10 Ways AI is Actually Changing Marketing (Not Hype)

An hour. You have to keep changing APIs. Okay, we're live. We're live. We're live. All right. So today, while you guys join, we're going to start off with 10 ways AI is actually changing marketing, not hype. And get this, this came from Claude Code again. So Neil, if you're to jump off this topic right now, here, let me just kick it off first. Number 1 for 10 ways how AI is actually changing marketing, not hype. AI fluency is now becoming a non-negotiable at companies, meaning that our company, for example, for Single Grain, we want people to be proficient not just with using ChatGPT, but they need to be good with Claude code within the next 6 months or so. And we even think 6 months is too long because of how powerful it is now. It's a major step change from how things were when first like ChatGPT came out. Now you're able to build anything. So like Neil and I were talking over the weekend and he just had an idea. about something he was doing. And I was like, oh, I'm just going to try to build it. And I built it out and literally it is a very useful— I'll just say it's a very useful tool that me as a non-coder can build. So we're trying to give these powers to everyone. And another thing I'll add, I actually did this over the weekend. This is, I think, I don't know if we talked about this on Friday, but my team told me it would take about a week to get something done for programmatic SEO on my website. Did I tell you about this? No.

Or no?

Okay, so I've been wanting to target these, um, these programmatic keywords for quite a while, right? So it's been probably 8 to 12 months or so, and we still haven't been able to do it. So I asked, I asked one of our guys, and he's like, next Friday. I was like, Friday's actually pretty fast, but F that. I don't want to wait till Friday. So you know what I did? I opened up, I opened up AI. I opened up Madness actually to do this, and it basically did $45,000 of work for me in Less than an hour. Okay, it did the keyword research, it created a content brief, it copied the templates we have for my programmatic pages already, and then it gave me 2 examples first, and I said they look good, and it cranked out the rest, right? And then I was like, you know what, I got 150 done on Friday, I did another 450 over the weekend. So I got 600 done. Okay, so this is no knock on him. It's more so to say that he has the power to do this. He's just very busy. But if I can do this as one person, this is why AI fluency is now non-negotiable. Because imagine how much power your entire organization's going to have if they can do this.

Yeah. Another way AI has changed marketing is data analytics. So we're in a world right now where Google's no longer going to be acquiring more social platforms. Facebook's not going to be acquiring more social platforms. You know, it's going to be hard for any of these players to acquire Perplexity or Anthropic or any of that, because not only are they large, but I don't think that's the issue. It's more regulatory. Governments don't want one player to control everything and become a monopoly. So what we're seeing right now is marketers have to adapt to multiple platforms. Data is everywhere. AI has made data and analytics a lot better, not perfect still, but it's analyzing data in real time. You can take it from multiple channels. You can put it into one centralized place for at least the channels that you're allowed to gather data from. And then it can go and analyze and help you figure out where there's a lot of inefficiency. And the reason I say data analytics is so important, when we work with customers, it doesn't matter big or small. And let's take one channel, for example, like Google AdWords. It doesn't matter how much technology Google AdWords releases, like with AI Max, PMax, et cetera, we typically find savings. In essence, they're burning money in areas they shouldn't. One of the most simplest examples of this is a lot of companies bid for their own brand name. If your competitors are bidding for your brand name, it makes sense. If it doesn't, chances are they're going to click on your result anyways. So we'll use AI to say, hey, if no one's bidding for the name and there's no competitor showing up, and you check multiple regions and areas and cities, then don't show the ad if no one's bidding. If people are bidding, show our ads so people go to our website and not our competitors. When we're doing things like this, what we're finding is companies save a lot of money instead of it just being on all the time. It's using data in real time and then adapting, and companies can easily save thousands if not millions. And this is really important because everyone talks about all the cool things AI does. Very few people try tying it back to actual revenue or profit or savings, and this is one way we're Where we're using it really heavily in marketing, and it's saving money in real time.

The third one is revenue per employee. So I believe, not just from a marketing standpoint, but businesses are going to be looking at the revenue per employee even closer now, because the— just from what I was saying earlier, the raw efficiencies you're going to get. So for example, today we were talking to someone where it looks like we're going to pitch one of the fastest growing supplement brands in the world right now, influencers. We're like, okay, so what was stopping you from, you know, increasing your spend, you know, from a couple hundred grand to, you know, double or triple? And it comes down to the creative piece, right? They want a lot more AI creative, especially if they can use the likeness of the influencers. So one of our— the creative guy that's working on it right now, one of the strategists, he's actually able to crank out a lot more creative as one individual, and he's building an entire system just on his own as one person. That means we're going to get a lot more out of him revenue per employee-wise, versus before, when you think about an agency in the past, maybe if you can get, you know, $200,000 or so revenue per employee, you're in a pretty good spot. Maybe even a little more than that. But I think it's going to start to rise a lot more in the near future.

That's what I think. Number 4, product-led growth. Marketers tended to shy away from product-led growth because it was hard for them to impact product-led growth due to their lack of skills in A, design, and B, coding. Now there's no excuse for that. If you look at my ad agency, NP Digital, we've grown heavily through our products, Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. Forget the software revenue, I'm talking about giving away software for free, capturing users, and then selling users something else. So we'll sell them consulting services. With AI, you can now end up not only building products and get it launched extremely fast, you can design mockups, you can collaborate with others, you can get so much stuff up without ever learning how to code. The products, the way we're seeing it right now, aren't the best. They're not as good as if you had 3 or 4 amazing engineers using AI versus only using AI and the marketer doesn't have any coding skills. But what we're finding is it's improving at a rapid rate where I think in maybe 2, 3 years, it'll be much better and more comparable to actually having engineers.

I say sooner. You want to bet? I'll bet you a dinner.

Sure, we'll do a dinner.

A nice dinner. We're gonna go to the same spot we always go to. Noah's gonna join us too. He's gonna bring his famous cookies as well.

His famous cookies?

His famous cookies. Anyway, number 5 is if you think about personalization at scale. Okay, so people will talk about account-based marketing. Usually people are talking about it from like a B2B standpoint. They even use it for B2C or D2C as well. But I think we're going to see a lot more personalization just because tokens are going to become a lot cheaper. And the ability to pull from all these data sources at once, I think what we've seen from personalization so far, it's pretty janky. You know, there's like website de-anonymization, there's a lot of these tools for enrichment and things like that. I just think it's going to get a lot better. And then once you're personalized, maybe with your retargeting, you also get an email at the same time, you get a text message at the same time, or maybe it'll space out a little bit. I just think marketers are going to be able to get a lot more creative with their personalization. Like, I think in the last couple of years it's been limited, and I think it's going to get a lot more interesting.

What number are we on?

6? 6 for you? Yeah. Yeah.

So number 6, we're seeing a little bit of a different world than what's being broadcasted in the news when it comes to AI. So you're hearing like Sam Altman talk about how there's AGI coming and it'll revolutionize everything. You're hearing Elon Musk talk about people won't have to work in, I don't know, how many years did he say? 7 years or 10 years or something like that?

10 to 15.

10 to 15. We're seeing a world where companies aren't really cutting back on marketing because of AI. AI has been implemented in organizations. It's not an edge anymore. We think it's a standard. We haven't really seen companies say we're not spending as much on marketing or even marketing services. I'm not talking about the ads. I'm talking about the humans doing the work. We're just seeing that companies expect people to do a lot more. And one of those areas that they expect humans to do a lot more is in strategy. So if you're in marketing and you don't, if you're not good at strategy or you don't understand strategy, that's going to be a big ding against yourself. In the future, we're going to see more and more companies require marketers to be really amazing strategists because AI can help with a lot of the execution.

Number 7, all things will converge back on services. And so, you know, people like to poop on services. I actually think services will become more valuable over time because to Neil's point right before, you're gonna need really smart people, you know, working at companies. And I think the bar is gonna get higher and higher. But ultimately, especially enterprises, a lot of enterprises, they just want the people to execute. They want smart people to execute for them. And I don't think services are going away anytime soon. I do think that the bar is gonna rise a lot higher for service-based businesses. Yeah.

Yeah. Number eight, we're seeing that AI makes companies or AI is pushing companies to ship faster. So people, when a lot of this stuff started coming up, people were like, oh, you can fire a lot of your team. You can do a lot with less, and AI can handle a lot for you. What we're seeing right now, especially in marketing and even other departments, almost every department. People aren't saying fire, fire, fire. Do more, and more specifically, move a lot faster.

Or get fired.

Yeah, sure, you're gonna get fired if you can't keep up. Yeah, but let's say if you're a company and you do a major release each quarter, so 4 a year. Now they're not saying, hey, with AI we can do it with half the people. They're saying, why aren't we doing a major release every month, if not every week? And It's starting to become where there's so much competition and it's, there's a lower barrier to entry that is pushing everyone to move so much faster. And we're seeing companies actually spend more because the demand for them to execute faster on everything, you know, not just marketing, product, engineering, support, people just want all companies to have better products, better services, and do everything faster and do more of it.

Do you find yourself working harder today?

Than compared to when?

2 months ago.

No, it's the same. I find myself working not as hard, being very honest, to 15, 20 years ago.

Okay, yeah, that's different. But let me put it this way, and then we get— and let me do number 9, you can do number 10. I find myself working probably around the same hours but harder. I'm compressing a lot more into the time I have right now.

Yes, I find myself doing more within my hours. I personally don't consider me working harder. I think we work on a little bit different stuff within our organizations. And the main reason being is, and you know this as well, when we both started, we were grinding it out. It was like, you either make it or you're gonna have to go figure out how to get a job or figure out some ways to pay bills.

Yeah.

And it was, you know, not even 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day. A lot of days were like 14+ hours a day, 7 days a week.

Yeah, because you feel like you're gonna lose everything.

Uh-huh, and you have no choice. So I find myself not being able to work that hard anymore. I don't know what it is. I want to, I just—

That's interesting. So you don't feel like at any given time you could lose it all? That chip's no longer on your shoulder, huh?

I do feel like I can lose a lot. Yeah, but let's, let's just go into reality. I've been doing this for 24 years now. I'm not the richest person, but if I— let's call it like something happened with the business and I got sued or whatever and business went to zero. I can sell stocks, homes, whatever you want to call it, let's say assets.

Yeah.

And I can go live in like where I grew up in my parents' neighborhood, which is still nice and good schools.

Yeah.

Buy a house. There's a house in my parents' neighborhood bigger than theirs, $1.2 million.

Yeah.

Buy it with cash.

Yeah.

I would have enough in the bank where I would never have to work another day in my life.

Sure.

My kids would be okay for a long time.

Let me put it to you this way. Like, I get that part. There's psychological safety there, right? But there's nothing driving you internally. I'm just curious that where it's like, even if that happens, that kind of feels like maybe you would have lost it all and there's nothing driving you to keep going.

If that happened to me, it would feel like I lost it all, but it's not the end of the world.

That's what I mean.

Because in perspective, there's so many people struggling. Like, my life's not bad. I would never have to work another day in my life.

Exactly. So our lives are great objectively, right? But I still feel like I just psychologically try to trick myself into thinking that I'm gonna lose it all, right? And that keeps me going.

But I can't do that for some reason. That doesn't work. I've tried it. Yeah. What's kept me going is looking at competitors who are bigger and feeling that I haven't accomplished enough.

Okay, so we have different ways of driving ourselves, and that's what I wanted to get to everyone. There's different ways of keeping it going because a lot of people are like, well, if you've done so well, why do you keep working? Are you just trying to make more money? Or— and some people are, but But sometimes, oh, he wants power, or they want power, or whatever. It's like, no, psychologically, we all have our own ways of trying to trick ourselves into keeping going.

Yes, but also what I found too is even with all of that, I still can't push myself to work as hard as I used to when I first started out.

No, you would work like 80 to 100 hours a week.

Yeah, so I don't have that kind of level of drive. In addition to that, There's like different. I think there's different phases in life. I work because I have kids. I love my kids. I'm not the person who's built to watch kids eight hours a day, right? I prefer working over being the person who watches kids 24/7. I want to engage with my kids, play with them every day, get to know them, spend hours with them every single day. But I'm not the person who's like that. So working also gives me purpose in life.

Yep.

And that's why I don't want to give it up, because then I wouldn't know what to do with— in life.

And by the way, so look, I'll hit number 9, I think, and then I'll give it to you. Um, my whole purpose— one, I don't want to feel like I'll trick myself into thinking I might lose it all, right? Which is unlikely, right? Um, but also at the same time, I want to continue to learn, and that's my purpose, right? So anyway, I think you all need to figure out what your purpose is. Number 9, AI theater. Versus AI that drives revenue. So to Neil's point, and what I'm seeing too, is you're going to see a lot of these big companies are mandating AI, but a lot of it is theater. It's like, remember the meme on Twitter where just like this guy's like, yeah, I'm a CEO of a company. There was a mandate that we need to adopt AI. So I signed up, signed us up for an AI tool, got 4,000 seats. The board saw that we have 4,000 people using it. Usage is up. They said, what happened here? It's like, I don't know. The board didn't know either. And so that's the cycle that we're seeing right now. A lot of these companies don't know. And that's why they're going to a lot of consultants right now. And to be honest, a lot of these consultants also don't know. So a lot of it is theater, right? And, you know, we've also spoken at things before where we ask people, hey, like, how have you actually driven ROI from all the AI stuff that you're doing right now? Not many people will say that they are. And so you're going to see a big difference between AI that drives revenue. I think we're going to see a lot more revenue in like especially the next 12 months. But I think leading up to now, we've seen a lot of theater.

We've seen too much theater. And if you look at the stock prices of like Adobe and Salesforce and a lot of these AI-driven companies, they're amazing corporations by the way, they're not seeing the revenue growth that one would think. So if you look at AI, the stocks that are up are typically anything related to LLMs, providing the chips for the LLMs, providing the data centers, providing the energy, The LLMs itself are worth quite a bit, but software that has AI enabled, we're not really seeing it being worth a lot or growing that much faster. Now, of course, you're seeing AI software that is AI enabled that's starting from zero grow super fast like that. I'm blanking on the Swedish company that you can build an app in like minutes. You know who they are. They do like a few hundred million a year in ARR.

Webflow?

No, not Webflow. Swedish company.

I don't know.

They're recent. Lovable.

Oh, Lovable. Yeah.

Lovable, right?

Yeah. Stockholm.

Stockholm.

Yeah.

And you know, when I see a lot of this AI stuff, everyone's just like, man, you know, with marketing, you need to see tons, tons more revenue and growth. And CFOs are telling CIOs, 'cause the CIOs are pushing for integration everywhere, and CFOs are like, we're not seeing the actual revenue and the profitability yet. Doesn't mean it won't come, but seeing it yet. And going into number 10, for junior level and mid-level marketers, you should still specialize on a skill, but you have no excuse of not being a well-rounded marketer. And the reason I say that is you no longer have to buy courses. You no longer have to watch long YouTube videos. You no longer have to read tons of blog articles on a subject. You can straight up ask AI a question and it'll give you an answer. If you're not decently enough well-rounded, that's okay. You better know how to use these tools out there to answer the questions and execute on basic entry-level marketing stuff. If you can't, you're going to be gone.

Let me ask you a question since we just talked about this, you're going to be gone and this type of stuff, right? So there's a narrative right now that says AI is going to destroy jobs. Do you think AI is going to destroy jobs? Or maybe you can take the other side. Do you think AI will create a labor shortage?

I think AI is going to create a labor shortage on the high end, white-collar jobs. I think AI will create— will reduce jobs On blue collar, like flipping a burger.

So check this out. So remember Grok, the one with the Q, the one that sold for $20 billion to Nvidia?

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So the chip company.

Yeah, the chip company.

So GPUs, right? They did.

I don't think it's GPUs. It's some type of chip. It's an AI chip company. I don't know about TPUs. I don't think they did TPUs. But Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of AI chip company Grok, offers a contrarian view: AI won't destroy jobs; it will create a labor shortage. He outlines 3 things that will happen because of AI. Number 1, deflationary pressure, meaning that this water bottle over here, your water bottle over there is going to cost less. Your housing is going to cost less. Everything is going to cost less because you got robots, you know, farming coffee more efficiently, building things more efficiently, building your homes and all that, right? So people are going to need less money. That's number 1. Number 2, people will opt out of the economy. This one's interesting to me. People are going to work fewer hours, they're going to work fewer days a week, and they're going to work fewer years. They're going to retire earlier because they're going to be able to support their lifestyle working less. Number 3, entirely new jobs and industries will emerge. Jonathan points to history as evidence. If you look at 100 years ago, 98% of the workforce in the United States was in agriculture. When we were able to reduce that to 2%, we found things for those— the other 98% of the population to do. So those jobs, the jobs that are going to exist 100 years from now, we can't even contemplate. Software developers didn't exist a century ago. Influencers didn't exist a century ago. So his conclusion is deflation, new industries we can't yet imagine will combine to create one outcome. We're not going to have enough people.

So I think him and I are saying the same thing because I believe you're going to have all this new demand for jobs, but jobs like flipping a burger or putting fries in oil, I think those will be automated just like how agriculture doesn't need as many people because machinery really changed How we do agriculture and technology, right? It's made it so much more efficient. I think the same thing's gonna happen with, do you really need someone to sit there and mow a lawn, or can a lawnmower just use a laser to detect everything and mow it itself? And then that person who used to mow lawns will have to go find a new skill.

