Heads In Beds Show - What Is Google Thinking About YOUR Content In 2025?

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

In this episode, Conrad and Paul think more about Google and how they're ranking and thinking about CONTENT on your vacation rental blog and website. They also break down AI overviews, search trends, updates and more.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Lily Ray on XGoogle Search DocsAI Overview XeetGoogle AI Overviews With Detailed Comparison Mode🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 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 Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Florida Paul, what's going on? How's it going? It's warm. level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Florida Paul, what's going on? How's it going?

It's warm. It's, it's real warm. Now I will say that we are extending the trip down here by a day. Because there is as there was two years ago. I think two years ago is 14 inches of snow that we were going to run into. I think the winter storm is going to now level us up to where Myrtle Beach was. So I think that's fair. Grand scheme of things. I think we're supposed to get eight to 10 inches on Saturday.

So we are going to push things back. I'll be flying in on Super Bowl Sunday instead, but yeah, it's nice to be warm. It's been single digits and or real feels of minus for the last week, looking up in Minnesota. So happy to be down here. How are you doing, sir? Yeah, good. I feel like I've said I've seen you know, twice in Florida once for Darm of two months ago, we were hanging out in person actually there. And now you just chilling at your at your place down there that your parents I think have in

Florida. And I think your smile is a little brighter, a little sharper when you're down in the warm weather. So despite your roots, maybe there's a maybe there's a feature where Paul is in a much warmer climate and he's a happier person. These are conversations that we've had multiple times. It's just like, well, you know, at some point down the road, what does that look like? And I don't know, it's there's a lot of other stuff down here that I'm so so on. But I will say the weather is the weather in the golf I'll take. Yeah. Well, and you could do what the ultimate, you know, move,

which is that you spend your summers up in the north and then you spend your summers out in the south. That's the, that's the ultimate work from home, you know, paradise that I think some people live in nowadays. So that's another play in your playbook that you could pull if you want to someday, someday. Yeah, someday, someday. Keep making that that make making these good assessments and insights and keep talking about great things. And maybe someday we'll make that happen. Yeah, exactly.

I like that. Well, cool. Speaking of assessments and insights, Google is assessing and learning insights from your content that you're publishing. So we thought this was kind of a refresh, a kind of a level set on a few topics that we've kicked around a few times over the years.

But we're focused today, I would say hyper focused today, on specifically how does Google look at content. So we're not really worried so much today about, you know, the ranking algorithms or all these core updates, although that'll kind of come into fold. But if you're going and publishing content on your vacation or website today, how do you know it's what Google is actually wants? What it looks for? How do you how can you produce that content at scale, hopefully, or at some level of volume? How do you know what's helping your business? How do you know you're getting more traffic? How do you know this is part of your overall plan for success when it comes to driving more traffic

and getting more bookings to your website? So I'll start maybe from my perspective, which is that we touched on this before, but just kind of restate the obvious thing here. We are doing a lot of blog content creation for clients. A lot of blog content creation for vacation rental websites is not intended to or typically drives any bookings. So most people going to a Things To Do

in Naples, Florida page are not actually looking to book when they're going on that page. What I've noticed though over the years, and this has kind of been our philosophy for a long time, is that the more valuable informational content you produce on your website, the better you tend to rank for the more valuable rental keywords.

So for example, you rank better on Naples, Florida vacation rentals or Destin, Florida vacation rentals when you have a library of content on your website, that is things to do, restaurants, best activities, best golf courses, best beaches to go to, blah, blah, blah. So that's kind of our typical SEO approach when working with a client is we're creating content

on the blog. Yes, that will get traffic. Yes, that will get us links, by the way, too, which is something we could touch on briefly. And it also gives us, in my experience, seen as an expert in the eyes of Google, which then helps us rank for more competitive terms ahead of the OTA platforms like Verbo and Airbnb.

So that's my philosophy. Based on everything that's changing right now, I don't think my philosophy is different. What I think I've learned, though, over the last year and really over the last four or five months or so is that that content is getting chewed away from a value perspective in terms of how much traffic we can drive.

And that is unfortunate, but that is the reality of the situation. So things like AI overviews, things like featured snippets have always been there, but maybe they're bigger now because the AI overviews are present. Things like people just not using Google as much for those informational queries, which I do think is happening, is sort of chewing into how effective that content is from a traffic standpoint. However, I don't believe that it's impacting the approach or the strategy

on making that content, and then it's later driving in this value on the direct booking traffic keywords that we want to rank for. Again, the vacation rental keywords. So that's kind of where I sit on blog content, keywords, that sort of thing on more guest demand side. What's your take on that? And then if you have any homeowner flavor, feel free to sprinkle that in. Everything's constantly changing. I think one of the, we pulled up the search quality ratiders guide and I think the reference point in there is like, we made 4,279 changes in 2022 to the algorithm. Well, that's crazy. Of course you did. I mean, because this is, this is happening all day, every day, multiple times a day. We talk about it all the time, but the solid principles of what we, you know, what we preach day in and day out, week in and week out,

those haven't changed overall. We are missing opportunities here and there for, I think, to our benefit, and this is still something that AI overviews aren't in our space as much as they are in other spaces. And I think that's a real positive for us. That is, I think more on the trip planning side, things to do, that's when you're starting to see things. So that's where we're probably losing out a little bit. But on the owner side of things,

you don't have a whole lot of missed opportunity right now. You're still kind of getting that standard local map pack of if you're looking for a property management company, big-ass rental management company, short-term rental management company, you're going to get that general search that you typically get right now. Now, maybe at some point they plug into whatever the future of a Caso looks like or the Casago looks like or whatever that looks like there and there's something a little more ingrained. But I think that's part of it is because there's not that big national entity of, you know,

you do the Airbnb search, you're gonna get plugged into Airbnb. Maybe at some point you're gonna go into the Airbnb host match system or something like that. I can see where that would be an AIO review type of experience that Google and the other search engines might like. But generally speaking,

the things that we have done previously are the things that Google is still rewarding. And I think it is. And then sometimes you have to kind of check yourself and dig back into that documentation and see, okay, like what is Google actually evaluating? And not just take it that, yes, there's a lot of automation going on

because there are humans behind the scenes that are actually taking into consideration. They're looking at 10 results and they're saying, okay, this result is better than this because of this. They're trying to educate the algorithm just like we are with the things that we're doing to put the best practices of technical SEO and putting that H1 in, putting those page titles in and those descriptions in. Those are the signals that the systems are looking for. Well, those quality raters are doing something very similar. They're

going through and assessing the quality of the content, where the answers are located. I think that's something that maybe I didn't put as much emphasis on, is that when you write content, you get a little fluffy. I think there's a reality in that, that sometimes you write more than is actually of value there. And Google's going to, in some cases, Google will actually, I've seen some examples in the last couple of days, just there have been a lot of examples on Next, Twitter,

whatever, about showing reasons why in the quality raters people have, you know, people have moved down rankings or why they weren't ranked as high as others were. Part of it is the answer isn't fully clear. It's not easily accessible. People have to dig to get to this. I think there's some of those things of, you know, you look in the Yoast SEO plugin and they say, well, have the keyword in the first paragraph and things like that. And there's a reason for that because they know just like we do behind the scenes that that's part of the signals that the algorithm is

reading. So everything that we do moving forward, you have to consider it within how is AI going to play a role in this. As far as AI generation content, that's something we're going to talk about here as well. How AI is kind of changing the way we're seeing these results and how they're aggregating different results. And how do you get in front of that? We don't have that answer yet.

And if you do, then I'm going to listen closely here in the second half of this. But that is, I think that's always going to be the question that's going to be the question we're going to get a lot over the next 12, 24, 36 months is, well, how do I get perplexity? How do I get chat GPT? How do I get more traffic on Geminid?

Well, as we've said before, let's focus on being in Google, because that's still where 90% of your search impressions, search share is still coming from. So this is going to be fun. It's a fun discussion here of just kind of refreshing and rehashing and continuing to focus on what's going to ultimately make your content stand out on your website. Yeah, I think you hit on a few key important points there. I

guess the one thing that to me makes a lot of sense when Google's evaluating the quality is that they've now changed their tune a lot on this side. They initially had some guidance on, no, AI-generated content can be a bad thing or might be a bad user experience. But they quickly pivoted out of that and saying, hey, AI-generated content is fine.

You might want to disclose it as now on their current docs. So at the bottom, you may want to say something to the effect of like on images. I think they now encourage you to say like, this is an AI generated image or something like that. We'll see how far that actually goes. Cause I see lots of websites using AI generated images, not disclosing it and they're ranking fine.

So that's always the problem with Google, right? There's what Google says and there's what ranks in Google. And the problem is those things don't often, you know, trend very well in the same direction. So you often want to tend to ignore a discount. If you've been doing SEO long enough, if you have a gray hair on your head, you've been doing SEO that long, then you realize that what Google says and what ends up ranking is not the same. So you tend to discount or ignore what they're saying. That being said, though, the AI content, let's be honest, it's gotten so good now. You can prompt

many things in these higher end AI models and get back content that sure if you look for it, you can find little things that maybe moreover, little phrases that chat tbt and Gemini and things like that use. But for the most part, it's not as bad as it once was, even two years ago, as far as the quality of what's getting out there. So Google had to pivot out of that. They couldn't just say, well, all AI content is bad because the truth is the AI content is pretty much indistinguishable in many situations depending on how you're prompting it from something that any writer would have just sat down and wrote or created in a document. Now, I do think, hey, straight up copy and pasting AI content without any modification or prompt or

just putting that on your blog is not the right play. That is not something that I think we'll ever be able to do for the most part if we're talking about something that's local. That being said, I think AI, this is kind of the direction we're heading in, is a heck of a first draft. And I think it can really replace a ton of time and a ton of effort and energy that a writer used to have to spend to go and put together a basic article. The 10 best things to do in Naples, Florida is now so much easier to at least get the scaffolding around with some of these AI writing tools versus before it was someone going word by word, typing, you

know, one by one. Now it's the first draft is done by AI. I take that I'm researching it. I'm putting in links and putting in content. And then I'm getting to a more final draft after one hour of editing versus before the first two hours of research. Then the next hour was writing. Then the final hour was editing.

