Episode 12 – Duane Forrester

Filipe Santos
00:00:00 – 00:00:53

Today, we’re exploring the future of search and AI. The impact of AI as it evolves, in terms of behaviors for customers. And of course, we’ve got the amazing Duane Forrester with us to talk through these things. So stay tuned for an insightful conversation about the future of search, of AI, and the challenge that, we’ll have to overcome to understand search as it’s evolving and its future for us. With that, we’ll switch right into section 1, which is talking about the shifts in search behavior. So, there’s a lot going on, Duane, and, obviously, I know you’re one of the the most read in the room in terms of, like, knowing what’s going on and having opinions on this. So I would love to kind of first ask you because we had a little pre discussion on this, but, you recently watched, rewatched it, I should say, Lex Fridman podcast, right, with Sam Altman. Mhmm.

Filipe Santos
00:00:54 – 00:01:01

And I’d love to know a little bit more about what observations you took from that and perhaps, like, your opinions on all that because it was pretty fascinating.

Duane Forrester
00:01:02 – 00:01:44

Oh, okay. So first off, I have to frame a vision for you, Filipe. I’m in my Jeep. I’m driving from Southern California up to Monterey for a couple of meetings. I’m listening to this podcast as I’m driving along, and I am shouting at my voice recorder all of these things that are occurring to me as I am taking in this. You know, because obviously, like so many people, you know, I’m I’m very tied to what’s new and newsworthy in the industry or things that may affect the industry of search or kind of like our tangentially related. So the podcast and the interview that we’re talking about is several months behind us now. And and, of course, I watched it, you know, the moment it came out.

Duane Forrester
00:01:44 – 00:02:22

Right? It cleared my calendar, spent the time there. And, you know, at the time, I just kind of, like, took it all in with an open mind and thought, okay. Well, I know a few things, and I knew these things then. CEOs have to follow a script. There are some things they can talk about, some things they cannot talk about. You know, anytime you represent a large brand, a public brand, you know, and I’m not meaning they’re publicly traded, but that they are well known by the public. You you have to cultivate a talk track, basically. You will have written out things that you will talk about, some things you’ll lean into, some things you won’t lean into.

Duane Forrester
00:02:23 – 00:02:58

And it was fascinating to me. Memories being what they are, they tend to shift things as you recall them. But I was pretty close to my original thought, which was, yeah. Okay. Sam talked about some stuff that he, you know, that he could talk about. Didn’t really talk about a lot of other stuff. You know, avoided a lot of the Chat GPT 5, the voice stuff, search. In fact, he basically shrugged and kinda kicked the whole concept of search and Google and going after them and playing in that sandbox very elegantly to the curb.

Duane Forrester
00:02:59 – 00:04:07

So much so that, you know, were you the interviewer, You may not have picked up on it and decided to follow that thread in any direction because it seemed like it was just so uninteresting to him that why would you go down that path, if you did, if he’s not that interested in it, then obviously it wouldn’t make for a good interview. So, you know, the interview went on for 2 hours talking about a bunch of other different things, you know, nuclear bunkers where they might be hiding things and, fun stuff about, you know, how they’re iterating and and that kind of idea. And then, you know, we were just like, this is maybe 4 weeks ahead of the recent announcements. And I was rewatching it all, and it occurred to me, no. There’s more coming here. So let’s say you’re a company that, has a very large investor to the tune of 1,000,000,000 of dollars. You are burning a lot of money in each month, each quarter to the tune of 1,000,000,000 of dollars. You’re looking for a way, obviously, to generate revenue from all of this new technology.

Duane Forrester
00:04:08 – 00:04:52

It’s not as easy as, hey. Here’s Chat GPT 4.7, and it now comes with ads. So you gotta wait 30 seconds or 10 seconds to get your answer while we read an ad out loud to you. Like, that’s pretty inelegant. It does not match how the company was formed, their ethos, the direction they might move in. And yet, you know that a quarter point of market share in the search industry is worth, like, $1,600,000,000 quarterly. That’s pretty tempting, I gotta say. You know, and it happens to be that the largest investor in your organization also happens to be one of the largest tech companies in the world, which happens to own one of the largest search engines on earth.

Duane Forrester
00:04:53 – 00:05:33

I would think maybe there might be not some direct influence, but at least the ability to learn and ask direct questions from someone who’s been there, done that, and use that to maybe formulate your plan moving forward. I’m also pretty sure that there’s a well, there’s always a proxy war going on between tech companies, and this is just another version of it. Invest in this company. This company has a technological advantage in a new space. Therefore, you get to fight your arch enemy in a new way. It’s asymmetrical warfare by tech companies. It it makes sense. We see this all the time in real life.

Duane Forrester
00:05:34 – 00:06:10

This is just playing out in the tech world. And, you know, like, it’s it’s it’s exciting because we all get to see ChatChiPT grow, and we get to those of us I’m I’m a paid per I’m a plus member, so I pay the $20 a month, have been since they offered it. And, you know, it’s exciting to watch the capabilities grow and to do things. Like, I asked this morning. I asked a basic math question, and I was just being lazy. I was prepping for this call, so I didn’t wanna do the math in my head. I was like, I gotta open this document, read this stuff. Oh, by the way, what’s 40% of x and go? And it just came it gave me the answer.

Duane Forrester
00:06:10 – 00:06:30

And I’m like, woah. Hold on a second. Because last week, had I asked the same question, it would have said, oh, this is math. Hang on a second. Here’s how we would figure this out. We would take this number and multiply it by this in this manner. Here’s what the equation looks like. And therefore, if we do this math and we put this in for x and this in for y, we get this.

Duane Forrester
00:06:30 – 00:06:48

And I’m like, yeah. Just want the baby, not the labor pains. You know? This morning, I got the baby. Just straight up. Just straight up. No math. I asked it then prove your math, and it went into the long winded detail about all of it. But we’re watching the growth of this technology.

Duane Forrester
00:06:48 – 00:07:14

Now we hear Sam talking about, hey. Search GPT. Oh, like, we didn’t know that was coming. Of course. And we’ve now got Chat GPT 5 is on the horizon. They’re talking about that. They’re talking about voice GPT, and there’s early adopters available for that. By the way, if anyone at OpenAI sees this, reads it, likes my you know, the way I’m I’m going on about this stuff, please get me into the early access for that.

Duane Forrester
00:07:14 – 00:07:16

I will download and sign up and whatever.

Filipe Santos
00:07:17 – 00:07:20

That’s all for that because I wouldn’t mind either. I love

Duane Forrester
00:07:20 – 00:07:50

it. Right? I’d love it. And, and I I I think that, look. For us, it’s exciting, you know, because we’re at this we’re at this front edge. Okay? We’re the people who used to walk into a grocery store, start up a conversation with somebody in line at the checkout, and they’d say, oh, what do you do for a living? And you say to them, I’m an SEO. And they’d be like, what the hell is that? And then you start talking about blah blah blah. You’d mentioned the word digital. Their eyes would glaze over, and they would gratefully move forward and, you know, pay for their groceries.

