#18 - "Is AI Breaking the Internet…or Rebuilding It?"

In this episode of Over the Bull, we break down how AI is rewriting the rules of search, SEO, and online marketing — and what that means for brands trying to stay relevant.

From zero-click search to AI-generated content flooding the web, we read directly from some of the most respected sources in the industry. Hear what marketing leaders and researchers from Bain & Company, SearchPilot, Forbes, and Tom’s Guide are saying — word-for-word — about the biggest shifts happening right now.

This 30-minute read-through strips away interpretation and commentary, letting the original insights speak for themselves.

DISCLAIMER:
The content shared in this podcast episode includes direct quotations from published articles, used for educational and commentary purposes under the principles of fair use. All credit is given to the original authors and publications. This podcast does not claim ownership of the sourced material. Full links to each article are included in the show notes.

1. https://www.bain.com/insights/goodbye-clicks-hello-ai-zero-click-search-redefines-marketing/

2. https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/research/ai-search-seo-traffic-impact/

3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2025/05/02/ais-search-engine-shake-up-6-considerations-for-brands-and-marketers/

4. https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/ai-slop-is-killing-search-results-heres-how-to-stop-it

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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Welcome to the new format of Over the Bull. I'm Ken. I'm your host. Now, before we get started, because we will be using quotes from other publications, I do want to share a quick disclaimer with you. The content shared in this podcast episode includes direct quotations from published articles used for educational and commentary purposes under the principles of fair use. All credit is given to the original authors and publications. This podcast does not claim ownership of the source material. Full links will be supplied along with the show. So thanks so much for tuning in. I look forward to talking to you a little bit this week. You know, there are some things that are going on with the web. And, you know, we've been talking a lot about it with artificial intelligence. And it's just interesting. It's overwhelming sometimes, you know, when you're trying to convey to people how dramatic it's truly going to be as things start to change more and more and how you engage with the Internet and how people look for things. And, you know, as an effect, it's going to affect your business as well. So let's jump into the first topic here. And this is the rise of artificial intelligence-driven technology. Zero click search. Now the source of this is Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI. Zero click search redefines marketing and it's by Bain and Company. And again, the link will be provided. So let's take a look at a few concepts here. First of all, what is a zero click search? I mean, that's kind of interesting, isn't it? A term probably some of you haven't heard yet. So let's start pulling some quotes from the article and kind of break this down a little bit. So marketing executives, this is a quote, tailor their customer strategies around search results, but search is changing quickly. AI search engines and AI summaries on results page are taking a bite out of click-through traffic. Baines also found through their research that 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results at least 40% of the time. One more quote. Now, the rise of AI search engines and generative summaries have upended traditional search behavior, delivering answers directly on search results pages and removing the need for users to click through to another site. Most marketers today are operating under outdated assumptions. In a survey of global marketing decision makers, 60% said their companies still rely on traditional search results as their primary source of inbound traffic. So I'm going to stop there for a second. And let's talk a little bit about this zero click. So zero A couple episodes back, I was mentioning that there was an article, and they were showing an example, and I believe it was Forbes' website. And what they've seen was a decrease in their traffic, if I remember the article correctly. And it wasn't because they're ineffective. It was because artificial intelligence is pulling information from their site, putting it directly into the chat, given the answer. And so therefore, people are no longer clicking on the link to go to the website because they get their information. Why would they do that? And so the idea is this zero click. So see, there was zero click involved in that transaction. A question is asked. In an AI situation like ChatGPT, an answer is given by pulling information and probably restructuring it from a company like Forbes, for example, and there's no click in the transaction. So if you think about it, the way we've been monitoring or tracking meaningful actions have been through things like what happens when someone comes to the website. Well, now we have zero click. Right. Meaning they don't click to the website. And as you can see, a lot of people aren't ready for this type of transaction. And then we see the research that shows 40 percent of the time, you know, people are using AI as their stopping point for their searches. So this could be kind of almost staggering if you own a business because you're like, well, how do I do that? And what does that look like? Now, you're not alone because most marketing companies and agencies are not prepared for this either. I'm still seeing people who are doing outdated practices that are still working right now. And unfortunately, it's going to not be a good situation ultimately. It's kind of like you're using 8-track cassette tapes and CDs are coming and