Ross Dunn (3:20)

Fun, fun. So much fun. Okay, well, you. You should take this one too because you. You found this. Sure.

Scott Vanack (3:29)

So this is kind of fun. I. I was going through a bunch of old SEO 101s. I was trying to find something specific like a. A tool. And I still can't think of what the tool was. It was a tool that made it really simple for comparing market share and things like that across different tool across different platforms. And it was a very specific site that was really good. And I can't find it anywhere. It's not my bookmarks. No, I don't think that's it, but I'll look for that one. I'm sure we had talked about it on SEO101 at some point and I just can't find it. Anyways, so I'm going through transcripts of old shows and I found a transcript that is just a good reminder, a good PSA on why if you plan on using your transcripts, you to proofread them. So if you're using voice or data, anything that's been transcribed, don't just post it anywhere without looking at it. This was not posted publicly, so I mean, we didn't make a mistake here. But I did find this funny. And it's from SEO101 at the beginning when Ross is actually after a break. Welcome back to SEO101 on WMR, hosted by myself, Rustan, CEO of step 4th but 4th, not f o u r th and his senior SEO Vanek. I'm just Vanek now, not even Van Ak. So it's my last name wrong and my first name disappeared. I don't know where my first name went, but it is now gone. Maybe there's a glitch in that recording. Oh, I should have checked the audio for that. Maybe. Maybe you glitched out and never said my first name.

Ross Dunn (4:53)

I doubt it. Definitely old. Yeah, some of the old algorithms are the old. What do you call it? Old models. Old AI models were really bad at transcription. Like, although, you know, I, I won't torture anyone with a Rastafarian accent, but that sounded so.

Scott Vanack (5:16)

You know, I, I was gonna suggest this and I didn't, but I don't think we would have done it anyways. For when you did your intro to the show. To use those names in the intro. Just, just for this episode. People like, what.

Ross Dunn (5:25)

What is.

Scott Vanack (5:26)

What's he talking about?

Ross Dunn (5:27)

Yeah. And maybe a terrible Jamaican accent. Rustad.

Scott Vanack (5:32)

I don't know. You might get cancelled for that one.

Ross Dunn (5:35)

I don't know. I would. And probably. Oh dear. Yes. Well, thank goodness we did not do that. Yeah. Let's jump into some past predictions. So these are my own. This is going to be lengthy, but I wanted to go through it now. Part of this was something that Kevin Indig did, a friend of mine, and I thought, this is brilliant. He goes by and he kind of makes sense really. He goes and he looks at how. How were his guesses from last year and then he reflects on what his new ones are going to be for this year. So how were mine for last year? First of all, I said that Google will demonstrate that it's ahead in AI technology, possibly with products like XR glasses with X advanced AI features. Well, the XR glasses are still not released, but they did do one thing correctly. They definitely demonstrated they were ahead in AI. They were so far behind, they even admitted, admit Singal admitted they were behind. I think they were just tentative about it, but then ChatGPT just jumped in and went all like hardcore. But AI Google has launched so much AI in 2025 that it's his name anyway, the guy from AI. Sam Altman. Yeah, Sam Altman, like announced like Code Red. They need to start working harder and getting things out faster because Google has really taken a lot of their business. So I wasn't wrong entirely. But yeah, I did hope those XR glasses were coming and they haven't come and. And by the looks of them, the first generation I'm going to avoid. They just. Why did it take so long? I don't know. Yeah, they look ugly. They just. Anyway, and they always have that Wayfarer look, like the Metaglasses they have the Wayfarer glasses, you know, the classic ones from Risky Business kind of thing. But anyway, those don't Suit my face. So I'm kind of waiting. All right, next up, AI agents, which are autonomous systems that can perform specific tasks based on simple human prompts, will become more usable and prevalent in SEO and other domains. Well, this is absolutely true. In fact, according to McKinsey's State of AI in 2025, 62% of survey respondents say the organizations, sorry, their organizations are at least experimenting with AI agents. That's huge. I mean 62%, I mean that's probably from 10% in 2024. That's mind blowing. Talking about growth that's just unprecedented. Next, the use of AI by the general public will skyrocket. Predicted skyrocket. I predicted. I predicted. Can't speak today to reach 50 to 60% of people having tried AI by 2025. Well, the result globally. No, I was way off globally. It's still one in six people. But I wasn't really talking globally. I'm always sort of thinking North America. And there I was on point almost scarily. In the USA, 61% have used AI within a six month period. And 51% of Canadians. So dead on.

Scott Vanack (9:10)

I wonder what the percentage is for people that use it regularly and consistently because I know a lot of people will dive in and just try it, check it out and then abandon. I know a few people personally that are like that, but then there's people like us who use it every single day.

Ross Dunn (9:26)

So yeah, and then there's some who are literally spending a 12 hours a day just doing it. And that's probably the 5, maybe 10%, maybe it's the size 10%. There's crazy amount of that right now. I try to track them and I, I just feel so overwhelmed. It's it like I, I try to monitor what they're doing and I just lose my mind. It's akin to trying to becoming a social media Expert and like 2015 while you're doing something else full time. It's just, there's too much happening and with AI it's even more, more so. And it's technical as hell. There's no you know what stat crazy.

Scott Vanack (10:07)

You know what stat I would like to see, which I don't even know if you could, if it exists, is how many people have used AI without knowing they're using AI. Like one example, I ordered a pizza a couple weeks ago and I, I was like not sure if I was talking to AI or a real person. The whole call was just, it was like eerily AI or the person was very robotic. So I wasn't really? Sure. And it freaked me out. Totally freaked out. And when I went to pick up the pizza, I asked him, like, do you guys use AI for your ordering? And it's like, this is a big, big company that I ordered from. And she said, no, they. They. They don't use AI for it. So it was. It turned out it was an actual human that sounds like a robot.

