Listicles Drive 9/10 Third-Party Mentions in AI Search

Did you know that listicles drive 9 in 10 third-party mentions in AI search?

9 in 10?

Yeah. So the latest—

90%?

So third-party sources drive 85% of brand discovery in AI search. So AirOps did this study, okay? Listicles drive 9 in 10, so 90% of third-party mentions in AI search. Product pages and homepages drive 26% of first-page visibility. 68% of brand mentions are often unique to a single AI model.

Okay.

You got this over here, right?

I knew the 9 in 10.

Yeah. Which is high.

But here's the problem with listicles. I actually did a presentation on this 3 days ago.

Where were you located?

I was here. It was a virtual presentation for a private equity firm. The problem with listicles right now, let's actually use ChatGPT for example. Right now, if I want to be the best camera company, right? The best camera for a YouTube video or whatever. If I create tons of listicles, the best camera for YouTube videos, best camera for Instagram videos, the best camera for a podcast, best camera for a video commercial, and I keep breaking them all down. The problem is, is if I put them on junk sites, ChatGPT cites them most of the time and you start ranking really high.

Yep.

It's just a ton of spam.

Yep.

And that's how Google was, right? And I'm giving a hypothetical. I'm not saying I'm actually creating that type of content, but if you look at it, it's just a bunch of spam. I believe ChatGPT, not now, But within the next 12 months, we'll start refining their algorithm, just like how they don't cite Reddit as much because Reddit isn't as high quality. And, you know, if you look at the same example, when Eric Googled NP Digital, it was my company name, LinkedIn name, and then it was someone who wasn't happy after they interviewed with the company. I didn't read it all, but they probably didn't get the job.

Which is not a good result.

It's not a good result.

Yeah.

But Forget me and my image. That's not what really people are looking for when they search NP Digital. Would you agree with that? Majority of the time, it's not a good experience. Yeah.

That wasn't— that result should have popped up if someone was searching for like employee reviews.

Yes. Not for trying to work with the company. This person was trying to get a job at the company and they weren't happy. They could say they weren't happy or whatnot. Maybe there's some stuff we can improve, but they still did interview with the company and It didn't work out. But the point I'm getting at here is algorithms shift and adjust. Their algorithm on ChatGPT, I believe, will start looking at industry publications and won't look at Joe the plumber talking about the best marketing tools and go off of what Joe the plumber is saying. So I think everyone just creating a ton of spammy guest blog posts and just publishing them all over the web with listicles of here are the top 3 ad agencies and all this, I don't think that's going to be effective.

Yeah. So this is interesting because The old days of SEO, going back to what Neil said, we did an episode on this actually last week, right? It's like Lycos, Excite back in the day, you just did the hidden text spam at the very bottom, right? Or hidden in the back of the page. Marketers tend to ruin everything.

Yes.

And so when a new channel comes out, if there's a way to game it, they're going to game it. The other thing is, if you're OpenAI or you're Google, you have to clean things up from a spam perspective. Otherwise, that deteriorates your product quality. And so they're incentivized to fight against spammers, right? And so I'm saying like, those of you that are doing this right now, it might be working right now, But for sure, long-term, it's not going to work out that way. Neil and I have been playing— we've been playing this game for quite a while, and we've seen the different movies here. History rhymes.

But when I was doing that presentation, there was other people on my panel, so we each talked for 10 minutes. There was a panel? Yeah, but we talked with slides for 10 minutes, and then we did Q&A. One of the people, I won't mention the private equity firm or the software, is one of the most well-known softwares for tracking AI visibility. They showed an example of a company that's doing really well, in their space and they're talking about their product and how they release on their own blog, that company, like literally they release on their own blog a ranking list of the best products in their space. And they of course mention themselves number 1. And they showcase how once they did that, they started getting included more in ChatGPT for everything.

Yeah. As if it's a revelation.

Yes.

Yeah.

But that to me is no good. Like if you did that on Google, yeah, Google would be like, this is junk. Yeah. We shouldn't end up ranking the site. And eventually ChatGPT will adjust their algorithm for The same thing you want.

Did you get to disagree on that panel?

I did not get to disagree on that panel.

That would've been great.

It was more so we each had 10 minutes of talk time.

Yeah.

And then people asked us questions and whoever it was relevant for, we would answer that question.

