AI & The Future of Search Engines

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to serps. Aloha. Mahalo. Put your serps up podcast. We're pushing out some grooving insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Morty oversting, the head of SEO brand here at Wix. And I'm joined by the always cutting edge, innovative new emerging tech of the SEO communications world, or head of SEO communications here at Wix and Wix studio, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello. I try not to cut up too much. I've been known to cut a rug from time to time. I've always liked that turn of phrase.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was better than cutting the cheese, so.

Crystal Carter:

Oh no, we're not doing that on this podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like a podcast, guys. What a bad rap for cheese. Like, cheese is wonderful. Like, why would I get her, like cut the cheese. Please, please cut me some cheese.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, I've had some smelly cheese in my time. Like there are some cheeses that like really go for it.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like fancy people's cheese. Like, I'm not talking about that. Like cheddar and mozzarella, right? Maybe some monster, right?

Crystal Carter:

We keep it simple. We keep it like, like classy. Yeah, that's what it works.

Mordy Oberstein:

The Surface up podcast is brought to you by Cheez whiz and not by cheese, but by Wix Studio, where you can only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight, over@wix.com SEO Learn Newsletter. But where you can also spin up some AI images, create title tags and meta descriptions using AI and more. Look for it wherever you do stuff inside of Wixtudicause all over the place. It's everywhere. AI is everywhere inside of Wix Studios. I'm trying to say is today we're talking about preparing for the future as AI search engines and AIO reviews aiositive set to dominate the skies perhaps maybe. And as the chat GPTs of the world rule the seas, why an entity first approach to SEO show rule the day when looking to get your URL's into AI outputs. Why there are no shortcuts, cheats and or hacks to reigning supreme in AI results.

Mordy Oberstein:

So sorry. Not heading yonder past the mountain views and gazing out on AI search engines beyond Google as AI SEO influencer, an actual real life human being, Garrett Sussmann pipes in on how AI search engines will change user behavior. Plus, we talked to Wix Studios Paula Mejia about what AI abilities move the needle for large marketing teams. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO News and who you should be following on social media for more SEO and AI awesomeness. So as AI search engines and outputs with URL's of all sorts set to ascend towards user preference, sovereignty, and how ye can knight thyself master of the realm. That is. LLM on this, the Serps up podcast. I win all medieval times in y'all, which like, it's such a weird thing, medieval.

Mordy Oberstein:

You show up to watch, like, people jousting while you're eating a cheeseburger. I've never been there, so I don't know, but it seems weird.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. I kind of always wanted to go to the knights of roundtable in Las Vegas. I don't know, mostly to hear the terrible english accents. Like people in Las Vegas going, hear ye, hear ye.

Mordy Oberstein:

Like, I'm not from England. Clearly they don't do that all the time.

Crystal Carter:

What? Have terrible english accents?

Mordy Oberstein:

No, like I thought, like, you know, if I'm an english person, I'm going into, I don't know, like a restaurant. I'm trying to get the waiter's attention. I'll be, hear ye, hear ye, thy waiter. They don't do that.

Crystal Carter:

Only for special occasions.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ah, okay. They don't have like a bella ringing?

Crystal Carter:

No, only for special occasions. In England, what you do find is there are sometimes places where they have a lord mayor and the lord mayor has bling, has ridiculous necklaces, this huge necklace and wears a cape and stuff. It's amazing because they're supposed to have all this decorum, but they wear all.

Mordy Oberstein:

This bling that I'm talking about touristy Englands for me. So. All right, all right. It's the subject of basically every marketing team's meetings, blog posts, social media. It's the subject of all the posters on trees, whatever, is basically how do I get my site mentioned? And when possible, link to an AI output like search, GPT, chat GPT, and everyone's favorite classic, the AI overview. And it seems to me that everyone is looking for some sort of like optimization hack. I cannot tell you how many times people are like, yeah, how can I get in there quickly? And the answer is, there's no hack. It's a lot of work to get in there, and it's going to be a lot of real digital marketing, presence, brand presence, building, that's the only way of getting in there.

Mordy Oberstein:

And for SEOs, it's a different kind of optimization and a different kind of way of thinking, because again, it's really entity based. If you go to chat GPT and you're like, what are the best places to get a cheeseburger? It's going to say McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's. Because McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's are everywhere. Those are the known quantities. Those are the known entities. And they didn't, McDonald's didn't get there. But doing something like SEO hack, they got it because they've been around forever and they're everywhere because it's not like, I don't know, it's not like links or title tags or crawl weights or whatever. It's good old entity building or in my day when I walk to school, uphill both ways.

Mordy Oberstein:

So we call brand building, or I like to call it momentum building because fundamentally getting inside of these outputs means being the entity related to the input. And there's no hack for that. And that's where I like to start this conversation.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, so this is something that I've looked into and I'll be speaking at Brighton SEO. I can't remember if this goes out before then or after that about this as well. And one of the things is that essentially within these systems, they're using entities to understand because from a large language model they're using entities to understand relationships to things, to understand language. Right. So a prime example that I use when I'm speaking to people is I put in the, there's a great tool if you're trying to understand entities. And we've got some great resources on the Wix SEO learning hub about entities and about the relationship between entities and search. So we have, Michelle Fortin's written a great one about entity relationships and we also have some other resources around that as well. So if you really want to get into that, and also I think Gus Pelosi has a great article about the knowledge graph and how that all works and that all backs up all of these sort of things.

