@tjrobertson52

In the last week, I've had several clients tell me that they got their first customer from ChatGPT and it's always so fun when that happens. Most of the clients I work with make a thousands of dollars for every customer they get so it's a big deal.

But honestly, in most cases, it's probably not the first customer they got from ChatGPT.

It's just the first customer that told them they found them on ChatGPT.

And when the customer is willing to tell them what they type in the ChatGPT, the most fun part is to go back and recreate that prompt to try to figure out why ChatGPT recommended them.

And it's usually some little thing we did some change we made to their website or some LinkedIn post or some listicle we got them included in.

That's what's so fun about this moment right now is we're just kind of figuring it out as we go tracking the sources that these large language models use to recommend our clients and their competitors and then figuring out how we can become the recommendation.

I talked about in a previous video how there are no AI optimization experts, no one's a GEO or AI O expert yet and while we do know a lot more than we did two months ago when I made that video, it's still just a small group of us. Feeling our way around in the dark and it would be reasonable to think why would I invest in AEO right now when no one even knows what they're doing?

I'll just wait till there are experts and that's certainly what most businesses are doing right now, which is what makes this such an exciting time to be doing AEO.

I don't know what percentage of small and medium sized businesses are currently making a significant investment in AEO, but I would guess it's something like 2%.

There's really not a lot of direct competition right now but I think it's safe to say that in the next few years that's gonna change very quickly.

So I can completely understand why someone might want to wait until more people are using large language models to find businesses or wait until best practices have emerged. Just know that that's what all your competitors are waiting for too.

I wouldn't be surprised if that 2% grew to 50% within the next few years.

Now just to make sure I'm not misleading anyone, how much you invest in AEO is not the only factor and not really even the main factor in determining how often you're recommended by large language models at least right now the main factor seems to be how well known you are in your industry, how much are people talking about you online? How much content is there about you?

And so a big part of what we do For our clients is helping them create that content and start those conversations.

But what those of us who have been following this closely are realising is that there are huge categories of opportunities that are going completely ignored. New opportunities that didn't exist. Four large language models, opportunities to create the content that ChatGPT is looking for or to get mentioned on the website that it's referencing before making a recommendation.

And in those categories, it currently just feels like one big land grab and 98% of your competition isn't even participating.