Surviving the AI Traffic Drop: The Rise of Search Everywhere Optimisation – Episode 167

One of the subjects I've got written down here. Well, it's a question is SEO dead? And it's this is like, you know, the twenty twenty six remix. So it's the annual debate that won't die. But this year the arguments are actually more interesting. The phrase doing the rounds is search everywhere optimisation. Yeah. So it's still SEO. It's not just Google anymore, it's ChatGPT, perplexity, etc. TikTok, Reddit threads and voice assistants. The new goal isn't to rank on page one, it's to be cited by the AI. It's a proper shift. I mean, I know it's not boring, it's I know it's interesting. And everyone's scrambling around and, you know, people on TikTok, you know, selling their shit saying, oh, we've nailed this. This is what you need to do if you're not doing this, or you might as well give up.

Which is all very well, but I give it six months and it's gonna be different again. So where do you go with that honesty? Yeah, I think so.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, a podcast about nothing.

No no no no no no. Let's let's start. We need to go on. A podcast about something or other.

Yeah, we've got a few bits and bobs in the list. Talk about I actually got some help from Claude.

Well, I did my long list was the one that Claude did as well. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. It's really hard to think of things when you're, you know, it's a subject and you kind of feel that you've covered it. So you kind of need a bit of help finding different angles. And if Claude. Does that help? Fair dues.

Yeah. I mean, we've never like in this podcast, you know, right from its inception. Um, no, actually that's not true. I was going to say from its inception, we've never done like six things to do with your pay per click, which, which will make it work better. We did go through a phase of doing stuff like maybe at the beginning, and all we were really doing was competing with people who were absolutely killing it, in which case, you know, what's the point?

Well, you're competing with people who specialise and just do that one thing. Whereas we obviously, you know, covered a whole range of things.

Yeah.

That's right. And our niche is not the tactic. Our niche is the industry. So it's a

Yeah.

slightly different approach.

You know, thinking about talking about, you know, at the coalface of digital marketing and, um, the daily delivery of stuff and trials and tribulations and, and then obviously the opinions and moans and groans that we like to have.

So inevitably.

There's plenty in my list to moan about today, but.

Yeah, it's a, it's a Monday. Shall we, should we moan?

I'll kick it off with the first one. Google AI overviews are eating into organic traffic. Yes. So if you're seeing your organic traffic dropping, um, the traffic coming from Google that you're not paying for, there's a good chance your rankings are all worse off and or worse than they were. The chances are that people are just getting answers in the search results, meaning they don't have to click through to websites. Yeah, I'll just read some some guff on that. The numbers are getting hard to ignore. AI overviews now trigger on forty eight percent of all search queries. I'm not sure if that's in the UK or just globally or whatever. It's up fifty eight percent year on year.

Yeah. Because last year it was kind of just the, the very generic informational how to do this, whereas they're popping up a lot more now.

And when they do appear organic, click through rates drop by sixty one percent. So basically in a nutshell, if there's an AI overview in a search result that you used to rank for, or you still do rank for, um, chances are the answer in the AI overview is now robbing you of traffic to your website.

Because ultimately people aren't going to Google because they want to visit a website, they're just going to Google because they want the answer to something. If the answer is right in front of them, why would they bother clicking through to a website and trying to find it? It's all there in front of them.

Yeah. I mean, how does that work when you need a service? You don't need an answer. You need somebody to provide the service.

Yeah. If you're looking for a service, then.

Most people are.

I mean, a lot of times.

You go to Google.

Context. Yeah. But I mean, this isn't that's not B2B numbers, is it? That's just generic numbers. If you're going to Google, a lot of it is, you know, like, um, you're just asking a random question, like, you know, what's the name of the actor that starred in such and such? Google's going to give you the answer. You never need to go on a website.

And that's what's, that's what's, uh, skewing the numbers. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, meanwhile, Google keeps saying make better content while hoovering it up to display in their own answers. Yeah. And it's always been like this, hasn't it? It's, you know, since the days of, you know, SEO, when SEO became a thing. Yeah. And we all started like worshipping at the altar of Google in our please show our results at the top of your search results, because it will mean people will click through to our website and buy stuff from us.

Yeah. And now it's like, please show them at the top of our of your results, because people might vaguely remember whose name they saw and one day come back and, and remember to find us, which is a lot more tenuous.

