Humans, Agents, and Authenticity: Rethinking Search and Sites in WordPress with Alex Moss

Speaker A Welcome to Within WordPress, the podcast about WordPress and all things around WordPress. With me today is Alex. Alex, welcome to the show.

Speaker B Thanks. Thanks for having me. It's. I've been, I've been watching, listening, whatever you do, but never been a guest on here. So thanks, thanks for having me on.

Speaker A Well, this is why we go to events, so I can pressure you into it. And at the event, Alex, for those who don't know who you are, please introduce yourself.

Speaker B Hi, I'm Alex Moss. I am from Manchester in the UK. I have been working in SEO and WordPress for a very long time. SEO more so been doing that since about 2000, 1999, something like that. I've been working with WordPress since about 2011 12. So I consider myself a late bloomer even though I've been in it for nearly 15 years. To me, I came in late and did discovered it going, how the hell did I not understand that there was a great CMS out there? So I have my own agency which I opened about a year after that and that still trades. It's just a small1, about 6 of us remote, but everyone's based in Manchester. And as well as that, I'm principal SEO at Yoast, so I dig in between product marketing and product innovation. So a lot of people inside Yoast have to deal with a lot of my ideas, some of which are terrible, but some of which I guess are

Speaker A okay and pass through, some of which are terrible. I want to hear them. What is, what is the worst idea that you came up with? And they were like, nah, we're not having it. But you pushed.

Speaker B I don't know. Usually it's something about UX where I say, can this be done? And then it turns out that there's a legal or regulatory issue that makes me not want to do that and can stop you from doing that. So it's all of those. I'm not, I'm not as not. I wouldn't say I'm not risk averse. It's just I don't even sometimes when I do product innovation, I don't think about the risk until later. That's a question down the line. You know, risk legal, reg, all of those things. I just think of something, then some poor schmo has to go away and see if it's actually legitimate, that can be done. So I don't envy that person. But yeah, lots of, lots of ideas. Idea machine gun. Some people call it idea diarrhea. You know, it's. It comes out, but it has to I also. I call myself 10% because only 1 out of 10 of my ideas are any good, but I need. I need to get the 9 out in order to get the 10th idea.

Speaker A I recognize that. I recognize that. I think it's also kind of a muscle. The. The more you let them out and discuss them, the better refined they are, whether that means it's a go or no go. But also, hey, that one gave me the idea for the next one. I think I recognize that. So.

Speaker B Exactly.

Speaker A So Yoast. You work at Yoast. I worked at Yoast as well. So I kind of.

Speaker B Not together, though. Not together.

Speaker A Not together. No, no, no, no. We didn't think that was safe. So most people know Yoast as the Yoast SEO plugin. You described your job as Principal SEO. What does that mean?

Speaker B And principality. I even had to look it up myself. It's more of a. Before IC was a term, it was kind of an IC thing. You're not necessarily a people manager, but you know the technical ins and outs of that particular skill set. So for me, I am one of. Well, there's Carolyn as well. She's my counterpart in the US and we both work together to make sure that everything's best practice, everything's kosher, anything that's getting deprecated or not looked at anymore on the side of search, we come in and we make sure that everything's up to date.

Speaker A So.

Speaker B And sound and built well. And as well as that, we think of new things based on what's around us and what's going on, as there is a lot going on around us. And it's actually quite hard to decide what to focus on, what not to focus on. I mean, again, you'll probably relate. I've wasted a week doing something which you think is going to get somewhere, and then at the end, you kick yourself for even spending a day on doing that thing. But again, it's like the ideas you have to do it. I think to me, openclaw is the example here. I wanted it to work so, so much, but I was finding that I was spending 10 times the amount of legwork to get things set up the way that they should just to. I could just do that thing. I mean, it's not. I don't see anyone who's come out and said, I installed OpenClaw, and three months later, I'm now living a different quality of life. Not one person can claim this yet. And until they do and give me an actual use case that isn't X saying there's Passive income and then the next twee tweets about crypto or something. I just. I'm skeptical. I'm a real big optimist, which is why I feel like I'm an early adopter of all of these things. I just want to see everything. Can it work? Can it work for me? Can I think like my wife who's on the creative angle of digital marketing, could that thing work for her? And a lot of these things are. Well, they kind of could, but do you really need them right now? Is that the actual solution right now? You don't need everything right now. Things are. Things are coming. I would say things are coming. And that's the exciting part. What are those things and how are they going to differ to today?

