How Does ChatGPT Cite Brands? Does It Need Google?

We are going to be discussing geo versus SEO on today's episode of the show. And Zach, thank you for joining. We have we have Zachary Long and David Quaid on the podcast. And I think Zach, we'll start with this. So you said over email, you said SEO and geo are not the same game with new rules. They are different games entirely. SEO is about hacking your way to the first page. It required a person to do their own research, click through results, and decide for themselves. AI search flips that. AI is your best promoter and your best salesperson. It does the research and makes the recommendation for the customer, but it can't promote you without context, without trusting you, without actually believing you are the one to recommend. Gio is about giving AI the information it needs to do that. To be your influencer, to be your brand ambassador, to be your best salesperson you don't pay. You can have perfect SEO and still be invisible to Chat GPT because AI doesn't care about your back links or where you sit on page one. It cares whether your business actually exists on the internet in a way it can read, trust, and recommend. And then your publicist also said, "Zack is not a fan of the term geo. He thinks it's just SEO people slapping a new label on the same playbook. He'd rather talk about what's actually happening. AI search is like a person. You can't trick a person." Um, so yeah, I was I was wondering if we could start with just you breaking this down about how, you know, these are these aren't the same game with new rules. They're they're different games entirely and what all this means. Yeah, I mean the, you know, SEO historically has been something that you kind of like scientifically figure out, right? There's certain things you can do to kind of play the game a little bit and you can do some of that with AI, but the thing that most businesses need to kind of try to wrap their head around is AI is dynamic. So you're not competing for 10 spots on the front page of Google and trying to boot someone off. Like someone can be having a conversation with chat just about, you know, their kid needing to get, you know, their driver's license and they're looking for insurance and chat can just proactively suggest, oh, here's a list of things you got to do and here's businesses you should reach out to and here's where you can buy a good starter car. Here's where you can get good insurance. Here's where you can do all this stuff. and the person didn't even ask for it. But chat's proactively trying to help them plan. And the businesses that are showing up in these suggestions from chat and other AI tools and Google's a big one because most people a lot of people will say like, "Oh, my customer doesn't use chatbt or I don't use chatbt." But at the end of the day, everybody's using AI for search because you know Google's building it right into Google. So whether you like it or not, your customer is using it. And they're using it in a way that's not typical. Like they're not going to AI and just saying, "Best dentist near me." They're saying like, "Hey, I struggle with dental anxiety and I'm trying to find someone to help me with that. Who would you suggest?" And they're going to list off people that can help with that. But if you're a local dental office and you don't have content on the internet that talks about dental anxiety, Chad's not going to recommend you. So, it's and and it's really not just about having like the keywords baked into your website. It's about having volume of content that's indexed by AI that speaks on a specific topic. And that volume of content is what makes AI SEO different. Whereas, you know, you could kind of blog irregularly, like not very often, and still have good SEO. But with AI, if you have a ton of content out about a specific topic, it just increases your chances of showing up and getting found. Does that make sense? No. So, I'm um I was following along nicely and then I got lost when you said um that you that that AI just repeats this list. Where does it get that list from? It's not What do you mean by I It doesn't repeat. So you you said you're you're so if we look at like Chat GPT's own published usage stats, right? Like 60% or 70% of conversations are like, "Hey, you're my buddy. You're my friend. Give me advice." Right? I I have a lot of friends who uh put in their business ideas. I have a a really good friend who has um their LLM act as like their counterpoint like why am I doing this? Am I doing the right thing? You know me, right? Should I be doing something else? Right? So th those are conversations you're not going to have with Google. And if you do, it's going to be problematic, right? So, but but then when it comes to like making a recommendation, right, you said, well, this is different. I'm suffering from dental anxiety and this actually is a project I've worked on before. So, if I'm suffering from dental anxiety, where is ChatBD getting that list or that recommendation from? I mean, it's looking at a couple different things. It's the the thing that we've noticed about AI is that the list isn't static. So, it's not just going to recommend the same people every single time to every single person. Like, it's since you, like you just said, you're having a conversation with it. So, it's kind of getting to know your conversation. It knows things about you with your family or personal stuff where it might suggest a different list of offices to you than it would someone next door to you just based off what it knows about you. But the content that it indexes that we found is the most important content is business listings with tons of reviews on them and just like good content on the business listing content on the website that lists their services. So you're obviously very familiar with that. But then the third tier which we find is one of the most important tiers is like article written content that AI can use to just answer people's general questions. 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 compact keywords.com. Back to the podcast. So, it's not about creating the content just to show up in the list. It's about creating the content so AI uses you when it's answering someone's question about dental anxiety, whether they're trying to find a dentist or not. And if you can show up. Yeah, sorry. I just Yeah. Um, just so I don't lose you again. Right. So, you've got this content that's specially written so AI can understand you, right? Where where does the content live or exist in a blog on your website in a in a blog on your website. Y So earlier you said it wasn't about having keywords in your website like SEO. Now it's about having special content that AI understands. Correct. It's not just about AI understanding. It's about just having useful content on the internet that it can use to answer people's questions because because SEO content isn't useful. SEO content is usable to show up in search. I'm not saying SEO content is out of the picture. What I'm saying is chatbt doesn't just look for like structure of the content. It's looking for genuinely useful stuff. So, how does it