Follow The Brand Podcast with Host Grant McGaugh

The End of Blue Links: How to Rank When AI Answers First with Kevin Roy

• Grant McGaugh CEO 5 STAR BDM • Season 7 • Episode 26

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The digital marketing landscape is undergoing a radical transformation. While SEO professionals have spent years mastering Google's algorithm, the rise of AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is creating an entirely new paradigm for online visibility.

Kevin Roy, founder of Green Banana SEO, reveals a startling statistic: 60% of Google's 405 billion monthly searches are now "zero-click" searches, where users get answers without visiting websites. This fundamental shift requires businesses to rethink their approach to digital visibility.

Roy introduces us to "answer engine optimization," explaining how AI models differ from traditional search engines. Unlike keyword-focused algorithms, these language models—"built by linguists, not developers"—are inherently conversational. They don't just match keywords; they aim to create comprehensive stories about businesses and their offerings.

For businesses seeking visibility in this new landscape, Roy offers practical advice that goes beyond conventional SEO wisdom. Small businesses should leverage reviews strategically, responding to customer feedback with location-specific language. Website schema markup becomes increasingly important as AI models use this structured data to understand your business context. Tools like wakeai.io can reveal what information AI engines might be seeking but not finding on your website.

What makes this conversation particularly valuable is Roy's balanced perspective. While embracing the technological shift, he reminds us that "people buy from people"—the human connection remains essential in the AI age. Personal branding, authorship, and establishing expertise become even more critical as ways to build trust with both algorithms and audiences.

Whether you're a small business owner, marketing professional, or digital strategist, this episode provides actionable insights for navigating the evolving search landscape. How will you adapt your digital presence to ensure visibility not just on Google, but in the AI-powered tools reshaping how people find information online?

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates, visit 5starbdm.com
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And don’t miss Grant McGaugh’s new book, First Light — a powerful guide to igniting your purpose and building a BRAVE brand that stands out in a changing world. - https://5starbdm.com/brave-masterclass/

See you next time on Follow The Brand!

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome everybody to the Foud Brand Podcast. This is your host, Grant McGall. We're going to talk about a very interesting subject today. A lot of people have heard of SEO, search engine optimization. Um, so when we are creating certain content, you want to make sure it's SEO ready. So it's searchable, so people find it. You want to be top of the feed, like in search engines like Google, Bing, and the like. But things have now changed with AI, you know, that's just overtaking a lot of different things, right? A lot of people are going to a Chat GPT, a perplexity, a Gemini, a Claude, and the like first before they're going to Google. So, how do you now rank in that kind of setting? We're going to ask these kinds of questions to Kevin Roy, who is a visionary in this field, he's very innovative. I want to get him up to the states right now so we can talk about this because this is important information. So, Kevin, you like to introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, thanks for having me. Uh Kevin Roy, Bring Banana SEO. Uh our 17th year now doing search engine optimization. And you know, we have a full-on um answer engine optimization uh process and protocol that I'm just excited to talk about.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, we got to talk about it because now you said 17 years, and you've been the, you know, and I I figure you've been ahead of the curve when it comes to performance-based SEO or search engine optimization. But what I want to know is what inspired you to break away from traditional models and then this is important, guarantee results.

SPEAKER_00:

So we'll start with we never guarantee results. We guarantee that if we get you right, you pay. If we don't get you right, you don't pay. Right. So that's the if you when when clients call and say, I absolutely have to be on page one next week, and this keyword, I'm like, great, we have a Google AdWords program for that. So um how I got into it, it's so we had been doing SEO like everybody else, but just how materials. You know, we're we're writing the content, building good links, you know, it's changed a lot in the last you know, 16, 17 years. Um, but we were doing it for about two years, and we had a we we still have but this one of our clients, we had a larger client, and um, I had to go in and present to the board, the boardroom, um, all of the stuff that we've been doing. And I had spent all night crafting this, what I thought was absolutely spectacular uh pamphlet of data of all the stuff that we're doing, all the stuff that we had been doing for them, and handed it out to everybody. And I'm not kidding, I spent literally all night. I remember I'd I had gone to uh um staples and I was I was collating things at like three o'clock in the morning. Yeah I brought it into them and and and showed it to them, and they looked at me and said, So what are we paying you for again? And I realized that when you're talking about late semantic indexing, schema, metadata, um, keyword quality, content, linking to a room of exceptionally intelligent executives, they don't it's all white noise. So in the middle of the meeting, I said, How about this? I know I can rank you for these keyword phrases. I get you on page one for these, you pay me. If I don't get you on page one, you don't pay me. But I'm never doing this report again because I spent all night building this report. And they're like, great, let's do it. And I came back and said to the the you know, the team, I either made a massive mistake or I think we have a great model. And so that's you know, that's really what did it because if you are if you're following the rules that Google puts out and doing things that are generating quality content and generating high-quality links that are pointing back to the page and you know, following some some the you know the solid SEO principles, you're going to rank. It takes a while, but you're gonna rank for most keyboard traces. You know, that save a you know, if if someone came in and said, Hey, I have a brand new dating site and I want to outwrite MASH.com, you know, by the you know, by the end of the year, we're gonna say, well, MASH.com has you know four million links and you know zero, so it's gonna take us a while. We're not gonna get one page overhead.

SPEAKER_01:

Very important to understand and set expectations early and understand what you're doing. Big risk, but yet you have the confidence to know what you're doing, and uh you can take it to the next level, and we're gonna get paid because we know we can make this happen, we're gonna make it done. Now, you've also said that traditional SEO isn't enough anymore. So I would like you to because this is the big elephant in the room right now. We know you've mastered, you understand the Google algorithm, you understand where you're at, and all the rankings that are there, what it takes to get on that first page, those first 10 blue links or whatever it may be is very important because that's where you want to, you know, your ad spin, people are gonna you get eyeballs onto what you're doing in the right audience. Now, can you explain what LLM SEO, that's large language model SEO, is and how it transforms the way businesses should now think about visibility?

SPEAKER_00:

So that's a that's a great question. Um, I think I would I would start by saying that as of June, um 60% of Google's 405 billion searches a month, so about 260 billion searches a month are now zero-click searches. So what that means is that they're getting the answer and not having to click on anything. So we're seeing in in in your like everyone that's listening to this is probably seeing a drop in some of their organic traffic. So even if they're on page one number once or something, then uh they're seeing, even if you're popping in the answer engines, you're seeing a little bit of a drop, but you might get in more direct traffic or more calls or more or more mentions. Um so it's important that you pop up in the top of a grop or a chat or a Gemini or a Claude search. Um those engines are looking for different things, but to kind of assuage everybody, um we're finding that if you're following the proper principles of generating good content and having high quality matching links that go to the page that you're trying to rank, those people seem to be doing a lot better in the answer engines than people that that haven't done that. Um, there are things the answer engines are looking for, like schema or markup language. Um, I guess uh for people that don't know what that is, um you Google Taylor Swift tickets and the ticket prices and the the venues are going to come up in the search bar, right? Right? The search that's that is markup language that's on your page. The the user can't really see that part of it, but the the Google is pulling that out and sticking it up in the search for the search result. Um, so what we're finding is that the answer engines seem to be looking at that faster, having more access to it, or maybe they're just more comfortable with it. And they're pulling information from there. So we're spending more time making sure that we have quality content and quality questions and answers in the cinema as well as on the page.

SPEAKER_01:

QA. So a question and answer, because you said something. I I like how you frame that. Because I would we were asking talking about this earlier. What do you call this now? LLM SEO? You said answer engine. So you look at an LLM as an answer engine, it's responsive and it's going, and to your point, when now when you uh uh let's say even you Google something, the first thing that pops up is something probably straight out of Gemini, right? Yeah, and it creates your eyes, you're probably gonna go read through that, and either you're mentioned as a source, or now do you have a clickable link in that little box up there? Because people may not be scrolling down.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep, you do have a clickable link in the box if Gemini and Chat and Claude they decide to show that link. Um, I know that that Google has Google has actually outpaced now, Chat GPT and and how and the complexity and the thoroughness of Gemini. And it's probably because they don't want to lose their revenue for search. And so now inside of Google AdWords, you can actually pay its sponsor and be in those top basis with your link. Um, that's that's rolled out a couple months ago, and it's become becoming more and more uh popular. But I think what so one of my favorite quotes in when you asked about questions and answers and why that's important, one of the favorite quotes that I've heard this year is that the large language models were built by linguists, not developers. So the developers are towering it up, right? Using things to create agents and um, but the linguists created the large language models. So that's conversational. It's asking a question and answering a question. It's not best pizza Boston anymore. It's where can I get the most delicious deep dish pepperoni pizza in Boston? And it's gonna go out and try to answer that question for you.

