In this episode, I interview Bernard Huang about the importance of creating engaging SEO content. We discuss the rise of AI-generated content and its impact on traditional SEO strategies. We also dive into what the future of search holds. This episode is not to be missed if you’re in the SEO industry!
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Episode Transcript
Azeem Ahmad (00:01.172)
Hello and welcome back to the Azeem Digital Asks All round Digital Marketing Podcast. I am super, super excited today to bring you my guest, absolute legend in the SEO game. Someone I was very, very fortunate I was, me, to share the stage with him at MozCon in Seattle earlier this year, but you’ve come here to listen, watch and learn from him. So this is the bit where I am going to show up. The last thing I’ll say is our topic of the episode, which I stupidly missed. That’s how excited I am to talk to him today. The topic of this episode is we’re going to talk about why SEO content must be engaging in the future. My friend, Vinod, welcome to the show.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (00:46.694)
Azeem, thank you so much for having me and the warm welcomes. Like Azeem mentioned, we had the honor of sharing the stage at MozCon earlier this year. And I was blown away by Azeem’s ability to wow and engage the crowd by doing all kinds of acrobatics on stage. And that is a good natural segue into why we need
Azeem Ahmad (01:09.651)
Ha ha ha!
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (01:15.886)
make sure our content as being read by readers and searchers is engaging in that particular manner, right? Content needs to have some kind of oomph to actually be relevant and stay relevant, especially as we enter this era of AI -generated commodity crap that we all have been seeing flooding the ecosystem.
Azeem Ahmad (01:43.206)
Absolutely. And before we dive into that, just want to say on recordings, we just spoke about it now off the recording, a special thanks for doing this. So by the time this episode goes out, hopefully all of these tech and IT issues where Microsoft basically shut down the world for what it seemed like, it’s caused you to get stuck in Boston. So I do appreciate you taking the time to do this for me and the listeners and viewers. So thank you. Anyway.
You mentioned about AI perfect place to start. We’ve been seeing a lot of stuff about AI overviews even very recently it started to come out in in the UK I’m seeing them for certain healthcare queries Just for those members of the audience who don’t quite know yet. What AI overviews are what do they mean at the top of the serps? What are they? What do they mean at the top of the serps for brands and SEOs?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (02:38.439)
Yeah, so quick backstory if you’ve been interested or looking at search, we’ve had a very turbulent couple years since chat GPT really took the world by storm and chat GPT, know, that magical artificial intelligence bot that you chat with that provides surprisingly good outputs for
any sorts of questions or prompts that you end up giving it is causing Google to have existential risk in that if searchers instead go to artificial intelligence and chatbots to get their questions answered, then what is the world that, you know, Google search actually plays for the end user? So you see Google
I would say trying a lot of different things. First, they called it search generative experience, which was a search labs like feature that they added to their search engine results. And what it would do is that it would summarize or paraphrase the top ranking Google results for any given query and attempt to answer the question that the searcher is looking for.
for any given search. From there, they since renamed it to AI Overviews, and AI Overviews are designed to sit on top of the search engine results page and give the answer to the question that somebody is searching for so that they don’t necessarily need to click on another results or do perform an additional search.
Azeem Ahmad (04:31.285)
Perfect, love that. That’s a perfect explanation. And thank you very much for sharing it. I have my own opinions, but I’ll keep them to one side for now because we’re here to listen and learn from you. So how do you think that this, let’s say not so new feature will have an impact on the traditional SEL strategies?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (04:58.102)
Yeah, so I’ve been thinking about this extensively and I think that AI overviews are designed to change the search engine results page in a variety of different ways. the main like piece of the main like way that I think that it’s going to influence how searchers really approach their search is
I think the AI overview is going to answer the question from a pure like definitional sense in a lot of different queries that somebody might be searching for. So to give a more practical example, let’s say that you are interested in learning more about artificial intelligence and your first step in your journey to understanding more about this topic of artificial intelligence is
definitely perform the search artificial intelligence. In the past, what you would see is 10 blue links that all more or less kind of say, what is artificial intelligence and why it matters and how artificial intelligence works and all these different things. And you’d click into those search results to understand or learn more about the particular topic. But I think with the advent of
intelligence overviews, what you’re seeing is that Google is providing this top level definition of, you know, what is AI, why it matters, how it works. And by the time the user is then looking at the rest of the search engine results, you can imagine their state of mind has been shifted away from wanting to know, you know, the basics of what this topic is about. And, you know,
basics of why it matters, they’re going to want to know, you know, you think it matters and how, you know, that technology can be, you know, used for the specific use cases that, you know, it’s performing well for. And so I think, you know, long story short, the AI overview is going to answer the definitional and like high consensus answers that we all used to get from, you know, reading.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (07:24.578)
the top one, two or three results. And what we’re going to start to see is that people need like wanting to consume content that’s, you know, more engaging and more relevant to their specific needs and, their specific research as they’re investigating, you know, the topic that they care about.
