What’s up for SEO at Google I/O?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to a special episode of SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO and boy are some things happening in SEO this time. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the always up to date on all of the things happening in SEO, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello. Hello, Mordy Oberstein. I am here. I am here with some original organic material intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. I'm coming with some authentic intelligence, I hope anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm artificial, but I'm citing.

Crystal Carter:

Are you grounded? Is your intelligence grounded in something?

Mordy Oberstein:

No, definitely not grounded.

Crystal Carter:

No? It's not?

Mordy Oberstein:

That's an easy question. You want me to cite you references?

Crystal Carter:

So large language Mordy is what we've got.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is better than foul language Mordy, I guess.

Crystal Carter:

Oh no, that's every other day of the week.

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can subscribe to our newsletter, search light over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. And where you can now utilize our headless CMS.

Crystal Carter:

So excited about the headless.

Mordy Oberstein:

Check that out.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

We've lost our heads.

Crystal Carter:

Lost our heads, but gained a friend. We gained a friend in Netlify. Just like launching with Netlify, but also get involved with your GitHub, like it's super exciting. Very exciting.

Mordy Oberstein:

Check that out. Now, if this is your first time tuning into the SERP's Up podcast, this is a bonus episode of the SERP's Up podcast. SERP's Up podcast usually, typically, comes out each week on Wednesdays. We have all sorts of wonderful guests, from John Mueller to Barry Schwarz to Cindy Crumb. Fabulous guests, fabulous topics. Check it out. But this episode is a very, very special episode because Google I/O 2023 was upon us and it left us with some impressions.

Crystal Carter:

Oh yeah, there's a lot to talk about and I think it's a really good example of them coming back from their previous conference experience. So they had a conference in February.

Mordy Oberstein:

In Paris.

Crystal Carter:

In Paris, Google in Paris, and it was less than optimal for them, if I can say that. And I think that this is the conference that I think they wish they could have had then. And I think that it's been a real good redemption for them to be able to come out and really show what they can do in terms of AI and where they're planning to go in terms of search.

Mordy Oberstein:

In Star Trek terms, this is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan after that disaster of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Just for the people who speak Star Trek, that's what it is. I don't know why every episode now, we always default back to Star Trek. I have no idea. I'm not even watching Star Trek at the moment.

Crystal Carter:

Resistance is futile.

Mordy Oberstein:

Link, nice. Good way to phrase that. Wait, so I think what we're going to try to do in this particular episode is run through I think some of the larger AI themes that we saw and then dive into obviously how it's going to impact search and kind of get a consensus and a roundup from the wider SEO community. So I'll kick this off. I was blown away by the AI ability to answer emails and to heavily handedly modify images.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it scared the crap out of me, I'm going to be honest.

Crystal Carter:

I think that there's a lot of some of the familiar tools that people have gotten used to in the generative AI space of creating text, creating images and things like that. I think what Google has in this particular thing is an audience that's already engaged with a lot of their products and they are already so integrated into our lives and how we use the internet and how we create content, how we edit content, how we update content. So the idea that when you're in Google Slides and they demoed this, in Google Slides you can sort of say, "I would like to add in a picture of this," I mean, that is solving a pain point that so many people have had. When you're making a deck or you're trying to do a presentation and you don't have an illustration, but you need one so that people aren't staring at a blank page or a wall of text, it's solving a really real challenge.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was brilliant. I think one of the things you and I cry about every once in a while is trying to find things in Gmail threads.

Crystal Carter:

Yes. Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

But now you don't need to do it. It will find it. I thought that's brilliant.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think using the AI is information retrieval within their products, fabulous idea. What scared me is how do you know what's real at this point? And when I'm saying that I am not putting this on the tech providers, I kind of feel like they're just giving us what we want. I am putting this on humanity. Are we OK with things not being real? And then how do we handle that? And I'll give you an example from what they showed yesterday, yesterday from the day we're recording this, from Google I/O 2023.

