Podcast With Dr. Marie Haynes

Is AI Killing SEO? Dr. Marie Haynes Explains!

Show Notes

Is AI killing SEO? Dr. Marie Haynes explains how artificial intelligence is shaking up search engine strategies and transforming how we drive organic traffic! In this insightful video, Dr. Haynes shares her journey from veterinary medicine to becoming one of the most respected voices in SEO, decoding Google algorithms and adapting to the rise of AI. Are traditional SEO tactics still relevant? How can you rank your website number 1? What role does AI play in reshaping content strategies and search engine rankings?

Discover actionable tips to optimize for the helpful content update, build brand authority, and create original content that stands out in an AI-driven world. Whether you're just starting or you're a seasoned pro, this podcast offers practical advice to boost visibility and drive more organic traffic.

Ready to stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly evolving landscape? Watch now and supercharge your SEO strategies! Don’t forget to subscribe for more expert insights and cutting-edge SEO tips.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:37 - Marie's journey: Veterinarian to SEO expert

03:55 - What made Mary effective at decoding Google updates?

07:39 - Does disavow still work in SEO?

10:47 - How has your perspective on SEO evolved over the years?

18:48 - What are AI agents and their impact on the web?

21:27 - What is Google’s Project Mariner?

22:10 - What is Google’s Agent Space?

22:59 - What is Google’s Customer Engagement Suite?

23:42 - What is Google’s Agent Development Kit?

25:27 - How will AI agents change user interactions with websites?

28:32 - What are personalized shopping results?

31:57 - How to optimize for the agent evolution?

34:30 - Google AI mode vs. traditional search: What’s the difference?

37:05 - What is the future of advertising?

38:56 - What are the key takeaways from Google AI overviews?

43:11 - How does AI mode impact traditional SEO?

46:02 - What is E-A-T and its relation to Neuralink?

49:10 - How does Google determine trustworthiness?

51:46 - What are the January Quality Rater Guidelines updates?

53:45 - How do Google's updates reflect in the SERP?

55:39 - What was Britney's experience with AI-generated recipes?

56:40 - Will authority matter more than backlinks in SEO?

1:02:15 - What early mistakes do businesses make when adopting AI?

1:05:18 - How do you stay ahead of the SEO curve?

1:08:21 - What should agency owners do to prepare for the AI-driven future?

1:11:05 - Rapid Fire: Quick insights

1:13:43 - Where to find Marie?

1:15:35 - Outro

Transcript

Intro

0:00 hello everyone and welcome back to the agency insider show i am your host Navnit Koshel today we are honored to

0:06 have Dr mary Haynes a true getter and master of SEO founder of Mary Haynes Consulting author speaker and one of the

0:13 most respected voice on Google algorithm EAT and the evolving world of search

0:21 [Applause]

0:26 [Music] [Applause] [Music] mary thank you for joining us oh thanks

0:34 for having me i'm excited for this chat yes so uh let's start with your journey

Marie's journey: Veterinarian to SEO expert

0:39 and SEO evolution uh uh you started your career in a veterinary medicine is that

0:45 correct it's kind of a weird jump right that like why as a veterinarian talking about SEO and now AI I uh I loved my job

0:53 as a vet i really love the diagnostics the best uh I really enjoyed surgery as

0:59 well um and one of our clients was the prime minister of Canada's pets actually so I mean I I I really loved what I did

1:07 and in 2008 uh just out of for interest's sake I started looking at

1:12 what Google was doing and got fascinated with the idea that this algorithm that's

1:18 basically just math can decide which businesses get recommended to people which websites get recommended so it was

1:25 a hobby for me uh I made my own little horrible veterinary website but it it

1:31 started to make me some money and uh and then by 2012 um if you remember were you

1:37 around when the penguin algorithm happened yeah and it was it was devastating to so many businesses so I

1:44 was on bed rest at the time with my I was pregnant with my second daughter and um I had all this time to just sort of

1:51 try to figure it out and by the time I was ready to go back to work after my maternity leave I I was making more

1:58 money just working from my couch uh I was really enjoying trying to help all these businesses and and having some

2:04 good success as well and so I thought you know maybe I'll I'll just stay home and learn about Google um and then since

2:10 then uh so much has happened you know I I started an agency ran an agency for a few years now I'm back to just solo

2:17 consulting again um and uh and then AI happened which uh you know we're going

2:23 to talk about but it really blew my mind that I can see the world is changing so much and I feel really honored and

2:31 privileged to uh you know be able to be one of the ones who figures this out and helps people adapt so yeah kind of a a

2:38 different career tra trajectory right right right so I had a guest on my

2:45 show who were teacher and came into SEO so yours is one of the most unique one I

2:50 have to but I believe most of the SEO we practitioners uh I mean including myself

2:57 are an accidental SEO it's not a choice it just so all we've been doing I mean I've been

3:03 doing SEO for now 23 years so that is why I also got across accidentally

3:09 itself and were you what were you before you were in SEO uh I I was doing my MBA

3:16 at that time while doing research i came across Alta Vista it was just I came

3:22 across Google and then I put my website for four pages testing out okay what is

3:27 it just like you put and then I got started getting called do you do SEO and I learned never to say no yeah yeah yeah

3:34 try stuff yeah amazing do you remember do you remember

3:39 Excite i used to use Excite all the time uh and in my in vet school I would be

3:44 always in the computer lab uh trying to understand like how does this thing work long time ago so wow 23 years yeah right

3:54 so now uh your early work on Google's penguin algorithm made you a sought after consultant uh now looking back

What made Mary effective at decoding Google updates?

4:01 what do you think made you so effective at decoding Google updates when so uh

4:06 few others could I think the answer to that is that I've

4:11 I've always been willing to share my thoughts so um at the time I was in the

4:17 SEO chat forums which they don't exist anymore uh but uh it was such a a great

4:22 forum where we would just there were a bunch of us i I was just chatting the other day with Nick Loy uh I don't know

4:28 if you're if you know him but we were good friends back in 2008 in trying to learn these algorithms in in the SEO

4:35 chat forms and we would just put out theories you know and and so I'm very good at seeing patterns and uh at first

4:42 we didn't even know that Penguin was about links uh and so it seemed really obvious to me that the sites that were

4:49 and I wasn't getting paid to look at these sites it was just out of a hobby i'd look at their uh I've been paying

4:54 for hrefs since like for many many many years and I would look at their backlinks and uh and see that like wow

5:02 almost all these sites had backlinks that were totally made for SEO that like you know had keyword anchors and uh and

5:09 and you could see that it was about links so what I did was I first started

5:15 with penalty removal with manual actions which was different than the algorithmic penguin uh um action um and penalty

5:23 removal some guy came to me on the forum and said I'll pay you $300 if you can remove this unnatural links penalty and

5:30 I was like no no I'm a vet this is just a hobby like I don't do this for money um and but I thought well you know I'm

5:37 sitting at home nothing to do i might as well and in doing that I I had to review

5:42 all of the links pointing to his website and then uh and then I had another one

5:47 come to me after that and reviewed all their links and in since then I've reviewed millions and millions of links

5:54 of penalized websites whether it was manually or with an algorithm and it's

6:00 really easy to see the the patterns of uh sites that exist you know just because SEO gave us uh this this way to

6:08 make money um and so what I did was every time I removed a penalty my clients would say "Well what do I do

6:14 now?" Like "How do I how do I rank in a way that's not going to get me penalized?" And so I started collecting

6:20 information so whenever somebody published a blog post that my clients could learn from then I made a note on

6:26 it whenever Google said something official I made notes on that um John Mueller's helps for for years i have six

6:35 Google Docs full of all of the notes from those helps um just trying to get

6:40 little hints of of what we could do and I started a newsletter uh to share and

6:47 that's what I think I think if anybody is watching this and like I want to you know I want to be known i I never set

6:52 out to be known i I just wanted to help people and so my newsletter uh I would

6:58 just share everything that I learned and I still do that today although there's more AI focus um and yeah so I think

7:04 that just learning sharing and I also because of the nature of my consulting

7:10 I've always presented myself as well let's experiment you know um and so my clients always know that there's like a

7:16 little bit of risk in uh you know maybe it won't work maybe you know we'll try this theory and maybe it does work and

7:22 and that you know not every SEO has that um freedom to to just go and and and do

7:28 whatever right so so yeah so I think I just had the right circumstances of uh learning sharing and having some success

7:35 uh and then it just kind of took off from there okay just a just a follow-up questions do you think this works

Does disavow still work in SEO?

