Why AI Search Personalisation Matters | James Dooley ft Garrett Sussman & Jabez Reuben

James Dooley: Is AI search personalisation important to understand and why? Today I'm joined with Jabez and Garrett Sussman from iPullRank. And obviously, Garrett, you've been speaking quite a lot about personalisation of the results. So, let's jump straight into the deep end. Is it important and what is it that people aren't understanding with the personalisation with AI search?

Garrett Sussman: Yeah, man, it's critical. I mean, we're all familiar with personalisation. We have been for a while in the sense of you think local SEO, right? If I'm searching for a grocery store near me, then I expect to get different results in the United States than in the UK, in Australia, anywhere in the world. We all understand that. That's a personalisation experience. But when it comes to AI search, we are moving into this realm of hyper-personalisation. This idea that Google, whatever frontier model, is collecting more and more context about who we are, what we care about. And so an answer that's relevant for me for a generic query is going to be different for you. And so, right now, we are just at the tip of the iceberg of how personalised the results we are going to receive. And as marketers, as SEOs, as GEOs, you need to be aware of how different each of our audiences' results are going to be to put together a good strategy.

James Dooley: Just on that, I just to break things down, um, does... I just want to make, like, some, like, short-fire kind of questions. So, does the location of where you're searching, is that being personalised? And is that... And this is... Is this also for Google AI Overviews, but also for ChatGPT?

Garrett Sussman: Absolutely. So, think about it this way. There's different type of contexts that these LLMs are taking into consideration when it's generating output. I like to think about it in two sections. There's explicit context and implicit context. The implicit context is the data that your account, your device, already has on you. To that point, location, your search history. Um, you know, ChatGPT and, uh, Google Personal Intelligence, which is a version that you opt in of AI Mode, and Gemini can use your Gmail, can use your Google Photos, and influence everything implicitly. The explicit context is when you start to tell things in your prompt, in your query, that provides more context to give a specialised answer. So, for instance, you're going to see a different answer for, "What's the best streaming network for me?" compared to, "What's the best streaming network for a guy in his 40s with a family, he has kids, he lives in the States?" All of that is going to be explicit context that's going to influence the output. So, whether we're talking about AI Mode, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Anthropic, or, um, what do you call... Perplexity. You name it. All of them are going to take those different types of contextual data pieces and influence the results differently.

James Dooley: And then... And then I'm just moving on from the location to, let's say, cost. So, if I was to book... I'm in the exact same location as Jabez, let's say I'm in Chiang Mai, and I say, "I'm looking for the best hotel." And then Jabez does that exact same search, "I'm looking for the best hotel." Does my history of, okay, I've booked some nice five-star hotels, mean that I'm going to get presented with premium luxury hotels, where Jabez, if he went to Airbnbs and cheaper type of ones, he would then be shown cheaper type of hotels? Would... Is that happening as well?

Garrett Sussman: Yeah, so it depends on the model and it depends on your account. So, for instance, we know ChatGPT collects memory. All the... All the LLMs collect memory. So, and in AI Mode, when you are logged in to your account, it is collecting memory where when you explicitly say something like, "I want a premium brand." Or if you are, from your search history or your YouTube watching history, you're watching those premium brands, it is becoming more and more likely to incorporate that into the results. So, I don't want to say definitively, 100%, yes, every time you're going to get a premium hotel. But that's, A, definitely the direction we're going in, and B, already starting to happen.

James Dooley: Have you seen any data? Go ahead. Have you seen any data, uh, for Google AI Mode or AI Overview personalisation, where compared to ChatGPT, it's, it's a lot of your previous conversations that become a part of, you know, the heavyweight of personalisation? When it comes to Google's products, especially AI Mode and AI Overviews, what's carrying the most weight of personalisation there? Is it the chat history or search history or your Gmail conversations or your Gmail Google profile? What is doing the heavy lifting there?

Garrett Sussman: Yeah, so what's been interesting is I want to clarify what Google Personal Intelligence is. That's something they rolled out last January that is opt-in. And that's where you're explicitly giving Google permission to look at your Gmail, to look at your Google Photos, to look at your calendar, to look at your YouTube search history. All of that is be... Is influencing results when you said yes. That's not everybody. That's a very small percentage of your audience right now. If you're just using generic AI Mode on your account, you're logged in, it's not in incognito mode, but you haven't signed in to Google Personal Intelligence, then it's mostly search history, right? It's mostly, you know, a little bit of NavBoost in terms of the websites that you go to and you click on, but mostly search history. It does take that into consideration. We even see that in the query fan-out. So, for your audience, James, who, you know, you guys are familiar, when you put in a search in AI Mode or AI Overviews, it's generating 10, 20, 30 synthetic related searches, going to the index, identifying the best content, getting all that information, and then synthesising and generating an output. That is getting personalised as well, whether you have Google Personal Intelligence or not. When we're talking about explicitly Google Personal Intelligence, we did a comparison of the emails versus the photos, and the email significantly had an impact on recommending specific brands. And that was across the board, whether it was transactional emails, marketing emails, um, and even personal emails. In the experiment that we ran, we actually, you know, set up, you know, an email saying, "Oh, hey Garrett, I recommend this brand." That wasn't being recommended in the top 10 results for, like, hoodies and shoes and banks. And then you wrote the email, Google Personal Intelligence, you know, 60% higher rate of recommending that brand than had you not sent that email. So, for Google Personal Intelligence, it's significantly impactful.

