How To Get Your Business Recommended by AI

LLMs are citing listicles more than any other content type. So, Evertoon AI ended up releasing a chart, and the chart breaks down the 6,000 most cited URLs per model on each platform for both March and April 2026. You want to guess what percentage of the time Gemini shows listicles or cites them?

75%.

65.

Close.

Google AI Mode, it's going down from here. Gemini was the highest, 65.1%.

Okay, now we're talking about AI Mode?

Uh-huh.

45%?

62.3%.

Okay.

Perplexity is at 60.4%. Google AI Overview is at 55.2%. ChatGPT is at 50.1%. Copilot's at 39.8%.

Okay.

Right? So it just goes to show, if you want to get cited by one of these LLM platforms, the listicles are your best approach, but Google's actually been making changes to listicles. Have you been seeing they've been playing whack-a-mole to listicles?

No.

Yeah, so they're specifically going after self-published listicles, which is very different. And you and I have talked about this, like, dude, people are going out there. We interviewed a marketer from a competing agency who ran their marketing, and I won't mention the marketing agency, They're like, oh, we've crushed it for them. We've created, I think it was almost 200 listicle articles on their own website. So they're ranking for a lot of agency terms. And we didn't end up hiring the guy because although it was impressive on the results, we didn't like the strategy and the tactic. We believed it was like a—

Short-term.

Short-term, one-trick pony in which if your whole playbook is, I'm just going to go create hundreds and hundreds of listicles on your own website. Well, Of course, your own business is going to list your own company, your own products, your own services as number 1 compared to all your other competitors. You agree you would be biased. Any business owner would be biased. Even if you felt you weren't the best, I don't know any business owner who wouldn't put themselves as number 1.

I mean, look at Amazon. They put their first product number 1. Why would you not do that? You have the distribution.

Exactly. And what it's causing is Google is just be like, whoa, this is just manipulated results. and they're just playing whack-a-mole at this point. But we're not seeing ChatGPT going after them as hard or anywhere near. It's more so Google is going after, and the key here is self-published listicle articles.

You know what's interesting here? So the fact that Google is going after listicles, these self-published listicles, it's no different than how they played the game before. They already have the search spam team, so they know exactly what to go after, what's being manipulated. And so when you and I saw this a couple years ago when it was happening, It's the same game because you know why? We've been whacked before, right? When we played this a very long time ago, this is 15+ years ago, 20, 15, 20 years ago, we had played this game and it was harder back then for Google search spam team to catch this, but they have to preserve the product. So they have that laid out. The thing is Anthropic and OpenAI eventually will catch up too. And I think they'll have their own versions of search spam teams, but this has been no different, which is why we've been saying this since the beginning. Yeah.

These are terrible strategies in marketing. And I'm sorry, I'm eating some Yogi's that Eric got me, which I sadly got him addicted to.

No, Yogi's are great.

Mm-hmm. It's just yogurt with fruit inside.

You can get it on Amazon. We're not affiliated, but they're great.

So any marketing tactic that produces high short-term ROI, that's really easy to do, and that's a caveat, that's really easy to do, usually 9 out of 10 times won't last long. And as a marketer or a business owner, you should avoid those tactics. And you can look at them one by one. There may be some edge cases in which you should do them, but in almost all cases, you should avoid those tactics. The reason being is you're spending energy, time, money on these short-term tactics that will go away. And then what you'll find is 2, 3 years later, all the effort and the money and the time you spent from previous tactics won't help you versus if you took the long-term approach, spent the time and money on strategies that don't produce immediate ROI and are not that easy, but then 3 years from now, if you keep doing those kind of strategies, the results start compounding and your ROI is much higher.

So we've all, well, I've always said this, that you want to do black hat things in a white hat way. So the way you would do this black hat thing in a white hat way is you would collaborate with other websites, okay? And then maybe they would list you on their listicle. But the whole idea is you don't want to do the self-service Because by the way, think of it this way. If you're an algorithm and you're like, whoa, people are really gaming this thing where it's like listicles are, if you're self-serving and everyone's doing it right now, it's pretty easy to identify if you're an algorithm. So you're better off thinking about collaborating with other people, building long-term relationships, and then doing that type of strategy. Maybe it's less volume, but you do it with these, you know, high authority collaborations. And the thing is, it's not even the link that you're going to get from it and the listicle at the end of the day, it's the relationship that you're going to get. You're going to be able to get a lot more from that partnership.

Yes.

Yep. So by the way, on this note, because we're talking about GEO SEO right now, you know what's interesting to me? I spoke to a couple people recently. One person, these are both content creation tools, okay? One dropped 80% in revenue, okay? 80%. I'm not going to name names right now, but just— I'll just say—

AI content creation tool?

80%. Okay. And I spoke to someone today. So some— a GEO tool was introduced to me today, okay? And let me tell you about something else that pisses me off. Last time I started the episode, someone pissed me off. Today, someone pissed me off again. You know what? I can only tell you this afterwards after we— But here's what happened. So, one of my friends introduced me to this GEO company, okay? And basically, I spoke with them and they're like, I'm like, we start to call. It's like, oh yeah, we don't want to ask you for anything yet. I'm like, okay, well, tell me about your product. So, I don't really get much about their product, okay? And then they're like, oh, they don't tell me much about the product. I'm like, okay, so how's your traction right now? You guys are looking to raise another round because they're looking to partner with me, right? They wouldn't tell me their traction. They wouldn't tell me about the product. I'm like, so what do you guys want, right? And then they're like, well, you know, we don't want to ask for anything. We want to ask what you want first. I'm like, dude, you're like pissing me off. Like, you're like, I get on this call because my friend asked me to get on this call. And then it's like, you don't tell me what you guys really do. You don't give me enough info. And then like, you don't tell me about your traction. So So how the F am I supposed to help you, right? And then you do this whole thing, like this whole weird positioning thing where you're like, well, I want to help you first. I really want to cuss right now. I'm just like, and I was like, guys, you're really annoying me right now. And I said that on the call. And I'm just like, I'm giving you feedback right now. If you're going to take these calls in the future, like you need to be specific about your ask because I have no idea how to help you right now. And, but it's one of those content creation tools again. So then, and, but the thing is what my point of saying this is that these content creation tools seem to be going on a downward trend right now. And it's interesting because one One person is like, they're done with that company. The, like, they're like, they don't want to work on it as much. And then the other one's like, they're just starting out. So my point of saying this is, by the way, if that company's still listening right now, the one that got on the call with me, I don't know if this is the space to get into. So.

Dude, did you see Lily Ray's study on AI content creation and the websites that are using these tools and what's happened to their traffic?

No, what happened? And she did an interview with Ross Hudgens, didn't she?

I don't know who the interviewer was.

You know what, Sajid was the first employee of Single Grain. I wasn't here at the time, but he was the first employee of Single Grain.

Yeah, I didn't know that. So pretty much the title of it is like, AI content creates a rapid growth before a steep decline. So there's 220 websites that she was analyzing using tools to see what happens when you create tons of content using AI. What ended up happening after a while, right? Keep in mind content's been published, so they saw traffic increases from organic perspective. But when you look at the data, You know, from their peak, 54% lost 30% or more of their peak organic traffic. 39% lost 50% or more. 22% lost 75% or more. Within those declines, a recurring trajectory appears. A rapid growth in organic pages over 6 to 12 months, organic traffic peak within roughly 3 to 6 months of the content peak, and then a steep decline in traffic that erases most of the gain and frequently drops below the prior baseline within the the following year. So what's happening is, is companies are using AI to create a lot of content at volume. It's causing traffic growth, but what they're missing out is from an SEO perspective, you're not just evaluated on a page-by-page basis, you're evaluated on your whole site, right? Think of it as an entity. And if you have a lot of junk on your website, it hurts the good pages that were written manually by humans. And overall, we're seeing, or what she's seeing, and we're seeing this at our agency as well, traffic starts dropping more and more and more. And you have this big messy website with tons of pages and you have to do a massive cleanup and it's very hard to recover the traffic.

It's interesting to me. I mean, I would say this, if you're going to produce something naturally, there's like a half-life where you start to, that traffic is going to decline over time. But I'm looking at the graphs that she has on this page over here and we should be able to pull up pull this up for the, um, the clip, but, um, you know, I don't need to show the camera, but maybe I will show the camera, but you see these like that, these are pretty steep drop-offs. It basically goes to nothing in the orange line. Um, and you also see the number of organic pages, uh, disappearing. At least this is from like an Ahrefs index. So, um, all that to say is, you know, it's been the same since the beginning. Like Neil and I have been doing SEO for a while. You publish poo poo, you end up with poo poo traffic.

Definitely.

Yeah. So you have a prediction here. Um, you get 3 in a row here, Neil. So you have a prediction here.

This would be 4 in a row.

Was it 4 in a row?

Yeah.

Okay, 4 in a row.

I lost the numbers.

Neil's on a streak. Neil, just for months and months and months, added no topics at all, and then today he had a random ballot of inspiration.

Yeah, so my prediction is Google will look more like ChatGPT and ChatGPT will look more like Google in the future.

What do you mean by that?

