Well, after twenty five years of just googling stuff online searches in the midst of a radical change.
Yeah, we're seeing the rise of conversational search and AI generated search summaries, which have big implications for the seventy billion dollar search engine optimization industry and the ability of KIWI companies to find a global audience online.
This week on the Business of Tech, powered by two Degrees Business, what businesses need to know about how search is changing and how will measure audience engagement in the world where clicks and impressions may mean a lot less than they used to.
Our guest this week is Ryan McMillan from Atlas Digital, a company that specializes in paid search and social media marketing and advertising. The perfect guy to explain and make sense off all of these changes that are coming to search and what it means for the average QWI company trying to make it on the global stage.
What I think we're going to see is probably less use of a traditional search engine as people start to find answers in different ways. Every year we hear something that SEO is dead. Is SEO dead?
I'm not sure about. SEO is certainly a worth.
Changing stay tuned to find out everything you need to know about the changing world of search engines.
First, though, if you hadn't noticed, we're about three months away from the US presidential election and the miss and disinformation is running thick and fast on social platforms like x and Facebook.
It really moved up a gear following the assassination attempt on former President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on July thirteenth.
Elin Musk's endorsement of Trump seemed to trigger a flood of conservative slash Republican propaganda across his own platform and counter offensives from liberal learning social media users.
Add in the escalating conflict in the Middle East, riots in the UK, sweeping political change there, and the social media scene seems like even more of a saspit than it usually is.
So what's going on and what can we expect? Is we approached that pivotal election when it comes to the peddling of miss and disinformation.
I caught up with aut Associate professor in Communication Studies and former BBC reporter doctor Helen Sissons to get some perspective on what's going on. Hi, Helen, thank you for joining us on the Business of Tech podcast.
It's a pleasure you've.
Joined us today to talk a little bit about misinformation and how these new media technologies are playing a role in the issue of disinformation and misinformation. And we saw an explosion of that very recently with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
Well, first of all, Ben, you're absl right. What we saw post the assassination attempt was quite alarming, and it has been obviously the subject of discussion, and we saw some quite senior people obviously piling in really with some really with some very concerning and not fact checked, no evidence to support what they were saying, accusing various people
that came from both sides. We had, you know, obviously the usual Deep State is involved in that actually was a Donald Trump construction, and so you know, the idea that the deep state is after him and has been and he's the victim has become a sort of mantra almost and we saw that within almost minutes of the of the attempt. We also saw quite senior people pointing the finger at Joe Biden, which of course is incendiary
and quite and very concerning. And then we saw on the other side, oh, this has been a you know, Trump's own supporters. They're doing this to get the sympathy of people, and that again is very concerning because you know, we see them both sides sort of piling in and we're in. It's very concerning for the people. If we've taken it from the people who were on social media, who are not politicians, who are not activists, it begins
to break down their trust. It's very It is very It stokes fear, It stokes concern, and it stokes who can I trust? Who's everyone out there is behaving in a way that makes it that makes me feel unsafe. So it is really bad for everyone's a sense of security within our democracies. And it has been coined by one of the top researchers in this area, Claire Wardle,
who's now Brown University, as information disorder. And now we always had obviously, rumors and misinformation have always been around, it's just the level and so the ability of social media to disseminate them in a way that hasn't been possible before. Misinformation has always been around, it is because of social media that it's now on steroids. And people believe, you know, half of New Zealanders believe that they're seeing
misinformation every day. It's not necessarily the truth. But when half New Zealanders think that they're seeing false information every day and ninety percent think they're seeing it monthly, then we've got a trust issue here with our information ecosystem.
Let's go to the issue of the moment. We talked pret Flea about the Trump possessionation attempt and the resulting frenzy of information following that. How does that kind of encapsulate where we are today, where we're more likely to believe whatever kind of comes through the social media channels, and maybe even less likely to believe the factual reporting that comes through mainstream media news.
As I said, you've always had this, the misinformation, the peddlers, and you've always had But then actually they were sitting in the pub talking to your two or three people, going, you know, I think the moon landings of the fake. Now you've got the ability for that one particular person, who perhaps only had an audience of three or four in the pub, to have built up an audience on social media across the world of many thousands of people.