Um, but I guess what I'm driving at with this is I'm trying to understand where it's going, and I don't have an answer, but I'm happy to sort of discuss it and try and understand like, what? Why should companies generate fantastic case studies and, um. Right. Interesting blog posts, useful educational information. If all they're doing is, you know, helping Google find an answer to a question that somebody's got and just give them the answer without even necessarily crediting the original source. But hasn't it always been thus with Google?

Well, no, because it's always been that Google has provided a list of links and you click through to that one. But I mean, a lot of it is you're, you're creating the content that Google wants, the informational educational content and people click on, read the educational content and then leave. So they're not, they're not reading it because they want to do business with you. They're just reading it because they want the answer to something and then going away. So, I mean, it's maybe not that far away from what it used to be, but people aren't even needing to click through. But then if those clicks were we've spoken about this before, when, when we used to rank really well for like, what is SEO and things? We got a lot of clicks to our website, but ninety percent of them were utterly useless because they were like students or people doing research, trying to work out what SEO was. They were never, ever going to become customers. So it's kind of the same thing. The people that are just looking for an answer to something, they're never going to become customers. You kind of want to be the people that answer the question because you want to build a reputation. But it's, it's a like even before the top of the funnel type thing, somebody not even knowing they've got a problem or somebody's just trying to find the answer to something. And, you know, they're not your audience, they don't really matter. So it's the same.

Sort of thing in a modern context with AI snippets, in the search results, with the AI search results, with ChatGPT and perplexity and all of these things. I mean, what game are we playing now?

All the stuff I've been listening to and reading is all about rather than writing.

Like absolutely tipping it down.

It is absolutely tipping it down. I'm going, oh, I'm supposed to be running tonight. This is looking less and less appealing.

It's only a shower. Well, it is for very long. Can it.

Running down the street.

Mhm.

Mhm. Fun.

Anyway, what were you saying?

You know, you used to write blog posts and basically not mention your company. Just make it very educational and worthy and and try not to sell in it. The tide seems to have turned and all the advice is, you know, talk about your unique points. Mention your company in it. Case studies, add examples, add personal insights, make it much more about your company now. So instead of blogging to fill the internet with content, you're bringing it back to what you do and adding in, um, examples and things. I mean, if I've asked, um, Claude or Gemini or whatever to sort of review an old blog posts with a view to updating it and sort of say, you know, what would you do to update it? They kind of say, well, make it a lot more specific, you know, focus on the geographical area, mention what your company does. So the tide seems to have turned. And in terms of, you know, how you've positioned a blog post and you're adding company information into the blog post now, because then it's nobody else can provide that information. And people kind of need to go and look to get the detail that seems to be how to deal with it, almost like make blog posts much more into a selling piece again.

Okay. But, uh, I don't know. I'm trying to understand what that means in, you know, in a practical sense.

It means that the search engines can't just like take the content and regurgitate it as generic answers because you're, you're mentioning what you do and making it much more specific and getting the people who are actually looking for what you do rather than just getting people who just want an answer to a question. Mhm.

Mhm.

But that seems to be all the advice is about, you know, add case studies, add unique insights and, and make it much more specific. So then people.

Don't get a sense sometimes though, that it's just a heap of nonsense.

Well, nobody really knows because it's changing all the time. So that's, that seems to be the like the, the perceived wisdom. But I don't really know where that's come from. And is that is that fact or is somebody just said that and somebody's gone, oh, that's a good idea. Let's, you know, let's say that's how you do it. We don't really know.

I mean, before we started seeing AI in search results and AI itself, providing people with answers, ChatGPT, perplexity, etc., we had this sort of game that you play where you can set your stall out by, this is what we do. You can support that. This is what we do information with. This is what we've done. Case studies you can support that with. This is what we think about Shit.

Yeah.

Blog post.

Blog post. Yeah.

You can try and get other sites to link to your site so that it gives a signal that your site is kind of important and other people trust it. Yeah. Therefore, Google will trust it in the search results. And it was that was the game that we were playing. Yeah. Which was nonsense. Because if you if you could play the game well, yeah, you could promote the shittiest services and the shittiest products in the world to the top of search results. Yeah. And that was the stupid game we were playing then. Yeah. And, you know, you'd maybe speak to business owners and and they would be like. But when I search for my service or my product, these guys are all over page one of Google. And I know for a fact that they're like cowboys. They're not very good. Their products aren't very good. Yeah. But they're, they're ours. Like we've been around for one hundred years. We've done this brilliantly for one hundred years. Our customers love us, but we're nowhere to be seen. Yeah. And that's just like, yeah, that's the game.

