What if your paid and organic search teams are competing instead of collaborating—and it’s costing you customers? In this episode, Luigi Ferguson of Intuit breaks down why SEO vs SEM is a false choice and how the smartest brands are winning by integrating strategy, data, and AI. Whether you're scaling B2B or battling click fraud, this convo will reshape how you think about search.
https://page2pod.com - In this powerhouse episode of the Page 2 Podcast, Luigi Ferguson, who leads holistic search at Intuit (QuickBooks), joins Jon and Joe to break down the future of search. It’s no longer SEO or SEM—it’s all about playing on the same battlefield. Luigi explains why collaboration between paid and organic teams is no longer optional and how AI is reshaping the rules.
From AI Max and automation to fighting click fraud, affiliate strategy, and rethinking content for AI Overviews, Luigi shares hard-earned wisdom from his time at McAfee, Yahoo, Critio, and now Intuit. If you’re in search marketing or performance strategy, this is a must-listen.
📊 Whether you're struggling with attribution, planning content for LLMs, or optimizing shopping feeds, this episode gives you tools and perspectives that apply today—and tomorrow.
📌 In This Episode (🔍)
• The “one battlefield” mindset: paid vs organic is an illusion
• How to align SEO & SEM teams—and why you must
• AI Max, automation & the death of granular control
• Fighting fraud and low-quality leads in PMax campaigns
• How to rethink ROI in a post-click world
• Planning content for AI Overviews and impression-heavy SERPs
• Using call center data to power high-impact content
• Why knowing your _non_-customer matters too
• Strategies for affiliate monitoring and brand term protection
• Optimizing shopping feeds with real search behavior in mind
• Tentpole marketing: balancing long-term planning with war room agility
• Predictions on the future of Google’s SERP with AI front and center
This episode is packed with insights to level up your marketing strategy and prep for the fast-evolving world of search. Whether you're scaling B2B or battling click fraud, this convo will reshape how you think about search.
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💬 What’s your take on the AI vs human content debate? Drop your thoughts in the comments!
đź”— Links and ResourcesÂ
• Luigi Ferguson on Linkedin
• Impact of Google Map Pack ads
• ChatGPT disrupting Chegg
Your user is on the same SERP, but they can only click once. That's how Luigi Ferguson thinks about search. It's not paid versus organic. It's one battlefield. One decision. One click. Luigi leads holistic search strategy, intuit for the QuickBooks brand, and in this episode, he unpacks what it really means to align SEO and SEM, especially as the platforms themselves become more opaque and more automated.
We talk about the rise of AI powered ad tools, the politics of attribution, and why the real challenge isn't just clicks, it's control. Luigi also breaks down how to plan content for AI overviews, defend your brand and search results and rethink ROI and a world where impressions go up, but clicks go missing.
And Luigi doesn't just talk theory. He's done this work at McAfee, Yahoo, Critio, and now into it. You've seen how teams win when they integrate and how they lose when they don't. The takeaway, if you're paid and the organic teams aren't in the same room, you're probably losing clicks and customers. Let's get into it.[00:01:00]
Welcome to another exciting episode of the Page two podcast. I'm your host, John Clark, and as always joined by my partner Crime at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DaVita. Today we're welcoming Luigi Ferguson to the show. Welcome. So before we dive in, lots of fun stuff to talk about, but I think just to maybe set the stage of your current role right at Intuit, huge company, lots of different brands.
Help us understand where you fit into that big ecosystem of products and and brands.
Yeah, absolutely. Within Intuit, I work on the QuickBooks brand, which specializes and really focuses on helping. Small and medium sized businesses get the tools that they need to run their business better and grow. And within the QuickBooks organization, I work in holistic search, so what I do every single day is understand what's going on across search engines, mostly on the organic side, but also try to make sure I understand what's going on the paid [00:02:00] side and not just Google and the places that you will traditionally think of.
It's also the new places too, where the places where we're not, but we know our users are. Potential customers are having conversations, how do we get there and make sure that we're present and can engage with them
too. Love that. Lots of interesting paths to go down there. But I think before we, we dive into the fun conversations, I think you and I just crossed paths at Razorfish.
I started in 2010 and I think you might have left around 2010. Is that accurate? And then I think you and Joe know each other from even before, right?
Yes. Joe and I, we definitely were, we start, I know Joe started before me on the digital marketing side, but we ended up crossing paths at a. Small e-commerce company based in New York called the PartSource Technologies way back when, and then you ended up joining Raise of Fish right after that.
And the timing. Yeah, it, it sounds about right. There are so many people that have come through that great agency, so I'm not surprised. Absolutely. It's a rich, go ahead, Joe.
I got, [00:03:00] got stung by a bee. I'm sitting outside today, but I'll roll through it. I'll sh I wanna share, I'll share a quick story. Luigi and I met 20 years ago.
We worked at this e-commerce startup, as you mentioned. 2005 we met, we started working together and it was a, it was a great way to learn e-commerce at a very large level. There was a million SKUs. It was a well run organization. Eventually it sold to Best Buy Luigi and I did not become millionaires from that acquisition, but we both, I think, learned a lot.
We both learned a lot. Right. It was a smart group of people. So I got, I started in 2005 and I had 18 months of e-commerce experience. I was still very green in my career and Luigi was responsible for managing the Google Ads program. And I got brought in to do some smaller stuff like affiliate and maybe you guys remember a Yahoo Search Submit Pro.
That was my, that was like one of the product. So we won't bought, you know, we, so we had a bo, we had a great boss at the time and he like gave [00:04:00] Luigi a lot of great responsibility and he tasked me with trying to grow this search, submit pro business. And at some point I was spending like double the money that.
I was in a certain amount of time, he's, I need an, if we wanna invest more, I need an analysis. I gotta bring it to our CFO. I was like, yeah, okay, I'll, I'll, I can do this analysis for you. So I like get out my notebook and I'm like, okay. Clicks. I write it down, spend, I write it down, number of links, blah, blah, blah.
Write it all down. I'm like calculating percent change. Okay. This divided by this times a hundred, I've got this whole thing, like three pages of notes and our boss comes over and he's like. How you doing with that analysis? I, it is right here. Here you go. I ripped the thing out and I hand him my paper.
He's, I can't walk into the CFO's office with your notebook. You have to put this in Excel. And I was like, okay. I had very little experience with Excel, so he's Luigi, can you show Joe how we conduct an analysis here? And Luigi had to teach me, he taught me a lot of things. About Excel taught me the percent change formula, the V [00:05:00] lookup, the H lookup, custom fields and pivot tables.
Things that I have gone on to teach countless search professionals to, but Luigi taught all that stuff to me 20 years ago.
It's crazy. Like this industry, there's so many tools, but there is really nothing like Excel.
Yeah. If, if it has to be quick and dirty, nothing is gonna get to the answer, unfortunately.
Right. Because there's a lot of, there's a lot that comes with that, but sometimes it's just, let's just use what we know and let's get in, get out and get our
day going. Absolutely. Definitely. I'd love to dive into holistic search. My, my background started on the page side and when I got hired at Razorfish, it was actually the first SEO official title I'd ever had.
