#61 - 4,651 to 63 Overnight

One business watched its Google reviews drop from 4,651 to 63 overnight. Terrifying... until you understand what's actually happening. On this episode of Over the Bull, Ken Carroll connects two stories the local SEO world is treating as separate: Google's June 24 spam update and the wave of disappearing reviews and review responses. They're not two stories. They're the same one. Google turned up the sensitivity on its anti-spam machine, and the agencies cranking out AI HTML sites and bot review responses are finally getting caught... but so are some businesses who did nothing wrong.

Inside this episode:

Why the June spam update changed the game (Google now polices AI-generated answers, not just rankings)
Who's really in the crosshairs, and who's sitting at the bottom of the ocean when it goes wrong
The Don't-Panic Playbook: exactly what to do if your reviews start slipping
Why EEAT ... Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust ... is your best insurance
The $500 "AI website in a box" scam making the rounds, and how to spot it
A first look at a new series: The Bull Sheet

If your reviews are real, they're not gone forever. The system that pulled them is the same one built to give them back. Here's how to stay on the right side of it.

Transcript

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The case of the vanishing Google Reviews on this episode of Over the Bull. Guys, it's coming. And it's coming hard and faster than you can imagine. So for all of you who are using AI-generated HTML websites, AI review responses, and all that AI content, this is a little crass, but I got a noise I want you to hear. Hold on one second. Let me get it pulled up. So I think you get the gist of it. There's a lot going on in the world of Google and the internet, and the idea was, you know, going back several years now, we saw YouTube cracking down on artificial intelligence-based content. I personally remember jumping on, and where I started to see the problem was the greatest basketball player of all time. And no, he was in the 90s, and MJ is his initials. This guy, uh, he was shown on YouTube as saying things about another guy who's not that guy, and basically saying he was saying things about that other person who was claiming to be as good as that guy. And uh anyway, I watched it and I thought it was interesting, and then I found out, oh, that's AI. That's not the real deal. So from that point on, you know, you can kind of see the toxicity. And I don't think I'm the only one who ran across this kind of junky stuff and got tired of it, and then it started hurting people as far as, you know, uh, well, not people, it started hurting YouTube in terms of what people were watching and listening to because no one wants to look foolish. No one wants to say this person said this, and in reality, they never said that. So the whole deep fake thing and all that jazz started happening. And anyway, um, now we've got this little bit of a war here because we have this history of agencies who have cheated and used uh different AI engines to build content and respond to reviews and do a bunch of this bot style stuff. And we've been telling you here that Google's not going to put up with it. These search engines are not going to put up with it because they want real content to come to the top of their search engines that's based on good credible information. They don't want the junk. They don't want the AI junk. And so what happened was was that in these reviews, and I don't know in this particular instance exactly what happened, but I can tell you we are witnessing in real time Google scrubbing, and they are scrubbing. Okay, so don't panic. This isn't a hack, and it's not going to be permanent if your reviews are going a little bit sideways necessarily. Now it depends on, you know, have you been a good good little boy or girl or uh have you not been, because if you're caught up in this net, then things can go sideways quick. But this should be a warning to you. Okay, there are agencies out there, and they are building these AI, HTML websites and going across and telling you what they can do, and they're selling you eye candy, and the eye candy is going to bite you. Just like these Google ads that are being run to these little micro sites and not your real website, it is going to bite you. I've been telling it now for some time. It's coming, it's coming. And this is a big signal right now that credible human EEAT. If you've not watched our podcast on EEAT, don't even listen to the podcast. Just jump over to Google and Google what EEAT is. Do a little bit of homework, and then ask yourself, are you following these principles? Or is the agency that represents your business following these principles? Because keep in mind, when you have someone representing your business on the internet, they are going to control arguably, well, if they do a decent job, more eyes that will judge your company than anything else you do. Now think about that. Are you trusting someone else to do it? Are you letting them just whip out content? Are you really using human content? Because guys, we're seeing it. We're seeing the sweep. So obviously, uh, this is over the bull, and my name is Ken. And here's what I want to do. You know, today I want to talk to you about two