Crystal Carter:

And one of the tools that I use when I'm looking at entity relationships, and it's really great because it's free to use and you can see it, lays it out really clearly, is something called Textrazr. Textrazr is old school. It's an oldie but a goodie. And what you can do is you can pop in a piece of text and it will pull out all of the entities that can see and all the entities that are related to it and how they're related, et cetera, et cetera. One of the ones that is a classic example that I use all the time is the Barbie movie description. The Barbie movie description doesn't mention anything about a doll. It says, like, barbie and Ken go on a hilarious adventure to save Barbie land, something to that effect. And when you pop that into textrazure, one of the entities it pulls out is Mattel and fashion doll and barbie.

Crystal Carter:

And it doesn't say mattel, it doesn't say fashion doll. It doesn't say. It doesn't say Barbie the doll. But because you have the word barbie and the word can in close proximity and you have the word Barbie land, the machine learning is able to, is able to identify that those entities are latent in there. So if, similarly, if you go into something like Chachi pt, if you go into perplexity, quad Gemini, et cetera, and you say, name me a fashion doll, what they will do is they'll say Barbie, right? Because they understand that Barbie, that the entity of Barbie is related to a fashion doll. Now, it's very tricky if you don't have a legacy ip like Barbie. Barbie's been going for like 70 years or something like that. Like, you know, the pre Internet in there, all of that sort of stuff.

Crystal Carter:

It's very tricky to sort of sharp your entity. However, Wix, which has been around for. I think we're coming. We're like old, old man Internet Wix.

Mordy Oberstein:

1617 years, 18 years, something like that.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's 18 years. It'll be 20. It'll be 20 years in 2026. And Wix on our knowledge graph says we are cloud based cms. If you go into chats and say, name me a cloud based cms, guess what it'll say Wix, right? Because that's part of our entity. This is really important for a couple of reasons. One is because people try to rank on Chachi BT, but what they forget is that, like, it's not that you have to wait for the updates, right? It's not live, live data. They do have links in there, but they're not like brand new live updating links.

Crystal Carter:

It's kind of like, I'm gonna date myself here. It's kind of like the phone book. Remember when the phone book would come out and they release it either once a year, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Big ass books.

Crystal Carter:

Now, if Aardvark taxis only started up in January and they dropped the phone book in December, guess what? Aardvark taxis isn't in the phone book. But the next time they drop the phone book, Aardvark Taxis is going to be top of the top of the phone book, right? So what you have to do is sometimes you have to wait for the next drop of chat GBT. So when it first came out, I think it was dated to 2022. I think now it's up to 2023. And I think that as they go on, they'll get quicker and quicker and, like, the gaps between their data updates will be between the training models will get smaller. So when chat GBT first dropped, I was like, hello? And they were like, hi. I was like, who is Crystal Carter? And they said, who? And I said, who is Crystal Carter? They were like, I don't know who you are. And it's like, okey dokey.

Crystal Carter:

And me and my little ego sat back down. So then I recently said to chat GPT, I was like, when was the last time you updated your data? What training data are you working up to? What was the last time you updated it? And they said, oh, 2023, blah blah, blah. And I said, okay, so who is Crystal Carter? And they were like, crystal Carter is head of SEO communications at Wix, blah blah blah blah, right? Because between then and between now, I've done a lot more stuff around my entity to build up my name around that particular stuff. Like, there's stuff on websites, there's stuff on articles, talks and this, that and the other, and that will update it. Similarly, I've had people who are like, oh, we just launched this product last month and we're not on track BT. I'm like, yeah. Cause chat GBT isn't up to last month, it's up to now. If you want to check an entity on something that's brand new, you need to look at some of the live scrape, the more like sort of hybrid ones that are like that are.

Crystal Carter:

They have augmented data. So they have a training set that's supported by live augmented data. Something like Copilot, right? So you launched your thing a month ago, check it on Copilot. Ask Copilot who is. Who is this? And if you're doing okay on that, then when chat BT up to updates, you're probably going to see yourself in there, right? But it's worth thinking about, but it's worth understanding, like, which models they are. So if you're. If your team is going, we're not ranking on chat GBT, we're not showing on chat to BT, understand the parameters, because there's some, some cases where, like, you're just ain't gonna. It's not, you're not gonna, you're not, because you just launched that, right.

Crystal Carter:

However, it's also the case of understanding, like how. How chatty BT understands that entity and understands where you are within that entity as well. So understanding, like some of these things is really, really important. And understanding how you can be unique in your entity.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I mean, look, let's assume for a second that chat GPT updated every day. It's updated every day. Fine. It doesn't. Right. As you mentioned, if you're, if you're asking, why are we not showing in there? How do we get in there? And then you're asking yourself that again next week, or even, like, I'll even say, like, next month, you're on the wrong track, in my opinion. Like, you, I don't think you understand how this works. It's momentum.

Mordy Oberstein:

Like, you need to generate digital momentum, which, by the way, can be offline, but you need to start, like, partnering with people. You need to start interacting. You need to start engaging, you need to start getting people talking about you, even if you have a strong entity. So, like, Google can understand who I am because I have a website, I have a LinkedIn profile of yada, yada, yada. You're not just trying to get them to understand, like, that you existed, right? You're trying to get in there from some kind of commercial way, like, what are the best soft drinks? It's gonna be coke, sprite, whatever. Even if it's not just as simple, like, as it's not simple either. But it's not as a matter of getting, like getting the knowledge graph to understand that you exist and to understand who you are. It's getting them to understand who you are and then getting them to understand that you're relevant enough to show us one of the top results in their output.

Mordy Oberstein:

And the only way to do that is to have that broader momentum that keeps building, by the way, that keeps building upon itself. Because if you don't and someone else will, and even if you are the top hot dog vendor, that when someone's best hot dog vendor in New York City, you might not be that again in six months from now, if the other hot dog vendor down the cart, down the cart, down the street with his cart, is building up all the momentum, and now it is the known entity or the hot entity around this, it comes down to you taking a different kind of mentality. How do I, how do I make connections? How do I get other people to talk about me? And how do I keep the momentum going? It's not a simple one to one linear optimization, like even a knowledge panel theoretically might be, which is also it's.

