CMO Panel: How AI is changing (and replacing) search & SEO

We could see greater shifts in search behavior in 2024 than at any time since the advent of search engines in the mid-1990's. This isn't just what you'll see on Google.com. It includes legitimate threats to Google's search supremacy.

Fascinating discussion at last week's CMO Coffee Talk about how AI is changing (and replacing) search and SEO. Special thanks to a panel of experts who joined us including Gilad David Maayan Kevin Lee Gregory B. and Karl Yeh .

If you are in the CMO Coffee Talk community, don't miss resources and slides shared during the session in the #swipe-file channel in Slack. Highlights from the chat in both sessions - including additional reading and link recommendations - are below.

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of nearly 3,000 of your peers, let me know or click here to learn more and sign up.

Love Perplexity.ai!

Google Voice….Google Assistant….both sexy. Both dead.

Early adopters switching and switching fast, but vast majority haven't been using AI still. Interestingly I'm seeing people make the behavior shift within like a week on search when they actually start.

Browse with Bing already puts in links

Fascinating - only a week to shift behaviours….is that across all generations, just wonder.

both my dad and his girlfriend in their 60's completely shifted their behavior in a week Meta! They find it so much easier

3 Things, yes. SEO is a practical machine-driven game. Let’s play with practical skills.

You can create 100% original content with your own ideas with ChatGPT. My AI content ranks crazy high on search

I like to think of it as new CATEGORIES of content

It's really important to differentiate between AI ideas and AI assisted writing. They aren't the same! Google has said they don't mind AI written content, as long as it's original and written for a human

beyond SEO and ranking, AI is presenting a massive challenge in journalism right now: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/lorenzofb_we-need-your-email-address-activity-7156714926231683072-Qm29/

But there's a huge difference between that and saying "why marketing is important, here's the exact ideas I want you to include"

All AI generated content is built on something non-original - there is something to be said about whether anything would be generated by a model is truly original from an IP standpoint

Including the ideas can definitely rank! It's no different from a human writing that

Yes! It has to be authentic and show your unique expertise and offer something new — when combined with comprehensive coverage of a topic semantically, your content will have a better chance in all the ways people search

Just my two cents on how can be on our front foot on this:

1) diversify watering holes (e.g., communities, review sites, influencers, events, podcast, etc) where customers congregate beyond search, especially those that offer a more authentic human experience

2) Go narrow and deep - do customer research and anticipate the questions that target customers will ask. Create highly relevant/personalized content (TOFU to BOFU)

3) get our content in trusted sources and media outlets used to train LLMs (check out commoncrawl.org)

Generative AI presents a unique challenge and opportunity for content development, I wrote about it? https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/rise-generative-ai-opportunities-risks-creator-economy-kerman-kasad/?trackingId=nx40qfB1RV%2Bwk8mRbqk7Dg%3D%3D

If you really want to understand SGE, understanding Google’s Paid Search positioning is critical.

All AI content is NOT unoriginal. All AI content with bad prompting, no context, no original ideas in the prompt is built on regurgitated content. But NOT all AI content. Those who know how to use it create incredible original content

From a business perspective, SGE is integrating Video and Display inventory. Google had a soft earnings call for Q4, and that is because they can’t sell enough YouTube and GDN inventory slots. SGE is one way for them to integrate that inventory with paid search

LOL - well I don't know about a GPT, but I teach the skills daily to overcome this! But you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink!

The cost of creating content will race to 0, but there are stages of this journey. Right now we better AI assist to create better content.

SGE is also a way for Google to fight off TikTok and Meta, which are increasingly being used for search

For sure, although I believe the 2nd most popular search after Google engine is still YouTube

Turn on SGE and start experimenting if you haven’t https://labs.google/sge

What won’t? change is that successful content has a unique POV - if everyone creates the same content using AI - it likely won’t resonate.

Good AI content is hard to detect. Most people don't know how to create good AI content though

SGE and GA4 and PMax - all their products are aimed at getting more display and YouTube inventory sold

Speaking of Google wanting to keep traffic - great Netflix series: “The Billion Dollar Code”.? (TerraVision - Google Earth)

I am however convinced if someone used an AI detector on AI Generated social media comments they would be detected 100% of the time. Though I don't know that study has been done ??

I believe PR will have a much bigger role in revenue gen, https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/lizaadams_ai-responsibleai-pr-activity-7148787680401588224-K0Kp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Haha I built a GPT to solve the problem last night: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/nicoleleffer_chatgpt-professional-network-social-media-activity-7158987926469578754-11Hy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

It’s interesting to see the websites most impacted by SGE…number 1,2, 3 winner? Google, Yelp, YouTube. Biggest losers. Meta and Pinterest, Etsy, twitter, etc

So true - SGE bots go way deeper into the internet to find results.

You can be in position 60 and still get shown SGE serps

Makes much sense. Branding has become increasingly significant in early stages.

Everyone is scared about this format bc it only has 1 Ad slot vs 3 ad slots

I’m bullish on Google doing something to keep us on their pages though.

