AI in Google Ads, Otterly.ai & AI-Driven Agency Operations – Episode 166

If you get AI snippets in results, you'll see ads before the snippet sometimes and after the snippet, and they'll appear on merit, just like any Google ad does. It's the keyword matching the advert matching the landing page. Is it okay? Yeah. And are you bidding enough and all that kind of good stuff? Yeah. Apparently the early performance signals from Google are that adverts that appear adjacent to AI snippets are converting better. And the argument is that people are, if they're at the point where they're asking long questions and getting AI responses in the search results, the further down the process of buying whatever it is or enquiring, you know, yeah, buying, I guess, whatever it is that they're interested.

Questions that are going to bring up an ad which is going to be ideally focused on them like high intent keywords.

Right. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And I've got some notes, but honestly, it's mostly flannel and absolute nonsense.

So hopefully you've got nothing new there.

Well, I've got notes that's new.

Yeah, that is new. It is a whole page of notes.

It is. So hopefully there's something of interest in there. Um utterly.

Utterly. Yeah. I'm liking utterly, utterly dot ai.

Yeah. So we've started playing around with this tool called utterly AI. And it's supposed to help you kind of figure out whether you are being cited when people are searching in perplexity, ChatGPT.

Cited and mentioned. So it splits out mentions and actual sort of citations and links, doesn't it?

Well, when I say cited, I mean mentions. That's it. Unlike traditional search engine optimisation, you don't need to have links.

Necessarily.

You want to be mentioned in the right places to then get mentioned in in AI. And I don't know, I mean, I'm I'm interested when we were now paying for it. So we have to be somewhat interested now.

Oh, good. Because I saw my free trial had run out.

Yeah. No, you should be fine now. You should. Yeah. Because it's the same account. But yeah, it's kind of interesting. There's even more guesswork, I think, in this than there is in search engine optimisation SEO.

There is because every single prompt that somebody types into our AI engine is going to be slightly different. So it's not like, well, anything that involves, you know, um, widget X, Y, Z, it's going to be a longer prompt and they're all going to be marginally different. So it is guessing the, the sorts of things that thinks people are going to write in a prompt and then measuring how often they actually do show up.

Which is why it says to, to kind of monitor what's going on in the engines on a particular subject it recommends fifty prompts so it can get meaningful data averaging out over the fifty.

And I guess then you.

Conveniently.

Delete the ones that don't, um, don't work that are just are not showing up. I guess you just stop monitoring them because it charges you per.

one hundred.

Prompts.

Because conveniently it, um, yeah, you get with a pro package, you get one hundred prompts and then it's ninety nine dollars for every one hundred prompts thereafter or something like that. So yes, they're going to encourage you to use lots of prompts in order to get meaningful data. But it's quite interesting. When I was working through some of the tutorials, he came across one of his own examples and there were five prompts in there. Yeah. And he kind of quickly, oh, I don't know why there's only five in there. And he kind of moved on. He moved on quickly, which I thought was quite funny.

Maybe less than fifty, you know, otherwise we're gonna be paying a fortune for it.

So still low numbers that are coming into our website from AI. And that's not because we don't show up in AI because we do show up in AI. Um, in no small part because of all the content that we produce. But, um, I think it's, it's something which we need to be across and obviously we are across it. And, um, that's the tool that we've used. I actually went through the, um, went through the tutorials and just sort of scribbled some, some stuff down by way of a sort of almost like a, our own user guide.

Right. Yeah.

Um, it's, it was telling, it was basically saying to keep prompt research bottom of the funnel and non-branded.

Right.

So for example, um, you know, like if you were monitoring a prompt such as is red evolution a good web management company? Well, that's not great because red evolution are likely to show up.

If we're not cited in that, then it's a that's a problem.

Yeah, it's pretty important. Whereas if you said, give me some names of reliable business class website management companies, that might be a prompt where. Yeah, actually we want to appear in that. And what the tool does is it lets you see who does appear for that and then sort of drills into why they appear for that and then gives you some help to try. And, you know, it really feels like, you know, another set of enormous task lists in order to, to really succeed at it. It really does.

But I think, yeah, like with anything, you've got to prioritise them and go through the things like, well, you know what? We could do that that's going to take ages and it's going to make a tiny bit of difference. Whereas we could do that. That's actually quite straightforward. We could do that quite quickly and that might make a significant difference. Um, but you can't do everything.

No. Well there's no Google search console equivalent of AI at the moment. And it's not likely to be because as you just said, every prompt might be slightly different. So it's going to be averaged information. It's going to be a bit like Google ads, where it gives you an idea of what people actually typed in, but you know how accurate that is. I don't know, but it's um, because there's no equivalent yet. It is all a bit of guesswork. You can start your research using keywords so you can put keywords in, and then it will suggest prompts that people probably use to incorporate those keywords. And then you can see how that transpires into.

