Rethinking Everything: YouTube, SEO, AI, and Attribution

And I was just fed up with it.

I'm like, you're fired.

Yeah.

All right, so I thought we'd start today talking about YouTube 'cause Neil just fired his YouTube agency. And ironically, or maybe it's not so ironic, but right after this recording, I'm going straight to the studio in Century City to record, which is where Neil records as well. And I'm enjoying my YouTube right now, but I'm very appreciative that Neil spent this money on his YouTube agency 'cause we took a lot of inspiration from what they do. And it's a lot of it's working for our stuff, but we're doing it in our own way, which I'll talk about in a second. But why'd you fire your YouTube agency?

Yeah, so Eric knew me going into this that there was a chance that I wouldn't end up working with them for a long time. Their editing quality is amazing. The problem that I have with them is, or what I ended up learning from this process, let's actually go back there and then I'll tell the problem. What I learned from this process to do really well about YouTube, it's all about the script. And the agency would help me with the script, But in reality, I would create my own script because they would give me a topic. Once they give me a topic, I then record, call it 10 minutes on the low end, 30 minutes on the high end of notes for that video. And over time, they would then take those, those voice recordings and turn it, or video recordings, 'cause sometimes I would screen share and turn it into a script. And in their scripts, some of it was bombtastic. And I like taking that word, you know, Ramit Sethi taught me that word a long time ago. When I say bombtastic, things like, if you don't do this, you won't achieve a million dollars income. Like a lot of it's money related, how to get rich related. And I hated that.

It's how to get rich. And, and, uh, it's also fear driven sometimes.

Yes. Bingo. Fear driven was also another one. Uh, urgency was another one. Scarcity was another one. And I figured out how to fine-tune the scripts over time because over time, instead of me just recording a video note on a topic, I would actually go into Google Docs or Grammarly or Microsoft Word, whatever you want to call it, and outline what I'm going to talk about in order so it'd be more logical. And then I would record the video notes. So it started getting to a point where I was just pretty much making the whole script. And what they were doing is adding in the hooks. So then when they would then send me a script and I was going in studio, there's a teleprompter so I could just read off the teleprompter. But because I created this script, I would just mainly use their hook and then I would riff, hook and then riff. And I really wasn't riffing because I already knew the script because I created it myself and I outlined it before I created the voice notes. And just some of the things that they would put in the script because they weren't necessarily technical in certain parts of marketing. The script didn't always make sense. I was just doing it on my own, and I still would be paying them to this date if it wasn't for things being bombastic. The video editing quality was great, but I would record a video on things like seven social media trends that you got to follow in 2025, and I would break down what's changing, why businesses need app, and I would include a lot of stats and data. What ended up happening is is I record the video. They would edit it and they'd put it up on YouTube. And right away the title was, where is it? I actually have the text thread with the guy who owns this company. And where is it? I said, they made the headline, these 2025 social media trends will make you rich. And I straight up texted, why rich in the headline? The video isn't about that. And I told him, I'm like, my team and I want to cut, you know, his company name because it's too bombtastic. And I was just fed up with it. I didn't once talk about in the video that if you do these things, you're going to make more money or get rich or any of that. And they kept doing it. And I told them so many times. And at one point, a lot of the topics were about quote unquote how to get rich, tried it their way, didn't work, went back to marketing. And when I went back to marketing, I never talked about money, but yet— they included money in the title majority of the time and I was just fed up with it.

I'm like, you're fired. Yeah. So I think there's a couple lessons from this one. One is if you're hiring, if you're, let's say you're an agency or you're, you're consulting with someone, if your client wants it some way, you're going to have to do it their way or else they're going to get rid of you. Um, it doesn't matter if you have a better formula or whatever, because ultimately a lot of times they're, sometimes they're going to think they know better than you do. Right. And so to, to, Maybe it's a good thing or a bad thing, but one, you got to be open to feedback. You got to listen to feedback. You've given them feedback so many times, they didn't listen. The other thing too is you have to provide more perceived value. The only perceived value that I saw was, yes, they really understood hooks and they had good editing. But at a certain point, that doesn't hold up anymore because whatever you're paying, a healthy 5 figures a month, the reason why their churn was so high, and yes, they work with all the big names out there and they still continue to, It's because they don't have something that, that's unique. And the other thing is, I think the people that are paying them, that continue to pay them, it's a— I think they've gotten addicted to the views. And I don't think that's the right way for them either. 'Cause for a lot of these people, that's not their main business, but they've, they've been chasing the wrong thing. Now you're not getting trapped into that. You're just like, dude, like I wanna do it this way. And the other thing I'll say is I look at other YouTubes. These guys might say, yeah, that the rich stuff that works, it gets a larger tab and all that. But when I look at other YouTubers that just focus on marketing, they're still getting 200,000, 300,000 views per video. And that's what we're saying. Like, there are examples of that. And I remember when I talked to this guy on the phone, he's like, oh no, you gotta show me some examples. I pulled up literally 5 examples that I showed Relix. I literally screen shared with him and he is like, oh yeah, you know, we just do it this way or whatever. I'm like, dude, this guy's not gonna listen. So I'm like, well, at least Neil's gonna work with him, so I'll see how it goes. And I knew 99% chance you're gonna churn. So yes.

Yeah.

And you do too, because you're like, hey, like, I'll leave it at that.

No. And before Eric even hired him, because he knew I was talking to him, I told him straight up, I'm like, dude, save your money. Let me go through it first. And I'll let you know what I learned and don't learn and then go from there. And I ended up breaking down the learnings to you, right? I think early on, I ended up breaking down the process and stuff. And we're just like, oh, cool. So the reason this works is we just pretty much have to put in the majority of our own time to to script. It has nothing to do with the agency doing everything for you. It is really for YouTube and social to do well. Eric and I were putting, or started putting in a lot of our own energy to make it work versus just outsourcing. That was the biggest takeaway I would say that I got from paying them money. The editing quality, you know, I'm assuming you agree, is amazing. They do some of the best editing work for YouTube. But high quality editing doesn't guarantee views. I can do a topic on something that's really gnarly of a topic like AI and marketing or Google, um, you know, I/O and their event. And I bet you if I just screen shared and broke things down, I would get more views without the fancy editing.

Yep. So, and, and interesting enough, that's where we're transitioning to. So I might, when I go over there today, I might do an intro, but then I'm going to go home and record a screen share and it's going to just do the screen share. 'Cause the thing is, um, someone on, on the team called it out too. When you and I are teaching at a conference, for example, or doing a webinar, we're kind of just teaching and it comes off very natural and people like that. And I see a lot of people doing that on, on YouTube and that's gonna work. But I, I do wanna give us some credit though, because some of the things you told me that we've adopted. So literally we just looked at your editing style and I, our team just started copying it. So it might be like 80% there. It's not 100% there. Yeah. It's good enough though. The other thing I'll say is I copied you on the Loom thing, right? So you're like, oh, like I just record a 10 to 30 minute Loom. I literally do the same thing and that comes up with the outlines and that helps a lot. And I didn't use a teleprompter, never used a teleprompter before. I think, no, we tried to do that in the office and I just never really like followed it. Um, but now I use a teleprompter and just, it's just the bullets, right? And I kind of riff off of those, which is what you and I are used to anyway. So I do want to give credit there. Yes, the hooks matter and yes, we try to put it to the next video. We try to, Have open loops as well and all that. Um, but you know, again, at a certain point, like if there's not monthly recurring value, they don't deserve monthly recurring revenue. So I think, um, what you paid was like good up to a certain point, but at a certain— if you're not getting much more, it's time to go. Yeah.

And I don't want to keep spending $25,800 a month. Like that's a lot of cash.

Yeah.

And especially when I'm doing a lot of work and people aren't following my instructions. My biggest pet peeve, and they'd never adapted on this one, Was for me to communicate through or to communicate with them, I was required to use Slack. So let's say if there was a new video for VeeEdit, they would post it in Slack and they wouldn't email me. So I would tell them, hey, why don't you guys just email me? They would say, this is not the way we communicate with our team and our people. So you need to communicate with us on Slack.

How about I just stop paying you $26,000 a month? Yeah.

And I'm like, wait, wait, wait. I'm like, and then when I was asking them who they work with, it's not really large corporations. And my feedback to them is I was like, and I'm not saying we're a large corporation, but my feedback was, if you're not willing to communicate with email and the general business communication methods that companies are used to, you're not going to land larger corporations.

Yeah.

Because we all use email. Yes, there's Slack for communication, but putting in there, hey, there's a new video for you to check out, and slacking that instead of willing to email that, And this is like, dude, why can't you just send an email? It—

see, that is— that goes back to customer service again. Because when I think about Carrot, like there's one customer in there that, that's paying us each month right now and they don't use Slack at all. And we're okay with that. Some prefer WhatsApp, some use Slack or whatever, and then some just want email. And that's okay because that's how they prefer to communicate. And sometimes client wants things cert— like you're here to serve the client at the end of the day. Yeah. And if you're not willing to adapt, I think this is why I didn't want to work with this guy when he Originally started the company, like 4 or 5, he's like, he showed me a communication thread and I basically, I didn't think it was worth it. Right. Um, and I think it was like a culmination of these things where I just like, yeah, this doesn't make sense. So thank you for, for giving me the download. But I will say though, um, the way we're doing it now, um, our videos probably get anywhere from 5 to 7 times more views. And then when we do pop, sometimes we'll have one that pops off. Like we had one that popped off recently, 130,000 views or so. And then you have some that like did really well, like 500,000 views or so. But the ones that popped off for us, they're not necessarily the ones that drive good leads. They might drive a lot of leads, but when I look at the leads that come through like YouTube or whatever, they're not nearly as strong as the ones that come through LinkedIn. So.

