I lived my life prior to meeting Erin (my wife), believing that I wasn’t ever going to marry anyone.

This is a belief I had about my future going back multiple decades.

I never envisioned getting married.

Marriage sounded like something for other people.

It sounded boring,

and for me, it sounded like opening myself up to unnecessary financial risk.

I’ve always known, without a doubt in my mind, that I would be successful.

It’s in my DNA; I come from a long line of entrepreneurial spirit.

FOB go-getters that blazed a trail and made a name.

Men that built with their hands and expanded the communities in which they landed.

Men that made this country better.

It’s my nature to explore, discover why, and make it my own.

Bend the rules, the parameters and find successful outcomes my own way.

Marriage didn’t sound like something that enabled more freedom…

It sounded like something that boxed me in and created dependencies.

More people looking to me for support and structure.

(none of this was driven by the relationships that were formative for me. My parents and both sets of grandparents are/ were all happily married)

Marriage just wasn’t for me, until it was.

I met Erin, and everything changed; I knew pretty quickly that my life near-term and long-term would be better if we teamed up.

I knew life would be substantially better with her.

And so I underwent an evolution. From a man focused on myself to one focused on starting a family.

Now, as much as I went on about how I never fantasized about marriage… I was openly opposed in many ways to having kids.

Having kids seemed like something difficult to “afford.”

In this political and social climate, it also seemed like a risk for a number of external factors as well.

But, just as meeting, Erin changed me and morphed me into a man that was ready to start a journey together,

My viewpoint on expanding our family evolved as well. Her love and kindness, the home and life we built together, began to seem like a perfect place to raise a child.

Again, my long-held, set perspectives transformed due to new input and shifting external factors.

On my own, raising a child seemed unreasonable and too distant to comprehend.

With Erin, it seemed like an exciting (albeit daunting) journey to embark on.

FATHERHOOD

When Erin told me she was pregnant, I was surprised because I had an unfounded belief that we would need some time to conceive.

Based on others, I figured we would need to focus on getting pregnant.

But, that wasn’t the case for us.

This was the most welcomed and the most important information I’ve ever received.

The weight of those words hit me, and found a home.

My role transformed again.

My Journey took an abrupt turn.

As it had in the past but towards a more meaningful purpose.

Being a Dad has an impressive status to it from my perspective.

My Dad, Greg, is still my best friend, biggest support, and a guidepost in my life.

He’s literally saved my life. See a short explanation here:

He’s attentive and forged me into the man I am today.

I’m sure at some point I’ll go into more depth about him as a man and role model, but for now - suffice it to say I’ve got big shoes to fill.

So, now I’m a Dad.

I felt the weight of that role and a new purpose immediately.

My drive for building out financial security (disconnected from any single point of failure) and gaining the freedom that comes with it, skyrocketed to levels I haven’t felt due to ‘golden handcuffs’ in almost a decade.

I realized quickly that time with my family was most important to me.

If I’m to optimize for time with my family, I need to be in complete control of my schedule, and working at any F500 corp doesn’t necessarily allow for that, especially as a people manager.

So, I ventured out on another journey.

A journey to build - what I’m calling - a golden parachute.

A journey to take back my time so that I can be the Dad mine was for me.

Cheers to all of the Dad’s out there focused on building better lives and raising great people.

SEO Transformation

The SEO world is going through a generational shift. Something big is happening, and speculation about the impending doom or absolute shake-up on e-commerce is swirling as Industry talking heads pull the fire alarm.

Rightfully or naively, It’s happening.

(For the uninitiated Google SGE, and Bing’s integration with ChatGPT is driving this shift)

And it’s rapidly bleeding into the larger space to the point I’m answering questions about the approaching “end-times” due to the fear-mongering being slung by vendors and would-be problem solvers in the cold emails to executives.

But- here’s the deal. I want to walk through what some in the industry are saying/ have said.

I’m not here to hold people accountable, but it felt like some just wanted to be first to “call it” and so they are firing off birdshot perspectives rapidly.

An aside about me. I’m by no means a machine learning (ML) developer or Ai professional. I’m just an insatiably curious SEO that has been dabbling in ML and Natural Language Processing tasks/ projects since 2015 & then, more specifically, with OpenAI products since GPT-2 in 2019.

My focus has been on aggregating and consuming as much as I have time and an appetite for. But, generally, staying aware.

To the point, ChatGPT wasn’t really that intriguing to me when it launched since I didn’t have trouble accessing OpenAIs tools beforehand.

That being said. I’ve got a lot to learn. I’m focused on being a sponge, and I try not to succumb to the shiny object and hype that can spark within the industry but burn out and lose steam rather quickly.

For instance:

Google announcements of the past that were supposed to have a mind-bending impact:

• Mobile update (2015)

• Mobile Interstitials (2015)

• RankBrain (2014-15)

• HTTPs (2015)

• BERT (2019)

• Page Experience Update (2021)

It’s no denying that the above are all pretty beneficial for the end user/ provide value, but when they were announced reception of most of these was frantic. (not saying sites haven’t gone completely dormant since these all launched; I'm just calling attention to the industry's ability to light its hair on fire and run around screaming… as a common practice.)

