RIP SEO: Here’s What Works Now in an AI World

Before we start, I'm going to do a quick introduction. Neil, why don't you tell them a little about yourself and I'll tell them about me and we'll get going.

I'm a digital marketer. I've been doing it for 20+ years at this point. I'm a co-founder of an ad agency called NP Digital. We do a podcast together, Eric and I, called Marketing School. And yeah.

So my name's Eric Siu and like Neil mentioned, we do the podcast together. I think we're probably over 110 million downloads now. So I've been doing it for about 8 years and I have an ad agency as well. It's called Single Grain. And that's what we primarily focus on. And we actually, what else do we have? We have a little agency owners group that we do together too called the Agency Owners Association. So let's go ahead and jump into it. I think the first thing we want to talk about here is why we think SEO as we know it is dead. So both Neil and I have a background in SEO and we think it's changing very rapidly. And Neil has a new acronym for SEO or a new definition for it.

So we look at SEO as change from search engine optimization to search everywhere optimization. Because if you look at how people search, it's no longer just a Google game. They're using ChatGPT. According to Google VP, young people use Instagram and TikTok to perform a search. So you now have to optimize for all the platforms because people no longer just search only on Google. And you know, when people think SEO is dead, We ended up doing analysis. We looked at through our sites, like through our tools like Ubersuggest, Answer the Public, we have access to a lot of data. And people are like, SEO is dead. Google released AA overviews in over 100 countries now. They're taking up all the traffic. And what we've actually seen is consistent growth in traffic to websites from Google. And according to Danny Sullivan, who's a Google search liaison, he said, Google has driven more organic traffic to websites each and every single year since inception. And we ended up validating this with our small sample size of data. I believe it was over 30,000 websites that we looked at, but websites in general are getting more SEO traffic over time. And even with the AI overviews, we actually saw a little bit more than a 1% increase in traffic. That's not a lot, but everyone said it's going to demolish SEO traffic. And when we compared a week prior and a week after, we didn't see a drop in traffic, we actually saw an increase.

Yep. And so look, search behavior's changing, right? So we've talked about this on the podcast where we believe that YouTube, at least I believe YouTube is probably the biggest opportunity for the next decade or so. And YouTube's the number 2 search engine, right? And then I look at behaviors from 20-year-olds and what do they search first? They actually search first on TikTok, right? So search behavior's changing quite a bit. But that doesn't mean that Google's dying, right? Google themselves has said they don't even know where search is, what search is going to look like in the next 5 to 10 years or so. So, you know, we're kind of taking it month by month, year by year type of situation. But I think it is a little overblown to say, oh my God, AI is going to change everything. I think long-term AI is going to shift things quite a bit, but I think it's a little overblown right now. So again, long-term, big, big, big tectonic shifts that we're going to see, right? But right now it's more or less, even in the last year, it's kind of been more or less the same thing.

Sure.

You know, I'm using Perplexity a lot more. I'm using Claude a lot more. Yes, I like computer use from Claude. There's cool things, you know, those of you out there that have used like Bolt.new or Replit, anybody here is now a pseudo-developer, right? You can basically create a front end, maybe 50 to 70%, and then send it over to developers and you can make a full-blown app, right? So a lot of things are shifting quickly, but I would say marketing as a whole, it's still mostly the same, at least right now.

Yeah, you just got to end up being patient and you'll see how things evolve over time. And a great example of this is this graph. Right here. So in 2020, we did a survey with around 5,000 people, and what we found was when we asked them, where do you go to find your answers to your questions online? I know this is only a subset of the queries that people are searching for, but back in 2020, 98% said, hey, search engines like Google. Fast forward to today, people are saying, hey, 61% of the time when I'm looking for questions for my When I'm looking for questions to my answers, I'm going to Google. 17% of the time they're looking on social media and 30% they're looking at AI chatbots like ChatGPT, 2% other. I know that adds up to more than 100%, but it's because people are using more than one platform. And this is what makes it interesting. You're starting to see the landscape shift and search is actually going to start looking more like social media. In social media, people are like, oh, Facebook's a juggernaut, they won. Well, you have Facebook, you have Instagram. Instagram didn't kill Facebook. Facebook actually makes currently more ad revenue from, or Meta makes more ad revenue from Facebook than Instagram. Snap still exists. Pinterest is out there, right? TikTok's blowing up. And what you're going to end up seeing is searches are going to be a very similar game. There's going to be many platforms, many options. People are going to use a lot of them, just like the average person uses 6.6 social networks, I believe, according to DemandSage. So that's a lot of social networks. At the same time, people use multiple platforms for search, so you have no choice but to optimize for all of them.

