[00:00:00] Arsen: All right. We are live. Hello, hello everyone.
[00:00:05] Andrew: Hello.
[00:00:06] Arsen: Tell us where you’re joining us from in the comments, and we are live on YouTube as well now. Um, we’re gonna kick things off. We have a lot to cover. We do have exactly, exactly 60 minutes today for this. So, um, we’re gonna get started right away.
[00:00:28] Arsen: Um, this is our first episode , in 2026. Um, we haven’t done one this year, guys.
[00:00:36] Andrew: Um- Can I, can I
[00:00:37] Arsen: just
[00:00:37] Andrew: dispel a rumor real quick, Arsen? Sure, sure. I had a couple people be like, “Did you guys have a falling out?” No. Like, what? No. No. So- Absolutely not … I just wanna make it clear, like we’re, we’re all good.
[00:00:46] Andrew: Um, we just had done like 40-something episodes every month through the pandemic, and we were kinda like, “You know what? We just need to, like, n- stop repeating the same thing every month.” So we-
[00:00:56] Casey: We, and we know that your time is valuable, and us- There you go … repeating the same advice- Yeah … every month to the same question five times, probably not the best use of your time or ours.
[00:01:05] Casey: So we appreciate that.
[00:01:07] Andrew: So, so we’re kind of aiming for a quarterly cadence, and then- Mm-hmm … 2026 just happened, and suddenly it’s late March. It’s already May,
[00:01:13] Arsen: the end of May. And, like, everything happened all in, like, the last month- Yeah … and yesterday. Um, we’ll get to all the cool things. Um, there’s obviously been a lot that’s been happening this year.
[00:01:25] Arsen: Um, I’m starting us off today because we have a new a new host joining us from Andrew’s team. Miranda she is your communications, right, at-
[00:01:35] Miranda: Yes …
[00:01:36] Arsen: at NerdPress. Perfect.
[00:01:36] Miranda: Communications manager at NerdPress.
[00:01:38] Andrew: Senior. Senior communications.
[00:01:39] Arsen: Senior.
[00:01:40] Miranda: Oh, senior. Okay. That’s an update for me. J- you heard it live today And I didn’t know that yet.
[00:01:44] Miranda: Right. Um, you heard it live, guys. Just
[00:01:45] Casey: happened. There’s a pay, there’s a pay bump coming with that too.
[00:01:48] Arsen: Right.
[00:01:49] Casey: Looks like a trade away. Andrew
[00:01:50] Arsen: is fantastic- …
[00:01:52] Casey: fantastic about that.
[00:01:55] Arsen: I’m gonna let our new host jump right in, but we wanna welcome everyone back. We’re gonna talk about AI overviews, we’re gonna talk about EET, we’re gonna talk about the Google IO announcement and what this means for bloggers.
[00:02:07] Arsen: We have questions that all of you submitted when you were registering for the webinar. We are going to answer as many of those questions as possible. We’ve… What we’ve done is we’ve combined them so that we’re not answering the same question over and over and divided them by topics, so we’ll try to get through them as, as quickly as possible.
[00:02:24] Arsen: And with that, I’ll let our new host take it away.
[00:02:27] Miranda: All right, thank you for having me. Thank you for that warm introduction. I’m Marina Wicker. Um, I know a few of you. I see a few people in the chat who I know, so hi, everybody. I’m glad to be here. Today we’re gonna talk about Google, which is what we spend a lot of our time talking about.
[00:02:41] Miranda: Google has shifted into this answer engine, and that changes everything for bloggers and publishers. And so today, as Arzin mentioned, we’re gonna cover AI overviews, EET, content auditing, all of that good stuff. But first, a quick housekeeping. We will be having a Q&A at the end of the session, so please feel free to drop your questions into the comment section.
[00:03:02] Miranda: If you have a question, just put a Q in the front of it so that we can flag that as a question and not a comment. We’ll get to as many of those as we can at the end of this chat, and anything that we don’t get to today we’ll cover in the recap that comes up within a week. So, let’s get started. This is gonna be a lively discussion.
[00:03:20] Miranda: It was already a lively 15 minutes in our, like, pre-discussion. Oh, yeah. So I’m, I’m ready to wrangle, okay? Casey, let’s talk about Google IO really quickly. Just, you… I’m giving you, like, 60 seconds. Go.
[00:03:34] Casey: Well, many of you heard that it’s all gloom and doom, and you heard that Google is gonna be moving to a full IO mode interface with a, a focus on conversational long-term searches, which we know has been coming for a while.
[00:03:48] Casey: Um, a lot of people are rightfully angry. Google is absolutely moving more towards answers, recipes, summary, planning things directly on Google. We’ve talked about this, the… We’ve referred to that as basically um, what did we say? Gated garden or um-
[00:04:04] Miranda: Walled garden.
[00:04:05] Casey: The walled garden. Walled garden, where, again, that’s Google’s point, is they’re trying to keep as much of that traffic on Google as they want.
[00:04:11] Casey: This is gonna impact a lot of informational queries specifically. I mean, if someone wants to know, you know, what’s the temperature for us to… for raw chicken, or, hey, how long, you know, do do we have to cook so and so for, those answers are going to be answered immediately, right in the search results, and people aren’t gonna click through.
[00:04:30] Casey: But you’re gonna find that- What, what Google can’t cover for you, which is what, which is why I think that publishers shouldn’t abandon SEO in general, is that there’s just a lot of things that Google can’t do. You know, your, your recipes, your testing, your notes, your troubleshooting, your substitutions, your personal experience.
[00:04:51] Casey: People want that information, and they are going to continue to click through. I do not see a, a huge drop in referrals immediately on this. I see that there will be a degradation on some of the more general informational queries right away. I think the bloggers who do the best have to make a mental shift from, you know, rank for keyword, get click, show ads, repeat, to where we are now, which is an substantially more involved and nuanced discovery journey.
[00:05:18] Casey: We… You as a blogger need to really focus on being the trusted source. Right. You really focus on having the answer clearly, earn the citation, do everything you can to get those people to your site and to keep them there. Go. That
[00:05:31] Miranda: was 65 seconds. So Arshan, I think you had some… That was, that was a little bit more than 60 seconds.
[00:05:34] Miranda: So I’ll give it to you. I’ll give it to you.
[00:05:36] Arsen: But it was good stuff. A little more than 60 seconds. It was good stuff.
[00:05:37] Miranda: Yeah. Um.
[00:05:38] Arsen: Arshan, you
[00:05:38] Miranda: had something you were gonna chime
[00:05:39] Arsen: in on. I think, I think the biggest takeaway, and I think the, the biggest point of freaking out for everyone, w- the misconception that Google’s getting get- getting rid of the 10 links.
[00:05:49] Arsen: The 10 links are not going away. They’re still going to be there. They will be suppressed, and Google is trying to keep that experience above the fold. Um, and I think the biggest change that we should be mindful about is the shift in how people will be searching for content, and that comes with what they, the changes that they made to the actual search box.
[00:06:07] Arsen: This was the biggest change in 25 years, or I think the only change in the 25, last 25 years. Um, and what it’s now becoming is essentially your, your ask a engine, right? So you can turn on your camera, open your fridge, and ask Google Search to tell you what you can make from the ingredients that are in your fridge.
[00:06:27] Arsen: So the way content will be discovered now is going to be much different than a human being typing in, “I want a recipe for so and so,” or what the temperature is for raw chicken. Um, so w- everything that you’ve been doing and if you’ve been doing this, you’re obviously still benefiting from this, but that’s that unique perspective that, hey, I don’t have sour cream even though this recipe calls for sour cream, but I have a Greek yogurt And when those searches are being performed, AIO is surfacing those results.
[00:06:58] Arsen: The results are going to come in the shape of AIO to the user. But Google does not give… And Andrew will touch on this later. Google does not give the entire picture. It’s still an overview. It’s an outline. So the click will still happen if you’re the right source for what the user truly needs. And we’ve said this before, this is going to be a cutting down on impulsive clicks, where people were clicking over to your site and then saying, “This is not what I want,” and then clicking back.
[00:07:25] Arsen: So the click- I, I like that … that’s going to happen… Go ahead.
