The AI reality: Navigating strategic shifts in SEO

[Music] I mean, it's the same thing. I mean, traditional SEO is required on the most part to get Google to site your articles in Google search as a blue link, in Google AI mode, as a link that nobody will click on. And in Google AI overviews, another link that nobody will click on. Without that, Google will not find that content. go through and we look at it and it's like just automatically changed all of their SEO title tags and they've like experienced a big drop off for a whole bunch of pages and are unsure why. I still don't think it's quite there to do the analyzing step for me, but at least then it can scrape competitors, come up with underlying suggestions about new topics that they're writing about. Doing that by hand would take weeks, days, multiple people, and it takes forever to find the right adjudication, anchor text, all those kinds of things. Hello. Hello everyone. We have already three experts that we are having in our panel today. Baris Schwarz, Thomas Phillips and Janip here to discuss the AI reality. Hey guys, could you please introduce

yourself briefly and then we will move forward with the questions? Absolutely. Do you want me to start? I'll start. Great. My name is Thomas Phillips, uh co-founder of DDC SEO Agency. We've been doing SEO for 18 or so years now at this point. Uh primarily on our own brands and now have been our clients as well. And obviously AI is becoming such a big thing lately. a huge thing that we're diving in on. So, super interested to to hear and understand more uh from the two other panelists on here as well and learn as much as possible. Hi everybody. Uh my name is Jana Pew. Um I have been in SEO for about six years now. So, not quite as senior as my other panelists here, but I have been able to do quite a lot in my career so far. Right now, I work full-time for a tech company in the Bay Area. And this panel has been like all day today. This summit has been really awesome, really great information and really excited to dive in. And I'm Barry Schwarz. Um, pretty well known for creating a lot of content that people don't like to read, but they have to. Yeah, I've written over 40,000 pieces of content, some call spam, spammy content over the past 20 plus years. Right. Thank you. Thank you very much, guys.

Move forward to to actually the questions that we want to cover today and discuss. So first one is how are generative AI tools like open AIS Chpt Google Gemini and Entropics uh Claw changing day-to-day SEO tasks for instance are you using them for keyword research content ideation metadata generation or SER analysis and what benefits or pitfalls have you observed so far in these use cases? Who's going first? You didn't you talked first. All right, I'll go first. How are we using it? I mean we played about with it from a content point of view. Um, but we're still very much on the side of like I didn't want to I don't want to risk it. And our writers and and like expertise seem to have a lot more in-depth knowledge than what you know chat for example can come up with. Now I'm sure there's other people doing much more in-depth writing than we might be doing with chat and things like that. But right now like we're still very much on on the edge of seeing like what is going to happen uh so to speak in terms of like meta descriptions and metatitles. Again, from my experience with it, I

just can't trust it. It seems to like, you know, hallucinate things and just not be anywhere near as accurate as like someone who has expertise to really deep dive in and do the keyword research first and actually build out something that that is going to rank based off of experience, you know, with things. But I'm very interested to hear how how other people are using it as well. Yeah, I would say uh for me primarily what we've been doing um at my company is working mostly on the background work like the data collection. Um for me I've been using it for a lot of competitor research and analysis the things that used to take a lot of manual hours to scrape and then you would have to go through the process of analyzing. So I still don't think it's quite there to do the analyzing step for me. But at least then it can scrape competitors, come up with underlying suggestions about new topics that they're writing about, if they've updated their navigations or processes or things that we need to also jump in on the line with as well as just coming up with again some of the boring manual collection of like interlinking

strategy building. Um I have a couple of like notebook LM like more closed circuits. Um but able to program them specifically to get a little bit more interlinking opportunities whereas doing that by hand would take weeks, days, multiple people and it takes forever to find the right adjudication, anchor text, all those kinds of things. So that's primarily what we're using it for. Yeah. And just to be clear, I'm not an SEO, so I don't really do SEO tests, but I write a lot about SEO. So I talk the talk, but I don't walk the walk. But that being said, if you're on a website, you pretty much do SEO. And I agree with pretty much what everybody said here. Um, I use Midjourney to create a lot of images for my website because there's nothing better than creating a robot eating paper to convey Google bot indexing stuff. It's just you can't do that. You can't find that in stock imagery. So, it's really imaginative and stuff like that. And it's clearly AI, so I don't really need to like pretend it's not. I tried using it for my content here and there and it just doesn't read like the way I write. So, I get to the point. Chat GBT and AI does not get to the point. They really just give you a lot of fluff. You said a host name just recently. I've seen people like talk

about how AI mode is like is it you know 2025 and like it's no it's not 2025 and then it is 2025 and Danny wrote an article in search land is it Tuesday and like no it's not Tuesday it's Wednesday it's really Thursday. Um, so it's like it's kind of funny and um, you got to be careful when you use it and like you all said like when you read a piece of content you could quickly see if it's written by AI especially write a lot. You know, sometimes your writers have personalities that the users expect and you should really think about it like the the whole Google thing and makes people want to vomit, but yes, you want to write for your users. And if people read your content and you're like, "This doesn't sound like the writer." Of course, it could be like some ghost writer, so you don't know. But if people read my content and say, "Wait, this is not written by Barry. This is look like somebody else wrote it." And that would be an issue. So, I do use MidJourney for image creation. I don't use it to write my content. I have used it in specific cases for figuring out how to create a good intro for some of my youtuby videos, the ones that get me the play button stuff, those ones that are really youtuby. Um, but outside of that, I try

not to use it out much outside of all that. It's interesting how we all speak about not being fully able to trust the AI engines, but still it's there and everybody are trying to leverage it and put it in the workflows. though the trust is on this level. Yeah. Just one more point. I I I I make my money doing software development. So I have a whole team of software developers that work on pretty much with me in New York and they've been trying to use it for software development. And it's like the they post examples left and right saying if I would have listened to this AI for this purpose, it would have deleted the whole entire website or it would have done this drastic thing and it would have done it would have broken this soft or the or the email like a four billion emails would have been sent out with credit card information. It's just wild what this stuff could do. You have to validate it. They could be useful tools. It helps with documentation and so forth, but you got to be very careful when you use this stuff and it could save you time, but at the same time, it could cost you a lot of time and frustration. Definitely. Do you think uh it is a temporary thing or and and it

will start developing and something will change there just hypothetically or do you think it's still something that we've have to deal with? It's definitely not. This is the future. AI is changing everything away. It's not going away. It will just get better and eventually it will replace me and all of us. We're all doomed. No, it's the future. I mean, it might not replace our jobs will change just like when the railroads changed things and horses went away and you know, things change. You know, you don't have Xerox machines anymore. You don't have fax machines. Things change and we'll adapt, but it's not going away. I don't think it's not like, you know, some other things we had that are feds. This is not going away. But uh while we are here, we can still continue our our discussion not replaced by AI. So Barry, you've uh noted that it ultimately matters whether content helps the user, not how it is produced. And Thomas cautions that AI generated content might seem like a shortcut, but it's a fast track to lower rankings. So in light of

these, how should SEO professionals balance the efficiency of AI generated content with the need to maintain quality, uniqueness, EAT so that content doesn't like tank your site despite being created faster? I don't use I I don't personally use AI for my content, so I really can't comment. I mean, we've seen some examples of websites over the past couple years using AI to basically cheat Google, and then a few months later, those websites completely tanked in the search results. You could always trick Google in the short term. It might be a few months. It might be even a couple years. Uh but ultimately, if you're trying to cheat the search engine, you're ultimately cheating this the user as well. And honestly, you think about it, it doesn't even matter. I mean, with AI mode and over AI overviews, you're not getting clicks anyway, even if you rank well. Um so, I don't know if it makes a difference anyway. But in the long run, you know, doing taking shortcuts is never the good, you know, way to do it. People say, you know, work smarter, not harder. I mean, I don't know. I mean, either you're smart or you're not. You know, taking shortcuts that you think are