You know, it's actually been a while since a new big platform popped out, right? Back, you know, 10 years ago, there was Snap, there was Instagram, all these things were coming out, right? And now you have these new platforms and some of the attention is shifting over. I don't know, I'm pretty sure this is the case for you too, but when we have leads coming in, we're seeing a growing chunk of them coming in from Perplexity or ChatGPT and we're like, I'm like, I listened to one of the calls, they're like, oh yeah, when we search through ChatGPT, you're popping up for everything. How do you do that, right? And so search behavior will change over time. Search in the past historically, like you had before Google, it was Excite, right? You had Lycos, you had all these things and now it's becoming more democratized, I guess would be the word. And so that's actually a good thing, right? Because competition breeds creativity.

Even with podcasting, if you look at what Eric and I have done with our Marketing School Podcast, you know, when we go to events and Eric talks to people, a lot of people have found us through a podcast. It's a new avenue to get people in.

Shorts too.

Shorts as well, yes.

Yeah, people will walk up to, I'm pretty sure it's the same case for you, but they'll walk up to me at a conference and be like, I watch your Shorts. It's not like I watch your long-form stuff. It's not like I read your blog posts, but I come to you through this medium that I happen to consume, right? So it goes back to what Neil's new acronym is, is it's Search Everywhere Optimization, right? And I think that's going to catch on more and more. So let's move on to the next piece. And this is something I've been big on, and I'm sure all of you are seeing this right now, but I believe that community is the new SEO, and there's a reason for that. The reason for that is this, because there's a proliferation of AI content that's been hitting the web, Google's like, oh crap, what do we do about that now, right? And so when you look at this graph, everything that's going up and to the right, you have HubSpot's in here. This is HubSpot's community, Zapier's community, Shopify's community. That's all moving up and to the right. That's all user-generated content. And when you think about the search engine results now, what do you see more of? You see Reddit, you see Quora, you see a lot more user-generated content because that's content that is more trustworthy than all the AI-generated content that you're seeing being put out there, right? And Sam Altman of OpenAI fame has said that he believes that not even just online communities, but in-person communities are going to be worth way more in the next 5 to 10 years. And this, guys, what we have over here, this is an in-person community, right? We're getting to shake hands with each other. We're getting to break bread with each other. It's the in-person stuff that really, that's what carries over into big collaborations and helping each other grow at the end of the day, right? Now, that being said, I use a company called Skool, S-K-O-O-L. There's actually another one called Circle.so. These are all community platforms you can use. And when you look at their SEO traffic, it's all moving up and to the right, right? So they're getting more SEO traffic. But the beauty of community too is that it's a retention mechanism. It gets people, you might get a customer in, but it gets people to stay, right? People stay for the community. People stay for the— this conference now is bigger than one of the biggest marketing conferences in the United States, right? It's because you guys love community and that's what it is at the end of the day. Have you ever wanted to target a bunch of accounts on LinkedIn at once and personalize them? Well, previously you couldn't do this. Let's say you wanted to target 500 enterprise companies and you wanted to hyper-personalize those ads. You can do that now. And LinkedIn has confirmed with us that nobody else can do this right now. Only we can do it. The product is called Karrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T and it's Karrot account-based marketing. So if you go to karrot.com, carrot.ai. You can go learn more about it and we'll see you on the other side.

One thing that you need to keep in mind is whether you're in Germany or any other part of Europe or any part of the world, people have tons of buying options. What community does is build brand loyalty. If you look at your purchasing decisions, a lot of the times you're buying from brands that you're already familiar with. If you build a community, you'll have stronger brand loyalty because what's happening in marketing is A lot of companies are looking very similar to each other, but the ones that have a community, it creates a little bit of a differentiation, which could be enough to get a customer to come to you versus your competition.