Azeem Ahmad (07:50.912)
Yeah, absolutely. And I just think if I sidestep temporarily, I have what started off as deliberately instead of change my search behavior, so instead of searching on Google for my requirements, I’ve been starting to use Gemini, for example, just to see and compare the type of answers I’m getting as opposed to very definitional.
versus things like I think you’re kind of nodding on to like experience type content. So that’s kind of where I wanted to get to now, by the way, I just deliberately, sorry, I don’t deliberately, just without even thinking, I just started to use Gemini much, much more. Just because I want to try and get into that mindset of what search is like and how to understand it from a searcher’s perspective, because personal opinion, I think sometimes
marketers talk to marketers a lot and maybe we market to marketers too much and we forget about the actual end user at the end. That’s a story for another day. Anyway, back to experiences. That’s something, excuse me, that’s something that, you know, I’ve heard you speak about before and I think the audience would benefit from your perspective on what do you think Google’s guidance is on experience rich content?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (09:10.574)
Yeah, so I think Google is preparing itself for this world where you get your quick answer that is the artificial intelligence output at the top of the SERP and they’re thinking, how do we as a search engine continue to stay relevant to searchers in a world where search behavior
is shifting as a result of this AI world that we all live in. And I think that Google actually has a quality content problem. And I think that Google is guilty of causing this quality content problem for itself because of the way that the algorithm has traditionally worked.
Right? The algorithm traditionally was built on top of backlinks to start. Then they started really thinking about this idea of quality content from a knowledge graph or topic comprehensiveness standpoint. And the SEO world rallied around building out longer and longer content that had a higher likelihood of covering all of the relevant entities or subtopics that
a topic should be about to the point where anytime you start reading anything about, you know, most of the common topics that people are searching for, you end up with this like overly optimized like SEO experience, right? You know this when you type in like diabetes or artificial intelligence or even, you know, like top things to do in X city and they all follow this very traditional template.
Azeem Ahmad (11:00.032)
in Peck City and they all
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (11:06.193)
if you will, where it’s like, well, what is artificial intelligence? Why artificial intelligence matters? And the reasoning as to why all of this works is because Google’s algorithm has prioritized and even emphasized, right? That longer content, more comprehensive content is just better for the end user. Then Google kind of gets slapped in the face.
Azeem Ahmad (11:12.833)
Hmm
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (11:34.503)
with artificial intelligence and they’re forced to have this like wake up moment where they’re realizing that actually, you know, a lot of the searches that people are performing, they’re actually getting, you know, like unsatisfactory content experience. instead, you know, because in the past there was no alternative. You just had to deal with kind of crappy Google search results and you were like, yeah, okay. But now right, there’s this like,
X Factor which is GPT or Claude or Perplexity or you you can choose whichever artificial intelligence technology you want you want to and all of a sudden there is an alternative and I think you know Google is looking at that and say well that’s that’s a big problem because you know in the past people just had to come to us and they just had to accept that you know the content that you know we have is is the best because that’s just how it is.
