Multi-platform search is here: Building brand visibility across Google, TikTok, and answer engines

Andrew:

Hello and welcome to SE Ranking’s DoFollow Podcast. Here we bring you in depth conversations with SEO, digital marketing and search experts, where we dive into the latest trends and strategies to help you stay ahead. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss anything happening in search. 

Today, we’re exploring “Multi-platform search: Building brand visibility across Google, TikTok and AI answer engines.” Put simply, we’ll unpack how people now search across surfaces—from Google results and TikTok’s in-app search to answer engines like AI Overviews, Copilot, and Perplexity—and how smart brands build portable visibility that shows up everywhere.

Now, I couldn’t be more excited about today’s guest, Jessica Redman. Jessica went from co-founding a revenue-focused organic search agency to becoming the person brands call when they need visibility that travels across Google, TikTok, and the places people now search. We’ll dig into her playbooks for entities, short-form video, product architecture, and measurement when clicks are scarce.

Hey, Jessica! Thank you for taking the time to let me pick your brain.

Jessica:

No, thanks. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited. Pick it all you want.

Andrew:

Sure! I just want to set this table for the folks who might be meeting you for the first time. So, if you could, please tell us a bit more about yourself. What are the ins and outs of your story? How did you go from co-founding Didgeheads to becoming the person brands go to when they need visibility that travels across all these search platforms, from Google to TikTok?

Jessica:

Sure. So, I’ve been in SEO for about nine years now. And when I started, probably like many people back then, it was very much about these cheeky little hacks, buying links en masse, doing all sorts of black hat stuff that you would get away with, right? And over that time, things developed massively.

Didgeheads actually started with frustration, to be honest with you. I was frustrated that agencies weren’t adapting to the new way that consumers behave. You know, it was very much about keywords, rankings, technical audits on repeat. And I could see for a long time that we were missing that marketing psychology side of it.

So, I started sharing my thoughts on that on LinkedIn, going to conferences. Look, this is how the user journey is changing. Like, we really need to adapt to this. We need to think like marketers, not so much in that headphones-on, technical side of SEO and silo ourselves. We need to be in marketing teams and working on this stuff day in, day out, working with social, working with products.

And so, the more I spoke about it, the more I’d get, you know, brands reaching out and saying, look, can you help us? We’re not doing so much of that joint-up search strategy stuff. And so, yeah, it just developed over time. Personal brand played a big role in that as well.

Andrew:

Perfect. Now, I want to sort of zoom out and define the playground that we’re going to talk about today. So, when you hear multi-platform search, what does that actually mean and look like? Are people just bouncing from Google results to TikTok search and just, and then go into AI answers? Obviously not. But where do you see brands winning or losing that journey right now? And what does that journey specifically look like?

Jessica:

I love this question, and I could talk about it for a long time. And I think where I would like to start answering it is going from that psychology side as a marketer, right? Looking at this from a psychological perspective.

If I was to ask you why there are more and more touch points—Google calls it the messy middle, right?—this part of the journey where we might know where the journey starts and where it ends, but there’s a whole bunch of behavior going on in the middle that, you know, attribution—as we know, attribution models are pretty murky, and they’re getting murkier. So, there’s a lot of stuff in there that we potentially don’t know is happening.

But we do know that trust is a really big psychological factor in how consumers interact with brands and products. So, 87% of consumers will pay more for products from brands that they trust.

So, if we look at it from that lens, what we’re seeing behaviorally is the erosion of trust in the marketplace—from fake news to, you know, dodgy ads on Facebook. I don’t know how many times people I love and know—my mom—has clicked on an ad on Facebook and bought something that’s never arrived. Ads, misleading ads, fake reviews—it’s just endless.

And so, we’ve kind of—we’ve built a consumer culture as marketers—we’ve played a part in that—where trust has eroded over time. And so, what that has led to is this multi-touch journey where I need to verify multiple times that the product I want to buy or the brand I want to interact with is who they say they are and that their product is going to work for me.

And so, when we look at it from that lens, then we understand where brands are winning and losing. And I’ll give you an example. Someone I know in my circle—I’m not going to say who the brand is—but they are a travel brand. So, you go on their website and you book buses to different places. Someone I know worked with this brand for a while. They brought them in, and they said, look, we need to drive SEO visibility. We need to focus on Google. It was very technical heavy—content, stuff like that as well.

