Google Discover’s New Rules, March Core Update Fallout & AI Content Penalty Risks

We are rejoined with some of the best minds in search engine optimization to discuss the newest updates in getting surfaced in Google and large language models. We're joined by Gagen Gotra Harpit Singh and the one and only Mr. David Quaid. I'm so happy to have all of you back on the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having us again. Great to be back. Great to be back. Yep. And we're going to open with uh with the Google discover update. And Gagan, I'm going to let you kick this one off. Yeah. Uh so Google uh came out with a discover update. That is like a first discover specific update. There have never been any update which is discover specific and uh they started rolling out on 5th February. Uh so it's been been a while and it took almost 21 days to roll out and also Google shared like what exactly they are trying to do with this update. Google clearly came out and said that they want more local content in feeds of users. So for example, if you are based in New York, Google want to show you more New York related content or which might be relevant to you. or if someone is based in like Singapore, Google want to show more of like Singapore related news and everything that is coming out in the feed of that user. So this was one thing and the second thing that Google said is they want to reduce clickbait content in Google discover. So people were trying to do two types of clickbait or one is the image the featured image that shows up in uh discover feed and second is the title. So in images people were trying to do almost like YouTube strategy where you try to do like this or something like that to uh make someone go like wow I should click on that and some people were also trying to do uh clickbait in the titles. So for example like page is about like uh some famous personality but in the title they are trying to make it uh tricky that uh try to learn what happened in this uh particular relationship. uh he got divorced or he's dating someone else like but the content on the page is like something else. So people were trying to create uh wow while the content is something else and that wow just exists so that people can click through and come to the page and Google now is saying that we don't want that kind of the content in uh discover feeds. So that's also something uh that they are trying to reduce now and it's been a while that update uh has been finished but I have not seen like any significant change in my personal discover feed. There is still click clickbait. There is still like weird featured images sometimes AI generated too that are like uh flying everywhere. So I'm not sure like how much impact this update had. But it was just interesting that Google is actually trying to go like more local and also trying to reduce these kind of the weird spammy tactics in discover. How important is getting covered in discovered in discover? How big is how big is that market? Uh it's it's billions of users uh every month and if you are a publisher who just your whole game is content publishing, you must be in discover because if you get in, you can end up getting like 3 to 4 million clicks a day. And if you're a large publisher, you can end up getting getting 20 to 30 million clicks a day from discover. And your search can be just like 1 to 2 million a day. So you you must try to get into Google discover uh if you are not already in there. And if you're trying to scale your Google discover, be careful with going around like some weird strategy because if you get out of discover, you never come back for years. I know some sites which are really really wellnown in UK and Australia. They got hit back in 2022 and they have not like come back in discover to this day and it's been years and they were getting millions in monthly traffic from discover. So just be careful. Don't try any weird tactic with discover because if you get out you're never in and it may pass like years. Why do they get hit? uh people usually get hit when they go like too broad. So if you're expertise and you you're writing about like two three topics for example like SEO, PPC, email marketing but suddenly you start to talk about like some u other topics which are outside of these fields. You just start publishing AI news like what is happening in AI space and everything else and then you add some other thing then you add some other thing you go too broad but you people are not searching for that. So for example, if tomorrow I start publishing content about like some dentist stuff or some doctor stuff, people are not actually looking to hear that kind of stuff from me. People are actually looking to hear SEO related things from me. So if your users don't expect a topic from you, then you have to be really careful. But if you want to expand topic, then you have to do overall marketing saying that you you are expanding into that topic. For example, like I work with some brands who are just like women's specific and now they are adding a men range but everywhere on the web it is saying that this brand just has products which are specific to women. So you you need to do overall marketing so that Google can pick it up that oh okay this brand was specifically focused on women for 5 years but now they are uh trying to do like a men specific product range. So if you are trying to expand your topics, you need to do overall marketing first so that Google can see that oh there is a expansion and then only you you stand a chance to stay in Google discover otherwise it's a really really risky bet if you scale your topics too quickly. Uh David and Harpit, have either of you looked into getting covered in Google discover before? Yeah. Um I've I've mostly by accident. Um, and I I just want to bring it back a second cuz I um I see a lot of like people confusing. So there's a couple of strands to discover, right? And they're all grouped under what used to be Google Caffeine. Google Caffeine came out I think in 2012 14. So basically you have a different set of crawlers that crawl um newsworthy sites. And if for example you get picked up on discover and what what is discover I think is is a great question right? So if you're using the Google app or if you're using Google on a mobile phone and if you don't if you open up the app or you open up search and you don't search for anything, Google will start to recommend articles or pages based on your crawl history. That is discover. If you're picked up by news in search console under discover you'll see another segment for news and that only happens for news items. The difference between the two is that inclusion is automatic and has been automated for a number of years. And so, as Gagen was saying, when you first got um accepted, they would pretty much publish anything you have. And now they're moving that trust level down to the article. So, now if you have an article that comes in and they don't trust it anymore, you get removed from the whole system. And so, uh I think there were a lot of people using it because of the incredible high impression count that you get. And so that is very good for advertising, that's very good for affiliates. And I almost think of it as like a HCU for discover type update. And it's it's worth noting that the discover system is very different from the Google core system and the crawlers it has. And so with discover using LLMs to look at your titles and your images, those you can't really apply the same rules to regular search. Um, but I'm noticing that there's less uh I'm not targeting discover and news, but I'm noticing sites that used to occasionally get cropped up with it, like with the blog post, just aren't getting added anymore. So, you've got to be quite intentional about it. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing 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 page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. 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. Yeah, I think it's a good thing that um these um like Discover is getting better essentially. Um my experience, I haven't touched Discover in a while, but goes back to 2021 after co um working in e-commerce. We tried to buy some discover pre-approved websites to for exactly for what David said, affiliate reasons for impressions reasons. And yeah, thinking back, you know, that was one of the spammiest things I've probably ever been involved in. Um, but it was so easy to game. So, obviously recently, I haven't been aware of what's happening, but as far as I can remember, it used to be a very spammy field. And if they're doing all these things to clean it up, it can only be good for the end end user. Obviously, the people whose websites are affected. Um, I don't don't agree with that. But, you know, if it's good for the user at the end of the day, I think I think that's okay. There might be another reason as well. I think um some of the problems that Google's been having, especially in the European Union um and and maybe also Quebec is where um publishers, news publishers want a cut of Google's profits. And I think Google's saying, look, there are other people repeating the news and um they're kind of playing a reverse copyright game that others are playing with them where they're saying like no one owns the news. So look, if if uh Le France Times doesn't want to give us the news for free, we'll get it from, you know, Harpit's coverage of France news and we'll uh publish it that way. Um now that's just a guess but um and that that that might be what they mean by going um hyper local. Yeah and also just just to add on like what what EU is trying to do they are trying to replicate what Australia did in 2021. So if in you are in Australia you scroll your discover feed you see some special cards which are labeled as showcase. So there are there a normal card is like image and a title below that and a showcase card is also no image and a title but in in a little like uh text it says showcase and that showcase is coming from Google and Facebook having to pay publishers directly in Australia because Australia passed some laws where they said that if you have to pay these like really big publishers if you are taking their content and surfacing in like a feed. So that's something that EU is trying to replicate right now. If you were to wrap up like with Google Discover best practices to to get covered, what would you say for for publishers who just like I I look I like I don't care about the laws. I just want more people to see my stuff. We're bleeding out here. What would you tell what would you tell publishers? Best thing is like whatever topics you're publishing if anything that is becoming a online conversation about that just publish a page or two about that. So if you're publishing about just SEO, you write only about SEO. And if on X, Reddit or anywhere on Tik Tok or Instagram, you see that some particular video discussing a particular topic is trending or getting a lot of likes and becoming a part of online conversation. Then you should try to write a article about that and don't make it like really thin where you just just have a Reddit post embedded and you are just like writing couple of words about that. Rather try to provide your opinion about that. Just like you what you do like if you see any highquality post anywhere from David or from Harpit or even from me you create a video out of that you need to do similar approach uh but write a blog page about that but make sure to include your perspective on that because what Google is looking for is firsthand perspective on whatever is going on in the world and if you are a large organization and like nowadays like war is going on straight off hormuse there is so much news about that and some journalists they are just writing long pieces about that where they are going into like what is the history of this thing what happened 20 years back what happened 30 years back what is geopolitics how does the different things play into this and those pieces are like 2,000 words or 3,000 words like complete breakdown of of the topic and those kind of the pieces also tend to like perform really really well in Google discover so you can do two things either you can try to do newsjing But not like loweffort newsjing. You just have to put in a lot of effort into making sure that you're providing your perspective or whatever is going on. You write a detailed piece about that. What about technical requirements? Like um I when I first tried to get into discover we had to have um AM pages and a lot of us used Google AM um and then that fell away. And I've also thought of um having dedicated news XML feeds and um also you know linking to those um XML feeds. What what do you think is the technical setup today? Technical setup today is uh featured image should be u the width should be more more than 1200 pixels. So that is the first requirement and the second requirement is that you should have RSS feeds set up properly and news sitemap and your general sitemap too. So these are like three main things that you need to tick. But if you have ticked these, you may still not end up getting the visibility. And if in case you you don't have any of these ticked, you may still end up getting visibility. So that's where Google discover the randomness parts come in. You can try to make sure the technical elements are done all right and still not get visibility. Or you may have your technical setup totally messed up, but you may still end up getting the visibility. So it's just really really random algorithm. There is no like specific checklist or specific strategy to it. For example, like sometimes I see like my clients they just write like 300 words on a page and it get like 1 million click from discover within a week and sometimes they write a detailed post that I even explain that tend to perform well but it don't perform well in discover. So it it is just like a hit and miss kind of thing. when you when you see something like that happening 300 words and it and it just performs really really well. Do you have any thoughts on why that happens? Maybe the content you said it's like a trending topic or something else. I feel like it it sort of becomes a click loop where once you publish a page, Google sort of like throws the page in feed anyway. So if you're a domain which is getting uh visibility in Google discover already. So Google has some level of trust on you no matter whatformational page you you publish Google will give you a chance and if that chance performs well Google will just accelerate you there. So any page on certain domain will get see thrown to like 100 people and if out of those 100 people all of them or most of them clicked on that page no matter what what is there on the page 300 words or 800 page Google got positive feedback from that and then Google is like I need to push this more. So that goes from 100 people to 100k people and maybe over that and sometimes if you your detailed post and Google shows it to 100 people and it not even 10 are clicking so that is a negative feed uh feedback loop that Google is getting uh from the users and that page just get like suppressed. So it's almost like a Tik Tok algorithm like once something goes viral it goes really really