I take detailed notes on these interviews....here's my personal notes, visualized with some imagery. I hope you like this format (let me know if you do or don't)!

(0:16) When I started my first business in high school, the only way I could afford to get traffic with $0 is by dominating the search engine rankings.

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(0:49) In the last 3-5 years there’s been a TECTONIC SHIFT in SEO. 

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(1:05) Ross says for smaller businesses SEO is harder, but for larger brands it’s not. 

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(2:22) Percentage of queries Google shows AI results is surprisingly only 7% (at this moment). 

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(3:15) I’ve been using Perplexity as my default search engine, and it’s like seeing the future of Google by doing an AI-first search. So I still click links in Perplexity, but it’s a bit different. 

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(4:25) “Library Sites” are mostly endangered and some completely decimated. Basically any “What Is…” type of search is being gobbled up by AI.

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(6:34) Ross’ favorite test search term is “What Is An IRA” because it has an easy answer, and a very complicated long-tail answer.

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(9:30) Reddit is skyrocketing in their search results since Google introduced the “Forum” tab. It’s the best way to find the “real” reviews, however it’s starting to get manipulated as well like anything. It’s called “The Manipulation Curve.”

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(11:50) Engineering teams will train AI off content only made before 2023 because there was no AI content then. 

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(12:30) Google’s whole existence has been a cat-and-mouse game of showing results, then preventing manipulation.

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(12:56) Ross very-late-in-the-interview intro!

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(13:30) SEO used to be: Write content → Then get people to link it. Is it still like that? Ross says links still matter to a degree but it’s changed massively. There’s fewer people blogging as more people go to social media. It’s much harder to “fake your way to the top” via getting links.

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(15:00) Big brands are winning in SEO because.

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(15:50) Social networks starting with TikTok have the opposite approach: You can have zero followers yet get 10m+ views. This never happens in SEO.

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(16:33) Google had to release some inside info and on-page time, click through rate, and brand signals seemed to be far more important than links. Links get you to the top 10, but brand signals keep you there. 

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(17:29) How important are meta tags, description tags etc? Not as important anymore. It also DEPENDS, for example if your website is for rural farmers and they have slow internet connections, then “site speed” is a big factor. 

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(19:05) Ross runs a big agency with 90+ people and the trends he’s seeing are: You want to rank high so you influence AI results. Doing “best of” roundup posts on blogs is actually working again (like Blog Carnivals from back in the day).  

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(21:20) AI works by figuring out the next word of a sentence. If you have a lot of ranked content on the web you can train the AI to say your brand.

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(22:29) People aren’t blogging as much….BUT they are making a crap-top of content on social networks, which is kinda like blogging. But now you have to post on like TEN places rather than just a blog. A lot of content creation is repurposing a long form blog post. 

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(25:28) To differentiate yourself from AI create more “First Party Data” where you’re doing surveys or gathering data and sharing that as a first source. A byproduct of that is then sharing that data across all social networks. 

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(26:52) Do agency customers come to you asking for social content as well as SEO? 

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(28:29) How the hell do you track where customers come from? It’s so hard now with privacy settings, that it’s seemingly impossible outside of asking people how they found you. 

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(29:34) GA4 stinks now, Plausible Analytics is a lot easier to use.

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(31:07) Half the time people don’t know how they found me first, because they’ll see me on different platforms several times before it even registers. It’s very difficult to find out which channel people find you from first (unless one network vastly outweighs another for you).

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(33:50) I post my short videos on LinkedIn as well, and it’s always surprising how many people in my friend network see them. 

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(34:44) LinkedIn vs X is different when it comes to hiring. LinkedIn is very sanitized, and X is hardcore, so it creates completely different vibes.

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(36:32) I miss longform blogging. Now most content is micro-content. However I’m seeing a shift back to longform. It’s much harder to make a long blog post, but it has many big benefits. 

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(38:59) Top of Feed vs Top of Search. With Top of Feed the downside is you have to post A LOT. 

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(40:09) A long form blog post is like a “house” for your content, and you can keep expanding or update it. 

