How to optimize your website for AI and AEO
Outline Summary: Transforming Website Experiences for AI-Driven Customer Journeys
Intro Kevin White, a veteran B2B tech marketer, shares insights from leading marketing at Segment, Retool, Common Room, and now Scrunch AI. He emphasizes hands-on operational thinking, unblocking bottlenecks, and accelerating startup velocity. The core theme: design your website not just for human visitors, but to optimizedly serve AI bots that act as prompts-for-place users, thereby shaping the AI-assisted customer journey.
Center
Context and shifts: AI is redefining marketing beyond classic content like white papers. The real shift is traffic migrating from human readers to LLM-driven research, evaluation, and comparisons. Marketers must recognize AI as a new growth channel and learn to engage it effectively.
Bot traffic is real traffic: Today, 10–20% of site traffic may originate from AI prompts, with potential growth toward 50–90% as retrieval bots proliferate. This traffic often represents genuine buying intent when the user prompts an AI to fetch data and returns with answers. Scrunch’s product demonstrates how to intercept and analyze this traffic in real time, differentiating retrieval bots (prompt-driven data retrieval) from training bots and standard crawlers.
Practical setup for AI-friendly sites:
Establish baseline measurements of AI-driven traffic (who, why, what pages) using analytics or Scrunch.
Structure content for AI consumption: prioritize Markdown, JSON, and schema markup; keep critical information machine-readable.
Be mindful of design choices: avoid overreliance on heavy JavaScript for AI parsing; ensure pricing pages render clearly without misalignment between backend data and what AI surfaces.
Create a parallel AI-optimized site: human-facing pages remain polished, while a separate AI-focused version delivers well-formatted content, FAQs, and structured data that AI can easily serve back through prompts.
Impact and outcomes: Early results show improved content accuracy and higher conversion signals when AI-first content is properly formatted. While causation is hard to prove, correlations include better prompt visibility, more accurate pricing/FAQ representations, and higher engagement with retrieval-path traffic. A notable example: one customer reported multi-fold gains, though results vary with adoption and market dynamics.
Cautions and opportunities: Avoid generic “AI-content arbitrage”—quickly generated pages without real value risk Panda-like penalties from search and AI systems. Focus on authentic topics, credible data, and user-centric problem solving. The market for AI traffic analytics will evolve toward diversification, with incumbents and startups alike jockeying for position.
Center Table: Practical Recommendations
Baseline
Measure AI traffic, intent, and pages
Clear starting point and trends
Content
Use Markdown/JSON schema; clean structure; define pricing clearly
Easier AI parsing and accurate responses
Technical
Reduce reliance on heavy JS; feed AI-friendly markup
Better AI comprehension and retrieval
Parallel Site
Build an AI-optimized version of pages
Dual experiences for humans and AI bots
Measurement
Track prompts, citations, and conversion signals
Data-driven optimization
Career insights: Kevin attributes success to curiosity and a growth mindset—melding experimentation, data-driven decisions, and hands-on execution. He cautions against moving too quickly into people-management or board-level duties at the expense of hands-on work, noting the value of a “super IC” route in flatter AI startups.
Outro
The call to action: start measuring AI-driven traffic now, experiment with AI-friendly formats, and consider a parallel AI-optimized site to align human and bot experiences.
Kevin stresses practical, iterative learning over theory alone. He expresses enthusiasm for Scrunch’s direction and invites listeners to explore how AI-bot traffic can become a meaningful growth channel rather than an existential risk. The discussion ends with appreciation for the opportunity to share and an optimistic note about evolving marketing in an AI-first era.
