Heads In Beds Show - What AI Summaries Are Doing To Travel Planning on Google

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down all of the changes happening to Google now, specifically travel planning topics (and therefore keywords) Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101LilyRay on X🔗 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 in Bed 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, Paul. Good morning. How's it going? All right, Paul, good morning. How's it going?

Well, you know, just another fantastic day to record here. I think we've got this is all these anytime we talk about Google, I always get a little excited because it's because you're a Google fanboy. Recently Google likes your post. Google. Well, that's that. That would be the be the whole thing. I think that's the thing about like search engine journal,

excuse me, general, search engine journal, search engine news, all of those kind of forums, they always kind of appealed to me. I don't know, I like the news side of it. That's kind of where I entered the space, I feel like. Not necessarily it was, it was just kind of reposting some of these articles and giving my my thoughts and feelings in the early days of the business blog on the travel net side of things.

So I like when we have these conversations. But how are you doing, sir? How are things going in your neck of the woods? Yeah, doing pretty good. Can't complain. After this recording comes out, the kids will be out of school. So I'm sure I'm going to be in the throes of summer. I know we record in advance for the listener, so we won't talk about any in your neck of the woods. Yeah, doing pretty good, can't complain. After this recording comes out, the kids will be out of school, so I'm sure I'm gonna be in the throes of summer. I know we record in advance for the listener,

so we won't talk about any current events happening. Oh, and I just spent 30 minutes talking about current events so that we don't mess up the beginning of the episode. I'll get there, so I feel like summer here is great. I like the extra sunlight. I'm a big extra sunlight fan, especially in the morning. I go to the gym and it's like not dark out. Like I just, something about going to the gym in the dark

that I just feel like just puts me in a little bit of a more somber mood to start the day. It's like I'm here and I need to do this. But I don't like that grinding feeling I like when I get out and the sun's out. And then I feel like, oh, I'm just having a productive morning. It makes me happier person. So I've been riding my bike to the gym now. So like I get a workout in before I get my workout in, which is like a little, I think the kids call that a life hack. So I'm kind of working on that

a little bit, which is fun. All good. No complaints. I do like you always have this fascination with Google. I think that it's given me honestly so much when I think about, you know, collectively, like all the benefits that I've gotten for the work that we've done and the work that our clients have benefited from. I think Google has done a lot for us, but Google is changing and Google is changing pretty rapidly. I guess we'll see like what the actual downstream impacts are going to be.

I suspect the truth is always somewhere in the middle, you know, but there's going to be the doom and gloomers who are like, this is the end of search. And then there's going to be the people who say there's, you know, it's the same fundamentals that have always been the case. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I actually point back. This is a recent example. This isn't in our outline. But I was talking with someone recently about picking stocks. And I said, look, I don't pick individual stocks. I'm not an expert on that side of things. I buy like these like boring, like large scale index funds with the money that I invest.

But I said one stock that if I had more money at the time, I didn't have any money at the time, I would have invested in, was Google during one specific event. And it was the time period, this would have been I think 2013, when they went from three ads on the top of the page and then a right rail of ads

and then two or three ads at the bottom to four ads in the middle, top of the page, and then four ads at the bottom. So the ad load actually went down. So to the lay person, they would think, oh, Google used to have like 12 ads on the page. Now they only have eight. Surely that's going to hurt Google's revenue. But the digital marketing person who runs Google ads all day realizes, no, moving those ads from the right rail, which got like a way less than 1% click-through rate back when I started doing Google ads, you could run ads on that right to the right side of the search results.

And you would just get like horrible click-through rates to the middle started doing Google ads. You could run ads to the right side of the search results, and you would just get horrible click-through rates to the middle top of the page, directly above the organic search results, going from three to four in that block. Again, I think this is 2013, 2014 when they do this. That was a sea change in Google and how much traffic ends up going to paid search, which they've, by the way,

they've just expanded that over time and added in all these extra SERP features. We're gonna talk about SERP features here, obviously, in one minute. But if I had any money at the time, which I didn't, I would have put a good chunk of my investment, my dollars, into Google, because I know that's going to increase their revenue dramatically,

because that extra ad is going to be really additive to their overall bottom line and the number of clicks that they monetize. So I think we're maybe at that same kind of moment right now with respect to these AI searches, where the funny part is you could almost make the opposite argument that maybe Google's revenue is going to hurt a little bit in the short term because people are going to go do a search on Google. And what we're talking about specifically

is these new AI summaries have launched. If you're a user of Google, you probably have already seen them. They're now much more broadly rolled out. And you and I have been playing with them for some time as part of this kind of beta program that Google had launched. But it feels like the same type of change, but the opposite outcome might happen, where Google might monetize less, maybe queries in some respect. That's kind of my take on it at least, or the monetization is going to look a lot different, and it might impact a lot of stuff that we try to work on ourselves, what we try to rank for, things to do, you know, restaurants, all this kind of stuff.

