AI, SEO, and Google’s Big Leak:

The Need for Human Creativity in the Age of AI

Google’s Big Leak: Much Ado About Nothing?

Let’s kick things off with the big headline: the Google leak. Yes, the one that had the SEO community in a fury, waving pitchforks and torches. Some documents found on GitHub revealed API calls and what Google tracks. Shock! Horror! Or maybe not.

Ashley and Matt agree that this leak was sensationalized. The reality? If you’ve been in SEO for a while, none of this is really new. Sure, Google might not always be 100% transparent about its algorithms, but honestly, who expected them to be? The takeaway? Good old PR is more important than ever.

For some of us in the SEO community – it is business as usual. It is still all about marketing your business – beyond Google. (even though many are just coming to that realization)

Brand Mentions Matter

One interesting nugget from the leak: brand mentions are crucial. If your company is getting a lot of love online, it’s going to help your SEO. This is particularly nerve-wracking for small businesses with limited marketing budgets. Competing with the big boys? You better start focusing on quality over quantity in your marketing efforts.

AI in SEO: Friend or Foe?

Let’s talk AI. There’s no denying that AI is making waves in SEO and content writing, but are we riding a wave of progress or about to wipe out?

The Pitfalls of AI Content

Matt compares AI to having “a million interns – not an Einstein.” AI can churn out content faster than you can say “keyword stuffing,” but that doesn’t mean it’s good content. AI lacks the creativity, nuance, and human touch that make content truly engaging.

With Ashley, the discussion always comes back to content. Whether it’s link building or content creation, the emphasis should be on quality. Unique, well-thought-out content resonates more with users and achieves better SEO results than mass-produced, mediocre content – an important distinction in the age of AI.

Good writing is born of good thinking. Ashley reminds us that while tools like SEO and AI are indispensable, they should never replace the unique touch and depth humans bring to content creation.

The Risk of Plagiarism and Inaccuracy

Relying on AI for content creation isn’t just lazy; it’s risky. AI often regurgitates information from questionable sources, leading to potential copyright issues and spreading misinformation.

The Human Touch in SEO and Content Writing

Despite all the tech advancements, the human element remains irreplaceable in SEO and content writing. Good writers are not just wordsmiths; they’re critical thinkers. They can create metaphors, craft engaging narratives, and connect with readers on a personal level—something AI simply cannot do.

User Engagement and SEO

A big takeaway from the podcast? User engagement signals are critical. It’s not just about stuffing your content with keywords; it’s about creating engaging, readable content that keeps users on your page. Break up those walls of text, use subheadings, bullet points, and make your content scannable. Remember, you’re writing for humans, not robots.

The Ever-Changing SEO Landscape

The SEO landscape is constantly evolving, and staying ahead means adapting to new trends and technologies while maintaining a strong foundation in solid marketing principles.

Google’s Privacy Issues

One of the more concerning revelations? Google is tracking user interactions on websites through Chrome browsers. Is this connected to user accounts as well?

The Future of AI Overviews

Google’s attempt to integrate AI overviews into search results was a spectacular flop. Google showed everybody us how unreliable AI can be. From recommending people eat rocks to suggesting glue for keeping cheese on pizza, the AI overviews were laughably bad.

Results ranged from pure comedy to harmful advice. Google has been behind in the AI race, and has continually launched products that are laughably incomplete, incorrect, and sometimes offensive. Rather than getting it right, they are more concerned about getting it out, and it becomes -another- reputation hit.

Google has done to themselves what no other competitor could do – they’ve made themselves look foolish and unreliable.

The Search Generative Experience is a failure, and is now being drawn back and being shown less. This should be a warning to anyone who thinks that AI is a replacement for creative and insightful humans writing content for other humans.

Conclusion: Quality Content Reigns Supreme

In the end, the message from Matt and Ashley is clear: focus on quality content. Whether it’s through good old-fashioned human creativity or leveraging the latest in AI tech (wisely), the goal remains the same—engage your audience and provide value.

So, next time you’re tempted to let AI take the wheel, remember: SEO and content writing aren’t just about algorithms and keywords. They’re about connecting with people. And no algorithm can ever replace the human touch.

