← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Machine trust and retrieval-based search transformation
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- [00:00]
A
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:43]
B
According to an Exponent 21 report from May of 2025, Google's AI overviews now appears in more than 50% of all search results, doubling since August of 24. This marks a major turning point where AI powered summaries are becoming the dominant format in Google Search, transforming the entire SEO landscape. With AI mode on the verge of becoming the default experience, this is only the tip of the iceberg of how it's impacting our industry. The traditional SEO strategies and tactics, even individual skill sets, must also evolve for us to stay relevant. Building trust in machine generated content requires new approaches and prioritizations of these efforts. This is the Voice of Search Podcast. My name is Tyson Stockton, CEO and Co Founder at Pre Visible and today we're joined by SEO veteran Duane Forrester. Duane's the founder and CEO of Unboundanswers.com, which helps businesses create innovative digital marketing solutions. Today, Duane and I will be discussing how to adapt our tactics and skill sets to be competitive and successful in this new age of SEO. So with that, Duane.
- [01:51]
C
Welcome to the podcast, Tyson. Thank you. I appreciate, appreciate the time today. Thanks.
- [01:57]
B
I'm looking forward to it. I mean I feel like a lot of these topics, you know, we've heard from different perspectives. I've been looking forward to this one. You've been in the industry for quite some time, so I think you've seen, you've seen fads, you've seen changes, you've seen how this industry kind of unfolds. And so I think you bring a lot of context and perspective into where are we going next. So I'm really interested to hear kind of that perspective from your side.
- [02:26]
C
Look, dude, you are absolutely right. I am old and with that kidding aside, it's true, seen a lot, been there. Very fortunately for myself and my career, a part of that, a large part of that was inside a search engine. So my perspective is somewhat unique. There are not a lot of SEOs who have had that access. There are a slow trickle of folks in that area. But it did help shape some of the experience and understanding that I bring to this. So when I see what's going on, I have an inherent understanding of some of the dynamics behind the decision making within the companies on what they're doing and why they're doing it, or where a hang up or a problem might exist for them that they have to address or solve. And you know, how that affects the timeline along with all of that. Of course, you know, I've spent so much time in this industry that you get a feel for the work, you get a feel for the people, the alignment, the concepts, what's resonating. You know, you mentioned, you know, this concept of like something that might have been a fad. You know, we've seen a ton of that and we've also seen a lot of stuff that, you know, people called a fad that just became normalized because at the time, you don't know, it's all new, it's all fresh. You know, I recently had a conversation with someone where they said, my head's going to explode. I can't keep up, the changes are too fast, too many. I don't know, like if I can do this again. And it very much made me realize the feelings that I have been having over the last few years is that we are essentially in some ways back to the beginning of this industry, that feeling of it being the wild west, we're experimenting, you know, there is gatekeeping. People are not sharing what they know is working for them. And that may be, you know, for competitive reasons, but it may also be because, you know, we all also very much understand that something that works for me may not work for you for a variety of other reasons. So it's not as simple as just saying, hey everyone, this works. You should do it like that. That is not necessarily the best presentation. We all know that now. But, but it's, it's very much the wild west again. We're learning new things, there are new concepts. And look, with that, we'll call it wisdom accumulated over time comes a certain level of exhaustion as well. You get burnt out, you get exhausted. It's, it's tiring repeating the same things over and over and not watching people do the work. And yet here we are now, suddenly everything is new. Suddenly there are new words, phrases, concepts. Everything has changed. And all the old stuff still matters, you still got to know it. But we're leaning into this new. At this point we have to, because this is the undiscovered country. These are the concepts we haven't wrapped our heads around yet. I don't think I really need to tell anybody that structured data is important or that they have to have page load speeds that are good or the quality of the content matters. Like, I've been repeating that for 15 years now. We've got to talk about chunking and retrievability and vector analysis and all of these different things that sound like made up phrases. Until you dive into the language of machine learning as an industry unto itself. Then all of a sudden you realize chunking is not a random phrase, it's a literal action that these systems perform. So exciting days. Super exciting if you like change air quotes. Exciting if you don't like change.
- [06:18]
B
I feel like on that point it's an interesting component because I've been in conversations with SEO that are very frustrated by the change and I've been kind of confused by that response because it's like part of, at least the attraction to search from my side has been the level of constant change, the constant challenge of what do you have to learn next? What's the next? And you're always kind of like, like we inherently chose an industry that's complex and fast moving. So it's like, for me, it kind of feels, I don't know, I'm more optimistic in this kind of next chapter because I feel a greater level of awareness, a greater level of interest. Right now there's a new spark in the industry. So it's like, I get why there's a lot of concerns, especially some of the in house sides. We're seeing traffic numbers, you know, be threatened.
- [07:09]
C
Yeah.
- [07:10]
B
But at the same time I'm like, well, that's kind of how we ended up in SEO to begin with. Is constantly learning, constantly challenging. It's like, this is why we're here, so might as well embrace it.
