Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of JUST Branding. Today, we have the most exciting, the most brilliant, the most notorious Mordy Oberstein on the show. And we’re diving into a provocative topic that should be on every brandbuilderss radar. And that is why brands should stop relying on Google. We’re gonna unpack that with Mordy. Who’s Mordy? He’s a voice many of you will know from the SEO world, if you’re from that space, because he’s a previous head of SEO branding at Wix. He’s the host of multiple marketing podcasts. He’s one of the sharpest minds out there when it comes to decoding search algorithms and the shifting landscape of online visibility. But today, in this episode, it’s not your standard SEO chat, although there’s a place for standard SEO chats, nothing against those. But today on JUST Branding, we’re going to be focusing in on branding and SEO being found online in the age of AI, with the rise of large language models, can’t even say that, LLMs. What does that mean for Discovery, for your brand? What does that mean in terms of traditional thinking about Google, about SEO, about ranking? And what kind of does that mean in terms of your brand? What it might mean in terms of holding your brand back if you’re not embracing some of these new ways of being found? So with all that kind of in place, Mordy, welcome to the show.

Wow, that’s quite the intro. Also, like, I’m notorious. Nice, I’m notorious MOB.

Yeah, well, you know me, I like to, you know, I like to give us some zip and some vigor. And also, you know, you definitely are notorious. And, you know, I’m thrilled to have you on the show. And so is Jacob. So welcome. Listen, let’s start off with perhaps a provocation. Why shouldn’t brands rely on Google anymore in your view?

Because they never should have to begin with.

Tell me more.

So first, if you’re talking about building a brand, and I’m sorry to tell you, if you’re coming from the SEO space, you’re listening to this, this is going to sound like a heresy. If you’re not, you’re like, this makes good natural sense. Google search is a hard way to build brand. I feel brand is a lot about consistency over time. And search is all about not consistency over time. You don’t know where you’re going to wait, where you’re going to show up, when you’re going to show up. It’s hard to build that consistency, to really build that presence, to really build that connection with your audience through the medium of Google search. That’s hard. I’m just saying it can’t happen or doesn’t help your brand, but building a brand that way, that seems backwards to me.

Sure. So how would you put it the other way around? What would you say the focus should be before we dive back into the backwards?

So Google always has been, and this is where I think it’s becoming okay, what kind of vehicle? But it’s a vehicle. It’s a vehicle to help you be found. It’s a vehicle to help you spread your content. It’s a vehicle to do a lot of different things. And the conversation around what is Google from a search and traffic point of view has shifted back to, okay, it’s a vehicle, it’s not a be-all end-all. What type of vehicle is it? Is it an AI, I don’t know, 2025 Audi? Or is it a 1987 Chevy? How reliable is it?

Yeah, let me ask you about that because, as I said in the introduction, we’re seeing the rise of AI and lots of different things that are coming around. I mean, if we just keep it specifically to Google just for a second, what are the big shifts that you’re seeing in the way that Google itself is working?

The biggest shift that I can point to was August 2018. There’s a thing called the MEDIC update. So Google has been doing, so Google has an algorithm, and every once in a while it presses a button and updates this algorithm. Starting in March of 2018, they started to announce what they call core algorithm updates. So they’ve always had core algorithm updates, but a Google spokesperson wasn’t announcing them each time. In March 2018, they started to announce these things. The biggest and most famous one of them is what we call the MEDIC update, which is really the August 2018 core update. It’s a really annoying name to say. Predominantly because it hit what’s called the YMYL space, your money, your life, health, things that impact your health and finances. And what we saw happening with that algorithm was Google was better able in new ways to understand content quality. And since then, it’s been progressively trying to rely less on, to put like, SEO stuff, well, links, all that kind of like SEO stuff, and predominantly on, is the content across the website, not just the web page, is the content across the website good quality? And it’s made certain shifts, it has made certain jumps, and it redefines what quality is. For example, Google has actual raters, I don’t know if people know about this, there are people called quality raters, and they’re paid by Google to look at content, look at a web page, say, is this good or is this bad? Obviously, like, completely oversimplifying this. And they have a set of guidelines called Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines, or the QRG, because we like abbreviations in SEO, everything’s got to have an abbreviation. The raters’ guidelines change over time, and of course, SEOs fight about everything, and is Google using these things that it’s telling its quality raters to look at, is it using it in the algorithm or not? So certain SEOs, no, certain SEOs, yes, certain SEOs, like myself, who cares? Obviously, it’s what they want. So sooner or later, they’re gonna start interjecting it at some point. But those, you can see how Google defines quality content shifting. And it makes so much sense because everyone looks at this like, oh, it’s an AI issue. Right now, it’s happening. It’s not an AI issue. It’s a perfect storm. Google has something that’s called EAT, and I swear I’ll stop with acronyms. It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It’s basically a fancy way of saying, is your content not rubbish and is it good? And in whatever year, Google added an extra E for experience, like two or three years ago. So now it’s E-E-A-T, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Why Experience? And Google wrote a whole blog post. You don’t have to, I’m not like making like, oh no, why do they do that? They have a post about why they did this. And they said, because we see that people are looking for more firsthand knowledge among the search results. That’s Google saying, we have the world’s largest data set and we’re really good at predicting where people are, how they’re behaving and where they’re going. And we see they’re going to TikTok. And that our interpretation of that is they want more firsthand knowledge. So what Google then did was that doesn’t, by the way, that doesn’t exist on the Internet. Because Google didn’t ever incentivize that. Google incentivized for years five ways to show that I have no actual human experience, but we’ll tell you what I think anyway. And it needed to somehow pull that content in. So a fire hose read it onto its result page. And that’s when the whole thing kind of like went topsy-turvy. Because Google’s trying to add content that it didn’t have, and the only way it has is Reddit. And Reddit, I don’t know if anybody likes it, is a sewer. And it literally like just superimposes sewer onto the SERP. Ah, I did another acronym, Search Engine Results Page, the Google page. And then on top of that, now you have the whole AI thing. So it’s a disaster.