Yes. It's not about how good you are, it's how good your SEO is. You know how many links you've got or yeah, you happen to have hit a magic formula, and now you're.

Moving into an era where these huge companies that make money on the back of processing and doing stuff with other people's hard Yakka want us to play a different game now?

Pretty much.

Yeah. Which we are sort of playing and experimenting with and trying to understand and everything else. But, you know, as business owners ourselves and, and as you know, business owners who we work with and business owners who maybe read some of the stuff we put out there, you know, it's just exhausting, isn't it?

But I mean, it's always been exhausting, though. Even like when it was proper, you know, SEO, it was exhausting because the, the rules change every few minutes. And, you know, it used to be about just like ramming as many keywords as possible into a page. And I mean, you still see pages that are like that and you're like, oh my goodness, if you're looking for SEO in Aberdeen, then find an SEO in Aberdeen specialist who can do SEO in Aberdeen, and you see them and you're like, oh, cringe. But very early days, that's what worked. And then Google went, oh, hang on a minute, this is shit. And it sort of sorted itself out and calmed down on that. And then it was like finding as many different ways of saying SEO in Aberdeen in many different ways, so that it all meant the same thing. And it had more semantic signals to say it was about SEO and Aberdeen, without saying the same words over and over again. And now we're, you know, now we've got to figure out a slightly new way of doing it, which nobody really knows yet. Yeah. But it's about, but it's about, um, everyone's wittering on about entities, which are just things and you have to like have a certain number of things and.

Whatever that means.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, one of the subjects I've got written down here is, well, it's a question, is SEO dead? And it's this is like, you know, the twenty twenty six remakes. So it's the annual debate that won't die. But this year, the arguments, the arguments are actually more interesting. The phrase doing the rounds is search everywhere optimisation.

Yes.

So it's still SEO? Yeah. It's not just Google anymore, it's ChatGPT, perplexity, etc.. TikTok, Reddit threads and voice assistants. The new goal isn't to rank on page one, it's to be cited by the AI, you know, again. Yeah. It's a proper shift. And this is, you know, we talked about this in the last podcast where we were playing around with or we are playing around with Ottilie and it's, it's raining even heavier now, although it is brightening up. Look. So this is how boring this shit is.

That we're.

Like, it's more interesting to look at the rain and yeah, so I mean, I know it's not boring. It's I know it's interesting. And everyone.

Is exhausting.

Around exhausting people. People on TikTok are, you know, sort of selling their shit saying, oh, we've nailed this. This is what you need to do if you're not doing this. Oh, you might as well give up.

And just not very well. But I give it six months and it's gonna be different again. So where do you go with that? I mean.

Honestly.

Yeah, I think so. And, you know, is SEO dead? Well, no, because at some point you still have to click through to the website to go and buy something. Unless we get to a point where you're basically go to ChatGPT, you know, find me this exact thing and go and buy it for me. At some point, you are still going to have to interact with the website, and that either is clicking a link in the AI overview or a link that ChatGPT or Claude or whoever provides to you, or one of the list of links further down in Google, but takes you so long because you've got your AI overview, then you've got some ads, and then you've got like snippets, and then you've got like a map thing. And, and then like maybe some more ads. And then eventually you get to the list of links that used to be, you know, page one of Google or position number one in Google is meaningless because you're miles down the page. But you know, if you've got the patience to actually, you know, want to find a website. You've still got to appear there somewhere, and you still have to get people to click through to actually, you know, make the transaction. If you're wanting to buy something or, you know, read your case studies or, you know, but even pricing information, you know, the AI engines will figure out what your pricing is. I asked. Remember I asked it, um, as an example, you know, what our pricing was, and we don't list our prices explicitly on our website. We mention ranges and things, but I mean, it gave a pretty good stab at what we charged and it wasn't that far off. So, you know, for pricing information, you don't even have to go on someone's website. Now. You really need to get in touch with them. You don't have to go on their website. The only reason you'd have to go on the website is to actually buy something, I guess. But you can do it pretty much the rest of it from out with.

Yeah. Yeah, I suppose so.