I've been in page search up until then and they had a lot of clients who were trying to figure out that holistic search ecosystem, and so I think I was a good fit because I had a little bit of SEO background, but was. Chief on the pay size. So maybe to start, a lot of times those two departments don't play nice together, or they're completely [00:06:00] separate.
They don't share a lot of data. In some cases, they're managed by different agencies. In your experience, are there any tips or maybe foundational principles that you would apply to situations like that? Just to try to start to bring that together a little bit?
Yeah. I really believe your point. It's about removing those silos and being very intentional about it from the outset, realizing that a user is on the same SERP and they can only click in one place.
So the closer that you are, the more that the agencies are talking, if they're separated, the more data that's being shared. Both pre proactively, but also when tests are being done. Like looking at the holistic picture, right? Because you might have grown paid clicks by 20%, but what happened to organic, right?
If you're able to drive your client your organic click rate by 15%, is it a landing page that now paid search can use? Are you using title tags and meta descriptions that maybe can be woven into RSAs, right? It's really about making sure that. All of it is looked at from the same lens. [00:07:00] And I feel like Google wants that because if you think about where it's going with AI Max, right?
It's almost like this very different version of, oh my gosh, I, I forget the name of it, but is looking at your website, you don't even need keywords. It's looking at the pages that you've built. It's coming up with dynamic search. That's what I was thinking up. It's created, experienced for you. So if you have a strong.
Organic presence. You have a lot of technical foundations done correctly. Your content has been created with right audience in mind. Now you can do these things like AI Max. You can do these things like broad match. You can now participate in these AI mode ads when they become available because you created those foundations and you've made sure that you're strong on one side, which enables you to lean into innovation on the other side.
Yeah, I love that comment about your user is on the same erp, your why co, why compete against yourselves in more ways than one? So you have hit, you had experience across both B2C and B2B, obviously [00:08:00] B2B today. When you think about holistic search, are there nuances between the two or do a lot of those same principles still apply regardless of who you're going after?
Yeah, it's interesting because on the B2C side, that sale is happening a lot faster, right? So there are just fewer touch points when you're trying to understand what that conversion path looks like. And on the B2B side, there's a lot more involved, right? They might be looking at a blog post and then they go and look at maybe your, one of your product pages, and then maybe they go to the pricing page, but then they need a different blog post, right?
So because of that whole idea of understanding that path to purchase ends of becoming a lot more important just because there are so many areas that are leaning in and providing an assist, right? Even, and that's just the things that you can track. We're not talking about people asking for recommendations and back channels, or people going and asking their favorite large language model about who they recommend.
So it's really important. I would say it's more so [00:09:00] important that that rigor, that governance, that cooperation exists. Holistically on the B2B side one, because you're probably also spending a lot to drive that conversion, right? So any place along the way where you can allow organic to own the conversation and to guide the user down instead of having to pay for that engagement, it's even better.
Especially when you think about the top of the funnel, right? Some of these top of the funnel searches, aios are dominating and they're impacting both paid and organic clickthrough rates. So you wanna make sure that you're getting into the A IO if possible, so that way you can be part of the consideration set.
Because at the bottom of the funnel, you may not even be thought of, right? So it's very important that cooperation exists. So that way from the beginning of who do I consider, who's everybody else talking about, you're there to the middle about, okay, how do I compare features? So that way when somebody's saying whatever brand they're filling in, that it's your brand, right?
Hopefully you're not paying the. [00:10:00] 87, 56, whatever it is, dollars per click at the top of the funnel. And you're letting organic own most of that. But you really, again, you want more of the interplay on the B2C side. There's a, there's a lot of that too, but just not to the same extent. Right, because you're probably battling more affiliates, uh, to drive that conversion.
You're probably battling more people that are doing like comparisons, like the ZD nets, Toms hardware, like that kind of stuff.
Yeah. You had a really interesting post on LinkedIn about this media halo effect, right? Where every impression has some sort of value to the end conversion, and you talked a lot about, right, the different steps in the funnel and how do you, right.
If you were building a strategy for SEO to really own that top of funnel and save some of those height. High click costs. How do you take that to a CEO and try to sell that in as it relates to attributing that ROI That is, I'll call it non-traditional, right? Because it's not directly attributed to the final click, if that makes sense.
But [00:11:00] have you had conversations around that?
Oh, it's one of those things that you, you do it and you think that you have it down, and then you're reminded every conversation is a brand new one. And I think to your point, it's all about the numbers because you know how much this click costs, you know what the CPA is.
So it's about how do we get more, more at bats, uh, by leveraging organic, let's say there are a million searches for this one keyword, but to be top of the page and paid, it's gonna cost you 50 bucks on average, right? Thankfully, there's a lot of technologies like value-based bidding and other things that'll make sure that you're not wasting too much.
But the reality is that $50 is an, is an expensive click. So if you can show a plan. Where you have that right to win, you have a content strategy that'll help you get there. You have a linking strategy, internal, external. That's what you, that's really what you bring. You say, Hey, here's the opportunity in terms of the addressable [00:12:00] market.
Here's the audience that we're going after. Here's our share and pay, but also here's our investment in paid. Here's what we think it's gonna take in order to get there on the organic side, and this is what that math looks like. So it's true months one through three, you may still have a lot of that spend still going on the paid side, but hopefully over time, hopefully months two and three, you're beginning to see some of that fruit start to bear.
And then ongoing you're there. And of course there's maintenance involved, but it's that one plus one equals three. And people always wonder, what do you mean? And that's the whole idea, right? If you're paying outta your pocket, you still need to pay for SEO, but it's that sustained. Your budget exhaust has exhausted on the paid side, but because you did the work, you're still getting that organic good.
And you're gonna keep doing it as long as you're doing all the right things. And that's the part you're trying to quantify. So when you do that, you look at, okay, what does 12 to [00:13:00] 18 months look like? And how do you show that draw down on your, on the paid side because you're able to compensate it or you just say, Hey, I want all of it, and now you know, here's the extra that we can potentially get.
Because you know what the conversion rate looks like when the organic together, that helps seek view of the investment versus what we can get with paid. And that's all we're gonna get.
That, that one Plus, I was gonna say, you,
you and I were probably gonna say the same thing, Joe.
One plus one equals three.
We used to call, we used to describe that as multiplicative, right? You're, and a lot of times we use that word to talk about brand search. I don't know if you guys remember this, but we, like we, sometimes you have to, you had to justify a little spend for brand search. And I, can you talk us through maybe your evolution in feeling about.
Brands paying for their brand.
Yeah. I think in this world where match types are not what they used to be, where search engines are absolutely trying to [00:14:00] bring as many advertisers into auctions as possible for their own monetization, you end up seeing lots of blurred lines. So in a perfect world, nobody else is bidding on your brand term.
You're getting all that goodness. But the reality is that if you have a product that really doesn't have a lot of high consideration, right? You could like the Coco Pepsi, right? Nike, Adidas. It's just something where I just need this thing. I don't care where it comes from as long as I get this thing and somebody is doing that search.