Duane Forrester
00:07:51 – 00:08:14

Today, you have that same conversation, and you mentioned SEO. And 70% of the time, the person says to you, oh, you do digital marketing. And it’s like, Yeah. Okay. But when we’re talking about ChatcheBT, well, a lot of people have heard of it. A lot of people don’t make their living related to it. And we’re still in that category. We’re at the front end of this stuff.

Duane Forrester
00:08:14 – 00:08:41

Right? So super exciting to see these things. I’ve already been retraining myself. And, I mean, you and I talked about this when we were prepping. Like, search is all about training human beings to take a specific behavior and repeat it. That’s what Google did 25 plus years ago. You had a question? Stick it in this box. We’ll give you a reasonable answer. And if you can remember back that far, if you were a part of it when it launched, it sucked.

Duane Forrester
00:08:41 – 00:09:20

It was limited. You had to be very pedantic about your question. Like, it was many years and not a lot, but, like, 3 or 4 before we’ve truly got to what we would recognize as a modern search engine, where you could just throw a phrase into the box and would actually give you things that were pretty tightly related to it. And and that was it. And they’ve spent 27 years now, I think. Maybe 20, oh, it’s about 26 years now, because I have actually oh, I’ve been doing this longer than they’ve existed as a domain. So, and so that’s my Kinda crazy

Filipe Santos
00:09:20 – 00:09:22

to see that whole lineage. Right? Like, all of that change.

Duane Forrester
00:09:23 – 00:10:07

It’s it’s like well, I mean, look. You know, like, I remember launching my first website going, what the hell do I do with this? And then finding a thing called the keywords tag and being like, well, what if I just repeat this keyword 15 times? And then going into dog pile and hitting refresh, and I was number 1. And then hitting refresh, and I was number 3. And then going in and being like, oh, you said it 17 times. Well, I’m gonna say it a 100 times. Like and it just like this brinkmanship of what I think of as experimental stupidity. And along the way, we learned how to exploit a search engine. Now Google was a bit more refined and became rapidly more refined than those other systems, but then so did we in our exploits.

Duane Forrester
00:10:07 – 00:10:49

And, you know, so so we but we spent most of 25 years with that same paradigm. Type your words in a box and you get an answer, but you still have to do the work. And humans don’t read the search results. They scan them, which is why the words that you thought to write in the box are bolded on the page because Google knows that’s the only way to connect that in your mind quickly. So maybe you’ll click on something, and then you’ll feel satisfied and you’ll stay with Google longer. So there’s more of a chance that you’ll click on an ad. Like, there’s so much psychology at play with everything that we do. Now how do you shift all that into the world of AI? If you ask a question out loud, how do I optimize for the question that the human invents? I won’t know what it is.

Duane Forrester
00:10:49 – 00:11:16

I won’t see it. I won’t hear it. And chances are the way you and I would both ask for something, they may vary differs they may differ slightly. Little bit of variance in how we ask it. Each one of those is unique. So as an SEO, how do you optimize, or do you optimize for both variations, or do you trust that the system will know that, oh, it’s the same question. So we’ll just, you know, disambiguate, and and the answers end up the same even though the questions are slightly different. I don’t know.

Filipe Santos
00:11:17 – 00:11:53

Wait. But that that’s exactly what I wanted to ask you about because, like, you you you were talking about that interview. Right? And and clearly, like, there’s a a there’s an opportunity for OpenAI. There’s clearly an opportunity for AI to take over, some of the stuff that we’re getting through search or we have been getting for the last 20 plus years. So, you mentioned some very interesting things about the psychology of that interview. And I think I would love to just, like, explore that a little bit more about how you kind of saw this fitting in to, like, the unwritten answers of that of that podcast because that’s, like, super interesting to me too.

Duane Forrester
00:11:54 – 00:13:05

So I’m, I am, probably over the last 5 to 10 years, I’ve become very fascinated with body language. And, look, I I started, you know, I started learning how to meditate, like, 30 years ago in life, and, I still suck. I don’t know that you ever become great at meditating, but it’s not about achieving the goal. It’s about, you know, the journey along the way. And so learning to read body language is a similar path. Right? Like, you will spend a lifetime learning the nuances. But when you watch somebody answer questions and they are moving in their chair, they are nodding, they’re making eye contact, they’re using hand gestures, and then the next question you get, the person is very still, very calm, and answers with dismissive language, not negative, but language designed to stop the exploration of the topic. It becomes pretty clear pretty quick that that’s a hot button issue, and there’s no reason for it to be a hot button issue unless you actively do not want to touch it.

Duane Forrester
00:13:05 – 00:13:49

Not because you’re afraid of anything, not because you’re concerned about it, but probably because you’re working on it. And the more people ask you about it, the more you have to veer into the territory of being misleading. And you don’t wanna do that. And that’s the vibe that I’m getting when I rewatch that that podcast, that interview. You see it at key points where there’s some animation and then there’s absolutely none. And absolutely none is tied to those moments in time that we are now seeing that are now the talking points. GPT 5, which we were told don’t know when it’s coming out. And the question was, is it coming out soon? Don’t know.

Duane Forrester
00:13:50 – 00:14:36

And then there was search. Nope. Not interested in that. Don’t wanna play that game, which itself was a fascinating statement because if you look at and we’re gonna touch on this in a minute. If you look at consumer behavior and how it’s impacting search today, the phrase from somebody who could launch a search engine saying, I don’t want to play that game. That is eye opening to me. Because what you don’t want is you don’t wanna show up to the game and say, I’m gonna replicate something that started 25 years ago. And the reason you don’t wanna replicate that is shift happens, and it is happening right now.

Duane Forrester
00:14:36 – 00:15:20

You don’t have to look very far to see that as a generation or as generations go, the shift is already happening. So I’ll I’ll start us off with a a small story from a friend. He was at his daughter’s, you know, bring your parent to work day and that kind of thing, career day. And he he he walked up in front of the class and said, you know, I do digital marketing. I help people get ranked higher on Google. And one of the kids in the class, these kids are only 9 10 years old, she raises her hand, and he says, yes. You have a question? She goes, yeah. She goes, can you explain what Google is? She goes, I hear my parents talk about it all the time, but I never go there.

Duane Forrester
00:15:21 – 00:15:46

And and he didn’t know if, like, this kid was joking. Okay? This is Gen Alpha. So let’s just put that generational mark up there. This is Gen Alpha. Okay? So let’s call this a 10 year old child. They are 6 to 7 years away from maybe having their first job and having money of their own and making purchase decisions. Let’s be clear. At 10 years old, they’re already guiding purchase decisions in their home.

Duane Forrester
00:15:46 – 00:16:29

So, like, they get the power of commerce. They understand the basics of how this all works. And yet this kid is straight faced asking, like, what is Google and why does it matter? And and that is a bright and shining beacon. So one of 2 things I believe is true. He encountered someone’s idiot child literally, like, the most uneducated, underexposed, you know, separated from society child ever. Or this kid is like a sample of one that actually represents most Gen X Alpha, which is yeah. They’re starting their queries on TikTok and Snap. That’s where they go to ask questions.

