Tim Peter & Associates

You’ve heard me say that “gatekeepers gonna gate” for a long, long time. Hell, I wrote a whole book about the topic. The funny thing is that most folks assume that OpenAI and ChatGPT are going to bypass the gatekeepers — and will likely become the biggest gatekeepers of all.

Maybe… But I’m not so sure.

While I could be wrong about this, I think that OpenAI is in fact in deep trouble and largely because of their own actions — and, more importantly, those of Big Tech gatekeepers. I’m reasonably sure that gatekeepers — and the reality that gatekeepers gonna gate & mdash; is bad news for ChatGPT. I don’t actually think that they’ll kill ChatGPT or OpenAI outright. But they’re likely to hurt them something bad.

Why do I think “gatekeepers gonna gate” is gonna kill ChatGPT? What do I think is really going on here? And, most importantly, what does this mean for your business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Here are the show notes for you.

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.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using the travel rig: Shure SM57 Cardioid Dynamic Instrument Microphone and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 23m 31s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Anyone who’s listened to the show has heard me say that gatekeepers gonna gate. That’s what they do. Right now, three years after the launch of ChatGPT, there is not a gatekeeper for artificial intelligence. There’s too many players out there. The market is super unsettled.

ChatGPT and Google and Meta could all make the claim that they’re the most used AI and those three, plus Perplexity or Claude could suggest that they are the most capable AI. They’re all kind of fighting for the same leadership crown and they all need to become the winner. They need this because they need to make more money, right?

And to do that, first they have to put the AI, they have to put their artificial intelligence in front of more people. They have to get more people to use it. It’s a distribution challenge.

That’s why you’re seeing things like the launch of AI browsers like ChatGPT Atlas or Perplexity Comet or Microsoft and Google embedding Copilot and Gemini into Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, respectively. And the browser is a core part of what I want to talk about today. So I’m going to come back to that in just a moment.

We are, of course, also seeing folks like Microsoft and Google putting Copilot and Gemini into all of their products. Again, they’re trying to solve for distribution.

When you have distribution, you also need some degree of monetization. Every single one of these players needs to find the right monetization strategy that covers their massive, massive and accelerating costs—and drives profits. Now they don’t need this immediately, but every single one of these suppliers, every single one of these tech companies, needs to show investors that they’ll have some path to profits someday.

And then of course the third leg of the stool around adoption here is that they have to provide functionality, they have to provide utility. Putting AI tools in front of customers doesn’t matter if customers don’t actually use them very often and customers won’t use them if they feel the AI doesn’t provide them utility. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even declared a "code red" because of his concern that Google’s functionality is gaining on them.

Now, I think that the launch of the AI browsers—Atlas, Comet, Gemini in Chrome—are one way that many of these companies are trying to solve for the utility and distribution problems.

I also think that these are the true beginning of agentic AI. You simply tell the browser to do work for you. You don’t even go to a website. You just say, "hey, go take care of this for me." And if you, the customer, find that the browser does the work for you, you might use it more often. And you might prefer a browser like Atlas or like Comet over Chrome or Safari. Agentic AI might be the true AI gatekeeper that we’re going to run into. I’m pretty confident that’s the most likely scenario.

So, by the way, is Amazon. Amazon is suing Perplexity to prevent their browser, Comet, from using its agentic capabilities to shop and purchase on Amazon.

Why?

Because Amazon knows that gatekeepers gonna gate more than just about anyone. Amazon, along with Google and Meta and Apple and Microsoft, essentially invented the practice of gatekeeping for the internet age.

And this lawsuit, this action that Amazon is taking, should be a massive wake-up call about the risks that agentic AI poses to your brand and to your business. Amazon being worried enough about this to take Perplexity to court is a flashing red light signaling all of us that big changes are coming.

This is episode 476 of The Big Show. Today we’re looking at what Amazon’s lawsuit tells us about the future of AI and about the future of marketing more broadly. Let’s dive in.

There’s a great article over on The Verge about Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity, and it includes the following banger quote. This is from The Verge.

Amazon’s statement says third-party applications that purchase products for customers on its site “should respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” and claims the comment provides "a significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience”

A "significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience." Amazon clearly recognizes the same threat around AI agents that I do and I think many of you do.

Those agents will make it harder for companies to create great distinct experiences that help us build long-term trust and relationships with our customers. We can ignore for a moment whether most companies actually do this or not, but the reality is that’s what we need to do.

Amazon recognizes that Comet—and really, any agentic experience—can turn Amazon into a commodity. They’re scared. And they probably should be. At least to some degree, you should probably be a little concerned too. I don’t want you to be scared. My job here is not to scare you. But we need to be honest about what’s happening here.

Agentic AI, whether delivered through a web browser, an app, or built into our device’s operating system will likely determine who wins and who loses at a level we’ve never seen before.

Yes, customers have started their journeys for years using search and social. But “search" and “social" represent two entirely different platforms. And each of those have more or less more than one player.

Obviously, there’s a dominant player. Sure, customers search on Google. But they also search, among others, on Bing and Expedia and Booking.com and OpenTable and Yelp and G2… and sure, Google and YouTube and Google Maps. Google is the biggest one. But there have long been places where you can have your brand show up beyond just Google.

Social has been dominated by Meta for a long time, via Facebook and Instagram. But Pinterest and YouTube and Snapchat and Reddit all existed even before TikTok came along to really shake things up. Again, you had a number of options for getting your product or your service and your brand in front of customers.

Once customers use AI agents, though, they likely will stick with just one or two of them. Probably. And in my view, probably, the ones they’ll use will be the one or two integrated into their phone or their laptop or smart wearables like glasses and earbuds or the very small number of apps they still choose such as their browser and email.

By the way, as a quick aside, this is one of the reasons that I think Google is in such a great position here. They already own and offer most of these services. Microsoft has a less secure position with home Windows consumers, but they have a great position with enterprise users for the same reason. And Meta is doing its best to win the wearables race and own the next device experience. Finally, whomever Apple partners with has a huge chance to win those customers. It could be OpenAI, it could be Google, it could be someone else. I’ve kind of been joking with a friend of mine that, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI buys Apple or Apple buys OpenAI. Right? Because that would be the perfect marriage from that perspective.

The point remains that the agent, regardless of where customers interact with it, will likely be the next major gatekeeper. And that’s why Amazon is trying to nip Perplexity in the bud here.

Now, the real key for you though is what do you do about it? Well, you want to remember that your brand is the prompt. That’s what we’re trying to work towards. And also remember that "The King, The Queen, And The Crown Jewels" are still key to building brand equity among customers. They’re still the key to having customers ask for you by name.

Now, if you don’t remember "The King, The Queen, And The Crown Jewels,” they are "content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels".

All three of those start with focusing on your customer. Your content needs to think about your customer’s needs and how you solve for those needs every single time.

We of course also need to think about content distribution. How do you deliver that content to customers? Well, first and foremost, especially in the age of AI, content distribution has to start with CRM. And your website has to be a machine for getting customers to talk to you directly. In a perfect world, everyone who comes to your website will sign up for your email or will sign up for SMS. On your website, you have to think about website conversions not just in terms of selling product, but in terms of getting customers to connect directly with you. Again, via email, via SMS, or via social follows.

You also want to look at chat on your site and the website search on your site so that you’re providing the same kind of experience customers expect when they connect with any company anywhere.

Of course, your own website is still going to be a place where your content lives, but you also need to make sure your content is available on social for the customers who are engaging there.

And finally, you need to ensure your customers tell a great brand story on your behalf when they’re on social. And that’s where customer experience comes in.

We’ve seen for years that customers will tell their friends and family and fans and followers about experiences they’ve had, good or bad, at almost every social opportunity. Sure, online, but also in group chats and face-to-face and even in casual encounters sometimes, if there’s a chance that they’ve got a good story to tell.

It’s really critical for you to make sure that the story they’re telling about your brand is a positive one. That’s why customer experience matters so much. It’s why customer experience is queen.

Finally, pay attention to your data. Obviously, we’re already starting to see shifts in traffic from AI or AI browsers. We’re seeing traffic show up in all kinds of ways.

One of the main metrics I would encourage you to think about is something we call "prompt brand equity." I talked about this a couple of weeks ago in "What Your Brand Is The Prompt Really Means For Your Business." And that’ll be linked to in the show notes.

Your data is going to be more valuable than syndicated or proprietary vendor research. There’s a fantastic article over on Search Engine Land about why this point matters so much. Essentially the idea is that most of this research is measuring different characteristics and that many of the specific narratives that they’re trying to tell are somewhat tied to their business objectives. They’re somewhat tied to the question that they ask and somewhat tied to what are they trying to accomplish with this research. It doesn’t mean that they’re faking the research. It doesn’t mean that they’re trying to lie to you with the research. It just means they’re coming from a specific lens. That’s why your data is going to tell you more than other data you see out there.

Now, if that “content, customer experience, data, King, Queen, Crown Jewels” sounds like a framework you’ve heard about before, either here or in my book, Digital Reset, there’s a reason for that. And that’s because it’s based on tons of research into the way your customers act in a digital environment.

AI is a new platform, but ultimately customer behaviors are still going to drive where we end up. Our job is to put customers first and make sure we’re not letting someone else get between our customers and our businesses.

Amazon gets that. They also get that:

A.) Gatekeeper’s gonna gate.

While I’m not suggesting you sue Perplexity or anyone else, I would take a page out of Amazon’s playbook and act now to ensure you don’t find yourself on the wrong side of a new gatekeeper’s new gate.

The shift is coming. The time to act is now. Take the right actions today.

Focus on your content, your customer experience, your data and your customer and you should end up in a really good position.

Keep me posted. I can’t wait to see how well you do.

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? And let them know what you think, too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 476, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And as always, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, something that goes deeper into this topic, I would love to suggest Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. It dives into today’s topic in even greater detail. Please pick up a copy, share it with your friends, and let me know what you think of the book. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, thank you so much for listening today. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back with a new episode next week, and until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

The post “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

You may have heard that Amazon is suing Perplexity, alleging that Perplexity’s Comet browser violates the e-commerce giant’s terms of service. Amazon goes even further, though, as an article from The Verge points out:

Amazon’s statement says third-party applications that purchase products for customers on its site “should respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” and claims the comment provides "a significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience”

Amazon knows better than just about anyone that gatekeepers gonna gate… and that a consequence of those gatekeepers’ actions often is “a significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience.” Of course Amazon knows this. They practically invented the practice.

This lawsuit—and Amazon’s comments about AI’s effects on shopping and customer experience—tell us a ton about the future of AI and marketing. They highlight some core lessons we all need to learn about where we might be headed. And they provide a roadmap for how to respond.

What are those lessons? What does Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity tell us about the future of AI and marketing? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Here are the show notes for you.

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.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify 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 into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 17m 45s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Anyone who’s listened to the show has heard me say that gatekeepers gonna gate. That’s what they do. Right now, three years after the launch of ChatGPT, there is not a gatekeeper for artificial intelligence. There’s too many players out there. The market is super unsettled.

ChatGPT and Google and Meta could all make the claim that they’re the most used AI and those three, plus Perplexity or Claude could suggest that they are the most capable AI. They’re all kind of fighting for the same leadership crown and they all need to become the winner. They need this because they need to make more money, right?

And to do that, first they have to put the AI, they have to put their artificial intelligence in front of more people. They have to get more people to use it. It’s a distribution challenge.

That’s why you’re seeing things like the launch of AI browsers like ChatGPT Atlas or Perplexity Comet or Microsoft and Google embedding Copilot and Gemini into Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, respectively. And the browser is a core part of what I want to talk about today. So I’m going to come back to that in just a moment.

We are, of course, also seeing folks like Microsoft and Google putting Copilot and Gemini into all of their products. Again, they’re trying to solve for distribution.

When you have distribution, you also need some degree of monetization. Every single one of these players needs to find the right monetization strategy that covers their massive, massive and accelerating costs—and drives profits. Now they don’t need this immediately, but every single one of these suppliers, every single one of these tech companies, needs to show investors that they’ll have some path to profits someday.

And then of course the third leg of the stool around adoption here is that they have to provide functionality, they have to provide utility. Putting AI tools in front of customers doesn’t matter if customers don’t actually use them very often and customers won’t use them if they feel the AI doesn’t provide them utility. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even declared a "code red" because of his concern that Google’s functionality is gaining on them.

Now, I think that the launch of the AI browsers—Atlas, Comet, Gemini in Chrome—are one way that many of these companies are trying to solve for the utility and distribution problems.