smart aren't always the best way to get get there. I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't know. Yeah, it's very interesting. Uh I was just thinking as Barry's just Barry was talking there in terms of like how many clients come to us and they're like, "Oh, yeah, we just created our whole blog with AI, you know, just uh just straight straight out of chat GPT." And we're like, "Okay, we're gonna have to, you know, we we're turned down clients because of that exact fact." I'm like, "All right, I don't want to I don't want to risk it." And your mindset is uh if if your mindset is around a quick um you know, take a shortcut, quick way of doing things, then uh SEO is definitely not not the play for you. Yeah, I would say I'm all for using it for an outline for blog ideas, uh even like a content calendar, but I I am a big proponent of only having it do something that you could do yourself. It just takes the time for you. I can create the copy myself. And I think users are we're all pretty smart in general. We're all a little dumb and

some, but we're very smart. We can all tell when copy is AI generated. There's like nine pieces of copy that all kind of sound the same and they're all pushed within the same month. that I like Barry was saying, they they can do really well because they contain that kind of like buzzy fluffy content that you know bots and LLMs are looking for, but at the end of the day, people don't really want to read that, especially if there's no authentic copy. If it was just created from AI, then humans could get that somewhere else. So, I think it should go back on the the companies, the employers to actually write the words that go on the pages, but I'm all for having it expedite the actual topics and outlines. probably continuing the topic of automation. Which parts of SEO do you see being successfully automated by AI right now? What works for you and where do you draw the line between AIdriven automations working well and introducing some errors and some disruptions in in the workflow? Yeah, I think as I mentioned at the start, like I just can't trust it. Aside from like helping me reformat an email slightly, um that's

about as far as it goes. uh in terms of where where we're using things internally. actually saying that yesterday I did actually use chat GPT to basically all we did was just help categorize a hundred products that a client sent over in terms of like what would what do you think the collections or categories should be for this and that is literally as far as as it goes in terms of where I draw the line in terms of trust from an SEO point of view but yeah yeah my issue is when it comes to the userfacing copy so the metatitles metad descriptions titles body copy the things that the humans would read is where I would have the most issue with AI generated copy and then like I said like when it comes to the back of house I think that's where the expediting and the streamline processes can come in because then you still have to go through your QA and deployment approvals and sending to the client and getting your schedules out on time but it'll speed up the time on your part getting the infrastructure laid out and getting these processes like if you were doing a technical audit in Screaming Frog you

can have these sort them by priority you can have automate a couple of those midline steps. Now, I would still be the one that's doing the QA and deployment. I wouldn't automate, I think, is a little misnomer. I I don't know if I really trust it to fully automate anything, but I think it could definitely streamline and expedite a lot of things. And the previous speakers went through like Dale had examples, Judith as well. So, the previous speakers on this on this panel on the webinar earlier went through a lot of good examples there. uh the best place of automating SEO is where Google just replaces us all and just shows AIO overviews and Google's going to change the search results with AI to again use our content and not send us the traffic. So that's the biggest challenge for SEO is this it's like we're not going to get the traffic and that's a big concern for people. I don't see any way around it. I know Sachar was just interviewed by the Verge at Google IO. It really he's seems not to at all um real I mean not convey to the users like to us that there there's a real issue here. It doesn't seem like Google's cares. I mean, they care about the searchers and that's the

