64% of AI citations come from editorial coverage on other sites, not your own website

Most brands are invisible. Our AI citation report found that 86% of brands aren't mentioned for prompts and queries that they want to be mentioned for. What steps do I take this week? Now, what's happening is like, oh, the publications that aren't Fortune and Fast Company and and Forbes and the page 2 through 10 results actually matter. It actually matters. We see 35% of journalists who come to Harrow oneclick opt out of anything that's AI generated. No matter how intelligent your workflow is, no matter how much you've trained it, you got to have a human in the loop to actually look at it. Now these customers are showing up to your business with trust and that's invaluable.

You you could spin up a product and launch it and the differentiator is going to be the person. How do we survive the next model update? The Nick Stanley Show. In December of 2024, a big company shut down Harro. Help a reporter out. If you've ever tried to get your business mentioned in the press, you know what Haro was. Three emails a day, reporters on one side, ordinary experts on the other. It had been running since 2008. It was free. And then one day, it just wasn't there anymore. Most people, including me, figured that was the end of it. My guest did not. He bought it. He had it running again about 22 days later.

Still free. No login the way that people liked it in the first place. Brett started out as a financial auditor. He then drove across the country twice asking people how they found work that they actually cared about. He wrote a book about it. He built a phone company shortly, a phone app company uh shortly after that that did not work out. Then he ran a SEO agency in Scottsdale that sat at number one for four straight years and he sold that firm. He now owns three companies that spent years trying to beat each other and they're all in the media space. So today's big question, how does a business get visibility today in the age of AI?

Brett, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Good topic. Absolutely. Well, let's let's jump in right there, Brett. Um, what's how do we get visibility in the age of AI? Great question. A lot of layers to it. I think it's helpful to understand where I'm coming from in terms of some of the perspectives. So, um, as you mentioned, we own and operate three different brands in the media space. We have featured, which is a co-pilot for public relations. We've got Hera, which is a journalist request service that connects journalists with sources. And we've got connectively which connects experts with uh publishers.

And so we've got well over uh 2500 publishers who are using connectively. We've got 75,000 journalists who are uh on Hera. We've got hundreds of thousands of users and all of them have this objective of how do I build visibility for myself and my small business. And so the thing that is at the core of each one of these different platforms is you your expertise your knowledge. It's valuable. It needs to be featured in in articles. And what's happened over the last few years as AI has just kind of take taken over search engine result pages is that editorial coverage is landing folks in those AI answers.

Uh we recently ran a study uh that looked at about 22,000 plus AI citations across 405 uh GEO audits or generative engine optimization audits. And the thing that we found was that about 64% of all AI citations were from earned media or editorial coverage. And so that's why we've seen platforms like ours start to become really popular as a place to, you know, carve out 15 minutes a day to answer relevant queries and to get you and your business featured so that it's not only featured in that publication, but it's really the end objective is increase in your visibility in those AI answers. So, what's the ratio these days of AI reading articles versus humans reading articles?

Like, am I going to get more value from ending up in those AI search results or from the actual people that just read the article that had me quoted or whoever me is? I think where online attention is changing and how folks are consuming information is has drastically changed uh because some people aren't even going to the internet. Some people are just opening up their desktop version of cloud and having it run and and then consuming information from there without ever having visited a web page and others are you know uh going to their favorite publication and reading that and learning about information that way.

So I think it's a mix. I think that recently there was a study from Cloudflare that said that there was more bots that are reading web pages than humans on online. Uh so you're seeing a lot of publishers optimize their websites for machines knowing that their the machines will consume that information and display that information to the end reader. But the destination has changed dramatically. Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's come back into how we get into these results. I did want to make sure to ask here. So, I I found it really interesting when you acquired Haro, it gets shut off. And what does buying that even even look like?

Cuz it's it's no longer an asset up there. I mean, who do you call to buy a brand that's been turned off? and what what's going through your head in that uh weeks or months leading up to that? So, the dots are that Hera was discontinued in April 24. When it was discontinued, it was announced that it would be rebranded into a platform called Connectively. And Connectively ran until December 24. And that's when I reached out on the general support email address. I think it was supportconnectably us and said, "Hey, I saw that everything's shutting down. Are you interested in, you know, talking about an acquisition and so somehow someway there was a generous support person that forwarded it on to to the right people and we were able to get a deal across the finish line." And what that looked like was an acquisition of assets that would allow us to revive and relaunch these uh different brands.

And the goal from day one was was saying, "Hey, uh, Hera was founded in 2008. It was founded and found product market fit very quickly because it was free for both sides. It was supported by newsletter ads. It provided incredibly uh, a very valuable service to journalists who were on deadline who needed sources for their stories. And it incre and then it just leveled the playing field for anyone to show up and say, "Hey, I could be helpful for that story and let me submit this information via email." And so we wanted to bring that back exactly how is it how it existed in 2008, but with the different safeguards and guard rails behind the scenes that would allow that connection to be uh quality.