Show Notes:

Highlights:

02:11 Discussing Google’s Recent Activities

03:30 The Impact of the Google Leak

04:27 SEO Strategies and Common Misconceptions

05:37 The Role of PR in SEO

07:50 AI in Content Creation

10:13 Human Touch in Writing

18:58 User Engagement and SEO

23:26 Navigating Client Conversations

23:38 The Importance of Page Titles

25:49 Tracking and Analytics Overload

29:13 Privacy Concerns with Chrome

31:18 AI Overviews and Their Pitfalls

39:47 Exploring Alternative Search Engines

42:02 Google Ads and Market Manipulation

Transcript: AI, SEO & Google Leaks with Ashley Jones

Ashley: I think this leak came out at such a good time when things like, you know, the AI overview were, you know, shortly released and, things like that, all these discussions about how to utilize chat, GPT in your business. Hey, I have nothing against AI.

I love AI for helping with efficiency, but you have to understand how to use it correctly. And, you know, don’t, don’t be a robot in of yourself, you know, make sure that you’re using, you know, creative thoughts and understanding to strategize your SEO

Matt: Well, hello, and welcome to your listener to another episode of the Endless Coffee Cup podcast. As always, I’m your host, Matt Bailey. And if you’ve been a long-time listener of the podcast, then our guest today should not be a surprise to you. Ashley Jones, who previously in other episodes was Ashley Schweigert, but you’ve been on at least one episode as Ashley Jones.

And so, Ashley, it is so good to see you.

Ashley: Yes. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to talk about today’s topic and, it, ‘s always good to listen to your podcast, Matt. You know, I share those on LinkedIn here and there. So happy to be here.

Matt: You do. I appreciate that. And that’s awesome. And it’s so strange because usually, you’ve been in the studio, but so now that we were doing more video, which is, you know, I have gone kicking and screaming into the video world with the podcast. , now it just makes, So much sense. You’re probably five miles away and yet on my video here.

Ashley: Yeah. It’s kind of nice. I mean, you know, I, in the comfort of my place.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. You’re in your office. You got your computer. You’re yeah. You’re set up.

Ashley: Yep. Guess.

So, Ashley, we are together today because, uh, usually when we get together, I, I, I think we, I don’t want to say we, we beat up on Google, but that does tend to be where a lot of our conversations go is, is what’s going on in the world of girl, go Google, but I will say, this is not us bringing it up in this episode.

Matt: The. If anything, I would say the past month has been very Google-centric. And so this episode is to walk through a lot of what’s been going on in the world of Google, whether things they have done or the quote-unquote, big leak that came out, uh, Earlier this month. And, so if you don’t know about that, what happened was some documents were found on a GitHub repository.

If you don’t know what that means, you’ll have to look it up. Uh, if you’re, if you’re at all nerdy, you know exactly what that was. Uh, and, and these documents were a bunch of essentially API calls, basically what Google tracks. And, uh, This was then rounded up as to, you know, this is what Google’s doing.

They’ve been lying to us for years. They’ve been lying to the SEO community and this is, and it was made to be huge, huge news. And. Honestly, Ashley, I, I, you know, we, we talked about this a little bit and this is why I tend to just sit back for about a week when stuff like this happens and just see what happens.

But honestly, I didn’t think it was as big as it was made out to be. It was completely over-sensationalized. I’ll say that.

Ashley: I do agree with you. There’s just a lot of stuff. If you’ve been doing SEO for a while, you should know that.

Matt: Absolutely. Absolutely. I don’t think there were any big surprises. You know, to me, there were, there were things that over the years, some of the Google search representatives have said, it’s not a big signal or it’s not big. And yet, when people got ahold of these leaked documents, it was like this, aha, it is a factor.

It is important. And, I don’t know, I guess, do you expect that their spokespeople are going to be 100 percent honest about the algorithm and what’s going on?

Ashley: I know. Well, I just think that you know, a lot of SEO is theory-based and, you know, you kind of know how to address a certain site, not, it’s not one size fits all, right, every site, you want to approach it a little bit differently. And it always drives me crazy when I hear, you know, clients go straight after.

You know, keywords, you know, versus looking at the bigger picture and the trends that are going on with the site. But one thing I did find to be interesting was the mention of brand mentions, right? So if a company has a lot of brand mentions online, that is to help them when it comes to their SEO, which can be kind of scary for small businesses, because if you don’t have a lot of marketing initiatives, where does that leave you When it comes to competing to competitors and why some of those competitors are big box brands.

Matt: Yeah. And that’s something I try to educate people about is that the algorithm is much more about popularity than it is accuracy. It’s so much more and you know, my whole takeaway, I’m going to give away everything in the first few minutes of the podcast here. My whole takeaway from the leak is that PR is more important than ever.

Ashley: And you know, I loved that.

Matt: yeah,

Ashley: I love that because that is my background.

