Google Bard release, AI SEO, Tucker Carlson, Shelon Musk

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Hsu.

0:20It's time for another reactions episode. We haven't done this in a while and we're going to jump straight into it. So we've got a fun filled episode today. We're going to hop around and we've got a couple of interesting topics. The first one we're just going to kick it off with is how Google is really getting into the game now with Bard. They've basically released it to the public. The waiting list is gone. And I'm going to set the stage real quick, Neil. I'm going to share my screen for those of you that are watching on YouTube for you to see just how interesting this is. And we're going to talk about what kind of implications there are for not just SEO, but marketing in general.

0:57So I am sharing my screen now. And this tweet is from a guy named It's Paul AI. So Paul.ai. and so the headline here is Google has just updated its free competitor Bard so we know Bard's been around for a while but it's kind of been inferior they kind of stumbled out of the gate and now they just had a big AI event this week Google and you can see the headline here also is the sub headline is here are eight things impossible on chat GPT but that Bard can do for free and I was talking to Neil on the phone earlier this morning and I was just walking and we're just like, man, like this, this Bard is going to, it could really slow down the growth of chat GPT.

1:42We'll see what happens. But first and foremost, it's completely free to use. Okay. If you go to bard.google.com, you can use it. If you're on a free Google account, you can use it. But if you're in a Google workspace, like we are, you just need to make sure you enable it as an admin. The second thing is it's connected to the internet in real time. So you can ask literally about a couple of weeks ago, SpaceX had a intended rocket explosion. And you can literally ask about what happened there versus ChatGPT. The results only go up to 2021. Now, ChatGPT does have an internet model or an alpha version that allows them to crawl the internet in real time, but it's not released to the public.

2:23And ChatGPT, or sorry, not ChatGPT, but BART is accessible in 180 countries. I'm not going to go through this entire list, but I think what's worth calling out is you can see the SpaceX one right now, but you can do things such as export it to your Gmail. You can export it to your Google Docs. You can do voice input as well, and you can export to text, which is what I just talked about. But there are a lot of implications here, and I'm going to talk about something else in a second that's related to this, but Neil, I wanted you to share some thoughts before we continue on? Think of BARD and what they're doing with their AI is they're getting more specific.

3:00So example that they're showing is Bluetooth speaker for a pool party. And what they're doing is they generate results based on a lot of different requirements, such as here's a speaker that's great for the outdoors. Here's a speaker that's great for showers. Here's a speaker that would be great for a fire pit in case you have a fire pit and you're roasting some marshmallows and making some s'mores. They get super specific and try to figure out all the use cases and the issues that you may face as an end user. And they try to give you a response for it. So a great example that they showcase in their demo video was one of Google's employees typing in like, what's better for a family with kids under the age of three and a dog, Bryce Canyon, or, and they listed out some other options.

3:46And their generated AI started breaking down things like, oh, both Bryce Canyon and Arches National Parks are family-friendly. Although both parks prohibit dogs on unpaved trails, Bryce Canyon has two paved trails that allow dogs. And they get super, super specific. In essence, think of what Google did with showing you the weather instead of you typing in what's the weather in Las Vegas, Nevada, and you'd have to go to weather.com. Now Google shows you the weather. They've been doing this for a long time. Also, if you type in two plus two, Google just gives you the answer of four instead of you going to the website.

4:23But people still have a lot of questions. And instead of now going to websites to get a lot of those questions, like you would go to Quora, they're trying to answer them right then and there for you. And these are not broad questions. These are very specific questions and situational based questions. And they're trying to give you the answers right then and there that are very specific for you. All right. So I'm going to continue on here. And let's, this is one thing that I don't think chat GPT can do, but I literally just went to marketing school.io, which is the website for our podcast. And I just said, summarize this into a blog post.

4:58So I just threw the URL in there and here's what happened. It just summarized the show notes that we have. So the show notes are timestamp and it's one sentence lines, but it literally just took the whole thing here. Now imagine if I just dumped in the URL of the transcript itself, then it can probably do even better here. And so you can see there's actually the ability to then Google this if you want, and then you can export the response, export to docs and draft and Gmail. I think that's really fascinating. And there are a lot of implications there. The other thing too, that I wanted to call out here is there's this document that's worth checking out that Google put out.

5:30And if there's anything worth reading, it's this because it is Google's take on generative AI search. So they're calling this, I'm not going to read through the whole thing here, but it's called SGE, which is known as search generative experience. The only thing I want to call out right now without going into the technical details here, because neither Neil and I are technical, is if you look at the query now, so those of you that can see the screen, if you type in a query, what you'll see on the screen now that is quote unquote above the fold is a generative AI response. And so this might mean that a lot of rich snippets, and this is very early days right now, we're talking, this is the tip of the iceberg, but if this is going to take up so much real estate, what is going to happen to the other organic results?

