I’ve had some really fascinating conversations with him about AI search, and he has a lot of strong perspectives. So he founded the agency Porton in nineteen ninety five, then sold it in twenty seventeen. Now he’s teaching at the University of Washington. He’s also doing consulting with a lot of major enterprises when it comes to what the hell are you supposed to do with AI search.

And he’s been doing digital marketing since AOL counted as a channel strategy, which is funny. Actually, I live in Virginia. There’s there’s like a whole AOL campus over there. It’s turning to data center.

So that’s fun. It’s all like full circle. But he calls himself the digital marketing nerd. He plays Dungeons and Dragons.

He writes about SEO content, AI, and marketing, and somehow makes like curmudgeon feel like a professional certification. Please welcome, Ian Lurie.

I love that background.

Oh, man. It’s dirty gone.

Hi, everybody. I am so excited to be here. I came last year, didn’t get to speak on this stage and just thought, wow, I’ll never measure up. But here I am. I did actually start with America Online. It’s true.

I should tell you a couple things about myself before we go too far into this. First of all, I have this thing called an essential tremor. If it looks like I’m making a milkshake up here, that’s why I’m not about to have a heart attack, I promise you. The other thing is I am a little more nervous than normal because my mom is here to watch me speak. And just a couple quick things about my mom. She’s a PhD physicist who built satellites.

So I’m a little always a little intimidated to talk about intellectual things. I will tell you that she raised me a feminist. I would not have made it past the age of twelve if I didn’t buy into that particular philosophy. So the other thing, yes, I do play Dungeons and Dragons. It’s gonna find its way. See there are other players here.

Tempest domain cleric, favorite class, but I’m usually a DM for life.

I it tends to end up in all my presentations. I try to avoid it, but it’s gonna show up. So I just thought I would tell you that. And then third, I’m a pretty typical digital marketing industry member and that I am constantly bitter and cynical about everything.

And I thought it was just me, but last night at the speaker dinner and yesterday during the day I was talking to some folks about marketing and we’re all in the same place. So like yes, we would love to do these big awesome things but our clients will never let us. The Google is stupid, AI is stupid, etcetera, etcetera. For the next thirty minutes, what I am asking is that we not be like them.

Instead, be like the animal in the background, the chill, happy, zen capybara. Okay? Be like that was perfect timing. That was amazing.

Be like him or her, whichever.

Put aside all the cynicism because I’m gonna talk about some pretty big ideas and there are things that you don’t have to apply a hundred percent of what I talk about. If you apply a little bit here and there, you’ll see some progress. The other thing is don’t worry about taking pictures. I mean if you take pictures of slides, that’s great. It makes me feel really good about my slides, but you don’t have to.

I will show this again at the end. It has a link that points at a page that has an article that I wrote about this, as well as all the resources that I talk about and the slides themselves.

This is a pretty complicated presentation, so I built a little subway map since we’re in New York that shows us what we’re gonna do. And I’m gonna start off with kind of the big thinking, the philosophical part. And I just wanna make sure you all understand, this whole talk is not philosophy, just some of it.

And I’m gonna start with some history. How many people here are familiar with the Michelin Guide and its story?

Not that many, that’s cool. So I was a history major in college, so I love it when I get to nerd out about history a little bit. So gotta go all the way back to nineteen hundred and the Michelin brothers are in their garage in France and they’re thinking, we need to sell more tires.

But there’s only about three thousand cars in France and people don’t drive them very much because it’s really, really novel, right? It’s something you do kind of as a weird thing to do. It’s not a mode of transportation yet. So they create this guide and the guide contains information on how to change a tire, how to top off the oil in your car, how to fix things that might break. It has maps of France and how to navigate, right? And they put this thing out and in the first few years, they distribute thirty five thousand copies. It’s free.

And by the end of nineteen twenty ish, there’s about ninety thousand car owners in France. I am not saying that the Michelin brothers are responsible for there being ninety thousand cars in France, but you better believe that some of those ninety thousand cars had that guide in their glove box, right?

