Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.644)
Welcome to Simple Wins, the show where we talk to the architects behind the most successful B2B firms.
We're currently in the middle of a massive project curating the 2026 B2B benchmark and we're looking for high level strategists that actually work in today's market. And I knew I had to bring Bernard Huang on the mic to help us set the standard. Bernard is the founder at ClearScope. They help brands get discovered on Google, ChatGPT, and whatever's coming up next. They've built a reputation for seeing what moves and what others are missing and I'm pumped to have Bernard here. So Bernard, a big welcome to
the show so excited to have you here.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (00:39.395)
Adam, thanks so much for having me. It's been a wild ride. That's all I can say.
Adam O'Leary (00:45.262)
I love it. So I'm so excited to have you here because as we're going through this 2026 benchmark, we're finding that the most successful firms are making very specific choices about their structure. So I'd like to start here with you. When it comes to your business model, are you more of building an elite boutique where you're staying small and going incredibly deep with top tier clients or are you more of a scaling machine where you've built out a system that delivers your high level results to as many companies as possible?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (01:14.769)
would say the high level systems machine. Like you said, I think you either go high touch or you go low touch. And we made the early mistake, I'll just say this, of going in the middle.
And we've since learned that the middle is not a place where you want to be. And so it was either go high or go low. And this was what we were talking about at our leadership retreat last year. And we said, let's go low. know, the world is moving towards more self-serve, you know, more people who like to get their hands dirty, try new products and run with it. And so that's our core focus.
Adam O'Leary (01:57.665)
I love that and are you guys mostly growing through authority where your content acts as a magnet to pull in the best clients for you or you more of a strategic partner who knows exactly which doors to knock on to create a perfect match?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (02:10.183)
Our business has classically been one of referrals and word of mouth. And so we have sat in the search engine optimization space for the last 10 years. If you've ever...
participated in learning or wanting to buy things within the SEO space, what you will have quickly learned is that there's a lot of snake oil, there's a lot of charlatans, there's a lot of people running around saying, I know this, follow me for my one tactic. And what we learned over the years is that nothing beats.
gaining customers more than customers telling other potential customers that they're finding results, they're getting what they need out of our software. And so our core focus has always been, how do we make customers happy? And through that, you know, build a sustainable business and have a marketing demand gen flywheel.
Adam O'Leary (03:07.85)
I love that. That is bang on the money right there. And I guess as you scale, are you betting more on elite talent, bringing in these top tier minds to help you solve big problems? Or are you building a smart system using tech and automation to do the heavy lifting for you?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (03:22.939)
I think it's a combination of both. think you need a top talent, which we have on our team to really be thinking through the strategies, know, architecting them, validating and invalidating what's working and what's not working. And then I think, you know, we are now more than ever in a world where a team of 10, which is about where we're at, can do so much with, with so little, right? We're talking about whether it's automations in
using AI or integrations or all these different things. And so we're finding that it's both a, yes, we want obviously great talent and great talent to that architect strategies and concepts. But I think in terms of the delivery of the projects, the initiatives, I think we're trying to get our team members to say, okay, can you do that with AI? Can you invent some sort of a solution or automate some part
of these processes to make your life easier. And that's what we've been pushing our team members towards.
Adam O'Leary (04:30.284)
That's awesome, really cool. And I guess if you had to focus just on one of these options right here, if you had to just pick one, would you say that you would spend your time, if you had like 10 extra hours in the day, let's say, would you spend that time scaling your impact, bringing your expertise to more top tier companies or perfecting the experience, making the results for your current partners even more elite?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (04:51.623)
It's got to be perfecting the results and helping our existing customers succeed more. If I were to choose, I think that at least in the space that we're playing, which is now AEO or answer engine optimization, which has evolved from search engine optimization, I think we're going through an existential crisis in terms of how search as a channel should function. You you have on one side Google who's sending
traffic than ever because of their AI overviews and their eventual release of AI mode, which would be you just talking with Gemini to get your information. And then you have on the other side, people being a lot more wary about creating traditionally what is known as like SEO content because the returns and the perception is that written content is largely commoditized by these models. Like in this world,
it's most important that we get results and we deliver stuff for our clients. And then, you know, in that way, we can then get a better handle on how to actually win in, you know, getting recommended by Gemini, ChatGPT, so on and so forth, and then, you know, reduce our churn.
Adam O'Leary (06:11.839)
I love that and that's such a powerful choice and one of the reasons I wanted to have you here and as you know we call this show Simple Wins because the best experts usually have the simplest solutions. What would you say is your signature simple win that one tweak you've seen work time and time again that listeners could execute this week?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (06:31.449)
Absolutely. So I will say it from at least our industry perspective. know lots of people are really interested in how do you get your brand to show up in an AI response, whether it's an AI overview, Google's AI mode, Gemini, Claude, GPT, so on and so forth. And the simple win is that
When you go to a variety of these services, you can ask them anything. On the surface, if you're using the user interface, it will do the prompt. It will then search the web, and then it will give you a response. But if you do it through the programmatic way, hitting the API with the prompt, you get a lot more.
data back. And the data that we're specifically interested in is the AI reasoning chain. You know, if you've been playing around enough with AI, you can flip down like the thinking and it will usually tell you how it thought about researching or responding to the prompt that you asked it. What we're finding and super simple is that the way to influence AI responses is to look at how the AI is actually thinking about the response.
In a lot of cases, the GPT or Gemini API, which is where we specialize, they will tell you exactly which web searches they use, these AI models use, to prepare the answer that they're giving back to the end user. So in our world, this is called an AI web search. And a lot of the...
playbooks and wins that we're seeing is just recommending that people target how AI is searching for facts, topics, more depth around the topic, designing content to serve the agents, and moving away from traditional keyword research. Your monthly search volumes, your keyword difficulties are, in some ways, an artifact of the past.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (08:37.699)
especially if we're moving towards a world where agents are going to be the primary communicators and surfaces that people will get information from.
Adam O'Leary (08:49.898)
So are you referencing when I, so I use Gemini a lot of the times. So in there, for example, it'll show like researching, thinking, putting together everything. Are you saying that when you press on like the show, the the logic or whatever to go in and search what keywords it's searching or which websites it's searching for, is that what you're referencing?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (09:08.549)
That is what I'm referencing. think Gemini specifically might not, again, give you that interface, at least from a, like, you going to Gemini.Google.com. But the simple thing to do as, you know, somebody who may not be as technical as hitting an API would be to go to Google's AI studio. They have a user interface there. You can configure it to whatever you'd like.
And then you ask the same prompt in Google's AI Studio. And in there, you can actually flip out the thought pattern or the reasoning. And then they'll show you also very clearly what searches Gemini performed when trying to get you the answer that you got back.
Adam O'Leary (09:54.442)
So you're reverse engineering the search. It's like you're trying to be an AI for the AI. Fascinating.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (10:01.305)
Exactly. Yeah, that's what we find, I think, the future being, right? I think AI mode for a huge set of searches and ways that people are looking for information is just way better. And so I think that search is moving away from an activity that users perform to an activity that agents perform on behalf of users for the questions that users will be asking agents moving forward.
Adam O'Leary (10:31.389)
That's amazing. And I love it when people call out the fluff. So what would you say is the one golden rule in your industry that most people think is essential, but you've proven is just a huge waste of time for a company.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (10:43.815)
well, that's a that's that's a it's depends sort of answer. But I will just take a few steps back and say technical considerations are generally a rabbit hole that most companies and people just should not care to sense about. And when I say technical considerations, from an SEO perspective, we're talking about like
page load speeds, mobile responsiveness, structuring your tags correctly, your title tags, your descriptions, using schema to inform whichever bot is visiting your site, what it's about, what kinds of media you might have on it. For the most part, if you're using a modern day CMS or modern web frameworks, all of them basically come out of the box with
good technical hygiene. And I think a lot of people get convinced or influenced or get lost in, my God, I gotta get my schema correct. And I'm not using the right structured data, but I think for the most part, it's just a waste of resources.
