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Answering The Question Will AI Be The Death Of SEO?

Di [email protected] Settembre 2, 2024 #ABS, #Absolute, #Account, #Ace, #Acing, #act, #Acting, #Action, #Ads, #Advertising, #Affect, #Age, #Agency, #AIs, #Algorithm, #Allen, #Amazing, #Amazon, #Ann, #Announce, #Announcement, #Answer, #Answering, #Anymore, #App, #Apple, #Application, #Applications, #Approach, #April, #areas, #ARR, #Art, #Artificial, #Attract, #Attribution, #Backlinks, #Bar, #Base, #Based, #Basic, #Behavior, #benefit, #Bias, #Big, #Biggest, #Black, #Board, #Brand, #Branded, #Brands, #Bring, #Brings, #Brother, #Budget, #Build, #Builder, #Builders, #Building, #Business, #calculation, #Calling, #card, #Care, #Case, #Cases, #CEO, #Change, #Changed, #Channel, #Channels, #Cheap, #Cheese, #Citation, #Click, #Client, #Cloud, #collect, #coming, #Common, #Community, #Company, #complet, #Complete, #Concept, #concerns, #Confidential, #Cons, #Consistent, #Consultancy, #Content, #Context, #Continues, #Conversation, #Copy, #Copyright, #Core, #Corp, #Corporation, #Correct, #Correctly, 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Kyle Roof is the co-founder of Page Optimizer Pro. He is also responsible for developing and implementing all SEO techniques used by the agency High Voltage SEO and is the co-founder of Internet Marketing Gold, a global community of 3000+ SEO professionals who test and prove cutting-edge SEO techniques.

No matter what you are reading, watching or listening to at the moment, everyone in the marketing, media and advertising world is talking about Artificial Intelligence – AI. Is it an existential threat or a tool to make us more creative, insightful, and effective? The discussion goes on, and the fact is that in many cases, only time will tell.

However, one area where AI is impacting performance right now is SEO. Google continues to be the dominant search engine in the global market, handling more than 90% of all search queries.

However, the rollout of the Google AI search function has dramatically impacted the user experience and the results for brands and media outlets, with some reporting a 40% increase in search traffic.

Kyle is here to answer the question, will AI be the end of SEO?

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, Podbean, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Podcasts.

I think hold the course for now. Do what you know works and continue to put out what you know works before making any decisions because it is still so new.

Transcription:

Darren:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder, and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management consultancy and welcome to Managing Marketing. A weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to help spread the words of wisdom from our guests each week.

No matter what you’re reading, watching, or listening to, at the moment, everyone in the marketing, media and advertising world is talking about artificial intelligence, AI. Is it an existential threat or a tool to make us more creative, insightful, and effective?

The discussion goes on, and in many cases, only time will tell. But one area where AI is impacting performance right now is SEO. Google continues to dominate search engines in the global market handling more than 90% of all search inquiries.

But the rollout of the Google AI search function has had some dramatic impacts already, not just on the user experience, but on the results for brands and media outlets with some reporting up to 40% drop in search traffic.

My guest today is responsible for the development and implementation of all the SEO techniques used by the SEO agency, High Voltage SEO, and the SEO tool Page Optimizer Pro. He’s also the co-founder of Internet Marketing Gold, a global community of more than 3000 SEO professionals who test and prove cutting edge SEO techniques.

To hopefully answer the question, will AI be the end of SEO, please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, the co-founder of Page Optimizer Pro, Kyle Roof. Welcome, Kyle.

Kyle:

Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Darren:

And you look certainly overqualified, hopefully, to answer this question because if I understand it correctly, you’ve spent a decade literally testing the Google algorithm from an almost scientific or mathematics perspective, haven’t you?

Kyle:

I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying really hard. I’m not a trained scientist, so I can’t say that it’s been completely scientific, but as well as I can do as maybe a highly-ranked amateur, I’ve done what I can with the algorithm.

Darren:

What was it that attracted you to SEO or to search? Because it is in many ways become a almost foundational skill for anyone in marketing and sales, but it’s also something that is often not seen as mainstream.