And whether people bought the cars because of the guide or drove more because of the guide or they ended up with the guide in the glove box and then bought tires because of it, doesn’t matter. One way or another, they created a piece of content that was super impactful for an entire audience and they helped demystify an entire mode of travel. So we’re gonna fast forward a hundred and twenty years. Michelin Guide’s still around, right?

But the Michelin Guide now has restaurants and hotels and things like that in it. And DigitalOcean decides to publish a bunch of guides on how to install software on your server, right? So set up a lamp stack, do things like that. This content is ungated, right?

You don’t have to sign up or register or anything to get access to it, it’s just there. And they start to dominate on every organic search service, AI and SEO.

And we shouldn’t care about this, right? But let’s be bitter and cynical for one second. Our bosses care, so I’m showing you this so that if they ask, you can say, yeah, this actually works. See, because we should care about revenue, boss. But if you wanna know, this is something you can brag about too. So they grab the AI overview, they grab the number one ranking. In AI results like on chat tpt, they become a cited source.

And they just basically dominate all organic search services because of this content.

Silca, how many people here are cyclists? Anybody?

Yeah, so I I it’s the nerdiest of sports. So if there’s a sport I’m gonna do, it’s gonna be cycling and I do. And they send me these emails, Silca does, and they’re a tire brand, a pump brand, things like that. And they say things like, hey, your tire pressure is wrong.

They don’t actually know that, but it’s a good guess on their part. And what they say is, we’re telling you it’s wrong, but we’re also gonna give you the access to this free tool.

Again, ungated. I can provide my email address, I don’t have to. I type in some information, it tells me what my tire pressure should be. And by the way, my tire pressure was way too high.

Because back when I was a kid, we put a hundred twenty pounds of air in our tires and we just let our teeth rattle as we were riding down the road. But no longer, and that got me to buy stuff. They even have a special collection of gear called the marginal gains collection, which is great if you’re a marginal cyclist like me. So I bought some stuff from their marginal gains collection. And of course, they rank number one for tire pressure.

They are a sighted source in AI.

Will Reynolds, rocking the comfiest hoodie I’ve ever seen, goes out and teaches a ton and gets access to tens of thousands of people. I know you all say his audience is tens of thousands of people. How do you think it got that way?

Because he teaches a lot.

Why do these work so well? Well, we can all start arguing but we’re not going to. No slap fighting, alright? It’s not about SEO, AEO, GEO right now, it’s about trust.

All these algorithms, whether they are search, human, AI or something else, are selling trust. Trust is their oxygen. They cannot survive without it. And if you wanna see proof, look at how Google has evolved over the years. They started with the link graph. What do they use links for?

They use them as a measure of trust. Every link they thought was a measure of trust. Now obviously, as marketers we ruin everything, so we ruin that for them because that’s what we do, it’s fun.

So then they came out with trust rank. The words are right in there. I don’t still to this day don’t know what the hell that is. They came out with author rank, right? Saying whether a particular author is trustworthy and established or not. They say it’s gone, I would argue it’s not.

They launched brand signals, right? They did not launch, but they are relying on brand signals. What’s a brand? Well, a strong brand is a trusted brand.

E E A T, I mean what does the T stand for? It stands for trust. So that one’s obvious. You go to AI, right?

Source distribution and waiting. What is that for? It’s to guarantee or guarantee, that’s funny with AI, why would I say that? To establish and improve the trustworthiness of content being delivered by AI.

Retrieval and grounding, same thing.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback, same thing. All of this stuff is there to try to improve the trustworthiness of the content that they’re putting out.

If trust is their oxygen and you provide it, they’re gonna reward you. Now I’m not saying that they don’t suck at it sometimes, because they do and we see hilarious examples all the time.

But there are twenty billion queries a day, queries and prompts per day. That was a number I looked up. That is mind blowing if you think about it. Twenty billion per day, this is their world, we live in it.

The fact that ten percent of the time they do something hilariously wrong is not something we have any control over. So they are selling trust. We have to do the things that get them to reward trust. Teaching builds trust.

That’s what all these brands are doing. They are teaching. From nineteen hundred to now, that’s what they’re doing.

And if the algorithms reward teaching and the humans reward teaching too, we need to teach the **** out of everything.

That is what we have to do.