All right, so this next slide over here is just an example. So this is a community that Neil and I have. It's called the Agency Owners Association, and this is where we just go in and help agency owners grow, right? But this is an example. If you go to skool.com, skool.com, you'll see a lot of these communities. And in some cases, a lot of them are free, some of them are paid. You can see how much money they're making. But it's an interesting way to see how I think the upside that everybody has here, if you go start a community right now, is that I believe that community managers are very underpriced when it comes to like a salary standpoint. So, you know, I think if you can get these people now, they're amazing. They're going to help keep your customers, they're going to help grow your customer base at the end of the day. This is just one of those examples.

Yeah. So, but if you're going to create a community, you need to make sure that you guys are really involved. It's not enough to say, hey, we're going to have an online community and let our group, our members talk to each other. That's fine. But if you're not really participating, the community's not going to grow the way that you're expecting. People are joining your community, your brand, your company's brand. Someone from the organization, whether it's you or someone else, needs to be involved in the community. If you're not on a daily basis, it doesn't work the same.

All right, so this next section over here, we're going to talk about moving beyond AI buzzwords because look, ChatGPT, you know, it's not really the advent of AI, but that's really what started the big push, right? Last 2 years everyone's been talking about AI. I think the word's a little overplayed now. I think it's still very important, but when we use AI in our marketing, I think it's a little overplayed there. So let's talk about this one, Neil.

Yeah, so we did a fun experiment with 60-something websites. I think it was around 68 websites. We had 744 articles created, half through AI, half through human. The AI-written content was modified by a human as well to an extent that made it decent enough to publish online. After 5 months, you know, on a monthly basis, we're looking at the organic traffic. On average, the AI content had 5.44x less traffic than the human-written content. Now, this doesn't mean that human— AI-written content is bad or human-written content, you know, is the best content ever. You got to end up finding the balance. You know, overall, we are seeing human-written content generate more traffic because it's easier to include E-A-T, double E-A-T, experience, expertise, authority, and trust. It's harder to do that with AI content. And a lot of AI content is just regurgitated information spun up in a new way. I look at AI content a much better version than an article spinner. And instead of just thinking about AI—

I want to explain what a spinner is.

Yeah.

Yeah, go ahead.

Article spinner, back in the day when we, Eric and I, first got into marketing, you would, put in text into this tool and it would spin it up and create a new version so it wouldn't be duplicate.

It was garbage content, but it worked.

It worked. And AI is a much more advanced version than that. It's taking everything from the web previously to create an output. If you look at the content that's doing the best in today's world, it's people talking about new stuff. It's hard to do that with AI. You people want to hear stuff and read stuff that they have never seen before on the internet. And there's a lot of AI buzzwords out there and a lot of people are using this technology and it's amazing. Eric has some amazing examples of him using AI. What we're seeing with most organizations are they're using AI, but they're not adding KPIs. So they'll spend a year using AI. They're like, look at all this cool stuff we did. Did you get more traffic? No. Did you get more leads? No. Did we get more sales? No. Did we generate more revenue? No. If you're not using this technology to help you with your main goals, what's the point?

