The Truth About SEO AI (GEO): The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Not everything about Generative Engine Optimization is pretty. Uncover the good, the bad & the ugly truths that the X AI SEO bros won’t tell you.

Dive into the intricacies of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) in this enlightening video. We’ll explore its advantages, the challenges it presents, and the potential pitfalls lurking beneath the surface. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast or a business professional, this video will unpack everything you need to know about effectively leveraging GEO. Don’t miss out — watch now to discover how to navigate the good, the bad, and the ugly.

David George Quaid, Founder of Primaryposition, a leading NewYork SEO agency.

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The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:22.180] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back folks to the WP Tonic show. This is episode 1,000 and 10. We’ve got a fantastic guest here. He’s become a new friend as well. We’ve got David Quaid with us. Um, he is recognized as a true SEO expert. He runs Primary Position, a leading New York SEO agency. He also is a regular on the Edward Show, which is one of the leading podcasts about SEO. Should be a great show. I’ve also got my co-host Kurt with me. So David, can you give us a quick 10, 15 second intro? And then when we go into the main part of the show, we’ll go into your background in a bit more detail.

[00:01:12.990] – David George Quaid

Yeah, thanks Jonathan, Kurt. It’s great to be here. Love the show. I’m looking forward to today’s episode. I got into SEO, I think, when I built my first website, which was back in 1995 when I was living in Cape Town, South Africa. And it was something I was always interested in. After I became a software engineer in Dell, I actually tried to build my own coding site, but I think it was just a little too ahead of the curve. And then I got into software development and my first startup in Ireland was actually a web design company or a software company. That moved into web design. And then I realized that SEO was just much more fun. And so that became its own industry around 2005.

[00:01:56.500] – Jonathan Denwood

I think that’s enough. And then we go into a bit more detail when we come back and I’ve got Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself?

[00:02:04.050] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, Jonathan, my name is Kurt van Ahnen. I own a company called Manana Nomads and we work directly with great teams like LifterLMS and WP Tonic.

[00:02:12.950] – Jonathan Denwood

Right. Like I say, we’re gonna be covering everything in SEO and AI and GEO and schema should be a fantastic show. Davey’s got some really, um, points of view, and he’s been proven to be correct on a couple of things, in my opinion. Um, but before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:02:40.190] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:03:13.550] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. Want to point out we’ve got some great special offers from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and technology and services for the pro, the small agency owner, and the freelancer. You can get all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic.com/deals. wp-tonic.com/deals. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. So like I say, David, So you come from South Africa, you, I think you moved to Ireland, if that’s correct. And then you were saying you started your first web agency, but then you got into SEO. So maybe we can start from those early days, more about your background, David.

[00:04:06.980] – David George Quaid

Yeah, I think after we started building websites, we realized that, you know, websites weren’t an automatic route to marketing. They were a product themselves that needed marketing and, um, search engines were just the easiest way. I remember the first search engine— first marketing techniques we used on websites were things like traffic share, where if you sent 1,000 referrals into network, you got like 10 back. And it didn’t seem great. There were 2,000 search engines, they all listed 100,000 results from the same website. So if you’re looking for something about Microsoft, you got 10,000 results from Microsoft. Um, and, and then Google appeared on the scene. Um, remember I was, I was working as a software engineer in Dell in 1998 when they came out, and, um, it was just really the best search engine, best search experience. Um, and I, I think, yeah, search SEO just, um, kind of took hold. I, I set up primary position in 2004 and I haven’t looked back.

[00:05:05.610] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:05:08.670] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, it’s just more like an observation, and I just, I, I really want to bring this forward David, you said 1998, and some people think that’s ancient, like, oh my God, you’re from the ’90s, um, you’re from the 1900s. Um, but the other side, like you said, you started in 2004 and you haven’t looked back. I mean, that’s, that’s really only 22 years. I mean, it’s amazing to me, like you were talking about the, the state of search in 1998 and, and, you know, kind of like how archaic that felt. But still, that’s very recent history when we think about things. It’s like saying the iPhone’s from 2007.

[00:05:44.960] – David George Quaid

I think it’s partly the rate of pace. You know, my dad studied computer science in Dublin in 1964, which is a long time ago, and not a lot changed, right? He, in his lifetime, he saw punch cards turn into magnetic tape, and in the 1990s, we were still using magnetic disk, right? So, actually at Dell, we were still using magnetic tape on Tandem mainframes. So, you know, that lasted for a solid 25 years. If you look at the last 15 years, how much technology has changed, that we now have more power in an iPhone than we did in a Tandem mainframe. I think that’s—

[00:06:24.690] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, yeah.

[00:06:25.430] – Kurt von Ahnen

And that’s always something that kind of blows me away because I’ve worked for giant corporations that are operating on servers that are 35 40 years old, right, with old archaic, you know, AS/400, like, you hear all these terms. And then we have these conversations about these very new technologies. And then when we’re talking to you about, like, SEO and how a business is found and all that, I mean, I think we have to recognize this is all, like, fairly new stuff. You’re at the forefront of stuff as we start to discuss it today. So if someone doesn’t feel caught up, they shouldn’t feel like a moron.