Kyle:

Initially I got in due to desperation. Very short version, my brother and I had a company where we were in India building websites. And the police shook us down, and the next thing you know, my brother’s in jail in India and we’re hemorrhaging clients because we don’t have employees anymore.

He got out of jail. He is out of jail now and he can code. And so, basically, he’s like, “I can take these four clients and take them and survive.” And I don’t code, I don’t know how to code. And we had just started doing this thing called SEO that I heard about.

And basically, for me to pay their rent next month, I needed to figure out how to do it so I could keep those clients and continue on. And fortunately, it turned out I wasn’t too bad at it. And basically, grew an SEO agency out of that doing freelance work and then meeting my now business partner and forming our agency.

But what I really like about it though, or what’s been really interesting is the problem-solving aspect of it. All sites kind of come from a different spot. They’re all in a different location kind of for what they’re trying to do, and they all have goals.

And it’s kind of like you need to go from A to B, but in SEO that’s a murky path. It’s often not a clear-cut solution on what you need to do. And so, you have to be able to navigate with incomplete information and best guesses and stuff like that. And I feel comfortable in that space and it’s a fun challenge.

And so, I think that’s what after survival mode, after I got past that just then it was very enjoyable. I really enjoy doing it and I’ve enjoyed it for the last decade.

Darren:

Because it really is a bit of a mystery, isn’t it? You can understand why Google, who are the dominant player in the market insist on keeping their algorithms confidential because they say they’re concerned about people gaming the algorithm to get unfair advantage.

But it does lead to people making up all sorts of hypotheses that are never actually tested. And therefore, gets surrounded by all these conjecture and theories that get pedaled around as fact.

Kyle:

That’s rife in the industry simply because people don’t know and most things are not anywhere near any kind of scientific, most things are correlational studies or just observations and deductions based off of observation and nothing beyond that.

And there’s times when people do something and they think they’re doing this, but they might actually be affecting something else. And that’s actually what’s moving the needle. But it’s hard to see, or it’s hard to decipher that that’s what’s going on.

So, yeah, the way the Google has set things up by hiding their proprietary algorithm, yeah, it’s the wild west when it comes to who knows what and what works and what doesn’t, and stuff like that.

Darren:

So, you took a more methodical approach, I believe. You set up some tests to actually try and get some insights into what was happening inside the black box.

Kyle:

Yeah. When I was learning and I would say like, “Should I do this or is this a ranking factor?” And search Google for it, you’d get like three yeses, three no’s, and three maybes and I was like, “That’s not going to help.

And then I realized, I was like, “Oh, everyone’s just putting up their own sites,” so you put up some sites so that you can then try some things. And then I realized that that was kind of slow going. That still didn’t give you an answer.

Because you could put up a site, you could practice and do things, but it still really didn’t tell you, “Should I do that? Is this a ranking factor? Is this something that I should care about?” And one day while searching, I kind of got an idea of, “Is there a place where the sidewalk ends in the algorithm?”

And so, then I put in a nonsense word, just a string of letters and hit go. And I found this page that says, “We don’t have anything that matches this.” And what occurred to me is that if I start building pages for that term that doesn’t exist, then I control that environment.

And then anything that I do, I know I’m only introducing that one thing because nobody else is doing anything to the pages that are ranking for that particular keyword.

And then that gave me a real opportunity to start to test the algorithm where I could put up, say, five pages that were identical, they’re all the same, and then I can change one thing on one page, and I can see if that page moves up, if it moves down, or if it doesn’t move at all. And then I can start to get a feel for if I have a positive factor, a negative factor, or a non-factor.

Darren:

Interesting approach. And actually, you say you’re not a scientist, but it’s actually quite a technical approach to it, isn’t it?

Kyle:

And I actually have a U.S. patent on the method too, so-

Darren:

Nice. So, you’ve actually-

Kyle:

I do have that.

Darren:

So, if anyone tries to copy it, they’ll have to-

Kyle:

I’m not entirely sure how I would enforce the patent, to be honest, but it was pretty cool to get.

Darren:

Well, only just recently in the past couple of weeks Google have had a bit of a leak. There was two and a half thousand documents that were discovered that were all about Google search methodology. Are you across that?

