In this video Trena Little explains how AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI summaries have fundamentally changed where prospective coaching clients conduct research, rendering traditional SEO and Google search less effective. She cites data showing that over 60% of U.S. consumers now use AI to research high‑ticket purchases, up from 41% in 2025, and highlights that AI trusts YouTube as its top cited source—200 times more than any other platform in Google’s AI overview. Trena argues that coaches should treat YouTube not as a subscriber‑driven channel but as a searchable, long‑form asset that AI can pull from when recommending experts. She stresses the need for hyper‑specific, problem‑focused video content, consistency, and cross‑platform signals (podcasts, blogs) to become the go‑to source for a given coaching problem. Real‑world examples illustrate that even channels with few subscribers can generate thousands of dollars in sales when their videos address a single, well‑defined problem. Trena offers a mini‑course (trenalittle.com/video‑plan) that walks coaches through video scripting, titles, thumbnails, and a step‑by‑step plan to get AI to recommend them. The core actionable takeaway: identify one core problem your ready‑to‑buy client faces, create a deep series of YouTube videos around it, and let the AI‑driven flywheel bring warm, high‑intent leads without the need for viral subscriber counts or heavy ad spend.
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Before AI completely changed the way we do our online business, Google and SEO was the spot to be. Your goal was to show up in Google when somebody searched your niche. Well, because of AI, SEO isn't going to cut it for you anymore because that is not where your future coaching clients are searching. They've moved to ChatGPT to research their future investments. They've moved to Perplexity. Even Google has changed the way it presents the answer to how people are now searching because people are No longer searching the old SEO way with keywords. They're creating summaries of information, and AI is going to be choosing the coaches it recommends. And either you're going to be on the list or you're not. I wanna show you how to get on that list. I'm Trena Little, and I help established coaches and course creators start to use YouTube as a sales asset, but not become a YouTuber. To be honest with you, I didn't even realize AI was sending me clients until late 2025. A client on one of my coaching calls nonchalantly said, oh yeah, ChatGPT recommended you to me, and I didn't really think much of it until 2026. Then I had about 6 of my brand new clients told me they found me because ChatGPT recommended me when they were searching how to build a YouTube strategy for business owners. That's honestly where I knew we were dealing with a change and I had to jump on this. In doing my research, I found that over 60% of U.S. consumers are using AI to research high investment purchases, things like your coaching program. And just last year in 2025, that was only 41%. And that jump is actually coming from established buyers. The people that are doing the research on AI have the money and they understand the importance of investing in a high-quality coach. And that's why it's so important that you are the one that AI is going to recommend. And I think there's still a place for SEO and Google, but you need to realize 60% of searches on Google end with zero clicks. Because AI is summarizing the answer right for her at the top of the page. And if you want to make sure you're at the top of the page in that summary, you need to make sure you're creating content that AI will pull from. And I need you to understand why this is so important. So many marketing gurus, so many business coaches, people that we have been listening to for years are still telling us to double down on the things that worked for them in 2020 and 2021. The same style launches, the same style funnels, the same style challenges. The same repurposing to every single platform, the same Facebook ad strategy. They've literally stuck their head in the sand and haven't looked at what is happening to businesses right now in 2026. They hit the gold rush back in 2020, 2021. I was there. I had babies and I was balancing being locked up with my kids. And so I wasn't really scaling a business at that time, but I'm still here today and I am still closer to where you are than where they are because they haven't tried to make $10K months. They haven't tried to make $30K months. They're well past that, so they don't understand where we are getting stuck, those that are in the middle here. And so they're constantly feeding you a strategy that's not gonna work for you because they haven't even tried that strategy in the last couple of years. They're doing their best Lisa Barlow from Salt Lake City, refusing to take accountability that things have changed. I mean, take a look at Amy Porterfield, right? She's not running the same strategy she used to run just a few years ago. Why? Because what used to work does not work anymore. AI has completely changed the game. So what can you start doing now to take into consideration what's no longer working, even though some people are telling us it is when we know it isn't? I first need you to realize that AI pulls recommendations, looks for sources that it can trust. And what a lot of coaches don't even realize is one of the biggest sources AI trusts is YouTube, because AI loves long-form content. YouTube has actually become one of the top recommended resources for AI recently beating out Reddit. According to a study by BrightEdge, YouTube is the number one cited domain in Google's AI overview. And I've seen this. I was just playing around the other day asking Google some questions, long-form questions, and I popped right up— my YouTube video. And YouTube is actually cited 200 times more in the Google AI overview than any other platform. And it's not just Google. Perplexity and even ChatGPT, which has zero reason to favor a Google platform like YouTube, still leans on YouTube to find experts to recommend. The reason why is because your YouTube footprint creates off-platform signals that ChatGPT can trust. So when somebody opens ChatGPT and does research around who is the best coach for X, or who can help me grow my business with this, AI is going to scan sources, find a consensus, start naming names, and the names AI pulls from most often