I, I agree with that. If I had to pick the best thing that I got from these guys, and this was something I never did and I should have done, we never turned on YouTube ads. Never cared to.

Why, why, why would you turn YouTube ads on?

They just by default turned them on. And I don't know why. It didn't really affect the views in a positive or a negative way. So they turned on YouTube ads and—

Oh, you mean for your monetization so you can get more views, right? Is that what you mean?

Yes, but what we found is when you turn on YouTube ads, you don't necessarily get more views or less. We think, I don't have any definitive data on this. I think it stays roughly the same. You know, you would think that, A, for YouTube, it benefits them to promote ones with ads turned on because they make more money. But again, I have no definitive proof.

Is it on now?

It's still on and it paid for some of the costs. And I was like, oh yeah, we should just keep on the YouTube ads.

Yeah, it pays for your content team, your content—

It pays for the content team. So that way at least we don't lose any money on—

And don't get me wrong, I will say like we've got, we have gotten some good leads on the YouTube side, especially for Karat or ClickFlow. Um, so it, it's good, right? But, uh, I think again, the trap guys is if you get trapped into going for views or showing off like, um, oh, this is gonna get you rich or showing off your ripped body or something like that.

Yeah.

That is gonna trap you in the wrong place. The thing for us is we're constantly focused on business. So at least on my side, I'm really talking about still marketing, but I am talking about, cuz I experiment so much with the AI stuff, I am talking about how I'm, I'm applying it to business, right? Um, and I think there's, there's a niche for that. And so YouTube will find a niche for you if, as long as you stay consistent with it. And yes, when we stay consistent on marketing, like the views eventually come. So I'm not too concerned about that, nor are you. But I think the reminder for everyone here is don't chase the views, um, because they'll get you distracted from your business, which is what we've seen with a lot of these influencers. And, and these guys work with a lot of these influencers too.

Yes. The other thing I learned from YouTube monetization is there's very little to no revenue in Shorts. Doesn't matter how many views you get, the ad revenue just sucks. And the reason I believe that's the case, because we see both ends of it, because you and I both run ads. Shorts don't monetize as well running ads in them compared to just longer form videos. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't run ads on Shorts. It is also much more affordable, but long form videos tend to convert at a much higher percentage from what we've seen. Hence, They cost a lot more.

Yeah. Look, I mean, we're talking about YouTube right now and Google. There's a lot of Google and YouTube topics in here. Can we just switch over to maybe talking about how SEO attribution is completely effed and how AI mode is actually going to shift SEO in general?

Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah. You want to start first or I can start? I can kick it off here.

Go for it.

Kick it off. I actually watched that Sundar interview with David Friedberg from All-In. Did you listen to that one?

I did not.

Okay, so it's pretty good. Like basically Friedberg from the All-In podcast is pushing Sundar, the CEO of Google, and they both started at Google at the same time, except Sundar became CEO. Um, and then Freeberg became a successful investor and a podcaster, but, uh, an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur. Yeah. Very suc— both very successful. And, um, you know, Freeberg kind of positioned this as, hey, there's this AI dilemma for you guys right now. And then Sundar's like, I don't see it as a dilemma. I see it as an opportunity. And this is before they launched all the things they launched this week with AI mode and all that. Um, and so what he called out was that, um, he said that the, the, the main thing is this innovator's dilemma thing, right? Because they have this, this cash cow that's printing all this money right now. And so you can't necessarily shift everything, even though Gemini has some of the best models out there, especially for coding. Um, and then this week what happened was that, uh, Google launched a bunch of things, but AI mode is the thing that sticks out.

Yeah.

It's like, basically it's like, It's basically like an LLM that you log. It's like using a Gemini. It's like using a ChatGPT or whatever. That's what you're going to— the default, it's going to become the default search experience. It's not default yet. So the thing I want to call out here is the innovator's dilemma is at what point do you switch it to this new thing to not disrupt your cash cow? And I think what they're doing, which is smart of them, is they're turning this AI mode on, but it's not default. And then they're going to look at all the data and figure out when it's time to kind of shift more.

Oh.

There, there, because they're seeing behavior shift a lot more. They are seeing though, um, a lot more— you and I are probably asking a lot more questions now. You would agree with that, right? I might ask on Google and then I might switch to ChatGPT or whatever. Um, I don't know if you saw this, you watch CNBC a lot, but did you see the Cloudflare CEO discuss how, um, the visitors per scrape has changed over time?

Visitors per scrape?

Yeah. So anytime Google crawls, it's scraping a page, right? So It used to be for 1 website visitor, there were 2 scrapes per Google search.

Okay.

Um, and then it shifted to, um, it shifted to 1 in 6.

Okay.

So every 6 scrapes you get 1 visitor.

Okay.

This was like a couple months ago, maybe 6 months ago or so. Now it's every 15 scrapes, there's 1 visitor, right? And not only that, I'll give you one more before we go into it. Um, OpenAI was 1 in 250. Um, so what, every 250 results you get one visitor to a website. Now it's 1 in 1,500.

And that's for OpenAI.

So you're talking about, uh, once for Google, once for OpenAI. Yeah.

Yeah. So Google is 1 to 15. OpenAI is now for every visitor they drive, they scrape a website 1,500 times.

Yeah. Wow.

I did not, uh, realize that.

So, so it's like a couple things. I think SEO attribution is completely effed and I think website traffic is gonna continue to be toast over time.

Yeah, when I look at the data, because we looked at AI overviews and how it's affecting traffic, we saw traffic declines in both B2B and B2C. But what was interesting in B2B, we actually saw a slight increase in revenue. B2C, we saw a slight decrease in revenue. Now there could be external factors like tariffs or economic conditions or algorithm updates that can affect traffic. But from a revenue standpoint, What we're seeing is a lot of the traffic that websites would've got, it's traffic that never really drove any revenue in the first place. Um, if you look at how most people are searching, and Google talked a little about this, there's a great Search Engine Journal article on it as well. Users are typing in longer and longer tail search queries. Most of them are question-based. So it used to be before roughly 8% of Google search queries were questions. I don't know what the percentage is these days, but it must be a much, much larger number cuz you can ask anything. And I was with a buddy who is visiting from Seattle, hedge fund guy. And, you know, him and I were talking 2 days ago, um, in person. And as we were walking, we were talking about Apple stock. And if you look at Apple stock, I believe the number is roughly, you know, today there's some news, uh, Trump made an announcement that Apple should be tariff more of their product shit. So it's causing their stock to go down. But generally speaking, the last time I looked at it, if you exclude today, Apple's stock, their company, in the last 3 years, the revenue has pretty much been flat. Profit's been roughly the same. So the company's not growing. Stock's gone up 40%. So I was telling my buddy this, who's a hedge fund guy, and he's just like, well, one of the reasons is share buybacks. Now they haven't bought back 40% of the shares, but right away he asked Grok while we were walking, hey Grok, what percent of, uh, or how many shares has Apple bought back each year for the last 10 years? And it just mapped it all out. And he's like, oh look, it was, I think it was the number was like 21, 22, or 23 million shares that they eventually had called roughly 10 years ago. To the most recent numbers where is, um, they're now at 14-point-something million or billion shares.

I bet you Buffett influenced that a little bit.

Yeah, probably. But when you look at it from that perspective, dude, the shares are just getting bought back. Um, and those weren't all buybacks in the last 3 years, but that's an example of a search that we now can easily run where that data, when you have done a Google search, It is very hard to get that from an exact webpage. They're getting it from so many different sources to get you the exact answer. And that works out really well for a consumer, but that's not a search that would really generate any revenue for anyone. And we are seeing AI impact those kind of searches when we look at navigational and transactional searches. And I have a chart on my Twitter on this. Um, there's really not that many transactional searches that are happening on OpenAI percentage-wise. The number of searches that OpenAI is getting, almost all of it is informational. And let me see if I can actually pull up the chart. Neil Patel ChatGPT versus Google informational searches chart. And let's see if I can pull up the image on this. Dude, so check this out. How people search on Google versus ChatGPT. Look, this is just absolute percentage. It's actually not the total number of searches because of course Google has way more searches, but 93.7% of the searches on ChatGPT are purely informational searches. This is not the stuff that's causing direct revenue. I agree traffic is changing from this standpoint, but when we look at revenue change, revenue change hasn't really been impacted. A lot of this is just informational-based searches.

Yeah, let me, let me think about this. Let me share an anecdote here. So when I think about buying things, like for example, we went to a resort recently. Uh, I didn't go through ChatGPT or anything. I still use Google for that. Um, and so—

But what, what'd you do specifically to buy?

I was, I was looking for reviews on the best, uh, the best resorts nearby. And I wanted act— I wanted to see actual reviews. That's the thing, right? Yes. And so Google has a lot of those reviews, whereas ChatGPT, I, I at least haven't seen it yet. Um, I did ask ChatGPT, what are the best resorts? And here's my plan. It did actually help me plan out things, but then when I wanted to go deeper into more transactions, I actually moved over to Google. Um, and that's just one anecdote. I'm not saying I'm right or wrong, but I think what we can agree on is that the way we're behaving is changing. 'Cause the, the whole, like, by the way, 1 in 2 and then 1 in 6 and then 1 in 15 now. I think people are just asking more questions now.

