In this episode of the International Web Effectiveness Podcast, we share key takeaways from BrightonSEO San Diego 2024, looking at the latest trends and strategies shaping the future of SEO. We highlight the growing importance of human-centric content, shifting searcher behaviors driven by AI and zero-click searches, and how brand discovery is increasingly influencing search rankings.
We also discuss the role of Reddit in SEO, the significance of identifying content gaps, and the evolving search behaviors on platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. Bill Hunt shares insights on content strategy, stressing the need for engaging, shareable content and the importance of building an audience for long-term SEO success.
With AI playing a pivotal role, we look at how to combine machine learning with human analysis for more accurate ranking predictions and how businesses need to adjust their SEO and content strategies to stay competitive. Bill Hunt also covers the buyer journey, AI-generated content, and the future of AI search, sharing insights on how companies can refine their approach to global SEO and content creation.
Key Takeaways
- Human-Centric Content: Prioritize user experience over just SEO strategies for broader relevance.
- Shifting Searcher Behavior: AI and zero-click searches are transforming how users find information.
- AI and Semantic Signals: Focus on content gaps and build topical authority rather than just targeting keywords.
- Reddit’s Influence: Leverage Reddit for SEO through brand channels and detailed posts linking to larger content.
- AI and Human Data for Rankings: Combine AI pattern recognition with human analysis for better ranking insights.
- Search Behavior Shift: Be present on social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram as people use them for searches.
- Transactional vs. Informational Pages: Align content with search intent to avoid Google ranking issues.
- Brand Building: Focus on providing value and solving customer problems, not just marketing trends.
- Content Strategy & SEO: Create engaging, shareable, and human-centric content for better SEO results.
- Buyer Cycle Insights: Understand the buyer journey to capture more search opportunities.
- AI Search Growth: AI search is growing rapidly and could soon rival Google searches.
- Simplification & Automation: AI can automate and refine searches, making information more accessible.
- Global SEO Adaptation: Evolving strategies and content are crucial as global search becomes more dominant.
- Leveraging Internal Experts: Empower subject matter experts to create high-quality, technical content with AI support.
Show Note Links
BrightonSEO San Diego 2024 Speakers:
►Daniel Russell
Talk Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lsekYSskcY
►Wil Reynolds
Talk Recording: https://info.seerinteractive.com/taking-action-from-digital-strategy-to-real-world-impact-2024
►Marcus Tober
►Nicolas Garfinkel
Talk URL: https://us.brightonseo.com/talks/keywords-arent-dead-its-just-complicated
►Rand Fishkin
Catch the Full Episode
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Rc6Q5azpjgc
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1irzLFNdhPtSh81Gy7razB
Transcript
Bill Scully: Welcome to episode seventeen of the International Web Effectiveness Podcast, where Bill Hunt and I, Bill Scully, discuss strategies and techniques to improve your web presence and manage your global websites. In our last episode, we explored IP location and language detection for redirection, discussing how businesses can manage IP detection effectively. We also emphasized the importance of eliminating errors for both SEO and visitor experience.
In this episode, we’re doing a roundup of Brighton SEO San Diego. Bill, how’s it going?
Bill Hunt: Good. How about you? How was Brighton?
Bill Scully: Brighton was great. I haven’t been to a conference since before COVID, so it was interesting. I used to attend a lot of conferences when I had to present in order for my company to cover the expenses. At Brighton, aside from a few people I interact with on social media, I didn’t run into anyone I knew or who remembered me. But the event was really well organized and professional. I’d say the focus was on the people, which was nice. There were plenty of opportunities to meet others.
It was also interesting—I’m not sure if they still do this—but none of the meals were included. Is that common now?
Bill Hunt: Yeah, most places don’t include meals anymore. At PubCon, they did, but I think it was just easier for them at the time. In previous years, at PubCon in Vegas and other places, you had to pay separately for meals. For instance, at the convention center in Vegas, there were multiple vendors, and you paid for your meals. I’ve seen both scenarios. It often comes down to logistics. Interestingly, food is one of the biggest issues people complain about when organizing conferences. From a cost perspective, I remember, when I was on the SES advisory board, they told us how expensive boxed lunches were. I forget the exact number, but they were ridiculously overpriced.