The perfect storm. The perfect storm of mess and algorithms loving it so far. A couple of other quick things. And so, in relation to the AI overviews that you now start to see, so is that coming from Reddit or is that Google’s own AI engine? How’s that working?

So now you’re stuck. Like now, I’ll Google, I’ll say, best place to get a coffee mug. And instead of it going to, first of all, Google will do a show like a landing page that wired.com used to have because everybody should ring for everything. That makes sense. That started to change as a different conversation. And a lot of people, a lot of the rankings you hear people say they’re losing. HubSpot is an example. HubSpot lost all its rankings. HubSpot lost all its crap rankings that don’t actually matter. HubSpot lost what’s the best coffee mug. As that’s happening, it’s harder for me to even rank because what’s showing up for best coffee mug used to be my website. Now it’s Reddit. And everyone telling me where the best coffee mug is. Now on top of that, you have AI overviews. And AI overviews are a mess. They’re pulled in. It’s an LLM. So it’s pulled in from content across the web. They do cite. It’s… I’m going to say something controversial. Is that OK to say anything? Yeah? Sure. Go for it. AI overviews are basically like a bastardized product. And they were never meant to come out. The only reason AI overviews exist is because Chad GPT and Bing beat Google to the punch. There was a famous conference that Bing announced co-pilot. Google had no idea it was coming and they were caught off guard. Google then ran, like, their own event a month, a month, like, two weeks later in Paris, showcasing a bunch of stupid things no one actually cared about. And that’s when the conversation of, ooh, it’s Google dying, started to come out. Two months after that was Google’s big conference, Google IO. They just had one relatively recently. This is IO. 2023. And they announced what was called back then SGE, Search Generative Experience. What is with all the freaking acronyms? SGE became AIO reviews. Why did they announce SGE? They didn’t roll it out. They just announced, like, here’s what it’s going to look like. Because they were getting killed, their stock was getting killed. Because Bing beat them to the punch. ChatGPT beat them to the punch. They had to announce something. Fast forward a year later, they already announced this thing. They have to release it now. Because, like, now what? You announced it a year ago and it’s your next Google IO big conference thing? You didn’t, you’ve done nothing? Got to announce it, otherwise the stock’s gonna crash. So they released it. And that’s why we have AIO reviews. What they really want to release, what they announced this year, which is AI. Mode. AI. Mode is more of a one-to-one competitor with Chad GPT, it’s better in general, it’s still a mess. So check this out. Google is running parallel products that cannibalize each other, on purpose. And at some point, somebody big is gonna lose their job over it. Wowzers, wowzers. All right, okay.

Well, pause, pause, pause. Okay, we got a lot of brand builders on the call, right? Listening in on the call, on the show, listening to the show, right? It’s not cool. They’re not calling in. Don’t worry.

No, can we take South of Staten Island? I would love to have a call.

Yeah, absolutely. It would be great to do a call-in. Sometimes, hang on, actually pin that. We’ll have to do that, Jacob, at some point, do a little LinkedIn call-in or something. But I think what I want to ask is just bring it back down to brand builders just for a minute. In your view, then, what does all of that mean for discoverability, right? Because that’s ultimately, you know, people building brands, they want to make sure that they are salient, they’re in the minds of people, you know, searching for what they’ve got to offer. And obviously, we all hit Google mostly to get to that, you know? So, what does that mean? What does that mean to brands in all this mess and confusion and AI robotics that you’ve been talking about?

