The Risks of Relying on AI Content I ft. Andy Tuxford

this week we're going to be joined by Andy tuxford our head of SEO here at exposure ninja hi Andy how you doing hi I'm doing good thanks Dale Andy what's your relationship to marketing so I've been um head of SEO with exposure D I've been working in SEO for must be about eight nine years now somewhere around that sort of region um um before that bounced around a few various roles in some of the UK's larger companies worked for a university worked for boots for a while um all generally marketing related role so talking going back 20 years now took quite a while um but directly in digital marketing about nine eight nine years now with exposure ninja incredible you done some fantastic uh SEO work during that time and been part of some our biggest campaigns as well so it's great to have you back on once again and we're going to go around the headlines you tell me your headline and then we'll choose which one goes first the best one will turn into tasks that market managers and business owners can complete today so Tim what's your headline for this week Google is testing sge in the UK and considering apparently charging for some of its search products which would be brand new Jess what's your headline for this week my headline for today is HubSpot relaunches it CMS as the AI filled content hub I feel like these two subjects may be connected and Andy what's your headline for this week so my headlines we've just finished um one of the largest algorithm updates from Google in or quite some time so pretty much Mark the entirety of March was pretty much an algorithm update rolling out from Google so talking about what they've been doing with that okay um I imagine not just myself many of the people watching listening will be thinking oh God uh what did I do what what am I impacted I don't know okay Andy we're gonna have to start with your story first okay yes I could jump so um yeah so like I say March has been pretty much the entirety of March was an algorithm update rolling out I say is one of the biggest ones because um normally Google takes two weeks they have a twoe window they roll everything out this was four weeks I say almost all of March so the biggest one I can remember certainly I can't remember one um taking longer than two weeks um and um changing quite a bit so um some quite interesting things coming out of it so uh where to start with there's loads of little bits sort coming out of it there often is with algorithm updates um so I think actually we could start well at the beginning so Google's um I think they set the scene before they even rolled it out if you were sort of paying attention to what they were putting out there um quite interesting thing that I noticed in terms of the language they were using talking about the algorithm when it comes out um this was in their blog before it came out announcing that it was going to happen they almost always talk about positive aspects of the algorithm update rewarding good content rewarding valuable content looking for the you know rewarding the good size this one they fli that they were talking about negatives so um to use their exact wording that they used is this update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if web pages are unhelpful have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people so um I there's always positives and negatives from any algorithm update there always is we know there is but Google almost always focuses on the positive so I think this speaks a lot to their mindset going into the algorithm update it wasn't to find the good content and reward that it was to clear out the bad there it very much to me feels like they were clearing house a bit to get ready for a big change and we all know what big change is on the horizon so um so it very much feels like they were looking at Clearing House to try and just shift that out and get rid of some of the the poorer content to make way for SGA okay I imagine that some people listening now or may not really be aware of what this bit over the horizon is perhap you explain a little bit about what this SG thing is yes so SG search genitor of experience a new element of search coming in probably the biggest change to organic search ever I I can't think of a larger one um at least not a more visible one because it literally changes the way search looks um if you've not seen it at the moment it's only available in the US they've started testing it released it to the wild as it were with their testing previously it was only available through Google labs and um for a lot of Searchers um about 80% of Searchers through when you put your search in you get this big box that opens up at the top of your search which takes pretty much the whole page which has an AI snippet in so it pulls content from all around the web and gives you an AI generated overview of whatever you've searched for to give you um bit of an Insight if you're familiar with featured Snippets that have been around on search for a while you know the box that has a bit more in it than the normal results usually takes a snippet off the page similar to that bigger bigger and better interesting well we're going to come back to SG in just a little while with Tim's uh story I want to dig in a little bit more into what you said about clearing the decks what do you mean by that what do you think they they mean of clearing the decks is it that they just want to start aresh and have like only good content or they're really dead against having any AI content spoiling the Ser so what what is the intent Beyond like preparing for SG yes so I think um they've been doing it to clear out the poor content so SG because it's AI it's reading the search results results it's choosing some usually between three or five different results that it thinks are very relevant to what you're searching for and it's combining them together and then giving you an AI generated overview in order for that overview to be useful for users it's got to be accurate it's got to be it's got to have good content in it so I think they're using this to clear out some of the rubbish some of the and we've all come across it the keyword stuff rubbish that people are just using it adds no value to the user it's just very clearly been built to create to try and rank for a keyword and that's it they don't care they're not adding value it's trying to shift that out of the search results and and