Will Google's New Rules End Most Businesses? transcript

A directory site and a plumber do not die in the same way. Neil Patel just put out a video called the new rules of Google. Most businesses won't survive. And the collapse he's describing is definitely real. HubSpot has one of the best SEO teams on the planet, but they lost 80% of their organic traffic in a single year. And their own CEO said that out loud on an earnings call. It happened, but every time he says businesses, I really want to know which ones he's referring to.

Okay, so this is diagnosis is correct. I'm obviously not going to argue with that publishers built their businesses answering questions Google could rank. And then Google learned to answer them. This is very similar to what happened a few years ago. One of the clients I had was a mortgage company, and they were hyper-focused on ranking for the term mortgage calculator. So we ranked them for it. It was expensive. It's a very competitive term.

Then one morning, we wake up and their traffic was down 80%. Uh no ranking change, nothing. So we looked at the search engine result, typed mortgage calculator into Google, and lo and behold, Google had added a mortgage calculator on the search page. So people didn't have reason to click anymore. This is basically the same thing that's happening with the AI overviews, except the AI overviews are answering almost all informational type queries.

So the list he gave, publishers, blogs, directories, media companies, and then businesses, those are not the same group. Okay, he mentioned them like they were, but they really aren't, right? Local businesses, however advanced Google's AI is, it's still at least a couple of years away from being able to replace your water heaters. So local businesses can't yet be replaced with AI overviews. Let's see what else he says.

HubSpot is a company with one of the biggest SEO and content marketing teams on the planet. For a decade, their blog was a gold standard that everyone copied. Then, according to data from Ahrefs and [music] SEMrush, their organic traffic fell by about 80% in a single [music] year. Their own CEO went on an earnings call and set it straight. AI overviews are answering [music] people's questions now and fewer of them are clicking through to websites.

Think about what that means. One of the best SEO teams in the world doing nothing wrong lost almost most their traffic anyway. So, you're not getting worse at SEO. The ground underneath all of us moved and HubSpot isn't alone. We pulled our own numbers at NP Digital and the pattern [music] shows up everywhere. In 2023, before Google's AI answers took over, organic traffic was still growing, up almost 6%. >> [music] >> The year AI overviews launched, it dropped to minus 7%.

The next year, down more than 13%. So, where did all the clicks go? >> Okay, so these numbers are across agency-wide organic his whole client base, which means that it's blended. But, it actually has very different impacts, right? Informational queries and transactional queries do not have the same impact with AI overviews. They're not moving in the same direction right now. For example, somebody searches how much does a water heater replacement cost?

They're going to get the answer at the top of the page. They're not going to click anything. But, if you're a local business and you talk in your area how much you charge to replace a water heater, you're very likely to be cited by that answer because not many plumbers in Gary, Indiana are talking in detail how much it costs to replace a water heater in Gary. So, when somebody asks Google how much does it cost to replace a water heater, Google knows where they are, you're very likely to be cited.

Keep that in mind when we talk about local content to get in front of searchers, even with the AI overviews. That being said, somebody searches plumber near me at 9:00 p.m. at night with water leaking through the ceiling, an AI overview is not going to help them with that. So, when Neil shows us the results from his own clients, it really tells us more about his agency's client mix, not about you specifically or what you specifically should be worried about.

We now know that Neil's clients are mostly in the informational query national SEO space. >> 20 years SEO traffic is pretty simple. You answer a question well, Google ranks you, and Google sends you a visitor. Google was a road to your website. Now, Google's a destination, and the reason it can do that is the part that stinks. The AI answers at [music] the top of the page is built from the pages people like you published.

Google takes your content, sums it up, and answers the customer before they ever reach you. So, you're not competing with other websites anymore. You're competing with Google, and you're the one who handed it the material. And it's gone more extreme every year. By early 2026, 68% of Google searches ended without a single click to the open web, up from about 60% in just 2 years earlier. AI overviews are the engine behind that.

They now appear on close to half of all Google searches, and when one shows up, click-through rates to websites drop by roughly 60%. The answer appears, people read it, and they stay right there. And the next wave, Google's AI mode, where there are no blue links at all. It's still small today, but it's doubling [music] every quarter. Now, this doesn't hit every business the same way. Some almost immune, others are already finished. >> Yeah, not a surprise, right?