So now, right, because people can turn to these different ecosystems, Google says, wow, okay, we have a big quality content problem. And, you know, what that is, is that people aren’t really trusting, you know, the content that we’re surfacing to the end user, because, you know, we cannot verify that the person who wrote it actually knows what they’re talking about. You know, we can’t, you know, confirm that, you know, the person, you know, actually traveled.
to the location that they’re writing about. And so you see Google, I think, take its first scramble to fix a lot of these quality content issues by really boosting user -generated content, Like Reddit, Quora, and these different discussion boards, because they look at that and they say, okay, well, that’s engaging, that’s relatable. These are people who have the firsthand experience.
that matters for this particular topic and we want more of that. But you know, they basically also at the same time, I think are scrambling under the hood and saying like, well, how do we, how do we get more of that? And the problem is that, you know, a lot of the SEO content world has been trained to say that that type of content, that firsthand perspective led unique, engaging original content,
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (13:57.855)
is actually not rewarded in the SERP. And it has not been, right? It’s been the SEO best practice, the SEO, you know, templatized content that has been rewarded. And so I think Google is now scrambling and they’re saying, okay, well, we don’t have actually that many sources where people are producing high quality and firsthand experience content. So we have to like rely on, you know, Reddit and these UGC sites.
And meanwhile, Google, I think, has a lot of propaganda, which they call EEAT, page quality ratings, and these kinds of things. And they’re saying, hey, we want content that looks more like this. But at the end of the day, Google propaganda, I think, is many years ahead of Google execution. And so I think that’s kind of left the content creation community kind of like.
Azeem Ahmad (14:28.021)
And we won.
Azeem Ahmad (14:36.354)
Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (14:55.244)
like miffed and confused, right? Cause they’re like, well, you’re saying you want this, but when I produce that I’m not getting any results. So I ended up reverting to, you know, producing this cookie cutter SEO content because it works. And, and I think that, you know, where we’re straddling, you know, both, both ecosystems right now. And I think people are confused, right? Like what does Google want? What do searchers want? And I think that there’s just a very
Azeem Ahmad (15:20.204)
Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (15:24.937)
very big like you know deficit quality engaging content on the internet and Google doesn’t really have much to work
Azeem Ahmad (15:25.126)
very big deficit.
Azeem Ahmad (15:36.3)
Yeah, no, absolutely. And your point on perspectives has led me to to my next question perfectly. So you’ve described it perfectly. But why do you think it’s important for brands to focus on that perspective led content? Now, if you’re working with a brand or a company, you’re sort of, let’s say, selling this idea to them. Why would you tell what would you tell them? Why is it important?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (16:04.399)
Yeah, I so I’ve been I’ve been having this thesis and I think this thesis I’m trying to build more evidence to confirm or deny it but I think increasingly Google’s algorithm is becoming a two set algorithm. Now let me describe what I mean by this two set algorithm. I think that Gemini which is Google’s version of chat GPT and
Azeem Ahmad (16:33.515)
Mm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (16:34.308)
is being leveraged, I think, to produce the AI overview is one model. And then you have the rest of the search engine results page, which is going to be this other model. So in the past, when you optimize for Google, you’re really only optimizing for the 10 blue links and the search engine results page. By doing that, you know, obviously you got
traffic and your rankings and you know that produced revenue and leads for your business. I think that moving forward, what Google is doing is that it’s saying that a huge set of like queries are essentially not worthwhile to send any traffic to. And you know these as you know queries where featured snippets currently show up. Right? If I’m Googling
Azeem Ahmad (17:31.458)
Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (17:32.793)
how many legs does a dog have or how many feet in a meter, Google is just going to give me that exact response. You’re going to say, you know, like a dog has four legs and here’s your answer. Those queries have stopped producing traffic for everybody, you know, like many years ago. We know this if we say like blah, blah, definition, right? Google just whips out it’s Google dictionary and it says, here’s the, you know, here’s synonyms
you know, terrific or here’s the definition to X. And so I think what you have to realize as a brand is that a lot of the informational, you know, definitional like type queries that you may have gotten traffic for in the past are at significant risk for producing traffic no more. And that’s because right, Google’s artificial intelligence is going to sit on top of the start.