I guess I don't think people do. I mean, I think people would still go to a website, but you don't have to, mm for B2B. If you're all you want to do is like make an enquiry or a phone someone up, you actually would be able to do all that without going to the website just by asking, you know, ChatGPT or whoever, whoever, whatever, it's not person. Um, you know what, what do they charge? What do they do? What do customers say about them? What are their, you know, what are their reviews like? Who do they work with? What products do they provide? What's their phone number? You could get all that, phone them up and know everything about them without ever having been on their website. But ChatGPT is obviously going to have to mainly pull that from your website, but also maybe from Google reviews or directories or LinkedIn. It could get it from lots of different places.

So the website is going to become something that is just there to feed the large language models with the information that they need. And people will. Yeah, people will stop visiting websites. But, but I think the thing is, I don't know. People look at a website and make a judgement call. Does this business look credible? What does the team look like? Do they look credible?

You probably still going to want to visit the website.

But maybe.

At the moment. But long term, maybe not.

Mhm. I mean, you know, I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a huge fan of AI and not just generative AI. I'll maybe talk about generative AI at some point in this conversation today. But, you know, I'm still I'm still trying to understand the end game. Yeah. As I, you know, as many people, I think some people think they've figured it out and basically everyone's going to be unemployed. And if, you know, if everyone loses their job because AI can do it, then where does that leave society? Yeah. I mean, it's just a zero sum game. It's just ridiculous. Yeah. But somewhere in the conversation has to be a kind of inkling anyway as to where this might be heading. And the speed that it's moving at is mind blowing.

It is. This is it. I mean, you know what we're saying now, we could revisit this in a year's time and go, hahaha, how stupid were we? You know that wasn't it at all. But we don't know.

Yeah, well, we'll maybe come on to, as I mentioned, the AI, the generative AI stuff. Yeah. But in the meantime, what would you like to talk about?

Well, one thing related to what we're talking about there about, you know, showing up in the AI and things. I was on a webinar last week and they were talking about, you know, how to show up in AI overviews or how to show up in search and AI engines or whatever. The every webinar in the world seems to be about the same thing at the moment. But, um, that's right. One, one interesting thing I kind of took away from that is if you're normally in blog posts or, you know, you're writing for the internet, you would, you would sort of tell a story and set some background. And, you know, I was doing this and it made me think of that. And this is what happens. And, you know, let me set the scene and here's some background and then, you know, towards maybe the middle to the end of your blog post. You're actually like answering the question and getting to the point. And it was saying that, um, for, for AI engines, you've got to put the answer in the top third of the content. You pretty much have to answer the question there. And then up in the first couple of paragraphs and then go back and sort of reverse engineer setting the scene and stuff. But it's sort of the way we're writing things is going to have to be very different if we're wanting the AI engines to pick them up, because you've got to put the answer, you know, right up in the first bit. So, um, the flowery storytelling type writing is, um, probably not, not going to work for that. Um, so that's kind of weird because.

Again, so not again, but we, we are going back in time to when you were saying before about the awful SEO that yeah, that people used to do.

Yeah.

SEO Aberdeen, if you want SEO Aberdeen, then we are an SEO Aberdeen company and all that kind of shit. Yeah. And we played that game, you know, and that was not written for people. If people read it, it was like, this is gobbledygook. This is nonsense. I couldn't possibly employ these people because they can't even write good English. Yeah. Um, and so this is even though Google always said, you know, write for people, not, not for search engines, people did write for search engines because basically they were trying to pay the mortgage. Basically it comes down, it comes down to survival, doesn't it?

So yeah, are we going to end up with a load of like unreadable, readable blog posts that get to the point very quickly and then waffle on for another two thousand words to fill the space? Or because if you think about do you ever look at recipes on the internet?

Yeah, from time to time.

And the recipes on the, you know, you look at a recipe and it's got a couple of thousand words of background. And I tried this and then I changed the amount of flour in the recipe. And then I, then I fed it to my family. And then we did this and, and look what Plato used to serve it on blah, blah, blah. And they've got at the bottom, at the top, there's like a jump to recipe button because they know that nobody actually wants to read all that crap. They just want the recipe, but they've got to fill it up with all the flowery background stuff to please Google. Yeah, and the recipe is right at the bottom. So now what do they have to put the recipe at the top and then backfill with flowery stuff afterwards or what? You know, where's that going?

I don't know, I don't know.

Because um yeah, the way those are done, that's exactly what AI doesn't want. But maybe if it's a recipe, it knows it's a recipe and it just jumps to the recipe and provides it. But I don't know.