viral. So the gap between like even Gary Vee talks about it like gap between getting 1,000 views on a short video on Tik Tok versus a 1 million it's not that high. If Tik Tok algorithms sort of loves you, it will straight away takes you to that 1 million mark uh without you having to like put any strategy into like what video you created or doing any sort of heavy editing. It's just that clicks feedback loop that keeps on repeating. Doesn't Google also say you need a lot of authority on on those topics as well? That's one of the technical requirements. So if you're not getting picked up, then you potentially need to boost your authority for that topic as well. Yep. Of course. Yep. So it's almost like you you should be doing all the other SEO things and on top of that you you you need to adjust your content strategy just that. So basically, if you're selling like ultra cheap ICBMs and you want to target the Iran war, for example, you you and you don't have any posts on building ICBMs, you're probably not going to get into discover either, right? You probably just need to do some basic what is an ICBM, where who uses ICBMs, that kind of Yeah. setup. Yeah. Uh but sometimes what happen is like if a news cycle is too quick then even newer sites end up getting visibility in discover. So you just have to be really um with the if you think there is a chance take that chance and see what happens. So even if your site is 6 months old, you don't have any authority or anything like that. But whatever your topic is, the news cycle is so fast that things are changing like every couple of hours, then you you still may end up getting into that cycle and discover may push you to a certain limit. But if you want the eye of the beholder. Yeah. Yeah. If you really want to be like more uh go go go to a level of like 2 million 3 million clicks per month or sorry per day, you just have to build really really high authority and do digital PR and make sure that your overall web thing is set up properly. Have either of you guys seen um apart from the clicks and impressions, have either of you guys seen a lot of um you know business value from from those clicks and those views? It's mostly just just getting getting the ads impression. That's what I've seen where if you end up getting 1 million people on your page in one day, that's a lot of ads impression and that can generate uh a lot of revenue. But uh for example like if you you sell products you're e-commerce uh company and a brand and you have a blog setup where you're trying to target Google discover you may end up getting a lot of people to your blog those pages if you try uh to build your authority and do high quality content with long pages but the conversion net value will be so low because most of those people are not right away going to buy your your product. But if you monetize by ads then there is a lot of value creation and even some companies I know 80% of their revenue is tied to Google discover. Wow. What about affiliate content? Did you see anything when you were trying uh affiliate? Yes. Uh before Helloful content update in uh 2023 uh even on like small to mediumsiz sites it used to work out really well but now it's just the big guys who are uh who stand a chance to get into discover if they publish affiliate content even the mediumsiz sites which which have like 20 writers or maybe 30 writers they don't stand any chance of getting into into discover I think there is some sort of like throttling going on or maybe helpful content update signal is trying to control like who gets in there, especially the small and mediumsized publishers. So, it's just a vague system, but big guys, they are still making millions of dollars from it. Tip go on. Sorry, I got a tip on um what Gag was saying about how news cycles move so fast. So a lot of people have thoughts on Indian publishers like the Indian news publishers, Times of India and like Hindustan and all of those ones but they are so fast with news cycles like anything happens anywhere in the world like it can happen like locally here like in Vancouver times of India or someone will have a story on it and like I bet it's probably to game discover or be at the top of search for when that new story happens. So yeah, I think people researching this should look at Indian publishers to see how fast they do publish on um like anything any world event. Um so yeah and also like uh when you're thinking around like what to publish regarding a news cycle. So there are some things that happen in in a row. For example, like a news comes out from a large publisher like CNN or Fox News, a video or an article comes out, lot of people in America or UK or Australia get to hear about it. But if the entities which are mentioned in that news, the name of the people, person, places, people don't know about that, then people will start to search about that person, their name or what they do. And that's where the gap that these Indian publishers are leveraging. They publish pages that what to know about this person because they know that a news came out. CNN is not going to write a biography page for that person if that person is that not known already. So for example like uh I think last year or the year before that the guy who who sang the song uh rich man north of Richmond uh want to just know something like that he went really viral on Tik Tok and then he ended up uh going on Joe Rogan too. And in that news cycle, nobody knew who that guy is. His just one song hit on Tik Tok and it went viral. And that's where Indian publishers came like they did the research about like who that guy is is what he has been doing, what job he do, he does and they writeed they wrote like those kind of the biography pages. I think you have to understand where the gaps are because large publishers they have their editorial and the editorial strategy. They have like whole process of like what get published versus what not get published and you need to try to figure out like what is not getting published from them in any news cycle and you can try to publish that information and that's the way for you to get into Google discover. Do you think it's you were saying that like small publishers really can't can't play in Google discover but do you think that's the case or do you think they just need a smarter strategy? I think it's it's the both both things at the same time. So if you're small there is an algorithmic throttling uh SEOs may have opinion about that but I feel like whenever you you have like a team of five writers on your website just five people are writing on the website there is a throttle on how much visibility you will get in into Google discover and you can't jump over that and the only way to jump on that is to have 50 people writing on your website. So that's one thing but you can play within that limit. So for example like for a particular site it might be possible that Google has throttled that site on 500k impressions per month from Google discover and to fill that gap you can start writing content but you cannot go over five uh 500k impressions from Google discover in any way no matter what your content strategy is. So whenever like a small I am working with a small site I need to see their historical data to see the pattern where has the peak been if the peak was in last 6 months in discover performance report was at 200k impressions a month or 300k impressions a month or something like that that's where I know that this is where the total point is and to go beyond that total point increasing the size of the site and having more writers is the only way but For example, if the peak was at 300K and today