#32 - ChatGPT Atlas vs. Google

OpenAI’s new browser, Atlas, is changing how people find information online. It’s powered by ChatGPT and built to act—not just search. In this episode, Ken breaks down what Atlas really is, how it threatens Google’s dominance, and what businesses can do to stay visible in an AI-driven world. Expect honest talk about data, discovery, and the difference between hype and real opportunity.

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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Is Atlas going to crush your business on this episode of Over the Bull? Thank you so much for joining me. Um man, the internet, um, you know, I don't like the word revolution, and I really don't like hyperbole. I mean, if you go to YouTube and you listen to some of these people, and forgive me, okay, I'm gonna be maybe a little blunt today, but you know, those goofy surprised faces, and then you jump in and then they give you all the sensationalistic talk about how this is going to be that. And, you know, it's just this this idea that sensationalism and surprise faces sell, and unfortunately, it it still does. So um uh I'm gonna try to you know stay somewhere in the middle on this thing, um, because I don't think that does really any good, and uh I'm not here to sell goofy faces. So um let's talk about Atlas today. Now, the internet, uh, the way that it's changing and the degree at which it's changing is creating a lot of problems. Now, if you're on your game, these problems are opportunities, they're not problems. But for a lot of software out there, a lot of freelancers, a lot of design firms, um, they are still following old practices. And when I say old, let's talk nine months. Following old practices, not adopting new philosophies, and they are bankrupting some of these plans that clients have been trying to build up forever. When I say clients, I mean businesses. Look no further than last week. We're in the middle of doing some huge cleanup for a brand new client because the agency that they had was using things that looked like they were link farms, low quality backlinks, they weren't properly tracking conversions in Google ads, um horrible website setup landing pages were completely irrelevant, they're not going to be effective. Um, the whole nine yards. And so if you could imagine you take someone like that and we introduce artificial intelligence, they're gonna use it as a weapon. You know, they're going to use it to create AI-generated blogs, uh, make it look like they're handwriting stuff. Uh they're going to, you know, oversell it, tell you that they're doing the latest and greatest and you no longer need to participate in content. Um, they're going to tell you what you want to hear because, let's face it, as the owner of a business, last thing you'll be doing is contributing to a blog, right? Or content. You want someone to do it for you. Now, the unfortunate truth is you're the expert in your business. But that's also the fortunate truth because that gives you opportunity if you take advantage of it. If you turn it over to your web guy, you're going to get what you get. And I've seen what that looks like, and I'm telling you, it ain't pretty because not only is this going on, but search engines like Google, the Titans, and yes, Google is still the Titan out there. Um, it's reacting to this junk AI-only content, and it's devaluing that content. Look no further than YouTube's demonetization of AI content. They know it's too much, people don't want to see it, and they want something different. And so it's kind of a beautiful thing if we can navigate the waters. But make no mistake, we're navigating waters and we're reacting in real time. Even even the ones of us who are trying to be diligent and follow it and you know, spending a lot of our waking hours just trying to keep up with what's going on. So, as the owner of a business, your biggest challenge is to find that person that knows what they're doing. And this whole idea that never was a good idea, these do-it-yourself systems, uh, inconsistent uh branding, uh, these web packages that don't really do anything, themes that are canned, all these things are just becoming more and more obvious that they're hurting your opportunity for success on the web. I know you're chasing, you're chasing the lower price point. I get that. You're thinking you can do it yourself and save money, and somehow you're cheating the system. You're not. Okay, you're not, and it's only going to get worse, especially when we talk about Atlas. So exactly what is Atlas? Well, you know, you've got Google Chrome and Safari and Firefox and Brave and all that. Well, this is an AI-first browser made by OpenAI, the people of ChatGPT, and uh right now it's only available for the Mac. Um, but I downloaded it and I played around with it, and I'm seeing the beauty of it. Now, the thing is, is all the stuff that you're doing for Google or have people doing for Google, assuming that they're still following best practices, those things are not going to play well with what's going on here. Now, there is some overlap. There are things that you can do, and I'm going to talk to you about those things that you can do to kind of stay alive as things are moving. But here's what you're going to see if you're not careful. Because remember, the tech companies are trying to react to the junk content. They are their algorithms are being adjusted. The freelancers are trying to shortcut or design firms, the one who really don't care. They're just trying to automate as much as they can to make as much as they can for as little work as they can. And you, as a business owner, want to save money and