When they gave the example from Gmail, the scenario was you wanted a refund from a flight that you canceled, something like that, and you gave Gmail a prompt to write you an email and reply back to the answer that the airline gave you. And you can now expand, so not now, you will be able to expand on that answer. Say, "Hey, Gmail, make it longer. I feel like if this is a longer, more forceful email, I'll get the refund." And if you notice what the prompt returned was, "I am a loyal customer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Give me my refund." How do you know? Maybe I'm not a loyal customer. How did you know that? And are we OK with this? "Yeah. All right. Google will return that. I'm a loyal customer, it'll probably work. Let's just go with that." Is nothing real anymore? And the images, you're manipulating it and then it never actually happened that way. How do you know what's real? And that to me is scary.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. So I think that we're kind of entering a space sort of now as well. And I think somebody writes something and you're like, "Did you write that though?" If somebody posts a picture and it's like, "Did you take that though?" And I think AI has been in our space for a long time, so on in Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok, there are tons of filters and people are going around. I have a cousin who whenever she posts anything on Facebook, there's like a million filters, I have no idea what her face looks like anymore because she always has so many filters on it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And so we've were like, "Oh my God, you look so young." It's like you look have a young person's filter, but they will completely change the bone structure of your face. And we've been in that space for a long time now. So one of the sections of I/O was James Manyika was talking about some of the guardrails that they had for helping us manage this reality. And he was saying that they're planning to add in and about this image panel as a guardrail and also giving meta tags for people to declare that something is an AI generated image. I think that these are great tools. My question is how many people are going to actually use them for these things?

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's sort of the problem. And I'm sort of summarizing a lot of sentiment that I saw out there. I know Kavi Kardos was interacting on Twitter a lot about this. She said, "This is my takeaway too. I feel like I'm the old man in the room." Because I said I feel like I'm the old man in the room. Do we not care what's real anymore as humanity? Jamar Ramos was jumping in there, he hit a line, "Yeah and I understand how loaded the phrase do our own research is."

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

But I think the person who summed it up best to me was Blake DeMond from Rickety Rue who said a quote from Edward Wilson, I don't know who that is by the way, "The real problem with humanity is the following, we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technology and it is terrifically dangerous and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall." That's from 2009. But it's a great way to sum this up because you can literally fake things and no one will know the difference. And I don't think we care.

Crystal Carter:

But I hate writing emails Mordy. I just...

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm OK with it writing the prompt.

Crystal Carter:

I think that I'm just saying that. I agree with all of those caveats. I think the challenge that we're facing though is that the technology is so, like they said, God-like technology. The technology is incredible. And so I think that we are going to be seeing more of this. And also there's that sort of singularity theory, which basically, if you think about where we are now compared to where we were when sort of ChatGPT kind of broke back in the autumn, miles, miles streaks ahead. We've moved forward so much, search has changed so much and the way we create technology and the way we create content and things has changed so much in just those few months.

If you think about that compared to the rest of the web before, it's been a much, much bigger thing. So I think that it's true that these are challenging conversations, but I think we're going to have to keep having them. And I think that this is one of the reasons why Google's putting so much emphasis on experience, why they've added that experience caveat. But I think also, you say what's real, people lie on those emails all the time, like when they're trying to get, but anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

The AI is just doing what we want it to do, which is lie, cheat and steal.

Crystal Carter:

So this is the other thing. So when you get generative images, it comes back, it's like a funhouse mirror kind of hodgepodge of various different things that it's seen. And this tends to be what you see on AI. I was talking about this, Garrett Sussman had a space which is on Twitter as well, you can play that recording. There's a few people talking about Google I/O hot takes there. And yeah, one of the troubles is that the models are based on what's on the web. So if what's on the web has some less than stellar content or opinions, then that's what we're going to get reflected back to us for, I think, there was somebody who was talking about Midjourney. Midjourney does a lot of, if you look up doctor on Midjourney, then you'll get a man.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, Natalie Slater did a lot of this.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So she was looking at all of the things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Engineer and it's all white men.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And so you get all these sorts of things coming through and that's a reflection of what's been on the web before. So no, it's not great, but it's also a reflection of the work that we as humans also need to do because the models are trained on what we had. But that's the existential things. Let's look into some of the additional.

Mordy Oberstein:

Let's go to Search. You brought up the helpful content update, I really want to get into that a lot because I think Google fired a shot across the bow kind of thing. But let's just first talk about does the functionality, in case you haven't seen what happened or what Google announced, so Bard itself is, which I would equate Bard to ChatGPT and that ecosystem, it's a separate environment. There are links being more interspersed into it now. It's now open for all, but then there's Search itself. And that looked, I thought, amazing. That looked amazing. So in certain cases, Google will return an AI prompt back to you. They said they won't do it for YMYL, so health, finance, where the information, if the AI's hallucinating, you will die.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's not going to have an AI response. You'll have your initial summary. There won't be citations like you have in Bing, but there will be little cards of websites that you can go to. So it's a little bit more visual in a way. And then you can refine the questions. And what I thought was super, super cool and I stand corrected, I thought we were getting a whole bunch of things that were not going to make me happy about Search because I am a curmudgeon fundamentally. What we got back has literally been asking for for two, three years. You can expand the AI response that Google will give you into a deeper dive. What it'll do is it'll break down the answer that it gave and it will essentially cite along the way.