I think people get to work on what they want to work on. That's what I think is gonna happen, more or less, because if the base level money is taken care of and there's a lot of abundance—

But wait, how's the base level of money gonna be taken care of?

Because if you have robots doing everything for you, they're creating all the abundance. And we're talking about not even just universal basic income, but more universal— people are, you know, universe— I don't know about universal high— yeah, universal high income, not universal wealth. I would say universal high income because we have like, look at the robots right now doing the work for us, like the Waymos and all that. We're gonna— the costs are gonna come down to such a low level where everyone's gonna be at a pretty prosperous level.

I don't know if I— That's what I believe. Yeah. Well, my— there's going to be a percentage of the population, and I know you agree with this, that is that Uber driver that doesn't learn a new skill, and then they're screwed, and then they can't figure out how to make money or pay their bills. I don't see a world where the government just steps in and gives everyone money, at least in the United States. We already can't afford, you know, our current deficit. I don't think we can afford more than—

$38 trillion, right? Or $40 trillion now? Whatever the number is.

And then supposedly he He's going to offer $700 billion for Greenland, plus $100,000 for every citizen.

That's a good deal for them.

So that I don't know, because I don't know what Greenland has in minerals and stuff like that. But I did look up the deficit that Denmark has, because I believe Denmark is the one who's keeping track of it.

Yeah, keeping track of Greenland, I guess.

The Google search that I did showed that they only had a debt load of $100-something billion. So I'm like, they would have no debt. I'm not saying they should do a deal or not. That's not for me to decide. And I think the people in Greenland need to figure out what they want in life, and people should take their perspective. But that's separate.

I'll give you my thoughts on this. I think in the short term, to your point, that Uber driver in the short term, I think in the next like five, ten years or so, I think there's going to be a lot of job displacement. I think there's going to be chaos, and I think I don't want this to happen. I think there's going to be social unrest, and my prediction last year was. The rise of socialism is going to continue. We don't need to go down that path, but I think we're going to see that happen. I think long term, if we can get over this hump, I think most people, the vast majority of people, are going to be okay. And when you're— and then I think the vast majority of people, because you and I have kind of realized this, right? Like, we've done reasonably well in our lives. Once you've done reasonably well, you realize that everything we wanted, maybe the beach when we're in like maybe 10 years old, 15 years old, we don't want to do anything. That was always the wrong way of looking at it, the fallacy. We always wanted to find something that was interesting To work on and to continue to work on. So I think AI is going to enable people to eventually realize that and then work on the things that they want to work on that also provide value to society.

Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, you have another interesting topic here: the death of software companies. I'm curious what this is because check this out.

You like this?

I don't see software companies dying anytime soon.

Well, yeah, check this out. So this guy Bubble Boy tweets this out: SaaS is cooked. AI reduces the amount of any BS. SaaS. A team of 3 to 4 engineers can recreate most of these products in less than 3 months. We can debate this. Um, so you look at all these tickers over here. I think Team, um, Intuit down here is down, uh, 14%. Um, and then Adobe's down 10%, Workday's down 8%. These are all SaaS companies over here.

Yeah, HubSpot's down. I don't think they're in here, but HubSpot's down quite a bit.

So this guy's like software, right? So we can like— I don't think SaaS is cooked, but, um, I don't think you can just say I'm gonna— you can sure— you can surely clone any of these things, and that's pretty easy. But managing it is very difficult.

Yeah. And let's go— let's use an example of both our businesses. What do you use for your CRM?

HubSpot.

Okay.

You use Salesforce.

And HubSpot. We use both.

That's right. Yeah.

So it depends for what. I don't know why we have 2, but we have 2. Let's see. Let's use HubSpot as an example. Do you agree that you can have a team of engineers who can recreate a HubSpot?

Just the base level?

Yeah, base level.

Base level, yes.

For the stuff you need that you use.

Yeah.

Not the other bells and whistles, but the base features that you use.

Uh-huh.

Pretty easily.

Yep.

Okay? Then you gotta maintain that product and you use AI, it's coded stuff out for you. Is it always perfect or sometimes does it break?

No, it's an— it makes me realize that it's really annoying to maintain this stuff.

Uh-huh, 'cause it breaks. It's not perfect, there's issues.

Yep.

The cost of HubSpot is much cheaper than—

And you have to maintain it.

Maintain it, build it, and make sure it doesn't break. 'Cause if, and then you end up not realizing how many leads you lost or it happens too late, you're screwed.

Yeah, and if you're a multi-billion, multi-trillion dollar company, you can't afford for it to break.

Even a startup.

Yeah.

Every single day is potential deals and leads, right? I don't understand. And I see this on the public markets. Like I watch CNBC almost—

Your favorite channel?

Almost daily. Yeah, it is my favorite channel. other than on Sundays when I watch football. And on CNBC, you see someone like the host talking about the software stocks and how they've been going down. They're like, yeah, I can use Cursor and Cloud Code and I can just build my own HubSpot and I don't even need them. And I was just like, okay. And I'm not trying to be offensive, but go run a business and go try to build your own HubSpot and rely on it. When you're creating a business, you don't have enough time in the day Resources or money. So why would you waste your time building a HubSpot when you can use the version, HubSpot has a free version, and then it scales up with you and it's really affordable. It's the dumbest thing for marketers to go build products like that instead of just paying for the ones that are out there. It's like you're recreating the wheel instead of focusing on your main core business.

That's the big one, it's distraction. It's the, it's just because you have this power now doesn't mean you should just try to build everything under the sun. Just because I'd like to talk about cloud code, Doesn't mean you should just build everything because that distracts you from your main thing, which slows down your— it actually slows down your growth. That's why one of my friends has said this cloud code thing is very dangerous because it— especially for entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurs have what? We have ADD, right? Yes. It's known as the entrepreneurial ADD. And so this one's interesting. So this is continuing on what we were just talking about. So what I'm showing Neil right now is the NASDAQ 100 and Morgan Stanley Software Index have diverged widely. Morgan Stanley SaaS Index, I don't know what's in it, but it's gone down quite a bit versus the NASDAQ 100, which I don't, I don't think it's all software companies. I think it's just tech companies, right?

It's probably the biggest 100 companies in NASDAQ.

Yeah. So I think we are going to see maybe a retracing of SaaS companies from like a public market standpoint, but we're not talking about it from that standpoint. We're talking about it from a business standpoint.

Yeah. And, and I don't know what's going to happen with these stock prices, but I wouldn't bet against HubSpot as a company. What happens with the stock price is a different thing. I can't control that. But every marketer out there recreating their own HubSpot and building it on their own, it's stupid. It's a waste of time.

You know, I mean, we should talk about that for a moment. Like, what should marketers do with this superpower? I think you should be making lead magnets. I think you should figure out how to splinter off, you know, elements of your software. Like, we relaunched ClickFlow last week, our SEO product. I'm like, what's all the go-to-market stuff we can build? And how do we build in the managed services component? We're looking at the funnel every day and we're just, we're also just plugging in with the Claude code. Hey, what can we do to kind of fix the funnel over here? It's just telling us what to do, right?

Yeah.

I think that's what you should be focused on. And so never has it been more important to focus because even like I was talking to my, some people today on my team and it's like, oh, this person's really good at AI creative. We should have them figure out how to, you know, do this and do this and do this. I'm like, that's actually not what we hired him for. And so I think if you're a leader listening to this right now, You have to double down on this. Because we're talking about the death of software companies, Neil, I think we might as well talk about the cancer that is in America right now. You want to know what the cancer is?

I'm curious. Is it cancer itself or is there something else that I'm missing here? No, no.

So it's this— it's a $74 billion cancer that's metastasized across America. It's known as Deloitte.

Oh yeah, they got a lot of government contracts and then we never launched any of those things that they—

Yeah, I guess it's a level of fraud, huh? It's like the Somalia fraud but bigger than that. The Somalian fraud, and we have nothing. By the way, when we say Somalian, it's the Minnesota fraud. That's what we're talking about. Nothing against Somalian people. So this guy Beaver tweets this. So you were never meant to hear the name Deloitte, and you were never meant to know the government has wasted $74 billion by working with them quietly. Deloitte is one of the largest contractors, quote unquote, building American government IT systems: Medicaid enrollment, unemployment insurance, child welfare case management. Food assistance eligibility. Wait, this sounds like all the fraud that's happening in Minnesota right now, all this stuff, and actually all around the US right now. So they're supposed to build all this stuff. When you interact with the state benefit systems, there's a decent chance Deloitte built it. In building the 600M row, 600 million row, and growing database for Somalia Scan— oh, oh, this is the guy that built Somalia Scan, which tracks the fraud that's happening in Minnesota. I sorted through literally millions of invoices, and one name Continue to appear. Deloitte. California's unemployment fraud disaster cost the state $32 billion. Built by Deloitte. Tennessee kicking 250,000 children off Medicaid. Built by Deloitte. The billion-dollar software project in California that got canceled after spending the budget. Ding, ding, ding. Deloitte. I didn't know this.