7:44 do I think which works this Oh disavow ah not now no for a while yes so

7:53 in the if you remember before 2016 from 2012 to 2016 Penguin was very penalizing

8:01 and uh and it was the only way you could get out of Penguin is to thoroughly disavow so now I only recommend

8:09 disavowing if you have a manual action for unnatural links or there are some

8:14 sites where like you feel what we used to say is you're about to get a manual

8:20 action because you can see like it's just the only reason you ranked was because you made thousands of links that

8:25 like were manipulating Google and um it's been a long time since I've seen

8:30 any evidence that disavowing has helped uh and I actually can't remember the last time that I personally recommended

8:37 this vowing or uh I did open the tool up recently but uh but no it was it was a

8:42 fun uh thing to be an expert on for for a while but not today i don't think it has much value i agree i agree i mean I

8:50 remember in 2018 we got hit by a negative SEO attack where we had like

8:56 almost 1 million links built and our rankings actually tanked interesting i was talking to Gary in Bali and I said

9:04 this is what happened he says I don't believe it i said it does happen he said okay send me your Google search console

9:09 access i said I'm not going to do that because you're going to dissect everything links which happened i said

9:16 I'm good yeah yeah i you know I mean that's a whole other topic negative SEO

9:22 i have seen one maybe two cases where I was really convinced that links uh took

9:28 a site down and they were many years ago i I really think today uh Google uses

9:33 page rank in a totally different way um and links they're really like if I can

9:39 see the patterns if I've looked at millions of links doing link audits and and disavows and I can like look at a

9:45 link pattern and go oh yeah this was made for SEO you know oh this one was an attempt at negative SEO google sees

9:52 patterns like that's all that their machine learning systems do is find the patterns and learn to get good at

9:58 predicting what is uh what is real and what's not so uh yeah so I I don't think

10:03 disavow is uh a good practice today yeah so the only practice which we find makes

10:09 more sense is when you see the rankings going down go put it all the back links in HFS see if anybody any of the links

10:17 have uh any of the domains have traffic less than 100 just get those link removes all that's all we do I mean I

10:23 don't think anything else matters so we just I mean even that I think Google probably just ignores those but uh it's

10:30 hard to say it's super hard to prove too uh because you know you got to share all your data with everyone or If you're

10:37 creating a site to do a test on well it's not a real site to start with you know so uh it's tricky definitely right

10:45 right now uh so how has your perspective on SEO changed over the years especially

How has your perspective on SEO evolved over the years?

10:50 as Google algorithm have become more AIdriven yeah so I mentioned I had an agency and

10:58 we and you met some of my team members um we had a fantastic time i mean what

11:03 we did we we had 12 people that all we did was do site audits and site reviews

11:09 and for a period of time we had incredible success so today everybody

11:14 has heard of EAT uh back in 2017 that's when I first started hiring team members

11:21 uh and it was just EAT then there were things that you could do you know you could you could add structured data you

11:27 could um even you know beef up your author bios actually hire people with expertise all of these things to um

11:35 improve uh and we had many many sites that uh saw nice improvements then

11:41 um I want to say like between 2020 maybe 2021 we were seeing fewer and fewer

11:47 returns now some of that is because sites that were lacking eat and just surviving based on SEO knowledge were

11:54 were knocked out of the SERs so what was left was like actual legitimate businesses right um but something else

12:02 was happening so when we do our site reviews and even today when I do my site reviews what I do is I look at who did

12:08 Google's algorithms elevate at the time that the site I'm reviewing declined right that's what they tell you to do in

12:13 their helpful content guidance and it was super obvious that there was one

12:18 specific pattern uh that and and it was something that you can't fix with SEO

12:24 and honestly it was that the page that Google was elevating was in some way more helpful now we can argue about that

12:31 like you know because I can look at a page and go "Well I think this is helpful." And you might not think it's helpful but Google's got data right that

12:37 shows we saw in the DOJ versus Google trial that um uh nav boost that uh you

12:44 know user engagement signals are used like Google can tell when people click back to the search results and um and

12:50 it's not a straightforward black and white algorithm like they they have all these signals to use to determine

12:56 whether people are actually finding these pages helpful so businesses we'd say um here's the problem you know you

13:04 have this content that was written you have so much content that was written by people lacking expertise that is like

13:11 essentially the same as everybody else's content on the internet why would Google want to rank you well when in the past

13:17 we had tricks that could do that you know we could get links we could we could optimize certain things and make

13:22 it look to Google like this was the best page so what happened was then in 2022

13:29 uh Danny Sullivan from Google contacted me and he said "We have this new change coming out can we talk to you about it?"

13:35 And I'm like "Of course." Like it's not every day that Google wants to talk to you about an algorithm up there right

13:40 and uh so that was they didn't say the name at first uh they said they were

13:47 going to call it the SEO first update instead they it was Barry Schwarz

13:52 convinced them not to do that they named it the helpful content update and what

13:57 happened was I don't think it actually targeted sites that used SEO but what happened is as Google used AI and

14:04 machine learning to um predict which pages people were likely to find helpful

14:09 then things that used to work in the name of SEO became less and less helpful and so that's why what we were seeing

14:16 was these sites that thrived off of um one of the most common things that we

14:22 saw in sites that were impacted by HCU was uh they'd take all the people also asks which is not a bad thing to do like

14:30 you can get inspiration from those uh and then they would like write whole blog posts based on the people also asks

14:35 which in the past would look good to machines because it's it's relevant it's

14:41 it's you know semantic relevant it's similar in any ways um but not necessarily the thing that's the most

14:47 helpful for people so what uh you asked you know what what was the biggest change or you know was the even downfall

14:54 of uh SEO was was AI that AI is being used in uh many machine learning systems

15:01 in Google uh to predict what users are likely to find helpful which means that

15:07 there are fewer and fewer SEO tricks and tactics that can be used which is really really hard so so I was saying to

15:14 clients you know you need to invest in original content and and these are all sites that had you know plummeted their

15:20 revenue had dropped uh and so it's very hard to sell people on uh you know go

15:25 out and spend millions of dollars on uh original content change your whole business model this and that uh and so a

15:31 lot of SEO driven sites uh declined um while you know real businesses that uh

15:38 have the money to invest in uh I don't want to say real businesses because those websites were real uh businesses

15:44 to to them but real world businesses that had uh a presence outside of search had a much better chance

15:51 and I think after HCU the only thing which helped was that uh Google started introducing a factor called brand

15:57 authority which means that if you are being searched as a brand which now of course people try to manipulate as well

16:04 but we seen very direct correlation if there's a brand there are lesser chances that you you would get a better rankings

16:10 right it's Yeah it's interesting because I don't know that Google's ever like specifically said there's brand

16:16 authority i know Eric Schmidt when he was CEO of Google said uh brands are how Google sorts out the cesspool um that

16:23 was many years ago though i I really do think uh a lot of what we call brand

16:28 authority is really just people recognizing your brand uh and so you're going to have um you know of course

16:35 Amazon has a better chance of ranking over maybe a a shop that has better products but uh it's because people

16:42 recognize the brand and then shop with who they recognize um and then you know there was an age I think we're just

16:48 ending in this age where people could try to manipulate brand authority uh and you could manipulate EAT that you could