Bill Hunt: Yeah, for just a sandwich, fruit, and some chips. So, I think this gives people a chance to leave the venue and grab food elsewhere. But the location has to support that, or else you’d need spaces to break into smaller groups.
Bill Scully: Yeah, there were plenty of places to eat. As an introvert, I was happy I’d already made some connections before the conference. A shout-out to Noah Learner from SterlingSky for creating the SEO Slack group, which has become my go-to place for catching up on information. They even had a Slack channel dedicated to the event, which helped me meet up with others. I mostly stuck with those people.
Bill Hunt: Great.
Bill Scully: I used to think lunch was a good opportunity to sit with new people, but, you know, there wasn’t really the same “birds of a feather” dynamic anymore. You know those tables where you pick a topic to discuss?
Bill Hunt: Yeah, right.
Bill Scully: You could sit down, and others would join in. It was a great way to meet new people, especially if you already knew someone at the table.
Bill Hunt: Right, right.
Bill Scully: I ran into Jessica Bowman—she’s a friend of both of ours.
Bill Hunt: Yep, she’s doing well.
Bill Scully: That was about it, really. The main themes I took away from the conference included content—you’ve got to move beyond SEO and focus on human-centric content, making sure you’re on all the platforms where your customers are. The landscape of searcher and user behavior is shifting, with people now using AI to get answers. We’re seeing more zero-click searches in the SERPs, and search is being more influenced by discovery and brand.
Bill Scully: So, not a lot of—well, I shouldn’t say not a lot—there were a couple of presentations showing that revenue is not all coming from search. Some of it’s coming from other areas of the web. Another theme that came up was that rankings are increasingly driven by AI and semantic signals. You should focus more on gaps and topical authority rather than on individual keywords.
I was surprised to see just one or two main sessions on AI, but nearly every session touched on it. One of my favorite presentations was by Nick Garfinkel, who did a fantastic job presenting the ineffectiveness of relying on keyword difficulty scores from tools. He used data-heavy graphs and demonstrated how to use other data sources to develop a more sophisticated understanding of ranking factors. This included using machine learning to find patterns, with human intervention for review and adjustments. That was probably the biggest takeaway for me—something that will likely change the way I approach things.
Bill Hunt: Marcus Tober gave a really good presentation.
Bill Scully: I wouldn’t have watched that, but you suggested I check it out. Another recurring theme was Reddit’s increasing influence. You can create brand channels there instead of relying solely on a subreddit.
Bill Scully: This also came up in Will Reynolds’ presentation. You can run data analysis by taking keywords from a paid search account, processing that through Reddit to find matching subreddits, and then repurposing your content there. Instead of just providing a one-sentence answer, you can give more detailed content with a link back to the original article to drive traffic.
He also called out an issue with Perplexity. He pointed out that the results from Perplexity were often influenced by paid content. While they didn’t claim to be affiliates, the links often looked more like they were built intentionally, not scraped.
Bill Scully: There was a lot of bias in Perplexity for products. They’re upfront about being a for-profit entity, but so is Google. I think people forget that Google is not a public utility. It’s a business that needs people to use its product.
Bill Scully: Moving back to Perplexity, I think the average person doesn’t care about the business side as long as the answers provided are useful. My frustration with paid search is that many campaigns are ineffective. You search for something, and the results don’t match what you’re looking for. Perplexity seems to be cleaning that up a bit. It’s like what Google’s automation tries to do—serve more relevant ads based on what people are searching for.
Bill Scully: People will go where they can find the right answers. That’s why Reddit is becoming more popular. It hasn’t been overly gamified, so people feel they’re getting a more authentic, in-context result.
Bill Hunt: Right, Reddit’s ability to drill down and give you relevant answers is one of its key benefits. Over the past week, I’ve clicked into more Reddit listings in search results than ever before. They seem to provide better answers, especially for product reviews, which I find more useful than the typical listings I see.