Kyle:

A little bit. It’s a lot to go through and what I’ve read recently are kind of other people’s opinions on it more than anything. So, I will be spending more time in the next couple weeks on it. But what it appears we have are indicators of what factors are out there, what they are measuring.

Now, I think Google will make a claim that maybe they can do something, but they don’t do it. They have the ability to, but they don’t use is what I think the party line is going to have to be.

Darren:

What’s that called? Magicians, call it misdirection, it’s like, “Look over here while we’re over here doing something else.”

Kyle:

Google’s got something to the tune of like 5,000, 6,000 patents, something like that. And the guess is they’re only using 500 or a 1,000 or something like that, that while they have this ability, they don’t do it.

I think that’s what they’re going to claim with all of the factors that show up there. Like, “Sure, I mean, we could use it. I mean, we’re Google, we’re that smart, we just don’t,” and so or you going to misunderstand what we mean by a particular phrase.

Because obviously they don’t define exactly what things are, there’s just the name for the thing. And so, that’s where I think they’re going to going to go with this. So, I mean, they have to save face.

Darren:

What I also … sorry, keep going.

Kyle:

I was going to say on some of the things they’ve said that they don’t use that, it’s not part of the algorithm and then it shows up on this list of factors. So, they’re going to have to say something to say like, “No, we weren’t lying this whole time.”

Darren:

Well, they have come out and said we don’t want anyone to make inaccurate assumptions about search based on these documents because they could be out of context or outdated or incomplete. So, they’re already going back into the behavior of misdirection.

Kyle:

Yeah. I mean, they have to, there’s no way around it, they must say that. Before, we were talking — the person, who is it, Dave Thomas Thompson? Maybe-

Darren:

Yeah, Davis Thompson from Google was the spokesperson that released the information.

Kyle:

I never heard of that person. Where is the search liaison? John Mueller or Gary Illyes, what are those guys? Those are the mouthpieces for Google. And the ones that have said that these things don’t exist or that they’re not factors or anything.

And I mean, they’ve actually really gone on the offensive for some people saying, that I think Google’s doing this as a ranking factor. And they’ve gone on the real offensive on people calling it just complete nonsense. So, now they’re going to say going to say-

Darren:

They have been very controlling. They have been very, very aggressive in protecting it for obvious reasons, one of them being commercial. But they’ve also maintained that all of the algorithm and one of the things I love is you say Google algorithm is an algorithm.

It literally is a set of, in many ways, calculations that gives a ranking of something based on a number of factors. And none of which we know, or we can at least have some insight into.

But one of the one of the things about that is that they say the algorithm’s designed purely to improve the user experience to deliver more correct or more valuable information to the user. That’s always been their justification, hasn’t it?

Kyle:

Yeah. And that’s a pretty generous view from their viewpoint. Google is a corporation, and it exists to make money and Google is a middleman is really what they are. They’re right in the middle of somebody that wants information and somebody that has information and then they make money on that transaction. And they make money on that transaction through ads in the search, through ads on websites.

But then they also make money on the data they collect and the process and it’s kind of some ancillary processes as well. So, I would say that their algorithm is set for you to continue to use it and use it in a way that’s going to make them money, not necessarily to improve results for the sake of improving results.

Darren:

Well, that’s where the AI application comes into the conversation, because we’ve seen Google roll out in many markets an AI function in the search algorithm that is starting to, based on a search term or a search inquiry, collect information and repurpose it from various sites and putting it at the top of the of the search list.

Kyle:

If there aren’t any links, if there’s no attribution, if there’s no citation of where that information is coming from, that’s what’s going to be most problematic for a couple reasons.

One is then they’re just stealing people’s content, which in that bargain where they’re the middleman, if one side is not getting the benefit of that arrangement, that there’s no reason for them to be there. And so, I think they’re going to have to figure out a way to give attribution.

The other thing about if we don’t know where this is coming from you won’t be able to verify if it’s true or not. One thing that’s nice about getting 10 results is you can go through the results and decide for yourself what you think is the best answer. What is the best approach to whatever your question or your situation is.

So, if you have no way to evaluate that information, because as we know the AI hallucinates a lot. It makes up stuff because it’s not looking … that’s the biggest thing. It’s not looking for the answer, it’s trying to guess at the right words that should come next for what you’ve asked it.

And as a result, it’ll make up something to make you happy. It’s a people pleaser. I don’t know how their “AI” and I use quotes because it’s not AI, it’s a language model. I don’t know how it’s doing it right now and that’s something that we’re going to start playing with a lot.

Once we can see what the results are, consistently what’s showing up, then we can figure out where it’s coming from and how they’re pulling it out. That’s really what we’re going to be focusing on in the next several months.

But right now, we don’t really know. I mean, it’s possible it’s not anything AI at all or a language model that it’s just another round of Python.

Darren:

And it is one of the problems with a lot of these language models, the LLMs are taking huge amounts of copyright intellectual property to actually build the model in the first place, often without attribution.

And there’s now quite a few cases, particularly from the content creators saying, “Where are we going to be rewarded or compensated for stealing our IP?”

Kyle:

And my guess is that they won’t be. Unlikely that they’re going to be compensated at least as they were before.

Darren:

And this is where we’re seeing reports coming that brands and for marketers that’s a big issue. Brands, but also the publishers themselves, the media owners that have relied on search to drive traffic to their websites for them to actually get advertising dollars are seeing huge drops reported as I said, up to 40%.

It’s in danger of actually killing the very reason that people do search, isn’t it? Or do you think users will be just happy to get a summary created by a language model or an AI of the information they’re looking for?

Kyle:

The end user doesn’t care, they’re going to use Google. And if they continue to get answers that they like, they’re going to continue to use it.

Well, I always like to ask somebody, I ask my dad, he’s 66, “What do you think of the new stuff in Google?” And you know what his response is, “What new stuff?” And he’s like, “What are you talking about? I just search, I find my thing and I go.” For him it’s just more like a design change. It’s not anything that’s impactful.

And really the only people that complain about Google results are SEOs and then people that have an ax to grind after that, people use it and like it. So, I always throw some feelers out to some family members that are not necessarily experienced marketers and get their feedback on it. It’s usually pretty eye-opening.

They might complain a little bit, but I doubt they’re going to complain any more than they were complaining before. The interesting thing about a 40% haircut, that’s rough. When featured snippets came out many years ago, people were calling that the death of SEO and that Google was just going to take that information.

And I think maybe the haircut was something to the tune of 10%. But then people also realized it was really good to get into the featured snippet and then from that time search has grown, so that loss has been absorbed.

And it’s more so like there’s more search and people are using more. Because probably they like the results and that brings more people to the product. I imagine we’re going to see something like that with this, although this seems a bit of a disaster of a rollout for the last few things from Google.

Darren:

To say the least, and look, the reason I say that is, one is there’s no attribution at the moment. And so, we’re getting reports of things like how do you keep the cheese on pizza, use glue. Because I think Google’s searching the whole of the internet.

They’ve probably gone down some Reddit group and found someone that — or eat stones or put stones on it and things like that. The quality of that information is so important. Mind you, your point about your dad saying, “I just search and get going,” the thing is, the value equation’s actually very low because users don’t pay for it, do they?

Kyle:

Right. I mean, there has to be that transaction made on that information obtained. And I have a hard time believing they’re going to leave it as is without some sort of revenue generation that has to come from that area.

And if they’re doing that, if they’re putting ads in there that have links, because an ad would have to have a link in order to be anything … it’s not a billboard. They’re just going back to paper billboards as a system.

So, there’s going to have to be some links in order, I think for ads to be there. And then attribution links must be around that it will for the other cards, or it just doesn’t make any sense to me. And they’re not going to lose money, I promise.

They’re not, they’re sharp. They’re sharp people over there. They’re going to figure out a way to make money off of it. So, we don’t know what the end result is. To the 40% though, something that I wanted to mention and if that’s true, I feel very bad for them.

I wonder what terms those are though. What types of terms are they losing? Is it kind of top of the funnel type stuff informational queries? Is it transactional queries? Because they’re showing more products or services in the SERPs?

Is it branded search where people might not be searching for their brand specifically? It’s important to qualify what type of traffic that is because some sites can take a 40% haircut and it’s not going to affect their bottom line because that traffic wasn’t doing anything for them.

Darren:

They’re probably bouncing as soon as they hit the page.

Kyle:

And then they might not have been getting qualified views for their ads or anything like that. So, it would be interesting to see what type of traffic that they’re losing based on what the AI overlay is actually doing.

Darren:

There’s already major concerns about quality of news found online and news seems to be the big issue. You can now go into Google and type, “What’s the news in Gaza?” And now get a summary of the news stories presented to you at the top of the search.

Kyle:

One can see how that would be problematic. I started university in 1997, and we were talking about how we’re going into a postmodern informational age, and we’re talking about how amazing it’ll be when once everyone has access to information where anybody can go online and then provide information, provide what’s going on, like a firsthand account of say, what’s going on in a war area.

What we didn’t realize is that people would make stuff up. We didn’t realize that there would be bad act — it literally never occurred to us that there would be bad actors that would go on and it would give false information.

And in fact, by having this ability for anybody to go on and say anything and pretend to be something, we didn’t realize what a mess this whole thing was going to be. So, I just mentioned that it’s who knows what-

Darren:

This optimism of youth. So, we just think everyone will do the right thing.

Kyle:

I am more cynical now, but on the other hand maybe it swings the other way. Maybe when you’ve got an AI with relatively little bias, maybe you can actually, and it comes down to a single source, maybe that becomes better. I don’t know.

So, at first glance, it seems problematic that they’re going to be the arbiter of truth. But on the other hand, maybe it could actually turn out to be a good thing because you can clear out a lot of the noise and a lot of people that are intentionally bad actors.

Darren:

Now, you don’t actually believe that AI is going to have a hugely negative impact on SEO that you don’t believe it’s going to kill SEO as a skill or a discipline?

Kyle:

Not yet. Not yet. I do think it’s just going to be another form of optimization. I think a lot of people that do SEO don’t really think about the why of what we’re trying to do. They don’t really think about the marketing of it that we’re marketers.

They’ve mastered a technique or two and AI might kill that technique. And then when that happens, they don’t know what to do. And they will say, “Oh, SEO is dead,” and SEO isn’t dead. That particular technique might not work anymore.

But I see that this is more opportunity. We’re going to have to figure out how to optimize to get into those areas and optimize for wherever we’re trying to get traffic. And that’s what we’re doing. SEO is like the really thing that I think that it can impact our impressions, potential views of the site. Now that’s what we can impact the most.

Then by extension that turns into clicks and then by extension that turns into sales but it’s impressions. And so, wherever the impressions are, wherever people are as long as it’s an algorithm that’s placing those things there, then that’s something that can be optimized.

The only time we’re done is if it’s a board of humans that’s actually manually curating the results. But otherwise, if there’s an algorithm behind it, and that’s what all of this is, then there will still be optimization.

Darren:

But a true AI and you called out the differentiation before between a language model and an AI doesn’t necessarily have a defined algorithm. I mean, it has rules, but it learns and rewrites those, doesn’t it, based on feedback.

Kyle:

Yeah. But I mean, it’s not value judging and you know that it’s not a human, it doesn’t have an opinion. It still has to do things in the way that it was designed to do them. And it’s going to work within a certain parameters regardless of how much it learns. And again, quotes on the learning.

Darren:

When you talk about particular techniques, you mean, so many people getting around selling backlinks and all that sort of stuff. Is that the type of thing that will finally die?

Kyle:

No. I predict backlinks might become more valuable because the sites that are doing well after the last couple of Google updates are for lack of a better term, DR so like domain rating types, how much a third-party metric has valued your site in terms of the links that you’re getting in.

The sites that have done the best are the ones with the highest DR which tells me that I think, well, I know that links are still part of it. That’s a bunch of tests we’ve run recently just to make sure that links are still moving the needle and pushing rank. But you could make the argument that Google will evaluate links better.

So, something in that list, in the document list was evaluating good clicks and bad clicks on links as a way to measure link strength, which is something that I’ve been talking about for forever. I’ve always thought if you could measure clicks on a link, you could see if that’s a valuable link or not. If that link was purchased just for the sake of being, or if it’s a link that’s providing value to the web.

