Conversation Transcript
Sat, Jun 17, 2023 11:25AM • 14:28
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
answer, google, ai, content, website, seo standpoint, rank, good, traffic, people, perspective, search, generative, interesting, destroys, question, give, search results, wanted, compete
SPEAKERS
John Paul Mains, Ted Jones
John Paul Mains 00:00
It just takes so long getting all those arms and um, this is Hello Growth Venture family, we are back today with myself and Ted Jones talking about some new stuff. And we just wanted to bring up something that we’ve been chatting about that here last few weeks, which is generative AI for search. And so if you know what generative AI is, you’ve probably been seeing it with Chet GPT. And all these different things these days. general AI for search, is the idea that, hey, you know, what, Google, and Bing have both said, Hey, we love and we’re kind of scared of what open AI did. We’re gonna integrate it in and provide it as well. So what does that mean for business, though? Was that mean for ministry? Was that mean for any organization? has a website out there? Yeah. If Google is actually able to answer your question, a user’s question A searchers question right then in there without them ever having to visit your website? So yeah. That would be a problem. If you’re if you’re really dependent on traffic, coming to your website for your content. And they’re no longer coming, because Google’s answering it for you. Well, oh, then what?
Ted Jones 01:25
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, like you said, Bing, and Google are doing this Bing, Edge browser, they’ve definitely got it built in. But, you know, Google now has a experiment in their labs, that actually is integrating these search results, which I know, you wanted to take a look at, which we can get into, but they’re calling it, you know, the search generative experience. That’s exactly you’re basically inputting the information you’re looking for pretty much in between Google search and your website. Right. And so it’s gonna have an impact on traffic is going to diminish, especially if you’re targeting specific keywords and trying to get presented, you know, at the top of results,
John Paul Mains 02:20
Sure. Because if I’m able to get my answer right then and there, and I assuming that Google is telling me the truth, or factor, whatever. I don’t need to go anywhere else. I got my answer. No, no, of course not. There’s all that kind of like your do it yourself kind of stuff. Or I’m gonna go watch a video. Or if it’s ecommerce, I’m literally going to have to go and purchase it off that company’s website. But if it’s like, I’m some kind of consulting company, or investment company or something along those lines, where I’m very dependent upon my content working well to bring me organic traffic. Google’s going to be taking a Google Bing, these searches are kind of taking it away doesn’t for it doesn’t make mean that people aren’t going to come to your website anymore. But, you know, this is well, well, this stuff here. I’m going to be losing traffic if Google’s able to answer my answer searchers question. They’ve been doing this for a long time. I mean, you can get menus. And you can you can get like movie listings and things like that straight off of Google without ever going to any of those types of sites. And so what does that mean? They’re stealing my traffic away using my own content against me?
Ted Jones 03:33
Yeah, well, obviously, they’re going to be indexing that content no matter what. Right? And then now using AI, pulling it together in a nice little package that basically answers your question right there on the on the web page, what will be interesting to see is if they you mentioned organic search, but from a paid perspective, how much of are they going to how much prominence will they give you in this little section? based off of how much of the data you’re providing to it? So
John Paul Mains 04:06
they’re not going to they’re not going to take away from their their cash cow, which is paid search. But you really have to wonder, yeah, there’s an interesting balancing act they’re gonna have to figure out on if they’re providing too much on a good answer to people are Pipkin stuff clicking on those ads? I don’t know. I don’t know.
Ted Jones 04:28
I, I’ve actually enabled the experimental my side if you want to take a look at it, and we can see what it does.
John Paul Mains 04:37
So definitely. So while we’re doing that, I just kind of want to explain AI generative AI for search here a little bit. Basically, the basic premise is the generative AI what it’s doing if you type in a search, it’s going to produce results for you what it’s doing, it’s aggregating contents from all the different websites out there, and it’s still just an algorithm But it what it’s what it’s doing is it’s taking all this stuff, all this content based off your question and providing what appears to be a good answer back. They’ve just gotten really good at making it sound like an intelligent answer using your content. This is this isn’t. This isn’t a true AI, this isn’t a true intelligence. It’s just making it seem intelligent. So yeah. All right. So we’ve got your screen up there, Ted.
Ted Jones 05:26
Yeah. And, you know, obviously, they simplify it by saying, you know, why do long dogs love tennis balls? Well, okay, but what about something that’s more relevant to a business? Right? You know, what we were talking about earlier was just like, what are some of these, you know, popular things that someone’s going to want to rank for? You know, right now, there’s a lot of people putting out content, or AI, right. And they’re really trying to get that, from a capture that traffic perspective. But let’s, let’s take one that we know of, it’s been around a little while, right. GDPR, GDPR has been, you know, probably been, what, five years now? I think that it’s been ranked up there. And people have put a lot of content already out there. From the GDPR GDPR. perspective. So, you know, like, I’m just going to do what’s high level, detail details. And GDPR. Okay. Now, you can see they’ve added a new box right up here, that Justin seconds generated this section,
John Paul Mains 06:47
an answer to the question,
Ted Jones 06:49
all day homepage, it’s the answer to it. You know, obviously, they’ve got their disclaimer about not being legal advice, and you may want to consult a lawyer. But this gives you very much a high level answer that may not require you to dig deeper into someone else’s website. Right?
John Paul Mains 07:11
I don’t have to go anywhere. I’ve got my answer right here. And you know, and that’s all I really needed. And obviously, it’s it can get as detailed as you want, you can probably dig into probably something pretty technically detailed on GDPR and get still get the answer here. But as we can kind of see, they only have links to kind of like three sites they took this content from, and then they’ve got prompts for other questions that you may have that will continue to answer your questions about GDPR stuff.
Ted Jones 07:40
Yeah, this is this is like web surfing and a single page app.
John Paul Mains 07:45
That’s a good yeah, that’s a real good way of doing. Thinking about it. Yeah,
Ted Jones 07:49
it’s contained here. And, you know, they they do have those drill down questions that allow you to kind of, you know, kind of fork off to where you might want to take the next question. Obviously, they they are citing some sources, but we don’t know if is that, right? You know, obviously, this is still experimental. But if it’s answered, will it be sponsored? How, how are they using these resources to accumulate this data?
John Paul Mains 08:23
Yeah. And that was Google discernment. I mean, it I mean, what we don’t know is if Google is saying, oh, yeah, these are the I’m pulling content from the top five resources that we know about whether they’re factually accurate or not as a different story. But why these few why these certain ones? Who knows this, kind of his true wild, wild west stuff here.
Ted Jones 08:49
And then they, you know, obviously, they’re injecting that at the top of their search results, but then below that they get into their normal ranked sites, right, would fall in the traditional rules.
John Paul Mains 09:04
But if I get my answer, what’s the point in doing that? I don’t need to go to these other websites, if I got my answer from what Google scraped from these other people’s sites. So yeah, I mean, how do you compete against this kind of thing? I mean, this is this is Google basically saying, Hey, I’m gonna, I’m going to use your own content against you and keep people on on Google itself. Yeah, you know, it’s your content. Sure. We want to keep people here because it’s best for us.
Ted Jones 09:38
Right? That’s right. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see. Yeah, I would, I would expect, you know, this this experiment. Google’s experiment goes until December of this year. I don’t know what being an edge are doing in terms of it. out putting any type of parameters around it, but I don’t think they compete on the scale that Google’s going to compete. Right.
John Paul Mains 10:08
Now, what this does do from an SEO standpoint is assuming this kind of stuff comes to reality, which I’m assuming that is going to I mean, it kills destroys the idea of ranking for a keyword. Of course, a lot of SEO guys have said, Oh, yeah, don’t worry about keywords that are in the past. And I think we’ve been seeing that for quite some time. But it really kind of forces you to think about the content you’re creating. Gee, you focus on the questions that people might put in trying to answer that question in the hopes that Google will use your answers and show you up in those top three, as opposed to your competitors. I mean, I think that’s a good strategy anyway. But it really totally destroys the concept of ranking for a particular keyword. I mean, of course, nobody puts in dentist anymore. Looking for who are the best dentist in my area? Yeah, and things like that.
Ted Jones 11:04
Well, yeah. And from a, you know, hands on perspective, you know, this, this is interesting when you’re getting into, like, how to do something physically, and know when or how to build a house, or how to update a plug. And when you get into those physical realms, like, Okay, that’s all I wanted, boom, give me the answer. I’m out. I love it that way.
John Paul Mains 11:28
Yeah, for those di wires out there, and you know it for like, you know, how do I fix my dryer? How do I unclog my sink? How do I do these things? Those kinds of stuff that have been out there for a long, long time? Yep, I hop over to YouTube, or some find some Vimeo or somebody’s webpage on answering a question. But if Google is answering the question, answering these for you using your own content against you, what do you do about it? That’s that’s the question. It’s gonna have to be answered the end of the day, I think there’s gonna be a lot of legal ramifications around this a lot of court cases around this on just what, what are they going to be allowed to do. But for now, it’s you got to rethink your own content and get out if the idea from an SEO standpoint or thinking just rank for keywords, you might be having to think about rank for props rank for the actual thing that people are trying to solve for, whether you’re on the b2b side, or the b2c side. So it’s
Ted Jones 12:30
now so again, we term now prompt engineering optimization. Problem, engine optimization.
John Paul Mains 12:43
Gotta focus on catching, it’ll be ours, but then Google, of course, steal it.
Ted Jones 12:47
Yeah, they’ll come up with their own like that there’s a tongue tied thing that they got going on here.
John Paul Mains 12:56
Well, I think, obviously, we’re gonna have to watch and see what happens. We’re playing with it. I’m seeing I am seeing good things come of this. I mean, from a user’s usability standpoint, it is. Good. perspective, not so much. And they’re going to tick off a lot of businesses doing this. We’ll see what comes of this over time. Obviously, there’s got to be ways from an advertising perspective to still have my business show up. Yeah, I’ve got to be able to have my content showing up. So Google can’t dispute, businesses would bail on the search engines if they just destroyed the ability for people to find their websites? So they got to take that in consideration. That can’t be that evil, but we’ll see what happens against them. Yeah. Cool. All right. All right. I think that’s it. Anything else you wanna throw out there?
Ted Jones 13:55
I love playing with AI. No. All right.
John Paul Mains 13:57
So be sure to if you like our content, be sure to give us a thumbs up subscribe. We’re going to be posting this kind of stuff on a weekly basis. And we’re not going to give up this topic. This topic is going to be a regular on the show as we see just what is going to come around generative AI and search and what all it means for us as business owners out here in the world. So till next time, y’all thanks.