If people can get what they're looking for on the search engine results page, just like the example I gave with the mortgage calculator, they're not going to click through. Google has been pushing what's called zero-click searches for decades, including like embedding YouTube videos directly into the search engine page, all the things, embedding the mortgage calculator, the knowledge panels, all of the information that they can possibly give people so they don't click and leave Google.

Right, Google makes more money if you stay on Google. If you leave Google, they lost your attention, less of an opportunity for them to serve you ads and to make money from your attention. A AI gave Google the ability to basically do this at scale. When we first at my agency, when we first started using Chat GPT 3 and 1/2 in November, by January of the next year, January of '25, we shifted the entire agency. We weren't taking informational clients anymore.

We shifted the entire agency to be focused only on local SEO for this reason. It seemed very clear at the time that with Chat GPT, even back the 3 and 1/2 version, Google was going to be able to use that technology and increase the percentage of zero-click searches. >> So, the real question is who gets hit the hardest? You can figure out with one quick test. If 100 other websites already answered the question the same way you do, AI can replace all of you with a single paragraph.

Answering questions was never the problem. People still ask billions of them every day. What gets you replaced is answering them with nothing that makes you the one worth remembering. [music] The most generic version of the answer used to win the click. Now, it's the easiest thing for AI to absorb and hand back without ever sending anyone your way. Look at who's already paying for it. Forbes built a whole affiliate arm called Forbes Advisor on top of its reputation.

Google hit it with the penalty for what it called site reputation abuse and a big chunk of that visibility vanished. >> So, a few years ago, if we wanted to rank for a given search query, we would analyze the content that was already ranking and emulate the language, the word patterns, the word usage that those articles used. Because those articles were being rewarded by Google, Google's algorithm was looking for more of the same stuff.

That really stopped working in the past few years. Essentially, since Chat GPT 3 and 1/2 came out, Google has been doing everything it could to get rid of AI slop, to prevent it from ranking, and then in a more recent update earlier this summer to basically remove AI slop from its index. So, if we think about how AI works, what AI slop actually is, AI slop is if you go to ChatGPT or any AI model of your choice and say, "Hey, write me an article about weight loss." or whatever it happens to be.

ChatGPT or the LLM is then going to write an article that is the aggregate of all the articles it finds on Google. Not very interesting. So, Google updated its algorithm to stop rewarding content that was very similar to already existing content. The phrasing that we use at my agency is informational additive. So, when we're writing content, uh and we focus on local, but even if we are non-local, we'd have the same focus.

If when we're writing content, we want to write content that is informationally additive. Meaning, if we look at the top three results uh for plumber near me, we want to write content about a plumber in that city that adds information that isn't in the existing content. What I'm saying basically is that AI content doesn't fail because it's bad. Most AI content is is fine. But, it fails because without the right prompt sequence, without the right research, uh it's going to just agree with everything else that everybody wrote.

Everyone can feed the same prompt into the same model and get back largely the same information from an AI-generated article. That's what Google updated its algorithm to de-index. News brands like CNN have watched organic traffic fall by roughly a third year over year, according to industry tracking. What puts you in the danger zone is sameness. [music] A how-to that reads like every other how-to. A definition page with nothing but the definition.

A review where you never actually tested the thing. If your page [music] has no fingerprint of its own, AI doesn't need it. It already has thousands just like it. And right now, you're running your own site through that [music] test in your head, wondering if it's you. For a lot of you, some of it is, but the real problem isn't losing traffic. That's just a symptom of something most business owners never notice underneath.

Most companies thought they owned a skyscraper, big, beautiful, millions of visitors a month, but they were only renting the land it sat [music] on. And the landlord just changed the rules. Google traffic was never something that they owned. They were leasing it. Google decided who got the space, how much, and how long. And now, Google's taking it back. The bleeding companies right now didn't lose because their content got worse.

They lost because they only had one way to be found, >> [music] >> and they didn't control it. They spent 10 years building demand for Google, and almost none for themselves. They built dependency and called it success. [music] And that works beautifully until the day the landlord changes the locks. >> Completely agree. What he's describing can also just be summed up by Google Business Profile. That's the profile that serves as the heart of a local business entity online.

