SEO Isn’t Dead: How AI Is Rewriting the Rules

[00:00:00] SEO and AI. You hear about them every day, but do you really know how they best work together? My special guest today, Bruce Clay, often called the father of SEO, shares his unique perspective on the past, present, and future of SEO in this new AI-driven world. You'll learn why SEO is far from dead, how AI impacts search results, and what your brand should do right now to stay ahead.

[00:00:27] So make sure you stay tuned to this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:00:51] If you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neal on your side. Because Neal Schaffer is your Digital Marketing Coach. Helping you grow your business with digital-first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your Digital Marketing Coach. And this is Neal Schaffer.

[00:01:22] Hey everybody, this is Neal Schaffer, your Digital Marketing Coach, and welcome to episode number 425. We are literally halfway through 2025. And if there is anything that still is bringing change to not just SEO or digital marketing or marketing or business or life, it really is AI.

[00:01:43] So last week, I released an episode where I recommended you manage your expectations regarding SEO in this AI world. And maybe it was time to shift those digital threads to other channels where we might be more effective. Now that isn't to say that SEO is dead.

[00:02:06] It might be to say that traffic that we can generate from traditional SEO might have peaked. Is there still traffic to be had? Absolutely. So with what is left with the emergence of AI overviews and large language models like ChatGPT and the searches we're doing in them, what is left and how can we maximize the opportunities?

[00:02:29] So in this episode, that is going to be the angle in which I bring you an eye-opening conversation that I recently had with Bruce Clay. The man many call literally the father of SEO and you'll hear his story in the interview. We explore how search engine optimization has evolved over nearly three decades and how AI is changing the rules once again. Now Bruce shares why SEO is more than just mere keywords.

[00:02:55] It's about owning your place on the search results page, understanding intent and working across teams to grow your traffic. If you want your business to stay visible and keep driving results in this new era, this episode will show you how important it is to think beyond just organic search and embrace a bigger picture. Now I think this episode is going to be a must listen.

[00:03:20] Any marketer or any entrepreneur, business owner, content creator, if you want to stay ahead in digital marketing, we need to continue to understand how AI's emergence and its impact on SEO is playing out. So today I bring you the perspective of Bruce Clay in this interview. So let's get started. You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neil Schaefer. Hey everybody.

[00:03:50] Welcome to another live stream edition of the your digital marketing coach podcast. So today we're going to be talking about SEO and AI's impact in SEO. And I want to begin with a little story and it may not seem directly related, but I think in reference to today's special guest, it'll all make sense at the end of the story. So when I was in university, for those that know me, I did a junior year abroad in Beijing, China, and I was there during what we know. What we now call the Tiananmen demonstrations.

[00:04:20] And yes, I saw them firsthand. Lots of pictures, but that's another story. But when I came back to university my senior year, I was having a conversation with my father, may he rest in peace. And I said, you know, this is what I want to write my senior thesis about. And my dad said, Neil, don't you think you need a little more historical perspective to understand what this event is impact is going to be on history. We just don't know until some time passes.

[00:04:47] And it's a concept that I've brought with me because as we get older and we have more experience, obviously we gain more historical perspective. And when we use that to our advantage, we can outperform many in business. So today's special guest, when we talk about SEO and AI, there is a heck of a lot of noise. But today we bring in truly someone who has been called the father of SEO, someone that was doing SEO when we were all still in our diapers.

[00:05:15] Really, when we think of the, you know, the top experts out there that have been doing this, you know, since the beginning, the name Bruce Clay is always a name that comes up. You know, author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, leading expert, trainer, consultant. And when he reached out to me saying he'd like to be on this podcast, I was absolutely honored. So I'm going to stop here. I'm going to let Bruce do the rest of the talking. I'm really excited about today's conversation. So Bruce, welcome to the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Well, thank you. I'm glad to be here.

[00:05:44] I'm excited for you to share your historical perspective because you've seen SEO from its very onset. And I think the emergence of AI has confused some, angered some. There's a lot of talk in the air, but there's still a lot of people who may not know the road forward. So I'm hoping by the end of this conversation, we'll have that as well as some other golden nuggets that I'm sure you have for us. But Bruce, I always like to ask my guests, how did this all get started?

[00:06:10] I mean, how did you get into a field that probably when you got into it was brand new at the time? How did you see that this was going to be the way of the future? Well, when I got into it, it was 1996. Wow. And anybody that remembers way back then, there were these things called modems. And that was when Al Gore invented the internet.

