The Cybersecurity Sales Channel That Appeared Out of Nowhere: Scott Johnson, CEO @ Amplifyd

Andrew Monaghan (00:05.4)
Well, Scott, welcome to the podcast.

Scott Johnson (00:08.518)
Happy to be here. Thanks, Andrew.

Andrew Monaghan (00:11.02)
Yeah, this is such a hot area for for for all companies right now, especially for Cyber ones. So it's a it's an interesting topic that I think people have probably heard about, but whether they really know what the reality is and how things really work, you know, let's see. But Scott, you have the dubious honor of being the first person to be part of a new segment on the podcast.

I've had a spin the wheel thing in the past, but it's all formalized now. There's a lot more to it. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna spin the wheel right now and whatever topic it comes up with, we're gonna ask and I'll talk about that towards the end of the podcast episode. So you're ready for me to spin the wheel?

Scott Johnson (00:53.082)
Let's do it.

Andrew Monaghan (00:54.859)
All right. It has landed on overrated or underrated. Alright, so we'll come back to that. I'm gonna ask you to opine on whether certain things are overrated or underrated, and we'll do that towards the the end of the episode.

Scott Johnson (01:14.448)
Sounds spicy, I'm excited.

Andrew Monaghan (01:16.671)
Alright, let me just switch that off just now and go back to that. take that out in the edit, Igor.

All right, so Scott, you've been doing you've been in the SEO world for gosh sixteen, seventeen years now. has anything changed as much in those seventeen years as it has right now with GEO coming into into play?

Scott Johnson (01:46.18)
Not even close. I mean, this has just been crazy. And not just for MySpace, SEO, GEO, but for everyone. I'm sure for you on the sales side, it's, you flipped a lot of things upside down. I think the only thing that even remotely comes close would be when mobile surfing the internet started becoming a thing, then all of a everyone was scrambling to change their entire builds of their websites to, you know, look good on phones. but no, nothing like this.

Andrew Monaghan (02:16.489)
And when when a cyber security CMO or marketing person calls you up for the first time, what are they saying? What's the sentence they're saying to say, This is what I need help with?

Scott Johnson (02:27.479)
We want more visibility in AI search. When I go into Claude and look for our service, I see our competitors and it's driving me crazy. So, yeah, I mean, so kind of the background is we have this brand new sales channel that is just materialized out of nowhere. And it's like, when is the last time that happened? You know, sales channels are been so consistent in cyber over the years. You know, there's been ads, LinkedIn, cold calling, cold email,

Andrew Monaghan (02:37.012)
yeah.

Scott Johnson (02:57.241)
You know, ABM, inbound. And for something like all of a sudden, like AI search to have fantastic leads coming into BDRs is is crazy. And we're already seeing for some cyber companies 5% of new business coming in from AI search. And yeah, and you know, when I mean AI search, what I mean is you have a prospect, they're on Chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity, whatever, and they're asking a question, and that AI is recommending.

you know, a few businesses and then they go to your site, request a demo. That is the flow I am I'm talking about. And even in our own business, so we do SEO for cybersecurity, our two largest deals in the last year both came from AI Search. So small proportion of total deals, but higher qualified coming in. And we're seeing the same thing with cybersecurity companies. We know one that just got a massive enterprise deal from AI Search.

So going back to your question, that conversation, what they want is GEO, which is generative engine optimization. There's different acronyms, but that's I think people are kind of starting to settle on that one a little bit. Thank God.

Andrew Monaghan (04:09.68)
I think the I think the industry missed a trick here though, 'cause SEO, I was thinking, okay, what's the AI equivalent? And I was thinking it's the old McDonald thing, it's A I E I O, right?

Scott Johnson (04:18.661)
Yes. Yeah. A E O. I just saw what was it? H E O Hybrid Engine Optimiz and it's like, all right, enough guys. I mean, you guys have more acronyms than us in cyber, but it's it's getting out of hand over here too.

Andrew Monaghan (04:33.82)
I was gonna say we haven't invented one for at least five minutes, so we need to get a few more out there. So w are you able to tell what a security practitioner leader is actually typing in to then get the answers back?

Scott Johnson (04:37.989)
Yeah.

Scott Johnson (04:50.797)
We can't get the exact prompt. So currently, Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera, they are not sharing that data. but they will at some point. Google didn't start off sharing that data either. But now in Google, you go to Google Search Console, you could see what a lot of people searched, exactly how many, how they got there. We don't have that visibility in AI search yet, but it's coming because you know, Chat GPT just rolled out, you know, ads. And to sell ads, it's based on data.

So it's just a matter of time. We don't have it yet. So now what you kind of do is get your best guess. There are tools like Perplexity, Gumshoe, there's a bunch of them. And you kind of find a basket of 20 prompts that your prospects might be searching for, but you don't know for sure.

