← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Why Google Decided That All Search Is AI Search
00:28:22
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- [00:00]
Ben Schapp
The Voices of Search Podcast is a.
- [00:02]
Michael Buckabee
Proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network.
- [00:06]
Ben Schapp
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.
- [00:25]
Michael Buckabee
A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts.
- [00:32]
Ben Schapp
Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.
- [00:38]
Michael Buckabee
Here's today's host of the Voices of.
- [00:40]
Ben Schapp
Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:43]
Tyson Stockton
Hey, what's going on? My name is tyson from Previsible I.O. and joining me today is Michael Buckabee who is the co founder at Noah Toa, which discovers ranking opportunities for brands within AI services like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, which is essential for enhancing their online presence and engagement. Today, Michael and I are going to be discussing why Google decided that all search is AI search. So with that, here's my conversation with Michael Buckbee, co founder at Noa Toa. Michael, welcome.
- [01:16]
Michael Buckabee
Hey, thanks so much for having me. This is really cool.
- [01:19]
Tyson Stockton
I'm glad to have you on. Excited to kind of dig into this topic. I think it's. And as we were chatting like right before we hit record here, I feel like this is obviously top of mind for a lot of SEOs out there. So with that diving right into this, like within the, the topic of today or like this episode, like you, you call out AI search. So maybe first if we could just set the stage for the listeners of like, what do you mean by AI search?
- [01:45]
Michael Buckabee
Sure, I think the general definition, like if you just talk to an SEO at a conference or something, I think there's still the perception that AI search is something that's like over there or that's like an up and comer. And so much of the press and writing and socials is about this. It's really placed into like a horse race. Like, oh, the referrals from chat GPT are up half a percent and that's, you know, taking away from Google. And I don't think that's a real holistic way to look at all these things. And my pitch to people, especially when they're like why should I care about this when it's such a small piece of this is that, you know what, it's just a thought exercise. Let's pretend nobody exists but Google because that's the way it was more or less for decades. And let's just focus on what Google is doing. And Google is moving towards AI in an incredibly aggressive way. The most obvious thing is the AI overviews. So they have stated publicly over a billion people have interacted with AI overviews. That's mainstream. That's more than double the number of native English speakers in the world. It's a crazy number. And my guess is most of the people using AI overviews don't even really exactly clock their AI overviews. They're just happy they got an answer to their question. And I think that's how we're going to see more and more of AI go mainstream is just that it's in the background, it does a thing and it just shows up. And in particular with search, I think that's what we're going to see more and more of.
- [03:20]
Tyson Stockton
Fair. And so in that lens, you're looking at it more of just being fully embodied by the, that Google's providing. So it's not necessarily just AI overviews. It could also be fundamental technologies used within the general algorithm rankings or, you know, anything else really, of how Google's surfacing. And I mean, really, I guess getting down to the core of like data retrieval.
- [03:47]
Michael Buckabee
Yeah, you know, I think AI is a change. It's an inflection point for all of this where I think most of the other things we've seen as search features that have come up have been more like small optimizations or tweaks. And so if we look just a little bit to the future, there's a couple things again that are publicly out there, one of which is at the end of last year, I think literally on Christmas Eve, there was a leak from an Android preview build that had the interface for the new Google AI mode, which is that Gemini, their, you know, chat GPT, like, you know, interface for working with AI is going to be brought into the mainstream sort of Omnibox, and you'll be able to toggle between those. There's going to be some different feature years. It's going to be much more front and center. Sundar Pache, CEO of Alphabet, you know, has said, yeah, we have AIOS now, but get ready for AIO 2.0, you know, which is going to be one notch up in terms of reasoning. And right now where it's just informational queries mostly like, hey, what's a xyz or what's, you know, how does this thing happen? It's going to be a lot more, well, what's better? This or that is going to be. Answer more of those questions. And there's a bunch of like, beta Google products out there. The ones I think about are. One is called Learn about, which is sort of an entire search journey, like, packaged up for you, that if you want to learn about a topic, you can go to it and it will pull. It will basically make a search plan. It makes like, oh, here's the six different areas of this you want to learn about. You know, the economics of Poland and, you know, post Cold war economics, whatever it is. Here's the six topics, then here's the best thing out of each of those. And Maybe that's a YouTube video, maybe that's a summary that they're providing, maybe it's images, but they package that all together in a really nice way. And Deep Research is another piece that came out. You know, I'm trying to talk to people on podcasts, and I think this is interesting because it's a query. You can't ask Google normally. And so what I asked Google's Deep Research tool was, hey, find me podcasts that accept guests that also have been updated in the last three months of 2024 that they're active. And it went off for five, 10 minutes. Came back with the list of 70 podcasts. I clicked a button and I had a Google sheet of those. And it's those sort of experiences that are really, I think, expanding search and making it more than just like, oh, it's a new search feature, fair, and.