[00:06:34] And clearly it was a lot of arm waving. There weren't a lot of websites. There certainly were not a lot of search engines. 1996 is three years before Google. So yeah, I've been around longer than Google has. And that meant we had Excite and AltaVista and InfoSeq and a few search engines.

[00:07:00] My background is BS in math and computer science. I have an MBA. I marketing and programming all went together back then. I was able to look and say, marketing, that's going to be search. And people are going to need to be there. And it's an algorithm. There must be a way to determine what works and what doesn't work. And I just sat down and started doing it. It wasn't even called search engine optimization.

[00:07:28] I started using that term 96 and it caught. It caught. I've been mentioned a lot by my colleagues, the father of SEO comment, right? It isn't an ego thing, but I'm too much of a marketer to give it up. Of course. Come on, really. When your colleagues give you that, you're going to take it. And you can do a Google search for it. It's kind of cool.

[00:07:58] I even tried it in chat and say, who is the father of SEO and why? And it came out and gave you all this stuff about me. So the early days, though, is how that happened. You were able to establish a brand because there were no voices. You were able to be perceived as a leader because there weren't a lot of people that were talking about it. I remember the first search engine strategies conference.

[00:08:27] I went. All of the experts in the field went. And all eight of us were able to sit at one table in the bar. Wow. That was it. The whole industry was right there. If there was an earthquake or a disaster and it wiped us out, the industry was dead. And it was kind of interesting anyhow. So and it certainly has grown. It certainly has grown. The early days were a little bit Wild West or a lot.

[00:08:56] The fun was in understanding and learning and doing things that worked and discovering new things that worked. It was a highly dynamic environment from the standpoint of the search engines. And I was fortunate. I had a methodology for analyzing and I wrote applications for it that helped me do smart things. That's the early days.

[00:09:22] Certainly since then, it has somewhat calmed down. And in fact, it got very complex over the years. Very complex. Lots of variables in the algorithm. And every Monday, it's a new industry. I mean, it's constant change. Somewhere between Google doing 5,000 changes a year and your competition wanting to eat your lunch. It was highly dynamic.

[00:09:51] It was just really, it changed a lot every day. And one of the fun parts about it, and I'll mention this, one of the fun parts was I get to make a change to somebody's website. I'm doing a real-time live company simulation. Right? I mean, think about it. I had a responsibility not to put that company out of business.

[00:10:19] And there was a lot of, yeah, you were responsible and you had to own it. And so it worked. It worked. It was fun for me. I think the advent of AI, which is today's topic, is really basically, it's Wild West again. It is resetting the clock to much like the first days of SEO. Wow.

[00:10:47] I think it's a little bit off and we'll talk about that, I'm sure. But yeah, it's put a lot of excitement back into the SEO space. Amazing. So, Bruce, when we were prepping for this and you sort of hinted at it when you said you searched on ChatGPT for Father Vestia and you came up. And this really gets to the heart of what I think a lot of people listening are like, hey, how do we show up when people do a search on Chat? But let's take a step back.

[00:11:14] As we were prepping for this interview, you said that we should feel good about the value of the new SEO. So some things to unpeel there. What is this, what you would call the new SEO? And then why should we be feeling good about the value of it? Okay. So I have a, having been around a long time, I have opinions.

[00:11:40] The first opinion, though, goes with the question, who said that search engine optimization was only organic? I think that's one of the base questions. I mean, I admit that when SEO started, all there was was organic. But it didn't say search organic optimization. It said search engine optimization.

[00:12:04] And I believe myself, I believe that what we're really talking about is anything that's on the SERP is SEO. And that within SEO, there are certainly disciplines. And they step all over each other. There's what's traditionally considered organic SEO. And then there's pay-per-click. And then content plays in there. And now you got AIO that plays in there.

[00:12:33] You've got some external stimulus that can cause it. Conversion rate optimization. Is that SEO? Do SEOs care? Quite frankly, conversion rate optimization can increase your dwell time, which influences rank brain, causes your site to look more appropriate for the query.

[00:12:55] Therefore, CRO impacts your ranking, not just conversions, but actual SEO work. So there's a lot of things I think are appropriate for SEO. But I also think that the implementation or at least the focus of a lot of the current SEOs is a little misplaced. They're still looking at the foundation.

