How Search Is Changing and What Food Bloggers Need to Do About It with Casey Markee

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Björk is interviewing Casey Markee, who likely needs no introduction for most of you. Casey is the SEO expert behind Mediawise, and he is also the SEO expert within the Food Blogger Pro membership. This is his 6th, maybe even 7th appearance on the Food Blogger Pro podcast, and we are thrilled to welcome him back. If you've been feeling like search and traffic have gotten harder to figure out lately, you're not imagining it and you're not alone. The rules are definitely changing and they're changing pretty fast. In this episode, Casey breaks down the biggest shift happening in search right now, the move away from the traditional 10 blue links model toward a semantic AI-powered model. For food bloggers, this means that publishing a well-optimized recipe is no longer enough, and Casey explains exactly what it takes to thrive in the search landscape that's replacing it. Birk and Casey chat about the technical fundamentals that still matter. The growing importance of building a content ecosystem and genuine topical authority, and how to make yourself and your brand visible beyond your website. It's an essential episode for every food blogger out there, and we hope you'll get a lot out of it. Without further ado, I'll just let Björk take it away.

Welcome back to the podcast.

Björk, thanks so much for having me. It's always a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, I think this is maybe 6 or 7. It's, I think you might be the most, yeah, other than like Lindsay and Emily, you know, who are team members. Uh, you might be the most frequent podcast guest. There's a reason for that. And it's because you are deep in the world of industry and a niche that we talk about. Uh, and that's really important, which is SEO for people who are publishing food content on the web. That world is changing. It's always changed fast, but it feels like it's changing faster than it has ever has before. Does that feel true from your end? You know, you've had 2 decades of experience in search. Does it feel like it's changing faster than it normally has?

I'm not used to you saying just 2 decades.

Okay, 3.

'Cause I am old.

4?

1998 is when I first started in SEO. I remember the good old days of Dogpile and Lycos and Overture.com. But yeah, it is a substantial change now. We've gone from that nice big set of blue links to where now Google is pulling from multiple sources to construct a kind of algamated Frankenstein-type answer where their goal is to pull multiple sources from various places, provide follow-up tasks that the user might want to complete, and make sure that everything that they're doing is on Google so that they could keep you on their listing. Yeah, completely different than what it used to be, which is what— one of the best documents to rank for Aquarian and sending this thing called traffic to bloggers for so many years. That's, that's changed considerably for sure.

Yeah. And so what you're talking about is kind of multifactorial. One version of it would be AI overviews. And most creators, most bloggers are familiar with this idea of AI overview. Even if like I'm talking to family and friends and they're like, how's work going? I'm like, well, things are changing. And I give the example. I'm, and I say like, we used to get a lot of traffic from Google. That was really important. But now a lot of times when you search, you might notice that the answer is provided by Google. So that's AI overviews. The other piece that I think is really important that you talked about is there's the AI overview, but then if you click to say like show more, it folds down into an interactive experience where then you are interacting like you would with Claude or ChatGPT. You are interacting with that query that you had in order to gather additional information. Is that kind of what you're talking about is like the changing landscape with search, one of the ways that it's changing?

Right. I mean, you're basically referring to what's called query fanout, which is where Google issues, you know, multiple related searches across subtopics. And they use multiple sources from many different sites to build a layered response. That's obviously very different from the classic one query, one SERP, and those 10 blue links that we used to have. And basically when we talk about old SEO, we're talking about, hey, here's the keyword, here's a title, here's H2s, that's how you rank. Now Google has basically moved to this, uh, it's, it's a lot more dense. It's more— we move— Google has moved from a lexical model of search to a more semantic model of search.

Can you say those two words again? The The first one was lexical. Okay. And can you define, yeah, lexical?

Yeah.

So lexical is basically when things are in a list. Lexical means that, hey, I've got this, uh, this is your query and now I'm providing you a list of 10 results to answer that query.

Yep.

Here are the best documents that we wanna rank for that query. Now Google has moved to a semantic answer and the semantic, and that basically means that it's an answer constructed from multiple sources and Google provides you a list of sources and they provide follow-up tasks to refine that list of sources. And then Google's whole goal is what can we do to help you so that you stay on Google? That's where we get with the semantic, the AI and the, and the fan out. So Google's using multiple related sources across subtopics and sources. And so it used to be, you know, we had keywords, titles, H2s, and that would be what bloggers seem to concentrate on and ranking for. Now with this modern SEO, as Google likes to call it. We have everything from topic clarity to answer clarity to entity classification to technical crawlability to structured data accuracy. All of this goes in to the results that Google is returning in the search results. That's literally what Gemini is designed to do, to provide you a complete answer, uh, not necessarily the best singular answer.

Sure. And before, like, I almost think about it within the context of talking to an expert. Like, let's say I were to go in and I were to talk to my doctor, describe something that I'm navigating. It would be as if the previous version of Google would've been like, you know, he would've handed me a document. He's like, okay, here's your response. So it's like you say a thing and it's like, here's your response. Today what's happening is you're kind of going in, you're having that same thing, you're expressing something., and then it's like, here's a custom response based on that specific query, uh, or that specific question that you had. Like, it's more, um, crafted. And similarly, it's like what your doctor would actually do. They know your history, they know like context about you. They'd be able to surface a response. Um, there was something, uh, you had talked about where Google's gathering information from. You talked about clarity was one of the words that you'd use. Can you talk a little bit about that to help us understand what's happening here? In terms of how those answers are being generated and what Google is considering when it is generating those answers?