stories that have been blowing up local SEO forums this month, and everybody's treating them as separate. Okay, but but they're not. It's the same story, it's just two different chapters. Now, what's actually changed with Google's June spam update and why reviews started disappearing, and what that means for you, and what to actually do is what we're going to talk about here. Okay. So here's the headline, and it ranks from about June 24th or so. Google rolled out a spam-focused update. Okay, now it was global uh in about two days, and it was fast, and it was heavy. Okay, we're talking about, you know, Mike Tyson in the 90s heavy. Like, you know, you you walk in the middle of the ring before the uh before the uh Star Spangled Banner is complete, the other guy's laying on the ground. I mean, that that hard that fast. Okay, so the big shift is Google isn't just policing search rankings anymore. It's policy manipulation of AI-generated answers. Okay, the bar for is this trustworthy went up across the board. Okay, so think about that. Is this content trustworthy? So what does that mean for all of that content, all of that website building that's going on where people are thinking they're cheating the system? Now the cheaters have always been there. The cheaters have been the cheaters, and there's always going to be the cheaters trying to rig the system and do things that they shouldn't do and make a quick buck. We know it. But you know who's sitting at the bottom of the ocean in that shipwreck? Businesses like you, not them. They cash out, they keep going, and they chase the next big thing, and they're just turning and burning as they go. You're the one who has to worry about that ship sitting at the bottom of the ocean. Now, is it worth it? And how do you use AI? Because I'm telling you right now, artificial intelligence is not the enemy. Let me say that one more time. Artificial intelligence is not the enemy. It's using a tool in an abusive way, similar to where if someone has the capability to do something nuclear, they can power a city or they can blow it up. It's the same thing with artificial intelligence. Okay, so we're doing some fabulous things with AI, but when you're watching this, I got it, it's kind of nice seeing this come to roost. It's kind of nice seeing the bad guys' content and what they're trying to shortcut, and then seeing Google having to respond because that content is no good. And honestly, it's been hurting search results for some time. I think um probably, gosh, about a year ago now, one of the podcasts, we were talking about the type of uh jot that was coming up in search results. And guys, this has happened since the advent of search engines. Now, Google's a search engine. Um they see something, they see someone cheating, and they react to it. They see things that hurt their product, which is giving good search results, and guess what they do? They react, and they reacted hard in this one. So, in a world where credibility is now keen, real content is now key, what does that say when you're running your Google ads to these little pages that are sitting out in Never Neverland, not running to your real business website, diluting or confusing your business? Guys, I'm telling you, it's coming. It's coming. Be prepared. We just saw a big example of this, and it was a big, big example of this. Okay, so let's talk about the review follow uh follow out. So the same window was this update. Businesses started watching review counts drop. Now, this is not a coincidence. It's the same reinforcement engine and its redlining, it's running hot. Now, let me paraphrase what Google said. When their systems detect suspicious reviews, they take a range of actions, including removing reviews and temporarily pausing reviews to prevent abuse. And they're investigating and will restore any reviews that were incorrectly removed. You see what they're doing here. They don't want to upset the Apple Cart. They don't want to upset the businesses, but their product is being damaged. And they're in damage control mode. And they're not just sweeping the floors. I mean, there's a big dumpster being backed up in the in the yard, and they're throwing things up, the windows, the doors, and everything else to get this thing under control. I mean, the infestation is here and they realize that. Okay, now how do those shortcuts feel when you get caught on this leg of it? You see, the agencies like it because what they can do is they can show you articles and they can show you this junk that they're producing, and it looks like it's a lot. And when you say aye, you can produce a lot. Now, the problem is that a lot is hurting you. Okay, it's like a cancer that you don't know exists yet, and someone just keeps feeding you junk in order to increase the the problem that you got. Okay, now here's the catch, guys. No timeline is given. And incorrectly removed is the tell. They know the net is catching legit reviews too. This is friendly fire. This is what you do when you have a disease. You go in, you cut it out. You have to get rid of some of the good with the bad. They've got to stop it. Okay. Thank you, spammers who are using AI incorrectly. Am I right? Thank you for causing problems for all of us trying to do the best we can. But what it is underneath is good. Because what this