The ChatGPT
episode

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're proofing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding at Wix, and I'm joined by the incredible, the fabulous, the absolutely amazing, the incomparable Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, internet people, and thank you, Mordy, for that fantastic introduction. I'm sure that you wrote that entirely yourself and did not get an AI writer to help you craft that introduction.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, more shadowing there. No. No AI writer is as good as me. Which is not saying much, I don't think, at this point yet about me.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know, you've written so much content, Mordy. I mean, they could have been trained on all those words. You are a wordsmith, sir. You are someone who writes many, many words.

Mordy Oberstein:

Has it really been me this entire time? We don't know.

Crystal Carter:

What? What? Where am I? Is this even real? How do I know any of this is happening at all?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's all a dream and/or a nightmare, depending upon how you look at it. The SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can add all sorts of variables to your title tags in bulk at the folder level with Wix. It's almost as if you had an AI writer writing them for you.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, my gosh. I mean-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh my gosh, so amazing.

Crystal Carter:

Put those bots to work, that's what I say. Don't do all these things yourself. Why are we breaking a sweat? Put those bots to work. Set up your syntax so that they do it for you.

Mordy Oberstein:

They don't mind. That's what they're there for.

Crystal Carter:

That's what they're there for.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, in case you haven't realized, this week's episode is all about SEO, the web, and AI writers. Perhaps you've heard about them on TV. Perhaps you use an AI writer from the comfort of your own home. The question is, should you? We're diving into everything, AI writers, what AI-written content means for the web, what AI-written content means for SEO, what AI writers should and shouldn't be writing. And to help us navigate all of this, we're going to bring in a very special guest for you shortly, Ryan Laws, the VP of Content over at Animalz, one of the most prestigious content marketing agencies out there, will join us shortly. Plus, we'll dive into the various ways search engines have already integrated AI writers into their result pages. And, of course, with the snappiest of news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. Episode number 29 of the SERP's Up podcast is spinning up right now.

So, content is hard. Wouldn't it be amazing if someone came along, and for a very, very low cost, almost free, created a ton of content for you? Wouldn't that free up your time? Wouldn't that save you money? Wouldn't it to help you if writing just isn't your thing? You almost see the temptation there to have a bot write all of your content for you, because it actually solves real pain points, serious pain points that many, many, many of us have. The question is, "Well, what about product quality? What about the quality of that content?" And that's really the crux of the issue here that we're going to explore today because imagine a computer program backed by artificial intelligence is writing content for you. It might seem like a great solution, but is it the right solution? And I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this decision, how we all collectively decide to deal with AI-written content, is going to reshape the web for better or for worse.

For worse, spoiler. So it's a serious topic, which is why we thought it would be prudent to bring someone who I've been following for a long time on the content side of things. His blog is amazing. Check it out. Obviously, a link to it in the show notes. It's of incredible quality, which is why we're having him here, because quality is the name of this game. What better person to discuss AI-written content and the future of the web and content than Ryan Laws, VP of Content over at Animalz? Welcome, Ryan.

Ryan Laws:

You so much for having me in this terrifying post-truth world that we find ourselves in now.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's an apocalypse. It's apocalyptic.

Ryan Laws:

Yeah, if I would not have put money on this being the kind of thing I'd be talking about this year a couple of years ago, but hey, that's how technology tends to unfold, I think.

Crystal Carter:

Honestly, I think there's a lot of people who are saying that if you're speaking at a conference this year, it's almost impossible to plan ahead at all because between the autumn, and I think I saw you talking on a podcast about how ChatGPT was the first time where you were like, "Okay, this is actually a viable thing," and I'm sure you'll get into that a little bit later, but I think that there was somebody who shared a script where somebody was able to write an email, a very, very well formatted email without actually writing it. They just said, "Write this email that says this," and then it just formatted that and it went. And at that point I was like, "Okay, this is something to pay attention to." And I think that so much has changed between then and now. And we're recording this in February time, and, I mean, in the next six months, I imagine it's going to change even more.

Ryan Laws:

By the time this airs, it will all be completely redundant and nothing we've said will have made any sense whatsoever.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm just worried if we'll still exist or not. Using ChatGPT to have an email written or whatever, that seems like a good use of time. I have been using ChatGPT to try to admit to me that it's Skynet trying to take over the world.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Ryan Laws:

There does seem to be a whole genre of people that are trying to work out, "Is this sentient? Is this artificial general intelligence? Is there something much bigger and more terrifying going on?" And I'm just trying to stay in my lane and think about content and SEO, and that's frying my brain as it is, to be honest.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's true. I'm staying in my lane trying to break it and trying to get to admit all sorts of horrible things.

Crystal Carter:

But I think that both of those things are the way to look at this new technology, and I think that's something that SEOs are able to bring to the fore. So within the SEO industry and the content industry and the PPC industry, if you're working in it across any of this digital marketing things, if you've been around the block a few times, you've seen the new fancy toy show up and you've learned how to assess it and how to kick the tires to see what it can do. And so I think that it's important to learn and to find the limitations of whatever the new technology is. And I know that you've been experimenting with it within a few ways. What things have you found ChatGPT and content writers to be good at, and what things have you found it to be terrible at or not so good at?

Mordy Oberstein:

Writing.

Ryan Laws:

Oh, yeah. It's good at writing and it's terrible at writing. Yeah. Well, yeah, obviously, as somebody who personally has tried to make a living off of writing and works for a company that makes a living off of writing and helping companies grow through writing, we were very, very interested to see, "What can this do? Are we going to have to replace parts of our workflow? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? How do we add value on top of these things?"

So over the past couple of years, actually, since GPT-3 was enclosed beta, we've been trying different use cases for it. We've learned quite a lot about the strengths and weaknesses so far. And probably the most bullish use case we're seeing at the moment that I know lots of people are doing, but not necessarily talking about, is actually trying to scale up search content in increasing publishing frequencies to levels that previously just not tenable when you were using people to do that.

I think a lot of it comes down to this question of quality, exactly as you say. Is this stuff good? I think it's really important to remember that quality is a totally subjective piece of terminology. If you think about SEO content, you're going to have something that maybe it's a very non-competitive search, maybe people are looking for very pragmatic, utilitarian information. And you can have something that is very basic, just gets the nuts and bolts information across, and that can be quality, that can do the job, that can meet the intent, and that can help companies rank for it. And in those cases, in those non-competitive SERPs, I basically don't see an issue with trying to get an AI writer involved in that part of the process.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that some of those things appeal to the kinds of things that Google will generally often replace with a quick answer, like, "What is it distance between the Earth and the sun?" If you're using an AI writer to write that up, maybe you want that as something that's of value on your website so that people don't have to leave your website and so people stay within your ecosystem. But from a search point of view, Google's like, "We can just tell you how many kilometers that is or how many miles that is, or how many light years that is. We can just tell you that in the SERP." So from a search point of view, that doesn't add tons of value, but from a user experience point of view within your website ecosystem, that might add value, in which case an AI writer might be something that might be useful to spin up something that's nice to read that doesn't just go, "This many parsecs."

Ryan Laws:

Yeah, exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's how I like thinking about this, where there's so much content out there that I can't, as a person, people in general can't add any more unique value anymore. I don't know, what is a tire? It's been done four million times. You're not going to add anything new that hasn't been, no pun intended, written under the sun before.

Crystal Carter:

We could reinvent the wheel.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, but not the tire. You can't reinvent the tire.

Ryan Laws:

Well, I think that's a good point, and that brings us to the other end of the quality spectrum, which is a hyper-competitive search where maybe they're big behemoth brands slogging it out with their 10,000 word meticulously optimized skyscraper posts. And in those cases, anyone that is pumping out a very utilitarian, largely unedited AI output are just going to lose. There's nothing more to be added there. So I think a good way of thinking about this technology is a bifurcation of search generally.

What is the really simple utilitarian, non-competitive stuff that you can and probably should outsource and just have AI handle? And where should you actually focus your energy and your skill and your expertise? What are the handful of really competitive, really important topics that you should be adding opinion or original research and data and perspective and matter analysis to? Because I think pretty much every company will have both ends of those spectrum they will need to create content for.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I have a theory about this. What's inevitably going to happen is let's say, for example, everyone writes a piece about, "What is a tire?" And they're using the same AI writers, putting out the same thing. How is Google going to know what to rank at that point for "What is a tire?" And what I think what it's going to do is it's going to look at the domain overall and say, "Hey, you know what? This website is about donuts. It happens to talk about a donut tire. This website is about tires and not about donuts. It's the same snippet of content. Let's take it from the one that's more authoritative topically and show that snippet from that website." So it won't be about the snippet of content anymore, but it'll be about all the other pages and all the other human-created content that you did that builds up the authority so you can rank for that top level keyword like, "What is a tire?"

Ryan Laws:

I totally agree with that, and I think basically, Google's only method of response to this ... I think as we've seen, it's not hugely tenable to plug every bit of content into a machine to say whether it's AI generated or not. I don't think that's doable. So actually, we're going to see even more emphasis placed on the non-word parts of search, like domain authority, topical authority, those kinds of things, which I think is perhaps slightly problematic because there is a big incumbent's advantage if you're a big established brand. It's probably going to make dominating even easier, and it might make it harder for new entrant into the market. But ultimately, yeah, I don't really see what other choice Google has. You just have to devalue the importance of the words on the page when you can create words on the page so easily, I think.