- [07:21]
C
You summarized it very well. Because one of the ongoing thoughts I have in my own mind is, wait, wait, you got into this industry and claimed that you love the fast pace and the constant learning, and now that that pace is faster and requires more consistent learning, you're telling me no, that's too much. I get it though, right? Like, I understand it. We all face this as individuals. We all face this, okay. Whether it's, you know, you plateau with a hobby and you get to a point where, you know, you have mastered it enough for your own needs and then it no longer holds the same. Kind of like, oh, if I turn my hobby into a business, it doesn't have the same allure to me. And so you don't pursue it as much. Fully understandable. It's a very human trait. And I think that the main difference at this stage is that, look, there was always continual learning, right? But the pace of the learning, if you were new to the industry, you had years to catch up with everybody else who had, you know, a decade plus more experience than you, but you could catch up. And it was like pretty straightforward. I would say maybe three years ago, we took a left turn off this straight highway we were on. And that left turn is a real shocker for people. There are lots of people now who are still learning SEO who are moving forward, who will never see that turn that the rest of us went down. And they will continue off into the sunset on the highway of SEO. Don't know how long that highway exists in front of them. Years at least. So they're going to go very deep on that. The real challenge though is that left hand turn. The speed limit on that new highway is probably. Well, I actually did some math around this. It's roughly two times whatever you were traveling at. And here's how I got there. I wrote an article about this where I talked about the pace of updates and changes. So if you go back and you track all of the Google updates and whatnot, and we'll toss Bing aside, because I know this from firsthand experience, Bing doesn't do updates the same way. It has a very different approach to it. So there's not a sequential ongoing rollout. The impacts are not as large. So we'll just focus on Google. And this isn't like, you know, an attempt to villainize them on this point. But the fact of the matter is we do have a cadence. It is consistent. People understand when it's happening. The results are noticeably differentiated. You know, way back in the day, the statement was always, you know, less than 1% of the websites are affected. And this kind of thing you. And it always seemed kind of strange because you would hear from half a dozen people in the industry who were directly affected and you're thinking, well, those half a dozen people work for companies that represent several hundred websites. So I'm not saying Several hundred is 1% or more of the Internet. I know it's not, but it seems really weird that I'm hearing from a fifth of that cohort that was impacted and that is represented by a low number of people. Like, it just doesn't feel like less than 1%. But again, don't have the data, you know, take it at face value. And the real thrust of it is if you look at the rate of change, the updates that are happening across OpenAI, across Claude, across Perplexity, across all of the systems, copilot, those updates are happening at a pace that is twice as fast as the traditional Google algorithmic updates. So those of us who turned left on this new highway now have to travel at a pace that is twice as fast as what we were used to. It's disorienting, it can be exhausting. You know, you feel a higher level of stress more frequently. That discomfort over time wears you down. You know, I, I take this back to, I would say maybe a decade ago, I turned all the ringers off on my phone and, and put people on my private list where like, if my mom calls me twice in a row, it'll break through my privacy settings and ring my phone. You know, there are exactly two people on that list. Everybody else, you can just send me a text or wait, I'll see the message. And there we go. The reason I did that was because I was starting to feel a bit of PTSD reacting every single time my phone went off because I had the ringer turned on for slack at work. And it was, I was plugged into so many different things, it was every 20 or 30 seconds something was lighting up. You know, my company was sending 15,000 Slack messages a day. So like I had to turn the ringer off or I was having a physiological response every time my phone vibrated or every time the ringer went off. And I was like, I got to do something to calm that down because, like, that's not good. And humans generally end up feeling the same way when it's new information, when it's overload for even old information. Now we work at a certain level. Some of us are 8 bit computers, some of us are maybe a little more advanced than that. A TRS 80, Commodore 64 maybe. And then there's some like Mac Twos floating around out there and whatnot. But we have a limit. And I think that when we hear people saying they're exhausted, they can't keep up. This is difficult. The pace of change is too much. I think that's all we're really seeing and hearing, not negating any of that. They're right, it's all true. But it is down to an individual thing. I have kind of just stopped watching television. And that time that I would have put into that medium is now learning AI things and diving in on AI and exploring different topics and learning how to use systems and all of that. Kind of had hoped that, you know, as I got further into my career, things would slow down and get easier. And just like, you know, you eventually get on the white horse and ride off into the sunset, then the happy music plays like, that was kind of how I assumed career paths went. And no, not even close. Not with AI on the scene now, not in our industry. And I think what's really important about that as well is some of us, me, you, many others in the