If you're not protecting it, now you open the door for somebody else. That wasn't planned on considering one of your competitors to do so, what is that worth to you? Because if your competitor has a compelling offer, like 80% off or flash sale, you likely can't compete with that, right? But here they are showing to your potential customers and taking them away.
So you see that direct impact to your click to rate that's going to impact your clicks, which is gonna translate into [00:15:00] fewer sales. So it's taking food out of your mouth by them being there. So it's turned into one of these costs of doing business. The reality is that there is software out there that is monitoring SERPs.
So that way if you're showing high in the organic, which you should, if it's a brand search and there are no competitors, it'll actually pull your bid down or actually pause it completely. Those incrementality conversations still happen because if you can save a dollar, let's save it. But also the reality is that saving that dollar might come at the expense of five or pen or a hundred dollars because by being absent, you've now opened the door for one of your competitors to steal that click, steal that consideration and turn somebody that wasn't even thinking about that brand into one of their customers.
Yeah, I think that's always the, not always, but oftentimes the un untalked about component of pulling brand search out as you open up that space a little bit. Yeah, it's a, it's [00:16:00] always a tough conversation. I'm curious, you talked a lot about. AI max and sort of automations and things like that. Having been in this industry for as long as you have, I'm sure you're familiar with the old school levers that we used to have to pull for page search.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The penny under the max bid. That was a fun one. So I'm curious how you're thinking about all this automation and sort of the, I don't know, taking away of those controls that we've become so accustomed to and using, and maybe how you foresee them affecting performance where a lot of that brand control and the old school levers are being removed.
Yeah.
Automation is amazing, right? Because it saves you time that you feel that you want to invest, but you don't have to. The cost is control and sometimes transparency in the data, and that's what we've been seeing over time, right? We're getting all this innovation, but in order to do, that's the trade off.
We can't show you every single [00:17:00] search that your ad restricted for. We can't show you the data for every single headline in your RSAs. We can't show you every single URL where your ad showed up. There's just so much data. We're talking about petabytes upon exabytes, that it's just not easy for anybody to administer, especially when you have as many advertisers as Microsoft or Google have.
So you have to decide where are you willing to willing relinquish that control, and where is it vital to your business? Right? So if brand safety is very important to you, there's a good chance that there are things that you might not do because you don't need exclusions. You need to say, I only want ads that are gonna run in these places, for example.
And a lot of times when people say, do I opt into the search network or the the search partners, or do I stay away? That's usually the biggest trade off, right? Yeah, you're in there, but what's exactly in there? You can block things, but I don't wanna show up there and somebody's sending me a screenshot. [00:18:00] So the innovation and the automation is great, but that's ultimately what you're deciding on.
As we're getting further and further away from that search term and that keyword, we all have to be okay with that. But if you're a small advertiser and you don't have the people or the budget to be able to be in there hour by hour, pulling the levers, then it's amazing because you don't have to pay an agency to do it for you.
You don't have to pay a person to sit there. You just, you're happy about the black box. You hope that it gets new features so that way you can get even more efficiency out of it. But if you're a larger enterprise where this data has more value than just what you're seeing, because it fuels what's happening across other teams.
You have a creative team, you have a landing page team, there's a team that's doing the optimization. There's a team that's coming up with a strategy. The further you get away from the data, the more complex that becomes. So you end up trying to use your own first party data based on what [00:19:00] happens after the click to try to understand what's going on before the click.
And then it's really based on your ability to bring the data in and to be able to analyze it, right? Because the in platform data is always gonna be the most optimistic viewpoint. But what does that mean when it actually gets to your bottom line, right? Because people may have canceled, people may have returned things, people may turn.
None of that is showing up in your Google Ads reporting, right? None of it is showing up in your Microsoft ads reporting, so you have to bake that in. So that's the trade off, and that's what we're seeing now where the ability to append data, the ability to update data after the fact becomes a lot more vital.
But if you can't do that, then you really just have to hope and trust that. What you're seeing is directionally true because if not, it's so hard to reverse engineer and try to get to the bottom of what's going wrong before when you could see everything was a lot easier. [00:20:00] And that's really where we've gone to where we have to trust the platform that we don't necessarily know how everything's working, but the numbers look good, so let's be positive.
Right? And when somebody asks how do we get more, the answer isn't optimization as much as it is investing. And that's a difficult conversation.
Definitely. It's also important for that whole idea of holistic search because when you have different teams, mostly op, optimizing out of individual UIs, Facebook, Google Ads, Microsoft, all of those conversion events are fighting for the same conversion and.
They'll often overly attribute what came from their platform versus another. You mentioned the challenge of advertising when maybe a competitor is running a flash sale or something like that. We work a lot with e-commerce clients where basically the version of that is Amazon, right? Like free shipping.
You can get it in two days. Oftentimes you'll have affiliates [00:21:00] pushing products through Amazon at, let's call it $5 cheaper than what you get, you could get on the official store. I don't know if that necessarily exists, that same sort of like issue exists for your current role. It's probably more traditional affiliate where maybe you have a nerd wallet buying ads or something like that.
But are there any tactics that you found are helpful in competing those instances?
Yeah. A lot of times you're opening the door and welcoming the fox into the hen house, right? You're creating this competition. The first thing is really just like good thorough documentation about what is allowed and what isn't allowed, and then also the administration so that way people are caught, that it's not just a meaningless notice.
You can actually like claw back revenue 'cause that's what affiliates understand, right? If they see that whatever it is, whether it's the traffic sources that they're using, that may or may not be the best. Or it's trying to undercut you and take conversions away. I found that's the most effective because people respect it.[00:22:00]
Everybody's just trying to get it. If I was able to blur the lines and get away with it, fair, but if you hold me accountable, I'll respect it. Or you're, they won't be a partner anymore. And either way, that may not always be the worst if you are running into these quality concerns. And then otherwise, there's a lot on the reporting to be able to catch offenders there.
There are some things that you can do from a targeting standpoint just so that way. You're really going after prospects versus a person that has been to your website might even be a customer, and they're looking for a way to, to save, whether it's cash back or something else before they buy, and basically treat those people differently in terms of how you bid for them, potentially what that landing page experience is.
And you're almost creating an experience on page that they can't replicate because it's something that you only get because I know that you're not somebody that's visited in the last seven days. You're not [00:23:00] somebody that's purchased in the last 30 days. Yeah, I, I want to earn your business more so than the person that always buys from me and they always have a coupon code.
They're always using cash back. So that also ends up being very effective. Understanding your audiences, being able to segment them in a way that allows you to message them differently, but also bid on them differently. And then if there is one last thing, from like merchandising standpoint, the reality is that you're the brand, right?
So whether it's Amazon or whether it's the serp, you can likely create different packages, different add-ons that an affiliate isn't necessarily aware of. They might still drive that traffic, but at least you're able to get more of that transaction. So instead of it being. People who are looking for only at $50 to get the $15 off, they now become a higher basket, which doesn't fix the affiliate problem, but it it allows you to get more margin out of it.