- [06:23]
Tyson Stockton
Just so we can include in the. In the show notes. So the. The latter of the two examples that you just kind of called out was Deep Research. And what was the name of the first one again?
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Michael Buckabee
It's called Learn about. And I think it's actually the URL is learning.google.com and then you have to navigate from there or, you know, you just Google for Learn About. And it's the first thing excellent.
- [06:45]
Tyson Stockton
And I think, like, shifting gears a little bit for this. So it's like most people at this stage are accepting that, yep, this is part of more of like the direction of our industry and with it not only being integrated into Google Search, like, Obviously you have ChatGPT connections with Bing, whatever else. To me, kind of like the, the board and area that we're competing on is just kind of like broadening and widening. And with that, we're going to have, you know, some changes. And I've had conversations where it's like, you know, there's almost the feeling like in some of these optimizations, it's, you know, it feels kind of like we're swinging back more into like PR and like digital pr to show up these. As far as kind of your experience on like factors, levers, like in your perspective, how does competing in LLMs shift from competing in Google search historically?
- [07:47]
Michael Buckabee
Sure. So something we have on our site is the Biscuit framework, which, you know, tries to walk through this in an agnostic way that it's not about our tool, it's not about a specific AI search, but it's about the general things you want to do, one of which is you want to get your site index so you can start putting information out there. And then the other thing you want to do is really consider your content strategy. And I think for Too long as SEOs, we've been really complacent with that where we've been chasing traffic. We get some traffic, we then try to get them on a newsletter maybe then try to get them on a webinar. Then whoever is on the webinar, we get the account executives to follow up with them. I can run B2B SaaS background. So that's what we did, you know, and you just try to scale that. And I think that top level, low intent traffic is going to be harder and harder to come by. And more and more of that is going to stay with Google or it's going to stay with chat GPT and more and more of the search journey is going to be opaque to us. It's still going to happen. People still are going to do their research, buyer's journey. It's just going to happen inside of Chad gbt, it's going to happen inside of Gemini. So trying to be the responsible, efficient marketer, we need to move to the mid and bottom funnel with our content. We need to have more brand statement content that says like, here is what we do, here is why we think we're the best. And I think that's a struggle for some SEOs and content marketers where it feels a little on the nose and it feels a little bit like I don't think anyone's going to read that. Well, the AIs are going to read that. And when someone asks a question of like who is the best mark, who is the best in this category, they're going to pare it back what it is. And so you meant, you asked about ranking factors. I, I think the biggest ranking factor and all the AI search is repetition, just repetition, repetition, repetition of the message you want to get out about your business and just repeat that in different ways and put that in as many different platforms as possible.
- [09:48]
Tyson Stockton
That's I think that's such a key on that last point. And especially being like on multiple platforms. And I think as SEOs, we've been so like more narrowly focused on just the activities that we're putting up on our own domain that whether it's social channel or PR partners or things like that, that counts in this repetition. And it gives you all those additional kind of touch points to have for the systems to come across and then increase your likelihood in this. Going back too to kind of your point of that top of funnel and maybe having the hit. I feel like that tracks well to what we've been seeing as some of the other SEOs have been talking about coming out of Brighton end of last year, both Reynolds and Rand were kind of speaking to, I mean, oversimplifying a little bit, but more into like brand marketing.
