Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

Quick show of hands. How many of you have sat in a meeting where somebody said traffic is down and then treated it like the building was on fire?

Tim’s not convinced that’s the right approach.

Traffic is a means to an end. The end goal always is revenue. And increasingly, traffic and revenue are decoupling in ways that should change how you measure success.

AI Overviews and AI Mode have made that decoupling even more dramatic since this episode was first recorded. Organic clicks are down for many businesses. At the same time, branded search and direct navigation are up for many of the clients Tim works with. Revenue is holding or growing even as raw traffic numbers fall.

That shouldn’t surprise you. It shows the difference between traffic that probably was never going to convert and customers who actually want to find you, your brand, your products, and your services.

As a buddy of Tim’s likes to say, “You don’t deposit clicks. You deposit money.”

In Digital Reset Foundations Episode 512, Tim Peter looks at what your marketing and content should accomplish, how to measure their real contribution, and where AI can help you produce work that drives revenue while preserving the human voice that makes your brand distinct.

Clicks and traffic can help your marketing drive results. Revenue and profits tell you whether the work ultimately succeeded. Your content should help customers understand who you are, see how you solve their problems, and choose to do business with you. It should also help existing customers stay satisfied and come back again.

Measure whether your content helps you gain customers, keep customers, and grow revenue. Use AI to make the work more efficient and to uncover patterns in your data. Keep your people, personality, and judgment at the center of what customers see.

Watch branded search, direct navigation, app activity, customer acquisition, retention, revenue, and profits. Use those signals to determine whether your content reaches the right people and does the work you need it to do.

Give people a reason to care about your brand, what you do, and how you make their lives better. Build stories and useful content that they want to share with friends, families, fans, and followers. Curiosity and investment in your brand can lead to customers and revenue whether the path includes a click or not.

Use AI to brainstorm, test personas and ideas, build outlines, create rough drafts, streamline production, and analyze data. Then put your people, your personality, and your experience into the final work. That is how you build trust and stand apart.

Ready to build marketing that creates demand beyond Big Tech’s clicks? Get Tim Peter’s book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, on Amazon.

Want Tim to help your team connect marketing activity with revenue and profits? Learn more about Tim Peter’s speaking, workshops, and consulting.

If this episode helped you look past clicks and focus on the business results that matter, send it to a colleague who needs to hear it. They’ll be glad you did.

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 15:47

Quick show of hands.

How many of you have sat in a meeting where somebody said traffic is down and then treated it like the building was on fire? I’m not convinced that’s the right approach.

Traffic is a means to an end. The end goal always is revenue, and increasingly, traffic and revenue are decoupling in ways that should change how you measure success.

In this Foundations episode, we’re looking at exactly how you can do that.

That matters because AI Overviews and AI Mode have made that decoupling even more dramatic since this episode was first recorded.

Organic clicks are down for many businesses.

At the same time, for most clients I work with, branded search is up. Direct navigation is up. And for a lot of clients, revenue is holding or growing even as raw traffic numbers fall.

That shouldn’t surprise you. It’s showing you the difference between traffic that probably was never going to convert anyway and customers who actually want to find you, your brand, your products, and your services.

I’m Tim Peter. This is Digital Reset Foundations, episode 512.

Let’s dive in.

Before I get too far into this discussion, I want to address the big question, which is, what is the point of marketing?

The answer, which you probably know but might surprise a few folks, is marketing exists to drive revenue.

Your job isn’t to drive clicks or traffic. It’s not even to build your brand. The point of marketing is to drive revenue. Period. End of story.

Building a brand is a great way to do that, to drive revenue. Almost always, it’s a critical step towards driving revenue. And clicks and traffic certainly help. But they’re also steps towards the overall goal, and that goal is revenue, or even better, profits.

As a buddy of mine likes to say, "You don’t deposit clicks, you deposit money."

I don’t mean this to be mercenary. Your company and your team and you yourself may have larger, more altruistic, more beneficial motives for the work that you do.

There are so many companies who do great work in this area. Think of companies like TOMS or Patagonia or Out of the Closet, a thrift store in my backyard that donates its proceeds to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

They’re all remarkable. They do tremendous work in their communities, and they deserve credit for their commitment to making the world better for all of us.

But without revenue, without profits, without cash money, those companies can’t deliver on their amazing, admirable promises to their communities.

Marketing that doesn’t deliver revenue, at least in the longer term, is a waste of time, it’s a waste of budget, and it’s a waste of effort.

That’s why I always say that content is your 24x7x365 salesperson and your 24x7x365 customer service rep. It is marketing in action. It is marketing intended to drive results.

The salesperson part of it is obvious. It drives sales. And the customer service rep part helps drive satisfaction and retention among your customers. Those lower your long-term cost of customer acquisition by helping you keep the people already using your products and services and getting them to come back again and again and again.

That’s why what you’ve heard me say before, that content is king and customer experience is queen. They work together to sell and retain your customers.

So shouldn’t your content at least drive clicks? I mean, it’d be great if it did. But it’s not necessarily what you need it to do.

Your content exists to connect with your customers, both real customers and potential customers. It helps them understand who you are and help people solve their problems, how you make their lives better, and again, help convert them to customers and keep those customers coming back again and again and again.

Convert and keep. That’s what your content needs to do.

Clicks are one way to do that, sure. But your content can do so much more than that, so much more than simply drive a single click.

When your content is shared on social channels, it can keep your name in front of potential customers. And that can drive people to type in your URL or, far more common, search for your brand name.

Think about how much search has changed over the last couple of years. We don’t have 10 blue links any longer. We don’t have the way search has always worked. When people search for your category or a topic area or something more generic, you might show up.

Do you know what comes up when people search for you by name? You, your brand. That is a genuinely good thing, capital G, capital T, good thing. You love to see it.

And getting people to be invested in your brand is part of what your content is supposed to do because that’s how you drive revenue. You get people to care about your brand. You get people to care who you are. You get people to care about what you do to help them live a better life. That’s the whole point.

My friend Mark Schaefer has a book, "Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World," which is well worth your time.

It is filled with tons of case studies of brands doing amazing work, creating great stories shared with their customers, friends, and families, and fans and followers that drive actual, real, honest-to-goodness engagement in the best possible sense of the word with brands just like yours.

It causes those folks to want to learn more, to browse, and yes, to buy, to create revenue for your brand, to create profits for your business.

Content that gets people curious about your business is good content, is really good content. That’s what it’s supposed to do, because getting people curious about your brand, getting them invested in your brand, is how you convert them to customers and how you convert to revenue.

You also can measure it. I know this might sound contradictory relative to what I said a little bit ago, but you can see the value here even without clicks.

Pay attention to changes in traffic from branded keywords. Keep track of how much direct navigation and activity on your app you receive if you have one.

Most importantly, keep a close eye on your revenue. While the specifics of how you drill down into the details around this kind of tracking are beyond the scope of today’s episode, every one of these are signs that your marketing is reaching the people you want to reach, that it’s doing the work you need it to do.

In fact, I’m going to say something a little controversial here, but if you can’t see it show up in your revenue, then your marketing isn’t working. That’s a sign right there that you have work to do. You need to be able to see something to know that it’s working, and if you’re not seeing it, then it’s not working. And if you are seeing things happen, then it’s a sign that things are working. It’s just drilling into the details to know how to do that.

So content marketing is good even without clicks on the content itself, right? It makes sense why you want to use it.

How does AI fit into this picture? Well, I’m glad you asked.

First, I want to go back to our prior episode where I said AI won’t kill content marketing. Bad content will. Boring, obviously machine-generated content that lacks humanity will. Content that fails to connect with human beings as individuals and as members of the communities they care about will kill content marketing. In short, AI will only kill content marketing if you let it.

I am dead serious about that. AI will not produce the content that your customers love. Almost no way, no how.

What AI can do, though, is help you brainstorm ideas for content.

You can use AI to generate personas for your target customers, then ask your favorite AI to provide feedback about your ideas before you invest too much time and treasure into producing them.

You can use AI to help you craft outlines or even, and I can’t emphasize this word enough, create rough drafts for your content, for your imagery, for your video scripts, and for your social media posts. Again, rough drafts, not the final draft.

You can also use AI to help you parse your data to uncover whether any spikes in your analytics represent a fluke or a longer-term trend.

When you use AI to help you craft content, do not, and I am begging you, do not take the output these tools provide and post them as is. Do not use them as the final version of your content. Anyone can do that. Increasingly, it feels like everyone is, and that’s why we see so much crap content.

I mean, if I’m being perfectly honest, I use AI-generated images more than I should. We’re going to be moving away from that over time. They’re just not always great images. They don’t do what we need them to do. They don’t tell the story of the brand we need them to tell. It was great to test them out. It was great to learn about them.

It was great to see what can be done with them. But fundamentally, do they actually represent us at our most human, at our most sincere, and at our most truthful and honest? No. They’re not great content. They’re fine, but they’re not great.

Instead, your content should reflect your brand, your personality, and as much as possible, a specific individual, a specific human within your company who can build longer-term relationships and trust with your target audience.

You don’t want customers to connect with a robot. For one thing, they probably won’t. For another, it doesn’t stand apart from anybody else’s robot.

Instead, you want your audience, you want the people you want to talk to, to connect with human beings, with the human beings that make your company, your brand distinct and human.

To give one real-world example, this podcast that you’re listening to right now is not scripted by a machine. It isn’t hosted by a machine.

We do use AI to transcribe the recording. We use AI to test titles. We use AI to generate the image that accompanies each episode and do some careful curation of multiple possible images. We occasionally use AI to review the script and provide feedback. And that’s it. That’s all we do.

Other companies we work with use AI to help personalize messages or test alternatives for different customer segments. Some use AI editing tools to streamline video production.

They and we use AI to improve efficiency and scale. But all of those start and end with human-crafted content. That’s the only way you’re going to stand apart. Otherwise, you’re going to sink into a sea of sameness.

So what are some key takeaways as you think about using AI to help your content marketing drive revenues without clicks?

The first is that the point of your marketing is to drive revenue, period.

Next, your content marketing is your 24x7x365 salesperson and 24x7x365 customer service rep.

If your content helps you gain customers or keep existing ones, your content is doing its job whether those people click… or not.

Next, your content that makes customers curious about your brand and your business is good content. Do more of that.

Next, you can track your content’s effectiveness by watching branded activity in search, social, and your website.

And AI can help you identify traffic and trends there.

Next, AI can also help you streamline or scale production of great content.

But AI shouldn’t be the face or voice of your company. Customers want to work with people they like and that they trust. Your people must own and produce your final content deliverables.

Plus, remember that everyone who uses AI to create their final content deliverables increasingly all look and sound the same.

Break free from that herd. Be human.

Ultimately, great content produced by and for humans will help you drive revenues and profits for your business with or without clicks. Embrace that reality. Your business, your brand, and your bottom line will all thank you for it.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Let them know what you think too.

You can also find the show notes for this episode and an archive of all of our past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcasts.

Thanks so much for listening today. This show wouldn’t happen without you. I very much appreciate you doing it. Please be well, be safe, and as always, take care everybody.

“Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the “shiny objects” to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post Traffic Is Down. Revenue Is Up. Clicks Are Overrated. (Digital Reset Foundations Episode 512) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

AI has gotten dramatically better. Faster, cheaper, more capable. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, all of them have improved significantly. It’s amazing how far we’ve come… and how fast.

What hasn’t changed? AI still can’t do the strategic heavy lifting for your business. It can’t define your value proposition. It can’t identify what your customers actually need. It can’t set priorities based on your long-term business goals without you first doing the hard work necessary to figure out what those goals are.

AI can help you brainstorm. It can help you analyze data, create content, engage customers, and execute faster, smarter, or better. You still have to supply the judgment about what makes sense for your business.

There’s a story in this episode about Gil Amelio, the CEO of Apple before Steve Jobs returned, and my favorite dumb business quote of all time. Amelio supposedly said, “Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom leaking water, and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.”

Um, what?

If your ship has a hole in the bottom, your job is to stop the water from coming in. Worrying about which direction it’s pointing guarantees that the only direction it’s going is… straight down.

That story illustrates the core point of this episode. AI is a great tool. Strategy ultimately is still your job.

In Digital Reset Foundations Episode 510, Tim Peter looks at the things that will never change about your business no matter what AI does: understanding your audience, solving real customer problems, and building trust and relationships with your customers.

AI can make execution faster, cheaper, and easier. Those benefits only matter when you’re executing the right strategy. Start with the customer, the problem you solve, the journey they follow, and the reason they should choose you. Then examine your messaging, customer journeys, and measurement framework. Once those pieces are in place, ask how AI can help you execute faster, smarter, or better. The tool supports the strategy. Your judgment stays in control.

You need clear answers before any technology can help you execute effectively.

Pay attention when content drives traffic but conversions remain flat, when your team produces more without reaching the right audience, when marketing and sales work out of sync, or when teams stay busy without moving in the same direction. Those are symptoms of a strategy gap, not an AI problem.

Revisit your messaging, customer journeys, website, app, sales interactions, and measurement framework. Make sure they point toward the business results you need. Then ask, “How can AI help us execute faster, smarter, or better?”

Ready to put AI to work in support of a sound business strategy? Get Tim Peter’s book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, on Amazon.

Watch Tim Peter explain why AI is changing what customers search for and why your most valuable search term is your brand name.

Want Tim to help your team build a practical marketing, customer acquisition, and AI strategy? Learn more about Tim Peter’s speaking, workshops, and consulting.

If this episode made you think differently about AI and business strategy, send it to a colleague who needs to hear it. They’ll be glad you did.

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 13:09

AI has gotten better, but it still can’t save a bad strategy.

I’d argue that will remain true effectively forever.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to explore some Digital Reset Foundations episodes, revisiting core concepts that continue to hold true long after they were originally recorded.

Today’s episode is all about how important it is for you to have the right strategy before you just sprinkle a little AI on it.

Since this episode was recorded, AI has gotten dramatically better. Faster, cheaper, more capable. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, all of them have improved significantly. In fact, it’s amazing how far we’ve come… and how fast.

What hasn’t changed? Well, AI still can’t do the heavy lifting for your business strategy.

Can it give you a strong strategy plan template? Well, sure, it can do that. But it can’t define your value proposition or identify what your customers actually need or set priorities based on your goals without you first doing the hard work necessary to figure out what those are.

There’s a story in this episode I still love about Gil Amelio, the CEO of Apple before Steve Jobs came back, that I cannot wait for you to hear.