6:12Are they going to get pushed further down? Sure, it's showing the top three results over here, but what are the implications here from an ads perspective and also from an SEO perspective? Neil, what are your thoughts on looking at this image? Yeah, so with the ad perspective, I don't think Google's going to do this to areas that are going to hurt their ad revenue because that would hurt their stock price, so I doubt they're going to do that. From an SEO standpoint, it should end up decreasing the traffic going to websites, but they've also already made a lot of other changes that decrease the traffic going to other websites.

6:40On the counter argument, I would say this improves the overall experience of using Google. So this should increase the amount of traffic that Google is generating themselves. So even if you're getting less clicks with more traffic going to Google, I still think websites will be fine. Danny Sullivan put out a tweet a while ago in which he talked about how Google continually has driven more traffic to websites year over year. That may change a little bit here and there, but I think in the long run, they'll still be driving more traffic to sites. We talked about this a couple weeks ago. We talked about the Turkey Mastermind.

7:15So when I was there, we were actually talking about the implications here.

7:20And Google is one of the best, if not the best, money printing machine in the world. And so they have some time to figure this out. So they need to balance a really good user experience and still staying relevant while competing with the open AIs of the world. And so I believe that they'll figure it out. I think this Bard, their AI announcements this week are a huge step in the right direction. And they have billions of users. We're talking YouTube here. We're talking Google. We're talking people that are using Google Workspace and all that. And you think about the trillions of lines of text, right?

7:53And I don't say that lightly. I don't know if it's trillions, but at least it's billions. And so if you think about it at the end of the day, they have a large data set and they have a large data advantage. And just looking at what they put out this week, it shows how serious they are. A couple of months ago, people were calling for the head of Sundar Pichai, who is the CEO of Google, saying that he's not aggressive enough and saying that it might be time to move on from him. But you look at the stuff that's come out this week, it's like, OK, they're really serious about this. And now it's like, oh, I feel like the game is really on for the very first time.

8:24because just a month or two ago, people were like, oh, BART is nothing. You know, BART can't catch up. But even OpenAI themselves, they were like, you know, these LLMs, like these large language models, the larger they are, that's not going to be the comparative advantage. It's really, it comes down to data sets. And Google has one of the best data sets in the world. Yeah, I think Google is going to win in the long run. And I said this over and over again, AI is based on the inputs. Google has the best inputs in the world. yeah let me share another thing others say that again they've just scraped the web more than others yep so i mean they are the ultimate web scraper right so that that's how they started so it's funny because they're the ultimate web scraper and then open i was scraping their their their results yeah so here's the other thing i was um i think we talked about this offline but But again, talking with a group of SEO savvy founders, we were kind of hypothesizing or theorizing on how to rank highly when it comes to just AI or any of these prompt, almost LLM optimization.

9:31So large language model optimization. So I'm going to show you what I mean real quick. If we take a look at this tweet that I put out earlier this week, and you can see when I search for who are the top digital marketing agencies in the United States, SingleGrain's in there. So that's my ad agency, right? And I have some thoughts about these other agencies that are showing. But then I also asked it, if I scroll down, what are the best marketing podcasts? And marketing school is number one. And funny enough, I also asked Bard yesterday what the top marketing podcasts are. Who's number one? Marketing school.

10:02So I want to, Neil, I mean, I have some thoughts around this. And I can start off first, but I also want to get your thoughts too on different hypotheses on how to rank highly. So my first one over here was your ranking is based on how often your site comes up for keywords related to the initial query. So marketing school podcast, literally our podcast name is marketing. And then we have podcast in there, right? And so I look at this as the primitive days of the first search engines, like Excite or Lycos, if you were alive during that time. And it was very, during that time, it was very simple to rank highly because all you would do is spam the same keyword on the page.

10:41And it's just all about how many times you showed up. It wasn't based on a link graph, like how Google set up, right? Or it was as based as a kind of link-based algorithm. And so my argument right now is that LLMs, large language models are fairly primitive. They're going to get a lot better very quickly, but you have this window of time where you can optimize and you can try to get listed in other places, other authoritative websites, and then try to see if you can rank highly. Because here's the thing. I don't know about you, Neil, but I've actually gotten leads coming through saying they searched through ChatGPT and they found us that way.

11:17So that's the first hypothesis. So, you know, similar to what Eric's mentioning, I think they're going to use keywords just like they did in the old days and they still are today. The other thing that I think they're going to end up looking at is who's ranking organically and then listing those kind of sites out. They're going to look at brand mentions. If you're searching for a podcast or a company or product, if it's mentioned a lot of times in a positive way, then they'll showcase it more because they know that customer sentiment is there. The other thing I think they'll start looking for as well in their algorithm is brand queries.

11:51How many people are searching for a specific brand? If more people are searching for a brand and clicking on the result, that means they know they like it. So when people are looking for products and services and the brand offers it and it's more popular than others, it's more likely to showcase that brand because consumers already prefer it. But I think quite a few of those things are going to be in their algorithm. So my second hypothesis is your ranking is based on how often you are cited. And so listicles, reviews, links, et cetera, because for marketing school, it's not like we've ever done SEO for it.

12:22But I will say that marketingschool.io, that site has over 2 ,000 podcasts listed. So there's at least over 2 ,000 pages on it that we've done over the years. and the frequency of the podcast is daily as well. And so the other thing too is that from a review standpoint, we have over 1 ,100 reviews on Apple. And by the way, if you haven't left a review yet, it helps us a lot. Please leave a rating, review, subscribe. That helps us a ton. And so the hypothesis here is that because it's a daily marketing podcast, we have enough citations, a lot of reviews, and we're showing up a lot in terms of the content that we're putting out.

12:57It's like an ongoing thing. If you're crawling the web, it's like, what's the best marketing podcast? Let's look at the reviews. How often are they publishing? What other signals are there to look at? And I believe that we meet those signals. And the other thing is if they were to look at it from a, uh, like each algorithm perspective, right? So expertise, authoritative trustworthiness, mostly what Neil talks about online is marketing. Most of what I talk about online is marketing or business at the very least. And so it just makes a lot of sense to list us as number one. And it's also called the marketing school podcast.

13:26So that's that. So links can be a citation. Reviews can be a citation. Social media can be a citation. Ultimately, they're all credibility signals. And so we're going to run some tests in the next couple of months, and we'll see what happens. But that is that. Anything else on this topic, Neil? No, just look at the normal SEO signals and assume that they're going to use a lot of those factors. Google's been working on this a while, but they've been working on their algorithm much, much more frequently. and just like how you would optimize your site to rank at the top of Google, a lot of those signals are going to be used in BARD.

13:59And the reason being is they know that their algorithm does a really good job of showing the best results. Chances are those are the pages that also have the answers to the queries that people are looking for. All right. So let's jump to our next topic. So you want to set this one up. So Tucker Carlson, do you want to set up kind of what's happening here? so tarko carlson got fired from uh fox i believe it is that he was on and he ended up stating that he was going to start doing his own show he was going to do that by going live on twitter so you can still watch tucker carlson when he goes live on twitter and that'll be his own version of a tv show um it's kind of crazy to think about right instead of having a built-in audience like going through Fox.

14:48The last time I checked, he had millions and millions. I forgot the exact number of Twitter followers are. I'm looking it up, but it was more than a few million. It was actually quite a bit. And let's see. The number of followers that he has based on Twitter is 7.4 million. So for him to do a show, it should end up getting a lot of views. He has made some announcements in the past, call it, few weeks. He did one on May 9th, 26.3 million views. That's a lot. And also 126 million views on the post itself. Yeah, which is crazy. In other words, he now is his own television channel. He's his own media network.

15:33He can end up doing his own shows. He can end up getting his own advertisers and keep all the revenue. I think it's a good model. And you know what? He'll probably make more money doing this than working for Fox. You know what's interesting? So I have it pulled up on the screen over here. So you can see the 126 over here and the 26 million views. There's a side note that I want to mention as well, but 24 million views on this one. And then 7.7 million when it's tied to Fox News. That's interesting, right? Right. So, you know, key thing here is to I'll stop my share. But the key thing here is Tucker Carlson.

16:04It's actually a blessing in disguise that he got fired because he already has the audience. He has a distribution and he actually got offered a hundred million dollar contract from Valuetainment, which is run by Patrick Bet David. So he's got you know, he he's got his main business, but he also has like a network of a podcast that he wanted to give Tucker Carlson his own show. So I thought that was a strong move to basically put it out on Twitter and say, hey, we're going to offer you$100 million. We'd love you to come over to Valuetainment. But Tucker Carlson is like, F that. You know what? I'm going to do it my own way.

16:33And I don't know if you watched the video, Neil, but I saw the video. And he basically was like, look, at the end of the day, Twitter is one of the last bastions of truly free press where you can really – it's a town square where you can talk about what you want to talk about and not worried about being censored or worried about being fired. And I really love that. And here's the other counterpoint, or it's not really a counterpoint. Here's the other point. There's a guy on Twitter. His name is the used car guy, and it's an anonymous account. But he started putting up his podcast, like the entire audio file on Twitter, and it's doing really well right now.

17:09And then Elon's actually paid attention to that. And Elon's like, oh yeah, like the used car guy is like, look, Twitter can actually be one of the best podcasting platforms out there. And Elon's like, whoa, like this is interesting. Like I'm going to pay attention. And so when you look at this video being posted here, it's a three minute video with 26 million views on it. I mean, that's amazing. That's good distribution right here. And I think, you know, what you love, love or hate Elon. The fact of the matter is I do think Twitter has actually gotten better in the last couple of months, even after cutting all the people that they've cut.

17:40Neil? Yeah. So look, if you want to create your own audience, you should. And you can do it through social media. You can do it through your blog, cross-promote, and use it to promote whatever you're doing. If you look at what Tucker Carlson is going to do, he's going to end up creating a massive business. You don't need to be on television to do well. You can end up creating your own community, your own network without any of these other players. Just leverage the platforms that are at your fingertips. Well, let's also not forget that he declined$100 million offer, which means he knows this is going to be worth way more at the end of the day.

18:14And I think this trend, we're going to see this happen more and more and more where people just go independent. it the real question is what was the real 100 million dollar offer one do they have 100 million dollars i don't know that company i'm not saying they don't well i mean it was paid over like five years there you go i was about to say number two was is 100 million up front or is 100 million over 10 20 years so uh but yeah 100 million over five years isn't bad but he probably can make more money on his own yep he probably doesn't care for the money either i mean he's got you know what's interesting i was talking to my friend over over uh f1 weekend and we we're having dinner and he's like you know eric there's three forms of power one is capital power the second one is political power and the third one is cultural power and i kind of think he has tucker carlson this guy has a little bit of cultural power and almost like he can influence politics a little bit as well.

19:10And I mean, he's got, it's not like he's a billionaire or anything, but he's got capital where he doesn't really need to worry about like a hundred million dollar offer. And he can just worry about focusing on the longterm. So when you have that, those levels of power, it goes a long way. And I thought that was interesting, Neil. And speaking of why this is working, which brings us to the next topic, podcasts are how now have reached 50 % penetration in us households. That's kind of crazy to think about how many people are listening to podcasts. This is also the reason on why people like Tucker Carlson can just go independent and they don't really need anyone because U.S.

19:47households, and it's not just in the U.S. You're seeing it in China, you're seeing it in India, you're seeing it in Brazil, you're seeing it all over the world in which people are consuming content through audio and video all on their own and they don't need it through their television sets. 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. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours, animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

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21:59Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. Yeah, I'm actually going to share the graph over here. Those of you that can see this. So this one was done by Edison. So every year Edison Infinite Dial does a podcast study. And I highly encourage everyone to read it. I actually didn't read last year's so far, but monthly podcast listenership is expected to grow by double digits in the next five years with an estimated 60 % of Americans listening to podcasts at least once a month. So you can see in 2019, it was about 32 % and then 43 % in 2021. So they skipped 2020 pandemic year, 52 % in 2023, and then estimated 2025, 58%.

22:43And so when you do the math on this, this is on 330 million people. It's a very significant number. Now you can say that podcasts have hit escape velocity and it's going to just continue to grow. And I think what's really special about podcasting is those of you that are listening to us right now, and those of you that have continued to listen to us over the years, and we really appreciate that you've actually gotten to understand our quirks and how we are. And so some people like Neil and I, like we're in this, right. But some people like they really enjoy the banter that we have. They're like, oh, you guys are like a husband and wife team, right?

23:13And sometimes you guys bicker. Sometimes I'm the husband. Sometimes Neil's the husband, right? And we just – we enjoy it. And so you get to know our personalities. Neil might share some stories. I might share some stories. And we're really – it's a very personal type of thing, and the retention levels are way higher than any other format. And so the key takeaway for me here is that continue to think about how you can repurpose your content. If you're good at YouTube, how can you repurpose it over the podcast? and to me podcasts are like the ultimate hack because i can meet people that i otherwise never would have met i've become friends with some of my closest friends because of podcasting neil neil and i have really interacted a lot more in the last six or seven years because of podcasting i remember when we first started neil you're like oh we're gonna hang out a lot more and i actually didn't really think much of that but that's what happened so cool let's move on to the next topic.