So when you think about Google, people associate Google with traditional search. We know from a, I'm not talking about it from an engineering perspective, but if you're looking at just LLMs and usage from people using it purely for search, ChatGPT is the winner by far. It has the majority of usage. I'm assuming you agree with that statement if you're excluding AI Overviews. The second winner is Google. They're in the number 2 place with AI Overviews, Gemini, et cetera, right?

AI Mode, yeah.

AI Mode, et cetera. But most people associate Google Search with just traditional search in which, hey, you're going to get some blue links and some videos and maybe an AI overview. You can go to AI mode to see more, or you can go to Gemini. You can do Lens on your phone, but not that many people use it. They're at roughly 20 billion searches a month right now for Google Lens, which I know seems like a lot, but to put it in perspective, Google's getting around 13.7 billion searches a day, just, you know, people just typing in some queries. So the 20 is not bad, but it's not a big chunk percentage-wise. And that again is monthly. And Google just made some new announcements. They changed their search box and made it an intelligent search box. It's the biggest change to search, to the search box in 25 years. So I don't know if you saw what they just released today.

What? No, I didn't see the product releases today.

So it's actually really cool. And if you see my screen, I'll play the video. Because I know Noah can see the camera there.

Yeah. So just for the editors, by the way, when we're showing this stuff, we have a link column for this. We should show these in the videos.

Yeah. So in this example, for anyone who's just listening, in Google search box, imagine a plus before you type in the queries. So in the search box, it's pretty much elongated oval. And on the right side, you have the search button. Now imagine now on the left side, you have a plus button. So you can click the plus and you can click on anything. AI mode, create images, or gallery. Where is it? Let me see the options actually again. Yeah, AI mode, create images, deep search, canvas, gallery, camera files. So for example, you can click on gallery and you can select 2 or 3 items that you like. Let's say it's a dress and that's what Google's using in this example. So the searcher could select 2 dresses, and then it highlights those 2 images, and then you add in text. You know, the example here is, help me find a similar dress, but in this color scheme instead. So they showed one dress image, one color scheme image, click search. Google showed all the similar dresses, but in that color. And that's the example of what Google's doing with search and AI. And that's just skimming the surface. They're getting really in-depth. Even with their new search feature, you can actually build an app just typing in a prompt into their search feature.

Yeah, it's called Seamless Google Search to AI Mode.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. So this is something that launched to many back in January, but it's now fully live. Okay, cool. So yeah, I mean, all that to say is this kind of reinforces— this is not investment advice, by the way. My dad was asking, if you had to pick one stock from the Magnificent 7, what would you pick right now? I said Google because they're on a tear and they're clearly profitable and they've clearly been continuing to innovate. So by the way, this— so you have this other piece over here. Google lets you build your own app within Google Search using agentic coding. Is there something else you wanted to go deeper on there?

No, I thought it just shows and it goes more with the narrative that Google is really going after OpenAI and Claude and they're integrating a lot of these features. And I was talking to my brother-in-law the other day. We were talking about businesses. I was like, you know, the business that I believe is massive right now that not too many people I haven't really seen anyone build it yet, is a consulting company that just focuses not on AI integration, because there's already too many of those, that just focuses on token optimization and fee reduction. And then you just take a percentage of the savings that you save. So think of like AWS and cloud, right? During back in the day with AWS and a lot of these cloud computing companies, there were companies that said, we would help you optimize your cloud architecture. So instead of spending $100,000 a month, you now spend $50,000 a month and they would take a percentage of the savings. I think there should be a similar business for tokens in which someone helps you optimize your token expenditure, because there's a lot of companies that are spending millions and millions, some even tens of millions. And I bet you there's many that are spending hundreds of millions because the supposed rumor is, is Anthropic's now around $45 billion in ARR. So if someone just helped you with that reduction and they're fee was a percentage of the savings, I think that's a win-win model and that business would blow up even though it's boring and ugly.

Here's what I'll say about that. So 2 things tied to Chamath. I have 2 things on Chamath today. This is a Chamath episode. So I spoke to a guy who basically is a leader at a $2 billion a year company revenue. Okay, $2 billion revenue. So pretty sizable, right? And he actually worked with Chamath's 80/90. So initially Chamath's 80/90 company was a company that said, hey, we're going to help eliminate all of your costs on like Salesforce and all these things right now. And bear in mind, this company is spending like $25 million a year on software. So they're like, okay, maybe we can chop $5 to $7 million a year. That's a good amount, right? And so they work with Chamath's company for a year and, you know, apparently it didn't work out because it was too complex to make those. And I was like, okay, so how would you have paid them? Well, they were going to take a percentage of the savings, right? And this isn't token savings exactly, but this is cutting on software costs. And that didn't work out initially. So here's what I will say though, because he has found a model that does work for him. That model didn't work initially. So maybe this token optimization model might work. I think it's still more of like a— it could be an add-on service. I don't know if it's going to be kind of the primary service. Could work, right? But what I really wanted to get into here was actually on Chamath saying, if you're running a consulting business and you're deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization, I'm looking at you, PwC and Accenture. you are letting the fox into the henhouse. OpenAI and Anthropic are openly funding and starting competitors to you while also using your usage to drive more success for them. This is not a failure on their part, but a failure on your part. So consulting businesses that understand this are adopting a control plane that allows them to arbitrate where tokens go and who generates tokens for them. So controlling the tokens, Neil, is controlling the spice, like Dune, right? So this was a key pillar of 8090's global partnership with EY, and we're close to another global partnership, but we're taking control of token generation and can direct them to any model provider, which is kind of what you're talking about actually.

So yeah, a little bit different. I saw his tweet out there. I think he's more so going after like the Accentures and the McKinseys and pinpointing how they're helping build OpenAI and Claude with all their customers and all the data and all the spend.

I do agree that I, again, like I don't think that's all that 80/90 does, but like to my point, what I just made earlier, I think token optimization and token routing is going to be a core service that companies add, and I actually think you're going to have it I think I'm going to have it too as a service.

I don't know if we're going to have it as a service. I genuinely believe that the larger players will eventually, I'm not saying in the short run, eventually will help you fine-tune and reduce the cost for you and do it in the most economical way. If you look at AWS, you know, and you take your cloud bill, they try to do reserved instances. They have consultants. They try to help you save on the bill. And we've even been pitched by Google, hey, switch to Google Cloud. We'll help you save X, Y, and Z on infrastructure and all of that. And that's why I believe that the LLMs themselves or the AI companies will try to save you as much money as possible in the long run, because if they don't, a competitor will come by like a Google and say, hey, we can do similar things and we can do it for half the token price and here's how. And then you're going to start seeing a lot of companies switch.

I have 2 thoughts, 2 more thoughts on tokens. I was talking to a founder today and we were just— it was like a 30-minute talk just on AI, right? And we're just like, dude, OpenAI and Claude are so smart because you know what, you pay the $200 a month and it's like you feel like it's an all-you-can-eat buffet and you're just going to town every day, right? But inevitably what's going to happen in the next year or two is they're going to have you so hooked on it. It's like you're going to have to pay more. And I was like, okay, fine, let's pay more, right? Because it's so damn good.

Hey, quick break.

If you're looking to work at an AI-forward company, we are hiring at Single Grain. So Single Grain, we are a tech-enabled marketing services company and our mission is to be the market and partner that B2B companies never outgrow. The way we're looking at things right now is we are going hard on tools like Claude Code, and we have different products, Carrot and ClickFlow. And our mission is to hire the best possible people who are very AI-forward, who love to nerd out on marketing, and who want to go into this future. And so it's not going to be an easy thing, but you can check out our careers page by clicking this button over here, or just go to singlegrain.com/careers, and we'll see you on the other side. The other thing is, I don't know if you saw this, Neil, but OpenClaw's founder, okay, Peter Steinberger, he spent $1.3 million on tokens in the span of 30 days, right? So he's like, people are freaking out over my token spends, but here's what nobody sees. So people are like, they're freaking out about it, the $1.3 million. It's like, how do you justify it, right? So he's actually justifying it here, and I think it's helpful for people to understand what the perceived ROI might be. So here's what he says. He says, here's what nobody sees. Part of what excites me so much about working at OpenClaw is that I'm trying to answer the question, How would we build software in the future if tokens don't matter? We constantly run 100 Codex in the cloud, reviewing every PR, every issue. If a fix on main lands, Claw Sweeper will eventually find that 6-month-old issue and close it with an exact reference. So he's just saying all these things. Okay, security issues, right? Deduplicating things, complex steps, ephemeral machines, log into Telegram. So basically he's trying to— I guess he's just saying that he's improving this quickly at scale. And he's saying that all this automation allows us to run this project extremely lean, which is interesting because there's a lot people that actually use OpenClaw. But here's the thing, we'll just leave it at that for a moment because I want to say that Hermes is starting to overtake OpenClaw. But Hermes has a much— I would say they have a more significant team, but OpenClaw has been able to get by so far until now where he's been saying that, hey, they're actually building a team around this. So it's interesting to see this because it's like, oh, this is open source. How is this so good? It's only one person doing it. But the reality now is like what's covering for it is actually that token spend. That token spend is actually what you would've spent on maybe payroll. In the past.