And it was only three months in when this organic stuff wasn’t working, where the person I know started picking up on the reviews of this company all around the web. Trustpilot, you name it, they were being reviewed. And all of them—I’m not going to say all—80% of the reviews were bad. People saying this is a scam. My bus never arrived. I was charged the wrong amount.

In that scenario, SEO is never going to cut it. What you need to understand as a brand right now is that it doesn’t matter if you’re ranking in position one for that money keyword. If somebody goes on Reddit, and there’s five threads talking badly about your customer service; if somebody goes on TikTok, and there’s reviews of your product and it’s breaking; if somebody goes on Trustpilot and you’ve got two stars—that is the search ecosystem now.

The first thing people do if they go to a restaurant and they get served a cold dish—they go and review the restaurant. Google reviews, wherever.

So, as SEOs, our job has become search ecosystem. And part of that is, as a consultant or a strategist, saying, we have a problem here. Customer service are getting the same complaint. How do we address this? You have to think about every single touch point and how that impacts consumer trust along the way.

So, the brands that are losing are the ones that actually are keeping SEOs siloed and thinking that rankings is enough, and then not doing the work on product, on customer service, you know. They’re not educating about the product—buyer guides, all of that stuff. They’re losing, and they’re going to continue to lose unless they actually face up to the truth, which is people can easily find this information now, and they will.

Andrew:

I can definitely resonate with the trust factor. I remember back in the day, before you had, like, the internet, you had to go to, like, a market, find the guy that you trust, buy something, and you only buy from that guy from that moment on because you made a good deal, you bought something good, and you don’t want to, again, waste time finding that something that you trust.

And I feel online, like, maybe, like, 10, 15 years ago, we had this social proof rolling out and people just sort of trusting a lot more because now they see that people are actually using it, getting real reviews. So, that sort of helped. I got used to that when I was picking out products—different stuff.

But now there’s another thing. We have so many different things. I can just buy stuff on Instagram without even them having a website. So, it’s just how much of a trust factor they build within that micro platform, you know, just Instagram alone.

So, I definitely feel like I’m doing a lot more work as a buyer, as a searcher, instead of, again, going back to that website I trust, seeing, like, 15 people like this product are looking at it right now, and I’m like, okay, great, I’ll just take it because I just see all these reviews. So, I understand the exact process, and I’m, right now, even with AI giving me all these sources, I’m still reviewing it. I still don’t trust it. I still can’t just blindly say, okay, just here’s my prompt. Here’s the answer without reading it. Let’s just send it over to my boss.

You always have to still go and—I’m not really sure how that is gonna play out with regard to the trust because there’s just so many players again right now. You can’t sort of just stop on Google and put all your hopes on Google, and just, if something goes wrong, you complain to just one source. So, yeah, there’s a whole lot of struggle going on with that.

Jessica:

That’s a really good point. I was just going to say it’s a really good point because a lot—what I’m seeing a lot is brands going, we’re panicking about GEO, whatever you want to call it. We need to, you know, we need an LLM strategy. I’m putting all their eggs in that basket and saying, right, this is a really big thing for us. This is the most important part of it. But like you said, that trust still isn’t there. So, if I’m going to ChatGPT and I get an answer, I’m still going to Google to verify it. I’m still going to a Reddit thread.

So, nothing at the moment is worth ploughing all of that resource into one area. And it goes back to, as well, what you said about if you find someone you trust on a marketplace, you go back to that person. It’s heuristics, which is like an approach to problem solving that is optimized for humans. So, the human brain always wants to take a shortcut to solve a problem.

So, when you’ve got a good barber, and I have a good hairdresser, I won’t go to anyone else. That eases the load on my brain because I know I’m just going to go to the same person. I’ve got her WhatsApp. I can just send her and say, hey, can I pick an appointment? It’s all about ease.

So, if you apply that to the way that you do a content strategy, you want to make it as easy as possible to come back to you—buy a guide. When I say good content, I mean, how does it work? How is it different from your competitors? Reviews, testimonials. Make it as easy as possible to trust your brand, and then that person will keep coming back.

Andrew:

Great stuff, Jessica. I want to talk a bit more about how to be found inside the AI answer problem that everybody’s wrestling with. So, with AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity summarizing results, how do brands earn citations and links, reduce hallucination risks, and measure share of voice inside those answers? What’s your playbook to getting included consistently?

