Ciaran: Hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Target Internet.

My name is Kieran Rogers,

Daniel Rowles: and I'm Daniel Rolls.

Ciaran: and today we are discussing the future of SEO.

Daniel Rowles: Okay, so we have had multiple conversations recently in podcasts and in various articles about what's happening with search engine optimization and the big conversation has obviously been about GEO, which is generative engine optimization.

And then there's been lots of debates.

Is it really a thing?

Is SEO just expanding?

We've got AI overviews.

And then we talked a little bit about answer engine optimization, which was, and anyway this all seems to be settling down a little bit

Ciaran: Is it though?

Daniel Rowles: Well, no.

If I'm honest,

Ciaran: I would say the SEO is dead.

Mongers have gone into overdrive with it all.

Daniel Rowles: that's normally me.

Ciaran: I know, right?

But no, it's everywhere now.

you, maybe you were like the Herald that saw it coming first, but there's a lot of panic and there's a, and there's a lot of lawsuits flying around.

People are getting that antsy about the

Daniel Rowles: So let's talk about that.

'cause you mentioned this to me as well, so that people are suing Google on the basis.

They're not as getting as many clicks as they used to get.

Ciaran: yeah.

Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: That seems slightly wacky.

Ciaran: of European businesses.

I'm not gonna go into it 'cause I don't wanna get embroided in the legal

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Dragged into a legal case.

Ciaran: not really.

But if you search on it, I'm sure you'll find it.

And I think it's really interesting the basic premise of this is across the board, a lot of businesses, particularly content marketing focused businesses and publishers.

In particular, and I think that particular consortium is made up of, a lot of

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: have seen their organic year on year traffic absolutely decimated.

And there's all sorts of numbers flying around between like 40 and 60% drops in some cases depending on kind of the keyword landscape that you're looking at.

And what I found particularly interesting.

Is that there's also a lot of reports that actually businesses just aren't seeing those levels of drops within e-commerce, So this is much more top of funnel kind of content research.

And that makes perfect sense because we now have AI answers, you know, that's been launched across the world.

But I think my view on this is that actually what's actually happening is because of that, people's behavior is shifting.

Radically, like before AI answers, you had to work a bit to get answers.

You typed in your search query and you got your 10 blue links, and then you did, you clicked around and you visited quite a few places and you actually, it was a journey, wasn't it?

You sort of learn a few things along the way.

Sometimes when you wanted to learn something.

Actually, it helps to have to work for it rather than it just being handed to you on a plate like

Daniel Rowles: Well, let's talk about that then for a second, because we've got AI overviews And it started off people saying, these are useless.

And then they got better because the large language models got better, and Google particularly got much better at this.

And then we started to see that in some circumstances was.

Answering people's questions.

The thing is, like you've said to me before, they are, they're sourcing maybe three different links in there, three websites where this information has kind of come from to some extent.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: And what's interesting to give you a quick example, is that if you search, what is data scraping, we always rank number one for that.

Now, when you search, what is data scraping?

There's an AI overview.

We're still number one below that, but we're actually listed in the websites where the information has come from in the first place,

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: so, so what that tells me is quite interesting is that actually by answering questions and exactly to your point, is there's a bit of a killer strategy still at the moment of like actually working out what are the questions that people are searching for, answering those in a really effective way that's still getting picked up by the search engines, but it's getting picked up to some extent by the large language models as well.

Ciaran: here's the problem.

You're gonna see a traffic drop, So across the board, in the accounts that I look at, I've seen lots of this.

You see an in quite a big increase in impressions year on year.

But you're seeing a big drop in clicks and more recently a drop within the rankings.

And that flows for me because I know that when you get a drop in click-through rate, it affects your rankings, like your average ranking overall.

So that kinda makes sense.

Why aren't people clicking?

Because actually for the majority of them, they've had their itch scratched by the AI answers.

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: You know that is enough, so not, so let's not forget if you're on a mobile device, that lovely AI answers, just push those 10 blue links even lower down the page.

we all know how lazy, lazy fat thumbs we all have when we're on the mobile device.

Like we just, it's effort to flick up

Daniel Rowles: right.

