How to Rank with Google AI Mode

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I’m Gyi from Attorneys Inc. And I am left-handed but right footed.

Conrad Saam:

And I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, and both my mother and my wife are named Jennifer Saam, and they’re both left-handed.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome. Wow, you caught me there. It’s kind of

Conrad Saam:

Creepy, isn’t it? It is, yeah. Sometimes you have to be careful, which Jennifer you’re sending in a text to.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. You can’t even go by which hand they are because they’re the same handedness. Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing where we not only talk about the specialness of being left-handed, we also talk about legal marketing. And today I am wearing my favorite Metallica t-shirt because my good friend Conrad recently just went to the show. How was Metallica Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

It was fantastic. I’m older than you. Were kind of getting up in our years. Barely. The fact that

These guys can rock out like this is absolutely amazing. And one of my favorite things about Metallica, every single show I’ve ever been to, James expresses a deep, genuine level of gratitude for people being there. He talks about the inclusiveness of the Metallica family. I met up with Sean Olson, an attorney out of Golden Colorado with his son, and we had, I brought my boys and their roommates and we had bad pizza and good beer. Well, Sean and I did before the Metallica show, and it’s just a wonderful, wonderful venue. It is full of middle-aged guys reliving their best years and bringing their kids along, which is awesome. So I appreciate the Metallica shirt. Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, that’s what I was super curious. How did your kids and Sean’s kids enjoy the show?

Conrad Saam:

I mean, it’s amazing. I took my oldest son to his first ever concert, which was a Metallica concert, and I said to him, I’m going to ruin concerts for you forever. There will never be anything like this. And he said, I don’t understand dad. And I said, wait until we get inside. And two minutes into the first song, he got it. It was awesome. It’s great stuff.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing that. In addition to Metallica, what else we got today,

Conrad Saam:

We have a packed news session along with some salacious tidbits, and then you and I as promised are going to go over Google’s AI guidelines.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Enter Sandman, just Kidding

Announcer:

Money. Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We have got a packed set of news and we’ve got a piece of news that we have already taped and are going to go a little bit deeper on and cover in subsequent episodes. But first, let’s hit that newsreel. Hey, Gyi, what is that one news item that is most commonly featured on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing that no one cares about

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What Gyi and Conrad did on the weekend? Just kidding. It’s Google’s core algorithm update, which they just released the June, 2025 core algorithm update. And of course, all of the SEO community is creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt of how they can help you navigate this algorithm update.

Conrad Saam:

And by the way, what did we tell everyone to do every single time we talk about this?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Absolutely nothing.

Conrad Saam:

All right. Go back and listen to old episodes of our news item where we tell you to do exactly that. Alright, Gyi, I woke up a week ago to literally hundreds if not thousands of messages from Google, local service ads for all of my clients. When we recorded this last week, you told me that you had the same thing. And this has happened clearly across the entire ecosystem of Google, LSA vendors. What did Google put its foot in the other day?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, honestly, and it seems to have resolved because I haven’t received these messages since, right? But it seems like they were sending new lead notifications to every account associated with any LSA ad program, whether it was a MCC account or an end user account. So not a great look for Google in terms of instilling faith that they’ve got their finger on the pulse of the LSA program.

Conrad Saam:

You and I talked about the concerns with them listening in and taking that data and using AI to analyze it. And one of the concerns that we had was this information getting into hands unintentionally or intentionally that we didn’t like. Let me just state this for the listener. Google basically sent mass emails to everyone on distribution lists who may have possibly been able to get them. So think about this. We really go out of our way and I think you do too, Gyi, to make sure that there’s no cross pollination across clients, there’s no confusion, there is no sharing of secrets or data, and they just barf this all out for a period of, I don’t know, seven or eight hours.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not great.

Conrad Saam:

It’s mistake. Big mistake.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Have you seen any comms from Google about this?

Conrad Saam:

Nothing. Zero. I haven’t looked, but nothing. Okay.