But if I was asking if I asked Claude, um, other AI's that are available, uh, if I asked Claude for a rice pudding recipe, it would give me a recipe and tell me why it was good. It would probably, it would probably tell me where it found the information or say, this is the BBC good food guide. Yeah. Recipe for what? But like you say, it would just it would just give me cut out the.

Yeah. I asked ChatGPT. I think I had like, you know, a few ingredients sitting around. I'm like, okay, you know what, what would you do with this? And it just made up a recipe, which I then sort of checked against other recipes and it had just made it up. I mean, it wasn't it wasn't one that was published anywhere. It kind of combined a couple of different recipes, kind of like a person would.

Yeah.

You know, if you had something you'd go, well, yeah, I'll use that recipe. But actually I don't like that. So I'll, I'll take that out. But this recipe adds this and I'll put that in. And it kind of had done that. So it wasn't taking anyone else's recipe. It actually made its own one up. I didn't use it because I kind of again, I semi used it, but then added a bit from another recipe because I didn't quite trust it. Mhm.

Yeah. But you're saying that. Yeah. You're saying that that's kind of what there's. Tom.

Stop looking out the window.

I know I can't help it.

Um, stop raining though.

It has. It's blue sky again. It's Scotland, isn't it?

So are people who have been writing in a certain way for years. Gonna have to completely change the way they write their, um, their content for their websites or. Yeah, for things like that. Does it maybe not matter because it it knows its a recipe and it'll find it anyway.

Possibly. I don't know really why we're talking about recipes.

I don't know.

Welcome to cooking from the coalface. It's just talking.

Just talking about like, types of content that are quite obviously written for Google. And, you know, maybe they don't have to be anymore because. But recipes are the one that springs to mind because it's so obvious that there's just so much guff before you get to the recipe that, um, it's.

We are in a well, yeah, but we're in this position, as you rightly pointed out, we're in this position because we, we needed to create tons of guff.

Yeah.

Which somehow impressed an algorithm somewhere into thinking, well, this must be good because it's, you know, when I was at uni, um, as a mature student, as you know, I was when I was at uni, you know, I got the impression sometimes that like that some that some um lecturers would literally just like, you know, get, get the bunch of work and sort of go, yeah, it's probably gonna be that kind of feels like a B sort of heavy ish. You know, I can see there's like you've written like a hundred pages or something. So yeah, there must be something good in there, right? You can have a beer or whatever. Yeah. You know, I just, I, where did we get to? How did we get to that point? And I suppose we got to that point because of the mass appeal of search engines. And suddenly everybody wanted to be found in search. And we're just doing exactly the same with AI, except AI's different because you don't for some things you don't actually need. I'm getting phone calls on here now as well. Um, you don't actually need necessarily to speak to the company, although I'll go back to the original thing, you know, if I'm, if I need a heat exchanger, then I don't need a piece of information about a heat exchanger. I need tubes of metal welded together with an inlet and an outlet and and a heat exchanger. That's what I actually need. And I need to speak to someone who can build me one. Yeah.

But if you ask.

For all the work that people have to do in order to be maybe the company that gets asked to build it because they got found. Yeah, I suppose that's it. That's the game, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, I'm certainly looking at, um, kind of what comes up in the I o reviews for a few clients. It tends to be product pages. If you're asking a question, it's very much picking the, the product pages, the sales pages rather than the blog posts. If you're asking sort of for links or whatever, it's, it's picking the, the hard facts over the, the stories.

So okay.

So does that mean now all the blogs are a waste of time and you don't need them anymore? Ah.

I, no, I don't, I don't honestly know. I mean, time will tell. And, you know, the experimentation will sort of send us in one direction or the other.

Or one direction and then the.

Other, then the other. Yeah. That's right. I mean, one of the subjects I've got down here is like the anti AI content backlash, which apparently is is a real thing. Right. And it's saying like the I love media found ninety percent of listeners want their media created by humans listeners.

So is that fair?

Yeah, it must have been. I don't know if it's if it's like podcasts.

I don't see the point in listening to podcasts that isn't created by people because it's just weird.

But it is, and it isn't because I've certainly enjoyed podcasts that notebook LMS put together.

But that's different. That's when you're like asked it to do a job for you and summarise something that you want to learn. I agree, which isn't really, it's not the same as a podcast as such.

No, that's.

Um, that's just putting the information in a podcast format. But I don't think that's actually a podcast.

I mean, the podcasts like this one is anyone listening to it can think to themselves, blimey, these people are as stupid as me. Actually make them feel like, oh, well, yeah, you know, I've got the same angst, the same questions, the same like, where is all this leading? You know, podcasts like.

