#1020 - WP-Tonic Show: The Next SEO Apocalypse For Mount AI

Speaker A: You're listening to the WP tonic, um, WordPress and tech focused on building a successful business in WordPress aimed at the WordPress professional and power user. Join Jonathan Denwood and Kurt Von Ahnin as your host and co host as we bring you great discussions from around the globe.

Speaker B: Welcome back folks to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 1020. In this episode we're going to be discussing a really hot subject. It's, you know, SEO is facing another major update from Google. It's rumored it's going to really affect those that have been producing a lot of content using AI. We've got a true expert on this. We've got Mihaly Suski with us, uh, co founder of Surfer SEO. And we're going to be discussing everything around SEO, uh, content marketing, how it's rapidly changing in 2020, 26. Should be a great show. So Mihail, can you give the tribe a really quick intro? Um, and then when we come back after our break we can go back into a bit more detail about your background.

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

Speaker B: That's fantastic. And I've got my co host with me, Kurt. Kurt, like to give a quick intro to the new listeners and viewers.

Speaker A: Yeah, Jonathan. My name is Kurt Von Ahnin and I own an agency called Manana no Mas and we do uh, work directly for the great folks over at WP Tonic as well.

Speaker B: That's fantastic. So we're going to go for our starter break folks, when we come back. Should be a great discussion. We'll be back in a few moments folks.

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

Speaker C: That was a total luck coincidence. I was basically without a job at the time and a friend of mine just asked me will I join the agency? And I asked what is SEO? And then he sent me some YouTube videos from Josh Pashinsky, state of SEO something, uh, 2016. And I said like, yeah, why not give it a shot. So I started writing blogs, uh, for pbns for clients. Then uh, learned uh, all the SEO elements, so to say. So I went through the writer, a link builder, then I ended up as the head of SEO of the agency. Uh, and then we wanted to scale up uh, the agency and we felt like we cannot hire anybody around. So let's scale up the processes. So we build internal tool and that internal tool is Surfer. Uh, so that's basically the whole story. We scratched our own itch with the product for ourselves and then what if we can quit clients job?

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker C: Okay, let's give it a shot. And it worked. And here I am nine years later still building that product, uh, for agencies, for freelancers and in house teams.

Speaker B: So how, how has Surfer SEO changed recently? Over the last 18 months, has there been any fundamental changes with the core product?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Um, uh, you mentioned uh, like if how fast is it changing these days, uh the whole environment, the SEO, marketing in general obviously because of AI and uh, the uncertainty it brings to the table. Uh, so we uh, started to work on uh, optimization for these uh, engines as well because the rules are slightly different uh compared to reverse engineering for Google. Uh there are a little bit different rules for uh, optimizing for AI set. So you said the core product and I say now content score, uh, is grading your content not only against uh entities and structure from Google but also uh, uh based on the sources that are being cited, uh, on a given queries, uh, prompts in ChatGPT, in perplexity, AI overview, AI mode and so on. So that's the, that's the major change we uh, introduced recently. Plus uh, the visibility monitoring which is definitely something to look at uh, if you want to know who is actually shaping uh the landscape in your environment. Because often these pages that are getting cited and make uh, opinions uh, on the web for ChatGPT, these are different pages than in Google quite often and in order to figure out who they are, uh, you need to start monitoring these uh, these prompts. So this is uh, what we do differently that we've been doing uh, say three years ago.

Speaker B: All right, um, over to you Kurt.

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

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Oh, uh, awesome follow up bro. Thank you so much for this uh, I love this uh, story because uh, yeah it was basically because of my brother who also co founded the product. He is an excellent programmer developer at the time, uh, uh, he helped us a lot to do it and it was like less than couple of months uh, of uh, a side project.

Speaker D: So you.