Jessica:

Love this. So, it’s a really important shift, and AI summaries—AI models—rely on what I call signals of truth. So, they pull from what looks structured, trusted, and consistent. If you have those three things, you’re in a very good position to be featured a lot in AI models. And I think—actually, I’m interested in your view on this—but I think we’re not quite developed enough to be touting GEO audits.

And when I ask—I constantly ask people on LinkedIn the question—what are you doing for GEO that’s inherently different to what you’re doing for SEO? And a lot of people find it really hard to answer that question because all of the stuff that’s great for AI models is mostly also great for traditional search.

So, number one, clarify your entity. So, entity is very simply who you are, what you do. And we do it in local SEO actually, right? We build citations where you have the address and the restaurant and what food you serve and the opening times, but you have it in multiple places across the internet—different directories and such. And that is basically telling AI models that you’re a real thing because I can’t touch a brand, I can’t feel it or see it, but you need to tell AI models you’re a real thing—you exist, you’re a tangible thing. And you do that by talking about who you are, what you do, in multiple places on the internet.

Structure. So, we talk about schema markup—yes, citations across the web, brand mentions, links from authoritative sources. All of that provides a level of structure to the signals that you’re sending AI models. Your credibility has to appear in multiple sources.

So, we go back to digital PR being a really, really big thing going into 2026, and it’s not about links on their own anymore, right? It’s about brand mentions, but it’s also about, are people talking about you on social? Are people talking about you on Reddit? Are people talking about you across the whole ecosystem of the web? So, that’s really, really important.

And then engaging in distribution where you’ve got really great content on your site or buyer’s guides—turn them into short-form videos, spread them out on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram. It’s about being present as a brand across as many platforms as you can, and just reiterating that message over and over about who you are and what you do until, like you said, you become familiar, right? And psychologically, people trust what’s familiar to them. It’s the mere exposure effect. The more times I’m exposed to something, the more I’ll trust it.

And in terms of metrics, I really like Peak.ai, and I also like LLMrefs. So, those tools basically can track your share of voice across a certain amount of queries in AI models. So, they’ll track how often your brand’s name or URL appears in AI responses. You can track anywhere from, like, 25 queries all the way up to, like, thousands and thousands of queries.

I think there’s still a bit of work to do in the sense that AI answers change at a rate much, much faster than Google rankings. So, you could argue, well, how valuable is it to see my share of voice today when it might be completely different next week and then completely different the week after? That’s something we haven’t pinned down yet. And I’m happy to say that, you know, I’m not a hundred percent clear on what that looks like yet.

The thing I am clear about is simply tracking, like, a GA4 report, where I just set up how many clicks do we get from ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera. It’s a really simple way of tracking it. I don’t think—I don’t know if you agree—but I don’t know if we’re a hundred percent nailed down on tracking visibility yet.

Andrew:

So, I have a couple of things to react to that. So, for example, I’ve heard from the conversations that I’ve had over the past couple of months that doing the right SEO is what helps you do right GEO. So, we’ve always been focusing on organic, on paid, on social, but we just didn’t think focus on social as much. We didn’t have the data to back up those interactions.

We were doing it mostly for the people because we thought, like, okay, Google is made for the people first. So, it should connect that social aspect in there somehow. We were just not sure to what degree, but now I think—I’m not really sure—but I think about around 60% of SERPs have a social link on their first page—just a whole lot of pages just linking social from TikTok and wherever it is—it could be LinkedIn, anything.

And with regard to keeping track of AI search visibility, we actually at SE Ranking have rolled out a tool specifically designed for those top-level decision makers called SE Visible, where we also give you an opportunity to see how visible you are for those prompts.

There’s a lot that goes on under the hood. With this, we update these prompts, I think, every couple of days. We make sure to run the same prompt a couple of times just to make sure we’re getting different responses. We also add location specifiers sometimes, but it’s still a difficult process. But the cool thing about SE Ranking is that we always reach out to our users to understand what they need.

So, we roll out an MVP, we get feedback. We add some more stuff. Right now, we’re focusing on sources, just so that you know who to address, to reach out to, because those sources are most likely to be cited by AI answers.

You know, pointing my finger at just one thing and just topping on that, but there’s just so much that goes into that. But indeed, this is something that a lot of marketers are eager to learn about—just to see what their visibility is and how they can leverage that information at the end of the day. Because, like you said, it can change tomorrow. It can change in an hour.

But still, I think, like what you said at the beginning of the answer, is doing proper SEO is what helps do GEO until we hear something else. But I’ve heard things like MCP. So, there are ways to optimize your information for those LLMs.

