SearchGPT Gives Brands 4x More Referrals vs. Perplexity

Do you think SearchGPT is going to crush Google?

No, because I haven't even used it yet.

I think people are going to be frustrated that it doesn't have the basic search functionality.

Have you used it yet? I don't even know it's out.

I have not used it yet.

Yeah, I just—

I think it's too hard. My buddy has a— my buddy has a— what is it, a beta account or whatnot? And I've used his, you know, when I was with him and I was able to use it and play with it.

Yeah.

Beta, alpha, or whatever you want to end up calling it. But he was able to have access. I myself have not had direct access to it.

I just think it's too early right now. Like we've said this time and time again, like in the short term, AI is overhyped. In the long term, it's going to meet the hype. And so like we're adapting over time. But, you know, I think it's just one foot in front of the other each day. And that's all you can do.

Yeah. And everyone believes like, oh, this new company is going to come around and they're going to crush these big old giants. I'm like, it doesn't work that way. TikTok and Instagram did not crush Facebook.com. I'm not talking about Meta, the company. But Facebook.com is up and running, kicking and still making a Yeah.

Agency owners, if you want to grow faster, my partner Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills, and you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people, and you're going to be hanging out with like-minded people such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you on the other side. Okay, so let's do another one. Did you hear about the, the story with Scribe Publishing? How they went from $21 million in revenue to bankrupt?

Scribd or Scribed?

Scribe Publishing. So they did David Goggins' book, He Can't Hurt— I think it's He Can't Hurt Me or something.

It's not that site that would just scrape documents?

No, no, no, no. That's Scribed. So Scribe Publishing. So you remember Tucker Max?

Yeah.

So this is his company. So it was him and another guy. God, I forgot the other guy's name. But then they hired another guy, right? This guy Jevon or whatever, right? And he wrote this entire story. It's on tuckermax.com. But it talks about how they went to $21 million in revenue. They were well on their way to $100 million in revenue. And then they had the CEO, right? And then what happened was one of the co-founders left and then the CEO like freaked out. And then basically the CEO started embezzling and started like taking money from the company and everything. Everything started falling apart. And I think something happened with his family or something. And so he just went like crazy, right? And so I'm just kind of going here. I just want to call out a couple of things that, um, some key takeaways for people. Um, but the whole idea here is that I think with Tucker, he saw some red flags with the CEO. He didn't act on them. It's kind of similar to me where I've seen, you know, we, you've heard my stories in the past where I've hired like GMs before, but I, I knew something was off. And so one of the key lessons here, and he's kind of calling it out too, is if you have a gut feeling about any hire, that gut feeling when you're about to hire them, Act on that gut feeling because that gut feeling comes from experience. And what do you think about that? Because I just think that when you don't act on the gut feeling, 100% of the time it will hurt you.

I agree with that, especially on firing. I don't believe in the IBM philosophy, you know, when someone made that $100 million mistake at IBM and the CEO is like, oh, you just spent $100 million training them, you know, why would I get rid of them? Like, no, they keep making mistakes or they suck. Fire and just put someone in who's competent right away.

And the other thing too is, I don't know if this guy was experienced with books, but like, you've been pretty good about hiring people that have been there, done that. I've been more experimental. And this is a case where he was a little too experimental, I believe. And so, he hired this guy and like, they became good friends and everything. And it seemed like he was a competent operator. But at the end of the day, it didn't seem like this guy could maybe take the company to the next level, which is why maybe he started doing all these crazy things. So, I think My take on it with my experiences and reading this is like, you know, there's a difference between a friend and someone that's very competent to run the company. And you have to trust that as well. You have to trust your gut on that. And the other thing, the third thing over here is that they were trying to sell the business. And this guy Jevon, he said, hey, he— so Jevon was emphatic about him handling the entire process of selling the business. So not hiring a broker, Because he said that they would take too high of a fee and slow things down. And so Zach— Zach is his name— Zach and I let Jevon handle the sales process himself. And if there was a single critical decision that contributed the most to the Scribe collapse, this was it, right? And so basically they were trying to sell the company. It could have sold it for like $60-ish or so. He's like, yeah, we're gonna sell it for $60, don't worry. And then it became like $40 and then became like $20 or whatever. And then it basically became like nothing, right? And so the key thing here is this is again, trust someone that's been there, done that, right? Don't just trust someone for their word. And I think For me especially, I tend to place a lot of trust in people. But now I've learned over the years that you got to trust and you got to verify, right? As I was reading this, I would say so. I know Tucker, and I think he's a great guy. He's a great writer as well. As I was reading, I was like, okay, at the very end of it, he takes responsibility. He's like, yeah, like you know most of this is my fault, right? I just want to remind everyone that like if it's your company, it's all your fault at the end of the day. Yes.