means is the cheaters can't cheat. The guys who are playing by the book are going to win. The ones who are really trying to do their job and legitimately run a legitimate business on the internet, they're going to win. And there's no way to gain the system. Now it's taken a while to get caught up. Remember, these search engine companies are huge. I mean, there's bureaucracies. But when they see the negative, they will react. Okay. So here we go. Let's do the don't panic playbook. Okay. So first thing is don't delete anything or mass flagged stuff in a panic. Um, you can make that even look more suspicious. Okay, so don't do that. You got damage, you just don't want to gut it all out. You want to screenshot and document your review count now so you can have a before and after. Now, of course, this is just in preparation, but you want to do that. You want to be prepared. Okay, keep running real reviews the normal way. Don't suddenly blast 50 review requests in a day. That pattern is exactly what the spam system flags. Okay, this is this is the problem when you hire SEO companies and you hire these other entities because they go out and they do things in a non-realistic way. They're not trying to legitimately do it, they're trying to artificially prop your business up so that you think they do real good. That's what these Google Ads guys are doing too. And they've been winning. Okay, I'm not gonna lie to you, I know of I know of a certain company out there, and they're winning in certain ways, and they're using old school techniques. And none of the credit for all those ads that they're running to those little scrap uh pages, none of it's really helping the business's reputation overall. And of course, now we've got to be patient. Google said they're gonna restore the incorrect uh pulled reviews. Now this is painful, but the fix is on their side, not yours. Okay. If the reviews are real, they're not gone forever. The system that pulled them is the same one that's supposed to give them back. Now here's the reframe. A lot of people are reading this as Google is broken. Now, the sharper read is Google is raising the cost of faking it. That's the long-term win for honest people who are trying to run an honest business. The bad guys are getting called. Granted, there's a little bit of repercussions on that. But would you rather them get called now and clean it up now, or let this thing get completely out of hand? I applaud the move. Okay. So here's the thing: real expertise, real reviews, real content. Google is pushing hard to rewarding businesses that are genuinely what they claim to be. All right, so this is the market finally paying off legitimacy. Expertise, experience, authority, and trust. I think I got those backwards. Let me look. Yeah, it's actually experience, expertise, authority, and trust. E E A T. Doesn't matter. These still work. Now, if that's how you build your business, you're on the right side of this. Now, if you're hiring an agency to go through and crank out a bunch of fluff on your behalf, you're on the wrong side of this. So right now, if you're talking to your agency, there's many agencies or the freelancers in one of two buckets. The one bucket, they're like, don't worry, we've been playing by the rules, this is part of the game. The other side of the bucket is, oh no, I just got caught, you know, caused some damage, and it's coming to roost. Now, to be honest with you, there's a lot of these agencies who have no clue. They have no clue that they've even damaged anything because they're just fly by nights, they don't really do their homework, they don't invest in a proper infrastructure, they don't try to play by the rules. Okay, so some of them probably don't care one way or another. It's your problem after all, right? So one thing you want to do is make sure your Google Business Profile information is accurate and complete. No fake or duplicate locations. And build your reviews steadily and authentically, not unburst. You need to go check out the rules when gathering reviews. There are some serious repercussions from faking those things. Time to be serious, time to really play by the rules. Okay. Invest in real proof credentials, original photos, genuine customer stories. This is why we've invested countless amounts of money in video and photography equipment. It's because we knew this was coming. The days of stock, the days of uh generalized content, that stuff is more dead than it's ever been. I mean, dead men walking, zombies, whatever you want to use. That's what you're dealing with here. This is the war that's going on underneath the war. You know, I'm sure there's some AI war angle we could put on here that would sound pretty cool, but that's what's going on. Okay, the businesses sweating right now are mostly the ones who took the shortcuts. If you built real, you don't have to feel it fear the algorithm. You're going to get rewarded by it before it's over with. Now, if you don't know, if you've hired the freelancer, if you've hired the agency that's using the AI stuff, if you've done those and they've not equipped those tools in the right way, if they're not using proper principles, they're the ones who are going to need to look out. You know, uh it's funny. You know, it's really funny because you sit here and you watch this stuff, and