I didn't know this either. So Deloitte is getting paid a lot of money and not building what they're supposed to be, or they're not building at all, or a combination of—

I think it's a terrible job, or they haven't fulfilled And so in every state they've provided services, 25 states, they had significant system failures, wrongful benefit denials affecting hundreds of thousands, fraud vulnerabilities that cost the taxpayer billions, projects that ran, and they kept getting hired by the government.

Wow. Well, that's bad press for Deloitte today.

Yeah.

I see it on Twitter, 29.6 million views. It's been roughly 24 hours since it came out. It's been 24, 25 hours. Yeah, almost exactly.

Here, I'll give you an example here. We can, we can react to this one. Okay, check this out. So Seema Verma ran a consulting company called SVC Inc. in Indiana. Government Pence— I think it's Mike Pence— paid her $6.6 million to help design Indiana's Medicaid expansion. When Trump-Pence won in 2016, Pence brought Verma to Washington as the CMS administrator controlling federal Medicaid funds. CMS. CMS pays 90% of the cost when states build new Medicaid IT systems. Verma hired Mary Mayhew, who lasted 3 months at CMS. Basically, Mayhew oversaw $135 million Medicaid contract to Deloitte, the same company that built Florida's unemployment system that was so broken it collapsed when COVID hit. So my point of saying all this is, one, good job to these people uncovering fraud. 2, Sometimes it's just who you know. It's not even what you do.

To get these deals?

Yeah.

A lot of it is who you know.

Yeah.

And that's business.

Mm-hmm. Um, but ideally, if you want to be sustainable, it's also what you do.

I— ideally, the person who wins at the end of the day has the best product or service, but sadly, we both know it doesn't always work that way.

No. And that's why you gotta— you kind of— you, as a leader, you have to have range. You have to know who to talk to, you have to know how to build relationships, you have to know how to keep these relationships, you have to know how to build a great product, you know, you have to know how to hire great people. All of these skills kind of come into one. But I think the level of fraud that we're seeing across the board from, you know, Nick Shirley, his exposé, he keeps exposing more and more.

I just hope we solve this.

As an American, to have what, I think $700 billion of fraud a year is nuts. And that's your tax dollars going into this stuff.

So yeah, no, it's it's all our money.

Yep.

But yeah, well, this is stuff that the government will figure out. But that's terrible press for Deloitte.

You know what we should talk about too? The article that I just that we just talked about right now, this Deloitte piece. X articles are crushing it. So have you started post your posting your blog post to X articles?

I have.

They're getting a lot of reach, and so like a lot of random people. that I like haven't seen in a while. It's like, um, the guy used to work for, um, uh, Treehouse, right? He wrote something. I think it got like, I don't know, 5 or 6 million views or something like that. And the, the post that you just saw, 30 million views on it. So the algorithm is giving—

When you're saying X articles, you're talking about long X posts?

Yeah, well, not X. No, there's a, there's a button called articles.

Um, I don't see it on mine.

Yeah, because you don't pay for it, you cheap ass.

I, I pay for X.

No, you don't.

Yes, I do, on a monthly basis.

On the, on the left side, click, um, X Premium.

I pay for X.

Yeah, it should be— if you click on Premium, the X— is there a Premium button? If there's a Premium button, there's an Articles button, and that's how you write the article. It's like, uh, it's like writing a blog post.

But look, I pay for X. Uh, you see it? I have articles here. I can write it.

You can write articles.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I pay for X. So my— yeah, you could— if you pay for X, you can do it. So my point is like, this is just like a long-form article. And that's all you're doing. And like, look, look at this guy over here. This post, it's like how to fix your life in a day. 168 million views.

Huh?

Yeah. See, you're going to start doing it now.

Yeah, I am. I'm going to write myself a note to release some of my content on X articles.

Just saved your life, Neil.

Yeah. X articles tests.

And it makes sense as we're talking about this right now. They're trying to make the algorithm more helpful and people are lacking long-form content. And I've read a lot of long-form content on X. There's a lot of good stuff there.

I find myself.

Sharing it quite a bit. So, and they're giving a million-dollar prize over the next two weeks for whoever gets the most reach, I think.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

That ain't gonna be me.

Yeah. No.

You could potentially win it because you write it. You'll write about politics.

If I write about politics, maybe. But yeah, no, I'm not gonna do that. So anyway, can we also talk about the AI monk that makes $100,000 a month? So have you seen this guy on on Instagram? This monk over here? There's always like a temple and all that, right? So he's got 2.5 million followers, and he's making $100,000 a month. This this monk or whoever is managing this monk, right? So you know he's like you know talking about like addiction, you know being tired, having more energy, and so his name is Ying Mun, an AI monk that doesn't exist. He's funneling his traffic to various offers. His main one. Being a 30-day healing journey. Okay, so so 2.3, so 2,300 members, $50 a month, $115,000 a month, and that's just one offer. So look at all the offers here. He's got a 30-day healing journey. He's got these ebook bundles and things like that, and it's just like AI versions of him, right? And millions of views on that service. I'm still not clear on what they do right now. Some seasons feel heavy, Neil. Time moves slowly at night. And the mind begins to— I don't know.

So how does it make the $100 grand a month?

It funnels everything to these courses and these memberships.

Okay.

Yeah, so he gets the reach and said probably at the very end of it's like, hey, comment this to get this, and they probably throw them into ManyChat or some type of WAP thing. But I think that's interesting, and I think we're gonna see a lot more of it.

Yep.

Yeah, whether it's monks, maybe it's a hot monk, maybe if Noah, you want to make like a bikini You know, something. I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right. You want to do the 10 SEO lessons that still work in an AI era?

Oh, you really like those, don't you?

Uh-huh.

Yeah. So see, Neil likes the Claude Code. So what, guys, what happened here was Claude Code looked at all 3,000 of our episodes or so, and it came up with kind of counterintuitive ideas, um, based on the episodes that we've done. Okay. So—

Oh, I just noticed on the right side, it gives us the 10 from our— based on our previous— Oh, there you go. Close.

Yeah.

I wasn't using that for the other one. I was just riffing.

Yeah, you did good riffing. Okay, so these are 10 SEO lessons that still work in the AI era. So number 1, topic clusters remain powerful. So what are topic clusters? Topic clusters are when you have, let's say you're talking about SEO, for example, right? You might have a bunch of SEO topics that are tied to it. So what is SEO? You know, how to measure SEO, how to do technical SEO, like all these things kind of combined in a cluster. They'll still work in today's day and age. SEO hasn't changed that much. We like to think that just because AEO or LLMO sounds like it's different, it's just an evolution. And a lot of the old SEO stuff is still very powerful today.

So this isn't a number, but I'll add on to Eric's and then I'll give a number. One thing to keep in mind is SEO, like 5, 10 years ago, whatever the timeframe, a lot, it was more keyword-based. You do keyword research, you figure out what keywords you want to create an article around and you do it. Now, Google and AI wants to rank sites and site brands that cover a topic thoroughly. So if I was to blog about SEO, they want me to blog about SEO, SEO globally, how to do research for topics and keywords, how to build links, how to fix on-page, right? How to optimize for multiple platforms and not just Google, how to do local search, how to gain reviews. But do you understand how I'm going really deep into a topic? That's what they're looking for. So it's moved from keywords to topics. Number 2, before the AI era, I used to build products, give them away for free because it was cheaper than paid ads, and the products would go quote unquote semi-viral, build a lot of natural backlinks and goodwill and help your rankings and get your brand out there. That works even better now in an AI world because in an AI world, People still use a ton of software. Forget what the stock prices are showing, but a lot of these software companies are still generating more revenue. You can see it in their quarterly earnings. And you can build software cheaper and faster with tools like Lovable out there. It may not be perfect and do everything, but it still works and it's a great link magnet. And actually even today's world—

Was it enough too?

And it was also a good citation magnet. Cool. Yeah, that was number 2. Okay.

