The Truth About AI Content, SEO, and What Actually Ranks in 2026 with Kyle Roof

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: The Truth About AI Content, SEO, and What Actually Ranks in 2026 with Kyle Roof
Host: John Wright
Guest: Kyle Roof
Published: Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:22:00 +0000
Duration: 36:39

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: Well, something that we've found is that, um, AI is terrible at SEO, which is, which is great for all of us. And so if you're bad at SEO, it's going to help you do bad SEO faster. It's not going, it's not going to fix your SEO problems.

[00:00:15] Kyle Roof: I bet you can't, but it's not going to find a market fit for you. It's not going to do your marketing for you. It's not going to find an audience. And it's definitely not going to be able to tell you if the output is correct or not. You, you have to be mindful that you're not going to be right a hundred percent of the time. Yeah. Just not. But you can be more right to your competitors.

[00:01:05] John Wright: All right. Let's start off with page optimizer pro.

[00:01:45] John Wright: I mean, you built that. We can't not talk about that tool. Uh, I've used it before and it's really cool. I kind of want to know like where, where's the SEO tool space going? And what are you working on right now in that tool?

[00:01:58] Kyle Roof: Well, something that we've found is that, um, AI is terrible at SEO, which is, which is great for all of us. Um, but the biggest thing we've actually been running a year long case study. Um, we're a little bit over a year now. And, um, looking at kind of the base level of terms that we get out of the LLMs, like without prompting what, what is the content that we're getting? You know, so we've been running this experiment with, um, uh, give me a thousand words on what to see in Rome.

[00:02:28] John Wright: And, and then we get that article and then we run that through pop to evaluate how good is this for SEO purposes and their garbage, they're actually terrible. And so late in, uh, in 2025, there were several, uh, Google updates. I think they were targeting AI content, but not targeting it to determine if it's AI or not, because they don't have to do that. They just had, they just have to count the terms and the AI content is so light in contextual terms or LSI, if you will, that I think that's all they had to do. I think they turned up the dial a little bit on contextual terms and, um, that allows them to spot AI content and, and, and knock it out. Especially like the mass built content.

[00:03:07] John Wright: So for us at pop, we're, we're loving this because we, we do very well with contextual terms and, um, and we're very proud of what we've got. And so, um, what we see kind of with, with, with, with, with AI, with people rely on AI more, you will need a tool that can count for you and can count the terms for you and give you the content that won't get you in trouble. Okay. So would you say then there's still a smart use case for using AI for content? Oh, for sure. But it, it, you have to understand that AI is a tool that helps you do things faster. Yeah. And so if you're bad at SEO, it's going to help you do bad SEO faster. It's not going, it's not going to fix your SEO problems. All right.

[00:03:46] John Wright: What about programmatic SEO where you're targeting keywords that are kind of valuable, but they've been really difficult to rank for. I mean, I come in the iGaming space and I just spun up a website recently where I aggregated so many casinos with my paper and I got a hundred thousand, but I'm not publishing all a hundred thousand. I'm just publishing the summary of them. But all that data is going on each casino review, which is like, I mean, it's just fully automated, but it's working. Like, is this a good example? Yeah, for sure. Um, programmatic SEO, I think something that AI has done is it's allowed more people to get into the programmatic space. You know, before I think there was a bar to entry in terms of being able to understand how to do it, how to set it up.

[00:04:26] John Wright: And that's something that AI is helping, you know, programmatic SEO, mass page build kind of stuff, much larger projects that involve large amounts of data can now be accessed by mere mortals when before it was the super nerds. They could only, they could only do it. Okay. So whether we're a SaaS company or an affiliate company, it doesn't matter. What would you recommend for the content team? Cause obviously you got the technical part nailed, but I think, I think contents, the space that everyone's confused. They're like, I don't know what to do. And when I talk about this to other affiliates, they're just kind of, they're like lost and they're kind of just copying the same playbook and looking

