AI SEO Is a Boom-and-Bust Trap

Gagen Gotchra is returning to the podcast. I'm hyped to do this. Gage, what are we talking about today? Uh, we are talking about everything that is happening with AI and how people are trying to use it to fully automate their SEO. So a lot of people online are posting things around like use cloud code or use chat GPT or use perplexity computer and just automate your whole uh SEO workflow rather than just doing it by yourself. So this is something that it has been going really really viral especially on X where people some someone start their post by saying that you don't need to hire any any agency you don't need to hire any SEO here is fivestep prompt that you can just go go and put in claude and it will give you a better strategy than any agency that you can hire but what they are missing is that claude is just giving you ideas to do scaled content abuse where cloud come back to you and say that oh you just got like 50 pages on your website, you need to make it 500. Or Chlor is coming back to some SAS companies and and telling them that you don't have any comparison pages. You don't need to, but you should be creating hundreds of comparison pages, not like five or 10 comparison pages. So, this is something that is going really really wild nowadays. But everyone who is sharing their domain if you go back and look at the graph how the traffic is performing in 6 to 8 months from the day that they share it's almost like this. So what is happening with all these um projects that people are trying to do is that it sort of picks up for almost like four to 6 months and then it just goes like this where they lose almost like 80 to 90% of whatever traffic they try to build using cloud and do scaled content. What can you talk about scaled content abuse for people who haven't heard that uh that term from Google? Yeah, so scaled content abuse specific policy Google introduced in March 2024 when they also rolled out a core update. That policy is just around like you you cannot use any automation or anything like that to scale your website too quickly. So I'll just give you example. If you're a restaurant, there is a limit to your menu. No restaurant has thousands of items in their menu. Maximum menu is like 20 items or 30 items. So, a restaurant website should not have like 100k pages. It cannot be a realistic restaurant where they created like 100k pages. It can only be like 30 or 40 pages where you have your menu, your dishes or some pages about your restaurant. And at the same time, a SAS website cannot have like 100k or more than that pages unless or until you are like a hub sport like really really large organization and even in those kind of the cases you should not try to scale your pages too quickly. So this is what u I think where Google came from. This is especially the AI part where Google saw that it it does not matter what is there on the page rather the quality is just depends upon the scale. If someone is doing anything at such a large scale, the chances of that thing being like bit uh of lower quality or of not higher quality is really really high compared to someone who is just uh running a site with 100k not 100k pages but only like 1k pages and each page is like in-depth and a lot of unique information which Google can show to its users. What should what should business owners be doing instead? I think business owners should try to use AI plus human writers to do a mix of the content. I know that that it takes a lot of effort just in terms of resources and money to get content right and get content live. You need to hire someone. They take a lot of time to write. Then you edit. Then you get reviewed by your brand team to make sure that everything is in line with your brand values. And then it goes through couple of other checks where you are trying to make sure that every fact or every if you're like medical company you are trying to make sure that you are aligned with US government regulations and then eventually it get published. So the time to make a page live for a brand is really really long. It can be from one to two to three to four weeks. But with AI, you can get that initial draft going within like 5 to 10 minutes. So what you should be trying to do is like just get that initial draft ready and start from there. Don't start from like publishing all whole page is just AI written and there is nothing any input from like human where they are adding to the content that AI is giving to you. So this is something that brands uh really really need to be careful. Do not use AI from like just generate using AI and publish it on your website. rather make it a part of your process where you're not like firing who your whole uh content writer team like like people online they have been saying that just fire your whole content writing team and just use yeah you see this all the time cloud or chat GPD or something like that and fire your SEO team fire your writers here's how you can use cloud to do everything yep that's right so I think uh if you you are a a brand who actually care about like how you are presenting yourself on your website. What are your values? What you stand for? You don't want to be related with like what Chad GPT like like gives you. Chad GPT content is like average content and if you think that your product is not average in the market and you are trying to target premium customers, they are not not going going to see the chat GPT copy and click on that buy button. So if anyone is coming to a product page where they see that oh price point is like like $500 or $600 or something like that and all the copy is just chat GPD generated content and there is no like unique information or or or faces people who are actually like using the product there is not much trust and if there is not much trust people are less likely to buy those products. So you have to make sure that your content writers especially uh in some cases like content writers are using AI but they are not telling the their manager or something like that. So you just have to make sure that we you are at least trying to do 50/50 where 50% AI generated 50% human generated content on a single page and better you can do like maybe 80 80 30 80 20 split where 80% is human written and 20% is just like AI part in the page. This method of marketing is so effective I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept using it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords landing page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer said, "Compact Keywords contributed to a $4,000 sale within the first six weeks." Another customer said, "Give it to a junior employee. Have them follow it exactly as Edwards laid out. You don't have to do anything, and you're going to gain a six-f figureure SEO level employee just by having them go through this course. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. You have any thoughts on how you probably think about this a lot. I think about this a lot on how programmatic SEO is different from scaled content abuse with AI. Programmatic SEO is like you are scaling something which is already valuable. And programmatic ST should be something where you take something that is not available on the web. So you have your internal database. For example, like I might have researched about thousand sites or thousand orders that I have done which is like my unique viewpoint about those websites and how they should be approaching SEO. So if I go ahead and publish all those thousand pages and even parts of those pages are like AI generated still those are like unique p uh unique pages. Each page is unique which get scaled which means that there is no no information like that or no opinions like that on the web already. So I scaled something which is unique to me and no one already knew it. So that is a good way to do programmatic SEO. But the bad way to do programmatic SEO is me going to claude giving it websites and asking it just do an audit and whatever cloud gives me back I publish that as thousand pages. So for brands if you have something which is not already available on the web something data set or maybe some information specific piece of the information which you think you can publish on website as like thousand pages just go go for it like there is no nothing wrong with scaling content or nothing wrong with programmatic SEO what is wrong is not unique value per page that you are publishing but if you can figure out a way or you have something internally in your that you think can be presented on the web as thousand pages just go ahead and publish that. How do you think Google uh Google catches scaled content abuse? Because if it's okay so we have two scenarios one where you're publishing valuable pages in mass two where you're publishing AI generated slop in mass and but how does Google discern the difference between both? I think it's going to be really really difficult for Google to like uh figure out the difference because scaling Google can actually identify really quickly. So today if you have like thousand pages but 1 month from right now you end up with 10k pages you added 9k pages in a 4 week period then Google can easily pick it up because Google is crawling your site you Google is seeing your site uh internal linking structure and the site map all the time. So identifying scaling that there is some sort of scaling for Google is not that hard but how Google is making that that judgment around like is the scaling good or bad. Good in the sense that you are scaling something unique or bad you are just uh scaling AI slop. There is no clarity. I I'm not sure how they are trying to handle it right now. There is some speculation around like Google can identify AI if if the content on the page is AI or if Google is actually trying to identify how much of that content is written by someone or how much is that uh just AI swap. So there is no clarity as of now which means that even if you are scaling unique content you should try to do it slowly you should not try to go too fast. So if you want to add 9K unique pages to your website, your unique information which you you generated 9K pages in one day, but you should not go ahead and publish all those in just one day or one week or one month. You should batch it out across like 7 to 8 months. I could imagine a combination of many factors. So like maybe Google notices that you are really increasing your content volume. Mhm. You're putting up tons of new pages on your site and then simultaneously your engagement signals are going down. More pogo sticking is happening, for example. That's like a that's a big one. People are spending less time on your pages. They're going back to the search results faster because and that's a huge that's a huge red flag. Or your engagement signals are going up. You're scaling content or they're staying the same. you're scaling content, but your engagement signals are pretty much the same or or because you're ranking for a bit more. A little bit lower, but not too much lower. But if you go too low below a threshold of engagement signals, maybe then there's something else that's more expensive that kicks in. More expensive can be like, can we detect if this is AI content? And that would be that would be Google can do that, but that would be expensive to do. Maybe there would be a scenario in which you would do that which is like okay this is and this is just me hypothesizing which is like okay volume went up simultaneously pogo sticking also went up let's do a let's