cassettes, we're going to completely bypass those and people are investing a lot of money in 8-track. So a lot of these outdated practices with Google Ads and things like that where you're building these special landing pages that are low quality, those are going the way of the dinosaur if all this continues to trend the way that it's going right now. So when you also look at these, one of the comments here was the rise of AI search engines and generative summaries. So we covered this a little bit last week. A couple of the new acronyms you want to be aware of is GAIO, which is Google AI Overviews. And also you will see AIO, obviously what that means. And what you're seeing is that people are now wanting to be more and more in these areas. And so this article continues to show that the idea that the way people are looking is going to change. So if you own a trade business, the question becomes at some point, will your prices, your terms, your booking element all be right there within an AI interface? And if so, how do you present the data so you even show up in an AI model? Right now, it looks like certain websites will be more impacted than other websites. I think that trade businesses and things like that, I think it's still very relevant to build things the way they are. And best practices are going to be more important than ever with web development. Now, what this means is... The freelancer who's downloading themes and using ChatGPT to create content and putting in stock photography, those websites, which really aren't a good presence anyway. I mean, it's a cheap solution, but really it's going the way of the, all that's going the way of the dinosaur. And I've got some really interesting information that'll further play into that. So here's another comment. rather than thinking about clicks and backlinks, brands must figure out how to be present in the AI-generated summary itself. So you see, everybody's seeing this thing going on, and everybody understands that this is something that has to be addressed. And so if you're not hearing people talk about this, then they're not clued in. And it doesn't matter if it's a big agency. It doesn't matter if it's a mom and pop shop, web design company or whatever. If they're not giving you answers in how they're going to address this, then you're barking up the wrong tree. Just think that as this becomes more and more, if you're not on the train now and then you're going to react, you know, this is going to move so fast that you're going to have a hard time reacting at the last moment to the changes that are going on within the web. So remember, I was telling you that credibility is the new currency of the Internet with businesses. So listen to this quote. The shift means prioritizing relevance, authority, and data quality because the models behind these summaries reward accurate and authoritative content. So what does this say? It's telling you that you need to be a specialist and you need to start publishing content and giving good information about your business and become an authority in your field. Now, in a world where people are cranking out content using AI and things like that, it's quickly becoming so noisy that good, strong content is becoming... harder to find on the web. And again, we're going to talk about that a little bit more as we go. And check this one out. This is a great quote, in my opinion. It's no longer about tricking an algorithm. It's about feeding the machine clean, useful data showing up where your customers are asking questions. Now, that's huge. That's a huge statement. So let's talk about that a little bit. We talked about this a couple episodes ago. But the idea is that if you've had your website built from an SEO guy, a lot of times you would see like where they put a big long list of cities at the bottom of the footer of a website, or they may use kind of content that's trying to like artificially position your business in a way that's almost– literally trying to trick search engines. And what's going on here is it's saying, no, really what you've got to do now is you've got to think about the questions that your customers are asking in their journey to buying your goods and services. And you need to do the homework to validate that those questions are the ones that are being asked. Don't just, you know, come up with a series of questions and then start creating questions content that answers those questions. Now, why this is important, because remember, AI or large language models, these are not sentient. We can't even define sentient beings, by the way. Consciousness and awareness is not something that humans can really understand. So it's hitting a moving target when we say that something's going to become sentient at some point. Because it could also be so programmed that it would mimic what we would consider a sentient being. However, it's completely not. Now, of course, this is all subjective and it kind of gets crazy. And with the advent of all the sci-fi stuff, you know, people's minds and imaginations kind of go crazy. But the idea is. is that you want to provide answers to those questions. So when artificial intelligence is looking for the most relevant answers to those questions, you've got content already set up in a way that it can see it and then it can refer to those answers. Because when you think about search engines, think like this. It used to be where you would have what you would call the sales funnel. Right. So at the top of the sales funnel is where you realize that you need something or want something. And then you do some research. And then once you do the research, you're performing multiple searches on Google or wherever. And then as you move down the path toward making a purchase, then that's kind of the last step other than, you know, wanting to get reviews or things like that. So the idea in this whole sales funnel cycle is if you're talking with with ChatGPT or Gemini or some of