So what social media allowed is people with perhaps unusual views extreme in some cases extreme views to find a to find like minded people to spread conspiracy theories. Now, the attraction of conspiracy theories is that they make a complicated world easy to understand. According to research from Victoria University in twenty nineteen, so even before the pandemic, So it's probably more now eight point nine percent of New
Zealanders believe the moon landings were faked. Social media is allowed what we've been minority opinions to become mainstream, and that has divided us. So that means that when you get a critical event, instead of pulling together, there is an opportunity for division to be stoked.
Is that because you know, there are these minority opinions, but they somehow hitched themselves to majority beliefs. QAnon for example, started out as this very fringe belief around deep state and child abuse rings and then it somehow became hitched to the majority Republican party in some way. So how does that happened and how does social media enable these fringe beliefs to then become hitched two majority believes?
Well, they need to be amplified by people who have large platforms. Right, Sometimes you know a view can be seeded on somewhere like four Channel or whatever, circulate there for a while, and then it can jump to mainstream social media, you know, Facebook, by somebody who's a member of both those kinds of groups, and then it begins to get shared. So then it's kind of an organic sort of thing, but often it is actually something that
needs to be amplified. So for example, a fringe British far right party a few years ago put out a video three videos asserting that a particular incident that was actually in Holland between two young boys was an attack by a Muslim on a crippled white kids. And this
was on a fringe British site. Not didn't pick up much until Donald Trump tweeted it, and when he retweeted it, it's obviously became viral and it was fact checked again by the wa she'd post, among others who and the Dutch embassy had to come in and say, neither of these boys involved in this video are either Muslim or immigrant. They were both born and bred in the Netherlands. The threat is real and this is very worrying because it's divisive and it can lead to people getting hurt.
We saw that with the christ Church attacks right his manifesto was called the Great Replacement I believe Great theory, Yes, Great Replacement theory, which is a conspiracy theory that isn't backed by science and doesn't have any basis and truth, but was used as a justification for one of the most horrific acts of violence in New Zealand's history. So you know, and that is kind of this meta narrative.
And like you say, if you believe in the truth of the big narrative, then it doesn't necessarily matter if every single piece of smaller evidence is true or not, because it feeds into your confirmation bias. Right. Do you think that Donald Trump intentionally weaponized Twitter in order to gain power and influence or do you think that he would have found some other way if it wasn't Twitter.
I think several things came together to help Donald Trump. One of them, of course, was the constant undermining of the mainstream media that went alongside that. The media was a bit slow, there was some hand ringing what have you, before they actually came out and said and called Donald Trump a spreader of misinformation and in fact a liar. Eventually, the media didn't want to do that. They would rather have taken each thing and fact checked it seriously and
put it against people were not there for that. And at the same time, he was going fake news. Every time there was a he had a rally and he would point at individual journalism, call your fake new CNN fake news, trying to undermine trust. So it went along side again it was they just trust me, don't trust them. He was speaking to these people who felt disenfranchised, felt that they'd been forgotten, and so social media allowed him to reach out to these little disparate groups all over
the place and bring them together for his base. So he was talking to them and it helped him a lot. That the mainstream media didn't quite know how to deal with this in the beginning, and again amplified many times his messages which were nonsense, you know, many of them, but taking it seriously, and it became like his car crash. I don't know about you, but I was every morning wake up wonder what Donald Trump had said. I was
as bad as anybody else. And this is a big mistake that often the liberal elite can make, is not to take seriously people who behave and act differently. They don't think who were they talking to? And then look at that carefully. So social media allowed him to communicate with a set of people that had been disenfranchised, and he's still talking to those people and they're still there.
Are we seeing this in New Zealand? Is it similar but on a different scale? Has our political structure with MMP rather than just having a two party system per se? It is kind of but not to the same extent as the US. Has that inoculated us a little bit against the extent to which it's happened in the US. Or are we just as bad?