do that? Well, it indexes the internet often. So chatbd has an index of the internet. Yeah. I mean they're saving they're saving content from the internet on servers and it's using that content now to engage. When are they doing that? Sorry. I actually don't know the exact schedule. Do you know? Um so here's what I do know. Um so I think a lot of people misunderstand what chatb and and LLM training is and does, right? and how an LLM works. And LLMs are so-called because they're large language models, right? So in other words, they're given hundreds and hundreds of thousands of permutations of sentences that people write and they try to predict the next word in that sentence. So for example, if I start typing how there could be a billion different permutations and then as I put in the next word, the number of permutations narrow and narrow and narrow and if my I get to a word like platinum MX, right? the number of permutations narrow substantially, right? So it learns these heruristics, right? A fancy word for patterns and those patterns are stored in a model that it can use to process natural language that we use cuz like language that humans use isn't isn't very very efficient and it tokenizes it and it can use mathematic models to help navigate what we put in and then content it sucks off the web. Now if you look at an LLM and the type of compute power, the type of compute power is Nvidia based right because they use polygons for doing um rendering of for computer games. So it's very efficient unlike Intel chips which are like sort of your jack of all trade processors that Google computers use it. Also most of these natural language models or large language models have to fit into like a 100 gig space, right? Otherwise, you've got way, way too much space to scale that over a million users. Um, and that has to have the same memory and storage capacity as well to have your conversation. Those are hundreds of gigabytes, maybe tens of gigabytes of space as well as local working space as well as the model space. The but the model doesn't actually have a copy of the worldwide web appended to it, right? That's not what training does. Um, that's a that's a flat file database and Google's flat file database is like 20 xabytes. So that would never fit inside a chat GBT or OpenAI data center is they just can't. It's just impossible, right? Um, and so what they do is their grounding queries or rag queries is they understand your question, right? like I'm trying to understand how to use my MX Platinum card and then you'll give it a feature token like how to spend with it, how to pay it off, how to manage it, how to apply for one, right? Those are the functions you can do with one and then it'll go to a search engine like Bing or Google, mostly Google through SER API, and it'll break down and take out all of the fluff of your prompt, right? So your prompt might be, hey, I'm a family of five people. We suffer from dental anxiety. We're looking for a dentist near us. We live in Austin, Texas, right? And then it'll go and it'll say, "Look, I'm looking for a dentist who can manage dental anxiety for a family of five people near Austin." And the search engine will return the list of just remember search engines don't open up their indexes and the most of the crawler bots that um LLM have don't crawl and index the whole worldwide web because they can't do that. Also, it would be prohibitively expensive for them to index the whole worldwide web and find information on businesses and then just chuck them out because it didn't like it, right? Which is which is a prerequisite of of what you were saying. So, they're very very heavily reliant on those searches and they get they get 10 to 30 results back up to 90 depending on how many queries are in the query fan out and they then synthesize that content. It's great. So, does that mean that real time content is more important than ever? Like fresh good content, or what are your thoughts? I don't think fresh content has ever been important. Fresh content doesn't make content better. It's something people think makes content better, but it doesn't necessarily make content better. If it's news and you're looking up, say, Ukraine, Russia, and you're on the news tab, it's going to be important for sure. But as you put in other keywords, they may not be relevant enough. So search engines are relevancy engines. They're not accuracy engines because there's no way to there's no truth in in in in our sort of subjective world that we live in. That's super technical. [laughter] I mean, so I think one of the things is like people go to chat GBT and and it it relies a lot on caching because it has more users than most others. And also I think their their deal with Microsoft ham hamstrung them quite a bit, right? And Google doesn't actually open up its index. It doesn't open up its its local maps database cuz you know that's proprietary information cost Google billions of dollars over two decades to assemble, right? I mean if you think about it, you go to Google or Bing, you have a Google business center. It has mapped the whole world using cars physically driving around. They have people with backpack geo devices that take 360° circles while they're walking around um park, right? Chat GPT doesn't have this. It it's missing, right? They don't have Chat GPT search control console, right? So, they don't have all of this information because they don't have all of the infrastructure to manage it and they don't even have it in the US, let alone globally. So um for for a search engine if if we go back to your model you were saying that these you know that LLMs are crawling the whole world worldwide web and then assessing all these businesses that that's a huge amount of infrastructure. Google just indexes content whereas these engines have to you burn tokens to read these pages. That would that would be trillions and trillions of tokens an hour to to try to do that. Yeah, I mean the the stock market would be like a 100 times the size because of the amount of like energy they're burning. Yeah. Um so what are your thoughts on Google transitioning to more of a chat interface? Um it it I think it all depend on their user base, right? their their user base is bifurcated where you have some users that don't like search anymore and they're living on Tik Tok and you have another user base that's using it to make business decisions and it's sort of or personal decisions and it's sort of like muscle memory at this point for 20 years and if they want to find a pizza parlor near them or they want to find a Thai food restaurant they've got Google Maps it's built into their car it's built into their phone it's the fastest thing they can type in restaurant near me faster than they can have a conversation with chatbt about it, right? I think there's a lot of instances where LLMs will have superior conversations like I'm going to Sa Paulo next week. What are the top 10 restaurants to eat in? You know, I don't like Italian food, so recommend something else. Um, I want to do some of the non-touristy things. So, everything you find on Trip Advisor, get rid of it. But in order to find what the top 10 things on Trip Advice are, the top 10 restaurants and top, it has to rag that out to a search engine. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely think that uh you know there's there's industries and niches that don't really need to think about getting indexed as much just because of their integration with Google. What would you think? What do you think about uh Google integrating with social now? Like syncing up your Instagram feed on your business listing. That's just that's just surface data. Right. So like um it doesn't interrogate it. Um, and it doesn't make sense to because like social media posts are all the time. They're they're they're consistent drift and there's no way to really sort of um score them if that makes sense. Yeah. Do you think that scoring is that important? I mean, how do you think scoring is how do you think it weighs with AI SEO? Like my thought with let's use the Google business listing as an example. So like syncing your Instagram feed. My thought with that is I know that like ChachiBT even Google like they really prioritize business listings that have activity on them. So if you have recent reviews they give you some weight to the credibility of like okay cool like they have this business has a thousand reviews this one has 500 but those thousand are stale for a year these this one has 500 has more recent reviews and I know that like ChachiBT Google like they prioritize the ones with recent activity. A lot of people don't realize they can actually post content to their Google business listing. So my thought with the Instagram sync is not just about, oh, they're syncing content and you know the user is going to see it, but it actually signals to AI that there's activity on the business listing. And my other thought behind that was with this content on Google, Google found a way now to get access to content that was behind a login wall. So, like when you're on Google and you're searching for stuff and the AI overview gives you an answer, they're using articles and YouTube videos to give the answer. Sometimes they're using Instagram posts. There's a lot of really good content on Instagram and Facebook that I think AI tools could use, but it's behind a login and Facebook probably wants to reserve that for meta AI whenever it becomes more popular with people's just daily life. So my thought with the Google syncing social post was that was their hack to get access to this information that they could actually now index for Google AI to be able to make that better and stronger. What are your thoughts about that? I think there's so there's a couple of challenges. Let's go back to like Google business maps, right? Mo most of Google local works on proximity, right? So there's no point recommending a the best anxiety dentist in, you know, Capertino if you're in Florida, right? So um proximity is is is the most important factor. Reviews is problematic, right? Because you could have more reviews because you're in business for 10 years and then suddenly you have a brand new restaurant that opens up that's truly innovative and groundbreaking. So the data in Instagram and Tik Tok and and other offline channels isn't important from a how does Google go in and discover it. But if you're very very popular or very good at promoting yourself in Instagram, that will carry over to Google search. So, if you've got a pizza place and people call it like the best mozzarella I've ever had, the best homemade smoked mozzarella, and people start doing those searches and your restaurant starts to surface more, you'll get more clickthrough rate and your restaurant will surface higher rather than Google being able to go in and trust an Instagram because it can't police accounts. And the way we can tell that Google can't police accounts is if you look at social media posts or Reddit posts, for example, that are often older than 5 years that still rank or posts that are are indexed that are um owned by accounts that have since been suspended, for example. So, Google can't really see if somebody is being spammed or buying followers or using advertising to augment a profile. So the simple bleed over is if whatever you're doing on Instagram actually reaches real people then the more searches you do in Google will actually go up and then that is a sort of like self-correcting system because Google has no way to interrogate and just because you have more posts on your Google profile doesn't actually mean you're a better business right so it's like these basic sort of like fundamentals where Google tries to view the world through like an objective lens versus a subjective lens so things like pressure is better or more posts is better or more Instagram likes is better. These are subjective preferences. You might like that. You might read a 100 fivestar ratings as like that's really good. I might look at it and go like this sounds like sheep mentality, right? This is just her thinking, right? Um that's the last thing I want, right? Or you might see that some people are giving it a four-star rating and you're like, "Wow, this person's really thought about it. I I think like five star ratings are astroturfed." And so those are how like individuals work. And so Google surfaces that data, but I don't think it interrogates it and includes it in its uh sort of like um ranking and waiting methodologies. I think you think a lot more than the average person does. I think the average person does not think about a four-star review like you do. That's that's I I feel like the general public is more basic. What do you think? I I really think it depends on the person and what they're trying to review, right? And so, um, I I think you'd be surprised. Uh, a lot of these decisions aren't actually made consciously. I'm just surfacing them. Um, a lot of people will look at things, and we can see that in like dating, for example, like, um, women talk about like the factor, but they can't put their finger on it. It's something that happens in split seconds in their brain, you know, neurons firing, um, and they just go, "Something about this, I don't trust it." They there's absolutely zero conscious thought going into it. Um and um you know those those things are very hard to to measure and observe but that's just sort of like as SEOs th that's how we understand how search engines work and I think if you look at how uh for example you know Edward and I have actually done a couple of shows where we've um invented words and published them on blogs and the following day and we I took one example I showed Edward on on X and he's like wow we got to we have to make a podcast about this tomorrow And we put it made up a sentence and um Perplexity wrote a whole page about it from one sentence. Um and I think it just sort of like discredits that view that um AI is going across the web and assessing every single company because that's not really what AI and what search engines do, right? We look at businesses and marketing and brands as marketers, but that's not the function of an AI chat engine, right? Because an AI chat engine might be there to talk [snorts] about your psychological needs