Yes.

'Cause even when I was walking to the office yesterday, I was, I was doing, I was like using my ChatGPT for a CFO and then I was using it for health and I was using for like, and then as I was, I was about to walk into the door, I was like, man, I just did things that would've cost me hundreds or thousands of dollars and I did it in minutes. And I think what's happening is we're just asking more questions cuz we're all getting smarter.

Uh-huh. And when I look at my search history now, you know, I also have a 3-year-old, but my 3-year-old asks a lot of questions each and every single day. I don't use ChatGPT for it. I use Google cuz Google has AI or And he has questions like, what's the bite force of a megalodon versus a great white shark?

How does he know what bite force is at 3 years old? I don't know. My God.

And then how much weight can a camel carry on its back versus a donkey? And he wants to compare. How much can a polar bear lift versus a grizzly bear? No joke, he has like 30 to 40 of these questions a day. I probably do like 15 to 20 of them. My wife probably does another 15 to 20. This is daily.

Yeah.

All right. Um, and then I also have a lot more questions too, just generally speaking, like in life, but I'm getting answers now to stuff quicker from, you know, all these AI platforms. And I think that's the big thing that's changed in which users are searching way more than ever because we can get what we're looking for easier. While before, dude, it was more so we would do a search, like if we want to figure out how much Apple's doing share buybacks, We'd have to go to like 5 or 10 or 20 different articles.

And you, you give up at a certain point cuz you're just like, I don't care that much.

Yes.

Now you get it quick.

Yes. And not just that, dude, we would have to go through all the articles, sift through 'em, and it would probably take us 20, 30 minutes to really figure out what the answer was cuz we would have to copy paste, put in spreadsheets. It's just too much work. It wasn't worth it. But now we just ask the question, we get an answer right away and we're like, cool, sounds good.

Well, so this is what we talked about too. This is new work that wasn't possible before. It would've taken too much time. It just wasn't practical. It's no different than the coach I have that's coaching people on how to work on higher leverage priorities, right? Or like a, a, a, a me that's trained to go coach you on how to do a one-on-one or like in, in sales. There's like mini versions of me everywhere, right? Um, no, I think that, that, that's a whole nother conversation with like, when does that go too far? But again, we're talking about creating new work now. And the other thing I think we can, we can spot here, like, cuz I, I know a lot of SEOs are worried and maybe we should talk about this. Um, but homepage traffic is starting to go up. Right?

Yes.

And so I'm noticing the same thing too.

We are.

Which means that's a good thing because people are asking more questions and they're learning more about us. And I'll tell you what, here's what I like about AI mode. I went, first question I asked, what's the best, what's the best marketing podcast out there? We're still in there. Okay. And then if I, if I ask, um, you know, who are the best digital marketing agencies or SEO agencies, right? Um, NP Digital is in there. Whatever we're ranking well for right now on page 1 and for top 3, like we're still there, right? So that at least is going to hold for a little bit. But I think let's maybe let's talk about what people should do about attribution and how they should adapt.

Well, before we go to attribution, let's actually talk about blog articles that you and I have written for so many years. Dude, you and I are known for writing. When we got into marketing, we were known for creating tons of content, getting Google traffic for it, and that's how our brands got out there. You agree with this statement, correct? You?

Yeah. I didn't get my brand out there. I did. I did that for brands to grow them. But yeah, same thing.

But you did it also for Single Grain.

Yes, yes.

Right? And that is how you generate a lot of your revenue and leads.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah.

May have been at a different scale than me, but that is actually what built Single Grain. Would you agree with that, Sam?

Yeah.

All right. When you think about all the articles that you created, we have a lot of articles like, what is SEO? And the list goes on and on, these informational topics. I'm assuming you guys track your revenue and leads from your pages.

Yep.

Did you really close a lot of revenue from those informational?

Never. And those are all tanking now.

A lot of those are taken by AI.

Yeah.

Totally agree with that. When we went back into our CRM, because we see in Salesforce where we're getting leads from, like what exact page and what's driving revenue. I understand that there's attribution stuff and we'll get into that in a little bit. But most those pieces of content that are being affected by AI, I still think it's worth creating those articles because it gets your brand out there and you're getting cited. and it's also helping you be seen more as authority. But those kind of pieces of content never really drove us revenue in the first place.

Mm-hmm.

And when I look at our traffic, our SEO traffic, and a lot of this was deliberate, not all of it, there was some algorithm updates, but a lot of it was deliberate. Our traffic has gone down, I don't know the exact number, let's call it 4, 5, 6x organic over the years. But our RFP count, You know, and I've talked about this on this podcast, you know, in 2023, just in the United States, we had 16 RFPs. 2024, we had 25. I haven't looked at the 2025 numbers. We're March or May 23rd when, as of recording this podcast, but the last time I checked, we're at 2020 or we are at 22 or 23 RFPs. just in the United States alone. So how is it that our informational traffic is going down, but yet we're getting more larger companies hitting us up? And when we look at each RFP, not only are we getting more, but the average dollar size that each RFP is coming for is actually larger than each year prior. So we're growing in not only the number of RFPs, But the RFPs are starting to grow in size where we're getting a lot more RFPs coming in our door that are million-plus dollar deals from day one. And some of them are even $3, $4 million deals from day one.

Yeah. So what do you think it is?

I think it is getting known for specifically what you do. We started focusing more on commercial and transactional related queries, and our marketing started getting very specific to helping large businesses solve very, not just technical, but very challenging business problems in today's environment. For example, how do you expand your marketing into multiple countries and languages before you have people on the ground? Like what are the strategies, the tactics? How do you implement it when you, a corporation will say, hey, we are, I'm going to come up with a company name like Adyen. All right, we want to go after Thailand. We don't generate really much revenue in Thailand from businesses there who are looking for payment processing. For us to build a team out there, it's going to be expensive and the ROI is not going to be worth it for us. But how do we go and expand to all these regions that are up and coming, Indonesia, Thailand, et cetera, and get traction there and then start building teams in those areas? And they can't just go and say, let's go hire tons of agencies to do it for us because that's expensive as well. They have some budget, but they don't have tons of budget. And when we started working on solving these problems for corporations and talking about this from our webinars to speeches, uh, to blog articles, that kind of stuff drove a lot of revenue for us, but it doesn't drive tons of traffic.

Yeah, I, I, I think so. Maybe we should talk about, uh, the website traffic piece is toast and, and what we're doing about, which is kind of what we're doing right now. And then we can talk about attribution.

I, I wouldn't say that the website traffic is toast. I think it's changing. You're not getting as much top of funnel clicks, but you're still getting a lot of traffic to a website that's more bottom of funnel.

I like saying toast because it's a good headline.

Oh, okay.

That's what was said by CNBC, by the Cloudflare, the website traffic is toast. That's why I put it in here. So it's not, so I, I, the way I, I break it down to people is like, it's like a cigar butt business. It's going to continue to decline over time, but it's still viable, right? And it's, it's not to say, oh, we should just throw it away and we should just abandon it as, as SEOs. Um, I think, What we should think about is, okay, the what is traffic or the what is content that we've created, that was always good for top of funnel and generating links. Like the what is stuff is good for links, right? Like it's, people like linking to the top result and then just kind of compounds on itself, right? And that's how you build links or one way that you build links. But the other thing too is that we've been talking about quite a bit is this search everywhere optimization approach where you can't just focus on on SEO or, or else you actually are gonna be toast. One, you have to do good work, right? Yeah. If you do good work, people talk about it. That's the easiest thing. It's always like, oh, Neil, what, who's a dentist that you use? Or like, if I have eye problems, I, I go to my friend, uh, who's, who, who used to be a nurse and owns a bunch of like healthcare business. Oh, what's the best eye doctor? Right? So word of mouth gets around. And the other thing too is people just want reliability cuz people change jobs and they, they like, they'll follow you around if you do, cuz it's just easier to pick someone that they worked with in the past.

Yeah.

Right. Um, and so people forget about that. They think it's all about marketing. No, but like if you do good work, that's also marketing itself. So focus on doing good work, but also diversify your traffic because if you think it's still the same SEO game 15 years ago, it's not. Because these are the people that are complaining the most on Twitter. It's just like, oh, it's so difficult now. It's so hard. It's like, no, it's just changed and you just continue to refuse to change and that's why you're so bitter. Yep. Yeah.

All right.

So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of Global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side. Our mutual friend Gaetano posted this yesterday and basically the headline here is SEO attribution is completely effed, right? Because all you're getting now, like you're getting way more impressions now, but you're not getting the clicks. And so what should you do about attribution, right? Let me tell you one thing. No, no, gimme the cookies real quick.

Oh.

Okay, so anyway, the cookies over here, guys, I'm not getting paid to say this, Everything Sourdough, right? These are healthier cookies, right? Like they have all these healthy ingredients. I bought this off of, I can't even attribute to who tweeted this, but I bought 6 bags instantly. And then Neil just ordered 6 bags over here. I ordered 6 bags when I landed in Miami for my event a couple weeks ago as I just got the bags. And these are, I'm like, healthier cookies, sounds amazing. Robot vacuum that I was telling you about that scans your whole place. That's about to arrive, right? I bought that for $1,200, but someone tweeted it and then I read a Wired article and I bought it. You cannot attribute that. I bought a Starlink Mini last week. I sent you the link to it. Why did I send it to you? Because there's a discount. So Elon retweeted a discount for 50% off. I'm like, done, discount.

But you got to pay a monthly fee.

I know. I'm not going to pay the monthly fee. I can cancel. I can come and go for the $50 a month or $100 a month or whatever it is. It does. It's not a contract.

Or do you have Wi-Fi or cell service on your iPad?

No, I'm too cheap.

Oh, so I do that.

Yeah, I'm too cheap.

I always do it because if I'm doing like a webinar or something, we have like 5,000 people and I get disconnected, I have a backup.

How fast is it?

It's really fast.

Like, did you run it on fast.com?

Here, if I actually disconnect from Wi-Fi right now.

Well, while you do that, I think the point of what I'm saying is that You know that the quote, remember in the 1800s, one guy, a really rich dude was like, you know, um, half my marketing works. I just don't know which half, right?

Yeah.

And that, that's, that's okay. It's, it's, by the way guys, this is called marketing school, but marketing is a subset of business. Business means doing a good job for your customers and marketing is that supports that. It's not marketing first, then business. Go ahead.

It's fast. So the download, it goes from 18 to 40, so it's somewhere in that range.

Not fast enough.

But it's fast enough for like a webinar or anything that you need to end up doing on it.

Yeah.

I can stream Netflix, no problem.

High quality?

Uh-huh.

Really? Wow. Well, still.

This is the download speed here, but we're in a steel building right now. The moment I go outside, the reception goes down.

But my point is you can't attribute this stuff, right? Like you just bought it the way I bought it. It's like you just, you just, and I'm not saying don't think about attribution, you should. But I think the problem is 10, 15 years ago, especially you and I like working in tech, I think we over-index on trying to attribute every little thing. Yes. And that over-obsession actually ends up costing you. You over-optimize. And I know for a fact, cuz you and I open Google Analytics every day. I, it was an unhealthy obsession. Yeah.

But dude, going back to the cookies and attribution there, I, Eric was like, oh, this is the company. You just go to their website. I Googled everything sourdough and I could not find their website. And he's like, dude, just use the QR code on the back. And their website was like everything-sourdough-co.com. It wasn't even in the top 10 when I Googled it. I'm like, this is just terrible. But I was able to scan it and then buy it. But I agree with you, attribution is getting tougher and tougher. And I think that's going to be the way it's going to continue moving forward. Um, you have a vacuum that cleans your whole house. You're going to test it out soon. Let me know if it works.

You're for sure going to buy it.

Um, but I saw on Instagram little mini goat carts that work inside your house.

Goat carts?

Uh-huh. And they're called like, uh, like Kid Cleaner Cart or something like that. I'm getting the name wrong, but I know it has cleaner in there. And it has a mop attachment that you put in the front. And it puts like a Swiffer pad at the bottom. So when my kids, I got 2 of them, one for each. So when they zoom around, it goes 5 miles. I have wooden floors. It straight up sweeps up everything on the floors.

Did you buy it?

I've had it for a long time. I saw an Instagram video of it. It was like $200-something each, bought 2 of them. My kids use it probably for 20 to 30 minutes a day. They clean up the house, sweep up like all the dust and everything without me doing anything.

That's great. See, that can be attributed though. So we're not saying, guys—

No, but how is it attributed? No one knows. Because I saw it on Instagram.

Was that Instagram Shops or an ad?

No, it was just an Instagram video of someone showing—

Oh, it was an organic post.

And then I just Google it. And I found it on Amazon.

Yeah.

And then I go from there, but there is—

3 touchpoints. Look at that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And when I Googled it, found it on Amazon, and then from there I picked one. There was tons of different options, bought one of them.

So our point here is, guys, like, don't worry. Like, yes, you should. We're not saying don't abdicate tracking. You should keep tracking whatever you can, but also don't over-index on tracking too much. And so when they say SEO attribution is completely effed, Maybe, maybe not, but like, you know, do what you can, but then focus more on creating a good product and getting more word of mouth.

Dude, but attribution, if you look at analytics, a lot of it's been not provided for ages.

Over 10 years, right?

Yeah. You use, I don't know how long, but it's been a long time. Use Google Search Console to get more data. It's hard to get exact conversion data for specific keywords. Uh, it's easier to get conversion data when you're actually bidding on the keyword and you can see it. And a lot of the studies we've done, we look at AdWords data to figure out which keywords organically convert the best.

And, and by the way, like sometimes when I listen to these, some of these e-commerce podcasts, like, like they start using all these, uh, mixed media modeling, incrementality testing and all this shit, right? And I'm just like, that sounds all cool, but you can't try to over-index over. And it's like these, it starts to become this science, right? Um, and, but business is, There's, it's part science, but it's also part just delivering good value and being good to your customers and listening to your customers. So you gotta do both.

Yes. But I get why large corporations do the media mix modeling because when you're spending $100 million, $200 million, totally, you want some data.

I'm, I'm talking about the e-commerce companies that are not even these large corporations that are over-indexed. You're like, you're too small to over-index on this stuff. I agree. Yeah.

And even the large corporations, they do all this stuff.

Yeah.

Part of it is science, part of it is gut feeling and art, and then it's just going from there.

It's not or, it's and, right? I think too many people have gone for or, and that's what it is. So that's why I say, look, website traffic is going down and attribution might be going down as well. But that is your opportunity. And I think, what is this? Rand Fishkin, I think he popularized, like, we're in this world of zero-click marketing now, but that is your opportunity to do well on YouTube, for example, like we're spending more time on optimizing on YouTube. That's your chance to do better on other channels, better on email, maybe owning your audience as well. Um, and so there's a lot of opportunity and, and it's a, it's a, it's very much a blue ocean when it comes to doing hard work. It's a red ocean with the easy work, right? Yeah. So do, do the, do the harder stuff and you'll be in a blue ocean, which means less competition.

Yes. And I look at things like SEO, whether it's search everywhere optimization or the traditional SEO. You got to do this stuff to be top of mind and have your brand out there. If you don't, you're going to end up losing revenue. And I look at digital marketing turning into television advertising. When you think about television advertising companies for so many years, even right now, I know there's companies like Tatari that help track in when people have internet-based or connected TV to try to say, oh, they watched a commercial, then they went to your website and converted. It's not exact, but it kind of works. But I look at this whole model here of the traditional old school TV advertising where companies did it for a very long time and just got their brand out there. This is why companies like Amex or Nike or Mercedes.

Coca-Cola.

Or Coca-Cola have done so well. Their brand is just out there because of all the years of just pushing brand related marketing.

Yeah, dude, we can come back to Google on YouTube in a second, but I just got this one. Palmer Luckey was doing, you know, Palmer Luckey, the Enduro guy.

Uh-huh. Who's also did Oculus.

Yeah. So he sold Oculus to Meta. And so he, so I have this quote in here. I think he was doing an interview with Peter Diamandis, but let me just read this to you because you had a blog post on this a very long time ago. Okay. So you see Trump here. He's with one of the sheikhs, right? I think this is from Saudi Arabia. So what is the sheikh wearing?

That's Doha.

Doha, Doha. Okay.

Qatar. Okay.

So what is he wearing?

He's wearing sandals.

Okay.

And similar to what I'm wearing right now, but mine are black.

Yeah. Okay. And then Trump's dressed up really well.

Right.

And Trump usually will wear like a suit. So the point is for them, that is dressed up. Yeah.

But that's not casual. So they have different versions of that clothing.

Yeah.

It's more so because it gets 120 degrees. They tend to wear all white.

This part's fine. I think this is funny to me. I like, and I'm sure the sandals are nice and they're really expensive. Right. But Harshdeep Rappal says, if you have enough money, no one will ask you if you have a business suit or shoes. And then Palmer Luckey is like, this is definitely true of my experience. And then Palmer Luckey, he's got like this goatee. He's like always wearing shorts and stuff, right? Yeah. Um, but point is, you know, we've talked about this before. Like, don't get me wrong. I think you and I, we like nice things. Let me establish that we like nice things. But for the most part, like I'm usually wearing like yoga clothes. Um, and then you're wearing like a yoga, like, uh, Vuori.

I wear Vuori and Buck Mason. That's my daily outfit. So.

The, the, the thing here is, does dressing nice make you more money? I think it depends on the industry that you're in. So if you're doing real estate or if you're like an investor, not like, yes, you should probably wear like a suit all the time. Right. Um, but it doesn't, it just depends on the industry that you're in. Um, but I think what we found is that dressing nice, at least for me, I'll speak for myself, doesn't typically make me more money cuz I, I have, you know, I have the cool suits and all that type of stuff, but I hardly wear it cuz it's just not comfortable to me.

No. Do you actually have suits?

Yeah, of course. I have like, I have like, usually you're supposed to have a couple go-tos. Like, that's what I have.

I bought one recently and it's my only suit.

Really?

Yeah.

But you had so many.

I don't fit in them anymore.

Oh, that's right.

I've gained like 10 pounds.

Yeah, but you used to have a lot. I remember your Vegas closet.

Like 20 to 30 suits.

