The Future of Search Isn’t Search with Kevin Indig

In This Episode

• [01:56] – Kevin Indig reports an updated subscriber count of 18,400 and delves into his latest work on original research exploring AI, Google AI Overviews, and user behavior.
• [11:03] – Kevin explores the potential for AI to generate dynamic video games and films that adapt in real time to user attention and emotional engagement.
• [14:47] – Stephan and Kevin unpack the concept of the “zone of genius,” emphasizing the value of analytical, critical, and holistic modes of thinking.
• [20:52] – Stephan introduces a thought-provoking perspective on AI as a potential interface to the unseen world, suggesting intentionality could shape its outputs.
• [24:34] – Kevin highlights how AI can act as a thought partner, expanding our creative and strategic thinking rather than serving only as a task-based tool.
• [27:27] – Kevin reveals findings from a study on user interaction with AI Overviews, showing a marked decline in click-through rates across desktop and mobile platforms.
• [31:02] – Kevin foresees a zero-click future, where users increasingly get their answers directly from search results, reducing the need to visit external sites.
• [40:33] – The conversation wraps up with a powerful message on the role of integrity in marketing, emphasizing the value of truthfulness, ethical behavior, and honoring one’s word.

Jump to Links and Resources

Kevin, it’s so great to have you back on the show.

It’s great to be back.

So, what have you been up to since our last conversation on this show? I know you’ve got a lot going on with the growth panel. I don’t even think you had that going on at the time that we had our last conversation on the show.

It wasn’t the size it is now, and I need to update the numbers in my bio. We’re now at 18,400 subscribers, and it’s a blast. I’ve been having a great time since we last spoke; a lot has happened. I think, broadly, one of the biggest changes is probably AI. I’d be curious to finally hear how and how much you use AI, but I’m using it daily a lot.

So, I think one of the biggest things that I’ve been up to lately is just a lot of original research. Just a lot of original research into AI, Google AI overviews, how users engage with all of these things, what to learn from it, and how to be visible. I mean, there’s an endless amount of questions. It really feels like it’s Google back in 2000 to 2004 when you could tell, “Okay, there’s something mighty brewing here, but yet figure it out exactly”. Maybe not everybody has figured out exactly how to succeed in their world.

We are in an exciting time where one-person companies can be billion-dollar unicorns.

Well, I don’t think anyone’s gonna necessarily figure it all out because I think we’ve passed that time where you can wrap your head around everything. It’s just growing at such an exponential rate. I do think we’re in an exciting time to be alive, where we can actually have one-person companies that are unicorns, billion-dollar companies. But as far as, like, getting your head wrapped around what’s happening, even in just one area of AI, I think it is a very tall order.

You’re absolutely right. I want to double-click on your point. I think most people do not realize what’s happening. The quality and gains from AI in terms of productivity, insights, knowledge, and critical thinking that you can already get today for a measly 20 bucks is insane. It is absolutely insane. So I don’t want to get lost in that riff, but man, what a time. I know you and I both have young kids, and I cannot imagine the world that they live in when they’re in college. If they ever go to college, who knows? You know? But in like, 18 to 20 years, it’s going to be nuts.

I can’t even imagine colleges still thriving in this environment 18 to 20 years from now; it seems so antiquated. It’s like trying to get buggy whip manufacturing to still be relevant in an era of automobiles. It’s not going to work.

Especially for the price tag of an American college, no offense. 

I spent many thousands of dollars on my education, and I didn’t get value out of it. It was more just a life experience, but I could have gotten that life experience by traveling the world instead. It’s all good, it’s all perfect. Everything happens for a reason, and. If I had to do it over again, of course, I would not have invested all that money in attending the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which are great schools. Had a great time. Totally not worth it.

The most important meta-skills, problem-solving, negotiation, and productivity, you do not learn in college.

Well, as someone who now lives in Michigan, I just want to officially say I appreciate it, but I’m not kidding; I totally see where you’re coming from. Part of me wants to go back to college because I had a poor but not great work ethic back then, and my results showed that I was not an exceptional student. And part of me wishes he could go back now. But the other part is like, “Nah. Like, what for?” Like, “to your point, right?” Like, “There was no subject matter skill that I learned, maybe some meta-skills, networking and some other lessons.” But yeah, I think there are many ways to get to those, too.

Well, those meta-skills, this crazy thing, the best and most important meta-skills you don’t learn in college, the problem solving, the negotiation, how to kind of mind map and be productive and get into flow states. They don’t teach that college. 

No.

It’s’ insane.