So we've taken that time, I think, for content to go live down drastically using some of these AI tools. And like I said, that is the direction we are going in a buildup, which is not my thought process two years ago. I was the opposite. I'm like, hey, this AI stuff is really bad right now. It hallucinates. It just makes up stuff that doesn't exist.

I don't trust that I don't want to go down that direction. I feel like it's gotten significantly better since then. But you mentioned this quality radar, guidelines stuff, or some of the things that Google says. What they say in their docs specifically, just so I'm getting this right, I'm reading it directly off the screen here,

avoid creating search engine first content. So this idea of, is the content only made to actually get a visitor from Google? Is that the only purpose, the only point of the content? And they give examples here that I would say are not as problematic in our space, but certainly I've seen these as a consumer or just a user of Google.

So for example, they talk about things like, does your content promise to answer a question that actually user of Google. So for example, they talk about things like, does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer? So for example, suggesting there's a release date for a product movie or TV show and one isn't confirmed. I've had that happen a lot because I'll search for like, you could do it right now actually,

go search like 2025 or 2026 NFL schedule release. And that schedule is not out yet as of our recording this podcast. And there'll be someone who has written an article where it's like a placeholder, where it's like, hey, when the schedule is released, we'll put it here. But if you were searching that right now, you would come to pages that look like

they're gonna answer that question. And they can't answer that question because the schedule is not out yet. If you're an NFL fan, you would know that, right? But that's the kind of thing that Google's saying, you're gaming the system, you don't actually have the answer. You're not actually giving the 2025, 2026 NFL schedule.

That's misleading. Insights like that are not what they're after. Now in our space, I think one thing that does happen a bit from time to time, David, can sample the bottom. 2025, 2026 NFL schedule, that's misleading. Insights like that are not what they're after. Now in our space, I think one thing that does happen a bit from time to time, David can sample the bottom, are you potentially making small changes to an article and then making it seem like it was a new article? I do think that's something that a lot of people in our space will tend to do from time to time.

So they'll write an article and it's the five best things to do and then they'll modify it and say, as we're recording this, February 2025, they'll say the 10 best things to do in, and then they'll modify it and say, as we're recording this, February 2025, they'll say the 10 best things to do in February 2025 in Destin, Florida, but they didn't actually change the content from where it was in January or where it was last February or where it was the February before. So that's the kind of thing I think that I can sort of get

online with Google with where I'm like, that's misleading people, that's annoying as a user. You click on something saying, oh, it's gonna show me events for what's happening right here. I'm in Destin, Florida right now, what's going on? And then you click and it's go to the beach, go fly a kite, go do this. And you're like, wait, that's going to show me events for what's happening right here. I'm in Destin, Florida right now. What's going on? And then you click and it's go to the beach, you know, go fly a kite, go do this. And you're like, wait, that's not a good experience. You're bouncing, you're leaving, you're going off to the next thing. So maybe I could put

a link in the chat. Lily Ray on Twitter is the source of this. I'll screen chop it. Go find the docs on the developer search section. So I think it's worth reading. If you're working with a writer or if your agency is saying, hey, we're going to be doing content on the website, I think them reading those docs is If you're working with a writer or if your agency is saying, hey, we're gonna be doing content on the website. I think them reading those docs is a good idea to at least understand what are the pieces that I'm actually working on? How is my content actually original?

One more thing I'll mention in here, I didn't say it earlier, is they use this word interestingly. Are you using extensive automation to produce content on any topic? So it wasn't this idea of like using some automation to produce content on a topic, they're okay with that. What they don't wanna have is a website that's like paulsblog.com

and it's talking about how to repair a Ford F-150, what things to do in Naples, Florida, and then it's talking about best headphones for iPhone or something like that, right? That's the kind of thing where Google goes. You can't possibly be an expert in all those things, unless you're wire cutter, they're exempt, but that's a different conversation. And then you're creating all this content in all these different areas. So it goes back to this core idea.

You have to write on your vacational website in your blog And then you're creating all this content in all these different areas. So it goes back to this core idea. You have to write on your vacational website in your blog so that Google knows you are an expert in that destination or that area. Another reason why multi-market is super hard, Paul and I have talked about it before, to say that you're an expert in the Poconos and you're also an expert in San Diego, from Google's perspective, doesn't really make any sense. So those sites typically don't rank well anyways. But the way you do that is through creating content that's valuable. Yes, I think you can use automation now more, AI writing tools now more than you could a

few years ago, the quality has gotten better, but it still requires you to make the information actually good. It has to be useful. It has to be valuable. And if you have that frame, I think you can probably go a little faster now than you could before, or you can produce a little bit, content a little bit cheaper and get, you know, put that budget or put that effort into other stuff, which is kind of what our thought process is. Maybe our content costs go down, but our link costs go up, you know, cause we can produce more content, better content. So that's kind of what we're thinking about there. Yeah.