Ross Dunn (10:43)

But anyways, they have a future.

Scott Vanack (10:46)

Yeah, no kidding. Nobody will know. But my point was that that sort of thing happens now where you phone and you don't know if you're working with AI or not. And it's. And it's just going to get better and less transparent.

Ross Dunn (11:00)

Yeah. Or worse, depending how you look at it. In fact, one of the things that I should have added to my predictions, because I think it's going to be an absolute nightmare, is they've gotten too good. These AIs have gotten so good that they can actually emulate our voice. That could easily train an AI on our voices from our podcast. Oh, easy. And then contact our parents or someone and say, hey, I need something. I'm stuck. I need money. And this is going to happen, and I guarantee it's going to happen this year. We're going to see more of it this year. I couldn't be more positive because these scammers are fairly advanced, so we need.

Scott Vanack (11:43)

To start doing the podcast with Rastafarian accents is what we need to do.

Ross Dunn (11:48)

Yeah. Keep using little terms that are always us. Yeah. Cheerio. I don't know if AI can screw up as much as I do when I'm speaking, so we'll see.

Scott Vanack (11:58)

That's right. Ross sounds very eloquent. This can't be him.

Ross Dunn (12:01)

Yeah, it can't be him, but it's going to happen. And I really feel my heart breaks for senior citizens because they're going to be taken to the laundry. It's going to be frightening. Yeah. In fact, I think I read something, and this is a good tip for everyone. I know it's not a CEO, but it's so important. It's so dear to my heart. I don't want to see senior citizens hurt, and I don't want to see people being taken. I think they. They. Something I read suggested that you have some sort of a code word that you use with your parents. Now, will they remember it? You're gonna have to put it somewhere where they remember it.

Scott Vanack (12:38)

That's right.

Ross Dunn (12:39)

Something that will say, you know, this is me. This is not someone else. And that's going to be the Kind of stuff we're going to get tips about this year.

Scott Vanack (12:47)

That's a good point. I'm going to do that. My mom will forget it, but I'll do it.

Ross Dunn (12:53)

Tattoo this on your hand. Okay, next up, AI sandboxes. Now these are knowledge bases restricted to specific data. Sour will become widespread among techies and in SEO. They'll be used to answer questions based strictly on uploaded proprietary content. Now I'd already been using this for a couple years with a tool called Odin, which is great. It was, it's really saw ahead and it does some crazy stuff now that even those things don't do. But it's getodin AI if you want to check it out. I'm pretty impressed with it. But essentially you could upload all of the manuals, all of the details about your business, everything you could put in all of your marketing from when you started marketing to now and then as a sort of a database or a knowledge base, and then ask it questions and ask it to create better solutions, all these different things. Well, you could do that then. And what I'm saying is it's going to be rolled out. And yes, projects were rolled out. That's what they're calling them. Projects were rolled out to the general public by ChatGPT in October 2025, which allow for AI sandboxes and memory. Memory being the coolest thing. Before it kind of had a memory like it could look at the documents, but that wasn't so much of a memory, it was more like it could refer to the knowledge base. But now it actually creates, I like to use Claude. It creates a separate section that you can access, which is the memory. You can't manually edit it, but you can tell it what to edit and you can see what is written. It's really, really cool. Very cool. Like looking at your short term memory. But it's the AI's short term memory. Very, very neat. Next up, ChatGPT Search or Search GPT will open access to the public without requiring an account by mid-2025, though possibly later. By then ads will also be incorporated to monetize the platform. Well, it happened earlier than I thought. On February 5, 2025, ChatGPT's web search feature became available to all users without an account. Ads, however, have not come yet. To my utter shock, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has expressed caution. He says, stating that while they may try ads at some point, they need to take great care to get it right, to maintain user trust. Listen to that. I mean, Google could Take a piece out of that. The consensus is that ads primarily target free tier users, while paid users may remain ad free. I don't believe that. I mean, Sam Altman started this as a nonprofit and it's very far from a nonprofit now. Yeah, it was a mandate to be nonprofit and now it's so for profit it's ridiculous. So. Yeah, whatever. My favorite note here though is that if you go to searchgpt.com which was what they were using. Yes, it was kind of a test, but it was broadly marketed as SearchGPT. So if you go to searchgpt.com it redirects you to chatgpt.com forward/search. Sounds right. Right. Well, no, that's a 404 error.

Scott Vanack (16:19)

What they need to hire us.

Ross Dunn (16:21)

They do. It just goes to show that even, even they should be listening to SEO 101 because the basics are lost so often. It's mind blowing. It's just. How many people are they losing to a 404 page?

Scott Vanack (16:38)

Just.

Ross Dunn (16:38)

Wow. Anyway, I. It will probably be hopefully be fixed by the time you listen to this, but check it out. I bet. I almost wonder if it will be because they're so big. It's when companies become that big, it's like they don't even care about those mistakes and they just build upon themselves. But anyway, check it out.

Scott Vanack (16:56)

It's like it doesn't matter.

Peloton Announcer (16:58)

Yeah.

Ross Dunn (16:58)

So just try going to searchgpt.com and see if it leads you to 404 error. And if you don't, it does get a chuckle because that's pretty dumb. That's really dumb. AI overviews will regularly occupy about 20 PI. 20 PI 25. See, AI can't make those kind of mistakes.

Scott Vanack (17:18)

Now I want pie.

Ross Dunn (17:19)

Yeah. We'll regularly occupy about 25% of the visible search results space in Google with increased ad presence. Well, our program has pretty much nailed it. AI overviews went from 6.5% of queries in January to 25% in July. They did, however, pull back to under 16% by November, indicating. So they're testing it and adjusting. But they did get up there. There's speculation that Google may be ordered to break up by the US Department of Justice. This is one of my dream predictions. Unfortunately, that did not happen. Judge Amit Mehta blocked this for a few reasons, but one of them was that, quote, the emergence of artificial intelligence and competitive threats from services like ChatGPT and Perplexity were seen as a factor reshaping the search market, which the judge felt mitigated. The need for extreme structural remedies. Unquote. Yeah, no, Google's already taking the farm like they're. They're taking so much of ChatGPT's market share already by launching better AI. So I don't. I, I'm quite cheesed that that didn't happen. Anyway, whatever. Another dream prediction. Google may finally curb local spam. Not. It's just as bad, if not worse than ever. It's.

Scott Vanack (18:46)

Why don't you copy and paste that prediction for the upcoming actual predictions for 2026? Because we'll just do it every year and eventually. True.

Ross Dunn (18:55)

Yeah, eventually. Yeah. I wouldn't be putting money on it, that's for sure. This was a kind of a dream prediction as well. The Bing would rise to a 10% plus market share and search GPT may reach 15% market share by the end of 2025 depending on wider public access. While the result was that Bing reached its highest 7.5% US market share in 2025, this was the highest percentage ever for Bing according to Statista, or at least one of them. Very, very close to the highest. So they got fairly high, but not 10% and only 4 to 5% globally. I didn't check chat GPT's growth, but it was huge. I'm sure that that went way beyond 15% market share. Well, it is for AI but not for general search. I think Google still 90% of general search. Yeah, challenges for AI. This was a little broader, but I believe that there would be growing issues regarding the energy and resources required to power AI, including the need for new infrastructure such as nuclear reactors reportedly being built for Google and concerns about the limitations of data for training. Okay, so yes, I was on point here. I won't get into all this because this really isn't SEO101, but it's gotten so bad. There's nearby residents in North Carolina are being gouged in their electricity bills to help pay for all this stuff. People are. There's been protests over cooling for AI data centers, all the water that's being used. Google made several announcements in 2025 regarding nuclear power, significant amounts of it, including developing three new ones. Microsoft signed a 20 year deal to purchase power from the Three Mile island in Pennsylvania that was the one that melted down. Which energy company is committed to reviving. Interesting. And yes, I hoped lastly to get my hands on some Android XR glasses if they ever launched in Canada. But no, not even in the USA have they launched. So I expect I'll probably wait till 2030 in Canada. All right, Scott, what were yours?

Scott Vanack (21:07)

Mine is way less comprehensive than yours and I didn't really prepare the current results for many of these, so it'll be going off the cuff a little bit, but that's all right. And my predictions, as usual, I'm really bad at predictions. And so mine are much more.

Ross Dunn (21:24)

You were right, most of them.

Scott Vanack (21:25)

I was, I was so right on everything. No, that's not totally true. So one of them was that significant advances in a. I will continue especially in search related tools like SEMrush, Screaming Frog, which will likely get better AI integrations. So yeah, obviously that happened. You know, all these tools are growing and integrating AI and, and adding APIs so that like Screaming Frog can access chat, GPT and all that kind of stuff. If you're just sort of a regular user, I don't think you really notice it. But if you're advanced and you're really diving into Screaming Frog, there's. There's a lot of stuff that even I have no idea what it is, but it, it is so advanced if you want it to be. But it's also very 101 on the surface, so I guess that's good for the regular users. They can. They don't get scared.

Ross Dunn (22:13)

I should, I should mention that when I was doing some pretty advanced analysis using AI, although it didn't work out all the time for SEO, it did give me some really interesting settings for Screaming Frog that included AI and a whole bunch of stuff that seemed to work. So you could always try digging into the advanced aspects of Scrivening Frog. Of course, I'm speaking to SEOs out there that may be listening, but it's really mind blowing. I don't know how to express it. Like, I did not. I feel like I was scratching the bare surface of what scribbing Frog can do. It's really created itself into quite an animal. It's amazing.

Scott Vanack (22:55)

We've come a long way from the days of Zenu Link Sleuth, that's for sure.

Ross Dunn (23:01)

Yes.

Scott Vanack (23:02)

And the funny thing is, Zenu is awesome in its time. I don't even know if it still exists.

Ross Dunn (23:07)

Awesome for its simplicity. We used it for years or over a decade, even when more complex things were coming out. It was just so easy. Yeah.

Scott Vanack (23:14)

And it got you what you needed. This one's definitely true. Content creation using AI will grow rapidly. Automation of AI content will become more widespread, though quality is a concern.

Peloton Announcer (23:26)

Yeah.

Scott Vanack (23:26)

I mean, I even have a note here. Yeah, this is obvious. It was one of those predictions like that Duh, this is going to happen. The quality is definitely still an issue and a concern. But it's getting better. It's getting a lot better. I've been using it here and there for content creation and you know, you have to do your edits and check things out, but it's pretty good most of the time. Automation. There are a lot of websites out there that are just doing their own thing. You know, AI is just running the site, posting new content with limited human interaction, which you shouldn't be doing that. Don't do that. But it's happening, it's. And it's just going to keep happening.

Ross Dunn (24:03)

Yeah. They called that AI Slop. That's actually made it into one of the words of the year. Slop.

Scott Vanack (24:10)

There is a really good clip. Go to YouTube and search for John Oliver. Last week, tonight AI slop, he did a segment on it.