bring the search results back so it only has useful content for users because that's what SG needs it needs that useful content to pull from to provide its summaries so um yeah from what we've been seeing in terms of the outputs of this very much make looks like um it's clearing all that and Google's own statement they're getting rid of content that is built for search engine rather than people and um the poor content that's not really adding anything they're clearing that out um one of the areas on the flip side that where we've seen real big gains on a lot of sites is where they're adding data to the conversation so where sites are creating their own data points um we've seen some really big gains um they've they've they they're the ones that have gained out of this they're the ones that have won this algorithm update as such they the people that are adding data to the conversation to the topic and when you think about it that's like gold dust for AI creat dat adding data points for it to pull from that that that's what AI lives and dies on so it's rewarding that those are the ones that have won whereas the the sites that are just regurgitating things that other people have said a million times before and just wording it s differently they're the ones that have lost out they're the ones that have dropped and in some cases been removed from search results Andy I wanted to ask you about collateral damage because often with Google updates there's a sort of an intended consequence and a bunch of sites also get impacted have have from what you've seen and from what the SEO team's been looking at so far with the sites that are impacted positively and negatively here has there been much collateral damage have we seen some good sites getting hit as well here and if so what can those owners do to help get that ranking back yeah so from what we've seen the impact has primarily been um so it's not just limited but it has been more in your money your life sites so there topic Finance Health those kind of areas Health particularly seems to have been impacted more than others um obviously you've got to be quite accurate with what you're saying around health and um it's it's an area that needs a lot of expertise and um informational content so sites that rely heavily on blogs and blog traffic and bringing in bringing in traffic through that way seem to have been impacted more whereas um the more um commercial type content Pages seems to have done better at least through the um obviously it's not a definitive list but through the one where we have actual data and we can see the actual data um seems to be there and like I said a moment ago sites creating data so um adding to the topic creating their own information that adds to it they've really don't that's interesting because SG certainly seems to be much more willing to answer health related questions than it does Financial so yeah interesting there that maybe there's a a bit more of a a careful filter on the health sites um that would certainly back up your your theory that this is clearing the decks ready for sg's wider roll out yeah so one area that we've seen um probably the biggest impact um and this is more anecdotal don't have loads of dat on it but um it's through um people that I know in the industry um it's only limited to two sites so it's not a massive um it's not a massive sample pool but it is those um two sides been completely affected that told about so we've had SES completely removed from the serbs so completely removed but not through a penalty so it's not through a manual action it's not through a quality race Sky it's algorithmically they've just been completely removed not lost their rankings removed so so they are no longer in Google's index those sites they've been completely taken out which is the first time I've ever heard of that happening algorithmically um but interestingly like I say it's not a huge sample size so it might interest both of those sites use 100% AI generated content they're not using AI as a tool they're not using it to help writers they've literally just you know got an AI tool and just gone right right right a page on this and then just copied it straight over they've gone so they've been completely removed um I believe that's down to um well poor use of AI it's not adding anything it's not adding anything to the conversation it's just regurgitating somebody else's information so why would Google want your information when it can get the original sources that that AI is used anyway so they've completely been removed so um potentially a warning for um you know the overuse of AI in on websites I don't think they're penalizing the use of AI specifically I think it's more that somebody's they're not adding anything they've just literally regurgitated somebody else's content with slightly different wording so it's not adding value Google specifically have said in the past they they don't penalize content for using AI um so I I believe them when they say that it's just um I think it's more um yeah if you're not careful with it you just you know use chat gbt and just throw a topic in there and go write me content on that it's not going to add anything to it it's not going to give any useful insights add any value it's just regurgitating somebody else's work so that's not adding value so that's where I think it's being cleaned up and remove yeah there seems to be a lot of like pure content affiliate sites in various Niche topics where they've been relying heavily on AI that have seen a similar thing where traffic goes in some cases to actual zero which is yeah like you say even in the days of Panda and Penguin you normally see that you get like a a 10 page penalty or something like that you could see the you could see literally the rankings go from like position three to position you know 103 or something like that but yeah to have an algorithmic penalty which removes you from the index is just extraordinary that is wild do you think there's any way of recovering that or is that you think that's going to be permanent um stop working on that content there's going to be a lot of it to get through start working on that content improve that content you've got to add value I mean Google's not been shy about telling us what we need to do for years got to add value for your users you've got to add add to the conversation not just regurgitate somebody else's so um yeah they need to be getting on that content