Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

Over the last three weeks on this show, our fearless leader, Tim Peter, covered three big ideas. These are: The AI value gap. Why 88% of companies are using AI, but only 6% are seeing real results. ChatGPT’s agentic commerce retreat. Why even OpenAI couldn’t predict how quickly consumer behavior and operational reality would push back. AI inconsistency. Why the same prompt produces a different brand recommendation more than 99% of the time, making any specific AI ranking, effectively, a coin flip. Those are not three separate problems. They’re three symptoms of the same underlying condition: a weak brand signal. The brands that show up consistently — City of Hope appearing in 69 of 71 AI responses, not 2 of 71 — have built something the machine can’t easily ignore. The question this episode answers is how they’ve successfully done this. When this episode first aired, Tim called it the "first, do no harm" framework: the bridge between traditional SEO and the emerging world of generative engine optimization. He introduced the shift from a world of card catalogs to a world of concierges. He laid out why content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels also works as an operating model to drive prompt brand equity for your business. And it’s a framework that has been validated in every episode that followed. One thing has changed since the original recording: the SparkToro research Tim mentioned at the time has since been published in full, covering 2,961 prompts by 600 volunteers across nearly two months of runs using ChatGPT, Claude, and Google. The numbers confirmed everything the original episode predicted… and then some. If you are staring at your 2026 budget wondering where to place your bets, this is the blueprint. Key Insights for Strategic Marketing Leaders In this episode, Tim breaks down: Why your mantra must be SEO plus GEO — not SEO versus GEO. This includes the "first, do no harm" framework for bridging traditional search and AI-generated answers. It also looks at why protecting your existing organic position is the prerequisite for any successful GEO strategy. Your secret sales force. Your customers’ ratings, reviews, and word of mouth have always been part of your content. They’re now also among the highest-weight signals AI systems use to decide whether your brand deserves to be an answer. Content is king. Customer experience is queen. Data is the crown jewels. Yes, this is something you’ve heard about before. But now it’s more than a branding concept. It’s also a working operating model. These three elements build confidence for AI to consistently include your brand in their responses. Prompt brand equity: the metric that actually matters. Your position in any given AI response is a coin flip. Instead of tracking rank, frequency across a wide array of runs is the number you want to track. Tim also offers a Quick Look at tools like Peec.AI, seoClarity, SE Ranking, Profound, and others that can measure prompt brand equity for you right now. Metrics that matter in a zero-click world. Revenue, lead volume, brand search trends, and prompt brand equity frequency. Tim provides a clear overview how to track what’s working even as traditional attribution gets increasingly unreliable. Your blueprint for 2026. We’re seeing a shift from card catalogs to concierges, a shift that should reframe every budget conversation. Tim explores what this means for how you invest your marketing budget this year… and beyond. Whether you’re in hospitality, retail, or B2B &mdash and especially if the last three episodes left you with a framework but not the foundation — this episode makes everything click. Want to learn more? Here are the show note for you. The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Episode 485) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Ep. 487) Why AI Gives Your Customer Different Answers… Every Time GEO vs. AEO vs. AIO vs. SEO on Google Trends Rand Fishkin proved AI recommendations are inconsistent – here’s why and how to fix it Are Citations in AI Search Affected by Google Organic Visibility Changes? AEO And GEO: Google’s Outbound Traffic Down 33%: The GEO Revolution Is Here Airbnb says traffic from AI chatbots converts better than Google LinkedIn abandons traditional SEO as 60% traffic loss forces radical strategy shift The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) 7 Best AI Search Visibility Tools for Enterprises (2026) Tools mentioned in this episode: Peec AI – AI Search Analytics for Marketing Teams seoClarity – AI Search Optimization Platform Finseo – AI-Powered SEO Tools for Next-Gen Search Optimization SE Ranking – AI SEO Software Profound – Optimize Brand Visibility in AI Search AI Search Monitoring Tool – Track ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AIO Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 18m 08s 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. Transcript: SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge Welcome back to the show. Over the last few weeks, we’ve taken a deep dive into some of the uncomfortable realities about the state of AI. I’ve looked at why 88% of companies are playing with these tools while only 6% are actually seeing significant value. I call that an AI tax, the time and money spent fixing machine mistakes and chasing efficiency at the cost of customer trust. Last week, we saw how deep that rabbit hole goes. And I discussed how AI recommendations change more than 99% of the time, proving that if you’re chasing a specific ranking in ChatGPT or Claude, you’re basically bidding your strategy on a coin flip… on a series of coin flips. And before that, we saw OpenAI pull back on agentic commerce features because operational complexity and customer behavior don’t always align with the tech press hype. These are not three separate problems. They’re symptoms of a weak brand signal. As we’ve seen, the brands that show up consistently, like City of Hope showing up 97% of the time, do so because they’ve built a foundation of corroborating stories, of digital witnesses, that the machines just can’t ignore. So how do you actually build that foundation for your business? How do you move from chasing the shiny object to investing for optionality? Today, I want to revisit a foundational episode that maps exactly how you show up when the world moves from card catalogs to concierges. This is the "first, do no harm" framework that bridges the gap between traditional SEO and the new world of GEO. If you are staring at your 2026 budget, wondering where you can place your bets most successfully, this episode is the blueprint for you. This is Digital Reset with Tim Peter. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. So I think we all agree it’s unbelievably important that you show up in AI answer engines. What I’m not sure we completely agree upon is the fact that you need to show up in SEO still too, in traditional search. I want to give full credit to SEO expert Lily Ray for this idea, but we want to think about the fact that first, “do no harm.” Forget for a moment how you show up in AI answer engines. Of course you want to do that. I also suspect, and see this with my own clients, that for most businesses, even in a world of zero-click searches, Google still represents a significant, and probably your largest, single source of traffic. So the first thing you want is don’t do anything that screws up what Google gives you. This isn’t an SEO versus GEO question. It’s SEO plus GEO. Remember, you don’t get the plus if you mess up one side of the equation or other. As you read GEO advice, as you listen to GEO experts, as you listen to people talk about this, you need to ask yourself, “does this have the potential to hurt

Rand Fishkin’s team ran 2,961 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI. 600 volunteers, 12 different prompts, two months of runs. They wanted to answer one question: how often do you see the same list of brand recommendations twice, even with the exact same prompt? The answer? Less than 1% of the time. The odds of seeing the same list in the same order are closer to one in a thousand. Most conversations about AI inconsistency treat it as a measurement problem: how do I know if my brand is showing up? That’s a legitimate question. But it’s not the only question. And it might not even be the most important one. If AI systems give different recommendations essentially every time, the same inconsistency is already baked into every AI chatbot you’ve deployed — your hotel chat widget, your B2B sales assistant, your customer service tool. Most teams have never measured it. And some of those inconsistent answers are already driving negative reviews for your brand and business. This episode connects three stories Tim has covered over the last three weeks — the AI value gap, the uncertain timeline of agentic commerce, and now AI inconsistency — showing that they all stem from the same underlying condition. It also explains what City of Hope, appearing in 69 of 71 AI responses for "West Coast cancer care hospitals," tells us about how you can fix this problem for your business. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders to Close the Gap In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down: The full SparkToro/Gumshoe.ai research — and what it actually means. Rand Fishkin and Patrick O’Donnell ran nearly 3,000 prompts with 600 volunteers. The list of brands recommended changed more than 99% of the time. Here’s why that reframes everything about how you should be tracking AI visibility. The operational problem most people are missing. AI inconsistency isn’t only a marketing measurement challenge — it’s a liability inside your own deployed tools. Your AI chatbot may be giving materially different answers to different customers right now. And, it’s almost certain that no one on your team is measuring that. City of Hope: what 97% consistency looks like. Why City of Hope appeared in 69 of 71 AI responses for "West Coast cancer care hospitals" and what that reveals about how AI decides which brands it’s willing to commit to — and which ones it isn’t. Why "post more content" is the wrong strategy. How AI actually works: triangulation across independent sources, why your own website is a low-weight signal, and what "digital witnesses" means for building prompt brand equity that holds up. The King, Queen, and Crown Jewels operating model. Content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels, not just as a branding concept, but as the mechanism that drives the AI’s confidence in your brand. Four moves to make this week. Shift from rank to frequency measurement. Audit your deployed AI tools for consistency before worrying about external AI visibility. Build credible witnesses, not content volume. And treat review velocity as a strategic input, not just a reputation metric. Whether you’re in hospitality, retail, or B2B, this episode is for anyone who’s deploying AI in a customer-facing role… or who’s who’s being asked to report on AI visibility and wants a better sense of what they’re actually measuring. The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links NEW Research: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products; marketers should take care when tracking AI visibility – SparkToro Rand Fishkin proved AI recommendations are inconsistent – here’s why and how to fix it Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Ep. 487) The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) SEO vs GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge Peec.AI — AI brand visibility measurement seoClarity — AI search visibility and GEO tools Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 22m 01s 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. Transcript: The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. I’ve talked about a concept called "Prompt Brand Equity" for a while now, the idea that what matters in AI search isn’t where your brand ranks. It’s whether you show up at all, whether your brand shows up at