Ross Dunn (24:18)

Good.

Scott Vanack (24:18)

And if you haven't seen it, it's. Well, you know, if you're sensitive to bad language, don't watch it. But if you're familiar with John Oliver and you like John Oliver, the AI Slop segment, I think it's about five or six minutes long. Really, really funny.

Ross Dunn (24:31)

It's really good. True benefit to humanity. I love him just.

Scott Vanack (24:37)

Oh, he's the best guy. He's so good.

Ross Dunn (24:40)

Yeah. And with automation, it's interesting. I was going through. Scott knows I have a problem or it's better now, but I was probably. I had a real problem with buying stuff from Appsumo and I was going through my list. I decided to throw it into notion. I'm really good at database system and I'm going through every single one and there's over 200 apps and a lot of them were AI once. I mean, it's just like a roll of the dice. These are lifetime memberships. You buy one and you get lifetime access. Sometimes they, they bite you in the butt, sometimes they pay off. I've got some that I've saved thousands of dollars on because I bought in early. Whether it's a wash at the end, I don't know. Probably pretty close. That said, there were a lot of them that used automating of automation of AI content, but they've all. A lot of them had sort of staled out. They just weren't innovating. And with AI content like, I just, I literally. I've got a little flag I put on and I sing Abandoned, Abandoned, Abandoned. I just. Not that they were abandoned, they were still kind of in use, but they were so dated. There's no point in me even looking at them again. You gotta keep on top of this stuff and AI content. Yeah. I'll get into my predictions later, but there's a lot of change coming. Absolutely.

Scott Vanack (26:08)

Another one. AI will become more useful for SEO audits and site health scans. Yeah, absolutely. It is. There are a lot of tools coming out there. Like YK is a good example where it does competitor comparisons. There's just a lot. I mean we could do a whole show on that. Maybe we should at one point go through the AI tools. But yeah, I mean, definitely that's come true. For sure. AI has or I said that there will be an increased AI presence in search. AI overviews will continue to evolve. Again, maybe it's a dumb prediction, but it's right. So I'll take the win. Even if it's a very, very weak win. Yeah. Anyone that's listened to our show more than once knows that we talk about AI overviews and how it's changed almost every single show. The search experience will move further away from traditional 10 blue links and more towards generative experiences. SGE Search Generative experience with increased imagery and new layouts. You know, we're still mostly seeing the 10 blue links, but you are seeing a lot of, you know, knowledge graph and AI overviews and a lot of stuff happening.

Ross Dunn (27:13)

There was somewhere dead on there. I don't, I don't think the 10 blue links really exist anymore. Yeah, I would say.

Scott Vanack (27:19)

Okay, that's true. There usually are 10 links typically. But they're all scattered a bit more like we talked about a couple shows ago where I saw ads, links, ads, ads, more ads. AI overview. Like, you know, it's more scattered and fragmented now. So. Yeah, it's not.

Ross Dunn (27:35)

I mean, okay, I see where you're going. I mean I'm looking at a result now and yes, in this case there, this one did have kind of the 10 links, but it also had videos. It had the people also ask and all these things are. Have gotten more landscape, you know, they're really taking more space and then the AI overview is so big and you can click show more and it takes more than half the page and you can dive deeper and you know, lots of stuff. Yeah, I think you were pretty on, on point there.

Scott Vanack (28:02)

Yeah. Chat GPT Search.

Ross Dunn (28:05)

Search.

Scott Vanack (28:05)

GPT will see huge growth in market share. You know it. The search aspect definitely is growing for sure. But was interesting. I looked at some stats, I think it was yesterday and if you look at. I guess this isn't search, this is just looking at as An LLM chat GPT has stayed fairly level at around the 80% mark and Gemini is increasing. So they're being caught. If we're talking search, they are taking a bite out of Google from search. So it's like yes and no in terms of market share as to whether or not. But you also have to think there's also way more people using it. So while they're even if their market share percentage is staying flat, their user base is growing. Crazy, right? So there's that and this is kind of a no brainer and will be forever. Google will continue rolling out core updates with without providing clear guidance or explanations. Probably dropping another one around Christmas. Look at that. I couldn't have been more.

Ross Dunn (29:04)

I love that one. That's my favorite.

Scott Vanack (29:06)

I think most people could have predicted that probably the Christmas one because they just have a bad reputation for doing that. They didn't have a lot of core updates this year. I feel like there were only three, four core updates or lots of other updates.

Ross Dunn (29:21)

But I talked to Barry. There's probably 30 that we didn't even pay attention to.

Scott Vanack (29:26)

Isn't that true?

Ross Dunn (29:27)

Right.

Scott Vanack (29:29)

The importance and effort needed for quality content will increase due to AI driven content proliferation. You must have added the word proliferation. That is not a word I use.

Ross Dunn (29:40)

You probably got it from AI.

Scott Vanack (29:42)

Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't even do these predictions. That's why some of them are right. Each will be more crucial. I mean this is totally true and we're definitely seeing that with any content creation. You, you need big time quality if you want to be ranking and the LLMs and Google now and that's just going to keep growing. You need to get that expertise out there more and more than ever.

Ross Dunn (30:03)

He wasn't talking about eating in a local restaurant. He meant E E A T as experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness are all things that are going to be more crucial. And yeah, it's dead on and I'll get more into my in my predictions. But yeah, it's becoming so crucial. Like crucial isn't the right word. It's fundamental underpinning. It is the fundamental underpinning of how these AIs are working now.