So that's what the mission was from from day one as soon as we revived it was was just bringing it back how people enjoyed it. Yeah. when we have a lot of builders and entrepreneurs. I spend a lot of time creating stuff with Claude Code myself. Uh what what's the sprint look like between when that deal gets over the finish line and you're going to relaunch this because you guys executed it very quickly. That could not have been easy. Yeah, I think that well there's a few things that make it possible. One is a great team. two is great partners that you rely on for for a technology and then probably three is just a simplicity of an idea that that works.

So part of when you're building you don't know what to build. You're bu you're building and building and trying to find fit and it's helpful when a brand has already found fit and validated over 18 19 years. So bringing back the thing that you know is fit is important and that allow expedites a lot of the the build. So, I would say that those three components is what allowed us to execute so so quickly. Yeah. And just to make sure, just to keep everybody with us in the conversation, if you're not familiar with product market fit, what do you mean by that? Product market fit is finding fit between the value proposition and your customers.

So the value proposition of Harrow if you're a source is getting featured in the media. And the the customer in this that you need to find fit with is a small business owner, a founder that doesn't have the budget to go hire a PR agency and needs to do it themsself. It's a, you know, subject matter expert that traditionally doesn't have a PR department to support them, but still needs to build up the credibility within their profession. And so product market fit within Harrow is get featured in the media for folks who don't typically have a PR department to support them andor also there's a PR agency that's another huge you know ICP or uh ideal customer profile of Harrow and so what's their problem and what's their value proposition their their problem is there's not enough media opportunities that to get their clients featured and Harrow is this faucet of media opportunities that consistently ly supplies opportunities for that PR firm that comes right to their inbox three times a day.

Yeah. And it's an excellent tool. Uh if that if I didn't make that clear earlier um and the simplicity of it is is really nice. Was was the response there immediately when you relaunched? One of my favorite stories is we hadn't told anyone that we were bringing it back and we needed to test whether the website worked or not. And so we deployed it uh on a Friday afternoon at like 3:00 pm Pacific Standard Time and just deployed it for like a couple minutes. And within those couple minutes, we already had 15 signups and it had been offline for probably about almost a year. And so just the fact that people were discovering it on a Friday afternoon, uh people were were very very excited to to have it back.

And that's one thing I think I underestimated in this was just the power of a beloved brand over the course of, you know, 18 years and what what that could really do for for a customer. Yeah. Now, what what does a successful pitch look like today in 2026? I always use the Harrow acronym as a way to to guide folks on what a successful pitch looks like. So, Harrow stands for help a reporter out, but in terms of how it can be successful for a pitch, it's is it helpful? Is it authentic? Is it relevant? And is it on time? So helpful is are you helping the journalist actually do their job. Authentic means you're not just 100% AI generating your pitches.

You're actually the human behind it. uh relevant is you'd be surprised at how particular journalists are in their instructions of exactly what they're looking for. Everything from here's the subject line I want you to send me to here are the qualifications that you absolutely need to have. Don't respond if you don't meet these things. So, making sure that you have the the job title, the all the qualifications to actually qualify to pitch is really important. And then on time means, hey, journalists are on deadline. uh they're typically looking for the best source as fast as possible. So if you could reply back to when they you know before their stated deadline those the key elements of those key elements which is the one most people get wrong definitely the the relevance uh one they are saying hey even though I'm not a licensed soand so in Massachusetts I am licensed in Ohio doesn't matter like don't waste your time don't waste a journalist time yeah Yeah.

Okay. So, if I am looking for visibility for a business I work in or one that I founded, whatever the situation might be. What step and I've never done this before. What steps do I take this week? I think the very first one is to do a GEO audit. So, GEO, generative engine optimization audit. You need to figure out which sites are being cited by AI and then you need to once you have done that research and figured out which sites are being cited by AI then it's figuring out okay how do I get into those sites and uh and reverse engineering and figuring out what pitch to actually execute and then pitching them and doing the thing that your strategy's identified.

So I'll give you an example real quick. Uh let's just take like a RV rental company and they want to discover, you know, which sites are being cited. So you could uh feature.com does this. You could go to feature.com and run a free GEO audit. Just type in run a GEO audit on website URL. And what it will do, it'll look at all the citations. It'll organize and prioritize uh to figure out which sites you actually need to reach out to and the reason for your outreach. And so an example for the RV rental company is like it'll discover, you know, some obscure like mini mom and pop blog that talks about RV rentals and it has this one blog post that has a listicle of all the RV rental tips that you need, but it doesn't mention your brand in this article.