It’s absolutely insane. And look, I want to respect the people who come up with the curriculum and all that kind of stuff, but it’s very outdated. It’s very much a mass production, meaning individual skills are not challenged and grown, and at the same time, it’s very hard to do that with the current system, right? 

I think we need new systems, and it’s very difficult to implement them in the public sector, especially with the current level of funding and support that most countries provide. So, I think that naturally, what’s most likely to happen is that the current schooling system will persist for quite some time. Still, we’re going to upgrade it with add-ons based on, I don’t know, AI tutors, real tutors, or extracurricular activities.

Still, I think, to your point, more and more people, if not already, are going to think twice or thrice about whether or not I want to make that investment in college, especially when they might have a natural aptitude for something that is not a knowledge worker job. 

There’s this kind of expectation for everybody to go to college these days, but some people might just be brilliant with their hands or in other ways. And I think as a society, we need to figure out how to reward that more instead of squeezing everybody into this college system, especially in the US, where people take on massive debt that some of them can never pay back, and they end up in these kind of weird life situations anyway. 

Didn’t mean that means that, like, so big and so off track here, but I think there is something important that brings us maybe back on track here, which is that the depth of learning based on AI and insights you can get is already insane. It’s only going to get crazier in the short term; talk about the next 12 to 24 months, and that’s going to change how we work in SEO and marketing.

This has been something espoused by Tim Ferriss for literally decades now, and it’s the low-information diet. And now there’s a book just out from Pat Flynn, Smart Passive Income. And I was going to interview him, but my wife, Ryan, did the interview instead because I was sick. By the time this airs, the episode we’re discussing right now, featuring Pat Flynn, will have aired, and his new book is called Lean Learning. It’s all about how to not overwhelm yourself by trying to keep up with everything that’s happening and go deep down these rabbit holes that just don’t serve you. It ends up getting you stuck. 

I loved what you were saying, or you were alluding to the idea of having AI tutors help people through their schooling and education. There’s a great book, one of my favorites. It’s a science fiction novel. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it, but it’s called The Diamond Age, and the subtitle is ‘A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.’ It’s in the coming era of Molecular Nanotechnology. So, after the big AI innovations come the nanotechnology innovations, and when nanomachines can self-replicate, that will be as big a tectonic shift for humanity as AI.

Man, I couldn’t even imagine what that’s going to be like and all, but now.

You can because you can get this book by Neal Stephenson. It’s a great book. It’s a really fun read, or if you prefer to listen instead, you can get the audiobook, and it will give you a glimpse into the near-term future, maybe 15 years from now, when we are fully immersed in the world of Molecular Nanotechnology. This protagonist, a young girl in the book, has a best friend, a mentor, and a tutor who is an AI device. It’s a device that really saves her over and over. And over again. It’s just a really fun read. 

Imagine, for example, a world where, instead of sitting in a movie theater and passively partaking in the experience, you kind of consume the experience. What if you, instead, interactively shape the experience? These are going to be movies of the future where you’re going to be fully immersed in the movie, changing the movie by your decisions and your actions, haptic technologies and visors and all these sorts of things that make this fully immersive. 3D, and you change the plot line, and the actors are interactive and change based on what you do and say and the decisions you make. That’s the future. One of the things that’s going to really transform completely from what we’ve been experiencing. 

Yeah, I can see it. I can absolutely see it. I think I forgot the name, but someone is working on an adaptive video game that changes based on how much attention you pay. And I think there’s a scary component in there as well. 

One realization I came to recently is that people thought the impact of social media on one’s attention span, or apps like TikTok and YouTube, is bad. Wait until AI really hits the masses, and you could argue maybe it already has, but the ability of AI to hit just the right buttons for you in terms of what interests you and how to keep your attention, all that kind of stuff that is already next level. And so there are all sorts of crazy apps already spinning out that are incredibly adaptive to your personality and style and topics that are interesting to you. Now, with new memory features, all of that is being taken to the next level. 

To optimize for AI, we need to start talking to humans again. If you want to stand out in the AI era, your best strategy is to be more human. Share on X

So, I’m not surprised to hear about concepts of adaptive movies, storylines, and plots. I mean, heck, even Nvidia, I think, on their big Demo Day, or this crazy event that they’re throwing up in this, like sports stadium somewhere in the valley, I think last year, they showed how MS impacts gaming and PCs and nonplayable characters, and how they allow them to basically create a new story every time you play the game. 