I also think that these are the true beginning of agentic AI. You simply tell the browser to do work for you. You don’t even go to a website. You just say, "hey, go take care of this for me." And if you, the customer, find that the browser does the work for you, you might use it more often. And you might prefer a browser like Atlas or like Comet over Chrome or Safari. Agentic AI might be the true AI gatekeeper that we’re going to run into. I’m pretty confident that’s the most likely scenario.

So, by the way, is Amazon. Amazon is suing Perplexity to prevent their browser, Comet, from using its agentic capabilities to shop and purchase on Amazon.

Why?

Because Amazon knows that gatekeepers gonna gate more than just about anyone. Amazon, along with Google and Meta and Apple and Microsoft, essentially invented the practice of gatekeeping for the internet age.

And this lawsuit, this action that Amazon is taking, should be a massive wake-up call about the risks that agentic AI poses to your brand and to your business. Amazon being worried enough about this to take Perplexity to court is a flashing red light signaling all of us that big changes are coming.

This is episode 476 of The Big Show. Today we’re looking at what Amazon’s lawsuit tells us about the future of AI and about the future of marketing more broadly. Let’s dive in.

There’s a great article over on The Verge about Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity, and it includes the following banger quote. This is from The Verge.

Amazon’s statement says third-party applications that purchase products for customers on its site “should respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” and claims the comment provides "a significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience”

A "significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience." Amazon clearly recognizes the same threat around AI agents that I do and I think many of you do.

Those agents will make it harder for companies to create great distinct experiences that help us build long-term trust and relationships with our customers. We can ignore for a moment whether most companies actually do this or not, but the reality is that’s what we need to do.

Amazon recognizes that Comet—and really, any agentic experience—can turn Amazon into a commodity. They’re scared. And they probably should be. At least to some degree, you should probably be a little concerned too. I don’t want you to be scared. My job here is not to scare you. But we need to be honest about what’s happening here.

Agentic AI, whether delivered through a web browser, an app, or built into our device’s operating system will likely determine who wins and who loses at a level we’ve never seen before.

Yes, customers have started their journeys for years using search and social. But “search" and “social" represent two entirely different platforms. And each of those have more or less more than one player.

Obviously, there’s a dominant player. Sure, customers search on Google. But they also search, among others, on Bing and Expedia and Booking.com and OpenTable and Yelp and G2… and sure, Google and YouTube and Google Maps. Google is the biggest one. But there have long been places where you can have your brand show up beyond just Google.

Social has been dominated by Meta for a long time, via Facebook and Instagram. But Pinterest and YouTube and Snapchat and Reddit all existed even before TikTok came along to really shake things up. Again, you had a number of options for getting your product or your service and your brand in front of customers.

Once customers use AI agents, though, they likely will stick with just one or two of them. Probably. And in my view, probably, the ones they’ll use will be the one or two integrated into their phone or their laptop or smart wearables like glasses and earbuds or the very small number of apps they still choose such as their browser and email.

By the way, as a quick aside, this is one of the reasons that I think Google is in such a great position here. They already own and offer most of these services. Microsoft has a less secure position with home Windows consumers, but they have a great position with enterprise users for the same reason. And Meta is doing its best to win the wearables race and own the next device experience. Finally, whomever Apple partners with has a huge chance to win those customers. It could be OpenAI, it could be Google, it could be someone else. I’ve kind of been joking with a friend of mine that, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI buys Apple or Apple buys OpenAI. Right? Because that would be the perfect marriage from that perspective.

The point remains that the agent, regardless of where customers interact with it, will likely be the next major gatekeeper. And that’s why Amazon is trying to nip Perplexity in the bud here.

Now, the real key for you though is what do you do about it? Well, you want to remember that your brand is the prompt. That’s what we’re trying to work towards. And also remember that "The King, The Queen, And The Crown Jewels" are still key to building brand equity among customers. They’re still the key to having customers ask for you by name.

Now, if you don’t remember "The King, The Queen, And The Crown Jewels,” they are "content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels".

All three of those start with focusing on your customer. Your content needs to think about your customer’s needs and how you solve for those needs every single time.

We of course also need to think about content distribution. How do you deliver that content to customers? Well, first and foremost, especially in the age of AI, content distribution has to start with CRM. And your website has to be a machine for getting customers to talk to you directly. In a perfect world, everyone who comes to your website will sign up for your email or will sign up for SMS. On your website, you have to think about website conversions not just in terms of selling product, but in terms of getting customers to connect directly with you. Again, via email, via SMS, or via social follows.

You also want to look at chat on your site and the website search on your site so that you’re providing the same kind of experience customers expect when they connect with any company anywhere.

Of course, your own website is still going to be a place where your content lives, but you also need to make sure your content is available on social for the customers who are engaging there.

And finally, you need to ensure your customers tell a great brand story on your behalf when they’re on social. And that’s where customer experience comes in.

We’ve seen for years that customers will tell their friends and family and fans and followers about experiences they’ve had, good or bad, at almost every social opportunity. Sure, online, but also in group chats and face-to-face and even in casual encounters sometimes, if there’s a chance that they’ve got a good story to tell.

It’s really critical for you to make sure that the story they’re telling about your brand is a positive one. That’s why customer experience matters so much. It’s why customer experience is queen.

Finally, pay attention to your data. Obviously, we’re already starting to see shifts in traffic from AI or AI browsers. We’re seeing traffic show up in all kinds of ways.

One of the main metrics I would encourage you to think about is something we call "prompt brand equity." I talked about this a couple of weeks ago in "What Your Brand Is The Prompt Really Means For Your Business." And that’ll be linked to in the show notes.

Your data is going to be more valuable than syndicated or proprietary vendor research. There’s a fantastic article over on Search Engine Land about why this point matters so much. Essentially the idea is that most of this research is measuring different characteristics and that many of the specific narratives that they’re trying to tell are somewhat tied to their business objectives. They’re somewhat tied to the question that they ask and somewhat tied to what are they trying to accomplish with this research. It doesn’t mean that they’re faking the research. It doesn’t mean that they’re trying to lie to you with the research. It just means they’re coming from a specific lens. That’s why your data is going to tell you more than other data you see out there.

Now, if that “content, customer experience, data, King, Queen, Crown Jewels” sounds like a framework you’ve heard about before, either here or in my book, Digital Reset, there’s a reason for that. And that’s because it’s based on tons of research into the way your customers act in a digital environment.

AI is a new platform, but ultimately customer behaviors are still going to drive where we end up. Our job is to put customers first and make sure we’re not letting someone else get between our customers and our businesses.

Amazon gets that. They also get that:

A.) Gatekeeper’s gonna gate.

While I’m not suggesting you sue Perplexity or anyone else, I would take a page out of Amazon’s playbook and act now to ensure you don’t find yourself on the wrong side of a new gatekeeper’s new gate.

The shift is coming. The time to act is now. Take the right actions today.

Focus on your content, your customer experience, your data and your customer and you should end up in a really good position.

Keep me posted. I can’t wait to see how well you do.

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? And let them know what you think, too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 476, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And as always, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, something that goes deeper into this topic, I would love to suggest Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. It dives into today’s topic in even greater detail. Please pick up a copy, share it with your friends, and let me know what you think of the book. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, thank you so much for listening today. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back with a new episode next week, and until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

The post What Amazon’s Perplexity Lawsuit Means for the Future of AI and Marketing (Episode 476) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

I am incredibly fortunate to do get to do what I do. I’m even more fortunate that I’m surrounded by amazing people every single day. And I’m tremendously thankful for all of those.

In honor of Thanksgiving here in the US, I thought it made sense to share what I’m most thankful for this year. I also thought it was worthwhile to share how those might be useful to you too.

Curious about the five things I’m most thankful for this year? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Here are the show notes for you.

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.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify 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 into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 16m 53s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter.

What are you thankful for? As anyone who has listened to the show for a while, know Thanksgiving, which is this week in the United States, is my favorite holiday. It gives me time to reflect on what matters in my life. I just think it’s an amazing opportunity each year to take a moment for gratitude.

So I thought I’d share with you the things that I am most thankful for, the things that matter the most in my life over the last year.

But to make it useful to you, I thought I’d also share some tips on how you might think about where those items can help you in your life.

So if you don’t mind me skipping a ton of setup this time around, I’m gonna dive right in. This is episode 475 of the Big Show, and these are the five things I’m thankful for this year. Here we go.

For starters, I’m not going to break this list into work items and personal items that just feels like cheating to me. My work is a huge part of who I am. It matters so much to me, so I don’t want to give it short shift. I believe less in work life balance — though that’s important — and more in work life integration. How do you make work and life work together properly so you don’t get too burned out, but you’re also keeping yourself fresh and sharp? Right.

So with that said, let’s start with number five on the list, which is new social media experiences.

Social has been changing a lot over the last several years, and it’s changing the way I think about social media now. Not everything I’m about to tell you are new items or new ways to use social. They’re also really critical to how I do my work and how I live my life.

I don’t really go on Facebook very much anymore, and Instagram has never really been my jam. I was always a Twitter guy, at least until Elon destroyed it. What I loved about Twitter more than anything else was its lists feature, which allowed me to curate the content and insights I most wanted to see from the people I most wanted to spend my time with.

A lot of what I’ve been focused on this year is how to recreate that experience and the benefits both personal and professional, that I gained from my lists in other places. Turns out I’ve been able to do that to some degree.

The places where I’m spending my time on social these days include:

And that brings me to number four on the list of things I’m thankful for, which is how easy digital makes it to create an environment of continuous learning. And I’m gonna spend some time on this one. As marketers, our world is changing rapidly. It can be overwhelming to try and keep up with all of those changes.

I’ve talked about this before in other podcast episodes, and yes, they’re all linked to in the show notes. The toughest thing that I find is where you should learn from the, the issue isn’t content. We’re drowning in that it’s curriculum. It’s what is it that I need to know? One of the reasons I teach at Rutgers Business School is because they actually define a curricula.

You absolutely can do this too. What I would suggest is that you start with the smartest people you know, the sharpest the most up to date. Take note of who they cite, what they’re reading. Uh, their LinkedIn feeds will often give you this information. They’ll tell you about, “I just read this great book, or I just was on this fantastic podcast or learned from this specific thing.”

You can even search for their name by adding the terms “book recommendations” or “top five books” to see other sources that inspired them. And check their websites to see if they’ve shared slides from talks they’ve given her or conference keynotes. The structures of those presentations often offers an amazing curriculum of things you can learn.

If they have a blog or a podcast, go back and look at some of their earliest content. Usually the first, oh, 10 or 20 posts or so can show you where their focus lies, what genuinely matters to them.

You can also do this in a more robust way. You can identify five to seven key concepts that really matter in whatever topic you wanna know about. You know, in marketing, these might include:

For each of the concepts that you discover, find the best single explanation you can find from three different respected experts. You know, use a Google search for this. Don’t just go to AI for this, and I’m going explain why in a minute. Keep track of what you’re finding. Use a spreadsheet or use a tool to map the different ideas into categories like foundation, application and critique to help you sort out the information and stay up to date.

If you do this regularly and repeatedly, this will help you build a dynamic curriculum from a variety of perspectives that ensures you’re not just learning what someone knows, but how their knowledge is constructed, how it’s applied, how it’s evolving.

I said I’d come back to AI in a moment. You can absolutely use tools such as ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Claude, or Perplexity to help build some of the curriculum and direct you to useful resources.

But — and I cannot emphasize this enough — do not use AI to tell you the answers. Don’t do it.

Research shows that for the things you really want to learn, it’s far more important that you do the work yourself. As Shiri Melumad wrote on The Conversation, they did research on this, and as Shiri Melumad wrote about this research,

“The data revealed a consistent pattern. People who learned about a topic through a large language model versus web search felt that they learned less, invested, less effort in subsequently writing their advice, and ultimately wrote advice that was shorter, less factual, and more generic.”

The quote continues,

“In turn, when this advice was presented to an independent sample of readers who were unaware of which tool had been used to learn about the topic, they found the advice to be less informative, less helpful, and they were less likely to adopt it.”

When the learner used a LLM, critically, the researchers quote “found these differences to be robust across a variety of contexts.”

Now I’m bullish on the ways AI can help you learn. The key language here though, is “help you” not “tell you.”

Imagine if you owned a robot and asked it to lift weights or do aerobic exercises for you. I mean, sure, it could absolutely pick up heavier loads and it can exercise faster and longer. But your muscles wouldn’t improve at all. Quite the opposite. You would atrophy, your muscles would shrink. The same is true for your brain. If you are not doing the work yourself, you’re not learning.