comes from YouTube transcripts. Not Instagram content, not TikTok content, not even your beautifully designed Substack will do. And this is why you're going to see more and more coaches go to YouTube as like their discoverable platform. But here's the thing, as a coach on YouTube, you don't have to play YouTuber games or apply YouTuber strategies. You don't have to chase subscribers, you don't have to chase views, because what you're building is a searchable asset for the coaching business that you already have. So that when somebody searches AI or asks AI to recommend a specific coach for a specific problem, AI is going to pull from the assets that you build on YouTube. Not because you went viral on a video, not because you have tens of thousands of subscribers, it's going to be from content that you solve the specific problem that they are searching for. And I've got a great example. I have a client of mine who hasn't posted to YouTube in over a year, not a brand new video in over a year. Her old videos are still pulling in over 200 views from ChatGPT, videos she's not even promoting. She's not even showing up on social media at all. AI is pulling her content citing them and sending her traffic. That's not consistency that's doing the work. It's compounding with the content that you create. And I get it. I know I said that you don't need to chase subscribers, but let me tell you why subscribers don't even matter to get you recommended by AI. A study of 100 million AI citations found one thing: subscriber count of the channels of the videos it recommends doesn't even matter. 40% of the cited videos AI recommended had less than 1,000 subscribers. The size of your channel, the amount of views that your video gets, doesn't decide whether AI recommends you or not. The clarity of what you talk about on your channel does though. That's why it's so important when I work with my clients inside the YouTube coaching experience, we make sure we are very clear on what do we want to be known for? What is the problem that our future clients are searching? And we build a YouTube strategy around that very specific topic because my clients aren't going broad. Broad isn't going to get recommended on YouTube. I help them get very specific so we increase the possibilities and the chances that AI finds us and puts us in front of our future clients instead of our competitors. And so I think it's important to understand that you don't get recommended by AI because you go viral. You get recommended because your name is consistently tied to a specific problem across the sources it can trust. And I'm not gonna lie and make this look, oh, this is the best thing. YouTube is just a piece of this. You need to make sure you're doing things across the board to continue to be the source for this particular topic. So you need to be doing guest podcasts, you need to be doing blog posts, which I show my clients how to turn their YouTube videos into a blog post. You need other people talking about you and what you do, but that's something you can't fully control right now. But you can control getting videos up on YouTube for the specific problem that you solve in your coaching program. And that's your flywheel that is going to build trust day in and day out without needing to show up on social media every single day without needing to be a YouTuber to get the sales that you want. I've had a client with less than 10 subscribers and her videos getting less than 20 views book over $19,000 in sales because we were specific on the problem she solved and we got the videos up on YouTube to do that. And I'm always here to be completely transparent and share the truth and tell you what's actually going on right now. So in 2026 alone, I've had over 100 views directly from ChatGPT go to my YouTube videos. Now that doesn't seem like a lot, but ChatGPT recommendations— there's people that come from ChatGPT— tend to convert at a higher rate because they are actively doing the research on chat before they finally come to your videos, and your videos are what closes them. So yes, it's less traffic, but it's a higher or a much warmer audience than anywhere else because a viewer from ChatGPT was already doing the research and they're in buying mode. They've narrowed down their sources and they're checking you out to decide if you are right for them or not. Those are the warmest leads for you to catch. Posting one video a week, cutting back your social media daily content, cutting back your ad spend, taking off Fridays while YouTube does the work for you in 2026. Now you're probably wondering, okay, Trena Little, but what do I say? How do I say it? What does a script to a YouTube video actually look like? I've got you covered. I've created a quick little mini course basically of my video game plan. And in this little mini course, I walk you through how to write a video game game plan, how to hook your content, but more importantly, how to come up with titles and thumbnails that will actually get the click. Because it doesn't matter how great your content is, if you don't win the click, nobody's ever gonna watch it. So you can get that entire little mini course at trenalittle.com/video-plan. If I had to tell you to pick one thing that you could do today to help get AI to start recommending you to your future clients, I would say pick one problem that your ready-to-buy viewer has. Has, just one. I would create a series of videos on that specific problem and go deep into that problem with every single angle that you can think about, because AI is not recommending people that are dabbling with topics. It's recommending the coaches, the content that get deep, that are consistently tying that problem across multiple videos. That's exactly what builds the flywheel. So think about your content right now, whether you're on YouTube or not. What's one problem that you want your name tied to that you solve for your clients? If you can't answer that in one sentence, AI can't either, and that's why you're not gonna get recommended. You've got to fix that problem first before you even create any content. And if you're still thinking about where does social media fit into all of this, and you're recently excited about the Gap Challenge, aren't we all? Well, I wanna explain why your clients aren't really on social media anymore. I break down exactly why in this video right here. I highly encourage you to watch that to see what you should be doing instead.