So if it says, you ask, "Where's a great place to go on vacation?" And it starts talking about if you have kids and you're going on vacation, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. When you expand the chat feature, it'll take that chunk and show you results about places to go on vacation with kids. And if in the next sentence talks about if you're going in the wintertime, it'll then show you a bunch of things about going on vacation in the wintertime. What it lets you do is A, give you the opportunity to see more organic links. What it really does is is that it breaks down that topic so well. So if you ask, "Was Michael Jordan a good basketball player?" And you get all different aspects of Michael Jordan and his career, it'll break that down for you and then give you links to explore more about that particular subtopic within the topic of Michael Jordan, which is amazing. It'll let you explore topics, it'll let you explore subtopics and it'll give you the links in order to do it. I thought it was awesome.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, this is Google achieving their goals. So they say that their goal is to organize the world's information and to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. And that's what they say their goal is. And this is them working to achieve that. And I think that this is something that works really well for introductions to topics, for instance. When I think about how I use ChatGPT, my best to use for ChatGPT is Googling rules for games. So George Wynn, the editor of the Wix SEO Hub, very kindly gifted me a set of Magic: The Gathering cards and Magic: The Gathering has a lot of complicated rules. I was trying to play this with my kid and I did a turn and I was like, "Oh, I think my gargoyle or my guide can play." And my kid says, "No, he has summoning sickness and he can't do that and he can't do this. " And I tried to look it up online and there's all these massive posts of 3,000 words of how to do the whole thing of Magic: The Gathering and stuff. And I'm like I don't need to know every single thing about it, I just need to know can I play my turn. Right?

So I can say in Magic: The Gathering for instance, can I do this with this card. And they can go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's some links," some links, I'm like, "OK, but if it's like this, can I do that?" And then it can go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and you can do this." And if my kid who can be very suspicious sometimes of these things, if he doesn't like what I've returned, we can click through to the link and then we can say OK, this is what it says on this website. And I think this will work with a lot of their systems because I think the way that they're looking at this is they're stacking a lot of their AI. So you'll be able to also go straight to the passage as well where it's quoted from most likely in order to verify the information. So they'll give you the summary, they'll give you the link and then you can verify it. And that is a really good workflow in terms of being able to corroborate information and see that you're getting the right information.

Mordy Oberstein:

So I'm going to run through, I just pulled it up on the screen, the exact example that they gave about the query was what's better for a family with kids under three and a dog, Bryce Canyon or whatever it was, another national park. Because I can't see the rest of the query, it's like too long. And when you expand out from the AI answer, so first, the answer is both Bryce Canyon and Arches National Parks are family friendly. Stop. It gives you a link that talks about the park being family friendly. Next part of the prompt that it returned, "Although both parks prohibit dogs and unpaved trails, Bryce Canyon is two paved trails that allow dogs." Stop. It now gives you a whole bunch of links about pets and the two locations. It's letting you explore these topics in such an easy way. Because one of the things as a user, I don't always know what I'm actually looking for.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Tell me all the things I need to consider and then it's doing that and then it's giving me the links to do it. I think a couple of things about this from an SEO point of view, SEO tools, red alert.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Red Alert because the blue links are not, as Cindy Crum pointed out on Twitter, David pointed out on Twitter, Nati Elimelech, our Head of SEO at Wix in my DMs, about this, Idan Segal was out there on Twitter talking about CTR is going to go down.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

For the 10 traditional blue links.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