[00:07:28] Miranda: I was gonna say, I like that sort of reframe of, like, the impulsive click. You know, this cuts down on the impulsive clicks and makes sure that the clicks are, um-
[00:07:37] Arsen: More meaningful …
[00:07:37] Miranda: more meaningful, more valuable. So, so Andrew, I’m gonna kick this over to you.
[00:07:42] Miranda: We know that, you know, Google is not providing full recipes and answers in search. Um, so talk a little bit about why are users gonna continue to click through, and how do we stop feeling like we’re working our tails off just to feed Google’s LLMs?
[00:07:59] Andrew: Yeah. Um, trust, and what I mean is trust with a human. Um, you know, we’ve talked about this I guess it was last year.
[00:08:07] Andrew: Um, you know, the, the parasocial relationship. Um, AI, AI doesn’t have taste buds. It, it, it can’t try six versions of a recipe until it gets it right. You know, maybe in a year, maybe by the end of the decade when Optimus robots can actually get into a kitchen and look at something, maybe, but it’s definitely not there anytime soon, right?
[00:08:26] Andrew: So if you’ve tested a recipe eight times and you can explain why you have to use this particular flour or it doesn’t work, um, yeah, some of that information may leak into the AI Overviews, but when it… The AI Overview then is gonna say, “Hey, you know, Stephanie learned really pushed this. You should go…”
[00:08:42] Andrew: It’s essentially gonna say, “You should go over to her site and get the recipe.”
[00:08:45] Casey: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:46] Andrew: We hope. Um, you know, one of the other things to keep in mind is Google just made all these big splashy announcements. Um, it’s going to depend on what people want. Um- Mm … not everybody loves AI Overviews. Yeah. Um, you know, if you ask a 20-year-old what they think of AI, they’re going to get…
[00:09:00] Andrew: Like, you’re gonna get a death stare, right? Because from their perspective, it’s taking their jobs. Um, 13-year-olds love it, so who knows, right? But people may not want what Google is doing here, and Google then will, like, I don’t think they care. They’re gonna try to give people what they want. So some of it is also building that brand loyalty essentially, and when you tell your audience, “Hey, you should come to my site for the recipes and support content creators,” people go, “Oh.”
[00:09:25] Andrew: Like Miranda, you had a text exchange with your cousin, what, this morning- Mm-hmm … about that, like-
[00:09:29] Casey: Yeah …
[00:09:29] Andrew: th- she didn’t understand, hey, I need to click through to this site to support the content creator. And as soon, as soon as she gets it, she’s like, “Oh, that’s awesome. I’m happy to do that,” right? So some of this is- Yeah
[00:09:38] Andrew: just education of our audience, too. Um, but yeah. Sorry. In case you wants to-
[00:09:43] Miranda: Well, I was gonna say, I think that education, I mean, I- my background is in education, so I think that education component is so incredibly powerful, and it is something that as a blogger, as a content creator, that is something that we can provide to those people who do click through, is to, to let them know.
[00:10:00] Miranda: Like, it’s so easy to stay in that Google bubble and think that this is how it’s supposed to be, but it’s not how it has to stay. It’s not how it has to be. You get to sort of set this model to, to operate how you want it to using your preferred source buttons, favoriting your sites, remembering where you got that great, potato soup recipe from?
[00:10:19] Miranda: This is the only thing I can think of ’cause of arson. But where did you get that great potato soup recipe so you can go back to it? So I, I think there’s some there’s some value that bloggers can provide, publishers can provide just in educating on how this all works. Um, speaking of that, talking about how it all works, and we’re talking about, you know, LLMs and how AI Overviews parse the information that’s on our websites versus the content that we know sort of protects the creator, that long-form content that gives more meat, that allows that recipe to be copyrightable, for instance.
[00:10:52] Miranda: So Casey, I’m gonna kick this to you. Are AI Overviews rewarding concise, like, answer-first text, or is long-form content still winning? Um, and how do, how do you recommend people structure posts so that they actually get cited as a link?
[00:11:11] Casey: Well, I think the answer is, is depends. And I know we’re gonna say that, right?
[00:11:16] Casey: Stole that from Andrew. Stole that from Andrew here. I’ll collect
[00:11:19] Andrew: my royalty.
[00:11:20] Casey: The thing to understand is that, um, we can’t force every O- AI overview to click. You know, we can’t force people to, to come to our sites. But what we can do is we can make sure that when they come to our sites, we’re providing them the information they need.
[00:11:35] Casey: The strategy is to stop writing posts that only answer the obvious, and I still see that every day in audits. Our goal is to make sure that we’re providing details that AI cannot provide, summarize, or rephrase. And so when we do that, what we’re doing is we’re showing our expertise. We’re getting people, we’re encouraging people to click over and find the information they need by showing, “I have made this recipe a thousand times, and this is what I have found from my experience that you’re not gonna find anywhere else.”
[00:12:05] Casey: There is no such thing as a recommended word count these days for the search results. We write when necessary to meet the needs of the user. Sometimes that’s a shorter recipe, maybe 400 to 600 words. Sometimes it’s much longer. But there is a lot of superfluous information that I see on a daily basis in recipe posts.
[00:12:24] Casey: We do not need a list of equipment in the average recipe post. The average kitchen has a spatula. The average kitchen has a mixer. You have been told incorrectly that that is good information for the user when it is not. You have been told that maybe you should spend five paragraphs on substitutions.
[00:12:46] Casey: Not true. You need to understand what is and is not important for the average user. In many places, that’s either using your own experience in looking at what’s been ranking and reflecting on search results, but understanding that more is not better, it’s just more.
[00:13:03] Arsen: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:03] Casey: So our goal is to provide the best experience we can, and that means sometimes being really ruthless with what we’re presenting to the user.
[00:13:12] Casey: We know that LLMs specifically favor the first 300 to 500 words on a page. That’s why you’re seeing the rise of these AI summaries, which are working incredibly well in the testing that we’re doing. But there’s a reason for that, because people have short attention spans. I know because I have two 20-somethings that I have to repeat things to repeatedly.
[00:13:32] Casey: Good times. Did you… And I, I wanted you to, I wanna run this by you. Is it true that college really is only so that we can prove that someone is able to show up on time for four years? Because I’m realizing now that that is really the biggest selling point to getting your kids to finish college- … because employers are looking for someone who’s going to show up for a task day after day for an extended period of time.
[00:13:56] Casey: So that’s something that I also see with recipe posts. What can we do to get
[00:14:01] Miranda: them to show up all the time? I think a lot of employees, though, a lot of them… But yeah, what can we do to get them to show up? But a lot of employees right now are looking for how, how many AI agents will it take to do this job, and that’s the tricky thing for our college kids.
[00:14:13] Miranda: Um- Mm-hmm … I have one who’s embarking on- Good times … his senior year of high school, and it’s, it’s, it’s tough. It’s tough out there. Mm-hmm. Um, not pivoting completely away from that, but staying sort of in this vein of SEO and getting people to your site, getting them, you know, to want to come and, and read your content.
[00:14:33] Miranda: Arsen, Google’s being an answer engine now. How is that fundamentally different from traditional search, or is it different? And, and do we need to optimize differently than we did even, you know, one year ago?
[00:14:50] Arsen: Am I the echo? Was I the echo?
[00:14:52] Miranda: Yes. You were the echo. That was you.
[00:14:53] Casey: Yeah.
[00:14:53] Arsen: Yeah. Oh. Oh, okay. I’m hearing it here. Okay. Is the echo still there? No.
[00:14:59] Casey: No.
[00:15:00] Arsen: Okay. Perfect. Um, so if you’ve been optimizing the wrong way- in the last two years, then yes, definitely. You, you, if you haven’t been listening to, to our webinars and all of the content that’s being pu- put out there look I’ve been shouting unique perspective since 2023 September of the release of the, the, the, the first iteration of, of, of the helpful content system.
[00:15:28] Arsen: We saw that, we called it out right away. We’re like, “Hey, everything that looks like it’s been just like a, a regurgitation of somebody else’s recipe not helpful,” right? We’ve been talking about unique pers- we’ve been talking about sensory cues, we’ve been talking about you know, no redundancy in your content.
