The Future of SEO: Lily Ray on Google Updates, AI Search & GEO Spam

Lily Ray, you are one of the most well-known figures in search engine optimization. So, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. I want to start with a question that a lot of people have been thinking about and talking about is uh is Google core updates and if you have seen any patterns across the last couple of updates. Yeah, I mean, um, there's often like similar patterns with each core update, I would say. Um, I've been pretty focused on core updates probably almost like 10 years now. Um, so I've analyzed almost all of them. You know, I think there's certain ones where Google's trying to do something kind of specific. Like I would say during COVID, I think there was a lot of interesting movement with like prioritizing more really high authority sites like government sites, things like that. But generally speaking, I would say Google's trying to, you know, improve the relevancy of the results, the quality of the results, and reducing spam and overly optimized sites, like sites that are basically doing too much SEO. I would say that's been the trend for a really long time. You talk about what too much SEO means. I think that's something that a lot of people don't really understand. Yeah. Right. It's kind of a it's a weird counterintuitive thing when you work in the SEO industry, right? But I think that's why I talk about it so much because I think understanding how to do SEO properly and like for the long term is a lot about knowing what not to do as much as what you should be doing. Um, you know, Google has all kinds of policies around basically doing things that are for search and not for humans. Um, so I think a lot of the times the SEO industry will identify and now I guess GEO industry will identify some type of tactic that works really really well and it definitely tricks Google's algorithms, right? And then it becomes really popularized and a lot of people talk about it, a lot of people do it, a lot of people share it at conferences or on YouTube or whatever it is. And then you get thousands and millions of people doing the same thing. And so it's very easy for them to kind of reverse engineer that and say we don't really want this type of like overly optimized SEO content in the search results, which I think we saw with like the helpful content update. So you know, some examples that come to mind are it's almost always scaling content in some way. you know, you find some type of trick that works and then you create tens of thousands of pages or whatever that do the same thing. It's almost always that something like that. Yeah. Actually, I have a question about programmatic SEO and I I want to know is uh when is programmatic SEO not spam or is it always just like uh you know it's it's kind of risky? It's always very risky, I would say. You know, and I think people love to debate about this because it's true that like there's ways to do it thoughtfully. Um, and there there's ways to do it where you're really bringing in a lot of original data and insights and information that Google didn't have before, but I really do think that they see it as like when you're trying to do something that's manipulative for SEO purposes and you're creating a lot of content that like isn't really adding a lot of original value. So, for example, there's a lot of sites that create like uh area codes, like different area codes around the United States, right? And then they're like trying to bring in all this different content dynamically and really just show a lot of ads, but like in reality, Google doesn't need 50,000 pages about area codes, especially now with AI overviews, right? So, it's like I think it's getting harder and harder to identify what those opportunities are, but I think there's plenty of examples of companies that have done it thoughtfully with original data and original information that usually can be okay. But more often than not, honestly, like over time, I see Google demoting a lot of these sites, even really big brands. Yeah. Yeah. The key words there that like a lot of people don't understand, and it's across all industries, but it's thoughtful. like it's it's if you actually try to make thoughtful content, you're going so much further than what a lot of other people are doing and you're less likely to make something that's that would be deemed spammy. Also, unique content when it comes to programmatic SEO. That's like that's another thing that I see all the time is that a lot of people are just doing programmatic SEO showing things that are already out there and it's it's like you said like Google doesn't need more of it. like it's it's already out there. Um yeah, I want to talk about I want to I also I want to go into into Gio because he posts a lot about uh about like agencies trying to get their brands cited more in large language models and then accidentally getting the sites nuked in Google and in LLMs. And so I think uh I mean it's a it's a fun question for me to ask but definitely not for people to hear. Well, maybe for some people to hear. What are some SEO disasters that you are seeing by people trying to do generative engine optimization, trying to get cited more in LMS? Yeah, and I think I think we're still really in the early days of this. Um, so I think even like there's a lot of people trying a lot of things where I feel like they're it's working and it's not necessarily the case that like Google or Bang or anybody's cracked down on it yet. So, I do think we're in a bit of like uh the early days of like spammy kind of manipulative tactics actually working pretty well. We've seen this before, right? We've been in all kinds of eras of SEO where people find some type of loophole and it works extremely well. Like, think about the years before the Penguin update or the years before the helpful content update. There were all kinds of things that worked really, really well until they didn't, right? So, I think we're in that kind of phase right now. And I do think we're in the early days of Google almost like collecting enough data of what people are doing because you know they need to they need to get it right right when they launch some type of counter measure um which is something that we see with like the March 24 core update when they reduced what they say unhelp they call it unhelpful content by 45%. You know that was massive but it took them a long time to create that. So anyway, some of the things I think people are doing. Um, I think right now there's a lot of people entering the space without SEO experience. You know, there's a lot of people that are really excited about AI and GEO and everything that are looking for an opportunity to get in there and they just don't really understand the cyclical nature of SEO. And so I think mostly it's, you know, using AI to generate lots of content. I would say that's again like the main way that people are putting themselves into kind of risky situations. Um, but there's a lot of like kind of manipulative stuff. I mean, I know you you talked about like my listical article, you know, putting a 300 articles on your website that call you the best company in all the different categories that you care about. Yes, it works for AI search for a while. Um, it works on Google for a while, but they're clearly identifying it and starting to kind of like nullify it. So, I think again like we're in this these early days um where a lot of things work for GEO, but I really wouldn't be surprised if I've been calling it like Google dropping like an atomic bomb on all these search results in the next few months. We'll see. You know, actually, I heard a crazy rumor uh that self-promotionalistic. So, you wrote this mega awesome article on self-promotional listicals and how they are how people are were using them for geo. Like it was Glenn Alop of Hrefs of previously detailed than Hrefs. He put out this article like look at all these companies that are using self-promotional listicles to game LLMs. And then you put out it was several weeks later you put out this article. Well, doesn't really look like it's working that well anymore and it actually could be hurting. And uh I actually just heard a rumor that self-promotional listicals are now actually hurting brands visibility in LLMs. So, if you you write for people who don't know what self-promotional listical, you're you're writing like a best x fory article, the best standing desks for offices, and you put yourself number one, and and I've heard rumors that like an LLM will be like, "Oh, yeah, this is a reputable BL brand, but I didn't include them in my recommendations because they had this suspicious article where they put themselves number one." And you know, you can't really it LLMs don't know why they are recommending things, but it it was interesting to hear that and I I was wondering if you've heard anything like that or if you think something like that could even happen. 