Full Transcript
Kevin White has had one of the most accomplished B2B tech marketing careers that we've had on the show, having led marketing at Segment, Retool, Common Room, and now paving the way for the AI first customer journey with Scrunch AI. Kevin is not only a leader and innovator, but loves diving deep into the weeds as a proper operator and unbundling bottlenecks to help keep startups moving at the break neck speed they need to. I'm super excited for today. Kevin's going to share how to transform your website for the best possible AI customer experience. not AI for your customers, but building the best experience for an AI bot to interact with your website and brand. Kevin, so stoked to have you here. This is such an exciting topic. Um, thank you for being on the show and excited to hop in. Yeah. Awesome. Well, that that was like one of the the best intros I've got. Maybe the best intro I've had so far. I got to like steal that from my LinkedIn bio or something like that. I really appreciate it and uh you're you're far too kind. So hopefully I can live up to that that that uh preamble there. No worries. No worries. I have no doubts. No doubts. Um I think you know given your career, you've really been at the forefront of modern marketing techniques, approaches, and strategies. And everyone knows it. It's, you know, old news by now at this point, but AI is completely making a seismic shift in everything. Um, but I think in some ways that people didn't necessarily expect. So, from your perspective, what are the major shifts that you're seeing that are demanding marketers shift their strategy and tactics? Yeah, I aside from just, you know, doing different types of work or creating different types of offers, I feel like the uh this is something we could get into too, but the the the world of creating white papers and ebooks and all this kind of stuff is like that content is so commoditized that um I feel like there's almost like a new way of looking at, you know, what kind of offers can we create? You know, can we vibe code something? Can we create like an interactive image generation thing? So, like on that side of things, I'm happy to get into I've done some of that stuff um in the past. But, uh but the other thing is I think we're going to try and talk more about today is this kind of shift from people and humans consuming your website content and then defaulting to an LLM platform to do their research, to uh ask questions, to do evaluations of products. And so this has kind of left marketers and myself I was definitely in this camp um and still am in some way uh is just okay if all of our traffic of our website if shift is shifting away to this other platform that seems like both like a scary type of thing that you know is existential that we need to figure out but also an opportunity if you can bridge that and do it in the right way. So I really view these LLM platforms like ChatGpt or Quad or Gemini or you know there's you know a dozen of them or so. Uh they are almost like the new growth channel for um marketing teams specifically um to figure out how to uh how to understand them and then after you understand them how to um wield them to uh promote your brand. And so that's um one of the reasons why I joined Scrunch is I I saw that problem that I was having. I was like, "Oh, we're seeing traffic coming from these sources. We know that traffic is actually doing like a lot more research behind the scenes." Um and this is like human traffic and um and like so this there must be something here and like how do I figure out even like how to like tap into this new channel? And then I just got my curiosity peaked and I just kept on going further and further down and pulling pulling the thread on that. And that's what kind of like led me to scrunch too and like Scrunch is kind of solving this problem. And so um that starts with monitoring but also gets into you know how do we intercept that AI bot traffic and serve up a different version of our site and like how can marketers kind of you know how do we make that easier for marketers to create that experience for users and so on and so forth. And so um yeah I think it's a really cool space. It's very early early learning stage and I'm still learning and it's you know really only taken off in the last like year I would say and so um I'm definitely not an expert so take everything I say today with a grain of salt but I'm happy to share what I've learned and seen so far. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if there are any experts yet just because it's so new and it's changing so quickly and exactly how the behavior looks like. But but I think something that was really interesting to me and I don't know if you have any stats on this or just rough guidance. Um I don't think I realized how much more bot traffic and AIdriven bot traffic there is than human traffic. Um you have a breakdown roughly of like take your run-of-the-mill site. I'm sure it differs a little bit but like what percentage breakdown is AI traffic versus organic? Yeah, I think most companies are like probably in the 10 to 20% range actually. Um, we have a product actually um that I can show. Um, this is kind of a fun thing to to show. Um, so let me go to our our product if you don't mind. And um, so what it does is it'll intercept that bot traffic and it'll kind of like show you what that bot traffic looks like on your site in real time. And so, um, what I can do is kind of give you a sense of like for us at Scrunch and and because you have to because you're the you have to own the website, of course, and so you have to like actually integrate with a CDN, we use um, uh, Cloudflare to take