Well, and the best way to explain is if we'll just use food bloggers as an example. For food bloggers, Google is trying to understand who you are, who the individual blogger is, what their site is about, what cuisines, topics that food blogger specifically specializes in, whether the recipes that they're being returned in the search results are tested. How these posts that they're returning relate to each other. That's where we get these fan-out queries. If someone's typing in Salisbury steak, it's very common for it also to pull out related dishes that might be best served with Salisbury steak. Now, with regards to Gemini, when you go full on into AI mode, and then the most important question is why does that person's version, that content creator, that, that author, that recipe writer, that blogger, why is their version enough to be referenced.

Hmm.

And so Google is basically pulling all of that information. It's no longer where, you know, people can't, you know, the days of you just being able to publish a recipe and say, okay, you know, I think I got the best recipe out there and I'm going to publish this recipe and it's going to rank. The odds are it's not going to rank because the world doesn't need another Salisbury recipe. So recipe as an example, there's just a lot more that go into the landscape now for the average blogger. And I think that's why they're struggling. A lot of people are thinking, okay, well, I need to put together this post with what I've learned previously. And what they've learned previously is not necessarily how Google is returning the results they're returning at this point.

Yeah. And what I hear you saying is like Google, as well as some of these other platforms, specifically speaking about Google, is getting better at understanding not just a piece of content, like, okay, you could get really good at like SEO optimizing a single post, right? You could be the best in the world in that. But if you don't have an ecosystem of content and authority and maybe social media and maybe email activity around the domain, if you don't have that ecosystem built around it, then you are going to really struggle. Like if somebody just started today and the only thing they did was posted perfectly optimized SEO content on a blog, that would be difficult because they don't have the ecosystem around them. Is that what a little bit of what you're alluding to and where kind of Google's going with how they make decisions around what to surface?

No, that's very true. I mean, there is a, there are tons of courses out there that will quote, teach you how to write a recipe post. Unfortunately, none of them are very good. The problem with that is that you're going to get these bloggers who'll come out, okay, I've got these 50, 100, 150 recipes. I'm going to start putting these recipes together. And it's like they're yelling into an empty room initially. We've already talked initially about the fact that previously about the fact that we don't need more recipes. We are literally at a, you know, a recipe incursion point now where we— there are enough recipes to go around. There has never been more food bloggers in the history of the world than there is right now. That is good and bad. That means that it's incredibly competitive. That also means that there's less room for new bloggers to come into the fray. Someone could use a piece of software, someone could use a template, and they have all these recipes and they put them on there. But it's not— that is not enough. The on-page signals still exist. But Google is very clear when they're talking about what do you need to do to rank with Google's AI. They literally list in their documentation It's crawlability, it's internal links, it's page experience, it's textual content, it's images and video. It's making sure that you have structured data matching visible text. It's all of these continual best practices a lot of bloggers struggle with out of the gate. Someone could come in and start a brand new site and they might not know that their site is just horribly incorrectly set up. Maybe they haven't used the correct schema. Maybe their internal links are completely nonexistent. Maybe they haven't optimized and fully passed Core Web Vitals. Maybe the site itself is not set up in a way to make it as algorithmically attractive as possible. That's just the on-site stuff. But as you mentioned, the bloggers that do the best are the ones that are looking off-site, the ones that are reinforcing their own expertise. All I do is audit food blogs 24/7, 365 days a year. And the vast— one of the biggest issues I get with bloggers, whether it's the new bloggers, established bloggers, or even the bigger bloggers, is that they don't realize that the days of just sitting behind a desk and publishing a recipe is over. You cannot do that and be successful. You have to literally be your biggest cheerleader. I show them how to use whatever LLM of choice they have, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever, to go out and push their authority, you know, virtually, you know, go find— here's a— here's how you can use ChatGPT to find local festivals in a contact list for all of the print, radio, and TV stations in your area. These, these are areas that you need to do to push your authority, because if you do not have that authority, it's very hard for Google or any AI in general to take you as a serious creator.

Yeah, it's one of the things that I think was really appealing about the world of food blogging, uh, and having a blog, whether it be food or fashion or whatever it might be, is that For a certain individual, it was really appealing, this idea that you could be at your computer, you could create a recipe, you could do keyword research and like you could rank and earn an income from that. And you know, what we're seeing, and same thing that you're seeing, is there's this shift, an industry shift. And with that, there's a shift around what skills are rewarded the most. Previously, you might have been rewarded if you had The ability to create a system and a process around keyword research and ranking a blog post and doing more keyword research and ranking that, you know, now what we're seeing is like, hey, if you are kind of a creator forward, um, you have a strong following on different platforms, you have a connected audience, you have people who respond to the content that you're creating. And then, and we're seeing a decent amount of this downstream, You are creating a site, ensuring that has best practices like you talked about built around it. Then what you have is you have this following of an engaged audience and you a lot of times naturally are a marketer. You create an Instagram reel, you create, you know, shorts, you are publishing emails, you're maybe doing a live event, you're doing something on TV. The downstream effects of that are that as, As long as you also have a site and that site is optimized, you're going to be able to capture some of the value there. But like you said, it doesn't exist in the same way that it did 5, 10 years ago where you're able to just play this game of like create and rank. It's like you have to create, you have to market, you have to connect, uh, you have to be seen. And then, uh, if you do those things and you have a well-structured, um, highly optimized site, you will also then be able to catch some of the benefit there. But what are the things that you're seeing that are most impactful? You mentioned this great example of like, hey, use Claude or ChatFBP to come up with a list of 10 different, you know, local opportunities. Local opportunities. And they're dying to have people on, they love having those.