I think it might impact a lot of the searches. I think we're going to be less impacted than a site like TripAdvisor. You know, that's a site that might really be impacted by this type of change, in my opinion, but I think it's going to change. So maybe you could do, that's kind of some general thoughts there. Maybe you could do an overview into like, what is this? SGE is now AI summaries. Like Google just made this change somewhat recently. Maybe you could talk us through the high level changes and then we could talk about the impacts of it for the listener.

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, this is for people who have listened to us frequently, this is something that we've talked about multiple times. You know, I think it's something that when they rolled it out, it was kind of cool. It was like, okay, let's see what's happening. Let's see, oh, this is the AI-generated result. And I think what we saw right off the bat was that it's not that it necessarily changed for the better or worse, but it was just, it wasn't really improving the overall travel experience. And I think our initial, my initial thoughts,

I think our initial thoughts, I don't know, but was that because they already had that Google travel ecosystem kind of built in place, that it was gonna take a little longer to get some understanding of what vacation rentals are going to have happening here. But I do, I think over time what we've seen is that Google really is trying to keep everything inside their own system. And that's something that goes back to, I remember doing little lunch and learn sessions with some of our digital teams. And it was, one of the questions we talked about one day was zero click searches.

And admittedly, I didn't read the article as closely as I should have that I was covering. And someone had a really great question about it. And from I mean, it is it's one of those lightning points now where from that point forward, it's and that's five years ago, six years ago, like Google has made that a point. It started with structured snippets. It started with, you know, people also ask questions, just elongating the page, but keeping you pretty much within Google's ecosystem. I think at one point, if you took a look, someone had done a survey, I'm going to have to find this article now, but it's a little older. So it's, if someone had done it more recently, it'd be a little different. But at that point,

someone had surveyed 15,000 search queries. And on average, Google results, whether that's a Google business listing, structured snippet, featured question, any of these any of these items was taking up 36% of the entire SERP. I mean, just under half of that page. And I would say that was far earlier on when we didn't have any of these generative search experiences. So now that AI is reading these websites, and here's the other thing about this,

and we talked about this obviously before the episode, is not only is Google trying to keep people and answer that question right within the search engine and not having people go out to these other sites, which is obviously impacting websites for everybody, but it's a matter of the way they're aggregating this information, they're just reading your website.

So they're reading your website, taking all that great content that you took a long time probably to develop over a short time. There's some investment there, but they're taking all that and instead of rewarding you with an organic placement in 1 through 10 or 1 through 7 or whatever that first page looks like, now they're just gonna serve up that answer with your content right in that little answer box, that little AI summaries box. So understandably, there are a few people in our space that are a little upset about this. At age, you can hear I'm getting a little worked up as I'm

going through my conversation as well. But when you take it down to those pieces, the individual pieces that got us here, and now you're looking at what the outcome is, is the result better for the searcher? No, I honestly don't think so. But you're certainly not giving a better experience for the people who are trying to get into those results pages. Yeah. And I think short-term, right, it's fine for Google because they're not going to notice any specific drop-off in the short-term.

It's the long-term impacts that you do have to wonder about where if you remove the incentive for us to create new content, new information, where in the world is Google gonna get it from? So right now if you were to go scrape the 10 best restaurants in North Myrtle Beach and you were to scrape the articles that we've worked on and other people have worked on, TripAdvisor, etc., and you kill our business model by putting in the search results, I think we always talked about things like that the past, Paul. I think the example we gave was like how old is Donald Trump is a good example of just like an answer based query, whatever, but no one was really making money off that. If we're being honest,

like that just was out there, it existed. That's fine. If we remove the incentive for anyone to make content going forward on what are the best restaurants in North Myrtle Beach, what's going to happen like four years from now when there's five new restaurants and no one's really covering them or people aren't covering them nearly as well as they were a few years back because you removed their incentive to create content, remove and create that information for you to then, to your point, Google for to borrow, aka steal the content and put it directly in the search results. I think it's starting down a not ideal path where there has to be some kind of like incentive, like you've got to give us traffic, or you've got to give us money, or you've got to give you got to give us

something. You can't just like remove all the incentives and just hope that the content quality that you're scraping from is going to continue to remain there. So I do worry about it from that perspective. I think for our clients, there could be certainly, like you highlighted, very potential negative impacts. Imagine if I do an example search here on the owner side, although I admit these aren't as common,

