Smoke, Mirrors and Marathons, Or The Exhausting Reality of B2B Search – Episode 172

Google's AI overview is pulled from search results. So fundamentally, what they want is the same as as what you would have been doing for SEO. LLMs are actually getting their information in slightly different ways. So this is really just apparently....

Well, they get it in one of two ways. They've got their memory, which is their training data, or they go out and carry out a live search.

Yeah. But AI overviews seem to work a lot more like normal search.

And they're trying to obfuscate, I think. I mean, they're trying to protect their domain.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Really. Because if they don't, then the AI engines will just become the tool of choice. And they'll just base the responses on their training data on their memory.

Google has Had pretty much no competition for the last.

Over twenty years.

Yeah. Suddenly there is competition and they're trying to make sure that they keep people doing things their way.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. It's always amusing, isn't it? Will I get it right? Will I not get it right?

Fifty fifty.

We've had a short hiatus while you gallivanted around the northeast of England. Like in. You were down in Newcastle.

I was, I was. I was being a digital nomad for a week. Yeah, that was fun. Apart from the chair situation, it was like there was just these tall stools to sit on at the dining table, which is quite high. And after like about three quarters of a day, I realised that my back had completely seized up. So I had to then take a stack of books and turn it into a standing desk. So there you go. Very flexible way of working there.

Plenty of time to think about riveting topics for us to talk about. No doubt.

I've got tons and tons of things written down here, but.

Good, I basically just got moans and groans. So probably you'll lift the tone with your with your fantastic topics.

But we finished the last one talking about your, Keswick to Barrow thing. So you better update our listener.

I finished it. Yay again.

Uh, how many times is that now?

Thirty two. It was brutal.

Yeah.

Brutal. Always brutal. Doesn't matter how many times you do it, it's brutal.

Yeah, I can imagine. Um, you did it.

Forty miles im eight hours, fifty five minutes. And it was...

Such a long time to be out.

It is but other than kind of running out of fuel a little bit, it was fine. I did a bit of running, mostly fast walking, but you know, a fair bit of running early on and then fast walking. Yeah, it was good. It's one of those weird things. I don't know if it's a metaphor for life. I mean, it's great. Walking's good for the soul.

Love a metaphor for life.

Well, yeah, but you get to the sort of twenty six mile point, you've got fourteen miles left, give or take. And it's....

You've done a marathon basically.

And it's over some really steep terrain. There's a massive climb at the twenty mile point. You've already done some climbs. But at the twenty six mile mark you do a big climb over a over a muir. And it's one of those where it's got like the false summit.

Yeah.

So you go up the hill and then there's another hill, eugh, and it's like that. And at that point you're pretty tired, but you've started to pick up some landmarks which are eight or nine miles from the finish line.

So you can see that you're nearly at the end.

That's right. And then it gets to the point where you're trying to keep up a good pace because if you do, it will be over in two or three hours as opposed to if you sort of like, "Oh, I'm so tired, I'm going to slow down now" and then It'll be four hours.

Yeah.

I mean, some people do take twelve to fourteen hours to do it.

Yeah I can imagine, easily.

You know, it's a weird thing as well, because it used to just be the Keswick to Barrow and it's the sixtieth anniversary of it next week and I've been, I was, fascinated by it as a very small boy. Watching people finish when I was like literally like six or seven or something like that. I was ten when I did it first. But I've been fascinated by it and then in a few years ago, ten, fifteen years ago, maybe, yeah, at least ten or fifteen years ago now, they introduced like a mini version called the Coniston to Barrow.

So do people join in?

So the Keswick to Barrow lot join the Coniston to Barrow lot having done nearly twenty miles.

Right. Okay. So you're over half way through.

And so they have an orange lanyard and you have a blue lanyard. Other than that, it's just like, everyone just piles towards the finish line.

Well you could tell the ones that look really, really tired and others that look really fresh.

The interesting thing, because in my opinion, and maybe I'm a bit of a Nazi on this thing, but like a reasonably healthy person should be at a walk twenty miles. That's my view. Unless you've got something wrong with you, you should be at a walk twenty miles. You know, it might be tough, but you should be able to do it. And honestly, some of the people that were doing the Coniston, they were lying on the verge and like, oh poor me. And I was like, "You've done ten miles, mate". You know, you've done ten miles. Just get a life, it really annoyed me you know, I know it shouldn't, but it did and the ten miles from Coniston down to Lake.

You know it's along the east side of Lake Coniston where Donald Campbell, died when he flipped his boat over. It's right down there and it's a little bit undulating, but there's no real climbing, not till you get to about ten miles in when they hit the big climb with, we're heading towards thirty miles when we hit the big climb and it's um, yeah. I know I shouldn't, but I just think eugh, come on.

Do you think people just do it and haven't thought it through. They haven't done any sort of training. They haven't even tried to go and see if they can walk 10 miles?

It's really funny. You get it on the walk as well. So you get people at the start line who are clearly not runners running. And you just think, you haven't thought this through have you?

So you're not a runner

And you can clearly see they're not runners, but they're full of vim and vigor and they're going to do this thing and.

Oh God.

You have to do that kind of ultra distance to really get a sense of what it does to your body and your mind. It really becomes mind over matter.

It's both, isn't it? Yeah.

