Google's AI Overview: Does It Meet The Hype? [Endless Customers Podcast S.1. Ep. 38]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy.

Alex Winter
0:00:00
Mandy, have you heard about this AI overview thing from Google?

Mandy York
0:00:04
Yeah. I have had no less than three emergency meetings today alone about the new AI updates. And if you want to hear all about how it's actually working and how it should impact your content strategy, then me and you need to talk.

Alex Winter
0:00:20
Let's talk about it.

Alex Winter
0:00:21
Welcome back to Endless Customers.

Alex Winter
0:00:29
My name is Alex Winter and today I'm joined by Mandy York, who's a lead content and video coach here at Impact. Mandy, what's up? Hey, how are you? I'm really good. I'm doing great.

Mandy York
0:00:40
Thanks. How are you?

Alex Winter
0:00:41
I'm doing well.

Mandy York
0:00:43
Nice. We love having you on the show. Welcome back.

Alex Winter
0:00:45
This is great to have you here in studio again. So we're talking today about Google, and specifically some of the new tools that Google's rolling out. I don't know if our viewers or our listeners have noticed, but when you type into Google now, what pops back is different than what it used to be.

Alex Winter
0:01:03
It changed. Like overnight, something happened. I don't know what happened. We've got to get the skinny on what's new. So let's talk about these new AI features that Google has just recently rolled out.

Mandy York
0:01:13
All right, let's do it.

Alex Winter
0:01:15
Google, obviously, is the world's largest search engine, as everybody knows, unless you've been living in a cave underground somewhere. But what a lot of business owners base their livelihoods on is SEO and getting found on Google so that their websites and their blogs and all these things

Alex Winter
0:01:31
that we practice and teach people to do show up and help people build trust and understand their products better and their services better, right? But this update, that's called the AI overview, it's at the very top of the page.

Alex Winter
0:01:44
So now this is like the first thing that you see, it's over the YouTube videos, it's over everything. How does that affect what business leaders and what marketing leaders need to be doing as we move forward? Well, I would say that it's one of those things

Mandy York
0:01:56
that you really, really, really need to be aware of and keeping an eye on. SEO search results, search engine result pages, all of these different things, they've been pretty static for a long time. A lot of the things that have worked historically

Mandy York
0:02:16
have continued to work up until the last year or so and things AI got introduced and things started getting just a little bit weird. And since AI has been introduced, we've had a couple, I've had to say the words, things are getting a little bit weird. It feels like every week, because there's always some kind

Mandy York
0:02:34
of new update. And this new AI search results at the top of the results page there. It's just another one of those things. That's just a little bit weird.

Alex Winter
0:02:43
Yeah, it's new.

Mandy York
0:02:44
Oh, go ahead.

Alex Winter
0:02:44
I was gonna say, yeah, it's new. And it's, it's different. And

Alex Winter
0:02:47
whenever there's change, it's always a little weird. As you say, it's like, oh, well, I gotta adjust and get used to this now and try to reconfigure how I approach this and just acclimated with it again.

Mandy York
0:03:01
Yeah, and it can feel like you don't even have time to get acclimated before something new drops. It's just, it feels like it's everyday right now. And I do think that that's something that we're gonna continue to see. I do think that we are going to continue to see

Mandy York
0:03:13
pretty frequent updates and changes and the resulting fallout of those changes over the next several months.

Alex Winter
0:03:22
That's a good point that you bring up.

Alex Winter
0:03:23
So I feel that, and I'm sure a lot of people listening and viewing this are feeling that too, where like between this and all the other AI tools, open AI, generative AI, all the like, there's so much going on all at once that I feel like every day there's something new and it's hard to keep up with.

Alex Winter
0:03:41
Do you have any suggestions or a way to keep up? What have you been doing? How have you been staying on top of all this? Because I feel like you are on the leading edge of this, at least compared to me.

Mandy York
0:03:50
I'm doing my best. I'm doing my best. The number one thing that I have actually used to keep up with this has been Google Alerts. So you can set up Google Alerts for certain key phrases and so I use Google algorithm as one of those key phrases. I've set up to receive newsletters from certain like thought leaders that I pay attention to and trust. So like Paul Roadster is one of those people that I get his newsletters. I get newsletters from SEOjournal.com and that way I get that information brought to me.