game writing uh just today I was looking at a video of somebody works in the affiliate space and has built lots of websites and doing Rank and rent where you build a website for um I don't know locksmith near you and then they pick up the leads and they sell them to whoever will buy them they do a lot of that even like link they're a link vendor as well they sell back links and you know just the kind of stuff that you should never have targeted to your website anyway and they've got one of their websites that is mostly affiliate content they had a manual action this March in the last couple of weeks they've processed the manual action and asked for like a reconsideration after removing I kid you not 1,000 air written pieces of content they've got 10 pieces of human written content left they've resubmitted it the the reply was that it's still I I was trying to find the words just now but the literally the response in Google was nonsense gibberish content and I looked at the cont they were showing the content they put it through like this system that said like 0.5% chance that this is uh G gbt or something else and they're just like completely confused why they can't get like the remaining human written content uh back into the index and I'm looking through the content and all I can see is nothing about this is helpful it's just product name product photo link to Amazon couple of paragraphs next bit next bit it's just no real life experiences no real life um insights to share on the product it's just a human may have written it but it makes no difference and that's where we'll come back to some something you referenced earlier this your money your life these search queries that relate to like putting your money on the line or health on the line come back to this General thing that Google has called experience uh well I can never remember it this happened to me just the other week expertise experience Authority and Trust like you've got to write content based on what you know from firsthand yeah you've got to add to the convers you've got to add to the topic not just not just repeat when it comes to uh Creation with AI attached to it as a bit of a co-pilot since that seems to be the name that everyone's using Jess or Tim have you got any any any guidance on how people may be able to use AI with confidence in their content creation yeah I mean it's pretty good for like brainstorming and that kind of thing like I regularly use it to kind of help me we all hate staring at a blank page and sort of having that Mind Block so it's really great to kind of get the creativity going and I kind of like it to like back up it almost feels like if I've written something or I've done an outline for a blog or a website page it kind of reinforces to me okay I've covered everything like sometimes I'll put my outline into um an AI and say is there anything I missed here you know just before I send it to Dale and waste Dale's time with stuff that could could be included you know so I kind of use it in that kind of way and um there was another thought I had Dale actually when you said about how this website had like you know even though it was human written content it was really poor I think we are going to see this world and I found myself doing it now where I'll be writing and I'll be like hm that kind of sounds like AI maybe I want to phrase that and I wonder if there is going to be a thing that it's going to be like okay an if an AI could write this then you're going to need to enhance it and like you said if it's just a product image and a link to Amazon then there's nothing just go to Amazon you know like I think they're going to be trying to find ways of like you know why are you recommending this or your website's just taking up space that it doesn't need to take take up really so yeah very interesting I want to come back to a point that um Andy was making earlier about data and Tim you in all of your SG testing and and observations from running with it for close to a year now it's been about the importance of data is there any kind of more recent uh insights you can share on how companies may be able to use it or gather it because I imagine some marketing managers or business owners don't know where to start yeah I don't know I think so far I've noticed SG is fairly at least in the test that we've run um SG doesn't necessarily seem to be prioritizing original data I I hope that that's a place it's going to get to and I think long term that makes sense and I think it it even make sense to build for that world because that's that's where Google has to get to if SG is going to be a winning product but at the moment SG seems to mainly want to just find sites that regurgitate what sge says which leads to this sort of um I don't know Human Centipede is a disgusting analogy but like a content centipede where you have this thing uh sorry you might want to ble that you know what I mean where you're just I'm staying in I'm staying in yeah it's just it's it's a regurgitation cycle let's call it an oroborus which is like a dragon that bites its own tail there you go that's nice or borus there you go yeah and and I think that's one of the challenges with SG is they need to get it to a point where it can it can Surface more useful and original information than a regular search result would or featured Snippets would for example yeah I think it's I saying I Think It's tricky because they've got to balance between like you say Tim surfacing that new information versus how valid is that new information obviously if it's new information especially if it goes if it's um maybe going off on a bit of a tangent to what maybe the General accepted um rule is whatever in that Niche is adding to it can be it it poses a problem for Google into how does it work out what's true and what is opinion and what is just somebody making stuff up so it's it's got to get that balance which I think is going to be tricky for them well and you're right and I think this comes down to the core of how SG actually works because Google's position is SG writes the answer and it then looks up for website it looks for websites which corroborate the parts of that answer so the implication is there that the m is the source of the truth and then these websites just happen to say the same things I don't think that's what any of us actually believe that's not what any of us believe this thing is working I don't think and you look at any of the other