How will Google's most powerful AI, Gemini, impact SEO?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by She who searches the stars for SEO answers, the one, the only, Head of Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, internet people. My name is Crystal Carter. I'm a Pisces and I am a stargazer. I've been enjoying Jupiter being in the Northern Hemisphere for the last few months. It keeps hanging out by the moon. We're going to talk about lots of things like that. So yeah, welcome to our podcast about SEO.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm also a Pisces. What does that mean though?

Crystal Carter:

I know you're a Pisces.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, because of my personality or because you know what my birthday is?

Crystal Carter:

Actually, a lot of SEOs are Pisces. I think it's because we like to jump around and we like to go with the flow of the algorithm and things.

Mordy Oberstein:

I always thought it was my traumatic childhood, but now you're telling me it's really... Okay. Got it.

Crystal Carter:

Definitely your star sign.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's just-

Crystal Carter:

I mean, I think I am definitely... I'm a Pisces rising in a Taurus. No, I'm kidding. I don't know how that works. Literally, I'm very top level on my astrology. I'm completely honest.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know Taurus, I know Pisces, and I know Gemini, and that's all I know.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, well, we'll leave it at that.

Mordy Oberstein:

A little foreshadowing there. Now, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our monthly SEO newsletter Searchlight over Wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also automate the heck out of your client's site with Wix's revamped integration with Zapier. Connect your client's site and take advantage of thousands of marketing automations. You know what else can automate a heck of a lot of things?

Crystal Carter:

What?

Mordy Oberstein:

Google's Gemini. Oh. They're taking a play out of the back pages of a newspaper, as our horoscope says AI technology is on the horizon. We'll get into what is Google Gemini, what has Google said about Gemini in search, and what are some possible ways Gemini may impact SEO in the future.

To help us see the future of search, we'll soon chat with the one, the only, editor of Search Engine Land, that's Barry Schwartz's boss. Danny Goodwin will join us in just a few moments.

We'll also talk to the co-founder of The Neuron, Peter Huang, about what Gemini means, not just for SEO, but beyond SEO, and of course we have the snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following a social media for more SEO awesomeness.

So let's see what's in the stars today and what the horoscope of the SERP is, as episode number 74 of the SERP's Up podcast. It's all playful, perceptive, and intellectually curious as we go all Gemini on you.

Crystal Carter:

You know, there are a lot of sides to a Gemini. It's like they have twin personality.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have no idea. I have literally no clue.

Crystal Carter:

That's what they say about all of that sort of thing, and I mean that kind of tracks with what we've heard about it so far.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice. Nicely done. I've never actually read a horoscope in my life before.

Crystal Carter:

Really?

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I've never really like-

Crystal Carter:

I love horoscopes. It's like a fortune cookie. That's how I treat it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like fortune cookies. They tastes good. Can you eat a horoscope?

Crystal Carter:

I mean...

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't care. Okay, so before we bring in Danny, let's talk a little bit what just very, very quickly is catch everybody up. What is Google Gemini? It's a new AI model that allegedly solves very complex tasks. It could understand all sorts of media and mediums, from text, to code, to audio, et cetera. It's extremely powerful and it's meant to compete with Google... With Google's. With OpenAI's GPT-4, and according to certain tests, it seems to outperform GPT-4, which is interesting.

So there are all sorts of possible implications about what this means for Google search. Google has kind of talked a little bit about it, which is why we thought we would bring Danny Goodwin on, because Danny wrote a whole article about this. So welcome to SERP's Up, Danny.

Danny Goodwin:

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Mordy, and Crystal, I guess I should disclose I'm a Scorpio. So-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, right. Scorpio. Right, right, right. Okay. I know that one.

Crystal Carter:

Right? Okay. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate that.

Danny Goodwin:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Danny Goodwin:

It depends.

Mordy Oberstein:

It depends.

Crystal Carter:

Although Scorpios I know are very, very loyal people. Very loyal-

Danny Goodwin:

Very true.

Crystal Carter:

Very, like, ride or die. That's my homie.

Danny Goodwin:

Very much.

Crystal Carter:

That's the end of that.

Danny Goodwin:

That's some people saying and it's some people, not their thing. But yes, that's a very good assessment. Loyal, ambitious, all that stuff.

Crystal Carter:

Well, welcome to the podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

It sounds like competing personality traits, loyal and ambitious.

Danny Goodwin:

Well, I don't know. I tend to look at as I like to do my absolute best for whatever company I work for. But in doing so, I also grow my own brand, so to speak.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, okay. That works.

Danny Goodwin:

I think they work together.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, that's cool. Okay. I get it.

Crystal Carter:

I think so.

Danny Goodwin:

It's like... You think back on my earliest days in search was at Search Engine Watch. A lot of the work I did there sort of built my reputation for the rest of my career.

Mordy Oberstein:

Truth.

Danny Goodwin:

So I thought... Yeah, I think just generally doing hard work and showcasing your talent is incredibly valuable for advancing your career. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And advancing the company you're with. So I've heard people who are like, "Oh, should I let my team go out and do speaking and stuff? What if they go somewhere else?" I'm like, "Yeah, but they're letting you shine by shining. I shine, you shine, we all shine." It's good for everybody.

Danny Goodwin:

Absolutely.

Crystal Carter:

Agree.

Danny Goodwin:

And we all love shining happy people.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, so let's talk Gemini.

Danny Goodwin:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

You wrote a whole article about covering... When Google came out with their big Gemini announcement covering what Google has said about it and what it is. So what has Google said about Gemini in search and what is Gemini exactly?

Danny Goodwin:

The easiest way to think about it is Gemini is basically the equivalent to GPT from OpenAI. It's sort of the backend large language model that is powering a lot of the things that Google wants to do in search in the future.

I don't think they have all the capabilities yet. And basically they came out with three flavors, I guess, of Gemini, initially, and this is 1.0. So we're going to see advancements in it. They have Ultra, Pro, and Nano. We're getting a taste of the Pro model now in Bard, and I believe... The rumor is they're going to have a paid version of Bard in the future, and I think that will be powered by the Ultra version. So we'll see how that shakes out. That's just all rumor at this point.

But basically, yeah. So right now they're testing Gemini for SGE. They've said that in addition to reducing the time it takes to generate the SGE responses, the AI answers, they claim that it basically has resulted in other search quality improvements. But they didn't really explain what those are.

It's in testing now and they said that it is coming to search and ads in the future, in the next few months. So that will be interesting and I don't think they're going to announce it before it comes out. I imagine it'll be sort of RankBrain or some of the other things they've just deployed. It will be there and then at some point later they'll go, "Oh, by the way, we launched this two months ago." So we will see. I could be wrong.

And I think this just ultimately gets Google closer to that model it's sort of been at for the... They've had this long-term vision. If you go back to some of the earliest interviews, Marie Haynes uncovered this really great old interview with Larry Page. It's just like, ultimately AI is search. "When someone comes to Google and asks a question, we give them the right answer. That's AI. That's search." It's sort of always been the model.

I've been comparing it recently... I'll give credit, too, to Michael King for this one. He had this great video from a few years ago where he compared where Google's going to the movie Her, which I don't know if you guys have seen. It was a 2013 movie, I believe. Scarlett Johansson... Really good cast, actually. Amy Adams and some other good people. But it's basically like Her was an operating system. It's a virtual assistant. It adapts to you. It learns from you. I think that's where Google's going. It's just you talk to Google and it will-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, I did see this movie. Okay. I did see this.

Danny Goodwin:

... Respond to you. Yeah, it's basically it learns from you and responds to you and anticipates your needs. It's basically your virtual assistant. And I think we're going to start seeing that first when they incorporate Bard into the assistant on Google phones.

Mordy Oberstein:

So where do you think, based upon what Google has said, what they're trying to do, where do you think they're going, what are they trying to use Gemini for exactly? It's simply to generate answers as better answers, faster answers? Or are they going to expand what AI means? Or do you think... Because we don't really know what they're going to do. But do you think they're going to expand what AI means on the SERP, beyond what we're currently seeing in the form of SGE?

Danny Goodwin:

I think right now, my guess is a lot of it, because... I'm sure you remember when they first launched SGE, it took a really long time to generate those answers, and I have definitely... We've reported, Michael King did research on it, Authoritas did some research on it, and that time has definitely reduced. So I think that's the biggest area right now.

Quality wise, I still don't see perfect answers or they're just very surfacey, generic. I don't know if they're going to make... I'd love to see a bit more depth if they're going to really go all in on this, but they're not there. It's kind of like a fourth grade book report on, "Tell me about this thing."

So I don't know if that's going to improve. That'll be interesting to see. But I ultimately think they have so much data that they collected on you, on me... They know the story you clicked on in Google News and what videos you watch on YouTube. I just imagine them connecting all these dots together ultimately, and Gemini is going to be that kind of backend for connecting all these dots and trying to figure out what you want, click on what you want, what content you want to consume, what do you want to read, what videos you want to see, all these things and just be like a real recommendation engine. Best way to compare it to what TikToks doing.

Mordy Oberstein:

So Google Discover on steroids?

Danny Goodwin:

Yes. Yes. That's what it feels like. Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Interesting. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And do you think that this is a play to put them back ahead of the game? I think that when ChatGPT broke more for the mainstream, and particularly when Bing was like, "We've put this into New Bing," I think Google, it seemed anyway, they were a little bit on the back foot. Not that they haven't been progressing with AI. They've had tons of AI for years. But for a public facing product, they seem to be a little bit trying to pull something together. Do you think that this is a play to move to be the forerunners, and do you think this puts them there?

Danny Goodwin:

I think it's definitely... There's definitely a PR aspect to a lot of what we're seeing. Going all the way back to SGE, it was kind of like vaporware announcements. It's like, "We have this really awesome thing. You can't see it yet though." And that seems to be how they've been going with us. And it was even the same with Gemini to an extent, because they had that video.

Mordy Oberstein:

The video was interesting.

Danny Goodwin:

The video was very interesting and was also very fake, and I called out on it. So it's like they're taking a couple steps forward and back. But it's like when they flubbed their initial introduction of Bard, when they had that wrong answer, and they got called out on it and their stock took a dive. Remember that way back in the day?