And what's going to matter more, I think it will use the expanded feature here because I will, are being featured in here. Now how do you track that? You might be able to give a tool the various long tail keywords that are relevant to you. I guess the tool can then run the scrape by running the query, seeing what the AI returns and then saying what URLs are in there, I guess is possible. But imagine organic research where you're not specifically telling the tool what keywords you want to track, but you want to research a competitor and see what keywords are they ranking for and where are they ranking. How is a tool going to do that?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's going to be tricky. I think that tools are kind of probably need to think more about entities because large language models have entities at their core and their understanding of entities is a sort of core sense of it. I think if you think about something like Kleenex for instance. Kleenex is a brand which is synonymous with tissues for instance. So if you have a brand, so I think that from an SEO point of view, I think those links are going to be getting few and far between. If Google understands that your brand is synonymous with a certain entity, if your brand is essentially that entity, then I think that you're more likely to show as part of those things and more likely to show more frequently. So I think that maybe pools might need to start thinking about how they're able to show the correlation between a certain brand or a certain website and certain entities.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think that's really interesting. I feel like it's a topic I haven't spoken about in a long time and trying to remember when I really was into this, it was when the core updates kind of came out back in 2018, of looking at your website as an entity. Because your website is an entity because it has a unique identity. Because I think if you're looking at how is Google going to decide what to rank or what to show, I hate to use rank in this case, what to show when it breaks down its AI response into smaller parts and then shows links associated with that.

It's very entity based. If they're talking about pets and national parks, if your website is viewed as an entity that discusses, that is about, that is identified as parks and pets, national parks and pets, that's what's going to be, I would say not the difference maker, I don't know the algorithm, but it's going to be one of the very, very focused things that I think Google's going to use in order to say this URL should be here because as an entity it makes sense for it to be here.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So on that Bryce Canyon one, the results that they showed were from the national parks, that's what showed. It was national parks and pet friendly was one that was showing. And so those are all…

Mordy Oberstein:

So having a niche identity is going to be really important. Especially because, I'm a little bit worried actually, so is Nati about this, that yes, I'm so happy there are URLs and there's so many opportunity for URLs, but I'm a little bit worried that the big branch or the big websites are going to be the ones that show there are not the niche sites. Although maybe if you have really strong niche identity, you will.

Crystal Carter:

I think that for going forward, the kinds of opportunities that I think that this will present is the kind of content, and we've seen this, we've seen this, so Lily Ray has reported on this a number of times. So we've seen this over the few of the last few years. Google's not that into dictionary websites, encyclopedia websites. If you're encyclopedia website and you're not Wikipedia, what are you doing? And I think that these LLMs are kind of covering a lot of that stuff. If you want to know what is gee butter or something and they'll be like, "Oh gee butter is a clarified butter that's blah blah blah, blah, blah," they'll tell you that and that information will be fairly accurate. It's also not that sensitive. You just kind of need to know what it is while you're, I don't know, cooking or something. But I think the opportunities will lie in doubling down on your entity, on your brand entity, your website entity, the entities that are within your business, et cetera.

But also I think that, potentially, there are opportunities around new ideas and around staying ahead of the curve. So where people are going to need to go to drill down into what's going on, it's going to need to be new content. So the historic content might be super competitive because Google, and I've seen this with Bing, bing is relying on very high authority sources, content that's been indexed for years in order to ground some of their LLM responses. So I think that for newcomers, for smaller businesses, being cutting edge, being on top of new ideas is going to be something that's beneficial to them. So for instance, trending topics is something that's going to be something that's really useful because when things are trending, people are looking for what's going on, what is happening, why is this a thing, what is this new term? And I think we're going to have a lot of new things going on anyway. So I think that where people are able to capture new ideas, they're going to be able to show in that space if they're a smaller business.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think I want to get back to that more, about the smaller business and all of that, because I want to talk about the helpful content update, which I think it's one of the more under discussed themes of what came out of there. My personal opinion. But before we do that, there's one in terms of the AI chat experience that Google has, we're going to have on the SERP. So Aleyda Solis made a great point, "Interesting how Google is highlighting the new AI search experience for commercial transactional queries rather than informational ones." And I think what she's referring to is all of the stuff they showed about the bicycles. So it's bonkers. So if you're searching for something related to getting a new bicycle, Google's going to give you an answer. I don't know, what do I need to consider when I'm looking to buy a new bicycle? I'm going to give you a bunch of information and then it'll show you a bunch of products.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

In the chat that you can click on and see a panel about and click on and go to and buy. And I thought to myself, "Holy cow, that is brilliant." Because if you're Google, there's no way, in my personal opinion, that you're going to be able to compete with Amazon and take them head on. Right? I'm looking to buy a product, I default many, many times, sometimes not, many, many times to Amazon and I bypass the SERP altogether, which is a problem for Google. But if I can catch you while you're in the research phase, then I've got you and you don't need to necessarily stop, now go to Amazon, I already got you in the research phase where Amazon can't get you. And I thought that was brilliant. If I was Amazon, I'd be a little bit concerned seeing that.