I always want to be able to roll my Rs and I’m just sitting here jealous. I’ve totally lost it, like you lost it, I don’t even know what to say now.

What does it mean to brands?

Yeah, so, first of all, for brand builders, this is great, I’m a weirdo. I’ve sat on both the performance side of marketing and on the brand side of marketing. So, I see both sides disturbing. This is great for brand builders. What makes this difficult right now is that you’re dealing with a company who’s not functioning logically, right? They’re not functioning. By the way, if you want, there’s a great interview with The Verge and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, I highly recommend you watch that if you really want to get a nerd’s eye view kind of thing. But they’re not functioning. I want to say a lot. They are functioning rationally, but their context of what is rational, what’s not rational is in a different orbit than us. They’re functioning for their stock price, and they’re functioning in a way that it’s hard to end up saying, what does this ultimately look like? For example, you’re currently running two products. One of these are going to die out. AI Overs are going to die out. It’s very clear. Who’s pretty much basically said it. And they’re going to move to what’s AI called AI Mo, which if you’re in the US, you now have access to it. If you’re not in the US, you can’t see it. But it’s more like a chat GPT-ish kind of thing. So you need to figure out, okay, we want to know is you need to be able to read what the hell is actually going on. Where does this end up? And what does it end up looking like? Because if you’re just chasing like, okay, we need to get into the AI overview. Well, that’s going to go away. Okay, we need to get into AI mode. Okay, so question, if AI mode, which is currently a separate tab, you know, like on Google, you have tabs for images and videos, a separate tab, AI mode. If it replaces AI overviews, there’s not going to be a separate tab for AI mode. As someone who’s worked on products, do you know why there’s a separate tab on the left for AI mode? Because they couldn’t figure out a way to run both products in the same place. And the guy, well, the best place to put it is on the left-hand side up there. It’s not like a strategic decision. It was just a mechanics problem. How does that end up getting integrated into the main SERP, into the main result page? My advice, there are multiple corrections that need to happen. And one correction is that this stuff is very expensive and it’s not going to last for free forever. I always knew it was a data center that cost the most money. I didn’t realize what part of it cost the most money. It’s cooling the data centers. The water cost the most money. And yeah, I didn’t know that like two weeks ago. Someone told me. Right? Super interesting. It can’t last for free. The only reason it’s lasting for free right now is because all of these companies are now, their bottom line is their stock price. At a certain point, the hype dies down and the ability to pump up that stock price with whatever new hype dies down with it. So now you have to switch to a cost flow, I’m sorry, cash flow model. Then this thing comes crashing down, because how do you keep offering for free? They have to monetize it, which they haven’t been able to figure out how to monetize it. So you know, that’s one, you know that it can’t end up looking this way because they haven’t been able to monetize it yet, and they have to figure out how to monetize it. They need to figure out how to bring costs down, which they announced we brought costs down, and then they need to figure out how to monetize it in a real way. I think it’ll probably end up like YouTube, where I run five prompts, and then a big interstitial ad comes up. I got to watch a video or whatever it is, then click skip, and then I get to ask Google the rest of my prompts. The second part of that is, does the AI hype last forever? And I swear I’m going to answer your question. If you think the AI hype lasts forever, then fine. Just optimize to get into whatever this thing is right now. And we can talk about what that would actually mean. If you think the AI hype is not going to last forever, like, any hype cycle, it’s going to die down. I feel like it already is. Now we’re talking about agendic AI. Like here, please take my wallet and spend money all over the internet for me. That’s exact. Sure, that’s a good idea. You already see like the AI, LLM generation, content generation, kind of dying down a little bit, and there’s more and more pushback. My wife’s a great example. She’s a nurse. She went to a conference about how to, what to know about AI as a nurse and she was like, I can’t believe this crap is going on. The world is doomed. So people are more skeptical also. By the way, when you know, people sitting around the dinner table saying, hey, SAI stuff is great, huh? And then when they have to hand over their credit card so it can buy new pants for it online, I don’t know how like, yay, hey, great. It’s gonna be the same way. Like people are funny when they have to open, they hand over their credit card number, which means, and Google was asked this in the interview I referenced, wow, I’m really going like full circle on full circle on full circle. And their CEO said he doesn’t think that the era of exploration is over, meaning I just want an answer and I’m done. But that’s what AI currently does. And I’m a former teacher and I’ll tell you, like, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that human mind is constructed. I don’t want to know anything. Just give me the answer on what I’m done. What I’m done. For certain things, it definitely wants that. For certain things, you want to be able to explore more things. I had like a small medical issue. I don’t know, like, come on. It’s like, no big deal. I’m fine. I didn’t want the typical answers and the typical websites Google was giving me. I wanted to go a little bit deeper and explore. So what I think the AI is going to end up looking like, and this is probably a good point to, like, discuss, when Google announced Gemini originally, which is their AI property, they showcased, they can’t do it yet. They have experimented with it a little bit. It showcased an example. If I ask it one question, I get one set of results that formatted one way. So if I ask it, like, what’s a great idea for a nine-year-old girl’s birthday party on the beach? And the layout and the type of results match that type of query, of search. Where if I ask it, what’s the best beard to, what’s the best brush to brush my beard with? It might list a totally different set of examples, and in a different layout all together. I think that’s where we’re heading. We’re headed to a place where it’s almost like a content portal. It’ll give you a summary, whatever you want, the LLM. You could explore more, but it’s going to open entry points so that you can explore deeper, which means that we’re about to enter an era, I think, of not expansion, the web is shrinking, which is another point we could talk about, but refinement. And if you want to, if you want your brand to align with what’s happening and getting into these LLMs, it’s about honing down that brand identity so that people, first of all, that you know who the hell you are, which is a whole conversation we can talk about is a mess, so that your audience knows who you are, so they can start talking about you across the internet, and then the LLMs can pick up on all of that.