16:55 uh create these fake authors and um you know yeah which like it you know has fewer

17:02 thankfully fewer and fewer returns now um but there's always going to be SEOs trying to manipulate i mean think this

17:09 way seo's job is to manipulate i mean honestly well maybe it's I mean it's to

17:16 that's actually a really profound thing to say i I think that SEO is but end of

17:22 the day I'm trying to rank my client website trying to beat I'm trying to beat the system so I can sugar whatever

17:29 but that's what I'm doing i mean I can sugarcoat okay I'm trying to give helpful content blah blah but tomorrow

17:35 another update comes and I'm back to trying to fix how I can quickly get the client yeah I mean you're understanding

17:40 how the algorithms work and then reacting to it right and uh yeah I think manipulation

17:46 because the word manipulation is in Google spam guidelines right like if you're manipulating you're going against

17:53 the guidelines which like you know what if it works for your client that's cool but there's always risk there but I

17:59 think you can still do SEO without manipulating you know you can optimize uh user experience you can optimize page

18:05 speed you can um you can create like truly content that's like so original

18:10 and unique that uh but is really hard to do you know because we I I actually feel like Google has used us as content

18:17 creators and SEOs um because for years we had this opportunity that we could uh

18:22 you know take the world's information package it into blog posts and then monetize it either with affiliate links

18:28 or with ads or whatever and um and now Google's got all the world's information

18:34 and all it really needs is like the new interesting original stuff that's why it's getting harder and harder to uh uh

18:41 to rank in ways that aren't manipulation right right right right all right so um

What are AI agents and their impact on the web?

18:49 enough we talk about the rank manipulations we're going to move to another section which is of course a hot topic these days is the AI so uh the

18:58 rise of AI agents and changing web that's what we got this segment is now AI agents are being called the next big

19:04 revolution in how we interact with the web uh for those new to the concept how would you define an AI agent and what

19:11 makes them fundamentally different from the traditional automation tool so an AI

19:16 agent is um AI that can take action it doesn't have to be necessarily

19:22 autonomous like you can you can tell it what action to take but it can take action on your behalf um and uh it can

19:30 take action even when you're not uh present there and so one of the examples

19:35 of an AI agent that many of us have used is the deep research that comes in Gemini and in chat GPT and and in Grock

19:42 as well and that is not just doing search it's actually browsing the web so

19:48 when you research a topic it will browse the web it'll find a link and go "Oh that actually I need to find more about

19:54 that." And it'll click that link and um and it will act almost like an assistant on your behalf so um have you used uh uh

20:03 OpenAI's operator yet uh yes I think I had used operator right it's pretty wild

20:09 right yes it it's a it's an agent that um uses

20:14 So basically you give it a command and it uses a browser somewhere in California uh that um will take actions

20:21 on my behalf so I can ask it do a Google search for my client's keywords tell me

20:27 what SER features are there and whether they rank in those SER features and then make a report for me there's uh you know

20:33 my assistant goes off does this work saves me a ton of time um I uh I'm going

20:39 to IO uh very soon and I um asked operator to find me flights and then I

20:46 uh did it myself and I came up with the same flight that operator found me and and then I asked it for hotels same

20:53 thing it and then it said do you want me to book the hotel for you which I was a little bit nervous about doing so I

20:58 didn't let it do it but but very soon that will be common place that a lot of the things you know whether it's

21:04 shopping whether uh it's researching for information um instead of us using

21:10 search we're going to send our agent and our agent might be Gemini it might be chatbt it might be like some personal

21:16 agent that we've coded ourselves um on open- source software uh and and that

21:23 agent will go out and gather what we need and then bring it back to us basically so OpenAI operator is uh so

What is Google’s Project Mariner?

21:31 you can you can only use it if you're one of the enthusiastic people that pay the $200 a month for uh for OpenAI's

21:37 plans um but uh soon Google is coming out with their own version which I

21:42 haven't heard many people talk about so Sunder Pachai mentioned uh CEO of Google

21:48 mentioned project mariner is what it's called and the difference is instead of using uh an external browser somewhere

21:54 in another city it actually uses your browser and will do things on your behalf and in a talk recently Sunder PCI

22:02 said that within two to three years um agents like project mariner will be

22:07 deeply embedded into our workflows that's kind of hard to to grasp right that like um you that I'm going to just

What is Google’s Agent Space?

22:15 have this assistant that can go off and do things for me so that's one thing the

22:21 browser agent but then agents will start to do things for your business so Google

22:26 announced agent space which is for large enterprises that um it starts off with

22:32 like you have all your documents and your data um and maybe you have an agent that is your onboarding agent and you

22:39 hire a new employee and the onboarding agent coordinates uh talking with the HR agent and the payroll agent um and you

22:47 know all of those they might have humans somewhere involved but a lot of the work

22:53 like all the paperwork and the stuff that like you really don't need a human to do paperwork uh is going to be done

What is Google’s Customer Engagement Suite?

22:59 by the agents so that's agent space and then they also announced uh customer

23:04 engagement suite which I don't know if you saw the video of the guy from Google who was buying stuff at um a garden

23:11 center and uh and then this chatbot comes up and it's like a real life sounding lifelike sounding voice and the

23:18 chatbot's like "Uh oh I think you have the wrong soil in your your cart can you show me what flowers you're planting?"

23:24 And they switch to video and the guy shows his patunia and the chatbot's like "Oh no no you need a different soil for

23:30 that." And like so it's it's changing how we're going to interact with e-commerce websites but even more

23:38 exciting beyond that see and this is like too much to to to comprehend almost is the business agents so Google uh

What is Google’s Agent Development Kit?

23:45 released just recently agent development kit where anybody can build these agents that uh accomplish tasks and um they can

23:53 use tools so they can connect with any API you know maybe search console or uh whatever and um and then they can do

24:01 stuff on their behalf so I could have multiple agents like let's say I have a

24:07 content optimizing agent and I have a traffic drop assessment agent and it's

24:12 basically you know just prompts that I've put in and tools that I've I've coded uh and it connects with different

24:18 APIs and whatever then you let's say you have a difficult traffic drop you're

24:24 assessing right now you could reach out to me and you know we could consult and one-on-one but if I have an agent I

24:32 could consult with thousands of people you know in a day uh using all my strategy and my advice and so soon

24:40 businesses Google says in their recent blog post that every business will have multiple agents and we will have they

24:48 developed something called the agentto agent framework which I think is um how the web is going to completely change

24:54 that much of what is done today uh will not need humans that it'll be my agent

25:00 talking to your agent um and your agent has access to all these like you have your whole list of agents that like you

25:07 use in your workflow um and my agent might be like well you know what that would actually be helpful for Marie so

25:13 I'm going to I'm going to connect with that agent and there will be a marketplace uh where we can charge for

25:19 those agents So I'll stop there because there's a lot of a lot of stuff but the the entirety

25:24 of the web uh is is soon about to change so so just so so so now uh of course so

How will AI agents change user interactions with websites?

