AI has changed SEO forever (SEO vs GEO)

So Google rankings versus AI citations from Matt Diggity here. So ChatGPT pulled in 55.2 billion visits by June 2025. That's an 80% jump in a single year via your favorite site, Search Engine Land. Sure, search engines still get 34 times more traffic, but that gap is closing fast, which means one thing: your content has to work for both Google rankings and AI citations. So here's the split, and we can talk about this. Google takes shots, short queries like car insurance UK or best shoes, best red shoes or whatever, and runs them through dozens of ranking factors such as backlinks, relevance, authority, technical SEO. For AI, AI deals with long conversational prompts. It doesn't filter as deeply. It leans more on co-citations than traditional links. So he's basically saying, look, many old tactics still work for AI system, but here's what works for both. So For you and I both know this already, but writing an FAQ section, what is, how-to questions, right? That's going to help. Add 2 to 3 sentence summaries at the top of every article explaining the main point. Include your business name, address, phone number. So NAP, back in the day, guys, NAP. And then break complex topics into 1 to 2 sentence factual statements that AI can easily extract. And then cover 5 to 7 related subtopics within each main article instead of creating separate pages. So these are the baseline things that you can do to do well in both. Yeah.

An interesting thing that we're seeing AI pull from when people ask questions about like the best X, the best Y, whatever it may be, like best credit card, best credit card for college students, best electric car. Dude, they're just pulling from what we've seen a huge trend on ChatGPT where they just pull from random sites. Forget authority. It could be written by like joetheplumber.com. There's nothing wrong with plumbers. They're your millionaire next door. Amazing businesses, by the way. And ChatGPT will pull it and index it. And I don't think they're looking as much as context, like eat. And I do believe that's going to change in the future.

Yeah. Probably within the next 12 months, to be honest.

Uh-huh. Because we've seen some players in different verticals because we scrape a lot of the different queries on OpenAI through their API. And no joke, they're just pulling from random websites that just do list-based articles ranking products or services or sites. And the people who just guest posted are doing really well. But, you know, Google went through this, they eventually realized that not all websites are equal, and they filtered out the junk.

Yeah, eventually, like people are trying to game it right now, they'll figure it out. And then they'll— it's always like a cat and mouse game. That's what it is. And Google's always been ahead. By the way, you actually tweeted this one. This— I want to give you the shout out for this one. But 98% of people aren't getting an ROI from AI due to this. And you basically did a quick study on MCPs. So most people you're saying do not get an ROI from AI, but people who use MCPs do. So you can go on.

People who use— I have a tweet somewhere on there, but people who end up using MCP. So think of it as like an AI for— or API for AI. And what it allows you to do is connect different platforms together or software solutions together so that way the AI can actually do stuff to help you get some ROI.

It honestly still like an API to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It really is. At least that's the way I look at it. I know technically it's not, but I really do view it as a API, and the numbers were not using MCPs. Think of it as like an API for AI, as Eric mentioned as well. 96% are not getting ROI. For the ones who are using it, which is a much smaller sample size, roughly 2% are—

You got 4% here using MCPs.

Not seeing ROI. Oh yeah, 4% using. Of the 4%, 61% are seeing ROI and 2% are not, which is kind of crazy to think about. Yeah. And then when you look at, uh, oh yeah, this is for— This is reversed. Yeah, it's reversed.

Yeah. So, so look, I think Neil's main point here is if you're using an MCP, like most people aren't seeing an ROI from, from, uh, AI, but if you're using MCP, you're far likelier to see 61%, you're likely to see an ROI. Those 2%, I'm sorry guys, you just probably just need to do some training on it and you'll probably see an ROI.

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah, it's kind of crazy to think about and it's just like, People are using AI and they believe using ChatGPT or Nano Banana is going to get you ROI. If you're using the wrong strategy, it's just AI is cool and it doesn't do anything for me from a financial aspect.

Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Carrick. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. You know what's interesting? So Alex Lieberman, one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, tweeted this too. So if you were to go to Fortune 500 executives right now, and I'm sure you and I have talked to some, but the AI bar for Fortune 500 executives, if you talk to an executive, If they see they're seeing an ROI from AI right now, most of what he's seeing at least is the leverage they're gaining from AI right now is only AI meeting recordings and summaries. So the bar is extremely low right now. And interestingly enough, and I think you've seen this too, you and I, like, I know I'm speaking to like an older group of CEOs next month. And the guy I was talking to is like, dude, this group has no idea what to do, and you need to whip them into shape or whatever. And I'm sure you've already done this for organizations too this year too. What are you seeing? Yeah.