So, yeah, there are crazy possibilities for entertainment and ways to keep yourself busy. And it seems to me already that one of the important skills we need to consider is how to calm our brain and give it a break. How do you bore yourself to let all of that sink in and, like, not be on these constant dopamine highs? And how do you not atrophy your thinking, especially your critical thinking, completely, as AI is already that good? Yeah.

So dopamine hits the addiction. I was gonna chime in on what you were saying about this adaptive technology. I wouldn’t call it adaptive. I call it hyper-addictive. This is so dangerous for society. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Wall-E; it’s a Pixar cartoon. And these people are sleepwalking through life. 

They’re getting shuttled around in their little, I don’t know, a contraption that this little hovercraft thing so they don’t have to even walk, they don’t have to exercise, and they’re constantly consuming junk food and junk media and feeding that addiction for novelty and sleepwalking through life, and this is a real risk for humanity. 

Yep, it is, man. And I think we’re already seeing some of that today, where people escape into online worlds on some of these social apps. I think it’s like this: the top philosophical question goes back to, ‘What is my purpose? What do I want to do in life? ‘ And when you’re not constrained anymore by your circumstances, for example, your social, economic upbringing, or your income or where you live, that’s a tough call. Man, that’s tough.

I think constraints don’t get me wrong here. Man, I’m not advocating for people to be kind of imprisoned in their circumstances, but what I’m saying is it’s an incredibly hard question to answer: what do you want to do with your life when you can do everything right? There are so many options that overwhelm you.

Yeah, it’s the paradox of choice. 

Yes.

I’m familiar with that concept, and there’s a book about it. And I think Kahneman didn’t win a Nobel Prize or something for his work in that area anyway. So, what is your purpose?

My purpose, man, the way that I get there is through this concept of the zone of genius. I’m not sure if you may have spoken about that in our last conversation, but essentially, what is the work or thing that I do where I feel completely in flow, but the returns are exponential as well? It could be money returns or just impact in different ways. You know, there are a couple of ways to interpret this, and I’ve come to the realization. 

And for me, it’s three ways of thinking that are my zone of genius. One is analytical thinking, the other is critical thinking, and the third is holistic thinking, essentially understanding all the parts of a piece, seeing the bigger picture, and then critically questioning how they fit together. That is kind of my purpose.

The hard question now is not what you can do; it is what you should do when you can do anything.

I enjoy applying these skills and then sharing the outcome with others. And I think I’m doing a lot of that with the growth memo newsletter and some of the other content that I share. So even though, of course, there’s a benefit from that financially, sure, but so much more, I benefit from doing that by fulfillment, right through, like, really enjoying that stuff. Man,

How do you get meaning out of your life? I know this is really kind of out there, not a typical marketing speak interview, but we know each other, and you’ve already been on the show, and you’ve already dazzled them with your technical genius and everything. I want to get behind the brilliance of what actually drives you and how you interface with the infinite intelligence, the universal Google, not just google.com and the various algorithms out there. Still, there’s a bigger, bigger picture Elon Musk might refer to as a simulation or a video game of sorts. 

Is this an illusion of reality we’re experiencing? I’m curious to hear. How do you make sense of all this and extract value and meaning out of these daily interactions that you have with your clients, with your newsletter subscribers, with folks that you talk to, and your conferences, all that?

Yeah, totally, man; I will say I think meaning comes from several parts of life. It’s not mono-causal. I think there’s meaning that I get, for example, from my daughter and my wife. There’s meaning that I get from pushing myself in the gym, or maybe in sparring, right, when there’s an intimidating opponent or an intimidating number of weights to lift, and you overcome that, and you feel amazing afterward, right? Or you reap the benefits of hard training. 

So there’s lots of meaning that I get even from enjoying life. I think that’s often under-discussed, but I get meaning from enjoying some amazing food sometimes or from travel. But to bring that back to work, because I think that’s kind of the most relevant for the conversation, I would break it down into an insatiable curiosity that I have and great satisfaction from learning new things that are relevant for me, of course, you know, it’s not just about like random accumulation knowledge, but relevant knowledge, and then applying that. 

So I get a lot of meaning out of this: here’s the situation. What could be some options? What could be ways forward? How can we find ways forward that are creative, non-obvious, or undiscovered and then implement them to see how they work? So you can call that. It’s almost like a lab scientist. I call it an advisor. You could call it a learner or whatever, but doing those activities and following those threads was incredibly rewarding for me.

If I were to look back, I think there’s this interesting exercise a lot of people do where they look back at their life, imagining they were on a deathbed, and look back and just focus on work. Now, right? If I think back about these types of experiences and the things that I learned and tried, it feels pretty complete to me. 