10 best property management companies in destination. And then it lists out these 10 different companies. OK, well, that's not necessarily that new. That's kind of the way it worked before. But what if you try to refine that search query and it just starts to come up with stuff that's just not accurate at all? Like you start to ask which of these companies offer short-term rental services versus property management. And Google just like falls apart very quickly. Like these high-level searches with lots of data,

lots of training data, lots of, you know, sources to get generative AI information from. I think the example I saw the other day on Twitter, or sorry, X was, we'll get that, we'll get that right eventually, was like how to make a chocolate chip cookie. Like the recipe sites are going to get decimated by this because there's really a lot of these recipes, recipe sites, excuse me, added no value to the process, right? It was just like, here's the recipe, you know, and it's kind of like, it's ultimately a list of ingredients, the best restaurant, there's a lot more

nuance to that than there is what the recipe is for chocolate chip cookie. So for Google to come in here and just kind of potentially decimate the traffic to this content, I don't think it's gonna impact them in the next three to six, nine months, 12 months even. I think a lot longer than that, there's gonna be some negative impacts. And yeah, it does, I think in some cases

negatively affect our clients. We don't know how much though, because my take on this, looking at some of the, you know, SGE, I keep saying SGA, AI overview answers that are coming in, is that the person who wants more detail is still gonna click through a lot of the sources. I'll give them like a tiny little credit here, a tiny little bone, that Google does appear to be citing sources better now than they were even a few months ago when we were in this SGE beta, where now you can see like when they underline something it's like referencing a specific thing to do or at a park or a theme or an attraction or a restaurant, whatever,

and you click on it and you go to the source or you go to where that's come from. So I'll give them a little credit there, but I don't know if that's going to drive enough traffic for it to really turn the tide in the right direction, nor do I know if Google actually wants that. So in our show notes, I'll put a link in the show notes to this help article that we found. And it was really funny. And it's people, as of the time of us working on this podcast outline, there was a hundred and something odd comments in the Google forums of how do I turn off these AI summaries? So there's some users that really don't like these AI summaries coming in. And we'll see again, long term, I will say

this, though, to Google's credit, people are going to hate any sort of change on Google, no matter what it is. If you make things better, people are going to come in wine and complain about it. So I don't know if Google has all the right data and information. There's been some, I guess, recent articles that have come out that the person in charge of Google Search, maybe people inside the company think he doesn't know what he's doing. Again, time will tell on that. I don't I

don't know. I'm not an expert in that. I don't know exactly what his or her motivations are towards changing Google search, but it's going to be a little bit of a rocky road between now and wherever the final search product is. And I don't think we're done. I think what the current version is today, I don't know if it's going to stay that way forever. And I do worry in the long term about where Google is heading as far as where they get the information from and how they're fairly compensating the people who are creating that information with traffic, which was always the trade off.

You give us information, you give us traffic. There's always been that win-win scenario. It seems like they're removing one of those loops, and that doesn't seem fair to me at first glance. I think they have to be very careful with who they're alienating. You don't want to alienate anybody, but I think they probably have a little more. With all this antitrust stuff that's coming out right now, I gotta say, advertisers, you can probably alienate them 30% less than you could six months ago before all these headlines came out. So that's one thing. Ultimately, you really can't alienate the billions of searchers that are

searchers or searches that are taking place. If they dramatically see a reduction in just the sheer number of queries and you start to see people transitioning, hey, I'm going to try Bing. I'm going to try some of these other search engines that people have, you know, I don't think people are going to hop specifically to subscription search engines where you're paying a little bit and getting what you perceive to be better answers but I think something like this where one you know a dozen talking heads a hundred talking heads a thousand talking heads there's billions of people out there but if they start to see a million searches going down a day or so something like that numbers that while

still are dropping the bucket but have some impact I think that's where you'll really start to, then they have to determine, okay, are we giving that better experience for the user? Right now, I think they can kind of stand on that line in the middle and say, yeah, we're just trying to improve the experience. After six months, after you have like the time periods

that you're saying, that's when they're truly gonna understand where these search trends start to go. People, that is, I put that pull up on LinkedIn of have you seen it and What is it better is it worse? You know, then it's it's it's early But I do think that as more people are engaging with these AI summaries They're gonna make that determination of okay Is this good is this bad if you've done it twice if you've done it three times if you start to get the same