these other models that are up and coming, what you're going to find is that this conversational piece will bypass multiple searches. And that entire cycle will all transpire in one quick conversation with artificial intelligence. Now, if it sounds crazy to you, I want you to know I do this right now. I'm working on a sunroom. I'm renovating it behind my house and I'm asking a lot of questions about, you know, stretching screens over large areas or things like that. And what it's doing is it's telling me how to do it. And then I'm asking where to buy a screen. It's given me recommendations. And then I'm asking about, well, do certain screens block out more light than others, which there are according to that research. And then I get to pick based upon the price. And then it gives me links where I can click and go in and buy it. Now, I'm doing this right now. And as you can imagine, as people get more and more used to it, the way that we're doing searches today is is going to feel antiquated. Every generation thinks that we're at the cusp of technology and that we know everything and that we're at the height of all knowledge from the human experience. However, just research something like nutrition. Take a hard look at what we truly don't understand about the food we eat. And talk to a nutritionist and you're going to get answers all over the map. You dig deep enough, you're going to find out that meat has gotten a bad rap since about, you know, what, 1950. And that the carbohydrates roll in the evolution of the food pyramid. I mean, just since the 90s has been dramatic. And so if you think that we're at the cusp of technology because we carry our own cell phones and ask Siri a few questions, I think the world's going to get upended again. And your kids are going to be like, wow, I can't believe you searched like that. I can't believe the Internet was like that. Now, if we move on, I want to move to another article here. And there are several entities that are big into search engine optimization and provide tools to help out with that. And I've used this tool historically. I don't currently use it. It's SEMrush or SEMrush. You may have heard of different pronunciations. But this is a tool that's generally keeping their hand on the pulse of SEO because this is what they do. And so let's talk about a couple of quotes from SEMrush's article. And here's the title of the article. Basically, we studied the impact of AI search on SEO traffic. And here's what they say. First pull quote. included in AI overviews, Google AI mode, chat GPT, cloud, and perplexity, could impact digital marketing and SEO industry traffic and revenue in the coming years. So that's a pretty important topic if you count on the Internet to help drive business. Digital marketing and SEO-related topics may start driving more visitors from AI searches to websites than from traditional search by early 2028. Let's read that again. Digital marketing and SEO-related topics may start driving more visitors from AI search to websites than from traditional search in 2028. And so you're seeing here the first articles talking about zero clicks, and now we're kind of getting a different spin from SEMrush. So you can kind of see the noise and people trying to put it together. Now, none of us can see the future, but... we are seeing that AI is definitely playing a role in both of these models. That's something we can derive from either one. Their next quote is, if the default Google search experience becomes AI mode, this transition could happen much sooner, which, you know, I've got my hand in some resources behind the scenes. And as such, one thing that is a lot of the chatter not publicly known talked about is how fast this is going to be rolled out. And I don't feel privy to talk a lot about that today. But the idea is it's coming and it's going to be sooner than later. Check this one out. ChatGPT weekly active users grew eight times from October 2023 to April 2025 and are now over 800 million. So you see what's going on here. You know, you got the Google, which has been the big gorilla, you know, in Internet marketing for a long time. Now we're seeing that with the advent of all these large language models, we're starting to see that, you know, people are finding their favorite flavor of ice cream as they go. Now, there's also a lot of factors beyond the scope of these articles that are worth at least thinking through a little bit. You see, these models are all predicated on the accuracy of the data and being able to give you good information. That's why I use Google. because Google search engine typically provides you with the most reliable results. And so you get what you need. So you use it again. And that's kind of their market. That's also why they really don't like people trying to do things to make their websites look better than they are, because you're kind of cheating the system and you're devaluing the search results by doing so. And so by not playing by the rules, you're actually causing a lot of problems, right, for them and other search engines. So I forget where I was going with that. But where was I going with that? 1,800 users. I'm not really remembering where I was going with that. But basically when you look at these– oh, here it is. This is what I was going to say. When you look at these models, a lot of them– are coming across, based on my research, as being biased, and they're also not giving a neutral voice to different subjects. And so the problem is, is they're adopting the philosophical bias of the companies that are developing them. And I've seen this in a lot of cases. Now, I've done this with... with ChatGPT in some like, I'll pick like really controversial stuff and just see what it does. And in general, I find that it's a little bit more neutral than the other search engines, but here's kind of the thing. The adoptability of artificial intelligence will be its ability to not try to push a narrative or a bias