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What’s The Difference Between Keyword Research and Prompt Research?

Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about both keywords and keyword research in our digital marketing agency’s blog (you can view a list of those keyword-related blog posts at https://allintheresults.com/category/keywords/), so we won’t repeat all of the valuable information about the keyword-research benefits shared there. Such research is just one piece, but an important piece, of an overall SEO/GEO/AEO strategy, and often is the foundation of all other SEO/GEO/AEO (search engine optimization/being found online) tactics, particularly when it comes to being found in traditional search engines.

Keyword research and prompt research differ on a number of fronts, including the factors outlined below.

How Keyword Research and Prompt Research Differ

  • Nature of What Is Entered In Search Tool By Searcher/Prompter: Traditional keyword research is/was all about discovering what topics (in the form of one word or several words (a phrase or statement)) individuals, in geographies your organization serves) are/were entering into traditional search engines on an average monthly basis. Eventually, keyword research expanded to “light” question research, using tools like Answer The Public. Prompt research is about discovering the various questions vs. statements or phrases that individuals are putting into an AI search/answer engine, like Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, or ChatGPT, to get an answer to a specific question.
  • Geographic Focus: as discussed above, keyword research is/was focused on understanding what terms/phrases/words target audiences in an organization’s geography were entering into traditional search vs. AI search tools to determine which phrases the target audiences were using most. With prompt research, there is far less geographic/physical-location focus, and it is far more difficult to obtain what questions individuals specifically in your geography are putting into an AI search tool, like ChatGPT, to get their question answered.
  • Ultimate Search Engine Optimization (SEO/GEO/AEO) Goal/Objective: Keyword research is all about helping an organization “rank well” in relevant search results fo relevant searches. Prompt research is about identifying the types of questions anyone anywhere is entering in an AI/answer engine that are either directly, tangentially, or very indirectly related to the products or services your organization offers.
  • How Research Is Used: Keyword research is used to inform the content that one includes on their website — whether it be post or page content — but particularly, the words used in/the phrasing of headers and subheaders, and behind-the-scenes meta/SEO tags. Prompt research is about identifying which content on your own website or a competitor’s website is being cited (linked to) by AI search engines, and therefore, being served up to “prompters” in the answer they spit back. This research can help inform the format and content nature of future blog posts or Q &A (housed in an FAQ website page). In addition, a different set of prompt research should be conducted to learn the exact phrasing/the nature of prompts that your target audiences are regularly putting into AI search/answer engines.
  • Tools Used To Conduct Research: Free and paid tools exist to conduct keyword research, and our team uses the free keyword planner tool in Google Ads to conduct such research. Prompt research involves the two types/branches described above and can be conducted by 1) adding the “first user source” dimension to your Google Analytics “pages and screens” report (see image below) and entering the names of various AI search engines, such as Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini, into the search query bar so you can see to which pages/posts on your site AI search engines are referring visitors. If you have a visitor coming to a specific post/page on your website, then the AI engine in-question must have cited (provided a link to) the website page or post in-question; and 2) using a paid tool like SEMRush which has a distinct “prompt research” tool within it to gather broader/more general target-audience prompt behavior, and therefore, behavior that goes on beyond your particular website.
This image is a print screen from a Google Analytics report where the page report has an added dimension of the first user source name so the user can see what AI search engine is referring traffic to which pages and posts of their website.

Need Help Conducting Prompt Research Or Keyword Research?

Reach out today for a complimentary discussion regarding keyword research and prompt research to support an overall SEO/AEO/GEO strategy!

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Your Best Chance Of Appearing In AI Overviews? Being The Best

After reading this Linked post by Eli Schwartz, a very well-respected and well-known SEO expert, about how to appear in Google AI Overviews, the above slogan came to me. I wanted to give credit where credit is due and share how I was inspired. It all makes great sense and is in keeping with what we, as a fellow SEO expert, has been sharing in recent months, i.e., if you want a search engine to declare you as the best, or indicate less directly that your organization is the best or one of the best in its field and geography by mentioning your organization’s name or sharing a link back to your site (known as a citation), then your organization has to earn that “best” title.

We’ve already discussed ways your organization can send signals to AI engines that you are trustworthy in a number of recent blog posts, and that includes getting rave reviews from happy customers. But, ultimately, the way to get those reviews is becoming a company whose products, services, and customer service is unmatched by competitors, by demonstrating your commitment to the community/communities you serve, and by making sure you’re an “employer of choice.”

Why I’ve Got The Experience and Knowledge To Speak To What Makes An Organization An Outstanding One

Having worked since I was a teenager and until my mid-50’s for employers (and served in a number of manager and director roles), and now, for the past 12 years run a marketing agency that has successfully served more than 150 clients and received public-facing accolades (reviews), compliments and appreciation from clients, I believe I’ve got the background and experience to speak to what makes an organization stand out from competitors, and therefore, be considered “the best.” You can learn more about my corporate marketing and marketing agency background on my Our Principal and History website page.

As a life-long marketer I feel so strongly about how many of the attributes below influence an organization’s success that I’ve written about many of the below in past blog posts!

What Does It Take For Your Organization To Be The “Best” In Your Industry and Geography?

  • Treat your employees well.
    • Offer them opportunities to learn and take on new and larger roles.
    • Take the time to listen to and consider employee’s ideas to improve work productivity or process, or the products and services you offer.
    • Offer tangible and intangible benefits that they value and/or need.
    • Celebrate personal and organizational milestones and successes.
    • Offer financial incentives where, if the company does well, the employee does well.
  • Deliver exceptional, world-class service each and every day at every point of contact (EPOC) with customers. As a marketing professional with more than 35 years of experience I know first-hand how important good customer service is to success. Not only when it comes to assisting customers/clients of your organizations, but handling inquiries and leads that come into your organization respectfully, effectively, and on a timely basis!
  • Offer solid, reliable products and services that meet client expectations and needs at a reasonable, fair price.
  • Give back to your community/communities.
  • Always keep an eye on business and daily life changes and how they impact your clients — whether they be businesses or consumers — and how you can make their lives easier or respond to a challenge they are facing.
  • Always be evolving and considering what new innovative product or service you can offer.
  • Educate. Educate. Educate — make sure staff and leaders have time to stay in the know on industry changes and national, regional, and local happenings and anything else that could negatively or positively impact how they and your business does their work or the products and services you offer. Ensure they can learn from both internal and external experts. To support all of this, designate times of the week as meeting-free and learning time!
  • Encourage out-of-the box thinking by all staff and leaders!
  • Treat your clients and customers like family.
  • Take the time to walk in your clients’ and customers’ shoes. Check out this blog post about the importance of walking in your customers’ shoes.
  • Show both your clients and customers appreciation regularly. A small “thank you” goes a long way!

I’ll likely add new features and characteristics to the above list as they strike me, but I think any organization that achieves the aforementioned will succeed at being top in their field, in their particular geography!

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Our Journey With LLM Advertising: How To Optimize and Set Up ChatGPT Ads

We never like to recommend, or try to implement, a new form of online advertising, until we’ve tried/tested it with our own business. That way we can understand the pros and cons of running advertising on a new advertising vehicle, plus all the “inputs” we’ll need to provide to the tool to launch the campaign. That makes it easy to know what questions we need to ask of our clients related to a new ad campaign launch on a vehicle that is new to them, or what we need their approval on.

We waited to try this new vehicle until they offered pay-per-click (PPC) vs. just pay-per-impression (CPM) advertising because, quite frankly, most of clients are small-to-mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and nonprofits and they have far smaller marketing/advertising budgets than large firms and need their ads to really work for them and generate leads and sales vs. just awareness-generation!

This gray image that runs horizontally is a print screen of Results Communications & Research's ad running on ChatGPT and It is truncated but says "Looking For Expert Advice For Bein..Learn How We Help Organizations Appear in AI and Traditional Search..." and contain a small powder blue image that says "SEO."
Results Communications & Research’s ChatGPT Ad

As of the original publish date of this blog post, It’s been about 1.5 weeks since we rolled out ads for our own business, Results Communications & Research, on the ChatGPT LLM-powered (large-language-model-powered) answer engine/AI search platform. We’ve documented below — and will continue to document — our 2026 journey with this new form of online advertising. So, be sure to check back!