Type of answers. I think that's where you're going to start to understand, okay, it may be in the next 30 to 60 days that, oh, people aren't doing travel searches, or it might be vertical specific, where I think shopping searches are still going to be great. Overall, when I look at some of the e-commerce product ties searches, I think Google's done a relatively good job with those. I still think travel hotels, these are areas where they wanna keep it in the ecosystem, but because they call it Google Hotels and they don't have rentals really into that API

and they don't have the full experience, when we talk about travel still, you talk about the experience. We've got, in the outline, we've got the how should I plan a trip to Myrtle Beach? A lot of great information, but it's still, I mean, as the local, the accuracy there is meh. Not so great. Let's put it that way. It's like, well, I guess the question is, does that perfectly satisfy what people are after? So when they do a search for how do I plan my trip to Myrtle Beach was the example keyword and maybe we can figure out a way to upload the

link to the screenshot in the show notes. So I'll try I'll do my best to kind of link that up here. But when you do that, is that like the example for the listener is that it gives a little intro at the beginning the example three day itinerary includes a mix of activities like visiting the beach exploring restaurants, going to live shows, etc. It also includes a variety of places to eat restaurants, etc. And then it gives you like day one, three things to do in the morning, evening, afternoon, or excuse me, morning, afternoon, evening, and then same for day two and same for day three.

Like I think we're on the right track there. And there is some like cited sources like there's Google My Business listings, you click on that, then you go to the website. It kind of helps a little bit, I think it kind of gives you some initial research. I almost wondered though, this goes back to something that we've talked about before, is that kind of ruining some of the anticipation of what people like when they plan a vacation? Are we giving them the answer almost like too easy? And they kind of want to like dig in

and explore a little bit more. Is the experience on Google what people are actually after? Like to your point, time will tell, I don't know the answer to that question at this moment in time. The answer may be yes, the answer may be no, depending on what someone is kind of set up for optimizing for.

So that's a valid question in my mind. But I don't know, I don't think that is the case. And I could be wrong. But I don't think that's the case today. I think people actually want to go watch videos, read longer form content, explore around a little bit. They just want they want to go to good websites, they want to go to websites that are like clean, you know, ad free or like light ad load, they don't want to get, you know, inundated with things, which is why I think the

recipe sites are going to get so decimated by an update like this. Because those are sites that people always joke about how what a bad experience it is to go there I don't know if we can say like objectively trip advisor is like a bad experience to go on that website because You get like user generated content reviews, etc That Google doesn't quite have the same level of information on like there's Google reviews But it's not quite the same thing as TripAdvisor And I think there's extra information on some of those sites that is more valuable than what Google has

So Google trying to swallow everything up from a concept perspective and just spit it out into like, hey, here's three bullet points, at least to I think a lot of sameness too. Like imagine it's gonna spit out the same agenda of the same itinerary to everyone who does that search and looking to come to the area. Imagine like these places are gonna get overrun with like people that are,

oh, I found this on Google. Oh, I found this on Google too. Like it makes things very clinical. And I don't know if that's what the traveling person for leisure actually wants to be honest with you. And ultimately I don't think it doesn't improve the trip planning experience. Like it doesn't give you a, it doesn't make it easier if you look at the food side of things, you know, food delivery and stuff, all the connections that you can get there. And I think they're cutting part of that out as well. But that was the benefit of being able to get that easy

access, book it easier, make it easier to book. Just having the AI summary does not make it easier to book the trip. Does not make it easier. Yeah, it gives you the itinerary. But even when within the AI, when we start to see AI summary results specifically for city vacation rentals or vacation rentals in X area or stuff like that, or planning a trip there. That process

still isn't any better. I honestly think it's going to be an Airbnb or a Verbo or one of the larger OTAs on the hotel side that is truly going to put, I mean, it's going to be Expedia and then Verbo is just going to have it kind of come in there or it's going to be price high or something like that. But I do think that that's the most likely because they are solely focused on this travel planning process. And I think Google has really invested what they want to for the time being. Now they're focused on AI and eventually they're going to have to meld those two together because still Expedia is one of their top advertisers. I mean, there's billions of dollars going