Crystal Carter:

Not, I think, from a practical point of view that that comes down to having, having like a paper trail, essentially having, having a paper trail. So one of the things that's worth thinking about is like, if there is somebody else within your sector, within your search ecosystem, I guess you would say, who is already a known entity to chat GBT and you're trying to get yourself aligned, like into chat GBT, it's worth prioritizing those links. So, for instance, like, if you were to think about Barbie, for instance, Barbie's gonna want to make sure that Mattel is already on there, right? If Mattel's already on there, then that great, that's a great place to start. So you need to make sure that you also are like very, very clearly articulated within the Mattel website within, and that you're associated with Mattel because you are, for instance, like one of the good example that I give for where Google gets a little confused and there's, there's some disambiguation that needs, needs acquiring, is like, if you were to say something like, Steve McQueen is a man known for his films, right? There are two Steve McQueen's who are men known for their films, right? There's Steve McQueen from the sixties, and there's Steve McQueen who's like a Turner Prize winning director from now, right? And what would be important if you were to disambiguate those particular entities? For instance, if you just said, who's Steve McQueen? Who is Steve McQueen? For instance, so that Google understands there are two, for instance, you need to make sure that they're very distinct, very clear named entities that are already known by these LLMs. So, for instance, Steve McQueen has a Turner Prize, or the current Steve McQueen has a Turner Prize as an Academy Award. It's worth mentioning in a bio, for instance, for, for Steve McQueen on his website and in any art, any podcasts, any, you know, awards, things that he does, any, any appearances anywhere where he's mentioned online that he has a Turner Prize, has, it has an Academy Award, for instance, because that will align with those particular entities. And then you would think when it says who's, who's somebody who's won an Academy Award, it would say McQueen. What I've seen a few times is I've spoken to agency owners, for instance, who are like, we're trying to get on chat GPT, and we haven't had any luck.

Crystal Carter:

We can't see why we're not on chat CPT. We ask, like, can you name a good agency in Paris? And we can't see ourselves on chat CPT. Well, I had a look at some, like, top agencies who have great, great, great work. They do wonderful, wonderful things. And one of the things that I saw was that everybody has the same bio. Like, everybody has the same, like, sort of the same, like, usp, like by line, tagline, whatever. They're like, we are a global agency serving top brands in, you know, over 100 countries on some incredible campaigns, but you could literally copy and paste that onto, like, seven different, like, top tier agencies, for instance. Like, it's the same one.

Crystal Carter:

So when Google's like, can you name me an agency? Like, they're, they're, they don't necessarily need to name someone specific or, sorry, not Google. Like, if you're looking at an LLM, like, they, they don't necessarily name someone specific because there's not anything specific to differentiate you. So when you're thinking about, about your entities, make sure that you're aligning yourself with named entities. So that. So that when you're, when someone's doing a search on an Llmde, on a generative search tool, like perplexity, like quad, like copilot or whatever, that when they're showing up, you're also showing up. And it's worth thinking about that in relation to your brand in relationship to the partnerships that you develop in relationship to the sort of online paper trail that you're developing across the web.

Mordy Oberstein:

You mentioned something that I want to piggyback on or swing back around on, and it's a website.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Like, I'm obviously interested in selling websites because that's how I feel my family. But yeah, I think a lot of, a lot of this is like, if you're, if you're listening to this and you're not a big brand and you're doing, and you're doing a podcast, are you doing a podcast? I'm gonna, I'm gonna run this, actually, right now. I'm gonna type. I am gonna search for Yankees podcast and best Yankees podcast and chat GPT at million bucks. This is what happens. I'm going to predict, okay, if I run best Yankees podcast into chat GPT, the results that are going to come up are the ones with the largest, like, web presence, and it's gonna be the ones that actually have a website even though they're more popular ones on YouTube. So let's run this great. Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a Yankees podcast I listen to. His father was actually a professional baseball player for the New York Yankees, Gary Sheffield. Gary Sheffield junior is called Yankees unloaded. It's a great pocket. It's one of my favorite Yankees podcasts, and there are many. And in fact, oh, this is perfect. Okay. They don't show up.

Mordy Oberstein:

In fact, the Yankees announcer and this might be an entity thing, actually has a radio show which on ESPN, which mainly talks about the Yankees, and he's not even here because they don't have websites. You know who's here? There's someone called talking Yanks. They're a whole like, network of podcasts, basically, and a bunch of their subsidiaries, like, they're like, they're like, I don't know what you call their sub brand podcasts. They're here because they all have websites. All of the podcasts that actually have a website and are connected via websites, those are the ones that show up here because you have to give the LLM something to grab onto. If you're just on your podcast platform, on Spotify, if you're just on YouTube, or if you're on Spotify and YouTube, there's nothing to grab onto. So if you are a smaller brand and you're like, what do I do here? The first thing to do is get, is honestly get off of social for five minutes and build a website.

Crystal Carter:

I think the important thing to remember is that. So chat GPT, one of the founding things for their model, one of the founding pieces of data for their model is a common crawl. So common crawl is one of the things it was based off of early, early on. And so, yeah, that's web scraping. If you're thinking about copilot, for instance, that's Bing and that's chat GPT. If you're thinking about perplexity, they have their own bot that goes around and across the web. It goes around and across web. And perplexity is listing things as well.

Crystal Carter:

They're also on the web. So it's worth thinking about that as well. It's also worth considering which elements are thinking about where they get their data from. So we know that Google is getting information from Reddit, for instance, and they're using that to train to train their models, including Gemini. We know that chat GBT is aligned with Bing, and you're using Bing search results as well. So, for instance, if you're not ranking in Bing, that's something to consider as well. But I think that it's worth looking at how these models work in order to align that with you. And they are listing links to websites.

Crystal Carter:

So the chat PBT four, which is the one that's free for most people, is listing websites where they can sometimes and then also perplexity is listing web listing links all the time as well. For instance, when you look in GA four, you can see the traffic that's coming into your sites. Jess Schultz recently shared a really good regex for finding it's really simple to use for finding all of the traffic that you're getting from LLMs. And Chachi BT is leading the charge in many, many cases, but perplexity is actually coming in significantly regularly.

Mordy Oberstein:

I mean, it's interesting, but yeah, and.

Crystal Carter:

It'S coming in regularly for a lot of folks, and I've seen it on some occasions where it's actually surpassing chat pt for certain queries. So I think that's worth understanding as well where you're getting a little bit of traction and where you can build. But they are sending traffic to websites and I think that it's worth getting on these LLMs if you're not already. Don't just log in to Google yourself, use them so that you understand how they work.

Mordy Oberstein:

If we're talking about perplexity, it kind of brings up something we asked Garrett Sussmann over at ipol rank, how will AI search engines change user behavior? Is this the death of Google? It's not, but it's interesting because it's a conversation that we wanted to have for a long time that a lot of SEOs are having is how are AI search engines going to change user behavior? So here's Garrett on how AI search engines will change user behavior.

Garrett Sussman:

How will AI search engines change user behavior? That is a meaty question. And you know what? Nobody knows. However, let's dive into this and think about it. So right now, current 2024, nothing stealing market share from Google, it's still like 90 some percent. We're talking perplexity. Search, GPT, even Bing's copilot, they're really not being used to the extent that they're making a marginal difference. However, just thinking about AI search engines and the way that they understand natural language so much better than traditional old school search engines, it could potentially be a game changer that we should delve into. No, but honestly, you think about the way that we used to use search engines, basic keywords.

Garrett Sussman:

We were trained by the search engines and their capabilities, but now they really can understand so much more context with the advent of mum and, and these types of algorithms that are making things so much more complex that they understand these nuance of language. So what happens when people feel more and more comfortable using these AI search engines? Well, we're going to use natural language. We're going to have longer tailed search terms. We're going to be able to talk like humans to ask our queries. We're going to be able to infuse our own biases, confirmation bias, into the actual searches we make, which as SEOs is extremely challenging and problematic because these AI search engines are going to search for more personalized results that are very, very, very specific and potentially pulled from all different types of content and other queries and other links. Remember, it expands on the queries. It's not just exactly what you're asking. In addition to that, rank tracking is going to be so much more difficult.

Garrett Sussman:

I mean, you're not going to be able to track a singular keyword because they're going to be so many variations. So do I think this is going to happen in the near future? Like twelve months? No, probably not. Unless, you know, we have some major antitrust trial where, you know, the american government decides that Google has to break up and there are consequences maybe faster than that, but chances are we're not going to see any actual user behavior change for another two 3510 years until people really become used to using these AI search engines and they trust the results so that they actually start to talk to them like real people. It's meaty. It's fascinating. Nobody knows, but I cannot wait to watch and see how we start to interact with this technology and it becomes more mainstream over time.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Garrett. Make sure to give Garrett a follow over on LinkedIn and on Twitter at Garrett Sussman or X. What do you want to call it? It's such an interesting conversation. He made a great point, or interesting point. It is a great point and an interesting point about the accuracy. Like for example, I actually looked up like best SEO podcast and Garrett had the rankable podcast. They got his name wrong as a host.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

So will the format allow you to deep dive the way you want to deep dive? I feel like for a top level query or top level search, like, yeah, it's probably like that's a no brainer. Like, you're going to see people going to the chat GPTs of the world, but for deeper investigations, like, I don't know, how do I deal with kidney? Like, I don't know if I want to go to chat DBT for that. But really looking to get like a balanced look and really dive into the topic. Maybe it's not the easiest way to explore, I don't know. But the accuracy thing, I know it's great, but there's, there's, there's still, and it's definitely better than it was before, but there are still a lot of instances where it's not exactly accurate. And if you're going to be like, well, I have to pick a search engine, which am I going to go to? Even like, no, 80% of the time might be great. That 20% is still going to weigh on people's minds. I feel like I, I feel like.

Crystal Carter:

Though, that main Google search is not always accurate either. So I feel like what I tend to use in terms of as a user, because I use multiple search engines is I go to Google and I can't find what I need or if I don't even know where to start, right? If I'm like, I don't even know what this is called, I don't know what this is. I need a thing that will help me to do this. And then they'll say, well, you might need one of this, this, this and this. And I'm like, okay, well, what is that? And then they'll explain that. The LLM will explain the information there. But he was talking about like conversational topics. When you go to Copilot, they have the microphone as the easiest thing for you to use.

Crystal Carter:

Like it's, it's really high priority. When you use the copilot app, the microphone is super useful and you literally just say what you want and then it will spit out something, something that you need. And I think that that's having the microphone as a central search tool is going to make you more likely to speak more conversationally, like Garrett is talking about. Similarly, within with Bing recently, they, they opened up their chat bar, like, you know, when you need to go onto it and it's like, oh, I think it's like 2000 characters or something they opened it up to. And all of these LLMs keep expanding the character count that you can add in for what you need. So I've had it before where I'm trying to troubleshoot a piece of code and before you were able to only able to put in a certain amount and then you'd sort of top off at the characters. And now I can put in pretty much the whole document and say, I have this documentation, I have this piece of code. Please can you help me debug it? And then it will help you to pull those things out.