Matt: Yes,

Ashley: So I got into SEO, you know, later in my career, but I started in PR and that has been, always been like my off-page strategy because, you know, back black hat SEO has been, you know, doing a lot of, directories. I mean, don’t get me wrong.

You still do some local citations. It’s going to help you. Right. But that’s just common sense stuff. Like, you want to be on Google, my business. And, but that’s the thing too, though, is all of this is common sense and, you know, to look at PR whenever I’m doing PR for our client, I don’t want to waste my time going after industry publications that, you know, Are lower tier that doesn’t have a lot of traffic that doesn’t, that’s not targeting their audience.

So I’m naturally going to go after the ones that are the big players and try to get the coverage. But the link from that unique, now here’s the key that I noticed with this leak is that, the value on unique content. And I know that should be something that’s like, well, why are we even talking about this?

It is something that has, I think, come back to the surface because people do not understand what unique content means. They don’t understand it because they’re thinking that they can leverage, you know, chat GPT to write their blog posts. And that’s going to be considered a unique piece of content.

No, it’s not. So this is what just gets me going because I think this leak came out at such a good time when things like, you know, the AI overview were, you know, shortly released and, things like that, all these discussions about how to utilize chat, be cheap, chat, GPT in your business. Hey, I have nothing against AI.

Matt: you know, like you, I use, I use AI, I’m using it more and more. I find it is best when I have to produce something that doesn’t require creative writing. You know, if you’re writing like an employment contract, if you are writing just something, a very basic email or something, an email series, you know, if, if you’re making an absolute decision that this doesn’t need to be creative, I just want functional AI is perfect for it.

It’ll get you 80 percent of the way. But the moment you say, you know what, I want to do an email series that blows people away. Now you have to deal with humans. Because AI is not going to create an email series, it’ll create a functional, usable, and I’ll even say good, welcome series. Yeah.

Ashley: Yeah, it’s not great because you have to give it something to take from there to under, I think it’s good. So I have my team that they’ll put together, say an email for our client and I could tell, okay, well this email is okay, but it could be a little bit more tight or, you know, maybe we need to make sure we have more bullets or we have some subtitles.

So instead of them messing around with it too long, cause we have to move on to the next thing, just put it in a chat GPT, say, turn this into a marketing email. And it already has something to work with, and then you can take it. Okay. Is this where I want to go? What do I need to be deleted? You should never just take something from chat to PT and use it directly.

And you should also never use it for research. I’m sorry. I am so against that because it’s just it’s taking all these sources online. I think it only goes back, what, one year or two years. So it’s taking all these sources that are, that are online to compile an answer. Those sources could be false sources.

You don’t know the sources. So that’s why you do want to look up the information yourself. You never wanted to just come up with something from scratch. Chat GPT is going to be as good as the prompts that you give it.

Matt: Absolutely. And that’s where learning to prompt, whether you are. Putting in a lot of instructions before what you’re doing or conversationally coaching it to get what you want. Just taking that first output and running with it is going to get you into it, it’s going to cause a lot of problems.

Ashley: Well, that just happened where I was looking at, so I had a client that wanted to utilize chat GPT to write all their blog posts, and like my mouth hit the floor because I’m thinking what? Why would you do that? And, but I got handed a blog post and I could tell instantly, before doing any fat check, fat facts, checking, or anything like that, that it was chat GPT or some other type of AI tool.

Cause it was very robotic sounding. That is not what Google wants. And it’s just like using keyword stuffing with SEO, right? That’s very robotic. It’s not, you’re not thinking about the user. So it’s getting back to like that Google leak, that Google leaks all about usability, all about relating it’s common sense stuff.

So that’s why if you’re going to use these tools to do a lot of your online writing, you’re going to run into some, I podcast on this cop potential copyright infringement issues. Um, you’re going to sound robotic. Um, it’s also not unique content because unique content is content that has been, uh, thought about by the writer.

It has, you know, a thesis. It has, it has a, like, it has a structure to it that a human had to put in some thought and some understanding. And a robot’s not going to do that.

Matt: No. So, um, prime example, uh, I was looking at articles that were written by AI for a music website. , things like, you know, the top vinyl albums for a collector, if you’re buying vinyl albums, this is what you want to look for. And even with prompting, even with, you know, built by AI, it was a very basic article.

Yeah. There weren’t any highlights and compare that against. A good writer and a good writer is going to put something in there that is specifically unique about each of the albums. And it’s going to be something that a machine would never say it. They’re going to make a metaphor. They’re going to explain what makes this so good in a way that a machine won’t do.

