Your AI Brand Footprint

Tony Martignetti
Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I'm your aptly named host, and I'm the podfather of your favorite hebdomadal podcast. Oh, I'm glad you're with us. I'd suffer the embarrassment of onychotrophia if you nailed me with the idea that you missed this week's show. Here's our associate producer Kate to give you the highlights.

Kate Martignetti
Hey Tony, here's what's up. Your AI brand footprint. What is this thing? Why should you care? And what can you do to improve it? George Weiner returns to acquaint you with his company's study of how artificial intelligence will influence giving in Q4. Then he explains the implications of the research, including that last year's content strategy is obsolete. He also brings tactics for you and your content to get the recognition you deserve from Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and their colleagues. George is Chief Whaler at Whole Whale. On Tony's Take Two.

Tony Martignetti
Hails from the gym. If she can do it.

Kate Martignetti
Here is Your AI Brand Footprint.

Tony Martignetti
It's a pleasure to welcome back George Weiner. In 2010, he founded Whole Whale, a top 100 nonprofit-focused digital agency supporting analytics, advertising, AI capacity, and digital fundraising. George is Chief Whaler. He's also the co-founder of Power Poetry, the largest teen poetry platform in the US, a safe, creative, free home to over 1 million poets, and CTOs for Good, a group of tech leaders at nonprofits that delivers social impact primarily through technology and digital strategy. You'll find Whole Whale at wholewhale.com. You'll find George on LinkedIn where he is very active. Welcome back to Nonprofit Radio, George Weiner.

George Weiner
I'm— I feel like we haven't learned a lesson. You keep having me on. I'm honored every time I get the invite. I was like, wow, I didn't mess this up. Thank you.

Tony Martignetti
Yes. No, you're— you've earned repeat— yes, repeat appearances. Absolutely. You know, so I was happy to read the bio that you provided, but I don't— I don't think it captures— I don't— it's not the bio that I would write if I were you. Because, you know, you have this enormous tech background. Now you do go on, the bio does go on, which I did not mention, that you were Chief Technology Officer, I believe it was for 7 years, at DoSomething.org, which is enormous, enormous, turned into enormous data capturing and assistance for activating young folks. That's enormous. But I would— so that, not that that is to be minimized, but I still don't feel like this all captures, I mean— Yeah. You're, you're the— you're a tech guy who understands it, explains it simply. Talk about like, I mean, you, you get in the weeds of tech. I mean, you're like a coder. You write, you write lines of code.

George Weiner
I do. I have. I've come in and out of it, interestingly. I used to be very actually like in the technical writing code, and then I hired people smarter than me to write much better code. And then I came in and out a lot of data analytics, advertising. I love learning. I love understanding. And then Helping nonprofits find the angle, right? Like, how do we leverage this thing? I've, I've studied the whole book. Just read page 17 and do it this way is what I love kind of getting at. And recently I'm very heavy into coding again, but frankly, with AI assistance, um, and, and building up causewriter.ai, which is a great customized platform for nonprofits creating, um, creating AI-generated content. And I do it in as safe a way as possible.

Tony Martignetti
Exactly. Yeah. So that's kind of what I wanted to— I'm glad that you mentioned. I wanted to get to a little bit CauseWriter.ai, a proprietary Whole Whale-created— is that right?

George Weiner
Yeah. Yes, I did this.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, that's the coding that I was referring to. Maybe you hired smarter coders to do better at it than your initial cuts, but which Nonprofits can use and train cautiously on their own, have the, have the model trained cautiously using their own content.

George Weiner
Exactly. Yeah. For you, not on you, in the sense that we build it so that there is a central source of truth that is stored and protected for you that can then be pointed at any model. And then custom-built prompts and guidance based on what your team needs to do today. And we delete every chat every quarter and pay for carbon offsets on all of the queries that are conducted to try to at least approach carbon neutral, as difficult as that calculation is.

Tony Martignetti
Well, I admire the attempt. You're also Whole Whale Certified B Corp, so you're, you're You're committed not only to the environment, but also to the, uh, to the causes of, of, of social impact.

George Weiner
We're trying. I've become really excited though about the upside of AI while still like having my little Tony voice in the side of my ear being like, well, but what about, what about like this? It's gonna steal the content here. It's gonna cause this. And I feel like this, um, AI study that caught your eye sort of like really walks down this tiny tightrope of I'm excited, but also, there is caution to be had for some of the insights we found.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, we'll get to some of those, but I'm glad the Tony voice accompanies— I'm not going to say haunts you— accompanies you. The Tony voice accompanies you because I do have my concerns, which I've shared with Beth Kanter and Amy Sample Ward and you. So listeners are acquainted with my skepticism, concerns about the, the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence and large language models. So I'm glad my voice is accompanying you.

