Jesse Cunningham Explains What Still Works as Google Adds AI

0:00Everything online is changing really fast, right? Google just rolled out a mega update and I'm seeing a lot of, you know, content built around it. This is interesting. So, publishers fear AI searches summaries and chat bots mean end of traffic era. We're going to get into a lot of things in this video, but listen, Google just rolled out AI answers that steal clicks. A lot of people use that term, steal clicks.

0:22Publishers are losing like double-digit traffic overnight. And the same best practices that everyone used to follow are now actively destroying websites. Do you hear me? What used to work can destroy a website nowadays. So coming to this article here, publishers fear AI search summaries and chat bots mean end of the traffic era. So if we come down here, some of the reported numbers are more than I thought. So Google search is down 33% annually or globally rather according to new data from more than 2500 news sites sourced by chartbeat.

0:54this figure is even higher for the US. Now if that is the case then you know I heard numbers of like 2% GPT has about 2% of market share but if this is the case what does this even mean? And it might mean it might mean that the AI overviews which we'll talk about in this video are truly dominating right now. Now this is very interesting. We have to stop here for a moment. Remember what I said people are doing things like it's still old school SEO world. In other words, if you have a website and you're still doing the old school tactics, you

1:23could be destroying your website. What I'm going to show you right now is kind of a glimpse into the future and we're going to build upon it. So, Google brings personalized ads into search AI mode. This is the future. So, how the heck does Google's direct offers and AI mode work? So basically, and I'm just going to paraphrase, with direct offers, retailers set up relevant offers they want to feature in their campaign, and Google will use AI to determine when the offer is relevant to display. In other words, we are in the world of big data, like actual big data plus AI being able

1:56to be used to sell us, the consumer, more things. So take that and kind of think, what does that look like in the next 5 years? It means that everything everything you see here, everything, all the ads on the side, I have a ad blocker on right now, but all the ads around you are going to know way more about your preferences, about time of day, about time of year. They're going to know everything about you. I use Google Chrome, right? This is Google Chrome right here. They I've used it for 20 years. They know everything about me.

2:23They know all my search histories, and I'm going to get more and more personalized ads. Now, do you think Google is going to use that concept for just this? No. They're going to use it for every portion of their business model. Now, this right here is a glimpse into the future and right now we have to figure out how to rank for this. I'm going to let it play through once, but just see the process. Someone's on the AI mode. They need something. They need this sort of luggage thing and they can pay for it all right through Google's AI

2:49mode, right? So, we're going to watch it play through once more. Shopify in Google. Shopify ecom brand, right? Ecom website CMS rather. Help me find a carry-on for a trip to Miami that's hard shell, lightweight, and has spinner wheels. three keywords. Boom. It's able to pull up the one that works for them and they can buy right there. Pay with Google Pay. Do you see what Google wants to do? Right? Google wants to be the one-stop shop. They want to provide everything. And this has always been the MMO. They want to provide everything in one screen so you don't have to jump off

3:17to any website. It is like the zeroclick economy. It's the zeroclick world. We can build websites though, and this is what's exciting to be the website that Google connects to through their AI so that we can make a lot of money. So, for the next half of this video, let's let's talk about what I'm doing at my agency, what I'm seeing other professionals do to stay relevant in these AI times. Now, off the bat, let's use this document moving forward. So, step number one, if you want to get serious about this, is to own the platforms that AI trains on.

3:45It's no secret if you look in the right places how AI learns, how it trains, how it does what it does, how it gives users recommendations is what we care about. So, AI models don't just read websites. They heavily ingest what? Reddit, YouTube, X, forums, Q&A sites. What does all of this have in common? This is all what we call usergenerated content. Just as I'm sitting here, you know, at my table talking to you, right? This is user generated content. I'm creating this. It's very hard to fake. That's why AI really, really likes this stuff. And Reddit, most importantly, is still

4:18perceived as very hard to fake, which is why SEOs are exploiting it, which is why you have to ask the question, how can you get on there? Now, a lot of people do this wrong. And how they do this wrong is very, very, very silly. I think it's very low effort. You go on there, you go on to Reddit, you identify your subreddit, you want to talk in, and you're like, I'm going to blast my my website everywhere, and you know, go check out this www whatever.com is not the way to do this. You do not even need a link to be effective. If you have a

4:46real brand, you go on to Reddit, right? And you just naturally talk about your brand. And if someone is interested, what they're going to do, listen, this is so important. If they see your comment and it has some relevance to the actual subreddit, the conversation, someone's going to see it and they're going to go to Google and they're going to type your brand name into Google and at that point that is some would argue CTR, click-through rate manipulation.