100% I think it can happen. You know, I think um again like we're we're OpenAI is a very young company and Anthropic and all these companies, right? And I think it took Google a really long time to create a web spam team. Number one, they didn't have one for a long time. You know, they didn't have the Panda update or anything for a long time or like Matt Cuts and and you know, just basically the web fam team. Um I think we're in early days of them even seeing that this is a big problem, but it's clearly becoming a problem. I mean, like everyone in their mother is talking about it. Um but I yes, to answer your question, yes, I've literally seen Claude in the last few weeks give me the exact same response. you know, when I asked about the best SEO agencies or whatever, it was like, here's some SEO agencies, but I do want to let you know this is a very spammed category. A lot of people are putting their own sites first. So, I tried to use reputable third party websites. I think we're going to see more and more of that. Um, I also think like I guess with chat BPT 5.4, like the new one, a lot of people are talking about how the fan out queries are using like site searches. Um, so they're basically honing down the fan out queries to specific domains. To me, that seems like a okay, let's stop allowing so many random sites to appear in citations and limit it to sites that we already trust. Why do you think uh why do you think it's it's doing the site sitew searching for a specific site? Do you think it's like seeing it's doing uh a search and then it's seeing a list of companies and then it's doing site to get more info directly from the companies that it found on its initial search? or is it something else? Yeah, I mean to be honest I haven't dug into too much yet into what those actual site searches look like. So it's still very early. I think it's like a couple days old that they've been doing that. Um but my theory is okay. So like if you want to look at reputable reviews about a business, you know, you can start by saying let's only look at Trust Pilot. Let's only look at G2. I mean, obviously there's debates around whether or not those are trustworthy sites anyway, but assuming that we call those trustworthy sites, you can just say this is a predefined list of of domains that tend to have the authoritative answer that I'm looking for and I'm filtering out all the other people that might be doing some type of manipulative thing. You know, if you're looking at travel recommendations, maybe you only look at Trip Advisor and Expedia booking and Yelp or whatever, right? So, I think they might just kind of be developing this like almost like whitelisted, you know, batch of domains for different questions. That's my theory. I mean, we'll see. Oh, that's scary. I wouldn't put it past them. Yeah, that's crazy. I I when I saw that cuz cuz uh cuz I looked at that screenshot, I think Chris Long shared it and it was it started it looked like it started with a normal search. I think it was like two normal searches and then it started doing the site colon ones. And so I I I was just like, "Oh, maybe it's maybe it's gathering sites from its first two searches and then it's and then it's going." I mean, it's possible though. I've I have heard other people say what you just said and that would be very very insane especially because there's so many sites out there and it's like how do you just cherrypick a handful to for to give in in different topics? I don't even like how do you even approach that? That's such a mammoth thing to do and the best sites are always changing. Yeah. I mean, I think it's naive of our industry to assume that OpenAI and these other companies will always just be like, all these sites are treated the same, right? I mean, like that's how Google got into trouble really early on, right? There's so much spam. There's so much manipulation. And I think that they're figuring it out, right, with each model update how to potentially like refine the results more and more. So, I think this might be their first attempt at doing that. Yeah, I 100% agree. It's like um it's I mean, you know, it's like they're they're a couple years in and it's like they're just learning how to deal with with spam and they have so many lessons from Google to to take and uh Yeah. Yeah. They're going to they're going to improve a lot. If um in terms of like getting results, if there is one thing that somebody does after listening to this podcast to get their brand recommended in large language models, what would you actually suggest? Yeah. The thing about it is like there isn't in my opinion a sustainable shortcut, right? Like there isn't like one quick trick, right? Um, I've, as you probably know and people listening probably know, I've uh, associated myself very strongly over the years with this concept of EAT. Um, and for me that's a very there's a lot that goes into that, but the fundamental nature of it is you want to become a human being, right, that is known in your industry and whether it's, you know, a handful of humans who are associated with a brand, right? like different people that are contributors and influencers and experts that are associated with the brand. The more that you can have those real people building out a presence and they're well known in the space and they're putting out original ideas and original content and building a social profile and building engagement and putting out authentic content across YouTube and Reddit and all the different LinkedIn, all the different places that search engines and large language models are citing. Um, I think that's the most sustainable way to have a presence. You know, I think that they both Google and Microsoft and everybody, they've been looking for a very long time at like real human content. And I think now with AI content, of course, yes, there's many examples of AI content that's really great, but they seem to be prioritizing over time, real humans having real conversations and real experts contributing content. Um, which is why I think we see, you know, so much social media and user generated content and everything over time because at the end of the day, users like engaging with that content. So I think the best thing you can do is establish yourself as an expert in the space. Put out your original ideas. You know, don't use AI to come up with all your ideas for you. You should be able to demonstrate that you have your own original insights. You can use AI to help write the content and everything, but the more you're just leaning on tools to do the thinking for you, I think the more that that's going to not work over time. So invest in I guess EAT, as I've always said. Invest in Okay. So, 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. This is this is an interesting question. I'm sure you've thought about this one a lot. How does how do you think Google judges EAT? Do you think it's a lot of external signals or are they looking for direct things or is it like a huge mix? Yeah, it's a really complicated question, right? It's a really I think it's a really big mix of things. You know, number one, they have the knowledge graph, right? They have actual an actual database of billions or hundreds of millions of different entities. you know, when you search for somebody's name, if they're recognized in Google's knowledge graph, they're going to be able to tell you about that person and talk about them in AI overviews and link to their social profiles and link to the articles they've written. You know, Google's done all types of like SER features over the years that highlight individual experts. Um, they've had like um author and article carousels directly in the SERs that show different authors in different spaces. You know, now in Google Discover, they have profile pages that highlight different contributors and everything like that. Um they used at one point they tested showing your follower counts directly in the search results. Like they've been testing so many different things over the year years but there's just it was clear that they have a way of associating individual experts with brands and with topics. So I feel like you know they don't necessarily want to tell us how they're doing it. You know I think that's why so many people debate about it but like EAT is mentioned like a 100 plus times in Google search quality guidelines. It's very indirect. It's not going to be some ranking factor that you can easily manipulate. It's going to be like vibes, right? It's like something that they can kind of tell about your your, you know, individual contributor and also like the brand