most important thing to them at the cost of the publisher and there's no way around it. So, I mean, the way that, you know, AI is going to help SEOs is by basically having them move into new careers. I'm sure it's it's a bit too much. Um, no, I mean, there's still going to be the only way for the AI answers to get the answers is for SEOs to make sure that content is indexed. Google has confirmed that AI mode and AI overviews need to be from pages that are indexed by Google. Of course, you know, just because you're indexed doesn't mean you'll get a click. And we've seen that over the past of the past, you know, few years with Rand Fishkin's, you know, zero click stuff. And now it's just going to get all worse. So, we have to figure out ways to figure out how we could generate clicks from these new AI experiences. And that's going to change over the years. We have to be on top of it. And I don't know if SEO is going to I mean, AI is going to really help us with that, but we'll see. We'll see what type of AB testing we could do and what a how how AI could help us improve the clickthrough rates from these AI experiences. Yeah, definitely. Well, speaking about uh Google AI overviews which are now roughly on 30% of US search queries, what strategic adjustment do you think should SEO SEOs

make and uh is traditional tactics for rankings still apply or we're definitely losing this part of traffic with AI results being on on top of search? I mean, it's the same thing. I mean, traditional SEO is required on the most part to get Google to site your articles in Google search as a blue link in Google AI mode as a link that nobody will click on and in Google AI overviews and another link that nobody will click on. Without that, Google will not find that content. Um, so traditional SEO in terms of technical SEO and building content and link building and all that type of stuff, everything that Google uses to figure out what content to use in their AI experiences is traditional SEO. How you could go ahead and get Google to actually send you traffic is a whole another story. And with these AI experiences, AI mode, AI overviews, we've seen Google test different ways of linking um within blue links, dotted lines, you know, changing the thumbnails, the fave icons. That's not really in our control. All we could do as SEOs is create content that is found

in these experiences and hope that Google gives publishers something or website owners something that will drive traffic to their websites. there's nothing really much we could do in term maybe you guys disagree with me but I don't think there's anything we could do to improve traffic because we've seen that clickthrough rates I think SE rankings have a study on that clickthrough rates have drastically dropped significantly from these experiences and hopefully Google I mean I've spoken to the highest highest levels at Google about these click-through studies and they're like what studies I'm like you car you kidding me what I mean what studies there's like several studies on this already we have our own internal data so share that own internal they won't share the data with us oh well well we we are tracking I'm like, I don't see it and we don't see it in Google Search Console. You could you could give it to us. No, we can't do that. It's not good for you. I'm like, what do you mean it's not good for us? No. Well, it's not useful for you. I'm like, show us the data either in the aggregate or on our own level or or just stop saying it's it's we're getting more diverse, happy clicks that are engaging and driving conversions. We're not seeing that from these experiences. So, I I've been very loud. I think the community has been very very loud about this and hopefully Google will take it to heart. But so far in the past, you know, two years since Google

first launched SGE, search of experience and then converted to AI mode, AI overviews and AI mode, we haven't seen Google act too much on that outside of limited tests that try to improve those links, but again, I'm not sure. So, I don't know if anybody else have anything to add on that. Yeah, I mean it's it's only really going one way by the looks of things, but I mean this is why we're really trying to focus a lot more on like uh commercial and transactional intent keywords where the AIO view hasn't necessarily caught up yet uh or may not, you know, kind of take over. So that's really our biggest focus is uh still creating all of that content that that drives the topical authority side, you know, potentially doesn't get as many clicks anymore, but I think changing the goal like in terms of reframing it to to a brand or a client or whatever it might be um as this isn't necessarily going to get you clicks and traffic. I mean, it didn't necessarily convert in the first first place to a sale necessarily, but yeah, really driving that conversion transaction on 10 keywords is our biggest focus anyway. Yeah, I was going to say I I know that we can take kind of a nihilistic

approach to it sometimes that, you know, AI is here, SEO is dead, you know, we can we can say all these things, which it's not true, but I think in a in a greater sense, our our customers and our traffic are still there. if they're just experiencing the content that we have to offer in a different way than I think we were maybe prepared or anticipating. For my site, for example, we've been really um developing FAQs because we work in call center software. It's kind of a niche industry and so a lot of our customers um that are heavy and ready to convert already know the keywords and buzzwords and topics that they're looking for and so they still come to the website and so our conversion rate is still doing fine because we are setting up the website for a more conversionoriented process but as a as a result our FAQs, our sessions, our impressions are all not doing so hot because we're able to see through like age refs of SE ranking things like that that we're we're getting a massive increase in AI overviews like from March