Because when you're paying out that [00:24:00] commission, that's what you're really eating out. You're eating from the profit associated with the product. It's a combination of those things. It really depends on the category and how fierce the competition is and where it's coming from, whether it's from affiliates or partners, or it's from other or it's from other brands.
And then testing to see which one ultimately drives the best performance.
I Lu Jad. I, I wanna, I don't the thought, I just wanna ask you to give us a little bit more on like fraud attempt detection and optimizing against fraud and with some context for the company, for or for our agency. We see it mostly with lead gen, not so much e-commerce.
Like we spend a lot of time trying to understand the quality of leads. And when we test new things, oftentimes we see a surge. In performance because of some fraud that we didn't anticipate. There's a lot of lead gen products out there that auto fill forms for people to make it easier for them to convert, but often we see that's where most of the fraud comes from.[00:25:00]
When we started to explore with Performance Max, with Google, we launched that product and found a lot of fraud in the conversions that we were generating. I worry now with AI Max, we're gonna have to go through those same steps to try to learn how to get rid of fraud. I wonder, do you, have you seen that a lot in your career?
Have you taken any steps to identify it not and optimize away from it? Anything you could share?
Yeah, so I think what we're talking about is basically the difference between your CPL. Your CPQL, right? So your cost per lead and your cost per qualified lead. And that ultimately becomes a differentiator. I remember working with some financial like clients in the financial services space before, and that was basically how they did it.
But they did it to the point where it was all the way to funding, right? So they wanted to know what's the actual ROI on this keyword. And what they would do is they would, they would append all that data, right? And they would say, okay. Let's [00:26:00] say that you drove a hundred leads, right? We know the pages, we know the ad groups, the campaigns, we know the keywords, the IDs associated with all these things.
So all that is being populated into their system. It's attached to the lead. So that way when they try to now qualify the lead, whether it's somebody reaching out or emailing and they realize, okay, this might have been a marketing qualified lead, but it's not a sales qualified lead, that's where we kick it out, right?
So we're optimizing towards the sale qualified lead. Even though in our platforms we're only capturing the mql, and that's how you do it, right, is you're hopefully using a system that's capturing all this data that is stitching it all together. So that way after the fact, whatever your sales cycle is, whether it's 30 days or 45 days, you're always going back in.
Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect, but you need something and that's the way that you do it. The reality is that there's also this idea that if it's too good to be true, it probably is. So if you know that your CPL. All in is usually like $25, but [00:27:00] somebody is coming in and all of a sudden you're seeing three kinds of typical lead volume and the leads are only 50 cents.
Hold on a second. Now, we've all been doing this long enough to know that there is no stuff saying as a good 50 cent lead. If there was, then we'd all be going after that. So you almost say it's like the human version of anomaly detection, right? This thing looks different, so I'm not going to trust it until I know and I can verify that I can trust it.
Right? And there may not always be ways that you can limit the investment there, but almost to the point where maybe you pause it until you let that data pass back happen. And you can see we let it run for two weeks. Is it? Is? It is, let's pause it for two weeks and see what ends up happening, right? Or whatever.
Whatever the case is for you to feel comfortable. Because what you're trying to do is to vet the inventory source. And that the way that it's being put in there, because that's the only way, because whatever that activity is probably being done the same way for every single advertiser, they're likely [00:28:00] not going to now move to someplace else because you realize they're not getting any, they're not driving any more leads for you, right?
Whatever they do, it's just, you just happen to be caught in it at that particular moment. So if you're able to basically test it, pause it, and then see if there's any data to validate the value. Now, and again, it sucks, but when the budgets get high enough. You need that rigor because if you're scaling, it could be hundreds of thousands of dollars and you wanna make sure that there isn't a lot of waste in there.
And it's better to say, we have this 12 week process, or whatever it is, so that way we can validate every source of, of investment across the portfolio. And it's better for you and it's better for us. Like everybody that does lead gen understands risk mitigation, right? So hopefully that's not a brain conversation for them.
Yeah, that was a very practical answer, Luigi. I was hoping that with Intuit's massive budget, they would allow you to send a SWAT team into Eastern European bot farms. But I guess we'll just keep following the same practical advice, get smarter about conversion feedback loops. It's [00:29:00] amazing in the sense
that whether you're like in Expedia or like at t who's spending over a billion dollars in media, or you're just like Adams dry cleaners, right?
Who might only have a few thousand dollars a year. It's the same issue. Because it's the platforms, right? It's the platforms and we're all using the same inventory, so unfortunately we all get exposed to it. The question is how soon do we cash it and how much does it impact us if we leave it unchecked?
Having strong, a strong regal team, it does help because you can send letters and those scare people, but you try to make sure you save that for the most kind of egregious circumstances. Otherwise,
try let the tech and your analytics lead the way. Having a strong legal team definitely helps when it comes to monitoring brand, especially when folks are buying terms and things like that.
If you have the brand trademark, obviously that helps in Google. Are there any, any other, I don't know, ways that you've found success in trying to mitigate [00:30:00] folks who would be trying to buy brand terms or using trademarks improperly?
There's a lot of software out there that that does that monitoring for you and will actually auto flag.
So that way you let them know who has the green light to show and who's not on that white list. And because they're looking, I believe you can have it go as often as every one hour or maybe every two hours, but whatever the frequency is, it's always looking. And instead of you having to now right click the URL in the ad and send it to an email address, all that's happening on your behalf.
So I found that. Ends up being the most effective. Sometimes it can be a little too aggressive and you end up declining or preventing actual partners that you want to show up there because you might have a limited time promotion, a co-marketing event where you know you want these people to show. So just making sure that those lines of communications are open so that way you can flag those things before they happen.
That's the only thing that I've seen. But [00:31:00] otherwise. That's the best way to do it. Right? You don't want to have to be refreshing a SERP every single hour of the day. If you can find a tool that can do it for you, then it just makes your life that much easier.
I remember at Razorfish there were some, we, some of the coordinators like that would be part of their role.
It was like every couple hours you go in, you take a screenshot. Yeah. I was curious how you have used shopping feeds in a way that sort of brings in SEO insights in order to optimize the shopping feed for page search. I think you mentioned something about that earlier on in the, the ideas being more holistic.
For example, we have a client who uses like really rich brand specific tone, which doesn't always align well with how consumers search in terms of the keywords and the product names that are being used. How are you guys, or how have you thought about leveraging those two things in the past?
Shopping is a great channel because the conversion rate is [00:32:00] typically so high right there.
They see something, they buy something. It's so much different, I would say. The two things that I've seen from a data standpoint, from an opportunity standpoint. One is what else you include on that page, right? So again, if you have the main product, are you doing it kind of in Amazon style where you're offering other products, right?
Because it'll help you understand what other things people are interested in that are expressing interest in this product, which might have some usefulness in other channels, whether it's directly on the website or. If you wanna use a similar experience on paid social or, or things like that. Also, you're talking about brands with standards and the crazy part is that you almost wanna be able to demonstrate how that's hurting more than helping to the point where I remember.