[00:05:05] John Wright: at what other people do, what's your go to market here? There, there are two things you want to think about. Um, one is the idea of supporting content on the site. So if you have a top level page, you know, this is the base that you want to rank, um, you need content that will support it, you know, that that's kind of around it and turns out that's really good for Google, but it's also really, really good for like AI search. And it gets into that query, uh, fan out concept where when AI does search, it breaks it into smaller pieces. And those are essentially people also ask type questions. That was what we're really talking about. So it's something that if it works on the page, it should be on the, on the main page, but then there's something that's kind of adjacent, um, that kind

[00:05:42] John Wright: of content you should have a plan for and AI can, can really help you bang out that content and in, in order to satisfy what Google wants, cause it's, it's always great for Google, but then satisfy, but AI search wants. But in addition, as I mentioned before, you do need to be very mindful of your accounts, I think even more so than before. Um, if you're not getting term rich content, you know, cause AI content, it looks pretty, so it reads pretty well, but it's missing. It's, it's, it's, it's deficient in the, in the number of terms that need to be out of the page and so you really need very, very careful with that. As long as you're careful with that, then you're good to go. Okay. So, I mean, it goes without saying it's like, while everyone's been screaming that SEO is dead, would you say it's gone the extreme

[00:06:22] John Wright: opposite where it's, oh, we're making more money now than we were last year.

[00:06:26] Kyle Roof: This is, this is better than ever. Um, and what's great too is because now you can, it's, it's essentially the same thing. Now we're calling it like an AI package and you can charge more. So, but it's, it's essentially the same principles because it turns out. Computers all think the same way, you know, there's only, they, and they're mimicking how humans think, you know, and they're obviously doing a little bit faster and better and a little more structured, but the way that we think is well, how we program computers and then that's all just, you know, the same stuff from before. So the, the, the, just because it's now an AI type thing, it doesn't mean it's changed, computing has changed. Yeah. What you just said in the last five minutes has made me write a bunch of

[00:07:05] Kyle Roof: notes where we're a SAS company and we're building more SAS tools and I think we actually need to go hardest on content if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. I mean, we're, we're doing so well with, with content that is satisfying Google and at the same time satisfying AI search as well.

[00:07:23] Kyle Roof: And it's really, it's the almost the same concept. Yeah. I mean, just to give you like a small story to kind of double down on that. And this is why we should actually react even stronger. I had an affiliate that came to us and one thing we do, we actually tell people how affiliates can detect when shavings happening on their account. And this guy was actually asking Claude, like how, how we can figure this out. And it's like, go to stats phone. And he told me that. And I was like, okay, you know what? Um, we need to go even harder on the content. We need to be like all the stuff that we do. We need to be the thought leader in this space. And I actually felt like there's a major gap in like people not really fully understanding how to set up post-backs. What's a dynamic variable?

[00:08:03] Kyle Roof: How's it different than a post-back? Sure. Sure.

[00:08:06] John Wright: Yeah, no, I'm with you. I think, um, when people were really concerned that AI was going to kill SEO, especially, I remember like Jasper came out a few years ago and everyone's like, Oh no, this is, this is it. What, what died off was the, um, like the content farms. Those died, you know, those died instantly. And I think we are losing some, uh, lower end providers, uh, and maybe some reduction in staff. But after that output has increased tremendously and the more there's output, then there's more money to be had. Yeah. All right. Let's pretend that tomorrow we just raised half a million and we don't even have an SEO department. Like I'm literally that person right now.

[00:08:44] John Wright: And I spend minimal time on it, but I do geek out on building, uh, SEO tools, uh, in-house. Um, what should we be hiring? Is this one person? Is this two people? I know content's probably going to be, I think top of mine. I'm kind of wondering, I'm like, do we need like separate people for link building? What is your advice for it? You probably need somebody that can, that can do the prompts and

[00:09:07] Kyle Roof: can do the, uh, do the agents, but you need the expert in order to be able to understand the output, you know, just getting output isn't good enough. So you will, I'm hiring two people. I'm hiring somebody that understands SEO very well and understand what the output should look like. And then I'm hiring somebody that can prompt and can build out, you know, your little claw bots and stuff like that. Because then once you've got the expert that can verify the output, then you can send that person out to them, create all the agents for you. And, um, you'll be pretty productive and I think you'll be pretty successful. Okay. And I'm assuming that you're geeking out with like, uh, research agents.