[00:13:22] They're looking at SEO, PPC, content, AIO, social. And those are the building blocks of traffic, admittedly. But Google has over 40 features on that search result page. Wow. They have everything from local packs to people also ask to even the dropdowns, the instance.

[00:13:47] All of the things that go on that search result page, those are optimizable to a great extent. I mean, the page number and the pagination isn't. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff that are features in Google if you want to be absolutely raw about it. But I think that what we're dealing with is we need to have traffic and presence. We need SERP visibility is what we need.

[00:14:16] And, you know, I still think that people will use social. And I think they'll use chat. And I think they'll identify what they're looking for. And as soon as they know what they're looking for, I still think a majority of them are going to go to Google or another search engine. Bing maybe. Google being, you know, the 800-pound gorilla. I just saw a stat that the number of searches on Google are slightly more than 350 times chat.

[00:14:44] Well, I would say Google is the gatekeeper from any source, anywhere, any source. Google is the gatekeeper on the way to e-commerce. They're going to look for reviews. They're going to look for all sorts of things. And that is where I want to dominate. That's our projects.

[00:15:05] I can take anybody and analyze and determine an optimal program and be able to say this is how you dominate in Google because everybody has to go down that bridge. And that's where the real money is going to be made. And that's why SEO is never going to die. It just isn't. How many times has, I mean, people have announced that SEO is dead maybe a dozen times now.

[00:15:34] It hasn't quite died. And, you know, my statement that I use in my training class, SEO is done when Google stops changing things and all your competition has died. Until then, SEO isn't going to go away. So when you talk about the value of the new SEO, it's really taking this more holistic perspective than what most SEOers take. It's also including that, yes, ChatGPT exists, but it's one part.

[00:16:04] And we're still going to go back. So it's really understanding how everything fits into place and appreciating the value of each of those pieces. Would that be including things like CRO, which are not typically covered by SEOers? Would that be a good description of that? Absolutely. I think that my perception is that people are all worried about what is it. And Neil Patel, for instance, he says it's search everywhere optimization.

[00:16:32] Well, folks, you don't have to change the name. You just need to optimize. I mean, we know we can get traffic. And we can definitely get traffic. I keep statistics on my entire customer base and the customer base goes up 20% in traffic a year. Not everybody, not right away, but you can absolutely do it. Do I believe AIO is going to be very important? From what I've seen this week, it is overwhelmingly important.

[00:17:03] And I think that Google may have figured out some pretty good things. But you got to get into AIO. And AIO uses search engine optimization itself, the EEAT component in particular, in order to trust that resource. I don't think that the LLM inherently has enough power other than it's a language-based model.

[00:17:33] It can't spider. It can fetch content. But it isn't going to chase redirects. It isn't going to look at canonicals. It doesn't care about speed. Speed has nothing to do with chat. That's all stuff that is resolved by the search engine. And chat just gets this AIO. Google gets to say, hey, do you trust this? Yes? Okay.

[00:18:01] I'll put them up in my AIO. And it is getting to be amazingly fast. And when I say fast, I mean, it's ridiculous. I did a blog post this morning at 823. At 845, I was the featured or at least top-ranked site in AIO and had the featured snippet.

[00:18:29] Folks, that's 23 minutes. That's incredible. So I know that what is happening is trust in brand and all those factors that have sort of been talked about. If you do it right, you can do it. The listeners, they can go to my blog post, pick my number one blog, go down to the FAQ, search on that question, and we own it. And you can cut it back down to four words, and we own it.

[00:18:59] I did a post this morning on LinkedIn about it. You can definitely, unconditionally, definitely get into AIO if you know what you're doing. And my opinion is that that's just sort of the start. As I said, there's 40 features on a Google search page, not all of which are for every intent. We have to understand intent matters a lot. I mean, a lot.

[00:19:27] If your page intent is transactional, don't expect a rank for that informational query. It just isn't going to happen. And if your intent is transactional, don't expect to show up in the AIO. So we have identified most of this. I haven't really published a lot on it.

[00:19:50] My internal book that I wrote is well over 600 pages about how to do things to dominate the SERP. And we're on top of that. But it turns out that the intent varies. And Google has, even in the AIO world, Google has algorithmic determination as to whether or not you should even show up.

[00:20:16] I mean, if you have a feature snippet and nobody pays attention to it, after a while, Google won't even bother showing it. If you have the local pack, nobody clicks on it. Google's going to stop showing it. So there's dynamic determination about the usefulness of components that are in the featured components of the page.

[00:20:39] So if you look at a Google search, here's the problem that most SEOs at an SEO level have with AIO. When AIO shows up at the top of the page, organic gets pushed down and you've got to scroll to get to it. That's the problem. And when AIO is there, it turns out that organic clicks, even for the number one entry, has dropped between 35% and 72%. Okay.

[00:21:06] So we're taking traffic hits, not because we lost our ranking, but because Google's pushed it down to the point where nobody's going to scroll to get there. And that is the biggest complaint, I think, that a lot of people have right now from an operational point of view. In order to get at the top of the page, you've got to show up in AIO. In order to show up in AIO, you have to show up in organic. So I'm going to work on organic. I'm going to be in the top three.

[00:21:36] I'm going to do what I can for the featured snippet. And automagically, I end up in AIO. But it's an effort. I think the biggest pain people have is that traffic is down. For informational queries like how do I or things like that. That's a terrible pain for the industry. But that goes back to my earlier discussion. If organic is pushed down, something else is above it.

[00:22:05] So I want to rank there. And there's 40 things that could appear. So I better be focused on how do I rank there, not just dwell on, oh, poor me, my organic went down. You know, we're in the traffic business. I don't control conversion. That's your sales team. That's your website. That's I can help. I can help a lot. Certainly generating more traffic helps generally.

[00:22:34] But folks, I mean, the biggest problem is not that SEO is pushed down, but because you're not doing anything to get what's pushed up, what's taking its place. We got to focus on that. And if I'm right and Google will remain the gatekeeper for a long time, that becomes what every CMO needs to do. And here's part of the problem as well.

[00:23:01] SEO may not talk to pay-per-click. And content is a separate team. And the implementation of all these changes is a separate team. And inherently, everybody has their job and they don't always talk to each other. If you're focused on SERP visibility, and that's really what I think it is.

[00:23:28] If you're focused on that at a CMO level, you orchestrate. You get everybody in the same room at the same time and you make them understand they're in the business of traffic. And that's a long-winded answer to where is it going? I think that SEO is one of those components. I think SEO is really sort of the superset. But that's me. I'm going to go with SERP visibility. That's what it is.

[00:23:59] Love it. Yeah. Makes a lot of fun. If I own that. If I own SERP visibility, every time they come in to that bridge, they got to stumble over my name 10 times. I win. And that's the way to do it. Yeah. It's funny. A lot of, you know, Neil Patel, there's a lot of others. But a lot of this advice on AIO that I see is SEO. It's like similar components, right?

[00:24:25] So with that in mind, Bruce, you know, in terms of seeing AI and its fit within search as a new tool. So obviously, we have the generative AI overviews. We have people that are searching on ChatGPT. How would you best describe where it fits and getting back to, you know, hey, we got to get the CMO, the content team, the PPC team, the SEO team. You know, we all need to get together and figure this out. Obviously, you provide consulting and training. So everything is, you know, customized company by company.

[00:24:55] But in general, any, you know, introductory advice that you can give our listeners as to what direction they should be going. And knowing that this might change, you know, this podcast will not be published for another few weeks. So who knows what's going to happen? It's so dynamic. But today, what is the initial advice that you're giving companies? Well, the best is that you have to understand what works, right?

[00:25:19] It turns out that if there is AIO and it's new, there is a ripple effect across all of digital marketing, right? Search marketing is impacted everywhere. AIO is everywhere. It's going to be in your payroll systems. It's going to be in your content management systems. It's going to be in your customer management systems. It is everywhere.

[00:25:44] The biggest, and I keep saying biggest, one of the big issues in search is how you use AI. And you can use AI to answer questions like, how is this keyword used or persona in that identification that's accurate? Or which phrase is better? Or can you recommend a heading tag or a title tag?

[00:26:11] And Chad can do those kinds of things. And they'll recommend things to you. But I think that the real impact of AI on search results, because that's what we're after is SERP visibility. The real impact of AI in that space is twofold.

[00:26:32] The AI component that is actually AIO or the equivalent that shows up in the search results and how that represents your site, that's an important consideration. But AI right now has a very, very big play in the content development area. And I'm not to toot my own horn, but we developed a product called PreWriter.