James Dooley: Interesting. So, right, if someone's looking at it, personalisation, they're saying, "Right, Garrett, I'm all in. I agree this personalisation is going on with Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT." What can they try to do now? If marketers are watching this, what can they try to do differently than what they're already doing to do AEO or GEO, knowing that this personalisation going in place?

Garrett Sussman: It's tricky, right? Because it's a moving target. You need to really identify who that audience is, and it's going to be different for B2B versus B2C. So, for instance, B2C a lot of times will focus on the demographics of, like, the gender, the age, the amount of money you make, those sorts of things. Whereas, a B2B might be more firmographics, the type of business you work for, the industry you're in. Now, what I would recommend for marketers is you're already doing persona building. You know, it's fundamentally good marketing of having an understanding of who your audience is. I would go and start to set up almost free Gmail accounts and start to feed in: what are the people in that persona, what are the newsletters they would subscribe to, what are the accounts they would follow, what are the types of searches they would make, and start to see what are the outputs. Like, where is the AI Mode or ChatGPT or AI Overview sourcing the information from? Now, it is a moving target. We've seen over the last 12 months, you know, Reddit surges and then all of a sudden it completely falls out of the sourcing. LinkedIn surges and then falls out of the sourcing. So, I would never put all of your eggs in one basket, but you need to be aware of what are the sources of content, both on your site and third-party sites, that are being incorporated into the results, and then start to build a content strategy around those sources. It's not a short-term play. It's a long-term play of good marketing, but you can augment your visibility by giving yourself as many chances as possible to show up in those results by having a presence on all those third-party UGC sites.

James Dooley: Would you... So, on that, like, if someone's then trying to work out who that ideal customer persona is, so are you saying that, like, obviously this query augmentation and then query fan-out is part of, like, synthetic query augmentation as well within... How would that extrapolate synthetic queries? Can... Can you see the difference in query fan-outs with personalisation? Is that what you're saying? Like, literally the different fan-out terms would be coming back as a logged-in user as per your user profile.

Garrett Sussman: Yes, definitely. So, here's an example of one thing that I, I found during my experiment was when I searched for... I made the reference to, "What is the best, uh, streaming service for me?" When I was logged in, I saw in the citations of the AI Mode output, top 10 family streaming networks from a CNET listicle. Now, I have a daughter. I have a family. I've engaged, like, with that context in AI Mode. It knew that about me. So, you could tell definitively, even though I was saying a completely general search term around streaming networks, it took that information, looked for best streaming networks for families, found the CNET article, and then incorporated that into the input. And then it was like, "Oh, of course, Disney Plus, your daughter." Now, it's creepy as heck because it mentioned my daughter's name, which I do not like. But that is a reality that we all live in if you are logged in and participating in a personal search experience.

James Dooley: How... Yeah, that... How much do you think... How much do you think, uh, is the percentage of people who have participated in the Personal Intelligence opt-in, whatever you call it? Did... Has Google published any numbers or are there any rough figures for that?

Garrett Sussman: They haven't, but I would be surprised if it was more than 1% for that specific programme, especially as we, you know, get to, um, so many data privacy concerns. Obviously, it also depends on your demographic. I would say in the EU, it's probably closer to 0.0001%, whereas, you know, in America there are probably more people. Um, but it's still a small percentage. That said, I do think it's going to change in the next six months, 12 months, one year, five years. My big guess is that Apple, for instance, has expressed that they already have a partnership with Google, and they're going to be integrating Gemini with Siri more and more frequently. I think with Apple being a closed ecosystem and consumer behaviour, people getting more comfortable talking to Siri and asking searches of within Apple, you're going to see more and more personalised results within the AI assistant, the LLMs that people are comfortable with, and the way that people search. So, even if it's minuscule now, I think the next 12 months, if not shorter, is going to see, like, serious changes in consumer search behaviour, and that's going to impact businesses.

James Dooley: So, you think that Google will try to pull in personalisation points upon, or, you know, just points about the user from anything possible moving forward? Even if they haven't opted for Gmail integration, they'll still try, you know, their best to, you know, pull in whatever data points they can from all the sources possible. Is that where you're heading?

Garrett Sussman: I am not going to... I'm, I'm not playing the conspiracy theory game, but we know, you know, it's like South Park made a joke about it, you know, a decade ago about Apple's terms and conditions. Like, when you participate in society, you are signing away a lot of your data privacy rights. And if you are not protected by, like, a government like the EU, you know, with actual consequences... You know, right now in our, in our industry, you're seeing people freak out about their TVs listening to them. You know, all this stuff is happening without any consequences. So, I am of the mindset that if you participate in any sort of, like, digital ecosystem, you're unwittingly having your data being, you know, scraped and migrated and pulled and, and ingested and all that stuff. That said, the Google Personal Intelligence at this point in time feels like you're giving explicit permission to Google to do it. But I do feel like, you know, in the same way that Google is always taking your location into consideration when giving output, um, for a good experience, that's the nature of these tech, tech companies.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Anyone who's listening to this, did you realise that AI search has personalisation? Did you realise that ChatGPT had personalised results or Google AI Mode had personalisation? I'd love you to leave a comment in the comment section. Make sure you check out the next episode as well where we dig deep with Garrett on exactly what AEO strategies that he's doing to get his businesses and his brands being recommended in Gemini, in Claude, in Perplexity, in Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews. What I'm going to be asking him, going deep on, is where people could augment queries or augment the different attributes. Is he going to turn on realising all the different ideal customer personas and appending those to the searches to try to make certain that every possible query fan-out term he's trying to optimise for? Make sure you check out that episode in the description. Garrett Sussman, you've been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.