[00:09:45] Kyle Roof: It's like, do we need to include these in the background? I mean, or is this like a must have at this point? Um, so you're either going to be doing it yourself or you to pay somebody else to do it. I mean, that's the bottom line. And so you either want to go and learn how to do it or you're going to be just have to be comfortable paying somebody, but even if you're paying somebody to do that kind of work where you still want to know what the limitations are, right? Yeah. Like what you can and can't do. And then I think that can help you decide, you know, what direction you're going to take your agency, your tools or whatever you're doing. Um, but you, I've been having so much fun.

[00:10:19] John Wright: I was kind of, um, I was kind of anti. I was like, you know, I don't really need to get into that and that's fine. I've got people for it. And then in the last few months I play with it and the stuff that I've built has been just a blast.

[00:10:29] John Wright: And, uh, it's like now I'm like down much more, um, pro.

[00:10:34] Kyle Roof: Uh, the stuff, um, I'm not a Luddite anymore. I'm an agent. So from a business philosophy point of view as a business owner, would you say that if you had a series of like five companies to invest in, are you only going to want to invest in the companies that are people like you where you're actually, you know, the stuff, but you're building rather than being someone that's so busy that your job is just pure management.

[00:10:57] John Wright: Yeah. I mean, if your job is that busy, there's probably some repeatable tasks that you should be able to get rid of. And if you're not figuring out how to get rid of those repeatable tasks, then you're going to fall on. I mean, I think that's, that's where you'll fall behind. If you're doing something that is very repeatable or you're paying somebody that's that's that's very repeatable. Um, there's probably an efficiency issue. So I would be hesitant to, to be involved in that type of company. Where if somebody is just completely resistant, they want to do the repeatable tasks, then that might not be where you want to be.

[00:11:28] John Wright: Yeah. But I think there's a extreme value. I a man like, yeah, it's better to at least pay someone rather than not doing anything. Oh, for sure. For sure. At some point, I think you got to get your hands dirty. I mean, this is like rebuilding a car in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, so I, my first car was a 1978 Datsun F10 and the Hashtag version. And, um, you could open up and you could understand the engine. I could change the oil. Could I do that on a car today? No, I don't think I could, but I do understand, I do understand how it works. And so I think that's kind of where we're at right now with these kind of things like you can open up the hood and you can understand what it's doing. And you can, as you said, get your hands dirty. I think in a little bit, you won't be able to.

[00:12:07] John Wright: And so I think now would be the time to learn it so that at least when it gets a little more complex, you still know it's limitations and, and where it can go and what it can't do and that kind of stuff. Yeah. All right. That, that, that kind of gives me a good roadmap. It's like I, I dabbled with agents. I'm actually building some, but I haven't rolled them out and I'm spending time kind of going, what is my computer setup? Like this is probably my biggest dilemma. It's like, I think I might want to get a powerful machine because I'm spending a lot of time on, like vectorizing content, like taking databases, putting them to Postgres and then going, okay, let's, let's make it so we've actually got semantic search. And maybe that's actually a good pivot to, to asking you about that.

[00:12:45] John Wright: Like most of the internet is WordPress, MySQL. And I think if we actually change the databases, I mean, the way Google works to my understanding is they vectorize everything and that's why they're super fast and they've got like a semantic search engine. Um, do you think that there's going to be a demand or an incentive for people to start changing their websites? It's okay. It's not MySQL anymore. It's going to be Postgres or something else. And you're going to build like really smart searches inside.

[00:13:12] Kyle Roof: I don't think the internet will change in mass like that enough for it to be worthwhile to give you any kind of benefit. I don't think I see exactly what you're saying, but I just don't think the internet's going to get on board with it. And as a result, I don't think, and yeah, and I always think Google does things as cheaply as possible. You know, like they have the ability to do certain things, but I don't think they really do because I think you can get the same result or very similar result by just using a bag of words model, like a, like a BM 25 and just bag of words plus word count is probably pretty close to what they want anyway

[00:13:48] Kyle Roof: with obviously a little, a little variation off of that, but I think they'll do it as cheaply as possible. So I think they have the ability to do what you're talking about.