run another test here which is more expensive and see like just across uh a couple of pages within the subfolder where engagement signals are really going down. Can we find a pattern in terms of the content? And it could be it could be something like that. That's me. Or it could literally just be like it could just be volume of content has gone up, engagement signals have gone way down like de-index this entire subfolder or something like that. Um I think it would be like yeah combination a combination of factors. Yeah, I also think so. uh and one thing that that I've been trying to monitor is like what happens when uh the brands who have social presence strong social presence they are trying to scale the pages so what happened with those kind of cases where that's a good question yeah where you publish a lot of pages every month but at the same time you are doing a lot of Tik Toks reals YouTube videos and I have seen like strong patterns where your links are going up you're getting more links you're scaling pages really fasted but you're also like doing a major public relations campaign a major press campaign yeah and in those kind of the cases I have seen that Google is sort of like bit more cautious around hitting the domain so if you are trying to scale unique pages too quickly you should also try to look into doing video uh video Instagram Tik Tok YouTube and everything else and PR as well where you're trying to build some momentum towards whatever you are publishing So I think these two things have to go hand in hand where you're not just trying to put out too much text content from your brand on the web rather you're trying to put out text videos what others are saying about you you're scaling your overall brand not just your website then Google is like yeah yeah it's all right otherwise there are some edge cases where you will get hit so the the uh the thing that we have to bring up is like Shopify which That's like the strongest brand ever. Freaking Shopify. It has so much authority with so many followers, so much content, but it scaled. It scaled AI content and it got hit. Yep. What do you think happened there? Too It just scaled too much. It it scaled past its authority. It stretched its authority too much. Yes, I think so. I think it it's uh it stretched it authority to a point where Google was like the results are getting bad. So I think what Google has maybe they have some sort of like mechanism to measure the quality of the search results not the quality of the page. So search results if we ignore all the AI things 10 blue links there if a site is pushing too much like Shopify then how what how many like like search results they are making bad by showing up to a match. It's not about it's not about Shopify. about how much search results page is getting ruined by Shopify. So if that number of search results which are like damaged by Shopify goes really really high then the whole section of that site got gets hit. So that's something that uh also I try to assess when building content strategy like are you trying to add through whatever is present there in search results right now or are you just like trying to just copy paste what is already there. So this is al something that you need to uh take care of when you are scaling your content where you are at least trying to make sure that you are somewhat better than each page that is ranking on the search results right now. each page. So, you go to nine of or 10 of those URLs and make sure that you're better than every one of them, not just on like the top three because I've seen like like many SEOs, they just look at the top three and try to create a better page than those top three. But you will have to make sure that your page is somewhat better than all the 10 URLs which are showing up right now. You're saying Shopify ruined a lot of SERs. They just put in too much garbage. Yeah. Yep. Um what have you seen happen to these small businesses who who are following the direct these like viral exposts the directions of these v viral exposts like what's happening to these small businesses who are try these small businesses and these startups who are trying to do that who are trying to do it and and yeah I'll start there what's happening to them I think I think that we should try to like categorize these businesses into two categories where one is like boring businesses and one is like non- boring businesses. So you you are just SMB like you're small maybe you are VC backed you are trying to grow your your company and boring business is like you're a restaurant shop you are a laundry you do uh rubbish collection company or you do house moving so these are like boring stuff which is like in any city like in New York there is a limit on like how many restaurants are there so there cannot be hundreds of restaurants or maybe thousands of restaurants But there can be thousands of startups. If you're doing trying to do like cyber security for large enterprises, there can be thousands of these companies who are trying to do that. So that is like a non- boring business. So what I've seen is that if you go to like boring sector, many of the sites globally in different cities in local search results, they are not as good as they should be because these businesses don't have enough capital to invest in SEO long-term. So they it's just been like a side thing where they are just like putting couple of thousands to SEO every year. So if you compare your let's say restaurant website to your competitors even your competitors are not that good. if an SEO is looking looking at that website. But if you use AI to publish like 50 or maybe 100 pages on your website or maybe organize your menu items properly or maybe do your about us page well or your homepage