It really starts to become such a... one person described it as... Some guy, he'd finished it and he said, oh that's the...actually, I think he said, "That's the thirty third time I've done it". So there's about ten of us who've done it an awful lot.

Yeah.

One person's done it over forty times.

Wow.

I had a twenty year break from it when I moved up here. And it kind of frustrates me that I took a twenty year break because otherwise I would have been like, argh.

Otherwise you could have been the longest.

Way out, way out there. Absolutely. But anyway he said, "That's thirty third time never gets any easier", um, and something to do with the pain cave. You know, you do kind of go into this... and people are going "yay", "come on", cheering you on by like the support people. And you're just like yeah I'm not interested. And you know what's really funny as well. It's some lovely, lovely people on the last sort of four or five miles and they've got like drinks if you want them, which is fine. They've got sweets and cakes and biscuits and you really just don't want to eat anything. You can't be bothered and they're kind of offering you this stuff and you go, "Oh, thank you, I'm ok".

And it would probably do you good to have them. And you just...

You just can't, you just literally can't eat it.

It's just the focus on moving one foot in front of the other.

But they don't understand because they think, well, you must be tired, you must be hungry?

Yeah and you are tired and you are hungry.

The biggest challenge with ultra distances is actually losing interest in eating and not being able to eat, even though you should.

So yeah, it's weird you think your body would want to protect itself.

Yeah, the banana thing I told you about. The banana and honey work fine, but.

Oh yeah.

I kind of rationed it when I shouldn't have rationed it. And then by the time I should have been eating it, I couldn't be arsed, you know what I mean? So what I've done, I've ordered some gels because I've tried different gels over the years. So I've now ordered some gels and I've tried them and they're actually all right. They're quite liquid and they didn't seem to harm my tummy or anything like that.

So next year...

I'm gonna go back to to gels I think. Yeah, I'm not a fan, but they kind of do what they say on the tin.

Yeah. You've got to just use them strategically.

Anyway anything about digital marketing?

Nah. Okay. Yeah. There's, sort of, lots happening in the world. Google seems to have sort of..

In the world of search and marketing? Yeah. Okay. There's certainly a lot happening in the world.

In the world generally, but we won't go there because that would take us more.

We've got a dead duck prime minister, somebody who's going to be the prime minister but isn't even an MP yet.

Yeah.

Who everyone is saying, well lots of people are hailing as the saviour of British politics and everything else. It's just like, well, why?

Yeah.

Where's the track record? "He's done a good job as mayor of Manchester", but that's quite a different job, though.

We vote for a political party. We don't vote for a prime minister. We vote for a party. So changing the person at the top of the party, that's not what we're voting for. We're voting for a manifesto that that party...now, if you're in that party....

They do need a leader and Starmer isn't that leader. I mean, I think it's right that he ships out. But it's like chaos.

But then are we not going back to this revolving doors of like a new prime minister every two weeks? And that's not healthy either.

Probably. Just need to go back to the country don't they, probably. It's just unbelievable. There's just such a dearth of talent in politics.

There's no personalities.

Well, I think I could argue there are personalities, people like Angela Rayner and David Lammy. There's certainly personalities, but I don't see any competence, leadership personalities. No, I mean, there just isn't. You just you need people like Blair. You need people like Cameron. He was a good prime minister. I mean, he went far too soon. He should never have quit after the Brexit result.

He should never have done the Brexit vote.

He didn't want people to vote leave. I mean it's sort of like often bandied around that they wanted to leave.

He didnt think it would go through.

Nobody did.

He did the referendum on the basis that, 'well, nobody's going to vote for it and it gets it out of the way, and then we can just get on with things' and it all just went very, very horribly wrong.

Absolutely.

We're still not talking about digital marketing. Should we try again?

Well, you can try, but I'll probably go back to the more interesting stuff.

Yeah. As I said, there's lots happening in the world and also lots happening in the world of Google and stuff.

There's always stuff happening in the world of Google. Tell me about what you think is really important just now.

Apparently, which I have no evidence of as yet in GA4, Google Analytics, they're going to start showing AI assistants as a separate channel group. So at the moment you see organic search and paid search and stuff. They're going to add in or have added in AI assistants. So you can actually measure conversions from AI assistants. So that's going to be really useful, but I can't see it. I've checked a few of our accounts and I haven't seen it yet.

They just rolled it out in America or something like that.

Possibly, it is new. But apparently that's coming. Google ads, they've improved.

Not gonna tell me Google Ads is changing, because that's not news. It just changes every day!

That's Monday.

Yeah.

No, they're changing the way of setting up conversion tracking and making the integration with Tag Manager and Analytics easier within Ads. So you don't have to go out of Ads. You should be able to do it all from there. Yeah, we will see if that actually makes it any better or not.

I mean, we've always, we've all. In fact, I was thinking of writing a blog post about it, but maybe I'll hold off if things are changing again. But conversion tracking is something that always gets people confused. And it's not just the mechanics of it, because the mechanics of it change all the time and seem it seems that it'll only work on a Monday afternoon between two and half past two, when the sun's out and then you might have a chance of making it work. But I mean, the bottom line is, and I think that it's the reason it's contentious, I suppose, is trying to understand what a meaningful conversion is.

Yeah. It's a completely different conversation from the technicalities.

