Heads In Beds Show - Generative Search Experience in Google: What Does It Mean for Vacation Rentals/Hospitality?

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

In this episode, Paul breaks down the beta on Google Search Labs: Generative Search Experience with real-world examples of how vacation rental brands are impacted.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellSupercharging Search with generative AI🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? Great, Conrad.

I admittedly, you know a little bit more about the story from last week at last day of school. I'm going to tell this one because this one's worthy. I think this one is. Yeah. Go for it. Last day of preschool. Son is super excited to be coming out and greeting mom, dad and brother. And yeah, that old base plant right into the ground because he was holding on to his backpack

straps and hadn't quite realized, you know, it. So yeah, we went to the ER hospital, seven stitches, five outside, two inside. Yeah, it was not exactly the way we were expecting to end the school year, but I don't think he's deterred from going to kindergarten. So that's how we ended last week. How are things going with you, sir? Yeah, I feel bad.

You had a rough go of it there. The little one did at least. Was that AJ? That was AJ, yeah. go of it there the little one did at least was that aj that was a little yeah that's a little kid injuries they are inevitable i feel like my daughter is destined to do those kinds of things because she's not afraid of anything so like she falls and stuff like that and she'll cry she cries i don't know that my first girl so i don't know if other girls cry in the same way but she also like will once she's recovered she gets back up and goes doing the same thing that got her injured so i'm a little worried that i have more of those little kid injuries on my horizon sorry you're dealing with it glad he's okay relatively speaking so well i heard best

day ever because he got two popsicles a smoothie and two juice boxes during the day at the hospital so i don't know how much those cost in the grand scheme of hospitals. I probably $30 juice boxes. It's okay. Probably happy times. That reminds me. I was much older when this happened to me, but I got a, I had a sledding injury when I was probably like 13 or no,

maybe a little bit younger than that. Cause I was still in elementary school. It might've been sixth grade. So I had to go back and do the math on it. But I was like, let's say a tween that age. And I fell off a sled, went underneath my grandfather's car.

It was parked at the end of the road i have i have 14 staples in my head from it burned third degree burns on my leg some of the skin is still not grown back properly i showed my leg one time when we're hanging out in person people are lovely by the way and i'll tell you the sympathy i got during that like three week four week run after that because this was during the school year was unbelievable i would be like i have to go to the they're going to change my bandage on my leg. It's usually like, of course, Conrad, take your time. No worries at all. So I totally understood now the whole Munchausen by proxy, or sorry, Munchausen syndrome thing. Because I'm like,

wow, people do treat you really nicely when you're like injured, and you have something going on, especially if hopefully you've been nice to them in the past and stuff like that. When you said that whole popsicle thing thing it reminded me when i was my dad and mom were bringing me home from the hospital and i was like okay that sucked but i'm like fine like i was very worried at the moment and i was like all right i'm fine it is what it is but they let me buy whatever movies i wanted we went to fye and oh yeah last few sets and they handed me like a credit card and were like buy whatever you want i was like i like bought dvds and i bought like some music that they wouldn't let me buy and put all that stuff on the counter and they were like

absolutely no problem so it's just like one of those moments that you just remember forever and the way you get treated so yeah you gotta be careful don't treat him too bad he might develop some bad habits oh yeah there was there was definitely happy meals for dinner and there was yeah it's been it's it is it's been the because it's right on his head and he is three-year-old little brother it was really just keeping him, stop, guys. Don't wrestle. Come on. Just give me three days.

Let's get the staples out. Let's get the stitches out. Then we'll go back, have fun, be three and five, and do what you got to do. Let him heal up a little bit. Right? Just a little bit. All right. Best to AJ.

Hope he recovers pretty soon and there's no nasty scars. If so, he can tell a cool story about how he got in a fight with a Colombian gang member or something and came out victorious. Speaking of new things, hopefully good things. We'll see what kind of the facts lay out to be. We're doing an interesting episode today because this is very much a beta feature. And you've got a little more experience on this because you got in the beta way before me. So I think we're titling this one, Gender Diff Search Experience in Google. How does it impact the vacation rental slash hospitality industry? Maybe zoom back a little bit what happened what did google introduce um what is the what is that product actually called what does it look like just describe it yeah so for the

listener and then we'll get into some of the specifics of how it's working yeah so i think they maybe baited it a little bit at or displayed it a little bit at google io but i think most of it most of the examples that i saw were coming from the google marketing live side of things so that is that's really where it's where they typically will go through announce all the cool stuff there there were some some interesting inclusions there on the ad side of things i'm sure we'll talk about as those get rolled out more to what we're actually talking about. But the generative search experience is, it's the AI version, AI powered version of search right now. And much more conversational as ChatGPT is, it is, I think there are visually, maybe it's a better experience.