Scott Vanack (30:36)

And the last one, which definitely happened in a lot of cases, likely decrease in organic traffic for informational sites as AI search results may sufficiently answer queries without users needing to click. Yeah, we're definitely seeing, you know, zero click searches and things like that happening especially for informational. Oh, I even said less impact is expected for transactional queries. That's True, that happened. The informational queries are really the ones that got hit the most. And who knows what'll happen? It might get even worse. Or maybe people will start clicking. I mean, I don't tend to click on the citations in AI overviews very often, but I do sometimes, so I guess there's that.

Ross Dunn (31:16)

All right, well, let's take a quick break. We come back, we're going to get into our predictions and there's some really good ones here that I think you're going to find very interesting and useful for the year to come. Foreign. Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vanack. All right, so let's jump into your prediction, Scott. What is going to happen in 2026? Oh, you're muted.

Scott Vanack (31:54)

I was muted. I'm not anymore. Yeah. So Chat GBT market share will decline among chat bots. I think, I think that, you know, Perplexity and Gemini and, you know, all the different bots, they're going to increase and, and start cutting into Chat GPT's market share.

Ross Dunn (32:11)

Chat box or.

Scott Vanack (32:14)

Oh, I didn't mean chatbots. Well, I mean, you know, like chat GPT. I didn't mean LLMs amongst our LLMs.

Ross Dunn (32:20)

Okay, I gotcha.

Scott Vanack (32:22)

LLMs. I'm dumb today. It's, you know, we're back from holidays. That's all I can say. I don't know. So, yeah, I think we're going to see that cut back a little bit.

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Scott Vanack (33:54)

I don't know, I just do. I. I don't think they're going to skyrocket relative to their competition other than search.

Ross Dunn (33:59)

We'll see. Yeah, I think the main takeaway there to me is that the Gemini will continue to grow and cut into cat chat GPT. I think. Yeah. Sam Altman's push here will be interesting. He's about to push out in more physical devices that promote voice based, this voice based search and voice interaction with AI and we'll see how that goes. But hardware takes so long to launch, especially with all of the limitations being caused by these data centers just being exploding like RAM prices and all these. I can't even imagine trying to launch a device right now. So we'll see how fast he gets it out there.

Scott Vanack (34:49)

Okay, next AI use in Google Properties will increase. I think this is kind of a no brainer. Google has already started a little bit within Google Search Console allowing you to filter data a bit more easily. You can just ask it and you can generate some reports. It's very limited right now, but I think in Search console, in Google Analytics, maybe in places like YouTube Studio if you're, if you're a content producer, Looker Studio, hopefully when you're setting up stuff because Looker is so confusing to me, I don't know why I can't wrap my brain around it. But if I could go into Looker and say hey, add a report that does pulls data from here, whatever would sure make life easy. And I think we're going to start to see AI in more of those Google properties just making life a bit easier. Hopefully they've already started so I feel like they're not going to stop. Next up, LLMs text adoption. So this is still something that people aren't really using yet. It's not big, but I think it's going to be and I think this year I'm going to start putting it on the LLMs TXT file on all of our client sites because it can't hurt. I don't think it's going to help. So it's not a priority by any stretch. If you're listening, don't run out and do it unless you're bored right now and you have time. But I think platforms are going to start using it. Google actually added it to some of their properties in December and then John Mueller, who had access to one of them, removed it. Some of their other properties still have it. Apparently this was related to a content management system change and not everybody was aware of it. So not everyone's removed it. And this file is also not in some of these Google properties readily accessible because it's not in the root folder. So you don't know it's there. You have to dig for it. And then John Mueller had even said that it's possibly there for other purposes, but didn't say what the other purposes were. So who knows what's going on. But Google's kind of playing with it, it looks like. So I think we're going to start to see places. Yeah, no kidding. He said a lot of. No, not at all. And he's talked a lot about how it's useless and all that kind of stuff. But I think it's going to make an appearance and start to matter a little bit. I don't think it'll ever be a huge, huge thing. But yeah, I expect to see it and see SEO is recommending you add it soon.

Ross Dunn (37:07)

I hope it does have some. I mean, I think it has merit. Whether or not it will or not, I don't know. But the one thing that you know, users out there, if you're using Cloudflare for your content delivery network do be sure. And unless you're really, really, really against AI not to block AI or LLMs, Cloudflare seems to. They wait, they make it really easy to block them. And it's very easy to mistakenly do that, I bet. Not that I've done that before, but I'd be very careful. If you really want to block them, go for it. But you are going to be limiting yourself. It's like blocking yourself to Google in some respects. So do keep it in mind.

Scott Vanack (37:58)

