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## The best lines from Frederik
> *"You can say it's dead, but it's just the old way of doing stuff that's really dead."*
>
> —Frederik Jakobsen
> *"SEO is the foundation. AEO sort of comes on top."*
>
> —Frederik Jakobsen
> *"I can do the thinking and then it can do the execution."*
>
> —Frederik Jakobsen, on working in Claude all day
📬 Find Frederik
Cold email done for you: [**DanishLeadCo.io**](https://danishleadco.io). Getting recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI: [**SourceRankAI.com**](https://sourcerankai.com).
**Like this one?** You'll also like [Brandon Leibowitz on what still works in SEO](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/seo-brandon-leibowitz) and [Jill Konrath on sales prospecting that gets you in the door](https://thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/jill-konrath-sales-prospecting).
## Full transcript (lightly cleaned)
*Skim the chapter headings and jump to what you care about.*
### 0:00—Is cold email, SEO and AEO still alive?
**Wes:** Is AEO, SEO, GEO, cold email alive and well or not? Let's get into it. You know, I've had a few folks in this realm. I like to keep my finger on the pulse. I want to see what's going on. We get into paid advertising as well. We talk about you know what is working, Reddit, LinkedIn, or just spray and pray. That's what we're getting into. Jacob I'm sorry, Frederik Jakobsen. So all the way from Denver.
I'm not editing any of this. Frederik Jakobsen from Denmark. I got Denver in my mind. I'm trying to get back there. I'm working on an account. Fingers crossed. I may have some news on that here coming up soon. But not in Denver, but nearby. Hint, little blue mug. All right, but I digress. And he reached me by cold email. And so cold email does work, right? Everything works.
What's the ROI? How do you feel about it? You know, is it honest? Is it sneaky? So again, we get into that. And he's well positioned and get into his history, how did he get started in this? What are his kind of results? And you know, he's a straight shooter, so we had a good talk, and I think you'll enjoy what we get into. So stay tuned for this interview with Frederik Jakobsen.
### 1:22—Welcome to Frederik Jakobsen from Denmark
**Wes:** Frederik Jakobsen, all the way from Denmark. Welcome to The Sales Podcast, man. How the heck are you?
**Frederik:** Thank you, man. I am doing great. How are you doing?
**Wes:** Good. I've been to Copenhagen, man. It was like twenty years ago though.
**Frederik:** It's not bad there. At least in the summer. I in the s in the winter
**Wes:** Yeah, it was a summer.
**Frederik:** I escape to Spain. Yeah.
**Wes:** Yeah. That's cool.
This past weekend I was hanging out with my daughters and my one of 'em's a school teacher and she's terrible at geography. So she's got an app though, so like all weekend she was taking this quiz, you know, you gotta pick all the countries and there's a whole lot of countries, especially after like the Berlin Wall came down, right? And the Soviet Union busted up. Like Dozens of extra countries pop in, you know.
Maybe they're not extra. They were there, right? Just got smashed into one. But after the weekend she got pretty good. There's a lot of like little city countries, you know, like Vatican City and Malta and Liechtenstein. I mean, there were some like I'm like, I don't even
**Frederik:** That's some pretty cool countries there actually. Nice. Yeah.
**Wes:** Know. And I was a geography major, but you know, that was thirty five years ago. My gosh. But we were counting and I think I've been to eleven countries, so not bad, but you know, it's also kind of skewed because like have you been to the US?
**Frederik:** Yeah. A few times.
**Wes:** You know, like a month ago I went for eleven days and hit five states. You know, that would be like five countries in Europe, you know, some of so it's a little bit skewed.
**Frederik:** Yeah. It's true. It's like you say I'm gonna I'm gonna go to the US, but it's like that's like saying I'm gonna go to Europe as like as so many yeah huge states.
**Wes:** Yeah. I mean I've driven I've driven from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. I mean, so it's not like I'm not well traveled. But there are a lot of countries
**Frederik:** Yeah, yeah. Yeah, true. That actually put some speci perspective on it. There are a little
**Wes:** So man, I gotta I got a few questions, okay? I'm just gonna I'm just gonna punch you right in the nose, okay? You're young,
**Frederik:** Nice. Bring it.
### 3:44—"Email is dead. Prove me wrong."
**Wes:** You're European, you do this rude, crude, interrupting, cold blasting, cold email, cold DMs. Why the hell should I listen to you? Why should anybody listen to you? Email is dead. Cold email is dead. Outbound is dead. Prove me wrong.
**Frederik:** I think at this point it's you know, we have a lot of results to point to and I think most of the time that's the easiest thing to do.
Like everyone said five years ago that cold email was dead. And since then, like I we even started doing it since then and everyone said like three years ago that SEO was dead, but SEO is still going as well. It's just evolving. And I think it's the same with Facebook ads and all the other marketing channels. It's like you can say it's dead, but **it's just the old way of doing stuff that's really dead** because it's constantly evolving. So, like what we were doing three years ago with sending emails, like it's not working today at all. We have to do so many new tactics and way of making sure that we even just are able to land in the inbox. So
**Wes:** So give me an example. Like what were you doing three years ago that you don't do today?
### 5:05—What changed in cold email in three years
**Frederik:** Like for example, we sent back then we like we didn't set up that many emails and domains. So like we set up separate email accounts and domains so that we're able to send from those without, you know, like messing up your primary domain that your website and everything and run everything else runs on. And back then you could push on those way more and you could kind of like blast lists and like it would still perform really well because people weren't receiving that many emails and wasn't that hard to actually land in an inbox and not in spam. But you know, that's just gradually becoming harder and harder. So it's like I think **ninety-nine percent of people that send emails are not really getting results from it**. But the one percent that do it better than the ninety-nine percent, that's the ones where people actually still like those are just the emails being opened and replied to.