[00:06:58.440] – David George Quaid

No, absolutely not. And I think Another thing about SEO is that there’s this, you know, there’s this need that it’s always changing, that Google’s always changing the rules and moving the posts. And I keep getting in trouble for this. Um, but I don’t think the fundamentals of Google have changed that much. There are some definitely, there are some, some big changes that have happened in Google. Um, if you look at the home screen, it’s pretty basic, right? It’s, it’s actually devolved. You know, at one point they were trying to be a portal and then they went back to just being a search phrase. Or sorry, search bar. But the mechanics of SEO are very much the same as they were 28 years ago. And I think people forget that. Obviously, it’s grown a lot more, right? Google does job search, hotel search. It’s a cloud company. But if you’re trying to build a SaaS company or you’re trying to build a local plumbing business or a local pizzeria, the mechanics are very much the same. They haven’t changed that much. And a lot of the changes aren’t visible. If you’re running from every Google update every quarter, you’re following the wrong people, right?

[00:08:06.330] – David George Quaid

I still have yet to have a site that’s been hit by Google update except for one that I bought from Canada on New Year’s Day for $200, which I bought because it was an HCU-hit site and it literally went from 100,000 clicks a week to zero. And I was just curious about how that had happened. But I think For me, I do the same things in SEO today as I did 10 years ago, and I don’t see that changing dramatically, right? Not as dramatically as when we were building applications for, like you said, AS/400s, and now we’re building web applications today or mobile applications. That change to me seems more dramatic than the changes in SEO.

[00:08:48.940] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, that’s awesome because it kind of leads into that next question, right? It says, um, You know, there seems to be a lot of contradictory information about SEO, GEO, AIO, like all these things. What are a couple of things that you think people— what are the main things people really need to know?

[00:09:08.050] – David George Quaid

There’s always been contradiction in SEO, in part because, you know, as my old boss used to say, where there’s mystery, there’s profit. In part because people feel the need to oversimplify things. And in part because people solve problems by overcomplicating them. So I think some of the things that people need to know is that there aren’t magic switches that people are holding back from you. It’s not that much of a black box. It’s difficult to understand because it’s a whole new set of language and 3-letter acronyms that don’t have meaning in everyday life. So it’s very difficult to get up to speed, but, and applying critical thinking to it is difficult. I think some of the really important things is if, if, if 1,000 people who don’t seem to be doing really well at SEO are telling you how it works, I think you need to take a little step back. If everyone’s saying the one thing that everyone doesn’t know, but should know is this one thing. You need to take a step back, right? If everyone knows what it is, it can’t be that much of a secret, right? All of the new geo myths are just recycled SEO myths.

[00:10:23.240] – David George Quaid

There are a lot of good ideas and a lot of noble placements. There are a lot of people who have, who think they’ve discovered the sort of the holy grail of SEO and they want to share that. But it’s misplaced. I think things like schema, the llms.txt, which has been debunked. I see a lot of people saying that, you know, LLMs love clear, fresh content. They love beautiful architecture and structure. Most of the people who say that are writers, right? Language. I was talking to CMO this morning. I was saying, you know, language is our stumbling block. It’s It’s our ancient technology. We have to convert concepts and shapes into noise so that another person can take that noise and convert it back into concepts and shapes. And, and our language is a very awkward way of doing that. And one of the most interesting sayings we have is like, a picture says a thousand words, right? We can sometimes understand a picture much more than we can a thousand words. Yeah. If you look at how LLMs work, they don’t understand language. They’re called large language models because they have a lot of language and a lot of heuristics and a lot of patterns.

[00:11:40.340] – David George Quaid

But what they do is they convert that into mathematics and into shapes. And that’s why they— that’s why things like NVIDIA chips are so important, because they were built and designed to understand polygons, which are very important when you’re building computer games, especially 3D computer games. And because they can do those math— that math very quickly, they’re much better than Intel processors, which are more sort of like tuned for doing basic math and bias processing, right? And I think that if you can, if you take something like an LLM that can take a document that’s 500 words and turn it into a white paper that’s 5 million pages and then turn it back into a 50-word statement, and you’re then trying to juxtapose the idea that you need to write clearly for it, I think someone who’s trying to tell you that is telling you a fairy tale. Right? And I think you should discount it as that. If you’re going to an LLM with a large document, like your terms and conditions from your bank, or you get, you see a letter written by a lawyer, or you see an observation written on a Supreme Court case, if you’re putting that into an LLM and asking it to summarize it for you, I think you can rationalize that you don’t actually have to explain things to the LLM.

[00:12:50.130] – David George Quaid

It’s pretty good at taking human language and transforming it into different objects.

[00:12:54.390] – Kurt von Ahnen

Nice, nice. Jonathan, over to you.

[00:12:57.600] – Jonathan Denwood

So that, so that’s one insight, a tendency to overcomplex. But I think with a lot of your latest podcast appearances, you also, it seems not entirely, but it seems that these large learning models are using Google’s index highly, aren’t they? And you, you have pointed out vigorously that they’re using that, they’re using other techniques to do a kind of wider search using a fan of long-tail terms and bringing it back. There’s even a debate of this. I think the term is, I’m trying to remember the term actually, that it’s not heat, but there’s a term that they use that. So some people say if you do the same prompt 10 minutes later, it could be quite different, even if you’re using the same learning model. In general, people say it tends— there will be differences, but it will tend to give you the same results roughly. But if you use a totally different model, right, if you’re using Gemini and then you go to Perplexity, you’re gonna get very different results. But your argument is that fundamentally, because they just haven’t got the resources that Google’s got to do the indexing that they would need to do to provide a total index of the internet, they just haven’t got it.

[00:14:57.050] – Jonathan Denwood

Is that correct? Basically?