See, this is the cool thing about panels. At the end of it, it should have been like, hey, did anybody say something you disagree with? And then it would've been more exciting. But the reality is we do disagree with that because the fact that they're saying that means they don't, they actually don't understand the SEO game. Like how this has moved.

They don't, but they have good software for AI visibility and they're well known for that, but their background isn't in SEO. So they, I'm not saying they're bad. It's just, they don't have the experience that you and I do for doing this for 20+ years and knowing how algorithms adjust.

Yep. By the way, so look, I don't know. I mean, other, like, I think our takeaway for this one, honestly, guys, is, is if you focus on doing the black hat things in a white hat way, that always works better. So we're not saying the black hat stuff doesn't work. It works, right? But if you do it in white hat, like Like back in the day, remember last week I talked about link wheels, which is where you have a bunch of spammy links that point towards these Web2 properties that then link to your site. How about you just have a bunch of good relationships that you build over time from high-quality websites, high-quality publications that link to yours? That's a better signal that lasts for the long term. And that's kind of what you're talking about too. You want to, you want to have high-quality publications. And even Eric Schmidt, like this doesn't change. Eric Schmidt said this, the internet is what? It's a cesspool of poo poo, right? And the brands will rise to the top. It's because the brands spend more time building their brand, building quality.

Dude, look at Reddit. Reddit cited a lot less on ChatGPT. They're getting less traffic from Google and ChatGPT, I believe, because their stock started taking a tank. Was it just ChatGPT or was it also Google? I think it was both.

I don't know.

But either— I know for sure it was at least ChatGPT because we have a graph on that. The problem with Reddit is marketers started spamming the crap out of Reddit because like, oh, ChatGPT, you want to end up pulling from this? No problem, we'll just spam the crap. And Tim Soulo from Ahrefs had a funny LinkedIn thread because I think Reddit made some announcements like, hey, you know, marketers have been putting messages, self-promoting, spamming. And I think Tim Soulo said something that was cheeky. To me, it was funny. I loved it. And he's just like, Actually, it's just getting started, which is spot on, right? Because if there's one signal that's working, Eric and I are not in this phase of our careers, so we don't believe in spamming. It's just too short-sighted. And 20+ years ago, we tried the spamming approaches. We just know it's not long-term. Marketers will just spam the crap out of something because you can make not just some money, you can make millions and millions of dollars in profit. It may only last 2, 3 years, but hey, your cost was very little to nothing. And that's a lesson.

Nature never changes. That's why you want to study history, right? You want to study human nature because if there's an easy way to make money, people are going to go hard on that, right?

Yes.

And like, I don't know if you've seen those memes where it's like the easy way out, that line is like super, the line is very long, but it's like the hard way, the long-term way, there's only like one person there.

Yes.

That's how this is, right? And so look, it's, I would encourage you all, if you're just getting started in this in your career, spam away, because then you'll realize you'll get the repercussions from it and then you get punched in the face a couple of times and then you'll stop doing it because that's how we learn over time. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So this will be maybe second last one here. So Jason Lemkin tweeted this. So he said, one of the best CEOs I know said to me the other day, I wish we'd never allowed work from home. So basically the takeaway here, the CEO, I never, I wish I never allowed work from home, okay? And he's just saying, Jason Lemkin, he has a fund, right? And he's like, what I can tell you in my ecosystem is the fastest moving and the fastest growing startups I invested in are either 100% returned to office with some exceptions, but as a baseline. So with some exceptions, right? But as a baseline or 100% distributed. Okay, so now the ones that are 100% return to office often are more flexible than pre-2020. Few are as 100% as pre-2020, but they are 5 days a week in the office as a base with the hiring trade-offs that come with that. They generally won't hire anyone that can't come into office and that hire— that limits the hiring pool substantially. I've also invested in some winners that are 100% remote, but they really, really work at it. It's all they do and it has trade-offs, especially on go-to-market and sales teams. But the ones that are some of the best efforts mix of maybe come into the office a bit, a few times a week. What was he trying to say here? But the ones that are some of the best efforts mix of maybe coming to the office a bit, a few times a week, they just don't have the same urgency. Okay, whatever he's trying to say, he's just saying the people that mix it together, they don't have the same sense of urgency. So all this to say, I think the key takeaway here is that You have to either be 100% committed to remote or 100% in office, because then you have the urgency.

100% to remote or office.

But you really have to work at it for both of them.