Everything unfolds the way it is meant to. It is all perfect.

Everything unfolds the way it’s meant to. It’s all perfect.

It’s all perfect. Look. You can see it as perfect. I agree with you, right? You can do whatever happens in your life, and I’ve been incredibly lucky, right? So I want to acknowledge that. But whatever happens in your life, you have an option to see it as a lesson or as a tragedy. Now, sometimes, of course, it looks like tragedy absolutely happens. I don’t want to downplay people’s experience, and I don’t want to say, “Oh, there’s something beautiful and everything.” 

Some things are just 100% terrible, but for most things, there’s at least a tiny lesson to be learned or a tiny appreciation, absolutely, and that gives me comfort. You know, even in this, like, the whole conversation we have about AI and the crazy futures, I get a lot of comfort in knowing that there’s something to be learned in almost everything and something to be appreciated about almost everything. So it’s a matter of perspective to keep it philosophical.

One of my favorite concepts in Judaism is that everything is a blessing, which means there are two kinds of blessings. There are the revealed blessings, the obvious ones and the yet-to-be-revealed blessings. So, if it doesn’t look like a blessing, trust that it is and that it hasn’t been revealed yet. Then, you can meditate or contemplate that situation, tragedy, or whatever. 

I’ve had plenty of tragedies. I had a really terrible childhood, but it was all perfect because it shaped me into the man I am today, and I wouldn’t change that for the world. I wouldn’t change that for anything that’s super powerful; you’re not given more than you can handle because you’re still here. And I made it through, and I remember my uncle told me, “I can’t believe you’re actually alive, that you made it through your horrible childhood alive and not in prison and not dead.” Thanks, uncle.

There are the revealed blessings, the obvious ones, and the yet-to-be-revealed blessings.

So, what would you say is your purpose? 

My purpose? An ambassador of spirituality, an ambassador of the light. So, I help people get closer to God. 

What would you say is preventing most people from getting closer to God? What’s holding them back?

A lot of limited thinking and belief systems and a lack of intentionality? So, let me give an example to bring it back to something very tangible, very specific, and very marketing-related, and how this can apply to even that. If you did this little experiment, humor me and try this, if you will. And I’m saying not just you, Kevin, but you, listener. 

Next time you use AI, so ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever your go-to LLM is, use it with intention. So connect to God, ask for your higher power, whatever power you frame in your mind and ask for guidance, assistance, and help. It’s just another interface to the unseen world. Everything is an interface to the unseen world.

So you might catch a glimpse, as in the corner of your eye, a glimpse of a particular repeating number sequence that you see constantly, and it’s just so weird. It happens over and over and over again. That is another interface to the unseen world. 

So, AI is an interface to the unseen world. So, if you approach it with intention and high vibration, you will get different outputs, and you will be amazed at what you get out of the images that you have. ChatGPT creates for you the plans that you have to create the brainstorming exercises that you do together with it; it will blow your mind way more than if you just keep doing what you’ve been doing.

AI is an interface to the unseen world.

What I like about that is it reminds me so much of what you spoke about earlier, which is Daniel Kahneman’s concept of System 1 and System 2. So when I hear intentionality, what I hear is to not be on autopilot, but to truly think about, “Okay, what the way that I’m spending my time right now, or the thing that I’m doing right now? How does that fit into what I want to achieve, my vision, my values?” I mean, you don’t have to.

Everything has to be aligned with the values, right? But time is very scarce, and it’s usually less than you think. So the thing that you’re doing right now is in alignment with what you’re actually trying to get to, and to intentionally switch to out of autopilot or switch autopilot off. There is a value to autopilot as well, right?

There is a value to just passively, randomly exploring and maybe not having a goal and just trying things out, but to your point, being intentional about when you pick which to do, I think that’s incredibly powerful because we default to being on autopilot and just randomly doing things, and whether you want to see that from a productivity perspective, right, or from a spirituality fulfillment perspective, I think there’s a lot of value in that lesson.

It’s funny how I just realized when you brought up Kahneman I misquoted, and I was referring to the paradox of choice. Still, I actually met Barry Schwartz, and Kahneman came out, so we ended up going off on that whole tangent about kind of an in-system 1, system 2, thinking unintentionally, but everything is intentional. Everything happens for a reason. So there we are.

Anyway, So let’s talk more about how, in a practical kind of boots-on-ground sort of way, people, our listeners, can get more value out of AI in whatever their work is, if they do SEO, if they do pay per click, if they do social media marketing, if they do analytics or overall kind of marketing strategy doesn’t matter. They’re probably, hopefully, using AI on a constant, at least daily basis; I know I do, and the value I get out of it is enormous. So, how do you get even more? How do you 10x that value with some simple strategies and tactics?