industry, are kind of the author of our own drama, right? I mean, here we are sitting here talking about this and we're going to cover things and people are going to feel some angst around these ideas and these topics and these thoughts, like, are we a part of the problem? Maybe. But I'd much rather take the shot and share the knowledge and the experience that I have with people through this new lens rather than say, oh, don't worry about it, you know, there's nothing to see here. Off we go. Because personally and fundamentally, I believe there is a crap ton to see here. There is like everything to see here. Like, if you just showed up three years ago and said, oh, I'm gonna learn SEO now, and you were on this track, you were on the road that turned left and you could keep up, you will, over time be able to backfill that historic knowledge. You better be pragmatic enough to know what you don't know, because you'll make a lot of simple mistakes moving forward and you'll do them at a pace and with confidence. That is pure danger. However, I think that there are going to be a lot of people that are going to thrive now. Like the whole. And you've seen some of the stuff on my sub stack, Tyson. Like, I do a lot of talking about careers, career paths, new titles, work alignments, like all of these types of things. I have an article that will be out probably in the next 48 hours or so as we're recording this. And that one is looking at a study that Microsoft did that shows the direct effect on job types. They track 40 different jobs. The work that those things do and how that work overlaps with the work that AI can reliably do. And in some of those cases, that work overlap. That job and the tasks that job has to complete are overlapped by 98% with AI, which effectively means that job can be replaced by an AI system today, reliably. That is going to be shocking to some people. I've taken that and translated that to SEO jobs. So writer, content producer, that type of thing. And I'm going to give some guidance in there. I'm going to talk about, like, this is not the end of the world. This is not the end of something. This is simply a moment to pivot. And here's how you pivot, here's what you focus on moving forward. But you know, the days of romanticizing, you know, I like to be. I like to be a writer and just give me a topic and let me go write, you know, 900 words on it. That's. That's not really a career path moving forward. And, and if that's what you want to do, you need to wrap your head around the new reality. Right? And look, as we're recording this, we're living in the world of ChatGPT 4.5, you know, 4.1 on the research side, like, all of these kinds of things. And we know that probably within the month of August, they're going to release ChatGPT5 and that's going to reset the bar. And we're talking in terms of OpenAI's product. Right? But let's not be so myopic about it. When we talk about advancing these models, we know Google is advancing its models, and then we know that Perplexity is advancing its models. Claude is doing the same thing. Mistral is doing the same thing. When ChatGPT steps forward, copilot steps forward. Like, all of these things are the reality that everyone with a career in this industry, we're staring down that and core concepts really matter right now, and understanding those things matter. We do live in a different time. We talked about how feels like a bit of a wild west. Like the original beginning of the SEO industry felt like a bit of a wild west scenario. We couldn't get answers. We had to reverse engineer a lot of stuff. We were guessing, maybe we were sharing, maybe we weren't like all of that back and forth. And I feel like we're kind of back to that now. Major difference, though, is you can actually ask these systems, how do you do what you do? Why do you make the decisions you make? What information are you taking in? What should I focus on if I want this to be my outcome? And I'm not saying that it's perfect with answering, but it's a heck of a lot closer than anything we've had in the history of our industry before. And yeah, I'm including even when I used to walk on stage for Bing and answer people's questions, when Google still does this today because there are parameters within which every representative has to stay. You can't just walk out there and say what you feel, say what you learned. That's proprietary stuff. But these systems, because the, how they do chunking and what retrieval looks like and how vector embeddings work and how Knowledge Graph operates, these are all public domain concepts. They came from open sourced concepts originally. So you can ask and get an answer and then ground your knowledge in how these systems work. And then you have to apply it to, in our case, the historical knowledge we have for SEO. If you're new to the industry, you're going to apply it to the other things you still have to learn about SEO. So like it's this combination. We're all bakers now all of a sudden, you know.
- [19:33]
B
Yeah. And it in a lot of ways too, I agree that we're seeing this kind of like resurgence and it's, you know, some say it's like, oh, Groundhog Day. And it's like, it's a different flavor though. So it's like some uniqueness obviously to it. But like, I think for myself personally, that's why I'm a really strong advocate in pushing people into more of like getting to some of the theoretical aspects of it, because to me, some of those are going to be more longer standing, more universal. You learn these different concepts and then you comply them to a variety of scenarios or like manifestations of that piece.
- [20:10]
C
Yes.
- [20:11]
B
Maybe kind of before and I would want to get into those skill sets in your article, but like kind of before that in your perspective, what are some of those core kind of like fundamentals that you'd recommend for someone to, if they haven't learned already, to dig into as being like evergreen pillars that they can build on top of.