Number 3. So the game very much is everywhere. And now we'll kind of COVID maybe a couple here. YouTube, for example, is cited quite a bit when you look at the LLMs. So SEO to me, whether you're looking at like an answer engine, you know, platform or surface, or whether you're looking at traditional SEO, it's still kind of the same to me. So these answer engines and these search engines are grounded. YouTube is a major one that they look at. Top 3 are actually You're looking at Reddit, you're looking at YouTube, Wikipedia. Obviously this changes over time. But the point is, what used to be able to— YouTube is number 2 search engine in the world, so it still works really well. And I think the key thing to understand in terms of old SEO lessons that still work in today's era is that you have to adapt. Because SEO, as far as I know, when I first joined, it's changed. And we're not talking about every year it's changed. It's like every, almost every week it's changing. And that's very much happening in the AI era.

Do you know what actually is the real number 2 search engine in the world? It's not YouTube.

What is it now?

Instagram.

Is it really?

Uh-huh. A lot of people search for things that you wouldn't consider search, like searching for a friend.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of— I think Instagram has like 6.5 billion searches a day, but they're not the same type of searches.

The intent is very weenie. Like, yeah.

The intent?

Yeah.

Forget weenie. The intent isn't as monetizable as someone typing in Affordable laptop. Yeah. Yeah. But it's still search. It's just, I, I—

Yeah, but technically—

No, technically it's search, but it's just a different type of search. It's not always as monetizable, but Instagram still generates a crap ton of revenue.

Oh, for sure.

Majority of their ads are actually Reels these days. I don't know if you knew that.

That I knew. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it was like Sensor.

Yeah.

I think it's well above 50% are now Reels that is making Instagram their money from monetization. All right, so number, what are we at, 4?

4.

Number 4. Back in the day, people would be like, don't put all your eggs in the Google basket, even though it's the most popular search engine. They would say, make sure you're on Google, make sure you're on Bing, and make sure you're on any other search engine. We see this pattern going more and more. SEO shouldn't just be Google. It should be Google, it should be Bing, it should be ChatGPT, it should be Perplexity, it should be Instagram, because people do search on Instagram for content and inspiration. It should be Pinterest. It should be Amazon, you know, if you're selling e-commerce products. Search has changed from search engine optimization to search everywhere optimization, even if people hate that acronym, in which you have to optimize for multiple platforms. They all have their own algorithms. You got to learn them, get good at them. But it typically starts with good product, good service, good content, good brand.

Number 5, what's old is new again. People are like, oh, especially the new people coming into AEO, they're like, Yeah, you know, it's these— if you spam the listicles, you're going to rank really highly. And then it's like, oh wait, these LLMs are catching up, catching on to the fact that listicle spamming is pretty easy to game. And now you have to do guest posting. Oh wait, that has been happening for a very long time. Oh, internal links are very good signals. Oh yeah, still sounds like SEO. So a lot of the old stuff in SEO still very much works well today.

Yes. What are we at? 6. So back in the day, I used to buy companies that had a lot of brand queries. Brand queries is someone typing in the name on of that domain name or the brand name into Google and then clicking over to a website versus just going directly. Helps with rankings quite a bit for the traditional Google sense. Strong brands also perform really well in LLMs like Perplexity and in ChatGPT. So you can either try to build your brand The bigger your brand is, the easier it is to rank on traditional SEO. But the bigger your brand also, the easier it is to rank on these LLMs. And you can build a brand by doing omnichannel, keep pushing out good information, product services, right? Engaging in communities. But it takes a long time to build a brand. That's why I tend to buy them over time versus just trying to build them. But either strategy could work.

Number 7, Content refreshing still matters. When you look at LLMs, for example, you look at a ChatGPT, usually 95% of their content, depending on the content type, you're looking at updated content from the last 10 to 12 months or so. You have to make sure that your content's updated all the time. So this, this is never actually— this has always been the case with SEO. You got to make sure that you're tending to your garden, that you're keeping your content updated. It's no different in today's AI era.

I had an interesting question on my webinar that I did earlier today.

Yep.

Someone asked, how often should I update my content? And as you know, that's a loaded question because it varies per industry. And the example I gave there, because people are probably wondering how often they should update it, it depends on your content type. If your content is on bananas and the nutrition facts about bananas, even if it's 2 years old, it probably doesn't need to be updated. Even if it's on the speed of cheetahs and how fast they run, that one I gave as an example, I'm like, Cheetahs run roughly the same—

You really like that cheetah example.

Yeah. Cheetahs run roughly the same speed that they did today that they did a year or two ago. So you don't really need to update much of that. But the way I look at updating content is you go check out your Google Search Console. You can compare year over year, week over week, month over month, quarter over quarter. You can pick the timeframe and you can see which pages are losing traffic. Traffic, losing rankings, losing impressions. Keep track of all those metrics because sometimes you're losing clicks because of AI and AI overviews, but you're getting tons of impressions still. And you want to make sure that you're not losing tons of impressions because if you're losing tons of impressions, someone's usually ranking ahead of you. And why are they ranking ahead of you? Well, they're probably doing something in their content that you're not. That's when you should look to see what your competitors are doing 'Cause they're probably doing something you're not, and update your content to be more competitive and better than theirs. And AI can help you analyze their content and then figure out the gaps in yours, and then you can update. What number are we?

I'm on number 9, and then you finish with number 10.

Well, I didn't go on the last one. I was just expanding on yours.

Oh, great.

You want me to go on it?

Yeah, go ahead.

Okay, so I'm on number 8?

Yep.

Number 8, in the world of SEO, Back in the day, people would write articles on everything like the nutrition facts about bananas. And guess what kind of conversions people get from that stuff? Little to none. And today we're seeing people lose a lot of traffic on those basic queries and they're getting no real effect in their revenue. And they're saying, my traffic's dying, my traffic's dying. Write stuff that hasn't been seen before on the web, stuff that's not regurgitated, and you'll do well. Be king. You just got to write about new stuff that isn't regurgitated. That's what did well in SEO years ago, and it still does well today. The problem is, is people only want to focus on keyword gaps and content gaps and just cover all the stuff that's been beaten to death by 100 competitors.

Yep. Number 9 from my side, last from my side, then you go number 10. Partnerships will never go away. So whether it's partnering with a website to help, just even a single simple link collaboration, that's one thing. You go— you want to go way beyond that. Because SEOs back in the day, they used to kind of just stop at the link collaboration. You want to go further and figure out, hey, can we do a webinar together? Can we figure out how we can maybe cross-pollinate our audiences maybe with our different products, right? What else can we do? Can we co-host an event together? Where you actually develop a business relationship. And it can start with a link collaboration first, but I think the key thing is always expanding on that relationship that will never ever go away.

Yeah, number 10, links are more valuable than ever. In the LLM world, people are like, oh, you don't need a link, you just need people to mention you. Well, if you can get them to mention you and you get them to add a link, even better. If they link, in most cases when they link to you, they're also mentioning you. Not always, because sometimes the link text says something else. But in an ideal world, you're getting that brand mention and you're getting that link. It helps you with your traditional rankings and it helps you how often LLMs are citing you. And the way you get those, build good content, build free tools, amazing product and service, all that kind of stuff helps. And also, of course, being in business for a long time. The businesses that are really old tend to do better. But keep cranking on the content marketing because it helps you get more mentions and links.

So I want to— I want us to react to this. So Pep, one of your, your best friends from CXL, said that agencies are getting fired. We surveyed B2B SaaS mid-market marketing leaders about where they're cutting budgets. The number one answer wasn't paid ads, wasn't tools, wasn't events.

It was agencies.

Here's what they told us. Here's 3 quotes for you. Number 1, agencies have no concept of what it actually means to run a business. Number 2, they assume we have endless time to implement new ideas. Number 3, I need execution, not strategy. I have plenty of strategy. 58% of these leaders are under extreme or high pressure to show short-term pipeline. They don't have 90 days for discovery phase. They don't want another brand positioning deck. They don't need a 50-slide audit. They need someone to do the work. Yet most agencies still sell like it's 2015. Week 1 through 4, discovery. Weeks 5 through 8, strategy development. Weeks 9 through 12, the playbook presentation. Weeks 13 plus, now you, now you execute it. Meanwhile, the CMO needed results in week 2. So the truth that agencies refuse to hear: mid-market companies don't hire you because you're smart. They hire you because they're underwater. When you don't show— when you show up with strategy theater instead of execution, you're solving a problem they don't have. The agencies that survive won't be the ones with the best decks. They'll be the ones who show up day one and ask, what can I take off your plate today? So then you have— this one has 1,000 likes on LinkedIn, 350 comments, and you have all these agencies in here commenting over here, right?

Yeah, they're probably trying to disagree or something.

Yeah, or they're trying to come up with like a creative way to respond where it makes them kind of stand out. That's what they're doing.

So have you seen agencies get cut from your friend circle?

No. I think we're getting more inquiries than, than like usually January for us is a slower month. It started off with a bang.

So January is always busy for us.

