S06.EP14 - Why Brands Shouldn’t Rely on Google (+ How to Actually Get Visibility) with Mordy Oberstein

0:00The motion like for the last 10 years is expand, cast a Y net, get more. I think the motion that we're in now is refinement. AI is going to help you refine what you're looking for, to help you refine what's out there, to help you get something that's more refined and personal to what you're looking for.

0:20Hello and welcome to Just Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

1:00structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the waitlist. That's joinbba.com. Now let's get into the show. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of Just Branding. Today, we have the most exciting, the most brilliant, the most notorious Maudie Oberstein on the show. And we're diving into a provocative topic that should be on every brand builder's radar. And that is why brands should stop relying on Google. We're going to unpack that with Mordy. Who's Mordy? He's a voice many of you will know from the SEO world if you're from that space, because he's a previous head of SEO branding at Wix.

1:46He's the host of multiple marketing podcasts. He's one of the sharpest minds out there when it comes to decoding search algorithms and the shifting landscape of online visibility. But today in this episode, it's not your kind of standard SEO chat, although there's a place for standard SEO chats, nothing against those. But today on Just Branding, we're going to be focusing in on branding and SEO and being found online in the age of AI with the rise of large language models, can't even say that, LLMs. What does that mean for discovery for your brand? What does that mean in terms of traditional thinking about Google, about SEO, about ranking?

2:31And what does that mean in terms of your brand? What it might mean in terms of holding your brand back if you're not embracing some of these new ways of being found? So with all that in place, Morty, welcome to the show. Wow, that's quite the intro. Also, like, I'm notorious. Nice. I'm a notorious MOB. Yeah, well, you know me. I like to, you know, I like to give us some zip and some vigor. And also, you know, you definitely are notorious. And, you know, I'm thrilled to have you on the show. And so is Jacob. So welcome. Listen, let's start off with perhaps a provocation. Why shouldn't brands rely on Google anymore, in your view?

3:14because they never should have to begin with. Tell me more. Tell me more. So first, if you're talking about building a brand, and I'm sorry to tell you, if you're coming from the SEO space, you're listening to this, this is going to sound like a heresy. If you're not, this makes good natural sense. Google search is a hard way to build brand. I feel brand is a lot about consistency over time. And search is all about not consistency over time. You don't know where you're going to wait, where you're going to show up, when you're going to show up. it's hard to build that consistency to really build that presence, to really build that connection with your audience through the medium of Google search.

3:51That's hard. I'm just saying it can't happen or it doesn't help your brand, but building a brand that way, that seems backwards to me. Sure. So how would you put it the other way around? What would you say the focus should be before we dive back into the backwards? So Google always has been, and this is where I think it's becoming, okay, what kind of vehicle, but it's a vehicle. It's a vehicle to help you be found. It's a vehicle to help you spread your content. It's a vehicle to do a lot of different things. And the conversation around what is Google from a search and traffic point of view has shifted back to, okay, it's a vehicle.

4:27It's not a be-all, end-all. What type of vehicle is it? Is it a 2025 Audi or is it a 1987 Chevy? How reliable is it? Yeah, let me ask you about that, because as I said in the introduction, we're seeing the rise of AI and lots of different things that are coming around. I mean, if we just keep it specifically to Google just for a second, what are the big shifts that you're seeing in the way that Google itself is working? The biggest shift that I can point to was August 2018. This is called the medic update. So Google has an algorithm, and every once in a while it presses a button and it updates this algorithm.

5:06Starting in March of 2018, they started to announce what they call core algorithm updates. Now, they've always had core algorithm updates, but a Google spokesperson wasn't announcing them each time. In March 2018, they started to announce these things. The biggest, most famous one of them is what we call the medic update, which is really the August 2018 core update. That's a really annoying name to say. Predominantly because they hit what's called the YMYL space, your money, your life, health, things that impact your health and finances. And what we saw happening with that algorithm was Google was better able in new ways to understand content quality.