It illustrates a core point: AI is a great tool. Strategy ultimately is still your job.

Here’s what today’s Foundations episode is really about, the things that will never change about your business no matter what AI does. Understanding your audience. Solving real customer problems. Building trust. Those aren’t AI problems. Those are business problems. They’re your problems… and they’re worth thinking about now and for a long time to come.

I’m Tim Peter. This is Digital Reset Foundations, episode 510. Let’s dive in.

Okay, we all know that AI has made content creation faster and cheaper and easier. Marketers are using it to do that kind of thing all over the place. But creating more content, creating cheaper content, creating content more easily, as much as content marketing matters for your business, is not the same as customer acquisition.

AI is great at doing those things. What AI can’t do is the strategic heavy lifting for your business. It can’t define your value proposition. It can’t identify core insights about your customers. It can’t set priorities based on your long-term business goals.

Yes, it can help you better understand any of those. It can help you do any of those, again, faster or cheaper or more easily. It’s a great brainstorming tool. At the same time, you have to supply the judgment of what makes the most sense for your business.

Let me give you an example of what I mean about judgment from an era long before AI, and it starts with my favorite dumb business quote of all time. I mean, this is just pricelessly dumb.

As the story goes, Gil Amelio, who was the CEO of Apple prior to Steve Jobs’ return to the company, supposedly once said to Jobs, “Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom leaking water, and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.”

Um, what?

Dude, if you’ve got a ship with a hole in the bottom, your job is to stop the water from coming in. Your job is to keep the ship from sinking.

In that situation, worrying about which direction the ship is pointing guarantees that the only direction it’s going is straight down. Believe me, I’ve seen Titanic like 10 times. I’m pretty sure that makes me an expert on sinking ships.

And this is not what you’ve got to do, right?

At any rate, regardless of my nautical knowledge, Amelio’s quote there is obviously an objectively awful metaphor, and it’s even worse judgment.

But we often think about AI in similar ways when, in truth, AI is a tool. Strategy provides the map, and without the map, the tool isn’t going to do you any good.

Anyone, anyone who’s listened to the show for any amount of time knows that I’m a huge fan of thinking about not only what will change in the future, but what won’t change.

And no matter how much AI shifts our daily practices over time, there are so many key areas about our strategy that simply will never change, no matter what happens with AI.

You still need to understand your audience. That is something that simply will never change.

You still need to solve real customer problems.

And you still need to build trust and relationships with your customers.

There are loads of great AI tools that can help you parse your data to better understand your audience, and you might already own and use some of these tools. Tools like Salesforce and HubSpot have AI capabilities built in.

There are also tools that can help you solve real customer problems. You can use ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini or custom-built models to brainstorm solutions for how to solve those problems.

And you can absolutely use tools like Copy.ai or Jasper or Gong or any number of chatbots to either create more content or engage your customers or improve your sales teams to try to build more trust and build better relationships with your customers.

As you know, there are also plenty of great tools out there that don’t use AI that can also help you do these things as well.

It’s not like we’re going to turn our business over to the tool. Because the point is that it’s not about the tool. It’s about thinking deeply about your customers’ needs and then focusing relentlessly on how you build better trust and better relationships with your customers.

Ultimately, our jobs in marketing and customer acquisition are to build those relationships.

You’ve probably heard a quote, it’s typically misattributed to P.T. Barnum, that says, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” and you can broaden that to the globe. It doesn’t matter.

I hate that quote for two reasons.

First, though less importantly, it’s actually American journalist and noted cynic H.L. Mencken who was the original source of the quote. Though, if we’re being fair, plenty of business folks have absolutely adopted and endorsed that quote over the century plus that it’s been in circulation. So fine, whatever.

The second thing, and far more importantly, is it is deeply, deeply wrong to think that way.

I believe, as sure as I believe anything, that you will never go broke treating your customers well, treating them with respect and dignity. You know, treating them as human beings.

Especially in an age of AI, I believe that your customers and the market as a whole are increasingly looking for businesses that are actually authentically human, that actually treat them like they matter.

Sure, tools have their place. You should use them. But you’ve got to make sure you’ve got your hands, and more importantly, your brains on the controls while you’re using them.

You know, one place I see people turn over control to tools all too often is in scaling too soon.

And yes, for some companies, you’ve got to worry about scale. I used to work for one of the largest hotel companies in the world. Scale mattered. We had to think about it a lot.

But using AI to scale the wrong things isn’t going to help your business at all.

Instead, think about whether you actually have an execution problem, which scale would help with, or if you’ve got a strategy gap.

Some ways you can tell whether your strategy is off are these. One, your content drives traffic, but conversions are flat, whether that content is created by AI or created by people. Two, you’re producing more, but you’re not reaching your audience. Another is that your marketing and your sales efforts are out of sync. Another is that you’re measuring clicks, you’re measuring traffic, but not conversions or deals. And the last is that your teams are busy, but they’re not aligned. They’re not moving in the same direction.

All of these are symptoms that you have a strategy gap, not an AI problem. All of those are signs that you’re working on the wrong things. And if you’re working on the wrong things, AI simply isn’t going to help you.

If you’ve got a gap in your strategy, ask yourself these questions.

First, who are we trying to acquire? Who’s the actual customer?

The second is, what problem are we solving for them?

The third is, where do they go to learn, decide, and buy?

And the fourth is, why should they choose us?

Those are the questions that actually matter.

Then take the time to revisit your messaging. Look at your customer journeys. Look at how people use your website. Look at how people use your app. Look at how they interact with your sales teams.

And then take a look at your measurement framework. Are you measuring the right things that actually point you in the right direction?

And again, once you have those, then you should ask, “How can AI help us execute faster, smarter, or better?” You can use AI to help you answer those questions. Ultimately, though, it’s your judgment that will decide whether those answers make sense for your business.

Again, AI has made content creation faster, cheaper, and easier. It’s made marketing faster, cheaper, and easier. But faster, cheaper, and easier alone is not going to drive customer acquisition for your business.

Also remember that AI cannot do your strategic heavy lifting. It can’t define your value proposition. It can’t identify core insights about your customers. It cannot set the priorities you need to set based on your long-term business goals. Sure, it can help you better understand those.

Ultimately, though, you have to supply the judgment of what makes the most sense for your business.

And it’s only once you understand where it is you’re trying to go, who it is you’re trying to help, and how it is that you can best help them that you should ask the question, “How can AI help us execute faster, smarter, or better?”

AI is a useful tool, but AI will not save you from a bad strategy. Focus on your strategy, and then your tools will help you build even greater success for your business.

I can’t wait to see what you do.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet, I’m pretty confident, that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the show? Let them know what you think too.

You can also find the show notes for this episode and an archive of all of our past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcasts.

With all that said, I want to just say thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I just so much appreciate you tuning in.

So until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other.

“Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the “shiny objects” to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post AI Won’t Save a Bad Strategy No Matter How Good it Gets (Digital Reset Foundations Episode 510) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

People who viewed YouTube creator content about a brand were 13x more likely to conduct a branded search and 5x more likely to purchase. Those are not trivial numbers. J.Crew got a 6% lift in brand preference and search traffic and a 13% increase in purchases from TikTok ads, driving over $2 million in incremental revenue. WeRoad saw a 22% increase in branded search and 31% increase in booking intent from its TikTok campaigns.

In each case, the story is the same. Customers heard about a brand somewhere, then went and searched for it by name. It doesn’t matter whether that search happens on Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, your website, or the ghost of Ask Jeeves. What matters is what they searched for: your brand.

Google knows exactly how valuable that behavior is. That’s why they introduced Attributed Branded Searches, a metric connecting video exposure to branded search activity. Google is a one-product company, and that product is ads. When Google builds a metric to quantify something, you can be pretty confident that something matters.

There’s another piece to this. Research from Ahrefs found a strong relationship between brand mentions across the web and visibility in AI answers. That makes sense. AI has never eaten in your restaurant, stayed in your hotel, worn your apparel, sampled your cosmetics, or hired your consultants. It knows what to recommend because it knows what human beings recommend.

AI isn’t killing search. It’s changing what your customers search for. In Episode 509 of Digital Reset, Tim Peter breaks down why Google’s most valuable search term is your brand name… and what you can do about it.

One way to understand the pattern identified in this episode is through our Prompt Brand Equity framework: the strength of the signals you’ve built up over time that cause customers to ask for your brand by name… and for AI systems to include and prefer your brand in their answers. Branded searches, direct navigation, credible mentions, and customer recommendations all provide evidence that Prompt Brand Equity exists for your brand. The stronger those signals, the less dependent your business is on being just one commodity option among many.

Ask the AI tools your customers use what they know about your brand, products, and services. Anything they get right is a win. Anything they get wrong goes on your roadmap for immediate attention. You’ve got to ensure that the content on your site, your social media, and in ratings and reviews gives an accurate picture of who you are and what you do.

Not just what you create and publish, but where it lives. Keep a version on your own site. Build an appropriate presence on channels where your customers already spend their time. YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, and the like help you participate in the conversation and encourage customers to ask for you by name. They also help AI learn more about your brand.

Your brand is the sum of every experience customers have with you, your products, and your services. Bad experiences make for bad brands. Bad products make for bad brands. Bad service makes for bad brands. And bad brands make for bad businesses. Customer experience is queen because those experiences determine what people say about you and, increasingly, what AI says about you too.

Ready to make your brand the answer customers and AI ask for by name? Get Tim Peter’s book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, on Amazon.

Watch Tim Peter break down what Google’s AI Mode hotel booking launch actually means — and why the pattern playing out in hospitality is coming for every industry with established gatekeepers.

Want Tim to help your team build a practical marketing, customer acquisition, and AI strategy? Learn more about Tim Peter’s speaking, workshops, and consulting.

If this episode helped you think differently about brand, search, and AI visibility, send it to a colleague who needs to hear it. They’ll be glad you did.

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 13:03

People who viewed YouTube creator content about a brand were thirteen times more likely to conduct a branded search and five times more likely to purchase.

In the era of AI, these brands are finding immense value in getting customers to search for their products and services by name. Even better, there’s research from Ahrefs that says showing up in social media and on YouTube plays an important role in getting your brand mentioned and recommended in AI answer engines.

My own experience shows that many clients are seeing branded search activity anywhere from twenty percent to thirty-five percent higher over the last year, in some cases even more than that. They’re also seeing that those branded searches drive greater revenue.

In short, what we’re seeing is that AI isn’t killing search. It’s changing what your customers search for.

I’m Tim Peter. This is Digital Reset, episode 509. Today, we’re talking about why Google’s most valuable search is your brand name. Let’s dive in.

Thirteen times more likely to conduct a branded search, five times more likely to purchase. Those are not trivial numbers. Google’s Philipp Schindler shared those numbers during the company’s Google Marketing Live event earlier this year. His point was to sell marketers on the value of YouTube. What he also did was give a clear picture of how customer behaviors are changing.

Here’s the full quote in context. This is a quote. He said, "People rank YouTube the number one platform for creator content. That’s because YouTube creators aren’t just making content to capture fleeting moments of interest. They’re building lasting connections and loyalty with communities of fans. YouTube is also the number one most trusted platform for creator content about products or services. When a YouTube creator talks about your products, viewers are thirteen times more likely to search for your brand and five times more likely to buy." He drives the point home by saying, "These are real results, not just engagement metrics."

I mean, I get it. Schindler’s job is to build YouTube, and Google more generally, as the place advertisers will invest their ad budgets. Good for him.

But notice what he’s saying here more broadly. He’s saying "people hear about your brand in place A, YouTube in this example, then they go and search for your brand… ideally on Google." Again, that’s Philipp Schindler’s perspective.

J.Crew got roughly a 6% lift in brand preference and in search traffic, along with a 13% increase in purchases following exposure using TikTok ads that drove over $2 million in incremental revenue.

WeRoad got an even better lift, seeing a twenty-two percent increase in branded search and a thirty-one percent increase in booking intent from its TikTok campaigns.

The J.Crew and WeRoad examples tell essentially the same story. Again, TikTok’s purpose is to convince advertisers that their budgets belong with TikTok. The data they share says, "people hear about your brand on place B, TikTok in this instance, then go and search for your brand…" and again, probably on Google.

What’s fascinating in both cases is that it doesn’t actually matter where they search. It matters what they search, your brand. If they go and ask ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, they’re still asking about your brand. If they visit your website, they’re still asking about your brand. And of course, if they ask Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or Kagi or, I don’t know, the ghost of Ask Jeeves, they’re still asking about your brand.

That’s highly related to the behaviors we talked about a couple of weeks ago when I said, "your customers already made up their mind before they got to your website." 95% of customers want to verify what they’ve heard about a brand before they’re willing to make a purchase. That verification could happen in AI, it could happen on social, it could happen on your website. At least at the moment, though, it’s mostly happening in search. And it’s driving increased volumes of branded search activity.

I’d mentioned before the break that there was another HUGE sign that showed how important branded search is. And you can tell it’s huge because, well, I wrote HUGE in all caps in my notes. No, wait. The real reason is because Google introduced a new product specifically called Attributed Branded Searches earlier this year.

Attributed Branded Searches, or ABS, according to Google, and this is a quote, "Is an always-on metric to connect the dots between a video campaign and a branded search, showing how ad exposure drives consideration among your customers." They go on to say that it will "help marketers understand the impact of demand creation on search volume and long-term conversions, and it provides a subset of total branded searches only counting users who saw a YouTube ad."

As I’ve said many times before, Google is a one-product company, and that product is ads. They know how to turn searches, and views, and engagements into dollars. Just a couple of weeks ago, I recapped Big G’s monster quarter, where they generated $63 billion in revenue, essentially from search ads alone. They know what customers want, and they know how to connect those wants into audiences advertisers can target. I’m reasonably confident that they built the Attributed Branded Searches metric specifically to show advertisers how valuable those brand mentions are.

Now, full disclosure, I’ve done the same thing with clients for years. I’ve used a very similar approach to help loads of companies better understand which parts of their marketing budget work well… and which ones are a waste of money. I even talk about it briefly in my book. On the one hand, I’m happy that Google finally just made that available to everyone. On the other hand, I’m a little bummed that one of my secrets is, well… available to everyone. Such is life, I guess.

And as I mentioned earlier, I’m seeing this with clients right now. In general, we’re seeing big lift in brand search volumes and the revenues that tend to follow from those. If that’s not enough for you, there’s another upside to all of this. Yes, being seen on social media can drive customers to ask for you by name. But you probably also know that social media mentions tend to correlate highly with appearance and recommendations in AI answers.

