Speaker 1: 0:24

I was in the kitchen in my office building earlier this week, not our kitchen. I was in the kitchen to my office building and there's another guy there, yeah, a little older than me. I would probably guess We've chatted before. Really nice guy I think his wife works in here too and he asked we've never like spoken more than a few sentences. But he asked what do you do? And I said usually when I'm talking to that generation people in their probably 50s or older.

Speaker 1: 0:54

I'm not really sure they're going to know what SEO is. So I said, well, I do a type of marketing. It's called SEO. And I kind of raised my eyebrow. He's like, oh really, I do SEO. Now, this is the first time this has ever happened to me in my career. Ever I have never just blindly said to someone I do SEO and they're like, oh, me too. I've met other people who do SEO, but that's not how I met them. And then he said something about, well, it's probably going to be changing soon or something along those lines, and I was curious by that statement. And then he went on to say there's this new uh search feature in chat GPT. It looks like it's probably gonna. I don't. I don't think he said the words kill SEO. But he said, sort of that will kind of be the end of SEO. And I could tell like right away I could tell, oh, he doesn't do SEO, he offers SEO. Seo is part of what he offers to and his clients are nonprofits which is great.

Speaker 1: 1:57

That's super. I was like, oh, that's really cool. Seemed like he, not somebody who has a lot of experience in SEO, because my response immediately was yeah, and I've spoken about this here on the podcast. Yeah, but ChatGPT just uses a search engine and he looked at me like he didn't. Obviously he doesn't listen to this podcast. Wow, but I said yeah, chatgpt uses Bing, Google's AI uses Google. And then I thought well, if this person who is not really claiming to be an SEO professional, but certainly selling SEO services.

Speaker 2: 2:30

That's what he does.

Speaker 1: 2:32

Yeah, if he still thinks, or if he thinks that chat GPT search is going to be the end of SEO, that seems like it's probably a pretty widespread opinion. I know we've talked about it on this podcast before, but I want to try to clear this up a little bit.

Speaker 2: 2:49

I think that's a good idea.

Speaker 1: 2:51

Give you a kind of tip on. You know where things are and where they might be going.

Speaker 2: 2:56

Yeah, well, might be when they are. Let's focus on where they are now.

Speaker 1: 2:59

Okay, so I've come up with this kind of theory. I was going to call it the AI fallacy, but I googled AI fallacy and AI fallacy is already something, and this is not it, so let's call this the AI search fallacy, and there seems to be this belief, even among like. This is what I used to think. This is what this guy thinks that AI is all knowing, right it knows everything, oh yeah. Yeah, whatever it does, it's coming back to you with the right information.

Speaker 2: 3:28

Absolutely the absolute truth.

Speaker 1: 3:29

Yes, there's two and that's not true. Yeah, ok, I can give you two examples Of why.

Speaker 2: 3:35

I say that's not true. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Number one. If you go to and I think we've done something sort of like this on another episode If you go to ChatGPT and you do a search who are some of the best family photographers in Brooklyn it's going to come back with a list, right? If you go to Bing and type the exact same question, it's also going to come back with results in a list format, basically right. So I did those two searches. I'm just going to give you the list of what ChatGPT gave me and I'm going to give you the list of what I found on Bing. I'm sure you might have a running commentary on these. First, chatgpt who are some of the best family photographers in Brooklyn? I'm going to just read off this list Le Studio NYC A Lime Green Dream Brooklyn Family Portrait Dorota McCauley Photography, daisy Betty Photography, michael Kormos Photography and Meredith Zinner Photography.

Speaker 2: 5:39

Oh, wow.

Speaker 1: 5:40

Okay, that was ChatGPT. Now let's go over to Bing and same question who are some of the best family photographers in Brooklyn? Now it gives some local results. First, Brooklyn Family Portrait.

Speaker 2: 5:51

That was number two on the ChatGPT list.

Speaker 1: 5:55

Then it says Justine Cooper, not on the ChatGPT list, meredith Zinner. And then Blue Skies Studio, new York Photography, not on Chet GPT's list, the number one. So I'm going down the search page here. The number one organic result is an article from Expertisecom the top 10 family photographers in Brooklyn. In that list, number one Lace Studio, nyc. Number two, a Lime Green Dream. Number three, daisy Betty. Number four Justine Cooper, not on the chat GPT list. Number five, karen Wise. Number six, michael Kormos. Number seven, emily Burke. Number eight Brooklyn Family Portrait. And then Lente Studio.

