3123: Yext and the Future of Search in an AI-Driven World

[00:00:04] Has the way we search information fundamentally changed? Has how you find information changed? Did you used to use Google? Do you now use a social media platform or do you use ChatGPT?

[00:00:18] These are questions I'm finding myself asking more and more as my search methods continuously evolve.

[00:00:24] And today I'm thrilled to welcome Michael Rallrath, Chairman and CEO of a company called Yext.

[00:00:31] And together we're going to explore this topic and also discuss the rapidly evolving search landscape and how AI is not merely augmenting but maybe reshaping our discovery processes.

[00:00:43] And as traditional SEO strategies face new challenges, especially if you're now searching for answers using an AI agent rather than Google, what does that mean for the future of search and businesses that pay to get on that front page of Google?

[00:00:59] Well, Michael brings his expertise from leading Yahoo's search advertising marketplace back in the day and has a deep understanding of digital strategy transformations.

[00:01:09] So, with AI-driven tools like ChatGPT, TikTok and new ventures from MetaAI, all collectively altering how consumers and businesses interact with information, I think the stakes have never been higher.

[00:01:24] So, how can businesses adapt to stay relevant and competitive in this new era where being on the front page of Google is not the be-all and end-all?

[00:01:33] These are just a few of the areas we're going to explore today and hopefully uncover some strategies and implications of a fragmented search market that is now moving beyond Google's long-standing hold.

[00:01:47] But enough from me. Let's get Michael onto the podcast now.

[00:01:51] So, a massive warm welcome to the show, Michael.

[00:01:55] Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:59] Sure. Thanks for having me, Neil.

[00:02:00] My name is Michael Walrath. I'm the chairman and CEO of Yext.

[00:02:05] Yext is a digital platform that helps brands manage the digital discovery of their products and services, their online reputation, social media and communication, various and sundry other ways of managing a digital presence.

[00:02:20] We've been doing this since about 2006.

[00:02:23] I was the chairman of the company for 12 years before I became the CEO about two and a half years ago.

[00:02:28] Well, it's a pleasure to have you join me on the podcast today, Michael.

[00:02:33] Something I wanted to share with you, I had a message pop in my inbox on LinkedIn today and it was from somebody that said they were looking for a ghostwriter or a tech writer.

[00:02:43] And they were recommended, I was recommended to them through ChatGPT, which completely blew my mind because they typed into ChatGPT and recommended me.

[00:02:53] And as a writer, I kind of assumed that OpenAI, ChatGPT will be taking away work from me rather than giving it to me.

[00:03:00] And it got me thinking about how people are finding information now and how they're moving away from traditional search.

[00:03:06] And almost we're seeing a huge fragmentation in this space.

[00:03:10] So, Akuis, from your perspective, especially around the fragmentation of the search market, how are you seeing AI-driven tools like ChatGPT, TikTok, Meta AI?

[00:03:22] How are you seeing this reshape the way consumers discover information?

[00:03:25] It's a great example.

[00:03:27] I hope you'll be writing someone's book based on that digital experience, discovery experience you've had.

[00:03:36] I think we're living in or we're getting ready to live through a huge tectonic shift around how consumers find, you know, how human beings find, consume and engage with information.

[00:03:52] And it's only surprising because we spent the last 15 years existing in, you know, one of the most stable monopolies we've ever seen, which is really Google's monopoly over how human beings find things.

[00:04:07] It's created a single-mindedness to how any brand, any business, even any individual distributes information in a way that they're more likely to be discovered.

[00:04:18] And interestingly, I think we have a model to understand what happens here.

[00:04:23] So, and I have a particular interest in this area.

[00:04:26] So, from 2008 to 2010, I ran the search business at Yahoo.

[00:04:30] And what I mean by that is I ran the marketplace that underlied the search business.

[00:04:34] So, the advertising marketplace that made our search business money.

[00:04:37] And what we lived through during that period between 2008 and 2010 was we had, there were a number of directories like Yahoo, search engines like Yahoo.