Now, you can see where they're clearly playing off of each other for certain things of how they're building lists, how they're generating the content, how they're generating results. I think this is also a convenient way for Google to incorporate more of the card style that they've done on the discovery side of things. That's something that's certainly been notable in just looking at that generative search experience. But it is, it's, I would say, AI written content that they're pulling blurbs very similarly to what ChatGPT does right now. They are citing things, but the sites are going back to cards and things like that. But for general searches, I think it's fine.

For searches in our space, I really haven't been that impressed. And I have, I've done a few LinkedIn posts on that. And I will probably continue to do that because I think it is, it's more about getting visibility out there. And as you're doing it, I hope we're doing those in tandem there because I think it is, it's an education point and it's definitely going to change the way people are using Google search. I, how people are finding businesses in our space through Google search. And I think everything, it is, we talk about a beta, everything has to be taken with a grain of salt here because it is changing every day. I've had results change from one search to

the next when I do the exact same search. So that's something that I hope Google is learning. And I hope that there are some improvements to the overall experience. But one of the first ones I pointed out to you was mutual partner that we have one of the branded partners that you've got, you do the website for. And the first thing that I noticed on a branded search was that there are no branded results there. And that is supremely concerning when I go to when I search for a brand name name and the first results I get are a social media page or a directory page on a local travel website. That's certainly something I've seen pretty specific on more than one occasion. And that is, that's something where the brands that I did, I did three branded searches last week, Casago, Cozy, and Beach Ball. Again, those are three pretty well-known brands in the space.

It's not like we're... Those are, I think, hundreds of rentals a piece. In Casago's case, multiple franchises, things like that. So I think there's plenty to dive into there. The same thing on more long tail searches as well. So it is, it's one of those things that I, right now, the overall experience for the traveler, I would say, is suboptimal. And certainly for the businesses themselves, I don't know how you are going to optimize for the results the way they are right now. Now, again, we don't need to really concern ourselves with that because I think in the next weeks, months, days, through the end of December, when it looks like this generative search experience beta will end, I think we just have to be very mindful of how we're, I think it's an opportunity for us to all educate everything because you can still, you can give the thumbs up, thumbs down on these results. And I've been trying to do that as much as i can here and giving that input input and feedback to google to i don't know try to shape the way they're actually doing things behind the

scenes i don't think that's necessarily helping but who knows so yeah i think in all it's a new experience it's a interesting experience. It's an interesting experience. Definitely a more visual experience, but how you're actually getting from point A to point B is very different there. So I think it is, I would say we can probably break it down into more of the generalized branded searches. We can talk about more of the long tail searches and then the individual or Airbnb or cabins or talk about those things there. And you can follow along as you're searching through and seeing what those results are coming up as. But on the branded search side of things, as you've maybe done a search for some of your partners, not some of your customers, what are you seeing? What are your thoughts on what you're seeing there in that overall experience?

Yeah, I got this much more recently than you did. I think they emailed me on Friday or something, and I didn't spend a ton of time over the weekend looking at it but i don't let me take a swing at describing the actual interface a little bit so you do a search on google like you've always done before and then you come to the search results at least for me right now some of the ai summaries or generative ai summaries are being automatically generated some only get generated when i click the button correct and then i saw one where it didn't show up at all it wasn't giving me the option to generate one. So it seems to me those are the three options.