Duane Forrester
00:16:29 – 00:16:46

And they want those personalities that they follow giving the answers to the questions. They don’t want a list of anything to read through. They’re not reading through anything. It would be like me saying, oh, okay. I’ve known for for 15 years in the industry. He’s smart. He knows what he’s talking about. Hey, man.

Duane Forrester
00:16:46 – 00:17:24

What’s going on with the latest Google update? And then you telling me what’s going on with the latest Google update. I don’t particularly feel like I need to go get more information about it. I have a general download from you. That’s what Gen Alpha is going for in queries and responses. They’re not doing it on Google because Google is still read me, and they won’t do that. So you see this generational change happening. They’re moving to social media to ask these questions on these platforms. And now you’ve got ChatcheBT, which a 100,000,000 active users a week are in that thing asking it questions.

Duane Forrester
00:17:24 – 00:17:50

And, look, you can, you know, come at me and tell me it’s a large language model. It’s all about predictive. It’s not a search engine. Blah blah blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the perception of the consumer. If I go and ask it a question and it answers me and my perception is that answer is accurate and it is fast and it is trustworthy. I’m done.

Duane Forrester
00:17:51 – 00:18:34

Mhmm. What I am doing is I’m contributing to retraining my own behavior. I’m moving away from going and typing in a box. And the faster you can get me to microphone, ask out loud, you understand me, I get my answer back again. The more it’s like me asking you, can you tell me the latest update from Google and you explaining it to me? It feels like a peer to peer interaction. Humans, by our very nature, are genetically programmed to seek out shortcuts to accomplish work. It’s all about burning calories, and our brains are the biggest hogs on burning calories in our bodies. So if I can hack my way to the answer instead of thinking my way to the answer, that’s a lot more appealing to me.

Duane Forrester
00:18:34 – 00:19:38

It releases different hormones and different chemicals in my brain, and my response that I get to those things is better and leans more toward pleasure. So asking out loud, getting the answer out loud tickles my pleasure centers, makes me feel better, makes me feel like I have actually done something that was good for me. And, yeah, I also got the answer along the way. And you don’t get that when you have to type something into a box and you get a list of things to scan through, and then maybe you find one. We are absolutely on the verge of hybrid search engines. I believe this is the beginning of we’ve already seen what I call the splinter net happening. But as soon as we have AI agents available to each one of us, which I believe will really start happening later this fall, Once we have those things happening, then I’m gonna be able to program my own Filipe bot, and it will have your voice, your likeness, and it will do my bidding, anything I want. Filipe put stuff on my grocery list.

Duane Forrester
00:19:38 – 00:20:00

Filipe place an order with Bonds to get my cart started. Like and that will be the very core of how I change my personal behavior. How I no longer go and search as a verb, I talk out loud, and then I get what I wanted. And Wait. A couple of things You know?

Filipe Santos
00:20:00 – 00:20:22

A couple of things come to mind, which are hilarious here. Right? First of all, yes, having a virtual twin or having, like, your own bot, that’s, in the like of somebody else. That’s funny enough. But, I mean, just imagine, okay. People are already frustrated with folks talking on their phone in in, like, public places. Imagine, like, when this happens. Yes. It makes it easier on our life, but it’s also gonna be annoying as heck.

Duane Forrester
00:20:24 – 00:21:06

know, yes and no. I think the behavior so we’ve long ago crested the mountain where, you know, you’re you’re walking down the street and you see somebody talking out loud and you think, I should call the police. They’re a raving lunatic. Like, the early days of cell phones, we saw that. We saw an uptick in people calling the police to report strange behavior. With the advent of remote earbuds and whatnot, we had that double take and side eye growth that happened where people were like, are they on a call, or are they just talking to themselves? And today, you see people wandering around all the time. Just their lips are moving. They’re talking in low voice, and your first assumption is they’re on a phone call.

Duane Forrester
00:21:06 – 00:21:51

That’s your first assumption now. Not that they’re a raving lunatic, but that they’re on a phone call. And so I think what’s going to happen with this is, yeah, you are going to have people talking to their devices more. And a lot of that is going to be, like, just chatter in the background that I don’t need to hear. It’ll be annoying, but no more so than what we already face. And you also have to take into consideration that there are, you know, a lot of technologies like our headsets that we wear and bone conductive microphones and speakers. Like, you can almost subvocalize in a lot of cases, and people will think you’re mumbling, that it won’t be interruptive. They’ll never hear you, and your system will pick it up just fine.

Duane Forrester
00:21:51 – 00:22:52

And and I I see a lot of that happening. I think that, you know, if you put in earbuds, you can have and I won’t lie. So, to give you an idea of how advanced some of this stuff is, that trip I described earlier, I was driving up to Monterey, and I was listening to the podcast. I started asking ChatCPT questions, and almost an hour later, I stopped the conversation. It was a 48 minute long conversation with Chat GPT on the topics that I pulled from that podcast. And my initial interest was to get Chat GPT to do some research for me while I was driving because I had access to a 5 g connection, but I’m driving. So I can’t really be, you know, typing on my phone. But I still, while it was all fresh in my mind, wanted to go through and ask the question and get the links so I could then go review my history in chat gpt and take all that information and use it to write articles from.

Duane Forrester
00:22:52 – 00:23:25

And and it ended up being a 48 minute long conversation where I realized I have to stop. Like like, this person, and I’m air quoting person, this person will just keep going. There is no end to the conversation with these systems. You have to stop because they’ll just keep filling in the blanks for you. Every question, every idea, and then they’ll ask, you know, do you wanna get back onto this topic? Oh, yeah. Okay. Great. I found more information.

Duane Forrester
00:23:25 – 00:23:38

Here’s what I found related to that topic. Like, this is massive growth for these systems. And now to say, oh, yeah. Okay. Full voice interface. Awesome. That’s gonna be fun. And on top of that, search GPT.

Duane Forrester
00:23:38 – 00:24:20

Yep. Alright. So now it’s really hard to argue that this is not a search engine, that it’s just an LLM that’s predicting the next word. And I’ve never really bought that argument because ChatGPT was plumbed into Bing. So if you asked it a question and it needed to research, it went to Bing and did the search and then brought the information back. There was that’s not predictive. That’s here are the results. So it’s we are at a very, very important inflection point with all of this, and we haven’t even started talking about the impact that this change in consumer behavior has on businesses, on market share, on a lot of things.

Duane Forrester
00:24:20 – 00:25:05

And it’s it’s going to be big. This isn’t just, you know, people stop using Google. Right? What we have to be talking about is this has the power to wholesale redefine what the word search means. It redefines how consumers today and in the future think about information retrieval. To be fair, no consumer is thinking about those two words, but that is the action that they are taking. They are coming online saying, I have a problem. How do I solve it? There’s a big difference between saying, I’m gonna grab a coffee. I’m gonna spend the next hour researching this, and saying, I’m gonna grab a coffee, and I’m gonna have my AI assistant research this while I go do x.