They really are. The biggest thing is these local, the local affiliates, whether it's NBC, CBS, or ABC, the Fox affiliates especially, They are dying for local community interest content. And I just say, here, look, I'm going to show you. I go into ChatFBP and I show you the prompt. And I said, okay, here's where you are and we're going to bring up this. Here's a list of all the local prime radio and TV opportunities in your area. Here is the public available list of the people that we would send an email to, to introduce yourself. And you're basically just going to say, hey, I am a food and con— I'm a food blogger. I'm a content creator. Here is my site. I would love to come in and do a cooking demo or provide some content to assist you in the morning or wherever you feel is appropriate. And they— trust me, that you'd be surprised at how successful that is. Yeah, it is incredibly. But a lot of bloggers struggle with this. I'm— I literally have two sets of, you know, basically, basically two communities of bloggers these days. I'm finding with a growing minority, so to speak, of my audits, you've got audience number one that is a successful blogger and they've been a successful blogger for a while. They know that they need to update their, their practices. They know that they haven't spent as much time on social media and being the public face of their site, and they're totally open to doing that, and that's fine. And you've got this other group where they are shy. They, as you said, they, they were comfortable sitting behind the desk for years and just publishing recipes, not— weren't very active on social media, had slight— had built a relatively strong email list, but that's all. And they just cannot bring themselves to market their site. They, they just— I can't do it, Casey. I'm just— I can't do it. I am not the kind of person who goes to a farmer's market. I am not the kind of person that you're ever going to see on TV in the morning. I, I cannot do that. And I say that's totally fine. This is, you know, we have them advance in other directions, but they also accept that they are not going to be as successful as these bloggers who are more social, as these bloggers who are able to go out and say, hey, you know, here's me with this doing video and, and here's why my Salisbury steak is better than the million of others. And here are some tips that I want you to understand. And, you know, they, they're very personal. There are just some people out there who are not at that level, and that's totally fine. I don't fault them for it, but they always come to me and this is, can I be successful without doing this? I'm like, you can be successful to an extent.

Yeah, it's, it's—

I'm not gonna lie to you, you are not going to be— I can't take you from 20,000 sessions a month to 2 million sessions a month if you're shy or if you can't get behind a camera or if you're not gonna go out and pound the pavement and, and get interviews and brand mentions and become the number one person in the United States with your name.

That's the goal.

I mean, whenever we talk to bloggers on the call, one of the things I look is I, first thing I'm doing is I typing their name into Google. Are they visibly on the front page? You know, sometimes it is impossible to be number one for your name. I am the number one Casey Markee in the world because I have gone out and killed every other Casey Markee.

Strategic.

Yeah. On the globe. It took me a couple years. That's fine.

It's another session.

You cannot do that.

Yeah.

Some people share their name with someone famous, and so they're always— that the top is always going to be dominated by a knowledge graph that they can't compete with. That is not the case with everyone. I just had an audit with an Australian blogger who shares her name with a local personality. And so what we did is we used her full name with her middle name so that she could get a knowledge graph, a knowledge panel. And that is something that bloggers have to start thinking of because you get a knowledge panel, your traffic goes up 20% immediately.

Can you talk about that, what a knowledge panel is and then what creators can do to help get a knowledge panel?

Sure.

So, 'cause it, I think it relates closely to all of this.

Right. If you go into Google and type in Casey Markee, sometimes it's, I get this full knowledge panel, takes up the entire top of the page. Sometimes it's only half of the page. It's really strange. It's funny. Sometimes I'll look at it and put Casey Markee in parentheses and it comes up with this full knowledge panel where I dominate everything. The knowledge panel is basically you being number one for your name. You get position zero mastery. You basically are, you get links to your interviews, you get links to your YouTube podcast or local podcasts or anything. And it's basically, it's called the Squeaky Wheel Syndrome. It's those bloggers who have gone out and really focused on claiming their brand. Can generate a knowledge graph. Now, their brand being their name, their brand being their name, and their name being tied to their site in many cases.

Yeah.

Now, in these cases, it's a lot easier for the average food blogger to get a knowledge graph if they have two things: a cookbook. Sure. And a large social following, because the cookbook tends to come with an ISBN number, and the ISBN number is something that we can apply directly to the Google Knowledge Graph. By means of structured data. So it's relatively easy to add you as a known wiki point on the knowledge graph when you have things like an ISBN number or when you have a lot of known, basically public PR mentions. I have a significant amount of PR mentions. I do not have a cookbook. Yeah, I do not have a book. I have podcast interviews, speaking at conferences, and those for the many years, those reinforce the entity disambiguation of my name. Google knows clearly who Casey Markee is. So when I talk to— when I have a blogging audit and I— one of the things I'll bring up is, you know, hey, do you have a cookbook? And they're like, yeah, yeah, I have a cookbook, but I haven't really done anything with it. Or I had a cookbook in 2011 and I look and they don't have a knowledge graph. That's actually very exciting because they can get a knowledge graph even if they have a cookbook or, you know, these, these press release mentions are older. They just didn't realize there are specific steps to take.

