Hybrid Engine Optimization: A Crawler Driven Approach to Maximizing Search & AI Visibility Featuring Jori Ford

Garrett: Welcome back to The Next Chapter of Search, promoted by SEO Week and iPullRank. If you haven’t got your tickets, New York City, April 28th to May 1st, we’re going to have speakers across the entire week, across SEO, data, AI, content, digital marketing, you name it. This is the event. Like, this is the first one, and it’s going to be so amazing. We’ve got 40 of the most fantastic speakers who are going to blow your mind on The Next Chapter of Search. And I am joined by one of them today. I am so hyped. None other than Jori Ford. She’s the Chief Marketing and Product Officer at Food Boss, and she is going to talk all about hybrid engine optimization. What’s up, Jori? How you doing?

Jori: I’m doing great, Garrett. Thank you for hyping me up so much. Now I’m all smiling and blushing.

Garrett: Nah, nah, nah. ‘Cause it is, we are so excited about this event. You and I were geeking out, like, before we even started this recording. I want to dive in, because I can’t wait for your presentation, but before you give us, like, a little taste, a little preview – current state of SEO, last 12 to 24 months have been wild. From your perspective, what does it look like?

Jori: I mean, everybody knows AI is, like, the hot topic, right? And I think in this era of, like, AI-driven search, there’s been a lot of major transformation. I agree with you. Particularly, though, for me, I look at it as the new crawling behaviors, right? And all the new statistics that are related to it. I think if you really think about it, it’s a new phase where we have to do a blended approach as Search Engine Optimization specialists, but also as marketers.

You’ll hear a lot of people saying brand is key, and I think that that’s the truth of the matter now, because AI taking over is absorbing data from so many different places, right? That people are like, “where is my traffic going to come from?” And now even Search is segmented by AI, right? Google’s like, “hey, we’re going to use AI, too.” And it’s not getting smaller. It’s getting more and more ginormous, right? You go to Google and you put in any kind of search today, even if you’re asking something about, like, SaaS, right? It used to be, “we’re going to recommend some brands to you.” Now they’re going to recommend code, brands, frameworks that are going to build the thing for you, and it’s going to take up way more real estate than it used to.

So now you have to figure out how do you make sure that you’re part of AI, you’re part of the overviews, you’re still part of search, and your brand stands out, because it’s capitalizing on 20 different resources when it’s displaying this stuff. AI agents are displaying all of those resources, too, right? Every source is now cited.

So, what you really want to think about now is, how do you become one of those cited sources instead of how do you rank number one? I think that’s the current state we’re in, is, how do you become the source of the content? And I think content marketing used to be, like, the big namesake, right? But now content marketing is being infiltrated by AI. So now it’s like, how do you actually become a relevant resource of content to be researched and developed using AI in search? That’s where I really think the landscape is.

Garrett: The whole thing is so fascinating, because I remember months ago we were talking about, do you, if you even could, block crawlers from the LLMs because there’s the IP issue of it, but you have all these different channels. You have to worry about Google’s index, Bing’s index. You don’t even know if maybe OpenAI is building their own index, because they have their own. So, give me the preview, kind of this leads right into what you’re talking about, SEO Week. What do we got to know? What are we going to learn when you’re talking?

Jori: Okay, well, I think one of the biggest things you got to think about is it’s a hybrid environment, so how do you hybridize your approach? Everybody who knows me knows I’m big on crawlers. The reason I’m big on crawlers, and I usually say everything starts with a crawler, is log files are the only way you actually know what’s happening on your site, right? Even if a bot’s not listening to you, right? Because like you said, you know, ChatGPT and its new AI agent, you don’t know if it’s ignoring your robots.txt, but you do if you look at your log files. All of them come through in the log files. So, for me, looking at that hybrid environment, it’s about how do we continue to look at how Google crawls and indexes based off of links, all the things we know, structure, freshness, while also figuring out how to prioritize high quality structured content for AI agents.

And the issue is, is that brands are going to look at it and go, “I want to be trending, I want to be on top of these things, and I’m going to take the seat that I’ve always taken as a marketer,” and you do what’s best for your brand at the time that’s relevant to you with the resources you have. You don’t just jump into the AI game and go, “you know what, we’re going to restructure our whole website. We were doing JSON-LD and showing up really well in Google search engine, but we got 10% of our traffic from AI agents. We need to change everything to be flattened and have structured data everywhere, because we know, right, it can’t be parsed by JavaScript, so it’s actually got to be embedded in the page.” How do you start understanding how to manipulate for embeddings? Big, big changes, right?

