← Always Be Testing
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- [00:07]
A
Well, welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. We're here live in Austin, Texas with Jordan Cooney.
- [00:14]
B
Yes. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
- [00:16]
A
Good to see you, man.
- [00:17]
B
Back in Texas.
- [00:18]
A
It's been a moment. It's been a moment. We're doing this, we're doing it. We've done a few. We've done a few live on the digital interwebs, but now we're in the flesh, which is way more fun.
- [00:29]
B
We have.
- [00:29]
A
Yeah.
- [00:30]
B
It has been a while since we've done this in person, so it's good. It's good to do something real and in person versus the video recordings that we typically do. So let's see where it takes us.
- [00:41]
A
I love it. I love it. For those of you who don't know, Jordan Cooney is the SEO wizard. He is a growth guru. I know those terms are thrown around a lot, but CEO and founder of Pre Visible. We got to had the pleasure to overlap at ebay, leading out SEO while I was doing our. My affiliate thing. And yeah, it's just this. Couldn't think of a perfect, more perfect time to talk about what the heck is going on with AI, this wave that's happening, and maybe you can help us make sense of it all.
- [01:12]
B
I don't know if I can do that. You might have to ask ChatGPT to make sense of it for us. But there's a lot happening, right? There's. There's a combination of both where this technology is helping us become more efficient in our work. Like, there's the whole work management component of how AI is just making SEOs and digital marketers just like so much more rapid at vibe coding, building your own reporting, building your own dashboards. And there's a whole. There's a whole hype trend around that, right? Like, there's a whole hype trend around, like, do we need to buy software? Do we need to buy technology anymore to help us do our jobs? And so there's a whole hype cycle around that. But then there's. Then there's the reality that this is now a new acquisition channel. This is like a real channel for finding customers, users. And there's a lot. And SEOs are known for this. They're known for being great arbitrage players of these ecosystems. And I was careful not to use the word spam, but like garbage men. Yeah, they've been known to, like, hack these systems. And I think we're in. We're in a very pivotal moment right now where organic is being RE is being tested today in terms of what it is and how we go about the mechanics of acquiring users through this organic channel.
- [02:31]
A
Yeah, what I mean, so much going on right now. What do you think is the one thing that you're sort of directing people to brands and businesses that are trying to figure this whole thing out and keep up with all that's happening with trying to get rankings in lm trying to address core SEO things that are still really important and maybe some not focus as much on the things that are less, less important now. How are you kind of like counseling people in this world? Like, what is it starting to look like for you?
- [03:05]
B
Well, the first thing is that the data is not the same. The data is a totally new set of requirements for the input factors of what is organ as well as the business KPIs that we're so used to connecting to. Inorganic are broken. So let's start with what's broken. Traffic is broken today. So traffic is broken. And by virtue, when we connect that back to business KPIs like Revenue or new user acquisition or app downloads or any of these business numbers where there's a transaction of data information or sales and conversions, like that is that connection point of like traffic to these business KPIs is busted. It is busted because it's no longer a traffic game. Organic is not a traffic game. And the sooner we think about reinventing the way we measure the baseline of conversion, the sooner we will be at being better at managing and measuring this channel. We can talk a little bit about what that is a little later on. But the other component that is quickly become, I like to call it mystery meat. But like it is just, it is a black hole of what is. It is what we traditionally would do in the organic space, which is rank tracking. So understanding our position in this somewhat confined ecosystem of rankings that is like gone. Because there are no more rankings. There are responses. We've gone from a rankings world to a response world. And in a response world, we have to rethink the way we measure what it is and where we show up. We're now choosing where to place billboards on a highway or a busy intersection versus choosing how to place bets in a search ranking position. And so this shift to LLMs may be in Google search, like AI mode or answer overviews or, or, or in what we we think of as like ChatGPT, Gemini Copilot. These LLMs or AI responses are no longer about a position. They are about a citation. They are about being mentioned. They are about brand recognition. And so we're really, we're really shifting the paradigm of the input metrics we used to use, how we used to think about success, which was more keywords and more rankings. And that's, that's testing the bounds of like how we think about doing organic today.
- [05:44]
A
So suffice to say, the zero click exposure impression view is kind of taking over a lot of how you look at measurement. Is that, is that a reasonable claim?