Ciaran: you know, if I've had the information itch scratched, why would I need to?

Scroll down.

This is the thing.

It's pulling together and actually it's quite smart.

Before we had to get quite creative.

Sometimes you'd need to rearrange the words or add in additional you know, you know, words to filter

Daniel Rowles: Huh,

Ciaran: Now

Daniel Rowles: a great stat on this

Ciaran: Yeah.

Go on.

Go on.

Daniel Rowles: so that the AI overviews are only including the exact phrase you search for in 5% of cases.

So the point being is that they understand, well, this phrase really means this phrase as well, and that's the same as this.

And therefore if I give you the answer to this, it's is what you're asking for.

You've just asked for it in a slightly different way.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: So that kinda shows that exact, this phrase, I'm gonna optimize for this phrase, and I'm gonna rank for this phrase is kind of gone.

Ciaran: I'm gonna throw in another thought for you all as well, and I haven't got, unfortunately, I haven't got anything that backs this up, but it makes logical sense to me if you are getting, as a user, if you're getting used to having conversations with Google.

Much like if you use chat GPT or Gemini, you have conversations with those chat, chat entities as well and Google's research actually does back this up.

The number of words people are searching on in any given search has increased quite dramatically

Daniel Rowles: Oh no, The numbers are there to back up.

Exactly.

There's all that stuff that came out from Google.

Put it into the show notes.

Ciaran: so here's the thing.

If I'm a publisher and for the last 15, 20 years I've been dining out on optimizing for certain key phrases and questions, when people stop asking those, 'cause actually they're phrasing 'em slightly differently, I'm not getting picked up.

So, you know, is that, is, is the thing I think's kind of unfair to, to, to Google.

And I mean, they're big en, they're big enough to fight their own battles.

They don't really need me to do it, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

You know, it's not Google's fault that.

had to innovate, they've had to bring in this new technology.

Let's face it, if they don't, they're gonna get wiped out by other competitors within the marketplace who will.

Right.

And I think actually, from what I've seen, they've done a pretty good job of this.

Like it's good, it's usable.

People are using it, the data's there to support that.

if I'm on Google, is it really my fault that the whole marketplace is now using the web and search in a different way?

Is it really my fault that, you know, certain businesses have over optimized for certain phrases that have been dining out?

No, not really.

That's just life.

Every marketplace has that.

People come in, new innovations happen.

People lose their share.

Other operators like still steal their thunder that's just how business has always worked.

So I kind of alarming that, like people are going down the lawsuit route.

Maybe there's an angle on this that I haven't kind of clocked, and if so, us a shout.

Daniel Rowles: Well, I do know a little bit more about it.

So it's the fact that the publishers, what's been happening is that publishers rely on the fact that Google was swallowing up some of their stuff, sourcing it in the search results, but then people were clicking through to the website.

So they kind of felt, well, we've invested in creating this content, but actually at least we are driving some traffic value from it.

But what's actually happening now is that.

They're getting all that stuff in Google itself, and they're not just seeing the value from it and they think it's a break in that relationship,

Ciaran: Okay.

Daniel Rowles: but, which I get, but it, that's not their fault specifically.

It's 'cause the operating environment has changed.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: let's take a step back for a second.

So we've got AI overviews showing up in the search results.

Search engine optimization seems to be expanding to include.

This concept of generative engine optimization.

I wanna show up in chat, CPT.

But the thing is we don't know a huge amount that's about how these large language models are working Still.

But we do know a couple of things.

LLMs are basically built on neural networks essentially.

And a neural network is a, something that's been around artificial intelligence for a long time.

And it's the connections between things.

Okay.

As in if a particular phrase is mentioned in lots of different places and there's positive sentiment about it, and there's all these kind of interconnections.

This is probably relevant.

Okay, so what that leads to is share a voice and brand sentiment being seen as really important.

But actually that's not as advanced as what Google will be doing a long time.

'cause Google have that next layer of user experience to say, well we think this is the most relevant thing.

But if a user clicks through to it, do they have a good experience?

Do they stay on that webpage?

They to scroll to the bottom.

So it's potential that the large language modules are kind of putting stuff up front.