or your shopping needs or your travel needs or your family dynamics or your health needs or whatever. There's a lot of things that might be about sports or about charity or about investing, right? They're not necessarily coming at it from a brand point of view. Um, but if if you wanted to talk more about how you think people um need to create content for AI, maybe we can go back to that cuz I I think you were saying that there's you were saying that in SEO you just publish a bunch of content and then in AI you have to be more deterministic about it. Is that what you were saying? Yeah. I mean, so from what we understand about it is with AI, it's so our our our take on it is a little less technical than yours. Like you're taking a really technical take on it. You obviously have a lot of SEO experience. I'm not discrediting Google SEO at all. Like I think it's very valuable. I think it's something that's important for every business to do. Our take with AI is is more about giving it the resources it needs to be able to sell you better. So like that's from our perspective like and when we understand AI even like your example of chat you know using tokens to search the internet in the moment like I mean it does do that and that's that's a strong use case for people that ask it to do research for them or to do planning for them. So I think there's for when we look at SEO it's not just about someone in that immediate moment is saying like I need this for my problem I have right now. They're building a relationship with AI where AI is answering questions and helping them through things in their life and all these different verticals and you know Chad Google like they can't they can't just formulate an answer on their own. They have to use context like you were saying earlier context from other things to kind of piece it together and give the answer. So when you're a local business or you're an expert style business, if you're giving it information about you, even if it's not indexing it every week and saving it to a server, but if it ever does a real-time search, which it can do and it does that often, if you give it the information about you that makes you different or unique or speaks to a specific topic that does position you as an expert, it increases what's a real time search. Sorry. What What's a real time? So you you introduced a new concept there. So I just think the audience might not understand that. I don't understand it. Um, what's a real-time search? So, when you're talking with chat and you ask it to you put it in agent mode and you ask it to do research for you, it's actually searching the internet in real time, is it not? Like the whole internet, like the worldwide web. Um, I'm I'm just struggling to see how it would do that. Like how how would it So like you mean like it would send a bot to go from website to website? I mean I haven't watched it do it. Well, I mean when you're ask So is it so is so is Chachi BT or you know uh Grock or whatever. Are they lying when they say like okay cool we're going to search and you see the agents kind of pop up and start searching stuff like are they faking that? No, no, no. They're searching it as in in other words, they're going to Google and they're doing a search and Google does a search that So, so that's how search engines work, right? They So, is that not real time? Because you're asking how it does it real time. So, the So, I I think the reason I was asking real time is because it sounded like you were saying they go out into the entire web and then find like these servers, find information, and bring it back. And that would be impossible because there's no search index, right? Or there's no telephone directory. What they're actually doing is they're running a query fan out. And what they do is they take your prompt with like all of your background information like I'm a family with brown hair and you know my son likes soccer and my daughter likes ice hockey and my other son wants to be a WWE wrestler, right? Or a fireman or whatever and I need a dentist. It doesn't need all that information. So it chops it out, right? And it just goes like cuz at the end of the day if you need a dentist, you need a dentist. your primary requisite is that you have teeth and one of them has a problem, right? So, it doesn't need like all that background information. So, what it'll do is it'll just break down what it thinks are like the key elements and then break it into a query fan out and then go to a search engine and then the search engine will return 10 results for each of those queries. So, either 10, 30, 90, 60, whatever. And then they synthesize the body document of that. And so that document could have been indexed by Google yesterday, an hour ago, three months ago, who knows? But the LLM has no choice but to accept that content because there's no way it can have an index of the entire worldwide web. It probably can't have a cache more than 10,000 pages to 100,000 pages, which is not a lot. If if you look at for example urgent care um as an index in Google when I started using it as an example for how big an index and how much content is in an index it was 410 million pages last week it was 520 million pages so 520 million pages about urgent care that's one for every person in the country and their dog and kitten so it's a lot of content right so there's no way an LLM can process can crawl all of those documents and then go, "Oh, this is the best or this is the most freshest or this is about you." Right? Because half of them or even 99% of them are even going to be geographically interested. However, the documents and there the way they're stored in web servers, they're not stored with geographical information. That's done in either Google or Bing's databases. That's why search engines like Brave Search, Duck. Go, Yahoo all ear off that data. Yep. So, it's still important to have content on the internet that's searchable though, right? Because these LLMs are you essentially using Google to search for stuff. They're all using Google to search. Yeah. And basically, they're also using Google's judgment. So, they don't have a way of controlling Google's index, right? So, they can't say, "Well, here's I want you to get me the top 10 best fashions by uh Valentino. Um, but I want you to use these search criteria." they have to use Google search criteria. So if Google stores them, you know, one to nine using its own page rank index, then that's how you're going to get them back. So if someone's asking a specific question about best X in my area, you're saying that Google SEO is more important than ever because AI is using those first 10 slots on the page to recommend the business. Absolutely. So I I often say if you want to make it a formula if you say AI SEO or GEO or AEO minus SEO equals zero, right? As in you take it out, there's nothing left. So um because these LLMs just can't have um search databases, right? They they don't have the money to build the power. One, they don't have the money to build the training systems they have. two, they don't have the money to build the user space that they need as as their as the size of their