And I want to make the switch and talk about discovery a bit—focus on TikTok a bit more. So, the platform that acts like a search giant, even though most people still call it social.

So, how do you approach TikTok SEO so that you actually show up when someone searches inside the app? Is that even a thing that you—that is the way to call it, TikTok SEO? So, to make sure that you actually show up inside those answers within the app and not just on the For You page.

Jessica:

Yeah, it’s a really good question. So, the answer is yes, you can optimize to show up in search. So, I’ll describe it as a blend between SEO and behavioral psychology, right? In the sense that on TikTok, you’ve got 70% of TikTok users say its search results are more engaging than other platforms.

So, what we have in traditional search is becoming more engaging, but typically we have, like, a list of links, right? And we get rich snippets here and there, and it’s becoming more and more engaging, but TikTok is still an engagement platform. So, we’re not approaching it in the same way as maybe traditional search in the sense that you’ve still got things like hooks. You’ve got to hook the person in the first two seconds. You’ve got to, you know, make interesting cuts and kind of build retention where people know what type of content they’re getting.

So, you’ve got that SEO side, but you’ve also still got the behavioral psychology. So, first of all, there’s semantics. So, that’s basically—you can do TikTok—in TikTok native search, they have, like, a creator insights section where you can basically do your keyword research there. It’ll tell you what’s trending, things like that. Lots of tools now are doing keyword research for social. So, semantics is basically using the exact phrasing people search for—like, type into search—in your captions, but also your on-screen text. So, that’s something I’ve tested a lot of—just having it in captions—but it actually works more if you have it on on-screen text as well.

The other thing is if you have it in your keyword—in your script. So, if you’ve got a creator that’s speaking, obviously that script is going to become captions. So, that’s another way you can get that keyword on screen is within your captions.

And then you’ve got something similar to what we do in traditional SEOs—like topic clustering, right? So, you don’t just post one piece of content and think that covers a topic. You want to post multiple videos talking about a topic, and TikTok will learn that you own that theme. So, the idea is that the algorithm understands what you’re going to talk about, what you’re an authority on. And it also understands that if somebody’s searching for that topic, that user is going to be satisfied by your content. They’re going to stay on your video for a long time.

Then you’ve got the hook. So, opening the first two seconds—capture their attention. So, start with a question. Oh, are you looking for a solution to XYZ? Here we go. And then you re-hook every 10 seconds. So, still not sure how we do it? Here’s your answer. That’s a re-hook, right? So, you’re constantly re-hooking, keeping them engaged.

Retention. So, quick cuts—have you ever, like, found a reel or a TikTok, and you don’t realize, but you’ve watched the same cut 20 times before you’ve realized it’s just the same scene repeating itself? Because I do that all the time. I’m like, I’m still watching the video; I’m 10 seconds in, but I’ve just watched the same two-second clip on loop. That is a technique because when somebody watches that loop until the end, it’s basically telling the algorithm, oh, they’re watching that bit multiple times. I’m watching on loop.

And entities—back to entities, what we just talked about with AI models. So, say and show the product, the place, or the topic name so TikTok can see and hear it. Don’t just talk about a product—get someone videoing it. Don’t just talk about your menu or your restaurant—show it. So, you’re linking entities constantly. Who you are, what you are, what you do, who your people are—over and over again.

So, yeah, in summary, I would say it’s a mixture of—yeah, you can optimize—but it’s also about that behavioral psychology is really important on TikTok.

Andrew:

Wow. Just a lot of insights packed into this answer. Just thank you for sharing that. Because, yeah, I sometimes feel like social platforms—the algorithm serves the people who talk the craziest stuff, the loudest sometimes. And, like, when you said engaging, the first thing I thought was a police chase with a helicopter looking at it. So, it’s—still, I want to watch it, but what good is it to me?

But when you went to the ending of your answer, I understood that we’re not just talking about building hype. There’s a lot of structure that goes into it—portraying your product, linking with the entity. So, I’m really happy about the answer that you just gave us.

I want to make the switch to the Google side. There’s a shift that puts more power in the hands of the user. Google search now lets people set Preferred sources in their Top stories. And what does that change about how publishers and brands earn visibility when they can ‘star’ outlets they trust? And also, what’s the move for becoming a star where these source people add?