Research from Ahrefs strongly suggests that appearance on YouTube and Reddit probably influences whether or not AI surfaces your brand in its answers. They noted that, quote, "The relationship between YouTube mentions and AI visibility holds up regardless of AI platform." It also goes beyond just YouTube and Reddit. Ahrefs also said, "More web mentions mean more visibility across every AI platform we studied."

If you think about it, this makes a certain amount of sense. Why? Well, there’s a very rough rule of thumb when it comes to online spaces, and it’s this: people only talk about your brand when you’ve made them very happy… or when you really, really didn’t. I suppose there’s a third category, which is when you paid them to, but we’re gonna skip that one. There really is no middle ground.

People are talking about the brands and products and services they love and the brands and products and services they hate… and the ones that pay them, but there’s probably at least a little love there.

When AI recommends a brand, it actually has never used that brand. It’s never visited your restaurant or stayed in your hotel or worn your apparel or sampled your cosmetics or hired your consultants. It doesn’t know what to recommend. It knows what other people recommend and what they really, really don’t recommend. The content on YouTube and Reddit and TikTok and Instagram and LinkedIn and all the rest that recommend specific brands and products and services comes from what people love. That’s how AI knows what to recommend because it knows what human beings recommend.

Quick side note, this is always why "the ones that paid for those recommendations" tend not to matter for too long. You absolutely can pay people to say nice things about your product at first. However, if your product isn’t great, your negative reputation will drive up the price you pay to get people to keep saying nice things about you. Eventually, you’ll either run out of folks willing to take your money… or you’ll run out of the money to pay them.

So what do you do about all of this? Well, if you’ve listened to this show before, you know that the first step is to figure out what AI already knows about you. Ask the AI tools your customers use what it knows about your brand, your products, your services. Anything it gets right is a win. Anything it gets wrong gets placed on your roadmap for immediate attention. You’ve got to ensure that the content on your site, your social media, and in ratings and reviews gives an accurate picture of who you are and what you do.

Next, you want to think about your content distribution strategy. Not just what content you create and publish, but where that content lives. Yes, you absolutely should have a version archived somewhere on your site. You also want to make sure that you’ve got an appropriate presence on channels where your customers already spend their time. YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, what have you? They help you participate in the conversation and help encourage customers to ask for you by name. They also help AI learn more about your brand, your products, and your services, which helps when customers ask about your brand.

You’ve also heard me say that customer experience is queen. Your brand is the sum of every experience customers have with you, with your products, and with your services. Bad experiences make for bad brands. Bad products make for bad brands. Bad service makes for bad brands. And bad brands make for bad businesses.

You know the expression, "All roads lead to Rome"? I prefer "all roads lead to brand."

The future of SEO isn’t about people finding you. It’s about getting them to ask for you in the first place. Social media mentions, those drive brand searches. AI recommendations, those drive brand searches. Content and experiences your customers tell their friends and family and fans and followers about? Yeah, those

Now, if you know someone who’s working on their brand strategy right now, do me a favor and send them a link to this episode. They’ll be glad you did. You can find the show notes for today’s episode, including links to all the research, at timpeter.com/podcasts. And if you’re ready to go deeper on making your brand the answer that AI reaches for, my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," is the roadmap you’re looking for. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate you. We’re going to be posting some Foundations episodes from the archives over the next few weeks, but I’ll be back with you before long. Until then, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

"Digital Reset with Tim Peter" helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post Google’s Most Valuable Search Is Your Brand Name (Digital Reset Episode 509) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Zero. That’s how many independent hotels Google invited to join its new hotel booking engine in AI Mode.

Independent hotels account for 40% of global hotel supply and 30% of US inventory. When Google launched hotel bookings inside AI Mode, it announced ten partners: Booking.com, Choice Hotels, Expedia, Hilton, Hotels.com, IHG, Marriott, Priceline, Trip.com, and Wyndham. Zero independent hotels. Zero rep firms. Zero technology providers working on their behalf.

That’s not an oversight. It’s math. Ten partnerships gave Google access to essentially 100% of the bookable inventory it needs. And when that same logic plays out across other AI platforms and other industries, a lot of businesses are going to find themselves on the wrong side of a gatekeeper. Not just hotels.

In Episode 508 of Digital Reset, Tim Peter breaks down what Google’s AI Mode hotel booking launch actually means… for independent hotels, for the businesses that serve them, and for every business in every industry watching from the sidelines wondering if they’re next.

When Google connects with just ten partners, here’s what they get:

Ten connections. Essentially 100% of bookable inventory. There are roughly 25,000 to 35,000 independent hotels in the US. Most have websites. Google chose not to connect with them. They chose gatekeepers instead.

Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol FAQ states: "Opting for our booking integration does not influence how we rank your properties or rates in listings."

What they don’t say: "Opting out of our booking integration will never influence how we rank you."

That gap is worth paying attention to.

Google announced partnerships with Shopify, Etsy, Stripe, BigCommerce, WooCommerce — and Amazon. In each case, the logic is the same. Why certify thousands of individual connections when a handful of intermediaries aggregate everything you need?

If you’re in an industry with established gatekeepers, Google just showed you which route they prefer. Different industry. Same pattern.

For independent hotels:

For every business:

The complete roadmap for building the kind of direct customer relationships that survive every platform shift is in episodes 498–500. Links in the related episodes section below.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Watch Tim Peter break down what Google’s AI Mode hotel booking launch actually means — and why the pattern playing out in hospitality is coming for every industry with established gatekeepers.

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 16:18

Zero. That’s how many independent hotels and support organizations Google invited to join its new hotel booking system in AI Mode. That’s nuts.

Independent hotels account for forty percent of hotel inventory worldwide and thirty percent of the inventory in the US. And yet, when Google decided to make hotel bookings available directly inside AI Mode, it invited exactly zero independent hotels to the party.

Now, before you go, "Well, I don’t work with hotels. This one’s not for me," give me a minute, okay? Because while the story I’m about to tell focuses on hotels, the reality is much broader than that. The situation independent hotels face in Google’s AI Mode booking tool is likely coming for lots of industries, lots of businesses. Google’s actions illustrate it clearly, and those actions are a warning sign for all kinds of businesses, a warning sign you’re really going to want to pay attention to.

What’s the bigger story behind hotel bookings in AI Mode? What does that mean for independent hotels? And how do those lessons apply to businesses inside and outside the hotel industry?

This is Digital Reset, episode 508. I’m Tim Peter. Today we’re talking about how Google just built a hotel booking engine and independent hotels weren’t invited. Let’s dive in.

So Google is rolling out a series of new travel planning and booking tools over "the coming weeks." For purposes of this discussion, I’m only going to focus on hotel booking in AI Mode, but they’re doing a bunch of interesting things with flights too. I’ve linked to the full announcement in the show notes, so you can check that out.

As I mentioned before the break, this is not only about hotels. So stick around, and I promise I’ll make the connection for folks outside the hotel industry too.

That said, let’s talk about what Google is doing with hotel bookings in AI Mode. Per their announcement, quote, "Simply tell AI Mode about your upcoming trip and your hotel preferences to get a visual list of options complete with guest reviews and key factors to compare. Once you’ve found the right hotel, just ask AI Mode to help you complete the booking. Then select ‘Continue on Google’ in the list of booking options. It’ll appear next to any of our integrated partners, which include hotel chains and online travel sites." Keep that set in mind, by the way. "From there, it’s just a few taps," they say, "to pick your room type, review details like the cancellation policy, and complete the booking securely via Google Pay."

They also make sure to include the heads-up, Google does, that says, "when you book hotels through AI Mode, the hotel or booking platform will act as the merchant of record and handle any customer service."

The partners they’ve announced as they roll this out include Booking.com, Choice Hotels International, Expedia, Hilton, Hotels.com, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International, Priceline, Trip.com, and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. That’s only about ten folks. And you’ll notice that there’s no independent hotels listed there.

As I mentioned before the break, despite accounting for 30% of all of the hotel inventory in the United States, zero independent hotels or their representation firms or their technology providers were announced as part of the initial rollout. No Preferred, no Leading Hotels of the World, no Small Luxury Hotels, no Amadeus or Aven. None of them.

Yes, some independent hotels are represented by soft brands owned by Marriott, Hilton, Choice, IHG, and Wyndham. That’s roughly only about 30% of the market though. That leaves somewhere around 70% of independent hotels out in the cold.

"But wait," you might say, "you can still book these hotels through Expedia, Booking.com, Priceline, and Trip.com, can’t you?" Well, sure you can, but those sites charge the hotel somewhere between 15% and 25% for the booking. Google isn’t helping independent hotels connect directly with the guests here. From an independent hotelier’s perspective, Google instead is partnering with the biggest gatekeepers… and the independents are left footing the bill. That’s bad.

Google’s rationale here, I suspect, is, well, rational. If you look at the numbers, when Google connects with Marriott, they get access to about 1.75 million rooms worth of inventory, you know, give or take. Hilton brings another 1.3 million or so. IHG and Wyndham have around another million each. Booking.com and Expedia each have many millions of listings split, of course, between traditional hotel inventory and alternative accommodations.

Signing just these few partnerships gave Google access to "all the inventory," the seventy percent that major hotel chains control, and the remaining thirty percent from intermediaries like Expedia and Booking. That reality will be true for other AI platforms, too, when they decide they want in on this action. And when that happens, independents end up on the other side of a gatekeeper. Keep that fact in mind. I’m gonna come back to it in a couple of minutes.

This launch is exactly what I predicted after Google I/O back in May and in our last episode. I laid out Google’s and Meta’s and Microsoft’s "super app" and "everything app" ambitions. Google introducing hotel bookings in AI Mode is one of the first real-world product implementations of that argument. We’re seeing it play out in real time, putting independents on the wrong side of a gatekeeper in a specific, measurable way. And that’s bad enough.

What also concerns me is what could happen longer term. As I noted on LinkedIn this past week, there’s a second problem hidden inside the first one.

Any online store, whether it sells hotel reservations or apparel or books or what have you, has had to figure out the right placement and sort order for the goods and services it offered. It’s the same with search results too. The key question always is: "What do I show first?" Sometimes they use a sophisticated algorithm. Sometimes it’s something simpler, like "closest to the city center" or, you know, "who paid the most money to show up?" The point remains, every digital platform has to come up with some system for selecting and ordering what they show.

Hotel bookings in AI Mode won’t be any different. What concerns me is that over time, the first filter may be the most significant one: Google may not show what it can’t sell. If its algorithm starts with, "is this hotel bookable? Is it saleable?", having reservations run through an OTA begins to look like the best-case scenario for independent hotels. The worst-case scenario is that they’ll be completely invisible.

Google says in its Universal Commerce Protocol for Lodging FAQ that, quote, "Opting for our booking integration does not influence how we rank your properties or rates in listings. The user experience for listings remains consistent. However, offers integrated with UCP will feature the direct booking option." I hope that remains true. Note, though, that they don’t say, "Opting out of our booking integration will never influence how we rank you."

Now, even if they don’t go so far as to filter first on product they can’t sell, this is another real-world example of what gatekeepers gonna gate looks like in practice, this time with two different gatekeepers in the mix. First, online travel intermediaries like Expedia and Booking.com aggregated lots of inventory, putting themselves between hotels and their guests. Then the ultimate gatekeeper, Google, partnered with those intermediaries, the folks with all the inventory, to get access to that inventory. Not good.

I have been having conversations all week with people about whether technologies like MCP servers, that is Model Context Protocol servers, or Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, also known as UCP, will help address this. Maybe… but I’m not completely convinced. First, MCP more or less exists as a standard today, and Google didn’t go that route. They seem pretty committed to UCP instead. Second, while hotel companies can join Google’s UCP for Lodging waitlist, there’s no means to use it right now. Its FAQs also haven’t been updated since May, so it doesn’t feel imminent. And of course, any money independent hotels pay intermediaries while they wait is money they can’t get back later.

I also see at least one other issue even if these tools come into being, and it’s one that we’re all dealing with right now in AI search. There are roughly two hundred million actively updated websites in the world. If most of those adopt MCP or UCP to connect with the AI platforms that matter to their business, those AI platforms will still have to sort, filter, and rank their responses just as they do today without booking capabilities.

Sure, AI tools will be more sophisticated at matching specific hotels with the needs of guests on their specific trips. It will understand the kind of trip, the brands or hotels they prefer, and those hotels’ proximity to the other attractions and businesses that matter for each guest each time. And as soon as hotel bookings in AI Mode go live, customers’ behaviors will start teaching those AI tools which brands they prefer and where they prefer to book their travel. By definition, independent hotels won’t be the booking source the AI remembers. They can’t be. The AI may likely mostly remember the gatekeepers.

On top of that, Google, and other AI players who follow a similar path, will have to connect with and certify every single one of these individual MCP or UCP setups. It might look like waiting for your site to show up in Google Search today. Only it won’t just affect your content, but also the commerce portion of your company. Uh, yikes.

Now, I told you this story isn’t just about hotels. While this is happening to independent hotels right now, it could also happen to you. If you’re in an industry with established gatekeepers, who do you think AI companies are going to connect with first? Twenty thousand individual companies? Or a couple of intermediaries all twenty thousand sit behind? Google just told us which route they prefer. With just ten connections, they got essentially one hundred percent of the information their customers want to see.

Remember those two hundred million actively maintained websites in the world? Do you think Google really wants to certify connections with all of them? Before you answer that, keep in mind that there are only about twenty-five to thirty-five thousand independent hotels in the US. Most of those likely have websites, and Google chose not to connect with them. They chose gatekeepers instead.

So what do you do about this? First, we have to start with hotels. I can’t do this whole setup with hotels without starting there. You’ve got to get with your technology partners, like your property management system, your central reservation system, your booking engine providers, and understand their plans to provide MCP and UCP connections for when Google and other AI platforms are ready to connect with them.

Next, you should talk with your rep firms and with industry associations like HSMAI, HEDNA, AHLA, who can argue for a seat at the table as the Big Tech players and aspiring AI entrants make decisions about where to source their inventory.

If you’re outside the hospitality industry, the same basic rules apply. You know, who’s speaking for you, for your business and your industry? Who is advocating for independent businesses? And which technology partners should have a seat at the table?