  • Days 1 & 2 (June 11 and June 12) – set up our ad and associated targeting for our campaign at ads.openai.com (ChatGPT is owned by OpenAI) — it was not a large lift at all! Needed to determine and document in OpenAI’s ad tool how much we were initially wanting to spend for a click (we initially put this at $3.50) and our daily budget ($25), plus in what geographies (Providence RI and Boston MA) we wanted the ads to appear. And, also provide context hints (OpenAI instructions explained this exercise this way: “describe the conversations, topics, or keywords where your products or services may be relevant; these hints guide matching, but aren’t exact-match targeting rules.” We also documented the images and content we wanted to use in our ads. We are testing two ads — one with longer and one with shorter headlines — but to keep something consistent, so we’d feel comfortable drawing conclusions about our headlines, we used the same image in both ads. We also had to share with the ad platform what page of our website we wanted ad clickers to land on (we created a brand new page on our WordPress website for such purposes — which is an online advertising best practice).
  • Day 2 (June 12) – launched our campaign by activating it in our OpenAI Ads dashboard.
  • Day 5 or 6 (June 15 or 16) – of course, being the digital marketing and analytics geeks that we are, we checked our advertising dashboard at openai.com countless times to see if the ads were being served up and generating impressions and/or clicks. Seeing zero movement on either the impressions or clicks front, we decided to expand our geography to NYC and our daily budget to $35 and what we were willing to spend for a click to $5.00, in case what we were willing to pay for a click (and the competition to have ads shown by competitors in the same geography for the same types of prompts) was causing the ads to not be shown or we needed a bigger geography to have enough opportunities for our ads to be shown to relevant “prompters” on ChatGPT.
  • Day 7 (June 17) – we saw in our advertising dashboard that our ChatGPT ads were starting to accrue impressions, and therefore, were being served up, but not to any great degree.
  • Day 8 (June 18) – we increased what we were willing to pay for a click to $7.50, and also added in the whole state of New Hampshire to our geographic targeting.
  • Day 9 (June 19) – seeing an alert in the OpenAI ads platform that we were often being outbid by competitors because of what we were willing to pay for a click, we increased our click bid to $10.00 from $7.50 – our first 2 clicks were achieved somewhere between the 18th and 19th, and at that point, our ads had a 0.66% click-thru rate (meaning less than 1% of individuals having our ad served up to them, clicked on it — not surprising for reasons outlined in the next bullet.)
  • Day 12 (June 22) – we just checked this morning and the increase in budget and what we are willing to spend for an ad click, plus the expanded geography seems to be paying off! As of this morning, our ChatGPT ads have generated 2,762 impressions (been served up that number of times), 13 clicks (a 0.47% click-thru rate), and an average cost-per-click of $6.44. We aren’t surprised by any of this. We had seen competitors running ChatGPT ads in our space when we were entering relevant prompts into ChatGPT, so we knew as a business-to-business advertiser we were more likely to have to pay more for a click than a business-to-consumer advertiser might. We also know that ChatGPT is a different animal than Google Search ads — the new form of ads discussed in this post is served up to individuals entering prompts into ChatGPT that might indicate they’d be interested in our services, but it’s not the same as someone entering “keywords” into Google and then Google serving up ads to those individuals because an advertiser provided those keywords as ones they wanted their ads to be served up for. We changed our daily budget to $50.00 today — we should have increased the daily budget a few days back in keeping with our increasing the amount we were willing to pay for a click! We also paused the shorter of our two ads since the longer ad was performing far better. To-date, we have not generated any leads — in the form of phone calls, e-mails, or appointment set-up — from these ads. We’re not discouraged by this at all, since, when it comes to a business engaging a firm for B2B services — or even reaching out to them — there can be a long lead time!
  • Day 17 (June 27) – we paused our ads today. Not because they weren’t generating impressions or clicks, but simply because we are a small marketing agency/SEO company who deliberately keeps our fees/rates very reasonable so that small businesses and nonprofits can afford to work with us. Going into this pilot, we planned to only spend about $300, but ended up letting the ads run until ChatGPT ads had spent $364.12, based on our daily budget and what we were willing to spend per click.

How Successful Was Our ChatGTP Ads Campaign?

Because businesses often take some time before purchasing business services, and therefore, like to research a number of companies before they decide to reach out to the one organization or the few organizations whom they are most interested in, we have yet to receive any inquiries from our ads, but still hope to get some inquiries from those who have clicked on the ads. At least we’ve generated some “awareness” among appropriate parties. We’ve also found in our many years of running online ads for our own business, that often, fellow marketing agencies/competitors click on our ads to see what we are offering and what we are all about. We did ensure our landing page for our ad clickers adhered to best practices, such as demonstrating why we are experts, including “social proof,” therefore, a review or testimonial, and much more!

Ultimately our ChatGPT ads yielded:

  • 11,321 impressions (this number of sets of eyeballs viewed our ads as part of entering an appropriate prompt into ChatGPT)
  • 46 clicks
  • 0.41% CTR (we aren’t concerned or scared off by this low click-thru rate — we’ve seen similar with Reddit and nextdoor.com ads
  • Average cost-per-click (CPC) of $7.92 – not horrible for a B2B (business-to-business) lead

As we recommended at the top of this blog post, keep coming back to learn more about our ChatGPT advertising journey! We’re all in this together when it comes to understanding this particular form of new advertising and how effective it will be in generating leads and sales, not just awareness, and if ROI makes sense for advertisers like our clients who need their ad $$ to work for them pretty quickly.

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The ABCs & Ds Of Being Found In Answer-Engine-Prompt And Traditional-Search-Engine Results

We will continue to conduct our own informal research — assessing how and when our own website pages and posts appear in both AI/Answer Engine Prompt results and traditional search engine results — but based on what we are seeing as of the date of this blog post, the items outlined in the image and bulleted section below seem to be common features or characteristics of website content that is being served up most frequently in any kind of AI or search engine.

And, it’s also very much in keeping with what we observed and commented on almost two years ago related to commonalties among content that was being served in traditional and AI search engine results.

How To Be Found Online? Do The Following Related To Your Website Content

  • Always keep your target audience in mind — what content/information would be helpful to them vs. content/information you want to share. Don’t be self-serving!
  • Keep your content clean and easily consumable by using bulleted or numbered lists
  • Don’t be afraid to take a different approach to what other experts are saying on a particular topic
  • We’ve talked about this in a number of blog posts, including this post about the types of links every website should have — always include internal links and external links to relevant content
This light gray vertical image says in a dark powder blue "the ABCs & Ds Of Appearing In Answer-Engine-Prompt and Traditional-Search Results and Has Bulleted Sharing the Same Bulleted Content That Is Served In the Post Itself

Need Help Figuring Out How To Write Content For Your Target Audiences Or How To Structure That Content?

Reach out today for a free marketing consultation regarding your organization’s particular challenges related to being found online.

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Medullar: A Safer Way for Professional Services Firms to Collaborate with AI

Guest Blog Post By Heath Anderson, Medullar

Professional services firms run on knowledge: every client engagement, advisory project, investigation, tax matter, or consulting assignment depends on the team’s ability to find the right information, apply judgment, and move quickly.

But for many mid-market firms, that work is harder than it should be. Important context is scattered across email, cloud drives, chat tools, research notes, meeting transcripts, prior deliverables, and personal folders. Teams often spend too much time searching for information they know already exists. Work gets repeated. Collaboration slows down. And when sensitive client data is involved, the pressure to adopt AI safely becomes even more complicated.

Many small-to-mid-sized firms want the productivity benefits of AI and move quickly to adopt AI tools without investigating if and how their proprietary data/intellectual property will be kept private. But, they cannot afford to treat confidentiality as an afterthought.  The crux of this problem is one that Medullar aims to solve.

