AI content is everywhere, but is Google quietly penalizing it? In this episode, we're diving into how search engines really treat AI content and what that means for your business. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Today I'm joined by Bruce Clay. He's widely known as the father of SEO. For more than 25 years, Bruce has shaped the way businesses approach search, and now he's here to share what generative AI means for rankings, visibility, and the future of digital marketing. Stick around because in this conversation you'll discover the hidden AI footprints that search engines look for and why they could be killing your rankings. We'll also talk about why most businesses are falling into the traps with AI-generated content. And we'll discuss the hybrid approach to SEO plus AI that actually boosts visibility without getting buried in search results. So if you want your content strategy to survive and thrive in the age of AI, you won't want to miss this episode. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question: what are we going to do about AI? If this is you, ChiefAIOfficer.com has the answer. We give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use generative AI in their day-to-day. We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results. And we'll also guide company-wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit ChiefaiOfficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Hi, everybody, and welcome to the latest issue of the Using AI at Work podcast. My name is Chris Daigle. I'm the host, and today we have Bruce Clay, aka the father of SEO, as our guest. And I'm pleased to uh get into a conversation that I think will be of interest to a lot of the listeners because this is a cutting-edge topic. So, Bruce, before we get started with the conversation, why don't you just share a little bit about the journey that you've been on that that got you here?
SPEAKER_00Sure. 30 years ago, January of 96. Uh I don't know if you remember back. That's when Al Gore invented the internet. Oh yeah. Oh. In January of 96, uh, I decided I wanted to be a consultant. I named it Bruce Clay because I'm a consultant. And I started uh doing it. My background, I have a degree in math and computer science, MBA. I wanted something that was business oriented, but programming. Yeah. I mean, and along comes the internet. Yes. Along comes search engines. Yes. And within search engines, along comes an algorithm. Yes. So, real quick, like a bunny, I reverse engineered it as best I could, understood what it would take to do the marketing within it, and I was in business.
unknownNice.
SPEAKER_00And then lo and behold, people hired me. And uh so it started that way. Uh, I've been given credit for coining the term search engine optimization.
SPEAKER_02Nice.
SPEAKER_00Uh, which is kind of cool, although I don't know that anybody really knows.
SPEAKER_01Um they will today.
SPEAKER_00Well, search engine optimization is pretty good. If you do a Google search for Father of SEO or even a chat search, uh, I own it. So that's pretty good. And uh while you may not have an ego to go with it, it certainly is a marketing ploy. Yeah, absolutely for sure. Given that up. Um, so I started doing it. Uh I have spoken at over 300 conferences. I've written three books, uh, including Search Engine Optimization On One for Dummies by Wiley. Yep. I actually have offices in Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore, all over Europe, India. It's a it's sort of a a very interesting thing. Uh, and just in case you want to know, uh, the reason I have offices there is I wanted to go there on a vacation, so I have an office there. Um it's it's the right way to do it. Yep, for sure. But I've been doing SEO for you know 30 years, and we've evolved uh to be one of the top shelf companies in that space. About two years ago, AI showed up. Yep. And we jumped all over it. And uh we've developed products around it, uh amazing power tools, uh things that other people aren't even close to having. And uh we just started making them available. Some of them are available for uh clients to actually subscribe to. So uh we've gotten into AI big time. Yep. Um, I sponsor conferences, speak at conferences, exhibit. I'm still very popular in trying to explain to people uh how it works. That's one of the things I'm kind of known for, is I will uh tell it as it is and I will explain it in a term that you can understand. So usually that works out pretty well. Although I have to admit, right now there's a lot of confusion about AI and small businesses. And those are the things that really need some attention right now.
SPEAKER_01Well, Bruce, I think it's remarkable that as soon as the internet came out, that you were already thinking about how do I not game the system, but how do I leverage the algorithm in my favor for sure. And I'm not surprised that when generative AI popped on you know GPT 3.5 or whatever, that you said, hey, here we go again. Um, you know, one of the topics that I'm particularly interested in is we've, you know, we make an effort to SEO our website and things like that. Are we good at it? I don't know. Um, but with the way things are moving with more people as I encounter business owners and users, I find that initially they go from instead of using Google, they take those same behaviors over to AI. And they their initial uh usage of it, their prompts are essentially good what they what would be a Google query. So it makes a lot of sense that you guys would have jumped on that. So what do you call the term? I've heard it called AEO, GEO, but essentially like leveraging these same kind of algorithmic efforts to pop up in search results. What are you guys calling it?