Crystal Carter:

So there's a couple of things that occur to me about this, like QA. I think that quality assessment, quality control and content curation, I think will potentially not necessarily be a ranking factor, but I think will be a point of differentiation because, essentially, while we're talking about general knowledge topics, for instance, that you could spin up, like let's say you had a knowledge hub that was a dictionary or something of terms about tires. Let's say we're thinking about terms. This is a hubcap and this is a tread. I don't know. I don't know anything about tires.

But anyway, so let's say you have a knowledge hub all about tires for those people who really love tires, and let's say you use an AI writer to write that. One of the tricky things and one of the challenges that I've seen are from my use of AI writers and looking at some of the results that we've seen from being AI's beta and from ChatGPT, and also I was looking at You.com as well, which is a really good one as well, is even for simple things, the facts that they put out sometimes are just nonsense. And the word "AI hallucinations" is now in common parlance because AI writers will just make these things up.

I asked it to write a meta description, and I said, "I would like you to summarize this piece of text in a meta description that is 150 characters." And it summarized it in 244 characters, but at the end of it, it said it was 155 characters. And I was like, "That is not 155 characters. That is 244," because I read it through another tool that told me that. And then they said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I will adjust." And then it made another one that was even longer, and I was like, "Okay, that is not what I asked you for. That's wrong."

Ryan Laws:

It's my Skynet theory.

Crystal Carter:

Right, so then I asked it another one. So You.com is a generative search tool and it's a lower level of doing what Bing AI is trying to do, but it's doing it now. And I said to it, I said, "Can you name some of the guests from the SERP's Up SEO Podcast?" And what it does is on the side, it generates search results, and then it has the chat, and it will give you comments and it will even provide links as well. But it was saying like, "Oh, Bill Slosky was on our podcast." And with all due respect to Bill Slosky, we started the podcast after he had dearly departed, and so that is not true. That is fundamentally not true, and there's ways that you can verify that just from dates. So the content curation and understanding the limitations of the tools that you're using is really important. How do you advise that people can, at scale ... Because that's the other thing is that you can do lots at once. So how do you check all of that at once?

Ryan Laws:

Yeah, it's a wonderful point, and I think probably the biggest mistake I see people make thinking about this technology is assuming that it is designed to serve as facts, and that is fundamentally not what it is designed to do. It's basically designed to take whatever disparate prompts or information you give it, smooth them together and create an output that sounds coherent. So in that instance, having somebody that's well known for SEO on a podcast about SEO, that makes sense within its understanding of what should be expected there. But at no point has it gone to try and find what actually happened.

And that's just not what this technology does, and that's not something I think it is going to do because who has the resources to vet billions of generated outputs almost every day at this point? You can't do it. So I can't say this is something I've solved at grand scale, not like programmatic SEO where you're publishing hundreds, thousands of articles at once, but we're working at a slightly smaller scale where we are basically having a human in the loop using generative AI as a force multiplier for their already great writing.

So we basically think to get the most out of this technology you need a subject matter expert who can review, who can structure, who can critically evaluate what is being generated from the generative AI, and that process is still faster than it would otherwise be. I think sometimes it's a lot more fun for the writer because you get to outsource parts of your thinking, and it can even be better in some instances because it can recommend ideas that you might not otherwise have. It doesn't have the same mental ruts and creative bottlenecks that humans do. But I think to your point, exactly that, having a person to evaluate that and actually stand behind and be willing to put their name to a piece of generated content is absolutely crucial. Otherwise, yeah, we will just very quickly descend into dystopian Wild West if we're just all publishing the outputs of these models wholesale.

Mordy Oberstein:

What's interesting there is that there's so much talk about AI writers and how it'll impact the content writing job market, and what you're basically describing is a new workflow of how writers will come into the process, which makes me wonder, just to zoom even out from there, how do you feel this whole advent of the AI writer is going to impact, forget SEO for a second, but the web as a whole?

Ryan Laws:

I think the thought experiment we have to run is we basically have to assume, "What if everything on the internet has in some way been touched by AI generation? How do we navigate that? How do we work forward?" Because I think that is just how we're going to have to think about this. I think it's a dead end trying to work out what is and what isn't AI generated. We have to assume everything is, and at that point, I think provenance becomes the most important thing. When you've got 100 people saying the same thing, you will generally seek out the person you think is most credible on that topic, and that is what we're going to do. I think that is what search engines are going to encourage, and I think we're starting to see that with the addition of extra ease to Google's E-A-T acronym as well.

Crystal Carter:

They should pick other letters. They could make it a nice acronym, because at the moment it's just E-A-T. Tasty. It's just like, "Come on."

Mordy Oberstein:

They're just screwing with us because now they know we're going to say that, and now we're going to be stuck, like, "What are you saying?" They're like, "Ah, look at all these SEOs walking around going 'E-A-T' anything."

Ryan Laws:

Oh, you mean eat or do you mean E-A-T?

Mordy Oberstein:

There's some Googler laughing at all this, like, "Ah, see what I did there? Ha ha ha!"