uh in a month of April you're not even getting getting 10k or 15k impressions from Google discover then there is a gap to build a strategy around like content and then you you have a content play where you uh try to do the news analysis and figure out like where the gap is and publish according to that. But if you are already hitting your peak then there is no way to go beyond that without expanding number of writers who are writing for for your website. We seen situations back to David's question. Have you seen situations where publishers have better smarter monetization strategies in so that they're not just depending on on ads and affiliates? It's I uh like honestly I've never se seen any anything that works better than affiliate. So it's just affiliate and second ads. So if you can make your affiliate game work in Google discover that's great because it pays way way better than ads and ads are just ads just became on like um cherry on affiliate cake kind of thing. But uh there is no like any other strategy that that you can utilize to monetize. It's just two two things. ads or affiliate. David, you're a you're a SAS person and I've been I've been screaming about this on on the podcast for I don't know 6 months or something and I'm like all publishers should vibe co vibe code a sass in their niche. You have topical authority. You can make bottom ofunnel SEO landing pages for it. You can channel your top off ofunnel searches to it. And I I just so strongly believe that all publishers should vibe a SAS and sell it. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. Um I think we're going to see a blend, right? I I think um the way we've seen like traditional industries get shunted and shaped in the new world order, right, between the 1990s and 2000s. I don't know if you guys saw, there was a really interesting news article where a struggling um shoe brand has pivoted from shoe retail stores in New York to an AI compute company. What? It's like a It's like a a steam engine company switching to um I don't know satellite production. It It's so bizarre, right? It It's And they were they were losing money and they've added 130 million to their valuation. Wait. Oh, it's Allirds. Oh, yeah. Yes. Allirds. Um so I I think you're right. The news industry is suffering, right? One because news is globalized. So you can have a a very quick efficient because that's what news is right it's who who gets the story first and SAS's problem with vibe coding is marketing is the only moat right so how do you build a mode around it right and I think um open AI just bought a very well-known podcast um for various reasons it's obviously good a lot of uh billionaires have their own um I'll have to Google it but DB TBPN I think uh the number is 200 million. It's not conf confirmed how much money I paid but people are saying that it's 200 million. So Mhm. Wow. So yeah. So a lot of a lot of billionaires obviously already own their own mouthpieces. So I think um this this blend is is is going to be more important. Um I just wanted to ask Harpre another question. um with the sites that you were acquiring that were like discover pre-approved, were there any specific backlinks or were there anything specific about those sites that that you noticed that made them discover friendly? No, because back then um so two things. So we wanted to buy discover approved sites and Google news approved sites and back then until 2021 2020 the bar was very low. Like you could go to um forums um with black hat in the name and just buy them. Like people sold them and they and they worked. They were churn and burn where you they worked for a month, a week, two months, but it was okay cuz the cost to acquire them was so low. Um so it wasn't anything going on. It was just bottom of the barrel stuff which um yeah, which I am assuming that doesn't work now. But also to another point, um you're talking about vibe coding SAS for every publisher. So I'm going back 10 years now and um a lot of news websites in England had secondary businesses associated with their with their with their domain. So I worked with the Guardian. So I was at the agency but Guardian was a client and they had Guardian dating. It was Guardian Soulmates it was called and they also had Guardian Holidays and then The Telegraph also had their own holidays. is um like pretty much every news publisher had their own like vacation like website or they had like spin-off sites and over the past 10 years they've each all of them have just shipped off those businesses like they've closed them down. One of the challenges I had 10 years ago was getting them to feature like holidays and dating stuff on the actual main domain. But they had rules in place internally where they only wanted to promote these sites through their subdomain. So I feel like whether it be internal politics within an organization like maybe it's executives scared to fall under executives being scared to maybe get you know hit by the law or whatever. Um I think publishers missed a big opportunity to monetize cuz the SEO wave kind of ended not didn't end but SEO got much more difficult after HCU. Prior to HCU if you had a news website if you had a publishing website you had so much opportunity to make money. um even through like small booms in e-commerce. So like we see parasite SEO all the time and through parasite SEO the publisher makes money because someone pays them to host an article on their website. There's nothing stopping these publishers from you know launching their own product and using very similar tactics and using the weight of their domain to rank for those products in search. So I think for whatever reason over the last 10 years publishers have missed the boat and I think with what you said um like W coding a SAS and trying to rank for that they already have the authority in a domain. I think this is their time like do it and make some money you're going to struggle cuz there's so many news publishers struggling around the world like they're being closed left, right, and center. So and it's crazy for for us like cuz you they have they get so many clicks cuz they're they're publishers. It's crazy. And they're they're not utilizing that. No, it's like you you move fast now or you're going to be left behind. Like there's Yeah, it's going to be a blood bluff in the in the publishing industry. Yeah. We we see vertical integration in so many industries like for example Costco now own their own chicken farms, right? So from egg to hatch chicken because they've got the $5 loss leader rotisserie bird at the back, right? um you've got that in the medical industry where insurance companies own pharmaceuticals and part of the vertical system is that you're keeping the profit in the same network. Also, if you own the company instead of like Forbes Marketplace being an affiliate or Guardian being an affiliate, uh the affiliate rules no longer apply to you uh because you own the product. And so just sort of like if the barrier to entry was SAS, now you can vibe code your own SAS or you could buy it from a like SAS farm, right? Uh so I I I think if you've got the eyeballs, advertising money didn't really pay you the net value of those eyeballs versus what you can collect yourself, right? Because you're splitting it between uh essentially three companies, including the middleman. Um, and like you said, the um, news companies have the eyeballs, but they're hemorrhaging money, right? So, um, I if they're going to survive, they probably need to look at that sort of like vertical integration. It's it's it's like it's hilarious because think about all the SAS companies that are doing very