to May we I think quadrupled the quantity of AI overviews we were ranking for. So I don't think it's a matter of pivoting the strategy because like Barry was saying SEO fundamentals are still going to be in practice. It's just a matter of changing up the reporting and the metrics that you're using to set those benchmarks because the consumers and the traffic are still there. It's just not coming to your.com. And speaking about uh a dad SEO, let's let's continue this uh this topic uh to the recent roll out of AI mode uh and the introduced features like deep search reports and AIdriven shopping recommendations. What is your take on that? What implications does this have for SEO? So this so deep search isn't live yet nor are the shopping experiences. They're very cool. So deep search honestly it's Bin came up with it. They launched it like a year plus ago and then they changed it to co-pilot search with Bing or in Bing. Anyway, it's basically just looking at instead of looking at like the top five results to give you an AI mode answer, they're

looking at like the top 1,000 results and giving you a much deeper, you know, answer with a lot a lot more content, it's like basically a research report with tons and tons of links from tons of different websites, which again, nobody's going to click on, but it's very cool. So, and then the whole shopping experiences, that's where you really kind of like, oh, this is maybe a way that we as SEOs and pro website developers can actually go ahead and get conversions for our customers with the AI agent. They call it an angentic experiences where if you do a search for I want to get a flight, I don't know, I want to go on vacation to I don't know SE rankings in Ukraine, right? Am I saying is that right? Yeah. So, you want to I want to vacation in Ukraine, which I don't know if people do that these days. Hopefully, you guys are safe. Um, but if you want to do it like is it safe to go there? Basically say, yeah, these are the safe places to go. Let me go ahead and book you a ticket and get find you a hotel. And it'll give you some answers and give you some like let you actually check out with Google Checkout to actually buy those right there. And if you could become integrated, if you could integrate your website with these

experiences, making agents like Google would actually integrate directly into your back end, which I don't know how that's going to happen exactly right now. They're testing it. that Google doesn't even know. But that might be the new traffic or conversion that SEOs have to optimize for by building directly into these agents building these agents into their website so that these AI experiences could actually go ahead and convert directly without having to go to the website. So that might be the new conversion which is super exciting. Deep search people don't want to read. It's like Google has said that. I don't get it really because everybody's like Google's like, "Oh, we want to give these little, you know, snapshots, these little clips of the answer with feature snippets and even AIO reviews, but nobody's really reading past the first paragraph, especially these days." So, I'm not sure how deep search would work. It's a cool experiment from maybe college, you know, people or people who really want to dive deep into a topic. But then again, if you read it, do you believe it? I mean, that's a whole thing. You have to do all this research and going through thousands of links. Who's doing that? I don't know. Um, but the injective stuff is really cool. Yeah, I was just about to say generative AI is here. That's the present. That's the concern that we have. But I think Agentic AI is where the future plans are

going to be just reading through. I mean it very much early stages now, but I think that's why we have these conversations to be proactive as to what the future of AI search is going to be. And it's definitely a gentic AI in terms of the one like one-click conversion opportunity. I mean, that's what Google's been dreaming of for years. So they're on the verge of keeping the user from start to finish on Google in an expedited streamlined process that will still provide value to us because we'll still get the conversion. We'll still get a user. Maybe there's some sort of educational journey on its way as they convert in the process, but it's the the future of keeping users in the most streamlined effective process for them. And I think that's very much where it's headed. Awesome. I haven't really got much else to say on that point other than I'm learning a lot which is fantastic. So that um integrating directly yet shopping with Google very very interesting. I'm certainly going to start going to be cool. It's going to be kind of rough when it first rolls out. A