[00:13:56] John Wright: I don't think they will do it because it's expensive. And then I think to your point, I think it's a great idea. I just don't think the internet will adopt it enough for Google to care enough. Really. Maybe it makes sense if you have, let's say a ton of data with really cool insights and you're the first person to create it and maybe that's the perfect example. Yeah, I like that. You know, and then, and then you're doing it for yourself, essentially not necessarily for an external validation through a search agent, but through making your data more accessible for your users, for sure. Okay.

[00:14:27] Kyle Roof: Just kind of pivoting a little bit. I mean, your SAS company and the whole SAS space, everyone's like, Oh, this is like the space that's getting ripped to shreds where I'd say technically it is, but I think there's a pivot of how SAS companies need to survive and be not just like surviving, but to get growth. And I think just from hearing what you're working on, I'm assuming that you're doing it for not just because of survival, like you're doing the right things, which is basically building unique data sets and creating data that no one else has, which your platform, far more unique, where I know there's other ones that are trying to kind of copy what you guys do. But I think when you have those data and you're geeky and building datasets, that's, I think your new moat.

[00:15:08] John Wright: Well, this is a point that I've had for a while in that, in my space, in the on-page SEO space, for example, where Pop lives, there really had five tools that have survived since we've been around five or six tools. And every year there are all these competitors that pop up and they go away because they're not creating anything new. They're just re-skinning an API.

[00:15:31] John Wright: And now we're getting a lot of tools. They're probably up there just re-skinning AI with, again, so they don't really have the knowledge of what the output should be. They're seeing it more as a marketing opportunity rather than, um, their on-page SEOs, you know, or they understand the, the on-page.

[00:15:46] John Wright: And so even just outside of say the SAS that I'm doing, I'm seeing a lot of up there, all these people thought like, Oh, I'm building this SAS or building that SAS, but you see very few of them come to market. And the ones that come to market don't survive. And it's because, just because you can build something doesn't mean you found a market fit.

[00:16:05] John Wright: And then also if you don't really understand what the output should be, you're really putting yourself in a, in a, in a bad spot because you don't know how to adapt or how to change even slightly. So I am not overly concerned about, you know, that somebody's like, I can build a SAS tool in two minutes now with this in. I bet you can.

[00:16:23] John Wright: I bet you can't, but it's not going to find a market fit for you. It's not going to do your marketing for you. It's not going to find an audience. And it's definitely not going to be able to tell you if the output is correct or not, and not just in the SEO space, but in any space in SAS because I mean, where are all these SAS tools?

[00:16:39] Kyle Roof: Yeah. That are, that are killing people. The one way people are, are, are maybe where SAS tools are hurting is that some people are getting smart enough to kind of maybe build their own little internal tool, they don't necessarily have to pay for a third party process, but that is such a small group of people. And it's, it's real nerds like you and me. Yeah. My dad's never going to do it.

[00:16:59] John Wright: He stopped running out and creating any kind of AI agent to do anything. So, but what if someone creates a, like the, the, the one click install for replacing Trello Jira intercom? I think we're getting close to that.

[00:17:14] John Wright: Maybe, but then once you do that, like, uh, so you do that, right? You create your own Trello. You have to get people into it and people are already comfortable with Trello. And they don't know John's, you know, you know, moving board of, of, of wonder like, and or, or, or garbage. Yeah. Exactly. You know, it's like, you know, or, you know, Kyle just invented, you know, this, this, um, you know, Slack alternative. Who cares? Like we already use Slack. We already like Slack. We already, so there is kind of, you're going to have to do a lot to break into that space. So like you can do it, but getting into the space is going to be extremely difficult. I think it depends on where people are like Slack.

[00:17:54] John Wright: It's like, you're not, you're not pulling people off Slack. Um, you know, Jira, maybe it depends, but it's different. Um, so pivoting it's, we've been building a database software, which is ironically enough, we're actually using it to build and replace some of these tools. And one of the, one of the database projects I'm geeking out on, did I just trash your idea? No, no, not at all.

[00:18:17] John Wright: You might've actually double validate.

[00:18:22] Kyle Roof: But, uh, yeah, so we, we first started building, um, datafists for our stats on customers, the helping affiliates, visualize their data. We were doing a Tableau and then we're like, you know what? AI just kind of came along and well, it's been around for a while, but the database got really amazing. The things that I wanted to build two years ago, I'm like, I need four amazing people to build this. And now it's like, I just need Claude.