into the advertising side that even if everybody's frustrated, you still got to hit your money. You still got to make your bookings. You still got to be able to put that ROI back and be able to reinvest. So while there's some bad stuff out there on the Google ad side of things, nobody's stopping Google ads immediately. Everybody is still going to need to use that to run their business. So because some of their major advertisers are still on the travel space, they're going to have to reconcile those two experiences and try to figure out how do we make, I mean, what does an AI summaries experience look like on the travel, hotel, vacation, rental,

whatever that looks like? How does it look like in that space? Because otherwise it is, it might be a good old, okay, now we're coming down the road and Apple is starting to take more of the share. I mean, they're looking to kind of dip a toe on the map side with hotels. Or now Airbnb is deciding, okay, we're going to be more of a search engine type of application type of social. I don't know what that looks like, but they're opening the door for others to give a far better experience on the travel side after it seems like they've put so much investment into it over the last decade. I mean, it just feels like a weird

clashing of terms when AI should be helping that process, I think, as a consumer and as a someone in this space. Yeah. Well, going back to my earlier comment, how do we know that people making those decisions are the same ones that made the previous decisions? I think there's some evidence out there that that's not the case, that Google feels like they have to go in this direction. This is where the puck is going, so to speak, with respect to people searching. And I think perplexity is the one that people keep bringing up as this is the new way that people are going to search going forward. Perplexity makes more sense than Google from a research. It answers my question in a more

logical way that a junior researcher may answer my question, then cites the sources and things like that. I've used the tool. I've seen actually some of these referrals start to pop up in a more logical way that a junior researcher may answer my question then cites the sources and things like that. I've used the tool. I've seen actually some of these referrals start to pop up in a few clients analytics accounts where people are searching for information. They're clicking through and then it shows like GA sources like perplexity. So I don't think that people are wrong about that. Maybe it's gonna catch on. I will say that DuckDuckGo has been on this like slow rise for a while. As far as like search engine market share from what I can tell. But it's kind of like just a different version of Google. I don't think DuckDuckGo has any

like real market advantage. I never thought that was the case. Other than, hey, we're not going to track you as much. But that's just like the average person I think doesn't care about that as much as people think. Like Apple leans into that, for example, marketing the iPhone, like, hey, we don't track you as much. And I don't know if you could like ask 10 people on the street if they could articulate the difference between Google tracking you using an Android phone and Apple tracking or not tracking you using an iPhone. I don't think there's enough legitimate differentiation there for them people to really notice and be like, oh yeah, that's definitely why I picked an iPhone.

It seems to be like a marketing thing that people don't massively care about, to be honest with you. So that makes it tricky to know exactly where things are going to go. And I think that's kind of our general theme of these AI kind of updates. We've done a handful, like you said, over the past few years on these kind of AI updates, which is that we don't exactly know where things are gonna go, but one thing that does appear to be the case right now is like Google's gonna continue

to march towards the direction of giving answers. They don't care that it's gonna impact your traffic necessarily, but the good news, going back to Paul's earlier point, is that our problems are a little bit too complex to solve right now from a booking perspective, that I think it's gonna be a long time before Google gets down to like the vacation rental level where they're like ingesting

all the vacation rentals, you know, out there, including on Airbnb and including on listing sites, etc, etc. And Google just relentlessly driving traffic into these vacation rental sites at the expense of costing them revenue or costing them ad dollars from clients that we work with, you know, clients that are driving in additional visibility and revenue to Google through the typical ad product. So there's kind of this push and pull. There's a little tension right now, I would argue between, Hey, we need to make money, we can't not innovate because then people will go to other search engines.

But we also can't turn off the money hose that is probably one of the best businesses of all time, which is the Google search ads from an intent perspective, from a revenue perspective. And most importantly, from like a margin perspective, like it costs Google very little to serve a webpage and they can make a lot of money on every single search that happens on a web page from different revenue sources and things like that. So I think that the opportunity in front of us with Google hasn't changed as drastically as people might have you think, but I do think you've got to keep an eye on it and understand how can I play the game a little bit differently maybe going forward

with respect to maybe it's less content or just realizing that my content is not necessarily going to drive the conversions. I had a you conversation or friendly debate, you know, with someone that you and I both know about this idea that people will come to the blog anyways on a vacation or to a website, even without these AI summaries, even without feature snippets, let's say you're getting 10,000 people a month to come to your blog, informational content, very few of them book. And my response to this person, when this person made this claim to me was like, I know, and that's not the point necessarily.