Next up, instant checkout growth. So right now, instant checkout and Chat GPT is, is really early on in the infant stages. It will be rolling out to Shopify users Widespread soon, but it isn't yet. There are some sites that are in sort of a test phase with ChatGPT. Basically what this will allow you to do is you can go to ChatGPT, you do a search, whatever, it'll give you a product listing, maybe, who knows, with a Buy now button where you'll be able to just click buy and it's done and it will purchase a product from the target website, whatever that site may be. The site owner's back end system in Shopify will look as if they had purchased it from their site. So from the business perspective, it's easy to make the sale. They don't have to do anything different. It all goes through the proper channels. But from the user perspective, it's very simple. They just buy it and it's done. There's a lot of that as well in early stages with Google's agentic checkout also in its infancy, should be rolled out in Shopify. I, I see by the end of 2026 this being more widespread and to take it to sort of the next level. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point just doing a Google search you might see products show up. You know, instead of a 10 blue link, a linking, a listing of a product and a buy now button, single click through your Google account or whatever and you'll be able to buy stuff that might be not this year, but it would not shock me one bit if it did show up. Next up, AI overview is becoming personal. So there was a bit of chat about this as well with Robbie Stein. He did a podcast with Claire Duffy from cnn and I can't remember what the podcast was called, but hinted that, you know, Google's AI overviews are personalized as well. And I think this is going to grow significantly. I think it has to. It's just what Google does anyways. And this level of personalization, who knows where it'll go, but I think it'll be pretty significant. I think it'll also to expand this a bit more into local. I think we're going to see. I didn't actually include this in my things because I've seen bits of articles here and there for people predicting what's happening with local and, and things like that. And, and I think local search is going to become a bit more predict or not predictable personalized as well. So for example, let's say you want to get to a business and Google knows you don't have a car, so they might try to prioritize businesses that are on a bus route near your house, things like that, even though they might not be closest or they, or whatever, they're going to try to prioritize things that you have access to or if you have a car and they know you have a car, they might recommend a business that's further away because they know you can easily get there, but it's a better choice, things like that. I think we're going to start to see that sort of level of personalization play into everything in search. Chatbot monetization obviously is going to happen eventually in terms of. Or not necessarily Chatbot. I did it again. LLM monetization. You know, we're going to start seeing paid ads in there. We're going to see instant checkout is going to be a big one. Maybe even affiliate links. We talked about this years ago, years ago with Google can. They're going to just throw affiliate links within search and I guess instant checkout is kind of like that, isn't it? It kind of is an affiliate program in a sense because they're going to take a cut off of these sales.

Ross Dunn (41:19)

So I don't know when I've been, I've been reading about it and the, the guesses are that when they build in any kind of monetization, it's going to be suggested links. Very subtle is what I'm getting at. It's going to be really subtle. It's just going to be part of the response and they're going to make it really easy for you to click on these things. Very Google esque in that sense. Will they say sponsored? Well, they should, but, and, and maybe they will. Maybe they'll say a part of this is sponsored. They won't tell you what part. I don't know. We'll see. It's going to be very interesting to see how they roll it out. And he's going to be very cautious about it, I think because again, they're losing so much market share. But unlike Google. Well, no, Google's also getting it, but ChatGPT is truly getting people paying and sometimes significant amounts of money to use it. So it isn't doing this to try and make. They're not desperate for money, which is an important piece I think, especially at this stage because everyone's getting bankrolled to the nines. I mean there's so much money coming at them, they can pretty much keep doing what they're doing forever until they create the, the ultimate AI they want to create. So anyway, Skynet or whatever.

Scott Vanack (42:43)

Yeah, Terminator. And then finally, and this is just wishful thinking that the terms like aio, geo, AI, SEO, eieio, whatever you got is, is going to die and we'll just go to SEO and everyone will know that SEO is the umbrella term that includes AI. I don't think it's going to happen. I think, or you know what I'd also be happy with is if we just came up with a single new acronym that encompasses everything and we just use that. But then we'd have to rename the podcast. So maybe let's not do that, but just let's eliminate.

Ross Dunn (43:20)

There's no necessity to do that. AI SEO is all I'm calling it. I'm doing SEO for AI. Yeah, that's it. And there's nothing. Yeah, the one that seems to be. If you had to pick an acronym that's taking hold more. I see GEO more often than in it. Whatever. It's annoying and I just try and get past it.

Scott Vanack (43:41)

Well, they're just trying to create a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Ross Dunn (43:46)

Exactly. And it's also a way to sell. A lot of people are using it just to confabulate things and make it. Ooh, look at this. This is pretty. I'm going to buy this.

Scott Vanack (43:57)

And that's. I think even John Mueller was talking about that. It's just smoke and mirror. It's just like snake oil type stuff. Right. Like it doesn't mean anything.

Ross Dunn (44:05)

Yeah, I mean, there are many people who aren't, you know, approaching it in that way, but there's enough that are that it just muddies the water. Okay, well, here are mine. So let's start with number one here. More companies will be posting AI ethics statements. Step Force is coming very soon, within the week. And by late in the year, I believe more customers will be considering them. I'd like to think that AI ethics statements. I'm going to be very, very clear that we have one. I want to make sure it's not hidden. We were one of the earliest companies to have an SEO ethics statement in the early 2000s, and we were really proud of that. And we still have it there and we still live by it. And I believe AI statements are going to be key. You know, we're going to make it really clear if you hire us for this service, no AI will be used. Or if it is used. Let's say this one does have AI you will use. It'll only be used for editing. So let's say you want human content. We'll have a spec. We're going to have a specific servicing human written content. It will not be written by AI, guaranteed. And it will, you know, and if we happen to have a component of it that uses AI for editing, to assist with editing, we're going to make that very clear. It's all going to be absolutely plain. And I think that has to be out there. People need to know what they're paying for and what kind of result they're going to get. Slop is a real issue and we don't want to be a part of that when clients want high quality slop, which is for anyone, for anyone listening slop, is anything written purely by AI. And I mean, there's going to be a lot of options out there for high quality slop. I mean, I mean, high quality, it'll probably be pretty hard to tell, but we're going to avoid it at all costs and whenever we do have to do it. Because I know there will be times where a client's like, look, just write this part where they. It won't be something that's cornerstone content for them. That's for damn sure. Yeah, okay, well, there we go again here. Number two, AI slop will become so prevalent, people will be making extra efforts to show their content was written by a human hand. Now, will this mean there's a written by humans seal on content? Who knows? But I believe it's going to be pushed back to that level that people will be really, really clear and they'll be really offended if someone says that, no, this is written by a. No, they're not. This is not written by AI. And it's. The offense is real. I mean, yeah, you have to take. It's a choice to take offense. I get that. But I, I've. This is, this is related, but it's a little different. I posted a picture on Reddit, a photo I took of some seals with a mother seal looking fondly at her baby seal. It's a really good shot. I like it. 100 accurate. There's no way I. At all. I've used my new camera and I've, I've been doing photography, photography for 30 years. It's real. But inevitably there's those morons that are saying, oh, that's, that's fake. Look at the eye. Like, are you serious? Yeah. And yeah, that. You're never going to get around that now. It's. There's always going to be a portion of people who just don't believe you. And yeah, ethics statements are going to be a big part of protecting that too.