And, and that’s what I like to try to explain to people that when you’re pulling from AI, like let’s, let’s. Let’s create an index here and I’m trying to get around my microphone. So I’m in the camera, so let’s create an index here. And up here is, you know, no, everything here is what’s in the language model.

The AI has been trained on how much of that, if they pull it from the internet, how much of it is junk.

Ashley: Yeah, I know.

Matt: know, let’s go up to about, you know, 70 percent and I’m being very, very nice. 70 percent of what’s online is junk. And so that leaves you 30%. And then you’ve got. Probably less than 10 percent of that is incredibly well-written content.

And then, so that gives you a good 25 or more percent that would be average. And what AI is doing is it’s reading all of that and it’s giving you an above average summary of existing content, but what it won’t do, you know, what it will do, and, and we’ve seen this, it reinforces stereotypes. It goes with, I would say the commonly accepted thought, it’s not going to vary, and it’s not going to, be contrarian.

It’s not going to provide a metaphor that grabs people. It’s not going to create, a play on words in a headline that’s going to get people’s interest. It gets people’s interest. So all of those are well. Done writing techniques that grab people’s attention and add that humanity to it. They’re not going to do. It falls outside of the parameters of what it has learned because it is so unique.

No, it’s outside. It’s going to take the mean or the middle and push that together and make something out of it.

Ashley: Well, and that’s why too, I know something in the leak even mentioned outbound links. So, um, I think it was, you know, you don’t, you don’t want to have a ton of them. I think it was. And actually, that kind of makes sense to me because you want to show it’s your content. So, um, you know, if you have all these links going back to all these sites, is it your content, or are you just rewarding it?

So it’s on your site.

Matt: Yeah, so there’s a couple of questions and I was asked these a couple of weeks ago. Uh, I was asked last week too, because of this leak, people were, you know, a series of questions about how long should an article be. How many outlines should you make? And my answer to all of that is as many as you need to. How should, how long should the article be? As long as it needs to be.

As soon as you start implementing formulas, you’re going to lose that, you know, does it require a 2000-page article? Then write a 2000-page article. Does it require a 5, 000 page? Then write it. Uh, are you citing other people? If so, then link to them.

Are you, you’re going.

Ashley: like a blog post that, you know, somebody on my team wrote, I like, I better see a lot of root beer and not a lot of foam. I want to

Matt: have to explain that to me now.

Ashley: the foam. Like when you get pop and you get all the foam, it’s such a letdown.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. See, now that what you just did there is a great metaphor that AI would never do it. You know, you’re, you’re, you’re making this, this visual, you know, immediately I’ve got the picture there. I know what you’re talking about. I asked you to explain it, but it’s, it’s, that’s exactly what distinguishes, uh, you know, that type of writing is that clear metaphor.

That’s what I want to see. Okay.

Ashley: to be creative and a good marketer is going to understand how to look at the data.

It’s going to take a look at what’s going on in the Google leak. What do I need to understand to make my company stand out?

Matt: and, and this goes to something I’ve, I’ve said before that, that using AI is like having a million interns do, do the work in a, in a split second, the research, the gathering, the basic, but don’t expect that intern to know everything. Right. To get the facts right. Don’t expect them to cite everything properly.

Don’t expect there to be AI is not an Einstein. It’s a million interns. And so now, unfortunately, when AI puts out better than acceptable type content, the problem is That what it’s doing is just adding to the mediocre content that’s out there. And, and, and I see a lot of people saying, but it’s so good.

Well, that means that in your measurement of what’s good, maybe you’ve been seeing bad content for too long.

Ashley: The same thing. And I’m like, do you know how good writing is? He tells me you don’t. Hmm.

Matt: the writer is not just a good writer. They’re a good thinker. Good writing is the result of good thinking. And a good writer can take that thinking and verbalize it in great ways. I think we underutilize that, that thinking part of it. And so when people talk about how great AI is, I, I think, you know, your bar has been set low.

Ashley: Or you’re just trying to jump on a train that you know is] popular right now. You want to look like you’re in the now.

Matt: One of the things from this leak that blew my mind is all of a sudden, I think some of the Google reps were saying links aren’t as important as they were, or they’re not a top three factor. And then, you know, they’re, they’re like, Oh, they lied. You know, it is important.

And it goes back to what I said if you want to build links, then do marketing. Do PR because I think this, again, reinforces, that it’s not the number of links, it’s the quality of the links. And as you said, if you’re getting cited, if your brand name is out there, that’s because of good marketing, that’s, that’s because you’ve been marketing yourself and that is key. You know, link building is not, you know, I, I cringe when I see these articles about modern link building, link buildings, marketing. What it is. that’s one of the things that we talk about is the user engagement signals

hmm. or tactic or however you want to say that, but it’s a part of the marketing.

