Heads In Beds Show - Google Rebrands Bard To Gemini: Here Is What Google Is Planning

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk all about Gemini - the new version Google's AI that's rolling out to their products. How does it impact the VR industry? Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right. Hello there, Paul. How's it going? Another fantastic day here. I think we're going to have a fun episode today. I'm excited about

what we're going to talk about. And anyway, we're still in the sports break, a sports abyss. Not quite the summer sports abyss, but it just feels like- Comes back tonight, right? NBA comes back. With NBA coming back tonight, it just feels- College basketball's been great this week, but I need that punch. I need that juice. No, I don't. Yeah. It just is what it is.

When you grow up in Massachusetts, what are you going to root for? There's no college basketball team. I can cross the lines into Connecticut, but that just feels gross to me. I just can't do that. I'm not going to root for UConn. I don't think like Boston College.

So Boston College would have been maybe when you were growing up, had Troy Bell. That was a Minnesota kid. I don't know. No, that doesn't make it up. No, I was going to say, and that was maybe you were maybe a Sweet 16 team at that point out in that area.

So I would agree. Just not our thing. Just not our thing. The inequity of Minnesota sports just makes it so you've got to root for college teams because that's what we got. So yeah, I think that it is our prototype. I'm not against it. I like watching the tournament and stuff like that.

The underdog stories. I think those things are fun. I just, I think it's, we talked about golf before. There's people who watch the Mexican Open this week and they love this sport and they just watch anything. And there's people that watch the Masters and that's fine. Like you don't have to enjoy the Mexico Open to enjoy the Masters. Like those are two independent activities, right?

Like I think you'd enjoy the tournament without watching any regular season games. I think that's the fun part about college basketball. I'm not going to lie. I 100% checked to see what Charlie Woods' score was in his pre-qualifier score. He had a 12 on par four, just like me. Hey, I feel like I can play like Charlie Woods. Hey, that's going to be the win for the day. Yeah, this is way off topic.

But I think with Charlie, it's one of those things where it's like, when I think it'd be really challenging to be successful when dad's a billionaire. I think there's an inherent grinding nature to the game that just get to get out there and practice all the time. And it's one of those weird situations where I think he wants to be good. But is he going to go till the right hand is covered in blood like his dad did? Like, I just don't think that's gonna be the case. So I hope I'm not speaking negatively on it. I'm not i hope your career and stuff like that but i don't

know it's just tricky it's hard it's hard it's a hard it's an impossible game you know what i mean but at 15 i don't know i would shoot that in junior tournament too i played better later on but certainly there wasn't 100 people following me in cameras and articles on pga tour.com and stuff like that which doesn't help the situation needless to say no he's a kid i would say the twitter handle was literally following him on his first come on when we're actually reporting that as news first of all we another time another topic for us to dive into another time way off topic but it's all good because today we're doing a fun topic which is gemini so gemini we did a chat TPT versus Bard episode a while ago.

And I think I said in that recording that Bard was a terrible name, if memory serves correctly, which it was. So Google changed their mind. So Gemini is now what was previously Bard. This is Google's kind of chat AI interface. You can make messages into it. It gives you back text responses. We had a long interlude before I hit record today because we're playing with it and we were talking a little bit about the functions. We were doing both personal fun hobby stuff. And then, of course, we were doing things back into the vacation rental industry. And we saw some interesting things. So maybe you could, for the listener, break down a little bit of Gemini, Google.

You've used it a little bit more than I have. So I think you have a little bit more context into it. I have been using ChatGPT a little bit more. But I've noticed some differences between the two. What's your take on these tools as we stand today recording February 24 compared to last time we talked about this? Yeah, I think, and it does, it goes back to the original, the original release video. I can remember Sundar had gone through, did about a six minute video, really showing how it was, I think, trying to demonstrate how it was different from chat GPT there a little bit. And a lot of it focused at that point on he was manipulating an image and it was able to really read and react and do things off of that.

So I think that that first off, Google just put more of a focus on image and video and stuff like that and being able to read and understand and interpret that outside of just the text space. just the tech space. I think it may be, again, large language models have certainly worked all right on the chat GPT side, but I think they built in more than just that. I do notice that most of it, most of the prompts that they just, again, playing with it on my phone and doing stuff like that, most of the prompts were to generate images, were to do some of these things. And considering what Google has tried to do in like the Google Merchant Center in Google Ads and being able to auto-generate and use AI to generate some of those images, it's not surprising that they expand the chasm there a little bit to bring that into the Gemini side of things.