Now, in fairness, Google has already announced partnerships with Shopify, Etsy, and Stripe, and it looks like they support BigCommerce and WooCommerce too, which is a sign that this could be okay for hoteliers in the longer term. What’s also true is that they’ve announced a partnership with Amazon… again, going with the gatekeeper instead of the businesses behind it. Different industry. Same pattern.

Regardless of which industry you’re in, this entire situation illustrates what I mean when I say "your brand is the prompt." The ideal solution always is to ensure customers ask for you by name. Connectivity solutions like UCP give you a chance to be seen. Brand gets you business.

Work on building direct connections with your customers. Provide memorable, human-centered service they’ll want to come back to again and again. Ensure you offer them value and a trusted relationship that’s worth them giving you their email, phone number, or physical address.

Our look at how you can do this long-term is spelled out from episodes 498 through 500. Those three episodes walk you through what it actually costs you when you don’t own your customer, how to know whether or not you really do, and they provide the complete roadmap for how you can fix this situation if you need to. I will, of course, link to all three of those in the show notes.

Just remember that having technical connections with Google and the rest of Big Tech may be necessary for the first conversation with customers, but human connections will help you win with customers every time after that.

Now, if you know someone else who’s working on their long-term AI strategy, do me a favor and send this episode their way. It might save them a world of trouble.

You can find the show notes for this episode and the full archive of past episodes at TimPeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on making your brand the answer that AI reaches for, my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," is the roadmap you’re looking for. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

"Digital Reset with Tim Peter" helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post Google Just Built an AI Hotel Booking Engine. Independent Hotels Weren’t Invited. (Digital Reset Episode 508) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Nobody made much money selling "the internet." The biggest network companies, WorldCom and Global Crossing, built the plumbing and assumed they’d extract a toll from everyone building on top of it. Instead, they and ended up holding the bag when the dot-com bubble burst.

The companies that won — you might have heard of them, like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta — built something valuable on top of the infrastructure, including services like search, commerce, productivity tools, and social networks.

That pattern is playing out again right now. And Big Tech’s Q2 2026 earnings calls make it incredibly clear.

Anthropic posted its first-ever operating profit: $559 million in Q2 on a $65 billion annualized revenue run rate. They did this not by selling access to foundation models, but from selling coding tools built on top of those models. On the other hand, OpenAI is forecasting $100 billion in ad revenue by 2030, despite the fact that eMarketer projects the entire US chatbot ad market will be under $1 billion this year.

Google made $63 billion in search revenue last quarter using AI to make search better, not by selling AI access. And both Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella used their earnings calls to explicitly describe their ambitions to own the front door between you and your customers.

Just like the internet era, infrastructure is becoming a commodity. The real value is in what gets built on top of it. And the biggest players are racing to own that layer… and to charge you a toll every time you use it to reach your customers.

In Episode 507 of Digital Reset, Tim Peter breaks down what Q2 2026 Big Tech earnings actually reveal about where the value in AI will land, and what every marketing leader and business owner should do about it before gatekeepers stand up their the next set of gates.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Watch Tim Peter break down what Big Tech’s Q2 2026 earnings actually reveal about where the value in AI will land, and why the infrastructure builders are not the ones who will win.

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 22:20

Big Tech defines the digital economy. Their actions and reactions tell us a ton about the state of digital, and those behaviors provide incredibly useful information if you’re a marketer or a business owner.

Even better, their quarterly earnings calls and earnings reports explicitly require them to tell us what’s going on in their worlds, where they’re investing, what’s working… and what isn’t. You know the expression, "Put your money where your mouth is"? Well, Big Tech’s earnings statements and their earnings calls literally show us where they put their money, not just tell us where their mouth is.

And this quarter’s Big Tech earnings calls showed us a lot.

Here’s my big takeaway from everything they showed us. AI is a lot like the internet. Yes, you’ve heard people say that before, sure. But I mean this in a very specific sense. I mean that going back to the birth of the internet, almost nobody made any money by providing the plumbing that powered the internet. The folks who made money built value on top of the internet. And with one significant difference, we’re seeing the same pattern play out right now.

What is that pattern? What’s the significant difference? What does that mean for you? And what can you do about it?

This is episode 507 of the Digital Reset Podcast. I’m Tim Peter. Today, we’re looking into Big Tech’s earnings and what they tell us about why Google won’t win by selling AI… and neither will anyone else. Let’s dive in.

Today, I’m going to talk about what Big Tech’s earnings tell us about the business value of AI. And my core thesis is that just like the internet before it, nobody makes money on the infrastructure, the undifferentiated model access. Nobody can make money. Doesn’t matter how good it is. It ultimately is just commodity plumbing.

Instead, the folks who will win using AI will make their money on products that provide real value to customers. Sure, they’ll need the plumbing, but it’s a commodity. There’s no long-term value there. In fact, at least at the moment, it kinda looks like it’s a money pit. More on that later.

Think about the internet giants that exist today: Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, JD.com, Alibaba, and Tencent in China. None of them got big by selling access to the internet, not really. They got big by offering value on top of the internet: web search, and email, and e-commerce, and productivity tools, and connecting with friends and family.

Even in the early days, eBay and Amazon were just commerce companies. Yahoo and Google offered directories, search, and email. Microsoft had Hotmail. Yes, there was AOL, which did provide access to the internet, but it was all the other stuff, email and news and stock market information and chat rooms oh my God, the chat rooms, that kept people coming back every day, at least if you could log on once the kids got home from school. And sure, some new folks came along like Netflix and TikTok and such, but none of them are selling "the internet." They’re selling utility on top of the internet.

Essentially, none of the big internet connectivity companies exist in any meaningful sense any longer. WorldCom got folded into Verizon twenty years ago. Global Crossing got bought by CenturyLink a few years after that. The internet, it’s just plumbing. Nobody makes any real money selling it to customers.

AI in this context is the same as the internet. It’s rapidly becoming the plumbing. Look at the performance of the frontier models offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. They’re all… fine. You know, unless you have very specific technical needs and knowledge, the models themselves are fairly undifferentiated. I don’t mean the front-end features and functions, which I’ll come back to in a moment, or even things like cloud hosting and security and the guardrails around them. Those absolutely have value. I mean the models underneath those front-end features and functions. Sure, any one of them can pull ahead for a few weeks or months and claim to be "the best," but most of us, we can’t tell the difference — we don’t need to care about the difference — for most of our needs.

Let’s talk about Anthropic and Claude. In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic was, quote, "Set to turn an operating profit of five hundred fifty-nine million dollars in the June quarter." And a couple of days ago, they also reported an annualized run rate of $65 billion in revenue. To be clear, they’re making that money, as the Journal said, quote, "As enterprises across the world race to adopt its popular set of coding tools."

In short, they’re not making their profits from access to the core models. They’re making them from the coding capabilities provided by Claude Code and Cowork, value adds built on top of the core models. Think about it. They couldn’t even offer access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, their latest, most powerful models, for a few weeks in June because of the, you know, some stuff going on with the Trump administration. That certainly suggests that the value isn’t in the foundation model. It’s in the services built on top of those foundation models that matter to customers. Most people didn’t need Fable and Mythos. They needed the coding services. That’s what Anthropic’s customers are willing to pay for.

Now let’s talk about Big Tech themselves, almost all of whom had monster quarters. Amazon had a great quarter powered by e-commerce and AWS. Microsoft had a great quarter powered by software sales and its Azure cloud. Google had a fantastic quarter powered by ad sales. Their CEOs, to a person, touted the role AI is playing during their earnings calls in making those core products more effective and more efficient.

Sundar Pichai said that, and this is a quote, "AI-powered features are driving increased Search usage." And Philipp Schindler followed that up by saying, "Strong performance in Search and YouTube underscores how our investments in AI translate into measurable value for our users and advertisers." Speaking specifically of Search, he said, "Revenues reached over $63 billion for the quarter." He said that "Sundar highlighted the momentum we see in Search, which directly impacts our advertising business." Right? Where are they making the money? Ads.

Amazon did something similar. They combined their Rufus and Alexa+ assistants into something they’re now calling "Alexa for Shopping." And they say that "active users are close to doubling," and interactions are, quote, "Up over 5x year over year."

Mark Zuckerberg said that the company’s rebuilt Meta AI drove, quote, "A sixty percent increase in the number of people interacting with the assistant each day," and they called WhatsApp, "the leading surface where people engage with Meta AI." Meta, by the way, didn’t have the quarter Wall Street was looking for. I’m gonna come back to that in a minute.

Notice, though, that each of these CEOs were explaining to Wall Street how AI is helping their businesses make money. Not making money by selling AI access to people, but using it to enhance their value-add products and services.

Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella each went a step further. Zuckerberg said that, quote, "We will have agents that can work twenty-four by seven on your behalf to help achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances." And Nadella described how they’re consolidating, quote, "Chat, Cowork, Autopilots, including code in one ‘super app’ spanning both consumer and commercial experiences." He went on to say that Copilot’s addressable market is structurally larger than Office, their core product, ever was. He said, "This is the first time where you have really an enterprise-wide tool which has both per-seat and usage-based pricing. The total addressable market is much more expansive."

This is the first time I know of that a Big Tech leader used the phrase "super app" in recent memory. I explicitly predicted this was coming following Google’s I/O 2026 in May, referring to "Google’s Everything App Trap." I am increasingly confident that this is how Big Tech leaders think about these tools. They’re looking to own the front door between you and your customers and to charge you a toll every time you connect with those customers. At some point, one or more of these companies will need to own the agentic commerce layer. No one is there today, but I feel very comfortable saying it’s coming. I think Mark Zuckerberg’s agents and Satya Nadella’s "super app" comments are about as explicit on that point as can be.

So that’s who’s making money. Well, sort of, we’ll get to this. Let’s talk about who’s not, or at least not the kind of money Wall Street wants them to.

To me, there are two poster children for "not making money" right now, and I think for the same reason. Those companies are Meta and OpenAI. Meta had a soft quarter. They paired outstanding revenues with the lowest profits they’ve made in at least a year. And as a recent Business Insider article stated, "OpenAI had $100 million in annual recurring revenue as of March 2026," but was still forecasting "$2.4 billion for the year and $100 billion by 2030" from ads. Meanwhile, eMarketer projects that the entire US chatbot ad market will be under $1 billion this year. eMarketer’s Nate Elliott called OpenAI’s assumptions "unrealistic." I think that’s super charitable. I’d call them total bull… stuff.

Each of these companies is plowing obscene amounts of money into their AI build-outs. Meta spent over $31 billion last quarter on capital expenditures, most of that for AI, and will spend between $130 and $145 billion in total… this year. They’re also unwilling to say, they will not give a number, for how much they plan to spend next year. But I bet it’s a lot.

OpenAI is saying it will spend roughly $750 billion between now and 2030. According to TechCrunch, that’s "…twenty-five percent more than it estimated earlier this year." Yikes. Go figure that Wall Street isn’t showing either one of those companies much love right now.

Ben Thompson of Stratechery said, speaking about Meta, quote, "Expenses increased 55%, while revenue increased 28%. And a lot of the company’s CapEx hasn’t started depreciating yet. I came away from the call," he said, "a bit alarmed." Yeah, I’ll bet he did.

Now, to be fair, all of Big Tech is investing in AI. Combined, they’re on target to spend somewhere in the ballpark of $725 billion this year. That’s… a lot. The difference is that Wall Street seems to believe that Google and Microsoft and Amazon have a plan for making money back. Meta said it’s going to start selling excess computing power, kind of like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, I guess. And all of those are solid and thriving businesses, really. So there’s logic there. But it seems like Wall Street is asking, "if you, Meta, if you, Mr. Zuckerberg, actually have excess computing capacity to sell, why are you investing so much money and not focusing more on where customers find value today?" That’s kind of the whole question, isn’t it?

To get back to my core point, though, these all look like signs that the big wins aren’t coming from selling access to foundation AI models. Instead, access to foundation models looks like a cost of doing business for Big Tech.

Now, I want to be fair. There is one big difference between my "AI is the internet analogy" and the actual internet build-out of thirty years ago. That is that the big internet providers back then — WorldCom and Global Crossing come immediately to mind — weren’t building the services on top of the internet. They assumed that they would extract a toll from everyone building services on top of their commodity product… and essentially print money forever. They ended up mostly left holding the bag when the dot-com bubble burst, and then their assets were picked up mostly on the cheap by other telecom companies.

The biggest difference though, between the internet era and the AI era, as I see it, and the thing that makes the analogy an analogy and not precisely the same thing? AI requires three major components to work properly. One, you need computing power. Two, you need lots of data. And three, you need amazing talent to teach that computing power how to use that data. Then… you need to do that again. Then you need to do that again, right?

There’s still a whole lot of work to be done before we reach the kinds of capabilities that all of these companies are pursuing, and that Zuckerberg and Nadella made explicit on their most recent earnings call. The "everything app" doesn’t work until customers can just set it and forget it, and we’re not there yet.

Internet connectivity, by contrast, pretty much required physical wires in the ground. Once enough wires were in place, you could just send any kind of data you needed across those wires without much further investment beyond general maintenance. And without any meaningful way for company A to differentiate its wires from company B… the very definition of a commodity.

AI, though, requires continual investment. It’s the gift that keeps on taking. That continued investment, and especially the upfront cost, is a huge problem. Again, Big Tech is investing roughly three-quarters of a trillion dollars this year to make all of this work, plus however much investment they’ll need next year… and the year after that.

Big Tech could be in big trouble if the foundation model capabilities they’re working on can be replicated with lower cost, less power-hungry models in the future. We might not be having nearly so many arguments about data centers and people hating AI if some smart folks, the proverbial two kids in a garage, figure out how to run models like these on your iPhone. That’s the biggest threat all of the big players face right now.

Returning to history, Google and Microsoft and Amazon were among the companies who provided the value add back then. I think they’re simply applying lessons they learned back in the ’90s that they need to provide the value add on top of the infrastructure, and their success as gatekeepers has taught them that it’s best if they control the infrastructure too.

If WorldCom or Global Crossing or some other telecom had successfully provided the value add, we might live in a different world right now. Ironically, AT&T had a series of commercials in the 1990s, the famous "You Will" campaign, that showed what the world would look like. They showed concepts we take for granted today, like Zoom meetings and instant translation and distance learning. Their tagline? "And the company that’ll bring it to you: AT&T."

Why AT&T wasn’t the company that brought it to you is far beyond the scope of today’s episode. I’m sure someone has written the definitive history of why AT&T fumbled the ball, even though they clearly had a vision for what was possible. But my core point remains. Infrastructure and good ideas aren’t enough. You’ve got to deliver the value adds, too.