Now is he going to start the company up all over again?

And so it got bought by Enduring Ventures, which remember the the dinner we're at? You sat next to this tall guy, Sierra Sieva. Remember that guy, the HVAC guy?

Uh, yeah, he was next to me. Yeah, he bought it.

Yeah, so his, uh, firm Enduring Ventures, he's partnered with a guy named Xavier. So they bought it, I think, for pennies on the dollar. And then Eric Jorgensen, who wrote the, the, the Almanac of Naval Ravikant, who's speaking at the YPO Global Marketing Summit, um, he's now the CEO. And I think he, he bought in with some money too. So I think they bought it for pennies on the dollar. But, um, this is a business that could have sold, you know, for probably $60 at least, um, if not anywhere from $40 to $60 million. It would have changed Tucker's life. Uh, but instead You know, it didn't work out.

And you're saying David Goggins's book is published by them?

Uh-huh. Yeah. So they, by the way, like a bunch of people paid them and then all of a sudden they're like, hey, we can't fulfill your book and we can't give you a refund. So it was tough. Yeah.

But now it's all fixed because someone bought it out.

Now it's all fixed. And they have a lot of talented people writing these books. It's not a problem with the business. It was, the problem was, was it does matter. Like people are like, oh, CEOs are overpaid. It's like, it does matter who's running the ship.

Yes. A bad manager just creates chaos within an organization. And if they're toxic, Well, they bring tons more toxic people with them.

Tell me about it.

Yeah.

All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint, and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. There's, there's one here where we talked about the attention. Just attention itself doesn't matter, but there's this post over here from Sarah Adam, who's head of partnerships and influencer marketing at Wix. So this case study, one IG Reel got 950K views, okay? But the influencer that they used here was— this influencer has 2,500 followers on Instagram, average Reel views 2,200, engagement rate 3.88%, right? So what they did was they're like, okay, we're going to spend $1,000 to just pay for the IG Reel, right, including promotional rights, and they spent $2K boosting it to Meta. And then the goal was brand awareness, right? Which is kind of like, Yeah. But results here, 950K views, 31,000 likes, 8 comments, engagement rate 3.31%. So what she's saying here is, this is one example demonstrating the value of working with talented nano influencers. When I started working with influencers 3 years ago, my discovery benchmark was 20K followers. So she's basically saying like, now you can work with influencers that are even smaller. Now again, this 950K, who knows what sales it led to? This kind of looks like a vanity metric. But at least we know that this is possible. So that's a good thing.

It is. And I posted some data on this a long time ago on X.

Oh, and Elon retweeted it?

That was a different one. But we took a lot of the influencer data from a company called Legion Athletics. It's extremely profitable for them. Why? Because they focus on nano and micro influencers and they focus on just scaling them up and they're much more flexible on the deal structure while the bigger influencers just want a ton of cash.

And the micro influencers are— the nano influencers are grateful for anything. Because they don't get anything.

Yeah, you just need a ton of them. The problem isn't making it profitable. The problem is it's just logistics.

Imagine when you have agents that can do this for you, that can set up these for you.

Hopefully they'll be accurate. But I agree with you within a few years.

Yeah, we'll get there. Kevin Indig has this one on— he analyzed 500K AI overviews. So let's, let's reset this one. So here's what you can learn from analyzing 500,000 AI overviews. So there's a strong correlation between organic traffic and AIO, so AI Overviews presence, indicating a strong link between high-traffic domains and AIO citations. Even when Wikipedia and YouTube are removed, organic traffic remains a significant factor. Weak correlation between common crawl data and AI Overview visibility makes sense because Google relies on its own index for AIOs. So basically he's saying ranking well organically is a major factor in being cited in AI Overviews, though not the only one. Meeting user intent and having relevant content for specific passages in AIOs is key too. So yeah, this data source is from Surfer. What are our thoughts here?

I agree with that. We're seeing sites that are really well optimized getting more traffic because of AIO reviews because of the citations.