Duane Forrester
00:25:06 – 00:25:39

Those are worlds apart, and you suddenly have a utility in one version that does not exist in the other. The other demands your time. And damn it, my time is hyper valuable, and I shouldn’t be putting in a lot of places in my life. My concern is that one of those areas we’re gonna look at in 5 years and say, I shouldn’t be putting my time in it is typing words in a box. That’s what I think happens here. Because I have an AI agent who will go do that work for me. And Yeah. And this is this is huge.

Filipe Santos
00:25:40 – 00:26:18

Well, you you, you definitely got me thinking a little bit here because, just not too long ago, I spoke to Anne Smarty specifically about this and, like, what what was actually going to kill Google finally. Right? And it seems like, the the thing that could hurt or kill Google is this threat, the threat of, like, search engines from OpenAI and and just AI as a technology if Google doesn’t kind of get their ship in order for the behavioral change. And you mentioned that there are like, people are using chat gpt, Perplexity, and, social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube to do a lot of their searching now or discovery. Let’s say discovery of content. Right.

Filipe Santos
00:26:18 – 00:26:35

I would love to know from you, like, what do you think these implications are, like, for the shift, for all all folks, like, related to marketing, to SEO, and to just, like, entrepreneurs themselves? What should they be thinking about, and how they should how should they be kind of, framing this for their own success?

Duane Forrester
00:26:35 – 00:26:51

Okay. 1st and foremost, we’re gonna start this with, you should be on every platform right now. And I know that’s a lot of work, but you need to be on Instagram. You need to be on TikTok. You need to be on Facebook. You need to be on x. You need to be on threads. You need to be on all the new ones.

Duane Forrester
00:26:51 – 00:27:35

You need to be on Snap. You need to have an understanding about what the kids today are doing. So look for the research that’s coming out of companies like Snap. They, every quarter, put out reports on what’s popular with their system. Well, what’s popular with their system is a direct correlation to what’s popular with their users. And a quick search will show you that most of their users are well under 20 years old. So it’s not a big leap to say whatever that behavior is is gonna carry throughout those people’s lives. Now the other thing that nobody thinks of, I’ve been talking about this for the last year and a half to 2 years, the Fortune 500.

Duane Forrester
00:27:35 – 00:28:15

I think we’re all familiar with it. Right? You can go fortune 50 to fortune 100 to fortune 1,000. However long you wanna make the list, I don’t care. It started, if I remember my research, maybe in the mid fifties, like, 56, 57, is when that list started. And at that time, if you looked in I’m gonna get this number wrong, but this number doesn’t really matter. It’s the number that’s gonna follow it that matters. But if you looked at that time, the average age of a corporation on that list was somewhere around 60 or 65 years old. Now remember, this is the heyday of Sears.

Duane Forrester
00:28:15 – 00:28:42

This is the heyday of all of these huge brands. This is the beginning of brands that lasted for a generation or 2 and then went away. I’m thinking of Kmart, and and these types of institutions that generations of people grew up with, and now it’s a nostalgic meme. 2025, the average age of those companies is going to be 16 years.

Filipe Santos
00:28:44 – 00:28:46

Crazy. Yeah.

Duane Forrester
00:28:46 – 00:29:31

Google is 27 years old. So Google is past its prime according to this math. Microsoft, you could argue, should be long dead and buried. But here’s the key difference. At specific and strategic times in history, Microsoft has reinvented itself. It’s gone from a software company to a SaaS company to a search company to a cloud company to an AI company. So each one of these iterations exposes the company to new generations as a new version of the company, effectively resetting the clock from an investor standpoint when new investors come on board. The biggest problem for Google is it is a noun.

Duane Forrester
00:29:31 – 00:29:51

It is a verb. It is tied to search. It is search. It invented search. Therefore, it can only and ever will be search. So couple that with, you know, a lack of early investment. And I’m saying that. Just to be clear, I have no idea what actual investment Google was making.

Duane Forrester
00:29:51 – 00:30:24

It’s easy for me to claim it was a lack of early investment. That’s why they’re playing catch up and saying these things. I know the flip side of that coin is very real. They have a ton of smart people working on exactly these programs. In fact, if you read all the news this morning, last night, the reporting was that Google’s latest models is actually trumping everything, including chatgpt4o in all the testing right now. So it’s a little disingenuous for us to all be running around saying Google’s behind the curve and they can’t catch up. These kinds of things. Right? They can.

Duane Forrester
00:30:25 – 00:30:51

They do, however, have to protect the revenue which comes from search. So it’s never an easy situation for them to walk in and say, oh, let’s make a change. It’s super easy for OpenAI to come in and say, let’s launch a search engine with no ads. Well, you’re not making any money now anyhow, and you’re not expected to make any money right now. And actually launching a search engine is the easy part of all this. That’s the easy part now. Go get an index. Not a problem.

Duane Forrester
00:30:51 – 00:31:13

We got a partner in bang. There we go. We have an index. Or just send a crawler out and collect the web and stick it on one of those servers you’ve got, those 350,000 servers. Stick it on that. You’re fine. And and, ultimately, I think what what erodes Google because I don’t believe that Google goes away. I think that Google settles at a new level.

Duane Forrester
00:31:14 – 00:32:20

You know, if we look at data right now, it’s like Google is depending on the report that you read. Google is anywhere between 68 93% market share of search. The the reality here is, though, that the problem we face is that query starts are happening in new places. So when those reports come out saying Google is 93% of the market, that assumes that we’re taking all of the search activity into consideration. The reports that report on social media spaces don’t report on query starts. So the search reports don’t include social media locations, only search engines. So you could easily see the world of search queries in the world of search drop down, and Google could still own 10 or or 93% of 10,000 queries. It would still be 93%, but it would be a meaninglessly small number because the query activity has moved to social media platforms, and that’s where people are getting their start.

Duane Forrester
00:32:21 – 00:32:57

And so I think that while AI is is causing some stumbling, I I can at least say that and and, you know, feel pretty good about it. I don’t know that AI, it it it doesn’t stop Google. It may what we would consider to be hurt them. They may lose a couple of points of market share. They may lose 50 points of market share. I don’t really know, but but it doesn’t stop them. I think the biggest threat, and this threat is to every single business, is generational change. And I will sum it up this way.

Duane Forrester
00:32:58 – 00:33:27

We don’t listen to our parents’ music, and that is an incredibly important lesson for everyone to understand. Because as I grew up, you know, I’m I’m gen x. I’m all about the eighties nineties. And my mom is all about the fifties. And I don’t I don’t listen to that music. She does. I don’t. So everything that I listen to is a much more advanced version of what she listened to.

Duane Forrester
00:33:27 – 00:34:00

Electric guitar, synthesizer. Like, these things are worlds apart, and that holds true with pretty much everything we consume in our lives. It is that way. There are very few institutions that stand the test of time and last for a 100 years, especially now with the way everything is so interconnected. Oh, forget it. And a friend sent me a, a video last night. It’s an astrophotography video because whenever we go camping, we do a lot of astrophotography. And, he sent me this video from a guy in Australia doing this thing, and it was like an 11 minute video.

Duane Forrester
00:34:01 – 00:34:38

And in the first 3 minutes, I was on Amazon ordering the phone holder that this guy was using to shoot these video these images with his iPhone 15. And then I was downloading the app that he uses to stitch them all together and paying the $6 for the app. Like, that’s the speed at which things go. He produced that video 11 days ago in Australia. And now I’m buying that consumer product here. I haven’t even finished watching the video, and I’m already making consumer decisions based around it. You know, that type of speed never existed in our parents’ time. And we will not be able to imagine what it will be like for those kids asking what’s Google.

Duane Forrester
00:34:38 – 00:35:28

And I hear my parents talking about it, but I never go there. Like, they’re working at a different pace and from a different point of view. I think that it’s incredibly important businesses understand this as well. Like, you know, if if that kid can say, what’s Google? They’re what’s the hope for your brand? I mean, you know, now we are seeing a resurgence with Gen Alpha where, and and the the tail end of Gen z, where they’re preferring in person engagements. So they’re they’re liking going back to shopping malls. They’re liking going into stores and buying things in person. You know, that was that was going out the door as, you know, the millennials aged and then Gen z started to take over, but it’s shifting. So what the business needs to take away is, look, you’ve gotta have a clean footprint.

Duane Forrester
00:35:28 – 00:35:42

You have to fill in all the blanks. You have to use things like structured data. Technical SEO, stop talking about it. Get that crap done. Don’t come to me and say, I’ve got a plan this year, and here’s what I’m gonna do. Don’t care. You’re a dinosaur. I your toys are us.

Duane Forrester
00:35:42 – 00:36:06

I expect you to be gone if that’s your conversation. What I do expect, however, is the people that are quietly executing on all this stuff are actually going to reap the rewards. And by the way, the technical stuff, I’m touching on it here. I don’t care. I don’t think any of the engines care either. They care about is the content, the quality, the expertise, the authority, the trust. That’s where they care. Look.

Duane Forrester
00:36:06 – 00:36:55

EEAT from Google, this is not some made up BS that Google’s trying to get people to swallow. If you think about how you want answers to questions when you ask them, you will see that your own expectations almost perfectly line up with EEAT in every case. Where you choose to take the answer from, who you choose to trust, when you’re doing your research, the things that you will put time into versus ignore, these are all very clear signals. And Google has distilled it down and shared it with everybody in a handy acronym. And why businesses aren’t making this their mantra and leaning into it? I don’t know. Except I do know. Because it’s not fast, quick, or easy to create content. Oh, and you’ve gotta be leaning into video these days.

Duane Forrester
00:36:55 – 00:37:37

You’ve gotta be okay being on camera because that’s how people want to get their answers. And they want to trust you and know that you are trustworthy and recognize you. This is part of the reason why we see we see, a lot of AI personalities and AI influencers growing because the consumer doesn’t actually care. They they don’t care that it’s Filipe or Filipe bot. They care that sounds reasonable, is helpful, answers questions, knows what they’re talking about, is trustworthy. Other people say he is trustworthy. They they don’t actually care if you drink motor oil or coffee. Robot, human.

Duane Forrester
00:37:39 – 00:38:08

And and there’s gonna be more of that in the future. And, look, I know most of the people listening and watching this are going to say, oh, but I care. Yeah. Well, look. The fact that you’re tuned into this, you are not a good sample for what’s going on in the real world. You’re way too close to this stuff, and it makes a difference. And look, we are gonna see I think as we see the evolution of all of this through new technologies, We are going to see what is happening. We see this happening with Reddit.

Duane Forrester
00:38:08 – 00:38:36

The open web is is literally in a threat situation. Look, Google has access to Reddit stuff, but if anybody else wants it, they have to pay. Okay. Well, that makes it difficult for any other search engine to have access. I think we’re actually going to start seeing, growth of niche search engines. You know, you’re a tennis player and, you wanna corner the market on everything to do with tennis. Okay. You’re gonna create your own tennis based search engine.

Duane Forrester
00:38:36 – 00:39:06

And everything in the index is gonna be total index, but it’s all gonna be tuned toward tennis. And then you will tune your advertising toward that, and you will develop a following of people who know you want tennis, go here. And and this is what is going to end up happening as we move forward. And and I think it’s because it’s hard for large search engines, Google, Bing, you know, pretty much every one of them. It’s hard to curate everything. It’s a lot. That’s expensive. It’s top heavy.

Duane Forrester
00:39:06 – 00:39:49

Your index has information in it that is randomly asked accessed, but costs you to maintain. Like, there’s a lot there. And so I think, you know, if you could visualize what the index looks like at a major search engine like Google, you would see that it’s very well defined across the top. It has some fairly well defined edges at the very outside of all topics, you know, across humanity. And the bottom is kind of dangling and dripping, and it’s losing bits and pieces of the Internet because nobody ever goes in there. Nobody ever touches this stuff. It’s old information. It’s not, you know, like, one person every 2 years goes to look for it.

Duane Forrester
00:39:50 – 00:40:38

And Google’s saying, well, that that costs me money. So I’m just gonna drop that because I don’t I don’t need to fulfill for that one person every 2 years. I’d rather them fail and not get the answer than keep the cost on my end and come through for them. And and I think that capturing all those bits and pieces is incredibly important. It’s it’s really and truly going to be what feeds a lot of niche areas. And those niche areas will just continue to have their own value. As consumers well, as consumers just want answers and they won’t go somewhere to ask a question and read, and they just want it spoken aloud to them. Those types of indexes, those niche indexes are gonna become incredibly valuable to power all of these AI front ends with the answers that we need.

Filipe Santos
00:40:38 – 00:40:45

Yeah. We’re already getting that model. Right? Through, like, GPTs and, all of that. Yeah. Exactly. That’s really cool.

Duane Forrester
00:40:45 – 00:41:43

I mean You wanna know what the businesses need to focus on? This is what businesses need to focus on. Okay? I really need you to stop focusing on whether an h one beats an h two or how many characters are in your meta description or if I put the keyword at the beginning of this paragraph versus halfway through this paragraph. Like, these are not problems you need to solve. What you need to solve is, do you truly know who your client is, your customer? Do you know where they are? Do you know how they’re asking questions? Because I guarantee you, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, they are not giving you these answers. That there is nothing valuable for them to give you those answers to fill in that blank for you, which is why they don’t supply that data. Like, Google Search Console isn’t gonna suddenly start saying, here’s all the conversational stuff that’s happening through AI and all of the the voice inputs. Here’s what that maps to as keywords and phrases and topics. They’re they’re not going to do that.

Duane Forrester
00:41:43 – 00:42:05

That’s a lot of work for no ROI. I know I built and launched Bing Webmaster Tools. There is no positive ROI directly for the tools. It it exists in service to something, And we are going to see massive, massive change for businesses. I think there’s a lot of opportunity here. Anytime there’s chaos, there’s opportunity.

Filipe Santos
00:42:06 – 00:42:32

A perfect segue, Duane, into, like, the the section 2, which is really the role of AI in search and SEO. And, specifically, I I had, I thought we were really on to something that was interesting, which is when you talked about, hallucinations and why that is not so that should not be the main focus of a lot of conversations because you feel like that’s changing. I would love to, like, know a little bit more, and maybe the audience would love to know.

Duane Forrester
00:42:32 – 00:43:32

I I you know, it’s it’s fascinating to me. My my gut reaction on this is that like any learning system, even humans, for example, if you asked, you know, a 10 year old for, I don’t know, ask him to describe how to drive an automobile, like, how to drive a car. Okay? You get a rudimentary explanation about it from their limited time on Earth collecting information on that topic. Come back and ask that same question of a 20 year old who’s been driving for 4 year and had owned automobile, and you will get a much, much updated version of the answer. So anytime we’re having a conversation and we’re gonna start saying, oh, hallucination’s a problem. What I’m hearing is you’re not paying attention to how these systems grow. You would rather things stay historically bad because you get to repeat the same phrase over and over again. Oh, hallucinations are bad.

Duane Forrester
00:43:32 – 00:43:49

Hallucinations are bad. And look, I’m I’m not dumb about this. I agree. Hallucinations are bad. I completely agree. If I’m gonna ask you about financial information, I’m gonna ask you about medical information. I personally believe the hallucination rate should be 0. Okay? We’re back to your money or life categories.

Duane Forrester
00:43:50 – 00:44:58

This is why we’ve seen Google, I think, roll back so much of the AI overview coverage that it was 60 and the last number I heard was, like, 7%. I kinda stopped paying attention to it because, like, we’re tracking something that obviously has a trend. I don’t need to know what the actual number is, but Google is rightsizing it for the areas that it knows it can completely trust it versus the areas where it still needs to learn. And that makes complete sense. But I guarantee you this. If you go look up the jobs that are open and you look up, at Google, Apple, TikTok, Amazon, Microsoft, big companies, OpenAI, you look at head counts that are available for things like AI engineer, you will see that they have 100 of current open head count at any one time. So if they fill even a fraction of that and add to the dozens or hundreds of people they already have deployed on solving these problems and I will point out that these are minimum masters levels people. 9 times out of 10, these are multi PhD holders.

Duane Forrester
00:44:58 – 00:45:41

I think it is safe to agree these are intelligent people. I don’t necessarily need to be at a cocktail party with them. Perhaps, maybe not the most socially stimulating conversations. However, if you were given the task of solving hallucinations in AI, I can’t think of smarter people to put to work on it than these groups of individuals. And they’re working on this problem. Now have been since before we even knew ChatGPT was a thing. Like, since before any of this launch, they knew about the problem and are working to solve it. So you can’t come at me and say, oh, hallucinations are a problem, without admitting that we’ve dramatically improved, and it will continue to improve.

Duane Forrester
00:45:41 – 00:46:19

In fact, we will reach a point my guess is in the next 2 years, we will reach a point where if you’re saying hallucinations are a problem, you do not understand the, at that point, state of the art of these systems because hallucinations are not gonna be a part of the conversation. And the fact that these systems are able to access a lot more information, that they’re able to fact check themselves, it solves the problem for us and we can stop talking about it. Right? It’s like it’s like that whole, I don’t even remember the name of it now, but we used to chase the frequency of words and keywords, within a page. Right? And that was a big deal in search.

Filipe Santos
00:46:19 – 00:46:22

And it came back a few years ago. Right? Was it a LSI? Yeah.

Duane Forrester
00:46:22 – 00:46:47

LSI. Exactly. It was part of that whole conversation. And I’m like, holy crap. I can’t believe we’re talking about this again. Like, we’re at the brink of hallucination not being a thing that anyone needs to focus on. Right? If you’re in the commerce area or ecommerce area, I don’t think hallucination is a problem for you in terms of what these systems are doing. If you’re in finance, you’re in health care, yeah, I’d still be, you know, concerned about that.

Duane Forrester
00:46:48 – 00:46:59

But but it’s these systems are moving so fast, and they’re evolving so quickly. Just like the conversations we’re having month to month go stale immediately.

Filipe Santos
00:46:59 – 00:47:13

I love your anecdote about the 10 year old and the 20 year old because the thing is, that is exactly how the learning process happens. But, of course, with these systems, as you mentioned, there’s much more muscle behind this, and it’s not gonna take 10 years to get those answers refined.

Duane Forrester
00:47:14 – 00:47:47

That’s the crazy thing. They so look. If you gave them 10 years to learn something, you’re looking at, like, a 1000000000 generations of that system evolving. Okay? Like, it’s in on it may even be 1,000,000,000 of generations forward in 10 years of our real time. Right? They’re evolving generationally, hourly, daily. And and so, you know, why why are we talking about hallucinations? I mean, you know?

Filipe Santos
00:47:47 – 00:48:21

Well, I mean, there’s one there’s one consideration I think that might play in here. Right, Duane? Now correct me if you think I’m wrong here. But, large companies can employ these armies of, really qualified engineers and professionals that are looking at this problem. Smaller companies that are engineers and professionals that are looking at this problem. Smaller companies that are creating their, you know, small language models or coming with their own form of information that’s protected behind their own, technology and infrastructure Mhmm. May not have that same opportunity. So are does that mean that tools are gonna be developed for better hallucination response that are gonna be made for smaller companies, or do you think that, a different way some things are just gonna still take a long time?

Duane Forrester
00:48:26 – 00:49:35

So, yeah. So this this gets us kind of in the conversation of that, you know, old bugaboo of build versus buy. I, early, early on, was a big proponent of buy versus build, when it came to AI. The costs involved of building your own AI are astronomical in terms of time, in terms of of, resources, and in terms of pure dollars, just the money involved. No oh, well, pretty much no enterprise level can afford it. So if the enterprise level group is getting knocked off that list and they are in a better position to buy, like it’s better to buy and they can go buy, tools will be developed for them to buy so that it speeds their adoption and their use cases and their solutions. That will inevitably trickle down to mid market, and then you will have service providers, SaaS companies coming in and saying, let us tap in to that high end. And for a middleman fee, we’ll give you more tools, and then you can do more with your information, and it will piggyback on this.

Duane Forrester
00:49:35 – 00:50:49

What we’re actually starting to see now is the advent of that for SMBs, where tools are starting to exist for SMBs from providers to actually allow SMBs access to it. Because to be crystal clear, even the largest of enterprise companies doesn’t actually have large dataset compared to what an LLM needs or is capable of managing. So I guarantee you no SMB, no medium sized company has a dataset so big that it needs an LLM. It’s just not the way it is. But again, generationally, you train from you need, I don’t know, what, 15,000,000,000 parameters in order to have an LLM that is coherent. Well, now you can actually go into, you know, a small language model that only needs a 150,000 parameters. And the reason it only needs it is because we’ve had so many generations of 15,000,000,000 that you’ve basically built the skeleton so it can stand on its own now and not fall over. And so it knows basic things like how to blink its eyes, how to raise its hand, how to stand upright, how to breathe.

Duane Forrester
00:50:49 – 00:51:20

And the small language model is the, how do I comb my hair? Can I pluck my eyebrows? The nuance things, the detailed pieces. And we’re not quite there yet. We still have several years before these services are reliable for SMBs. Right now what we see are tools integrating things, targeting SMBs, mid market enterprise with specific ideas. Like, hey. Here’s something that will help you write things, make your writing better. Okay. That’s great.