Speaker C: He was basically bored at the day to day job and what can I do now for you? Uh, so I said this, this and that. Uh, so basically it was all about going to Google, uh, finding out the top 10 ranking pages and telling me what do they have in H2s, H3s, what do they have in their paragraphs, how many images, what's inside the image alts and so on. Uh, because you know I was doing it manually, I was creating Briefs for the writers. I was checking the structure, I was checking the length, I was checking a bunch of different things like keywords in use variations, LSI and so on. And I was pain in the ass in Excel, obviously. Um, so uh, when we discovered that we can do it this way and then we can not only use it for briefs, but also we can use it for optimizing existing pages like okay, we are ranking position 20, uh, what's the average of the top 10? Oh, we are missing like so many keywords in headings. So we've been adding these keywords and ranking higher. It was so easy like ten years ago, nine years ago. Uh, so uh, we thought it's, it was kind of silver bullet. We knew it's working, it was working for all of the customers of ours and we had like couple of hundreds of customers in the agency. So uh, this is when we thought like hey, maybe we can try like all in. And the, the period uh, between we decided to go uh, for it and go all in. It took us like a year. Uh, so it was like a side project for a year. And then we realized okay, let's quit uh, the agency work. Let's quit every other thing we have on the table. So the table is clean and it's only server. And that was actually uh, the best decision we could, we could make, uh, is to laser focus on a single product instead of like you know, consulting agency, uh, work some analysis enterprise. And by the way, I'm also doing a product. No, just the product. Nice, nice.

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

Speaker C: Uh, you know I uh, think uh, they have better ways to kill websites than use the uh, if AI generated or not, they have behavioral signals. And this is so much more powerful uh, because like there's nothing wrong with your content if they have positive behavioral signals. So they satisfy their end user, they satisfy the person who is not pogo sticking, which is like going in and out to another search result. Another, another, another. Uh, so you are the one. They land and they read and they like and they go away from Google search. So if they have these behavioral signals, why would they penalize a page that is sending positive behavioral signals but is written with AI like it doesn't make sense from the business point of view. What will they replace it with? With human created content but shitty signals? Definitely not. Uh, so I wouldn't worry uh, about that if the quality is there, if the, if, if the users like it. But unfortunately a lot of people create content that is garbage, uh, that has no value, um, that has nothing unique, that has nothing related to their brand, which is basically all that evergreen content full of entities and keywords and looks like any other type of page in top 100. They all look the same. Uh, this is something we have to worry about and this is something that can be a trigger. Uh, however, uh, one, one last comment on this is that I, I don't think they will, they will do these like a massive updates like they did like a panda, uh, penguin or something. I uh, feel like they are more like continuously updating it. So, uh, because you know, back in the days we've been running data studies comparing winners and losers before and after algorithmic change. So we see that, oh, these guys that won, they are doing these, these guys that lost there, they were doing this or don't do this and do that instead. And now there is uh, like every month, every week they will say like, there's an update, there's an update, there's an update. So there is no time. That is like a calm C. That you can check. Okay, this is before, this is after. Now we compare and then we see what did they change? They push so much noise. So we cannot reverse engineer these updates. So if they did so, so created like another penguin update, but for a, uh, content, we would be uh, blessed because it will be so easy to find the patterns. What exactly did they go after? So I do not expect a massive update. I expect continuous update. Because it's hard to track.

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

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

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Jonathan.

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

Speaker C: Oh no. So, but it's not the first time. It's not the first time. We used to see these knowledge boxes. We used to see these direct answers. Uh, back in the days even like um, world uh, cup results, right. You don't have to go to the sports website. Google will give you the stats, even the uh, shortcuts, even like pictures, uh, everything. So they are stealing our content uh, for a couple of years now at least. They just increase the scale now with this. And um, what's, what's our uh, uh, what's our take uh, on how to kind of recover from the AI overview update is that you are uh, not trying to pursue traffic anymore because like you said it's not going anywhere. If people will be satisfied with the answers, well that will be it. Uh, what you can do though is you can be the source of information for the AI overview. And if there is at least of a fraction of commercial intent in a given query, you need to fight for this query to become the source. Because the next question in AI mode may be who will provide me a solution? And if you were the source at the beginning, they wouldn't waste more tokens crawling another websites. They will just look at you again and say ah, uh, these guys have an answer. So ah, my, my number one technique to actually make some use out of these informational pieces of content is ah, to connect these informational stuff with next potential action that your reader may have. And if that action has at least a little bit of a commercial intent which is actually using your solution or maybe buying your product or maybe at least you know, something commercial, uh, then you have to figure out what might be their next question and answer their next question that is related to your business directly. And this is how you can uh, you can monetize on AI overview for these next questions.

