SearchGPT and the End of SEO

David: All right. Hello, everybody back here again with Lexicon CEO and Founder David Norcross. Hello. For yet another conversation about generative AI. We’ve had about three of these already and the technology just keeps evolving super quickly. So back again, how are you doing?

Justin: Doing good, doing good.

David: Good good. So you recently wrote a couple of articles. One of them was called SearchGPT and the End of SEO. Pretty bold title. So first of all, for the folks at home, can you explain what SearchGPT is? And then secondly, defend this title. How is it going to kill SEO?

Justin: Sure. So as you said, this is our third conversation on this, and I think the first two were appropriately hyperbolic. Things were moving very quickly. It’s somewhat stabilized now. I think people are already using ChatGPT kind of as a search engine anyway. I know I am. But still, Google is the dominant search engine. OpenAI just announced last week that they’re actually launching a dedicated search engine, SearchGPT. And what this means is potentially seismic for Google, because at least at the moment, ChatGPT has the momentum of a trusted provider, and sometimes the results are wrong. But they’re not malicious, at least. They make mistakes. But it’s not intentional. They’re not biasing the results consciously, as far as we know. Okay. So having a dedicated search engine that’s in real time, not just looking for keywords, but trying to genuinely find relevance, this is going to be a game-changer because Google, very often it’s whoever’s paying the most money or whoever’s gaming the system. If SearchGPT can genuinely provide an alternative, and because it’s a paid platform, they may actually be able to do it without ads, then this could be the end of SEO as we know it, which has been the dominant digital marketing tool for 20 plus years. But this could be the end of that.

David: Okay. So there’s there’s a lot in there. Yes. But definitely I remember even just five years ago when I first started working at Lexicon, get these assignments where we were doing SEO, blog writing where you get these assignments and you’re just cramming as many keywords into the article as possible, doing things about sit stand desks and the best sit stand desks in all of Australia. And if you want to find a sit stand desk in Perth, Australia, come to these guys. So are you saying that’s not going to work anymore? Potentially.

Justin: And I go back even further than you on this stuff. I was doing SEO copywriting 20 years ago, and at that point you could just write the same word 100 times without any other words, and you could make the words in white even. So, there were all sorts of scam tactics back then. It is more sophisticated now, and Google is still genuinely trying to find the best results, but it is still quite easy to game those results. So yes, that could be the end of that practice because as far as we know about SearchGPT, it’s going to be looking for genuine relevance. And there will be multiple signals to indicate that. Okay.

David: So what does this mean for marketers? Gaming the system is no longer going to work as you say. How are they going to game the system?

Justin: Well, best practice hasn’t changed that much in 100 years of marketing. It’s digital marketing and people often forget the second word. Digital is a part of that. But creating useful, helpful content is always the best strategy. So even Google itself over the last few years, its last update was called the Helpful Content Update. They’ve been trying to actively change from just generic scam content to signals that indicate human usefulness. So yeah, there’ll be more of that moving forward. And basically, a brand that is able to truly understand its audience, truly produce content that’s helpful. Talking about contemporary topics as well as evergreen topics and putting out that content on a regular basis across its website, social media channels, etc., they’ll be the brands that stand out because people will be searching for brands on subjects rather than just keywords.

David: Right. It’s interesting how [00:04:00:00] the robots are getting a lot better at detecting and evaluating content that is that humans would appreciate. Yes. I’m sure I said some incorrect things from a technical standpoint there, but, you mentioned in one of your secondary articles, the follow up to this SearchGPT, the concept of storynomics or the book Storynomics. And this came out quite a few years ago, right? But it emphasizes the power of storytelling and marketing. So talk a little bit about that. Is that still going to be relevant, or is that going to be even more relevant in the age of SearchGPT?

Justin: So, authors of that book, had kind of foreseen this result. Obviously, they didn’t foresee SearchGPT, but they saw a world in which it was so saturated with advertising that it just ceased to be useful. And in that world, the only way to truly stand out is by telling stories, by engaging your audience on a human level, understanding their needs, their pain points, and providing solutions. And they wrote that 2018, it’s six years later now, almost seven years later, and the principles were true then, but they’re even more true now in this context that it’s truly being helpful and producing good content and trying to be a good thought leader over an extended period of time that will see you get recognized. It’s not just going to be how much you can pay Google this month, it’s going to be the brands that truly position themselves as brands and have solutions for their audience, their concerns, their pain points, their problems, and position themselves as a helpful guide to guide the hero to success.