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Michael Buckabee
Yeah.
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Tyson Stockton
And hey, like, you shouldn't be worried as much about direct traffic. It's revenue. And with that there's this interest and need on like brand. And so it kind of feels like too how you're describing that is like setting the expectation of, hey, if you're measuring just by organic traffic, you might have a tough narrative to be explaining internally. Because if you only report on, hey, traffic's up, traffic's up. With this, I feel like it kind of also will challenge how people are reporting on SEO.
- [11:21]
Michael Buckabee
Oh, absolutely. So there's been a lot of talk in the last couple weeks about HubSpot and HubSpot took a big traffic dip. I really looked into that with respect to this and this is all public information they've written about. I'm not like talking about the mountain school, but so they took this big traffic dip and I looked into it and one of the terms that they took a huge hit on was resignation template that, you know, people looking for like resignation letter, resignation template. And they had a page that was perfectly SEO optimized, you know, from the technical standpoint with add schemas. Eat. It had a diagram for, you know, Google Image search. It had everything but an actual, like copy and paste this template so you can resign from your job, which is kind of the search intent. They had you go to another page where then it was the HubSpot smart form where you put in your email and you hit next. Then you put in your next bit of information and there's an AIO for that now, which is here is this very reasonable resignation letter that you get in the aio and then you click a button and it launches it in Gmail or you click a button and it opens it in Google Docs, you can tweak it or if you ask for the same thing in chat GPT, it will just ask you what is the company that you know you're resigning from, who it is. It will write it for you if it happens to be a big company. Because I was messing around with this, I'm like, oh, I'm trying to work on this thing to show for HubSpot. It knew who the CMO of HubSpot was and like wrote their name in like, hey, it's been a pleasure working with you but I'm resigning now. And so I think they made a really smart choice and they have an awesome post about this which is they are doing a content audit and they have said that like this isn't a top of funnel term for us even. It's like strat. It's in the stratosphere of our funnel. Like maybe some people and maybe some traffic from this is useful. And so it's actually redirected right now like a 302 to this post about how, how they did this content audit and where they're focusing their efforts. And that new article they wrote is amazing. And it's amazing because it provides value to the rest of the organization. It's a technical document. They could give that to their support team. The support team is like here's how you do a content audit. Because it's so specific to them. Their sales team can use it because they can point to it and say like we just moved 13,000 web pages. Yes, we can handle your site. We just handled this massive site. Our and so it's an opportunity to really prove the value of search and content into more of the organization that hasn't been there before. Once you move away from traffic.
- [14:09]
Tyson Stockton
I like that point from Hubside. That's clever on their side as well.
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Michael Buckabee
Yeah, I thought that was great.
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Tyson Stockton
So yeah, no, no, no, that's cool. So from this I feel like one, I think, you know, one of the call outs that are given here is like human nature is not necessarily changing as far as like the buyer's journey, how we obtain and learn about stuff. It's more of hey, we're going to be more presence in, in this area. So there's some level of strategy impact and then there's some level too of like tactics in the sense of the repetitions that you mentioned or kind of being more targeted towards that brand statements. What are we about, what are we kind of known for? Yeah, any other kind of like tactics that you see that are maybe either entering as new tactics or things that are maybe resurfacing as like old tactics that are showing that they have life again.
- [15:10]
Michael Buckabee
So I think there's a couple things I recommend people do and they could do this like literally right now they can go to their AI engine of choice and do this. One of which is to look into, you know, we're saying you need to invest in brand. That always hits me the same way. People used to say, like, you should write a really quality article. Like I'm trying to do that anyway, that's a little too vague. And so I've tried to really break this down. So one thing I really recommend people do is they do a lot more brand information content, which is distinct from the brand statement content. The brand information content really came about because I was talking to someone and they said, hey, you know what, Mike Chat GBT is now our most popular and least well trained company representative. Like, who knows what it is telling people about my company right now. Do you operate in California? Are you Sock2 compliant? Do you have a HIPAA product? Like those are money questions, Those are in the buyer's journey. And if the person searching for that like, oh, they don't operate in California, well, I'm not even going to look them up. Like, how much money did that just cost you? So my recommendation is go to Chat GPT or Claude and say, hey, I want to make a buyer's guide for my company. Help me make a detailed buyer's guide and it will come back and ask you, oh great, sure, tell me about the features and tell me about the objections people have and tell me about the benefits. And out of that you will create a document that gets all the bits of this that are stuck in your head that aren't on your website. And then if they're not on your website, they're certainly not going to be in the AI engines. And that's your content plan to start moving out. And that content is again, tremendously useful to the rest of the company. So it's an easy sell to your cmo, it's an easy sell to your client that, hey, we're just putting this out there so people better understand us. So these things are there. I think that's a great starting point for, for people to think about this.