Ashley: So you have social media and you have a lot of posts that are safe for your blog, right? Well, it’s not a place for link building, but your blog post should be enough that it’s going to be engaging to where somebody wants to click on that blog to go read it. And the person that’s following you on social media should be more of an engaged user.

And so when they go to your blog and they are reading it, the chances of them seeing it Staying on that page or maybe clicking more, it’s going to be a lot higher than say you getting another type of user on your site. So, and also like Google knows that that is a trusted platform like it knows, it knows what it is.

So, if you’re having good engagement from a blog post, so from a user that clicks on your blog post back to your site, that’s just going to help your SEO. And that was one of the things that I saw within, um, You know, the Google leak that user signals were, were big. So I was looking at user engagement from multiple platforms.

That’s what I should have said. SEO is a platform. So it’s going to look at that and you know, how they’re all interacting with each other. So do you have good omni-channel marketing?

Matt: Well, not just that. I think it shows the importance of understanding human factors that engage people on a page. And that goes a lot into understanding how markup works, but not just using markup, but how markup affects the eyes, the use of color, and contrast. Uh. Typefaces, size, all those factors that enable people to quickly scan the content, find what they’re looking for, and engage them.

You know, we’ve talked about this before if you have a seven-sentence paragraph and you have a series of paragraphs that big, it’s just a wall of text and no one’s going to read it. But breaking that up using subheadings, paragraph headings, bullet points, making it easy for that eye to travel down the page, you, by breaking it up and making it more scannable, keep people there longer. And so understanding more of those human factors. And again, it’s not because of the search engine, it’s a human factor. It’s what. When you understand the neuroscience of it, when you understand the usability of it, you’re doing it for people and there’s a natural benefit in the search engines and what they’re watching on the page.

Ashley: This is, there, there should be a balance between, you know, taking those keywords and. Writing a nice blog post and making sure that the keywords that you use correctly should answer a question that the user is looking for. So, you’re, you’re killing a couple of birds with 1 stone, but you want to make sure that it also looks nice right on the page.

So, that gets into where your design can come in. So, if you’re a larger company, and, you know, you have your, your mark or your writer, put that together. If you have a designer in place, that’s good. A place to use them, and have them break up your content on your site.

Matt: That, and I just dealt with this the other day, and I think anyone in SEO has dealt with this, uh, working with a company where one of their primary keywords they don’t want to use because they use a different word,

Ashley: Oh my God. Yes. I run into that a lot.

Matt: don’t, and so it’s one of those conversations where you got to choose.

You can’t, you can’t create your search term when it doesn’t exist. People know it is this, that’s what they call it, and that’s how they’re going to search. And by choosing not to accept that, you’re losing out. Because you’re creating your term and they are and they know it they are rigidly and so they’ve got to then rely on paid search to get people for that keyword.

Ashley: Yeah. Yeah. I see that a lot that something more, um, I guess company culture related. Um, you know, yeah. And then you try to have that conversation and it can be hard. Like sometimes a client will buy into it and we’ll do that. And sometimes they don’t. And unfortunately, you have the results do show.

Matt: Well, and that even gets to, I think I’m looking at a couple of things here from the leak. Um, I don’t know what, who was saying that the page title wasn’t important anymore? I don’t even know.

Ashley: No, like these on-page elements.

Matt: say that.

Yeah. And, and that’s the first thing a searcher sees is your page title in the Google results.

Ashley: I think I know why because of a lot of these on-page things that I’ve seen throughout the year. So, like, all tags and, they’re like, oh, well, you know, many keywords aren’t important and stuff anymore. Okay. Yeah. Well, Google does prioritize certain things on a page, but you still, it’s still a robot.

You want to help it to understand what your site is about. And I think it’s because when somebody searches for something like the title tag that you put in on the site and the meta description you put on the site, that’s not how it always shows up if is somebody searching for something. Those things that are behind the website are to help the robots understand what your site is about.

Matt: Yeah, I’ve, I will say lately, I have not put a whole lot, um, I, I still do descriptions, even though Google has decided that they’re gonna pull from the page because there are other search engines besides Google, and so I stay with those meta descriptions, but the page title is something I have always.

Always put so much thought into, it because like I said, it’s the first thing someone’s going to read about your website in the search results. This is how you stand out. This is how you communicate. We have the content you’re searching for. Uh, so I, I thought it was interesting that that, that was, you know, page titles still Matt.