And so what this tool will do and what many different tools will do is it'll just say, "Hey, you should reach out to this editor. Here's their email address. here's a pitch that you could send them. Click send and it'll go off to that editor and essentially say make that editor aware to say, "Hey, I actually should go and update that article and include this one company because it makes my content better." That's a that's a that's an example of that. Yeah, that's an interesting strategy right there. Um, now before you mentioned don't just have AI send your pitches. Let's let's unpack that a little bit more.

What are the mistakes people are making? How should we use AI in this process? Right? Because it's still a tool I would imagine that's part of the process. It's it's part of what you guys are developing. But there is a balance that uh where we we find the the right amount of human and the right amount of AI to speed things up. I'll give you the good example and the bad example. So um and and we know this because we actually run every single pitch that comes through connectively that comes through Harrow through an AI detection tool. And so this AI detection tool will run um and give it an give it a score.

And so 21% of all pitches that we get through Harrow are 100% AI generated. And so at the same time we see 35% of journalists who come to Harrow oneclick opt out of anything that's AI generated. So the that's kind of what's happening from behind the scenes on a platform perspective. Now the good and bad example of how AI should be used. The bad example, I'll start with that one, is just having Claude uh ingest all these different journalist opportunities to autogenerate a response without ever looking at them to autosubmit this stuff and then just that's spam plain and simple. That is a bad example of how to use AI.

No matter how intelligent your workflow is, no matter how much you've trained it, you got to have a human in the loop to actually look at it. Now, a good example of of AI use is you're on a treadmill and it's 5:45 a.m. and you've got your Harrow edition or whatever and you're working out and you voice something to an AI to say, "Hey, polish this response. Make this mine. Here's my insight. Here's my experience." And then AI can essentially generate an experience from what you voiced into it. Now, that's called AI assisted. It's something that the pitch got polished, but at the end of the day, it's your experience.

It's your expertise that uh went through the system and then got to the journalist. And the journalists that we speak to, you know, they care about getting connected with the right source. They don't want to be duped. They don't want to have more work that gets created for them where they have to check to see if this source actually exists, that what they said is true. Uh they want to be able to get connected with someone for an interview. So there's a big difference between AI generated and AI assisted. Yeah, it immediately makes me think of the what's happening with college essays today and students.

We have so many students that are like, can't I just have chat GPT answer these things for me? And it it just smells like something created by a machine. And there and humans read these things uh at least on the second pass. and at some point they read them and they they just don't resonate um with other people. And yet the AI assisted version where you give it the right elements and images and stories, your real stories that happened to you in your real life that can illustrate who you are and what you have to offer. Those pop just as well as someone who grinds on it uh with pencil and paper or or just typing it all out themselves.

Um but that is that is the key switch right? Yeah and I I would say that uh journalists are like your most tenured professors in terms of AI detection. You have a journalist in inbox is a very scary place. They I get on calls with them and you know I ask them uh certain questions like Brett look in the 15 minutes that we've been talking I've already look at how many pitches I've gotten. And so they're going through a lot of these pitches and they're the probably one of the most well-trained professions in terms of just looking at a pitch and determine if it's AI assisted or generated or not. Right now, what does that look like if I've got um I respond to one of these emails that comes through and and a reporter does uh like it and I meet the specifications and everything they're asking for.

What's the what's that how does that process develop? Yeah, I think that it depends on a couple things of what the query actually is. Some journalists will want to connect with you for an interview and uh and essentially learn more. A lot of journalists do do that. Um, and I I find, you know, as someone who writes and contributes to a couple different publications, it's an incredibly valuable experience where, you know, you get all these pitches, you get your your pick of the best sources, you get an interview, you write a great article. That's the magic. The reality is that journalists are doing a heck of a lot these days.

Uh, they are now entrepreneurs. They are supporting themselves with multiple different publications, multiple streams of income, and time is of the essence. And so some journalists will also use Harrow as a way to just get great quotes. And they will take what's in the inbox. They might do a verification of the person and the the information that's been given to them. They might just copy and paste and put it into their article and publish and may maybe never even tell you. So I think that the experience of using Harrow depends on the journalists. You're able to research the journalists. We've have herojournalist profiles.

You're able to click and see who this person is that's that's requesting and uh get a gauge on what they're writing about the articles that they've produced. But the the experience ranges from, oh wow, that was easy. In five minutes, I I got featured in, you know, one of these different publications to, okay, I went through the interview process and gave them what they needed. Yeah. Now, before we went on the air, you mentioned the long tale and and there there are changes right now in the importance of the longtail. I'm really interested in that because that article, I believe it was in Wired magazine called The Long Tale that came out so many years ago and they were it was right when Netflix had first come on the scene and they were talking about how there was this dramatic change and how powerful The Long Tale was and that a video rental store could not carry a movie that was only rented one time every 3 months.

But Netflix could and they could carry thousands of those and that that longtail added up to all these views and brought in all these people that really loved that thing that maybe didn't it didn't apply to or appeal to a lot of people but there was a deep love for it for the few who really loved it. Um and that that was really powerful to uplift Netflix in the beginning of streaming. So what's what's going on with the longtail in in all of this this media landscape now? I love that comparison. I think that that's exactly what's happening. So, traditionally with PR, it most people think of PR and they think of a publication like Forbes or Fortune or Fast Company or Inc.

and they want to get featured in these tier one, you know, publications. Or you think of Google and you think of search engine optimization of like page one or it doesn't matter. Now what's happening is like oh the publications that aren't Fortune and Fast Company and and Forbes and the page two through 10 results actually matter. It actually matters. Uh we ran a uh our first featured AI citation report that covered uh GEO audits on our platform between June and August. We looked at 22,000 AIT citations. The big finding here was that 34% of AI citations were from websites with domain authorities of less than 40.

And domain authority is a score of how authoritative your website is on a scale of one to 100. 100 being, you know, you're awesome, one being like you may have just started your website. But onethird of all sites that are being cited are that longtail. And that's very interesting for SMBs who want to get AI visibility if they could focus on that third of the longtail. This is the third that is wide open. This is like not the ones that are landing on your media list for the PR agency that you're hiring that's focused on getting you to those tier ones and getting you the the nice placements. This is stuff that you could reach out to this mom and pop blog and who does you know covers pa in Spain and you know get featured there and it's incredibly helpful to now get your brand mentioned in those AI answers.

Right. So and just to make sure I'm with you here. So, it's I get featured in a couple of websites that are not going to come up in a Google search or they will come up in a Google search. It's just they'd be so many pages deep probably not anybody's going to find them. And yet with Claude or Gemini or Chatg GPT because they can search all of that and ingest all of that then I'm actually being found where the end user is usually going now which is Chad GPT Claude Gemini and it's pulling those longtail results and then there's not nearly as much competition to get your whatever it is you're doing your your small business into these uh longtail websites to be quoted by them or sourced by them.

Is that Yeah, that's pretty accurate. And you think about, you know, the job of Google of, you know, over the last 20 years and you think about the job of Perplexity or Claude, Chatbt, Gemini, and their the AI engine's job is to generate an answer. Google's job was to generate a directory of search results and let the user decide. And so Google's job was actually like pretty easy. It was a ranking system and you know you ranked things one through 100 and that was the job. Now the job with with creating an AI answer is you've got to look across maybe 59 different sources. Let's hypothetical look across 59 different sources and generate an answer based off the information from those 59 sources.

So how do you who are those 59 sources? And I guarantee that, you know, third of them might be those low authority accessible website owners who you're able to to, you know, get your brand mentioned by. And so if you're able to do that and be on four of the 59 or whatever it is, now that AI summary essentially is saying, hey, this brand that's mentioned in four out of the 59 places is one that maybe we should put into this AI answer summary. This episode of the Nick Stanley Show is brought to you by Zapier. If you've ever felt buried in repetitive work, copying data, moving files, sending follow-ups, you know it's like death by a thousand mouse clicks.

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Sure. So, Harrow three times a day, email, newsletter, journalist requests, and those are really great for people who want to check their inbox three times a day and people do and they set calendar reminders for themselves because it goes out the same time every single day. Um, and they'll look through the email and they'll answer the ones. uh not everyone likes to do that. So connectively exists as almost harrow in a platform. It's a platform where it's searchable, it's findable. You could go set up alerts and essentially, you know, find the the queries that matter to you. Um and it's interesting because the limitation with Harrow is that it gets sent out pretty much every five hours.

So there's the morning edition, the afternoon, evening, and journalists typically have to wait till the next Harrow goes out to get connected with their source, but they need them immediately. So there's like a a 4hour gap that they're just like waiting. So we put them all on connectively for early access to Harrow queries so that the journalist gets the source that they need and then you know connectively users have a reason why they should sign up and subscribe because they get early access to hero queries plus all these other queries from the 2500 publishers that they use connectively. So you've got those two and then featured is your co-pilot for PR.

And so we have because we own and operate hero and connectively all of those requests get into featured uh so you're able to get access to all those. But what featured really is is the problem with PR today is it's not one thing. It is almost everything. It is finding podcasts to pitch. It's finding journalists to pitch. It's finding the mom and pop blogs to get your GEO visibility up. It's responding to journalist requests, pitching by line articles, everything under the sun. And so what feature does is it allows it, it's almost like a chat GBT for PR. It's got a a chat box there. You could just put in a natural language prompt, get connected with the right media opportunities.