Duane Forrester
00:51:20 – 00:51:56

But that’s one thing. What I need is you to also not just help my content writing team, but I need you to help my product planning team understand trends based on our selling and our sales data and data across the Internet for these people who buy these products that we sell. I wanna know what the trends are. When are they likely to be interested in buying more? When are they gonna shift and wanna buy something different? All of that, if you put the data into the right models, you can get insights back out of. And that that’s not quite there yet. Right? Companies are claiming they have it. It’s not quite there. It’s a little kludgy.

Duane Forrester
00:51:56 – 00:52:16

It’s hard to work with, but we’ll get there. I mean, Grammarly wasn’t that easy to use when it first came out. And some people will say it’s still not that great today. But, look, I’ve worked at a place where we used it, and it was great. It helped people. It it increased productivity. And so, like, things get better. They improve over time.

Duane Forrester
00:52:16 – 00:52:25

I don’t think we fully understand what that time frame looks like right now with all of the AI stuff. It gets vastly accelerated way, way faster than anything we’re used to.

Filipe Santos
00:52:26 – 00:52:55

Yeah. I I love that perspective. And I think we can we can kinda move into the more interesting, more compelling area of, like, section 3, which is the future of SEO and content creation just because I think, like like you said, that’s a little bit more, of something that we can grasp and start to implement right now. You did mention quite a bit about technical SEO and its value and how it’s diminishing over time, but that it’s still here. Mhmm. I don’t know if you wanted to go a little bit into why you think that is.

Duane Forrester
00:52:56 – 00:53:36

Well, I I think what’s happening here is it’s just basically commoditized. You know? Like, the basic package you might get from a company like Wix or GoDaddy, the basic installation from a WordPress installation, you get Yoast SEO plugin and a host of others. I call it Yoast because I happen to know the founders and world friends, and that was the tool that I used on all my blogs. But there are lots. Right? All in one SEO plugin, like, all kinds of different things. Bottom line is, it’s not particularly difficult to do good technical SEO today. And I’m looking at this from a perspective across the Internet. I fully agree that there are a ton of customized CMSs out there, and technical SEO on them is difficult.

Duane Forrester
00:53:37 – 00:54:05

But the technical SEO on the platform isn’t really the difficulty. The difficulty is convincing your IT team to give you resources to do the work. That’s the difficulty in technical SEO today, not the actual code level work. The code level work is only as difficult as it ever was at one point. It is, in a lot of ways, a copy and paste exercise. You write what you need to add. You paste it into the code. You publish it, and now you have that feature, that functionality.

Duane Forrester
00:54:05 – 00:54:07

You’ve canonicalized. You’ve done whatever.

Filipe Santos
00:54:08 – 00:54:10

And we have copilots now.

Duane Forrester
00:54:10 – 00:54:37

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Right? Like, I’m not kidding. I added something to one of my personal blogs recently, and it was a it was a search box, and I was testing it. And I’m like, oh my it’s been decades since I’ve written CSS or HTML. And so I’m like, chatty p t. I need to integrate this piece of code for this functionality into this page of code.

Duane Forrester
00:54:38 – 00:54:42

How can I do it? Please give me the output and highlight the addition.

Filipe Santos
00:54:43 – 00:54:43

Mhmm.

Duane Forrester
00:54:44 – 00:55:04

12 seconds. And I copy and pasted character for character out of my window, back into my text, pasted that, published it on the website, hit re hit, refresh, and there I had a new search box. Mhmm. And I’m just like, oh, look at that. Turns out, I’m a different type of coding idiot. Great. Whatever. It worked.

Duane Forrester
00:55:04 – 00:55:16

Moving on. You know? I feel like like, I feel bad that I lost all those skills, but at the same time, I’m like, I don’t necessarily need them now. Like, okay. Moving on. I think that’s a little dangerous.

Filipe Santos
00:55:16 – 00:55:23

That’s the thing, though. We reformat we reformat our brain all the time. So if we’re not using something, we’re saying, well, there’s something more valuable I’d like to put there.

Duane Forrester
00:55:23 – 00:56:02

Well and and that’s I mean, you know, I think we tell ourselves that, Filipe, but a lot of times, you know, the more valuable more valuable thing we’re replacing with is the 2nd generation of Beats and Butthead being launched. So, you know, like, I don’t know if it’s more valuable, but, you know, the space was used. Let’s just say that. Right? You know, RAM has been filled. But, but I think that, you know, technical will always play a role in this. I do believe we have a future where crawling is going to become less. The search engines will move away from it because it’s expensive and they wanna, you know, obviously limit costs. I think we’ll have a future where we will have knowledge graph to knowledge graph plugins, where you will need to build your website on a knowledge graph.

Duane Forrester
00:56:02 – 00:56:33

So you can take an output from that, give it to Google, and then they will take it and plug it into their knowledge graph. It saves them from having to go crawling. If you are trusted embedded, then the data flows back and forth and they have instant access to it. It offloads some of the compute. It offloads a lot of the cost. The other thing that ends up happening in that world is we then do start to see another version of I’m using the word splinternet. By the way, I didn’t coin that phrase. It comes from something that was going on in the late 19 eighties, early 19 nineties on the Internet.

Duane Forrester
00:56:33 – 00:57:08

If folks wanna look it up, I’m not claiming that I invented it, but I am applying it here. And and then you’re gonna see that there are websites plugged in to the backbone and websites that are not plugged into the backbone. And and that’s gonna be a bit of a differentiator for for businesses. And that is a technical aspect. You know, from a content side, boy oh, boy. Let’s just go straight back to e a EEAT, and and you better be answering all the questions. You know, like, this is the advice that I give everybody. You come to me with a piece of, like, with a question or a piece of content, and you say, I think this is good content.

Duane Forrester
00:57:08 – 00:57:45

You know, I followed all of our best practices, all of our rules and whatnot. And I’m gonna say, your rules and best practices are crap because that’s you inventing something that you’re agreeing to follow. That’s pretty limited. Take your question and your answer and give it to all your family and all your friends. Give them the question without the answer and see how they answer it and see how close your answer is and what you missed. Because I guarantee you, you do that with 20 or 30 people, your answer is gonna be way more robust than you originally thought. And you thought yours was awesome because you followed your guidelines. And I’m not saying the guidelines don’t have a place.

Duane Forrester
00:57:45 – 00:58:24

Right? But if you invent your own guidelines and then you follow them, you can hardly reward yourself and say, this is excellent. That’s a bit of an echo chamber. Right? So when you look at these things, you need to look beyond yourself. And this is where using AI systems can be hugely helpful. Another aspect of it that’s hugely helpful is, you know, don’t spend your time coming up with ideas. Like, just a few bullet points and a concept of what you want. Give it to chat g p t four o and tell it, create a list of 20 topics, and it will go and create that list of 20 topics. 16 of them will be crap.