In B2C land, it's quite simple. If you flog something as a result of a click, then that's a conversion you made some money. In B2B land it's more complicated.

And Google can kind of understand that, add basket, checkout. And I think it seems to find that quite easy to pick up.

You can understand why, you just put a trigger on a thank you page and that's it. Boom. You know, this person bought something.

And if there's enough of them. Yeah, the data makes sense. If there's like one or two, I think it struggles, it's never going to be one hundred percent accurate. If you know you've had three sales and it's showing two or four, then it's hard to know exactly what's going on. Whereas if you've got a thousand and it's showing a thousand and one, it doesn't really matter.

That's right. Yeah. And I guess really what actually constitutes a conversion as well. We've had this conversation, you know, when you use tools like HubSpot, you can actually decide to feed back marketing qualified leads to Google Ads. So it only uses them to try and improve the quality of the traffic that it sends you. Yeah. And I think that's a good idea.

You do need a brain the size of a planet to work out how to do it.

It's not too bad, I mean, it's just a life cycle stage thing. Which is fine as long as you're using those tools. If you're not using those tools, then it's still not too bad, but then it can just suddenly not work for no apparent reason. And it obviously requires intervention as well, because it means that somebody clicks an advert, comes to your website, fills a form in, you look at them and you decide, "Ah, these are people worth speaking to". So you change the life cycle stage to marketing qualified leads.

And that involves a human remembering to do it.

And at that point, Google gets told that that click was meaningful. Whereas a lot of the time people just go for the easy option. If they fill a form in, it's a lead and you tell Google "Yay, they fill a form in" and it could be just absolute crap.

Yeah, it's better than nothing. It's filling in a form, but it's not that accurate.

But if you listen to this and you're using Google Ads, we definitely spend some time and look into what you're classifying as a conversion and how you're feeding that information back to Google, because that's how it will improve the quality of the traffic it sends you. In theory.

So the HubSpot thing, is that quite easy to set up?

It's easy to set up like form fills. And then if you want to change it from a form fill to an MQL, then yeah, you just do it by life cycle stage. So it's fairly straightforward to do. Usual thing, when I was setting up one last week, it was very straightforward, apart from the fact that if you're....you're obviously logged into HubSpot as you, so you've got to connect the Google Ads account so that you can actually do it all. It won't just say, well, somebody connected the Google Ads account. Therefore, you can do everything you need to do. You've got to prove that you've got access to it as well so that you do it. So I just found that a little bit tedious, but it just is. I mean, how much time do we waste just sort of unpicking stuff that's, like, unnecessarily complicated. It just seems that it's part and parcel of digital marketing. It's like, yeah, let's just make it complicated. It's like knitting fog. It's just impossible sometimes.

It really is. It's really hard to figure out.

What were you saying something about conversions? So they're going to simplify the whole conversion tracking thing between Google Ads and GA4 and everything else?

Yeah, they're going to put it all within Google Ads. So you don't have to come out of Google Ads, to go into Tag Manager, set it up there and then, or set it up in Analytics. And I've never quite worked out which order to do that in and how they even speak to each other at all.

Again, with HubSpot, you can, you know, once you've connected your Google Ads account to HubSpot, you can just go in and you can say, 'show me all the contacts that that campaign created' and go and look at the context. So they were good contacts and we followed up on them. And it's generated X amount of business and you feed that ROI back into Google if you want to. Again, using these tools makes it so much simpler. And I know this sounds like a pitch for HubSpot. I don't care what tool you use, but if you use a tool like HubSpot....

It is great. Yeah. You can go into the ads section and just go for contacts and then you look and go, well, that actually was someone trying to sell something but three of them were decent. So manually you can see straight away which campaigns have worked in terms of like, that's a great contact. Where does it come from? And you can trace it right back and that's brilliant if you want. But if somebody just wants a report and like a quick snapshot, it's quite hard to get that. But maybe we'll get easier.

Well yeah, maybe.

Um oh, last week or whenever it was, two weeks ago, we were speaking about people using five search platforms and I was trying to figure out where that number had come from. But I actually have no idea where that number has come from. But I have got data on which platforms people are using to search. Okay. I think it's slightly different data, but it's, how many searches per day someone makes on different platforms. So YouTube is top other than actual search engines, YouTube is top with somewhere around eight searches per day per person. Followed by...

I carried out, I think two or three today on YouTube. Yeah.

X is next, which surprised me. It's also somewhere between six and eight, which I kind of forget about it because I just abandoned it.

Is that not just people going on X and saying, you know, show me that video of Donald Trump falling over and he was getting off an airplane? It could be. Yeah.

It could be, yeah. It's still a it's still a search.

So it's nothing to get too excited about in the B2B world. No, probably Pinterest next. Yeah. Again, more B2C, more kind of give me some ideas for different wallpaper for my new frontroom or whatever.

Yeah, definitely. Then LinkedIn next at like four ish. Is that LinkedIn? There's two blues here I can't work out which is which. Yeah, that's LinkedIn then. Or is that TikTok? LinkedIn and TikTok are both round about four. I can't actually work out without moving my head miles away from the microphone. I can't work out which is which. Then Facebook connects, then Reddit.

Reddit's lower down then, I thought it would be higher up than that.

But TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit are all around about three or four. The graph lines keep overlapping with each other. So there's, six or seven there that are used daily by people to do searches. So yeah, it's hard to keep track.

I guess it's a case of, you know, like we've said before, it's a case of finding out like where your tribe hang out. Yeah. I would think for a lot of our customers, their ideal customers are hanging out in all of those places, probably in different times of the day and in different situations. But it's, um.

Engineers', probably less likely to be on Pinterest, I would imagine.

I would imagine, but yeah.

But who am I to stereotype engineers? Maybe they are looking at hairstyles for forty five year olds or how to wear cowboy boots or whatever it is. You never know.

Yeah. You get engineers are also twenty two year olds. Yeah. They might be baby engineers, but they're still engineers.

Yeah, exactly. They're probably still not hanging out in Pinterest. But if you're an engineer and you love Pinterest, let us know. The same research had the percentage of total website visits that go to search engines or AI or whatever. So out of all website visits in the UK and Europe, 11% is a search engine, 1.7% is an AI engine and 2% is an e-commerce site. And then the rest is other websites anywhere else. So AI at the start of 2025 was 0.9%. By the end of 2025, it was 1.7%.

It's more or less doubled.

Doubled in a year. So, you know.

Yeah.

That's one to watch. But the search is pretty constant. It looks like people are just searching more. They're not necessarily replacing Google searches with AI searches. They're just doing more searches.

So you're saying only 10% of the people coming to our website are coming from a search engine?

No, no, no. It's every time you open a browser, 10% of the websites you visit are search engines.

Okay. All right. No wonder marketing's confusing.

I know. So yeah, basically 15% of total website visits are searching type things.

Okay.

If that helps at all.

Yeah. No.

I didn't think it would.

Are you just gonna keep spewing stats at me all day?

That's it. Beat you until you into submission.

And the last person just switched off.

Yeah, Now, Google has also...... I've got a tennis match on Wednesday, and I've just found out that someone has a garlic and onion intolerance for the sandwich purposes.

Well, just tell them to bring their own sandwich.

I know. Right. Google has given guidance on SEO and AEO or GEO or whatever.

What's it saying?

And this is new, new stuff from Google. So it's saying...

Where is it coming from this information? Is it.

Actual Google.

Actual Google?

Actual Google! It says...

Like the actual Google who phoned me last week because they were trying to tell me that my account, someone had tried to change the phone number on my account, someone in Hamburg, or somewhere like that. But basically they were scammers, very plausible. And they said, we think your your phone has been, we think your device has been compromised. We're going to send you a code. Can you please tell us what the number is? And you know, one of G hyphen da da da da.

Oh, one of those codes.

Yeah. I was nearly taken in by it. And I'm pretty good with these things but they were pretty plausable.

It sounds like quite feasible. But what would have happened if you'd given them the code?

Well, if I'd given them the code, they would have then been able to, that would have proven to Google that they had my phone and it was me, and then whatever they were going to do after that. Luckily, I just gave them another nonsense number, but as soon as I gave them the other nonsense number, they hung up. What was that number again? Da de da, woosh and the line just went dead. And it was from a mobile number as well. Mind you, even when Google do phone it's from a mobile number these days. Anyway. So watch out if somebody rings you up and they ask you to recite the g hyphen, yada, yada number that they've triggered.

And have they sent it to your mobile as a text?

So they've tried to do something and Google said, right, just to make sure it's you, we will send a code to your phone. Yeah. And they'll trigger that event. So it sends the code. So it all sounds very plausible.

You're helping them hack into it.

Basically yeah. What do they call it? Social engineering type thing, situation where they just create a little sense of urgency and it sounds feasible. And it sounds like Google, very well spoken person at the end of the phone.

That doesn't sound like Google at all then.

Sorry. What were you saying?

I have no idea.

It was that black bit.

Yeah. So yeah, Google basically says.

It was it was about what Google are now saying about about SEO and AEO.

Their saying it's the same.

Yeah. so nothing's changed.

They're saying....

Use useful, good content that helps people solve their problems that they've been saying since 2008?

They're saying, provide non-commodity content, unique expert led. And that adds value beyond common knowledge. So same old, same old. But having dug a little bit deeper into that, that's Google's AI overviews pull from search rankings, search results page, SERPs. God, that's a struggle today. So, the AI overviews are pulling from search results. So fundamentally what they want is the same as, what you would have been doing for SEO. And LMS are actually getting their information in slightly different ways. So this is really...

Well are they?

Apparently.

Well, they get it in one of two ways.

Training data.

They've got their memory, which is their training data. Or they go out and carry out a live search.

Yeah. But they could be looking for mentions of you, not just your pages. And their AI overviews seem to work a lot more like normal search. So yeah. Um, unique, expert led, helpful content and....

Whatever that means.

They've said that, the 'chunking' thing that's been bandied around quite a lot, you know, having lots of little chunks of information. They've said, nah, it's fine. You know, the engines are clever enough that they don't need little chunks of information. They can figure it out. So don't worry about chunking. Chunking is dead and they've said there's no ideal page length. Shorter pages can work just as well or longer pages, depending on....

So nothing helpful at all?

No, no, just.

They're trying to obfuscate, I think. I think they're trying to protect their domain.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Really.

Yeah.

