How Do You Market When Organic Search Is Dead?

On today’s show we are talking about the changing face of business. This is the first in a two part series that explores the connection between the online world and the offline world. We live in the offline world, even though it seems at time that we spend much of our time with a device in our hand. 

I need to first start with a distinction between marketing and sales. On today’s show we are talking about marketing. On Monday’s show we are going to be talking about sales which is a different process. 

10 years ago they would scrape 2 pages for every visitor they would send to your website. That’s a pretty good trade. You would share your content with Google and Bing and they would send you traffic in exchange. They would also advertise along side your organic links and would provide themselves with ad revenue as part of the implicit arrangement. That remained relatively constant over much of the past decade. The Google crawl rate has remained relatively consistent over that entire time period, up until 6 months ago.

We have seen it get harder to attract traffic over the past decade. It feels like it is about 3x harder and that in fact lines up with the data. Up until the end of 2024 Google was scraping 6 pages for every visitor it sent you. But in the past six months, Google which still represents about 58-60% of all search traffic is now scraping 18 pages for every visitor it sends you. 

When you perform a search using AI, the AI tool gives you the link to its references at the end of each AI result. But how many people actually click on the little link icon. They don’t share an entire web address with a blue link, it’s an anonymous icon of two chain links. You don’t know where the link is going to take you unless you click on the link and almost nobody does. The ratio of content scraping to website visits has now risen to 1500 to 1. A decade ago we were at 2:1 then 6:1, then 18:1. Now we are at 1500 to 1. 

Who is going to invest all of that time and effort to create content with a 1500 to 1 ratio?

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Welcome to the real Estate Especial podcast, your morning
shot of what's new in the world of real estate investing.
I'm. Your host Victor Minash.
On today's show we're talking about the changing face of
business. I'm talking about all business,
not just real estate. This is the first in a two-part
series that explores the connection between the online
world and the offline world. Of course, we live in the
offline world, even though it seems at times we spent a lot of

(00:23):
our time with the device in our hand.
I need to start first with a distinction between 2 words.
That's marketing and sales. And on today's show, we're
talking about marketing. On next Monday's show, we're
going to be talking about sales,which is a completely different
process. Marketing is the process of
generating interest. If I want to learn about a
particular topic that might eventually translate into a

(00:45):
business transaction, I'm going to start by searching for
information. I'm not ready to buy, but I
won't want more information, so I might become more opinionated
on what I may want to buy in thefuture.
Marketing is focused on fulfilling that first part of
the process. Marketing is about generating
interest in sales is about generating revenue.
Sales don't generally happen without marketing in some way,

(01:07):
unless it's a commodity and people don't actually even care
to get informed about the product.
I'm going to start with the implicit contract between
content producers and search engines.
For this I'm referencing the work of Matthew Prince from a
company called Cloudflare, who recently gave an interview at an
Axios conference in Cannes. 10 years ago, the search engines

(01:30):
would scrape 2 pages. They developed their search
content by scraping and indexingthe entire content of the
Internet by searching every single website as long as the
indexing page on that website allows that page to be searched.
And back in the day 10 years ago, for every two pages that a
search engine would would scrape, you would get a single

(01:51):
visitor to your website. That's a pretty good trade.
It's a pretty good ratio. So you would share your content
with Google or Bing and they would send you traffic in
exchange. That was an implicit contract.
There was nothing explicit. They would also advertise
alongside your organic links andthey would provide themselves
with ad revenue as part of that implicit arrangement.

(02:12):
That remained relatively constant over much of the past
decade. It's been a little bit of
erosion. So the Google crawl rate has
remained relatively constant over that time period, at least
up until six months ago. Now, over the past decade, we've
added another 2 billion people to the Internet.
The world has gone from 4 billion people connected to the
Internet to 6 billion. You would think that with the

(02:33):
addition of all those new users,that would be in fact more
visitors. But as we know, that's not how
it's played out. We have actually seen it harder
to attract traffic over the pastdecade.
It feels like it's about 3 timesharder.
And that in fact lines up with the data.
Up until the end of 2024, Googlewas scraping 6 pages for every
visitor that it sent you. So that's a degradation from

(02:55):
that 2 to one ratio now to six to one.
But in the past six months, Google, which still represents
somewhere between 58 to 60% of all search traffic, is now
scraping 18 pages for every visitor that it sends you.
Now the fact is people are lazy and Google is keeping more
search on its platform and not sending you to the content

(03:15):
publishers website any longer. The summarizing the answer to
your query in a snippet at the top of the search results.
Now, originally that snippet would have been based on the
content from a single website. But today, increasingly, that
snippet is no longer just from one website.
It's an AI summary of several web pages that have been scraped
from multiple sites. There's no longer a direct link

(03:38):
between the information being presented in the search results
and the creator of that content.Google is getting that content
for free from you and I, the content creators, and no longer
giving visits in return. That is in some ways a violation
of that unwritten contract. So we've gone from 2:00 to 1:00
to 6:00 to 1:00 to 18 to 1. Now let's go and look at the
share of search that is being performed exclusively in an AI

(04:01):
tool, whether it's ChatGPT from open AI, whether it is from
Meta, from Gemini, from Google, Grok, from X.
Many people aren't asking an AI tool for the answer to a
question, and they don't go beyond the initial answer to
engage with anyone or anything outside the AI tool.
At first, the answers were not reliable enough for people to

(04:23):
trust the AI result alone. But today, more and more people
are satisfied with the quality of the answer and they don't
look any further. Easy and Fast has replaced
thorough and deep, so when you perform a search using AI, the
tool gives you a link to its reference at the end that
usually shows up at the end of each search result.
But how many people actually click on that little link icon?

(04:46):
The icon doesn't share an entireweb address with a blue link,
it's an anonymous icon with two chain links.
You don't know where that link is going to take you unless you
click on the link, and almost nobody does.
So the ratio of content scrapingto website visits is now risen
to 1500 to 1A. Decade ago we were two to one,
then six to one, then 18 to 1, and now we're at 1500 to 1.

(05:07):
So the question is, who's going to invest all of that time and
effort to create content where you're getting a 1500 to one
ratio? Organic search, in my opinion,
is completely dead in this bravenew world.
In fact, paid advertising is somehow going to replace organic
search almost entirely. Now let's be clear, the AI tools
have not figured out how to monetize the screen time spent

(05:30):
on their platforms with an advertising revenue model.
That may come at some point in the future, but today doesn't
exist in a significant way. In a world where the search
engine platforms are no longer providing traffic back to the
content creator, what is the incentive for the content
creator to continue producing all that free content for the
search platforms? What I'm describing is a

(05:50):
monumental shift that has already happened.
I'm not talking about what mighthappen in the future.
It's already in the rearview mirror and much of the world is
seeing it. Some are in denial, some are
trying to figure out what to do about it, and very few have
answers at their fingertips. As you think about that, have an
awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen
and we'll talk to you again tomorrow.