Crystal Carter:

So I think that when we're thinking about search and how people are going from some of these tools into a website, I think the trust factor is important. I think for ymyl stuff, it's super, super important. I was looking at some financial question or something and I said, if my income is this, how much should I invest in this? If my income is this, how could. And then it was like, it was like, you should. And then the number that I put on the income or whatever, they were like, the whole number is what you should invest in the thing. And I'm like, that's terrible advice. Luckily, I'm not a complete moron, but if somebody was to just follow that advice wholesale, they would be putting their entire savings into whatever this investment thing is and would have nothing. And the thing that's fascinating about that is that if you go onto, I mean, break the fourth wall, I was looking at Cedars type types, things where you look at supporting smaller companies, startups and stuff.

Crystal Carter:

And if you go on one of those websites, it has disclaimers all over the website that's like, be careful. Investment is risky. Make sure you've read all the terms and conditions. Do not invest everything. Blah, blah, blah. If you go to buy a credit card, they say, please be careful about all of these stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

Like, credit cards are coffee, coffee is hot, please be careful. Right?

Crystal Carter:

There's all of these different disclaimers, but in chat and copilot, there was nothing. It was just like, go, like, invest all of the, everything that you want, like, make all this money, like, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, guys, like, where are the, you know, you should understand it's.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not always there yet. That's kind of the thing. It's not always there yet. And that it's a bad association. Like, it's all about it. These kind of things of trust is all about associations. It's a bad association. I don't think it's there yet.

Mordy Oberstein:

I do think though, like, what's interesting or perhaps different about, let's say, like Google's use of AI versus like, going to chat. If the Google's a overview doesn't give you what you want, or it's a little bit wonky or whatever it is, you have the actual results right underneath it. So even though the results sometimes aren't always right, they're diverse. So like, the top results, not what you want, the second one might be so like that. That diversity of sources, I don't think is something that's ever going to go away. I think it's like inbuilt in what we want is when we want to look at a topic. And I wonder if, I mean, I searched GBT something different, but like the chat GPTs of the world, that kind of format, what really lend itself to what people ultimately really want. Again, it's a lot.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a lot to discuss there. Who knows what we're talking about? AI products. We have a little treat for you because we know someone who knows a lot about AI products. No matter what AI search engines you might be using or what it might mean for user behavior, there's no doubt that the technology has already impacted your marketing team and one way, shape, form or another, I completely botched that idiom. And it's fine. I'm okay with it. I'm hallucinating right now. I'm AI.

Mordy Oberstein:

Anyway, the question is, in what way should AI move large scale marketing teams or big organizations, or even small ones too, into action? To help us end this, we're going across the wix verse with our very own vp of marketing enterprise, Paula Mejia. And this very special, as I already mentioned, across the Wix verse. Three, two, one, ignition.

Crystal Carter:

Lift up.

Mordy Oberstein:

Paula, welcome to the show.

Paula Mejia:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here, you guys.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm terrified right now. It's Monday morning. This is like one of the first things, like, I'm actually doing with, like, you're the first person I'm speaking to this week.

Paula Mejia:

Oh, that's so. Actually, you are also, other than my children, who woke up at like.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I spoke to my wife and children. Like, those are not people. That's family.

Crystal Carter:

We had a silent school run. I don't know about you guys, my kids.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't have a silent anything. I'm lying.

Crystal Carter:

We didn't at all. There was lots of shouting.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's lots of shouting. That sounds.

Crystal Carter:

Where are your socks? Where are they? Anyway?

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, my God, the socks, right? What the hell with the socks and the shoes?

Crystal Carter:

Takes forever for anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

I love system.

Paula Mejia:

I have a system. So outside of marketing our enterprise solution, I have systems for finding socks. I will share it with you separately.

Crystal Carter:

No, please share it now.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. Yeah.

Paula Mejia:

Those like grocery bags that are like, the sustainable ones that are like nets?

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Paula Mejia:

You know? Okay. I have three kids, and they're really young, so they have similarly sized feet, which is part of the problem because I'm like this. I don't know whose sock this is, and somehow it doesn't fit everyone. So anyway, so I got three of those nets and I hang them next to the laundry. So, so each net has a name, and then I put all the socks in their corresponding child's net. And then I have a basket on the side for all the pairless socks. And so they just live there until like two weeks. And if you don't find your match within that time frame.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, that's smart. That's smart.

Paula Mejia:

You go, you are done. I don't want anything to do with you. It's not very environmentally friendly, but like, I just can't with the, like one sock.

Crystal Carter:

You can recycle them at TK Maxx. Shout out to TK Maxx. You can recycle the spare socks at TK Maxx. Yes, you can. And also, this is one of the reasons why Paula does what she does, because she finds solutions for things. She finds solutions not just for socks, but for your whole enterprise. She's very good at this kind of.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thing, which is what we should be talking about. So AI for large marketing teams, I'll start with this off. I feel like there's been a little bit of pushback in the, in the digital marketing space, especially in larger organizations around AI. It was neat, it was awesome. We tried to implement it and it didn't exactly go as we thought it would, or we lack differentiation. We're worried about what it's going to mean for all these different concerns that maybe you don't have at the SMB level, but you might have at the enterprise level. What are you seeing out there in the enterprise ether?

Paula Mejia:

Yeah, no, I totally hear that. So I think before you assess the impact that AI has had for marketing teams today, I would just first look at what marketing teams, and especially leaders of marketing team, they're feeling. And what they're feeling is a ton, a ton of pressure. So I think marketing has evolved a lot over the last couple of years, and the list of responsibilities for marketing teams just keeps getting bigger and bigger. So where you used to be responsible for brand and growth, now you're responsible for, you know, ginormous P and ls. But you have less budget, you have less resources. All sorts of additional business metrics are kind of, of part of the KPI's for marketers. And marketing takes a lot of time, and it's really not that easy to do, even though a lot of people think it looks easy.

Paula Mejia:

And this is why I think you also see ten years of like, senior executives in marketing being quite short compared to others. So I think the average tenure, first CMO is two years, whereas everyone else in the C suite is more than five. So you kind of enter this world of like, pressure, pressure, pressure, less resources, deliver more, and in comes AI for marketers, right? And everyone is like, oh my God, a little scared. Maybe it'll take some more jobs, but it should bring a ton of efficiency, right? You should be able to create content like that. There should be no problem. It should be super great. And yet that kind of sense of urgency and lack of support, I would say organizationally, still is very much felt for marketers. And I think right now the reason is that AI feels a bit like a false promise to marketing teams in terms of the efficiencies it can deliver.

Paula Mejia:

Because while it's being used to varying degrees in different organizations, as you said, where it is being used, it's mostly in small kind of slivers of content creation. So aspiring partner for your content writer, maybe editing certain pieces of your blogs, occasionally being used and designed to make the process a bit more efficient. But it isn't an integrated part of your marketing process. It's kind of bits and bolts. And then you look at kind of the process of going live with a marketing campaign and it's, you know, it's like a full, it's a huge thing that involves many levels of approval. Often it's, let's call it gate kept by technology that may or may not be set up in a way to make you more efficient. And this is obviously the area that Wix studio addresses the best. So what I often tell people to look at before they even look at the AI solution is, is what are the processes and systems in place your marketing team has? And are those the right ones to make it more efficient? Because right now, if you use AI to create more thought leadership content or a campaign, but you can't get to market quickly enough because you're depending on a developer or the technical person that works on your DXP, it doesn't matter if you create that content really fast, but no one will see it.

Paula Mejia:

And marketing content. Tell me if you guys agree. I don't think that there's such a thing as like Evergreen content anymore. I think most marketing content now is a very specific shelf life. So I see a lot of marketers under this pressure to create more. And the creation process is kind of getting there, but then the getting to the market with that thing you created is not being enabled by AI. And so this is part of the gap that I think we absolutely have to bridge and something that we're working on at Wix Studio to do so teaser. That's the new product that's coming out next year.

Paula Mejia:

But basically what we understood is, okay, you know, Wix generally, and Wix Studio has kind of solved the problem of creating sites at speed, creating digital assets at speed at the highest quality.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Paula Mejia:

So that's kind of the end, right? And the beginning is more the content creation, which as I said, right now feels quite strange in terms of how AI can support you. And my content writers use club and my designer uses whatever synesthesia promotion video. So how do you kind of integrate all those things together? And this is, that's the idea. This is what we're working on, a platform, a marketing suite, let's call it, that enables marketing teams to create the highest quality assets that are enabled by AI.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that this is something I really like about the approach. So when you go into Wix studio, there's AI everywhere, but it's not overwhelming. Like I use Grammarly all the time and Grammarly is constantly trying to push AI on me and I'm like, I don't want it. Just tell me how to spell receipt because I always put the e and the I in the wrong place. Just tell me how to spell it, please. Thank you. And whereas like with Wix, like what we have is we haven't, we have an opt in for all of the areas and we have, and with Wix Studio, we have it built into all of the different parts. So if you're stuck on a page and you need to get that page out and you're, you're like, I don't know how to write this about page.

Crystal Carter:

You can click the create with text. If you've got a bunch of products that are brand new and you need to get product descriptions on there so that you go to market, then we have tools that help you do that. We have tools that help you do stuff in the CMS that you're like, okay, I want to create a bunch of dynamic pages. We have templates for that. Go forth and do what you need to do. I've got this image that somebody sent me. It's a great image, but it's only this many megapixels and I need it to be bigger and I don't want to have to wait two weeks for them to send me another picture. I can upscale it in this part of the, the CMS as well.

Crystal Carter:

You don't want to have to wait four weeks for the developer to come back to you to make the page responsive. All of that sort of stuff, we have it built in at point of use so you don't have to go and search for another tool to find it because I think that that can be really tricky for marketing teams right now. There's this need to adopt. But also, every time you try to adopt something, there's the time to learn it, but then there's something else that comes out right after that. And then you're like, oh, I spent all this time learning this other AI tool and now there's this new one and it's sort of, there's so much technology coming out right now, it's difficult to keep up.

Paula Mejia:

Exactly. No, that's exactly right.

Mordy Oberstein:

The pressure to adopt, I think, is interesting. It's almost like, it's like a value in and of itself. Like, we have to be using AI, but so it creates this, like, almost like weird, weird pressure on these teams to start using AI. But then when you start actually think you mentioned before, when you start thinking about, like, where it's actually applicable and where it's not applicable, it's really, you know, I would say not few and far between, but it's really targeted. I feel this. Right. I have a ton of content to get out, but I also am, like, very, very careful about my messaging.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

So it does work, but that it doesn't work. And, like, finding that sweet spot is so hard right now.

Paula Mejia:

I feel like, yeah, for sure. I think for me, it's really also important to say that when we talk about efficiency, I think it's often understood as, oh, marketers are just trying to put more and more content out there. And for me, it's less about. More and more about optimizing content you have.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Paula Mejia:

Like, everything.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Paula Mejia:

You need to be able to put things out and then iterate on it quickly. And what about. I need 17 different articles. I need to create the landing page that comforts best for my audience. So I need multiple versions generated quickly enough, which I think is very in line with what you said around your messaging. Like, it's about kind of getting that quality and efficiency at the right balance.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. That's why, like, reusing something that, where you can have, like a construct and have the AI reuse it in multiple places and you come in after the fact and kind of like, do your thing with that, with that construct, I think it's a great way to use AI.

Crystal Carter:

I think also when you're talking about building on the quality, like, there's the, you've mentioned evergreen content, and I think that our idea of evergreen content has definitely changed, partially because, like, the not trend cycle, but what's new, what's considered new content on Google, whatever is changing. Like, the gap between, like, and I, I talked about this at the beginning of the year. And then we're seeing it, seeing this play out is that the gap between content refreshes is getting much smaller because teams that are using AI, teams that have accelerated content updates. So, for instance, it might be that you put out a piece of content and then you look back at it and you're like, actually, I could put this into a table. You can use AI to take that paragraph. You drop that into your AI tool and say, make this into a table. And they can make it into a table. It's not rewriting.

Crystal Carter:

It doesn't have to hallucinate. You can check everything really quickly. You can pop that into the table and make the content better, more readable, accessible to more people. For instance, using tools like that, maybe you didn't have illustrations and maybe now you're able to do that, for instance, and repurposing content. Right.

Paula Mejia:

Like, we marketers have lots of ideas. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. You just need to get it to your audience, maybe in a different channel, make sure they didn't miss it on the channel that already existed. And repackaging content, that was good and that had an impact. Like, we need to be doing that. That's for sure. Our key to efficiency and making sure that our, our impact is higher.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, we just recorded 100th episode of this podcast a few weeks ago. So we recorded in a stream. We did a live version of it recorded in Streamyard. And Streamyard gives you a way to, like, auto generate clips through AI to repurpose them, like, just exactly what you're looking for. Like, I don't want to have to go back through, manually create an audiogram if you can, you know, cut that out for me and it's, and it's decent. Give me 20 of them. If ten of them are good, then great. I still save a ton of time.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. And I think that there are a lot of people who are talking about efficiency. PricewaterhouseCooper recently did a report and they were saying that that's the biggest gains that we're seeing right now, today. And then as we go forward, we should see more AI agents that are more specialized and more unique for things. Where are you seeing marketing teams make the most efficiency gains right now from AI?

Paula Mejia:

Yeah, I think in content creation, that's where I see it the most. But I think that the impact really lies in the, in the hands of the creator. You guys have seen some really bad execution events in the SEO world, and I've all like people who I'm just like I, you know, I'm not an expert, but that looks really not like.

Mordy Oberstein:

The right way to create.

Paula Mejia:

I think some people, like I said, have misunderstood the efficiency that AI can bring with the fact that you still really much are the gatekeeper of the quality of that content. So I think this is, this, you know, like I said, there's, there is a promise that AI has for marketers. And I know we're close, but I think we need to be responsible in the way we use it and make sure that it is up to the highest quality standards. And that's something that I think anyone who is concerned about the future of your job with AI, whether you're in content design or in a more managerial area in marketing, I don't think that they will replace you. I don't think AI was going to replace an individual, but I think people who use AI will take your job if you're not using it. That for sure.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I agree.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Paula Mejia:

I think for agencies, I don't know if this is something that's come up in some of your conversations in the past, but I've spoken with a lot of agencies, some of which are more hesitant to use AI than others. And I think customers of agencies are rising up and asking, how are you using AI to make my money go farther? Show me the ways in which you're employing this new technology, or I'm going to go to another agency that can. And I think that, like I said, marketing and advertising is an area of a lot of pressure. And I think AI, because everyone hears about it and hears efficiency, you will be, in a way, accountable for showing how you're using it, but also making sure the quality is of the right standard.

Crystal Carter:

I think the other thing is that. So I recently attended an event. There's a group in London called Agency Hackers, and they've got another one coming up at the beginning of the year called the robot, are coming. It's a great session. It's very hands on about AI and how people are using AI. I spoke to loads of agencies there about how they're using AI and how we use AI at Wix and how one of the things, so just to give us the wix first, a little bit behind the fourth wall or whatever, at Wix, like, and you posted about this, actually on your LinkedIn, Paula, about how, like, we had, we, you know, we regularly have, like, AI workshop days. Like, we have, like, what can we do with AI? Let's have, let's talk about, like, different things that we're doing with AI. We have like, you know, we have, you know, working groups where people are trying things, testing things, iterating with things, talking to each other about how they're, how they're using it.

Crystal Carter:

But what's really important, and one of the things I love about Wix is that, like, we test things and as a team, as a company, as a business, we're not afraid to like, try something and see what happens and learn from it. If you're an agency, enterprise business, any kind of business, if you're not using AI, then you're also not learning how to use AI. If you're not using it in any way, then you don't know, you know, what you can do or how you can do it. We had Dale Bertrande on for a great webinar a few months ago, and one of the things he was talking about was a really good way to get started is to use Chachi. He had a couple of, a couple of ways. One was to try to use Chachi PT for everything, and then you'll learn very quickly what you can't use it for. Another way was to give it your to do list and say, how can you help me with this? And that can be really useful as well. But testing iterating and not expecting it to be, not expecting it to be perfect the first time, so, so, so important, I think.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think you have to kind of realize, like, where it is and where it's not really applicable categorically. Like, if you're on the performance side, like, there's gonna be a lot more ways where it's really, really, really easy and much more linear to realizing how you can use AI. Let's say you're more like, on the brand side, and especially in a world where content has become much more conversational, that you're going to have a more of a difficult time using it, or I was a more difficult time. You're going to be a little more creative in how you're going to use it. I use it in the research phase. I can use it to write up to x points where you're going to have to be a little more cautious, a little more strategic about how you go about implementing it. And again, if you're a marketing manager listening to this and you have multiple teams under you, I think you need to realize that different types of teams are going to be able to use the AI in different ways in different moments. It's not a linear equation.

Paula Mejia:

Absolutely. I will say, though, about the brand component, at least our solution does allow marketing teams, especially with larger integrated marketing teams, where I keeping that consistent tone of voice across, whether it's a franchise model or just different localized teams, that does enable you to keep more consistency in place just by putting certain guardrails in terms of how changes are rolled out across all your sites, making sure that it's following certain brand guidelines. So there are some things kind of helping that brand consistency component that I think teams really need to be aware of. But yeah, back to your point, Crystal. I think something that marketers are also responsible for on top of brand awareness, growth, conversion, blah, blah, is a tech stack. Now, no matter what you do, you're a technology user. And if you're managing a team, you need to be up to date on what technology they're using. Are they using the right one? Are they using outdated technology? Do you have even just from an ROI perspective, do you have too many licenses for things that are not bringing you value? Like do your tech stack audits people, even if you're not really like, this is kind of like a realization I had.

Paula Mejia:

I was at an event recently that we hosted in London and I was talking to someone about their CRM and they're like, oh, we have three CRMs. And I almost fell out of my chair, girl.

Crystal Carter:

Why?

Paula Mejia:

And you know, it's like legacy and also different teams. We don't like there was a some kind of reason, but you know, from an efficiency and like data quality perspective, three CRM's not the way to go, you guys.

Crystal Carter:

This is like your sock. If you haven't found your socks in two weeks, if you haven't touched that CRM in two weeks, let it go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Having worked two different SEO tool providers, I can tell you like, there's a significant amount of their user base or people who are paying large amounts of money every month who don't log into the tool.

Crystal Carter:

It's like people who go to the gym or who have a gym membership and.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly, that's what. Yeah, that's the SEO equivalent. Right, Paula? Folks want to keep up to date with what you're doing on the enterprise side for marketers and AI. Where can they find you?

Paula Mejia:

You can find me on LinkedIn. That's my, that's my jam these days.

Mordy Oberstein:

So everybody's jammed these days because there's nowhere else to go.

Paula Mejia:

Also true.

Mordy Oberstein:

Also speaking truth on the serves up podcast. Thank you so much, Paula, for coming on and telling us about the enterprise product. And we'll see you out there.

Paula Mejia:

Yeah, happy to. Thanks so much. Have a good day.

Mordy Oberstein:

Make sure, you follow Paul Mejia over on LinkedIn. Paul is wonderful, you know, also wonderful, Barry's wonderful, and all the other people who cover the SEO news as well. Which brings us to this week's snappy news.

Crystal Carter:

In a major development that was the talk of the digital marketing world, Semrush has announced its acquisition of third Door Media, the parent company of search Engine Land. This acquisition also includes all of their door media's brands, including SMX, the search Marketing Expo, Martech.org, comma, the Martech Conference, and digital Marketing Expo. For anyone that's been keeping score, this is another jewel in the some rush SEO media crown alongside backlinko and traffic think tank, this is quite the media portfolio. In other news, Google has announced a significant leadership change. Nick Fox has been appointed as the new head of Google Search, succeeding Prabhakar Raghavan, who is transitioning to chief technologist. Fox has been at Google since 2003 and will now oversee the knowledge and information division, which includes search, ads, e commerce, products and other things. This leadership change comes amidst lots of competition and legal pressures as Google faces lots of challenges from lots of different angles. Speaking of Google challengers over there at Bing, Microsoft is integrating new AI features into their search platform, so you can expect to see AI enhanced summaries providing concise information from different online sources appearing in the knowledge panel section.

Crystal Carter:

Though these aren't quite widely available just now, you should expect to see them roll out in the near future. Also from Bing, there have been lots of reports that there are bugs within the Bing webmaster tools API and documentation. Ryan Siddle, for instance, highlighted at least five issues, including problems with setting country and region on site requests. Microsoft has responded, saying that they acknowledge the bugs and that they are actively working to fix them. So they've already got two scheduled. And that concludes the snappy news.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was wonderful. Thank you, Barry and all those who cover the news. When Eric Clapton wrote wonderful tonight, he was writing it about Barry. Indeed. I hope that makes you feel a little bit awkward, Barry, that's special kind of way. If we're talking about AI and we mentioned who can you follow the very beginning of this episode for more SEO and AI awesomeness? This then Eli Schwartz is your man. Eli spends a lot of time talking about SEO and AI. He did so on our 100th episode of the podcast, and he does so all over LinkedIn.

Mordy Oberstein:

A lot of thought provoking question about how AI will not just impact SEO practice, but impact the SEO industry and the amount of money you're able to earn as an SEO so check out Eli on LinkedIn. It's a lot of great content about that.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think he's absolutely, absolutely great. And he did a webinar with us as well, which was really good as well, talking about all of these different tools and talking about how they impact. And he talks a lot about brand and about reputation as well. So he was joined by Anne Smarty for that webinar. Highly recommend checking it out.

Mordy Oberstein:

He's a good dude, and she's a good follow also. Wow, so many follows.

Crystal Carter:

So many follows. Check it out.

Mordy Oberstein:

How many follows? But where do you follow people now? Not an ex, I guess. I guess.

Crystal Carter:

LinkedIn.

Mordy Oberstein:

LinkedIn.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's also weird.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's all we have, Morty.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know, I know. It's all that's left. It's problematic.

Crystal Carter:

I get more action on Instagram than I do on Twitter.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not doing Instagram. I get a mix. It's funny to see what works well on X and what works well on LinkedIn. They're not the same thing. It's really interesting. Anyway, anyway, we can.

Crystal Carter:

That's a different podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a different. That's a different griping session. Thank you for joining us on the Surface up podcast. That sounded like Sean Connery podcasts. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into refreshing your SEO career. Look forward wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix studio SEO learning hub, over@wix.com SEO learn looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content webinars on the Wix studio learning hub at, you guessed it, Wix.com SEO learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify.

Mordy Oberstein:

Until next time, peace of love and SEO.