What's, what's your read on this when you look through that talk, what sticks out here with something that's like, that's interesting. People should be paying close attention to that. I mean, I think it brings me back to Simon Sinek, starting with the why. I mean, they, they, they talk about the why a lot in the, in just the quality content and just talking about, not even just that, that about the why a lot in just the quality content. And just talking about, not even just that, that's in the developers documentation too.

And it is, I think so often we're focused on the keyword. Oh, we gotta show up for this keyword. We gotta show up for this keyword. Why are people looking for this keyword? And that intent, I mean, it is. Both Ahrefs and SEMrush do a good job of telling you, okay, is it informational? Is it educational?

Is it commerce? Is it, you know, what types of keywords are you looking for? And I do, I think that that's really important to consider when you're picking out your content strategy. It's not even just keywords or a blog post or stuff like that. It's when you're crafting your content strategy, you have to be thinking about that buyer's journey.

And I think that that's something that we only talk about on and off and then talk about the full funnel and everything like that, but there is a buyer's journey still. It might not be 58 touch points like it used to be or 45 or 34, it might be five or 10, but you still have to figure out

where you're going to latch on, where that content is going to capture them in that buyer's journey. Those things to do, that's important pieces. That's inspiration. Maybe they're going to go to social media and then they're going to come back to your website and they're going to bounce around and they're going to do a lot of different things.

But you have to have that content there. And I think, you know, they hammer on EAT and the expertise authority and trustworthiness and all that. And that's really important in the content. But I still drive a lot of that back to the link building side of things, because that is going to demonstrate that at a much higher level. And we see that all the time. It's that everybody wants those high, again, talk about link building strategy. Everybody wants the high domain because that's the big power grab and you get a domain rank of 70 linking back to you.

Okay, that looks good. New York times.edu.org, these are positives. But at the same time, if you have 10, 20, 30 smaller sites that still provide value in Google's eyes and they're pointing back to you as well, that's a huge positive signal to your website and one that you shouldn't be just second guessing and saying, no, no, no, I don't want to link back from you little podunk this or that or whatever it is. No, every link back you can get is valuable and as difficult as they are to get, I would never turn one away. I mean, unless it's super spammy or anything like that, I would never turn one away. So that is

something that some of those principles I do. I struggle with the concept just because it is. It's very difficult to truly demonstrate expertise in our areas here because there's so much nuance. I mean, there's one person may like this restaurant, one person may hate it, one person may like this sightseeing opportunity, one person may hate it. And I think that that's something in each of these individual markets. You're going to take what you're going to take, you're going to get what you're going to get. And then that type of content specifically is where I think you can get a good AI draft. You can get something that's going to hopefully not have too many hallucinations in there. That is still always the concern with AI. But if you can put your local spin on it, you have to know. And I

think that's, again, we talk about these multi-markets. If you're not in the market and you really don't know the area, I mean, you've referenced pizza places in Myrtle Beach many, many times. And if one isn't on that list, you know it's not the right, I mean, it's just low quality. And I think that there's something to be said for that, is that if there are 12 lists out there and your list is the only one

that doesn't have the number one ranking in every other list, hmm, you think Google's not going to maybe think about that and say, let's slide your ranking down a little bit there. Which is a bit of a problem, if we're being honest, because I don't know if consensus is really the best way to get to the outcome. It's like, okay, well, if I have to write a 10 best pizza places article and I have to include these 10 places in order to rank, I do worry about that a little bit. Whereas like in theory, the large language models are not shackled by that,

you know, demand of, hey, we're trying to find consensus across, you know, 5,000 different pages, talk about the same topic. In theory, perhaps they could give a more, you know, neutral answer, a more accurate answer, you know, depending on exactly what people are, you know, searching for or looking for. There might be something to that. I realize it's hard to predict, you know, where exactly exactly what people are, you know, searching for or looking for, there might be something to that. I realize it's hard to predict, you know, where exactly things are gonna go.

But yeah, I do worry about that a little bit, that like Google's ranking model is based on consent. And when you try to write something very different, it doesn't rank well. It doesn't. If you try a brand new topic, hey, these are the best, 10 best based on these criteria, you're gonna have a really hard time, you know,

getting through that first step of, you know, going into that process. And even if you're explaining your process and everything like that, because I remember there was one where we did, we actually put together a grading system, this is back, travel net days, but we put together a grading system and we included it in the blog content

and we still couldn't get that thing to move. The Smokey Mountain Market, something like that, maybe Gatlinburg, maybe Pitch and Forge, but put together a nice little scoring rubric, made it very clear and graded everything and did it. And that's, that was a one time deal because it just didn't move the needle and it felt like a whole lot of extra work that just that didn't do it for us. So that's, I mean, that's another part about the AI encroachment, I would say is that because it does take that time away and because you've got a little more efficiency there, it is.