[00:18:46] Kyle Roof: Right. So I'm building a Google search console plugin. I've got, I think I put maybe like four hours into it, but do you think with search console, if you had to build like the perfect plugin, that's like, whatever you want, would you say like, this is a plugin that you'd probably want to spend like 20 hours on, like just grinding out and going, everything you could imagine, like build the full suite, like this is possible.

[00:19:08] John Wright: To build like a clone of search console or to Not a clone. Can I analyze search console? Yeah. Like to take the best value. Because every time I interview like people like you, it's like, I get an idea for search console. I'm like, that's great. And then I started going, wait a minute. Let me take all the comments that everyone said about how you can use search console in the best way. And even AI does it for me. It's like, give me the best uses of search console that people don't understand. And it's like, and then built.

[00:19:36] John Wright: Yeah. No, I mean, that's great stuff. I think the best way to validate that kind of ever, or in any tool is, are you going to use it yourself? And if you're, if you're solving your own problem and you're using yourself for those types of insights or, or getting the type of data that you need in a certain way, then there's, there's likely somebody else has a problem. And then, and I think about what's the least amount that somebody would spend to solve this problem so they don't have to do it themselves. And if that, if that dollar amount justifies bringing it to market, then that's something that I would consider. Okay. Because I mean, we've all seen, like there's lots of friends we

[00:20:14] John Wright: have on LinkedIn and X where they're building their own Looker Studio plugins or Looker Studio templates. And there's a massive market on that just for only search console. And that's not even including Google analytics. It's not even including a module for Cloudflare, if and when that matters. And I guess what's nice too, is you kind of have a built-in audience with the affiliates that are associated with you too. Right? So you can kind of bring stuff to kind of a beta and try it out with a, a fit, a base that already likes you, you know, they already, they already are, I hope so. They already hit that beast nominally. Yeah. And, and then you can give it a go.

[00:20:53] John Wright: So you can kind of like solve your own problem. Then you can bring it to market with your group before trying to bring it to a much larger audience. So that's a nice way to launch, I think. Yeah. I'm thinking about just basically launching two versions of the plugin. One is like a free version, which is could be fully open source and you can basically download it. All you need is your either API keys or like one of these emails that you just kind of put in search console and connects to your cloud.

[00:21:18] Kyle Roof: Yeah. And then maybe the advanced one, which is like, okay, let's go all in and go super deep. And if people care about it, then yeah, maybe we'll turn it into something. Yeah.

[00:21:27] John Wright: Yeah. I like it. Let's do it. All right. I'm in. I'm in. Speaking about search console, like, you know, I hear over and over again, it's like, this is like the gold mine. What are you, what are you digging at a search console today that everyone keeps overlooking? Because I've watched some of your, I've seen some of the videos on, you know, internet marketing gold. It's like, to me, it's like that one I feel like is the most underrated one.

[00:21:50] Kyle Roof: The, the thing that I really like to do in search console, especially when I'm looking for, for wins is doing a CTR by rank report. So you can sort and you can figure out everybody you can figure out your own CTR for by rank positions. So all the ones that are in the one position, what is your actual CTR? And then I go back through and I find underperforming keywords. So let's say if I'm sitting in the five spot, I should have a CTR of eight, you know, 8% or something like that.

[00:22:20] Kyle Roof: And I'm only at 3%. That means I'm leaving 5% on the team. I've already got the ranking. Just there's something, there's a disconnect there. And that's usually just tweaking, you know, meta descriptions and, and, and titles without habits. You can get some real wins quickly by taking advantage of the rank that you're just not squeezing the most out of. And so a CTR by rank report and then going back through and finding underperforming keywords is one of the things I love doing with a search console. You could probably immediately add that to your, to your suite of tools. I'm going to do it right after this. I mean, it's so that you're not, I can tell you from experience, you're not going to get the full 5%.

[00:22:59] Kyle Roof: You know, you're not going to fill that gap, but you can get a few percentage points off. And when you add that across an entire site, that's ranking for thousands of keywords, and maybe you find 50 to 100 that are underperforming. You know, that turns into a lot of real quick wins. Yeah. So do you have an MCP for, for pop or building right now? Okay. That's very cool.