Additionally, Google loves to build and destroy.

It loves to acquire and shut things down.

It really has no objection as an organization to launching and killing a product or deprecating it. Most recent example is Google Domains -

Check out https://killedbygoogle.com/ and go down memory lane.

I say all of this to highlight some aspects that I’ve noticed about the SEO industry and Google as an organization that will help to inform my perspective as I share more and how I approach the current scenario.

Now, let’s check in on the industry.

The Industries hot take:

Author of “Product-Led SEO” - Eli Schwartz, lit up SEO Twitter back in early May with this take:

Now I realize there is a psychological tactic at play here for engagement. Alarmism and polarization can increase the response from the crowd and, in turn, boost your engagement… but come on.

As an in-house SEO, I’m dealing with this type of hot-take from non-SEOs day-in-day-out.

Eli’s main points:

• Search Traffic (organic) will decline by 30-50%

• 1st position rankings will be equivalent to 10th position with Google’s SGE

• PPC/ Google Ads will see a massive decrease in clicks as Google gives up short-term revenue to maintain market share while it hunts for monetization capability

• Best practices will be even more of a moving target

Organizations that operate via organic through the value they bring to complex markets like technology and hardware have spoken out publicly - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-sge-break-internet

Some of Avram’s main points:

• Google’s SGE is a new search interface that takes and displays content without attribution, and the result could harm and degrade the open web and user experience at large.

• The SGE response tends to take up an entire screen.

• The “front and center” claim from Google refers to 3 link thumbnails that occasionally appear alongside the SGE response.

• These responses that SGE provides often plagiarise content.

• Google claims the links corroborate the SGE result and are not the source.

Below is a screenshot of a search I performed recently that mimics the aftermarket automotive customer journey.

Founder of Siege Media - Ross Hudgens, shares his perspective that SGE doesn’t appear to be “better” but duplicates and feels like B- work.

Longtime E-A-T evangelist Lily Ray cites some examples of plagiarism as well:

ML/SEO Data Scientist Britney Muller raises some concerns.

My Working & Evolving Perspective:

• Google has access to an obscene amount of data that is highly valuable for training these modules.

• Google has direct access to a giant group of willing QA/ Beta testers.

• Google’s vertical integration solving it’s compute needs with it’s custom TPUv4 (ASIC hardware) - built for this type of large-scale work.

• Google is the most commonly used search engine by far +93% world wide, device agnostic. ( https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share )

• We haven’t seen the search engine market shift the way people assumed it might happen. Bing hasn’t really turned GPT hype into market share, which tells us - Novelty… when people are searching on a search engine, they still use Google.

• The Search Engine + LLM use-case hasn’t really been proven out yet. We buckled two things together, and no one is quite sure what to make of it outside of “novelty.”

• Google still has to deal/answer to the US Gov if it decides to shatter the e-commerce landscape… resulting impact would be organizations collapsing + GDP loss. Overall destabilizing impact for the sake of market share doesn’t sound palatable - something would have to shift drastically (market share needle) for this to seem reasonable.

• This isn’t a “well, you shouldn’t have just built a giant horse farm when Ford got his first car off the line” It’s more like - “Everyone has a horse farm, and now the only feed company sells Brawndo… and I’m not sure Brawndo has what horses crave.”

Ultimately, no one knows what the future holds. From my perspective

It’s beyond clear; Google is still relevant.

People are still using Google search to enable transactions, and LLMs, regardless of how “cool,” have yet to change the face of the internet/e-commerce.

I’m not saying that they can’t/won’t;

I’m saying that an abrupt left turn has ramifications that will further destabilize an already teetering economy, and the “why” or the underlying use-case that implementing these LLMs solve for the customer is still unclear to me.

I’m unclear on the specific Search Engine + LLM setup & what we are trying to solve.

Why isn’t this a tool we explore and utilize as a stand-alone until we determine the beneficial use cases?

People were trained to use search engines by Google (for the most part). It seems most people are approaching these conversational ais in the same way, but they don’t really do what people expect.

Ultimately, if the current Google SGE product sticks, I think we’ll see a low-impact version deployed that shifts the presentation layer more than anything - less impact on underlying data or how sites “rank” - for now.

I’ll be sure to update my perspective and share more about this industry transition as it evolves.

Transformations are never easy.

We’re not finished yet. We’re not going anywhere.

Not if, but when.

Best,

Matt Caramenico

Cool Cars:

• Found a new YT channel that’s pumping out awesome Porsche 911 content regularly. Michael has a funny IG, and his YT with the Canyon runs and detailed vids on his collection are equally enjoyable.

• Check out this sweet 1973 911 Targa in Viper Green he’s started working on. Ultimately, this is what pulled me in.

• Something I’ve been keeping my eye on over the past week. This BAT 1987 Porsche 911 Carrera Coupe G50 is insane. I’m interested to see how high it goes.