[00:04:49] And then there was, you know, in the early 2000s, there was this upstart who was just doing it differently.

[00:04:54] And they were presenting an incredibly clean user experience.

[00:04:58] There was very little advertising, very little monetization.

[00:05:01] It just flat out worked better.

[00:05:03] I would ask a question and I would get an answer.

[00:05:05] And it was like magic.

[00:05:06] And everyone who was around remembers how magical Google felt then, right?

[00:05:11] Because it was, you know, how does this machine know exactly what I'm looking for and can take me exactly where I want to go?

[00:05:18] And if you remember back in those days, they had one sponsored link.

[00:05:22] Yahoo had a lot more than that, right?

[00:05:25] And what we knew at the time was the more we monetize that experience, the faster our customers would ultimately leave us and go to Google.

[00:05:35] But as a public company with financial targets, it was a really difficult sort of a Sophie's Choice.

[00:05:42] What we're seeing today, and I'll land this and we can come back to it as much as you want, is something very similar.

[00:05:48] You know, you just described a magical experience on the discovered side of it.

[00:05:53] But on the discovery side of it, the way that search generative experiences like OpenAI and Perplexity and many others that we can name are delivering a consumer experience that feels like magic because it's conversational.

[00:06:07] And because I don't have to retrain it every time that I ask another question.

[00:06:15] And like the kind of early, late 2010 decade and early, you know, 2020 decade, we're seeing something very similar, which is a singular, highly monetized experience is being slowly nibbled away by something that's much more magical.

[00:07:03] It really is.

[00:07:05] And I was able to get to exactly where I wanted much, much quicker.

[00:07:09] And of course, I did the dad thing and I'm kind of like, yeah, but you need to understand where that data come from, hallucinations, how up to date it is.

[00:07:16] But again, it got me thinking that people are already searching for information differently.

[00:07:21] And with Google's dominance in search beginning to waver, what immediate steps should businesses be taking to maybe adjust their SEO and SEM strategies to remain competitive from these changes?

[00:07:32] Yeah. So I think it's the key question.

[00:07:35] And it's funny for every story that you hear about someone having a great experience today with an open AI or chat GPT or search GPT, there's at least one or two, you know, similarly horrible experiences where it just made up the answer.

[00:07:49] Right.

[00:07:49] And so, you know, I think what businesses have to be prepared for is that these generative AI experiences are going to get a lot smarter about how they determine the answers to questions.

[00:08:00] So they're already brilliant at understanding the nature of the question and they're brilliant about talking in language that humans understand.

[00:08:08] So, you know, our generation, you and I are probably around the same age.

[00:08:12] We grew up learning how to speak search engine.

[00:08:15] Yeah.

[00:08:16] Right.

[00:08:16] So we grew up learning how to say best burger near me, vegan options, my zip code.

[00:08:23] Right.

[00:08:24] Like that's how we, that's how we learned to speak to search engines.

[00:08:27] The way that my children will speak to search experiences, I'm hungry.

[00:08:32] I think I'd like a burger.

[00:08:33] My friend is a vegan.

[00:08:34] Right.

[00:08:35] And you can blow that out and you can imagine what is the end of that become.

[00:08:39] The end of that could easily become, I suggest the order from this place that has a great burger, but also has, you know, a vegan salad option.

[00:08:48] Would you like me to have this door dash to your home now?

[00:08:51] You don't have to tell it where you live.

[00:08:52] You don't have to, you know, you don't have to explain to it, you know, any of those things because it has, it has this, this, this memory.

[00:08:59] Um, and that's where the world is going to, the rules of how do I make sure that I'm the discovered are going to be challenged because to, and again, to go back to it today, we, you know, for 15, 20 years, we've been living in a place where the only thing that matters is, am I, am I showing up on Google?

[00:09:16] Um, and, and I see no world in which that continues over the next five to 10 years.

[00:09:23] A hundred percent with you.