5:45And since then, it's been progressively trying to rely less on SEO stuff, links, all that kind of SEO stuff. And predominantly on is the content across the website, not just the web page, is the content across the website good quality? and it's made certain shifts and it's made certain jumps and it redefines what quality is like for example google has actual raters i don't know people know about this there there are people called quality raters and they're paid by google to look at content look at a web page say is this good or is this bad obviously like completely oversimplifying this and they have a set of guidelines called google's quality raters guidelines or the qrg because we like abbreviations in SEO.

6:31Everything's going to have an abbreviation. The raiders guidelines change over time. And of course, SEOs fight about everything. And is Google using these things that it's telling its quality raiders to look at? Is it using it in the algorithm or not? So certain SEOs, no. Certain SEOs, yes. Certain SEOs like myself, who cares? Obviously, it's what they want. So sooner or later, they're going to start interjecting it at some point. But those you can see how Google defines quality content shifting. And it makes so much sense because everyone looks at this like, oh, it's an AI issue. Right now it's happening.

7:02It's not an AI issue. It's a perfect storm. Google has something that's called EAT. And I swear I'll stop with acronyms. It stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It's basically a fancy way of saying, is your content not rubbish? And is it good? And in whatever year, Google added an extra E for experience, like two, three years ago. So now it's E-E-A-T, experience, expertise, authoritativeness. Why experience? And Google wrote a whole blog post. You don't have to, I'm not like making like, oh no, why did they do that? They have a post about why they did this. And they said, because we see that people are looking for more firsthand knowledge among the search results.

7:44That's Google saying we have the world's largest data set and we're really good at predicting where people are, how they're behaving and where they're going. And we see they're going to TikTok. and that our interpretation of that is they want more firsthand knowledge. So what Google then did was that doesn't, by the way, that doesn't exist on the Internet because Google didn't ever incentivize that. Google incentivized for years five ways to show that I have no actual human experience, but will tell you what I think anyway. And it needed to somehow pull that content in. So a fire hose read it.

8:19Onto its result page. And that's when the whole thing kind of like went topsy-turvy. Because Google's trying to add content that it didn't have. And the only way it has is Reddit. Reddit, I don't know if anybody likes, is a sewer. And it literally like just superimposes sewer onto the SERP. I did another acronym. Search engine results page. That's the Google page. And then on top of that, now you have the whole AI thing. So it's a disaster. The perfect storm. The perfect storm of mess and algorithms. Loving it so far. A couple of other quick things. So, you know, in relation to the AI overviews, you know, that you now start to see, did you, so is that coming from Reddit or is that Google's own AI engine?

9:08Like, how's that working? So now you're stuck. Like now, like I'll Google, like, you know, I'll say like best place to get a coffee mug. And instead of it going to, first of all, Google will do a show like a landing page that Wired.com used to have. because everybody should rank for everything. That makes sense. That started to change. That's a different conversation. And a lot of people, a lot of the rankings you hear people say they're losing. HubSpot is an example. HubSpot lost all its rankings. HubSpot lost all its crap rankings that don't actually matter. HubSpot lost what's the best coffee mug.

9:40As that's happening, it's harder for me to even rank because what's showing up for best coffee mug used to be my website. Now it's Reddit. And everyone telling me where the best coffee mug is. Now, on top of that, you have AI overviews and AI overviews are a mess. They're pulled in. It's an LLM. So it's pulled in from content across the web. They do cite. It's I'm going to say something controversial. Is that OK to say? Yeah, sure. Go for it. AI overviews are basically like a bastardized product and they were never meant to come out. The only reason AI overviews exist is because ChatGPT and Bing beat Google to the punch.

10:26There was a famous conference that Bing announced co-pilot. Google had no idea it was coming and they were caught off guard. Google then ran like their own event a month, like two weeks later in Paris, showcasing a bunch of stupid things no one actually cared about. And that's when the conversation of, ooh, Google dying started to come out. Two months after that was Google's big conference, Google I.O. They just had one relatively recently. This is I.O. 2023. And they announced what was called back then S.G.E., search generative experience. What is with all the freaking acronyms? S.G.E. became A.I.O.