SPEAKER_00Okay, so um let me. It's a longer answer, but it is the answer. Sure. Google themselves in conferences from the stage have announced that to get into Google AI, which is AI overviews, yeah. In order to get in there, all you really need to do is add a couple of things on top of SEO. And that SEO is really what you're doing. You're not inventing new terms. My experience is the people that really go out and invent new terms are narrowly focusing on a couple of things, but uh there's subsets. Yeah. See, in the beginning, in a search engine, all there was was organic results. And people assume SEO is organic, but there's nothing anywhere that says search engine optimization is only organic. Now, according to Google, uh, if you do your SEO correctly and a couple of extensions, that's all it takes. And uh we're very strongly leaning that way. That's item one. Okay. The next one is you gotta understand Google has 27 years of detecting spam. And the and spidering, and they have racks of servers, and they have all this stuff, and there is absolutely no reason for AI to reinvent it. So, what actually happens is AI is dependent upon SEO to to get rid of the spam and to hide uh garbage and to focus on uh expertise and authority and in sites that are properly structured. Yeah, that's SEO. Yeah, it is. And if you can do that correctly, use the schema, and you're developing references and mentions on other sites. That's SEO. If you're going to do your SEO correctly, then you can show up in AI. Okay. But now we're down to item three, the extensions. In order to show up in AI, we have to pay attention to what AI is trying, ultimately trying to do, and that is to answer complex questions. Okay. So uh by way of extension, I can say, how do I I can say find the top eight sites, identify the ones that are in you know, Illinois, and uh sort them alphabetically by revenue. Uh, you know, whatever. I can give that as a single command the chat and it would do it. It it's a series of instructions, typically. A lot of people just use it like Google. Yeah. But if it's a series of instructions, it would take all day to do that in Google. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or a while. Sure. Um, so we are finding that more and more people are using chat for questions. Uh used to be a question with six percent of all queries, now it's eighteen percent. People are learning that they can ask a question, like conversation and get what they want if they can ask it correctly. You know, when you put in one two, three-word phrase, you had to there was uh there was homework for you to figure it out, right? Yeah. Um in chat, you can ask it a question, and then you can say, Oh, wow, look at that answer. Can you do it only for green items? And then it will refine it, right? It's not a separate query, it'll remember, it'll it allows you to get your answers, and I think that is fundamentally the advantage that I have seen out of me using chat. Now, a lot of people, especially uh, and I'm centered, of course, on SEO in the web. Yeah, a lot of people are using chat to generate content. Yes. But let me give an example. If I put in a keyword, search engine optimization, I can say, give me a 1500-word article about search engine optimization. And it will do that. It will give you a 1500-word article. And when you read it, you're probably gonna sit there and say, perfect. You're gonna like it. It's generally pretty good. But what it is, is a assembled collection of words that are on many websites. Which is this word is followed by that word 10 out of nine, you know, nine out of nine times. So it puts it next, the next, the next. So it assembles, uh, and it comes across uh pretty straightforward. And when you run it through some tools, and there's all kinds of tools out there on the market, the one I use typically is zero GPT, but there's GPT-free. I mean, there's all those. Yeah. And you can run it and it'll say you are 92% AI. Interesting, yeah. And it's typically, and uh for your listeners, it's typically because every sentence has the same number of words, and every section has the same number of sentences. And if there's a bullet list, every section has exactly three bullet lists. Yep. Yep, there's a footprint. Yep. So it's easy to detect uh that kind of a generation. There's tools out there. Yeah. We have tools, our pre-writer.ai, and it knows to randomize the number of sentences in a paragraph and number of words in a sentence, and number of paragraphs in a topic, and number of topics in a subject, and it randomizes all this stuff so that it it breaks the footprint. But it also the tool has to, or the solution, whatever solution you're using, should think differently. See, the example I gave was I put in a word and I got 1,500 words out. The way we do it is we put in a word, and then we determine who would ever search for that word. A persona. Smart. Yep. Then we say, for that persona and that word, what are their pain points? Why are they searching? Yes. What is the solution to that pain point? And then we add those keywords to your original keyword, and then we can generate an article that is more likely to convert because it answers the pain. Smart. Not just, well, you just gave me a word. Yeah. Right? So that kind of stuff is a power way over Google. I see it. That's great. And uh so we have what we call the uh page creator. Uh it has 152 of those steps. Wow. Okay. That's how many steps it takes to ultimately build a competent page. And that's what we build. Yeah. Um so when anyhow, where I was going with this, is for an office, for a small business, one of the things you're gonna care about is when I use the tool, do I do it right? Yeah. And 90% of the people doing chat are just gonna stick in a keyword and read it and say it's good and publish it, and Google's gonna see it's AI. Yeah. And um you gotta be careful with that because that's a trap. Yeah. It truly is a trap.