major sort of AI search products and that they sort of run a web search and then summarize the the top ranking answers and and that that's how they work in which case the reliability I guess comes from the fact that these websites are ranking in the first place so we can therefore trust them to be real but you know that that's that relies on the existing uh Authority mechanisms like backlinks and you know topical Authority and the number of citations and all all these types of things eat on the page so you end up just basically with existing SEO and then the S sge is just a a rewriting mechanism which I think poses all sorts of um copyright and various issues which I I would assume is why Google hasn't presented it as as being that on the subject of sge Tim it' be actually great to hear more about your headline for this week yeah so mine is a few um I I guess a few little mini stories about SG or or a couple in particular so first up the BBC reported last week that SG is now being tested in the UK so previously if you wanted to play with Google's new AI search engine SG you had to sign up for Google Labs you had to be in the states uh and you had to log in through a Google browser and usually on desktop so it's quite difficult to use it um but then they've started rolling it out they started rolling it out on mobile they've started rolling it out on non-g Google browsers they've started rolling it out um now in in the UK to logged in users um but you don't have to be signed up for search Labs which is kind of interesting there was also some feedback or or some interview or some Snippets from one of the Google uh staff members that went along with this article which I thought was kind of interesting and may actually be more useful here um so I think the BBC asked whether um the SG was still going to display links and whether it's still going to use ads and the representative from Google said it was a priority to continue sending traffic to creators I.E websites and they actually claims that AI powered search results were showing more links to a wider range of sources how you have more links than the existing Google search search results page I don't know um so I'm not entirely convinced by that um but she did say the proof was in the pudding that far more and that users were clicking on an increased range of sources too which does back up our experience that SG will surface less reputable um websites in its answers than you know than you can get ranking on on Google uh regular there was another story around the same sort of time from Washington Post called I tried the new Google its answers are worse which is basically a scathing um review of of sge focusing on the misinformation that you can still get in the answers and some lower Authority sites being referenced one of the interesting Trends though I think with all of this SG news is I've been curious to see how people's perception of Google has been changing as they've been playing with this AI um these AI tools and I know that we want to trust internet comments to be like an accurate barometer of society or anything like that but 218 comments on the BBC article about you know Google potentially releasing SG in the UK how many do we think had any positive intent towards Google at all any positive sentiment what do we think use website comments well maybe War it was the author yeah that's right sort of ballpark yeah I counted two or three um overall the the sentiment was that Google's research results have been worsening in quality and it was people saying you know I'm going to use this I'm going to use this I don't trust AI I no longer trust Google this sounds terrible all that type of thing which I thought was was kind of interesting Washington Post article 300 comments I counted four or five that had any sort of positive sentiment at all so whilst there is internet comments I think it's interesting to see that the public at least the commenting public does not seem excited for sge they seem to be incredibly untrusting they seem to be very skeptical that AI in general is going to be useful and and positive and there really is a lot of uh resentment towards Google for what people perceive as degrading search quality which I guess ties back to Andy's update with the March um the March helpful content update this seems to be one of the most important periods for Google in its history that this March update has to be good it has to clean up the search results or Google are going to lose users to perplexity and Duck Duck Go and all of these I find it interesting because a lot of the people who using the AI tools available are first movers you know it's not the vast majority of people who are going to be uh using AI tools and are more likely to switch from Google to perplexity or Claude or one of the many others um and I wonder whether some of what's coming out from Google whether it's being link leaked or leaked intentionally which is often a very common thing with Google for their other products they often accidentally leak product updates before they come out just look at any of the more recent like pixel phone releases I wonder part of this is just the satisfaction of shareholders they're just like okay we're we are working on the AI stuff we are taking chat GPT seriously and we're doing this stuff and we're testing it out and it's more for them and less for the for the typical searches of the in you of the internet um and whether a lot of the people that are commenting on there have a bad opinion of Google and if Google has just kind of pushed this stuff out without any press around it like they have with feature Snippets and the local M pack and all these other improvements that never really gets talked never really get talked about or announced people don't go oh my God this is terrible they just accepted for what it is if they just pushed SG out without any Fanfare a lot of people probably wouldn't even noticed because it's not going to be for all Search terms anyway yeah I think that is an interesting point I think Google is definitely in a difficult place with its shareholders because the you know their their earnings calls the shareholders and the the investment firms are very much you know that they're looking at sge they're they're worried about the impact on ad Revenue they're worried about Google losing market share to other you know other places like perplexity or like chat GPT Google is simultaneous stuck with having