So I guess that's the things you're wanting to show up for. Even if you don't. And then you can do the, it looks at your website and suggests what it thinks people might be typing in to get there, which might be slightly different.

You can also use pages so you can put a page in and say, like, what might people type into perplexity and ChatGPT, etc. that then that this page might show up or might be cited in the actual response. We certainly live in interesting times. It's it's obviously. Search engine optimisation hasn't gone away, and we still get most of our traffic from Google.

And I think most people do. When looking at the numbers, it's still sort of ninety percent ish, I think, coming from Google, isn't it? But I mean, I think that's going to go.

At least.

I think I think even maybe in a year's time, that number is going to be vastly different.

Yeah. But it was, um, you know, it's interesting learning about it. You know, it as, as is always the case in the industry that we're in, there always seems to be something else that you, you should know about. And I've got another one which we could potentially talk about later on. If I don't go waffling on about heating oil and rockets.

Oh yeah.

But anyway, utterly I it's worth a look. Early days for us, but we quite like the look of it. And you know.

We'll.

Probably talk about it in future podcasts. But there's lots of them out there. You can get bolt ons or different versions of SEMrush. And we already have SEMrush, and we pay for SEMrush for sort of site analysis and monitoring, etc. but they've got an AI component. But the way that Ottilie is querying the AI engines to get its data is subtly different from the way that some of the others are doing it. So, you know.

Yeah.

It seemed to have good reviews. It seemed to be well spoken about.

It's definitely useful, and.

I could see it being useful. I could also see it being like, oh, we haven't logged into Otterlei for a couple of months. Yeah. You know what I mean? We need to be careful with stuff like that because you just finish up paying and you know, the government are bringing out new legislation, aren't they? By twenty twenty seven, which makes it easy to cancel subscriptions. Oh, really? You know, because some sclerous people, businesses make it virtually impossible to to unsubscribe. Yeah. Well, they're bringing new legislation out, which is, you know, just what we need in a, you know, in an energy crisis, heating oil cost crisis and priorities. And, you know, you can.

Subscribe for the magazine.

Being facetious because it is an important thing and they should be doing it. But I just thought it was quite amusing. Right. What have you got?

What have I got? Something I was going to talk about. Storm Dave storm Dave is coming at the weekend, which made me laugh because we've got two Daves in this office.

So yeah.

That was.

I always think of myself more as a kind of irritating breeze than a storm, sort of, you know, not not quite light breeze where you don't worry about it. Just enough of a breeze that you need your, you need your windproof.

I think you get a gusty breeze. So you had to put your coat on and then take it off again and put it on again. You never quite know if it's going to be windy or not. It's one of those.

That sounds like a porn star. Gusty breeze.

Is now your porn star name.

It's my gusty breeze. That's right. It does. It does sound a little bit suspicious. Got a doppelganger for Dave with a similar dog. Just walked.

The dog. The dog wasn't similar at all.

The dog was a dog and it was pulling on its lead, so. Yeah. Anyway. Sorry. What were you saying? Storm. Storm. Storm. Dave's coming up. Yeah, I'm playing golf on Saturday as well.

Saturday morning should be all right. Yeah. Saturday evening? Not so much. No. You're okay, is it? Yeah. It's not coming till six o'clock on Saturday, which is good because I'm running 10-K on Saturday. Very good. Um from Balmoral, which is a big event around here. And um there's a lot of gazebos involved so that should be entertaining if the storm kicks up early.

How many events have they got this year? They've got like a five K and a ten K.

And two kids races and then a five and then a ten. And then on the Sunday there's like two trail races. And I think it could be a bit iffy for them because somebody's running up a hill with trees falling down and stuff.

Yeah, that could be.

So I don't know what they're going to do. Mhm.

Watch this space. Are you running with a bunch of pals or are you just running on your own?

Um, I'm running with one friend. The rest of my friends who used to run have all kind of dropped out. But there's a running club in a bar, and there's a lot of people from there running as well. And my niece and nephew are also running, which is fun, although I won't be running with them because they'll be like at least half an hour ahead of me because they're young and fit and have very long legs, and I am none of the above. So yeah, I'll see them.

Looking forward to that. Which sounds sounds good. Um, anything digital marketing related do you want to talk about?

Yeah, I think we touched on it last week, but I thought it was worth revisiting. The thing about marketers ruining everything they touch.

What have they ruined now?

Well, nothing new, but, I mean, I was trying to work out what they ruined first. I think they ruined email first because definitely, um, television, the marketers had to pay for advertising and they had to make the advertising kind of good. So I don't think I think TV ads didn't ruin television. They had to be there to pay for it. And I don't think anybody would have said, oh, the marketers have ruined television. And I don't I don't want to use it anymore because of all the ads. I mean, some people don't like the ads and radio. Some people don't like commercial radio stations because of the ads. But I think people are kind of accept that they're necessary and that the balance is, you know, they're they don't take up too much time that they're that annoying. So I don't think marketers particularly ruined, um, TV and radio, um, or print magazines. Again, the ads in print magazines are there, but they're not particularly annoying. But then when it came to email, um, because it was free to use, you can, you know, you can email Yeah. Millions of people.

Yeah.

For no extra cost. Then, you know, marketers then cottoned on to that pretty quickly and just made it all really annoying and clogged up inboxes to the extent that nobody can actually find the emails that are important anymore. So I think, I think marketers ruined email, and.

I don't think there's any revelations there either.

No.

I do, I don't disagree because email is I still think is incredible. Yeah. When you think what you can do with email messages and attachments and, and the immediacy of it is and yet it has been, I literally today couldn't keep up with my inbox. And a lot of it was fair enough notifications from Monday. Yeah. And the, the work management tool that we use. And there were some things I do subscribe to. And but in amongst that there was. And, you know, I do think that now and again I go, right, I'm going to just not just delete them. I'm going to go unsubscribe to these things, but they just keep coming.

It's it's really hard.

And I'm pretty brutal with my email. I delete things, you know, very quickly by, by and large. But yeah, just now my inbox is groaning.

Then I then I think marketers kind of jumped on to search engine optimisation and stuffed the internet full of content that nobody will probably ever read.

And to a certain extent, we're still doing that.

Yeah, we're still doing.

We're doing that.

Because.

Because we know that to get attention, we need content. And now and again, a piece of content resonates. So in amongst all the stuff that doesn't and just clogs up servers.

Yeah. And I think, you know, Google is constantly trying to crack down on that, but it's, um, yeah, again, it's, it's really difficult.

It also feeds off it. So it's a funny one, isn't it?

Yeah, I know, but um, and then then there's a whole like backlink thing and there's all the dodgy stuff, you know, there's, there's so much opportunity for dodgy practices and then then social media. And that was like a really nice way of people like, you know, communicating with their friends. And then suddenly like marketing people went, oh, this is good. Yeah. We need to be here.

Yeah. And that's the whole internet, isn't it? Whether it's websites, magazine sites, social media sites, including LinkedIn and all of them, it just becomes swamped with advertising. And the people that own the platforms, um, you know, they, they actually support it because that's how they make money because they can't make money. But there's the.

The, there's the, the free stuff. You know, there's people just posting, you know, promotional.

Stuff.

On, on social media. And then there's the ads and, um, there's a very fine line between the two. Um, the ads are now, I think they've let too many ads in and sometimes you can't, you can't move for ads on, on like Facebook in particular, you just can't, you can't do anything with the ads. And I know we use them and I know they're great.

It's sort of self-defeating, isn't it? Because the platform just becomes so crammed with crap you don't want. It's like the worst offenders, I think, are Newspapers, websites.

Oh my God, you.

Literally can't.

Read. You can't. No, they're absolutely unusable because of all the ads. And and yeah, I get it. They, you know, they're not making money from selling newspapers. And then, you know. It's always been a partially a ad based model in newspapers, but they've messed it up big time. Yeah. So yeah, no, I haven't got an answer. I'm just, um, commenting that people, people like us have ruined the internet, basically. And, um, yeah, maybe they make, you know, they have to make the ads more expensive so that there are fewer of them and they can still make money or they need to stop, um, trying to be multi-billionaires because they don't need to be and, um, like lower the number of ads. But then yeah, you've still got the, because it used to be that somebody, things were posted on Facebook and you saw them. Now there's so much stuff you don't see the stuff you want to see because there's too much of it. Mhm. Um, and so yeah, how do we, how do we as marketers stop being such idiots. There's the question.

Well, and if anybody listening cares about that drivel, then then do get in touch. Um, and, um, we will, um, probably just ignore the message you sent us. Um, first month with our new red man red evolution deliverables management system, which is called red man. We've just, uh, we moved over to it at the start of March of having used a different system that we built ourselves and this red man, we built ourselves and we used a different system, which we call the Ms. Resource management system, which was okay, but it had some gaps in it. So we went through a process of redeveloping from scratch, a new system. And, um, I think we've hit the jackpot with it. I think it's, I think it's really.

Everybody's managing to use, uh, everybody's up to date with it and there's not been any major sort of, you know, I don't want to use it or I don't like it or anything. It seems to have settled in really quickly, actually.

Yeah. And it's a way for us to you know, I think what's interesting about it, I mean, it's a really sweet piece of software. But what's interesting about it is the speed with which we developed it. I mean, it's probably only two or three months since, you know, since we really started work on it over Christmas when Phil and then it's now, you know, it's now beginning of April. So it's taken about three months, but it was perfectly.

Usable using it at the beginning of.

March, way before that. Well, it was usable before the beginning of March. We put it into production at the beginning of March. So that was only two months. And it was kind of more or less there. We were just kind of continuing to experiment with it. It was kind of a lot of it was in place after about a month, which was incredible really.

Um, but the way we've done changes over the course of March, like no human beings have touched it.