Google doesn’t make money from searchers. They make money from advertisers.

That’s right.? No one should be worried about SEM.?? They should be worried about their SEO.

Yea poor SEO professionals. Gonna get some gray hair on this one

I wonder if we're going to see a dramatic increase in direct traffic when this launches> would think a lot of people would see that result and go to "Wix.com"

if everyone has to re-learn how search works, I wonder how much extra space this gives Perplexity to steal market share

I was just thinking this. If search UX is disrupted, who can benefit?

Brilliant for Google as most will pay more for pay per click advertising to compensate! They are printing money over there…….

Given more competition for the smaller real estate for ads, ad cost will probably go up.

Perplexity is growing so fast and it's a much much better user experience. They just raised a ton of $. Will be so interesting to see

I see Brand building budgets getting a huge bump

May lead to more battles with CEO/CFO on brand spending

This is second week in a row that I’m scared out of my pants with what’s coming…yikes

Or lead to better justification on brand spending

Or Google will let perplexity figure out the experience and then buy them…

I think this is the article https://searchengineland.com/how-google-sge-will-impact-your-traffic-and-3-sge-recovery-case-studies-431430

We still have to prove that SGE leads to conversion at some point downstream.

The doomsday scenario - full SGE - seems ultimately self-defeating for Google paid search.? If there is almost no hope of getting top results, why will advertisers bother paying for it?

On the other hand, the users may stop using google , since it would get harder to go into websites. WDYT?

I wonder how long Perplexity will stick with it business model in primarily making money based on subscriptions, not ads

We’re seen more ChatGPT cited as the lead source on our lead page

We’ve seen significant increases in organic with the rebrand and bringing that content in our central blog and resource center.

The challenge is finding the sweet spot between what we think is good and what Google thinks is good.

A/B test Google vs Perplexity for stuff like that too, dramatically different experiences

+1 to Value per word.

So, are you saying word count does not matter anymore?

It’s a little wild to have ChatGPT remove the fluff - when I was judging business plans, i was able to ID what came from AI (and verified with copy leaks) b/c it was so fluffy and hand-wavy

This feels like the “answer first” format that we were all trained to think in back in Dell’s glory days. (Up until the “human” part, we weren’t always good at that).

i always tell it to write as concisely as possible. I tell it to use The Elements of Style by Strunk & White as a writing style guide. Otherwise it is sooo fluffy.

So human in the loop for SEO! Love that idea

So basically go back to what we should have done in the first place …

Bingo—it’s that deep knowledge.

We need to hire more journeys type content people

I’ve been beating this drum for a loooong time

I wonder if human in the loop will help the noise in LI

“Put the most important stuff up top” - can you please let all the recipe websites know this? ??

also tell all the SDRs who call me this... I am not going to sit through 5 qualifying questions before you get to the point...

Love this quote:? Distribution is undefeated.

So if doing syndicated content… don’t use content that is on your site… they’re going to need the change the term syndicated content. Lol

I asked GPT to tell me what relevant publishers accept content submissions - super helpful

Google is searching your gmails for ad purposes so it’s probably reading it for indexing

We’ve found that content syndication generally has poor ROI in terms of driving pipeline, and it would be a hard argument in today’s “efficiency” environment to pay for content synd just to fuel the LLM, though I understand and agree with the premise.

Sounds like the word “syndication” is being used in a different way than “content syndication.” If using “content syndication” as a tactic, best to get links back to your domain to help with passing authority.

I’ve always found tech bylined articles to be good for this because of the combo of authority + reach + neutral domain

David Wilson shared the media sites referenced as content sources that AI companies use to train their LLMs. Depending on our products and industry, we need to be covered in these:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7151245993861173248?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28V2%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7151245993861173248%29

Andy Crestodina’s LI article https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/andycrestodina_seo-ai-activity-7156012695769554944-4qzn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

And Andy’s follow-up article, https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/andycrestodina_seo-marketingtrends2024-googlealgorithm-activity-7158800424500621312-36Mt?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Follow Andy Crestodina, my two cents. He’s brilliant

The behavior change that's coming with search is going to be the real tidal wave

Google has been replaced by Perplexity for me.

I use ChatGPT for search these days

I so rarely google too. I'm not all in on Perplexity like others but I use Bing Chat and ChatGPT with Browse with Bing over traditional search 90% of the time

I also think there is a general decrease in the trust that people had previously in content found on the web. They know it is gamed, vendor paid or vendor biased.

I use primarily Perplexity and Chatgpt for search now. Only use for google maps

Without IMDB my googling would be nonexistent. I could just download the app instead, but I like to give Google the little bit of my remaining search intent.

Conversely, I search in Google all the time. This is where most of your customers are searching …

I spent the weekend using ChatGPT to write complex sheet formulas to clean up 60K rows of data. What would have taken a week took me a few hours. It was a game changer.