you know it's coming. I mean, I've been talking, this is why I did over the bull back in 2025, early on. I saw this coming. Okay, I'm not an Ostradomus and no, I'm not pounding my chest and I'm not doing all that. But it's coming. Okay? It's here. And in working with businesses, I understand what you guys go through. I know how hard it is. I know what it's like trying to make payroll or when you're going to bed at night. I can't tell you how many businesses I've talked to that express this exact same thing. I mean, every one of them thinks that they're uh unique and they're not going through, but every single business owner goes through it. Every single business owner doesn't want to pay a lot of money for original content or pay for photography or videography and want to use stock photos or send different things that hurt the credibility of their company. Everyone's tempted. Okay, that's okay. You've got to resist the temptation because when you do, you're going to win in the long run. You see, this kind of behavior is not something that you're going to be able to just um fake your way through. And the thing is, is that all entities, both large and small, when it comes up against hurting companies like Google on their search results and hurting what their artificial intelligence results are bringing up. By the way, zero-click conversions, boy, if you're not thinking about artificial intelligence, you'd better start thinking about that. The uh the way people are uh getting around the web and finding people, you better be thinking about that one. But when those results bring up poor answers, those are the things that Google will hammer down on. Now, this is kind of a hybrid here because I had to do some homework on this one. This was just not me uh off the cuff and rambling this week. This was well, kinda, I mean, I kind of do this anyway, to be honest with you, but I wanted to make sure I had my facts kind of, you know, uh set up here. And so, you know, when you look at the the worst case that I brought up today of the 4,651 approximate reviews down to 63 in 24 hours. I'm doing this to shock you, to let you know. It doesn't matter if you've got 20, 30, 50, 100, whatever the reviews you've got. The point is that people look at that stuff. And you need to make sure that you're playing by the rules. Okay, so where'd I get all this stuff at? Um search engine roundtable is one location, the search engine journal is another one, uh tech number two geek is another one, and then there's another reference from the search engine roundtable where I gathered my data. So if you have any problems with my data, take it up with those cats. No, I'm just kidding. It actually uh it's really you can actually see it in real time. I mean, we're working with clients, and I even got an email today from one of my uh one of my long-term clients, and she was like, you know, where did all my review responses go? Now, I know that she answers hers, and I know that she puts a personal touch on everything that she does. So she she's caught up. Now, it wasn't her actual reviews, it was the the uh responses to the reviews. And uh, you know, so you know, if you've been around a while in SEO and search engines, you you see the gaming of the system, and it kind of becomes an old hat thing. It's like, you know, nothing new under the sun kind of thing. Because, you know, back in back in the old days, what you would see is people would, before search engines got sophisticated, people would take what they're trying to show up for in a search engine result and they would put it in white text on a white background. And so no one could actually see the spammy content when they visited the website, but it was in the coding part that search engines would read. And Google hammered down on that. Okay, this is really no different than that. It's just 2.0. Now, your challenge, as the owner of a business, is you gotta find out who you can trust. You gotta find out who's going to wield this thing called artificial intelligence the right way. And you gotta find out who's wielding it the wrong way. And the problem is to spot the fake, to spot the fake diamond, diamond. Versus the real diamond is going to take more and more of an eye that understands the difference between the two. It's not something the lay person can get. And I mean, the pitch is when I was talking a couple weeks ago, and one of my guys came in and talked to me, and he's like, you know, there's a company right now going around the web saying that you can make, you know, you know, I forget the number, offering to build somebody a website for 500 bucks using AI. And his strategy was go around, look for really bad-looking websites, call them up, say you'll build them a brand new one for 500 bucks, run it through AI, stick it in there, collect your 500 bucks, and go on. That's real. That's real. You could probably find it. Now, I don't know the exact example, I just know the story behind it. That's the stuff that'll burn you. But you see, the average person may look at it and go, well, gosh, yeah, that's just an upgrade. That's a retrofit. And you're thinking, well, but who's going to know the code? Well, the text that goes into code, the formatting of the code, all these things, I'm telling you, man, they're looking for it. They're looking for