Decision Engine Optimisation vs Discovery Engine Optimisation: Winning the 11th Hour with AI

James Dooley: Decision Engine Optimization versus Discovery Engine Optimization. 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 Optimization and Decision Engine Optimization?

Kazra Dash: So Discovery Engine Optimization 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 listicles, whether it's with more citations, whether it's looking at your query fanouts, etc. That's what a lot of people are talking about but what I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about Decision Engine Optimization 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: Yeah, for sure. Now, I'm going to throw this out there. I coined the phrase Decision Engine Optimization. When I searched it on Google, there was not one mention of that exact phrase Decision Engine Optimization. There is now because I've written a book about it and now the book is ranking in position number one for that term. And 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 and 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's called LLM Mastery and it was in London and it was when one or two people started to say, I do AEO and how am I able to sell this to clients? And 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 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 roofer number one and roofer number two? You need to make certain as a business owner that AI, that's chat 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 job and losing that £20,000 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 and nobody talks about it and 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 and 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 chart GPT made that decision and I'm like, so you're telling me that chart GPT 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. Chart GPT 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 SEMrush or looking at Peak AI or looking at any of the AI visibility tools, I more care about how much money did that make you and the three case studies in that description are all monetary values. There's not only extra clicks I've got, it's how much physical money from projects that we've done and we've started and we've invoiced that we would not have won and the clients literally told us that AI formed that decision, which is a scary time, but that's what all three of those case studies did. Now we're trying to find more to see how many times is this happening because we don't know if we're losing jobs to certain AI platforms saying I'd sooner go with competitor over here and I need to understand why they're saying that and then try and do the query, find out, try and do the optimization, but I need to be making certain that 11th hour AI is saying that our business is the best. Anyway, what other stuff then Kasra with regards to discovery engine optimization and decision engine optimization bothers you about the industry, like is there anything that you're thinking they need to stop underselling their services when they're doing AEO because they just care about the AI citations?

Kazra Dash: So I mean it's a difficult one because obviously agencies are KPI'd on something, right, and whether it's the amount of listicles you get a client in, whether it's the amount of comparisons you get a client in, I think it's going to be a very hard one for agencies to actually calculate the ROI of because it very much comes down to the communication of that business. One thing that I would say is that there is definitely a difference between discovery and decision because I mean you could be the best discovered business in AI search, but if you've got a million one-star reviews, then guess what, no one's going to, it's going to massively have an impact on people signing up to your tool or your service. So I think it kind of needs to be run alongside one another. If you're going to be investing money into discovery engine optimization, you also want to be investing money into decision engine optimization as well.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure, and some of the nuances that's different from discovery engine optimization and decision engine optimization is at the bottom of the funnel, some of them queries might not form part of query funnel, so they might not form part of what a traditional AEO strategy looks like, and certain things now that we've started to do is making certain that we put our insurances, so our public liability insurances online, that we're also putting the certificate that's on there. We're making certain that all accreditations, whether it's CHAZ, whether it's construction line, we're making certain obviously like the awards, the reviews, the case studies, which all forms part of discovery as well, but we're amplifying that in as many places as possible, and then we're asking chat GPT, we're consistently now comparing us against our competition and saying why would you go, if you had three reasons that you had to go with then, what three reasons would you give, and then we're trying to get them three reasons and improve it upon our site, that they're thinking that these are three reasons why these might be better than you, and we consistently, I'm not bothered about search volume, I'm not bothered about query funnel, I am just bothered about ticking every single box, it could be warranties, it could be guarantees, it could be the materials that's being used, and we've got to shout and scream of why we feel we're the best value, which doesn't mean the cheapest, but why we are the best value, that's another reason the costs page comes back quite a lot, and when the cost page, when you start having a cost page and you start realising, look we might not be the cheapest, but we will be the best value, pay cheap, buy, what is it, buy cheap, buy twice, and all that mentality you need to be putting on your costing page, so that when AI is reading this content, it's now starting to say actually, even though they're not the cheapest, I believe they're the best value, and I believe that your business is the right choice and the safest option when you're looking at that zero moment of truth and that 11th hour, is there anything else to expand upon there with regards to bottom of the funnel kind of stuff of what you think should be being done?

Kazra Dash: I think the best way that you can probably describe decision engine optimisation is it's almost like CRO, so conversion rate optimisation of LLMs about what they mention about your brand, so if you have potentially some negative reviews, I wouldn't really worry about it too much, but I would try to make AI say the right thing about your business.

James Dooley: Yeah for sure, anyone who's watching this, make sure you leave a comment in the comment section, have you ever heard of decision engine optimisation? I don't think you will have because when I went online and I was asking lots of questions about this bottom of the funnel, I couldn't see it anywhere and I was like I think DEO is the best, my only issue is when I wrote the book about DEO, as in this decision engine optimisation, I then realised that some people called DEO discovery, and I thought actually this could work well, we can do the trade-offs, both are important, you want to be discovered and get the inquiry, but then you want to have that converted at the 11th hour, that zero moment of truth, you want that decision engine optimisation to get AI to say you're the best value and you should place the order there, and at that point it's now leading to us winning more orders. I strongly recommend checking out the links in the description to the case studies of decision engine optimisation official case studies. Kaz, it's been an absolute pleasure.