#48 - AI Drunk: The New Marketing Hangover

RESOURCES:

• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/using-gen-ai-content
• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
• https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-e-e-a-t-how-to-demonstrate-first-hand-experience/474446/
• https://searchengineland.com/demonstrate-e-e-a-t-ai-generated-content-394227
• https://ahrefs.com/blog/eeat-seo/
• https://hastewire.com/blog/google-seo-and-ai-generated-content-guidelines-explained
• https://seo.ai/blog/googles-position-policy-ai-text-content
• https://koanthic.com/en/google-ai-content-guidelines-complete-2026-guide/
• https://futureseolabs.com/googles-eeat-standards/
• https://www.proceedinnovative.com/blog/eeat-google-ai-search-optimization/
• https://www.allbusiness.com/google-eeat-guidelines
• https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/d04913be-3f6f-4d2b-b283-ff432ef4aaa5/why-language-models-hallucinate.pdf
• https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.155/
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06265
• https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-hallucinates-more-frequently-as-it-gets-more-advanced-is-there-any-way-to-stop-it-from-happening-and-should-we-even-try
• https://www.ft.com/content/7a4e7eae-f004-486a-987f-4a2e4dbd34fb

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

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

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On this episode of Over the Bull, I'm going to offer you a stiff cup of coffee to help you with this artificial intelligence hangover that you may be heading toward. So, man, there is so much with artificial intelligence. You know, it's something that is making a major impact in the world. And, you know, I could go on about what affluent people are saying about the power of artificial intelligence and the sentiency of artificial intelligence and all that. You know, as a business owner, I'm sure it's interesting to you, and it might strike your imagination, and you wonder if you're missing the boat. But keep in mind, at its very core, we don't know a lot. I mean, especially when we start talking about sentiency and consciousness and these concepts. I mean, the very definition eludes mankind. And so when you hear people say this thing, it's kind of like it's a some kind of mesh between some sci-fi movie and reality where people are so excited and so over the moon on this thing that they're over-exaggerating exactly what it can do and what it can't do. And as the technology is being evolved and the innovators are coming out, they're creating models that are supposedly going to revolutionize the world. Now I'm not saying AI is not going to revolutionize the world, and I'm not telling you that it's already not doing crazy things because it is. But I can also tell you emphatically that within the world of business, that it is um disturbing to watch what I'm seeing happening. What I'm seeing happening is almost like a feeding frenzy of all these models and all these misconceptions and all these ideas that are coming out with artificial intelligence. And people are thinking that it's going to do things they cannot do. And they've completely parked the logical part of their mind in this feeding frenzy just to try to find their piece of the success that artificial intelligence is promising. And so this is a challenge for you as the owner of a business to navigate these waters and to really understand exactly what's going on. Now, as you know, over the bull is predicated based on real-world experiences. And one of those experiences that I'm seeing is this confusion, you know, where people think they're going to go full AI, you know, AI for everything, and they're going to transition people that were in creative and technical roles into kind of AI admins. Now, the problem with, you know, a lie or a misconception is there's usually truth that's kind of sprinkled in with that. And so the idea is that the truth is usually somewhere between those two points. And in this case, it absolutely is between those two points because we use artificial intelligence all the time at our agency. We just try to apply it where it needs to be applied, but not in other places. So I want to start a little bit with the thought experiment. Now, this is actually a thought experiment that began when Meta started announcing their full AI goals that they were going to try to achieve, I think, by the end of either this year or sometime before 2028, I think. And so the idea is that businesses, they're thinking about going full AI. Now, let's really think about that. Let's take 50,000 businesses and let's say they all go full artificial intelligence. They try to make agents, they're customizing their voice, they're trying to build all this stuff out. And they are they've they've gone full on board with everything from creative all the way down. And I'm seeing this where people think that that's going to happen. Now, let's hit the pause button right there, and let's assume we have 50,000 businesses that are doing that. Now, why are they doing it first? What's the purpose? Now, a lot of the purpose in regards to marketing is gaining visibility. More visibility, more content, more whatever. But now let's look at what Google wants. Google and other we'll call them search engines for lack of a better word. We can use LLMs or whatever, but at their core, they're search engines. And what they want to do is serve up the best results when somebody's looking for something. That's their whole business model to be an effective tool to find answers. So if 50,000 businesses are producing generic content and they're all trying to like sculpt in a voice and do all these other things, then essentially all of these businesses are working counterintuitively to what Google and others want. You see, they're not actually working with them, they're trying to almost fool them. Okay, so that's the second person in the game. You're the business, one of the 50,000. Number two are search engines trying to find the best results. And then we have the third person who's playing the game. And those are the people who are looking for stuff. Now, first, and I don't know about you, but if I go to a search engine and I start looking for stuff and I see a bunch of junk AI generic stuff that pops up, I'm going to leave the search engine and go somewhere else. Now, people like Google understand that, or companies like Google understand that. So they don't want those results to come up. But if they do come up, and even if I click on them, you're going to lose my interest real quick. Now, we all know this because every one of us who actually encounters artificial intelligence on those levels, we resist it. We don't want it. But for some reason, we think it's different when we're doing with our company and other people are looking sometimes. And it it's very odd that that connection's not being um made between the two. So then what happens is is um, well, let's let's look at uh mid to early late, uh mid-early last year when uh YouTube was uh which is part of Google, they devalued uh AI content. Now, why did they do that? Because people didn't want it. It clogged up their search results. It was showing things that were basically just goofy. They weren't connected to reality. And so they demonetized it because they needed to get something under control. So as I read last year, there was a lot of um content out there talking about. I mean, they use some real rough words, you know, regurgitation, things like that to describe the type of content that's coming up on search engines. Now, there's one thing that we know that we know that we know. Any of us who've worked with search engines for any period of time know this. They have rules, and then people try to break those rules and shortcut those rules. Then search engines react to those rules by creating penalties, by creating different standards, and then the game is trying to be broke. They try to break the game again, try to hack it, try to shortcut it, and then it happens again, and then we rinse, lather, and repeat. So this is really nothing new. It's just that the tools have gotten more sophisticated in the process. And so now what's going to happen? Okay, so we got our three parties: people looking for stuff who are trying to find something relevant, the search engines that are trying to serve up something relevant, and then you got the businesses that are trying to gain visibility, and a lot of them are trying to gain the system with AI content. So, what kind of content should come to the top? They've already told you this. Human content, human written content. We're going to talk about that. Human created, human-touched content is what is going to make the difference. We've already established that AI hates AI content. It doesn't want it. When you're trying to build certain things, we know that they don't want to see something that was created by them. They want to see something human-touched, something meaningful. You see, that's the real gold mine here. The gold mine is not full-own artificial intelligence. The gold mine are people who are willing to break out the pickaxe, dig in the ground, and look for the gold, and then deliver it to search engines, and then have that human authoritative content that now they can take and serve up because that's what's going to make the few that stand out from all the AI blather that either the companies are creating internally or the agencies are doing behind the scenes and trying to fool the businesses into thinking that they're actually doing more than they are. You see, the this principle of human-curated content is going to be the driving force. It's not going to go away. Humans want to know human stuff. Now, let's talk about a little bit more about what's going on here. So I'm going to roll through my notes. Okay, so let's kind of recap here. Uh, businesses are chasing these AI website builders, blog factory, social content, SEO automation, and the agents. We know that. Just like we know that years ago, these do-it-yourself website builder programs sat out there and promised that you would not need a designer. You could pick a template, add your content, and get found. They're still peddling that. And they're making all the money, and the businesses that are operating on those platforms are making very little. That's why you see a very, very small percentage of a small percentage of a small percentage that have success on those platforms. It's not because it's overwhelmingly successful, it's because even a blind squirrel can find a nut. Now that's the hard reality of what we're facing here. Okay, so what they're hearing with all this AI stuff is that you can basically replace your agency with it. Absolutely not true. Okay, we've already run a test all of 2025. I believe I've talked to you about this many times. And what we're seeing is when you introduce human content, you keep moving forward through the storm. When you try to go full AI, you start to tank. Okay, here's the reality of it. Um, AI content is average at best. Authority signals are missing, experience is missing, and trucks collapses. Now, I'm not saying AI is bad. So when you hear this, I'm not like super anti-AI, you know, I'm trying to defend something or whatever. That's not the case. This is simply the facts. When we go through and use artificial intelligence and we try to use it beyond what it's designed to do or what it's capable of doing, maybe not designed, but capable of doing, we see the wheels come off the bus really fast. Now, this is what's interesting. Believe it or not, they've already told you the recipe. They've already told you how to play the game right. But people like Google have always told you what the game is and how to play the game right. But people insist on trying to game the system. Now, just as much as you have people going full on AI and trying to create these voices and create these other things, keep in mind that the largest tech companies on the planet are also trying to identify it to make sure the results come up to the best possible answer so they can survive during this um transition as we we learn AI more. And so what are these signals? You can go online, you can look it up yourself. Look up the acronym E A T. That stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. Okay, now artificial intelligence can absolutely assist in these signals, but it cannot replace those signals. It can't. So how do you replace it? It's the hybridization of artificial intelligence and human thought. Now, we know the examples. Okay, we can have we can poke holes in it all day long. We could talk about how blogs that are written by AI cite wrong information, repeat generic content. It can hallucinate statistics and produce identical structures across multiple sites. And of course, these signals reduce authority, domain reputation, and of course, user trust. I mean, do you really want someone's first experience with your company to be some generic content with inaccurate results? Do you really want that? And do you really think they're going to engage with your organization if you produce that? And what if you do it wholesale and you're not auditing it? And what if it refers to things that you don't want it to refer to? I mean, there are so many ways in which this can get tangled up and absolutely destroy your company. This is why it's important to think about quality over quantity. And quality doesn't mean AI, grammatically, whatever content. It's human, it's EEAT. This is what they're all telling you. We want EEAT. Now we've proven in the last year if we can stick to those principles, we're going to be successful. But here's the trick overhead. It requires overhead and it requires thought and it requires processes. And it's so much easier to hit a button and produce content and say we're X number of percent there. But the whole thought process is faulty because you're assuming you're making headway to begin with. You could be rowing in the wrong direction. Okay. So let's take a look at what businesses misunderstand. They don't understand that AI is really good at creating a summary, analyze data, assist in writing, but it cannot understand industry nuance, validate real experience, establish authority, and manage brand voice over time. You see, without this oversight of humans, AI becomes content spam with this human accent. And the idea is that it's not a matter of having a human that can push a button or understand how to make more generic content. It's the hard work. It's this podcast is an example of hard work. This is not something that I'm just producing whimsically using artificial intelligence. If it was, you may not be interested. And so the human experience needs to be tied into it and EEAT principles. So the thing is, is that it's not use AI or not use AI. It's use artificial intelligence correctly or in the best possible practice known today as established. So I want to introduce this concept to you. I kind of like this, um, and it's really aren't my words, I just really like it. It's called the AI chaos model. And so the idea are businesses that run AI without structure. And this is, you know, using AI to write blog, build pages, create ads, uh, write product descriptions, those kind of things. It's chaos. It seems somewhat structured because you can say do this and this and this, but the result is mass content with no authority. Now we're facing the challenges just like anybody else. And we've chosen to go down the road of EEAT principles because we think that if we can produce content that serves everyone, that it's going to be a win-win. We believe that if we can help produce meaningful content that follows EEAT principles, we believe that search engines and technology is going to find out which of that content is actually real and which is generic. And what's that going to do? It's going to help the businesses propel to the top of search engines, surpass all the generic content that exists. And then what's it going to do for the person searching? It's going to give them the content that they need in order to make a decision. And that is going to help search engines remain credible in the end. And so what we believe is that gaming the system is really something we do want our competitors to do. We do want nine out of ten companies doing it the wrong way. Because when they all do it the wrong way and we put in the hard work, our clients are going to do better. Now, we don't know what the future holds. No one does. But as of right now, this is the reality of artificial intelligence. And it's getting smart. I mean, my goodness, we've implemented some tools with AI that are just amazing at this point. Like the way that it can engage with communications. It's done really good with that and it's come a real long way with it. And we've implemented those tools. We've also implemented techniques in order to properly train AI. But, you know, we're training AI based on EEAT principles. We just don't upload a bunch of generic content about plumbers, electricians, or you know, whatever company it is. We have to use the actual content that's generated from that company. You got to program it. I mean, how many times have we heard over the years, garbage in, garbage out? You got to spend the time and you got to do the homework. You got to put in the human aspect of it. Now, we use AI for looking at the competitor landscape. We do an analysis. I mean, it can break down data that's incredible, but we still hand touch each one of those competitors that we research to understand them on a deeper level than what AI can do. Keyword intelligence is great, but understanding the nuances between the um between the data is just as important. You see, there's human and there's AI. You can't separate the two, and you don't want a technician just putting up pushing a button, building out a page and going, okay, here we go. It's got to be curated. Okay. So what we're looking at here is layering things basically. So, you know, you got different examples here. Um, everything from the research phase, I'm looking at what we call the authority framework, um, where we get expert commentary, real insights, things like that. Then we can use AI assisting in the drafting of structures and outlines and research aggregation. I mean, that that's just part of it. It's just part of the tools now. But then we have to put in the human layer on top of it, the experience, the expertise, the brand voice, the fact validation. And then we do strategic publishing, internal linking, authority stacking, domain strengthening. I mean, if you look at some of these tools that even do interlinking on pages, uh, you can't even put those things on autopilot. Those things can really create some wonky results. It's got to be human-touched. And that's overhead. And this is why a lot of businesses don't like it, because you know, what's the enemy? If you can reduce your staff by X number of percent, but the problem is if you're replacing them with by frustrating people, you're not a large company, more than likely. And if you're going to frustrate people by trying to force them to do something they don't want to do, they'll go somewhere else. I mean, anyway. So I I guess it I guess we could say something like this. A circular saw can help build your house faster, or it can cut your leg off. The difference is the person who's handling the tool. Okay, so I want to wrap up today with your AI sobriety test. So uh please step out of your vehicle and let's run through this real quick. Uh number one, who is providing the real expertise for your business? When content is published on your website, is it AI writes it and we publish it immediately? B AI drafts it and someone glances at it.

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C

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A subject matter expert reviews, edits, and improves it. Now why this matters? EEAT requires real expertise. AI can assist, but it cannot provide the lived experience. Number two, in your sobriety test, who verifies the facts? When AI generates statistics, claims, or industry advice, do you A assume it's correct? B, occasionally double check or C, every important claim is validated by a human. Now why this matters? AI hallucinations are real. Publishing incorrect information damages trust and authority. Number three, does your content sound like you? If someone reads your blog or website, or dare say even listens to your podcast, does it sound like generic internet writing? Sometimes it sounds like your brand or it clearly reflects your experience, your voice, and your perspective. Why it matters? Brand voice and experience are part of authority. AI tends to produce average content unless it's guided carefully. And yes, there are some tools that help with that. Number four, are you building authority or just producing volume? Your AI strategy focuses on a publishing as much content as possible. B publishing regularly, but with some review, or C, creating strategic content that builds authority over time. Why this matters? Search engines reward topical authority, not just content volume. Is AI assisting strategy or is it replacing your strategy? So this is number five on your AI sobriety test. So how is AI used in your business? Is it doing most of your marketing work? It helps speed up some task, or AI supports a clear strategy led by humans. Why matters? AI is a tool. It's not a strategy. Okay, so here's the test. If you got mostly A's, yeah, you're pretty drunk. You're letting automation drive decisions that should be guided by expertise and strategy. Mostly B's, you're kind of bussed. AI is helping, but there is still a risk of losing authority and credibility. If you're mostly Cs, you are disciplined and on target for success. AI is being used as an accelerator, not a replacement for expertise. So there would be the closing line on how you can test your sobriety level or not. So AI is one of the most powerful tools businesses have ever had. But like any powerful tool, it can either build something incredible or create an absolute mess. The difference is whether AI is assisting your expertise or replacing it. Okay, so true story, I've never done anything where I actually equate drunkenness with work or anything that I do. So this is a first for me. So uh hopefully I use the terminology appropriately and uh all that fits into place. Anyway, guys, I really do hope that this helps you put artificial intelligence in its proper perspective and um, you know, spin the overhead or work with agencies that are dedicated to EEAT. In the end, as of right now, it is absolutely the safest and best approach to harmonize both. Until next time, this is Ken with Over the Bull to your success.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

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