One of my favorite ways to do the work, by the way, to do the learning is number three on my countdown, and that is travel.

I learn more while traveling than almost anything else I do. Why? For starters, travel exposes me to new places. I do my best to learn a little bit about the history or something cool about everywhere I go, either by reading about it a little bit or by asking folks I run into along the way. That second point is the key one for me and why it matters from a marketing perspective.

Quite simply, whenever I’m traveling, I’m talking with people throughout the journey. Those include the people I’m traveling to see, obviously.

I also usually have a chance to talk at least for a couple of minutes with Lyft drivers or hotel staff or waitstaff at restaurants, and occasionally, not too often these days, but occasionally random folks on planes or in airports.

I want to be clear, I’m super respectful when people are reading or wearing headphones or doing their very best to avoid eye contact with some person on a plane, right? Nobody wants to be that guy who kept trying to start a conversation and wouldn’t take the hint.

I also try to keep myself aware of the people around me, and I’m absolutely happy to have a brief conversation if somebody engages and the opportunity arises.

Our job as marketers is to make our customers lives better, and we can’t do that if we don’t understand people. So we need to make at least a little effort to talk to people from time to time in the wild, in the real world, not just in some controlled focus group or using, say, synthetic audiences on artificial intelligence. Those have their place too.

So much comes from just talking to people when the opportunity presents itself.

Speaking of people. People represent both the number two and number one items on my thankful list this year, and frankly most years.

At number two, are my clients and my team. Obviously, I love these folks.

I’m super thankful, as you might imagine, for the financial success that comes from having a robust client roster and from having a team that helps me keep those clients happy.

That’s not the part I like most though, weirdly. Instead, it’s that my clients give me the opportunity to do interesting work. They, that work helps me learn and grow. Sensing a theme here”

Even more important than the learning are the people themselves. There is nothing more fulfilling than seeing the work that I do and that the team does help our clients succeed, help them learn and grow, help their businesses grow. It is deeply, deeply gratifying and it’s the main reason that I love the work that I do.

I am so lucky to get to do this work, and my clients and my team are the reason that is.

Number one on my thankful list, and I kind of have to separate this out, are my friends and family. To be fair, many clients and many folks on my team are part of my group of friends and family. I’m thrilled that some clients of mine are some of my best friends too.

I could spend hours talking about how lucky I am to be surrounded by the people in my life. In the interest of your time, I’m not gonna do that today. It’s probably not why you listen to the show. I just want to say that I’m so deeply grateful for the people in my life and what they bring to me every day in terms of lifting me up and carrying me.

What I am going to do is encourage you to take a minute after you listen to this episode and let the people that matter to you know how much they mean to you. Believe me, what I say, someday you’ll be glad you did.

There is one last item on my gratitude list. That is that I’m so thankful for your support.

I’ve said many times that I wouldn’t do this show or send out the newsletter or have written my book if it wasn’t for you. So thank you so much for all of your support this year and every year. It means the world to me.

I’m going to wrap up this show quickly this week simply by reminding you that you can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s tim peter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 475. And take a minute to like share and subscribe to on wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

I’ll be back next week with an all new episode of the podcast for you, but as I said many times throughout this show, thank you so much for listening.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to share with you. Until next time, please be well Be safe and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

The post The Five Things I’m Thankful For This Year (Episode 475) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

I’ve been talking about the idea of “the brand is the prompt” for a while now. But I think now would be helpful to dive into what that means in a lot more detail. Why? Because too many folks seem to think that AI agents and answer engines will always come between you and your customer.

I don’t believe that has to be true.

I’ve studied how we can build brands beyond Big Tech for over 20 years. That’s the core of what Digital Reset is all about. And while AI is different, I believe that the only way that AI will always get between us and our customers is if we let it.

So, what does “the brand is the prompt” really mean for your business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Here are the show notes for you.

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.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify 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 into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 20m 10s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Welcome back to the show. I’ve been talking a fair bit about this idea that the brand is the prompt as part of your company’s digital reset. Today, I want to go deeper on what this means and why it’s absolutely critical for the future of your brand and your business. I am completely serious. See this face? See my face? This is my serious face. My friend, Mark Schaefer gave an unbelievable stat on LinkedIn the other day that I think everyone should know. Here’s what he said in full: "Amazon has limited the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day."

Three books per day. I’m an author. I wrote a book. Imagine how tough it is for my book to be seen when a single “AI author” — and I’m using that term loosely — focused on my topic can “create” — again, LOOSELY — then upload roughly 1,100 books per year. And that’s only one person. If a thousand people do this, that’s essentially 1.1 million books every single year. Now…

This isn’t about books only. Extrapolate that to every piece of content that you create for your brand:

And imagine that individuals and organizations that might compete with you could use AI to churn out three versions or more of those every day.

And that’s just the good actors, the good guys. Imagine the bad guys. Your marketing, as you know it, at least in theory, is doomed.

Or is it? I don’t think so. And I believe that the brand is the prompt will save you.

That’s why I think it’s time to look more deeply into the brand is the prompt and what it really means for your digital reset, your brand and ultimately your business.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 474 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

AI slop is here today. exists. Mark Schaefer’s story about Amazon limiting the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day illustrates the point perfectly. Almost all of those books are, to use a technical term, crap. They’re just absolute garbage. But they’re garbage that every decent quality book has to compete against just to be seen. So you’d think that’d be the doom, that’d be the end of books, right?

If you look at Amazon’s best-selling book list, though, you won’t see a whole lot of AI slop. You’ll see well-known, well-regarded books by authors we’ve all come to know and trust. Hmm. That sounds important, don’t you think? These are authors who’ve built reputations good enough that their readers ask for them by name.

Cool. Keep that in mind.

Now let’s shift this discussion to AI answer engines and agents. We know that technology shapes customer behavior. Customers are starting to use AI agents and AI answer engines differently than the way they’ve traditionally used search engines. They’re having more robust, more detailed, more personal, more intimate conversations than simply a search query.

As a result, lots of folks are focused on teaching you how to show up when your potential customers have these conversations with their favorite AI tool. And that’s a good thing, by the way. Sometimes I’m one of those folks. You should 100% do the work to show up in those contexts. No two ways about it. What’s also true, though, is that we need to flip this idea on its head. Because customer behavior also shapes the technology.

For instance, tech that doesn’t meet customer expectations doesn’t get adopted ever. History is littered with great technology that failed in the marketplace because it didn’t meet its customers’ needs.

Supposedly, Betamax was a better videotape format than VHS, which won in the marketplace. AOL got everyone on the internet and then promptly vanished. Blackberry was a smartphone before anyone called them that. MySpace was social media before Facebook came along. Google Glass was smart glasses before Ray-Ban’s Meta AI glasses. And, you we’re gonna have to see if those will stick around.

But you see the point. We know the ideas work because most of those technology concepts still exist. We still have video, we still have the internet, we still have smartphones, we still have social media—for better or worse—and we’re seeing an increasing number of smart wearable devices in day-to-day lives. Even if the Ray-Ban Meta partnership ultimately isn’t the winner, I strongly suspect that the format is going to live on and probably for a long time to come.

The technologies, the tools that live on are the ones we know by name. YouTube, Verizon, and AT&T, iPhone and Android and Samsung, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. These brands are the brands we know and trust—or okay, more or less trust—to help us meet our needs.

You may not know this, but were you aware that one of the top searches on Google is YouTube? Another is Facebook. Another is Amazon. Customers aren’t just going to those websites, they’re "searching" by typing in a name they already know. They’re not asking, "Where should I look for video? Where should I look for my social network?" They’re telling Google, "Take me to the place I already know." These services have built reputations that are good enough that their users, their customers, ask for them by name.

Again, that’s the key lesson. I’m convinced that AI is going to work, will work the same way because humans have needs.

We talk about agents getting between our businesses and our customers as though it’s inevitable. Bullshit. I don’t believe it’s inevitable. I believe it’s only inevitable if we let it happen. Instead, we have to make sure that our customers know and care about us enough to ask for us by name. There’s this belief that the tools will provide the perfect, true, one and only answer that meets customer needs every time.

How exactly do you think that’s going to happen?

I said a couple of minutes ago that customer behavior also shapes the technology. That happens first. I’m convinced that will happen here.

An AI answer engine or agent cannot give you the perfect, true, one and only answer until it knows what’s perfect and true for your customer. The AI is going to have to learn.

Sometimes it will learn by inference. It will watch customer behaviors, for instance, in an AI-powered browser like Atlas, Comet, or Chrome, and it will figure out what your customer likes best. Sometimes its learning will be explicit. It will ask, "do you like option A or do you like option B?"

But until it learns, it can’t possibly recommend the perfect, true, one and only answer. Our job is to get our customers to teach their AI tools that our brands are the ones that they want. And the time to do that is right now before our customers teach AIs to recommend someone else.

It’s easy when we do this to focus on what our business needs first. That’s why we’re putting so much attention into things like GEO. And we should do that. We also have to pay attention, we must pay attention to what our customers need and find the intersections between their needs and our own.

The Venn diagram of those two needs will never be a perfect circle. For starters, customers will almost always want to pay less than you want to charge. The point remains that the more you can make that Venn diagram overlap, the better a chance you have of getting customers to ask for you by name.

I’m going to give you an example from the hospitality industry where I’ve done lots of work over the years. The first time guests travel somewhere new, they choose hotels for a combination of four reasons:

Those four attributes—price, proximity, quality, qualities—make up our P’s&Q’s model. We’ve used this for years.

There is a fifth attribute that I don’t talk about as much, which is brand. Brand absolutely plays a key role in many cases, and especially for the next time a guest chooses a hotel in the same city or town, or the same brand in a different city or town. A well-known, well-regarded brand provides an easy short-cut to understand the P’s&Q’s that matter to me as a traveler. Guests say "I really liked the Four Seasons when I stayed in Orlando. I’ll probably like the one in Chicago, too." That’s the reason why so many of the hotels in the U.S. carry a well-known, franchised brand like Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt or Wyndham or whomever. It makes it easy for someone who wants to open a hotel to tell guests whether or not the hotel is any good without them having to do a whole bunch of other work first.

In any case, hotels build brand equity first by being a good fit for their guests, P’s&Q’s. The best hotels then reinforce that by offering amazing, memorable experiences. As you’ve heard me say, customer experience is queen. That’s kind of where that came from.

Many hotels also offer loyalty or reward points to keep you coming back. And those are particularly important when your experience isn’t as distinct, it isn’t as differentiated. If I can’t make you remember the place, I can at least remind you that you’ll get paid for staying with me. The point is that great experiences that guests remember help guests remember the hotel and ask for it by name the next time they’re heading to that town.

Other businesses and other industries have their own versions of the P’s&Q’s. They’re not going to be exactly the same. But, know, Jeff Bezos famously built Amazon by always providing "broad selection, fast shipping, and low prices." Walmart did something similar in the days before e-commerce without having to worry about the fast shipping part. Nordstrom’s famously focused on remarkable customer service for every single shopper, every single time. FedEx was built on fast delivery. Apple focused all their energies on what they called "insanely great products." Google provided the best search results. And Facebook originally was the one place where all your friends and family were online. You see the same pattern again and again.

And if you notice, these are all brands that we know and love. Well, okay… brands we know.

Besides that, what do these brands all have in common? Well, they’re all different; you have to be different. They all have values and you have to have values, authentic values. To be fair, most companies, most people aren’t that authentic. They’re presenting "processed cheese authenticity," a version of themselves designed for mass public consumption. Unless folks and brands are willing to stand apart and take the risks associated with that stance, they’re going to drown in the flood of AI slop.

These brands that we know don’t just meet the P’s&Q’s. They’re great at something. Customer experience, product quality, executing flawlessly every time. They’re memorable. They’re different. They stand apart from their competitors. They’re authentically who they are.

My friend, Mark Schaefer, calls this practice of standing apart this way, being audacious. He talked about this in his book Audacious. The title alone models the behavior. He could have called the book "Different." He could have called it "Distinct." He could have called it "Authentic." Because you do need to be different, distinct, and authentic.

But Audacious? That’s literally putting it out there. That is drawing a line in the sand and saying this is what matters.

By the way doing this strategy isn’t just coming from me. Google has said, Danny Sullivan at Google has said, "are you doing the things that are useful for human beings? That’s what we want to reward." Perplexity is, and this is a quote, "advising marketers that AI search will shift budgets toward old fashioned brand marketing."