Speaking of PR disasters, we may come back to this, but if you would like to dig deep into the salacious and kind of chaotic social media world for lawyers, I recommend jumping on the Facebook page of Ben Sessions. He’s an attorney in the south. He has gotten into a very clearly and very public vendetta against a couple of people in their market who have been fixing, according to Ben, have been fixing DUI tickets. So this is Johnny Vines and Michael Howard and Johnny Vines seems to have been able to get a 100% dismissal record for DUIs when presented to Michael Howard. So more on this later, but if you want to dive deep into this, it’s an interesting very public approach that Sessions has taken, and I’m interested to see if there’s any strategy or objectives behind what he’s doing other than pure public outrage. Gyi, thoughts?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To me, I look at this and I’m like, this is exactly the type of thing that lawyers should be doing. It’s speaking truth to power. It’s calling out corruption in government, especially as it impacts their local community. And I’m all for lawyers serving this function in our society. So I applaud Ben for bringing this to light.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, and at a maybe macro level, we might need a little bit more speaking truth to power when it comes to corruption and government, but that is for a different episode. Alright, in the news we’ve brought to you lots of acquisition news recently, Clio, big, huge, immense bion dollar acquisition of V Lex. What do we know about the Clio VL acquisition?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I love this deal. I have been very fortunate and grateful to get to know Jack Newton and Ed Walters and a lot of other team members at both of these companies. And this is just a massive coming together of some of the, in my opinion, smartest people in legal tech and really a big step forward in I think Jack’s vision to impact legal beyond just practice management. I mean, if you think about the potential for research and what V Ls does in terms of trying to understand substantive law and how that will relate to firm data that’s going on in Clio, really a game changer across the board depending on how this all shakes out. But I think it’s an exciting deal for the people involved in obviously a massive deal.

Conrad Saam:

And along this theme, we started off with Metallica. We are going to end the news with Scorpion, no, not Klaus Minor, the 76-year-old guy who is still touring, but Scorpion out of California. Clio and Scorpion have recently reached an exclusive partnership agreement for marketing services and we reached out to Scorpion and Clio for commentary. We are going to hopefully be recording that call later on. And so there are two episodes in the making. One is Ian Conrad’s Knee Jerk Reaction to the Clio and Scorpion exclusive marketing partnership. And then we’d like to hear from Clio and Scorpion directly. And on a tragic note in the news, our thoughts are with as a parent especially, and I’m not sure why that makes a difference, but it does. Our thoughts are with the families and communities devastated in Texas. It’s kind of a rough one. We do have a request, this comes from DEI Friday.

There is a ability to register with a Texas disaster legal help group. We’ll make sure that there is a link to that group. It is a LinkedIn group, the Texas Disaster Legal Help Group if you are an attorney in Texas and would like to help out with what is going to be a very long and emotionally painful recovery. The other thing that Delicia asked for was there are plenty of attorneys who have lost everything in this area. And if there’s any way that you can help out share your homes, office computers, please do so. And now is a great opportunity and a time for us to be better people than we are on the day-to-day. So if you’re in Texas, our thoughts are with you. And hopefully if you’re in Texas and a lawyer who’s not been affected, maybe you can jump in and help out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back. And as we promised, we wanted to explore Google’s guidance on how to get content to perform well in AI experiences on search. And so that’s both AI overviews and AI mode. And we’re going to reference a couple of different documents from the Google Search Central documentation. And we’re going to start with this John Mueller post from Wednesday, May 21st, 2025 on the Search Central blog that is titled Top Ways to Ensure Your Content performs Well in Google’s AI Experiences on Search. And Conrad, when you look at this document over, what are some of the first things that jump out at you that we can tell lawyers about making sure their content performs well in these new AI search experiences?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things is it’s redundancy. It is old stuff, right? We’re talking about new technology, but old stuff. Focus on unique, valuable content for people and implicit in the four people. Part of that is you are not doing this to game the search engines, which is problematic for people like Gyi and Conrad who generate content to drive traffic to websites, to make people hire lawyers. This used to be back into the old vicious keyword stuffing days where that was a very big problem. But is this valuable content for people? Not sure how are we supposed to change what we’re doing when it comes to that? I think that’s one of the biggest problems on this document here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I mean, I’m so grateful that John, I mean, he’s the true liaison. I know there are other liaisons, but to me he’s the real true liaison to the SEO community and he’s making an effort to try to articulate what it is that Google wants. But historically, we’ve always joked because the answers are usually like we’ll create great content, and it’s like this circular reasoning and some of this documentation even kind of reads like this, right? We’re reading the post, which links to the creating helpful Reliable People first content document, which talks about eat, which links to the eat section, which takes you back to here. And so I