I want people to come to the blog post on the best things to do in Myrtle beach, two buck. I want that, but there's not really enough intent there for them to do it. What they are doing though, is they're getting into my retargeting funnel. They're getting on my email list, potentially some percentage of them. They're seeing my brand name. They're seeing my company name. And most importantly, I would argue from an SEO perspective, I'm telling Google

that I'm an expert in this destination. And if you go do these searches, as I've been doing a lot of lately, we're doing new market research right now, the companies that I'm an expert in this destination. And if you go do these searches, as I've been doing a lot of lately, we're doing new market research right now. The companies that tend to rank well in Google tend to be ones that have much more comprehensive information about a destination than sites that don't have that. So you see sites ranking on Google that are experts in that area, like that one specific market or the large sites. You don't really see a site that's like in five different areas,

rank that well in Google. Hey, we're in, you know, Amelia Island, Florida. We're in Miami, we're in Galveston, Texas, and we're in Seattle. I'm just making that up. I don't think anyone fits all that criteria. Google doesn't rank sites like that very well. Because how could you be an expert in five completely different geos? Fakasa can get away with that or Airbnb can get away with that or Verbo, because these are national brands, large brands that people know. They have domain authorities in the 90s. Like this is a different sort of game they're playing. If you're a single property manager in a single market,

you can still win. Like we have clients who. We have clients who just looked at analytics on Friday before we record on Mondays, but I was looking last Friday, all these rollouts, we have clients that are up 20, 30, 40% year over year in organic search traffic, and they're getting 10, 20, 30, 40% more bookings year over year in many cases because they're building that brand awareness. People are coming in and they may find them through Google. They may not find them as often going forward on Google as they did before. I think that's a reasonable conclusion to make here. But I don't think it invalidates the fact that when it comes to that money keyword,

like you were talking about earlier, they still have to go on the website, put in dates, and make that booking. And if you can deliver on that process, if you can deliver on that system, I think that the water sloshing around the boat in the short term is not going to impact you as much as people think.

And I think that if you make too early of a judgment call here on abandoning this, my question would be, where are you going? So if you say, Hey, Google is now screwing us over, we're not going to get the same traffic, I'm going to go somewhere else. My question to you would be where are you going to go where you're going to get the same kind of quality of traffic, we're going to be able to drive people in. It's not on social. I love social. And we've talked that many episodes about social before. People on Facebook are not going

to convert like people on Google. That's just in fact, even if there's less of them, even if the pool is smaller that you're fishing in, it's still going to work a lot better for you to continue to invest in Google for the immediate future. And if that changes, I'll let you know, you know, I'm all for what works best. And if there's a different channel that is presented to us in the future that works better, I'll be the first one to hop on it and champion it. But I don't think that we're, we might be on a ski slope going down with respect to some content views, but I don't think we're on a ski slope going down as far as people going into Google, trying to find a company, a property, et cetera, that meets their needs and then them being

comfortable enough to make that booking. I still think we're very much on the upswing there from a behavior standpoint, even if the demand is down a little bit year over year. That's it is the ultimate behavior and how ingrained everything is. I mean, people literally run their businesses through G Suite. So clearly Google has a foothold in what everybody's doing. I mean, you know, whether it'll be the default browser for different devices and different stuff down the road, we'll see. I think that may change things, but that's down the road. That's like, that will have a year's worth of, you know, you're going to see a year's worth of work to get that to happen, And then search habits are going

to start to change. I mean, we're talking about 18 months, two years down the road, three years down the road, if it happens at all. So I do, I think that it's really important to know about it. And you're going to see it, it's going to have some impact. I think we, you know, whether it's substantial or whether it's small, we should know that there's gonna be some impact in how we do searches or how we run our businesses. So keeping ahead of it and keeping in front of these trends and really understanding, okay, are the things I need to do or do I just kinda let things slide here until we get to a point?

