Garrett Sussman: Welcome back, Inside SEO Week, I am excited, we are – you know, I feel like it’s different dimensions when I’m talking about like the East Coast in the US and Australia but I am here today with Brie Moreau, he is the Founder of White Light Digital Marketing, he is doing some wild stuff and you are in for a treat. For his presentation at SEO Week, I mean the dude’s been in the industry for like 20 plus years, worked with all types of major global brands, we’re talking like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, BMW, Audi, you name it, all these Fortune 500 Organizations. Brie, what is going on, man? How are you doing? 

Brie Moreau: Yeah, good, man. Good. Really, really excited. And I’m really, really grateful to have an opportunity to speak at SEO Week. So thank you. 

Garrett: Dude, I mean, you are doing in the world of link acquisition and really like researching and analyzing the value of links in traditional SEO, but in AI search – I want to dive, I want to pick your brain. Let’s get into it, man. A lot has happened in the world of AI search. What is top of mind for you right now in our industry? 

Brie: Yeah, so at the moment, there’s a lot of open field because there’s not much research being done on AI citation specifically. And we’ve done a lot of research. We have a five-person data science team. We’ve been running data science for about five years now. Basically, our agency specialized in backlinks with data science, and we have the largest link building database in the world that we use and we have specific ways to use it in that are very, very crafty and depending on what the client’s needs are. Now what we’re seeing, we’ve done an initial data study and we extracted over 300,000 citations and we basically went through that and we’re looking for correlations and we found quite a lot and because none of this research has been done before it was actually it’s kind of like Bitcoin mining, we kind of found the really kind of quick, easy wins. And we’re just like, oh my God, the algorithm for ChatGPT is actually really, really easy to kind of see and kind of to basically manipulate for lack of a better way of saying it. 

Now, what we’ve seen is that there’s specific patterns that we can, that we’re able to, we’re basically able to take a client’s, like to say a client is using Profound or, you know, BrandRadar or Surfer SEO for tracking AI citations. Basically what we’re able to do from that is we’re able to extract all those citations out, run it through our process and figure out which ones of those citations are really high value and which ones are low value. And we’ve got a whole bunch of math around that that we’ll share with you at SEO Week. And once we have that math, we’ve done kind of like large data studies with Surfer SEO and figured out that our database from their data set contained almost 8% of all the citations that we extracted, which was 200,000 citations. And what it shows you is that A) our database is bloody amazing, and we’re able to plug and play into any client that’s doing AI citation work. And then we see which ones that we have in our database. Then we’re basically able to go out and negotiate and try and secure those AI citations. And then from that, actually build those IA citations, which in turn builds basically visibility. Because once you’re in that matrix of where the AI bots are crawling, then you attach yourself to that kind of like matrix. And then from that, you increase your visibility within AI search. 

Garrett: It is fascinating because we are, it feels very wild wild west with, we’re like in that nascent phase of AI search. And it is, you know, there’s a lot of changes, there’s a lot of volatility. Just in the next like six to 12 months alone, what direction do you see SEO heading? 

Brie: Yeah. Okay. So nice, easy question. So the way, as we know, there isn’t that much overlap between, at least with ChatGPT and Google. So I think that there’s going to be more of a divorce between those two systems in a way. And it’s like going to be a question of like, do clients put budget towards optimizing for ChatGPT? Of course, all the on-page stuff and the technical stuff and AI search, which, you know, you guys are amazing at, we’ll work on the on-page stuff. And then it’s a matter of kind of like supplementing that with the crawl visibility stuff with the off-page stuff, which is the stuff that we do. Now, we haven’t done the study yet. We’re going to do a massive study, which you guys know, for SEO Week, we’re going to do the most comprehensive AI citation data study out there, and we’re going to be comparing ChatGPT and Gemini. And once we get those results with Gemini, it’s going to give us a clearer understanding of how the relationship between Google Search and Gemini works. And this is what’s going to be really interesting because, in my opinion, over time, Gemini will start to take a lot more market share from ChatGPT for multiple different reasons, which we haven’t got time to go into for now. But I think in the three to five year horizon, that, realistically, Gemini is going to come out on top. So for us, it’s a matter of doing what’s cool and trendy now, what’s working in the ChatGPT space, and then building out the strategies and the systems for the Gemini, basically for the future. 

Garrett: It’s fascinating to me what you’ve been building and how it’s, you know, just diving into the way things are changing. Your core wheelhouse is like developing these patterns with your team, understanding like the link value, how does that show up in your thinking about SEO? Like, how do you think about communicating that value to clients? 