- [20:33]
C
Okay, so purposely for this conversation, Tyson, I'm going to ignore most of what we would talk about in terms of core traditional SEO concepts. I'm just going to work from the assumption here that if I just made that statement and you don't know what it means, you can go look those up and there's all kinds of foundational information around them. If you do understand it, then you don't need the grounding in that and, you know, we should kind of move forward. Notable exception in there though, is going to be structured data. You know, I walked on the stage, I introduced schema.org to the world at one point and was underwhelmed with the adoption. It's really been the last few years that the curve of adoption has like done that hockey stick thing, because everybody moved to knowledge graphs and suddenly this was a way to have a trust signal wrapped around something and there was value in it. So now I could propose it to my IT team or whoever and get sign off on getting the work done. And there we go. And along the way these systems that we're using today became, I don't want to say dependent, but they are consumers of structured data. In whatever format that's available, they definitely use it for making decisions. So look, if there's one core skill set that I'm going to tell you that you need to understand, it's structured data and the purpose of structured data and how to deploy it, which is kind of bring me to this other skill that I think everybody needs. If you're an SEO, it's kind of an age old skill. It's the idea of storytelling, being able to explain things internally to your boss, your coworkers, your dev team, your cio, anybody who has a vested interest in time invested for a return on that time. You have to be able to very clearly articulate to them why you are recommending what you are recommending. And structured data is one of these things because it's not a binary, it's not a one for one. If we do this, we get that. It's literally if we do this, we might. And after that everybody stops listing, right? Because might is not a strategy. So you have to have a skill of being able to, to intelligently, factually and quickly distill the importance of all of these tangentially related items into a cohesive concept that everyone gets. Ah, what we are doing is complex, but if we do all of these things, we increase our likelihood of X X being, you know, you're cited in an answer or you are the answer, or in traditional search you're at the top of the rankings or you know, you're in the answer box or whatever. So you have to be really good at that. I would also recommend the concept of budgeting become something that every SEO wraps their head around. And I'm not just talking about dollars and cents, right? Like, you know, we all know that, you know, lemonade at the lemonade stand in the summertime costs five bucks a glass and if you've got ten bucks on you, you can buy one for you and treat it for trend. Everyone gets this kind of budgeting. Or I'll buy one now and then I'll come back later and buy a second one because I have $10 and one cost five and super, super simple. But the concept of budgeting time is far, far more complex for people, and that time directly translates into dollars or opportunity for the business. So you have to be really good at being able to look at the work and understand the budget, whether that is your time or you're going to ask the IT department to go do this work and what that looks like. When I worked at Microsoft, there were very specific groups. I was a pm, I was a PM and a pm. So it was like project management, program management, like pick your pmm. Along the way, I was also pmm. So point being is that those were different groups within the company. They were functionally organized silos, which meant I did not have the engineers in my group. My group was pm. So when I needed to get something done, I had to go to the lead engineer that I was assigned to work with and I had to budget within all of the work that they were assigned, where my work would fit, which meant I had to help them prioritize what the return was going to be on their time invested because they were responsible for their time being invested. I was responsible for making sure that they were investing in something that was going to return for us. Like it's, it's all of that type of layering. And I'm using the Microsoft example where it's big and it's hairy and it's, you know, all of that. But this is the smallest of companies face the same thing, limited number of resources. What are you going to do with them? You need to figure that out. Critical. And if you want to get into some more like herd things, you do have to understand how knowledge graphs work, what they are. And if I get on one more meeting and somebody says, oh, yeah, no, I know what a knowledge graph is. And what they mean is, I've heard the phrase knowledge graph before. Okay, go learn what a knowledge graph is and how it functions because then you'll understand its core utility within traditional search at the top end of that hierarchy, okay. You have to understand concepts like chunking, that an LLM system kind of loses track on long form content. Right. It's kind of like an idiot reading. They just kind of lose the plot and then they drift off, right? And then they don't even finish. Right? They just go, oh, I'm drifting them out and they leave. And whatever else you wrote down there, lost. They've never seen it. You know, however, what they did do, coming back to concepts from knowledge graphs, entities and relationships, is they did actually go through the information they had there and they attempted to Identify an entity. Tyson's an entity relationship. He knows Dwayne. Oh, okay. Well, if the query is about, does Tyson know anybody in the SEO industry? Well, the answer to that is Tyson knows Dwayne. Not because the phrase Tyson knows Dwayne was written anywhere, but because the system came in and semantically understood, oh, there's an entity Dwayne Tyson. There's a relationship. They were on a show together. Does Tyson know Dwayne? Yes, Tyson knows Dwayne. Now, we haven't gotten into, are they besties? What's the depth here? That's the next entity and the next relationship and so on down until it loses the plot and it just screws off into the ether and doesn't bother with your long form content. So the whole concept of chunking is based around make it easy. Make it easy for the system, the LLM crawler, to come in and say, oh, there's an entity and there's relationships. Got it. Okay. Now the relationship might not be everything. Okay, the relationship in the content that we are notionally referencing here is not everyone on earth that Tyson knows and Dwayne is in the list. Okay, could be that, or it could just be the write up for this podcast, nothing more. But that's what got pulled and there's the answer. So this idea of chunking now becomes a really important part of this. Okay, so what we were just talking about is much more in the vector embedding concept. Now, from that, or technically before that, you have to, as a content producer, think about chunking your content to make it easier for that LLM to consume. So you would have a paragraph. If the content is all the people Tyson knows, then the paragraphs would be, tyson knows Dwayne, Tyson knows this person, Tyson knows this person, and so on. It's a little pedantic for humans to read that type of thing, but again, this is your human in the loop. This is