Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast - EP 191: AI Search Takeover - The End of Traditional SEO + Web Browsing?

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

Traditional SEO is going to die. The way we all use the internet is going to drastically change. Why? Because AI search is here. So what effect do AI and LLM chatbots have on the future of traditional web searching? We're diving in.Newsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode pageJoin the discussion: Ask Jordan questions on AI searchUpcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: [e-mail] with Jordan on LinkedInTimestamps:02:30 Daily AI news06:40 Jordan's background in SEO12:01 Utilize Google's SGE, ChatGPT, perplexity.14:01 Stack Overflow: open forum for developers.18:08 Big publishers suing OpenAI over copyrighted content.20:22 ChatGPT's usage has skyrocketed, generated significant organic traffic.25:56 SEO experts emphasize content volume for ranking.29:31 Online platforms consuming content without generating traffic.32:03 Companies forced to prioritize ad revenue over user experience.37:02 Underused generative AI; personalized content saves time.37:40 MIT study on AI replacing human jobs.43:49 SEO focus shifting to voice and AI.45:29 Consider partnerships or join content publishers' union.48:02 Google's AI search fills screen, discouraging scrolling.Topics Covered in This Episode:1. The Future of SEO and Web Browsing2. Impact of AI and Voice Search on Traditional SEO3. Usage and Benefits of AI Search Engines4. Legal Issues and Partnerships between AI Companies and PublishersKeywords:SEO, AI, traditional SEO, Accelerant Agency, white hat SEO, local service-based businesses, AI features, Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, AI platforms, publishers, legal action, OpenAI, The New York Times, traditional news publishers, recipe search, perplexity, web browsing, lawsuits, partnerships, AI companies, personalization, ad revenue, publishers, browsing experience, retargeting ads, push notifications, video ads, excessive ads, unsustainable browsing experience.Send Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Start Here ▶️Not sure where to start when it comes to AI? Start with our Start Here Series. You can listen to the first drop -- Episode 691 -- or get free access to our Inner Cricle community and all episodes: StartHereSeries.com Also, here's a link to the entire series on a Spotify playlist. 

This is the Everyday AI Show, the Everyday Podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in Adobe Firefly, the All In One Creative AI Studio. Just describe what you want to create and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome. The assistant accelerates execution. Traditional SEO is going to die.

And the way that we all use the internet is going to drastically change. We're going to talk about those things today and more on Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. My name's Jordan Wilson and I am the host of Everyday AI. And this is for you. This is your guide every single day to learn. generative AI and to leverage it. That's what we're all about at everyday AI. So thank you for joining us. If you're new here, make sure look in the podcast notes. If you're listening on the podcast,

we always have related shows and more resources for you. And if you're joining us on the live stream, thank you for joining us. Make sure to get your questions in today about what your thoughts are on SEO, about the future of using the internet, all of these things. So if you're joining us live like Brian checking in here from Minnesota or Tara checking in here, here from Nashville. Thanks for joining us. But I want to hear your thoughts. Has the way that you used the web changed? Do you think SEO is still going to be here? We're going to tackle both those things. But first, as we do every single day, let's take a look at the AI news. And if you haven't already, go to your everyday AI.com and sign up for the free daily newsletter because

we're going to be recapping today's conversation. We always have, we always go over some high-level points of the AI news, but we always have a lot more in the newsletter. We have what's called fresh finds, which is where we find different interesting things from all over the internet that relate to AI as well as we always take a deeper dive into the episode each single day in our free daily newsletter. So we're going to be throwing a lot of information on this one today. So make sure you go check that out. And I tell people, it's like a free generative AI university. We have now almost 190 different episodes that you can dive into, whatever you care about, whether it's, you know, sales, productivity, enterprise, you know, governance, right?

Like whatever angle of AI that you care about, we have probably a handful or dozens of episodes in each of those categories. So make sure you go check that out. But it's highlight what's going on in the world of AI news, shall we? All right. So a deep fake of President Joe Biden told voters to skip the New Hampshire primary and it's causing a lot of concerns. So voters in in New Hampshire recently received robocalls featuring an AI-generated voice claiming to be U.S. President Biden. I listened to it. It didn't sound very good, but it could fool some people. But this voice urged voters not to participate in today's primary, sparking an investigation by the Attorney General's office. This incident highlights the growing use of AI and political propaganda, including the creation of deepfakes that can generate fake voices and manipulate media.