Well, that's right, it's all been done with cloud code. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and.

You typed in, you know, we wanted to do this and it. Yeah. It's not, it's gone and done it, you know. Yeah.

It's been incredible. It really has. And what's, what's really exciting about it. And I think what's useful for people to understand is that like, we've built this system that we use for managing our business, and we've also built into it an MCP server model, context protocol server so that the AI engines can talk to it. So we can just use natural language to interrogate this system and ask it questions. Have we created Monday groups with tasks in for all of the deliverables that we put in there? Right. I've gone through it. Yeah, I know you've missed a few out and this one hasn't gone and this one hasn't even got a relationship with Monday. You need to go and give it a board to talk to and stuff like that. And just just using natural language to, to interrogate it is it really is. It's incredible. I'm over the moon with it. You know, we built it for the management team predominantly to kind of have this heads up display of what's going on in the business. It's not a project management tool by design. It's not a project management tool because for work management and projects we use, we use Monday, but because it talks to Monday, it's yeah, that's the thing.

And that's the thing I was most excited about the fact that once you put all this work into, um, red man at the beginning of the month. You don't have to then go and put it into Monday manually. It's now just doing it for us, which is a huge, you know, a huge relief to me because it was taking a lot of time.

Yeah. And I think, I think, again, I'm trying to kind of make sure that this story is, is, is relevant, not just us saying how wonderful we are for developing. But I think what I'm saying is, like with the right people, and I'm not saying like, if you're not if you're not a developer, you're not a quarter, you can write apps using VB coding, Claude chord, you know, whatever. You can do stuff and that's fine. And you might have some success with that, but put it in the hands of a really good developer and the speed to get apps built is incredible. So rather than, you know, rather than sort of use an app and subscribe to a, maybe a SaaS service or software as a service service, you know?

Yeah.

Rather than subscribe to some SaaS, you can actually write some software potentially that I'm not saying like, you know, write your own version of SAP or write your own version of Salesforce. But if you've got something that you need that's quite particular to you, and if you go down the SaaS route, it's not going to quite do what you want it to do. It's going to be expensive for licenses and everything else. Well, I'd say consider getting a developer to, to help you work with, you know, some of the, some of the tools, like Claude Chord, for example, and, you know, rapidly prototype something and then potentially take it on and go into production with it. So, you know, basically what I'm saying is like AI is properly helping us with our operations.

Yeah.

Because because of that app we've built and the way that we've connected it up with an MCP server in order to, you know, so that the AI can talk to it.

Yeah. And if you want to get a report off for a client on like, you know, what, what we've been doing over the last two months, three months, whatever it is, it, it'll pull off the report in the format. We want it as well.

Yeah. That's right. So that's been good. I mean, and the only reason I'm mentioning it is because we've just come to the end of the first month and using it. So we had to do the consolidations of the work that got finished and some work that didn't get finished in March, etc.. And, um, yeah, it's all just been working, working so well and people seem well, like you said, people seem to have adopted it quite good. Yeah.

Because quite often you, you introduce a new system and people forget about it or they, you know, they're not quite, you know, using it and it takes a wee while for it to bed in. But I think it's happened really quickly.

So that was that. Yeah, it.

Was.

Good. Okay. One of our clients. Sorry, it's not actually a client yet. It's a potential client. We've narrowed it down to you and another agency. Um, and they were asking about, um, AI in paid search. And as a result of that, I, I'll share this with you, but I put together, um, it's like a briefing note. I put together a briefing note, which is like, you know, Google ads in AI search, AI overviews AI mode and what, and what it means for advertisers because she basically said that what they've done in America is they've rolled out the opportunity to, to explicitly put adverts into, into AI results. Yeah. Not not.

Here yet.

It isn't in the UK yet, but it's only being rolled out. I mean, well, let's just start start from scratch. You if you get AI snippets in results, you'll see ads before the snippet sometimes and after the snippet. Yeah. And your normal Google ads will appear in those above and below snippets, and they'll appear on merit, just like any Google ad does. Is it, you know, it's the it's the keyword matching the advert, matching the landing page. Is it all.

Enough? Yeah.

And are you bidding enough and all that kind of good stuff. Yeah. Apparently the early performance signals from Google are that adverts that appear adjacent to AI snippets are converting better. And the argument is that people are, if they're at the point where they're asking long questions and getting AI responses in the search results. They're further down the process of buying whatever it is or enquiring, you know? Yeah, buying, I guess, whatever it is, they're asking.

The questions that are going to bring up an ad which.

Is.

Going to be ideally focused on, um, like high intent keywords then. Yeah, I guess. Yeah.

So Google basically allows search and shopping ads to appear above, below or directly within AI generated answers. So it's doing, it's doing that now, but, but you can't specifically say only show my ad in AI answers. They're experimenting with it. Just, just, just like they do with Google ads.

They'll put them up.

At the bottom and all the rest of it. So that's fine. And again, the early performance.