[00:14:58.960] – David George Quaid

Yeah, absolutely. So in marketing, there’s always been, you know, with Google being a sort of unichannel, there’s been two factions in marketing, if you want to look at it as a bifurcated market, where you have SEOs and then you had people on the other side of marketing who were like, you know, brand and channel and things like content, who wanted to believe in sort of their own hard work. And Google obviously is based on PageRank, which is an objective way of measuring the web. And it PageRank, just quick brief history, was modeled on something that Sergey and Larry looked at, which is a way of rank stacking medical review papers, right, and peer research. And what they did is they looked at the people that cast votes, and they gave more weight to people with more prominence, and then weighed up where they had said a peer document or a medical document had, had better chance of being accurate. And they took that same model and they built PageRank and they looked at websites that linked to each other and websites that had more links got more of a vote. And that was their objective standard.

[00:16:05.380] – David George Quaid

And a lot of people never liked that. They never got on board with it. In fact, today, I think 99% of SEOs still believe that one day Google will start to rank documents based on the document’s quality. I’ll point back to an Aristotle, um, observation that the document is the claim to rank. Therefore, the document can’t be the evidence to rank. And a lot of people people don’t love that, especially writers, especially people who are building brands. They want to be, they want to see Google ranking them on their own merits. And I don’t see that happening anytime soon. So when LLMs came out, I think a lot of people thought that spelled the end of search, the end of Google and the end of PageRank, right? And that LLMs would start to read documents, go like, hey, this is good. This is accurate. This is, this is just fluff. This is just marketing nonsense. And people started to hypothesize that LLMs had access to all the information that humans had ever produced. It’s kind of true. It’s the most information we’ve ever produced, but it’s not all the information we’ve produced. There’s a lot of information that isn’t on the web because it’s just not on the web.

[00:17:09.700] – David George Quaid

Um, but also unfortunately, consensus itself isn’t a good factor, right? A lot of people might believe that there’s still lead in pencils. That doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been replaced by graphite, for example. So, back to where we are, I think a lot of people think that LLMs are replacement search engines. They’ve got a better way of ranking content. And so you see people talking about in—

[00:17:33.470] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think we’re getting to the crux of it because I just want to put this statement in and maybe, Kurt, I can’t— I don’t know what you want to do, Kurt. Go on to— you do question 3 or I do it. But I think we’re getting to the crux of this, David. Um, I think there’s people when it comes to search, what you’ve tried, cuz David has been very generous and given me some, a fair bit of his time around my own website Tribe. And he’s tried to point out to me a couple things cuz you, you know, David, I’ve been quite concerned about a few things. Um, that cuz there’s this, there’s this attitude that Google’s been using DeepMind. And their own large learning model technology that they had developed. And I think quite a few of the people that went over to ChatGPT were part of BigMind, BigMind, whatever it’s called. So they got this idea that Google— and I think it’s not untrue, isn’t it? They— Google’s building this technology to use large learning models to put another layer upon how they judge the quality of a page or a domain.

[00:18:57.470] – Jonathan Denwood

But I think what you are saying, uh, what I’m— is my observation of your other interviews is that’s there, but they depend on external links, titles, slugs, basic stuff to a higher degree than BigMind, whatever they call it, because just, just because of the volume that they’re indexing. So I think you strongly have said that they don’t really fundamentally understand what, what your page is saying, that they’re just looking at a mixture of different things, but they don’t have a deep understanding. Of the page. Is that correct, David?

[00:19:40.380] – David George Quaid

Yeah, 100%. And that was the basis of the DOJ’s argument that Google shouldn’t have a monopoly because they did a better job. They actually set out to prove that Google doesn’t understand content. And what they found was an executive onboarding slide in their, in their HR onboarding deck, which is on the internet. You can go look at it. It’s at, it’s at DOJ.gov that says, we don’t understand content, we fake it. We serve content and we measure people’s reaction to it. And I think that’s important. I think when people try to break down content, they always go into the library model. They look at, we can check facts and things like that. Very little human content is facts, right? A lot of it is opinions, observations, confirmation bias, conjecture arguments, you know, political stuff, right? Not a lot of it can be fact-checked. Right? Like you, you can’t fact-check economic models unless you can find an exact environment in which to implement and test them. Right? So, um, yeah, it’s even fine to do it.

[00:20:45.760] – Jonathan Denwood

So, but when we go on to the large learning models, and I don’t know if you would agree with this statement, is that they don’t understand the content either. They’re using extremely impressive mathematics and pattern recognition. To group different words together because they use this mathematical technique to group patterns together and then they spill it out and it makes sense.

[00:21:15.400] – David George Quaid

It does.

[00:21:15.800] – Jonathan Denwood

And but they don’t— it doesn’t understand anything or what it’s spewing out. Is that correct? Yeah.

[00:21:25.000] – David George Quaid

The way models are trained, it’s literally they’re fed 100,000 sentences on different topics, right? So they learn how we use words. So for example, if the first 5 words of a sentence are, you should read your credit card statement, it will then guess the next likely word and then the next likely word and the next likely word. And as you fill in more words, the number of permutations gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And that’s how they end up being accurate, right? So when you search in an LLM and ask it something, its vocabulary, its conceptual understanding, and its ideas come from— Gemini is trained on Reddit, ChatGPT is trained on a corpus of web or whatever. Um, and then when you ask it a question, they break that question down into a series of queries called the query fanout. They send that to a search engine. A lot of people still think that ChatGPT uses Bing. It doesn’t. It uses SERP API to go to Google. Claude goes to Brave Search, which is a Google clone. Perplexity and Gemini both go to Google and so forth. And so they break these queries down and then Google gives a result.

[00:22:34.880] – David George Quaid

And those results are based on good old standard, plain old boring SEO. All right.