That's a lot.

And tuxes and stuff like that.

That's a lot.

And then sport coats and jackets and all that stuff.

Yeah, you gave me one. I still have one of your sports coats, the Tom Ford one, right? But so, The point here is, and by the way, you used to have a stylist and everything, and now you don't care as much anymore. Like, I think this stuff is still nice, but you don't care as much.

Dude, so I was, you know, we both shop at Brunello Cucinelli, right? I think that's probably my go-to store. I'm assuming that's yours as well.

It's the best.

And before, you know, I shopped a lot at Loro Piana. I think the majority of my wardrobe is from Loro Piana, Tom Ford probably next. Brunello is the newest brand, but I've been shopping with them for a while now. And I would say those are probably the 3 main places, you know, where my clothes are from.

So you want a discount on it? One of our mutual friends, because he's so good with people, can get a, like, a 40-50% discount on Brunello.

I don't really buy much anymore.

Okay, see that? Just let us know in the future.

Yeah, so, and this is where I was getting to. You know, I've been working with some of the same people for so many years. And some of them know that I end up spending money on clothes. Like a lot of my Loro hoodies are like $4,000 or $5,000 a pop, but they look like $20, you know, just casual hoodies.

Yeah.

And I wear them not because of the brand. You can't see the logo, you know, unless I take it off and it's on the inside and it's just a tag. I wear them because it's soft and they're super comfortable. And I have a lot of the same ones in case, you know, kid spits up on it or one rips. Yeah, one rips. Um, but going through that whole process, I've bought a lot of fancy clothes. And, you know, a lot of people I work with always tell me, you spend all this money on clothes, you don't really wear any of them. And I'm like, what do you mean? They're like, if you look at what you really wear, you wear— I tend to wear Viori I don't know what they're called, like yoga pants, right? Well, let's call it $100. And I have one for every day of the week. It's the same exact color, looks exactly the same. There's no difference. I just have duplicates of 'em. And I wear these Buck Nation t-shirts, which I don't know how much they cost, $20, $30, $40, $50 max. And I have 20 of 'em in my closet or 30 or something like that. And I buy 'em like once or twice a year, but they're just like, you have all this nice stuff. This is all you wear. And you usually put a sweater on top. that's typically blue or gray in color, and it's Loro Piana, and it's just a standard normal looking sweater that I may have spent $1,000 something to $4,000 on. And I tend to wear the ones that are $1,000 to $2,000 the most because other than the hoodies, the hoodies are expensive, but they're just the most comfortable. And they're just like, you start shopping at Brunello and Tom Ford, like you wear none of it. I'm like, oh yeah, this is a good point. And I started looking at how much I'm spending on shopping a year. I didn't go back long enough, but I was looking at my credit card statements. Call it on average 20 grand a month for clothes. I don't really wear any of it. So over the last few months, I just cut it all off and my closet is still the same size. And when I look at what I actually wear, because I'm, you know, really paying attention now to what I pick, no joke, I wear like 3 or 4 sweaters, same white t-shirts, same pants, same shoe, and that's it. And I don't wear anything else in my closet even though I have it. And I've gotten to the point, because I still speak a lot, I have these like gray dress pants from Loro Piana. They won't make me any more of them because they don't have the fabric anymore. And I've— I have like 12 or 13. But you know, I was talking to my wife and I was like, do you think I can get away speaking in very yoga pants. And she's like, don't go that far.

Why not? And look at what Gary Vee wears when he speaks.

Dude, that's what I was saying. I was like, but why can't I? I don't want to wear dress pants anymore. And, you know, because my business is global and we're in so many countries, in certain countries, like in Asia, like when I go to Hong Kong, everyone dresses up. So in certain countries, I would feel more uncomfortable wearing the yoga pants, but still I'm like, why can't I? Who the crap cares?

Well, your sweater's nice enough, so how are they gonna know, right? That, that's my perspective. 'Cause usually you're wearing a nice sweater up top and the other stuff is just yoga and your inside's still a Henley. Um, and by the way, when you look at Gary, like he's always wearing a hat, right? He's always wearing like a t-shirt or whatever. And so like he is just, that's just who he is. And so my point is we've gotten older now where maybe that stuff might've mattered when in our 20s. I just don't care anymore.

Yeah, that's true. I think I should just try speaking at conferences and wearing yoga pants.

Yeah, I thought you've been doing that already.

No, I wear the Loro Piana dress pants.

But these look the same to me. I'm sorry, they look the same to me.

No, but they're slacks. You can tell that they're slacks. They have a crease in the middle.

This is how much I don't care. I just, I just, to me, you look the same because also guys don't care too. Yeah, guys don't care. But here's, here's what I want to call it too. Like, um, so yes, Neil had a blog post a long time ago. This is like, uh, in our mid-20s or so. On how he spent X amount of dollars and it made him this amount. But like, it wasn't like a huge amount at the end of the day, right?

It helped. It was revenue, not profit that I made. So I'd probably still say it was a loss because if you look at how much I spent on clothes, when you're generating revenue, there's expenses on that. But the big thing I would say when I did that article and I did that experiment, times have changed. Back then, more people dressed up than they do now. I think we've gone to athleisure wear culture.

Well, it's because tech made it cool, right? A lot of tech people, Mark Zuckerberg just wore whatever. But now Mark Zuckerberg is wearing nice things.

Yeah, but if you look, that article is more than 10 years old.

Yeah, right.

Uh, athleisure wear wasn't as popular as it is now.

It was starting to become, it was, it was on its way up.

It was on its way up, but it was nowhere near where it is now. And especially in the corporate world, people were not wearing athleisure wear.

Yeah.

Now they wear athleisure wear. Um, and then the other thing is, and I would still say this is relevant when you're younger, I think it matters much more than when you're older. If you're an entrepreneur and you're 18 or 20 years old, people look at you differently than when you're 30 or 40, right?

You've gotta make a good first impression.

Yes.

In your 30s, 40s, you could just tell the way you carry yourself in a conversation.

Yes.

They can tell whether you've been there or not. Um, so like it, it's, so does dressing nice, like, does it make you, like, for us right now, it doesn't necessarily, I would, I wouldn't say it makes us more or less. I would say in our younger years, probably it does. Um, and you kind of have to prove yourself in your earlier 20s, right? Here's what I will say though. If you want to get 50% off from luxury brands like a Brunello or a Loro Piana, so one of our mutual friends does this. The way he does this is he basically becomes really good friends with whatever store associate. And he's tipping them all the time on the side, right? $1,000 gift here, $5,000 gift here, $4,000 gift here. And then whenever he goes to buy things, he buys a bunch at the same time. And that's how he gets 40, 50% off. 'Cause a lot of these sales associates, they get a big discount. And so if there's one thing that he stands out with, it's always becoming really good friends. Like whenever we go to a hotel or whatever, he's always pre-tipping a lot. And I actually stole this from him. So there's, um, there's this, uh, health network thing that we've used and I actually helped his daughter, oh, his, um, his friend's niece actually with a rare condition. So I went through the YPO network and then, um, they have this health thing, right? So I reached out and then what I did on the side was I was like, I just copied what he did. So I just sent like a couple thousand dollars on the side and then boom, she's taking care of us with everything. And they got that health condition that was super rare taken care of.

Oh wow.

And he, and then I told that mutual friend and he's like, oh my God, that's so genius. I was like, it's not genius at all. I just copied you. So this goes all the way around. It's just like, Sometimes if you just take care of someone else first, it's the, the rule that you learn from the, the book Persuasion. If I give you something by default, you feel like you owe me, right? Which is why like I never want you to buy me something and I never want you, you never want me to buy you food or whatever. I just don't wanna owe you. Like psych— psychologically, that's just how it is.

On a side note, I just looked up Dharmesh Shah HubSpot speech. I wanted, I was just curious to see what he wears.

He doesn't wear anything special.

He, he just wears usually like lots of—

A t-shirt.

Agent AI t-shirt. Sometimes it's a collared shirt, uh, like Kind of buttoned up, but not like fully. I don't even know if he tucks it in.

Yeah.

Uh, but you can see a t-shirt underneath.

Yeah.

And yes, he is like 100+ times more successful than I am.

Uh-huh.

Uh, congrats to him on owning OpenAI shares.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

He's gonna crush it on that one.

Yeah.

Uh, but I was like, wait, I should just probably start wearing t-shirts and yoga pants for everything. I'm gonna just start trying that out instead of dressing up at all.

Why don't you just have a shirt that says search everywhere optimization?

No, I like my Buck Mason t-shirts.

You know, um, Tim Soulo from Ahrefs wears a lot of t-shirts. I like wearing it. Like, I wear his t-shirts, by the way, the Ahrefs shirts. They're nice.

He dresses up though.

He, he does wear a blazer on top of it.

Yes. And his shoes are Zegna Second Skin shoes.

Yeah.

Like $1,000-something a shoe.

Yeah. Well, he, he does well. He does well.

Yeah, he does extremely well.

Yeah. Um, okay, cool. You pick the next one.

You see the change that Netflix making with advertising? I think it's gonna revolutionize TV ads.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

What is this? All right, so if Netflix films a show or a movie, whatever you want to end up calling it, it could either be both. And let's say there's a scene where someone's in a fast food joint or a food place. They can put a Coca-Cola machine in the background and change the drink people are drinking to Coca-Cola.