Yes. I don't think remote's easy either to do it right. We've had office with some people remote, but we used to mainly have office and we put them everywhere. Now we're remote, but we still have some offices and remote has made it too hard to go back into office because we started hiring people all around the world, wherever we can find the best clients combined with where our clients are. And for us, it's actually worked to our advantage because we can see and interact with our clients more. But that was a choice, but you do got to work at it. It's not as simple as just making the choice and be like, oh, this is going to work.

I think it also comes from the top too, because your style is more of a remote style.

Yes, it is.

Like whatever people say, like the energy does come from the founder. So however the founder likes to work, that's probably how it's going to be.

But also even though we're remote, we push really hard on a lot of client interaction. So for example, this is Friday when Eric and I are recording this. Monday I'm driving to San Diego and back to pitch someone for 1 hour and then I'll come back.

You're driving yourself?

Yeah, I'm driving myself.

Dude, it's such a tiring drive.

Yeah.

I get tired of doing that. You should take the train.

I'm pitching our buddy Jeff. You know Jeff?

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Oh, so that's worth it. That's like a little hangout too.

It's a little hangout, but I still would've went whether I knew Jeff or not. I've known him for over 10 years, but still, like, that's my philosophy is I will go and I'll make the effort to, and just like, dude, just send me the contract. We're good. No joke. I was just on the phone with him. He's like, what do I need a pitch for? Just send me the contract. I was like, no, dude, You need to know what you're getting and it has to make sense. And he's just like, just send me the contract. He's just like, he's like, you're one of the share— because I'm a shareholder in the company, in his company. So he's like, of course you're going to do what's best. And he told me what his budget was earlier this week. And I told him, I'm like, hey, we're going to come in under budget because I don't think it makes sense to spend all of that. And we should spend the money in other areas outside of us. And he's like, cool, whatever you want. Just send me a contract.

But the in-person goes a long way too.

Goes a long way. Because when you do that, like, Every—

you're building a, you're deepening the, like Jeff and Neil have known each other for a very long time, but still just that one touchpoint goes a long way. It shows that you care and then he'll remember you a lot more too. And there's a lot more things you can do. You're, you're going to have a lot more flexibility too.

Yeah. And then when I go to his main office, because our pitch is at, I think, 11:30, there's a few team members coming. I'm like, dude, I'm going to have to drive back. I'm like, you still have Everbowl in your office? He's like, yeah. He's like, you just make sure. I'm like, cool. We'll eat some acai while we pitch here. And he's like, all right, sounds good. That's good.

That's good. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. By the way, okay, so this can be the last one here. So you and I were talking about this, but I kind of tweeted this the other day, but this is how the economy is actually affecting marketing right now. So I feel that general economic sentiment is crappy right now. And so the railroad data is off, right? The restaurant data, Restaurants Performance Index, that's like, you know, kind of going up and down a little bit. So that's how much people are going into restaurants, right? Railroad data is how much traffic's, you know, how many transactions are going to the carts, right?

Yeah.

You know, we've seen Google, Meta, and LinkedIn reps. They have reported, at least on our side, I don't know about you, but increased CPLs, cost per leads, and decreased volume. With our client data, I think you're seeing similar stuff here too. We're seeing similar, similar kind of decreases. And then agency businesses, I've talked about with you, other people as well. A lot of agencies, I'm seeing anywhere from like 30 to 80% decrease in month over month leads.

So what's happening with their revenue?

I haven't asked about their revenue. I don't think many people are increasing their prices. So I have to suspect that it's going down for most of them.

Yeah, because I told you, I think I showcased on the last episode or one of our episodes, our lead going down and I was breaking it down for you. But if I look at our October numbers, October's not done for us. Last week, I know for a fact October's our second biggest month for new revenue close in history of our company.

So you guys are increasing pricing. We're increasing our pricing too. And that's something I've been—

No, we're not increasing our pricing.

You haven't?

No.

That's what you told me at lunch last week.

No, we're not increasing pricing.

Your average price has gone up, no?

No, we're not increasing our pricing. We're going upstream.

So this is— Oh, got it, got it, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

So we're not charging more for the same work.

Yeah.

It's just we're closing bigger accounts and bigger accounts require more work. So the dollar ticket is much bigger, but it's this, it, it, we don't charge hourly, but if you looked at it from an hourly perspective, we haven't increased our hourly.

Yeah, that makes sense. So for us, we actually are increasing our pricing just based on the sheer volume of stuff that we're doing on average, right? You guys, I mean, it's, it's kind of a similar result at the end of the day. If you're going upstream, the prices are probably going to be higher. You're probably going to make more.

