Broc: So we’ve talked about the dot-com bubble, we’ve talked about the AI bubble, we’ve talked about the state of AI. What happens to SEO if the AI bubble bursts? And specifically, people who are investing people who are switching from Google, I’m assuming there’s a big number of people who are like, okay, bump this Google noise because whatever, it’s not worth it. They have the little pop-up box, nobody even clicks on websites anymore. Like, let’s invest everything in AI. So what happens eventually when when SEO companies pivot to this, they build their infrastructure on AI and then it pops and then
Joseph: Probably nothing.
Zach: Well what’s the goal of SEO?
Joseph: To rank higher in search engines.
Zach: Like well, what’s your end goal there? Why do you want to rank higher in search engines?
Joseph: Customers, right? Customer sales.
Zach: So you wanna grow your business, you want more people to find you. Yeah. So it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a search engine. It c like people wanna be found wherever people are looking for things, I think is the end goal there. So whether it’s Google, whether it’s AI, there’s going to be something. If we have to go back to the phone book, who cares?
Joseph: Right. But I think the reason it doesn’t matter is everybody they want everybody wants you to think everybody that that has something to be made, they want you to think there’s a difference between SEO, GEO, AIO, LML PQ, whatever, like all the stupid acronyms. Like they all want you to like, well, you have to do a certain thing to show up in ChatGPT, and you have to do a certain thing to show up in Gemini, and a totally different thing to show up in Google. And the truth is Google will like Gemini ChatGPT, they’ll index you a little better if you wrap your existing content in tagging to say, this is a question, this is an article, et cetera. But otherwise, everything else stays the same. Like most AI bots, if you want a local business to show up, you just need y Yelp and YX, all those in directories to talk about you and they’ll pick you up. Same as Google. If you want to show up in that question box, your blog just has to have the right kind of tags. Like we have a plugin I wrote last week. All it does is connect to Claude through their API, and go through and all your bullet point items automatically wrap them in the proper schema tags so that AI can pull them in. And a lot of companies like Yoast and all them, they’re charging, you know, fifty bucks a month, hundred bucks a month for this tool that is just auto tagging. And I’m looking, and our cost is like dollars. So I’m like we could release the same thing for ten bucks a month and we would be fine. And so it’s kinda that’s a whole nother subject on like but it’s the bubble, right? Everybody thinks there’s all this value. And really the only difference, that’s why I don’t think anything would happen. If anything, it would be better for companies like ours, because if it just went back to being more simple where it’s like Google, I never would have thought I would say that. if it was only Google we had to worry about. But like that i if it went back to that, it would just make it simpler where You know, it’d be a little more streamlined. They probably still try to have suggested answers. But if you’re building the right kind of content and all the kind of stuff so that it’ll show up with LLMs, it’s more than likely still gonna show up in Google.
Zach: Even how much of the work that we’ve done for clients is just automatically directly translating to being found by LLMs?
Joseph: Yeah. Like we’ve had multiple clients where we weren’t even doing AI for them and they’re like, Yeah, I’m getting a lot of traffic from Chat GPT. We’re like, Cool. That’s great.
Broc: Yeah. So the same things you do to rank and Google will help you in AI basically.
Joseph: Yeah, there’s like minimal differences. People are gonna cry wolf or foul or whatever it is, and they’re gonna be like, No, no, no, that’s not true. And it’s like, it’s true. Yeah, like it’s true. Deal with it. Sorry.
Broc: The AI bros in the comments. Get out of here.
Joseph: We’ve done this long enough and we have enough clients that we do nothing to optimize for AI, and they’re still- we have a client whose website was built in Pakistan. It’s terrible. We’ve done nothing from the AI standpoint and was getting lots of Chat GPT leads. So just, you know, it’s just one of those things where, you know, now we do some now, but like before we were even doing it, it was just it was working anyway. And it was just because we created good content. Like even if you have a crappy website, if it’s able to be indexed, it’s not spam, you’ll eventually get traffic. Like you gotta put the work in, but it’ll pay off eventually.