[00:23:18] John Wright: You need to tell me when it comes out. Yeah. So I think we're gonna be done probably the end of this week and we're actually building

[00:23:27] Kyle Roof: an AI version of Kyle.

[00:23:29] John Wright: You can actually go and use pop conversation. Is the idea. So we're trying to get to the non-techie crew. You know, we're like people that want to use a tool, but just don't have the time for the learning curve. Right.

[00:23:44] Kyle Roof: Or don't even maybe know what the right questions are. And it's like, look, if you're, if you're frozen or you got analysis paralysis, here you go. Here you go. And you could actually, and you can have a, you can have a conversation with me. It's actually pretty good. It's awesome. But so yeah, so the tool and we're not, you know, we're getting into marketing. Yeah.

[00:24:05] John Wright: We're not calling it like, you know, meet Billy.

[00:24:09] Kyle Roof: What we're actually trying to do from a marketing perspective is this is the tool, you know, the, you know, so like everybody launches their little assistant and like, talk to Susie, our AI assistant, you know, and then that to me is a weird disconnect because now it's something, what we're actually trying to do is basically infuse this into the tool that this is. Right. And it's a vastly superior way to interface, just tell it what you want. And then the tool actually go, and then Kyle will go into it for you. That's cool. That must have like taken a lot of your messages and said, okay, let's take all of your writings and your podcasts and be like, that's what we do. Yeah, that's exactly what we did.

[00:24:47] John Wright: And then like draw it in my courses. But like, what's been a lot of fun is that having a conversation with it. And like, how would you answer this kind of question? People are probably gonna ask you about this, and then kind of refining it a little bit. But I would say on the first run, it was like 85% correct. Okay. As how I would respond. Yeah. To it. And it was just kind of fine tuning. And I would say right now we're seeing about 95% correct. There's just like some small things here or there. But so we're building the MCP.

[00:25:15] John Wright: The devs are actually doing that. I'm working on the interface itself to train it up. I'm thinking a couple of weeks, we'll have this. Like, actually people would be done, I think at the end of this week, they would do a little more testing. And then maybe end of April, we'll have it launched, which is pretty exciting.

[00:25:30] John Wright: So what other tools would you say would go well with either pop or and or the MCP?

[00:25:37] Kyle Roof: If you are doing like your own like content creation, like, you know, like people that have their own content tool, this would be great because we have an API already that you can sink into. Because as I mentioned at the beginning of the call,

[00:25:52] John Wright: getting your term counts is more important now that they've been in a long time. And so you can use something like pop to double check your counts. So you have a great way that you're already pumping out your content.

[00:26:02] John Wright: Do a sanity check, you know, with pop to make sure that you're not going off the rails.

[00:26:08] Kyle Roof: Also in pop, we have a really good,

[00:26:10] Kyle Roof: we call it a one click silo. And this gets into the query panel. So you basically put in your concept. And then we'll find if there's like a page on your site that's already ranking for that term, and then other concepts. And if you're already ranking for them as well, or if you have pages for them. How to create a silo the right way that the AI search wants, and Google wants as well. Those two kind of things I would think would be great for people that have their own processes to tap in for, you know, nine cents ago, and get that information. I think it costs like nine cents, 10 cents, something like that, to get better. You know, just, but then 10 cents to save yourself.

[00:26:47] John Wright: It's not a bad spend in order to make sure that you're not getting it get penalized.

[00:26:52] John Wright: But we know some people won't spend that 10 cents. No, absolutely.

[00:26:56] John Wright: They'll spend it in arrears after they get hit. And then they have to go back and spend a lot more money to fix it. Nobody likes to buy life insurance.

[00:27:06] Kyle Roof: Or they'll sell their business to someone else that, you know, took the time and basically started stacking all the wins and said, Thank you, we're gonna acquire this and we're gonna optimize your business. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So let's pivot a bit to content management systems. I built one recently, and I'm imagining, Okay, well, what are all the things that I wanted to build back in the day, but when I didn't have a budget and like nothing got done, both in terms of design and custom features. And I was thinking, I'm like, well, why not include some of these SEO things where here's your content. And it's like, can we make it easier such that your content writers get that visibility of search console, maybe even pop could go in there?