[00:22:40.800] – Jonathan Denwood

What do you want to do, Kurt? Do you want to do the next question or should I do it?

[00:22:45.150] – Kurt von Ahnen

I can jump in. I mean, it’s, um, It’s interesting for me, right? Because I think David just did a really good job of explaining to some people why you can make a brilliant piece of content and then not see traffic and not see results and not see— and you know that you made brilliant content, but you haven’t gotten reaction from others. So the search engines don’t recognize the reaction to make the referral.

[00:23:09.790] – David George Quaid

Exactly. And that’s the problem with the sort of like good content mentality, right? Is that If you look at urgent care, that is, that, that index is now 510 million pages. It’s grown by 50 million pages in 30 days. So if you write the best page on urgent care and you get Shakespeare back to help you write it, it’s not going to rank unless you can find someone to link to you, to give you some sort of credibility that Google will appreciate it to show it up in its index. And If Google doesn’t have it in its index, it’s not going to return it, which means the LLMs are never going to quote it, right? So LLMs don’t really cite things from Reddit or YouTube. They take their query and Google tends to rank Reddit quite highly and, and some YouTube results. And that’s why we see them in those result sets that the LLMs use. And I think it’s very confusing for people when they’re given that information. I just shared on X before I came on here that if you look at, if you look at the top advice that people are giving, right, the checklist of the top 10 things you should do for GEO, the top 10 things you should do for SEO, and then you look at the people who come to Reddit and say, look, my pages aren’t getting indexed, right?

[00:24:25.950] – David George Quaid

I’ve written these pages, I’ve created this page, I’ve got no errors on my website, I’ve got a sitemap, I’ve got schema, I’ve got an llms.txt file, I’ve got I’ve got the best content ever written. I’ve got meta descriptions. I’ve got a sitemap, but Google won’t index my content. That happens about 7 to 10 times a day. And you look at those sites and they don’t have anyone linking to them.

[00:24:50.910] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, that is, that is, um, that, that’s really, uh, insightful for a lot of folks, I think. Um, the next thing was we were going to talk about Mount Everest. Mount AI, and I’ll be honest, it’s a fairly new term for me. But in the SEO industry, we have people that talk about mount AI a bit. And I was hoping you could explain kind of what that means in your own terms and kind of get people up to speed on what we’re discussing and then kind of like the outcome of that.

[00:25:19.740] – David George Quaid

Sure. So if we look at the SEO, the different tribes that make up SEO and web developers, right? Web developers are very focused on what they produce should be the ranking result, right? So writers look at content of writing and they think, I’ve written a great piece of content, I should be appreciated for it. Web developers think, hey, I’ve built a really fast website. It’s really good quality. The code is a good standard. I’ve got a great tech stack. That’s the quality signal, right? And again, it fails for the same reason. And one of the things they found around authority is to just publish a lot of pages at once, right? And it’s called scaled content. It’s sometimes called PSEO, which means programmatic SEO. I think that’s an unfair thing because programmatic SEO is what big sites like Amazon, eBay, and Reddit itself use, right? In other words, they’re template pages with lots of user-generated content. That’s okay. PSEO, uh, scaled content is where people take a long list of keywords and have an LLM produce 1,000 pages and they publish it in in one go. All of that content gets indexed because there’s so many pages.

[00:26:27.570] – David George Quaid

A lot of pages go into what are called uncontested, um, indexes, right? So 25% of search phrases every day are brand new, which means there’s no search index. So if you’re the first page into it, you don’t need authority to break into those indices. No one else is competing with you. You’ll get into them. And so if you look at the indexing map, it goes up, And the number of clicks goes up and then the Google spam engine that looks for scaled content abuse comes in, the site gets hit, the pages are deindexed and it comes down again. And so you end up with this mountain shape, um, which is called Mount AI. So it’s like a sudden high return in visitor traffic as a result of publishing a large amount of pages in a short amount of time. And then the penalty comes in and say you have a downslope on the other side. So your stats sort of like go skiing. Down from the top. And I think that’s a big growing problem for a lot of people.

[00:27:28.850] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think I want to ask a question that viewers might be thinking, and it might sound bizarre or too simplistic, but I think about my own use case, David. I can’t help because the world revolves around me. You work in a certain industry and there’s certain keywords that you’re going to use because you’re in that industry and you just described like, I’m going to invent a keyword. 25% of the keywords are new every every day, right? Well, if I’m doing that, I’m chasing hits and views, but they’re totally irrelevant to my niche or my, or my vertical, right? But if I stay within my vertical, then I’m, then I’m competing in spaces I won’t get attention for. And so I would think there’s a danger in trying to reinvent like new keywords and discover, like, get traffic from some new weird strange vertical if it’s completely irrelevant to your core message?

[00:28:20.390] – Jonathan Denwood

Sure.

[00:28:21.770] – David George Quaid

It’s not necessarily dangerous. It’s just not very helpful, right? But when we look at when people come and talk about, you know, how they’ve suddenly grown their ranking, the scaled content penalty is actually one of Google’s oldest, right? It predates AI. It’s not actually related to AI, but obviously AI can produce relatively high-quality content now. 15 years ago, it was machine-generated gibberish, right? It didn’t make sense.

[00:28:50.700] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:28:51.570] – David George Quaid

Um, the problem isn’t the relevancy of the words. The problem is that Google has been able to detect it for a very long time. It can look at, um, volume, velocity, frequency, right? And, and targeting methodology, right? In other words, how you build and structure those pages, as Jonathan said at the start, The slug, right? The slug is how Google gets 90% of its relevance. If all of that’s very, very targeted, produced very, very quickly in one very quick page, it’s a massive red light to a spam detection, um, bot, right?