11:04reviews. Why did they announce S.G.E.? They didn't roll it out. They just announced like, here's what it's going to look like. Because they were getting hit. Their stock was getting killed because Bing beat them to the punch. ChatGPT beat them to the punch. They had to announce something. Fast forward a year later, they already announced this thing. They have to release it now because like now what you announced it a year ago and it's your next Google I.O. big conference thing. You've didn't you've done nothing. Got to announce it. Otherwise, the stock's going to crash. So they released it. And that's why we have a overviews.

11:35What they really want to release what they announced this year, which is a.i. mode. A.i. mode is more of a one to one competitor with chat. G.B.T. It's better in general. It's still a mess. So check this out. Google is running parallel products that can't overalyze each other on purpose. And at some point, somebody big is going to lose their job over it. Wowzers. Wowzers. All right. Okay. Well, pause, pause, pause. Okay. We've got a lot of brand builders on the call, right? Listening in on the call, on the show, listening to the show, right? It's not cool. They're not calling in. Don't worry. Can we take Sal from Staten Island?

12:11I would love to have a call in. Yeah, absolutely. It would be great to do a call in. And sometimes, hang on, actually pin that. We'll have to do that, Jacob, at some point, do a little LinkedIn call-in or something. But I think what I want to ask is just bring it back down to brand builders just for a minute. In your view, then, what does all of that mean for discoverability, right? Because that's ultimately, you know, people building brands, they want to make sure that they are salient. They're in the minds of people, you know, searching for what they've got to offer. And obviously, we all hit Google mostly to get to that, you know.

12:45So what does that mean? What does that mean to brands in all this mess and confusion and AI robotics that you've been talking about? I always want to be able to roll my R's, and I'm just sitting here jealous.

13:01I've totally lost it. You lost it. I don't remember what to say now. I'm stuck on the R. What does it mean? What does it mean to brands? Yeah, so first off, for brand builders, this is great. I'm a weirdo. I've sat on both the performance side of marketing and on the brand side of marketing. So I see both sides disturbing. This is great for brand builders. What makes this difficult right now is that you're dealing with a company who's not functioning logically, right? They're not functioning. By the way, if you want, there's a great interview with The Verge and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. I highly recommend you watch that if you really want to get a nerd's eye view kind of thing.

13:36But they're not functioning. I want to say they are functioning rationally, but their context of what is rational, and what's not rational is in a different orbit than us. They're functioning for their stock price. And they're functioning in a way that it's hard to end up saying, what does this ultimately look like? For example, you're currently running two products. One of these are going to die out. AI overs are going to die out. It's very clear. Who's pretty much basically said it. And they're going to move to what's AI called AI mode, which if you're in the US, you now have access to it. If you're not in the US, you can't see it.

14:11But it's more like a chat GPT-ish kind of thing. So you need to figure out, okay, what you want to do is you need to be able to read what the hell is actually going on. Where does this end up? And what does it end up looking like? Because if you're just chasing like, okay, we need to get into the AI overview. Well, that's going to go away. Okay, we need to get into AI mode. Okay, so question. If AI mode, which is currently a separate tab, you know, like on Google, you have tabs for images and videos. It's a separate tab, AI mode. If it replaces AI overviews, there's not going to be a separate tab for AI mode.

14:45As someone who's worked on products, do you know why there's a separate tab on the left for AI mode? Because they couldn't figure out a way to run both products in the same place. And the guy, well, the best place to put it is on the left-hand side up there. It's not like a strategic decision. It was just a mechanics problem. How does that end up getting integrated into the main SERP, into the main result page? My advice, there are multiple corrections that need to happen. And one correction is that this stuff is very expensive and it's not going to last for free forever. I always knew it was a data center that cost the most money.

