Over The Bull – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Say your lease says no pets and you get a dog anyway. For eight months nobody notices, and somewhere in there you stop thinking of it as a rule you're breaking. Then one neighbor makes one phone call and you've got thirty days.

That's the internet right now. Your Google listing, your Facebook page, your reviews, whatever books your appointments, whatever sends your email. You don't own any of it. You have an account, and an account is a lease.

This episode is about being a good tenant, and about what you should own outright so it doesn't matter as much when you're not.

Ken gets into the most common rule people break without knowing it, the keyword sitting in your Google listing name that somebody probably put there years ago and never mentioned. A study tracked fifty listings doing it. Sixty percent got a warning, twenty percent got locked out of managing their own profile while it stayed live to the public, and twenty percent disappeared off the map. The part that should get your attention is that Google isn't catching these automatically. Somebody has to report you. So when a guy tells you it still works, what he means is nobody's turned you in yet.

Then the other half, because it isn't only rule-breakers who get hurt. Amazon cut affiliate commissions overnight in 2020 and wiped out people who'd followed every rule. Google deleted the free websites it built for small businesses in March 2024, and by June anybody clicking those links hit a dead page. Nobody did anything wrong. The service just ended.

Plus the legitimate stuff sitting untouched on almost every profile in the country, and why it's free.

Next week: is Google actually dying? There's a number going around about that, and it got corrected once already.

Sign up for the Bull Sheet at OverTheBull.com. And if you're bold, put your business in at the bottom and we may roast it on the air.

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.

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#63 - And You Think You're Confused.

Saison 3 · Épisode 63

vendredi 28 août 2026 • Durée 21:47

Six words: how do I show up in AI search.

The answer looked great. Bullet points, bold headers, links. It also couldn't tell what the question meant, built its advice out of marketing blogs and LinkedIn posts, and ran sponsored ads for two companies selling the exact service it just said you needed.

Thirty years in this business and Ken sat there genuinely unable to tell which parts were real.

Nobody outside the AI companies knows how these systems decide who to recommend. That vacuum got filled by people who profit from sounding certain, and the machine reads their sales pitch and hands it back to you as an answer. It isn't lying to you. It's an echo with a checkout page.

So this episode isn't an explanation of AI search. Nobody can give you one honestly right now. It's the Bull Detector: four questions, about a minute, and they work on any advice you're handed.

Who makes money if I believe this?
Whose numbers are these?
Could this be wrong?
Is it asking the machine about itself?

Plus what's actually still solid, why your own numbers beat anybody's study, and the oldest rule on the internet: there are no cheat codes, and the technology to catch you cheating is every bit as sophisticated as the tools you'd cheat with.

Next episode: a company with more than 900 five-star reviews that fell out of the top three at every single point on the map. The reviews never moved. Something else did, and Ken can prove it.

Sign up for the Bull Sheet at OverTheBull.com. And if you're bold, put your business in at the bottom and we may roast it on air.

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

#62 - The Outsourced Brain

Saison 3 · Épisode 62

vendredi 14 août 2026 • Durée 26:41

Ken got back with a stack of messages... and a good chunk of them were people asking him to Google things for them. Not strategy. Just look-it-up-for-me. That absurd little moment opens a bigger question: what happens to a business when its people stop thinking for themselves?

This week on Over the Bull, Ken digs into cognitive offloading ... the habit of handing every mental task to a tool until the muscle between your ears starts to shrink. He walks through the 2025 Microsoft/Carnegie Mellon research on the "confidence paradox" (the more you trust AI, the less you question it), a real example of an AI report that confidently merged the wrong location's data and almost went out the door, and why Google's own crackdown is punishing the businesses that outsourced their thinking.

Inside:

Cognitive offloading, in plain English (Google put down one dumbbell... AI walks you out of the gym)
The confidence paradox and why your own expertise is your best defense
Delegating vs. Abdicating: the distinction that keeps you from getting fleeced
Why "average just became free" and competency is the last real moat
The "Monday list": how to keep your reps up and pressure-test every answer

AI isn't the enemy. Checking your brain at the door is. The lazy get lazier, the sharp get sharper, and that gap is about to become the whole game. Pick a side.

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.

#61 - 4,651 to 63 Overnight

Saison 3 · Épisode 61

vendredi 31 juillet 2026 • Durée 28:29

One business watched its Google reviews drop from 4,651 to 63 overnight. Terrifying... until you understand what's actually happening. On this episode of Over the Bull, Ken Carroll connects two stories the local SEO world is treating as separate: Google's June 24 spam update and the wave of disappearing reviews and review responses. They're not two stories. They're the same one. Google turned up the sensitivity on its anti-spam machine, and the agencies cranking out AI HTML sites and bot review responses are finally getting caught... but so are some businesses who did nothing wrong.

Inside this episode:

Why the June spam update changed the game (Google now polices AI-generated answers, not just rankings)
Who's really in the crosshairs, and who's sitting at the bottom of the ocean when it goes wrong
The Don't-Panic Playbook: exactly what to do if your reviews start slipping
Why EEAT ... Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust ... is your best insurance
The $500 "AI website in a box" scam making the rounds, and how to spot it
A first look at a new series: The Bull Sheet

If your reviews are real, they're not gone forever. The system that pulled them is the same one built to give them back. Here's how to stay on the right side of it.