[00:09:24] And a few years ago, a lot of people were saying that Amazon Echo would be the way we'd all be using our voice.

[00:09:29] But then of course, Amazon have struggled to make that work.

[00:09:32] And one of the reasons, if, if we just look at an example of maybe ordering a pizza, we could have 10 people in the room with us right now.

[00:09:39] We would all ask to order a pizza in a myriad of different ways.

[00:09:43] There wouldn't be one way of ordering that pizza.

[00:09:47] Another example I've seen more and more is perplexity for searching.

[00:09:50] I don't know if you've seen this, but as a journalist, if I want to research something, it will give me from one question or one search, it will give me 10 different sources and links to those sources and an overview of all those sources to get me where I need to be.

[00:10:03] And one of the things that I was excited to get you on the podcast today, one of the reasons there is because you've mentioned that search is being redefined rather than just augmented.

[00:10:13] So again, what does this mean for businesses that rely heavily on Google centric growth strategies?

[00:10:19] Yeah, I think what it means is that businesses are going to have to think, start thinking in terms of data.

[00:10:23] Right.

[00:10:24] So we could use two words interchangeably here, and I think this is going to be another important shift, is that the way that these systems think of discovering things is data.

[00:10:35] We also call it content.

[00:10:37] Right.

[00:10:38] Right.

[00:10:38] And so as the breadth of services that offer question and answer solutions just continues to expand, I mean, you talk about Amazon undoubtedly will have a play here through Alexa.

[00:10:53] Siri, Apple Intelligence, Siri is becoming Apple Intelligence.

[00:10:56] That's currently in partnership with OpenAI.

[00:10:58] Who knows if it's always a partnership with OpenAI?

[00:11:01] We're going to ask questions.

[00:11:03] And what those generative search experiences are going to do is they're going to deliver to us conversationally data.

[00:11:11] And so the big challenge for a business is going to be, how do I get my data organized and actionable so that no matter how broad and how fragmented that search landscape gets, I can do two things.

[00:11:24] One is I can distribute the data to all of these different experiences in whatever way they want to adjust data.

[00:11:32] Some of them will take data files through an API.

[00:11:35] Some of them will crawl and index more like a traditional search engines.

[00:11:39] You know, there will be numerous ways that they're already aggregating massive amounts of data.

[00:11:46] And so it's going to become incredibly important for every brand, every business from a single location retail shop to the largest companies in the world, multi-location companies in the world to figure out how am I making sure that I'm discoverable in this new universe.

[00:12:01] And it starts with creating a structured database.

[00:12:03] And then that allows them to create a flywheel of determining what is the content that I should be creating and how should I be distributing that content out into this world in the form of structured data.

[00:12:16] Does that make any sense?

[00:12:17] Yeah, 100%.

[00:12:18] I think for businesses with consumer behavior shifting so fast, especially with platforms like everything we've spoke about here, OpenAI to TikTok, they're all becoming the preferred search tools for Gen Z, gradually dominating the workplace.

[00:12:33] How should businesses rethink their approach to engaging with these emerging audiences?

[00:12:38] Because it must be quite daunting how quickly things are changing for some business leaders.

[00:12:43] Yeah, I think it is.

[00:12:45] I think one of the things our customers are seeing is that they're ready for it.

[00:12:47] So because we've been a little bit of an ugly duckling the last five, six, seven years, because we've insisted that you're going to need structured data and you're going to need to have all sorts of ways to distribute that data.

[00:13:03] What's happened in a lot of cases is things have gotten, I'm going to say, dumbed down to you just need this way to manage Google and maybe a little Apple and maybe a little Bing and maybe a little Facebook.

[00:13:14] But that's kind of all you need.

[00:13:16] And that has largely been true for 10 or 15 years, but it's quickly becoming untrue.

[00:13:22] And so what we're talking with our customers about is you already have the structured data.

[00:13:27] We're finding ways to deliver that data into TikTok and into OpenAI and into places where consumers are doing more exploration.

[00:13:35] Google still owns the exploit.