Andrew Monaghan (05:36.612)
And the example you gave was top of funnel, right? Find me or show me the the best whatever identity companies, right? Is that what it's people are mostly using it for or is it all through the funnel?

Scott Johnson (05:46.722)
Yeah, so I don't know for sure. what we can see though is we can see how many people do a search in AI and then click a link and come to the website. But as you know, are by the way, do you use AI a lot, Andrew? Like in your day-to-day kind of little bit? Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan (06:01.006)
Yeah. It's been t it's been ten minutes and I haven't used it for ten minutes, which was rare for me.

Scott Johnson (06:05.903)
yeah, you're pushing it. so you know how often you do a search and you don't end up clicking a link and going over to a site. so we only get data if they click and go to go to a site, which is if I had to guess, you know, two percent of usage. but what we're seeing as far as lead flow is very, very bottom of funnel and ultra specific. So for example, the way someone might search in Google might be email security solutions.

you know, a three-word type of thing. And in AI search, it may be two to three sentences. It could be, hey, I'm a CISO at a, you know, manufacturer, we're looking for email security for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. then they get an answer and then they iterate off it. I think it's more likely to be bottom of funnel. And I think AI overview in Google, that tends to be more top of funnel. So with someone saying like what is prompt injection, that top of funnel will show there and they'll pull it from there.

Does that make sense?

Andrew Monaghan (07:06.658)
Yeah, yeah. it feels like it could be used in all sorts different ways and then how do you influence that, right? Is is a thing. What do what do people really want to get when they and we talk about influencing and and getting your you know, as you say that CMO wants to get their name in this in the output as opposed to their competitors. What is it they actually looking to get by doing that?

Scott Johnson (07:31.557)
Do you mean the person using AI or the cybersecurity company looking for more visibility? Okay, so the potential buyer in AI search.

Andrew Monaghan (07:35.224)
This the vendor.

Andrew Monaghan (07:42.028)
The the the ven sorry, the cybersecurity vendor who's saying, Hey Scott, we need we need help. My competitor showed up. Are they just looking to hey how do I get in there rather than them or is this part of a bigger strategy that they're they're trying to do?

Scott Johnson (07:53.316)
Yeah. They want to show up rather than their competitors. So so here's I'll I'll give you a couple data points. so for example, Apollo did a study, O-P-O-L-L-O, I think they spell it, in 2026, showing that conversions from visitors from Google are at 2.8%. Conversion means they come to the cybersecurity website, whatever, they take some sort of action, fill out a form, newsletter, whatever. 2.8%. From AI search, it's 14.2%.

So they convert at five times the clip. And then G2 did a study on B2B commercial queries. So they they tracked how people with buyers intent, B2B commercial intent, used AI search. And they found that 33% of them were looking at what is the best. So, you know, what is the best agency security solution or what is the best whatever? 31% were comparing competitors. hey, I'm looking at buying this service. How does company A compare to company B?

And what we're seeing from you know the cybersecurity CMOs or whatever, they're running searches and they're not liking what they're seeing. And they either A, want to change the narrative because they don't like the way AI is positioning them, or B, they're not showing up and they want to. here's a fun test I recommend everyone listening to do. Go into incognito mode. So Claude, Chat GPT, whatever you use, go into incognito mode, pretend you're a buyer of whatever you sell for your cybersecurity firm.

And you know, so the whole ICP, hey, I'm this job title, I'm looking for this. What are the differences between put in your company and then put in your competitor and say, give me the pros and cons. If you want to feel uncomfortable, go do that. Cause you will see what AI thinks of you. And like I've done that for for us, and I'm like, you know, banging my head against the wall. That isn't true. We do that. They say we don't do that. And then they'll say why they like the competitor more than you, and vice versa.

And what you do is you do that, you find what you don't like, ask the AI to cite its sources. Then you find the source of that nonsense you hate, and then what you do what you can to manipulate it. So anyway, long story short, back to your question, they either A want to change how they're being described, or B, they're not showing up in.

Andrew Monaghan (10:07.58)
And in the SEO world going back ten years, it's all backlinks and anchor text and internal linking and things like that, what is the equivalent that you do in this new world? What should companies be adding or thinking about in their strategy?

Scott Johnson (10:22.881)
Yeah, so AI is much better at sussing out the nonsense. Google, I mean, it's nothing like it was in 2010 when it was very easy to quote unquote, you know, trick. But you could still kind of hack your way to the top of Google now. and AI is much better at giving better results. It's looking at your entire reputation around the internet. What do people say about you? what do they say about you on Reddit? Do you have good reviews at

Trust pilot or G2 or whatever it may be. So reputation matters even more, where in Google, you can kind of get a bunch of mediocre links and still rank very well. So what we do and what really all these cybersecurity companies should do comes down to two things. Number one, have high quality content. don't have lots of AI slop. High quality meaning take a stance, have an opinion.