to find that bot traffic and then service it up in analytics. And so, um, I can share, sorry, I'm trying to like talk and and do things at the same time kind of like what that looks like to give people a sense of like V volume to answer the question. Um, you know, I feel like companies are seeing 10 to 20% of traffic from AI sources right now. Um, in the future, I think it's going to be more like 50% or maybe like 90%. Um, because, you know, that bot traffic is going up and up and up. If you think about what's going on behind the scenes there, it's a human on the other side of things that's prompting an AI and then the AI is going and retrieving that traffic, uh, retrieving your site content and crawling your site and then pulling that response back to the user. So, in the old world of things in marketing, I was like, bot traffic is garbage. Like, I don't want to know when Google's crawling my site. But now, with the types of uh AI bots that are crawling your site, there could be like actually real intent behind that. And often times there is. And so um that concept of you know this we call it like a retrieval type bot. It's essentially a bot that is taking a real-time prompt from a user going and fetching that data from your website and then pulling it back in in response. That's actually someone who's in a buying state. A lot of times they have a lot of intent and so that traffic is actually going to become super important. And so um this is a look at our dashboard here. It's it's using our scrunch website because again we are the only ones that have first-party data that can like actually um surface this. So but but you could do it for any site. You just have it would have to like integrate with your CDN like Cloudflare, Forcel, AI, WordPress, all these things that we integrate with and you can kind of like see this bot traffic on your own site. Um so we break it down by a few things like retrieval bots. These are the bots that are like doing that rag type of search. A user prompts something the bot will go fetch from something from your site and pull it back. There's like the training bots that you can you can see which are more like long-term type of like we're going to use this we're going to crawl this site as a LM and then we're going to use it to train our model. Those are a little bit more like um what the what the initial version of chat GBT and others were like. And then there's like your typical like Google index search bots. And so you can see at the top bot agents visiting our site here you can see the different pages that are being crawled the most by these bots. And then what's even interesting in our conversation here in the last since like 11:00 you can see chat GBT is hitting up our site. Cloud training is hitting up our site. Um and you can see the type of bot and the pages that are um that are being visited. So someone on this one could have said you know what is Scrunch's uh what is Scrunch's funding? What is Scrunching Scrunch's pricing model? And this chat GBT retrieval bot will go hit our site and then pull that answer back to the user. So this is almost uh 100% guaranteed a user chatting with chat GPT and then that chat GBT traffic is visiting our site on behalf of the user and so the user is not actually coming to our site. So um we think I think in the future like this is what we're going to be building for marketers. We're going to be building a site experience that works on the human end when someone's visiting your site and it looks nice, but then also we're feeding this AI traffic the right kind of content that it wants to surface up the right information to the people behind the prompt. Yeah. And I I think I think that's an interesting part that a lot of people don't think of. It was a nuance for me that hey, that bot traffic isn't actually bot traffic. It's it's people behind the bot. So they're sending their executive assistant to go check out your website and get the information that they need, but there's an actual person who's receiving that information. So that's actually I I would argue in a lot of ways probably some of the highest intent traffic that you might be getting because you might get random people coming to your website on accident. Um, but if somebody's going into an LLM asking a very specific question and your website has relevant information for that question and then you're getting positioned in front of that person, that's really really important interaction. Yeah. the behavior that we kind of infer and some data that we've seen there's been studies on this where if you're getting human traffic from an LLM like they click on the citation uh and actually get to your site um that traffic is actually converting a lot higher and higher has usually a higher value um uh with the visit of compared to like you know organic or direct traffic. And if you think about the reason why is that usually the person is prompting the GPT or the LLM with um many like a long stream of questions like compare this product versus this other product. I want to learn about this. I have this problem. I have this painoint and they're getting a feed of information and then once they get to a point where it's like oh I want to make a decision now. That's when they would click the link and come over to your site and then convert. And so we you you kind of see that behavior play out with your traffic from LOMs, but it's even like by by capturing that bot traffic, you get a a sense of what's happening before that as the bots are doing the work with as as the person's chatting, if that makes sense. Yeah, totally makes sense. And I know it's early days, so I know there might not be a full formula for