- [17:08]
Tyson Stockton
I love that point. It's so simple but so pointed in the sense of identify the holes that exist in what these systems already are showing for your brand. And then I'm assuming going to your previous point, hit those missing gaps in repetition, whether it's through website or content on your website, maybe even posting on Reddit or social channels also that we know these systems are on.
- [17:37]
Michael Buckabee
Yeah. And it's, it's so easy in a way like it feels almost too easy to be like, yeah, you should make a little video about this feature of your product and put that out. That's awesome. Social content, that's, that's great. And I think people over complicate this stuff a lot and they think either it's immovable, that it's not changing, but honestly from the perspective of someone who's like trying to influence these AI search things, they are desperate for more data and more content. Something to consider is, you know, it is literally billions of dollars that Microsoft has invested in OpenAI, makers of Chat GPT. Part of that deal is that OpenAI gets access to LinkedIn owned by Microsoft, it gets access to GitHub, owned by Microsoft. And you know, that is not for nothing. And so you know, if you take your content, maybe you have SaaS, B2B SAS, you make a static documentation site, you put that on GitHub. GitHub hosts static websites. We don't really think of it that way but it's easy like literally free to the static website on GitHub that will be pulled into the LLMs. They are aggressively trying to scrape every website on earth. Like if you look at the bot traffic, it's just nuts. And so much of this is still low hanging fruit. Where I think of the top like Fortune 1000 sites, still like 40 some percent of them are blocking one of the major AI search engines from their marketing site. Not from their proprietary data, just from. I just want to know about your company and you know, if there's an opportunity here because of this for challenger brands, for smaller people to come in. I think this is it where it's hard to build 10,000 backlinks. It's a lot easier to publish a buyer's guide that says what you do in a clear way that can be picked up. You know, it's hard to get mentions and a thousand reviews on G2. It's a lot easier to come in and say, hey, in 2024 our customer said we're the best in this category for these five reasons. So a lot of opportunity, a lot of change. But I think I am very positive on this for the SEO community as a profession. I think it's a lot more platforms to wrangle, a lot more strategy that needs applied and I think it's one of Those things that's just going to explode in terms of need and in terms of value.
- [20:06]
Tyson Stockton
Okay, so Neil, in that you kind of made the comment there about searches broadening into like these other platforms. And I noticed too in the description of your company, you know, you have call outs to ChatGPT. Perplexity. Claude Gemini, like, how are you viewing the landscape and kind of like how search is broadening beyond just Google?