- [05:55]
B
Yeah, it's absolutely a reasonable claim. I mean, zero click I think is too narrow minded today though, right? Because zero click in, in its kind of construct is really about still thinking about a world where there's rankings, but we're in a world where there's no more rankings.
- [06:11]
A
Right.
- [06:11]
B
And I've been talking about this for years now. I've been talking about how refrigerators are going to take over search. Right. It's not about Google, it's about your refrigerator being your recipe and your ingredient and your checklist at the grocery store. So why would I ever need to do one of those searches again? And that world is now a reality because you can just talk to your fridge and tell it to give you a recipe for pancakes and it's going to know if you have enough eggs, enough milk, enough flour and it's going to be able to go right like that. I mean, I'm not saying that the refrigerator is going to cook the food for you yet, but it's probably coming too in a not so distant future. But the foundation of where we do search is completely shooken. Right? And right now we don't do search the way we used to, which was we go into a search engine, we'd start refining all these keywords and hoping and praying to the search guys that it would come back with a really good list. That's gone now. We get responses and those responses are much more rich and much more contextual than I think any of us ever expected.
- [07:11]
A
Yeah, I've had talks and conversations similar to this and we've talked about it, but audio comes up to mind. Here we, here we are having some audio conversation. Go figure. Is that, is that kind of where you see the puck going? I know Apple kind of. There's rumors around like, okay, they've got all these devices, get the AI and the audio firing on them and you're good to go. And maybe some glasses. Where do you think some of this stuff is headed to? Not get too speculative, but think a little bit about is audio the format versus what was.
- [07:47]
B
I mean, I think format is always going to be predicated on what your audience wants. And I think that there is definitely no question in my mind that some of These models, including ChatGPT today, are way behind the eight ball in their ability to consume these different formats, multimedia formats like audio or video or even others. These LLM models aren't there yet. Right. They can read a transcript and they can make some decisions off of that. But we're not yet there where you can go into an LLM and it goes directly into a specific section of a podcast and tells you exactly the insight you want out of it. We're getting there. It's going to happen. It'll probably even happen this year. I wouldn't be surprised by the end of this year that this podcast we're recording right now, someone could prompt out what they want from this podcast and it give them a clean, short form, viewable, shareable segment from our recording that's going to come and it's going to be very easy for these systems to do that. Now here's the reality. The thing that we all keep forgetting is that audience matters. And your audience is really the key indicator as to what media type you should be using, why you should be using it. Do they engage with it?
- [09:12]
A
Yeah.
- [09:13]
B
And it's never been a single media type universe. No, we've thought we think about it that way because we're such channel marketers.
- [09:21]
A
Yeah.
- [09:22]
B
But it's not. And you need to be able to invest in all these different forms and define what the user's expectation is in those forms.
- [09:29]
A
It's a good segue because we've talked to you and I have had a little. Obviously Reddit's on top of mind for so many reasons over the last few years. The Google partnership, the ability to kind of improve rankings in LLMs. What is it about Reddit that works? Doesn't work. Limitations. I'm just curious to know where you see the opportunity there. And then maybe some of the other players that people brands that are trying to improve their ranking should be invested in. Obviously it goes back to what you said about their audiences, which is something that's super important to us as well. But I'd love to hear your perspective on kind of the Reddit player versus some of the other options.
- [10:10]
B
One of the cool things we did at the end of this past year is we published an article on 2 million LLM sessions. So we analyzed 2 million visits to websites from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, the like. Right. And one of the notable findings from that is that the pages that you, you would think get the most traffic are not the ones that are getting the most traffic. The pages that are getting the most traffic are things like the about us pages. Very specific concrete location pages, very minute help center or service pages that are like about the product in a very unique way. So it's someone going into the help documentation of a website providing a ton of context on what their problem is and then either someone from the company or some other user responding. And so to your question about like Reddit and these ecosystems, these community ecosystems are a lifeblood for LLMs to create context, but they're just a context carrier. And I think that's what we missed out on in this like craze of Reddit is that what all these LLMs are doing is they're building their models, they're building the sophistication behind the technology that they have. And community content is one of those context carriers that they need in order to understand do people like, dislike, are people happy, sad, Are, are there, are there key influences in the decision making that they should be making in a response, in the LLM response. And so I don't see Reddit as a long term trend of traffic or weight in a, in a significant way for most brands or companies, but it's certainly an ecosystem you have to be mindful of and it certainly could sway context one way or the other very, very quickly. Right. So if a lot of Reddit users start to really bash your product or your service, you, you can bet that that's going to bleed its way into responses about your product or service in an LLM. Yeah, but it's not too different though from the about us page. It's not too different though from the help center content, about a minute problem or issue with your product. So there's a broader ecosystem that these LLMs are already getting into. We are already seeing it in the data that we pulled on LLMs.