Speaker 2: 6:43

So you see some.

Speaker 1: 6:45

Well no, this is a list that you literally probably pay for and just get onto.

Speaker 2: 6:50

Oh, yeah, right.

Speaker 1: 6:52

So, but you can see there's some pretty heavy overlap. Where do you suppose ChatGPT came up with those results? Yeah, so that was example number one. Example number two I was doing a search recently on Google and I was actually doing it during part of a workshop, so I was doing it live. And I did a search on Google about something about SEO. I was just trying to demonstrate some results and in the AI-generated response that came back, it said to do something that was clearly spam, clearly violated Google's policy. It was spam. It wasn't it's not my subjective opinion, it was really spam.

Speaker 1: 7:34

Now, how does that happen? Yeah, now, how does that happen? Well, I was doing a live workshop so I couldn't dive deeper, but I can almost guarantee that there is a blog somewhere near the top of Google that says you should do that. And so what Google's AI doing is something very similar to Bing. It's scanning the top results. It's taking what it thinks is the best advice or the most authoritative advice and putting it into its AI results. Now, why am I telling you this? What does this mean?

Speaker 2: 8:04

That you can't trust everything you read in AI.

Speaker 1: 8:07

That's true, but also this is the next evolution of SEO. This is how SEO changes. People keep saying SEO is dead. No, SEO adapts Like literally.

Speaker 2: 8:19

Like everything.

Speaker 1: 8:20

Literally. If you're using ChatGPT as a search engine, why wouldn't search engine optimization still apply this? Is true, even if the actual, even if chat, gpt and AI results are kind of a layer on top of the actual search engine.

Speaker 2: 8:37

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:38

Because what it's kind of basically doing is it's just Googling shit for you putting it in and summarizing Right.

Speaker 2: 8:43

And you said the second example, the most recent, when you were teaching a thingy that I think you did. You say it was in Google or ChatGPT.

Speaker 1: 8:53

That was in Google.

Speaker 2: 8:54

Okay, because you may have said ChatGPT Okay.

Speaker 1: 8:57

Well, if I did, then I meant to say Google. So this is really, I think, the first big evolution in SEO in probably, I would say, a decade. Like SEO changes little bits pretty much constantly, but this is a pretty big shift, so clients used to ask me. I haven't gotten this question recently, but they used to ask how do? I get my website into AI and I've mentioned that before on the podcast and for a long time it was like I don't know, nobody knows.

Speaker 1: 9:28

Like we have no idea now. It's pretty obvious how that works. I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but for right now what? For right now two things you can be at the top of search engines yeah, that's, that's the best way. And number two, be on additional lists, like that list I read from expertisecom yeah, so my question is pay for those things? That's part of SEO. Some of those lists are going to be worth it and some are not.

Speaker 2: 10:00

Okay, how do you differentiate?

Speaker 1: 10:02

Probably the best advice I could give you is if you see a list that's somewhere near the top of Google, that would be a good one to be on. Okay, a list that you can't find anywhere in Google, you know what? Google doesn't really appreciate that list very much, so I would say don't worry about that one.

Speaker 1: 10:17

So, it's not going to take what is in that list and put it in its AI results Makes sense. So there is kind of a circular aspect to this and it does make it confusing. I'm still, you know, right now what I'm doing in terms of being a consultant is that's where I'm looking. How is that algorithm whatever algorithm is going to select results from search engines and select which lists to look at. That is what I say when I mean the next evolution of SEO. It's looking at that. So that's where we are now. You might be wondering, well, what's next? What's coming next? What should I be?

Speaker 1: 10:57

prepared for yeah that I don't know, but what I can say is you don't need to freak out and think that SEO is dead and there's this whole new thing that's going to take over.

Speaker 2: 11:11

Immediately overnight.

Speaker 1: 11:13

It will take care of it. There's people like me working on this, and so I guess my message for the episode is I don't know the future, but don't worry about it, We'll take care of it Whatever happens it's going to happen Right, and change is inevitable. Yeah, we're going to keep changing.