SPEAKER_01:

This is important understanding because what I heard there, and a lot of people I know they're tuning in, they're leaning in right now because this this is this is hot. You need to understand your ad dollars of where you want to position your business to get the the most amount of uh opportunities uh out of your of your efforts. So you you mentioned something like how do businesses actually get their brand mentioned in whether it's chat GPT or Cloud or H Gemini because this is important. And then you also stated Google does not want to lose their ad spin because you know that that's a huge revenue source for them. So is there a way to reverse engineer that so that you're in both locations?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. So um there are tools there, there's a tool that we use called um I I don't get any uh I have no affiliation with this company, I just think it's a grand tool. It's it's it, I I don't love the name. It's I shouldn't say that, but it's wakeai.io. And what that does is you can put your company in, you can put your top two competitors in, and it will tell you, hey, chat, Claude, Perplexity, Sonar, um you know, Jen and I are looking for this type of content to answer questions about your brand that they're finding on your competitor's site, but not finding on yours. So for example, we have a we have a really large client that um doesn't spend a lot of time talking about pricing on their website, and the language models to create a story about their company are looking for pricing and they're not seeing it. And their competitors are addressing that. So um when what we're seeing is that like chat perplexity, claude, sonar, Gemini um are trying to create a complete story about you so they can answer the question. So they're trying to get as much detailed information about your product or your service, um you know, so that they can create a story to give proper input back to the user.

SPEAKER_01:

So you said it's so important there story versus just information. You know, and that's what I got out of that. Like when you do a Google search, well, you're really just getting information or potential information. It's not really story-like, right? It's just information, it's links, it's there. If it captures your like that one-sentence hook that captures your attention, and then you click on it, like you say, non-clickable links. You just said that. You go to that that first box that you're seeing, and then it's story-like, well, people love stories, right? Right. It's a and you know how the algorithm is working, it wants a complete story, it wants a good story, within that probably like a paragraph or two, maybe, and it's there, then you want your company to show up there, obviously, because that's where the eyeballs are. Because if people again aren't scrolling down as much, you've got to have the information right there. So many leaders, I think, still think that ranking on Google is the ultimate finish line. My question to you is what are they missing about where search is really headed in the AI era?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, so search from everything that I spend a significant amount of time every week um keeping up with the you know AI trends. I'm also really fortunate enough to be part of the uh SEO mastermind group, and we're always sharing information when we meet once a week. Um, what we're the the general consensus is is that Google is gonna keep their um location or their GDP information because they do really well with that. They're making a lot of money on that. Um, on that, they may actually get rid of the links at the bottom of the page. Um so that that is that is a cause for a lot of debate to whether they're gonna get rid of that and then pop the information just in the answer engine up top. So that's something that people have to think about and say, hey, I I I really want to make sure that I'm comp that my brand is strong and that I'm that I'm creating a complete story about my service or my brand, um, so that so that these answer engines are getting all the information about me. So one of my favorite analogies is the peanut butter and jelly analogy. So imagine if if you and I want to write for the um how to make the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We're gonna create a comprehensive page about how to make the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But then we're gonna create a page about bread, page about jelly, and a page about peanut butter. And on our bread page, we're gonna go and say, here's how to make, here's how to make the best bread, here's how here's where to get the best high-quality flour. And you know, here's where to get the the best eggs, you know, to to go and make that bread. So we're gonna tell this story that creates an uh a complete picture for, you know what, this really is the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich because I know absolutely everything there is to know about how to make one.