well, there is no issue with that because you are improving search results compared to your competitors. your competitor websites are already and if you are using AI to make your own website better then it's so so easier a step but if you are a YC backed startup and you are a SAS company all these guys are already thinking of like how their UIUX should be what their brand value should be what their color it's really crazy right it's it's really crazy what's happening with these VCbacked companies and how they're all falling for this and it's like how don't you know, how don't you know that you will get hit, that you're going to get the mount AI pattern? Like it it's the SEO community is screaming about it and and just how do they think like do they think that Google is so stupid that Google one of literally like one of the top three most valuable companies in the world is so dumb that they can't detect scaled AI content. What? Like I don't understand how all of these VC backed companies are falling for it. It's insane. Go. I think it's uh just from what I've seen and what people have been telling me, it's just like a network effect, referral effect. I would say there are some companies in the space uh who got a some large enterprises that build some brand value and referral value too. So they got referred to some other companies, they got referred to some other companies, they got referred to some other companies. You know what you know what happens? This is what this is what happens. Somebody tries it and when it's going really great, they're screaming about it and then and then their friends, they're all in these communities, they're all in these these startup communities and their friends are going, "Oh my god, like look what's happening to my friend's company over here. We got to try it." And then they try it and it happens to them and then it happens to the next and it happens to the next and then like a month later the first person gets hit and then a little bit after that the second person gets hit. But it's like it's like the do it's like a domino effect where the dominoes keep popping up and and the thing is when you go on X and you go on LinkedIn and you show your results and you scream about how amazing this is at the beginning, it looks really really tempting. And of course these VC these VC back companies are not doing the same amount of vocalization about how bad it is. They you don't want to scream about how about your fails like that. So they're not putting in the same amount of effort to scream about how oh my god we are hit, we are dead, this is terrible. You're not going to do that. You don't want to look weak. Y and so as a result all people see is the positives and they're not seeing the reality which is what happens in a month, two months, 3 months later. Yep. Of course. So I think there are some VC firms if you go to their website and they say that they are they have they are backing these 50 companies. If you manage to find like five companies that are doing scaled content abuse, you will see that all 50 are doing it. So it's it's just like a net network effect. But there will come a time where everyone's will sort of like try to back back off from these things. It it's just almost like a cycle where you go to boom and bust cycle. So now is boom. So everyone is trying to do that. Everyone is trying to leverage cloud code or all the other tools many SAS AI content generator tools in SEO space and u over time what we will get to is that there will be a big hit big wave from Google's end maybe a core update or some other sort of like spam update or maybe Google will come out and say something more about like scaled content abuse and hundreds of websites will get hit in a week or two week time period then there will be big news and everything else and then we will get to a point where VCs and all these other like known SEO executives will get will say that no no we are not doing scaled content abuse anymore. So there will come come a point where search engine land will write a detailed uh piece around like why you should not be doing scaled content abuse no matter what any AI content generator SAS company is telling you and beyond that I think we will get back to normal where we are trying to be careful around like what what is getting published on the website people will again try to build a bright content teams maybe use AI to some extent but not to like full extent like Everything should not be AI generated. So it's just a boom and bust cycle. But I have been telling telling companies that it's up to you that if you you are fine with the risk then go for it. If you're not fine with the risk then you should do the SEO right way. And many companies have come back to me and they have said that they are going for like series A or series B in 6 to 8 months. Go 6 to 8 months. So they need the higher numbers for just this time frame. So this is also something that is contributing to uh people doing this kind of the behavior where they are doing a raise in four months and within this period they have to show the number is going up month on month and at the same time opposite has also happened where a company is going for series A in 12 months uh and they try to scale it but they got hit at 7 month time point and now their series A is impacted because VCs and their teams Some do some don't do look at search visibility but I know some VCs they do look at the search visibility graph at the surface level not like digging into like what's going on but they will just go go to Samrush or HFS and plug the domain there and see mount AI you know what I want I want to I want to get one of those founders on the show I want to get a founder who's been hit who's gone way up really fast and then got hit and