Mandy York
0:04:27
I don't necessarily have time to go out and search out every single little AI thing that pops up because there's a million of them a day. So I get that information curated and brought to me so that I know as soon as something new happens and I can formulate an educated guess

Mandy York
0:04:43
as to how to respond to that.

Alex Winter
0:04:45
Right, right. Or you can at least start experimenting with it and playing with it and getting ahead of the curve on it. So that's a great tip, good looking out. So let's go back to the AI overview with Google, right? So it does seem to be sharing its sources

Alex Winter
0:04:58
in that overview section right at the top there. But do we know where it's pulling from those sources? You know, like similarly with GPT-40 and stuff like that, do we know where they're citing their sources and all this information's actually coming from?

Mandy York
0:05:11
So, tricky question, but at this time it does look like there are a few things that that AI search feature is favoring. Number one, it likes to get all of its information from a one source, if possible. So if you ask it a very simple question, and you get those search results, it wants to be able to pull, much like what used to be a featured snippet, it wants to pull one or two sentences

Mandy York
0:05:41
that it can straight copy and paste and put on that top of that page. So that's, as we've been telling our clients for years, you need to write in a natural, easy to understand way that would historically rank for a cert feature. That would historically rank for a cert feature.

Mandy York
0:06:04
And it's kind of the same way that you're seeing those things now. The problem here and where it gets a little bit trickier than what cert features used to be is that whenever it gets those, the source of where it pulled that information from,

Mandy York
0:06:18
most of the time you have to click a little dropdown arrow and then it will pull those sources of where, of you plus other people that wrote similar articles that have been pulled for similar queries before and the annoying part of that is a lot of people are not going to click that. A lot of people aren't going to click the drop down. I don't. I don't. If you're just giving me the answer, why do I want to go

Mandy York
0:06:40
and to the source? I am going to choose to trust that Google is correct and I'm going to read that, take my information and run. And I think that's what most people do.

Alex Winter
0:06:50
That's what I do. Yeah, and I think that's something that is becoming increasingly, I'm more aware of it when we talk about AI in general, but just the more that we start to dive into this new technology, it makes you question the sources of where it's pulling from and where these things are coming from and how it's going to affect certain of the future. Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:07:09
Yeah. So we have seen some examples where it's pulling from places like Reddit or where you can be really sarcastic with their content, and some of it might even be inappropriate. So Google's AI doesn't seem to recognize that it's suggesting things like using glue and pizza sauce or something like that. I'm reading the notes here, like, I don't know why you would ever put glue in pizza

Alex Winter
0:07:29
sauce, but for people who don't know, if you're a teenager and you're making your first pizza because mom's not home or whatever, and you're going to type this into Google, and it's like, use Elmer's glue, how would people know any better? So I guess, back into the same question of like, what would you give for advice for people

Alex Winter
0:07:47
to be a little bit discerning and to be aware of like, you shouldn't just take everything face value?

Mandy York
0:07:52
Right, so I have a really long-winded answer to that. Okay. So bear with me here. So the Reddit example that's been going around is really funny at first glance, but I think this is gonna become more and more common.

Mandy York
0:08:07
Like you mentioned the idea of a teenager making a pizza for the first time. I taught high school for 10 years. God love those children. They are Gen Z, like young millennial Gen Z down, are not good.

Mandy York
0:08:22
And I say this from personal experience. They are not good at what the elders of this community think of as actual research. So where you and I and our viewers, listeners here, would think of, you know, you go to the library and you pull the little card out of the little catalog

Mandy York
0:08:40
and you go find the thing and you write it down in MLA format. Yeah, the Dewey Decimal System, let's go. Yeah. Thank you, thank you.

Alex Winter
0:08:48
I'm glad I'm not the only one that remembers this.

Mandy York
0:08:50
So, it's not a thing anymore. Like, they don't, it's not a thing. Oh no, if I said that to kids right now, they'd be like, the Dewey what, should I call it?

Alex Winter
0:09:00
Yeah, they're like, who's Dewey? Who's that, see on TikTok?

Mandy York
0:09:04
That, I don't, I think that's gonna become a real problem. If they can't figure out how to get these results to understand the nuance of human interaction and human language. And we know that Google is heavily favoring community-based, high-authority domains. So Reddit is a website that's been around for a long time. It has a ton of backlinks.

Mandy York
0:09:25
It has a ton of contributors. It is high domain authority.

Alex Winter
0:09:39
They just went public too, I believe, right? So they're a big deal, publicly traded company now.

Mandy York
0:09:45
Yeah, and it's all community-based. So it's like an obvious place where this new AI is going to start pulling information from. What it doesn't get is that Reddit is not exactly a scholarly resource in the nonfiction section. It's people blowing off steam. It's people saying things, pretending to be someone that they're not. It's totally anonymous.

Mandy York
0:10:10
You know, it's a patently bad place to get information from. That's how you wind up with blue on pizza. And so there are two things that we have to do to combat this. The first one is if you have younger people in your workforce or even if you have kids, like teenagers at home, explain to them what a primary reliable source is. Help, like we as humans have to adapt to this

Mandy York
0:10:36
and have to learn and keep up with that technology so that we can use it properly. And then from the other side of it, you can combat that from a business perspective by choosing the way that you write to be more in that vein.

Mandy York
0:10:53
Make it simple, make it conversational, make the things that you're writing easy to understand. Get rid of all your big fancy words and your complex explanations of things. Use more charts, use more graphs, use more images. Explain things using examples.

Mandy York
0:11:11
Explain things like you're talking to an actual customer that is standing in front of you, and you really want them to understand the thing that you're saying. Because that's, in theory, what you're doing. The robot, it's like a little baby robot.

Mandy York
0:11:23
AI is still a little baby AI robot, and it doesn't know everything. And so we have to meet it where it's at if we intend to work alongside it forever.

Alex Winter
0:11:35
No, I love that.

Alex Winter
0:11:36
And I mean, that plays directly into the ask and answer. It's the same principles of meeting people where they are to build trust and to speak in the language that they're speaking in so that it's relatable and it's understandable and digestible, I love that.

Alex Winter
0:11:47
I also think you make a really good point. I never really thought about it that way until you just said it, but like, the problem isn't necessarily the AI or the tools. The problem is really that these younger generations don't know how to do research the same way

Alex Winter
0:11:59
that we learned how to do it. So like the fundamentals need to be taught. It's not necessarily the tools and the tool belt. It's the actual fundamentals of like the construction behind it.

Alex Winter
0:12:07
Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:12:07
Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:12:08
Very cool.

Alex Winter
0:12:09
You just blew my mind. I love that. So that kind of is a great segue because it feels like the gold rush that's happening with AI right now, right? It's like open AI with chatTBT like really made huge strides forward over the last year, year and a half. Does it feel like Google's rushing to keep up with them? Is that where some of this, I don't want to call it messy,

Alex Winter
0:12:31
but at least from somebody like me that's watching the situation unfold, it seems like Google's really trying to rapidly keep up. Microsoft, they're all trying to keep up with open AI. Is that true?

Mandy York
0:12:42
I would personally say yes. I think if you're not, and this is true not just of the big players here, but of everybody. If you're not on the cutting edge of AI, it's a problem. It would be akin to somebody saying, oh, we don't need a website. Back in the day, saying, oh, we don't need a website.

Mandy York
0:13:02
We run ads in the local paper. And then you look at that, and you're like, oh, that's ridiculous. But that's what we're doing at this point. Everybody's trying to stay on the forefront of that. And whenever you've got all those people rushing to first place, they're going to be tripping over each other.

Mandy York
0:13:18
And I would be lying if I told you I didn't think that the Google AI search results that are popping up now aren't a little bit of a trip. I think whenever we're talking about the sources and the kind of information that it's pulling and the verifiability of some of the things that it's saying, I think that it's got some stumbles. I really do, I don't think it's a perfect technology.

Mandy York
0:13:42
I don't think that it's even, I don't think it's even close to being Google's final answer here. I think we're gonna see several iterations of this before it's something that the average person is going to think is truly usable.

Alex Winter
0:13:53
Yeah, that makes sense. And listen, OpenAI has had some mistakes too and had iterations that they, like they're not perfect either. So I'm not trying to paint this picture that like everyone has to keep up with

Alex Winter
0:14:02
chat GPT. But I have a quote here from Google's CEO, and it says that we weren't the first company to do search. We weren't the first company to do email. We weren't the first company to build browsers. And right now, we're in the earliest possible stages of AI.

Alex Winter
0:14:15
So it seems like, to his point, it's playing into what you're saying, where they're in the race, they're keeping up with it, and they're doing the best that they can and taking all their experience and knowledge and applying it and trying to find the best ways to leverage these tools. Is that fair to say that?

Mandy York
0:14:29
Yeah, I would think so. I would think so. I think we're all kind of in this soup together. I think maybe, you know, Google's CEO might know a few more ingredients of the soup than I do. But I do think that we're all just trying to figure it out.

Mandy York
0:14:45
What does the human race want AI to look like? What do they want it to do? How do we want it to shape the way that we live and work? And you're seeing the experimental testing phase of that currently.

Alex Winter
0:14:58
Yeah, so we're in the testing phase. Sorry, I'm having a sip of water here.

Alex Winter
0:15:01
So we're in the testing, we're in the testing phase, but in general, there definitely feels like this AI race. So what does that mean for us humans, for us business owners, for us business leaders, for marketers, for sales folks, how does that translate in best practices for us to keep on the leading edge, but also not be drinking from a fire hose every day,

Alex Winter
0:15:23
basically, yeah.

Mandy York
0:15:25
So for us, I think it means that we just have to be as up-to-date as humanly possible, and that means you might be changing this week's strategy based on things you learned last week. And I think that, like I said before, we can guarantee there are going to be multiple rounds of updates. And so it's going, at times it is going to feel like you're drinking from a fire hose and it is going to be frustrating.

Mandy York
0:15:42
I really do believe that. I don't think that there's anybody out there that is like, oh, this is so easy. Everything is going so well right now. Everything is, I think keeping in mind that we, it's not a system for us to game. So even with the Google algorithm information documents that were leaked late over Memorial Day weekend, people are looking at that as a way to game the system. And they're like, oh, now we know all these metrics. And I think the healthier way is to consider not how are you going to be at the top of the search results page, but how are you going to provide value to someone that reads your content?

Mandy York
0:16:35
And so, whether that's, like we said, speaking in a conversational tone, making it easy to understand and grasp providing resources, whether that is walking someone by the hand through the journey of working with you or using a specific product or service, you know, whatever that may be, if you go out there with the intent to help other people, the rest of it will come out in the wash. Because right now we don't even know what soap we're putting in the wash. Google doesn't know. Right. No, that makes that makes so much sense. And again, it plays back into they ask you answer,

Alex Winter
0:17:08
and it plays into the mentality of meeting people where they are because the more honest you can be, the more genuine you can be, the more trust you're going to build and the better chance you have of somebody making a purchasing decision. And here's the deal, people are very smart these days. People have a lot of research tools, a lot of AI tools. So if you try to rank number one on search and you still have that old school mindset

Alex Winter
0:17:31
of like if we rank number one, our odds are this much better, that's not really true anymore. People are smarter these days. They're wiser. So you really have to position the content first and think about your end users first before anything else and then experiment with these tools when you can and try to leverage them in a meaningful way that's not, I don't know, shady, I guess is a good word to say.

Mandy York
0:17:51
Yeah.

Mandy York
0:17:52
Yeah.

Mandy York
0:17:53
It's a whole big mix.

Alex Winter
0:17:54
Yeah. Anything we haven't talked about with Google's new AI features that we should talk about?

Mandy York
0:18:02
The only other thing that I would say is that the best thing that you can do right now is to optimize your content, look at it with a laser focus. I talked to a lot of clients who say, oh, that article has been performing great for 10 years and all of a sudden it's tanked.

Mandy York
0:18:25
And I go and look at it and I'm like, oh, well, this is a big sales pitch.

