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As entrepreneurs, we are constantly trying to acquire new skills and knowledge to survive and thrive in the competitive business landscape. While reading an insightful business book is almost always the best way to gain knowledge and wisdom, not everyone can find time in their busy schedule to read books.
So what should a busy entrepreneur do?
The answer is simple: listen to podcasts!
You can tune into podcasts anytime you want — while commuting to work, jogging, cooking, cycling, or even while working out at the gym.
Podcasts are immensely popular these days. According to Convince and Convert, podcast listeners listen to an average of 8 podcasts per week.
There are podcasts covering almost any topic you can imagine. Entrepreneurship is no different. There are a ton of business podcasts, where successful entrepreneurs and business leaders share their expertise, insights, experiences, and strategies that can be immensely helpful in your own entrepreneurial journey.
To that end, I’ve compiled a list of podcasts that will make you a better entrepreneur.
Here are the 20 best entrepreneur podcasts to help you get started.
Table of Contents
Rework is a podcast by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founders of 37signals and authors of one of my favorite business books, “Rework.” It’s a perfect companion to the book, expanding on their unconventional business philosophy and offering a behind-the-scenes look at their journey with 37signals.
The podcast dives into startup stories and lessons learned, showing you why bootstrapping, staying small, and growing slow can be just as rewarding as scaling quickly.
If you prefer a more organic approach to entrepreneurship, then Rework is among the best entrepreneur podcasts you can listen to.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Recommended reading: 7 Business Lessons from “Rework” by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
Pivot is a weekly podcast produced by Vox Media and New York Magazine, featuring hosts Kara Swisher, one of Silicon Valley’s most respected journalists, and NYU Professor Scott Galloway.
This show combines sharp insights with lively banter, as Swisher and Galloway share their takes on technology, business, politics, and culture.
Whether they’re analyzing the latest tech trends or debating the implications of recent business developments, their engaging back-and-forth makes Pivot both informative and entertaining.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Naval Ravikant is a serial entrepreneur and one of the most well-known venture capitalists in the world. Naval’s unique perspective on life, happiness, and success has set him apart from other tech entrepreneurs and he has amassed quite a following on Twitter because of this quality.
Naval explained this dichotomy on the Joe Rogan podcast by saying, “The reason why people like hearing me is because it’s like if you go to a circus and you see a bear, that’s kind of interesting but not that much. If you see a unicycle, that’s interesting. But you see a bear on a unicycle, that’s really interesting. So, when you combine things you’re not supposed to combine, people get interested.”
Naval has been sharing his unique philosophy on business, wealth, and happiness on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast over the last few years and has built quite a reputation for his reflections. While you can always tune in to Naval’s several podcast interviews on shows like The Tim Ferriss Show and The Joe Rogan Podcast, Naval’s podcast is the best place to get a peek into Naval’s thought process and mental models.
Naval’s “How to Get Rich” podcast episode contains a treasure trove of tips for entrepreneurs on how they can maximize their leverage, acquire specialized knowledge, and build wealth. The podcast contains two long-form episodes (over 2 hours), while most of the other episodes are bite-sized snippets on a broad range of topics.
If you find Naval’s philosophy interesting, I’d highly recommend you read Eric Jorgensson’s The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, a compilation of Naval’s best thoughts and reflections on wealth, happiness, and life. You can read the entirety of the book online for free at navalmanack.com.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Recommended reading: 50 Best Naval Ravikant Quotes to Inspire You
Tim Ferriss is a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author known for profoundly influential business books like “The 4-Hour Workweek,” “Tribe of Mentors,” and “Tools of Titans.” His work has transformed the way people think about productivity, entrepreneurship, and personal development, offering actionable strategies for achieving more with less effort.
Tim’s podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, frequently tops the charts as the #1 business podcast on Apple Podcasts. It has also secured the top spot out of more than 500,000 podcasts on numerous occasions.
The podcast features interviews of successful people from all areas of life (investing, sports, business, art, etc.) as Tim examines the tactics, tools, and routines they typically use to achieve peak performance.
Past guests on the show have included Arnold Schwarzenegger, LeBron James, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Malcolm Gladwell, Vince Vaughn, Susan Cain, Ramit Sethi, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
The Wondery podcast network has several podcasts that entrepreneurs will find useful and entertaining. But my pick for the best business podcast series from the network is Business Wars.
Hosted by veteran radio journalist David Brown, Business Wars explores some of the most intense corporate rivalries and how the leaders and investors involved in competing companies drove their companies to new heights or financial ruin.
From covering classic brand rivalries like Coke vs Pepsi and iPhone vs BlackBerry to more recent rivalries like Marvel vs DC and Red Bull vs Monster, David Brown’s impeccable storytelling skills will keep you hooked and wanting more. That said, it’s not just the entertainment factor that makes this such a compelling podcast. You’ll also find a ton of lessons and cautionary tales along the way.
The podcast gives a multi-episode treatment to each brand rivalry, while each episode is around 30 minutes long. My personal favorite is the 8-part Netflix vs BlockBuster series.
If you enjoy learning about corporate rivalries as much as I do, you’re going to love this podcast.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
Chris Guillebeau is the author of The $100 Startup, a New York Times bestseller that has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide. In his most recent book, Side Hustle, Guillebeau explains how anyone can create a new source of income in 27 days. He explores the subject in greater depth in his podcast, Side Hustle School.
The purpose of Guillebeau’s podcast is to help you create a new source of income without quitting your job.
In each episode, you’ll hear a different story of someone who’s started a side hustle — along with what went well, how that person overcame challenges, and what happened as a result.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify
Gary Vaynerchuk is a serial entrepreneur and chairman & CEO of VaynerMedia, a full-service advertising agency servicing Fortune 100 clients. Gary Vee has an active presence on social media, including Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube, where he has his Q&A show #AskGaryVee and the daily video documentary series DAILYVEE.
In his podcast, The GaryVee Audio Experience, you’ll find a mix of #AskGaryVee show episodes, keynote speeches on marketing and business, segments from his DAILYVEE video series, interviews, and fireside chats, as well as original content recorded specifically for the podcast.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Entrepreneurs on Fire is an award-winning business podcast by John Lee Dumas, where he interviews successful entrepreneurs to inspire you in your entrepreneurial journey.
The goal of this podcast is to present you with the inspiration and strategies you need to fire up your entrepreneurial journey and create the life you’ve always dreamed of.
Since launching his podcast on September 22nd, 2012, Dumas has interviewed over 2,000 entrepreneurs, including Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Barbara Corcoran, Tim Ferriss, Neil Patel, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Hosted by Laura Shin, Unchained is one of the best cryptocurrency podcasts on the web. Shin was the first mainstream media journalist to cover cryptocurrency and blockchain full-time at Forbes. Most recently, she authored the book The Cryptopians, which explores the origin stories of Ethereum.
If you’re a crypto entrepreneur, then you should definitely tune in to this podcast as it delivers the most up-to-date information on the top crypto stories of the day. In addition to covering breaking news stories in the cryptosphere, the show also features interviews with thought leaders, leading experts, and influencers from the industry.
Past guests on the show have included the likes of Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), prominent Canadian VC Chamath Palihapitiya, and several other blockchain innovators and investors. If you’re a crypto beginner, then their episode on “How to explain cryptocurrency to the average person” is highly recommended.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website | YouTube
Hosted by the Webby award-winning host Lindsay Graham, Business Movers is a weekly podcast that explores the true stories of innovative entrepreneurs, creators, and businesses. It examines their strengths, flaws, and the incredible risks they took to reach new heights.
From unravelling Coca-Cola’s biggest mistake to exploring the secrets of Warren Buffet’s business success, Business Movers examines the triumphs, failures, and ideas that transformed our lives. My personal favorite is the 5-part George Lucas series, which explains how Lucas defied the odds and risked it all to make Star Wars.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