Bill Scully: It’s interesting how things are shifting. One of the key takeaways is what you referred to as “findability.” Eighteen years ago at a conference in India, the final speaker didn’t realize he needed a visa to enter the country—typical for Americans with blue passports. They asked me to step in last minute to talk about where I saw search going, and I introduced the concept of “findability.” Even before social media exploded, I was talking about it—wherever people are looking, that’s where you need to be.
Bill Hunt: Exactly. My daughter does a lot of her searching on social platforms—Pinterest, Instagram, and the like. You’ve got to be present there, even if it’s not like getting a medical result on Instagram from the Mayo Clinic. But the point is, things are changing.
Bill Scully: And another thing is going back to the searcher. Let me plug an upcoming podcast episode where we’ll discuss why your perfectly built Hreflang setup may not be functioning as expected. I’m starting to see more anomalies. Just the other day, I posted about a case where a client asked why, out of a thousand pages, Google hadn’t picked up two of them. One of those pages was for their product name, and they were asking why a Canadian page was showing up in U.S. search results. It was a reverse issue, where a non-U.S. page appeared in the U.S. search results. I ran it through Ryan Jones’ CircPrecon tool.
Bill Hunt:
The minute I saw the results, I thought, “Oh man, this is new.” The Canadian page was a commercial query. The query for the product name was, in all practical purposes, transactional or commercial—whatever the cool kids are calling it these days. The U.S. page, because of the legal jargon and all the marketing fluff, was flagged as an informational page.
Think about it: if the query is transactional, why would Google show an informational page? There’s no reason for them to do it.
Bill Scully:
Right.
Bill Hunt:
They reached out to another country and said, “Hey, this is…” When we used Ryan’s tool, it showed that all the results were commercial. An informational result just didn’t fit—it was like “one of these things isn’t like the others.” That was actually the first time I noticed this, and then I started looking for it in other cases. I found two other situations where the page in one market was transactional, but in two other markets, it was deemed informational. There was also the reverse case, where an informational query about ingredients didn’t match the same wording across all pages, but the article still had different phrasing.
So, I think it’s great to hear people talking about this. I loved your example of finding what Will was talking about—here’s the phrase, and then how is it being used on Reddit? We used to talk about this back in the day with social media and help desk issues: What are the questions people are asking your call center? Do we have a page that answers that?
And there’s an article I’m putting up, and we need to queue up a podcast about site search in the future. You and I are both fans of optimizing site search and using site search data.
Bill Hunt:
This made me think of something: taking a question people are asking, taking something from paid search that may not be performing well, and looking to see how it’s being answered elsewhere. In your example, it was on Reddit, but the principle applies everywhere. People aren’t really talking about this, and I think the main reason is that it’s a lot of work.
Bill Scully:
Yeah.
Bill Hunt:
So, I was going to mention the keynotes. Will Reynolds did a—well, it felt like a twenty-minute rant about how search sucks, and he went through a customer journey. Everybody needs to be doing this, and it was so bad. Google failed every attempt he made to find something. He was looking for jeans, I think, and he talked about a company that’s environmentally friendly or focused on sustainability. But when he searched for it, nothing about sustainability came up in traditional search. All the good mentions were in social media.
I think this was in one of the AI search results—all the sustainability mentions were there, but traditional search had nothing to do with the company’s core message. Between social media and AI, though, it was perfectly dialed into that messaging. I thought that was fascinating. It raised the question: why is traditional search failing? I think it’s because many people don’t even implement this on their website. We’ve got all this content grazing, but everything starts with a TLDR (too long, didn’t read) statement—”We know you’re not going to read this because people don’t read anymore.”
Bill Hunt:
So, we feed it in bite-sized chunks, with bullets, pictures, stories, reels. But we don’t put that on our website. These other tools gather it from elsewhere and aggregate it, so it gets surfaced. What do we do about that? I’d be curious to hear what some of Will’s recommendations are to get around this.
Bill Scully:
Yeah.