I want to have one of them on the show to talk about what that felt like the excitement statement of getting so much search traffic so fast, screaming about it. People be like, "This is crazy." And then and and being so hyped, we're going to raise so much money and then getting hit and and then like the reality of what that feels like as like a cautionary tale. Yep. I think uh people who have uh sort of like now come on the right side of SEO, they will be all right to come on your board and tell the story. But many people most of them will not be all right. I think it it looks they don't want to admit it. Yeah. They don't want to admit it and they don't want to Dude, I saw that I was con I was consulting an NFT company in 2022. Mhm. And so they they launched uh they launched and they made like $2 million on launch. And then like a month and a half later, this NFT company was making $8 million a month and they were on top of the world there. They and it was a company in in Hungary and $8 million a month in Hungary. 8 million USD a month in Hungary is a ton of money. And so within like another month, they scaled a new comp, brand new company, two new founders. They scaled to like 60 employees and they're and they're going crazy. They're like, we're going to dominate the world with and and I'm sitting here like, yo, cut your like chill out with the spend. Turn a turn a bunch of the crypto that you have to cash so you have good reserves. Like actually like be like kind of conservative right now. going crazy, hiring, hiring, hiring, hiring, and they're going up and up and up. And then NFTTS start going down and down and down, and they lost they lost everything. And it was that and I saw that same it was the same excitement, the the boom the same boom and bust excitement. And I think if you've been in a lot of hype markets, because I've seen crypto for several hype markets now, and I feel like we're seeing this with AI, you are so used to just seeing these crazy up and downs. And you see the same emotions from people, the same once in a lifetime, we're on top of the world, now we're going to dominate the world. Oh, and we went way too, way too hard, way too fast. And I kind of feel like that's what we're seeing right now with scaled AI content. Yep. Like you just keep seeing these posts trending on X and LinkedIn. Yep. Uh I think uh with other cycles like you mentioned NFT crypto like many have died like like there was this monkey apes. Monkey apes became so much popular. Bape yach club. Yeah. Bipe club. Almost every profile in my uh x feed used to have like like that monkey thing. So now it Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Now it's gone. But the problem with those kind of the cycles is that uh they come and go but with SEO cycle you are left with a burn domain which you don't want to carry forward. Yeah. So so maybe and then you put all that work in in building links and content making the brand and putting up the site and you know some people might argue well I had AI do everything so it's fine. And you know what? If you had AI scale a site and it wasn't hooked to your Google search console and it didn't affect any of your other properties and you just if you were just doing churn I think if you're doing churn turn and burn with completely AI generated sites that are not linked back to you that's pretty cool. I mean it's gross cuz you're literally polluting the internet with with spam and garbage. But like you are winning. Like that's the truth. But for but most business owners, they're just like like I just want to I I just want to grow my business year over year and and feed my family and and I'm not really interested in doing churn turn and burn spam plays like that. And that's most business owners. They're not interested in doing churn and burn spam plays. And that the reality is you need to be very savvy to do one of these churn and burn burn spam plays where you are not where where it is not getting uh back to you and it is not like hurting other properties and things like that and setting it up so that it's actually effective. Yeah. Like you need to be very Yeah. It takes a lot more work than people think. Yeah. I think it it gets to a point where maybe you have spent like $1 million on building your domain value where where people get to know your domain that it's.com.au or it's.com orco.uk or whatever it is. But if you burn that then all that money that you spend on building that recognition value where people recognize that it's brand.com.au or it's brand.com or it's brand.in and it's not something else. I think that is still valuable because what I've seen is like in with the Marco core update that recently rolled out many companies in uh Australia they had com.au those domain got hit really really bad and they immediately switched that com.au to domain and they redirected their whole website and right now that is coming up all right but over time Google is going to pick up that signal that we hit com.au AU and now they are redirecting to AU. We so we have to pass all that those negative signals to the new.AU domain and many brands have built that recognition that it's brand.com.au and not brand.auu. So you are losing that recognition value where people already know who you are and where you are located on the web. You know, you know what, Gagen? I think um I I think that social profiles, having social profiles that link to your site are going to become more and more important because the a lot of social media companies do some sort of minimal like identity checks before you're creating a social. It's minimal. Some some not not really but others will do some like minimal like if if if something looks suspicious you can't you can't create a profile or you can't post whereas