More people in New Zealand believe the moon landing was faked than in America, So I think we've got to be very careful not to believe where this little country at the end of the world that nobody is going to target, nobody cares about. It's not true. We're very strategic, we are valuable. The fact that we are a liberal democracy makes us very attractive as a target for some misinformation peddlers, and there's been some excellent work done by
Stuff Circuit on the soft power of China. I think the disinformation campaign at the last election didn't find as much misinformation as we thought there might be, but work that's been done in New Zealand has shown that we are very concerned about misinformation. New Zealanders are and believe we see quite a lot of it, which just that
belief undermines our trust in our information sources. So we need to work very hard to build trust and the trust research has done out of aut Media Muliati and Greg Treadwell has shown that this is not going away, but we can do things about it. Media, literacy, education, there is a lot of hope, you know, there is a lot of hope. People are concerned, they want to learn and we can help. So yeah, I don't think we should be all doom and gloom raising awareness and
knowing what has been a human pattern. It's just that social media has allowed that pattern and a lot of a lot of extra miles, so to speak.
So being no easy answers from hell and there. It's complex, it's societal, it's interwoven with technological change and control of those platforms. It's only going to get worse, and AI is just another element that's going to confound things even more.
Yeah, it wasn't the most positive sounding of interviews, but at the end of the day, I think what we do need to remember is people do like to speculate and get excited about things, but social media can just take that speculation and excitement and turn it into something
pretty nasty pretty quickly. So media literacy is really key, and just making sure that we're all you know, if you hear somebody talking about something, you have that little voice that goes, just check that one maybe, and reminding your kids that it's really important to do the same as well. That's vital.
Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting in the whole endorsement of Trump by I wouldn't say, you know, a widespread contingent of tech leaders in Silicon Valley, but definitely some of the powerful ones. Peter Thiel, who was a big backer last time, but most notably Elon Musk within hours of the assassination attempt endorsing Trump to US
one hundred and ninety two million followers. Incredibly powerful and that's why Trump is basically said in the last week, I sort of need to support electric vehicles because of Elon, And so he's starting to see this really which we haven't. We knew it was happening, but haven't seen it to this extent. That sort of the tech bro tech elite, conservative leaning elites anyway intertwined with Trump. They've all got super packs. They're giving him money. There's got to be
some payoff for that. So, for instance, on crypto, Trump has gone from saying cryptos a scam to basically saying, oh, yeah, I think I'm going to I'm going to see assets, crypto assets and use it to payoff national debt. So he's done a one ad on that. But you know, is a crypto sector going to see a dream run of you know, no regulation and government endorsement of their
way of doing things. I doubt it. You know, Trump is just so sort of self interested, He's got authoritarian tendencies, and crypto goes against that.
Yeah, I think you use the term payoff there, So maybe we'll just let that's it.
So anyway, that's what's going on with social media and the fight for control of the political narrative, which is intensifying with the US elections looming. But there's another big movement underway in the world of online search and the advertising that goes with it.
The online search engine market was worth around two hundred billion last year, a market dominated by Google. Even here in New Zealand. Google's local accounts show it generated the best part of one billion dollars in sales here, much of which will be through businesses paying to feature at the top of Google search results.
Those paid links are everything for a retailer or a financial services company trying to attract customers. But AI is changing search. It became most evident last year with conversational Search debuting and Microsoft's being search engine powered by the same tech underpinning chat GPT.
Then a few months ago, Google debut it's aioverview future, which will try to answer your search query, not simply with a bunch of relevant links, but a short blurb attempting to answer your question.
So featuring in that AI generated blurb will increasingly be the place to be in search results. That is implications for the type of content website owners create to appeal to Google search algorithms.
At List Digital is a Wellington based paid search and social media startup that helps other tech startups find an audience in the noisy world of search.
It's founder, Ryan McMillan, has helped secure some impressive results for fast growing companies like Chersey's and Jasper. He's been thinking a lot about the future of the search business as Google Bing and others embrace AI.
This one is worth listening to for anyone trying to find an audience online. Here's at list Digital's Ryan McMillan.
Brian, thanks so much for coming on the business of Tech Now. We met probably a few months ago for the first time. It was on a red Eye flight to Wellington, and I was really taken by the conversation. We talked about the tech landscape, startups which we're both passionate about, and search engine optimization and started talking about this revolution that's happening with generative AI, conversational search, which
is changing the game. So we're going to get into that and what it means for New Zealand businesses going global trying to find people online to buy their wares. But tell us a little bit first about your business at list Digital.
Yeah.