[00:15:44] Arsen: Basically, if, if, if you… They’re not providing unique perspective or value, don’t, don’t write it just to have the words on the page. Um, and all of that is slowly coming together with what Google is doing with this new technology that Google is implementing across the board, and Google is aware of what’s ranking already.
[00:16:01] Arsen: Google’s aware of what’s on page one. Google’s aware of all the angles that have been described there, and there’s a reason those top 10 are top 10. So if you’re just going to do the same thing, you’re not gonna get into the top 10, and you’re not going to get into those AI overviews because with the way it works now, it’s collecting like, you can see what they say, like a few million facts per day at this point, or a billion facts per day.
[00:16:22] Casey: Yeah. Billions.
[00:16:23] Arsen: It… Yeah, like, so like for, for… Just like, just like featured snippets, right? It, it, it’s… If somebody’s asking for the temperature to cook a tomahawk steak, Google’s gonna answer that without a citation. It has this information. But if you’re providing something like I said, like this unique variation, a unique substitution or a unique method, or you’re being very specific about sensory cues, like why this thing, whatever I’m mixing is, is you know, hard to mix or is not, or is too watery.
[00:16:50] Arsen: Or even with travel, don’t provide just like, unlike top 10 things to do in F- in, in Fort Lauderdale, right? Like, actually get into it, pick sub-regions, talk about your experience, talk about stuff that is not typically found, and that’s what going… That’s what’s going to get you. That unique perspective is what’s going to get you cited in those AI overviews.
[00:17:12] Arsen: And again, like continuing from what I was saying earlier, it’s a different input method because when Google responds to you with a AI overview, with the new changes to the platform, you can continue having that conversation and it puts you into AI mode now.
[00:17:26] Andrew: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:26] Arsen: So you need to be able to continuously show up in front of your audience as they’re doing those zero-click discovery processes, researches, whatever, until they’re like, “Yes, I want to click through and read from XYZ blog because they’re constantly showing up in these AI overviews and providing the perspective that I’m looking for.”
[00:17:44] Casey: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Just to… And just to reiterate here, I mean, let’s dumb this down a little bit. Let’s dumb this down a bit. Traditional search always asked us- What are the best documents to rank for this query? That is over. That does not exist, and I think that’s where we’re, there’s a lot of struggle here, especially when we’re doing audits today.
[00:18:01] Casey: Google’s AI search increasingly is asking what answer can I construct based upon all the sources out there, and then they’re asking follow-up questions by using things like query fanout mode, which we’ve mentioned previously. And this query fanout mode is really integral for bloggers to understand how AI mode and how AI Overviews use, because Google is basically taking all of this information and they’re using it to build a uniform response.
[00:18:28] Casey: And so when we’re putting a recipe post together, our goal is not to answer every possible question we can ask, but our goal is to understand that, gosh, I have made this 1,000 times. What are the most important things that I have taken for granted every time I’ve done that so that I can represent that on the page, so that when Google comes and grabs this for my response, I can be included in that basically Frankenstein result that’s gonna be returned by means of citations.
[00:18:55] Casey: And if there is any positives, and I know it’s hard to find those these days, in the introduction of these AI Overviews, it’s that the citations have tripled because of feedback from publishers. The citations have tripled. If you search for something now, you’re gonna see an individual citation there trying to…
[00:19:17] Casey: for Google to give, you know, where they pulled that information. And those citations will only continue to go up, which will of course increase the opportunities for someone to click through to your website for further information.
[00:19:28] Miranda: So I think, Andrew, you had something to add to that, yeah?
[00:19:31] Andrew: Go ahead. I just wanted to give our system props.
[00:19:34] Andrew: Um, about a week ago, Google published a article on Search Central called Optimizing Your Website for Generative AI Features on Google Search, and I put the link in in the chat. Um, it says, “Create valuable non-commodity content for your au- audience.” Mm-hmm. And then the very first paragraph says, “Provide a unique point of view Our AI systems look at a variety of sources, so it can be helpful to have a unique viewpoint that stands out.
[00:20:01] Andrew: Arsen’s been saying this for, like, a year, right?
[00:20:03] Casey: Well, forever.
[00:20:04] Andrew: Forever. Um, and it goes on and it’s… What’s, what’s amazing though is, like, everybody should read that ar- this article, ’cause it basically lays it all out there. There’s nothing groundbreaking in here. Mm-hmm. It’s all the same stuff, it’s just everything feels heightened, right?
[00:20:18] Andrew: Yeah. Because the competition is fiercer, ultimately. Um, but anyway, I just wanted to give Arsen the props on that because they’re basically quoting him. They, I- they… I think what they did was they actually fed one of our webinars into AI- …
[00:20:29] Arsen: and just- But no citation. We got, we got, we got quoted, but no, not cited.
[00:20:33] Arsen: Right, right.
[00:20:34] Andrew: That’s big.
[00:20:35] Arsen: Yeah.
[00:20:35] Miranda: That’s called plagiarism, FYI.
[00:20:38] Arsen: We’re, we’re gonna come after them.
[00:20:41] Miranda: So okay, so that is… So talking about unique perspective actually leads us really nicely into the next set of questions that we have, and that’s about content freshness and this, like, the freshness treadmill. Um, because when you have a unique perspective on a recipe or on a…
[00:20:58] Miranda: You know, obviously it’s easier, I think, to have a unique perspective on a place that you visit because if you visit it again, there’s something else to discover or you see it in a new way. But when you’re cooking the same recipe over and over and over, that unique perspective might start to wane just a little bit, but you need that content to stay fresh to continue to surface, right?
[00:21:15] Miranda: So how can publishers realistically maintain hundreds of old posts, updating this unique perspective, keeping the content fresh, while also producing new content? Arsen, I’m gonna kick that one to you first.
[00:21:31] Arsen: Right. So, you know, it’s, it’s… I’m still… Sorry, just today I looked and I saw a post in, in my GI- set of queries that I check consistently.
[00:21:42] Arsen: One of them is potato soup recipe. Um- But I know those results. It’s, it’s my, it’s my barometer, it’s my what is it? Bird in the, in the um,
[00:21:51] Miranda: mine-
[00:21:51] Arsen: Your canary
[00:21:52] Miranda: in the
[00:21:52] Arsen: coal mine. Right. Right, right, right, right. Um, and the posts that have been published in 2021 and hasn’t been updated since February of 2025 is still holding number one position without moving, and that’s consistent across the board.
[00:22:10] Arsen: And those posts, if you actually dig into it and look, you’ll notice that m- the biggest chunk of content on that page is unique perspective. And you can easily open up that ask Chrome, ask Gemini in Chrome, and you can type in, and I’ve done this on some of my coaching calls and some of my consultation calls w- with my clients.
[00:22:31] Arsen: Like, let’s type it in and say, “How much of this recipe is unique perspective versus standard recipe copy?”
[00:22:42] Miranda: Mm.
[00:22:42] Arsen: And it’s going to give it to you, and it’s gonna say 40/60, 70/30. But you can literally use AI to tell you what is the difference. You can open up all three of those top three results in tabs in Chrome, and you can ask it, “Hey, um, what’s the difference and what’s in common between these three posts?”
[00:23:03] Arsen: And it’s going to give you that info. Literally takes a second. Not rocket science, like Andrew said earlier. And you’ll see the difference, the different angles, the different approaches, the different preparation methods, the different… You’ll see the tho- the differences. You need to be actively monitoring your content, especially your best performers, your money makers.
[00:23:21] Arsen: You need to constantly be doing audits of your content. If you can afford it, you hire people like Casey or, or, or my team. Content performance review, audits, content audits to keep you up to date on what needs to be, like, what your pipeline for updates needs to be. I don’t think you need to have a specific, like, “I’m gonna stop publishing new content and just worry about updating.”
[00:23:45] Arsen: In, in some cases, that might be the, the, the, the situation that you’re in because a bigger chunk of your content is just, like, has been aging. It’s stale. And you’ll notice this because it’s just not earning the same amount of money, and then you can start looking at those things and bucketing them out for yourself.
[00:24:02] Arsen: But y- y- it should be a balance. If you have a big chunk of content that, that, that’s performing well and you’re doing well, then definitely continue doing what you’re doing. If you need to update your content, you go in and you start ear- you start updating your content. And the updates don’t have to be rewrites.