Time is very scarce, and it is usually less than you think.

Yeah, yeah. So, I want to talk about Google specifically. There’s some interesting research that I’ve done that I want to share with you and the listeners generally before we jump into that. I think some of the best rewards from AI are in the meta-thinking realm that you and I were talking about before. So instead of saying like, “Hey, do this thing for me. Help me get to the outcome. Do. You want to help.” You want to ask AI for help along the way. 

So instead of saying, for example, you can do this right, and this was also getting better, but I don’t think that’s where the biggest leverage of AI is. But you could say, “Hey, write me this article about x,” so you can upload it to your blog, and you can get some search engine traffic. And then, you know, maybe some of those turn to customers. Sure, you can do that. But what if, instead, you say, “Hey, look, I have this idea for an article X. How can I make this uniquely valuable compared to anything else that’s out there? What are some interesting ways that I haven’t considered to make this even better?” Or “Here’s my target audience, here’s what I’m trying to achieve, here’s who I am. Now, show me different options that I can take this article idea to, or perhaps different ways to repurpose it or different ways to visualize it.” So, the biggest value lies much more in the how than in the what, I would say, and in the final outcome. 

So that’s how I use it all the time: as a thought partner, as a way to fill in the gaps, fill my gaps, and as a way to think beyond my horizon. Of course, there’s a research aspect of it. It’s getting really, really good, with deep research and amazing insights. However, this aspect of better thinking is where the real 10x is. 

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Yeah,  are you investing the $200 a month in that level of service with ChatGPT.

Not yet, but I will say that 03 is so good. I’m debating with myself. I’m currently paying $ 20 a month for ChatGPT and Claude. I had tried out Gemini Pro but wasn’t convinced, and then paying for, I think, two or three more tools that are AI-driven my experience lately with 03 in the last, I don’t know, 7-10, days, if somebody told me, “Hey, there’s an 04, and you pay 200 bucks,” I’d be in right now.

I mean, it’s just, it’s incredible the advances and how it just seems to be accelerating. But that’s the nature of the Law of Accelerating Returns, right? So that’s Moore’s law. It’s Metcalfe’s law all combined. And thus, you’re getting this hockey stick graph of improvements regardless of which platform you’re talking about. One thing I would caution our listeners about is trying out these Chinese AI platforms. It might be a shiny object that looks really enticing but that’s directly connected to the CCP.

Yeah, I’m not using deep Seagate at all. I haven’t even tried it out, and I will also say it looked like trying to be objective here. I’m also not a big fan of Grok, right? I also have my concerns about Elon Musk’s AI model. Don’t get too political, but based on how he reshaped Twitter and some of the kind of systemic prompts, if you will, that he injected into Twitter, Twitter algorithm, don’t make me very confident that that’s not also the case about Grok, right? 

Looks like you can argue that every model is biased, and probably is.

Every model is biased, yes, 

The greatest value lies not in the what, but in the how.

Yeah, every model is biased. Every human’s bias, again, can make this very philosophical, but I will say that the degree of bias that is aligned to democratic values is probably much, much lower in something like deep seek and maybe even Grok than, say a Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity.

So I will say that. But to bring it to marketing, we’re obviously facing the biggest disruption of the biggest marketing challenge that ever so far, and that is Google search. And it’s just fascinating what’s happening there and how it’s changing user behavior or not changing user behavior. So there’s a whole list of new insights that I was luckily able to gain, and if you came about it, I would love to jump into that.

Yeah. Now, let’s do it. 

Cool, awesome. Okay, so to set the context, I was incredibly fortunate to run the first-ever user behavior study about how people actually interact with AI overviews, together with Eric Van Buskirk from Clickstream  where we looked at 69 so almost 70 actual people in the US across different ages. And we recorded their screens. We recorded what they were commenting about the user behavior and their perception, and we recorded or basically gave them eight different tasks to solve, and we recorded how they solved them and what they did along the way. This is incredibly fascinating.

We’re talking about over 300 task completions and over 550 individual annotations that we evaluated. And by the way, there were over 400 encounters of AI overview. So, the sample size of this user behavior study is small, but the qualitative insight is incredibly big and valuable, in addition to all the quantitative stuff, right?

