AI vs Google Search....behind the scenes
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If you stand in the way of Google making money, they will flatten you. We're told, make good content. That's not what Google's trying to rank. That's what they require. One of the ingredients for their system goal, and their system goal is to make ungodly amounts of money.
Welcome, humans, to the Neuron Podcast. I'm Corey Knowles, joined as always by my trusty co-host and good friend, Grant Harvey.
What's up?
Today, we're joined by Mark Williams-Cook, who is a, frankly, a prolific influence in the direction of modern SEO. He recently discussed how AI is creating what he calls a leaky bucket problem for search. And today, we're going to learn more about that and a variety of other things. Mark serves as director at Candor, a Norwich-based SEO agency, and he's also the founder of Also Asked and the co-owner of Top Dog Harnesses. Mark, welcome to The Neuron. It's great to have you.
Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here.
Awesome. So opening question here, and this is probably the trillion dollar question. According to who you follow on social media, AI has either destroyed or resurrected SEO. What are your thoughts?
I mean, this is the running joke in the industry, right? So I've been working in SEO 22 years, and I think I've lived through, this is maybe my eighth death of SEO now. Someone actually made a really lovely graph of the value of the SEO industry over the last 20 years, kind of going up and then marked every time it had died. So for me, there is a debate we could maybe get into later of a lot of people renaming what we do, SEO, as geo, generative engine optimization. For me, if we have to call it geo, which I hate, it would be a subset of SEO. Yeah. So I'm still doing pretty much the same things I was doing two years ago, five years ago. Just how I do them has changed slightly. And that's always happened throughout the years.
So no, I'm still very much in the people are asking me for SEO. We're doing stuff. People are getting results. You can't get rid of us just yet, despite what public opinion may want to.
Right. Every core algo update trying.
Yeah.
That's hilarious. Well, Corey mentioned the leaky bucket at the top. And this was from a podcast that you did recently that we put you on our radar and we got really excited to talk to you about this. So can you explain the leaky bucket for our listeners and what you meant by that? And do you see the bucket getting less leaky over time or more leaky?
Yeah, it's, I think it's really, you can apply that leaky bucket analogy, which are probably going to regret saying off the cuff now on that podcast. Now I've been cornered about it, but it's really just about how a lot of systems that are becoming reliant on large language model based technology. And I say that specifically rather than just the general term AI. is because the output of a lot of these systems is non-deterministic you know most of the time you'll get this answer but sometimes you get something a bit spicy and wild it creates systemic issues for chains of things that need to be correct over and over and that leads in my opinion to all kinds of trouble with search engines because firstly the scale i think google said recently they did eight trillion searches last year like i know that's how many searches they're doing right
So even if you had a very small percentage of the results they were giving as wrong, that's still an awful lot of people getting incorrect or faulty in some way information. And tied to this, and it's tied to how the user interface, I think, of a lot of the, whether you want to call them like chat assistants or AI search surfaces work, is there's a strong user feedback loop. Even with traditional search, they watch very closely how people interact with their search result pages, what they're scrolling, what they're hovering on, what they click on when they come back. And that works quite well when you have a kind of static page of results. There's a lot of parity between searches and the user input is still messy and noisy.
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