Jessica:

You know what? And it’s interesting because there’s, like, a running theme, and it’s trust. And it’s the biggest trust shift or indication that we’ve seen from Google in a long time. That’s very trust-based. It means that, as a user, you are almost like the architect of your own algorithm yourself, which we haven’t really seen before in the sense of being the architect of what you see. It’s always been behaviors that you’re not conscious of.

So, like, sometimes I’m on Twitter—or X, whatever—and I like football. My whole feed is, like, Arsenal football. And every now and again, I’ll get something really click-baity. I don’t like reading about politics when I’m on there because it’s—as that platform more than—it’s so explosive and opinionated and damaging, I think.

But one little tweet will capture my attention for a little pause as I’m scrolling through—just to pause. That is immediately telling the algorithm, she paused on TikTok, she paused. I’m going to send more. I’m going to feed more of this content into her feed. I pause again. Here we go. And suddenly you’ve lost control of your algorithm. You’ve probably had that happen to you. You look at one dog video; next day your feed is full of dogs. So, you kind of feel like you’ve lost control. This puts control back into the user’s hands.

So, how do we build trust with those users to say, when I’m looking for something, I always go there because I trust that they’re going to deliver? It taps right into that authority bias. We naturally rely on brands that we recognize. So, a big part of this is visibility as a brand. If you’re not already building that brand salience, in my opinion, you’re going to disappear from the star lists, right?

The strategy for me is act like a publisher. Consistent expert commentary, structured data for authorship. Authorship is a really big one. If you’re in the health and wellness space, or finance—YMYL, your money or your life—credible writers, not just the brand writing kind of rough blog posts, but do you have people in your organization that you can show off their knowledge? Do you work with experts—doctors, whatever, therapists? Credible journalism.

So, as a brand, to do that, you have to become the publisher—become that preferred voice. And you do that through authorship, regular posting, quality content. And it’s a long-term trust-building exercise. It’s not about short-term rankings. This is something that you need to do consistently over a long period of time.

Andrew:

Got it. I understand that it’s only the end of October. It’s too soon to call the season for Arsenal, but I’m really hoping that…

Jessica:

Don’t jinx us! Please, please!

Andrew:

No, I’m not going to jinx it. Fingers crossed.

Jessica:
Thank you!

Andrew:
I have loads of friends, fans. I understand their struggle. I, myself, am a Real Madrid fan.

Jessica:

Okay.

Andrew:

And I remember last year how you destroyed us.

Jessica:

We did.

Andrew:

The free kicks—they’re just insane. And about the algorithm scrolling. So, I’ve noticed myself that I scroll some—just open this list of shorts and just automatically—I don’t control what I see next, right?

So, as soon as I see something that I just don’t like at all, I close the app entirely. I open it again, and I start from the initial video that I had in the feed. So, that sort of tells the platform, the algo, that I really just did not enjoy what I saw. And what I’ve noticed is I do control it somehow.

So, when I start scrolling, I see football, football, football—for example, a dog. I don’t mind dogs, but then I see somebody building a chair—I don’t know, like, a gaming chair—and it’s, like, there’s this new type of video—it’s just they’re showing all the little screws that they put on. And I just immediately just close the app. And then I start again, and I don’t see it. So, hopefully, I’m learning to control it.

And another thing that I want to say is with regard to the content that you put out. So, we’ve been, over the years, we’ve been at SE Ranking writing blogs about everything just to cover the topics around digital marketing, SEO—just, like, what is search volume? What is share of voice?

Now we’ve moved past all this to specific researches. So, we conduct researches using our data, our databases, and this is what makes us unique. And we’ve been focusing for, like, the past year and a half only on these types of articles, content. So, we have not even published anything just about general, like, what is AI?

If we do publish about AI, we have one of our people running a comparison or running a research on specifically the use of ChatGPT’s latest model or asking AI Mode to—or, like, an agent builder—using the agent to, I don’t know, book you a trip to Hawaii for a week or something like that.

So, this is how we’ve changed everything. I feel like your answer included all the points, like the authorship, the value of it. So, great stuff.

Now, I wanted to move from the media to talk about how big sites are structured so that machines can understand them. What is your playbook for making large catalogs searchable everywhere, so that TikTok, Google, and quick AI answer experiences can understand and recommend the ranges that are offered on our website?

I realize that it’s sort of on the e-commerce side of it. And is the secret clean facets, internal search insights, and entity queues, or is there another secret to making your catalogs discoverable everywhere?

