Why AI Feels Like Takeover

Meredith's Husband 0:33

I'm going to talk about AI a little bit today for the reason that I feel certainly, and I I know a lot of other people feel the same way, it feels like AI is just taking over. Like AI is this thing that's going to be doing everything. If you're not using AI to do everything already, then you're behind. You need to be using AI to do everything for you. And while AI is great, and certainly it can do, it can help us do a lot of things, and we want to make use of it, and we want to do, we want to use it to do as much as we can. There are some problems with that. And these this is a phenomenon that is kind of emerging. You know, nobody saw it coming, at least that I know of. But it's the fact that AI is starting to take over our thinking. Like people are are not thinking about things as much. And this is happening in the business world. There's a lot of articles out there about this, not just my opinion, but it's a kind of general over-reliance on AI, especially in the in the business world. And I'll talk about that a little bit. And then I want to share with you one AI tool that you, if you are a website owner and you want to build business through your website, a tool that you really should be using. It just came out. I've only used it myself for a single day, but I've already found a pretty big issue for a client of mine that I probably would not have found otherwise. But first I want to talk about this over-reliance on AI.

When Businesses Reward AI Overuse

Meredith's Husband 1:50

And is this happening with big business? It's happening with small business. In big business, this happens because companies from like big organizations, top-down, they are kind of almost demanding that their people and their teams use AI and they integrate AI and they provide incentives for their employees using AI and they create rewards for their employees using AI. And that in itself is a that inevitably leads to problems. People are, you know, using AI when they don't need to be, or they're using AI just and I've seen this one a few times firsthand. They, if they do something and it, you know, it's wrong, and somebody, you know, uh above them in the organization says, What happened here? They say, Oh, it was AI. Not my fault. AI did that. AI told me to do that. I've seen clients doing this, like not my not agencies, but the end clients. I've seen teams doing that. I've seen team members doing that. I've seen solopreneurs doing that. I've seen photographers doing that. And it's not that you are doing something wrong and you know you're doing it wrong, and then you say, Oh, that's AI. And this has happened with photographers, especially when I have new students start in the mentoring program and we look at their website and I say, okay, this, this, this, and this, these are all harming your SEO. And the response very often is, well, AI told me to do it. All right. So it happens with big business, small business. I did this myself not too long ago. Got caught up in a new AI tool that looked great, and I purchased it, and then very soon after realized I didn't need it. I really had very little

Media Overload And AI Anxiety

Meredith's Husband 3:23

use for it. And although there's really no kind of guaranteed solution to this, certainly I think less media consumption. Like I know that's probably easier said than done, especially in this country. I don't know what it's like in other countries. I have a feeling that it's this is kind of similar in Britain, maybe, but in this country, we are consuming way too much media. I think a lot of us are consuming media before we even get out of bed in the morning by looking at our phones until we turn the lights off in bed at night. And that in itself is gonna make you feel overwhelmed. But especially with so many uh you know media messages surrounding AI, it's certainly gonna make you feel like AI is more overwhelming than it needs to be. And this started to become clear to me. I live in New York, in Brooklyn, I take the subway a lot. And on the subway, I don't know if you're familiar, there's advertising. There's a whole bunch of little ads and banners on each subway car. And sometimes a company, usually with a lot of money, will buy every single ad in a subway car. So the entire car, it's just all advertising for one company. And I don't know how much that costs, but I would imagine it's very expensive. And usually because I only see big companies do, I don't see small companies doing that. So it must be expensive. And for the for many months now, every single time I take the subway, every single car, all the ads are purchased by some new AI company that I've never heard of, and that usually promises to do something super easy, super, super fast, super cheap, it's perfect, blah, blah, blah. But this is happening, like I said, every every single time I get on the subway. And it certainly makes me think that all these companies doing this advertising have a lot of money, have a lot of money to spend. I can only imagine that it reminds me of the dot-com bubble, but if there's an AI startup, I I've heard certainly that these companies have no trouble raising money. So they get huge budgets. They do things like plaster advertising all over subways. And if they can do that, of course, they can do it lots of other places. So AI messaging is just everywhere, I feel. And for me, uh, you know, I try to just put my phone down more often. I try to consume less. It's probably better for me in general, but especially helps me sort of keep a realistic outlook on AI and how it's changing. Now, that all said, there is something that I think you should be using very much. And

New Google Search Console AI Tab

Meredith's Husband 5:53

this, like I mentioned earlier, this just rolled out literally in the last week. I've only been using it for a single day, and it's part of Google Search Console. And specifically, now what you can see when you look at Google Search Console is not only how your website is appearing in search engines, but in AI search specifically and separate from the rest of it. For a while, the information that you look at in Google Search Console has been, at least we have a very strong suspicion that it includes people searching in AI. So people using Gemini. And the information there, when your website is mentioned, that is included in the Google Search Console data. But they didn't set Google has not separated it out. They've never said you've got this is how you're performing in in AI searches, and this is how you're performing in search engines. They now have those two sections are separate. And so you can go to Google Search Console underneath the performance section. There is a new tab. It's called Generative AI. And you can ignore the word generative. That's just the AI that we're using nowadays that you and I are familiar with. It's all generative AI. So the information you're going to find there is how often your site is appearing in AI conversations and what page is being mentioned or referenced from your website.

What The Data Shows And Hides

Meredith's Husband 7:11

And I know there are other tools out there claiming to do this. Do not trust other tools doing this. They do not have this data. The only way other tools can tell you how visible you are in AI is by doing searches in AI and telling you how often they find your website or your name or your business name. There are many, many flaws with that method that I won't get into. But this information is coming straight from Google, straight from people using AI search in Google. Now it doesn't include Chat GPT, it doesn't include Claude, but you can assume that if people are searching AI in Google, one way they're going to be searching in a similar fashion, AI using ChatGPT URCLOT. So this is not a complete picture, but it is a representative picture. It will tell you exactly what of your content and which pages are being chosen by AI to share with people. Now, the other thing that this will not tell you is it's it's not going to give you a keyword or a query. Like the way people search in Google, they type in a keyword or a question and hit search. That's going to be your keyword. In Google Search Console for many, many years, they have given you the keyword. They tell you exactly what did somebody search for when your website appeared. They can't do that with AI search because every AI search is, they're going to be totally different. It could be the result of a single question. It could be the result of a very long conversation when your website comes up. So it can't say this was the keyword that led to your site being

Shift From Keywords To Topics

Meredith's Husband 8:52

mentioned. But this is an important trend that I at least think I have talked about before here, is to start thinking about topics instead of keywords, especially when you are blogging. Not so much your main site when you want to, you know, optimize for a wedding photographer in Dallas, let's just say, for example, you obviously still want to optimize for those keywords. But when you're blogging, you're you're really not thinking or you shouldn't be thinking so much about a specific keyword. You should be thinking about a topic and answering questions, you know, that naturally come up within that topic. So if you can take that approach and then use Google Search Console to see which of those topics are popular by seeing which of your pages are being mentioned in AI search, that's going to help guide you in how to create your future blogs and what to blog about. Okay, so I'm sorry, I can't give ultra specifics about this. Like I said, I've only been using this one day, but I did already find an issue for a client of mine that I most likely would not have found or would have been would have taken much longer to find just using the traditional Google Search Console. This just appeared and became very obvious with this new generative AI feature inside Google Search Console.

What To Check On Your Site

Meredith's Husband 10:05

So I would encourage you to just go take a look and see if your site is appearing in AI searches. And if so, for what topic or which page of yours is being mentioned? All right. I hope this helps.