In their search results that might be mentioned a lot might seem to be good, but isn't necessarily a good user experience and so on as well.

Now lots of people would argue, actually Google's been showing stuff at the top of the search results isn't a good user experience for a long time.

And you know, Rand Fishkin has been saying that, you know, for a long time.

But what it does mean is when I use a tool like the HubSpot AI search grader, which has actually got a lot better and it's trying to kind of estimate how visible you are in Chatt PT and Google Gemini and places like that.

So two things they say is, where have you been mentioned?

What's the brand sentiment?

The brand sentiment analysis is pretty clever 'cause it'll say these are the things that people thought were good about you.

These are the things that people thought were potentially negative about you, but it's sourcing stuff that maybe isn't very reliable.

So what they're looking at a lot is stuff that's mentioned in forums.

So Reddit.

Cure those kind of places?

Well, we know that Reddit is the Wild West.

There's some good user stuff in there.

There's also some pretty wacky stuff in there as well.

But it also, if there's a lack of, like if you've got online reviews.

But you've got, you know, mentions you've around other places they can be picked up.

So places like App Sumo, which I'll give an example of places like Wikipedia and so on.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: So let me give you the app Sumo example.

I bring that one up.

We did an app Sumo promotion, and if you're not familiar with it, you go into App Sumo, you say, right, we can do a special offer.

We want a load of users just so we can test out our product platform.

And they take.

More often than not 70% of any money you make and you're supposed to give a lifetime subscription for like a 10th of what people would normally pay.

Right.

It's a pretty, it's a pretty bonkers model when you look at it from a commercial point of view.

'cause you have to sell a lot to make it work.

But what it does give you is a user base and a test base.

Right.

So we did an app Sumo promotion.

I can't say that I'm entirely pleased with the results, but let's skirt around that for a moment.

Ciaran: you being very excited before it went live, and then you got frowny.

That's all I'm

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Ciaran: When

Daniel Rowles: Well, I'll tell you what was interesting was that my commercial director had said to me, this is a really dumb idea.

We've got a reasonably well established product.

We are not the right life stage of business.

And I think that's completely right.

It's like if you're a brand new startup and you needed a test user base, this makes perfect sense if you're as established as we were.

And because she'd said to me, this is a bad idea.

And then I was like, no, it's gonna be brilliant.

We're gonna get thousands of users.

And then we did it and it was a, it was like we, we've basically given away about 50,000 pounds worth of our product for about a thousand dollars.

Ciaran: do you T-shirt she gave you saying?

I told you so?

Daniel Rowles: No I've got so many of them now that you know, but anyway, you should probably, people listen to your commercial directors.

Ciaran: Yes.

Daniel Rowles: so anyway, you get a load of reviews from these people, and these people weren't inherently our target user base, right?

So we had some kind of strange, we had loads of really nice reviews.

I mean, it was still like 95% positive reviews, but because the large language model is looking for the positive and the negative to analyze the brand sentiment, when you go in.

And I went into the AI search grader, the HubSpot tool, put our brand in and it says, most people love you.

You are brilliant, it's great.

Here's positive stuff.

But some people think an outcome, these app Sumo reviews from how many five years ago that it was kind of thing.

Because we aren't on many platforms like that by nature of what we kind of are.

That will now haunt us forevermore.

So the only way you can really deal with it is say I need to be mentioned in more places by more people.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: advocacy, and I've been telling this to a few training courses recently.

We were talking about advocacy before, like, you know, it's not about influencers, it's about advocates.

It's those everyday people that say nice things about your product.

You want a thousand true fans, all that kinda stuff.

It's never been more true because yes, Google's looking at Reddit more now and places like that, but actually these large language models are as well.

So if there were two quick wins in this.

Ciaran: yeah.

Daniel Rowles: I would say the first one is advocacy.

Get nice people saying stuff about your more places.

And the other one is answer more questions in depth and think about that the way that people are changing their searching,

Ciaran: and like I've seen this on Wikipedia and be

Daniel Rowles: right.

Ciaran: there's a big drive at the moment.

People have clocked that a lot of the AI systems really rely on Wikipedia for facts.

And it is quite good for that, right?

Because they have quite a robust system of editors, like human editors has the double check stuff and double check edits when they're made.