this. And I know the LMS may behave a little bit differently in the near future. or who knows? But current state, are there any practical things a company can do to make sure that their website is set up to accommodate the bot traffic and give it the information it needs and do it in a way that gives them what they want efficiently and passes it back to the person that's working with it. What What are some practical things people can do? Yeah. Well, the um uh one thing to start is just starting to measure this traffic in general. And so whether you're going to measure it through Google Analytics or product like Scrunch, I feel like just getting a baseline of you know this is the bot traffic that's visiting my site and like why and trying to interpret like why is this bot traffic there and what is it doing and like what is the intent behind it? um gives you like a baseline and then you can kind of like measure like oh is our are our um is our bot traffic going up over time. Is it going up for the right the right types of retrieval bot versus a training bot etc. So just like a baseline measurement which is like what I would say 90% of people like don't even do right now um is is probably a good starting point. Um from there it's kind of like there there are um the bots have a way of crawling and indexing a site and so they really speak the language like the lingua frana for for AI bots is markdown uh and JSON. Um so if you can optimize your site to feed this AI traffic with that type of um uh structural like technical content also like schema markup like this is an author post this is a this is a definition whatever like Google has this whole like you know this is the schema that you can use for your content. AI is really good at like consuming cont. It wants to like consume content in that way. And so some broadstrokes things are like if you have a bunch of like fancy JavaScript and animations and stuff like that on your site. AI is not really good at parsing and understanding that JavaScript yet. Um it might get there, but um that is one thing that you know you might want to look out for. Other things that we've seen kind of AI get trapped tricked up with is the structure of like a pricing page is a really good example where there's multiple columns and um there's different pricing structures and different features for like four or five different plans for example and if you look at the code behind it because the AI is not looking at the site like like a human would. It's looking at the backend code. It's oftentimes like structured in a way where it mixes up the pricing from the pro plan to the features of the enterprise plan and all this kind of stuff. And so, uh, that is like a good example of, you know, structuring your content in the right way for AI to consume it by putting in like nice markdown, nice format helps it understand what the, um, what it should be referencing and servicing that information back to the user behind the prompt. I don't want to plug scrunch too much but but that is like the product that we are building as well which is not only intercepting this AI site traffic is um and giving you analytics behind it but servicing up a separate version of your website a parallel version of your website that includes things like the AI needs like markdown JSON clean format but then also maybe additional content like more FAQs about this topic or different content to supplement what that page's intent uh is and so that kind of separates like you have this nice site that looks great for humans, but then also like a separate parallel site for AI, which is also super important traffic. And so we see that as kind of like the future or the way of things happening with marketing is to build this kind of site that is that is optimized for AI to consume and that's how you communicate with this channel. Yeah. And I'm wondering um in the work you've done with customers, do you see any um specific results? So once you start to optimize or the LLMs to receive the information well te it up to the people there that are getting prompted um how what type of tip and performance do you typically see once they've implemented some of these practices? Yeah, and this is the part where I like heavily caveat things. Um, is that uh it's definitely correlation, but it's it's impossible to know the causation because the AI like LLM platforms don't open up like this is how we score our algorithm on things. Um, but we when we um when we roll out this product um you can see that the content that you the first thing is just um showing that it works. So it's like we fed AI this content. Your site was actually formatted in this way before and after the AI is now um servicing an accurate representation of that pricing page, that FAQ page, that whatever. So that's like the first thing is just getting the getting the accuracy of the content that you want to communicate the over to the AI in the right way. Um and then the other thing that we see is definitely performance improvements um in terms of like traffic and prompt visibility and citations and stuff like that. That's actually the first part of our product is just baseline monitoring your AI presence comparing it versus competitors um and different stages of the funnel and all these other sorts of dimensions and then like getting insights to optimize that. But then the third part is this like you know build a site that's built for AI consumption. Um but we do see uh when best practices around I hate the word best practices. I shouldn't use best practices but that's okay. uh when when people are are um taking those insights and implementing them, they see um you know, one of our customers