lot of people I think are going to be scared, surprised, concerned, but I I think it's definitely the future and I think it will be pretty cool once they roll it out and you know all the bugs and kinks are worked out. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And let's talk about the whole different way like that people are now searching for for new things no matter what if it is shopping or information. So AI is just changing the way we search but uh there are also some other uh platforms like for example Bing or Tik Tok factor um which is which is rising in that direction. Should SEOs start uh optimizing for query uh types beyond tax like voice um images videos just to make them more um AI readable and optimized for this discovery part of the journey. 100%. I think you know if you can repurpose a bit of content that you're doing into multiple different ways of using it. Yeah. Like I'm sure you guys

have seen like you know podcasts and then they transcribe the whole thing and now all of a sudden that whole thing's indexable or you know uploading a video with the transcript so Google can actually go through and crawl it. I think it's all extremely important and you know great ways of brands using one piece of content and using it across multiple different areas uh across the site and potentially getting more clicks and more traffic coming across. Yeah, I do agree with that. Um yeah and also the whole angentic stuff you know we should be looking at that as well like we just we discussed before but yeah rep it was funny cuz on the Sunday PIA interview with the Verge the Verge is the head the head of the Verge and achieve is like honestly if I started the Verge today I wouldn't probably make a website I'd probably you know make a Tik Tok account or Instagram account and go that route so people are thinking like website last approach as opposed to you know website first approach and then repurposing your website is maybe it's like repurposing your other content to put on your website. in fact when I I just made a video recently um that's getting a lot of views and I'm like you know what maybe I'll make a piece of content on that video after I made the video. So

it's really sometimes I'm thinking the other way around when it comes to building content because like we said clicks are you know traffic to publishers is way down compared to what it was you know a couple years ago even especially five years ago. So I think it's thinking about it the other way around. What where should I put my content first and then how where else should I put that content based on that? Yeah, I think it's really cool that this is I know it's scary in a lot of ways, but I think it's really cool that the first time in many years, if ever, we're finally in a multimodalo omni channel industry where Google's organic search isn't the only way that users can experience your brand in a real fashion. Like, Bing can actually be a presence that we can actually optimize for and pay attention to now because of the, you know, the change ups that have been made in recent months and years. And I think it's a really awesome way to add videos, add images, to have a specific content calendar where all of your media across all your PL plans and social media, they're all pushing on, you know, this

one specific thing for a single month. So you can see how universal and omni channel that your brand is for a specific thing. You build up your experience and your semantic understanding of this one specific area, but you do it in a variety of different ways. So, if you have a video that you're pushing on YouTube, you can also splice and put it up on Facebook and Tik Tok or if you're a local business and you have a couple of products that you're launching, you throw it up on Google My Business. You throw it up on all the other channels, not just on your website anymore. And I think that's it's going to take more time for people to figure out which new avenues are best for their specific brand for their industry. But at the same time, I think it's a really cool opportunity to be less domain focused. We have several questions in chat from our guests. So I guess we can uh shift to to that discussion because those are really good questions too. First one is in your view what's the biggest AIdriven shift in SEO that pros need to adapt to right now? Apart from everything that we've already

discussed, whatever is the most time consuming, if you're not using AI and you're manually doing stuff that takes 15 to 20 hours that needs to be automated, I think spending your brain power is now used for strategic connections, analysis, deployment. So, if you're still manually pulling and you're using your VLOOKUPs, I I think there's more efficient ways to spend your time. um not necessarily in like creation but more so in efficiency. Yeah. I mean if you look at what Reddit did recently um with their translated pages. They even touted it's they're getting so much traffic from other Google search properties outside of the US like other specific regions to their translated AI translated pages and they were so excited about it that they touted on their earnings call how Google even helped them use Gemini to go ahead and create these AI translated pages with their Google stamp of approval or whatever you want to call it to make that happen which is sending tremendous amount of traffic to Reddit. You can