David: So are we actually heading to a post advertising world where storytelling is going to replace advertising?

Justin: I think there’s always going to be advertising. Who knows what SearchGPT is? It might just be an advertising.

David: This is an unfair question to ask.

Justin: But LinkedIn will always have advertising. I mean, Google’s not going to die. I say it is in an article to be hyperbolic, but it’s never going to fully go away because it’s so integrated into Android [00:06:00:00] and everything else. Google is always going to be around. So advertising is not going to die necessarily, but the only true tactic that you will always win is storytelling, like producing helpful content for a real audience on a regular basis. That’s the best content for social media, for your newsletter, your whitepapers, your LinkedIn content. It’s always going to be relevant. And whatever technological change comes along, whether that’s print media or whether it’s AI or whether it’s Google. Ultimately, the most helpful brand, the most helpful content, the most helpful people will stand out. Yeah.

David: Okay. So that leads in nicely to my next question, which is something we mentioned in one of our last conversations, I think in every single one of them is, okay, so now that the technology is getting much more sophisticated, it’s picking up on things that are actually helpful to people. What role and you mentioned LinkedIn there in your last response. So what role does personal branding play and how can people leverage LinkedIn to make the most of their personal brand? Yeah.

Justin: So any channel is just one of many potential channels. The good thing about LinkedIn has always been the ability to connect directly to a target audience in a way that no other platform really does. You’re connected directly to your perfect audience, and you can, on a daily basis, understand their pain points and help them succeed. Obviously, there’s different parts of the funnel. You’re kind of right at the top there, right at awareness stage. Every single day of the week, you can be providing guidance, providing authority, empathy and solving their problems. And there’s no better way to do that than with the personal accounts. The personal accounts allow you to add 400 connections a month to tell multiple stories from inside your brand, and as a result, they’re better than the business accounts. The business accounts you’re limited to people following you, opting in, choosing to follow you. But even then, we manage a lot of both accounts, and it’s always the personal accounts that get the better results. For sure. In [00:08:00:00] terms of reach, engagement, everything.

David: Yeah, I mean, you said it, but just to emphasize this point, of course, somebody’s going to prefer to interact with an individual than they will with kind of a faceless corporation. And I think as we’ve been saying, in this age of AI, of deep fakes and all of this stuff, genuine human interaction will absolutely be at a premium.

Justin: Exactly. And aligned with all this other stuff is the AI content. There is an increasing amount of of AI content, which we forecast a year ago. Some of it’s not bad, but a lot of it is really generic. And so having a personal voice, a tone of voice, being on camera, talking to people directly, these are going to be true ways to stand out from the noise and from the crowd by genuinely being a human.

David: Yeah, a human. Okay. I knew you were going to do that. Um. All right. Excellent. So, I mean, we could go on and on about this for the rest of the day, but there’s plenty of AI content we got to sift through.

Justin: Yeah, I think we should cover one more topic before we go, which is some stuff that’s happening just this week as we film around Google. Okay, that’s an addendum to this, almost.

David: All right. For the folks at home, tell us about this.

Justin: Yeah. So as you know, there was a big scandal earlier this year in February when Google launched its image generating yes, the Gemini.

David: Yes, it had Nazis of color.

Justin: It had Nazis of color.

David: Yeah. Amongst others. Yeah.

Justin: So it had, that was the most scandalous example. But they’d set the filters to try. And I mean, it’s a noble intention that they don’t want to pepper results with any kind of bias, or they don’t want to just be all white people or all black people or anything.

David: But, yeah, you can’t really have…The Pope of the Catholic Church is typically not going to be a woman of South Asian descent. Exactly.

Justin: And that’s a really serious tech issue because that’s not, it’s not an error in output. It’s an error in processing. It’s they’re telling the results: hey, make sure you factor these elements in. Which might not be relevant sometimes like…I mean there’s not many more homogeneous groups than the Nazis, right?

David: Right.

Justin: Those results are.

David: It’s kind of the whole point of the thing. Exactly. Indeed it is.

Justin: So that happened in February. And I think that’s part of the reason why SearchGPT is so exciting to many people, and that it’s something that’s new. Just this morning as we came to work. Google has been charged in the US with. I’m not even sure the exact definition of it was, but a monopoly issue. So they’ve been, if you search for flights on Google. It’s Google flights that comes up. They’ve basically got a complete monopoly on advertising. And the Monopolies Commission is looking for ways to break up that dominance. I think given that they’ve had that dominant position for so long, they’ve able to be a bit quixotic, I think, is the word I use in the article.

