The next SEO apocalypse is here. Discover how Mount AI is reshaping search rankings and what you must do to survive the shift. Don’t get left behind.

With Special Guest Michał Suski, Co-Founder of SurferSEO

This Week’s Sponsors

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:22.130] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 1020. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing a really hot subject. You know, SEO is facing another major update from Google. It’s rumored it’s gonna really affect those that have been producing a lot of content using AI. We’ve got a true expert on this. We’ve got Mihai Suski with us, uh, co-founder of Surfer SEO, and we’re gonna be discussing everything around SEO, uh, content marketing, how it’s rapidly changing in 2024. 26th. Should be a great show. So Michal, can you give the tribe a really quick intro? And then when we come back after our break, we can go back into a bit more detail about your background.

[00:01:10.800] – Michał Suski

Thanks. Thank you for having me. So I’m from Poland. I started SEO 10 years ago, and for 9 years we’ve been building the product, fully focused on that. And as of today, besides building the product, I go around the world and explain, uh, research, how it works, the product, and so on at conferences and events. That’s me in a nutshell.

[00:01:36.910] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. And I’ve got my co-host, Kurt, with me. Kurt, would you like to give a quick intro to the new listeners and viewers?

[00:01:44.180] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, Jonathan, my name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Manana no Mas, and we work directly with the great folks over at WP-Tonic as well.

[00:01:53.420] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. So we’re going to take our starter break, folks. When we come back, it should be a great discussion. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:02:03.790] – Speaker 4

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[00:03:22.560] – Jonathan Denwood

I just want to point out that we’re really happy to have Jetpack as one of our major sponsors. Go and have a look at what they’ve got to offer. It’s a great package. Um, we’ve also got some great special offers from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services for freelancers or small agency owners. It’s a great free resource. Where can you go and find all these goodies? Go over to wp-tonic.com/deals, wp-tonic.com/deals, and you’ll find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re gonna get on that page. So, uh, Mihail, let’s go straight into it. So you gave a quick bit about your background. So how did you get into the world of SEO? And then how did you, um, with your co-founders, start Surfer SEO?

[00:04:20.400] – Michał Suski

That was a total luck coincidence. I was basically without a job at the time, and a friend of mine just asked me if I would join the agency. And I asked, what is SEO? And then he sent me some YouTube videos from Josh Paszynski, State of SEO, something, uh, 2016. And I said like, yeah, why not give it a shot? So I started writing blog posts for PBNs and clients, then learned all the SEO elements, so to speak. So I went through the writer, link builder, then I ended up as the head of SEO of the agency. And then we wanted to scale up the agency, but we felt like we couldn’t hire anyone nearby. So let’s scale up the processes. So we built an internal tool called Surfer. Uh, so that’s basically the whole story. We scratched our own itch with the product. And then what if we can quit our client’s job? Right.

[00:05:30.390] – Speaker 4

Okay.

[00:05:30.630] – Michał Suski

Let’s give it a shot.

[00:05:31.770] – Speaker 4

And it worked.

[00:05:32.660] – Michał Suski

And here I am 9 years later, still building that product, uh, for agencies, for freelancers and in-house teams.

[00:05:41.770] – Jonathan Denwood

So how, how has Surfer SEO changed recently over the last 18 months? Has there been any fundamental changes with the core product?

[00:05:52.430] – Speaker 5

Yeah.

[00:05:52.920] – Michał Suski

Yeah. 100%. Uh, uh, you mentioned, uh, like it’s how fast is it changing these days? Uh, the whole environment, the SEO marketing in general, obviously because of AI and, and, uh, the uncertainty it brings to the table. So we started to work on optimization for these engines as well, because the rules are slightly different compared to reverse engineering for Google. There are a little bit different rules for optimizing for AI sites. So you said the core product, and I say Now Content Score is grading your content not only against entities and structure from Google, but also based on the sources that are being cited on a given queries prompts in ChatGPT, in Perplexity, AI Overview, AI Mode, and so on. So that’s the, that’s the major change we introduced recently, plus Uh, the visibility monitoring, which is definitely something to, to look at, uh, if you want to know who is actually shaping, uh, the landscape in your environment, because often these pages that are getting cited and make, uh, opinions, uh, on the web for ChatGPT, these are different pages than in Google quite often. And in order to figure out who they are, you need to start monitoring these, these prompts.

