AI Has Introduced Product Slop

0:00People are talking about, okay, these agenda coders, right? I think what's happening now is, and we've kind of warned against this, but there's a new phrase now. So we talk about AI slop, like content slop, right? Now there's product slop because it's so easy to build all these products. So when we can ship at 100 times the speed, the problem now, Neil, is whatever you build into Ubersuggest or whatever you build into Answer to Public, there could be risk where you have too much features and it's too much crap and it inundates the entire system. so more things faster is rarely a recipe for excellence when it takes weeks to ship you justify every feature when it takes hours you ship everything why not it feels like progress and momentum it's what we call perceived progress yeah but it just hasn't just introduced a product slop it's introduced marketing slop it's introduced engineering slop it's introduced slop everywhere because people are doing a lot of stuff that they don't need to do the amount of messages i get on a weekly basis of people showing me cool shit they're doing with AI.

1:01And no joke, more than nine out of 10 times, I'd be like, this is never going to make anyone any money or do anything from, they just created a new, cool, shiny thing for marketing. And it's like, whoop-de-doo. So speaking about slop, I saw this post on LinkedIn. This guy, Mike Cornugin wrote this. So he said, we published 2000 AI generated articles across 20 new domains with zero authority to see if raw AI content could rank. Here's what happened in just 36 days. So 71 % of pages got indexed, eight sites ranked for 1 ,000 keywords each, 122 ,000 impressions, over 240 clicks in total. That seems very low.

1:37Five sites hit top 30 for 30 % of their keywords. But here's the plot twist. All articles disappeared from search after three months. What went wrong? First, it's obvious that all the sites were brand new. No trust signals, no domain authority, nothing to make believe you're worth citing. Plus the content was fully AI generated with no human input originality. No author with strong EAT signals. How do I know that's a reason? Because we tested six AI assisted articles on our main blog. The difference night and day. Still ranking with three in the top ten after six months. 550 ,000 impressions and growing featured as sources in AI overview.

2:10So yes, AI generating content can rank easily but it doesn't stay there unless the content is updated and supported by enough trust signals for Google aka SEO. Yeah. Yeah. You can't just spam. We've been saying this for ages. Everyone who's just creating tons of AI junk content, is it going to do well? You need to involve a human. You need to build trust. You need to have the EAT elements, expertise or experience, expertise, authority, and trust. on a side note you know what I've been seeing a lot from SEOs and marketers the lazy marketers are getting even lazier because of AI I'm getting so many videos of people using Claude Cowork and they're like look it's doing my job for me so I can work less and get paid like the lazy people are getting lazier like people at your company not my company like friends who are in marketing.

3:04I get it. They're showing you how they're doing it now. With Claude Cowork and how they're working less and getting paid. Like I have people being like, look, I'm getting paid like 120 grand and look, I'm doing Claude Cowork. He's the best investment ever. You know, I can work less and get paid the same. And I'm like, this is just this terrible attitude. I'm like, eventually you are going to be replaced with this kind of attitude. Well, I don't know. I mean, remember what Bill Gates used to say? It's like, you know, you don't want to exactly have you want to work for someone that's smart but you want to work for someone that's lazy because lazy people always find a loophole and they find a creative way to do things.

3:39So are these people lazy and smart? They're smart enough to figure out how to do a lot of their job without doing it but they're not smart enough to go above and beyond and do more to maintain and keep their job and grow within the corporation. So these are people who are pretty much entry-level jobs, not mid-level. maybe a little bit higher than entry. And most of them that have been sending me, I don't have too many examples, but the majority of the ones who sent me, there's only three. The three that I'm thinking of, they also complain how the world is against, they don't make enough money.

4:15People should pay them more. Like it's unfair. And they have tons of things about that. So they don't, I'm not saying they're right or wrong. I'm just saying, I haven't seen them make the effort to try to improve themselves. I have seen them make the most amount of effort in recent times to improve themselves, but that's because of AI and specifically AI doing their job so they can get paid and travel more, do whatever they want so they don't have to work. That's one of the three. There's two more. So these people are maybe humble and smart, but not hungry.