How do you balance that? Because to produce high quality content, I don't care if you're the best writer in the world, the fastest hyper in the world, it takes time. You got to do the research. If you're not doing the research, it's not as good. I mean, it is, unless you know everything. Again, you be that local expert and do all that. It takes time to produce content.

So I can understand taking the shortcuts along the way, especially when you put the time in and it doesn't rank. And then you do, you put something flippy blasted together that does rank immediately just because eh. I think that's the other thing is we don't necessarily know we can read all the search quality guidelines until we're blue in the face. We can memorize that booklet and it still doesn't ensure that when I write this perfect piece of content in the eyes of the quality Raiders guide or or in the eyes of the technical development documentation, it still might not do it for us.

That's the lovely part about what we do. Yeah, we touched on links a minute ago. And I think just what people understand to the content can only take you so far, right? Like, at the end of the day, you mentioned like a perfect article, I don't know if such a minute ago. And I think just what people understand too, the content can only take you so far, right? Like at the end of the day, you mentioned like a perfect article. I don't know if such a thing exists, but if it does exist, I know this for sure,

which is that if you have quote unquote, a perfect article or the right formatted article, it's not gonna get very far if it's on a website that doesn't have the right domain authority or enough authority to rank it in the eyes of Google. So I do think that with all things SEO, with all things content for sure, you've got to figure out a path towards balance of like,

I'm building awareness, I'm building content, I'm building towards something that makes me an expert in this area, in this destination, but I also got to go back and build links to it. And in theory, the better your content, the easier it is to build links. But certainly a lot of link building is boring, grinding manual work of outreach

or having different websites that you can work with or local partners or whatever the case may be. So I think people need to understand that as well, which is that I think like a lot of things, we tend to do this in our own business. I do this in my own business as well. I work on the thing I'm good at, work on the thing I'm comfortable at. I work at the thing I know I can get a good outcome from, but I don't often do the thing that I'm uncomfortable at, I'm not good at, I don't really know. And as a result, those things can become my weakness. And like not training one muscle group over

time, that really holds you back from making progress. So it's like, well, my biceps look good. But yeah, my legs are these little tiny skinny chicken legs. Yeah, yeah. Or the other way around, maybe for some people. I'm closer to that than the other way around. That's for sure. It legs are decently strong, though. The arms are pretty skinny. So I do think that, you know, people have to understand have to understand it is this whole approach to be successful with content. And it definitely includes getting links, getting mentions of your content on other websites that are linking not to the home page but to the actual content you're writing. I think that's a hard challenge but one that makes a lot of sense. Let's turn the page a

little bit to this Rusty Brick, Barry Schwartz tweet who is never going to come back to a Dharma event again after we rushed the stage back in December. And he looked like, you guys are weird, which is fun to think about. So Barry has a tweet out there. We'll put this in the show notes so people can check it out. But it's an anonymous example. We don't know exactly what the keywords are. But it's someone who ranks number one, pretty much number one for every single keyword in their search console that they filter to this data set. And yet they're getting, let's say one is the lowest one I see on this tab, 1.1%. The best one

I see is 9%, but most seem to be 3, 4, 5% click-through rate. So in other words, a thousand searches occurring every month, and they're getting, in some cases, 10 visits, or in some cases, 90 visits to some of the pages, and they rank number one in Google. So keep that in mind, right? You could rank number one in Google, and I have this conversation all the time with clients, right, especially clients that have had historically good SEO results, and they go,

well, we ranked number one in Google, we maxed out Google. It's like, first of all, no, you haven't, because there's ads, so that's a whole discussion right there. Second of all, even if we ignore ads just for a moment, you could also do another website, or you could try to rank another page for other know, for other keywords. So believe me, we have not maxed out the channel. I've yet to see a site max out Google. Amazon.com has

maxed out Google. So if they have maxed out Google, then there's no way that you have, you know, individual vacations manager or host. But it does prove the point that this is an unfortunate thing I saw a while ago. I was working with a site here in the Myrtle Beach area, you know, who was trying to in the Myrtle Beach area, you know, who was trying to rank for Myrtle Beach hotels. And we actually got them ranking for Myrtle Beach hotels. And they their reward for ranking number one in Google for Myrtle Beach hotels is a paltry point three, I kid you not point three percent click through it, because you're below ads, you're below a featured logic block. And then you're below this like, you know, dynamic map

search thing. So you're like, link number 15 on the page, even though you rank number one in the regular rep results on Google for Myrtle Beach hotels. So I've seen this happen a while ago. It is getting exacerbated worse and worse now by these LM1 or AI overview type things. And it's frustrating because we have clients whose traffic is down year over year. And I go look and I'm like, well, we rank number one. How can I do a better job as an SEO? How could our company do a better job when we rank the client in Google? Number one for that given search.

