The Digital Footprint Problem

As more business owners realise a major shift in consumer behaviour is underway, many are quite reasonably looking to their existing marketing tactics and suppliers for the answer.

In the real estate world, SEO companies that initially said, "It's just SEO", are now recommending more blog posts and AI-friendly content. Marketing departments are talking about schema and structured data. Those things matter, but they are only part of the bigger picture.

We cant solve this new game by playing a slightly different version of the old one, however tempting that may be. This change matters because this isn't just a new interface, marketplace or aggregator. It's a new recommendation layer, and the recommenders are some of the most capable and fast reasoning systems we have ever had access to.

Research that once meant someone taking out the time to visit multiple websites, reading About Us pages, comparing listings, checking reviews, fees and assessing credibility and brand can now happen in seconds. When this human research is replaced by crawler bots, retrieval systems and AI reasoning, websites with beautiful design alone lose almost all of their value if they don't provide the right relevance, content, structure, data and evidence.

As these systems become more capable, as they undoubtably will, and more and more people rely on them, as they undoubtably will, we can no longer look at digital marketing through a single lens such as keywords, backlinks, domain authority or even a website that converts well. Our research at Schutle suggests we now need to consider something much broader: a business's entire digital footprint. That means everything a business owns, creates, publishes, influences and is associated with online becomes either an asset or a weakness. Every page, every dataset, every listing, every review, every mention, every citation and every source of evidence contributes to how AI systems understand and recommend that business.

It's a more difficult and complex approach because it reaches far beyond the basic elements we are used to considering and curating with real purpose. But it also creates a significant opportunity for businesses willing to adapt before their competitors.

The biggest opportunities often come when the way customers discover businesses fundamentally changes, it can lead to a meaningful changing or the previous order. I believe we're entering one of those moments.

Written by

Jaimie Beers

Founder of Schutle

https://schutle.com/