You know, I've been talking about this on the everyday AI show for literally since probably the first episode last year that this was going to be a huge problem specifically for the 2024 elections here in the U.S. Just wait. It's going to get nasty. We're going to be seeing stories like this probably on a daily basis or an hourly basis as we get closer and closer, especially to the November 2024 election. Next piece of AI news. So the U.S. Department of Defense has updated its directive on AI, which hadn't been updated in 10 years. So this updated directive on AI is aimed at clarifying and regulating the development and use of autonomous weapon systems. So this update was prompted by a lot of growing concerns and controversies surrounding the use of AI and military applications because many feared that the Department of Defense was building killer robots. So this updated directive adds stricter review policies for the development and approval of autonomous weapon systems largely impacted by AI.

So specifically, it does require that autonomous weapons systems be approved by multiple senior officials before development of any such weapons can start. So if you want to read more about that, make sure to check it out in our newsletter. Last but not least, a Chinese startup is making some waves. So this Chinese startup called 0.1.aI, I believe that's what it is, is reportedly testing off the charts when it comes to large language models. So according to a wired report, this little-known startup from Beijing, 01.aI has released an open access model that outperforms Lama 2, which is leading open source. large language model from meta. So the model itself is called E-V-L, so Y-I-V-L, and it has received some of the highest marks using the popular MM-MU benchmarking method, which is the multimodal understanding and reasoning, one of the most popular benchmarking test out there that essentially says, hey, can this large

language model reason similar to a human? So the model from 0.01.a.I., called Y-I-V-L, received the highest marks on that MMMU benchmark outside of the GPT4 model from OpenAI. So very interesting news there out of that little known startup. I hadn't heard of them until just read the article this morning. So if you're joining us live, thank you. You know, Josh from Dallas tuning in, Maybrit, thank you for joining us. As always, talking about using Google versus chat GPT. We're going to get into it. Megan, Megan knows with the flame emojis. It is hot take Tuesday, y'all. Let me know how hot today's hot take should be. This is a new, little new segment that we started in in 2024 to keep things spicy. We do our news that matters every single Monday. So kind of recapping, but also forecasting ahead and cutting through the fluff. And then hot take Tuesday, I just come with some fire takes, right? A lot of people in AI, or just,

out there in marketing and advertising are just wrong about a lot of things. And I like to set them straight. So that's what we do on Hot Take Tuesday. So let me start here. Let me start here. All right. Tara says a lot of flame emojis. So we're going to pump up the volume.

So let me first explain my background. Some of you know, some of you don't. But technically, like, so if we're talking about even SEO, right? Because this is ultimately about. what this is, right? Now we have these AI search, right? We have the search generative experience or SGE from Google. You know, we obviously, people are using chat GPT a lot more to find information that they would otherwise maybe use the web. And then perplexity, right? Perplexity, I love perplexity. It's fantastic. You know, it's an AI search. It, you know, when it returns, you know, information to

you, sometimes it cites up to 20 plus sources. You don't have to. to read those 20 plus articles. So real quick on my background, I've technically been doing SEO, you know, for 10 to 15 years pretty routinely. But my first foray, I'll tell a little quick story here, my first foray into SEO was actually when I was like 14, right, built my first website. So that was, I don't want to age myself, but that was a quarter century ago. And that was my first taste of SEO. So I built a simple website and then I, you know, there's all these rankings, right? I think it was like geo cities, if any of you remember, geocities. And just me being naturally curious, I'm like, okay, how does this work? How can I go higher on this list of, you know,

Geo cities, rankings? And I found out early on that, you know, SEO, a lot of it's just gaming the system. So I game the system and, you know, at the time it was very easy. You just put a bunch of keywords in the, you know, in the footer of the website and, you know, hid them in different colors and you know, you did all this things, but, you know, soon enough, you know, my website was number one on this list. But I have been doing actual legitimate SEO, you know, if you know much about search engine optimization, there's things called, you know, white hat and black hat, right? So white hat is when you do things the right way, you do them correct. Black hat is, you know, when you're doing things shiasty and all you're trying to do

is game the system. So, you know, obviously we do white hat SEO and we've been doing this for clients at my main company, Accelerant Agency now for almost five years. You know, we've had a handfuls of clients that we just do SEO for them. And I'm talking big websites, y'all, that have millions, millions of organic visits. Yes, millions with an S. And I've helped, you know, those companies usually 30 to 40 percent growth over, you know, six months. So it's, I know what I'm doing in SEO, right? then doing it off and on. You know what?

My previous role at a nonprofit, that's one of the other things that I did is I made sure that we showed up in search results. I had of anyone else that was looking to volunteer in Chicago, right? That's a big one. We showed up first. So I have the background, right? I know what SEO is. I know how it works.

But I also am a huge AI enthusiast, right? Generative AI. I have a daily podcast and live stream and newsletter about AI. So I want you to know when I say these things and when I come off with these hot takes, I'm not biased, right? Similar to the, you know, my first hot take Tuesday of the year when I talked about Open AI in the New York Times. You know, I was a journalist. I was a journalist as well. I've worn a couple different hats in my day.