Maybe support it with data, whether it's firsthand or third party. And then the other thing, I mean, PR is is having a glow up for sure. I mean, you just you need to have good PR. And it moves so fast. You can have a post on Reddit that I don't want to say goes viral, but you know, gets a lot of upvotes. And the next day you're higher up in AI search. So reputation and high quality content are the key.

Andrew Monaghan (11:44.89)
It feels like from what you started off saying though as well is customer success is a is even more important than ever. I mean this old adage the best marketing is happy customers, right? But it feels like companies should be thinking about how do I get them advocating for us as opposed to just being happy.

Scott Johnson (12:04.941)
Yeah, you're right. No one could market your product better than a happy customer. and what AI really likes is beyond a happy testimonial, they want a data point. AI is so thirsty for data points. So rather than yes, we worked with Andrew, he was fantastic, we're so happy. It's yes, we hired Andrew and our close rate increased by 10% in four months. So it's not only a testimonial, but it's trying to get them to use some data point.

And I mean you could double your your AI lead flow off something like that.

Andrew Monaghan (12:37.223)
Hm. And what's an example of maybe one of your clients or a company where they have been a bit more provocative in their POV and they have decided to to say a little bit be a little bit different than the rest of the people in their space?

Scott Johnson (12:51.757)
You know, in cyber, it's pretty rare, to be honest. there's a lot of copycatism. That's not a word, but you know, people see what the big guys do and often try to copy it. I don't see a lot of provocative. And I even see on the branding side, a lot of companies kind of do the look-alite thing. You it's a it's a black website with guys in hoodies and red font and stuff like that. It's like, come on, guys, we can look different. I met with a company a few weeks ago and their site was white with pink.

accents. And it's not like I'm a big fan of pink, but I just said, thank God for just having your own style and personality and not a copycat. but I can't think of an instance where someone got in trouble being provocative, but I could think of a million where they didn't stand out because they weren't.

Andrew Monaghan (13:39.938)
Yeah, we've talked about this in the podcast many times. It feels like people are a little bit I don't know what the right word is, but a little bit timid in being out there. The the shift that's happening in cybersecurity, Scott, is a lot of the Israeli back companies are not like that.

Right, if you look at the the big name obviously in the last few years being Wiz, but you know, there's a whole bunch of other ones where you just see okay almost as they come out of stealth, you can look at their branding. Okay, I bet you that came out of Israel as opposed to Silicon Valley. And then often that's the case, unfortunately. But they've really figured out that this is part of it. You have to be different, act different, sound different to stand out, not just have a great product as well.

Scott Johnson (14:18.583)
Yeah, why do you think that is? Do you think it's more to, you know, more VC backed companies playing it safe, or what is what is your theory on that? Or just the American culture?

Andrew Monaghan (14:27.778)
I I think that

Well, let me flip it around a little bit. I think that one of the things that's happened is you look at Cyberstarts was one of the VCs in Israel Wild Ventures. They figured out the formula for a success, right? They they get people out of eighty two hundred, they they back them, they introduce them to prospects and, you know, do customer research, things like that. Then there's two or three branding agencies that they they they seem to go to that are part you know, it's just part of the thing.

It's not like they're, you know, going against the grain by doing that. It's just the way the the the formula that you have that works. Whereas I think in other parts of the world there isn't that, right? And then, you know, you're looking at, well, you know, do we go spend the money on a an agency? Do we build it ourselves? What's the quick way to do it? And I think through that process, they they probably, you know, second guess themselves a little bit and end up with something that's a little bit more samey. I think that's probably what happens. I'm sure people will would get angry with me for saying that.

But it seems like that's that's kind of where things end up.

Scott Johnson (15:32.675)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, separate from not standing out as well, one thing I see more in cyber than other industries is they don't describe their their superpower very well. So what I mean is when you land on a homepage, you should understand who people are, who they do it for, and how they're different in five seconds. And, you know, there's probably a million cyber websites that say agentic AI security. It's like, well, yeah, but like what is your superpower?

So I I used to own a branding agency, not anymore. But one of my favorite things to do would be to talk to the CMO or the highest level you possibly can. And you're kind of setting them up. But what you'll say is, hey, tell me about why people choose you instead of your competitors. And their eyes will light up and they'll say, this, that, and it's because this. And it's really our number of integrations. No one could come close. And I say, that story is not on your website. So that that's a cheat code to better marketing.