anyone can just buy a domain and make a website anybody anywhere can buy a domain and make a website and start putting up pages on it but with social pro like social profiles are a lot stricter like I man even on even on X I was I was living in Poland and I was trying to create an a new ex account and I couldn't do it just like living in Poland and I tried for months and months and months and then I finally like I finally got it and and I I had other friends who were in Poland who are having the same issues and it was very difficult to do and there you see problems like that with with meta prop with uh with meta social media platforms and yeah all over the place LinkedIn this actually happened um I'm funding this new company and it happened. The operator is is in a foreign country and it happened with the operator's LinkedIn. It got taken down and the operator had to verify some stuff like actually verify some stuff and so I think social profiles will be a lot more important in the future or maybe it might be anybody can rank but if you start fitting that pattern of scaled content then they're going to look for then Google is going to look for extra patterns to make sure that you're real. Do you have social profiles like you said? Are they posting? are is your press growing? All of these other things. Yeah. Yeah. And even like uh sometimes uh the log out thing happened with Gmail too. Like uh I went from Singapore to Dubai and I open my laptop connected to Wi-Fi. I try to go to my Gmails. I have couple of them and all of them got logged out automatically because maybe Google thought that someone is trying uh to access my uh Gmail from Dubai while I I should be in Singapore. Dude, dude, this just happened to me being being in New York now. And so I'm in New York now and I tried to open an email account for which I am the this was within a Google Workspace that I'm the administrator for and I tried to open and I and I and I turned off to to FA for this one account and I still had to put in a phone number to verify it. But it's like think about think about owning a website. it and like so if you want a social media profile where you can put up posts, you probably will have to do some sort of minimal verification. If you want to a Gmail where you're going to email people, you will have to do some sort of minimal verification like give a phone number. If you want to put up a website and and put up posts on your website and pages on your website, there is a no verification required. Yep. And so that's why I think actually having social profiles just having them linking back to your site could be so much a major like we have this the concept in SEO of foundational links and social profiles are seen as these foundational links but I think a lot of SEOs don't think about just how important they actually might be. Yep. I think the the the problem that most of the companies face is like there are too many channels to allocate resources to. So everything go get prioritized. Some brands end up prioritizing Google ads over meta and then come SEO. Then come Instagram then come Tik Tok and some brands maybe they are fan of Gary Vee and they end up prioritizing Tik Tok as number one which get the most amount of the resources and the SEO being the last on the on the list. I have never come across a brand where they have allocated resources equally to all the socials and all the channels. So I think uh no we're doing that. We're doing that. We're doing that. Yeah, we're doing it. Dude, I'm like cuz I mean you see me you see me with content cuz I and and I know Dude, you even sent you you sent um you sent that screenshot about how my about how this podcast just ranks for everything in SEO, which it kind of does, which is crazy. And and that's because I understand how important a good social strategy is in addition to like traditional SEO and when you actually it's it's insane. Yep. But I think you are really really good marketer rather uh and SEO too of course. It's true. Yep. But but if we we scale that to like like a company who has like 100 people in the marketing team then it becomes a problem of like what who get uh what get prioritized and how the things are going to move. So most of the companies get into that challenge and I hope I feel like over time we will get to a point where AI is going to make it way easier to manage all the channels and allocate like almost equal resources there where I I right now like many brands they just have someone who is just like scheduuling the posts across all the channels like like they are going into a dashboard they are taking the creative they are making that's important that's really really important function that takes Yeah, but that is really really repetitive task. Maybe over time we will get we will get to a point where brands just need to create the creative they upload in a folder and it just take years of posting and creating the caption, creating the hashtag or whatever. So it might get to a point where tomorrow I wake up, I just record a video, I upload in a folder. That folder automatically decides that this should go on Tik Tok, Instagram or whatever what time it should be posted to get max engagement, do the caption thing and everything else that need to be done and it get posted automatically. I think that's where we are headed and even in Google ads we are headed to in that direction where Google ads or even meta I think uh sometime back Mark Jerberg uh I will mess the last name Mark uh he was on stage doing some interview where he was telling that you don't need to do anything like you do you just give us the creative Zuckerberg was like yeah you don't need to be you don't need to do anything you don't need just give us a creative we're going to figure it all out