What we're seeing is we're seeing the same thing. It doesn't matter if it's run by older people or younger people or who the executives are. It's all very similar. And corporations, big or small, they all claim that they use AI, but they don't understand what is a good bar, what is a bad bar, How to actually use it to get an ROI. Is it actually creating time savings or people just spinning their wheels? The biggest thing we see when we talk to large organizations like Fortune 500, Global 10,000, whatever you want to end up calling it, they're actually seeing an increase in expense due to AI.

Mm-hmm.

They're buying all this stuff for AI and they haven't figured out how it's going to help them save money. Or make money.

Yep.

But they're reading how it's going to solve all these problems and they can't figure that part out yet.

I saw Mark Cuban on the TBPN podcast. I think it's Tech Bros Podcast Network, TBPN. And he was just like, dude, in my 20s, like I was trying to get everyone to get a PC and they're like, no, I have my assistant, I have this, right? He's like, the gold rush right now, if you're in your teens, is to get people on to help businesses get on the AI train. My question for you is, what age did you start using the internet at? Because I remember for me, I stole my mom's credit card when I was about 8 years old and I signed up for MSN. When did you start using it?

I don't know what age, but it was really maybe like somewhere between 9 and 12 years old, if I had to guess. So probably before 12, but I would say 9, 10, or 11.

Roughly around the same age, right? And so—

It was a dial-up modem.

Yeah, that's what I had.

People couldn't use the phone when I was on the internet.

Yeah, same for me. And so I didn't buy an extension, so I had to— I waited for my mom to leave and I would move, 'cause my computer desk had wheels on it, so I'd move it over to the phone thing, plug it in, and once she got home, I'd like unplug it and then move it back. That's what I did for the longest time. But my point is, most people don't know what to do with this right now. And especially if you're younger right now, this is your opportunity. If you really try to understand one business and then try to optimize that business for AI, you saw Sierra, they raised like a bunch of money and they're just building agents companies. I think there's another company.

I didn't actually see that. They raised a lot.

Yeah, hundreds of millions. There's another company that just started recently with Kushner, Josh Kushner. They're almost like an AI services company too. Yeah, so they're AI services company and they raised like $200 million, I think, just like this week.

Yeah, Josh is well connected. He's done well with Thrive.

Yeah, he's a killer. So yeah. Anyway, all that to say, go ahead.

Yeah, but I look at, AI is similar to any business, you know, tool that you have available at your toolkit. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it. I genuinely do believe it's here to stay. I think businesses just focus on the wrong thing and they look at, they have shiny object syndrome instead of just focusing on what's going to drive ROI. You know, dude, like the other day someone asked me about this podcast. They're like, you record a podcast with Eric? I'm like, yeah. They're like, how many years have you been doing it? And I was like, I don't know, maybe 5 to 10 years, somewhere around that range.

9 years. 9 years? Yeah.

Okay, so it's a long time. I knew it was more than 5, but I knew we didn't hit 10 yet or we would've celebrated on the podcast.

I don't think we would've celebrated. I think I'm likely just forget it. You wouldn't even know.

I thought we would've been like, we hit 10 years and then we're done.

Okay, we have like 1,000 episodes, 2,000 episodes, 3,000. We just keep going.

But I was telling them, they were just like, you know, they're like, okay, they're like, what's your ROI from the podcast? I'm like, honestly, I think it's negative. Like genuinely speaking, I actually think the ROI is—

On pure dollars.

On pure dollars, which is all that matters, right? At the end of the day, for me, the way my brain works.

Continue, continue.

Right? And they were saying, why do you do it? And I was like, I don't know, I enjoy my time with Eric and now Noah too. And, you know, they're just like, You know, we were talking about business and I'm like, yeah, sometimes people do things that have no ROI but potentially could. And people spend a lot of time on wasted stuff within an organization and they focus on either what we see as shiny object syndrome. They see something that's cool, they want to do it. Or the second thing is, is they listened to a podcast, watched a video, or read a book and heard on how someone did something amazing and grew and they're like, We're going to stop this. This is the new thing. This is what we're going to do. And it's like, cool, how about you go do the fundamentals that have proven to work for 90+% of businesses that you still haven't accomplished yet?