I think a search an AI search product that I don't think many people think it's Superior most people who've used it think it is kind of inferior or vastly inferior but Google's sort of stuck with trying to push this thing because it's what the world seems to reward and it's what people want to see people want to see that you've got AI everywhere and this if they if they don't roll out sge what's the game plan you know if they kill sge if they say this isn't fit for purpose what is the game plan how do they fight back against chat gbt and whether whether they lose meaningful market share is is kind of irrelevant really because shareholders will assume that Google is then absolutely doomed so share price will go down and everyone's bonuses will be affected so I I yeah I I don't know what the game plan is here it's it's really weird and it feels a little bit late stage but then fundamentally I think we have to return to the fact that if you want to find something online Google is more often than not the best place to go for it right you we hold Google to a higher standard because we all use it so much but featured Snippets and weather listings and product listing ads knowledge panel Maps images all of these things are genuinely useful to people on a daily basis and you can say yeah duck. go oh it's so Superior yeah but you know if you want to find movie listings or you want to look for flights or you want to do any of these things or you want featured Snippets like how useful is duck Dogo compared to Google like if you did a like if someone brought out if dr.go brought out a product that was like regular Google search today people be like holy crap that thing is amazing right I just I don't know I think we hold Google to a higher standard fundamentally it's a good product and it's still I I still think it's a market leader but there is this sort of growing swell of discontent and I think fear ins inside Google about how they fight off these these challenges there's sort of a really interesting thing that I've noticed which is like technolog is getting to a point where tech companies are struggling to do that mind-blowing moment and I think they're constantly chasing that so for instance like the iPhone when the first iPhone came out that was like a mind-blowing moment and then you know there used to be those times when people would queue outside for new iPhones and they would be like Oh I'm the first person to get it and you know it's iconic video somebody's like I've got the first one and it just falls out the box smashes on the floor um but you know that doesn't happen anymore and it's because people and people are going oh Apple isn't innovating Samsung isn't innovating you know but that're it's because they've like almost perfected the thing right and then when they do try something different I think the Samsung fold phones are just silly but at least they're trying something new you know like at least they're trying something different than new Resurrection from like 20 years ago yeah that's true that's true but at least they're doing something a bit different and trying something new and I think we are like when the original iPhone came out maybe people were like why would you need all that that's ridiculous and now it's like smartphones are like the staple right so I do wonder if a lot of that negative sentiment is coming from the same people who will moan that Google isn't innovating as well and it's I suppose with Innovation comes a bit of discomfort and I wonder if that's kind of the phase that we're we're going through now really that's just a thought I think um for the for the average person there's no AI killer app yet there's no AI use for the average person that adds to their life that makes their life better that's even in simple ways there's no AI for the average person it's not doing anything to them they go you know what that makes my life so much better it just helps me so I think it's it's not there it's said people are natur they're distrusting of it they they don't see the point it because well what's it going to do they hear a lot of negative it gets a lot of negative press from people saying oh it's taking away jobs from various Industries and nichas and so on and that's all they hear to them it's taking away these jobs from various people and it's not adding anything they're not seeing where it is adding things because currently it's still in reasonably specialized roles where people are like oh wow this is amazing makes my life so much easier it's great um but for the average person it's it's just not there yet it's not really maybe SG will change that maybe it'll launch everybody will love it and they'll be like oh he it's brilliant time will tell um yeah I think there is that trouble with like matching it up to Everyday usage like Andy you shared an article in our artificial intelligence Channel earlier about like AI being added to fridges right and that sounds really silly like when you read that headline you're like what is that but what it actually means is that it will use the AI to make smart decisions about how your food is being cooled and the energy that your your fridge is using I think um and it also a while yeah it'll like you know figure some stuff out for you and that's the kind of thing that people would then be like oh actually I'm really noticing the difference there or if it was you know I also shared I'd come across a brand that uses AI to track everything that you've got stored around your house or if you use a storage unit um and what was interesting as well is the person who worked on this was an artist and when they announced it everybody kicked off because they thought it was an a they Associated Ai and artist and were not very happy whereas actually this was a totally different project that had pretty much nothing to do with with art um and I think that's a really good application of AI where it's like you know you can see oh I always lose my stuff now I can use AI to find out where my stuff is as well as know how much is in my boxes if I need to pack something else away or or whatever so I think yeah I think you're bang on in terms of people don't understand how it helps them so they're kind of like why is my money being spent on this you know yeah yeah I've got one more point to share before we go to the next headline as you was Jess um and that is about um intercom who do customer service chat Bots um I shared this video with