and the people that work at the brand. It's just clear to me that they've been able to like kind of identify that and highlight and elevate that type of content over time. When you when you do site audits, what are some common EAT mistakes that you see over and over again? I think a lot of people try to fake it, right? You know, I think a lot of people look for shortcuts. Um, you know, I've seen over the years like midjourney generated, you know, author images, right? Um, and like yes, that can work for a while, but like the whole idea is to like it's not just about like having an author name or whatever. It's about having all the different signals across the ecosystem that indicate that you're a real person. You know, I think look at the SEO industry for example. If you look at like any of the main prolific SEO contributors, right, you look on Google, they have all kinds of information about conferences they've spoken at and articles they've written and videos that they've done, interviews that they've done. Like you can kind of extrapolate that for different industries. And yes, I do believe there's many many categories where it doesn't matter as much. Google's very clear about that, right? Like you can be a puppy photographer and maybe EAT is not that important, right? But like when we're talking about finance and health and politics and news and safety and things like this, yeah, they really want to get it right. You know, they really want to make sure that they're highlighting authoritative content. I think even for puppy photographers, you still want to have social profiles out. It's still it's still good if you have a page on your site that explains why you're why you're a puppy photographer, why who you are, like and and that's a thing that it's crazy to me that a lot of people don't do that. I um actually when when I had Rand Fishiskin on the show last year, something that I said to him because he was like the first person that I started paying attention to when I was learning SEO and I I said, "I really loved your focus on doing like broad marketing, general marketing, and how that actually benefits SEO." And I also think it's the same with increasing large language models because if you're focusing on broad broad marketing, you're getting mentions in a lot of different places. you're getting a lot of reviews. If you're getting a bad review, you're trying to maybe work with that person and and then like have them not hate you and and then get more better reviews and all sorts of things like that. And I I think what happens what you see in in the SEO community is a lot is people will focus on one specific external thing for example like link building instead of actually thinking how do I do just some awesome marketing for my brand. Yeah, 100%. You know, I mean, I think listen, like it's it's hard. I would say it's harder to um do it what I would consider to be like the right way long term, which is instead of focusing on buying links all day, focus on putting out one incredible piece of content or one incredible asset or one incredible LinkedIn post that gets a ton of engagement or an article that you've written that gets a ton of engagement because it's actually useful. It's actually helpful. It's actually controversial, whatever it is. And you're going to get a ton of links without doing anything, without doing well, you did something. you you produced good content, right? But you don't have to like artificially manufacture interest and popularity. You can just get it by doing the hard work and doing good work. And I actually think right now with AI, it's easier than ever to put out really interesting stuff. I mean, like I'm still working on it, but it's private. But like yesterday, I had Claude do this incredible analysis about something happening in the SEO space, and I like vibecoded a whole visualization of it. And I'm like, if I publish this, it would get so many links. You know what I mean? But it's like now it's like an equal playing field where you just have to have the ideas. Um and the research and putting together the content is easier than ever. I'm looking forward to making an episode on that. Um we'll see. Have to be careful about publishing that one. Oh. Oh, that sounds spicy. Um so your favorite your favorite techniques for getting links would you is it linkable assets? Do you have other things that you like doing? Expert quotes? Yeah, it's very um you know it's case by case depending on the client. Um I will say you know over the years so my history in the space is I got hit really hard by Penguin when I was first starting in SEO. I literally had no idea that buying links on Blackout World was against Google's guidelines. I just had no idea. There was no one to like teach me that. I hadn't I hadn't reached my you know that point in my SEO journey yet where I actually knew that was against the guidelines. But I learned the hard way. Um, and so that always put me off of like paid link building, even though I know obviously many many brands engage in it. That's very much how the internet often works. Um, but my approach is always to do things that won't ever get clients in trouble. Um, because Google's really good at this stuff, right? They have spam brain. They're always updating it and like link spam is one of the biggest, you know, violations of their policies over time. So I think I like to not put my clients in hot water. Um so the more that we can yeah invest in like whether it's like a survey or original content, original images, original videos, but really focusing on like yeah like I guess it's a linkable asset. Um something that takes a lot of time and effort to build and kind of earns links because it's naturally important and then you can do outreach with that content, right? That's not against the guidelines to try to earn links to something that you've built. Yeah. And honestly, people people underestimate the results that you can get when you actually let a brand compound and you don't dodgy things that can actually get a hit. Like people really don't get it. It's really crazy. But it's like, oh, it takes a little. It It is tougher though for the for the agencies who have to who feel like or maybe they just have to get results fast for their clients. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's I've worked in agencies for 13 years, right? I totally get it. I think the main thing with agencies is education. You know, it's having those conversations up front though, you know, there's many many companies who want to see really dramatic results from SEO in two months and you're not always going to see that. And so it's a lot of it is like having these conversations early where it's setting expectations and saying, "Listen, we want you to grow over the next 5 to 10 years, right? We don't want to do something dodgy that's gonna screw up your website because I'm sure you've seen it before, but when you do drive dramatic SEO growth in two to three months, you often crash and then it's very very very difficult to recover for a very long time. Could it could take years. Yeah. Yeah. And and if you when you actually let the brand compound and you act you're you're building up just a very solid authority profile. I don't even want to call it domain authority or brand authority or any of these things. It's just like you know that this is an authoritative brand. You actually do you actually are able to get those wins. Like there are some big brands out there that have massive topical authority. They don't they just don't know how to find the right keywords and then it's like you they can find these keywords and then rank high for them within hours and they're extreme and those are the types of wins that they want to get and they can get them because they let the brown the brand compound. I think it's similar to how Forbes could rank for anything and it's like well it's an aged brand and it's and you know it's it maybe it's not the best example because they have done they have done a lot of dodgy things. I don't know, maybe it's not the Yeah, I mean, I've seen it on my personal site. I've seen it on our agency site, AMS. Um, we're not they're not very big authoritative sites. We're not Forbes, right? But because I would say both of those domains, just using those as examples, have only ever really done what I would consider to be like highquality work or like natural kind of link building because of like earned publicity or like putting out good content. I see it where we can I don't want to say we can rank for anything but we do rank really fast when we put out an article and we get cited in LLM within hours. So for me that's the approach. It's like build an authoritative asset where search engines and also LLM trust you enough to say we know that the content being put out on that website is good and so we're going to reward it very quickly. when you work with clients, do you ever do you ever get a client that's doing all the SEO fundamentals correct? And it's like, okay, so now we actually have to do offensive SEO, what do we do? And yeah, and and and if you do do get clients like that, what do what do you tell them to do in terms of like offensive SEO? They already have the defensive fundamentals down. Well, what do you mean by offensive? Offensive as in they they fixed the common mistakes that lots of people are making. the mistakes that we were just speaking about and it's like where do we go from here? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think there's clients in super competitive categories where that can be really tricky and I know it's really tempting to try to do something really crazy in those situations, right? Um, you're going to get different answers from different SEOs. Obviously, I'm much more riskaverse than most SEOs just because I work with so many companies that have been burned, right? So, that totally changes my perspective. Um, but I think in those cases, yeah, it's going to come back to like some type of content and social strategy where it's like, you know, I worked with a finance company um or like a credit card comparison site where they put out original content based on survey data, you know, about it's it's re it's relevant to their niche. It's not exactly what they focus on, but it's like things that their audience would want to know, right? Statistics that they would want to know. And those articles do really really well to get a lot of press. You know, they get mentioned in the news. They get a lot of really great links. They get talked about in social. Um, there's also like Google Discover. There's some types of content that I help companies with to get more visibility and discover. I think all of that that kind of shows that the brand has a pulse and that they're creating really interesting content. I think pays off with SEO. Yeah. By the way, I'm I'm the same. I I commonly get the criticism that I am too riskaverse and and I and for me it's like I said I know what happens when you let the brand compound. So yeah, I'm I'm very I'm very much the same way. What do you what what strategies do you suggest for Google Discover? Yeah, that's actually one that I um focus on and have specialized in since I would say 2018 or 2019 when Discover came out. Um but I don't necessarily talk about the tactics as much publicly at least. Um sometimes I talk about it in private conferences and things just because I know how these things go with Google number one they are watching what I tweet and what I post. Not just me but many people. Um you know if I were to share what works in discover it would get shut down in a month. So but the reality is at least for the last few years Google discover has been much more easy to manipulate and influence than SEO. Um, you know, I think, yeah, I think a lot of it is driving click-through rate, right? And they'll tell you that the Google Discover guidelines say don't have clickbait, you know, don't have misleading headlines. And it's true. When you overdo it, you can get manual actions and things. Um, but the reality is the stuff that works in discover is tabloids, tabloid type content. You know, it's it's trending more and more towards like social posts and things. I think they're trying to improve the quality of discover. But over the years, there's been ways to write your headlines that leave out little bits of information and entice the user to click. And then there's ways to optimize the featured image so that people are really engaged, like a lot of like human faces, close-ups of faces, popular celebrities, things like this. Um, there are a lot of kind of tricks that you can do in Discover. Um, but just be careful because it's one of those things where like if you overdo it and it's working too well, they will shut you down. So really um yeah I mean discover you can lose all your traffic like forever if you go too why would they shut you down if you're if you're doing things oh you mean if it's too clickbaity as in like you're not you are overpromising and completely underdeling. Yeah. So like some examples that are pretty clear um are like the actual manual actions that come from discover. So release date spam within the movie category for example. If you do a lot of articles that say when is the next, you know, MCU movie or whatever TV show coming out um or like like something like find out when it's coming out and then you don't say in the article when it's coming out or you say it in like the 10th paragraph and then you say sometime in summer of next year. I think they have systems that actually look for the date like the actual explicit date on the page. Um so it's a lot of that kind of like misleading stuff that's just traditional clickbait. If you go too hard in that direction, they will either penalize your site or you'll lose a lot of traffic really fast. How do you find a balance? This is always an interesting question. How do you find a balance between making content that properly satisfies the SEO signals that you want to satisfy um while also you know targeting the keyword properly so that you are as relevant as possible. I mean, I think yeah, it's always about striking that balance, right? I think, you know, SEO from 10 or 15 years ago is just put the keyword and the, you know, relevant keywords and similar keywords in as many places as possible. I think that's still true to a degree. Like, I wouldn't say, you know, don't put the keyword in the title tag. Like, you should still do that. Um, there's still some fundamental SEO things that are true, but like obviously Google's gotten a million times better at understanding language and semantics. And so I think there's a lot more freedom to kind of just like make sure that you're producing good content while also using, you know, keyword research tools and looking at query fan arts and looking at all these things and saying, am I really answering the question clearly and staying on topic on the page? Um, and I think there's a lot of interesting work people are doing now with AI search to like make sure that paragraphs and and I guess like chunks of content are kind of like self-contained with the exact answer that an LLM or that AI overviews would be pulling in. And there's a lot of like complicated stuff you can do with embeddings and everything to like cosign similarity and really like really drilling down to make sure that the paragraph itself has the answer that's that's needed. I'm a little skeptical of that stuff because I think if everyone starts to do it too much, Google's going to say this is skewed way too far from producing good content for humans. So, um there's that they're striking a balance. I think as a good SEO, you're like, "Yeah, if I gave this to the average person, they would read it and they would have a really good experience and they wouldn't feel like you're just repeating the same keywords over and over. you're doing things specifically for SEO while also making sure that you're writing clearly and concisely and you're getting the message across without being too vague or too ambiguous. Yeah, I've made episodes on how the stuff that you just described is like it's over it's it's overly technical when it doesn't need to be. Like I think I think uh I think someone could even have like probably create a a decent checklist of what good content is for a newb who's coming into SEO. And it's like okay like will the searcher bounce? Is the searcher going to pogo stick on this? Is the searcher going to want to click in the first place? Is a searcher going to come to this page and feel like it is for them? Are they going to see AI images and not trust it? Are they going to see real images and be like it's it's like uh yeah, think things like that. Um, I want to talk about the helpful content update because actually when all of that stuff was going down, I watched a few podcasts with you to get your take on it because you were one of the the leading the leading people talking about the helpful content update and uh so it wiped out so many publishers and I'd like to ask you what are some takeaways that apply from the helpful content update to today in 2026? Yeah. And I will say that that update like broke my soul. That was such a big one that like I really and I don't think this is a secret. I think Google went way too far. Um I think they hit a lot of sites in really really dramatic ways that probably didn't deserve to lose 85 95% of their visibility in Google search and still to this day can't really get it back um in many cases. So, you know, what I learned about that and I think it