why, you know, you may take all of this content that you've factually written and you've even marked up with structured data, and you may just turn around and give that to an LLM and say, keep this intact so that it's chunked for an LLM, but make it more consumable for a human, and it'll give you a reasonable approximation of something like that. But again, human in the loop, you've still got to get in there. You've got to do your thing and ultimately make a decision. Who is it that you want to appeal to more? What's the goal behind this Another concept that I think people really need to focus on is goal orientation is defining goals for specific pieces of content. We were pretty good at this in SEO, where we were like, here's a keyword or here's a topic, here's the content on it, build the pages and off you go. And then suddenly you've got a hundred thousand page website and that's your website. It's very much not like that with LLMs. You could literally just throw up random web pages with buckets of content on them and throw them into paragraphs and chunk them out and. And it'll fill in all the blanks from there. Right? Bit of a dog's breakfast for you. And I coming by to read it where, like, they couldn't bother, like, could you, like maybe paragraph this kind, like. But for the LLM, you know, like anyone who's used ChatGPT or any of the systems, your typing is atrocious. I understand it, as is mine. You don't go back and spell check, you don't make the changes. It still knows what you're asking. It does lose the context. So it's really good with kind of like crap layout. Right? It can manage that. I urge people, I wrote an article or I created a product. It's a quadrant chart that compares, I think, 34 or 35. I've got another four or five products I need to add to it. These are all AI SEO tool sets and I rank them on a quadrant map to, you know, against 36 points on each scale. And how do they score on this? Right. One scale is largely about trustability and the other is about utility. So features and, you know, is it reasonable that they're going to do what they claim they're going to do? And off you go. It's a starting point for people to look at tools and say, well, you know, like, if I want to narrow it down to a half a dozen to put my time in to like, where do I start? You know. And my advice wholeheartedly to every single person is you start with everything that's above the halfway mark and higher because that's a signal of more along the concept of trustworthiness. The horizontal is just a features. So if you're high on trust and low on features, you're going to be in the top left quadrant. But if you want to score higher and your product plan shows you're going to put another half a dozen features out, you're suddenly going to jump closer to the top right quadrant because you have more features, you have to execute on them, they have to be good, like they have to be real and all that kind of thing. But point behind all this is there are a bunch of tools out there and there are lists of these tools and you need to start digging in. You need to put time on your calendar to get demos of these tools. You need to have a clear understanding of the goals for your program so that you can understand if the tool can give you information that gets you on the path to that goal. It's these are not the days of, I mean I grew up in this industry. I built and launched webmaster tools from Bing. So like the concept of a tool set that just gives you all this data and we kind of know what that is, whether it's Ahrefs, Semrush, Conductor, like all of the big names. Those are kind of like the foundational things, right? And what we're talking about right now, we're talking about do we replace the shingles on the roof with a metal roof? Do we go with clay tiles? We are not talking about foundation anymore.
- [32:51]
D
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- [34:19]
C
We're talking about the top edge. We are the front edge of this stuff. And it turns out if you haven't paid attention because, like, your roof generally lasts 25 years. So you don't know what advances have happened in material sciences that are used in these products. You won't know any of these new tools. Like, there are two tools that if. Three tools that if I didn't personally know the people who built them, I would look at them and go, oh, that's a dumb name. And just like, I'd write it off, right? Because I'm like, the hell does that even mean? How do we even pronounce that? But then, you know, you have friends and they build things and they're like, hey, I want to show you this. And you go through and you see the reporting and you see the type of information that they can give you based on the data they're gathering, and you're like, oh, you can use that for decision making. And here you go. So absolutely, you have to put time on your calendar to go get demos of these new tools and learn what is useful in the tool. Now, you can't just take the tool's word for it that if it's in the tool. That's the important part. Because again, if you look at things the way I do, fewer features is less utility, more features is more utility. I don't know anybody buying a tool who doesn't want more utility. But just to be clear, there's a point in time here where there's a diminishing return. Over here on the right hand side, right where, you know, we've all seen this. You know, you buy a tool, you get access, use it for one thing, 70% of the tool you don't use. And you'd be just as happy if you could pay less money for what you do use. So, like, it's important, Right. I feel like we're entering the era here of we are not going to have one tool where we go and we do whatever it is we do, or one tool that does 60% of what we want to do. No, we are going to have four or five tools.
- [36:09]
B
Yeah.
- [36:10]
C
And that's what the new tool stack is going to look like. So you better start learning now what the tools are capable of. And, and ask all of the people, share your product pipeline with me, tell me what you intend to build in the future, and they should be able to share some sanitized version of that, Right? Well, we'd like to add this feature, this feature and this feature. They're not going to tell you everything. They can't do that. Shouldn't expect it. They're not going to go into detail when you ask them, oh, can you explain more about that? You should expect them to say no because again, this is proprietary, this is competitive, and then I give that away. However, they should be able to articulate a growth plan for the product. So that will help, you know. Oh, okay, got it. So you do have a plan for the next 18 months to be investing in this thing. So if I tell my company to invest now and we're using it and basing decisions on the output of the data, it's reasonable that there's some Runway here. Right. So, you know, that kind of thinking. But I will say that that kind of critical thinking is extremely important here. All right. Because look, if there's a concept or a topic you don't understand, just go ask one of the LLMs, be very clear and pedantic and deep in your query and then like 80 to 95% get you exactly what you need to give you the knowledge you need to understand that phrase or that concept. And then you can obviously level up and continue from there. But some of these skills are. These are going to come from within. Right. And again, if you're exhausted. Yeah. You got to find another gear because the race isn't over yet.