onto its people and allow people to make their own decisions. Now, of course, there are going to be people that are just going to read headlines and they're going to trust whatever AI tells them. And that's kind of dangerous. We're already seeing, I saw this article, I think I shared in the last podcast, where people are actually developing a psychosis because what you're getting is you're getting this, a confirmation bias, meaning that these AIs are just agreeing with people and confirming that things that aren't right, and it's actually making them think things that they shouldn't think, and it's actually damaging certain people, which I assume they probably had some issues anyway. But if it's reinforcing something that's not true, then you can kind of see those issues. And believe it or not, there's a lot of crazy articles out there about what's going on within that. So the idea is we don't know how that's going to play out either. And these things aren't really figuring into that. But obviously it's dangerous if they're going to do some kind of thought control. And for deep thinkers or people who want to see the alternative view to certain subjects or just want to get a neutral view, if they start to see that these sway in a biased way and pick up on it, then how well they're adopted could be influenced as well. And I have seen it where it's pretty bad, some of these things, how biased they can be. Check this statistic out. The average AI search visitor is 4.4 times as valuable as the average traditional organic search visitor based on conversion rates. Okay, so what is a conversion rate? A conversion rate is a meaningful action. So, for example, if you're trying to generate phone calls, well, that should be a conversion you're tracking. If your Google Ads person is not tracking conversions and they're focused on impressions, then you need to have a talk with your Google Ads person. But the idea is that conversions are 4.4 times as valuable than traditional organic search. Wow. I mean, you know, your business is not about clicks. Your business is about calls, right? And so if we're seeing that it's that much more effective, then it's really relevant that we start thinking through exactly how that's going. Moving on, one of the quotes here is LLMs, remember, large language models. They tend to equip users with all the information they need to make a decision. By the time they reach your site, they are ready to convert. You see that? See how much different that buying cycle is? And that's incredibly different because traditionally we would try to create different places in the person's journey from wanting or needing something to making a purchase. We would try to inject ourselves into different searches along that journey to try to either push them further down the funnel or encourage them to buy, you know, our client's stuff or whatever. And then you're seeing that now it's all being kind of mashed together in one quick conversation. And so as you're seeing this happen more and more, now think about the value that that brings to the consumer. I no longer have to perform three, four, five, ten different searches. Now I can start a conversation about wanting a new pair of shoes or more screen in my sunroom or the best paint to use on my deck. And then I can ask a lot of questions and then I can say, where do I get that? And I get the answers. And so you're seeing that from a consumer perspective, it's much, much more efficient. So moving on, ChatGPT search primarily cites pages that rank 21 or lower in traditional search almost 90% of the time. ChatGPT search primarily cites pages that rank 21 or lower in traditional search almost 90% of the time. That's kind of interesting, huh? That top page thing is... We need to think through that a little bit. Check this out. Reddit and Quora, Q-U-O-R-A, are the most commonly cited domains in Google AI overviews. Now, what's interesting is that you're seeing that almost like what different search engines value may also align... may or may not also align with their philosophical biases, which that would be kind of interesting. So are you playing in Reddit's sandbox? Are you playing Quora's sandbox? Should you? I mean, these are big questions. Half of ChatGPT links point to business or service websites, including that large language models often rely on company websites as key sources. Now, see, this ties back in to exactly how this is going to function on business company style websites. Now, keep in mind, we got the first article where it talks about no click. And here we're talking about how it does still affect websites and traffic and journeys and that. So you can kind of see that it's going to mesh. It's not one or the other. It's not that this article's right and the other one's wrong or whatever. vice versa, what you're going to see is exactly what we see in real life. Different people are going to do different things. And the branches in which the way people will do things moving forward could be significantly different. And people are going to start using more and more what they like. And now here's the other side, too. If we get back to the philosophical bias, you know, if one is leaning a certain way politically or on certain subjects, and then they get a confirmation bias, people tend to migrate toward things that reinforce what they already believe. So, for example, if you believe a certain thing about a religion, then what's going to happen is you migrate toward literature that tells you how great your religious views are, or non-religious views, atheism as well. And then what you do is you migrate toward that content because you want to be reinforced that you're right, and then you're going to start swimming in the same waters as those people. Well, you could imagine that if these AI models are appealing to a certain philosophical view, that people are going to migrate toward those views. philosophical views. So I find all this very