10 or so years ago, there's like this big push around normalizing what's in your feed to what users are saying, right? [00:33:00] So if you're saying that your dress is plum, it's not plum, it's purple. Nobody is searching plum, but lots of people are searching purple. That the shoes, it's not an elevated heel, it's a pump or whatever it is, right?
You. Because shopping is one of the most democratic ways of meeting a customer where they are, right? You can translate what you sell and what they're searching for. But you have to take the initiative to do, and I understand, right? Because if you're like Hermes or something like that where you. You're not for everybody.
I don't know why you'd be running shopping ads, but if it's something like that, then I could understand why your brand standards are your brand standards. But I would make sure that maybe like in the description, not necessarily the headline, it may be like in the description or like in the attributes in your feed that you're finding a way to map, because that's really what you want do.
Even in my home life, whenever I need to find something, I find out, okay, what does the industry call it? But then [00:34:00] what do regular people call it, right? And I maybe I've just been doing marketing too long, but when you're trying to find that thing that's like the thing you're really looking for, that's usually how you do it.
So there's a lot of great information, a lot of great insight, only because when you think about your web experience and the facts and the filters on your page, shopping can help you understand a lot of that nuance because you can see. Okay. Are people searching by color? Are they searching by size? Are they searching by price?
What are those triggers and what are those levers that really help people go from idea to engagement to conversion? Right? And of course it can happen a million different ways, but if you understand those big chunks, now you can play around with where do we put things, right? Because you can only show but so many characters in the headline of the, of the shopping listing.
So do we lead with the color? If you have pictures. The color is pretty much a foregone conclusion. So maybe you don't need to lead with that. Maybe you're leading with the thing that people can't see, right? Which might be [00:35:00] a detail, whether it's like a pattern or the length or a size, something where you're not, you're able to drive better clicks as a result because you've provided this extra info, but also you're providing a better experience to the user, right?
Because everybody is doing one thing, but you're doing something different because of your data and your understanding of the data, right? So in those instances, it's better to stand out and be different because. Hopefully that difference is a way that you're driving better performance.
Yeah, I love that.
Talking about shopping and knowing we're quickly approaching Q4, which is crazy. I wanted to, yeah, it's been nuts. I wanted to tap your brain on how you've approached head pole moments. So Black Friday, obviously the holiday shopping season in general, and now in your role at Intuit, there's different tent pole moments, right?
Like tax season and stuff like that. How do you think about planning [00:36:00] for those sorts of things and signing budgets and stuff like that? Obviously, not getting into specific numbers, but just how do you approach like big moments like that from a holistic planning perspective?
Yeah, I love that question because.
You wanna be thinking about that really as early as you can, right? And the best way I can explain it is almost like a barbell strategy where on one side you're trying to think, okay, broad strokes, what are we doing differently this year than last year? What did we learn from last year that we can apply to this year?
Whether it's a creative strategy, a landing page strategy, an investment strategy, do we Right? Because your customer is always changing, right? Because your customers responding to external stimuli, whether it's inflation or it's the job market or the stock market. So you, you have to look into the future a little bit, read the tea leaves and try to understand what could happen.
And then you have, in my experience, you usually have a strong [00:37:00] plan A, and then you have that plan D that you don't want to use. But in case you need to break the glass, you're not scrambling around. You have it there. You figure for Black Friday, cyber Monday, probably. Around June, you were thinking about that, right?
Trying to figure out, okay, what are our investment levels? What's the learnings? Let's go back to that wrap up that we did after last year and revisit it. And then you're getting like that skeleton, right? You're beginning to flesh it out based on has anything changed around your target audience? Are there any new capabilities that you want to test out before?
Because that's the thing, right? When you get to that period, there's too many things going on. To be able to learn. So you start that planning upfront. So that way if there are things that you wanna learn, if there are tests that you want to perform, that you can do it during these low, during these slow seasons, because everything's going to intensify exponentially, the visits, the conversions, the mayhem, right?
So you really wanna get that learning. In market as as [00:38:00] soon as possible. But then from an organic standpoint, you want that the upfront time because there might be content that you want to create. 'cause you realize that your content strategy also has evolved, right? We're talking about AI mode, AI overuse, we're talking about getting content that's ready for ai.
If you're not thinking about that in 2025 when it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you're probably leaving someone on the table, right? But to produce that content, you likely need to get people onboarded, whether it's freelancers or your internal team, you need to solidify that creative approach.
So that's gonna take time, but also you wanna make sure it starts ranking. So you wanna make sure that you leave room for that. So I would say it's early, it's integrated. Hopefully it is forward looking. And considers things that you can't see, but also that you have a way of being able to pivot. And that's the other part of the barbell, right?
I'll never forget being in those almost like war rooms [00:39:00] where you think you have everything set and then you find out that a competitor is doing something that you never plan, and now it's two days. People have that Turkey like in their mouth at the table, and you're like, okay, over email on your phone.
What are we doing? Okay, I have to step away and take a call. But that's, it's the gig, right? And hopefully you plan well enough that you can compensate for 90% of it, and you're only dealing with that 10% that you have to be flexible on. But that's the other part of the barbell, right? What are those things that we're doing in the moment day of intraday?
Where can we lean in heavier? Where do we wanna pull back and ultimately execute that? That is what makes those tenfold moments so nerve wracking, but also so exciting because as marketers, we get that data instantaneously. That peeves that you built in August, you see how it's playing in November, right?
And things that you didn't know. Now you say to yourself, okay, next year. Here's how we're doing it differently. You're using, you're gathering those insights [00:40:00] almost in real time on both sides. And that's the way that you wanna approach it, right? Because the way that you do the smaller events, whether it's like a President's Day or 4th of July, is gonna be a subset of that, right?
So the more you flesh it out, the more diligent you are about capturing what everybody does and timing it out is only gonna make it easier to execute and decide is the investment worth it for, I don't know, Memorial Day, right? That's a very like mattresses, furniture, cars. But if you have a software product, should you, I don't know.
But based on all the work that you have to do to spin that up, that'll tell you,
yeah, I, I like the comment around like. There's just too much mayhem to be testing in that moment. So are you thinking about those like smaller holiday holidays, president's Day, Memorial Day, as like those are the testing, those are the times to do the testing and anticipation for that big temple.
Is that sort of one way to [00:41:00] think about doing promotions during that time or,
yeah, absolutely. Right. The reality is that because you have so many people in market during a holiday, promotions is something to consider, but you have to almost think, are you getting anything from it, right? Because if you offer 10 or 20% off, you now have to drive a much higher conversion rate in order to balance that.
And of course from an LTD standpoint, there is some impact to gaining incremental customers, but you have to weigh that against, are we doing a doorbuster when nobody is looking right? Because prime days are a great example. Nobody was thinking about these July, October moments that the Amazon now owns.
Now that they own them and people are looking for it and thinking about it, it's a great time to be in market, right? If you sell the kind of things that people are looking for before nobody was thinking about them. Now you other big retailers running other sales in tandem as a [00:42:00] result. So the customer leads the way.