25:32 how do you see AI agents changing the way user interacts with website and will the web be designed more for agents than

25:40 for humans in the coming years yeah it's interesting because Google tells us that we're supposed to create content for

25:45 people first right people first is what the uh uh what the helpful content um

25:51 updates were all about and yet I really think that we're moving to a world where most interaction on the web is done with

25:58 uh with agents and so um yeah there's this controversy right now over is

26:04 optimizing for language models uh any different than SEO and we we you know we

26:09 haven't really decided on what we're going to call that and um and I think the reason why we haven't decided is

26:14 because we haven't actually seen what this new we're like people in the time when when electricity first started

26:20 being used you know we can see like wow it can make lights up when like we could

26:25 never foresee what you and I are doing right now right so how do we plan for this world that like we can't comprehend

26:32 just yet um but I do think that what our our I mean as long as there are businesses that need to be found there's

26:39 a need for people like us who advise on how to do that and I think a lot of what we do today optimizing for uh for people

26:48 for design uh things like that will switch to being optimal for for agents

26:54 uh and so you want to make it so that your your data that is important to people is easy to find this agentto

27:00 agent protocol every agent has a card um it's just like a little name tag

27:05 basically and it's in JSON uh that says here's here's what I do um and what I

27:11 can accomplish and so I think optimizing your agent is going to be something that's important and I think uh it's

27:18 going to be difficult for a lot of businesses but also it'll open up great opportunities for for those who

27:24 understand what's going on because what I predict is going to happen is right now of all the people that are using AI

27:31 like pretty much everybody I know has used AI in some source some sense right and like Google Apple OpenAI all these

27:40 companies are putting billions of dollars into AI yet I don't know too many people that are actually making

27:46 real money you know from from this new technology so like there's a disconnect

27:51 there and I think it's because these companies know what's coming so I think there's going to be a tipping point

27:57 where people start to make real money off of AI agents and when that happens

28:02 you're going to see that those businesses uh do extremely well and then

28:08 it'll be like um the businesses who don't want to accept AI who don't want to have an AI agent uh will be kind of

28:15 like if we try to operate without a phone today you know like you would be behind so um so I think we're going to

28:22 see a tipping point where all of a sudden there's huge money to be made and uh but it's so vague right now because

28:27 like we only know a little piece of uh of what the future holds yeah well just

What are personalized shopping results?

28:33 just a day back uh OpenAI introduced shopping in their chat so that's something and then of course the agent

28:41 is bound to follow on right yeah and it's interesting i was checking that out uh and the shopping results in OpenAI so

28:49 we know OpenAI uses Bing's index but the shopping results were not ranked in the

28:54 same order for me at least for the the things that I searched so it's going to become very personalized and uh chatbt

29:02 um has memory and they recently announced that now there's memory across all your chats uh and then Gemini as

29:09 well well now it's just one version of Gemini that can access your your search history if you give it permission um but

29:15 eventually that's what our agents are going to be is like you know so if I'm out in my garden and uh I'm trying to

29:22 figure out what fertilizer I need you know my AI agent knows what plants I've

29:28 planted you know we've had all these conversations on how to plant them and um and so when I'm like "Okay I need to

29:34 buy something to put in this bed here." And also we haven't talked about wearables like all the AI is going to be

29:39 in glasses so I'll be out in my garden just looking at the garden going "What do I need?" And you know my AI whether

29:46 it's Chachi or Gemini is going to be like "Well you know the leaves look a little yellow and uh I'll put all the

29:51 things together it probably needs fertilizer here's the products I recommend uh that are closest to you do

29:57 you want me to buy one?" And then you know I haven't touched a computer but I

30:02 can say to my agent "Yeah sure get me you know," and it's like "Oh Walmart has it." And they deliver and then that

30:08 afternoon I have fertilizer in my hand so that's a different web right that uh

30:13 uh that um we're optimizing for what you know for for for machines right so so so

30:22 of course then I mean websites will become uh less relevant if AI agent has

30:28 to create content for users or is there another way you see it i think a lot of websites will be less relevant um I mean

30:38 I'm trying to think of what like I I still surf the web today but more and

30:43 more I get information from AI like even uh so in my newsletter if I'm trying to

30:48 write news stories about what's happening in AI I have this whole routine I start off in Google news and

30:54 then I go to social media and uh and then I end up on on websites um but

30:59 lately what's helping me is both chatbt and grock that I will say you know

31:04 what's the what's interesting in AI and it gives me the whole story right there now I still go to the website because I

31:11 need to reference it in my in my newsletter but I I don't think we're far from the day where the vast majority of

31:17 what we currently get off of a screen on a website uh we will not want um from

31:24 there now um you know if you're a store I there will be people that still want

31:29 to browse like uh but you know maybe that's done through our agent as well like if I'm wanting to plant a certain

31:36 type of I have this arch that I want to plant seeds on right and so yeah I might

31:41 want to go to a store and browse what you have but even better would be if my agent can say "Well there's five stores

31:47 near you and here's what all of them have and I can browse through my agent and I didn't have to go to their

31:52 website." Right so yeah I think a lot of what we know about websites is is going to change now could this lead to a new

How to optimize for the agent evolution?

32:00 SEO matrix for example optimizing for an agent evolution versus a human search behavior i I 100% believe so yes yeah

32:09 and again I think it's too hard to predict it's not um there's all this talk about you know are we optimizing

32:14 for chatbt i had somebody contact me today to say like how can you make me rank better in chat GPT i it's so hard

32:22 because it's essentially gathering all of the signals that it has available to

32:27 it and then determining for each individual user what's best and we won't

32:32 be optimizing for keywords like um you know nobody's going to well maybe people

32:40 type something like best running shoes into chat GBT but really what's going to happen is I'm going to have a

32:45 conversation saying like I'm going to start running and you know help me figure this out and oh by the way what

32:50 shoes do I get you know right uh and so like keywords are are we're going to have a real problem in trying to track

32:57 uh what's and try to track and optimize because we don't know what people are searching and I can't track it right

33:04 yeah exactly i I think attribution is going to be a nightmare i mean it already is but

33:11 it already is my clients think how can I be in here in here and I says so it's

33:16 difficult because we have to tell them that it's not searching it has its database so it's it's not a real life

33:23 thing it has it's not a search engine it's just taking a data from Bing or whatever it is in their database so I

33:29 can't switch it on overnight it's not going to happen like that yeah what I like to do is look at like who is

33:36 getting recommended um for the like I'll have a conversation about my client's

33:41 product and then say "Can you recommend some clients?" And then um and then you can ask the LLM like "Why did you

33:49 recommend them over this site?" Uh but the thing is that it's not always going to be 100% right so you know it might

33:56 recommend it might just make something up right but you can get ideas and um

34:01 and a lot of the time what it's recommending are brands like we just talked about uh and that's tough you

34:07 know like I I so how do you get seen amongst the brands like you basically

34:13 have to build a reputation uh as the the go-to place for this type of product or

34:18 information um which is brand building uh essentially yeah

34:23 because then there is no going to be 10 results it's just going to be one result so that's uh the challenge yeah uh and

Google AI mode vs. traditional search: What’s the difference?

34:30 and lately I also seen that when you are speak uh uh chatting with chat GPT it

34:37 doesn't end the conversation it always keeps it open okay how about this so

34:42 I've seen it in last one month that it's not ending the conversation it keeps on suggesting one or the other thing keep I

34:49 mean when you try with any other chat any other LLM they just end what you ask

34:54 they just end it but here in chat GPT the difference is it keeps on asking okay I wrote this do you want me to

35:00 create social media for you do you want me to do that and it actually prompts okay it's just gonna take me a It's just

35:06 gonna take a minute it's like that it's it's

35:11 with that brings up a good point because uh I don't know if you've played with Google's new AI mode much but it's an

35:18 experiment in search labs so when AI overviews first came out uh they started

35:24 as an experiment in labs and now there's AI mode and it's different than AI overviews it's a whole new search engine

35:31 essentially so if I search for best running shoes um right now in search uh

35:38 you know Google's going to understand the keywords in the query the concepts that are important and then find me websites that are are likely to be

35:45 relevant in AI mode what happens is they use something called a query fan out technique and they don't they they

35:52 figure out what is your next question going to be you know uh and some of that is based on your personal history so if

35:59 I ask best running shoes it's going to know the city that I live in it's going to know uh you know some of my search

36:05 history perhaps even eventually be personalized to like understanding what

36:10 kind of colors I like what like like everything about me right and so AI mode

36:15 produces a gigantic AI overview type answer um and links to websites but it's

36:21 completely different than uh than what you see in traditional search and you

36:26 have the ability to ask follow-up questions so I think that AI mode and Gemini will essentially merge um and I

36:34 think that uh for those who use Google Assistant if you have Android devices or in your car or on your television um

36:42 that this is going to be the new search is uh kind of like starting off as AI

36:48 and then when needed we'll show you a website uh which is going to be a big change yeah and I don't know really how

36:55 Google is going to monetize and how SEO is going to fit in the picture so that's still a little hazy for me i'm not

37:02 worried about Google monetizing that Sergey Brin uh had a thing a little while back he was at a hackathon for

What is the future of advertising?