And all these things have consequences. So from big perspective, Bing is honestly... The game is over for Microsoft. This was, to me, I thought their kind of the last chance because they had all this hype going with GPT, but we've followed the numbers. They've gained no market share since launching this, despite all the hoopla. Despite like, "Oh my God, this is the shiny new thing. ChatGPT is awesome." Hasn't helped them a bit.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is interesting because Google went doubled down and said, "Oh, you're going to do that? We'll do that better." But was that really what users really want in the end? And I think...

We don't like talking about this on the podcast, but the money aspect is fascinating and the PR aspect is fascinating, because a lot of this does have to do with stock prices. And a lot of it is, "Hey, let's put this out there. Let's show us... Position ourselves at a certain way." But at a certain point, you do have to actually address what users want. Otherwise, your fundamental product will not work and that's also impact the stock price. And I wonder if it goes back to what you were saying before about offering deeper answers because I find it... It's novel, it's interesting. It's really not that helpful. It's a featured snippet with citations. Like, okay, that's interesting.

But one of the things that I thought was interesting when Google announced Gemini was they were showing, if you can ask it something like... I think the example they gave had to do was "I want to plan a birthday party for my kid." And it gave you one format of results that kind of aligned to the information. Maybe there's a lot of videos there, maybe there's a lot of lists or whatever. And they formatted the result to meet the need of that query, so that you can better explore what you wanted to learn about whatever is about a birthday party for your kid.

Then they asked about a recipe and the format was very different because the type of exploration you're going to do when you're looking for a recipe requires a different visual format to be able to explore those results. I thought that was fascinating, and I wondered if maybe they would bring something like that to SGE.

I think where SGE, to me, at least where it's novel is... Not it's pitting out an answer. It's novel in being able to facilitate exploration. "Here's a bunch of little tidbit of information. Here's a bunch of information that I'll give you the TLDR and you can now go explore this." And it'll be really interesting to me if they were able to bring in the custom formatting that they discussed in the Gemini demo, we'll link to that in the show notes, and bring that to SGE because that would really allow you to explore like a mad person.

Danny Goodwin:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I think that Google hasn't figured this thing out. I think they'll dispute it. They'll say they didn't rush this out. I feel like they felt like they had to rush it out. It's an imperfect product. It's an experiment. They keep reiterating, "It's still an experiment."

So yeah, I feel like this is just going to be one of those things. They're really all in on this. I know a lot of people are like, "Oh, they think that SGE is not going to end up being launched." It is going to be launched.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, it's going to be launched. Just what will it be?

Danny Goodwin:

Right? Yeah. And that's the big question. So yeah, if they can do that and they can really nail that user intent, that is going to be, I think, the major change. We've already talked about there are certain niches that are really going to be hammered hard by SGE. There's been lots of discussion about that. Informational searches. What is this thing? What is that thing? Those are going to be hurt. They're going to lose a lot of traffic. Yes.

And I remember Ryan Jones... I don't know if everyone watching knows who Ryan Jones is, but he is in SEO. He's been around for a long time. At Pubcon, he basically said, when I was watching his presentations, "When the web launched, you have to think about... " People were looking for answers, but webpages were the only way at that time you could get an answer. Since that time, 25 years later now, the web has evolved a lot. So there are other ways to get answers now, especially with these deep learning systems that Google's using, passage ranking, all these things, and users really expect more.

Even Google has admitted that they're seeing the Gen Z, the younger people, they're going to TikTok, they're going Instagram when they're looking for a restaurant or other things, and that is a threat to them. So it's like they have to adapt, especially... Maybe the three of us have searched a certain way. We've done so for many years, but maybe we're not the core audience anymore. I know I'm probably outside the key demographic for them at this point, but-

Mordy Oberstein:

Are we old?

Danny Goodwin:

It could be. I know I am, but I don't know how old you two are, but-

Crystal Carter:

I do not identify as old.

Mordy Oberstein:

I do, and I have for a long time, even though I was young.

Danny Goodwin:

You both look much younger than me.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you!

Danny Goodwin:

SEO is aged for me very much.

Crystal Carter:

Like when you see those presidents at the beginning of their term and then at the end, and they're like, "Wow."

Danny Goodwin:

Exactly.

Crystal Carter:

And you see Obama on a jet ski and you're like, "Oh, he looks great now. He suddenly doesn't have the way to the world." But one thing that I think is interesting, with Gemini, for instance.

With the release, they also talked about Vertex AI, which is one of their product things. And essentially, they talk about other people being able to build with it and to be able to create with it. How much do you think that's going to affect how this develops and who adopts and what they adopt and how they integrate?

Danny Goodwin:

That part is very interesting. I've been reading a lot of stuff that's kind of outside of SEO. It almost seems like to me we're heading toward this weird future, too, where Crystal has her own AI persona. Like Mordy has his own AI persona. And your persona exists separate of you on the web, goes out, and does things that Mordy would want or figure out things that you would be interested in and finds it.

Mordy Oberstein:

I already have this. It's called my Twitter account.

Danny Goodwin:

Well, yes. But imagine you just took and trained your model on your Twitter account. You went out there. Boom, there you go. Now you don't even have to do it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Don't let that happen.

Crystal Carter:

Too late.

Danny Goodwin:

It's kind of scary. It's like the whole web at some point in the future could just be the AIs talking to other AIs. And that was another part of that movie Her. It's like the main AI in that movie, the Her character is talking to all these other AIs and they're coming up with these solutions to things and doing things all on their own, separate from humans.