So I'm always going to be very upfront with you. I have no, no one's paying me to say one thing or the other. All right. But let me just start with the hot take. Traditional SEO is going to die very soon. Yep. Sorry, SEO's out there. I'm connected with a lot of you on social media and you say, you know, oh, SEO's not going anywhere.

Yeah, it is. Traditional SEO is going to die very soon. What's going to happen? I have some ideas and we're going to be laying that out throughout the rest of this show. That's number one. I don't think it's going to be every single area of SEO, though. So I do think one area of SEO that's still going to, quote, unquote, live on for at least a couple more years is when you're searching for local service-based businesses, right? I think that is still something, you know, especially when you're, you know, opening Google Maps and you maybe search for restaurants, right?

Like that is a form of local SEO. So I do think that local service-based businesses, if you're hearing me say this, don't worry, I don't think SEO is going to change very much. But for everyone else, right, if you're looking for a new camera handstrap to buy, or if you're looking for a pancake recipe, right, something like that. All of those publishers on the other end traditionally are huge companies, probably making millions of dollars. That is the SEO that I'm talking about is going to die.

It is going to change. And that obviously is going to boil over to the rest of us. How we use the Internet. If you haven't already changed the way that you use the Internet, I'm telling you this right now. Start doing it differently. If you're still just opening up Google.com and if you're not using, as an example, Google's SGE features, or if you're not searching within chat, GBT, or if you're not searching within perplexity, you are potentially wasting. dozens with an S, dozens of hours a week, right?

If a big part of your role, because hey, this is what we're all about here at everyday AI. We're helping you grow your company and grow your careers by using generative AI. And if you are still manually searching things, and if research is a big part of your role, which it is for a lot of people, right? A lot of people maybe spend, you know, three, four, five hours a day researching and reading. Okay. researching and reading, if you're not already doing those things by using either SGE from Google, chat GPT with plugins, or perplexity, let me repeat this again, you are wasting potentially

dozens of hours a day. I've done dedicated episodes on just how to do those things. All right. So if you are getting questions in, I'm going to try to get to them. So, you know, trip, I'm going to try to get to your question. later. But yeah, if you do have questions, make sure to get them in now because I'm going to, I'm going to dive in here. All right, I'm going to dive in here. So let's first look at how website traffic is being impacted. Okay. So we're kind of going to start at the end. So one of the biggest cases of this is Stack Overflow. All right. So probably about a month or so after chat GPT was released, there was a lot of stories that talked about how stack overflow is losing

so much of its traffic, right? So if you're not familiar with what stack overflow is, it's for geeks like me, right? I used to spend a lot of time on stack overflow, but it's essentially an open forum where very smart developers go and they help each other troubleshoot things, right? So highly technical things on web, web design, web development, coding, right? So very technical things. It's essentially an open forum where there's just some of the, literally some of the smartest people in the world solving some of the hardest problems when it comes to web design, web development, coding, et cetera.

All right. So one of the big stories that came out, you know, in like March or April of last year. So about six to eight weeks after, you know, chat GPT was kind of popularized, right, in early 2023. There's all these stories. And Stack Overflow was one of the biggest, I guess, early casualties. And at the time, they said Stack Overflow saw a 14% drop in traffic month over month from March to April 2023.

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people literally stop talking about like, oh, you know, all these big websites are losing traffic, right? Unless you work at a huge publishing company, you're probably not talking about this. But we need to talk about it because it wasn't just a 14% one-time month-over-month drop. All right. So if you're listening on the podcast, I'm sharing some things on my screen. So you can always check in the show notes and come back and watch this on LinkedIn and interact with others. but I have two different screenshots here that I just took this morning, so they're fresh, fresh hot off the press, right?

So this is looking at Stack Overflows Traffic. Okay. So I'm using Semrush that gives you, Semrush is a tool that gives you estimates on organic traffic based on where companies kind of rank in different search engine results page or SERPs. So pre-chat GPT, Stack Overflow is getting roughly 71 million. organic traffic a month. So 71 million hits, organic hits to their website. All right.