Focus on your customers. Build a brand that customers love. How about that?

I don’t think people like Mark have to worry about getting lost behind AI slop. I don’t think the great hotels I work with do either. I don’t think Nordstrom’s or Apple or BMW or Fender or a host of amazing brands have that concern. They know that their customers will ask for them by name.

Their brands are the prompt.

And that’s really the key. That’s what you have to do.

Pick one area to be great at:

Then focus your content and your customer experience on reinforcing that point every chance you get. Ask your customers to connect with you directly through your email, your CRM, what have you, so you can talk directly with them and bypass AI and bypass Big Tech overall. That’s how you teach customers to ask for you by name. That’s how you get them to teach their AI agents that you’re the one they want. That’s what "the brand is the prompt" means. And that’s why it’s so critical for your digital reset, your brand and your business long term.

It’s not just "the brand is the prompt." It’s "your brand is the prompt." When your customers do that, it won’t matter whether they use traditional search, AI, or whatever comes next, because they’ll always end up coming to you.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you 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 and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 474, and an archive of all of our past episodes.by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something to read about this topic in more detail, I’d love to suggest my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, that you can find on Amazon.com or Bookshop.org. Please pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, I just want to say thanks so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

We’ve seen a lot of work around agentic AI in the last handful of weeks and months, with Google adding agentic AI to Chrome and in its Search Labs; ChatGPT offering its Atlas browser that offers agentic capabilities, and Perplexity doing the same with its Comet browser. This last one seems to be ruffling some feathers, as Amazon has “demanded” that Perplexity stop using its agents to buy stuff on Amazon.

Part of me wants to say, “Boo-hoo, Amazon. Not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot, is it?”

BUT…

Amazon has invested lots of money and effort into creating content and crafting experiences only to have Perplexity come along and scoop it all up. While it’s tough to feel bad for any Big Tech gatekeeper, at least in this case, Amazon’s got a point.

That point is even more relevant for your business, your brand, and your content. What happens to you? Will agents replace the content you’ve worked so hard to create and curate, giving customers answers to their questions? In short, will agentic AI kill your content marketing?

I’m skeptical. In fact, I believe our job now is to actively work and make sure that agentic AI doesn’t kill your content marketing.

Why? What’s so important about maintaining a coherent, capable content marketing strategy in an AI-dominated landscape? How can you make sure you content continues to work for your brand and business? Ultimately, how can you make sure that agentic AI doesn’t kill your content marketing?

That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

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.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify 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 into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 19m 09s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

I saw a funny story a few days back about how Amazon wants Perplexity’s agents to stop making purchases on Amazon’s channels. Why does Amazon hate what Perplexity is doing? Three reasons:

Content. Customer experience. Data. Those are the three legs of the stool necessary to build a brand through digital, as I’ve talked about in my book Digital Reset — and just about everywhere else for the last 10-plus years. And Perplexity is kicking all three of those legs out from under Amazon’s seat as the king of e-commerce.

Huh. Kinda sucks when gatekeepers get between you and your customers, doesn’t it, Amazon?

Normally, I’d say, “Let them fight. Let the best content and experience win.” Except, in this case, Amazon’s got a point. They’re terrified that they’ll be stuck on the wrong side of an intermediary and lose their connection to customers. Few companies know better than Amazon how destructive this can be to businesses and brands. For years, in fact, having this done to your business was called “getting Amazon’d.”

The point though remains. Connecting with your customers — especially in the age of AI — has never been more important. And it’s my view that the first, best way to build that connection is through great, distinct, engaging content. However, the age of AI also changes how we create, curate, and circulate our content.

That’s why now is a great time to revisit this episode of the podcast that asked, “Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing?” Spoiler alert: Only if you let it. The rest of the episode will tell you how to keep that from happening. And it’s coming at you right now.

Something that is universally true is that agents need content. I’m going to assume for reasons that I’m going to get into a little bit later in the show that agents will want the best content that they can get their hands — or little AI agent brains — on every single time.

Sure, they can make up their own content using generative AI to create answers that probably make sense. They can also source it from social media, from user generated content.

Generative AI and social sites or UGC are 100%, absolutely potential sources. In fact, I think they’re more than potential sources. They are likely to be actual sources some of the time.

The challenge for your brand and for your business is that you don’t control either of those.

But that’s okay because there’s another issue and that’s the challenge these sources represent to agents. The challenge for the agents is that each of those other sources have some inherent trust issues. And I don’t think that’s a small challenge. I think that’s a pretty big problem.

Is the content that they find or create accurate? Is the content true? Does it have biases?

Yes, content on your website will also have a bias, but that’s a known bias. The answer engine can take those biases for granted and attempt to adjust its expectations for them. Unknown biases, the type that might sneak into GenAI content or on social media sites? Those are a lot tougher to figure out.

Was the content on the UGC site written by an experienced customer? Or was it written by a competitor or maybe a former employee with an axe to grind?

Figuring out whether or not those content sources meet the standards that they have to set for quality content is really challenging. And I’m going to come back to this in just a moment, so hang tight.

I expect that the content they’ll rely on will be a combination of sources. It’ll be your content, what you say about your products, your services, and your solutions to customer problems. It will also be UGC, user generated content that validates what you say. And some of it might be generative AI when that adds to the overall content experience for the person who’s actually interacting with the answer engine.

Next, agents will need a place to go to find that content. That could be your brand’s social presence. Sure, absolutely.

It also raises the issue for you that social sites might preference somebody else’s brand, somebody else’s content over yours for any number of reasons. Could be commercial reasons, could be quality reasons, could be they just like them better. Who’s to say? You just don’t have the control then.

Social sites like that also raise the issue of whether or not the page where the answer engine finds the content: if it’s genuine or not; if it’s a genuine and trusted source of content about your brand, your products, your services. Again, is that content accurate? Is it true? Is it free of unknown biases?

That’s the problem with content on sites other than those that belong to brands. That’s been true for a while. Instead, it’s better for the answer engines if they find the content they need on a trusted source, something like, oh, I don’t know… a website? Then they can also use user generated content to test the brand’s contents claims against.

So while you’ll undoubtedly use social media and other resources to put your content in front of both customers and AI answer engines, you also will always need a place where your content can always be found.

Always.

I’m going to say that again. Always.

In short, you’ll still need a website.

I do think it’s incredibly likely — in fact, it’s almost certain — that the definition of a website will change. You’ll probably use more structured data, or tools like a model context protocol server (MCP), to make your structured data more accessible to AI answer engines. Your web pages — your entire website — also might be more dynamic, exposing only content that’s most relevant in the moment to the actual human beings who visit your site.

None of those factors though mean that your website goes away. It simply evolves.

If you think that my point about websites evolving is wishful thinking, we actually have a real world case that followed this exact model. We’ve seen this movie before. Google and other traditional search engines have given more weight to brands and trusted domains in their algorithms in recent years to prevent spammers and scammers from taking over their search results. Those algorithms increasingly favor large, well-known brands as trusted sources of information.

That’s why larger sites have been winning in search more often and why smaller sites have had a harder time cutting through. Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines have specific sections advising their quality raters to evaluate the reputation of the website, not just the page, placing particular emphasis on validating that other sites also speak well of the business or the website. They want to be sure that they’re getting information and that they’re learning from the most trustworthy sources in every case.

Similarly, Google’s ongoing focus on EEAT — that’s experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness — reflect Google’s desire for truly trustworthy content, content that they can believe in.

Remember, they only added experience recently. It used to just be EAT: “expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.” But it’s not enough for them that content was created by people with quote-unquote “expertise.” They also wanted folks with, and I quote from their guidelines, “necessary firsthand or life experience for the topic.” Google wanted to be sure that the people who were talking about this topic literally knew what they were talking about and had hands on experience.

If you ask me, it looks like the LLMs haven’t figured out the importance of that work yet. They really haven’t dived into that enough yet. I’m convinced that they will.

I spoke about this in our last episode and I’m going to continue speaking about this until I see evidence that suggests it’s no longer necessary.

But LLMs have a lot of trust factors to deal with, including a big one right now. They’ve already got hallucinations. If you’re not familiar with why hallucinations are a big deal, I’ll point you to research in the show notes that explains why hallucinations might be an inherent and permanent feature of the way generative AI works. Hallucinations almost certainly are not going away anytime soon.

Add in the fact that scammers and spammers are trying to get their content into large language models, into AI answer engines, and you’ve got a recipe for really bad answers being presented to customers regularly.

Longer term, I’m confident that this is an issue that LLM companies must address. AI answer engines have to get this right. If customers find that they can’t trust the answers they’re getting from, for instance, ChatGPT or Perplexity, it’s easy enough for them to switch to someone else. After all, isn’t that the very situation Google faces right now? Isn’t that why people assume that they’re under threat, that customers are looking for better answers?

Customers ultimately get to decide who wins as their go-to experience for the answers that they need. Period. Only services that give them the answers they need are in a position to succeed.

Your job is to make sure that you appear there, and that ultimately depends on your content.

Finally, I genuinely believe with all of my heart that we are foolish to give up our websites without a fight, to give up ownership of our content and the customer experience without a fight. The open web has been one of the most critical resources helping businesses — new and old, small and large — attract and acquire customers effectively, efficiently, and affordably.

The open web is under greater threat than it’s been at any time in its 35 year history. These threats aren’t just from AI answer engines. They’re also from entities and enterprises that want to put themselves between people and the content that those people can see. That’s an enormous problem.

I’ve talked about how gatekeeper is going to gate here on the podcast, on my blog, and in my book for years. Well, “gatekeepers gonna gate” isn’t always solely about business or economics. And it’s something that we need to be really conscious about and do our best to prevent from making go away.

So the question becomes what can you do to keep your business front and center for your customers as AI agents emerge? I’m not suggesting that we’re not going to have AI agents. They’re real, they’re coming, and they’re going to be important.

But there are things you can do to ensure that you remain relevant and remain front and center with your customers as they become more everyday experiences for people.

The first of these is to own your content hub. Keep your website and your CRM as the single source of truth for your brand. Think of it as your control center for both customers and AI agents. The one place they can always go to, the hub. You’ve heard me say it before, content is, was, and always shall be king. Make sure the king has a place it always lives.

Next, begin to structure your content for AI. Make sure you’re connecting your data with artificial intelligence in appropriate ways. Invest in cleaning up structured data, invest in adding website schema, or begin testing emerging tools like MCP servers so agents can easily understand, find, and surface your content to customers.

Next, leverage social proofs. I’m reasonably confident, I’ve said this a couple times in this episode, that AI will look for external confirmation of your content’s claims. Actively encourage and curate user-generated content that validates those claims. And make sure you’re continuing to improve customer experience so that your customers want to tell a great story about your brand and business on social media, that they want to participate in the creation and curation of a positive brand story for your business. Again, customer experience is queen.

Finally, evolve, don’t retreat. Agentic AI is not the end of content marketing. It’s a shift in content distribution. That’s how you want to think about it.

Brands that adapt the fastest and the most effectively are going to win more trust. They’re going to win more reach. They’re going to win more customers. And ultimately, they’re going to win more revenue.

It’s absolutely in your best interest to create content that continues to answer customer questions. It is also absolutely in your best interest to have single repository, a single hub that you own and control where your content can always be found. Anything else ensures that the gatekeepers will always win. It’s surrendering your brand and your business without a fight.

So maybe let’s not do that.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you 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 and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 470, and an archive of all of our past episodes.by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something to read about this topic in more detail, I’d love to suggest my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, that you can find on Amazon.com or Bookshop.org. Please pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, I just want to say thanks so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Revisiting Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Podcast) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

With customers increasingly turning towards AI to get the answers they need for their business, you might be rethinking the value your website provides to those customers — and to your business. It’s absolutely worthwhile to ask the question. The answer, though, might surprise you.

In this episode of the podcast, Tim Peter looks at whether you still need a website in the age of AI, what its value is to your customers and your business, and, most importantly, how to make sure your website works for both in the longer term.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

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.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify 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 into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 25m 06s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Earlier this week, I spent time with a bunch of super smart folks, including chief digital officers and marketing professionals, having a spirited and healthy debate about the future of websites in the age of AI. Do we still want to invest in our websites the way we have? Hell, if customers are going to spend the bulk of their time interacting with AI answer engines and agents, do we even want to invest in our websites at all?

The big question I came away with is this. Is it time to rethink your website?

The answer is a resounding yes, but not in the way that you think.