So it's really interesting to think about. Is the Web even going to be human-centric 10 years from now? I know we're already overrun and we're already overrun by bots. We know that too. Bot traffic too.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right.

Danny Goodwin:

So that's only going to get worse.

Crystal Carter:

I definitely know what you mean though, because I've seen people saying, "Oh yeah, you can have your AI read your emails." And then somebody else being like, "You can have AI write your emails." So who is actually reading the emails? But I also have this sort of thing where I'm regularly thinking, "Oh, that's how we ended... How that movie ended up like that." I feel like we're in a lot of times these days, I just find myself like, "Oh, that's how that movie starts. That's how we ended in that futurescape."

Danny Goodwin:

Totally. I know. Yeah, just don't let it take over the defense system is all I know.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know. Someone cue up the Terminator music.

Danny Goodwin:

Right. That's when all the trouble really starts.

Crystal Carter:

But I do think it's important to look at the Google Cloud stuff as well, because when I found... Particularly when I was looking at visual search a few years ago. When I was doing the research for it, I was looking at all of the Google Cloud product drops. Basically, that's where they tell you how the AI actually works, is that they're at the Google Cloud product drop things. That's where a lot of the magic happens, and I think that it'll be interesting to see who adopts the APIs for Gemini and how that rolls out to see... Because Google very often gets ideas from users, from large scale users for these kinds of products, for how we might see it applied in search, I think.

Danny Goodwin:

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that's definitely a To-Be-Determined area. I couldn't claim specialization in that area or expertise, so I won't. But yeah, I definitely agree. Definitely watch whatever Google Cloud is doing. I've seen that many times, especially the stuff around... All the entity SEO stuff. There's so much to learn in that area too, from Google Cloud and all those tools. So yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

It does, to me, kind of come down to what you were talking about before as to how we consume content and how that changes. To piggyback off of Ryan, I'll oftentimes... I don't live in the US anymore, but I follow NFL football. So most of the games are in the middle of the night for me. So if it's a game that I want to catch up on, I'll watch the highlights in the morning. I'm like, "All right, I'll watch the highlights. I don't want to know the score yet." And before I even go to Google or anything, I turn my phone on and there's a little card that says the score. I'm like, "Damn it." And that's not a feature snippet on the service. Not a direct answer on the service. This is a push notification.

And the way we consume content and people talk about, "Oh, it's taking away clicks." But it's not just Google doing it. It's just a whole ecosystem is built and designed... That quick information is not meant for websites anymore. I know it sounds horrible to say, but to a certain extent, it's not. It's meant for a push notification. It's meant for an AI answer. It's meant for whatever. And I feel like however content consumption evolves is how AI is going to evolve to match it and to supplement it and to drive that need or that desire that people have in what they consume and how they consume it.

Danny Goodwin:

Yeah, I remember there was all kinds of outrage at one point. I don't remember the year. It was probably early 2010s, and everybody got so upset. I think it was a search on Google for the temperature was literally a one answer result. I don't know if you remember this.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, I remember this. I remember freaking out about it.

Danny Goodwin:

Everybody freaked out about it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Every once in a while still shows up that way. There's nothing else on the SERP, but the direct answer.

Danny Goodwin:

Exactly. And it's just like, well, yeah, because you can find the temperature on weather channels, on the news, on various... It's just a thing. You shouldn't base your monetary model around getting organic traffic for the current temperature.

Mordy Oberstein:

Basing your business strategy on something that someone's able to understand by literally sticking their hand out the window-

Danny Goodwin:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

... Is probably not the best thing.

Danny Goodwin:

Also, yes. But one interesting thing that, just going really quickly back to the sports thing, which I found very interesting. I don't know if this could be rolled out in some way to search, but I just signed up for YouTube TV. They have an option on the TV now where you can hide sports scores before you watch the game, which I had not seen before.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, nice.

Danny Goodwin:

That would be very interesting if they could roll that out into search somehow where it's like a spoiler free version.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's amazing. That'd be great because it's happened so many times. Okay, I'm looking forward to that.

Danny Goodwin:

So anyway. I don't know if that, but if YouTube's doing it now on YouTube TV. Who knows? It could come to search someday. We'll see.

Crystal Carter:

I think that comes back to what you were talking about before. You mentioned that Google has all these different data sets and they have all this different amount of data on us, just as Google users and all of that. And I think it's interesting, because you were saying with Bing while they were trying to push ChatGPT and while they were trying to push New Bing, they were like, "Hey, if you want new Bing, you've got to make Edge your default browser." And I was like, "What?" They were like, "You got to put it on your phone." And I was like, "Huh?"

My first response was like, "Why are they doing this?" And then I realized, "Oh, they don't have the same amount of data that Google has on me for being a Chrome user for years and years and years, and that everybody who has a Google Pixel has and everybody who has Gmail and all that sort of stuff. That whole ecosystem." And I think that that's going to be the linchpin for Google being able to drive Gemini forward and more of their other tech is how much data that they're able to collect on a daily basis about search and things like that. And like you said, being able to pull the dots together.