4:51Yes. And I don't know how smart you would want it because it's like they don't ever want to get better if it involves work. they want to get better if it means they can work less you know this should give you hope those of you listening to this because it has never been easier to get ahead yeah that's all i gotta say get paid so well and i'm like so you know i only have to work like 30 minutes to hour day like yeah look at this i'm getting 150 grand a year 120 or whatever don't get me wrong i'm a pretty lazy person i just like doing things in a creative way but i like keeping myself stimulated so yeah i I need to keep myself stimulated.

5:26Yeah. You know what I actually told all three? What? You should go into a new industry. I'm like, you do all this kind of stuff because you never like marketing. You should go into something you love. Yeah. And then you'll put in the time and effort and get really good at it. Use that marketing for someone that will pay you for it. Their marketing skills get paid by someone in a different industry. They're getting paid for marketing. They're employees. Yeah. I'm saying they shouldn't be marketing employees. They should go do something else in their life. What about the one that likes to travel?

5:53What do you think he would do? He should be a photographer for National Geographic. He does amazing landscape and nature pictures of animals and stuff. Really good. Loves it. And then when I tell him to, he's like, eh, it's not going to make enough money. I'd rather be a marketer. But it's not about the money. And they travel anyways. I'm like, you should just go take pictures. And if you're really good at what you do, I believe someone would pay you$100 ,000 and$200 ,000 a year. Not only that, he'll find someone amazing to marry to because, oh, what do you do? I'm a photographer for National Geographic.

6:22That's pretty sexy. Yes, because he ideally wants to marry someone who travels and wants to take photos. Yeah. And I'm like, you'd be a perfect National Geographic photographer. You should send him this clip. And I believe if you're really good at taking photos, people will pay you more than$100 ,000 a year. Oh, for sure. For sure. We know something we should talk about because ChatGPT Ads is coming out soon. So Daniel Preachly tweeted this out. I used to see this guy on Clubhouse all the time. Clubhouse. So ChatGPT experimenting with advertising and their free subscription. I'm old enough to remember when Google started running ads and for a few years, you can get warm leads for pennies.

6:57I also remember when Facebook launched ads and they had so many eyeballs and so the first advertiser cost nothing to get clients for the first few years. Corporate advertisers don't move fast on new things. They take six months to plan and six months to test before they go in heavy. So right now, ChatGPT has almost a billion users a week. If they start running ads, they will have a lot of eyeballs, not so many advertisers until the corporates come in. What do you think? That's wrong. That's totally wrong. It is, of course, always cheaper at the beginning, but you know how many corporations I know that are lining up?

7:23I think they're already because they've seen this movie already. Yeah, they've seen this so many times. This is nothing new. And they've already been making the push. How many calls do you get on a monthly basis? A company's like, we need ChatGPT to recommend our production service. Same here. Probably one of the biggest requests. Yeah. They're already on the ads kick, and they've been waiting for ads to come out from day one. Yep. Yep. And Sam Altman tweeted this. I mean, he said, you know, we're starting to test ads in the free tier, but here's a signal for you all. An example of ads I like are on Instagram, where I found stuff I like that I otherwise would never have, would have.

7:58We will try to make ads ever more useful to users. So he's implying here it's probably going to look more like a social feed. You do know who runs their ads, right? Like an ex-meta person? Yeah, I know the person's name exactly. Yeah. But their LinkedIn doesn't say it, so I don't want to say it. But Fiji Samo came from Facebook. She tweeted about ads. She's high up. Isn't the Instacart one? Yeah, she was ex-Instacart CEO. Then she became CEO of OpenAI applications. And I believe ads is underneath her. But if you look at a lot of the people that ran ads at Meta, they are at OpenAI. But here's the thing that I think the question we should answer here is how hard should you bet?