Because if they don't protect their domain, then the AI engines will just become the tool of choice. And they'll just base the responses on their training data, on their memory.

Google's had pretty much no competition for the last...

Over twenty years.

Yeah.

So suddenly there is competition. And yeah, they're trying to make sure that they people doing things their way. So that's what they're saying. They've also put out some kind of guidance about, AI slop basically. They said it's scaled content abuse, when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.

Yeah. But that's been going on for a long time, hasn't it now?

But then they've sort of added a little bit about, sort of, AI generate content.

Because there was a time, late 2024, where a lot of these things were coming out that can detect whether something was written by a human or written by AI. And now you can get AI to write content that, let's face it, there are plenty of bad writers in the world, so if you look at something and you just think, well the grammar's not very good. This isn't put together very well.

It's probably written by human.

It's probably written by a human.

I've seen people who are very good writers get pulled up for being AI because it's too good.

Yeah. I'll tell you a little story about that. When I worked at the University of Aberdeen, my boss at the time, who sadly is no longer with us, Doctor Neil Hamilton, he wrote something once and he asked me to check it and I was reading it. I was like, Doctor Neil Hamilton wrote this? He's got numerous papers and it was awful. And I went back to him and I said, this isn't this isn't. He said, oh, sorry, I should have explained. It's written for a child, it's written so a child would understand it. So it was very simple.

Explain it to me as if I'm a five year old.

Yeah. It was that kind of "Ah, right. That makes sense now!" because it didn't quite resonate like what he'd written. But, um, where were we were that we were talking about like humans writing content.

Yeah, if you write really well, you get flagged up as AI because it actually doesn't sound human because it's too perfect.

Yeah. I mean, developing a tone of voice to use makes absolute sense, where AI is concerned. But ultimately using AI can take the grind out of producing great content. Yeah, it really can, as long as you don't rely on it. And we've said this plenty of times, there's nothing wrong with using AI. And the search engines are saying the same thing.

Yeah. I mean, it's not saying don't use AI to generate it says don't use AI to generate many pages to manipulate search rankings and make it unhelpful. It's said this abusive practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little or no value to users, no matter how it's created. So it's not just how it's created. Just don't generate garbage. So basically, Google has produced guidelines that say exactly the same thing as all its other guidelines have ever said.

All Google's ever wanted people to do. I mean, it's ridiculous. Even that statement makes me teeth itch because Google has made, a multi-billion pound business out of consuming other people's content. Yeah, great. Somebody needed to do it because otherwise how would we possibly find stuff? You know, if you rely on like a librarian to put it all in the, whatever that system is called. So it needed indexing, it needed curating, automatically not with a human curator in order for content to be discovered, content to be found. But it quickly turned into, you know, what Google recognised, I suppose, was that, the fact that people come to them looking for information. So you make sure your information is presented in a way that we can consume it. So we can then regurgitate it to people and send you traffic. And in the meantime, we'll maybe intercept some of that traffic and get them to click our adverts and make tons of money, which, in simple terms, that's what's happened.

That's all it is, yeah.

That's all it is. I mean, like most of the internet is fuelled by, people getting tricked into clicking adverts or clicking adverts because they want to click the advert. But Google's never said anything different. It's always just said, create content that people are looking for and if you do, we'll reward you by sending you traffic. And in the meantime, we'll probably just nick some of that content and put it on our page so they don't have to visit you. But thanks for the content anyway. Yeah, so it's just a massive game. It's exhausting. I've said that before.

It's just saying, well, help us make our product better because if you provide more useful content that makes Google more useful. Yeah, and if you provide garbage, it makes Google garbage. So if people are going to continue using Google at all, it needs to be full of useful content. But having said that, it doesn't police it.

No, it trusts the internet to police it.

Yeah.

By looking at citations and trust signals and all that kind of stuff. And it's the only way it can do it. It's too much content for it to be done any other way. It has to be an automatic automated process and algorithm.

It is. It's better.

So the revelation from that little snippet of stuff is?

Google's changed nothing!

Google's changed nothing. But you know, the interesting thing, I mean, Leslie sent some stuff through for us to look at and possibly talk about. We saw some good stuff in there and it's talking about a March update. I don't know. I don't follow the updates.

There was one, I think that's....

What Google has always tried to do with the updates is weed out.

The crap.

The crap, basically. So if you found a little way of fooling Google, like back in the day, private blog networks. They were the big thing. So basically you paid somebody a few hundred dollars, you got access to their private blog network where you could put as much content as you wanted with links back to your website or your clients websites. And how would that look like to Google. It would look like trust signals, private blog, blog networks. Then they got discovered and they figured out how. So, those people that were relying on the private blog networks got stuffed. Yeah. And so, it's always been the case that if you're looking for ways to game the system, then eventually, probably, not always, you'll get caught out. And that's all they're saying now, they're saying exactly the same.

It's also saying inauthentic mentions are a no no. And that's things like buying links. It's still talking about, not buying links, although everyone knows that that actually does work. If you do it well.

Because they have no way of detecting it if it's done properly.

Yeah. But they're still banging on about that as well.

Yeah. Because, you know, if their algorithm is manipulated sufficiently, as you rightly say, the search results start to become even worse than they are. And let's face it, they're quite often awful.