Sure, So I started at list Digital about five and a half years ago, and fundamentally what we do is we specialize in paid search like Google Ads, paid social like LinkedIn or Facebook advertising, and then search engine optimization as well, which obviously we're here to talk about today. So some of our clients seventy five percent of them to B SAS companies, with the other twenty five percent being B two C SAS or B two C tech.
And what we find with almost all of the B to B SaaS companies is that they're looking to expand internationally. So from an SEO perspective, that can already introduce a number of questions that need to be answered and ideally thought of fairly early in the piece. For example, your domain structure is something that's quite important to consider, as is the localization of language that you'll be using. Do you need to talk in different languages? Do you need
to colloquialize the language. These are just a few of the things that we set out to answer quite early on and then work through building a strategy in order to make best use of that.
So I think the perception out there is you know search you know was in the late nineties, there were early search engines. Google came along with the power of its way of ranking pages and its algorithms changed the game, and then nothing really happened fundamentally for the next twenty five years. There was a lot of great innovation behind the scenes, but search the experience that white screen with the search bar didn't really change and people love Google.
Early twenty twenty three, we saw Being, which had really been struggling in search, team up with open Ai integrating GPT into the Being search engine. A lot of interest in that, and that was really the start of conversational search, an auto generated summary that tries to answer your question. So, Ryan, what is actual conversational search?
How does it work?
The ability of conversational search is, first of all, can understand using natural language processing the intent behind what you're looking for at a much deeper level. It's not about going what a related keyword someone might talk about, but actually really understanding, hey, what does this person want to know? And then on top of that, it has this sort of multifaceted, dynamic approach where you can continue to on the questions you're asking and almost like it's mimicking actually
talking to a person. You know, I want to buy Nike shoes, and it shows you a bunch, Well, I want to see all the red ones. And then now you've got all the red ones, and you can really build on that, and you can even loop back later like remember those those red shoes you showed me? Can you show me the first two? Because I want to see those two and so the reality is that you're almost starting to get this customer service experience from conversational search.
Like it means that we can go a lot deeper with the searches that we're doing, and off the back of it probably not only answer the questions we've got better, but also walk away with a lot more than we sort of bargained for as well. For example, you could look at buying Nike shoes, choose the red ones, and then go, now, I really want to run this half
marathon in about six months, what's a training plan? And you can really build that and have that all stitched up in a few minutes versus right now, you'd need to google half marathon training plan and it wouldn't cater to you, it wouldn't have your past search experience, it wouldn't know who you are, and it wouldn't be out of therefore, adjust that information to cater to yourself. So it's a really exciting space to be in.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. And what's your take on how this is changing search engine optimization and your own business?
It is hugely changing the game. And what I think we're going to see is probably less use of a traditional search engine as people start to find answers in different ways, and by the very nature of that, it will also change the SEO industry itself. Do I think that that will be the end of SEO? Certainly not. But I think SEO as we know it is going to change, which I suppose is something quite cliche every time every year we hear something that SEO is dead.
Is SEO dead? I'm not sure? But SEO is certainly always changing.
So what does that mean for the types of content? Because ultimately your job now is to try and feature in that auto generated summary you want. For instance, if your campman do a clothing company and some enters tell me the best clothing for a trip to root Burn. If I'm hiking the root Burn, what gear do I need? Katmandu wants to be in that summary at the top of Google. So what do you need to do now to make sure that your stuff gets there.
The experiential nature is probably the most important piece of SEO at the moment, and in my opinion, it's the way that we really find that competitive advantage against llm's which your AI like Gemini, which will be able to give your answers and result in people not visiting your
website at all. I think with the Gemini responses, really what they're doing is synthesizing all of the information on the web and then using that to obviously generate an answer based on the patterns and data that the model's been trained on. So I think that there's going to be less opportunity for businesses to really produce that sort of information level content that doesn't necessarily have a point of difference, and that's where this originality piece really starts
to shine. The thing is about one three hundred percent increase in searches for Reddit variants in the past twelve months, and Reddit, I believe was actually the sixth most or so visited website in the past year compared to the sixty eighth the year before. And I think that what that shows is a really solid display that people want information. They want to search what do I need for the root burn track? And they want to know I need, you know, a range jacket and this many thermals and
that type of thing. But they also want to know from you know, John that did the root burn track and how we found it and if autumn was a good time to do it, and what his experience was and I think that there's a real harmony that can exist in search results, in this sort of information seeking dynamic where humans can continue to play a big part.
