About The New "Ask YouTube" Feature | Ep. 94

The new "Ask YouTube" feature is rolling out, and wow... it’s a big update! I am sharing my honest thoughts on how this new feature could shift everything we know about YouTube search and content strategy. I am breaking down what Ask YouTube means for your channel, how to adapt, and why showing up authentically matters more than ever. 

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Transcript

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I have some thoughts and opinions on YouTube's new Ask YouTube feature that they announced last week. And I'll be honest with you, I'm kind of excited about it, but it's a big, big change. Like it's it's a huge dynamic shift for YouTube once it rolls out to all users. And uh, you know, depending on how well it's adopted by users, um, it could be probably one of the biggest shifts on YouTube in a really, really long time. And I have thoughts and opinions, I have some tactical things for you to know, and there's also some things I want to share with you that you're probably not gonna want to hear as a business owner on YouTube. My name is Meredith. This is the Video Brand and Fusion Podcast on YouTube. The video version of this is also in the Apple Podcast app. I host this podcast on BuzzSprout, and I just upgraded to host it as a video podcast. As long as you're watching or listening from a podcast player that supports video, you're gonna see me on video. But you already know that my main platform is YouTube. So let's dive into these Ask YouTube changes. Now I want to mention that one thing you have to keep in mind with YouTube as a whole, as a platform, is yes, it's a powerful search engine, but it's more than just a search engine. And so no matter what they announce about this ask YouTube feature, no matter what changes happen with the search, with the search bar and the search results on YouTube, there's so much more going on on YouTube that helps you reach your target audience than just search. So don't think that YouTube is like all of a sudden going to be a completely different place. YouTube still wants users to find content on YouTube, watch that content, feel good about the content they watched, feel satisfied about the content they watched, and then watch more content. That's always going to be YouTube's goal. And when you keep that in mind, as the person who is creating content for the platform, wanting your target audience to find you, it's almost impossible to fail at it because there's really nothing for you to keep up with other than providing value to your audience, making videos on topics your audience already wants to watch. That's a key. And um, and showing up consistently once a week with a long-form video. If you can do that for the people that you want to reach, that's all YouTube really is asking of you ultimately. Now there's strategies, there's tactics, of course. That's you know everything I teach inside of Video Brand Academy. But just because they're rolling out something different or a change doesn't mean that you have to get all in your head about trying to keep up. So ask YouTube is a new search feature in the same spot on YouTube that you would find the regular search bar, where instead of simply providing you the searcher with a list of videos that are optimized for that search phrase, it's actually giving you a page of resources from YouTube videos that help kind of answer the query that you typed in. If you've ever used perplexity, it reminds me a little bit of perplexity, but it's like perplexity for YouTube, where you're putting in a question, a query, a search phrase, or um a paragraph of context of something you're trying to figure out, and it will give you not just the like not just information, but information with the sources and the resources where it gathered that information for you. Right now, I think as of the time of this recording, you have to have YouTube Premium to use Ask YouTube, and I think it's only in the United States, or it may only it may be in certain countries. So I did upgrade to YouTube Premium so I could check it out and play with it. So I have YouTube open over here on my desktop, and this is just the home page. I just logged into YouTube with the account where I have YouTube Premium. This is the home page, and you can see we have this ask YouTube button where the search bar is right up here at the top, and it gives me some of my most recent searches, but it also gives me ideas to actually put in as a question. And you can see how some of these are not exactly just keywords, right? Some of them are questions with a little more context and a little more detail. So I'm putting in a search phrase here, and you can see that it's very similar to the regular search bar. It's trying to kind of finish my sentence, and I could put in here like how to like learn how to quilt for beginners, right? And if I hit search, it's just gonna give me the regular search results, right? Like this is what we're used to seeing. It's a list of videos, it's a list of search results in order for me, the user, to find out which of these videos is actually gonna work for me, like which one is actually gonna be the most helpful. I have to hit play and watch it. That's YouTube, right? You have to hit play and watch the video. But if I hit the ask YouTube button, it's taking the same search query, and now it's looking at all of the different possible videos. Some of them are the same that we saw in the search results, but it's giving me an actual guide, like a curated guide from parts of a bunch of different videos. So now I don't have