And that's the obviously the category that you want to be in. But also what takes not just doing what everybody else is doing. And it's even in the AI era, it's like it's super easy to do a lot of the things and do them well. And that almost becomes the problem, and then you have to like rethink it a bit. Because now it's super easy to do all the cheesy personalized liners that actually used to work relatively well.
But now everyone gets them. So now you have to think, like we don't like in most of the emails that we send, we don't even use AI for the scripts. **We actually sit down and write the scripts** and then we send them out and they just they still go out to a very curated list and then they just feel like relevant and feel like it was actually a human that wrote them. And that gets more replies than trying to build a super fancy like AI email where we mentioned where they went to school and all of these like basically irrelevant things.
### 6:58—Is it sneaky? Extra domains and the inbox game
**Wes:** Yeah, they it's so overdone. It's so dumb. You know, but what do you say to the argument? I mean, it seems a little sneaky, right? You gotta create these one off emails, these spin offs, you know, variations of your domain so you don't quote unquote, you know, burn your domain reputation. Because I mean, the ESPs don't want this, right? That's why you've gotta create multiple domains, multiple emails, limit the you know, how much you send from each one, rotate through. I mean, are you gaming the system? Is like is it just how the game is played? So like, well, do it or do it or don't.
**Frederik:** Yeah, I mean that's the major difference I think between running you know, cold email versus you know, meta ads or TikTok ads or Google ads or whatever, you're kinda like you are partly playing against the platforms that you're using, but at the same time you're also relying less on the platforms. So like with meta, etc., you are a hundred percent dependent on like if they change the algorithm or like who they send the email or like who they show the ad to, you literally do not know.
Where swi but like meta want you to spend money and they want like they want your ads to perform well, more or less. With email it's like sort of the opposite, where the platform doesn't really want you to send at least they don't want to spam want you to spam people with emails that people don't want. And that's also like we try to make them relevant and not spam. But at some point like s with some of us, you just don't know if people are in the situation where they need it right now or not. And then, you know, it becomes a bit more like spamming. But there you are not like you know exactly who receives the message, so you can actually make it relevant to that person as well. And you can control that exactly. But yeah, I mean it's
### 9:12—How personal does a cold email need to be?
**Wes:** But how well do you know the person? Right? Like if you're using a list, you know,
**Frederik:** For most of the businesses is just the best.
**Wes:** A scraped list or whatever, I mean, we can make an educated guess, or I can see your profile on LinkedIn and know a little bit about you. You know, but what if people don't put all that much on LinkedIn or wherever? I mean, how accurate is the data and how personalized does it need to be? 'Cause I get I get dozens of emails a day and they're just cheesy and I mark most of them as spam and block You know, they overpersonalize things. It's really bad. A lot of is are pitches for the podcast and, you know, hi Wes, I really enjoyed your recent episode with John Smith and I mean it's just terrible. Why not just cut to the chase, you know, address the pain that you y you can, you know, make an educated guess that I have.
Then see if I want to solve it.
### 10:11—The cold email that booked this episode
**Frederik:** Yeah. I mean, actually the way that, you know, we got to know each other and reason that we're recording this podcast is also for the same reason that we reached out. And apparently with a relevant enough email. And those emails like were done in the same way that most of what we do is done. So like we sit down and then we actually try to understand overall, like we build a list of these podcasts we think are relevant, like I would actually like to appear on.
And then we sit down and write very relevant emails to those. Sometimes we have some custom variables where I don't know, like if it feels relevant, we mention like a past episode or whatever, but most of the time we don't because as you say, it feels cheesy and everyone is doing it now. So if you can actually just like get straight to the point, here's why I think I would be a good guest on the show. Like let me know if you'd be up for recording an episode. Most of the time that performs better right now. So that's the like I think that's what it comes down to really.
**Wes:** Mm. And you know, your offer was simple enough, you know, to be a guest on the show and really it's just timing. You know, I'm having folks on to talk about this 'cause I'm still investigating AI deeply. Still curious about cold email. I've never done it. I've helped a few clients with mediocre success. You know, they'd already had it in place and I was trying to help get a little ROI out of it. So I'm just is it just a matter of just throwing up crap against the wall, something's gonna stick, you know, if you just overwhelm the world, you know, even if you only get a very, you know, fraction of a percent, if you send it to enough people, the math works out.
### 12:12—Is cold email just a numbers game?
**Frederik:** It's like it's pulling from both ends. So it's doing everything that you can to make sure that who you're reaching out to are like, you know, relevant podcasts where it would actually make sense for you to appear on and they I don't know, like they're not huge podcasts and you know what they talk about like they've had on like what how I built the list was I was looking at as well, have they had on like similar guests in the past in sort of this space?
