CEO Warns: SEO Traffic Will Be Zero?

Did you see what the Condé Nast CEO said? He's basically saying you want to act as if SEO is dead. So this is the part that everyone missed about Condé Nast CEO. He is saying that you want to act as if SEO is dead. So I'm going to share my screen right now so you all can see this and we can react to this, Neil. And then I'll go first on this reaction. So look at what he's saying. So this dude, Roger Lynch, who's the CEO of Condé Nast, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, has directed all the company's brands to operate as if search traffic to their properties will be zero. He says the era of turning search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone. We took a snapshot of search results from 7 or 8 years ago, and what you saw were a few sponsored links, then the 10 blue links. Do the same search today, you get an AI overview, then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links, then you get the sponsored stuff. Each of the last 3 years, we would do our budgets and we put forecasts of search traffic declining because we see the pattern of algorithm changes. And generally those algorithm changes were negative. Every year our search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told my teams, assume there's no search. You have to have your business plan as if search is zero. We don't expect to— we don't expect it to be zero. We expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic. So here's what I would say first, and then Neil, let's get your thoughts too. So my take on this is that I think it's a smart thing to act as if it was zero, but That doesn't mean you treat it as nothing. Okay, so you still treat it as part of your strategy, right? Because the understanding is AI overviews or LLMs, they're still grounding on these search results. These LLMs still need content from somewhere, whether they're grounding on Google, they're looking at YouTube, they're looking at Wikipedia, they're looking at Reddit, they're looking at TikTok, they're looking at— they're even looking at LinkedIn now. So you still want to have some type of strategy, but What I'm really looking at here is Neil, maybe 10 years ago or so, 15 years ago, where companies bet their entire strategy on SEO, those days are gone. Okay. So I think, oh, I thought you were saying something, but it's actually a car going by. So those days are gone. And I think you need to start thinking about the search everywhere strategy that we've been talking about for the last few years. But I think certainly, like, having no expectations around search traffic, I think that's a helpful mindset to have.

Yeah. This Condé Nast example that you're using, I just approved an outline for one of my next presentations and it has that early on in my slide deck.

Nice.

And it breaks down how they try to look at it as single-digit percentile. One caveat I want to give you here is for everyone listening, Condé Nast is a publisher. Their monetization model is very different than most businesses, right? Most businesses that I know are not publishers. I agree, it's really hard for publishers. If you're in e-commerce, you're selling a service or a product or whatever it may be that's non-publishing, I think SEO traffic is still really valuable, but you don't need the views that a publisher does. A publisher typically makes money from ads, so they need the traffic to then go sell ad inventory, typically on a CPM basis. a company, you don't need the traffic, you need the sales. And what I mean by that is if someone does research on your company through LLM or even Meta's AI or through an AI overview and they see your brand, but they don't click over right away, right? Because typically when people did research in the old search model, let's say there's 10 blue links, they may click on 5 or 6, decide what site they want to go with, and then they go back to the website. So they clicked on those 5, 6, then they go back to the one where they want to make the purchase. In today's world, if they don't click, but they understand about your brand and product and the reviews and the ratings and what others think, and they know they want to go with you, it's okay if you don't get all that traffic, but you should still be able to generate more sales, not the same amount, not less. You should be able to generate more sales with even less traffic. That's a pattern we're seeing when people are doing their marketing right. So in a non-publisher world, you still need to rely on search traffic, whether it's from an LLM or traditional search engine, but more so you need to make sure that your brand is visible and the sentiment and the context of what your brand or your products or services are stated is very positive compared to your competition. So that way you get the business and you don't need to just measure traffic. You need to also measure visibility in this new world and sentiment.

Yep. So what I would say, I mean, there's always been talk of the death of SEO, okay? I think there's always been about adapting. We've said that for as long as this podcast has been going. It's just a matter of adapting because the game board is constantly changing. Right now, I'm going to go to the other side of this, Neil. Let's go to the death of another channel over here. So this is regarding the death of email, okay? So Which is really interesting because email is like, I think when you look at the return on investment, what is it like 36 to 1, 40 to 1 or something like that? So, Tomasz Tunguz, who's a popular venture capitalist, so he says, nobody will open Gmail 5 times a day in 5 years. The average knowledge worker receives 121 emails a day. That's one every 4 minutes during work hours. The inbox is a conveyor belt that keeps accelerating. You open Gmail, you read, you decide, you respond one at a time. But the belt doesn't wait, it just moves faster, okay? So obviously today, the way we triage our email, Neil, is like we just kind of decide what to read, what not to read. And Neil actually has a— I think you're like an inbox zero freak. I just let it compound. And so I would just say this, you look at this chart over here, AI email architecture is this. You get 121 emails a day per person. You have the AI process over here. So skills and rules, on-device models, workflow triggers, And then maybe the AI will process 115 and decide how to auto-route it or draft responses and handle it for you. Then you have 6 that are high priority. And it's really every day, Neil, when you think about my email inbox or your email inbox, there's only a couple that really matter, or maybe it can go into like the tens or so, tens, twenties, thirties, maybe a little more than that. But you're not necessarily processing 121 important emails a day, right?

Yeah.

And so that's what's interesting to me because email marketing has been so huge. And now that you have the AI kind of processing here, how do you make sure that whatever you're sending is ultra important where you can get past the AI processing? Because that's what it really comes down to from a marketing standpoint. What do you think?

Yeah, I don't see emails being dead. I think they're really valuable, but I do agree in which you may only get like 10, 20, 30 emails max a day that are really important that you need to go through, assuming you're a larger organization. If you're getting 100 emails that you have to go through, that's super unproductive of A, your time, and B, that means your management and the other people in your organization aren't able to solve their own problems and they're bringing you into too many things and you probably need some personnel change.

Yeah, it means your team's not good enough.

Yeah, like you shouldn't be on that many email threads. But yeah, dude, on a daily basis, do you remember how I used to get over 1,000 emails a day? Like no joke, over 1,000 emails a day because of the blog. Now I don't know how many I get. I know we have also filtered emails. So like speaking goes to Marina and not me. Support goes to a different email. So a lot of the emails are diverted, but to my inbox, I know I still get more than 100 a day. I do know I get less than 200 a day. It's somewhere within that band. Weekends are less than 100, that I know for sure. But if you're talking about just Monday through Friday, assuming no vacation, somewhere between 100 and 200. On a daily basis, there's not more than, call it like 3 to 5 that I really need to handle that are super important. And there's probably another 10 or 15 that need responses, you know, that I need to really check up on and stuff like that. Now, when I'm giving you this 100 to 200, I'm not including getting, hey, this is Amazon emailing you, check out this new sale or promo, or this is Legion Athletics, check out this protein powder for sale. I'm not including those in emails. I'm talking about actual work-related emails. But yeah, I think people are emailing more than they need to, not from a marketing standpoint, but I do believe they're also with email, Like, people just don't know how to prioritize their time and focus on what's important.

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And speaking of email, there was a guy that you talked to named Matthew Paulson. I think we both follow him on X.

Matt Paulson?

Yes. Matt Paulson. And he had this strategy that has helped him generate— I think Eric mentioned yesterday at the event, what was it? How many millions? He's pretty public about his numbers. Was it like $50, $60 million?

He's pretty public. I think in public he said $40 million, $50 million, $60 million. Let's just say something around that range, $40 to $60 million a year. And he's been running this this email list newsletter MarketBeat for quite a while. And he has this concept known as the Make Money Button. And the way the Make Money Button works is if you opt into his investment newsletter, right? They give you like tips and things like that. If you click 3 emails within the first 7 days, you get put onto this Make Money Button list, okay? What the Make Money Button list is, it has your primary offer. So you can have different products and services. So you might get one, here's a product service offering over here because you're very engaged, right? Your open rate's going to be extremely high. And I implemented this make money button and our open rates on that particular segment is like 85%, Neil. So then it goes one offer, you get another offer 2, 3 days later and another offer, and you can just keep going through all your offers. Now, the way it works is after you go through that sequence, you are on a cooldown for the next 30 days or so, or you can be a little more aggressive and say 21 days. Now, after 30 days or so, you click 3 emails again in 7 days, guess what? You go right back onto the Make Money Button list again and you cycle through. So you should probably be adjusting that segment and updating it every quarter or so because you don't want to burn people out. But the whole idea here is that if he's added a lot of value and clearly you find a lot of value in his list, then he will auto-segment you into this other one and then run you through that. And I think that's been genius. And he said that's made him millions and millions of dollars.

And I'm assuming his make money messages are different the second time he puts you on, right? Because I'm assuming that if you do the same message over and over, they don't work as well. And I'm assuming it's different offers.

It's the same.

It's the same.

He runs the same. Same.