[00:13:37] So we talk a lot in terms of explore are all the questions that we ask before we buy something and exploit is when we buy it.

[00:13:44] And in a lot of cases, the current search generated experiences are really good at explore.

[00:13:50] You know, they'll give you lots of information.

[00:13:52] They'll give you product reviews.

[00:13:54] They'll tell you lots of things.

[00:13:55] And they're finding that information.

[00:13:57] They are not yet.

[00:13:59] And I say not yet because they're clearly going to go here doing the exploit, which is the here's the specific product that you can buy by clinking on this link.

[00:14:06] Or I can and eventually, as we talked about before, it's going to just be as simple as would you like to buy this?

[00:14:12] I'll do it for you.

[00:14:14] And so as a business, I think what we're talking to our customers and companies we don't work with a lot is this all starts with making sure that every piece of information about your business is in a structure stable database that allows you to, in effect, use AI to create new data and distribute that data into this ecosystem.

[00:14:37] And you're someone that's got a super cool origin story.

[00:14:39] You've been there since the very beginning of the internet, the days of the browser wars, GeoCities and AOL.

[00:14:46] And as someone that has seen search ecosystems evolve during your time at Yahoo, how is today's shift comparing to those past disruptions in the search advertising marketing?

[00:14:57] Is there a few parallels there?

[00:14:59] Yeah, and that's the nicest way anybody's ever called me old before.

[00:15:02] Well, you're in good company there, my friend.

[00:15:04] Yeah, I think the difference this time is it's all just happening much faster.

[00:15:09] So I started my career in 1999.

[00:15:12] I worked for DoubleClick.

[00:15:13] One of the main things that we did at DoubleClick was we sold keyword search advertising on AltaVista, which most people listening probably don't know what AltaVista is.

[00:15:26] But it was a very early search engine.

[00:15:29] And all we were doing was keyword matching.

[00:15:31] It was, you know, you would type in new car and we would put display banner ads on the top of that page for Ford or General Motors or Toyota.

[00:15:42] And it took, you know, I mean, that was 1999, 1998 timeframe a little bit earlier.

[00:15:47] So it took, you know, 15 years before Google became absolutely dominant.

[00:15:52] Right?

[00:15:53] And they've held that position for a long time.

[00:15:55] What we're seeing is a pace of change.

[00:15:59] Over the course of the last 30 days, we've seen Facebook launch a search engine.

[00:16:03] We've seen Search GPT.

[00:16:05] We've seen OpenAI, I think, paying $20 million for the URL chat, chat.com maybe.

[00:16:13] I saw that.

[00:16:13] That was a headline.

[00:16:14] I can't be absolutely sure that's true.

[00:16:16] But we're just seeing this unbelievable unfolding of language models have become, have enabled the consumer experience to change so rapidly that I suspect, you know, two things.

[00:16:31] One is this is going to happen way faster than we think.

[00:16:33] And the other, and this is going to sound, you know, sort of like they controvert each other.

[00:16:36] The other is it'll take longer than we think for it to play out fully.

[00:16:39] So Google is not going to disappear tomorrow as one of the most important or potentially the most important marketing channel that a brand has.

[00:16:48] But over the course of the next five, 10 years, I think we'll see this really healthy fragmentation, which will create tremendous complexity for businesses, but also give them the opportunity to win in ways that they haven't been able to win before and potentially less by paying for it and more by earning it.

[00:17:05] Well, I could geek out with you for hours, talk about AltaVista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves and all those great ones.

[00:17:11] But fast forward to present day.

[00:17:13] I mean, the rise of AI powered search experiences is creating new opportunities, but also challenges for discoverability.

[00:17:20] And that is the big one here.

[00:17:22] So how can businesses or business leaders listening, how can they better balance innovation with maintaining relevance in this rapidly changing environment?

[00:17:31] But as you said, there is a bit of time here.

[00:17:32] I don't want to get people panicking, but any advice you could offer around that?