Sure.

To apply those, uh, that information onto a graph. We call it entity disambiguation. The goal, of course, is to make it as easy as possible for Google to understand you as a person and the various entities that go into your individual content, including your recipes.

Yeah, it's interesting. Lindsay doesn't have a knowledge graph. Like, if you search for her name, has a strong social following, but there's also doesn't have a cookbook, but there's also another Lindsay Ostrom who's like a craft blogger. Right. Um, and so it's one of the, we haven't like worked super hard on it, but just recently, especially as Google has started to release some of their creator profile stuff, we've come back around to it and we're like, hey, I wonder if—

there's no reason she shouldn't have it.

Yeah. What would your advice be for us if we're like trying to get after getting a knowledge graph for Lindsay?

Uh, well, the first thing I would do is I would try to take, I would find those, she, and she doesn't have a cook— she has a cookbook, doesn't she?

No cookbook.

No cookbook. Okay. You know what?

You can write a cookbook.

You don't even have to set up an ebook.

You can set up—

you don't have to set up a cookbook.

Yeah.

You can set up anything through Google Books. The goal is to get an ISBN number. Once you have the ISBN number, we can get you on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes Noble, all of those.

Yep.

And once you have that, that is a piece of very important piece of Wikidata information. And then it's just a matter of applying that to the knowledge graph. There are various ways to submit that information. So that we can start creating an entity and fill that entity out.

Yeah, it's one of the big, you know, oftentimes you hear people talk about how a cookbook is beneficial just beyond the revenue from the cookbook itself.

Well, let's talk about that because I mean, I think you would agree. I mean, I, in my experience, most people do not make a lot of money off their first cookbook. As a matter of fact, I tell bloggers, you're not buying the cookbook, you're not doing a cookbook because you're going to make any money off of it. Far be it. No, you're, you're doing the cookbook because it is a way for you to generate that ISBN number.

Yeah.

Have something that in the hands of someone who's practiced, fill out all this information. I mean, a good example is Louis Ghaffari with Urban Farm and Kitchen has a fantastic knowledge panel. If you type in Louis Ghaffari, if you type in Urban Farm and Kitchen, he comes up. He did not have any of that until he published his cookbook.

Sure.

A couple of years ago. And then he was able to start going out there and putting all of these farm-to-table and other mentions together. And of course, you know, it helps that there's not a lot of Louis Ghaffaris there, but there are other Louis Ghaffaris. There's a— he's competing against a journalist, an architect, and several others, and he is the one that has the knowledge panel. So all of that is possible. It's just a matter of being able to put all those entities together in a framework that's easy for Google specifically to pick up.

And the benefit of that, you talked about a search lift that comes from it. What, where does that search lift come from if you have a knowledge panel?

Well, the knowledge graph, Google has its own knowledge graph.

Yeah.

The knowledge graph has been around since 2007. Uh, Google's knowledge graph is used to be based on two sources, which is hilarious, the Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. Well, the CIA World Factbook was sunset earlier this year. It no longer exists. So Wikipedia is still kind of the, the largest external third-party way to apply entities and to kind of simulate, so to speak, what our placement on the Google Knowledge Graph would look like. So when someone is trying to say practice entity disambiguation, every time someone writes a recipe, there are various entities on the page. How can we get Google to find and process those entities? As easily as possible? Well, there's fantastic tools out there. One, one of them is called NLinks. That's NLinks.net. NLinks has their own way to inject actual structured data in a way to make it easy for Google to crawl a page and pull out the entities. I always explain it to bloggers when we're talking during our audits. Think of Google as a rat. Entities are little pieces of cheese. And your site is a maze. Your goal is to use schema to lead the rat that is Google through the maze that is your site to find these entities. And you do that by using structured data.

Like a recipe is the most obvious example. It's like, here's the recipe, Google.

Yeah, exactly.

And so, but there's lots of other versions of that that exist.

Various, like for example, Yoast has built-in schema called knowsabout. You can actually go in and optimize your user account with, with your awards and your experience and, and topics. And if you do that correctly, a lot of people don't even realize that this is built into Yoast Premium. You can go in and when someone takes one of your recipes and puts them into the Rich Snippets Tester at Google, you'll see all the recipe schema, but you'll also see that this person is a recipe developer or a certified dietitian. There'll be literally fields that you can control there to make it—

to give Google context as to who you are. Does that show up within search results, or it's more like information that Google potentially takes into it?

It shows up in the rich results tool, but it won't show up as a forward-facing rich snippet, so to speak. But it's data. Anything we could do— and that's what becomes more important now, because you've heard me say for years we want to optimize for toddlers and drunk adults. Well, now we're optimizing for toddlers, drunk adults, and LLMs. Sure. And LLMs are not smart. And that's why things like this structured data, whether it's web page schema, recipe schema, knowsabout schema, all of these things go in together to help with this entity disambiguation, to make it easier for Google to understand not keywords but entities.