All right, I think I’ve made my point. The real question, the real thing you care about is what do you do with this information?

First, and most importantly, recognize that AI is a tool, not the end game. You almost certainly don’t need access to foundation models to create better products, services, and experiences for your customers right now. Sure, you can use AI to help you define, design, and deliver those products, services, and experiences, but core to your success is still about providing value to your customers at a profit. In fact, given the customer backlash against data centers and the folks actively opposed to AI, you might be better served not using AI some of the time. Heresy, I know. But as my friend Mark Schaefer likes to say, "The most human company wins." Rand Fishkin has a fun take on that same idea, noting that there’s still a place for what he calls "human and weird." I think they’re both a hundred percent right.

Second, recognize that Big Tech wants to be the front door between you and your customers. "Gatekeepers gonna gate" isn’t just a pithy phrase I thought up. It’s a fundamental law of the digital economy. In their earnings calls, Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella explicitly stated their ambitions to make that happen. Google did the same thing at I/O this year. These folks want to be "the everything app." They’re not content with being plumbing. They plan to offer the value add for many services… and to be the gatekeeper between all the rest. Your job now is to build direct connections with your customers, grow your email and SMS list, grow your physical mailing list, connect with customers directly before gatekeepers cut off your access or raise the tolls you’ll pay to reach them.

Finally, keep in mind that any of these players could win… or lose. Yes, they’ve all got great plans. They’ve all more or less got access to computing power, data, talent, and the money to keep those things going. I’ve gone on record saying that Google’s scale in those areas gives it a huge advantage. But you know what else? AT&T had a great plan, too. They didn’t succeed in delivering on it.

You know the saying about don’t build your brand on rented land? Well, one risk of building your brand on rented land is that the landowner you’re renting from might fail. You could have the best strategy for succeeding on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or SEO or Amazon or app stores, and the company providing that platform could get upended by another member of Big Tech, an aspiring member of Big Tech, or by two kids in a garage. Make sure you’re building value adds your customers are willing to ask for by name, are willing to use your brand as the prompt. That way, you’re in a great position no matter what. Your business won’t depend on a given company winning. It will lead your company to win in every case.

Now, if this episode gave you a clearer read on where Big Tech is actually heading and what that means for your business, do me a favor. Send it to a colleague who’s trying to figure out their AI strategy right now. It might save them from building their brand on an expensive piece of rented land.

You can find the show notes for today’s episode, including all of the research and the sources that I cited, at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on building a brand that customers will ask for by name, one that helps you bypass gatekeepers, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, is the roadmap you need. You’ll find it on amazon.com and bookshop.org, and the links are in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening today. I genuinely, genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

"Digital Reset with Tim Peter" helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post Google Won’t Win By Selling AI. Neither Will Anyone Else. (Digital Reset Episode 507) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Most marketing leaders are optimizing for AI recommendations. That’s the wrong problem to solve first.

The more urgent question, the one hiding inside the data, is what happens after the recommendation. Yext found that only 5% of consumers move directly from an AI answer to purchase. The other 95% verify. They search Google. They visit your website directly. They click through to reviews. And they do this regardless of how much they trust the AI; high-trust users and neutral-trust users verify at nearly identical rates.

Your customer may have already made up their mind before they got to your website. But they haven’t committed. They came to confirm what the AI told them. What they find during that verification step — your pages, your reviews, your branded search results — is where the decision actually forms.

In Episode 506 of Digital Reset, Tim Peter breaks down what the verification gap actually costs, why reviews are the signal customers trust most, and four specific actions you can take this week to own the verification experience, not just the AI recommendation.

Step 1: Assess what AI says about your brand

Step 2: Audit the pages verifying customers actually land on

Step 3: Audit your review presence

Step 4: Check your branded search results

Owning the AI recommendation isn’t enough. A customer who learns about your brand from an AI and then lands on a thin website, finds inconsistent reviews, or gets routed through an intermediary during their verification search will never enter a direct relationship with you.

You’re not just building on borrowed land once. You’re building on it twice. First the AI platform introduces the customer. Then an intermediary captures the verification click. That’s the gatekeeper problem from episode 498 — and from the last 15 years — extended another step into the customer journey.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Watch Tim Peter break down why owning the AI recommendation isn’t enough — and what you need to own the verification experience that determines whether the customer actually converts.

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 17:49

Most people use AI passively. eMarketer has new research that breaks usage into different kinds of AI adoption: asking, doing, playing, working, shopping, and connecting. And for each level that your customers pass through, the numbers decrease.

Just over half of internet users ask a question using AI every week. Some of those are what I refer to as passive AI users. They’re interacting with Google AI Overviews and AI Mode or ChatGPT or Meta AI or any of the rest the same way as they’ve always done a Google search.

Roughly a third are more active users of AI, using it about weekly to, quote, "manage their lives… help with personal tasks, advice, and guidance." That’s from Nate Elliott at eMarketer. Roughly a quarter use it for work. Seventeen percent use it for shopping, again, quoting Nate Elliott, "whether researching and comparing products or finding the best prices." And maybe ten percent, quote, "turn to AI each week looking for a connection, chatting with it as a friend or as a therapist."

As Nate concludes in his post, "Problem-solving and personal utility drive the vast majority of AI usage. Shiny technology might create trial, but human motivation drives lasting habits. Marketers and retailers targeting people on AI platforms need to focus less on frontier models and platform share and more on what people are trying to accomplish when they use AI. That’s where they’ll find the marketing opportunities they’re looking for." I completely agree.

What’s also true is that a larger share of people don’t trust AI compared to where we once were. That’s fairly aligned with what I talked about a couple months back — research that shows fifty-five percent of people hate AI. Pew Research now reports fifty-one percent of people don’t ever use AI, with most of that concentrated among people aged fifty and older. But even among younger people, "do not ever use" was chosen by thirty-four percent of eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds and thirty-nine percent of thirty to forty-nine-year-olds.

Now those numbers measure different attitudes. It’s clear that they start from the same place. Fifty-four percent of people who do not ever use AI shared "concerns about how their personal information will be used" as a major reason they don’t use it. Forty-five percent said that they don’t trust AI to give them accurate information. And similar research from Fractl says that trust in AI answers has fallen from eighty-two percent to fifty-four percent in the last year. I suspect the difference in those numbers is, A, due to when the surveys were in market, and B, the specific types of use cases they asked about. Pew was speaking about AI generally. Fractl was focused on AI search specifically.

The point is that there’s a trust factor here. Again, looking at eMarketer’s data, seventeen percent are using it for shopping. Another way of saying that is that 83% of people aren’t using it for shopping.

We’re facing a scenario where customers need to trust. They need to learn about products. They need to learn about whether or not your brand, your business, and your products are right for them.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 506 of the Digital Reset Podcast. Today, we’re talking about how your customer already made up their mind before they got to your website and the role trust plays in making that happen. Let’s dive in.

So as I mentioned before the break, eMarketer is reporting that 17% of customers are using AI for shopping, which means that 83% of customers aren’t. Research from Adobe shows travel visitors that AI sends convert 28% less often than other visitors. In retail, people convert at a higher rate when coming from AI. What’s true about both categories, though, is that the folks they’re sending engage at much higher rates. They spend more time on site. They’re less likely to bounce. They’re really diving into the content on the sites that they’re visiting after looking at you on AI.

I think there’s a connection between folks not trusting AI, the data we talked about before the break, and the fact that people are engaging at much higher rates. When customers come to your site from AI, they’re not sure if they should trust you. They’re certainly not sure they should trust the AI. Pew and Fractl’s research shows that pretty handily.

Think about the two categories Adobe’s data talks about. Travel is almost always a high-consideration product. If I’m a traveler booking my family vacation or a honeymoon or a girls’ weekend, I need to make sure that the places I’m looking at meet my needs, that I and anyone I’m traveling with have a great time, have the experience we expect. It’s almost always a high-consideration purchase. Even for a business trip, I want to make sure that the property meets my expectations for quality and price, is near to the clients or prospects I’m visiting, and is convenient to restaurants, the airport, or anything else I need to get done while I’m in town, right? That’s pretty typical, isn’t it?

Retail also has plenty of high-consideration products, but many are not terribly complicated. Lots of times I know what I want to buy. I just need to know where I can get it quickly and at the best price. The same principle applies in B2B. Software purchases and professional services behave a lot like travel. They’re high consideration and heavy verification. Office supplies or commodity tools — they behave like retail. You just need to know where to get it.

So I might be using AI to help me shop around for price comparison or specific details of places that sell the products or services that I’m looking for. But I don’t need to do as much research when my chosen AI recommends a site.

Yext found that after receiving an AI recommendation, sixty-two percent of users immediately search Google for more information. Fifty-eight percent visit the business website directly, and fifty-two percent click through to sources cited within the AI’s response. What makes this remarkable is that verification rates are nearly flat across all trust levels. High trust users — people who rated five out of five — verify via Google at sixty-two percent. Neutral users verify at sixty-three percent. The level of trust people have doesn’t predict whether somebody verifies. It only predicts how. And either way, they check.

Also from Yext, only five percent of consumers move directly from an AI answer to purchase. Now, sure, Yext sells products to help you improve your ratings and reviews. Fine. But their findings line up pretty well with Adobe’s and eMarketer’s.

Keep in mind what all of these studies have in common. None of this is about discovery. It’s about trust. Customers verify. Nearly all of them do. I feel pretty confident that’s what accounts for the higher engagement rates. They’re not engaged in the sense that they love every piece of content you create. They can’t wait to consume more of it. They’re engaged in the sense that they want to confirm the information they were looking at before they came to your site.

We’ve actually seen this for years in loads of e-commerce and B2B contexts. Customers have questions they want the answers to. That’s the point of content at its core. As I wrote in my book when defining what content is, "simply, content answers your customer’s questions." Content is your company’s twenty-four by seven by three sixty-five salesperson and your twenty-four by seven by three sixty-five customer service rep. Your customers might ask AI, do things, play, work, shop, and connect with AI, but at least for now, they want to verify what they’ve learned from AI someplace else.

Another reason I’m pretty confident about this: reviews. Reviews are the thing that customers trust most. In Yext’s data, review signals dominate the purchase decision across the board. It occupies five of the top six purchase influencers.

We’ve actually seen this behavior before. This is not new. When e-commerce first emerged, people liked the fact that they could browse and compare products and services online. They did that all the time. But purchases took a little bit longer to connect. It took a minute before people took that for granted. One of the reasons Amazon emerged as the dominant e-commerce company was that they sold a lower consideration product — books. They later added CDs and DVDs and eventually everything else. But at the start, they were just an online bookstore, something that was easier for customers to trust. The second reason for their emergence, as well as that of eBay, was the addition of reviews.

Which brings us back to trust. And as the saying goes, trust but verify. AI today doesn’t have a verification system. Amazon and eBay did. Customers know that it sometimes gets things wrong, that AI sometimes gets things wrong, or that it outright lies to them. So customers have taken verification into their own hands. You show up in AI, they’re gonna look for reviews. They’re going to search on Google, and they’re going to check out your website content to verify what the AI told them. They may be ready to choose you, but you’ve got to verify what they think they know.

To do that, there are a few things that you need to do. First, you need to assess what AI says about your brand, your products, and your services. Is it accurate? Is it up to date? Does it build confidence in your offerings? Be sure to ask these questions. And when you’re doing it, do it in an incognito tab without being logged in, maybe in a different browser, and probably through a VPN, so that way the AI won’t personalize its answers to you specifically. You want to see what AI knows about your brand without it tailoring the response to you.

Then take a look at your website itself. Don’t just look at your homepage. Look at the specific pages verifying customers land on. Do your room pages or product pages or service pages answer the questions someone asks after finding an AI recommendation?

Next, audit your review presence. You want to look at volume, but you also want to look at recency, accuracy, and the specificity of the reviews. An AI recommendation that leads customers to a review profile that hasn’t been updated in six months does not build trust. It doesn’t build confidence or conversion.

Finally, check out your branded search results. What shows up when someone searches your name after hearing about you from an AI? If some third-party listing shows up first versus your own site, the verification step happens someplace you don’t control. That’s… not great, and it’s a clear opportunity for improvement.

Over the last seven or eight episodes, I’ve been talking a ton about why and how you must own the customer relationship. To deliver on that, you also have to own your customer’s verification experience. A customer who learns about your brand or business from an AI and finds that something isn’t quite right, or lands on a thin website, or finds inconsistent reviews, or gets routed through some intermediary during their verification search will never be convinced to enter a direct relationship with you.

In these situations, you’re not just building your brand on borrowed land once. You’re building on it twice. First, the AI platform is where the customer first learns about you, and then some intermediary captures the verification click. That’s not great. You really need to move away from that.

Here’s what I would do next if I were you. First, pull your traffic source report for the last ninety days or so. Look specifically at time on site and conversion rate by source. If AI-referred or organic traffic shows high engagement and lower conversion than other key channels, the verification gap is real and measurable for your business right now.

Then check out your brand name in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity. But this time, take it one step further. Click through to wherever those tools send someone who wants to learn more. Is it your website? Is it an OTA listing? A review aggregator? Some other third party? Whatever site captures that click is capturing your customer’s verification traffic… and potentially owning that relationship. If it’s not you who shows up, that’s the gap you want to close first.

Finally, audit your top three or five landing pages specifically from those links, from folks verifying your products and services. Does this page answer "is this place or product or service actually as good as I just learned?" Or does it answer "what is this place, product, or service?" Those are different questions that you’re going to have to answer if you’re going to build trust. In my experience, most pages are built to answer the second question. They need to do more to answer the first one, too.

I’m convinced that over time, your customers will start to use AI more and more actively. That seventeen percent who buy will undoubtedly go up. Either AI will add its own verification system or its answers will get better, more trustworthy. That’s the only way it can grow. Your goal is to make sure you’ve taken the necessary steps to ensure you grow right along with it, or even better, ahead of that curve. Make sure your site helps your customers verify what the AI tells them, and I’m confident that your traffic won’t just check you out… it will convert.

If you know someone else who needs to hear this information, do me a favor and send it their way. It might save them a whole world of trouble and help their business grow too.

You can find the show notes for this episode, as well as a full archive of past episodes, at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on making your brand the answer that AI reaches for, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, is the roadmap you’re looking for. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening. I genuinely appreciate you doing so. It means the world to me. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

"Digital Reset with Tim Peter" helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post Your Customer Already Made Up Their Mind Before They Got to Your Website (Digital Reset Episode 506) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

If AI is doing all the work — the writing, the research, the analysis — what happens to the people who are supposed to decide whether the work is any good?

Steve Cummins calls it the validator problem. And it’s not theoretical. It’s playing out right now in every marketing team handing a junior marketer an AI tool on day one and calling it onboarding.

In Part 2 of their conversation, Steve and Tim dig into the question that keeps Steve up at night: how do you build real marketing expertise when AI is doing the work you used to learn from? The answer isn’t what most people expect. It’s not about tools or frameworks. It’s about curiosity. And it turns out that’s much harder to teach than anyone wants to admit.

They also get into what actually changes a founder’s mind about focus, why the fractional marketing model is becoming essential for growth companies, and why simple still works even when the technology around it has gotten infinitely more complicated.

Foundation Capital identified four roles AI will need in the workforce: C-suite accountability, architects (who build the AI processes), relationship people (effectively salespeople), and validators. Those are the people who take AI output, iterate with it, check it, and validate it.

Steve’s concern: how do you get to be a good validator if you’ve never done the work yourself? The graphic designers and art directors who are genuinely good at their craft only got there by doing the grunt work and working their way up. Same with lots of other roles. If AI removes that learning layer, the risk isn’t replacement. Instead, it’s a tendency toward mediocrity, where validators who are "okay" at their job validate "okay" output, and nobody ever gets better.

Steve’s three-part answer:

Most growth companies need marketing strategy much earlier than they can afford a full-time marketing leader. That’s the gap the fractional model fills. Not just a consultant who writes a report and throws it over the fence, but someone embedded with the company a day or two each week, driven by their success, who knows the people and can bring a higher level of strategic thinking than a seed or Series A startup could otherwise access.

Steve’s issue with "fractional CMO" as a label: most small growth companies don’t need a CMO. A CMO deals with the board and investors. What they need is someone who can do the planning and roll their sleeves up. And too many people on LinkedIn calling themselves fractional CMOs have never even been a VP of marketing, let alone a CMO… or are simply doing consulting while they wait for a full-time job, which is a different thing entirely.

The real value of the fractional model is continuity. Being part of a team’s growth process over time, not just dropping in with an ICP, a couple of recommendations, and then moving on.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Watch Tim Peter and Steve Cummins on the validator problem, why curiosity is the most important hiring attribute in an AI world, and why simple marketing still works, even when the technology has gotten infinitely more complicated.

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 32:11

[TIM PETER]:

This week, Steve and I get into something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and something that Steve calls the validator problem. Here it is in the simplest terms I can put it in. You know, if AI is doing more and more of the actual work, the writing, the research, the analysis, what happens to the people who are supposed to evaluate whether the work is any good? How do they build their skills?

This is not just about theory. This is playing out right now in every marketing team hiring a junior marketer and handing them an AI tool on day one. Steve has strong views on what that means for the people coming up in their careers, for their leaders, and for what curiosity actually means as a hiring attribute this year and down the road.

This is part two of my interview with Steve Cummins. I’m Tim Peter. This is the Digital Reset Podcast. Let’s dive in.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

The other frustration I have when I first talk to founders — nearly every time, you know, I say, "What have you done for marketing?" They say, "Well, we did some Google Ads, but it didn’t really work out," right? Um, and I think because Google Ads is, once you’ve got a website and all that, Google Ads is the next easiest and the next — of course — um, but as with all these things, there’s a skill to it. You have to invest a decent amount of money to make it worthwhile. You have to have focus and all that. But it’s sort of like a bingo card when I’m talking to a founder for the first time. It’s like, at what point is he gonna bring up Google Ads?

[TIM PETER]:

I wanna go back to your point about wearing different hats and especially earlier in your career, ’cause I wanna dive into this in just a second. Um, I love to tell the story about when I started my career. I actually worked for Charles Schwab during the dot-com boom. That’s a story I’ve told people for years. But one of the things I loved about the job was because it was the dot-com boom and because I was early in my career — you know, much like you were talking about, the advice you give about AI this month versus two months ago versus two months from now might change — the early days of the internet, the early days of the web, the early days of digital was a very similar thing. And what I loved about my experience at Schwab more than anything else was every three months there was a new opportunity to learn and grow, right? There was an opportunity to do something different, and it helped me a lot in my career.

It has helped me a lot in my career, that in those early days, you know, something new would come up and it’s like, "We’re gonna talk about search." And I’d go, "Oh, I wanna do that." And then, you know, they were like, "We’re gonna talk about email marketing." And I was like, "Oh, I wanna do that. Oh, we’re gonna talk about…" And I’m like, "I wanna do…" You know, just raising your hand. And I was probably the second or third worst at everything in the company, right? Like, you know, ’cause there were people who were really good at one specific thing. But because I was the second or third or fourth person at all of those things, I could backfill anybody. And it made me very employable over the course of my career ’cause I can go, "Oh, wait a second, I actually know something about this. Oh, I know something about this." Obviously, you tend to get more specialized at a middle part of your career. But for sure, it was definitely something that worked to my advantage, I think.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

My concern — I have a lot of concerns with that, but one of my big concerns is how do you get to be a good validator if you’ve never done the work yourself, right? It’s worried me for years ’cause I work with a lot of graphic designers, art directors. Some very good ones, but they only get to be good by doing the grunt work and the junior work and working their way up. So if we’re now taking out that level of experience, how do you ever get to be good? And then my fear with that is, well, then you just tend towards mediocrity because all of the validators are gonna be okay at their job, so they’re gonna validate okay stuff. So that was the theory behind it.

Um, so I think there’s a few things that you can do. One is when you’re using these AI tools, be very critical about them, right? So don’t set it up to do something and then let it do its thing in a black box and then deliver it to you. While you’re doing it, interrogate the AI, right? I’ll go back to, uh, to your potential sponsor, Anthropic. Um, you have to expand it in most cases, but it will tell you the process that it’s going through to do something, right? So you can look at that and learn from it.

You can run your own experiments. Before AI, if you can remember such a time, I always used to be a fan of — I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m gonna start anyway. I won’t be great at it. I guess this is your third and fourth best argument, right? I’m gonna learn as I do it, and it would then lead me to one of two things. Ideally, if I’m in a growth company, once I’ve done the basics and set up — let’s say it’s search — I can then hire somebody in to actually take it over and do it better. But I’ve learned more about it. I know who I need to hire. I’ve kind of set it up and kind of modeled the behavior for that person to come in. The other way that it helped me — I would come and hire somebody like you, Tim, which I have done in the past, to come and help me with SEO. But I know enough to talk to you knowledgeably about it, make sure that I’m bringing in the right person, and then have a good conversation about it, right? So how do we get people to that level?

And it’s curiosity. I hate to say this because that’s an undefinable thing, and I don’t know how you train people to do it. Um, you gotta be curious. You can’t put something into a black box, take out the answer, and go, "Okay, move on." Um, I think when I’ve managed people or mentored people, you get people to that point just by asking a lot of questions, right? Like, "Why did you do that? How did you do that? Did you think about doing this?" And you build that up. So I think a lot of it’s gonna be driven by, for as long as they exist, middle managers, to make sure that it’s not just "the machine has given me this answer," but, well, "why did you set it up that way? You know, what context, what questions did you give it?" And for certain things, I think you’re gonna be looking for people that have an interest in their own lives, right? So somebody’s an artist in their spare time? Well, they’re probably gonna be a good validator for graphic design. But the medals are gonna go to those who are curious and those who are willing to play around and dig into the details.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

The other thing I would encourage people to do all the time — and it sounds like you do the same thing — is look to frameworks that encourage critical thinking. You know, I’m a big fan of the five whys, right? You know, why did this thing happen. Why did it happen? Okay, well, why did that happen? Well, why did that happen, right? And you just keep going deeper till you find a lever you can pull, until you really understand it.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

The other thing I talk about a lot is books, right? Which is not an exciting area for a lot of people. I used to, in my interviews, when I was interviewing people, I used to always ask them, "Tell me about a good book that you’ve read?" And I gave up because the number of people where I’d get the deer in the headlights, and then they’d start telling me about a blog that they’d read or something. But I actually think books are having a little bit of a resurgence. The trick with that is a lot of these books can get outdated pretty quickly. So look for ones that are more about a framework or process. Um, a book that you and I, I think both like is by Ethan Mollick — he wrote it think three years ago now. He didn’t write about AI as it was at that moment. He wrote about the concepts behind it and how we should be thinking about it. Uh, I think there’s something in there about treating it like an alien. Still valid, right? So searching for those kinds of books that are about the frameworks and the mindsets — I think that’s another smart way to keep up with things.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

I think we’ve kind of covered this a little bit, but, you know, we’ve both watched either well-funded companies or frankly companies that wish they were better funded try to spread their bets across every channel and call it a strategy. You know, what is the conversation that actually changes a founder or a CEO or the head of marketing — what changes their mind about focus, right? What drives the moment that matters in the room?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

Um, if it’s someone with more of a sales background, you know, "How did you get your first five customers? Was it by going and talking to everybody you’d ever met?" No. It was by identifying the specific group of people that are likely to buy and then targeting in on that. So I think you have to appeal to whatever their background is.

Now, if it’s a VP of marketing, CMO, whatever, it’s a little tougher. I think you have to understand why they feel as though they need to do everything, and it could be because of pressure from the top. It could be because they have not stopped and thought about what are they truly trying to achieve and who are their customers, right? So, you know, as marketers, we always talk about the ICP, right? The ideal customer profile. I tend to be dismissive of a lot of marketing theory because in startups you gotta move quick and you can’t spend a whole lot of time doing strategy. But the ICP makes a lot of sense ’cause it saves you an awful lot of time, both in targeting who you’re speaking to and where you’re spending your money. So I would always start out with that.

And it may be that for a head of marketing who’s all over the place, they haven’t done that or in a lot of cases I find they haven’t been allowed to do that. And sometimes coming in as a consultant from the outside, you are enabled to do that. You can say the thing that needs to be said. I think a lot of small companies used to just be so focused on the tactics, and they are now realizing you do have to have, albeit a thin layer of strategy or planning at the top, because marketing is so diverse now, right? And the other thing is, if it’s somebody that’s, funny you — you just talk about money. Like, where do you want to spend those resources? If you’re gonna give X amount of money and you want to have impact, you gotta tell me which of these three things we go spend it on. So I always bring it back to the three things. Let me do three things really well, and then we’ll worry about the other 20 things on your list.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

The one thing that I am seeing, which maybe others aren’t, is that there is a shift in expectations for marketing. And I think part of it is because of AI. I think part of it is just a general higher level awareness of what marketing is and what marketing can do. But, you know, what it’s meant for me is most of my career was running corporate teams. You know, I ran marketing at a division of Panasonic for a while. I’ve done it with smaller startup companies. But what I’ve realized is a lot of companies need marketing and marketing strategy much earlier than they can typically afford to do it.

Typically, companies would get into that — well, at some point I’m gonna be able to hire a director of marketing, VP of whatever, right? But oftentimes it was too late. Like, you need to start building that awareness much sooner than they were able to do.

Um, so this new model — a lot of people call it fractional CMO. I don’t like that phrase, um, for a couple of reasons. But this idea of being able to hire somebody on a part-time basis — so typically, when I work with companies, it’s a day a week. So what it means is I’m not there as a consultant, you know, writing a report and throwing it over the fence — I’m embedded with a company. I’m driven by their success. I know what’s going on. I know the people. And I can bring in that higher level of thinking than typically a startup — you know, a seed or even Series A startup — isn’t able to do. But I’m also not really a pure strategist, right? I can do the strategy, I can put together a plan, but I also am somebody that wants to execute on it, right?

Um, so that model, I think, is really helpful for growth companies. The way I often phrase it is, it’s for companies that know they need to do more with marketing, but don’t really know where to start. And if you hire a junior marketer, they are gonna tell you to do whatever the thing is that they know how to do, right? When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So I think it’s an interesting shift. It’s somewhat self-serving ’cause it’s what I’ve chosen to do. But one of the reasons I chose to do it is I have a low boredom threshold. I like to be involved in a lot of different things. And I’ve always got excited at this early stage of growth. I think it’s great to be able to help companies at that level of growth hopefully sort of get off the launchpad quicker.

Just quickly on my thing about fractional CMO — I don’t like it for a couple of reasons. One is most companies, at least smaller growth companies, they do not need a CMO. A CMO is all about strategy, dealing with the board, dealing with investors, whatever it may be. What they need is a director, or whatever — somebody who can do the planning and roll their sleeves up.

The other thing that drives me absolutely crazy, Tim, and this is LinkedIn again — the number of people I see on there that say they’re a fractional CMO, and oftentimes it’s one of two things. One, they’ve never been a CMO, never even been a VP of marketing, right? But, you know, they did a bit of marketing. And the other thing that drives me nuts is they’re actually not a fractional CMO. They’re somebody who is looking for a job, wants some consulting between times. I have no problem with that, but part of the value of a fractional CMO is you can be there through the growth curve of somebody, and if you’re looking for a job as well, you know, you’re not gonna be able to do that. As soon as you find a job, you’re gonna move on. Again, if you want to do consulting, have at it. But I truly believe the fractional marketing approach is about becoming part of a team and being a part of their growth process — and not just dropping in saying, "Oh, here’s your ICP. Here’s a couple of things you should be doing," and then moving on.

[TIM PETER]:

And it’s funny you tell the story about people who are just doing this while they’re waiting for a job. I literally had somebody ask me in the earliest stages of starting consulting — "Well, the reason we’re not sure we want to hire you is you’re just doing this till you get a real job, right?" And I was like, "No, I actually did this on purpose. This is what I wanted to do." But it took a little bit of time to convince people that that was actually intentional and not just doing this until a better gig comes along. I’m like, "No, this is the better gig."