Jessica:

Yeah, it’s a good question, and I think it’s one that a lot of brands get wrong because, potentially, they overthink it. And it’s basically psychology. Again, going back to the psychology of human nature—people crave simplicity. So, if your site architecture makes them do work or think to find something, that’s not a good user experience.

So, when you’re mapping a site architecture, you’ve got to start with your ideal customer profile, right? What are their problems? What are they trying to find a solution for, and mapping that journey. Okay. If I was them, and with all the data that we’ve got on our ICP, how are they going to approach this journey?

So, I actually really like looking at massive sites like ASOS because they do it really well. Think about how many products and product variations a brand like—a site like—ASOS will host: sizes, colors, materials, trends—all the different clothing types. And somehow, when you use the ASOS site, it’s easy. It’s super easy. I love that site. I love that architecture.

So, the way they do that is they get into human psychology, and they see it as a pyramid, almost. So, the first thing is—you’ll see, and I know this because I did a piece of content on it, analyzing it—is what’s the first port of call that a person will go to looking for clothes? The first simple filter where you can get rid of 50% of items, narrow it down, is gender: male and female.

So, you’ll notice when you go on the ASOS site, those are the first two categories, and that filters out 50% of the potential availability of products. Then you get to women’s shopping. Then it will be, like, tops, trousers, skirts. So, basically, you want to build your mega-nav so that you are eliminating choice.

And you’ve got to eliminate the right choice because if you’ve studied marketing, you know about choice overload. If people have too many choices that—I don’t know what I want—I’m just not going to get anything.

So, you’ve got to—I think a lot of the time, the focus is on giving as much choice as possible, and that’s wrong. Your navigation should be about eliminating choice and helping them filter down, and down, and down, and down, and down. So, that’s what ASOS do really well. They get 50% gone, and they get 20–25% until you’re down to that 5% of products that you’re interested in.

So, clean up your categories. Think about that user journey and how you can eliminate choice with each step. Clean up your filters. Use your own internal search data. If you’ve got an internal search bar, see what people are looking for that’s not surfaced in your mega-navs. If they’re searching for something a lot, you might want to surface that earlier on in the journey.

You can also use Search Console and filter out your keywords by brand. So, if I was going to go into SE Ranking, I would go into your search console, I’d filter out your keywords with SE Ranking, and there you’ll be able to find navigational keywords. So, if someone says SE Ranking, SE Ranking AI search tool, or AI tracking tool, and that’s not surfaced—and there’s lots of people searching for that—then you need to surface it.

So, you can find little nuggets in there. Then you’ve obviously got structured markup—so, schema—and then weave in short, descriptive, like, entity hints, right? So, short and descriptive is materials, uses, and problems that you’re solving.

A lot of product copy or site copy I see is feature-led. So, it’s like, if it’s a supplement, it’s like, we have moss from Northern Sweden that has been curated and filtered 85 times. No one cares. No one cares. What they care about is what that moss is going to do for their health.

Is it going to make me feel more energetic? Is it going to help with my stomach problems? That is a part of your architecture as well. I know I went—I could talk about this for ages—but, yeah, I find it so interesting because it is that psychology, right? Side of it.

Andrew:

Yeah, I know analysis paralysis is real, and I’m still picking out some things for my house. Whenever I open the list of, like, available wallpapers, it’s just—I just don’t know what to stop on. 

Jessica:

Exactly that!

Andrew:

It depends on my mood. It depends on my mood most of the time. And, like, I don’t know what I’m going to feel tomorrow. So, yeah, this is something that I’m still struggling with.

And I want to talk about reporting—like, keeping track of the data. So, if a brand gets mentioned but not clicked, how do you measure that success? What hard and soft KPIs go on your dashboard to prove visibility across Google, TikTok, and AI answers? Is it share of voice, citations, assisted conversions? What are you looking at specifically, Jessica?

Jessica:

Yeah, that’s a really good point, and it makes our job 10 times harder. So, it’s not one that I’m necessarily that happy about. I’m not going to lie. So, we see more and more zero-click moments. In my opinion, where I see search going—Google, OpenAI—is they want to become the publisher, and they want to give you everything you need without you having to click anywhere. That’s how I see it going eventually.

You can add to your cart—you know, you have a connection between retailers and search engines. You can do anything you want—watch videos within that SERP. And with OpenAI, I think that that’s where they’re going, right, with Atlas, is you don’t need to leave—you stay there. So, yeah, that makes things really difficult. I typically do split metrics into hard and soft.