[00:27:46] John Wright: Yeah, for sure.

[00:27:48] John Wright: That's always kind of the dream, isn't it? To have the content management system that everybody will use.

[00:27:54] John Wright: People talk about like, why should I use pop? Like, so it's like, I'm getting great results off of, say, one of my competitors. And they're like, should I switch to pop? I'm like, if your team is using it, and you guys are doing, well, no, the best tool is the one that your team will use. And even though I'm like, I can tell you that I think my dad is better. And I can tell you that we think this feature is better. But if your team is using and they're happy, that's great. So if you build something that people will adopt, that's the key. You know, the content team will actually use it and get value out of it. That's the key to any of those kind of things. Yeah. All right. So we've got option A, which is all these new CMSs popping out of the market. And option B, where if you've got like your own one powerful

[00:28:32] John Wright: website, do you think people should be really pivoting pretty hard and saying, look, your site, if you can't make these changes fast enough, like you need to implement this AI tech stack where it's not just design in UX. It's also programming custom features and not having this, like, technical debt has to disappear at this point. Yeah.

[00:28:54] Kyle Roof: I mean, most people won't put down. It's stuck. Like, I don't think you can count on them having the foresight to do that. Most people will grind in the way that they've been grinding. And they'll just grind it straight into the ground. And then they're forced to change.

[00:29:07] John Wright: Nobody, they're called early adopters for a reason. There are some people that will actually adopt and change. But then the vast majority won't. So I don't know that people will get on board with what you're saying just on their own. Something else is going to have to push them. Yeah. It could be push them through M&A. I mean, like, just to take a couple examples would be our SaaS website, I'm like, I already know that our SaaS website isn't AI ready, but I know exactly what we're going to do to change it such that I can make changes on the site, both for content SEO and design and UX.

[00:29:39] Kyle Roof: And I think at some point, we're going to be able to look at people's sites because they're exposed. You're going to be able to be like, hey, this site hasn't changed in eight months. We don't know if they don't have a plan behind it. But there's some people that they're just not ready for this and they either don't have the time or they actually don't have the skills.

[00:29:56] John Wright: They don't know what SEO looks like unless they hire that person. Right. That's right. And to your point as well, I think the bigger things is they just don't know.

[00:30:07] Kyle Roof: It's not like they're stopping it from happening or preventing it rapidly. It's just they simply don't know.

[00:30:15] John Wright: That anxiety and that fear that something's out there, but they just don't really know what they could or couldn't do.

[00:30:20] Kyle Roof: Because just to give an example of what I'm putting inside the CMS is like I created something, but I know other people have used this term before. It's called crowd post. So it's like I didn't invent it, but I know it's been invented previously. And the idea was that I could give people a link and I could give them interview questions. But rather than having to me give an email or a Google Doc and format and manual work, the whole thing would be automated. Like they'd be forced to include a picture. They could do things anonymously. They can actually do polls. And I can actually do interviews at scale and just kind of mix up all the questions and have an automated template. And I think this would be a great way of making it super easy to get content out of people

[00:30:59] Kyle Roof: and having that insight to kind of go, OK, what's going to be really good content that I know Google's going to respect? And could I make this super easy to give to high value people where it's like,

[00:31:12] John Wright: how do I make this super easy for you to just click a link and think, oh, let me just do this. Right. Yeah, any ways to reduce friction would be the end. I think you're thinking the right way for sure. All right. So yeah, there's a lot covered there.

[00:31:29] Kyle Roof: I think I need to get back into paid job. Has this been a validating session for you? It's been both validating as well as like, all right, we're just getting some extra money in the bank and we've not hired an SEO. It's been like four years. So what I have been appreciating is doing this podcast, getting a chance to talk to people like you. And I'm like, OK, I feel like I know what I need to do.

