The Death of the Direct Click: How Scrunch is Redefining SEO

Preston: As more and more people are going to these AI search platforms, less people are going to your website. Users are coming less and less to your site and your new VIP user is an AI bot. So we need to make sure that when they come to your site, your content is optimized, structured and organized so the AI bots can digest it and take it back to these users, rather than just bypassing you and going to your competitor or someone else to get this information.

Dan: Preston, you ready to get a drink?

Preston: Let’s do it.

Dan: Let’s do it.

Nicole: Hi, it’s producer Nicole Denson. Today we’re talking with Preston Melle. Preston, lead strategic agency partnerships at scrunch the AI customer experience platform. He works at the intersection of AI driven search and agency strategy, helping more than 35 top agency partners make AI visibility a core part of how they serve their clients. His background spans customer success, marketing and business growth, and he’s built his entire career around making complex change seem simple and actionable. He’s also a husband and dad of three, and he leads with a real sense of empathy. So the timing couldn’t be better. Back to the show.

Dan: Preston Melle, today, grateful that Preston came all the way down from the Bountiful area to come and join us on Sweet Takes. And we’re just going to get to know Preston a little bit today, and then we’ll, turn it over to him to give us his sweet take. Basically, it’s hot take on a life of, his unique way he sees the world right now and what he wishes more people would know. Preston, thanks for joining us.

Preston: Of course. Happy to. Happy to be here. I was just down at big league offices last Thursday meeting with the team. So I feel like I was just here.

Dan: We should get you a shirt and, and a badge and become part of the team at this point.

Preston: You know, you can’t turn down free swag.

Dan: So, Preston, our our company is our team got to know each other over the last, like, year and a half.

Preston: Yeah, yeah, we’ve been, big league. Was one of our first agency customers so long before I started. Which in the world that I’m in a long time actually isn’t that long, but.

Dan: It feels like we’re dinosaurs in terms of how long we’ve been working together. But it’s been pretty quick.

Preston: Yeah.

Dan: Tell us a little bit about scrunch and tell us a little bit about, what you specifically do with scrunch and your kind of customer success.

Preston: Yeah. So at scrunchies and I search platform and for those who don’t know, I search. If I were to explain this to someone who’d never heard of it, you know, think about AI and people going to ChatGPT perplexity cloud, you know, and and the user behavior more and more people are going to these platforms to get answers right. Where before if you’re doing research on Google, you typically have to dial in your your question of Google to be perfect, to get the answer you want. Or you open ten different tabs and you have to try and compare and contrast. And so long story short, more people are going to these loom large language model platforms or AI platforms to get answers. And so our platform helps businesses to see how often their brand is showing up in these platforms. So if I search and what’s the best Hvac company in Lehigh Utah? You know, ChatGPT spits out these different answers of the top companies and, you know, are you visible or not? Are you showing up when users are searching about your brand or even just about your industry? And so we help businesses that see that visibility if they’re showing up or not, and where they can improve their AI search visibility.

Dan: So I’m curious, people listening, right. I’m sure you’re probably nodding your head along a little bit as Preston was talking, going, yeah, search behavior has changed. Obviously, I don’t know anyone, at least in the United States, that hasn’t, used Google in the last ten years to search for something. And now all of a sudden we have all these extra layers, all these extra engines that can help us to search. And it’s cool. They’re they’re unique. They’re different. Right. I go to Google and I type something in and it gives me results. I can go into chat or into cloud or something, and I can put a lot more context and I can contextualize that for me and give me a more well-rounded answer. So it’s cool.

Preston: Yeah. It’s incredible. I mean, there’s so many things if you’re going through like from a business standpoint, if you’re going through the same task over and over and over, you can feed a context to these platforms so that it remembers who you are, how you talk, what your interests are. And, you know, but from a personal standpoint, like same thing, right? It knows based on how much you give it, it knows what your interests are, the type of buying behaviors you have. And I mean, just last week I was planting I’m not a landscaper by any means, but I said, hey, we need to update our landscaping out front with the garden area. Geez, I’m I’m the last person to do this. I don’t know what type of plants, you know, plant or how to space. What looks good. And so we took a picture of our current, you know, current at the time, area and said, how should we do this? Like what would look good? We’re from Utah, you know, you know, the weather and it put together a draft or a.