Right? I’m so glad someone clapped. That made me feel so good. I stood in front of the mirror going teach the **** out of everything for so long today.

See, that’s great. Thank you. Thank you.

This is how you optimize. Alright? Forget the checklist. Forget private blog networks. Forget programmatic content for a second.

Forget all that. Teaching sparks the behaviors that signal trustworthiness to the algorithms. Teaching sparks dwell time. It sparks shares, links.

It sparks all the behaviors you want.

The likes, everything.

You must teach. It is eighty percent effective and is zero percent a bad idea.

How many things are there that we can do where we can say that? Right? I know eighty percent of it’s not a hundred percent effective, right? This is where we’re being cynical again.

Put it aside. Copy Vara. Remember copy, come on, on queue. Damn. Not quite.

Eighty percent effective, zero percent a bad idea. It doesn’t go wrong, right? So we have to teach the **** out of everything. That’s enough of the philosophical stuff.

Alright? We’re good. We’re done. Next stop on the subway is where we start getting really tactical.

How do you actually do this? How do you teach the **** out of everything? It’s not just about going out and sharing a lot. Right?

We are marketers. We need to create and shape demand.

So we have to teach in a way that’s going to do that, that will lead to something positive. And the way to do that is we need to have real experts providing frictionless, real solutions to real problems.

I’m gonna go over all these individually, don’t worry. And I could do this with a really Harvard Business School style formal presentation with case studies and stuff. No, it’s not gonna happen. We’re gonna get into Dungeons and Dragons.

I invented this company called Green Slot Enterprises. Just don’t worry about it if you don’t know what it is. Just call them GSE.

And they do see someone knows what a green slot is. I just heard that.

And what they do is they provide security and reputation management for wizards. Because wizards are kinda introverted, spend a lot of time in their towers reading stuff. They don’t necessarily understand the things that can happen to them, right, like a lot of our clients. So we kinda help them out.

And the challenge for GSE is how do we teach the **** out of everything? How do we pick the right problem?

How do we choose the right solution? How do we find the experts to talk about it? And how do we get them talking frictionlessly about it? We have to brief and create all this content.

We have to do all this stuff. And normally, right, way back when, the days of AOL, no. Way back when two years ago, we would grab our website, maybe grab some competitor sites. We would go to Reddit and find some interesting related threads, relevant threads.

Go out to discussion forums, scrape those, get some call transcripts from the sales team, get some customer support discussions from the support team, go to our knowledge base, and maybe take a look at people also ask.

No problem, easy.

Then we’d actually create the content. So we’d have to go out and find experts at our company, which is always a joy, right?

Source our content, write our briefs, and then turn all that magically into stuff.

Has anyone here ever gotten to do that? It’s alright, you can raise your hand. I might call you a liar, but you can raise your hand. The problem is you’re partway through that process, you’re probably just doing the research when suddenly you realize you have your quota this week of three twenty two word blog posts with two point five percent keyword density. And you have to go back and do those in a hurry. So this all falls apart.

Which brings us to the next stop, all right? This is the tool.

And there is a way to do this that scales, that’s easier to work with, that lets us use AI in a way that’s not gonna suck up every token we have and cost a bazillion dollars.

And also organizes all that information for us. So we can at least get through the first couple steps.

And this is all based heavily on this concept that a guy named Andre Karpathy Karpathy came up with, and someone talked mentioned him yesterday called the LLM Wiki. And I’m not gonna go into all the details of LLM Wikis and how they work. You can go read his stuff. There’s a fantastic tutorial from Teachers Tech about using an LLM Wiki that I recommend.

The main thing to understand is it ingests a ton of raw material and turns it into a Wiki so that then you and the AI can query the Wiki and research the Wiki instead of the raw material. It’s easier to get through, the research is already done for you, and it burns fewer tokens if you’re using AI to do that kind of mining. So really, really handy, here’s the tools you need. Some AI.

I use Clod. I’m a huge Clod fan. Can’t help it. Yeah, right? Clod’s kinda awesome.

A text editor. Any text editor, but the better it is with markdown, the better. Because markdown is sort of what AI talks in and it’s also easy for us to read. It’s a nice in between, right? It’s easier than us trying to read HTML.