Yeah. What did they spend the $1.3 million on?

Or what are this? All this stuff over here, this, all this automation to help with just maintaining.

But like, what was the end result? Like, what did you, what did he get at the end of—

I think his point is, his point is saying that the $1.3 million that I'm spending a month on this keeps OpenClaw stable with a very lean team.

Got it.

Yeah.

So it's more so maintenance.

Yes. So maintenance, security issues, and a lot of tests that they need to run. That's all he's saying over here. Scans for comments, for spam, and blocking issues.

So instead of paying $1.3 to people, it's tokens. The tokens may or may not be cheap.

$12 million in payroll. And like, how many people are using OpenCLAW right now? I'm actually curious to see. So let me, let me see.

Yeah, I have no idea how many people are using it. Although I do think OpenCLAW's growth has slowed down because of Claude.

Hermes is kicking its butt now. Yeah. So, so I know you could say Claude too, and I think a lot of them are building these solutions, but Hermes is the one that's really eating their lunch. It's like it's taken up like a third of the GitHub stars now. Okay, here I have I have some data for you.

Just in most of the corporate world though, I don't hear Hermes too much, too often.

Yeah, you can see Claude.

Yeah, I hear people, everyone using Claude.

I actually think Claude Cowork, I'm sorry, at least of right now, as of this recording, Claude Cowork is a piece of crap. And they've added like these managed agents and things like that. So I don't know, like, and Claude's obviously going to claim that a lot of people are using it, but if you use it once, you're considered a user, right? So like, what do you think about that? Yeah, this is anything though. Yeah. So monthly used visitors for OpenCLAW is 38 million. Running instances, it says 500,000 active users, 3.2 million. So take that for what it is. And then 350,000 GitHub stars, and 48,000 forks, and then 1,000 active developers for contributors. Yeah. So, and I'm actually curious, so Hermees number of users and GitHub. Okay, so Hermes is 158,000 GitHub stars, 25,000 forks, hundreds of thousands globally, contributors hundreds, but they do have an active team as well. I don't know number of users here, but anyway, all that to say is that is how someone justifies $1.3 million in token spend in 30 days.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's a big amount.

Yeah. You look like you're highlighted on one. Do you want me to pick the next one? Here, I'll pick the next one. Go for it.

Pick the next one.

So, you know, a lot of people are talking about this. They built this, this AI tool that replaces CMOs, right? And I want to talk about this, right? So someone here, so Guri Singh, your competitors are about to hire an AI CMO and you don't even know it exists yet. Higgsfield just launched Supercomputer and most people think it's a video tool. It's not. It's an AI CMO you hire once and it runs your marketing while you sleep. One prompt, it picks the workflow, routes the thinking to GPT-5.5 Pro, and you give it your TikTok, your Meta ads, your X, it studies your niche, ships new content, reads analytics, Every run sharpens the next one. You stop opening 14 tabs, you stop hiring 4 freelancers, you stop guessing what hook to try next. Okay, so here's the thing about these types of posts. These posts really annoy me because the thing is this, who's the one that's going to come up with the strategies? Who's the one that has the taste ultimately on this stuff? And by the way, this supercomputer from Higgsfield, it eats up tokens like crazy and you can only use it like a couple of times. Like if you're on a free trial, you can probably use it like once and that's it, right? But, you know, it's interesting to me, Neil, because you have the Grand Theft Auto CEO. He said something on an interview. He said what he's learned from seeing so many games being created over the years, you know, you can have thousands and thousands of games created every year. You might have 1 to 5 hits and that's it. So you know what he said, Neil? He said that in terms of AI replacing humans, it cannot replace the taste piece because you can make as many apps as you want right now, as many games as you want.

Yeah.

It can't replace that. Same thing goes for CMO, a really good CMO with taste and that experience that, that taste comes from good experience that no CMO that's good is going to be replaced for a long time.

No, the thing that a CMO has, it's not just taste, it's experience. If you're good at taste, if it comes, if you've been doing something for a long time, that experience is really hard to replace. And the easiest thing to ask yourself is, how often have you used LLM and found it to be off? Every time I ask this question, almost everyone raises their hand.

You asked that last week.

Yeah, I asked it last week and almost everyone raises their hand. And the people who don't raise their hand, it's kind of scary because it's off. There's instances of when, if you use it where it is off, and if you don't realize that it's off, you're doing things a really wrong way, especially if you're using it for work. So you should always double-check. It doesn't mean that it's off majority of the time, it's just off a percentage of the time, whatever that percentage may be. Some of those mistakes could be costing— can cost the organization millions and millions of dollars, sometimes even more than that. This is why you have experienced talent.

So speaking of experienced talent, Neil, do you know what the Airbnb CEO said, Brian Chesky?

No.

So he said, I don't think people managers will have any value in the future. So he said, the people most screwed by AI will be the people managers. So, you know, my thinking on this, Neil, is And I'm curious to get your thoughts too. When we think about hiring at my company now, you can't just be a manager, you have to be an individual contributor. So, you know, you've talked about the concept of player coaches. I think everybody has to be a doer in the company now. If you're a pure people manager and we both have very people-intensive businesses, I think you're in trouble. And so like, what are your thoughts on this right now? And then we can kind of go back and forth on it.

Sorry, someone ended up texting me. I thought it was an emergency.

Neil's not paying attention. It's probably related to a deal.

No, no, it's not even that. You know how iPhone summarizes your texts?

I don't read— I don't have notifications on. If you try texting me right now.

No, I don't have notifications on either.

Yeah, then how are you seeing the texts?

I'm— I have the text app actually open on my phone.

Why are you opening it in the middle of a podcast?

It's because I have to move in a house, so it's like a lot of stuff I want. So someone's texting me and they're just like—

You might as well share the story because—

Sure. So someone was texting me about something silly. Technically, first they called me and I didn't— I ignored the call. So my calls don't go on silent. I can see when a call comes up. And then they started texting me and I can see the text and Apple is summarizing how it's important and I should call back sooner than later to discuss a bathtub. And I'm like, this is not important. And I just texted back, I'm like, the designer is on site, just have them look. I'm like, if there's anything else that's wrong, then text me. But other than that, I'm like, I don't know why you're bugging me.

Yeah, I see, I see.

I see what this is. This to me is AI failure because it's telling me it's important when it really isn't important.

I know what you mean. Yeah, it'll say like sometimes it'll say like, oh, this is a big— this is an emergency right now and check it. And when you look at it, it's like it wasn't an emergency.

Correct. It's just, you know, Apple summarizing. I'm not saying it's bad overall. I do like the summaries, but sometimes it's just off. Another example of how AI can be off.

Dude, speaking of, we're just talking about compute capacity. So OpenAI just announced this. They're releasing OpenAI Guaranteed Capacity, a new offering that enables customers to guarantee long-term access to OpenAI compute. Dude, if I can buy at a fat discount right now, I would consider it. So they've made long—

are they selling it at a fat discount? Yeah.

So, well, I don't know about that, but now it's called Guaranteed Capacity, helps customers plan ahead for critical workloads in a compute-constrained world. Look at how they're marketing it. So you have to talk to sales about this. It says plan for capacity, but scale with capacity you can be certain about, plan with predictable compute. It doesn't say anything about discounts, I'll tell you that.

So yeah, no, it's— yeah, people will buy in advance if you can get discounts.

Well, let's come back to the statement here. So Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO, says, I don't think that people managers will have any value in the future. And I think what he really means by that is that pure people managers are in trouble. But if you're a people manager and you know how to individually contribute, you'll be fine.

Yeah, it goes back to being a player coach. I do believe there's going to be people managers in the future. I've always believed that managers, at least in my company, our managers are all player coaches. I don't know one manager that's not a player coach in which they'll get their hands dirty and help manage. The reason I don't believe managers go to zero, let's use marketing for example. If you've been in the industry for 20 years, so like we have an ad agency similar to Eric, ours is called NP Digital, and we have managers who have been in the ad agency space literally more than 20, 30 years. And we have new people as well who have been doing it for 2, 3 years. What's valuable about offices, and I know I'm switching, but it'll all make sense in a bit. What's valuable about offices is when people come in person, the younger people get to learn from the people with more experience and it helps them improve their skills faster, at least from what we've seen. This is also why people managers are important is because if they're a player coach and they're good at what they do, they have a lot of experience. Even if it's virtual, it's not in person. The younger people may not be learning as quickly, but the younger people will gain a lot of knowledge by just being around seasoned managers who are willing to share and help them out.

You know, at least with my observation, Neal, with the younger people right now that just pick it up, it's very easy to train kids on AI when they're— and I call them kids because they're in college or some of them coming out of high school— when there's no— when it's an empty slate and they're opening to just listen to everything. Now, that being said, you still need to mix it with experience. So I think we're going to see an influx of more hiring from college grads and even high school grads.

Yeah.

And that's going to be a good thing because people are like, oh my God, all these kids are not going to have jobs. I think a lot of them are going to have jobs.

Yes, I think a lot of them will.