WeCrashed is a limited podcast series that covers the rise and fall of WeWork and its eccentric founder Adam Neumann. If you don’t know about the whole WeWork IPO fiasco and the company’s subsequent fall from grace, this podcast should definitely be on your radar. It tells you exactly what was happening behind the scenes at a company that was once valued at $47 billion dollars and highlights the pivotal reasons behind the company’s downfall.
This 6-part series is hosted by podcast veteran David Brown, who also hosts Business Wars (see #5). The podcast was later adapted into an Apple TV+ limited series of the same name, starring Jared Leto as Adam Neumann and Anne Hathaway as Rebecca Neumann. The show is a good adaptation of the podcast and it’s one of the must-watch series for entrepreneurs.
Both the podcast and the accompanying TV series are worth your time if you’d like a sneak peak at all the insanity that preceded WeWork’s disastrous IPO.
Side note: To learn more about WeWork’s rise and fall, and Adam Neumann’s eccentricity and narcissism, I’d recommend Reeves Wiedeman’s book Billion Dollar Loser.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
Aside from co-hosting the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway (see #2), award-winning journalist Kara Swisher has her own podcast called On with Kara Swisher.
The podcast features candid interviews with an impressive array of guests, including tech execs, entrepreneurs, politicians, celebrities, and more. New episodes are released every Monday and Thursday.
One reason this podcast is an excellent choice for entrepreneurs is Swisher’s ability to dive deep into the minds of her guests, revealing their thought processes, experiences, and lessons learned.
Past guests on the podcast have included Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, Hilary Clinton, bestselling author Adan Grant, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
Masters of Scale is a business podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, where he invites successful entrepreneurs to share the stories and strategies that helped them grow from startups into global brands.
Reid and his guests talk entrepreneurship, leadership, strategy, management, and fundraising. But they also talk about the human journey — with all its failures and setbacks.
Past guests on the podcast have included Arianna Huffington, Ben Chestnut, Kevin Systrom, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
With over 3 million subscribers, Morning Brew is one of the leading business newsletters on the internet. Founder’s Journal is a podcast hosted by Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman.
Lieberman approaches his podcast like his personal audio diary where he shares the tools you need to think better and build better products. You’ll also find a ton of productivity hacks on his podcast. For example, in episode #298, Lieberman reveals his favorite productivity method and entrepreneurs from all walks of life can take valuable insights from it.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
Thrifty Titans, hosted by marketer-creator-media nerd Saikat Pyne, has been ranked as India’s #1 Marketing Podcast, and among India’s Top 20 Business Podcasts by Apple Podcasts. Tune in to learn business and audience growth insights and hacks that you can implement without losing your mind or breaking the bank.
Past guests on the show include Neil Patel (New York Times bestselling author and Founder at NP Digital), Bharati Balakrishnan (Country Head and Director – India and SEA at Shopify), RS Raghavan (Founder & CEO – Animaker), Tusharr Kumar (COO – Only Much Louder), Advait Gupt (Co-founder & CEO at Kulfi Collective) among other top global media founders, business leaders, influencers, and content creators.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts
StartUp is a podcast from Gimlet Media hosted by Alex Blumberg and Lisa Chow. The podcast is all about what it’s really like to start a business.
The first two seasons of the show followed stories of starting businesses. Season 1 was about the starting of Gimlet Media itself, and season 2 dealt with the starting of a dating company called “Dating Ring.” The third season follows one business per episode.
Listen on: Website | Spotify
Smart Passive Income is a top-ranking and award-winning business podcast hosted by Pat Flynn, a blogger and entrepreneur known for his immensely successful blog, The Smart Passive Income, where he teaches his followers about investing in online businesses and generating passive income.
In his podcast, Pat Flynn reveals all of his online business and blogging strategies, income sources, and killer marketing tips and tricks so you can be ahead of the curve with your online business or blog. The podcast covers a broad range of business topics such as automation, crowdsourcing, SEO, affiliate marketing, outsourcing, and more.
Since launching his podcast in 2010, Flynn has invited several entrepreneurs, authors, and business leaders to share their secrets of success. Past guests have included Gary Vaynerchuk, Nir Eyal, James Clear, Ramit Sethi, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Hosted by Stig Brodersen and Trey Lockerbie, this podcast interviews and studies famous financial billionaires. From Warren Buffet to Jeff Bezos to Howard Marks, We Study Billionaires teaches you how to apply the billionaires’ investment strategies in the stock market.
This podcast was launched in 2014, so there are a lot of episodes to skim through. I’d personally recommend you start with the very first episode of the podcast which examines Warren Buffet’s business philosophy and investment strategies.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
The Dropout is a limited podcast series that tells the story of the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her revolutionary blood-testing company, Theranos.
Once touted as the “next Steve Jobs,” Holmes’ net worth was valued at $4.5 billion while her company’s valuation was $9 billion. It all came crashing down when it was later revealed that her blood-testing technology didn’t work and that she had been deceiving investors and using intimidation tactics to silence her employees.
All this and more is covered on the podcast, which features exclusive interviews with former Theranos employees, investors, and patients. The podcast also covers Elizabeth Holmes’ trial and final sentencing in detail. The podcast was later adapted into a Hulu limited TV series of the same name which is definitely worth a watch. It features a great ensemble cast and Amanda Seyfried nails her role as Elizabeth Holmes.
To learn more about the Theranos scandal, I’d highly recommend you check out John Carreyrou’s brilliant book Bad Blood. Carreyrou was the first reporter to investigate Theranos and played a significant role in its downfall.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Last but not least, I’m including my own podcast on this list — Marketing Mantra. I launched this podcast with the help of Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor) back in August 2018, with an aim to share actionable marketing strategies and tactics that have worked for me at my blog and my digital marketing agency.
From time to time, I also invite other bloggers and entrepreneurs to share their success stories and business tactics. Past guests on the podcast have included Matthew Woodward, Daniel Daines-Hutt from AmpMyContent, Alexandra Tachalova from Digital Olympus, Vlad Calus from Planable, and many more.
If you’ve liked any of my content in the past, I’d request you to please subscribe to Marketing Mantra on your preferred podcast player.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
The 20 podcasts featured above are my personal favorites, but the entrepreneur podcasts below are also highly recommended:
So there you have it — the 20 podcasts that will make you a better entrepreneur. You can also check out this list of 38 marketing podcasts if you’d like to get your fill of the latest marketing trends, insights, and tips.
Looking for more business podcast recommendations? Check out these other lists from my blog:
Did I miss out on any of your favorite entrepreneur podcasts? Let me know in the comments section below. I’d love to hear your recommendations.
If you liked this article, please share it on Twitter using the link below:
Editor’s Note: This article was first published on 20 September 2019 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness.
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Sandeep As a an avid listeners to podcasts and a fellow podcasters, I am glad to see your compilation. Have you listened to Brent Leary’s podcast on Small Business Trends?
I would add marketing in the car by Russell Brunson, smart marketer, great content.
Thanks for the recommendation, Seki. Will definitely check it out.
[…] of topics — including business. If you’re looking to improve your skills as an entrepreneur, check out this 99signals post by Sandeep Mallya for a selection to add to your list. Then see what members of […]
I use great lists like this all of the time for deciding which podcasts to listen to.
Please consider as well these fast risers…
Two Are Gathered Leadership Podcast (dealing with the heart issues of entrepreneurs)
Global Studio Marketing Podcast (teaching entrepreneurs how to THINK like seasoned marketing pros)
3 podcasts that will make you a better entrepreneur:
1) The Pitch – this is Seth Mclaughlin’s podcast. It airs every Saturday on NPR and talks about the life of entrepreneurs.
2) Planet Money – more or less, it discusses economics and how these relationships manifest themselves in our society. This is not to be missed for anyone wanting to learn more about money in general.
3) Freakonomics Radio – you have probably heard Jonathan Levitt interviewed on many networks, but his podcast talks about different things that he has learned, primarily through studies as opposed to an interview.
We started our business listening to Tim Ferris show and now we are doing amazingly well. You just need to gather the right skills, bring the right confidence, and move forward.
Awesome list! Especially The Dropout, I still can’t believe what Holmes pulled off. I also suggest the book Bad Blood — it reads like a thriller! On the podcast side, I would suggest Road to CEO — the guests are real folk from various backgrounds and they share pretty amazing stories. So, if anybody is on the lookout for a more underground podcast gem, this is the one.
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Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…

Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…
A few links on this blog are affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service through one of these affiliate links, I’ll receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
Rest assured, I recommend only those tools that I personally use and genuinely trust. In most cases, you’ll find in-depth reviews, tutorials, and how-to guides of these tools on my blog to help you make informed decisions.

source

By Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.
Today, I’m talking to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the Google I/O developer conference last week. Google’s focus during the conference was AI, of course — Google is building AI into virtually all of its products. My personal favorite is the new AI search in Google Photos that lets you ask things like, “What’s my license plate number?” and get an answer back from your entire photo library. All in all, Google executives said “AI” more than 120 times during the keynote — we counted.
But there was one particular announcement at I/O that’s sending shockwaves around the web: Google is rolling out what it calls AI Overviews in Search to everyone in the United States by this week and around the world to more than a billion users by the end of the year. That means when you search for something on Google, you’ll get AI-powered results at the top of the page for a number of queries. The company literally describes this as “letting Google do the Googling for you.” Google has been testing this for a year now, in what it called the Search Generative Experience, so you may have already seen a version of this — but now it’s here, and it will change the web as we know it. 
Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!
Until now, Google’s ecosystem has been based on links to everyone else’s content: you type something into a search box, you see some links, and you click one. That sends traffic to websites, which their owners can try to monetize in various ways, and ideally everyone wins.
Google is by far the biggest source of traffic on the web today, so if it starts keeping that traffic for itself by answering questions with AI, that will change or potentially even destroy the internet ecosystem as we know it. The News/Media Alliance, which represents a bunch of fancy news publishers, put out a press release calling AI previews in search “catastrophic to our traffic.”
If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it Google Zero, and I’ve been asking web and media CEOs what would happen to their businesses if their Google traffic were to go to zero. If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing everything for you, why would you go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what’s the incentive to put new content on the web? What’s going to stop shady characters from flooding the web with AI-generated spam to try and game these systems? And if we succeed in choking the web with AI, what are all these bots going to summarize when people ask them questions?
Sundar has some ideas. For one, he’s not convinced the web, which he says he cares deeply about, is in all that much danger. You’ll hear him mention Wired’s famous 2010 headline, “The web Is dead,” and he makes the argument that new, transformative technologies like AI always cause some short-term disruptions. 
He says injecting AI into Search is about creating value for users, and those users are telling him that they find these new features to be helpful — and even clicking on links at higher rates in the AI previews. But he didn’t say where that leaves the people who put the content on the internet in the first place. We really sat with that idea for a while — and we talked a lot about the anger creative people feel toward AI systems training on their work.
I’ve talked to Sundar quite a bit over the past few years, and this was the most fired up I’ve ever seen him. You can really tell that there is a deep tension between the vision Google has for the future — where AI magically makes us smarter, more productive, and more artistic — and the very real fears and anxieties creators and website owners are feeling right now about how search has changed and how AI might swallow the internet forever. Sundar is wrestling with that tension.
One note: you’ll hear me say I think Sundar keeps making oblique references to OpenAI, which he pushes back on pretty strongly. I thought about it afterward, and it’s pretty clear he wasn’t just talking about OpenAI but also Meta, which has openly turned away from sending any traffic to any websites whatsoever and has been explicit that it doesn’t want to support news on its platforms at all anymore. I wish that had clicked for me during this conversation, because I would have asked about it more directly.
Okay, Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 
Sundar Pichai, you are the CEO of both Alphabet and Google. Welcome to Decoder.
Nilay, good to be here.
I am excited to talk to you. I feel like I talk to you every year at Google I/O, and we talk about all the things you’ve announced. There’s a lot of AI news to talk about. As you know, I’m particularly interested in the future of the web, so I really want to talk about that with you, but I figured I’d start with an easy one.
Do you think language is the same as intelligence?
Wow, that’s not an easy question! I don’t think I’m the expert on it. I think language does encode a lot of intelligence, probably more than people thought. It explains the successes of large language models to a great extent. But my intuition tells me, as humans, there’s a lot more to the way we consume information than language alone. But I’d say language is a lot more than people think it is.
The reason I asked that question to start is: I look at the announcements at I/O with AI and what you’re doing, I look at your competitors with AI and what they’re doing, and everything is very language-heavy. It’s LLMs that have really led to this explosion of interest in innovation and investment, and I wonder if the intelligence is increasing at the same rate as the facility with language. I kind of don’t see it, to be perfectly honest. I see computers getting much better at language and actually in some cases getting dumber. I’m wondering if you see that same gap.
Yeah, it’s a great question. Part of the reason we made Gemini natively multimodal — and you’re beginning to see glimpses of it now but it hasn’t made its way fully into products yet — is so that with audio, video, text, images, and code, when we have multimodality working on the input and output side — and we are training models using all of that — maybe in the next cycle, that’ll encapsulate a lot more than just today, which is primarily text-based. I think that continuum will shift as we take in a lot more information that way. So maybe there’s more to come.
Last year the tagline was “Bold but responsible.” That’s Google’s approach. You said it again onstage this year. And then I look at our reactions to AI getting things wrong, and it seems like they’re getting more and more tempered over time.
I’ll give you an example. In the demos you had yesterday, you showed multimodal video search of someone trying to fix a broken film camera. And the answer was just wrong. The answer that was highlighted in the video was, “Just open the back of the film camera and jiggle it.” It’s like, well, that would ruin all of your film. No one who had an intelligent understanding of how that camera [worked] would suggest that.
I was talking to the team and, ironically, as part of making the video, they consulted with a bunch of subject matter experts who all reviewed the answer and thought it was okay. I understand the nuance. I agree with you. Obviously, you don’t want to expose your film by taking it outside of a darkroom. There are certain contexts in which it makes sense to do that. If you don’t want to break the camera and if what you’ve taken is not that valuable, it makes sense to do that.
You’re right. There is a lot of nuance to it. Part of what I hope Search serves to do is to give you a lot more context around that answer and allow people to explore it deeply. But I think these are the kinds of things for us to keep getting better at. But to your earlier question, look, I do see the capability frontier continuing to move forward. I think we are a bit limited if we were just training on text data, but we are all making it more multimodal. So I see more opportunities there.
Let’s talk about Search. This is the thing that I am most interested in — I think this is the thing that is changing the most. In an abstract way, it’s the thing that’s the most exciting. You can ask a computer a question, and it will just happily tell you an answer. That feels new. I see the excitement around it.
Yesterday, you announced AI Overviews are coming to Search. That’s an extension of what was called the Search Generative Experience, which was announced in a rollout to everyone in the United States. I would describe the reactions to that news from the people who make websites as fundamentally apocalyptic. The CEO of the News/Media Alliance said to CNN, “This will be catastrophic to our traffic.” Another media CEO forwarded me a newsletter and the headline was, “This is a death blow to publishers.” Were you expecting that kind of response to rolling out AI Overviews in Search?
I recall, in 2010, there were headlines that the web was dead. I’ve long worked on the web, obviously. I care deeply about it. When the transition from desktop to mobile happened, there was a lot of concern because people were like, “Oh, it’s a small screen. How will people read content? Why would they look at content?” We had started introducing what we internally called “Web Answers” in 2014, which are featured snippets outside [the list of links]. So you had questions like that.
I remain optimistic. Empirically, what we are seeing throughout the years, I think human curiosity is boundless. It’s something we have deeply understood in Search. More than any other company, we will differentiate ourselves in our approach even through this transition. As a company, we realize the value of this ecosystem, and it’s symbiotic. If there isn’t a rich ecosystem making unique and useful content, what are you putting together and organizing? So we feel it.
I would say, through all of these transitions, things have played out a bit differently. I think users are looking for high-quality content. The counterintuitive part, which I think almost always plays out, is [that] it’s not a zero-sum game. People are responding very positively to AI Overviews. It’s one of the most positive changes I’ve seen in Search based on metrics. But people do jump off on it. And when you give context around it, they actually jump off it. It actually helps them understand, and so they engage with content underneath, too. In fact, if you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.
But I understand the sentiment. It’s a big change. These are disruptive moments. AI is a big platform shift. People are projecting out, and people are putting a lot into creating content. It’s their businesses. So I understand the perspective [and] I’m not surprised. We are engaging with a lot of players, both directly and indirectly, but I remain optimistic about how it’ll actually play out. But it’s a good question. I’m happy to talk about it more.
I have this concept I call “Google Zero,” which is born of my own paranoia. Every referrer that The Verge has ever had has gone up and then it’s gone down, and Google is the last large-scale referrer of traffic on the web for almost every website now. And I can see that for a lot of sites, Google Zero is playing out. Their Google traffic has gone to zero, particularly independent sites that aren’t part of some huge publishing conglomerate. There’s an air purifier blog that we covered called HouseFresh. There’s a gaming site called Retro Dodo. Both of these sites have said, “Look, our Google traffic went to zero. Our businesses are doomed.”
Is that the right outcome here in all of this — that the people who care so much about video games or air purifiers that they started websites and made the content for the web are the ones getting hurt the most in the platform shift?
It’s always difficult to talk about individual cases, and at the end of the day, we are trying to satisfy user expectations. Users are voting with their feet, and people are trying to figure out what’s valuable to them. We are doing it at scale, and I can’t answer on the particular site—
A bunch of small players are feeling the hurt. Loudly, they’re saying it: “Our businesses are going away.” And that’s the thing you’re saying: “We’re engaging, we’re talking.” But this thing is happening very clearly. 
It’s not clear to me if that’s a uniform trend. I have to look at data on an aggregate [basis], so anecdotally, there are always times when people have come in an area and said, “Me, as a specific site, I have done worse.” But it’s like an individual restaurant saying, “I’ve started getting fewer customers this year. People have stopped eating food,” or whatever it is. It’s not necessarily true. Some other restaurant might have opened next door that’s doing very well. So it’s tough to say.