top offunnel SEO that are just trying to get brand recognition in their niche and then you have all these publishers who have a good amount of that. They're not doing this. So, but it's um to your point, this is why I think a lot of SAS companies are trying to buy publishers because now let's get into AI AI search and um you know um so Samrush for example, they bought uh the search engine land. Um the more sources you own, the better it is for AI search. I think that's why a lot of SAS companies are trying to buy media networks because they want to expand their coverage. So yeah, it's a two-way it's a two-way thing. But I definitely think for whatever reason publishers, they missed they missed a step and there was so much opportunity they could have capitalized on, but there's still a window. I think there's still a few window where they can do something. There's um we we brought up this brand. It's a brand that I'm very close to that I've talked about at this show, but I I can't say the name, but we all know it. And I've been pitching to them because I I know their seuite people and I've just been telling them like do this like now is the time everyone everyone knows this. It's one of the most widely talked about brands in SEO, publishing brands in SEO. And I've been pitching this to them and it's something that not only did they not consider it, the idea still seems so foreign to them. Like it seems crazy and uh hopefully there are some agile publishers who will jump on this and it'll be the best thing that they've ever done and it's like wow business is great. I can't believe we didn't do this sooner. And you could do it for 20 million, right? save them 90%. Right, Edwin? I It's just they Yeah, they're not even like open to it at all. It's also funny that um talking about AI search that some of the big geo uh um agencies and and especially the geo tool vendors are doing so much work in SEO like they're publishing tens of thousands of pages and then the sort of like geo bros who are coming in saying like oh geo is new and it's all about llm.ext and it's schema and it's recycling old SEO myths. They're not doing any SEO and they're not visible at all. Right. Um it's hysterical that they're actually drinking so much of the Kool-Aid. At least companies that are in the geo space that begin with a P, at least they're doing SEO and hiring SEOs, right? Even if they're doing the oh go so different. Um but the the clever thing is if you actually look at their um rankings, they're ranking for a ton of things. Uh it's very spread out. But the small independent geo guys who are publishing, oh, here's the difference between AEO and GEO, they're not even doing SEO. Uh, which I find quite hilarious. Let's let's move on to the March update and uh and the spam update. Yeah. Uh so so uh once uh Google uh discover update finished on uh 27th Feb and uh next month in March, Google did two updates. uh one was spam update that was first and then they started rolling out core update. So spam update they started rolling out on 24th uh March and it took almost uh 21 hours to get it done and I was surprised to see that. I was thinking that it's uh maybe going to take take like one or two weeks but that was really really quick and uh regarding this spam update Google did not share any specific thing that they are targeting. They just said that whatever don't align with our spam policies is going to get hit. And as we all know there is a lot of things in spam uh policies. So there is no like clarity around like which site got hit or which site got boosted. And once this spam update was done uh then on 27th of March, Google started rolling out another update the March 2026 score update and that took almost 2 weeks to uh finish and with this update there is again not much clarity around like who got hit but what I have seen or the companies that I'm talking with people who are doing a lot of AI generated content they were hit really really hard and at the same time Google uh de-indexed a lot of pages So anyone who who I'm talking with, I just look at two things. Have you been doing AI generated content? Yes. Then I look at what happened to their index pages. The AI pages uh pages which were indexed over uh last 6 months. They all got dropped out of index in two weeks period when the update was rolling out and therefore they lost uh the clicks too. So yeah. Is that general? Sorry. Is that just um any AI content or scaled AI content? Uh that's uh that's for scaled people who are publishing a lot of pages. I I just want cuz I just want to um call a key differentiation to that because the the Google AI policy is free. It's open to everyone. Just Google AI spam policy. Um AI content is allowed, right? What Google has never liked is scaled content abuse. And there's always a blurring of lines. Like programmatic SEO to me was something that you did for UGC content like eBay, Amazon, forums, which is totally legitimate. If you're going to create a job listing site, you're going to have a million jobs. You're going to have a million cookie cutter pages. That is not frowned upon. But if you're going to go and write 10,000 or even a thousand AI blog posts, you're in trouble. And I think a lot of again a lot of web devs who think they understand SEO as I often say if they want if they want your opinion on SEO they'll come and give it to you. Um they're getting hit. We see that a lot in X. I know Harpit you've been harping on a little bit about that as well. Yeah. Um yeah, similar to what Gagen said. So not all AI content has been hit, but some of the sites that have gone a little too, you know, a little too a little too far, they have been hit. Um, but I'll also say that right now it seems like so a lot of big maybe not enterprise but maybe venturebacked uh few hundred million in funding companies are doing um you know are making a lot of this AI generated content and with all the other marketing they're doing their domain authority is going up. So, you know, I don't like you looking at domain authority like that, but to make things simple, yeah, the domain authority has been going up cuz they're doing so much other marketing and they're getting away with it. Like, they're going to get away with it for a longer period of time. So I think if you're one of these big venturebacked companies, if you've got like a billions of billion dollar valuation or maybe multi-billion dollar valuation, you can get away with it much longer than the SAS that maybe has 50 million in funding and 100 million in funding cuz they're not doing all of these other marketing things. I think right now with the reason I ramp like just ramble on decks is because I don't think marketing leaders quite know what they're doing. This is just based on my opinion and how like my interaction interactions with people like Web Flow for example. They will host a I'm just naming them cuz you know I don't like their marketing. I think it's pretty crap. Um they will host a webinar with multiple CMOs and be like you guys need to add FAQ schema to your page and this will happen for AI search or you're not ready for AI search because your website's not doing doing this. So what's happening is these companies, they've taken over the discourse and now everybody thinks they can do the same thing, but they can't. Like I said, the company with, for example, RAMP, they can get away with what they're doing for much longer cuz they have all of this other marketing going on that's helping them improve the domain authority. It's just helping improve their brand name and yeah, like good for them. But then a $50 million value company is going to try and do the