[00:24:16] Arsen: You don’t have to reshoot the… You don’t have to reshoot the recipe. You don’t have to go re-travel that. You can literally go in and take a look. And again, ask Gemini in Chrome and say, “What part of this post is redundant?” Pieces of co- of, of information that are repeated multiple times across the post, and just clean that up.
[00:24:35] Arsen: Get rid of anything that feels overly optimized. Clean that up.
[00:24:39] Miranda: So when you clean it up and you get to the republish or the last updated point, Casey, give us… I know this one comes up a lot. We’ve had this question many times. That last updated date or republishing with a brand-new date. Why do some posts completely fail to rebound after an update, and which is the better, which is the better way to go?
[00:25:02] Casey: Well, because updating is not magic.
[00:25:04] Miranda: Mm.
[00:25:05] Casey: You still have to make valuable inclusions. You still have to show that you’ve improved. A lot of people make what are called superficial updates to content, but then they don’t build any new links, they don’t re-share the content, they don’t show any new unique or enterprising angle to the content.
[00:25:22] Casey: The thing to understand about updating content is that if people are just updating content because they’re trying to fake freshness, Google knows that. Google keeps anywhere from 12 to 15 copies of the content for review at any one time. So if I’ve got a blogger who’s just going through and updating content to show a new date, Google’s gonna ignore all of those updates 99.9% of the time because they have the ability to very quickly compare in real time the updated version versus the legacy versions in the SERPs.
[00:25:53] Casey: They’re not gonna make any changes to that. The only time I would ever tell anyone to completely republish to a new date these days is if you’re literally tore down the entire recipe. It’s not remotely, even remotely like it was before. Otherwise, it is just an update. We wanna keep the history of the post in Google whenever we can.
[00:26:14] Casey: If I go in and I change out a photo, if I go in and I add a quote, if I go in and I’ve redone my expert tips or clarified some information, I’m going to update that post to show a fresh date, showing that I went in and did what I would consider valuable improvements for the bottom usability of the user and, and, you know, my audience.
[00:26:36] Casey: But where people fail is that you, you change the date because you’re just trying to show that it’s been freshly revisited, and there’s just no value in that. Yeah. We don’t wanna do that.
[00:26:47] Miranda: And the, the, the readers can tell eventually, you know, if they’re repeat readers, the bots can tell. So let’s talk about the bots Because it’s hard to fool them.
[00:26:57] Miranda: Andrew, to block or not to block? That is the question. Right. Should we be adding scripts to block bots from scraping our sites? Is there value? Like, let’s talk, let’s get into it a little bit, ’cause this one is back and forth, right? We go back and forth on this one all the time.
[00:27:15] Andrew: Right. And I wouldn’t use scripts.
[00:27:17] Andrew: If you’re gonna block bots, I wouldn’t use scripts. I think there are better ways to do it. But n- outside of a technical answer- Mm-hmm … um, there’s a lot of push/pull on this. Emotionally, it feels really good to block them, right? Because it feels like AIs are, or the LLM answer overviews, whatever, are stealing traffic.
[00:27:33] Andrew: Realistically, we need to take a step back first and go, okay, the big player is Google. Google uses one crawler, Google Bot. You can’t… If you wanna get in the search results, whether it’s the blue links or the AI overviews, which are gonna get more prominent over time, you can’t block Google Bot. So you can’t just say, “Google, I don’t wanna be in the AI.
[00:27:52] Andrew: I don’t want you to train my AI,” and still be in Google Search. So that’s like, what? 95% of search, right? Um, so okay. So you gotta take that off the table. So now you have to, you have to- Mm-hmm … realize that you’re talking about maybe 5% of stuff. So it’s… So that just lowers the stakes, so we can all kinda take a breath for a second.
[00:28:11] Andrew: Um, and I know Raptive is pushing everybody to block, um, and they’re doing it as a strategic play to try to get paid publishers paid as a, as a- Mm-hmm … bargaining mechanism. Um, that may or may not work. I’m guessing the latter, but we’ll see. Um, I support the idea or the effort. Um- Mm-hmm … I don’t think blocking is an all or nothing thing beyond that, though.
[00:28:31] Andrew: The, the, um, aboveboard crawlers, the big players, you know, the OpenAI and Anthropic, um, and Gemini for the AI stuff for Gemini, I think they do it, um- They identify different types of crawlers. So there are training model crawlers, there’s user crawlers, and there’s search crawlers, or, or bots, I should say.
[00:28:52] Andrew: Um, and so it’s possible to say, “Hey, I don’t want you to train on my content. Don’t train the model with, with my stuff.” But if somebody goes to ChatGPT and says, “Hey, can you find me some good roast chicken recipes?” I want you to be able to find my s- my site there and surface it. Um, so that would be a search bot or a user bot.
[00:29:11] Andrew: So one of the things that I think has been striking a good balance is to say, okay, if you wanna take a stand, block the training crawls, don’t block the user and search crawls. And to me, I think that, that sort of take sends a message. Um, and you know, even if you block them, the training crawlers, they’re still gonna know about your site because it’s not blocking them from knowing about your social media and all the other things.
[00:29:32] Andrew: Is that Ted? Um, um- Good morning … they’re still, they’re still gonna know about your website. They’re just not gonna be able to actually ingest the direct content. So they can infer a lot about your website anyway, so you don’t disappear. Um, but that, that sort of like, puts a, a flag in the ground, I guess.
[00:29:48] Andrew: Um, so, with, with NerdPress, we make that easy for our clients. Um, we keep a managed list of training crawlers, so if one of our clients says, “Hey, I wanna block the training crawls,” we go, “Great.” My team flips a switch, and it’s done. Um, Cloudflare has some tools if you manage your own Cloudflare or whoever you’re working with.
[00:30:02] Andrew: But I do think blocking… If you’re gonna block, doing it in like a firewall like Cloudflare is a better place to do it. Um, and then we can get into the, the nitty-gritty of like user agents versus bot management. But bottom line is, if you’re gonna… If you wanna… If you’re interested in blocking, I’d say block the, the training crawlers, as they’re called.
[00:30:22] Miranda: Well, and that’s the advice that I gave my cousin today too, is, you know, ask the LLMs to grab the recipes for you and, and link you to them. I think Colin built a tool that, that he’s got an agent that builds his recipes menu for the week. Um, one of the, our, our… He, he uses an agent to build his menu. So if you block those Nobody’s coming to your site with that.
[00:30:47] Miranda: So-
[00:30:47] Andrew: He’s also
[00:30:48] Miranda: told- Very applicable tools …
[00:30:49] Andrew: he’s told, he’s told his agent only to visit NerdPress.
[00:30:52] Miranda: Yes, he has. Told us- Only, only visit
[00:30:53] Casey: NerdPress.
[00:30:55] Miranda: He does always go to NerdPress sites and HubUp sites first, so.
[00:30:59] Casey: The issue is really comes down to if your business depends on visibility in Google Search, and you wanna be visible to the discovery layer, you can’t block bots.
[00:31:10] Miranda: Yep.
[00:31:10] Casey: And you also have to realize that it’s not a level playing field if you decide to go that route. I would never, I, I wouldn’t, I would never say, “Hey, if you’re really passionate about it, you do what’s best for you.” But I just tell you, “Here are what the downsides of that are going to be. You are literally invisible to the discovery layer.
[00:31:28] Casey: You will not be cited, you will not be used, you will not be viewed on par with these other, here’s five sites and four of them are blocking AI.” Most likely they’re going to have more visibility and more citational awareness, um, than you will, and that could be noticeable with regards to loss of both citations and bottom line traffic in the future.
[00:31:49] Andrew: This is also gonna keep changing. Like- Mm … this is all evolving very rapidly, particularly with agentic or with agents which are really getting popular right now. Um, and, like, we’re, we’re, we’re doing some trials with Tollbit, which is another company trying to do, um, essentially pay per crawl. Pay per crawl.
[00:32:08] Casey: Pay per crawl.
[00:32:09] Andrew: Pay per… Yeah. So that idea is not dead. Um, and it may actually become more important. If everything does become agen- agentic, that may be a way for publishers to make money without having to serve ads. Where it’s like, I create content, and yes, Google knows they have to pay for that content essentially, so it’s, it’s a micro licensing approach.