15:18I didn't realize what part of it cost the most money. It's cooling the data centers. The water costs the most money. And yeah, I didn't know that like two weeks ago. Someone told me. Right? Super interesting. It can't last for free. The only reason it's lasting for free right now is because all of these companies are now, their bottom line is their stock price. at a certain point, the hype dies down and the ability to pump up that stock price with whatever new hype dies down with it. So now you have to switch to a cost flow, I'm sorry, cash flow model. Then this thing comes crashing down because how do you keep offering before you have to monetize which they haven't been able to figure out how to monetize it.

15:57So you know, that's one, you know that it can't end up looking this way because they haven't been able to monetize it yet and they have to figure out how to monetize it. They need to figure out how to bring costs down, which they announced we bought costs down. And then they need to figure out how to monetize it in a real way. I think it'll probably end up like YouTube, where I run five prompts, and then a big interstitial ad comes up. I got to watch a video or whatever it is, then click skip. And then I get to ask Google the rest of my prompts. The second part of that is, does the AI hype last forever?

16:29And I swear I'm going to answer your question. If you think the AI hype lasts forever, then fine. Just optimize to get into whatever this thing is right now. And we can talk about what that would actually mean. If you think the AI hype is not going to last forever, like any hype cycle, it's going to die down. I feel like it already is. Now we're talking about agentic AI. Like here, please take my wallet and spend money all over the internet for me. Because that's exact. Sure. That's a good idea. you already see like the AI LLM generation, content generation kind of dying down a little bit. And there's more and more pushback.

17:06My wife's a great example. She's a nurse. She went to a conference about how to, what to know about AI as a nurse. And she was like, I can't believe this crap is going on. The world is doomed. So people are more skeptical also, by the way, when you have people sitting around the dinner table saying, Hey, hey, SAI stuff is great, huh? And then when they have to hand over their credit cards so we can buy new pants for it online, I don't know how like, yay, hey, great, it's going to be the same way. Like people are funny when they have to open, they hand over their credit card number, which means, and Google was asked this in the interview I referenced, wow, I'm really going like full circle and full circle and full circle.

17:43And their CEO said he doesn't think that the era of exploration is over, meaning I just want an answer and I'm done. but that's what ai currently does and i'm a former teacher and i'll tell you like i don't believe that i don't believe the human mind is constructed i don't want to know anything just give me the answer on what i'm done i want i'm done for certain things it definitely wants that for certain things you want to be able to explore more things i had a small medical issue i don't know like go on it's like no no big deal i'm fine i didn't want the typical answers and the typical websites google was giving me i wanted to go a little bit deeper and explore so what i think the ai is going to end up looking like, and this is probably a good point to like discuss, when Google announced Gemini originally, which is their AI property, they showcase, they can't do it yet.

18:31They've experimented with it a little bit. It's showcased an example. If I ask it one question, I get one set of results that format it one way. So if I ask it like, what's a great idea for a nine-year-old girl's birthday party on the beach? And the layout and the type of results match that type of query of search, where if I ask it, what's the best beard to, what's the best brush to brush my beard with? It might list a totally different set of examples and in a different layout altogether. I think that's where we're heading. We're headed to a place where it's almost like a content portal. It'll give you a summary, whatever you want, the LLM, you could explore more, but it's going to open entry points so that you can explore deeper, which means that we're about to enter an era, I think of not expansion, the web is shrinking, which is another point we could talk about, but refinement.

19:22And if you want your brand to align with what's happening and getting into these LLMs, it's about honing down that brand identity so that people, first of all, that you know who the hell you are, which is a whole conversation we can talk about as a mess, so that your audience knows who you are, so they can start talking about you across the internet, and then the LLMs can pick up on all of that. Wow, there's a lot there. There's a lot to unpack. If you're building a brand and want to do it right, this is for you. Join the Brand Builders Alliance for expert coaching, live masterclasses, and a crew of brand builders who've got your back.

20:00Get on the wait list now at joinbba.com. Now back to the show. Morty, I have to ask about this shrinking internet thing because as far as I understand, like the internet is like just getting spanned with so much content that is just like expanding and so i'd love to hear your take on that so this is great i mean it's not great depends how you look at it it's interesting put it that way so the verge i forgot his name vilay patel asked google this question he asked the ceo google it's the same question he said is is the ceo is it it's harder for people to get traffic or things just seem to be like constricting he goes no we're in expansionary era right now.

20:38And his answer back was there are more web pages than ever. That's not what he asked. He asked more traffic. Yeah, there's definitely more web pages than ever. There's not more traffic than ever. So I have data in this. I used to be the head of comms at CenterRage. I still consult for CenterRage. CenterRage is like an SEO data tool thing. I still spill the beans that I'm talking I'm doing next week, but maybe this is not going to come out before then. So I'm not spilling beans, tea. I don't know what people say anymore. But basically the data shows and they talk about this in the interview, the web is kind of just plateaued.

21:09Like you always think about the web should be like the stock market is always going up, which if you're ever in the stock market is not how it works. Since COVID, so COVID was the peak, you could see web traffic, however you slice it, whether it's like total traffic across the web, average monthly visits a site's going to get, comes down after 2021 or the middle of 2021, and it levels out. Over the course of 2024, there's a 2 % difference between where it was in 2021, meaning it's leveled out and we have 2 % growth in three years, which is nothing. It's like 2 % is like what I have in my milk.

21:49That's not growth. So we're pushing more and more and more content out there, more content than ever. And it's stagnating, which to me says that it's it's shrinking because we're propping it up with all this content and it's still not growing and it's still stagnating all right curious bad news for the bears i guess yeah good good news for your brand though i feel like why is that yeah because if you if you can double down and have some like real identity if you understand like who you are they can connect with you you have some kind of reason to exist that has a level of depth, a level of meaning to it, and you're refining that, first off, you're so far ahead of the curve right now.

22:33And you can stand out because no one's doing that. But you can't get found in search. So is it relevant anyway? Yeah, there's a lot of ways to get found. Yeah. Well, let's talk about traditional SEO because we've talked about AI and Reddit just pushing out results further and further down the page. Is there any room for traditional seo like has it evolved into anything else what's your take it depends it's always like the seo answer if you're a technical seo but so you're somebody who makes sure that um you're working for cnn i don't know or you know one of these like big news websites thousands of millions of pages and you're making sure that their pages can be crawled and indexed by google they can they're served quickly on the server like to users all those technical things that's very much still a job.

23:22Like in its own right, regardless of any of this, you need someone to make sure that all of these bots can come access, crawl the page and do whatever they do with it, whether it's an LLM bot or whether it's Google, whether it's Bing, whatever it is. So that's definitely still a thing. The traditional SEO going out there and like, you know, we're going to change the heading on the page and we're going to go after SEO keywords. I think that was stupid for a long time. I think it's really stupid now. for a variety of reasons. One is that's not how LLMs work. Let's assume for a second that there are no more links on the page.

23:57Everything is just the AI answer. The LLMs, ChatGPT, isn't looking at you like Google's looking at you. Google's looking at you, your page, the rest of your pages to make sure that they're all quality, so not sending the user to a bad website, which has one great page, but a decent site overall. ChatGPT is like a much more fanned out, wider lens kind of angle on the internet and how does the internet understand you which becomes much more value much more valuable what other people are saying about you than what you're saying about yourself i'll give you an actual case first off that was always google's main thing in the algorithm their whole difference way back in the day was you know yahoo altavista all those ask jeeves the reason what made google better was google was looking at links and was looking at links like a vote of confidence if somebody's linking to this website it must be they like this website.

24:47So it was always more important when other people said that you were saying yourself. What happens in LLM land is if it's just me talking about myself and I've seen cases like this. So if I ask whatever LLM, my AI mode or chat GPT, a really niche question about my brand, it'll pull up what I have on my website and it'll source me as the source. That's not what you want. You want other people seeing you as the source and writing about you, because when they broaden out a little bit, let's take this podcast. If I, on your website have, you know, just branding podcasts, all the information about it.