Andrew Monaghan (16:26.677)
Yeah, you know, I'll not my clients right now, but I I had a client probably three or four years ago and I asked the CEO, how are you different to the eight other ten or twenty other companies who have the same four letter acronym that they're trying to do? And the answer back was I don't know. And I figured, well, you know, if the CEO doesn't know the company's different, what chance themselves of marketing folks have? Seems like a a f one of the fundamental things they probably need to figure out.

Scott Johnson (16:50.883)
Yeah. Well

Scott Johnson (16:54.649)
Sorry. Yeah. You know who would know is the customers. Customers always have the key. it's just asking them, Hey, why do you like working with us? And if you ask a few people, they will tell you why. And then that feeds into your marketing.

Andrew Monaghan (17:09.462)
Well let's talk about that then in terms of you know you were you were saying before, you know, looking at G2 and things like that, right? Trustpilot. How do you go from why did you buy us, what do you think we were different at, into something that's actually real good content going out there that's that's different, that's gonna help with your your GEO when you're working with Scott or other people like him?

Scott Johnson (17:32.675)
You mean as far as getting a testimonial?

Andrew Monaghan (17:35.133)
Yeah, and and using it differently or I don't know, yeah.

Scott Johnson (17:39.31)
Yeah, I'll I'll tell you what we do. because getting testimonials is hard. You work with busy people, they're they're thinking about their own job. They're not trying to go be an advocate for you, you know. so first you have to be proactive and you have it has to be a system. So what we do is I'll go to our client-facing people, our account managers, and after a certain point, you know, let's just say four months, I'll say, all right, here's a template to send to the client, here's what to say to the client.

And you get $200 if they do a video testimonial. And it's all processed out. It's super easy. They they send the exact email that I've tweaked to get it just right. And then the recipient, the CMO, or whomever, clicks a link, it opens a video, and they answer a few questions, and that's it. We make it super easy, but it has to be a system and we compensate the account manager so they go out and are hungry for it. And once I have that video,

I will use those for eternity. I mean, like at my funeral, they will play these like testimonial videos. I mean, we're putting them into text where YouTube videos were long form, short form. I mean, you can get so much squeeze, so much juice out of a single video testimonial. so we like we use a tool called Video Ask. I'm not affiliated with them, but it just works very well. And video's good because

When you see someone saying it, it's so much more powerful than text on a website saying, We loved their service or whatever.

Andrew Monaghan (19:05.927)
Yeah, it's less chance anyway these days of being made up, right? Although there's still still better chance of it happening, but not so much. So we talked about testimonials, we talked about using the the content from that out there, talked about you know having a different point of view. What have you seen that cybersecurity companies get wrong when they're trying to to do this around GEO?

Scott Johnson (19:09.572)
Yeah.

Scott Johnson (19:29.173)
good question. You're trying to get me in trouble. all right, here's one I hear a lot. I'll show up to our initial meeting and they'll say, Hey, we're really good at AI. We could post 20 blogs a day. And they'll have, you know, a thousand blogs on their website, all of which have no traffic. And and they'll say that like it's a flex. Like, you know, we'll do 600 blogs a month. It's like, yeah, anyone could, and it's crap and it's not working.

I would rather you have four actual quality pieces of content a month than a hundred things of AI slop. Because if you think about what the AI is doing, first of all, it has no experience, it has no expertise. It's looking at other articles on this topic, it's mashing them together and rewriting it. So it's just copycat stuff. And you're not going to copycat your way to the top of Google or AI search. So that's one, tons of AI slop. AI certainly has its place, but

Here's the way, and by the way, here's the problem. The problem is the subject matter experts at cybersecurity companies, they didn't sign up to write blogs. And they're also working constantly. So to go to them and say, hey, can you write a 2000-word article on so-and-so? It's never going to get done. So what I would always advocate for is a respect the hell out of their time, make it so it's as efficient for them as possible, and hop and zoom with them, turn on the recorder, and

Have them talk about, you know, whatever is important to them and the industry at the time for four minutes, turn off the recorder. Now you use AI to turn that into an article and it's based on someone's real expertise and experience, and you only took up five minutes of their time. So that's the right way to do it.

Andrew Monaghan (21:14.352)
You know, as you as you were talking about that, one of the the thoughts that sprung to mind for me is a theme I'm starting to see more and more, which is the thing that stands out is being more human as opposed to being more AI. And you know, i in a field of of slop, if you're the one that's more human and you're the one that people listen to and lean into rather than lean away from, you're doing things right.

Scott Johnson (21:37.614)
I agree. And I'm very bullish on video for that reason. And yes, there can be AI video, sure. and currently things like Claude and Chat GPT, to my knowledge, they can crawl video titles and metadata and things like that. But they're not pulling, you know, Andrew said this, the 23-minute mark and that kind of stuff. But it's coming. And that's why I think doing stuff like this, and then of course turning into article and repurposing the podcast or whatever as much as you can is great.