interesting, especially when you start to break down exactly how this is going to play. It's almost like you're going to have to hedge your bet in multiple places because business is not supposed to tie in, at least I don't think it is, it does. It really shouldn't tie in a lot of things that oftentimes businesses get drug into, you know. Anyway, I won't keep going any further. You can kind of take that review and take it. So let's move on here and let's talk about AI's search engine shake. Six considerations for brands and marketers. So this is kind of an interesting article. Let's dive into this article. A couple of quotes that I pulled from it. AI has undeniably shaken up numerous industries with marketing and search marketing at the forefront. As Google AI overviews, remember G-A-I-O, increasingly overlap with organic search result, SEO has surged back into the spotlight. So you see now, what they mean by that is back in... There's multiple ways to advertise on the internet. One is paid advertising. Another one is organic SEO. And then you have this SEO kind of like bait and switch with a lot of web people today. Like they'll call local SEO. What they really mean is your Google business profile, essentially. And they're not really thinking about your website and your content. And so there's this idea that they basically try to manipulate it in a way where you think SEO is one thing, but they're talking about something else. This isn't true with everyone, but I see it so often where that's being kind of convoluted. Now, If I'm right, and I think the content that I'm reading is right, it's all going to kind of marry into you've got to kind of have this credibility factor where overall you're more credible. Well, one of the reasons that I'm so down on the Google Ads people who spin up their own pages and run ads to those pages is because it's not contributing to the cumulative effort, the cumulative credibility. And if they start putting these splash pages on your Google business profiles and things like that, they're just creating more confusion. And it may feel good today, but as you're seeing here, it's not going to continue down that path long term. And so preparing and building that cumulative effort and that overall credibility is one of the things that your business needs really needs to kind of process and kind of looking at how this is going. And so part of what they're saying is search engine optimization is search back to the forefront because people are like, wow, I need to be optimized for GAIO. I need to be optimized for citations so that, you know, chat GPT will reference my business when questions are being asked. And so therefore, before I go dump all this content and spend time building it, I'd better get my ducks in a row and know the questions that are being asked and have that technical research performed on the front end. And then if you go the way that most people are going and just start spitting out content from search engines and dropping it on, well, that's where things are going to get kind of hairy as we move forward. Check this out. This is another quote that I liked here. It says, before the rise of AI. So you see, not coming AI. It's here. Searchers often visited multiple websites for comparison. Google AI overviews streamlined this process. So think about this. Think that if you own a company and you offer your product at a certain price point and someone else offers at a price point, you have certain terms, they have certain terms. Now, I often do this in different ways with AI right now for competitive research and things like that. But I'll ask for demographic information, price points, and it gives it right back to me. And so within a question, I can find out all the businesses that are offering a service in an area, and I can find out how much they charge for that service, and I can determine which one that I want to use from that service. And from that and then from there, I can click inside and then look at that business. So you see, it's a lot different because now what happens is people who were traditionally just going to go, well, let me look for this. And then they pick the result that's top of the page. They make a quick decision on if it's something that they feel is worth the cost or not. And then what you're seeing is now they're able to just talk to artificial intelligence. And by talking to it, they can get those comparisons brought up right there in front of them. And so they no longer even have to really do a lot of homework to do comparisons. And so if you're seeing your sales start to decrease or you're seeing different actions taking place, Part of this whole thing is the idea that people are getting smarter on how to use these tools. And they're really not hard to use at all. When I'm driving home, I'll be driving home tonight, and I'm probably going to have a couple questions. And I'm going to click and ask artificial intelligence those questions. And just talk to it like someone's in the passenger side of my car. And I'll probably make a couple decisions about a couple hobbies that I have. And I'm going to check in because... Chat's also notoriously really bad about not getting up-to-date information, especially if it's a niche. For example, if I'm working on programming and I want to know where something's at within an editor like Bubble, then what I'll find is that the information often is not accurate. But they're getting better. They're getting better and better as they go. So let's look at this last quote, and then I want to jump into the flip side of this coin. You want to stay tuned for this. While AI generated content offers efficiency, it also carries risk, including content devaluation and search penalties. AI content still requires, and here we go, human optimization. Are any of you guys out there right now Cranking out content with artificial intelligence and chunking it into your blogs. Are your SEO people, which I know