The AI Search Strategy That Actually Works

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

75%.

65.

Close.

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

Okay, now we're talking about AI Mode?

Uh-huh.

45%?

62.3%.

Okay.

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

Okay.

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

No.

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

Short-term.

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

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

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

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

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

No, Yogi's are great.

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

AI content creation tool?

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

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

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

I don't know who the interviewer was.

Neil Patel was the first employee of Single Grain. I wasn't here at the time, but he was the first employee of Single Grain.

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

It's interesting to me. I mean, I would say this, if you're going to produce something naturally, there's like a half-life where you start to, that traffic is going to decline over time. But I'm looking at the graphs that she has on this page over here and we should be able to pull up pull this up for the clip. But, you know, I don't need to show the camera, but maybe I will show the camera. But you see these like that, these are pretty steep drop-offs, it basically goes to nothing in the orange line. And you also see the number of organic pages disappearing, at least this is from like an Ahrefs index. So all that to say is, you know, it's been the same since the beginning, like Neil and I've been doing SEO for a while, you publish poo poo, you end up with poo poo traffic. Definitely. Yep. Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads and landing pages, you can't do it on LinkedIn ads right now. But you can do it with Karrot. It's www.karrot.ai. Again, karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. So you have a prediction here. You get 3 in a row here, Neil. So you have a prediction here.

This would be 4 in a row.

Is it 4 in a row?

Yeah.

Okay, 4 in a row.

I messed the numbers up.

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

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

What do you mean by that?

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

Yeah, AI Mode, yeah.

AI Mode, et cetera. But Most people associate Google Search with just traditional search in which, hey, you're going to get some blue links and some videos and maybe an AI overview. You can go to AI mode to see more, or you can go to Gemini. You can do Lens on your phone, but not that many people use it. They're at roughly 20 billion searches a month right now for Google Lens, which I know seems like a lot, but to put it in perspective, Google's getting around 13.7 billion searches a day.

Wow.

Just, you know, people just typing in some queries. So the 20 is not bad, but it's not a big chunk percentage-wise. And that again is monthly. And Google just made some new announcements. They changed their search box and made it an intelligent search box. It's the biggest change to search, to the search box in 25 years. So I don't know if you saw what they just released today.

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

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

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

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

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

Uh-huh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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