In this episode of the podcast, I’m going to look at the current state and future of your website and talk about how you need to rethink your website in the age of AI.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 473 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

Okay, so this probably isn’t news to you, but we are experiencing a generational shift in customer behavior, much like we did with the web and mobile and social media. Moving too slowly when we think about how AI will impact our customers’ experiences with our brands online, obviously can put you in a terrible position, and could create all kinds of problems for you down the road. Moving too fast, on the other hand, can waste resources and budget. You could simply be there before your customers are ready.

Here’s the reality of AI: Customer adoption of artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly, sometimes even without the customers realizing it. If you think about Google Search or Google Ads, customers are experiencing AI all the time. Obviously, AI Overviews offers a similar reality. Those AI responses just appear and give folks the answer they’re looking for. The point is that the number of customers who are using AI is only going to increase whether they know it or not.

Now, when I think about that, obviously that creates the question of do we need a website? Do we need our website to do what it’s historically done if customers are already getting the answer?

The first point is that I don’t think this is an "either/or" situation. I think this is a "both/and" situation. You can’t choose between an AI strategy OR a website strategy. You have to have an "AI and website" strategy. That means you’re going to have to fund both. You’re going to have to pay for both. The real question is, or the key to it really, is how you allocate that funding.

Now, before I get into why your website will need this continued funding and the role that it plays in this integrated "AI + web" strategy, I want to talk a bit about the reasons against doing too much with your website. I’m not necessarily arguing for these. I am saying that we need to think about them.

So, what are the cons of funding a website in the age of AI?

The first that we must think about is, as you’ve heard me say for years, that your focus should be on "the painting, not the frame." That is, your focus should be on your content ("the painting") more so than the container that content sits in ("the frame"). And if customers can get to your content, whether it’s on your website or it’s through an AI agent or an AI answer engine, then who cares where it sits? Does it matter? That’s an important question and I think it does matter, but for reasons that I want to kind of hold off for a second.

The second problem is that most websites are fairly generic and don’t do as much as we might like them to to differentiate our brand. The reality is websites kind of have to be generic if they’re going to offer a quality user experience. Customers spend most of their time on websites that aren’t yours. So if they come to your website and it doesn’t work like all the other websites in the world, they’re likely going to leave because they can’t figure out how to use it or they can’t find the content and the information that matters to them. Customers are already used to what a website looks like and works like.

So by definition, having a good website means that you have one that kind of is commoditized, kind of looks and acts like all the other websites in the world. So that’s another argument against doing a lot of funding for your website, right?

The last, of course, is that gatekeepers need new roads, as I think of it. You know, we know that Google is the primary gatekeeper of content on the web. We know that Facebook is the primary gatekeeper of social information, whether it’s on the original Facebook platform, whether it’s on Instagram, things like that. They kind of own that space. And we know places like TikTok and YouTube are the people who own the video space.

But new gatekeepers like AI platforms, whether that’s Google Gemini, whether that’s ChatGPT, whether that’s Perplexity or Claude, or something we haven’t seen yet, they need to control this pipeline. They need to control the road so that they can install their own gates. We know this is coming.

This is nothing new. I’ve been talking about this for a little bit and I’ll link to some of these in the show notes. But there’s a reason why ChatGPT has introduced its own browser, Atlas. There’s a reason why Perplexity has introduced its own web browser, Comet. They want to be the place customers start.

One of the big questions I have is over time, AI going to be more like the internet, the platform on which everything sits, or is it going to be more like an app or more like a search engine where people go on the web? And I don’t know the answer to this one yet, but I know they’re acting a little bit more like they’re the search engine. They’re the place you start and they’re the gatekeeper who gets between your customer and your business.

We’re going to have to see how this plays out, but if you build your business on an AI platform and they turn out to be more like a search engine than the internet, if they’re not just a place where lots of businesses can show up, then they become the next gatekeeper and that’s a real struggle for you.

And that leads to one of the reasons why we need to think about your website as this enduring, non-negotiable place where your content will always live. Yes, it’s no longer the primary discovery channel, but it is a foundational asset and a point of control for your brand.

Ignoring the direct web channel is a fatally flawed approach long term. I’m going to say that one more time because that’s really important. Ignoring the direct web channel is a fatally flawed approach over the long term. Your website is, has to, remain the singular authoritative source of content, not just for people, but also for AI agents and AI answer engines.

AI agents need reliable content to cite if they’re going to maintain their own credibility. AI answer engines need to point to authoritative sources. If they’re going to maintain their own credibility, we are already seeing ChatGPT talk about a model similar to Google’s E-E-A-T—that is experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness—for determining what content to cite. That should be you. That should be your website. And some customers are going to come to you, probably some of the time. for a long time to come, right? We’ve got a long way to go before we see mass adoption of these tools. Then we need to make sure that when they come to our sites, we’re actually engaging them effectively in the longer term.

The second thing we need to remember is you don’t ever want to build your brand exclusively on rented land. If we’re simply trading an AI answer engine or an AI agent interface that we don’t control as a replacement for a social media app or Google, we’re simply giving away our brand. We’re letting the gatekeeper determine who wins in the long run.

Your website is the only way and the only place where you get to own the relationship and potentially put content and experiences outside the reach of a gatekeeper’s gate. The other thing that this is gonna matter here, we’re gonna talk about this in a second, is there a great way for you to get first party, real, interesting and useful data about your customers. We’re going to come back to that in a moment.

The third thing and I’m going to admit this one’s a little more philosophical than business. So you know feel free to go okay "I hear you but…”, but the open web is one of the greatest inventions that we have had for humanity and for businesses in, certainly in my lifetime. It is the place where customers can always go and go directly to the source. It is the place where you can put a message out and reach people without a gatekeeper necessarily getting between you and your intended audience. And if you look at what’s happening right now,

Lots of folks are trying to find ways to put those gates between you and the people you want to talk to. If we hand over that control to any AI without holding onto some component of it for ourselves, we’re basically conceding the point. The open web dies forever. And it’d be really, really, really hard—incredibly hard—to bring it back. So I wouldn’t necessarily concede that point too soon.

The last point about this is you’ve heard me say many times that the brand is the prompt. We want to invest in the equity of our brands. Our brands are the ultimate firewall against commoditization. They’re the key to surviving the shift to AI answer engines. It’s not just that the customer asks for a business like yours. They have to ask for you by name. It doesn’t matter if customers come to your website or not if they don’t ask for you by name because you may not show up in the consideration set. If they’re asking for you by name, you’ve got a chance to win regardless of where they do this.

You may have heard me say this before, but brand isn’t everything any longer. It’s the only thing. It has to be our core focus.

To that end, we need to start thinking about how we pay attention to customers’ interactions with our brand more than just their interaction with our website or their interaction with AI. It’s are they talking about us? And so there’s a couple of conversion rates I would think about.

One of these is something we refer to as prompt brand equity. It’s not just regular brand equity, but it’s brand equity within the context of an AI prompt. Are their prompts triggering brand mentions? Are customers actually asking for you by name? We need to start tracking how often your brand is cited by AI answers, both for branded discussions and also for non-branded high intent queries.

Do you have any contextual influence here? The frequency and context with which your brand is cited, sourced or mentioned within an AI generated answer is incredibly impactful for your business. Prompt brand equity helps you measure how often the AI deems your brand a relevant answer for a given customer need, a relevant point of interest for a customer need, and it helps obviously build equity in your brand with those customers going forward.

The cool thing is there’s a bunch of tools you can use right now to measure this. Tools like:

And there’s more coming.

Another great conversion point we need to think about is our data acquisition rate among first party data. Think about when people come to your website, when people engage with your brand, are they converting into emails or signups on your site? Are we gaining ownership of that data? Are they opting in to receive your email or SMS or direct mail marketing messages? Are they willing to provide you the personal information that allows you to continue that dialogue? We should be tracking that first party data acquisition rate today, because it really matters.

And then the last, and this one goes back to more traditional marketing, but is unaided brand recall. Are customers bypassing what the artificial intelligence tools are telling them and simply going straight to the brand name? Do they know you and do they ask for you by name? Or do they know enough to think to ask for you by name?

Now obviously, we can’t do that if we don’t give customers a reason to come to our sites and if we don’t give AI tools a reason to reference us in the first place. And so we have to think about the types of content that help us stand apart in this new universe.

We’ve got to invest in proprietary data, unique research or branded tools that the AI can’t easily pull into a generic answer. You kind of want to force the AI tool to link to you or credit you directly. Think about creating content as unique, proprietary intellectual property. This could be research. This could be named frameworks. This could be a unique data set that only you possess, and only you can share, that helps protect against more generic artificial intelligence generated answers. Think in terms of naming these items if you can. You want to build this distinct brand platform and a distinct brand portfolio of assets that potential customers associate with you and ask for by name.

I realize these all sound like good ideas and everything, but how do you action this? And I’m going to be honest, this is something that is a work in progress, but I think there is a fairly easy budget breakdown we want to talk about. And I think of it as a 70-30-10 approach.

Focus first on foundational investment. 30 % of your budget really needs to help make your content accessible and discoverable by the new AI platforms. Whether this is through GEO or AEO or AIO, whatever you want to call it, it has to be a big part of what you’re doing right now. So some percentage of your web budget, probably about 30%, needs to be focused on how do we do this better right now. You’ve got to invest in structured data.

We’re thinking in terms of structured data and making our content readable by machines in a way that they can access. It’s something that’s incredibly important to ensuring you show up in the first place and you need to work with your web development partners or use tools that provide these capabilities, make it easier for you to get your name out there in the first place.

One of the things that we know about GEO and AEO and AIO and all of those at the moment is that we can’t even decide on the name yet. It’s still a fairly immature space. That’s why I wouldn’t go much bigger than about 30% of your time or budget on this because this could shift really heavily. Don’t go all in. Don’t, in the words of one of these really smart people I talked to this week, don’t over-index in either direction yet, certainly not yet on AI answer engines. But make sure you’re allocating a meaningful chunk of your time, 30%, to showing up in those places.

70% needs to be focused on your website’s new capabilities. When we talk about, you’ve heard me talk about the hub and the spoke model many times. The hub are the things you control and the spokes are the places where your content can show up outside your website.

Well, the hub isn’t just your website. It’s also your CRM. It’s also the place where you can build those direct connections with customers and maintain a direct connection with customers, regardless of whether they start on an AI tool or not. Your CRM is a massive component of that hub and maybe will be the long-term hub even more than your website. Maybe.

So your site’s job is to ensure that it absolutely converts people to wanting to connect with you directly. Now some ways you need to do that are first, work the way the web is starting to work.

Just as I was talking about before, this is one where we want to lean in to the way the web is beginning to work. Because if your site doesn’t do that, you’re going to get left behind here. The role your website has to play is to efficiently convert AI-driven interest into a direct customer relationship, into your CRM. Again, this is where we’re going to pay attention to first-party data acquisition. Are we acquiring that customer information? So that’s the 70%.

The final part is the 10% that we need to focus on brand equity, on building brand equity. That’s dedicated funding for the creative and proprietary and distinctive content that’s going to build unaided brand recall over time. It’s the ultimate investment in the brand as the prompt.

We may find over time that the 30% and the 10% flip as we start to get some of the foundational elements in place, as we start to get the infrastructure in place, as we start to provide the kinds of structured content that allow customers to find us and allow AI agents and AI answer engines cite us. Maybe we don’t have to put 30% there. Maybe that becomes the 10% and content shifts to 30%.

The point is, over time we need to be building that brand equity. We need to be investing in that for the long term.

Finally, we’ve got to move with some degree of urgency here. Now this is, this one gets a little complicated. There is a long-standing strategy called being a "fast follower" where we pay attention to what our competition does, we pay attention to what the market as a whole does and then we move fast to then duplicate that.

I’m a little concerned that if this is in fact a generational shift in customer behavior, moving too slowly could create problems. So you absolutely want to pay attention to your data. You absolutely want to pay attention to your market. But you also want to make sure you’re at least testing now.

If you’re not showing up, in GEO—in AI answer engines—right now, if AI agents in agentic browsers like Atlas or Comet can’t find you and aren’t citing you today, then you already have a problem. You’re already behind the eight ball here. You want to make sure you’re doing at least some investment right now to find out how much more investment you need to make, right? But it’s time to focus on that. The time to move fast is today.

Think about how you split your budget accordingly to do what works for you. Again, start with 70-30-10. You can obviously play with those. Maybe in your world it’s 50-40-10, maybe it’s 50-35-15, but start with a model that works for you so that you’re not over-indexing in any one channel, but instead you’re investing in your brand, in your structured data, and in your content, as well as website functionality to build that connection with your customer for the long run.