Yeah, we knew that.

Ashley: because people like, like what you were saying, like the meta description, like, you know, people are like, well, Google doesn’t put as much weight into that. So I don’t have to do it. Well, you should still do it. Like, it’s So it’s like, it may not be as important, but you should still do it. And in fact, what could happen later is that another leak comes out and then you’re like, Oh, I should’ve done it because now it’s important.

So my thing is, it’s like, why not do these things? It’s like, I don’t have to brush my teeth, but I’m still going to do it. You

Matt: Well, and I think that brings up the, the, the whole, the context of the leak is that these were API calls. And so what it was was a list of everything Google tracks. And I laughed about it because I know so many businesses and I’m sure you do too. When they set up analytics, they track everything. And, and, and, and, and we see this across the industry.

People are tracking everything, but what are they measuring? What are they analyzing? Probably less than 5 percent of what they’re tracking. So they’re, they’re more concerned with tracking everything. Then analyze, let’s say a fraction to solve a problem. And I see this list of API calls the same way that Google is.

Anything that can be tracked is going to be tracked. And we’re going to, we’re going to do that. , whether or not they’re using it, there’s no proof of what they’re using it. And there’s no proof of the prioritization, anything like that. And so again, yeah, that’s a leak. Yeah. It doesn’t change anything, doesn’t change anything I’m doing because, if anything, it reinforces, that it’s all about marketing.

Ashley: Yeah. Yeah, it is. I know back in, you know, And I still say this, but back in the day, I used to always talk about how You know, with, AdWords, for example, how you have your, your landing page that, I mean, it’s always nice to have a very nice landing page for AdWords. It’s going to hit those user signals, right?

So it has certain colors for your conversions, all those types of things. It’s always nice. But what if I’m a company and I don’t have those nice AdWords and these nice landing pages for my AdWords account and I have an e-commerce site, I say, sending those people back to your product pages is just going to help, you know, Your SEO because you are, you are bidding on terms that you also want to rank for organically.

And Google is going to see the user engagement that is happening from those terms back to your site. And in turn, it does help your SEO. I have seen it and it’s something that I haven’t, if there’s an article online about it, great, but I haven’t seen anything on it that’s like, this is a best practice or like this can help you.

I just saw it from experience and I know that that can help.

Yeah. There are a couple of things now I will say, this is one thing that did get me about looking at all these things that are being tracked. And one of them was using Chrome browsers.

Ashley: Yes.

Matt: what people do, not just in search results, but on websites. Oh,

Ashley: I thought about you

when I read that. holding back on that.

Matt: I was like, God, I’m holding back on that because of everything that screams a huge privacy issue.

Ashley: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Matt: if they’re pulling this, they know who you are, you have an account, you’re using a Chrome browser. Anyone concerned about privacy is not using a Chrome browser. Uh, you know that. So I guarantee that the click data that’s being collected is connected to your account.

So every website you go to, they’re looking at the depth of it and what you’re looking at where your mouse hovers. This. To me, this is an extreme invasion of privacy. If not only, yeah, we know, they track searches. We know they’re looking at what sites you’re on, but here now is evidence that they are tracking your interaction with websites.

That, that’s another level,

Ashley: Yeah,

Matt: level. And, I, frankly, would be surprised if that doesn’t turn into a lawsuit.

Ashley: Yeah, I don’t know. I have a lot of thoughts on, um, privacy and some of the tools that are being rolled out and, um, You know, Google analytics for compared to Universal and some of them, I know that you use another platform, but just, I think that there are some things that.

Matt: I’m done with,

Ashley: I, well, you know, yeah, I have, that’s a whole nother can of worms that I won’t, I won’t go down to, but yeah, there’s, yeah, there, there are some concerns there for sure.

Matt: Well, the other side of this is the AI overviews, integrated into Google search. And I will say for about a week, it was a lot of fun as people discovered what Google’s AI overviews were, were teaching, um, everything from. It’s healthy to eat at least a small rock a day, uh, for the minerals to use glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza.

And one of the most concerning was, uh, someone had said, you know, what to do for depression and Google offered to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Ashley: I didn’t hear about that one. I heard some

Matt: was, that was

Ashley: hear about that.

