What We Are Seeing With AI SEO Right Now

0:00All right. So we're going to talk about what we're seeing with AI SEO right now. So Neil, you want to go first? or you want me to go first? The big thing that I'm seeing right now, dude, is I'm just seeing a massive creation of people doing Q &A pages on their sites. Whether it's UGC, like what LinkedIn is doing, or some people are just manually creating a lot of question and answer pages. They're all trying to go after, all right, Google and Bing are going to answer people's questions. How do we create 1 ,000, 5 ,000 pages that just have specific questions, long tail, and answers. And we're seeing a mass creation of that.

0:40And on top of that, you and I are both seeing this, but we're also seeing a lot of companies create a ton of AI-driven content. We're actually seeing more of that earlier this year. And realities kicked in with a lot of the companies that we wanted to work with, and they were just like, no, we can create all the content through AI. Or some of the people that we're working with, like, no, we want to use AI. And we started running A-B tests for them and showing them and it's like, look, one is getting a lot of traffic. The AI stuff isn't getting that much traffic. And people are starting to shift their strategies to becoming more like what they used to, but not exactly.

1:19And the difference here is they're still using AI, but they're using AI for idea creation or images or helping craft some of the content, but not all of it, or updating their content. But they're involving humans to a much higher degree than they were earlier this year from what we're seeing. Yeah, we've said this before, but the answer to winning with AI SEO is AI plus human beings. And so when we think about what LinkedIn is doing, their traffic is compounding. A couple months ago, we talked about this. They're maybe getting one or two million visits from this UGC content. Now it's like they're getting three million visits from it.

1:58And if it continues to stack, the growth rate continues to stack, it can become pretty significant. Maybe it can become five, 10 million visits a month or maybe even more, right? and so I think that piece is interesting I would say there's one trend that's that's popping up too is more and more people are talking about programmatic seo and what I will say with that is sure you can create you know hundreds or thousands of these pages you know things to do in rome things to eat in japan or whatever but here's the issue with that if you're going to create thousands of these pages how are you going to qa them and so there's a rising need now to figure out how you can qa these pages at scale or else you're going to create a bunch of trash content and it's not going to be good for your site dude okay so check this out there's two companies that i remember specifically because i was on the pitch one was a fashion company one was an auto company and the auto company is large um and when i say auto company they don't actually produce cars but they are one of the most popular content sites for auto okay so and the fashion site they have a lot of fashion content but they also sell clothing and stuff like that Both of them, we lost the pitches earlier this year.

3:00They decided to use no agencies. And they ended up saying, hey, we don't like the SEO strategies that you guys are pitching. We're just going to use AI. We think we can do it more economical and drive more traffic. All right. The fashion site ended up hitting us up and then they now work with us. The auto site we're talking to, they don't work with us yet. But guess how much traffic the fashion site lost just from creating AI-based content with very little human interaction? They said some humans helped them out, but they were just posting literally thousands of articles through AI. Guess how much SEO traffic they gave or lost?

3:3630%. They lost a little bit more than 23%. Okay. Close. All right. So overall, their traffic went down because now their good pages aren't ranking as well either. And it's because overall, the site has a ton of junk. The auto site, guess how much traffic they're down? 60%. No, not as bad. 38%. But they're also down, in my opinion, I don't have data on this. I think the AI stuff really hurt them. But I also think just general trends, people aren't buying as many cars right now. If you look at Tesla, they did price reductions. so i think they can be getting hurt on both ends but 38 is a lot of traffic to be down and a lot of their rankings forget just traffic across the board are down and the main reason being is a lot more junk content they still had human intervention the auto site actually had more human intervention than the fashion site but it was still a lot of junk data and worse of all a lot of the data was just inaccurate right or the content was inaccurate not data but the the stats, the data within the content were just inaccurate.

4:46Yeah. I mean, that's a lot. And so how much, do you know how much content is like thousands per month? Is that what they were doing? The auto site was creating around 700 pieces of content, 700 to 800 a month. Okay. And what was, do they have strong domain authority? How did that look? Really strong domain authority. Wow. And it was, do you think it was attributed specifically just to the AI stuff? Yes. Wow. That's, that's incredible. So that's a big thing. That's why this whole QA thing, people aren't paying attention to it. If you're not going to QA it and figure out a way to – like what we do with the marketing school content is we do – there's a – maybe the AI will produce the blog post.

5:22But basically the human being will jump in, fact check it, add links, add other content as well, and add other images. And that makes it – that's basically a QA process over there. but again if you're going to do the programmatic stuff like for us when we're doing it we're removing a ton of pages and we're going back and we're trying to figure out a way where we can where we can have the ai qa at scale right like this is actually makes sense so just keep that in mind if you're going to do this yeah so what else are you seeing with ai and seo no those are the the two main things i think the qa thing is rising programmatic thing you know there continues to be like it does well if we're if you're doing it carefully and then obviously the we call it AI enhanced content.

6:03That's like going to continue to be a thing. Like that's been a boon for us doing this pod. Yeah, the biggest gains I'm seeing is updating your content using AI and having it help because then you can get more pieces updated. We're seeing that help with traffic gains. The biggest thing that we're seeing hurt with traffic gains is the AI content is junk, which is bringing you down the overall score of the whole site, which is affecting rankings in a negative way, even the good pages. So don't put junk on your site. That's a really important thing that people mess up on. All right. So that is it for today.

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