I think for like a big organization like Take Brew Dog for example, have a look at Brew Dog's Wikipedia page, there's a ton of stuff.

On their page is quite balanced.

There's some positives.

Plenty of negatives as well, you know, overall they've got quite an established like brand page on Wikipedia, right?

So something, you know, negative but relatively small happens, it's quite easy for that just to get ignored or missed.

'cause it's not relevant to the big entity that they are, like the editors will overlook it.

However, if you are a new company.

Without much history and somebody goes, oh, let's get a Wikipedia page.

'cause then we'll exist as an entity and the LLMs will trust us more.

Yeah.

True or true, have to go through this process of submitting an entry.

You have to kind of.

Make sure it's balanced.

Like it can't be overly on promotion.

You have to submit it to an editor.

editor's gonna look through your immediate kind of recent history, just do a few checks to check what you're saying.

And if they find anything negative that you haven't included there, they're gonna slap that in there.

Yeah.

Or worse ban you for like making a, an unbalanced, unbiased submission.

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: And then once it's out there, remember this page is public property, so anybody can make a.

An edit.

And I think the problem is when you don't have.

I suppose it's a bit like, let's say Kieran decides that he's important enough to deserve a page in like the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Like it is it, that's a nonsense.

Like I'm not, I'm just not at that level.

I doubt I ever will be.

Right?

But let's say I decided I was gonna push it not be very much verifiable fact that's interesting enough that you could put into that Britannica page, right?

And so what is there is gonna be a bit skewed.

if there's any one thing that's no, like verifiably notable and it's a bit negative, that's definitely going in there.

Right?

And now you've got something that's factually true, but kind of biased because it's only focusing on the things that are big enough or epic enough or verifiable enough.

And that's the risk with this.

So

Daniel Rowles: Be careful what you wish for.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Ciaran: careful what There's there's a concept really here that actually really.

Wise people actually spend a lot of time thinking about the outcomes of their actions.

Fools just rush in and don't think about the outcomes that their actions and bad stuff happens.

Right,

Daniel Rowles: Well talk, talking of which

Ciaran: Yeah,

Daniel Rowles: I I decided that I was worthy of a Wikipedia page, so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So because, well, because published authors quite often you are a published author.

I've got quite a few, like I'm sitting, I'm, I've the humble break behind me that no one can see is I've got the big bookshelf with all my books on.

It

Ciaran: are behind him and they're extensive.

I'm

Daniel Rowles: is

Ciaran: on half of one of those books.

Daniel Rowles: half of one.

That's all right.

Ciaran: Well, I wrote half of it.

Daniel Rowles: But

Ciaran: count?

I

Daniel Rowles: you are on two of them.

'cause there's one in another language I think as well, but there's like 14 languages, books, blah, blah.

Anyway, so I thought, well that must be a good opportunity.

Ciaran: in

Daniel Rowles: Anyway.

I've been,

Ciaran: Isn't it so

Daniel Rowles: I think it is.

Ciaran: I think it's in Russian too.

Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: So there's a few language.

There you go.

You are worthy of Wikipedia page.

Look, you in multiple languages.

But the point being is there was that, and then there was like I published Imperial College academic papers and a few other things, and I thought, come on this would be really good from an SEO point of view.

Ciaran: yeah.

Daniel Rowles: I went on to Fiverr and I found this guy that like specializes in in doing Wikipedia pages.

And he got.

Well, he was actually, he was really good.

I'm not gonna diss the guy, but he I spent like an hour and a half writing an email.

Here's all the links to all my staff.

Here's all my books, here's the conference of the judging that I do, the things that I'm members of, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And after an hour, if I submitted it and within 45 seconds, he'd responded to me going, you really don't deserve Wikipedia, Paige.

I said, that's brutal.

Alright, well thanks for that.

Ciaran: been there though, right?

He

Daniel Rowles: Well, that was the point.

Ciaran: is.

Daniel Rowles: That was the point.

Ciaran: the thing.

This is the thing.

And I think that's the danger with this.

And let's say you get your company there and it only mentions one thing about you.

And that thing's a positive thing.

Everyone's happy, right?

Until something not so good happens and it gets reported on in the press, and then you're just waiting for that, that to drop,

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: It could happen at any point.

They might.

Here's the thing, when you first submit, everything's double checked.

Once you've got a page.

what I've seen, I've found quite a few examples of companies that had all sorts of, you know, advertising standards, agency rulings against some stuff never mentioned on the Wikipedia page, but it's 'cause the Wikipedia, your page was created maybe six, seven years before that happened, So, but at any point that could catch up, and when it does, very difficult to get rid of it, and that's permanently on your record and that is totally gonna get skewed.

So you could be in a situation where, yeah, the large language models are using it and they're now only citing one thing that's a bit negative.

They're trying to give a balance view and actually it doesn't, so be careful

Daniel Rowles: Okay, so we've got Share of voice is important.

Brand sentiment is important.

Be careful your brand is showing up something.

So we've got increasingly got this no click environment where you're not as getting any clicks, and that's because people are searching, getting the answers they want.

You might get more direct visits, you might get more brand searches, so keep an eye on that.

Ciaran: important.

See, people are still thinking about you,

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: it in a way that you can measure.

They're not clicking and it's the clicks that we can

Daniel Rowles: Well, you mentioned to me off platform research.

I thought that was an interesting way of thinking about it.

Ciaran: do it all the time.

Like before I Google stuff now I'll go to my large language learning model and I'll do my research there and I'll refine my search down for two or three things.

Sometimes just one thing.

I was telling Daniel, I've just bought my first Windows pc.

I'm so excited about it.

Secondhand, it was old.

I needed to use some Windows software for a project that I'm doing, so I instantly, I decided, right, I'm gonna try out the agents feature in chat, GPT and I set So I've just bought my first Windows pc.

Very excited about it.

It's secondhand.

I needed it for a personal project working on, I needed some Windows software that was only available on Windows.

So I set my agent to find me the cheapest, best spec laptop on eBay for under 150.

It came up with absolute sto.

It did all this work for me.

Now, previously I would've been clicking through, you know,

Daniel Rowles: From Google search after search.

Yeah.

Ciaran: gonna get a trail of it.

eBay's gonna get a massive trail of what I've been looking at and thinking it's gonna start showing me ads based on what, I didn't have any of that.

Because actually what it did is it found me a really lovely, like X one carbon think pad from 2019 for 135 quid.

I'm like, get in there.

That's a two, 300 pound quid model.

It's got decent memory, decent hard drive, SSD, loving it.

So I just went straight on and bought it straight away.

So suddenly all of that click and evidence data that previously would've been used to stalk the hell out of me and mark it to me.

Just irrelevant.

Didn't even happen.

Right.

And actually my decision process from, okay, I need this to finding the right solution, was literally about 10 minutes try and reach somebody in that window.

Daniel Rowles: So it's a complete change in search behavior.

Ciaran: just shows Actually, I think people do, and that's, so, lots of people are doing this and lots of different levels, not just with agents, but just with, you know, the chat services in general.

And so they're refining it before they even start searching.

And that is a massive change.

You know, people used to do half a dozen searches to refine, they just use Google for doing this.

Now they're using other tools as well as Google.

So you've got a double effect on that.

And I think, you know, we're kidding ourselves If you think people are still behaving the same way they were this time last year.

So when you're doing those year on year comparisons, like, you know, you have to factor this in.

Daniel Rowles: Let's make a little view actually on as well, why the stats are being so confusing about this.

And I'll give you an example.

I thought what I'll do is a little study to try and work out how do people actually behave when they get an AI overview versus when they don't.

And was it like, and my stats were completely misleading when I worked out.

So I did, every time I did a training course for a while, I got people during the training course to buddy up with someone else and just go.

One of you search for something and the other one of you observe them and then you see their behavior, which in my head was a lovely test.

Okay?

It's completely flawed.

I'll explain why the second I say to you.

Go and search for something.

People in that kind of classroom environment go to a search engine and they put in a search phrase.

Which in their head is like a two or three word phrase, but that's not what people are actually doing anymore.

What they're doing is they're interactively asking questions and discussing and debating, but I've just said, go and search them.