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

Speaker C: Let me tell you this. Uh, so you still need rankings uh, in order to get cited as a brand, uh, and to get cited as a brand and get rankings, uh, you need some topical authority anyway and even though not so many people are reading this, you have internal links sending uh, some link juice to uh, to the pages that are the money pages. So you shouldn't abandon that that's one thing and the other thing is that we did uh data analysis on like huge sample of uh AI answers and it turned out that the most frequently cited source is actually a branded blog. Uh it was like 30 something percent. Uh so uh and the second one was like the third party blog was like a guest post, something like that. So uh, definitely I wouldn't, I wouldn't get rid of blogging. However I will, I would focus more with these blogs on something more commercial especially on the listicle pages. Um so pages that will compare uh, different services, different products, different uh use cases uh and obviously put yourself on the top. However if you are afraid of that uh you can also push uh these listicles on third party websites uh like a pay a little bit and let them publish the listicle that you are on the top. Because these listicles are really working well. And I'm also monitoring that uh, that part with uh, with our data science team. And even though there is a lot of bad press around the self promoting listicles they are one of the best right now as of today still one of the best performing ways to manipulate uh AI results. So whether we like it or not this is what works uh today. And uh, if we are not doing this, our competition is doing this and they leave a mark that they are the best. And yeah everyone who is not doing it uh, they leave uh room for them to expand and it will be harder and harder to get rid of that uh message positioning in the future.

Speaker B: I would, I, I totally understand where you're coming from but I would be a bit wary about doing it on my own website. Um you know I've, I would use guest, guest blogs or I don't mind putting WP Tony in the mix but putting it at the top I would

Speaker C: please put it on the top. I'm begging you, put yourself on the top. Seriously. We are measuring all that stuff 20 million uh scrapes sample and is like 20% of all the cited uh pages were self promoting listicles. Uh so that was like insane and uh another, another one. I mean I know it may be tricky for companies that are aged like I see 1020 episode. That's massive for surfer is also like 9 years on the in a business and we have less tolerance for risk. Right. But for all of the companies that are just starting or early in their journey uh I would definitely take that risk uh in order to make a difference.

Speaker B: Uh yeah I understand. I'm still a bit wary about it but I do understand. I think it's A good place for us to go for our middle break folks. It's been a great discussion with Michal. Um, he's a real expert on this. Got great product as well with surfer SEO. We're going to go for our middle break. We've got some other great um, topics to discuss when we come back. We will be back in a few months folks.

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

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

Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's uh, it's uh, the velocity of your publishing, uh, and how fast uh the general topic of the website can change. So uh, because you know we all have these semantic center of our website. Let's say there is a hundred articles about technical SEO. I'm pretty sure we can find 100 topics on technical SEO, like robots, redirects, all kinds of broken links, all kinds of stuff. Um, and we are technical SEO, okay with 100 blogs. That's our center. And imagine what happens when we bomb it with a thousand articles on marketing. So what does Google see when they revisit? They really liked us as experts in technical SEO, but somehow we morphed really quickly into something they cannot even comprehend and categorize. Who are you? Now? I expected to be a great technical SEO agency or resource uh, for people. And now I receive what television ads and their cluster, I receive content marketing. And that cluster like it's first is unnatural and second this type of content does not belong to you as you were technical SEO. Uh, so I feel like this is the, the biggest problem. People are greedy, aren't they? People uh, want all the traffic they will go after. Low keyword difficulty, high search volume, topic ideas even though they are out of their uh, expertise, out of their scope, but they somehow find a way to connect it. Uh, and this is uh, in my opinion uh, the main reason of, of that happening is basically uh, out writing out, publishing your original uh, content with a lot of pages that are only somewhat related to where you started with and you lose your expertise. And Google cannot categorize you about uh, as a, as a trusted resource anymore in this area. So you'll lose everything scaling too fast basically in too many directions.

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

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

Speaker A: Okay, back over to you.