Which you had had, so that was why you came on the like got on the list and when we reached out as well. So as much as that as you can do as possible. And then it's also like a it's also you have to send emails. Because it's like the same with cold calling. It's the same with Facebook ads as well. It's not like you show your ad to one person and then you're a hundred percent certain that the person is the right person and then they click through.
It's like a few people has to see it. With email, you have a few things that where it's like sometimes it's not gonna land in the inbox, sometimes they're not gonna open the email, and in those instances, it's like they never even saw it. And you know, if 50% of the emails that you sent go into that bucket, which if you don't do it that well, it's probably more like 95%.
It's only actually five percent of the people you reach out to that even see your email. And that's then where, you know, like that's the impact that you actually have. So there **you also need to have some skill**. So it's like you wanna do it as relevant as you possibly can, and it varies from offer to offer.
And then you want to make sure that you actually send enough emails. And in like with most of us, that's multiple hundreds and most of the time thousands of emails a day that you have to send to actually generate something where it's like consistent and you're booking meetings every week.
**Wes:** Mm hmm. How do you get through? You know, 'cause you mean you got through to me. You know, is it just reputation over time? Is it skill? Is it luck?
### 14:22—Volume, luck and relevance: the M&A example
**Frederik:** It's a little bit of all of that. Like there is the volume part which sort of goes into the luck part where like we have a lot of M&A clients, for example, where like most people like we reach out for M&A clients, like for M&A advisors to business owners potentially interested in selling their business. And you know, that's something that mo most business owners do once in a lifetime. So the chances that we hit them just at the time where they had a talk with their wife that morning about how like how much they hated their business and they just want to get rid of it is pretty low. But that's where you need some world volume as well. But then you also like there's also all the actually making it relevant to them.
Thinking through what's the actual situation and most of it is like a sales call it's like you want to understand the person as well as possible so you can actually make it specific to them. And that's not necessarily what they write on LinkedIn, etc. It's like understanding like what does these people in general, your persona, like what do they think about? What are the pain points that they're experiencing? What is the situation?
So for example, when you reach out as an M&A advisor, you don't just say like, so if you're interested in selling your business or if you're interested in getting a valuation, let me know. You also open the door for like, hey, like I know you might not be interested in selling right here and now. If it's something that you'd be open to, you know, within the next few years or you want to have a chat about it, you know, we're more than happy to talk. **That's when that campaign started performing like a lot better than before**.
Because okay, we'd actually gotten the understanding of who are we reaching out to and what's the situation. And it's kinda the same when you reach out to any different type of persona. It's like the better you can actually understand who you're reaching out to, what the situation is, how many of these similar emails they're already receiving. 'cause like let's say I was reaching out in an industry where I knew nobody is reaching out to these people, all the people that are reaching out to them.
They don't use AI personalization and all of these things, then you can actually reach out and use some of these. Hey, you know, as I read your last episode on the podcast that you appeared on. And then it works well. But if you're reaching out to, for example, podcast hosts, you can be a hundred percent certain that ninety percent of the emails that they're getting with people wanting to appear on the podcast mention that exact line. And then you want to take another direction. So it's really about being conscious of the situation, what are they likely already receiving, like what's the competitive landscape, what does that look like? And then you draft your emails based on that. And like **make it easy for people to say yes to**.
### 17:17—Can local businesses use cold email?
**Wes:** And I mean like your pitch to me is low risk, right? Low threat. Hey, yeah, I want to be a guest on your show. Okay, easy enough. And you know, the timing was right. I'm having more folks with your background on the show. And your appro you're your the way you structured it was a little more human, you know, than just the pure cold crap that I get. So, you know, that was good.
Who can use cold email? I mean, would the local chiropractor benefit from just blasting everyone, you know, within ten miles of his clinic, you know, and you know, would a local realtor benefit from that? Loc you know, local commercial insurance agent, I mean all of these are clients of mine, and or friends and family, you know, that are here locally.
You know, or is it more pure B2B you know where would you say that works?
**Frederik:** We do a decent amount of like B2B to B2C or whatever you want to call it, where it's more like partnership based campaigns. So for example, we work with some of the biggest mold testing and expect and inspection companies in the US, where we reach out to like property managers and those types of like real estate related titles where they essentially set up partnerships with those and that like those partnerships are super high value and it's super high value for the actual property managers as well because they're solving a pain point. But it's not really, you know, like the property managers obviously are like who the mold testing companies are actually serving, you know, is the like it's the end users, so the consumers.
So that like in those instances, those campaigns can work extremely well, also because it's angles that are being taken less often. Like **they're not getting that many emails because in general local businesses don't think in these ways**. So the emails in general work very well. And you're not trying to sell the property manager anything. You're trying to actually help them do a better job with their clients. So in general that that tends to work quite well. But otherwise, yeah, like most of the clients that we work with are B2B companies, like advisory firms, manufacturers, yeah, a lot of a lot of different types of businesses really.
### 20:02—How long setup takes: warming up new domains
**Wes:** How long does it take to get set up? Like it's you know, it's nine AM for me, right? Nine thirty. On a Wednesday, you know, would we be up and running like by Friday? Does it take a couple of weeks, you know, like what should I expect?
**Frederik:** Yeah, it the thing with the setup is we have to buy these email accounts and domains and we do what we call warming up. So like with those, you know, we have all of these email accounts and domains that we already own and they already have reputation and they're landing the inbox. We control those. These new ones that we then set up, we wanna like increase the reputation so that when we actually start sending out emails to people that you know, it actually goes to the inbox and not to spam. So what you do is you send emails back and forth. And if it lands in spam in the inbox, then it gets picked out and marked as important and then replied back to. And you know, we just use tools where we can do this efficiently at and at scale, so we can increase the reputation. And **that takes two weeks typically** before we've like increased the reputation enough that they actually land in spam. Because if you go out and buy a new domain and set up an email account for it today, even manually, if you like went ahead and did it, the first emails are almost always gonna land in spam. When you do that simply because you have no reputation. So it takes two weeks and in that week, in those two weeks, we work through everything. We build the lists who we're like gonna reach out to and figure out like what are we actually gonna send them by actually understanding.
Like the client and the customer. Yeah, so that's the typical time frame.
**Wes:** So these existing domains that you have, will you like let's say you know, let's say we set up, you know, the-sales-whisperer.com. You know, will I email to your existing accounts and you reply and that kind of warms it up? Is that kind of how it works?
**Frederik:** Yeah, exactly. We just do it at scale and completely like completely automated and controlled. So you don't have to like literally do anything. Yeah.
### 22:23—Doesn't Google know the game?
**Wes:** Sure. But don't the ESPs know the game? I mean don't they know everything? Isn't Google watching us? Look at that. It only emails it only emails the people that he's created. I mean it's i it's not that hard to track.
**Frederik:** Yeah, like we the tools that we use for it allows us to like send emails to all the other people using those tools as well. So then it becomes a lot harder to track. And it's like Google knows a lot of these things. And Microsoft knows a lot of these things. But that doesn't mean that it's easy for them to like penalize or stop us from doing pretty much. So like overall they know people are doing this.
But it's really hard to track because there's so many, like there's literally hundreds of thousands of emails that we sent between, between all the people that are using this tool. So like for them to track that is like it's not easy. And then, you know, you think, you know, they could just, you know, all like everyone that is creating a new email account, and like then, you know, just not make them land. But then they penalize all the people that are actually just creating an email account for their little business and you know want that to land. So they're constantly you know trying to f you know find measures of doing this and they're getting better and better, but you know, we also get the same kind of tools to do it as well and make it and make it better as well. Yeah.
### 24:01—Danish Lead Co. and SourceRank AI
**Wes:** So that's your DanishLeadCo.io. You've also got SourceRankAI.com. So are they totally exclusive? You know, do people usually bundle these or like if somebody wants to do cold email like they're not too worried about SEO? Where do you see the line?
**Frederik:** Yeah, we like we actually started it because we started doing like SEO and AI, SEO, AEO, whatever you want to call it, to like optimize to be recommended by ChatGPT when that came out. And then that started working really well. It's like **we did that for Danish Lead Co. to get more clients** for Danish Lead Co. That started working really well. And then we started offering it to a few clients.
And doing it for a few clients and that's been, you know, performing really well as well. So it's not like we bundle it oftentimes, but it's not necessarily 'cause for some clients AEO, SEO doesn't make sense where cold outreach makes a lot of sense and the other way around.
So it's not really it doesn't really have to be bundled, but a lot of times it does make a lot of sense to do both. Also because you kinda capture the you know, when you reach out to a lot of people and people like your ideal customers suddenly start receiving emails from you, more people are gonna Google your, you know, business name and gonna ask ChatGPT about your business. So the better that you can appear when they do that, of course the better your results from that are gonna be as well.
But yeah, that's yeah. I think that's the answer.
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### 25:43—Does AEO actually send traffic?
**Wes:** So I see like your own site you're talking here, you know, from zero citations to a hundred and seventy. And so that's cool. But then like how much traffic did you get from that and how much business? You know, because I know they're talking about everything's interrelated, you know. SEO is really what feeds AEO.
So, but there are cer you know, you can structure your pages now in a different way and do some things to help get ranked in AEO. And I know I'm just one person, but I mean I'm on I'm using AI all day, every day, and have been for the better part of this year. And I can't think of too many times I've clicked a link to somebody's site.
Because of an AEO recommendation. But obviously that is changing, that's growing. So do you have any metrics on that? Like how is the world changing? And it's weird, like I need to kind of look at my own habits because I go to like Google.com much less. You know, I'm getting my answer, but a lot of times I'm just getting the answer that I need with Gemini.
Or Manus or Claude and I have the info I need and I just close the session you know without visiting the site. So you know how important do you see AEO becoming you know in the next six to twenty four months?
**Frederik:** **Like I think extremely important**. There's a lot of data on just like the growth of you know, the AI models and how much more people have started using those. But the interesting thing as well is like Google has not stopped growing either. Google is still on the same like people still Google the same amount that they do or like that they did two years ago. But like the growth of the ChatGPT and all of these and how like how much people searches on those is growing like crazy. I think it was like sixty percent last year and thirty percent this year or something. It's like it's pretty massive and it's like billions of searches.
