The AI birthday party

I went to a birthday party on Saturday for a friend of a friend.

Though I’d normally have a few drinks, I was completely sober. I had some errands to run later that night and a full schedule on Sunday, so I couldn’t let a hangover derail any of that.

Whether you drink or not is none of my business, but I rarely find myself the only sober person in a room full of inebriated individuals.

For the first few minutes, I felt it a bit difficult to socialize without any liquid courage.

I made my way around the room, introducing myself to people I didn’t recognize and catching up with friends as they walked in.

About 20-30 minutes after I showed up, this guy walked into the party. Let’s call him Jeff.

I’d seen Jeff once or twice before at previous get-togethers, but we’d barely spoken.

But on Saturday, we re-introduced ourselves to one another and got to chatting.

We covered the basics: how you’re doing, where you live, where you’re from, what brought you to LA, etc.

Then we got onto our careers. As it turns out, he works for one of the top microchip companies in the US.

Microchips practically run the world nowadays, and I’d personally never met anyone who works in that industry — pretty cool stuff.

Then the conversations shifted to my career. I told him that I do SEO.

And usually when I say that, people immediately fire back with “SEO. What’s that?”

But this time, the first follow-up that Jeff asked was “How are you thinking about AI in your processes?”

I wish I was making this up — that’s a real question that he asked me. I hate talking about business at social events. I’m there to socialize, not work.

Usually the conversation about SEO dies after I explain what it is, so I was shocked as we continued down this rabbit hole.

But I was sober, and I’d rather answer questions about SEO than the dreaded “Why aren’t you drinking?”

Then we got onto how search results have changed over the years and even months.

I explained how mommy, food, and travel bloggers were practically wiped off the map in the last few months alone.

I told him that eCommerce sites were relatively immune to these kinds of updates, though.

“Why?” He asked.

“Because Google can’t afford to kill off these kinds of sites, even in the organic results.”

In 2023, 77.8% of Google's revenue came from advertising. That’s an enormous chunk of revenue.

With that in mind, imagine this.

You’re an eCommerce brand that spends $20,000 each month on Google Ads.

You also invest $3,000 to $5,000 each month in SEO.

Because of this, your brand appears twice when users search for your products, once in the paid results and once in the organic results.

This is the ultimate sign of trust & authority to a potential customer and one of the many reasons you should use both Google Ads & SEO to scale your brand.

Now imagine that Google rolls out an update that severely impacts your organic search presence, knocking you off the first page and all but eliminating your organic search revenue and traffic.

You’d be pretty upset, right?

Of course you would.

If it were me, and a company disrespected my brand like that, I’d take my advertising dollars elsewhere.

Google would immediately lose out $240,000 each year in ad revenue from your company, likely more as you continue to scale.

Google doesn’t give a shit about a quarter of a million dollars.

But an update like this wouldn’t just impact your eCom brand, it would impact millions of eCom brands.

And though they may not all take their ad dollars elsewhere, many of them will, costing Google hundreds of millions in ad dollars.

Google can’t take that chance — your ad dollars are too important to them.

They want to keep you happy enough so that you keep pumping money into their platform. And in exchange, they’ll keep you on page 1 of Google unless you’re doing some egregious black hat SEO.

Like I said last week, eCom brands are nearly immune to Helpful Content Updates, assuming your content is at least somewhat helpful to readers.

TLDR: Don’t overthink your content strategy as an eCom brand, start publishing.

Peace.

Kai