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

Speaker C: I, uh, will tell you this. Uh, we had quite a lot of articles on our website, even though they weren't written with AI about technical SEO stuff. But we cannot help with technical SEO with either services or our product is not technical SEO product. And we lost these keywords. So we look at the search console and see, oh my God, what is this traffic? What's happened? Just to realize that was empty traffic that didn't belong to us as the solution for the problem of technical SEO. And then I thought, thank you Google. It's actually good that you removed that traffic because it wasn't converting for us. We couldn't help anybody. Uh, we just had it because it was also SEO. So that's the, uh, that's the misconception, uh, people have, like, it's, it's also on the water. So I will, I will start selling like the, I don't know, swimming suits. Yeah, why not? Uh, because it's also water. Uh, so that's, that's, that's this, this type of, this type of thing. Uh, and we can have so many, so many examples like uh, where, where, where people will like explore new areas with content, but they won't explore these new areas with business. So business offer and content offer is not aligned. If they are aligned. You, you can grow your content. You can grow your content unless you go outside of your business, uh, operation area. That will be the, uh, for me, that will be the boundary, uh, the limit you can hit if you go outside of your business services, then stop, stop publishing. Right?

Speaker B: Is it, is it me for the next question or you, Kurt?

Speaker A: No, I think it's you.

Speaker B: Right, um, well, I put on the next question. Um, do you think slow delivery SEO is more likely to compound an aggressive optimization? But I think what a better question would be is you've got any advice to it to anybody that has seen, and there's been a lot of people that have seen quite large declines through AI. Um, you know, um, seen a traffic decline through what Google's done with AI overviews or they've just seen a decline? Because I definitely think Google's tightened domain authority. They, you know, everybody's saying they're seeing a lot of pages indexed, you know, being indexed but not shown. They're seeing a lot of that increasing amount of their pages being indexed by Google but not being shown by Google. And a lot of people thought it was Mount AI, but I don't think it is. I think it's consequences of everything we've discussed in this, in this interview really, isn't it? But have you got any advice about what people, if they've seen a big decline, what, what are some Key things that they've got to really consider this year that might help them turn things around a bit. What or what do they have to get into their mind really? I think you've already touched about. They've got to forget about getting as much traffic to the website. I think you've touched about that already in this discussion, haven't you?

Speaker C: Yeah. So number one thing is uh, to look into data. So first figure out if the, the traffic you lost was actually yours. Because often uh, we are blessed from Google receiving some traffic that actually does not belong to our business. Then we say we won, we are winners. Now look at my spike in Google search console. And then uh, Google's correction, uh, is actually uh, is actually right like we were not supposed to get all of that. Uh, and um, I would say that people have to check what was the type of traffic they were receiving that is gone first to, in order to realize whether it is really a disaster uh, for their business or it is just the healthy correction of, of the direction where their content was, was. Was heading. Uh, and uh, then if it turns out that it is actually a disaster and we've lost the, the, the traffic that was making us money.

Speaker E: Ah.

Speaker C: So my number one thing is to check who we were replaced with. Uh, and based on that we can make decisions so we can uh. Let's say we were replaced with different type of content. So let's say it used to be blog, now it's landing page with call to actions. So if we spot that change. So on the keyword that we ranked with the blog, now it's all landing pages. It's obvious we need to create a landing page and ideally redirect the blog to the, to the landing page to strengthen it uh, quickly. Uh, so that will be like a uh, m. The second step. So first assess in order to get the idea of which ones were actually making impact on the business. Because you may lost thousand keywords and only 10 out of that thousand where the keywords that make you money. So you know, you need to focus on 10. Okay. And then on these 10 you perform the uh, analysis what type of content is ranking there now? And then you can make decision like can I create the same type of content? Or maybe that's just a different service, maybe that's just a different answer. Maybe it's not my city anymore because well now it belongs to a different state or something and that's why I lost it. Uh, there may be so many different reasons like production of this product is discontinued. Nobody's Searching for that anymore and you are crying or your search console asking why. And it turns out basically this, this service is gone from the market. So it may be not only Google. So we shouldn't be blaming, always blaming Google. Sometimes it may be a different situation. Uh, also checking uh, impressions decline versus clicks decline. Uh, because that may be a case like uh, clicks decline and impressions stay the same, positions stay the same. You cannot do anything about it because it's basically traffic stolen by the AI overviews as people are not going deeper and deeper into blue links anymore in this question, in this prompt, in this keyword. So go explore something else. Um, but if impressions went down, position went down, clicks went down, then well yeah, there you might have a chance to win it back. But first you need to reverse engineer who are you replaced with. And yeah, uh, I would keep on talking for hours.

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

Speaker C: So we have a native integration, there is a plugin even. Uh, right now we are uh, through the plugin uh using uh the log server analysis uh to monitor if chatgpt perplexity and so on. They are visiting your website. So actually server is quite connected with WordPress.