Choose, it's not a separate button to pressing put them in AI answers. It is just it puts them where it thinks it is most suitable.

That's right. Yeah. It's saying the ads within AI overviews are currently live in English on mobile and desktop in the US, Australia, Canada, India and several other markets. The UK has not yet confirmed for ads within AI overviews, though AI overviews themselves are visible to UK users, as we know. So. But then you've got AI mode.

Yeah, we have AI mode now as well.

Yeah, you can.

Get the.

AI snippets, but you've now got AI mode if you want.

To dive deeper in the eye or whatever, and you can go in and get, uh.

You know, Google's conversational search experience, a chatbot layer effectively.

Yeah. You can then ask it more questions.

Yeah. That's right. Um, it's got seventy five million daily active users now the AI mode search apparently. But on the eleventh of February this year, Google announced a new shopping ad format designed specifically for AI mode. And these ads appear as sponsored products and retailer recommendations within the AI conversation clearly marked as sponsored. So this is what you were saying in one of the previous conversations we had about, um, ChatGPT, wasn't it?

Yeah. There's ads in ChatGPT.

And then is that a UK that they're doing that or is it.

That was only in the US when I last looked into it. I don't think they're here yet, but they have been launched in the US.

Yeah, I think it's I think they're treading a fine line. I think I understand why they want to do it. And you know, to to monetise the expensive...

Particularly if people are going to be using, they're encouraging people not to use, you know, the search links, they're encouraging people to use I mode, which means that they're going to lose revenue on ads because people aren't scrolling down through the search results. So they have to put ads in the in the AI results, I guess.

That's right. And then you've also got on the Google ads side of things. So that's ads appearing in AI results in snippets. And in some countries and in some types of ads are appearing in AI mode. But then obviously you've got AI within Google ads itself, the AI Max.

For example, that actually runs your ads.

And well, that's what Google was saying. They're basically saying, just give us your budget. Tell us the web.

Yeah, we kind of tried that, didn't we?

We have played around with it. Yeah. But because we're predominantly working in B2B and B2C.

And BTB BTB or comp. Kind of complex decisions.

It's um so the AI max relies on um, broad match technology and keyword targeting to find new new users. So it's, it's basically, you're not giving it a bunch of keywords, you're just kind of giving it the information it needs. And then it's saying, I've got this.

Here's, here's, here's the thing, or here's the page. Off you go and, and send people to it.

And the problem is when you're working in niches, uh, we, we, we, you know, the advice seems to be, and certainly what we're reading and what we, what we believe, I suppose, is that you need humans, you need paws on it. You need to, you know, you need to be picking keywords carefully, monitoring what's happening, adding new keywords, removing keywords, adding negative keywords. You need to be kind of on it a bit more when you're not getting the numbers, which allow the AI tools to learn.

Yeah. That's it. I mean, essentially, if you're going clicking through and buying stuff, it can see quite quickly if it's high numbers, which, um, which keywords or whatever they're calling it in that, um, which keywords are actually causing sales and which ones aren't. But with us, you're never really getting a full conversion. It's a, it's an enquiry at the best. It's probably just somebody looking at the website and then going away and coming back by different means another day. And so it doesn't know which, um, which of the clicks are actually the good ones and which are the bad ones. And, and, and there's not enough data for it to even know which clicks should and shouldn't be happening.

Yeah. Well, as we've said before, it's one of the reasons we like the offline conversion tracking because we can decide, yeah, we like that. Tell Google that was a good one. Yeah, get me more of them sort of thing.

But if you're only getting a couple a week, then it's never ever going to be able to pick that up and run with it and understand and feed its machine with them.

I can see, I can certainly see in B2C and in maybe in some B2B, but certainly B2C, you know, the attraction of just giving Google your money and saying, go and get me some leads. Go and get me, you know, sell, sell some of my stuff.

And yeah.

So I can understand the attraction of that. But um, yeah, I.

Think it's not. Yeah. We haven't got any clients that that's gonna work for. I mean, even um, client I've been working with really small numbers, really small budget for, for um, Google ads as well. Um, and even with it being very specific, Google still like going, well, I can't really, nobody's really searching for these things, so I'm just gonna punt it out at something kind of vaguely related that isn't right.

Isn't right at all.

And, um, so you've, you've got to be checking it because if you do have a small budget, you can waste the entire budget on things that Google's going, hey, look, these people are the people you want. And then you're like, actually, that's not quite right. And, you know, I can't blame Google really, because even I'm, I'm going back to the client going, is this right or not? Because it's quite sort of nuanced and it's like kind of what they do, but not the actual thing they're trying to sell with this ad. So you've got to be really careful and you've got to be checking it And yeah, you can't just like Google go and do its thing.

Unfortunately, maybe eventually, but it doesn't seem at the moment that that's a sensible option. Know what else you got right now?

Um, Reddit.

Yeah. Comes up all the time when you're doing any research around AI because AI loves it.