It's, it's, I don't know why, like the past couple of years it's been slow for us, but this year it's like, it's, the pace is like really quick.

So yeah. We've always, if we look at most of our clients, they do require strategy help, but it's guided strategy. It's not them saying like a Deloitte or a Bain or McKinsey saying, hey, can you figure out what we should do to fix our business? I'll give you an example of guided strategy. They may say, let's say they're, I don't know, I'm making up a company name. Walmart, and Walmart may be like again I'm just creating a hypothetical here. But Walmart may be like we know Google's awesome, we know Facebook's awesome. A lot of people are using ChatGPT now. We want to figure out how to dominate ChatGPT. Can you do analysis and figure out how we can do better on ChatGPT? And then if we like that, can you go and execute on it? So in essence, when I say guided strategy. They already know the channel. You got to figure out how to do it, what it's going to look like, pitch it to them, and if they like it, they'll pay you to execute on it. So we're seeing most of our work, and it's always been this way, is actually execution. That's what we mainly get paid for. The strategy has never been for us, hey, figure out how to grow our company. It's always been, these are our channels, Can you figure out how to do them better? Or, hey, Facebook or Google is not working out as well. Can you come up with a new strategy for this channel? And then figure out how to go and execute on it. But it's never been blind for us where clients are just like, once in a while, because we have so many customers. But I'm 99% sure the majority of the time they're asking us, go and execute on a specific channel. But before you do, We want to hear your game plan.

Let me just rephrase this, okay? Agencies are getting fired. Let's replace the word agencies with bad people are getting fired, which is a constant everywhere.

Yes.

The thing is, I would say most agencies, and we can put bad in front of it, the reason they've survived up till now is because the work was there. There's more of a, like, a gap, like a moat, right? So Before, let's look like 10, 15 years ago. Many people didn't know how to do SEO. So if you even knew like a little more, like you're going to get hired, right? And you're probably going to be able to maintain the client for a while because your client doesn't know what's happening. Okay. But people have gotten a lot smarter since that time, right? So the bar continues to get higher. I would just say that a lot of agencies haven't met that bar, especially with AI now. If they're not going to adapt, that's why they're getting fired, right? Because all this comes down to is how do you run your company? What is your company about? How well have you hired? If you haven't hired well, then well, that's why you get fired ultimately, right? So when you hear— I will say this, I think we can both agree on this. Like when you and I, we talk to our friends, the reason why there is kind of contempt or like people kind of look down upon agencies is because they've had such bad experiences with the product. Because the product is so— it can be inconsistent with bad agencies, right? You might have a really good person, that person gets burnt out, they quit, boom, okay, now you're thrown onto a junior person. That's what I think most— that's why there's a general disdain for agencies. But look, just don't do it that way. Just set a higher bar. Easier said than done. But then you— I don't think you need to worry about getting fired because if you're that damn good, they can't afford to fire you. Yep.

So on a side note, you have in here Sequoia agent-led growth is a new market. I think this was like from Pat Grady. I could be wrong.

I don't think it was from Pat Grady. Let's double check. You know, okay, so this is Sonia, Sonia Tweety Bird, Sonia Huang, okay, partner at Sequoia. So she says we're going from the age of product-led growth to the age of agent-led growth. Okay, so product-led growth is that's when you might have a product where you have a crippled version of it and you give a lot of features away for free, like HubSpot has a freemium version, I believe. So you see this most clearly if you're using Claude code actively. It says, hey, for a database, you should use Supabase. For hosting, use Vercel. It's choosing for you the stuff you should be using. So exactly like we're talking about using these intelligent coders, right? So product-led growth brought us closer to the vision of best product wins, but ultimately people are still lazy. Yes, people are still lazy. That's never going to change. They can't read all the reviews, nor do they want to read the reviews, to be honest. And they kind of default to just what looks cool on the website. So whereas your agent has infinite time to go and make these choices for you, it will read all the documentation, read all the user comments, and figure out what you need for your use case. So again, instead of product-led growth where you have to kind of play with the product and look at G2 reviews and all that type of stuff, right? We're now moving to a world where robots are just going to be talking to each other all the time. What would you— water tastes nasty?

No, no, no. I've already read this, but I have a very different take than what you have.

Okay, go for it. Go for it. Oh yeah, it was Packrate. You're right.

Yeah. Um, their whole take is marketing agents will start choosing everything, but I haven't read it fully, but I saw it on social media. And one obvious thing is agents will look at your G2 reviews. Agents will look to see what is popular. Agents will see what people love and what they're saying. This is still marketing. You're optimizing for algorithm. We were doing the same thing for Google. Yes, it was a human who clicked on a link and then bought, but now you're optimizing for the same metrics, the same signals, so an agent can click and buy. There's not much that's changing on the consumer end or the marketer's end.

Yeah, I do think, I mean, I don't think it's unfair what they're saying though. I think it is, we will be, as marketers, we're going to be optimizing for more robots.

But you already optimize for robots. What robot do you not optimize for? You optimize for Google, ChatGPT, Facebook, Instagram, Yeah.

Snap. What I mean is, you're not wrong, but I mean the behavior of these agents is a little different than like a Googlebot, for example, right? So—

How's it different than how they've been evolving? They look at sentiment on Googlebot and ChatGPT for things like their AI. They look at your brand versus the competitors, the context. They're looking at a lot of the similar signals.

Yeah.

It's just an evolution.

So that's what I'm saying. I think we're on the same page there.

Yeah, but it's not a drastic evolution. No, that's the thing. Like they're painting it to be very drastic. I'm like, I don't see this as much drastic.

No, I think they're trying to paint a new word. And coin another word, and not Sequoia. Andreessen's pretty good with the media play, but I think they are trying to coin a new word, and sometimes it sticks, sometimes it does. Like founder mode, for example, product like or like content marketing, right? I think they're trying to do that. I just think marketing. I don't know when's the last time these people were you know operators, but you know Sequoia's a legit company or a legit firm.

Yeah, they're a legit firm.

Yeah, but I mean on that note, kind of similar to that. Is people are talking about, okay, these agent decoders, right? I think what's happening now is, and we've kind of warned against this, but there's a new phrase now. So we talk about AI slop, like content slop, right? Now there's product slop because it's so easy to build all these products. So when you— we can ship at 100 times the speed. The problem now, Neil, is whatever you build into Ubersuggest or whatever, you know, you build into Answer the Public, there could be risk where you have too much features and it's too much crap. And then it inundates the entire system. So more things faster is rarely a recipe for excellence. When it takes weeks to ship, you justify every feature. When it takes hours, you ship everything. Why not? It feels like progress and momentum. That's what we call perceived progress.

Yeah, but it just hasn't just introduced product slop, it's introduced marketing slop, it's introduced engineering slop, it's introduced slop everywhere. Because people are doing a lot of stuff that they don't need to do. The amount of messages I get on a weekly basis of people showing me cool shit they're doing with AI, and no joke, more than 9 out of 10 times I'm like, this is never going to make anyone any money or do anything for them. They just created a new cool shiny thing for marketing and it's like whoop-de-doo.

So talk— speaking about slop, I saw this post on LinkedIn, this guy Mike Corral Cornugian wrote this. So he said, we published 2,000 AI-generated articles across 20 new domains with zero authority to see if raw AI content could rank. Here's what happened in just 36 days. So 71% of pages got indexed. 8 sites ranked for 1,000 keywords each. 122,000 impressions. Over 240 clicks in total. That seems very low. 5 sites hit top 30 for 30% of their keywords. But here's the plot twist. All articles disappeared from search after 3 months. What went wrong? First, it's obvious that all the sites were brand new. No trust signals, no domain authority, nothing to make Google believe you're worth citing. Plus, the content was fully AI-generated with no human input or originality. No author with strong E-A-T signals. How do I know that's a reason? Because we tested 6 AI-assisted articles on our main blog. The difference? Night and day. Still ranking with 3 in the top 10 after 6 months, 550,000 impressions and growing, featured as sources in AI overuse. So yes, AI-generated content can rank easily, but it doesn't stay there unless the content is updated and supported by enough trust signals for Google, aka SEO.

Yeah. Yeah. You can't just spam. We've been saying this for ages. Everyone who's just creating tons of AI junk content, is it going to do well? It needs to— you need to involve a human. You need to build trust. You need to have the EEAT elements: expertise or experience, expertise, authority, and trust. On a side note, You know what I've been seeing a lot from SEOs and marketers? The lazy marketers are getting even lazier.

How so?

Because of AI. I'm getting so many videos of people using Claude Cowork, and they're like, look, it's doing my job for me so I can work less and get paid. Like, the lazy people are getting lazier.

Wait, wait, like people that are at your company?

Not my company. Like, friends who are in marketing.