George Weiner
Yeah. And I like to— I like the— it's like respectful challenging too when you come at it. I think there's some folks that try to shut down arguments and be like, you're wrong, I'm right. You're like, you have this very like clever way of getting in my head on, you know, the edge cases that come up. And I'm like, damn it, how am I going to answer this for, uh, for, for this type of argument, and it's important.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, thank you. I'm glad. All right, um, the AI Brand Footprint, uh, study, because, uh, you're concerned that, uh, AI is going to have an enormous influence over giving decisions in the 4th quarter that we are now in, right? AI's influence on giving. See, my questions are so wordy, you can't even— where's the question? The guy talks so long. Where's the kernel of the question? Yeah, you're concerned about the artificial intelligence's influence on our millions of giving decisions these 3 months.

George Weiner
It is going to be an unprecedented influence for AI on philanthropy. And that is maybe a hyperbolic way, an excitable way of saying that AI continues to grow in its answering of questions we have. And as that happens, one of the questions that comes up in Q4 is, what are the best animal nonprofits I should give to? What are the best ways to support mental health and youth for charities I should donate to? Where should I give for the most effective cancer fundraising efficacy? Mm-hmm. Fill in the blank of your cause. Those questions are going to be answered in the millions of numbers controlling billions of dollars. I thought it was worthwhile to take a quick look at the data behind that.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, so you looked at 6 different large language models. I'll let you name them. I have them listed here. Oh, you want me to name them? No,

George Weiner
no, no, I can go through it. It's like a lot of technical Got it. But I know there are some, some geeks among us. And so here was our methodology. We looked at 12 different cause areas, and then for each of those areas, we chose 10 sort of iterations on the types of questions a potential donor might make alongside those. Okay, the next step is, where should we test this? Should you just choose one model in the corner of the room? No, anything worth doing is worth overdoing, as I like to say. So we looked at 6 major models that kind of comprise the landscape as we see it. Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Grok, just in case. And, um, you know, from there, and also, sorry, Perplexity. And from there, we then literally send requests to all of them. Hmm. multiple times, get their responses back, and then analyze them. There's a number of reasons for doing this, but on one level, we also have to understand this is a probability. It isn't like Google Search Rank where I can definitively say you're number 3, you're number 1. Like, that's not how this works. It's like rolling dice each time. But when you roll dice enough times, you get that little nice little bump, the Gaussian distribution. of a lot of things here, and then out toward the sides, less and less. I wanted to understand a bit more about the distribution of nonprofits being recommended in each of those areas across those models. How many flags of jargon am I going to get thrown at me right now?

Tony Martignetti
No, that's okay. No, you're all right. Um, I do want to clarify, Gemini is the Google, uh, the Google product, uh, just to make that clear for folks. Uh, and Anthropic's, uh, is named Claude. I don't know, folks might know that as Claude or Anthropic. Okay, the other ones I think people are familiar with. X is Grok, etc. Okay, no, no, you're okay, Jargon Jail. I'm listening.

George Weiner
I just don't want to go to jail too many times today.

Tony Martignetti
I'll let you know. I'll let you know. All right. So that's a lot of questions because 12 cause areas times 10 questions, different iterations of questions times 6. So 12 times 10 times 6. Isn't that something like 720 or so different rolls of the dice?

George Weiner
Yeah, over 700. But more importantly, like, we're talking about millions of words being analyzed by the end of the day, because each of those prompts comes back with a bunch of text that we then have to parse. And then from there, what we did is we have to figure out, like, all right, you know, what is the there there in this prompt? And we began to go by counting the number of mentions of unique nonprofits As well as sources of influence. What does that mean? It means a lot because who did the AI point to as who, according to whom, is this charity verified, quality, worthy of donation?

Tony Martignetti
This is how we get to our first action step because there are some very clear, clearly prominently mentioned influencers that, because see, this is the value. It's more than, you know what, We're not even gonna talk about who was the top named mental health charity or the 20 most common named animal welfare charity. We're not gonna do that because I don't think that's where the value lies. The value lies in recognizing that, see, I'm trainable, George. I'm trainable. Yeah. At 63, but I'm still trainable. I think the value in this study is the threshold recognition that artificial intelligence is capturing you. It cares about your work. And, and what does— how does it learn about your work? What does it learn about your work? What does it say about your work when people ask either specifically about your charity or generally in your cause area or any other, any other reason you might show up in a, in a, in a search result? AI cares about AI is paying attention to, and I don't know, cares about is maybe a little overstatement, but AI is paying attention to you, to your work. Okay, so let's go to our, uh, our first, our first real, real takeaway, the influencers. I'll let you name the, name the most common influencers that nonprofits have got to be If they want to be, if they want to be thought of well by, by these large language models, they need to be approved by or have high standing with. Who were these influencers?