Crystal Carter:

I think also particularly the bicycle one that they showed, it's got a hybrid of there's also some of the search results there. So they've got the summary of your key points, they've got some deep dive blog posts and things and they've got the products there. And it's a pretty nice UX as well. It's not too cluttered, it doesn't feel overwhelming. It feels helpful. And I think the other thing that it highlights, and I started seeing this a lot more around product things, is unique content around products. So in order for the bicycles to show in different ways, having unique content around these things will be useful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, because the layer of content they're showing is one level deeper than you would normally see for let's say a product description.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also the connection with Google Merchant here is going to be absolutely critical here. So they're using that as essentially a knowledge graph for products and that's really, really important. So for instance, they show one, it's like Avinton level two commuter bike and it's saying, "Oh, it's listed here and it's listed in seven other stores as well." So it's important to be on that.

Mordy Oberstein:

The importance of Google Merchant Center just increased a hundredfold.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed, indeed. And it's super useful. And there's so many different ways, again, to define your entities and add structured data. They talked about structured data, they talked about being able to look at unstructured data as well when they're looking through content. And I think that they're kind of, after what happened in February and Bing came out very confident with their presentation. And I think Google's just like, "We have tons of bells and whistles. We've got lots of stuff," and they've put the full force of their AI might here behind this. And I think it'll be interesting to see.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's really interesting. But before we get into the, I want to round up some of the thoughts in the community. Before we do that though, I want to go back and touch on the helpful content update. By the way, if you haven't watched the keynote, we'll link to the keynote in the show notes of this episode. Also check out Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz, it's like an unbelievable amount of content that he produced very timely, in a very timely manner, going through all of the major changes. So definitely check out that. We'll link to a bunch of that in the show notes. And one of the articles that Barry wrote was, "Google to update helpful content system algorithm in the coming months. Google said its update will help it understand content created from a personal or expert point of view as part of the release for Google I/O."

On the Google product blog, whatever you want to call it, there's a post, "Learn from others' experience with more perspectives on search." And at the bottom of that post, and the reason why I'm saying this, this is part of the official release at Google I/O, and I've never seen this before, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think I've ever seen them talk about an algorithm update as part of I/O. And they're right. I think it's like the second or third H2 on the page, how we help you find the expertise you need. And I'm just going to read it real quick, the first paragraph or two. "In addition to making it easier to find authentic perspectives, we're also improving how we rank results in search overall with a greater focus on content with unique expertise and experience." By the way, the fact that expertise and experience are linked is because expertise is linked to experience. They're not separate things.

Anyway, "Last year, we launched a helpful content system to show more content made for people and less content made to attract clicks. In the coming months, we'll roll out an update to this system that more deeply understands content created from a personal or expert point of view, allowing us to rank more of this useful information on Search. Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard to find places," addressing my point from earlier, "a comment in a forum, a thread, a post on a little known blog," OK, good, we're going to see that, "on an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these hidden gems on search, particularly when we think they'll improve the results." I kind of think this is a shot across the bow. It's a warning shot. OK? They're being far more specific about what they're trying to do with the helpful content than they ever been before, which is one difference to me.

And also it's part of Google I/O, it's part of their official launch. You have to feel real confident in what you're about to do to announce it as a brand in that kind of way. So I think this is going to be legit and I think it's going to be impactful. I don't know if it's going to be one big update that's going to be, it might be a series of updates over time, but the net effect I think is going to be real and I think it's going to be legit. And if I could say, I think this whole time, back to your point like, "Oh, we looked at the Paris event link. Maybe Google's off its game." I think Google got off its game a little bit because Bing came out and had to respond to that. But I think if you take that little moment of time out, this entire time, Google has been playing three-dimensional chess with us. Go back to the product review update. What I think that they did there was they said, "OK," they knew the AI was coming because they were making the AI.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

And they said, "OK, we need to figure out a way to handle this algorithmically." And they said, "OK, let's focus on one place on the internet where we can train ourselves to highlight expertise and experience in a very tangible way." What better place than product reviews where the actual firsthand experience is completely manifest in the content. It's not like an underlying theme, it's not latent or embedded. It's supposed to be actually manifest in the content itself and let's train ourselves on that.

Crystal Carter:

And also reviews, when people write reviews, it's full of all sorts of emotions and maybe might be good grammar, might not be the good grammar. It might be like, "This refrigerator sucks, it leaked and I didn't like it at all."