So, for me, I’m looking at it and thinking, how do I help you understand how to take a hybrid approach to understanding how the crawlers, from both an AI perspective and a search perspective are crawling, and leverage that frequency plus how they’re hitting your channels to determine which strategies to plan for next? Instead of that being the strategy, it’s indicative of the strategies you should take.

Garrett: It’s so fascinating, because you’re right. There’s a lot of really important business decisions where you’re trying your best to future-proof with the resources you have, with so much uncertainty about how user behavior will actually change and whether it’s worth it to do this now or wait. So, based on all that, what’s one thing you are recommending to people that they tactically should do right now in the context of your presentation?

Jori: Okay, I will say something that I think, I’m going to say it again later in my presentation, but I’ll give it away. If we know that content is really important, we know that structured data is really important, we know that it’s going to show up in answer engines, and we still want to show up classically in Google, I think creating AI-citable answer blocks within your high-authority pages are the way to tackle that, right? Because you’re giving the LLMs and the ChatGPTs, the Perplexities, Claude, they like that quoted, structured, concise, self-contained, blocked information. Put it high up there, right? But we also know Google loves it, right? Remember the age of FAQs being at the top as the bulleted list. Everybody was like, “That’s the dumbest thing, let’s get rid of it. Why would we concentrate everything we know about an entire topic at the top as bullet points?” And now it’s back.

I think that that’s going to be the biggest highlight because those blocks are going to get scraped, they’re going to get embedded, they’re going to get cited, they’re going to be more reliable, they’re going to be concise, and you can fit your brand in there, right? So, I think that’s going to help you win with the featured snippets, it’s going to help you win with the people also ask, it’s going to get you highly cited within the AI overviews, and it’s going to be in the AI agent.

Garrett: It’s so good because it’s like, we always talk these days about quality content, EAT, all that stuff, but you also have to remember that Google, it’s machines, it’s efficiency, there’s money, you’re crawling, takes resources on their end, so, structured data makes it easier to extract. There’s so many reasons that that’s the way to go. So big picture, you’re mitigating strategies, what’s next for search? What do you think is coming next in the way that people search and Google and AI and all that?

Jori: Well, I actually think that like, Google’s kind of leaning into the thought that it’s going to be a hybrid engine, right? Everybody keeps saying things and I’m going to be in trouble with many of my friends who are going to be speaking at SEO Week because SEO is not dead, AI is not taking over, because the engine that everybody’s used to collectively is hybridizing. So, Google’s still going to maintain a huge share, right? A lot of these LLMs, LLMs, I love saying that ’cause it always messes me up, they’re leaning on Google’s index and there’s a big difference, right? It’s indexed information. I said, we need to become the cited source.

So, for me, I feel like search is going to evolve into a hybridized state, that’s why I felt like my topic was really important, especially as a launching pad for what other people are going to talk about, because as we know it, it’ll no longer be, how do we get crawled? How does this happen? But we’re going to have to think of a constructive way to optimize for all things because we no longer get to lean on, “I’m going to need to show up just here or there,” here and there are now the same, right? Eventually AI agents and Google are going to be used synonymously because Gemini is pretty much spewing out search results plus AI answers. They’re the same thing now, right? And so, I think it’s just going to continue to happen until we hit the point of diminishing returns with these AI agents. And it’s going to be, does the big eat the little? Which I don’t know if you’ve been around for a while, but every single time a little comes up, the big guy eats it. And I don’t think Google’s trying to take a back seat and Bing’s trying to step up as well. So, when you got two big guys, I think they’re going to eat the little guys again, honestly. So, I think that’s where we’re going to end up is hybridized state in the same engines that we were used to, they’re just going to evolve instead.

Garrett: I can’t wait to your presentation, such good stuff. And I’m with you because it’s like, you’re already seeing it both like the general AI output of this conversational search, but you’re also seeing the AI-curated results, which is probably what people want. They don’t just want the conversations, they still want things organized. Jori, okay, I can’t wait to just spend time and talk to you at SEO Week.

Jori: I’m excited.

Garrett: It’s going to be awesome. So, you guys, if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, end of April, the 28th, to May 1st, New York City, we’ll see you there. It’s going to be awesome. Thanks for joining me.

Jori: Thank you, can’t wait to see everyone.