Generally speaking, I think the results are similar to a chat GPT on the overall tech side of things. I think there's many more references back to the search engine. I think that there is some reliance on what a typical search page would look like and linking out to specific areas there. And we'll talk about that in some of the results that we've seen. But is it ultimately going to replace the search engine itself? Not today.

But you can see how they're trying to take a little bit of what we saw in the generative search experiments and experience it and that type of thing, building it in here a little bit. We're probably not, who knows how far away we are from seeing what's really going to happen on the Google side of things, but your initial interpretations, how does it compare to chat GPT? What have you found to be helpful here as we're doing these quick searches? Yeah, I think obviously the one obvious benefit that I see so far is that it can access information that's more live and it's the responses. So I gave an example, what are the best vacation rental companies in area?

And it was an area where we have a client and I was happy enough to see that the first result was the client. So I'm like, oh, Gemini, like we got it. You know what I mean? We're now a Gemini SEO agency. I'm joking about that. Don't, I'm just joking. I'm not, oh, Gemini, like we got it. You know what I mean? We're now a Gemini SEO agency. I'm joking about that. Don't, I'm just joking. I'm not serious about that.

But obviously this brand, this website that I'm talking about does rank well in Google organically, which of course is where they're getting that data from. But so it's a little more multimodal. Like you said, you do a request. If you do that in chat GPT, they might say, number one, they might have old data. The data might be six months old, a year old. Like, you don't know without the web browsing plugin on TrackGPT, it's always a little bit problematic there.

With this one, it feels like a little bit more interactive. There's like a link. What was funny was that it was the wrong link. We mentioned that before we hit record. So they mentioned the name of the company and then they show a link to hotels.com and a small section of inventory they have on hotels.com, not the website of the actual property manager. So again, imagine you did a search,

what are the best vacation management companies in Myrtle Beach, and it was listing a link to hotels.com because a property manager happened to have 10 listings in a given area on hotels.com on a page there. So that was really weird. But I will say the graphics and stuff like that, there's a little thumbnail preview image that looks nice. This is more pleasing to the eye, and it mimics obviously like a Google search results page to your point a lot more than chat GBT, which is pretty much always just text unless you do a specific prompt or request for an image. And even then it's using Dolly and it's making an image, an AI image, so-called, whereas these are like actual images of the destination, like a little thumbnail. And then I'm clicking on it. I'm going to the actual website of some of these other property managers that it mentions.

So that's interesting. I share your kind of initial reaction there of this feels like something where it's going to be somewhere in the middle. This isn't Ted Blue links, obviously, like the traditional regular Google organic search results, but nor is it chat GPT where it's like, like a closed garden where everything's staying in chat GPT, it feels a little bit more in the middle. Hey, here's the link out, click on it, I click on it opens in a new tab, and I go there, which feels a little bit more how I feel like the stuff will actually go down the road. And obviously, open AI could do the same thing. There's nothing preventing them from doing the same thing and offering links out. And I know they do in some cases,

but most content and queries that I use chat GPD for, I don't ask for links or external information because I know it doesn't have the same index of information that Google does. So I think we said this before too, it'd be very foolish and dumb in my mind to write off Google in this respect, even if open AI is ahead of them right now, because they have this indexing of information that's obviously so world class, and no one has the more up to date info. Again, you could ask it what was the score of the game last night and Gemini has that information already because they just crawl the web and they know what's going on because it's all based on Google. I did a fun one after by the way of asking who's the best vacation rental marketing agency. And they don't make specific recommendations. They said, I say they Gemini, I don't know what the word is

there assigning a human element to it. But they said, consider the following options. They gave you a bunch of questions to ask about your budget, your needs, your target audience, what are the location of your company, they actually do reference the fact that you should go on online directories and review platforms like clutch, which is like a directory for for agencies or reach out to industry publications and conferences for example the vacation rental management association conference vrma so again it has a little bit more accuracy if i do that same search in chat dbt or same i don't know what the term is query in chat dbt i don't know if i'm going to see the same kind of input maybe i'll do that as you go through your process they're also very annoying i get logged out of chat dbt all the time. Whereas when I went to Gemini, it logged me right in. Whereas yeah,

