Episode #110: Is AI really driving a search change across Shopify stores?

Speaker A: Welcome to the Milk Bottle E Commerce show, brought to you by Milk Bottle Labs, one of the world's top rated accredited, ah, Shopify experts. The Irish based Milk Bottle Labs team upgrade, migrate, manage and advise some of the highest performing Shopify stores worldwide. Founder Keith Matthews interviews merchants, developers, fellow agency owners and Shopify folk to share as many Shopify tips and tricks as possible. If you're planning on upgrading to Shopify 2.0 or migrating over to Shopify, reach out. Milk Bottle will help. Now over to Keith.

Speaker B: Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. Today I am delighted to be joined by a good friend of mine, Dan Cavanaugh. He's one of the sharpest minds in the digital marketing space. Based in the uk. We have a packed conversation ahead. We'll dig into Shopify's recent updates and in terms of LLMs, where AI is taking E Commerce next and why data and structure has never mattered. More than ever. Plus we'll get into the Shopify Google relationship and the recent UCP launch and what that means for merchants. Dan, great to have you. How are you?

Speaker C: Hi Keith. What an intro. Sharpest minds in digital marketing. Wowzers. It's very generous.

Speaker B: It was a shorter intro than usual actually, so I focused on that word. I focused on the word sharpest. But look, it's really good to have you.

Speaker C: Yeah, same. Thanks for inviting.

Speaker B: We work together, we share some mutual clients. So that's, I suppose where we ultimately met. Dan. It's very confusing. There's a lot of change on at the moment. Uh, Shopify have recently launched their Knowledge Base app which uh, is supposed to improve the way your Shopify store will talk to LLMs. It has recently launched the Agentic app which is now showing Shopify merchants that went live a few weeks ago. Every single Shopify store on the planet now can see exactly what traffic is coming from. ChatGPT copilot. So it's a big area now because it's in the technology press, it's in current affairs, it's in political press. The way AI is moving. What's your overall view on the last six months from a kind of a digital marketing Google SEO perspective?

Speaker C: Yeah, um, so I think over the Last sort of 12 to 18 months the conversation in search has been very focused around, uh, AI, um, and how this technology is emerging. From our point of view, we've been um, observing the impact on search basically. Um, how are people's search habits changing? Because we've traditionally been very focused on organic search, you know, search engine optimization, on paid search, and obviously ux and testing. So we're not, I'm not really qualified to talk about how AI is, you know, speeding things up, uh, uh, you know, reducing the need for humans or whatever. Um, it's really how it's affecting that search landscape. And the overall term for that is generative engine optimization or, or geo search. Right. Um, and geo search for me, having been doing this for 28 years now, has always been like, that was geographical search, that was like local, uh, SEO, and now it's about generative engine optimization. So, uh, images and people finding answers really, without having to visit websites. Ultimately, we've been keeping, uh, a strong eye on that. Uh, I think what, what I would comment generally as a bit of an overview is how many sort of experts there seem to be in the AI space, particularly from an agency point of view. I think our industry is renowned for sort of jumping on things. Has always been, always been the way, you know, since the dawn of the search engines, you know, lots of like SEO experts immediately sort of cropping up. For me, if you're going to be expert in something, you need to dedicate a lot of time and resource and critical thinking and testing before you really know, um, whether a thing is useful for your customer or how you can harness this technology or process or methodology for a paying customer. I just want to, want to make m. That point is, clients give us their budget, they trust us with their budget to take results forward in the world of E commerce. Really what they want is for us to help them sell more products, want, um, more revenue, more new customers, more profit ultimately. And therefore we should be dedicated enough to understand how AI, for example, and how generative engine optimization is achieving that for our clients. Are we taking that client forward? And there's a lot of noise, um, you know, a lot of expert opinion. And for me, as an, as an overview and observation to the industry is not a lot of testing and critical thinking and an awful lot of trust being thrown over to the AI, you know, quite quickly.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I agree with you 100%. I was on a podcast recently and um, John Reidman was the host and he runs Ask Bosco. Great. Like, he's just a great man. And uh, he asked me a question and I explained to him, you know, in one sentence, well, if you're doing 20 or 30 million a year, you know, you should probably train yourself on AI, uh, rather than handing it to AI.

Speaker C: Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: There's also an obsession with getting things done quicker, but the tools aren't tested yet. So getting it done Quicker. And having to do it two or three times is not really getting it done quicker if it's going to be wrong.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's right. It's not a replacement for critical thinking. It just like anything, it needs to be used properly. If we go back in the short history of the search engines which, let's face it, Google's been around since 98, it's not that old really. Google came along about 10 years after the Internet was invented. It was designed to be helpful to its customers, you know, help people navigate the Internet, find information that they were looking for that was useful to them in the context of a buying journey. You know, they were using search engines to you know, build trust in a product and a brand and make a safe, comfortable decision that you know, they trust this brand enough, this website to buy a thing from them. And I think that is no different really. Uh ah, as to where we are now, what there is, is there's just an enormous larger number of platforms that someone can go on that journey with and AI is now a big part of that. Undeniably it dominates for informational search as we would call it. So it's taking the customer on a journey, it's resulting in a lot of zero click traffic. So people not visiting websites as frequently for question based search. But right now you still got to end up at a website to buy something.

Speaker B: So if you look at the structure then of a product page on a Shopify store. Are you saying that at the end of the day the structure, Google is still using the same rules it was two years ago to access that structure and your team is analyzing a similar structure. Has it changed?

Speaker C: It's changed to an extent. You've, I mean you, you know me, Keith, right is we, uh, we're a sort of non sexy digital agency, right? What, what we love is boring foundational work. You know, data is also the boring bits, right? So you know, we don't you know, enter awards for our um, latest PR SEO campaign. It's not sort of creative in, in that way. Of course that's an element of uh, of what we do. The, the foundational work is understanding that the, the Google basically is an LLM, right. The original and arguably still the best. But I would still describe Google as you know, sort of late teen, maybe a 20, 21 year old in terms of its maturity in, in these areas. The, the AI has come along, it's still a relative infant because uh, they're machines, they've got to find and assimilate data, right. So it's always been really important to get your product pages right, to have useful ah, content on most product pages that is not the same as all the other content. If there's 10 brands selling the same lawnmower, they're arguably still buying it all from the same place. They get the same image, they get the same product description and everyone's using it. And you're kind of trying to differentiate yourself maybe on price or something in Google shopping, but your product feeds are going to look the same how you load your SKUs into your inventory, probably all the same. But again there's always been an element of just sort of getting that kind of data in quickly, you know, and an anxiety almost. Let's just get it up. We'll populate the inventory. We've got the products, let's go. Now we're running Google Ads and a lot of fields are missing. There's inconsistency, the number of times we see the wrong product in the wrong collection in the inventory, but the merchant fee doesn't match it. And all this stuff is absolutely critical, always has been and is now even more important because the AI is trying to surface a uh, product with uh, potentially a much uh, stricter like longer, uh, a set of parameters. So the informational search that's going into AI now, like the prompts as they would call it, um, are really, really specific. You know they're sort of, we're identifying here that people are on a journey of discovery, they want something really specific. Let's say it's, I don't know, a pair of white trainers. You know the prompt that might go into AI now as opposed to, you know, men's m pair of white night trainers is now going to be, you know, men's night trainers, size 10, whatever brand it is, um, under £100 delivered tomorrow. You know, no quibble return, right. That's the sort of prompt that's going in. So the LLMs, the AIs now have got to now try and surface a product that matches that exact like long tail prompt. Otherwise they're delivering a bad service to that customer is not accurate. This is something that Google's been struggling with for forever really. You know, Google's just done a less bad job than all the other search engines at it, you know, in terms of accuracy.

Speaker B: And so just there does that mean then, um, traditionally if you didn't have that, you just dumped budget in marketing. I mean obviously people, a lot of people are getting a lot of success out of Facebook marketing, which is technically Instagram that's where most of the traffic is coming from. And um, Google AdWords, yes, obviously, you know, that's the business that you're in, that's obviously a major traffic generator. But are you kind of saying then that there's actually room for everybody to kind of go backwards, to go forwards? Because if you don't have the basic data, which is exactly what we do and exactly what you do is to fix that. But dumping budget in Instagram or Google is actually not going to fix that. If the rise in AI search is going. Is that logical?