- [37:46]
B
100% and with a toll point too. It's like, I mean, it's, I think that's fair and really relevant in a lot of industries. It's like, I mean, you're not going to build a house with one hammer, but you might have your favorite hammer and there's going to have the utilization purpose and everything else behind it.
- [38:03]
C
Yep.
- [38:04]
B
But then it, I think as you've been saying that too, there's a natural just kind of evolution then of where I think our time and focus needs to go more towards. And that's going to be in that critical thinking, that strategical elements, these other areas. And going back kind of even further to. You made the comments of chunking how alums might look at that, how a human might. Which then I think poses the question, how do you see the industry unfolding in the sense of are we targeting now for our information to just be surfaced in some other environment, some other experience, or how much is designed for the user within your own house? Like, you know, are you building the furniture that's going in someone else's house or are you building the house that you want people to come into?
- [38:57]
C
Yeah. So this concept, Tyson, is like so near and dear to my heart. Right. Because we're really looking forward with things. I Talk about this in some of the earliest articles I've put up on my substack. And it's worth kind of conceptually revisiting where we're at right now. So you want to be found, you want to be engaged with. First off, I have to say, I don't think throughout all of this, even looking into the future, the GESIO goes away. I think the acronym as we know it, Search Engine Optimization, is going to be archaic and SEO is going to assume new meanings as we continue to evolve. Inevitable. So I think for the reasonable lifespan of all of us, we can continue to call this work SEO and everyone will understand what it means, regardless of the platform or the landscape across which you are doing this. Right. Although if somebody can come up with a good acronym that accurately encompasses it all, that isn't already obviously attached to other concepts in humanity's existence, I'm looking at you, geo, then I'm all for it, right? I mean, bring on the new acronym, but for now, SEO, just not geo. Yeah, exactly. Personal thing. I really don't care if somebody wants to call it geo, go for it. We know what we're talking about. But the point here is how we get our information is changing. That's the bottom line here. And I don't mean you get it from ChatGPT. Okay? What I mean is, in the world around us, I'd like to ask the audience, raise your hand if you've ever had a smart speaker, because pretty much everybody in the audience is going to raise their hand. They're going to raise two hands and they're going to say, I have seven of them and I still love them, and blah, blah, blah, whatever, I don't really care. The fact of the matter is, we had this tech, this tech came into our lives and it gave us another way to actually retrieve information. I could just ask my question aloud, get the answer, and whether it's a smart speaker or it's the intelligent assistant on your phone who. I'm going to air quote intelligent, because I still think Siri's an idiot. But this change is already underway. Okay? Now we've got to look at things like. We look at things like. I'm a big fan of meta Ray Bans. I've had them for years. I had my prescription lenses added to mine, use them all the time as regular glasses. It's frankly, for a piece of technology that is as simple as it is in construction, it's a pair of glasses. There's not a lot of real estate to work with here. It's staggeringly impactful in your everyday life. It is an amazing step forward for a user interface. I don't know, I'm not really going to make the claim that that's the new user interface. It replaces our phone and blah, blah, blah. I don't. I think we're like several generations away from replacing our phones. I mean, I will be buried with mine, to be clear. Right. So you're going to need a couple generations after me who want to get away from a phone, basically. So I don't think that we have a wholesale replacement coming. But what does happen is if I can see an object, ask my glasses to give me an answer about that object and it will talk into my ear and give me what I want. I don't need anything else. I got the answer that I wanted. And the more people that try this, the more experiences they have with it, the more they like it, the more they tell two friends, who tell two friends, the more impact that has on where answers show up and how answers show up. Right now, meta Ray Bans are audio only. They're not a system where they're showing you something on the screen. They're not equipped to do that, but they can take video and then that video maps to my app. So if I open my app, I can look through my glasses on the app and see things. In an AR instance, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. We're going to see there's a battle for the dashboard that's always ongoing in our automobiles and Google and Apple are right in the middle of it and they are trying to take over dashboards in people's automobiles because they want to give you the seamless experience and they want to own your life. End to end. Ask your question. Question in the living room, continue it in the kitchen, go get in your car. Same conversation. They own all of that. Share of mind, share of market, basically. If you look at what's happening in the world of local, these systems are capable, because of the data gathering on our devices, of a staggering amount of insight into not just like time of day and day parting. And, oh, you go to Google Maps and you see, oh, it's busier now more than normal, or it's not as busy as it normally is. And you know, this is two dollar signs and that's one dollar sign. That's all great and really useful, but that's kind of like the nascent version of where we started. We're stepping into a world for local businesses where local Businesses are going to need to be contextually aware of their neighborhood and everything going on in their neighborhood. Because if Banksy shows up in my neighborhood and paints something on a wall down the street from me, I need to be able to talk about that on my local footprint. Because consumers who want to follow Banksy or do follow Banksy or want to go to that location and get a photo with that new mural are suddenly within 100ft of my door. And I damn sure want them to come in for a coffee or a pickle juice or a croissant or whatever I'm selling. But if I'm not aware of what's going on in my neighborhood and I'm not broadcasting that out as part of my business, I miss that moment. And these are critically important things. Because my assistant chatgpt when I ask it, hey, I'm visiting New York for a few days. This is where my hotel is, what's fun and going on around me right now. Use Live Search to find their latest information. When it does that, it's going to pull up the Banksy painted on the wall. It's not going to pull up that you've got great coffee and you've got a 4.9 out of 5 on a thousand reviews. You're not getting included that way. But if you're talking about Banksy, suddenly now you're relevant to what my AI is filtering back to me. So, like, we have a