Optional tools, I love Obsidian. If you haven’t used Obsidian yet, try it. It’s a big markdown management tool that lets you build a personal Wiki and markdown. You can use it for task management for everything.

And then some kind of web clipper. So something that lets you quickly clip a page and convert it to markdown. I use the Obsidian web clipper because it just lets me clip directly to Obsidian. Then you set up three full, and by the way, all of this is in a GitHub repo that’s linked from that page.

So including a fake website for GSE and some content that I admit I had Claude help me with. So if you wanna read up on GSE service and hire us, go for it.

But you set up three folders. One is raw, that’s where you put clippings and stuff. The AI doesn’t touch that, it just reads that folder. The Wiki is where Claude will write the Wiki, or your AI will write the Wiki. Briefs is where it will generate content briefs. And then these are your two instruction files. How many people here have worked with AI and with instruction files?

Like actually building it out. All right, this will be a good learning exercise if you try this because these two files are fairly simple. They just contain a list of things that you want the AI to do and keep in mind when you ask it to do something. Claude.

Md is something that Claude always looks at. Every time you give it a command in this folder, it’s gonna access that file and look for instructions. That one contains instructions like when you generate a content brief, put it in the briefs folder. When you generate the wiki, put it in the wiki folder.

The t t s o o e, which is teach the **** out of everything. I was gonna try and make that into a hashtag and it just I just couldn’t get my head around it.

But t t s o o e is where rules specific to teaching the **** out of everything sit. And I don’t wanna make the AI read that file every single time. If you’re here yesterday, you heard Annie talking about six thousand line code files. You don’t wanna make AI read a ton of stuff at once.

So this way it only accesses that file when specifically ask for certain things. All that is there. You can just run it or you can go through experiment with it. I encourage you to and tweak it.

But first you gotta go out and get all your raw materials. So this is me using the Obsidian Web Clipper. I go on Reddit. There are actually Reddit threads where people talk about the public relation relations problems that wizards have in the world of Dungeons and Dragons.

That that is that is our lives, okay? It’s amazing we ever multiplied. But the more you laugh, the funnier I get, so I love that.

So you take this and I just tell it put it into raw. It puts it into that raw folder for me, right? And I go on and you wanna be a little selective because this system will work for maybe a thousand to five thousand documents. When you get over that, you’re gonna need more.

You’re probably gonna need some kind of AI that reads the content constantly. But up to five thousand documents, it works. So I’m grabbing different threads. This is what it looks like in Obsidian.

So it’s just a nice markdown viewer. It shows me the formatting. Everything here was done for me. I did not do any of this.

But I can annotate. So I can go into my text editor and I can just add comments. And this is one of the commands in that claud. Md file.

And here I just created a regular HTML comment and it just specifies this footnote is an example of teaching small. So when I ask about teaching small, you should access this information. And it’s doing all this for us, right? This is the thing that used to be so time consuming.

Plus, when you go to your bosses and they say, I don’t know why the hell did you come up with that as a question. You can say the AI did it and they’ll be like, okay, you need to do this right away. The AI did it, no wonder.

And then you just tell it ingest all the content, and it does it for you by some magical something. And you can, by the way, you can have it ingest new content. You can constantly add new stuff. You can remove stuff.

There’s a command called lint where it will go in and remove duplicates or things that appear to be wrong. And it extracts critical concepts and puts them into the Wiki. It builds out this cool link graph. So this is in Obsidian, it actually lets me see the link graph, which is kinda cool.

It creates this one critical file. This is the one that is critical to teaching the **** out of everything. This is the questions file. It’s a list of every single thing, every question, explicit or implicit, that appears in the raw content that doesn’t seem to have a clear or quality answer.

And it will tell you why the answer is not sufficiently clear or why the answer needs to be higher quality. Those are the things you’re gonna teach.

Those are the real problems. I’m gonna go through a specific example in a second. And then it’ll build out briefs when you ask it to.

And the briefs include, here’s how you put right this. I wish I could take credit, but the truth is the AI is just doing this. I just said go write a brief and it just does it. And it does it pretty well.

So and it’ll also give you the list of experts by the way. So that’s the tool. Now we’re gonna talk about an actual process. Remember those four things, right?