user base grows, but also the size of their contracts grow. For example, if they're utilizing their LLM for a particular model like the US Department of Defense or NASA or somebody wants to come in and do some training on it like CERN. The second thing mistake I think people make is that LLMs go off and they like trust certain spaces like Reddit or G2 or Capter. Um, Reddit has sued everybody and they did this last year that tries to access their database. They they've only ever licensed it to Gemini. So if you're doing a search in ChatgBT or Perplexity and it's returning YouTube or Instagram or Reddit content, it's because Google is returning that content. Great. So, do you think there's um opportunity though for businesses that aren't ranking in the top 10 to produce content that gets them to show up to AI just by answering basic questions? So, you know, this local business may not be, you know, the top dental office for anxiety, but if someone's not asking for that and they're just saying like, "Hey, I'm looking for some things I can do to help my kid through this or help my spouse through this." If a dental practice in an area has articles on the internet that Google can find that says, "Here's five things you can do to help your spouse with dental anxiety or here's three things you can do with your kid before you go to the dental office." Do you think that that content now is more important not just for because typically for Google SEO it may not be as important because you know it's there's all these other other variables but now with AI in the mix it's actually doing critical thinking and searching for content. Could this open the door now for businesses that aren't SEO optimized for Google to now get new customers just because they've got this good content on the internet? These questions are super complicated because you introduce critical thinking and I don't think LLMs are capable of critical thinking. I think LLMs are um capable of recursive thinking or recursive processing but um I I think let's let's let's step back to you know you said at the start go and SEO and and apologies if if you'd like me to use a different word other than go is it do you prefer AI SEO or AEO? I prefer AIO. I honestly don't care. I I think I don't have a hate for that term. I just I think that there's room for this to be simplified, you know. I think like there's there are a lot of things you can do to complicate the process, you know, and a lot of this is really technical. I don't think the average business owner is going to understand anything we're talking about right now or care to. But I think like if they can find a way to connect the dots with there is an opportunity now for my business to get found that I may not have had because I can't get on the top 10 list on Google right now. Just there's these competitors that are crushing it there on Google. How what can I do to just get found by AI? And from what I I know that AI can't critically think. I think that's kind of an overanalysis of that. I think at the end of the day, it's just get content on the internet that can help you show up. And if you're not, then you're just not going to show up. You know, like if you actually addresses any topics on anything, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. So, let's just So, I just want to pull you back because you're jumping into gaps here. Just so if if if you're publishing content and you can't compete in Google, then how is the AI going to find you? It's not about not competing in Google. It's about people are interacting with ChachiBT differently. So if I if if you go to Google and you say, you know, what are five things I can do to help my kid with I'm going to keep going to dental anxiety because it's just top of mind. Like what can I do to help them with that? we can stay there and you look at the Google AI overview and you look at the sources on those just on Google, you know, I don't know cuz I'm not, you know, I don't work with these specific businesses, but some of these articles that are being cited in the Google AI overview are from like super small mom and pop dental practices in a really small town, you know, but they're showing up at the top of Google now in the AI overview and then they never would have if they didn't have that piece of content on their website. Well, obviously if you if you if you don't write the content, you can't show up in an index for it, right? Yep. That's what I'm saying. So they so they must have written the content first, right? Mhm. Exactly. So and then the content must have been Googled and put into an index, right? Yeah. So like my my perspective is there's tiers to being findable. There's tier number one like what you're talking about where you're already Google SEOed and AI is going to recommend you because of that. And it's very important to still think about that. I don't think that that's not important. I think there's another bucket of findability for people that didn't spend the last, you know, 5 years working on their Google SEO and haven't invested the time and energy to do that, but now they can actually get recommended by AI tools. We have a lot of good examples of that. We've got, you know, a lot. Okay. So, great. So, let's take that as an example, right? Let's just like box that off, right? How do you So, if you can't get into Google and you don't do SEO, how do you then get recommended by AI? I'm not I think you're I think you're feeling like I'm attacking SEO. I'm not attacking SEO. No, no, no. By the way, absolutely not. I I don't think I think SEO So, I think Zach, SEO can be attacked all day, all day night. I think that SEOs attack each other all day, all night. So yeah, um, sorry from my point of view, please don't please don't think you're going to offend me or hurt my feelings about it. I'm I'm an SEO. I do what I do. I like learning and I like talking to people and sharing new ideas. I do help a lot of small businesses. I do most of my work in like tech and venture capital tech companies, right? So in no way is any of this close to the bone. You can you can talk freely. You can put SEO down. Honestly, not going to hurt anyone. I' I've had people do far worse. Trust me. Yeah. I think I just think there's opport I think that there's an opened opportunity right now for people. I think that, you know, Google SEO is competitive because there's limited spots, right? And it's just kind of the way it is with it is it's an unfair pyramid, right? Yeah. You have 500 million articles and only the top five articles are going to get clicks. Yeah. But now, you know, you look at you look at you go to the Google AI overview and just ask it a question. Don't say like best whatever in my area, but ask it a question like what do I do for my, you know, um, kids tooth ache. Okay. And it's going to give you what are the top 10 non-invasive tooth care remedies. Yeah. And it'll give you an answer like AI would. Okay. But when you click on the link, where does AI get the answer from? I think is what people I think. So I'm ask think of playing devil's advocate for the user. I'm watching this video, right? I'm a dentist. Hopefully that would be great. Um, and I'm like, "Wow, this is this is interesting. I I really suck at like Google now. I want to get in front of chat EPT. So what is it I'm doing to get noticed and to get sponsored to get recommended or cited? Exactly. So kind of dovtailing off of that to now if you're not SEOed for the top 10 on Google. Now if you want to show up in AI from what we're seeing, you can go to Google right now and you can search, you know, five natural remedies for helping with a toothache. Okay? And it's going to give you an answer. But when you click on the link where it's cited, where it got the answer from, it's going to kind of pop out a little list of YouTube videos, like you said, Reddit boards and articles. And if you click on some of those articles, you'll notice some big players. Okay. Obviously, they've been indexed. They've got good SEO. But often times there are random people that you know don't have good SEO that are now showing up in that AI answer at the top of Google. And it's because they have a piece of written content on the internet that for whatever reason was indexed by Google. It could have just accidentally had awesome SEO, you know. But doesn't all the content Google have is written? I think it I mean, yeah, I mean that's the that's the point of of, you know, blogs kind of being a thing now again because I think they're just Right. But even if you don't have a blog, even if you have a website, it's written, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's really important to have your website indexed for SEO 100%. That's super important. But I'm saying I'm I'm asking for AI. Let's forget Google here, right? How how so you just said you go to you go to Gemini, right? So if you go to Google, you're effectively also going to Gemini, right? You get your Google results, you get your Gemini results. If you go to Chat GPT, you just get your Chat Chat GPT results. If you go to Perplexity, you get your Perplexity results. They're all similar, right? They're the answers differ every time, right? But they're all similar. So, I'm saying if I'm not this mega health institute, I'm just like, you know, one dentist just fresh out of college, right? Mhm. How am I getting my content into that AI overview? That's what I think everyone wants to know. And I think that's where what what you were going to answer. Absolutely. Yeah. So from our perspective, from what we see, you got to write expert style content on those topics to have it on the internet, whether it's in written format or even creating a video so that AI can read the transcript and index that video as well. Like having this content, how does it know I'm an expert though? Well, if you're a dentist, you're an expert. So, but how do I know it's a dentist? Well, it doesn't what whatever industry you're in. If you're trying to sell a product or service, you're an expert. stay with dentists, right? Let's stay with dentists, right? Let's say I'm a dentist, but I I hate writing, right? I got through dentist school writing like stuff I learned in textbooks, but I my own website. I'm not, you know, so I get my neighbor to write my content. How does it know that I'm an expert? Like, how does it know if one dentist wrote it or one dentist got a company to write it? What's the How does it know? You know, I It's gonna guess. It's gonna just have to guess. Okay. [laughter] I mean, there's obvious t there's obvious things you can do for SEO like, you know, h having it well written with good structure like there's technical pieces to it. It's not just about blurbing out your expertise and getting it on the internet. I do believe that you've got to have a structure that AI can in like read and use. You've got to have, you know, code on the back end that helps it read it and understand it. Like those those are very important things. It's not just about going to chatbt and having it write an article and pasting it on your website, you know. So, you can't do that. Are you saying you can't do that? I mean, you can. I just, you know, I'm sure there's I'm sure you have a lot of ideas around that. I'd love to hear them. But, uh, I I don't think that AI can make those decisions yet. I'm sure it's more technical, but at the end of the day, it's not just about It's not just about that science behind it, okay? Like it's if you're a business owner, whether you want to spend money on it or not, you've got to get written content on the internet to be findable. And I I agree 100%. Yeah. So, that's our message. That's our mission. Our message is that I I you know, you've got a lot of experience with SEO and you are far far more advanced in terms of like the website stuff, which is awesome. But I think that there's people just I'm actually terrible at websites. I I suck at websites. I don't touch my own website. I'm actually color blind. I' I've worked in marketing for 26 years and I'm color blind. Yeah. I used to be a software engineer. but just coming back to that structure. So because I I think we see a lot about AI structure content on X and LinkedIn. I don't know if you use LinkedIn a lot. I I like I spend too much time on LinkedIn admittedly. Uh mainly because of Edward. Um but um what what what do you think is the is the structure? How what what have you seen in in your experiences work or how do you think structure helps or dude I think that there's a lot of different ways to look at it from our perspective. The structure is less about you know scientific stuff and more just about did it have genuine good stuff in it. Like if it sounded like AI and has a bunch of m dashes is probably not good. If it actually is something that like a human could read and find value in, then it's better than nothing, you know? So, our perspective when we when we're looking at content, we're looking at it from is it easy to digest? Does it is it actually genuinely useful and helpful? And is it something that actually had genuine purpose behind it? That's how we look at it. So, like, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of SEO guys that are hacking their way through it and finding a lot of success with like super structured articles in like a scientific way that give mediocre value, but they're structured so perfectly that AI loves it. I get that. But from our perspective, there's kind of a hybrid between the two where you've got content that AI can understand because it's got good headlines, it's got bullet points, it's got stuff that it can kind of like scan and use, but also like a human could look at it and read it and be like that was genuinely useful and helpful for me. So we look at this might help. Sorry, if this helps you um if this helps you with your thinking in in going forward is um Google is actually content agnostic. It actually doesn't care about structure. So you can actually put one word in a document or 100 words. This idea that Google cares about a particular structure is bunk. Perfect. [laughter] Yeah. So, so what what I'm saying is like if if if you're building a business and you want to describe, you know, your how you built your um dental practice and your dental clinic, you can just use normal words. You there's no preferred structure. You can use 20 words, 50 words, five, it doesn't really matter. And then when AI reads it, it turns it into tokens. Um so for example, a credit card is one token, an AMX credit card is another token. And then it builds a mathematical model of all your content. I don't know if you've ever gone to like an LLM and like you know when you start typing and then you like correct your typos and then you just give up correcting your typos cuz it just automatically fixes it. It's the same thing, right? There's like like if we say like go pick up the box. We have all these words. So pickup is the action, box is the asset or the thing that we wanted to do. And AI just dispenses with all those words and it just builds these models, right? So, you can go to like an AI and you can say, "Look, I don't understand this PDF." I don't know if you do that. I I'm not super technical. Um, I'll like someone will go like, "Oh, here's a Google patent." I'm like, "Oh, great. Here's 50 pages in a PDF written by somebody who's never been to a wine mixer, right?" And I'm like, "I don't want to read this." Right? I just drop it in and I go like, "Give me 10 bullet points." Right? And you know the way like it just takes that whole document with like there's like more ifs, ands, this, buts in the document than there's actually like context, right? And it just it could take the whole thing and turn it into five block bullet points. Or you can go and you can say look I have a dental practice that we you know we do cavities we do invisalign we do um intervention free this we don't use x-rays or we do use x-rays or we use whatever you know we're we're like we also give you like holistic teeth care programs or whatever it can actually turn that into like 50 documents for you right it just like just goes and extrap you just explode it like a model and then just give it back as Right. It's I I think that's the most powerful thing about an LLM. Absolutely. Yeah. I think too I mean I like to try to predict the future. It's kind of fun to What are your predictions for the future? Um I I believe that over the next three to five years, you know, AI, whether it's Chat GBT or, you know, Google's probably going to win, you know, like if anyone's going to like win, um I believe that AI is going to be so integrated and I don't know how they're going to store all of this information, but I think it's going to know so much about our past searches in the actual tool that we're using or it's going to be able to somehow find them and and index them. I think that over time as people are using chat or Google to answer their questions about basic stuff, it's going to save the content that it's finding and it's going to um start to recommend businesses even a year later after, you know, that person's been talking about whatever they were struggling with because maybe they weren't in that season of life to buy that service right now or that product and a year later. What if that business closes down though? I mean, it's probably going to I don't I don't know. Maybe it'll search in real time and to find it. Who knows? Like maybe it'll I see it very much like the way the the cloud evolved, right? We had like the NTFS file systems from Microsoft and we had like Unix file systems from the Linux and Unix world and like NTFS was designed I think in 1991. Unix file system the last development was like 1994 and all the cloud did is virtualize it right so you have one server but it just created an abstract layer so I don't think there's really a lot of sense for LLMs to go back and figure out the reverse engineering right it's like car companies they don't go and like go like okay well Tesla's electric and Ford is petrol let's build a coffee powered car right this doesn't make sense right it's a lot of re-engineering for for zero return just technical debt. Uh whereas if you're an AI and you want to integrate in like a pair of glasses or you want to integrate into a kiosk, that's where like future sort of like modes are built, right? Defenses or unique value proposition or unique selling points. So like it makes sense like if you've already got like this Google Microsoft Yandex B layer, why go and reverse engineer it? It's good at what it does, right? Like Google has already figured out how to keep the top 1% of the web refreshed within a minute or with within half a second, right? There's no if if you catch up with that and you build a thousand data centers around the world and then you build points of presence in every ISP, which means you have to build a relationship with every ISP, which means they have to put hardware in their physical points of presence on the internet. you're you're investing as much as your company cost to get you to the point where you're already at, right? It's like it doesn't seem it seemed like if I was an investor, I'd pull out of that, right? Like I wouldn't give Anthropic like $100 million to build what Google already has, right? Yeah, I hear you on that. I don't know, man. It's a crazy world. Zach, so so you have a platform that helps businesses optimize specifically for AI recommendations. Y yeah, our focus is on um helping them create the content that they can that AI can use to answer their basic questions. So, it's less about like David, what you do is likely just help them show up on the top of Google, which is like awesome and a insane talent and skill and I admire you for that. I think you've got a lot of brains behind that, which is super cool. Our tool helps them just take that step to generate the content that can increase their chances for AI to use them in an answer to someone when they're not just saying best whatever near me but they're talking about life and AI is helping them with a situation in life whether it's for a product or a service and that person may not even be looking to buy something in this moment but chat should be these tools like follow up and say would you like me to research this for you would you like me to find is sing for you. And our tool helps them generate this content essentially on autopilot in the form of articles and also we generate their social media content uh their images and their written content that basically takes these articles and puts them into a social media post format so that they can um automate that piece of the business as well and again have the content out there that just increases their chances of showing up and then also helps AI whenever someone is asking a question about their business specifically that if they are going to in that moment go and search that business, whether it's on their website, their blog, or whatever, there's content on there that AI can use to now help sell their business and talk about it to that person and really help that person understand if it's right for them. And I know AI doesn't, you know, think critically, but I do believe that it can piece dots together very smart. And if you have the content on the internet that helps them do that, then it can piece the dots together. The analogy that I like to use is if you hire a salesperson to, you know, sell your service or your product and you don't give them any resources, they're going to suck and they're not going to be able to do it because they're not going to know what they don't know. But if you hire them and you give them all the resources they need, even if they just pick and choose from those resources, they're going to be a much better salesperson for your business. So, we're helping businesses create that content so that they can be used in that way by AI. What what does your tool add to the content or how does it build the content so AI can use it more efficiently or to make recommendations? It's ours is uh I'm sorry about that. Ours is focused specifically on um like expert content that answers general super basic questions like very basic stuff. Stuff that like you know if you were going to blog yourself and you would go to chat and have it write an article for you or you just wrote an article yourself. You're going to write one article on a topic, get it to your blog, and you're going to call it done. Um, what we like to do is we like to basically create 10, 15, 20 pieces of content around the same topic with different angles that um, AI can now use to actually like answer that person's question in that season of life. So it could so a good example could be if you're talking about toothaches talk about toothaches for different ages, different genders and have those in specific articles that now and I know you might have some theories on this but our theory is if you have it on the internet and a can use it then it makes you more findable. It makes it easier for it to sell you and actually suggest you to someone who does have a 2-year-old or a three-year-old that's you know a specific season of life, you know. So we we have it right around topics like that. We cluster topics together and then we also have it write. We have layers of audits that it goes through where it writes the content and then it audits it for just genuine usefulness and it goes through two or three rounds of layers before the official articles written and added to a content calendar in our platform that they can now schedule out to um our blog site which we built for them. They they have a full micro site that we build through our platform for them that has their articles, services, all these different things. Um, or we've got a WordPress integration where they can send it directly to WordPress as well. So, h how is that different from scaled content? Oh, shoot. I don't hear you. So, I'm saying how is that different from scaled content? Scaled content as in what do you mean? So, scaled content is where you um go to an LLM or a machine, right? And you have it say, look, here's 20 topics. So, SEO is very similar, by the way. It's SEO isn't about technical changes to make a website appear in Google. It's about understanding use cases, creating content for those use cases, and then beating out the competition. Your content still has to be findable, right? And you can't pretend that because you've written 20 versions, it's now more findable, right? So, but scaled content is much more of an urgent worry because I could take a competitor's website and take all 10,000 of their blog posts and say to LM, "Recreate these 10,000 blog posts." And Google really really doesn't like it. It's actually one of their oldest penalties. It actually predates AI content uh by like two decades. So if if I go to an LLM and I say, "Look, I want to write 20 pages because I want to become more findable," that actually will attract what's called a scaled content abuse penalty. I got you. And then Google will block you from its search index for life. Yeah. Well, thankfully, we don't have 30 articles that are around the same topic. There there it's not about the same topic. It it doesn't have to be about the same topic. What I'm saying is like let's say let's say I have a marketplace and I'm selling everything. I'm selling dresses. I'm selling BMW car lights. I'm selling coffee machines. Um and I want to write a blog post about every article and I get a machine to write a 100 different blog posts and they go through four different levels of rereadership and they go through a quality control bot and then they go through like a expert bot or whatever and I publish those to my blog. That's that is scaled content. Can I send you some examples of of what we're doing so you can tell me if it's scaled content? If if it's being produced by a machine and published to a CMS, it's scaled content. The qu this isn't a question of quality, right? It's a question of production and means to production and means to publishing. Interesting. So all AI written content is not good. No, that's So it's not about AI content. It's just that AI engines are easy to do this with. Right? So even if you use a template, even if you use um a word jumbling system which we used to use as we called it machine generated content, right? LLMs obviously produce this very quickly and it looks sophisticated. It doesn't matter if it's readable or good or if it was taken and derived from Shakespeare's content or several novels. It's made by a machine, right? So it's machine scaled content, right? So if you massroduce something and the the when I say mass, right, we're talking like tens to hundreds, not thousands, and you've got a blog and your users got a blog and they write 100 this week and 100 next week and 100 next week. That's scaled content. And so we see a lot of developers who are like to hell with SEO. Um, I can grab Claude and then I can get Claude to write the content. Then I can get Claude to give that to Chatbt and get it to check it for our template style and overview that's that scale content and it takes a while for Google to penalize that, right? Or worse, you can have your competitors um report it, right? Google has like an open spam report and they can go like, "Hey, I think this is um this content is machine scaled. I want to report it." And if it matches Google's heristics, it just falls out of their database. Interesting. So if you're doing one article every other day, is that machine scaled? I don't know what. So none of us know the heristics, right? So while while we know how Google works at a social level or topical level and we know how to like functionally build content like Google has a lot of guides like it has an SEO starter guide, it has an SEO dev guide and then it has an SEO penalty guide, right? which talks you through all the things it doesn't like people doing. There's about like 19 or 20 things in there. And scale content is currently their main focus. So the last three updates since November, they're probably tweaking and expanding how they go after scale content. That's great. I'm going to dive into that. I hate to end this on this note, but I do have a call I got to jump on here right now. But so uh yeah, I'm just going to thank you both. Zach, where should everybody find you? Yeah, you can find us at modernhumans.ai. Thank you so much, Zach and David. Yeah, David, as always, thank you so much. This is episode 1,71 of The Edward Show. 171 days in a row doing this podcast. Let's go. It's great. 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.