So now, as of January of this year, it is on pace for 23 million. Okay. So about a third, which is unheard of, right? If you're in the SEO world or if you know know about, you know web analytics, that is not normal. right? It's not normal. Because Stack Overflow for, four years had been growing a very passionate, you know, base. They didn't just, you know, shoot up to 71 million users overnight. It took a very long time for them to provide this forum, well, well policed, well regulated forum, where people can go and get helpful answers. But now so many of those things you can do within

chat, GPT. You're trying to debug some code. You can use the kind of code, interpreter feature inside chat GPT, right? Or if you're looking for specific information on, you know, the, on certain programming languages. You might go in there previously and read a couple threads on Stack Overflow, but now you can just go to Perplexity and get them all laid out for you in an instant. All right. So this, yeah, Frank, Frank saying here, Stack Overflow versus Chat GPT has become a mean. Yeah. It's not even, it's not even, it's not even clear. close anymore. It's not even close anymore. You know, most people, unfortunately, aren't going to the same websites that they used to, or at least I'd say early adopters, right? People who are

really using this technology like Open AI's chat GPT, like, you know, Google Bard, you know, Microsoft being like people are just going to these websites instead, these AI chats because smart people have quickly found out it saves them time, right? it saves them time. So there's obviously the bigger question here. So we're going to get into this, but I'm going to throw it out now. So what's happening now is there's a lot of lawsuits, right?

Because now big publishers are saying, hey, large language model company, you've gobbled up my copyrighted information, and now you're just serving it to your users without linking to us or without citing us, right? So I talked about this on the first hot take Tuesday of the year, you know, the New York Times is seeking unspecified amounts, but billions with an S, billions of dollars and damages from Open AI. It'll probably settle, but, you know, they allege

that Open AI used millions of their articles to train its database, essentially, and they're seeking billions of dollars. So I talked about this before, so I'm not going to talk about it very long. the future of how we use the internet and the future of SEO, a lot of it is actually pegged on that decision. What's going to happen there? Right. I don't think it's actually going to go to trial. I do think it will be settled out of court.

But presumably, I do think it's going to be one of the largest settlements potentially ever, right? They're seeking billions with an ass. Are they going to, is the New York Times going to get that? Probably not. They're probably going to get a. shocking amounts, maybe undisclosed, but they're going to get a shocking amount of money. And that's going to set off a chain reaction, all right? Because so many large publishers are watching to see what happens.

And again, y'all, this affects all of us. All of these different websites you go to or maybe don't go to anymore and now you're using an AI search, they're all going to be impacted, right? Some of them may not be able to wait around to see the verdict. Some of them may be going out of business. Some small ones have gone out of business already. And they've said, hey, all this information now, you can ask an AI chat. And it's gone.

And they might not have the money to fight, you know, these big tech conglomerates, you know, with trillion dollar market caps or that are doing, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. They don't have the money to fight it. All right. So let's keep this going. Let's look at perplexity, right? Because we've all, it's been very well established. that chat GPT's, you know, usage has skyrocketed, right?

You know, 100 million users over the course of like weeks when normally it takes like a decade or more, right? And now, you know, I'm looking at the traffic here, about 200 million organic traffic every single month right now from Open AI. which makes it one of the, you know, chat chbt, which makes it one of the largest websites in the world. But let's even look at perplexity as an example, right? Perplexity has gone from like zero to a million users, right? Or at least a million in organic traffic, again, according to Sumrush.

These tools are fairly accurate, but it's not to a T. But, you know, essentially what this is showing here on the screen is an upward trend, right? All of the big news publishers, their traffic is. all going down, nose dive. And then you have the perplexities and the chat GPT of the world that are literally going from hardly nothing to millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users. Instantly. So let's talk about what this looks like.

And we're going to look at it from both perspectives. I wanted to tackle two things on this hot take Tuesday. I wanted to talk about SEO, right? Start engine optimization. And there's literally millions of people who do this for a living. right this is one thing that you know my company accelerant agency does we primarily work with local service-based businesses and I did that on purpose because I saw even two years ago that the way search works is going to change right so we stopped taking on you know big you know big

SEO clients that wanted you know their their products or you know let's actually just look at an example and then maybe this will make sense right let's say The SEO for a large cooking network as an example, right? Huge. This is huge. You know, so many, you know, whether it's recipe websites or, you know, cooking channels, a huge majority of their traffic comes from people looking for recipes. Okay?

So here's what happens when I go into chat GPT. And here's what I say. Please give me an easy pancake recipe to make from scratch, which I did for the first time, like a month ago. And I looked at my wife and I'm like, why haven't I been doing this all along? It's actually so easy, right? But please make, so I said, please give me an easy pancake recipe to make from scratch. Include all ingredients and instructions.

Please find them simplest recipe with as few ingredients as possible, right? Right. Right forward. And then I get this output from chat GPT. It gives me an ingredients list. There's all my ingredients there. You know, my one cup of flour and two tablespoons of sugar, et cetera. And then it gives me all the instructions as well.