Danny Goodwin:

I mean, yeah, there are cases where being the first mover matters. I don't think in search it does, because Google can wait. And from the beginning, I was almost like, "Google's going to sit and watch Bing for a little while, see what they screw up, and not do that." That was my thinking from the beginning. I was just like, "Let Bing be the first one through the wall. Let them make all the mistakes. And it's one less thing that they'll have to worry about maybe from a feature antitrust thing, because I can go, oh, well, Microsoft did that first."

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, that is coming back to bite. There are lawsuits now.

Danny Goodwin:

Well, this is true, yes. But it's just... Again, goes back to the PR angle, which I know probably isn't most interesting to your listeners.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I find that part the most interesting, because it's like the puppet and the string kind of thing.

Danny Goodwin:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, ultimately... And I said this... I did my keynote at SMX. It's like when you think about these AI companies, behind everything, you always have to remember it's monetary. They're not in this... I mean, yes, they want to give users a good experience, blah, blah, blah, because it makes them money. Like, yes. Okay, you're going to get good results. But ultimately they're making money on these great results and they don't want to upset that model.

So that's why I say people who are saying SGE won't launch, just give that up. It's launching. They're going to figure it out and I kind of compared it to a casino. It's like, the House always wins. They just got to figure out where to put the big money slot machines on the right location on the floor, and they're going to stack the deck and they're going to figure it out. And they're probably going to end up, too, with ads. It's going to be less inventory, which means prices are going to go up for PPC advertisers.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right.

Crystal Carter:

I think the other thing is that they've got a lot of, in terms of the house always wins or whatever, they've got a lot of cards in their hand.

Danny Goodwin:

Oh yeah.

Crystal Carter:

They call it SGE now. It might be that it feeds into a different part of the SERP. That it might be that it shows up in a different way. It might be that it's just a shopping assistant or something and that sort of stuff. So they have a lot of different levers they can pull in terms of AI integration. So yeah, I think it is absolutely important that people pay attention to what they're doing there and how it all moves around.

Danny Goodwin:

Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

So if people wanted to connect the dots and find you, Danny, where could they find you?

Danny Goodwin:

They can find me on Search Engine Land. Probably the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Just search for me. I'm Mr. Danny Goodwin on socials. I am on X, but not as much as I used to be. But yes, mainly, writing daily on Search Engine Land or near daily. And we also have our two big SMX shows twice a year, SMX Advanced and SMX next. And you just spoke Next and Mordy got rave reviews. Everybody should know, because he is awesome as a presenter.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you.

Danny Goodwin:

So thank you for joining us.

Mordy Oberstein:

One good thing I'm good at. Presenting. I'm very presentable.

Danny Goodwin:

You are.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you.

Danny Goodwin:

Yep. Yeah, the people love you in our community. Well, some of them.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, well. The SMX site are a classic... Some people do. SMX are a classic SEO conference. They moved to digital a couple of years ago.

Danny Goodwin:

Yep.

Mordy Oberstein:

And they're free. Are they... Right? I'm correct to say that?

Danny Goodwin:

They're totally free. Yep. Yeah, we moved online, unfortunately due to covid, but they've actually ended up working out really well.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I spoke at SMX during Covid, and it was lovely. I think I spoke with, I remember chatting to Barry actually during a session.

Danny Goodwin:

That must have been fun.

Crystal Carter:

Which was great.

Mordy Oberstein:

I hope you two had fun. Barry loves fun.

Crystal Carter:

Oh yes, we did have fun. Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's great. So yeah, definitely please, you're listening to this. Check out the SMX conference series. We'll link to it in the show notes. It's free. Sign up. You can learn an absolute ton.

Danny Goodwin:

And yeah, read Search Engine Land every day.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely.

Danny Goodwin:

All spam. That was my spam plug.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no, no. We're all-

Danny Goodwin:

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Mordy Oberstein:

No, we're all for plugging.

Crystal Carter:

Like and subscribe.

Danny Goodwin:

Yeah, like and subscribe.

Mordy Oberstein:

So say thank you to Barry and say hi to Barry, rather. Say hi to Barry for us. Barry looms large over our show. He's a part of our show every week, but he is not actually on it.

Crystal Carter:

Should we have him on it one day?

Mordy Oberstein:

We had him once. You forgot? We had Barry. See? We-

Crystal Carter:

Yes, that's true. That's true. But we didn't have him as an interview. That's why.

Mordy Oberstein:

For those of you, it's your first time listening to the podcast, we cover the SEO news. Often we'll cover Danny's articles. But we also often inevitably cover at least one of Barry Schwartz's articles. So Barry is a very much part of our podcast each and every week, and he looms over it.

Danny Goodwin:

Have you had the Standee behind you for an entire podcast?

Mordy Oberstein:

I need to get that. It's still in England, I think.

Danny Goodwin:

That was fantastic. So I just remember... I don't... Which conference was it? Was that BrightonSEO, where you went-

Mordy Oberstein:

It was Brighton, yeah. We had a giant cut out of Barry Schwartz and it was a cornhole game too.

Danny Goodwin:

That was epic. I remember seeing that and just laughing when I saw that on social. I was like, "That's awesome." I wanted that.

Mordy Oberstein:

People, we have to get it. It's still somewhere in England. People came up and thought, "Wait, is that actually Barry?" And didn't realize it was a cutout.