be on the cutting edge. And so you're maybe inclined to chase some of these rainbow unicorn um sales pitches that make you think that they've got AI figured out. And uh so there, it's the perfect storm, guys. I mean, this is just absolutely the perfect storm for opportunity and disaster. You know, I'm sure that uh below beautiful sailing ships, there are um graveyards of uh ships beneath them from making bad mistakes. Are you gonna be in the graveyard? Are you gonna be selling your ship? So the idea is this this search engine's different. So if you can remember, you know, the thing is that humans are in general, you get one person who does something, and then you see other people follow behind it, and they basically mimic it. So, like if you look at the search engines, you go look at Google search engine, and then you go look at Bing or one of these others, and you're gonna see they basically look the same, right? You'd perform a search, you get results, and what you used to do was if you were interested in something, you would start searching based on you trying to learn it, and then eventually you might buy something down the line. So that could be very short if you're looking at movie tickets, it could be something long if you're looking at buying cars. Now, with this new uh browser that's out there, this idea of using that same model where you get the 10 results and the map listing and all that, that's out the window. That's way different. And what you do to show up in those results is even more different. And and so the idea is it's it's changing the tried and true method of what people are used to, but now people are getting more used to conversations with uh uh things like ChatGPT and by extension this new browser uh that again you can download on your uh your Mac. Uh you know, it's uh called Atlas, A-T-L-A-S. And uh so now what you're seeing is all of them are doing these AI overviews. Um, even though the format still looks like what you're used to on Google and uh Bing, you're seeing that these AI overviews are starting to dominate more of the top positions, which means you need to be ready, not just for this browser, but for all browsers. But that's good news because at least there's some consistency, at least there's still a North Star we can kind of follow as we try to prepare our businesses for success. And we also know what not to do. Uh now the question is, are the people you're working with going to help you with that, or are you just going to get a lot of bad advice that's outdated, you know, you know, whopping nine months. I see I see businesses and uh freelance agencies still making mistakes that were mistakes five years ago, and they're still touting it as though it's something reasonable. I still see these junk landing pages being built for Google Ads. That's gone. That does not help your credibility. Um you're gonna have to shift, and it's it's gonna be painful. But that's what it is. It's it's an AI-first model. You should download it and check it out because this is gonna kind of show you and kind of introduce you to the new waters in which we're going to be presented with. And what we could see are maybe dramatically different results because you know, if you look at Google, you know, look at their revenue that they generate from paid ads. That's a large part of their revenue. They can't give that up. So right now, uh you're looking at uh uh Atlas, and there's no paid ads for Atlas yet. Um but perplexity, yeah. Uh from my understanding, you can still buy ads out there. Uh looking through my notes, yep, you can. And so let's talk about um what is this reality check? You know, let's let's put the goofy faces excited these these things aside and let's get really kind of sober-minded about this. First is um if it's optimistic, it it could be an adoption or uh uh a disruption. And so if you look at the different parts of a sales cycle, it could start to siphon off a large part of that uh moving forward, depending upon how Google reacts. And can Google react? Because again, they they can't disrupt their revenue stream, which I think could leave a door open for Atlas and things like perplexity to kind of sneak in. And the other side is that um these companies, let's face it, their customer service is the big guys, their customer service isn't good at all. I mean, matter of fact, it's horrible. Uh, even the way they've they've tried to uh do different things over the years, it's just not been what I would call optimal customer service. You know, it's kind of like you know, you do it our way because, you know, we're we're the only game in town. And so a lot of our clients we're seeing they want the new game in town and they want them to be successful. Um so challenging Chrome's dominance is is definitely not going to be easy. AP News points that out. Um, but the shift and the repercussions from a marketing perspective are definitely going to change. Okay, so let's jump right into this. Um I want to talk to you about what you can do to optimize for Atlas and then also play nice with everything that's there. Hedge your bet, work on everything, and try to keep your head above water as you go. So the first is make the facts on your website machine readable. Okay, make sure you look at schema. If you go to schema.org, that's s-ch-h-e-ma-.org, you'll see all the different kinds of schemas that are available to put on your website. Is your web developer talking about schema? When it comes to FAQs, are they asking you to create the questions or are they providing you with research questions that you need to answer? You see, you no longer guess. The guessing game's out, but humanizing the content is in more than