[00:29:28.050] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. It’s, it’s my website, right? So hosting e-learning WordPress, right? My number out of 10. Links in my website, 4 of my top 10 are— have to do with mountain biking.

[00:29:43.620] – David George Quaid

Okay.

[00:29:43.800] – Kurt von Ahnen

I just inadvertently wrote articles about mountain biking or whatever, and all of a sudden those get all this traffic. And when I asked AI, like, I’m in the web hosting business, right? I make e-learning websites. I wrote an entertainment piece about going mountain biking and I get all these views on that. How come I’m not getting views on other stuff? And it says, because there’s less competition in mountain biking, so I’ll get more traffic and hits on that.

[00:30:07.650] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, wouldn’t which I thought was weird. Yeah, I don’t follow that. I’m sorry I interrupted, David. Yeah, that’s the problem. Do you want to answer that? Because I’ve got a couple of things to say, but do you want to answer that?

[00:30:21.650] – David George Quaid

I was rude, but first of all, if you hadn’t written, would you be better off not having written the articles on mountain biking?

[00:30:31.450] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, see, then that comes to my personality. No, I’m like, I’m gonna write whatever I want to write about. Right. So for me, I’m happy to put out the content and it’s great that people saw it, but in that environment, it’s not bringing the traffic that’s going to grow my business.

[00:30:44.320] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s not going to— it’s not going to grow conversions, is it? It’s not going to lead to customers. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?

[00:30:50.490] – David George Quaid

So I think there’s two ways of looking at it. If you can take your stories on mountain bikes and make it businessy and make it and use them as an allegory for marketing stories, right? Then you might actually be able to tie it into something, right? Yeah. The way keyword topics are joined together is actually really, really basic, right? Travel Canada is as related to the word travel USA because of the word travel, right? So if you can figure out a way to get from mountain bikes to hosting, you can use that traffic and I’d encourage you to do so. But it’s not a bad thing, right? Google, what Google tries to do with sort of like restricting topical authority, you know, seeping from one topic to another is that if you write a blog about your CRM or SaaS tool, that you can’t just write one article on something like hosting and suddenly become a hosting expert. That hosting article will just get ignored. But it’s not doing any harm. But you would have to go through the same process of building up your reputation as a SaaS or CRM tool in hosting. So you would have to start with the basics, like what is hosting?

[00:32:04.090] – David George Quaid

What are types of hosting? Why should I be seen as a person? You can’t just take the fact that you get 100,000 clicks a day on SaaS and convert that to— and that, that stops sites from just becoming the next Amazon or the next eBay by just earning a couple of backlinks and earning a couple of clicks and then suddenly expanding into every topic, right? They made it very hard. And they’re making that harder. I think most of the core updates, and I think I’ve seen that in a couple of sites as well, where, where you had a small bit of content on some looser topics, Google sort of like ranked you lower, ranked you lower, and you’re seeing like a steep decline in traffic for that. That’s what I call a tightening of authority. I’m not sure if that’s the best word, but it’s the best I came up with so far.

[00:32:50.590] – Kurt von Ahnen

That’s good. Jonathan.

[00:32:52.570] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, just to, well, I think, I think I kind of, once I drove you crazy, but we’ve had a couple of discussions and you know, it’s become a bit of a, because my own website, I’m going to be frank with the audience because it’s my tribe, is that I’ve been using AI. I use it because I’ve got a bit of dyslexia and kind of until Christmas I was producing about 3 to 5 pages a week. Kirk would, not all of them, but quite a few of them would edit them and I would put video on it and we would add, attempt, I would do other things to add value. And, but I’ve seen, you know, um, if you look 2 years ago, my traffic was going quite well. I was getting a lot of inquiries. It got hit about 18 months ago. Um, and then about— I managed to get it up to about two-thirds of the traffic. And then about 4 months ago, 4, 6 months ago, got hit again. And like Glenn Gab, you know, um, he, he— I would say he’s the one that kind of introduced this term Mount AI. And Glenn worked for Google, I think, for 6 years.

[00:34:09.220] – Jonathan Denwood

And he, he kind of— his opinion, if Google senses you’re using AI content, you’re going to get hammered. You know, your position, I think, is it’s, it’s, it triggers, it leads to other factors that trigger Google and it triggers the scale content abuse.

[00:34:34.910] – David George Quaid

Penalty.

[00:34:35.310] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, penalty. But using AI itself isn’t the reason. The reason is it triggers other effects, which triggers the scale content abuse. And what you’ve tried to drill in my head is that if you’re producing 3 to 5 pages a week on some— something, Google ain’t going to care. It’s like when you’re producing hundreds or thousands of pages that it triggers the scale content abuse. Have I got that correct?

[00:35:10.010] – David George Quaid

Absolutely. And so maybe there are users out there worried about this as well, Jonathan. I don’t think you’re the only one, right? So I have seen a lot of users come in.

[00:35:19.850] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I wouldn’t say worried. I’ve got paranoid and it’s got me deeply depressed, which Kirk will testify to you.

[00:35:27.900] – David George Quaid

I think a lot of people will actually have this question and where I share this online, I think a lot of people have been asking me similar questions. So I think this is a really good area to dive into. So I’ll try and do it as succinctly as possible. Right. The scaled content abuse penalty has been around for a long time. And if you want to diagnose or see if it’s happened to you, if you look at your Google Search Console, it’s like a cliff. It looks like here’s your content, here’s your clicks. And it’s a straight down within 48 hours, your content, your clicks will go down by 99.9%, straight to the ground with zero recovery. And then your page, some of your pages might become deindexed, right? So, so de-ranking and then de-indexing. And I’ve seen a lot of people come in and they’ve tried to pretend that they weren’t building content very quickly. They said, you know, all of this is handwritten and I was like, okay, well, how many pages are you publishing? They’re like, well, we’ve been doing, you know, 15 to 50 pages a day. That kind of velocity is enough to trigger, um, a scaled content abuse, right?

[00:36:33.260] – David George Quaid

So, um, unless you are an established job site or an established big market, don’t be publishing 300, 500 pages in a day. That’s, that’s gonna be problematic, right? I don’t know what the heuristics are for the scaled content abuse. Google has a document called its AI Policy Guide, right? Using AI content for websites is not banned. Google doesn’t step on people’s freedom of speech or its freedom of expression of speech. In other words, you are free to structure a page how you like. There’s no magic formula for content structure. You can use 10 H1s if you like. You can use 10— I’m not saying it’s a good idea. You can use 2 H2s, a H1, a H5, and H3, Google doesn’t care. It’s not, it’s not looking for structure. It’s not your English class teacher, right? It’s not going to punish you for grammar, and it’s not going to punish you for spelling mistakes. It’s, it’s, it doesn’t care. If your users care about grammar, they’re going to bounce, right? And that’s going to, that’s going to hurt your site. If they don’t, it’s done. But using AI content isn’t going to hurt you. Using AI content at scale or doing something to manipulate rankings is what Google is concerned about.

[00:37:47.580] – David George Quaid

Right. And I think if you look at it from that lens, it’s, it’s pretty straightforward. And that’s why I don’t think you should worry. You know, I’ve looked at your content. I think your content reads very well. Your content didn’t hit a brick wall. What’s actually happened is what we were talking about earlier with those 25% of searches being unique every day, the small volume of searches, a lot of your traffic was made up of that. And as Google has tightened those authority bands and the way certain keywords feed into others, your site has come down.

[00:38:17.690] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m following you now because I really went for long tail, didn’t I?

[00:38:22.020] – David George Quaid

Yeah.

[00:38:22.290] – Jonathan Denwood

Because, because I mean hosting and learning and there’s a lot of big hosting companies that I wanted to, I decided to talk about learning management plugins or, or SaaS learning management systems. Because I didn’t want to talk about hosting because it’s so competitive. So I went, I went long tail with most of my articles, which is quite understandable, but it had a consequence which you’ve just explained so clearly, David.

[00:38:49.760] – David George Quaid

Yeah. And I think when you, when you, when you see it like that, it’s less scary and you can sort of see a path back to growth, right? So if people are worried, uh, you know, if you, if you have been using scaled content, then you’ve got a different recovery pattern. But if you’re someone like Jonathan, you’ve just seen, a change in traffic. Um, it may just be that tightening of authority.

[00:39:10.640] – Jonathan Denwood

More than a change, David, it’s a semi-collapse. There’s no people signing up for my service. So, um, it’s a slight problem, isn’t it, David?

[00:39:23.090] – David George Quaid

If it looks like a staircase, you can walk back up. If it looks like a cliff, then you’re—

[00:39:27.410] – Jonathan Denwood

you’ve got a problem, right? Right. It’s been fascinating. It’s actually one of the best Obviously, I don’t know if Kirk feels this because this is— Kirk knows that I, I’m a fanatic about SEO. I would prefer to go into SEO than WordPress, really. I’m just a fanatic. I’m a nightmare. Kirk will, will report back, say, yeah, that’s correct. But I think it’s been a fantastic discussion so far. David has just explained some complicated things so well. Um, I think it’s time for us to go for our middle break. We’re a bit over, Kirk. We have to probably go a bit early, but, um, it’s time for our middle break and we’re going to continue this fantastic discussion in the second half of the show, folks.

[00:40:17.130] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:40:54.280] – Speaker 4

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[00:41:31.070] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. We just had a fabulous discussion in the first half. Also, I want to take the opportunity, if you’re looking for a real partner, a hosting, but much more your white-labeled learning management community membership partner. If you’ve got a large project and you’re looking for a partner that can really help you build out a major product and re— project and really give you fantastic advice, why don’t you look at becoming a partner with WP Tonic? Um, we can host, we can advise, we can build out for you. To find out more, go over to wp-tonic.com/partners, wp-tonic.com/partners. So over to you, Kirk.

[00:42:24.200] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m going to be honest with you, Jonathan. I almost want to push this one right back to you. I am not well-versed at some of these tools, but you had mentioned questions using different tools to measure AI visibility and stuff like that. Could you, could you kind of bring David into that question and maybe do a better job of that?

[00:42:41.840] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, because it’s, um, it’s with, you know, somebody you know, David, who I like, and he came on the show about 6 to 8 weeks ago. It’s TJ, and he does a fantastic— and he, he admits he’s gone full AI mode, as I call it. He, um, he’s got not as extensive experience as you, but he’s got over 12 years’ experiences in a middle-level Las Vegas digital agency as head of SEO. Seems a legit guy. I like him.

[00:43:19.090] – David George Quaid

Me too.

[00:43:20.310] – Jonathan Denwood

And but he’s gone full AI mode, GEO mode. And he did a video and he explained and he’s saying use a tool like Peek, P-E-E-K-A-I. There’s a number of these tools, but this is really popular and it should give you— its legitimacy is it supposedly gives you the fanout. You put in a term and it gives you the indications of the fanout using different learning models, using different large language models, right? There’s a lot of debate here, isn’t it? Because A lot of people say if you’re using the same large learning model, you, and you go back in 10 minutes, you’re going to get a different result. I think that’s pushing it a bit. I do think they’re going to be differences, but it’s going to show similar patterns of the resources it’s recommending to you. But you definitely use different large learning models, you’re going to get totally different results. So what’s your feeling about this? And it’s very popular in using a tool like Peek and building these pages. TJ seems totally, totally committed and totally convinced on that, isn’t he?

[00:44:51.650] – David George Quaid

He is. And he’s such a great guy. I really like him. I, I actually listen to his TikToks every day.

[00:44:57.070] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, they’re really good, aren’t they?

[00:44:58.370] – David George Quaid

Very, very good. He’s a great guy, and I really recommend people go and listen to him. And I think the big problem we have with GEO is actual data. There’s also a GEO community that are the opposite of TJ, that are really spreading a lot of misinformation and disinformation. TJ’s a straight-up guy. You can tell that within half a minute of listening to him. You know, he’s going to give you the absolute truth, the absolute best information that he knows about. That’s his MO, right? And that’s what makes him a great guy. Um, the problem is that nobody really knows what people are putting into LLMs. We don’t really know how they’re using them. Uh, I think OpenAI put out some stats like 6 months ago where 67% of people in the US were using it for things like friendship and psych— psychology and help and, and things like that, which is very interesting.

[00:45:55.290] – Jonathan Denwood

It, I find— I really find that disturbing. I understand it, but I really find it disturbing. My, my unofficial, uh, therapist is Kirk, and he wants to give up the job because he’s had enough. He’s got his own. And you, you’ve had to put up with me as well.

[00:46:11.420] – David George Quaid

Uh, um, no, I think, I think it speaks a lot to where society has become and where, um, devices that connect us also maybe separate us a bit. I think I’m, you know, I, I I have a lot of empathy for parents. There’s a lot of people that are cut off in society today. It’s very scary. Like, for example, I don’t think dating tools have in any way helped the dating industry, right? Or the dating scene, sorry. I’m glad that was all after my time. So I think that there’s a couple of challenges for society. Also, I think there’s a societal inertia to embrace LLMs. But if you look at one of the KPIs that everyone keeps ignoring, Google Ads business seems to be doing okay, right? And so that wouldn’t be the case if 90% of people had shifted over to LLMs, right? You can also— also one of the— so the problem with all of these visibility tools is they don’t really know the volumes, right? And a lot of them are guessing. And if you look at The one tool where you get a tiny glimpse into real data, that’s the AI Performance tab in the Bing Webmaster Tools report.

[00:47:25.680] – David George Quaid

I don’t think Google will be releasing one while it’s doing SERP API. SERP API is the tool that gets around what Google calls its Search Guard facility, which is meant to block sites like ChatGPT from getting at its index, right? So I don’t think they’ll release any data on that.

[00:47:42.360] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, I didn’t know that. Can you— So they got an actual tool that is resisting.

[00:47:47.900] – David George Quaid

Yes, largely have a lot of tools that prevent machines from accessing their search data. One of those reasons is, for example, to prevent people from creating false clicks on their ads network. Right. So for example, a lot of people say, oh, you know, be careful running ads on Google because you can—

[00:48:05.960] – Jonathan Denwood

you’re talking— sorry to interrupt— you’re talking about what Spot— Spotify has seen lately, because some guy, he’s been arrested because he, he generated AI songs, right? And then he made the farm and he got bots to do the clicks and he made a fortune. But the feds are after him now, seemingly.

[00:48:27.340] – David George Quaid

Yeah. And so Google has its own default technology for both SEO, where it’s called, um, CTR manipulation, and ads, where that’s called click fraud. And so they’ve got different mechanisms to detect machines versus humans, right? That’s where you get the CAPTCHA check from. If it, if it sees you doing too many searches, it stops and says, we detected something funny about your IP, please finish this CAPTCHA check. Um, and then it has its own tool to prevent other people from building search engines based on it. And SERP API is one of these tools that can get around that using essentially a whole bunch of IP addresses and bots. To send clicks in. And so they’re suing SERP API for providing that search data to OpenAI at the moment. Right. And I think that’s why they’re not going to share that data. But Bing is sharing that data from Copilot and it’s not— it doesn’t really include ChatGPT because ChatGPT doesn’t use that much because Frankly, it’s just not as good as Google. Um, and, and that goes back to what you were saying earlier. These LLM companies can’t keep up with the NVIDIA and RAM compute power they need.

[00:49:43.450] – David George Quaid

Google is an old-style data center that’s sort of like laterally broad, right? It has lots and lots of compute power to go and fetch documents, to build indexes, to crawl the internet infrastructure. Whereas what LLMs need is lots and lots of memory to remember all these sentences and patterns and heuristics to synthesize content that comes. So they can’t both compete with Google. It’d be a bit like if SpaceX had to compete with United Airlines, right? It’s two different types of voyages into, into the ether, right? Um, they’re about small single rockets with a lot of energy to get to break gravity. United Airlines is about tons and tons of airplanes ferrying people around the planet, not above the planet, if that makes sense.

[00:50:28.540] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I follow what you’re trying to point out there. So, um, so you, because you seem to agree with me, I’m a bit cynical about tools like Peak AI. Is that just my opinion? You, you know, would you just to finish off before we go on to the next one, is that you don’t— you would agree that you got to take it with a large pinch of salt, what they’re showing you?

[00:50:56.510] – David George Quaid

Yeah, and there’s a good guy on X, um, that we, we both like as well, um, Harpreet. Um, yeah, he’s great, and he does a really good job at taking apart some of the specific things that some of these tools like Profound do as well, where they inject, um, commands into your LLM tool that, that sort of like very, you know, skew results that you’re gonna get back. I think that they don’t really know the volume and percentages and repetition of these.

[00:51:24.440] – Jonathan Denwood

And so the reason why I, the reason why I added this, I’m not gonna name them, but there’s a major SEO YouTube channel. It’s a UK-based SEO agency. And they do a fantastic job of promoting themselves on YouTube. And they’ve gone big into utilizing this. They like, not as honest as TJ, but they really are pushing that. It’s very mechanical that if you— they, they had the insight because they use these tools like Peak and then they produce content and you’ll be guaranteed to show up in the large learning models results. And I just don’t, I just don’t see it myself. Um, there’s too many factors. Do you think I’ve been a bit unfair there?

[00:52:19.180] – David George Quaid

I don’t think so. I, I, I don’t think that, you know, the LLMs are given a defined space to learn from. And so I don’t know how somebody can inject your brand into that. You know, we, you watched a video with me and Edward and, and, and another guy from a tool company who said that if you have a very, very succinct value proposition, the LLMs will talk about you. That means that they have to go around the world and evaluate every single brand, and that’s just a mission that’s not really feasible, right? So unless they’re just talking about standard SEO, so when somebody puts in a prompt and then that tool goes to query fan out, and if your wondering, well, I use ChatGPT and I don’t see a lot of query fanouts. ChatGPT doesn’t— isn’t honest about it. Neither is Grok. Perplexity is much better. If you take the same prompt and put it into Perplexity, you notice it says, I’m searching the web, or put into Claude and says, I’m doing a web search. ChatGPT won’t do that. And so I think a lot of people think that it’s doing this from recollection from its training, and it’s really not.

[00:53:26.360] – David George Quaid

It’s not, it’s really, really not. And I did an example earlier. I asked Claude, well, who’s the best SEO community in the world? And it came back and it said r/seo on Reddit. And it said because it has 430,000 members. And I thought, you know, I know that that’s not true. It’s nearly 480,000. And I looked at the query fanout and it went to a blog post and the blog post is a year and a half old. And the blog post said, that, that subreddit had 432,000 users. Um, and that kills a number of things, right? One is it shows that Perplexity and Claude aren’t trained on Reddit, right? Because they had to go to Google, they had to get a blog post. It shows that they don’t care about freshness because that post is storing a number. If, if they’re really going through Reddit and learning on Reddit, one, why did Reddit sue Perplexity on October 25th? Because they it didn’t have a license to access it. Only Gemini actually has a license to scrape Reddit. So there’s just too much disinformation here, and it’s too difficult for people to pull all this together.

[00:54:29.350] – David George Quaid

Oh yes, Reddit sued Perplexity, so Perplexity couldn’t possibly be trained on Reddit. Yet your favorite geo agency that you follow on LinkedIn will tell you every day, well, LLMs just love citing Reddit because they’re trained on Reddit. They’re not trained on Reddit. They can’t be. It’s too much information for an LLM to remember, right? So I empathize with marketers and business owners today. However complicated it was to understand SEO 10 years ago or yesterday, with all of this information coming out, it must be impossible. Kurt, I don’t know how you feel.

[00:55:07.340] – Jonathan Denwood

He’s given up. He thinks I’m totally bonkers. Kurt thinks Well, maybe he’s right for other factors. Maybe he’s right, but I’m harmless. Well, I’ve got a good heart and I could, uh, I, I bored you endlessly on this. I’m, it’s become a sickness with me, SEO, David. Uh, um, I’m just a maniac about it. Uh, um, Kurt’s got a hard deadline. Are you okay to continue with the next couple of questions, David?

[00:55:38.970] – David George Quaid

Yeah, of course. I’m here to answer them.

[00:55:40.690] – Jonathan Denwood

Kurt’s got a problem. Fire Engagement he runs. So we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. You’ll be able to see the other part, the whole interview on the WP Tonic YouTube channel, folks. So David, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your incredible knowledge around SEO and the whole subject really, David?

[00:56:05.920] – David George Quaid

I love X. I think X is a great place to talk about SEO. And I’m on LinkedIn. Um, and, um, yeah, and, um, I have an agency, um, account as primary position on, on Reddit. So, um, I have my own subreddit under my own name if people want to ask questions, or if you want to talk to me on LinkedIn.

[00:56:26.390] – Jonathan Denwood

And, um, David’s just a friend. I can’t— if you’re an agency, a WordPress agency, and you’re looking for a good SEO partner, maybe I couldn’t recommend David more highly. He’s just a fantastic guy. I’ve learned an enormous amount from David on the Edward Show. Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you?

[00:56:52.900] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I’m just hanging out with David over on X and LinkedIn, so come on over, folks. I go by Mañana No Más on X and Kurt Van Onen. I’m the only Kurt Van Onen on LinkedIn. Easy to find.

[00:57:05.420] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. We will be back next week with another fabulous guest. We’ve had some really great guests lately. This is one of my most enjoyable interviews I’ve had in a long time, but I think it’s just the subject, but also sharing knowledge with David. Like I say, we will be back next week, folks. We’ll see you soon. Bye.

[00:57:26.830] – David George Quaid

Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group, and also to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.

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