And so stepping back from that, there's a big sort of semantic understanding component that Google and other search engines have been really trying to capture the past several years. So since about twenty thirteen and specifically in twenty fifteen, there's pretty big updates to the Google search algorithm around really understanding the wider meaning of what you're looking for. It used to be the case. I mean, this is a whole other story, but it used to be so interesting.
You could literally just write in white text on a white background life insurance five hundred times and that would help you get to the top of Google. And these days you don't even have to use the exact word life insurance to rank for the keyword life insurance. Your page just has to be about that. And so this sort of wider contextual semantic understanding has existed in Google's
machine learning algorithm. But what's so interesting now is really the ability, through the patterns and data matching, to anticipate the other things that you might want to know to your point around what does a business need to do? Google talks about something called EAT, which is experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, and I think that those things continue to play a big role. Experience obviously is a big one,
as demonstrated by Reddit. Fundamentally, what we want to do is create content that's original as a keyword or as a key point, but also that can't be copied easily, because that's the real point of difference here. And so when you can leverage things like first party data. So if you're cat man Do and you for some reason had data on how many people are doing the rout burn track, you could leverage that data in some way to provide a point of difference in an article that
someone can't get elsewhere. Likewise, you could have your own catman Do community and then break that down into the different tracks people have done, and you have your own sort of Reddit experience. In that sense, trustworthiness and brand signals is a big one, and I think what we really want to do is build around specific authors so that they know, hey, it's Peter that's writing this article. When I follow Peter and Peter is writing for Katmandu or Similarly, it could be if you're the CEO of
Catman do, then you build this authorship. These owned communities are going to become more important, and I think the placement of content across different channels, with SEO being one of them, is really where the space is going to move to.
Yeah, so it's easier than ever now to actually generate content for your website with generative AI. You can get chat, GPT or Perplexity or Gemini to do that. But the search engine isn't going to like that because everyone is doing that. It's not unique. What they're wanting is that community based stuff, that experiential stuff, case studies. So what
does does that mean? Let's say, like a campman do, should you be really pushing to get people to review your stuff and write about your stuff on redded or in camping forums and things like that. You're going to have to put a lot more effort into generating that more genuine content.
Yeah, I believe so.
And I think that there's been this concept in se of backlinking, which Google has always described as kind of like votes from other website about your website, and that provides you a significant boost in your chances of ranking for a search result.
If lots of other websites.
Are ranking a linking back to you, now what I think the backlinks will continue to exist, But and that component and the ranking algorithm of what we populate, whether that's populated by an AI or it's populated in the search results below that automated response, it's going to focus much more on social signals, So are you on LinkedIn
and have a following and other things like that. And I think that it's also going to focus in a big way on the review component as well, and so building that trustworthiness through reviews I think will become one of the key new sort of ways that you get backlinks.
So yes, you should be on forums, you should be on social channels, and really you just want to leverage as much anecdotal personal reviews as you can, as opposed to just writing a blog about here's how you can get to the root burn track and then asking someone else that wrote about a different track to link to the root burn track article you've written, which is the old way of doing it.
At the end of the day, like.
What Google rewards is providing users with a great experience. So Google is a multi billion dollar cash machine they invest in all sorts of stuff, from automated driving through to all sorts of other sort of like research endeavors that they're involved in, but really it's all funded by Google Ads. And so for them, success looks like someone searching in Google, getting their answer and leaving, or you know,
continuing to search for other things. And so what they want you to do is just provide the best user experience. And I think that the main opportunity for providing the best user experience now comes from what can people add to the max, not what sort of blogs can we come up to?
Which are a GENAI could just do it?
Yeah, and we're seeing some of our B two C brands like Charities, which is a client of yours. They're doing great work to doing podcasts, are doing how to articles, they're active on social media. So in the hope that that stuff rises up because it's really good quality content. But in terms of like maybe a company like Timely, which is more of a B to B company, it's the same sort of set of rules apply. How do
you introduce that experiential sort of review type experiences? Is what using Timely is Like, I mean, there are websites like clatching that which review businesses based on their customer service and the quality of their products. Is there going to be a lot more of a focus on those sorts of review aggregator sites that are aimed at B to B type products.