Yeah.

And that's really what bloggers are struggling with is they're— the days of, you know, okay, here's a keyword that I'm going after and I know that I need to put the keyword in this heading and this heading and in the meta description and things like that. We— that's just outdated advice. We— that's not going to help you these days. It's very rare that you can rank at the top of Google by following an old keyword-first optimization strategy.

Yeah, it, it feels like generally speaking, the shift, if I were to put it in a phrase, and let me know if this resonates, is that there was a season where like your content was the product. You create a blog post, it might matter if it's you that did it, it might not matter. Like if you can figure out how to get it to rank, That is the product. I think continually the product is the person. It is your following, your expertise from you. You are creating these, in our case it's recipes, but you're creating this content, but it's really more about you and, you know, brand following engagement and less about this individual post that will matter moving forward. These, the, the knowledge panel that displays is an example of that. Um, the other thing that Google recently released is, I don't know what it's called, but like these creator profiles, um, which feels like adjacent to this a little bit. Can you talk about what those are and if that's something that we should be filling out?

Well, the creator profiles you're talking about, the ones that are only available if you have a very specific number of social media profiles. I think it's like 100,000 people on Twitter, 100,000 people on X, and 200,000 on TikTok or something like that. I think you have to have a—

Yeah, there's certain numbers that you have to hit in order to apply for these creator profiles. Where then you can like follow these creators on Google. But we just recently did this for Pinch of Yum and essentially it compiles all of our social content in one profile.

Right.

I don't know, I don't have a clear understanding right now of the benefit of it.

Well, that's the, that's the issue. There is really no noticeable benefit other than it's a, it's an ego trip. The fact that you qualified for a creator profile, but they're not sending any traffic. As a matter of fact, the one thing that is actually helping bloggers is being voted as a preferred source. The Google.

Yeah, that was going to be the next question I was going to ask. We were actually just talking about this as a team this morning.

That's taken off. I'm very— I was literally one of the first people to push that last year. It's been over a year now.

Yeah, I remember having a conversation about it.

We had, we had it on, we put it on Leeds Culinaria and David's site has been an incredibly early benefactor of that. He, he was literally one of the first 3 sites that we put that on and put it on every page. And again, there's a lot of things he's done that others haven't done or that he's done that have been more successful. But he has, quote, never had more traffic than he's had at any point in his career than right now. And a lot of that is because he has been pushing these signals out that Google wants to see.

So one of those signals that being the, being, being the preferred source, can you talk about what, like what's happening behind the scenes with that essentially? And people could just Google and find this contest. Sure. Like people are saying, I prefer this site and you can just use a link that you send to people via email or include in a post. Yeah.

You have the button and then someone clicks on the button and then they have to go in and specifically bookmark that site on their list of internal preferred links in their Google account. Basically the whole point of this initially was discover feed optimization, but then Google came out and said that is an actual ranking factor. It is something that they take into account.

Oh, interesting.

Account. That's a— it's a worldwide ranking factor now, which is very interesting.

So they— it now factors into a search algorithm as to what content they show, right? Yeah.

So if you are able to generate enough of these, you know, preferred saves, who knows what it is. I mean, it's like Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals is a ranking factor, but nobody knows. Yeah, so low that it's not really anything more than a tiebreaker, but every little bit helps. And so this preferred sources Very easy to implement. It's built into the Feast themes. It's built into the HubBub plugin. Shareaholic now has introduced it. It's very easy to implement, or you can just download the code yourself and make your own custom button. But yeah, it should be on most every page for every food blogger operating out there. It's very easy to implement.

And, and the places that I would immediately think of having it would be within a post itself where you'd have some call to action, add Pinch of Yum as a preferred source. And then email, you're sending it out as an email. Is it just people who have a Gmail account then? Like, do they have to be— do you know if they have to be signed into a Google account?

But no, as far as I know, no, it's applied to every site generates the button once they get to a preferred level of traffic. So for example, we had an audit with a client the other day and she was only doing about 5,000 or less searches a month, very relatively new site, less than a year and a half old. She did not have a Google preferred option yet.

Oh, like it, you couldn't even do it if you wanted to.

Nope. Because Google didn't provide the option to enable that for her site yet. So there is clearly a minimum required to generate it. You can't just create a new site and in a couple months have this preferred button profile. It's set up for you behind the scenes.

Yeah. Do you know then, can you see like how many people have, are there any analytics around preferred sites or is it like? You just are hoping that people are doing it.

The only analytics, the only way to attract it would be to put on button tracking, which is what David did.

Sure. So you can see in Google Analytics how many clicks. Yeah. Yeah.

He's getting dozens of people a day using it. So that's why he realized, yeah, I might as well keep it.

Yeah.

You could also use Clarity. I mean, Clarity, you could track buttons just like you would track how many people are clicking on an FAQ.

Yep. You're Clarity, like Microsoft Clarity.

Microsoft Clarity.

Yep.

You could use that. Yep. Um, all of the, anything you could do to track that. I'm, I'm a big believer in that. There's no reason you shouldn't me tracking. It's just like the AI buttons. Yeah, people always say, oh my gosh, I'm not getting any traffic from those. I'm like, yeah, you are, because I can look right in your Search Console and see that there's, there's traffic. Or if you're using HubBub, HubBub actually has enabled tracking anyway, and it's right on your post screen. You can see if you've got any clicks on those.