Most people are still using Google because most people still don't use AI for anything, but seeing how early AI adopters are changing behavior with search is a window for marketers

I don’t research using blogs and content as much. I ask the experts I know in that area. Anyone else seeing that?

It just optimizes to give each person exactly what they think they want. Given human behavior, what could possibly go wrong?

I'm watching people who start using AI for search change their behavior over quickly... like they do it for a week and never go back

This behavior from Google isn’t new.? It just has a Gen AI label now.

Pretty telling use case why Mike Kaput uses Perplexity for research vs Google. Follow Mike Kaput as well, my two cents ??

https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/mikekaput_ai-marketing-business-activity-7158496661554483202-yQ_C?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

I’m somewhat worried about personalization narrowing our window of learning - hating how echo-chamber my LinkedIn has become - I see the same people most of the time.

Agree. Historically we all hung out in the public square then migrated to the personalized square.

Now … Migration from personalized square to the private square is the pattern I’m seeing in B2B.

It’s what we’re doing right now, together.

Goes back to classic content marketing strategy

The challenge … how, as marketers, do we gain access to the private squares of our market ?? … especially when it must be earned not rented.

This is the most exciting time in a long time in coming up with innovative/creative new marketing strategies

F. Scott Fitzgerald's quote about holding two opposing ideas is as follows: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function"

This quote reflects the idea that intellectual maturity and capability involve being able to entertain conflicting thoughts or concepts without losing the capacity to act or make decisions. It emphasizes the importance of cognitive flexibility and the ability to navigate complexity and contradiction.

Duality is my life. makes my head spin...

Maybe Duality is our theme for 2024!

The cost of ‘crappy AI content’ is going to zero but content that still deliver values requires that human voice/experience

I 100% agree. I wish that the rest of the C-suite was in the same pace of thinking and using.

I asked Perplexity a question about my category today - and wow it was surprising where it pulled from.? Such good SEO insight.

Providing genuine value does not cost nothing

Authenticity is key. People know it when they see it.

I don’t believe a Bot can replicate a human voice.? We still need a human to create authenticity

Good content takes time. Time is money.

I think HIGH QUALITY content will take a human in the loop.? Documentation and basics can be AI driven

Content is more than y’alls marketing copy ??

Hospitality = the word that surfaces each week as we wade and untangle the change that is required.

I’ve surfaced to my marketing team as 1 of 3 intentions we are holding to in 2024.

As a brand, we have to differentiate from the competition, and provide real value. That requires real expertise, which can be expensive.

It’s like product-led growth lol. Empathy, authenticity and service on a small scale will make people want more.

The cost of MEDIOCRE content is going to zero, but so is the value of that content. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/why-cmos-shouldnt-cut-content-budgets-2-charts-joe-lazer-lazauskas--skjie/?trackingId=cpF5AYkRSvqagHicun5kMg%3D%3D

i find Chat GPT is good for editing LinkedIn posts, but I never let it start the post. I get it 90% there and then I ask Chat GPT for suggestions for final edits... and I often don't take it's advice :)

Choose your own adventures and personalized experiences will be key. We all figured out how to do bdays parties during covid, having car parades. We can do this

SMEs and brand ambassadors don’t need a script they need to be activated and appreciated.

I believe that there will be a sharp segmentation between low-value commodity content and high-value farm-to-table GMO-free content.

efficiency is different than free

When everything can be faked, how do we ‘prove’ authenticity?

That might be my country roots but let’s not forget .. as parents all that matters are the core values we teach our kids .. as marketers all we need is to remember core principles. Core principles are pretty much timeless.

Zero cost = Zero value. So if your content is costing you zero to produce, you already know it’s value before you distribute.

TikTok knows it’s a search platform not a social platform. I appreciate that they've leaned into that.

Be more like Taylor x Travis — can’t fake authenticity intentionally deployed

Want to see a CFO’s face when I ask for a headcount for Psy Ops.

As a former PsyOps officer I crack up SO hard when I see those posts.

The dilemma we (I) face, is that dark social and awareness is harder to connect to ROI. It requires a sea change in how businesses quantify value.

YES - because marketing worked exceptionally well before we had all this data and tracking.? I know because I was there!!

Does getting GPTs to talk you up and tell people to work with you count as dark social?

The fundamentals still hold. It is just like when the Internet started. There is noise. We as marketers can cut through it.

I think the brand objective is to on the short list of vendors to talk to when you are ready

honest question... has anyone here actually ever felt like everything they were doing was perfectly tracked and attributed?

Huh. turns out that good marketing is still the best marketing. Who knew?

Its amazing how we see this BUT many CEOs/investors don’t get it and still want marketing originated and show me the inbound/outbound metrics

Eat your vegetables. Floss daily.

Providing value through an authentic lens. Everywhere. All at once. Sounds like good old fashioned integrated marketing grounded in STP...

Know your benchmarks

Wonderful new ghosts in my head - great session y’all!

Awesome - though scary - session? Thanks again

This was fun today everyone? - chat was on fire.