Listen to the radio really is just somebody chatting away and you kind of get to know them. I mean, I think I've mentioned before, like my favorite podcast is a women's running podcast. And I was listening to it on Saturday and they said that they'd, um, they'd found some research. So sentiment research into, um, no, it was Reddit. They'd found a Reddit thread about their podcast and they said they really people, their listeners really, really hate it when they talk about running too much.

Yeah.

And it's a running podcast. And the episode was like that I listened to was nearly all about running. And they were like, we are so sorry. We've actually talked about running all the way through this running podcast. We apologise, you know, but we promise never to do it again. And people are people are in it because they've got something in common with the people talking like, you know, they go running, but they're just, they just want someone to chat. They just want to hear people chatting away and yeah, being able to relate to them.

I think some of the best podcasts are like that. I mean, I'm a big fan of Geoff Norcott comedian. His podcast, what most people think is it's sometimes a monologue. He does some of them on his own, but but it's usually a guest and they have a, he maybe briefs them beforehand and they have a, you know, this is what we want to talk about in the podcast and what have you. And but it is this just listening to somebody have a conversation. I was pointed at, um, uh, Adam Buxton's podcast, you know, Adam and Joe, the two comedian writer guys. Yeah, they were certainly on the telly a lot back in, I don't know if it was the nineties or whatever it was, but yeah, their podcast, I think it's just called the Adam Buxton Podcast or whatever it is. I was pointing at a particular episode and the episode was from it was with Louis Theroux. Okay. He was the guest and it was from back in Craig. It was before Covid. So I'm thinking it was about twenty eighteen, something like that. So, you know, eight years ago in.

The early days of podcast, surely.

Um, I don't know. That was episode one hundred. Okay. Back then. So they'd been going at it a little while, but it was just, it was about nothing at all. Yeah. But as I said to you before we started recording, you know, the very famous and very successful program written by Jerry Seinfeld and the brilliant Larry David Seinfeld.

Yeah.

Was, you know, billed itself as a show about nothing. And if you ever watch it, it kind of was nothing. The subject of the episode would be like a girl he was dating had hands like a man. You know, that was it. Yeah. And then just nonsense around. Yeah. Yeah. It was, you know, and then you'd have, like, someone who was a quiet talker, you know, quiet talker, and you're like, well, what did he say? I can't hear you. You know, and things like that. And it really was, you know, it was a show about nothing. That's how apparently anyway, they pitched it to, um, whoever it was, you know, one of the big American networks.

Quiet talker thing reminds me of somebody that used to go to networking events, and he spoke really quietly, but he also liked a lot of personal space, so he would speak quietly. So you'd kind of move closer to hear him and he would move backwards. You'd end up at the other end of the room because he would back away. But while still speaking really quietly.

It really because my hearing is not the best. Having been a drummer since the age of eight and played in bands, my hearing is not the best. Um, and yeah, quiet talkers. It's just it's. So I just give up sometimes. I just, I just, I'm sorry, I can't hear a word.

It's not really worth it. Yeah, I'm sure it's very interesting, but I can't be bothered anymore.

Yeah. But anyway, we were talking about, um.

I don't know.

We were talking about the content, the AI content backlash and.

Right.

I think we've got to be careful because there's no point like deciding that if something's generated with the assistance of AI or, you know, if the, if the lion's share of it, you know, if it was created by AI. If it's then proofread and edited by a human and it imparts some interesting information, then just because AI was involved doesn't make it crap. I think what you're talking about is like, hey, you know, ChatGPT, write me fifty blog posts about, um, about the benefits of, you know, some sort of thing you spray on a carpet in case you spill wine on it or something like that. Just because you've been told you flog that stuff. Oh, you need a blog and you need, you need fifty or sixty posts. So go on. And it, you know, it just churns out.

But yeah, it's basically something that people aren't ever gonna read. Yeah. But I mean, if either, you know, say, I have to write something about a technical subject, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the internet and do loads of research and summarise the research and rewrite it in my own words and refer to the where I got it or Claude or whoever's going to do the same thing. And the results are pretty much exactly the same. It's finding the expert information and putting it all together into a blog post. Now you know the source information is the same. The process is the same. Reading it through, summarising the key points that are relevant to this blog post and saying, look, you know this, this is some stuff that might help you. And, and here's the the sort of expert who wrote it. It's the same thing, but it's quicker.