all. And I mentioned some early research from Rand Fishkin at SparkToro, shows that AI recommendation lists were unpredictable. You could be number one in one chat and number three in the next, even with the exact same prompt, by the exact same person. Well, the full research is out now, and the numbers are much more striking than I expected. Rand’s team ran 2,961 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI with 600 volunteers over two months. The question they were trying to answer, how often do you see the same list of brand recommendations twice, even if you run the exact same prompt over and over? The answer? Less than 1% of the time. I want to say that again. Less than 1% of the time do you see the same list twice. In other words, practically never. That has real consequences for how you measure your business’s AI visibility and for how you think about the AI tools that you’ve already deployed in your own business. And for the ROI gap that I covered on episode 486, which if you missed it, was about why 88% of companies are using AI, but only 6% are seeing significant value from it. It turns out that these trends, these traits, these facts are connected. Today I want to get into how. This is episode 488 of Digital Reset with Tim Peter. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. Okay. Let me start with what the research actually found, because the headline number undersells it a little. Rand Fishkin partnered with Patrick O’Donnell at a company called Gumshoe.ai. They recruited 600 volunteers to run 12 different prompts, things like "recommend headphones under $300," or "what are the best project management tools." They ran these through ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini, Google AI, over and over for two months, nearly 3,000 runs in total. And what they found is this: the list of brands recommended changes more than 99% of the time. The odds of seeing the same list in the same order twice are closer to one in a thousand. That’s nuts, right? So I wanna be fair about what this means and what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that AI is useless. It doesn’t mean that brand mentions in AI are random and it definitely doesn’t mean you should give up on showing up in AI answers. Far from it. What it means is that where you appear in any given AI response, whether you’re number one or number three, tells you essentially nothing. That position is random. It’s not predictive of anything to you or to your business. The useful metric isn’t rank. It isn’t where you show up. It’s frequency. How often does your brand appear at all, across a large sample of runs on the questions that matter to your customers. That number tells you something real. That number is, of course, prompt brand equity, not position, frequency. I mentioned Rand’s early work on this in episode 485 when I talked about how we’ve moved from a world of card catalogs to a world of concierges. The new data just puts specific numbers into what we already expected. The picture is much clearer now, and if I’m being really honest, a little more dramatic than I expected. Now, here’s what I think is the most under-reported part of the story, and it matters a lot if you are in hospitality or honestly, if you’re in any business that has deployed AI in a customer facing role. When people talk about AI inconsistency, they almost always frame it as a marketing measurement problem. You know, how do I know if my brand is showing up? And it’s a legitimate question. I’ll get back to that in just a moment, but it’s not the only problem here. The second problem is operational, and it’s happening right now in your business. If AI systems give different recommendations essentially every time to customers asking the same question, what do you think is happening when your AI chatbot answers the same question from two different customers? Think about that for a mo

OpenAI launched in-chat checkout in September 2025, promising that users could shop and buy directly inside ChatGPT. Analysts forecast trillions in sales. Then, just last week, the company pulled back: near-zero sales, a dozen merchants integrated out of millions, and a consumer base that was happy to research in ChatGPT but wanted to buy somewhere familiar. Expedia and Booking Holdings stocks rose on the news. So what does this tell us about agentic commerce — the idea that AI agents will act as buyers, completing purchases on customers’ behalf? It tells us that the direction of agentic commerce is real… and the timeline is not. The question then is what do you do when you can see where we’re headed, but not when we’ll get there. That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders to Close the Gap In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down: OpenAI bails on its shopping plans. What actually happened with OpenAI’s checkout walkback, and why it matters. The similarities with “the Klarna pattern.” OpenAI’s pullback is another example of the Klarna pattern—overstated capability claims followed by operational reality. The deal with Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Why Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol is in a different position (and very much worth watching longer-term). The power of optionality in strategy. What "investing for optionality" means when you can’t predict which platform wins. How to win in any case. Four tactics that improve your business today and position you for any version of agentic commerce—whenever it actually works. How the aligns with “gatekeepers gonna gate.” Why this is the same gatekeeper problem independent hoteliers have been solving for 20 years. Whether you’re in hospitality, retail, or enterprise marketing—this episode is for anyone being asked "what’s your agentic commerce strategy?" and isn’t sure what to say. Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Digital Reset Episode 487) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links OpenAI Scales Back Shopping Plans for ChatGPT — The Information OpenAI Kills In-Chat Checkout After Near-Zero Sales — Awesome Agents ChatGPT to Scale Back Agentic Commerce Amid Users ‘Browsing Without Buying’ — Performance Marketing World OpenAI Just Blinked: Nobody Seems to Want to Shop Inside ChatGPT — Spree Commerce OpenAI’s Shift Shows Travel Is Too Complex for Quick-Fix Distribution — PhocusWire ChatGPT Bails on Direct Bookings, Sending Expedia and Booking Stocks Soaring — Silicon Review Lengow Blog — What Went Wrong with ChatGPT Checkout Google Blog — Agentic Commerce Tools & Protocol Google Makes Etsy and Wayfair Items Shoppable Within Agentic AI Search — Retail Brew Google Ads Chief Details UCP Expansion — Search Engine Journal March 2026: The Month Agentic Travel Gets Real — OAG IDC — Agentic AI Will Redefine Travel and Hospitality in 2026 Travel Brands Are Building AI Agents for a Consumer That Doesn’t Exist — Skift OpenAI Recalibrates E-Commerce Ambitions — OpenTools AI Structured Data’s Role in AI Search Visibility — Search Engine Journal How Structured Data Schema Transforms AI Search Visibility in 2026 — Medium Mews — 2026 is Make-or-Break for Hotel Transformation The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) – Tim Peter & Associates SEO vs GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) Best of the Show: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Podcast) Best of the Show: What ‘Your Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Podcast) Revisiting Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Podcast) Digital Reset: Build Customer Relationships Big Tech—and AI—Can’t Touch (Thinks Out Loud 458) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) – Tim Peter & Associates Google Schema Testing Tool Why Amazon Is Going to Launch a Search Engine (Thinks Out Loud Episode 345) What’s Amazon’s Travel Offering Really About? (Travel Tuesday) Gartner: AI agents to command $15 trillion in B2B purchases Strategic Predictions for 2026: How AI’s Underestimated Influence Is Reshaping Business The Vor Game: Lois McMaster Bujold: 9780671720148: Amazon.com: Books Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 23m 55s 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. Transcript: Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. OpenAI launched a feature in September of 2025 called Instant Checkout. The idea behind it was really simple. You could browse for a product inside ChatGPT, and buy it right there without ever leaving the chat interface. The press loved it. The tech press just went nuts. Everybody on LinkedIn said, "Oh my gosh, this is the best thing ever." Analysts said that it would disrupt Google Shopping.  Gartner forecast that by 2028, 90% of B2B purchases will be handled by AI. Last week… OpenAI pulled the plug. They’ve gotten near-zero sales from it. A dozen merchants integrated with it out of millions. OpenAI hadn’t built the state sales tax infrastructure and it turned out that users, consumers, customers are happy to research inside ChatGPT. They just don’t wanna buy there yet. In the travel space, Expedia and Booking Holdings stocks went up on the news. The OTAs, the online travel agents that were supposed to be disrupted by this got a lifeline. Here’s what I want to do today, though. I’m not going to tell you that agentic commerce isn’t coming. It is. The direction is clear. But instead, I wanna talk about what you do when you genuinely cannot predict the timeline. Because we can’t. OpenAI just proved that. And the right answer to that uncertainty isn’t to freeze. It’s also not to build your strategy around the next big press release. It’s to do the things that make your business better today, and also happen to prepare you for any version of the agentic future when it actually arrives. This is episode 487 of Digital Reset with Tim Peter. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. Here’s what happened. In September of 2025, OpenAI announced that they were going to make it possible for people to be able to book reservations right in ChatGPT. They said that people would be able to buy things from folks like Wayfair right in ChatGPT. They were working on a big integration with Shopify so that people could buy right within ChatGPT. And here we are six months later—this is early March, 2026—and they’re pulling back from this. They’ve announced "we are not gonna do this." And there are three reasons why this happened. And let’s start with the most important one and always the most important one, which is customer behavior. Customers were browsing, they weren’t buying. People today use ChatGPT, the way they use Google. They research and they narrow down their options, and then they complete their purchase somewhere that they trust. It’s not an implementation issue that they’re working through here. This is a behavioral reality. The second big reason is operational complexity. Payments require tax infrastructure. They require fraud prevention, refund handling, and consumer protection and compliance. OpenAI had built, well, none of it yet. For travel specifically, there’s also all the liability issues, cancellations, disrupted trips, customer service complaints, et cetera. PhocusWire called it too complex for quick fix distribution. These aren’t bugs that OpenAI is going to patch right away. They’re fundamental hard problems of commerce that Amazon and Expedia and Booking and lots of other folks have spent the last 30 years solving. In travel specifically, Amazon has attempted more than once to build a commerce platform only to back off because, well, it’s hard and it doesn’t really align with what they do well. Right? They’ve got free shipping, which doesn’t matter in travel. They’ve got, uh, warehouses, which don’t matter in travel, right? All of these things don’t play to their strengths, and at the moment they don’t play