It's one of the most cited sources on AI, um, like some of them like Wikipedia, but they all seem to, and some of them like YouTube, but they all seem to like Reddit. Um, which kind of ties in with the, the marketers ruin everything theory because people use Reddit because they don't let the marketers ruin Reddit. If you go in and you're overly promotional, like people just yell at you and kick you out, don't they? I mean, I don't use it. I, it reminds me of like.

I flirt with it. Alex was a big Reddit fan. He was big into Reddit, but I felt like.

The old forums before. Before social media, it was forums.

And I love forums. I mean, there are a number of forums now and I really like forums.

The rules for Reddit seem to be very much like the rules and forums like you're there to have conversations, ask questions, answer questions, do not promote what you do. Yeah. Um, if, if you do, it's got to be like, you've got to gain people's trust. You've got to have had conversations, help somebody out and then go, by the way, I do this thing, but you've really got to hold your, you know, wait your time and hold on and do it at the right moment. Yeah. So it's an interesting one though, because, um, well, because people.

Are asking questions all the time and AI likes answering questions. So where's it going to go to to feed its MLM.

The trouble is, I mean, the people who answer questions on Reddit aren't necessarily talking anything that's actually sensible. It might be utter rubbish. So then you're feeding the AI, AI engines with stuff that somebody just decided is true. It's like, you know, asking a bloke down the pub if you know the answer to a question and then he makes something up, and then you go and tell everybody else that, you know, this is what it is. And then when you actually do find out, like it's absolute nonsense.

Well, there you go. There's my my AI hallucination of the week. And there's been a few. But my AI hallucination of the week. I was trying to mine some data in Google Search Console and I was, I asked Claude, my my favorite helper, to create a regexp. So for the non-text regexp, it's like a. It's a combination of characters which helps you filter. So if you wanted, for example, to say, find me all of the phrases in my search console that contain this word, but don't contain this word or contain this word and this word, but not this word kind of thing. You can write, you know, regex in, you know, um, uh, um, and statements to actually do that. So it wrote me out a regex for this specific requirement. I tried it, it didn't work. I said, that doesn't work. Okay. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. GSC uses re two. So I'll give you it in re two regex version two I don't know. Yeah. Um that doesn't work either. Oh right. Okay. Well it's quite a complex thing that you're trying to do. So what we'll do is we'll stack them. You can stack them. So you ask it one thing, it filters that and then you ask it another thing and you get to where you want to get to. So I said, great, let's do that. I said, oh, you can't do that. It's like it just literally said, do this because you can do it. I said, how do you do it? And it said, you can't do it. Yeah.

I've had that before.

It did make me laugh. I thought it was quite funny.

I've had ChatGPT say, would you like me to now do such and such and create this, um this diagram? Yes, please. I can't do that. You just asked me if I wanted you to do it, and I've been saying you can't do it.

Much as I love it and I'm enjoying, you know, getting, you know, way more productive with it. And, um, but yeah, it's still quite funny. It goes back to the thing like, you know, I think AI and there's a few people talking about this on, on TikTok and various other places where on the one hand they'll say, you know, like it's all hype and don't get excited about it, you know, because there's a lot of stuff now. Oh, you know, people are going onto TikTok and they're going like, yeah, you don't need web designers anymore. You know, you literally just get clogged to design your website. Fair enough. And then some people have like, queried the video and said to the person, well, yeah, but I'm a web designer and I'm using it and I'm producing great work with it and I'm producing it quicker. I'm doing X, Y, and Z, and they're like, oh yeah, yeah. If you're actually an expert, then it's a really good tool to help you do what you do really well, even better, and all the rest of it. So it does. It's all a bit confusing. And, you know, I'm um, certainly, you know, certainly a huge fan of it, but I think, you know, I'm enjoying using it because it's helping me do what I do more efficiently. It's helping me do it, do what I do probably better than I would do it just left to my own devices.

It's a great.

Tool if you're if you're procrastinating, for example, it just.

Helps you just get on with things. I mean, it's brilliant. It is, um, it's really good.

And we're not just talking about generative. I mean, I'm literally using it in operations as well. And, um, you know, just, um, I've got, I've got a list of things I want to investigate with it.

So yeah, it is great. But yeah, I mean, yeah, when you're asking a question, bear in mind that it could have just pulled that straight from Reddit and the person that wrote it and read it could have no knowledge of the subject whatsoever. And it just made something up.

Yeah, I could probably even read it. Amongst all the good stuff, there's probably plenty of conspiracy theorists and I.

Would imagine.

So. The latest one is like, I wrote down like rockets because obviously Artemis two is it went off to the moon yesterday and I watched the launch last night, which is why I'm quite tired, I suppose. But it was all very it was all it was. It's exciting, but I just felt like the coverage of the launch wasn't as good as the Apollo coverage of the launch.