[00:17:37] Yeah, I think the first thing we're seeing is people are beginning to understand the risk, right?

[00:17:42] And the risk is that if people choose other ways of finding information than what has been the sort of 80% way over the last 10 or 15 years, then if you're not doing the things that you need to do to be discovered there, what you could see is a fundamental shift in your traffic patterns.

[00:18:01] And so we've spent uncounted trillions, billions and trillions of dollars creating these beautiful web experiences.

[00:18:10] We have amazing, our customers have built these incredible search experiences, find an advisor experience, find a provider experiences.

[00:18:19] But it may turn out that over the next five to 10 years, the beauty and the sort of interactive nature of your digital experiences, your websites, your web properties are going to be less important than capturing all the data that underpins all that beautiful design work and distributing it directly to the places where you just – we are clearly moving towards something where the AI will do more of the exploit.

[00:18:47] And so that's really, I think, the biggest thing that our customers need to focus on is being ready for that shift and being in a position where they're not going to lose significant traffic because their entire strategy is built around managing one or two digital experiences or including their own.

[00:19:04] That's the risk.

[00:19:05] I think the opportunity is that if you get that right, then instead of Google's, what, $200 billion of paid search advertising today, that's a lot of money being spent in order to show up at the top of that page.

[00:19:21] As we see with shifts like this, often there's less expense around being discovered on newer experiences.

[00:19:30] That was certainly true of Google back in the day.

[00:19:34] But there is just as much opportunity.

[00:19:36] And so that's the exciting thing about it, is that you may be able to repurpose a lot of those hard dollars you're spending just competing for paid search into content and data that's going to help you win in experiences that are, at least for a period of time, less monetized.

[00:19:52] And for businesses unprepared for the upcoming transformation of all this, the risks of inaction will eventually be significant.

[00:19:59] But right here, right now, everything's going great.

[00:20:02] The traffic is as it's always been.

[00:20:04] But when they start to see the little subtle changes of traffic dipping and fragmentation, et cetera, any advice you'd give to companies on how they should adapt quickly and effectively to those changes as and when they see them?

[00:20:19] Yeah, it's the same principle.

[00:20:21] I mean, we're starting to see one of the things we're starting to see today is that when you look at things like the local pack on Google, the number of impressions that so the number of times that, you know, and the local pack is what really matters to local businesses, anybody who has a store or an advisor or a doctor, any of those folks, we're seeing impressions decline there.

[00:20:42] And part of the reason why we're seeing impressions decline there is because Google is selecting, is delivering AI experiences to queries that are less monetizable typically.

[00:20:53] So if I, you know, the example I use is if I search emergency plumber near me right now, that's a highly, highly monetizable query.

[00:21:00] And they know I need an emergency plumber right now, right?

[00:21:03] If I search, if I, if I go to chat GPT or Google and I say, do I need a plumber to unclog my toilet?

[00:21:10] What I'm going to get is instead of a list of businesses who will do that for me is I'm going to get an AI response that says you probably don't.

[00:21:17] If you have a plunger, try that first.

[00:21:19] And, and, and so that, that's kind of what's happening today is that impressions are declining, but the clicks and the calls and the conversions aren't really changing.

[00:21:28] And that's simply because Google is changing their behavior about how they answer questions.

[00:21:32] What will come next and where businesses will see it is they'll see it in my traffic is actually declining and I'm getting less clicks, less calls, less conversions on my website from, from Google.

[00:21:42] And that'll be the canary in the coal mine that these other experiences are starting to, uh, are starting to take share.

[00:21:50] There are certain things businesses can do.

[00:21:53] And we help a lot of companies with this to understand where their traffic's coming from and begin to understand that, you know, like you, you, you started with the description of, you know, someone found me through chat GPT and maybe you're going to get a book deal out of it, which would be great.

[00:22:05] Um, you'll begin to see more of that.

[00:22:08] And that'll tell you that I need to work harder to be found on these other experiences.

[00:22:13] And that's really the work that we're doing with our customers these days.