George Weiner
Yeah, I think this is an interesting way to answer this question is actually to give you a section of one of the responses from one of the prompts from one of the models. And I just want you to consider The implications. And the prompt I gave this model, and this was a Gemini model, was where to give for animal organizations. Like, it's kind of disfluent in sort of how I put it together, but where do I give is the central question I asked. And there's one prompt that came back. It said, before donating, always do a little research. Charity watchdog sites. These sites evaluate charities and efficiency and program spending. Charity Navigator, GuideStar, now Candid, and BBB Wise Giving. Hmm. Check their websites for their mission statements and how they use donations. Local reputations. And finally, financial efficiency. A good rule of thumb is at least 70 to 80% of their budget should go directly to program, not administrative costs or fundraising.

Tony Martignetti
You're right. That's instructive. All right. So that's a pretty— that's quite a good answer. I like that answer.

George Weiner
Yeah. I think unpacking it sometimes, though, is that what you're hearing are it is not going to primary source. to evaluation platforms, your Charity Navigator, your GuideStar, your BBB Wise Giving Alliance. Those public profiles matter more than ever. They mattered before, but they mattered in your mind. You're like, oh, you know, like a donor's gonna like do some research and go check it out there. Like, no, no, no, no, no. This is being baked in upfront before someone even finds you. They're finding what other people think of you on these sites.

Tony Martignetti
Huge takeaway. Huge takeaway. GiveWell was another one that was named. Thank you. Thank you, Marc. Another influencer. Yeah, no, but you were, you were quoting from one, one prompt out of that, one response out of 100, 700. So, okay, Charity Navigator, GuideStar, which is now Candid, Better Business Bureau, Wise Giving Alliance, GiveWell, Charity Navigator, GuideStar, which is now Candid, Better Business Bureau, Wise Giving Alliance, GiveWell, Takeaway number 1, you've got to be thought of well. You've got to be well-ranked. Not quite for the reasons— I mean, George, the reasons that we thought they were important still exist. There are still people who— my dad, before he died, used to get the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance printed guide. And he would check to see if a charity that sent him mail was listed in the printed guide. So I'm not sure people are using the printed guide too often anymore, but they are looking— the people who do go to your site are looking for those little badges, the high-ranking badge, the platinum for Charity Navigator, et cetera. But now even more so, the large language models are using the influencers, like you said, George. Yeah. the second-order recommendation or, or, or evaluation sites, not recommendations, evaluation sites in their, in their, in their responses.

George Weiner
Yeah, and those types of giving guides, third-party validation, there's a lot to unpack there, but it's not just, hey, let's update our website, it's go there. Another sort of nuance here were, um, mentions of GoFundMe. I was kind of curious when I was looking through the data of like, all right, how much of this is going to be like find individuals and go that route. And what we found was, based on the mentions of GoFundMe and the requests of like, how do I help, let's say, youth mental health or poverty issues, right? Where should I go? How should I help? Like, it's an open-ended question on purpose. We did want organizations, but we wanted, what is it and how is it advising? And for GoFundMe mentions, actually, 70% of those mentions came from Grok. So in the land of Grok, which is Twitter, which is X, which is Elon Musk, just to get all of the bingo cards there. It is disproportionately recommending to go to GoFundMe. It also recommended charities, mind you, but I found that interesting. Part of that is in the training set and part of that is in the sort of, you know, we do our own homework, but to a bizarre degree in there. So into its reasoning.

Tony Martignetti
So Grok was looking at the frequency of GoFundMe campaigns for charities as a way of determining whether they were a good place to give?

George Weiner
They, first off, are meant— we are meant— we are analyzing its responses across all of those causes, right? Every single cause, every single chat. So across all of those tested areas, we were seeing that it just surfaced that the user should go find and look for Someone in that cause area to donate to on GoFundMe as a point of helping that particular cause. Why that happens, you can speculate, but actually, you know, it's training dataset. There's a lot of people that go onto X saying, hey, I need money for this, go, you know, fund me on GoFundMe. And that type of link and that type of cause might be overweighted, plus potentially an underlying, frankly, baked-in mistrust of institutional organizations. Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
That's a bias. Grok had a bias for GoFundMe campaigns.