From our standpoint, when I look historically even over the past decade, we have provided more traffic to the ecosystem, and we’ve driven that growth. You may be making a secondary point about small sites versus more aggregating sites, which is the second point you’re talking about. Ironically, there are times when we have made changes to actually send more traffic to the smaller sites. Some of those sites that complain a lot are the aggregators in the middle. So should the traffic go to the restaurant that has created a website with their menus and stuff or people writing about these restaurants? These are deep questions. I’m not saying there’s a right answer.
But you’re about to flip over the whole apple cart, right? You’re about to start answering some of these questions very directly. And where that content comes from in the future, I think you want the people who care the most to publish that information directly to be the thing that you synthesize. 
I agree.
The incentives for that seem to be getting lower and lower — on the web, anyway.
I feel it’s the opposite. If anything, I feel like through AI Overviews, when you give people context, yes, there are times all people want is a quick answer and they bounce back. But overall, when we look at user journeys, when you give the context, it also exposes people to jumping-off points, and so they engage more. Actually, this is what drives growth over time. I look at desktop to mobile, and there were similar questions. In fact, there was a [magazine] cover I’m almost tempted to pull out, saying, “The web is dead.” There was a Google Zero argument 10 years ago. But you yourself made the point that it’s not an accident that we still remain as one of the largest referrers because we’ve cared about it deeply for a long, long time.
I look at our journey, even the last year through the Search Generative Experience, and I constantly found us prioritizing approaches that would send more traffic while meeting user expectations. We think through that deeply and we actually change our approach. If there are areas where we feel like we haven’t fully gotten it right, we are careful about rolling it out. But I think what’s positively surprising us is that people engage more, and that will lead to more growth over time for high-quality content.
There’s a lot of debate about what high-quality content is. At least in my experience, I value independent sources, I value smaller things, I want more authentic voices. And I think those are important attributes we are constantly trying to improve.
You mentioned that you think more people will click through links in AI Overviews. Liz [Reid] who runs Search had a blog post making the same claim. There’s no public data that says that is true yet. Are you going to release that data? Are you going to show people that this is actually happening?
On an aggregate, I think people rely on this value of the ecosystem. If people over time don’t see value, website owners don’t see value coming back from Google, I think we’ll pay a price. We have the right incentive structure. But obviously, look, we are careful about… there are a lot of individual variations, and some of it is users choosing which way to go. That part is hard to sort out. But I do think we are committed at an aggregate level to do the right thing.
I was reading some SEO community trade publications this morning responding to the changes, and one of the things that was pointed out was that, in Search Console, it doesn’t show you if the clicks are coming from a featured snippet or an AI Overview or just Google’s regular 10 blue links. Would you break that out? Would you commit to breaking that out so people can actually audit and verify and measure that the AI Overviews are sending out as much traffic as you say they are?
It’s a good question for the Search team. They think about this at a deeper level than I do. I think we are constantly trying to give more visibility, but also we want people to create content that’s good. And we are trying to rank it and organize it, so I think there’s a balance to be had. The more we spec it out, then the more people design for that. There’s a tradeoff there, so it’s not clear to me what the right answer is.
That tradeoff between what you spec out and say and what people make, that’s been the story of the web for quite some time. It had reached, I think, a steady state. Whether you thought that steady state was good or bad, it was at least at a steady state. Now, that state is changing — AI is obviously changing it.
The 10 blue link model, the old steady state, is very much based on an exchange: “We’re going to let you index our content. We’re going to [have] featured snippets. We’re going to let you see all of our information. In return, you will send us traffic.” That formed the basis of what you might call a fair-use argument. Google’s going to index this stuff, [and] there’s not going to be a lot of payments in the middle.
In the AI era, no one knows how that’s going to go. There are some major lawsuits happening. There are deals being made by Google and OpenAI for training data. Do you think it’s appropriate for Google to start making more deals to pay for data to train search results? Because those AI snippets are not really the same as the 10 blue links or anything else you’ve done in the past.
To be very clear, there’s a myth that Google’s search has been 10 blue links for — I look at our mobile experience — many, many years. And we have had answers, we allow you to refine questions, we’ve had featured snippets, and so on. The product has evolved significantly. 
Having said that, as a company, even as we look at AI, we have done Google [News] Showcase, we have done licensing deals. To the extent there is value there, we obviously think there is a case for fair use in the context of beneficial, transformative use. I’m not going to argue that with you given your background. But I think there are cases in which we will see dedicated incremental value to our models, and we’ll be looking at partnerships to get at that. I do think we’ll approach it that way.
Let me ask this question in a different way. I won’t do too much fair-use analysis with you, I promise, as much as I like doing it.
There were some news reports recently that OpenAI had trained its video generation product, Sora, on YouTube. How did you feel when you heard that news?
Look, we don’t know the details. Our YouTube team is following up and trying to understand it. We have terms and conditions, and we would expect people to abide by those terms and conditions when you build a product, so that’s how I felt about it. 
So you felt like they had potentially broken your terms and conditions? Or if they had, that wouldn’t have been appropriate?
That’s right. 
The reason I asked that question — which is a much more emotional question — is okay, maybe that’s not appropriate. And what OpenAI has said is essentially “We’ve trained on publicly available information,” which means they found it on the web. 
Most people don’t get to make that deal. They don’t have a YouTube team of licensing professionals who can say, “We have terms and conditions.” They don’t even have terms and conditions. They’re just putting their stuff on the internet. Do you understand why, emotionally, there’s the reaction to AI from the creative community — that it feels the same as you might have felt about OpenAI training on YouTube?
Absolutely. Look, be it website owners or content creators or artists, I can understand how emotional a transformation this is. Part of the reason you saw, even through Google I/O when we were working on products like music generation, we have really taken an approach by which we are working first to make tools for artists. We haven’t put a general-purpose tool out there for anyone to create songs.
The way we have taken that approach in many of these cases is to put the creator community as much at the center of it as possible. We’ve long done that with YouTube. Through it all, we are trying to figure out what the right ways to approach this.
But it is a transformative moment as well, and there are other players in this. We are not the only player in the ecosystem. But, to your earlier question, yes, I understand people’s emotions about it. I definitely am very empathetic to how people are perceiving this moment.
They feel like it’s a taking — that they put work on the internet and the big companies are coming, taking it for free, and then making products that they are charging $20 a month for or that will lift their creative work and remix it for other people. The thing that makes it feel like a taking is [that] very little value accrues back to them.
That’s really the thing I’m asking about: how do you bring value back to them? How do you bring incentives back to the small creator or the independent business that’s saying, “Look, this feels a taking.” 
Look. [Sighs] The whole reason we’ve been successful on platforms like YouTube is we have worked hard to answer this question. You’ll continue to see us dig deep about how to do this well. And I think the players who end up doing better here will have more winning strategies over time. I genuinely believe that.
Across everything we do, we have to sort that out. Anytime you’re running a platform, it’s the basis on which you can build a sustainable long-term platform. Through this AI moment, over time, there’ll be players who will do better by the content creators that support their platforms, and whoever does it better will emerge as the winner. I believe that to be a tenet of these things over time.
One thing that I think is really interesting about the YouTube comparison in particular — it’s been described to me many times that YouTube is a licensing business. You license a lot of content from the creators. You obviously pay them back in terms of the advertising model there. The music industry has a huge licensing business with YouTube. It is an existential relationship for both sides. Susan Wojcicki used to describe YouTube as a music service, which I think confused everyone until you looked at the data.
Universal Music is mad about AI on YouTube. YouTube reacts. It builds a bunch of tools. It writes a constitution about what AI will and will not do. People are mad about the Search Generative Experience or AI [Overviews] on the web. Google doesn’t react the same way. I’m wondering if you can square that circle.
That is so far from reality.
You think so?
That’s so far from reality. I look at other players and how they’ve approached—
You’re talking about OpenAI, which is just out there taking stuff.
In general, when you look at how we have approached the Search Generative Experience, even through a moment like this, the time we have taken to test, iterate, and prioritize approaches, and the way we’ve done it over the years, I would say I definitely disagree with the notion we don’t listen. We care deeply; we listen. People may not agree with everything we do. When you’re running an ecosystem, you are balancing different needs. I think that’s the essence of what makes a product successful.
Let me talk about the other side of this. There’s search: people are going to game search and that’s always going to happen and that’s a chicken-and-egg problem.
The other thing that I see happening is the web is being flooded with AI content. There was an example a few months ago where some unsavory SEO character said, “I stole a bunch of traffic from a competitor. I copied their site map. I fed it into an AI system and had it generate copy for a website that matched their site map, and I put up this website and stole a bunch of traffic from my competitor.” I think that’s a bad outcome. I don’t think we want to incentivize that in any way, shape, or form.
[Shakes head] No, no—
That’s going to happen at scale. More and more of the internet that we experience will be synthetic in some important way. How do you, on the one hand, build the systems that create the synthetic content for people and, on the other hand, rank it so that you’re only getting the best stuff? Because at some point, the defining line for a lot of people is, “I want stuff made by a human, and not stuff made by AI.”
I think there are multiple parts to your question. One, how do we differentiate high quality from low quality? I literally view it as our mission statement, and it is what has defined Search over many, many years.
I actually think people underestimate… Anytime you have these disruptive platform shifts, you’re going to go through a phase like this. I have seen that team invest so much. Our entire search quality team has been spending the last year gearing up our ranking systems, etc., to better get at what high-quality content is. If I take the next decade, [the] people who can do that better, who can sift through that, I think, will win out.
I think you’re right in your assessment that people will value human-created experiences. I hope the data bears that out. We have to be careful every time there’s a new technology. There are filmmakers, if you go and talk about CGI in films, they’re going to react very emotionally, and there are still esteemed filmmakers who never use CGI in films. But then there are people who use it and produce great films. And so you may be using AI to lay out and enhance video effects in your video.
But I agree with you. I think using AI to produce content en masse without adding any value is not what users are looking for.
But there is a big continuum and, over time, users are adapting. We are trying hard to make sure we do it in a responsible way, but we’re also listening to what users consider to be high quality and trying to get that balance right. That continuum will look different a few years out than it does today, but I think I view it as the essence of what search quality is. Do I feel confident we will be able to approach it better than others? Yes. And I think that’s what defines the work we do.