actually probably um explains a lot of my position right now is, you know, in 2022 before the helpful content update, I felt it coming only because like I've dealt with Penguin and Panda and medic and all these other big updates over the years. I knew that this was going to get crackdown on like there were a lot of sites that were using very very similar approaches to SEO that were working really well and we were also in like the early days of like AI generated content. So, there were some companies, I'm not going to name names, but companies that were um allowing their clients to start experimenting with producing lots of content really quickly with AI or optimizing content with AI. Um or like using these very clickbaity titles where it's like, you know, 10 things that do this and that and then like a little bracket that's like you'll never believe number seven, right? Like everyone's doing that and it's working really well. It's definitely increasing click-through rates. It's driving a lot of SEO traffic. But then you start to hear the backlash where there's a lot of publications like The Verge and everything where they're like, "We hate SEO. SEO is ruining Google. We're having a really bad experience." And when Google starts to get a lot of public pressure like that that their results are not good, they take really dramatic action. And I think we're in the early days of that with AI search right now, which is why I think the listicles are the first clue. But, you know, my big takeaway from the helpful content update is that even if you're doing something that does really, really well with SEO, and let's say it lasts six months, when everyone else starts doing it, becomes very popularized, and you start to have the average user like, "This is annoying, and it's ruining my experience on Google." Google takes countermeasures that are more aggressive than they need to, I think. So, I feel like we're in that cycle again right now. So, how about when when everyone starts doing the same thing in SEO, but it's actually a good tactic that searchers like? Can you name an example? Um, okay. TLDDRs are getting pretty popular. So, putting up too long, didn't reads that literally give the answer right away to the target searcher at the top and and a lot of a lot more people are doing that. They're they're having they're they're scaling AI content and even telling the AI content to put the TLDDR there. And you scaled AI content, that's like another conversation, but like yeah, TLDDR would be an example. I think that's a really good example. Um, you know, I do think it generally helps users and even search engines and LLMs and everything to have a TLDDR. So, you know, I'm not going to sit here and say don't do that because if everyone starts doing it, it's spammy. I will say there are certain things like that. For example, tables of contents, which I think tables of contents are good for users. I've recommended them to clients forever. I use them in my own content when my content's very long. But if you remember, Danny Sullivan from Google like right after the helpful content update was launched started making a laundry list of all these things that Google just kept seeing over and over that was like you all are doing this. It's everyone's kind of participating in the same thing for SEO, right? And he actually listed table of contents as one of them. So, it's almost like we can't have nice things because even if it is good for users, if it becomes this pattern that everyone's doing for SEO purposes and the whole internet becomes super homogeneous and like Google just says, these are the patterns that we're seeing in these sites that are doing way too much for SEO that have lost authenticity with users, good things can even eventually become a liability. You think table of contents still hurt articles or still hurt pages? I haven't stopped doing it. You know, I think that it's one thing among many different clues that they're looking for when they demote websites, but in my experience, it's of course when you have a super long article, especially now with AI search where it likes to jump to different parts of the page, you know, I wouldn't say not to do that. Now, if you're if you're doing it all the time and it's like really spammy and excessive and maybe the article doesn't really need it, like you don't always need one, right? But I think if it helps if it helps the user experience, then yeah, you should use one. I've actually thought about experimenting with just doing anchors just uh just yeah just anchoring different parts of the page instead of doing like a traditional TOC because I' i've seen the same I've seen the same thing that pages with the table of contents even even now in 2026. It it still doesn't seem to be working out as well. Um, what separates sites that grow during updates from those that collapse? Yeah. I mean, over the years there's so many sites that like were poster child for like good SEO, you know, two years earlier and everyone's like, "Wow, they're so good at SEO." I'm thinking of some obvious examples um that have crashed, right? And it's like I'm not going to name names, but like just because something's working for a really long time, it doesn't mean it's always going to work. And I really do believe, you know, like it or not, I think one of Google's biggest motivations with core updates is to demote SEO tactics that are working too well. Even when we all agree, wow, they're doing SEO really well. If Google says this is too repetitive and too many people are emulating this strategy, they'll demote it. So, I think, believe it or not, and this is something that SEOs don't love to hear, um, the best thing you can do in a core update is to be some type of site that's not doing SEO, like a government site, right? Or in some cases like a forum, you know, like things where it's just raw, authentic, like helpful content that's not really thinking about SEO. Maybe they have like good titles or whatever, but generally speaking, I'll see a lot of those types of companies or not even companies, like organizations and institutions, you know, the CDC and the Mayo Clinic and this stuff where it's just literally good content, not thinking about SEO. But I do think that um you can kind of take that um you know, philosophy or approach and use it in your SEO strategy. So, it's like it's a defensive SEO strategy. It's like, how do I make it seem like, yeah, I'm addressing technical SEO. I'm addressing user experience. I'm addressing conversion rate optimization, but I'm not exploiting, you know, SEO tactics to try to drive as much traffic as physically possible. I'm just trying to earn traffic for the topics that I'm very relevant for. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's um and I'm glad that you you mentioned you mentioned titles because you have to there we were again going back to that conversation. And how do you balance between actually having good content but also having relevant enough content that it ranks and uh yeah because you you still need to you still need to be uh relevant. I also think what you just said speaks to why doing having a varied marketing mix is so important because that makes you more like a real brand rather than an SEO brand. And if there are all of these different s if there are all of these signals that indicate during an update that this is a spammy site by doing lots of different types of marketing you are probably less likely to fall into those signals because you have like even if it's a a backlink profile you have like a more natural backlink profile for for sites that do get hit. What is the first step that you take when a site loses like 70 to 80% of its traffic? Even if it's not during a core update, if if just a client comes to you and they're like, "We can't rank anymore. We don't know what's happening. We've lost so much organic traffic. This is our Google Search Console. Why does it look like this, Lily? What what should we do?" Story of my life. Um yeah, and listen, you can lose a lot of traffic really fast outside of a core update um for different reasons. And you know, listen, like yes, there's there's sometimes it can be explained by you accidentally no indexed off the site. You accidentally blocked something with robots.txt, your JavaScript is not rendering so search engines can't see any of the content. Like the you want it to be that stuff, right? Something that's actually fixable, the technical problem. Like that's the dream. So you have to rule those out. And obviously if it's one of those things, hopefully it's one of those things and you can get back in Google's good graces pretty fast. I've seen a lot of examples recently where site like big brands they lose all their traffic in two days and it's like you go to the site