Wow, there’s a lot there.

There’s a lot of time back. Just a quick reminder, the Brand Builders Summit is back this September 16 to 19. It’s free online and features 40 branding legends covering strategy, design and business. Head over to brandbuilderssummit.com to grab your free ticket. Now back to the show. Mordy, I have to ask about this shrinking internet thing, because as far as I understand, like the internet is like just getting spammed with so much content that it’s just like expanding. And so I’d love to hear your take on that.

So this is great. I mean, it’s not great. Depends how you look at it. It’s interesting, put it that way. So, the verge, I forgot his name, Vilai Patel asked Google this question. He asked the CEO of Google this same question. He said, is it harder for people to get traffic? Are things just seem to be like constricting? He goes, no, we’re in an expansionary era right now. And his answer back was, there are more web pages than ever. That’s not what he asked. He asked more traffic. Yeah, there’s definitely more web pages than ever. There’s not more traffic than ever. So, I have data in this. I used to be the head of ComBit Center, which I still consult for Center, which is like an SEO data tool thing. I still spill the beans that I’m talking about doing next week, but maybe this is not going to come out before then. So, I’m not spilling beans, tea. I don’t know what people say anymore. But basically, the data shows and they talk about this in the interview. The web is kind of just plateaued. Like, you always think about it, the web should be like the stock market is always going up, which if you’re ever in the stock market is not how it works. Since COVID, so COVID was the peak, you could see web traffic, however you slice it, whether it’s like total traffic across the web, average monthly visits a site is going to get, comes down after 2021 or the middle of 2021, and it levels out. Over the course of 2024, there’s a 2% difference between where it was in 2021, meaning it’s leveled out and we have 2% growth in three years, which is nothing. 2% is like what I have in my milk. That’s not growth. So we’re pushing more and more and more content out there, more content than ever. And it’s stagnating, which to me says that it’s shrinking because we’re propping it up with all this content and it’s still not growing and it’s still stagnating.

All right. Curious.

Bad news for the bears, I guess.

Yeah.

Good news for your brand though, I feel like.

Why is that?

Because if you can double down and have some real identity, people understand who you are, they can connect with you, you have some kind of reason to exist that has a level of depth, a level of meaning to it. And you’re refining that. First off, you’re so far ahead of the curve right now. And you can stand out because no one’s doing that.

But you can’t get found in search, so is it relevant anyway?

Yeah, there’s a lot of ways to get found.

Yeah. Well, let’s talk about traditional SEO, because we’ve talked about AI and Reddit just pushing out results further and further on the page. Is there any room for traditional SEO? Has it evolved into anything else? What’s your take?