Almost every AI tool relies on the Google Business Profile, as of course does Google itself and Gemini. Uh almost the only exception to this is ChatGPT, which basically just uses the Bing for Business Profile, the same thing but on Bing. So, the entire local industry is built around the Google Business Profile. And this is this is not theoretical. A competitor can go into maps, hit suggest an edit on your listing, and then change things about it.

If they have a decent local guide level, Google might just accept it. We've had clients who were personal injury attorneys that got their category changed to airline, okay? When that happens, calls stop uh basically overnight. So, before we get too comfortable in local, there are of course ways to prevent that, locking your Google Business Profile. There are a lot of third-party tools that can allow you to lock up Google Business Profile, so those edits can't work for you.

Uh but even so, uh we're all very happy that Google removed the ability to edit location pins. That was the worst tactic that shady competitors used to use. But the point here is almost every local business who is getting traffic online is relying on their Google Business Profile. And if they're using ads, the ads are likely linked to their Google Business Profile. If they're using organic, then it's obviously their Google Business Profile.

And even if they're getting traffic from AI recommendations, it's still likely their Google Business Profile. So, different mechanism, right? We're not watching publishers get destroyed. Different mechanism, same exposure. And it's important to note, Google hasn't made a significant update to its local rank algorithm in nearly a decade. But in March, a few months ago, Google rolled out Ask Maps. So, the impact of that is now with Ask Maps, it's getting Gemini to talk to users about local businesses for the first time.

In my opinion, and I don't have any evidence for this, but Google very frequently will roll out tests like this. So, in my opinion, this feels like Google is testing how well does Gemini help its users in finding and identifying a local business. Potentially signaling a major map algorithm update where it's going to be more reliant on Gemini and less on its base algorithm. >> Which raises the obvious question. If everyone's built on rented land, how can anyone survive Google's traffic collapse?

Let's check back with HubSpot. HubSpot lost about a reported 80% of its organic traffic. By every old metric, that's a disaster. But over that same stretch, their revenue didn't fall. It grew more than 20% according to their own earnings. The reason is simple. People don't just search best CRM software to [music] find HubSpot. They search HubSpot. The clicks left, demand stayed. That's what the whole industry is missing.

Clicks and demand were never the same thing. We just [music] spent 15 years measuring the one that's now slowly disappearing. And it's not only HubSpot, across 42,000 sites, [music] the average website just gets 2.4% of its search traffic from its own brand. The top [music] performers get almost 10%, nearly four times. The winners aren't ranking better. People are searching for their name. >> So, there's the point. Traffic down 80% but revenue up 20%, his read is that brand demand carried them.

And I'm not completely sure that's what happened. HubSpot's revenue growth comes from enterprise sales, seed expansion, pricing changes. The blog was a top of funnel for a freemium product years ago. So, the blog losing 80% of its traffic didn't hurt revenue today, but that just means the blog may not have been producing very much short-term revenue in the first place. And I've seen this before on local businesses. We took over a client, uh they were a local LASIK eye surgery in Chicago.

They were paying over $8,000 a month for SEO. They were getting 100,000 clicks a month coming in from Google, according to their own search console. Beautiful traffic graph, everything up into the right, the kind you screenshot and put in a case study. But, they were barely getting any customers. All the content was pulling in readers from cities that weren't Chicago. Their local rank map in Chicago did not look very good.

They were not getting local calls. Now, that could be analogous to what's happened here with HubSpot. Smaller numbers, but the same basic problem. Traffic that was never attached to revenue, so when the traffic left, revenue didn't suffer. If you're selling four blog posts a month to a local business owner right now, this is something that you really need to sit with. A blog post that's, you know, top five ways to winterize your water heater, maybe it might bring some traffic, but it will not bring any local relevance or local calls to your business or to your client. >> There's a clear pattern to who makes it.