So he doesn't change up any of the copy or anything like that?

I would recommend changing it every quarter or so, but like I've ran the same, I've ran the same copy over and over because I literally just copied his segment because he put it up on X. And it's been, it's worked well for us.

So yeah, no, I believe it works. We do something similar on our end in which we have a drip sequence. People go through the drip of our most important emails and we sprinkle educational. And then when we're seeing people engage every week outside of education, we'll pitch them an email for one of our products and consulting. And then the third one is a webinar. So anyone who's engaging, we try to push them on those 3 things once a week. And we constantly have education. We constantly have pitching every week. We rotate up the webinars, we rotate up the consulting pitch, and we rotate up the product pitch on a weekly basis, and we found it to work well.

Well, Neil, let's talk about this because people talk about the death of email, right? And sure, I think AI filtering is really going to get more aggressive, but if you're constantly focused on education and adding value and making sure that, okay, yes, you're absolutely, you're teaching, you're sharing numbers, things like that, and you get them interested enough in your other stuff, that's cool, right? Because that is interesting enough where people want to continue to open your stuff. But if you're constantly pitching all the time, then of course you're going to get filtered out. But if they say, if they tell their AI, hey, I really like this email list over here from Neil, I really like this email list over here from Eric, because they're constantly providing value, then sure, you can maybe get past the filters, right? So we'll see how this goes. I don't think email is going to die. I think people are so used to using email. I think a lot of these things take a long time to die anyway.

Yep.

So I would just say focus on adding value because I look at Neil's talk yesterday, I look at my talk at this conference. I've never really been a pitch guy. Neil, I don't think you've ever really pitched hard. Whenever I've tried that, that just never worked out well for me. So at least that's what works for us.

I've tried pitching hard. Remember the Agora days?

Yeah, but that didn't really work. That wasn't you.

It wasn't. Yeah, sure. I pitch hard for other people due to partnerships and It did generate more money from the same emails to the same people than when I didn't pitch hard.

Like it— But you also kill a lot of goodwill too.

I do believe you kill goodwill. I don't have the exact data on it, but it just— forget the revenue side. It doesn't feel right.

And if it doesn't feel right— Exactly. For one thing, it's not you.

Yeah. If it doesn't feel right, it's just like your soul's not in it. If your heart and soul's not in it, and then eventually I believe you'll see a revenue decline from it.

Yeah. It's also, it doesn't feel right. It also kind of feels exhausting too. So, so I just like teaching and it's, I like seeing when people have a light bulb moment in their head and they might take whatever they do with it and sometimes they become customers and they don't. Right. But I'm a big fan of, and I mentioned this when you're away for a moment, but the more you give, the more you get, you help others get what you want. You're going to get everything that you want. Right. And so it's like almost like you're, you're, the goodwill comes back to you. It's like a, a wake that you leave, a goodwill wake where you're like driving a boat or something like that.

So yeah, but if you look at the contrarian viewpoint, and let's keep using Agora as an example, Agora has always pitched hard and they continually do, and they've done it for more than 10 or 15 years or however long they've been in business. Bill Bonner is one of the richest people in the world, right? I think just his real estate portfolio in Baltimore, because he picked up stuff for like a dollar You know, when the city was just giving it away and then he had to gentrify the buildings. His real estate portfolio's massive, his castles and all the businesses. When you look at Agora, all the divisions, I don't know what they generate now, but when I used to be closer with some of the people in marketing there, again, they have different divisions. Like they used to have Agora Financial and Stansberry and Money Map Press, and the list goes on and on. They're generating over a billion a year in revenue and maybe some years closer to 2. And the reason I point this out is Eric and I don't pitch hard, but we don't make anywhere near the amount of revenue that Agora makes, right? I don't know Eric's revenue, but I'm pretty sure if you combine his revenue and my revenue, we're much smaller than Agora in totality by far. So even though we don't like pitching hard, there's a lot of people who make much more money than we do pitching hard. We're not saying it's right or wrong. We both just choose not to do it because it just doesn't feel right for us. But for others, it may feel right.

Yeah. If it feels right for you, more power to you, do it. I think you just got to do what's true to you. I think if there's anything we've learned in our roughly 40 years of living, kind of around the same time, but you got to do what feels good because it's going to be more long-term. If it doesn't feel good, then you're not going to be able to do it for long-term and it's going to suck the soul out of you. So there you have it, guys. Hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll catch you next week We'll see you later. Bye.