GTM Innovators: The GEO Playbook – How Partner Marketing Fuels AI Discoverability with Michael Cole

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In this episode of GTM Innovators, host Kyle James sits down with Michael Cole, SVP of Marketing at Everflow, to explore how Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is redefining the rules of search and discoverability. As AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini become the new front doors to information, long-tail SEO is giving way to a world driven by citations, partnerships, and authentic content. Michael shares how leading brands are adapting—building relationships with publishers, rethinking affiliate strategies, and creating human-led content that fuels visibility across AI-powered ecosystems. If you’ve ever wondered what replaces SEO in the age of AI, this conversation is your new playbook. 

Subscript to GMT Innovators Series on the following platforms:

Transcript:

Kyle James (00:00.492)
or something. Yeah, buffering a little bit. All right, we’ve got good quality audio video coming through. Setup, all right, let’s do this. Nice. Welcome everybody to another episode of GTM Innovators by 360 Insight. I’m your host, Kyle James, and today we’re going to dive into generative engine optimization.

Michael Cole (00:01.589)
Yeah.

Kyle James (00:30.288)
Right, what is GEO? Some of you have heard of it, some of you haven’t. But it’s kind of this whole idea of like long tail search is dead. Because everybody’s going to chat GPT, Claude, Anthropic, Perplexity, whatever model they prefer to kind of get their answers for and people are not doing long tail searches in Google anymore. So what does that mean? What does that change? And to kind of help me really talk through this today, I’ve got Michael Cole, who’s the VP of Marketing at Everflow on the call here. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Cole (00:58.2)
Great to be here, yeah, I’m excited to talk about it and talk about why long tail is dead, long live, long tail forever because it’s brought it back at the same time. It’s interesting times.

Kyle James (01:10.95)
Yeah, yeah, it’s a good point and I know we’ll get all into that. And you know, this was kind of one of those exploratory questions I was throwing at because we see it’s changing and you kind of jumped on it. Hey, I’ve got a great way to think about this and talk from a partner marketing perspective. So I’m really excited to kind of jump in and kind of discuss this with you. But I think as we kind of prep this or set up the conversation here, it’s probably useful for people to understand like your VP of marketing at Everflow. Like what does that mean exactly? What does Everflow do? It kind of helps set the stage for how you guys help people do.

partner marketing, then we can really dive in and explore, right, what does this play? Like how should people be thinking about that from a go-to-market perspective and discoverability now that these other things are changing a little bit and how they should adopt to that?

Michael Cole (01:53.304)
Yeah, so Everflow is a partner marketing platform and we do the tracking and attribution and management of all types of partners with a specific emphasis on

the sort of like traditional ones that drive a ton of revenue. So affiliates, publishers, creators. And it’s just been very interesting as we, as like the head of marketing, I think a lot about how we do our own marketing. And it just, as we were figuring out our own marketing, we were like, wow, like now that I’ve deep dived into sort of like how the LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini generate their content.

This all sort of leads to long-tail publishers, which are affiliates bread and butter, and more important, you always need some way to sort of build these relationships in the first place, which typically involves affiliates. So that’s why I thought it was really interesting and like a full circle.

Kyle James (02:42.491)
Yeah.

Kyle James (02:48.677)
Yeah, it’s a good play, right? Because for so long marketers have been told, like, long tail, like, write, if you get every single sales question, write content about that on your site, on your blog. Build up this big long tail because it’s an annuity, right? You could write a blog post that addresses this pain point that a customer has, and then three years later it could still be driving organic search for people that are out there searching. But that’s really changing a lot, right? Because now they’re looking at these more credit, like, authoritative searches. So like, maybe to kind of prep it set it up a little bit,

I’m gonna talk about like, what did you first realize kind of this is changing and the way, or maybe even define like how this is working now, right? Like how these search engines or people are going to AI to get their answers and like how AI is coming up with the answers for that and why that’s changing everything for people.

Michael Cole (03:38.787)
Yeah, I think it’s important to understand sort of how this came about. What’s really interesting about how it answers it is that it uses this consensus approach. It used to be that SEO’s all about like, hey, what are the top 10 placements for a search term? Those people get all the traffic and no one else gets any of the traffic. And if you’re not number one or two, you’re not getting anything most of the time. So it’s all about like, how do I rank at the top of Google?

Whereas with ChatGBT, it’s pulling from a consensus of usually like eight to 10 different locations, different articles, YouTube, Reddit, all of those together. It generates those into a consensus answer that it then predicts what the response is based on those eight sources.

What’s really interesting about that is like, this could be one of the, they’re called citations that it’s pulling from. One of the citations could be like, Page 8 in Google, where it’s gotten like two clicks in the last year, but now that publisher’s content is being a key piece of how chat GPT answers someone about like,

Kyle James (04:38.757)
Mm.

Michael Cole (04:48.79)
what is the best solution for managing affiliates? They now have a ton of impact even though they have no search traffic and no one else has saw them. But because the LLMs go so deep into the system and they’re pulling different data sources each time, it now has a huge influence on that. So I think that’s the main piece there. And then I can talk about our own journey of learning this.