Crystal Carter:

I think that there's still going to be people who are making high quality content, but people who are high authority, I think we might end up in a situation like what we've seen with big scale publishers, with people like the New York Times, like The Atlantic, et cetera, where they gate their content. And this happens on YouTube as well. A lot of YouTubers have gone to a subscription model where you have to pay for their content or you have to sponsor them on Patreon or that sort of thing. So yeah, I think that it's likely to see that sort of thing. When we talk about AI, everybody's using AI in lots of ways already. I use Grammarly all the time. I cannot spell without Grammarly. I use Grammarly all the time. We use visual search tools to generate tags that's just built into Wix. There's lots of things like that. So I think we're using them in lots of different ways. I think it's just a lot more mainstream.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, yeah, also more narrow. I don't think if you gave an AI writer, "Here's a paragraph. Regurgitate it, re-summarize it, or write a heading for it," that, to me, seems like a no-brainer. It's a quick thing. It's just taking a very closed input and putting out a very closed output. So those kind of tasks, like no-brainer, go for them. Obviously, you need to check it. I think now that we're seeing things like ChatGPT where we're talking about, "It's an ocean." It's not an enclosed environment anymore, and that's a huge qualitative shift.

Crystal Carter:

There's so much AI art at the moment, and I think from your perspective, you were saying that we should all assume that everything's AI written. Well, I mean, as somebody who writing for me can sometimes take a long time, it doesn't come naturally to me necessarily, it can sometimes take a long time. So the idea that thing that took me hours and hours and hours to do will now be perceived as being AI-written even though that was blood, sweat and tears for me. I'll be honest, I have some feelings about that. I have some feelings about that. But if that's how things are going forward, I guess that's how things are going forward. But I feel that this must be how artists have felt for the last, I don't know, six, 12 months where a lot of the dolly stuff and mid-journey stuff has been coming to the fore because if I see a picture now, I'm like, "Did you do that or did an AI do that?" I'm not sure.

Ryan Laws:

Yeah. Probably the thing I hear most from people that are writers or artists is, "We didn't choose this. We've been forced into a world that has ..." in some cases, people think devalued the thing they have invested their entire lives in. There's a lot of that personal meaning imbued in writing and creativity, and I find that, and if I could put this technology back in the bottle, I would be tempted to do it. But again, that's generally not how technology operates, and at least in my capacity as somebody that helps growing companies, I have to use this if there's an advantage to be had.

On the art point, though, I do think something can still be beautiful and meaningful and incredible even if it has been generated by AI because there is still a lot of human involvement and curation and process that has gone into that. And actually, I'm sure people felt very skeptical about, "Oh, I can't believe that printing press. This wasn't written by hand. This is devalued. Content should be smaller scale." Or even the emergence of the internet. This democratizing thing of writing where anyone could suddenly write. There was a big influx of terrible writing in addition to great writing as well, and I think it just changes our experience and our perception of it. I don't necessarily think it has to be better or worse in some cases. This is just the new world we find ourselves in, and the composition of what art and creativity means will probably change on the back of that.

Crystal Carter:

I think there's opportunity there as well. So for instance, speaking on the art point, I've seen people who paint live. They'll paint live in the street as a street performer. They'll paint live, and you know that thing has been created by hand. So if that's something that you value, then you can create that by values. And I think there's potentially opportunities for people to connect in a live setting to-

Mordy Oberstein:

Watch me write. Pay five dollars to watch me write.

Crystal Carter:

Well, not necessarily what I was saying. Right. But to connect with that knowledge because the written word, for instance, is a vehicle for a conveying knowledge, and that's what people fundamentally want is knowledge. So the publishing industry, similarly in books, had a decline in people buying non-fiction books. Well, part of that was because people were getting that on YouTube because why would you buy ... You wouldn't buy a book on how to change a tire if you can see a video that you can pause that shows you how to change the tire and has more information even if there was no words on it than if somebody writing and you trying to understand what they're explaining from what they're saying. So I think that there are potentially additional opportunities that come from the way that people are changing how they are accessing information.

Mordy Oberstein:

I also think it'll create an opportunity for brands to really stick out. If a brand is really dedicating the resources to create really good content, which is even the new space now happening the same way, just at a different angle, you'll start seeing people realize, "Hey, wait a second. While this website, it counted probably a bunch of AI's content, this website looks like really they're putting in the effort to create really unique content," and that'll be a branding asset.

Ryan Laws:

I'll say on that point, I do think even at that top end of the spectrum, the incredible, unique, amazing content, AI is still going to be involved in that. Probably a different part of the process, probably in terms of ideation and brainstorming and that kind of thing, but I think this technology is just too good. It's going to touch every part of writing that exists within a company within the world. I think it's just too good to not use and not find its way into those processes.