has like 6x performance improvements and conversions called run pod. Um there's a customer story up on our site. Um and I would say this there's it's I put a huge caveat on this because I'm not going to say like overnight you're going to get 6x more traffic and conversions and all this kind of stuff. Sure. It's a rising tide lifts all boats. So you're also getting um more people using AI and more traffic from AI in general. But we do see heav heavy correlation with if you implement these things like using authors on your site, chunking out content um uh putting stats and that are credible like those types of things tend to help the LLM surface up the right kind of content to the end user. And as a way of doing that, then you tend to see a correlation with higher traffic and higher conversion rates. Yeah, makes a ton of sense. And I know I early days, um, who knows what best practices right now. I think there's a currently this is what some people are doing. And I think a lot of people aren't even aware of some of the stuff going on. Um but there is there is one thing sorry there is one thing that I caution kind of against um which is uh a lot of a lot of uh folks out there will say hey you need to find untapped content opportunities and then use AI to generate content. Um which um to me ends up you can create these workflows that like generate a bunch of pages. is like anyone can create a page nowadays with just a prompt and it it takes zero time and zero effort. And so I I feel like that type of content is AI slop and it might work in the near term, but I feel like in the long term it's going to be hit with like a panda- like update and like all that traffic is going to go away. So maybe now is the time to to lean into that arbitrage if you're open to the risk, but I feel like over time like that strategy is going to be a a losing strategy and and the LMS know if something's generated by an LLM. So um at some point I think they'll turn off any kind of visibility or any kind of traffic to that if it's not actually helping servicing the user, you know. Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense which I'm excited about. I'm excited for, hey, people who have real content to share, organic stuff to share, actual insights. I I mean, I've seen it a million times. You go on somebody's website and they have a hund hundreds of articles. Yeah. A bunch of definitions of things. Yeah. It's like, come on. This isn't uh No, nobody wrote these and nobody put those together. But in your um in your opinion, it there's such an industry around SEO and you know there's so many companies and tools and everything just like built just to do that. Do you think we're going to see the same thing or what it it's been branded as AEO um right now or do you think the nature of the LMS themselves will kind of make it difficult to game the system? Yeah. Um, interesting question. I feel like we're already starting to see all these um types of AEO GEO companies spin up. Uh, I mean, Scrunch certainly has uh dozens if not maybe hundreds of competitors already. Some of it's the incumbents like uh Semrush and Hrefs that are building something similar and they were big in the SEO space and then there's other like startups that's been up, you know, almost every day, every week. So um uh I I actually think that that market of monitoring AI traffic um while I think our product is you know the best one out there and I'm biased I do think that that's going to be a commoditized feature and um where we'll start to see divergence in the market is um the different philosophies around like oh we have this philosophy of changing the content of your website to service this AI bot traffic but others might have a um philosophy around you know building content workflows or something like that or some other diver divergent um uh market differentiator there. So um the market is definitely shaping out. It's still early days. I feel like all this all this traffic from AI um started coming more online when chat GBT introduced citations and sources and that seemed to be like the January 2025 period and we started seeing like more and more traffic over time and then people are like oh I need to measure this traffic and then I need a tool for that and so that's how the market kind of is got started but I feel like over time it's going to evolve quite a bit and there will be more science around it. I would imagine the other question around is uh are the AI platforms just going to like pull up the ladder on us? Maybe. I mean, that's that's totally possible. They could just make a super app and and there's nothing else that exists. I don't think that that plays out in um in the market so far. Like there's still there's Facebook, there's Google, there's um there's Amazon, and there's also Shopify. there's like so many different other alternatives to things out there that I feel like there's going to be a market across the board and specializing. Um I don't think a I don't think open a is going to like just be the only company that exists. Uh if that makes sense. Oh, totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. I agree. I think that's um probably a hyperbolic view of how it might end up. Um, but I think I'm I'm just curious how that industry is going to shape up and how much you can I I I don't want to call it gaming because I know some of it's just like, hey, we're going to create put out information that is helpful, but I'm just wondering how much of it you can game versus what the SEO industry seem to have done. What I what I actually really like about the um some of the differences that I'm seeing that we're um you know again this is all a black box. So