Scott Vanack (47:46)

I'm actually getting really annoyed with AI swap. Like, I, you know, in the evenings, you know, we'd have the TV on and I sometimes sit on my phone and scroll YouTube shorts because I don't know why. Stupid thing that humans shouldn't do, but sometimes we do it. And I've actually stopped doing that completely because I'm finding more. Most of those shorts are full AI slop. And some videos like, wow, can you. And I'd be like, okay, I gotta show my wife this.

Ross Dunn (48:08)

This is.

Scott Vanack (48:08)

And Then let me double, let me fact check this one because something seems off and the video looks convincing. It looks perfect. And then you start doing some research and snopes come snoops. Snopes. I don't know how you say it, but you can find all kinds of research that or evidence that no, it's not real or, you know, you find that infamous three finger hand in there somewhere or whatever there. Yeah, but so much of it is fake. Like I saw one video and it was like a rib, which is like an inflatable boat and it was just a wave came over and it sank and it was like a video camera with it and it's sinking, like, well, it's full of air. It's not going to sink. It can't. It's at that point it's unsinkable. But in the video it's sure sinking. And it's like, oh, it's, it's AI. Like it's. And then if you look more closely, you can see water coming from the floor. Like it just doesn't make sense. And there's so much garbage like that out there that I don't even look at the good stuff anymore because I need to research every video to know if it's real or not. And I don't know, it's taking fun away from watching videos online because yeah.

Ross Dunn (49:03)

I just treat it all as entertainment now. And if I ever want to consider it as something more than that, I do my research, which. So I avoid doing that as much as I can.

Scott Vanack (49:12)

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Ross Dunn (49:15)

All right, next, I took a more dim, dimmer view on Google Search Console. I don't think they're going to provide a way to separately analyze AI mode or AI overview data. I think they are hiding something. I mentioned this to Kevin Indig and he seemed to agree that what is it? What's going on? They've had a long time to make it possible for us to break this down and they still have not done it. So I don't believe they're going to do it. I hope they do. I just don't believe they will.

Scott Vanack (49:48)

I think everyone who knows anything about SEO agrees with you that they hope that we can extract that AI data in Search Console.

Ross Dunn (49:56)

Yeah, it's funny every time like within LinkedIn they're pretty active Google guys and John will. Or someone will post that. I mean John Mueller, but. Or one of his associates will post this great new feature they've added, Google Search Console and inevitably almost the first comment is, where is the ability to look at AI reviews and like why can't we segment this? Crickets. Nothing. They know it's an issue and they're hiding it. I don't know why. What could it be? It's very interesting and. Or maybe it's. There's something about the information that we could leverage too much of for marketing. I don't know. I haven't put a lot of thought into it but it's very suspicious. 2026 will be the year when authentic brand storytelling becomes the mainstay of successful businesses. I'm going to say that again because I believe this wholeheartedly. This will be the year when authentic brand storytelling becomes the mainstay of successful businesses. I believe it so much. We're building services around this. We're getting exceptional writers. I've got an exceptional PR person and we're making sure that we have the tools for our clients and we're going to do this for our own brand to show why we are different, why we are a unique company. Why would you want to work with Stepforth and just using us as an example. But what is it that makes us stand out and authentically telling the story and AI can't do that. It's soulless. It does not do a great job of that. Will it someday? Maybe. But right now it isn't. And I think with all the slop out there and all this noise, companies who do a good job of putting this out there are going to see immense success. It's gonna. They're just gonna glow amongst all the CD looking content out there. So that's a huge takeaway from the show. I can't stress that enough. Number five, the SEO tools that have effectively incorporated AI tracking and AI SEO tips will become the talk of SEOs on LinkedIn and they may be snapped up by larger companies. This is a bit of a no brainer I suppose, but there are a lot of them out there. YK is the one we talk about a lot just because the ones one I latched onto I kind of like it. And that spelled W A I K a Y Not what you expect, right? W A I K a Y but it's really cool. It's not perfect. None of them are. But what is it? What will come out of this year as I think that they're going to have the time and the user base to start to perfect these and we'll finally see something that we all want to start using. Hopefully it's YK kind of putting our money there but you never know and maybe they'll get snapped up because I think although Adobe's probably done by doing Semrush, there's a lot of other companies out there that are going to want to snap up these guys and make out some pretty impressive data sets because there's a lot of money to be made right now. All right, so the quality of local SEO results will be further eroded by AI trying to add quote value. And I, I say that because I haven't seen any good results yet. And it's local SEO. Why be optimistic? Just why there's no point anymore. Now if I'll say this, AI will present incorrect facts about local businesses and Google probably won't do anything about it unless it makes headlines, unless it makes them embarrassed and then they'll probably want to do something about it. But otherwise I don't think they, they can. They just don't seem to have put any of the money into monitoring this stuff unless it's paid ads. We'll see.

Scott Vanack (53:55)

If we hadn't been talking about local and all the bugs and problems and vulnerabilities and that for so many years, I would say they're going to fix it this year. That would be a prediction. This is here they fix it. But it's been going on for a decade. I don't even know. It's been so long. I don't, I've lost track of how long it's been.

Ross Dunn (54:14)

Fifteen years, I think. At least. Well, ever since it launched. Which is like 2008, right? 2009. I don't know.

Scott Vanack (54:19)

Oh, maybe. Yeah, yeah.

Ross Dunn (54:24)

All right, number eight. Oh no. Number seven. SEOs in the small business market. Small medium business market like us will be offering more handholding to medium businesses rather than hands on SEO. I don't like this, but I think this is probably true. By no means, like by no means will this happen for all businesses. Some of them do still want an SEO to do everything for them, but a lot of them are trying to bring this stuff in house. They're making a mistake doing it entirely in house. I would not say all the time, but in general because they're, they're thinking they can use AI for all this and that's just a muah, that's such a mistake. So this is part, this is part dream, this is part really what should happen is they need an SEO with experience to be their touchstone, to go, am I doing this right? Is this a good idea? Should I be listening to this AI slop advice? And we're going to be, we're specifically Creating services for that because we know it's gotta be done. And a lot of these companies want to cut their costs, fine, we're here for them. If they want to be there at least, at least have someone to talk to to verify this stuff and then save money. If they want to pull stuff in house, I don't really see how it's going to save them money. I think it's going to cost them more and we're going to, in 2027 we're going to see more people coming back to trusted SEO companies. But we'll see, we'll see. I, you know, AI is not staying still so we don't know what's going to happen next. So yeah, a shift to more consultative positions for SEOs in the medium businesses, small businesses will definitely need SEOs and definitely need marketing for this foreseeable future. There's no way you can create a system that will automate SEO and all these different things so that everyone can get a top ranking. It doesn't work that way. Someone always has to succeed.

Scott Vanack (56:22)

There aren't infinite number ones.

Ross Dunn (56:24)

Yeah, exactly. And of course we're not talking about just one number top rankings anymore. But people say, you understand, we're talking also about being sighted in AI and all these different things. We kind of boil things down to the basics a bit too much sometimes. But number eight, AI agents will become more knowledgeable or sorry acknowledged by the average person as they become ubiquitous. So AI agents, I talked about how they've been take they, they've taken more of a hold this year. That was a lot of enterprise level companies and more advanced people but agents are going to be more and more known by the average person this year. I'm certain of that. Number nine, SEOs will be re engineering the infrastructure of websites and associated content to provide AI and AI driven search engines with clear authority signals. Scott was talking about eeat that expertise and all that stuff and all the things that really show AI and show users that this is a company they want to work with, that this is that this information is valid and, and should be paid attention to and deserves a visibility. Well, a lot of websites weren't designed that way up to last maybe two years ago. More advanced ones should have been. But it really depends, it depends on how you're marketing. A lot of content's been written around just having a particular keyword ranking for a particular page and what, where you lose sight there is that. All of this needs to be connected into topics into well the old style of silos. If you did it, if you did your marketing around silo marketing, we talked about that in the past. It's more advanced, but if you've done that, you're probably closer to ready and able to manage with AI. But this infrastructure, there's going to be some changes and SEOs will be doing a lot of this work on sites and making sure that these sites are ready to amplify these authority signals. That includes authority, I'm sorry, authorship. Making sure that's really clear. A lot of sites don't have proper author pages. They don't link to their author pages for that particular author. That author page doesn't include all of their different certifications and qualifications. Oh, there's a lot of stuff that's gotta be done. There's tons of work to be done in 2026 for 90% of the companies I see on a regular basis. Let's make it 99%. It's a lot of work. Now. We've already begun doing this for clients only for our biggest ones at the moment. But we're going to be working more and more with our other clients on this. It's not something that can be done by AI. AI messes us up terribly. I have tried, tried so hard to automate. Have you ever stuff? Yeah, I mean, good bullying about, little hair out I have left. It doesn't work. This requires hands on stuff. So I mean that's good, that's job security, but it's also something that everyone's going to have to look at in 2027 or 6. I mean, and here, here's a dream. The growing alarm right now is huge. This is true that AI growth is surpassing safeguards. It's going too quickly and ethics and governance is going out the window. So I'm hoping that all this news will spark a global initiative to slow down AI, to allow safeguards to catch up. That's my hope. I, I don't really believe, because it's become a. What's the word for it? A weapons race, an arms race essentially. I don't see how it's going to happen. But so more pessimistically, I believe we will see more AI safety and governments governance employees quitting in disgust or protest from the leading AI SEO or AAI companies. I mean, as their concerns and guidelines are thrown out the window, I really believe we're going to see either or hopefully a bit of both, if not only the good stuff. But yep, when does that ever happen?

Scott Vanack (60:37)

It's, it's a scary time. I hope you're right. I don't think you are.

Ross Dunn (60:43)

Well, that was a huge show. There's a lot we shared there and I hope you got some real value out of this. There's some major takeaways that I just can't emphasize enough and I hope I did. I hope we did emphasize enough that, you know, sleep on that and let me know if you have any questions or anything like that. You can post any questions you want on Facebook by going and in Facebook searching for SEO 101 podcast and you'll find our group there. Please do post any questions you have. It's a little quiet there and we're always happy to see any questions and answer them for you on our next show. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my company Senior SEO Scott Vanack, thank you for joining us today and Happy New Year. Have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on wmr.

Scott Vanack (61:33)

Thank you for listening everybody.

Ross Dunn (61:41)

Hello and welcome to SCO101 on WMR FM.

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