It depends, is always the SEO answer. If you’re a technical SEO, so you’re somebody who makes sure that you’re working for CNN, I don’t know, or one of these big news websites, thousands and millions of pages, and you’re making sure that their pages can be crawled and indexed by Google, they’re served quickly to users, all those technical things, that’s very much still a job. Like in and of its own right, regardless of any of this, you need someone to make sure that all of these bots can come access, crawl the page, and do whatever they do with it, whether it’s an LLM bot or whether it’s Google, whether it’s Bing, whatever it is. So that’s definitely still a thing. The traditional SEO of going out there and like, you know, we’re going to change the heading on the page and we’re going to go after SEO keywords. I think that was stupid for a long time. I think it’s really stupid now. And for a variety of reasons. One is that’s not how LLMs work. Let’s assume for a second that there are no more links on the page. Everything is just the AI answer. The LLMs, ChatGPT isn’t looking at you like Google’s looking at you. Google’s looking at you, your page, the rest of your pages to make sure that they’re all quality. So not sending the user to a bad website, which has one great page, but a decent site overall. Chat GPT is like a much more fanned out, wider lens kind of angle on the Internet. And how does the Internet understand you? Which comes much more valuable, much more valuable what other people are saying about you than what you’re saying about yourself. I’ll give you an actual case. First off, that was always Google’s main thing in the algorithm. Their whole difference way back in the day was, you know, Yahoo, Alta Vista, all those Ash Jeeves. The reason what made Google better was Google was looking at links and was looking at links like a vote of confidence. If somebody is linking to this website, it must be they like this website. So it was always more important what other people said than what you were saying yourself. What happens in LLM land is, if it’s just me talking about myself and I’ve seen cases like this, so if I ask whatever LLM, AI mode or ChatGPT, a really niche question about my brand, it’ll pull up what I have on my website and it’ll source me as the source. That’s not what you want. You want other people seeing you as the source and writing about you, because when they broaden out a little bit, let’s take this podcast. If I, on your website, have, you know, JUST Branding Podcast, all the information about it. And if I went to ChatGPT and said, tell me everything I need to know about JUST Branding. So, Google, Google, well, Google possibly be using AI mode or whatever, would source your website and would show you everything about it. But then if I zoomed out and said, what are the best branding podcasts? What you wrote on your website is now not nearly as important as what everybody else is running on their websites about you. And I think that’s where SEOs are having a hard time, because it doesn’t become the website anymore.

On that note, right, folks, please just, you know, jump on your websites and say something nice about JUST Branding, just putting it out there and that would be helpful. But no, no, absolutely fascinating. I like that idea of like a wider lens, like it’s going to become, I guess what we’re saying here, and I think this was always the case with Google, like and search just generally for brands. It’s stopping you faking stuff, isn’t it? It’s top, you know, everyone’s trying to play the game. And this was my impression of SEO, like, you know, over the last 20, 30 years as it came online. And it was like, oh, the meta tags, keyword searches. You know, it was all very technical, but why were we doing it? We were doing it to play the game, to play the algorithm, to get ourselves higher up in the rankings. And as you say, Mordy, like that’s completely changing. And I know, you know, I actually wanted to kind of ask you, Jacob, something about that, because I know over the years, you really did play that game, if I can call it that, really, really well. You’re probably one of the best kind of SEO experts that I look to, you know, in our space, in the branding space. In fact, a little quick, tiny segue here, a little story. So many people won’t know this. Shall I tell this story, Jacob?

Yeah, go for it.

I’m telling it real quick. So I used to run an agency, okay? And this is maybe going back 20 years, right? A creative agency. And we used to, I used to have someone on my team and they used to look at search engine rankings of our company’s kind of rankings. And so for example, we’re looking at phrases like graphic design, you know, that brand identity design, that kind of stuff. And we had like a selection of 20, 30 hit, hit, you know, key phrases we wanted to rank for globally. And I used to keep going into these meetings every month as the founder and director of the business. And we kept getting knocked off. We were number one for ages on some of these phrases. We kept getting knocked off, kept getting knocked off. And the same kind of website kept knocking us off. And that website was JUST Branding, not JUST Branding, JUST Creative. So I used to like, and I’m like, who is this JUST Creative? So I used to, I found it’s this Jacob Cass, absolutely hate his guts, like keeps knocking me off, keeps knocking me off. And then eventually I sold that business and moved on and reached out. I was reaching out to people who I admired and, you know, I reached out to Jacob and he was so generous to kind of start a conversation. And that eventually led to this podcast starting. So just a little little side side there. Jacob, I know you were very successful and then, you know, things changed. So I wondered if you could kind of put a highlight on it.

Mordy, so just for context here, a couple of years ago, we probably peaked at about a million page views a month for our design blog called JUST Creative. And we’re running an affiliate model. And also we had a lot of articles for designers and creatives focused on logos, branding. But we also had a segment focused on, you know, best laptops for designers. And it was like listicle articles. And it was very heavily focused on affiliate revenue through partners like Amazon and Vado and creative marketplaces. So we scaled that. I had a team of about 10 people. It was like hockey stick growth for a number of years. And then it all came crashing down, lost like 95% of the traffic. We tried to rectify it, but the game just totally changed. Google pushing up or removing affiliate-driven sites, pushing folks like Reddit and even LinkedIn and community forums that are being buried on the internet up number one. And like we just got pushed back to pages like far below.