They are going up, but our business, not just recently, for the last 3 years, I would say we've been going upstream and I don't think we're really upstream the way I want. I would say within 2 more years, I think we'll be in a place where I'm happy, but knowing my personality, I'll want something—

You'll never be happy.

Yeah. I'll want something very—

That's a feature. I think that's a feature. If you're happy, that means you've become complacent and then you stop.

Yeah, because right now we'll get included in, like, we just lost one pitch. We got eliminated in the first round. We usually make it pretty far. It was a pitch that was $7 to $9 million in agency fees. We got eliminated. Most of our other players got eliminated. It looks like they're going to go with a holding company and they're looking to just use the holding company because it looks like that's who's just remaining. Holding company being someone who's listening with like 100,000 employees or something like that. We don't have that.

Yep.

But I believe, call it 2 years from now, that'll be much more of a standard for us and we'll have a lot more of those. And you're probably right, then I'm going to want the $50 million average pitches or $20 million pitches. And we don't really get included in $20 to $50 million pitches. I'm not talking about spend, I'm talking about in our fees.

Mm-hmm.

It's very rare a customer comes to us saying, here's an RFP for $25 million a year in services. What's typical is they'll pitch us and they'll give us an RFP and be like, you pitch 'em and be like, we have a budget of X million dollars, and then you have to work to land and expand 'em and get 'em to pay $5, $10 million over time. But out of the gate, they're not handing you a contract for $10 million bucks a year.

Yeah, and I think this will be the final thing. I mean, it's not to say that Neil's money hungry or anything, it's more so how do you just play the game at a higher level? Because, you know, waking up to play business kind of feels like, at least for me, it feels like you're playing a video game. And that's why you continue to enjoy it, right? You play the friends game, the family game, and then you play your business video game. But I heard this, I heard Ben Horowitz from a16z, he was talking to the Databricks CEO today. So Databricks, I think they're valued at, I'm looking at this— $100 billion or something. $120 billion, right? Last valuation. And what's interesting to me was that they got an offer that was 6 times their value, which is maybe a couple years ago. And then he told his executive team, the Databricks CEO, and then the executive team's like, oh my God, we're gonna make so much money, right? We should sell, we should sell, we should sell. We're gonna sell, right? We're gonna sell, right? And then, The CEO went to Ben and was like, should I sell? Like, we got this offer. And then Ben was like, look, man, like if you sell, more power to you, right? Like the 6x on this, it's gonna be good for, you know, me to return to my LPs, right? We're gonna make money off of this. But it would really be a shame for you to have such a good CEO and such a good idea. And to think back when you look at it, you sold the company, it's like, man, I really had a good vehicle. And, you know, I sold out. I never got to realize what it could have been, right?

Yes.

And that's the same thing with Mark Zuckerberg as well. And we're not saying we're Mark Zuckerberg or Databricks necessarily, But that's the fun of continuing to play. And I think a lot of people think the goal is to sell out, but then what are you going to do after that?

Dude, what is it called? Jay Kron is back at Kajabi.

What?

Yeah.

Why?

Running it. Co-CEO.

That's amazing.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

And the point I'm getting at with that is it's the same thing. After you sell, what do you do?

You want to get back in the game. Yeah.

You get bored at home after you cash your check.

By the way, unless you hate what you're doing, then absolutely sell it, right? Unless you're like burnt out, whatever. But if you like what you're doing already and you're continuing to learn, you're continuing to compound, like how can you fail over a 10, 20, 30 period? You can't.

Yes, but you and I like continually going because it's fun.

Yeah.

And we always want to challenge ourselves and be better.

Yeah. Maybe secretly we like pain too, but you know, it is what it is.

When we're during the painful moments, there's no exit opportunities really.

Yeah.

Or exit opportunities that we would take.

Yeah.

During the good moments, we're like, this is great. Why would we sell? So we want to keep pushing forward.

Dude, in the bad moments, okay, this will be the last thing, but bad moments, like, Neil would call me and say, hey, I think you should just bankrupt, man. And I was like, that's the logical thing to do. But like, I'm just going to keep going.

So, and Eric literally said on the phone to me, that is a logical thing to do. And he's like, but I'm not going to do that.

Yeah. Yep. And look, we're going to keep going. So anyway, that—

And look, it worked out for you.

Yeah, it worked out. Anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.