Matt: And the problem is so many of these things were coming from Reddit. And so Google using Reddit information, going through their AI and which, you know, it made me scratch my head anyway, when Google made this arrangement to use Reddit for, for AI,

Ashley: Cause it’s a

flat. Couldn’t be a worse data set on the planet. Besides, besides YouTube comments, which are the most depraved, insane, worthless piece of content on this earth, next up is Reddit. Yeah,

I was so somebody, you know, I said how I got handed the blog post that was created by chat GPT on the same person was like, well, AI overviews are going to ruin SEO because yeah, because of the collector rate debate, um, You know, which, come on,

Matt: no.

Ashley: not, and then like, I wish I would have thought about that.

I forgot about that.

Matt: And it’s been pulled back. It’s now I think less than 1 percent of searches now are showing a lot of these AI overviews. Um, it just like, for example, and by the way, I am using Reddit because there is a sub called Google AI gone wild, um, where people are posting the AI in for overviews. Uh, so someone wanted fruits that end in um.

And it says, there isn’t much information about fruits that end with um, but here are some other fruits that have names that end with a vowel, blueberry, dragon fruit, persimmon, watermelon. And so it’s not just inaccurate, it’s flat-out wrong. In many of these, it’s just hilarious. I mean, it’s comedy. And.

You know, when this, you know, maybe the leak came out to take away from these AI overviews, but someone asked a very, very good question that if these AI overviews are inaccurate if they are incorrect and they give bad information, at what point now is Google liable for this information? You see, section 240 protects Companies, and tech companies from other people’s content. You see Facebook’s protected because of what people put on Facebook. Facebook didn’t publish it. That’s what the protection of Two 40 is, is these tech companies are not publishers, they are platforms. So once Google starts putting out these AI overviews, does that make Google now a publisher? If so, then they are not protected by Section 240. And that’s where Now, liability for inaccurate, wrong, incorrect health advice, legal advice, and anything that causes someone to search, get bad information, and go through with it. Is Google liable? Now that’s the big question and Google pushed so hard to get this out and it was bad. It is a, they had a big black guy before.

Because they fell behind and then the other guy got popped when they tried to push this AI overview.

Ashley: that’s what it’s like. I mean, you still see it. I was just trying to find something here because With the AI, because I don’t even pay attention to the AI overviews anymore. After all, I know that they’re not accurate. But I did see that somebody was saying that they will like them, they will take the information from some sites versus just like Reddit.

But, you know, to put that up there, and I was trying to see if I could find that to be true.

Matt: So here, here’s an AI overview. And the question is, why is Pabst Blue Ribbon so good?

Ashley: \Yeah, I

Matt: AI overview says Pabst Blue Ribbon is a beer that some say is good for many reasons, including its taste, versatility, and marketing. And then what’s highlighted here, others say it’s good before operating watercraft.

Watercraft.

Ashley: Well, and you know, this is the thing too, like, Even though, so I’m just looking at some of my notes over here. So that’s why you’re seeing me look over.

Matt: Yeah, I’m looking, I’m, I’m, I’m now, I’m now stuck on Reddit, looking at some of these.

Ashley: I know. Well, this, I’m just like wondering where some of these AI, you know, cause you to know, people are talking about the click theory, but, you know, going, going back to SEO, you know, if these get cleaned up and are they going to impact SEO, I mean if you think about it, they’re going after long tail keyword phrases.

And they’re not going after the short-tail ones. So your site should still be able to compete.

Matt: Absolutely. Absolutely. and this is good for trivial content. I think that was the idea. It was made for trivial content to answer questions. But if you’re researching a product, if you’re researching a decision, if you’re looking for customer service, if you’re looking for in-depth content, the AI overview is not going to do anything.

Now, where I was most concerned about that is where, and it’s now again pulled back, is where the AI was rewriting articles from news publishers and then presenting those as original content. In that way, it’s stealing content from publishers. And so this gets back to the relationship between Google and publishers, which is terrible.

And when Google’s using AI to essentially steal readers away from publishers, that’s another big problem. And again, that’s been pulled back as well as when it’s been directly plagiarized.

Ashley: my gosh. Yeah. You know, I get, I get hot on that. I can’t handle that. But yeah, it’s an issue, but you know, if you think too, like if somebody is looking up something that says, if you wrote a blog post as a company, that’s after a long tail keyword phrase, that you’re trying to rank for as a question.

If that’s a good. Blog posts with good-quality content. That means that you have your own, you know, thoughts behind it. It’s really good. , even if somebody says, looks for that same thing and the AI overview pops up and they are truly interested in that, they’re going to want to read something a little bit more in-depth regardless.

Matt: And an important thing to keep here as well as with any good article, if you if you’re doing any level of persuasion is what’s the next level of progression. But once someone has this question answered, what do they look for next? What will they need next? And so if you’re writing your articles with an eye toward that progression, that will show up in the search results as a subsequent question or related question.