- [12:38]
A
I love that. I love the data pulling and be able to dig deeper in there. And it kind of brings me back to a thought I had earlier, which is the historical practice of on site SEO versus off page. Right. What are, I mean, what can you share with the audience that you think would be helpful around the topic of on site SEO or technical site changes vis a vis this AI wave that we're in?
- [13:06]
B
I'm really excited about this part of the space. Most people are not. Right. Most people are really caught up on like what's going to happen with YouTube and did we get enough.
- [13:14]
A
That was my Next question.
- [13:16]
B
And it's about the content. Right. Because these LLM are a content vehicle. They provide you text based responses in many instances. Right. There's this appetite to really focus on that. But accessibility is going to become a major, major topic. And I can already tell you that there's one major key difference between what Google is doing and what OpenAI or Perplexity or Claude and to some extent possibly Gemini and Copilot. A Gemini and Copilot I'm going to put off to a corner for a second.
- [13:51]
A
Right.
- [13:52]
B
Because they are pegged to a search engine.
- [13:54]
A
Yeah.
- [13:55]
B
One is big. Not to say that it's big, but it's there. And the other is Google. And so we're going to put those off to the corner for a second. Second.
- [14:04]
A
Yep.
- [14:04]
B
What everybody hopefully takes away from this podcast. Because this is the most important thing that I will probably share with you. Literally.
- [14:10]
A
Drumroll.
- [14:11]
B
Drumroll it is. I wish we could. Can you have the editors inject a drum roll? Here's the most important thing I will share with you. LLMs are grounded to search results. If you go in to an LLM and you put in a prompt, may it be Gemini, copilot, ChatGPT, you are likely to get grounded to a set of search results in a search engine. And this grounding concept is super critical for everyone to understand because your success in search will likely predicate your success in an LLM response. And I don't see grounding going away anytime soon. With the two exceptions that we were talking about earlier, we'll talk about that later. Your ability to still outrank your competition has this direct impact into whether or not you're going to show up in a response from an LLM.
- [15:02]
A
Yeah.
- [15:03]
B
And I think that one of the things that most of us don't understand is how that happens, why that happens. And there's a lot of topics out there in our industry about this. Things like fan out queries, which is the relationship of these queries to the prompt that a user puts in. There are now good data sources. Like Bing is providing an AI performance overview that's showing you the specific AI grounding queries that Copilot and likely chatgpt, they say partners are using kind of
- [15:31]
A
a webmaster tools for AI.
- [15:33]
B
Exactly, exactly. And this is super important for us to understand because it's really our first clue into real data as to what's happening in these models. And it's our first foray into like, what are, what are some of the contextual decisions that these LLMs are making and making a decision on in order to best inform the user. So I'll give you an example. If, if you go into an LLM today and you type in something about say, buying a vehicle or, or, or, or going on a vacation or any of those high priced decisions that we all make, which LLMs are great at helping us refine those kinds of things, I can almost, with 100% certainty tell you that one of those grounding queries is probably going to be about price or economic value. It's going to happen. And knowing what those are in relation to, the types of prompts or the type of industry you're in is super important because then it dictates a better clarity around your content strategy, your editorial strategy, your site structure and organization, your refinement. So if you're refining your products on your website in a way, you probably want to do it to best align with how those grounding queries or that refinement in the LLM is being done. So, long story short, the thing that I want everyone to take away is LLMs are foundationally connected to search. And this foundational connection means that you have to make your websites accessible to search engines. There's a whole new set of requirements likely coming as to what that means for an LLM, because LLMs will never crawl the entire Internet like Google has. That is Google's mission. It is to crawl the entire Internet and they spend billions of dollars doing it. They have massive infrastructure and systems in order to do this, and no AI company is going to do the same.
- [17:26]
A
A little bit of a moat, I think I've heard. Right, of course.
- [17:29]
B
Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
- [17:30]
A
No, no, I don't think it's an easy thing to catch up to. In other words, not at all.
- [17:36]
B
Not at all. And no one's going to do it. There's no, there's no reason for them to do it. And that's where Gemini and Copilot might have a different approach to how their models work in the future. Because if they can bypass the concept of grounding and use their core index data, there might be an advantage or a unique value add in terms of how these systems are built. But then back to your original question. How we as business owners, websites, web developers and web designers, marketers and content contributors, we all think about how those systems get access to our websites.
- [18:15]
A
Yeah. If you're OpenAI just as an example, and you're not as anchored on the search engine for that access, if you will, for those that are not as familiar with kind of how the players are drawing from data, how does that player work on it versus a Gemini when it's not maybe, as it obviously doesn't have its own engine yet as much as Google does?
- [18:38]
B
Well, I mean, they're literally going into the search engines. They're tapping the search engine complexity cloth.
- [18:43]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [18:43]
B
Like these. They're literally going straight into Google or Bing and they're looking at what is this website that's showing up. And of these 10 web pages, do I want to take one or two of them and then go crawl those?
- [18:55]
A
Right.
- [18:55]
B
But you have to remember, if you look at any rankings or results from Google, you're going to get hundreds, if not tens of thousands, if not millions of web pages that are related to that search query.
- [19:05]
A
And just to kind of piggyback on that, isn't that why Google was like, hey, we're not going to allow you access to as much as we have? Essentially limiting the number of links and the number of.
- [19:18]
B
We are, we are about six months away from a accessibility war that's going to unleash and likely happen here in the US because this isn't just about accessibility of a massive conglomerate search engine to all these AI models and them not wanting or limiting how they pull their search results. That's one accessibility component. The other one is many of us have brands and work at established brands or we work at an agency that supports brands, and our brands have a whole bunch of content in context and we are going to want to limit or choose what they use. And that's also going to become a huge predicator. I know that there's major brands right now, Fortune 100 brands that are sitting down going, I don't know If I want ChatGPT using my financial models content, and I don't know if I want Gemini to be using my healthcare summary sections. I'm nervous about this. And so I'm just gonna block them entirely and prevent any models from training, accessing or using my content. And so there's a whole accessibility war coming. And it's. And right now it is a heavy investment for big tech to like manage and regulate. And there is no, like, oh, just put this one little thing in the tags and it's gonna stop the LLMs from crawling.
- [20:46]
A
Yeah, cat and mouse game will continue. Didn't cloudflare come out as a selling point to really push that? They could help throttle that.
- [20:52]
B
Cloudflare came out with some nice articles and some nice messaging around how to manage that and regulate. I think that they're going to become a player as well as a bunch of others in helping companies think about regulating how models, LLMs or AI companies access their information. And remember, this is only going to get democratized beyond the core LLM models that exist. Think about a future that's two to three years away from now where all of a sudden there's a whole bunch of AI models only dedicated to health care, only health care. And they're just running around scouring the Internet for information just about health care. And so like that's, that's a reality. Right? Like, I think that these things are going to become highly verticalized as well. And you're not just going to be thinking about ChatGPT or perplexity, these big names in the space. You're going to find a whole new slew of entrants that are trying to sell their data to other companies or sell that context to pharma companies who are doing drug research and drug development. There's a whole, whole other ecosystem.
- [22:03]
A
Is there a world, I think about 0 to 1. I think about monopolies, I think about moats, I think about all the great growth best practices like network effects that we're familiar with and we've talked about with our clients and inside businesses, et cetera. Is there a world like with this explosion that you think that we're almost entering, like a slightly back to the future beginnings of Web 2.0 when a new technology comes into place, there's a race to adopt it and there's this frenzy to figure it out and regulations are catching up and competitors are catching up and what you kind of alluded to. I wonder if there's a world where you kind of reference democratization. We almost go back to that blog world, dare I say era, where it's like a little bit more democratized and there's less of the gatekeepers of meta, Google, Amazon. Do you think that's possible? It could happen? Or am I being Pollyanna or overly optimistic about what could come? I mean, it could go the other way too.
- [23:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, it could. I mean, so, so here's the existential question about what's happening with websites, digital businesses, online businesses, or any brand that needs a digital footprint. Right. Like if you need any form of digital presence, which is, in my opinion, 99.9% of companies, there are some that don't need it. There's no question there are some that just don't need it. Yeah, they're very, very few. Yeah, but, but they exist. It's like, it's like A stat. I recently heard that in the United States, 98% of Americans have a cell phone. But I would love to know the 2%. Like that 2% is a very unique people.