Real problem, real solution, real expert, frictionless. We have to do all four of those things. So we’re gonna start with a problem.

Someone on the marketing team says, you know, everybody searches for dragons.

There’s a lot of search volume around the phrase dragon. I think we should write a ton of content teaching people about dragons.

Well, the thing is a real problem should be one that our audience actually has to deal with day to day. A question that they really have. And as it turns out, when I go to the wiki and I say based on or to the AI, I say based on the wiki, tell me unanswered questions, implicit and explicit.

It tells me that we actually had a customer call from this wizard whose name I changed to protect him. His name is Archie. His name is not really Archibald, but that’s what we’re going with.

It turns out that his problem and as I dig a little deeper, the real problem wizards face is not dragons, it’s angry villagers.

There aren’t that many dragons and they live a long time. They don’t have a lot of incentive. Villagers get really angry really fast and if you blow them up, they just make more. So villagers are the real problem here.

Alright? That’s the real problem. Angry, distrustful villagers. So now we have a real problem, we need a real solution.

A real solution teaches me to solve the problem, and this is important, without selling me anything.

We need to provide a lesson to all of those wizards, how they can deal with the angry villagers without lighting them all on fire. Alright, that’s not the objective here. How we can diffuse a situation with angry villagers. That’s what we need to do.

So then, I just say, alright, create some content briefs for me based on the questions document, the documents in raw, and t t s o o e.

I misspelled it there. T t s o o e principles.

Write content briefs to answer these questions. And it gives me this one, and it says, look, here’s the things you need to do to deal with angry villagers. And it actually briefs out that content for me.

And it offers me a solution.

Physical security, sure. Spying protection, because maybe you are doing things that would make the villagers angry, I don’t know. But if you are, you don’t want them to know about it. And better PR, that’s the key, right? Is you wanna improve your public relations. So one of the briefs I got said, take this one case study that we already have about the cow incident where a bunch of villagers accused a wizard of actually turning someone into a cow. They had not done it that time, but they were accused of it.

Take that and add some useful information to it. So we use storytelling and we add in, you know, here’s things you shouldn’t do. Here’s some decisions Archibald made that made things worse.

Here’s decisions that were made that made things better.

And now in addition, it did provide a content brief for a very specific training course that we also provided and I’ll show you that in a minute.

So now it’s down to real experts. This is the hard part, all right? There’s nothing I can do to get the experts to actually cooperate. What it can do though is I put in all the bios of all the people who work at the company. And I said show me the experts and it just pulled out two people and told me what their expertise appears to be so I can reach out to them. I am so gonna run out of time guys, I apologize.

And I can reach out to them and get them to provide input. And because of the way this is all structured, they don’t have to write anything. If I can just go in with my phone and record, right, then I’m good.

So that’s real experts, we just include them in the content.

And yes, they have bios that show how smart they are.

This is not an SEO check off item. The bio does not make the expert, the expert makes the bio. So I’m showing you this just so you know, yeah, there should be a well structured bio. But don’t think, I wrote a bio therefore it’s okay.

I’m becoming bitter and cynical again, I’m just gonna move right past that. The next important thing is it has to be frictionless. This is the part where you’re not selling me anything until you’ve established trust by showing me the useful information. Bicycling magazine, I have many reasons to hate them.

If you see me later, I can tell you some of them. But the main one here is how they just they are just evil. So let’s say I have a flat tire, I’m sorry but they are is there anyone here from Bicycling Magazine at Rodelpre? Am I doomed?

Yeah, right. God.

The publisher is evil. I don’t know about the the writers are wonderful.

So I get a flat tire, I’m up to my elbows in grease, I’m trying to figure out what to do. I get on my phone, I do a search. How do I fix a flat tire? I get this, I go there and I get this.

Yeah, groan. Come on. It’s it’s something on how to change a tire. Maybe I fill this out, but I mean what kind of information am I gonna give them?

Right? I’m not gonna give them real information. I’m gonna do everything I can to make their lives miserable. This is where when a sales team comes to you and says, we need to gate this training content.