but like some of the correlation that we're seeing is um with the the way to optimize for uh AI traffic is actually to um to uh focus a little bit more on like bottomfunnel type of queries like long prompts that answer like very specific questions. And um if I you know I think there's a world where you know you're the only company out there that can answer this question or there's maybe like two or three out there and like no one's going to try and game that prompt and so you you can create content around this like very specific thing and like AI will find people who are interested in that and then service your content to them. Um I feel like we're seeing more of that than than compared to something like SEO which is like rank for this keyword. it has all this awareness. It's a super competitive game and it's like really it's either expensive to pay Google the vig to show up there or like you have to have like a content army and backlink army to like rank number one, you know? So, I feel like it is still early days. Who knows like you know over time it might I'm sure it'll become harder and harder as people figure out you know new opportunities and it gets known and spread and marketers ruin everything. But right now it seems like focusing on what matters for that bottom of funnel like answering users like true pain points and making that specific is something that your brand or your your thought leaders can only answer like that seems to be working actually pretty well. I think these insights are incredible. I'm learning a ton right now. Um, I I'm just curious, is there anything else as a business we can be doing to put our best foot forward with these LMS and just give them the information they need? Yeah, I'm a I'm a big fan of instead of reading something or digesting some content or listening to this podcast to go out there and actually try it yourself. like getting your hands on, especially in in a new uh market like this, there's a a new channel, like the best way to learn it is to go out there and do it versus listen to people like me talk about it conceptually. Um, that said, I do feel like there is kind of like a minimum uh thing you can do, which is just to start measuring the stuff. um measuring how your brand's showing up in prompts, measuring um where your competitors are showing up, if you're being cited or not, like that baseline at least give it's kind of like Google Analytics in the early you need a baseline to understand what's happening with analytics and then you can kind of like make inferences and and in insights and decisions based off of that. And so, um I would encourage people to look at look into a you can do this manually. Um actually you can like put these prompts into a spreadsheet. You can prompt the LM models yourself. you can probably build a custom GBT or something to like do all this for you. I would say that's probably not a good use of time when there's like a, you know, credit card transaction type of product like Scrunch out there where you can just, you know, uh, set this up and we can do all that mess for you. Um, but try one of these products. Um, I'm I mean I hope everyone here will will like give Scrunch a try, too. But like, you know, there's plenty of other products out there to just measure this from a baseline. And then from there, you'll I guarantee you'll start to get ideas of like, oh, we're we're seeing this this corner of uh prompts aren't being um aren't being addressed the right way. We can create content around that or we can like change some of our site content to address that and then you'll start building and learning over time. And so that's my advice is start measuring it, but then also start doing and start trying things because that's where you'll get the most learning from. Yeah, I think that's great advice. Just get the feedback loop going now. Start iterating moving forward. And I think um to your point, yes, hands-on best way to learn things. Um I may arguably the only way to learn things. Um well, I'm I'm curious. I' I'd love for you to share just I think you've had such an interesting uh career in marketing and um I'd love if you could just share how you ended up at Scrunch and kind of the experiences that stacked along the way to get you to where you are today. And one thing I always ask if our guest can share if there's anything you attribute your success to um or anything that you think someone could copy and and emulate for themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Um, we'll see. That's a tough tough tough thing to a answer. I feel like I've like uh reflecting back introspecting on my my career. Um, no. Uh, I think you know the the thing that got me to where I am is um curiosity. Uh and so what I mean by that is um when I first started in SAS marketing essentially I this was back in the day um where I I joined a SAS company is called Giga. Actually the the CEO of Giga is now an investor in Scrunch and one of the reasons why I joined Scrunch. Well that's a different story. Shout out Patrick Salar um uh if you're listening. Um, but like when I joined this company, I was very junior, not, you know, not knowing how SAS and PLG and all this kind of stuff works. They're just like, hey, we bought this thing called Marquetto, like go figure it out. And so that essentially just got my curiosity building and learning kind of um learning by doing um mentality going or just like I need to figure this thing out. I need to um understand how to generate revenue, how to like get people interested. And from there, like I kind of just that got me into more of like a growth mindset where it's like, oh, we built out this infrastructure for life cycle marketing. How do we get people in the top of the funnel? How do we get them to engage with this stuff? Um, and so, uh, you know, it just by by setting something up, you kind of like get this curiosity of like how do I go and like learn how to achieve this objective that we want to do. Um, and then I feel like that leads a lot more to like a growth type of mindset, like a growth marketing type of mindset, which is, um, hey, we need to we need to solve this thing. Um, I we need to do both like the uh analytical and the creative part of it. So like the creative part is like oh what offer can we put together? What channels can we reach to get to this audience? But then also the the uh infrastructure and um datadriven side of things like when someone actually does this action, you know, how do we report on that? What insights can we learn from it? Like what data science can we apply to that? And like merging those two things like tend to be a really good combination for a growth marketer. And growth marketer is a really good stepping stone to leading all of marketing I would say because um I mean everyone needs growth in distribution otherwise you don't have a business. So I would say that has been what's got me to where I am in my career to leading growth at segments and then also you know leading marketing at retool and then common room and then now scrunch. So yeah hopefully that somewhat answers the question. No, I think it makes a ton of sense. And I think um taking that growth marketer path as the path to, you know, running the whole show, head of marketing, CMO, I I think I think you're right. Closer you can get to the revenue performance. Um and then use everything else as a tool, brand and your channels and everything else demand genen techniques, but being Can I add one other piece of career advice? Yeah. To this as well. So on paper that career trajectory looks really great. Um but be careful what you wish for because I got myself to a point where um I was leading a marketing team. I was really ambitious. Um and what your day-to-day looks like from where you're starting to grow to where like you're leading a team of like 30 people is very different. And so, um, I ended up at Common Room actually taking like a step back and taking more of a super IC role because my day-to-day was just filled with board updates, internal marketing, um, dealing with drama from the SDR team, like all this kind of stuff that was just like killing my joy. And so, um, if that's there are people who love doing that stuff and if you aspire to do that, like do it and great. But also, there's another path for being an IC. And I feel like especially nowadays with AI companies being small and being pretty flat, like that type of role is actually something that um, you know, if I was starting early, I might, you know, go more into that direction knowing what I know now. Yeah, I think that's great. And you may have to go through that experience to even know cuz it looks so alloring like when you're early in your career and um, you know, wanting to be in a position to make an impact and be a leader. But to your point, the day-to-day it's pretty treacherous and mundane and kind of boring sometimes. So, and it pulls you away from some of the like newer exciting hands-on work that you could be doing in that type of role. Yeah. And the pay is not all that much more for the stress. So, uh something maybe maybe equity wise it is. But yeah, anyway, different topic. No, I think that's really that's that's sage advice and I appreciate you sharing that because I think um most people have in their heads like hey how do I rocket ship to the seauite but are you sure that's actually what you want to do? Um and I do think there are more opportunities now because the organizations are relatively flat to where even if you have a C title like oftent times you still have to roll up your sleeves and and do stuff. So I think that's a good thing. I think most of us get attracted to the work. Um, not necessarily just professional management and especially board management and things like that. Um, so I think it's a great path if you can carve it out. Yeah, I feel like I wouldn't be able to give advice if I wasn't hands-on with things. And so despite driving some of my team members crazy, and I'm a team of one right now at Scrunch, so I can drive myself crazy. Um despite that uh I still like feel like I must be hands-on with something and um for the people who are in that you know path of destruction who are working with me on on that thing I feel sorry for them but I'll pull back and bother another team member at some point as I build my game. So yeah amazing amazing well Kevin this has been awesome. I think you really illuminated this stuff for me where hey a lot of the traffic already 10 20% of the traffic is is really guided by LLM's uh retrieving information teeing it up to people who are prompting them to get the information they need. That's only going to increase over time. I love the practical uh recommendations and tactics that you gave to help put your best foot forward and just get started measuring so you know how much of an impact it has on your business. I think Scrunch AI, your technology, your platform looks incredible. So people can um people can leverage that to start getting a baseline and then who knows what the future holds, but I trust someone like you is going to figure it out and move with the waves as they come. And thank you so much for sharing everything you did today. Of course. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a blast. I I uh had a good time. Awesome. Thanks, Kevin.
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