Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Dotdash Meredith is a large media conglomerate with Good Housekeeping, Allrecipes, Investopedia. It's probably the most successful SEO company of all time. And it's also one of the most cited, probably the most cited in LLMs as well. Wow, did not know this. As you talk, I think about if you go to Google, no offense, Mr. SEO, but if you go to Google these days, it's just like a bunch of unuseful stuff, just like this hyper SEO'ed content. Do you think ChatGPT will be able to avoid that fate where it's just a bunch of hyper SEO'ed content that is not what you actually want? Probably. And what you're saying with SEO is that everyone's rewriting each other's content, nonexperts rewriting each other's content. So I get a content-scoring tool, which then looks at all the results in Google and it says, "These are all the things that the other articles are saying. And then this is what you haven't said yet, so here are recommendations for how to be more typical." And then everyone rewrites each other's article. And then one other interesting thing is that the majority of landing pages drive no impact. So we did an analysis where one out of 20 landing pages drive roughly 85% of all your traffic. So 19 out of 20 landing pages drive little to no traffic, which means if I want to get ROI, I need to spend a small amount of money on a large number of pages. And so then you get a nonexpert to say, "Rewrite this other person's article," because that's cheaper than hiring someone from The New York Times to write your article about what's the best payroll management software? But if you knew the few things that would work, the few landing pages that would work, and you wrote them really well, then you could push all that money to that one page, which is what we try to do. But right now it's people rewriting each other's content, so Google has not solved that yet. That's probably a very hard problem to solve. Will they ever solve that? Probably. Will ChatGPT ever solve that? Probably. How I would solve that would be, one concept would be information gain. So did you say something that somebody else didn't say? Two is how typical are you? Are you so typical that I think that you're a rewritten version of somebody else's content? Potentially, Google has EEAT, expertise, authority, trustworthiness, which actually I don't see having an effect unfortunately, but it could. And I could say, "Well, this person's an expert, this person's a certified financial advisor, rank them higher." And I'm actually not seeing that, but they could increase the weight of that. So these are all potential solutions, but I'm sure that the reason why it has not been solved yet and why everyone's rewriting each other's articles. It's probably just hard to build an algorithm to solve that, but will they ever solve that? Probably.…

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