Biggest winners and losers of Google AI Spam Update, 95% of agency work will be taken by AI, Do AI-generated images generate more or less engagement?

0:00All right, first, we're going to talk about the biggest winners and losers of the Google AI spam update. So this just happened recently. Let me guess who's the biggest winners. Go ahead. If you're wrong, what do I get? Free Erwan, because you love Erwan. Okay, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? You take all your dates to Erwan. Huh? What? I don't know what you're talking about. Let's talk about the podcast. Guess. Okay, guess. You're guessing the winners. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. People who don't use AI content. Those are the winners. No. No, there's one I'm looking at here. They do use AI content.

0:29Tons of AI content? Just pure AI content? No, no, no. All right. And I bet you the losers are people who use AI content with no human intervention. The losers I'm looking at here, it's a lot of programmatically generated content. Yeah, it's the same thing. Yeah, you can call it that. I mean, AI content program has been around for years. Let me tell you who the losers are first. Wikipedia. So the way this is being scored, so this post is from Lily Ray. Again, she does great stuff. Follow her on Twitter. So she's looking at a week-over-week absolute winners versus losers via Systrix visibility index data.

1:02And so on my screen, we'll pull this over on YouTube if you're watching too. So you can see Wikipedia, their previous score, visibility score was 7 ,000. Now it's 6 ,500. So it dropped about 500 points. IMDB dropped about 144 points. Britannica, remember Britannica? Yeah, go to the Encyclopedia. Yeah, they dropped 90 points. Reddit dropped 86, 7 points or so. Instagram rounds out the top five, negative 77%. Even YouTube dropped a little bit too, which is a Google property, which is a little strange to me. Absolute winners, you would never guess. Okay, so by the way, keep in mind here, negative 552, negative 144, negative 90, negative 86, negative 77, right?

1:41Now, the absolute winners, they only went up like six points, three points, two points. So they didn't even win that much. Who are these winners? Tech Target, Tech Radar. These are like the sites that, I think these sites sell links. Tech Radar is a new site, I know that. Tech Target, Tech Radar, Pokey.com, I don't know what that is. mp3juices.click. That sounds pretty spammy to me. Pokey, the chocolate Pokey sticks? P-O-K-I. You know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah, I know what you're talking about. The one with the cream. The Asian. The strawberry, chocolate, everything. They have cookies and cream flavor too.

2:16I didn't know that. See, they did that for Americans. So number five, the website is pornhub.com. Just wanted to let you know. So 2 % change. So it's a little strange to me. TripAdvisor went down too, by the way. I like to talk about TripAdvisor all the time. Indeed went down as well. TripAdvisor has a good SEO team. Yeah, it's amazing. That's why they get so much traffic. But we should talk about this a little bit. Because the other thing is, I don't know if you saw this, but there have been a few SEO influencers that have been talking about all the Black Hat stuff they've been doing. And they've grown a lot on YouTube in the last 12 months or so, even the last 18 months or so.

2:52Even on X, they showcased their screenshot of all their traffic. Never, ever. And Google whacks them. Never ever brag about your stuff. Never ever showcase your stuff. No, you can brag and showcase if it's legitimate and you're not doing shady tactics. But you never show your stuff if you're doing shady stuff. Why? What happened to all of them? They get whacked. But this happened 15 years ago when people first got started. Yeah, they got torched. When we say torched, when they got whacked and torched, we meant that they got de-indexed. And so they might have properties that are getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of visitors per month.

3:26It all went to zero. Yes. Because what they're doing is they're going out there and saying, this is the correct way. Look, look what we did to game Google. They're idiots. And look, our way is better and everyone should copy. So what do they do? They make an example of you. Yep. Do you know what's happening on May 5th? No. Okay, so another update. So they're basically, this update, Google saying, hey, we're going to give you guys Parasite SEO. Remember that? Yeah. Any site that's doing Parasite SEO. You're going to tell the people Parasite SEO. I'm just saying, I'm saying. So Parasite SEO is, let's say I go to your site.