But I would say the marketplace defines the need because if nobody else is offering anything, or even if it's just one or two, I don't know if you, if you take the bait, so to speak, right? You can try it during a holiday and then you can do the finance due diligence and see if we did nothing and we just made more per customer would've been worth all of the people energy and time, all of the reporting, all the everything that we did to spin that up.
Or do we just get what we get right and. And I think that's the hard part, right? Sometimes as marketers, we think that we create the markets, we don't. It's very hard to pull people in unprompted. That's the great thing about tv. That's the great thing about big media investments, whether it's like a YouTube on the homepage or buying a Yahoo homepage or something.
Yeah. You've now created critical mass, critical awareness. You've built the urgency. Then people act. It's [00:43:00] Liketu. It's like a Tuesday in May. I'm not excited about anything. I'm just trying to get to the week versus Black Friday, where people have been clipping coupons, they've been checking forums they they have on their headband because they've been sweating, pouring over this stuff.
That's the difference, right? So you really wanna make sure that based on your product in your category that you're considering all that.
It really is crazy to think about Prime Day in general. First one. Big success next year. You had Target and some of these other big retailers having their own day and now you'll see prominent sellers on Amazon just calling it like, yeah, we're having a Prime day sale on our own official site in conjunction with everything else.
It really has shaped that time period in the summer where historically there hasn't done much. Pretty amazing,
and, and, and Amazon has been able to do what nobody else has been able to do because of their reach. Right. Everything from the boxes to, they can now tell you about it. Across video, across their music service, across [00:44:00] Alexa, across their, their Audible platform.
They can drive a lot of awareness very quickly. So I've seen Black Friday days in July. I've seen Christmas in July. I've seen so many variations where people are trying to pull forward that back school spending. And it, it didn't really land it, it didn't, and it's not until they do that. And now think about it, right?
Amazon knows that November is this peak shopping period. So what are we gonna do? We're going to preempt all of it. We're going to grab, we're gonna steal that share wallet. And now everybody has to fight for whatever's left, because if the deals are good enough, if the right vendors and and brands participated, you may have gotten 90, 80, 90% of your shopping list done.
So yeah, I might pick up some extra things here and there and see what other people have, but otherwise. I'm good. Right? So those dynamics have really been changing, and what I see is that there are brands who are working to try to get there [00:45:00] too, whether it's like through podcasting or through influencers, and try to build up momentum for certain time periods.
And it works at varying degrees. But the reality is that just the amount of investment that's needed to create that, that sheer of thought. There's so many things that we're thinking about, that's ultimately what moves the needle. So if you can coordinate it, you can be very successful. But if you don't have the, the infrastructure to be able to accommodate it, you have to hope somebody else has the idea and you can provide their coattails.
Yeah. You, you mentioned content and you had this really great LinkedIn post around the impact that LLMs are having on Chegg and just the. Massive disruption in traffic. As you step back and think about just content production in general, how are you thinking about creating content in a way that still results in some sort of KPI?
Right? Whether you're thinking more about SEO as a brand channel and an impression or an actual click that's getting someone in, in [00:46:00] light of what we're seeing with other brands like Chegg just getting decimated in terms of traffic, AI overviews, all those sorts of things. Like how, how are you thinking about creating content, finding topics, maybe even the structure of the content itself and how that plays into discovery?
It's actually crazy you bring
that up because I was, I wa I was in a webinar on Friday talking about this exact thing, right? Because it is possible to do AI too much where you've taken the humanity out of your content, but also you're trying to battle. How many brands are becoming publishers and are becoming media outlets because they have proprietary data, they have the ability to spin it up and to get it out there, and because of who they are, they get lots of press behind it.
That's a very hard thing to fight. Uh, but at the same time, regardless of who you are, we've all seen this. It's been called like the alligator pattern where your impressions are going up, but you see your clicks are going down. And I would [00:47:00] say you take a step back and it goes back to a three letter acronym.
US marketers, we love these three letter. Three letter acronyms. KYC, right? Know your customer. I don't care what the other 8 billion people in the world are doing. What I care about is that one customer that I want to read this to be able to associate our brand with what they are struggling with, the problem they're trying to solve.
So that way when they're ready to pull the trigger, when they are ready to enter into that needs state, after they've done their research, they put a higher value on what our brand has given them than other brands. AI is a great enabler of that because it can take the mundane aspects of customer research, uh, and take it off your plate.
It can also take data and provide summaries. Help bring some of those ideas to the forefront. And here's what I'll say, right? If you have a call center or if you have a sales team and you have calls that are being recorded and you are not using AI to be able to [00:48:00] process that and to gain nuggets, you are leaving money.
You are leaving money behind. You're allowing your competitors to have parody with you, even though they should not. And that's because this is first party data. These are people, even if they don't become customers, they're telling you, I would've watched them today except X, right? And your product team is going to hopefully use that.
Your product marketing team's gonna use that hopefully when it comes to positioning. But if you're in the middle or the bottom of the funnel with your marketing activities, you wanna make sure you're doing that too, because you are gonna have to create. Collateral, right? Ad copy, creative titles, descriptions, a landing page.
Why? Guess when you have that kind of information at your disposal. Oh my gosh, I got completely sidetracked about what we were talking, right? So content production, right? So as you're going through this process of knowing your customer, I think that's also something that we all have at some point, separated ourselves from reality where we think that we are for everybody.
You're not. One of the things that I've [00:49:00] learned by working at agencies is that there's tremendous value in knowing who your customer is, but also who your customer is not. If you are trying to market a Sheridan property, that is a very different audience than a St. Regis, even if they're in the same city, right?
And if you're running the same ads and you're taking people to the same kind of landing page with the same kind of I imagery, you're not respecting the customer, right? So once you know who the customer is, and I'm saying everything from their potential job title, what they're struggling with every single day, what those inefficiencies are that they're trying to solve effectively, their jobs to be done, then you can weave that into your content.
And from that standpoint, there, there is no limit in terms of the topics, because every day as technology improves things, it also creates new frustration, right? So you're now trying to figure out how do I have technology to help me do this thing better? We live in a world where I think of read ai, right?
Which has come to the market and says, Hey, we think it was an [00:50:00] opportunity for you to get better summaries of your conversations. You're be able, you're able to better understand who's speaking and who's not, and what people think about the conversation. Like something that we all do way too much. In the last five years, those kind of point solutions are able to put themselves into play, even though there are so many big players out there that provide a similar product.
Why? I'm sure they probably did a lot of research to understand the problem and the way that they talk about it highlights that. So you wanna make sure that you know your customer, you wanna make sure that you're speaking to what they need, but also why they need it. And if there is a way that you can layer in your own content, your own customers that are talking about how your product provided that value, so that way you're not doing it like, don't believe me, by all means don't listen to me, but this person who is actually paying for our software, listen to them because they're more like you than we are.