SPEAKER_01How are the search engines like treating or ranking what they perceived to be obviously AI generated?
SPEAKER_00There was just a very large survey by a tool called AHRES. Yep. And what they did is they took, I think it was almost a million keywords and looked at the top 10 results and analyzed it for is it AI or not? Yeah. And it turns out about 40% are AI. In the top 10. Yeah. Which implies that Google isn't really that good at figuring it out or they don't care. Now, if it's clearly AI, the footprint is so conspicuous, uh, that's a different story. But it seems as if Google cares more about is it a legitimate answer than is it AI? Is it useful for the query? Yeah. So if I say how high is the Eiffel Tower, it doesn't matter if it's AI or not, it's gonna give me the answer. True. Yeah. Right? If I uh say how do I do SEO, it may matter a lot. Yes. Right? So I think it's very dependent upon uh what you're after. So here I am, I'm a small business, and let's suppose uh I want to buy a drone. Yeah, it's pretty popular, they're all over the place. I can say what are the top ten drone manufacturers, and what is the positive and negative for each? How are you gonna do that in Google? But in chat it's one sentence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So depending upon the amount of innovation your answer should have, if there's zero innovation, AI's perfect. If you require it to invent something, AI is not your answer. You can have it do research, but it isn't gonna finish the solution. And I think one of the traps people have right now is they're dependent upon AI, an SEO in web design, they're dependent upon AI to give them an answer that they can publish. Yes. What they really want is the research, comprehensive research that they can give to the writer so that they can write it faster and get it better. And writer being a human in this context. Correct. I uh we built a tool called pre-writer.ai, uh and we insist it goes to a writer. Okay, good. And in fact, we even disabled some potential features to make it have to go to a writer. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's uh that's a that's our commitment to doing it right. And we're real happy with it.
SPEAKER_01Do you think that that has uh a perishable timeline before AI is to the point to where it's looking at the transcript of this podcast and it's going, oh, let me correct and you know do it the way that Bruce is suggesting.
SPEAKER_00Well, it could. Um my experience. Oh, this is a terrible story. So I took and said, humanize this, get it to be 100% human, and it was 20%. So then I took the part that was still AI and I said, why is that AI? And it said, This is why. And then I wrote the script to say, now correct that, and it went to 14%, but other things were flagged, and I said, now correct that, now correct that. And I kept going through that loop until I got it to be 100% human. But it was AI. The problem is, yeah, it actually took the article and made it 100% human. The problem was every sentence only had three words. Not good. You can accomplish something, but then nobody wants to read it. Yeah. Right? So there's trade-offs. Yeah. Let me give a really interesting story. We had something human written, 100% human. We ran it through grammarly. Yes. And what grammarly did was it corrected human error. Okay. And then we ran it back through the test and it was only 94% human. Grammarly eliminated the errors that humans have, and then it made it look more like it was artificial. So technically, how does a search engine know if you just aren't writing that well?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Is there a threshold at if I were to run some content that was, you know, human generated exclusively, would the uh I guess would would the evaluation tools that you're using, is there a margin of error for those to assume that it was actually AI generated or that it's not a hundred percent human generated?
SPEAKER_00They would they would probably take uh it's very difficult to get 100% human. Okay. They would probably be wrong a little bit. Uh in our experiments, what we found is that certain of the test tools are great for e-commerce and terrible for information sites. Yep. And vice versa. Yeah. It turns out the kind of site, the intent of the site, determines how it rates you as human or not. Yeah. Right? I mean, if you look at an average e-commerce site, they have the same template for every single page. Yep. You know, it it looks artificial to a test tool, whereas a research report might not. It also depends on if you're a writer. For instance, uh, one of the jokes I've always used is the way to tell if it was written by an engineer. Is that whole paragraph has one period and seven commas? Yeah. Yeah. It's about all right. All right. So, I mean, the style of the writer and who who's your audience, and are they sophisticated? And it really does change things. My view is if you're under 20% AI, it actually is going to tag you as mostly or probably human. And that's the way you have to do it. Especially when almost always the initial AI version is 80-90% AI. I've had a 99% AI, uh, and we've been able to convert it down to under 20%.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's and this is a tool that any anybody could use. They could they don't necessarily have to hire your agency. They can go to what was what'd you call it pro writer?