I put them in a mindset, which is what they were doing two years ago.

So what I found in that scenario is that 82 people I tested this out on, and it was only about 5% of them that got an AI overview answer and then didn't click through to our website.

They just got what they wanted, right.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: We chose if everything was just flat and Google is just having AI overviews now, you'd already be losing 5% of the clicks, right?

But that's without all this change in behavior of me going into chat two BT and researching something, my search terms getting longer because the fact that I'm used to now inquiring in a more conversational tone of voice as well.

So you'd layer on that on top and you start to get to the 30, 40% we're talking about as well.

Ciaran: When you just had 10 blue links, it made no sense to give it a three sentence question.

'cause you, it just wouldn't give you better

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Yeah.

Ciaran: But now it does and we've learned how to prompt and actually Google's learned how to accept.

Prompt level inputs.

And actually increasingly people are just talking to Google, like they're using voice.

And it's much more conversational because the, it can deal with that now.

Like it couldn't, five years ago it was you could do it, but you wouldn't, you weren't gonna get the result, you weren't gonna get anything back out of it.

Now, you definitely

Daniel Rowles: So two, two points in this, first of all is if you haven't seen it, we haven't mentioned it briefly before they've rolled out AI mode in search, which is basically you click the AI mode button and it drops into Google Gemini basically.

And essentially you're having a contextual conversation.

IE you ask it a question and then you can ask it follow up questions.

So that's a completely different way of searching, and it's clear to me what they're kind of doing is saying, well, people are using chatt pt.

But if they've got that built into Google search, hopefully more people will come to us.

So that seems like a competitive move to do

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: that.

The second one from this is that.

If you think about previous search page 10 blue links, you click through to them.

What would generally happen is you'd ask a question, you click on the first one.

It's like, oh no, this isn't what I want.

You click on the second or the third and you go through four or five of them and eventually you get the answer you wanted.

'cause they trying to work it.

Well, actually, if you are taking that away from me and you are doing that work for me, which is the theory, it's not necessarily that they are, but that's the theory.

They're working out what is the best answer.

Ciaran: yeah.

Daniel Rowles: I don't need to do that dance, but what that also means.

If that was five clicks to get to the right answer, four of those clicks were trash.

As in, I got your website, I didn't like what I saw and I left.

And if anything, it was a negative brand touchpoint to some extent because I got your website and you didn't really gimme the answer I wanted.

So actually, we are worried about this loss in clicks, but what is it?

A loss in quality clicks

Ciaran: The

Daniel Rowles: and

Ciaran: suggests not, but I think certain keyword landscapes, you know,

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Ciaran: the world's moved on.

It's changed and whole sections are being decimated.

But

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: is out there too, right?

'cause

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Ciaran: literally crying in the street over it.

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Yeah, that's it.

So, so look, if I were to try and take away some of this, like what on earth can I practically do now?

I would just go, like I said a moment ago, there's a couple of things you want to talk about.

Share a voice and brand sentiment.

Where can you get mentioned online by your advocates?

How can you drown out the negative with positive stuff?

That means be really nice to your customers and encourage them to engage.

About you as much as possible as well.

Build that advocacy, encourage those conversations as much as possible.

Benchmark yourself now to work out where you're being mentioned.

So you've got tools like ai, search Grader from HubSpot.

You've got way K, which stands for what AI knows about you.io.

So way, k.io.

They're tools that are basically saying kind of like social media monitoring it slightly different.

Like where have you been mentioned, where are the brand mentions of you online as well?

So Aldi, where you are now, and then think about is that good stuff?

If it's bad, how might you get rid of it?

But also how are you gonna build up positive mentions?

So brand advocacy hugely important.

I really work on that.

And then the other piece is, okay, well we know that people are searching in more complex questions.

We need to answer questions and we need to think about those deeper questions and really do more research and speak to our target audience.

So I think that's a really good starting point.

One thing you mentioned to me, which I thought was interesting, which is the recency of LLM training.

Now

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: you were making about this was that an LM is updated every month, three months, whatever it might be.

So, and what they're gonna do, they're not gonna be rebuilding the whole LLM each time.