Speaker C: Yeah, it is. That was a much more succinct way of putting it. Thank you. I was on a ramble. You basically, if you can get a lot of your data and structure right in the first place, so the quality of information you're giving to Google and to the AI is top notch, better than your competition, then you're going to get surfaced more. Um, this has always been the way even in merchant center, uh, like feed optimization, be really thorough in those areas because otherwise you have no real point of difference. It's the same product, it's the same description. You're just trying to fight on um, price. What then happens is it's a race to the bottom. So data and structure, auditing those and not letting the AI do it for you either is essential. But it's time consuming, it's boring. You've got to be consistent. But you also need to understand what your customers are searching for.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: You should always be striving to understand that customer journey and then correspondingly allow the machines to pick up on that information. You could have next day delivery on everything none of your competitors do. But it's not, it's not positioned correctly in the inventory or the feed. It's not for Google, it's not on your product page. So you're losing these things that are compelling reasons for a customer to come to you.

Speaker B: So in one way, the way you're describing it, it hasn't really changed other than the fact that it needs to be 100 accurate.

Speaker C: Yeah, thorough and accurate.

Speaker B: This is probably a question you might not be able to, able to answer. But Shopify's changes are obviously well in advance of a major shift, you know, uh, in terms of where traffic is coming from. But does anybody know if the LLMs are searching for something different? Like are they still searching for that structured data that you've just spent? You very eloquently described, you know, the order, tracking the date, the inventory which is feeding Google Merchant Center. Do we know what they're searching for? Have Google told their official partners themselves?

Speaker C: No. So, so Google is, is, you know, is not on record as saying, you know, this is what we're looking for. Right. There's the, you know, the, the updates that Google has historically released have often been, you know, algorithmic updates, not, not really formally announced, you see. Used to have to wait years for, for some of them, um, and now they're more sort of real time updates again. Google is looking really for simplicity. What information can you give it to help it decide whether your page is more useful than another page in answering that particular question that a customer of Google has? And the LLMs, uh, are really the same. They're looking for the same sort of ranking, uh, signals. I mean Google um, reduced its index to 10 pages um, not long back, which is thought really to have reduced the amount of data that the LLMs have got to go at. I was talking about um, SEO experts appearing really quickly without much uh, time even to become experts.

Speaker B: That's because you can create an SEO expert agent 15 minutes with uh, cloud code.

Speaker C: Oh yeah. So what happened, we saw this sort of last year was digital agencies suddenly have a geo SEO page, right? Generative Engine Optimization. And it sort of build as this is the new way uh, of searching. And when you drill down into it really what they're saying is well, do SEO properly and you're going to be ahead in, in AI, right in terms of citations and visibility and being surfaced. And we're just like well yeah, but that's. So it's kind of saying that the AI is looking for the same things that Google has always been looking for. But Google's had a massive head start in that. But the customer hasn't really changed because we're interested in things, we're typing what we're interested in, be it into Google or the AI. So they've got to rely on structure to surface the websites effectively that can deliver that answer or help you move on in that journey. So from that point of view it hasn't changed uh, any of our clients because we've always been quite, I don't want to say purist in SEO, but very anchored in a lot of this foundational work is any client who's been with us for more than 12 months on SEO is flying in AI, whatever that means in terms of visibility, citations, surfacing, uh, um, mentions in the right categories, be them in premium or at the bottom end or wherever.

Speaker B: Does a blog have the same power as it did 10 years ago on Google Original handwritten content representing your brand. Does that, does that have, still have value?

Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. Still, still really important. We, we've always been a bit, a bit down on the blog, um, as a mechanic. So the, the kind of. The blog was invented sort of 2005, 2006. Matt Cutts, who was the former head of content at Google, we went on record and said, you know, one of the things Google's looking for is regular content. Right. So the blog was born, um, on that day and it was a mechanic to throw out content in huge volume. And we kind of missed the point. It was all about quality of content. So blogs are important, but we would reposition them as advice centers or resource centers or knowledge hubs, whatever you might want to call it. But we deploy it different to the traditional blog mechanic is your content's got to have a good home in there, uh, in the right category. So we go quite granular in terms of that. Um, and what we want to do is saturate topics with authority, which means understanding your customer. We always go back to the customer. What questions is the customer asking? How do we help them on their journey to purchase? Okay, you've got to cover all that stuff. And m. I'm not just talking about blogs, you know, like long form content. You know, this could be FAQs or white papers or guides or an infographic or.