Conrad Saam:

Mean, that’s good linking structure, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, great internal linking structure. But I think if I’m going to take just the words as they’re written here, and this comes up in all of these documents, is this idea of uniqueness. And I think that there does seem to be this consistent idea to train on trying to find, identify stuff that’s unique. Because if you think about this at scale, Google is crawling and indexing millions of pages about what to do after a car accident because every lawyer in their SEO company has published this 10 things you need to do after a car accident, what to do after a car accident, who do you call after a car accident. And so I think finding ways to deliver responses to information demand that are genuinely unique, that should be a guiding principle in what you’re publishing, in my opinion, versus another 10 things to do after a car accident.

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to read this verbatim. It’s funny because it’s not true when it comes to automatically generated content. Our guidance has been consistent for years. That is not even close to true. When AI came out chat GPT launched, they were very clear that that was a exact no-no.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. The other one here is this provide a great page experience, which again, we’ve heard this forever. They’re talking about navigation, they’re talking about pages that aren’t he, because this is published by John Cross Device latency of the experience distinguishing main content from other content. I mean, there’s no doubt that Google is trying to distinguish between pages that might be delivering bad page experience. But I got to tell you, and this is the part that’s not super helpful for people. There’s plenty of sites. We talked about the Intaker issue where it’s an intrusive interstitial pops up on the websites and we’ve talked about people who hit the footer links really, really hard and people that don’t have even, I mean hopefully we’re not seeing this as much, but for years non-responsive, not mobilely optimized websites that’s still ranked. And so it’s like, are they taking this in consideration?

They say they are, but is it really helping? I mean, I always come back to this as I’m like, at the very least, these things are good for user experience, which means they should be sending user signals back to Google as well that are positive if people are engaging with it. And so if you’re going to convert somebody into a client from your webpage, these page experience issues should be at the top of your prior list for fixing. Ranking wise though, there’s still a lot of really crappy websites that rank really, really well in my perspective.

Conrad Saam:

One of the specific things that comes out of this, and I don’t know how much this feeds into SEO traffic or performance versus the aios, but in many different phrases across their guidelines, it talks about the many pages approach. This is the long tail. We’re going to create pages for absolutely everything. And you and I have spoken ad nauseum about the importance of decreasing page count, but they’re very specific about AI with what they call scaled content. I’m going to read two different points, but it is really the same message using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users. Here’s another one, creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader, but contains search keywords. Now this goes back to 2011. You remember the Panda update, which was all about lots of pages with low quality, thin it was thin content, and that was a site-wide SEO penalty. But I do think there is this focus on, in many cases, reading not even that far between the lines where they’re really discouraging high page count sites that are become high page count sites because of the ability to generate tons of content cost effectively.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Makes sense. Here’s one that I think is actually, again, it’s not new, but I would be prioritizing this. And this is, this idea of multimodal subheading here is go beyond text for multimodal success. And the short version is to make sure that you’re including imagery and videos even with your text content.

Conrad Saam:

Yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I think that this is a big one. They even, in fact, John makes the point of supporting textual contents with high quality images and videos and making sure that your business profile information is up to date. And I think that especially for brick and mortar, especially law firms, Google business profiles, imagery, video content where you’ve got, you can use client testimonials where you can use expertise videos with internal linking and links back to your website. A lot of Google business profile, like the posts intermittently have the ability to link back to pages on your site. I think that that’s a really, really important thing that I would prioritize is this idea of multimodal as we’re in AI land.