Oh, it's like the, the things that they used to have in— that they have in movies where Um, people can pay for like a BMW place when they're in a Maserati or whatever, right?

Correct. But you can do that on the fly with AI.

Dynamic.

With AI, they just switch it all out now.

Wow.

Now, they weren't the first to do this. Amazon has actually been doing this a long time with Prime, 'cause I met up with one of the people on their ads teams from Prime, uh, probably a year and a half to 2 years ago. Most people don't know this, but Amazon's been doing this for Prime for a very long time. Mm-hmm. Uh, but Netflix doing this, Self-serve? Amazon. I don't think it's self-serve yet, but I bet you eventually they'll get there. This is just going to start going mainstream and people are going to start switching to us. But I think this is going to really start changing digital marketing because if you look at the trend where digital marketing is going, it really is becoming a game of top of funnel, not necessarily from a click standpoint, but from a brand awareness standpoint. How do you get your brand everywhere that's relevant to your audience? So for example, if Netflix filmed a documentary with Bill Gates, Inside Bill Gates' Mind, right? I believe that's what it's called.

Yeah.

A lot of business people watch that. That would be great for us because—

Oracle or NP Digital or Salesforce. Yeah.

So I would pay when Bill Gates is filming in his library to have, you know, something in the background being like NP Digital that blends in and it just—

Or when he says something really inspirational, right?

Yeah.

You want the mindshare where he's inspiring. It's like, and whatever someone says, something inspirational.

Yes.

Yeah.

So I would pay for that because a lot of, or a percentage of the people, even if it's a small percent watching it, would be a good fit for us. And I think this is a great way to get more top of mind. And I think this is what really, even when you think about SEO back in the day from what we were doing, we weren't really optimizing for clicks. I know everyone was tracking clicks. We looked at clicks as, oh, more people get to know our brand, dude. We created content on so many long-tail queries that never drove revenue. And we knew that because we wanted to get our brand out there. And we believe that the more people that get to know our brand in the long run, whether it's people talking about us or mentioning us, eventually it would cause customers, even if it was 2, 3, 5 years later. It's the same thing now. but you can't necessarily attribute the traffic to your website. You've got to create the content so then that way people can see you, see your reference everywhere, your logo everywhere, your favicon's everywhere. And in the long run, we still believe that'll drive revenue because it's worked for us.

Yeah, I think I'm just looking at YouTube now, or we know that Search Console, Google Search Console, you're getting more impressions. You're seeing this open jaw thing where impressions are going up and traffic's going down. Um, it is becoming more of this. We were just kind of talking about it. Like if you're doing good work and your brand's getting out there more, it's fine. Don't try to, you're not, don't try to lose sleep or don't lose sleep over not being able to track everything.

But one thing that's been pretty resilient with all these AI changes for us, mm-hmm, is tools.

Mm-hmm.

Because, uh, if you look at Ubersuggest and Answer the Public, it's keyword research.

Yeah.

In today's world, people still need keyword research more than ever cuz it's complex on What are you trying to optimize for to get your brand out there from social media to Google to YouTube? Right. And we look at the tools. Tools are somewhat AI-proof in which you're going to use what, AI to do keyword research?

I think AI also links to tools more, meaning it calls out tools more because it can't do this. And I think tools are higher bar too. So because of you can vibe code a lot of stuff now, I think the bar is now higher. It's like it's easier to make an ebook now. Yeah, it's easier. So That now it's like if you go towards a harder thing, the blue ocean, which is building tools, you're going to stand out. And so with ClickFlow, we try to give like, oh, here's 25,000 words for free, right?

Yeah.

That's like, that's a good offer. And so with you, you have like, you do have Ubersuggest, you do have a free version, right?

Absolutely. And we're actually trying to go more free, which we talked about last time. We're running tests on that in like, I think 2, 3 weeks. We're making some other changes in the short run.

Yep.

But we're integrating things like AI data from all the search queries people type in on these AI platforms and how often your brand shows up. So we're starting to tie in some of those things into our tools. We're at least experimenting on our end before we release them. But when we start gathering data from a lot of places and showcasing it within our own tools, we're seeing usage on our tools do very well in this kind of environment and we're not seeing it decline really.

You know who called this out? The head of SEO at Canva, she posted, or he, she or he posted this on—

CEO's millennial.

No, no, SEO. Uh, adding in.

CEO.

Yeah. Um, so this person was like, hey, we're actually seeing a lot more traffic go to our calculators and, um, our different, like, basically, you know, either trending topics or calculators or tools and things like that. Basically saying that, um, they're seeing their traffic from LLMs go up and it's because of those pages, not so much the what is, the informational pages. Yeah. And so if that's a signal, then it's like, that is a signal to go build more things and, and do tougher things. Um, but that's what it is ultimately. And, and by the way, um, do you have any, anything else on this one before we move to the next one? No, I wonder. Okay. So, um, I do wanna go back to, cuz we've talked about this a couple times already, but Wall Street Journal posted this on, uh, bosses are done being quote unquote nice, right? And then on, on one end I see on LinkedIn, like I see one person, she posted saying that we need to unionize as employees. We cannot let this happen to us. And it got like 3 likes on it. Um, My point of saying this is that it's not that bosses are done being nice necessarily. It's so, it's, it's basically saying, oh, um, bosses are tired of this. You know, I hear from some bosses, they're like, some people, they're, they're going on a rampage right now. They're cutting due to AI. You know, we hear, oh, this person cut $8 million in payroll, this person cut 400 people or whatever. It's not that people wanna do that. It's just whatever's best for business at the end of the day. And I think what happened maybe in 2020 or so, and this is what I saw, 2020, 2021. When interest rates were very low, um, the economy was ripping and everyone was investing a lot and people were paying crazy high salaries and everything. Um, and people had to be a lot more accommodating. And I, I think what happened was people became very entitled, right? And, and bosses had to deal with that. What you're hearing now from Wall Street Journal, you're also hearing this from other podcasts, is that, um, people are starting to realize now that maybe they were being paid too much, which is ironic to me. Um, so people are being paid too much. And then also again, bosses are tired of this whole, like, as I'm interviewing these CEOs, they're like, so, so Eric, what's your take on it? Should we be back in the office? Um, you know, what, what about this remote work thing? I talked to my, my, one of my relatives who works at the, um, who works at the IRS, right? Um, I was like, hey, what do you think? Should they have cut 20,000 people? What is like, absolutely they should have cut 20,000 people. So you're seeing all this happen in the economy right now where I, I think the, the, the quality bar expect is expected to be higher. And a lot of people aren't willing to meet that, that new bar because AI is making us, helping us do things a lot faster. We're asking questions a lot faster. And so that's why there's this quote about bosses are done being nice. It's not unionizing or anything. It's that a lot of these people, you and I, we spend a lot of time on talking to other people and learning how they're getting faster. We just wanna be more efficient, right? And so, If people aren't willing to meet that bar, there's a lot of CEOs out there that have said, hey, here are our new standards of excellence. Here's what Tobi from Shopify said. Here's what the Box CEO said. Here are new standards of excellence. If you don't want to meet it, that's okay. You don't have to be here, but we're done being accommodating. And that's what business is. Business is, you're just here to serve your customers and you're here to make sure that your numbers aren't upside down. And that's what nobody wants to be mean, right? Like we don't start a business to be mean. And so when people talk about unionizing or this is not fair, or like, this is, you know, um, this, this boss is a tyrant or whatever, it's like, no, like we don't even have time for that. Yeah. So anyway, this is just me ranting a little bit, but it's, it is, it's interesting to see both sides. Um, and what I will say is it's very refreshing to see the people on my team that are stepping it up. And it's also very easy to see who's not willing to step up.

Yes.

Very easy.

Yes. And people can try to do whatever they want, like unionize and all this kind of things, but If they don't figure out how to play ball, I think in the long run, a lot of them will just end up being replaced. And if you look at typically what I see from an employee standpoint being unionized, it's the people who aren't doing the best job who are really for unions. The people who are A-players don't care for unions, don't want that. Because they're compensated really well. It's the C, D, and F players that are just like, yes, we want unions because they want protection.

Yeah.

And they're not learning, getting better, putting in the time and effort that's really needed.

Yeah. And by the way, like, I don't want to spend too much time going into politics, but it's what we're for at the end of the day is equal opportunity, not equal outcome. Because if everyone has the same equal outcome, there's no incentive for you to work hard, for me to work hard, for Noah to work hard. There isn't, right? That's just what it is. And so It's not that bosses are done being nice. It's more so bosses, if you want to call them that, or really founders. They just want to get things done. And I don't know about you, but like when someone blocks me from getting something done, I just, I just want to get things done. Just get out of my way, please. Like, that's all it is. Like, join me or like, please just get out of my way. That's all it is. 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 Karat. 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. One thing about getting out of, out of, out of my way in a different context too is Going back to YouTube, did you see that 14 million YouTuber? He had 14.8 million subs on YouTube and he quit. So the question really is, is getting views worth it? Is going viral worth it? Because this guy just packed up and quit.

Was he generating a lot of income each month?

I don't know. He probably was. But this guy would post about how he's like walking in the Alaska mountains and it's freezing and he's like vlogging it. He's like, about to die, by the way, until he finds a cabin and he goes in the cabin. He's like vlogging that, right? So very wide TAM type of stuff. He'll get a lot of views.