Speaker B: So Dan, are your, are uh, your customers investing the same amount of time and effort into blogs as they were five years ago? That's the same question, different way.

Speaker C: Okay, yeah, it's a good question. Yeah. So, so, um, content is a really important part of, uh, how we deliver search engine optimization, authority building, as we call it. And it's a really important part of what the AI are looking for as well, because this is your opportunity to let all these machines know that you are, um, the authority in your area. You've left no stone.

Speaker B: And authority is the key word there.

Speaker C: It absolutely is. So where the structure comes in, you know, you're asking about structure. It's not just structure in your shopping feed. It's structuring your headers and your footers. It's structuring your, uh, main navigation.

Speaker B: Yeah, Shopify users are lucky. They don't realize it, but obviously Shopify's theme bases and its entire kind of database structure is designed to feed directly into that. So, uh, Shopify users take a lot of that for granted, you know.

Speaker C: Yes, but of course the way that you build your Shopify site also helps because you know all this, Keith. So how they're built and structured is still important outside of the.

Speaker B: Which is why you should purchase a uh, official Shopify theme which is properly structured and whoever's going to customize it, like somebody like us, it has to be done with the SEO gods in mind as well. So um, again it's all connected. But you mentioned something earlier on there, you said that, I think you might have said 0 click purchase or something like that. So that moves on then to the recent Shopify and Google. Timo.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: So yeah, UCP the way forward do you think? Or have we no choice? Because if Google decides on that universal protocol when then we, we have to, we have to play ball, do we?

Speaker C: To a point, I would think, yes. So again, UCP or universal commerce protocol, you know, is a, is a joint Google and Shopify endeavor which is still being tested in the States. I think, um, Walmart and Target, uh, are among the heavyweights that are testing it is. It kind of makes sense if you think about human nature. We want things easy and quick. So if, if we are going to be more and more reliant on AI and whatever your chosen AI is. Um, it makes sense that why would you visit a website to buy something if your entire search journey is in AI? So I think that that's probably a logical endpoint of buying. Okay, so the UCP is platform agnostic. It's going to be able in theory to plug into any AI and surface any product. Um, I have no idea how safe it's going to be, how secure it's going to be, what the conversion rates are going to be like. What we do know is that in order you want to be in the game as a paying customer, you've got a Shopify store, you want your products to be in as many places as possible where your customers are. So it makes sense from that point of view to get all that data and structure right now and get ahead of that because it's good practice. Anyway, you were saying about zero clicks again is there's roughly depending where you read or where you look when. Um, the analytics work that we do with a lot of clients kind of points to this, that there's up to 60% of searches now at zero click. So people getting their answers in AI, they're not visiting a website any longer for it, but right now they do have to visit a site to buy. Okay. And um, the AI, ah, the UCP will probably change that at some point in the not too distant future. It just kind of makes sense that that's where it'll go.

Speaker B: I should have researched this actually before I joined uh, this podcast. But Google released an update about 10 days ago and I watched uh, a kind of a shortened version of it. You know, they have these releases, the same as Apple now and some similar tech companies. And um, they announced the ability to go into Google Search and to save a product to effectively a virtual cart. So in other words, if you go on to Google Search right now and you find a product, if you go off the page, well then that's all gone. And it seems to be some sort of a cart kind of a bookmark facility. And I'm assuming that it's eventually going to feed into ucp. So the bit that frightens me is the fact that somebody can technically purchase something without ever going to your site. And we have access to it, we've tested it internally and you can do it.

Speaker C: Yeah, but the, the purchase still comes from. Yes, you though. So you're, that you're the client, you're selling the product, the purchase still ultimately ends up being bought from you just, just on that.

