#12 - Marketing in Its Death Throes: AI Isn’t Playing by the Old Rules

In this episode of Over The Bull, Ken Carroll explores the unraveling of once-trusted marketing tactics in the face of AI-powered search. From low-domain microsites to landing-page hacks and pay-per-click crutches, strategies that used to dominate are now in their death throes.

AI isn’t just disrupting the game—it’s rewriting the rules. Ken explains how large language models are bypassing gimmicks and favoring content from credible, well-cited sources. If your strategy relies on throwing ad dollars at thin content, it’s time to reassess.

You’ll learn what actually works in an AI-first future: structured data, digital reputation, real authority, and content worth citing. This isn’t about fear—it’s about getting ahead of the shift.

Listen in and learn how to move past the bull before it buries your brand.

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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If your business uses Google Ads, you're going to want to absolutely listen to this episode of Over the Bull. What's going to happen in the near future is going to rock the world when it Welcome to Over the Bull. My name is Ken, and I look forward to talking to you today about some incredible changes that are going on in the world of artificial intelligence. So it's probably no surprise to you that large language models such as ChatGPT and others, they're really taking the world by storm. People are talking to them more and more. People are asking artificial intelligence for recommendations. they're kind of using artificial intelligence as a friend. And as that, any recommendations that these models are giving to people are becoming more valuable to them than traditional search, such as Google searches and things like that. Now, all the big tech companies are fully aware of what's going on. And they know that this is the next big push. Look no further than what you're hearing about the energy allocations that are going to be required to build these models and how you're hearing companies like Google talking about building nuclear power plants and the urgency of doing so. And so it's here. Like it or not, it's here, and it's going to affect businesses in a lot of dramatic ways. Now, if you're not careful, what you're going to do is you're going to fall prey to falling asleep behind the wheel because a lot of agencies, especially one agency that I've had my own in the last week, they're using practices that are quickly becoming antiquated, and they will be absolutely irrelevant as practices artificial intelligence becomes more and more relevant. So here's the question. How is your business going to ride the wave of artificial intelligence and be something that artificial intelligence will recommend to people when they ask questions about services and products in your area? Now, this is huge. You know, 30 years ago when I was a kid, I remember Kmart was big. You know, Kmart was the department store, is what everybody trusted, and they looked so big they weren't going nowhere. There was Sears. You know, you can draw your own analogy. But those were replaced, right? So now we got our Walmarts. And so looking back then, if you would have invested one way or spent all your time, you know, trying to get into Kmart versus Walmart, you would see where you are today. And so what we're seeing in this trend of artificial intelligence is that it's kind of that big of a swoop. And we don't know who's going to win the battle. Now, there's a lot of undercurrent, and there's a lot of speculation, and there's a lot of people who are creating some hyperbole around the idea of what artificial intelligence is going to do. Now, of course, they're using the buzzwords, artificial intelligence, all these kind of things. And what they're trying to do is sell product, but they're not really getting to the brass tacks of what it means. You know, the idea that you're just going to use things like chat GPT to write content, which if you're doing that, you really need to go back and listen to the EEAT conversation in an earlier Over the Bull episode. because it's much more complicated than that, and it's really going to really impact how people shop and look and research. Therefore, it's going to impact how your business is also going to need to address those issues. So let me talk about this specific instance, and let me give you an example of what this is going to mean. Now, before I do that, what we need to do is we need to kind of look at what AI models are doing. AI models, just like Google and other models, what they do is they want to pull up the most credible resources. And so the people that have the most trustworthy, reliable, organic, authoritative content, original content, those people are going to show up more and more while some of these people kind of turn and burn processes are going to be less and less effective. So really pay attention to what's going on here because I think this is going to affect a lot of you who are listening and you're going to want to forward this to people that you want to understand exactly what's going on. So when it comes to Google Ads, here's what a lot of agencies are still doing. They're creating these little microsites, these little one or two page websites. And these websites, what they do is they actually send the paid ad traffic to these little microsites. And they're built, you may hear like squeeze pages, you may hear terms like funneling, you may hear these other terminology. And what they're doing is they're sending ads to those particular pages. And then that's