By the way, I don't know if you've seen this one, but clipping is about to take over tech media. So we've kind of talked about this, but I want to go into how it's applying to tech companies.

Okay.

All right. So Lovable is— they have like a clipping channel that's clipping their CEO. Ramp got 85 million views with The Office's Baumgartner. I think it's Kevin from The Office. The bald guy, do you remember what I'm talking about? Do you watch The Office?

I didn't watch the show.

Okay, you would love it. You would love it. And then, and so, Ram got 85 million views and used 5 dedicated cameras, okay? Replit has a clipping channel, clipping their CMO and getting hundreds of thousands of views, okay? Whisperflow, so basically a lot of tech companies are starting to do this now, and we're starting to see this a lot more. So here's what I'm going to say. So when he talks about clipping, by the way, I see the clipping as more horizontal videos or more vertical videos, you know, the ones that come straight down.

Yeah.

I think the clipping that works for people like you and me is more so the horizontal ones, the ones that go to the side, because I've actually looked at my X analytics, the ones that are straight, like vertical, they don't perform nearly as well as the horizontal ones. Same thing for LinkedIn as well. So I think if you go 2 to 3 minutes, 2 to 10 minutes or so, mid-form content, Horizontal, that works a lot better than just the short form. So I think, sure, clip away, but when we're talking about B2B, at least from what I've seen, that performs better.

So from B2B, we haven't seen any patterns with vertical versus horizontal. We see more so the content type. When I mean content type, like the subject, the topic, is it trending? Is it not? Is it hot? That impacts views more than anything else.

So to continue on this piece, so it says the bottleneck is source content. So what Neil and I are actually filming right now, is source content. So even though this is a podcast here, you'll get the long form. The way we look at this is this is building a content factory, right? And you want to engineer the content for clipping. So in this, this episode, actually, we actually created a lot of classics. It's only that I didn't know Neil that was going to contribute today. And so usually he doesn't. And so what happens is when I contribute and I ask my, my, my bot to do the work, it will actually look at all the links, it'll look at all the titles, and I'll add a hook for each one. That's an example of engineering the content for clipping because you want to have like a strong hook. To be able to lead to it and to get people's attention for the first 1 to 2 seconds or so. Otherwise, you're going to lose them. And then you have to make sure that you're curating the content and then making sure that they're going to the right channels. And then you want to make sure that you're tracking everything. We use Metricool, you can use an API for that. And then you double down on what's working and what isn't working. And then you just continue doing that. But I think you're seeing more and more people do it. And, you know, we've been adding basically mid-rolls to the end of our clipped content. And I would say, yeah, it's been working pretty well. So anyway, all that to say is we're going to see a lot more of this.

Sure.

It's just the meta. It's the way of playing this right now.

With B2B, when you mentioned vertical versus horizontal, I think one differentiator here is the vertical content tends to be shorter. In B2B, depending on the topic, a lot of people want more in-depth content because B2B can be very technical in some aspects. The horizontal content instead of vertical, right? Think of vertical as like short or Instagram Reels, think of the horizontal content as like a long-form YouTube video, you know, and I think that's what tends to do better in B2B is when you just go more in depth on a topic versus just covering it for 30 or 60 seconds.

Yeah. Even when you go, by the way, shout out to Overlap, by the way, Overlap's been great for clipping. Overlap, I think, has a limit on these horizontal 2-minute videos, and 2 minutes is actually not that long, right? And those actually perform pretty well on X because yesterday or the day before, Neil, I was just scrolling through my X and I was looking at all the horizontal ones from the past. And the moment you— every time it jumps from like a vertical one to a horizontal one, it just performs a lot better, the horizontal one.

But is a horizontal one longer in length?

It's like 2 minutes versus 1 minute. It's not much longer.

That's double the length.

It's double, but you're getting like a multiple of the views.

Yeah, but you're also getting more engagement. If someone's watching more, it keeps them on the platform longer. So the algorithm's probably pushing it harder.

You are. Here's what I'll say too. If you have a really good topic that performs well, like obviously these algorithms are different, but when you're talking about like something that crushes on Instagram, you push it on X, it just doesn't move, right? And so we don't know. I mean, technically we do know how their algorithm works because he open sourced it on GitHub, right? And he has the— in the algorithm, I actually asked my Hermes agent, I was like, hey, tell me about this agent. And it's like, Oh, it's like this algorithm really likes videos. And so anyway, all that to say is whenever we tried doing the short form, and Neil has a point there, I'm just saying from what I'm seeing right now, I'm staring at it. Yeah, big difference.

Yeah, and I think, you know, it comes all down to almost—

Dude, we have a horizontal one, okay? 42 seconds, 124,000 views, horizontal.

I really do think it comes down to the topic more than if it's horizontal and vertical. I don't think their algorithm cares that much if it's horizontal or vertical. I would be shocked if it does.

I think it cares. Yeah, because here's what— here's something else I'll say. I talked to a guy that has a startup that specifically helps LinkedIn companies and they have, they say they have a lot of data. They're like, yeah. So he's criticizing me, right? During the call, he's like critiquing me. He's like, dude, you should stop posting horizontal. I'm like, same to you. I'm like, what data do you have to back that up? Right? He's like, I'm telling you from what we've seen, when you switch it to the— when you go from vertical to horizontal, they just do better. Right? And then now, like for the first time on X, I'm seeing that I don't have anything to verify it on LinkedIn, but all I can do is look at my account. I'm like, yeah, big difference. Yeah.

Yeah, on my LinkedIn, I've gotten more views on the vertical than I have horizontal.

No, the other way around.

No, I'm saying vertical, I've gotten more views.

No, you haven't.

Yes, I have.

I'm looking— I looked at your videos the other day.

Yeah, but that's just one. If you just look at it in totality—

We're not talking individual, dude.

That's cheating.

We're talking about individual.

Then I could say, oh, that topic was more of a hit and it's 10 minutes longer, so the engagement— No, I'm telling you, dude, this is the bunch of biggest baloney ever. If a vertical or horizontal, that doesn't logically make sense. And if you look at X, they publish their algorithm, I do not see one being horizontal versus vertical and it creates more engagement.

Here, let me ask my thing while we— while we talk.

Wait, go check this out. Go look at what the average length is for a horizontal versus a vertical video. I bet you almost always, majority of the time, a horizontal video is longer. That impacts engagement.

Longer than vertical videos, uh, looking at the X algorithm. And GitHub repo. Okay, so we'll come back to that. And then I'm looking at—

Yeah, I just don't see it because you've also had vertical images of videos that get millions of views.

Not on X, not on X, not on X or LinkedIn.

Have you tried placing those videos on X and LinkedIn recently? Yeah.

What do you mean placing?

The vertical, the ones that got millions of views, like recently going—

Yeah, we have, we have.

Like recently, like now, like today or last month? Not like last year.

Like last month, last month. Yeah.

Which one?

They don't work.

Which one that got millions of views on YouTube?

We tried the ones that I don't remember, but we tried the ones I'm like, hey, let's just try it on all of them. It doesn't work.

Pull it up.

Which one?

It doesn't work. We got right here.

It doesn't work.

All right.

While you're doing this right now, Neil, I'm looking at yours. Okay. So I'm looking at Neil's vertical views right now. So 100 likes on this one. Okay. Another vertical one, 146.

You got to go look at the views.

Another one, 106. I can't look at your views. Only you can see your views.

Oh yeah.

Okay.

So then your next one, by the way, But on your X, by the way, I'm scrolling down to May 14th. I don't see any verticals. You're only posting horizontal.

Because we switched.

When'd you switch?

Recently. You can ask my team, but okay. I'm looking at, okay, your horizontal one on LinkedIn, and I don't want to lose the audience here, but we just, you got 270 likes on this one and 81 comments.

How much longer was the video?

This one was 15 minutes. The other one was Your other ones are like 1 minute or so, okay?

Yes.

And by the way, I'm not disagreeing with you on, yes, the views, the retention matters, 'cause they do want watch time.

Which they've actually published as part of their algorithm.

That's why I believe horizontal— Or is that LinkedIn, by the way? So I don't know about LinkedIn, but X—

Almost all social platforms look at video engagement.

Yeah, they want more watch time. I don't disagree with you there. I will say though, like, okay, you published another one here, 556 likes on it. It's a 15-minute one. So yeah, and you could make the argument, Neil, that a horizontal video has, it's longer form, so by default it's going to get more engagement, right?

Yeah, but you typically, people spend more time creating a horizontal video than a vertical.

Yeah.

But like I'm looking, I'm already at April 19th. I don't see any vertical videos on your profile.

On X?

Uh-huh, I'm continually scrolling.

Why is my Hermes not responding to me? Uh-oh. Okay, there we go.

I'm going back even more and more and more. Let's see, I'm on April 13th. You have a lot of X content. All right, I'm still going. I'm on April 5th. I see a GIF. That one's cool. Old school Transformers. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh.

Anyway, so I'm already in March. I still don't see any vertical videos on your profile on X.

Yeah, beats me. But point is we've tried it so we can move on. While my Hermes pulls up the algorithm over here. So I'm going to move on topics. Let's move on to Google's guide to optimizing your website for AI. Okay.