Tim this week to get his opinion I found it really fascinating to see the the co-founders the the people in the SE Suite they've come back in they're trying to do some content marketing some PR stuff to kind of get people talking about Ai and make it relevant to intercom because intercom have done very similar like AI kind of stuff with their platform since like day one and they're doing these videos to say we see the impact of AI it's going to be massive people are not taking it seriously enough I find it really interesting because a lot of people really still have not begun to grasp how impactful all this stuff is and I know we talk about it often I know it's often in the dojo but people really aren't taking it seriously the SEO is going to be systematically flipped upside down and completely a different place in the next 12 to 18 months like it's going to change it's incremental but it will be a completely different um system like visually how it works how how people find you find your brand find your product Services whatever it's all going to systematically change and if you're not already doing something about it you have to start and the first place you should go is to YouTube and search for exposure ninja exposure ninja sge you get a couple of different videos about how it works and how to rank in SG because we have a lot of great uh campaign level uh successes with that for our clients but another starting point is go to exposion ninja.com review where you can ask a review uh from our team and they'll explain exactly what you can do to get the very best out of your website as well as have a little peek at what SG potential there is for your website as well as how SG is going to impact you too so go to exposure nin.com can't get my words out today exposure ninja.com revie to request your free website and marketing review so we're going to stay on AI though because Jess your headline also includes AI as well doesn't it I was muted sorry I said we tend to do this on this podcast where we bring we all find our stories independently but for some reason they all have like this little thread connecting them together we got this little exposion Ed hive mind it's quite good yes my story is actually one that Dale Shar with me and it's all about um hubspot's new basically they've relaunched their CMS as the content Hub um which is you know their content management system which they use I believe it's connected to websites and whatnot so you can manage all your stuff in one place um but and it's kind of good that we've come to my story last because I think it connects in quite well with this um it's the whole trailer for it is kind of like AI this AI that you can make AI choose your blog titles and then AI can write your blog and then AI can turn your blog into a podcast and a social post and an email and this and based on you know the research that Andy's done and just our own experience if you use this because HubSpot is in all the search engines when you're a newbie marketer maybe setting up your business if you use this and you're none the wiser to all these extra little AI nuances then your website could be totally screwed you could be putting and you'd be like why am I not ranking I'm doing everything that I should be I'm putting content out I'm promoting stuff on social I'm doing this and the other and then nothing's happening because it's all AI it's all AI generated I have to say some of the use cases I did enjoy for instance being able to change an article into audio lots and lots of websites already do that and I think that's really fantastic for accessibility for instance but I struggle to see the benefits to The Wider world of the CMS being like just do everything well the content Hub apologies just saying just Do Everything using AI you don't even have to think about it do thousands upon thousands of Articles and blogs and guides it's just not I don't know it's not sending the right message at all Tim who do you who do you think this is for H I don't know I don't I don't want to say lazy people but it's got that you know passive income Vibes to it I just can't get away from I can't get away from this they're talking about AI writing your blogs for you and that's just that is the worst like you may as well just do nothing you may as well do nothing um yeah I I don't know I know I know that I know that HubSpot and I follow dsh who's he's one of the founders of HubSpot and he's really switched on he's super bullish on AI and I know he's a he's a tenro and he he plays and builds some of these tools and he was he I think he built the the chat spot um HubSpot AI sort of conversational agent thing himself um and and I don't know whether this is one of his initiatives or something like that but oh people be so careful this is this is not it yeah I just I'd just be thinking Hub spots it's popular so if I'm using it there's going to be a few thousand other people using it and if we're all getting our blogs written by their AI just how different are they actually going to be it's we're going to have 10,000 blogs that are all basically the same blog it's and then why would Google ever rank yours over theirs I think the way that I look at this is you got to think like who's in Market at the moment for HubSpot so they're trying to get Enterprises they're trying to get big businesses to buy their biggest you know hubs the sales Hub and the marketing Hub and all this kind of stuff to All Connect together and it's going to be fantastic for their you know new Revenue New Deal Revenue all that kind of stuff but let's say 4% of the market is ready for HubSpot there's the entire other percentage of the market that isn't so it's like all the people at the front end who are like micro business small business entrepreneur running their own little thing freelance aners they're not ready for that but how do you get those people ready for that you got to help them along the way now I think for like some of those people a lot of these features will help them and will get them in the HubSpot ecosystem long enough to then convert in the future as they grow for example if we we Expos injury use keep as our CRM we're kind of embedded in that it' be very hard to leave because of just how set up the system is if we' have started with HubSpot we would have had the same situation like we would have had a great difficulty to leave that as we have with with keep as well so as soon as you get people into