37:09 Gemini and I don't know his exact words so I don't want to misquote him but uh

37:14 he said for 25 years we've had this great deal where we've given people search for free uh paid by advertising

37:22 and it sort of implied to me I don't think advertising is going to end like there's there's obviously it's Google's

37:28 biggest revenue generator um but uh he said if the product is good enough and

37:33 he was talking about Gemini at the time if the product is good enough then the business model will sort itself out now

37:40 if we go back to this idea of agents if every business has multiple agents those multiple agents need to run on AI and so

37:47 I need to be buying uh compute from Google i need to be paying for the AI

37:53 that uh is powering all of my AI agents and we already saw I I don't know the exact numbers but in Google's last

37:59 earnings call uh the revenue from cloud is going up and up and up every every

38:05 earnings call um and so I I do think first we're going to see that uh AI

38:11 becomes a bigger source of revenue than advertising and second that advertising completely changes that um AI will make

38:19 it so that uh instead of me seeing a banner ad for buy these running shoes uh

38:24 you know it's going to be like hey do you want to talk to our running shoe agent who uh you know can can walk you

38:30 through the whole process or our our shoe fitting agent that you know you just put a put your foot up and it and

38:36 it tells you what's best like um we're in for a whole new world of interactivity within advertising so a

38:43 lot is going to change right now let's Let's come back to what today we have is

38:49 and uh specifically Google AI overviews and changing search behaviors we're

38:54 going to this segment we're going to talk more about that now you have analyzed Google AI overviews extensively

What are the key takeaways from Google AI overviews?

39:00 and Google's new AI mode is already changing the look and feel of search results with longer more citations heavy

39:07 answers and a focus on local intent now what are the most important changes for SEO and marketers to understand here

39:15 so AI overviews right now the vast majority that I've seen have been informational and we see all these

39:22 studies that say oh when AI overviews are there your clicks are going to reduce there are other studies though

39:27 that show that if you're linked within the AI overview for a lot of queries your clicks actually improve um but I've

39:34 heard one thing consistently with the clients that I've analyzed AI overviews for and that's that it's not really

39:40 affecting their bottom line and so a lot of the time the AI overview answers the

39:45 questions that have common knowledge in the world and yes they might draw it from your your website just like a

39:51 featured snippet would would draw an answer it's really just a long featured snippet um but so far uh in the clients

39:59 that I have AI overviews have not really made a big difference like it's almost like a vanity thing that I want to be

40:05 the site that's linked to in there and we've done some tests i I managed to get uh some sites in AI overviews and then

40:12 Google changed the whole it's constantly changing how they're doing it uh and then we dropped out again um and so

40:18 right now for AI overviews I'd just be looking at uh where do we appear there's

40:23 a bunch of tools that can can tell you that um and do we appear for any queries

40:28 that really matter to our revenue um that will change though because Google

40:34 has said that they're uh they're they're going to be introducing commercial queries and I think they need to get it

40:40 right like the biggest news about AI overviews is the mistakes that they make and this is a part of how AI works it

40:46 works by reinforcement learning which means you need to you need to do well to be like they're not it's not like we

40:53 always tell them oh great answer Google like but we tell them with our clicks you know if we if an AI overview is good

40:59 and then we interact with the websites that it gives us like that's a sign that it did well um if it's bad uh like

41:07 somebody going to do another search or um and a lot of these ones that are bad are people just putting in nonsense

41:12 queries that like nobody would have searched for anyways uh and that teaches the AI overviews to to become better so

41:19 as they get better and as Google's language models get better one day we'll look back at I I think we'll look back

41:25 at like laughingly at at how bad they were so when they get good Google's going to start to be putting in more

41:32 commercial queries i've seen a couple of them where uh it was a product review so

41:37 you know if you were like looking comparing bicycles um the AI AI overview

41:43 actually showed like five different bicycles uh and links where you can buy them uh as well and so that's when we

41:50 need to be monitoring what's happening and the tough thing is like they're so hard to monitor for multiple reasons

41:57 like number one they change repeatedly um Google changes how the tools can

42:02 access them like uh they change the the make the markup of the you know the way

42:07 they're using JavaScript or or whatever um and then also the way that people search is changing like I find myself if

42:14 I'm using AI mode I'm doing much longer queries uh than I would you know uh with

42:21 very specific like I want to if right now if I searched on Google for like I want a bike that's this color this many

42:28 speed you know it's a mountain bike it's good on whatever like you're not going

42:33 to get a good search result but in AI mode you can so uh so that's going to be

42:38 really hard for us to to monitor i I don't really know the answer to how we uh how we track what's going on in there

42:44 so what I'm advising um my clients and the people who uh learn from from me and

42:50 with me in the search bar my community um is uh just monitor monitor what's

42:55 happening take a bunch of screenshots monitor what's changed um and that's kind of the best we can do right now so

43:01 that when it does start impacting our our bottom line uh then we have a little bit more insight um than than others who

43:09 haven't been monitoring now uh uh how do you see AI mode

How does AI mode impact traditional SEO?

43:15 impacting traditional blue blue link SEO strategies should agencies rethink how

43:20 they approach content and visibility so AI mode tries to find content that

43:26 meets the entire search journey and one of the things that I've seen again it

43:31 keeps changing though i I was going to do a video on this one uh site that I've been monitoring and rank nowhere in

43:38 search and then they were ranking number one in AI mode for a term that brings them a lot of money uh and then uh and

43:44 then the next day when I went to shoot the video it had changed again so they they weren't there but that post that

43:49 made them a lot of money um walks the it's a travel query and it takes you

43:55 through like everything you'd want to know um not just here's the top 10

44:01 places to visit in this city like those posts don't do well anymore because

44:07 there's you know many people writing about the top 10 places but what I want to know is like what are the what do

44:14 most people do like where do they go and what are the super interesting places and what's the weather going to be like

44:20 and like like a bunch of things so so if you're trying to optimize for AI mode first monitor what is showing up um and

44:28 start to look at what searcher needs they meet uh there's a a guy from Bing

44:33 named Frederick Daboo who a couple of years ago he did an interview at a conference and uh there's a very short

44:40 clip on YouTube where he said SEOs are going to need to change from keyword

44:45 research to intent research and that's the key really is understanding what

44:50 your audience wants and then meeting their need because a lot of what the way

44:55 we do SEO today is looking at what currently ranks and trying to be a little bit better and and and you know

45:03 Google doesn't need more of what currently ranks so one of the things is finding the gaps um there's a a great

45:09 patent from Google on information gain and uh I really think if you look at the

45:14 search results whether it's in AI mode AI overviews whatever it's interesting to see how often the results will meet a

45:21 slightly different need like if it's a recipe like oh this one is vegan and this one is uh you know cheap

45:28 ingredients and and this one's quick to make uh and it kind of makes sense right because like if I go to the library and

45:34 I want 10 books on like 10 of the same recipe I want uh

45:41 a variety of things that are that's going to help me so so that's what I would say is like really focus on um

45:48 looking at user intent not just transactional versusformational but like deep what

45:54 does your customer want to know and then meeting that need all right now uh given your expertise uh

What is E-A-T and its relation to Neuralink?