Dan: Whole plan for.

Preston: A plan of, you know, these are the types of plants to look for, like, you know, layer it this way. And I was blown away. Right. So then we go to the store and I say okay.

Dan: And if you’d like, I can create your shopping list for you.

Preston: Sometimes I think it, you know, I give it too much information, but that doesn’t bother me. I mean, I’ve been in marketing with data and it’s going.

Dan: To get it one way or another.

Preston: It’s going to get it one way or another. So I, you know, a perfect example of like I was at the store, you know what, at Lowe’s or whatever. I don’t even remember where we went, what was at the store, taking a picture of different plants and saying, okay, would this fit well into what I’m trying to do? And it says, yeah or no. And so it help from a personal standpoint, it helped me build exactly what I need needed and without I, it would have taken me days or weeks to build this plan. But because of the search behavior changing, I knew I could get an answer immediately rather than, you know, having to Google like, oh, you know what’s good in this area? Or like it was able to get me a question answer super quick.

Dan: It’s on that borderline of really helpful. And also I think for many people I it’s scary and it feels like it’s an invasion of privacy. And it depends how much information you put in. I was in a similar. So it’s we’re moving. Okay. So I’ve been asking lots of questions like here’s my yard size house. What would you do with your yard? Yeah I’m interested in a pergola or this. Like what are the different types of pergolas or gazebos and what are the pros and cons. And I’m looking at a hot tub and what are the and it’s pulling in answers for me. It’s like well, and because you’re in Utah in this climate and it’s just pulling all this extra stuff that I told it before and, and it’s like that good friend who you told ten years ago about something and they see you and like, hey, how’s your dad doing? Right? Or how is this happening? Or you said you were getting your realtor’s license. How’d that go? You’re like, how’d you remember that? Good for you.

Preston: He probably remembers better than me. Is a good friend, you know? Yes, but it’s, I mean, from a in tying it all kind of back into scrunch, like as you start to think about, like, I mean, just last week, right? I was trying to look for a new backpack, okay? Like, I’m, you know, going on a few business trips, like, sometimes I don’t want to take a whole luggage set. Yeah. This is what I want to do. Give me a backpack. Like, what are my best options? This is my price point. And it spit out actual products that I could. You know, this one’s good for this scenario. Like if budget is your option or your concern look here. And so from a scrunch standpoint, like more people are having these types of experiences that you and I are and so is more people are spending less time of, you know, picking up the phone and calling a business, getting ten quotes or opening up ten different tabs on Google. They’re going to an AI platform and getting an answer immediately.

Dan:

Preston: And so that’s how scrunch kind of ties it all together. Like we work with, businesses, you know, a lot of fortune 500 companies that we all use on a day to day basis. But also like we just want to help businesses to get ahead of this new behavior that we’re seeing in the in the market right now.

Dan: All right, Preston, thanks for hanging out with us once we taste today.

Preston: Of course. Happy to be here. Love it.

Dan: Where are we going today?

Preston: I decided to go to Thirst. Why? Tell us.

Dan: Others. What do you love that I.

Preston: I relate pretty well with, you know, the founder, Ethan. I follow him on social media, followed him for quite some time. Just he’s around my age and he’s just always grinding. Make an impact on the community, like, I. I live up in Bountiful. There’s a thirst up there. And I just love, like he’s always at the store, you know, doing posting in the local neighborhood pages. Hey, come to thirst. Like, here’s what we can do. So I just love the way he carries carries his business. There’s and there’s also soda shops on every corner. So online you know I, I personally love business model of thirst and I want to go there.

