Episode 70: Amazon Search, GEO, and Book Discovery with Kadaxis’s Chris Sim

BookSmarts Podcast

• 42 min

Play episode

Chris Sim is the founder of Kadaxis, which uses AI and market signals to help publishers understand what readers are looking for and make their books more discoverable in retail search and in AI tools like ChatGPT. The company runs keyword and metadata programs at catalogue scale, with methods refined across hundreds of thousands of titles, and publishes original research on Amazon search and generative engine optimization (GEO). Its clients include several of the largest trade houses. Kadaxis was named BookTech Company of the Year at the FutureBook Awards and shortlisted for a BISG Industry Innovation Award. Chris was previously CTO at Bookish.com, the book discovery venture backed by Penguin, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, where he built its search and recommendation systems and co-authored a patent for a literary recommendation engine. He was later a venture CTO at BCG X, formerly BCG Digital Ventures, where he was recognized as one of the firm's global topic leaders in generative AI. He has spoken at industry conferences, published in industry journals, and contributed to BISG's keywords best-practices standard. On this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast, Chris joins Joshua Tallent to discuss how publishers can optimize their book discovery strategies for both traditional search engines and AI-driven tools. Drawing from Kadaxis’s empirical research on Amazon Search and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Chris breaks down why over 90% of standard publisher keywords fail to drive exact-match search visibility and explains why natural, search-phrase-based keywords dramatically outperform single-word "tagging." He reveals how Amazon’s "warm start" algorithms leverage book descriptions, cover images, and descriptive metadata to establish comp relationships for new titles before sales data exists, and outlines actionable steps publishers can take to ensure their books are indexed, recommended, and cited as authoritative sources by large language models like ChatGPT. Resources Referenced: https://kadaxis.com/notes/how-books-show-up-in-chatgpt-and-ai-search https://kadaxis.com/notes/should-book-keywords-be-single-words-or-search-phrases