Creators Built the Web. Google AI is Rewriting It.

[00:02] to be true. The rule at the top of the list, focus on the user and all else better, John? >> If you do enough excellent, compelling takes care of itself. >> If you want your pages to be recommended

[00:16] something awesome. >> Somebody wrote to me on Twitter today building strategy, Matt?" And I was like, "I post useful things." >> That became a simple promise to creators. Make quality content and

[00:31] Google will send you the audience. Adam and Joanne Gallagher of Inspired Taste built their entire business on that promise. 16 years of serving families with recipes they'd share in the most sacred place of all, their homes. To

[00:44] dead. >> What you're talking about is theft. recipe. >> AI has a seat at the table this holiday celebrating the results. >> You get consistently bad food and you're

[00:59] devastating the world of food creators across social media and the internet. the top-ranking page have dropped by 58%. But lost clicks aren't the worst of it. AI has been quietly taking their recipes, blending it with others, then

[01:13] result. Misrepresenting the food they've poured their hearts, expertise, and resources into. People were being served the wrong recipes under their name. [music] >> The results, they look very different.

[01:28] >> Completely different products. That risks the trust they've been building hear their founding story, learn the keys to their growth, and understand what Google AI search is doing. Not just to their business, but to every business

[01:43] that relies on search. And before the end of the day, I'd show them a tool before I can do that, we needed to find out where their traffic and revenue is >> Can you share roughly [music] how much traffic you're getting?

[01:56] >> So, right now session-wise 7 million a month. In Q4, that's a heavy heavy time. Revenue, it is a multi-million dollar business. >> Generating millions from a recipe site is impressive on its own, but that's not

[02:11] >> For 8 years, we weren't profitable. And we've been doing this for [music] 16 years. We started seeing a select few blogs like DIY and travel blogs that growing these brand deals. They would renovate their bathroom and they'll get

[02:27] this." >> It was back when like blogs were cool, I guess. Like it was okay to be a blog. >> We had a day job that we didn't really together. That that was our main connection. We said, "Hey, DIY blogs,

[02:44] the scene. [music] So, let's just start to tell our story. Let's record it. Let's pick up a camera, take a couple photos, and people just read what you >> [music] >> we got our first comment. That was our

[02:58] aha moment of someone trusted the recipe, went to the store, [music] bought ingredients, came home, made it. That was the turning point for us of we >> it, too. >> From humble beginnings to a massive

[03:10] business with a loyal hungry audience, I needed to know their secret ingredient. And that takes us to their [music] first key to success. It all comes down to one word. >> Consistency. It's such an annoying word

[03:22] bottom of something and then you're getting advice from someone else who has to be consistent." And they're always right. Once we figured out how we wanted to share a recipe and we liked that format, we've done it again and again

[03:38] and again and again. We've had ups and downs, but we haven't allowed that >> We just stayed consistent. I think that is the best word. >> Consistency helped them get millions of visitors every month, but getting it to

[03:50] a multi-million dollar business, the model was shockingly simple. >> There was the Google ad partnership program that started to hit. Now we can have AdSense on there. >> Google Ads gave them the income to

[04:02] eventually leave their jobs and go all in on Inspired Taste. And steadily, they built it into what it is today. [music] But the same company that gave them their audience and much of their revenue is now becoming a threat to that very

[04:14] business. And it didn't take long for me to see just how bad things have gotten. >> How is AI impacting your business today? >> It is starting to steal our content, doing it cuz we can't block it from happening, and our traffic is going

[04:29] down. It's stealing clicks. >> It's not just changing their product, it's changing their entire revenue stream. Inspired Taste runs on traffic to their website. If that goes away, so does the income. And this isn't unique

[04:41] to them. It's happening to websites across every industry that depends on search. And all of this comes down to one core conflict. Google and publishers >> It sounds like there's a little bit of a conflict of interest here because

[04:54] >> you want to get the clicks, especially somebody who's monetized through if people don't visit your site. But then Google or any search engine's job, within their own platform. >> You have different and competing goals.

[05:09] >> While you're losing the clicks, it also tells us Google AI overviews are tells us Google AI overviews are actually helpful to the user.