They're— I have friends who are showing you how they're doing it now with Claude Cowork and how they're working less and getting paid.

Yeah, like I have people being like, look, I'm getting paid like $120 grand and look, I'm doing Claude Cowork. He's the best investment ever, you know, I can work less and get paid the same.

Yeah.

And I'm like, this is just this terrible attitude. I'm like, eventually you are going to be replaced with this kind of attitude.

Well, I don't know, I mean, remember what Bill Gates used to It's like, you know, you don't want to exactly have this— you want to work for someone that's smart, but you want to work for someone that's lazy, because lazy people always find a loophole and they find like a creative way to do things. So are these people lazy and smart?

They're smart enough to figure out how to do a lot of their job without doing it, but they're not smart enough to go above and beyond and do more to maintain and keep their job and grow within the corporation. So These are people who are pretty much entry-level jobs, not mid-level, maybe a little bit higher than entry.

Yeah.

And most of them that have been sending me— I don't have too many examples, but the majority of the ones who sent me, there's only 3. The 3 that I'm thinking of, they also complain how the world is against them.

Oh no.

They don't make enough money. People should pay them more.

Oh God.

Like it's unfair, and they have tons of things about that. And I'm not saying they're right or wrong. I'm just saying I haven't seen them make the effort to try to improve themselves. I have seen them make the most amount of effort in recent times to improve themselves, but that's because of AI and specifically AI doing their job so they can get paid and travel more, do whatever they want so they don't have to work.

What are you talking about?

That's one of the 3.

Yeah. Okay.

There's 2 more.

So these people are maybe humble.

Uh, yes. And I don't know how smart you would want it because it's like they don't ever want to get better if it involves work. They want to get better if it means they can work less.

You know, this should give you hope, those of you listening to this, because it has never been easier to get ahead.

Yes.

Yeah, that's all I gotta say.

Some of them get paid so well and I'm like, so you know I only have to work like 30 minutes to an hour a day? Like, Yeah, look at this. I'm getting $150 grand a year, or $120, or whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a pretty lazy person. I just like doing things in a creative way, but I like keeping myself stimulated.

So yeah, I need to keep myself stimulated.

Yeah.

You know what I actually told all 3?

What?

You should go into a new industry. I'm like, you do all this kind of stuff because you never liked marketing. You should go into something you love.

Yeah.

And then you'll put in the time and effort and get really good.

Use that marketing for someone that will pay you for it. Their marketing skills, get paid by someone.

No, no, they're getting paid for marketing. They're employees. Yeah, I'm saying they shouldn't be marketing employees. They should go do something else in their life.

Like, what would one of them— okay, what about the one that likes to travel? What do you think he would do?

He should be a photographer for National Geographic. He does amazing landscape and nature pictures.

Does he?

Animals and stuff. Really good. Loves it. And then when I tell him to, he's like, ah, it's not gonna make enough money. I'd rather be a marketer. And I'm like—

But it's not about the money.

And you can just— and they travel anyways. I'm like, you should just go take pictures. And if you're really good at what you do, I believe someone would pay you $100,000 to $200,000 a year.

Not only that, he'll find someone amazing to marry too, because, oh, what do you do? I'm a photographer for National Geographic. That's pretty sexy.

Yes, because he ideally wants to marry someone who travels and wants to take photos.

Yeah.

And I'm like, you would be a perfect National Geographic photographer.

You should send him this clip.

And I believe if you're really good at taking photos, People will pay you more than 100 grand a year.

Oh, for sure, for sure. We know something we should talk about because ChatGPT ads is coming out soon. So Daniel Priestley tweeted this out. I used to see this guy on Clubhouse all the time. Clubhouse. So ChatGPT experimenting with advertising in their free subscription. I'm old enough to remember when Google started running ads, and for a few years you can get warm leads for pennies. I also remember Facebook launched ads and they had so many eyeballs, and so the first advertiser cost nothing to get clients for the first few years. Corporate advertisers don't move fast on new things. They take 6 months to plan and 6 months to test before they go in heavy. So right now ChatGPT has almost a billion users a week. If they start running ads, they will have a lot of eyeballs and not so many advertisers until the corporates come in. What do you think?

That's wrong. That's totally wrong. It is of course always cheaper at the beginning, but you know how many corporations I know that—

I think they're all ready because they've seen this movie.

Yeah, they've seen it so many times. This is nothing new. And they've already been making the push. How many calls do you get on a monthly basis? Companies like we need ChatGPT to recommend our products and services. Same here. Probably one of the biggest requests. They're already on the ads kick and they've been waiting for ads to come out from day one. Yep.

Yep. And Sam Altman tweeted this. I mean, he said, you know, we're starting to test ads in the free tier, but here's here's a signal for you all. An example of ads I like are on Instagram, where I found. Stuff I like that I otherwise would never have, would have. We will try to make ads ever more useful to users. So he's implying here it's probably gonna look more like a social feed.

You do know who runs their ads, right?

Like an ex-Meta person.

Yeah, I know the person's name exactly. Yeah, but their LinkedIn doesn't say it, so I don't want to say it. Yeah. Fiji Sumo came from. Facebook. She tweeted about ads. She's high up.

Isn't the Instacart one?

Yeah, she was ex-Instacart CEO. Then she became CEO of OpenAI Applications, and I believe ads is underneath her.

Yep.

But if you look at a lot of the people that ran ads at Meta, they are at OpenAI.

But here's the thing that I think is the question we should answer here is how hard should you bet? And I think you should bet extremely hard. You should press hard on this. I mean, the Demand is already there.

Demand's there.

I remember when Facebook ads first came out, I'm like, man, didn't press hard enough. But that's like the crappy like side ads. Doesn't matter, it's gonna get better. You press hard because this is one of those situations where it's always been like this. It starts out very cheap and it gets ever more expensive and it never really gets cheaper. So yes, so here's a question for you. How hard, when you think about your clients, like you're not working directly with their clients, but how Do you think they should allocate more?

I don't look at it as budgets. I look at it as spend whatever's profitable. And most companies, even though they have budgets, every time they exceed their budgets and their campaigns are profitable, they can go to CFO, even if it's publicly traded, and they're given as much money as they want, as long as they stay within some profitability band. Almost any CFO is going to approve some testing. You could take $10,000, $1,000, pick a number and start off with it. If you're getting good traction, your finance people will let you ramp it up. I've never heard a finance person says, oh, it's highly profitable? You're limited on what you can spend as much as you can, as long as it's profitable, but just make sure we're not in a cash flow crunch. And the last question is, when do we pay the bill? When do we collect the revenues? And as long as you're not in a cash flow crunch and the numbers pan up, people are like, spend, baby, spend.

Mm-hmm. Now, because we're talking about ChatGPT, Microsoft actually revealed how to get traffic from ChatGPT.

So I'm curious on this one. Did they talk about stuff that was 5 months old or 10 months old?

This article is too long. So here's what it shows. So it's another one of these articles.

Okay.

So Microsoft just released a here's how to get traffic from ChatGPT guide. It's gotten surprisingly little attention. Let's go over it together.

So, oh my god, not that long.

It's pretty long. So Microsoft central message is in the doc is that retail competition is shifting from being found to being chosen. I'm just going to read the headers. Microsoft also broke down the difference to them between AEO and GEO. Microsoft makes it a very clear distinction. Agentic engine optimization, in their estimation, optimizes content and data so AI systems can, Copilots can find it, understand it, summarize it. It's not getting to the point.

On that note, when you're talking about AEO versus GEO, remember at the Ahrefs conference, you said search everywhere optimization was going to win? We hear AEO more from customers more than anything else.

Patrick Stocks was the one that said he saw search everywhere optimization more. And I actually asked the other day, I asked my Gong, I said, hey, look at all our sales calls for in the last 6 months or so. And it's answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization.

Yeah, we're seeing AEO pick up more steam than anything else.

Yeah. And then you know what I did with that? I said, hey, now map it with the Ahrefs MCP to see what keywords are exploding. It's actually the GEO and GEO and AEO are exploding in trends right now.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm trying to get a key takeaway for this one. Okay, Microsoft then went into how AI actually decides what to recommend. Okay, so there's, there's a couple things here. So AI does not rely on one data source, but rather fuses crawled web data, product feeds and APIs, live website data, okay? And like AI reasoning includes Patagonia and North Face make quality jackets, hiking jackets need to be lightweight and waterproof, your model is $179 and in stock, so feeds. Brand X is known for hiking equipment, so brand positioning. Okay, number five: Microsoft then really breaks down the journey from SEO to AO to GEO. Then Microsoft talks about three data layers control. You know what? I'm just going to use Grok to summarize this because this is really annoying to read. That's what I'm going to do.

Yes, it's right there on that page.

