Why AI SEO is BS, AI is actually making you STUPIDER

0:05All right, guys, we're going to talk about why AI SEO is BS. So the other day I was on a webinar and I was doing this webinar and like, guys, Eric, please tell me about AISU. Like, how do you do it? Blah, blah, blah. Is it BS? I was like, 100 ,000 % is BS right now. Dude, I just saw a company, Profound, they just raised$20 million today. They raised from NVIDIA, Coastal Adventures, all these, who's who's these investors, right? And they help you, apparently they help you rank higher on these LLMs, right? I don't think they help you rank higher. I think they track. They say that. Yeah, it's a lot of tracking.

0:36I'm like, how did they raise$20 million? I hope there's a great vision and I haven't used it myself yet. I trust that there's a great vision there. But AI SEO as it stands right now, and I'm curious to hear from you, it's like, okay, you hear people citing all these case studies. Yeah, you need to, chat GPT is 95%. It's refreshed content. Okay, well, that's still traditional SEO. Oh, you need to make sure your H1s are good to go for the AI overview. That's still traditional SEO. You need a lot of citations. I keep searching who's the best marketing podcast, marketing school. And I was like, I asked it for the first time.

1:08I was like, justify your ranking for putting marketing school number one. It's like, well, they have over close to 3000 episodes. They have thousands of reviews. Okay, we have a ton of citations and we're constantly refreshing because we're constantly creating new content. But not only that, if you look into the creators, we've been doing it for a very long time too. So there's a lot of trust that's already built with it. But citations is like since the beginning of SEO. And so anything that's AI SEO right now still tracks from traditional SEO. We're not saying it's gonna be like that forever, but it is BS right now to say, you know how to maximize and get number one guaranteed for LLMs right now.

1:41Total BS. Dude, I agree with that too. And there's a search in line had an article on this. There's a direct correlation from ranking on page one of Google and being mentioned by these AI platforms like chat GPT and the metrics that you're talking about are the signals you're talking about, like brand mentions and backlinks, you know, it's a form of digital PR or it's a form of SEO things like schema markup. so they can understand the text on the page better and what you're trying to convey. Things like internal linking. You know, all these things are traditional SEO elements. It's just, I look at AI SEO as, it's the same thing as traditional SEO.

2:22It's more so people look at AI SEO as different than traditional search. And what they're not grasping is traditional search will eventually no longer exist and I'll switch all into search will just be AI based. Now, does that mean there'll be 10 blue links or zero blue links or just answer? I think it's gonna vary based on the question people are asking. Like if someone says, I'm looking for a red dress and you give details, you're gonna see multiple options. But on the flip side, if you're just asking what's two plus two, the answer's four. You don't need any links for that, right? At least that's my take on it.

3:01And then what people will have to do is optimize for just ranking or being mentioned, whether it's high up on these AI platforms, being the first listing, like when we're talking about what's the best marketing podcast, or whether it's just being the only one that's mentioned. And I do believe that the AI platforms will adjust over time. Like I've been reading some articles and some SEOs are saying, hey, it doesn't matter if you get mentioned by New York Times or Joe the Plumber, if you get mentioned on the AI platform, it's all equivalent. Well, just like traditional SEO, AI platforms will go through the same evolution which their algorithms will adapt over time.

3:39They'll be like, huh, a lot of people can manipulate Joe the Plumber talking about NP Digital or Single Grain or any company out there, but it is harder to get New York Times to mention you. So we're gonna put more weight on that. The other thing, dude, is you think about AI mode and you actually touched upon this a couple of weeks ago. If you look at AI mode, it actually cites the sources. And if you're searching for the best marketing agency, it still pulls from those lists, those listicles, right? So you're still going to reach out to those sites and ask for inclusion. Or maybe if it's clutch.seo, maybe you have to pay for a sponsorship to get a higher ranking.

4:13So a lot of it hasn't changed. Again, we're not saying it's not going to change. It's definitely going to change. But it's overhype right now. This is where people in SEO give SEO a bad name because they try to make it this brand new thing to try to get as much attention as possible. But we're just saying, I mean, look, Neil and I, we've been playing the game of SEO for a long time. AI SEO in its current form right now, the way people market it, that part is BS. I totally agree. And you were speaking about Profound and we're doing something that's interesting, call it within, I don't know, maybe like I'm hoping we can launch it within two months.

4:50I had this concept because I was like, man, Profound is super expensive. Like, I don't know if you looked at their price. $4.99 for the... self-serve, I think. I looked at it this morning. $4.99 a month? Yeah. No, it can't be. Is it? I thought it was like$100. It was. They upped it. I think now that they've raised from all these people, they have the winds of all these opinions dragging them around. Oh, wow. $4.99 a month. So our models that we're going to do... Give it away for free? Yeah. I was thinking about that this morning. I was like, why don't I just give that away for free? I'm like, what's so special about it?

5:26It's expensive to do the pumps. How expensive are we talking? They do, based on this article that I'm seeing that they raise money, and this is from FinSmes, it supposedly says they do 100 million AI search queries each month to support customers in 18 countries in each language. So let's call it 100 million. I'm guessing it probably cost them, I don't know, 100 plus grand a month just in API costs. I'm guessing. I just messaged a guy. So I'm looking at their Twitter right now. So there's a growth guy that works at Ramp, the credit card company. And so this guy tweeted, we've Forexed our AEO test velocity at Ramp over the last two months.