And it sort of looks like Google back in the day. But the interesting part is people haven't stopped Googling. But that's also because Google in itself is a search engine and they're also doing AEO, like they're also doing the AI models now. So they just give the AI overviews at the top. So when people Google, they like the I got some numbers on that. I think it was like sixty percent or something. Or 60% less now actually click a link from the like the normal blue links that you know a Google search give you gives you compared to like they actually just get the answers in the AI overviews or they click directly from the AI overviews. So it's sort of the same story. And I think that's just gonna be like it's probably gonna almost take over within the next year or two, I imagine. Cause, you know, AI essentially just does the job that we used to have to do with like, you know, clicking a bunch of links, understanding each link and determining what's the best answer for my question. And AI can like do that and it does it pretty well. So I like I don't think people are gonna be using Google like they did in the past two years from now.
Yeah, they're gonna be using I think AI in every step of the way.
### 29:55—Off-site vs. on-site: how AI picks who to name
**Wes:** So in your work you're talking about this four step process, you know, are you updating someone's content, you know? Are you making something totally new for them? 'cause I've gotta imagine like my domain is twenty years old as of last month. I don't think I would want a new domain, right? Would you come in and put like better structure to it, more modern, you know, some tips and tricks for AEO purposes, you know, and how important is blogging in AEO?
**Frederik:** There's like there's essentially what we call like off-site and off and on-site. So improvements that we make to your website and then there's like backlinking, it used to be called with SEO. So it's essentially getting you named on all the sources, all the articles, all the directories, etc. That all the AI models are already citing, are already using to give their answers.
**Getting you mentioned on those is like the pretty much the highest leverage thing that you can do**. That's what's gonna like give you the highest impact the fastest the fastest, but it's also the hardest to do. And that's also part of the reason that we decided to go into this, is because you know we have an a pretty extensive background in direct outreach, which that essentially is. It's like finding these articles, determining which ones are relevant for you to be mentioned on, where AI models are already using them.
And then reaching out to the right person who probably wrote that or at least has like knows or has decision making on to like who goes onto that article, but finding their email, sending them a good email, probably send them sending them a LinkedIn DM as well. And doing that in a structured way and being able to do that at scale. So that we do like relatively well. And that's like extremely important because you're essentially bypassing like all the let me try to create blog posts and articles and optimize my website and everything else and then you're sort of hoping that the AIs actually pick you up. But when you like when you just get listed on the articles and sources that they're already using, you're virtually guaranteed that they're gonna start mentioning you.
So that's like that's the one that's the first thing. And then there's the optimizing your website. And optimizing your website, there's the optimizing what's already there. And then there's creating new stuff. And creating new stuff, there's a lot of things that tend to work, but in general, **it's making sure that you have pages that answer the questions directly** that people are asking.
Both in Google and in these AI models, and like answering them with proprietary data that you have or answering them with specific case studies, making it as specific to you as possible, so that it's not the same article that every other business, every other one of your competitors also got when they went to Claude and asked, hey, write me an article that answers this question.
Because it might work like that article might work now in the next month, but it's not gonna work you know six months from now.
### 33:29—Comparison pages AI loves
**Frederik:** So you want to do that, and what in general works well as well is **comparing yourself to your competitors**, simply because it's sort of like the same with humans, is how I think about it. It's like if someone can tell me you know.
This is how this company compares to these five companies that you already know. I instantly know way better. Okay, like then I know where to put that company in my you know, in my head and like which box does it go into. So you sort of wanna do the same and create pages where you're just saying, Hey, like Danish Lead Co., this is how Danish Lead Co. compares to all of these bigger competitors in the space and you're not talking down on the other competitors, you're just saying what do they do well and what do we do well. And that makes it easier for the AI to know, actually like when people ask this specific thing, for example, they ask about PE and M&A like outreach to founders.
Then we should probably mention Danish Lead Co., because they're actually saying like that's what they specialise in. And th like the other competitors, they're not really specializing in that. So that in general works very well as well. But there's a lot of different formats that works well, but it all pretty much comes down to answering the questions that people are actually ask asking these AI models. Because that's what the AI models then go out on the web or in their knowledge base and search. And if they can find articles or web pages that answer that specifically, then you're more likely to actually get you know, picked up and then mentioned and recommended.
**Wes:** Well, that's basically SEO, right? Answer
### 35:14—What is llms.txt?
**Wes:** The questions that people are asking, you know, but I'm here like I ran a report on my own site while you were talking here. So I'm on your score page and I see here like llms.txt guide. So how is that similar or different from a robots.txt?
**Frederik:** It's like basically the same. It's just pointed directly at the LLMs. So it's all of these technical things that you can optimize on your website that like we do all of them. It's hard to track exactly how big of an impact each and every like single one of them have. But what we know is if you just go ahead and like optimize all of those things, like all the technical stuff, that's not gonna get you picked up and recommended on its own.
If you don't actually start like posting blog posts or writing articles or pages that actually answer the questions, unless you already have that, of course. So like **it's the cherry on top pretty much**. You wanna optimize it. Cause what it does is it just makes it as easy for these AI models to understand what's on this page and like essentially crawl the page as possible.