SPEAKER_00If you go to pre-writer.ai, yeah. Uh you can just go and sign up, no credit card. We give you 20 tokens to play. Yeah. And you want more tokens, you buy them, and yeah. That's the tool. And so anybody can run it. And as I said, we give you 20 free uh to you know test it. Test it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's kind of the model these days with these AI tools. Who is concerned about that? Is it writers exclusively? Is it SEO nerds? Like who is because I would imagine that most users of Chat GPT, they're definitely using it to create content. Whether or not it is SEO intent behind that content, they're using it to create that content. That content is being distributed either as a social post or a blog post or copy, you know, web copy, sales copy on their sites. Who who do you find tends to be? Is it writers that is concerned about this? Is it the average business owner?
SPEAKER_00I think that what you're gonna find is if it's published on the web, it is writers, uh, copy editors that that function within the business. They care a lot.
SPEAKER_01So they should be using this if they're not.
SPEAKER_00Right. And that's what the tools are for. They're pre-writer research tools. But if I'm just writing an email, have you ever written a document, set it down, picked it up a couple hours later and read it and said, Who wrote this? Yep. Well, that's what you get from the AI. It'll write it, and if you put it down and pick it up later, you're gonna perceive it differently, right? It's the same. Yes, yeah. And uh, but if I'm writing emails or if I'm writing an internal document that's never gonna be seen by a search engine, I can go more with the pre with the writer output. Yeah. Right? With what you get from chat. But if I'm gonna put it on the web, you there is it it is poison to just take it out of chat and publish it. That is, you will die. Yeah. Because it is so footprinted, so easily seen, it you will die.
SPEAKER_01I was just gonna say to help the the listeners right now, how what what are some of the footprints that you're seeing that that they should be looking out for to know whether or not their employees are using Chat GPT and spending the rest of the time, you know, on Instagram, or if they're actually writing? What are some of the dead giveaways that it's AI-generated content?
SPEAKER_00Well, uh the first thing I would do is uh I'd run it through a tool. Okay. And uh as I said, the tool I use is zero gpt.com. Uh-huh. So just run it through the tool and it'll tell you. And by the way, I have run into that where I have a service that maybe does something for me and they send me an article. We have our own writers, we write our own stuff and we proof it and everything else, but they send me stuff. I've had it where I've run it through the tool and it's 60, 70% AI. So if you have an external service writing things for you, or if you have your own writers writing things or a contractor writing things, you have to run it through the tool. You have to.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And if it's too high, you have to tell them it's it's AI.
SPEAKER_01Because the the downside of that, you're suggesting, or or you know, is that you have the potential to be penalized at least on results that get returned when somebody's searching for a term that's important to you. Correct.
SPEAKER_00My belief is you're gonna be last among equals. So even if you have the right answer, yeah, you may not be the top of the list. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And uh Google has this thing called the Google Quality Rader Guidelines, where people would review uh search results to see if they improved or got worse. And AI is called out. If you know it's AI, that's a bad result. So yeah, the average person running their own business needs to run the tool to find out if what you're getting from your hired help is AI. And you're absolutely right. A lot of writers didn't know that there were tools that would tell them.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00And they just, hey, look at how easy this is. And you got to clean it up.
SPEAKER_01We kind of find ourselves in this conundrum because obviously, you know, there's a lot of concern about for certain professions, specifically knowledge work professions, that AI is going to be able to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and you may not need either any humans or as many humans. Are we going to find like like how do we price? Because I would imagine that I can go to Chat GPT and I can get an article spun up, take a few of the tips you've given me, and in a minute have an article that I would say, hey, and maybe even run it through Zero GPT or a similar tool and get a score that I would be comfortable with. And that would cost me, you know, part of my $20 a month or $200 a month if you're on pro subscription. How do I start to justify paying for humans when I know that more of the content that's out there, and I guess by default, the search engines, if that's what's being generated, they're not gonna have a choice but to index or to return those results, even if it is AI created, if there's so much. Like, what's gonna happen to writers? Are they still gonna be viable as a as a career?