8% of companies have adopted AI. Only 6% are seeing "significant" value. That leaves a staggering 82% value gap most businesses face. If your team feels like they are running faster just to stay in place, you aren’t suffering from a tech problem — you’re paying an "AI Tax." In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down the data from McKinsey, Section, and Workday to reveal why the C-Suite thinks AI is a miracle while the front line sees it as a burden. More importantly, he talks about what you can do to close the gap for your business. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders to Close the Gap Acknowledge the Productivity Paradox: 76% of Execs claim AI saves them 4–8 hours a week, while 40% of workers say it saves them nothing. This disconnect is where strategy goes to die. Avoid the "Efficiency Trap": Chasing "more with less" often leads to "more noise for less impact." We look at the Klarna case study and why cutting costs too fast can erode the very brand equity you’ve spent years building. Move from Tasks to Objectives: A mandate to "use AI for 20% of tasks" is a vanity metric. Real leaders set business goals (occupancy, conversion, satisfaction) and let AI earn its keep as a tool to reach them. Protect Your Crown Jewels: AI is a commodity; your first-party data is not. The 6% who win are those who feed their specific, proprietary data into the models to create a "moat" that Big Tech can’t cross. The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The State of AI: Global Survey 2025 | McKinsey CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story. – WSJ Klarna plans to hire humans again, as new landmark survey reveals most AI projects fail to deliver | Fortune MLQ.ai | AI for investors The Single Biggest Myth in Digital: Content is Expensive (Digital Reset Episode 275) Is Content a Strategic Product for Your Business? (Digital Reset Episode 319) Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines — PDF Link SEO vs GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) Why AI Won’t Kill Search — It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Digital Reset Episode 482) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 16m 24s 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. Transcript: Welcome back to the show. 88% of companies use AI. 88% of companies use AI. Only 6% see significant value from AI. 6%. That is a massive 82% gap between those who use AI and those that actually get value from its use. 82%, for those of you who don’t love math, is a lot of percent. It’s hard to have a whole lot more percent than that. That gap was first reported by McKinsey towards the end of last year. And in the three months since the report dropped, I’ve had conversations with C-suite and digital leaders at companies ranging from the Fortune 100 to individual hotel owner/operators that usually tell me something strikingly similar. Lots of companies are "playing with AI" or "testing AI" in some portion of their business or other. They’re mostly looking to drive efficiencies, to do more with less. Despite these efforts, they’re mostly not seeing the value. They’re falling into that 82% value gap too. What we’re going to talk about today is what lives in that gap and how you can get to the other side of it. This is Digital Reset with Tim Peter. I’m your host, Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. Okay, so there’s an 82% AI value gap. That is 100% real. There’s also a big gap between the people who see real gains from AI and those that don’t. The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks back on a research study from a group called Section that found 76% of C-suite execs thought AI was saving them “at least four to eight hours each week.” Essentially one in five claimed that they saved more than 12 hours per week using AI. By contrast, 40% of non-management workers said that AI didn’t save them any time at all. Another 27% said that it saved them less than two hours per week. Only 14% said that it saved them greater than four hours a week. So that’s 76% of execs versus 14% of line employees saving more than four hours. That’s a 62% productivity gap. As the article notes, “A new report from the business software company Workday goes so far as to call frustrations with the technology an AI tax on productivity. Though 85% of the roughly 1,600 employees it surveyed reported saving one to seven hours a week by using AI, much of the time was offset by having to correct errors and rework AI-generated content.” Think about those numbers I’ve just talked about. Those are huge differences. An 82% value gap. A 62% productivity gap. An AI tax that employees are paying. What in the world is happening here? First, let’s unpack McKinsey’s 82% value gap. Note that AI does produce value every day. And admittedly, a small number, 6%, see “significant” value. There’s also a larger share who see some value, just not at “significant” levels. Similarly, think about the AI tax on productivity that 62% of workers see here. It’s not a question of does AI work. It’s far more about how and where the folks that get the value put AI to work. I am seeing too many companies, you know, “play around with AI” or “test AI” without clear plans, clear objectives, and a clear strategy for what they really want AI to do. The McKinsey data says it. I see it every single day. I know of companies whose execs delivered mandates to their team, things like, “Everyone will use AI for X percent of their tasks,” and similar such messages. That’s not a strategy. It’s not even a goal, really. It’s more of a hope of what could be. What it lacks is a strategic underpinning. You might remember Klarna famously announced a couple of years ago that, “AI did the work of 700 human agents and does it much faster.” As their CEO said in December 2024, "I am already of the opinion that AI can do all of the jobs that we as humans do." Less than five months later, they reversed course and started hiring again in serious numbers. And the reason is simple. They moved too far, too fast, and with too little thought about what they really needed. I didn’t say that, by the way. The company CEO, Sebastian Semetkowski, said it himself. MLQ.ai had a write-up where they wrote, "We went too far, he said, noting that the focus on efficiency and