[00:31:53] John Wright: I think my personal problem over the years has been analysis paralysis. But there's been a couple of guys that have been mentors that have just said, look, I see you have that paralysis. Do this. Just do it. On the other side, you're going to be fine. And one guy that did that was Victor Carpenko. And he's just like, look, it's pretty basic. It's like, here's Surfer SEO. Here's your search console. Here's your analytics. Here's HS. Blah, blah, blah. Keyword research. This is the content. 4,000 words. Go do it. There you go. All right. Here we go.

[00:32:20] Kyle Roof: It is pretty much like that.

[00:32:23] John Wright: I think that's fair. I'd say that's fairly accurate.

[00:32:26] Kyle Roof: It's really just having a repeat. You need that repeatable system, right? And the thing,

[00:32:32] John Wright: you have to be mindful that you're not going to be right 100% of the time. Yeah. Just not. But you can be more right to your competitors. And you can do it. You can do it in a system that's repeatable that you know this will consistently work. This will consistently move the needle and get things going to where they need to go. Not 100% of the time, but the majority of the time. And that's all you need. Yeah. That's why I like testing. And that's why every time I see you post once in a while, you talk about case studies and things you're doing. I mean, some of your experiments have been so crazy. I'm like, wow, this is your lore. If someone is just like,

[00:33:01] John Wright: that's legendary. It's like people still talk about it today. It still works. You know, like when, because if that's the first question everybody always asks like, oh, that doesn't work today. Does it like, and that's always part of the talk. I'll show a new page that put up a few months ago. Yeah. And we're in pairs at SEO. In iGaming is, it's ridiculous right now. Sure. I bet. I mean, well, as soon as one person in iGaming gets an idea, I mean, everybody's watching everybody so closely. You know, then everybody's going to jump on it. Right. And it's difficult not to build more affiliate sites because I keep finding like, and I do all this keyword research and I'm like, I find these websites. I'm like, I know they're making money because they're targeting keywords and they're ranking for it with the,

[00:33:40] John Wright: not identical type, but they mix it all up. But I'm like, it's a single page. I'm like, this is brutal. And then of course you do like, I do with my geeky stuff on my, I'm like, okay, let me look at the DNS, see what they have. I'm like, okay, separate Cloudflare accounts, but I know it's the same owner. Right. Exactly. It's working.

[00:33:58] Kyle Roof: Yeah. And that's actually something that I learned. Actually, after the lore, I made something.

[00:34:03] John Wright: Nothing's in my name.

[00:34:04] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:34:06] John Wright: Why?

[00:34:07] John Wright: Nothing's in my name anymore. Yeah.

[00:34:11] Kyle Roof: Don't put your name on anything you care about. Yeah. God, I'll try to remember that for when I write content. And we'll see what we do in the future moving forward. Kyle, thank you so much for doing this. I want to pass it back to you one last time. How can people get ahold of you? And of course, tell us about pop. Yeah. Page Optimizer Pro is where I'm at. That's my main focus.

[00:34:30] Kyle Roof: As I mentioned, we've got AI Kyle, it should be coming out. And I think it's going to make the goal. Which we'll really, even if you're a pro, even if you know what you're doing, it's just going to be easier to use.

[00:34:38] John Wright: And then also, if you want more human interaction, something else we have is what we call Like Love, where we do it for you. It's kind of an agency-ish model. But we have, I think, 100 agencies use us. And so the idea is that it's at at a price point that there's still a margin for you. And you can kind of get, because a lot of people, they want to use the tool, or they have the ability to use the tool. But it's time and resources. And so basically, you can have AI Kyle pretty soon. But if you don't like AI Kyle, or you want somebody that's a little more hands-on and actually human,

[00:35:10] Kyle Roof: we have that for you as well. So we've got a lot going on to try to bring this type of data to where you're at. And that's kind of, that's one of my focus in the last couple years is try to make this as accessible as possible so you can get effective SEO at a really good price. Yeah. So it's like, otherwise, I don't have to do these interviews once a week where I'm asking questions, but I'm really just taking a ton of notes. Thank you so much. This is actually not being posted anyway.

[00:35:35] John Wright: This was just your way to beta test a few ideas. We'll do a little workshop on some concepts. We will post it live in a week.

[00:35:44] Kyle Roof: That'd be great. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Have a great day.

[00:36:23] John Wright: Where better data leads to better decisions. If you're not measuring it, you're guessing. See you next time.