You could set up workflows so that you've got an always on PR assistant to monitor all these different things. And so featured is very much almost like all of PR and Harrow and connectively fit within that one section of PR which is journalist requests. And so that's how they all three kind of work together. Okay. Okay. And somebody who's just first dipping their toe into it, where should they start between those? I think that I would recommend signing up for Harrow uh because it gives you a great flavor for what's happening today in media. It uh what are journalists looking for? Well, Harrow will tell you three times a day of exactly the sources that they need, the stories that matter, uh things of that nature.

So, I think that Harrow is a great introduction to media. Um, connectively is great if you want to manage Harrow and featured is great if you want to do your own PR and get connected with opportunities beyond journalist requests. Got it. Got it. Okay. Okay. And then we were connected through a PR team. Which which of those tools were were they using and how did that come together? Yeah. So I think when you have a a what's called a podcast pitcher, so we have 814,000 podcasts in featured directory and that was started from a analysis of 5 million podcasts that exist. And so we took the 5 million, we got it down to 814,000 based off of who's an active podcast, which podcasts do people actually want to pitch.

And so then you can go to featured and say find podcasts about blank and it'll pull up the the different ones. I'm amazed by it because it finds podcasts. I don't know which what episode this is or what what we're on, but like you've been around, you know, so u it'll find find you and it'll find the podcaster with two episodes that they recently just started up, you know, a few weeks ago, but they're relevant for for what it is that you want to talk about. Interesting. Interesting. And that's I mean I get that's proof of concept right there, right? Because I as far as I know no one on the team submitted us to this directory or anything like that.

Like it found it did did that work behind the scenes and and it clearly worked cuz as soon as I saw the inquiry come in I was just like oh uh I mean I always said Haro and apparently I should be saying harrow. Um so I'm going to correct that. one of our our sponsors, uh, Zapier. Um, they still get called, um, what is it? Zapier. Everyone wants to call them Zapier because that's how it's spelled. Um, but yeah, Zapier is the because they produce Zaps that make little automations. Um but in any event with as soon as Harrow came across um I I I was immediately interested because I was familiar with with the tool um have used the tool successfully um numerous times in the past and uh yeah I mean that's just the cool side of of these AI tools making things work like that that um I don't know I mean there's a lot of there's a people get focused on people over overusing these tools and not being authentic.

anymore, but there there are some just incredible benefits um to all of it as well. Here's the thing that I've learned. So, like when I ran my SEO company and what inspired me to found these companies, we served probably like 500 small business owners. Everyone from an equipment financing person to eyelash extension supply company and everyone in between. Yeah. Everyone's got knowledge to share. Everyone's got like some interesting element to share about their business. And it's about connecting that person with the person that wants to hear it. And now media is becoming like this accessible thing.

It used to be very inaccessible. You had to have a $5,000 a month PR retainer to get into these, you know, publications. And what is media today? you the one of the most interesting stats that we've seen is that there's actually so there's uh a little more than six PR professionals for every working journalist today and so the six to1 ratio so you can imagine what that journalist inbox looks like and on the flip side of this there's 30 full-time creators for every journalist and these full-time creators this is all they they do they you know monitor iz from posting on YouTube or Tik Tok or Instagram, um, hosting podcasts.

So, there's 1.5 million creators uh, that are out there that this is their full-time thing. And so, now this ratio gets flipped where if you have 30 creators for every one journalist and six PR professionals for every one journalist, now there's five creators for every PR person. So now PR becomes, well, how do I get my message to these creators who actually want to share it, who need to create new episodes, create new content, things like that. So I think we're entering in a really exciting time where you could take that eyelash extension supply person and you could find people who actually want to receive that message and talk about it.

Really cool. It is. It is. And that's a great example. I mean, I immediately am like, what what is that? What's a day in the life look like for the eyelash extension person who's running that company? And how's that different than running a media empire? Uh yeah, it's a lot of it's a lot of cardboard boxes. I'll tell you that. Okay. Okay. lesson you've learned that really strikes you right now from running these various companies and what you're doing now that entrepreneurs can put into practice. I think the lesson is everything changes and right now everything changes faster than when it how it used to change.

Um you know the the everyone can create products very very quickly. Um this this you know one of the things that happened recently was that Reddit was this darling of AI answers and then overnight it's on 80% drop on chat GBT in terms of how how often it was referenced and now Reddit's like out of favor. And so like you have entire businesses that were optimizing for Reddit and now overnight you know it's it's different. Everything changes very very fast in this age of AI and you need to be able to adapt whether that's a product whether that's a business whether you know and so I think that it comes back to that product market fit of always reassessing what's the value proposition and who's the customer and how do you make sure that that's always just in in a good herring that everyone's happy there and you as a founder just have to constantly be aware talk to your customers figure out where they're having you know, successes where they're having failures and then just readjust.