- [23:44]
A
The dumb phone owners would be intriguing as well. There's like a little.
- [23:48]
B
I'm just talking about some selling. I know there's a whole new like generation of people who want flip phones. That's a different conversation. The flip phone, the returning flip phone.
- [23:57]
A
Coming back.
- [23:58]
B
It's coming back.
- [23:58]
A
It' but separate episode of the pot.
- [24:02]
B
So back to the question here, which is like the ability to win in this space, to be a competitor in this new space, this new era. It is a massive change from what Google used to be. Because Google gave power to very, very, very small and very, very unheard of brands and companies and businesses.
- [24:28]
A
Especially in the early days.
- [24:29]
B
In the early days. I mean, whether it be affiliates, whether it be network affiliates, all these. Exactly, exactly.
- [24:36]
A
Rascals.
- [24:37]
B
But let's talk about it. Because these were players who had a technology advantage that big established companies didn't have. And so they could create a footprint in a digital way that no one else could do. Right. There are, there are tens of thousands of now retired travel agents, but they had a little office in a little town and they would, you'd walk into their office and you'd buy your ticket to fly to Mexico or whatever vacation or trip you're in.
- [25:09]
A
Crazy.
- [25:10]
B
Those days are gone. You go to an OTA. And OTAs are basically giant affiliates for what? Hotels and flights booking? Yeah, exactly.
- [25:20]
A
Et cetera.
- [25:21]
B
Exactly. I mean these are giant companies now. Right. But they didn't start as giant companies. They started as a technology revolution. And they took advantage of organic search, of affiliate plays, of all these things that they could scale because they had a technology advantage over the small little travel agent in a small town. And so here's the point of all that. Will AI search or AI discovery, will LLMs allow for a new set or a new generation of innovative companies to be spawned in a new way? The answer is yes. The one big difference here though is that it's not going to come on the backs of arbitraging big brands. That happened a lot in Google Search, a lot in old established companies like the, the, the Home Depot, the Coca Cola is. And the Barnes and Nobles is a great example that is completely decimated by, by Amazon. Yeah, right. Those companies did not want to or did not have the foresight to invest appropriately in their digital technology, technology and accessibility of their web presence.
- [26:31]
A
Yeah.
- [26:32]
B
And thus a Whole new slew of competitors came in and aid them up now, whether it be affiliates or other new brands that came up online. We can debate that later on.
- [26:42]
A
Sure.
- [26:43]
B
That's not going to happen with AI because AI is going to understand the context of a brand and Google didn't for the better part of 10 years when they first started.
- [26:52]
A
Crazy. Fascinating. Yeah. And it kind of goes back to a thought I had earlier when you were talking. It feels like, not to make too many broad strokes, but there's a possibility this could raise the bar for all people in the ecosystem. The consumer has more access to data. Some essentially like a. An assistant to kind of help them make better decisions. Businesses have the same exact darn thing. We're basically as informed as we want to be now to some extent. And it almost feels like we can serve each other better if we're thinking of it that way and we have that intention and that agency that gets thrown around too much. But it could be an interesting world where, I don't know, I got a optimistic theme out of what you said. I think I just was kind of building on that.
- [27:37]
B
Yeah. We're all very reliant already on what LLMs can do for us.
- [27:43]
A
Yeah.
- [27:43]
B
Whether it be us looking up a recipe or for us looking up parent advice. We're going to LLMs for that stuff, Right.
- [27:50]
A
Yeah.
- [27:50]
B
Because we don't have to read a mommy blog. We don't have to get anything wrong. A chef blog. And I'm not a chef. I just. Yeah, I just need the ingredients. I'm at Whole Foods now and I was the worst. Yeah.
- [28:05]
A
You have to scroll down to like, I got to get to the bottom.
- [28:08]
B
I'm going to an LLM for that. I'm just going to. It's going to give me the list of.
- [28:11]
A
You're like, stop. Give me a brief answer.
- [28:13]
B
Give me.
- [28:15]
A
I'm addicted.
- [28:16]
B
And you can. And you can carve it into what you want. It can be a brief answer. It can be.
- [28:20]
A
Yeah.
- [28:20]
B
You can turn it into a whipped
- [28:23]
A
cream part of it.
- [28:23]
B
Exactly.
- [28:24]
A
Yeah.
- [28:25]
B
And that's. That's the massive advantage that these systems have is they give consumers a far more complete and immediate response without all the noise. Now, this is bad for certain industries, for publishers and for news companies.
- [28:39]
A
That's what I want to get to. That's the downside I want to talk about. So we talk a lot about. Well, these guys are the fuel of the ecosystem or the R and D of affiliate. And these content creators are so important, whether it's wirecutter or New York Times or a local newspaper. If you step back and put yourself in the pubs, publishers, shoes, what's going on there? Like, what do you think? I think it'd be interesting for people to even understand, like, what's actually happening between them and Google, between them and OpenAI, because I don't think that gets talked about outside of our circles that much and even inside our circles. And I would love to hear your perspective on that concerning piece.
- [29:22]
B
So I got two schools of thought on this. Yeah, you're gonna think I'm a total lunatic because both of them are absolutely crazy. Right?
- [29:29]
A
Hit me.
- [29:30]
B
So I'm gonna go with the more pessimistic, and then I'm gonna go with the optimistic one. So the pessimistic one is that major, major publishers are going to have to get their wallets out and truly buy off government officials in this country and lobbyists to genuinely create change in what is and desperately needs to be a highly regulated industry. Search, discovery, whatever you want to call it. This needs regulation.
- [29:56]
A
Not the first time that's happened.
- [29:58]
B
It's not. And we desperately need it. I mean, this is no different than any other major concomitant industry. And I mean, as we're recording. I know. I think today or yesterday, Zuck is being. He's actually in a court, in a civil court case right now in Los Angeles regarding whether or not Facebook is essentially a broken product that is built to manipulate and manipulate and confine children into using their platform. Like this is happening right now. But this is a civil case. This is a civil case. It's super important for us to have that context.
- [30:36]
A
Because it's like mom and dad are the plaintiff.
- [30:38]
B
Exactly.
- [30:38]
A
Zuckerberg, please take the stand.
- [30:41]
B
Right, exactly. And so that's the problem, is that we need to think about how we're gonna regulate this. And I think publishers are gonna have to really be the first to speak up, because what they have as an asset, which is their newsrooms and their editorial teams and these very smart and very capable and bright people who contribute to this whole ecosystem and the audience that pays them for their subscriptions is now getting ripped off because these models are taking that information and regurgitating it in an AI model that is fully protected under US Law. And so their ability to regurgitate that stuff is fully protected. So we need different regulation, need different laws. So that's the. That's the pessimist view, because I don't think.
- [31:20]
A
Yeah, but I think it's a good. It's a Good call to action at the end. Not to stop you from the optimistic side that's coming, but like, I mean,
- [31:27]
B
they never come now.
- [31:32]
A
New regulations, good things. Keep up with the tech lawmakers. Yeah, yeah.
- [31:37]
B
So. So the optimist view. The optimist view is that this is going to create a whole new uprising in local information and context and media. We are going to go to our local communities and we're going to want to create real, genuine relationships that are in our own backyards. Because we're going to want real. We're not going to want a regurgitated L response in certain instances. And so we're going to choose to get up out of our home and we're going to go to our local churches and our local centers and. Yeah, right here. Anywhere. Anywhere in America. I mean, I think.
- [32:15]
A
I couldn't agree more.
- [32:17]
B
I think that that that's the other swing of this.
- [32:19]
A
Right.
- [32:19]
B
And I mean, it's funny, I was listening to a podcast about how much the traditional movie industry has grown in the last couple of years. People are going back to DVDs, people are going back to DHS, people are going back to these media forums because it's physical, it can't be manipulated, it can't be like transferred. It's in my hands and I can take it and I can put it right into my TV and I can watch that 100 times, one time, five times, I can fast forward and I don't, I don't have to pay 699 to download it and then it disappears the next day. Like none of those gimmicks, the holiday
- [32:56]
A
movies that you buy every year, which you don't need to rebuy every year
- [33:00]
B
that people are going back to that. And I think there's a reason because there's a. It's not about the nostalgia. Everyone wants to talk about the nostalgia. It's about because it's freaking real. It's just real. That's it.