lot of change happening and we haven't even touched on generationally younger people are using Google less and they're using things like TikTok more for discovery. TikTok is opening an entire ads group. I saw something this morning. They were saying there's something like 122 jobs open in their ads division. And that's like paid advertising on TikTok. They actually are leaning in on localization with TikToks. Like, they're going to explore all of these things. And whether TikTok stays or not, you gotta understand that it's in Meta's best interest, which is Instagram and Threads. It's going to be in LinkedIn's best interest to lean in with data in these ways. Like all of these things are really, really important. So it's no longer just, you know, oh, Google owns the serp and that's how I get my traffic. That's a part of it. But as I get older and my kids grow up and become more of the everyday consumer, I can guarantee you a single thing, those kids will not listen to their parents Music. And that holds true culturally, generation to generation to generation. I've got my music, my parents had their music. Sure, we listen to each other's music. But when I really want to get into the nostalgia and grab my feels, it's the 80s, that's the decade, it's not the 50s. That's my parents. So the same thing is going to happen with our biggest brands, with our biggest search platforms, right? I have a friend who tells this story. His daughter had a bring your parent to school day, right? It was, you know, he came in and it was like, what do you do? And he says, oh yeah, I work in Internet marketing and I help businesses rank highly on Google. And immediately girl in the front row, he knew who she was. He's one of his daughter's friends, right? She raises her hand and she says, what's Google? I hear my parents talk about it all the time and they use it as a verb, but I don't know what it is. And he said, my life split at that moment. And he said a part of me recognized the futility of my future and futility of everything I've done in the past and how this is the end of everything in my world. And he said the other part of me had to explain to her what a search engine was and how you find information. And oh, she said, oh, I talk to my friends, I use TikTok and I use Snap. And then he said that took me right back around to my funk about here's a nine year old and they don't actually understand how Google operates or they don't go there in their own words. And that becomes a problem 10 years from now. Not even 10 years from now. That becomes a problem because when that nine year old becomes an adult with an income and is a purchaser and makes their own decisions, they will be sticking with the areas that they're comfortable with. Listening to their music, not listening to their parents music. This is a problem. Facebook had to face this. They bought Instagram, Instagram is now facing this. Threads. Threads is going to face this. LinkedIn won't face it because LinkedIn is all about career. So it's all about you young, you old, doesn't matter, it's career. And that's okay. All right, X. I don't think X cares. So X is X, right? Like it's, it's a very interesting melting pot. But point being is that and all of those systems, right? Like we want to call it Snap, we want to call it TikTok, we want to call out these kind of new spaces. They're all going to run through their own version of this eventually. It's inevitable, it's going to happen. Okay, the real challenge though, and this is what these LLMs are bringing forward, right? Like I'm excited for GPT5 because I need the idiot edges of 4.5 to go away, right? Like I feel sometimes like I'm working with a really smart seven year old. They have access to the world's knowledge and information. They will lie to me when they don't know something because, because they want to please me and they think that's more important than facts and they're embarrassed by not knowing a lot of facts. So they lie somewhat frequently like it, you know, and it's incumbent on me to know all of that information so that I can pull the truth and useful from the fictitious, you know, I want five to get beyond that. Like I need a nice semi sentient 24 year old that knows the difference, you know, like isn't really looking for that approval and just like when I give it the rules that like, oh, I'll follow those rules, like that's what I need five to be. We'll see. And if it's not five, then you know what, it's going to be six and if it's not six, it's going to be seven. Like it's inevitable and we will get there when that happens. Or I guess along the way what ends up happening is all of these users build an affinity for that platform, whichever one they've chosen, right? Whichever one they're using at the time. And the more affinity you have and the more history you build with it, the harder it is for you to incorporate anything from anywhere else. That's again a very natural human thing, you know, like, are you a Pandora guy or are you a Spotify guy? I'm a Spotify guy and I don't care what offers, deals or anything Pandora's talking about. You're not getting me. I'm Spotify. I built playlists, I understand the interface, I've got it plumbed in every everywhere, passwords are already in. I'm just lazy. So I'm happy with what I have. And that's it. Again, human nature and LLMs are extremely good at pulling out the threads of human nature and appeasing them. So I do think that we are going to see a lot of change with these systems and platforms. We are going to see a lot of shift and I don't know that Google's influence in search I can't help but think that the percentages are going to start to come down and that's obviously going to be a problem for the company. However, I think that they are very uniquely poised to go through this hybrid period and come through with a credible answer. Right. It's not particularly hard to build a traditional search engine, not now, not today. Like any of us could do it, but ChatGPT hasn't done it. Perplexity's kind of sort of done it. Claude hasn't done it. Like, you know, they're, they're more interested in the humanistic aspects of AI than the commercial aspects of it as a company. So they're not looking that way. And so that kind of puts Google in a position where, you know, it's, it's very easy. I don't say very easy, but they have all the components they need to take that lead essentially and become that like, hey, there was traditional, then there was hybrid and now there's AI. Like, if that's the path we're on, the arc that we appear to be on with the evolution of search and SEO, they're really well poised for that, you know, like they've got everything they need to get there. So I'm excited, I'm optimistic, but I'm also pragmatic about it, you know, and it's extremely hard for practitioners and for businesses and pretty much anybody who relies on revenue that originates from search. It's extremely hard to sit down in a boardroom and go, we're going to make decision A because we believe future A and off you like, because any day now we're going to get chat GPT5 and you know what if it's a functional 30 year old, like, holy crap, like whatever you do at 6, I'm not really worried about it because functional 30 year old beats genius 7 year old all day long.