Okay.

So this is the part that everyone missed about Google's guide to optimizing your website for AI. So you've seen what they wrote about how to optimize your site for AI?

I have not seen the article, but I did see someone post on LinkedIn, how anytime they tell you what not to do, when people do it, they do better.

What is that?

When it comes to SEO and AI and GEO, because they have some guidelines that are published.

So this is the— I'm talking about the guidelines. Internet sucks, but— Oh, there you go. I got it. Okay.

Okay.

So this guy wrote this. Okay. So to Neil's point, Google released something called Optimizing Your Website for Generative AI Features on Google Search. Okay, so here's what he says. Basically, it's like, oh, is SEO still relevant for generative engine search? So this is what we should talk about first. Okay, so Google said, in short, yes, best SEO practices continue to be relevant, which is interesting, because when people reach out to your company or my company, when they start saying, oh yeah, we just want AEO, we just want GEO, we don't want SEO. What do you say?

If they just want SEO and not GEO?

No, if they just want GEO, AEO, they're like, oh, we don't really need traditional SEO, we just need GEO, AEO.

What do you say Well, we'll try to tell them what they, what we believe they need is and why. And if they only choose that they want one thing or to start off with one thing, we'll work with them. And then we try to showcase how it's great, how it also benefits SEO and how we can do a few other things and even kickstart the SEO even more. But we will be upfront and tell them, hey, there is overlap in both GEO and SEO.

Yep. So what Google, and I'm not going to add anything to that. It's just the same thing for our side, but Google also said What do you want to do? You want to create valuable non-commodity content for your audience. Easier said than done.

Okay.

But you should think about what does that mean exactly? That means thought leadership content, right? That could be a really helpful PDF backed with data. Okay. What else could it mean? It could mean what?

My bad. I'm still scrolling on your X profile. I'm already in January 18th. I still haven't found a vertical video.

What are you talking about?

I'm certain. You want to see the last vertical video I found?

Can you just— here. Okay.

I'm scrolling, dude.

Here, I'm gonna scroll. I'm gonna scroll to the ones now because you're trying to make a point. I'm gonna show you right here. So I'm gonna go all the way back. Oh, I saw one.

12,000 views. Here you go.

I'm gonna go back all the way.

12,000 views.

So since Neil wants to double down, I'm gonna shove it in your face now. No, no, no, no, no. You're not letting us go.

I think you're talking out of your butt.

No, no, no.

Just being honest. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's obvious that these algorithms look at engagement.

Vertical has less views, man. I didn't disagree with you though.

I know, but that's why vertical would get less. I didn't disagree with you.

But you created a vertical that's 10 minutes. But you asked me a question. You said, did we publish any verticals that performed well on these other channels here? And I'm going to pull one up for you right now. Okay. So—

Yes, I want to see it because I don't see any verticals on your ads.

It's going to ruin this. We're spending so much time on this right now. We're going to— it's not good for the audience.

I don't mind because I had to go all the way to January.

I'm already beyond January. Okay. So, so let's see. Keep going. But you got to keep going.

You're talking about roughly 6 months ago.

I'm talking about we have published these things and it's not like the algorithm just magically shifted into something new.

Okay, fair enough. Yeah, but where is it months and months ago?

Yeah, it is months and months. I'm looking at it right now. I'm looking at it. Look, I'm looking at a bunch right here. You see this? 118 views, 188 views.

When was this?

This is, uh, December.

December?

Yeah.

But I also think it's the topic because some of your horizontals have like Jensen Huang in there and all these people.

My point is these same ones we've published on Instagram and they've gotten way more views. Not 100 views. You know, it's not 100 views, right?

I don't know what is on your Instagram, but I can—

I got one over here. I got— hey, remember the ones when I said if you hate billionaires, you have low IQ? Yes, that one crushed it. Look at this, 245 views.

Wow.

Yeah, that's right. If you hate—

but it could just be X is a different audience for that, and there are a lot of rich people on there. If you hate billionaires, what is it? If you hate billionaires—

If you hate billionaires, you have low IQ.

Have low IQ?

Yeah.

Eric Siu. Hating billionaires means you're focused on— Instagram. All right, let's see if I can pull up the reel. It did better on Instagram than X, but I just don't believe if it's— I don't think vertical versus— if I had to break it down, what I'm getting at is The format of vertical versus horizontal makes no difference on view count. I don't think that's part of their algorithm. I think it's everything to do with the content, content length, etc., but not actually the format if it's vertical versus horizontal.

Remember, I just gave you an example, right? So I, when I had a video that got 124,000 views and it was only 42 seconds, that was horizontal recently, right? And you can look at the other ones. I'm trying to pull some up from recently, but it just, nothing else has gotten close to that before. Now, I want to caveat that by saying the, The caption I had was pretty good too.

What was the caption?

I think the caption carried it. So it was, my bet, here's the caption, Neil. So it says, my bet is everyone is going to have something River-like at their company. So talking about the Shopify thing, and that was trending at the time.

Yes.

So that helped it. Yeah.

But I think it's all, or what I'm getting at specifically, yes, we understand engagement matters, we understand hooks matter. I don't think the video format of vertical versus horizontal actually makes the difference in views. If anyone actually has real data on this and they took the same clip, same, you know, uh, caption, same hook, et cetera, and one format vertical, one horizontal, curious to see if you have data, please share it with us and then we can go from there.

Yeah. So, and by the way, both these things can be true, right? Like I didn't disagree with you earlier. I said, look, if there's greater watch time, it's going to perform better.

Yeah. But I'm just saying, I don't think formatting matters. You know what, actually I should just text my friend at LinkedIn.

Yeah, why don't you? I will after this. Why don't you do it right now?

It's because it goes on camera.

Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, good call. Okay, so let's continue on this. So we'll see what happens. And if you guys work at any of these companies, oh, actually, I have someone I can hit up too. But we'll hit up our friends, we'll see what happens. And we'll settle the debate that way. Now, going back to talking about Google optimizing your site with AI over here. Okay, so a couple things, and we can react to this over here.

over here, right?

So, so first of all, Google again said SEO is still relevant for generative AI search. So for those of you that come to us when you say we just want GEO, AEO, come on, this stuff still grounds on SEO, traditional SEO. The other piece is create valuable non-commodity content for your audience, which we talked about. The other part is build and maintain a clear technical structure for AI SEO. Guess what? That still goes back to traditional SEO, like a lot of the technical structure that we're talking about right now, schema markups, having an FAQ section, having a summary at the top with the bullet points. And all the, all these things that are basically traditional SEOs and technical SEOs look at still matters, right? And then it says what you don't need to do. Okay, you don't need llms.txt. You don't need to chunk your content. You don't need to rewrite your content just for AI systems. You don't need to seek inauthentic mentions. And you don't need to overly focus. Interestingly enough, you don't need to overly focus on structured data. What do you think, Neil?

My bad. I got this one as a real emergency, but it's not—

Neil's distraction machine today, man.

My wife's like, I got a spider in my car. What do I do?

Seriously? Seriously? Seriously? I'm like, hit it.

Take care.

Okay. Anyway, so here's what Google said to focus on for AI SEO. Okay. We apologize guys for today. So as you continue working on your website, remember that there are plenty of content thrives in Google search without any overt SEO at all. And you don't need to accomplish everything in this guide in order to succeed on Google Search. To recap, here are the key takeaways from this guide. Apply SEO best practices to generative AI search. So continue prioritizing foundational SEO best practices, such as building clear technical structure, creating unique valuable content, and then create non-commodity content that's helpful, reliable, and people-first. And then third, prioritize effective SEO strategies over GEO and AEO hacks. And you can ignore chunking content, creating unnecessary text, LLMs.txt, And then finally, exploring agentic experiences. So stay informed about emerging technologies that allow AI agents to interact with your site, such as browser agents and new protocols. I think this is all great. By the way, SEOs like to invent work. Yeah, you know, I've been chunking my content in these llms.txt. That's how they get you to pay their consulting prices.

Dude, so many SEOs say, oh, if you don't do this thing, you're not going to get any LLM traffic. What's that?

Cloudflare.

Cloudflare ended up releasing something for LLMs where it ends up reducing the file size, it makes it easier so they can just get to the text of the, or the meat of your content.

The .md maker?

No. Is that what it was? What did you call it?

The .md maker, like the markdown maker. There's a markdown—

Oh, I think it's, is it markdown?

Yeah, because agents like reading markdown and to an extent even HTML.

Yeah, markdown for agents.

Yeah.

Right, so they introduced this a while ago. Don't get me wrong, like it's cool, but whether you do it or not doesn't necessarily mean your traffic's going to go to zero or it's going to double.

Yeah.

And we ran tests with this specifically using CloudSphere's solution with a few clients. And guess what the difference in LLM traffic was?

Like almost nil? Pretty much.

