Tracking AI Outputs is the Best Thing we can do for Right Now.
Our brand-new tool Waikay launched and got its first customers this week. Feedback has been great, and the launch has gone reasonably smoothly. Here’s some digital wood for you to touch with your cursor…
As half of the content I’m seeing online is AI generated – and the other half is complaining about the first half – I wanted this post to give an authentic insight into why we chose to develop Waikay and the hard truths we came to in the process.
It all started with: “is AI a threat to InLinks?”
However selfish this heading sounds, please bear with me as I feel it is only fair to share shed some light on how Waikay really came about.
Like nearly every full-suite SEO tool this year, we were feeling the pressure as AI started to take up more and more space. We knew that InLinks was and is still as effective as ever, but there was an uneasy awareness that jumping on the proverbial AI bandwagon was an inevitable fate. We were slowly being lost in the noise and needed a drastic update to capture and hold the attention of our users.
Although we were still succeeding in what we had set out to do, it seemed that people had taken their eyes off of traditional SEO strategies and started dipping their toes into ai focused solutions for their immediate problems. Part of us wanted to sit and wait out the storm to see if the basics of a great SEO strategy would come back into fashion. We wanted to scream about how an entity based internal linking strategy, schema and content is still the best way to fight declining traffic. However, it quickly became apparent that the majority of our target market had been flooded with scaremongering posts threatening to take away SERP space, and if we didn’t address their concerns we were going to be in trouble.
It wasn’t long before Fred Laurent told the InLinks team with his bold new idea for an AI tool that integrated InLinks’ knowledge graph. Always the innovator, Fred knew that there was a problem that we could fix with our amazing database. There was clearly a demand for a new AI reporting tool so what should we do about it?
We asked ourselves the question “Should we integrate this new tool into InLinks?”
This was an internal battle. InLinks has a great reputation, strong authority and an incredible customer base who really understand SEO. Adding what we now know to be Waikay into our existing tool seemed like a plausible option. That is, until you see that it’s not just SEOs that need a tool like Waikay. Brand managers, news outlets, schools and influencers to name a few are all at risk when it comes to AI spreading misinformation. It suddenly became very clear to us that SEOs are really only half the battle when it comes to AI and everyone who is maintaining any form of online presence will soon need to track what is being said about them.
InLinks is a very particular tool that helps people integrate SEO strategies and reap the traffic rewards, but is that what people want from an AI tracker? Was it reasonable to think that those interested in AI would also be enticed by InLinks or was it more plausible that they would be overwhelmed with the technical aspects?
I’ll leave you to ponder the decision you may have made, but we landed on the latter and started brainstorming what we really wanted our new tool to be. Now onto the crux of any development stage.
What problems are people really facing with AI?
This was really a turning point for the development of our new tool. We had to cut through the noise and figure out what people really needed going forward. There was an influx of posts about AI; people complaining, people raving, people trying to gather data insights. The overwhelming narrative was the fear that AI overviews were really the new position zero and that if AI got it wrong, they would suffer the consequences.
We inferred there was a belief that the hard work and dedication given to an existing SEO strategy was going to be superseded by an LLM. Although I do not subscribe to that narrative myself, it provided an interesting insight into why InLinks may be suffering from the AI uprising-people just didn’t know if their hard work would pay off.
This uncertainty is interesting phenomenon. Until now, we were all – sort of – on the same page of what was required of us as digital marketers. That there were a series of SEO tasks that needed to be competed and monitored and if they were done to a high standard using best practices you would typically see an uptick in visitors to your site. Now people aren’t as sure as they once were. What everyone really needed were some definitive answers about what AI knows about them so they could put in a strategy to fix it.
So, we decided to keep it simple and name our new tool What AI Knows About You, Waikay. This tool was built to give some certainty and clarity that could be measured, tracked and updated over time. It was going to give people unprecedented insights to help calm the nerves and highlight issues arising in different LLMs. It was going to save the world! (too far…?)
Then we got ahead of ourselves
As the tool developed, we started to gather never before seen insights into AI overviews. We had real data on where AI was getting things wrong. We saw firsthand the large-scale misinformation it was providing about brands, where people were suffering from not being in training data, or not being successfully linked to through link hallucinations. We started to build a pretty amazing understanding of how AI is working and how this could potentially be fixed. We got excited.
It was at this point where we almost decided to turn Waikay into WAIKAYAHTFI (What AI Knows About You And How to Fix It. OK, I’m sure we would’ve found a better name, but you get the point.
Essentially, the team started thinking that an AI reporting tool may not be enough, that we needed to provide a solution to this from within the tool like some of the other big brands around were doing. I mean, who wants a tool that doesn’t do all the work for you in this day and age?
We began adding buttons around the place that told you exactly what to do and how. And, before we knew it, Waikay went from a simple tool that provided answers to one that posed more questions for users.
We had lost sight of our mission statement and joined the crowd of tools promising AI visibility when they really have no right to do so. Waikay showed evidence that AI overviews are fickle. We were seeing entire AI responses get corrupted from a comment on a low traffic review site or from the transcripts of YouTube videos. There is no way in hell a tool can tell you how to fix these problems from one report, especially at the accessible price point we wanted Waikay to be at.
So we scrapped the how to fix it part because that is an increasingly complex thing that is evolving as we speak. Waikay is now firmly an AI tracker which collects valuable data for you to make sensible SEO based decisions.
We finally came to a hard truth: AI Reporting is the most valuable thing we can provide right now
It seemed counterintuitive to take a couple of steps back here. We were close to a full suite tool that provided “promises” of AI visibility. Don’t get me wrong, we were sure that our suggestions would help to some extent, but a tool still cannot replace the work of an online marketer. It can find the issues, it can flag them, it can provide unprecedented and insights into what is going wrong with the output, but we still need a human to do the ‘why’ bit. Why is AI saying these things about you is something that requires a professional and in-depth understanding of a brands online presence. It requires human leadership. It requires a great SEO strategy. It requires Waikay to be there throughout.
Waikay works as an elegant and accurate reporting tool. It is the first step in a long battle you will have with AI, and it is brilliant. It allows you to cut through the noise and see the actual entities you are covering and the ‘facts’ AI has about you. You can find a lot of answers, but you will also have to ask yourselves a lot of questions to effectively combat.
Is this real enough?
Like I said in my opening, I know a lot of us are flustered by people and brands hiding behind AI posts. I’m guilty of it myself! I wanted you to know that Waikay is being built by real people that care about your online visibility and don’t want to sell you an AI tool for the hell of it. Waikay is a tool that does not provide definitive answers on how to optimize for AI, not because it can’t, because it shouldn’t. At least not yet. We owe it to you to be responsible in our reporting and allow you to use it to help your existing strategy flourish.
My biggest tip for using Waikay is to focus on building a really in depth understanding of your brand through multiple reports that are updated 2 times a month. Then run far away from AI solutions and take the information you have to a human, who can interpret this better than any AI ever could. It’s valuable data that will put you at a significant advantage when it comes to AI optimisation. We really just want to answer the question, “what does AI know about you?”