Yep. So Neil just kind of brought it up. This is an example of one thing that we're doing at Single Grain, my agency, and these are known as agentic workflows. And the way I would explain this, to back up a second, you let me know if I'm going too quickly here, but You hear about Satya Nadella, you hear about Mark Zuckerberg talking about AI agents and how they're going to change the world, right? These are workers that are infinitely patient, that will work 24/7, that won't argue with you, that understand your strengths and your weaknesses, right? Now, the way to think about agents, and I was actually having a conversation with a guy that's leading up Microsoft agents last week, and they're very much getting into this now. And he's like, whoa, the stuff you guys are building is like, yeah, just keep doing this, right? So here's an example. If you want to build, let's say, an SEO agent, the first thing that you have to do, so an SEO worker basically, you have to think about all the jobs to be done. And I recommend that everyone Googles jobs to be done framework, just read up what that is, okay? And a jobs to be done is basically what are all the things that an SEO worker needs to do? So they need to think about technical SEO, they need to think about onsite, you know, SEO, internal linking, external linking, they need to think about all these things, right? And any job is a very thankless job. There's a lot of time and effort that needs to go into it, right? And so here's an example of an agentive workflow that we created because in SEO, what works? If you update your content, if you delete your content and you consolidate your content, that helps with traffic, right? So this is a consolidation agent over here. If you start at the very top left, you can see that this agent starts off with fetching Google Search Console data and it winds down and it kind of goes through things and it's looking for content that is similar to each other. that should be combined, right? And so you can see one of the steps over here, it says, you know, identifying vectors, right? It's identifying similar vectors, and then it's combining it, saying, hey, maybe these 3 pages need to be combined over here. But the problem also, just a little side quest here, is a lot of people run AI, they think, oh, we can just have it spin up a bunch of articles and let it go. You can't do that. You have to actually have a human in the loop. We believe that in the next 2 to 3 years, you need a human in the loop. And so what our agent here does is, It'll note all the content we should be consolidating and I'll say, hey, do you want to consolidate all these pieces? A human in a loop will check. And then what will happen afterwards is they can hit approve or they can disapprove ones, but they can do it at scale, right? This is an example of an agent at play. Do you want to add something before I move to the next one?

Yeah. And what Eric is doing when he's creating agents, in essence, he's looking at the tasks that need to be accomplished by his team To improve his main KPIs, his key performance indicators such as traffic, because he knows traffic leads to more leads or it leads to more revenue. So he looks at the workflows that his team is doing and saying, hey, can I have AI replicate this and do this 24 hours a day? So A, it's more efficient. 2, you're getting more done. 3, that should increase the results from the channels that are producing results for him.

Yeah, and so by the way, if any of you have an agency or a services business here and you want to build agents for yourself or for your clients, just go to your clients. This is the same thing we do at Single Grain. We go to our clients, hey, what are all the core processes that you have right now that are actually money generating? That's a key thing, right? Because to Neil's point, if you're not generating revenue, if you're not generating more traffic, who cares at the end of the day? And that's a problem with a lot of generative AI, right? And so here's an example of a workflow that we built that searches for internal linking opportunities on your website, because that's a very simple thing with SEO, right? So you can see it, it's kind of just working right now. And we're finding, it's trying to search, right? And it's like you can see the agent working, right? So we build a platform internally and we're just like, let's build all these marketing agents, let's just throw 'em into the platform. This is a simple example that anybody here I believe can do. And so I think it's key for everyone to think about, again, what are all the jobs to be done? Look, it's still working right now and boom, it's like we found these opportunities over here. Do you approve? Do you disapprove, right? This is how we think the future of marketing is going to look. We believe that You know, you're going to have a lot of smart talent on your team and they're going to be armed with 1,000 agents, maybe 10,000 agents, maybe even 100,000 agents or so, and they're going to be a lot more efficient, right? I think maybe a couple years ago I was a little more pessimistic about what would happen. Oh my God, all the jobs are going to be lost. Now I'm a little more optimistic. I think people will learn this stuff and I think more jobs will be created. If you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster, check out the Agency Owners Association that's hosted by my podcast co-host, Neil Patel and myself. And we have other agency owners that are doing 8 figures a year. They were doing 9 figures a year. They sold their business for hundreds of millions of dollars and they're going to share their experiences with you. There's a whole host of other benefits. And the cool thing is that there's a 7-day free trial and you should check it out now because we're going to take the prices up. So just go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more and we'll see you inside.

And when you also look at AI, are you optimizing for these platforms for revenue? You know, I had a person message me the other day and say, hey Neil, want to work with your agency?