I think review aggregators are one part of it. That market itself is actually very saturated, and if you take a given search, like you insert your vertical plus software type search, so say like here Salon software or something like that. In the case of Timely, those software qualifier searches are pretty much dominated by the likes of G
two and trust Radius, et cetera. So it's important to be part of those, but it's also important to add a personal touch of actual customers reviewing your product, whether that might be other sort of business influencers in the space. There are sort of like smaller medium business influencers around the world that actually focus specifically on the beauty industry, but also just talking to your specific customers and then
tying that back to the actual business benefits. Because there's say the G two reviews that you might get, which are more feature driven and are really about parody and which software does what better than the other. But then there's also this other experience of like the purpose of using that software, which is I now have a lot more time, and I've managed to hire two more people. I spend that time working on the business, not in
the business, those types of things. So adding in that first party data improvement that you've got and then putting faces on it, because at the end of the day, people pretty much buy from people.
Yeah, So for decades, Google has made a lot of money by you know, those first few links, sponsored links at the top. They've talked about that this will apply to AI overviews at some point as well. How do you see that playing out? So you will literally pay to be featured in that summary overview that they give. How do they balance that trust and interest in giving you the really good stuff with their desire to make money out of those those who are featured in those summaries.
Yeah, well, I think a lot of it will come down to the actual trust for the brand for that business. So if people still really trust Google, then the same way that Google ads is really effective is that actually people might just go, oh, I'll just go to this anyway, because you know, I trust Google, I like to I'll continue using it. Similarly, in and the AI responses. As long as people are getting the value from those responses, whether they're sponsored or not, people will continue to come back.
And in Google Ads an SEO, Google has a way to measure the actual quality of what's happening as well, sign a quality score to your ads, and that influences the price that you actually pay as well. And so I don't think necessarily that the sponsored component will make people stop using the platform more or less. It's more about the quality of the sponsored content if they got.
Their query answer.
Now, one bigger piece to think about is actually just the business models that will be used, because obviously open ai is using a subscription model at the moment, and Google Ads is using like a pay per click model where you click their ad, the advertiser would pay Google a bunch of money and that's how they make these billions of dollars. So it's interesting to think about, you know, what the actual business models will be that will drive this.
I'm sure there will still be continue to be an advertising component, but will that look more like a Netflix where it's like there's sort of two tiers where you can pay for a subscription and never get any sponsored content. You know, essentially paying Google almost for like a type of ad blocker, yeah, which should almost be genius from Google, or actually just paying to see the ads, and they get paid both ways as well.
So it'll be interesting to see how that changes.
If you do feature in an AI summary. How are the metrics potentially going to have to change when it's not necessarily all going to be about clickthrough and impressions.
Yeah, it is really interesting and definitely a question that all advertisers are asking. Fundamentally though, we need to really think about in terms of attribution, moving away from impressions and clicks anyway, in my opinion, I fund you know, Atlas Digital obviously measures to a very great degree right through to close one business, how much revenue we're actually
generating for a customer. Somations useful for us. But what we do know is that when you focus on top level brand awareness and make people feel something about your brand, that's generally what tends to drive the majority of new users into your company, especially as you grow. And so I think that brand advertising is going to be really important and that you just need to really focus on.
There needs to be almost some sort of metric to understand the quality of the experience someone had, and maybe that will be solved by things like, you know, you've got your laptop camera and can recognize the emotions in
your face when you're looking at something. Obviously there's hover over rates and other things like that, but I think it's these kind of micro engagements that will start being measured to a greater degree so that we can know if we're eliciting positive responses around what the person's seeing in our brand.
We have seen sort of the dark side of AI generated search already. You know, Gemini and Google's oversights. AI insights had a rough start putting glue on pizza that thing. So there's that aspect, the hallucinations, the misinformation that could potentially be built into those If they see content being engaged with on Reddit in a huge way, it might be featured on Google, but it might be wrong. So
there's that problem. Then, is I guess the ethical issue off where they're scraping content from and who gets rewarded for producing that content If it doesn't have a product you can buy at the end of it, someone's just creating great quality content which Google is scooping up.