yeah yeah we're going to figure it out all and uh When the interviewer asked him about like what the agencies is going to do then like who runs ads on behalf of brands he was like I don't know but our goal is our goal is to get to a point where you can come to meta and you just give you a creative and we will figure out the rest of it. Yeah that's uh waiting for that waiting waiting for that day to really be or do you think how close do you think that day is? uh I think uh it's going to be 3 years or 3 to four m 3 to four years uh will be a will be a tectonic shift in marketing. I think omni channel marketing managing all the platforms at the same time will become so easier. You will be able to do at the same time without thinking about like resources or prioritizing or anything like that. I think so. Three years. Three years. Three to four, I think. Dude, I'm I' I've seen I'm wondering how much better how much more qualified AI can get. Like I I get that we have like anthropics saying, "Oh my god, like this model is so powerful that we can't even release it and we have to give it to the government because it can crack any it can crack any system." Like I get that we have like these hype statements from AI companies, but I'm also like I've also heard very smart people saying actually I think we need an entire an entirely new paradigm to get to the next level of intelligence with to the next level of intelligence from AI. And we can't like with the current with the current paradigm of what we're what we've been doing, we can't actually go that much further. Yeah, I'm very I'm always super dubious of these claims. Yeah, sure. Uh I think uh the fundamental model level things uh need to take a longer time to improve. But what I meant in like like 3 to four years, we will get to a point where in tooling things will get to stabilize. Like right now you you go on on X almost every second day people are launching like new tool use my tool use my tool to do this I can do it 2x faster they can do 2x faster but in 3 to four weeks time I think some tooling brands will emerge just like Google Meta Facebook there will be these kind of like big companies where one will be like social media tooling who will handle like AI agents and everything else. So you just go there, you give it creative and it get allocated and everything else on its own. But the intelligence part is going to take a longer time to improve. We are moving towards a world where we will see like AI tooling brands in uh especially like SAS all the digital domain domains especially uh I I was talking to a company like who who is trying to do like uh you know iPad and uh when plumber is doing some work uh some of them they have like an application to review like uh what they need to do or how the design or the layout of the pipes and everything should be and now they are trying to do like where you can do a live with a bot and that is attached from here. It is giving them live feedback that this pipe need to be connected this way, this pipe need to be connected this way so that they can do like really complex things uh easier and they don't have to like keep on checking their iPad. It can just speak to them and review the video that they are doing uh sort of like a live stream with the model. So I think we will get to those kind uh kind of tool set companies. There will be in any domain there will be like three to five really really useful companies which we can use to do things and over time intelligence of course underlying models will keep on improving um open AI and tthropic and Elon Musk like XAI is also trying to uh do that uh with scaling the compute. Before we go, I want to ask you what do you imagine people who are doing SEO right now? The ones who who are who have won in three years, what what are they doing right now? The ones so the the companies that are doing SEO right now, the ones who have won in three years, what did they do right? They focused on brand building rather than SEO. Hate to say this. What do you mean? So brand building is you are trying to do omni channel marketing to just make sure that people know you in respect to any product or service. So if in 3 years someone comes to me and they mention that oh someone named Edward or someone named Kagan they should they should come to a point where they think that oh SEO they should not be thinking about like gagen go.com or Edward's website or Edward's social they should be thinking about the product or the service or the thing that you are associated with. So any company or any marketing team who is focusing on that level of brand recognition, they are going to win SEO long term. How much SEO are they doing? Not that much. Most brands are not doing enough SEOs and uh No, but I'm talking about the brands who have won SEO in three years. Like you're saying they're doing brand building. I agree with that. Brand building is really important. So how much SEO are they doing? What type of SEO are they doing? Uh they are generally uh trying to do right SEO content marketing on their site where their content strategy is structured at top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel and they are trying to build awareness through that rather than having no strategy uh defined as the funnel. So the teams who are doing top of the funnel, 10 pages top of the funnel, five pages middle of the funnel, three pages bottom of the funnel each month and they they talk to their customers, they read the sales script, they read the feedback that is coming from their existing customers or whatever prospects is telling them in the sales meeting. All that is getting fed on the website as structured as funnel. So uh the SEO content game uh in the long run and at the same time of course doing the omni