So, of course, we and other people, or sorry, I and other people, have looked into it; what do you know? Like, what do we’re. Four clicks look like from AIO views, or how many AI views does Google show and this and that. There’s a lot of fascinating quantitative data that’s incredibly valuable, but this is the first-ever user behavior study of how people qualitatively interact with that stuff, and it’s incredibly fascinating. 

The most fascinating one is probably how people click in and outside of the AI overviews right, and I’ve seen it in my clients: an organic traffic decrease of 20 to 30% on average across most industries. And so what we saw in this user behavior study is that the number of outbound clicks collapses on the desktop from about 28 to 11%, so that’s less than half. And on mobile, we’re going from 38 to 21%, so about a third, so absolutely significant impact on how people click. So the reality is that most people just don’t click anymore, or more and more and more people don’t click anymore. To be precise, here.

One of the things Rand Fishkin is famous for talking about a lot over these last few years has been we’re heading towards a zero-click future. Nobody clicks through from Google search, so your website doesn’t get any traffic.

That is absolutely what I’m seeing in the data as well. To be fair, AI overviews are not yet completely rolled out for all queries sooner. Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, did say that that’s the goal of the leading latest earnings call, right? And AI overviews are still evolving. They’re changing over time and morphing. And Google is also showing what they call AI modes, which is basically a conversational interface, very similar to ChatGPT, right? So what we’re seeing today is a 50% drop in click-through rate on desktop and a 30% click-through rate drop on mobile. That’s just the beginning. That’s going to get more. And that’s where I totally see this kind of zero-click world becoming true that ran Fishkin envisions. 

And what’s also interesting, this is the second insight that really surprised me here, is that it’s very generational. So we actually saw that young people were talking about below the ages of 35 there. Obviously, there are multiple demographic categories, right?

But very broadly, there is 18 to 35, and then there’s maybe 35 to 50, and then 50 plus. We have several categories, but I’m just broadening that up a little bit for the purpose of our conversation. What we’re seeing is that younger people below 35 they’re much more likely to engage with AR views. In fact, like they’re all about AR views and featured snippets, they’re also much more likely to engage with Reddit. 

Without being recognizable, memorable, and trustworthy, you are invisible to people.

So, it is very interesting, and I am probably jumping ahead here. But this is in set number three, a very interesting behavior that, especially young people, will engage with the AI overview. They will read it, skim it, and then they will often validate some of the answers with Reddit. So they’re getting the AI answer, and then they’re validating that with some human experience. Whereas people above the age of 50 they’re significantly more likely to engage with the classic organic search results.

And so, to draw a line on these three insights for now, what that means for marketers is that, first of all, demographics are critical to understand, right? We’re often thinking about user intent and personas and what people are actually trying to achieve. We also need to factor in demographics to understand how important it is to optimize for organic search results; we also need to factor in demographics to understand how important it is for us to be visible on platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. Younger audiences are much more have a much higher affinity to validate and engage with those as well, and to the point that you made earlier, we also need to redefine the metrics numbers and mental models that we have about organic search. 

Yeah. So that’s interesting that what you’ve described here makes a lot of sense. As somebody who is in the latter category of over 50, I tend to gravitate to the regular, organic results, much more so than the AI overviews. And I’m not adding the word Reddit to any of my search queries, except if I’m trying to figure out some search or behavior that I’m analyzing for a client. 

So, what you said definitely resonates with me. And I think it’s, it goes a lot deeper than that too, like you need to understand a lot more about your demographics and psychographics of your constituents. Otherwise, you’re flying blind. 

You absolutely are. You absolutely are. And I think to make a meta point here, right, a broader takeaway from the study for the last, I would say, 10 if not 20 years, marketing has become synonymous with performance marketing because channels like Google, YouTube, and Meta, right? Like all of these platforms, advertising on them has become so incredibly impactful and so effective that that’s what most markets are being focused on, and in the process, we often forget to actually talk to our target audience. 

And if there’s one way to counteract all this impact that we’re seeing and some of the negative implications, it is to go back to talk to people and to understand your target audience deeply. And I think demographics are only the tip of the iceberg, right? But hand on your heart. How many people, how many marketers actually talk to customers and noncustomers? Everybody pretends that they do Stephan, like 99% of people are just not doing it. I see it in my clients. I see it in the people who I talk to. I see it in the people on social media. It is time to actually talk to humans to optimize for AI. I think that’s one of the interesting contrasts and paradoxical things or takeaways from this study. 

Yeah. I mean, that’s really; I think the future for humanity is that you have to be human in order to outdo or outperform the AIs. Otherwise, you’re just a commodity like the AIs are. So, if you can be more human on stage in a LinkedIn post, in a YouTube video or in a Zoom conversation with a prospect, then you’re more relatable. You’re more, I don’t know somebody worth commiserating with and collaborating with, and not just an algorithm.