Oh man. That’s rough by the way.

It was rough.

Yeah, I’m feeling like the pain. That’s so hard.

Yeah, so I wasn’t the only one, but that kind of pivoted me into, well, not forced me into a corner, but it made me pivot to other things, right? Because that was a big passive income stream and it’s where a lot of my client leads came from. It was all organic. I didn’t have to do outreach or anything. So I’ve got to mention that. Yes, we had the blog, but it was also a lead pipeline for my whole business. So things just had to change and we moved to social and so forth.

That’s what’s hard about it though, because it does like when organic performs, organic is great. It’s slow, it’s steady, it’s consistent. You don’t have to do much. It’s there and it’s there and it’s doing its thing, but you really are at the mercy. So Google, for context, Google had this thing called the product review update, which eventually became the review update. Google went to war. Google went to war with affiliate marketers.

Yep, we lost.

Everyone lost but Google. Just trying to fight town hall or city hall. You don’t win.

Yeah. We fought it for a couple of years and you had some little uptakes and we were back. And then another update comes in like, damn it, we’re down again. So yeah. But yeah, it was a good experience but things have changed.

Things are changing and I think what it is is, as I say, you can’t play the system anymore, can you? And it’s a tough one. So with that in mind, I have a question, Mordy. Top tips. You’ve sort of given a few, but if you were to keep it tight, right? I’m a brand builder, I’m in marketing, I’m working with my company. Like, what would you suggest in this new world of perplexity, chat, GTP, Google AI? Like, what should we be focusing on just broadly?

Can I give you a real example? I hope they’re not listening. Maybe they are listening. So Wix announced something called Wixel, which I thought was like, it was going to be something else. I remember this product they were building and I was still there. And then I saw, I’m like, no, this is not that. It’s a Canva competitor. I’m like, no, that’s not, you should not be doing that now. What you should be doing is Wix is great. Like my, I’m not saying, like I work, because I don’t work there anymore. I’m saying, because it’s a really good platform and I have my website built on it. Wix is great at being Wix, so be Wix. Stop trying to expand out and I, my whole thing is we’re fine down better into who you are and what you do and do that better. And now, when you do that as a net outcome of that, you start building up cache, right? Like all these things, LLMs, search engines, they’re just, they’re just digital moths. And whoever has the strongest, greatest, best presence possible on the, what they’re going to be attracted to. If you’re spreading your wings all over the place, they can’t figure out, what the hell are you? Are you a website builder? You can have a competitor? Like, what, what, what are you? What are you about? It’s going to be way harder, way harder to get an LM to figure you out.

Yeah.

It’s gonna be hard for Google.

Yeah.

The problem with that is, especially in a larger organization, is the internal comps part, is getting everybody on that same page. I always have this thing that SEO should really exist under comps. It doesn’t. SEO exists under performance, and performance kind of does its own thing. And people don’t realize, it’s really, I call my thing Unify. Performance teams don’t talk to brand teams. Those don’t. You’ll have a brand team build out in an LP, and the performance team, the SEO team will manage the blog, and they can be talking about the same product in two completely different ways. And that doesn’t work right now. Everyone needs to be on the same page. There has to be strong identity. When I say like, oh, it’s great, like, you know, the fact that the Internet is constricting, I think that’s a good thing. I think a lot of the content people are creating, what you were saying before, it wasn’t there to help users. It was there so I could rank for a keyword. It was there so I can get traffic. It wasn’t really there to help people. So, the fact that we’re in an era of refinement, I think is a good thing for the user. I mean, not a good thing for digital marketers, but if you will like, in marketing, I feel like there’s always like a motion. It’s very philosophical, like I’m trying to get into Aristodilian like emotions of the world, but there’s always motion. The motion like for the last 10 years is expand, cast a Y net, get more. I think the motion that we’re in now is refinement. AI is going to help you refine what you’re looking for, to help you refine what’s out there, to help you get something that’s more refined and personal to what you’re looking for. And if marketers can get refined and aligned, I think you’re so far ahead of the game. Because people naturally don’t want to refine, they want to expand, and teams have a very hard time seeking up in a real way.

So, Mordy, what’s that look like in reality when you say refined, like as a brand or a product?