Yeah, I definitely think that the hallucinations component will be solved in time or at least obviously reduce and the frequency that it happens over time. The licensing component is quite interesting to think about, and I'm not too sure how Google is going to really deal with scooping that content, as you put it, from different websites in the years to come. If we think about the current information and the web, then we've got that's what all these llms
have been trained on. And if we think of that from a static picture, producing new content right now potentially has become less advantageous. If you're a business, you might want to produce fewer pieces of content that's more original experience, as we've been discussing, or you can simply use an LLM to mass produce content that effectively exists already and doesn't really add anything to the ecosystem.
So, if we think.
About in two decades time, what's all the new content going to be, people are going to have to produce it, and Google or other searchings that are going to have to provide some sort of way for people to get some sort of commercial benefit from doing it. I actually think that, you know, owning your own audience is the best thing that you can do at the moment, whether that's all your followers on LinkedIn, and you know YouTube does it so well with all their creators monetizing all
of the audiences that they've built. And then over time, I think that there will be opportunities to show and Google, whether it's through life licensing or advertising or whatever it may be.
So then if you do own your own customer base, essentially we're talking about things like email distribution lists, maybe setting up a forum for them. And if you can do that on your own platform as opposed to just being in a Facebook group or on LinkedIn, the insights you're going to get about their behavior and what they want are going to be that much greater.
Yeah, exactly, And I think that there's something that exists for all of them, right, Like larger enterprises will be able to build their own communities. I know law View has done a fantastic job of building a community. I think total on a B to B SaaS company. Whereas if you're a smaller business, it might be that you just have a subreddit and you're just constantly in that subreddit.
You might have a Facebook group, and certainly there's email distribution lists and LinkedIn groups that you can.
Build as well.
And so I think it's just not really putting all of your eggs in one basket and then seeing how things play out.
Yeah, what's your sort of vision for where search is going to go in sort of the next decade? If we're looking big picture, it's the game has been sewn up by Google for so long? Is this really the starting point of a proliferation? We've got perplexity, We've got all these stability, we've got all these AI companies. Are they going to be able to hop over that wall that was insurmountable before by building sort of search related functions into their own AI products to compete with Google?
Yeah, I think that the search market definitely has been a win it takes all scenario. I think that the sad reality is that up until and I don't know if this has changed, but up until about a year ago, the most search thing in being was Google, or at least the top five, which is really demonstrative of Google's
dominance in the market. It's possible that new entrants do come and shake that up quite significantly, but we also need to take into account when thinking about the future of search that whole adoption cycle as well.
It doesn't.
While it seems like ais everywhere, a lot of people aren't using it outside of the bubbles that we might exist in, a lot of people have never even used it, and they're still using Google in a big way.
And so I think that the.
Actual time it will take before people have migrated to a totally different system will be a very long time, and certainly the younger generation might adopt it earlier.
Could be the case.
But likewise, Google has a massive war chest of capital that they can invest and they've got Gemini rolled out. Obviously, eating a rock a day isn't the type of thing that's great for their brand, but they do have a fantastic brand that people do love. Like Google, it is literally a verb you know, you don't bring it, And so I think to unshake that solid position they've got
will actually be quite difficult. Where I think commercially, in terms of digital marketing, the search market is going, I'm not too sure. I think that I've got a couple of views on it. I think think that advertising models will change quite a bit away from pay per click.
You know, if you're going to.
Reduce the attribution that you can show in terms of how the efficacy of using those channels, then it makes sense that they will start to stack up less versus other channels because you simply just don't know the roy So I think that there might be more of a shift maybe to more subscription driven businesses versus just pure like pay per click models. That's probably my main view.
I also just think that it's important not to shoot your shot too early, to iteratively change your business as you go and adjust to the times, but don't go all in, because I think this is really just scratching the surface of, you know, where everything's going to go.
In some ways, I guess it seems like Ryan is saying that things won't actually change that much. There's still going to be a lot of energy and effort put into figuring out how to be ahead of the game when it comes to search compared to others, and it's going to take specialists. It's going to take time and energy to actually learn how to do that. But it's just the way that you do it might be changing a little bit.