same thing with onetenth of the marketing team. They're going to create 200 pages with AI. Sure, they'll do great for two months and then it's and and then it's over. So, I think that that's why I ramble on an exam. I think our industry has just been diluted with one one shoe, one sizefits all type of information, but it's not like that. It's way more nuanced with what we're with what we're doing. And each website has its own challenge. Each business has its own has its own challenge. You're not rambling on. I I think you're you're doing a very important service cuz it's not just the $50 million startups. It's the $100,000 startups, right? The bootstrapped. They they cannot afford an SEO agency. Not because they can't afford it. It's because they just can't afford anything, right? They they may not be able to pay their Web Flow hosting bill at the end of the quarter. And so if someone's saying to them, look, I found the secret, right? The secret is to publish 5,000 pages and here's here's a Google Search Console chart. If you don't know what authority is, and I think this is very common in the in the web development community, and um and I mean this with respect, not not not to to sort of slap anyone in the wrist, but if you don't understand that SEO is content times authority, um and that you don't just get to publish and Google just obeys what you say, right? Your your site map is not a to-do list, right? Um, if you if you if you have that mindset or you've come from an environment where you were working on websites that had authority, you're not going to appreciate how hard that authority is to get. And so if someone says to you, look, this is what I did. Here's my graph. I see so many people copying it. And like you said, you could ruin that domain for a long time to come, right? As in if you're a startup, months count, right? Months can be forever. Um and I think what you're doing is a great service and more people should should follow you for that. Yeah. And I think uh in in our uh industry and even in online conversations the problem is that uh the loudest people are working with already authoritative sites and most of advice that they share they don't apply to 90% of people who are looking to buy SEO services. That's the clear point because whenever there is any conference or or even like one of my client come to me and they say that their marketing team or SEO team is going to this conference in Sydney or this conference in Brighton Brighton SEO whenever they come back the questions are always the same. Someone got on stage who is working with already really high authority brand and they did the whole talk from that perspective but who is sitting in the audience is working with a brand where there is not enough authority or they need to build authority and people don't talk about that that anything which is relevant for a enterprise brand large brand cannot work for a startup or a medium-siz brand who is actually trying to build more authority. So these are like two different games. But the loudest opinion is coming from enterprise SEOs but in the market 90% people don't need that advice. Instead what David said they need to build more more authority and their strategies should be focused on that rather than trying to publish like 100k blog pages which is going to be all right if you have a large authority already on your domain. But if you do same on on a startup site or on a medium-sized uh site, you are going to get crushed in four to six months. So Gagen, I I I don't know if if you'd agree, but I would call this almost the the Forbes effect, right? Where Google um you know, they almost called the reputation abuse, I think it was colloally known as the Forbes reputation abuse uh penalty, right? I I I think that this is a sort of fallout of that, right? that um it showed that Google was potentially too afraid I I don't know what the right words are to go after Forbes and they have a boatload of authority. Do you think that's left the door open for this kind of um programmatic SEO abuse? I think where where this advice is coming from is is that people are moving from one thing to another. For example, like I'll give you example like recently I talked with a company and their uh marketing team. The main person in that marketing team who runs the whole team comes from performance marketing background where they their whole carrier they have been doing meta ads and how meta works is like beyond the technical configuration in in the in the dashboard. Once you hit the right creative for your ad, right headings and whatever your creative image or video is, then it becomes a game of pumping in more money to scale that creative winning creative to more audience. And they come with that same mindset to SEO where they see that 10 pages, 10 blog pages are working, which means that the next thing to do is to pump in more money into content using AI and scale those 10 pages to 100k pages. I've seen this common pattern where the decision-m person their whole career they have been doing meta ads or Google ads where once you hit the right creative the end game becomes you need to put in more money to get more dollars out of that creative but they try to apply that same thinking to SEO but that don't work at all so there there is I think this this major gap where performance marketers are trying to do SEO in the way they they do performance marketing and at the same time the online advice that everyone is hearing is from enterprise SEO perspective not from what 90% of the market actually needs you know I think so this is experience I think I'm kind of going through right now so I think that what you just said comes from top down pressure so the executives they are putting pressure on the CMO or they're putting pressure on the marketing leaders who generally come from a performance marketing background I think I think I don't know if it's common but like I don't I think many SEO people make it to that leadership position where they oversee the whole of marketing. So now you've got someone above the SEO who is from that performance marketing background. They're getting pressure from their seauite and they look at numbers the same way. I think SEO or GEO AEO whatever it's one of those things where you can't make an apples to apples comparison with meta ads with with other with other paid ads. And I think that's the fundamental problem that people don't know how to measure this thing. So sometimes you make one blog post and it works and it does so well and over the past 2 years it might account for so much of organic revenue then the exec and the performance marketer as you said is going to say oh why don't we scale this and now do this this this and this but then the other 99 90 900 pieces of content they might not bring in bring in any revenue at all. So I think it's just I don't think people quite know how to measure this thing and it's nothing new. It's been going on for a while. But now we have a problem with AI operations and efficiency coming into the mix. Cuz the type of messages I'm getting, the type of stuff I'm hearing is um how can we be more efficient with AI? How can we do how can we get more output with AI? Cuz the board want to see more output. The board want to see as the board want to see that we can do or we can publish this number of things in this quarter. Last quarter we did this but because of this new AI tool or this new AI advancement we think we can do x percentage more and that just compounds the problem we're talking about even more. And maybe that's what's happening at some of these companies that are backed by have multi-billion dollar