Speaker B: So for users who are uh, familiar with the Shop Pay app, which is effectively Shopify's payment gateway, which is back ended by Stripe and they've turned it now into an app which is called Shop Pay. So once you log into Shop Pay, if you go to any Shopify store, you can make a purchase purchase. So in the demos that we've run with using the UCP effectively, what happens is if you go on to a music store and you buy two new two albums, well then you just go straight into the checkout through Shop Pay and you actually purchase on the store without actually scrolling through the product page. So in one way it's very powerful. But it's very worrying also that all of this other effort you're putting into the store doesn't get appreciated maybe.

Speaker C: Well, yes. So like how you make the store look and feel and what that journey looks like and brand kind of. But this kind of underlines what I'm talking about, getting your data and your structure right, because I think that's where the time and money investment needs to be. Because without that you are not going to be in the mix. Your products are not going to be surfaced at the right time to the right people for you to be in whatever it's going to look like, you know, a bookmarked area or uh, a short list or however that's, that's going to work. And, and um, I think um, a lot of that messaging is kind of, kind of Been missed like up, uh, to this point is it feels like it's, it's almost overtaking itself. And where we are is, well, to use your phrase, almost going backwards to go forward again is. I think this is the perfect time to revisit the basics, the data, the structure. I know, it's boring. I'm like a crack record, aren't I? But will be so powerful, give you a massive head start against your competition. And I know that working with you, you're absolutely on this page. The time and care you take over migrations, for example, to try and protect rankings and traffic and get that foundational structure right is refreshing for us, which is why we've worked together for so long.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, the amount of people that don't fully understand, you know, like a lot of the stores that we would migrate to Shopify could be 10. Some of them could be 10 years old, which in Internet land is actually a 10 year stretch. A 10 year database of customers, a 10 year database of order industry and of sales and email addresses, you know, you know, prior to GDPR, which came out in April 2018, like that's a fair amount of data. And the amount of people that don't fully understand those URLs being preserved correctly, that's like oil. Like, that's like the fuel of your store. The amount of people that don't fully understand that. And um, Dan, I've talked to two people in the last maybe four months where they actually migrated traditional business, family businesses over, and the agency never even went near Google. They lost everything.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's surprising in this day and age that that type of activity still happens, really, because your structure and your domain is your investment. Right. So it doesn't mean that you can't make big improvements and take large steps forward, but you've got to handle how you notify the search engines, uh, of these changes to protect what you've built. Again, it's probably boring, right? But so impactful, so important.

Speaker B: Yeah, but that's why people pay professionals, Dan. As simple as that. Why does anybody go to a hairdresser's to get their haircut? I mean, if it was so easy, everybody would be doing it themselves. And the businesses that we're running are the very, very same. Um, the lack of understanding, I suppose, keeps us in business in one way.

Speaker C: Yes, I guess it does. And I think understanding is, is the key bit because, you know, the agency world, the SEO world, you know, is a bit of a soup, isn't it? It's been no better underlined than in the last 18 months with the, you know, myriad of advice going on with, with, with AI and uh, you know, the pace of change. It's very difficult for a paying client to know who to trust and why to trust, um, and what questions to ask.

Speaker B: The term I use is that clients don't know what they don't know. They actually don't know. So a client doesn't know what ah, structured data is on a product page. Most people don't know how important that feed is. You referenced the Google Merchant center feed, which is the core to the Google Shopify, the Google shopping ads and most people just don't know. So to finish this conversation, is it correct to say that your advice is just to listen to Google's advice and to continue doing the basics right rather than over investing in a technology which might change direction or which might actually be. It's still unknown.

Speaker C: Yeah, I would say so ultimately and I want to be careful of dishing out general advice because a lot of it can be to Taylor. Yeah, I would say that Google's quality rate of guidelines are an amazing set of instructions to build any sort of marketing campaign around. Google's trusted them and developed them continually, uh, for getting on for 30 years. The AIs are looking very similar signals. Get back to structure, get back to data, uh, get your foundations right. Ah, and that's your platform for success. That's what I would say. Don't overcomplicate it.

Speaker B: It sounds like advice that I would give somebody building Shopify store, which is, which is, which is kind of refreshing. Your insights have been fantastic. Really great to have you and thanks very much and best of luck in the future.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks Keith. Good to be on.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. All of our episodes are available on Apple, Spotify, itunes and Google Podcast. If you're an E commerce professional with an exciting story to tell, reach out to the team on helloilkbottle, uh, labs.com until the next time. Take care.