This image shows a black woman, Caucasian and an Asian woman looking at and working on documents together as they sit on a comfortable-looking brown leather sofa.

Medullar is a privacy-first, secure AI collaboration platform built for professional services firms that work with sensitive information. It gives teams a safer way to bring project knowledge together, collaborate across people and tools, and use AI in workflows where privacy, permissions, and trust matters.

At the core of Medullar are secure, encrypted Spaces. A Space acts like a private project room for a client engagement, matter, deal, investigation, proposal, or internal initiative. Teams can gather relevant documents, emails, notes, research, transcripts, and other materials into one controlled environment. Access is permission-based, so only the right people can see and use the information inside.

This matters because professional services work is rarely done by one person in one tool. A consulting team may have client emails in Outlook, research in browser tabs, deliverables in Google Drive or SharePoint, notes in a meeting transcript, and key context sitting in someone’s inbox. Without a shared, secure environment, valuable knowledge stays fragmented.

Medullar helps firms reduce that fragmentation without forcing a major data migration. Its universal search tool can search across connected apps and sources, helping teams find relevant information where it already lives. That means a team can locate prior work, surface client context, and reuse institutional knowledge faster, while still respecting permissions and access controls.

Just as important, Medullar is designed for private AI interactions. Instead of exposing confidential information to general purpose, publicly trained AI models (such as large language models (LLMs)/answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity), teams can work with AI inside a governed environment. AI can help summarize, compare, draft, validate, and search across approved project context, while keeping the work scoped to the right Space and the right users.

Consider a consulting team preparing for a client engagement. Before the project begins, the team creates a secure Space for the client work. They gather relevant emails, prior deliverables, client notes, web research, meeting transcripts, and internal reference materials. Instead of hunting across multiple systems, team members can search across everything from one place. They collaborate with each other alongside their frontier AI model of choice (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc.) to help summarize the current state, identify gaps, compare findings, and draft sections of a client-ready output, all without exposing sensitive client information.

The same pattern applies to advisory, accounting, tax, investigations, and legal-adjacent services firms. A team working on a due diligence review, an RFP response, a case triage, a board briefing, or a client deliverable can use Medullar to organize the work, search across fragmented knowledge, and collaborate more efficiently.

This is especially useful for firms that are large enough to feel the pain of scattered knowledge, but not so large that they can tolerate slow, complex systems. Mid-market firms need tools that improve daily work without adding unnecessary overhead.

A secure AI collaboration platform should do more than answer questions. It should help teams work together around sensitive information, preserve client trust, and turn existing knowledge into better outcomes.

This is the image of Medullar's logo which says "Medulla"r in primarily dark purple letters and has a magnifying glass at the bottom of the m in the word Medullar.

That is where Medullar fits: helping professional services firms use AI safely, find and reuse information faster, and deliver higher-quality work with less friction. Interested in learning more? Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion about our secure AI collaboration and productivity tool for your own small-to-mid-sized business and/or for one of your clients; or, ask our friends at Results Communications & Research to make an e-introduction on your behalf.

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Why Citing Experts Supports Your Own Organization Being Cited

Since we’ve already detailed in a recent blog post the reasons why you want your organization to be cited (when it comes to being found online), we won’t revisit that extensively here. We will say that being cited by a search engine or search tool, i.e., having them serve up a link to your organization’s website vs. just mentioning your name in relevant search results is a very positive thing. But, as we’ve also shared in the past, in order to increase the probability of that happening, your organization needs to demonstrate to search engines (both AI and traditional search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo) that you are credible and trustworthy.

What’s An Easy Way To Show Search Engines You’re Credible?

There’s a very easy way to show search engines you’re credible and that’s citing other organizations in your website content, i.e., mentioning and sharing links to experts in your field, or on whatever topic you are addressing in a particular section of your website. You can also ask experts to write a “guest blog post” for your site, or partner with a fellow expert on a blog post.