If you do that, I guarantee that your business is gonna be in great shape no matter how the web evolves and no matter what the truth of the future of the web is.

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 and let them know what you think. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, which is episode 473, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. It dives in today’s topic in even greater detail. Make sure you pick up a copy, share it with your friends, and let me know what you think. I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week and until then, please be well, be safe and as always, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

I’m generally bullish on AI and its potential benefits for customers and brands. What I’m less bullish about are all the folks essentially telling you that AI will make you give up building meaningful connections between your brand and your customers. Without meaning to, they’re describing a world where every brand becomes a commodity. And, frankly, I simply refuse to go along.

Instead, we need to do the work, right now, that will drive customers to ask for us by name. And that depends on building brands customers care about. In short, in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Why is brand “the only thing” in the age of AI? Why does it matter? And what can you do to ensure customers ask for you by name?

That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Here are the show notes for you.

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.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 14m 41s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

AI is starting to affect the relationship between our businesses and our customers. Some share of customers are asking questions using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, and MetaAI.

And these questions are leading them to products and services and brands that meet their needs. Ideally, Those products, services, and brands are yours. But sometimes they’re not. And that has profound implications for the future of your business.

Many people I respect are rightfully talking about all the ways your business might be in some trouble as customers shift to using AI or agents to find and choose the products and services they need. Those folks aren’t wrong to point out the challenge. Not exactly, no.

But their discussion of where we’re headed leaves me a little itchy. Because far too many people talk about this shift to AI and this shift to your customers using AI to do all of their shopping and buying and engaging with brands as though it’s inevitable. As though the only way to win on AI is to be all in on AI—solely, purely. And, you know, that’s one thing you probably want to do some things with, but it can’t be your entire strategy. We can’t be all in at the expense of your website, your CRM, and your other owned channels or experiences.

Too many of us have seen this movie before. And at least for me, I’m convinced that we have way more control over the outcome than most people are discussing right now. I refuse to concede this point.

Let me state this right up front: AI will only hurt your relationship with your customers if you let it. The key to winning is to build a brand your customers want to ask for by name. Which is why in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

This is episode 472 of The Big Show. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in.

Intermediaries in the digital space are nothing new. I grew up in the hospitality industry and watched intermediaries like Expedia and Booking(.)com get between our guests and our hotels all the time. They were the first big tech that I really experienced. They were the intermediaries that inspired the original research that led to my book, Digital Reset. I then watched these digitally-native powerhouses slowly lose share to the real Big Tech players like Google and Facebook or Instagram, which only drove the point home further. The lion’s share of Booking and Expedia’s marketing spend every quarter goes to Google and to social media like Instagram or Facebook.

Quick aside:, the way, Kayak and Trivago’s core business is known as the travel industry as Metasearch. They display rates from a wide array of sources so that travelers can see how much they’d pay based on where they book their reservation. I’m deliberately not referring to Facebook as "Meta" to avoid confusion with the kinds of metasearch offered by Kayak and Trivago, which are owned by Booking(.)com and Expedia, respectively.

Okay, so sure, AI is a different kind of platform. It’s a different kind of threat. It might be the first and only place your customers go to find what they need.

But it’s not just a threat, it’s also an opportunity.

In fact, I’d suggest that the interaction with AI is starting to look more like the interaction with phones than the interaction with, for instance, search. Your customers have a lot of apps on their phones. And many of these apps allow for them to search for different things. They have Google. They have Amazon. They have Temu. They have Shein. They have Safari or Chrome. They have YouTube. They have Instagram or TikTok—or I guess if they’re over 45, Facebook. They have Spotify. They might have Expedia or Booking(.)com.

The point is that they choose the app that works best to find what they need in that moment. But they don’t start by opening the app. They start by picking up their phone.

Consumers increasingly are treating AI like it’s a device. It’s where customers start before they choose the app or before they buy. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me that ChatGPT calls its integrations with other companies "apps," not integrations. They’ve partnered with companies like Expedia and Booking and Zillow and Spotify and Canva and Figma to offer apps within the ChatGPT experience.

They’ve also launched its browser, Atlas, and it’s why they’re working on physical devices. They want to be the first place people go. This is why Perplexity has launched its Comet browser that, to quote the company, "works for you." Note the emphasis. It’s doing the work, not you, not your customer. The AI—or if you’d rather call it this, the agent that’s built into the browser—does the work. And there are others that are coming.

These companies want and need to be the first place that customers start, every time, if they have any hope of replacing Google or Apple as the first place customers start every time. As I mentioned in the intro, that’s our opportunity: to be the place that people ask for when they pick up that phone when they pick up that app, when they look into the device, when they start the conversation with AI.

That’s why AI will only hurt your relationship if you let it.

The key to winning is to build a brand that your customers will ask for by name. I’ve said it another way in the past. I’ve said that the brand is the prompt. The last thing you want is for AI to turn your brand into a commodity. The last thing you want is to let AI turn your brand into a commodity, differentiated only by price or sales channels. That’s just not a way to win. You’ve heard it said for years, "don’t build your brand on rented land." And this just isn’t that much different from that perspective.

I mean, sure, we’ll use these tools to increase the reach and awareness of our brands. But we cannot let AI replace our brands. Keep repeating to yourself that in the age of AI, "brand isn’t everything, it’s the only thing."

We should be thinking of these tools as ways to build our brand, not replace them. Look at current customer behaviors. Customers ask AI questions, then come directly to your website by typing in the URL or by searching on your brand name. Obviously, over time, that’s going to change some.

First, more features, more integrations, more apps within AI platforms will allow your customers to buy or book or connect with your sales team without leaving that experience. Second, as agents emerge, the agents themselves will be able to buy or book or connect with your sales team without the human being being involved all that much, or at least they won’t bother them until the very end of the process.

Our job as marketers and e-commerce leaders then is to make sure that they’re either choosing to buy or book or connect with our sales team on our owned web channels or to make sure they’re asking for us by name when they buy or book or connect with sales teams within the AI platforms. That should consume almost all of your energies right now, driving that behavior now. Because it’ll be much harder later to change customer behaviors once they get accustomed to bypassing you to just working through the AI.

Like I said, we’ve seen this movie before. We know what it looks like when customers buy through a third party and then we have to spend the time and energy and expense to get them to choose us directly. That is super hard. So maybe let’s not do that part.

Now, it’s entirely fair for you to ask, okay, how do you get your customers to ask for you by name?

First, you’ve got to build direct demand, on connecting with customers now. Push your loyalty and CRM. Push email and SMS to connect with customers directly. Focus on improving on-site conversion now so that they know to come back when they’re ready to buy. And then treat your industry’s various marketplaces and social media as paid shelves to fill gaps in demand as it’s needed.

Next, make your content AI ready. Build structured offers through schema and product or service feeds. Look at MCPs as a potential way to make your content—especially your structured data—available to the large language models. Lean into concise, clear, well-structured content like FAQs and authoritative explainers that AI tools and agents can cite to their users.

Next, diversify your channels. Balance search with social or YouTube or outdoor and print media. Look at some high intent partner channels. Who’s connecting with the people that you want to connect with? For each of these, make sure that you’re measuring the incrementality of these channels. We want to measure whether they’re delivering additional benefits or if they’re just taking credit for things that would have happened.

Finally, you’re to want to test some of the new messaging commerce functions that exist out there. Stand up a WhatsApp or iMessage flow where it’s appropriate. And look at blending service and sales into a holistic experience. Remember the idea that we’ve talked about so many times on the show that customer service is queen.

If you can do these things, if you can start to make sure your content and your experiences and the engagement you have with your customers is such that they actually like you and actually want to work with you again and again, you’re increasing the odds that they’re going to ask for you by name. You’re increasing the odds that you will not become a commodity. You’re increasing the odds that people actually want you.

The bottom line remains that AI will only hurt relationships with your customers if you let it. And the key to winning is to build a brand that your customers ask for by name. Again, and finally, remember that in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

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 and let them know what you think. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, which is episode 472, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. It dives in today’s topic in even greater detail. Make sure you pick up a copy, share it with your friends, and let me know what you think. I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week and until then, please be well, be safe and as always, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Are you as sick as I am of hearing people claim that SEO is dead? I mean, c’mon. How is that we keep regurgitating the same foul nonsense to drive clicks, engagement, and a little bit of anger among the marketing community. I promise I’m not going to ask “is SEO dead?” or claim that “SEO is dead” or anything similar anytime soon.

What’s also true is that how your customers search for what they need is changing — and quickly.

Some folks want to call these changes GEO. Some call them AEO. Some call them AIO. I don’t think it matters what we call them. What matters is understanding how your customers’ behaviors are changing… and what you can do to ensure your customers find you whenever they’re looking. And that’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to know more about “the new SEO”? Then be sure to check this one out.

Here are the show notes for you.

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.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using the travel rig: Shure SM57 Cardioid Dynamic Instrument Microphone and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 20m 26s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

 One of the perennial questions, comments, and provocative blog post titles in digital marketing is that SEO is dead or something fairly similar. Let me tell you right up front, this episode isn’t one of those.

What’s also true is that with the emergence of AI answer engines, we’ve seen more change in search over the last 10 months than over the last 10 years. Seriously. There’s been so much change that folks don’t even want to talk about the practice of showing up in these answer engines as SEO any longer. Instead, they want to call it GEO (for Generative Engine Optimization), or AEO (for answer engine optimization), or AIO (for, you know, artificial intelligence optimization).

I still prefer to call it SEO, which to me means search experience optimization. It reflects the fact that people search in traditional search engines like Google, they search using artificial intelligence tools and they search on places like social media & and it reflects how those all work together. But, whatever. I’ll live no matter which name succeeds in the marketplace of ideas.

The fact that no one can commit to a single comprehensive name at the moment suggests two points to me, though.

The second is that we’re still in the very early days of learning about how to best meet the needs of those changing customers and of the tools that drive those changes.

I’m Tim Peter, and we’re going to talk about the new SEO.

Is SEO dead? Of course not. It’s also still a good time to revisit a prior episode of the big show that talked all about the new SEO. I hope you’ll enjoy it. It’s coming at you right now.

My assumption when we talk about search is that you work for a business that sells things. I’m not going to talk about the publishing industry. It’s not my core area of expertise. It’s got an entirely different economic model. And the realities of what’s happening because of search in that industry are very, very, very different than what people who sell things are dealing with. So we’re not going to talk about those today.

There are three big variables, though, around selling things. And they are:

These are true for products or services. They all kind of map onto those variables. And there’s lots of examples:

Most businesses who are in these industries tend to want two things from their marketing:

Now, historically, over the last 20 years or so of digital, those tend to have gone hand in hand. I’d argue that they still probably do, despite all the conversations we’ve had about zero-click marketing lately. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in depth in a moment.

For many businesses over the last decade, and certainly until this recent emergence of AI search, SEO was the way to get traffic and revenue. Most companies put a lot of effort into getting into the first page of search engines… which in practice meant the first page of Google.

And that traffic converted. It generated enormous amounts of revenue. For many businesses I’ve worked with, 50%, 60% or more of the revenue was coming through search.

For the first time in a long time, though, people are starting to question whether that’s a good thing, whether being so dependent on search is actually beneficial. They’re also starting to ask whether it’s enough.

I genuinely believe that this is a super healthy question to ask. In fact, it might be the most important question that needs asking every single day. We don’t want to depend on any one channel or company for our traffic or our revenues.

This is such an important point that I wrote an entire book about how to think and act beyond Big Tech companies like Google or Facebook for driving your traffic and revenue. I’ve also made the case for some time on the podcast, on the blog, on social media, about the risks that emerge when you’re too dependent on Google or any other channel for too much of that traffic and revenue.

And yet, for many businesses, Google still contributes either a plurality or an outright majority of your traffic. You still see a lot from Google, even now, even in this changing environment. If you’re one of those businesses, and Google loses — if Profound is right — and Google loses in the marketplace, you lose too.

So that’s what makes this post that Bill wrote so interesting and so important. Because he talks about a VC that’s putting enormous amounts of money behind companies that are designed to upend the traditional SEO industry. As he wrote in his post, “capital of this size and caliber doesn’t just validate a company. It signals to the market that GEO has moved from niche theory to enterprise scale priority.”

Bill also shares quotes from the company’s pitch for their services. And these include some fairly provocative lines, such as, “In five years, $1 trillion of commerce will shift from Google to chat GPT.” They also say, “If your company generates greater than $1 million from SEO, you’re facing an existential threat. Ranking number one on Google will soon be as relevant as ranking number one in the Yellow Pages.”