SPEAKER_01:

This is important. Now, let me ask you, and how is that different from traditional SEO, where you're making sure you have the right words, the right, you know, phrasing.

SPEAKER_00:

Is it similar or different? It's it's actually similar. So what so one of the one of the methodologies that we use is we go and look at everybody that's on page one for a specific keyword phrase and look at the content that they all have that's similar. The keywords that are so when Google is looking at a page, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, for example, um, in order to tell a story about peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it needs to see the word bread, it needs to see butter knife, it needs to see crust, it needs to see oven, uh, it needs to see the word spread, right? So um it's it's trying to formulate like why is this the most important page for this specific keyword phrase? So we extract all of those keywords that are mentioned the most frequently and then build a page using that we call a recipe, a recipe of the keywords um to write our content. We find that that the language models are looking for the same thing, but it's because they're trying to complete the the story. They're trying to get an entire story on that specific piece of content. So a lot of times if you're if you're building your pages that way, you're probably in a really good spot. What's not gonna work is is if you're just over-repeating a keyword phrase on a page, which which actually still works to rhyme for, but it's not telling a story. It's not giving the person enough information. Um if if you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, I think an important thing to think about isn't just um getting people to the page, but getting them to convert. Yeah. And that's where you want to have that. So those digestible bytes, the really important information out top, then you can dump all the FAQs and all the keyword density down in the bottom of it. Um, so the in the language models fortuitously like those. So a lot of the pages that we've been building, I think we might have just gotten lucky. And they're looking at a lot of this.

SPEAKER_01:

But you're on the right, right, right. And and it flowed there. But I like how you just said because there's a model that's out there, right? Especially in sales, we all understand it. Usually you're you're creating awareness uh about your program, right? And then you get consideration for your if they're in the market to buy, and then you convert. So understanding that conversion model, I think is so important because that ultimately that's what you want as a business. You're spending the the uh, especially if you're doing paid advertisement, maybe you have some organic traffic, but ultimately you want them to convert, either pick up the phone, give you an opportunity to present your product or service. I think that's important. Here's my question for you. And in my case, I am a small business, and if I am a small business owner and I'm listening to me and you right now, what's the one action, the one thing that I could do this week to improve my visibility in AI-driven search?

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, if you're a small business and if you're a service business, I haven't addressed this yet, but you need to focus on reviews and answering or responding to your reviews with a if if you're a location-based business with a location and your service-based or your product-based keyword. So to the best of my knowledge, Google gives as much credit for a review as a review replied. So it's going to sound corny, but Grant, I'm really happy that you were excited about our kitchen remodel in Minneapolis. Uh, you know, uh, next time you're looking for someone to upgrade your kitchen, or you know, please think of us again. We've we've enjoyed working with you. So you're so I'm I'm putting a keyword phrase and I'm putting a location in the response. Yeah. When people say that sounds really corny, I say, Do you want to make money or do you want to bite to be okay being corny? Right.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, to your point is that there's machine language and then there's human language in a conversational style. What is the machine? Could because ultimately you want the platform to amplify your message. You want it to amplify yourself within your target audience so that they see it. And I love you know, the advice you just gave is is awesome. Because a lot of you don't realize, well, how do you, you know, you you you you may be ranking on Google, you're there, but are you optimized on the platform so that it's showing it to as many eyeballs that that that it can to get you to a point, like they said, if I am I am looking for the best Peter peanut butter and jelly service provider in my area, you need to be there. And your story needs to be there. It's not just okay, yeah, they they they provide it, but then you go into depth about it, and then it makes me want to go buy it. I'm gonna go drive over there or order it or have it sent to me or whatever it may be, it's gonna convert. I think that's so important. Now, here here's the question: what mistakes do most agencies make when it comes to AI search optimization? And how can business owners protect themselves from empty promises?