5:11Very, very powerful because Google goes off a user engagement to rank websites, right? I know that's a lot there, but Reddit is hyper powerful. Our agency does this for clients. It's part of our package. I also teach exactly how to do this in the Rank Expand Academy. Very, very powerful. Now, YouTube, you may be saying, "Man, that is difficult to do. I don't want to go there." I get it. Maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze, but just realize all these things are usergenerated content. If you want to truly create a moat around your brand, you need to be doing all of it. Now,

5:42we're going to get off this subject in a second, but I want you to see this, right? So, it's top domain cited by LLMs June 2025. And this is going to be increasing more. So, so Reddit right here, 40%. Wikipedia, which is very hard to get on. YouTube, right? 24%. Google, Yelp, Facebook, Facebook is humongous. It's slept on. Facebook is huge. Amazon, Trip Adviser, and so on and so forth.

6:03Coming down here, more graphics. This is like Reddit answers. We can talk about that in a different video, but look here. This is the this is why this is so important. If you type in what's the social media scheduler, right? And it shows organic. And then it shows organic, and then what does it show? It shows Reddit. So, what you have to do is learn how to get on Reddit. You have to learn how to get UGC out there for your brand or you will be irrelevant in the next couple of years. Now, this is my community, the Rank Expand Academy. In

6:31the classroom, I'm going to have a build out for Reddit, a whole module dedicated to how my agency does Reddit at scale, right? So, if you're interested in that, it's going to be available here in the Rank Expand Academy. So, step two, moving on, is create content that AI can safely quote. This is a huge one. This one right here is probably the biggest lift that my agency has to do for clients. It's a lot of work, but it works, right? AI systems avoid uncertainty and risk. Put that in the back of your head. Never forget it. AI systems want to be right more so than

7:03anything. Why? Because they need to prove to the powers that be that AI is relevant, that it can work in the future. Right? People are like talking AI hallucinates everything. So, what AI really, really cares about is accurate information. So, studies show that AI overviews favor clear definitions, lists, step-by-step processes, and consensus facts. We could get I mean, that right there is a rabbit hole we could go down. Uh, what others are doing, rewriting content to lead with direct answers and use concise summaries. Hello. You have to be able to and SEO gets seogggets.com is great for this. You have to be able to identify

7:42what content on your website is decaying, going down. And then you have to identify on that specific page that is going down. How do you rewrite it? Now, if there's data around your content, like factual information based upon statistics, and if it's proprietary data, statistics is really, really powerful. But you update that. Think of like law websites. Law websites do this all the time. In fact, some law websites do it monthly where they go into their website, they update it so they show up on SERs and compete with their competitors all the time. Nowadays, we have to compete not only against our

8:15competitors, but we have to compete to show up on AI overviews and sometimes compete against the AI itself. Heads up. Now, entity gravity is step number three. Kind of like a weird term, entity gravity. Do not just build pages. So, the old school way was you're just going to pepper your your website full of AI content. And that's it's crazy to say that's old school way, right? Old school. It's only been around for like two and a half years, but the old school way was just pepper your your page with, you know,formational AI content. I made a lot of money doing this. I have

8:44friends made a lot more money doing this. It doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work. So just pages, if you're just going to create content off of just pages, it's not going to work. What you need to do is build entity gravity. So AI systems rely heavily on entities. So brands, people, companies, not URLs. Google AI search increasingly pulls from known brands, structured entities, so schema and corroborated sources. What is a corroborated source?

9:08Well, think of well coming back to Reddit. Reddit is like the king of all of this because it's so trusted. SEO tools and analysts confirm AI overviews favor entity consistent sources across the web. So, if you've ever heard of NAP, name, address, phone number for local SEO consistency. Nowadays, we have brand consistency across the web for every website. hyper important, right? So, what we're doing is doubling down on Wikipedia if you can. Very tricky, very tricky, but Wikipedia is super powerful.

9:37And then you have all these things such as LinkedIn and then repeated brand mentions across trusted platforms. So, instead of just focusing it on content, content, content, and backlinks, backlinks, backlinks, you have to go out into the world and figure out UGC, user generated content. Now, if this topic interests you, if you know you should be doing things that you are not doing right now and you have questions on how to do it, come over to the Rank Expand Academy. This is my community. There's over 400 members. If I zoom in here, you'll see 17 people are online right now. It's a hyperactive community. We do

10:08weekly calls, right? An hour long each. You can see they're all recorded here. You could jump in and you can start watching like 18 hours of content if you wanted to. The point is, if you want a place to talk to high performing people making money online using AI, this is it. I'll have a link in the description.