Right? Integrating all of that together, that is how you win, right? Because a [00:51:00] search engine is gonna see it and see wowed. You have considered all the aspects of this problem. You provided a thorough answer. You have done so in a way that's. Like very concise and very easy to understand. I love that because my users love that.
The customer, the user, they love that because I don't always need to read 5,000 words. Sometimes it's 1500 words with a video here, infographic there and the opportunity to read more or for you to say, here's all you need to know, but if you want to read more, here is another piece of content for you to consider.
Right? Guide you down. Everybody loves that, right? If you think about these recipe websites, they probably made it horrible for everybody. Accept that bad example. But that's what they do, and that's what we're doing now, right? We're trying to make everything like a recipe, and then when you publish it, you have to think about distribution, right?
Your website might be the last place you publish something. It might make sense for you to post it on your LinkedIn first, get that buzz going, and then once it's heavy on LinkedIn, [00:52:00] then bring it over to your YouTube channel, because now people are starting the conversation. Let's bring the conversation over because you know where the conversation happens in the comments, right?
So you're hopefully driving that interaction. And if you have a a TikTok account, an Instagram account, you're hopefully providing a very brief summary of that content as a short, as real. And then on your website, you're finding ways to make sure it's merchandised. Because again, if you post something today, the likelihood that's gonna gain instantaneous traction is possible, but unlikely.
Right? So that rush to always hit, publish it, there's a benefit to it, but you really have to consider, what am I doing it for? Right? Is this a product release? So the second people open up their product, they're gonna see this change, that content you absolutely might need on your website like this, like as soon as possible.
And then you have videos and explainers and things like that after the fact. But other [00:53:00] content, yeah, it, it, it's one of those things where it, we've been using the internet the same way for 20, going on 30 years. We do these things in a real, in a almost. Ritualistic way that doesn't always honor the way that people consume media, right?
If you have a younger audience, there's a good chance that posting that on TikTok has a better likelihood of them seeing it than putting it on your website. Who goes to your website, right? Your website is usually that point of it's like that, that that point of final. A final ascent, a final descent. Once they've decided everything else, they're not typically tuning into your website because they can look at what other people have had to say.
Maybe there is a Reddit channel, I'm sorry, maybe there's a subreddit where people are having conversations and you feel brave enough to put somebody there from your brand to, to not necessarily insert yourself there, but to provide some actual answers. Because in your category, people have lots of [00:54:00] questions, but they're all trying to figure it out on their own.
There's so many ways of approaching this content thing, and I think because we have all thought of content as written words that exist on this owned and operated website, that so many of us are tied to it exclusively. But when you see the brands that are doing really well. They have found a way to be truly multimodal.
They are platform agnostic. They are medium agnostic. The thing that they are not agnostic about, that they have very strong opinions about is serving their user. Right? And once you know your customer, that's how you're able to maneuver a lot of your competition. 'cause they're following the traditional playbook and they're doing it the traditional way.
And you know what, they're also probably getting.
Traditional results you make a you ma, you made so many great points. Just answering that last question and we're running outta time. We wanna hit you with a few rapid fire questions, but a few just jumped out at me that I don't know that What I love the [00:55:00] idea of you should be recording all conversations that come into your company.
If you've got that ability to record calls and get transcriptions, you should be mining that information. For content development, we've made the a similar recommendation on reviews. You mine all the content from your, and you create FAQs for your page. You come up with new scripts for your call center.
We've made that recommendation before. I don't know that we've ever made the recommendation to not only record all those incoming calls, but analyze. Look for new ideas for content. I really thought that that one was great, Luigi. Thank you. If you have a few minutes more, we'll just do a few rapid fire questions as we wrap up the session.
We're going a little
over. Yeah, let's do it. Alright. What is the best SEO or SEN tool you can't live without,
uh, these days? Yeah, so I'll say that I find myself living in S scm Rush. We have access to lots of tools, but. They have spent a lot of [00:56:00] time innovating within their platform. And like one A is actually a lot of the dashboards and tools that we built internally, but people don't have access to those.
So that answer doesn't really help every nanny. But you know, I've used lots of them, and I'll say that another one has also been Screaming Frog, just because they've been adding a lot of integrations, allowing you to allow AI to really be a copilot and with those extractions, be able to do things, massage the data.
And that has been also like a multiplier on the SEO side that if you would've asked me two years ago, definitely didn't see that coming.
Yeah. Screwing Frog has been on fire with their releases lately. It's wild how fast they're integrating, integrating things. What's a recent campaign or maybe a tactic that you've seen?
And you really admire, that's not something you are affiliated with. It's not something that
I, oh, are we, are you talking about like at Intuit or are you talking about like anywhere?
Anywhere could be at Intuit or another [00:57:00] totally unrelated brand. Let's see, something really
cool. I always love how bold, like when Wendy's had their run.
I love that because you can't look away. You can't look away. Like the internet is an imaginary place with real people in it, and Wendy's has just found a way to live in the minds of so many of their competitors, but then they bring other people along for the ride, right? And it's a fast food chain. Like you don't think that there's gonna be a personality there, but because they have one you drive and you're like, yeah, let me stop.
I'm bye. Right. I don't know if they calculate the ROI of those interactions, but I love that because they made a decision and they stuck with it and they doubled down on it and they've been able to show brands that it's okay. To have an edge and a lot of brands have been trying and failing, but they did it and they keep doing it.
I don't see them in the headlines as much as I used to, but that run where it seemed like every single month they were roasting somebody. That always [00:58:00] sticks out to me just because so many brands are, they just exist, right? There's no voice to them, but when you're able to find it and then you lean into it, you at least have an opportunity to, to be polarizing and, and that's what marketing is, right?
It's gets you to feel something. So I've
always loved
that.
Yeah. It's also incredible that it's such an old brand and they found a way to make them part of the conversation again. Yeah, that's a great example.
Hey, when you have that nostalgia value. You kinda get that license right there. There's something like, I feel Jack in the Box with their commercials.
They try something like they're more out there like in uh, Ryan Reynolds kind of way, but Wendy's, they just go for the jugular, right? If any brand is gonna tell you your mama joke, it's gonna be Wendy,
right? Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Which one? Non-marketing skill that's made you better at your job? Curiosity.
Curiosity has nothing to do with marketing. You hope that it does, but every time that I read something, every time that I see something, most times that I hear something, [00:59:00] it's that why, right? Been doing this 20 years and still I say, why to myself so much more now than I did back then. Maybe a little of that is because I know how some of these things work.
So when I see how certain people choose to go to market or do things or position things a certain way, I just scratch my head and say, why? And at work that helps because we're so busy being in the business of getting our job done, that when you take a pause and you ask why you're able to do two things I think are really cool for every single organization.
One is you're able to question the norms, right? And this whole idea of we're doing it the way it's always been, who validated, that's the way it's always supposed to be done. And then the second is. Like this whole idea of innovation, right? Where we were talking before about content, and now you can add tools that kind of take some of those steps and condense them down a bit.
You have to be able to say, why are we doing it this [01:00:00] way? Like, why does it take three weeks or 18 people, or $2,000 if you account for everybody's time and energy to update one piece of content, right? What if we step back and we look at all the places where we can do something different? Where did that come from?