Simple. straightforward. All right. So instead, I clicked on the first result in Google. So I typed in Easy pancake recipe, simple ingredients, right? So it brought me to this website, allrecipes.com. So if you're watching with me live, you can, you will be able to see and understand this, but let me try to describe this for the audience. All right. So first, I have to, I'm greeted with a cookie banner, right? Not the kind of cookies you eat, but the kind that say, yes, website, you can store my information, et cetera. Okay, so I have to agree to the cookies first. Next, ready? This is actually real. I just did this this morning. Okay. So after I click accept cookies,

I am freaking bombarded, bombarded with notifications, right? So first I get a browser notification saying, you know, all recipe wants to send me push notifications and I have to block or allow. Then I have a large above the fold banner ad from fidelity, right? So I'm getting retargeted for things. Okay, so I have a big fidelity retargeting banner. And then on the side, there's something. for Disney, right? So I have one notification. I have two banner ads. And then there's also a video,

a video ad. You know, I don't even know what this is. It's some video about website conversions, right? I'm a dork, so that's the kind of stuff I look at. So when I, after I have to click accept cookies, and I go on the page and guess what is not anywhere to be found on my screen? anything about an easy pancake recipe. There is nothing. There is absolutely nothing on my screen at that time that tells me anything about how to make pancakes. It's a lot of push notifications in three different adverts.

All right. That's not even including there's a separate one, a full pop-up screen ad that I don't even think I took a screenshot up. All right? And then you have to scroll down for forever. right, to actually get the information that I want. And this is where SEO comes into play. Because SEOs, that's what they're called.

If you don't know, you know, they don't call themselves SEO specialists, but SEOs, they've learned over the past decade and a half that Google likes it when you have a ton of content on your page. Okay. So if on your recipe page, if all you put was what chat GPT put, which is here's the ingredients and here's the instructions, you know, maybe 200 words, that website is not going to rank in Google, right? So there's all these programs and they're going to say, oh, to rank for this, you need,

you know, 2,000 words. You need, you know, eight H2 headlines. So you need eight different sections, right? So what, unfortunately, how the internet has been built over the last 10 or 15 years, and I've been a part of this, right? Yeah, if my client wants to rank for something, I know I have to write a ton of content. in order to show up on Google. When in the end, all people need is that one little paragraph, right?

That one little list. So this is obviously causing a problem for publishers. A huge problem. Okay? So showing a screenshot here from the Wall Street Journal saying news publishers see Google's AI search tool as a traffic destroying nightmare. Right? And it is.

And it is. all of these tools. So not just Google's SGE, right? So if you haven't used that yet, it is, it's when Google gives you a suggestion. And it kind of answers your query for you, but by using different kind of results. Right. So it's going to take, just like perplexity does, it's going to take different aspects of the search results. It's going to pick and, pick and choose, you know,

oh, these couple things from this article, these couple of things from this article. And it's just going to give you a result there. Right. But this is driving down clicks. So this one goes out to all my all my SEOs out there, all my technical dorky people, because for four years now, you know, Google has had something called, you know, like a knowledge graph or, you know, people also ask, right? So that was a great way that you could get a relatively unknown website up there, right? Like if you show up in this, you know, knowledge graph or, you know, people call it like position zero. It's when you search for something and Google previously would just put, you know, your answer up there, but it would always link to it. And that link would be very

prominent. All right. So that was called position zero. And SEOs would love that. I personally didn't like it because, hey, I found when our clients were in position one versus position zero, sometimes in studies show this. When that came there, people didn't click on it, right? They would just scroll down and maybe click on the next one. But now what we're seeing is people aren't clicking at all. People aren't clicking at all. And that's a big problem.

It's a big problem because now you have all these publishing companies that, let's say this quiet part out loud, They're the ones that built large language models technically, right? Because all large language models are is they've ingested the entirety of the open and closed internet into their database. They just swallow up all this contents, right? Whether it's copyrighted or not, they're eating up every single piece of content. So then when I go and ask chat GPT something, in theory, it knows the answer because it's gobbled up, you know, a hundred different articles online about what I'm asking about.

But guess what? No one is clicking. So all of these online publications, you know, your stack overflows of the world, your recipe websites, your blogs that go over, you know, the best cameras, none of those are getting traffic, right? And the way that so many of these companies work, which is why now in this example, I saw ads all over the places, ad revenue, right? Users equals revenue from display ads, from clicking, from affiliate commissions.

You know, if you have a website covering camera blogs and someone reads your top 10 camera lenses for 24 and they click on that and they buy it, they're going to get a little commission from, you know, Amazon or wherever someone, you know, bought that, you know, BNH photo, right? But now none of those publishers are getting the same amount of revenue. All right, which leads to how web browsing is now in 2024. We already kind of talked about this. But now, you know, I was reading one of the stories this morning. You know, when I cover the AI news, I use a combination of perplexity and chat GPT,

but also physically reading stories. And one of those stories this morning, here's an example, right? Same thing that we talked about with the recipes. You get greeted with this before you can see anything. You get greeted with a full page pop-up. then here we are again this is this was an article about um about this new mit study that said AI is too expensive for companies to replace jobs with all right so I'm reading this article on quarts pop-up ad right away I get rid of the pop-up ad I still don't even see a headline right

I see essentially a nearly a half-page ad for Deloitte right and then I scroll down and then I scroll down I can finally get a little bit of the article, but even at the same time, there's still ads covering this article everywhere. And that is the future of web browsing. It's already here. And I talked about this in my, you know, 24 bold predictions for 2024 when it comes to AI is the internet is going to become unusable. I think it already has, you know, but you can't blame these companies. You can't blame, you know, if a stack overflow, you know, was was previously getting 71, you know, million organic users a month, and now they're getting 23. Guess what?

They either have to lay off a ton of staff, start shutting people down, or they have to drive more ad revenue per page. So y'all, this is the future of browsing the web, an unusable experience, making it almost impossible to read and comprehend information. then again, I go on chat GPT and I say I use plugins so I can actually read this article. So instead I say using the web reader plugin, please summarize this article. And then I link back to this exact article that I was talking about, this Quartz article, talking about this MIT study.

And obviously chat GPT when I'm using plugins, it spits out in five seconds, a perfect recap. All right. Same thing with perplexity. I've talked about perplexity a lot. So same thing. So I say, please recap the current MIT study from January 20204 that replacing human jobs with AI was too expensive. So I'm going into perplexity.

If you just drop a link in perplexity and say recap this, it doesn't always do it. So instead, I'm saying, hey, there's this MIT study from January 2024 that says this, please let me know. And then perplexity, you know, it shows right here. There's 15 different articles that. it essentially read to get a better context and a better understanding. And y'all, this right here, love perplexity, but this is why how we browse the web is going to change and why SEO is going to dot, because guess what?

I'm clicking on zero of those 15 sources, right? Because here's the result from perplexity. It's great. It tells me everything, right? It did a very high-level recap and it not only, only highlighted the one main article that I wanted to kind of encapsulate or get a better understanding of, but it also found, and on its own time, it went out and found other research and other recent news related to this, right, with all these 15 different sources.

And then throughout the, you know, a couple of paragraphs where perplexity spit this back, it also cited and sourced all of the other things. So this is the future of using the web. Period. Right. That's where Google is going with SGE.E. They've just been testing it early on. But you are not going to be going to websites in the future.

So what does that mean for the SEO industry? I don't know. It's messy, right? I mean, one thing is, you know, there's going to be massive lawsuits, right? Or massive settlements. massive deals, right? So right now, even Open AI is working on deals with publishers that are reportedly between a million dollars to five million dollars annually, right? So they can avoid, you know, further lawsuits in the future. And they're saying, all right, well, now let's just form

partnerships. Right. So here's what's going to happen then. I'm guessing in a big update that's coming from chat, GPT, you're going to see something that looks more like perplexity. You're going to see things that have multiple sources within the content. Right now in chat GPT, you might get one, maybe, usually not, but you might get one or two. Perplexity is well sourced, well-sighted, you know, when you have all those external copy link, or you have all those external hyperlinks. But I don't know. What's going to happen to online publishers?

What's going to happen to SEO? Well, I think it's going to slowly die, right? And there's going to be those, you know, the 10% or 20% or 30% that strike up content partnerships with the Open AIs, the Microsofts, the Googles, the perplexity. And I do think, and you know, they've already been testing this. But even within, you know, these results by using AI search, you're going to see ads, right? Google has tested ads when you are using this SGE search. So if it's highly relevant, just like they would for normal search, even when you're using.

Using AI search, you're going to see ads. They've already been testing it. So let's look at another benefit, though. Right? Because a benefit that people aren't really thinking about, and this is again, thanks for sticking with me. I know this is a long-winded hot take because it's personal to me. But one of the most underused, I think, aspects of generative AI right now is to do exactly this. Right.

So what I have on screen, it's I'm asking purpose. about this article and it's giving me well-sourced, well-sighted, great depth, right? Where normally I would have to go read five, ten, fifteen articles, which would take maybe two to three hours. I mean, I'm going to spend 30 minutes alone closing all those pop-up ads and trying to find the article, right? It's unusable. Anyways, one of the most underrated aspects is personalizing things to you, right?

So I went in perplexity. I just said the same thing. I said, please recap the current MIT study from January 2024, that replacing human jobs with AI was too expensive. And here's an example of how you can personalize that and how that may affect jobs in hiring and manufacturing. So as an example, maybe you see this article from MIT and your normal thing is you're going to click on a couple, you know, couple results in Google. And then you're going to do some research about how this might impact, you know, hiring and manufacturing. Maybe you work at HR for a manufacturing company, right? You're going to see this.