6:11And Profound has been a huge part of this. Shoot me a message if you're obsessed with solving the LLM visibility challenge. Literally, I just DMed him because we're talking about this right now. And this guy's name is Luke Tubbs. But Profound, look, look who they, again, they've raised from Kleiner Perkins. Okay. They've raised from Coastal Adventures. They raised from NVIDIA. They raised from the CEO of Vercel and then Appleovin CEO. And then you have some podcast people. So I'm just interested. Again, I've never used it, so I can't say much. But I'm interested to see where they take this. Yeah, I didn't know they're a New York base.

6:45I just can't believe they raised$20 million. I'm curious what valuation. What do you think it is? I don't think they lost more than 20%. So call 80 or 100? Yeah, I'll go 100. Yeah. Maybe their revenues, I got 5 million bucks. Someone gave them 20 times. Yeah. 5 million is pretty, I can see because everyone's, this is the marketing of this thing. It's like free car into LLMs. Everyone wants that right now. So the hype draws people in. Yeah. But I'm curious to see what, like as you get closer to it, you can bring it up. Well, we pay for a lot of these solutions, including Profound. So we know how it works.

7:19It is super expensive. Do you actually use it yourself? Do I use it or does our agency? I've used it. I've used it. Yes. How is it? I generally don't know. So how is it? It's pretty good. So we use Profound. We use Scrunch. Atrus has a version. SEMrush has a version. But I would say the main two that we use is Scrunch AI and Profound. Yeah. They're pretty good. So Profound is a little bit different where they're just looking at all the queries or all the prompts, and they're just telling you how you're mentioned versus a competition, and they're just saying good, bad, et cetera. What's interesting about Scrunch that I like with their interface and their graphs and the sentiment, just the way the data is visualized and represented is kind of cool.

8:06But all it is is just data vomit. And then you got to figure out what to actually do with it. They're all contact sales. So Scrunch costs$300 minimum. I did not know they were that expensive. Yeah. Well, they do have an agency program, too. I'm just looking at it right now. So the scrunch and profound are pretty similar is what you're saying. Yes. They go after each other. Huh. Interesting. Well, best of luck to them. And I'm keen to see whatever free solution you have coming out or cheaper solution. Yeah. Yeah. Because what I do is there's a lot of people who buy this data. Okay. So think of like a lot of marketers.

8:43And what we would say is, hey, a lot of marketers buy this data. we will go and let's say if someone buys this data and it costs$100 ,000 a month. I'll say, cool, give me a data dump of it as well. And I'll cover half your costs or one third of your costs. Just transfer me the data. So that's eventually where we get to. At the beginning, we'll be paying for the data just like everyone else. So it's expensive. But when a lot of people pay for the data, you can just share costs and it becomes cheaper. I like that. because there's people who will get the data and then sell the data. And then we just go to those people because they'll make things much more affordable.

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11:32Like if you're in SaaS, typically you should just think about your competitors and make these versus pages as quickly as possible. Neither of them actually did it. So you see slash dot and source forage and tech crunch as the top three. So if you're profound or you're scrunch, you're listening right now, you should probably just take care of that because it's pretty easy to do. Anyway, so that's what we think about that. But I came across this thing, and you have a similar topic here, but here's where AI is actually making you stupider. So there is this report over here that basically says, I'm just quoting from this report, MIT completed the first brain scan study of ChatGPT users and the results are terrifying.

12:06So yes, ChatGPT makes you 60 % faster at completing tasks, but it reduces the quote unquote germane cognitive load needed for actual learning by 32%. So what you're doing is you're trading long-term brain capacity for short-term speed, right? So we're managing to become stupider, but more productive. And there's a caveat with this whole study. So what it does say in there is that if you do have very strong baseline intelligence, so thank God we grew up having to learn things on our own, that means you're gonna become a lot stronger. So you need to establish that baseline first. So I don't have kids, but you have kids.

12:39So my concern for your kids right now is like, if they rely too heavily on this beginning and they haven't established a resilience or a very strong intellectual baseline, they're gonna become like this. And I do think that is massive risk to humanity in general. You do need to establish that baseline. So maybe there is a rule where kids can't use AI until a certain age where they've achieved a certain baseline. How do you feel about it? Because you have kids. We don't let them use AI. We do. Well, that's it depends what you classify. Are you talking about like Chad GBT or someone asking Alexa a question?

13:09Because Alexa, I believe, has AI integrated. Yeah. Well, Alexa is still really stupid. I still I only ask it about the weather and the time. But yeah, my kids use Alexa a lot. Probably use it for 20 to 50 times a day. But they ask like, what's the weight of like a blue whale or something? Correct. Yeah. That's different. Yeah. Because they're actually trying to learn there, right? I think using it to solve problems though, like I will notice sometimes like when I'm trying to solve like a, come up with legal terms or things like that, I just default to what the answer is. But I'm like, no, no, no.

13:37I actually need to think about this a little more. That's what I mean. So when my kids use Alexa and they ask a question about, let's say a lion or a rhino, and my son doesn't like to answer he says your source is off alexa your source is that's an answer you would give and i'm like where'd you get this from he's like mommy says if it's wrong it's taking it from the wrong place that's funny and he's like mommy says it's called a source so he's just like your source is off and he's like yelling at it he's like you're wrong but you know what's funny what your son does that that's like baseline what most humans do we're just wrong if you get in an argument.

14:16There's like, no, there's something wrong with your source. Well, where are you getting your information from? That's a baseline reaction. Yeah, I can see that. Anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow.