Decision Engine Optimisation vs Discovery: Which Matters More for AI Visibility?

James Dooley (0:00)

Decision Engine Optimisation vs Discovery Engine Optimisation. Today, I'm joined with Kazra Dash, and we're going to be talking about the two different DEOs that people need to be understanding if they're looking to increase AI visibility, but also what additional advantages it has at that 11th hour, where customers might be looking to place those orders.

So Kazra, for anyone that doesn't know, please can you explain the differences between Discovery Engine Optimisation and Decision Engine Optimisation?

Kasra Dash (0:36)

So, Discovery Engine Optimisation is very similar to what people are constantly talking about. You go on LinkedIn, you go on Facebook, you go on Twitter, and people are talking about AI search, increasing visibility on those platforms, whether it's with listicals, whether it's with more citations, whether it's looking at your query fan-outs, etc.

That's what a lot of people are talking about, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about Decision Engine Optimisation. And that is the 11th hour. So, once, say for example, people already know about three brands that they want to go with, what are you doing to enforce AI to recommend your brand in the decision-making stage? So, if you're a construction company, maybe your customer already has three different quotes in front of them from two of your competitors and obviously yourself. If you are a SaaS, maybe your potential customer that might sign up to your SaaS already knows about your two or three different competitors. What's actually going in the decision-making for ChatGBT or AI search in general to actually recommend your brand?

James Dooley (1:51)

Yeah, for sure. Now, I'm going to throw this out there. I coined the phrase, Decision Engine Optimisation. When I searched it on Google, there was not one mention of that exact phrase, Decision Engine Optimisation. There is no, because I've written a book about it. I know the book is ranking in position number one for that term. The reason why I wrote a book is because I'm a business owner and I'm obsessed with conversion. I'm obsessed with return on investment. I'm obsessed with profit. I'm not obsessed with impressions and clicks and vanity metrics and a lot of people in the marketing industry is obsessed with discovery. I'm not saying it's not important. It is important, but they're underselling all the services of what they do. Last week, myself and Kazra was at an event with Jabez called LLM Mastery and it was in London. It was when one or two people started to say, I do AEO and how we're able to sell this to clients. I'm like, straight away, it's a no brainer for any business owner that they should be doing AEO, not just for increased volume of inquiries, but that bottom of funnel making certain that if you've priced up a job for 20,000 pound to do a new roof, and your biggest competitor has priced it up, and they're exactly the same price, and they ask AI who is better, who is the better value, who should I choose in roof number one and roof number two. You need to make certain as a business owner that AI, that's chart GPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, every single one of them is saying why yours is the better one. Because that is the difference between you winning that 20,000 pound job and losing that 20,000 pound job. At that zero moment of truth, AI is forming that decision for your client. You've already wasted the time of speaking to the client, quoting up the job, maybe going out doing a site visit. How dare you go and lose that job at the 11th hour by not doing proper AEO or GEO. Nobody talks about it. The only reason, to be fair, how I started to come about it and the importance of it was, one, it started to bring down my ROAS on PPC and on Facebook ads, but two, it also then started to increase, obviously, the amount of sales that was getting in. When we started to ask the clients, because it's for our own business, and one or two of them started to come back saying that ChatGPT made that decision, and I'm like, so you're telling me that ChatGPT would have said that my competitor was the better option than me, you would have gone with the competitor, and the exact words from one of the head teachers was, and she looked at me right in the eyes and went, absolutely yes.

ChatGPT 100% made that decision, and if anyone's looking at it, check out the three case studies. These three different case studies, I name the exact businesses, I name the projects, I name the value of the works of what's being done, and instead of it just being, hey, here's my AEO case today, here's my DEO case today, and it's just about how many more clicks that you have, and how many more impressions that you have, looking at brand radar or looking at SEMrush1, or looking at peak AI, or looking at any of the AI visibility tools, I more care about how much money did that make.