For the listener, there have been a lot of subtle shots at OpenAI today.
Can I put this into practice? I actually just did this search. It is a search for “best Chromebook.” As you know, I once bought my mother a Chromebook Pixel. It’s one of my favorite tech purchases of all time. This is a search for “best Chromebook.” I’m going to hit “generate” at the top, it’s going to generate the answer, and then I’m going to do something terrifying, which is, I’m going to hand my phone to the CEO of Google. This is my personal phone. Don’t dig through it.
You look at that — it’s the same generation that I’ve seen earlier. I asked it for the best Chromebook, and it says, “Here’s some stuff you might think of.” Then you scroll, and it’s some Chromebooks. It doesn’t say whether they’re the best Chromebooks, and then it’s a bunch of headlines, some of which are Verge headlines, that are like, “Here are some of the best Chromebooks.” That feels like the exact kind of thing that an AI-generated search could answer in a better way. Do you think that’s a good experience? Is that a waypoint or is that the destination?
I think, look, you’re showing me a query in which we didn’t automatically generate the AI.
There was a button that said, “Do you want to do this?”
But let me push back. There’s an important differentiation. There’s a reason we are giving a view without the generated AI Overview, and as a user, you’re initiating an action, so we’re respecting the user intent there. When I scroll, I see Chromebooks. I also see a whole set of links, which I can go to and that tell me all the ways you can think about Chromebooks. I see a lot of links. We didn’t show an AI Overview in this case. As a user, you’re generating the follow-up question. I think it’s right that we respect the user’s intent. If you don’t do that, people will go somewhere else, too.
But I’m saying — I did not write, “What is the best Chromebook?” I just wrote “best Chromebook — [but] the answer, a thing that identifies itself as an answer, is not on that page. The leap from “I had to push the button” to “Google pushes the button for me and then says what it believes to be the answer” is very small. I’m wondering if you think a page like that today is the destination of the search experience, or if this is a waypoint and you can see a better future version of that experience.
I think the direction of how these things will go, it’s tough to fully predict. Users keep evolving. It’s a more dynamic moment than ever. We are testing all of this, and this is a case where we didn’t trigger the AI Overview because we felt like our AI Overview is not necessarily the first experience we want to provide for that query because what’s underlying is maybe a better first look for the user — those are all quality tradeoffs we are making. But if the user is asking for a summary, we are summarizing and giving links. I think that seems like a reasonable direction to me.
I’ll show you another one where it did expand automatically. This one I only have screenshots for. I don’t think I’m fully opted in. This is Dave Lee from Bloomberg, who did a search. He got an AI Overview, and he just searched for “JetBlue Mint Lounge SFO.” And it just says the answer, which I think is fine. That’s the answer.
If you swipe one over — I cannot believe I’m letting the CEO of Google swipe on my camera roll — but if you swipe one over, you see the site it pulled from. It is a word-for-word rewrite of that site. This is the thing I’m getting at.
The AI-generated overview of that answer, if you just look at where it came from, is almost the same sentence as the source. And that’s what I mean. At some point, the better experience is the AI overview, and it’s just the thing that exists on all the sites underneath it. It’s the same information.
[Sighs] The thing with Search — we handle billions of queries. You can absolutely find a query and hand it to me and say, “Could we have done better on that query?” Yes, for sure. But in many cases, part of what is making people respond positively to AI Overviews is that the summary we are providing clearly adds value and helps them look at things they may not have otherwise thought about. If you’re adding value at that level, I think people notice it over time, and I think that’s the bar you’re trying to meet. Our data would show, over 25 years, if you aren’t doing something that users find valuable or enjoyable, they let us know right away. Over and over again we see that.
Through this transition, everything is the opposite. It’s one of the biggest quality improvements we are driving in our product. People are valuing this experience. There’s a general presumption that people don’t know what they’re doing, which I disagree with strongly. People who use Google are savvy. They understand. And so, to me, I can give plenty of examples where I’ve used AI Overviews as a user. I’m like, “Oh, this is giving context. Oh, maybe there are these dimensions I didn’t even think of in my original query. How do I expand upon it and look at it?”
You’ve made oblique mention of OpenAI a few times, I think.
I actually haven’t.
You’re saying “others.” There’s one other big competitor that is, I think, a little more—
You’re putting words in my mouth, but that’s okay.
I saw OpenAI’s demo the other day of GPT-4o, Omni. It looked a lot like the demos you gave at I/O. This idea of multimodal search, the idea that you have this character you can talk to — you have Gems, which are the same kind of idea — it feels like there’s a race to get to the same outcome for a search-like experience or an agent-like experience. Do you feel the pressure from that competition?
This is no different from Siri and Alexa. When you’re working in the technology industry, I think there is relentless innovation we felt a few years ago, all of us building voice assistants. You could have asked the same version of this question: what was Alexa trying to do and what was Siri trying to do? It’s a natural extension of that. I think you have a new technology now, and it’s evolving rapidly.
I felt like it was a good week for technology. There was a lot of innovation, I felt, on Monday and Tuesday and so on. That’s how I feel, and I think it’s going to be that way for a while. I’d rather have it that way. You’d rather be in a place where the underlying technology is evolving, which means you can radically improve the experiences you’re putting out. I’d rather have that any time than a static phase in which you feel like you’re not able to move forward quickly.
A lot of us have had this vision for what a powerful assistant can be, but we were held back by the underlying technology not being able to serve that goal. I think we have a technology that is better able to serve that. That’s why you’re seeing the progress again. I think that’s exciting. To me, I look at it and say, “We can actually make Google Assistant a whole lot better.” You’re seeing visions of that with Project Astra. It’s incredibly magical to me when I use it, so I’m very excited by it.
This brings me back to the first question I asked: language versus intelligence. To make these products, I think you need a core level of intelligence. Do you have in your head a measure of “This is when it’s going to be good enough. I can trust this”?
On all of your demo slides and all of OpenAI’s demo slides, there’s a disclaimer that says “Check this info,” and to me, it’s ready when you don’t need that anymore. You didn’t have “Check this info” at the bottom of the 10 blue links. You didn’t have “Check this info” at the bottom of featured snippets.
You’re getting at a deeper point where hallucination is still an unsolved problem. In some ways, it’s an inherent feature. It’s what makes these models very creative. It’s why it can immediately write a poem about Thomas Jefferson in the style of Nilay. It can do that. It’s incredibly creative. But LLMs aren’t necessarily the best approach to always get at factuality, which is part of why I feel excited about Search. 
Because in Search we are bringing LLMs in a way, but we are grounding it with all the work we do in Search and layering it with enough context that we can deliver a better experience from that perspective. But I think the reason you’re seeing those disclaimers is because of the inherent nature. There are still times it’s going to get it wrong, but I don’t think I would look at that and underestimate how useful it can be at the same time. I think that would be the wrong way to think about it.
Google Lens is a good example. When we first put Google Lens out, it didn’t recognize all objects well. But the curve year on year has been pretty dramatic, and users are using it more and more. We’ve had billions of queries now with Google Lens. It’s because the underlying image recognition, paired with our knowledge entity understanding, has dramatically expanded over time.
I would view it as a continuum, and I think, again, I go back to this saying that users vote with their feet. Fewer people used Lens in the first year. We also didn’t put it everywhere because we realized the limitations of the product.
When you talk to the DeepMind Google Brain team, is there a solution to the hallucination problem on the roadmap?
It’s Google DeepMind. [Laughs]
Are we making progress? Yes, we are. We have definitely made progress when we look at metrics on factuality year on year. We are all making it better, but it’s not solved. Are there interesting ideas and approaches that they’re working on? Yes, but time will tell. I would view it as LLMs are an aspect of AI. We are working on AI in a much broader way, but it’s an area where we are all definitely working to drive more progress.
Five years from now, this technology, the paradigm shift, it feels like we’ll be through it. What does the best version of the web look like for you five years from now?
I hope the web is much richer in terms of modality. Today, I feel like the way humans consume information is still not fully encapsulated in the web. Today, things exist in very different ways — you have webpages, you have YouTube, etc. But over time, I hope the web is much more multimodal, it’s much richer, much more interactive. It’s a lot more stateful, which it’s not today.
I view it as, while fully acknowledging the point that people may use AI to generate a lot of spam, I also feel every time there’s a new wave of technology, people don’t quite know how to use it. When mobile came, everyone took webpages and shoved them into mobile applications. Then, later, people evolved [into making] really native mobile applications.
The way people use AI to actually solve new things, new use cases, etc. is yet to come. When that happens, I think the web will be much, much richer, too. So: dynamically composing a UI in a way that makes sense for you. Different people have different needs, but today you’re not dynamically composing that UI. AI can help you do that over time. You can also do it badly and in the wrong way and people can use it shallowly, but there will be entrepreneurs who figure out an extraordinarily good way to do it, and out of it, there’ll be great new things to come.
Google creates a lot of incentives for development on the web through Search, through Chrome, through everything that you do. How do you make sure those incentives are aligned with those goals? Because maybe the biggest thing here is that the web ecosystem is in a moment of change, and Google has a lot of trust to build and rebuild. How do you think about making sure those incentives point at the right goals?
Look, not everything is in Google’s control. I wish I could influence what the single toughest experience when I go to websites today as a user is — you have a lot of cookie dialogues to accept, etc. So I would argue there are many things outside of that. You can go poll 100 users.
But what are the incentives we would like to create? I think, and this is a complex question, which is how do you reward originality, creativity, and independent voice at whatever scale at which you’re able to and give a chance for that to thrive in this content ecosystem we create? That’s what I think about. That’s what the Search team thinks about. But I think it’s an important principle, and I think it’ll be important for the web and important for us as a company.
That’s great. Well, Sundar, thank you so much for the time. Thank you for being on Decoder.
Thanks, Nilay. I greatly enjoyed it.
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July 05, 2024 08:31 ET | Source: SEO consultant Eric Schwartzman SEO consultant Eric Schwartzman
Manhattan, NY, July 05, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — SEO consultant Eric Schwartzman has released an exclusive podcast interview with a well-known SEO consultant who runs a New York-based SEO consultancy about what the recent Google leaks mean for SEO consultants and their clients. In this special episode of the Earned Media Podcast, these SEO consultants share their revelations about search engine optimization best practices.
This podcast episode was released just days after one of the SEO consultants wrote the groundbreaking blog post announcing the leak. The post created a buzz in the SEO consulting community with revelations from leaked internal Google documents.
The SEO consulting findings shared in this podcast are already changing how SEO consultants approach SEO strategy, offering a competitive edge in understanding and navigating Google’s complex ranking systems.