46:03 in EAT how do you think Google AIdriven results will evaluate and surface trustworthy content yeah

46:11 so let me tell you a funny story i So I was at Google IO last year and I didn't

46:17 know anybody there that's because it's their developer conference and I'm like I play with code but I'm not a developer

46:22 i'm like why did you invite me here and I sat down for lunch and this guy sits next to me and I thought he looks kind

46:28 of familiar well it's Jeff Dean the head of AI at Google the guy who wrote like hundreds of papers on ranking on like of

46:36 all the people to talk to it was just fascinating and so we had this big long talk about multiple things about the

46:42 brain and about AI and then at the end of the conference I saw him again and I asked him this question i thought it was

46:48 kind of unfair to ask but I was like what do I do with my life because I

46:54 spent all these years studying EAT now EAT and I don't think my life's purpose

47:00 forgive me like if this it belittles anyone but I don't think my life's purpose is to just make one website rank

47:05 higher than another website like I think for most SEOs we're training for

47:10 something we're we're we're you know we're understanding something that very few in the world understand and the

47:17 reason is this is where we're going to get a little bit kind of crazy sounding here is that right now we're in this

47:24 transition where like agents are going to start doing things for us you've probably heard of um uh Neuralink Elon

47:32 Musk's brain implants right which sounds kind of crazy like would you go out and get a brain implant i mean some people I

47:38 ask are like "Yeah I would totally do that." But like most of us are not going to get brain surgery to put AI in our

47:43 brains um although just last week somebody developed a brain computer interface that just goes under the skin

47:49 on your scalp you don't need brain surgery and it can interpret your thoughts where I'm going with this is

47:55 that we are moving towards the day where AI is integrated with our our thoughts

48:02 and it is so important for us to be able to trust what comes in and goes out like

48:09 via because I was thinking the other day about Chachi PT's memory it's going to

48:15 get mixed in with my memory like the other day I asked Chachi PT

48:20 uh what was that recipe you gave me for muscles and I can't remember what the ne the last last ingredient was and then

48:27 chat on my screen said oh yeah don't forget the coconut milk or whatever it

48:32 was um soon like for people who choose to to have some type of an implant some

48:38 type even if it's a wearable even if it's just glasses it will just become part of our normal thinking pattern that

48:45 we're like oh what was that last ingredient click let me check my AI memory and we sort of merge together

48:52 where like AI is a part of what I do so if that happens which I can't see why it

48:59 wouldn't it's the progression of where we're going it's so important that what is given to us in AI is is is

49:06 trustworthy is is good so Google has been developing this concept of eat

How does Google determine trustworthiness?

49:11 since before the days of Panda that came out in 2011 um and you you asked like

49:17 how will they know with AI i think that EAT is um many many signals that are

49:24 being used uh and um they use machine learning to continually refine upon uh

49:32 how they do that so I have this theory i don't know if this is true this might be like another uh crazy Tim Foil hat

49:39 theory but for a while um AI generated content was ranking like really well and

49:45 you could you could spam out thousands of AI generated posts on like you know you take a topic have AI make a topical

49:53 map for you produce a million posts and you're printing money basically right it's much harder to do now but um I

50:00 actually believe that Google allowed us not us I didn't do it allowed SEOs to to

50:06 do that so that they could train and learn because they needed like you you

50:13 don't need like just 10 examples you need millions of examples of what's good and what's uh legitimate honest

50:19 trustworthy um and what's just you know made to make money on the internet and

50:25 so anyways I I like to ask how is Google going to determine what's trustworthy

50:30 really it's machine learning it's seeing examples of good and bad uh the quality raers uh do that in their rating now

50:37 they've been Did you see the thing uh where um John Mueller had said uh there

50:43 was a slide that said you know AI quality raers are now going to be asked whether content is completely AI

50:49 generated but the part that didn't get highlighted in that quote from the Raider guidelines is not it doesn't

50:54 matter that it's AI generated it's AI generated with little to no effort um and not helpful to people uh and so um

51:02 the quality raers are there to sort of uh assess whether Google's algorithms

51:07 are producing things that are trustworthy so I don't I I don't think I completely answered that because like I

51:14 don't think if we knew the secret sauce as to how Google determines that then you know that would be dangerous uh but

51:20 they're continually improving on that and the reason I believe is because like one day AI like it's kind of crazy to

51:28 think that AI will mesh with our personhood but it it already is

51:33 happening like imagine living your life without your phone uh you know it's a part of you essentially right so it soon

51:40 will be yeah i I mean we all are using AI so much i know that right uh you

What are the January Quality Rater Guidelines updates?

51:46 talked about quality rator guidelines now what were the biggest surprises for you in the January 25 quality guidelines

51:54 update especially around AI generated content yeah so they mentioned a lot

52:00 more about AI they kind of gave it a definition of of what AI generated content was and then they mentioned in

52:06 several places uh AI generated content however the whole point it was always

52:12 about the effort put into it um and the like the intention behind it basically

52:18 uh and so Google's got a big long blog post on what's acceptable for using AI

52:23 and they don't they basically say it doesn't matter who created it um as long as it's helpful so uh whenever I create

52:30 content every piece of content I create to some extent is AI has helped me create it but I rarely just say go write

52:38 me an article on this um you know like that's that's just going to regurgitate

52:43 what's already known but I might say like take this research article and pull

52:49 out what's important and then put it into layman's terms so I can put it in my article that type of thing so the

52:55 raider guidelines yes the raiders are being asked to uh uh to look at um

53:00 whether they think something was generated by AI but really it's about whether it's lowquality the the other

53:06 thing that was surprising to me in the Raider guidelines was there was new stuff added about filler content um and

53:12 you see that in recipe sites and one of the examples they gave was a recipe site that had like loads of stuff before you

53:18 actually get down to the the thing you came for um I don't think that's related to AI but uh very important i think

53:25 we're gonna whenever something's added to the Raider guidelines usually within a couple of updates we see changes uh in

53:32 the core systems that reflect what the raiders were being asked to to look at so it's worth paying attention to yeah

53:39 that that's a good point because otherwise why are they being asked to look into exactly yeah yeah yeah a

How do Google's updates reflect in the SERP?

53:46 couple of updates ago in the Raider guidelines they uh updated uh guidance on forums and then when we saw uh so I

53:54 think that change was made in November last year and then the most recent core update in March many forum sites uh were

54:00 impacted and so it makes sense that and I I've looked at quite a few and it's really interesting to see like people

54:06 were like oh Google loves Reddit and therefore Reddit's going to win for everything but when you look at the

54:12 actual posts for Reddit that got boosted above um another forum and you look at like

54:18 how well it actually meets the need that people wanted uh the Reddit post is usually better so I think Google's

54:25 getting better at figuring out which content uh is the one that people would want to land on to get their question answered

54:31 in fact so is the case that now a lot of people append their queries with word Reddit just to get the right type of

54:38 results so if in a hurry I would rather put Reddit and read that thread rather

54:44 than going and getting all through artificial content yeah exactly right and I think a lot of us have written

54:50 content assuming that we have these readers these magical readers that read every word that we write you know um and

54:57 that was good for us like for SEO for many years because search engines read every word on the page and and figure

55:03 out what to prioritize figure out what the page is about but if you think of like how we search on the web we have

55:09 very short attention spans and we if we're trying to find something if I'm standing in front of my fridge and I'm

55:14 like "What do I make with chicken today?" And I um and I look at a few websites and I you know I just quickly

55:20 see like "Is my answer on this page?" No I'll go to another website actually for for recipes though I use AI for almost

55:26 all my recipes now which I I it's sad to say because I have a lot of friends who uh create recipe websites but uh but

55:34 Gemini is really good at making recipes wow i'll try myself i I I still am going

What was Britney's experience with AI-generated recipes?