8:40And I think you should bet extremely hard. You should press hard on this. I mean, the demand is already there. Demand's there. I remember when Facebook ads first came out, I'm like, man, didn't press hard yet. But that's like the crappy side ads. It doesn't matter. It's going to get better. You press hard because this is one of those situations where it's always been like this. It starts out very cheap and it gets ever more expensive and it never really gets cheaper. Yes. So here's a question for you. How hard, when you think about your clients, like you're not working directly with their clients, but how do you think they should allocate their budget?

9:13I don't look at it as budgets. I look at it as spend whatever's profitable. And most companies, even though they have budgets, every time they exceed their budgets and their campaigns are profitable, they can go to CFO even if it's publicly traded. And they're given as much money as they want as long as they stay within some profitability band. Almost any CFO is going to approve some testing. You could take$10 ,000,$1 ,000, pick a number and start off with it. if you're getting good traction, your finance people will let you ramp it up. I've never heard a finance person says, oh, it's highly profitable.

9:48You're limited on what you can spend. They usually say, well, spend as much as you can as long as it's profitable, but just make sure we're not in a cashflow crunch. And they'll ask questions, when do we pay the bill? When do we collect the revenues? And as long as you're not in a cashflow crunch and the numbers pan up, people are like, spend, baby, spend. Now, because we're talking about ChatGPT, Microsoft actually revealed how to get traffic from ChatGPT. So I'm curious on this one. Did they talk about stuff that was five months old or 10 months old? This article is too long. So here's what it shows.

10:22So it's another one of these articles. Okay. So Microsoft just released a, here's how to get traffic from chat GPT guide. It's gotten surprisingly little attention. Let's go over it together. So. Oh my God. It's not that long. It's pretty long. So Microsoft's central message is in the doc is that retail competition is shifting from being found to being chosen. I'm just going to read the headers. Microsoft also broke down the difference to them between AEO and GEO. Microsoft makes it a very clear distinction. Agentic engine optimization, in their estimation, optimizes content and data so AI systems and copilots can find it, understand it, summarize it.

11:00Just not getting to the point. On that note, when you're talking about AEO versus GEO, remember at the Ahrefs conference, you said search everywhere optimization was going to win. we hear AEO more from customers more than anything else. Patrick Stocks was the one that said he saw search everywhere optimization more. And I actually asked the other day, I asked my gong, I said, hey, look at all our sales calls for in the last six months or so. And it's answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. Yeah, we're seeing AEO pick up more steam than anything else. Yeah. And then, you know what I did with that?

11:34I said, hey, now map it with the Ahrefs MCP to see what keywords are exploding. It's actually the GEO and GEO and AU are exploding in trends right now. Yeah. So I'm trying to get a key takeaway for this one. Okay. Microsoft then went into how AI actually decides what to recommend. Okay. So there's a couple of things here. So AI does not rely on one data source, but rather it uses crawled web data, product feeds and APIs, live website data. Okay. Okay. And like AI reasoning includes Patagonian North Face, make quality jackets, hiking jackets need to be lightweight and waterproof. Your model is$179 and in stocks of feeds.

12:12Brand X is known for hiking equipment, some brand positioning. Okay. Number five, Microsoft then really breaks down the journey from SEO to AEO to GEO. Then Microsoft talks about three data layers, the control. You know what? I'm just going to use Grok to summarize this because this is really annoying to read. That's what I'm going to do. Yes. It's right there on that page. give me the key points and then we can finally talk about it see guys maybe don't write an article on x that just talks about another article like it's just talking about that it's not even giving me key points let's see here pick one pick pick something else while i'm waiting for this on a random note the google founders all left to florida to avoid the billionaire tax but it looks like it's facing tons of opposition a lot of reporters are writing that it probably won't pass.