Exactly. Now, I'm going to caveat this in which we don't have an exact way to know if you're getting more citations and people are seeing your brand mentioned more and it wasn't causing traffic. But from a traffic perspective, we didn't really see any meaningful results. And the reason I throw out that We're not 100% sure is you could say, oh, Neil, why aren't you using visibility tools? Well, with AI visibility tools, you put in a prompt and then it tracks it for you. You don't know exactly what a user types in. There could be a sentence that Eric and I are searching for on Google's algorithm or some stats, but if we type it in with a few different words in that sentence, we can get different results. Heck, if you use the same prompt over and over again, you still can get different results. So the AI visibility tracking is not perfect. Eventually, you need Google and OpenAI and ChatGPT to replace something like Search Console.

We should do a— here's a fun episode. You would get views on this one. So Neil's building a home in Beverly Hills right now. I'm just curious, when you're building a new home in Beverly Hills to figure out the right materials for your home, how was the marketing that convinced you? Like, how did that work to convince you to buy the right thing? Was it referral or what else went into it? Like the tub, for example, that you're talking about. What marketing got to you to convince you that that tub was the right tub to pick?

It's called, I didn't pick anything and I will show up to the house and whatever it looks like, it looks like.

So the marketing is the marketing happened to your wife?

Yeah, I have no idea. It's called designer wife or whoever picks stuff picks it. And then I just go in and whatever's there, I think it's beautiful. Nobody say it's not beautiful.

You get in trouble.

It costs me more to change it. No, nothing trouble. It just costs me to change it, which I don't want to do. Yeah.

Okay. So that's a practical business side of it, right? But I'm just talking about like, not enough people talk about the marketing that goes into building a home, right?

There's actually one channel and it appeals to women. It's Pinterest, right? Because they have more of a woman audience than a male audience. What a lot of people do, I kid you not, when they're doing interior design stuff, they go look on Pinterest and they go look to see what's popular and has a lot of engagement and likes. And they're like, oh, Oh, I like some of this stuff. It's really popular. Other people like it. We should do something similar to this.

This is what we call vibe marketing.

There you go.

Yeah, yeah.

Quick break.

If you're doing AI SEO or content marketing in general, you know what the problem is. The problem is you're spending hours writing yourself, or you're paying agencies lots and lots of money, and you're getting AI slop that sounds just like everyone else. That's why we built ClickFlow. ClickFlow creates production-grade content that actually sounds like you. Plus, it helps you with other areas such as building internal links, creating FAQs, and more. One customer even reported saving 90+ hours a month just by using ClickFlow. You can get a 14-day free trial just by going to clickflow.com. No more AI slop, just production-grade content that drives traffic and conversions. Back to the show. So I, I have this chart I want to show you, Neil. You might have seen this already, but the whole idea here is that everyone was talking about ChatGPT, and then so Anthropic fell behind, right? Now they say it's AI boom's front runner. So I actually wanna debate this, Neil, because look at this, look at this chart. I'm showing Neil, but he's not looking, but it's okay. So if you look at this chart over here, it actually shows you that this is ramp spend, share of ramp customers with paid subscription to AI services. So again, Anthropic was behind before, but now it's AI boom's, it's the AI boom's front runner. So you see this over here, OpenAI, it's in the baby blue, it's going up and up, you know, 2025, boom, it explodes. And then now you can see Anthropic 2025, they're almost like, we call it, I don't know, $5 billion in revenue or 5 million customers or something like that. I don't know what it is, or, oh, 5%. And now it has shot up to about 35% or so, and OpenAI has actually gone down. Okay. And then you have Google at the bottom, XAI at the bottom. So all that to say here is Wall Street Journal and Ramp are basically saying, oh, Anthropic is emerging as the presumptive front-runner in the race for artificial intelligence supremacy. So who knows how true this is right now? Because Neil, one thing I'll say to you is that I have actually switched back to OpenAI. Months ago, I was talking about Claude, everyone was talking about Claude, everyone was talking about Opus. Even the guy I had the AI conversation with this morning, we're like, oh, we switched over to Codex. And I hope my team isn't listening to this, but here's what I'll say. Wait, why don't you want your team to listen to this?

Because they're all on Claude team.

Right? It would be a pain in the ass to switch them. So I'll tell you what, CTO, OpenAI. I'm on OpenAI, okay? Even though I pay for Claude Teams, but Codex is— it is the shit right now. Pardon my language, but everyone that's serious right now is back on 5.5, ChatGPT 5.5. And I'm just saying this tug of war is happening all the time. So we might say Anthropic's ahead right now and they have the mindshare, but I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI just takes it right back.

And I wouldn't be surprised if Google comes out of nowhere and just kicks both of them So I don't think OpenAI is going to quickly take back the mindshare for and compete against Claude Code. And the reason I say that is I know so many companies that are already in contracts with them. I'm not saying eventually in the long run, it'll just take time to pay it back.

You can't renege from your contracts that quickly. I think it's going to take— it's, I think I think what I'm speaking about, Neil, is actually consumer mindshare, right? And I think that's going to take a little time too. Right now, I'm just— we're talking people at the cutting edge, like developers. But I think we're going to see this constant tug of war. And that's a good thing for us, because this competition benefits nobody but us, the consumers and the businesses.

Yeah. That's what I think.

But again, you look at Google down here, you can barely see it, Neil. But they were like, they're going to— I think they're going to shoot up. But you can look at this OpenAI, like Anthropic, and then OpenAI went You see that?

What is the chart based on? Share of—

Share of RAMP's customers with paid subscription to AI services. So it's not exactly the best data source.

So it's, it's, it has the tech community, which is, I would probably say is the early adopters.

Yeah. Yeah.

But does it show you percentage of spend?

This is percentage of customers with paid subscriptions. No, not, not percentage, but this is just overall.

Yeah. I'm curious more on the percentage of spend.

Well, when they reveal it, they reveal it.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I don't know. All that to say, hey, by the way, update us on what happened with the house.

The house being done or the spider in the car?

Every time Neil has to look at the phone, he has to update us on what's happening with the spider. What's happening with the spider?

It's brownish and tan.

That's all I know. Is it big?

Yeah, but it can't be that big. We live in Southern California and we live in residential with not really any forest or anything like that. We're not like in the mountains, so it can't be that big.

You should buy her a portable vacuum so she can vacuum whatever spider she wants. That's what I've done before.

The Honda Odyssey has a built-in vacuum. I mean, pick up the chicken nuggets, the french fries.

Oh, that's good. That's good.

No, I'm not joking. Honda Odyssey literally comes in with a built-in vacuum.

Does it really?

Well, if you buy the one that does, you know, you need to buy—

you need to buy the fly swatter that has the electric thing on it so it electrocutes everything. I used to electrocute spiders all the time.

Yeah. You know what I, I just bought recently? You'd be shocked at me. I talk so much crap on the car. What about the Tesla Model Y?

You did? Oh, congratulations.

You know why?

They don't make it anymore. Are they making more? They're still making more.

Model Y, the cheaper one.

Yeah. Okay. So they're still making this.

Yeah. They make the S, not the S. What is it called?

The 3 and the Y. The X and the Y. The X and the S aren't being made anymore. Yeah.

Their marketing message sold me.

What? How?

There was some stat that I saw. I forgot on which site. Tesla's self-driving car is up to 7x safer than a human driver. Okay? That's the average human driver. I'm assuming you agree I'm not the best driver.

No. So 14x for you.

Right? And I don't know if the 7x was true or not. I don't know exactly where I saw it.

Yeah. But it got you.

That sold me. It's safer for me. It's safer for the people on the road. And I'm not like a terrible driver. Sometimes I just miss the freeway exit because I'm thinking about work or whatnot.

Oh, sometimes worse than that. Sometimes Neil will go in the wrong direction on the street.

I haven't done that in a long time, but yes, I have.

That was over 10 years ago. Yeah.

But I have done that. I'm not the best driver. So I now only drive in areas that I know, although technology's a lot better now with the GPS.

Do you autopilot it?

I will now with the Tesla. And the cool part is, is in the state of California, because some of my daughter's schoolmates, they don't hold the steering wheel. Like you don't have to hold the steering wheel. You don't have to touch a gas pedal or brake, of course. You just have to look at the road. And people are like, oh, you can cheat if you wear sunglasses. I don't want to cheat it. I actually will have my hands ready to grab in case it messes up. But the technology is there where it's amazing. Now I'm just waiting for Mercedes to integrate this technology into like a Maybach.

You have a lot going on this week. You have a new car, you're moving, all these things this week, right?

Tomorrow I move. I have no choice. I get kicked out of my place.

So we will be recording at my place again.

Yeah. My rent's over.

That's convenient for me. All right. You better be on time.

I'm actually better when I have to drive somewhere versus when I'm doing it at my own place. Just like the event that I spoke at, the Social Commerce event. I was there like an hour before my speaking slot, just in case traffic would be bad.

Yeah, you were. You were.

But generally when I had to go to a meeting, I'm on time. Anytime I'm doing something in my own building, 9 out of 10 times I'm late.

I don't know why. Are you here next week, by the way?

What days?

Okay. Anyway, I don't know, Thursday, Friday, I'm going to go to the next episode now. So Neil, we're going to do some classics, okay?

No, I'm in Colombia Thursday. No, Friday I'm here, Thursday I'm in Colombia.

So let's talk about 7 marketing tools for June 2026. I'll start first, Neil, okay?

Okay.