People are sick of AI crap and they want humanity.

Andrew Monaghan (22:10.115)
Yeah, I think that's that's happening more and more now. And those that can figure that out and you know, be a human again and really double down on that are gonna do very well, just in general, I think, not just in in our world.

Scott Johnson (22:19.141)
Yeah, and it's I hate LinkedIn nowadays. I'm on it because it works, but it's just it's all AI stuff and responses. And you can tell, you know, they write in like the AI poet or sorry, the LinkedIn poetry where everything is one line. It's not this, it's that. And then there's a rocket emoji. It's just like, come on, be human, have an opinion, please.

Andrew Monaghan (22:40.404)
Right, right, right. It's yeah, unfortunately that's the way that's going. what happens if you you do the test that you said, right? You go put your name versus the competitor, and what it pulls back about your company is just flat out wrong or it was based on something from five years ago. What sort of strategies can the the CMO or the company do to try and fix that?

Scott Johnson (23:03.117)
Yeah, go straight to the source. So ask your AI, please cite your sources, and then find where they grab that information. so maybe it's on, you know, some old blog post that you actually wrote, you know, five years ago and you forgot about when the company was different. but find that source and then see what you can do to change it, which you can't always do. but oftentimes you can. And and the other way is to drown it out. you know, I had one instance, it's actually last week.

Andrew Monaghan (23:26.645)
Okay.

Scott Johnson (23:31.961)
There was a company that had a real bad PR piece written about them in 2023. Like really bad. and AI just latched onto that. And Google latched onto it. And when you Google their name, the article is above their name. And they're like, hey, can you help us? We need to make this thing go away and go above it and outrank it and things like that. And was like, I can't help you with that. Like I could help with minor stuff. I said, honestly, what some companies would do in this is just change your dang name.

But they're, you they're a 500-person company. But sometimes you can manipulate it. Sometimes with something like that. Sorry, you're stuck. You can try to drown it out with good PR, but that's easier said than done.

Andrew Monaghan (24:15.296)
Right, right, right. How you know, in in the SEO world people used to measure it, were you on the first page of Google and then were you in the top three and things like that. What's the equivalent of being able to measure this in the AIGEO space?

Scott Johnson (24:29.475)
Yeah, so there's a couple common ways that we do it. One is just brand visibility. So you can use tools like profound, ahref, semrush. They're they're typically a hundred a month-ish sort of thing. and that could look at brand visibility or brand mentions. So you can get a chart, hopefully going up to the right, seeing you know how many mentions. It's not the best for measuring for my role, which is inbound lead gen, because

There could be a bit of PR that you know, maybe you were acquired or whatever, and all of a sudden everyone's mentioning you and the graph goes up and to the right. That's not a great measurement of true lead gen from AI search. So our favorite is to find a bundle of prompts that your ICP would search for and increase your visibility in those specific ones, not overall mentions.

Andrew Monaghan (25:18.478)
In the AI world, is it the same with regions where you might rank highly in America but not in Australia, things like that, or is it just one big L L that they're using?

Scott Johnson (25:28.227)
Different everywhere. And I could do the same search now and do it five minutes from now and possibly get something different. Now, it's not necessarily going to be wildly different. And that's why I mentioned like the basket of prompts. You're just kind of getting a temperature check. but it's gonna vary constantly, and it is so based on your your search history as well. So that is the challenge. I mean, to go back to your question, the best way to measure is leads from AI search.

That's that is truly the best way to measure, but you need the leading indicator, which is you know increasing visibility where it matters. But even tracking leads from AI search can be tricky. like again, you could track people that do a search, click a link and go to your site, but what if they just did a search and then they just hop over and go direct to your site? So the only way to get proper attribution is either in maybe your demo request form or have the salesperson to ask. So on us, we we just ask when they sign up.

Andrew Monaghan (26:24.422)
Yeah, I I've been in the mode for many years now where I I just don't click on the link, you know, partially because in cybersecurity is just something that's this you know built into you. but also I don't want to get tracked as much as possible, right? So I'll I'll be the person that opens up the incognito tab and then goes off and and types in the URL and away I go, right? So that that yeah, so I see that later on you to maybe try and get triangulate it really, I guess, from two or three different angles and see what you get back.

Scott Johnson (26:49.347)
Yep, definitely. And I I another tip that is sort of loosely related is you know, I'm talking about visibility and AI search. And what most cybersecurity companies do is they write all about their solution. We do agentic AI security, this, that, we prevent phishing, you know, all the things. But you really want to attack it for much more granular levels.