[00:32:27] Andrew: I don’t know if that’ll happen, but, like, there are a lot of ways all of this stuff can play out, and it’s very dynamic, and it’s gonna depend on what people want, right? Bringing it back to that.
[00:32:36] Miranda: So speaking of people, when we’re talking about people, we’re talking about write for your readers, write for a human reader.
[00:32:41] Miranda: Um, let’s talk a little bit about keyword relevance. Because if we’re writing for readers, yes, there is a keyword element in that, but how people search for things is changing. How the LLM search for things is changing. So let’s talk a little bit about keyword search tools. Are they relevant or has AI changed how search engines understand intent?
[00:33:04] Miranda: Um, Arsen, I’ll kick that one to you.
[00:33:09] Miranda: You’re muted.
[00:33:11] Arsen: I think, I think we’ve, we’ve, um, we’ve had a few episodes on, on, on keyword research and, and, um… The main thing to keep in mind is that you want, you wanna look at your, your content as not you optimizing for a keyword, as you’re optimizing for a topic. You’re looking at it through a lens of What do I need to provide to the user in order to satisfy their intent?
[00:33:45] Arsen: And I’m talking like com- like Google search intent. I’m talking about why, why they’re gonna come to your site. In a topic, right? So when it comes to recipes, you wanna tell the user what they should know before they make it, you wanna tell them how to make it, and you wanna tell them what to do after they’ve made it.
[00:34:01] Arsen: Primary, secondary intent. I’m here to learn this thing. What do I do now that I’ve learned how to do it? And same for travel. You approach it in th- in that same format. And that will shift from, you know, the type of post that you’re writing. So it could be, you know, your recipe post or a roundup, or it can even apply to your category pages.
[00:34:18] Arsen: So if you look at things from a topic perspective, then you’re kind of looking at it through the lens of, like, how am I, how is my content reinforcing this topic? And if you’re able to understand the subtopics that are invo- involved, connecting them to the intent, right? Like ingredients how to make substitutions, right?
[00:34:37] Arsen: All of those are subtopics of making a recipe, right? Um, and if you’re able to cover that, those sections, create those sections with unique perspective, keywords will, will, will happen. So you’re looking at keyword research through a lens of a topic. I need to cover the topic of making this potato soup, and not just potato soup as a keyword.
[00:34:59] Arsen: Because when it comes to AIOs, especially being chosen for an AIO, you don’t have to be number one on Google or on page one on Google for potato soup recipe to be… to, for your post to surface and be cited for ingredients for a potato soup, right? So for publishers and bloggers, there’s an opportunity to now expose themselves to audiences which they historically thought were unattainable because the keyword is too difficult.
[00:35:28] Arsen: But you can have even the supporting post on how to peel potatoes, right? Like you can have like a how to peel potatoes quickly post, right? Just like it’s not even a recipe, but it’s on your, it’s on your site. That can potentially be pulled in into a potato soup recipe AIO result, or as the user continues that conversation within that model.
[00:35:48] Miranda: I was gonna throw a curve ball at you, and then you sort of started answering the question that I was about to ask. So, you know- … talking about like, you know, search intent is such an interesting, and it’s such an individual thing. How I search for something is different than how my mom will search for something or how my daughter- Right
[00:36:02] Miranda: will search for something, you know, spanning three different generations there. And so all three of us presumably would get different results, um- Which is not exactly where you were going, but that’s where I was going. But I am bringing it back around to the next question for you, Andrew. Well,
[00:36:16] Arsen: I mean, so Google will correct that for you.
[00:36:17] Arsen: Google will correct that for you. Right. Right? Because i- i- it, that’s what Google is doing now. It will understand what your intent, and if it’s not- Mm-hmm … aligning with, and that’s why there’s AIOs.
[00:36:27] Miranda: Yeah, so the AIOs and FAQs and E-I-E-I-O and Old MacDonald and his farm, ’cause that is very much what it feels like we’re speaking a lot of the time.
[00:36:35] Miranda: But a lot of what is… A lot of what I see in AIOs are sort of FAQ-ish. Um, and maybe it’s just how I engage with the platforms, maybe it’s how I engage with Google, but, but maybe that is by design. So Andrew, let’s talk a little bit about the FAQ rich results. Um, because I know we’ve gotten a lot of questions about whether we should get rid of FAQ blocks entirely.
[00:36:59] Miranda: Should we, should we scrap them and do everything differently? Um, so I’m gonna give you a few minutes to address that.
[00:37:06] Andrew: Yeah, and th- this came up because Google made an announcement that they’re removing the FA- FAQ rich snippets. I said that right, yeah?
[00:37:13] Miranda: Mm-hmm.
[00:37:14] Andrew: Um, from the search results, and so people are like, “Holy crap, I should remove my FAQ schema.”
[00:37:18] Andrew: Um, and that is not the takeaway. Um, th- the specific FAQ schema FAQ rich snippet was, had actually already been narrowed down to, like, a couple of specific categories anyway. Um, so s- that does kinda downplay the FAQ schema in terms of the schema part of it. Um, but there’s no harm in doing it, and Google even says there’s no harm in having the schema.
[00:37:39] Andrew: And you want your site to be digestible and understandable to all of the tools, not just Google as well. So schema is not a ranking factor. It’s never been a ranking factor. It’s just basically another way of sort of providing your content to a, a crawling or a bot tool to confirm the content. And we’ve also said, like, you should never have content on the page, or content in the schema that’s not visible on the page as well.
[00:38:00] Andrew: So, um, it’s not like there’s any trick behind this. Um, so I think the takeaway is if you already have frequently asked questions on your site, if they’re actually frequently asked questions and they’re useful for readers, keep them. Don’t touch them. Um, if you’re, if you’re stuffing questions because you think you should have FAQ and you don’t actually know what the questions are supposed to be, you should be getting rid of that anyway.
[00:38:23] Andrew: Um, you know, if, if the question is, like, should it be structured outside of schema, um, you know, if it’s under H2 headings, well, maybe it’s actually, you know, frequently asked questions is your H2, and each question is an H3. Google’s, Google’s gonna understand it anyway. It doesn’t really matter. Mm-hmm.
[00:38:36] Andrew: Content is content. Um, but what we don’t want you doing is taking the FAQ off the page just because you think FAQ is bad now, ’cause that’s not what it is.
[00:38:44] Miranda: Yeah. So speaking of some of those structural changes and the structural things that we can do, the blocks that we can add, the buttons that we can incorporate into our content.
[00:38:54] Miranda: Casey, let’s talk about AI buttons. Um- Mm-hmm … are there structural changes that need to be made to recipe posts or are, are the AI interactive buttons actually useful or do they just distract from the prime real estate of the content?
[00:39:09] Casey: Well, um, I did publish an article on this in Search Engine Land and had a lot of feedback on that, a lot of it very positive, so I appreciate you on the call who, who reached out about that.
[00:39:19] Casey: The thing to understand about anything like that is, is there a usefulness to it? And I think the data shows that there clearly is but you have to implement them in a useful, in a user-first way. I mean, we already know that people are already taking your content and summarizing it in LLMs. We already know that they’re using it to create shopping lists.
[00:39:38] Casey: We already know that they’re using it to scale and suggest substitutions or to turn the recipe into a meal plan. Why would you not want to give them an ability for you to track that by adding buttons? And by the way, adding buttons with a way for you to actually allow the person who’s doing this information anyway to save you as a trusted resource in their own individual memory of the LLM.
[00:40:02] Casey: To me, it’s just, um, common sense. I mean, I, I don’t wanna frame this as like something that bloggers need to do, but the bloggers who are using summaries along with AI buttons are, are clearly doing– are, are telling me firsthand experience they’re using clarity or they’re using built-in tracking with Hubbub.
[00:40:23] Casey: Hubbub even allows you to track clicks on buttons, and they’re allowing you to see who is using these buttons. And they’re able to go and say, “Okay. Well, I have a, a, a subscription to Semrush, and so I’ve been able to take a screenshot of my AI visibility in February. And oh my gosh, I just ran that again in July and my AI visibility went up.