how they're tracking their conversion. So they don't want to confuse their leads because what they're doing is using that to prove their worth to a company. So the danger in this is that AI models are looking for credible content. Now, businesses... may or may not know this, but every website has what we call a DA score or a DR score. Depends on the resource that you use to gauge the authoritativeness of a website. And the higher the authoritative nature of the website or ranking of that dictates kind of like its credibility factor. So in auditing a couple of websites, matter of fact, I audited about 15 websites over the last week, and I saw this kind of hurricane on the horizon. So what the company does is they go through and they build these little websites that they think are highly converting and they concentrate on the wrong factors. These websites typically have a DA score or a DR score of under one. And the reason is, is they're not worried about building the credibility of of that particular website up. They're just worried about driving traffic from Google Ads to there in order to get the phone to ring so that you'll basically use their services. Now, the problem is that the AI models are not going to trust that content. And as a matter of fact, it can even create confusion by having these little microsites all over the place and not give your business the credibility that it should get from that traffic. Now, this is huge, absolutely huge. And so what this means is that you're going to have to make a decision if you're going to invest in Kmart until it goes away. Or are you going to start moving toward Walmart in how you look at your business? And this is huge because a lot of times when you think about a business and you think about your KPIs, KPIs is just a fancy word for the stuff you're trying to track, the things that are meaningful to your business. And typically they fall into two groups, traditional KPIs, such as phone calls, um, you know, email signups, filling out forms, making a purchase. Those are traditional KPIs. But now what we need to do is we need to concentrate on KPIs that are less direct sell, but better for long-term visibility. And those KPIs would be things such as creating a a better domain score for your website and building up your website, which is going to include things such as content marketing, posting to social, a holistic approach, something we've been calling for a long time here at Integrus, the snowball effect, meaning that we want to build a cumulative effort to build the reputation of a business so that they show up everywhere. Last week, I gave a mention where Google Ads is a small part of what we do. And it garnered for one of our clients 50 some odd phone calls last month with their budget, but their overall phone calls was almost 200. Now that's a huge difference. And it's because what we're doing is we're building credibility for that business everywhere on the internet that's applicable to that business and driving traffic from multiple resources. And so this idea that you're going to continue to have these little micro websites that have no credibility and that it's going to continue to be authoritative for your business, I think this is a huge, huge mistake. And the idea that... you're going to be able to get away with that in the future. I think what you're going to see in the next six to 12 months is more and more of a transition to where people are going to chat GPT and asking questions. So not only is it going to affect how you run ads and where you send those ads to, But now it means you really need to start building the authoritative nature of your website and your business in general on the Internet. So you can't focus on one thing. Now, here's a trick. Here's a trick to this. So one of the common responses to these concerns is that no single person or no single agency can be great at everything. So somebody's got to concentrate on your Google ads. You've got to have somebody concentrating on your website, somebody concentrating on your social. and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the problem with that model and having all these cooks trying to make you a meal to promote your business is a lot of times this will become disjointed. And if it becomes disjointed, you're going to have a whole other subset of problems. Plus, you're going to have different temperaments, different moods, different whatever, which is why the only thing we saw we could do on our end is to learn how to do everything that's important. So we have our own social media posting model where we can post. Our clients can post in addition to it. We're working on Google Business, getting our NAP scores increased, using the right tools to get our NAP score, which basically is name, address, and phone number. That needs to be consistent. Getting everything lined up where everything is optimized, getting the website where it's happy, optimizing the website to where it's structured correctly, and then doing a few other things. So the take-home, the urgent take-home is if you're using Google Ads and you're happy with your Google Ads guy, and he's not sending traffic and contributing to building the overall authority of your website up. So let's talk about this and break it down a little bit so that you can understand it in a way that's going to help you describe what's going on. So let's talk about the old playbook, what used to work. These little microsites using keyword stuffing and pay-per-click dominance. You may have heard terms like click funnels, old-style landing page with manufactured authority, or paid-only visibility