Azeem Ahmad (18:04.662)
Mm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (18:29.985)
and answer those kinds of queries in a way that satisfies tons of users. And I think there’s one set of people who say, well, how do I train or be part of that training data to be part of the answer that Google gives in the AI overview and be one of the citations that Google is going to
give to the user. And I think that that’s one of the algorithms that I’m seeing happen in this two split algorithm. I think my main question there is that, does it even make sense to try to optimize to become the AI overview when the whole goal of the AI overview is literally to answer the searcher’s question with them performing no additional
And right, if you really think about it in that lens, it’s almost kind of foolish, to try to influence that particular, like be a part of that answer box, because the whole goal of that answer box is that the user finds what they need and they don’t click into your site or do anything. Okay, so if that’s like one algorithm, then we have to ask ourselves, you know, what’s the other algorithm?
Azeem Ahmad (19:30.06)
Hmm, yeah.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (19:57.605)
really trying to prioritize and look for. And that’s where, you know, this concept of perspectives and user engagement and unique content and information gain come in play, right? Google is saying, okay, if we’re going to answer the question that the user has at a surface level as quickly as possible, then, you know, we have to ask ourselves, what is the content that lives below the fold
Google wants to give users and users actually want to click into and therefore when they click into it, they’re visiting your website and that’s value add. And I think that that content is going to look, you know, very closely to what we know as, you know, what’s showing up on Reddit and Quora, right? And it’s this unique firsthand experience that is engaging. And so I think
Azeem Ahmad (20:37.442)
Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (20:53.768)
you know, that’s essentially the future that Google is setting up and they’re saying, okay, the content below needs to actually be unique, interesting, engaging, and you know, value add. And, but currently, again, we don’t, we don’t actually have that much of it. And so we’re relying on Reddit to fill that gap. And we’re using our propaganda to influence how we as contributors to the internet produce our content.
Azeem Ahmad (21:13.986)
Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (21:21.809)
And so hopefully in like a year or two years, Google could have more unique original content that lives below the fold that is perspective rich and really gives searchers something that they want to click into.
Azeem Ahmad (21:38.061)
Yeah, I love that and no notes. That’s perfectly explained. You made me think though, and I’m sure the listeners and viewers might naturally arrive at this question themselves at this point in the show. I won’t give any specific example because I don’t want to deliberately lead you down a path, but where brands are in a space that’s, let’s say, quite crowded, they all offer the same service or product.
How can these brands create content that would meet this sort of new criteria from Google, but then also stand out from their competitors?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (22:18.731)
Yeah, you know, I think this is where I would like the first answer that comes to mind is really just first principles, marketing, right? And what I mean by that is that, if you were to think about your marketing in terms of trying to put your product or service in front
your ideal customer profile with the messaging and positioning that resonates with them. That’s exactly how I think search engine optimization should be shifted into the approach, right? So let’s say you’re Nike as an example, and you know that running shoes is a important product category for you to serve to your end user.
Well, you know, if you’re thinking about running shoes, you have these different personas of, you know, customers that you believe are your ideal customer profile. And this can be, you know, your soccer mom who is too busy, you know, living their identity, you know, as a parent, a working, you know, parent, a parent who has small children, you know, a loving, significant other.
and how does this soccer mom, what are her needs and her desires? And it’s probably that she wants functional shoe wear that can be worn on and off the practice. so her lifestyle is athletic because she needs to be performant at every stage in every phase of her life. And so if that is the case,
then you can start to imagine content pieces that match, you know, what the soccer mom might want to be purchasing could be things like, you know, great looking shoes for everyday wear. And that just happens to be, you know, like a running shoe that can fit that model or, you know, how to care for your everyday wear knowing that, you know, your life is kind of all over the place. And, you
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (24:36.459)
when you start to think about content creation to mirror, right, your ideal customer profiles and the jobs, you know, that they have that they need to be done and the questions and problems that they’re thinking about, then you start to create content that, you know, kind of has this, this flavor of like, I know you and I understand that these are your problems. And, you know, here’s a content piece that I’ve written to answer that particular problem.