You're going to lose your mind. You're going to be like, oh, my gosh, is AI going to take jobs? You're going to read this article. You're going to read more about it. You're going to read about things in the manufacturing. There you go. You just wasted 90 minutes or more. All right.

Or you can use perplexity or other AI search to personalize your results because you can do that. Then you see on the screen here, not only do I have a recap of this MIT study from multiple sources, but then I have a multiple sourced kind of personalized output here from perplexity on how it specifically impacts manufacturing, right? The details of this aren't important, but it's more of the concept, right? That's something that you can't get right now from traditional SEO. You can't get that from search engines, right? You can't personalize everything that's happening or, you know, as an example, you know,

pancake recipe, right? That was the one I threw up on the screen. But for someone that's lactose intolerant, right? or for someone that's gluten-free, right, or for someone who's fully organic, whatever, right? So there's multiple steps to how we use the internet. First, you have to get the information, and then you have to do a bunch of digging down so many rabbit holes to make it personalized for you, for your life, for your company, your career.

And guess what? AI search just does that. Hey, Val said this show was gold once again. Thanks, Val. So I did see a couple questions here. So I'm going to try to get to some of them. And hey, if you are listening on the podcast, I'd literally put our email in there. Just shoot me an email too.

I respond to them all. It takes a little while sometimes. But all right, some good points to note here. So Herman's saying that in the Netherlands, there's still no SGE for me, unfortunately. Also, you have to understand when you're using Google. As an example, some of my Google accounts have it. Some don't. You know, my work accounts with Google workspace, because we're a smaller company, we don't have

access to it. Stupid, I know. But if I go into my personal Gmail account, I have access to it. But yes, SGE and some of these features aren't available in every single country. That's important. Dr. Harvey Castro is saying, do you think Google stock will go down? I don't think so. I don't think so.

Anyone that's playing in AI right now, they're not going to see their stocks going down significantly, right? I talked about this on the show a couple of weeks ago. If you look at 2023 in general, the U.S. economy, literally, and I'm not exaggerating, in late 2020, when every, you know, big economists is making their predictions, literally every single big economist said 2023, there's going to be a recession. The economy, the U.S. economy is going to tank. I literally was like, no, it's not. Like, AI companies are going to skyrocket.

And I went over on the show a couple of weeks ago about how, essentially, the big AI tech companies accounted for 70%. So all of these essentially AI led companies, magnificent sevens, your Googles, your Microsofts, you know, Tesla's big in AI. All these AI first companies propped up the entire stock market. So I think the same thing is going to hold true. I don't think. And again, this is an official financial advice.

This is just my hot take. It's hot take Tuesday, Tuesday. It's hot take Tuesday, Dr. Harvey. So don't get mad at me. I don't think Google stocks is going to. tank because of the loss of, you know, clicks. I think they're smart. I think they're going to figure it out. But I think traditional, still, I think traditional SEO is going to die. And I still think that how we use the web is going to change. We're no longer going to have 72 tabs open for the best

gluten-free pancake recipe with organic ingredients, right? We're going to have one search in perplexity or chat GBT or, you know, Google SGE. All right. A couple of things. A couple questions I'm going to get to here fast. So Brian, great question here. So how do we create a website that leverages chat GPT instead of SEO or can we? Yeah, I mean, there's still organic traffic out there. There's still organic clicks to be had, but it's less. You know, it's less.

Right now, I'd say if you've phased out traditional search, which I encourage people to do, you're an early adopter. But still the overwhelming majority of people are still searching old school. But I think the same way that I showed people and I said, the internet is becoming unusable, more and more people are going to be making the jump to perplexity, to searching with chat GPD, to searching with, you know, Bing co-pilot chat, to search with Google SGE. But right now, I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon, but it's going to happen. I think faster than we think.

All right. Tripp says, don't you think SEO is going to be transformed by new capabilities and opportunities presented by generative AI? No, not necessarily. I don't. will, here's the thing, y'all, they're still, I'm not saying SEO in and of itself is going to die. I'm not saying if you're an SEO out there, if you're an SEO specialist that you're going to be out of a job tomorrow. It's going to be radically different, right?

I think that you're going to be optimizing for voice search. I think you're going to, there's going to be a whole new thing, you know, optimizing for the first citation on perplexity. So is SEO the industry going to die? No, traditional SEO is going to die. where if you're writing a recipe for pancake, for pancake recipes where you fit in 8,000 words and, you know, eight titles and you're buying backlinks, you know, off the internet, that's going to change. That's not going to happen anymore.