3:59Your site has a lot of authority, right? I might just contribute a few articles and then leverage your domain authority and then let that article rank, right? So a lot of these websites are letting people basically barnacle or Parasite onto their authority. And they're creating a lot of irrelevant content as well. There's a site called indiatimes.com, I think, and they have a lot of that going on. They have tons of it. Yeah, and so they're saying, hey, websites where you guys are doing Parasite SEO, where you guys are basically letting people leverage your authority, you have until May 5th until we do something about this.

4:35Yeah, which means they're not going to have much time at all. Yeah, it's not a lot of time. Because what ends up happening is Google doesn't mind guest contributors or contributors. If you're a business website and you have people creating content around business and marketing and it's not regurgitated information, it's amazing content, they love it. The problem is, is what you've seen is a lot of publishers have all this authority. So then they get a ton of people to guest post like, oh, you want to get to guest post about dentist stuff or a business site? Well, a dentist is kind of a business.

5:07So yeah, right. Whatever you want to write about when it comes to teeth cleaning. Well, like, all right, they're not actually talking about creating a dentist practice. They're writing about teeth cleaning to build more authority and backlinks. And the site's like, well, cool. More content. Oh, we got a thousand of these contributors on a weekly basis. oh great our traffic is now up 30 40 50 percent we're making a ton more ad revenue and then eventually google's gonna whack i'm just curious to see after may 5th what happens with forbes because forbes is like hugely affiliate driven now it is hugely affiliate driven forbes still has good content quality but there are a lot of guest contributors that i know that have slipped through the crack and just publish whatever they want yep this message is brought to you by single Grain is single grain is a marketing agency ran by yours truly.

5:53Single Grain does paid media, SEO, creative conversion rate optimization, has worked with a handful of companies such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, to startups, venture-backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers. If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. Again, it's single grain, grain like wheat, and we'll see you on the other side. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more.

6:30And now back to the show. Yep. Speaking of which, there's one more over here around, did I send you the Sam Altman thing where he believes that 95 % of agencies will, 95 % of agency work will pretty much disappear. Yeah, so here it is. This is Kieran Flanagan, which, by the way, everyone, we're going to be doing a collab with the HubSpot Marketing Against the Green podcast. We're going to be talking about this there too. So the headline here is Sam Altman says AI will handle 95 % of marketing work done by agencies and creatives. And so here's what he said. 95 % of marketers use agencies, strategists, and creatives professionals for today.

7:08AI would do all of that. So we had a conversation on the phone about this, but we thought it would be helpful to bring this here too. Well, there's two big issues. Sam's really biased because he's on the AI front and that's what he does. I'm really biased because I have an agency and that's how I make my money. That's how we're biased. Yes. The way I like putting it is, yes, AI will be able to replace a lot of agencies and people for any type of job. but ai is not the top one percent ai is creating average results mediocre and i don't see it producing really amazing quality work anytime soon what i mean by that in next few years i just don't see it um because ai is just taking a lot of information already out there on the web that's you know old information and then they just parse it and they regurgitate it on top of that there's a lot of bad information out there in marketing.

8:05How does AI know which ones are bad and which ones are good? Just like a search engine doesn't know what's accurate and inaccurate. So you have a lot of results that are biased on both sides, especially when you talk about things like healthcare. There's so many articles that say the vaccine is good for you and there's for COVID. And there's so many articles that say it's bad for you. Which one is right or wrong? And I forgot who did this study. We both saw it on X. Remember when they talked about how left or right leaning certain platforms were. Yeah. Right? They said Gemini, very left-leaning.

8:39Open AI, very left-leaning. I don't know what they said about Grok. And when we're talking about left-leaning, we're talking political. Left is Democratic, right is... Grok is like in the middle or slightly in the right. Yeah. And right is Republican. But when you have this, how is it that AI is going to produce amazing marketing? They're going to produce the same stuff as everyone else. If everyone's using their AI to do marketing, what are they going to get? They're going to get similar strategies that all the other competitions using. So how do you separate yourself? And it goes down to people don't hire agencies to get marketing work done.

9:12They hire agencies because they want much better results. A lot of them have in-house teams. They're looking for that 1 % who's going to produce amazing results that they weren't able to achieve on their own. So there's this one interview that has Elon Musk and it has Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. And so Jack Ma's like, there's no chance that computers will be smarter than humans. And then Elon was like, no, that's definitely not true. And Elon's basically like, computers are going to be way smarter than humans in the next, call it however much time. And then there's another interview with Joe Rogan, where he's talking to Ray Kurzweil, the futurist.

9:51And Ray Kurzweil, so he's been on the AI train forever, the singularity where we combine with machines. He's basically saying, once 2029 hits, the machines will be way smarter than humans. Neil's saying, look, short-term, nothing much to worry about, which I agree with. I think long-term, maybe 10 years out, a decade out, I think the number's a little lower. Maybe it's like 30 % to 50 % of work will be replaced. Yes, and by no means am I saying no work is going to be replaced by AI. That's just so odd. Work is already starting to become replaced by AI, and you'll see more of it. it's how much will it be 95 seems really high and i do agree ai will be smarter if you ask me some question about egypt i'm not going to know the answer ai will know the answer but when it comes down to marketing there's going to be a lot that's off in the ai system based on what they gathered from the web versus what i've experienced direct hand that is not on the web so as i was making my point i was trying to get a clip over here you know anyway um so we're basically saying the thing here.

10:53So short term, we don't think there's going to be much impact. Long term, let's say, 10 years out, 30 to 50%, I think it could be a little more than that, but I don't think it's going to be 95%. I think you have to look at our bias, which is we both have agencies, and you have to look at Sam's bias, and you have to maybe just meet in the middle there, and 30 to 50 % is meeting in the middle. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes.

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13:07Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. And forget meeting in the middle. Cause it doesn't have to meet in the middle, but I'm with you. I don't know if it's 30 % or 50 % or 60 % or 70 % or 20%. I just highly doubt it's 95%. The other thing too, is we've talked about this before. It's The only people that are going to be replaced by AI is people that are not enhanced by AI. It's like using the internet. It's basically like, are you using the internet or are you not using the internet?

13:47Someone that's using the internet has a bigger advantage over someone that's not. That's all. It's just a bunch of stuff. AI, it's the new trend. That's all it is. We got one more. Well, funny enough, to go back to AI really quickly. OK, so I ended up we ended up doing a study that ended up looking at if AI generated images generate more or less traffic than human generated images. Right. Just speaking on this AI trend. And what do you think the results were, Eric? I think they generate less engagement. AI generated. Yeah, it is less. So we looked at 304 Instagram accounts and it was a little tough to do this study because someone has to actually say, all right, you know, like mention in the text that it's AI.

14:38We don't have a pure proof way to detect if an image is AI or not. I know there's some tools out there that help, but they're not 100 % accurate from what I've seen. So we're actually going based. We're looking for accounts that post normal pictures and AI ones. but when they post AI ones, they let you know it's AI because then it's easy to just look at the engagement difference. So keep that in mind. So the study is, of course, a little bit biased. But what we saw was AI-generated images created 41 likes on average. Human-generated images were 66. Comments per post for AI-generated 2.3. AI-human-generated 3.1.

15:17What's the sample size? 304 accounts and we looked through more than thousands, tens of thousands of images over time. Dude, who's reviewing all these for you? I have a team in India. That's crazy. Well, you take tens of thousands and then you whittle it down to the accounts that actually showcase if it's AI or non-AI and then you have to go from there. So when we're doing the analysis, we're scraping. You can't just be like, okay, let me just look at this account. You just literally had to go look for AI images and people who label them AI. You're doing a big data pool. You're not individually looking at that.

15:54Bingo. And then from there, you have to look at the accounts. So we first scraped tens of thousands of images, whittled it down to specific accounts. Then we only looked at the images within those accounts because we were comparing the likes on those accounts that were AI versus non. Because I can't look at Gary Vaynerchuk doing an AI image and me doing a human. Because even if they say human-generated images get more engagement, Gary has like, I don't know how many more followers. Let's go with 10 plus times more followers than me, right? Maybe even more than that. On Twitter? It doesn't matter, any channel.

16:25I'm just making up a number, but it's probably true. So if you look at that, whether he produces AI and I do human, he's going to get more engagement just because of his mass reach, right? So you got to look at individual accounts and compare their AI content versus non-AI content. All right. So that's a good place to wrap today. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe. It helps us grow, especially on YouTube. And go to marketingschool.io slash agency to apply to the Agency Owners Association. That's where we help agencies grow. And we'll see you tomorrow.