cost ultimately reduced the quality of the company’s offerings and eroded trust with customers." Let’s start with the fact that companies that get the most out of AI, by contrast, have a clear strategy in place for what they expect of their AI efforts. They’ve got well-defined objectives they want to reach. And those objectives aren’t, “We want to use AI 50% of the time.” Their objectives are specific. They’re relevant. They’re time bound. Consider this hotel client of mine. They want to drive more occupancy, put more heads in beds. They want to increase the revenue they achieve from their guests. They want to increase guest satisfaction and retention. They want to lower their costs for achieving these. And they want to accomplish this within a particular time frame. I want you to notice something about those objectives. Did you notice how none said, “by using AI?” You know why? Because it doesn’t matter if they achieve those goals with AI or without it. It matters if they get more customers, keep those customers happy, encourage those customers to provide more positive ratings and write more positive reviews, and reduce their operational costs while they do that. That’s how their hotel succeeds. That’s how their business succeeds. Of course, they then looked at AI for ways to meet those objectives. And they were super willing to rethink internal processes where it made sense to do so. But the conversation started with strategic objectives and a strategy for how to get there that included AI, not “use AI and hope for the best!” They were also realistic about where AI might not work — usually because they didn’t have the right data or the right skills available — so that they didn’t waste time and resources along the way. Companies achieving value from their AI initiatives target growth and innovat

There is a lot of mixed information out there regarding how to rank in the age of AI. In this episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter, Tim cuts through the noise to explain the transition from traditional Search Engine Optimization to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). While the tools are changing rapidly, the core mission remains the same: ensuring that your customers’ “digital concierge” knows exactly who you are and why you’re the right choice for your customer. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders ”Do No Harm": Before chasing new AI trends, ensure you aren’t breaking what already works. Traditional SEO still drives the majority of traffic for many businesses and, more importantly, often provides the foundational data that AI models use to understand your brand. The Reality of GEO: Whether you call it AEO, AIO, or GEO, the practice of appearing in AI answer agents is still maturing. Recent data shows that even major players like LinkedIn are seeing significant shifts in traffic patterns, making it essential to track your visibility in AI Overviews and agents. Your Brand is the Prompt: In the "Age of the Concierge," AI doesn’t just look for links; it looks for brand consensus and context. If the AI gets your brand details wrong, it’s a sign your digital signal is weak. Your goal is to build a brand so distinct that customers ask for it by name — effectively making your brand the search prompt itself. The Toolset for 2026: Showing up requires measurement. Tools like Peec AI and seoClarity are becoming the new standard for measuring "share of model" and visibility within generative engines. Customer Experience is Queen: AI agents are becoming more efficient at converting traffic than traditional search. This means your website must be optimized for "the handoff" — providing clear, structured information that an AI agent can easily digest and present to a human being… otherwise known as your customer. SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links GEO vs. AEO vs. AIO vs. SEO on Google Trends Rand Fishkin proved AI recommendations are inconsistent – here’s why and how to fix it Are Citations in AI Search Affected by Google Organic Visibility Changes? AEO And GEO: Google’s Outbound Traffic Down 33%: The GEO Revolution Is Here Airbnb says traffic from AI chatbots converts better than Google LinkedIn abandons traditional SEO as 60% traffic loss forces radical strategy shift The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) 7 Best AI Search Visibility Tools for Enterprises (2026) Tools mentioned in this episode: Peec AI – AI Search Analytics for Marketing Teams seoClarity – AI Search Optimization Platform Finseo – AI-Powered SEO Tools for Next-Gen Search Optimization SE Ranking – AI SEO Software Profound – Optimize Brand Visibility in AI Search AI Search Monitoring Tool – Track ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AIO Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface and edited in Ableton Live 12 Suite. Running time: 20m 29s 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. Transcript: SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge Welcome back to Digital Reset with Tim Peter. There is so much mixed information about what’s going on with AI tools and most importantly, what you need to do to show up in AI answer engines. That’s "mixed information," by the way, not "mis-information". I don’t think people are lying. OK, mostly nobody’s lying. I bet somebody is though. The truth, though is that we’re still in the very early days for so much of what is going on with artificial intelligence. And so it’s hard to authoritatively state that this is the absolute one and only possible truth about the way that AI works and that AI answer engines work. As you might imagine, I’m somewhat skeptical about that framing that there’s only one possible answer here. First, up until recently, most digital marketers couldn’t even agree on what to call the practice of showing up in AI answer engines. Some called it GEO, some called it AEO, some called it AIO. Oy! If you don’t know what your practice is called, if you don’t know what you’re actually working on, that’s a damned fine sign that the