your net it's very hard for them to kind of get out again but if you make something that is useful to them at their level you probably don't need a lot of content you just need a destination to send people through your other marketing efforts not necessarily blog content to rank in search that is true but if they join HubSpot and you know their business sort of relies on them getting online traffic and they're using this CM this content Hub that is then creating content that doesn't rank doesn't even appear in Google doesn't even get indexed then they're never going to become big enough to be a HubSpot Enterprise customer anyway so they're just going to do the content be like well this is Naf see you later you know like oh I've just spent all this money with HubSpot to get nothing done it's un likely they're going to want to stay with HubSpot after that if nothing's happen because they've got nothing to lose they can easily just change to a different system but imagine if you're HubSpot and you've got a partner Network and a whole bunch of agencies that you can refer people to that's actually good for business you can help people to a level where they got they have some content they have some leads coming through they've got like all their ebooks being delivered for hub spot but they reach a point where they're like okay I need to go up a level but you know this part's not working out I'm getting leads from my LinkedIn work or the videos I put on YouTube I have a podcast that's bringing people to the website some of the content is useful to help them through the sales Journey but I've reached a level where I need my SEO to go up a bit oh hi I'm your Hub SP representative what you problem what are your problems at the moment okay I actually know a bunch of agencies here's our agency directory I can make some recommendations that suit your budget that's good for HubSpot because those agencies are going to still recommend HubSpot Maybe makes HubSpot a little bit of money probably now I don't know how that system works but there reaches a point where they can go great you can stay with HubSpot and now do SEO at a bigger scale so it's still benefit spot it will but only if those businesses are successful which they won't be if they only use AI to generate all their content and then don't get ranked that's what I was trying to get at is that if people use this tool effectively and use it as a tool rather than using it to write all their content and they manage to get traffic they get traction Google's actually indexing them that's great but what I was talking about is the people who are potentially not none the wiser to this they go in they use HubSpot their website doesn't rank at all they get no traffic no leads no sales they're not going to stay with hopspot they're going to leave and then be like oh okay actually using this AI tool that HubSpot recommended to me didn't help my business and now my Affinity with HubSpot is ruined forever so there's there's there's two there's two risks here two quite interesting separate risks really for both consumers and for HubSpot themselves and and I I think you know just to go back to the whole comments sentiment there was also a video recently of someone saying AI on stage at South by Southwest and the word is booed by a room of creators like I think we're getting to a point where similar to what Jess was saying that just saying oh now our service includes a AI isn't necessarily universally celebrated right there there is a bit more skepticism around it as well so it's not like a given that just just because you say right now you're going to be able to use AI on our service you're going to get this sort of Halo um of uh of Attraction um particularly I think if if people could see through it or they could just tell from the brief or even the specification a bit like what we're doing here that maybe this isn't the greatest thing in the world so I I think people have got to be careful but yeah I can see from your perspective that why it makes sense for them to just add it to their feature list then if someone's trying to choose between HubSpot and Salesforce well hubs hubspot's got AI so great doesn't doesn't matter if no one ever uses it just added benefit on their mental checklist it yeah I think as well one of the biggest things that puts um people off when they're looking at like you know creating a website growing their website at least might experience is the thought of having to create the content they don't know where to start that is probably the biggest area I find with um clients and you know people they just what do I do with the content I know I need content I have no idea what that should look like so even just having that just to say well we've got an AI that can do it for you it's that it's even if it's not that great it kind of takes that um that worry away from them oh that'll deal with it so that that was my blocker I don't know what to do with it they they've got the machine will tell me so yeah great um even if it ends up not being that great it still gets them past that blocker so it gets them it gets them moving at least even if not rocketing at least starting going in the right direction and it just goes to prove that there's no real substitution for human like the human as a solution with in all of this you can create content using these these software Solutions you still need a human to do the majority of the work and make it make sense you can use uh clavio or whatever else to do your email automation it can't do it all for you and I don't think it'll ever totally be able to do it for you even if AI improves at the same rate it is you still need a human with expertise to do it all or if you're doing your SEO you need a human to make sure that the strategy all works together if you're doing some social humans better understand how other humans want to see content and interact with it online as well like the the human element is irreplaceable no matter how good AI is going to be in the future so yeah I think it's good to have a platform like this available to people but it doesn't take away the fact that you will either need someone on it within your team to to take care of it and make it make sense and make make it work or you need a partner hi uh to help you along the way to help you reach your goals any further thoughts before we uh pick a headline to turn into tasks I still I'm still bullish the ability of AI to replace