[00:07:33.240] – Michał Suski

So this is what we do differently that we have been doing, say, 3 years ago.

[00:07:41.260] – Jonathan Denwood

All right. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:07:44.700] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, Michal, I was really struck at the first part of your answer to the first question, and it was we scratched an internal itch. And then we made this product and then we stopped doing customer work. Jonathan and I have interviewed a lot of product developers and they seem to follow a similar path. How long, how long did it take for you to create the product to use internally? And then what made that— what made it obvious that this would be a product that could free you from client work?

[00:08:20.000] – Speaker 5

Yeah.

[00:08:20.470] – Michał Suski

Oh, awesome follow-up, bro. Thank you so much for this. I love this story because, yeah, it was basically because of my brother who also co-founded the product. He is an excellent programmer, developer at the time. He helped us a lot to do it and it was like less than couple of months of like a side project. So he was basically bored at the day-to-day job and what can I do now for you? So I said this, this, and that. So basically it was all about going to Google, finding out the top 10 ranking pages and telling me what do they have in H2s, H3s, what do they have in their paragraphs, how many images, what’s inside the image alt and so on. Because You know, I was doing it manually. I was creating briefs for the writers. I was checking the structure. I was checking the length. I was checking a bunch of different things like keywords in use, variations, LSI, and so on. And that was pain in the ass in Excel, obviously. So when we discovered that we can do it this way and then we can not only use it for briefs, but also we can use it for optimizing existing pages like Okay, we are ranking position 20.

[00:09:41.630] – Michał Suski

What’s the average depth of the top 10? Oh, we are missing like so many keywords in headings. So we’ve been adding these keywords and ranking higher. It was so easy like 10 years ago, 9 years ago. So we thought it was kind of a silver bullet. We knew it’s working. It was working for all of the customers of ours and we had like a couple of hundreds of customers in the agency. So this is when we thought like, hey, maybe we can try like all in. And the period between we decided to go for it and go all in, it took us like a year. So it was like a side project for a year. And then we realized, okay, let’s quit the agency work. Let’s quit. Every other thing we have on the table. So the table is clean and it’s only Surfer. And that was actually the best decision we could make is to laser focus on a single product instead of like, you know, consulting, agency work, some analysis, enterprise. And by the way, I’m also doing a product. No, just the product.

[00:10:57.930] – Kurt von Ahnen

Nice, nice. Um, I believe that clarity probably really helped you focus and grow more quickly. So you talked about how easy it was 9 years ago, you know, analyzing top pages and H1s and H2s and stuff like that. But we look at what Google’s done recently and how many people have been hit recently with their SEO and the AI overviews and all the stuff that we all talk about. All the time. Do you think Google’s going to do another, like, just giant shift or crackdown on sites that are, like, overleveraging artificial intelligence?

[00:11:37.910] – Michał Suski

You know, I think they have better ways to kill websites than use the— if AI generated or not. They have behavioral signals. And this is so much more powerful because, like, there is nothing wrong with your content if they have positive behavioral signals. So they satisfy their end user. They satisfy the person who is not pogo sticking, which is like going in and out to another search result, another, another, another., so you are the one they land and they read and they like and they go away from Google search. Uh, so if they have these behavioral signals, why would they penalize a page that is sending positive behavioral signals but is written with AI? Like, it doesn’t make sense from the business point of view, what will they replace it with? With human-created content, but shitty signals? Definitely not. So I wouldn’t worry about that if the quality is there, if the, if, if the users like it. But unfortunately, a lot of people create content that is garbage, that has no value. That has nothing unique, that has nothing related to their brand, which is basically all that evergreen content full of entities and keywords and looks like any other type of page in top 100.