ever. And so doing the opposite is going to get you in trouble. Doing it the right way is going to help you out. Strengthen your identity or your entity graph. Um, consistent nap score. Um, this is really, really important. Uh, we have a special tool that just does your nap score optimization. That stands for name, address, and phone number. And so what we want to do is you want to get out there and you want to use a tool. We have a tool that we use to do that, and uh it produces really good results. There are other tools that go out and also help you with your nap score. Uh, if you're interested, integers design can help you out with that. If not, just do uh do a little bit of homework on that and then try to uh talk to your vendor about NAPScore. And if they just talk about going into your Google business and optimizing it, and that's as far as they talk about, really bad sign, guys. That's a really bad sign if they're talking about that. Um you want to be source worthy. Okay, so the idea is you want to have evidence-backed explainers, checklists, comparisons uh without bound citations. Now, what that means is you want to become an authority. Okay, go back and check out EEAT principles on our previous podcast and understand how important it is that your business become an authority in its field. You're not going to become an authority by using things to uh AI to create you blog articles that are generic. You're going to need to insert humanized um content in that mix. We have a really neat recipe where we're we're actually mixing that up and we actually give it to the client to humanize content. And we we have different ways to inject uh human factors into it. You really do want the best of both worlds here. AI is not your enemy, but it's also not your blind, the guide that's just going to take you everywhere you want to go. Um you want to also build your structure for extraction. You want to add short executive summaries, tables. Um, you want to make sure you use images. You don't want it to be all text. You want to make sure you have rich pages. Um facts are huge, SKUs, pricing, locations, hours, as much of that stuff as you can put into it. Um then you want to track your AI presence. You want to be able to track your mentions and citations and answer engines and then fill the gaps wherever you are not showing up. There are great tools to do that. Um hrefs has got some really good tools to help you out with that. And then make sure that you're doing some very basic stuff, like you want clear call to actions, you want a frictionless booking checkout process, and you want to have action schemas in place. So here's the thing: this all sounds all nerdy and technical, but the reality is, is this is what your marketing people should be talking to you about. Are they talking to you about that? Are they asking you to give them images? Are they talking to you about what you need to do on social to become more relevant? Are they talking to you about posting to your Google business? Are they doing these things? Or are we talking template, send me over some stuff and let's make a few changes and run paid ads? What are they doing here? All right, so um this is important uh for you to think about it. And also what you probably want to do is you want to play around with perplexity. I would I would get in there and and run some tests in perplexity and just see what's going on. I mean, we're doing so much to uh with a lot of clients that uh just getting all the current site content up and everything has been a challenge. So what you need to do, in my opinion, as the owner of a business, is get a hold of a Mac, download Atlas. If you're not playing with Chat GPT, get on it, download the app for ChatGPT, talk to ChatGPT, and you're going to see a stunning world that's um here. It's not around the corner, it's not tomorrow, it's here. And believe it or not, people have jettisoned big tech in favor of using these engines. So that's a lot to kind of uh absorb and think about today. I'm actually going to leave the podcast here because I really think it's a good place for you to go to start meditating on exactly what's going on. Carefully consider the team that you're using. Ask yourself if they're on the edge, chasing the edge, or reacting. Now, we're all reacting to some extent, and we're all feeling our way around to some extent because of the movement and how fast it's going. But those few tips that I've offered you at least will point you in the direction and give you sound processes. Now, um, I will close in telling you that the games that have been played to try to manipulate search engines and that still work, think about putting your cities at the bottom of a page. Think about um poor backlinks, think about some of these other strategies that people have used, these little dinky landing pages to send Google ads to. These things are going to become more and more toxic. And you need to avoid it. You need to clean up and find good people to help you out. All right, guys, that's all I got for the day. I hope you have a great weekend. I'm winding this thing up on a um Friday afternoon. And uh, by the way, I'm I'm sorry that I'm a little bit late getting some of these out. Um just had a uh a grandson, our first grandson, and uh man, it's just uh kind of put us in a little bit of a uh spiral. Plus, we've been so busy helping out clients that are trying to navigate through it and have had poor experiences that we've just been extremely busy. Uh so that's why we moved the uh the podcast over from Wednesday to Fridays. So uh until we meet again, thanks so much. This is Ken with Over the Bull.

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