You know, human written content is, I think, going to eventually be the type that is sourced by your perplexities, right? So I do still think that there's elements of SEO that are going to live. on, but traditional SEO where you're trying to drive as many users as you can to your website, I don't think that's going to work anymore. I think in the same way that SEOs have been trying to optimize for a knowledge graph or the way they've been trying to optimize for a top three map position, you know, when someone locally searches for something or when they're trying to, you know, optimize for, you know, people also asked, you know, one of those drop downs,

position zeros. Ultimately, all of those things were to drive websites, visitors to your site. that's going to be the case anymore. I think people are just going to be trying to optimize for voice search and for, you know, essentially AI search engines to get cited. A different kind of search. Trip also asking how can companies leverage what I'm sharing? How will you change your marketing strategy? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, if you're a publisher, if you haven't already, you have to make the decision because you can also on your website, right, if you're that pancake recipe or if you're someone else, you can make the decision to essentially put a in your, not getting too technical, you know, putting in your robots.txt file, which essentially

tells search engines how to crawl your website. You can say, hey, GPT bot, you can't come to my website. So you can make publishers are going to have to make the decision. Do we want to block this content from large language models that are scraping our site? Or, hey, if we block it, they're just going to get our competitors anyways, right? So it's, it's tough. You know, like I said, unfortunately, I think the big future, if you're a big publishing company online and you're losing traffic, you've got to figure out, are we going to block large language models, or are we going to try to forge a partnership with one of these big companies? Or I think you're going to see, you're going to see now representative. And there's already, you know, I guess the word

is escaping me. But I think you're essentially going to be joining. a, you know, kind of like a content publishers union, and they will be settling for you. And they'll be representing, you know, hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of different smaller online publishers and going, you know, and they'll be negotiating on your behalf with a Microsoft, with an open AI, with a Google on, you know, how they can access your content. Because, yeah, if you want to be discovered on the web, you obviously have to allow a certain amount of crawling and scraping by these search engine bots. but you also don't want your things to just be regurgitated by a large language model and not cite you.

So yeah, it's a weird time ahead. Megan asking, do you recommend Perplexity Pro? Yes. Yeah. Same thing, $20 a month. You can get unlimited searches. If you have a free account, you get limited. But yeah, you can also plug in just so you know you can plug in your choice, whether you want to use OpenAIs GPT4 or if you want to use Emproftics Claude.

You can kind of choose your model as well. Perplexity, I think. doesn't get enough shine, doesn't get enough love. It is a huge time saver. I'm a big fan. Last but not least, last question here is, what do you think about the future of Google ads? Curious what you think.

Yeah, I mean, you're just going to see ads in these SGE results, right? The same thing. What I think is ultimately going to happen, right? Because they said, you know, page two is where, you know, you go to die, like on Google, right? Like, if you're on page two, no one ever sees you. You know, I forgot the latest study, but there was a study probably like a year or two ago that,

said, you know, 90, I think it was 97 or 95% of clicks go to one of the first three results inside, you know, a Google search. I think that's going to change to 100% pretty soon. It's going to be 100% of clicks are either not going to happen because the AI search does such a good job that I don't need to click something or I think just close to 100% of clicks are just going to go to what happens or what is displayed in this SGE result, this search generative experience result because those things take up a huge amount of space. So no one's going to scroll. Like when you use SGE, depending on what device you're in, you know, Google's AI search,

it takes up almost the majority of your screen. And it does a fabulous job of answering your query. So there's really either number one, no reason to click or number two, there's no reason to scroll. Right. If you do want to click, you're probably just going to click the thing that now is the only link on your screen. That's it, y'all. The hot takes, we're only mildly hot today. But to recap, let's do this. The way we use the internet is going to change. And if you want to grow your company, grow your career, if you're not already using these different AI searches,

you need to. They are huge time savers. On the flip side, traditional SEO is going to die. sorry, I've been doing SEO for half of my life. That's the reality. Some things change, y'all. So yeah, if you're a marketer, if you care about SEO, it's going to drastically change. It's going to look different for different businesses, different publications, but it's going to change. I think we're going to see a lot more partnerships. We're going to see maybe less, less ability for smaller publications to compete, to get those clicks.

but if you want to find out, we're going to keep our eye on it here. We're going to always be covering it. So if this was helpful, I hope it was, please go ahead, repost this. If you're watching live on LinkedIn, please repost this. If you're listening on the podcast, share this with your friends. But also, most importantly, go to your everyday AI.com. Sign it for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be diving into this.

This was a big one, y'all. There's a lot of information in here. We're going to be diving into this in even greater detail. And hey, holler at me. That's why we put our information in the podcast episode. I'm right here on LinkedIn. Hit me up. Thank you for joining us.

And we'll hope to see you again for another episode of Everyday AI. Thanks y'all. Meet Firefly AI Assistant. Now live in Adobe Firefly, the Allman One Creative AI Studio. Just describe what you want to create in your own words and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome while the assistant,

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