The Demise of Google Search and the Rise of Generative AI

0:00You had sent me a Business Insider article that was FOBO or fear of becoming obsolete is the new business buzzword. So apparently, you know, you got all these kind of big wig muckety mucks out at Davos talking about, you know, these world changing things. And what everybody's freaked out about is how, you know, they're all about to become obsolete. Why again? Because of AI. AI is making everybody obsolete.

0:32Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. This is the episode that almost didn't happen because someone came in. We redid our little podcast room upstairs here. And somebody came in and I guess disassembled my entire camera and everything because I touched it. They were helping Roland. I touched it. And I'm going to say, I don't want to say literally exploded, but it did literally fall into several pieces, including the camera going down, two tripods that were holding it up, slowly sinking while Ryan was like, wait, you're getting lower. and uh but here we are on the ipad it was so fun by the way to see it from this side of the camera like to be like on the other side of the lens and watch it happen um was was great yeah it's like i don't know what happened but i think roland's dead i think he just got hit by an asteroid glad that's not what happened so uh anyway here we are and uh ryan i'm having a little bit of a things falling apart on me kind of day how are you doing You know what?

1:33I'm doing great. Funny enough, while we're talking about technology, my youngest, he's in a robotics club. And so that's what I did this weekend was go to this robotics competition. And what's funny is the weekend before that, my daughter had a little cars that attack each other and things. So this one wasn't that they had to like perform all these little tasks. Right. So it was similar to that, but it wasn't like a BattleBot thing. That's another league. I think that's in the spring. um but yeah so i did that this weekend last weekend was my daughter's like dance competition like her like dance you know deal and boy you could not imagine two different groups it was quite a contrast so um so yeah it was um and and just one of them was exceptionally run i mean everything was perfect like the visuals the music and the other one the guys just a dumpster fire and I'll let you figure out which was which.

2:32I'm going to, I'm going to guess the guys were super organized because they're engineers and yeah, not that. Yeah. No executive function really over there. But yeah, it was great. Nice. Any one of them that could have fixed your setup. That's where I was going with that. Any one of them would have had your setup on lockdown. How old is Timmy now? Hey, he's about to turn 13. So, okay. I need some more 13 year olds here helping with the, uh, the technical side of things. Cause my son is, I think he's aging out, Ryan, you know, he's, he's 30 something now. I think it's just, it's, he's just too old, you know, he's too old.

3:07Time to move him on, put him out to pasture. I could do that. Cause he's on his way over here, guys. He can't possibly be listening to this. And I don't think he ever listens to them after the fact. But that said, you guys probably don't care about any of this stuff. what you might care about is a couple of articles and thoughts that Ryan and I were circulating back and forth, which I'd pull them up on my computer. But when I do, my screen goes black because I'm on my iPad. And Riverside thought that why on earth would you want to have it continue to broadcast while referencing some material? Let's interrupt the flow and turn off the video when that happens.

3:47So anyway, that being said, what the heck are we talking about today? Yeah, well, it's fun because I sent you an article that I saw that I thought was interesting. You sent me one. And then I was also listening to another podcast. And they're all kind of in and around the same thing. So I guess to set this up, the article that I sent you is a press release. Gartner predicts search engine volume will drop 25 % by 2026 due to AI chatbots and other virtual agents. So I want to get your thoughts on that specifically, you know, in just a second. But then you had sent me, which I think is highly related.

4:27You had sent me a Business Insider article that was FOBO or fear of becoming obsolete is the new business buzzword. So apparently, you know, you got all these kind of big wig muckety mucks out at Davos talking about, you know, these world changing things. And what everybody's freaked out about is how they're all about to become obsolete. Why, again? Because of AI. AI is making everybody obsolete. And I was listening to Tim Ferriss' podcast. Oh, sorry. What's up? And then you have, what was the, China released their deep, what is it? Deep something. Deep city? What is it? Yeah. Deep something. Deep something.