[00:22:16] Fantastic.

[00:22:17] Uh, just to bring to life everything we're talking about here, I'm going to ask you the impossible question now and ask you to look into my virtual crystal ball and share your vision of what a, a post Google search world would look like.

[00:22:30] And how you see technologies like Gen AI continue to redefine how we search and connect and find information very quickly.

[00:22:38] That's relevant to us.

[00:22:40] Any way you can, uh, give me a vision of what that world would look like.

[00:22:45] Sure.

[00:22:45] I, well, I, again, I have no idea, right?

[00:22:47] So I'm only, you know, but I'll do it even though I'm almost guaranteed to be wrong about this.

[00:22:52] I think, I think the first thing I would say is I don't see a post Google world.

[00:22:56] What I see is that, you know, as other technologies appear, Google's, Google's going to have to make some decisions around the monetize ability of queries versus the ability.

[00:23:06] Cause clearly they can deliver an AI search experience, right?

[00:23:09] And much in the same way that chat GPT and others are, it's less monetized.

[00:23:13] Um, and so, so I think the hard part for Google is going to be how much of that $200 billion or so search business are they willing to cannibalize in order to continue to keep, keep share.

[00:23:23] Um, and I can't know the answer to that, but, but.

[00:23:26] I think what we'll see is we'll see a world in which Google is far less the only thing that matters or the thing that the matter that matters the most.

[00:23:34] Um, and so it, it, in that world, the complexity is going to make it more difficult, but the opportunity is going to be bigger.

[00:23:43] Um, and I think, you know, it'll happen over time.

[00:23:47] Um, and the way you'll know what's happening is because you'll, you'll be, any business will be receiving traffic from, um, dozens of different places in different ways.

[00:23:57] And, and the hard part is going to be figuring out how do I optimize that?

[00:24:01] Um, because the rules of SEO won't necessarily apply to all of these different experiences the same way.

[00:24:07] Well, I think every single person listening will have been, uh, or have done searches online for as long as they can remember.

[00:24:15] And I think I can almost hear a lot of light bulb moments going off around the world as people are listening to our conversation and how this is changing, how they're seeing it change, how they're seeing their, their kids search for things differently as well.

[00:24:27] And so thank you so much for delivering that message, helping people prepare, but I'm going to have a little bit of fun with you.

[00:24:33] Now we've shared your insights.

[00:24:35] I want you to leave one final gift for me, and that is either a book that means something to you that we can add to our Amazon wishlist or a song for our Spotify playlist.

[00:24:44] All I'm going to ask is what are you going to leave everyone with and why?

[00:24:48] Okay.

[00:24:48] So I'm going to give you two books.

[00:24:50] Um, they're both, one is a business book.

[00:24:52] One is sort of a business book.

[00:24:53] So, uh, for anyone who, uh, is running a business or part of running a business, uh, my favorite book and my team is like, he's going to talk about this book again.

[00:25:02] Cause I make everyone read it.

[00:25:04] It's a book, uh, by Will Thorndike.

[00:25:06] It's called the outsiders.

[00:25:07] And it's, uh, it's, uh, to me, it's a, uh, an amazing story of who actually are the best value creators of, of all time in the world of business.

[00:25:18] It was written in 2012.

[00:25:19] You would think it's out of date, but I think it's really not out of date.

[00:25:22] Um, and it talks about, you know, who, who are the companies who created the most sustainable value over their lifespan.

[00:25:29] And it's a, it's a very different and maybe potentially out of vogue way of thinking today, because it's really all about capital allocation and, uh, and ultimately, you know, boring metrics like free cashflow and profitability in the world of tech.

[00:25:43] Those things don't get as much airtime as say explosive revenue growth.

[00:25:47] Uh, the second book I'll give you is a book called deep survival.

[00:25:49] I'll forget the author's name.

[00:25:52] Uh, it's a, it's an incredibly well-researched account of why some people survive, uh, in survival situations and some people do not.