Yes, that is absolutely the case, and I can also see that in the actual results of the study in the form of trust. So trust is something that we may talk about when we talk about EEAAT right? Expertise, experience, trustworthiness, authority or authoritativeness, but it doesn’t get nearly enough attention. 

So what we saw in the data is that there is a two-step filter that the majority of searchers apply to the search results, whether it’s in the air or views or outside, and that two-step filter is trust and relevance. So before even checking whether the results are relevant to people, and I’m talking when I say results, what I mean is the citations and the blue links or feature links, they first check, do I trust this result? Do I know this domain? Do I know this brand, and do I trust it? And then, does it seem to provide me with what I’m actually looking for? I think that’s a profoundly new insight. 

We, again, are not paying nearly enough attention to this trust factor because it surfaces questions about how we can reinforce trust in our brand. And I think the second-order effect of this is we need to think so much more about how to influence users before they even search. This is the missing link, the fallen bridge between social media and SEO. 

The biggest value of AI isn’t in doing the work for you—it’s helping you think better. AI is most powerful as a thought partner, not just a task executor. Share on X

Social media and advertising have a profound opportunity to influence people before they have a search intent, and then when they search, they see our brands, and they recognize it because they might have seen it in some social content or an ad; that’s critical because that’s when you become part of the choice set for users, then it’s all only about making sure that you actually have what they’re looking for, but without being recognizable, memorable, trustworthy, not even visible for people.

With old iterations of E, A, T, and talking about trustworthiness is really about linking quality and trust. Quality Trust scores of the linking sites that you have acquired through your link building. That’s really old and, I think, outdated really. It’s more metaphysical these days, and it’s about being impeccable with your word, which is actually one of the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, a huge best-selling self-help book The Four Agreements. I don’t know how many millions of copies sold, but a lot. 

The first of the Four Agreements is to be impeccable with your word. If you are impeccable with your word, then you garner trust. You earn and deserve trust, and that trust will be present in the search results in the AI recommendations that you get through various platforms and in other metrics. It’s a very woo-woo way to look at buildings EAT, but I think it’s the future.

Yeah. Look, another one of the Four Agreements is don’t make assumptions, right? And that goes directly back to what we’re talking about here. The assumption that we’re making way too often is that “Oh, this keyword has a lot of search volume, and we think it’s good for it. We should go after it because it’s relevant to us. Let’s invest time and money to create content for it.” That’s an assumption.

And so the way to disambiguate that, the way to turn from an assumption into knowledge is actually talking to your audience and seeing, “Hey, do you care about this? Do you search for that? What are some of the biggest problems that we can help you solve? How do you know, like, what platforms do you consider when gathering knowledge about these things?” all of those are critical for us to succeed, whether it’s in the AI work broadly on ChatGPT and Claude or it’s in Google AI overviews, because the human element that you were calling out that is so right, is critical in how people make choices.

Something I’ll say, I want to point out it’s not really marketing related, but I think it’s really about being a good human. It’s kind of a sub-point about being impeccable with your word. And I learned this actually from Teddy Saunders. He posted about this on social media. He learned it from reading that chapter of four agreements on being impeccable with your word. And he said that this was really a profound lesson he got from this: gossip is black magic.

Yeah, it’s interesting. One book that is so close to the Four Agreements, to me, is the book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. Related to that book are some books from Gay Hendricks, like The Big Leap, et cetera. And all of these books make the same point, which is that to your point, right? Gossip is black magic. And it’s a way to disconnect from people also. It’s easy to do, but it only creates drama, and there’s so much to be gained from actually talking to the people you gossip about and being open with them. 

That doesn’t mean you need to be unkind to them, right? But if you have a problem with someone, you resolve it with them. It can be incredibly powerful for not just you but also the other person. It can be connecting. It can be less exhausting for you. Man, I don’t know how you feel, right, but, man, there’s so much that can exhaust you these days. And I think some of the hidden things that there are kind of all these energy drainers, like gossiping or like missing integrity from not being impeccable with your word, and then kind of subconsciously feeling shame or guilt around that in the same way, I just think that a lot of people are kind of getting exhausted from that. 