Auto, my button, like opt-in basically, or not at all. And what's surprising to me about the first bucket, maybe the second bucket to some degree, is slow. And it's not slow in the sense of relative to like us going and doing a search on other search engines. It's not necessarily slow. But Google is obsessed with, and they've talked about for years, how valuable it is that they get results back to a user quickly. When you click one

of these AI summary buttons, you have to wait for three to five seconds. Again, people listening might be like, yeah, whatever. They might be like, that's a ridiculous thing to complain about. But I guess my perspective on this is that three to five seconds when a company like Google has spent decades trying to trim off like a 10th of a second seems a little bit like that's just not really a good experience for the user, honestly. So that's my first reaction is that it's slow. And not only is it a little bit slow, you do the search and you see your regular Google organic search results that you've seen for the past decade plus two decades, depending on how long you've been doing this underneath it. And then this search AI summary comes in and shoves it down the page a little bit.

Granted, we're opted to this beta, so maybe the user experience will get a little bit smoother as it goes along. But that seems bad to me. I don't like the way that's laid out. I think that's an issue. That's a problem that I don't know exactly how you solve it because my understanding is these queries

are very expensive from a compute perspective. So I think part of the reason they're doing that is, sure, if they pre-generated that summary and then refreshed it every day and then put it in there, I'm sure they could cache it just like they cache typical web results and get a result back very quickly. But I think that would be, from an economic standpoint, incredibly expensive. So what they've done is good, but I think not great from a speed perspective. So that's one reaction that I had to it.

My second reaction was just that, which is that a lot of these businesses that I'm looking for, and as you said, I'm searching for a lot of our clients and kind of keywords that they'd be focused on. A lot of them are showing summaries, mostly of Google My Business outcomes or Google My Business profile listings. I know they just changed that name and I'm just so used to saying Google My Business. It took me like five years to stop saying webmaster tools. So you're just going to love it. But anyways, the business listing on Google, the free version, we're not talking about Google vacation rentals, although you could see a path where that could come in here, but it's not there at the moment. So makes me say something, which we talked about this a few episodes back, we did like a summary of Google My Business. And we said, I don't know, this is a little bit less important than it was,

because it doesn't show up nearly as often as it has in the past. Now, this kind of brings this back a little bit, which is interesting, because what that obviously means is that it's mostly biased. And a lot of these vacation rental searches, rentals in location name it's very biased towards the local companies that have good reviews and good ratings i don't see for the most part the listing sites in here i don't see airbnb i do see vacasa in this one although it's interesting in vacasa north myrtle beach they don't have a verified business listing but somehow they they show up in that little right side of the search results so i don't know exactly where they're getting that data from but maybe yes and it is and so i think the interesting part is that there is there's two ways that you can visualize it where you've got the cards up on the side with the map view but

then you can there's a little expansion tool where it moves those cards on the right side underneath the individual results and that's where I think it gets a little nasty here, specifically on those, the, I think I was doing cabins in the Smokies and cabins in Gatlinburg and cabins in Myrtle Beach and stuff like that. And that's where when you start to do those searches and you pull the card results into kind of the inline version of that SGE, what's happening is that like you are underneath the individual, like the top result, I saw smokymountains.com. I saw actual competitor based domain sites filling in under those individual results there.

And that's where, again, my heart skips a beat there and thinking that, okay, Google's presenting these results in line like we're all used to. And the assumption with that user experience would be any of those cards underneath are pointing back to either the specific website, a specific place where you can find it on a listing site. No, it's just going to generalize all the location. If it's a travel site, SmokeyMountain.com or something like that, they're just going to the main page that has all of the listings there. So from that, whatever the top result is, you may be going for branded business number one, and you're clicking into their first card, and you're being directed to a site that's not theirs, more of a generalized local site. to a site that's not theirs, more of a generalized local site or tourism. I've seen tourism bureaus pop up. I've seen all sorts of things pop up there, but you're not getting to the actual website that you want to get to. It's two to three clicks, sometimes four clicks down the road before

you're actually seeing what you want to see, or maybe not. And then that's where if you're searching high level enough, maybe that's what you're looking for that kind of experience where you can explore but boy if i'm in that top placement i want any of the cards under my individual listing to direct back to something that i'm associated with or to direct back to my website not going back to generalized travel sites or things like that that is almost like the quality of the index is completely different from the regular index where it typically where it typically has a lot more guidance which is interesting because you would think i always joke about this inside of gmail and google docs or like the search inside of gmail and google docs is pretty poor and i'm