- [33:09]
A
It's real. Is. Is. That hits hard. Yeah, there's a. I mean, I've talked for ad nauseam about the lack of trust and that's, that's such an interesting hit. It's like if something is genuine and legit and you've got your hands on it, you can't, you can't question it. Whereas if it's in the digital world, it's, it can be revoked any time. Is a very interesting concept that we. It's fascinating to hear that the rebound in the movie deal. Yeah, that's wild. Going back to some of the I don't want to dwell on the tactics of SEO and AI, but I'm just curious. From your view shoe player in the E Comm game, consumer brand, let's say they're kind of navigating this world with someone like yourself, is there some things that you kind of say you need to stop doing the following or you need to not fall into this particular trap? I imagine you and I see patterns quite a bit. What patterns are you seeing with a brand of that type? Hypothetical. That's kind of like hey gang, you need to. And maybe it's sort of what you've covered already, but what would you say like, hey, either stop doing this or hey, watch out for this. In this whole new era that we're
- [34:19]
B
kind of dealing in, I think that one of the things that most business owners, brands, a lot of agency folks don't realize is that the cheap fast path has never worked and it always fails because it crumbles under the stress test of human evaluation. If a human evaluates what you produce, whether it be machine generated content or you paid off hundreds of influencers to promote the crap out of your product, but it's a crap product, it doesn't pass the test. It doesn't pass the test, it doesn't pass the human test. And so I think that we fail to recognize that. I mean don't get me wrong, can it create a quick hit? Can it catapult your initial sales? Absolutely. But it will come back and it will haunt you. And I think that's one of the the reasons why all these LLMs went to Reddit is because they don't want to get game. They want to see the real human interaction and discourse of this product being a garbage product or this not being what false advertised. In this social media hack that was spun up, you still have to make a good product, you still have to be genuine, you still have to create relationships. I still have to fly to Austin to record in person with Ty because this matters more than any other quick trick hack that I can come up with. This will last longer than any article that I can spin up with AI can send your way.
- [35:57]
A
I mean I can't top that. I think that's just put a bow on this thing and call it a day. Let's go eat some barbecue.
- [36:03]
B
Let's do it.
- [36:04]
A
Anything. Yeah. I mean we could go on and on. And there's the collision of SEO and affiliate. We obviously are excited and loving that. And so we're digging into GEO impact on affiliate and how it overlaps with what you're doing. But is there anything related to that or stuff that you think's coming ahead for 26? I think you kind of gave it to us. Is there anything that you want to point out or call out for the audience that you think is interesting?
- [36:28]
B
One thing I'll leave everyone with, and I think this is a fun one. It's more personal.
- [36:32]
A
Right.
- [36:33]
B
One of the activities I've been doing a lot more lately is humifying my emails. So my emails are highly AI assisted at this point. Right. Whether it's in our Google workspace at work where we have Gemini in there, or in some cases when I have a really important one, I might go to ChatGPT and try to upload a bunch of stuff and really kind of create a refined email. But when I look at my emails now, I'm trying to be more conscientious of humifying, humifying them, making them feel human. Like, is this. Is this me? Is this the way I would say stuff? Is this normally how Jordan communicates?
- [37:07]
A
You mean you're not just clicking the default option on Google Gmail?
- [37:10]
B
No, no, not at all. It sounds good, pal, but think about it, because we have our own styles of communication. I have my own style. Some people like it, some people don't like it. But if everybody starts speaking Gemini, it's not great. It's not fun. I sent an email yesterday to a friend of mine whose father passed away. So sad situation. I'm not gonna deny I needed some help from AI to figure it out. How do I communicate? This is a tough thing to share. And it gave me some good ideas. And one of the ideas it gave me and I wrote the thing myself. This was human written, but one of the things that it gave me was it gave me the last sentence that I really felt was really good, which was, hey, there's no need for you to respond to this email. I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you. And that was like. I was like, that's good. That's really good. And that's me. That's like that. I would say that to this person if I was talking to them.
- [38:04]
A
Yeah.
- [38:05]
B
And so I'm not saying, hey, ditch AI entirely and start writing all of your emails manually, but spend the time to humify them and make them real. That's all.
- [38:16]
A
That's beautiful. I couldn't wrap it up any better. Jordan, it's always a pleasure, man. Thanks for coming. Always. See you soon, my friend.
- [38:23]
B
Thank you.
- [38:23]
A
Thanks, everybody.