Conrad Saam:

And when we come back, Gyi and I are going to dive deeper into Google’s AI content guidelines, specifically digging into that annoying acronym, eat. And we’re back. Before you do anything else, please go to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing dot com. You can hang out with me and Gyi and some real luminary digital marketing people on the in-house side of the desk in Las Vegas, September 22 through 24. Gyi, who are you looking forward to hearing from?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, one of the sessions that I’m super excited about is David Mims discussion about market research. And I know that we’re actually breaking some news here, but both Mockingbird and Attorneys Inc have partnering up with neared for a new market research offering that I think is going to be a real game changer and advantage for folks that are participating. So if you want to learn more about that research, make sure you get your early bird tickets to the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit.

Conrad Saam:

I mean, this is in depth analysis of how people look at lawyers, how they select lawyers, what’s important to them, what’s not important to them. And we’re really looking forward to having the godfather of local marketing and the Scratch golfer. David Mim, join us. Alright, I wanted to focus on eat because it is something that I ignored when it came out when Google started talking about eat. And now that they’re talking about it more as it pertains to aios, I thought we should revisit what EAT stands for and then tactically, what does that actually mean for people from an A IO ranking perspective?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, what does it stand for?

Conrad Saam:

If you don’t stand for something, you don’t stand for anything. Gyi eats the unfortunate acronym. EEAT is experience, expertise, authorit and trustworthiness, and that is guidance that they gave about SEO and they are now talking about the same exact principles for aios. And so the question for Megi tactically, what are some of the things that lawyers should be doing to, I hate to say this phrase, to improve their eat, to optimize their eat, to lean into eat. What does that look like?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and we covered the guidelines for creating helpful content. We talked about bylines, we talked about author bio pages, we talked about profiles across the web. So again, the idea here is that when the machines find you talking about your subject matter all over the place from Reliable Pages, it’s more likely that they’re going to, that you are an expert on the topic. That’s one dimension of it. The other part of this, and I think this is the part that I think gets a little murky and why people are a little bit skeptical, is this idea that how does Google distinguish from one expert and another expert? Google might be able to say, Hey, look, take some of your top, most recognized, most published visible lawyers on their subject matter, and they’ve got tons of data from stuff they’ve published, but there could be somebody else just as authoritative, but just not as well published, not as ubiquitously known online.

Conrad Saam:

Well, let me ask you this. I’ll read the guideline here. This is directly from the horse’s mouth. Focus on

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Accuracy,

Conrad Saam:

Quality, and relevance when creating content for the web. Focus on accuracy, quality, and relevance, especially when automatically generating the content. No, 11 fingered images. Please. Let me give you a common thing that lawyers want to know about. Hey, Google, please create a list for me. Of the 10 best family attorneys in Sheboygan, how do we do accuracy on that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They just look for as many of the 10 best, so they do their fan out. So maybe we should talk a second about that.

Conrad Saam:

Talk about fan out. What does fan, it sounds like what we did at Metallica,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, fan out is just they perform a bunch of different related searches. So I think this is an important distinction that people don’t follow this closely pick up on historically, you got a search box, user types in a query, you get results, Google does. Its fancy math behind the scenes, spits back results. Now user enters a query, Google or GPT or whatever it is, does a bunch of different searches that it believes are related to getting to the response that’s trying to respond. And so in this context, if you’re like, I don’t remember used the word, the location,

Conrad Saam:

Sheboygan 10 family lawyers in Sheboygan,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

10 best family lawyers in Sheboygan. It’s going to do a bunch of searches. So it’s going to do 10 best family lawyers in Sheboygan, maybe the best divorce lawyers in Sheboygan, who are some of the best family lawyers in and around the Sheboygan area, a bunch of different queries that might be related to that, this fan out idea. And it’s going to collect all of the results of those. And then for the best we understand is it’s looking for the names that are showing up on those lists. Now, first, because I’ve done this first, sometimes it just paste the list that it found. So it’s like whatever list it decides is the best list. It just posts that list. Other times though, you can see, and especially if you run this and you a bunch of fan outs and a bunch of queries and doing at scale, you see a lot of the same lawyers will show up on the list, and the answer is that those lawyers are added to lists around the web. For best lawyers in Sheboygan is part of that answer, not the whole thing, but that’s definitely part of it. So anyway, point is being recognized as one of the best lawyers. So what do you think about awards, industry recognition, other peers? We’ve seen this in our industry as well. When somebody writes a list of the 10 best or whatever, you want to show up on those lists. So I think that goes to this answer becoming more part of the eat as well. What do you think?

Conrad Saam:

I just struggle with some of these elements. Some seem to be very subjective and focused on accuracy and some are actually a little bit more helpful, but they talk about depth of content, depth of information, having a personalized perspective or experience that you can share. And there’s a depth to that that you can try and show that, hey, this is not just the same stuff vomited elsewhere. But I was thinking about this, Gyi, as a pragmatic perspective for let’s say a large law firm. I’m going to take one example, John Morgan, who’s actually authoring this content now, I’m pretty sure John Morgan hasn’t sat down and written a practice area page in the last decade or two. How do you focus on the authority of a firm owner when most of the content is really being built out by marketing staff, bloggers, paid people, and this is really focused around the experience, expertise, authority, and trust of an individual. It’s an individual here it is less firm, it is more the individual. How do you do that in a firm with at Morgan’s size or even a firm that’s got 20 lawyers, right? We’ve got clients who it’s hard to play in this game,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Yeah. Again, my response is it’s not John Morgan doesn’t have to write a single thing about it. It’s John Morgan getting interviewed. There’s people talking about John Morgan, it’s other people putting John Morgan on their best list. He doesn’t have to write a single word if he doesn’t want to at this.

Conrad Saam:

Well, no, no, but I think that’s where I have the difficulty. I think John Morgan for example, and we even talked about Ben’s sessions here right now at a much smaller scale and a much smaller geography doing a lot of work to get their name out there and out in the world and on the web and having a big profile and directories and all of this stuff. But if that content is not tied to that individual, does that really help that content surface? It talks about the importance of author bylines, right? And Morgan’s an extreme example, but those people who have done a really good job of building that digital footprint of a reputation, they’re not writing that content.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But again, that you’re talking about one specific example of what they’re talking about. So yes, they do want to see stuff that you publish, but let’s just look at it. Here’s best personal injury lawyers in the us, finding the best objective. Morgan and Morgan’s name comes up on there, nationally recognized firms. When you look at all the citation stuff though, America’s top 100 personal injury attorneys, best law firms, Morgan, Morgan site, but it’s a bunch of other third party sites that are mentioning him,

Conrad Saam:

Right? My question is tying that individual piece of content to that awful acronym, eat,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The way to do that is for you to have a byline, and we didn’t mention this one, but this is a big one too. I think moving forward, add the structure, the relevant structure of data to the stuff that you’re publishing. Obviously they’re also taking consideration where it’s published or it’s published on your site. Those things go into it. That’s kind of an easy one. You don’t have to do anything to it. But again, my thing is I think it’s less important that you’re out there every day writing your expert blog posts, and it’s more important that everybody else is writing about you as the expert.

Conrad Saam:

I think that’s my point, and how do you make that happen? I do think this little bruhaha that Ben Sessions has created in his market, it may be an initial case study on this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

In fact, maybe Ben will be willing, I know Ben’s a listener. Thanks

Conrad Saam:

Ben. Ben’s willing to talk about Ben.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean that with love. But it might be interesting to see his name’s a breakout topic on Google Trends, and so you might expect to see an increase visibility for relevant queries, him getting surfaced more in those results, right? Because now he is unquote that PR is giving him a expertise bump for lack of a better way of explaining it,

Conrad Saam:

And you are specifically not tying that to individual pieces of content that Ben is writing on his own website,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Totally. It’s like Facebook posts. It’s transcripts from videos.

Conrad Saam:

That’s my point, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, I think that’s right. But again, is that really any different than it’s ever been, right? I mean, it’s your notoriety around the web. That’s a big part of traditional SEO. It’s a big part of prominence in local. I don’t know. Is that new?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I remember this because I keep coming back to this and you keep reminding me that it’s irrelevant because Google killed it because SEOs destroyed it. Remember authorship, my good old friend authorship. That’s the thing I keep coming back to as kind of, and let me explain this. For the less than five years into this lawyer who’s listening, it used to be you could get your little pretty picture put up. It was driven by Google Plus, and Google would try and insert your picture into the search results based on who actually wrote the piece of content. I’ve long surmised that even though they killed it publicly, the concept of using who wrote the piece of content as fundamental in whether or not it ranks, I’ve never really believed that they gave up on that, but you’re looking at that at a bigger picture. It’s not about that individual piece of content. It’s about the overall ecosystem and what Surface is there for.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I think this is a really good point too, because then obviously what they surface is also very query dependent. We’re seeing this already with this idea of the decoupling between impressions and clicks, especially on an individual page basis. In the past, in a simpler, less complicated Google world, this best personal injury lawyers in the US query would probably pull up a bunch of individual pages of sites that had created their best list that’s gone. All of those publishing sites, all those sites that said, here are who we think the 10 best are. Here are who we think the 10 best are. Google’s like, forget all that. We’re just going to tell you who the 10 best are based on all the data we have. And that’s the same thing that the GPTs are doing, right? They’re not like showing you here’s all the different sites that created a 10 best list. Here are the 10 best and so

Conrad Saam:

Accurately,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well a different issue, but we’re here to tell lawyers how to appear in these results. And so again, I think it’s less about I need to publish stuff on my site to try to pick up these long tail queries because that’s not really a thing anymore. I mean, they’re there. They’re just buried below Aios, buried below local packs. They’re buried below, not to mention

Conrad Saam:

Version, several

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Versions, several versions of their ad product and the sites that do still show up for those, they tend to be the big director. It’s best lawyers, US News and World Report. And then there’s the question, the forum sites, so like Quora and Reddit, those are in that mix, and then I think you start getting into the actual law firm sites, so they’re still doing the same thing. But again, this idea that you’re going to write this blog post that’s going to pick up long tail search traffic, it’s still a thing, but even if it’s in the consideration set, it just doesn’t have enough prominent visibility with a user experience, whether it’s a hyperlink or whatever to get someone to click that that’s going to be a sustainable strategy moving

Conrad Saam:

Forward. The death of the long tail brought to you by, Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I felt like as I was saying that I was like, this is going to be misunderstood. To think that it’s death of the long tail, long tail is still a huge thing. In fact, I still believe that Google, and in fact, I think it’s going to be the opposite. Google has forever had this. 15% of the queries are brand new. My sense is, is that if you took into consideration the actual user queries, all the fan out queries, all the follow up queries, I mean, remember these things are retraining us how we engage with the actual search interface. My sense, and Google says the same thing they’re reporting, even though there’s no real, we can’t check their data on this. My sense is there’s an explosion of the number of new queries and derivative queries that are actually happening in the search interface because of this very point is that the journey isn’t search, click consume the information, it’s search fan out, follow up, zero click information being presented to you. It’s not that linear search journey anymore.

Conrad Saam:

It’s interesting. You and I have been critical for a long time of content sites just pushing and pushing more and more long tail stuff. You need massive authority on your site to play the long tail game, and most people don’t think about that. They think, just think about barfing out blog posts. So that is one thing that has been problematic with the long tail theory for a very, very long time. We talk about this all the time, search agencies like generating tangible content because it’s something that you see and you think you’re getting something there. Whether or not IT services because your site has no authority, is immaterial because we’ve delivered something. We’ve nailed our deliverables. The other part that I, and this is just supposition on my part, I can’t prove this. The more you have a long tail specific query, the more you’re going to rely on a AI generative experience to needle down to what you’re exactly looking for instead of trying to find that piece of content that already exists. And that I think is a change in consumer behavior that many of you who use AI for your search experience are individual experiencing. Now, I don’t know if there’s any data on that, but again, it presupposes that we are changing our behavior, which I think is very true,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And that’s why too, all of our historical notions about keywords and rankings and traffic and all this stuff, it’s all going out the window. And so people say, oh, whether you want whatever, SEO is dead meme you want to pick from, it’s not that it’s dead, but it is changing in a way that is so foundationally different that once you even start getting into this concept of searches and impressions and keywords, you’re already kind of missing that the user journey is changing in a way that you are doing work that’s actually not going to get the outcome that you believe that it’s going to get because the search user journey is not ending in a click to your website. The other thing too is that there are a lot of overlap with traditional SEO best practices. Now, everybody’s coming in and said, oh, hey, look, I’m going to try to sell you on how to get you ranked in these AI mode and AI overviews, and maybe there are some things you can reprioritize technical structured data.

There’s some content formatting concepts that I think are applicable. People are talking about the death of links, right? Links don’t matter anymore. There’s still a lot of overlap with, especially when you’re talking about Google with what they’ve done historically. It’s not necessarily the AI mode just abandons all of the historical search algorithms that they’ve used. It’s now just changing the way that there’s this intersection between the generative content and the traditional search and that these levers are constantly being pulled or dials being turned. And so I would caution folks that are, oh, I’m dumping all of, I talked to this person. They’re an A IO expert or an A EO expert or AI mode expert, and we’re dropping all this

Conrad Saam:

Person, how many experts are there? Gyi, how many people know what’s going on here?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Zero. Even the people that work at Google. Anyway, I would caution that and I would go look at the documentation, but again, in our very, very early understanding of what we’re seeing working, I think if anything, I’d start thinking about this idea of this co-occurrence. So this citation idea, when your name is showing up across the web on these best lists or industry recognition or in local journalists coverage. That’s the kind of stuff. It is more of this traditional PR stuff and to get people to say, well, we’ve always been supposed to been doing that. And it’s like, right, exactly. That’ss, what we’ve been trying to talk about is that it’s more traditional marketing just in the digital space.

Conrad Saam:

Let me end with one interesting piece of guidelines from Google. They’re asking you to self-identify your content as being AI generated. So if you are using AI to generate content, whether that’s text or imagery, Google is asking you to self-report yourself. It’s like that good old disavow link list from the past. But it is something that I would take into account if you are using AI extensively for generating our whole new website. The imagery is all ai. We did that very deliberately, but there are tags, special tags to identify that you’re actually using ai. Now, if anyone can’t figure out that a bird holding a briefcase is ai, that’s kind of on them.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Did you disclose on your website that you used ai? Is that part of your,

Conrad Saam:

It’s not live yet, but I’ll be able to tell whether or not my staff listens to this podcast. If we launch the website, which is scheduled for the next week or two without the AI tags to identify that our birds with briefcases are actually not real. We didn’t send people out

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we joke, but there are states that are pursuing consumer protection statutes that say that you need to disclose your use of ai. To me, it’s such an interesting thing, like they don’t ask you to disclose that you’re using autocorrect or a calculator calculator or word processor or Grammarly or yada yada. And then it’s also, and so even if you got over that hurdle, how much AI usage triggers the need for the disclosure? So I am writing the thing myself, but all of my research and all my questions and everything is all ai. Do I need to say this was researched using GPT? I don’t know. No one knows. Nobody knows. It’s provocative,

Conrad Saam:

Brought to you by launch our league of marketing. We don’t know

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Where do we go from here, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

So now’s a great time for us to foreshadow our upcoming two podcast. Gyi and I in the next episode are going to talk about our perspective on the pretty big Clio Scorpion exclusive marketing deal. And then we’re really excited to have Clio and Scorpion join us for their joinder to our perspective. Stay tuned.

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