Roger [music] Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, the company behind Vogue, GQ, and The New Yorker, calls it a barbell. On one end, brands that are large [music] and authoritative in a big category, and on the other end, small brands that completely own a narrow niche with an audience loyal enough to pay. Both ends keep growing. Though it grows every year. The New Yorker >> [music] >> just had its best year ever. The danger is the middle.

Brands that aren't authoritative enough to be the name people trust and aren't focused enough to own a niche. Lynch even told his own teams to [music] plan as if search traffic is going to zero. So, the real question is stops being who ranks, it becomes which end of that barbell are you going to be on? And who would even miss you if you disappear tomorrow? And if [music] the answer is brand demand, the next thing to work out is where you build it.

Because it isn't just Google anymore. Search is everywhere. >> All right, let's talk about this barbell. Big authoritative brands survive, small brands that completely own a niche also survive. Everything in the middle gets crushed. For local, that's good news on its face. A plumber with a service area, a verified profile, and 400 completed jobs in one city is sitting on the niche end by default. Nobody had to earn that.

It came with the business model. And on the other side of it, multi-location large companies, something like Roto-Rooter for plumbers, they have the brand recognition, the brand awareness that they're going to get recommended by ChatGPT, they're going to get recommended by Gemini uh because they have so much authoritative content. >> Search used to mean one box on one website. Optimize that box, you win. That world is gone.

Now people search on Google, then YouTube, then TikTok, Instagram. They ask Reddit, what's real? They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. They review >> They listen to podcasts. They open up newsletters. >> ChatGPT alone is handling over a billion searches a day. That's not a side tool. That's a search engine. And one in five people now start a search inside a social app, up from about 1% in 2021. [music] Most people here search everywhere and picture being on a dozen platforms at [music] once.

That part is just noise. The real goal is to be the brand people already look for when they go to each of those platforms. Stop working to be found and start working to be remembered. >> Cold recall for customers is the holy grail in marketing. It really doesn't happen outside of a handful examples, and those examples are basically worth a fortune because they're able to create cold recall. This is one of the greatest moats that a company can create against its competitors.

The classic example, of course, is Warren Buffett's investment in Coca-Cola because he saw Coca-Cola had spent generations building cold recall. Um if you are a local business owner, please don't take what Neil is saying here to mean that you need to create cold recall with your customer base. That is exceptionally difficult to do, not a reasonable goal for a local business. >> Your name is the one they type. But [music] being the brand people look for is one half of it.

The other half is refusing to let a single platform own your revenue. The best example of both is People Ink, the publisher behind People, Better Homes and Gardens, and Investopedia. Over about 2 years, Google fell from 55% of their traffic down to 25%. AI overviews [music] now show up on nearly 70% of their top 10,000 keywords. By the old playbook, that's a death sentence. Instead, their digital revenue grew 8% last quarter to $253 million.

They grew their off-platform audience on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, [music] and Apple News by more than 60%. They signed licensing deals with OpenAI and Meta to get paid for their content directly, and they built their own app so people come straight to them. They stopped waiting on Google and started showing up everywhere their audience already was. [music] And you don't have to guess whether that's working. You can now watch how AI engines actually talk about you.

Whether ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude >> Okay, uh Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and Apple News and licensing deals, none of that exists for a business with one location and three trucks, right? Your local business is not licensing content to OpenAI. You're not going to build an app that anyone is going to actually install and use. So, what does search everywhere actually mean for a local business? Because there's a version of it, but it's a shorter list than it sounds.

Of course, the Google Business Profile, filled out completely, every category the business qualifies for, every box maxed out, every service, all of it. Don't keyword stuff, but put them all in there. Reviews, specifically the language inside the reviews, not how many stars, but whether anyone actually names the service you performed and the outcome. Hugely important in this AI world because AI will read all of those reviews and attribute match what people are asking AI for against what your reviews are talking about.

Whether the business gets mentioned anywhere on the internet that isn't on its own website. And your own website, built so the entity, your business entity, is completely unmistakable. A page for every category, a page for every service, the city in the title tag on all of them, everything pointing back at the exact structure that your Google Business Profile has. That's what we call the Core 30. It's the same architecture that I've been building for local clients for years, and it works almost identically whether the thing reading it is Google or Gemini or ChatGPT.