Yeah.

Um, he was done. He quit because too many people recognize him and it started to interfere with his personal life, right?

Ah.

And so this again is a trap of, is it better to be anonymous or famous, right? And I think what we called about earlier in this podcast, the very first topic that we had was, Um, talking really part of it's talking about how these business influencers have started to chase views, but this is the price you pay at the end if you chase too many views because everyone recognizes you and it interferes with your family life and your personal life.

Yeah. I look at it as, as some people want to be famous and they like the attention. Not everyone is that way, but I do believe a good chunk of people are like that. And for those people, they should go after it. Um, if it was me personally, I would rather be anonymous in life and rich. I put the and in there. Uh, I think that is the best setup. I have a friend who is pretty high up on the Forbes list. I know him well. He wears like flip-flops, Nike flip-flops.

Hey, why dressing nice doesn't make you more money?

Yeah. He ha— he probably has nice clothes. I've never seen him in nice clothes. Uh, whereas Nike Flip-Flops, I don't know what he drives as a car, but he has nice cars, but I think he drives like a Toyota or something, or one of those cars.

It's his daily driver.

Yeah. Doesn't care. Doesn't have the fanciest home. No one really knows who he is. And he goes around and just lives his life and he loves it.

Yep.

Um, by the way, and he's rich as crap. When I mean rich as crap is like he can go buy a sports team rich. Okay. In any league.

So billions and billions. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so this piece, okay. I wanna talk about, so I, I, I, I like sharing the new stuff that we're, we're working on with AI. This is the nerdy stuff. This is the stuff I do on Saturdays, by the way. So maybe we can talk about some cool stuff we're doing, some cool shit we're doing in AI this quarter. So I kind of told you that, um, I'm using this product called Lindy.ai, and what it does is it's, you know, Zapier, right?

Yeah.

So Zapier, you get, you have these workflows, but within each workflow you can basically, uh, prompt it to do something, right? So I, I think I told you before that I have it go into our, our Slack and then every day it's, it's like if you say your, your, your daily report, the highest leverage thing you're working on today is, um, creating a report, this thing will coach you and it'll, it'll actually rate how, how, how, how high leverage your activity was, how consistent you are with filling it out. And, um, it actually coaches people up. I will, I think I, I mentioned this already and I'll go into some more examples, but after doing this for a week or two, everyone instantly shaped up. They, they instantly leveled up. Right. And so what I started doing was like, oh, okay, I'm gonna have this sit in as like a, like I work with ChatGPT on the prompts. Right. So I was like, oh, I wanna have a sales coach or I wanna have an EOS coach. 'Cause we, we still run on EOS. Right. And you, you guys don't do that anymore, but EOS is like an L10 meeting, attraction meeting. Right?

Yeah.

You, you talk about your rocks, you talk about your goals and all that. But a lot of people on the team, they don't know how to run that effectively. So I just say, I want you to be the best EOS coach ever. Make a prompt and makes a prompt. And then I bring it over from ChatGPT to Grok. I'm like, hey, ChatGPT said this. I thought you're the best prompt. And they start fighting each other, right? And I take the Grok prompt, I bring it to ChatGPT. Grok said this, I thought you're the best model. And then it makes the perfect prompt, right? And I dump it in there. And then every Thursday, Um, it will scan through all the EOS calls. It'll do like a coaching thing and it'll put 'em into a spreadsheet and I'll send a Slack. It'll send those people a message too, right? And then it also does it for sales calls too. Oh, it also does it for client calls too, right? So you have a, you have a coach in there. And this is, to me, this is like level 1. There's like multiple levels to it. I was walk— working with ChatGPT. This was, this was on one of my walks with ChatGPT. I was like, hey, I'm doing this right now, but this is like level 1. I want you to gimme levels 2, Like all the way up. It went all the way to level 7. It's like, this is the highest tier that you can do. You gotta incentivize people and then it'll come up with like new things that you can build, all this stuff. Right. And I'm like, how much time am I wasting with this? Right. And it's like, you're not wasting time at all. It's like, this is like a top 0.1 thing percent that people aren't doing right now. I'm like, but this will become really common. It's like, yes, this will become common. I was like, but, but, but also what's the downside to this too? The downside is, Eric, if you put too much surveillance, right. It's, it's, it's also not a good thing. Right. Right now, um, this is the type of new work that you and I couldn't have done before.

No.

And I think this is just the very beginning because it instantly lifts the bar across everyone. And it's not costing me that much money. Like I'm paying Lindy $300 a month for 30,000 credits. Um, I've almost exhausted them, but, um, this is the type of stuff that I think is interesting. Now here's the flip side to this. I think you can over-optimize for sure. I think there's a lot of people on YouTube right now talking about, oh, this N8N workflow that I built. It's like these Zapier workflows. That's a lot of time. I like, I like the Lindy one where I could just prompt it and like make these like random things, but it's cool. I copied, I copied this from Neil, by the way. This I stole from you. So what I really like about how Neil goes about his recruiting, and I'm sure he stole this from someone on his team, is they look for people that not only have one promotion, but ideally 2 promotions. at 2 separate companies, correct?

Yeah.

So I have a Lindy that does that. It will find people with 2 promotions from 2 separate companies for specific roles. It instantly lists them. For whatever reason, the recruiters that we work with, not saying they're bad, but they just can't— somehow they can't nail this. But this thing just nails it.

Well, that's one of the easiest things to nail.

But it does it. It lists it for you very quickly instead of having to scan through LinkedIn. And then it'll make a sequence to just add them and then message them. You can just also dump them to like ChatGPT operator or Manus or whatever. My point is earlier this conversation on this podcast, we're just like, we're asking 6 times more questions, 15 times more questions. We're also going to do things 6 to 15 times faster. Yes.

One thing that we're doing this quarter is we're buying a lot of data from, uh, different sources that showcases not only all the search patterns on all these AI platforms, but also breaks down who is showing up. And we're then looking at the queries, the volume of the queries, and then doing research on the internet for those queries. When are those companies mentioned? So we're trying to look at the type of articles, what sources they're coming from, where they're pulling from. And then we're going out there and creating variations of those pieces of content around the web, uh, not for links or anything like that, but more so for the mentions. So then that way we can influence when people start asking AI questions related to our business, we stay top of mind and then it drives revenue indirectly on, you know, for our services.

This is real LLMO. Mm-hmm.

This is real GEO.

Um, what I, I think because this is such the wild, wild west right now, there's going to be so many people that are figuring out how to, play the game. Yeah. And then eventually they'll patch it up and then there'll be a new way to play the game. Right. But it's, it's good to stay ahead of this. Like, by the way, what do you think about these, these other tools like Profound that will show you how you stack up with the LLMs and all that? Like people talk about these, but I'm like, are these, are you paying for that?

We're testing all of them.

Yeah.

And one thing that we're doing too is when you look at the LLMs and you ask questions, a lot of them will cite sources and you can end up seeing, okay, if they said this is the best marketing firm, it's from this source. So when we go to that website or some of those websites that are mentioning it and we hit them up just like you would normally do link building, we try to convince people to swap out corporate names and agencies to ours. And we tell them why we're better, whether it's awards or case studies and why this is a better fit.

Do you offer some money sometimes?

No, we just organically do it and we do it in mass quantity. Yeah, it's a low hit rate similar to link building, but it works really well. And we're slowly starting to see it helping because then we track some of the queries and then when we start typing them in later on, we're noticing slowly, very, very slowly though, that they are starting to mention us more.

When you use AI mode, it's funny because it lists the sources in like a 3-pack on the, on the right. And when I ask about the, the best marketing for whatever, it's always like Clutch or like these lists, right? Yeah. So your move, which people, a lot of, SEOs have been doing this already. They'll reach out to you because you and I have these list pages on our site. Yeah. So we see it. It's basically that, but more of it. Yeah. So in my mind right now, LLMO is still very much traditional SEO, but that will change over time.

So. I agree. I think their algorithms are going to adapt, but it is very similar to very traditional SEO. And I don't think you need to do pay for play. I think you just need to do cold outreach and convince people because if you can't convince people, what's going to happen is New companies and people are going to create articles around the web and they're not going to mention you. So you got to figure out why they're mentioning other people and not you and how you can fix that with your core product or service or your business or your branding so that way you get mentioned more. And that's the real long-term solution.

In my mind, this goes back to having these agents that could reach out and then whenever you have a new offer to input, it just inputs that offer in there and it dynamically shifts it. Because like what you can't do is when you reach out, you send the same reach out For 12 emails, 14 emails, just following up, just following up. Just, it's like, no, maybe you try a sequence of 7 with one offer and then that fails. And then maybe 2 months later you reach out with a new offer and then the same thing again. Um, but that's how you adapt. So we, we got time for 2 more episodes here. So, um, I kind of want to talk about this, this, this weird economy. One, how we're generating pipeline in this weird economy, and then 2, how this weird economy is affecting marketing. You can pick one.

Let's talk about how the weird economy is affecting marketing. Actually, you want to do both?

Yeah, we're going to do both.

So let's start with how it's affecting marketing and then we can go into the pipeline.

Okay.

