How ChatGPT Will... Eliminate TOFU Content?

I want to talk about how ChatGPT will eliminate top of funnel content, also known as TOFU content. So just a brief recap for people. So TOFU is top of the funnel content. So it might be like, what is SEO, for example? Middle of the funnel might be like, when should I look for an agency or something like that, right? Like an SEO agency. Or bottom of the funnel might be SEO agency in Los Angeles, right? That's very high intent. People are, you know, ready to buy at that time. You know, with SEO and content marketing in general, typically you would have top of funnel content, in your stack because you want your site to gain more authority. And things like trends type of content, statistics type of content, or tools typically will drive a lot of links. And you want things to drive links because you want your site to have more authority, right? But now the game is changing. And Will Reynolds actually wrote this on LinkedIn. So he said this, and I'm actually going to share this on my screen so you can see it as well. So Will Reynolds said, I had a lead hit us up and select ChatGPT as their source. I asked for his prompts and the result made my head spin. I'm thinking about that the ChatGPT is only 1% of my traffic statement through a new lens after watching someone prompting to get an answer. For Shear, which is his agency, to have captured this lead and been there as a brand for every part of his journey, we would have had to write, have written blog posts and rank these posts for each step of his decision-making process. So again, tofu, mofu, bofu, right? A blog post. So this is one of, these are 4 blog posts he would've had to make. One is a blog post addressing their problem. 2 would be for this person that went from problem to what is a job to help with this. That would be the next part. So they have to find, okay, here's my problem. Okay, here's the person to do the job for this. 3rd one would be he looked for an agency to help with a specific problem. So I would have had to have a dedicated page explaining why we were the right fit. And then 4th one would be a branded search leading to conversion. So NP Digital, for example, or Single Grain, for example. So I bet he would've had 5 different searches leading to 20 to 30 sites visits over the, the course of weeks. Those 30 page views in all of our analytics tools vanished. He got no links. Now he went from problem top of funnel to I might need an agency bottom of funnel in 40 minutes, not 30 days. His single ChatGPT session handled all of that. No clicks, no deep dives into websites. The user gets a shortlist of agencies at the very end, searches for one, branded search matters, and converts in just one step. If this pattern scales, could ChatGPT be gobbling up all of that top of funnel? If so, be real careful assuming that 1% is too small to pay attention to. Shoot holes through this idea. I'm looking for points of validation and counterpoints. I thought this would be interesting for us to discuss.

I don't think ChatGPT and these LLMs will take up top of funnel. And there's one big reason why. If you look at where people consume top of funnel content, a large portion of it is the social web. And on the social web, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc., people are consuming top-of-funnel content. It doesn't mean that people aren't going to ChatGPT or even Google AI overviews and getting answers to top-of-funnel, but it's more so it depends on the platform. And I think some people want top-of-funnel content on many of these platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc. On Google, we're still seeing a lot of top of funnel content being clicked on even with AI overviews being at the top.

Dude, here, let me take you on a tangent, then let's come back for a second. I actually use Deep Research to analyze like, you know, clutch.co, the directory for agencies, right? You can actually analyze the categories or the blog posts or the, like for example, they might have AI categories for agencies and CRM, for example. I wanted to see their content strategy for the last 4 to 5 years and I wanted to map out a graph showing which they increased and how much content they had per category. And ChatGPT Deep Research actually did that. So that's a little tangent that you guys can run there. That one actually worked pretty well. I don't know how accurate it is. But coming back to this, so I think that, let me ask you this, Neil, are you increasing or decreasing your blog output in 2025? Increasing.

Increasing.

Okay. So my take on it, because I think you made a good point because the post that I just shared from Will, that was from LinkedIn. And there's a— there's— I was reading some articles this morning and it was shared by people from my team, but they came from X, for example, right? And so maybe we might be seeing less blog posts, but you're actually increasing it. But we might be seeing these LLMs pull more from the social graph. And that I can— I think there's always going to need to be top of funnel content in some way, shape, or form. I don't think it just goes away. I think the channel it comes from might change in terms of frequency, but I don't think it just goes away.

Yes.

All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

And if you look at you and I, when we discuss marketing topics each and every single week, we're pulling a lot of top of funnel stuff from blog posts and the social web. It doesn't matter that there's LLMs out there that can answer a lot of top of funnel stuff. We still pull stuff from the social web. If you look at all the groups we're in and the articles that are being passed around, a lot of them are from the social web and they're just linking us to stuff that people are posting. If you look at Will Reynolds, you know, what his post is, is a top of funnel post. Where is it circulating? LinkedIn. It got quite a bit of views.

Yep. All right. So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. And there will be no more Agency Owners Association. We'll save that for another Marketing School episode. And that being said, you know, we'll have some other things to throw your way in the near future. So catch you later. Bye.