Meta MCP. So Meta MCP, which is still rolling out right now, but for June it should be rolled out to everyone. I talked to someone over at Meta, it's like should be available for everyone, but the ability to call on your ads from your agents or combine it with other data that you have and have it just execute, just saying, hey, how's this performing over here? Can you double down on this over here? That's super powerful because you don't need to log into their clunky UI. So Meta MCP, I think, is going to be great for June 2026.

Ubersuggest MCP, if you haven't tried using it, it's actually growing at a really popular pace. Fastest thing that we've ever released when it comes to traction, like the usage is just skyrocketing. You can get everything you need without having to go to Ubersuggest.

Is it free? I don't know. Okay.

So my account is calm. So I'm assuming there should be a free version.

Is Ubersuggest free?

No, I'm saying like my own Ubersuggest account is a free paid account.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

Oh, you don't know if the MCP is free or not?

Yes, but there's, I'm assuming there is a free version.

Yeah. Okay. Well, number 3, On the similar vein, ClickFlow API, which is free as of tomorrow. So we're doing a free version of the ClickFlow API because we want the agents to be able to discover it. And that should help people create more high-quality content. And we should be able to— they should— they can decide if they want to expand or not. But I think that, by the way, I just want to call this out real quick too. The reason why Neil has free MCP and I have free API, the reason— and I'll explain why I went with API instead of MCP.

Yeah.

Is because we, at least I believe that a lot of this software is going to zero self-serve. And the fact that I talked to that person recently and their thing dropped so much, I'm just like, yeah, man, it's like, I think it's, you're better off almost going free for self-serve and having, and your team discovering who looks like they're a good fit to talk to for higher tier services. That's how I see it. Now, one more thing I'll say too, Neil, is I was a big fan of MCP initially, but I realized it's too clunky over time. And so the agents, from what I've seen, have done a better job with API. They start eating up too many tokens when they're using MCP. So that's why at least my decision is no MCP. But you're going to say something.

Yeah, we're on what, number 4? Number 4, ZoomInfo's AI marketing automation. It's not really like a full suite of AI marketing automation. What we use it for, because ZoomInfo has a lot data, it helps with personalization. So imagine personalizing at scale, especially when you're doing cold outreach. It's great with ZoomInfo.

I'll go with Beehive API. Okay, we'll do it. We'll keep doing APIs and MCPs because these are so new right now. Beehive just released the API and then we combine that with our agents and they're like, oh, well, like, hey, what actually performed on the YouTube API and the X API? And then based on that, what should we be posting to Beehive? And then what, what, what has gotten the highest open rates, the lowest open rates? And so you're able to all just publish that within one interface and we just use Slack for that. It's been really convenient to do that.

Number 6, I don't know if they have an API, but I do love this. A lot of marketers deal with sensitive information. Have you ever used Venice?

No, what's that?

Venice AI?

No.

Think about using all the LLMs, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT, but the data is yours and it's protected and it's not being used for anything.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah, that would be my number 6 because a lot of marketers all use LLMs, at least all the ones we know.

Venice.ai. Oh yeah, I have seen this one. Yeah, Venice.ai.

I don't know if it's veniceai.com or venice.ai.

I think it's venice.ai. Number 7, we'll go with Higgsfield API. So the reason I like Higgsfield API, I think it eats up a lot of tokens, but Higgsfield API can make you UGC content. It can also make you ads as well. And now that they have the MCP, I think they have an API as well that you can use. I honestly think all the tools that we mentioned today, whatever has an MCP, whatever has an API, you should combine them together. And then Neil has a new story to tell. Go ahead. What's going on with the spider?

I texted the guy who's on site at the construction site, because I text him the whole time. I'm like, scared, spider in car. He's like, I know, I'm trying to find it now.

I'm like, okay, at least someone's on it. So, okay, so you texted the person on site to help your wife with the spider?

Yeah, because construction workers, they have to deal with critters and bees and all that stuff, and they usually are not afraid of them. And I asked him nicely, I'm like, hey, do you mind helping out? And I'm like, I don't want her to hit someone.

or anything.

I told her at first, I was like, just pull over and just go get an Uber and leave the car in a parking lot or something.

Isn't that funny how spiders can do so much?

Yeah. I'm like, I was texting at first, I'm like, the spider is more afraid of you than you are of the spider.

Yeah, yeah. But it's— logic goes out the window sometimes. Anyway, all right. Number— okay, I got one more for you, okay? So now let's talk about 7 AI work tools for 2026. We're gonna go one more and then we have a bunch of classics here, okay? So 7 AI work So work tool for me, actually, Neil, the way I see it now is Slack has been incredible. And I was talking about this with a friend today. The reason why Slack is so good for AI work is because when your agents work, you have threaded replies for the agents and you can actually every chat— I didn't know you can do this until recently, Neil. You can actually open each chat into a new window. So I got a new monitor over the weekend. I said I got a new Studio Display and now I'm way faster. Now I used to have double monitor in college.

Yeah.

But now I'm back to double monitor. I'm like, whoa, I'm an idiot for not having double monitor. Because then I started working with the agent, right? And then I worked for like 2.5 hours on Sunday and I was like, hey, how much faster am I compared to like a similar period of work time and compared to like 5 different periods in the last couple weeks? And then it did a calculation. You could see it working, working, working. It's like, you are 1.8x faster because you're able to, the turns of work, you're able to do way more now. So anyway, I'm giving you a 2-in-1 here. Use Slack with your agent. Whether it's Hermes, OpenClaw, NemoClaw, Claude, whatever you want, and then get a second monitor too.

Oh, cool. I know Eric doesn't care as much for this tool. He has an alternative that he prefers more. But at my agency, a lot of us use Claude Cowork, and you should see our Claude Cowork bill. It's—

How much?

It's growing at a rapid pace. I know we spend 6 figures or we've crossed 6 figures.

A month, right?

Yeah. I'm assuming it's per month, but—

Yeah, should be per month.

We see the bill. Someone ended up showing it to me. I didn't know what the billing cycle was for it. But it's expensive and we've gotten a lot more efficiencies out of our A players and B players and so forth, so down the list.

How are you tracking the efficiencies from Cloud Cowork on your A and B players?

The managing directors. So the managing directors manage different countries or regions and they work with the team and they'll tell us what we're getting output-wise. We also use project management solutions that track all our work and hours. So we now know how long it takes for us to create a lot of these outputs, we can see it directly and hey, this is how much we spent on Claude Cowork and here's the quality of the outputs because it gets reviewed and here's how much time it takes now versus before. So we can quickly tell if the money that we're paying for Claude Cowork is worth the time savings. And so far internally, we really do believe it is and not even we believe, the data shows that it is.

It's interesting because we use, we use Claude Teams, right? And then there's Cowork is in there so we can see their Cowork usage, we can see their Claude Cloud code usage as well. And then to your point, we do check in and say, hey, Neil, okay, you're talking about building all this stuff. Who else is using it right now? Number one. Number two, what value are they getting from it? And I find that that question is so important because it's so easy to build right now. Like we've had someone on the team spend 4 or 5 weeks building and there hasn't been much, much, much movement until like, you know, someone else stepped in. So it's really important to ask those 2 questions. So number 3 from my side, So number 3, this is kind of a multi-set of tools, but it's more so a command than a tool here. If you use /goal in Codex or Claude Code or Hermes or OpenCLAW, you know what /goal does, Neil? Imagine if I worked for you and I didn't get tired. You say, hey, /goal Eric, build this house, okay? And I kept working until I built the house for you. How would that feel?

If you kept working—

And it was a nice house.

If it was what I wanted, yeah, I would be happy.

You say, hey, Eric, build me an app that makes me $1 million. Obviously, it's not that easy, right? But if you were very specific with your asks, right, and it just went through, it didn't have to go back and forth with you. Not like you're having to go back and forth on like the bathtub and all that stuff right now.

My hesitation is, what does it cost for it to achieve that outcome? Because if it's double or triple that I wanted to end up paying, then no, I'm not happy.

It's not as bad as you think. So my point of saying this is that /goal is with all these things now, and you basically Basically, like, I've seen someone work, like, they had the Codex work for like 48 hours. And I'm like, okay, so what did you yield from it the other day? Right? And he's like, I got my app completed for me. I was like, was it worth you spending all your tokens? He exhausted his token budget for the week. And he's like, absolutely it was. And so I've been running it over and over and I just didn't want to wait on a couple of things and I got them all done, I think a couple of days ago. So it's, I think, using that command judiciously.

Yeah.

will be able to get you a lot of yield. Yeah.

Number 4, we use HighLevel now for our workflows for our webinars. So it automatically creates personalized landing pages. It then ends up promoting it automatically and it connects with our kit and it starts sending out the emails, non-openers, then personalized messages back to them, the reminder emails. It pretty much does it all. And the best part is, is the personalization of the landing page is a really big plus. I'll give you an example of this. Do you remember when AI overviews were in the United States but weren't in other countries, right?

Mm-hmm.

And imagine a lot of marketing stuff rolls out in the US first, like ChatGPT ads, and then other countries eventually follow along. You can talk about AI ads, but if you're sending it to someone in the US, you can end up pushing harder on ChatGPT ads because it's available, but in Europe, Europe or in other countries, you can push more on AI Max where you can end up getting access to AI ads that you may not be able to within the United States through, let's say, ChatGPT. So just customize, even though the webinar's on the same topic, you can adjust the landing page to show the AI type of ads that they can buy in a more easy way versus just doing it all manually.

Oh, that's interesting. So you're using HighLevel now, but you're still using StreamYard or—

We use StreamYard for the webinars.

Okay.

And then we still are sending out our emails through Kit that it connects with. Okay, great.

Number 5 AI work tool. So it is SingleBrain. So the whole idea of having a unified brain that knows all the context around your company. So the way we have it is we focus on revenue agents. So these revenue agents can spin out a bunch of creatives or they can help you with, let's say, spinning up cold email infrastructure, cold outbound infrastructure. Okay, but the whole idea is that you can talk to these agents inside of Slack and you can ask for whatever data about your company. How are my ads performing? How's my organic traffic going? What content should we double down on? Can you make that content? We can leverage the ClickFlow API. So it's kind of the whole idea here is that you have that single brain, you can call it world brain or company brain or unified intelligence. But that is number 5.

Number 6, Smartsheet. So think about modern project management. I don't know if you use Smartsheet yourself.

I haven't heard of that one for a while, but yeah, Smartsheet's great.

Yeah, it ended up getting bought out by, I believe, Vista Equity.

They were doing well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I don't know if their stock was doing well or whatnot, what caused them to get bought out, but they've added quite a few new cool features, especially for project management and workflows. People should check it out.

Great. Number 7, last but not least, this one's a simple one. A lot of people like to talk about Granola. You know what I like about Granola? It has an API so I can ask whatever I— dude, the beautiful part about this, Neil, I met up with Alex Lieberman, the founder of Morning Brew. So he has an AI consulting company called 10X. X, and they do well now. And he was just telling me that he has this workflow that will basically ingest his content from Slack, for example. I'm like, wait a minute, I have so much good content from my Granola. I have so much good content from like my Obsidian, and that can help me pull spikes, like interesting things that I've said, and then format it for all the different channels. And he was telling me, he's like, Eric, I don't post anymore to LinkedIn. I don't post anymore to X. And the thing is, I look at his engagement, he's getting getting like hundreds and hundreds of likes on his LinkedIn. He's like, that's where I get a lot of my pipeline. And I'm like, X, he's doing well too. And none of this stuff is written by him anymore. And so he gave me his skill.md file and I dumped it into my agent, I modified it. And I just said, hey, use my Granola API. Because when you and I talk, like let's say when we're off camera, that's when the good stuff actually comes out, right? And so a lot of stuff has to be sanitized and then like my Granola, but it's good enough where I can publish it out there and it saves a Yeah, cool. Yeah.

All right, what's the next topic?

You pick one. By the way, this, the ones that are highlighted in yellow, I asked AI, I was like, hey, highlight the classics that you like the most.

Let's see, Google's turning search into an AI interface, not just—

I haven't verified any of these topics, by the way.

I was like, this is the problem with AI.

I got a good one, I got a good one, okay.

Okay.

Turn content into pipeline, not reach. Okay, he's like, let me give you the hook here. Neil, views are cute, pipeline pays the bills, content should create qualified demand, not vanity applause. So you and I have seen some business creators, some people that you to be really hardcore on business. Now they're full-on creators, millions and millions of views, millions and millions of followers, and they're creating all this wide TAM content now. And you know what it does for them? It makes them a content creator. That's what it does.

So the title of this, or the sub-short title, is content should create pipeline. Yeah, I agree.

Content should create pipeline, but we should give examples on how people have fallen in the wrong direction.

Yes. I think people— actually, we should start with your examples, and you caught it early on. We talked about this on the podcast. Eric actually did a deliberate experiment in which he wanted to create wide TAM content to see if the views would increase his brand recognition and that would increase business opportunities. He ended up creating quite a few wide TAM pieces of content like Your Rich BFF. I think that was the person, Vivian, is that her name?

Vivian Tu, yeah. Yeah.

And there was content like, if you're at a job for more than a year or 2 years or 3 years, you should end up quitting or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, which, which you did, you disagreed with.

I disagreed with that. Yeah. Uh, because a lot of the people who I know who make the most money have been loyal. Like if you look at the CEOs, a lot of these publicly traded companies, they've been very loyal to these organizations. I know they're rare. Um, but that content, Eric would go to YPO events and people, spouses would be like, oh, I saw your article or video and you're getting a lot more brand recognition from it. But did it end up generating more revenue for you?

No. And let me tell you, I'm going to give you more examples here. So it didn't generate more revenue. And by By the way, like I interviewed, so there's Vivian Tu, right? Personal finance. I had Humphrey Yang, which is personal finance. I had the dating guy too.

Yeah, the dating guy. I remember the dating one. Those went viral.

Each one's like, dude, they still get a lot of views per month right now. So one of them got like 700,000 views, the other one got 500,000 views or so. You know what's great? It did nothing for me. Let me give you another example, okay? On X, when the US went into Venezuela real quick for that excursion, so I saw X exploding or not X, Threads, and I just like kept adding fuel to the fire to see if I would drive reach. And instantly it's like 2 million views. Or when you and I talk about Shake Shack, okay? And we talk about discounts, 8 million views. When you and I talked about Loro Piana, the discount store in Italy, 6 million views, okay? So no doubt we know how to drive the views, but at the end of the day, if none of it turns into pipeline, it's worthless, right? But you and I have seen smart people, okay, who are considered business people go way too far into becoming content creators where it's It's captured them so much that they can't get off the hamster wheel and they're afraid of losing that. And so when you focus on the business first, it's better for you because it keeps you focused on the business. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, dude, we're on the same page. And I also tried creating Y TAM content, like what I learned from flying business class only, or what I learned from— and by the way, I fly economy as well— what I learned from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothes. When I look at my content now, like we just did a webinar this morning. The topic of the webinar, I should know the title on top of my head. I know it was related to marketing for multi-location businesses. AI-powered lead gen, the new way multi-location franchises and global companies scale. Very specific, would you agree? It's lead gen, super specific. multi-location and franchises and ideally global companies that are multiple.

How many people registered and how many people showed up?

I don't know the numbers on how many people registered or showed up. I do know it was less than And no one gave me the stats or the data. I just know when we get super specific, we get less views. And I was okay with that. Why? Because that's the type of content for us at least that generates more revenue. I don't need the most amount of views. I need the most amount of revenue that I can possibly generate.

Yeah.

And if that means 1/10 the views but double the revenue, I will take that deal every single day, assuming the profitability and the unit economics are still there. Still good.

I would say similar to that, my LinkedIn doesn't get as many views as my other channels does. And here's the thing, we've had multiple people reaching out and saying, oh, I really enjoyed your AI content on LinkedIn. And you look at my LinkedIn, it's like 100 views, 50 views, 150 views. And I'm like, still does a good job, right? And so keep that piece in mind. One thing I want to call out here, this will be the last episode we have. But Neil, this classic is a good one. Creative volume without feedback is just expensive confetti. The loop is the asset. And so a lot of people right now, especially in e-commerce, they're like, You know, we really need to just jack up our creatives. We need to do 500, we need to do 1,000, we need to do 1,500 or so. But if you don't have a loop where you actually are analyzing your data and not just doing creative for creative's sake, then you're just going to be lighting a bunch of money on fire just because people that you respect are— you're seeing them talk about on podcasts. They actually have a loop that's figured out. If you don't have that loop, you're going to be in trouble.

Dude, I'm with you. Too many people are cranking out way too many ads, like 5,000, 10,000 ads a month and being like, look at this, we're using AI. We're just doing tons and tons of ads. There's no feedback loop. And what they're not thinking about is how much money are you wasting due to duds? We all agree that you need to test. We all agree that you need variations and you're going to have losers to figure out new winners, but just cranking out tons and tons of new variations every single month and not learning from what's working and what isn't working is just going to waste you thousands, if not millions of And you know the stat, right? Depending on the source that you look at, the average waste in ad spend per year on digital ad spend is somewhere between $60 and $100 billion a year. Like, that's massive.

Wow. You know what, one thing I'll tell you, and I'll tell you the result of this one thing. So speaking of agent, so my agent has a rule in it where it says everything has to have a 4-to-1 return, return on investment. Okay. At least it's not going to be perfect, but at least you have some type of rule in there. So for me, every stupid thing I I say is not going to necessarily have a return. Now, here is the final result here. So this might— my agent actually analyzed the GitHub repo for X. Okay, so here's what it says, Neil. The repo does not support this claim. Horizontal videos are algorithmically boosted over vertical videos. The repo supports this claim: X uses media aspect ratio, video duration playback, and full-screen dwell signals in its ranking system. So the practical read, if horizontal videos perform better, it's probably because of user behavior and Higher completion, better full-screen dwell, more rewatches, better viewer fit for long-form content. Not because the repo shows a clean horizontal equals boost rule. And we will end the episode on that. Goodbye.

Goodbye.