But they also like develop quite quickly these bots and the AI models and they also get like better and better at actually reading the pages. So I think like six to twelve months ago llms.txt and all of these files were more important than they are now because the like the AI models are just like more clever and they can read more different formats that a page is written in and like all of these things. So that in general just makes it like less important. But it's kind of stupid not to do.
'Cause it it's not that hard to optimize all of these things on your site, and it does not hurt.
### 37:19—Is AEO faster than SEO?
**Wes:** Yeah. It's so i is it just a continuous ongoing thing just like SEO is? Or can you game the system,
**Frederik:** Yeah, pretty much.
**Wes:** You know, or is it as involved as SEO, you know, or is it a little more maintenance, like a little slower pace, just stay steady with it?
**Frederik:** I think like we've had some clients where we've seen like a huge pickup relatively quickly. And then there's others where it takes like more time. But in general **we see it work faster than Google**, like in general.
But yeah, like the way that I sort of explain it is I explain it as **SEO is the foundation. AEO sort of comes on top**. Because if you do really well with SEO, then you have a better foundation for doing well with AEO and like with the AI models as well. But just because you do super well with SEO doesn't mean that you do well with the AI models as well. I actually ran some tests and also found some studies on it.
I can send to you as well. But it's something like **80% of the articles that Google lists in the top ten**. So like eight out of ten, they're not even like mentioned or recommended by the AI models or like even cited by the AI models. Even Google's own AI models. So even Gemini and AI overviews don't use the same sources and don't use this like recommend the same companies.
So if you do well with SEO, it doesn't mean that you're gonna do well with AEO. But you obviously have a better foundation for also doing for also doing well. But yeah, it's a lot about the tracking, which is a bit different from SEO, because SEO Google gives you all the numbers, like it gives you exactly how many people are searching for the specific keywords and terms and all of these things. You don't get that from the AI models. So you have to build your own tools.
Or like there's tools for it as well. We've built our own tool to actually be able to track a lot of prompts through these different AI models and see what do they respond with today, who do they actually like who are they already recommending, why are they recommending those? And then you wanna trace like we do it every two days, like multiple times, because it also varies like a lot. It doesn't just give you the same answer every time.
Which also makes it harder to optimize for.
But you want to get as much data and then try to optimize based on that. And it's basically the same as SEO, you're just tracking a different thing.
### 40:02—SEO vs. AEO vs. GEO: real or just acronyms?
**Wes:** So I see on your side as well, towards the footer, like what is the difference with GEO now? So we got SEO, we've got AEO, now there's GEO. Are y'all just making up acronyms just to get people to give you money?
**Frederik:** Yeah, like I think GEO is one of the first ones that came out. It GEO is generative engine optimization. Like basically it's you're optimizing to get cited and not recommended. So you're optimized to for the AI models to like pick up your site and use your articles or your pages to give its answers, but not necessarily recommend you as a company.
And AEO is answer engine optimization. So actually optimizing to become the answer that it gives. But yeah, it's like people use them interchangeably, they don't really know the difference. And to be honest, that's like **you wanna be optimizing for being in the answer and actually being recommended**, because that's what's gonna get you clicks and that's what's gonna actually you know generate revenue, generate new clients and customers.
But yeah, it feels like it. There's more as well. There's AI SEO, there's AI visibility and AIO and yeah, it basically mean this.
**Wes:** Well, mean, so it's prominent on your site, I got it there in the footer, but you don't really talk about GEO services. So is it who needs to worry about it?
**Frederik:** Like not really, like honestly, **AEO is the term that you should be using**. That's where like you're describing that you're trying to optimize to get your company mentioned and recommended by the AI models. That's what's actually like gonna drive the needle. So that's the term that I would use for any business really. That's trying to actually, you know, do this.
And then we write GEO as well, 'cause a lot of people use it for the like for the same thing because they sort of think it's the same thing. And then, you know, it makes sense to mention as well, 'cause people are also searching for that. And that's pretty much the reason.
### 42:25—Where social media and Reddit fit
**Wes:** Where does social media fit into all of this?
**Frederik:** There's some like some sites such as or social media like LinkedIn. LinkedIn has like a partnership with Google, so a lot of LinkedIn posts and articles actually rank quite high on Google if you search for something specific.
And it's the same with a lot of the AI models that actually use LinkedIn articles and posts. So what we actually do for a lot of our clients is when we create a nice blog post, then we post it on their company page as a LinkedIn article as well, which most people like I never heard of it before, but it's you can I apparently you can post articles on LinkedIn as well. And that's like a bit longer format, and then we just reword it a bit, make it like a bit more like position for something for LinkedIn. And then we post that there as well. And sometimes that gets picked up. But in general, we have at least we have less proof behind it. A lot of people were talking about Reddit as well, like six months ago, like having a huge impact. From all of what we're tracking. It doesn't it has a an impact on like it's it's essentially using or like most of the AI models are using Reddit to answer questions but not who it's gonna recommend. So it's like it doesn't get which company it's gonna recommend from the Reddit thread. It gets the understanding about the topic and what people are asking and all of these things from the Reddit threads. And then it goes out and actually finds, okay, which are the companies that I should recommend. So a lot of people started optimizing on Reddit and all of these things.