Duane Forrester
00:58:25 – 00:58:43

3 of them will be not too bad. One of them is a winner. And so then just keep telling Chat GPT, create another list, don’t repeat anything. Create another list, don’t repeat anything. Before you know it, you got 5 or 6 things that are absolute winners. And then you can go back and say, okay, give me a rough outline, 200 words on this. This is what I need. Cite your sources.

Duane Forrester
00:58:43 – 00:59:22

Give me the links, that kind of thing. Now you’ve actually got a draft of a document that you can start writing from. And you’re going to put produce higher quality content because you’re more on point. So I like, there’s so much here for productivity and and for creativity that this is going to unlock and boost. It’s it’s gonna be huge for for companies and businesses. And we haven’t even talked about creating explainer videos. Just telling the system, create an explainer video that does this, and it creates everything. And then if you wanna go all through all the work, you could create a trademark character and put them in all of your videos.

Duane Forrester
00:59:22 – 00:59:26

Like, it’s it’s mind blowing how useful these utilities can be.

Filipe Santos
00:59:27 – 01:00:03

That’s true. And and one of one of my, like, last questions for you, that I think is kind of interesting here. You mentioned technologies or kind of follows like IndexNow. You you mentioned a little bit about how, you know, tech SEO is diminishing. And, of course, you’re talk you talked about niche search engines and the the the way that things are gonna go in the future. So, really, like, what kind of skills, what kind of mindsets do you think, marketers and particularly marketers and entrepreneurs need to consider right now so that they can be on the cutting edge and so that they’re not paralyzed by all of this information? Now, of course, some of the fatigue that comes with AI.

Duane Forrester
01:00:04 – 01:00:42

Okay. I’m gonna I’m gonna throw some concepts at you here, Filipe, because, like, this doesn’t really flow in a a linear fashion. Okay? But, first off, foremost, people need to understand the concept of a t shaped marketer. So that that is not a new concept. People can research that. The basics behind it, you need to have a strength in a core area and then competencies across other areas within marketing. Now apply that to digital marketing. Okay? If you are a core deep tech SEO, you also have to have a fairly deep competency in content and in a number of other areas related to digital marketing.

Duane Forrester
01:00:43 – 01:01:37

Part of that, I’m gonna say, is, developing a competency around consumer behavior and being able to get that research, understand that research, translate that research into product management and then developing project management. So there’s 2 more skills that I think are really important, product management and project management. I also am going to challenge everyone to be curious AF. So if you’re gonna come to me and say that ChatGPT is not a search engine, I’m gonna say you’re not curious enough. What there’s things about this that you’re because you have a it’s this and only this point of view, you are blocking access to other things that could be happening that are important for you to understand. So you may be looking at it saying social media is the death of society. It’s killing us. It’s destroying our children’s brains.

Filipe Santos
01:01:38 – 01:01:38

Yeah.

Duane Forrester
01:01:38 – 01:01:58

Okay. I get there. I I get it. And I’m not gonna argue with you on the point. What I am gonna say though is you need to be on every one of the modern social media channels. You have an active presence. And I don’t mean, oh, I have an account and I watch stuff. I mean, you actually have to be participating so you understand the ecosystem that your consumers are a part of.

Duane Forrester
01:01:59 – 01:02:44

So that’s the critical part. So watching TikTok for me, watching TikTok is less about the content I’m consuming. It’s more about how the platform is changing and monetizing and the things it’s doing to interrupt my flow to try to get me involved in commerce in some way. And so I derive less pleasure from TikTok, but I still spend 45 minutes to an hour a day in there. I’ll go through and watch the channels that I want and I get value from. But then I’ll just go through the for you page and I’ll see how they are evolving, what they are doing. Because all of these things they’re doing are basically traps where they get people’s attention and they keep it. And if people are there, they’re not going anywhere else.

Duane Forrester
01:02:45 – 01:03:30

Which then means as a business owner, you better be producing content that can actually be seen by people on TikTok. So now you have to understand, well, how does the search work in TikTok? Is it hashtag based? Is it keyword based? What are people looking for? How are they searching? Oh, you know what? I should probably look up a generational slang translator so that I understand the difference between lit and fire. Because if I wanna use those things, it’s going to impact which generation is seeing my hashtags and my words and everything. Like, there’s so much that needs to be accounted for that if you’re just doing the same old thing you’ve been doing for 10 years, you’re falling behind. That’s that’s it. And if you’re not falling behind, you will very shortly be falling behind.

Filipe Santos
01:03:31 – 01:03:44

I love that perspective, and I agree with you. So with that, Duane, I would love for you to give your, let’s say, 3 best tips or pieces of advice that you think that folks could really use right now.

Duane Forrester
01:03:44 – 01:04:00

Absolutely. Number 1, just mentioned this one, be curious. Don’t look at these new things that are coming up and say, oh, crap. Another new thing. No. No. Look at it and say, how can I learn and exploit this for the benefit of my business? Take that perspective on it. You’ll lean in a little more.

Duane Forrester
01:04:00 – 01:04:17

Number 2, consumer behavior. The data is out there. Get in, dig in, look at it. Because if you think that Google sets direction, you’re mistaken. Consumer behavior tells Google where it needs to go. So you cannot look at this and say, I’ll follow Google. No. No.

Duane Forrester
01:04:17 – 01:04:38

No. The Google’s already following someone else. So you should pay attention to what that other person is doing, and those are the general consumers. Number 3, look. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people. Don’t be afraid to connect. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. This industry that we are a part of is so interconnected and so open with their knowledge.

Duane Forrester
01:04:39 – 01:05:03

Absolutely. If you’re a business owner or you’re curious about something, reach out, make the connection. Just it’s worth having the conversation to get your question answered because there are there’s nothing worse than you struggling to come to a conclusion on which direction to move in, where to go, what investment to make because that holds up everything. And as we all know, it’s better to move forward than to try for perfection.

Filipe Santos
01:05:04 – 01:05:29

Absolutely. And, Duane, this has been a fascinating and amazing conversation. I think there’s been so much that you brought up here in this short amount of time, and I think that folks can probably listen to this 2 or 3 times just to get all those concepts if they’re not already, like, an expert like you. So this is great. I would love for you to kind of, tell people how to follow you or reach out to you, since I think they’re an amazing resource.

Duane Forrester
01:05:29 – 01:05:47

Look. Super easy. I am at Duane Forster on x. You can reach me. Just look up Duane Forster on LinkedIn. I’m happy to connect with rational people. If you’re irrational, I might not connect with you, basically. I will be speaking at PubCon this October in Las Vegas if you care to come out there.

Duane Forrester
01:05:48 – 01:06:01

If you’re in the Pacific Northwest, go to the Engage conference 2 days later because I will be speaking there as well. Watch for a new substack that I’m releasing shortly. I’m easy to find. Right? I I I am all over the Internet at this point.

Filipe Santos
01:06:02 – 01:06:14

Yeah. Well, that’s why you’re a legend. You’ve been around and you you know how to put information out, and you have a very, like, unique perspective on things, which I think is extremely valuable here. So, yeah, thank you so much for your time, Duane.

Duane Forrester
01:06:14 – 01:06:20

Dude, Filipe, this is awesome. Everyone who stayed with us this long, thank you so much. You guys are you guys are the best.