And it’s tough. I mean, I still — I’ve been doing this three, four years now, and I still get the question from people. It’s like, "But if they offered you a full-time job, you’d take it, right?" "No. This is what I wanna do. This is what I enjoy doing." And there’s risks. There’s risks with everything, right? But no, this is what I chose to do. Um, and the other side I’ll say is it’s a tough job market out there, so in no way am I saying anything against anyone doing what they need to do. It’s the terminology and the approach is all I’m talking about.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

Um, the other thing I would say is — you said some nice things about my newsletter. It goes out every two weeks, talking primarily about B2B marketing. There’s been a lot of AI stuff in there recently, but I typically sort of tell a story about something that I’ve been dealing with, um, and then I also include what I’ve been reading this week, so I put a link out to something that I think is interesting for people. So it’s a Substack newsletter — if you just go to Substack, search either for my name or The Marketing Mix, which is the name of the newsletter. If you subscribe for that, I would be thrilled, and you’ll get a letter from me every two weeks.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

Um, so, you know, summer cocktail, something called a Hugo Spritz, ’cause it’s very refreshing. It’s low alcohol. Um, so it’s basically prosecco, it’s elderflower liqueur — the St-Germain stuff you see in these funky bottles — a little bit of soda water, some mint if you’ve got it. Um, really nice and refreshing. My other go-to cocktail — I have a lot of go-to cocktails — since I suspect a lot of people who listen to this may be road warriors as well, my travel cocktail, which is also refreshing, nobody can screw this up and you can get it on pretty much any airline, is scotch and ginger ale.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

Um, and then allied with that is this whole idea of just pick three things. Just pick three things and do them well. It’s not to say you don’t do any of the other stuff, but block out your calendar, make sure every week you’re doing something on those three things and building momentum and moving it forward. Marketing does not have to be as complicated as people think it is. You can make it very complicated, but the basics — like putting a cocktail recipe at the end of my newsletter — the basics still work. The technology around it’s gotten more complicated, but you know, just keep it simple. At least start simple.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

This interview wraps up what I think has been a really solid stretch of episodes for the show. Uh, we started with the gatekeeper problem in episode 498. We worked through the roadmap in episodes 499 and 500, took a look at the historical view in episode 501, and validated it with Daniel Stanica’s research in episode 502. Now Steve has given us the practitioner’s view of what it all means for the people actually running marketing teams right now. Fun stuff for me, hopefully super useful for you.

I’ll be back next week with another episode. In the meantime, if you know a marketing leader who’s wrestling with what AI means for their team, send them this conversation — both parts of it. They’ll thank you for it.

You can find the show notes for today’s episode at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on building a brand that customers will ask for by name, my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," is the roadmap you need. You’ll find it on amazon.com and bookshop.org, and the links, of course, in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening today and every week. I genuinely appreciate all of your support, and I would not do this show without you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and as always, be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

"Digital Reset with Tim Peter" helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post Steve Cummins: If AI Is Doing All the Work, Are You Building Skills or a House of Cards? — Part 2 of 2 (Digital Reset Episode 504) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Marketing exists to drive revenue. That might sound obvious. But given how obsessed many of us can be with AI tools, content calendars, and channel optimization, it’s a surprisingly easy fact to lose sight of.

Steve Cummins has spent more than 20 years making sure we don’t do that. He grew a B2B tech company to $75 million in revenue before acquisition. Their own VP of Sales said Steve took an unknown technology company to the point it was recognized as the global market leader. Today Steve works as a fractional marketing leader through Solent Strategies, helping startups and teams of one punch above their weight.

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Steve and Tim get into the questions marketing leaders are actually wrestling with right now: Where does the owned channel argument break down? How does a marketing team of one figure out where AI fits into their day-to-day, and not just in theory, but in reality? And if you have to start on rented land, what should you build while you’re there?

I hope you enjoy this candid conversation between two practitioners who’ve watched platform after platform change the rules on the businesses that depended on them.

Tim and Steve spend time on a question that trips up a lot of lean marketing teams: the difference between genuine focus ("do two or three things really well") and using focus as an excuse to go deep on someone else’s real estate.

Steve’s answer: pick two or three things you can have an impact on, get very good at them, be consistent. Then, once you’re at roughly the 90% level, add a fourth. You’re constantly building the stack, not going infinitely deep on one channel you don’t control.

And if you do have to post on rented land: think carefully about the assets you’re creating there and where else they can live. The content you create for Instagram or LinkedIn can become a blog post, a newsletter section, a video script. You may have to do it because you’re posting on rented land. Make sure you’re using those assets for something else.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Watch Tim Peter and Steve Cummins discuss what AI actually means for lean marketing teams — and why the rented land argument doesn’t mean what most people think it does.

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 28:23

[TIM PETER]:

My guest today has spent more than twenty years making sure that never happens. Steve Cummins has built marketing functions at companies ranging from Japanese tech giants to crowdfunded Danish startups. He grew an entrepreneurial IT business to seventy-five million dollars in revenue before it was acquired, and their own VP of sales said Steve took an unknown technology company to the point where it was recognized as the global market leader.

Today, Steve works as a fractional marketing leader through his firm Solent Strategies, helping startups and B2B companies punch above their weight. He also coaches and mentors people I think about often when I make this show: marketing teams of one.

What you’re about to hear is a candid, honest conversation about what AI actually means for marketing teams right now. There’s no hype here. There’s no fear here. It’s a practical reality of how a lean marketing function can use these tools to build something that lasts without handing ownership of your customers to yet another gatekeeper.

Today is part one of a two-part interview with Steve Cummins. I’m Tim Peter. This is the Digital Reset Podcast. Let’s dive in.

So, Steve Cummins, welcome to the show. I am so glad you’re here. You know, we’ve known each other for a long time. We’ve been I think friends for quite a while, have enjoyed working with one another over the years, and I’m just thrilled you’re here today.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

So you have just the best newsletter. I love your newsletter. I read it every month. It’s really great. Um, and you wrote recently that marketing exists to drive revenue and everything else is noise. Uh, as you know, I’ve been making a similar argument for owned channels for years. What I’m curious about is where would you push back on me? You know, because I think there’s a version of focus on what you own that becomes an excuse for avoiding the hard work of actually getting your content and getting your message in front of people, you know, distribution and the like. So in your view, where does the owned channel argument break down?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

But to dig more into your question — where does the focus on owned break down? I think a lot of it depends on your domain or the industry you’re in, right? So I know you do a lot of work in hospitality and hotels. So in that world, there’s some very obvious places where people go on that first level of search, right? So could be Google Maps. That’s often how I search when I’m looking for — I go into Google Maps, and the listings are there. Maybe it’s TripAdvisor, you know, there’s a few other places. Restaurants, similar kind of thing.

So in that case, you know, the earned media is sort of a given, right? You have to do it, but it’s — of course — and then you can really focus on your owned media.

Now, a lot of what I deal with is B2B tech companies. So let’s take an example. One company I worked with, they do a fairly niche area of ed tech, educational technology, right? Something that goes into classrooms. So that first level where somebody might say, "Oh, I need this thing. Let me go find out about it," there’s not a lot of obvious places to go for that beyond good old-fashioned Google search, right? There’s not a platform like Yelp — there’s no, there’s no TripAdvisor. So you actually have to do a lot more work. Probably not even G2 or things like that — they don’t really cover that space. I mean, G2 is much more focused on software, right? So if you’re in hardware, industry websites, magazines is probably the closest you have for it. So you do have to do a fair amount of work on what little earned media there is out there.

And then the other thing is, there’s only any point in doing owned media if you can get somebody to that place. So again, in the case of hotels, somebody finds it on Google Maps or TripAdvisor. First thing I would do is go through to the website, right? So immediately you’re on it. And God bless you for that. I may be in the minority. I don’t know.

Um, but again, with a tech product, you know, how do you get somebody to your website in the first place? So something like a podcast might be, right? ‘Cause people are looking to find out more about ed tech, and maybe that’s how they find it. But I think it’s a lot tougher to get people to owned media. So yes, you should do owned media, but in certain areas, particularly where it’s a niche product, I think you have to do a lot more effort to build the blocks to get people to come to your owned media.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

So rather than trying to explain and solve the big problem, what I would then tell them to do is focus on the thing, on the part of the problem that you solve, right? So, you know, ’cause there’s other people out there frankly with much bigger budgets that are gonna talk about the bigger pie. So really focus in on that one bit, and maybe that’s how you get people to the website. Because then it’s more of that longer tail type search where somebody’s saying — so I’ll use the ed tech example again, right? So somebody knows that they need a screen share widget. So they go out there, there’s two or three big players out there. Those are the people they find. But actually they’ve got this one problem, and this one problem is that it’s very difficult to switch between Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Skype, right? And that’s actually the thing that this company is really good at. So you spend your time focusing on that so that when somebody starts searching, okay, I know these are the three people, but this is really the problem I have. That’s the bit that you’ve really got to get sharp on.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

That particular instance — the marketer who’s shipping code — is probably a little bit of an outlier. So they’re a cybersecurity SaaS company, Series A, right? So they’re growing fast. Two-thirds of their employees are software developers. So the whole mentality, whenever I talk to the founder, he wants to know have I done this in Claude, right? Everything they do is in Claude. So for this particular marketer, it was just expected ’cause everybody else is doing everything in Claude and it was expected.

So I don’t think that is the answer. It’s not the answer right now for most marketers, and I’m not sure it’s ever gonna be. But particularly if it’s a team of one, which is very common, right? And oftentimes I work with companies where they have a junior marketer who’s very good at the doing, and I get involved to sort of help them with the planning and the strategy and what have you. You sort of need that layer between, you know, we’re doing a lot of things, and are we doing the right things moving forward.

So if you’re a team of one, first off, you probably don’t have the time to work out how to start coding stuff and ship it and all of that, unless you’re in a software-forward company. What I encourage people to do, I think there’s probably three ways you can look at AI at the moment.

The first is pretty much every software program platform that you use is rolling out AI functionality. So the simplest way to start using AI and benefiting from AI is, you know, whether it’s HubSpot, MailChimp, whatever it is you’re using, Canva, they all have AI built in. Some is good, some is not so good. But that’s the first thing. Play around with that because it’s already in your stack, you already know how you’re using it, and it’s probably there to help with your workflows. You and I are recording this on a platform called Riverside. Every week they’re rolling out new AI things that make the editing process easier. So every marketer can do that. It’s typically included in your existing subscription. So that’s the first thing to do.

Um, second thing is, and I’m less keen on this, is there are a lot of standalone AI tools out there that will tell you, you know, "We’ve developed this AI from the ground up. This is gonna solve your problem." Not a big fan of those because, A, they’re still in their development cycle, so you may spend a lot of time effectively helping them make their product better. B, a lot of them will go away. You know, they will get bought out, disappear, whatever, and you’ve just built your stack on that. So if you’re interested, play around with it on the side, but do not build your processes on these platforms that have only been around for three months. And I apologize to any of my clients that might actually have those products right now.

Um, but I actually think the big thing — and what I’m playing around with a lot at the moment — is agentic tools, right? So I’m a big fan of Claude Cowork. And I think for a lot of people, when they think of ChatGPT or Claude, they think about the chatbots, right? You go in, you ask a question, it helps you write, and that’s all very valuable, particularly for a marketer of one.

But Claude Cowork actually helps you run tasks, right? So a real simple case, two days ago, I was working with a client, we’re building out an ABM program for them, and very simple, I was building a list of potential targets, and I realized that I hadn’t filled out the column that had their LinkedIn page on. I just put it into Cowork. And if you haven’t used Cowork, what you realize is you just speak English to it. You just say, "Hey, I have this table. I need to fill in column B with LinkedIn pages," and off it goes and does it. And as far as I could see, there were no mistakes. There was four or five that it couldn’t find, and then I went and found those myself. So start simple, right? And I think Claude Cowork is $20 a month.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

You know, the other thing I’ll say on that, a lot of people are very worried that they’re getting left behind on AI, right? I think you and I have talked about this before. And I have a couple of answers to that.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

Which kind of leads to the next question I wanted to ask you because you have talked quite a bit about do a few things really well. You know, I have talked about own the channels that you build on, and to me those kind of feel like they’re the same argument or there’s a lot of overlap there, right? Fish where the fishing’s good, double down on where your opportunities are, things like that. Um, at the same time, I have seen people who I consider fairly smart use focus as a reason to go deep on a rented platform. You know, we’re gonna be on Instagram, we’re gonna be on LinkedIn, we’re gonna be on whatever channel is working right now and the like. So how do you help your clients, how do you help people you talk to, distinguish between genuine focus and just doubling down on someone else’s real estate, building your brand on rented land, and the obvious risks that that entails?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

But once you get to that level — and I don’t know what it is, let’s say it’s the 90% level — then you pick the fourth thing. So you’re constantly adding to the stack. So I think it’s diminishing returns to go deeper. It’s that T-shaped thing, right? Get very good at two or three things, but then broaden out.

And I think part of this came from my corporate career before I started consulting. Typically, I would join a company early on when there was maybe one or two marketers, and we would grow the company. And if you’re in that growth environment, the nice thing is if you take that approach, if you get very good at one or two things, then you get to hire somebody to take those things over and maintain and iterate. Meanwhile, you can move on to the fourth thing and the fifth thing. So yeah, I’m not a fan of going deep.

Whenever I’m talking to a new client or someone who’s asking me for help, I always do this first tier audit. You probably do the same thing, right? So I go look at their website, and one of the things I always do, I scroll down to the bottom to look at their social icons. Where are you telling your potential customers to go find out about you? And the number of people that I find that have five or six icons on there, right? They’re on LinkedIn and Twitter and Blue Sky and TikTok and all this, and then you go and click on each one of them, and the only thing they post on there was two years ago, three years ago. But you’ll find one. You don’t know what it is. It could be LinkedIn, could be YouTube, where they are very active. And so then it’s an easy conversation to say, "Look, you thought you would be able to handle four or five of these things. Let’s get rid of those other icons. Let’s get really good at the one you’re already active on. And when we think we’re ready with that, then let’s go to the second one."

I think you have to have that honest conversation. The other thing that I always laugh at is why they picked that one thing, right? Why did they decide that TikTok is gonna be the thing for them? And, you know, sometimes it’s rational. It’s very industry dependent. I worked with a company — it was actually really interesting. They had multiple businesses. One of them is hotels, and the other is a tax advisory business. Very different. Having my call with them, and they have a junior marketer who’s working on the hotel side of the business, and she’d just been brought over to the advisory side as well. And she’s telling him, "Oh, we’ve really got to do a lot on Facebook to get this." Now, they’re trying to bring in high net worth individuals to come in and do their tax advisory. You’re not gonna find those people on Facebook. But for this marketer, it was sensible for her. They’d been very successful with the hotel with Facebook, so therefore we’re gonna do that on the other one. So you also have to be very thoughtful about, once you decide you’re only gonna do two or three things, you may not find the perfect things to do, but at least make sure that they are logical.