55:40 to the websites and using the recipes yeah you should try it it's like I I think I've had one I've probably made

55:47 300 things with like I go between Gemini Chat JBT and Grock grock makes pretty good well they all make good recipes and

55:54 I had one bread recipe from Gemini that didn't work out but like pretty much everything else was amazing and then you

56:00 can say you know oh I want this but with healthier ingredients or with you know my my favorite thing is to say make it

56:07 as tasty as possible and then it goes back and it's like oh you could add Dijon mustard and you could add this and

56:13 that and like it it's really a neat experience if you if you can trust uh that you're going to get a good result

56:19 from it that's the only thing my my kids going to eat so I I don't know how it's going to end up so I just try to play

56:24 safe yeah yeah yeah yeah understandable yeah but uh no I I don't know maybe I'm

56:30 the only one who does that but I I have had great success with the AI generated recipes

56:36 all right all right now uh given the evolving landscape do you think authority will matter more than

Will authority matter more than backlinks in SEO?

56:42 traditional backlink profiles in ranking decisions i I think that Google's use of

56:48 backlinks has changed dramatically over the years um I think with every single core update backlinks become less and

56:55 less important it's not that they mean nothing uh but Google gets better at

57:00 figuring out um I mean why do we get links links are a vote for our content

57:06 and uh for a while you could you know you could create all these micro sites you could create your own uh blog

57:12 network and then link to your content and and it would fool Google into thinking oh lots of people think this

57:18 content is about this keyword anchor that keeps getting used um you know like I think we're beyond those days i think

57:25 that links uh work for a couple of reasons um they're important to get your content discovered and this is why I

57:32 I've had these arguments and this great passion over the years on the importance

57:37 of links because I have friends that wear white hats and black hats like and

57:43 um the black hats are like you're a fool if you think that links don't matter

57:48 links are like everything and the white hats who are like legitimately are ranking websites are like we haven't had

57:55 success with link building in years here's the difference if you're a black hat you're probably more likely to be

58:01 working on a website that that only exists for the purpose of search and um

58:07 that means that it's harder to get it found and so if I'm a white hat that's working on a business that gets

58:13 mentioned you know in the press or like social media or whatever Google can see like there are there's evidence of

58:19 people talking about it um but for a black hat website uh links are needed in

58:26 order to get attention from Google in order to get Google to crawl the the content so that's one thing then links

58:32 are also a component of EAT so uh in 2017 I asked Gary how EAT was measured

58:40 and he said it's primarily based on links and mentions and he said for example if the Washington Post mentions

58:46 you it's a good thing so I think that that's less about the link and more um

58:52 about the connections in the knowledge graph so if I um is one of the reasons why I do podcasts uh that this will be

59:00 evidence on the web that you found me worthy to talk about these subjects

59:06 right um and you know you'll maybe you'll link to my website maybe you won't but regardless like it's okay

59:14 either way is is good um regardless so uh I did an interview last week with um

59:22 97th floor Paxton Gray and he mentioned in the title of his podcast he said

59:28 Marie Haynes SEO and AI expert and didn't link with those words but it was

59:34 the podcast i looked I couldn't believe my rankings uh when I I checked my

59:39 rankings last week I was ranking um in the AI overview and number six organically for Google SEO expert which

59:47 like has not been something I've not been building that I'm not optimized like I mean I'm a little bit optimized

59:52 for it um but what I'm trying to say is the mentions uh in on the web being known as the

1:00:00 quality raider guidelines mention repeatedly being known for your topics it's reputation that matters more than

1:00:06 links so when you said authority I think if authority is um uh aligned with

1:00:12 reputation then that is true so my instead of link building I like to see

1:00:19 people switch to reputation building is like getting you known for uh the topics

1:00:25 that you're that you talk about it just it just because it because you become an

1:00:31 entity and then Google sees that for that entity right that's how if

1:00:37 I if I get mentioned in search engine land or I like I write something for

1:00:42 search engine journal or something like that like that's connecting the entities my name as an entity with the topic of

1:00:49 SEO or AI or whatever right um and so it yeah it's the whole the knowledge graph

1:00:56 is really like just connections between words and things and um and so that

1:01:01 should be our goal where but it aligns very much with links because uh the link graph is very similar and I think that

1:01:08 so here's an interesting fact Penguin was 2012 a month later less than a month

1:01:15 later was when the knowledge graph came out and um shortly after that in 2013

1:01:21 was when Google's word tovec paper came out which was the start of uh using um

1:01:28 uh language semantics of language to understand uh queries and content and so

1:01:35 Since that time period which coincidentally has been like the time that I've been in SEO so like I've been

1:01:40 able to see this grow uh Google has taken their initial

1:01:47 pageorithm which was based on the the graph of links on the web and um and and

1:01:53 changed it morphed it into an understanding of everything on the web not just the links so page rank used to

1:02:00 be the number one signal and now like there's the March core update last year Google said we brought in um new signals

1:02:08 to the algorithm and uh and so now it's kind of like everything that's available

1:02:13 okay okay so right now now uh so I I know you said

What early mistakes do businesses make when adopting AI?

1:02:21 uh for your uh clients as well as your community that it's important that they

1:02:27 continue to follow how AI and take screenshots now uh my question is what

1:02:32 are some early mistakes you see uh you have is you are seeing businesses make as they try to adopt AI powered server

1:02:41 i think one of the things it's so hard because we anybody who's interested in

1:02:47 AI can see that it's changing the world but there's this frustration because we don't know what to do like even me I I

1:02:54 use AI all day long and I feel like I'm going in a million different directions when the knowledge that I have should

1:03:00 you know I should be able to focus that laser focus on something so the number one skill that I think businesses can

1:03:06 have right now is the ability to learn is just to to to practice every day with

1:03:12 using language models and instead of focusing on where they mess up or where they they hallucinate something focus on

1:03:19 like what can you actually accomplish like for example uh I wanted to optimize an image for my website and I gave it to

1:03:27 Chatubt and I was like can you make this 800 pixels wide and optimized for the web and it was like no you need to use a

1:03:33 tool for that and then I said no no you can do it i believe in you and it whipped up some Python and uh and now I

1:03:40 have a GPT that I just pop in an image and it it optimizes for me so it's it's

1:03:46 like we're learning to speak a new language you know so try to get language models to do stuff for you um I think

1:03:53 every business should be looking at agents but also it's too early to be

1:03:58 like building them unless you're building them for the experience of like learning how to do it uh I think we're

1:04:03 going to see like great changes it's kind of like when we first heard of a website like if you built a website I

1:04:10 remember I did the um about.com hello world tutorial and like like anything

1:04:15 you build built as a website back what in in your early days like you wouldn't

1:04:20 be using today right as a as a website yeah so like a lot of it is just

1:04:25 learning um and then I think the biggest mistake that people use with AI that businesses use with AI today is trying

1:04:31 to get it to do what you think like what it will do in the future and u so using

1:04:37 it to completely write content using it as a shortcut uh for something where you're like your gut tells you really

1:04:45 like it would be better if a human did this but you're trying to to to use AI to like get ahead i've seen countless

1:04:52 cases of people um publishing large amounts of AI generated content that

1:04:57 initially takes off and then crashes uh so I I would say today's the age where

1:05:03 we are learning learning learning um and there will be benefit for those who who

1:05:09 do all that learning uh but we're not quite at the point um where AI can just

1:05:15 you know we can plug it in and it makes us millions of dollars right now now with so much change in

How do you stay ahead of the SEO curve?

