Ethan Smith: belief

Transcript context

…The first thing is that there's significant misinformation on AI and on AEO, and it's pretty extreme. It's unusually the percent of misinformation to correct information is pretty substantial. So one example is every two years there's news articles about how Google Search is going to die or it is dying because there's a new thing. So that's happening right now with AI Overviews and with AEO, Google's going down, which is not true. Before that it was TikTok search, so everyone is using TikTok now. Gen Z is using TikTok, they're never going to use SEO. SEO's going to be dead, and so you really need to focus on TikTok search, which is not false. It's not untrue, but it's not taking share away from Google, it's just a new surface. And then before that it was Instagram, and then before that it was Facebook and it was YouTube. And people do search and discover on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, but it doesn't take away from Google Search. It adds on top of it. These are all new channels, so Google's slice of the pie stays the same, the pie gets bigger. And so misinformation about Google going down, Google is not going down. Google published something recently, their VP of search explicitly said, "I looked at the traffic that we're sending to publishers, and it is not down, it's up slightly." So it is not true that Google Search is going down. And most of the news information about that is saying that it's going down, so that's the first surprising thing. The second surprising thing is tooling. And I've never seen a channel where these extremely expensive tools that essentially do commodity tasks. So imagine if I said, "I'm going to charge you $50,000 for keyword tracking." You would say, "Well, of course, that's absurd. It's keyword tracking, I could write this in a day." No one would do that. But for answer engines, it's mysterious and people don't really know how it's working. Also, the slope of the growth curve is so significant, that I'm seeing people spend huge amounts of money on what are essentially keyword tracking commodities. So that's the second thing. The third thing is the growth curve of the channel. And we did a Reforge AEO webinar a year ago, and there was excitement and then it died and there was very little excitement about it. This was in June, and then people didn't really care. They were intrigued intellectually by it, but they didn't care because they didn't see the impact from that. So there was essentially very little interest between July and January, and then suddenly in January it's just skyrocketing. So it's ChatGPT launches, people are very interested, and then it's not that interesting for growth people. And then there's this little spike in June, and then it's like this, which is usually not what you see with a new channel. So the slope of the curve is unusually steep, and the shape of the curve is also very unusual. The last is that a lot of people do think that SEO and AEO are different and they're not different. nnel. So the slope of the curve is unusually steep, and the shape of the curve is also very unusual. The last is that a lot of people do think that SEO and AEO are different and they're not different. I think probably part of that is because it sounds great to say that there's this new channel, it's completely different. And I'm an expert and I have a tool to sell you, and it's totally unique and all these other tools are not relevant. In reality, it's actually there's quite a bit of overlap. There is the difference of the citation optimization. The head is different and the tail is different, but the core technology is pretty similar. So those are probably the most surprising things. This piece about January being the inflection point, you mentioned that it was because references started showing it more prominently. Is that the big change?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.