I was like, okay, cool.

you find us? Oh, I asked ChatGPT and they recommended you. And when we started doing analysis and surveying different companies, what we found is when they were looking at their customer base and asking their customers where they find out about that product or service or business, we started seeing ChatGPT come up as a channel. ChatGPT is still exploding in growth. It's growing at an exponential pace. If you're not optimizing for these AI platforms, whether it's ChatGPT, Google has their own version of AI or Perplexity or whatever it may be that's out there, the latest version, you're going to miss out. You look at Amazon, they're integrating, you know, Anthropic into, what is it called? Alexa, right? Because they're one of the big investors in it. If you're not optimizing for these platforms, you're missing out on revenue. The other day I was with my kid. I travel a lot, but I was with my 3-year-old And my 3-year-old's talking to Alexa. He asked me for chocolate and I said, oh, we don't have any chocolate. So he goes to Alexa and he says, Alexa, order me chocolate. And Alexa purchased him chocolate. So then I had to run to Alexa and I said, cancel the chocolate. I, I, I've— it didn't, it didn't click for me that my kids can start making purchases on Alexa. And then I started going to my Amazon account and I started noticing so many orders. Post-it notes. I'm like, why would I ever use a Post-it note? And then I see my kids always write me notes on Post-its and put it all over the house. And it quickly hit me that they're ordering all this stuff off of Amazon through Alexa. And on top of that, they subscribed me to Audible. They're subscribing me to HBO Max, and they subscribed to some other video service and music service all through Amazon. or the Alexa device, and I had to start canceling all these subscriptions. But it just shows these are all channels to think about that a lot of us forget. And an interesting thing is the younger generation actually uses voice search, which is going to be powered by AI more than traditional search because they learn how to talk before they can learn how to type.

Yeah, dude, let's just face it, like Amazon Echo right now or Alexa, Piece of crap. Your Siri, also piece of crap. But now that they're layering in Anthropic and they're layering in OpenAI, it's just going to get way better. And I'm excited for that, right? Because we actually have a voice assistant that can help us now. All right, let's keep moving here. We have a couple more things before we get out of here. So is it costing you customers? Neil's got some cute more, these cute extra graphs over here. Let's go for it.

Yeah, so the top marketing channels to invest in time and revenue. And if you look on the left side, Right. That is where most people invest their time, organic social. When you look at the graph on the next right, you can see that people are getting their ROI not from organic social, they're getting it from channels like SEO or paid ads or influencer marketing. And we surveyed quite a bit of companies that generate a minimum of $100 million in annual revenue. It just shows A lot of where the revenue actually is coming from versus where people spend their time is totally 2 different things. And this is important for you guys to know because it's not about where you're getting your ROI from. It's okay, you may understand that, but does your time where you're investing it match with where you're getting your ROI from? And it was just like the example that Eric gave with the agent stuff that he's doing. He's focusing on doing AI stuff that isn't sexy, but it's helping him produce more revenue.

And by the way, it's often the unsexy stuff that makes money, right?

Yeah, you know, I had someone ask me earlier today, do you guys go to Cannes? Eric and I don't go to Cannes, and Cannes is—

We're dialing back our conferences.

Yes.

Yeah, keep going.

And him and I, you know, if you look at a lot of the creative stuff that gets shown on Cannes or in marketing in general, They show the sexy, cool commercials that you see in the World Cup or the Olympics. That stuff doesn't make the majority of the money out there. It's valuable. We're not saying that you shouldn't do it, but people don't like talking about paid ads. You know, the majority of the internet spend online is Google Ads, then Facebook, then Instagram, then Amazon. Those are literally the top 4 in order. The 5th one is YouTube.

All right, so we're going to wrap this. I mean, we have a couple more minutes to talk about the future of marketing as we see it. So why don't you start off first? I mean, first and foremost, we've talked about the future of SEO being community, right? This is community over here. We think that's just going to continue to increase. What else do you see happening?

We talked a little about voice search. I think within 10 years, the main way that everyone's going to be searching around this world is going to be voice because of AI integration. 2, I think search is going to be everywhere, not just search everywhere optimization, But technology's moving. Like, I was looking at a company the other day and they're showcasing to me their smart fridge. And when I say smart fridge, it can detect how much milk is left in your fridge and you can click a button and you're going to have new milk in your house. Now imagine the fridge making recommendations to you on the brand of milk you should buy based on an advertising deal. Search is literally becoming Everywhere, and it's being integrated more so into hardware. Right now, when we think about search, you think about searching on google.com. Imagine searching everywhere you go, like your car. Eric has a really sophisticated car. His car makes fake noise to sound like it's a petrol car, but it's actually fully electric.