**We've not actually seen it make any difference**. Unless you have like very specific things. Like, for example, if you're selling an espresso machine and you can see that the thread, the Reddit thread that the AI models are citing, they're talking about different espresso machines, and you can see that those is like those companies or those specific espresso machines are being recommended by the AI models as well, then you want to optimize for it. We've just not seen that happen across like the clients that we work with.
So it's not something that we really focus on. So there's not a huge thing with like social. It's more PR, which is like the backlinking s thing. If you can be like if you can create collaborative posts with relevant like companies or relevant media and they can post those on their blog or on their website, that tends to like have a way bigger impact.
On your performance with the AI models, et cetera.
**Wes:** Yeah, is it because Reddit like got mad and blocked all the AI tools? 'cause I mean they were like reading and getting, you know, shaping their models, right? And then Reddit's like, Hey, you don't stop stealing our data
**Frederik:** Yeah.
Honestly I'm not sure. 'cause I mean if you go to Google, Reddit is used as like it's still used as sources a lot of the time. It just doesn't look like the AI models actually getting the answers to which companies it's gonna recommend from those. And I don't know if it's the AI models that trust it less or yeah.
**Wes:** Yeah, it seems like it it's allowing web crawlers to index, right? But not it's not letting the AI crawlers or bots, whatever you wanna call
**Frederik:** Yeah, I don't actually know if it's that or if it's just the AI models not trusting like which companies people are recommending in those AI like in those Reddit threads. Or if like most of the Reddit threads people might actually not be recommending specific products or companies. And then the AI doesn't really have anything. Yeah, exactly.
**Wes:** Well, they do, but you know how it is. You know, then they'll frown on it if you're just there pitching and it's a weird place.
**Frederik:** So I don't necessarily think that it's Reddit actually that's penalizing it. At least it doesn't look like that, because it's still being used as a source like a lot by the AI models. So they're still citing it and they're still reading the threads and all of that. They're just not like getting there which companies they're gonna recommend or which products they're gonna recommend from it.
### 47:13—Write LinkedIn articles and get found
**Wes:** Well, I've recommended to people for years, you know, like in my Inner Circle, I tell people, you know, I've got clients that are, you know, they're employees, so they don't have a blog, right? The corporate has all of that. But I tell go write articles, you know, on LinkedIn and post there and bookmark those, you know, create your own FAQ, create your own talking points.
Overcome objections on, you know, common things, price, availability, blah blah. You know, number one, to strengthen your own thinking, right?
'cause when you write, you you've got to ponder the solution, you gotta research it. And in the in that process you get better and you become more confident. Even if nobody ever goes to read that page, you've become better.
You're better on the phone, you're better in person, you're gonna send better emails, you know, but that it does get indexed. I mean, it's owned by Microsoft, you know. It pops on Google, it certainly pops on Bing, and Bing is still popular, you know, people use it. So but and it's free, right? 'Cause you can post on Substack, you post on Medium. But you know, why not just go where people already are? You know, and it you B2B.
Go write some stuff there on LinkedIn and see if you start to get found. So
**Frederik:** Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred
**Wes:** That's cool.
**Frederik:** Percent. And like **the more actual proof and the more proprietary stuff** or like specific processes that you do and no one else does, like the more of that you can like crunch in there the better in general. Both people are gonna find it 'cause you if you can tell it from your own story, if you can tell it from you know, your own process and not just whatever like general topics there are then it's more engaging to read for humans and it's gonna last a lot longer with all the AI models.
**Wes:** Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. Very cool. Well, I'll be linking to both of your sites. They'll be in the show notes. But DanishLeadCo.io and SourceRank AI.
Very cool. Did I forget anything?
**Frederik:** I don't think so. I think it was good. Anything you want me to ask you?
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### 49:51—How Frederik got started
**Wes:** How did you get into this? I mean you're still well, I mean you're still young. How did you get your start in this? What was your trajectory?
**Frederik:** I was running a Facebook ads agency four years ago now. Was not going very well. Yeah.
**Wes:** Okay. But that was your own?
**Frederik:** I was trying to figure out like how to get more clients for that and then I started sending emails. That started working well. I started doing it for a few of my Facebook ads clients. **That worked a lot better than the Facebook ads did**. And then, you know, I just pivoted everything to doing emails that 'cause I also hated Facebook ads.
**Wes:** Really? Why?
**Frederik:** I don't know. I just hated the fact that I was dependent on them showing the ads to the right people and you have no clue if they are even showing it to the right people. So I found it extremely frustrating and like the thing with Facebook ads, like you can post one campaign with all the same ads, like throw it up there, give it a thousand dollars to spend and nothing happens.
And then you can like duplicate the campaign, do the exact same thing, and then it like goes like crazy. So it's like an algorithm thing where it's with email you know who you're reaching out to. So you like you have less variables that you don't know about. You still have like you still don't know if people are actually like opening your emails or if they're actually like if they're actually landing in spam, like for sure. You can see it on the reply rates.
In general, but yeah, I just like that so much better than Facebook. But I know Facebook like people are killing it with meta ads and Facebook ads as well. So yeah. It wasn't my thing.