SPEAKER_00I believe they are. Um, I think that the writers, it depends on the tool. If you think you have a tool that wrote in your style and your voice, and it did compliance, right? It it didn't violate any of your company policies, it accurately uh made statements, it didn't hallucinate, it didn't imagine resources. I I once asked chat to give me a quote from a book author, cite the book and give me the ISBN number. And I read it and it sounded great. And the author's name was a legitimate author's name, and the ISBN number was 0123456789, and that was a clue. Yep, yep. It hallucinates, it it has filler material, right? This is it didn't actually go do the Google search, but it's gonna format something that looks like it did. You have to protect yourself, and it does hallucinate and imagine things sometimes. It certainly many times you you say do this and you get it, and it made it up. Yeah, but it sounded good. Yeah. Publish it. Yeah, yeah. So you really have it's a buyer-beware situation. You have to protect yourself, and uh that is a copywriter role, but you can have your writer do it, and your job is to do it. When we built Pre-Writer, I could have easily said, tell me what kind of style you want and what kind of voice you want. Yeah, is it conversational professional? I mean, I could have asked it that and then told it to write in that style. I intentionally didn't because I wanted it to have to go to a writer to do that. Got it. If I made it so you could bypass the writer, you're gonna be publishing my stuff, and that isn't good for the web. Yeah. It's not good for your company.
SPEAKER_01You know, let me ask you a scenario that we encounter a lot. I do these podcasts, we generate a lot of content on the podcast, which is an authentic conversation to humans, you know, ahs and ums and all that kind of stuff. However, a lot of the social posting and blog posting that we do is augmented with AI. If it's not purely synthetic, meaning like, hey, write me an article and it comes up with it, but it's actually based on like the context was a legitimate, authentic human conversation. Does that have an impact on how the output that you'll get from AI if you say, hey, take this and write, you know, an article based on this podcast episode?
SPEAKER_00Well, our routines will do that to some degree. It'll it'll summarize, uh, it'll supplement, it will build article. I mean, it'll do a lot of that. The problem is that you're not gonna rank or not rank based on a social media post. Historically, it is a summarization process, right? That's that's what it is. Yeah. Take this uh entire uh stream of words, whatever that stream is, and summarize it. What are the three high points? Uh, are there any takeaways? I mean, you have all sorts of tools now for uh even for Zoom or wherever that will create transcripts for you. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You can easily take any of those and summarize it, and you're probably fine unless you try to get it on the web. That really is uh the biggest factor. Yeah. The biggest factor. I'll tell you, right now, uh, I've I've had to go out of my way to get some of this to work. For instance, I can take any input into our tools. I can take a keyword, an outline, a list of words, I can take uh an email, I can take a presentation, I can take competitor articles that rank above me, and I can run it into the mill to generate our briefs. And we take that, we do keyword research, we do gap analysis, we do persona analysis, we build in the pain words, we build all that in, we build an outline, we write an article, we re-sequence the paragraphs in the article based upon a reader's learning sequence. How do they accept content and not have technical at the top and easy at the bottom, right? We re-sequence all that and we get that, and then we go back to an outline, create an outline from this. Yes, and then we get rid of the article and build the entire article over again. And it's a superset of what you started with, no matter what you started with. And because it's built from an outline, chances are it isn't um, there's no plagiarism. You didn't copy paragraphs and stick it in. You built from an outline, and even then the formatting of the output is unless you tell it otherwise, it's gonna have a footprint. So you still have to humanize it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I'm sitting here thinking, and and kind of my opinion on SEO was that it was gaming the system, right? Not not morally or ethically challenging uh viewpoint on it. It was just I understand how the system works and what it's looking for. Let me manufacture content based on the the rules that it's looking for, right?
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01So in a way, even though a human may be writing it, the intent is somewhat synthetic. Because I'm not necessarily a subject matter expert on the topic. I'm creating content that is specifically structured, manufactured to meet the things that I know, check the boxes that I know that the search engines are looking for. So this is using AI to create content, even if you run it through, like say, hey, create an SEO optimized article. Is there much of a difference whether I've got the human writing it and they're again, not a negative way, but they're gaming the system versus having AI maybe follow that same framework in an attempt to game the system. Is there a difference?