with low effort on credibility or depth. Directory-based reputation tricks. like keyword spam listings. These are techniques that marketing people have used, and honestly, they've kind of worked historically. Now, we've never banked on it because I've won awards in SEO and other things, and I just know kind of the value of this whole snowball effect in which our company is based. But now let's talk about how AI is shifting and what is changing as this is becoming more dominant and people are using it more and more as a trusted friend. Okay, so first, large language models favor content from authoritative, well-structured sources. Large language models think large language models equals artificial intelligence. For lack of a better word, that'll get you over the goal. AI-driven search bypasses paid ads in favor of verified information. This means you need to understand what EEAT is. You don't need to start posting a bunch of stuff that's strictly artificial, intelligence-driven, like create me a blog article based on this. By the way, that's a horrible, horrible idea. Anyone doing that without putting in human intervention is really making some huge mistakes. The rise of AI agents using conversational sourcing, citation, and trust signals. So what does this mean? Well, as you get more into chat GPT and some of these other models, you're finding that people are asking questions that bounce around from the top of the funnel to the bottom. And they're asking a lot of questions. Well, the idea is it's going to change how you write content so that people these large language models can actually use that as part of their citations as they're making recommendation. And this idea of can I trust this brand is no longer based on first page placement. It's about reputation signals. So you see, this is phenomenal because it's only going to kind of like completely kill the old playbook. And now it's like, okay, well, how do we write content that's going to be conversational content? How do we build our website and properly structure it? So terms like schema are going to become more and more relevant because schema is a way for you to flag content and pages on your website to help these, um, AI models understand what your site is about. And so certain things that SEO people have traditionally thought about now is really becoming more to the forefront. And we're hitting this new frontier on how you become more reputable, more trustworthy, in addition to visibility. And using old visibility techniques like this old hat landing page process is going to be something that is going the way of the dinosaur if everything continues to trend the way it is, and there is no signal that it's not going this way. So, let's talk about how AI disqualifies low-value tactics. Thin content and low-domain microsites don't get cited, okay? This means that They don't listen to them. They don't like them because it's like someone without a voice, someone without a reputation is saying something. And just like Google wants to give you the best results, artificial intelligence is only going to want to serve up content that is the most trusted because they want to be trusted as well. Recycled or duplicated templates get ignored. Okay, so think about that. Think about these recycled templates that are out there, these really pretty websites, but not websites that are driven for these models. And it's very common in today's world that you're seeing people use these templates, especially in agencies and freelancers, because they're easy to build. There's high profit margins in it. They look good, but it's completely the wrong process. So you want to make sure that you avoid that. Fake urgency or spamming CTAs are penalized in conversational answers. You see, now the stuff that was working is no longer going to work. And here's another one. Google Ads won't influence AI's training data or retrieval results. You see what's going on here. Those KPIs that once are driving your business, you got to get on the wave here and you're going to have to start thinking about the type of content. You know, I'm thinking right now, like one of the things we use are our content tools that actually look at the most relevant questions being asked. And we actually create content around those questions. We don't just guess as far as what those articles are. That's just one phase of this thing. So think about like if you're creating blog articles and your guy is saying, okay, let's run them through chat GPT. Here it is. Can you look at it? And does this work? And they don't really concentrate on the length of the article, the keyword densities, the subject matter of the article. Would it be relevant to artificial intelligence? If they're not asking all these questions and kind of putting it together in a soup, then you're going the wrong direction. And so Walmart's coming. You see what I'm saying? And so now let's talk about what wins now and going forward. Okay, so we're going to look at this other technique. We're going to call them legacy. We're going to call them outdated. We're going to call them the eight track tapes, these microsites. And now we're going to say is, okay, now what's going to be the future and how's it going to go? First, long-term investment in brand trust and structured content. Okay, it's about building trust, reliability, original content. We've already talked in previous podcasts how that AI doesn't really like reference AI content. It wants original human authoritative content because it's using that in its large language models. Schema markup. Schema, learn about schema. Ask your web guy, ask your