The Intersection of AI and SEO with Dixon Jones, CEO of inLinks

“What we need to do first is build technologies that will allow us to see what the LLMs are doing.” – Dixon Jones

In much the same way that search engines revolutionized how people find information, AI is now poised to take the next step forward in sifting through the proverbial haystack of information on the internet to find that one little needle that will be of use. While potential customers are using LLMs to vet businesses, this presents an additional concern for those businesses: What are LLMs saying about them. This new layer of managing public relations and marketing campaigns – sometimes referred to as “Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)” – has spawned a host of new services that allow businesses to find hallucinations, get a sense of their business’s and products reputations among AIs, and see how those stack up against competitors. Some such tools in this emerging sector are BlueFish AI, BrandLight, Peec AI, Quno AI, and RankScale. Another is Waikay, an acronym for What AI Knows About Me,  from the England-based SEO company inLinks. We caught up with its CEO, Dixon Jones, to discuss the importance of these tools, how they work, and how to use them. “We’ve created the tool to see into the LLM’s world,” Jones explained. A summary is below and the full-text (recommended) is available here for download.

Key points from the interview:

• Managing a business’s reputation among LLMs is just as important as managing is reputation among people.
• Waikay allows businesses to see how their brand is represented across multiple AI models and fact-check that information.
• Users can track down the sources of misinformation and take corrective action.
• Maintaining a web presence with up-to-date content is still important.
• Traditional SEO practices still apply. For now.

“Those tools really weren’t available a few months ago,” said Jones, “Of course, before ChatGPT came along, there was nothing to build tools on.” InLinks’s Waikay runs queries across multiple AI platforms including Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, and two versions of Gemini.

Jones shared a real-world example of how the tool helped his own company: “For inLinks, when we were testing the tool, it came back and said inLinks is a rank checking service. We’re not a rank checking service.” By tracking down the source of this misinformation to a third-party review site, they were able to contact the publisher and get the error fixed, potentially eliminating a source of AI hallucinations about their company.

Jones believes AI is becoming the next primary method of search and reputation management: “I think that it’s only going one way, and anybody that’s hanging on to the notion that people are going to carry on using traditional search in the same numbers as they were before is just not seeing these ChatGPTs, and the Perplexities, and the Claudes.” He emphasized that content and SEO remain important, but companies need to understand how AI systems are interpreting and presenting that information.

“Content is still important,” he said “It’s just you may not see why it’s important until it’s too late.”