valuations. Maybe one of the reasons they're pumping out so much is because they're being told to use AI to be more efficient in their day-to-day job and that's just what they're doing. Like RAMP, for example, it's not just SEO that they're scaling in the blog. Like I follow some of the other people that work um work in the company. They're doing some other cool stuff with AI, right? They're doing so many AI experiments. Maybe what they're doing in SEO is just one of those AI experiments for operational efficiency. So I think um yeah I think it's a top down thing and I think yeah it's coming from the performance marketing directors but also their also their bosses. Absolutely. I I kind of know um I've studied ramps marketing quite a lot um for a project I was working on and there's actually a massive amount of um holes in their in their armor. Right. So they have a huge amount of traffic and circling back to what you said um it's from the top down. and it's from the board not understanding um the nuances here. I think that's critical. The the companies that I've seen the greatest success, right? So, I've worked with companies that have gone from 16 million to 250 million in 10 years. I've seen companies do that in two years. The companies that do it fastest, the CEO knows the top 10 or 20 keywords. And you can come in and say, I headline numbers, we brought in a 100 million growth. Not interested. these numbers don't meet what our our core ICP is searching for. And even if numbers are going down, as long as they know we're in the top three for those, the the the success is almost guaranteed as long as they can keep their eye on that ball. Um, I think that a lot of startups will see they'll grow from 100 clicks to a,000, the leads will grow to 10, they'll grow to 2,000, the leads will grow to 12, and they see this line, and they see the up and to the right, and they keep expecting both lines will go up and to the right. If the one line doesn't follow, pivot, right? And that's the problem with the boards. They think we need more. We need faster up and to the right. We'll bring everything up with it. And and if you're if you're a news agency, maybe that works. Um or maybe not as as we've seen. Um but I think that the board needs to take ownership of that as well. Yeah. And SEO is just what like I think a lot of people also forget like with SEO you can burn a domain and you can be in algorithm jail for 2 three years. The way I look at projects is you know SEO is not a 2-year thing. It's not a three-year thing. Most companies you work with they plan to be around for more than 10 years right? So like you should look at SEO on really big timelines like what am I doing today and what could the SEO program look like in 2 years? So maybe there's internal pressure and sometimes let's do the FFO chart. Sometimes you have to push the envelope a little bit to try and get better results, but you kind of know what risk you're taking. So you have to know like what am I doing today? Okay, is that going to get me slammed by the next algorithm update? And then is that going to take me another two updates to recover cuz now that's two years that I'm uh that I'm not going to achieve my organic objectives. As an SEO person, I think a lot of the times you can also jump companies. So that's the other thing. So like if you're part of an SEO team and they're doing this, okay, well 6 months later you have a big name on your resume and you can move to another job. So there's al there's so many things that go into an organic strategy that um it's hard to explain in a single in a in a single in a single podcast. But yeah, that's a that's a factor too. Like what time zone are you playing the SEO SEO game for? Like I remember listening to I went to a conference a couple of years ago. Um, it was Moscon in Seattle and the guy from Healthline, I forgot his name, but I follow him. He ran the SEO program at Healthline and he's like when he left Healthline, I believe they got hit with an with a manual action and he felt awful, but he's like now Healthline is doing fine. U but yeah, when he left he said he felt awful cuz one of the reasons they got hit was um because of some of the work he did. But yeah, look how long ago that was. I think it was in the 2000s and now we're in 2026. So for Healthline's case, SEO is a program that's been going on for for 20 years. So I think when I think it's just best practice that when we do SEO, we should kind of look into the future and just think about like what we're doing today, what's that going to do for the business in 2 years, 3 years. I think that's I think that's where the board needs to come in, right? It it's very easy for marketing to get hyperfocused on the wrong things. Like for example, I've seen marketing teams fixate on email open rates and forget about conversion rates or fixate on conversion rates and then forget about open rates and um or fixate on content and not looking at the open rate. And I think the board needs to be there to say come back, try to link what you're doing to outcomes, right? And and pull them out of the weeds a bit. Um and then they can only do that if they have some appreciation and put in the time also with the board like um David you mentioned top three keywords like if we go after top three keywords you will you will make money they need to know like these are the key words we need to rank for but now everyone wants to invent something new right then so for it could be whatever aspect of an industry but they might want to invent a new term and then they want to own the new term yeah but like it's not competitive and you take their competitors new terms. Dude, I'm working on a project right now. Um, invented a new a new term, but when you search and I was talking about this yesterday, like when you search the term on Google, nothing shows up. You've got a press release announcing. Yeah. Because and and no one's no one's created content for it. No one's searching for it. But in the event that someone does search for it, you don't even own the first page of Google and you don't own the AI answer because you have no content or you don't have anything to back up what you're trying to say. Um, when that happens, what's the point of making the new term? Because now you're inviting your competitors to use the same term and own the thing that you wanted to use in the first place. And that's why I always like using Levis's example. Like every time we talk about branding and SEO, I talk about Levis's on their website. Yes, they use the term 5'11, but when you go to the URL, it's like slim fit jeans or like whatever. Like they they use the numbers, but all the SEO elements, they are the keywords that someone is going to search for. Like, I ain't going to search for 5'11 jeans. I'll I'll search for something like slim fit jeans or I'll search for like regular black jeans. Look at their URLs. They're not going after the branding. And this is one of the world's biggest like jean companies. So, I think that's a big tip for everybody. Like branding is fine, but when it comes to SEO, on page elements, just do the use the thing people search for because they are your they are your customers. Branding comes after. I've always said um SEO is about building a bridge from the land of the known to the land of the new. So you have to build that bridge. People can't cross the river on their own. Yeah. And also like I think once you get get to a certain level where uh SEO is driving revenue for you but you need to be really careful uh in your strategy to protect that revenue. I think that's where many marketing teams make make mistake too where they see