But Google keeps pushing down the search results, you know, in this way. So this is frustrating, but this is something that's happening. What are you seeing here? It is beyond frustrating. And I think not even I mean, looking at everything you're talking about on those the hotels tonight, that's accurate. Now shrink it down to the mobile side of things because I think again, we get blinded into that desktop and we see you scroll 40% down the page, that's still way too

far to get to an organic result. But you scroll that far down, at least you're going to hit something. You got to scroll and scroll and scroll on a mobile device. I mean, I think that is one area that it's not a bad experience, but it's just, it feels like some of the mobile travel searches have become more scattered where you're going from the map to the meta search to now they're throwing into some activity cards that you can kind of swipe through there. And then you're going for some more pricing on the MetaSearch. They've elongated the page so much that, yeah, it's not surprising to look at the, kind of the second half of that tweet

and see that when you're looking at organic click-through rate versus paid click-through rate, when an AI overview is shown versus not shown, those numbers have gone down dramatically when AI overviews are shown. And another tweet out there is also saying that for keywords like a long tail keyword of eight words or longer, the number of AI overviews are doubling.

So not only are we getting more AI overview results, we're getting fewer click-throughs. I don't know how, I truly don't know how Google can justify it. And we talked about how ad revenue is up, yet the Google stock is down. This is part of that. I don't understand that. Part of it is they're catching up on the AI side of things. But they're trying to catch up on the AI side of things. And now they're trying to, you know, catch up to deep seek and everything else. else, whole nother discussion. But truly, when you see in January 2025, the numbers are organic click-through rate when AI overview not shown, 3.97%. Organic click-through rate, AI shown,

0.64%. Paid click-through rate, AI not shown, 17%. Paid click-through rate, AI shown, 6.56%. shown 6.56% those are ridiculous differences. And I, again, I don't know how you can justify because I can't think that people are coming back and using it is I can't think that the retention on the search settings is that good that there's there's gotta be tell me what it is. I need you to explain this to me like a five year old because this doesn't make sense. I do wonder if it's like victim of the moment type stuff going

on a little bit where it's like Google the perception out there and we'll have some data on this very soon. By the way, stay tuned. We're gonna have an episode pretty soon where we do this and talk a little bit about this idea that search TV is taking over Google. It is such a that is such a dumb thing to say right now is that going to happen in the future? Again, but it's like, who knows? It's my belief.

Everyone wants to be the first one to say that they were right on something. Everyone wants to be the first one to say that they were right on Google dying. I just don't believe that, to be true at all, like the baseline data I'm seeing. Because even with all this traffic getting chewed away, show me who's next.

Show me where the traffic is coming from. It's just not happening versus it going somewhere else. That would be a different scenario. That would be like people are leaving California to move to Texas. That's like something you can measure and track. That's like a change in a change in behavior. People are not leaving Google to then go to other systems for the types of clients that we work with. I think it's very dependent on the type of keyword, the type of query you're going after. The things I use gbd for are often not Google questions or Google ideas. It's a brand new. It things I use TrackGPD for are often not Googleable questions or Googleable ideas.

It's a brand new concept. It's a brand new assistant, if you will, that's happening. So yeah, this idea that people are not going to be using vacation websites to make direct bookings is just a silly concept. I don't know how to answer your question. But that's why it is so frustrating. I also don't know.

Maybe there's some investor that follows us that can walk us through this. How does Google make 10, 12% more revenue and they're doing billions of dollars in more revenue than they were expected to do. And their stock goes down that I can't really understand. You and I talked about the only thing that was down was what their AdSense revenue, which is, you know, display ad inventory, which is not good inventory anyways, to be honest with you. It's always the, you know, the redheaded stepchild of Google ad inventory, regardless. So that being down is almost a good thing, I would argue low key for Google. It's like, oh, less money being wasted on that stuff that your advertiser

isn't getting any value from. Good, send them to search where they get better results. But as far as this intentional crushing of the page, I can't I can't justify it. I can't explain it. No. And I think I mean, it is because I think you're going back to the AdSense side of things. When you look at some of those quality rate, or like some of the examples that they give, some of the examples they give,

there's too many ads on the page. Well, that's because of AdSense, guys. They do not, they're shooting themselves in the foot. Do you not see this is just a bad ecosystem that you've created here? Like you want to reward these directory sites or these, you know, whatever they are and give them money, but now you're going to compromise their S okay. Sure. Why not?

Um, yeah, but I think, you know, like going back to just the what people are using things for now this morning, I think I saw another, we're just, we're dropping Mary all over the place. That means chat GPT did just drop their account requirement for search. Google expanded 2.0 to all and everybody's trying to open things up more, which leads me to believe that they need to test the systems more. They need to get more people and get more people through the door. But I don't necessarily think that that we're providing a better experience there.

Like chat GPT search, I said it. I didn't like it. That's something that I don't know if I need the 10 blue box, 10 blue links. I don't know what I need, but I know that when I was asking chat GPT search for an answer, it wasn't giving me what I wanted there. And again, well, we can figure out why that was and try to test it again at some point. But I do, I think that that's the other side of this

is nobody's really determined how people are going to use a search engine in an AI generated search engine. We've got these tasks and these tools and these operations that the systems are able to do, but do you really feel comfortable asking them a question? generated search engine, we've got these, these tasks and these tools and these operations that that the systems are able to do. But do you really feel comfortable asking them a quote, like any medical related question and search engines the same way, which feel comfortable asking chat GPT a question you'd ask a doctor WebMD something like that. I've done it if that's what you're asking. I've gone to these, I've gone to these tools. Yeah. And I've, you know, I've done it, if that's what you're asking. I've gone to these tools.