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

Speaker C: Yeah, that's the tricky question because I uh used to be using WordPress for all the websites uh like a year ago and the last website I created was pure HTML vibe coded obviously with, with, with Claude, but this was just like a single like one pager so that was easy. I just dropped one uh, one uh, uh HTML doc and that was it. Uh, but for, for websites uh, that have like a blog that are longer, bigger and there is something to manage. I actually still use WordPress. Uh, I'm not sure if I say still because if I say still it may change. I don't plan uh to migrate actively to any other solution as of today because you know uh, WordPress is,

Speaker B: it

Speaker C: has like a lot of possibilities but if you don't want all of these possibilities. It's super easy and useful. I mean uh, for anybody. Uh, so I feel like WordPress is not going anywhere, uh, anytime soon. However, there will be or there is already a movement uh, of, of the people trying to find some more static websites just because of updates, plugins, hijacking and this kind of stuff. Uh, so um, for smaller websites we may see more people going towards something even simpler than that. Uh, but it's not like with Google, like Google will die in two years because of ChatGPT. That's the same story with WordPress. Like WordPress is not anywhere.

Speaker B: I think it's more likely the other way around actually. Uh, the way things are turning recently, I think there's more chance that Google um, is going to be around and Chat GPT isn't. Um, but who knows? Um, I'm going to over to you Kurt for the last question.

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

Speaker C: Yeah, many, Many I think many. Because like I said at the beginning, people are greedy. They are obsessed with numbers. Like how big is your company? Ten people. One uh, hundred people.

Speaker E: Wow.

Speaker C: You see, uh, but it can be a case where 10 people company is so much more uh, powerful than a hundred people company. Uh, and it's the same with uh, creating websites, uh, as ah, they will think like oh I need to post now, not weekly, daily. I need to post daily. And then they start cannibalizing. Then they start going out of their ah, expertise area. Uh, and they dilute, I would call dilute ah their expertise. And it also happened to us like two years ago we released AI Humanizer and AI Detector. It was a by byproduct of us working with AI with data science. We saw like okay, uh, people, SEOs want it. So yeah, let's do it. And you know what happened? We received millions of page Views from students. Uh, they were only looking uh, to check uh, their, their homework basically if it's chat GPT generated. Right. Uh, so our conversion rate from the visitor dropped like, you know, really bottom of the bottom. Uh, and was it our traffic? We were obsessed for over a year. Why did we lose this humanizer traffic? Oh my God. Our chart in AHREFS will look really bad right now our search console is showing the deep. Oh my God. But when you think about it, is, is actually, is actually good because these were the people who weren't buying from us anyway. They were looking for something else. And somehow we ranked uh, in this area. And um, you know, if we made this mistake, even though we are like a content focused data science, data driven reverse engineering, yet we still failed there. I uh, feel like there will be many people uh, that they don't even know they are wrong.

Speaker A: Yeah, I appreciate that. Thanks for clarifying. Um, our last question is kind of like an earmark of uh, the show. We always ask people if they had their own Tardis or their own time machine and they could go back in time to when they started their business journey. What advice would they give themselves? What, what advice do you think you would give yourself, Mihal, from the business perspective?

Speaker B: Yeah,

Speaker C: uh, I um, would say, um, sell when it's growing. Sell when it's growing.

Speaker A: Yeah, you're like, get out quick. Like.

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

Speaker A: Interesting. Jonathan, over you to you.

Speaker B: Yeah. Have you got time to stay on for extra 10 minutes or do you have to be off?

Speaker E: I'm good.

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

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

Speaker B: Yeah. And Kirk, what's the best way for people to find out more about you?

Speaker A: I'm hanging out with Michal over on LinkedIn. I'm the only Kurt Von on there and I'm easy to find.

Speaker B: That's fantastic. Um, if you want to support the show and you're listening on mobile, on your app, on Apple, um, just leave a review on Apple. It's really easy. Or Spotify, it's the same. It's really dead easy to leave a review. Um, that's the best way to support the show and share it on social media. If you found this discussion really interesting, I think me hove has um, really been excellent guest. We will be back next week with either great discussion or roundtable show. We'll see you soon, folks. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group and also to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com forward/newsletter. We'll see you next time.