[00:26:58] And I made a decision a long time ago that a writer is an artist. They know tone. They know voice. They know everything about your company. And I don't. And AI certainly won't. And so what we did is we felt that the writing stage and the research stage were separate. So we developed PreWriter to be everything up to the writer. All the research.

[00:27:26] There's no gaps. There's no blind spots, right? There's no writer's block. There's no, oh, you didn't have the experience in that area. There's no, oh, your competition's writing about it and you didn't know. I mean, it's a comprehensive PreWriter. And then after that, the writer takes it and finishes it. We've been able to cut four and a half hour writing exercises to an hour and a half.

[00:27:56] Using AI as the research arm of the writing process. Statistics commonly say right, right. Research is more than writing in time. Right. What's the saying? If I wanted to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first four hours sharpening my axe. Well, that's fundamentally what this is. Right.

[00:28:20] And PreWriter is, PreWriter.ai is a collection of 30 some tools. And they're great. And we use them. And a lot of other people use them. Over a thousand people so far. Awesome. Yeah. What I want to be able to do, of course, is to continue developing the logic that makes it powerful. Right.

[00:28:46] I can take in 15 minutes, I can take one keyword in. I'm going to give a clue. This is a tip. Most people who use chat, they put in a keyword and say, give me an article. And chat can do that. And then you have to edit it. Right. And you can do that in three minutes or less. Our approach is you take the keyword. And instead of going out and building an article, we determine the persona that would enter that

[00:29:16] keyword. Then once we have three personas and a composite, we say, what are their pain points? And then what are their solutions? And then from those, what are keywords? And then we build those into the creation of an article so that now the article is written to solve that person's problem, not just regurgitation of facts. I mean, that's just one out of 100 things we do.

[00:29:46] But you see, that's a different orientation about using AI. Because, you know, if you just create an article, it's not done. One of our other steps is we have 130 some tests. We recursively use AI to improve the article AI wrote. That's pretty good. It's pretty meta. Right. I mean, that's where it's going.

[00:30:13] And those are the things that we have to be able to improve. Right. Our content brief is 158 steps. Wow. At three minutes each, it would take you eight hours. Easy to do them all. And so by focusing on the research component, you know, keyword lists and outlines and a brief

[00:30:40] and FAQ structures and things like that, you actually end up with something very powerful. Yeah. Amazing. Well, you know, I cover and follow a lot of tools myself. One I haven't heard of. That's definitely on my radar. Prewriter.ai. We'll put it in the show notes as well. And, you know, my question was going to be, well, what can we do with your tool that we can't do in ChatGPT? Because I find a lot of the early AI tools, once you figure out how to leverage ChatGPT,

[00:31:07] but if you're building in 180 steps, that's going to be a really, and obviously your expertise. And I think this is where I'm glad I asked you about your professional background, because if you started in computer science, you definitely have an advantage over us when it comes to understanding how LLMs work. So that's really exciting. I did want to ask you though, Bruce, just one really targeted question before we leave. Because, well, I mean, you're the expert on this, but what I'm reading, you know, EAT really show your experience, your unique perspective.

[00:31:34] And I think the traditional way of writing a blog post was definitely more research driven. But I'm curious what you see as that research component still being important, but how after someone uses prewriter.ai, do you have problems? Or how do you figure out a way to include those unique perspectives, experiences that can really solidify that EAT? Or will the tool help you? You know, you said it asked for three different personas, which is a great idea to get more

[00:32:03] semantic keywords and really solve the problem. But as far as all the components of the EAT, how do you cover that with a tool? Or is that after the content brief, you know, your writer has to understand your company, your experience and really bring in that value. What is the role of each of those components? Well, first, EAT is very, very important. Now, part of the problem is AI is a tool, not a solution, right?

[00:32:27] And as a tool, it's going to give you logically consensus answers to whatever you're asking. And I think that's what we all expect. That's the way it should work. But Google has also said that they expect something, a superset of what is normally available. Now, you would interpret that to be uniqueness or invention or something else.

[00:32:56] I think that is an interpretation of that request. What we do, and I mentioned it, what we do is we end up asking all these questions of chat and we build it. We even have it re-sequence the content to be the learning sequence of a reader, right? Don't give them high-tech stuff at the front before you've built the foundation.