look for opportunities like that. That sounds very scary to me. The whole Reddit thing is very scary. I mean, one day, like you see this with Google all the time, like Google ranked Yahoo Answers very well in the early days and ODP and then we had Wikipedia's ranking very well in in in Google. Now it's Reddit's turn and then in a matter of a second, Google's changed their algorithm and then Reddit traffic goes away like that. And it's a big concern for for Reddit and I'm surprised people invest in that stock. So, um I'm not a stock of I don't know. I mean, I didn't invested in because I don't I guess I don't know how to invest money, but it just seems scary to me that people are using AI for shortcuts. Even though they're useful and Google's like distinction in their documentation around creating content, is you could use AI gener you could use AI to help you with content and so forth. Not about if it's AI or humans or whatever. As long as it's providing value and it's helpful and so forth. And that's a very subjective thing that an algorithm has to figure out. And you could be you could get in trouble even if you think a lot of people think their content is great. A lot of people think what they're creating is is for users and search engines might have a

different approach uh feeling about what you're creating versus what you think you're creating. So look for ways you can utilize this technology to make something that's real valuable to users and maybe have a third party look at that that's not part of your website to say is this really something that's valuable or not? Are you getting are they getting a value ad or do they think this is kind of garbage? And if it's something that's most on most people think is actually useful and you could use AI for that, great, do it. I mean, we're seeing amazing movies coming out of like VO3, Google's latest AI generation tool for videos. It's absolutely amazing. It's getting tons of attention on social media. You create a cool video using VO for your website. Um, you put on your website, that could generate a tremendous amount of brand recognition, links to your website, and so forth. And that's a value ad. So just do it in a smart way and get a third party that doesn't have any connection to it with your website to really vouch and say, "Yeah, that's actually something that I find valuable as opposed to this junk that I'm creating that I think is useful." I mean, it really depends, I guess, what angle you're coming in with that question at, you know what I mean? I I instantly think of like from a client point of view, like the biggest thing that we're seeing, as I said, you know, is like a

bunch of clients are coming in with AI written content across the board. So something that um you know SEOs really need to think about is like vetting the client's site beforehand like how much of it is actually just chat GPT garbage or how much of it is from their actual in-depth expert who built their um product uh in the first place and actually wrote about it on their product pages. So that's the way I think about I guess that that question specifically. But yeah, hopefully that's helpful. Great. Great. Thank you guys. Um then moving forward with with the next one. um also interesting uh and a bit painful, hard to think and hard to talk about it, but with AI automating tasks, how can SEO stay essential? Barry has already uh started talking on that being completely removing the SEO professionals from from the landscape. But maybe Barry, it's not that pessimistic for us. What is it? Yeah, maybe not. Again, these AI engines need content to be indexed. If you want to show up there, think about how maybe

that content is shown in the AI answers with your brand there. Like somebody reads, all this brand keeps coming up for the same types of queries, people will trust that brand over time and maybe go to you. That's a really hard thing to do. But SEOs need to think more about branding and the aentic experience to become relevant. SEOs have changed many many times in the past 20 plus years from the days of you know Excite Alta Vista um Ashes to Google overtaking everybody and now we're in this new phase with AI search engines. So I think the best SEOs have survived over the past 20 years and you just got to keep trying these experiences seeing what you could do to give your clients some type of edge and experiment test experiment test and keep doing that over and over again. Yeah. And to Judith's point earlier today, I know some people can say that, you know, AI can do everything. And I think on paper maybe that's true, but when it comes to the logical reasoning, the conclusions, the the factf finding, the reporting, the analysis, that all needs the human