SPEAKER_00The answer to your question, yes, there is a difference. Okay. The human under normal circumstances there's two humans here. The writer humans should be writing for the audience. Yes. And to address the question and you know, solve their pain. The SEO writer gotta be looking to, I will never show up unless I do these things. And it's the hybrid that causes it to rank. The fundamental third level would be an AI, if you will, where it just says, I'm just gonna string these words together. And that becomes uh far more complex. Let me give an example also on how that would help you. When AI does its thing, its first pass is to look for this word, what's the next word, what's the next word. It builds the article and make sure it's grammarically sound, right? So I have my article, but it's spent all of its energy to build the article. Yes. Right? In our tools, we also have a list of about 130 tests. This is what you should do to have a good article, human, usability, all that stuff. So what we do is we take the article and we run the test. Does the article pass this test? If no, correct the article. Interesting. It corrects itself. It's a recursive process. And then there's something called EEAT, experience, expertise, authority, and trust. There's certain characteristics for that. We have a process to improve those so that the entire article can be self-improved. Then we can say handle transitions and handle the dot the i cross the T stuff and randomize the sentence length. Uh, never use an EM- or a semicolon, not more than 12 words per sentence, right? For a nine-year-old. You can give it all these characteristics that when all of them are done, it comes out human.
SPEAKER_01Let's talk about a scenario. I go into Chat GPT and I say, hey, um give me the hallmarks of human content as compared to synthetic content. And it tells me all the things that it understands how a human would write. And then if I were to say, okay, following those rules, write me an article on SEO or mountain climbing or whatever. Is that good enough to publish? No? Okay.
SPEAKER_00Uh it's still gonna use all it does is string words together. Yeah. So it's gonna use way too many four-syllable words or way. The hallmarks, yeah. Yeah. It's gonna follow rules, but it's going to be different. That's why you have to have rules and recursively apply them. Yes. Um, you can come close. You may not be 90% AI, you might be 50, but uh, yeah, you can do that. It isn't it, and by the way, chat doesn't always follow what you tell it to do.
unknownThat's right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I can't even tell you how many times I say, do this, step one, step two, step three, step four, and then I ask it, did you run step three? Uh no. Yeah. Oh yeah, let me rewrite it. Would you like I'm sorry? Would you like me to do that now? Nah, never mind. Yeah. You know, it it it isn't totally congruent anyhow. Yeah. But I will tell you, it is uh an excellent. And I mean, I am just amazed at what it can do. Yep. But it has a tendency. Uh, I want give me five paragraphs on this topic. Show me the document, and then it'll show you three paragraphs. Yeah. And then you say, Where's five paragraphs? And it says, I'm sorry, and then it'll give you the five paragraphs. Well, what are you gonna do? Every time you generate an article, you're gonna second guess no. You have to there are ways you can tell it, never summarize, never condense, never abbreviate, always do this, adhere to this count. You can do that, and you have to be explicit, and nobody just sitting at the console typing in chat commands is ever going to do that.
SPEAKER_01All right, let's switch gears a little bit. Do you see a point at which whether or not my content has been structured to game the system again, SEO it? I'm the writer and I write something and I don't pay any attention at all to SEO, but it's obviously human-generated content. Do you see a time when, whether I use SEO strategy or not, that there will be so much AI-generated content out there that the results engines are going to be hungry for what's legitimately authentic as compared to whether or not it's structured correctly or if it has better or not information than an AI-generated article.
SPEAKER_00There may be a time if you're innovating that uh the fact that you have the unique answer is a good thing. Okay. However, chat right now looks for everybody says it's this way, therefore it's right, and I can't be wrong. Yeah. So it's sort of diametrically opposed from uh a standpoint of that. But the issue is many times, and by the way, I've had people come to us, I used to rank for this keyword, I don't rank for it anymore. They got cutesy in their content and took the word off the page. You know, there's certain rules. Yeah. You ever want to show up and search, you better use the word. Yeah. Right? And uh, so too many people might not have um complied with some of the best practices for SEO as a writer. Yeah. You know, they they were trying to be impressive, and uh it confused the search engine. That could happen. Too many topics on a page confuses it. Yes. Um you don't use the right word and then you don't rank for it. You didn't know. Yeah. Um, so there's a lot of stuff where I think having a human writer is totally fine if it is the kind of thing you want to write and you don't want any content gaps, you want to be uh nose to nose with your competitors, you uh really I mean a writer has blind spots based on their experience. Yep. They will have writer block occasionally, right? AI can finesse that, which means that your final article is more complete. Because it's more complete, the search engine might like it more. But when you give it to the writer, you have to trust that artist to do the writing. And they have to get it right.
SPEAKER_01So in in a lot of the training that we do, we kind of teach this concept of 10, 80, 10. And we explain it as the first 10% is you being clear on what you want. I want an article that's SEO optimized on blank. You hit enter. The next 80% of the work is done by the models. But we always tell people that last 10%. Now you may say copy, paste, send it. It may be fine, but that last 10% is intended in our models to be in our suggested frameworks on how to use AI, is that you still review it and you might oh cross that out and that kind of thing. Is that an acceptable practice if I want to leverage AI for, you know, I don't have a blank sheet of paper. I'm starting from something, but I still want to not necessarily I still want to get ranked. I still want to be relevant in the search engines. Would you say that that is close enough? Or would you say that it was uh that that last 10% is probably not enough?
SPEAKER_00I don't think it's uh 10%. When we Okay, so I have a writing department. We do content for clients all the time. And so we create a brief out of our system, which really saves a lot of the research component. Yes. We can take five hours down the two. Yes. We give it to our own writers. And and by the way, this just as a an aside, when we first designed the product, I decided it was a research tool. I'm going to give you everything you want. Yeah. It turns out I gave the writers so much that they hated it. Too much. Because it was too much. Yeah. Right? So we've selected out the things that matter. And now a writer is instead of five hours, two hours, we're never going to get it down to 15 minutes. Okay. Yeah, that's helpful then. Um, but two hours is a hell of a lot of money to an average company that's pumping out content. That's right. That's right. And right now, at the small end, there's a lot of people where the president of the company, after dinner, works on his blog post and maybe does one a week. And this can get him two days and buy him back a lot of time.
SPEAKER_01That's a good point.
SPEAKER_00That's why why you need this kind of stuff. It's a tool, it facilitates your ability to accomplish what needs to be accomplished, which is really the goal. Yeah. I want to write a good article, give me all my research. Anybody can do that. Do you want to tweak a couple of words here and there? Sometimes that's all it's going to take. But other times, no, I I gotta rewrite this. It depends. Right? One of the interesting stories was a lawyer used chat to produce a brief document. He turned it in, gave it to the judge, and the judge went ballistic. Yeah. Right? The guy's still trying to figure out if he has a job. And um I mean it's it's a shame because people don't know the chat is just evolving. It's an internet. And will it get better over time? Sure. Can it get better? Sure. Can it absolutely write more human if it wanted to? I don't think chat is geared towards the internet. I think chat is geared toward uh voice. I think it is geared towards um helping you write an email. The Dewey Desmo system, I think we know what it is. Yeah, sure, I do. Yeah. But now in chat, it's just gonna give you, you know, the summary of the book, and you don't even have to what's a library? I mean Yeah, exactly. Right?
SPEAKER_01It it that's what it is. I do have um not really SEO related, but obviously with the extensive experience you've had with uh playing in Google's backyard for a long time, there are upstarts like perplexity, right? Um I I find and recommend perplexity as a replacement for Google when we're training executives and things like that on some accessible tools that don't require like a whole lot of learning curve, right? Right. Do you see this combination of, and for those listeners that don't know what perplexity is, use it. It's gonna be your Google replacement. Do you see Google being threatened by something like perplexity? Or do you see them just, oh, we'll just copy what they're doing?
SPEAKER_00No, not at all. I think that what we're gonna see, it's gonna take years. So, you know, I I don't have a clear vision past two years, right? Yeah, yeah, especially with AI. But what is actually gonna happen, in my opinion, is that people will go to social media, which will develop search and references and people will go to Chad and Perplexity and Claude and others, and they'll have their favorites and they'll do their thing, and they'll come up with their research and they'll want to go buy it. And as soon as somebody says, I want to go buy it, they're gonna go to Google and do the search anyhow.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. Okay.
SPEAKER_00You see, I think Google for a long time is going to be the gatekeeper that no matter where you got your research, no matter what kinds of answers you've had, you will eventually want to see reviews or you'll want to see um pricing and the shopping components and all the technical transactional stuff that's in Google, you're gonna want to see that. And I think Google's gonna remain that gatekeeper. I hadn't considered that.
SPEAKER_01That's and you're right. A couple of points that I'm taking from that. If I'm looking for authenticity, I'm gonna assume that social media environments are are authentic, right? Because that's individuals posting their stuff, as compared to if I go to a website, especially like maybe next year, I'm gonna assume that most of it was AI generated. Still may get the information, still may get value, but there's something, I don't know, energetically or whatever about the authenticity of a social post from somebody saying, hey, I went to this restaurant, blah, blah, blah. Well, man, we don't know, honestly, now with AI avatars and things like that, that may all change as well. I know that they're doing user-generated content videos that looks like an influencer standing in their kitchen, you know, talking about how great this knife is when the reality is it's AI generated UGC.
SPEAKER_00Well, here's here's part of the problem. If I go to social media, I'm gonna ask a question, I'm gonna get an answer from 10,000 friends that I've never met. Yeah. I don't care. I'm gonna look at it, and then I'm gonna go determine in Google if I trust it. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Google is still gonna be the gatekeeper. It is the the 10,000-pound grill. It is they've got a lot at stake. There's a lot there, and uh and a lot of people are gonna use it. I don't think we're gonna displace it. I think we're just gonna use it differently.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that's a great opinion because I I've I've been wondering about that for a long time. I mean, they've got a lot of money behind it, they got a lot at stake. They're they need to stay on top of things, but there's obviously upstarts like perplexity and that are threatening the way. But the one thing that Google's got is 27 years of behavior of people going, I need an answer, let me go to Google. And I'm surprised that it's only gone from six to fourteen percent of people like using it like Google. I'm surprised it's actually not more to see that Chat GPT usage.
SPEAKER_00And part of that is also something called zero click. You can just ask a question, get an answer. You don't even have to go to a website. Yeah. Right? Yeah. How many movies has this person been in? 17. Thank you. I don't have to go to a website. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. How do I get to this restaurant? You're you know, you don't go to a website. Yeah. And uh so typically of all of the queries out there, 60% of mobile are no clicks to a website. 35 on a on a desktop. So where are they? Are they in social media? They're just getting information, they're never gonna go to a website ever. They're going to Google. They got their answers, thank you very much. Yeah. Or what camera do you recommend? We recommend this and this and this and this, and then you go to Google and search for them. Yeah. Right? Uh, let me describe it. My behavior with Amazon. Uh I'm a prime user, been forever. My garage is where Amazon boxes go to die. Same here. It's the Amazon box graveyard. I mean, that's my garage. And then I have to go slice them up and pallet them and put them out of, you know. But when I go to Amazon and I'm looking for a product that may have been recommended socially or recommended just somehow in chat or whatever, I'll go to Amazon. The first thing I do is I put in the brand and model and I go to the one-star ratings. Yeah. Oh, interesting. That is my behavior. Yeah. I'll guarantee you if it says the box came dented, I don't care. Right. If it says flimsy, I had the prior model, this broke after two weeks. Yes. Yeah. There isn't anything on this planet getting me to buy that. Yes. So as I said, Google, maybe even Amazon is going to be the gatekeeper.
SPEAKER_01That's fascinating. Man, this topic, like, there's so much here. And I'm no S SEO expert. I understand it well enough to be interested in like asking some personal questions about it. But this is um, there's a lot to unpack. So if people want to unpack more about Bruce's perspective on SEO, where would you where would you suggest they go to Bruce Clay.com?
SPEAKER_00Right. Normally they would go. Well, I have a couple websites. Okay. Uh BruceClay.com is my consulting-based website. So certainly that's where you would start there. Uh, pre-writer.ai is for the tool. Yeah. I also have SEO training.com. Oh, perfect. And it is an online training program. Uh, it is a classroom training program. And every month I run a one-hour QA for the members. Nice. You can get in, ask your own questions, you can get an answer every month, month after month, uh, and then we archive them on the site. So there's a lot of ways that you can get answers. Yeah. Um, we try to be helpful. I want to be fair that some questions are research-centric and some are simple. Yeah. But uh, we're happy to help.
SPEAKER_01Dude, that's awesome. Um, so we're gonna have all those links in the show notes. I would encourage you if if SEO is a topic that's of interest to you, or you just want to you know know more whether you're gonna commercialize that effort or not. Uh the stuff that I've heard from Bruce here today on this episode, there's no question it's coming from a seasoned perspective. So, Bruce, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to share with the listeners. And um, for everybody listening, we will uh have a new episode out every Monday, and we look forward to seeing you download and listen to the next one. So uh only bit of advice I've got for you after this, go use AI. So, thank you, everybody. Thank you, Bruce.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
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