Citing experts on your website demonstrates to search engines:

  • Your organization makes and takes the time to follow and learn from experts
  • Your organization is not too self-serving, i.e., only focused on your needs and self-promotion vs. wanting to provide valuable information to your readers/target audiences, even if it means sharing information about other organizations
This is a gray rectangular image that runs vertically and says in dark-powder-blue letters, "citing experts supports your own organization being cited" and that contains the logo of our Braintree Digital Marketing agency.

How Do I Know What Experts To Cite?

One of the easiest and best ways to figure out who to cite on your website is to use LinkedIn’s search tool to enter search terms/keywords related to the topic for which you want to identify experts. You’ll likely want to select “posts,” “people,” or “services” by clicking on those buttons to generate lists to review after you’ve entered the keywords in the main search tool on the left top of your LinkedIn homepage.

Review the bios and posts of some of the individuals LinkedIn has served up to you, and begin following those that interest you. Their posts will start appearing in your newsfeed. You’ll soon see/learn which individuals resonate with you and whose websites you want to share on your website in appropriate places. And, keep in mind, you don’t have to share links to their website on your website, you can also share links to their LinkedIn profiles, as we’ve done below.

Here’s Some Of The SEO/AEO/GEO Experts We Like To Follow On LinkedIn

Kristine Schachinger

John McAlpin

Mike Friedman

Erik Marsh

Neil Patel

Eli Schwartz

The above individuals are just a handful of those we follow on LinkedIn because there’s so many experts, like us, who regularly create and share content about search engine optimization (SEO), answer engine/AI engine optimization (AEO), and generative engine optimization (GEO).

Need Help Identifying Which Experts You Should Follow On LinkedIn?

Reach out today to our Greater-Boston digital marketing agency for a complimentary discussion about your marketing challenges and opportunities.

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Do I Need To Keep Adding New Content To My Website To Continue To Be Found Online?

The answer to the above question is pretty straightforward, and in most cases, “yes.” Given that we are in the day and age where individuals are using what’s known as answer engines — think ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude — more and more for both business and personal purposes, if an organization wants to continue to be found online, it DOES need to regularly produce and publish new content. Unless your site is one that is only meant to provide very static information and credibility to people who already know or have found your organization, your organization will need to do the following to support your organization’s name being mentioned or a link to your organization being served up by answer engines in response to relevant prompts.

This image is a print screen of what it looks like when you go into a WordPress website to add a new post and says "Add new Post" at the top and "enter title here."

What Types Of Content Do I Need To Create If I Want To Be Found In Answer Engine Results?

  • Blog posts or questions that reside within a website FAQ (frequently asked questions) page that answer questions that your organization regularly gets asked by prospective clients and existing clients
  • Blog posts or questions that reside within a website FAQ page that answer questions that keyword research and answer research indicates your target audiences are asking answer engines/searching on
  • Blog posts that speak to topics that are “tangential” to the particular products and services you offer, but that are important ones for your target audiences. For example, you might offer seniors in-home care, but write and publish some blog posts about senior fraud, aging in place/aging at home, and exercises for seniors. You get the picture!

Even if you’ve already published such content, target audiences’ questions and needs change/evolve, and both from a marketing standpoint and a search-engine standpoint, you need to demonstrate that you are staying current/relevant/up-to-date. It’s not good to have clients or prospective clients visit your site and see that you haven’t put up any new content in many months and/or content is outdated — it looks like you’re not minding your shop, and if you aren’t, what else might you neglect? And, search engines are more likely to serve up new, fresh content than content that is old and dated.

In sum, a static site will NOT help your organization be found online by target audiences, given how individuals gather information these days. Sure, it’s time-consuming, but regularly producing and posting new content answering questions and providing information that benefit your target audiences needs to be an ongoing marketing activity. As we’ve always said, “SEO (search engine optimization) is NOT a one-and-done exercise.

Need Help Figuring Out What To Blog About And How Frequently?

Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion with our digital marketing agency about your blog strategy!

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The Marketing & Sales Downfall of Focusing Too Much On Appearing In Answer Engines (AI Search)

I’ve attended a decent number of webinars about AI search and how to get your organization’s name or a link back to your website (citation) to be shared by an answer engine in response to a topic-relevant user’s prompt. To-date I’ve heard the following list of key tactics mentioned related to how to get your organization’s name or page served up by answer engines like ChatGPT:

This is a very brightly colored image with question marks of different colors in the background and then the words, where, what, when, why, how, and who in brightly colored captions bubbles -- yellow, blue, pink, red, green, and orange.

What Types Of Organizations Benefit The Most From Appearing In Answer Engines/AI Search Engines?

For bigger brands who offer services and products throughout the whole U.S., or even the world, it makes great sense to want your organization’s name and links back to your website to appear in answer engine results related to relevant-topic searches. But for organizations who only offer services or products locally, i.e., in one city or town, in one state, or in one region (such as New England), there will likely be far less value to your organization to your organization from being found on answer engines than there would be for a national or international organization. Why? Because many individuals entering prompts into an answer engine just want their question answered. They aren’t looking to buy a product or pay for a service. And, the answer engines are more concerned about serving up content that easily/readily answers the question, regardless of the geography of the content producer or of the individual who is looking to get their question asked or answered. Unless, of course, the searcher/prompter includes their geography in the prompt, such as a prompt like “who’s the best digital marketing agency in Braintree MA.”

The Big Mistake That Organizations Who Need To Rank Locally Are Making Related To AI Search

Let’s face it, smaller, local organizations have far smaller budgets than a national brand like Progressive Insurance. They also have far smaller marketing teams. When they put the majority of their marketing dollars and energy into producing content that will be found in AI tools like Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT, they are missing out on other opportunities which might better help them be found locally, since, as we shared above, many individuals to whom their website content or name will be served up by answer engines won’t be in their geography.

What Are Some Marketing Tactics That Help Organizations Be Found Locally?

  • Nextdoor Business Profile and Advertising – you can’t get more local than that!
  • Google Search Ads – where you’ve selected a geography appropriate for your business
  • Display Advertising – Google, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), other social media advertising – again, where you’ve selected a geography appropriate for your business
  • Publicity in Local Newspapers and/or on Local Media websites
  • Community Event Participation and Sponsorships – in communities your organization serves
  • Social Media Strategy and Posting – like with AI/answer engine search – you can reach local individuals and businesses who follow you this way, but there’s always some “waste,” where you are reaching individuals who can/will never become a client or customer because of geography or for other reasons
  • Optimizing Your Google My Business Profile — this is your best opportunity to be found locally and have your organization served up for “near me” terms
  • Writing a guest blog post for another local organization who serves your geography and/or requesting a backlink from their website to your website

Why You Need To Diversify Your Marketing Efforts

Check out our blog post on why it’s particularly important right now to diversify your marketing efforts and reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion of your organization’s particular marketing challenges and opportunities in the time of AI!

Acceptance of Circumstances, AEO, AI Productivity Tools, AI Search, GEO, keeping up with trends, online presence, organic SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Understanding Your Environment

AI Tool Use In 2026: Up, Up, and Away!

If you think AI tool use to get immediate answers to questions is slowing down, think again!

We’ve gathered information from a number of AI, AEO, GEO, and SEO experts and their research indicates it’s full steam ahead as far as U.S. citizens using AI to easily access the information they need by entering a “prompt” into the AI tool in-question.

And, individuals aren’t just using AI to complete a “search.” They are using it to be more productive, learn new skills, and get administrative work and other more complex work done!

Why Is AI Tool Usage Up?

AI tool usage continues to grow, because as these experts explain in the various articles cited below, not only are people using popular large-language-model answer engines (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Perplexity on their laptop and desktop computers, they are using AI capabilities embedded in mobile apps, or mobile apps whose key purpose is to serve as an AI tool (mobile versions of LLMs/answer engines like ChatGPT) to find solutions to problems or immediately gather the information they want and need.

Search Engine Land: AI assistants now equal 56% of global search engine volume: Study

Wonder Tools: The Best AI Mobile Apps

Five Percent: AI Is Much Bigger Than You Think

In addition, as mentioned at the top of our blog, use of AI tools to complete tasks and be more productive is expanding exponentially, as these AI experts explain.