Yeah, and where you put your effort not necessarily just you know, in terms of where you spend money on paid search and social media, but in terms of building that sort of content base that is going to appeal to search engines, not just Googles, but any search engine that it has AI at the heart of it, it's all about experiential content. It's about how to This was what I did with this product, and this is why I liked it or didn't like it, which is why I read it and that I have suddenly seen a
surge in traffic. So, thinking about any company, whether you're a B to B or a B two C company, how do I build a platform or a community or a forum that creates that sort of content that is going to be the real rich stuff that when Google indexes my site, the algorithm goes, ooh, this is really useful storytelling or experiential evidence. I want to use that to feature in an AI overview of some sort of summary.
That's what people are going to have to be thinking about, and that is quite tricky because maintaining a community takes a lot of work. You have to sort of police it and make sure that it's a nice place to be. We saw that in the nineties early two thousands, and with the rise of blogging, it was a great time for the Internet because there were genuine communities that were moderated, usually with a light touch, and it was great commentary
going on in those places. We're sort of seeing return to that sort of goal that comes out of those communities. But it's quite a big investment to sort of especially if you're doing it off your own platforms, to sort of build that and maintain it.
Yeah, I think we may, you know, unintentionally, see a new arms race in terms of that content creation. You already have probably seen those gifts of videos going around the Internet of people with a literal wall of mobile phones that are all plugged into a central computer and they're just going through and putting fake reviews up and doing all this kind of stuff. So no doubt we'll start to see people trying to game the system with some fakery as well. I don't know how that can
be done. In terms of creating your own community on your own website, I don't think that's something that necessarily will be able to be done. It's going to be about creating communities on existing forums. Like you mentioned Reddit, right, and you have your subreddits, but you also have people mentioning things in various reddits, so you might have an art reddit and people will ask what are the best paint brushes? That subreddit isn't controlled by I don't know
what's an art brand. I really should have picked something I know anything about that isn't necessarily controlled by a particular art brand. So it's about getting your valued customers to engage with you in those common spaces online.
Yeah, and the other thing that really struck me that Ryan said towards the end, there is the rise of gen Ai built into personal assistance and voice assistance, and the changing nature off searching for things as a result of that, where we sort of outsource these search queries to a voice assistant. To date, that's been a pretty crappy experience. It's very clunky. But what Amazon is going to try and do with Alexa and Apple with Siri, with Apple Intelligence and all of that will elevate that.
So that may mean that impressions and clicks are less important in future, and that will be a great relief to a lot of people whose lives are dictated by those sort of metrics at the moment. And I think at Hired, a lot of people know that those are
hollow measurements. But what do you replaced them with. So if there is some other ways of measuring success through searching for things in a different way and being stepped through processes how to make a recipe, a dish based on a recipe, how to go travel, and companies are rewarded along the way, I think a lot of people will welcome that.
Yeah, you know, it's a nice idea of the future of search, isn't it that we would be getting our information from these people who are experts and experienced and have done it and can talk about it with that authority. I think traditionally we haven't really seen that shakeout in the Internet when it comes to corporate interests and advertising.
So maybe this will be the golden time. Maybe this will be the golden age of the Internet in terms of how we get information from other people and authoritative sources. That would be nice.
And literally the day after we spoke to Ryan, the news broke about this Department of Justice case against Google, basically saying confirming in court Google is a monopoly and we are going to now take some time to decide what to do about it, and that could include everything from telling them they can't pay Apple and Mozilla billions of dollars to favor the Google search engine anymore, all the way through to We're going to break you up and how that might work. That's got years to play out,
so we won't see any immediate results from that. But another fact there, and maybe something to your sort of optimistic view about the era that we may be entering. If we do have three or four strong players in search, what that would mean for the average Kiwi company that's going out to try and buy some Adam ventry on a search engine. Maybe it's going to lead to them paying a lot less and therefo we're able to invest more to find an audience. That would be a great thing.
Yeah, he is hoping anyway. I feel like I say that a lot at the end of our episodes, a lot of hope. Hope is good. We finished on an optimistic note.
Thanks to Ryan McMillan from Atlas Digital for joining us this week. I learned a lot and I hope you did too.
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