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the perfect place. It's the perfect close environment to train yourself on a particular thing.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

And then what did Google do in April? It said, "Let's expand this. Let's go to all reviews. No more product review. It's review update." And now, and I called it, what's Google doing now? It's zooming out again and saying it's not just product and reviews, it's everything.

Crystal Carter:

Everything.

Mordy Oberstein:

Everything.

Crystal Carter:

Everything.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I think it's used a product review and now the review update in order to train itself so it could ultimately do this. I think Google knew they wanted to do this and they were training themselves the whole time for years. I think in 2021, the first product review, they came out, to do this, which is analyze content for experience and experience with expertise. Because it's one thing to say, "I went to Disneyland, it was fun." That experience has no value.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So I think the other thing that's interesting about that is that what I've seen when I look at reviews and pages, I've seen a couple of times where there was something that was reviewed and it was ranking, or one channel that was a review page and it was ranking and it didn't even have as many reviews as the other ones were below it. And I was like, 'Well, why is this? Why is this page? It's got fewer reviews." Then I looked at the reviews and the reviews were much more unique. The reviews there were much more nuanced, they had much more experience of actually interacting with that entity, with that actual thing. And I think the other thing is that I think we can think of experience as shorthand for human because we, in this space where everything's AI, the experience element is basically there was a human that touched this, there was a human that sat in this chair and said, "This chair is too small and I don't like it."

Mordy Oberstein:

It smelled weird.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Or I plugged this toy in and it was really noisy and it scared my cat.

Mordy Oberstein:

No AI is going to do that.

Crystal Carter:

They're not going to write that, but people who have cats want to know if the thing's going to be noisy.

Mordy Oberstein:

One of the pages I was looking at in my analysis on this February, 2023 product review update, they wrote, "Pro: Whatever, whatever. Con: It smelled funny out of the box." There's no way, either you completely made that up or you actually used it. So I think when Google says experience, it's interchangeable for AI, it's this code word. We don't want to say AI, so we're just going to say experience.

Crystal Carter:

Right. We're saying experience. So experience like we're saying this shows expertise, authority, trust and a human have something to do with this. And there's going to be, again, with YMYL things, it's going to be much more important that a human was involved with whatever was going on with, I don't know, that medicine or that particular tool or whatever that's to do with your money, your life, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason why they're mentioning in here, they're mentioning surfacing things from comments or from forums or from Reddit or from wherever is that's where humans are and that's where humans are speaking in a candid way, often unfiltered, often unedited. And I think that that's what they're trying to do.

With regards to how you include that in your content, I think that's going to be an interesting thing, how we pull that in. The other thing that Google's doing, and they talked about this in Google Workspace, they're like, "Oh yeah, we're adding all these things so that you can just add a prompt and then it will write the essay for you. Or we're adding this thing so that you can take your notes and then format it."

Mordy Oberstein:

This is a cure to that disease, I think.

Crystal Carter:

Right. But I feel like people say, "Oh, can you find something that's 100% human written?" But I use Grammarly all the time and Grammarly...

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. 100%, well, I don't think, you can help me write it. I can write it, "Hey AI, make this better. Take out all of my weird syntax idiosyncrasies in my writing."

Crystal Carter:

But then it's less human.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, in the case of my mind, let me better explain, I'm writing something that I want to be cold and generic.

Crystal Carter:

OK.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I am not good at writing cold and generic, so please do that for me. Whatever the use case actually is.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know, I can't imagine a time when you would ever write a thing that wasn't in your tone of voice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, see. So that's why I immediately thought of using AI to take my tone of voice out it of because maybe you don't want so much Mordy in your content.

Crystal Carter:

Everybody wants more Mordy, more Mordy-fication of their content.

Mordy Oberstein:

It converts. But I think you're right. I think it's going to change how we, I'm hoping it changes content fundamentally. For example, let's say you take a look, an SEO post. OK? How to do rank tracking.

Crystal Carter:

What is rank tracking?

Mordy Oberstein:

What is rank tracking? We talk about it in a vacuum. What I would like to see is, "What is rank tracking, blah, blah, blah?" And when I've done it, I've found that this did work or that didn't work or my clients or when we and then they and when we all...