Um, but you, you were saying with the AI button, so to be clear for people who aren't familiar, the AI button is something that exists on your site. You click on it, and it pre-populates a prompt into ChatGPT or Claude or whatever AI tool you use. Yeah.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude.

With kind of like a prompt to like, remember information about me or about this site. And what you're saying is you can, number one, see how many people click on that. There's integrations that you can have with a tool like Google Analytics where you can track if you have the right code, or you mentioned some of the others that you could track. And then you're also able to see now within Google Search Console, the LLM impressions. What, what would it be technically?

Yeah.

Which is interesting. So that's rolling out slowly, but it is rolling out. I actually ran across another profile this morning and there are 1,000 of LLM impressions, but it doesn't give me any click data. So it's basically useless.

Yeah. It's in Google Search Console. Not everybody will have this. It's slowly rolling out.

This generative AI, it's called generative impressions.

Like how often are you showing up when there's a generative answer, which is like, exactly. In our world, it doesn't matter because 99% of people are generating revenue through traffic and impressions. It probably does matter if you're a brand and you're a shoe brand, uh, you know, or a food brand where you're selling granola, uh, cuz then it does matter if you're showing up because just an impression is valuable, but more so in our world, you know, it's, it's traffic. So, yep. Um, so some really important things for us to be thinking about Um, you know, as the search landscape changes, as we continue to think about, hey, are we showing up in AI overviews or across multiple sites? I'd be curious if you have thoughts on like, do you feel like the, uh, goal is still traffic? Like, or are there ways that you are seeing other people get creative, um, with their site, with, you know, search as we move to a more like impression-based world. Um, cause I think that's one of the bigger shifts that is happening is like, man, if people are getting an answer from an AI overview, um, but you are a part of that answer, that's maybe good. And you might have a link that's referenced within it. And we're seeing that a little bit more now where links are starting to be included in AI overviews, but you still don't get the traffic the same amount. Um, I'd, you know, it's a little bit of like a prediction question. Like as you look out a year, 2, 3 years, where do you see things going and what do you think bloggers need to be thinking about in order to like start the process of like moving in the right direction if they haven't made any big changes yet?

Well, I, and that's interesting because I, there are a significant amount of bloggers who are still growing traffic. I, again, I've been very fortunate. I mean, the average traffic increase from one of my articles is about, is still around 25, 26% and and we can get anywhere from 17% to 23% increases in just RPMs. But a lot of that isn't necessarily because there's more traffic now. There's actually less traffic. It's just that bloggers routinely don't know how to do SEO in this new age. And so when we go in and we make changes on their site, whether it's on the technical side or on the content side, we're making their site incredibly more algorithmically attractive to both Gemini and LLMs in general than previously. And they're getting the results of that. For most bloggers, the big theme in 2026 and beyond is clarity. Clarity really has to be something that, that the average blogger embraces, that, you know, AI summaries equal clarity, helpful content is clarity, UX signals are clarity. That's what Google and AI systems reward. They're, they're rewarding direct answers, clear intent matching, and clean structure. And that's why, respectfully, If you think you can do that on your own, you're probably not going to be successful because there is a right and a wrong way to do that. And that's again why I consider my audits so incredibly successful because that's what I'm training on. We're showing how AI functions and how AI views your site. So I'll be able to go in and use tracking to see, okay, well, this is what is sticky, or we'll send off one of your recipes to a focus group and the focus group will say, well, I don't know why she has 5 photos of the finished dish, or gosh, took me 1,500 words to get down to the information I need, or whatever. That's direct feedback that I can give the content creators so that we can change their template and at least help them on the on-site side.

Mm-hmm. Like it's optimizing. That's a great example of optimizing for people.

It's great. I mean, that's the thing is that you, and I love Feast. I think Skylar has done a fantastic job with Feast. But if you are on the call and you're using the Feast template to optimize your plot, your, your posts, you are not going to build traffic because you have horribly underoptimized your posts and you've made your recipes appear like 6,000 other sites. You are not going to rank competitively. An LLM requires the keyword on the page. It's common sense. So if you've been told, hey, I'm not going to put any of my, any keywords, any focus keywords in headings, you are literally shooting yourself in the foot. It is 100% okay to have, you know, maybe you have a recipe overview with a keyword. Maybe you have a how-to or step-by-step section where it literally says how to make Salisbury steak. Maybe you have a section further down that says expert tips to make this Salisbury steak. There is nothing wrong with that. Anyone who tells you that's over-optimization, I've got a bridge to sell you in the Arizona desert.

Hmm.

Okay. Because it's not remotely the case. And the bloggers who are understanding and unwinding some of that advice 'cause as you can imagine, I get a lot of feast sites coming to me and I'm like, who told you to do this? Like, well, you know, it's in this documentation here. Well, again, no one, Google and LLMs are crawling your site. They have to know what the recipe is about. You can't just have an H1 and an H2 on your page with keyword and expect that you're gonna compete against these other sites that dominate page 1 of Google and do not remotely use this template.

True. And your point—

Little things like that. Yeah. You kind of have to unwind.

Your point with clarity is that you need to be as a, if you're structuring a blog post, you're publishing, you know, putting together a recipe post, you need to be ultra clear in what that is about because an LLM will come and they'll read it, you know, a bot will come and it will try to understand what it's about. You do that through the actual content that you're creating as well as structured data.

Nice.

But then my guess is the other piece that you need to get really clear with is like who you are, as a creator, like, you know, Urban Farm and Kitchen is a great example where it's like, it is clear how he, what he is creating content about. And so there's the macro level clarity as well.

What are called real testing notes, real testing notes, or clear firsthand expertise. I am shocked at how many times I'll have an audit on a blog and they don't have any of that. Sure. You've made this recipe. Hopefully you've made this recipe dozens, if not hundreds of times. Why does that expertise not come through when I'm reading this recipe post?

Like the notes and the insights and—

and this is where I think the recipe summaries that I've been pushing relentlessly have come into play and why I will literally die on that hill. The bloggers who have the recipe summaries at the top, the bloggers who are literally spoon-feeding their audience and the LLMs here are the main points of view. This is why this recipe works. This is, this is what I'm doing to differentiate myself. The bloggers who are doing that are the ones that continually send me emails saying, oh my gosh, Casey, my traffic has never been this high in June. It's never been this high in July or May. That is allowing you to differentiate yourself. LLMs are stupid, but we also know that LLMs prioritize the first 300 to 500 words on that page.

Hmm.

If I'm at the top and you have a teaser text and then I have to navigate through 4 paragraphs of the history of why you made this recipe, think of all the information that you did not provide there earlier that would allow both the user and the LM to make an informed decision on whether your recipe is of highest mise en abyme to be considered for future.

Yeah. And what you're talking about, it's like a callout box at the top that gives an overview of like, here's the specifics of It's kind of like what you can expect here. It's, I think maybe importantly, it's different than kind of like a table of contents.

That's what you need to know. It's, yeah, it's definitely not a table of contents.

Yeah.

Table of contents could still work. I mean, the, the reason that table of contents were a big deal initially was because Google gave you jump links. You would go into the search results and you would see, okay, I'm on page 1 or 2 and right below my meta description, there is a section, there's a jump link linking to ingredients. There's a jump link linking to step-by-steps. Here's a jump link linking to expert tips. Those exist, but they have been incredibly deprecated. The, the amount of those rich snippets that exist now, and they're literally nonexistent in AI mode. They don't exist. So again, if you can use a table of contents as a way to be helpful, especially if you've got at least 5+ headings, H2s on a page, our research clearly shows that people still use them, but understand that the benefit of those, just like with FAQs, you know, there's no real rich snippets for those anymore, but we still use FAQs because they're easy for us to qualify. But the people also ask accordions.

Mm-hmm.

Just understand that what worked 3 years ago isn't nearly as effective as what works now.

Yeah. So if you had a table of contents before, you might see that replicated within search results. It's another link that could be clicked. What you're saying is like, hey, it still might show up now. Probably not gonna show up a ton.

Not nearly as much as it did before.

Yeah. Uh, especially not in AI mode. Um, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. It might still be helpful. It might still be beneficial for a user. And that's what a lot of this comes back to is finding that balance between, you know, you talk about structured data, schema markup, the flow of a post, some of these like tactical things that are important to do. But then there's also like user testing where you have somebody look at a piece of content as a person, not as a bot, not as an LLM, and say, what is it like for you to use this? And if they're like, hey, this is a bad user experience, that also should go into considerations that you have as a content creator. And that's what we talk about a lot, which is like the art and the science of this. It's both of those things.

It really is because, you know, sometimes we rely on advice from our ad companies. Ad companies, again, will provide some advice and some of the advice will be helpful. Some of the advice will not be helpful. I remember that at a conference a year ago, an ad company who shall not be named told everyone in the audience, you should stop grouping their blocks.

So stop what?

Audience grouping their blocks.

Oh, sure. Yeah.

Okay. And people group their blocks because it was known to improve readability. It was also known to better control where ads pop in. If you have a lot of ads on your site and you have 4 or 5 paragraphs in a row, you might have an ad popping in every 2 paragraphs, which is gonna lower your readability and cause an exit very quickly.

Meaning that like you'd have more, uh, from an ad ops perspective, it's like there's more opportunities for an ad to show up.

Right.

From a readability perspective, the more ads that are showing up, more opportunities for, for the user to exit the page. Yeah.

That it becomes too many ads and so we, uh, started recommending grouping blocks and it was very successful because one of the worst things that you can have is to go to a page there is a teaser paragraph and then right below that an ad pops in before you even see the featured image.

Sure.

That's a terrible experience for users. No one has any data that says it's not.

Mm-hmm.

Doesn't exist. So all you did was you grouped the teaser text with that featured image so that the user can actually invest in the post and scroll down before they're actually confronted with an ad.

Yeah. It's one of the great things—

He asked within the app.

Oh, go ahead.

He said, hey, remove all of these. Remove all of this group. And so every blogger in that conference literally went in and removed all of their ad groupings. And you know what happened? Their exit rate went through the roof.

UI/UX was impacted.

UX went to the toilet. And so I'd have this audit and they would say, why did you do this? I mean, here, here's your RPM. It did not improve. Here's your time on site. It went down 20%. What happened? Well, I was told to remove all my block grouping. Blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, I don't understand why people give you these recommendations when there's literally no data there to support it.

Yeah. It's one of the things that we are, uh, speaking personally for Pinch of Beyond, constantly trying to, and I'm sure everybody else, um, figure out is like, what is that balance? And I think we, you know, when we look at our ad density personally, it's like we're on the lower end traditionally.

Um, and it, but it's hard when you can play the numbers game and say like, You know, I mean, hey, I'm only at 18%, but if I get to 25% during the holidays, I'm going to make an extra $4,000, $4,500 a month.

Yes. And acknowledging just as a creator-owned business for anybody listening, that's hard, but also encouraging you to sit with it and say like, and you know, the testing I think is really important. It's one of the things we constantly come back to is like, how can we run a test on this? Like, how can we let the data speak for itself as to earnings, you know, and how can we let the data speak for itself as to like engagement and if people do fall off. And so I think it's one of the great things that you talk about, which is like, okay, let's just look at the data. Like you can hear stuff all different places, but like as much as possible, how do you go back to the data?

You've used SEO testing on your site for years. I've used seotesting.com. I've used focus groups. I've used Hotjar. Yep. When I, when I, and I'll just pull out my phone during an audit and I'll say, look, I want you to pull out your phone. And I'm, I'm like visually showing them, and as we scroll down, they can't see their content because it's completely covered with pop-out ads. Maybe they have SMO buttons on their mobile that they totally forgot about. Those are covering the left-hand side of the screen. As we scroll down, maybe they have a full over, a full, uh, popover ad that is becoming more and more popular. Hate those. Those interstitials should be burned at the stake, but those are the kind of things that users They are putting faith in their ad companies and their ad company is destroying that faith in the purchase of a dollar.

Yeah. One of the things—

really have to— you really have to be on top of that. As I tell bloggers all the time, just, just pull out your phones.

Yep.

Have a family member look at your site.

Get—

have them give an honest review of how easy or uneasy it was to navigate the page.

The user experience piece for sure, I think is important. And I encourage anybody who is working with the ad company. I don't know if this is at certain levels or if, you know, we work with Raptive and we're able to do this. I don't know if Mediavine also does this or any of the other ad companies, but just to see like, hey, I'm interested in doing this, or maybe there's a recommendation saying like, can we run a test on it just to see like, what does that data look like? We're coming to the end here, Casey. We could talk for 3 hours here because there's an endless amount of content that we can cover within the world of search. Obviously have you on again for 7 or 8, whatever it will be. But if people are interested in working with you for an audit, can you talk about what that process would be like and how they can reach out?

Well, you can always reach me. I'm on Food Blogger Pro forums. You can always private message me there. You can also drop me an email at Casey@mediawise.com. That's M-E-D-I-A-W-wise and yellow S-E dot com. My website is mediawise.com. There's plenty of information on there. I'm currently booking for mid to late July, uh, right now. My goal is always to try to provide as many free resources as possible. That's why we try to have this discussion at least once a year, because everything is so dynamic. I suspect, unfortunately, that AI mode will probably go live next year.

Can you talk about when you say go live, that means like it'll become the default? Because it is live right now, but it will become the default. Yeah.

Yeah. So AI mode possibly will go live probably the second quarter of 2026 would be my guess. But hey, ask my wife, I'm wrong all the time.

Second quarter of 2027. 2027. Okay.

Uh, and if AI mode goes live, it will be jarring. Uh, so a lot of bloggers might wake up with a 20% drop in traffic and wondering what's going on. Because AI mode again is funneling more of that traffic to stay on Google. There are no carousels. And all of that will be gone. So we'll, we'll see how it goes. I, uh, am fortunate to, um, be going to a couple conferences this summer where we will be speaking directly with Google, and I'm interested to see what they are going to say about 2027. They tend to keep a lot of this stuff close to the vest. Uh, but I, there is a lot of traffic that can be had from Google, but you— if you're using, you know, an SEO piece of software, it is not going to find the information you need to get your site to the level that Google is like, oh my gosh, this site is so algorithmically perfect, I have no choice but to send it to traffic, send it traffic. And that's where professionals would always help. So hopefully you've gotten some takeaways from this. Great. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks for coming on. If you continue to do this for decades longer, You know, we'll continue to have conversations with you about search, um, because, you know, I'm waiting.

I, I, as you, we were talking earlier, we really, I relocated to Colorado.

Yeah.

Uh, recently, and, uh, I am waiting to become a kept man. I'm waiting for my wife to fully support me. She is killing it. She's, uh, yeah, joining a new nationwide law firm recently, and, uh, nice. He's traveling quite a bit, so I am—

so you have the time and energy to continue. Okay. Yeah, I see.

House husband in future.

Yeah, yeah, those are two options here looking at the future: deep in SEO or househusband. So Casey, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Björk. We'll see you again soon.

Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll be back next week with an interview with Sam Vander Weelen, an attorney and the founder of Sam Vander Weelen LLC. Burek and Sam will be discussing all of the legal stuff related to growing your business, your blog, posting content online, AI. They're going to cover it all. It's going to be a great episode, so we hope you'll tune in, and in the meantime, make it a great week.