Because people are actively clicking on it, and that’s actually in that document. And so, you could make the argument links can become more valuable if they can do that at scale, where they can actually evaluate.

Because links are votes and this is actually a good vote. This is good content. This is content that I should have in the SERPs. People are nominating this content. Like which was the original concept for Google back when it was BackRub when they came out. So, I could see links actually not going away, but becoming more valuable.

Darren:

One of the other applications of AI is being to build websites that are for advertising only. So, they’re actually building them to scrape and collect data from everywhere else and build a website that is purely designed to drive traffic and sell ads. Do you see that as a risk for SEO and I don’t mean the SEO of those sites, I mean for other players.

Kyle:

This isn’t a new problem; it’s just more people have access to it. But there have been mass page builders for a very long time that do this, that spin content, buildup 10,000 pages at once and you go and you can build them at scale, hundreds, thousands a day. You could do this through a WordPress plugin.

WordPress is one of the more common website builders. It’s the most common website builder in the world and there’s a plugin you can use to actually do this for you. So, it’s that low level of technology.

AI might make it a little bit easier for some people. Because there are opportunities where there’s absolutely just no code necessary, just kind of ask, if you have the right prompt, you can do it right. But what Google ends up doing is they handle this in two ways.

One is if they get any red flags that you’ve done this, they just stop crawling your site. So, they handle it through crawl budget. And then the other thing that they do is they would, the emails that get attached to that, they shut down the ads or their ad revenue. So, they make it economically and feasible to go forward.

Like you spent the money and the time, but you’re not making any money off of it. So, it might take a bit time, but they hold money for I think, 90 days on ad revenue. And that’s giving them time to catch you is really what it is.

Because then when they catch you, they hold all that money. They don’t give you the money and then say no more. They hold it for that amount of time. So, this has been a problem that has been for a very long time within SEO, and I think they’ve got some mechanisms to handle that, and I think they’ll be okay.

Darren:

So, as an overview, you see the application of AI is actually going to improve SEO or at least improve the players in the marketplace in the short term.

Kyle:

It gives an opportunity to make more money. I would point out though that people think that with an AI, they will instantly do good SEO and all the AI does, it speeds things up. So, if you’re bad at SEO, it’s going to help you do bad SEO faster, that’s all it’s going to do for you. It’s not going to instantly make you good at something.

So, there’s opportunity to make a lot of money, I think. There’s an opportunity to provide services. There’s an opportunity to build better websites. There’s an opportunity to get a larger share of voice, I think.

But just the existence of it is not going to make SEO better, in the same way, it’s not going to kill SEO. It is just another tool. It’s another thing to do. It’s another function. And if you can figure it out, I think there’s real opportunity.

Darren:

I overheard a conversation earlier this week at a AI conference for marketing and advertising. It was two agency leaders and one said, “This is great. AI’s going to be able to allow us to produce a lot more content much faster and cheaper.”

And the other one said, “Yeah, but we have to be careful. We’re not just producing more crap.” And the guy looked at him curiously and said, “What more crap than what we’re producing at the moment.”

Kyle:

As though, right now they’re producing Pulitzer prize winning content.

Darren:

They’re producing gold and suddenly it’ll turn into fool’s gold. It is an issue, isn’t it?

Kyle:

People romanticize the past. And even if the past was yesterday, remember the good old days when we were writing that great content.

Darren:

Well, it’s a problem particularly for advertising. Because today the demand, you know, we tracked back in 2004, a brand was typically producing 250 pieces of work a year. And now it’s over two and a half thousand because of the number of channels and the high demand for just constantly refreshing.

I mean, one of the things AI will do is at least find a way of speeding up the process. It won’t necessarily make it better, but it’ll certainly speed it up.

Kyle:

You wonder, because when we talk about topical coverage. Do you think when you’re talking, when you’re writing about something, I do feel like you can cover a topic and there’s no point in going any farther. And from an SEO perspective, you’re not going to get any benefit.

So, what do you think about, you went from that 200 number to the 2000 number, but it kind of might be world population where it kind of rounds out at a certain point. So, like, yeah, maybe we get it to 3000, but that’s as high as it goes.