- [53:11]
B
Well, like in that same vein too, it's like, yeah, we don't know for certainty what tomorrow or the next week will bring in that sense. But it's like, I do feel like, and kind of bring the conversation around. You have your safe bets to invest in, which is like, if a kid's going through school, it's a safe bet that they should learn how to read and write. We don't know how the world's going to change, but that skill set can then be applied and built upon. And I think that's the way that we should be looking at the industry is what are those fundamental skills that we need to then build on top of and where you kind of, you know, going back to early in the conversation, I think it's also fair and valid in a human side to also recognize that it's like, yeah, it can be exciting. I can be optimistic. We're also people, too. And it's fair to say that it's like, yeah, I've been grinding out for the last 15 years on this. Like, it's also. I think people can give themselves that break to be like, like, I'm tired. I've been running a long time.
- [54:19]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's completely valid. If you're sitting here right now with a career in this industry and you're feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and you're questioning life's choices, I think you're exactly where you should be. I think that's completely valid. And honestly, I think every single one of us, if we're being truthful, is going to admit we're there or we were there, or we were about to go there. Like, again, it's all on a curve. And, you know, that's. That's the reality. I think that the fundamental skills that you learned as an SEO or a content developer or a programmer, I think those things are hugely valuable. I think they are core layer on AI. Everything you plus AI, right. That increases your productivity, that increases your ability to research and learn. Keep critical thinking on all of it. You can't usurp your agency. Like, you don't give it to the System and trust 100% what it gives back to you. I mean, literally editing one of my articles today, I went through and said, I'm not sure about this phrase. Is there a better way to say this phrase? And it goes, oh, yeah. And it gives me the example of it. And it quoted from the document I uploaded. It quoted the sentence that I wanted change back to me, but changed the sentence in the quote and said, here's what you wrote. And I'm like, I did not write that. Here are the words in the document. The document is attached. You have it. I don't know how you got there. Like, you control, right? That's the thing. And that is still exhausting because you're still in charge. You don't get to. Here's the steering wheel. Someone else drive for a little bit. Nope. Still you. Still you navigating, still you pressing the gas pedal. Still you making decisions on braking, still you deciding where you're gonna go. Still you pulling over, putting gas in the tank. All you 100. But a lot of those things, it's helpful to have an assistant for so everything you've learned, everything you know, for your discipline. And this falls neatly in line with the concept of human in the loop. That's not a phrase that I made up. That is a phrase from the LLM, the machine learning industry. The concept of human in the loop is incredibly important. Right. It's you with a layer of AI. That's it. Think of it as your superhero cape and go forth and be the superhero version of you. That's what we're talking about. And it's a little bit of change, a little bit uncomfortable, but, you know, I think the rewards are absolutely going to be there. In fact, I can see a lot of people in this industry ending up moving their careers forward because they will be the first people in their companies, their organizations, their teams who truly became AI fluent. And everyone else is like, oh, I don't know, let's hold back. I don't want to learn. No, don't go do that. You know, and these are also the same people, by the way, who advocated blocking LLM crawlers. Oh, no, no, they can't come in here because they'll take our stuff and they'll use it, and then that's ours. Proprietary information. It's the description of a screwdriver that you sell that is not proprietary information that you need to protect. But I guarantee you, if you want sales in the future, you have to have that crawler accessing your URL, because if they can't, then it won't be your screwdriver they talk about in the answer. Period. So, like, we've kind of seen some of that evolution now, but there are a lot of people who are still on that no, no block side. And it's like you need to be on the no, no access. And here's why. Here's how that impacts our business. Here's how this action supports our company goals. You. You move yourself forward by adopting all of this. That's my. My firm belief.
- [58:13]
B
Absolutely. So that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Duane Forrester from Unbound Answers for joining us. If you'd like to get in contact with Duane, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Or you can get more information about unbound answers@unboundanswers.com also be sure to check out his substack, which will be in the show notes for some of these articles that have been referenced. And if you haven't subscribed yet and would like a daily stream of SEO content marketing knowledge in your podcast feedback. Hit the subscribe button on your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed soon with that. That's all for today. Thanks for stopping by and we'll see you in the next episode.