Speaker A There's a lot of excitement if you're daring enough to look at it that way. I think before we started recording I said one of the things I want to steer away from as much as possible is the doom and gloom mentality. I don't think that benefits anybody. I think it's much more. I think conversation should much more be about opportunities seen and looking at ways to better yourself in your craft and all that sort of stuff. I think that's a much more interesting approach to life in general. But we do live in interesting times with the advances of AI. I like your example of OpenClaw. Obviously I've installed it in an entirely no access to the Internet type of way, no access to my client stuff, no access to my personal stuff, nothing. Because I just want to understand what it does. And like you, I don't see the advantage. And I've. I've watched quite a few YouTube videos, read articles and I go, I get what it does, it's just not. I don't. I don't see how that's going to materially change my way of working.

Speaker B Well, I guess more so, I think it's the theory of it that's going to change. So without OpenClaw, there wouldn't be scheduled tasks or loops or would there? You know, inside Claw, for example. It's just. I think that would have happened anyway, but maybe openclaw accelerated people inside Anthropic's offices to do more quicker. And I think that's this race of getting stuff out fast that this year I think, not haphazard, but there's. I feel like there's a new service, a new app, a new thing to do, something coming out every day I go away, a week on holiday, I come. It's as though I've missed a year. It's. It's a lot. It takes you two days to catch up with the week. And in those two days something else has happened. So you've got to keep on catching up. But again, you've got to pick your battles. But I mean, I agree with you as well. I'm really optimistic about the future, the doom and gloom. I listen to all of it. I want to hear that point of view. I think the closest one, and I don't know who it was who talked about there would be 15 years of dystopia, but once that 15 years is through, there would be utopia to do with humanity. And I think it is the confusion. And it's probably similar to the way that the Internet came out. People were a. It's a phase, which isn't happening here. We understand that this is not a phase and it's something new. And so there's. Therefore there's not a lot of trust. And we need to get a lot of trust earned by humans in AI, otherwise we're going to keep thinking this is Skynet or the Matrix and that's our thought. We're paranoid that something clever in us is going to overpower us and use us for fuel or work or whatever. And I just don't think that's the way they think. That's the way we think that they think.

Speaker A Yeah, I think I agree with you. It's changing everything, but not necessarily in the way that it intended to change the thing. And we're learning as we're going. Just to reference openclaw, again, I'm not actively using it, but when Xai, was it this week or last week? It's one of those things, right? There's constant noise of new things being introduced, but for Grok, there is now Grok bot. And I look at that and I go, now hold on. This is something I feel like it's safer for me to use. It's also more versatile for me to use. And then I see other people come up with the first ideas of how. Because first, for those of you who don't know what GROK bought, it is essentially an automation, plus planning plus loops, plus, you know, understanding context of where you are, what you need to do. It can. It can do stuff on websites, interact with the web pages, fill out stuff and all that sort of stuff, but not much from a developer standpoint or a command line type, more like anybody could use it.

Speaker B And that's the way to go because we've been building stuff meant for us developers are building for developers and if everyone else, which is open from it, so be it. Yeah, which is open claw. But like you say, openclaw makes other people think differently and create something that's To a different audience. I mean, I know people aren't going to use Grokbot simply because of the connection to Elon Musk and people's political views or thoughts on him personally. And even then I think that's a loss, like maybe, maybe really good opportunity for that person.

Speaker A You know, anybody coming up with that moral high ground. I say, is there any social media or big tech company whose leader you fully align with? Because I have a list of a few and I'll, I'll give you stuff they're doing which you're not going to agree with. You don't agree with any, anything of anybody at that level or power. So I, I much look at it from a utility utilitarian. Is that, is that how you say it? Yeah, a point of view, like, what does it allow me to do without compromising me? I don't know. Buying into a system I don't fully agree with.

Speaker B Exactly, exactly. But people think there's bias in, in LLMs now. Right. So. And there is, you know, without. Yeah, there will be, based on the leanings towards what however it's been built and however it's been trained. So people may think that Grok as an LLM may have, you know, the political and personal opinions the same as Elon Musk, which I don't think is actually true anyway. I think it just gives a bit of sass, doesn't it, compared to all the other LLMs. So. But again, that's part of. I'd rather deal with sass than, hey, that's a great idea. You know, every single time. Not everything I've got is a great idea. I just told you that.

Speaker A No, no. I saw a benchmark not too long ago of Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and Grok. And Grok was the only one on the political spectrum. He was kind of in the middle.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A And the other ones were quite on the left side of things, for there was very standard questions to ask and the answers were just essentially giving you the political lay of the land of those tools. If, if I want to choose a tool to use, I want it to be as neutral as it can be. So yes, that sort of made me go like, okay, I like, I like hearing opposing views, I like understanding opposing views. I don't necessarily immediately agree with whatever that thing spews at me, but I'd like to be offered the option to think about it.

Speaker B Do you do that with your LLMs? Now where in my perfect world, I would have kind of. I don't know if it works like open routes, but where you have one central. You have one central session and it either chooses or it converses with each other with other LLMs. What I do now, sometimes I think of something in Claude. I get a certain way through and then I open up Gemini and I either give it the same question or I tell it to critique what Claude just said. I get the critique, I go back to Claude. So now I've created. And you can't really do that autonomously with things like openclaw yet. But it's like having a team and consensus, isn't it, between LLMs. So if one LLM may have one opinion, another LLM may have another opinion, they're closed off from each other. Isn't it nice to get the conversation between those two LLMs, not just two agents?

Speaker A I do it all the time and I think cursor kind of allows you to do it because there's an auto setting that it can go to whatever LLM makes most sense. I don't think we have the control yet to do exactly this, but you're right, I do that all the time because I want to hear the other side. I want to hear the angles. I don't get the same way. When I write an article, the end result of my draft goes into whichever LLM and I'll ask it, what am I missing? What's the logical fallacy? I'm jumping in, obviously grammar, because English is not my first nor my second language. I need checking there. And it retains my style, it retains my message, but it sometimes adds two or three paragraphs ago. Oh yeah, crap, that. That should have been there. Yeah, it's an aid. And then the output of that is then put into the other one because check, double check and check again is how I'm being raised so.

Speaker B Exactly. But I don't. Would normal people do that? Or is that just because of who we are and how we work and what we do and the way we think? That's the. That's why we're getting a third. A third perspective, third party perspective from another LLM.

Speaker A Yeah, I don't think most people do that.

Speaker B No. But it was also interesting because my parents, who are completely technically inept, right. They hate everything to do with technology. Both my parents now use Gemini daily and there's a couple of reasons I figured out for that. They're on Android. So Google's going to push their own products. Fair enough. They're already familiar with the Google landscape. It definitely gives you a tone of voice that's googly in all the feedback and it does do all the research that my parents just. They now think of the notion of doing your own research, which is what we've been doing all this time. Idiotic. So you're telling me that if I wanted to buy a car, I would have to spend hours and hours and hours looking at tens of websites going onto this forum, checking. Now it's all done for me. And I don't care about the trust element. I'm sure it's right. And if it's not and I want to double check, that's the point when I'll go and do my own research or I'll go into a car showroom or whatever. So yes, it's changing the way in which people do research in general, but again, there could be fear of the people. Just like a calculator. Is this like a worse version of the calculator where you know the answer, but the important parts, the working out in the middle, what happens to that working out now that these agents are there doing, doing the middle part for us?

Speaker A Yeah, there's a risk there. If, and I think this is, this goes back to the same principle. There's folks who are abandoning WordPress now because AI allows them to build sites. And there's tons of stuff why, tons of reasons why that's a great idea. But from my perspective, there's way more reasons why that's not a great idea unless you fully understand what you're working with, as in the output. And that means like literally everything in the output, not just the technical SEO side of things. So you have valid HTML doing the right things for SEO, all that sort of stuff, but also from accessibility, from link route and all that sort of stuff, all the stuff that you would normally have inside in CMS to guarantee quality of output. You're also siloing your clients into your output. Right. So there's no way the general client is going to add a little paragraph here, change a little this there. No, they're all dependent on you. And if that's your business model, I mean, more power to you, I guess it's just not my way of working. I think it's.

Speaker B No,

Speaker A I think it's interesting to see how people use AI and I think. So you come from an SEO perspective, meaning you understand Search Engine Optimization, but that acronym still assumes you understand how to search. So take the example of indeed my parents, when they're looking for something, they're just really low tech going for the thing they're searching for. And when I search, I do the exclusions, I want to focus and I filter more and all that sort of stuff. And we see the same behavior with AI, like, if you have a rudimentary level of looking at how do I retrieve the information I'm really looking for versus what the vast majority of people do. That's a big difference. How do you, on the Yoast side of things, how do you keep that in mind? How do you play with that incredibly wide variable?

Speaker B Well, it depends which is the famous SEO answer for everything. But it does depend on each business model. I mean, everyone should have their own ideal candidate profile Personas, which we have. We have five different ones, I think maybe six now. And then we just try and cater as much as possible to all of those ICPs and that's it. So when you were talking and you were saying like, you and your mum, different people, I'm like, all I was thinking of, yeah, but I've got to get both of you on board to get to my site and convert you, both of you. And how do I do that knowing that you're both very different? So in Yoast, your mum is of no interest to me. You are of interest to me. So I'm going to prioritize content and tone of voice and targeting generally to someone like you. And hopefully you would influence your mum to then look into it and they would get some other perspective and then purchase off the back of you. So the word of mouth is still there and the brand authority, but you're more of an authority than your mum in WordPress. So hearing you say Yoast is the best WordPress plugin out there, then it would have some authority and go further, you know, so just say that and then I'll be able to cap cut it at some point.

Speaker A Yeah, well, first of all, I'll have you know my mom is on WordPress, she has a blog. So you are. You should also treat her as a customer. But you're right, there is a. The word of mouth doesn't go away. We've already talked about AI from a few different perspectives, but I think one of the biggest tensions we currently have is the understanding that working with an AI of any sorts takes away a lot of the actions you would normally perform inside a search engine interface. First of all, is there any data on what the actual percentage of people who have moved to a LLM for their queries primarily versus what used to be on going to Google or Search Brave or Bing or whatever,

Speaker B bits and bobs. But by the time the data's out, there's already a shift happening. This is weird. I think literally since ChatGPT came out, I've been in talks where you can't even do year on year data. Next year I don't think the data and the visitors and the way it's shaped will be the same as this year, which isn't the same as last year. So it's very hard to compare this change. But there are more people, I think that everyone that you know somehow will have used in, you know, some form of LLM once. I'm talking about my parents using Gemini. So it is changing. And Google did say search is a function. All I know is there's a few stats that are coming into my head. One of them is that only 16% have opened an LLM ones and the rest of the 84% of the planet have never interacted with an LLM. Right. So we're already in that. Yeah. So it may be 1516 now, but it's not going to be 20 yet. So that's about adoption taking a while. When I was explaining the Internet took 10 years to get used to it, I think the technology is going faster than us and humans are still going to go as slow and we're still going to have to build trust. The other stats, I can't remember them exactly, but Kyle Risley who works at Shopify, he wrote a blog post only in the last week or two and it was all very positive from Shopify's point of view that there were different types of visitors coming to the website now. They were usually more, had more intent and there were higher value, but there was a lot more happening now within LLMs, I think. I don't know why 197% is popping in my head as the increase in LLM consumption. But the blog post, I'm sure at the bottom right now when you do the replay will be there. Yeah, I'm seeing just positive stuff and like you say in SEO, it's a bit threatening to some because search as a function is changing the 10 listed links in a SERP. I've not seen one in a while. I don't know about you, I'm not really. I'm in Google doing some stuff but it's usually not a first interaction with something or it's something super simp, you know, the weather. I'm not asking Claude what the weather is. I'm not wasting my tokens on that. And that's what Openclaw eventually did for me. I spent 10 hours setting it all up and it gave me a morning digest, including the weather, which by day five something went wrong and it couldn't give it me. And traffic, it's one of those things. But I think those are the positive things that we are changing. We're getting used to it faster than we were with the Internet. It'll force us a lot as devs to work faster to do and adapt to more things. But I think the future of websites, the future we con, the future of how we consume websites, purchase is all going to change just as, just as dramatically as the high street, you know, and the threat to the high street because of online and it took a while and the high street is still there because people still like that thing and it will still be there in 20 years, but it will shift again. Yeah, we're all going to be all about in. I think in real life experiences are going to be the most valuable thing. There was one more video I watched when someone said if you saw, if you showed a child now a video of Niagara Falls, would that child believe that Niagara Falls is real? Right. Just because you showed them a video. Right. And they won't know. The only way to confirm it isn't by going on the Internet because it could still not be. It's by seeing it with your own eyes. So things like travel, I think it's going to become hugely important, more important to us as humans, you know, in the future as things that are around us offline are going to maybe I feel like it's, you know, when you come out of a club, you've been in a club all night and then all of a sudden your ears are all ringing. I think it's kind of going to be like that, going more offline because we've been going offline offline. We came online, now the social media, it's at the top. And I'm, I'm hoping, my optimism in here is that the, the state of influencers and you know, TikTok will change for the better and that we may evolve away from doom scrolling. Maybe doom scrolling is going to be a term like cassette. I'm hoping that's going to be the case. And this is a weird, murky area that we can't see the light out of the tunnel, but I think there is going to be one. And that right now is maybe the worst of what we're seeing. Which is weird to say because I think people are saying this is the best of what we're see. I seen. We've seen nothing yet.

Speaker A Oh yeah, I'm. I'm with you 100%. I really like the stepping out of the club. First of all, anybody under 30 who doesn't know what that is, you.

Speaker B Because that's it.

Speaker A That's already a difference. When you go to a club, there's a lot of loud noise. And because you've been exposed to a lot of loud noise when you step outside after, you know, 4 o', clock, 5 o' clock in the morning, the absence of the noise makes your hair, ears, ring a little bit.

Speaker B It does. Maybe. I'll tell you what everyone has done. I'll tell you everyone has done. Woken up in the morning. If ever, if anyone has been woken up by someone just quickly opening the curtains.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B And then you have to get used to the light. I guess that's the vision version of what we're explaining here. It's stinging at the beginning, but eventually you get used to it and you get your vision or your hearing back.