Yes. And the lean startup is a great uh book for anybody that wants to learn more about that product market fit because it's a pretty massive concept if you're not familiar with it. So, yeah, Eric's one of our adviserss, so Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So, he's he's been advising us for the last couple years. And I guess, you know, some of the the stuff that that I've taken from him and and from uh from others, it's just like I try to do between five to 20 calls a week with customers. And the customer will tell you they will tell you what is right and what is wrong and what they need. And all you as a founder have to do is show up and ask.

And so fortunately, like I I block off an hour every single day to welcome every single new subscriber we have, every single churn subscriber that we have, every upgrade, every downgrade, and just reach out to these people with a personal message. It's me. It's not AI. And just say, "Hey, I'm seeing what you're doing. Like, I'm here. Anytime you want to talk, I'm in. And here's my calendar link." And I'll probably get about five to 20 demos a week. Uh that and it's the best time ever. Like then I take that uh that meeting. I have a skill in my cloud that will put it into an ASA task for a development team and say we got to ship this and here's the priority.

Here's the thing. Here's the ICP. Here's the problem. And then go back to that customer. And it's the most mind-blowing experience for that person where they're like, "Hey, I just subscribed to this $39 a month thing. The founder reached out to me. I talked to him. I said this was my problem and then they solved it and shipped it in the la in 24 hours. So that's how you have to just keep going and iterating to build your product you know day by day brick by brick. That is incredible. I am also a believer in the philosophy that if you will listen to the market, they will tell you what they want, what they need, uh rather than trying to tell them what it is they need or want.

Um, but you you got to make the time to listen the and I I mean you've taken it to the next level though. I mean I I I'm I'm just pausing for a second. I mean the idea that you're connecting with the customers directly and then listening so much that you're immediately putting a tweak or a new feature onto the product based on that feedback. Yeah, that would be mind-blowing as a user of one of these services to then see it within a couple of days or shorter than that suddenly it exists and that's that strikes me as being on the on the cutting edge of where uh businesses need to think and act today.

Yeah, it's basic super basic business and it's almost like so one of the thing one of the inspiration uh areas that I've looked at is gym memberships. Like gym memberships traditionally have super high churn and they have deployed they've researched this over four decades about how do how do we get people to go to gyms? How do we get them to keep paying us? And one of the things that that struck me was that uh in these studies is that if one person from the gym greets a member within the first seven days, then there's a 20% le uh less likelihood that they churn. If they if two people greet them in the first 15 days, there's like a 40% higher likelihood that they stick around.

up to four people that and then it's like if four people know your name and greet you and the whole gym that people that work there are like Brett welcome back 80% likelihood that I'm not going to churn. So, you've got to be able to humanize a business in in 2026. Uh, you know, I think that if you're a customer and you're and you are able to access the team behind the product, that's different. Like I can't, you know, I grew up like when FA though Facebook was coming out like I couldn't email Mark or know the people who who were there and stuff like a lot of these companies are so big and and faceless that you lose the connection.

Uh, and I think that that's the difference between how businesses are going to be built in the future is it's going to be very easy to launch businesses. Like you you could spin up a product and launch it and the differentiator is going to be the person. It comes back to the human whether it's business building or whether it's being able to get quoted and featured in the media. Like journalists want to connect with real people and feature real insights in their stories. Customers want to buy from real businesses with real people. doesn't change. Yeah, you've got you've got my head spinning right now because we have a new product uh called Reach that does it's got all kinds of information on every high school across the country and every college across the country and yet so in my uh educational consulting I have customers phone numbers and so I and I have their email addresses so I can call them I can email them and just say hey I just want to check in let's see what's going on and just like you I learned so much from direct interaction with the customer.

This new project because it's there are people spending time with these tools, but there's there there's not a um a direct way to call them. But I'm I'm already thinking I many of them submit an email address so they can get a more detailed reports and just sending all of those people an email and saying, "Hey, I want to check in. Here's a Calendarly link if you want to talk about your experience and what you wish was on here, what uh features you'd like to see. I mean, that could be really powerful. Um, and just like you said, a huge differentiator um in this age right now where it's become so much easier to build a new thing, but almost a little bit more difficult unless we intentionally carve out the time to connect directly with the customers.

Yeah. And if you're going to go down this route, the advice that I would have is provide a positive ROI for the customer who devotes their time. So the positive ROI, the reason why this works is if they say here's a problem, we let that problem sit there, right? It's not good. Like, so that's why you got to be able to ship that so that they know that, hey, that 15 minutes that I invested with with Brett was probably some of the best 15 minutes that I spent this week because now I was listen to. I now have the feature that I want. Um, and so you got to have an a good ROI, which is why a lot of companies will dangle Starbucks gift gift cards or whatever because there's not the you got to have the balance with with that equation.