Give me the key points, and then we can finally talk about it. See, guys, maybe don't write an article on X that just talks about another article. Like it's. Just talking about that. It's not even giving me key points.

All right, what's the key point?

It's taking forever to pull it off.

Let's see. Score 46.

Here, pick one. Pick something else while I'm waiting for this to pop up.

On a random note, the Google founders all left to Florida to avoid the billionaire tax, but it looks like it's facing tons of opposition. A lot of reporters are writing that it probably won't pass, and these are left-leaning sites.

Hmm. Let me tell you something. Actually, no, I'll tell you after the call. So, okay, I got the summary here. So Alex Groberman's post, it shares an in-depth breakdown of Microsoft's October 2025 guide on optimizing content for AI search engines like ChatGPT, emphasizing generative engine optimization techniques to boost visibility and traffic. Key recommendations from the guide includes using structured data formats like Q&A, lists, and schema markup for easy AI parsing. With data showing a 357% year-over-year increase in AI referrals to top sites, reaching 1.13 billion visits by June 2025. And the post highlights the user's under-the-radar status despite its practical aligning for value for SEO pros.

And— I'm still waiting for the meat. Come on, Grok, summarize better.

Right here, it gave me more. So core recommendation is the structured piece. That's all. That's the only meat, guys.

Yeah, I told you.

What did I say at the beginning?

How did you know what this— We're gonna get something 5 to 10 months old or something like that. Yeah.

Okay, so this is actually really annoying. Okay, so this guy got 100,000 views on this using this— see, this is why you know the X articles are getting a ton of views right now. This thing that— I'm sorry, Alex, this added little to no value here. Okay, got 100,000 views on it.

So as we're talking, 2:54 PM. Someone messaged, you need to post and repurpose content for X articles ASAP. This is after we were talking about it during the episode. I don't know the person, they just have my phone number. $1 million reward for the best article this month, algo's boosting them. You'll shit on everyone. Excuse that person's language. I won't. I was like, LOL, I was just talking about this. I won't win because I don't write about politics, but I'm publishing articles soon. And they said, nah, I'm sure you have a chance because Nikita, I don't know who Nikita is.

Nikita Beard, head of product at X.

Is almost mostly overseeing the campaign and he's heavily invested in crypto X because he has equity in Solana and other stuff. I've been, I've seen dozens of articles, but they're whatever. Worth a shot, MIO, or in my humble opinion, and you can probably bait engagement from big folks.

I'm like, You don't need a bait engagement. Just write what you write.

Like, yeah, no, I already know I'm not going to win. I'm not going to win like an article like Deloitte stole. I'm not saying they did, but I think the article was like Deloitte $75 billion or whatever.

But you didn't need to do that. There's one talking about context layering, and I've read a couple of these articles and there's one like that's an AR article. It got like 7 to 8 million views on it or like a couple of these Claude code setup ones, millions and millions of views. And so—

No, no, no. The article on Deloitte, the $74 billion cantrip.

30 million.

30 million. That one is going to be too hard to beat. You can— it's too hard to get the views.

Forget the 1 million.

Yeah, yeah. I meant for the 1 million. I'm like, I'm not going to win that.

I'm just talking about the views. I think the views are worth it because the thing with me is like X has a lot of smart users. You know, yesterday, you know what I felt was disingenuous? SimilarWeb was like Threads beat out X in terms of daily active users. But that's not the— that's not the complete story. I was only looking at mobile. But when you look at the reality, the total number of daily active users for X is like 250 million or so. And whereas the total for Threads is like 141, which is still high. But also when I look at Threads, it's just people complaining about politics and how their life sucks.

So yeah, yeah, X is very similar. I see people complaining a lot about politics.

I don't actually see that. Mine is, if you look at my feed, it's all AI stuff and people talking about what they built, what they're sharing.

I see many politics.

And you see all the shit— the, the— not shit, sorry, the cool stuff I share with you on, oh, you're drinking a bad water bottle. Oh, you should, you know, have pomegranate juice. It'll like clean up your plaque in your arteries. That's the stuff I read.

So— Oh, pomegranate juice cleans up the plaque in the arteries?

Yeah.

I should drink some.

You didn't know that? And then I shared it with my dad because, you know, when you're older, you have more plaque in your arteries, right? Leads to heart attack. But What it said was like the reason why pomegranate juice doesn't get marketed as much is because that it's not helpful to the medical companies to market that because it's not a high-dollar, high-cost treatment. So it's just like a, you know, natural remedy type of thing.

I just wrote myself an email to buy pomegranate juice.

Yeah, so actually, I mean, when you, when you think about these, um, what tend— let's talk about this because you just said you don't think you're gonna get that much reach on X articles, right?

No, no, I think I'm gonna get good reach. I meant like people are messaging me like, oh, you can win a potential million dollars, or one person messaged me. I'm like, there's no way because I don't blog about or write about politics. I think you get hundreds and thousands of views, no problem. I don't see myself getting 10 million views in an article when it's not a mainstream topic.

Well, our point here is like, Tam, your topic, Tam, is not that big, right? Because if you're— if we're talking about dating, we're talking about politics, we're talking about money, we're talking about health, of course you're going to get a lot more views. When you're just talking about marketing, it's a little different.

I agree.

Yeah, but the reason why I'm excited about this is because this is actually where we started in our careers, blogging.

Yeah, yeah, and I already have a ton of content. I just have to copy and paste and put that stuff out there.

Yeah, I, I'm actually more excited to talk about all the stuff I'm doing with, with Claude Code, and so that's exciting to me, and I like writing, so.

Yeah, I think it's gonna be fun.

Yeah. And you know what's interesting too? I've been experimenting this with my YouTube recently because Claude code is trending up so much. I'm just cranking out a bunch of these Claude code videos and they're like 1 out of 10 on YouTube. I'm like, oh, I'm just gonna keep doing this for a little bit. Yeah.

I like it.

Saves money too. Yeah. All right, we have one more to do.

All right, let's see. Let's pick, let's see. See, we already talked about the death of software companies. Oh, the streamer vibe coding to $1 million. Who's the streamer that coded to $1 million?

Okay, so this guy over here is running a cluster of Claude code terminals, vibe coding apps until he hits $1 million. Most interesting person shipping I've seen recently. He's on here too. So you can see he's like, look, he's like dancing. He's like vibe coding and dancing.

And push-ups. Yeah, that's his dog.

So I guess that's all he's gonna do. It's like a spectacle, right? Um, and if we look at his YouTube, let's just look at his YouTube for a moment. Okay, so, so far he has 34,000 subscribers and vibecoding an app until I make $1 million. So stream 4 days ago, 18,000 views, 28,000 views, 28,000 views. Let me tell you why this is smart. So he's also vibecoding when he's not talking.

I—

when I spend time on this, I should just turn on my stream over the weekend and just turn it on, like, just talk. Look at this, amazing, right? And people follow you for the spectacle, and they also learn from you as well.

You should start streaming.

I do stream. I'm streaming right now.

No, you should stream. I probably will. While you code.

I probably will, because every single day now— yesterday, even when I was going to bed, I was going to bed, I was like, whoa, I actually shipped 5 things today on top of all my other responsibilities. This is great, but this is cool. I think if you can have a cool headline like vibe coding until I make $1 million, $10 million, or whatever, you're for sure gonna get a lot of views because people are interested in the spectacle. Yeah, and by the way, check this out. So he's been doing this for 120 days. That's why he has so many subs so far. So 120 days, he's vibecoded until he makes $1 million. How much revenue do you think he's made so far?

$30,000?

No, $3,106.90.

I hope he gets to 30,000 soon.

Yeah, because here's— when he streamed 4 days ago, that was a 3-hour stream, and the day before that, uh, it was a 6-hour 30-minute stream, which seems crazy, guys, but it's not that crazy when you're on this stuff. It goes so quick.

Yeah, he's already doing it, so it's like you're just recording your normal life.

Here's a question: do you think I should start a new channel for this one?

You should.

That's a lot of work.

Oh, you put it on the same channel.

Something to follow me by. Oh, maybe I'll do it. Maybe you'll start doing too. Maybe we'll do it together.

No, I'm pretty private with my personal life. What do you mean?

It's live streaming.

I don't stream my life or in my house.

No, not in my house. I'm just on my computer. You're on your computer just talking like you're doing a webinar.

No, but this guy's filming.

Oh no, I wouldn't. I wouldn't do that.

That's too much. No, it's like invasion of privacy.

I want to be like dancing and doing all this stuff.

No, it makes it more entertaining. You should be dancing. Go back to your EDC days, yeah?

Yeah. Anyway guys, that's it for today. Check him out, um, BridgeMind AI, and we'll catch you next time.