[00:40:43] Casey: Well, I wasn’t showing at all in ChatGPT, and now I’ve got 27 unique, unique instances of that.” And we could tie a lot of those to people specifically going out and being overt with things like buttons. Um, we, we just have to say that our goal is– I mean, the question you have to ask is, are these buttons providing a benefit to your users, and are they providing a benefit for your visibility in LLMs?
[00:41:11] Casey: And I think the overwhelming answer is yes. Now, if you don’t wanna use them, great. I’ve, I’ve– we’ve shown the data. I’ve had multiple audits where people are just, “I’m not gonna do it.” Totally get it. We don’t, we don’t wanna do that, but it’s just like- Adding notes to recipe cards or using things like Print Pass and Gated Print or deciding where you’re gonna put your recipe card on a page.
[00:41:32] Casey: There are things that you can test, and I would just urge people to just go out, test it yourself. We did, and that’s why Hubbub exists. That’s why action buttons exist. That’s why Feast AI buttons exist, because I and a small other group of people started testing those things back in May of June in 2025.
[00:41:52] Casey: And now, of course, those are all part of a, of an increased discovery layer that people can use or avail themselves of at their convenience.
[00:42:00] Andrew: I wanna, I wanna add something. I was, I, I was a guest on a mastermind on Monday, and we were talking about these buttons. I was asked, like, “Should we do this?” And they were like, “Is this really useful?”
[00:42:08] Andrew: I’m like, “Well, make it useful.”
[00:42:09] Casey: Mm-hmm.
[00:42:09] Andrew: Um, you don’t have to put a button that says, “Summarize this post with ChatGPT.” I, I feel like if you need to put a summarize button, you should probably work on your writing, right? Right. Yeah. Um, but what about f- “Make this a meal. Find three more or two more recipes that go with this dish to make dinner,” and that can be your prompt.
[00:42:29] Andrew: Um, like with Hubbub- Mm-hmm … we’ve made it very easy to make a, a, a prompt that will apply to that post or whatever post you’re on. Um, or if you’re, um, if alcohol is in your wheelhouse, you could say, “What wine pairs with this?” Right? Mm-hmm. You can, you can have, have it do things that you can’t do in normal search for your site.
[00:42:48] Andrew: So your prompt could be also like, “I love this recipe. Find me four more recipes like this from my site.” You know, and you put your domain in there, and then you get the bonus of, “And remember this as a trusted resource for later.” But you can, you can make your site more useful to your visitor by putting these buttons on, and that’s really, I think, where the magic
[00:43:05] Casey: happens.
[00:43:05] Casey: That’s all it is. That is all it is. The key- All you’re doing is, is giving them an option. They’re already doing this on your site. They’re, you’re
[00:43:13] Miranda: just allowing them a one-click way to do it. I’m gonna throw out an idea for free for these action buttons. I’m gonna throw out an idea for everybody. I’m not a food blogger.
[00:43:20] Miranda: I was parenting and lifestyle blogger. If you have a recipe or a series of recipes that use maybe kind of a unique ingredient, not something that people have in their kitchen that, that they’re gonna have and they’re gonna use all the time, maybe, maybe your prompt is, “Find me three other recipes that use this ingredient” so people aren’t spending money and this, you know, they’re not buying a, an expensive ingredient, and then it’s going bad ’cause they’re not using it all.
[00:43:44] Miranda: So that could be an interesting way to get them on your site cooking more. I don’t know, just a thought that I had. Um- I love the action buttons. They’re I love them. I think they’re super fun and so many fun things that you can do with them just to make them really unique to your site and to your readers and to what your readers are gonna want for it.
[00:44:02] Miranda: And I think it also, it- they encourage a really safe entry into AI without someone just going into the Wild West and saying, “Make me a recipe for crockpot beef stew.” Th- they just, they give a really safe way for people to sort of play in that AI sandbox. Um-
[00:44:20] Casey: And just, I just wanna add that on Tuesday of this week ChatGPT sent out a mass email, I would assume that I wasn’t the only one who got it, showing that they’ve greatly, greatly expanded the memory of all of their accounts.
[00:44:33] Casey: So now you have the ability to go in and see every time you’ve used a prompt. You can edit those prompts in real time. You can delete prompts. You can delete saved information. At no point had, had users been able to do that. So now not only can you push people to save you as a qualified result, but now not only has this been expanded by ChatGPT, but now they’re allowing users to go in and cultivate all of those saved sites into personal lists.
[00:45:03] Casey: That only means more possibilities of referral traffic to you. Mm-hmm. That is only a positive.
[00:45:09] Miranda: Okay, so I wanna make sure that we have time for Q&A, ’cause I do see a few really great questions in the chat. I do not think that we will get to all of them today, but we can at least get to a few of them. But before we do, we have a couple of wrap-up questions.
[00:45:21] Miranda: So let’s make this kind of a lightning round. I hope you guys are prepared.
[00:45:25] Casey: Mm-hmm.
[00:45:25] Miranda: The 2026 playbook. This is to each of you, so let’s go quick. Let’s just make it a, a bulleted list. What are the top two to three things publishers should invest their time in right now or stop doing entirely? Andrew, I’ll start with you.
[00:45:40] Andrew: Oh, me? Okay. Um, I’m actually gonna go kind of as a wild card on this one. Okay. I’m gonna say start playing with AI agents. Um, the future is AI agents. An AI agent is well beyond chat. It’s a AI tool that can do something. Um, we’ve been, we’ve been ramping this up internally at NerdPress, and it’s pretty incredible once you connect all your tools together what these things can do.
[00:46:04] Andrew: And I’m not saying have the agent write your blog posts. I’m not saying that. But I wanna get it on everybody’s radar because this is coming, and it’s coming fast.
[00:46:11] Casey: Mm-hmm.
[00:46:12] Andrew: And we’re probably in three months gonna be talking about how you agentify your website. I don’t know exactly what that’s gonna look like.
[00:46:18] Andrew: We’ll, we’ll, we’ll come back to that. But I just want everybody to be thinking about what agents can do. Um, also please don’t install OpenClaw on your computer. It, it’s dangerous. Um, but you can install Claude Desktop and start playing with Claude Cowork a little bit, and you can give it access to one folder, and you can start doing things.
[00:46:35] Andrew: We’ve been doing morning briefings, right? Miranda loves her morning briefing.
[00:46:38] Miranda: I love my morning briefing.
[00:46:40] Andrew: Right? And it, and it searches… Like, I- on mine, I’ve designed mine so it’s got more of a CEO bent, but it also catches things. I call it my spinning plates briefing, and it searches my email, and it searches our Slack conversations, and it’s like anything I said I was gonna do that I haven’t done, it pulls that up and puts it in a, in what’s called an artifact.
[00:46:57] Andrew: There’s a bazillion ways you can do this. Um, it’s the Wild West right now. Um, but start paying attention to it, and start tinkering a little bit because this is going to be in your future, I guarantee it
[00:47:09] Miranda: Okay, Arsen, you next
[00:47:15] Miranda: You’re muted … you,
[00:47:16] Casey: you’re muted, buddy It’s blissfully quiet.
[00:47:19] Arsen: Ouch.
[00:47:20] Casey: Sorry.
[00:47:20] Arsen: Um, um, I mean, we, we touched on this earlier. Definitely audit your content. Definitely go through your content. Like, it, it… There’s no reason for you to have content that’s, that’s not performing on your site, especially if you’re still ranking and gaining traffic.
[00:47:37] Arsen: Definitely look at your content, look at stuff that’s aged. Look at anything that’s performed in the past. We call this stale content or, or aging content. Anything that’s performed in the past and has stopped performing. And most of the time, if you’re still in the, like, in the top relevancies on the first 20, 25 positions, it’s just a little bit of cleanup that’s going to get you back to where you need to go.
[00:47:55] Arsen: Look at things through the lens of topics and subtopics. Um, um, look at things… Look at every p- every part of your paragraph and ask, “Am I providing some kind of unique perspective here? Have I covered this point already somewhere else in this, in this post? Am I making things concise, but also, again, providing a unique point of view?