[00:33:23] We actually re-sequence everything based upon learning sequences. Natural language is built. I mean, there's a lot of stuff built in. But one of the things that solves that particular problem for you, when we do it, we actually go out and pull the top websites. Now, we're not stealing their content. I don't care about their content. What I care about is their links, internal links.

[00:33:51] I want to know what they link to from their navigation that they think is important. I want to know what are the links in the first 200 words within their website. And then I take those and determine if any of those are keywords. So going back to what Google said, they expect you to offer something more than just an AI thing.

[00:34:15] And because no one site is going to have all those blind spots covered by pulling in all those keywords, when we do our keyword research, we're able to be a superset of most websites. Because we cast a wider net across keywords. And the keywords we're using are actually navigation words. What's in their navigation?

[00:34:43] How do we leverage that? And so as we go through the process, the easiest way to offer something unique is to offer a superset of the topic. Now, remember, it's pre-writer. The writer can always add more. They can always invent things and add it. They can. Oh, by the way, I'm going to say it just to say it.

[00:35:11] But we do not try to aggressively apply tone or style or voice. The reason is we're really good at what we're doing. And if we did that too, people would just start publishing our stuff. That's not an acceptable step for us. I almost insist.

[00:35:35] And I've in some ways limited what we're doing to not be publishable without a writer. And I know that it sounds counterproductive to building a product. But I'm pretty much insistent that you have to go through style and voice and even compliance.

[00:36:01] And you're the expert, not AI and not us. And so we need you to be involved in that process. By the way, one of my cool tools is called the Humanizer. We can run things through chat and it comes out and you test it in all these things. Zero GPT is an example. It'll come out and it'll test it about 86, 90% AI. You're running through our Humanizer.

[00:36:30] It's almost always zero, but it's certainly under 5%. We can make it more human, right? And we've built that into our tools. But I still insist that the writer check it, right? I don't want this stuff to just be regurgitated up on the web and I'm going to generate a thousand pages a day. And that's not what we want.

[00:36:56] I want to solve the problem of competent content. And AI can help. It's a tool. You have to use it as a tool. And that's the only way we can get around it. And by the way, PreWriter is self-serve. You can go to the site. You can buy tokens and use it. The actual sign up is you go to the site. You sign up. You don't give us a credit card. We give you 20 free tokens to play with it.

[00:37:27] And then you play with it. And then once you like it, you can always buy more if you want. Awesome. Well, Bruce, thank you so much for the background. I think that makes a lot of sense. At the beginning, I'm like, you know, consultant, trainer, speaker. Now, obviously, software tool as well. And it's a very timely tool because I've seen, you know, we've seen a lot of these optimization tools out there and even with AI. But when you build your expertise and perspective and authority into a tool, it just makes it vastly different.

[00:37:56] So I think if anyone listening has ever used one of those other tools, definitely go to PreWriter.ai. Get your free 20 tokens. Take it for a test ride. I know I'm going to be doing that as well. And yeah, at the end of the day, you know, AI can only get you so far. Correct. You need to take ownership and in a responsible way with your own unique voice and tone and experience. So I think that makes for a great combination, because if you're not going to use AI as part of the process, definitely your competitors are already doing it to begin with anyway. So, you know, I think you'd agree we're all we're all playing on a new playing field now.

[00:38:26] Right. With the emergence of AI. Well, yes. And we're even well into a process on something called Bedrock from Amazon. And Bedrock is where our and by the way, I'm not running prompts. We actually program the prompt and use the API. So we're in the process of making it work through Bedrock, which is an API hub.

[00:38:54] So we talk to Bedrock and Bedrock will talk to all the LLMs, every one of them. And so it translates what we're asking for into the appropriate API call for all those LLMs, which means we're not dependent upon just open or just Claude or any of them. We can switch. If it's transactional, we might use one. And if it's informational, we might use another.

[00:39:22] If one of them goes down, we just switch to a different one. This is amazing. And it's expensive, but it is amazing. And, you know, this is the example. AI is moving at the speed of light. That didn't exist a month ago. Wow. I mean, so when you get into this kind of stuff, this is, by the way, that's not something anybody giving away a free prompt is going to ever be able to do.

[00:39:52] Right, right. Right. Yeah, that doesn't work. We had to write an application to drive this thing because there's so many steps and error conditions that can occur. If you've ever run a chat, you run it and it works and you run it and it works. You run it again. And it says, sorry, Hal, I can't do that. Right. I think we've all had that. Yep. You know, I mean, it's weird.