Dan: And for those of you not in Utah, if you don’t have a soda shop on every corner, it’s going to happen at some point.

Preston: It does it.

Dan: It’s growing quickly and there really are so many shops in every corner here in Utah. It’s pretty crazy.

Preston: Yeah, there’s there’s definitely goes out of the way. Like they’re unique. It’s not a copy and paste of everything else. It’s you know they have been years. They have pretzels, pretzel dogs have cookies. And then they’ve got the drinks. So I love that they’re not just a copy paste staple. It’s they’re unique and put their staple on on Utah.

Dan: Well you got me thirsty. I’m hungry. Let’s go do it.

Dan: So my role at Big Leap I do a lot with partnerships. I do a lot with new business. Okay. And so I’m on the phone a lot or I guess I’m on zoom a lot and I’m sharing my screen with someone and I’m saying, hey, do you have any clue how your company is being found when it comes to anything related to eye searches? And most companies I talk to go know, can you help me with that? There you go. Let me show you. I actually use scrunch.

Preston: Okay.

Dan: I threw in a an example for you and I put in your URL, the website I put a few competitors in. The tool is really slick. And it said, well here, based on all that here are probably kind of your buying audiences. Here are some of their pain points and frustrations. And then just it starts to it says which platforms would you like to to select. Right. And I can select ChatGPT and I overviews and pick the ones I want and get rid of ones I don’t. And then it’ll select prompts like actual keyword searches or prompts is what they’re called here. And it will end up saying here’s some recommended ones. Do you like these or not? And I’ll say yes to most and get rid of a few. And then I can show someone, here’s the topic. And so for example, there’s a foot care company or a shoe company I was talking to the other day. And their shoes are based on trying to help people that have a lot of pain. Okay. And so the topic was something like what sandals and shoes exists to help me if I have plantar fasciitis, that I had to have comfortable sneakers. Yeah. And I click into that and it shows. Okay. Here are seven exact prompts. Here’s where they’re tracking inside of each of these different platforms. Yep. And here’s the competitors that are showing up and you’re not. Yeah. And you can see it really granular. It’s really cool. And I I know they’re blown away. Yeah it’s cool.

Preston: It’s it’s fun. I get to have conversations like that every day. I mean, my role at scrunchies, I, I’m on the customer success team. So people that are using the platform, I mean, I work with big league, but I work primarily with our strategic agency partners. Right. So some of the top agencies in the world are coming to scrunch with these exact pain points where their customers are asking, are we showing up? I don’t know, like, can you help us? And these agencies are coming to us saying, my clients have this pain point, this is what we’re looking for. This is what we need as an agency in a solution like yours. Can you help us? And so I get to have these same types of conversations like you just went through every day. And it’s so cool to see in the marketing agency world how every agency does things different way they have a different perspective on, you know, their reporting or different services that they might offer. And so it’s super cool to tailor and customize scrunch, and these types of use cases to people and businesses like big league that, you know, help them grow and scale within their customers.

Dan: So let me ask you, from two different audience sets, one would be from maybe a client perspective, and one’s going to be from, someone that’s more experienced in digital marketing who maybe doesn’t know quite as much of the intricacies.

Preston: Yeah.

Dan: So let me start with that one. And have we have we talked about any of these questions I’m asking you as far, by the way, or is this just completely organic?

Preston: It’s all impromptu on the fly.

Dan: You have no clue what I’m about to ask you, right? No.

Preston: And I love it. Good.

Dan: So in the agency world, and I know people that listen to this podcast will probably have some agency type marketing people that will listen to this, like, hopefully this will speak to you. SEMrush or SEMrush.

Preston: Yeah.

Dan: Two schools of thought. How you say it. Either way, it’s a huge tool that was purchased by Adobe recently. That’s one that agencies I’ve used for years to help track keywords and help to come up with strategies and things like that. What would you say is a huge competitive advantage or why would you say that somebody would look and say scrunch, fill in the gap of what maybe SEMrush isn’t accomplishing for me? Yeah. Why would someone use it on top of maybe using SEMrush and still find value in both? I threw a lot at you there, but take it whatever direction you want to take it.

Preston: This is great, and I will preface your question with something that’s super cool. So our VP of partnerships just came from SEMrush, okay. To us, he was our global head of partnerships over there, and he heard about what we’re doing and he met with our C, our CEO approached him and said, hey, this is what we’re building. What do you think? And he said, oh my gosh, like, is this just another? He started off by saying, is this just another AI search platform like we have that. But then as the vision started to unfold and our CEO and co-founder talked to him about our long term vision and how we’re looking at the space and how to optimize, he said, I want it. So that’s one thing. Right. But in terms of like the differences and like what what makes scrunch unique compared to a SEMrush? I mean, SEMrush is a great example. It’s a.

Dan: Great tool.

Preston: There are we’ll say I search platforms popping up left and right, because you can get your data pretty easily from ChatGPT perplexity like they make it accessible via API, which basically means that you can access it, you know, historical data that’s been collected. But scrunch does things a little bit differently. There are many companies out there that are getting it via API and, and that works. What scrunch is doing is we’re actually collecting our data firsthand. Right. So we’re actually going out and scraping these platforms with a question or a prompt going to them with different agents that we have, and we simulate what a user will experience. So we go out, we take the prompt what’s the best Hvac company in Lehigh. And then we get the response from ChatGPT, perplexity cloud etc.. And we pull it back into the platform, the actual response that we received. And then we dissect the data. You know, after you tell us if your brand has been mentioned or not, like you know what your brand is, we then can tell you, okay, you’ve been mentioned, here’s your competitors, the same thing you went through. So it’s super cool to have that type of visibility. But more importantly is we have a product called our Agent Experience Platform or Exp. And what this is and I’ll keep it pretty high level. But as more and more people are going to these AI search platforms, you know, like we’ve talked about with these user behaviors, less people are going to your website.

Dan:

Preston: And this product of ours, AXP, it’s meant to help you optimize your website for these AI bots. Because what our whole thing is like, users are coming less and less to your site, and your new VIP user is an AI bot. So we need to make sure that when they come to your site, your content is optimized. You know, it’s structured and organized so that I bots can digest it and take it back to these users rather than just bypassing you and going to your competitor or someone else to get this information.

Dan: All right. We officially got to go through the drive through. We picked out a few things. I’m going to review the pretzel bites. I’ve had many a pretzel bite in my life. I really like these, and I haven’t even tried the nacho cheese yet. But there’s a heck of a lot of salt on these, which is right up my alley. I’m a big fan and I’m like, I’m a different seasonings and everything, but just give me salt and cheese and I’m a happy man. Would you like.

Preston: I got the the do pow wow. So Mountain Dew mixed with some Powerade and coconut okay, so I’m a mountain dew guy.

Dan: So what did you think of the the lemon cookie?

Preston: Oh, it was good. I, I’m not like, a crave all the time with lemon, but it’s their specialty is. Okay, we’ll give it a shot. And it was great.

Dan: And we were hoping for the Cadbury cookie. We missed.

Preston: It. Cadbury cookies are my biggest weakness. We get Cadbury eggs, you know, during Easter, and they’re gone the next day. Kids are all mad.

Dan: Your biggest just appreciation. They give a shout out to thirst. Yeah.

Preston: Is what I think the variety, you know, like it, like I said, are not a copy and paste, but like, you know, they’re they’re doing great things. And the people took good care of us. They knew who you were. You know, you must be a frequent flier there, but I hope you got your rewards program. But the customer service is great. People are great in the food and drinks. They’re awesome.

Dan: Well, shout out to thirst if you haven’t given it a try yet, go drive through. All right. Thanks so much for joining us on Twitter to today.

Preston: Thank you.

Nicole: Thanks for coming along for the ride. If you enjoy, Sweet Takes be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. Join us next time. There’s more sweetness ahead.