[00:13:25.640] – Michał Suski

They all look the same. This is something we have to worry about and this is something that can be a trigger. However, one last comment on this is that I don’t think they will do these like massive updates like they did like a Panda or Penguin or something. I feel like they are more like continuously updating it. So because, you know, back in the days we’ve been running data studies comparing winners and losers before and after algorithmic change. So we see that, oh, these guys that won, they are doing these, these guys that lost, they were doing this, so don’t do this and do that instead. And now there is like every month, every week, they will say like, there’s an update, there’s an update, there’s an update. So there is no time that is like a calm sea that you can check, okay, this is before, this is after. Now we compare and then we see what did they change. They push so much noise so we cannot reverse engineer these updates. So if they did so, so created like another Penguin update, but for AI content, we would be blessed because it will be so easy to find the patterns.

[00:14:43.350] – Michał Suski

What exactly did they go after? So I do not expect a massive update. I expect continuous update because it’s hard to track.

[00:14:53.160] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s from an agency perspective. I’m sure you understand this, but it’s, it’s very, very difficult because on one hand you have this thinking that says if you just like telling your customers, right? If you just made good, honest content and you answered the questions or the concerns your customers had, SEO wouldn’t be a thing. Like you would just, you would just be serving the need of your customers. But then there’s the other side of the conversation that says, well, AI is looking for keywords, it’s looking for images, alt text, it’s looking for all these things to recommend you in the AI summaries. And so you have to please all of these things. And it’s made it very difficult to communicate this to customers in a way that’s understandable.

[00:15:41.150] – Michał Suski

The thing with these behavioral signals, this is what AI search is missing because the robots have no feelings. They have like, They only have token economy. They only have this rule that says, how much did we spend on reading your content and how much did we extract valuable info for that from that? And if they have to spend a lot in order to extract one useful sentence, your content is basically not useful for AI. So they have like Like, this is one of the reasons there are some different optimization rules. Like, for example, for AI, first 100 words, bro, if you don’t provide the answer there, you are doomed. And for the people, maybe you need a long intro, maybe you need an anecdote at the beginning, maybe you need a joke to get them read, they like you, and then you provide the dry facts. So these are the differences and it’s hard to basically like balance them.

[00:16:44.740] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:16:45.620] – Speaker 5

Yeah.

[00:16:46.680] – Kurt von Ahnen

Jonathan.

[00:16:48.440] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. I think you made some great points there. You have. Um, um, so I think, I think I agree with everything you said there. I don’t, I don’t think unless, unless you’re producing an enormous amount of AI content and then I think you’re looking at a manual penalty situation. But I don’t think, I think it’s like what you said. I think it’s more about the consequences of using AI content that it doesn’t provide a lot of unique content. But have you got, before I go on to the next question, because I, which was going to be about Google AI Overviews, which I Have you got any insights about how you produce unique content that, but I suppose that’s too big a question. It depends on the particular industry and that. So that’s probably a too big a question. So let’s go on to AI overview. So I think the, I think a lot of websites have been hit by AI Overviews with Google AI Overviews providing the answers. Um, you got any insights about how people can counter that? What kind of content? How, how do they have to change their attitude in general to be able to move forward?

[00:18:22.800] – Jonathan Denwood

Because AI Overviews ain’t going away, are they?

[00:18:26.600] – Michał Suski

No. No. So, but it’s not the first time. It’s not the first time. We used to see these knowledge boxes. We used to see these direct answers, uh, back in the days, even like, uh, uh, World Cup results, right? You don’t have to go to the sports website. Google will give you the stats, even the, uh, shortcuts, even like, uh, pictures, uh, everything. Uh, so they are stealing. Our content for a couple of years now, at least. They just increased the scale now with this. And what’s our take on how to kind of recover from the AI overview update is that you are not trying to pursue traffic anymore because, like you said, it’s not going anywhere. If people will be satisfied with the answers, Well, that will be it. What you can do, though, is you can be the source of information for the AI overview. And if there is at least a fraction of commercial intent in a given query, you need to fight for this query to become the source because their next question in AI mode may be, Who will provide me a solution? And if you were the source at the beginning, they wouldn’t waste more tokens crawling another website.

[00:20:02.300] – Michał Suski

They will just look at you again and say, ah, these guys have an answer. So, uh, my, my number one technique to actually make some use out of these informational pieces of content is, uh, to connect these informational stuff with next potential action that your reader may have. And if that action has at least a little bit of a commercial intent, which is actually using your solution or maybe buying your product or maybe at least, you know, something commercial, then you have to figure out what might be their next question and answer their next question that is related to your business directly. And this is how you can, you can monetize on AI Overview for these next questions, basically.

[00:20:57.170] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I’m kind of following you. I think that was really interesting. So what, how would you advise a business like WP-Tonic? We’re a very, we’re a very small, um, we are hosting, but we’re also agency. We are platform as well. We offer additional functionality. We’re a bit of a hybrid. So how, how, and there’s loads of companies like WP-Tonic in there. How can we, should we give up on blogging at all? Or is it, is it a mixture of blogging plus pages that have higher intent?

[00:21:34.360] – Michał Suski

As you mentioned, let me tell you this. Uh, so you still need rankings, uh, in order to get cited as a brand. Uh, and to get cited as a brand and get rankings, uh, you need some topical authority anyway. And even though not so many people are reading this, you have internal links sending, uh, some link juice to, uh, to the pages that are the money pages. So you shouldn’t abandon that. That’s one thing. And the other thing is that we did, uh, data analysis on like huge sample of AI answers, and it turned out that the most frequently cited source is actually a branded blog. It was like 30-something percent. So, and the second one was like the third-party blog was like a guest post, something like that. So definitely I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t get rid of blogging. However, I will, I would focus more with these blogs on something more commercial, especially on the listicle pages. So pages that will compare different services, different products, different use cases, and obviously put yourself on the top. However, if you are afraid of that, you can also push these listicles on third-party websites, like pay a little bit and let them publish the listicle that you are on the top because these listicles are really working well.

[00:23:06.300] – Michał Suski

And I’m also monitoring that part with our data science team. And even though there is a lot of bad press around the self-promoting listicles, they are one of the best right now as of today, still one of the best performing ways to manipulate AI results. So whether we like it or not, this is what works. Today. And, uh, if we are not doing this, our competition is doing this, and they leave a mark that they are the best. And yeah, everyone who is not doing it, uh, they leave, uh, room for them to expand, and it will be harder and harder to get rid of that, uh, message positioning in the future.

[00:23:54.550] – Jonathan Denwood

I would— I, I totally understand where you’re coming from, but I would be a bit wary about doing it on my own website. Um, you know, either I would use guest, guest blogs, or I don’t mind putting WP-Tonic in the mix, but putting it at the top, I would—

[00:24:13.860] – Michał Suski

please put it on the top. I’m begging you, put yourself on the top. Uh, seriously, we are measuring all that stuff, 20 million, uh, scrape sample, and It’s like 20% of all the cited pages were self-promoting listicles. So that was like insane. And another one, I mean, I know it might be tricky for companies that are aged, like I see 1,020 episodes, that’s massive. For Surfer is also like 9 years in a business. And we have less tolerance for risk, right? But for all of the companies that are just starting or early in their journey, uh, I would definitely take that risk, uh, in order to, to, to, to make a difference. Uh, yeah.

[00:25:12.650] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. I understand. I’m still a bit wary about it, but I do understand. I think it’s a good place for us to go for our middle break. Folks. It’s been a great discussion with me, how it’s, um, he’s a real expert on this, got great product as well with Surfer SEO. We’re going to go for our middle break. We’ve got some other great topics to discuss when we come back. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:25:38.780] – Speaker 4

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[00:26:16.160] – Speaker 5

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[00:26:53.700] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. Had a great discussion. But before we go into the second half, if you’re looking for a great partner to build your learning management system or your community website and you’ve got a really big project and you’re a bit wary, you, you think you need a partner, a white glove partner, why don’t you look at using WP-Tonic? We build, we host, we consult. Find out more by going over to wp-tonic.com/partners, wp-tonic.com/partners. Wp-tonic.com/partners. Let’s build something special together. So over to you, Kurt.