And I think that the world of content is increasingly becoming this very fractured and disjointed experience, right? And somebody who is the soccer mom who’s looking for shoes isn’t going necessarily to want to just Google best running shoes, right? They’re gonna be like, I want active shoe wear for an active lifestyle. And then if there’s a content piece, it’s just
20 of the best, you know, like everyday footwear for busy parents. They’re going to click on that and they’re to say, well, that seems way more relevant and engaging to me than just like best running shoes. And, you know, Google already has all this psychodemographic data on us as users of Google. And they’re going to start to say, OK, well, you know, you know, Anne is searching, why we would just give her that rather than a
Azeem Ahmad (25:40.098)
Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (26:04.239)
best running shoes. So I think if you’re a brand, you know, I think it starts to become how do you create content that is unique to your ideal customer profiles, where, you know, you’re answering questions that they have that are actually meaningful to the way that they’re researching and evaluating, you know, their options and, and their products and services.
Azeem Ahmad (26:30.338)
Yeah, no, absolutely. And that example was perfect because you didn’t even know I literally performed that same search earlier today and I was served content. It’s like they knew what I was looking for. So I have a concern, which I didn’t Google, which is about the durability and length of life of running shoes. So I just performed a couple of Google searches on that happened upon.
couple of brands and the one that stayed with led with the strap line was something like long lasting shoes designed to run X amount of miles and immediately I’ve got the proof
and underneath it was like an actual human, not an AI, but their own experience with it, their own photo, holding the train and saying, I’ve covered X amount of miles, I’m sold, I’m gonna stay. That’s exactly, as you described it, just perfect. So thank you very much for sharing that. We are absolutely flying through this episode. I’ve got a couple more for you and then can let you get on your way and enjoy the rest of your day.
I would be a fool if we didn’t get this far and I didn’t give you the opportunity to share some examples of some maybe some of your own work that’s had some success in leveraging perspective led content. have any examples of those that you could share with us?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (27:59.016)
Yeah, I think that perspective -led content varies in mileage. I’ll just start with that asterisk as we get into it. I think that when we’re talking about more of the consumer -related searches, you’re starting to see a lot more perspective content start to enter the fold, right? These are things where it’s like saying how Google and
is going to die or should be eliminated. I mean, this was years ago where Google AMP, which is short for Accelerated Mobile Pages, right, this was an experiment that Google had where they gave publishers the ability to publish content onto Google servers. And by publishing content on the Google servers, you basically got an almost instantaneous delivery of your content to be served
whoever might want to consume the content. A lot of SEOs subscribe to this idea even though they may not necessarily be publishers because the whole idea was that you would decrease your page load time to close to zero, right? Since Google is serving the content, it would almost be immediate. The significant downside to doing this was multi -fold, but number one is extraordinarily complicated to actually
syndicate the content correctly to Google. And number two, the content was hosted by Google, right? And so the way that you would track the content would become this really weird way because you wouldn’t get the event to fire on your own servers because they would fire on Google servers. Long story short, it was kind of a really bad execution across the board by everybody in Google.
AMP decided to shut down, I think like a year or two ago. But leading up to it, if you Googled Google AMP, you would actually see content pieces showing up that is like Google AMP is dying or like should you do Google AMP? Like the short answer is no. like these or Google AMP is dead. Like don’t do Google AMP. And these results would show up on Google AMP because
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (30:21.128)
And I think it’s because of the user engagement signal that Google has become so heavily dependent on. Google says, OK, we’re going to try this. And if a lot of people are clicking on it and finding what they’re looking for by not going back to Google and performing an additional search, Google just has to believe that whatever was on that page is actually good and satisfying the user, regardless
again, whatever is on that page. And so when Google started to really depend highly on user engagement signal was when you started to see this like this disintermediation of traditional SEO backlinks, keywords, just get wiped away. Because right at the end of the day, if you were say, you know, WebMD and you produce a mega piece of content with high authority and Google tried it and
it was just ultimately a very crappy experience, then Google would demote that in favor of, you know, a more perspective led and engaging piece of content that didn’t follow the traditional like SEO playbook. So yeah, I’ve been on kind of a, like a path to calling this out for I think like the last five years. Back then, you know, I’ve been calling it ranch style SEO.