Yep. Citations, strong. So high traffic domains, right? Because if you're— if you have a high traffic domain, Google's— you've already gone through all Google's filters, right? You passed the filters. Same thing with the citations as well. So it makes a lot of sense. I don't even think I mean, 500K is a good sample size. So good job to Kevin and Surfer here. So that's what it is. Yeah.

And Marc Benioff recently even said AI is overhyped, and Microsoft is partly due to blame because of that.

Why does he say Microsoft is to blame?

I'm assuming because of ChatGPT and everything that is pushing on the market. Yeah. But when you're looking at AI, Benioff and Others, including Eric and I, none of us are saying that AI isn't here to stay, and we all believe it's very valuable, but people act like AI can solve all their problems. That's not the case today. The technology is really far from being amazing. It's great already, and it's shocking what it can already do, but you just have to be patient and wait 4 or 5 years for it to really be great.

Yeah. I mean, I listened to a couple interviews with Jensen Huang recently, or Huang, and I think, you know, this stuff is gonna get crazier and crazier. Like, the amount of people that are spending on infrastructure right now, um, for that giga cluster— that's what they call it— that Elon stood up, it took him like 19 days. He's like, dude, that usually would take years for people to stand up.

One year. He said one year. It took Elon 19 days.

19 days. And then he has a team for it, right? So it's just astounding. But my point of saying all this is that there's going to be a lot more resources being poured into infrastructure, and Nvidia will probably continue to go up for the next couple years or so. Um, and I— look, I We've, we're saying in the short term it's overhyped, but we do both believe in the long term our businesses are gonna be pretty affected by it, um, in a good way. That's what I think.

Yes. I think it's gonna help.

You know, he said something too, like, I, my kind of stance on like, okay, these AI agents is like, you know, we can only afford to hire like the best people. But Jensen's take on it is like, okay, we're at maybe 20,000 people right now at Nvidia. Maybe we get it to 50,000, but maybe we add another 150,000 agents and we'll be way more effective. And so he, his whole take is like, everyone will learn how to use these agents. and we'll all be more effective. It's not that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs, which I think is a lot more optimistic and I like that.

I also think he's much more realistic about it. I think Sam Altman's the other extreme on it's going to replace a lot of stuff. I do believe it is going to replace certain industries, but the technology just isn't there. The quality isn't there where it can just replace tons of people's jobs. And AI agents is just another word of saying you're going to have a buddy or assistant next to you that's going to help you accomplish a lot of your things, which is how a lot of people are going to operate. And sure, these agents can go and get things done even when you're sleeping and pretty much be a quote unquote virtual employee or AI employee. You're also going to see though individuals in an organization being paired with AI that's already trained by that organization for them, and it's going to help you do your job better.

I think we're just going to become a lot more productive and entire society will benefit from it. And then also, we're— I think society will just become more prosperous. But that's happened over and over, right? You go from, you know, the, the— all the ages we've been through. Like, you have the Industrial Age, right? Like, you have the Gilded Age, right? You had— I don't know how many ages there are. Like, there's a lot of ages that we've been through, and each time a big technological shift happened, we all got richer from it.

And— but the ages are getting shorter and shorter now.

Like, would you rather be a king from 500 years ago or be like, you know, just someone making like, uh, like a mid-level salary right now? I'd rather be that person making a mid-level salary.

Oh, I would want to be the king.

Why? Have you seen— okay, I've seen documentaries on the castles. Do you know how bad it gets?

Oh, from 500 years ago? I don't think they had toilets.

So the toilet, all the poop starts to build up in the castle. See, you don't know that. And then also, also like the food starts to rot and everything. It's not nice. Like there's rats everywhere. Like when you're sleeping, It's not a good life.

Nah, I wouldn't want to be a king 500 years ago. And the main reason being for that is people are after you and you're going to eventually die. Exactly.

So like, you're— look, we've net-net, you know, everyone complains about the rich getting richer and everything. Like, yes, that's true. There's a gap, but like we all are continuing to become more wealthier. That's true.

Yeah.

Hopefully. Yeah.

We're knocking on wood. We're hoping everyone in this world starts doing better.

So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And we will see you later. In fact, you know, I'll tell you what, Neil and I will be recording in Germany. I didn't even tell him this yet. We will be recording in Germany. I found a podcast studio. So, you know, that's another way you can make the most of your trips. So yeah, bye.