5:12They released their deep thing that basically opens, as I understand, I skimmed that headline before we came here, that opens the algorithm of kind of open sources, the algorithm of how they are doing mathematical and logical operations, which is something that none of our American clawed open AI and Gemini, to my knowledge, have done. So that's a big thing, too, which is also related to this because that's like, you know, I don't know, FOIPO, fear of intellectual property. You know, it's like they're missed. That's going to be an interesting thing, too, because obviously what I would think politically China would like would be to open up the open source and have everybody developing on their platform while America gets left behind and they end up with a crowdsourced best AI engine ever, which they then can control and could withdraw at any time.

6:09And, you know, I'm sure the government would love that. You're concerned about TikTok. I can only imagine how concerning AI would be. So it seemed like lots of interesting things to talk about. And similarly, by the way, just to continue to set this up, I was listening to the Tim Paris podcast. He had Chris Saka on, who's a, you know, big like startup guy. And they were kind of going through all the jobs that are essentially going to be displaced. And, you know, Saka asked, you know, Tim Ferriss, like, hey, so if you have a kid, are you You can have him go to college for, you know, to be a lawyer.

6:41You know, no, because like all, you know, every legal document is going to be done by this. You can have him be, you know, a finance major or an accountant. No, you know, what about no, you know, and Tim asked him, like, so what does this mean for humanity? And Saka's response was, we're effed, you know, he used the full word. This is a family show. And that was kind of like the big takeaways, like this human race is about to become obsolete. complete you know so apparently though it's going to start with google and then trickle down to the whole of humanity so i would just love to get your take let's kind of start off easy let's ease into the demise of humanity that's where we want to end up um easing into the demise of humanity we're going to start with google where gartner predicts again as early as 2026 which is in less than a year, mind you, as early as 2026, search engine volume is going to drop 25%.

7:34Your thoughts? I don't, that doesn't surprise me because, and I think that you would have to, I couldn't tell because neither you nor I wanted to invest$40 ,000 in Gartner's research program to be able to read the full report. So we're kind of going from the, from the, you know, the, the, the cheap seats here. But that said, my guess is that they are talking about traditional search engines in favor of the AI chat engines like OpenAI, Gemini, Clawed, et cetera. Grok, not to leave Elon out because he always calls us when we leave him out and he's like, guys. Anyway,

8:15the, so, you know, to me, that's not any kind of news at all because Google is the Yahoo of search today. They have cluttered the thing that made them great before was having the easy one focus thing. And then that led to relevant search results. And they were all about relevance for years. And then they've just side saddled themselves into basically, you know, Yahoo, what Yahoo was before, which was the search box cluttered with all these other things. Now you search for something I almost never find, and I'm a pretty good searcher, what I'm looking for. I've got to get through four to five ads on the top, plus keyword stuff, stuff, such plus paywall gated stuff.

9:00When I want to click on something and I take, it takes me to a thing that says, now you can pay to sign up. That's like a, I can't believe they've allowed the user experience on Google to decline as much as it has and in favor of money. But that's so short-sighted and it's, it's shows you to me the danger of a monopoly because I think they own so much of the search space that they just like, we don't care. We're going to do this to make money. And that's the capitalist thing to do, which is fine. But it's a crappy user experience. And now they're going to suffer because of that, because I would way rather, I use Gemini, but I use ChatGPT and Claude.

9:35And I don't really want to use Gemini because I'm still pissed at them for doing what they did. And the only reason that we have these other, The only reason we have Gemini is because OpenAI forced their hand. And the only reason we have not Gemini with ads is because OpenAI and Claude don't have it, and they've gone for the subscription model. So my hope is that they all maintain equal market share. Give Claude 30 and 40 to ChatGPT and 30 to Google and let Elon come in, and maybe it ends up 25s. But that's the only thing that gives us a prayer of having a decent user experience. So of course, everyone's going to bail on not relevant search result, not giving me the answers I'm looking for engines like Google in favor of let me ask a question and get straight to what I want without a whole bunch of ads.

10:30Now, as that evolves, we'll see, does that tip the scales back at all towards search? But unless they radically change the user experience there, and I don't think Google can afford to change it. Because I think enough people are slow adopters of AI and chatbots that they're going to milk that for as long as they can. But if we're talking search as chatbots, that's where it's going to go. People would rather have answers. It's what Bezos said when he said, I look at not what is going to change tomorrow. I look at what's never going to change. What's never going to change is people want their stuff on time.