Brie: If I’m going to be really honest with you, the audience at SEO Week is the audience that understands what we do. And we’ve been doing this same process for over four years since the links update since July 21 we’ve taken one of our clients to number one in the world for online casino which is stake.com and a whole bunch of other keywords around that we’ve done this in multiple other niches as well, like we’ve really the process we do it really really works and even though it works so many clients are still stuck in this mindset of like, “oh we need a high dr link with a website traffic of 20,000 plus” and this doesn’t work anymore and it hasn’t worked for a long time, which is great for us, but because obviously our clients do very well in these situations. But the reality is, is many SEOs are very, very – or people that are managing SEO campaigns – are very, very uneducated. And we’re showing a whole new way of doing things with math around cosine similarity and co-citation similarity. We’re doing a whole different type of math. And the math is real. Like we can sit there and say, the reason why Google loves these links is this math and this metric here and it’s validated, right? And for us, it’s a matter of trying to educate people from being in this old world to this new world. But it’s really hard because they’re just used to paying for things like a certain way. It’s like this price for DR40, this price for DR50. And we’re like, we have different metrics and we have a different way of looking at it. And it’s much harder to build links our way. But if they build links our way, our links are the best value in the world, you know? and it’s a matter of trying to get them across. 

Garrett: So what do you think that dynamic, you know, instead of like, how do you avoid the “trust me, bro,” versus like the, “no, this is like, we’ve done the mathematics.” How do you break it down for folks who might not understand it? 

Brie: Yeah, it’s actually quite straightforward. There’s two main patents that I was told to by Gary Elias when the Links update happened. and one of them is called the reasonable Surfer patent and that basically tracks the way users behave on a specific page and whether they click through to a link or not. And what that essentially says is does the page have web traffic, right? Or page traffic, right? Does the page have page traffic? That’s the first variable. So I’ve broken it down into two binary variables just to make it simple. First one is page traffic. The second one is cosine similarity. Mike and you guys are very cosign similarity as well. We’ve been across it for a very, very long time as well. And basically what that means is how relationally close is the page that it’s ranking, the page we’re getting linked from to the actual page that we’re actually putting the link on. 

Now, what’s important to point out here is we only get links that are ranking for the keyword or related keyword that the client is going for. So if the client is going for Adidas shoes, the page needs to rank for Adidas shoes or some variation of that, right? Now, if you just go out and write a guest post about Adidas shoes, it will not rank. It will just not be seen. And the second patent is called topic-sensitive page rank. And the thing here is that when Google has basically an algorithm for every single keyword out there, so it has a Google bot that goes in for Adidas shoes and crawls a certain distance around Adidas shoes and ignores 99.9% of the internet, and that’s where most of the guest posts live, right? And so we have to get in that area. And that area is a specific math that’s called cosine similarity. So we’re looking for a specific cosine is basically from high school math. I had a meeting with my builder yesterday and he had his old cool calculator out. He had the cosine button on there. And it’s old school math, right? It’s like the angle of a triangle, right? So the closer the angle is, the more tightly related it is, the more it’s in a cluster. And if it’s in that cluster, it’s really, really tightly related. So we have the math that basically goes, the Google bot goes in here and only looks this far. So as soon as we get outside that radius, it doesn’t exist anymore. So, and that’s what we’re doing. And that’s, it’s very, very simple. Does it have page traffic? Is it ranking for a keyword or related keyword? They’re the two variables that we go for. And this is what our success has been around. 

Garrett: Dude, it’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s ridiculous. I, okay. So I can’t wait to, to, to meet you and chill. We’re coming up on SEO Week. Tell me, like, from your perspective, like, what are you excited about for SEO Week? Why should someone come and see you? 

Brie: You know what I’m excited about? And I’m bringing one of these kind of lone wolves. I’m excited about the conversations with the people that are working in the background that are not on the stage. That’s who I’m excited about, right? You know, we’ve all heard their DJ sets. We know the hit songs, right? And there’s some really good Berlin underground DJs out there. They’re producing some crazy stuff and have some really, really good angles. And I want to meet those Berlin DJs, right? They’re the people I want to meet. So I’m also bringing another one along called Anthony Derishan that is one of those guys. So it’s about those conversations in the background. And also to understand what that level of client, the clients that will be coming to SEO Week, how they’re preparing and what are they doing, because I only have a little limited visibility in that space. And I just want to understand how they’re adapting to these environments. 

Garrett: Well, there you go. I mean, if you want to learn more about what the capabilities and what you should know when it comes to AI citations and all the research that Brie’s doing, if you haven’t already, get your tickets April 27th to the 30th in New York City. It’s going to be freaking amazing. And like White Light Digital Marketing is actually a sponsor as well. So you’ll get to talk to the reps there. Thank you so much for joining me, Brie. This is going to be awesome, man. 

Brie: Thank you so much for having me, Garrett. I really appreciate it. 

Garrett: There you go. Inside SEO Week. We will see you there. Catch you.