Yeah, so 2 parts to this and I'll address the podcast or my philosophy on the podcast piece. But I think one, it's not just a shiny object. People should be thinking about, yes, what drives the highest leverage? It's not even the high— it's not even just ROI things. It's what's going to drive the highest leverage ROI. That's how people should prioritize. And I think if you're going to be serious about the AI stuff, as an executive, you should have a coach or somebody helping you understand this. I don't care how old you are. That's on the AI side. Now, on the podcast piece, interestingly enough, someone came up to me at HubSpot and was like, he's like, dude, the good— actually in the past week, I've talked to a handful of people. When I get on a call with them, it's like, dude, we cut our teeth learning through you guys. I'm like, how long have you been listening for? 7 years. He's like, one guy that we just started working with, he's like, I started listening at 19 years old. There's a lot of people that learned marketing through us.

Yeah.

That I'm just, I'm kind of shocked by that. But the other thing is, The guy I met at Inbound was like, the good thing about your podcast is it forces you and Neil to kind of sharpen your brain, right? To understand kind of what's going on with trends. And you and I study our own things around business and all that, like the business we operate. But this does, it forces us to engage in discourse and whatever discourse we're having here, it stays in our mind, right?

Yeah.

I will say we did make some money too for those good 3 years that we had with, we love you DreamHost.

Oh yeah, that's true. DreamHost paid us really well.

We're ROI positive, I think.

No, but I was looking at more like a time perspective, right? I would say the podcast is really useful for me as an individual. You know, I don't know about your business, but for me, when we're going after SMBs, the podcast hasn't been useful as we've been over the years as we moved upstream.

I would say mid-market, sometimes enterprise, they're listeners. And I would say a lot of times if they're super fans, like if, especially if the CEO listening, they want to do everything that we're talking about, right? So I would say, I think it's helpful. Like, for example, you have your blog as a touchpoint, you have your YouTube as a touchpoint, we have this podcast. To me, it's not the rule of 7 anymore, it's the rule of 21. You need more touchpoints. This is just another touchpoint. And you know what? This is interesting. We just hired a new social guy because I'm so angry about how we're doing social right now. I'm like, guys, look at our Marketing School channel, 10,000 subscribers, nothing, right? And this guy came up with all these ideas like, dude, with all the clips that we do for you and Neil, because sometimes you have really good clips, sometimes I have really good clips, right? They're like, why don't you guys just like add us collab on the Instagram? I'm like, Oh yeah, duh. So there's a lot of things like we don't pay enough attention to this stuff.

No, yeah.

But I think it's just, to me it's just another touchpoint is how I see it.

Yeah, and the way I look at podcasting is, is I'm in the marketing business. Marketing is very different from enterprise than most businesses. If you're at Accenture, you can generate a lot of business, not just from RFPs, but from relationships, knowing the executives, going to Harvard Business School with them. In marketing, even if you know the right person or they listen to your podcast, marketing for enterprise contracts is a pure RFP game. It is not who you know. If you look at all the RFPs for most of enterprise, not just brands, but dollar amounts, they go to the holding companies, not because they know someone there. It's just a default that you just go to the large agencies and it's an RFP process. I was at a conference Somewhere in Europe, I think later last year. And I learned this from a person who worked at one of the big holding companies. They wrote a book and they started becoming consultants to agencies. And he told me something that was interesting.

Oh, tell me about this. Yeah.

Yeah. The guy's retirement at this point. And he's like, when I was in the agency world, it was old school Mad Men relationship style. And he's like, the marketing industry compared to most spaces has really moved to RFP game and they don't really give a crap about relationships as much. That's the difference. And what we found is we just get RFPs for not YouTube videos, not creating blog content. It's more so requirements that you have X amount of people in these regions. We don't want to work with 5 agencies. We just want to work with one. So you were one of the ones that we included in this pitch.

Yeah.

And that was it.

And that's the game. I think the way I look at this, and we can move on to the next topic, but the way I look at this is there's an ROI in many different areas. Now, is it the best ROI money-wise in terms of time? No, right?

Yeah.