So, hard KPIs and soft KPIs. So, soft KPIs—might look at share of voice inside your AI answers. So, that’s a big one, right? That’s, like, you’re looking at the queries that you want to track. How many of those are you appearing for versus your competitors? And actually, from what I’ve seen, that doesn’t vary as much as individual queries. You tend to have, like, a maybe 3–8% variation week on week, depending on the brand. So, share of voice is a really good one.

And entity coverage—so, brand mentions. That’s a big one as well. How many people are mentioning your brand? Where are they mentioning it? How often are they mentioning it? And then you’ve got things like, like you said, assistive conversions, organic revenue, actual clicks from AI models.

A lot of people talking about tracking queries, but I’m looking at actual clicks. The data shows that clicks you get from AI models—don’t quote me on this, I can’t remember the exact quote—but it’s something like three times more valuable than clicks from traditional search. So, yeah, right?

Andrew:

I’ve heard something like that—something very close to that number.

Jessica:

Yeah. And the reason is because, like, they’re answer engines. They’re not designed to drive clicks. They want to give you the answer within the engine, but there are certain queries that they want to drive clicks for, and those are kind of maybe more lower funnel.

So, when they’re recommending—okay, someone says, what software can I use to automate LinkedIn posting? That’s when you’re going to get the click. Those are, like, the more mid and lower funnel queries. So, they want to send clicks there. So, if you’re measuring clicks, you can easily set up a GA4 report tracking those.

So, that’s a big one as well. But, yeah, I would say share of voice is probably the number one emerging metric that everyone should be looking at.

Andrew:

Strategy takes resourcing, and many teams still heavily relied on paid ads. Let’s talk about that balance. So, unfortunately, budgets are finite. For teams still over-indexed on paid social, what’s your case for rebalancing toward organic brand building across Google, TikTok, AI answer experiences, and how do you pace that investment so that it compounds instead of spiking and fading out?

Jessica:

I love this question. I’ve always really believed that brands get addicted to paid search and paid social. I was watching Dragon’s Den recently—I don’t know if you watch it—with Stephen Bartlett. He’s on Dragon’s Den, and there was a brand that came in, and he was like, what’s your revenue? The numbers look really good. Then he was like, can you give me a breakdown? I think, like, something ridiculous like 92% of revenue was coming from paid social and paid search.

Andrew:

Is this like Shark Tank?

Jessica:

Yeah, it’s like the UK version. Yeah. And then he went on this whole rant that was basically—how I saw it was, like, a pro SEO rant. It was like, that’s not really a business because if you turn off your ads overnight, you don’t have a business anymore. You’re literally just a customer of Meta and Google. That’s what you are. It’s not a business. So, I think—and he used the words ‘addicted.’ He said a lot of brands get addicted to paid social.

Paid is like that dopamine hit, right? And it’s—I think it’s good in the short term for a brand where you’re needing cash flow. You need cash flow, and you want to reinvest that cash flow.

But psychologically—and we know this because of click-through rates in the traditional SERP—click-through rate for the first result is around about 36%—organic result. Whereas you look at, like, paid click-through rates, they’re a lot lower—one, two, 3%. And that just shows people do skip past the sponsored results because they trust if you rank organically. It builds those trust signals.

So, that repetition again triggers that availability heuristic. If you’re available and you’re ranking in Google, and you’re there, and you’re everywhere—you feel credible, it’s easy to find you, it’s easy to click on you. The case from my side is if you’re looking at building a brand in the long term, and you’re focusing on the lower funnel, what’s going to happen when that well runs dry?

You are running paid ads—paid search ads. They typically focus on people ready to buy now, right? Those people, at some point, that well is going to run dry. Now, if you’re not talking to people in the mid and upper funnel that are going to convert in six to 12 months, but your competitors are—maybe they’re interacting with their content on their site or their social—who is that consumer going to choose in six months to 12 months when they eventually see your PPC ad?

They’re going to choose the brand they’ve already interacted with. They already follow on TikTok. They’ve already read the blog. They already get the newsletter. So, if you’re just focusing all of that resource in the lower funnel, you’re not filling your pipeline six to 12 months down the line. What does fill your pipeline is organic.

When I say organic—I said organic specifically because I mean organic social, I mean organic search. You’ve got a lot more leverage in the upper funnel. You can educate, you can build connections, you can build trust. So, my case is, yes, I think they work well together, but it’s not a long-term strategy, because that well will run dry, and you need to build your pipeline. Organic is the channel that does that.