[05:21] >> If you come down to the the most simplistic problem we have, when it's a branded search, when you say Inspired Taste carrot cake, they are still putting an AI overview above us, and that AI overview will sometimes have an

[05:36] AI generated or Frankenstein recipe. >> Can you explain what a Frankenstein recipe is exactly? >> How LLMs work in a nutshell is they take [music] characters, words, and smoosh them together. So, for recipes, they

[05:49] take a bit of our lemon drop martini, smoosh it with a little bit of Love and Lemons, or a little bit of another site, and just smoosh them together. I kind of nicknamed it cuz they're trying to bring something that isn't real into the

[06:01] >> If you were to compare our carrot cake recipe that is on Inspired Taste and the >> [music] >> often in AI mode, has, they're not the

[06:13] same. It's wrong. It's just a lie, right? Like it's not our recipe. A user may think that they're getting an answer, but it's incorrect. [music] >> When you search for an Inspired Taste recipe, the AI overview hands you what

[06:28] appears to be theirs, but search again and again, and the recipe keeps changing. This is bigger than losing clicks. This is misrepresentation. >> In the case of a branded search, they're using our name.

[06:41] >> You can get into the the debate of commodity versus non-commodity. Who is Google to decide? Google isn't supposed to be the publisher. That wasn't the deal. AI can't taste or test, so why are you making up recipes? You've never

[06:53] tested it. You're going to ransack our business, use our name, brand name, and Frankenstein where your face is on our thumbnail of a video, and then someone >> Yeah. >> And the ingredients are wrong. If a user

[07:08] the AI overview with what is written on your site, you're saying that they would >> It would be different. >> I don't think that the average person will be able to tell the difference. I use AI quite a bit for for cooking and

[07:20] stuff, and it's fine. >> Well, let's go make it then. >> Joanne and Adam are showing me firsthand how AI [music] search will affect their shocking. >> So, you're making a a Frankenstein

[07:32] >> Yes. >> beef tacos. I'm actually, honestly, not >> Can you tell us more about what's going on here? Don't tell me which one's which cuz I I do want it to be a surprise. >> One of them starts with beef, onions,

[07:47] fresh garlic, five spices, [music] tomato sauce, and some water or chicken stock. The other recipe starts with the same amount of ground beef, a different selection of spices, more onion, actually adds this is Anaheim pepper,

[08:01] tomato paste instead of tomato sauce, and [music] chicken stock. Certainly more ingredients on this one. The biggest difference is the spices are quite different. Also, the the amounts of the spices are quite different

[08:13] between the two. [music] >> Finding out what is real is exactly the problem. It is a branded Frankenstein [music] recipe. Google claimed that one of these was Inspired Taste's version, which it's obviously not.

[08:25] >> While we were waiting to sample the AI versus Inspired Taste beef tacos, Adam and Joanne walked me through exactly what Google was doing. More importantly, initially thought. >> Google is a known monopoly twice over,

[08:39] search. The gatekeeper of all human knowledge, or at least a vast [music] majority of it. And the gatekeeper turning it into branded Frankenstein, that was like it was a dagger. >> I mean, I was that really pissed me off,

[08:52] >> With Google's tight grip on online search, it's been making it difficult >> Who is searching Inspired [music] Taste, Thomas, other than Adam and myself? It's someone who knows about it. And it's one of our readers, or it's [music] someone

[09:06] found us on YouTube, or found us in social media. I would literally in our social media captions, I used [music] to say Google Inspired Taste recipe name, and we'll be right there. No problem. I can't say that anymore, [music] because

[09:20] an AI overview? I was really disappointed for us, because I felt taken advantage of, but also [music] for our readers who are going to be >> From day one, Joanne and Adam built Inspired Taste on authenticity, and it

[09:34] earned them something AI can't replicate, community, Which brings us to >> Curious if you've been able to build a community. [music] 25% of the number of returning and it's

[09:46] above industry average. The other conversions that are even more important come, they find out we have a Instagram sign up for our newsletter. That's probably why we have a higher retention.

[09:59] captured them and converted their their trust. So then they come back the next >> By building trust with their audience and having regular newsletters, retention was maintained as audiences received frequent reminders. But even

[10:13] with strong retention, AI overviews continue to eat into their traffic. So they turned to an area AI overviews hasn't replaced. And that brings us to Connect with your audience through videos. They've been developing

[10:26] channel for 15 years. >> We're going to continue doing what we're doing cuz people are going to continue to search for Trust the Breast Besties. >> Compared to blogs or articles, videos are one thing AI overviews can't really

[10:39] overpower. Why? Because it's about the human experience of watching the content, not reading a summary. That's the protective moat which keeps video era. >> We do believe that Google can change.

[10:52] can be coming. >> Joanna and Adam have made substantial progress turning things around. From appearing on national television to they've been advocating for the protection of creators content across

[11:06] >> And in a moment, I'm going to show them something that will take their efforts to the next level. But the big question still remains for Inspired Taste and other creators. Can AI and the creators it depends on actually coexist?