Yeah. Yeah. But a lot I mean, I've had that experience, right? you fill out uh Google ads ask for it all the time for feedback on their product, right? And some of their surveys are take 20 minutes to fill the whole thing out and I don't know, we're sitting there 6 months later and none of it made any sort of a difference. And it's like, why did I waste 20 minutes telling you what you think? Because there are plenty of things in here that that would make this product better. Um but you don't feel listened to. Um I I really like that. positive ROI for the person who's going going to invest 15 minutes to give you feedback on what you're working on.

Yeah, absolutely. Any any way that you can, whether that's pushing a product, whether that's publicly thanking them on your LinkedIn, you know, uh a roundup of all the different people that you spoke with that week and the impact that you know it made, whatever you could do to to have a good ROI. Yeah, that's really good. I did I did have one LinkedIn post that people really liked and it was just about hey we sent this tool to some college counselors and said let's see if you can break it and somebody did they entered in some really odd combination of stats that we hadn't thought of and it probably wouldn't exist in real life but they did find the hole in it and then we did a post on hey thank you so much for doing this and people then responded to that post and more people wanted to go see if they could go break it and find bugs with it and it was this really positive feedback loop.

Um Brett, I yeah, thank you for this little side conversation where you're you're coaching me on my my CEO duties. Um if to to bring it back to our our main thread here, where do you see things if it's possible to see into the future, where do you see media shifting uh next? Because as you've mentioned, like things are changing really fast and really often. Yeah, I think that we hit on a lot of the quantitative things that there's 30x more creators than journalists. That they're, you know, that 34% of all AI citations come from websites with domain authorities of less than 40. So, the long tail is getting longer.

It's getting more uh accessible, and I think it's also getting more fragmented. So, you've got to be able to start your efforts, if it's getting more broad, you've got to start your efforts by getting more granular and you've got to be able to focus on what is actually going to move the needle for me in my business. And having that clarity has always been rare because like the secrets lie within a $5,000 retainer. And so so now I think that it's becoming more accessible and open uh where you could prompt and query something like cloud or featured and be able to get connected with opportunities that are going to help move things forward.

So I think that's part one is getting more granular. And then maybe part two is is uh showing up to the gym. It's it's being able to put put in the work. And most people, you know, uh, month one is great at the gym and then month two gets a little harder and month three you're a little little more MIA and you got more problems in the business than, you know, it outweighs the PR efforts and things like that. But consistency is what's going to win, you know, moving forward in in the in the age of AI. If you find yourself guessing at your kids college odds, know that it doesn't have to be that way.

There's a website. You pick a college, any four-year college in the country. Type in your student's GPA and their SAT or ACT score, and you get to see their odds built from that colleg's own published admissions data. Change the score, watch the results change. You can look up any high school in the country as well to see their results at getting kids into the UC's. It's free. It's called Reach. And you can get there at www. highchoolreach.com. Well, let's let's connect that then. What are the benefits if you're saying, "Hey, Nick, this is why you should stick with it in the right." And I I love going to the gym, so I understand that payoff, right?

I feel better when I stick with it. And I start to feel a lot worse when I drop off with the workouts in keeping up with this uh our our PR strategy. what are the what's the thing we're driving towards down the line? What does that what does that look like and a direct benefits uh for me by by doing that? What it looks like the consistency payoff is getting on a customer call and asking how did you hear about us and when they say oh just found you like I was doing some AI search and and they recommended you it's like all right that's what consistent consistency looks like. So right now today I think it was our AI citation report found that 86% of brands aren't mentioned for the prompts and queries that they want to be mentioned for.

So most brands are invisible. All right. And so that's the reality of what today looks like. The consistency is like, okay, maybe you go through month one and month two and you're and you're getting releases out there. You're getting featured in the media. Things are are good. You're starting to see now your brand is getting mentioned for some of these different prompts and queries. Consistency is like, okay, what about the next model update? What about, you know, the what about perplexity? Chat GBT might be mentioning you, but Claude might, you know, not. And so consistency is all about like how do we survive the next model update?

How do we get into all of the AI engines because now it's you know four instead of one uh with Google. So I think that it's uh the payoff is hey uh our customers coming to us from an AI recommendation. Yeah that is when I talk to fellow entrepreneurs that is what everyone is talking about right now. I mean, it's just how do I get into those AI results? Because even if even if we're not looking at data, we know that's where people are going right now for their information. Um, and so that's an excellent answer. I mean, that that's motivating uh to me right now. That's really cool. Like I mean people have personal connections now with their AI.