those consistencies, and they can flag it, and they're going to get better and better at it. And the more you try to fool them, the more it's going to be, and the more you're going to have these uh wars going on. You know, one thing that I think about is, you know, you think about all the greatness of what's going on with artificial intelligence. And again, I'm not anti-artificial intelligence. I'm against not properly using it or treating it as though it's always right and doing certain things because it's not. It's a it's a tool like anything else. And the more you you train it and you teach it and you you you show it your systems and stuff like that, the better it's going to be. But out of the box, it's it's it's going to be wrong on a lot of things. It's going to be ambiguous on a lot of things. So you've got to know how to handle that. But it's a great tool. Um making sure that that's being harnessed correctly is perhaps one of the biggest challenges moving forward. You know, uh one thing that I talk about quite a bit is when you look at um, you know, because some people are like, well, it's gonna take jobs, it's gonna take this, it's going to and then other people are like, yeah, I'm gonna sit on the beach and drink margaritas all day and a robot's gonna bring them to me and I'll never have to work again. No, that's not how it's gonna work. And no, it's not the end of the world. It's not gonna be the cause of the end of the world. We covered that in uh uh another podcast. All its sensationalism, all of it is is just them trying to get you a read or watch or click or whatever, you know. The the actual place of artificial intelligence is somewhere mundane, but the problem is you could take the same AI engine, and if you know how to build it and you know how to show what you're trying to get, you can get vastly different results from that same artificial intelligence. Now I'm gonna argue that there's some better than others because I've tested them all out. And, you know, it seems like, you know, nothing can get by the philosophical predisposition of its uh creator, and unfortunately that creates some problems for the answers that AI will give you. Uh but it's more than philosophical. The other thing is, is, you know, where is it getting its data point? You know, because when you start to go upstream, you know, if you look at the water in front of you, it may be clear water and beautiful, but if you walk upstream, you may see a dead deer contaminating the water just 20 feet upstream. So as you're using artificial intelligence, the source of the information and where you tell it to get the source and how to use the source information is incredibly important. Now, a lot of people use it out of the box, frankly, because I believe most people who are doing a lot of the marketing and advertising today are all looking for shortcuts. And I see it more and more every day, and I know you see in your business too. People are taking the shortcut. They don't want to work, they don't want to do the things that they need to do. Now, what's beautiful about this industry, right here, right now, it's a great time to be in this industry. Because if you're operating ethically and honestly and trying to produce a good product, your clients are going to win, you're going to win if you find the right people, and you're going to lose severely if not. I mean, imagine you getting all of your business through Google Business because and it was faked. And Google flags it, and your business goes down the toilet. Now, that's not good for you, right? It wasn't ever worth it because you built your business up, you built your employees up, you built everything up, you got a whole mechanism, and then it goes away. You built your house on sand, you didn't build it with the proper foundation. So if you question those things, then you need to make sure that you're having someone who goes back and look at it. Now that's something that we do. Okay, no pitch. We really do it. I do have a pitch for you, by the way. Um I'm getting ready to launch a uh series. It's not ready yet. It's called the bull sheet. So far, it's tenatively, but I thought it was kind of neat. Um, and what the the bull sheet is going to do is going to give you all kinds of um little tips and advice on how you can spot uh different things to hopefully help you preemptively keep yourself from going over the cliff or having someone push you off the cliff and you're paying them to do it. Okay, and some of you guys are doing that. Okay, guys, um I really recommend you go back and get more educated on this because your marketing is the lifeline of your company. And when you think about the people who are running your marketing, remember they're going to have more influence over your business if they're doing a decent job than literally anything else. Anyone that picks up the phone or anything, that should be your wake-up call. All right, guys. Well, I did this during the day today, and there's a lot of uh background noise and stuff like that. I apologize. You might have heard an airplane today or a door slam or any of that. Let's just call that ambiance. All right, guys. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, this is Ken with Over the Bull, and I look forward to talking to you in the near future and to your success.