Based on now how we know how people search in AI. So what do I mean? Rather than only attack the solution, write content on the problems. So if you do a gentic AI security, have an article on prompt injection or shadow AI or whatever it may be. That way, if people in AI search have this problem and they're looking into it, you're the source and they find you. What also works really well. sorry, go ahead, Andrew.

Andrew Monaghan (27:35.077)
I was just gonna say that you're asking us to do something we're not good at, which is stop talking about ourselves.

Scott Johnson (27:41.478)
Yeah, sounds like good marketing though, doesn't it? yeah, and writing industry specific content works really well too. and the last thing, so like, you know, if you let's say you serve five different industries, have content for each of them. That way those people searching find you. The last one that's kind of a cheat code right now in cyber, and this used to be, you know, you would never cross this red line even 10 years ago, but do competitor comparisons on your site.

Say, you're looking for this company alternative, or here's how we're differ than this competitor. In the olden days, like, do you think Coca-Cola would mention Pepsi on their website? I mean, no, you like they'd rather put a gun in their mouth. but nowadays, because so many people are searching, hey, how's this company different from that company? You want to tell the story and control the narrative. So now all cyber companies are doing competitor comparisons on their site and it works really well. And if you're not doing it, you should.

Andrew Monaghan (28:39.366)
Yeah, I've seen those pop up in the footer of of websites a lot, right? There's a a list of twelve on some of them. It seems like a quite a big investment to get that done.

Scott Johnson (28:48.961)
Yeah, and I wouldn't put in the footer. I've seen that too. To me, I don't want my competitors' name on the bottom of every single page on my site. I do think they should be there, but not that prominent.

Andrew Monaghan (29:02.512)
How would you do that then? Just have I don't know, how'd you do that?

Scott Johnson (29:05.709)
Yeah, just have it. It could be a blog post, so it's in the blog section somewhere in there. and then you know there's nerd stuff you do, you add schema and FAQ and things like that. and by the way, a mistake would be to go on there and do all kinds of qualitative stuff, like qualitative stuff, like we're amazing, we're better than them for these reasons, blah, blah, blah. AI's getting really good at ignoring the kind of marketing fluff that we are prone to do.

And so you want to just list the facts. So you may say you're the best, sure, but you better back it up with a bunch of reviews. Or you could say you're cheaper, but how about you say your average price versus theirs or whatever? Support the claims you're making and you're much more likely to get crawled.

Andrew Monaghan (29:49.55)
So maybe not the flowery piece, but you know, the more factual bare bones the better it sounds like. That's hard. That's hard.

Scott Johnson (29:55.686)
Stick to the facts. Yeah, I try to avoid it. No, I'm kidding. yeah, another thing I see a lot are these lysticals. And those were a cheat code the last two years. You know, the top 10 you know, whatever, active directory security companies. And people, of course, would put themselves as number one and their competitors, but not their good competitors, just the kind of mediocre competitors, two through ten, and sort of, you know, diss them on it. Like,

they're not bad for their size, but they can't handle this. And what AI is doing now is pretty funny. It's ignoring the company that wrote that self-promotional lystical, but giving visibility to all the competitors. So that's definitely a cybersecurity company fail in GEO that I'm seeing a lot now. And they used to work, but be careful now, they're backfiring.

Andrew Monaghan (30:46.486)
So are we gonna see like used to be the case and maybe still is, like content brokers where suddenly the you know, sites go up just to hold this type of content and they're you know, they're they're supposedly independent but they're not really. Is that gonna come back again?

Scott Johnson (30:59.285)
And you you know, you slip two hundred bucks behind the scenes kind of thing. Yeah. Some of them are still around. I won't name names, but they're they're definitely still out there and in the cybersecurity space.

Andrew Monaghan (31:02.624)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan (31:11.038)
Interesting. let's let's think about the seed or or series A company.

you know, the there's two or three people in marketing and there's maybe ten to fifteen people in the sales wider sales team and they're trying to allocate resources and try to make the best moves they can. budget is limited, time is limited as well because they they're trying to do fifteen jobs, but there's only three of them in marketing. what would what should be their play then? What where should they start? What's the highest impact thing they should just get going on now?

Scott Johnson (31:46.936)
Yeah, and just speaking specifically to SEO Gio, I would find 20 different keywords on how buyers might search for your product. So let's just use email security as an example. maybe people search for enterprise email security, maybe email security for Gmail, for Outlook, whatever. Do the various prompts, the malware protection, phishing, et cetera, and write content around each of those.

And then you could even use AI to help you, but you want to have very good prompts. But you know, put it on LinkedIn or do video, whatever. And what we're doing is called topical depth. So what used to work is the big guys like Forbes would have an article on email protection for no reason whatsoever. And they'd be number one because they're Forbes. Google and AI have gotten a lot better about respecting the small guy with deep expertise. So

I think writing like those 20 kind of articles and showing that topical depth and posting, I I truly think they can get inbound leads within ninety days. I I really do. But but keep it highly focused. Don't try to rank for email security. Try to rank for, you know, the the very niche search.

Andrew Monaghan (32:58.749)
Right, right. Wh where are we, do you think, on the hype cycle around this, Scott?

Scott Johnson (33:07.173)
Pretty high. Like it definitely works. There's no question. We're seeing companies spend from 3,500 to 20k plus a month to rank for it. But and the hype is there and it works. And of course, yes, I'm biased, but the hype is too high because they're more focused on that than something like Google, which is still gonna bring in 10 times as many leads, is AI search. so it's for its 5% slice the pie.

In my world, it's probably getting seventy percent of the attention.

Andrew Monaghan (33:40.583)
Let's let's play that out then. So right now AI search is gained ten percent of of the leads compared to Google search, right? When how long before it's fifty fifty, do you think?

Scott Johnson (33:54.692)
I don't know. I think I don't know if it'll get to full 50-50, but let's even say, you know, it's it's close. I think it'll happen in cyber probably five years earlier than everywhere else, just because you have tech savvy buyers that are early adopters to techie stuff. I think it's gonna take some time. and I also think Google.

Google's still the elephant in the room. I still think they're gonna dominate AI personally. I know it's all about anthropic, chat GBT, et cetera, but Google has an immense amount of data. They have the budget. I I still think Google's gonna end up kind of owning both, quite frankly. But how long? I don't know. Five years? It's it's impossible to say. It's just a guess.

Andrew Monaghan (34:35.299)
Right, right. They have the resources I guess to to do all that. They already had the mind share 'cause you that's where you go first. Well, mostly you go first, right? I'd love to know actually how many people outside our our echo chamber actually go to a AI tool to search versus go to Google still. I imagine it's heavily weighted towards Google still.

Scott Johnson (34:52.409)
Yeah.

Yeah. I saw a data the other day. I wish I remembered it. just shooting from the hip, it was something like 10 times the amount of searches in Google versus ChatGPT. But ChatGPT kind of has an unfair advantage in a way, in that people will prompt it over and over and over. So I might be looking for a gym, get a response, but then I might prompt three more times, like, do they have, you know, this a sauna, this, that, whatever? So that kind of racks up the views faster than Google might get.

I'll tell you though, my mom is 75 and she's retired. She travels a lot. She uses Chat GBT all day long, man. She she uses to book all her itinerary. And you know what she did? It's kind of adorable. she will use Chat GBT and print out the output and then mail it to me. And like, I don't have the heart to tell her there's a share link because it's so cute. So I don't know. It's being adopted fast.

Andrew Monaghan (35:44.611)
That's awesome. Right, right.

It is, you know, I just one thing I heard the other day, CISO was saying they're actually trying to encourage employees to go back to using Google search, because obviously it's a lot cheaper for the company. It's not using up their tokens so much. And you imagine you got a fifteen, twenty thousand employee company, you're gonna churn through tokens just by people searching on basic stuff that can be done better in Google.

Scott Johnson (36:14.797)
I mean, we're a fifteen person shop. We spend tens of thousands of dollars a year. I mean, this token thing, I I hate the token thing, just personally. Like, remember when SaaS first came out, the whole thing of like you have a subsc like you had to pay Microsoft monthly rather than the 250 bucks to own Windows forever? And I remember everyone laughed, like, that's stupid. We'll never do that. Like that's a such a rip-off. And their whole position was, well, yeah, we'll keep it updated and modern and this, that, and you kind of had no choice, so we did it.

The tokens is the next iteration of that. I have so many different tools now that I've paid monthly SAS style for years. And now they're like, hey, you're gonna love it better. We're switching to the token model. And I'm just like, but you don't save money if you use less. It just means you have the ability to pay more if you're a power user. And I loathe it.

Andrew Monaghan (37:00.845)
Right. Yeah, there's no none of it says your your your plan came down a little bit, so if you don't use this very much, you'll be okay, right?

Scott Johnson (37:06.339)
Yeah. Yeah. And like we got I got one yesterday and it's like they have no business being a token. It's completely unrelated. They're not using data center, it's just this this tool and it just drives me crazy. But that's that's the future.

Andrew Monaghan (37:20.685)
Yeah. It feels like there's it's a lot of tr turmoil in that whole area. There's a company I've been using for workflows called relay.app and they just they're shutting down. And I th it was an awesome tool and I'm just so disappointed. But I think it was you know, they were trying to eke out their bit of that market and tokens and how you charge and how much you eat up and I think that's you got a lot of experimentation to figure out what the market's gonna take up for that.