I've asked these LLM tools for that information and been reasonably understanding of the response or happy with the response that they give back. I guess that's the idea, right? Is that if we can trust the LLM tools to do a good job, so this early hallucination problems that they had, if those bugs are squashed, if those are gone, then the user is gonna trust

these things more and more. I could see a future where the user or the guest in our case is often who we're thinking about is using Google, or excuse me, using Google. See, there we go. Using these large language model tools in a way that they would have used Google before. I think we're a little bit away from that right now,

just because it's also so slow. You know, like these operator demos I see people keep doing, I'm just like, who has patience for that? Like, versus, and if you want an answer to a question, and it's just something that you could answer by doing a search and getting that response quickly, why is it better to like have a computer do the search for you?

Like I'm a little torn on where that's gonna go. Now doing a task, that's completely different. But again, that's not what Google was doing. Like that was not, that's a new use case. So that's not apples to apples, that's apples to bananas. Or apples to giraffes. Like I was gonna say, we could go further than that. Yeah, like operator in the way that Chat GPT is using that product.

Again, let's stick in the context of travel planning. Yeah. I sort of maintain the belief too, going back to this idea of like, I'm asking Chat GPT those questions about medical information, for example, because I'm very confused by the feedback that I get on Google. On Google, I do get 10 blue links. And then I go, well, I don't know. I mean, Mayo Clinic sounds legit. I guess I'll click on that one. You know, like, OK, that makes sense. But it's JTPT, better for better for worse.

Maybe we'll see if it ends up costing me. Gives you that simple answer, where it's like, what are the ideal blood levels for a newborn on this metric? And I don't understand the report. And I upload it to JTPT. And it goes, oh, based on this information, like, here's the response rate. So if we could trust them on the feedback coming back, I do think that that could chew up some of those queries. As far as travel

planning goes, going back to that, like I said, our core problem set that we solve with my belief, we talked about this previously too, is that people enjoy travel planning. The act of Googling and researching is kind of fun when you're travel planning for leisure. Now I do think it's different if you're travel planning for a business trip or you just don't care, like, hey, just give me the closest place. I'm going to a funeral, you know, like two weeks from now. You know, just give me the place closest to that's, you know, reasonably large and, you know, I can get to. I don't really care.

You know, give me good value for my money. I'm there one night and then I'm leaving and going back home. That's different than we're taking our Christmas vacation this year with my family. We need to go find a place that can sleep, you know, for kids that has, you know, a crib that has all this stuff. Like maybe I could see an AI tool giving you a better matching,

which is something that Brian Chesky has talked to length about. Hey, I need to do a better job on Airbnb matching you to what you want. Right now just dates and rates is not enough context to like really match you with the ideal property for you. If I can get better at that, that's gonna help a lot. So I like that idea that he has quite a bit.

That could be a good use case to sift through with 10,000 photos, tag, categorize them all and say, oh yeah, this one has a crib, this one doesn't. 10,000 photos, categorize them all and say, oh, yeah, this one has a crib, this one doesn't. Cool, here you go, stay with this property. I'm suggesting this property, you then take a look at it. Let me present you with five listings, not 500 listings, which is probably what you want, if you can give it the right feedback.

So I could see us going there. But I don't know if it's going to meaningfully change the trend line that we're on in the short term. So I think that's often what people are doing. And thinking about what Google is doing right now, it's hard to say what they're doing is most optimal for Google in the long term, or in the short term, excuse me. So the question remains, is it what's good for Google in the long term to give more of the answer engine and give up this idea of, hey, we're going to give you links. I think right now they can train all this data that's been created. But imagine as new things come out, as new things are created, are we going to have the same incentive to make content

when you can't get traffic anymore from a search engine? It's like, all right, a lot of sites cease to exist in that model. I said this, I did a LinkedIn post on this one the other day, TripAdvisor ceases to exist without Google. There is no TripAdvisor that's a meaningfully sized business without Google. TripAdvisor is reliant on Google. Booking.com is not reliant on Google. Booking.com has built its own brand. If Google D index Booking.com tomorrow, their business would take a meaningful hit, don't get me wrong, but it would not die. It would continue on TripAdvisor would probably not continue on its current form, it would have to be completely reinvented, or it would have to be a brand new product with a much smaller team, a much smaller amount of revenue coming in, because they would lose 70 to 80% of their

traffic over time if they weren't in Google. So I think you have to think about what kind of business you're building and realize that these are all risks as much as we talk about the fact that we love Google and we appreciate doing this content and SEO thing has been a fun thing that I've done for a long time. I also admit that we might be on the decline and for on the decline. How do you build your business that's to be more resilient in the face of that? And it probably is a lot more of social content. It's probably a lot more of video. It's probably a lot more word of mouth. It's doing other things that are going to get you more attention. And yes, it might also be potentially getting your data quote unquote indexed in a large language model tool. But these are things that you have to figure out as you go along. There's no simple answer. I mean, it is. I think every time I mention something related to it on LinkedIn, I do feel like old man shouting at cloud. But it does feel so strange to me

when I hear people who have kids who are teenagers and stuff like that. They use TikTok as a search engine. They use Instagram as a search engine. That's what they do. You'd rather watch a 15 second video than read a paragraph and boy is that painful on many different levels, but that's where we're going.

That's where we're trending trending so understanding that is very important and again if that means that your content strategy moving forward is 60 percent written content 40 percent video content or some variation of that then that's how you have to adapt yeah I I don't like the idea of everything moving to video because I mean we just lose so much and there's pictures worth a thousand words and all that give me all day but at the same time, I don't know it's the same reason I like picking up a hardcover book or a paperback, some type of book that I can hold and read as opposed to having the digital version of it. And maybe that's an old school thing, but those old school, the boomers, the Gen X-ters, that is not going to be your target audience, your target buying audience probably in the next five to 10 years. So, and I think just like you just said, immediately, no, not a whole lot of action that needs to be taken right now. But you have to be planning for

two years, three years, five years, ten years down the road. Because that is, that's something that video SEO is going to be way more important than tagging and doing all these things and production more important than tagging and doing all these things and production value versus efficiency versus length of content versus all these fun things. I don't like it as a trend but as a marketer we have to understand it and we have to future proof ourselves for it. So knowing all this and then making making the plans to adjust, pivot, do the things that need to do to reach the audience that we need to reach, we still got to find the people. That's the thing. You are going to always need to find homeowners. You're always going to need to find new travelers to increase your portfolio or to book those properties. So however you got to do it, be ready to do it, I guess. And we're going to just keep finding ways to do it on the SEO side and however else we need to do it.

Yeah. If the value of the content that we write has gone down permanently, again, to kind of put a bow on this, I can live with that. And I think that you've got to realize in your business that, you know, some things have this margin of almost like error or margin of opportunity to them, you know, and it's like, if my ads got a little bit less profitable, would I still do them? The answer is like for most of our clients, yes, like, do I want that to happen? Of course not. I want our ads to be more profitable. But if they get a little less profitable, it's still a great option. The alternative in my mind always comes back to what else can I do that's different from what I'm currently doing. So if I turn if

I stop doing all my blog content, okay, cool. I'm seeding maybe some of my traffic on Google, but that might be going down a little bit anyways. Okay, fine. That's fine. Where am I putting that effort into? Where am I putting those dollars those time that energy into and if you can put in something that's gonna work better, and you're going to see better results from it, then you should absolutely do that thing. But again, I think people are jumping off of a train way too early. I think they're jumping off of something they

want to maybe jump off of something a little bit too early. And I see that as more of like a this is a five year plan. This is a three year plan of how we're going to migrate all of our content to be video first video only. And it means hiring a video specialist and it means doing more shoots. It means getting better camera equipment in our office, just like we have computers in our office. We should have camera equipment to do more video content. Maybe it's partnering with an influencer to do more video content that I could use. And they shoot. Who knows what that may look like.

Right. But I do think that if you think that the content game is over, I think you're probably a little bit off. That being said, the rules have changed and you have to adapt to those new rules or you're not going to be happy with the outcome. So I think that's a fair way of doing that. So I don't know, Paul, any final thoughts in here? Should we put you on this one? This is a little more ranty than normal. It is. I think, yeah, anytime we're going to talk all Google, it's going to get a little ranty. Yeah Google, it's gonna get a little ranty. Yeah, it's gonna get a little ranty at times. Yes, they are our best friend and our sworn enemy,

depending on the hour of the day. That's exactly it. Now, this is the refresher course that we'll probably come back to every quarter or so, and as new stuff is coming out. We got a good week where a whole lot of stuff came out, so it was a good time to kind of rehash and talk about, you know, what it looks like now and start to predict what it's going to look like down the road. Yeah, you know, people need to be doing more app although they should

be making potentially content for their website. That's true. They also need to leave us more podcast reviews. So go to your podcast app of choice. If you're a Spotify or iTunes listener, we get the most downloads from you. So you are the most culpable in this goal that Paul and I have to get more podcast reviews, tens of thousands of downloads and counting. The ticker goes up every time we publish and yet the reviews are light. They're light. They're not there in the quantity that we want them in. And quality, if you're going to leave a podcast review, of course, please make sure it's five stars. Yeah, leave a good one, please. Don't put a dagger straight through our hearts. That is not a good way for us to start the month of February here in 2025.

So anyways, we appreciate you listening. We appreciate you made it all the way to the end. We also appreciate, super duper appreciate a podcast review. Make sure you subscribe, share, follow, leave us some awesome feedback there and we'll be able to catch you in the next episode where we'll be a little less ranty next time. We'll have some good stuff coming. So thanks for listening. We appreciate you and we'll catch you on the next one. Thanks so much.