It rounds out because there’s no point in actually, even though you can create more content, there’s no point in having it. There’s no benefit to it.

Darren:

Well, yeah. So, when is more clutter, just more clutter and not actually making a difference. And that’s probably the thing that everyone’s trying to come to terms with.

Do you have any view of what people should be doing in the short term with SEO? Because I know a lot of marketers have a substantial investment in SEM, but they also have an SEO function on almost every website that they own. What should they be looking for?

Kyle:

Well, one thing that I’ve been doing the last two, three months is rerunning all the old tests. One of the big things are like with AI, Google’s not looking at tags anymore, HTML tags, and H tags don’t matter. They’re all past that. Links don’t matter anymore, that sort of thing.

And I’ve rerun all my old tests and it all still works. Like nothing in the algorithm has actually changed in terms of how they’re approaching it. So, the thing I would caution against would be trying to change everything.

I think hold the course for now. Do what you know works and continue to put out what you know works before making any decisions because it is still so new. I would then start to look for patterns in what you see in the AI overlay. What shows up, where is it coming from?

Start taking notes as to where that information’s coming from so you can kind of get a feel for where that is. And then we can start working on new forms of optimization for that. But meanwhile, hold tight, don’t freak out. Don’t hit the panic button just yet.

Everything that was working before is still working. If the people though, that are in trouble right now are the people that got hit by the la one of the last two updates, because there’s been no meaningful recovery for any of those sites.

Which is a first, I’ve never seen this before, where you go, eight, nine months with no recovery for anybody. So, those sites are in trouble, and they need to figure something else out. Because that traffic is probably not coming back, at least not in the near future.

But if your site made it through or you’re starting a brand-new site, all the stuff that worked before is working and don’t worry about that.

Darren:

Interesting. Because perhaps some of the reporting that we’re getting of site traffic dropping is also as much about the last two updates as it is the AI. Maybe it’s a perfect storm of changes.

Kyle:

Well, it usually takes months to be able to identify. And I mean, they do make announcements on when their updates and stuff like that, but it usually takes a while to identify, “Okay, these types of sites got hit here, what is it?”

Because it’s hard to see in the moment, but yeah, that 40% drop could have just been the March core update and it took until April, end of April for the thing to end probably and the ripples through and it takes time for all that to settle. So, what might be they think is an AI issue is actually just a last update.

Darren:

Someone said that, and you raised the point earlier that Google is a publicly listed corporation with shareholders demanding return on investment, almost exclusively, their revenue comes from advertising. The advertising is based on traffic, on people clicking and viewing pages.

What’s their incentive anyway for not just generating as much of their own content as possible from everyone else’s? Because in some ways they then eliminate the need to have other websites.

Kyle:

The contract is that they’ll need new content, is the idea. So, they could steal everything now and maybe for the next year they would be able to do that. But new events happen. New things happen. New technology happens, new trends happen. And they need all that content on people who are in those particular niches looking at all the new stuff and writing about it and talking about it. And they wouldn’t have that.

They still need people who are sitting in, they’re in those weird niches and out in the middle of wherever and they’re just not going to be able to cover any of that. And there are people that are searching for those things.

So, I think that they could, if they were to steal everything right now, it’d be a pretty short-term play because the balls will keep bouncing.

Darren:

There seems to always be someone wanting to create something. As you said before, we never knew that people were just going to make it up, so they’ll keep making it up.

Kyle:

We were so young and innocent.

Darren:

But how cynical we’ve become. Life has a habit of doing that.

Kyle:

It does indeed.

Darren:

Kyle Roof, it’s been fantastic having this conversation with you. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to come and talk about SEO.

It’s terrific that you’re so optimistic because every time someone talks about AI, they tend to be either disaster-prone or fearful. It’s good to hear from someone who actually sees opportunities. So, thank you very much.

Kyle:

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Darren:

I have just one question: I’m starting a new website. What would you recommend as the first step?

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Answering The Question Will AI Be The Death Of SEO?

I think hold the course for now. Do what you know works and continue to put out what you know works before making any decisions because it is still so new.

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I think hold the course for now. Do what you know works and continue to put out what you know works before making any decisions because it is still so new.

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