Kyle James (05:14.991)
Well, to that point, like I love, you said this before we got on the call here, like citations is kind of the new back, the new backlinks, right? Like that’s a good con, that’s a good way to kind of think about it, where before, how do you get as many links dropping back? But now it’s like these citations, but yeah, maybe kind of explore or share the journey, how you do it. Like, I think everybody out there’s like, okay, how do you discover where these citations are coming from and who is getting to choose what the citations are? And maybe that’s part of the journey, if you want to kind of keep expanding upon that.

Michael Cole (05:44.631)
Yeah, so I think all of this started probably four or five months, not that long ago for us, of us changing our entire thought process and strategy here.

Even though AI has been hype for a year or two, I’m part of all these communities. I get to see it front and center. And the actual use cases were pretty small, no matter how much people got excited about it. Whereas what changed in this situation was I started using this tool, which I’ve now buzz marketed endlessly, but I still highly recommend it called PromptWatch. And the reason I recommend PromptWatch is they have a free trial. takes 10 seconds to set up.

And what PromptWatch does is during your free trial, you basically just be like, OK, here’s my website. And it’s like, here’s 10 prompts that we think people ask to find you.

Kyle James (06:34.064)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (06:34.614)
and they like pull in competitors, et cetera. And then more importantly than the prompts, you can see every single response from ChatGPT, from Gemini, from Claude. So you can see exactly how it answered every single time. So you’re like, it’s like sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes completely off base. And you get that idea. But then the more important thing is not only does it show you the responses, it shows you how it generated those responses, which are the citations. So it’s like for this response, it generated it by checking these three Reddit posts.

these two YouTube videos and these other three to five publications of long-tail publishers and it took all that content, it figured out a consensus of what was the answer and then it…

Kyle James (07:10.961)
Interesting.

Michael Cole (07:16.78)
presented the answer to the person who asked it. So once I saw that, was like, wow, like A, it’s pretty obvious what to do in that situation. If there’s any places talking about our competitors as a review, we should make sure that Everflow is there because if someone’s asking what’s the best affiliate software, and it pulls a citation from three publishers that don’t mention us,

Kyle James (07:37.926)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (07:38.539)
It will usually not mention us in the response. So first thing is you need to make sure that you build all those relationships with those long tail publishers. And it’s very easy to know who they are because you can see what it’s citing. Like that’s what’s really fascinating about this is that all this data is very transparent. Like the fact that all the responses are available, the fact that citations are available, like it’s a very open book. So the execution there is very clear. So that’s where we started from it. And then we, from there had a lot of strategies of how we’ll continue to grow, but it’s, it’s clear.

that partner and billions of relationships is a key piece of it.

Kyle James (08:11.737)
Yeah, and it’s interesting because as I’m hearing you describe that, reminds me so much of back in the day when we had like keyword ranking tools, right? Like it rhymes, but it doesn’t repeat necessarily, you know, it’s like history rhyming here. Cause it’s really not that different. You had these tools that you go and would like help you understand how you’re coming up in things and where the traffic’s coming from. It’s just a new way to do it. I’m curious as you’ve really been diving into this, like have you seen certain publishers that maybe you’re getting

cited more or have you seen certain brands that are really doing this well that you could kind of share?

Michael Cole (08:48.654)
Yeah, so I think when you look through the data, there’s a few things that are pretty obvious about it. the answer is for a lot of stuff is no, I haven’t because like I just worry about our world and like making sure that we make it successful. So are there other companies crushing it? Maybe, but I’m not, I’m not asking Chachipiti those questions. So I’m not finding out. But for us in particular, it’s, it’s clear that the three main ones that matter the most are.

Kyle James (09:04.005)
Yeah.

Kyle James (09:09.329)
Sure.

Michael Cole (09:17.58)
As I was saying, like Reddit, YouTube and Wikipedia, those are heavily cited sources as trust. One for, like two of them are user-generated content and they have a lot of it. And then Wikipedia is just considered a trusted source. And then I think for competitors who doing a good job, it’s just having very robust, like content about comparing the competitor versus the other solutions and how to think about it. Because that’s the other piece of, the citation thing is like,

People are asking chat GPT all of these different questions and it’s the like they’re asking all these questions and if they’re asking a very like specific question where there’s not that much information about like how to say like how to work with email or affiliates is like a pretty complicated topic. There’s a lot of compliance, et cetera. If there’s not many sources that can pull from there, then the one like

Kyle James (09:50.395)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Cole (10:15.16)
company that’s building that content is the one being cited there. I think that that’s the other piece. So it’s like, surely you want to make sure that Reddit, Wikipedia and YouTube, that you have a good strategy there and you’re treating those with like authenticity because they’re tricky channels and they backfire really badly when you get bad sentiment. But on the other hand, for your own strategy, it’s also like, how do I compare versus all my competitors? How do I make it really easy for chat GPT to answer other people’s questions with me as one of the main authority sources?

Kyle James (10:32.869)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (10:45.144)
so that it can answer easily.