There's a massive overlap. The difference is review language, branded search, and getting mentioned in high-profile places, depending on the competitiveness. If you're a plumber in Eclectic, Alabama, you don't need to worry about it. If you're a plumber in Houston, you might want to focus getting mentioned at the Houston Herald, or whatever the local newspaper in Houston is. I made up the Houston Herald. So, this is what he means by search everywhere.

You'll want, of course, your Apple Maps listing, your Bing for Business listing, your BBB profile. All of these things will help you create your online brand presence. Um And, yeah, if you can score a licensing deal with Open AI for your plumber in Eclectic, Alabama. I mean, go for it. That sounds amazing. >> Now, one shift changes what the three letters >> [music] >> S E O even stand for because you're not screwed because Google traffic is down.

You're screwed if Google was only place people could find you. HubSpot proved it. Lose the clicks, keep the demand, and the business still grows. That's the line between the companies that disappear this year and the ones [music] that get stronger while everyone else panics. So, those three letters don't stand for search engine optimization anymore. They stand for search everywhere optimization. >> Okay. Okay. I'll I'll I'll take the reframe.

It's It's a good line. It's a good line. Uh it's I kind of wish I'd thought of it, but good. >> And for your name in every [music] place people look. The traffic was always temporary. The brand is the part you actually keep. And if you're already building it, there are early signals that show it's working long before the revenue does. >> But, when we talk about that barbell, that's exactly where it stops working for local.

Right? If you're a publisher, the two ends on the barbell can't overlap. Vogue can't be a niche newsletter. It has to choose one. In local, they do in fact overlap. You can be both. One of my clients uh has like 45 different locations, and that client comes out in ChatGPT constantly. It beats every single local mom-and-pop shop in basically every local market it operates in. Nobody ran a campaign for that. It happened because when you get 45 locations, you get written about.

Uh you also have the budget to source these uh local papers, business journals, association directories, uh 45 Chamber of Commerce listings, case studies, hiring announcements. All of this happens with that many locations. Authority just accumulates as a side effect of being that large. A one-location business in the same town is not nearly as newsworthy. So, the chain is the authoritative end of the barbell and the niche end of the barbell at the same time in 45 cities at once.

And the only reason it doesn't already own every single map pack it touches is proximity. Google hands the small business a handicap, right? Distance from the searcher does a huge amount of the rankings work, which is why a mediocre shop, a small mom-and-pop business four blocks away, can outrank a 45-location business that are that's 3 mi away. Everything we focus on in local SEO is trying to stretch that radius. Building geographic and topical relevance to rank farther and farther away from the GBP.

That's the whole game. Now, I mentioned that in March Google shipped Ask Maps, Gemini sitting inside Google Maps. Type a full question, somewhere good for a group with outdoor seating that isn't overhyped, and it just chooses it recommends places for you. Personalized against your own Google search history. Now, you don't have to panic about this today. It's a separate tab under the search bar that almost no one ever uses.

It's minuscule in comparison to the traffic that your Google Business Profile is generating from map pack results. Okay? So, not something to panic about. But, like I mentioned, when or if Google introduces Gemini into map pack rankings, when the map pack ranking starts to match attributes instead of measure distance, proximity goes from deciding the order to deciding who's eligible. Distance will likely still matter.

Nobody wants a taco place, you know, 100 mi away, but it stops carrying you. And when distance when proximity stops carrying you, whoever actually built the online presence can take the whole radius, can take the whole city, instead of just their neighborhood. This cuts both ways, and that's why I don't want to sell panic here. Chain authority is generic. It's press about the brand, not about the Tuesday emergency surgery at the Boise location.

Review language that names the specific service and what happened, a real page for every category and service on the profile instead of one service page with a list and real local press. Almost no one does the local press part, including videos on YouTube about your local business. A massive way to help train Gemini. These are the levers that are available today and every business currently coasting on proximity is not doing any of it and when Gemini starts recommending local businesses in more volume, they're going to feel the pain.

Neil [snorts] says most businesses won't survive. For publishers, he's describing something that's already finished happening. For local, it hasn't gotten started just yet. So, now is the time to make sure your local presence is strong enough that you can survive not getting the proximity boost anymore.