like how is the best search company on planet earth for web content like web indexing somehow fail to retrieve an email when i put it in like palm whatever something something like that it always a little bit interesting obviously they're going to maybe improve the quality of the index and stuff like that going on i guess what i'm trying to see right now on these searches is what's better about this and i'm trying to be like optimistic it's more visually appealing there's some benefit there maybe it shows the review next to the site which certainly it does do that in regular google my business kind of search results like maps results but in a regular organic which certainly it does do that in regular Google My Business kind of search results, like maps results. But in a regular organic search, it doesn't do that because it does. And of course, has like the vacation rental block there now. So it doesn't

really even show local businesses. It shows like local listings that are all syndicated through a different feed, again, different discussion for a different day. But even if you look at the organic results underneath, sure, I can't tell that company ABC is actually located in the market. I can only tell who's good at SEO, I guess, if you want to have the cynical point of view on it. So there's something to be said for, interestingly, Google, at least at this time of recording, they tend to be biased more towards local businesses. But to your point, they don't seem to be perfectly matching the local business with even the local business website. And it is clunky to get there. If I did a search for pet-friendly cabins in Blue Ridge, Georgia, I would expect to just get a list of cabins,

number one, or a list of pages about that, which is what the search result was before. So I'm trying to see the value in here. And I see a few things that I, from a user perspective, I feel I could see the, I can make the case for maybe that's a little bit more appealing, or it's a little bit more useful to see which businesses are local and have great reviews, which is what this is showing me mostly is businesses are local and have good reviews, mostly descending the stuff at the bottom as worst reviews, the stuff at the top has generally better reviews. So that's good. Maybe you want to focus on your Google business profile reviews if that were the case. But yeah, show me the thing here that's, oh, wow, this is giving me insight, or this is letting me sort

through the problem a little bit more clearly. And that to make a positive case for what it could be, excuse me, in the future, that's, I think, the most positive case you could make, which is that, okay, instead of having to visit 15 different direct booking websites to find a pet friendly cabin in north in blue ridge georgia it would be much easier for me to say okay go to google google you crawl these 10 pages for me which they've done before pick out the ones that are for better but then put them put all those links in like little buttons underneath in the search result that would be fantastic because then it's it's almost like the web browsing plugin on the chat dbt side of things it goes on the page looks for what you're

asking for, retrieves it pulls it back and puts it in the output. That's a little bit closer to I think what would be more useful for a user. What I see right now is just not really that useful on these general searches. And then branded to your point there to circle back on that because I forgot to. That's a job. Yeah, it pulls the address from this, it pulls the number of listings, I'm assuming from the about us page says, hey, they accept credit cards. There's a review. So it takes the sort of metadata that's inside Google business or the metadata on the about page and puts it in like a more friendly paragraph, for example. But again, is this really that much better for the user? I'm not sure about that. There's like reviews around the web, which is nice. You see

the photos that are reviews about the web, but I searched for the name of the vacational company. I probably want to go to the vacational company's. And you're right, there's really no way to do that. I have to click to Facebook. And then once I click on Facebook, I can click the link there or I can click on another branded search. And then it brings me it's almost like a loop, it brings me back to the same place almost when I click that name again. So this just feels choppy. I'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt. If you if you go do a restaurant search, I think there's something to be said for that. Best restaurants in location. It does a good job, in my opinion, of like pulling little snippets from other restaurant review sites. And then it's, oh yeah, this person said the chicken parm was good. This person said this meal was good and

stuff like that. But the experience here just really isn't doing a lot for me, to be honest with you. No. And I think even if you do the general like location cabins or cabins in location, what I've found Airbnb and location Airbnb is that right now it is just trying to crawl those directory sites of some, whether it's Airbnb or whether it's one of the local ones. And it's just generating like plain text. Oh, two bedroom condo in downtown, three bed.

There's nothing linking out. There's no, even if you're trying to bring in those cards underneath the inline results. I mean, there's a list of 15 bullet points with maybe one or two cards going out to not even usually Airbnb. I think the three Airbnb searches that I had done and put on LinkedIn, none of them actually went to Airbnb. It was home toGo, it was Picasa, it was I think TripAdvisor and a couple, Expedia and a couple even.