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.

#60 - The Cookie Crumbles

Saison 2 · Épisode 60

vendredi 17 juillet 2026 • Durée 18:12

For years, the internet let you follow people. Tag a visitor on your site, chase them across Facebook and Google, and close the sale later. That playbook is dying, and most business owners haven't noticed yet.

Third-party cookies, the tracking tags that made retargeting possible, are getting phased out. Not all at once. Not evenly. Depending on where your customers live and what phones they use, some of you are already feeling it. Others won't for another year.

In this episode, Ken breaks down what third-party cookies actually are, why attribution is quietly falling apart, and why your cost per acquisition is climbing even if your strategy hasn't changed. No fear-mongering. Just the watchtower view of what's already happening and what it means for your marketing dollars.
If your ad performance has gotten weird lately and you can't quite explain why, this one's for you.

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.

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#59 - The Cheap Guys Are Back (And They've Got AI)

Saison 2 · Épisode 59

vendredi 10 juillet 2026 • Durée 31:47

Cheap vendors have always cut corners. What's changed is the disguise. Now they're using AI to churn out website content and HTML in a weekend, and it looks polished enough to fool business owners who don't know what to look for. In this episode, Ken breaks down why the real problem isn't the price tag, it's what's happening underneath the hull. He walks through the questions every business owner should ask before hiring anyone to build their site, why a proper game plan is the one thing cheap vendors can't fake, and how skipping the discovery process leaves you blind to what your market actually wants. If you've ever wondered what separates a real website build from a template with your name on it, this one's for you.

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.

Lire plusRéduire

#58 - Shooting the Bull: Don't Build What You Can't Fix

Saison 2 · Épisode 58

vendredi 26 juin 2026 • Durée 33:04

There's a quiet line a lot of business owners are crossing right now without noticing it: letting AI build things they couldn't rebuild, repair, or even explain on their own. It feels like leverage. Ken thinks it's a liability waiting to go off—what he calls "the big burst."

In this episode, he gets into how he spent two weeks fine-tuning the way he actually works with Claude, and the breakthrough that came when he stopped trying to communicate the way humans think and started meeting the AI where it actually processes information. That discovery led to a rule he now lives by: don't use AI for anything you couldn't reasonably pick back up and do yourself.

Plus the real story that made it click—a guy who shipped software written in SQL, a language he doesn't know. Funny until you think about where that software was running.

If you're leaning on AI to run parts of your business, this one's worth twenty minutes before the burst finds you

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.

#57 - Shooting the Bull: Frankenstack - When Your Tools Start Fighting

Saison 2 · Épisode 57

vendredi 19 juin 2026 • Durée 34:22

Every business owner has had the moment: wait, why are we paying for two phone systems? That's a Frankenstack ... the pile of overlapping tools you end up with when tech moves so fast nobody stops to turn the old one off. In this one we get into why it happens (every platform now wants to do every job ... your CRM does payments, your payment tool does texting), and why the real damage isn't the wasted spend. It's the handoffs. When two tools both own the lead, the customer gets double-messaged. When two tools both touch the money, you ask "what did we collect this week?" and get two different answers. We walk the three seams where this always breaks ... presales to marketing, marketing to fulfillment, and the money ... and the one discipline that separates the owners who scale from the ones who just accumulate mess faster.

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.

Lire plusRéduire

#56 - Shooting the Bull: Is AI a Machine or a God?

Saison 2 · Épisode 56

vendredi 5 juin 2026 • Durée 32:21

Everybody's got an AI take right now — it's coming for your job, or it's the second coming. Ken thinks both camps are wrong, and the truth is more boring and a lot more useful than either one.

This one's off the cuff: from the blacksmiths who didn't disappear (they evolved) to the calculator that was "cheating" in the '80s and required by the '90s, to the famous story about an AI that "blackmailed" its way out of being shut off — and what really happened in that room. Ken pulls the myths apart, puts the tool back in its proper place, and lands on the rule that actually matters for your business: AI amplifies the judgment you already have. It can't replace the judgment you don't. Use it inside your wheelhouse and it's the best assistant you've ever had. Let it overrule the experts you're paying for, and you'll burn bridges you can't rebuild cheap.

No doomsday. No hype. Just where the line is — and how not to cross it.

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.

#55 - Shooting the Bull: Rainbow Chasers and Widget Counters

Saison 2 · Épisode 55

vendredi 29 mai 2026 • Durée 40:08

Most business owners think hiring a marketing agency is a one-way transaction — you pay, they deliver. But the truth is, the client side of the relationship matters just as much, and there are two behaviors that quietly sabotage results every time. In this episode, Ken walks through two real stories: the client who couldn't stop chasing the next shiny idea, and the one who only valued tangible deliverables and treated strategy like fluff. If you've ever wondered why your marketing isn't sticking, the answer might not be your agency. It might be you.

This show breaks down the unglamorous marketing systems that actually work—structured websites, schema, local signals, consistency, and momentum over time. No hacks. No trends. No dopamine marketing.

Each episode explains why boring, repeatable actions compound, how businesses accidentally reset their own progress, and what to build if you want growth that doesn’t collapse when the campaign ends.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is for you.