[00:40:18] But, yeah, you have to have, you better, you better really have somebody that knows what they're doing at a programming level. And that's an expensive proposition. We've developed ours and we're migrating ours over the last two years, you know, and it takes a while to get it working. I can imagine. And fortunately, what I'm doing is I'm basically, I made it really cheap.

[00:40:44] I take my API fees and mark it up 10% or whatever. It depends on the application and which chat you're using, but it doesn't, I'm not getting rich on it. I do consulting services. That's where I make my money. I don't, you know, I do this because it's really exciting for me to do this. And I love it. Awesome.

[00:41:10] I think most of the greatest tools in digital marketing actually came from internal use. And I'm assuming you tested this internally. I used it with your clients and then rolled it out. So that's awesome. So everybody wants to get it. It's pre-writer.ai. Bruce, where else? Obviously, for consulting training, I'm assuming we're going to send them to bruceclay.com. Anywhere else that we should be sending people or making them aware of when it comes to all things Bruce Clay? Well, we really operate the four main sites. And soon a fifth one.

[00:41:40] Bruceclay.com is for consulting services. And we're pretty competitive, but we're the company people go to when they can't solve it any other way. Then we have SEO training. And that is both an online and a classroom course. SEOtraining.com. That's a nice domain name. That's a very nice name. We own SEOtools.com, which is our proprietary tool set. And we have pre-writer.ai.

[00:42:08] And so far, that's what we've got. You can find us at any of them. They're all branded together. Different sites, but branded. And quite frankly, when we sell a retainer type project, we give away to that retainer our training and our tools. So, you know, they get to, you know, do what they need to do. It's an appropriate package.

[00:42:34] Yeah, you built a comprehensive footprint there of all the tools consulting the training that companies need. So that's amazing. Bruce, thank you so much for your time today. And yeah, it sounds like pre-writer.ai is going to be a great success. And I look forward to seeing how that tool develops in the marketplace. Yeah. As I said, it's free to try. But I think that what you're going to find, you got to enter it into the, with a mindset of it's not trying to build the final product. Right.

[00:43:03] You got to really think that way. And if you think that way, by the way, the development of the tools that are in pre-writer, as I said, 30 tools, they're all written with that premise. Which is very different from writing something with the intent of you don't need a writer. Right. I mean, it's night and day difference when you build a tool. And I think we're the only ones out that are really emphasizing that, hey, you know, we're part of your team.

[00:43:32] We're not displacing your team. And hopefully people will like it. Yeah. Now, thank you for that. And I've always said, you know, you never want to just one push. And I know there's tools out there. And it looks like they're reputable tools. Reputable tools that will do that for you. But I would never recommend that. I think it's a little bit of irresponsible for tools to be recommending that as well. So. Yeah, I agree. I'm glad that you've taken that approach. You know, you've given us a lot to think about today. So thank you once again, Bruce. No problem. Thank you.

[00:44:00] Hey, I hope you enjoyed that interview. And I also want to give you a little bit of personal news. I am deep into creating my revised edition. It'll be, well, it'll be a year and two months when I release Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth. And I want to expand it with new or expanded sections, revised sections that go deeper into AI and how we can use it with LinkedIn, deeper into content creation, different content formats,

[00:44:27] best practices, and introducing a new workflow that I am going to recommend to everybody that goes above and beyond just LinkedIn. So if you've read Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear your feedback so that I can incorporate it in my next iteration of my book. Feel free to write to me at neil at neilshafer.com. Hopefully you know by now that I am the real Neil, N-E-A-L, S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R.com.

[00:44:56] And I would love to hear from you. If you haven't yet read my book on LinkedIn, it is available exclusively on Amazon, meaning that it is in Kindle Unlimited. So if you are a Kindle Unlimited user, you can read it for free and I would love to hear your feedback. Outside of that, next week I will be back with a LinkedIn-specific episode based on the latest R&D that I've been doing in preparation for the book.

[00:45:21] So I'm really excited to share some updates on how I view and how I am using LinkedIn to my benefit. And I think that you'll get a lot out of that episode. So if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe. We got a lot of other great interviews with other thought leaders like Bruce coming up. And all that's left to say is thank you for tuning in. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schafer, signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach.

[00:45:49] Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilshafer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilshafer.com to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.