Ask them how high quality the leads are. We can gate it and usually it’s actually the marketing team because they have a lead quota to hit, but they don’t have a sales quota to hit. So just think about are you actually generating leads that turn into anything? Or are they just people being creative and ways to tell you to screw off?

Right?

Rei dot com does it right. So they have this very complete guide. I could be by the side of the road and I could use this step by step. And then in the guide, they have embedded calls to action. You need a tube, buy a tube from us. Need tire levers, buy tire levers from us. And then at the end, it lists all the products that were in there and says go ahead and buy them.

And you can do this with anything. So here’s here’s that case study. This is also completely frictionless, right? It’s just at the end. Wanna learn how we did this? You know, we just taught you how to do it, but if you wanna learn how we do it, get in touch. That’s all.

We even kinda make a thing out of it, right? I’m not gonna turn this into a sales pitch. This piece of content is frictionless. If you want the pitch, go over here instead. So notice, we are shaping demand. I’m not saying this is a purely idealistic exercise. We’re still trying to generate revenue.

Now the system will generate a frictionless call to action. I haven’t tweaked it quite right yet, so what it does right now is it gives you like things for people to download and stuff like that. This could be very useful.

If the wizard has something hanging on the wall by the window. So when he looks down and sees all the angry villagers, then look over and say, oh, I need to do these things. But that’s a little bit more involved than just having some quick advice on a page.

All right, we’re almost there.

So teaching big and teaching small. This is an important bit of strategy. You wanna teach big because you get a chance to win big.

So for example here, GSE did a full training course.

Ten part training course on exactly how it is that you can deal with crises if you’re a wizard.

And it is completely frictionless. No sign up, no email, no paywall, nothing. You just go there and take the course. Anthropic built out this entire academy.

Right now this is a little different because it’s based on their product, But you know, most of the AI, the big four AI tools are big enough now that if you’re putting out training without a gate, I sort of consider it teaching the **** out of everything. But they invested a ton of time and effort. Again, coming back to Will, you know, he puts these posts together and it looks like it’s just a LinkedIn post, but he did a ton of research and that video is professionally produced if you watch it. That’s teaching big.

Big investment of resources, time, budget, whatever. The problem with teaching big is if it doesn’t work or it doesn’t work fast enough, then the angry villagers are your bosses and they come to burn your tower down and you are once again writing three twenty two word blog posts with two point five percent keyword density. So you can teach big but don’t just teach big, All right, you should also teach small. If you teach small, you miss small.

So you can do little things like here. I just put, you know, we just put a quick little tip onto a page. This is actually a product page, right? Services page saying, hey, for PR, this is what we do.

But then you have on the side there just a little piece of advice saying, oh, you know what? Dragons are not the problem here.

It’s the villagers. And someone reading this page will say, I just learned something. That’s kinda cool. And you can do this on product pages, you can do it everywhere. So that’s teaching small. You’re being kinda sneaky. If you have an Instagram template, right, you can just do a quick Instagram post.

I mean it’s not quick, right? It’ll take an hour or two, maybe you have to get it approved and everything else. But it’s not making a video or producing an entire training course. So this is teaching small. And if it wins small, that’s fine. And of course, because you’re doing this on Instagram, all the calls to action are implicit and they’re managed by Instagram. So that simplifies us even more.

Right? Like, share, save, forward, whatever.

Okay, that was a lot.

My head’s exploding and I’ve rehearsed this thing like seven times. I do need a drink, but we need to come back to kind of the key core points of all of this. First, the algorithms reward teaching and so do humans.

Eighty percent effective, zero percent bad idea. Always keep that in mind. It’s better than a private blog network. It’s better than just about any tactic. It has worked for at least the entire life of modern marketing to date, hundred and twenty plus years. It will still work a century from now. Doesn’t matter what the surface is, it will always work.

It works when you have real experts providing frictionless, real solutions to real problems, not keywords.

So we all need to make sure that we teach the **** out of everything. So please, teach the **** out of one thing after you leave here. Then you can go to everything.

All right, that’s it. Thank you very much.

Yes, yes, Ian Lurie, everybody. I feel like I I’m so jealous that you’ve got better give it up for our next presenter because I am so hyped.

This is a debut y’all.