marketing people about schema and what schema is and how they're using it in today's time. And can they give you examples of what schema is and how you can participate in that process? NAP score. Remember, name, address, phone number. Name, address, phone number. NAP consistency is huge. So when you put in tracking phone numbers, you also have to have a way where you can unify that phone number across multiple platforms for consistency. So just putting a tracking phone number on things without connecting the dots is bad. It's always been bad, but now it's worse than ever. And we also have to create this content designed for AI readability. So this is kind of a big one because people think putting words on a page sometimes does the job. And sometimes your agency, rather than doing the hard work, does the busy work because the busy work is easier to do and requires less thought and less expertise. You also want to get cited in articles, directories, and reputable third-party sites. So this could be indicating that we need to start getting back into press releases stronger than ever. At our company, we're constantly pumping out press releases, not just for that reason, but we were also looking at how they get distributed among X and then X's relationship to Google. So you kind of want to think through that a little bit. And then we want to get actual customer reviews and proof over flashy conversion language. Okay, so this means that just like in a political race or whatever, popular votes matter and getting real reviews also matters. So we've got to think beyond where we have been historically. So let's talk about some action steps for you guys. You need to evaluate your current strategy. Are you relying on short-term pay-per-click gimmicks, these little scrape websites that have no authority you're pushing people to to get those conversions? You need to get away from it. If you're going to live with it and you're going to ride it out as long as you can because you think that it's working, remember that it's on its deathbed. Audit your website presence. Would an AI model cite your content as a trusted resource? How do you know the content being put up on your website if you have an SEO guy? Is it just something generated by artificial intelligence and thrown up on a website? How do you know that it's being adjusted and fine-tuned to optimize its opportunity for success? Huge, huge Qs. Or if you're not looking at some of that content, you want to be able to look at it. You want to be able to understand it. And you want your guy to be able to explain to you how that content is being created. And if they use very ambiguous language, like, well, we target certain keywords and write an article based on, you know, whatever, ask them the tools they use. Because there are some tools out there that will blow your mind when it comes to content. Okay, we need to shift our budget. OK, you need to start thinking about investing in content citations and your long game SEO. That's right. You know, the SEO is not short term game. It's six months. It's a year. It's longer. It's constant. It's a battle. If you want to survive, you're going to need to start thinking about your SEO strategy, the keywords you choose, the structure of your website. Last year, Google put out, I think, a leaked document. They didn't put it out. It was leaked, I believe, and it had over 12,000 points that are going to impact or that impacts search engine optimization. It's a serious game. And I met a guy three or four weeks ago, and he was talking about The way they were doing it, they were trying to go full AI on this thing. And it's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Matter of fact, I've heard two people in the last 60 days talk about it. So make sure your SEO guy's on his game and not just chucking up stuff. Embrace structured data, reputation building, and go back and listen to the EEAT Principles podcast that we produced. This is huge. Okay, the future of search. If I could leave you with anything, it's the future of search. It's not about who shouts the loudest. It's about who's trusted the most. You need to understand that because this is way different. If your KPIs are all about who's going to spend the most money and get the most immediate clicks but not thinking about the long game, you can forget about the AI thing. You're investing in the Kmart model, not the Walmart model. We want to start looking at the future. We don't want to get stuck 30 years ago. And the thing about AI and the thing about the internet in general right now is it is in hyperspeed. It's like, you know, if you heard about like, you know, people live so long and there's so many human years and a dog year, things like that. Just think about that when you're looking at What's going on on the internet today and the shifts that are going on and the growth and the technology? I mean, we're talking about days to years in our language. We're seeing huge shifts very, very quickly. And if you don't get on the bandwagon, if you don't do this, your business, although what's looking may be working right now, What you're doing is investing in a daily game without any long-term planning. You're living paycheck to paycheck, and you don't have anything in retirement. So this is an urgent message. I think this is extremely relevant, and so many people are still using the old-school game, and it's going to bite them. I hope this helps you out. To your success, and next time we meet, I'm Ken with Integrous Design. Thank you.

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Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.