and they you know it's like under construction or something like well yeah of course you're going to lose all your traffic. Um, but you know, you have if it's not that, and more often than not, it's not that, um, you have to start to reverse engineer what it is. And I really recommend working with someone who knows what those patterns are because I would say, listen, there's all kinds of SEOs out there with all types of skills. Not every SEO has the skill to understand what gets sites in trouble during core updates or outside of core updates. There's certain SEOs focused on that. You know, I think you look at that. I look at that. Like Marie Haynes, Glen Gabe, there's a lot of the people that look at that and not every SEOs does that and that's fine. You know, lots of SEOs only do e-commerce. Lots of them only do news, whatever. But like a lot of people literally work on core updates. So, I would say try to work with one of them because they've seen the patterns over and over. Um, but I'm I would say I'm able to spot the patterns pretty often with a lot of these sites. Um, and it almost always comes down to some shady SEO thing that they did, whether it's in the last year, it can sometimes be two years ago. I often ask them who they worked with for SEO. A lot of times they'll tell me, you know, we worked with four different agencies or four different consultants and these guys built all these pages and then these guys deleted it and these guys built all these. Like, you have to kind of like start with the history of what happened. um you know when you crawl the website you can often see those patterns anyway but there's usually like I think of them as like I don't want to say like a cancer on the site but like something on the site that's the problem or maybe a few different things that are the problem and you have to start by removing those um but it's not only just removing those now I would say it's harder than ever to recover on Google so it's not only removing it it's also showing signals that you are a good brand that's contributing a lot of good content as well. I think your analogy is pretty good. Like cuz it really it really does seem like that for there there's a lot of people who are newer in SEO who listen to this podcast and I'm sure that some of these new people have gotten clients like this and they feel overwhelmed. What would you recommend to them in in terms of how they should start if they if they or if you're or if you're a business yourself and uh you just saw a drop. But yeah, especially to the to the newer SEOs who might have gotten clients like this. Yeah, there's a lot of really great content out there about what to do when you see a big traffic drop. Um, Alita Solless comes to mind. I think she's written about that quite a bit. Um, but I would honestly like Glen Gabe, someone that I talked to pretty much every day. You know, we're very aligned with SEO stuff. He's written all types of amazing content over the years about what to do with getting hit by algorithm updates and penalties and manual actions and everything. He has a lot of really good stuff. Um, but I think yeah, like focusing on Google's search quality guidelines, focusing on Google's helpful content update guidelines, like you mentioned before, like a checklist that people should use to see if content is good content. Google literally has that. They've had it for a long time. A lot of people just don't use it. But you have to go through all the content and measure it against that criteria that Google has. That's a really good place to start. You know, my team when we work on core update recovery, we we literally use that checklist. And you want to be um as unbiased as possible. You know, one thing that you'll always hear from companies hit by core updates, I'm sure you've heard this, is we were doing everything right and our content's really good. We have the best content in the space. Like really not so sure about that. Yeah. All the time. Um all the time. Yeah. So I think using, you know, the content that's available to understand what why do sites get hit and what do I need to do to recover? Start by kind of like internalizing that information. Where is the checklist? I'm sure a lot of people want that. Yeah, it's um I believe it's Google's Google's like criteria for helpful content. Um there's a questionnaire that they have that's like you know 30 or 40 questions that you should ask when you're considering if your content is helpful. That's awesome. I actually I just I I put out a podcast. It just came out a few hours ago and it's about how Google literally recommends linking out in in like articles like citing sources and it's like I've been saying that for years. It's part of EAT. Like for us it probably seems like a no-brainer type thing. It's like, of course, you should site your sources. And it's like, I I I I like uh I don't know, Google is still helpful, but I feel like the Matt Cuts days, they were really helpful with like explaining things and well, the industry unfortunately kind of screwed itself because um you know, Danny Sullivan stepped away from being liazison last year and we're feeling it now. We're definitely feeling it now. You know, they're they're less communicative with the public. Um, and I think that the cast of characters that's communicating from Google right now, if if at all are much more vague. They're much more focused on AI. They're not as engaged with the search community. But, um, if you remember after the helpful content update, there was a lot of very angry people. And I think Google just took a step back from, you know, talking to us at all, which doesn't help. There's a theory that a bunch of SEOs have, which is that Google is less focused on SEO spam and their engineers are all working on AI stuff. What do you think of that? I would agree with that. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think um we've seen over the last few years it's pretty obvious you know Google declared a code red after chat GPT came out and I feel like ever since that code red it feels like all the resources that Google shifted towards AI you know it's like everyone's probably working in Gemini and AI overviews and everything and they're hiring all kinds of roles for like AI mode and AI overviews. I think that's true. Um but you know I also I I think it can't go on forever. You know Google can't just like all right screw it we're just going to let spam rank for everything. I think they're probably working on something behind the scenes. Do you think uh do you think AI mode will become the default anytime soon? Not 100%. You know, it's not going to be like when you go to Google search, it'll be AI mode in the next, let's call it, six months. I don't think that's going to happen. I think they're trying all kinds of things to push users towards AI mode and more. Um they're also trying different types of formats like web guide that are a mix of traditional search results with AI features. I think it'll land somewhere with that because there there's no chance they can be profitable with everything being AI mode in its current form. Think about how many think about how many sponsored links there are on Google right now and how much they look like organic links. The fact that they need to put fix ads above the fold that literally look identical to organic links tells me that that's how they make money, right? You're not going to be able to do that in AI mode. AI mode doesn't have that layout. You know, I think they're starting to experiment with putting ads in AI mode, but until they're literally able to replicate the amount of ad revenue they're getting from search right now in AI mode, they're not going to fully switch over to AI mode. It's going to be some type of blended experience. Do you ever think about what SEO will look like three years out, 5 years out, even 10 years out? Sure. I mean, I think right now Claude in particular is the one that's scaring me the most right now. you know, Claude's ability to do analysis is like, wow, okay, it just in the last two months got so much better. Um, so I think, yeah, I think it's, you know, we all have a lot of much more advanced tools at our disposal to do really, really smart stuff with SEO. And I think it's going to become more and more competitive. You have to be more and more creative. But, you know, I do think you hear a lot of people say this, as long as people are searching, there's going to be some type of SEO needed. even if that's just like listen like personal branding and branding, you know, guidance in the search results. You know, you're still going to need to set up your Google business profile. You're you're still going to need to input a lot of that data into the system. And I think there's ways to always optimize