I mean you think about think about that like you know there's what what's that quote? It's like you you are who you spend, you know, like the top five people or whatever. Yeah. The average of those of those five people. Yeah. Like who are you spending most of your time with today? I I bet you're talking to your AI sometimes more than your spouse like on a daily basis. Um you've got a personal connection with your AI. Yeah. You've got a you you have a a strong connection with your AI. And so think about how most businesses have grown the business over the last few decades. It's referrals. You find the best people to hire and you get your most customers from referrals.

And so if people are now trusting their AI and your AI is referring you to certain companies, they're not referring a list of 10. They're saying, "Here's one, maybe two, maybe three, unless you really prompted me and asked for it to go talk to." And so now these customers are showing up to your business with a uh with trust. And that's invaluable. That that is a different referral than what existed of being found in a Google search where someone's like, "Hey, I Googled, you know, digital marketing company. I'm talking to 10. What makes you different? I don't trust digital marketing companies, you know." So, right.

I think that's I think that's what what's happening. No, that's interesting because when you find a a business, even when you're looking for that specific thing that they offer and you find them through Google, you as a customer still show up with a degree of skepticism and you're checking where are they really coming from when you get someone on the phone or or through email and if one of these authoritative AI platforms recommends something directly, I mean, it was the result of one of one or or one of three, you're going to come to it with so much more trust. That feels insightful. Totally. And especially because you've already like prevetted, you know, via your your AI.

So, it's not like you just clicked a blue link and you're on a website and you pick up a call. It's like, here are my concerns, Claude, and you're recommending this company. Okay, great. I have some questions about this company. like let me have the call before I have the call. Like and that's why you're going to show up on that call as a much different consumer. Yeah. Yeah. For young people or actually I would say for parents of young people, right? They're all very concerned on where these things are going. What skills should my kids be developing in order to be competitive down the line? And I know this is a little out of your wheelhouse, but I'm just going off of instinct here.

I feel like you may have an insight here into this. Yeah, I got three kids, so I think about this all the time, and I'm scared out of my mind about how to coach the 13-year-old, how to coach the 10, how to coach the seven. So, I think the skill that matters is is language. It's being able to type, speak, and being able to describe what you what you need. And you know, I think that as as the kids are playing Fortnite or whatever, it's like, all right, you're getting away from the skill that you're going to need, which is you're going to need to be able to connect with people. You're going to need to be able to describe in very clear words what it is that you need, the problem that you need to solve, the solution that you're thinking of.

So I think that that's probably it is is the and so what's scary is like well how do you know what to describe if you don't have the expertise in in the thing that you're you're you're describing. So you need to be able to like have a very clearcut you know initial prompt if you will of to start and then be able to have all the stuff come back read and then write. And so reading and writing I think is actually a pretty critical skill. That's interesting because you're the second person this month who I've spoken to. Joe Laser uh an author talked about something uh very very similar concept which is that initially when the models all started coming online the big predictions were that like language skills were just going to their value was going to plummet right because these tools are going to do all the writing the reading and the talking for us apparently and that feels like a real shift for a lot of people where they're going no those are actually the most important skills those are the ones we should be pouring energy into because that's how you interface with these tools that are super powerful, but they are not all knowing and all capable um and can't do any of the human stuff.

And so being able to use language effectively is actually the the superpower that you're that you're looking for. Yeah. Exactly. So, at least that's what I'm telling my kids to do. It's go read and write. They're like, "Dad, you're old." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true. And it might still be really good advice uh for them. Um and then uh Brett, as we as we start to wind this thing down, what do you think your uh suite of companies, what are they going to look like five years from now? Well, I think that they're going to be accessible doors to public relations. And like I've said, PR is confusing.

It's it's been for decades, it's been a secret behind a $5,000 a month retainer. And now it's becoming more clear about what is PR, what do you need to do, and what's the unique value that you bring to a relationship within the media. So, I think that's really exciting that that that's basically what I think it, you know, the the trajectory is for for our companies is you should be able to show up as you are with a limited amount of time, share the the valuable thing and make it valuable for for everyone involved. That's an excellent positive note to end on right there. Love it. Um Brett, it's been uh super educational.

Um, I I feel like I learned so much during this conversation and I'm sure everybody else has, too. Uh, really appreciate your time and and expertise today. Yeah, it was fun. I'm glad we got to talk about it. So, thanks for having me on. Fantastic. Oh, and then if anybody wants to find you and your platforms online, don't want to don't want to forget the most important part. Uh, where where do they go uh to to find all that? So, you go to feature.com as a co-pilot for uh for PR. You've got helper reporter out at helperreporter.com and you've got connectively at connectively. us and then I can be found on LinkedIn like I said down to connect anytime.

Great. And we're going to have all that in the show notes if somebody just wants to scroll down and just click directly on it. And have a uh fantastic rest of your week, Brett. Cool. Thanks, Nick. All right. Okay, everybody. Until next time, ask questions, don't accept the status quo, and be curious. The Nick Daily Show.