Adam O'Leary (12:02.119)
I love that. That's really interesting because you hear a lot of people say the opposite. So I'm so glad that you're saying that because that's what this show is about. That's awesome. Yeah. And I guess if you could snap your fingers and give your clients like a massive win by December, what's the one transformation you'd love to see every single one of them achieve?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (12:10.172)
you
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (12:20.869)
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's understanding why you need to create content about your brand and architecting your content strategy in a way that makes you most AI visible. In practicality, what that looks like is A, identifying the core topics that you want your brand to be surrounded with.
And then B, making sure that you have the right product, features, service, and informational content that addresses all aspects of that topic. So what we're seeing, which is a distinct deviation away from SEO, is the fact that ranking, number one, no longer means as much in a world where people aren't clicking, right?
Obviously, ranking number one is still very beneficial. Don't get me wrong. But I think what becomes more important is giving the AI models actual training data that represents your brand in the way that you want it represented. So in this new world, what becomes more important are about us pages or
product pages or geo pages if you're a local lawyer or service technician. And so I think a lot of people have glossed over these things because in essence, they've been chasing after search volume. They say, OK, when a user types in IP law in Austin, I want to show up. And so a lot of what these people have been doing is that they've been building links because
showing up number one versus number two versus number five are going to be orders of magnitudes of different clicks that you're getting. And they would create like one page where they would point all of their authority, right? That's the backlinks, the internal links, so on and so forth onto this page. And basically then that would have the highest likelihood of having that page rank in the top spots. Large language models flip the script on this because large language models don't
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (14:40.193)
necessarily care that you're rank one on a keyword, right? They just want to understand as much as possible about your brand. And so in that way, you can imagine, you know, this is what we're observing within the AI world is that there's a lot of personalization and context that's being used when AI responds to any given user prompt. And so in the past, if I'm in Austin,
and I wanted an IP lawyer, would say like, you know, best IP lawyers in Austin. Now, you know, I might just be like asking Gemini and being like, hey, you know, I need a patent filed and Gemini will know that I am in Austin, that I am a small business owner, that I'm in tech, and it's going to then do searches for me, right? It's gonna be like, okay, well, I looked at the top IP lawyers that focus on small business and high tech.
in the Austin area and here are your recommendations in terms of boutique firms if you budget, like if your budget is a big concern, but if you want to go with the heavy hitters, here are some other firms. The way that the large language model is going to get to those answers is from you, it doesn't have to be you, but hopefully it's you, providing all of that context behind your brand, which is what a lot of people don't do.
and what a lot of large language models have to like infer by like reading reviews or reading Reddit or reading, you know, different sources. And then they're like, well that brand, you know, they just have five pages on their site, but they actually are cheap and focused on tech and, know, do SMB. It's better if you as the brand give the large language model all of that context behind your brand. So that way it doesn't hallucinate or think differently.
when it's trying to make these recommendations. That was a long-winded response.
Adam O'Leary (16:33.488)
No, but that was fantastic. That's the reason I wanted to have you on. I you know exactly what you're talking about when it comes to AI search and all this. And Bernard, where can people go to learn more about you?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (16:43.975)
I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So you can just type in, you know, Bernard space Wong and a LinkedIn search. You'll probably find me as a founder of clear scope. Um, and then we, we have a newsletter at clear scope. That's clear scope.io slash newsletter where we're always sharing our up to date tips, tricks, tactics, or inviting lots of industry, you know, leaders in the space to interview them because right now
I think all that we know is that we don't really know what's happening and there's a lot of confusion, anxiety, fear surrounding the SEO world and we just try to give people insights into what's happening as best we can.
Adam O'Leary (17:28.133)
I love that. Bernard, thank you so much for being on the show. Truly appreciate you coming out. Absolutely, you're the best. Well, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for being here. And please make sure to click on the link in the description and go give Bernard a visit. Ciao ciao, everyone. See you later.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (17:32.699)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