Even if it comes up in a little snippet, it shows that you’re not just answering the question. You are now providing the next step the next resource or the next idea that people need to have. to get the full answer, but continue on that journey.

Ashley: Yep. Yep. So that’s why I like quality content. SEO is not going to go anywhere. I feel like SEO is just a part of your research for developing quality content.

Matt: So I’m going to take a, a minute here as we’re, as we’re kind of closing down here and I’m going to make a recommendation. If you are feeling frustrated with the search, I am going to recommend it, and I think it’s KG, K A G I dot com. It is a search engine and here’s the kicker. You pay for it. You’re not the customer with Google advertisers are the customer.

Uh, and, honestly, Google’s the customer that’s, uh, Google’s the one making the most money from their search engine. I have been using Cagey. And, and I think that’s how it’s spelled. You get, like a hundred free searches to try it out. And if you like it, buy it. You pay for any other type of software that you use.

And what I like about this is you are paying for good search results. They are fast. There are no ads, there’s no tracking. It is privacy-focused. You do have to register and pay, but where does the money go? It goes for servers. It goes for algorithms, goes for technology. It goes to provide the service like any other paid software. So that’s just my plug. I have been using it for the past few weeks and I have loved it. Loved it. I’ve got an account. You can also set up a family account and your family can use the search engine and you get a discount number of searches and a monthly rate there. And highly, recommend it.

I think this is the beginning of maybe another search war for searchers as Google tries to do these things. And. Not always working out. Uh, we’ve seen more and more, you know, we’ve known this for years. Google’s number one priority is Google. Their number one priority is revenue. And it shows that they are doing everything they can.

They will even make the search results worse to increase revenue. And so, yeah, you know, that’s, that’s kind of a trend and it’s only a matter of time before people just start going somewhere else.

Ashley: I will tell you if I receive another call from a Google rep on Google ads, I know this has nothing to do with SEO, but

Matt: No, but it’s

Google. more time, because I know what they’re going to do, they’re just going to try to tell me, Oh, use broad match.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Just spend more. Just spend more. Let your, yep, yep, yep. That is always the Google rep’s response to everything. Spend more. Increase your budget. Broad match.

Ashley: Yep. And I was like, do you think I was boring yesterday? I know what you’re doing. Oh,

Matt: Yeah, like you don’t know anything, do you? Um, but it’s not their job to know anything. It’s their job to get increased budgets.

Ashley: Yes, yes, and I’m sure like if there’s anybody that’s listening that has an AdWords account They’re probably getting just as many calls as I am. It’s like it’s got it’s gotten really bad

It’s probably a couple every couple of days. I don’t get a call Yeah,

back on their ads, because it’s, they’re getting, you know, the ad prices are being artificially inflated. It’s, uh, you know, I tell everyone, well, go look at the Department of Justice filing against, uh, Google ads as a monopoly. Uh, it’s eye-opening. It is incredibly eye-opening what Google has done to make advertisers pay more.

For listening. When they don’t have to, uh, and, and, and they’ll do things just ahead of quarterly reports to make their stock price go up. you,

that’s a little

Matt: which again, they, they announced the whole AI overviews just ahead of quarterly reports. So they could say we’re using AI and search results. And if you look at their stock price, it went up, because they were using AI and search results, even though it wasn’t ready, even though it.

Ashley: I didn’t know that. That’s

Matt: Yeah, yeah, they tie a lot of the reports to quarterly, uh, quarterly returns.

Ashley: Oh wow. Oh, and I’m not surprised.

Matt: No, no, it’s amazing. Um, I, I think Google has done a lot of good for the community, but I also think there’s been a lot, a lot of stuff that’s been happening lately. You know, both SEOs and, and, you know, businesses, when they see traffic go down when they see results suffer. You know, that’s what got Google the big crowds to begin with it was fast, accurate results better than everybody else.

And people ran to it. So, very few people I think are dedicated to the Google brand.

Ashley: Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m, I’m still on here. But I understand.

Matt: Absolutely. Well, Ashley, it has been a lot of fun talking with you. I look forward to a couple more conversations we’re talking about here and getting into the pipeline. And so as always, it is so much fun having you on and again, getting to reconnect and talk with you here on the endless coffee cup.

Ashley: Thank you again.

Matt: It’s been awesome.

And thank you, dear listener, for joining us for a great conversation. And I hope to see you next time on the Endless Copy Cup podcast.