On today’s show we are talking about the changing face of business. This is the first in a two part series that explores the connection between the online world and the offline world. We live in the offline world, even though it seems at time that we spend much of our time with a device in our hand.

I need to first start with a distinction between marketing and sales. On today’s show we are talking about marketing. On Monday’s show we are going to be talking about sales which is a different process.

10 years ago they would scrape 2 pages for every visitor they would send to your website. That’s a pretty good trade. You would share your content with Google and Bing and they would send you traffic in exchange. They would also advertise along side your organic links and would provide themselves with ad revenue as part of the implicit arrangement. That remained relatively constant over much of the past decade. The Google crawl rate has remained relatively consistent over that entire time period, up until 6 months ago.

We have seen it get harder to attract traffic over the past decade. It feels like it is about 3x harder and that in fact lines up with the data. Up until the end of 2024 Google was scraping 6 pages for every visitor it sent you. But in the past six months, Google which still represents about 58-60% of all search traffic is now scraping 18 pages for every visitor it sends you.

When you perform a search using AI, the AI tool gives you the link to its references at the end of each AI result. But how many people actually click on the little link icon. They don’t share an entire web address with a blue link, it’s an anonymous icon of two chain links. You don’t know where the link is going to take you unless you click on the link and almost nobody does. The ratio of content scraping to website visits has now risen to 1500 to 1. A decade ago we were at 2:1 then 6:1, then 18:1. Now we are at 1500 to 1.

Who is going to invest all of that time and effort to create content with a 1500 to 1 ratio?

-----------

**Real Estate Espresso Podcast:**
Spotify: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast](https://open.spotify.com/show/3GvtwRmTq4r3es8cbw8jW0?si=c75ea506a6694ef1)
iTunes: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-real-estate-espresso-podcast/id1340482613)
Website: [www.victorjm.com](http://www.victorjm.com)
LinkedIn: [Victor Menasce](http://www.linkedin.com/in/vmenasce)
YouTube: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast](http://www.youtube.com/@victorjmenasce6734)
Facebook: [www.facebook.com/realestateespresso](http://www.facebook.com/realestateespresso)
Email: [podcast@victorjm.com](mailto:podcast@victorjm.com)
**Y Street Capital:**
Website: [www.ystreetcapital.com](http://www.ystreetcapital.com)
Facebook: [www.facebook.com/YStreetCapital](https://www.facebook.com/YStreetCapital)
Instagram: [@ystreetcapital](http://www.instagram.com/ystreetcapital)