George Weiner
They all have a bias.

Tony Martignetti
Right. Well, let's talk about some of the biases. Yeah, because this gets to what the large language models think of your nonprofit in some of these biases. And then of course, we're gonna talk about what to do. How can you enhance your AI brand footprint in light of what we're learning from the survey? So let's talk about some of these biases like size. The ones that I saw, the results, these were, I don't know, maybe not 100%, but these were very large charities. They had large digital footprints.

George Weiner
Yeah. In, in most of the cases where we then do a sort of top 10 breakdown, we have a, like a herding effect where it is the, the larger, more well-knowns, uh, are at the top. You know, you look at the environment, we end up with, uh, just using that as one example, the environmental mentions by model, like on Gemini, the top 2 are Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy. And then on Anthropic, which is Claude, World Wildlife Fund comes up first, then The Nature Conservancy. Nature Conservancy wins on OpenAI. On Grok, World Wildlife Fund wins. On Perplexity, The Nature Conservancy wins. So you see, it's like this sort of jockeying, but those are massive organizations. Yeah. And you have to go down pretty far till you get to something like an Earthjustice or Oceana or I'm trying to find like Arbor Day Foundation, which is not small. Uh, Defenders of Wildlife, you know.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, but those aren't the household names. Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife, or— well, yeah. Um, all right, what other— so size. So, so our listeners here are in small and mid-sized nonprofits. They are likely not in any of the environmental causes you just named specifically, and they are very likely not in Any of the biggest names in any of the 12 cause areas that you evaluated. But I hasten to add, there are things you can do. We're going to get there. We're going to get there. It's coming. Fear not. As Grandpa Martignetti used to say, nunja worry, in his New Jersey Italian accent. Nunja worry. There are things you can do.

Kate Martignetti
It's time for Tony's Take Two.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you, Kate. I have a new Tales from the Gym. There's a woman who's been coming to the last 3 classes that I take every Tuesday morning. It's the only class I take each week. Just, I just go to this one class. And she's, she's quite active. She does— it's an aerobics class. She does all the weights. Yeah. She does most of the moves, you know, like we're stepping back and forth or side to side, things like that. She's, um, she moves pretty well. I, I have my eyes on her because, uh, she stands right in front of me all 3 times. She's been right in front of me in class. And the thing is, you know, she, she's got all this activity for the hour-long class, but she's on supplemental oxygen. Wow. She's got a tank down next to her and the tube and the cannula in her nose, the whole class. So there's some things she can't do, like she can't step too far forward or back or side to side because the tube isn't that long, but she moves enough and she keeps up. You know, like, yeah, I can't help but see her. You know, that just makes me think, I mean, if the woman with supplemental oxygen stays energetic through this hour-long aerobics class, anybody, almost anybody could be working out there. Of course, there are people that are more compromised than just supplemental oxygen. But, you know, anybody who's not on oxygen, we all could be working out to some degree, if this woman can do it. So she's, she's, um, pretty amazing, pretty uplifting and encouraging. That's another tale from the gym. And that is Tony's Take 2. Kate?

Kate Martignetti
I don't know if you follow like gym TikTok or anything on like Facebook or Instagram, but now I'm seeing a lot of fitness instructors coming up with different Workouts that are seated for people with maybe mobility issues or any sitting-down disabilities. But that's great that she can get up and do it and enjoy it and still be active with something that's probably heavy, you know, to carry around.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, well, the tank is, but it lays on the floor. Yeah, I've— I haven't seen any of that. On TikTok or Facebook or anywhere online. But I have seen chair yoga, which is— that's for older folks who do have mobility issues, balance, you know, balance could be an issue. There is chair yoga out there. We might— I don't know if we do a chair yoga class in my little beach town, Emerald Isle, but I've seen chair yoga. But yeah, the woman is clearly Uplifting. Yeah, she's, she's moving. It's awesome.

Kate Martignetti
We've got beaucoup buttloads more time. Here's the rest of Your AI Brand Footprint with George Weiner.

Tony Martignetti
Other biases. What other biases did you find in our, our large language model friends?