IT Pro: Global Demand For This One AI Role Has Skyrocketed

Capital Logix: Generative AI’s Explosive Growth

Forbes: How AI Is Changing Work

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Where Can I Get Updates About Use Of AI Tools?

We plan to keep adding links to helpful article from experts as we identify them, so return here for ongoing AI tool usage updates.

Need Help Related To Your Organization Being Found In AI Search Results Or Understanding How AI Tools Can Make Your Team More Productive?

Reach out today to schedule a complimentary discussion about AI tool use to be more productive, or about how to have your organization mentioned or cited in AI search engines, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

advertising agency, digital marketing agency, Google Ads, online advertising, paid search, pull marketing, push marketing, Results Analysis, sales, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO, Strong Ad Creative, traditional marketing

The Challenges Of Display Advertising, A Form Of Push Marketing

While our firm has developed a specialty in, and has gotten well known locally for search engine optimization (SEO), i.e., both paid and organic tactics that drive individuals who are actively searching to identify someone who offers the products, services, and solutions to products you do to your website, we also have a lot of experience with “push marketing.” Unlike SEO-related marketing and tactics (pull marketing), push marketing is all about putting the idea about your organization’s products, services, and solutions into the heads of individuals who aren’t actively searching to identify someone like you, but who still might be a great fit for your product, service or solution, based on various demographics and behaviors. And, our blog post is focused on one form of push marketing — display advertising.

Who Does Display Advertising Target?

Like all forms of push marketing (think print, e-mail, and radio marketing), display advertising (advertising that includes an image vs. just text) allows you to target individuals and/or businesses based on one or more of these criteria about the individual or business:

  • the geography in which they live or are located
  • their age, gender, and household income, if an individual
  • key life events, such as graduating from college, having a baby or retiring, if an individual
  • their hobbies or interests
  • their role at a company
  • their recent purchase, or research conducted related to a potential purchase
  • the size or nature, if a company

So, What Is The Biggest Challenge Of Display Targeting?

Over the years, in both corporate marketing and consulting/agency roles, we’ve run a decent number of Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram, Reddit, Nextdoor.com and other “display campaigns” that have employed the targeting detailed above. But, with recent campaigns, it’s really struck us what one of the biggest challenges is related to running such campaigns to pursue individuals who aren’t necessarily looking to buy your products, services or solutions, but who might be a good fit for them.

And, that display advertising challenge is this. Many consumers and/or individuals associated with a business often click on ads, not because they have an immediate need for the product, service, or solution advertised nor will they ever have such a need. But rather, they click on ads out of what we call “the curiosity factor.” Something about the language and/or image in the ad — known as the “ad creative” sounds interesting or intriguing to them and they click on the ad to learn more just because they are curious.

This image shows part of the face and only one eye of a boy with dark hair and dark eyes peeling back brightly colored blue, gold, and purple curtains to look out the window.

How Does The Curiosity Factor Impact Display Advertising Results?

Here’s how individuals clicking on display ads simply out of curiosity impacts display advertising results:

  • Since for display ads, you often pay for ad “click,” you often pay for clicks that will never become a lead or sale.
  • The conversion rate for your ads is far lower than what you see with “paid search” campaigns (where ad clickers are in active search mode to identify someone like you) and your cost-per-conversion may end up being far higher than what you see with push marketing. The last statement depends on how much your cost-per-click is for your display campaign since often the cost-per-click is far lower than for a paid search campaign.
  • Ultimately your campaign ROI or ROAS (return on ad spend) ends up being quite low and doesn’t warrant continuing to spend on the campaign even though you’ve generated a lot of awareness of your products, services, and solutions thru your display ad spend.

Need Help Determining Whether Or Not It Makes Sense To Run A Display Advertising Campaign?

Our team is glad to chat with you on a complimentary basis about whether or not piloting a display campaign would make sense for your organization. Schedule a complimentary display advertising discussion today!