1:05:21 technology how do you keep yourself and uh continuously learning and staying ahead of the curve so I made it my

1:05:28 full-time job i mean I do have clients i I say full-time job i probably have two full-time jobs i have clients but then I

1:05:35 spend every day uh learning uh and reading um the top stories in AI um and

1:05:42 what I do so remember I told you in my newsletter was uh to help tell people what Google was doing um that's what I

1:05:49 do now today is it's it's a mixture of Google news and then also AI news uh and

1:05:55 and then also just practicing with the language models i switch back and forth between Gemini and chatpt i'll use Grock

1:06:02 because I I do think that Grock uh X has uh the largest cluster of supercomputers

1:06:09 and um Grock 3.5 is coming out soon like Grock is very good considering that it was a latecomer to the to the game uh

1:06:16 and I think we need to keep an eye on it but um the new 03 from Chat GPT which

1:06:21 they just increased the usage limits even if you're uh on a free account or a

1:06:26 $20 account uh you can use more 03 is mindblowing it will use tools within

1:06:32 ChachiPT it will do deep research when it thinks it needs to do it like it will create images uh it it understands

1:06:40 images better so right now that's my my favorite one but I I would say just like do all you can just learn get the max

1:06:47 out of using the language models uh and then um to stay ahead i mean you can

1:06:52 read my newsletter that would be one thing yes thank you um and then uh and then

1:06:59 like don't be afraid to share stuff if you're somebody who like lurks on social media there's so much opportunity right

1:07:06 now for uh people who are willing to put themselves out there like I I've added a

1:07:11 few new names to my newsletter from uh mostly a few women on on LinkedIn i can't remember their names now but are

1:07:18 posting like I did this thing with 03 and it didn't work perfectly but uh here's what I got you know and um and so

1:07:25 that's how I became like why I'm on the podcast that's how I became known was I

1:07:30 was willing to try things and share things one problem that we have in our social media right now like when I first

1:07:37 started on Twitter I had a group of like maybe 30 friends that we were just talking back and forth with like oh I

1:07:42 tried this optimizing thing and now I'm on page one and like today when you share something it's like this committee

1:07:49 of pitchforks comes out with people just want to knock you down and I think half those people are bots uh that are just

1:07:56 like trying to to keep you in a bad mood or something um but I would say don't be

1:08:01 afraid to share stuff and uh and then that's how you get known because if

1:08:06 every business is going to have multiple agents and right now the number of people who thoroughly understand SEO and

1:08:14 what we know so far about agents is tiny so there's so much opportunity that's out there right now uh now uh for agency

What should agency owners do to prepare for the AI-driven future?

1:08:22 owners listening today what are the top three action they should take right now to prepare for the AIdriven future sure

1:08:29 so like I said learn to use language models um not even so much with like

1:08:35 prompting tutorials just just play around with what what you can do um I would actually say read some uh AI

1:08:42 research it's really hard um uh to get through some of these papers but you can

1:08:47 use AI to help you uh the all of the tools are really good at you know you can say like dumb it down or put it in

1:08:54 layman's terms or uh you know you can the new Gemini in you have to pay for

1:08:59 Gemini advanced for this but uh you can put in a research paper and say make a

1:09:04 game to teach me about this paper and it opens up canvas like spits out a bunch of code and you get like a a a game that

1:09:13 has that can teach you the concepts in a paper how wild is that right so so

1:09:18 Number two would be like to to read other papers be wary of the media um

1:09:24 because the media uh AI is a threat to the media for obvious reasons and so everything in the media not everything

1:09:31 but so much of the media skews negative against AI uh so don't believe all the negativity don't get um fixed on the

1:09:38 drama of who's fired and whatever like your goal is to learn what the new models are and then the third thing I

1:09:45 would say is to experiment with building things so I told you I wasn't a coder and Google invited me to their

1:09:51 development conf developer conference well now I think I kind of am a coder like it would be embarrassing if I you

1:09:58 know nobody would ever hire me for my code um but I don't know if you've heard of this term vibe coding it was coined

1:10:04 by Andre Karpathy who was one of the he was at Google and one of the founders of OpenAI eventually um and that's where

1:10:11 you use language models to help you code stuff so I started off I had I I find chat GBT works best a lot of people like

1:10:18 Claude for it uh and I just said like I don't know the first thing about I don't

1:10:23 even know where to put my code and chat GBT taught me about VS Code and like you

1:10:29 you just try to create something if you're an SEO it's really easy to connect with the search console API and

1:10:36 so like try to just get your keywords from the search console API and uh talk

1:10:42 in natural language and chat GPT will give you the code and then you put it into VS Code and then if there's an

1:10:48 error you give it back to Chat GPT and at some point you think like I'm not even needed here because you're just p

1:10:54 I'm the person who pastes stuff back and forth um but if you can learn to build

1:10:59 stuff then that's going to be a skill that's very very needed in the future

1:11:04 all right now we with this we come to the last section of our u show which is

Rapid Fire: Quick insights

1:11:10 a rapid fire question so bunch of questions you answer what comes first in your mind so let's go so your favorite

1:11:17 AI tool you use daily one ah I'm going to say chat GPT it'll change from week

1:11:23 to week but yes chatbt okay most underrated SEO tactic today

1:11:30 um understanding user intent and making that easy to find and semantically easy

1:11:37 for machines to find okay uh one technology you think will completely dis

1:11:43 disappear in the next 5 years one technology well that's a tough one i

1:11:50 don't know um I think that I don't know if it's a technology i mean I think many

1:11:55 news websites will disappear uh I don't know that I can answer that all right uh

1:12:02 personal mantra you live by oh my husband gave me this one that uh I

1:12:10 did not like it at first but I know it'll help somebody because I went through a lot of bad stuff over the last

1:12:16 few years um and it was it's not happening to you but for you pretty much

1:12:21 everything we go through in our life even if it seems like it's just crap is building you for something it's teaching

1:12:27 you something i I agree with that yes now book or podcast recommendations

1:12:33 for agency leaders say that again sorry book books or

1:12:39 podcast recommendations for agency leaders whoa okay um podcasts uh so what

1:12:46 I do for podcasts is I I go to the front page of YouTube and and just put in AI

1:12:52 and I'm mostly listening for lectures from actual AI leaders so uh what Deis

1:12:58 Sabbasis is saying um the founder of Deep Mind uh Deep Mind itself has a

1:13:04 podcast i can't remember the name of it but I would watch every episode of that um books uh Eric Schmidt has a new book

1:13:11 out right now on um it's called Genesis and then also Mustafa Sullyman uh who

1:13:19 was one of the co-founders of Deep Mind now leads AI at Microsoft has a book

1:13:24 called the coming wave i think everybody should read that it is uh about how AI

1:13:29 is going to be changing our world in dramatic ways um and it's not all like it's a good mixture of there can be some

1:13:36 bad things but also some very incredible things as well i'd recommend that all

1:13:41 right all right uh and Mary thank you so much for sharing your insights and uh

Where to find Marie?

1:13:47 for more than an hour now and where can our listeners follow your work or get in

1:13:52 touch with you for sure so I would love for everybody to join uh in our community it's at

1:13:57 community.mmariehanes.com um it's totally free where I post in SEO

1:14:02 and AI news every day uh and then there is a paid area which uh we have some fantastic discussions people that are

1:14:09 trying to build actual stuff with AI and sharing about what we're doing um and then uh my newsletter is

1:14:17 mariehannes.comnewsletter and it's about twice a month uh pretty much everything that you need to know in terms of what's

1:14:22 happening with AI and search uh is in there right i still remember when there

1:14:28 would be a new updates coming all I would do is wait for your newsletter that information and say okay

1:14:34 this is what we researched it's so wild too cuz Google like it for many years every time there was a core update it

1:14:41 was when I was traveling like it was almost you could predict like oh I'm going away in May and there's going to be maybe watch May there'll be another

1:14:48 update but I haven't traveled as much lately so uh yeah I I love following

1:14:53 what Google's doing um I don't study the core updates as much now because they

1:14:58 all are basically Google just getting better and better at their goal which is uh rewarding helpful content um so

1:15:05 there's less and less we can uh glean from it other than like just create stuff that's the best for your audience

1:15:11 and uh and then that's how you win right right right uh uh with that we come to

1:15:18 the end of our show and to everyone listening if today's episode sparked new ideas or gave you a road map for

1:15:24 navigating the future especially with AI make sure you follow Dr mary Haynes and subscribe to her newsletter for regular

1:15:31 updates i myself have been subscriber to it for more than six years now thank you and as always stay curious stay

Outro

1:15:38 resilient and keep tuning in to the Agency Insider Show for more expert conversations until next time take care