13:00These are left-leaning sites. So, okay, I got the summary here. So Alex Groberman's post, it shares an in-depth breakdown of Microsoft's October 2025 guide on optimizing content for AI search engines like ChatGPT, emphasizing generative engine optimization techniques to boost visibility and traffic. Key recommendations from the guide includes using structured data formats like Q &A, lists, and schema markup for easy AI parsing, with data showing a 357 % year-over-year increase in AI referrals to top sites, reaching 1.13 billion visits by June 2025. And the post highlights the users under the radar status despite its practical aligning for value for SEO pros.

13:46And... I'm still waiting for the meat. Come on, Grok. Summarize it better. Okay, here. It gave me more. So core recommendation is the structured piece. That's the only meat. Guys, I told you. What did I say at the beginning? How did this get a lot of reach? They're going to give something five to ten months old or something like that. Okay. So this is actually really annoying. Okay. So this guy got 100 ,000 views on this using this. See, this is why you know the X articles are getting a ton of views right now. This thing that, I'm sorry, Alex, this added little to no value here. Okay. He got 100 ,000 views on it.

14:17So as we were talking, 2.54 p.m. someone messages me. You need to post and repurpose content for X articles ASAP. This is after we were talking about it during the episode. I don't know the person. They just have my phone number. One million dollar reward for the best article this month. Algo's boosting them. You'll shit on everyone. Excuse that person's language. I won't. I was like, lol, I was just talking about this. I won't win because I don't write about politics. But I'm publishing articles soon. And they said, nah, I'm sure you have a chance because Nikita, I don't know who Nikita is. Nikita Beard, head of product at X.

14:56Is almost mostly overseeing the campaign and he's heavily invested in crypto X because he has equity in Solana and other stuff. I've seen dozens of articles, but they're whatever. Worth a shot, MIO, or in my humble opinion, and you can probably bait engagement from big folks. I'm like... You don't need to bait engagement. Just write what you write. Yeah, no, I already know I'm not going to win. I'm not going to win like an article like Deloitte stole. I'm not saying they did, but I think the article was like Deloitte$75 billion or whatever scam. But you didn't even need to do that. There's one talking about context layering, and I read a couple of these articles.

15:31And that's an AR article. It got like 7 to 8 million views on it, or like a couple of these Cloud Code setup ones. Millions and millions of views. And so - No, no, no. The article on Deloitte, the$74 billion canter. $30 million. $30 million. That one is going to be too hard to beat. It's too hard to get the views. Forget the 1 million. I'm just saying, yeah, yeah. I'm not going to win that. I'm just talking about the views. I think the views are worth it. Because the thing with me is like, X has a lot of smart users. You know, yesterday, you know what I felt was disingenuous? SimilarWeb was like, threads beat out X in terms of daily active users.

16:06But that's not the complete story. I was only looking at mobile. But when you look at the reality, the total number of daily active users for X is like 250 million or so. whereas the total for threads is like 141 which is still high but also when I look at threads it's just people complaining about politics and how their life sucks X is very similar I see people complaining a lot about politics I don't actually see that if you look at my feed it's all AI stuff and people talking about what they built what they're sharing I see many politics the cool stuff I share with you oh you're drinking a bad water bottle oh, you should, you know, have pomegranate juice.

16:46It'll like clean up your plaque in your arteries. That's the stuff I read. Oh, pomegranate juice cleans up the plaque in the arteries. Yeah. I should drink of St. Paul. And then I shared it with my dad because, you know, when you're older, you have more plaque in your arteries, right? It leads to heart attack. But what it said was like, the reason why pomegranate juice doesn't get marketed as much is because it's not helpful to the medical companies to market that because it's not a high dollar, high cost treatment. So it's just like a, you know, natural remedy type of thing. I just wrote myself an email to buy pomegranate juice.

17:16Yeah. So actually, I mean, when you think about these,

17:23let's talk about this because you just said you don't think you're going to get that much reach on X articles, right? No, no. I think I'm going to get good reach. I meant like people are messaging me like, oh, you can win a potential million dollars or one person message me. I'm like, there's no way because I don't blog about or write about politics. I think I get hundreds and thousands of views, no problem. I don't see myself getting 10 million views in an article when it's not a mainstream topic. Our point here is like Tam, your topic Tam is not that big, right? Because if we're talking about dating, we're talking about politics, we're talking about money, we're talking about health, of course you're going to get a lot more views.

17:57When you're just talking about marketing, it's a little different. I agree. Yeah. But the reason why I'm excited about this is because this is actually where we started in our careers, blogging. Yeah. Yeah. And I already have a ton of content. I just have to copy and paste and put that stuff out there. Yeah. I'm actually more excited to talk about all the stuff I'm doing with Cloud Code. And so that's exciting to me. And I like writing. Yeah. I think it's going to be fun. Yeah. And you know what's interesting, too? I've been experimenting this with my YouTube recently. Because Cloud Code is trending up so much, I'm just cranking out a bunch of these Cloud Code videos.

18:29And they're like 1 out of 10s on YouTube. I'm like, oh, I'm just going to keep doing this for a little bit. Yeah. I like it. It saves money, too. Yeah. All right. We have one more to do. All right. Let's see. Let's pick...

18:44Uh, let's see. We already talked about the death of software companies. Oh, the streamer vibe coding to 1 million. Who's the streamer that coded to$1 million? So this guy over here is running a cluster of cloud code terminals, vibe coding apps until he hits$1 million. Most interesting person shipping I've seen recently. He's on here too. So you can see he's like, he's like dancing. He's like vibe coding and dancing. And push-ups. Yeah. That's cool. That's his dog. So I guess that's all he's going to do. It's like a spectacle, right? And if we look at his YouTube, let's just look at his YouTube for a moment.

19:23Okay. So, so far, he has 34 ,000 subscribers. I already like this guy. Bridge mind. He's entertaining. And vibe coding an app until I make$1 million. So streamed four days ago, 18 ,000 views, 28 ,000 views, 28 ,000 views. Let me tell you why this is smart. So he's also vibe coding when he's not talking. When I spend time on this, I should just turn on my stream over the weekend and just turn it on, like, just talk. Look at this. Amazing, right? And people follow you for the spectacle, and they also learn from you as well. You should start streaming. I do stream. I'm streaming right now. No, you should stream every single day while you code.

19:57I probably will. Because every single day now, yesterday, even when I was going to bed, I was like, whoa, I actually shit five things today on top of all my other responsibilities. This is great. But this is cool. I think if you can have a cool headline like vibe coding until I make a million dollars, $10 million or whatever, you're for sure going to get a lot of views because people are interested in the spectacle. And by the way, check this out. So he's been doing this for 120 days. That's why he has so many subs so far. So 120 days, he's vibe coded until he makes a million dollars. How much revenue do you think he's made so far?

20:26$30 ,000? No. $3 ,106.90. I hope he gets to$30 ,000 soon. When he streamed four days ago, That was a three-hour stream. And the day before that, it was a six-hour, 30-minute stream, which seems crazy, guys, but it's not that crazy when you're on this stuff. It goes so quickly. Yeah, he's already doing it. So it's like you're just recording your normal life. I hear the question. Do you think I should start a new channel for this one? You should. That's a lot of work. I don't want to start a new channel. Put it on the same channel. Put it on the same channel. Something to follow me by. Maybe I'll do it.

21:02Maybe you'll start doing it too. Maybe we'll do it together. No, I'm pretty private with my personal life. What do you mean? It's live streaming. I don't stream my life or in my house. No, not in my house. I'm just on my computer. You're on your computer just talking like you're doing a webinar. No, but this guy's filming him. Oh, no, I wouldn't do that. That's too much. That's like invasion of privacy. I wouldn't be like dancing and doing all this stuff. No, it makes him more entertaining. You should be dancing. Go back to your EDC days. Anyway, guys, that's it for today. Check him out. Bridge Mind AI.

21:31And we'll catch you next time.

21:36Foreign