I do. I think that there's a lot more learning to do and maybe it is. Maybe it's the complexity of Google having to build in the hotel and the travel side and the vacation rental side. And that maybe may make our industry as a whole behind the times a little bit or ahead of the times,

because maybe they are working on it behind the scenes and we just don't know what's happening yet. But yeah, I just, and even outside of the going back to hotels and resorts and trying to find some other stuff there, it just seems like we're not giving people a better overall experience. Even if it were getting your question answered with a zero-click search or something like that. I don't even think that these results necessarily are going to give zero-click searches because I don't think they're giving great answers right now. It doesn't get the job done.

So we've always talked about this before as like a keyword set or a keyword example, like how old is Joe Biden? It's always been my example, or how old is Donald Trump when he was the president? And it was, okay, I just want to know how old he is. And then we do that search. He's 80. His birthday is November 20th, 1942.

That's pretty much all you care about. So yes, technically Wikipedia ranks number one for that search term, how old is Joe Biden? But is that really like you just wanted to know, and then you answer that and it's in the one box. Would giving an AI summary of that keyword really make it any better than what they had before? I don't think so. When I click the button for AI overview of that keyword,

it says, here's how, actually, how about this? This is fun. The AI is wrong. I just did it. How old is Joe Biden? And it said Joe Biden is 78 years old. He was sworn in at age 78, which would have been January 20th of 2021.

So that's wrong. That's not even correct. He's 80 because his birthday is 1942. His birthday is have been January 20th of 2021. So that's wrong. That's not even correct. He's 80 because his birthday is 1942. His birthday is not until November 20th. So how about that? They say info quality may vary and they disclose it. But the AI summary actually got it worse than just the one box, which is what they had before. I'm assuming just they wrote a script to scrape Wikipedia or sorry, scrape index Wikipedia, and then they were displaying it on the page. So I think there's something to be said for, again, the piece that would be interesting to me from Google's end is making the generative AI more of a task completion one. And that's what ChatTPT seems to do a little bit better right now

with the web browsing plugin is you can say, here's a list of pages, cite me example, or find me something on this page that mentions this or something like that. And it'll go clicking, clicking, clicking, looking and finding it. Google should have that in theory because they have all the content index. So they should be able to search against that index, that shard and say, okay, I looked at these 40 pages. Excuse me. Here's five links to five cabins that I think fit your criteria, but they're not doing that to a user perspective. Like I'm trying to think if I show this to my mom or I show this to my dad, who's not really in the industry at all and said, Hey, try to get this done. They'd be like, where's the properties? And they'd be like, show me what, where's my date?

Show me what I can do there. And I'm just not seeing it right now. To your point, certainly the chances of Google figuring this out and making it a little bit better seem realistic, but it just feels like a slightly different SERP layout with a little summary at the top that honestly, I don't think is a huge departure from what I'm, the path we're going down today. And if anything, it seems to favor the local companies a lot more in its current iteration versus the ota sites even a site like airbnb yeah do that part of it and i mean i think i going back to just the speed side of things i do think that's

something that's a it's a not even a bad experience but it's a different enough experience that it is it's going to cause some people to to it to abandon the searches or do something like that or go somewhere else. And I think it's, again, timely in the fact that we both just did that Google Ads survey a couple of weeks ago, talking about the experience with Google Ads. One of the questions on there on my survey was talking about the speed and how you would prefer or what your preference would be. Would you rather have the most up-to-date data that comes in a lot slower? Or would you rather have data that's 6 to 12 hours or 12 to 24 hours removed, but it's coming like that? Me personally, I'm used to not having real-time data.

I don't need to have the last 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours. For us, we're not managing by the hour, by the minute or anything like that. So it's not as necessary to have that real-time data in place. However, doing this and taking, and I thought I actually noticed like an increase in speed over the weekend in Google Ads.

So again, this is, it's one of those things where it just seems like they're a little contrarian to what they have preached and preached for at least the last decade on the page speed side of things. Which to Google's defense, it's one of those things where you might have to break some of your conventions of your previous point of view when you're trying something new and you have to try something different to see what the impact's going to be. Part of me wonders if some product manager at Google is like, all right, I'll build this. I'll show you that it's not really that revolutionary or even that much

better for the user. And we'll kill this notion of, oh, chat TPT was going to swallow up Google's business or something like that. Because now that we've had some time to digest that opinion and digest that take, the truth is they're completely different tools. I don't really think that chat TPT is really necessarily a good search tool for the context that we're talking about here today. Nor do I really think Google, the Google, I'm not talking about Bard, but just like the Google search interface is really meant to do what ChatGPT does.