- [20:30]
Michael Buckabee
Sure. I think this a really interesting thing to me is that Google in a lot of ways did a lot of the early investment in AI. They released a lot of the early tools that really started the momentum in this. And then I think we're facing a world in which they are now seeing a thousand competitors rise up out of the ground everywhere they look. You know, we sort of talked at the beginning of this about like, oh, AI search is mainstream now because in every Google search there's potential for an AI overview. A real interesting thing to me is Claude. So Claude is from Anthropic, which is another competing AI tooling set. And they, I think probably have the next best distribution channel, which is they are on every Amazon homepage and every Amazon product page, because that is what powers Rufus, the Amazon AI shopping assistant. And until this launched, if you wanted to do not exactly a product search, but a search of like, hey, I'm trying to buy like, you know, a new microphone for my podcast, or, you know, I'm trying to buy this new smart light bulb, you couldn't really ask those questions of Amazon's product search. You could look for a smart light bulb and it'll give you a list. But right now, if you go to Amazon's homepage and you click on Rufus and you type, hey, write me a Python hello World script, it will write you a Python hello World script right there on the page. It will then also pitch you a few Python books to learn some more about programming, but it will happily do that and it will happily answer all sorts of these questions that used to be the domain of Google. And I think we're going to see that across all the platforms. You know, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, there's a lot of complicated feelings about them, but one thing they have really done is they really started the open source AI movement and released a lot of the models and the weights. And you probably don't hear that much about them now. But what's happening is that every single one of their products is getting a little bit smarter in search every single day. And more and more searches are filtering into those in A way that they weren't before. And you know, it used to be Google's the only place to look for like, hey, give me the best restaurants in New Orleans. Now people go to Instagram. You know, people are within WhatsApp and they're searching. And that's a real different world. A lot of that is dark to us because it's not in the analytics, it's not in our search volume estimates. But those are real things that are happening and there's a lot of reasons for that, mostly around a better search quality experience that they get from it. And right now the worst AI is ever going to be and the most expensive AI is ever going to be and the prices are dropping like a rock for like how expensive. It's cheap now to do compute. It's literally dropped a thousand X in the last year. So it's a real different world where search is going to be much more distributed, it's going to be in a lot more systems. And you know, here, here's something to consider from a technical SEO perspective. All of us know we have to make sure googlebot can reach our site now just for Google, you have to worry about googlebot, you have to worry about Google's extended bot, which feeds Gemini. You have to worry about their interactive agent which could potentially use your site. And that's just Google. And there's like 25 more that you need to track now just to be indexed, you know, just to get the starting like foot in the door. And I think that's just representative of the complexity we're going to see in the explosion across all of this.
- [24:14]
Tyson Stockton
I share a lot of the same feelings and sentiments there. Like, I feel like each one is essentially able to also kind of like, I think build off what is, what is out there and like in the market. And so it does feel like we're going to see more and more competition in this. And I mean to me it kind of feels like you're gonna have that like heavyweight clash of the, like Google gonna have, you know, multiple variations and offsets for like the specialization. But it's kind of the do does everything category of like the heavyweights. And then I'm thinking that there's gonna be a lot of like, kind of like specialization and verticalization as that competition increases. And I think like your points on Claude really I think resonated into that area where, yeah, they're starting kind of general, but then whether it's a subset or kind of like a spin off of one of these, that kind of like specialization, I would assume, is going to present as you have more and more players in the game.
- [25:21]
Michael Buckabee
Yeah. And I think so much of this. What's interesting to me is one, you know, chat GPT did not set out to threaten Google. That's like almost a happy accident. Which is kind of crazy. Just that, like, oh, the Google Killer wasn't someone with a bunch of funding that's like, we're going to make a better search engine. Like, no. It's almost this academic project that came out, but the interface of it and the overall experience was so much better that it just, you know, drew everyone to that. And the other is, I think we're going to see more and more from a classical search perspective, weird competitors where we don't think of it this way. But Cursor. Cursor's an interactive development environment developers use. I use it for a lot of my coding and how it operates is it just operates directly on the code. So I don't look up like, hey, what's a JavaScript loop? How do I do a while loop? You know, in JavaScript I just highlight that code and within the editor I hit command K and say, fix this loop. And it just fixes it. And that's a bunch of searches that kind of went away. And that's a Google competitor in a lot of ways. And we have to shift around our thinking to. To deal with those sort of issues as marketers and to figure out where we can add value. So.
- [26:38]
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. Well, with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Mike Buckabee from Noah Toa for joining us in part two of this conversation, which we're going to publish tomorrow. Michael and I are going to continue discussing and we're going to dive into the topic of how AI search is changing the SEO industry. And if you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Michael, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. Or be sure to check out his website@noahtoa.com that's K-N O W A T O A dot com.
- [27:18]
Ben Schapp
Okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is pre visible IO. That's P R E V I S I B L E I O Just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about if you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SE and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.