[00:27:37.180] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I don’t want to completely abandon the idea of talking about artificial intelligence. If we think about like how we’ve seen some people, especially Jonathan and I, because we kind of look at this a lot from, from different providers. There are some people in our circles in the WordPress space that have created an inordinate amount of AI, and then we see their traffic go up and then suddenly traffic collapses, right? We see traffic go up and then traffic collapses. What do you know what causes that or how to prevent that? Or is that just the risk of running that content?

[00:28:13.950] – Michał Suski

Yeah, I think it’s, it’s the velocity of your publishing and how fast the general topic of the website can change. So, uh, because, you know, we all have these semantic center of our website. Let’s say there is 100 articles about technical SEO. I’m pretty sure we can find 100 topics on technical SEO, like robots, redirects, all kinds of broken links, all kinds of stuff. Uh, And we are technical SEO. Okay, we have 100 blogs. That’s our center. And imagine what happens when we bomb it with 1,000 articles on marketing. So what does Google see when they revisit? They really liked us as experts in technical SEO, but somehow we morphed really quickly into something they cannot even comprehend. And categorize who are you now. I expected to be a great technical SEO agency or a resource for people, and now I receive what? Television ads and their cluster. I receive content marketing and that cluster. Like, it’s first is unnatural, and second, these type of content does not belong to you. As you were technical SEO. So I feel like this is the biggest problem. People are greedy, aren’t they? People want all the traffic.

[00:29:57.280] – Michał Suski

They will go after low keyword difficulty, high search volume topic ideas, even though they are out of their expertise, out of their scope, but they somehow find a way to connect it. And this is, in my opinion, the main reason of that happening is basically outriting, outpublishing your original content with a lot of pages that are only somewhat related to where you started with and you lose your expertise and Google cannot categorize you about, uh, as a, as a trusted resource anymore in this area. So you lose everything scaling too fast, basically in too many directions.

[00:30:56.070] – Kurt von Ahnen

I see that as an obstacle for a ton of businesses. Like even if we’re not, even if we’re not talking about the internet space, like let’s forget the let’s forget we’re agencies, right? So, because it’s easy for us to talk about agency stuff. Let’s say I own a boat dealership and I’m— and I sell boats. And for the longest time I sold bass boats and fishermen were my number one customers. But then I got a couple of new dealer agreements and I start selling jet skis for entry-level, you know, personal watercraft. And then I start selling, you know, bigger boats like cabin cruisers. To like families and pontoons to families. So based on your answer, like that risk is I’m going to come out with a lot of content because they’re new products. So I’m going to say I got a ton of pontoons, I got a ton of jet skis, and Google’s going to go, wait, wait, wait, wait, you only sold bass boats.

[00:31:51.290] – Michał Suski

Actually, actually, this is how you— the way you explained it is actually the way to go. So first, secure that you’ll have a product and have it available to sell in order to make a conversion from that traffic. Because if you don’t have these pontoons, you only have a traffic that doesn’t end with conversion. So you are useless to the visitor. And this is what people like with the— when they are scaling, they only want traffic, but they— it’s like empty, empty traffic. It’s like Coke Zero, like no sugar in it, right? Uh, And, uh, the way you explained it, so they secure 2 more dealership deals and they have these products and they can satisfy the person looking for a pontoon, then it’s good. But if they cannot sell the pontoon, but they start with expanding their content because this is about, this is about, they both go on water, right? Uh, so that’s the same thing. So we will expand. That’s the wrong way. Uh, if they’re selling, it’s actually okay.

[00:32:56.430] – Jonathan Denwood

Okay.

[00:32:57.860] – Kurt von Ahnen

Jonathan, back over to you.

[00:32:59.700] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think you made, um, I think what you’re saying is it’s a bit like what you said in the first half. Um, it’s not using the AI, it’s the consequence of using it because you, you’re, and, um, Kirk’s example I actually think that’s okay, actually, Kirk, because as long as you’ve got a core product, the other products are still about water. They’re still about some element of the core business. And so you could set up separate pages about those products. It’s when you’re, you’re talking about one industry here, and then you’re talking about a completely different industry, and then you’re talking about a completely third industry sector, and you’re talking about those on the same website and they really don’t have any kind of linkage. Kirk, I think. And then you add AI and you start pumping out a lot of pages about all these very diverse sectors that got nothing to do with water. I think that’s when you’re going to get into trouble. Kirk, because, and hopefully Mihai will agree, is that Google, what the hell is this website about? And that’s the problem. Would you agree with that, Mihai?

[00:34:33.130] – Michał Suski

I will tell you this. We had quite a lot of articles on our website, even though they weren’t written with AI. About technical SEO stuff, but we cannot help with technical SEO with either services or our product is not technical SEO product. And we lost these keywords. So we look at the Search Console and see, oh my God, what is this traffic? What’s, what’s happened? Just to realize that was empty traffic that didn’t belong to us as the solution for the problem. Of technical SEO. And then I thought, thank you, Google. It’s actually good that you removed that traffic because it wasn’t converting for us. We couldn’t help anybody. We just had it because it was also SEO. So that’s the misconception people have. Like, it’s also on the water. So I will start selling like the, I don’t know, swimming suits. Yeah, why not? Because it’s also water. So that’s, that’s, that’s this type of, this type of thing. And we can have so many, so many examples like where, where, where people will like explore new areas with content, but they won’t explore these new areas with business. So business offer and content offer is not aligned.

[00:35:59.070] – Michał Suski

If they are aligned, you can grow your content. You can grow your content unless you go outside of your business operation area. That will be the— for me, that will be the boundary, the limit you can hit. If you go outside of your business services, then stop, stop publishing.

[00:36:25.810] – Jonathan Denwood

Right. Is it, is it me for the next question or you, Kurt?

[00:36:29.370] – Kurt von Ahnen

No, I think it’s you.

[00:36:30.720] – Speaker 5

Right.

[00:36:31.050] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I put on the next question, do you think slow, deliberate SEO is more likely to compound than aggressive optimization? But I think what a better question would be is, you’ve got any advice to anybody that has seen And there’s been a lot of people that have seen quite large declines through AI. You know, seen a traffic decline through what Google’s done with AI Overviews, or they’ve just seen a decline because I definitely think Google has tightened domain authority. They, you know, everybody’s saying They’ve seen a lot of pages indexed, you know, being indexed but not shown. They, they’ve seen a lot of that increasing amount of their pages being indexed by Google but not being shown by Google. Um, and a, a lot of people thought it was Mount AI, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s consequences of everything we’ve discussed in this in this interview really, isn’t it? But have you got any advice about what people, if they’ve seen a big decline, what, what are some key things that they’ve got to really consider this year that might help them turn things around a bit? What, or what do they have to get into their mind really?

[00:38:06.450] – Jonathan Denwood

I think you’ve already touched about they’ve got to forget about getting as much traffic to the website? I think you’ve touched about that already in this discussion, haven’t you?

[00:38:17.960] – Michał Suski

Yeah. So number one thing is to look into data. So first, figure out if the traffic you lost was actually yours, because often we are blessed from Google receiving some traffic that actually does not belong to our business. Then we say we won, we are winners now, look at my spike in Google Search Console. And then Google’s correction is actually right. Like, we were not supposed to get all of that. And I would say that people have to check what was the type of traffic they were receiving that is gone. First to, in order to realize whether it is really a disaster for their business or it is just the healthy correction of the direction where their content was heading. And then if it turns out that it is actually a disaster and we have lost the traffic that was making us money, So my number one thing is to check who you were replaced with. And based on that, we can make decisions. So we can, let’s say we were replaced with different type of content. So let’s say it used to be blog, now it’s landing page with call to actions. So if we spot that change, so on the keyword that we ranked with the blog, now it’s all landing pages.

[00:40:00.550] – Michał Suski

It’s obvious we need to create a landing page and ideally redirect the blog to the landing page to strengthen it quickly. So that will be like the second step. So first assess in order to get the idea of which ones were actually making impact on the business, because you may lost 1,000 keywords and only 10 out of that 1,000 were the keywords that make you money. So, you know, you need to focus on 10. Okay. And then on these 10, you perform the analysis, what type of content is ranking there now? And then you can make a decision like, can I create the same type of content? Or maybe that’s just a different service. Maybe that’s just a different answer. Maybe it’s not my city anymore because, well, now it belongs to a different state or something. And that’s why I lost it. There may be so many different reasons, like production of this product is discontinued. Nobody’s searching for that anymore. And you are crying or your Search Console asking why. And it turns out basically this, this service is gone from the market. So it may be not only Google. So we shouldn’t be blaming or always blaming Google.

[00:41:15.270] – Michał Suski

Sometimes it may be a different situation. Also checking impressions decline versus clicks decline, because that may be a case like clicks decline and impressions stay the same, position stay the same. You cannot do anything about it because it’s basically traffic stolen by the AI overviews as people are not going deeper and deeper into blue links anymore in this question, in this prompt, in this keyword. So go explore something else. But if impressions went down, position went down, clicks went down, then well, yeah, there you might have a chance to win it back. But first you need to reverse engineer who are you replaced with. And yeah, I would keep on talking for hours. I would—

[00:42:07.970] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think there was some— before we go on the last question, I’ve got another question. Um, you know, what’s your general view on WordPress? Would you, do you, as, um, you’re not agency, but you work with loads of agencies. Um, but you’re not, you’re not really involved with WordPress. Um, oh, you are.

[00:42:30.860] – Michał Suski

So we have a native integration. There is a plugin even, uh, right now we are, uh, through the plugin, uh, using Uh, the log server analysis, uh, to monitor if ChatGPT, Perplexity, and so on, they are visiting your website. So actually server is quite connected with, with WordPress.

[00:42:50.500] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, I apologize. I mean, I see where you’re coming from. I meant as a, as a kind of more agency level user. I use clumsy wording. I apologize. Uh, um, but that’s great to hear. But what, what’s your view on WordPress in general? Where do you think it is? The middle of 2026?

[00:43:11.110] – Michał Suski

Yeah, that’s the tricky question because I used to be using WordPress for all the websites like a year ago, and the last website I created was pure HTML, Vibe-coded obviously with Claude, but this was just like a single, like one-pager. So that was easy. I just dropped one HTML doc and that was it. But for websites that have like a blog that are longer, bigger, and that is something to manage, I actually still use WordPress. I’m not sure if I say still, because if I say still, it may change. I don’t plan to migrate actively to any other solution. As of today because, you know, WordPress is— it has like a lot of possibilities, but if you don’t want all of these possibilities, it’s super easy and useful. I mean, for anybody. So I feel like WordPress is not going anywhere anytime soon. However, there will be or there is already a movement of the people trying to find some more static websites just because of updates, plugins, hijacking, and this kind of stuff. So for smaller websites, we may see more people going towards something even simpler than that. But it’s not like with Google, like Google will die in 2 years because of ChatGPT.

[00:44:58.330] – Michał Suski

That’s the same story with WordPress. Like, WordPress is not going anywhere.

[00:45:03.360] – Jonathan Denwood

I think it’s more likely the other way around, actually. The way things are turning recently, I think there’s more chance that Google is going to be around and ChatGPT isn’t. But who knows? I’m going to over to you for the last question.

[00:45:21.320] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, we do have a last question, but you have used a phrase that I found very interesting in, in a lot of your answers today, Michal, and that was it wasn’t their traffic. Like, you, like, you didn’t get the hits, but it wasn’t your traffic. How many people, like, like the majority or just a few, like, I don’t expect real numbers, but like in your feelings, how many people do you think are frustrated with SEO and AI and, and all of these discussions we’re having, but they’re frustrated about something they shouldn’t have been frustrated about. Like, it wasn’t your traffic to start with. You should be happy you got what you got because now you can focus on what’s left.

[00:46:03.620] – Michał Suski

Yeah, many, many. I think many because like I said at the beginning, people are greedy. They are obsessed with numbers. Like, how big is your company? 10 people. Uh, 100 people.

[00:46:16.640] – Speaker 5

Wow.

[00:46:17.490] – Michał Suski

You see, uh, but it can be a case where 10-people company is so much more, uh, powerful than a 100-people company. Uh, and it’s the same with, uh, creating websites. Uh, as they will think like, oh, I need to post now, not weekly, daily. I need to post daily. And then they start cannibalizing. Then they start going out of their expertise area and they dilute, I would call it dilute their expertise. And it also happened to us like 2 years ago, we released AI Humanizer and AI Detector. It was a byproduct of us working with AI, with data science. We saw like, okay, people, SEOs want it. So yeah, let’s do it. And you know what happened? We received millions of page views from students. They were only looking to check their homework, basically, if it’s ChatGPT-generated, right? So our conversion rate from the visitor dropped like, you know, really bottom of the bottom. And was it our traffic? We were obsessed for over a year. Why did we lose this Humanizer traffic? Oh my God, our chart in Ahrefs will look really bad right now. Our Search Console is showing the deep. Oh my God.

[00:47:55.480] – Michał Suski

But when you think about it, it’s actually good because These were the people who weren’t buying from us anyway. They were looking for something else and somehow we ranked in this area. And, you know, if we made this mistake, even though we are like a content-focused, data science, data-driven, reverse engineering, yet we still failed there. I feel like there will be many people that they don’t even know they are wrong.

[00:48:37.570] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I appreciate that. Thanks for clarifying. Our last question is kind of like an earmark of the, of the show. We always ask people if they had their own TARDIS or their own time machine and they could go back in time to when they started their, their business journey. What advice would they give themselves? What advice do you think you would give yourself, Michal?

[00:48:59.440] – Michał Suski

From the business perspective? Yeah. I would say sell when it’s growing. Sell when it’s growing.

[00:49:14.240] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah.

[00:49:14.890] – Kurt von Ahnen

You’re like, get out quick.

[00:49:18.280] – Michał Suski

Yeah, that’s what I would I would give, like, uh, because if, if the ocean is getting red, uh, then it’s getting harder and harder. And I can tell you, uh, from, uh, my experience during the last years, I’ve seen hundreds of clones of our product. And, uh, right now you can go to Claude, show some screenshots of Surfer, or even without, there’s already a lot of information about our product on the web. Make me a surfer, no mistakes. And it’ll be kind of something, something imitating. And there is a lot of that stuff right now. So, yeah, the advice is that you should prepare for the black swan effect and it will come sooner than you think. Fake. This disruption was crazy.

[00:50:17.160] – Speaker 5

Yep.

[00:50:19.150] – Speaker 4

Interesting.

[00:50:19.710] – Kurt von Ahnen

Jonathan, over to you.

[00:50:21.010] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, um, have you got time to stay on for extra 10 minutes, or do you have to be off?

[00:50:27.060] – Speaker 5

I’m good.

[00:50:28.670] – Jonathan Denwood

All right, that’s fine. So we’re gonna do some bonus content. I’ve got a couple quick questions. We’re going to wrap up the podcast— pod part of the show. Kurt’s got to go off. And do a live show in a couple of minutes. So, uh, Miho, um, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:50:50.030] – Michał Suski

Hmm, check my SEO conference. This is where we can meet, but I, I believe not everybody will go there, so probably the LinkedIn, uh, the LinkedIn page of mine is, is the best place.

[00:51:03.730] – Speaker 5

Yeah.

[00:51:04.070] – Jonathan Denwood

And Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you?

[00:51:07.980] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m hanging out with Michal over on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt Von Ahn there, and I’m easy to find.

[00:51:13.040] – Jonathan Denwood

Easy. That’s fantastic. Um, if you want to support the show and you’re listening on mobile, on your app, on Apple, um, just leave a review on Apple. It’s really easy. Or Spotify, it’s the same. It’s really dead easy to leave a review. Um, that’s the best way to support the the show and share it on social media if you found this discussion really interesting. I think Miep Hoef has really been an excellent guest. We will be back next week with either a great discussion or roundtable show. We’ll see you soon, folks.

[00:51:47.300] – Speaker 5

Bye.

[00:51:48.010] – Jonathan Denwood

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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