What Wealth Advisors Need to Know About AI Search

I'd love to step back to Finder and I want to hear from your perspective and you were there doing such an interesting time.

So you were there SEO days and then pre-AI and then stepping right into the AI days as of late.

I'd love to hear from your perspective what that was like on the ground, how you managed that change, what changes you made, what was your approach and what was your thinking along the way?

It was a lot all at once.

So it was, again, from 2015 to like 2019 was like the golden age of SEO.

But then all of a sudden, again, the Zerp era ended.

ChachiBT launched in late 2022, which was like the first real competitor, like actual credible threat to Google's search business.

At the same time, Google launched the helpful content update, which was a pretty significant update that hurt a lot of publishers.

And there was also this whole zero-click search environment.

That was also happening where Google was launching more features that sort of dissuaded its users from actually clicking into websites.

It was going to give you all the information right there on the front page.

And so

it

was a long grind.

So first, it was almost like all the stages of grief, like denial and all that.

How do we win back our traffic? And, you know, trying to follow the guidance Google had set forth with the helpful content update, like,

oh, make quality content for humans.

And,

you know, very obscure sort of advice that everyone was trying to interpret, like it was some sort of like, you know, Rosetta Stone or something.

And no one was successful.

And eventually there was a big Google event where the folks at Google were essentially like, yeah, recovery is not really on the table, not in the way that you think it is.

You're back.

And that was the realization moment for me when I realized, okay, we have to change the game.

SEO is no longer going to be what it was for us.

And it was what Finder really built its business on in the US.