it seems like I get it's it's chat GPT is like behind this kind of like login paywall type thing because I do pay for like the premium version of it. Whereas Gemini was just like loaded up instantly ready to go, which I thought was a fun thing to do. The last thing I'll say as you go through your kind of thought process using it for a little while now, the speed of the actual text printing onto the page this sounds small but it's really not when you're looking for an answer to a question i would argue is significantly faster than open ai and that's with by the way i'm paying for it so it's not like i'm using like the slow gpt 3.5 this is gpt 4 the latest version as far as i can tell and when i did that same query in open ai versus gemini it was significantly faster in Gemini, like probably half the time, maybe that whole answer printed in two and a half seconds on chat GPT, it can take

anywhere from five or six seconds, because it's like printing each word one by one when it's answering you. So those are some of my early reactions. What do you see that kind of relates to this? That's I think, going back to the incorrect URL, that's something we saw pretty consistently. And then incorrect, maybe, I don't know, doing a little bit of work there. But we've seen it where the results. No, it's either you're going to the Google business listing. They're going to click. From that local pack, you're never getting directly to the websites on that first interaction.

It's going to be you're going to go to a new tab is what it's usually been with just the Google business listing. And then you can get to the opportunity of actually clicking and clicking over to the website. So that, and it is, and we've also seen it where directory sites for Gatlinburg searches, we see smokymountain.com. So David and Gotti's really happy, but the rest of us are just like, whoa, what is happening? Let's get that direct traffic coming back to us. I'll stay out of that one. I was going to say, there we go. But that's something that I think that is not unique to what we've seen now. Now, I don't know if that's going to, again, if the ranking factors that we think we know, that we might know are going to point in that direction.

I actually did just how could I get in contact with, in this case, Beach Ball Properties in Orange Beach, Alabama. And in that case, the result that they gave me wasn't the Google business listing. It was call them on their local number, which I assume that's the number on their GMB. Send them an email at reservations at beachballproperties.com. Visit their website at here and do a contact form, follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, send them a direct message, visit their office located here, and then subscribe to newsletter, blah, blah, blah. But actually taking them in every result back to the actual website there. So that's something that I don't know how often

that question would happen, but that's a pretty good rundown and not too Google-y is the best way to put it. Not an ad section, not the Google business listing. That's really getting to the point of how do I reach out? They answered the question. How do I contact? And they did a pretty darn good job of that. Let's go in that direction when it comes to properties. So obviously these are like more general questions. Like a guest may search broadly for who's the best company and then click on a link and that's fine. But you did a search that you actually got some interesting results on.

Mine didn't quite work the same way. So tell me the search you did with regards to like dates and rates and looking for that stuff and what kind of results came back from Gemini in that query. Yeah. So admittedly, I took a slightly different market. I wouldn't say it's a non-traditional market. It's a good market. It's a solid market there, but it's a Midwest market. So take that for what it is. Give me five vacation rentals that I can book in Traverse City, Michigan tomorrow. So the first thing that it did was it started the the animation on the gemini logo whatever it was and it pulled up google hotels right off the bat which again that's going we're plugging right into the to the aggregator there to the meta search and at that point it gave me the little

prompt of gemini doesn't always get it right be sure to check the following hotel details so we know we're already going to go into the hotel side. Vacation rentals in Traverse City, Michigan. In this case, we're today or this tomorrow, February 23rd through 24th to adults. I cannot confirm availabilities yet, but here are some vacation rentals in Traverse City, Michigan that you might like. Because we're plugged into Google Hotels on those results, what did we get? Tamarack Lodge, Grand Beach Resort Hotel Indigo, Bayshore Resort, Cherry Tree Inn and Suites. Now, yeah, I'll give you that Bayshore does have some cabins. I remember working with them over there, but these are hotels. So we're getting the meta search results for Google Hotels. Now, over time, is it going to be able to learn and understand that it wants to

switch over to the vacation rentals? Now, if I did the search for Google travel, would I even get vacation rentals in Traverse City? That's another question to ask. But I can see where you can start to see where if it's smart enough to actually plug us into Google Hotels versus Google vacation rentals, if Google wants to go down the experiences, Google Experiences there and really trying to go something like that. But yeah, and then they actually took us, any of the clicks, these are links out

to their actual Google Hotel profiles where you can check the dates and actually take the bookings right there. To answer your question, yes, Vacation Rentals do come up in the block. Do they? Okay. So yeah. So here was my query because I didn't get the same type of, I would argue that you got

something adjacent to what you were looking for, right? Your query to Jeb and I was about vacation rentals. They're spitting back hotels because they find that data easier or more straightforward to digest today. Again, we could do a whole episode on Google vacation rentals and the schema.org thing. We did go back and listen to a few, three, four episodes back when we talked about that. So obviously they're trying to figure out how can we take this and google is admitting like this is a messy world of vacation rentals and format the data in a way that we can understand and crawl

and index and store and then get back to the user in a more straightforward way by the way a lot of people try to be like oh this is going to kill airbnb and ots i that's i don't think that's at all if anything i could see airbnb ingesting this data and giving it to Google in the cleanest format possible because they have everything. They have the inventory, right? And it'll be easy for them to say, hey, here's 25 listings that are available during these days because we know the calendars and we have all that information. So anyways, back to my query.

And Gemini, I said, show me vacation rentals I can book in North Myrtle Beach for this weekend. Now, keep in mind, I'm based in North Myrtle Beach. Here was the response from Gemini. Unfortunately, it's currently Thursday. And this weekend refers to Friday through Sunday. Since today's Thursday, there wouldn't be enough time to make it

and book a rental by Friday. Again, keep in mind, I live here, so I could make any rental by Friday. I could make any rental within about 10 minutes. However, if you're playing a future ship, ask me, oh, sorry, here's a few questions you can tell me to narrow down your search. What are your dates of travel?

How many people are you traveling with? What is your budget? What type of rental are you interested in? And the examples they give are condo, house, is it oceanfront or not, et cetera. What amenities are important to you? Pool, hot tub, fitness center, and so on. I'm going to do a response now and see the difference between the two and see what the refinement is.

But anyways, what I did on the follow-up query for this example is I said, oh, okay, this weekend seemed to throw you for a loop, Gemini. What about June 4th, which is my birthday? Many months away from this recording as we're doing it. They gave me a link to booking.com. They show an individual kind of property detail page. They gave me a link to Seascape Vacation Home. So I'm actually not familiar with them, being honest. Vrbo, Elliott Beach Rentals, large local competitor of a client of mine, ElliottBeachRentals.com, again, homepage. And then they give some feedback at the end.

Make sure you book early. June's very busy in North Myrtle Beach. Read reviews, compare prices, and so on and so forth. So if I fill out the form as Gemini wanted me to, what are my dates? How many people? Budget? Type of rental and amenities? I'm curious if they actually get better recommendations. And I'm picking an area that I know well, just so I can judge the quality of it. But I could see, to jump ahead a second or two here, I could see how this is going to

be a little bit more appealing of an interface for a lot of people, right? Instead of going in like clicking in dates and stuff like that and being very specific about this is what I want. This feels a little bit more conversational. This feels a little bit more like how we might ask a friend or if we had an executive assistant book a vacation rental for us, we would say something like this. Hey, I'm going on this day with this time. Hey, I want to make sure we have views of the water. That's important to me, whatever. The only thing they didn't say, oh, they did have a budget in here. I wonder this is where things might fall apart a little bit. How do they know what the rate actually is?

I think they don't without going in or doing specific date searches. Of course, we live in a world of dynamic pricing. So is Google and Gemini going to get to the point where they can go into a website, enter in dates, scrape out the output from that, or are they going to have access into a PMS system down the road where they could actually scrape out that data and give it back to you that feels like it's

a long ways away from my perspective i could be wrong but that's my sense of it at this moment what's your sense so i just that is i just like i kept doing the searches now now because i did want to see we're talking about airbnb we hadn't i hadn't done that search yet so find me five airbnbs in san diego tomorrow. Google doesn't always get it right. Be sure to check the following hotel details. This time it was just hotels in San Diego. And the response was, I'm sorry, I cannot search for Airbnbs yet. But here are some hotels in San Diego you might like. When I said five Airbnbs, which is how people would search it, I would say right now, they'd said that it couldn't find it.

But if I said five Airbnb rentals, it did give me results going back to Airbnb results on the actual Airbnb.com. So again, it seems like it's smart-ish, smart adjacent. It has some idea. But I think as we run into just on the general marketing side of things, what do we call everything? What do people call these rentals?

And this is going to be the search more than likely that most people are going to do until we really have it ingrained in them or however we have to say it, pounded in their heads. Short-term rentals, vacation rentals. And again, if this is what Gemini knows, or this is what the search engine or BARD or not BARD anymore with Gemini or what ChatGPT knows, how are you going to have to structure it? Is that going to be part of that vacation rental? Or is it better to have the structured schema in there? We said this is going to be a fun episode. Yeah. It's a good question because there's so many limitations i think that we know about because we've been so deep in the weeds for so long to google getting this information whether it's through the vacation rental block is really about giving i would say property metadata bedroom bathroom size location amenities etc it's really not getting into the

weeds of rates and dates which is what you always say which i think is such a perfect example of that's when the rubber meets the road that's when i'm ready to book is when i'm putting in dates and i'm getting rates back and i'm making a mechanical decision a strategic decision at this point i'm going to book place a place b place c and so on and so forth that feels a long way off at this moment in time because yeah how in the world do you integrate it and this would be an interesting question is the tool useful if five percent of people integrate into the system so let's say okay we're going to support this with track owner res. And hostily, I'm just making up three examples, right?

It's like, okay, yeah, but you're going to leave out Escapia and you're going to leave out Streamline or you're going to live res, whatever you get the point. Again, I'm just giving random examples, but it's, that's going to be a situation where the web index is actually much better because Google can index any webpage, right? What is Google's actual mission statement? Organize the world's information, make it universally accessible with rates and and dates, that's going to be, again, a heck of a task. And you could argue they're not fully there with hotels yet because a lot of hotels won't give them that level of access. Running hotel ads is, I would argue, solid and profitable and we have

clients that do it and it's a good idea, but not every hotel is running hotel price ads, right? Not every hotel is using OTAs in the same way. They might limit their reach and distribution on OTAs. They might use OTAs sparingly. They might not use OTAs at the same way, they might limit their reach and distribution on OTAs. They might use OTAs sparingly. They might not use OTAs at all. There's large luxury hotels that don't use any OTAs whatsoever. They have enough demands to satisfy their booking requirements without that. Without it being comprehensive, does Google even go down that path? Or did they stick more with these answers of, yeah, here's some things to consider and here's a bunch of links, which is, are we just layering a chat interface on top of what was previously just a list of blue links?

And is that a more, I guess, friendly interface for people like human beings to use Google in that way? Maybe, I don't know. It's just, it feels different to me. I don't know if it's automatically better or worse. It feels worse to me because there's, even though it's faster than chat GPT, it's still slower than like just doing an organic search and clicking on the results. But maybe people need guidance.

Maybe people are asking, looking for, Hey, I don't actually know if I can trust this company. Is there any information, more actually know if I can trust this company. Is there any information, more information you can tell me about this company to see if it's legit? My wife's done that before. Clicked on a Facebook ad and sent me the URL and go, does this company look legit to you? And sometimes I can't tell if I'm being honest. I like, this is going to sound weird.

I put them in like Ahrefs and I'm like, hey, has this company been around for a while? Do they have traffic? Because if so, that might indicate it's more legit in my company. She got scammed one time by this site. She clicked on a Facebook ad and it was like, oh yeah, I'm going to sell you this thing. I forget what she was looking for, something for the kids. And it was like not a real site. It was like a fake e-commerce site. So anyways, that same thing could happen in vacation rentals for sure. If we just give Google a feed of data and just trust Google is going to be the intermediary, it's easy to fool data with a

feed of information, right? The real where the rubber meets the road again is like putting in rates, putting in dates, going to a checkout page, and most importantly, putting a credit card in there and saying, all right, I'm going to go ahead and book with this property manager or book on this OTA platform. So that feels maybe the beginning of something. But to your point, Paul, to bring it back to you, it looks like what Google is biasing towards is, hey, no more hotels. And it's like, yeah, but I don't really want a hotel. I want a vacation rental. And it seems like they just aren't there yet, understand in that context. And I think it will be a ways of time before they could ingest enough vacation rental schema.org data or enough vacation rental properties to make their search better than

either going to an OTA, if I'm being honest, or going and looking on direct booking websites to find inventory. Yeah, that's one number that I'm surprised and maybe it is out there that we just I've seen it or something, but you would think that they would be hyping up the number of vacation rentals they have in those results. Obviously, it is probably just third party connections and direct connects and stuff like that. I would have to think the number of people who are actually using Hotel Center and loading it in and running ads through there. Dozens? Maybe we're up to 100 in the set. That seems like a lot. Maybe we're up to 100 in the set.

That seems like a lot. Just again, depending on how many professional property managers you think are in the space, that's still like a third of a percent or something. It's a very small number of actually people who have opted in to have Google be another channel in that more direct booking path. So I think for better or worse, when hotels got popped on, because there were so many users of those, so many installs of those PMSs, it was easy. Flip the switch, you're turning on 50,000 units there in a very short order. So I think that's, and that's also why I don't think Airbnb is really at risk here because we don't see

Google as this be allall, end-all of a place to find the right vacation, or find vacation rentals, or you're not going to book through there more often than not. You're going to have to go to that third-party site. So until we have that more universal, yeah, I think we're going to, it is, they're going to struggle to find and structure the data

in a way that makes sense as we would see it, I guess, and perceive it. Maybe it's too simple. I don't know, but yeah. I think it's one of those things where ultimately like the user is going to drive the direction here. People take to this tool and use it all the time, and then they're going to expect the results to keep getting better. And Google will allocate resources accordingly. But as I look at our clients

results here in 2024, compared to 2023, year over year data, I don't see this massive loss in organic search usage, right? There's clients we have that are up and down, not everyone's up, but we have lots of clients that are getting significantly more traffic this year than last year. Not because the market's up, by the way, but because they've done SEO work, and they're now ranking better. There's still obviously plenty of clicks out there on the organic search results. If that hasn't been said explicitly enough yet, at this point, then that should be said now, that is still where the bulk of the results are going to come from. And before you hit record, Paul, maybe this is the direction I was going to go. And we were talking about media, this idea that media is just a

channel. SEO is just a channel, right? Doing an Airbnb is just a channel, everything is just a channel, every form of, I can get more bookings here, I can get more traffic here. I can get attention on social media, et cetera. It's just a channel. And it's your job as a vacational manager to figure out what channel works best for you. It's not a promise or a guarantee that this particular channel, just because it's right for this company, it doesn't mean that it's going to be the most optimal channel for you. And it also doesn't mean that it's not going to work. Every channel can work. If you pump enough volume into it, if you put enough effort into it, there's someone out there searching today, probably for vacation rentals, who's going

to book, quote unquote, book through Gemini by doing, you're clicking on a link and then going to a website and making reservation. But is that going to be enough to sustain you today? Of course not, right? Not at this moment in time. If you're a 20 unit property manager in Florida, right, that's not going to be the case. So I think the best way to think about this is like, where should this fit into my overall channel approach?

Is this something that's going to, I should be aware of it at this moment in time. I don't see the use case for it connecting to a website and making that direct reservation today. To me, this feels like an extension of do great SEO work and Google will find you in the Gemini index, just like they find you in the web index. And I say that not just, I was joking earlier when I said, I looked for a destination and said, who's the best vacation company in this market. And one of our clients came up first. But as I look at other markets that we don't have any clients in, it's giving me local results. It's actually not tending to mention OTA platforms. It's actually mentioning local businesses. So this could be returned to a more beneficial

platform for a lot of vacation managers. It doesn't have to be a bad thing where it's only pushing people out to OTA platforms unless they master the data feed. Then it's a different story. OTA platforms unless they master the data feed, then it's a different story. And I think you captured it perfectly there in the fact that we hope that the work you do on the SEO side carries over here. There's no guarantee. That's the other side of this coin here is that, yeah, I would hope that because Gemini feels relative to the search engine, there's some back and forth there, it seems like, that it would be rewarding of the same things that we get rewarded for on just general best practices in SEO.

That, I guess, that's where I'm maybe waiting for the rubber to hit the road there of, at some point, do you optimize for it? Because it is. I don't think anybody should optimize for it right now to know about it and to think about it and maybe start to comprehend how people would use it to find you and search for you i think that's like trying to find those user paths of how people would enter prompt and go from there but no i it is do we still have to focus on the things that we know are going to move the needle and that your best practices and SEO are going to do that and then some. So yeah, no, I agree there a hundred percent. That's our 30 minutes breakdown of Gemini where it

stands today. I think the best thing for us to do, Paul, is just to keep coming back to these AI platforms, how they work, what's going on, because things do change rapidly. And certainly the tooling and some of the video stuff that OpenAI put out is incredible. Again, I look at the demos and I'm really impressed. And then the next question, I'm just a very practical person person is always, how are we going to use this? I see a path, but I don't know if it's quite there yet. I listened to this on the all in podcast, which Brooke turned me on to actually, and I don't listen to every episode, but this, there was a good segment from Saks on there. And he was talking about the problem with some of these AI tools when it comes to like actually doing creative work in them is that there's no editing and refining of the

output. So let's say you put in a prompt and it's show me a family having a good time on the beach. And I'm going to use this in a video ad that I put on Facebook. Just give it as a narrow example. And then you go, oh yeah, that Skywheel is in the wrong place. Move it over here. And then you actually regenerate that prompt and you get a totally different output, right? It doesn't remember what it did 20 seconds prior when it was generating an image or it

was generating video or something like that. It just makes something brand new and there's no way to like refine and edit. It also blows my mind when you do any sort of image generation and open AI, I'm assuming Gemini is the same way. The text is never spelled correctly. Like it looks like words, but it's not words. It'll be like, it almost looks like a different alphabet that's not of this planet. So again, how could you ever put out a piece of creative like on Facebook or Instagram or something like that? And it was, Hey, take this image of one of my vacation properties and put in the bottom of it special deal just slash rates. And then it puts out words that just aren't even correct. So again, all this will be fixed. All this will work better

a year from now than it does today. So anyways, back to my original point there. I think we just need to keep apprised of what's going on. We'll share with the listener kind of our thoughts on it. I think these tools are coming. As I look today, I don't know if I see the use case for a lot of the creative side of it. It's fun, but is it like really practical things that we're doing? I don't know. I don't see that kind of connecting the dots fully today. I think AI is much better at text generation. I think it's much better at responding to short, simple messages.

I'm talking to someone right now who's more on the vendor side, who's doing that, answering questions, using some of these AI tools trained on like data that you give it and stuff like that. To me, that makes a ton of sense. I think that's where we're going to go. And the output of that stuff is much more impressive. But as far as this taken away from your SEO results, or this taking away from your ability to drive direct bookings, if anything, I think it should help it in the short term. We'll see maybe a tiny fraction amount. It's I don't know if you remember this. Do you remember like the

voice search trend a while ago where everyone was like, voice search is going to take over? Yep. Not really. Does voice occasionally augment our searching behavior? Of course. Like sometimes I use voice in some context, but this idea that I just talk to my phone all day, not like in my phone, like on meetings, but talk to my phone all day. Hi, I'm doing this and help me with this, that sort of thing. Even though we have these so-called digital assistants, you know, Samsung's and Google's assistant and things like that. I don't know if the promise has really been fulfilled on there.

That was the original vision back in 2016, 17, 18, that timeframe. I don't really see that today. I would agree. That smart home trend is, it passed us by maybe a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is somewhere in the middle, right? I see how it's going to land and it's going to be this excellent assistant and stuff like

that. But where we are today, it's just, yeah, we'll keep you apprised. I think that's the, that's the finishing thought here. And one thing we're keeping you updated on tools and kind of our thoughts and what we see happening in the marketing world and what's going to benefit you. One thing that would benefit us, if you had a moment, is you go to your podcast app of choice, leave some five stars, no fancy AI tools necessary. Don't have to log into anything.

I guess you just log into an account like your iTunes account. iTunes and Spotify is where most of our listeners are. So if you're on one of those two platforms and you leave us a review, it's a double thumbs up. If you leave it on any other platform, it's still a double thumbs up because we appreciate reviews anywhere. But if you don't mind the backbreaking work of logging into iTunes or Spotify and leaving us a review, we greatly appreciate that. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Paul, for recording with me as always. We'll be back next week with another fun episode about marketing or AI or who knows what it is,

but it's going to tie back to the Heads and Beds Show charter of helping you put more heads in beds, get more bookings for your vacation rental business. So we thank you and we'll catch you on the next episode.