for a fact, they're doing this right now. They're creating, they're just whipping out AI content and throwing it on your site and kind of patting themselves on the back. And then you think they're creating all this content. And in reality, they're just whipping it out with AI. So what's it saying? AI content still requires human optimization. human intervention, human editing the content, human authoritative content. You see, and that goes back to those EEAT principles that we've talked about previously. You don't want to go through this wide gate where you're just cranking out AI content. You want to have your custom information sitting out there that will help you show up as this trend continues to basically spiral at a just hyper speed, whatever rate you want to put to it. Feel free to insert your own nanosecond analogy. So check this out. This is really interesting. This is from a source called Tom's Guide. And here's the title of this. This is crazy. AI Slop. is killing search results, and here's how to stop it. Now, if you remember, I was telling you that I jumped on YouTube three or four weeks ago, and I was looking for something, and I was scrolling through, and there was a famous sports athlete. You will know him if you followed the NBA in the 90s. And he was talking about someone that is playing basketball today. And the thing was, is that I was listening to it and I'm like, wow, that's exactly what I would think. And then I realized it was AI generated. It wasn't even him. And so then I'm like, well, that's the stupidest thing. It's who cares what AI generates as far as what someone said. And then I started going through and then I start seeing all this stuff. AI content. I watched one thing and it was showing, like I watched some MMA stuff and I watched this one thing where this one person was doing this incredible move and then I'm like, oh, that's AI too. Oh, that's AI too. And by the time I was done, I'm like, I don't, I don't care to be on the site because I can't separate what's real and what's not real. I don't really have the time to do it. And I don't really care to play, you know, kids games with something that AI can do. So I believe this is where we're going here. So let's look at a couple of quotes. If you've noticed your Google searches getting worse lately, you're not imagining things. Whether you're looking for the best travel gear or a banana bread recipe or how to fix your Wi-Fi, you're likely wading through a sea of vague, repetitive, AI-generated content. Okay, now, this is huge. This is absolutely huge to stop on this. So here's the thing. Remember, search engines make their, like Google, and in the large language models, the idea is to pull the most relevant content And so they have worked hard over the last 20 years to weed out all the games that were played over the years to kind of like fake or trick the system into bringing your website to the top of search engines. And so now we've got this mess that's starting to happen on the Internet. And what's going to happen is either these search engines– like Google, are going to figure out what to do with it and devalue this junk, or the internet's going to become this mess of AI content that no one cares about and will just frustrate people and will polarize them to use other methods to find what they need. And so you can imagine that if you're contributing to the noise, And Google and other search engines and chat models and large language models, all these are going to figure out how to weed that out. And then you've got a whole sea of this junk on your website, in your blogs or whatever. Then what's going to happen is you're going to get swept up in this whole thing. So if your SEO guy is doing this technique, well, guess what? This is not going to help your business out. Now, of course, there's levels and conversations, but the spirit of that comment is very much the reality of today. Check this quote out. I love it. Welcome to the era of AI slop that's quietly polluting the Internet. Now, if this is happening, this guy's not the only one. You probably have sensed that where you go to the site and you're like, what is this? big article. And by the way, length of article. People have this misconception that some people don't read long articles anymore. Not true. It's the type of content. If you're really interested in digging deep into something, you want more details. So don't fall into this. I've got to say it in five seconds. Think about the type of content and how much research is needed in order to provide good answers. I'm going to read a couple more of these. These are just really fun. What's worse, a lot of this AI-generated content gets rewarded by algorithms because it technically checks the SEO boxes. So what's that say about those SEO boxes moving forward? If they can't weed out the junk, the algorithms are going to have to change. They've got to figure out a way to do it. They've got to figure out a way to figure out what's going on. Now, This leads to a lot of questions about what are you going to do moving forward. But as you can see, these are very relevant and real big problems as we move forward on the Internet. And so what's the answer for your business? It's the same thing we've been talking about here for about a month now. Work on your EEAT scores. Work on creating original content and doing homework as to the questions that are legitimately being asked. It's time to do the real work. Now, of course, this is problematic because if you're an electrician or you have certain trades and you're hiring a marketing team to do it, then you're You've got some tough decisions to make. Who's going to be in control of your voice? And how do you know that they're not using AI or generative content to publish that and then fake you into thinking that they're doing more than they are? And so, you know, I just find this incredibly interesting as I'm going through here because what you're seeing in the