### 51:54—Paid ads vs. cold email
**Wes:** Are you doing any paid ads or you just focus on cold email or you know, email?
**Frederik:** We tested it a bit for Danish Lead Co. as well like a little while back, and **spent I don't know, six or ten thousand dollars and got one really bad client out of it**. And then we were like we're just gonna send more emails, like we know the ROI on that. Now we actually we've actually started yeah, as a separate thing. Doing a little bit of ads for a few clients as well.
But yeah, though they that's very specific niches and products where email just does not make sense. And my co founder Martin is running that entirely. So actually I have nothing to do with that.
**Wes:** I just started running some ads, but just testing, like brand new ten dollars a day and but letting Claude I'm seeing if Claude can just do it all.
And it's been good so far. I mean, very good opt in rates. Couple little seven dollar upsells. I just made a forty seven dollar. I'm gonna publish that here this afternoon. So but you know, very small. I've never I don't think I've spent a thousand dollars on advertising in twenty years, you know, but it's funny. It like I I'm starting to trust people who advertise more than those who just do try to be an influencer because it's like if they're spending money then it must be working. Whereas everything else, the algorithm is just let's show somebody who's cute or outrageous or whatever and it's like so much noise. You know, I'd rather be on social media less. And so it's been weird like running some ads and I've kind of been hands off and kinda turned off some of my social media for a bit and but then go check the metrics.
And even then, like, you know, Claude is just it it's headless for me, right? I don't have to log in to Meta, I don't have to log into my email tool, I don't have to log in to my website, I don't have to log into my order form. You know, Claude gives me a dashboard for all of that in one place. And it's freaking blowing my mind.
**Frederik:** It's crazy. I'm just in Claude like all day, every day. And doing all my workflows because it's just more efficient. And they can just do all the clicking around taps and like there's no reason I should sit and be doing that. **I can do the thinking and then it can do the execution**. I like it. It is.
### 54:38—Working Danish hours with US clients
**Wes:** All right, man, it's dinner time for you, what, six PM?
**Frederik:** Yeah. There it is. Nice.
**Wes:** Yeah. Do you shift your schedule? Do you focus on the US or do you just live your life, your normal hours and take the leads as they come?
**Frederik:** Like I don't work graveyards, but I work until eight PM every day, and that covers like most of the US. Yeah, exactly.
**Wes:** So yeah, noon Pacific, yeah, get ya get you into three. Three PM Eastern, that's probably fine. Just get back to folks the next day if you have to.
**Frederik:** Yeah, exactly. It's like I would rather do that and not hate my life and be able to do it for the next ten or twenty years than like work.
**Wes:** And you don't want desperate clients. Get back to me right now. It's like, bro, kiss my lily white ass. No.
**Frederik:** Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's not the clients that are gonna be fun to work with either way.
**Wes:** Yeah. Okay. Cool, man. Well, enjoy your dinner, Frederik Jakobsen, all the way from Denmark, man. Thanks for coming on the show.
**Frederik:** Thanks man. It was a pleasure. You too.
**Wes:** Have a good night. All right. Cheers.
### 55:53—My takeaways
**Wes:** Now you know. AEO, SEO, GEO. And like we talked about there towards the end, I am I'm running some ads right now, so I'll report back in a probably take a few weeks. Get this really dialed in and show you some results. But man, AI is so powerful. And I'm doing more with my tech team on HANK. There's another update. I'm gonna get installed. Doing some recordings to explain. I've been using my own AI to create us versus them kind of comparisons and sharing those out with the world really for my own clarification, right? Because as I was saying at the end, you know, I recommend that my clients, especially those in the Inner Circle, you know, create content. And I have my supercharged Claude create the content for me to educate me, right? I go and read my own stuff and I make changes and I ask clarifying questions.
Both of HANK and I'll ask it just straight like in Gemini or whatever. I'll get different opinions. And so it shortens my learning curve for sure. It shortens my time to market. I'm putting out better content faster. I'm having it create infographics and comparisons and then cross link into all the others. It's amazing, right? Because my Claude, it knows the article it knows my whole website, but it knows the articles it produced, so as I go it can add additional links. You know, that would take me forever just to go back. Let's say I've got five or ten posts. Now I want to cross link to each of them. The time it would take to create the related, you know, posts and man, it just does it all. And this thing is it's unbelievable. My tech team thinks that, you know, the prompters of the future are gonna be English majors.
And they're coders. They understand, you know, the role of the code monkey is changing dramatically and quickly. So how well can you think? And you know, Frederik brought that up as well towards the end. So we're still creating the content to answer the questions that our customers have. So it's SEO, it's AEO.
Can you turn around and blast that out to a list? Hey, knock yourself out. I personally haven't done it. Still kinda torn. I may test it just to see. But I'd rather have people opt in on their own, want to hear from me. So, you know, to each his own. But I think that is more sustainable in the long term. So but let me know what you think. You know, I appreciate you listening, watching, reading, engaging, leave me a comment. Whether it's on YouTube, any of the social media platforms or any of the listening platforms, Spotify, Apple, leave a review. I appreciate it. It all helps. And you know, you can always get to me. I have no assistant screening calls, so you can reach out. You're better off texting. I usually don't answer my phone, but if you let me know who you are, I'm happy to get back to you. All right. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Go sell something.
Make it easy for people to say yes.
That's my takeaway. Answer the questions your buyers are already asking, get named where AI is already looking, and write like a human. **Go sell something.**
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