It is, it is quicker. I think for me, when I'm using AI to help me be more productive, the kind of litmus test for me is like when I read it, am I enjoying reading it? And if I am, well, you know, maybe I'm stupid, I don't know. But I mean, if I enjoy reading it, then what's wrong with that? What's wrong.

With it? Yeah, exactly. All you're doing. I mean, you're not you're not writing these blog posts off the top of your head unless it's a, a subject you're really, really familiar with, in which case, great, but you can't be really, really familiar with everything. And even if it's a subject you're familiar with, you're probably still going to go and like back up this statement you're making like, you know, I could write a blog post about something in marketing and, you know, say, you know, sixty percent of something, but I'm still going to go. I better like back up that number. So I'm still going to go on the internet and find something to back it up. Or I can say to Claude, go and find the, you know, something that backs this up. Yeah, it's the same difference.

I think it's all about, you know, the whole AI thing. It's all about it's how well you use it.

Absolutely.

Just like pretty much any tool. Yeah. I suppose when typewriters first came out or word processors first came out, people went, wow, I've got this amazing tool now. And yet the good start typing and still produce the stuff that was as garbage as what they used to handwrite.

They could just do it.

Quicker, I suppose, and just do it quicker. That's right. Yeah. So yeah, I suppose the speed thing is the is the thing, I mean, for me, hugely helpful. Yeah. And in.

You know.

Yeah. Procrastination, for example.

Fact checking and you're reading it and you're editing it and you're making sure it is. It's nice to read and that you're introducing something original into it. But if it's just going away and finding the facts and, you know, providing sources to you and things, then it's just taking the boring research a bit out of it and it just does it a lot faster.

Yeah. I do wonder if going back to the, you know, Queen, the band, you know, for years, every album they produced, they said, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the credits. And at the end it would always say, and no synthesizers.

Yeah.

All the sounds were produced, you know, by with real musical instruments.

That's true. I mean, we.

Don't they stopped doing that after a while because they realised that actually quite like synthesisers. We can do a lot of good stuff with synthesisers. And they started using them and they stopped bragging about it.

Yeah. You don't not listen to music because there's a synthesiser involved.

You never listen to the Pet Shop Boys, would you, if you if you didn't have synthesisers or most of the eighties music.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn't make it worse.

I know, but it's I just wonder if like, you know, it's going to be like produced by humans is going to be like, like a mark of quality or, or is it just going to be a snobbish thing that people who couldn't be arsed learning how to use AI properly? Right. You know, just kind of make it a badge of honor because their output is tiny. The content is, but hey, it was written by a human, so.

It's.

Definitely better.

You know, but it comes back to music. I mean, you're never gonna release anything that is just basically, you know, you go in a room, record it. No computer involved whatsoever. It's not going to work. You know, even the most like pure music or authentic, you know, there's still, there's still going to be some fiddling about on a computer to make make it sound better.

The thing is as well, I mean, I will often look at some of the older posts, older blog posts and, and content pages, just, you know, service pages on our website. And I read them and I just think, Jesus, what was I thinking? Yeah. Awful. Just think to myself, that is awful.

But you he looked at another day and go, it's all right.

Yeah, probably. Yeah.

But yeah, things change and opinions change. And yeah, I guess the way, the way we talk about ourselves changes. So I mean, you've still got to go and refresh things, whether it's, you know, AI or not. And once you've written something, it's really handy to go and get, you know, get Claude or whoever to go, look, I wrote this like two or three years ago. I know it's out of date, but give me an idea of what to update. What would you what would you change in this? Because it's hard to audit your own work.

Yeah. That's right. I mean, one of the, one of the terms that's getting bandied around, just to stay on this subject, which summarises what we were saying about producing garbage with AI, is this term AI slop. Yeah, that's what I think. For me, it's more apparent in visual communication, you know, like AI produced videos and things like that. And then if you're on TikTok, if the voiceover has been done by AI, Yeah. You just. Oh, yeah. Swipe just get lost sort of thing. But again, I think, you know, just kind of repeating myself. But if you used use these tools in a kind of lazy, slapdash way, you will produce rubbish with them in much the same way as if you sort of like set yourself the task where I'm going to write five blog posts this week, and these are the subjects I need to cover, and I can't really be arsed with it. I just want it done. And you sort of type, type, type, type, type count or four hundred words. I need a bit more type type type type type. What am I? Six hundred words. You remember Little Britain and one of the characters was like a Barbara Cartland esque author, and she used to lie on her chaise lounge and have her. David Walliams was the was the person taking the notes and he. And it was a beautiful sunny evening and he. And he swept into the room looking like Mr. Darcy. How many words? You know how many? You know how many? Yeah, just three hundred words. Right. Okay. That'll do for today. Yeah. You know, sort of thing. It was just it was just a Quantity.