SEO Consultant Uncovers Google Algorithm Secrets
In this episode, the SEO consultant discusses Google’s ranking systems and the factors influencing search results. Drawing from his extensive research and analysis, he reveals the hidden mechanisms behind Google’s algorithm, providing valuable insights for SEO professionals. These insights include a detailed examination of how different ranking factors interact and influence each other, suggesting a clearer picture of how Google determines the order of search results.

SEO Consultancy Exposes Google’s Deceptive Practices
Discover how Google appears to have misled the SEO community about key ranking factors. He explains the real role of domain authority, click data, and more, challenging the conventional wisdom within SEO consultancy, and provides evidence from the leaked documents that show discrepancies between Google’s public statements and their actual practices, revealing the need for SEO consultants to test, critically evaluate and adapt their strategies.

SEO Experts on the Impact of AI on Search
SEO experts need to stay ahead in the evolving search landscape. He delves into how AI is reshaping search and the implications for SEO strategies. Learn about Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and other AI-driven changes that are redefining SEO. He highlights specific AI technologies and how they are integrated into Google’s search algorithms, emphasizing the need for SEO consultants to understand and leverage these advancements.

Actionable SEO Consultant Insights
The SEO consultant provides practical advice for SEO consultancies on optimizing for the new realities of search. He emphasizes the importance of authoritative content, user engagement, and adapting to AI advancements. He also shares specific tactics for creating content that not only ranks well but also engages users, increasing the likelihood of achieving higher conversion rates and sustained traffic growth.

SEO Consultant Discusses the Truth About Click Data
Contrary to Google’s public statements, click data plays a significant role in rankings. The SEO consultant explains how this impacts your SEO efforts and why understanding this hidden factor is crucial for SEO consultants. He provides detailed examples of how click data influences search rankings and offers strategies for leveraging this knowledge to improve SEO performance.

SEO Consultant Emphasizes Authoritative Voice in Content
Creating high-quality, authoritative content is more crucial than ever in the age of AI. This experienced SEO consultant shares insights on why an authoritative voice in content creation is key to success in the current SEO landscape. He discusses techniques for establishing authority and trustworthiness in your content, which can lead to better rankings and more engaged audiences.

SEO Consultant Offers Actionable Strategies
The SEO consultant offers practical tips on optimizing your site for AI-driven search engines. Stay ahead of the competition by implementing these actionable strategies shared by a leading SEO professional. These strategies include advanced keyword research techniques, on-page optimization tactics, and link-building methods tailored to the evolving SEO landscape.

SEO Consultant Highlights Fragmentation of Search
The increasing diversity of search platforms necessitates optimizing for more than just Google. The SEO consultant discusses the fragmentation of search and why a multi-platform strategy is essential for SEO consultants. He explains how to effectively optimize for different search engines and platforms, ensuring a broader reach and more comprehensive SEO strategy.

SEO Consultant on AI and Verification
The role of AI in search and the need for users to verify information through trusted sources like Google is crucial. The SEO consultant provides insights into how AI impacts search verification processes. He explores the ethical considerations and best practices for ensuring that AI-generated content remains accurate and reliable.

SEO Consultant Analyzes Google’s Core Updates
Recent updates are addressing AI content and the ongoing battle against spam. The SEO consultant analyzes these core updates and what they mean for SEO consultants. He breaks down the specific changes in Google’s algorithms and offers guidance on adapting SEO strategies to stay compliant and competitive.

SEO Consultant’s Best Practices for Language Models
Ranking in AI-driven search environments requires new strategies. Based on his latest research, the New York-based SEO consultant shares best practices for optimizing language models. He also provides detailed advice on creating content that aligns with the preferences of AI-driven search engines, ensuring better visibility and higher rankings.