[TIM PETER]:

I had to look it up — I apologize, but I couldn’t remember the source of the phrase — but there’s a phrase my dad used to use all the time about the guy who jumped on his horse and rode off madly in all directions. And that kinda doesn’t work out, you know? There’s a lot of that.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

Absolutely. I realize I didn’t answer part of your question as well, which is the whole rented — deep on rented. The only thing I would say is I think for a lot of smaller companies, you have to start on rented land.

[TIM PETER]:

[STEVE CUMMINS]:

[TIM PETER]:

First, his newsletter, The Marketing Mix, goes out every two weeks on Substack, where he covers B2B marketing with the kind of honest, real-world perspective you just heard today. Pro tip for you: there’s a cocktail recommendation at the end of every issue. You won’t want to miss it, and you’ll find the link in the show notes.

Steve is also on LinkedIn, as you might imagine. Just search Steve Cummins. You’ll find the link to his profile in the show notes, too.

And if you want to work with Steve directly, check out Solent Strategies. All the details for how you can get in touch with him are in the show notes for today’s episode.

Now, Steve and I only covered the first half of our conversation today. Next week, Steve and I get into something that I think is one of the most important questions in marketing right now: What happens to the people building marketing skills when AI is doing more and more of the actual work? Steve calls it the validator problem, and it’s something every marketing leader needs to think about very carefully. That’s part two coming at you next week.

In the meantime, if you know somebody who’s running a marketing team right now and trying to figure out where AI actually fits in their day-to-day, do me a favor, send them a link to this episode. I think it might save them a lot of time and a whole lot of second-guessing.

You can find the show notes for today’s episode, including all of Steve’s contact info, at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go even deeper on building a brand that customers will ask for by name, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, might be just what you’re looking for. You’ll find it on amazon.com and bookshop.org. Links in the show notes to those too, of course.

Thank you so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate all of your support. I would not do this show without you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and as always, be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

"Digital Reset with Tim Peter" helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post Steve Cummins: You Have to Start on Rented Land. Here’s What to Build While You’re There. — Part 1 of 2 (Digital Reset Episode 503) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Google killed 79 out of 100 blogs. The median site lost 85% of its search traffic between 2022 and 2026. Not the worst blog in the study. The middle. Half did worse than that.

But this isn’t really a blogging story. It’s a story about what happens to any business that builds its customer acquisition strategy on borrowed brand equity, renting visibility from a platform — a gatekeeper — that eventually shuts the gate. Daniel Stanica’s research on 100 once-successful blogs was written as a warning and a way forward for bloggers. It also produced 100 real-world data points confirming the argument Tim Peter has been making for years.

In Episode 502 of Digital Reset, Tim breaks down what the data actually says, who’s really responsible (spoiler: it’s not ChatGPT), and what every business in his audience can do about it right now… regardless of where they’re starting from.

Pull your traffic composition by source for the last 12 months. Look at the share each source provides — not the totals. Then ask two questions:

That’s what tells you whether you’re building a relationship that only you can own.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Watch Tim Peter break down why Google — not AI — killed 79 out of 100 blogs, and what every business depending on organic search needs to do about it right now.

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 21:04

Google killed seventy-nine out of one hundred blogs. The median blog site reviewed in recent research lost eighty-five percent of its search traffic. Not the worst blog in the list. The middle. Half actually did worse than that. And all of that in less than four years.

Daniel Stanica researched one hundred top blogs and found that between 2022 and 2026, they got slaughtered. Again, the median dropped by 85%. Sixty-five of the one hundred saw their overall traffic drop by fifty percent or more. Another fourteen dropped by an average of 36%. Only twenty-one grew.

That’s… bad.

You know, it’s also a problem for folks beyond blogs. Any business that’s dependent on organic search for its revenue is headed for the same fall. Large publishers have warned us about this issue for years. And it’s coming for every single business that depends on search.

I’d also argue that AI won’t save us because AI is just another iteration of the same issue. It’s a gatekeeper deciding who wins… and who loses.

This is the Digital Reset Podcast. I’m Tim Peter. Today we’re talking about how Google didn’t kill blogging, but how they’re killing the businesses whose model was built on borrowed brand equity. Let’s dive in.

Daniel Stanica put together some fascinating research that looks at what’s happened to one hundred top blogs between 2022 and 2026. And as noted before the break, most of them, seventy-nine of the one hundred, got crushed. The median blog in Daniel’s study lost eighty-five percent of its search traffic. And again, sixty-five of those hundred saw overall traffic fall by fifty percent or more. And that is all kinds of bad.

Now, as Daniel noted in his post, "this is a cohort study, not a representative sample." This is a quote. He said, "I am not claiming that two-thirds of all blogs on the internet lost their traffic. I am claiming something narrower and harder to wriggle out of: Of the specific blogs publicly celebrated as the model’s biggest winners, two-thirds lost the majority of their traffic."

Again, in my view, this story isn’t really about blogs or blogging. Give me a minute and I’ll get to what it’s really about.

One of my favorite bits in Daniel’s article, though, is where he noted four traits among the twenty-one survivors. He didn’t just say, "These folks survived." He called out what they’re doing well. They are, one, first-hand experience; two, owned audiences; three, a real product; and four, brand search. That’s genuinely useful information, and if you’ve listened to past episodes, it maps directly with advice I’ve offered in the past. Again, I’ll come back to that connection in just a few minutes.

What’s worth noting here, though, is that this story isn’t a "ChatGPT stole our traffic" story. ChatGPT didn’t steal their traffic. Google did. Google gave these folks life and then snatched it away. Let me say this again. AI didn’t kill these blogs’ traffic. Google did.

AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% of all searches on Google. Ahrefs published data in February that showed when AI Overviews appear on the search results page, click-throughs drop by roughly 58%. Worse, Google’s AI Overviews only cites the top pages in search about 38% of the time. That’s down half from 76% last year. In short, if your business depends on search engines, you’re in deep, deep trouble.

And switching or planning on switching from dependence on Google to dependence on AI probably won’t help you. Why not?

Well, first, none are stable platforms for brand growth right now. No single AI holds more than fifty percent of the market. Second, the rules of the road for each AI platform change almost daily. You know, for instance, Reddit’s citation share in ChatGPT fell from roughly sixty percent to roughly ten percent in just six weeks. So if you were depending on Reddit volume for helping you show up there, that’s just gone. Third, and most importantly, choosing this path means you’re just switching from one gatekeeper to another. You don’t get access to more customers. You’re still letting someone else decide who hears about you and who doesn’t.

AI isn’t the cavalry riding to your rescue. It’s just another gatekeeper seeking its chance to own your customers.

Yes, you want to show up in AI and you want to show up in search. They’re important signals to your customers that you’re a real, honest-to-goodness, trustworthy, reliable business. They also come with huge hurdles and more than a few strings attached.

I also want to be fair to the bloggers and other businesses who’ve built their businesses using these channels. As I talked about last week, these businesses were built by people who followed a highly functional playbook: Create high-quality content. Use search and social shares as low-cost distribution to drive awareness and traffic. Monetize that traffic. And double down on the kinds of content and distribution channels that worked best.

They didn’t do this because they were dumb. They did it because it worked. Right up until it didn’t.

In last week’s episode, I explicitly outlined the platform trap and how smart people fall into it all the time. As I mentioned last week, we’ve seen it when Google updates their algorithm, social media sites collapse reach among your fans and followers, OTAs favor paid placements, and most recently with Google AI Overviews. It’s the same storyline every time. New platforms, generous early and expensive later.

Of course, it’s even worse if you’re caught in this trap. Because you’re not just competing with the platforms. You’re competing with the folks who didn’t get caught. Those 21 blogs that Daniel cited built something sustainable beyond big tech and have an advantage that new entrants — or old competitors rebuilding their business — have to overcome.

They’ve earned citations. They’ve earned their audience. They’ve earned the right to show up in their customers’ inboxes. And they’ve set the bar for what customers expect today.

The core element that ties those 21 survivors together is that they built distinct, memorable, desirable brands. Brand is the one thing that helps you grow beyond Google and the rest of its Big Tech brethren. In the age of AI, brand isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. Remember, your brand is the prompt. It’s something that bypasses the algorithm, and teaches AI assistants and agents which products, services, and experiences their users prefer without even asking. Your brand is the prompt means you’ve beat Google at its own game by building brands customers ask for by name.

You build that kind of brand by focusing on three pillars: Content is still king. All that’s changed is the kinds of content, and where it appears. Customer experience is queen. The relationship you earn with your customers is what makes you worth asking for by name. Data is the crown jewels. Your CRM, your email list, your first-hand knowledge about your customers’ cares, concerns, and interests is what lets you connect directly with customers — and without asking Big Tech for permission.

I wrote that in Digital Reset. And it’s exactly what Stanica’s survivors all demonstrate.

"Firsthand experience that can’t be AI-summarized" is "Content is King," simply stated using different words. The content that survived came from its creators’ own first-hand, lived experiences. Only they could create that content because they’re the ones who did the thing they blog about: they cooked the recipe, they designed the outfit, they traveled to the destination, they ran the business. Only real people can share real experiences.

Similarly, the way survivors shared their lived experiences represents "the customer experience" for a content business. They didn’t just answer a question; they shared their real-world experiences with audiences who wanted to know not just how… but the who who knows how. Anyone, including and especially an AI, can produce a "top 10 list." But a real human being, sharing a real human experience is distinctly different… and distinctly valuable.

"An owned audience" is "Data is the Crown Jewels." Period. The email list, the CRM, and, most importantly, the subscriber base who can’t wait for your latest post. The 21 survivors built direct connections with customers who valued their experience and expertise. And that connection continues to exist even after any algorithm changes.

"A brand name people search for by name" is "your brand is the prompt" and "beat Google at its own game by building a brand customers ask for by name" almost word for word.

By contrast, think about the 79 blogs who lost vast amounts of traffic. I recommended a simple, three-question test in episode 498 that tells you whether you’re in trouble or not. Think about these questions in connection with those bloggers: What percentage of their acquisition ran through channels they didn’t control? Was their direct traffic growing or shrinking? What was their 90-day alternative when Google changed the rules? Seems pretty likely what those folks would answer. And that’s the whole point right there.

One quick aside. In the data that Daniel showed, he found that of the 21 winners, 3 grew by an astonishing amount. So much so, in fact, that they skewed the data for everyone else. When you look at all 100, it looks like traffic "only" fell by 32%. What really happened though is that three grew a lot and the other 97 fell by more than 63%. The point being, don’t let a few winners distract you from the problem areas. I see this all the time. As I talked about in episode 497, one business had seen decent amounts of traffic and revenue year on year. In reality, their organic traffic had fallen roughly 20% and their paid traffic grew by 85%. So, yes, their overall numbers were OK. But their costs were up big time. The "composition effect," much like in Daniel’s study, was hiding the real story: Their profitability was about to get much worse.

Of course, the question, as always, should be, what can you do about this reality? And as I did in episode 500, I’d break it down by where you sit as a company.

If you’re in the first group we talked about, companies in real trouble today, bleeding revenue or profits, your first job is not "fix your SEO." It is to grow your CRM and direct traffic as much as you can. Look for specific opportunities to gain more direct traffic. Look at your analytics and determine the highest cost gatekeeper channel. Does it fail the owned demand test? If so, redirect at least some portion of your budget towards growing your email list or your first-party data about your customers. Also, encourage all site visitors and other contact points with prospects to opt into your email or SMS communications. Give them some incentive, say, a special benefit or a one-time discount in exchange for their contact information.

For companies whose business isn’t shrinking but isn’t growing much either, your approach is actually gonna be pretty similar. The one big difference is that you’re in a position to start thinking about content that no one but you can make. What experience and expertise do you and your team have that sets you apart from everyone else? What can you talk about that your customers want to hear about? Don’t think quantity. Focus heavily on quality. A single photo essay or video or podcast or written piece that encourages engagement, sharing, and most importantly, new subscribers, is more valuable, much more valuable, than ten or twenty or one hundred automated, mediocre, meh content pieces that no one cares about.

If your company is growing and optimizing, if you’re in the third category, keep that Reddit citation collapse story in mind. Even strong citations represent rented demand that might not last for long. Your job is a continued focus on building brand equity, growing branded search, gaining more information and insights about your customers, and accumulating positive ratings, reviews, and, yes, additional citations across an array of channels. Those will put you in front of more customers and likely will turn up in the next AI model updates. The best way to offset the risk that any one channel can hurt you is to appear in as many places as you can where your customers spend their time.

Daniel mentioned in his post that the problem was, quote, "A model that was a single, large, leveraged bet that Google would be the middleman, sending free clicks indefinitely to publishers in exchange for content. However, since 2023, Google has called the bet, and websites that leveraged this model became a liability rather than an asset."

Don’t be that guy.

Your job is to be a trusted resource customers will turn to whenever you’re the right fit for their needs. Your job is to be a brand that customers want to hear from. Your job is to build a brand that customers will ask for by name.

The last few episodes we’ve done here have walked you through precisely how you can do that. Episode 498 showed you the real-world cost when you don’t own your customers. Episode 499 helped you identify whether you really own your customers… or not. Episode 500 gave you the full roadmap of what to do about it. And Episode 501 laid out the historical pattern in detail. Today’s episode, well, that’s all about what it looks like when folks get it wrong. Daniel Stanica gave us 100 real-world examples without even knowing that they underlined the argument I’ve been making for years.

Don’t borrow brand equity. Build your own.

In fact, here’s what I want you to do right now. Pull your traffic composition by source for the last 12 months and look at how much share each provides. Then ask these two questions. One, what percentage comes from direct traffic, email and SMS, and branded search? And the second question is, is that number growing or shrinking? That will tell you whether you’re building a relationship that only you can own.

Again, don’t borrow brand equity. Build your own.

Next week, I’m going to talk with a brilliant marketer, Steve Cummins, all about what this means for the folks running marketing teams right now.

In the meantime, if you know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today, do me a favor. Send them a link to this episode. I hope they will appreciate it, and I know that I would.

You can find the show notes for today’s episode, as well as a full archive of our past episodes, at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go even deeper on building a brand that customers will ask for by name, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, might be just what you’re looking for. You’ll find it on amazon.com and bookshop.org, and of course, you’ll find the link in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate all of your support. I would not do this show without you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and as always, be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

"Digital Reset with Tim Peter" helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today?

The post Google Didn’t Kill Blogging. It Killed Borrowed Brand Equity. (Digital Reset Episode 502) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.