George Weiner
Our large language model friends. This kind of surprised me. I don't know if you can classify it as a bias, but it kind of getting back to the herding effect, but in the number of charities mentioned, like the unique number of charities mentioned, really surprised me between the cause areas that we go between. So something like the environment or poverty, there was a range, like unique nonprofits mentioned across all of our sampling of 127. Okay. I then go to something like cancer and there's a 30-organization spread. That is massive. I was shocked. I was like, Shouldn't they all just probabilistically find a large number of things? There's extreme herding in certain cause areas. An action step that you might use here is actually do this type of research for your own backyard. Abstract, pull back, and say, what kind of question might somebody who's caring about my cause area and my locality put in to find the most effective? Yeah. Best run, greatest places to give for X, and see who shows up. But remember, you wanna do this on a like incognito, not influenced by your own GPT. If you are paying for it, I've trained it. You wanna actually have it from a cold start that isn't biased by your bias and your information. 'Cause then you'll show up, be like, obviously you are the best. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Like, hold on.

Tony Martignetti
Right, right, right. So does that mean you shouldn't even do it from your, your nonprofit, your office browser?

George Weiner
Is anything that's passing in information to it, like geographic is fine, but I would say any other things that are passing information are essentially tainting it and tilting it toward something that's more relevant to you, when in fact you want something that is better reflective of the underlying biases and approaches of that model to sort of explore it. We actually use Direct to the API call. So we know exactly what information we gave it and exactly what we got back and could kind of like clean out the clutter, so to speak, of any customization going on or cached information or browser influence.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. All right. All right. So—

George Weiner
Here's a tip. Actually, no, here's a very, very hard tip. And you're like, I don't know where to start. I want you to go to the site openrouter.ai. And that will let you just mess with whatever model you want and see what happens with you getting full control over the, the data that are being sent.

Tony Martignetti
All right. Router.ai. What does this do?

George Weiner
Uh, OpenRouter. Just look for OpenRouter.

Tony Martignetti
OpenRouter.ai.

George Weiner
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. All right. So that's a— are you saying that's like a safe place that, that's— it's less likely to be tainted by—

George Weiner
It will let you test different models. side by side in a way that is safe in this land and gives you control over more of the variables. And it's really like kind of elegant for side-by-side comparisons.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, okay, very good. All right, um, all right, so let's move to, um, you know, what, what small and mid-sized shops can do now. Part of what they can do is what you are doing at Whole Whale with AI brand footprint, which I am helping you to do. I am propagating this for you. So explain what I— go ahead, you flesh out what I just said that I know you're doing that we are helping you with.

George Weiner
By the way, thank you for reinforcing AI brand footprint.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah.

George Weiner
Why we keep using this term is because it is a concept that we created at Whole Whale to explain what's going on when you're discussing this ecosystem of information that AI is talking about and representing your brand on. You're not getting a lot of data about it, but you know it's happening. You're starting to hear maybe somebody in the development department be like, you know, they heard about us from, uh, they said from chat. And it's like, oh, that's interesting. There's a whole ecosystem out there and we're just sort of, uh, scratching the surface of it with this study, but you should begin to care about what that footprint looks like, what's influencing it. Yeah. how big it is, if it is growing, or if it is shrinking. Why I am focusing on and why I love the fact that we've mentioned it like 17 times now is because we are trying to put this concept out there, imbue it with meaning, and connect it to us so that when, not if, and it already has happened, that Google Overviews, that's the little AI answering when we do Google searches, talks about this concept. It attributes it to us, it surrounds it with our links and our language rather than literally stealing it and just throwing it into the soup that is the overall, you know, word salad of the AI systems. So to pull back, how do you imbue with meaning, own concepts, and encourage attribution? There are a number of tactics, but that is the game we are currently playing and laughing about as our inside joke here.

Tony Martignetti
Exactly. So we are not going to leave Nonprofit Radio listeners, you know, wondering what are some of these tactics? How can you create something around your work that's unique, will be attributed to you when, as you said, when not if, the large language models find it? How do you identify all this, bring this all back to you? And your site, your work? Because you're doing— well, this is exactly what Whole Whale is doing with AI brand footprint. There, I said it again for you. It's going to be in the transcript. It's going to probably be in the show notes. What tactics can we all learn from what you're doing at Whole Whale?

George Weiner
So the content that we used to write for AI Engine, for SEO, search engine optimization, is dying. The idea that all I have to do is answer a question accurately and I'll get credit is dead. Uh, because also, if you realize that the AI could answer the same FAQ question, generic, hey, how many, uh, how many ounces are in this amount of thing? Like, that information has been commoditized and will no longer bring you traffic. Your 10 facts about this issue is not going to work anymore. What will work are first-party data. What kind of information can you bring to bear on this topic? Have you surveyed your audience? Another way to think about it is, according to whom? Is there a testimonial, a statement that can be attributed to the CEO, to the founder, to the stakeholder who received the service? Because when AI combs And summarizes and takes that content, it actually is sensitive to trademarks, first-party data attribution, and saying, oh, according to the local animal shelter or youth center leader that this is the thing. You're like, oh, that's tied and anchored now to something that the AI will respect. I think there's a lot to unpack in there, but hopefully you begin to see the nuance.

Tony Martignetti
This is all about optimizing content for the, the AI tools, right? You're, you're— is that— or this is a subset of optimization?

George Weiner
It's a way to make sure AI respects the source attributable to the content it has scraped and taken from the site. More and more, we're going to see increased traffic from these AI bots that are coming to, you know, answer somebody else's question. And maybe they show where that information came from and maybe they didn't. And in doing that, these are the initial phase of tactics when you create your content. And also, frankly, it's putting the human back in the content. Like the stuff I think we may look back at writing of Uh, the how-to, like, tie your shoe content, like, because it gets traffic, was not that relevant to our organization. Like, the, you know, 15 cutest cats to promote our thing really was only getting people on a very high level to maybe browse through our site. So this is hopefully a return to real content.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, but that had value. I mean, the, you know, the 15 cutest cats, all right, well, Well, let me take a look at this shelter. Maybe this is a— if it's a local place, maybe I'm looking to adopt, maybe I'm looking for a place to volunteer, or obviously maybe give. So that, I mean, as the beginning of a pipeline, that had value. It probably still does have— it does still have value. But what you and I are focused on is the AI evaluation of your work. And from that perspective, the 15 cutest cats, not valuable.

George Weiner
It won't drive attention. I

Tony Martignetti
mean, we are still humans here. This is where Tony voice is like on your shoulder.

George Weiner
No joke. Like, cats drive most internet consumption.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, okay.

George Weiner
However, the fact, the nuance, the difference here is that you won't get the attention you used to for that article. It used to drive attention. Without attention, you're not going to get the 1% of those people sticking around and giving you their email, of which 1 out of 10 makes a donation. That flow of traffic has been severed and is in the process of being severed. And you can see this— action step— look at your organic traffic year over year. It is at best flat, if not going down. No, no, no. Even the smartest folks playing the game are publicly saying, we're in trouble when it comes to organic traffic. So that game is like, we're on the decline. Uh, to come back, does that make sense?

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, yeah, it does. Um, that, that is— I mean, that's what I'm talking about. It's, it's a source of organic traffic.

George Weiner
But I'll play the cute cat game if you want. So let's say I'm sitting there and I've got like a cat shelter, like, okay, uh, how could I turn this into something quotable, something from, uh, AI won't steal, or if they do, they'll attribute it to me? Well, Maybe back to cute cats, I could actually do a study of over the past quarter, actually 70% of the cutest cats based on my cuteness score versus ugly, cute or ugly, were adopted. Yet 90% of ugly cats don't get adopted. And suddenly I've got first-party data that you collected, you surveyed, you did. It is wildly interesting because I'm like, what's an ugly cat? Right? And now you're playing the game because when AI comes, it's like, according to the Long Island local cat shelter, ugly cats don't get adopted at a rate of 90%. Well, that's awesome.

Tony Martignetti
All right. That's a very good example. That's interesting. Okay. Okay. That's an excellent example of, of this, the tactic that we're talking about.

George Weiner
Please, if you go out there and do an ugly cat survey on a rate of adoption, please send it to me because I think I'd be curious. What's an ugly cat is the greatest question. You could use— hold on, you could use AI to make the determination so it that way would save you from the whole like internet fallout. Like, according to— yeah, right. And now you can see how cute is this cat from 1 to 10.

Tony Martignetti
You can blame it on AI. Okay, you, you mentioned some other things, uh, testimonials, quotes from the CEO.

George Weiner
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
You know, all again, all it's first party attributable to you. So, so then in, and I'm gonna use Google too because that's the, the primary search engine that people use. So in that Google summary powered by Gemini, right? This is all Gemini results that we get when we see the Google is, doesn't it say AI summary or something like that, right?

George Weiner
Yeah. It's AI overview.

Tony Martignetti
Over there.

George Weiner
AI mode. They'll change it next week, so fine.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. It's Gemini. It's, it's their Gemini.

George Weiner
Yes, correct. That's the underlying model. You're correct.

Tony Martignetti
So we, we want to get attribution. I mean, we want it to say from Whole Whale, from the Long Island Cat Shelter.

George Weiner
Correct. You want to be the authority that pops up on the side. So you do in fact get a potential click and brand impression associated with the topic of someone saying like, Uh, why do ugly cats not get adopted?

Tony Martignetti
Where do we put these testimonials and quotes?

George Weiner
They're basically embedded on your site, right? Right in your content, right in line. Um, you can use quote tags, you can use, uh, what are— it's called schema markup to make sure that when the AI is reading it, uh, it is more quickly attributable. And in those testimonials, like, you can just also just make up quotes. Like, I, I now have to come up with some sort of clever thing to say. And I think for the AI study, I literally put in there, I was like, I have to come up with something. So I was like, all right, this season AI will determine giving more than any other in history. Like, it's a little over the top and like a pretty safe statement, but I said it, I quoted it, I shoved it in with a quote tag inside of there. And now that's one of those attributing factors. There's another big thing I wanna touch on, but I wanna make sure that makes sense.

Tony Martignetti
Uh, it does, but all right, so remember your big thing, but you are in jargon jail for schema. You are in jargon jail for schema markup.

George Weiner
I was gonna end up there somehow. Uh, the schema markup is, uh, little HTML tags in there. So behind the scenes, like, if I want to make something bold, I put a little B tag on it. Every P tag has that little spacing. H1 tags make it at the top header. This is just another one of those types of tags in the system that the machines read and understand more quickly what's about to come and what lives between the open and close of that tag.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, very good. All right, you're out of jargon jail. And listeners, the person who does your website will know exactly what we're talking about. This is HTML.

George Weiner
AI will know what you're talking about. If you literally— this is the amazing thing. Like, your expert is the— say, hey, teach me what I need to know about schema. What would I need for schema markup of this page? You can ask AI. And it is your ready-to-go developer on that front.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. This is the thing that— these are the things that concern me. This is where we get into creativity conversations. What was your other big point?

George Weiner
The other big point is something that has dawned on me, and it kind of, uh, it SOX, technical term, because I've realized a lot of my writing is being commoditized and is not going to be found by people. It's gonna be summarized. And what I realize is, where do we go to be uniquely human? Where do we go for trusted information? And more and more it's going to be, I think, in audio and video. Video that is harder to fake, not impossible, but much more unique, a little bit more messy. And so for your tentpole content, your main focused content, You have to have a video associated with it for a number of reasons, including the fact that YouTube is the number 2 search engine, including the fact that people are now going to say, like, I get that all this text I'm looking at is all like AI-driven. I want to hear a human say it because at least that human had to read it before saying it and letting those words out of their mouth. And third, because it is also showing up very, very clearly In those AI overviews, right below, they're giving video answers to the textual answer that AI gives, and then they are having the good old-fashioned links, which are going to go the way of the Yellow Pages, I think.

Tony Martignetti
So we're talking about side-by-side content. One, one, one part is for the humans and the other is for Is for the AI models on our site. You're talking about videos, videos for the humans mostly, although AI, I understand the AI summaries are there, they're finding the video and promoting those for you if they're on point. But then there's the also, but there's the AI-needed content, like side by side. We're not talking about having to, I mean, Yeah. Yeah, I, I, isn't that what we're talking about? 2, 2 different levels of content, one for, one for the machine and one for the, for the humans who do come to your site.

George Weiner
I'm beginning to believe that we're probably headed toward the, the text of your site is more of like a database for AI to reference. And so what is it that you're going to create that is uniquely human communicating in that way is going to be video for now. Uh, because that, you know, is, it is also getting the lift on these other platforms. It is showing your brand, your people, and your message in your words, as opposed to AI summarization of it spit back out in text. Sometimes it's attributed to you, sometimes it's not. There's no way to sort of like, just sort of be like stealing video the same way you do text. So I'm really emphasizing and have been for a while, the library of content that rides alongside my written content, which, you know, I try my little heart out on, but I, you know, make no illusion that AI isn't literally copying it and shoving it into its system and answering the questions that used to drive attention for us. So how do I play this game? I look at the data. I look at, all right, it seems that it's still on YouTube searching. I can embed it on my page so I increase engagement on my page when people do in fact go there, which is a positive signal in the land of— Yeah. The Google and old SEO and current. So it is a way to think about when we're talking about your AI brand footprint, it's a sort of adjacent because of the way Google is showing it and the way that everyone else also copies Google. So like in Perplexity, which is a kind of Google competitor, I think, for AI-based discovery of information and searching. Yeah. They are all sort of playing this game of amending and appending the relevant videos they find to that topic.

Tony Martignetti
Hmm. Okay. This is, um, I don't know, to me this is as revolutionary as when back when we were saying you need to have a website.

George Weiner
Yeah, this is a big phase shift. This is the Yellow Pages to website shift. I, I don't make that out of just sort of a throwaway statement. Is a big change and we're in the middle of it. And so that is also one of those reasons I try to rant as much as possible, but wake people up to the type of content you're about to create. You got a content calendar. All right, we're gonna map out 2026 and here are the like 36 articles we're gonna write. I'm like, take a beat because I think if you continue to write the way you used to and create content, the way you used to, you are, um, you're creating another listing on a Yellow Pages. And I don't want folks wasting their time in that way. And also, this should not be a surprise, but if you are using AI to write all of your content, why do you think AI is going to surface what it already wrote or what it can already answer on your website? It is You don't have to think that hard to be like, oh, wait a minute, the hundreds of millions of people, like 10% of the adult human population on this current planet we are on uses AI to answer these questions. You're disintermediating yourself. You are removing yourself when you simply press copy and paste from AI. And by the way, people can tell when you've written it in a lazy way.

Tony Martignetti
Oh, that's huge. That— see, you— I wanted to— I, I— you were, you were given like a perfect summary. I thought, oh, this is a good place to end. I'll just say that's George Weiner, Chief Whaler at Whole Whale.

George Weiner
I'm out.

Tony Martignetti
Then you opened up. Yeah, but then you opened up. And, and by the way, um, you're— you know, people can tell. Yes, yes. Uh, we're still human here. And I don't know, I'm not, I'm not saying that I've spotted every bit of artificially and artificially developed content that's ever come across my screens. I'm not saying that, but there is a feel of fakeness to artificially generated paragraphs. Yeah.

George Weiner
Yeah, it— you know what's interesting? The human's ability to do pattern recognition is tremendous. It's, it's unbelievable what we're able to tune our attention to and what our brain simply learns behind the scenes. Like, we can now smell an AI-generated image a bit. We can smell the AI-generated text. Maybe it's the verbosity, maybe it's the, uh, unusually accurate cadence of number of words per sentence. There is something that you pick up, and we are all collectively building this ability to see it. And maybe I'll take a step back. If you don't believe me in our amazing pattern recognition, I want you to think in your mind of a stock photo of the following: successful business person shaking hands. And you're like, it's like you could smell it. It's just the way it's image-focused, cropped, and it's just generic humans doing business thing. The same way you can spot stock, we can now and are building that muscle, that pattern recognition for AI slop, work slop, whatever category of a bunch of AI-generated text, which is why it's also fun talking about this new phase of like putting the human back in. How do you do that with video? How do you do that with testimonials? How do you do that with actual first-party data? Like, I used to waste tons of time writing like very, very long articles and thinking and researching. But like Google searching and pulling back information. Instead, I threw all that away. I spent all of my time doing this AI study to be like, I, I get to like geek out on this topic, go way deep, and then put that out instead. So like you're just channeling your energy of creation in a different vector.

Tony Martignetti
I think your ability to spot stock photos analogy is spot on too. All right. That's— I think that's very valuable, George.

George Weiner
Well, we were here to make sure your audience didn't walk away with panic. I feel like a lot of conversations go towards this, like, hand-wringing, what do we do next? So you have some takeaways.

Tony Martignetti
You got a lot of tactics. Uh, let's, let's, uh, give Whole Whale one more shout out. Uh, your AI brand footprint— that's the research, that's the proprietary First-person data that you'll find at wholewhale.com. Go, just give him a break. Give him, give him some organic traffic. Just go to wholewhale.com. Don't, don't not click through from anywhere. Just, just type in wholewhale.com and go. Do it for George. Let's see, let's see if he gets a burst in, uh, in, in the month of October. And you'll find George at, uh, on LinkedIn. He and I are very active there together. Just, you know, valuable content, George. Been valuable, valuable ideas here. Thanks very much for sharing all this.

George Weiner
Thanks for giving it a larger audience.

Kate Martignetti
Next week, HR for non-HR professionals.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, that was supposed to have been this week, but George Weiner came in and he's related to 4th quarter. So that's why I squeezed him in, because it's the first show of the 4th quarter. So that's the explanation. Ordinarily, I would blame the associate producer, but this time, just this time, it was my own, my own, I would say rather savvy decision, but it was my decision. However you might characterize the decision, I made it. Savvy decision.

Kate Martignetti
If you missed any part of this week's show,

Tony Martignetti
I beseech you, find it at tonymartignetti.com.

Kate Martignetti
Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I'm your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for Nonprofit Radio, Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%. Go out and be great. Thank you.