Ouch.

I’ll come back to this in a minute. But as you might imagine, I have thoughts here.

We want to start by talking about Bill’s insightful summary of what he calls, “the two workstreams you can’t ignore.” In Bill’s words they are, “Workstream one. Solid structured content on your own properties.” He defines this by saying, “This is where you say it. Publish authoritative structured machine readable content that positions you as a source of truth.”

Bravo, couldn’t agree more.

He also lists “workstream two.” And this is, “Inclusion in the reference set. This is where others say it. Trusted third party citations, industry hubs, and forum mentions that cement your authority in AI’s consensus layer.”

Again, I completely agree with this view.

I’ve talked and written about following a hub and spoke strategy for years. Bill’s workstreams are another way of stating that.

Critically, Bill points out that AI increases the importance of workstream two — or the spokes. And I think that’s true, at least for now. And I promise I’m getting to this, but I’m gonna come back to that in a big way in a moment.

Getting back to Profound’s bold claims about a trillion dollars shifting to ChatGPT or page one of Google being like the yellow pages, though, well… here’s what I think. And I want to say this as clearly as I can: Bullshit.

I just think that that’s, you know, way, way, way overstating the case. And I’m going to admit I have come 180 degrees on this.

But Google is as well positioned as anybody to win as we go forward. I’m not totally convinced that they will win. In fact, I’d put the odds at maybe 40%, you know, maybe 2.5:1. But they’re still in such a better position than anybody else.

Why is that? Well, they offer great utility. They have great distribution. They can get in front of any customer pretty easily. And, this is key at the moment, they have great monetization. They know how to pay for this right now.

There’s even some evidence that ChatGPT secretly relies on Google search results to answer some questions. And I will link in the show notes to the article in The Information that uncovered that. More than a few SEOs also have done studies that seem to support that finding.

So yeah, Google is as likely or likelier to win as anybody else in the marketplace. And I don’t see all that much shifting away from them in the immediate term. I could be wrong, but it’s a tough bet for me to make.

Second, and highly relatedly, all of the evidence seems to suggest that the things that help you rank in traditional SEO also mostly help you show up in large language models, in ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude. Bill says this himself in his brilliant post noting that this is, “the same fundamentals, new battlefield.” He continues, “If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s built on SEO’s oldest truth: On-site content, what you say; off-site validation, what others say.”

Yes, there’s more emphasis now on what others say than what we’ve seen. But that may be a little bit of a smokescreen. You know, the spokes play a bigger role than they have up till now. But again, we’re talking about the same fundamentals. SEO, GEO, AEO, AIO, whatever you want to call it, just aren’t that dramatically different from what SEO work has always done. Keep reminding yourself again and again “same fundamentals.”

Third, I’m not sure that current best practices for showing up in LLMs will last very long. Google’s traditional search works the way it does because they’ve spent a couple of decades fighting black hat SEO techniques to spam the search engine results pages. They’ve released countless algorithm changes over the years to ensure quality results. The LLMs are really only just starting that process.

And we’re seeing so many people sharing either well-intentioned or maybe less well-intentioned tactics that are a little snake oily that are designed to show up in LLMs quickly:

I’m not saying that some of those may not work. Hell, even I tell you to do the last one all the time about making sure you show up in other places. Instead, I’m asking the question, how long do you expect they’ll continue to work?

ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude and Copilot only have a chance of unseating Google as king of the hill if they consistently provide a better experience. And that’s not going to happen if their results are filled with folks who’ve learned to game the system, who’ve learned to game their algorithm. They’re going to learn how to beat spam just like Google did — they’re going to have to — or customers aren’t going to use them. They’re not going to trust them.

The truth is that at least up until Google introduced AI Overviews and AI Mode, the best way to rank organically was mostly, “create great content that answers your customers’ core questions.”

I don’t mean to diss other tactics, and I don’t mean to diss Profound. They may have an amazing product. At the same time, some of their benefits only matter until LLMs come around to where Google ended up. And I suspect that they will do that.

Finally, and much more importantly for those of you who sell things, customers still have to come to your website to buy them. And when they do that, they’re usually asking for you by name. That’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Customers may discover you on an LLM. They may discover you on social. Then they go to a traditional search engine and ask for you. Yeah, they might type in the URL, but far more often, they’re typing your name into Google and clicking on the organic result.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the rest do a terrible job of driving traffic right now for that reason. What they’re doing is creating awareness. Customers learn your name, and then they go looking for you.

That could absolutely change. It might change. But then they’ll either click the link to your site or as the technology matures, use their agent to make sure that they make the purchase from you.

You’ll almost certainly need to invest in a model context protocol (MCP) solution for your inventory and e-commerce systems sooner rather than later. Though let’s be fair, that’s way out of scope of this episode.

There’s also a huge risk to your business if you sell through intermediaries that customers never seek you out and instead choose to buy through higher cost third parties. That would be a big problem too. That’s also a topic for another day or you could just read my book.

In any case, the question you need to ask is if this is where we are and this is where we’re likely headed, what do you do about it?

Well…

Most importantly though, you build a company and a brand that’s worth asking for by name that customers will seek out by name. Then you’re not dependent on any one intermediary. You’re not dependent on any one gatekeeper.

No matter whether chat GPT or Google wins, you definitely will.

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 and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 469, as well as an archive of all our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. It dives in today’s topic in even greater detail. Make sure you pick up a copy, share it with your friends, and let me know what you think. I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen if you didn’t, so I really appreciate you.

We’ll be back next week with a new episode, and until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Revisiting “The New SEO” (Podcast) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

I assume most people know that Google makes almost all of its money from ads. And, in practice, those ads are based on clicks. Paid clicks. That fact means that Google can’t survive in a zero-click world. While that same reality is not (yet) true for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI answer engines, they’re almost certainly going to need some form of ads—again, probably clickable ads—to fund their operations.

For example, ChatGPT alone is planning to invest over 1 trillion dollars in their compute and infrastructure. That’s “trillion.” With a “T.” Some quick back-of-the-envelope math says that, at $20 per month, they’d need to sign up roughly a quarter of the world’s population—and keep them paying for a couple of years—to cover that cost. That seems… unlikely.

So, does zero-click search forecast a world where Google is doomed? Does it mean the entire ad-based world is over? And, most importantly, what does zero-click mean for your business? That’s what “Revisiting the Real Story of AI and Zero-Click Search” on the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

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.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 19m 22s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

 Hi, and welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter.

A few weeks ago I talked all about artificial intelligence and zero click search and the connection between those two realities. And at the time I predicted—or I shouldn’t even say, predict; I forecast—that Google was still in a pretty good position relative to OpenAI, relative to ChatGPT… and that we would know more when people came back from school.

Well, people are back from school and people are back from summer vacation, and it looks like that forecast, that concept, is holding up. Google and ChatGPT’s data, according to the SimilarWeb, seem to be holding relatively steady, more or less. There’s minor movement and definitely something to watch, but nothing crazy yet.

What’s also true is that people using ChatGPT still are creating a lot of opportunities for your brand to be seen, for your business to be seen. That then shows up at your website either as organic branded search or as direct navigation—people just coming to your website. And that’s why I think this is a really good time to revisit that discussion from a couple of weeks ago all about the real truth of AI and zero-click search. So I hope you’ll enjoy as we revisit the real story of AI and zero-click search, coming at you right now.

I want to talk about the reality of search marketing today. And this episode is very much a follow-up from last week’s discussion about the rise of a agentic AI among your customers. You don’t need to listen to last week’s episode for this one to make sense. But I’d like you to be aware that I’m building on a ton of assumptions that explored in gory detail last week. If you’ve got questions about those assumptions, you definitely want to check out last week’s episode.

It’s also a little less future focused and much more focused on our current reality, maybe where we’re going to be for the next six months or so. As I talked about last week, things could change at any time. So some of this may not age perfectly, but I think the bigger picture holds true.

I don’t think we’re going to see a massive shift in customer behaviors in the next three to six months. I explained the systemic reasons why that’s the case last week.

For one additional piece of evidence why I think that’s so, look at the public freak out that happened when ChatGPT, when OpenAI released its GPT-5 model this week. And more importantly, how the company backtracked and made its legacy models available to customers. Customers don’t typically accept change all that fast. We saw that play out in the most pure way possible over the last few days.

What’s also true is that while I think that this stuff is going to hold true for the next, you know, three to six to maybe nine months, I could absolutely be wrong about this.

As I mentioned last week, keep our core and explore methodology in mind. Focus 80% of your efforts on your core and about 20% of your efforts to see if things are changing. And that way, that should help ensure that you’ve got your bases covered in either case.

Regardless, this comes back to the bigger picture of where are we with search? And is Google losing? Is AI taking their business? Is zero click killing us?

Well, it’s complicated.

First, data for the last couple of months is potentially very misleading. I’m not convinced that the current data — that is data from June, July, and August — tells us as much as we might think it does.

We know that use of ChatGPT and other AI tools is highest among younger people and better educated people. And there’s one large group of people that falls into both of those buckets, and that is students, particularly high school and college students. They’re not in school right now, and they are heavy users of these tools.

When we look at data from similar web or Google trends, we see that OpenAI’s traffic declined in July, and the gap between Google and OpenAI got wider. Over the last few weeks, that gap seems to have shrunk a tiny bit, which does align with kids heading back to school. So there’s some evidence that suggests that’s right.

What it also suggests is that any boost you see in ChatGPT’s numbers in the next month or two might be driven largely by students and not by the larger market.

Maybe.

Why does that matter? Well, it depends on what you’re selling.

If students represent a large share of your customer base, then those numbers could be very meaningful to you. If they don’t, if you sell to a broader market than just students, then it means that activity by those student groups is going to make it tougher to see what’s genuinely happening with your actual customers. Non-commercial activity — or at least commercial activity unrelated to your business — might mask your reality.

Now, normally I’d tell you to simply pay attention to your analytics, but there’s two problems with this approach.

The first is that your analytics might not tell you the whole story if you’re not doing the work to appear in AI answers right now. I’m going to come back to this a little later in the show, but it’s an important point.

The second is that customer behaviors seem to follow a pattern right now of what’s called “explore and exploit.” This is a super common behavior among decision making strategies. People do this in all kinds of realms. What explore and exploit means in this specific case is that a fair number of folks are using AI for exploration. They’re engaging with AI to answer questions, to learn, to get exposed to new ideas, and yes, to find products and services they like — hotels, restaurants, clothing, technology, and so on.

However, at the same time, they can’t really buy through these tools (e.g., agentic AI) yet, at least not easily or consistently. Again, see last week’s episode for more on this topic.

Instead, when they’re ready to buy, when they’re ready to exploit what they’ve learned, they’re likely to navigate directly to you or search for you by brand name. And we’re seeing lots of companies that we work with getting significant increases in clicks and click-through rate on brand in terms of Google Search Console, as well as big lifts in “direct/none” traffic in their analytics. In other words, customers coming directly to the site.

But only after they found the brand during their explore activity.

This is critically important when we talk about the zero click search situation. Notice I called it a situation. I didn’t call it a problem. At least not yet. The reason is because today it’s only a real problem for certain industries. If you’re in publishing, for instance, or some other industry where your revenues are directly tied to your traffic, you do have a problem. Customers who don’t click — and more to the point, get the answers they need in the search results themselves — cost you real money. That’s a huge problem. No doubt about it.

Most other businesses, though, sell things, actual real physical products or services that the search results point to, but they don’t deliver.

For instance, if you sell hotel rooms, any zero-click answer isn’t robbing you of hotel reservations. Potential guests still have to book your hotel through some site. If you sell consulting services, clients still have to contact you to arrange the services that they need. If you sell software as a services, customers still have to sign up. If you sell books… they still have to go to a bookstore in some way, or form, whether online or in person to get the book.

For most businesses, zero click doesn’t have to mean zero revenue.

Now notice that I said your customers have to buy or reserve through some site. There is no guarantee right now that that site will be yours. Even when they don’t choose a competitor, they could still buy through a third party or some other intermediary. You know, they could buy through Amazon. They could buy through Expedia. And in some cases, that intermediary is Google.

For example, in cases like Google Shopping Ads or Google Metasearch for hotels, you’re not selling through Google, but you are paying for the clicks. And those still cost you money. You’re paying, in effect, a commission for Google to drive the sale.

More importantly, remember that in the past, at least some of those opportunities were free. We’ve gone from a free click to a paid click. Gatekeeper is going to gate and all that. You might have heard that once or twice before around here.