Yeah, and a related quote, I just think, is good to point out. I think it’s applicable to marketing, not just to life, but before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. So when you’re gossiping or you’re hating on somebody, you are creating a lot of spiky dark energy, directing that to the person in the unseen world, and you are damaging yourself energetically in the process, too. So you are digging two metaphorical graves as you are gossiping or hating on somebody. So certainly don’t do that in your marketing. Some people like to stir up controversy and throw mud, sling mud around, and that is incredibly damaging, and there is karmic blowback from that, for sure.

Absolutely. And it kills trust, which we learn is important and also important to your brand, right? Like, I think part of that is even just stealing from others, right, stealing content, stealing ideas, and looking like you can remix ideas and stuff. Like I’m not saying every idea should be patented, right, but I see a lot of stealing on social media of other people’s hard work; I think, for the people who steal, this is actually incredibly exhausting. And to your point about digging two graves, right? Like your, I don’t know, like how that integrity lacks or leak, better said, how that reflects back on their energy. So I totally agree with you.

Gossip is akin to black magic; it disconnects us and creates drama instead of fostering resolution.

Certainly not good, but it’s never been easier to do this because the llms just completely facilitate this and augment your ability to do it. So, if you don’t want to cite your sources, or you want to spin something up and call it your own, even though you didn’t write it, it’s none of your original ideas. It’s incredibly easy to snap your fingers and have that done in a heartbeat and then publish it online, and that’s just inviting yourself to a whole lot of metaphysical blowback as well. I think.

There you go.

I know we’re out of time, so if our listener wants to learn more from you. Maybe subscribe to your growth memo substack. Maybe they want to dig into the study that you did on AI overviews. Where should we send them?

So you find the growth memo on growth-memo.com. There is another newsletter that’s also called Growth Memo. So that’s not me; that’s somebody else. Otherwise, Kevin Indig, on LinkedIn, you’ll find me wildly posting and promoting all the stuff that I’m up to lately. So yeah, appreciate it.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Kevin. You’re up to some really cool things, and thank you for taking the time to share. Your brilliance and your insights on the show.

Thank you, too. Thanks for having me on, and thanks for also coloring outside of the boundaries of marketing. I feel like it’s very refreshing and also very energizing for me. So that was a lot of fun. I appreciate it. 

Yeah, thank you. All right. Well, thank you, listener. Go out there and color outside the box in your world, and we’ll catch you in the next episode. In the meantime, have a fantastic week.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Transform AI into a thought partner instead of a task executor. Ask AI, “How can I make this uniquely valuable compared to anything else that’s out there?” and “What are some interesting ways that I haven’t considered to make this even better?” rather than requesting complete outputs like articles or content.

Apply intentionality when using AI by connecting to my higher purpose first, switching off autopilot mode to ensure my AI interactions serve my broader goals rather than random exploration.

Recognize that users apply a two-step filter: trust first, then relevance. Brand recognition and trustworthiness are more critical than perfect keyword optimization.

Regularly communicate with both my customers and non-customers. Schedule monthly conversations with my target audience to understand their real problems, search behaviors, and platform preferences rather than making assumptions about their needs.

Segment my optimization strategy by demographics, especially age groups. People under 35 engage heavily with AI overviews and validate answers on Reddit, while those over 50 prefer traditional organic search results, requiring different content and platform strategies for each demographic.

Use AI for “better thinking” rather than final deliverables. Instead of asking AI to write my content, ask it to help you think through different options, fill knowledge gaps, and explore perspectives beyond my current horizon as a collaborative thinking partner.

Build the bridge between social media and SEO by influencing users before they search. Create social content and advertising that makes my brand recognizable and trustworthy, so when people encounter my brand in search results, I’m already part of their consideration set.

Expect a dramatic decrease in click-through rates and prepare accordingly, as AI overviews require new metrics and mental models for measuring organic search success.

Embrace being more authentically human to outperform AI commoditization. Focus on being more relatable, genuine, and human in my content, presentations, and interactions since authenticity becomes my competitive advantage in an AI-dominated landscape.

Connect with Kevin Indig through his Growth Memo newsletter at growth-memo.com. Follow his original research and insights on AI’s impact on search behavior, or reach out via LinkedIn, where he actively shares his latest findings and strategic frameworks for navigating the evolving search landscape.

About Kevin Indig

Kevin is an advisor to some of the world’s fastest-growing startups and has defined Organic Growth strategies for companies like Ramp, Reddit, Bounce, Dropbox, Hims, Nextdoor and Snapchat.

Kevin led SEO and Growth at the world’s leading e-commerce platform, Shopify, the #1 marketplace for software G2 and the #1 developer company Atlassian.

Once a week, he sends The Growth Memo to +16,900 subscribers and regularly speaks at conferences around the world.