Well, the way we see it is just there's a lot more uncertainty. Companies, even if they're doing well financially, are afraid to spend and invest. And this is creating opportunities where we're seeing some things cheaper where you can just go and get more market share. But overall, even though the economy is weird, technology's changing at a rapid point, we're not really seeing companies stop marketing or really take their foot too much off the pedal. We're seeing it slightly in some cases, but not too much. And the reason I say this is you can just see the Google earnings and the Facebook earnings or Meta earnings because they break down how much money they generate from ads. It's still growing, uh, and we're still seeing companies spend. And if they don't spend, their numbers get even worse. So they have no choice but to figure out how to keep spending to maintain their numbers.

Yeah. What I'm seeing is right after that China-US deal happened, or that temporary pause in tariffs for 90 days, um, our leads instantly picked up a lot. Yes. Um, I would say that, um, people are cautiously optimistic, I would say. It's not like they're starting, at least with us on the more kind of, um, call it SMB mid-market side. Um, these deals, they're, they're not saying, hey, we're ready to spend a lot out the gate. It's like, hey, like we're, we need to keep moving to your point. Um, and I will say the way this weird economy is affecting marketing too is there's get— there's a lot more interest in, in, in YouTube. There's a lot more interest in Reddit marketing as well. So it does kind of go with this, um, The search everywhere thing. I will say with some clients that we have right now, so one is in semiconductors and we do SEO for them and they're like, dude, where's all this LLM stuff doing? Like, you know, they're like, we use ChatGPT, whatever. So you have to be prepared. So we've been talking about search everywhere a lot. So you have to adapt your marketing because marketing is changing. All the stuff we talked about, AI mode and how search behavior is changing. That's what I would say. So, so this weird economy, I would say it was a pause and then now I think we're back. I think once interest rates start to come down, if they even come down this year, if they start to come down, then people will start to more aggressively spend. Um, but I don't know if that's going to happen or not because, um, my base case has been stagflation and, but my base case has been like that for 5 years. So eventually I'll be right. So.

Going back to your pipeline, when you said it's increased right after, what did it drop down Percentage-wise, if you had to guess, uh, during all the tariff stuff?

It had to— a lot. I, I, I'm going to say like 50%. Got it.

We— and then what, what did it increase by?

Did it—

did you recuperate everything?

I would say we're, we're back to maybe 80, 80, 85% of what we were at before.

Yeah. So I know our lead numbers pretty well. We dropped roughly 20%. It was a little bit less than 20%. Um, but it was more than 19%, uh, right when all the tariff stuff hit. And we, this is organically, this is not RFPs. Um, and then I would say coming out of it, we went up 13% over the prior month. So if you look at April, uh, to May, on May we're on track for growing 13%. So that doesn't make up for the loss, you know, around 20%, because even if we went up 20%, you're going up 20% from a lower base.

Yeah.

So you're not fully making up the number. You would have to climb more than that. But we're seeing it recover and we're starting to see it pick up more and more, but it is slow.

Yeah, it's slow, you know, but with business, I think the one thing that we've learned doing this for a while, you've done it 14 years longer than I have, is you just got to keep going. That's just what business is.

Well, we also see it in which the news cycles are really impacting marketing and we can't control it. An example of this is today. Uh, Trump says starting in June we should tariff EU. I think it was 20%, 25%. I can actually pull it up right now. He says, um, where is it? Trump calls for 50% tariff on European Union starting June 1st. And then Trump says 25% tariffs must be paid by Apple and iPhones not made in the United States. So that kind of stuff just keeps affecting it. It creates uncertainty. What we're really seeing when we talk to companies when it relates to marketing, they want a lot of this tariff stuff to be behind them and the deals to work out. They announce that they're figuring things out with China. They're figuring things out. Was it with the UK was the first announcement?

The UK, they got a deal done before China.

Yeah, but we don't know the details of it still. And we don't know the details of the China deal.

No.

And what people are saying is, At least the companies and executives we're talking to, it's cool they're getting these deals done. We want to see the deals done with pretty much all the countries.

Yeah.

And we actually want to see what the deals entail.

Yeah.

Well, right now when they talk about it on TV, it's a good deal for the United States. We got a deal done. You know, it's great. Yeah. But there's no color when it comes to the detail.

I do think my hope is that things will work out because you look at this $2 trillion investment from the Middle East. You look at this pause, like it feels like things are moving in the right direction. And what I had— what we both had called before was that he's going to lead hard with these tariffs to get them to come to the table. And it seems like that's playing out right now. I just hope this gets done sooner than later.

But is it really a $2 trillion investment from the Middle East? It's like saying Apple is now investing $500 billion into the US economy. They've been investing for many years. They're slowly increasing the numbers. What is the net increase? If you look at the Middle East funds, Look at how much Saudi Arabia has in their sovereign wealth fund. It's not a trillion dollars. It's under that the last time I checked. Norway has the biggest sovereign wealth fund.

Mm-hmm.

These guys take their money and they allocate it to different projects and investments to make money. If you look at what they've been doing over the years, they've been investing already in the US economy because US, Europe has tons of potential revenue. We have the population and the GDP. We haven't, like, they've already been investing money. Are they investing more?

Sure.

But are they really investing $2 trillion new dollars?

No, it's like a capital call. It's like when you invest in a fund, like when do you call it? Right.

Exactly.

But to your point, the economy needs more certainty. And I'm, I'm, I think my point is, I think it feels like we're trending in that direction. I hope it continues in that direction. And I do think that we're, we're trying to do deals with everybody. Um, and I, I, I hope it works out sooner than later, and I hope we start to drop interest rates at some point, but we'll, we'll see what happens. I hope that, you know, this $38 trillion that we have in debt and this $2 trillion deficit, like we start to clean some stuff up. But, um, that's, that's, that's where we're at with this, this weird economy. And we call it weird, by the way, because it, on one end, it seems like, at least for me, it seems like it's, it's hopeful, but on the other end, it's also a lot of uncertainty right now.

Right?

So like, how do you balance it? But go ahead.

You're gonna say something.

Yeah.

Yeah, so check this out. I think the real thing that's affecting marketing more than anything else is interest rates. Because when I look at internal data from our own company and other agencies, March 2022 is when the Fed started increasing rates. It was pretty much zero to the end of the year. It ended up becoming, uh, around 4.25 to 4.5, I believe it was.

4.25.

March 2022, they started increasing rates and it started going at a rapid pace. We started seeing a slowdown in marketing mid-2022. When I talked to other agencies, client spend and all that kind of stuff, they say the same thing, mid-2022. 2024, they dropped the rates down by 1%. 2023, they increased the rates by another percent. 2024, they dropped the rates by another, or they dropped it by 1%. And in 2023, things were still getting really bad. 2024, they started getting better, but what did they do? They dropped it a percent for the Fed rates. If they eventually drop the rates in 2024, hopefully, uh, 2025, uh, 2025, sorry. And if they can do that again in 2026, I think that's what's really going to push marketing more because it makes borrowing cheaper. And borrowing is not just businesses borrowing money to spend it on ads or inventory or for real estate or building factories or warehouses. It affects everything. It affects everything. Credit card payments.

Yeah.

When interest rates are higher, the government, when, when they increase rates, that means the rates on your Visa card and MasterCard and American Express, when you have a balance and you're continually paying interest, it starts going up.

Yeah. Look, I, it, it affects spending directly, right? Because just keep in mind, and this is not an economics lesson, but if the risk-free rate right now, if the 10-year Treasury is, I think approaching 5% or so, you don't need to take a risk for that because you're, you're, you're loaning to the US government and for the most part, very likely they'll pay you back, right? So there's no incentive to, to go out further on the, on the risk curve. But if interest rates are zero, if you're not gonna get paid much on treasuries, then you should take more risk with stocks. And then people start going into private equity and crypto and all these things, right? And then that affects, oh, they're gonna invest in businesses. Oh, if they're gonna invest in businesses, these businesses need to invest in marketing. So it's like a downward effect for everything. Um, the last thing we should cover before we go here, is in this weird economy, how are we generating pipeline?

Right.

So it's the traditional stuff. Email marketing still works. Webinars still work. Okay. SEO. Yep. Still works. Right. YouTube. We're still putting that time and effort into YouTube.

Conferences. We both speak at conferences.

Speak at conferences. Even hosting that event as well.

You do dinners?

Yep. Doing dinners. There's a lot of personal relationship stuff that we do that's hand-to-hand combat. Like this is a form of hand-to-hand combat, right? Yeah. Dinners, hand-to-hand combat. Speaking at events, hand-to-hand combat.

We do a lot of partnerships.

Yeah, you guys do.

Uh-huh. Where we sell other people's products and services and they sell our products and services.

Yep.

That helps too.

Yep. And so, oh, by the way, a lot of these things that we're talking about are relationship-based. Like if I didn't, if I wasn't friends with Neil, he wouldn't have kept come to speak at my event. In fact, in fact, all those people wouldn't have come, came to speak at the event if we weren't friends. Right? Yeah.

And we all did it for free.

Yeah. Almost the one person charged.

Okay.

Yeah. Um, but that's my point. It's, it's, if you continue to do good work, people will become attracted to you. You're gonna build good relationships and then you continue to do it for a long time. That's how you're gonna continue to generate not just pipeline, but relationships for the long term. And it doesn't matter if it's a weird economy, a good, uh, good economy, a bad economy. Um, but that's how we do it. And it's a lot of the stuff is, um, you know, the standard traditional blocking and tackling stuff. And it works. Anything else?

Nope, that's it.

All right. We will see you tomorrow. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe.