YouSaid · the spoken record

Eli Schwartz

lines on the record
126
first
2024-09-19
most recent
2024-09-19
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Up where you're supposed to. And then it's going to be most helpful for me by subscribing to my newsletter and giving me ideas and feedback on what to write. Really enjoy writing and I really enjoy hearing from people. So my newsletter is productlet seo.com.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, you can find me on LinkedIn. So, search Eli Schwartz, and you should definitely look for my book. So book is product SEO. And actually one piece on just your own personal brand and your own personal rankings. It doesn't matter where you rank if you search your own name. So if LinkedIn shows up first for your name, that's great because they're finding you. And a lot of times brands and people will be very focused on where they're positioned. But it's about the journey. Like if they find you, they find you. It doesn't matter what's number one. And that also underscores that it's not all about links. I believe for my own name and probably for you too, I outrank LinkedIn. And my book, so if you search product SEO, my own personal website, which does not have the best domain authority, it outranks Amazon. So that should right away disprove that it's all about links and it's all about SEO metrics. It's really all about the right fit. So be the right fit and you'll show.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I don't know if I could say most proud of, but I really like what I do with Tinder because it was understand like it brought the entire journey together. There's users out there that didn't know that Tinder would solve a very specific problem. And it's just there to solve that problem. And it's not the way Tinder thought of themselves. They thought of themselves as a dating app, but it's a loneliness solution problem that answers a Google search.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I don't know that it fits into sentence, but it's something I always encourage people, which is to really think big and think long. So I just started working with LinkedIn as a consulting client. And I've talked to LinkedIn about working with them for six years. So never give up like, you know, you meet someone and propose something and suggest an idea. Like, you never know we'll go. Like, I had that with all through my career, with living in different places, like really not think about the moment of where things will go. But, you know, just, it's a relationship you're building. You never know where anything will happen. So look at the big picture.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I'm so embarrassed when I use Grammarly on my book, and it just shows up ball blue and green. I'm like, oh man, if only I had known.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's not a recent product, and it's like the kind of thing I fall in love with over and over again, and it might be cliche, but it's my phone. So I recently traveled in Southeast Asia. I lived there for a little bit. So I hadn't been back in eight years. And the things I was able to do with my phone, like traveling, like Google Maps and ways and ordering food, like I went from multiple countries and I was able to use the same app to book rides and like make payments. It was so useful. Like eight years ago and I was there and I had to like buy a SIM card and my phone didn't really work and I couldn't make payments. And it changed my entire experience. Almost didn't like need a computer. So like falling in love with my phone again. And then another one that it's not necessarily recent, but I absolutely love, which is Grammarly. So I like writing. I write all my own stuff. I don't write with AI. Grammarly helps me to be a better writer.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I was on a plane and I saw this movie Blackberry and it looked like a documentary. So I don't know if you've seen it, but it was fascinating because it's one of those movies that has a cliffhanger and you know exactly how it ends. And it's such a fascinating movie. Like I didn't know all that history, but it was, they owned the entire smartphone industry and they went to zero and it really charted that journey and it makes you think like you never really rest on your laurels. You have to create a product people want and understand your users and keep selling that product and not be like, well, we're number one. This will never go away. And great movie.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Simon's next start with Y. Again, same idea. Really understand what a product a business is supposed to be doing to understand users for growth. This is specifically for growth advisors and not necessarily for PMs, but million dollar consultant. It's a book I read recommended actually by Ethan Smith many years ago. Fascinating book on how to build a brand and become a growth advisor. I ended up working with the author as a coach for almost a year. Amazing book. And then the last book that'd be remiss in not recommending is my wife's book, which is How to Stop Caring What Others Think For Real. So it is a book for precisely that, understanding your own success is not worry about what other people think about you.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “As has been apparent, I really like user journeys and understanding people. So there's a book called Small Data by, I think Martin Lindstrom. I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, where he talks about understanding people and understanding how people buy. And he digs into that entire process. He actually goes and lives in people's houses and watch how they use different tools and toys. Always find that book to be fascinating. Recommend to people who want to understand users.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So, as my own forecast and prediction, I think the need for SEO expertise is going to explode because a lot of what is happening in the search layouts is going to mean that companies have to pivot their approaches. So again, companies focus on rankings. They focus on traffic. And a lot of that goes away. Suddenly the layout changes, the traffic changes. It's not necessarily going to impact their bottom lines if their SEO wasn't a right fit. So this is going to create a lot of interest in SEO help. And I'm seeing this over the last year, my own inbound has really grown because there's a lot of questions as things shake out. So there will be people that want to go into SEO consulting, and I think there's going to be a huge need for it in growth advising in general. What I would say is, and I had amazing mentors along the way, some of your past guests like Casey Winters and Yuri Timmin, Ethan Smith, they were all guests with great episodes, but like they.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And you're doing everything wrong. And the CMO says, what do I tell this board member? I said, the board member's completely wrong. This is the Google Search Console. And Google Search Console is not perfect, but it is, again, it's real data. And our Google Search Console shows that our traffic has quadrupled in COVID. So it doesn't really matter what this external tool shows. So they're helpful tools are helpful, but I don't think they are a source of actual truth.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yes. I mean, I have a great example of how wrong they could be in estimating traffic. So there was a company I was working with early in COVID, their board member, the public company, their board member emailed them and said, you guys are getting crushed by your competitors in COVID because look at your competitors. I'm looking at one of these tools.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “They're indicative. So I would say if you want to know, do most people spell WordPress with a space or WordPress without a space, it's pretty indicative that people spell it without a space. But if I were building a forecast and say, oh, I absolutely choose this based on this defined number, I don't think so. I can use it for normalization. And I use them only for normalization to understand like how do people search? And I really like user journeys and they're helpful for understanding user journeys. But as an exact science, it's hard to really use that.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Overestimating my 10 times. Sometimes they're underestimating my 10 times. So I'm not saying they didn't get the exact monthly number wrong. I'm saying they got it wrong by many factors.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Doing, they have their own secret sauce for estimations. So even Google, again, for past monopolistic reasons, Google's not allowed to give their real number that they see on Google Ads for how many people search it. They have to buy it from another data source and then give that out. I forget why. So they're all basically guessing. So they're using whatever sort of proprietary algorithms to guess, which is why a lot of them are not aligned because they have their own algorithms. So you're using, whether it's Semrush or HRFs. One of my favorite tools is similar web, which a similar web has a lot of browser plugins which snoop on the way people are searching. So whatever it is that similar web has browser plugin, but they're not seeing every single person search, so they have to use algorithms to estimate how much the entire world would be. And again, I don't know that any of them can get close to truth was when I've worked with big companies where there were keywords that I could look at Google Search Console, some of them, the tools were.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Essentially, we need a top down, you're closer to the truth. Now, you probably aren't going to get to the truth. I've never seen a product plan get to the truth of what it could do, but it will help you make a better decision than if you just guess.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “AOV was wrong. My market penetration was wrong. I was wrong on the total population. I didn't realize that in Japan no one bought shoes on the internet. But at any point in time, you can go back and adjust your forecast. Whereas if you're doing this bottoms-up forecast, it's actually, in many cases, wrong to begin with because the keyword research volume is wrong. Like I worked with some really fascinating companies where the largest query in their space was the biggest query. So I worked with WordPress. So WordPress, the word WordPress is the biggest query in the web development space itself, right? Like there's no other word that's as big as WordPress. And the number that every single keyword research tool had was completely wrong of what Google Search Console said for the word WordPress is. So when you're building these forecasts based on keyword research tools, that first number that you build the entire forecast off of if it's wrong, your forecast is wrong. So when you do this top down, it's a TAM forecast.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “We got 50 million people that would buy shoes. But now we're also going to say, well, there's older people and younger people, and we're not selling shoes to them. So now we're going to take $25 million and cut that in half. And then from there, again, we're selling shoes on the internet. Not everyone buys shoes on the internet. Some people buy shoes in a store. Some people buy shoes on the internet. So you take some percentage rate of the amount of people that are going to buy shoes on the internet and say, well, take 10% of our 25 billion people in our market, two and a half million people buy shoes on the internet and we want to do SEO for two and a half million people in our expectation is we want to get this number of market penetration, whether it's 10% or 50% or 100%. And there's your number and multiply that number by the amount of shoes they're going to buy every year and your AOV. And there's your forecast. And that may be inexact. And you can tweak those numbers up or down. You can say, well, my.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And that's your SEO forecast. Now, the problem with that is that usually it's too small. So you get this number and now you're pitching to launch in a new country. I want to launch in Japan and sell shoes. And you say, well, I think I can get 500 users because based on the way I got here, this is my click-through rate and this is my rankings and I'm 500 users and no one will ever fund that. That's too small. Now if you're launching in a new country, it's actually fairly easy to figure out what your SEO upside is because you can take the population of the country. So this is not something Farah sells. So I don't have to, I'm not giving away anything. But say you're launching shoes. You're launching a new product website that you're selling shoes in a country like Japan. So I'm going to guess. I don't know the actual numbers for Japan. So say Japan has 100 million people and you're selling shoes. And you're not going to sell shoes to 100 million people. We're only selling shoes to men. And let's just divide in half. So 50% of Japan is men.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yes, so I think we talked about how to decide whether to resource SEO, but we didn't talk about how to understand what the expectations are from SEO. So this is something I came up with while I was working at FAIR, which is a very interesting company. So it's F-A-I-R-E. They are a wholesale Shopify. So they were launching in a new country and they wanted to understand what the upside of launching in that country was from an SEO standpoint. So the way most people do SEO forecasting is they do a bottoms-up forecast, which is they look at keywords. So say we want to sell a pair of shoes. So you do a bottoms-up forecast, you go on to a keyword research tool, and they're all fairly the same. Look at how many people search for shoes every month, and then you try to estimate what your ranking would be on that word shoes.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “It is not a dark art. It should be for most things, it is simple. And there are tons of companies out there that get in a lot of trouble. And there's billions of dollars to be made on doing the right SEO, but a lot of can be unlocked by very simplistic SVO PMs that don't really have an SEO background can do enough SEO to make a lot of money for the company without needing to be an SEO expert.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Of pages, if you're Zillow, how you link to each listing, if you're Airbnb, how you link and allow Google to crawl a site and understand a site, very, very important. If you have a hundred-page website that sells a SaaS tool, Technical SEO is probably going to be less important. So spending money and time on Technical SEO would be a waste of time. So I think that's another big myth, is you solve SEO problems with the right SEO solution rather than let's do an audit or let's get better links or my page speed is another one that agencies like to sell on things related to PageSpeed, Google keeps changing the words of what that is, but it doesn't matter as much because at the margins, yes, maybe if you're kayak and you're competing at Expedia and kayak is maybe slightly faster, maybe that matters. But if you're in a space where you're competing against lots of slow terrible websites,”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I'll touch on one more myth, which is that technical SEO is an easy solve to any SEO problems. So there's been a lot of Google updates recently. I think I don't like to defend Google because in reading the verdict, I think that Google did some pretty evil things. But a lot of what Google has been doing is pushing back on the things that users hate. There's a lot of bad SEO content out there. So Google's trying to get rid of a lot of this bad SEO content in their recent updates. When sites get hit by these updates, they try to solve the problem that they think happened to them by doing technical SEO. So they'll reach out to me or to someone like me and say, can you do an SEO audit and understand why are our traffic has suffered? The reason the traffic has suffered is because they've done things that were not really useful for users and they sort of polluted Google. They need to solve that problem. So Technical SEO has a place. So if you have a large website with tens of millions.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, cool. I mean, that's what it is, but it's a buyer journey. So at the top of the funnel, you're curious. You don't know if you have intent. And in the older way of doing SEO where you only focused on top of funnel, you only focused on rankings as a KPI to think is sort of the incorrect way of doing things. There is no intent. So you showed a KPI that matched with a non-user, which matched with a non-buyer. As you move down the funnel, There is intent, so there is a user, and there's less traffic. There's always going to be less traffic at the middle of the funnel, but that doesn't matter because your KPI is closer related to your business metrics.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “But ultimately, Google is still the right place to do those searches, to do those BitFunnel searches. So maybe it was more inappropriate that Google ever, that there ever wasn't a TikTok for you to get those better experiences for those top of funnel things you had to suffer through reading awful content that was written only for SEO purposes. And now you get rich dynamic content that comes from TikTok. And one interesting piece on this is if TikTok does get banned in the US, which looks like it's likely, a company that will pick up all of that users is YouTube, right? So YouTube as YouTube Shorts. And again, we're looking at a potential monopoly with Google. As Google tries to put those YouTube shorts to solve the problem that TikTok was now solving. So that will be kind of interesting.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So, in the Google verdict, I think Google's said this before, 63% of Gen Z uses TikTok to search. But I think that's just a headline number because it comes down to, I said it over and over in the podcast, user journeys. So there's going to be things that are more appropriate for TikTok or Instagram. And there are going to be things that are more appropriate for search. So I think if you're doing top of funnel discovery, you're going to maybe watch TikTok videos to learn more about the topic. But as you go into the mid funnel, so say you want to a popular TikTok search is around travel. So you want to go on a trip. You want to go to Southeast Asia. You don't know where exactly you want to go. So you might want to watch a bunch of videos and see influencers and see experiences. But now you're ready to book and you want to book a hotel. You want to book your flights. All of that is not going to happen on TikTok. All of that is going to happen on Google search. So that's the mid funnel again. So a lot of search will move different places.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “It's very easy for agencies to sell content as a deliverable because it's something they actually Delivering strategy the way most of my growth advising works is very difficult because I don't have a strategy to offer in a proposal because I haven't developed a strategy and we don't actually see the fruits of that until we implement the strategy. But agencies can end run that by just saying oh you pay us on a monthly on a monthly basis and these are the things we're going to ship to you.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, so I am biased. I think they should have the right people to give them advice on SEO. So if someone wants to be, if they validated that there is an SEO effort, paying for help on SEO goes back to that resource discussion we had before. So if you want to hire a growth advisor, a growth advisor might be very expensive, but you squash a learning curve so you don't make as many mistakes as fast. If you hire someone in-house, and a lot of times I see this with roles where I'm helping companies hire someone for SEO, they don't have a lot of budget, which means they're going to have someone that doesn't have a lot of experience. So is that the right decision to make? If you're hiring an agency, agencies are typically expensive and agencies a lot of times get paid on deliverables. So are the deliverables they're doing worth paying? So an easy deliverable that a lot of agencies produce now is content. But that goes back to our earlier discussion. Do you even need the content?”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “But the basic idea of how you build SEO is very simplistic, and Google has the best practices guide on what it is that you should be doing, which is build a website that Google can understand, link to the pages in that, write content that is helpful, and that users want to read. And those are the basics. And starting with that is how you're going to build an SEO strategy that improves upon it. But the idea of if I take all three of these steps right now, I'm guaranteed to be number one. I think is something that is completely incorrect. And there's an assumption that if you do a lot of things around SEO, you're going to be successful. And I think that's incorrect. Yes, there are nuances. But for the most part, you get from zero to ten, you can get to step eight by just doing the best practices.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Link building. So link building is brand building. So it's thinking about how you're going to build a brand and have people mention to you. And when you're doing link building, you're creating a relationship between the piece of content that has linked to you and the product or whatever you're trying to monetize. So that should be link building. Just getting the idea of getting links on an HTML link will equal SEO success. Again, I think that's completely wrong. And then I mean, probably the biggest myth in general is thinking that Google itself is a black box. So I think there's nuances to how you rank and no one can really unearth what is it that will make you be number one and what it is that will make you be number three.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “No one will just decide. Oh, I've got money to burn. Let me just burn it. So somehow SEO becomes this thing of like, oh, I've raised money. Now I need an SEO team. So that's, I think, the first myth that's really important to just put to bed.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Probably the biggest one we said over and over is they even need to do SEO. So this always default assumption that you've raised money, you have a marketing team, you should do SEO. And I think that one is really worth putting to bed is like think about that user journey. Should you do SEO? And it's a question like they ask about other channels. Should you do brand marketing? Should you take out an ad in Times Square? And no one will say, well, I just raised a million dollars. I should totally take out an ad in Times Square. And congratulations on Main Times Square, by the way.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Gets cut. If you're selling shoes, people still need to buy shoes. If you're selling information, though, your media, if you're WebMD, yes, your revenue declines because that information that you now aggregated and curated and gave away for free in return for people clicking on ads, Google is now going to give away for free in return for no one clicking on ads.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Would like to click result number five. That's the best fit for what you're looking for right now, which means that there always needs to be multiple choices to make. So yes, most clicks are probably going through the first one, two, or three results, but there needs to be seven, ten multiple pages at Google because some people do go to those other pages. So I think that's the most important thing to underscore is that all of this means that search changes, a lot of top of funnel search goes away. But in general, there's always going to be a world where people are doing the searches. And then the last piece on that really is when you're looking to do something with search, you're looking to take an action. And companies benefit from those actions. So say you're a hotel and you want people to sleep in your hotel and pay you to sleep in your hotel. The aggregate number of people needing to take that action and pay you for it does not change even search volume.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “I think the most important thing to leave people with is that SEO is not dying. There will always be a world where users are requesting their own information. So one of the reasons I think these home assistants, whether it's from Google or Apple or Amazon, have never taken off is because you don't have choice. You talk to Google and it gives you only one answer. You talk to Amazon and it gives you only one answer. Like I want to buy toilet paper and Amazon just buys you whatever it decides to buy you. There will always be a world where they need choice. And one other piece from the verdict is Google believes that we're in the very early days of LLMs and even with all the machine learning they do on understanding users, you will always need real user data, which Google has on past searches. So I think users will always be requesting their own information and there's never going to be an AI that understands you so perfectly. It's going to know that for you personally.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So I didn't realize that duck duckgo did actually know what their market penetration was. So when I shared this survey, Gabriel Weinberger is the CEO of DuckDuckGo hit me on Twitter and he said, can you share the data with us? Because we really would like to see it. So this was, let's say, 10, 12 years ago. In the verdict, it said that duck duck goes market share is 2%. So I came back with 1% 12 years ago. Duck duck go, I think they raised $100 million. They have all these brand partnerships. They have like, you know, at baseball games, they have their logo. They've done everything and all they've been able to do is get from 1% to 2%. So there's a lot there. And Google being Google, I don't see anyone knocking them off.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, and that's what the court said is like Neva didn't have a chance because of that. And one other point is, so I did this survey. This was years ago when I was at Survey Monkey. I did a search market penetration survey to figure out who used what, like Bing versus Google. And on my survey, I was generous. I threw Duck DuckGo on there.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “So, I don't see any way that those deep, like if they break the default agreements, Apple actually loses all that money Google's paying. And then users will still Google. So that's not what we'll do it. I think the only thing they can do is figure out how to prop up a competitor.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I don't think so. Yeah, that's, I mean, I'm no legal expert. I don't know what the DOJ will do, but what's interesting, if you saw Google's press release when the verdict came out, so Google tweeted, we thank the court for recognizing that we're the greatest search engine in the world and more to come, right? Like they're going to fight back. And it's almost like a bully being declared the world's greatest bully. And they're like, see, told you we're strong. But when reading the verdict, it actually said there is no competitor. Google is the greatest search engine. They have 25 years of great data. Like they've done a fantastic job.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Another one was Mozilla had a partnership with, I think it was Yahoo, and they did a Rev Share deal with Yahoo, and everyone switched back to Google. So when people say SEO is dead, everyone's going to go to OpenAI and you just look at the 25 years of Google's existence and what they've built. I really don't think so. I really think distribution and the force of brand will keep almost everything Google has today. Now, why is Google fighting back so hard to build AI overviews? I think there's two answers. One is, like I said, Wall Street, like they really want Wall Street to think that they care and they're doing this thing. And the other is losing small percentage points to ChatGBT costs Google a lot of money. So it's worth it for them to invest in it. But I don't think that they have any fear about not being the most dominant search engine in the world.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “This verdict was about is how much a force of habit, how much the brand, and how much the distribution agreements Google has drives searchers to Google. And there were a couple of very interesting insights. One is that Bing tried to give itself to Apple for free, and Apple said there was absolutely no price that they would take to use Bing Search within Apple.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Or something. A senior person at Google created a new search engine, and a lot of the trial was focused on how Neva could not be successful despite having a better search engine, despite having a better experience for users, because they didn't have any default distribution agreements. So that's the part that I thought was most fascinating. Google has these default agreements with Apple, and they also have Chrome, and they have all these inputs into Google searches, which means that I don't think there's a chance, and this is the biggest anyway, I don't think there's a chance that ChatGPT or perplexity or Claude or any of these other LLM startups, because they're startups now, even OpenAI is a startup with Microsoft's investment, still a startup. I don't think they have a chance at really unseating Google purely from a quality standpoint. And that's what a lot of the documentation is.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Google would say, Oh, we think it's like 80% because they didn't want to be viewed as a monopoly. And Microsoft would say, well, maybe we have 20%. And I just found a recent document from Microsoft where they claim to have like a lot of market share in search. And in the verdict, it says that Google has 98% of mobile searches. And I forget whether Goo, it said that the court said it and they said Google didn't disagree or that came from Google's own documentation, but 98% of mobile searches. The thing that I thought was most fascinating from the verdict is how much the default partnerships that Google has contributes to Google's success. So the plaintiff in the case was the Department of Justice suing Google for being a monopoly. However, I don't know what the word is, but like one of the complainants in this is this company Neva, which was a search engine started by a past Google, I think it was like ahead of research.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Yes, so this verdict explains how Google decides to rank a page. The verdict explains how the auction model works in ads and Google ads. I think that's fascinating. Talked about the comparison between social media. This court really understood a lot of the questions that were posted. So for example, Google tried to say that they're not a monopoly because they're social media. And the court analyzed that question and said social media is not a comparison to Google search. Google tried to say a lot of the things they did were non-monopolistic because there's alternatives like Bing. And the court really analyzed a lot of these things. So where I found it fascinating was, again, a lot of the testimony was public is the summary of how the court put it all together and averted. So a few of the things I learned is, one, the market share, Google's market share. So that's been a number that no one really liked to talk about.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So it's fascinating. 286 pages. So I basically read a book. It was a verdict. And I would say that the judge or the clerk that wrote this verdict has a better understanding of how SEO works and how digital marketing works than most people I meet in digital marketing.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Comes down to is this something that someone would actually be looking for? Does this page itself provide a solution? So Zapier provided a solution because But there are many tools like Xapier, which try to be Zapier, but they're not looking for that solution. And going back to some of that template companies you mentioned. I don't think a lot of companies that make templates, they're doing programmatic, but there's not a use case for every single one of those templates. So they've made programmatic for no purpose. So again, ServingMonkey was one where we had a fat head of templates we could make, but it wasn't a long tail. So we could make 100 templates, but we couldn't make 10,000.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “So programmatic is the right solution when there's scale and when there's a user use case. If there is not, you create scale for nothing. So an earlier version of programmatic, again, pre-a lot of the internet companies now is building out a piece of content for every single zip code in America. So say you offer some sort of local product, you would build out a page for every single zip code that is in theory programmatic, but users don't look for it and Google has completely disrupted that with their own local products. So programmatic can always be something. I see programmatic mistakes all the time where websites look at, they say, look, we're making reviews of software. There's 10,000 different softwares in the world. We're just going to make out a page for each one and we're going to combine it with, I don't know, a city. So you can make programmatic pages like that, but there's no use case. So really knowing what programmatic solution to use.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Do you approach us from an editorial standpoint, or do you approach us from a programmatic standpoint? Something the companies I mentioned earlier, like G2 and Captera, which are completely being disrupted. So they're being disrupted by editorial, but they're also being disrupted by Google itself with their AI overviews. So if you look for the top CRM tools, you have G2, where you have Keptera, but you also have Forbes writing out a long form piece of content on what Salesforce is, what HubSpot is. And that's probably unnecessary.”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “So editorial would be in TripAdvisor's case writing out that long form piece of content around each hotel, each city, and all the things they've done. Zillow would be the same. Was Zillow would take five hundred million properties and write out an editorial piece of content. Neither of those would be a fit for their model, and it would be extremely expensive. So say each piece of content would cost $1,000. That would be cost prohibitive for anyone to do. Going back to my distinction based on the user. What is it that the user is looking for? So is the user looking for the value of a home? They don't need a long form piece of content. They need a piece of content or a page that just says what the value of that home is. TributAdvisor's case, they're looking for a single thing, a rating, or maybe they need some that UGC, but really they're looking for that rating. That long form piece of content, there's a purpose for it, but not on TripAdvisor site. So understanding what is it that the user needs will help solve”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Example is Zillow. So, what Zillow did is they solved an early problem many years ago in the real estate space, which is no one understood what the value of a piece of property was. So Zillow took in all of those data sets. So they got, some of them are government data sets, some of them are their own comparison data sets based on other home sales. So the government can say a house is worth one price and based on their comparison, Zillow can completely disagree with it. So they're building in these data sets and they're taking photos from realtors. They're taking neighborhood data. They're taking school data. And that's a programmatic SEO page. And SEO is the only channel to bring in traffic to each one of these pages. They're not going to do paid traffic for my house. They're not going to do pay traffic for your house. The only way someone would find that page on Zillow, either they start at Zillow.com and there's navigate through it or they Google it. So those are programmatic SEO efforts. On the flip side is”

    2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source