Yeah. Search results. I was looking at cars at the weekend online. I went, actually went, to a garage. I might talk about that. Christ, that was exhausting!

Oh. It's painful.

But I was looking at cars and I thought, "I wonder if there's a Lexus dealer in Perth?", you know, Perth's ninety miles away.

Yeah. It's quite close.

Yeah. So Lexus Perth. Oh they go great. Click. Started searching. Well why are the price is in dollars? Perth Australia. I mean it's just watched me go. Dundee Aberdeen. I'll check Perth.

Australia.

Perth must mean Perth Australia. Must be wanting to buy a car from Perth in Australia. That's how clever those systems are, you know.

Yeah, yeah. My daughter's in Newcastle and she said that she got really excited about something or other opening up in Newcastle and...

Newcastle, Australia?

Yeah. Newcastle, Australia.

I've driven past that.

So yeah, it's like, surely it must know where she is. I don't know whether it was tick tock or whatever Instagram or whatever, but you know it knows her location. Why on earth would you show something. You know, get it right. Yeah. The other thing Google are doing...

Did you say Google was saying something about AEO as well? Or is what you just said apply?

It said it's the same. It said that for it's purposes, um, it's still SEO that it's not differentiating.

Yeah. But is it saying that so that you don't differentiate to help the LMS learn faster?

Yeah.

Probably because the LMS quite like structured data, don't they. They quite like schema. And Google's been saying for quite a while now. Oh, don't worry about schema anymore.

It does mention schema when it said about the chunking. And it also mentioned, it wasn't that bothered about schema, but it did say, you can use it to, in certain circumstances, but it was very much playing down the schema thing.

It would possibly playing it down because when it started talking about it, marketers the world over went, oh, schema, let's just ram everything with schema because that works now and do that thing that marketers do.

Yeah. Break everything, essentially. In the AI responses there now....

Is this the AI overviews in search results as opposed to AI mode?

Possibly both. Okay. But AI overviews, I think, they're going to actually have where the source that they got the information from.

Okay. I think I might have seen them introducing that.

LinkedIn or Reddit or whatever, they're actually going to put in where it was found.

A link to the actual source or just to the domain of the source.

It says they're adding more context to these links, like a creator's name, handle or community name to help you decide which discussions you might want to read or participate in. So it's keeping its options open there. Um, but it is going to give you more detail on the source of the random information that it's chucking at you. Okay. But I mean, if it's from Reddit or LinkedIn, it doesn't make it more accurate. It makes it probably more likely to be a load of rubbish, but I'm not sure if that's helpful or not. But at least you know where the rubbish is coming from.

That's right. Yeah.

So that's another thing it's introducing. In Google Business profiles it's adding social links.

Okay.

And they were never in there before. But it's going in and generating them itself. So it's worth going and checking if it's got them right. It's got hours right.

So they are in there then. So they're no jus talking about it, they are doing it.

Yeah. It didn't have our LinkedIn or our TikTok though, so it doesn't seem to be be pulling in the LinkedIn ones. So if you're, if you're a LinkedIn person.

Who owns LinkedIn, is it meta? Are they pulling Facebook.

Is it. No, no, it's not meta. It's Microsoft.

Microsoft. Oh that's right.

Yeah. Just want to be aware of that, go and check and add in any that it's missed out.

I can see why they're doing it because I do see traffic, like through search, will land on our site, look at a few pages and they'll click away to one of our social platforms. Quite often it is LinkedIn. Yeah, so I can understand why they may be doing that.

Yeah. I think people want the sort of validation of, you know, this is a company and they're sort of active or they still exist or it's just sort of where people are comfortable.

Yeah. Makes sense.

Um, well, apparently a new scam and the marketers break everything world. Okay, people, web developers, web designers are speaking to people and saying that if your website's old, then the AI engines can't read it.

Okay.

On LinkedIn, somebody said the answer to that is, well, it can read Jane Austen, so it probably can read a ten year old website. Um, yeah. Nonsense. Sounds like it, dont be fooled. I mean, if it's structured wrongly and you've got a some sort of block that the AI engines can't read it, fine. But I mean, that's not going to be there if your website is ten years old, because it wouldn't have been in place, it wouldn't have existed. So yeah. Nonsense.

So yeah. And if you do searches, you'll quite often get links, search result links to very, very old websites. Yeah. But if the content's good, the content's good, I suppose. I suppose people will try anything in order to....

Oh yeah. "Your website's old". Yeah. "You won't get picked up by engines because it's too old" and they don't recognise it or whatever.

Yeah.

Not true.

It kind of feeds in a little bit to something I wrote, I scribbled something down, last week, potentially as a topic of discussion. And we don't need to discuss it in any detail, but this kind of marketing is getting increasingly exhausting. And that's one of the reasons because you get people who say, "oh, well, if you're not doing this, you're dead in the water". You've got to do this and you've got.... and those people never have to do it necessarily, they're just good at telling people what to do. "Oh, if you want to get fit, you need to go running". "You need to do ten miles". "You need to do...."

fifteen thousand steps a day.

What do you do? Oh, I'm not doing anything, you know. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

That was a marketer as well.

Yeah I know.

Surprise, surprise.

We're talking about steps. Just go quickly back to the K to B, seventy six thousand, seventy six thousand steps!

Oh my God. Did you watch explode at that point?