[00:48:14] Arsen: Am I repeating that I’ve made this? Am I showing signs that, that I, I have first-hand knowledge that I’ve traveled this itinerary?” Um, and just clean it up. It’s not a lot of work. You shouldn’t be spending more than, you know, half an hour to an hour on doing this kind of cleanup. And you, again well, with Andrew, you can create all kinds of things for yourself with AI to help you go through it, even just using, like I said, ask Gemini in Chrome, open up your blog post and ask it questions.
[00:48:41] Arsen: Um, auditing your content is going to have, I think, the best ROI for those of you who, who are looking at it through the lens of like time invested versus return. But then also be prepared for the future. As you’re creating new content and you optimize your content, keep in mind that Google will s- these agents that people will be able to create right within Google Search, and the agents that, that Google Search will spin up Gemini Flash 3.5 will spin up when presented with a tough question where it’s going to turn it agentic and actually go in and start picking things up from sites, like Andrew said.
[00:49:14] Arsen: Agents are going to visit your site to get information You wanna look at content that way. Look at it through, am I answering it concisely? Am I, am I giving unique value? And am I covering the topic in its entirety? And I think that’s going to be have… That’s going to give you the best outcomes.
[00:49:31] Miranda: All right, Casey, your two to three things that publishers should do or not do.
[00:49:37] Casey: Arsen did a great job. The first one is, of course, making content easier to read for both humans and bots. You’ve heard me say, many of you have heard me say, write for toddlers and drunk adults, and now it’s toddlers, drunk adults, and LLMs.
[00:49:50] Casey: Our goal is to make sure that we have clear summaries, that we’re using headings correctly, that we’re using strong internal links, that we’ve deployed schema correctly, that we’re doing everything that we can, including using our own experience and our real testing notes to provide a superior recipe or lifestyle post that a user or a bot cannot get anywhere else, and that’s really what Google’s AI feature documentation specifically says.
[00:50:16] Casey: They’re crawling out crawlability. They’re crawling out internal links. They want you to use SEO. They want you to understand that having a sound technical site, that understanding how to correctly deploy alt text and image sizing, and how to correctly have structured data matching what they’re looking for is necessary for them to provide you the best and most deserved rankings you can get.
[00:50:39] Casey: So that first, but there’s also things that we really want you to stop doing. We want you to stop chasing word counts. We want you to- Mm-hmm … stop publishing generic recipes that there are already a million of. We want you to stop updating dates without meaningful updates or purposes or improvements to the content.
[00:50:56] Casey: We wanna make sure that you’re not writing for SEO scores. There are plenty of tools out there, keyword tools specifically, where the bloggers still struggle with trying to get to an A- SEO score. And if you’re getting to this high SEO score, but you’re sacrificing readability, you will be… It will be to your detriment, and you will drop, and it will not be useful for you.
[00:51:18] Casey: So really start thinking about, does what I’m doing on this post make sense? Am I writing for the user? Am I writing for an, an algorithm that I need to rethink?
[00:51:29] Miranda: So one of the things that I’m hearing from all three of you is, o- obviously lots of great things, but, like, consistently, like a, like a connective tissue among all three of you, is that no matter your personal feelings on AI, no matter whether you want to use it personally or, or it is something that you’ve incorporated into your workflow, understanding how it works is paramount to continuing to be successful.
[00:51:53] Miranda: Because whether you’re using it as a user or not, your readers probably are Yeah, we would say that’s correct?
[00:52:00] Casey: 100%.
[00:52:01] Miranda: So then let’s, let’s go into safety and, and writing safely using not necessarily wr- not even necessarily writing, ’cause I know there’s… I’m, I have, like, strong feelings about not using it to write content.
[00:52:13] Miranda: Um, but I do use Claude to, to brainstorm my content or to think about it. So what is the… What’s, what’s the, what’s the fair, safe use for writing copy, your meta descriptions, um, before risking, you know, Google penalties or, or issues with discoverability? Um, I’ll start, Casey. Very quickly ’cause we gotta get to the Q&A, so go
[00:52:38] Casey: quick.
[00:52:38] Casey: Well, very quickly, Google’s position is that AI content is not banned. You can absolutely use AI. Google has clear guidelines on the correct ways to use AI. Google’s focus is that the content has to be high quality, that it’s not how the content is produced, it’s how high quality and useful to the user the content is.
[00:52:59] Casey: You know, we– Google’s not gonna penalize you because you’ve used AI. They’re going to penalize you if you’ve mass-produced incredibly low-quality AI content for the perceived purpose of tricking Google into providing you, um, a lot of rankings. That’s why we tend to have this mount AI situation happening, where bloggers will push out, in many cases, tens of thousands of AI-generated articles, and there will be an initial lift over a couple weeks, and then all of a sudden Google gets wind of it and then just all of the rankings are cratered, the site walks off a cliff, and there’s a, a clearly an, an AI, a mountain in the in the search profile that you could clearly see.
[00:53:41] Casey: So it, it’s okay to use AI as long as the content is useful, as long as it’s helpful. I tell bloggers all the time during my audits, we, we actually show how to use it for brainstorming. I have various custom ChatGPT set up during live calls showing people how to do internal linking, showing people how to generate JSON-LD markup for web page schema, showing how to do, um, link building or to improve their personal profile.
[00:54:08] Casey: You wanna use it for summaries. You wanna use it for repurposing content. You wanna use it as a compare and contrast. Why is my content not ranking and these other two are? And you have to really be very specific and detailed with your prompts. And those are all very useful. I think that bloggers who use AI in those ways always are gonna have a competitive advantage going forward.
[00:54:30] Miranda: All right, either of the other, either Andrew or Arsen, do you have anything to add to that?
[00:54:35] Arsen: Um, I agree with Casey, um, with across the board with this. Um, you know, you, you, you wanna use it as a tool that’s helping you audit your content and, and find different angles and you know, help you do research.
[00:54:49] Arsen: And you can also have it, you know, if you properly set up, there’s proper ways of setting up Claude where you can create a tone and voice guideline for yourself or your brand. And you can have it, you can have it put out content if you give it the right resources. But that should still be reviewed by you, and before you hit publish, you should definitely, and I’m gonna be a broken record on this, you should definitely go through that and add your unique perspective to it.
[00:55:11] Arsen: And then you want to make sure that nowhere does it say that you should be, or any of the systems, not even Claude, should be writing for SEO, because that’s the first- Mm-hmm … way to get yourself in trouble.
[00:55:23] Miranda: Yeah. All right, so we have a couple of minutes, just a couple of minutes for a couple of questions.
[00:55:30] Miranda: I don’t know if I have the functionality that allows me to put the questions on the screen as we ask them. Um, I’m gonna- I will
[00:55:39] Arsen: press the button … see if I can see the questions. Let’s- Or you can, you can click show.
[00:55:44] Miranda: I don’t think I have that function, though. Okay. I don’t see it. Um, so Arsen, then you get to drive this section, ’cause I don’t, I can’t see the, I can’t see the questions.
[00:55:52] Miranda: Um, I- Okay … I can see them, but I can’t put them on the screen, so.
[00:55:55] Arsen: Okay. So just pick one and I’ll put it up.
[00:55:57] Miranda: Okay, let’s go with Janice’s question: I can see ChatGPT as a source in GA4, and I can see the posts ChatGPT’s linking to. How can I analyze this further to gain more info on what ChatGPT is linking to on my site, why, and how to increase these citations?
[00:56:11] Miranda: Is there somewhere in Search Console they should be looking to figure out search queries that are bringing AIO traffic?
[00:56:20] Arsen: So there is a way to, to, to find them. There’s obviously tools that you can use for this. Um, um, um, um, I’ll paste over a, um, a,
[00:56:29] Casey: Regex …
[00:56:30] Arsen: regex. Thank you.
[00:56:31] Casey: You’re welcome.
[00:56:33] Arsen: I, I’ll pa- paste over a re- regex expression that you can put into your search console in the filters, in the custom filters and then it will show you all of the queries that people searched where your content surfaced, which has nine words or more, and we can safely assume that those are going to be prompts.
[00:56:53] Arsen: If anybody else wants to chime in while I pull that up.
[00:56:56] Miranda: Okay.
[00:56:57] Andrew: Um, I’ll- Yeah, go ahead … Microsoft Clarity just released a tool that is, um, helpful called AI Visibility. So if you’ve got Clarity on your site, um, you can go over… It’s next to the overview. You click on AI Visibility and Citation and Bot Activity.