Crystal Carter:

Do you know what? Actually, this brings me back to when I first had my kid, and you must have had this, you have children, and shout out to anybody who doesn't have children, but this is the experience that I found. What I found was that everybody had advice. People who had kids, people who didn't have kids, people who had kids 40 years ago or whatever. Everybody had advice for me. And I got very tired of advice from everybody about what I was doing, about whether I should, I don't know, let them cry, don't let them cry. I don't know, all the things. Eat this, don't eat that. Go to sleep here, go to sleep, all of that stuff. But what I did find was experience was useful. So whatever their experience was, if they were like, "Oh, when I had my kid, I would find that I could help them get to sleep if we did this, this or this."

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, I know exactly what you're saying.

Crystal Carter:

Do you know what I mean?

Mordy Oberstein:

I know exactly what you're saying. Yes.

Crystal Carter:

If I hear their experience, I can take whatever nuggets...

Mordy Oberstein:

I want out of it and it's not forced on me.

Crystal Carter:

Right. It's just their experience. Their experience cannot be false, it can't be wrong. It's just their experience. And so I can say, "OK, well from what you've said, I can discern that actually I wouldn't do it that way, but this could work for this or that could work for that." So maybe that's a Google is trying to do, is less advice and more experience. I could give you advice on how to do parasailing, I have never parasailed in my life, but I could give you advice on it based on something that I've read. But I can't give you any of my experience because I've never done that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly. There's a post on the Wix S O about this, not about this, I think it was Sophie Brandt who wrote about SEO reporting, I could be misremembering the exact post, but I think what she did was she went through in different scenarios and you could tell the scenarios that she came across.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I remember reading that post and being like, "I love this because it's different and it's hitting on a different level. It's hitting me in a different way." And I'm hoping that's where we all go in terms of content across the web. I think this is a good thing, net good thing. With that, it does bring up a lot of the E-A-T stuff and that was a wider consensus around what was happening in the SEO world. For example, John Luca for [inaudible 00:34:24] wrote, "So very hot takes. The fact that Google AI answers is presenting links above the fold, surely is important. That also means that everything we do to stand out according to the E-A-T principles is even more important now because we must suppose that the sites that Google considers the most expert with expertise, authority and trust are the ones that not only are going to rank better, but are going to be used as a source for the AI generated answer hence linked." That's a really interesting point.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. And I think that we're going to see how that plays out in the SERP.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And it's an interesting point, you have to think what's the content that Google's basing the AI off of? You want to be that. I don't know how that works.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

As a concept, you want to be that. And Garrett Sussman chimed in with his hot takes, he wrote “keyword research is going to change, Entity research is the new keyword research.

Crystal Carter:

I agree.

Mordy Oberstein:

Everything depends, yes, we spoke about everything depends on when this replaces Google search and how there will be big problems when it's first rolled out, but they'll get it right. I think we both totally agree with that. And also, a good point, there's going to be problems when this rolls out. That's what happens when you release a new product.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, in the last few months, Google's been all over the place. There's been a lot of updates and there's a lot of changes where I've just been like, "What? Why is that?"

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

And stuff. So I think there's a lot of new things coming in. There's a lot of new features coming in. And I think the pace at which it's happening means that search is going to be very, very, very dynamic right now.

Mordy Oberstein:

So hard.

Crystal Carter:

Very dynamic. And I think also from a wider space, if people are accessing less of that sort of informational intent via Search, if people are using more generative things, like asking chatbots, "Oh, I asked about my plant," I was like, "What's another name for a mother-in-law's tongue plant?" And they were like, "Oh, it's a spider plant or it's a vipers thing or whatever. "And I'm like, "Oh, OK." Now, normally...

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, it makes sense a mother-in-law's viper think.

Crystal Carter:

So that particular one, so I would normally have done that on a Google Search, but I did it on the Bard chat and I also asked it, "Oh, why are the leaves going brown?" Because I've killed this plant. I'm pretty sure I've killed this plant. I need help. And these are different. So as those searches change and people are needing different content. What I did find for that particular one, so I tested it on Bing, I asked that question on Bing, and what I found in the chat was that they were constantly referencing this same website. So I asked it, I was like, "What is this plant called? Why are the leaves wilting? Why are the leaves brown? Should I cut it?" And I kept getting the same website, was coming back and forth with the same thing. And that tells me that that website knows all about this plant and all about this drama that I'm having with this plant.

And now I'm like, "OK, I can go to that website to get good information about this thing." So I think that understanding the entities and understanding the flow of information and the kinds, people who have done topic clusters that flow all the way through the user journey. And Jonas Sticklers done a good article on the SEO Hub about this as well, but people who have a good understanding of the customer journey of, "I have a plant. I have a problem with my plant. How do I fix this problem with my plant?" That sort of thing, that flow I think will still be valid. And understanding the entities that are related to those queries will help us to rank and to perform and go forward on the web.