In.

nineteen sixty nine. Yeah, it just wasn't done as well. Yeah, it was all a bit it was funny because like they were doing it, you know, ten, nine and you could see the thing moving. It's like it's already taken off me. And he went ten nine eight seven six five four three two. It was just like really? Oh dear. Yeah. It was all a bit, it was all a bit shit. And um, yeah, the astronauts are not as squished up because I don't know if there's less kit or it's obviously different.

Probably it will be a lot smaller.

They're flying it from the ground. They're not actually flying it.

So it's remote control rockets.

I'm pretty much a remote control rocket. So it's going to go up and around the moon and back. And it's.

Another mission. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is it's all very exciting and it's interesting. Um, and I can't remember why I mentioned it. Why did I mention this? That's right. So there's the usual things on.

Facebook have been to the moon.

Well you know, what do you mean. NASA's going to the moon again.

What do you mean again? I mean, yeah.

So it'd be quite good if they sort of spin around the moon and take some photographs of all the debris from all the other, all the other, because the Chinese have already done that. They, they took photographs of different Apollo mission landing sites and all the rest of it.

So you might be able to prove it once and for all.

Maybe, maybe.

But yeah, there's another talking about hallucinations. I do have quite a nice example of a hallucination. So, um, somebody was writing a LinkedIn newsletter about AI basically. Um, and mostly it was mostly automated. And so it was going out and finding sources and then, you know, summarising them and, and stuff. So it had found a source, um, which was a link. It was just a link to an image, but because the link was from a sort of trusted authority, it made up an article to go with the link.

All right.

So this guy's LinkedIn newsletter had this article that was completely made up by AI, but he clocked it. He thought, well, you know what? I'm just gonna leave it in there and see what happens. So, um, I think within a couple of days, um, this, um, it was about, uh, Google core update that never happened, basically. Okay. Um, so within a couple of days, Google was ranking it on page one. So Google was, was linking to this story about a core update on Google that had never happened. It was showing up in Google's AI overviews about a core update in Google that never happened. Um, and then several other websites published blog articles, um, about it. Some of them then made up extra stuff that also didn't happen. Um, and then then it appeared in other people's LinkedIn newsletters who were summarising the articles or the whatever was out there. Um, and it spread. I mean, this was all.

With a life of its own.

Within about.

A week.

Within about a week it was everywhere and it never happened. Mhm.

So what have Google done? Have they roared back? Have they kind of manually intervened and got rid of it.

He's published now the story of the case study of what happened. And that now that is what's showing up in Google AI overviews. Is that the case study of the misinformation thing? You know, they're calling it an experiment. So, um, it's not, you know, it's not out there. It's packed anymore, but I don't know what's happened to the articles that, that talk about it, but it was, it was like days that was everywhere.

Mhm. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, the danger. I mean, I've mentioned a couple of times that I'm using AI in operations to actually do things that I could do, I would do manually, but it can do a lot quicker, check things, do things, whatever. And, but when it comes to generative, I think you have to be really, really, really careful.

Because, um, it, it writes stuff and then then it goes and finds sources that kind of match back up what it said, but it does it in that order. It doesn't do what a human would do, like read an article and then go, you know, and this article sees this, it, it does it the other way around. So it kind of tries to justify itself afterwards. And sometimes it just makes up links that sound right, but actually never existed. So, um, you've got to then ask it if it's, if it's then quoting links, you've got to ask it to then go and verify the links and find ones that actually exist because it kind of knows, Claude knows that it does it, and it knows that it then probably should go and verify it and find real ones, because it just makes them up.

I guess you could bake that into the skill.

Which I have done.

Now I want the citation. I want to see a link to the actual information.

I've asked it to like verify all the links and go and find ones that actually resolve because, because they do, they just because you go, oh, look, you know, here's a whole list of sources. And like, yeah, most, most of them don't exist. You'll click on them and they just aren't actual pages. It's just made them up. Mhm.

Mhm.

Yeah. It's got a good imagination.

Um, despite the, um, that bloke in America, um, you know, disrupting the global economy, I think got a sense, you know, we've had a few enquiries coming in over the last financial year. Um, maybe. Yeah. I mean, it was budgets.

New marketing budgets. They haven't been paid yet.

They didn't feel like, like enquiries that were related to, to like now we've now got some budget, but, but it's, it just feels like there's a little bit of movement because, you know, I think it's, you know, there's no, um, it's no secret that, you know, the business world is, is, um, going through some interesting times.

Well, yeah. And I think as soon as things are uncertain, people, people kind of hold back and don't make decisions because it just becomes more risky to commit to anything, doesn't it?

Yeah. But just, I don't know, maybe it was just I mean, some of them have been, you know, sort of stuff that we wouldn't want to be involved with, wouldn't want to do, you know.

Yeah. Not right for us.

Not right for us. That's right. But some of them sound okay. You know.

There's just been a bit more activity generally.

Yeah. I think that's what it feels like. Yeah. It's quite nice. Yeah. That's good.

Kind of. Yeah. Refreshing.

Yeah. Well we need, we need the work to come in so that we can afford to pay for heating oil.

Jesus. We need a lot, a lot of work to pay for that.

That's now. Yeah, off the scale. It's really quite interesting. I think the way the government have dealt with it, because it's a small number of people, relatively speaking, one point something million people in the UK use heating oil. So it is yeah, something like that. It's it's got quite a lot in Northern Ireland, quite a few in Scotland. Not that many in in England. Maybe in like south west England, down in Cornwall, places like that, probably. But we're quite a small. I mean, you and I both use heating oil. Yeah. Um but, you know, we are a small bunch. Yeah. It is a very select. Yeah. But um it's, it's incredible when you know, the, the stuff has more than doubled in price in the last three, four weeks. Yeah. And yet there's virtually no help. I mean, you and I don't necessarily need help.

But everybody's getting a bit of help with their electricity whether they need it or not. But not everybody's getting help.

With the energy price caps on gas and electricity.

Yeah. And the.

Majority.

There's, um, you know, there's, there's limitations on how much that can go up. But, but the, you know, the help for heating oil is only for people on benefits and stuff.

So yeah, there's like a hardship fund. And the funny thing was, it's like there's a, there's a, like a one off three hundred quid you can get if you're, if you're, if you tick the boxes. I mean, I wouldn't even bother trying obviously, but if you tick the boxes, you get three hundred quid, which currently would buy you two hundred and forty litres of oil. Yeah. Which you can't buy. You can't buy two hundred and forty litres of oil. You've got to buy five litres of oil.

You going very.

Long. It just seems absolutely crazy. Yeah. I don't know. It just I think I always think it's interesting when these things happen and you realise that the government doesn't or can't either doesn't either doesn't or can't help. Not really.

No.

And pretty much on your own.

If you don't live in London, Edinburgh or Glasgow, you know, big cities, you're, you know, rural communities. I think they just like they don't really matter. But that's.

What it feels.

Like very much second class citizens for things like that. Because, um, you know, we're, we're a minority and, you know, we, we don't have a loud enough voice. And, you know, it's like, well, never mind, you know, they can, they can freeze. It doesn't really matter. Yeah.

Because when I was thinking of, of getting into politics, it's too late now. It was yet to be yet to Announce your your intention to stand and pay your deposit yesterday.

Oh well, we've all had a lucky escape.

We've all we've got past that. But that was that was kind of where I was coming from. You know, I just thought, I just want to go and I just want to go and make some noise and try and make a difference for rural communities, because I just think it's absolutely awful.

We're completely ignored.

Particularly for me, because I'm fine, you know, and I can, you know, but but there's certainly a lot of people who are not.

Yeah. And, um, everything is getting more and more centralised. You know, there's big schools and big police stations and everything's big and in the middle and little and hospitals and things, little community resources are just being, um, being closed down. Mhm.

Yeah. You've experienced that first hand with some of those situations you've had in with schools and what have you, where you live.

And I don't think it's a good idea. I think having things locally and you know, not everything has to be big and efficient. It doesn't actually make for the best results in the end, just having everything big.

No, no. Absolutely. And one of the one of the reasons I mentioned it is that we've got a new pet project, which we're just kicking off, which is a new podcast that we're going to produce. So we're just at the planning stages of it, but, um, it's going to be all about, um, the rural communities, if you like that live in Deeside. So all the way along the valley, the Deeside. It's going to be, we're going to call it Deeside Ways.

There's a lot of history around here.

There is a lot of history. There's a lot of nice businesses. Um if there's any businesses in in and around Deeside that might be interested in coming on some of the first few podcasts that we do because we want to talk to businesses, we want their backstory, what they do, why they're here, um, and all the rest of it. And we also want to talk to people who've got interesting stories to tell all related to this area.

So I'm sure there'll be a few of them.

Yeah, I think there will be. I think some of them, you know, capturing these stories that older people have got is a good idea because obviously once they've gone, the stories have gone. So, you know, that's what we'd like to do. Um, So yeah, we'll keep you posted on that. So it's not going to be like this podcast, digital marketing or anything else. What we want to do is produce something with broad appeal. Yeah. As an exercise, as a, you know, as an exercise, we've talked about it for quite some time.

Yeah. Producing a, a different podcast.

Yeah. Producing something for that pretty much anybody might be interested in listening to.

Quite nice. B-corp thing as well, isn't it?

I guess it is, yeah. I suppose we have not mentioned what a peacock in this episode.

We haven't mentioned it yet.

Oh no, it's not Peacock Month anymore, is it? It was, it was March.

But I think it is a nice thing because it is sort of like giving back to the community and, and just being part of the community.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well.

That was I have nothing else. No.

I don't think we had anything at the start and nothing changed at the end. Did it really? Um, yeah. The D sideways. If it's something that you might be interested in, you know where we are. And you've been listening to Dave and Julie on Digital Marketing From The Coalface.

Well done.