to hit play on one video and then decide: is this good? Is this helpful? Is this a real person? Um, is this up to date? I don't have to figure that out as the user. YouTube figured it out for me and then put these different sections of videos together. So first one here is prepare and cut your fabric. And we have piece the quilt top and then baste the quilt sandwich and then machine quilt the layers and then bind the edges. It's literally answering the query that I put in, which is learn to quilt for beginners, provided to me in the format of a guide, but all through YouTube videos. And you can see how like this bind the edges one. I'm not seeing the thumbnail for the video, I'm seeing like the first frame of the section of the video that YouTube determined to be the best kind of section, the best little snippet of content for binding edges of your quilt. If I keep going, there's a few more topics that it's presenting to me, and now it's suggesting beginner-friendly quilt patterns. Because it makes sense if I'm just searching learn to quilt for beginners, I might also want to look at beginner-friendly quilt patterns. It's like anticipating my needs as the user of like what is this person probably gonna need to know next. Um, we have some shorts showing up here, and then it's even asking me, like, where would you like to go from here? It's giving me these suggestions like, do you want to talk about best sewing machine? Do you want to talk about how to choose your quilt fabric? This is what makes Ask YouTube really interesting and intriguing to me, because as the user, I'm kind of building my own guide. YouTube is curating that guide for me. It's probably saving me a lot of time and a lot of headache of me having to go and find all of these topics, especially when it's a um when it's a topic that you like if you don't know much about it, you kind of don't know what you don't know, so you don't even necessarily know what to search for next. As the user, if I'm like, okay, this is great, but like what if I don't have any space for quilting. Now I'm still on this same page, right? It's just just like Chat GPT, just like Claude and Gemini, you continue to have this conversation and you're kind of building this resource for yourself. So now I have quilting in small spaces. I don't know why this woman is upside down and that in that frame. That's interesting. Um, but uh it's giving me ideas for portable design walls, folding support tables, rolling storage cards, stackable project bins, right? It's solving this problem for me. It's giving me some information, it's giving me like a little summary, but it's really encouraging me to go watch all of these videos. And the way it's laying out is it feels like a guide, right? It feels curated, it's not just a list of videos that I have to sort through and find what's gonna work best for me, right? So from a user perspective, I feel like that's really interesting, that's really useful. From a YouTube video creator perspective, I'm like, oh holy crap, that's a lot different than what we're used to. And some of the uh some of the things that make it uh like a holy crap moment for me is because we are we're used to thinking about the fact that when you upload a video and somebody clicks on it to watch it, they're almost always watching from the beginning. A view almost always means somebody saw the thumbnail, they saw the title, and they deliberately clicked play. If we're using Ask YouTube and YouTube is curating different pieces and parts of our video and putting them together in a guide, and people are clicking play from there, they're not necessarily seeing the thumbnail, they're not even necessarily seeing or noticing the title of the video, they're not necessarily hitting play from the beginning, and that is wild. You know, as somebody who loves to look at YouTube analytics, I love diving into the numbers and the metrics. I like to look at it like I can sort of get a good view of what's going on inside of a channel or how YouTube sees a channel, how the algorithm, how the audience sees a channel by looking at the analytics. If everyone was to be using Ask YouTube right now, I don't know what like the the numbers in the analytics aren't going to be as clear now. We're not going to be able to draw the same uh conclusions or make really clear decisions based on what the metrics are telling us, unless YouTube analytics changes and gives us like data on like how people are interacting with our content from the ask YouTube results. So there's a lot of unknowns with this whole ask YouTube thing from a YouTube creator perspective, but there are some things that we can do tactic tactfully, tactically, tactfully, strategically, if you will, um, to make sure that we're really optimizing our content to have the best possible opportunity to show up in those ask YouTube results. First of all, the spider web strategy that I teach that I've taught for a long time about um how to grow your YouTube channel is really beneficial here because one of the things that I read about the Ask YouTube feature is YouTube isn't just looking for one-off videos. If you think about search results now, it's always been pretty like relatively easy. I put that in air quotes because it depends on the niche and it depends on the topic, but it's been relatively easy to show up in search results if you have a really well-optimized video. The title, the description, your transcript, what you're talking about in the video. Um, YouTube automatically transcribes your videos. It already knows it, it knows what your video is about without the title. It's relatively easy to show up in search results, especially for topics where there's a lot of people searching and there's not a lot of competition. Like there's not a lot of other videos out there on that topic. I like to call those golden ticket topics. That's great if you know SEO and you know how to optimize your videos, but it's not always great for the user in that the best video, like the best actual content might not be the best optimized. And I see this a lot with my clients who have really great content. Like the what's inside the video is like their best stuff, it's like gold, it's helpful, it's informative, it's interesting, it's fascinating, but they're not showing up in search because they're just either the topic is very saturated or their title and stuff is not very well optimized or whatever. And you could have the best videos in the world if they don't show up in search, then no one can find them if they're searching. Remember, I said at the very beginning of this video, search is not the only algorithm on YouTube, it's not the only thing happening on YouTube, right? And that's why you can still get views and still grow your channel and grow your audience, um, even if your videos aren't showing up in search. My point with this is that where you used to be able to simply rank and search is going to be a little bit harder now because YouTube, the Ask YouTube feature, is looking at your actual transcript and looking at your whole channel to determine if you're if you really know what you're talking about. Because now it's like thinking about the user, like, well, let's give the user the best curated guide that we can, not just the most well-optimized videos that happen to show up. I like to tell my clients you have to make it stupid easy for YouTube to show your content to your target audience. And it's never been more clear that the spider web method, the spiderweb strategy is the most tactical way to do that because you can cover the topics that you want to show up in search for, the things that you want to be known for, that your target audience, your target clients are actively searching for by simply talking about those things from all of the different angles, all of the different perspectives. So the spider web method is about covering everything there is on the topics around your niche, right? And you have multiple videos on your channel and you're establishing yourself as an authority, a thought leader, a go-to expert on this, like if you treat your channel that way and not just a place to talk about whatever kind of like comes to mind or whatever you feel like talking about this week, if you can be really strategic about it, then you are making it stupid easy for YouTube. And we were talking about this Ask YouTube feature in my Video Brand Academy coaching call this week. And one of the things that I mentioned was that you should you really should be putting chapters or timestamps in the descriptions of your videos. That's one thing that I've been really lazy about. And I can be better about it. The script is really good at actually finding those chapters and timestamps. But the more I've been using that ask YouTube feature, the more I'm finding that the videos that are showing up in those curated Ask YouTube results pages, they don't have chapters. They don't have chapters or timestamps. Everything that YouTube needs to know about your video is in the transcript. So I'm not saying don't do chapters or timestamps. I still think those are helpful. I think they're helpful for the humans that are watching your video. I think it's helpful for the bots that are crawling your video, but ultimately YouTube knows the content of your video because of the transcript. Now, this is where I mentioned at the top of this video, like there's some things that I think you're not gonna want to hear. One of those things, and this is this is just something that's kind of been brewing in my own mind um over the last couple of months or longer, as we continue down this path of AI generated everything. And yes, ask YouTube is an AI um feature, right? It's it's using AI to quickly and efficiently go out and curate the best content for you, the user. But here's what I want you to know if YouTube already knows everything it needs to know about your video based on the transcript, and based on the transcripts of all of the videos on your channel, and based on the viewer behavior of the people who are already watching your videos, who've already been watching your videos today, this week, this month, you're probably hurting your chances of showing up in Ask YouTube if your videos are really tightly scripted. And the reason for that is because when you script a video word for word, even if you have an outline, if you're pre-scripting your kind of pre-polishing the content to make yourself more concise, to make yourself more clear. Like here's a whole paragraph of something that I'm trying to say. I'm gonna script it so that it comes out clear. I'm not wasting people's time and I'm saying, I'm like making sure that I say what I need to say, right? That's the that those are the reasons why I like to script a video, in addition to the fact that if I script it, then I don't have to worry about going off the rails. But what it really does is it strips all of the context, all of the details out of your video and replaces it with something that's polished or you know, seemingly polished. And I've had this, you know, like love-hate relationship pendulum swing back and forth with scripting videos and not scripting videos over the last however many years, how how long have I been doing this? 11 years. Sometimes I like to have every single word word for word scripted, and I'll read it from a teleprompter, and then I'll go, you know what, I don't like this. I'm just gonna riff off the top of my head, and then you know, I sit here and talk for two hours, and then I have to spend five hours editing that. Like there's there's a definite uh spectrum of tightly scripting and totally riffing off the top of your head, and somewhere in between, I think there's a happy medium between you just authentically showing up, trusting yourself to speak what you need to speak, to say what you need to say, mistakes or no mistakes, while having a structure, while having some kind of an outline. And I think when you do that, not only do you come off as human, I mean it's never been easier to just be a human on camera, and it's never been more necessary, it's never been more necessary to just be a human on camera than it is right now, because of all of the AI generated stuff that's out there, even the AI generated like good stuff is still not human stuff, right? And so you have this opportunity to just not use a script, say what you need to say as clearly as you can, trust yourself to say it tactically, like strategically, because of how AI works, because of how natural language processing works, and if you've ever used Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or Perplexity and just like dumped a whole long run-on sentence of context of of query, just give me some results that talk about X, Y, and Z and blah blah blah. You know how good it is at processing just regular natural language that isn't keywords, that isn't perfectly polished. And I think when you're scripting your video, you're kind of um there's a really good chance that you're missing out on all of like the nuance of how people are searching for content now, how people are looking for no, I don't want the keyword results. I want a perfectly curated list of video topics and experts in this niche that's like customized for me. Right. Let me give you a really good example of this that just happened yesterday. I had to drive my dog to the dermatologist. Yes, to the dermatologist. So it's about a two-hour drive from my house one way. So while I was there, I was like, I'm gonna get something to eat for the ride home, but I don't want to leave the dog in the car by himself. I am not that really that familiar with the city. So I was like, I I just just take me to a drive-thru. But also I wanted to eat something that was more like a wrap or something like semi-healthy that wasn't just like a burger, you know? So I went to Claude and I was like, here's where I am. I'm looking for a drive-thru place that sells wraps. What what do you got for me? Can you see how in that situation I'm giving it so much context and nuance and making making it so specific to me in that moment? And AI can give me the exact results, like it feels custom to me. And I know what happens when I script YouTube videos word for word, is I try to make them concise. I try to deliver the content in the shortest amount of time possible. I don't want to waste your time. I want you to like keep chugging along, keep watching the video, and it strips out all of that nuance. It strips out all of that context. It strips out you, it strips out all of the you-ness of your content, of your words. And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm actually kind of excited about this Ask YouTube feature because I think it's gonna um force us to really evaluate what's really important when we're creating our YouTube content and force us to stop hiding behind a thumbnail and stop hiding behind the perfect hook and the perfect opening and the perfect call to action. Because if everyone started using Ask YouTube today, there's a really good chance that no one's ever seeing your thumbnail, they're not hearing your hook, they're just hitting play in the middle of a random video where all you really have to do is show up as a human authentically as yourself, being a thought leader, being an expert, providing value and and and helping your audience in the way that only you can. Now, if you're hearing me and you're like, but Meredith, you you created a whole toolkit for Video Brand Academy helping me script my videos. Yes, I did. I also give you fill-in-the-blank scripts inside of Video Brand Academy. I also tell you, put this in your own words, make it sound like you. I also think that your job as an online business owner, as an expert in your niche, is to be a really good communicator. And I think there's a there's like a phase where you're learning how to communicate on camera where it's really helpful to have a fill-in-the-blank script. It's really helpful to know what you're gonna say because your brain is like, oh my god, uh, we don't know what we're doing. We're talking to a camera, this isn't normal. And so having a script is like the training wheels, right? The next phase of being a good communicator, of being a thought leader in your niche, um, and being like the the trusted go-to expert is just showing up as a human and trusting what comes out of your mouth is the right thing to say in the right moment. Those are my thoughts on the Ask YouTube feature, and I'm excited for it because just what I've seen from it as a user makes me feel like it's actually providing a better user experience. And that's always going to be a good thing for YouTube, for any platform. And of course, as things change and evolve over time, I'll talk about it here on my channel. So make sure you hit subscribe if you're not subscribed already, and I'll talk to you next time.