which is just a play on skyscraper technique where if the skyscraper was a 5 ,000, 10 ,000 word article on the ultimate guide on, you know, running or whatever, you know, ranch style SEO was kind of saying that you should be as broad and kind of like, you know, little, little dose doses because that’s actually a better fit for the user, right? Instead of like, what is running, why running is important.
and have that be in one piece, you should take that and turn it into, you know, like 20 different pieces on, you know, like what is running, how to run, how to run as somebody who has never ran, how to run, you know, how to like level up your running if you’ve already been running for a little bit, right? Basically slicing it all up and presenting the user on these, these little bits. I think to start it kind of then like,
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (32:45.242)
people called it, okay, like, you know, the topic cluster or like pursuing long tail keywords, or you’ve probably heard of this idea of zero search volume keywords. And I think all of these are all nods towards this model that Google has really pushed us into, which is user engagement centric, right? And so I think Google’s algorithm is heavily dependent on user engagement signal.
Azeem Ahmad (32:54.529)
Mmm. Yeah.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (33:14.893)
which is why this whole idea of perspective led content even works to begin with, right? If you can actually just produce a piece of content that is on the right perspective and it’s just more forward thinking. Yeah, there’s no reason why, you you can’t, you can’t rank. I wish I had more like live practical examples I could share with you from my own experience. We’re about to, you know, conduct a lot of tests.
Azeem Ahmad (33:40.356)
Mm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (33:44.44)
across the board on this. But I think that, you know, the long story short of it is that for consumer driven searches, you’re already seeing it happen. If you Google, you know, something diet or, you know, this, you know, consumer related search, you’re going to see all these things that are like seven things I wish I knew before starting the keto diet or, you know, like, don’t do the Atkins diet, you know, like, there’s all these things that are already happening.
And consumer related searches also have the added advantage of having way more testing data that Google can rely on to reinforce user engagement signal in a unique and interesting way that B2B searches typically do not have as much of, right? Because they’re more niche, they’re more long tail, and there’s just less.
testing data that Google has. So they have to rely more on the traditional domain authority, topical authority models that have been how they’ve been approaching
Azeem Ahmad (34:51.971)
Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (34:56.89)
Perfect. Two things. All I was going to say was, me, if you’re running tests, we absolutely must get you back on the show to talk about the outcomes of them. You’ve answered my last question on the show perfectly. So I’ve literally got one more question for you, but you speaking about testing. So before I ask you the question, I’ve been doing like an unofficial test. And by the time this episode comes out, I’d love to like do a sort of semi live pre -recorded one with you.
For me, like we were talking about running a lot, my smartwatch says I need to get more sleep in order to recover better. Now for me, I have no problem falling asleep. I just have a problem with the duration of it. So I start to Google how to get more sleep. The serps that I see all have information about how to fall asleep, which are inherently two different things. And I have seen that across
all the arrows under the sun, even on the surf itself.
If you, after this recording now, wherever in the world you are or when this comes out, just search how to get more sleep and then just have a scan and see if the results tell you about how to get more sleep or how to actually fall asleep and like stay asleep. Nothing to do with the duration at all. So we’ll do an unofficial test and in two weeks time when this comes out, we’ll see if the serps have improved. I can tell you for a fact now Gemini is awful at it. It will tell you about reducing screen time, et cetera, et cetera.
fall asleep it won’t tell you how to get long asleep anyway that’s my boring boring bit over the last question I want to ask you just to round out the show is if you could just sort of don your hat your wizard’s hat that you had on for Marscon if you didn’t see images of Marlon said you absolutely must because he was amazing now that AI is becoming much more prominent it’s everywhere
Azeem Ahmad (36:59.448)
What do you think the future of searches now, anyway, it’s prominent, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. In your opinion, what’s the future for us?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (37:09.63)
I think the future is fractured that’s the best simple message that I can tell you it’s recognizing that search is just one channel amongst many channels that people will choose to…
do research and get get information right. I think at the start of the internet there was Google search and there was social media and you know now there’s YouTube now there’s TikTok you know now there’s artificial intelligence and you know there’s there’s going to be I would say plenty more and the disintermediation of search is happening.