Bill Hunt:
Honestly, I couldn’t remember what he searched for, but I know he was looking for SEO and PPC agencies. His main takeaway was to build an audience and create fans. He shared his company’s example—he’s shifted his focus from running the company to focusing on content creation. He’s all in on this. He believes in building an audience and fans. This ties into branding. Brand plays a huge role in search now. If people aren’t searching for your brand, you’re really struggling to rank for those big keywords. It’s got to be shareable. You need a content person who can take your technical information and turn it into quality, human-centric content that’s shareable.
Bill Scully:
I think—
Bill Hunt:
This is an interesting thing. I’m going to skip over one of these topics because I’m a little too passionate about it—the whole brand discussion. It reminds me of the old days of faith-based marketing: all the TV ads, “Yeah, TV, TV, TV!” It worked because people heard about the brand and it stuck in their minds, even though we couldn’t track it. At Pubcon, I saw people parroting that—it’s all about the brand, it’s all about this. But I’ll leave it at that.
Bill Scully:
So, you’re not a believer?
Bill Hunt:
I’m not a fan.
Bill Scully:
I’m not a fan either.
Bill Hunt:
Let me talk out of both sides of my mouth. I think one of the best things Rand Fishkin ever did was become a brand ambassador without actually being one. Through the whiteboard sessions, everything he did helped build the brand. I totally agree with that—you need to build your brand. But when I ask people about keywords, I ask them to answer two questions: What do you make, and what do you do? Then, how would someone search for that—whether they know it exists or they know you exist?
Bill Scully:
Right.
Bill Hunt: The other side of that equation is, what if they don’t know it exists and what if they don’t know you exist? If you think about those four squares—and I’ve seen people be just short of tears when they do this. I’ve had people want to not work with me after this exercise because they realized… One person wanted to actually ask for a transfer out of small business because he realized after this session that there’s no such thing as small business products. There’s no small business person who has ever put small or medium business in front of a query. If you want a router, you may put in features and functions to indicate like a five-port router.
Bill Scully: Totally, totally, totally with you there.
Bill Hunt: I don’t think when I talk about brand, I’m talking about the company name. That’s what I mean—company name or person name or whatever. IBM laptop, you know? But what if somebody didn’t know about IBM? The only reason I’m saying this is because I don’t want people, like they normally do, to only focus on this area. And I don’t think anybody’s…
Bill Scully: I’m with you there.
Bill Hunt: But I’m thinking like, a Google engineer.
Bill Hunt: I’ve got—I don’t know, pick a product—I’ve got, you know, seven thousand light bulb companies. How do I rank a light bulb search? I’m going to give preference to the brand. And how did they get that? So, let’s walk through the mechanics, because I think it’s engagement with the SERPs going to the site… Sure, people hear, “How did you get there?”
Bill Scully: This is great, because this is why we wanted to do this podcast originally. And for those who weren’t in the first episode, we wrestled with it. We wanted to say, “Why the why?” Right? We wanted to get the why behind the why. And what Bill is going through right now is exactly the why. You know, a Google engineer… There are seven thousand light bulb manufacturers, or brands of light bulbs. Which one do we show?
Bill Hunt: And I just really wanted to clarify, it’s not because Sylvania—which was one of the biggest light bulb producers in the world—I don’t even know if they exist anymore, because they were too short-sighted to go after LED. They wanted incandescent. I mean, they tried to get the government to protect them, you know, to ban these other CFLs and LEDs because they didn’t want to pivot off of that. Right? So that’s what I’m getting at.
Bill Scully: And as you started to say, “What are the factors? Or is it being clicked?” Well, you can’t be clicked if you’re not ranked. And you can’t be ranked if you don’t have the other signals.
Bill Hunt: And I think this is why I get spun up when I hear, because while what you heard wasn’t where my brain went, I’ve seen in the past two weeks people basically telling you the only thing you have to focus on is improving your brand image and brand name. But you didn’t say that. I didn’t. And Will didn’t say that. But these other things that people read from prominent, you know, influencers, that are saying that’s where you should spend your limited budget. And so, that’s why I just wanted to interject that, and you did it for me.
Bill Scully: I’m with you. So, you know, I get my… my head jumps to what I think people are saying, and I don’t say it out loud specifically, but I think we’re in agreement.
Bill Hunt: Right. Totally in agreement.
Bill Scully: Okay, totally in agreement. No, no, no. Because you then clarified that. So, it isn’t… And again, I want to, you know, say that it’s great that it’s being talked about. Mhmm. But we need to—when we hear something—and again, this is my fear, and I see it all the time.
Bill Hunt: People will hear something and they only hear part of it. They don’t apply critical reasoning and then they go back and they start re-architecting their organization. Mhmm. You know, to go down a rat hole on something that’s a micro fragment of what the speaker actually was trying to say. Yeah, and I think, you know, it gets back to our whole idea and why, you know, I get so animated sometimes with this is because, you know, my brain is thinking multidimensionally, the implications because I—you know, we both have to deal with the implications of this. Sometimes it could be great for business.
Bill Scully: Right.
Bill Hunt: Like we were talking before, you know, I’ve had a couple of people tell their clients that, you know, if you’re having a problem with your Hreflang, don’t fix the problem but use a canonical to the main market. That definitely fixes your problem because now you don’t have any other market websites when you do it. So it clearly fixes the problem, but people hear this. And then they go and parrot it, you know, or they come back because they misunderstood it because they’re not thinking through. And then, like I was talking about this case about brand. I was more reacting to the other articles that were telling you that brand was exponentially more important.
Bill Scully: Mhmm.
Bill Hunt: And it brings back to the whole day of, you know, the lesser SEO people were really focused, and that’s like paid. There was an argument the other day—yet again, with yet again a gazillion points of data. I think, Ahrefs did it, 2.5 million keywords they looked at in paid. And a branded paid term. And I don’t even remember what the conclusion was because halfway through they lost me. It started out there saying, “Yeah, do you need to buy your brand terms?” Putting in all the logical caveats implying brand terms, then went down this rat hole. I believe is why I tuned out, saying, “Because brand is so important to organic search these days.” It’s like, “No, no.” Okay, I stopped reading at that point. And I haven’t thought this through, but I think if you just used what we’re suggesting, going through a customer journey, there are probably good reasons to do paid search.
Bill Scully: Sure.
Bill Hunt: Maybe people looking for something in the thousands are landing on your homepage, where they should be learning somewhere else. So that’s just because they’re searching for your brand and something else, and your homepage is such a high authority for the brand name. And what about all the people who—and I saw somebody did this recently—they tried to quantify the number of people that are just searching instead of going to ibm.com or, you know, internationalwebmastery.com, they search the name and click whatever comes up, whether it be paid or organic or whatever. I just think that that brand name—and when we had Data Prism—I mean, we had so much data to demonstrate these types of things.
Bill Hunt: Time and time again, you know, but we could never get anybody to listen. But I do think it’s…
Bill Scully: Mhmm.
Bill Hunt: Let me make one more point, and then we’ll get off of this. The point you just made about somebody searching for your brand name, I wonder how many people have looked at the chain. However, they got to your homepage. How many people went into site search?
Bill Scully: Yeah.
Bill Hunt: And then, what did they search? Yeah, that’s one of the first things I always review with people is, you know, what can’t people find?
Bill Scully: Exactly.
Bill Hunt: Because if they can’t find it in the navigation, and you spent a gazillion dollars on the latest greatest UX people, and they can’t find it—I mean, we used to mine this like crazy at IBM. You know, anytime anything would pop up, we would feed it back to say, “Oh, wow.” It was interesting when IBM was pivoting into solutions, because, you know, if you just, you know, take a shopping basket, and you get a server, and you get this, and you get this, and you get a consultant, you’ve now got a solution. So, we solutionized everything.
Bill Scully: Mhmm.
Bill Hunt: And people thought that solutions was solving problems. It was interesting. Like, in an actual focus group, they said, “No, I thought this was where I could go to solve my problems.” You know, all they had to do was pull it down and say, “Oh, bank transfer. I can help. I can help desk.” Like a help desk.
Bill Scully: Right.
Bill Hunt: So, we put the brain trust together to figure out, “What do we call that?” In the end, after spending millions advertising that “We’re a solution company now,” they wouldn’t budge off the term “solutions.” So, we just dealt with it.
Bill Hunt: It’s interesting how things like that happen. And I want to come back to one last point on this… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken about this at conferences, and people either told me they were confused by it or felt that it was an overwhelming amount of work when I discussed the buyer cycle.
Bill Scully: Mhmm.
Bill Hunt: I did a project once for a major electronics company with Dataprism. We wanted to know—we charted out a hundred different flows. One of those was for televisions. A hundred flows, and that was one of them. We tracked a searcher who started with a query for “TV,” and we asked, “When they did this query, what were they really looking for?” I need to publish this article. I built a whole cool flowchart for it. But what is it that they’re asking? What are they searching for? What content do we need to put in front of them?
Bill Scully: Mhmm.
Bill Hunt: We created what they call a “fishbone diagram” for every question at each step, like, “What did we think they were looking for?” We did this from the first query for “TV” to identifying a particular model number. It involved around sixteen steps from a broad query like “TV” to a specific model. And we found that, at the culmination of this entire chain, we were represented less than two percent of the time.
Bill Scully: Wow.
Bill Hunt: So, imagine fifty searches to get from “TV” to a specific model. By the end of that search chain, you know, Google says it’s five, twelve, or twenty-two queries. It’s like the old question: how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll? If it’s twenty-two queries, how many of those twenty-two queries are you represented for? Are you there for “TV”? Are you there for, I don’t even think we have LCD TVs anymore? Are you there for some other feature combo? Take all the different feature-function combinations and ask, “Are you there?” We’ve done this for probably a hundred companies, and the best anyone has ever managed to be present was twelve percent of the time. So, that means eighty-eight percent of the time, from the first query to the last, you weren’t there.
Bill Scully: Wow.
Bill Hunt: Right. So, that goes back to your point. That’s what they’re saying. Think about that. Do we have content for that? What do we have to represent those different pieces? If the best we ever came across was twelve or seventeen percent, that’s a lot of missed opportunity. That’s why I love your Reddit takeaway. I remember doing a project at Adobe where we, along with Autodesk, mined social media. We tracked queries where people had problems with competitors’ software. How do I do this drawing in a competitor’s software or this with a competitor to Photoshop? And guess what Adobe did? They created an answer on how to fix the problem, but they did it using Adobe. They’d capture people with a defect or challenge in someone else’s product and show them how to solve it using their product. That’s huge.
Bill Scully: Mhmm.
Bill Hunt: For me, hearing that people were talking about that at the conference tells me we’re heading in the right direction with getting people to think about where things are going.
Bill Scully: Mhmm.
Bill Hunt: The big takeaway from AI, going back to your Google engineer analogy, is that everyone’s trying to predict what’s next in a sequence. Going back to Google’s first camping demo: Someone wants to know about camping, but really, they want to know things like “What do I need for camping?” or “Where should I go camping?” Do we end up down the rabbit hole of tents and sleeping bags? I just tell people to search it, and Google figures it out. You’ll see all types of content for a query like that.
Bill Scully: Mhmm.
Bill Hunt: It’s good. People are talking about it. To me, that’s a great takeaway from the event. Anything else?
Bill Scully: There was a session on AI, content, and legal matters, and I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t go into detail, but it’s a lot different than you might think. For example, if something is created with AI, nobody owns it. If you create a logo using AI, there is no ownership. If you create articles with AI, there’s no ownership. Anything you upload to help generate your AI output becomes public domain.
Bill Hunt: Yeah, you need to be really careful with AI.
Bill Hunt: I think that’s a great insight. We’ve seen people launch companies in the past couple of months, showcasing logos or products they created using AI tools like Canva. It’s an interesting concept. I wonder, if you add some human touch to it, like you said, would that make it unique and more valuable? It ties into your point about adding a human element to anything you produce. But more importantly, uploading content into these AI tools means you’re essentially giving away perpetual rights to that data. You could even be violating NDAs.
Bill Scully: Exactly.
Bill Hunt: I’ve heard of cases where proprietary information—like earnings statements or balance sheets—ends up in AI-generated outputs because someone uploaded it for their project. Fascinating, right? Another thing that came up was that states are starting to create their own regulations, which could be a potential nightmare. I’ll drop a link from Daniel Russell, the expert on AI and legal issues. He mentioned a bill in Congress that we should all support to prevent every state from creating its own regulations. It would be a nightmare if that happened.
Bill Scully: Cool.
Bill Hunt: Any other nuggets?
Bill Scully: I don’t know if you’ll believe this, but AI search is currently three percent of the market. It’s increasing at thirty percent per month. In twenty-six months, it’s possible that AI platforms will handle as many searches as Google. What do you think about something like this? My wife and I were talking the other day about something like Po or an interface that taps into whichever tool you’re using.
Bill Hunt: Right. You do a query, and similar to Google, it determines the intent. What are the fragments? Are they looking to… Maybe not even a query, but the query could be converted into a prompt. That prompt goes out to whatever tool, and brings back a result. Any thoughts on that? It could be a game-changer—almost like the “Google of AI interfaces.”
Bill Scully: So, aggregate search results with different intents for a single keyword?
Bill Hunt: Yeah. Well, maybe not just a keyword or a phrase. Let me give you an example. United is now running direct flights to Greenland starting this summer.
Bill Scully: Mhm.
Bill Hunt: And Greenland, on my world map, is a big piece of real estate that hasn’t been colored in yet. So I was looking up, “What can I do in Greenland?”
Bill Scully: Right.
Bill Hunt: And the answers on Google were all terrible—same copycat, clone content, all trying to sell me tours and trips. So I went to four different engines—AI tools like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.
Bill Scully: Mhm.
Bill Hunt: Perplexity and one other tool restructured my question into a series of prompts. It took my relatively naive “What to do over three days in Greenland” and turned it into a proper, more efficient query.
Bill Scully: Yeah.
Bill Hunt: That got me thinking—what if there were something that took an oversimplified query, not like “What time is it in Greenland,” but something more ambiguous, and broke it down into a series of prompts? It could then bring back a fully baked itinerary. I know there are travel tools that do that, but you get the idea.
Bill Scully: Right.
Bill Hunt: You could create an agent to do that. You could set a prompt, “Ask me five questions to improve this query,” pull information from each, then create a Word doc with it.
Bill Scully: Yeah.
Bill Hunt: And then… tell me about your agents here.
Bill Scully: An agent.
Bill Hunt: Bill, you’re a hundred times more technical than I am with this stuff.
Bill Scully: I’ve created agents. It’s not that hard.
Bill Hunt: It’s like—
Bill Scully: Nope.
Bill Hunt: The average human is not going to—
Bill Scully: No. Yeah.
Bill Hunt: Yeah. The person who searches on Google or maybe uses ChatGPT because they want to be with the cool kids—the moment you say, “I’m gonna put that in a Word doc,” they won’t do it.
Bill Scully: Right.
Bill Hunt: What I’m saying is, is there a simplification of Google? Someone’s likely already doing this. Is there an “AI-ified” tool for human laziness and inefficiency?
Bill Scully: Mhm.
Bill Hunt: A tool where I don’t have to do any of this. Look at the rave reviews about no-code tools. Every day I see posts on LinkedIn, “Hey, I built this tool, and I didn’t code a line. I just entered my needs, and it refined them.”
Bill Scully: Yeah.
Bill Hunt: That’s all I’m saying. I get the agent. But can that agent create another agent? I could go to agentsrus.com—or .ai—and let it work in the background. It would take my naive query and turn it into a proper set of questions. Then it would gather information from the world, package it, and bring it back to me in something I can read in bite-sized formats.
Bill Scully: Yeah.
Bill Hunt: I think until we have something as simple as Google, people won’t leave it. They are out there searching and using tools, but I’ll go back to my Bing experience.
Bill Scully: Mhm.
Bill Hunt: I thought Bing was going to destroy Google, but they never marketed why it was different—just “use Bing.”
Bill Scully: Right.
Bill Hunt: You’ve heard the story—when we were at the theater, the Bing commercial played, and the women behind us said, “I tried it, but I hated going to Google to get to Bing.”
Bill Scully: [Laughing]
Bill Hunt: They didn’t know they could change their browser to Bing. They searched in Google for Bing and felt the results were similar.
Bill Scully: Right.
Bill Hunt: How do we avoid Bing-ing this agent? I don’t even know what my wife uses as her default phone browser—she probably doesn’t either.
Bill Scully: Right.
Bill Hunt: But yeah, you’re right. Most people don’t know how to switch.
Bill Scully: Well, that’s part of the lawsuit, right?
Bill Hunt: Yeah.
Bill Scully: It wasn’t set up as a one-click option to choose a different browser. You had to go through steps to unbundle it.
Bill Hunt: Yeah.
Bill Scully: That was one of their arguments—they purposely made it difficult to change.
Bill Hunt: Again, if we want to leapfrog, it has to be as simple as the early days of browsers. I remember when that magical search function converted long numeric codes into results we could actually see. It was like, “Oh my god, I don’t need to remember that anymore.”
Bill Scully: Yep.
Bill Hunt: That’s the point—I think as the results and the ease of use improve, we’ll see this shift. It comes down to ease of use and the quality of results.
Bill Scully: Yeah.
Bill Hunt: If someone figures that out, I think it’s going to be Perplexity. They’re forcing paid users to test their findings, which might be a way of sharing it with a smaller group before they get it really right.
Bill Scully: Yeah.
Bill Hunt: I’ve paid for Perplexity, and I’m pretty sure that’s the one that converted my vague “What to do over a long weekend in Iceland or Greenland” into a series of prompts with a detailed response.
Bill Scully: Yeah.
Bill Hunt: It’s training me to think differently as a user.
Bill Scully: Well, not just that—it’s thinking at every step before moving to the next one, which is pretty cool.
Bill Hunt: Right. And that brings us back to the customer journey—understanding the steps from idea, need, or want to purchase is key.
Bill Scully: So cool.
Bill Hunt: It’s interesting to watch how the numbers change. I think Brett made a prediction today—one that I liked but didn’t like—saying going global is the new local.
Bill Scully: Hah, so every Tom, Dick, and Harry is going to be a global search expert now?
Bill Hunt: Exactly. It’s changing, and if you’re trying to crack this the old way without adapting—like not editing your content—you’re going to fall behind.
Bill Scully: Right.
Bill Hunt: I want to circle back to something before we wrap up. Should companies focus on enabling their internal experts to create technical content? What if engineers, tech writers, or subject matter experts created content? At Cisco, Julio Fernandez did this, and we did it at IBM. Engineers wrote about what they were doing—it wasn’t polished writing, but it was authentic and deeply technical.
Bill Scully: Yeah.
Bill Hunt: What if we taught more technical folks to create this kind of content, which we could later refine into readable formats? Often, when we outsource content, we might get brilliant writing, but it lacks the depth of a true subject matter expert. What do you think?
Bill Scully: I love that idea. There’s so much potential there. Maybe there’s already an app for this?
Bill Hunt: Could be.
Bill Scully: There’s a company called Otter that records conversations, transcribes them, and uses AI to summarize. It breaks things into executive summaries, paragraphs, and even action items. Imagine something like that for technical content—
Bill Hunt: Oh yeah.
Bill Scully: —where you record a conversation, and AI turns it into a tech article or blog post. You could probably train it to be very effective at this.
Bill Hunt: Right—get both the human perspective and AI workflow automation to create polished outputs.
Bill Scully: Exactly.
Bill Hunt: Cool. I like it.
Bill Scully: Alright, I think that wraps it up.
Bill Hunt: What do you think?
Bill Scully: Yeah, I think so.
Bill Hunt: Alright. Please, we hope you’re finding value in our conversations. If you’re enjoying the show, we’d really appreciate it if you could take a moment to rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform.
Bill Scully: We also want to hear from you.
Bill Hunt: Your feedback motivates us to keep creating these episodes and tailoring them to what matters to you.
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Bill Hunt: And let us know what you think! We get a lot of likes, but not enough conversations—we’re looking for more engagement.
Bill Scully: Thanks, and talk to us!
Bill Hunt: Yep. Thanks!