David: Tilting at windmills. Exactly.

Justin: Yes. They’ll be like, oh, yeah, we’re already the top dog. What can we do to help? I don’t really. They shouldn’t be interfering in this stuff. Just what’s the answer to my question? I don’t need you to give me your. You should know about this as well. That’s not really relevant. Right.

David: I come to you for the search results. I’m searching for something. Give me the results. I don’t need your spin. Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of. We could get into the whole how the media has been doing this to just report the news. Don’t don’t tell people what they should think about the news.

Justin: Yeah. And when I read that this morning, I was like, oh, okay. That’s. It makes sense why they’ve been doing that. Because they’ve been number one by such a huge distance for so long. So they have this luxury. Yeah. And there’s an arrogance that comes with that. That okay. Well we’re not just giving you results. We’re making the world a better place. Yeah. Are you though, like.

David: And do we need you to do that?

Justin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then also, I’m not sure if you saw this, but Gemini had an advert for the Olympics running. Did you see this?

David: No, I haven’t seen it.

Justin: It’s kind of. I think it just handled the whole AI thing badly. Obviously it’s quite new to Google and all of that comms on this just seemed terrible. So they had this this advert running during the Olympics, which is meant to be a nice storytelling advert. It’s a dad talking to his daughter about their favorite Olympian, and the dad saying to the Olympian that how my daughter, she’s going to write you a letter, she loves you so much, you’re her favorite. And he just gets Gemini to do it for his daughter. It’s like, what’s the lesson there? Like, you can be a lazy parent too. You don’t need to teach your kids how to read and write. Just give it to Google. That’s a dystopian message. That’s not a family friendly.

David: Right. It’s not heartwarming at all. No.

Justin: So I just think Google’s really dropping the ball with this. Like maybe it is that level of they can be arrogant and slow moving and, yeah, arrogant, I guess, because they’ve had such dominance that all these little missteps are just really basic errors. Like, don’t put out your generative AI tool unless you’ve tested it properly. Don’t be putting adverts like that out because you’re going to get. It doesn’t seem human. Like the people are scared of AI a little bit. They’re scared of it taking away their jobs. I mean, this is taking away parenting. That’s even worse.

David: Right, right.

Justin: So yeah, I think Google, as we just discussed during this discussion, I think they’re having their first real challenge in a long time because Bing has not been an issue previously. Duckduckgo is not an issue. There’s no other major advertiser apart from Facebook, which isn’t a search engine. So this is going to be a rough couple of years for them. Right.

David: Which could be a good thing for us users. All competition is a good thing. They’re going to gonna have to innovate. They’re gonna have to kind of shake themselves out of this complacency, that, as you suggest, is the cause of all of this nonsense recently. Um, so. Okay, so any final thoughts for marketers, for storytellers, how to break through in this new, terrifying, exciting landscape?

Justin: It’s the same stuff we’ve been saying for a long time. If you know your brand truly. What are you offering? Who are your key people. What’s your tone of voice? What are you selling, essentially? That’s your personality. That’s your brand. And you also know specifically these are my audience segments one, two, three, four, however many. You know their pain points, their concerns, and the problems that you solve for them, it should be very easy for you to make content beyond that. You just make sure that those two things are aligned. Here’s what they need. Here’s what we do. How can we find storytelling directions into that? So you can be talking about the same basic subjects over and over again. Just find different directions, whether it’s a white paper or an article, an interview, an animation. Just make sure that you’re available when they’re ready to buy. As we discussed many times, only 5% of a B2B audience is ever in-market. But you should be there 100% of the time so that you’re always helping them, advising them, guiding them so that when the time is right, they can come to you. So that’s not just running ads all the time. It’s genuinely trying to be helpful.

David: All right. Excellent. Let’s leave it there. So you wrote three articles recently. I don’t have them in front of me, but let’s put them up on screen. So if you want to learn more about SearchGPT, Google’s struggles, Storynomics in the age of AI, check out one, two, three David’s articles. And then for the folks out there, if you guys need any help with storytelling, if you need help producing white papers, videos, podcasts, images, all of this great stuff, you know who to call. Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters.

Justin: Thank you Justin.

David: Thank you David.