background is– Everything that we've been talking about, and I'm no Nostradamus, I just have my hands on the pulse of what I see happening on the internet. And then this cumulative effort, this whole world of, I'm going to pay this person to do this, this person to do that, this person to spit this out, and it's not cohesive, and it doesn't present you as an authoritative resource, you're going to be paying people to spit out content that is going to ultimately hurt your business. And you're going to have a lot of cleanup to do once all this stuff keeps sorting out. Once you see these algorithms start figuring things out, once they start to realize that, hey, people want to see what people are really saying, not these AI generated models. Now, of course, you know, we see them in movies and things like that. Of course, it's entertaining to see it. But when you're looking for real information, If I were to go to YouTube and pull a quote from that video, I would look like– I wouldn't look very intelligent, right? So the idea is that you want real stuff when you need the real stuff and you don't have to fight through all the noise. This also shows that the days of lazy marketing, the days of looking at– going to these websites, these do-it-yourself builders, and putting together these kind of sites that are just kind of basically junk sites. One of the terms used historically was scrape sites. These sites scrape together with content. They're going to die. And so getting serious and hiring someone who's serious about it is actually going to be part of the criteria to put you on the forefront of these issues rather than playing catch-up. And the idea of going cheap, for lack of a better word, or trying to cheat the system is going to blow up. I think one of the first podcasts I talked about was a concept called PBNs, or Private Blog Networks. And this is horrible. It's this cat and mouse game, basically, where what you're seeing is that search engine optimization companies are building all these sites up, and they own all of them, but they try to fake Google into thinking that they don't. And then they interlink these for their clients, and then try to artificially push them to the top of search engines. And, you know, it's just such a dangerous game, especially... As technology is getting better and better, I mean, do you really think they're going to be able to hide this from search engines forever? They're living for the day. And then plus, do you want to get caught up in something like that? Because there are stiff penalties for private blog networks. So if you want to go check that out, you can go check that out. But you want to make sure the people that you're working with are people you can trust that are actually doing real work and not following any of these practices. So a lot to think about and process and discuss with your team, your people that are helping market your company. And then part of the idea is to ask questions. Say, okay, when it comes to large language models or AI or chat GPT, however you want to say it, or Gemini, whatever, Because Gemini is coming, that's why I keep talking about it. I've just seen things behind the scenes on that. That's why I'm bringing that one up a lot. It's just kind of ingrained in my head. But as you're looking at these things, the big question that you need to ask is, what are you doing to research content to see that I'm actually going to be possibly used as a citation? in a conversation. What questions should we build that content around and how do you get there? And if you get an answer like, we're going to talk about it and build it based around a keyword, that's way, way wrong answers. The other thing is, is how are you building the reputation of my company? Are your services contributing to that cause? And if so, how are they contributing to that cause of building my reputation up for my company? And if you're not getting good answers, then you really need to shift gears because I don't know what the percentage is, okay? The bottom line is we are– we don't engage. Like I never– We don't ever recommend a company. We got our own network of companies that we work with that are our partners. And what we do basically is we work in that group because we know we have a certain standard that we want to keep. But I can tell you that we also investigate or have to pull things from other companies within our company, like other marketing firms. And most of the time, the practices that they are using are generated or implemented because it maximizes their revenue for their company, and it's not good for your company. And some of them, frankly, don't have a grasp on marketing. They've just taken some courses on a couple things, or they built their company around one little piece of the puzzle. And that's also going to be extremely problematic moving forward. So hopefully this gives you food for thought. This is kind of like what I want to do, at least as one segment moving forward and over the bowl, is to kind of give you a place where you can look at what's going on from the web. I'll throw a little bit of commentary in between it. And then it gives you food for thought to kind of think about what's happening on the Internet and let you know that, you know, hey, this is real. You know, these websites are not saying this just to say it. You know, these are websites that... Bank on being able to offer valuable insight into what's going on in the world of marketing and the internet. And hopefully what this is going to do is prepare you, give you more confidence to understand what's exactly happening, and then be able to think about your business and your best practices for your company so that you can be successful in as this revolution on the internet continues to gain momentum. So until next time, this is Ken with Over the Bull. I hope you have a great week and take care of yourself out there.

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