I think it is a hammer and a screwdriver. I think they're two different things. I would agree. So ultimately what I'm seeing here just makes me think this can't be the final version of it. Just that a button above that summarizes some of the content below

with some kind of weird linking loops that you have to fall into. Yeah. I think the final version of it. Just that a button above that summarizes some of the content below with some kind of weird linking loops that you have to fall into. I think the final version of what they do is going to have to be a lot different from this. And as someone in the SEO industry, I'm really not thinking that this is going to be this traffic drain that maybe I was initially thinking or reacting that way at first, whereas, oh boy, that can be really bad. If anything, I don't know if I want people to be using these results because these results appear a lot worse and in theory even if i was quote unquote ranking in the top results i don't think anyone's serious about booking would actually go through this headache i think they just scroll down and go ah this company i know them click and then they go in and they would do that search from there or they do that action for sure and that's what i'm and

that's what i'm concerned about is do we have does this just completely replace... Right now it's generative search and then the standard SERP page. At some point, I have to think there's no standard SERP page anymore and that we're going to get melded together. That seems like we will... I don't know if the SERP pages we know it has done, but I think you can make the argument that by the end of 2023, so used to you getting your gas vehicle, you drive for 300 miles, you fill up for five minutes, 10 minutes at a station. That's how you do a cross country travel. Cross country travel with electric vehicles is different. You have to plan out an hour charge or a 15 minute charge or a 20 minute charge. And it's that's something that I think that's something that as consumers, we're going to struggle a little bit there. But it's the same type of thing here where we're going to have to reeducate the user of search engines.

And I think we're all in the process of being reeducated here through ChatGPT, through AI, through all these new search experiences. But I think that there is going to be that point of people are going to have to relearn Google a little bit. And that just seems so contrary to what we're going for. But this is the AI world we're living in. So I guess we have to adapt or fall behind. Yeah, nothing about this, though, feels like, oh, no, we're like in this new paradigm or in this new world. I could see to your point of the blending of, okay, what do we know the search results page as today? What is this AI thing? I could see the featured snippet area be overtaken by these AI type summaries where it's okay, 20 best blah, blah, blah restaurants again in city and then it would's kind of how bang works as well by the way like source uh cites all the sources of where they got the restaurants from and then if you really want to go to that restaurant you would click on it you'd explore more and stuff like that so i see a path where that is feasible where this summary result

is cached and it is more like a feature snippet which as you know if people listening may not know a feature snippet only shows up on maybe one percent of queries i don't know it's not super common it shows up very commonly for us on like content keywords. Again, like best restaurants in destination or pet friendly restaurants in destination. Food's on the mind, I guess. I keep saying food things. But anyways, that seems like a viable path

where they can maybe go down where it's like, hey, here's the summary of what it is that you searched. But ultimately, you're going to want to dig into the specifics, I would imagine, in many cases. And here's what those specifics actually look like and go to their links and check out what they have to offer and stuff like that initial

reaction right now is you know this c minus we were critical of bard at first they've improved that drastically so obviously this is google they have more engineering resources than i assume any company on planet earth i could be wrong about that but i assume if that's not the case then it's darn close to it so they could certainly improve this experience make a lot better but what i'm seeing here right now, it doesn't feel like this seismic shift of approach. It just seems, oh yeah,

the search result page looks a little bit different. And if you were one of these companies that was relying on certain types of traffic, I could see little as this, as updates tend to go a little slivers, get obliterated, but the overall market of search and how it works might look a little bit different going forward,

but I don't think it's going to be this drastic thing. Actually, Brian Chesky had an interview on this Week in Startups that I thought was interesting. And he mentioned that he pulled their plugin last minute. They were actually built a plugin for OpenAI. They were about to release the plugins and they were in there. And then last minute, he was like, I'm sorry, guys, I changed my mind and he pulled it out. And he said, the reason for that is that he thinks that text is a very bad interface for searching Airbnb. Airbnb is so visual. You need the photo. You need to see the property.