[00:25:59] And, uh, and I, to me, it's one of the most powerful business books that I've ever read, uh, because it, I, there's a little spoiler alert.

[00:26:06] It, it, it effectively comes down to what kills you isn't the threat.

[00:26:10] What kills you is, is disregarding the nature of the reality in which you're operating.

[00:26:15] Um, and I think it's very relevant to what we're going through in a world of AI, uh, innovation and adaptation that those who, who, who recognize the challenges and the opportunities here are going to do a lot better than those who, uh, who, who miss, misunderstand the reality that we're going to face.

[00:26:36] Awesome.

[00:26:37] Well, I'll get both of those books added to our Amazon wishlist for people to check out.

[00:26:41] I don't know if it's because we're in sync as men of a certain age.

[00:26:45] They're talking about browser wars, Alta Vista and Yahoo and AOL and stuff.

[00:26:49] But when you said outsiders, I had flashbacks from my school years and I think it was a book, S.E. Hinton that became a Brat Pack movie.

[00:26:56] I don't know if you've heard of it.

[00:26:57] Yeah.

[00:26:58] Yeah.

[00:26:59] Just for that.

[00:26:59] That's a great book too, but a little different lesson, I think.

[00:27:02] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:27:04] Uh, what's the, for everyone listening, what's the best place to find you or your team online and, and ultimately dig a little bit deep on anything we talked about today and find out more about Yext, of course.

[00:27:14] Yeah.

[00:27:15] So yext.com is our, is our digital presence.

[00:27:17] Uh, we have lots of social channels on, uh, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, um, that are easily, easily accessible.

[00:27:25] I am a, something of a dinosaur when it comes to social media.

[00:27:28] I maintain a LinkedIn page.

[00:27:30] I don't really do much other than that in terms of, uh, social media.

[00:27:34] Um, but I'm pretty easy to find.

[00:27:36] Awesome.

[00:27:36] Well, I'll get links added to the website and LinkedIn so people can find you nice and easy.

[00:27:42] And for me, it was just so many big takeaways about the fragmented search landscape, how consumer behavior is changing rapidly and causing some big changes there.

[00:27:51] And how maybe Google's hold on search could eventually start slipping and businesses that fail to act with, uh, with urgency could eventually find themselves left behind.

[00:28:00] But there is a lot of work to be done before we get there.

[00:28:02] So I don't want to get people panicking too much, but just thank you for shining a light on that.

[00:28:06] Take me down memory lane as well.

[00:28:08] And, uh, leave me with two books.

[00:28:10] Really enjoyed your, uh, our chat tonight.

[00:28:12] Well, Neil, thanks for having me on.

[00:28:13] It's been great chatting with you and, uh, it's always fun to go, go take that walk down memory lane before we go zooming off into the future.

[00:28:19] So as we wrap up today's conversation with Michael, it's clear that the search landscape is undergoing a significant transformation.

[00:28:27] We have AI redefining discovery channels and consumer behavior is shifting dramatically.

[00:28:34] So businesses need to rethink their digital strategies.

[00:28:37] We've discussed the potential of structured data, the strategic distribution of content across multiple AI powered platforms and how we can enhance discoverability.

[00:28:46] But as the search paradigm shifts, what will be the next big change in how we connect with information online and find the answers to questions?

[00:28:55] But over to you, have you noticed any shifts in your own personal search behavior?

[00:29:01] Please share your experiences and join the conversation by emailing me techblogwriteratoutlook.com, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, just at Neil C. Hughes.

[00:29:11] Let me know your thoughts on this one.

[00:29:13] We all search for information, so I'll be interested in what you use.

[00:29:16] Do you use Perplexity, ChatGPT, TikTok, Google, or some other platform?

[00:29:22] I don't know, uh, Claude, for example, is another popular one.

[00:29:25] Let me know.

[00:29:26] Other than that, I'll be back again tomorrow with another guest.

[00:29:29] But thank you for listening today and bye for now.

[00:29:31] Thank you.

[00:29:32] Thank you.