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(40:35) “Need to Update Content” has increased in it’s frequency. Like with AI the news is so fast it might be updated by the month or week. It used to be “Best Tips for 2026” now it’s “Best Tips of September 5th, 2026”

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(43:17) The biggest/longest article used to rank, now the top searches are far more concise (or “efficient”) articles. The length depends on the type of search people do.

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(45:05) What’s the deal with AI? Ross’ ideas on using AI and how they’re using it at his SEO agency. They use it for first draft editing, they use it to interpret large datasets. They don’t use it for spinning out full articles. 

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(47:33) Can I just use ChatGPT to spin up 50,000 articles and rank really well? 

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(48:49) As a person who runs a writing company, I see a lot of AI writing wins and fails. It’s being used for DIFFERENT things than we expected. Depending on the content, the connection to it being written (or mostly composed) by a human is stronger than expected. 

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(51:28) AI is helping make content that wasn’t possible (or not worth it), like our podcast show notes have custom images for each note…this would’ve been incredibly time consuming and not worth it before, but with AI it’s feasible. 

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(53:38) A guy in our Office Hours tests “evilness” of any companies privacy policy using AI. So many interesting use cases coming out. 

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(55:15) In the 50’s they thought the killer app for computers was storing recipes. Turns out there’s soooo much more than that. Similarly, we think there’s cool AI use cases now, but there will be so many more cool uses we can’t think of now. 

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(56:19) The biggest part of blogging is not writing, it’s researching. With AI you can do what used to take a full research team to do. 

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(57:46) The sauna research example, and you can really dig into the data much more than ten blue links.

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(59:10) What are the toolsets you use now at your agency in 2024/2025? Grammarly for AI editing. Key Search for keyword difficulty. Claude for AI writing. 

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(1:00:27) When we moved from KK to CC there was an 8 month gap where we lost all traffic, and we noticed very little happened. Unless the traffic was specific and targeted it was useless.

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(1:03:05) Ross thinks Copywriting Course lost some of its fun when it changed the name, but the personal brand is strong and growing. There’s something about having either a name personal brand or vague name so you don’t put yourself in a box. Like “Siege Media” started out purely doing SEO, but now does so much more including consulting, and the name doesn’t box them in. 

This is an awesome way to display who an agency has worked with in the past. 

Greg Isenberg at Late Checkout told me that listing this info out in this chart results in 10x to 20x the conversions from their previous page!

In my opinion this is the order which a sales page should be grown:

The Copy: The basic starting building block of any sales page. First write out and organize your thoughts. 

The Imagery: Add images, graphs, or use cases of the product in action. It's often easier to show than tell.

The Proof: Got testimonials, past results, or examples of the product working and making life better? Show em!

The Layout: Organize all of the above information into the best flow.

The Design: Make it easy to read, yet match your vibe. If a quirky brand, have quirky design. If a serious bank, have professional design.

Anytime a post or video goes viral, you can count on this happening in the comments 😂

I went to lunch with a group of buddies, one friend orders a salad, when it arrives he pulls out a FULL SIZED BOTTLE OF olive oil he brought from home 😂

I've seen people bring small hot sauces and stuff, but a FULL SIZED BOTTLE....that's a new one 🤣

Technically when you sell someone an online course you’ve just given them a massive assignment. 

You’ve added work/time instead of removed work/time:

I know this because I own a company called "Copywriting COURSE."

Over the years we've morphed what was once just a self-paced course into:
• 1/3rd course.
• 1/3rd live weekly help.
• 1/3rd community forum for re-writing copy (average response time ~4 hours).

So it's partially a course, but much of the real value is REMOVING work and REMOVING decisions and REMOVING mistakes from people...which makes it far more valuable.

I think you'll see many other course creators make this move as well.

I don't normally like pre-packaged drinks but these are super good! From what I can tell they are also decently healthy for a packaged drink.

- No added sugar 
- 42g of protein (that’s a lot)! 
- Low calorie: 230 calories (there's also a different version with only 150 calories and 25g of protein):

I drink probably 1 of these a day. 

It's nice because it tastes amazing, doesn't make my stomach funky, and keeps me full because of all the protein.