And I wanted to control the visual experience of searching a lot better. This feels more like what a search result maybe on Airbnb might do in the future where you, and it works this way today with Explore. They're now encouraging you to be a lot more flexible. Tell us that you want to do a weekend in June, which is a lot more flexible than we used to do before where you had to click June 18th to June whatever, right? You had to be more specific. And then we'll show you a bunch of options that you might consider. I think the hook for Airbnb or the hook for these bigger companies is saying, oh, you've stayed in luxury places before. So Paul, I'm going to go ahead and show you family friendly stuff that's 300 bucks a night. Conrad, obviously you take these vacations to get away from your family. So here's smaller places for 200 bucks a night, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's where I think the AI layers can make

a lot more sense. And that's what Brian was alluding to in that interview, which is that we have a lot of a good amount of information about people, we need to work on customizing that a little bit. He described AI as a matching solution. So we're going to better match a property with the person, because one property is great for you and bad for me or vice versa, or right for you and wrong for me and vice versa. So it doesn't mean that that person's a bad host or that person's a bad manager. It's more so can I put a product out there that matches what the guest is looking for? And can OTAs like Airbnb do a better job of connecting those dots together? If that were the case, I think there can be a better outcome. And ultimately, I think that's

what Google needs to work on here as well as needs to match my search intent better with the content that it's showing me. And then a summary can be very useful instead of just giving me a list of links. But the current iteration of it is pretty mediocre, in my opinion. And we'll see where they end up. But got to get better. Anything else to add? This is like our early look.

First reaction. Yeah, it is. I think if we know one thing for certain is that what we see today is going to change tomorrow. It's going to change the next day. It's going to change in a week. I feel confident on that one. So yeah, I think it's an observation time for us.

It's fun to be behind the scenes and start to test these and not break the system, but as close as we can break the system and see just how trying to determine how people write our own user stories. How are people going to use this when they're on the travel side, when they're on the homeowner acquisition side, when they're on any side of this equation right now? And how do we start to future-proof our content? It's from in the back of my mind, it's how do we start to future-proof our content? Where is some of this content being pulled from? And how do we really make sure that we're giving Google more and more of what they want? Now,

can't make those decisions now, but in two months, three months down the road, maybe six months down the road, I think we're going to have a much more clear more of what they want. Now, can't make those decisions now, but in two months, three months down the road, maybe six months down the road, I think we're going to have a much more clear set of guidelines for the best practices for generative search versus pre-searched SEO 1.0 or 2.0 or whatever it is right now, 3.0,

going to 3.5, 4.0, whatever that's going to look like moving forward. Yeah, I think that's a fair, that's a fair take on all of our AI commentary that we do, which is stay tuned and see what's going to happen in the coming weeks and months and everything is likely going to change so we'll circle back and give our thoughts on it as it impacts the industry and impacts like our ability to get get traffic get eyeballs and ultimately uh put more heads in beds that was a nice little there you go so wow yeah yes whoa

we're firing all cylinders here despite the despite paul injury he would really appreciate it i think your son said he did want people to leave a review special request that he really yeah what was that request it was in in memory of his broken broken skull broken dome we probably better get a few reviews in just to make sure even if you're saying how many stitches did he have what five on the outside two down. He went down to the bone. So it was seven stitches. Yeah, seven reviews. I think if we get seven reviews in honor of the seven stitches, one for each stitch.

Yeah. Even if it's five, I'll take the external ones. That's that. It works for us too. Okay. Okay. So five to seven of you who made it this far. First of all, we appreciate it. Thank you so much.

In honor of AJ's injury, five to seven of you listening. And that's you, by the way. You may think, oh no, someone else is going to do it. The data tells us that someone else is not going to do it. That's you if you so much. In honor of AJ's injury, five to seven of you listening, and that's you, by the way, you may think, oh no, someone else is going to do it. The data tells us that someone else is not going to do it. That's you if you're listening. So we joke, but we do appreciate some reviews

and we're glad that little ones are going to be okay in this situation. But also it would honor, you know, his Stitch memory very nicely if you left a review. So click on over to your favorite podcast app of choice. Click five stars, leave a review,

hit the submit button, makes our day whole and does make us smile and laugh even in these trying times. So appreciate it quick episode today but i think it was good to talk about this and go over some of the early reaction to what's going on we'll have a new episode next week um and we appreciate you listening we'll catch you on the next one thanks so much