But all of this is normal, right? Just in the same way that in the past we used to get our news through newspaper or radio or television. I mean, you know, does anyone actually really get their news through radio these days? It’s probably some people, but it’s very, very low. And so I think that, you know, my message is that
Azeem Ahmad (38:24.42)
Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (38:35.71)
Fracture is happening, right? And I think that with the advent of artificial intelligence, I think we are seeing the biggest cannibalization of Google searches, and that has happened since Google search has launched. I think we’ve seen many cannibalizations where people will no longer search for finance symbols as much. They’ll just go to their stocks application.
They won’t really Google weather as much because they’ll just go to their weather application. They won’t really Google as much, you know, like product related things. They’ll just go to Amazon. They won’t really Google as much, you know, like how to or leisure related stuff. They might just go to YouTube. And so recognizing that the form of consumption of content is rapidly changing.
and kind of setting yourself up for a like thinking of content more as an orchestration rather than a singular channel by channel. so when you produce content, I think it’s increasingly important to think about what is the distribution channel for this content. And also, how do you slice and dice it in a way that makes it easy?
least shareable on TikTok or YouTube or email newsletter or X or LinkedIn or all of these different things. also being scraped by artificial intelligence so that your content’s used to train AI models. All of this is happening at record scale. And I would say you have to be prepared for a multi
Azeem Ahmad (40:09.227)
Mmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (40:31.174)
a multi -channel future and recognize that content formats are continuing to evolve. And I think that, you you should likely be very pro AI because I think the technology is game changing. And I do think that, you know, future generations may no longer search in the way that
grew up searching, think that search could just be going to perplexity or Gemini and asking them to do the search for us. And so, right, if that is the world that we’re going into, instead of kind of being cautious or poo -pooing on the new stuff, I think you gotta embrace it. And that’s to say that if…
you didn’t embrace TV or radio or the internet. You when all of these things happened, you lost quite a bit. And so I think that the future is multi -channel and we gotta just stay on top of our need to experiment and test different channels and different content formats.
Azeem Ahmad (41:49.447)
Love that perfect. No, no, the future is multi -channel. Perfect way to to round out the episode. Thank you so much for giving up your time.
sharing your knowledge, wisdom and experience with the listeners and viewers. Just before I let you go again, I’ll be a fool if I didn’t give you the opportunity to share your details in terms of where people can find you, follow you, how can people connect with you and say thank you for sharing some really cool stuff today with us.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (42:21.646)
Yeah, well I would say these days it seems like LinkedIn is where the party is at so you can find me at slash Bernard J Huang on LinkedIn. We also have a newsletter for clear scope. It’s clear scope .io slash newsletter and that’s to say that fact the multi -channel thing. Yeah, you know Twitter or
I think, you know, is kind of going through its moments. But ultimately, I think, you know, owning your own audience through email subscription is still the tried and true. And so I highly recommend that if you have not been building your own list and your own audience that is owned by you, that getting that started as quickly as possible is by far the best thing that you can do. Realizing that if you spend
A decade building a following on Twitter, that could be all taken away from you in the blink of an eye. having that kind of dependency on a singular channel, I think is really quite a big risk, especially as your company grows into a bigger and bigger brand.
Azeem Ahmad (43:37.586)
Yeah, absolutely.
Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. I honestly can’t thank you enough when I come back to edit this I’m literally gonna be nodding away again furiously as I as I have been That about wraps up another great episode again a massive thank you to but I’ve been giving up his his time to to share His knowledge and wisdom with us. Remember the future of searches multi channel. So don’t forget that As always, please do like rate share and subscribe and if at
very least you could just go and connect with Bernard and say thank you so much for sharing some really really cool stuff with us. I’ve learnt a lot today and I’m sure you will too. That about wraps it up. Please do join us for the next episode and if you enjoyed it please do say thank you to Bernard and share it with your friends. a friend to tell a friend and then tell that friend to tell somebody else and we will see you on the next episode. Thank you very much. Bye.