Mordy Oberstein:

True. Before we have to let you go, I'm curious, with all that, with it's not going anywhere, it's going to touch the process, are we looking at a scenario where at least temporarily the quality of the web's content is going to fall off a cliff?

Ryan Laws:

My instinct is to say yes, but then I'm reminded of the status quo, and I think we talk about the perils of AI-generated content, but actually it is pretty much the same problems, the same issues that most of the world's current SEO content written by humans has already.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're saying it can't get much worse.

Ryan Laws:

No, I think we're already there. We're already at that point. This is going to exacerbate the existing traits of search content, and search content today generally is pretty bad and pretty unhelpful and pretty faceless and very duplicative.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have ways to build backlinks.

Crystal Carter:

The content mill model has definitely created a lot of repetitive content with limited value. So I feel like there's opportunities to differentiate, and it's very interesting that also one of the ways that Google can tell whether or not a piece of content is written by AI, or one of the ways they say they can, is whether or not there are videos and other assets to verify some of the content that they have there. So these are things we should see.

Ryan Laws:

Give me a few days to spin up an AI video workflow, and I can add that into the process and job done.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you?

Ryan Laws:

I spend too much time on Twitter @thinking_slow and The Animalz blog. That's where I channel all of the writing, all the energies and creative output of our team into talking about content search and AI at the moment as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Real human insights on the Animalz blog.

Ryan Laws:

There's a little bit of machine creeping in there, not going to lie.

Crystal Carter:

Have you named your AI for your Animalz blogs? I feel like everybody should have a name for the AI tool that they use. Obviously, not how obviously they think they be a nice robot name.

Ryan Laws:

I haven't yet. No, no. It's probably naming me at this point.

Crystal Carter:

Was it Sydney? Was that what Chat-

Mordy Oberstein:

Good morning, Bob.

Crystal Carter:

I think Bing's AI says it's called Sydney. That's the-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, really? That's-

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, it's sentiment. It has named itself.

Crystal Carter:

I know Barry said that that's what he's called.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, if Barry said, then it must be true. Awesome. Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it.

Ryan Laws:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Talk to you soon.

So thank you again, Ryan, for stopping by and sharing your really cool insights about what's going on in the world of AI and content and SEO. Again, follow Ryan on Twitter @thinking_slow, that's thinking_slow on Twitter. Of course, we'll link to Ryan's profile in the show notes.

Well, now that we're talking about AI and search engines, did you know there's multiple search engines that have incorporated AI writers or AI chat, rather, into their own results pages? So wouldn't you care to explore what they look like, what they're doing? You would? Yes. Yay! With that, let's dive into search engines integrating with AI chat as we go into so many search engines.

Automated:

Google's latest update. Popular search engine, Bing. Duck, Duck, Go. Yahoo. AltaVista. Jeeves.

Mordy Oberstein:

Before we get started, imagine a world where machines have the ability to craft words, to tell stories, and to paint pictures with language where the very essence of human creativity is at the mercy of code and circuitry. Welcome to the world of AI writers, a place where the line between man and machine blurs and the outcomes are both strange and wondrous. You are entering the Twilight Zone. That was the intro I asked ChatGPT to write for this segment.

Crystal Carter:

Oh my God.

Mordy Oberstein:

I said, "Write a segment for the SERP's Up Podcast where we talk about AI writers in this tone of the Twilight Zone," and that's what it gave me.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Thanks, Gene Roddenberry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hm? Gene Roddenberry? That's not Gene Roddenberry, that's Rod Serling or whatever his name is.

Crystal Carter:

Rod Serling. My bad. No, ChatGPT told me it was Gene.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, ChatGPT. Right, right, right. ChatGPT was wrong. No, anytime I'm wrong about something, I be like, "Oh, AI told me. AI said. The AI was wrong. I would've been right."

Crystal Carter:

That's what the AI said. They told me that.

Mordy Oberstein:

So while that intro was incomprehensible, thank you ChatGPT, what essentially we're they're going to do here is there's a bunch of search engines that have integrated AI chats into their SERP's. Google announced they're going to be introducing Bard at some point. Bing already has one. NEVA already has one. You.com already has one, and they all function a little bit differently. So we thought we'd just share with you what we're seeing out there. For example, if I'm on NEVA and I type in SEO, I get a whole thing, "A search engine optimization as a set of practices, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," and it has footnotes where it tells me where these pieces of information came from. So for example, as part of its writeup, it says, "SEO involves making small modifications to a part of a website." It got that from Google's documentation in Spanish.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, wow. It got it in Spanish?

Mordy Oberstein:

I think so because it's giving me ... Well, actually, it's pulling in ... So when you hover over, so what it does is it gives you a footnote to the corresponding sentence. So every sentence has a footnote, and when you highlight the sentence, where you hover over the sentence, it brings up an aside panel, like Google where the knowledge panel is, it brings up the full link and it says, "Photo number three. Here's a link," and it's in a giant box. And it pulls up an image from that blog also, from that URL also. And the URL is showing me here is from Google, but the image is of Google's search central in Spanish.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Very interesting. So I did a similar query. So I went into You.com, which is a tool that has a lot of different options, actually. So they have options for using AI for content generation, they have it for generating images, they also have it for queries. And I typed in, "What is SEO," and they gave me a featured snippet paragraph, so a short paragraph describing what SEO is. And they've also referenced an article. So in this case they referenced AA Trusts as well, and as they're generating that content, as they're answering the query, they give you a list of links on the side of that particular query.

So on the top, you can see something from Search Engine Land, then from Moz, then from Semrush, then from Mailchimp, then from You. And then also underneath of that, they also put a link to a Wikipedia article that references what SEO is. So in that case, I think on that particular one, I think they've done a good job for that particular query, and I've seen this for other ones. I think we discussed this earlier with Ryan. I've seen mixed results from You.com, but they have explained that the product is in beta and they have a disclaimer underneath their chat. It says, "This product is in beta and its accuracy may be limited. You.com is not liable for content generated." So I think that's important to remember as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's totally true. The answers you're going to get, for example, I asked NEVA, "Is SEO good?" And it gave me pretty much the same answer as "What is SEO?" The last line was, "SEO is an important tool for improving visibility of a website and can be beneficial for a businesses looking to increase our online presence." So it's pretty generic. The first half is totally irrelevant. They gave me a whole thing of "SEO is a practice." It's the same thing as the other one when I asked, "What is SEO?" So it's all going to be improving, I hope. A lot of it's pretty generic, I find. It's not super deep. I think the URLs are pulling from at this point are not super deep.

If you're going anything SEO wise, it's basically pulling from Search Engine Land to Moz, at least on the NEVA side. And what's interesting is on the second half of the answer where I'm asking, "Is SEO good?" and it gives me that first part where it tells me what SEO is, there are three citations, two from Moz, one from Backlinko. Where it tells me, "SEO is an important tool, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," there's no citation. I don't know where it got that from. So even though there is citation, it's not citing everything.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So yeah, that's a similar ... So You.com, I said, "Is SEO good?" It says, "SEO is generally considered to be a good practice as it helps increase visibility, et cetera, et cetera," and goes along those lines. And then they've got a similar sort of thing. So they're pulling from Digital Marketing Institute, from SEJ, from Google, from Forbes. So that's top there. Then they also have a panel that's pulling from Reddit that has some Reddit examples saying, "Is it a good career investment? Is it worth it these days? Is it good for this or that?" So when I compare those search results for "Is SEO good?" on Google, I get roughly the same results that showed up in the sidebar of You.com, which was using generative, and if I go into Bing-

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, while you're doing that, I do like the way that You.com is putting in the URLs one is you see the organic results. There's a set of results right there. It's not like it's below the fold, underneath the chat box. Also, it does the footnotes, but it has the actual URLs there. On NEVA, it just tells you the name of the site. You.com is giving you, basically, the title tag and the URL, and it's much more prominent. You really notice it that much more. And again, you have the thing on the side, also.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I was playing around this the other day, and I was like, "Actually, this is pretty good." And again, they're in beta, they're still working things through. But the thing that I found interesting about it was that I think that this is a really good opportunity to see an expansion in a differentiation of search capabilities. So generally speaking, if you wanted to get video searches, you would go on YouTube. But what we're seeing right now is an explosion of people creating their own search engines, using different configurations in order to surface information. And I think that we're living in a really fascinating time for search. It would be interesting to see which ones come out of the end of it and how it all works out, but it's very fascinating.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is super interesting. I do speculate or wonder that NEVA and You, they have the search, they have the chat, the AI chats, I don't know how much more relevant that makes them the search engine. I saw, for example, someone did a poll in the SEO industry, I forgot who it was, I apologize. But does Bing having a really seemingly good AI experience, does that make Bing more relevant to you as a search engine? And the numbers weren't great. It is interesting, by the way, on the Bing side, and this is going to be something to keep an eye on, I think, again, and we've been focusing on this in the last few minutes, to me this citation is the most important part of all this from an SEO point of view. without the citation, your links are not there, it's a bad practice in general, I don't think it's necessarily an ethical practice. But without it, you don't have traffic coming to the site from those AI experiences, and I do think you will.

It's the same thing as a feature snippet. The same thing as direct answer. I type in, "How many home runs did Babe Ruth have?" 714. Let's say there was this part of a featured snippet and there's a URL there. If I feel curious now to learn more about those 714 home runs that Babe Ruth hit, I will click on the URL. If not, not. It's the same thing here. For example, one of the templated answers that Bing has, because I don't have access yet to the beta, if you're listening from Bing, please could I? But one of them is-

Crystal Carter:

Yes, same.

Mordy Oberstein:

... they give you a sample. They give you samples, you can see it. And it's about creating a dinner menu for six people who are vegetarian. And it is cool. It has a whole list of what you should start with as a starter or main and a desert, and it has a bunch of footnotes. And I saw Barry Schwartz report on this recently. Who knows if it'll change or not, but you can't actually see the URLs now until you click, "See more."

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. You say this is from an SEO point of view, but literally from a skeptical and just from a knowledge base, if I want to know something about something, I want to know where you got that information from, I mean, I need somebody to be able to answer that. And so you say like, "Oh, Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs."

Mordy Oberstein:

How do you know that?

Crystal Carter:

How do you know that? Like, "Oh, well, I've got this card, or I read it on this or I saw it on that," because there's lots of people who spout lots of facts and it's important to have a trail for that information in order to qualify how somebody knows one thing or another. So I asked the Babe Ruth question, for instance, into You.com and they pulled up Quora, and that said it was this much. And I could say, "Well, I don't think that's a valid source, for instance. There must be a better source than Quora for a query like that." But to be fair, they've got that ... Oh, and to be fair to them, to You.com, they have an article, they have the SERP showing next to them that says, "Did he actually hit 715 home runs?"

Mordy Oberstein:

Aha. Aha.

Crystal Carter:

So is this a debate? Is there something to think about?

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, to that point, the chats could be the starting point for a click. So for example, I just searched for, "How many home runs did Aaron Judge hit?" And it without any citations from You.com, "Aaron Judge hit a total of six C2 home runs in the 2022 season." Now I didn't tell You.com I wanted the last season. I really wanted his whole career. So there's a link right next to it from Aaron Judge Statcast and Visuals, blah blah blah. It's a stat website. I'm going to go click on that next. So just because there's no URL or entry point from the chat itself, it could lead to, "Okay, now I need to go to the website that you're showing me right next to it because the AI chat didn't answer the question."

Crystal Carter:

Right, and I think that the UX here is important. So for the Bing, lots of people have been sharing screenshots and videos and things around and also doing tear-downs of some of the answers. So for instance, Bing previewed their chat bot, their Bing AI, and there was somebody who did an article, Lily Ray shared it recently, and they talked about fact checking some of the things. So I think one of the things they demoed was like, "Oh, plan a trip to Mexico and some great night spots in a town in Mexico." And somebody went through all of these places and they're like, "This place hasn't had any reviews since 2014. This place seems to be completely closed. This place is not a place that a tourist should go to at all."

And so they went through and they were like, "That's doesn't really work." But when you look at the way that Bing AI is planning to showcase some of the links that would help you to verify some of the things that they're talking about, from what I've seen, they seem to be putting it below the chat and potentially outside of You or showing the conversation above the search results. And I think this is turning into a You.com love letter, but I think that what You is doing with the side panel I think is working really well. And I think that there-

Mordy Oberstein:

Showing the results on the side-

Crystal Carter:

I think is good.

Mordy Oberstein:

... next to the chat is great. I love the You.

Crystal Carter:

I think that's great. And I think also Bing is planning to do side panel, I think, as well with their chat where you're allowed to do that, and I think Google also has a pop-out side panel or something.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's going to have be something because you're absolutely right, and I think especially in the beginning when people are still skeptical of the answers they're getting from these AI chats, you need to have the URLs there so people can be like, "You know what? Before I actually go ahead and click pay or do this, I'm just going to go to the website." And if it's annoying to get to the URLs, it's going to make your search engine annoying to use. So there's incentive to have the URLs there.

I don't think we're heading to 100% zero-click universe because of the AI chat experience on search engine. So don't worry. Check out You.com. Check out NEVA.com. They have some really cool experiences there. You can see what's happening. It's going to get better. I think what you see there now is only the beginning. So it's like, "Oh, this is not good," I think it's only the beginning of all these things. You can check out. If you're using Edge, you can see the examples that Bing has also and interact with them, and you can sign up for the wait list, unless they already opened it up for everyone by the time this comes out. But that will be news. That'll be new.

Crystal Carter:

And the people that I've been following who've been chatting about this consistently, Barry's been talking a lot about this, Brady Clark as well. Glenn Gabe has also been talking about some of the different features that he's seen on ThinkChat. So if you ask them very nicely, they might query something for you, maybe.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Not to put them to work.

Mordy Oberstein:

Follow them first. "Hey, I followed you."

Crystal Carter:

Follow them first.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

There you go. Now, if Bing did open up its AI chat experience for everybody, that would be in the news. Would it be in this week's news? I don't know. But there most likely will be something related to AI in the news. Most likely. Who knows? Well, let's find out as we get into the Snappy News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Well, this is the AI episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast. So what better time than now? And to let you know that GPT-4 is coming. If you love AI writers, then yay! If you hate AI writers, then the sky is about to fall. For Roger Montti over at Search Engine Journal, open AI is about to release ChatGPT 4, or GPT-4, rather. What makes GPT-4 better than GPT-3? Well, it has a four, and four is higher than three. Also, it's a multi-modal model, which means that the one area of AI where most of us still saw Google as visibly ahead, i.e, MUM, multimodal unified model, will now be part of the Bing-verse. What is multimodal? What is this multimodal thing that I speak of?

Well, usually with machine learning, which by the way, all this stuff is not AI, all of it is machine learning. But why split hairs anyway? The usual case with machine learning is you have one input and one output. So you input text, you get back text, much like ChatGPT is now. Well, multimodal means you can get back all sorts of media, say video, for instance. Google does this with Lens, if you want to see what this actually looks like in reality. So for example, you take a picture of some bike part that you have no idea what its name is. For me, that's all of the bike parts, other than the pedals and the brakes, and you write a text input, let's say, "How to fix?" Because again, you don't know what the thing is called, so you're taking a picture of it and you're hoping Google can match it up.

And Google does match up the image, which it identifies, let's say, as the chain. And then it gives you results on how to fix a bike chain because you didn't know, like me, that that was called the chain. Well, clearly I knew it was called the chain because I just said it was called the chain. How did I know? Fourth walls aside, multimodal means a multimedia synergy. And that's the direction of the new GPT-4. Also, like Google MUM, it'll have a focus on working across multiple languages. I've always wanted Google to do more with MUM, it's multimodal technology. Well, MUM is open source, but Google MUM. Again, splitting hairs. I really hope they will reshape the Google results page and I think it eventually will. But now Microsoft is involved with open AI as well with this whole multimodal thing. So I guess let the multi-modal wars begin.

Anyway, on a totally separate note, per Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land, the February 2023 product review update is over. Goodbye and good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, or if your site did well, nice seeing you. Come again. Either way, the chances that your site was impacted with this product of the You update was far greater than with the recent iterations of the more recent product of You updates per a heap of Semrush data that I pulled, which you could see in the article from Barry, which is linked to in the show notes.

Personally, I've looked at hundreds of keywords, and the ranking trajectories here, you could see it in the trends, are way more significant. There's way more significant drop-offs. Where you see a page ranking for a keyword, dive 10 or 15 positions down off of page one and onto page two, I tend to see the increases being less drastic here, but that is more than a little anecdotal. So take that as you will.

And last up, and again from he, the great Barry in the sky over at Search Engine Land, Google rolled out new site names, Favicon and Sponsor Label on Desktop Search. Barry, if ever a headline set up the entire article, that is it. So you go to Desktop on Google, you will now see favicons, a label that re-sponsored and not ads for the ads, and site names above the URL, meaning the name of the site, or if you've been using the desktop version of the SERP over the last month or so, nothing has changed. It just officially rolled out.

For this site name, by the way, Google has a few ways to make the determination, but one way is via website structured data markup, so make sure you have that set up. And with that, that is this week's version of the Snappy News. So was the news, so was the news. And before we do depart, we do need to tell you who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. And because we're talking about AI and AI writers and SEO, you should be following DataChaz on Twitter. That's @DataChaz, and that would be Charly Wargnier, who does an absolute ton around AI and SEO, who's constantly talking about it. He's been all over it.

Crystal Carter:

He's been on board since as far as ... Since it's broke, as a big thing, he's been all about it. And he's always been about data and things anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

And technology.

Crystal Carter:

And a bit of a technologist. But he's been fully on board. So if you are planning to keep track of how things are developing, he's a great follow. He shares great resources for that, including different kinds of prompts you can try, different tools that are using it, different things that are working. And I think while he's very enthusiastic about the technology, I think he also has a healthy skepticism. So he's aware that there are challenges, and he's very much aware about having those conversations and making sure that we're having conversations that are talking about all of the fantastic things, but also all of the things that are still in the works. So I think he's a good follow for that.

Mordy Oberstein:

For sure. And he's one of the forerunners of the SEO Python world. He's got a great website called seopythonistas.com, which happens to be a WIx website where he honors the work that Hamlet Batista of Blessed Memory contributed around Python to the SEO community. There's an enormous amount of resources at seopythonistas on Hamlet's work and other SEOs contributing to the Python conversation. So check out that website, and of course, follow Charly on Twitter @DataChaz. That's D-A-T-A-C-H-A-Z on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

So hopefully you'll do that.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, do that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And I would have a snazzy outro where I said the AI writer is going to write the outro, but I don't feel like that would be fair to our audience because they didn't do a great job with the ... The Twilight Zone theme was great and hilarious, but I don't think it was the best intro for our last segment.

Crystal Carter:

How did they used to end The Twilight Zone?

Mordy Oberstein:

They just had the music. Pick out to music. Do, do, do! Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into building a solid SEO team with a very special guest contribution. Who will it be? You'll have to see. Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to a learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a reading on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.