That to me is the biggest shift in search that we need to keep in mind. Search is not a free channel. We can argue whether it ever was. SEO activities always had a cost after all. Today though, you’re going to need to pay when customers are ready to buy from you, no matter whether they found you in traditional search or because an AI told them about you. And that’s the future we’re going to live in for a while. I simply don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Here’s why.

Google had revenue of $54 billion from Search in Q2 and $96.4 billion overall. They earned $33 billion of their $31 billion total earnings from services, notice that’s more than their overall earnings. Services include things like Maps and Android. We know that search and YouTube make up 75% of the total and search alone is 65% of the total number.

During that same period, paid clicks were up 4% and paid click revenue was up 12%. Think about that for a moment. By definition, Google has to be charging more for every click or else clicks and revenues would be more in line with one another and they’re not. Call me crazy, but someone should write a book about what this means for your business.

Anyway, to drive this revenue, Google is spending $85 billion this year largely on what they called “AI infrastructure investments.” It’s pretty easy to see that they’re paying for these investments on their revenue from search and ads more generally. And they’re going to keep on doing it.

Sundar Pichai, the CEO said in Q2 2024, this is a quote, “the risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing.” That $85 billion dollar number includes an additional $10 billion that they just announced in this quarterly earnings call. They just said, “nope, we need to spend an additional $10 billion on top of the $75 billion we had already planned to spend to keep driving that.:

The plain truth is that as I talked about on The Becoming Radical podcast recently, Google can’t survive in a zero-click world. I’m going to say that again. Google cannot survive in a zero-click world.

56% of its total revenues and some major percentage of its earnings, probably around 70%, came from clicks on search ads.

And yes, I know that I’m only looking at Google’s numbers here, but the same basic pattern exists for Meta and Amazon to say nothing of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and or Claude. And those last three have monumentally worse revenue numbers than Google does.

As I talked about last week, any or all of these players can only win if they successfully monetize what they offer to the marketplace. And at least some of that monetization almost certainly has to come from your business, from you in the form of ad dollars, and quite possibly for purposes of user experience and traceability, from clickable ads.

In short, it’s not that you should be worried about zero click, it’s that you should be worried about the end of free clicks. Remember, again, gatekeepers gonna gate. They have to pay for their investments in AI or search or customer experience. They have to. That’s the reality we live in.

So what do you do about this? Well, you almost certainly should be working to get some short-term awareness boost by showing up in AI answers today. In fact, I’d encourage you to do that. For starters, it’s largely free, again, ignoring labor costs or the cost of qualified SEO folks who understand how to show up in these tools.

Normally, I would tell you you’re gonna base that decision on your own analytics and then invest as the demand grows.

But as I mentioned earlier, your analytics might not tell the whole story if you’re not doing the work to appear in AI answers:

This is one case where you probably have to build in advance of the data. To flip a well-known quote on its head, “if you don’t build it, they won’t come.”

Longer term, you also need a strategy that connects you with customers directly, too. I’ve talked about this a lot in recent episodes and in my book. For reasons of time, I’m going to link to all of those in the show notes.

The point remains that the immediate future of search is not zero click. It’s zero free click. If you’re not adapting your marketing to that reality, you’re setting yourself and your business up for less revenue, higher costs, or both. So maybe let’s not do that.

There’s already a solution for zero-click marketing. It’s called marketing. The marketers and e-commerce folks who do a good job of that are going to win no matter what happens. I’m confident you can be one of them.

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 here today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 467, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

And if you’re looking for something new to read, I’d love to suggest my book called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. You can pick up a copy on Amazon.com Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech or bookshop.org. And let me know what you think. I’d really love to hear from you. I would genuinely appreciate it.

I want to thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other.

The post Revisiting the Real Story of AI and Zero-Click Search (Thinks Out Loud Podcast) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

OpenAI just introduced Instant Checkout and apps in ChatGPT, allowing customers to buy products and services directly within the AI. This is, as they say, “the next step in agentic commerce.” It’s genuinely a capital-B, capital-D, Big Frickin’ Deal. No doubt about it.

At the same time, some folks might be rushing to claim these a whole new world, or a complete upending of commerce as we know it.

I’m… not convinced. Instead, I’m concerned that too many people are going to trade the Big Tech intermediaries we face today with a different set of intermediaries. Yes, ChatGPT is giving us the tools to transact directly in their platform. That’s good. How we use them, though, and what they mean for our businesses is what our job is all about.

So, what is the meaning of Instant Checkout and ChatGPT apps? What is the right way to approach these tools? And, ultimately, how can you use them to benefit your business today… and in the longer term?

That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

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.

You might also enjoy this webinar I participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify 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 into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 15m 04s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter.

ChatGPT launched two new features this week that every marketer and e-commerce professional must know about. The first is Instant Checkout, which allows users to buy directly from Shopify and Etsy. They’ve also open-sourced their Agentic Commerce Protocol, that, as they say, "lets AI agents, people, and businesses work together to complete purchases." Very cool concept.

OpenAI built the protocol with Stripe and "leading merchant partners to be powerful, secure and easy to adopt." Notably, the company calls this the next step in agentic commerce. So maybe we’re going to start talking before too long about A-commerce — agent commerce or agentic commerce — and maybe less about E-commerce. Time will tell, but it’s definitely something I’m going to be watching.

The second big announcement is apps in ChatGPT, which is a way for users to connect directly with apps that they use regularly right within ChatGPT itself. You don’t have to leave your chat session. You can simply have the app, do things for you.

The idea is that you can have customers interact with your company via a ChatGPT app without ever leaving the ChatGPT experience. Some of the folks they’ve launched with our Spotify, Canva, Figma, Zillow, Expedia, Coursera, and Booking.com. They also state that Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable, Target, Peloton, TripAdvisor, and others are coming.

I’m seeing a large number of thoughtful, well-considered articles and posts that talk about the meaning of these two innovations for your brand and business. I’m also seeing some unhinged recommendations that, you know, you must sell on ChatGPT today or risk losing your business to those that do. I mean, it’s not 100% wrong. There is some risk there.

But the recommendation as being the thing you absolutely have to do is a bit misguided. And part of the reason those recommendations are misguided relates to a recent interview that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave about where he sees apps and instant checkout going. And no discussion of these developments makes sense without taking those comments in his interview into consideration.

So what’s really going on here? What really matters to your business? And where should you get started?

This is episode 471 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in.

I want to start the discussion around apps in ChatGPT and Instant Checkout by pouring a little bit of cold water on the early hype. These tools are interesting, but they’re kind of just okay at the moment. You can absolutely, 100% see the vision of where OpenAI is headed, where ChatGPT is headed, and it’s conceptually very cool.

They’re also not the most intuitive to install or use for most people. My friend, Brad Brewer, said on LinkedIn that "they should have waited" and, this is pretty harsh, but I think it’s spot on, "This feels more like $500 million dollar vaporware." Another friend of mine, Michael Goldrich, stated that "they’re still pretty unusable… the squeeze isn’t worth the juice.""

In general, I agree.

Where I disagree — not with Michael and Brad — but with some of the other posts that I’ve seen and some of the other thoughts that I’ve seen, is about what the purpose of these apps truly is.

Put simply, Instant Checkout and apps in ChatGPT do not exist to help your business They exist to help ChatGPT’s business.

Don’t believe me? Well consider this Sam Altman was interviewed by Ben Thompson of Stritechery and he said two things that I think everybody needs to pay close attention to. The first and this is a quote

I’m going to say that one again because it’s really important. "If we," that is, ChatGPT, "ever start doing anything that is not our best effort to get the user to the best answer, trust in ChatGPT… would fall precipitously."

Now, I want you to think about it for a moment because both of those quotes cannot be true at once. And I can prove it. You can prove it. You can see it for yourself based on how various apps work.

I connected both the Expedia and Booking.com apps to my ChatGPT account. It’s not the most intuitive process, as I mentioned earlier, but I was able to do it. And then I asked ChatGPT to search potential travel dates for me.

While it churned on its answer, I wondered which app would it choose? After all, I’d installed both Expedia and Booking.com. Was it going to give preference to one over the other? Would it show me a comparison with rates that they each show to give me a sense of where I might get the better deal? I honestly couldn’t wait to find out.

And then its answer came back. And what it did was… neither.

When I asked ChatGPT to book a hotel that met my needs for a potential trip, it told me to book directly through the hotel’s website. It literally said "that’s often the best price and inventory.” It did this despite it being unable to pull prices from the hotel’s booking engine. It also gave me the property’s phone number if I’d rather call, which, I mean, as somebody who’s always encouraging hotels and other businesses to get customers to buy directly from you, woohoo! That’s a big win. Booking direct, buying from the source wins the day, at least for the moment in ChatGPT.

The problem as it happens, was that I made a mistake when I used ChatGPT’s Expedia app. On Expedia’s page announcing the app, they give a couple of different steps and step three says that I need to, "ask Expedia for a flight or place to stay. Example, Expedia find me hotels in New York for October 12th through 15th."

Again, the usability of these apps could have been a lot clearer. I didn’t understand that I had to tell ChatGPT which app to use by name. It wasn’t going to decide whether to use Booking.com or Expedia. I had to tell it which one I wanted.

I didn’t get the Expedia experience because I didn’t ask for Expedia by name. Yes, I can get a better Expedia experience — or a better Booking.com experience or a better hotel direct experience — if I ask for that app by name. But if I don’t, who knows what you’re going to get?

In short, as I’ve noted before, the brand is the prompt.

Otherwise, ChatGPT is going to do what it thinks it’s best every single time. Which goes back to Sam Altman’s interview. Notice that ChatGPT did its best to give me the best answer. Not Expedia’s best answer. Not Booking.com‘s best answer. ChatGPT’s best answer.

Remember, Altman said, "if we ever start doing anything that is not our best effort to get the user to the best answer, trust in ChatGPT would fall precipitously."

If you want to ensure customers work with you in ChatGPT, they have to ask for you by name, regardless of whether you have an app or Instant Checkout… or none of those tools. Otherwise, ChatGPT will make its best effort to get the user to what ChatGPT thinks is the best answer. They have to.

I’ve been talking about this for months and Altman outright admitted it in his interview. If LLMs don’t give customers great answers, "trust will fall precipitously."

So what does that mean for you? Does it mean that you should ignore Instant Checkout or apps on ChatGPT? No, definitely not. You should build services or partner with providers that make your products, your services, your prices, your inventory available to ChatGPT and other AI answer engines. It’s definitely a commerce channel that is coming.

If you want to take a look at this, Expedia, for example, has connected with perplexity as well as ChatGPT. Travel companies TripAdvisor and SelfBook — as well as other merchants and other verticals — have also integrated with Perplexity too. And I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of this across the board.

But if everyone’s got an Instant Checkout integration or a ChatGPT app, your advantage will disappear. If these tools take off, that’s inevitable. Just like if you have an app on somebody’s phone, they have a lot of apps to choose from. Most apps never get opened.

What will ChatGPT do then? Well, they’ll do what’s best for customers. And more precisely, they’ll do what’s best for their business.

This is going to become more important over time as agentic commerce and agentic AI start to pick up. If your customers aren’t asking for you by name — if your customers are explicitly and implicitly training their agents that you are the brand that they want every time — you’re at the mercy of ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity or Claude or whatever other agents start to win in the marketplace. That is a guarantee.

And that’s why, regardless of whether you incorporate these tools into your business’s marketing and e-commerce strategy, you also need to build your brand. I just saw this in practice. I just told you exactly what happened. Unless customers ask for you by name, ChatGPT — and every other AI answer engine or agent or whatever comes along next — is going to do what’s best for their business. Not Expedia’s, not Bookings.com‘s and not yours. Theirs.

They have to if they’re going to succeed. Again, Sam Altman told us "if we ever start doing anything that is not our best effort to get the user to the best answer, trust in ChatGPT would fall." Your job then is to make sure you’re the trusted brand that your customers ask for every time, regardless of the vertical you’re in.

Remember, the brand is the prompt. Don’t put yourself at the mercy of another gatekeeper that puts their interests — your customers’ interests — ahead of yours. Always remember that the lasting brand that Altman and company seek to build is not going to be yours. It’s going to be theirs.

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 link to the episode? Let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 471, and an archive of all of our past episodes.by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you want to learn more about these topics and lots more, I’d love to suggest that you pick up a copy of my book, * Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, that you can find on Amazon.com or Bookshop.org. And you can find the links for those in the show notes.

Be sure to let me know what you think of the book, too. I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Finally, thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.