About SEO Expert Eric Schwartzman
SEO expert Eric Schwartzman is a leading digital marketing consultant specializing in SEO and content strategy. His Earned Media Podcast is a must-listen among SEO consultants, frequently igniting heated discussions about the future of search. With years of experience and a deep understanding of the industry, he is a trusted authority in SEO, making this podcast episode a must-listen for anyone serious about staying ahead in the field of search engine optimization.

Learn these SEO Consulting Benefits:
SEO Consultant Podcast Episode Highlights
Listen to the full episode to gain valuable insights from these SEO consultants and stay ahead of the evolving SEO landscape.
Media Contact: 
Eric Schwartzman
info@seonewsbureau.com

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Download your copy of SEO Trends 2025 and discover what to be hopeful about in a changing search world.
Join us in analyzing 3 case studies that show the importance of driving brand search behavior and engagement, and how to do it in months, instead of years.
Download this guide and learn how to optimize and manage Google Performance Max campaigns, with expert insights and actionable strategies to ensure your campaigns are effective.
Join us in analyzing 3 case studies that show the importance of driving brand search behavior and engagement, and how to do it in months, instead of years.
Join us in analyzing 3 case studies that show the importance of driving brand search behavior and engagement, and how to do it in months, instead of years.
Join us as we dive into exclusive survey data from industry-leading SEOs, digital marketers, content marketers, and more to highlight the top priorities and challenges that will shape the future of search in 2025.
Google’s John Mueller confirms core updates impact the search engine’s AI-powered overviews.
In a recent LinkedIn exchange, Google’s Senior Search Analyst John Mueller confirmed that core algorithm updates impact the search engine’s AI-powered overviews.
This info gives us a clearer picture of how AI is being woven into Google’s search results.
Responding to a question on LinkedIn, Mueller stated:
“These are a part of search, and core updates affect search, so yes.”
This backs up what folks in the SEO industry have noticed—the sources used in AI overviews seem to change after major algorithm updates.
Google rolled out AI overviews in US search results a few months back.
These summaries use a special version of Google’s Gemini AI to generate answers at the top of search results. The AI pulls info from different websites and combines it into a short, easy-to-read overview.
Core updates are broad changes to Google’s search algorithms and systems, typically rolled out several times a year.
These updates are intended to improve the quality of search results by reassessing how content is evaluated and ranked.
Google’s most recent core update, launched on August 15, is still rolling out. The company advises waiting until the update is finished before analyzing the impact.
As Google keeps integrating AI into search, publishers need more clarity around how core algorithm updates impact these features.
Mueller’s confirmation helps, but there’s still a lot we don’t know. There are still many questions about what makes content show up in AI overviews and whether it’s different from what makes websites rank high in regular search results.
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Matt G. Southern, Senior News Writer, has been with Search Engine Journal since 2013. With a bachelor’s degree in communications, …
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As you know, the Google November 2024 core update started rolling out Monday, November 11, at 3:30 pm ET. So far, some sites are seeing really big movements, like massive movements, with their search rankings. But it seems like most SEOs are not noticing big changes across their sites. So maybe, this update is not as widespread as some other core updates or maybe it is just too soon to tell…
It is very possible that we are being slow to pick up on these changes or maybe this update is not hitting that many sites across Google’s search index. It just may be too early to tell. The high level Google Search volatility tools still mostly seem calmer than normal, especially all those pre-Google core update ranking volatility we’ve been covering. And many are saying this update started days before Google announced it, but every time I ask Google if that is true, they tell me no – it is not true. Take that for what you will.
Some are telling me they are seeing huge gains with their sites returning in Google Discover. Some are seeing huge changes with their organic traffic. But most seem to say they don’t see any movement yet on their individual sites.
Glenn Gabe has been tracking this update like a hawk and has seen tremendous movement for a nice number of sites:

Good Morning Google Land! This is the Nov 14th edition of "Core Update Notes". Like I thought could happen, I believe we are starting to see the first movement from the Nov 2024 core update. I am seeing some big swings in search visibility across sites and verticals. I've also… pic.twitter.com/ISdQAzuFGX

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 14, 2024

Good Morning Google Land! This is the Nov 14th edition of "Core Update Notes". Like I thought could happen, I believe we are starting to see the first movement from the Nov 2024 core update. I am seeing some big swings in search visibility across sites and verticals. I've also… pic.twitter.com/ISdQAzuFGX

Core Update Notes cont'd: Going through this process has also underscored how volatile September and October have been. I've been surfacing more and more sites that saw a lot of movement during that time, surging or dropping significantly.

Also, I ran the visibility numbers… pic.twitter.com/RzaNJbjFUw

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 14, 2024

Core Update Notes cont'd: Going through this process has also underscored how volatile September and October have been. I've been surfacing more and more sites that saw a lot of movement during that time, surging or dropping significantly.

Also, I ran the visibility numbers… pic.twitter.com/RzaNJbjFUw

Core update notes (cont’d): And I had to share this finding… It’s very early and it’s not up a ton yet, but very very interesting to see Forbes Advisor surge a bit with the Nov 2024 core update. Here is the 30 day view and then zoomed out a bit with the drop I originally… pic.twitter.com/7bAoGM6MYs

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 14, 2024

Core update notes (cont’d): And I had to share this finding… It’s very early and it’s not up a ton yet, but very very interesting to see Forbes Advisor surge a bit with the Nov 2024 core update. Here is the 30 day view and then zoomed out a bit with the drop I originally… pic.twitter.com/7bAoGM6MYs
I asked on X and LinkedIn if anyone is seeing movement after the core update was announced and most are saying no, they have not. Across both polls, so far about 80% are saying they are not seeing movement and 20% say they are.
Even going through WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World and this site, I am seeing most people saying they see nothing but some are saying they are seeing big changes. So this flows with the overall response. Again, everyone may start seeing big changes tomorrow or maybe not – I don’t know.

SEO Chatter

Here is some of the chatter I am seeing:

No movement yet! Discover is also not moving at all.

Day after we went from #2 to #1 on Black Friday
Now back on 2!

Had a strange 2-day spike last week, but nothing either way after the update (long may it last!)

Sadly, we found a new level of zero but it wasn’t far to fall, so I’m not sure if that would count as a lot of movement.

Yes big time yesterday on one of my sites

More volatility between core updates than during the update

Not in the SERPS’s, but I see a lot of movement in Google Discover.

The update has been going on for a while, but it’s currently interesting. The ranking of my website is improving, but the number of visitors via Google has dropped again. Meanwhile, the Google News traffic has reached 0. What I find very strange, however, is that very old articles in particular receive traffic from Google, while new articles, i.e. all the news that we publish during the day, receive 0.

We are dropping but that doesn’t mean the update has just started. We all know the update was pushed a few days or perhaps a week before they announced it.

From what I’m seeing: from March 2024 to July I had stable traffic from GSC but the billable visits were off the roof, after checking with WP Engine, I saw many came from the same IP (Google) and other cities in the US, so it was some boting, the bandwidth was impacted too (scrap website?). Conversions were bad at this time
August to mid-September were okay months, with normal traffic patterns (like 2023). This month, I see the same, traffic matches between the WP Engine dashboard and GSC. Bandwidth is low. There is no conversion, but I have inquiries. For this month, it’s normal as everyone is waiting for Black Friday deals!

I believe they are gaslighting with this update, seen hour on hour movement for the last 6 weeks (loads of posts on this in that time) then total stagnation since the announcement, nothings moving! I believe they ran the update 6-4 weeks back and announced it when it completed!

Anyone notice any ‘changes’?
So far I’m seeing absolutely nothing. This core update feels non-existent.

Same here.

10% up yesterday (vs same day last week) and 20% up today so far….

My site got hit. Some posts on Page 1 went down to Page 2 or lower.
Seeing lots of YouTube, social media posts, forums in the mix, pushing my pages down.

Guys do you see any volatility at all? Seems odd, it’s been 2 days since the core update announced…
I see no change

Our traffic has stayed the same for the past two days: 75% from Google, 15% from Bing, and 10% from other sources.

I had a nice jump in traffic over the last 5-6 days, and then the spam reappeared in force today. All gains were lost, and traffic is back to where it was before. How predictable is Google with its ranking of spam, hacked and expired domains.

So this is a mix bag and it seems like some sites are seeing really big changes but for most, SEOs are asking where this update is…

Google Tracking Tools

The tools also seem much less volatile now than they were over the past several weeks. But again, maybe we will see things pick up tomorrow? Here is what they are showing.
Semrush:

SimilarWeb:

Sistrix:

Wincher:

Cognitive SEO:

Accuranker:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Mozcast:

Mangools:

Algoroo:

SERPstat:

Data For SEO:

Keep us posted on what you are all seeing.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
The content at the Search Engine Roundtable are the sole opinion of the authors and in no way reflect views of RustyBrick ®, Inc
Copyright © 1994-2024 RustyBrick ®, Inc. Web Development All Rights Reserved.
This work by Search Engine Roundtable is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Creative Commons License and YouTube videos under YouTube’s ToS.

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Search Engine Land » SEO » SEO reality check: 13 hard-hitting truths you need to hear
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SEO is far from dead – it’s simply changed beyond recognition. To stay relevant, SEOs must adapt to these shifts, expand their skillsets and embrace new technologies. 
This article outlines 13 hard-hitting truths about modern SEO, revealing the realities every SEO professional needs to know to stay ahead.
These insights are intended to challenge your current approach, pushing you to rethink strategies that may no longer serve you.
Traditional content and website-level SEO tactics like page speed, keyword optimization and link building alone will no longer succeed. SEO now has three tiers: 
You must continue to work on traditional content-level SEO, but you will fail if you don’t upskill and apply all three tiers of modern SEO. 
The who behind the content is now key. Optimizing the creator and publisher entities, including their E-E-A-T credibility and topical authority. 
Dig deeper: How the Google leak confirms the significance of author and publisher entities in SEO
While links from websites with powerful domain authority (DA) remain helpful, their direct impact on SEO performance is dwarfed by other credibility signals. 
Google assesses many other signals to judge credibility, such as: 
If you overlook these factors or rely too heavily on traditional DA link strategies, your results will likely fall short.
Stop relying on keyword counts to boost rankings. 
Instead, focus on key elements like:
Keywords can still inspire your strategy, but use them thoughtfully and shift your attention to multimedia content that aligns with each stage of the buyer’s journey. 
Keep your messaging consistent, clear and always on-brand across all content types.
Written content is steadily losing ground as Google and Microsoft Bing increasingly prioritize multimedia elements like videos, images, Knowledge Panels and generative AI in their search results. 
As AI becomes better at analyzing and presenting multimedia content, traditional text-based content is taking a back seat in the SERPs.
For decades, ranking in the blue links has been central to SEO strategy, relying heavily on written content, keywords and links. 
Yet these traditional tactics have steadily dropped in priority. 
They still serve as the foundation of the SERP, as confirmed by representatives from both Bing and Google.
However, their impact on visibility and traffic has been diluted by the rise of SERP features, knowledge elements and the steady evolution of search. 
With the integration of generative AI, blue links are becoming even less relevant for achieving meaningful traffic and visibility.
With the introduction of Bing’s Deep Search and Google’s AI Overviews, blue links now carry value primarily through what I call “implicit ranking.” 
In implicit ranking, the search engine analyzes multiple results based on a query and combines them into a single, summarized outcome. 
This process happens behind the scenes, making it nearly impossible to measure or control. 
Bing’s Deep Search already demonstrates this approach in action, signaling a shift in how search results are presented.
If you haven’t embraced on-SERP SEO, now is the time to start. It’s far more than a buzzword – it’s an essential strategy that’s here to stay. 
On-SERP SEO shifts the focus from generating clicks to maintaining consistent brand visibility and narrative throughout the acquisition funnel.
Achieving this level of visibility requires mastering SEO for both on-site and off-site content.
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
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Websites are no longer the primary gateway to online visibility. 
Instead, brands are gaining dominance across various channels, including social media, review platforms, video and traditional PR mentions. 
While your website remains the central hub and ultimate destination for your digital marketing and SEO, it’s essential to expand your focus beyond the website itself. 
Over time, it will become less visible in search results and assistive AI platforms, requiring a broader, multi-channel approach to maintain brand visibility.
Google’s understanding of your brand identity now outweighs traditional content strategies focused on keywords and links. 
It evaluates entities – whether a corporation, person or product – and ranks results based on how relevant the content is to these entities rather than simply counting words and links. 
A clear sign of this shift is when Google recognizes your brand name and displays it in the SERP. 
If it doesn’t recognize the brand, it will only show the domain, highlighting that the website is a weaker proxy for brand understanding.
Dig deeper: Modern SEO: Packaging your brand and marketing for Google
Google and Bing have moved away from schema markup due to its inconsistent and often manipulative implementation across websites. 
Much like the meta keywords tag of the past, schema markup is frequently misused in attempts to game the algorithm. 
Neither search engine is investing in expanding its support for Sschema beyond the basic types and attributes they currently recognize. 
Instead, both focus on extracting information directly from pages through:
The future of SEO lies not in explicit semantics like schema markup but in implicit semantics. Think clear, on-page content that is consistently validated by multiple trusted sources.
Entity optimization goes far beyond simply adding schema markup to webpages or obtaining a Knowledge Panel for a person or corporation – it’s just the beginning. 
True entity optimization involves creating a highly confident understanding of the entity, which is essential for search algorithms. 
This confidence is often overlooked but is crucial for search engines to accurately grasp every attribute of the entity and its relationships with other entities, such as persons, corporations, products, services, webpages, books, topics and cohorts.
To build this understanding, you must create a detailed and accurate network of relationships and attributes for your entity. 
Maintaining this confidence means ensuring that this web of relationships remains stable as your digital footprint evolves over time. 
Additionally, you must ensure that your representation of related entities aligns with their actual attributes and relationships, reinforcing the interconnectedness across the web.
Dig deeper: How to optimize for entities
Google is increasingly capable of identifying the creators of content and the corporations that publish it. 
As a result, it evaluates and applies credibility signals related to notability, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness and transparency (N-E-E-A-T-T) across three levels: 
People now rely on both traditional search and conversational assistive interfaces. 
This means your SEO strategies must adapt to the conversational and multimodal nature of platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and SERP features such as AI Overviews and Bing generative search.
Conversational, multimodal search is the future. 
Fabrice Canel from Bing highlights the “bridges” between these platforms that move users seamlessly from one to another, depending on the task. 
For instance:
This shift is happening now, so you must optimize for these new platforms today before it’s too late.
Supply creates its own demand. 
Assistive chatbots haven’t replaced search. They’ve expanded the ways we can leverage information gathered from the web, using algorithms to solve user problems. 
As AI transforms the search and assistive engine landscape, Google’s dominance is waning. 
AI-powered on-SERP features (i.e., Google AI Overviews and Bing generative search), along with off-SERP platforms (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta, Alexa, Siri, etc.), are becoming crucial for reaching audiences. 
With billions of users across these platforms, ignoring them would be a missed opportunity.
This shift to a conversational, multimodal, and multichannel experience requires optimizing your content, corporate brand entities and key subject matter experts for all the BigTech algorithms. 
Furthermore, AI bots are integrating more deeply into everyday tools like CoPilot+ PCs, Zapier, Canva, Gmail and Excel – creating new opportunities for those with a broad, beyond-Google SEO approach.
Dig deeper: Search everywhere optimization: 7 platforms SEOs need to optimize for beyond Google
Search has expanded far beyond Google SERPs, and this shift is irreversible. While content-level SEO remains essential, it’s no longer sufficient alone. 
As AI increasingly integrates into everyday platforms and tools, Google’s dominance is diminishing. Search now spans multiple modalities and channels. 
People are engaging in search, research and assistance across text, voice, images and video using a variety of platforms.
Although the number of ways to engage potential customers has grown, Google and Bing still control the web’s indexing, keeping things relatively straightforward. 
By maintaining strong, consistent content online, you can influence how search engines interact with your brand. 
However, relying solely on Google is a mistake; Bing, which powers ChatGPT and many of Microsoft’s platforms, also plays a crucial role.
To thrive in today’s landscape, you must implement a universal strategy that optimizes your content, brand entities and subject matter experts for all the major search algorithms. 
Doing so will ensure your survival and position you for success, as these new technologies offer vast opportunities for visibility and customer acquisition across the entire funnel.
In my next article, I will present a practical 13-point roadmap for navigating the future of AI-driven search and assistive engines, providing actionable steps to help you adapt to SEO’s new reality and capitalize on the evolving digital ecosystem.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
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