Mandy York
0:18:26
You know, this isn't, this isn't helpful content. And, and you have to kind of take your feelings out of it, even though it may hurt, even though it may hurt your feelings. Um, you take your, take your feelings out of it and really think about if you were in the client or the customer's shoes, would you want to read that article or watch that video or listen to that podcast?

Mandy York
0:18:48
And if the answer is no, you would scroll past it. You've got to make a hard decision about what you're going to do with that piece of content. So many, you interface with a lot of great companies.

Alex Winter
0:18:57
You work with a lot of businesses, you train and coach sales and marketing professionals. Um, but you know, there's, there seems to be in the air this like looming, um, recession or talk of recession globally and how that's going to affect business and what business owners really should be doing, especially when we're talking about these new tools and these AI tools. So what would you recommend

Alex Winter
0:19:17
there? What's a good take or your take on it from just being on the

Mandy York
0:19:22
front lines? Yeah, for sure. So one thing definitely does have to do with the other. So, I mean, all of those amazing, wonderful businesses that I work with, you know, they're kind of deranking a lot of things and upsetting a lot of traditional SEO strategy which is causing people to fall in page views. And then it's like this perfect storm of that

Alex Winter
0:19:52
happening paired with the economy so like you have a shifting of the tide with AI and then also the economy at the same moment so it's sort of unprecedented.

Mandy York
0:20:03
It is, it is. And as those things kind of swirl together, as that storm kind of culminates, what ends up happening is you've got a lot of people in every sector, every sector, every locality, every level, small, medium, enterprise, huge businesses

Mandy York
0:20:19
that are feeling the impacts of that. You've got people whose leads are down and they're going, oh, is it the economy? Is it all of these AI search results? Is it, did we do something wrong? Is it, you know, what do we do?

Mandy York
0:20:31
And the answer that I have been giving people is it's all of those things. It's not that you have messed up. It's not that you've done something wrong. It's not that you're a bad business. It's, it's the, the landscape of things right now is rough. And I think it's important that we say that out loud,

Mandy York
0:20:49
that AI is making it hard for content out here. The economy is making it hard for businesses out here. And so those things together lead us to have less incoming leads to our website for many, many people. And what I always say is maybe used to, you had a hundred leads a day and you closed 10 of them.

Mandy York
0:21:12
Now you have 10 leads a day and you need to still close 10 of them. So instead of having a 10% close rate now you need a 100% close rate. So what are we going to do to get it? To make the same volume of sales, the same strategic business moves, the real answer is if we can't bring our leads up you must bring your conversion rate up. And bringing that conversion rate up rests on, as Marcus said, how well are you feeding that audience? Once they have made it to your website, which in order for them to be a lead, then they've been on your website, right?

Mandy York
0:21:50
Can they go to the Learning Center and find helpful human content that helps them understand what they're doing? Can they download a guide that thoroughly explains everything that they need? Just ignore the idea of ranking first on Google entirely for a second. And are you giving people the information they need in order to make an informed buying decision with your company? And are you giving it to them in a way that they can understand? And if so, and you're doing your very, very best with that.

Mandy York
0:22:20
That's when your conversion rates are going to go up. And that's when you're going to worry less about the number of total volume leads that are coming in. And you're still going to enjoy the same amount of success from your business that you've grown accustomed to. I love that.

Alex Winter
0:22:34
No, it's really well said quality over quantity. It's really shifting the mindset and it's, it's totally possible. It may, it may take a little adjustment, but it is totally possible.

Mandy York
0:22:42
Well, sure.

Alex Winter
0:22:43
Very cool. Great insights.

Alex Winter
0:22:44
Mandy, I love talking with you.

Alex Winter
0:22:45
Thanks for being on the show today. If anyone has any follow-up questions about AI Overview, Google, or anything we talked about, how can they get in touch with you?

Mandy York
0:22:56
Yeah, absolutely. Message me on LinkedIn anytime.

Alex Winter
0:23:00
Awesome, awesome. Well, that's our show, folks. Thank you for being here again, Mandy. And for everybody listening and watching, this is Endless Customers. I'm Alex Winter.

Alex Winter
0:23:08
See you on the next episode.

Mandy York
0:23:09
Bye!