Kyle James (10:47.589)
Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s interesting, right, that Reddit is such an authoritative search result. And I wonder, like this is just me, I don’t know, conspiracy theory. Is it because Reddit’s selling all their data to and it’s really easy for them to access? Or is it because we all actually think Reddit has great answers for everything? Which, I don’t know, there’s some really deep, dark holes that you can go down to in Reddit threads.

Michael Cole (11:08.216)
So I do think that it is just the fact that there’s no more forums and other easy user-generated content. Most of it lives in walled gardens. All the meta system, et cetera, they can’t pull from that. So Reddit is one of the few sort of non-walled gardens that has a lot of user-generated content. Google started using Reddit heavily way before anyone was paying Reddit for this stuff. So I think it’s just that this is the best data source

Kyle James (11:17.659)
Yeah.

Kyle James (11:34.801)
Sure.

Michael Cole (11:38.18)
for user generated content of the things that they can easily pull and therefore it’s become so dominant.

Kyle James (11:43.92)
Yeah, yeah, so you’ve got those big ones that, like you said, like you’ve to be delicate with, like a backfire, but it seems like the other big winner of this is, like you said, it’s working with those partners. It’s working with those content machines and like figuring out like how to work with them. Let’s dig into that for a little bit. Like talk about tips and tricks and like how do you find, I mean, obviously platforms like Everflow could help with that, right? But like, how do you recommend companies and brands approach working with these partners? it?

look at the prompts and see where you’re showing up and approach those brands or is it a more holistic approach that kind of you think about through this?

Michael Cole (12:20.62)
Yeah, so a lot of the publications being cited, especially if you’re looking for like, hey, I’m just trying to reach people looking out for my solution, what I offer. A lot of those are gonna be like review comparison websites.

So the nice thing is like you can use these prompt tools to sort of figure out who’s being cited. You can then have someone on your team who’s like reaching out to all of them to build relationships. It’s one of those things where there’s almost certainly going to be some sort of monetary relationship there, which is the advantage of having like a platform for managing this, tracking this, making sure that it has value and also like handling the payments is tricky. So that’s where that adds value. But in the main thing, it’s just like, just assume that

you will have to have a budget to go here because it’s just the easiest way to sort of be like, hey, you’re reviewing for my competitors, I’d like you to review me. They have to spend publication time on that. They have to put resources that make sense. So you’d be like, hey, I’ll pay $500 for you to do a review of my website, et cetera. So I think that’s the first part. once you’re seeing how your competitors are being cited, like,

where your competitors are showing up, who’s being cited for competitor, like when your competitors show up in a response, where is it being cited? You just start reaching out to all of those long-tail publishers. That’s like piece one. I think the other piece that’s really interesting about this, and I can go into more detail, is that like with this consensus pulling, sentiment matters a lot, like sentiment.

the way that they talk about you matters a lot. And if they talk about your product wrong or they talk about a lot of cons that are very negative, that’s gonna actually show up in ChatGPT’s answer, Gemini’s answer. So it’s really important that you not only get placed on these publishers, but you help them really understand what your product does and how it’s differentiated. Because the way they explain your differentiation is a way that ChatGPT will. So that’s the other thing to keep in mind there.

Kyle James (14:01.073)
Sure.

Kyle James (14:19.533)
I’m curious from your perspective because you kind of mentioned the monetary aspect. My head starts spinning around that and like, where does that budget come from? Because everybody’s like, where are we going to find a new budget to add a new line item for something? And I’m wondering, like maybe the right answer is, where so many companies have spent all this time on internal content production, maybe that’s it, right? Like you’re getting these other brands and outside sources to write the content. You’re just paying them to like edit and revise the content already out there versus like you.

filling up a blog on your site to try to go for all the long-tail stuff anyway. So it kind of just moves from one line item to another in a lot of ways, right?

Michael Cole (14:54.626)
Yeah, I think there’s two parts to it. one is, I mean, at least given personal experience, like advertising is just, it’s so much, the performance for us has dropped down a ton this year versus last year.

for many reasons. And like we’ve paused a lot of our advertising recently as we just doubled down on this AI just because we were getting like so much leads and so much inbound stuff, but it just, wasn’t driving that many customers and it was profitable for us, but it was like such a distraction to the sales team. And now that I paused all that stuff, like our organic has shot up. Like it actually, you would think like, Oh, I’m advertising, reaching other new people. But by pausing it, it actually is really increased our organic traffic.

Kyle James (15:25.169)
Hmm.

Kyle James (15:29.787)
Sure.

Michael Cole (15:41.769)
And who knows what this specific reason is, but I would say that rebalancing between paid ads and building these publisher strategies actually makes a lot of sense right now because, again, like…

Kyle James (15:42.383)
Interesting.

Michael Cole (15:55.855)
and 20 % of people are doing their searches now on ChatGPT and you can influence that, that’s a huge amount of audience that you’re now influencing that your advertising used to influence but now they’re no longer using, say, like Google, et cetera. So I think that’s one thing is you can move some ad budget over here and the cost of advertising is…

Kyle James (16:04.165)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (16:16.15)
so much higher, like you cut one month budget in advertising and you have the budget to work with every single publisher you’ve ever worked with. The prices are not…

comparable yet. So like that’s why one good opportunity and then the other piece is like, your internal content is really still important, but I think it’s more like how do I empower my own content team to produce this quicker and to make sure that we’re adding perspective and domain expertise so that we’re not just generating AI slot because anything that’s too easy, everyone will do and then eventually it’ll be dinged and we’ll all go away anyway. Whereas it’s really easy to sort of like have a unique

Kyle James (16:52.753)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (16:56.064)
piece of content that is half written by AI but is guided by your perspective and expertise etc. And it creates for very good unique content that reads totally different than just asking it to generate an article it’s like pure slop.

Kyle James (17:10.031)
That makes sense. So what I’m hearing you say is one quality versus quantity. Maybe we dial that back a little bit different. But I think the other interesting piece is when you talk about like cutting down paid and going into this, well, the complete difference, I’ve always joked that like paid is kind of like a drug addict, right? Like you got to keep spending to get the hits from it, right? And it just keeps getting more expensive for the same dose over time. But what you’re talking about is you’re investing in these long tail things.

Right, like yes, you might spend the same amount of budget, but that’s an annuity that’s gonna continue to pay out in the future. And if you could then find more of those out there, you’ve got a lot of different things paying you back. like that actually wins a lot bigger in the long run, right?

Michael Cole (17:48.973)
Yep, and the other thing about this is most of the major prestigious publishers now have an affiliate site. So if you think about like,

Forbes or Conde Nast or any of these other ones like they all have a full affiliate division to for reviewing like many of the like the most competitive products so it’s very easy and there’s a natural flow for you to sort of like start working with them directly through the affiliate side and one of the reason like we had a one of our clients or one of our customers unlock Does like home equity financing and one of the big appeals of launching affiliate program was that they were being

Kyle James (18:23.921)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Cole (18:27.064)
talked about wrong by all of these review websites because they were being put in this category of like home loans, which is like a standard category, but they were home equity financing where there’s no debt. You’re just giving up a percentage of your house to get financing and it’s a completely different category, but they’re all lumped together and they had no, they weren’t being distinguished even though they were showing up on all these like prestigious publishers. So by launching affiliate program, they were able to go direct with the publisher. They were about able to sit down with them, have them spend time on it because the publisher has the time.

they’re making money to really understand the product well. And they basically all showed up, got added to like this new category and talked about the right way and their entire affiliate programs. Like the first year they switched to us, it was like 700 % growth when they, from their prior year at the affiliate program. And it just continued to grow from there. And it was just like working with these big publishers on the affiliate side and make sure that narrative actually has the right, like talking about them right way with the right sentiment, et cetera. Like it was extremely powerful.

Kyle James (19:11.131)
Wow.

Michael Cole (19:26.864)
So that’s like, that’s why this whole like affiliate side fits into it is because like smaller publishers, a lot of them you pay 500 or a thousand, they’ll write a review for you and now you’re done there and you can move on. But then like the major publishers, you typically have like an ongoing relationship through affiliate to sort of make sure that you are showing up, that you’re being pulled by ChatGPT the right way. And you can sort of expand out from there and use other sorts of their inventory.

Kyle James (19:52.72)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you kind of threw out 700 % growth. Like I’m sure something a lot of listeners are sitting there thinking like, okay, great, this sounds all good. But obviously, how do I measure it? Right? Like how do I track it? like, I’m sure you guys have ways to do like talk through a little bit like, what are best practices that things people need to think about as they think about like tracking it and knowing ROI and what are key performance indicators and things like that they should look at is like execute on a plan like this.

Michael Cole (20:18.208)
Yeah, so it will always be tricky and I think especially for this whole LLM discovery, it’s very early days, which is why it’s a great opportunity in terms of like you can do a lot with very little resources. For that side, like the best way to think about it is just like making sure like how often, how many citations am I, like how many of the places I’m listed are being cited? And then how, for the ones that are not,

Kyle James (20:32.497)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Cole (20:47.854)
listing me right now, how many of them have I got inside it? So you have a very clear path of like, hey, there’s like 200 different publications that are reviewing my competitors, but not me.

how am I doing with getting that and how many citations have I gotten since then? Because that’s gonna be your growth number six months from now. And at least you can have a very like quantified amount. It’s like, here’s my hit list, here’s how we’re going, here’s the citation. So I’d say like that’s the first piece for this specific strategy. The other one is like building out an entire affiliate marketing program, which like.

Kyle James (21:02.331)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (21:21.814)
Affiliate marketing, the reason people love it is like it is the most cost effective channel because you’re basically, if you’re paying 10 % of what you make, you would do that all day forever. So on paper, perfect. In practice, generates a ton of revenue. But it’s just one of those things is that typically affiliate managers, that’s all they do and they don’t talk about their influence on.

Kyle James (21:31.313)
100%.

Michael Cole (21:44.181)
AI and top of funnel demand, cetera. So it’s kind of limited the sort of like reputation of the channel. But on the other hand, no one disagrees that it’s great for revenue.

Kyle James (21:46.459)
Brand awareness, yeah.

Michael Cole (21:55.949)
For that piece, if you want to do affiliate marketing, first you have to have a network or platform to manage it because the affiliates, they typically are promoting, it’s their time, it’s their effort, they’re sometimes spending money, so it’s their risk. They need to have a platform where they can sort of see the analytics, know what’s happening, and make sure that they’re going to be steadily paid. So that’s the first piece.

And the second piece of affiliate is you need to know who to recruit. There’s like standard super affiliates everyone works with, and then you have all of the long-tail affiliates and media buyers and stuff like that. They’re a little bit more complicated. I would recommend that if you don’t know how to do affiliate marketing, don’t even bother trying it. It’s a complex channel. It takes a lot of relationships. Like affiliate marketing is very interesting because it’s…

One of the few places where I can safely say just go with an agency because unlike say like a media buying agency, an affiliate agency, they have the relationships. They can set it up. They can get everything running competitively. And if you say six months down the line, you’re like, you know what? I think we could take this from here. You can just fire them and the affiliates that are making a lot of money with you are not going to leave. So it’s always easiest to start with an agency because they can prove it out. They know where to start. They know who to.

Kyle James (23:03.377)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (23:10.068)
after etc. And then once you have traction you’re ready to go. So I would say that if you want to go straight for just the LLM AI stuff, focus on citations and who to recruit. If you want to explore affiliate marketing to sort of build these like bigger publisher relationships, I would just encourage go to agency. You can always like reach out to me or like go to Everflow and we have an entire affiliate team that will just introduce you to agencies.

Personally, I’ve done the agency side myself. I know that world well. If you ask me, how many agencies am I paying for is a good way to think about this, and there’s one, which is a Reddit agency, Discoverability agency is the only one I’m doing. But the only other one I would consider is affiliate marketing agency because they have the right skin in the game and the cost of you not working with them in the future is very low. So it’s a really good way to test it because it does take domain expertise to make that work.

Kyle James (24:02.885)
Yeah.

Kyle James (24:07.345)
Makes a ton of sense right like if they’re find the right publishers for you. They’re gonna know who they are They’re gonna know the right connections and it’s not gonna spend you months to like hire the person and get up to speed like you’re gonna hit the ground running Right away, and then like you said if it’s working great You’ve got those deep relationships at that point six months nine months a year and a half later You could you built it up to a point where you’re seeing big results and you bring on somebody full-time to either a manage the agency or do it all Themself. Yeah makes a ton of sense

Let’s talk a little bit about, like, the good thing about working with these publishers is it’s still, for the most part, human, authentic, generated content, right? And I think what we’re seeing now, and I’d love you to kind of talk about it, because you mentioned earlier, like, the AI slop that we’re seeing come into everything, and, you know, me being someone who spent years at HubSpot teaching everybody inbound marketing, I personally feel like I take the blame for some of it, because we told, I can’t tell you how many hundreds of companies, I personally told, you need to have a blog, you need to be putting all this content in, like, now,

Michael Cole (24:56.27)
Yeah.

Kyle James (25:05.563)
tell them remarkable content, they still put out human slop. And now the AI models are trained on all this human slop, that there’s way too much of it out there. And now we’re trying to reign it all in in some ways, but then also fighting the AI. So talk to me a little bit like why it’s more important now than ever that we have human-generated, real, authentic content, like even this podcast, right?

Michael Cole (25:08.568)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Cole (25:27.19)
Yeah, so I think there’s two parts to it. So one, as we’re talking about the citation stuff, if you are one of the few sources talking about a topic, you will likely get included in the response that GCPT is answering. Sometimes you’ll be linked, but…

you’ll probably be referenced either way of like, hey, Everflow mentioned on this podcast that this is the best way to do it, et cetera. Like, those kind of like references.

for like a brand that’s perfect, because that’s a lot of awareness and I don’t actually need the click if I’m getting people in the funnel and then eventually they’re signing up. I don’t have the same publisher dilemma of worrying about my traffic being taken. Like if you’re referencing me regularly, that’s valuable enough for me. So I think that’s the first thing is like, it’s important to feel all the gaps of like expertise in your industry. And that’s one part. The other part about like making good authentic content is just like, it’s basically

Kyle James (26:02.639)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (26:27.376)
game theory on that one. Like if all I have to do is like, okay, I think here’s a 50 like most important topics for me. And they’re all generic and they’re not, you haven’t really thought about like how, what are specific terms that are only used in your industry and nowhere else.

If they’re all generic, guess what? Someone’s gonna do that too, because all you have to do is type in like, write me a blog post for this topic, write me a blog post for that topic, and like, you produced it all, you can fill your entire blog with like 10,000 posts in like a week, and from what I’ve heard, the people that are doing that right now, they are seeing a spike up in traffic from doing that, but then it like levels out and goes downwards, and it’s already going downwards, where you talk about six months from now, like,

Kyle James (26:57.542)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (27:11.436)
the way all of like LLMs are going to go, like it’s clear that they also have to hire people for making sure that they don’t all become junk too. So they’re going to have to have a system that just removes like second, third hand AI generated slop so that they like are not being too deluded themselves by like having slop, build on slop, build on slop, build on slop, build on slop. So like it’s clear that they will have to have a solution here. And there’s a lot of stuff you can do to sort of like leverage AI technology

Kyle James (27:34.319)
Right.

Michael Cole (27:41.36)
and give it authentic voices to talk about.

Kyle James (27:44.4)
Yeah, I mean, I feel like a broken record now, but once again, this is another one of those history repeats itself where like, remarkable, well thought out, well positioned, I think is the key there. Like, this is your brand, you’re in this industry. Like, no, don’t just give me the generic, like, give me your strong opinion about why you think about it this way and not. You’re gonna still win. And yes, you’re gonna have some people that might not agree with you, but probably won’t ever give you a customer anyway, right? No, that’s good.

Michael Cole (28:09.122)
Yeah, it’s totally true. The thing that’s changed is just the velocity. It’s like creating like, everyone’s like, create like these big pillar pieces that are like massive content, et cetera. And you would spend three months, six months creating this content and then you just hope that it ranks. Because if it doesn’t rank, it’s basically pointless.

Kyle James (28:27.824)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (28:31.994)
And it’s so much work to produce those in really high quality. again, you just can’t do that if it doesn’t show results very quickly, or if you don’t have a clear demand from your users. also, even for trying to get your own team to read this content is hard enough. How can you expect a prospect to go do that? So I think that that’s the challenge with that old model is it sounds good on paper. It doesn’t work that well in execution unless you really

find the right space with the right distribution. What’s different here is like one, you no longer need that entire pillar content to be consumed because now it’s just pieces being pulled out of it that are being used in answering. And then the other thing is just your content, if it’s pulling apart, that’s like very good perspective in like a key report or whatever.

Kyle James (29:10.97)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (29:25.824)
It’s showing to someone in the moment they actually care. Because if I’m saying like, hey, how do I handle compliance for email affiliates? In that moment,

I will actually read the entire article about how to set this up, cetera. Whereas if I’m on your website and I’m like, oh yeah, I kind of want to do an affiliate program and I haven’t like, I’m like, oh, I want to work with the emailers, et cetera. Like I’ll read some pages. Like maybe there’s a section for that, but I’ll be like, oh, I’ll skim it. Cause I’m like overwhelmed by the amount of choices. And I’m like looking at a bunch of stuff. So I’m not going to spend time, but when you’re actually just sitting down with chat GPT, that’s the time when you’re actually consuming the full thing. So I think that one, it’s better that you don’t

Kyle James (29:38.821)
Right.

Kyle James (29:51.793)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (30:04.272)
rely on everything to rank for it to be used. then two, it’s much, you’re reaching people at the point where they care the most, so they’re much more likely to actually consume the content you’re producing.

Kyle James (30:14.821)
That’s a very good point. Let’s talk about sentiment a little bit more, right? Like you kind of, we kind of hit on that earlier in the importance. How important is that? Like when you’re going through and you’re looking for these affiliates and things, do you specifically try to target ones that, let’s say you have two that are ranking, do you go for the one who is like giving you bad sentiment and like really try to turn, like how valuable do you think that is? Like being able to turn the tide, some of that negative into positive versus like the more authentic, am I making sense here?

Michael Cole (30:42.892)
Yeah, it makes total sense. So I think if they have native sentiment, you should move on. That’s not a winning battle. It’s more the neutral ones and making sure that there’s more positive ones. But it does make a huge difference. The best way to look at this is like the Google AI summaries at the top or whatever they’re called, Google AI snippets.

Kyle James (30:50.373)
Okay.

Michael Cole (31:06.19)
When it’s saying, hey, let’s talk about this product, if it’s pulling the citations from, like, reviews that have negative things, like, it’s saying, like, hey, this platform is really good for these things, but some users say it’s too complex or it’s overwhelming and don’t want to use it, that’ll be the way it summarizes by default. And then it, like, it’s kind of…

damning with faint praise and stuff like that, where it’s like now people are a little worried like, maybe it’s too complex, I shouldn’t do this. And if you were writing your own marketing, you would never be like, hey, by the way, you might be overwhelmed by how advanced it is. Like you wouldn’t want to do that. And you can actually influence that snippet quite a lot by just having more content, working with the partners or saying like, hey, it’s too advanced and being like, hey, that’s fair.

Kyle James (31:42.715)
Right.

Michael Cole (31:55.629)
But can we work with this more thing of it’s more complex because it gives a lot of options and there’s a lot of customizations to it. You can work with those sort of neutral publishers in that way to make sure that when they talk about cons, it doesn’t read us that badly. And these AI snippets update so quickly. You could work with a publisher and two days later, the Google search could be completely different in terms of positivity. you obviously don’t want to ever try to work with people that are already negative against you because like,

The best you can do is you like pay them off and like that’s never worth it. It’s better to just focus on who can I get the positive and how can I make sure that when people talk about the cons that they’re being like authentic but they’re using wording that doesn’t sound like this thing sucks.

Kyle James (32:29.563)
Yeah.

Kyle James (32:42.319)
Nice, nice. What other tools? Like you mentioned PromptWatch is like a good tool to kind of monitor this stuff. Any other things out there that you’re using or things that you kind of recommend to people? mean, maybe it is as simple as like go use the LLMs and search for your different things or ask it to help you come up with what kind of searches you should look for.

Michael Cole (32:59.896)
So again, I would recommend anyone start with.

prompt watcher equivalent product. It’s really helpful to know how you’re showing up in these different LLMs and what’s being cited and having a list there. So I think that’s table stakes. I think once you get to the next level, it’s like, okay, now how can I influence this further? And in that, sort of leverage these AIs in useful ways. And we can talk about sort of how you actually do the content creation or how you make sure you’re

content’s landing with like prospects and stuff like that. Those tools are pretty cool which is like I can talk about like how we do that with Gemini and notebook and I think that’s a really interesting world that strikes this balance between like creating lots of content and making sure the content is unique.

Kyle James (33:49.21)
Is that kind of like your evals that you’re kind of setting up of like very specific, you know, personas, mentions and things like that? I mean, it’s probably a whole other conversation we could have on that stuff, but I don’t know if you want to have some like high level best practices tidbits you want to drop here.

Michael Cole (34:04.076)
Yeah, so I’d say for anyone who hasn’t tested it, notebook.lm is super cool. It’s a Google product. It was originally used by academics for comparing a bunch of academic research papers, but it has a ton of very useful business uses. And what it lets you do is you can have any number of sources and then ask the AI questions about those sources. So one way we use it is basically pull…

90 sales calls that led to the person becoming a customer and I put that into notebook LM and now I can be like hey What did they care the most about like can you give me a like give me a? entire prompt

for everything they care about and how I should improve my website for that. And then I could go into Gemini and be like, here’s my website, here’s all of the recommendations from Notebook, how should I improve it? So that one’s really useful because as a marketing person, getting all of sales perspective and everything else on aggregate.

Like you have to hire full-time people for that and it’s very hard to justify that role until you’re a giant company because it’s it’s a nice to have. Now you can get that insights in like 10 minutes with Notebook LM. So I’d say like that’s a really good starting place and there are lots of ways to use that for like the sort of like research and understanding what your like prospects care about. So that’s step one.

Kyle James (35:08.667)
Yeah.

Kyle James (35:30.662)
Well, and I’m just sitting here, my head spinning, like that kind of data, that kind of call transcripts, yes, it’s good for marketing, but it’s also good for salespeople. They’re trying to like find objections when, hey, find calls where this competitor came up. How do we overcome objections there? Or, you know, product people that are looking for, hey, how should we write our product roadmap based on all these conversations? But I imagine you could perform the same sort of, you know, compile of research from like,

pull out your support ticket database, right? And do something very similar or, you know, there’s other types of data that companies have depending on what they do, whether it’s stuff out of CRM or whatever, but that’s, yeah, it makes a ton of sense, like content ideas.

Michael Cole (36:11.372)
Yeah, we also use it for like agencies and like the affiliates themselves so that we no longer rely on like the domain knowledge of any one person. They talk to them, they get down all these details, then we get it into a notebook. And that way anyone can be like, hey, sort of like who…

like who are the best affiliates for promoting semi-glutite offers. And then we can sort of make introductions between our customers and those affiliates to make sure that they are working better together. there’s a lot of super useful things to use and I think that it’s like just a clear value add and for this whole discoverability strategy, you can use this to figure out what content to produce.

Kyle James (36:32.57)
Nice.

Kyle James (36:51.365)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, as we start to kind of wrap up a little bit, I’m curious, Michael, like, how do you this playing out 12, 18 months? Can you see that far? mean, just think about how much this stuff’s changed in the last 12, 18 months, but any predictions, you are not gonna be held accountable for anything that you throw out there. But how do you see this changing or going from here? Do you see this continuing to build? You mentioned kind of early innings. It seems like, do you think this will be a long-term play that we’ll just see more and more of?

kind of saturated market for people doing this?

Michael Cole (37:22.306)
Yeah, so I think on that side, definitely. I think the best way to think about this stuff, rule of thumb, is like, is this a better experience? Like, for all the problems with Uber and how much money they lost, they were fundamentally a better experience than taxis. So regardless of all the other stuff, they eventually won out and they eventually became profitable. I think it’s the same thing here is that Google, like the Google search experiences got in progressively worse.

Kyle James (37:31.323)
Yeah, yeah.

Kyle James (37:50.609)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Cole (37:50.863)
And these provide a very good solution for finding this information. I think that the usage is just going to continue to increase. that’s one. Two, I think the idea that publishers are going to not be used at all is crazy, because I think that a lot of times, like ChatGBT and Gemini are going to be the first step.

You’re gonna be like, okay, what are the five best products to start with? Then you’re going to do your research from there because you need to have those perspectives. You need to have the individual voices to see images to get a real understanding of what it looks like, et cetera. So that’s my prediction too, is that publishers will have a huge amount of the closing value on this situation outside of the citation stuff we’ve been talking about. Three, I think the whole chat GPT being able buy through it is really interesting in that…

Kyle James (38:19.483)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (38:42.414)
If you know what you’re going to buy, I think people will buy through ChatGPT because, again, it’s a better experience. I don’t know if you’ve bought a lot of stuff on the web lately, but most e-commerce websites, it’s so frustrating. There’s like 20 pop-ups where they try to get you a 15 % code. They interrupt everything and break the page. It’s just not a good experience. So if I could just go to ChatGPT and buy the same thing, I will do that.

Kyle James (38:57.072)
Yeah.

Michael Cole (39:08.962)
But I’m not going to do that if I don’t already, I have, if I’m not in the final phase and ready to buy. So my one sort of worry there is that we get like chat, GPT research, publisher, second stage, make a decision, go back to chat, GPT and buy. That’s the bad use case. If there’s not analytics around chat, GPT, if it’s the other one where it’s chat, GPT publisher, then direct brand or Amazon. That’s a lot better. Cause there’s a lot more transparency into what’s happening and the publisher gets rewarded there. So I.

I think that there’s an interesting underplay, but I do think that like, if you think about it just in terms of like buying through chat GPT or buying through a website, there’s going to be people buying through chat GPT when they’re ready to buy in very specific one-off situations where they’re not buying a lot of stuff. So that’s prediction three. And then prediction four is that like, I can’t possibly see this not popping as a bubble within like the next 12 to 18 months. Like the spending is crazy high. The most AI company

or doing things that makes no sense from a value perspective. So I think it’s gonna burst, at the same time, again, fundamentally this is a better experience. It’s amazing in so many ways. So I think that even if it bursts, it’s definitely not the end of the world. It’ll just reset to the right level.

Kyle James (40:12.091)
Yeah.

Kyle James (40:25.679)
Yeah, no, I really like those, because at end of the day, that’s all any product is supposed to do, right? Like, give me a better user experience that solves my pain. And you’re right. And you’ve also kind of indirectly found ChetGBT’s, like specifically, its revenue model. Boom. If you can help me buy things for the better experience, it’s easier and cheaper and faster. Totally, who wouldn’t do that? But yeah, there’s definitely a bubble here. But we had a bubble in the internet, it’s still around.

Michael Cole (40:52.919)
Exactly, there’s been lots of bubbles that have burst and as long as it was fundamentally better, it just grew over time.

Kyle James (41:00.789)
Yeah, yeah. Michael, what about I’d asked you about this that you wanna kinda share as we start to wrap up here? Anything on this point that is like, kinda wraps a bow on all of it or just, you know, best practice or takeaway you you wanna give people?

Michael Cole (41:15.116)
Yeah, I think the last thing I’ll mention in this is just, I think this is more for all sort of like, execs and leaders is that you probably already have a team doing affiliate marketing and partnerships at any larger company and they’re completely siloed in almost every company.

This is a really good lever where they can add a lot of value or like actually move sort of like your growth and thing with the stuff they’re already doing, but they probably don’t know about it and they probably don’t rely have not. And if they do know about it, they haven’t talked to you about it. So I would say like revisit inside your own company about sort of what tools you have to get in front of these like long tail publishers, because like it’s just, that’s the only thing that’s different than SEO is that in this current moment you can do this stuff and then see results.

a week later, which was only in the very early days of SEO. there’s a lot of experimentation. There’s a lot of internal team resources that could already be leveraged to do this. And it’s really just about getting your company to come up with a game plan and then start testing out how you can drive more citations.

Kyle James (42:06.447)
Hmm.

Kyle James (42:26.587)
Love that, love that. And Michael, tell everybody, could people help you? What’s the best way to connect with you? Are you on LinkedIn? Anything on, know, the Airflow’s website, the kind of resources you want to recommend people? Kind of tell people, what’s the best way to find and connect with you?

Michael Cole (42:41.228)
Yeah, so you can always connect with me on LinkedIn. Just look up Michael Cole and at Plus Everflow because I have a very generic name and you’ll find me. So yeah, Michael Cole plus Everflow on search in LinkedIn. The best way to connect. always happy to answer other questions.

You can check out everflow.io to learn more about our platform. You can search Everflow plus Red Visible, which is a Reddit agency that we actually use ourselves. And we did a little master class on how this consensus works and everything else. And also, that’s kind of a sneak peek of how to build high quality content using AI.

plus like real transcripts and real conversations. So I highly recommend checking out the red visible post on Everflow in our master class section. And yeah, feel free to reach out with me for any other questions.

Kyle James (43:33.434)
I’ll make sure those get into the show nuts. Well Michael, thank you so much for joining me today This has been super insightful and I’m sure people got a lot to take away and guys This is cheap and and the fact that in today’s world like instant gratification like this works instantly pretty much So go out and try it if it doesn’t work, you’ll know within weeks not quarters Awesome. Awesome. So thank you once again for joining me everybody out there Stay tuned for the next GTM innovators and keep growing. We’ll talk to you next time

Michael Cole (44:02.511)
Cheers.

 

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