Crystal Carter:

Like a foot taller than him as well. It was a giant Barry.

Mordy Oberstein:

He was a great sport. He took a picture just for that. I didn't pull that picture offline. He actually took a picture for the thing. He's a great sport, Barry.

Danny Goodwin:

Yes, yes he is. And he is been doing it 20 years, which is insane. His productivity, I don't know... If you don't mind me plugging one more thing. JR Oakes did this really awesome article on Search Engine Land. I don't know if you saw that one. But yeah, it was just sort of recapping the history through the lens of Barry Schwartz, which was... There was so many amazing insights of how productive Barry is and just all the... So many topics he's covered through 20 years and how his growth of... His writing has gone up into the right curve over the years, which is insane. He just gets more and more productive. So I don't know how he does it.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's amazing. JR is also amazing. I will-

Crystal Carter:

Do you think it's AI?

Danny Goodwin:

No. Definitely not.

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry's not a robot.

Danny Goodwin:

BI? Barry intelligence?

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry...

Danny Goodwin:

But we do need to... Yeah, we should download his brain.

Mordy Oberstein:

We should save it in the ether forever.

Danny Goodwin:

Yes, absolutely. If for nothing else, just the sarcasm. Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

A thousand percent. A thousand percent. Thank you so much, Danny. Really appreciate you coming on, and we'll see you out there. Thanks for all you do for Search Engine Land and the industry.

Danny Goodwin:

Thank you, Mordy. Thank you, Crystal. It's been great to be here.

Mordy Oberstein:

So limiting the conversation around AI just to SEO will not be doing Gemini justice. And because it is something of influence in the stars, I want to do Gemini justice, and I don't want to get my horoscope ruined and my life destroyed because I didn't do justice.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

So we're going to take a look at what Gemini means for the evolution of AI with a little help from the co-founder of The Neuron, Pete Huang, as we move out of SEO per se and into a segment we call the Great Beyond.

So Pete is a masterful expert around all things AI. Said a lot about the topic. So we asked him, "Hey Pete, why is Chip and I a big deal for the evolution of AI?" And here's what Pete had to say.

Pete Huang:

Gemini is really a catch-up moment for Google this time. Last year, people had two thoughts when it came to this sector, AI, if you rewind to just two months after ChatGPT got released. The first one is OpenAI might just run away with it and nobody's ever going to catch up. And two, where the heck is Google?

I mean, after all, they have everything on their side. Money, computing, resources, talent, and they seem to have no answer to what OpenAI has done. And so every time Google would make an announcement, it would just be one or two steps behind where people thought they needed to be for them to catch up.

So Google releases Gemini and makes a very pointed statement that their best model Gemini Ultra beats OpenAI's GPT-4. And if this holds up after people get access to Gemini Ultra, we would now have two models at this level, which is more choice and more capabilities on the market that performs as well as GPT-4 does, which is currently what powers ChatGPT on the backend, especially if you upgrade to ChatGPT Plus.

The main way this has shown up so far is in Google Bard, which is like Google's version of ChatGPT. It had always been lagging ChatGPT and was sort of unusable when it first launched. When we first used it, we would ask it for basic integration stuff, which is, "Can you find me three restaurants near this area?" And all the information would be wrong.

Since then, they've swapped out the model behind Bard to use Gemini, and it's gotten a whole lot better. It's become good enough to recommend, in fact, especially if you use Google products.

So in summary, Gemini is really Google saying, "We're here now and we've taken a year to do this." I mean, Gemini was released in the tail end of 2023. "But we're finally here." And in the grand scheme of these sort of races to build technology one year really isn't all that much. But it does paint a contrast to what was going on earlier in the year in 2023, where it felt like every day, every week, every month, there was something happening. And so therefore, it made Google's relative silence feel like there was nothing real or tangible or productive going on there, or at least that they were very much falling behind in the race.

So from my perspective, it is good for developers, good for businesses who want more choice, and certainly good for the consumer who wants to use Google products even more. As for SEO, I think this is the part where the SGE generated results might get a little bit better. The question I think is whether or not SGE is the form factor, is the product that makes users more engaged. That is ultimately the question that decides how far a new feature gets rolled out. So we might see SGE results improve, especially if they share that Gemini is powering those results. But that is all TBD and I think more immediately we're seeing the impact in products that Google Bard for now.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Pete. Make sure you check out Pete's newsletter, The Neuron Daily at TheNeuronDaily.com, and we'll link to Pete's social media profiles in the show notes. So make sure to give them a follow. Really, really interesting.

First off, I want to take up the SGE thing really quick. I don't want to get too hung up on the SEO side. We said it's the great beyond. We're beyond SEO for a minute. But if you look at what happened with Bing and their version of SGE, it did nothing for them in terms of market share. And I think we talked about this in the podcast multiple times. The SGE, as you see it now, was part of the great AI race to keep up with Bing. And I don't think it's fundamentally what users actually need or want and that what will move the needle for Google.

So I do see, to Pete's point, I do see SGE morphing to something else and not being what it is now. In terms of the overall picture, if I could sum up what I took away from that, there was a lot of daily noise for the last year or so, and then things went quiet. And now we're finally looking at the real developments in AI as opposed to all of the noise around AI, which is so ironic because you see the interest in ChatGPT falling off a little bit over the last few months. So it's sort of ironic as now things actually ramp up and things develop people's interest in it, it's sort of gone down just a bit. We're all past the hype part of it. But ironically now we're getting to the real stuff. Maybe it's now when you should be paying attention.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I think that that's the case. I think that when a lot of people are like, "Oh, AI is magical." It's not magical. Basically-

Mordy Oberstein:

No. Wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What?

Crystal Carter:

It's not magical.

Mordy Oberstein:

I thought it was at the end of a rainbow was an pot full of AI?

Crystal Carter:

No, no. And the other thing is that we've had AI in our lives for ages. What we've have now is the ability to harness it directly ourselves in a way that we were not able to do before. And I agree with Pete when he says that Google was playing catch up and this is now them trying to get into it.

Because I think that ChatGPT has made AI more accessible. It's very user-friendly. It's very easily accessible. But to get real good nuanced, sophisticated benefit from these tools, you still have to know stuff. You can't just be like any schmo off the street and just walk in and get something that's particularly amazing because literally everyone has access to it. So the smart people still have access to the same thing as the people who are maybe moving along and making their way. So I think that we are seeing, like you said, the real... More sophisticated, more nuanced, and people who have been working with these tools for years, because they have been available for years, are able to do more than they were able to do before.

And I think that, yeah, I agree that Bard is going to... I think at the moment they've got a lot of things running. They've got Bard running, they've got the SGE running, they've got Gemini running, they've got lots of different things running, and I think that we're probably going to see convergence.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bet their knees hurt from all the running.

Crystal Carter:

We're probably going to see a convergence of some of these AI tools at the same time, because the other thing that they have running as well is Lens.

I've talked about Lens a lot across when I was talking about visual search a lot. And Lens is becoming very, very sophisticated. So you can use it for QR codes. You can use it for it for-

Mordy Oberstein:

Translation of images. I use it all the time for that.

Crystal Carter:

Right? It's super useful for that. You just hold it up in the thing and it translates multiple languages at once.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so good.

Crystal Carter:

So if you're looking at ingredients and you're trying to figure out whether or not it has peanuts and it's going to give you an allergic reaction, you can see it in English and French and Spanish, and it can translate all of those different languages at once. And I think that we're probably going to see a convergence of those tools into something that changes search significantly. And Gemini, I think, like Pete is saying, is going to be the backbone of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

And you see that reflected in the fact that Gemini has multiple pricing models and multiple models are not for the average person.

Crystal Carter:

Right? And like I said, in our discussion earlier as well, we are going to see more players that are making use of Gemini, the quicker Google's going to be able to learn from that. It's the same reason why they made ChatGPT available to people in the first place for pretty much for free. And then the plus is because they are learning. They're learning from every single interaction that we're having with it, and they're learning what people value from it, what people can do with it, and all of that. So as Gemini is more available to enterprise level clients, they're going to be able to learn what it's able to do and they're going to be able to make more advance, more advancements more quickly.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what I would like? I would like to have some sort of chatGPT version of Barry. BarryGPT. It's like you ask Siri. "Hey Siri, what's happening with the NFL today?" And Siri gives you an answer back. "Hey Barry, what's happening in the SEO news today?" And it would be Barry talking and telling you what's happening. BarryGPT.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay, you've put that down. Now that... You now ideate that.

Mordy Oberstein:

If anyone takes it, I want, some kind of finder's fee for it.

Crystal Carter:

I'm sure there's a technical term. Technical legal term for it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I don't know what it is, but give me the money. It was my idea first.

Crystal Carter:

Right?

Mordy Oberstein:

So without further ado, here's Barry and other people talking about the SEO news and possibly about AI. Let's find out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now for this week's snappy news. Barry Schwartz reports on SEL that Google has dropped web stories from the image results, Google Discover carousel, and reduced the grid view to carousel view in Google search. Web stories have had a mixed reception amongst search marketers due to their complex implementation, effect on Google Discover traffic, and what Lily Ray referred to as the ability of folks to have used the feature by spamming the hell out of web stories. Glenn Gabe, who shared a great thread on the news, predicts that this change is the start of a full scale deprecation and that web stories could be completely gone in a year or so. Time will tell.

Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Goodwin reports that Yandex search engine has been sold in a $5.2 billion deal. The Dutch parent company of what is effectively Russia's version of Google has just agreed on the sale of their search engine to a conglomerate of Russian based companies and business leaders. It is used by more than 60% of people in Russia and could result in some changes to how the search engine performs in the not too distance feature. So keep an eye on this one.

In a post from blog.google, Google has announced that they are merging their Google Bard product into Gemini. This signals a move to streamline their AI offering and is illustrated by the fact that they are adding Gemini into the Google Assistant tool. This means that those who opt-in can use Google Gemini on their phone simply by saying, "Hey, Google." This, combined with a subscription-based model, should help them become more direct competitors, which ChatGPT, and might make voice search more of a thing. Maybe this year is the year.