They're adding on what's new.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: So actually the point you were making that it's gonna favor

Ciaran: There's a

Daniel Rowles: logically,

Ciaran: there's a potential weak point you can exploit there.

I think if you are publishing high quality, well referenced, and here's the thing, you can't just churn stuff out guys, which says and claim stuff.

You have to back it up

Daniel Rowles: right?

Ciaran: supporting links that show you know what you're talking about.

and this is a bit more trustworthy than everybody else just.

Standing on a soapbox, spouting stuff.

So I think it's, it is one of the things I've been playing around with.

I think like tools like Gemini are fantastic.

Helping you to find stuff that supports what you're saying, that's gonna be like taken by.

But in a way, our commercial writing has become much more aligned with what they would do in academia where you cite.

You know, studies and

Daniel Rowles: You have to reference everything.

Yeah.

Ciaran: You do.

Otherwise it's just gonna be more dross for the grist and it's just gonna kind of get ignored.

And publishing regularly on recent stuff and recent events, that's potentially somewhere where you could get attention.

'cause not everybody's doing that 'cause it's hard work.

And that's it's a strategy that I'm exploring at the moment.

I can report back on, on how well that works, but my hunch is that'll work a little bit better.

I think also there's a great opportunity to, you know, we've always talked about, you know, take your diamonds and polish them.

You know, actually, if you've not recently updated your best stuff, maybe it's time to, maybe you need to revisit that and.

Daniel Rowles: I really agree with this.

Yeah, because I think this is a big opportunity.

Ciaran: and reference it properly.

Whereas previously we wouldn't have done that.

And it just a few hyperlinks in there can make all the difference.

But make sure you are quoting, you know, well respected co content.

So suddenly I think your links to other people's content are much, much more important than they potentially have been

Daniel Rowles: S so a fo.

Ciaran: reason.

But remember, you are now competing for.

For the top three links, not the top 10.

Right?

So there's a lot less people that are gonna win with this and I think that's the key take home for me on all of this.

don't think SEO is dead for of course it isn't.

There'll always be what like things that you can do to help and exploit you know, the systems that are out there that indexing everything for sure.

But it's become a lot harder to influence it and be wary at the moment.

There are a lot of absolute snake.

Oil salesmen out there trying to sell you like solutions to things that are not really well tested.

And I think, you know, brands need to be wary of this.

Everybody's coming out of the woodwork with amazingly sounding like products that claim they do this, but where's the evidence?

That's the key quote.

Take a step back.

Where's the evidence?

Look, I know they're selling something that you want because you've got a real problem here.

But please just check.

Do some like sense checking before you leap in and start spending tens of thousands of pounds on it.

Daniel Rowles: Brilliant advice.

Well, let's finish on a positive.

I've got a really positive note to finish on here, which is a lot of the stuff we've just spoken about is actually demonstrating.

Your expertise, your experience, your authorit, and that builds trust.

Well, that's eat, that's Google's eat, right?

And Google.

Ever since a lot of this AI generated content came out and said, you must now demonstrate, eat with your content.

Add referencing, add case studies, add examples, make your content different.

You know, give answers to questions, your experience.

So actually you can do really well.

SEO by thinking about those principles.

And we'll put links through in the show notes, target internet.com/podcast to loads of other stuff we've done about eat previously.

But actually that's gonna help you from a generative engine optimization if you wanna separate the two things as well.

Now what we have done recently is we've done all of our members and our newsletter subscribers get these monthly update sessions.

So if you're not a newsletter subscriber, target internet.com/newsletter.

We did one on AI agents.

And we did one on the latest Google algorithm updates as well.

So if you're not signed up to newsletter, sign up.

'cause you'll get those every month.

It's one hour live session online, but members have got the whole library of the recordings of those as well.

What we've also got from members coming up is a half day masterclass on using AI agents and a half day masterclass on latest SEO techniques as well.

So, either get signed up as a member to target internet.

The annual membership is on a really good offer at the moment.

Or just get signed up to the newsletter if you just want those monthly updates 'cause we're talking about this stuff a lot and it gives you a chance to ask some questions and those kind of things as well.

Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast and we'll see you again very soon.

I.

For more episodes, resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to target internet.com/podcast.