element. So there is a lot of things that can be done with AI. Not everything should be done with AI, but it still takes you with your expertise and your understanding to still make the connections between the analysis and the implementation dots. So SEOs, as humans, as employers, as people working these jobs in this industry will still be around for a long time. Um, it's just a matter of working with the AI and not necessarily against it. Yeah, I think that's a really good point, working with it, not against it. And there's a there's a tool that we keep seeing popping up. I think it's called Search Atlas or SEO Atlas or something that like that. Bunch of clients coming in using it already. And then we go through and we look at it and it's like just automatically changed all of their SEO title tags and they've like experienced a big drop off for a whole bunch of pages and unsure why. And I'm like, well, you had a pretty optimized title text before and now it's just I pulled in whatever other chat GPT garbage you had on your page beforehand and now it's

just thought that it should be about something different. So I guess in terms of automating tasks like 100% we're still essential when it comes to when it comes to that as opposed to you know just trusting everything and clicking all the nice green buttons and it all looks good. you know, the tool says it's optimized and yeah, it might be, but right, I'm pessimistic still. You can tell. Okay, thank you. Thank you for covering the this topic and probably the last one for for today just because we are short of time for for the next month. But is there any AI SEO trend like content generators or AI search or automated optimizations that you really are skeptical about? Like the whole thing? Yeah, I was um kind of a variety of the above. Anything that humans are reading on your copy side, I am always skeptical about because people say it's super easy. You know, you train notebook LM on all of your, you know, 15 most recent blogs and I can just make six million new blogs for you and it's super

super easy. But I think it still needs to be human generated. It still needs to be reviewed. Uh my biggest pet peeve is people thinking that AI written content is somehow new and unique when AI can literally only create what it already can index. So the by sheer nature of AI created content you are not providing anything that's truly authentically new to the users andor LLMs Google search anything the above. So I am always skeptical when people have like easy solutions about just AI generated copy. Yeah, on that point I do think at one point AI will be able to generate completely new unique content. I mean, what do reporters do? They get sources. They read press releases. They put their own spin on it and they might like quote some people. With social media, they could just go find those quotes automatically from people who are reacting to this new announcement. They get the announcement from the source and they can write this stuff up. So, I don't see why. I mean, people, it's a

big that's my biggest thing. Like I people are saying there's no way they need our content and so forth for us to for them to produce content. I really do somewhat disagree with that. I'm like the only one I think or one of the few that disagree with that which is a whole another realm. But yeah, I don't know. I'm I'm my biggest I guess skeptical area is how Google's going to handle Google's like AI content's fine as long as it's valuable and useful and so forth. I have to imagine at some point Google's going to have to be like, you know, this is where we draw the line and be more clear about that. But they've been very very quiet about it over the past several months. I've been pressuring Google to give us more information about this and they think they've given us enough. It's going to be a big issue for Google. I can't I can't see how they're going to continue to index as much as they're indexing and try to rank as much as they're ranking. Eventually, it's just going to go implode by itself and it's going to be a big issue. But I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. No, that's fair. I respect that. We're actually now tracking revenue that's coming from Chat GBT because we're seeing for some clients it's like in the thousands per month. So I definitely don't think that like AI if you want to call it AI search whatever

you want to call it like things like that is is going to slow down like so many people I introduced my parents to uh chat GPT my dad's mind was just blown you know so it was just like okay I can only see this starting to increase now um so I definitely don't think AI search is going anywhere but that's really where we're starting to track a lot more and and try and get a more of a handle on that data and work out how we can appear in those curated lists um And thankfully uh it all comes down to like fundamental SEO what we've already been doing getting links on big authoritative websites and talking about the unique selling points of that particular product and brand and you know have chat link it back and and and pull that into its curated lists for different things. So yeah it's very very exciting. I definitely don't think that that is going anywhere but yeah content generators and optimal automated optimizations probably just going to get better and better with things but I'm still skeptical. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for sharing and being honest about all of these uh all of these trends and all of these

changes. And uh probably the bottom line would be AI uh is not going anywhere but SEO experts are not going anywhere too at least for now. So we have to just make sure that AI is helping us being more efficient with some tasks and uh some things that we can um leverage it for. So thanks a lot for this discussion that was really great. [Music]