Scott Johnson (37:48.773)
Do you think cyber sorry. Do do you think cybersecurity will ever pivot to the token model? Like, you get this many alerts and then it costs this?

Andrew Monaghan (37:59.0)
I've heard of people at least thinking about it. whether it's

you know, t take away tokens but consumption in general. I think the biggest problem is is trying to get things approved through the CFO office. If there's a lack of certainty of how much it's gonna cost, you can slow down deals very, very fast by in injecting something in that you perhaps don't need to. So if it's if you're being a little bit opportunistic about it, I think that's gonna backfire. If truly your business model and your unit economics mean that you have to do that, then I I guess you have to tread carefully. I don't know.

last question on this topic, Scott. What if we look at twelve months, what's something that people are doing now in GEO that you think might just go away in the next year?

Scott Johnson (38:51.071)
I would say creating lots of pages at scale. so this is separate than the AI slot blog post thing I talked about earlier. So programmatic SEO, you have the ability to create hundreds or thousands of pages pretty easily. So let's say you have integrations and you have a thousand of them. let's create a thousand integration pages overnight. I think that is gonna start going away. I think it makes sense for some types of pages.

But again, looking through my SEO and GEO lens, they don't like to cite duplicate content that's highly similar from one page to the next. And that is an inherent property of these pages committed, completed at scale. So I think the mass production of content, whether it's programmatic or AI slop, will hopefully go away. Fingers crossed.

Andrew Monaghan (39:38.922)
Yeah, I was gonna say not necessarily a bad thing, right? All right, let's go back to our spin the wheel game. If I bring this back up on the screen right now, do you see that? All right, so we settled on overrated or underrated. So I'm gonna present three three things on the screen, and you have to tell me whether you think right now it's overrated or underrated. The first one is clawed. Overrated or underrated.

Scott Johnson (39:41.199)
Yeah.

Scott Johnson (39:50.457)
Yes.

Scott Johnson (40:07.361)
Underrated. I think most people, even daily cloud users, are using less than one percent of its capabilities. The things it can do to streamline so many things that people do every day is hard to wrap your brain around. So I will say underrated.

Andrew Monaghan (40:24.863)
Yeah. I I feel like I have an annoying thing in my gut that says I'm not doing nearly enough and being nearly intelligent enough about what I'm doing. And I feel like I'm probably ahead of most people. But every day, every hour almost is an R thing of if I just could do that, it would mean such such a big thing for how I do business.

Scott Johnson (40:46.723)
And it gets overwhelming 'cause there's always more to learn. I think in sales it's particularly amazing. I use it constantly for various elements of sales, so

Andrew Monaghan (40:55.625)
What what do you think is the most impactful thing that you've done with Cloud for sales?

Scott Johnson (40:59.781)
first of all, having transcripts of every single sales call. So it's it's me and we have one other salesperson. first of all, I have transcripts in everything. I have it crawl the site. I can create better and more custom proposals that are highly specific to their exact use case in 10 minutes versus an hour of me manual.

I will do it. I have an automation where it coaches after a sales call. So it'll tell me what the prospect cares about the most, which isn't always what we think, even when we finish the call. It'll pick up on little context clues. it will say what I did well, and it'll give me areas for opportunity like, hey, you did good when they talked about this, but you should have had a story ready rather than just say you can do it. and then and then before the next pitch, it'll come in and give me a reminder. Hey, just so you know this is what they care about most, I would open with this.

Andrew Monaghan (41:42.963)
That's awesome.

Andrew Monaghan (41:50.355)
Cool. Love that. All right, next one. overrated or underrated? A top five position in organic Google results.

Scott Johnson (42:00.419)
I'm gonna say underrated. it's just I have seen companies and even with our own, where if you're in I'll say top three, five top five isn't what it used to be. Now there's so much crap on the the search results page. But like we have one ranking that's number one that drives a ton of lead flow. And if that goes away, so does our lead flow. So I will say underrated.

Andrew Monaghan (42:21.607)
Yeah, it feels like the hype is maybe with the AI results, but still the the engine is working fine under on traditional Google, right? All right, last one. comparison pages tarting competitor names. Overrated or underrated?

Scott Johnson (42:31.077)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Johnson (42:38.273)
Underrated. Underrated, love it, but use facts, not fluffy marketing speak.

Andrew Monaghan (42:46.171)
Love that. All right then. Well listen, Scott, it's been a pleasure having you on the podcast. hope the rest of the year into the next year is is good for you guys.

Scott Johnson (42:54.821)
Same deal. Thanks, Andrew. It was a privilege.