This watch, the Apple ultra, that I use it manages. The previous watch I had whatever version it just sort of ran out of interest and stopped at like thirty six miles or something. It's like, I'm done, I'm done, I'm finished.

I can't.

I can't carry on. The ultra was fine. So that's how I know it was like what it was.

That's crazy.

It is.

Yeah. Ten thousand steps was invented by somebody trying to sell pedometers. So it was like, you need to measure your steps, you need to do ten thousand and look here's a gadget.

I got plenty of conversations. Oh no, I just gotta get my steps in. I gotta get my steps. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, it's really good.

Absolutely.

But seven thousand is the sweet spot. And anything over seven thousand is neither here nor there. But everyone's different.

Yeah. That's right.

What else have you got.

I've been, I mean the whole marketing is getting increasingly exhausting stuff, we've kind of covered. I know that, some of the stuff Leslie was sending, sending through was about the whole SEO thing and SEO, all that stuff. And you've kind of covered most of it anyway. It's kind of like, business as usual. If you're producing good content and you're getting good citations and you're credible and you get mentions and all the rest of it, then. Yeah. But it does feel hard still, like it always has like a racket.

Oh, yeah.

And you are going to be up against people who are just playing the system and will do anything and don't really care whether it works or whether it doesn't or whether it could get them....

long term...

Penalised or whatever. They'll always do it. So it's always one of the difficult ones when you're working with customers is the whole justifying your existence. And that's often the stick thats used.

I ordered through something and it says all these things. And then you've got to spend time kind of going, well, yes, that's important. And we're working on that. And you know, that isn't important. And yes, we're not doing this because there's only so many hours in a day or that's not our speciality. And, you know, we're focusing on these things and they sort of expect you to tick all the millions of boxes in one of these reports. And you just have to prioritise.

Exactly. You do. Anything else?

Yeah.

Oh go on.

There's more. Headless CMS seem to be reappearing as a thing.

Okay. Is that, I wonder why. What's the context there?

Because apparently, I wrote this down fast, they provide fast delivery of content and they resist the heavy load of AI agents. Whatever that means. But yeah, they can ping stuff out very, very quickly and basically, the AI agents seem to like the way that works.

Content management systems have always separated content from presentation. That's what they did. I mean, Joomla, WordPress, even HubSpot, all of them separate the two things out. Headless CMS, for anyone who doesn't understand the concept, is that you have a content......

It's like a database is'nt it?

Repository. See how I paused there? Content repository. And the reason that that could be fast is that you could then put a very lightweight web page together that has nothing in it that isn't doing something. And then you just squirt the information into it remotely from the headless CMS. You can use HubSpot as a headless CMS with WordPress to manage all your content, including all the funky stuff that HubSpot does, but actually display it, give it to people using a hub, a WordPress plugin that goes and grabs the content from HubSpot, which is on a massive content delivery network. So it's ultra fast.

You can also use it if you want to send content to an app and a website and a shop and lots of different places. You only need to do it once and it can squirt it to lots of different places at the same time. Yeah. But then somebody said something like.

Somebody said something.

That's a great webinar. Somebody said something. No, just started my brain going. So is there a case for. Basically, you don't have a website as such. You just have a.... the AI agent asks a question and you create the answer on the fly?

Yes, but then how's that going to work in search?

It would just be free, if it gets to the point where AI agents are the majority of searches and like blue links don't really count anymore. You just have a ton of information. And when the AI agent asks the question, you would just generate it to answer the very specific question. Yeah, it's probably coming....

Yeah. I mean, I suppose it already does because people are using agents with their websites and people land on a website and instead of looking at the content, they'll just speak to the agent and ask it for the information. So it's doing that already.

Yeah. HubSpot has it in the like the knowledge bank things. All the chatbots have it. So you've got the knowledge bank and somebody types something into chatbot and it makes up the answer on the fly. So that could be your whole website.

But in order for LMS to learn, they need to be able to crawl and read content. In order for Google to work, it needs to be able to crawl and read and regurgitate content so that content has to be there. But yeah, it might be that you almost create a website just for the LMS. You don't want people going anywhere near it. That project that I mentioned last time, which, you know, I'll mention again now, even I'm not talking about what it actually is. It's primarily for the LMS. Yeah. You know, the one that we're working on internally.

Yeah.

That's true because nobody's ever going to bother to read the content that that we're putting together. But the LMS might because they.

Want to consume....

That kind of content. So, I think, you know, I've spoken about headless stuff over the last few years. I've struggled to get the guys interested to investigate it. But, I think there's something in it. I quite like the idea of just having your content and then you just say, right, let's use, I don't know, something like Astro, which is an ultra fast framework. And we'll deliver the website using Astro, but we'll manage all the content inside HubSpot. You know, just to produce a website that's lightning fast and will tick all of the, you core web vitals boxes and all that kind of good stuff. Be interesting to see how effective it was. But yeah, you know, just to explain to people, quite often with a content management system like WordPress, Joomla, HubSpot, all the rest of it, when a web page renders a lot of the stuff, that's behind the scenes if you go like view source of website of the web page, stuff that doesn't really need to be there like entire libraries of JavaScript because one functions used things like that. And so, I guess if you have this headless thing, you can just think what type of page is this? It's literally just a blog post, right? So we just have a header, title element, yada yada.

Yeah. You don't need all.

This stuff, all the rest of it. And then just pull in that information, raw information, display it HTML and it's a really, really fast resource. And again, because you've got complete separation between content and presentation, you're never going to be worried about, well let's move our website to WordPress from HubSpot or HubSpot to Webflow or whatever. It doesn't really matter. You can be completely, almost, display presentation agnostic. But all of your content is safe in this, as you said, it's like a massive database.

Yeah. But.

But theres a but....oh, no.

Talking about things to make your site really, really fast and everything. There are, like plugins that kind of make sure.....I'm really struggling today. The content only loads....

Doesn't seem different to usual.

No, I know, the content only loads as people scroll down the page.

Oh yeah. I mean the guys use that lazy load images.

But there's a version of that for text as well. So it only loads the top of the page. And then as people scroll down, it loads the rest of the content. AI engines can't read that. They can't read the content because they don't scroll. They just look at the whole page. So if you're using that sort of thing to speed up your site. You're screwed. So that is a, i thought that was quite interesting.

It's not difficult to, programmatically, to detect that it's an agent. This is an agentic visit to our website. Right. Render everything. Just render it, render the lot straight away. I'm sure. But yeah, because we should always be trying to create the best result for people.

Yeah.

And if that is a good result for people because it's faster or whatever. Yeah. I mean, how many web pages really need to load a bit at a time other than videos and things? Yeah. It's kind of like, just because you can do it doesn't mean it's actually worth doing.

The words aren't the thing that take ages it is generally the pictures. Yeah, that's something to be aware of.

Especially, you know, bandwidth is less of an issue anyway because it doesnt matter, whether it's the device in your pocket or your desktop or your laptop or whatever, you've usually got access to huge amounts of bandwidth.

Yeah. But talking about humans and machines, that was part of the webinar that I was talking about. They were talking about headless CMS. They were also saying that websites need to work for humans and machines, but you need to think about it slightly different for both. And you just said that I'm like, oh, actually I wrote that down. So humans, it's all about the experience, the hierarchy. So things are easy to find. The journeys through the website, the interaction and the branding for the AI. It's basically none of that. I doesn't care about any of that stuff. It cares about the structure, the entities, the metadata, the context, and the relationships between the things. So you've got to do both.

Yeah.

So it's got to be easy to travel through and find your way around and look pretty for the humans. But then the AI is very much just about like how it's all laid out and how it's all labeled and headings and things like that.

Being slightly contentious, this idea of the humans journey through a website. I don't think that's real.

I mean, it is to an extent, if you're on a generic page, you're going to learn, click through and get more information if you're really interested, or you're either going to go to a case study or a contact page. You know.

Very occasionally we get people who go like they seem to go through our website, like the whole thing. And they seem to look at it very occasionally. Most people, it's one or two pages. Well, usually it's like, you know, you can see they were looking for website management or they were looking for branding or they were looking for search or HubSpot help or whatever. And then they might go to 'Contact Us'. They might go to 'About Us'. Sometimes portfolio, sometimes they'll go home, sometimes portfolio. But this idea that people will carefully go through and look at all your pictures.

No, no, not all the pages.

They just don't do that.

But the journey is very much. Um, home page or product page or whatever page they landed on then some sort of validation. Uh, it's about us or portfolio or something like that. And then contact. That's a very typical journey. Yeah.

Yeah. That's right.

So yeah, the AI engines don't care about that. And you've kind of got to think about both when you're building a website, which again, just makes it all more exhausting and confusing and hard, which isn't fun.

Well, yeah the agentic searches or crawls or whatever they are. They struggle with content that's rendered using JavaScript as well, which is the same thing, which is exactly what you've been saying. Yeah. So it's, just broadly speaking, if it's rendered with JavaScript in order to make it more efficient or whatever, or to make it pretty or to make it fade in or whatever it does.

That's not helpful.

It's not gonna, it's not going to help things. No.

There we go. Um, I think I've run out of steam.

That's okay. We've been yapping away now for, you know, fifty odd minutes. So the two or three people that are still left probably thinking, yeah, that's enough. I've driven round and round the block in order to make sure I get to the end of this fantastic podcast.

Sitting in the car outside the house going will they shut up now? Because I need my tea.

Do you ever do that thing where you drive in, a distance, you might just have come back from Aberdeen or something, which is like, what, thirty or forty miles to get home and you just get home and you just sit in your car and you go, ah! And you just feel quite restful in the car.

Kinda. But, I know people that do.

Karen does.

Sit.

She gets back and she'll sometimes have a nap in the car rather than go in the house because it's just like, I don't know if it's like something soporific about about the journey home because, it's a nice drive from out to this part of the world from here, from the city.

Some people struggle with transitions.

Mhm.

So like going, just going from one situation to another. They just need a little moment to adjust. So they just like sit in the car and get ready for the transition into a house. And I think sometimes it's just the sort of, like, giving your brain time to adjust to being in a different place.

Anyway. You've been listening to all kinds of stuff today from, uh, myself and Julie in the, uh, in the podcast. Hopefully little bits of it were interesting. And if none of it was interesting, but you just like listening to people babble on, then maybe you've enjoyed it as well. We certainly enjoy doing it. All right.

Thank you.

Bye.