[11:20] people using AI for recipes, but we demand and many creators, it's a growing [music] backlash, that we need to be compensated. Because yes, recipes per se expression of it can. [music] And we've talked to our lawyer, and it is illegal.

[11:35] basically the anti-competitive nature. We do believe that the courts will lean our way, but it might take 5 to 10 years happen. >> Which [music] why in in the meantime

[11:47] we're saying you exchanges need to change. We need to have links. You need >> remove the directions that are rewritten off of our work. The answer is there. off of our work. The answer is there. Use AI to help surface the trusted human

[12:01] >> With everything covered, it's time for me to test InspiredTaste recipe versus the AI-generated Frankenstein recipe. >> I have this thing where I just put way too many toppings on everything. It's leaking through.

[12:21] I just don't want to say anything. Because I don't know if it's yours or not. The word that comes to mind is not a nice one. Like a hot dog. Just stick it there.

[12:38] >> Top chef. >> [laughter] >> This is very stressful. >> Mhm. >> That's definitely Frankenstein. >> Yeah, this one. Yeah.

[12:53] don't know why. >> Just because it looks like a [music] going to turn out well. >> Thank you for sharing that with me. I >> With the taste test confirming clear

[13:06] traffic data. And then I'm going to show them a tool that will help them in their [music] Adam wanted to show me their Google Search Console stats, because he had hard data of what's happening to creator-led [music] content sites.

[13:20] >> So AI overviews are taking our clicks. You can see on November beginning of >> Yeah. [music] >> there's a clear drop in clicks, but more importantly, the impressions [music] are starting to go above that light blue

[13:34] >> Basically, the purple line used to always be below the blue line, so the clicks. That's interesting [music] though, because your average position clicks. >> A drop in visitors to the website, but

[13:49] more impressions. A good indicator that AI overviews are spreading their reach to more people, but cutting off traffic to creators. This isn't surprising. At discovered a major statistic. >> AI overviews reduce clicks by 58% to the

[14:04] our own data. Everyone's kind of losing clicks. For your Frankenstein recipes, Are you doing it randomly or how are you tracking >> actually using Ahrefs to find out where they're being surfaced. If you go over

[14:17] to Brand Radar, this is where it actually shows you what the output is, Frankenstein examples right here. This is actually great advocacy tool for us to know when and where these Frankenstein existences are popping up.

[14:30] heard of Latticed? >> No. >> So, we basically have an AI agent that has [music] unrestricted access to all >> With their focus on finding incorrect recipes in AI overviews, I introduced

[14:43] them to a brand new tool [music] developed entirely in Latticed. A detect anomalies. >> Now that you're really big on advocacy Frankenstein recipes, cuz I know that Frankenstein recipes are really

[14:56] your your own reputation. [music] >> I asked it to create, using Brand Radar's data, a Frankenstein report. And so, what it can do now is it can generate Frankenstein reports anytime, and just tell me which keywords where

[15:09] you are being mentioned, but the data is different from your actual recipe. So, recipes and from Brand Radar. >> That's incredible. >> But then, it goes to your page and it crawls it, and then now it can tell me,

[15:21] check this out. You you said something about hummus. So, [music] now we can see the AI overview and the ones that weren't. >> And so, now I can go through this and I can say, "We scanned 393 AI overviews

[15:36] >> Now, this is AI used for good. >> Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. >> Right? With Latido, it's like you have [music] a team of SEOs on your side that you get to decide like, "Hey, that's good. That's not good." [music]

[15:49] >> Using Latido and this new tool I've shown them, Adam and Joanne are left thinking about the future of Inspired Taste and the entire [music] industry. fear

[16:01] and optimism. [music] There's a huge gap between what's now and advocacy and having minor UX changes that make a big impact. We did get a response from Google and they heard feedback that could make a huge difference.

[16:13] >> And it turns out that feedback was heard. Not long after filming, Google rolled out changes to the AI overview layout for recipes. They improved the UX, now including links and recipe cards in a redesigned carousel, but there's

[16:26] right below those cards are the Frankenstein [music] recipes, still robbing creators of their hard work and denying readers an accurate [music] recipe. The fight isn't over yet.

[16:38] recipes, [music] always. >> Yeah, I think AI will make us more efficient, but at the end of the day, humans are always going to long for to perpetuate [music] the need for that.

[16:50] >> It is only highlighting need for human [music] connection and us to share passions, be creative, value [music] creative work. That's only going to increase. And if it pushes us in that direction even more, while being a bit

[17:06] more responsible, that sounds like a great future.