By somebody asking why, right? But if you don't, if you aren't curious, it's very hard to be an advocate for your customer, right? It's very hard to be somebody who is customer centric or customer obsessed. If you're not asking why, because your customer, they don't work for you. They, they don't work there.
They're buying it, they're using it. So if you're there like in the factory, seeing how it's all being made by asking why you're able to hopefully get people to justify some things that nobody should be doing, right. And saying, oh, you know what, we're gonna, we're gonna take that back and we approach this.
Or everybody gets excited because we know why. We are excited about the why and because we're so sure about it, we're gonna find ways to double down [01:01:00] because we may not have been confident, but once we actually validated it, now we can go full steam ahead.
Yeah. I love that. Curiosity is one of our brand tenets that we're, when we're interviewing, that's.
Something that we're trying to dig into and find folks who want to ask that why they wanna know more about why is it done this way? I would absolutely want to be a detective. Yeah.
I would be at it, but that's what I wanna do.
Yeah. I feel being observant and curiosity are probably two core elements of being a good detective, I would guess.
Alright, last one. This is more, maybe more of a prediction question, but we like to, we've been asking all of our guests, if you had a crystal ball and you looked ahead 12 months and you go to google.com, what do you expect that experience to be after you enter a query or maybe a prompt by that point?
Yeah. I think in 12 months on google.com you are going to see a home paid experience that is very similar to what on. Chat gt.com, as well as copilot microsoft.com, where you're given examples of all the [01:02:00] ways that Gemini can help you. Right? Search is something that it can do, but it's just one thing that it can do, right?
Google has launched vo, they're always updating their, they're they're Gemini platform. At some point, they're gonna feel comfortable enough to bring that to the forefront and say, Hey, here are some things that we suggest that you do, but also try anything, right? Google has the most to lose because they have a core business that they're disrupting on their own, so they have to walk that very gently.
But when you look at what they're doing right, web guides. AI include, they made it very clear that they take the threat of consumer facing AI very seriously. When you look at the homepage experience that the competitors have, that is a very stark difference. You go to google.com, it looks very much the way it's looked for almost ever, where it's a long search bar, two buttons underneath and a doodle up above.
I would, [01:03:00] I have high confidence that is going to change in the next 12 months chat. GPT five is getting ready to come out. Microsoft is gonna launch copilot mode. In that time, you have perplexity with their own browser that puts AI agents at the forefront. There's no way that they can just sit back and play that relaxed posture.
That's usually the posture that Apple takes, and they see what everybody does and then they go after. Now Google's taking it where instead of being the aggressor now because of their size in the space, they have to sit back and see kind of way people feel and go from there. I also think you're going to see a lot more multimedia.
Right? So there has been video added in there, but not that much in in the way of images. Like a little bit with feature snippets, maybe a little bit with the knowledge graph panels. I would imagine that based on the query, it's gonna feel almost like we're going back six or seven [01:04:00] years, where for some searches it was like a whole bunch of images that might be up at the top, or like carousels.
Just really digging deep and realizing that there are so many places you can get an answer. If we want you to trust us and to keep using us, we have to use what we know about you and show it to you in a way where you wanna keep coming back. How do we do that? We know. Between mail maps, docs search, maybe you have Android.
So there's a good chance that they know a great deal about you. And once they find that right balance between personalization and freaky, don't, don't be like that's a little bit too much. Once they confine that blend, you're going to see that the SERP is, I don't wanna say it's completely ai, but you can see they're giving a lot of real estate to ai and then they're using the traditional SERP as a fallback.
And the way that Microsoft has [01:05:00] done this, if you guys haven't tried out copilot mode in edge, I recommend it because what you can, because what's really cool is that you can do something. And you can also say, Hey, just show me standard web results. Right? And I believe that with Web Guy, it does the same thing.
Like it, it'll do like that AI mode, light query fan out and provide that kind of experience. But also it'll let you look at the regular stuff too. I think that's where it's gonna go to, right? Where AI becomes front and center. It's not the entire page, it's not the entire experience, but it's the predominant portion just because it's table stakes, right?
They have to check that box. There's a lot of ad. Potentials, right? Because what Google has been trying to limit the amount of inventory, right, the right rail is gone. Brands can now show both at the top and the bottom, right? So this whole ability of scarcity and something that is virtually limitless, it's a recurring thing.
So AI provides [01:06:00] more of that. So why would they not lean into a place where they're saying, Hey, within this result where people are going to engage, there's three spots and only three spots. So you now need to compete for those three spots. We're gonna use AI to take out the low value, but we want you to provide your highest, best final price to get this new user to drive this transaction.
Otherwise you're not gonna see 'em, right? So if they don't test something like that in 12 months, I'll be very surprised.
It's funny, the two things sort of align. The curiosity on Google's part is less about them wanting to be curious and. Being forced to be curious like what, why the search has to be 10 blue links in light of chat, GBT, and all these other things that being forced, their curiosity hand is being forced, I guess, is the best way to talk about it, right?
So it's like, what do people, what images on Instagram are a associated with the search? What content across Quora and Reddit are associate with the search? What can I curate from an AI standpoint about this search? And here you [01:07:00] go, right? Based on usefulness and relevance to your search, I'm gonna reconfigure them.
'cause ai, mo, I'm sorry, AI overview aren't always at the top. They've actually been testing showing them. But then people also ask also lower down on the page so they understand that it might not always be the most relevant thing for a user, right? So if they think that a little bit, there's no reason for them to not think that a lot, right?
So I wouldn't be surprised. I just feel like when in doubt, follow the monetization. That'll always answer the question for these big platforms, right? Why is there a newsfeed? Why is Discover coming to desktop? Why is threads a thing? And scaling globally, why does AI max exist? Right? It's all about monetization, not a bad thing, right?
It helps us all with our jobs to be able to reach more people in these places, to have experiences that resonate with them. In the end, whatever experience fulfills the [01:08:00] user's query, but also allows them to drive a higher revenue per search. 'cause searches are coming down on Google, right? Some of that is on purpose and some of that is happening because people are searching on Bing and Reddit and TikTok and Chat t and everywhere else.
So for their standpoint, it's always gonna be about fewer, better clicks and whatever they can do that brings the advertiser along for the ride and the user can feel good about in the end. That's ultimately what we're all gonna be looking at when we go to
google.com. Awesome. I think that's a perfect spot to wrap things up.
Before we let you go, please let the audience know where they can find you.
Honestly, at this point, the only place I am is on LinkedIn. I think I, I'm pretty sure I'm the only Lui Ferguson out there, but if you do a search, you, you, hopefully you see me and if you do, feel free to check out any of my content.
And if you agree, if you disagree, I love the commentary because that's how all of us get better. That's how you know as a [01:09:00] marketplace, we get smarter. Don't be shy 'cause I reply.
Love it. Luigi Ferguson, everyone. Thanks again for joining us on the Page two podcast and if you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe, rate and review.
We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.