channel marketing. So right now if you you don't know on your website which page is at what level in the funnel you get it wrong in 3 years you will be in trouble. So if my one take my one take away from this call can be like if you try to classify all of them as is it top of the funnel middle of the funnel or the bottom of the funnel page. So at least you know where a page is sitting in your funnel and based upon that you can make further decisions around like creating maybe more bottom of the funnel or maybe you need more top of the funnel where just to create some awareness about whatever you're trying to solve or whatever your product is. I agree. So, um, Ran Fishiskin is coming back on the show in a couple of days. And he was on the show last year, actually in May, and and, uh, almost a year ago. And the first time he was on, I told him that one of the reasons that like I was learning from him when he was doing whiteboard Fridays and all his content was he talked about omni channel channel marketing a lot. I have personally always thought that omni channel marketing is part of good SEO and that if you're doing omni channel marketing, you're really going you're really going to win. You're going to have like a strong you're going to have the strongest entity. Google's going to understand what you're about. You're going to have natural links that are passing traffic and you're like lots of different profiles are going to rank for more terms. Um, and it's it's just going to it's going to benefit you all around. You're going to have a more natural backlink profile. You don't have to worry about do I have enough high domain authority sites, low domain authority sites, anchor text like this, anchor text like that. Just do it and it's going to work out. And target keywords along the way. Try to find good keywords that other people aren't targeting. And then as you get more authority, you can target more competitive keywords. And I really agree there with brand building. And in terms of classifying keywords along the bottom of the funnel, there is this uh there a super popular post on the entrepreneur subreddit about like what are the best SEO conversion rate optimization tactics that people have and this post in the entrepreneur subreddit got so many comments and I was looking through it and most people were just saying match intent. Figure out what the intent is for your keyword and match intent. And that is what most of these posts were saying. They're all saying the same thing, match intent. So, I really agree with what you said. And and I think I think like you're saying, like actually building a brand is a pretty good way for for Google to tell if you are a if you are a real company versus an anonymous AI scaled content site or just a a scaled content site. Yep. there you can have more trust in your content even if your engagement signals are not the best. Yeah. And uh I think uh in like so far like it's 5th of May here in this year whatever meetings I've done with brands people who have got are getting like a lot branded traffic every month and at the same time they are making a lot of technical SEO mistakes where they have many brocker links on the website. Still they have not been hit by Google. While you you any SEO would come to that uh site and when do the audit they would think that oh there must have been some traffic loss over the years but there was not. So I just tell brands that the branded traffic is is a pillar that you can lean on any time. So even if you are making SEO mistake, you are trying to scale your content, you are using too much AI, you are using AI generated images or you are building weird back links. If you have good enough branded traffic coming to your website every month, you will still be all right to some extent. So branded traffic is your ultimate sort of like cushion which you can lean on anytime. Go, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Yep. Great to be back. I I always have fun doing these for people for for uh people who don't know. I mean, nobody no one knows, but I literally messaged Gagen like a couple minutes before we recorded this and I'm like, "Hey, you want to do a podcast today?" And he's like, "Yeah, let's do it." And so I'm I'm so dude, I'm so happy. I'm so grateful to have friends like Gagen, friends like you, friends like David Harpit will be on in a couple of days as well. He'll be back. And uh just uh yeah, dude, you're awesome. And so thank you. Thank you again. I think it's uh it's great to talk with uh with all the people who are actually practitioners who are actually talking with with the clients or doing talking with people every day because there is a limit on like how many meetings I can do each day. But if I pick up something really really unique and I share with you or others, it sort of like amplifies a really really um sort of build like a network impact where everyone get 10xed every month kind of thing where where the in like right now like in I feel like if you are an SEO you find one unique thing that moved the needle for ranking or traffic or even in AI search there is so much opport opportunity to implement exact same thing on 30 different brand sites who are not already doing that. So this is something that SEO should always watch watch out for like if you end up on any edge case or any specific element you should try to scale it not on the same site but on different brand sites because if it is working on one brand site the chances of it working on like other brands is really really high. So this Yeah. All right. This is episode Thank you again. Thank you again, Gagan. This is episode 1,035 of the Edward Show. 1,035 days in a row doing this podcast. Let's go. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.