Rezolve Ai Investor Day: SEO, AEO & Discovery - Laurence O'Toole - REZOLVE AI PLC

Thank You Michelle I must confess I can relate to that shopper and I brought the evidence this is everything I purchased so far this year sorted into three columns by how I chose it or should I say by how AI chose it for me on the left ai researched evaluated shortlisted and recommended everything on that list from a sensible german electric car for the family to a second-hand car for my daughter after she drove the first one into our house yes really to uh to a wood logger chopper something else for shifting logs i don't even know what it's called an electric chainsaw my point is this 80 of my expenditure was here was fully researched and evaluated and recommended and shortlisted by ai two years ago that would have been zero in the middle this is where the volume is low value commodities over a hundred and fifty items that I wasted my time researching manually comparing potato peelers and waste bins and extension leads and car shampoo my car doesn't care what cow shampoo I use and nor do I I would happily hand all these over to an agent I will as long as it buys reputable products from reputable retailers with a good returns policy and finally still manual for now the stuff i care enough about to read the reviews and actually watch the youtube videos but for me that list is getting shorter every single year i'm lawrence o'tall i spent my career optimizing websites for search engines and more traditionally now recently for ai search engines what my purchase habits tell me is if you are missing from the AI shortlist you're going to miss out on the sale and there's two factors driving this that I want to cover first is machines are reading more data than humans these days and the humans are telling the machines much greater context about what they want I want to look at each of those in turn and then look what that means for merchants and how we can help them. So according to Cloudflare, 62% of traffic on the web now is bot traffic and it's growing. It's almost two to one. That gap is widening. Why? You make a query to an AI engine, as Dan mentioned earlier, and it does multiple queries behind the scenes, reads dozens of web pages. You hand that to an autonomous agent that's running 24-7 and that multiplies and multiplies again. I think what's really interesting is human security did a research last year and it said, well, where are these AI agents going? 87% of the pages they're reading are product pages. Why? Large language models have training data and it has cutoff dates. So to offer agentic commerce, to offer great recommendations to clients, they need accurate information. They need accurate product feed information. That means descriptions. That mean conversational attributes so they can match the right customer to the right product in the right moment they also need things like agentic decision making factors like popularity rank and return rate you'll notice that google microsoft open ai etc have all added these conversational attributes to their product feeds google recently announced that retailers that meet their best practices for agentic commerce feeds see a four and a half percent increase in conversion value and five percent increase in conversions in the following month after implementation. So the AI platforms have articulated for us what it means to be successful in agentic commerce and as consumers we're articulating more about what we want. Google again said that queries in AI mode are three times longer than they are in traditional search. Our own research into grok conversations showed that 85% of them are longer than 10 words. Chat GPT research 75% longer than ten words. As consumers we're sharing greater context than we've ever done before. Why? Because we get better answers. And so that means we don't just express what we want, we express why. A couple of years ago I'd have searched for a backpack and then gone through ten organic links and visited lots of websites. Now I can describe, I'm looking for a backpack that fits a 17-inch laptop. It's waterproof, it's got rugged zips, it can go on a bike a lot. The retailer's catalogue needs to match that context. And if it does, then it stands a great chance of getting shortlisted by the AI agents. And AI agents, large language models, the platforms out there, they understand that consumers, we still like to window shop, but they will present a shortlist to us. Very rarely do they give a single best answer. Our research shows only 3% of the time from branded queries do AI answers contain just one brand. Even if you're named and your brand is mentioned in the prompt, 76% of time, alternative competitors will show up on that shortlist. And the thing about shortlists are consumers like them. Growth Memo did some research that said 74% of time, consumers don't go beyond the shortlist. They're happy with the options and they evaluate and purchase from there. And that varies by category. Some are higher in other categories. I've spent 25 years optimizing for search engines. And what I've learned over time is that I used to help brands get to number one on Google. Now it's about being on the shortlist consistently, and most retailers are not ready. Most retailers are running on a Google Merchant Center feed that was built a decade ago that doesn't really understand intent. There's millions of Shopify stores that are arguably technically enabled for genetic commerce, and yet they don't have the context that the AI engines require. It's not enough to be named as a brand. It's no enough to being well-known. You need to add the live conversational attributes, the real-life context around your products, so that large language models, these AI agents, can match the right customer in the right moment to your products and services. And also, you need to ensure that your marketing claims are corroborated across the web for AI to trust you. This is interesting. Our own research showed that 97%, 97 out of 100 of the top US retailers published no way for an agent to check out on their site. That's the opportunity in one number. And that opportunity compounds because the sources and websites that AI trusts today are the ones that will be coming back to tomorrow. And we're building the solutions for tomorrow today for our retailers to capitalize on this opportunity our optimization layer for gentic commerce helps the merchant win the sale whether that happens off-site on a platform or on their store whether that's bought by a human or whether it's bought by an agent there's one platform three layers we land once and then we can expand into the other areas our seo platform has done what digital marketing teams always need optimize your performance for google and bing that market hasn't gone away it's still there and still critical the answer engine optimization platform helps you understand how you stand across chat gpt google ai mode gemini claw perplexity and so on it helps you understand your brand's visibility its perception which products it sells the merchants and which sources the ai uses to frame their answers and finally our agentic commerce platform helps optimize at scale and this is the one i'd ask you to remember because it clearly differentiates us from every single other seo and ai aeo platform out there our agent commerce engine reasons about the why behind your product if you think about every product in every catalog out there someone a designer built a product with a consumer b2b or b2c or a set of consumers in mind but often that's just lost across the e-commerce supply chain and ends up with a couple of bullet points on a pdp page a product detail page we think about the why we think the real life context what are these scenarios the applications the use cases the time and the occasions that would give rise to someone to need to buy these products and we put that back into the content in a way that helps sell the products for humans it helps search engine bots find it and it's irresistible to ai agents here's a quick preview of what that looks like so let's say i'm trying to sell men's jackets Our framework, our research framework, thinks about the key commercial criteria that are important to customers when they're buying that. We can build a set of research prompts that are representative and check any of the major platforms out there. Once we're there, we can help you understand your visibility, your perception, whether the top products, the top merchants, and what are the key sources that the large language models are relying on to formulate their answers. we can then give you and your marketing team a set of precise data-driven recommendations to help you improve your visibility beyond that the regentic commerce engine we will reason about your catalogue we can ingest your whole catalogue we can think through architectural engine about all the scenarios all the applications all the use cases even possible objections key entities we need to mention and we can put real life information on the product page who's this for what's it suited for this is ideal for we can think about the agentic conversational attributes and enrich a feed so this is no longer just a rain jacket this is a range of commuting in inclement british weather or for hiking or for dog walking we go through the whole catalog and enrich absolutely everything you need we can build the technical foundations and tests to help your team get agentic ready and we can run experiments so you can drive real ROI in essence we can tell you how you're performing across AI engines why you're performing like that and what on earth you need to do about it get that right and the sale happens four ways it can happen inside the AI platform it can happen agent to agent machine to machine it can be a happen with click and collect in store and this is where our location based technology kicks in with her permission when she enters the zone even down to the collection bay we can ensure that we trigger an alert to staff so that coat is ready the moment Michelle arrives in the collection Bay not only that we can use that to trigger offers loyalties and post sale follow-ups all on the stack of retailer runs today and finally the fourth way the sale happens is the way that's happened for many years is that she'll arrive on your website ready to buy mid-conversation and the next 30 seconds is the difference between making the sale and closed browser tab that's David's territory more than mine so over to you David