Andrew:

Great. Great! Thank you. And I want to get a couple of thoughts—a couple of your thoughts about something that’s been happening in the headlines recently. So, we’ve already sort of touched on the rollout of Atlas, but how do you see that situation with the Google—the judge—they’re not forced to sell Chrome, but they just need to have some data sharing requirements. The rollout of ChatGPT’s Atlas with all its capabilities, Perplexity’s Comet.

How does that combo—rising answer-first challengers and Chrome staying intact—change the channel mix, how you optimize for answer-led browsing versus traditional search?

Jessica:

Whoo! You know what, that question is a really tough one, and I’m kind of reticent to necessarily answer it in full now, because it’s so early on, and I can’t predict what’s going to happen. But I think the reason that Google have been able to keep Chrome as is, is there is enough competition happening. And, yes, Google has a vast majority of market share, but all the data points to that market share eroding over the next few years—even, like, you know, some predictions that more people will be using AI models in 2027 in Google search. That’s two years. It’s really not a lot of time. And I think that that is reflected in that, because we know there’s competition, and it’s serious competition.

And I think the way it’s going to go—I briefly touched on it—but we are probably going to see zero-click search rise, and rise, and rise, even in the lower funnel. I think eventually we’re going to see the OpenAI’s and the Googles and whatnot actually hosting that buying journey at some point. I think they’re going to become publishers in their own right. I think publishers are going to really, really struggle. They’re already struggling, but they’re going to struggle even more.

We are seeing that OpenAI—there are some murmurs about them building their own index—because it does not make sense for a company like OpenAI to rely on another company like Alphabet to populate its answers. So, they’re going to—these—Claude, you know, Anthropic and Alphabet—they’re going to start building their own indexes. They’re going to—you know—they’re not going to rely on Google search anymore, and that is going to change the way that we approach algorithms. We don’t know what the algorithms are going to look like. How are they going to—you know—are they going to follow the Google model and do it in a similar way? Or is it going to be completely different? We don’t know.

I think that what I would say is I’m seeing a lot of these quick-win hacks. Publish a post saying the top 10 software and put yourself at the top—listicles—and then buy loads of, you know, links—publishing the same listicle.

What we saw with Google is that, over time, the algorithm had just adjusted, and it just made all of that—all of that stuff people were doing, buying cheap links en masse—was just a waste of money. The same thing’s going to happen. At the moment, the algorithms are really immature with ChatGPT. It’s easy to game it. That’s what Google was like at the beginning. They’re going to catch up. It’s not going to take long.

So, I’d say, as a brand, don’t get that shiny object syndrome and start following these quick-win hacks, because eventually it’s going to get wiped out. Go back to that marketing mindset. What is my user need? What do my customers need? How well do I know them? And if I don’t know them, I need to get to know them really, really well. I need to know their journey, and I need to create presence around—across—that journey.

Andrew:

Excellent, Jessica. And we’re actually running real low on time, and I wanted to sort of bring it to the last takeaway question. So, if listeners remember just one thing about building brand visibility across Google, TikTok, and quick AI answer experiences, what is the mindset or the move that you want them to take in their next planning meeting?

Jessica:

Remember that search is human behavior, not algorithmic behavior. Stop getting carried away in the algorithm. Stop getting carried away in the AI model hacks. Focus on the user—what they need. Get all the data you need to understand them on a deeper level—or the keyword research, whatever, internal search, whatever it is. Understand how they think. Their shortcuts, their biases—what makes them feel safe. And you’ll never be behind or get slaughtered by an algorithm again. You’ll be sweet.

Andrew:

Yeah, I’m really sad that we only booked you for one hour, and I would love to keep talking, because I have just a couple of more questions, but we’re not—just not—going to get to them. Hopefully, we’ll have an opportunity to talk more in the future and continue our conversation.

But, right now, I want to say that this is our time. Thank you, Jessica, for being here. That wraps up this episode of the DoFollow Podcast with Jessica Redman of Didgeheads, where we talked about building brand visibility across Google, TikTok, and AI answer engines. We hope you’re leaving with practical ways to craft content, product data, and video that travels, and with a measurable plan that proves it.

Jessica, thank you for sharing your playbooks and insights. And thanks to everyone for tuning in. Subscribe to the DoFollow Podcast for more conversations on search, and see you on the next one.