Totally.

Yeah. And I think even if you're, you know, if you were writing content, you know, if you if, because there's always been an element of with content, there's always been a quantity element to it. Yeah. If you produced like, if you had a business that did whatever it did, maybe you were accountants or something and you produced like one fantastic piece of content every month. So after twelve months, you've got twelve pieces of content on your website. Probably not going to do a lot of good for the business. Yeah. Whereas if you leverage some of these tools and like by the end of the year, you've got one hundred and twelve items, you'll probably find you're getting more traffic, you're getting noticed more, you're generating more business from your website. Sadly, sadly, yeah.

It should be that the twelve really good pieces of content is enough because, you know, the, the other one hundred odd are probably just saying the same thing in a slightly different way. But that that is what it's like. Mhm.

Yeah. Anything else on your list? Um, because we're going around in circles with this stuff.

I do, but I kind of want to save it for the next time because it's, it's another one we can kind of get stuck into.

Okay. Um, do you want to tease people with what, what it might be?

So something we covered in a previous what are we doing podcast.

Is a.

Podcast. So it might be, um, just about, um, you know, recruiting marketing people and what level of person you want, but I think we could like go into quite a lot of detail on that. I'd quite like to go into a lot of detail on that. Okay. So I'm.

Going to save that.

Save that for another time.

We've got one scheduled to record on Friday aren't we? Yeah, it's Monday today. So we'll do another one on Friday. We can look at it then. Yeah. Okay. So I think if AI were to create a mediocre episode of our podcast.

Probably do better than this.

It would be today's. It's in the.

Top everybody wants to speak about.

It is, you know, there's no answers though. I mean, you know, you could be completely anti AI. You could be really snobbish about it and say, oh, this is a road to nowhere. We shouldn't be doing it or anything else. Or you can be kind of sensible about it and say, well, there's a commercial aspect to this, and if we can do it more efficiently and what we produce, as long as we're happy with it, you know, we're not just kind of blindly giving, giving AI the keys to our website. So just go and publish one hundred posts about this. I don't care what you say. Just go and do it. And, you know, if you find the balance, then then it's a tool to be leveraged.

And to be fair, today I've been, um, throwing spreadsheets at Claude and getting it to like break them down. Well, firstly, I had a whole load of companies, um, and I was trying to do like analysis of somebody's customers by the size, by their company size, but they didn't actually have that information in their CRM or even though they'd asked me to analyse it. So, you know, here, Claude, go and find out the size of these companies, which it did a pretty good job of. And then.

You think.

Well, I'm going with it. And then I was like, okay, now look at all these job titles. And, you know, there's a whole heap, there's like six hundred different job titles. And I group them into sort of sensible groupings. So you can sort of see what types of people are being interested and then which ones of them are converting. And then, okay, now provide like data on like the conversion rates for different, each different group that would have taken me ages because I've had, I'd have had to manually go through and go, well, that job title is kind of like that job title. And it would taken me like all day. Yeah. So I mean, that was brilliant. Things like that. It's just so much better because that's not adding value to anybody. Me sitting there, you know, manually colouring in a spreadsheet, I'm like, yeah, Claude, off you go and do it. And just what a relief. I mean, you know that and that saves the client a lot of budget as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

So yeah, for I think that's indisputable that, you know, using it for that sort of thing is, um, is brilliant for everybody. Like everybody wins, I think in that. Yeah. Um, the other stuff is um.

Up for debate.

Yeah, definitely.

Mhm. Well we'll keep debating it then in future episodes.

I think we will. And I think we have to keep debating it because we'll we'll find out new things or we'll say, oh, you know, something happened and that changes everything. Or it backs up what we thought and somebody will come out with another theory. Then everybody will go, oh, this is how you do it now. And maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

Yeah. All right. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, a podcast brought to you by humans with Love. Even though mostly we talk about AI.

Yeah.

At the moment.

Humans talking about AI. One of these days it'll be AI talking about humans.

Probably. This might be it. People won't know.

That's true.

Right. Bye.