I don't think, coming out of this, I always like to have actionable items to have out of the webinar, but I don't think anything's actionable here outside of maybe starting to do some searches that you think people will do in your area and starting to see, are there AI summaries coming up? If you're one of those diligent digital marketers in maybe a higher competition area, absolutely. If you're in the Gulf Shores, if you're in Myrtle, if you're in Hilton Head, if you're in 38 and it's same day, I mean, some of those big markets, I would start to just have, you know, a list of five or 10 searches that maybe you do in

Google on a regular basis. And you just start to see, maybe that's a good rule of thumb to do for everybody, but just start to see how AI is impacting these results. And is it beneficial? Is it not so beneficial? And do start to put together some ideas for how that's going to affect your homeowners and your travelers, because there will be a little bit on both sides of the aisle, and you've gotta be thinking about both of those

as we continue to work through these fun Google issues. Yes, here would be a good one. I just thought of this on the fly. It wasn't in our outline, but go to Search Console. Look at your last three months of data, for example, from a click perspective and go do those top 25 searches, let's say, from either a page level, maybe pick the top few for each page, or you can certainly go to the keyword level and do some of the searches there. I'm looking at a client's Google Search Console account right now that gets roughly 10 to 15,000 visits a month from Google Search. So this isn't a massive mega site, but

it's doing well in its individual market. Don't get me wrong. This client has keywords like for example, area name vacation rentals ranking, obviously, area name beach rentals area name. How about this one area name beach house rentals oceanfront with private pool. That's one of their top keywords. So how about that one doing the searches Google, I see no changes to the way those search results are coming up today. Could that change? Of course, they could change to be foolish for us to say that it's

not going to change because we don't know what Google's thinking or what they're going to do. But look at it and you may realize that all these, again, so-called money keywords probably aren't being shifted as much as you think. And if you lose some content traffic, you lose some content traffic, there's not a lot you can do about it. I still think it's helping you build your overall profile of two Googles saying, here's what I'm about. Use me as one of your AI summary sources if you have to. But then you're citing me and you're calling me the expert in, you know, Myrtle Beach or Hilton Head or San Diego, California. I'm the expert.

And although you're hurting my traffic, which bums me out, that's actually not how I make money, right? Like all the clients we work with, if you're listening to this show, you don't make money off of traffic views anyways. We alluded to that earlier. You make money off people eventually going and searching for your company name,

the name of one of your individual listings, or the name of some topic that describes them, their travel intent. So short-term rentals in location, vacation rentals in location, oceanfront vacation rentals in location. These are the keywords that actually move the needle for you. So until those are strongly impacted or you're seeing, Oh God, I can't get traffic on my keyword anymore until that's true.

I don't think that we're in for doom and gloom quite yet. And time will tell. Like you, like you said, Paul, this wasn't as actionable, I admit, but it's sometimes good to like be informed as to what's coming. And then you have to decide as the business owner where you want to place your time, effort, energy, dollars, you know, all, this wasn't as actionable, I admit, but it's sometimes good to be informed as to what's coming. And then you have to decide as the business owner where you want to place your time, effort, energy, dollars, all those kind of pieces. And if you can find me a better channel

than Google Search right now, I'm all ears. I'd love to hear about it. Email me, email Paul, and we'll study it, and we'll figure out better ways to continue to get that traffic in the door. In the meantime, let's take the changes that Google has in store for us, learn from them, study them, and then we can just make a better plan

as we go forward. I think that's a fair way to approach it. Awesome. One plan that would help the listener going forward is leaving us a review on their podcast app of choice. iTunes, Spotify is where we get the most downloads. If you made it this far, you must have liked a little bit of what we had to say.

Therefore, you have one piece of homework, and that is you're going to go to your podcast app of choice, iTunes, Spotify, click five stars, leave a nice comment too. We've gotten some reviews, by the way, somewhat recently, Paul, where people left five stars but they didn't say anything. So they left five stars which I appreciate, but you could type one sentence there. Hey, these guys are the best. Hey, the Celtics are going to win the series over the, you know, Timberwolves. That maybe already

have happened by the time you listen to this. Maybe not. Maybe it went the other way. I don't know. We'll see. Time will tell. But either way, leave us a review. We super appreciate that. Leave a little sentence there. Puts a smile on our face when we see those reviews come in on the podcast apps. Helps us a ton. And we can do more episodes like this. So we'll be back next week with a fun new episode talking about things that are non-AI, but we got to do an AI every once in a while now. It's contractually obligated. We just made that up, but that feels to be the case. So appreciate you for listening. We'll catch everyone on the next episode of the Heads in Bed Show. Thanks so much.