It would be instead of Wix going out, like creating a Wixel as a competitor to Canva, I was saying like, whatever, Canva’s got what it’s got. What do we do to, like, who are we as a website builder? What are we actually really all about? Because I think it’s like, I know it’s not like a silly question, but brands don’t do that enough, I feel like. And when they do do it, it’s usually not with enough depth, and they get distracted. It’s like, why do I see all these companies going after AI this and AI that? In my opinion, it’s just my take. It’s because these companies never really have strong brand identity to begin with. They didn’t really know who they were, and they didn’t know, wait a second, like, that’s not who we are. We have to not stray off. Yeah, we should get into AI, but what’s within our wheelhouse? What’s not within our wheelhouse? And companies getting back on that and figuring, okay, who we are, how do we double down on that? How do we make that better? How do we create services that maybe they’re different services, but they still support that same idea? I remember when I was back at a company called Rank Ranger, they got an SEO rank tracking team. They got about a similar web a couple of years ago. They were dev teams, and dev teams do this, by the way, if you’re listening. They were just building for the sake of building. Google does it all the time. And instead of building a product with a roadmap where one thing built on the other thing that help you create product identity, they were just kind of all over the place. And it worked back then because the internet was so, the industry there was so big, it was fine. I wouldn’t do it like now. Everything needs to be strategic to build up that identity of who you are and what you’re about so that you stand out and that you’re remembered.

Can I ask another question, Mordy? So, what do you think about brands investing in… You know, we talked about Google being a middle man, right? Or middle person, you know, a middle being, entity. And therefore, we can’t control it, right? And you talked at the start about, you know, it’s evolving itself, and it probably doesn’t quite know how it’s going to end up just yet either. So, there’s a lot of unknowns if we focused on trying to show up in AI and so on. But what about the flip side of that, which is stuff that we can control? So, what do you think about brands focusing on the stuff that they own, their channels like their email, community building, that kind of stuff? Do you think that that is of value to brands?

Yeah, I think it’s all of value to brands. I think it’s what’s valuable to brands. And again, I feel like with this kind of question, there’s so many different… This is my perspective on it. I don’t like how I’m like, this is the perspective, this is my outlook, my perspective on this. If I worked at MailChimp, I would probably say the opposite of this. Yeah, I think email is great. And I think the problem with things like email is, okay, yeah, so I have them, I own the audience. You know, never own your audience. This is a weird way of thinking. But how do you get the email list? Like, there’s like an email list fairy, boop, they have an email list. I think everything always comes back to understanding, again, building up that momentum based on who you are. And you can use, by the way, like, I’ll give you a good example of this, where you can use the LLMs to figure that out. Like, where in my industry is there a ton of skepticism and hesitancy to consume, like to buy the product or the service, that no one else is talking about? And Gatorade is a good example of this. Turns out when you ask LLMs if Gatorade is good or not, like, what should I know about Gatorade? It tells you, yeah, it’s like, yeah, great if you have like a really great workout, but it’s got a ton of sugar in it. And then if you ask Gatorade, which is better? Drinking Gatorade or drinking vitamin water? It’ll say after an intense workout Gatorade, but for most other cases, drink vitamin water. Guess how many times? And that’s a real thing. The LLM is a proxy of the web. And that’s gonna be one of the things to realize. Sometimes AAAA, non-alcoholics anonymous, nor the American Automotive Association. Sometimes AI and LLMs hallucinate, but sometimes they’re actually just serving as a representative of the entire web. They’re saying and summarizing what the web is saying about Gatorade in this case. And if you could pull out Gems, like, huh, when I asked the same thing about Powerade and all the other competitors, this thing about the health thing keeps coming up. But no one, guess how many times Gatorade mentions the word health on their website? Did you say zero? Zero. Zero times. Vitamin water also, zero times. They say that you shouldn’t drink it because it’s from New York. I’m like, I’m from New York and the East River is disgusting. If I was a website in that health drink space, I would use AI and I would use LMS to realize like, wait a second, there’s a brand gap here that we can totally capitalize on and talk about. So it’s less about, do I get into the AI? Do I build on my email list now? What do I do on social? It’s about getting ahead of the things that actually relate to your user concerns and pain points and skepticism and actually getting ahead of and talking about it. And now you want to talk about what’s the best way to distribute that? Is that through email? Is it through running a blog post? Is it if I saw one, it was, I asked AI who makes seatbelts? Random, I know, but it listed a bunch of companies. And then it had other no issues in Google’s AI mode, other notable company and elicited another company. Other notable company is like me asking you like, hey, do you want to go out? And you saying when hell freezes over and then me saying, so you’re saying there’s a chance. Other notable company, like I already saw 10 notable companies. I don’t want the other notable company. If I was that company, I would even start online. I would start like networking in Washington, DC and getting in front of Congress to testify about all the data I have about seatbelt studies and seatbelt safety and using that to create momentum and then case studies and whatever online. So yeah, email is great, communities are great, social is great, search could be great. But unless you have that real brand foundation there to begin with, none of it matters.