Mordy Oberstein:

And look, there's going to be so much change. There's going to be so many things that you're going to have to think about in totally new ways. All this raises all sorts of new questions and how are things going to happen? It's going to be very, I think, confusing in the beginning. Before we spoke about SEO tools, I think that's going to fundamentally change in a lot of ways. I know on Twitter, Caitlin Hathaway was saying, "Very keen to see how SEO tools are going to track the new developments, including clickable boxes with images and citations using generative name AI. Also keen to see," check this out, " if Google Search Console will let us track follow-up questions to the queries."

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's a good question.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right? Good question.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Lily Ray was saying that it's important to remember that not all searches will spark an AI answer. So it might be the case that, and I know Semrush recently launched an extra feature that said that there were SERP features or how many SERP features there are on a particular query. So it might be that they count it as a SERP feature. So whether or not this particular keyword or this particular question triggers an AI response, and if it does trigger an AI response, that's something that you should be aware of.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. And just there's so many questions, so many larger questions still have to be unanswered. Brian Freiesleben was saying very in to see Google's approach for noting AI generated content with metadata and watermarking, which Google mentioned they're going to do, will let you do in images, you brought up before the guardrails. Will Google make this bold in their search results? Will they require publishers to note this? Also, a good question.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And I mean, is this something that we're going to need to add into some of our systems and stuff? So for instance, on Wix, we automatically add meta tags, are we going to need to add that as a meta tag, for instance, for people to update. Also, what counts as an AI modified image. If I make myself look a little bit younger, is that the same? What if I dye my hair in my AI image? That's definitely an AI image. But I don't know. Where is the line?

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. And I'm kind of adverse to the whole thing. Which by the way, Lily Ray up a great point. Google's announcing all these features, what if there's backlash? What if people don't like them? Will they use them? That's also still left to be unanswered. In the SEO space, Brandish we're saying very interesting. I wonder how they'll incorporate local results and how accurate they'll be.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So it's very interesting as well though because they talked about Chrome and how Chrome's going to be super personalized and all of that sort of stuff. And I think that they're going to be using personalized results potentially for some of these AI things as well. So potentially, they'll know more about where you are. And so for instance, if you say, "Where's the best place to get a taco?" It's no good you telling me that I can get a taco, that the best taco is in Santa Fe, New Mexico if I'm not in Santa Fe, New Mexico. So it's going to be interesting.

And also from the AI point of view with regards to entities and with regards to reviews and with regards to demonstrating experience and all that sort of stuff, they are all over Google Maps. The other big takeaway from Google I/O was like that they're just doing tons of stuff on Google Maps. Google Maps, they're doing as much as they possibly can. It was a meta-fication of Google Maps. They were like, "Oh, look at this sort of AI thing." And I'm like, "What?" ..

Mordy Oberstein:

That's bonkers.

Crystal Carter:

So they have a lot of proprietary stuff within Google Maps. You put your content into your Google GBP profile and they have access to that, to understand it through the reviews that are left on GBP and they can access that when they're figuring out what things are, and people check in and people review and people do all of those sorts of things. So I will guess that Google's going to add a lot of AI to local. And I think that...

Mordy Oberstein:

Local. I think it's one of the better places for the AI actually. I want to get into it, but we promise ourselves, because we could go on for hours with this. We literally said, "OK, we have to cap this off at around 45 minutes," and we're just past 45 minutes. So if you want to hear more of our thoughts, find us on Twitter, I guess.

Crystal Carter:

Yes. Find us on Twitter and thank you to everybody who shared their hot takes on Twitter. Yeah, really happy to hear from everybody.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was one of those moments of there's so much going on, there's so much conversation and made Twitter enjoyable again for a few moments.

Crystal Carter:

Awe.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

Nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks, y'all. You guys are great. Well, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. There are future episodes, our regular scheduled episodes are back next Wednesday. We're talking about Momentum and SEO with Erica Schneider. So if you want more SERP's Up awesomeness, well, go check out previous episodes and keep up with the podcast with our upcoming episodes released every Wednesday over on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars we have on the Wix SEO Learning, I bet you guessed it, at wix.com/seo/learn. If you like the podcast, don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time we see you, peace, love and SEO.