This week, there was also some great discussion on core web vitals as Google search liaison, Danny Sullivan, doubled down on a previous statement saying, "We don't confirm any core web vitals as a direct ranking factor." As reported by Barry Schwartz in Search Engine Roundtable, Sullivan shared an article saying, "While not all aspects may be directly used to inform ranking, they do generally align with success in search ranking and are worth attention." And in a lively Twitter discussion, he shared that. It doesn't say it's a ranking factor. SEOs continue to be confused by this, but as Danny explains, "Is there a single page experience signal that Google uses for ranking? There is no single signal. Our core systems look at a variety of signals that align with overall page experience." So in the end, I think if we can all agree that it depends, and that's this week's snappy news.

Mordy Oberstein:

Do you think now that Barry heard this idea, because Barry does listen to the podcast, if he'll create, if Barry created BarryGPT himself, does he still owe me a finder's fee thing?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. You'd have to discuss that with Barry.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. It's all right, Barry, I'll just take a bread and butter sandwich instead as payment.

Crystal Carter:

Sounds good. I think that's fair. I think that's fair.

Mordy Oberstein:

For Halloween, I want to dress up as the butter and Barry can be the bread. This is, by the way, an inside joke about Barry's ability to make butter sandwiches, which is not as great as his ability to make news.

Crystal Carter:

I'm like, "Why didn't you toast it?" And he's like, "No, I just thought I'd mangle the bread."

Mordy Oberstein:

"There's no time." Just to explain, Barry, a year ago and somehow it resurfaced, posted a picture of his butter sandwich that he made, and it's mutilated. It's like the bread is torn. The butters in chunks.

Crystal Carter:

It's what happens when you put cold butter on soft bread and just smear it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just force it.

Crystal Carter:

Right? It's not going to work.

Mordy Oberstein:

Spread, damn it. Spread. It's unbelievable. But he's like, "I didn't have any time to make a sandwich." I'm like, "All right."

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll link to the tweet in the show notes. That's how... Yeah, this is pathetic, but we'll link to it in the show notes. We've gotten way off the rails. Speaking of other people who are AI tools, or love AI tools rather, our follow of the week this week is a very special person. He happens to be one of the producers of this very podcast. It is the one, the only, host of EDGE of the web radio. Erin Sparks over at E-R-I-N-S-P-A-R-K-S Sparks on X, formerly known as Twitter. Twitter, formerly known as X, in my mind.

Erin does a podcast called EDGE of the Web. It's a great podcast. Listen to it after you listen to this one. And he does the SEO news every week, which I co-host with him, which is full of shenanigans. It's not like anything like this podcast at all. Pure shenanigans.

Crystal Carter:

With the occasional guest star from yours truly as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I do appreciate you, Crystal filling in for me when I can't.

Crystal Carter:

Mordy's like, "I can't. Can you?" And I'm like, "Sure. Great." Love Erin. Love Jacob.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're great. Jacob, Jacob Mann. They're fabulous people. And Erin loves his AI tools. And every week on the SEO... On the EDGE of the web news rather, he'll cover his favorite AI tools, which makes me completely check out, by the way.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. So every time I guest host, and this is the reason why Erin is our follow of the week... If you're not following Erin, do.

But every time we go on there, he's always like, "Oh, I found this new thing." I'm like, "But that's so cool."

Mordy Oberstein:

Some of it is really cool. Okay, I gave him a hard time. But there are some really cool ones in there.

Crystal Carter:

There's some cool ones. The best one I found, or the one that he showed me last time, was one that was around AI image generators. And I've tried AI generator-

Mordy Oberstein:

You showed me this hack, by the way.

Crystal Carter:

... And my prompts are... It's good, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it's very good. Okay, explain, please.

Crystal Carter:

So my prompts are janky. I've tried and people are like, "Yeah, it's great." And I was like, "What?" And all the images that I get are terrible. My prompts, I do my best. They don't really work. So then he showed me something called freeflow.ai, and basically they have a bank of prompts that did work. And you can go in-

Mordy Oberstein:

And you just steal them.

Crystal Carter:

... And you can copy, you can adapt, you can remix, you can update the prompts for it. I used this to redecorate my office. So I found a design prompt and stuff. But for instance, there's one that's like a selfie one, for instance, and you can see the prompt. And the prompt is selfie shot, iPhone 12 Pro Max of subject taking a selfie, et cetera, et cetera. It's got all these different things that whoever's done these prompts actually understands the way, the syntax that the bots prefer in order to give them the best thing.

Anyway, it's really great, and he has tons of these and he shares them a lot. And Erin's also super nice and funny and knowledgeable and does a great podcast. And yeah, follow Erin.

Mordy Oberstein:

Him, Jacob, the whole EDGE of the web crew, really wonderful people. A lot of SEO knowledge. A lot of AI knowledge. So definitely please give them a follow and tell them we said hi when you follow them. "Crystal and Mordy sent us to follow you."

That's... I'm all out of predictions from the stars this week. I have nothing else to add.

Crystal Carter:

Well, I mean, I think that means Mercury's in retrograde or something. Is that what it means?

Mordy Oberstein:

Sure. Mercury. It's in tuna fish also.

Crystal Carter:

I'm done. That ended me.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's great. Anyway, 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 do you really need experts to write the content for you to actually be expert content by experts? Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on SEO Learning over at Wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content webinar resources on the Wix SEO Learning at, you guessed it, at Wix.com/SEO/learn.

Don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.