Nice. So we’re starting to come to the end now, and I just wanted to ask you a couple of other quick questions about the future, a way you’ve hinted at this. But imagine we’re fast forwarding, that’s better, three years’ time, right? What, you know, some of these things have been resolved. What does success look like for brands online? Like, how do we actually imagine the future to be? I mean, we’ve got Alexa, we’ve got Voice, you know, we’ve not even got Clicks anymore, you know, coming into the picture. Like, what does this start looking like in your view?

I mean, three years from now, success for me looks like I haven’t lost all my hair.

You and me both, man.

Yeah, I’m just like telling you straight up. I think it looks like direct traffic, which people, it’s funny because like SEO performance, people always crapped on direct traffic the most, because it is, analytically speaking, a black hole. Anything that’s not, you know, attributed to Google, attributed to social, attributed to a source, just ends up in direct. But to me, direct is also brand traffic, right? Where, like, where was it? Cheers, like, you want to go where everybody knows your name, right? No one ever said you want to go chasing people around the internet like a chicken with your head cut off screaming your name. That’s not the end goal. The end goal is to have people come to you to be a destination. So it’s leveraging all of these things. It’s leveraging people, oh, there’s no more clicks. There’s no more, for them, it clicks for a long time in a lot of things, like Google weather in New York City, Google Yankee score. There hasn’t been a click in, I don’t know, 10 years. So it’s not a new thing. What I think success looks like is I go and I’m like, all right, where’s a great place to get notepads? I need new notepads, by the way. Like I’m too cheap to buy the good ones. I’m waiting to go to the next conference to go to the vendors and steal the good ones, which is sad, it’s pathetic, but it’s my thing. Where do I get a good note? But which conference has the best vendors that offer the best notepads? That’s the conference I want to go to. And I see a thing in the LLM, and I see a thing here, and I see a thing on social, and then eventually, you know what? I keep seeing, you know, I don’t know, like whatever conference, Bob’s conference show up. They’re the ones with the best notepads for free. All right, so let me Google Bob’s notepads. And Rand Fishkin, if you know, if you’re listening, who Rand Fishkin is, but Rand is an amazing marketer. He has originally started one of the SEO companies a long time ago. And he talks about how everyone attributes traffic to Google, because Google is the greatest source of traffic. But that doesn’t mean that’s where it started. You could have saw me on social, Googled me, found my website, went to my website. That traffic analytically gets attributed to Google, but it’s not really Google traffic, is it? Success in the future looks something like that, because the funnel is messy. It’s always been messy. I argue that really, is it a funnel to a certain extent? I think that’s a whole myth. But people see you, they know what you’re about. You have a certain level of identity distinction and they’re coming to look for you. They’re typing your website’s name, forget Google, directly into the browser and going to your website.

So to summarize, we should be focusing on being known, right? Not just being found, right? Like work on the basics, work on adding real value out there so that people are talking about you. That wider lens becomes more authentic and true and then we’ll find success, which is what in terms of brand building, brand strategy, the long-term game we’ve always been advocating for as brand builders. But it’s so tough to do, isn’t it? So it’s going to take a bit of readjustment and movement. I want to thank you so much, Mordy, for coming on the show. It’s been really exciting and enlightening. Jacob, anything last from yourself or any final questions from you?

I think there was one little question here. If you had one message for brand builders today, what would it be?

One message for brand builders today, identity is everything. It’s everything. It will get you so off course if you don’t have it. And if you haven’t tapped into it in a meaningful way, the problems that you’re going to end up with are, you’re going to end up chasing whatever iteration of Google’s AI, whatever is out there. And there will be iteration after iteration after iteration. You won’t have the ability. I hate the Wayne Greskey analogy, like skate towards the puck. You won’t have the ability to do that. Also, I don’t know if Wayne Greskey actually said that or not. I don’t know.

Then ask me. All right. Brilliant. And just to wrap up, where can people connect with you?

Tiktok. No, I don’t have a Tiktok account. I don’t fall downstairs and I don’t sing or dance. So, LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, on my website, univitebrandmarketing.com. I’m kind of on Twitter, but not as much as I used to be.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Mordy. You’ve been brilliant. The audience have been listening and we want to thank everybody for tuning in as well. We’re ever so grateful. Please remember to like this episode, follow, give us a comment, give us some five stars. We always love a good five-star review. We really appreciate it. Thank you everybody, but particularly, thank you to you Mordy for carving out some time. It’s been awesome.

Thanks for having me. It was fun.