that. Now, I got to ask, what sort of things are you seeing or or using cloud for? Everything. the last month or two I switched from like you know using AI for lots of different things to now like with cloud co-work and cloud code um and connecting it to different like SEO tools and different data sources like even Google search console and Google Analytics um you know talking to cloud about my data talking to cloud about um performance of different sites over time like I use the HFS MCP for a lot of things um and I'm able to do more largecale analysis of like SEO trends much more quickly now. And um you would laugh if you saw my setup. I'm in in Argentina right now, but I have like my regular work computer. I have a client work computer over here and then I have my MacBook over here with Claude and I'm literally going between the three all day every day. But it's like Claude's always doing something in the background because whatever questions I have in the SEO space, it can help me answer them now, which is amazing because it's like you're supercharged. You can just do so much understand so many more things so quickly with especially with like cloud co-work, you know. Yeah. I use like when even when I'm making the show sometimes I I'll get like some interesting breakdown that I want to report on and there's like a paragraph that I think is like written really poorly and I'll just take that I'll give it to I'll give it to Chachi PT I'll give it to Cloud. What does this mean? I don't even understand. It's like bulleted out. Perfect. are there any are there are there any SEO content things that you would consider act or just in general with SEO? What would you consider actually automating? cuz you know there's people who would try to automate everything then there's people who are like I'm not I'm not going to automate anything and so I'm curious what Lily Ray thinks. I think there's a lot of parts of the process that you can automate internally with your team or with you know whoever you're working with that like like for example keyword research right or like topic research or reporting or data analysis there's a lot of stuff that can be automated where I draw the line still is hitting the publish button right like letting letting um the automation say okay we're going to update a thousand of your articles every month to get that recent date that date modified in the search results and use AI to find the latest and greatest thing and automate that because again when you look at Google's policies th this is a new version or an evolution of spam tactics that have been against their guidelines for 20 years right they've had um artificial refreshing as something that they've looked at forever long before AI so there's a lot of people that are very excited about using AI for things but the reality is like just because you can do it in a more sophisticated way doesn't mean it's not against their guidelines it's still against their guidelines So, you know, I think if you're going to update content, it really truly needs to have something unique and original and like meaningful. And I also think that they can see when you're doing things with AI basically for search that's not done in a in a way that took a lot of human oversight. Um, and I think they're going to get better and better at demoting that. And honestly, we're seeing that already. I know you and I like are in a group chat where we talk about this stuff. A lot of sites they're using these tactics to like oh we can use AI to like automatically generate or produce a lot of content even if it's very good content. It seems like Google there's some switch where Google says this is not going to work anymore. Yeah, that group that group chat is fun. It's it's like it's we basically share different people on X who are like, "Yeah, I had this client. Look at the massive spike in traffic I did by doing this spam geo tactic." And and then like in the chat we're like, "All right, it's two two months out. we're going to see it all collapse. And it always happens. It always happens. I mean, I I feel almost bad because there's a lot of case studies out there right now that talk about how amazing things are and then when you share the name of the site, it's like, of course, people are going to go look at what happened three weeks later and they're not going to talk about the fact that it crashed back down, but it happens a lot. Yeah. Um, back to back to recoveries. This is actually an interesting question. How long should a site realistically expect to wait for a recovery after making major improvements? It's a good question and it's a question I hate answering right now because uh Sorry. No, it's fine. I mean, I think there was one example, listen, I think it is possible within 3 to six months, but it's rare. Um, you know, there's one example that my team and I worked on in 2018 during the medic update. Um, we actually won an award for this, like best SEO campaign in the health space or something. And the client, um, at first they didn't even agree with our approach. Um, and they actually stopped working with us because their site was burned so badly before that they like they're like, "You know what? This is going to take too long. It's going to take too much hard work. We don't want to do it." So, we're like, "Okay, sorry." You know? Um, and then they came back uh I think 3 to six months later and literally wrote a letter and was like, "We're really sorry. We we understand now. You know, we want to do things right." Um, and we we rebuilt the website. We redirected a lot of things to better versions of pages. We got rid of lots and lots of content. They completely upgraded everything and about actually as soon as they launched the site about a month later they actually came back to where they were before. So that whole process was about it was about a year. Um so I think you're looking at a year in many cases but right now I would say that Google is becoming even more strict. Like if you look at the helpful content update it took some of those sites two years. So, you know, I tell people 6 months, but in reality, it's often more like a year or even two years. When you're looking at a site, when do you especially a site that has bloat? When do you prioritize getting rid of bloat before going after new opportunities in search? I think getting rid of bloat should always be the first priority. I think bloat um is a liability. If you think about Google's um like perspective and their goals, right? I think at one point, I think it was like 2019, Google said that 50% of the sites that they crawl are like spam. Think about how much crawling they're doing and how much spam that is, right? So, their incentive is to get rid of spam and to elevate really good content. If you're producing lots and lots of content and that content is not great, they're going to try to get rid of it really fast, right? So, I think that's why I'm very conservative now with my approach to SEO. So I think if you do have anything that could be considered like bloat or even like spam, even if you don't think it's spam, they might think it's spam. So I am very much of the mindset right now that less is more in SEO. So if you have something like that that could be dragging down the quality of your site, you want to address that before you start creating a lot of new content. Yeah, this is kind of a redundant question, but it's I I like how this one is phrased because especially about SEO tactics that people don't talk about. So, are there any SEO tactics that still work incredibly well, but just like you never hear people sharing, but they work it works so well. Why aren't more people sharing this? Internal linking, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Um, internal linking is something you can just do forever, right? It's like things that help search engines and users simultaneously to navigate your site. Conversion rate optimization, right? Um, yeah. like there's no harm in putting a lot more like I I don't even want to say eat content because it's not right but like more information about your authors and your brand and your expertise and your rewards and all this stuff like none of that can hurt right so I think like just investing in like really providing a better experience and more trust signals always help yeah and I mean from an SEO perspective when you're satisfying intent searchers aren't pogo sticking that's a major signal like for sure yeah This is a really, really hard question and I'm sure you've thought about it. Are affiliate websites still viable long term? That's a definitely a hard question. Um, and I I speak at I'm actually I spoke at an affiliate conference in January and I'm about to speak at one in March or April as well. Um, it's probably one of the hardest spaces in SEO right now and one of the ones that like for better for worse, Google's really really really cracked down on, you know, for obvious reasons. I think a lot of people you know, figured out that you can make a lot of money really fast with product review content. So, Google had to crack down on product review content really hard. Um, including many sites that probably didn't deserve to get hit that hard. There are examples, a very small handful of examples, I would say, of sites that I would consider to be doing it right. And they're not 100% immune from updates. Sometimes Google does like reviews updates where even good sites see declines and then they come back with the next update. So I think Google's always trying to get it right. But like um there if you if you really do approach it in the way that Google also they also have guidelines around review content. If you read those guidelines and you can meet the criteria of their guidelines and not fake it, right? When Google says you need to show evidence that you tried the products and you tested the products, you know, that's not like, oh, go into Claude and tell Claude to like create fake evidence. Like no, you have to show evidence, right? You have to show pictures and videos and everything. If you can really approach it where it's like, "Hey, I love running shoes and I love running and I want to make a hobby blog that literally shows me buying and trying the shoes and talking about my experience, I think there's a world in which that can still work, but most people don't want to do that level of work." Yeah, it that's well actually um this brings me to I have three questions left and what you just said brings me to the next question which is what are areas in SEO SEO and GEO where people just really lack common sense? Um well right now with GEO I I don't know if it's common sense I think it's lack of experience. So, I think a lot of people coming into the space right now that are really excited about like ranking in LLMs. Um, that's to me like a really big area right now where there's a lot of again, I don't know if it's common sense, but just lack of um understanding of how things work. Um, but yeah, again, I don't know if it's common sense. I think most of this can be answered by just like not having enough skin in the game and not having enough history in the space because all of us were young SEOs once, right? All of us came in there and for me I bought like some black hat world and one day all my rankings disappeared. I had no idea, right? So I think it's l it's not lack of common sense, it's just lack of experience. Well, I think there are some areas where it's lack of common sense. It's like uh for example, spamming unreed AI content on your site like and and some people they they they do it and they literally don't even know that like there's a problem with it. Or another example, just putting up a bunch of like lazy but wellargeted content on your site, not thinking that there might be like a sitewide quality score. It's like, of course, if if you people are if searchers are pogo sticking on every page, why is Google going to continue to trust you enough to show you for new pages that you put up? And yeah, I think people don't give Google enough credit for being as sophisticated as it is. I think a lot of people enter the space and think they can get away with things and they don't realize how easy it is for Google to detect what they're doing. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. like every and what's crazy too is it's like um and I I don't know this kind of sounds mean but I'm going to say it anyway. It's like the people who who completely underestimate Google are also the people who are least likely to be able to outsmart them. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I wouldn't ever try to approach things by trying to outsmart Google. I mean, I know different people do different things, but if you care about the long-term health of your site, I wouldn't try that. If you're willing to crash your site because things work for three months and then it crashes, then go for it. You know, different and and silo property, silo domains in Google Search Consoles. But but like it's but it's it's the new SEOs. There are there are sophisticated SEOs who are like, "Yeah, yeah, Google's asleep and we can do this and it but but actually to your point, they are they are siloing Google search consoles. They know that they're turnurning and burning and like they they completely know what they're doing. All right, two questions left. What advice would you give to somebody starting SEO in 2026? Well, you have to learn all the rules, right? I know that AI can do a lot of the thinking for you now, but I think the thing that's going to differentiate people that do SEO well from anybody else that can open up Claude and Chachi PT and ask it to what what SEO is, right? like like you me like I spent years years like watching all the whiteboard Friday videos and brand fishkin and going to all the SEO conferences and asking all the questions and learning from all types of different people like you have to put in the work right just because it's not necessarily like a college course that you can take or like a degree that you can have it doesn't mean you don't have to spend years mastering the craft right so I think start I always say start with Google's own documentation Google has the search central documentation. Read that, learn that. Um, and there's a lot of other really good courses out there. Even Moz has like really good information. I think as much as you it's tempting to use AI to do everything, I think having that knowledge will really help you long term. Yeah. Um, all right. Last question. If you are starting a new site this this month, this March, you're Lily Ray is starting a brand new venture. What do you what do you do to grow this new site? And I may or may not be doing exactly that, by the way. You'll see. Um, but yeah, uh, I think number one, um, I guess like the EAT method of like for me, you know, if I'm starting something and it's associated with me, I luckily have kind of like that built-in authority. But if you don't have that, start building that. Um, you know, you have your podcast, you know, you have a lot of things that you're doing to like create a name for yourself. I think that you can extend that for any type of business. So, it's like if you're a pest control company, you know, I talked about this in one of my EEAT talks a long time ago. There was a a guy that ran the business that loves pest control for whatever reason, and he's the face of the company, and he has a lot of expert content on the blog, and he has videos about how to remove pests from your house. And it's like, think about what how you can set yourself apart with providing a lot of expert advice and building a name for yourself as it relates to the brand. Um, but then beyond that, it's going to be having really, really engaging, helpful, whether it's like tools or assets or information on your site that you can't find elsewhere. Yeah. Yeah. I I um for me it's it's start by doing marketing that actually gets referral traffic or or or direct or people directly looking for the brand. So, I actually I started a new venture this month, too. And uh how are we how are we launching? We're launching on Product Hunt. We're launching on beta list. We are do we are crafting very tailored pitches to journalists. We'll have a few pieces of SEO content on the site just so like eventually like as we're building authority it starts ranking. But we are doing things where we want humans to go see this as soon as possible and to actually grow like a trusted brand. And when you do that yeah I mean you can tell me but I think I think that also grows SEO 100%. all the brand signals and everything and having search demand, search volume, all of that leads to good SEO results. Thank you again, Lily Ray, for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. Everybody knows where where they can find Lily Ray, but if you don't know, if this is somehow your first time hearing about the legend, hearing about Lily, uh what are the top places? X LinkedIn threads. Yeah. Well, um it's kind of like relevant to what we talked about today, but I'm very diversified across different platforms. Um so I tell people to Google my name and pick the platform of their choice. Okay. Uh Lily, thank you again for coming on the show. For everybody who watched this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. Whoever For everybody who listened on Spotify or Apple Podcast, thank you so much for listening. This is episode 987 of the Edward Show. N Oh yeah. 987 days in a row doing this podcast and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.