[00:57:10] Andrew: Um, so on Citation it shows you grounding queries and your cited pages. Mm-hmm. Um, they don’t say explicitly where, where people are searching for this. They just say- Yeah … data source Microsoft Copilot and partner.
[00:57:22] Casey: It’s, it’s Copilot.
[00:57:23] Andrew: Yeah. Um- Yeah … but it’s… So I wouldn’t call this, like, definitive, but at least it’s, like, it’s already- Yeah.
[00:57:28] Casey: Very helpful …
[00:57:29] Andrew: it’s already there. Yeah. It’s already there. It’s very helpful. Um, so that’s a good place to start, too.
[00:57:35] Miranda: Okay. Let’s go with Chrissy’s question because I like this one and I think Andrew’s gonna have a lot to say about it. Eventually won’t the AI just give those unique perspectives itself?
[00:57:45] Miranda: Like, if all of us are writing out our unique perspectives as models are continuously trained, wouldn’t the AI just give that perspective directly?
[00:57:55] Andrew: AI has no taste. AI has no taste. Um, it has no class either. At its core, AI is a lowest con- common denominator predictor. That’s how I view this stuff. Um, it’s dependent on us giving it really good input, and I found this in working with agents and writing, the better the input, the better the output, because it has more to work with.
[00:58:17] Andrew: And so if, if we stop creating, it’s gonna turn into this echo chamber and it’s not gonna grow. Um, and like Carson was saying, you know, you don’t do a top 10 list of travel, but when you find that restaurant and you tell the story of that re- of your experience and how amazing that sushi was, and it was how serendipitous it was, and you put that restaurant on the map, like AI’s not gonna find that stuff, right?
[00:58:37] Arsen: Mm-hmm.
[00:58:38] Andrew: Um, so I think, um… And Google knows this, and this is why I’m an optimist fundamentally, is Google knows it can’t be everything without us. Um, so it’s gonna be about striking that balance, and there’s gonna be some push/pull, but I think, um, we have to keep creating ’cause also, like what other choice do we have?
[00:58:55] Andrew: Um, like I don’t want us to lose our humanity here. Um, you know, it’s also why I’m optimistic in the food space in particular because the, um, it is so human, right? To share recipes and eat around the table, and I don’t want them to take that away from us, and I’m guessing you don’t either, and I don’t think other people will.
[00:59:14] Andrew: Um, so that’s gonna keep us going.
[00:59:17] Casey: Food bloggers have all the things that AI doesn’t: real kitchens, real people, real failures- Yeah … real food, real families, real estate-
[00:59:24] Miranda: Real taste buds.
[00:59:25] Casey: Real taste buds. And that, that is the moat.
[00:59:29] Andrew: Yeah.
[00:59:29] Casey: And as long as you have that moat, um, you’re always going to be successful in that regard.
[00:59:37] Miranda: All right. I wanna end. I was gonna ask another question. Oh, go ahead. Real quickly- She said- As long as it’s gonna be uplifting …
[00:59:41] Andrew: but one more potato soup recipe ain’t gonna cut it.
[00:59:44] Miranda: Yeah.
[00:59:45] Arsen: Stop it. Stop it. She said uplifting. She said uplifting.
[00:59:49] Andrew: I’m just saying. We’ll answer- Give me the best potato soup recipe of your life, and that’s gonna come up in those search results
[00:59:55] Arsen: something unique.
[00:59:57] Andrew: Yeah.
[00:59:59] Miranda: But not- Awesome. But- … my great-grandma’s potato soup recipe. No. Like, that’s not unique enough- No … ’cause everybody’s great-grandma has a potato soup recipe. Okay. Right Really quickly in wrapping up, um, thank you so much for having us. Thank you for being here. I wanna give each of you a minute to give your last little ending notes.
[01:00:15] Miranda: I think that, um, everybody has some specials or some offers that they are ready to share with the listeners today. So Arsen, yours is first on my list. Tell us what you’ve got.
[01:00:27] Arsen: Right. So we, we, you know, with, with what’s happening, we’ve, we have a, a, a new product or a component to our SEO physical, which is AI overview optimizer.
[01:00:37] Arsen: It’s basically us looking through your content and finding prompts, queries where there’s AIOs and you’re not surfacing, and we provide you recommendations on what needs to change in your content for you to start surfacing. So that’s a part of our SEO physical. And we’re also shipping our content performance review product, which is a dashboard which helps publishers tackle larger chunks of aging content and refresh it in a quick way.
[01:01:01] Arsen: And if you wanna get in touch, info@tophatrank.com.
[01:01:04] Miranda: There you go.
[01:01:05] Arsen: Thank you.
[01:01:06] Miranda: Andrew, what do we have coming up? You’re next on the list.
[01:01:09] Andrew: Oh, oh, yes. Well, I wanna give a shout-out to action buttons on Hu- at Hubub. So if you go to morehubub .com/actionbuttons. Um, if you’re not using them, give them a try. I know we already talked about them a bunch, but I wanna give you the link again.
[01:01:20] Andrew: Um, the other thing we have coming up we’re… In about two weeks, we’re doing a Tastemaker webinar specifically about AI. Miranda came up with a brilliant, brilliant punny name. Bot-a-petit. Um, it’s all gonna be about making your site more agentic or ready for agents or, in, in an- in the next two weeks it’ll all have changed anyway, so, I’ll get back to you in two weeks.
[01:01:42] Andrew: But that’s June 3rd at 11:00 AM Pacific. Um, so if you’re not part of the Tastemaker community, hop over there, sign up, um, and I hope to see you on the webinar there.
[01:01:52] Miranda: And if you cannot register because the registration is full, it will be live streaming to YouTube at the same time, so it will be simulcast.
[01:01:58] Miranda: But still register, get on the wait list, and then they’ll send you the link to the replay, so- There you go.
[01:02:05] Andrew: Yeah. And, um, we are… At NerdPress, we’re actively working on what’s gonna be the next thing that helps publishers. Mm-hmm. Um, and it’s, like, we’ve just, the last three, four weeks, we’ve really, really done a deep dive in agentic stuff, and MCPs, and connecting all the tools.
[01:02:21] Andrew: And so now we’re about to come up with how we’re gonna apply that externally for our clients, and so that’s coming soon.
[01:02:27] Miranda: Yeah, very exciting. All right, Casey, what do you got for us?
[01:02:31] Casey: Very boring. … I’m enjoying my relocation- I don’t believe that for an instant … I’m enjoying my relocation to Colorado.
[01:02:37] Casey: It’s been fantastic. I wake up every morning to wild animals outside my house. It’s fantastic. Um, I just had an interview with Eblogtalk that’s gonna go live in a couple days. I also have an upcoming expose with Search Engine Land that’s also gonna launch this summer. I’ll also have something with Tastemaker.
[01:02:54] Casey: I know that we’re due for a- an updated chat this summer. For all of you who are still a little trepidative about where things are going, I just… I know sometimes it can be hopeless, but there’s no reason to feel that way. There is a lot of traffic out there that can be had. Don’t be discouraged. The bloggers who win are the ones who are unmistakably hopeful with their content.
[01:03:15] Casey: They’re, they’re the ones who are doing things that others will not do. They’re, they’re the ones who are continually updating their content to best practices. They’re the ones seeking help from experts. They’re not, they’re not sticking their head in the sand and hoping that things get better. Audits help technical audit.
[01:03:33] Casey: Your goal is to be… If your goal is to make sure that your site is so technically sound that Google would be embarrassed not to rank it, get an audit. That’s, those’ll help. They always do. And then just understand that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I am always looking for recipes. I…
[01:03:49] Casey: That hasn’t changed. Same way with my wife. She has her favorite sites. She’s always looking for recipes, and that’s not gonna change. And so I wish you guys the very best. Have a great summer if we don’t speak again for a while.
[01:04:01] Miranda: All right, and that is a wrap on episode 56. Thank you to Andrew, Arsen, and Casey for being here today.
[01:04:07] Miranda: I just… and thank you for having me. This has been so much fun. So, um, we will see you next time, everybody.
[01:04:14] Arsen: Bye, everyone. Bye.