SPEAKER_00:

So I don't know what mistakes that they're making because I'm really not standing paying any attention to looking at what competitors are doing because we're just trying to produce the best results for our customers. But using a tool that can talk about how many times you're cited in an AI um model, and then looking at that are we being cited more or are we being cited less? Another thing, um I um it if you know anything about me, you know that I'm a huge fan of data that cannot be skewed. Um, and that's Google Analytics. Um so I I don't have enough money power and influence to tell Google Analytics to change the data to make it look better in a customer's website, right? I don't think anybody does, but I'm not sure there are some people that it's not me. Um so the they're starting to pull in clicks from Grok, clicks from Perplexity, clicks from Gemini, clicks from um ChatGPT in the um traffic acquisition tab. So that will, even though we mentioned that there's a lot of zero click search and people are clicking, some people are still clicking. So you can look at, hey, I've been working with this company, I'm getting more clicks in ChatGPT than I've ever done before. Yeah. You know, so even if you don't, when you look at their reports, because there's so many different types of reporting, um, the one that we use is great. Is it the best? Uh there may be there may be better ones. Um, is it uh I have to trust the creators of the tool for the accuracy. Yeah, I don't have to worry about when I look in Google Analytics if that data is valid, right? If that is true coming from Google. So you can also you can always look at Google Analytics, and albeit the number will be smaller, seeing if you're getting more interactions from those engines.

SPEAKER_01:

I think that's important. I know in my world, especially in information technology, cybersecurity, we always use these two words, trust but verify.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Trust but verify. So if you can get verifiable statistics and analytics, you just pointed that out. Google Analytics doesn't lie, it doesn't need to. So it's not competing from an agency standpoint. My question for a green banana is that how did you position yourself to become the SEO agency AI platform that now becomes actually recommended in these engines?

SPEAKER_00:

Um uh our clients kept asking us for it. And so we, you know, we have a lot, we were really fortunate to have a lot of great clients that we collaborate with. We we kind of work with our clients as partners. So we're we like to think of ourselves as an extension of the team, and they're sharing as much data with us as we're sharing with them. And and all of our more aggressive clients have been saying, we need this, we need this, we need this. So it's something that that I had to really, as the as the resident SEO geek of Green Banana, I had to you know deep dive and figure out um how it could start appearing in all of these um answer engines. And what was fortuitous is a lot of the stuff that we were doing already was what were the things that that I was reading as recommendations.

SPEAKER_01:

This is important. I want to ask you this because now we're we're kind of morphing now into agentic AI. You have agents, there's a lot of automation orchestration taking place. So you may not be the human HI intelligence actually looking things up anymore. Have you optimized for that?

SPEAKER_00:

So we've we're optimizing for all of the engines that are using the agents. The thing about an agent, one thing that's going to be exceptionally difficult to track as as it moves on, is if you had to have an agent on your machine and I have an agent on my machine, it is very personalized. It is reading all my emails if I wanted to, it is looking at my calendar, it is looking at my social media channels, it is getting and that's something you could go on for weeks talking about how frightening that is. Um, but so it's it's giving you personalized information. Um, so a search on your computer and a search on mine are going to be different with the output. Um, but we're still going to know what gets mentioned the most. Like one of the things that that um Gemini has done, Google's product, is that there is training that when they show the reporting, they show training data and grounded data. Um, training data is all the information that the answer engines already have, they've already compiled about you. The grounded data is they're actually using Google to go do research. So they are continually pulling information from Google to create, to increase the training model that they have to get more information for that. So that's really important. That I think if you continue to focus on high-quality SEO, high quality content, high quality links, not like farm junk, um, you're gonna do really well on these things.

SPEAKER_01:

Good advice for people trying to understand, get a handle on this change that that's happening, uh, because the machine-to-machine language is just becoming dominant, the the conversations, the types of things that you need to do to get your your the visibility uh that you're looking for and that conversion that you're looking you're looking for. Now you you have worked across industries from biotech to retail. My question is, what lessons about brand growth and then customer connection have proven universal throughout your experience?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, one phrase people buy from people. So it's that human connection. That's why social media is so important. That's why a lot of people are getting great information from Reddit and Substack and Quora. People buy from people.

SPEAKER_01:

See, we gotta double down on that. I want people to understand. Now, like I said, I've been in information technology for probably 30 years. And I've I've been I work for companies like uh Avaya that were big into uh customer service engines, uh, you know, the CE uh world when it came to uh platforms. Yeah, remember the first voicemails were even coming up and that type of thing. Automation is good to a certain degree, but we always knew that the purpose of the technology is to enable a human-to-human connection as quickly as possible. You don't want to substitute, you know, or keep the human always talking to it in AI, so to speak. AI, you know, you could define that, it's been around for a long time. Anytime you interact with any kind of capital, boom. Yeah. But it also proved to be um um it can have negative impact uh uh as well because it's just dissonant, there's there's social dissonance there. People still like talking to people. So when we go into this AI and the gentec AI world, and people are like, oh, that's great, yeah, but you can also distance yourself from your client, and then and then you you're not really interacting with them, you're interacting with the machine. As far as I know, machines don't have money, but I guess maybe digital currency, maybe they do, maybe they they start buying things on your behalf. But I think there might be a little bit of oversight on that. Tell us the core about what you think about that hi to hi interaction, and you is just enabling that interaction.

SPEAKER_00:

I I so I think so. When you're writing content, you want to have authorship of that. So I don't there's there's something that a principle that that Google was really pushing years ago, and it's still really prevalent. It's called Eat, it's the you know, um, expertise, experience, authority, and trust. Um, and so I think actually it's it's probably a brilliant way for them to try to mitigate some of the AI generated content by having people take authorship or ownership of that content. So it was really big in finance and health mode first started coming out. So they they weren't even ranking sites that didn't say, Hey, here's the doctor that published this, and here's the school that you went to. Right. So it's looking for things like that. So when you're writing content, you become an author in a good super secret happen. To this is you put your author page on your bio and LinkedIn. So Google is going to say, hey, we trust LinkedIn. It's a really big high authority publication. It mentions your author page and it links back to the author page on your site. So you're giving yourself a high quality, um, direct link to that. And it's it's you're giving your authorship a little bit more credibility.

SPEAKER_01:

I think that's so important. It's me as a personal brand strategist. I've been uh known as a personal brand uh guru. Like I think I got ranked uh so far in the top 30 on global gurus just here at 45, which I like. And I I've been preaching this for a while, especially my knowledge and understanding how machines actually work, is that you've got to give it the right data. You have to give it the right data from a personal brand perspective. You create the digital footprint so that when uh Google, let's say you Google Grant McGall, I know exactly the information that's gonna come up. And I'm starting to notice even now, as I go into the different, and I like how you say answer engines, because I think it sounds better than LLM. Answer engines sounds kind of cool. I'm gonna coin that one.

SPEAKER_00:

It's easier to say, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I like it. It sounds better to me than LLM because you got to define further defined it. Right. Um, but if someone goes to uh Chat GPT or Cloud or whatnot and they put in Grant Magall, I want to see what's coming up. They're not gonna be exactly the same, but it's very similar as far as the information because it's pulling information directly from what I've given it, whether I've given it from LinkedIn, whether I've given it from my my um my website, press releases, things like that, because I know in the background is gonna pull and it's gonna pull from credible sources, and that's gonna bring you uh forward. Am I correct on that assumption?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I think that's a really important thing to highlight. You're controlling the narrative of your story. Yeah. Very, very, very, very smart and important, or someone else is gonna do it for you, and you don't want that. Right. And you get negative press, right?

SPEAKER_01:

And negative employees.

SPEAKER_00:

Right, negative press or no press, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Or or no press.

SPEAKER_00:

Or not or not.

SPEAKER_01:

Or nothing, nothing at all. Right, right. Right. So so here's the question. Last question. Maybe I I can't guarantee that, but you know, but outside of business, you're deeply engaged in your community and mentoring. I want to understand what does that leadership philosophy, how does it show up in the way that you run your company?

SPEAKER_00:

I think it gives me a different perspective. So I'm the I'm the president of the board of my local YMCA. Um uh I um one of the things that the YMCA does that that means a lot to me, and which is why I want to be involved, is the amount of uh things they give back to people. Um, there are so many people in in the community that I live in that um can't work because they can't afford daycare, that they they uh um don't have a place to live, they can't afford a gym membership. And the why is is is donating all that stuff and helping people so that they can become that. Um and so when I when I one of the reasons that I joined is when they had first asked me, my first thought is I'm too busy, I have a lot of stuff to do at work. And then I thought to myself, you know what, I'm just pushing ones and zeros on a computer and I'm helping my clients make more money. That's not helping the world. So how can I give a little back? And I think that has helped me identify a lot more with people, identify a lot more with my my employees. Um you know, there's uh um, I don't know, it just it part of it. I just feel good to it makes it feel good to tell people.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Social impact. I I'm I'm on the in the circle of making money for money's sake, you know, it it is good, but it has no value. It's like being on a deserted island. If you have a bunch of money, what what good is it? You know, so what are you doing to circulate uh the things that you're doing and bringing back the good work that's there? That should the money again it should not be the end of the road, it's part of the road, it's part of the journey, right? Um, but it's not the that's not cyclical in a way, you know. So, what is how do you take that good um that goodwill and then regenerizing the social community? Because that same community is accessing networks, they're accessing websites, they're going to Google, but if you're not enabling them in a certain way to be able to be able to do that, then what are you doing? So I I like how you position that. Now, here's my last question, and I like asking this question because I like to ask them of my guest in real time. This is your first experience with the Follow Rant podcast. Now you've gone through the interview process with me as the host. How did you like this interview?

SPEAKER_00:

The quality of the questions that you asked were fantastic. So, this was a this for me was a really stimulating conversation. I enjoyed it, and I I I learned a little bit more um after speaking with you. So I think like those are the the you know, it was fun, it was informative, it was challenging.

SPEAKER_01:

Those are you know the three perfect pieces to uh uh absolutely and I learned a great deal. I think the audience learned a great deal about something again that's very pressing, it's just top of mind right now because things are just changing uh rapidly. So I like to see what what's happening, like you know, open up the hood, let's let's look at the engine down here, our answer engine, right? Or yeah, our social uh engineering optimization. These are all these engines that are going on, but I really appreciate you taking the time and uh do this. Okay, and you gotta let us know how to contact you at Green Banana, and what is the best possible way?

SPEAKER_00:

So you can go to greenbanana sf.com or this but you can't ask this to an answer engine because it's gonna answer differently. But I kept losing my business cards years ago or forgetting them. So I ended up optimizing I just met Kevin. So if you Google I just met Kevin, you can get to my contact information. If you ask Chat TP GTP, I just met Kevin, they're gonna say, big deal. Who's Kevin? Right? Right? So I just met Kevin, or you can go to greenbanana SEO.com. And if I could say one more thing, I think that will will be helpful. When I first saw, learned about AI, I was nervous about it. I'm scared, like this is gonna, you know, this could be taking over my business. Um and the more that I study it and the more that I learn about it, the more I realize it is an it is an amazing opportunity for growth, no matter what business you're in. So if you're listening to this and you're nervous, don't be nervous and learn more about it because it it will help you in some way or another, and it's not going away.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. I I encourage everyone. I just had this discussion with another group of people, and I I I put it in this way just like you need to understand, let's say, the Microsoft suite of uh software um packages, whether it's email, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, you needed to know these things. You need to know these things in today's business environment. You need to know AI. And AI is a lot of different things. It's not just an answer engine, you know, that's LLM launch. That's part of it. That's what people kind of used to know, but it's a lot more than that. There's a lot of uh uh automation that's taking place, content generation, whether it's video, audio, text. This is how business is getting done. This is speed to market. You cannot sleep on these things. I implore everyone to get involved with any kind of AI workshop that's gonna upskill you on these platforms so that they you become proficient at it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, or just even just download Gemini or Chat GPT and start doing stupid things with it. You're gonna learn. You're gonna say, Oh, I didn't know it could do this, or if if if if it gets the answer wrong or you don't get the output you want, who cares? Have fun with it and you're gonna start learning learning stuff.

SPEAKER_01:

And you'll mold it to yourself. We talked about customization and personalization earlier. Then you start to realize you have a real assistant that's built just for you that can help you uh along live sorts. So that is great. I want to make sure that your all your particular audience can tune in to all the episodes of Follow the Brand. They can do so at five star BDM. That's number five at Star S D R D for Brand, D for Development, Informasters.com. This has been wonderful, Kevin. I want to thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01:

You're welcome.