humans in a lot of these areas someday and we're doing everything that we can to figure out if that day is today or in the future that we're testing and experimenting relentlessly on on these types of things but yeah I I do agree with your assessment that it's it's definitely a not yet and if that point changes we will of course let you know yeah 100% um and on that point of being at the Forefront I was just thinking back earlier to when our teams content marketing team SEO teams I've been playing with G gbt software or based software since like 2017 18 when like Jasper came out with using gbt 2 and then three and all these other tools like we were all like straight away bang right what can we do with it what makes sense what's still going to be useful what's still going to be like you know clean for SEO always like testing it so it's kind of great to still see us in that position of like we're looking longterm let's figure out how this works and you know what to avoid um and if you again if you are unsure about how this all impacts you just go to exposure ninja.com review you can ask us to take a look at your website or just go to YouTube search exposure ninja sge got a lot of content about how this may impact you or not it's going to impact you let's put it that way cool I'm G to to pick a headline really hard to pick on this week we've got the algorithm update we've got um HubSpot with it Ai and sge I feel like I'm going to pick all of them because they're all related to each other sorry but they're I mean they are they're all related to Ai and sge and conentration and and SEO like ranking not ranking content not ranking All That Jazz so Jazz based on today's stories what tasks should marketing managers be doing today I'd say review the quality of your content so it could be that you have done all human written content but maybe it was sort of outsourced a scale or um you know it's just not really hitting the same Mark that it it had been previously so I would say review your content See if you could be putting more helpful content out there um whether you use AI to assist you gently in that or not um yeah I also think obviously check your stats see if you've been hit with any traffic drops if you have it could just be General volatility with search engines but if it's huge then maybe you are one of these websites where if you've got a little bit trigger happy with the AI you're probably going to want to get UNT trigger happy with it basically Tim what tasks or which tasks do you think that business owners should take from this story I'm going work on today um I would yeah I guess it's like tempering the hype so I there was a comment I saw in LinkedIn maybe to one of my posts that was something along the lines of are we stop doing SEO like last year because of sge and all this stuff coming and I thought you're making a really strange Choice there because you're saying that firstly because there's going to be an AI search that traditional SEO is is not worthwhile that is that is completely mad right because you know that SG is still looking at the same search results but secondly you're making a a decision about your today marketing on like extrapolated future possibilities like the best businesses run based on the numbers and what their data is telling them not on like oh yeah but what if this happens wait we should just stop digital marketing because this is going to change like that's that's just crazy right so I think it's just like looking at the data today and making your decisions based on that but also all of these I search engines are performing web Searchers so SEO is exactly the same so just be cool people be cool and they wonder if you'd uh mind sharing a few SEO recommendations or giving a few tips on where people should really be putting their attention when it comes to all this SG and AI stuff okay so um Jess pretty much covered it if you've been here you need to be looking at your content you need to be evaluating your content particularly I'd probably start with your informational content if you're unsure where to start it's worth if you've got the data if you're tracking those things it's worth having a look and seeing okay which Pages specifically of losing traffic um if you're not that into your data you've not got all that start with your informational content that's where the majority of the impact we've seen has been um but yeah start looking at and making sure you are adding to the topic you're not just rehashing other people's points you're adding your own take on it you're adding new information to it make sure um you've got to approach that content as it's got to be useful for users not just targeted for a specific keyword does the user care what you're talking about and what information do they need to help them make decision make um whatever they need to do make sure you're covering that um if possible so looking can you start creating your own data points can you use your industry knowledge your what's happening with your business to start creating your own data points can you um identify for example other the Tren Regional Trends if you're National you're all over the country can you start spotting Regional Trends can you start talking about those um you know that kind of information and that's then adding to the conversation those points are search engers love them so yeah we used to say deserve to rank didn't we like you you have to deserve to rank and I don't think that's going to change like yeah there's some hacks that you can do to get your SG you your content ranking on SG but they're probably going to be shortterm like fundamentally the most defensible position is to deserve if if you want to compete you got to deserve it love it well Andy thanks again for joining us for another episode of the dojo I hope you'll come back in the future but maybe next time fingers crossed there won't be any algorithm updates to discuss hopefully well thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of Dojo you can join us next week where we'll be joined by Danielle from our account management team to share a little bit more about what people are doing at the campaign level and perhaps a bit more than that thanks again to everyone and uh see you then bye [Music]

Channel: Exposure Ninja

Views: 1,946

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Id: hATRSiG_NyQ

Length: 52min 29sec (3149 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024