11:06They want it faster. They don't want to pay for shipping. They want what they ordered. In search, people want answers. Whoever gives them answers, the best answer is the fastest with the least amount of friction. That's who's going to win. So I think that platform-wise, unless, and I'll stop ranting here in a minute, unless Google basically fuses Gemini with the Google search engine, which probably wouldn't be a terrible idea, and then make it either ad-free for$20 a month or, you know, with ads for not, unless they do something like that, I think Google search is going to die, you know, a long death like traditional media has because it's got a lot of tail of unsophisticated users.

11:50But then it's not really changing anything, though. Like, that's not a revelatory statement that it's going to decline by 25 % because it's just going to move over to a different place. It's effectively, we're not using Google, we're now using Bing. We're not using Google, we're now using open AI. That's, that's my, my short take. What is, what is your take on it? Yeah. People are never going to stop having questions. And they're always going to seek answers, you know, from somewhere, something resembling, you know, on the line.

12:20Yeah. What I have a problem with, and I'll read the full, I'll read the full quote from the piece. So this is from Alan Anton, who's the vice president analyst at Gartner. He said, organic and paid search are vital channels for tech marketers seeking to reach awareness and demand generational goals. Generative AI solutions are becoming substitute answer engines, to your point. They're becoming substitute answer engines, replacing user queries that previously may have been executed in traditional search engines. This will force companies to rethink their marketing channel strategies as Gen AI becomes embedded across all aspects of the enterprise.

12:56So what he's saying is that people are going to stop going to google.com and to the search box completely. I believe that that is true. What I have a problem with is 25 % in under 12 months. I just don't see it falling off that fast. These businesses that have taken 20 plus years to get where they are, they die a very, very slow and a very profitable death. So do I think it's going to happen? I don't have a problem with the prediction. I have a problem with the timeline. And all I got to look at is all my redneck friends. Like this is one of the nice things about like, and why I just tell every marketer and entrepreneur and technologist for the love of God, get you some normal friends and just look at what they do.

13:41Cause you know what they're all still doing? Google and stuff. Yeah. Almost none of my normal friends are using Chad GPT, they might use it recreationally, right? Like it's a drug, but it is not something that they use all the time. Now compare that to like YouTube, right? They're now all finally cutting the cord and you go over to their house and they're pulling up YouTube on the big screen. Now that took a while though, because all my more technologist friends have been doing that for years and years and years. How long did it take podcasts to become the thing that everybody listened to? We've been talking about podcasts and doing stuff for over a decade.

14:15YouTube would be what about 18 years? Cause was it 2007 that, that kind of Google was either six or seven that they bought. So, so that's a pretty, that's a pretty fair analogy. I like that. Cause that, that fall off period, and it's still obviously got a long tail. Um, that that's, what's going to happen with search too. It's, it's going to be slow. Yeah. I agree with you on that. It, it, it would be highly unlikely that in a single year, all search volume declines 25%. Yeah, I wouldn't. Now, what I do like, I thought a really interesting prediction. I hadn't thought about it this way. I wonder if Google's not doing this on purpose.

14:53What if they're making the experience so miserably crappy so that they can introduce a premium version that is ad free? I mean, this is what Spotify did. This is what YouTube did. And their experiences weren't even that bad. They just had a few ads every now and then. If Google at this point were to say, hey, for 20 bucks a month, you're going to have no ads. So there's not going to be any Google ads. Or heck, if it was just even the old school where only ads in the sidebar, that would be a breath of fresh air. So just sidebar ads only. And Gemini is not going to suck with respect to to the kind of the search queries, that'll be 20 bucks a month.

15:36I mean, I'd pay for that. Would you pay 20 bucks a month for Google? But at the same time, kind of their brand is, it's always been free. So they're gonna have to call it something different. I wouldn't do it now. Uh, you know, but I'm not one of your friends, right? I mean, you know, I am your friend, but I'm not one of your, you know, I am, I am. Hey, that's cold, man. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. Yeah. You're one of my weird friends, not one of my normie friends. I don't, I don't, you know, I don't use Google at all anymore unless I can't get what I want from the search, you know, from the chatbots.

16:03So I think we, I think we agree. Yes, it's going to happen. Uh, I would definitely, um, I would, I would short the idea of this happening though, of the 25 % by 2026. I mean, again, that's like freaking 11 months from now. Uh, and I've, I've seen this by the way, with people who make predictions, they're directionally accurate. They're just brutally off on their timelines all the time. They always think it's going to happen faster than it does. So yeah, it does. It does, though, to me, create a giant opportunity. And it's one you and I've talked about a while is that SEO is back. It's moved to AI chatbots.

16:41And so how how do you want your site set up now to be able to have the answers that are being returned, especially now that sources are being cited? How do you want to set up your, you know, Your overall text on your website is moving much towards how do people interact with the chatbots because they're going to scrape and pick up the things that make it easiest for them to process and answer too. So if you've got Q &A format about your products, about your market, that whole initial information about your market followed by, which is going to help the AI target who it's relevant for, to Q &A format, which is going to help them have an easier time.

17:28seeing that the specific question is being asked that is being asked to the chat bot is being answered by your website. And then the schema markup stuff that is making it easy for them to get in and analyze that and deliver it. Like that's a giant opportunity, which to me reignites the possibility of SEO, which had kind of gone away other than just, you know, make good content and, you know, put it in the right format. So that's exciting, I think. And I think it's an opportunity and a threat because it's a threat to the people that don't do it. And it's a giant opportunity to the people that come in and do it right to start.

18:04And I'll tell you, it's a benefit. It's funny because it simultaneously benefits and hurts the legacy brands. Because if you're a legacy website, a legacy business that has a lot of content that's already out there, that's already been indexed, the AI bots have been crawling you and learning from you whether you like it or not for a very, very long time. And so good news. There's going to come a time when they're going to have to start sourcing you and they're going to start queuing you up. But if you don't take those extra steps of optimizing for it, it's probably not going to happen. You're leaving the door open for disruption.

18:43So it's simultaneously a good opportunity for you while at the same time opening the door for somebody else. It's funny you mentioned the sourcing. there because it's weird. AI and AI search is living kind of in these two worlds and I can't tell which direction it's going to go because the history of search is one where websites, content providers desperately came cap in hand, please sir, may I have some more to Google begging to be listed, scrape all my content, whatever you want, just please for the love of God, tell people about me and send people to me, right? You can have all my content that you want.

19:25I'll serve it up for you on a silver platter, right? I'll do whatever you want. Come on, right? That's the history of search is content providers kowtowing to the search engines. What we're seeing now, though, with AI companies is they're having to go back to the content providers and license them for all the content that they're learning from. I've got a friend who's a big time author, who's written a bunch of bestselling books. And they just got approached last week from their publisher saying, hey, you know, we just got hit up from a couple of the major AI companies, obviously OpenAI. I think Google was among them.

20:05And they're doing a big licensing deal with this publisher across their entire catalog. And each author got an option to opt into it and they got paid a certain amount of money for it. So this author, they were coming to me like, what do you think? It's like, this is the check that I would get, but kind of once I say yes to this, that's kind of all I will ever get from it. But it was sort of this one-time deal with the publisher. So it seems like the future of AI is the content providers are getting paid. So I wonder if it's going to be one of those things where if you're getting sourced, you're getting paid and it flips itself, but probably not.

20:46Because I still think there's going to come a day where everybody wants to just be featured and seen. We all want to be famous. What do you think? I agree. I think that what we're seeing is that the Spotify model of we're going to put your stuff out there. And if you're not on here, you're going to be irrelevant and your fans won't have access and they'll find other people. And if you are on here, we're going to pay you pennies. and where all of the content providers are gonna have to tailor Swift it and figure out how do I monetize outside the sale of that digital stuff, right? So physical books, obviously they were gonna go away when Amazon came along 20 plus years ago.

21:27That didn't happen. People still buy tons of physical books. So you'll still have the ability to make your money. That way you'll get discovered through the AI chatbots that you're maybe going to get a sliver of nothing for. It's not going to matter. It's like YouTubers that have a million streams and make$400. It's not anywhere close to the money Google makes. But what you will do is you'll find other ways to monetize. So you'll monetize through events and things that can't be duplicated, like an interactive you know, thing or something like that. So it's going to basically be, uh, you're not making money from the sale of books, really.

22:07Uh, you're making money from the things that you do up, up the funnel from that. So I mean, it's really what happened with Spoto. To me, that's the best example I can think of. Uh, and it's going to be the same. Yeah. I think that's a great, great analogy. All right. Any, anything else you want to say about Google or you want to move on to the death of humanity as a whole? Uh, I think we can go straight to the death. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So long story short, if you're in the SEO business, pivot to Gen AI optimization. If you have a legacy website, find somebody who knows how to optimize for, you know, for the generative AI bots so that you can get listed there when the time comes.

22:47And if you're a new website, probably don't, you know, try to double down on traditional SEO. I agree. That's a big one, too. I think if you're new, go AI and screw the other stuff. Why enter the Red Sea anyway? Yeah. It's like coming in today and being like, you know what? I think I want to see if I can make a go at buggy whip manufacturing. I think that's going to be huge. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. All right. So FOBO. Well, technology is cyclical, Ryan. Technology is cyclical. We'll be back there. Yeah. Horse and carriage is coming back. People love the great outdoors and just the wind blowing through their hair, the original convertible.

23:24All right. Fear of becoming obsolete. What do you think? Should we be afraid? I think it's a legit fear. It's specifically that article is in the context of employees that are the companies are FOMO. They don't want to miss out on the opportunity of getting AI and be outcompeted. But the employees have the fear that the employers move to heavy AI will completely displace them. And the happy solution is that we need to upskill employees to allow them to bring AI in to help them perform what they do better. and it may be upskilling them out of replaced jobs into, you know, better jobs and not everyone will make it.

24:14Not everyone will want to, not everyone will be open, not everyone will be capable, although it's a pretty daggone low bar. So I think it makes sense. You know, I think it's a real thing and it's definitely happening. And even you and I know in our businesses, it's like, we don't need as many copywriters as we needed before. But you know what? Until it dramatically improves, we still need copywriters, right? Well, it's interesting you mentioned that specific example because we were actually interviewing four copywriters at one of our companies. And we had a guy come in and apply for the job. And he said, and one of the questions that we're asking everybody is, how do you feel about leveraging AI in your copy?

24:56And the only wrong answer is, I don't want to use AI at all. To me, that is the only wrong answer. um you know i like they i want to see as a copywriter that you're somehow leveraging ai whether you're doing it for research or for like i just to not use it as a tool to me is just foolish um but this person said um he said yeah i'm almost exclusively ai i was like okay i don't know that i like that very much at all that makes me very nervous yeah i was like that that terrifies me and um but he broke down his entire his entire process and um how he's like what i actually do is I come into companies.

25:32And he said, I'll be completely transparent. He's like, I'm not actually looking for a job. He's like, this is what I do. I come into companies. He came in on a deception, which is a little frustrating. A little frustrating. But it was a good enough pitch that I'm... And in fairness, he didn't come through the job application process. He was referred to us by somebody and so he didn't know the full scope of everything. That's fine. Yeah, I don't want to mischaracterize his intentions. Yeah. So but but now he's like what what I do is I come in and I actually build out these things. He's like, I can write copy.

26:07I am a copywriter. But what I found was that I was doing this for companies and they really didn't need me anymore. And so I can go in and I can set these up for companies. They can pay me a small fee to go and work it. But after a period of time, they don't really need me because it gets good enough. If they got enough good copy to train it with, if they don't, that's what I write. Like I've got to produce enough good copy to train it with that's in their voice. So they, because if you don't have good copy, it can't produce good copy from scratch. But once it's there, it's pretty good. And so we went from thinking we need to hire two copywriters to we're going to hire this guy first and see if we can hire no copywriters and just work with the ones we got.

26:52So that's one example. Example number two, we're doing a pretty significant CRM migration away from one legacy system to HubSpot. And it's a freaking nightmare. I mean, if you've ever migrated to CRM, just, you know, I mean, it's like, let's just hit yourself in the head with a freaking attack hammer. How many times have we migrated in the last decade? It's like, this is at least a different business, but we are, we are like the Serengeti. We are the great migration once a year. We're like, let's all go. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. We're going to lose a lot of people to the alligators, but what the heck?