that SEO is generating uh 1 million a month and then they sort of like try to go into like let's scale that up while they should also be thinking is that let's protect it and protecting it takes a lot of work too where you are trying to monitor your competitors so closely saying that this specific keyword this specific position is bringing us 100k a month what other competitors are trying to do or what backlinks they are building from week to week monitoring that and keeping an eye on uh that and trying to build a prediction model where you can actually see that we this position if we lost this position to this particular competitor this is how much revenue we are going to lose. So after a certain level you have to spend at least 10% of your time uh be conservative and figure out if we lose this position to our competitors and what exactly they are doing what is the probability of us losing this position you need to model that all those things properly rather than just like trying to focus on let's go scale scale scale because in scaling from one uh million as your revenue per month to 2 million you might end up losing 1 million too. So, you just have to be really careful. You know what what's something something that's shocking to me doing the show and talking to so many SEOs, especially especially small business owners who are who are getting started with SEO, maybe they've even been doing SEO for a couple of years. So many people who are trying to do SEO don't even track their keywords. They don't track their keywords and they don't track their competitors for their for their keywords. And to me, that like now that you're talking about it, Goen, that's crazy. SEO is so much easier when you are tracking the movement of your keywords. Absolutely. And I think that's where multi-dommain names come in and and I've I've seen um Jackie Chow and Charles Flo talk about this on X saying, you know, it how can you not be doing this? I've worked on four projects since Christmas where our SEO strategy has been unpublishing pages, not publishing more. Um we're not chasing like can we put a thousand in, we're unpublishing. Um, there was one domain that I was helping that went from four and a half thousand clicks a month to nearly 30,000 uh just from unpublishing content that could have been moved to another domain, right? Where it wouldn't have been cannibalizing, where it wouldn't have been having a negative impact. If you can produce four blog posts a week, you can run two domains. You just have to you just have to buy into it yourself, right? And if you have two domains, you're not only uh getting the second clicks, you're also shoring up protection against Google and against your competition. David, just on that, so I just literally reported on this uh on Friday. So we launched a second domain for one website and I'm talking AI search numbers now. for the one website we have. I think it it shows up in AI search. The citations account for like 70% of the prompts we want to track for that one domain that we have. Launched a new domain. Um the domain is quite old, but we weren't posting SEO like traditional SEO content on it. Started doing that a few months ago, like one blog post a week type of thing. So nothing major, but it now shows up for 6% of the of our track to non-branded prompts. So that's the way I framed it to the board. for other SEOs. Like that's how I'm framing AI search. Like, okay, um, we're now showing up for X% of non-braded prompts via this secondary domain, but that's it. Now, from that 6%, I've got the proof of concept to go ask for the resources to take that six to 50. So, rather than publishing lots of content on our main domain, we now have a second domain to work with. Yeah, I agree with what you're saying. Um, yeah, second website. It's the best way and that's why people want to buy publishers and it's just going back to that thing where I think Samrush owns so many different sites. I even think profound are trying to buy sites. I read something about their I don't know one of their guys talking about how they're running experiments on other sites. I think Gagen I sent you the site a few days ago. It was a very basic it was a very basic site but um yeah, it seems like it's owned by them. Um, it's the best way to show up in, you know, in the future version of search, which is going to be way more AI AI focused. For for both of you, when you do when you do those uh those satellite domains, do you have them on the same Google search console as your main domain? I don't want to, but right now this one is. So, yeah, that's the other thing. So, never have I I never I don't believe in having the same domain in your Google search console. on search console one domain is what is the rule I I like to use but this is an enterprise company so it's it's more tough but any personal projects and side projects no I'm not bu so the most of the satellite domains I'm building are branded for the same company and so they're not try we're not trying to look like an independent site we want to look like the main site so the strategy really is um you know why invest in a brand that no one's heard Right? You you that's your outcome and it's a long windy road, right? You can't replicate Apple today without appreciating what Apple went through. I mean, Microsoft nearly buried them in law suits and then had to bail them out, right? So, it's a very long windy road. You can't just go from A to Zed. So, if you're going to start building um a subdomain or sorry, a satellite domain, um you you have to put effort into it, but you have to realize that that's a stepping stone to your brand. You don't you can't just bring people straight to your brand and expect them to go, oh, wow, you know, I love I love this product, right? It doesn't happen that way. Most people actually have to buy and deploy the product to find out that your support is amazing, for example. So, um this this idea that we can only run branded domains or having a non-branded domain somehow dilutes our brand. These are all um irrational fears, right? Um it just really makes sense to to to do that. So, yeah, I I run them in the same GSSE because I I want them to be seen as the same domain. I'm not trying to do anything separate. Yeah. And also like I'm working with a brand uh their founder has a big uh online presence on uh Instagram and Tik Tok and he has uh multiple accounts. So for example like GageNotra and his second account is not Gagenotra and his third account is personal GageNotra. So on uh Gagen Gora account he post about his business and whatever he's doing and on not gagen go he just do vlogging when he's traveling and on personal gagra he post about like family stuff what he's doing in uh with the family and everything. So so I think and even like I recently saw that Gary Vee he he posts from over 70 handles every day and almost 400 pieces of content is coming out from those handles. So it's just better better to have like as many handles or as many domains or as many YouTube channels as possible. And even HubSpot like even though they have been uh losing search rankings but recently they acquired like couple of YouTube channels which are already established. Everybody this has been a lot of fun. I always love doing this. We're going to do some more of these soon. There's constant news to discuss, constant updates. How is search changing? How do we get how do we get surfaced to the one and only Mr. David Quay, the one and only Mr. Harprit Singh, and the one and only Gagenra. This is episode 1 of the Edward Show. 1 days in a row doing this podcast. 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.