Yeah, I don't know if it sounds like a petrol car, but yeah, it sounds electric.

Well, electric cars are usually quiet. There's no noise.

Yeah.

But his car created fake noise, so then that way it sounds like there's Yeah. All right.

So look, Neil and I, we're not technical, right? But we always want to build, we always have ideas. We want to build new things all the time, correct?

Yes.

Okay. So the cool thing earlier I talked about bolt.new. So it's bolt.new. Okay. N-E-W. There's also Replit. There's also Cursor. So all the people that are big on AI on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, are talking about this, right? And we actually ran a contest with my team yesterday. The contest ended. and we paid $500 to whoever came up with the most interesting thing. And like people were like going hardcore on this contest, right? And people were building like different paid media solutions, whatever their job is, they're coming up with new solutions, right? They're creating different front ends. My point of saying this all to you is that again, everyone now is a pseudo developer. You have to check this stuff out because literally you can prompt saying, hey, I did one just for marketing school for fun. I said, hey, why don't you take our YouTube links and allow me to upload audio and video files or post a link and then come up with the right packaging for YouTube thumbnails and headlines, right? And it actually built the front end for that. It took— I could see it coding everything. I see it like catching its own mistakes. And then when I see something's wrong and I ask it to adjust it, it'll do it, right? So you can prompt a front end app out and then you can have your developers finish the job, right? So that's one example. I still don't think it stops you from needing to hire engineers. You still need to have technical people on your team, So this is an example of an account-based marketing system we built for LinkedIn. And so account-based marketing means that you're looking to target, let's say Coca-Cola, you're looking to target multiple people on Coca-Cola, right? And so what we do for LinkedIn right here is we say, oh, Amazon should be doing this, Coca-Cola should be doing this, right? And then we're able to create all these LinkedIn account-based marketing ads at scale and they're all customized, right? This is an example of something you can build using Bolt.new. You don't need to be super technical to do this. Yes, we had my CTO build this out and we're running this right now actively, but this stuff works, right? And the cool thing is this, you can't do this in Germany per se, you can do this in the United States though. If people are visiting your website, you can see who it is, you can see what their emails are and everything, and then you can just, oh, if this company visits 3 times, automatically dump them into this thing and start account-based marketing to them, right? And this has been working well with one enterprise company that we've been working with. So this is not to say, hey, come use this thing, This is one thing is to say you can build this on your own, like 60 to 70% of it. The other thing is we've talked about this on the podcast before, Neil does this really well. How do you build stuff and just give it away for free, right? I think we're going to see a proliferation of products being built in the next couple years, and that's what makes me really excited because we were really limited because we're not technical. And Neil and I were talking on the phone maybe like a month or two ago. He's like, man, you know, the— I really wish what I had was like a really strong technical co-founder back in the day, right? Remember that? Yeah, yep. So you guys can get there a lot faster now, right? So this is another example and then that's another example. But that being said, Neil, do you have anything else to add before we take a selfie with everybody?

Yeah, I would say, you know, today is Tuesday in the States. It'll be Tuesday soon and, or it's already actually maybe Tuesday. It's Election Day in the US. If you notice one trend in marketing, The candidates actually started spending way more time on podcasting than a lot of the traditional media when it looks to interviewing. You know, Donald Trump went on the Joe Rogan podcast, 42 million views. That was just a YouTube clip alone.

44 million now.

44 now, as Eric mentioned. Yeah, that would be hard to get 44 million views by going on national TV. It's an upcoming channel that a lot of people aren't focusing on, and it's not that competitive. There's only around 4 million active Podcasts. To give you a perspective, there's over a billion blogs, right? It's not that competitive and it's very powerful of channel when it comes to getting your message out.

All right, so basically look, new media is replacing old media. Balaji Srinivasan called this about, he called this in 2016, right? We're seeing it happen actively now and now's a good time to do it. So you guys have been amazing. We're going to take a quick selfie, so put your hands up, but let's take a selfie. Let's do it. And then we'll get out of here.