But in a lot of other intangible areas, we talk about the relational wealth standpoint. I think keeping our minds sharp, I think that does dictate how we have conversations and how we make decisions too. And so I think it's a net positive in my mind, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. And I'm assuming you wouldn't be stupid to keep doing something that's not a net positive.

It's not that, some of it's friendships. But before, I know we only have time for one or two topics. I want to cover the Peter Thiel one on building a monopoly. Oh, I knew you liked that one. I'm assuming this is Zero to One from his book, or is this from something else?

Yeah, so here, I'll open this up and we should pull this up on the clip. So Peter Thiel on building a monopoly. So there's 3 steps to building monopoly. You can see—

Wait, before you go, is this a new thing or is this old?

This is just a combination of, I think, his writings from the past. So this is posted this week. So you see up here, so Peter Thiel, obviously he was involved with Palantir. Palantir is crushing right now. PayPal, right? And then Founders Fund. And so 3 steps to building a monopoly. Number 1, you start small and you monopolize. What does he mean by that? Every startup begins small and every monopoly dominates a market. Focus on a very small specific niche first. It is easier to dominate a tiny market than a large one. So let's focus on this one. Here's the example. Let's talk about it. Example, PayPal initially targeted PalmPilot users, though that early attempt failed due to a poorly defined market. So those that don't know, PalmPilot was like the iPad before the iPad became a thing. I used to always want one, but turns out it was a failure. It was too early for its time.

Yeah.

Yeah. So start small and monopolize. She just basically means niche down initially.

Uh-huh. Yep. It's like do marketing for only D2C e-commerce shops and then expand into CPG and then more and more markets and more services.

Number 2 is to scale gradually. Once you dominate a niche, expand deliberately into adjacent markets. Example, Amazon began with books, then expanded to CDs, videos, software, and eventually all retail. eBay started with Beanie Baby collectors, then grew to a broader online auction marketplace. Sequencing matters. Expanding too quickly or into unrelated markets can fail. So let's use, use an example. So maybe you started more SMB initially and then you expanded to mid-market enterprise.

What was the title for number 2?

Scale gradually.

Got it. Yeah, yeah, I would say that's right. We started SMB and then we scaled slowly into mid-market and then we slowly scaled into enterprise. And while we were doing enterprise, we scaled globally, which was very expensive, but that helped us get more enterprise.

Yep. And then last one over here is don't disrupt. So people talk about Silicon Valley disrupt, I'm disrupting this industry, this and that, right? Avoid framing your startup as a direct competitor to incumbents. True creation is not about attacking existing companies, but offering something new. Disruption can attract attention, but also unnecessary conflict. Remember we used to use Napster back in middle school? Everyone used Napster, got shut down, right? Too much attention, right?

Negative attention. PayPal grew— They're also breaking the law.

Well, yeah, that's a big one, right? But PayPal grew the overall market for payments rather than trying to directly destroy Visa. So I remember back in the day, like we were teenagers at the time, I was trying to use PayPal. PayPal had problems all the time and they're such a niche player. And I knew everybody, we know now everyone was trying to kill them and they didn't say they were trying to destroy Visa. They wanted to partner with Visa. So when we look at Carrot right now, we're like, oh no, we're not trying to disrupt anyone in the personalization space. We want to partner with you. And so right now we're working with all these companies to partner with them.

Yeah.

And the last one, bonus insight. This one's counterintuitive. The last mover advantage. So people like to say the first mover advantage. So Coke used to be the first mover, right? People talk about first mover advantage. Being first is tactical, not strategic. Aim to be the last mover in the market, make the final great development and enjoy lasting monopoly profits. So Google wasn't the first search engine, they came later and they're very much a monopoly. Monopoly, right? Strategy, dominate a small niche, then scale carefully toward the long-term vision.

Cool. Yeah.

So guys, that's how you start a monopoly. And Peter Thiel's whole thing with monopolies is you should strive to be a monopoly so you don't have as many competitors and you can get really big.

My favorite thing on one of his speeches when he talks about monopolies, he's like, one thing that they all have in common, they have a really like strong brand. And then he goes in to say, I don't understand how they build a strong brand, but it's a requirement.

Yeah.

Because like his brain just doesn't process things that way when it's— He's like a machine. Yeah, I think— all right.

Yeah, brilliant guy.

Yeah, I don't know him, but brilliant guy.

So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, rate, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.