practice itself isn’t very mature. For now, I’m calling it GEO. At least judging by Google Trends data, GEO appears to be the winning term. It looks like a pretty clear winner. If I’m being honest, I don’t really love the term GEO. I fully admit to thinking that doing right by search engines generally benefits AI and that it’s all SEO in the end. I appear to be losing that argument though. Such is life. More importantly, these tools are evolving and fast. What’s true today may be less true weeks or even days from now. You can’t go a day or more without some new change being made or some new change being announced by the big players around these tools. What is most important is making sure that AI answer engines and AI assistants and AI agents know about your brand and your business. It’s why I’m so keen on this concept that your brand is the prompt. It’s easiest to ensure you show up if your customers and their AI assistants and agents ask for you by name. Regardless, you want, and need, these tools to surface your brand and recommend you to their users. That’s even more critical as we move towards agentic interfaces, which are coming. Your brand has to appear as an option or else you simply don’t exist. We’ve moved past an age of card catalogs into an age of concierges. As I talked about last week, I think that Google’s AI Overviews are the biggest single AI that most customers interact with regularly. And I expect that growth to continue. So there’s a ton of overlap, not only between your SEO and GEO goals and efforts, but also in terms of how your customers might find and experience your brand in the immediate term to midterm. My goal today for this episode isn’t to tell you how you show up. Instead, I want to talk about some foundational elements that matter as you work to show up, that ensure your brand and your business benefit, no matter how these tools evolve and change over time. I want to make sure you can tell where it’s important to focus your energies and where it’s not as you help your customers find you. This is episode 485 of The Big Show. Today we’re talking about SEO and GEO in the age of AI. Let’s dive in. So I think we all agree it’s unbelievably important that you show up in AI answer engines. What I’m not sure we completely agree upon is the fact that you need to show up in SEO still too, in traditional search. I want to give full credit to SEO expert Lily Ray for this idea, but we want to think about the fact that first, “do no harm.” Forget for a moment how you show up in AI answer engines. Of course you want to do that. I also suspect, and see this with my own clients, that for most businesses, even in a world of zero-click searches, Google still represents a significant, and probably your largest, single source of traffic. So the first thing you want is don’t do anything that screws up what Google gives you. This isn’t an SEO versus GEO question. It’s SEO plus GEO. Remember, you don’t get the plus if you mess up one side of the equation or other. As you read GEO advice, as you listen to GEO experts, as you listen to people talk about this, you need to ask yourself, “does this have the potential to hurt our current organic situation?” If the answer is no, go ahead and do it. Do it immediately even. If the answer is yes, well, don’t ignore it outright. Instead, then ask, “okay, how do we gain the benefits of this recommendation while also keeping our existing SEO position — or better yet, improving that existing SEO position?” Again, it’s not either SEO or GEO. It’s SEO and GEO, SEO plus GEO. Second, and you’ve heard me say this many times that customer experience is queen. I’m kind of bundling the first two portions of our royal c

The "Search Bar" isn’t dying; it’s evolving into an expensive gated community. In this episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter (formerly Thinks Out Loud), Tim breaks down the economic reality of Google’s bananas $400 billion year. Despite the hype surrounding AI as a "search killer," Google’s 17% growth in search ads proves that the 800-lb. gorilla still dominates the discovery landscape. We are also witnessing a structural shift from the “Age of the Card Catalog” to the “Age of the Concierge.” AI assistants and agents are turning into “context engines,” consolidating and connecting brand signals from across the web to provide direct recommendations rather than just lists of links. To survive this latest phase of your customers’ "Digital Reset," brands must move beyond Big Tech dependency and reclaim their demand through clear, consistent content and experiences. And they must become brands customers will ask for by name. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders The Economic Scale: Google’s growth in 2025 was larger than the total annual revenue of OpenAI, reinforcing that Big Tech continues to lead in the marketplace. The Concierge Reality: It’s been clear for a while that discovery has moved from "finding links” to "receiving recommendations.” The reality is that AI trusts brand consensus — what it finds out about your brand everywhere — over marketing claims on just one or two channels. This is a profound shift and one that marketers must address today. The Tax on Discovery: With ad revenue reaching $82 billion in a single quarter, the cost of "buying back" your customers via Big Tech continues to rise. Keep repeating, “Gatekeepers gonna gate.“ Your Brand is the Prompt: In the “Age of the Concierge,” the only signal a machine cannot fabricate is a clear, consistent, human brand identity. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Google Earnings Q4 2025 OpenAI CFO says annualized revenue crosses $20 billion in 2025 | Reuters “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) Digital advertising trends for 2026 – Think with Google Marriott brings hotel bookings directly into… • Hospitality.today Marriott (MAR) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript – AOL Alphabet earnings, Q4 2025: CEO’s remarks Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) Q4 FY2025 earnings call transcript Number of ChatGPT Users (January 2026) Google Search Statistics 2026: Search Habits Revealed Now • SQ Magazine Google AI Overview Statistics: 2026 Trends and Impact | Heroic Rankings New Data: Google AI Overviews Now Appear in 60% of Searches Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Episode 481) What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 17m 43s 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. Transcript: The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. As a marketer and digital strategist, there’s one source of Intel that I love to check out all the time, and that is Big Tech’s earnings calls. Big Tech tends to know more about what’s going on with our customers than anyone. Where they’re making and spending money tells us more about the state of digital and where it’s headed than just about anything else we can look at. Usually when I do this, I look at the Frightful Five as a collection. I want to see Amazon. I want to see Google. I want to see Facebook. I want to see Apple. I want to see Microsoft. Sometimes I even share thoughts from folks like Shopify or Spotify or Expedia or Booking.com to get a bigger picture of the state of digital. This time, though, I’m going in the opposite direction. I’m only looking at the 800-pound gorilla that scares every other beast in the jungle. And that is Google. I’ll get into some of the details of Google’s earnings and what they mean in a few minutes. For now though, it’s enough to say that Google had a giant, massive, mammoth quarter. Almost $114 billion in revenue, an 18% increase year on year. That is, in a word, bananas. If it’s not immediately obvious, Google’s financials make all the chatter about them losing market share and mind share to OpenAI and ChatGPT look, well, downright silly. I don’t mean to diss ChatGPT, they fired the first shot of the AI revolution. But as the saying goes, money talks and, well, other stuff walks. And Google is making serious money. Another thing to recognize is that Google’s earnings mostly come from ads, which means that their 18% growth is pulled straight from your pockets. They’re charging more tolls in more places to more businesses and reaping the rewards. Gatekeepers gonna gate, don’t you know? What else can we learn from Google’s earnings? What do their earnings mean for your business in reality? And what can you do to succeed in a world still controlled by the baddest beast in the entire jungle? This is Digital Reset with Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. So yeah, Google got that bag last quarter, as the kids say. They generated $114 billion in revenue in Q4, up 17%. They also pulled in more than $400 billion in revenue for the year, their biggest ever, up 15%. By the way, quick aside, I’m not trying to manage your portfolio. I’m only looking at this through the lens of where are your customers interacting with AI? All right, not stock advice, please. Anyway, 15% growth is great when you’re a $25 million company. That would represent an extra $3.75 million in sales. I mean, that is good work, right? Yeah. Okay, Google pulled in almost $53 billion in extra sales last year. To put this in context, OpenAI made over $20 billion in revenue in 2025, according to their CFO. That means that Google’s growth in 2025 was two and a half times OpenAI’s total revenues. If you want your first big takeaway from this, it’s that Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Google also made $82.3 billion in revenue from ads in Q4, up roughly $9.8 billion year on year. That’s about a 13.6% increase. That $82.3 billion is fully 72% of Google’s total revenues. Hell, search alone represents 55% of Google’s total revenues. As CFO Ruth Porat said it best on their earnings call, “Search revenues really reflected broad-based growth across verticals. Search remained the largest contributor to revenue growth.” Google’s ad growth happened despite lots of folks claiming that the company was under serious threat from OpenAI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others. Now, not to keep kicking OpenAI in the teeth, but YouTube and Google Network — that’s the non-search ads portion of Google’s advertising platform; it contributes just 16.9% of the company’s revenue — generated $7 billion more in the quarter than OpenAI did all of last year. Damn. Let’s just not forget though where that revenue came from. It came from you. When you hear that Google had a great quarter or year, just remember it’s that it’s your ad dollars that paid for that. They’re collecting a toll from you to reach your customers. Google is in very good shape long-term here, built on your ad dollars. Now, I’m not saying that OpenAI is doomed, though I did hint at it at that towards the end of last year. What I am saying is that they’ve got a long way to go if they’re going to compete head to head with Google’s money machine. And all of that is before we talk about Google being the AI underneath the hood for Siri on Apple devices, which I broke down here on the show last month. So that’s two big takeaways. The third major takeaway is that Google is using AI to improve its ad products in a big, big way. Philip Schindler noted on Google’s earnings call that, and this is a quote, “AI innovation across our ads ecosystem is core to every aspect of our product portfolio, from targeting, bidding, creative, measurement, and across campaign types.” In short, Google is using AI. It’s heavily integrating AI into its core

Summary: In this episode, Tim Peter explores why we need to stop asking if AI is a replacement for social or search, and start seeing it for what it truly is: The Context Engine for your customers. As Tim explains in the episode, AI doesn’t just find links. It’s not a social site where your customers hang out. AI is a Context Engine that synthesizes your website, your social signals, your content, and your reviews to create a context that guests and agents trust. The discussion outlines why social media and search remain critical as "human signal" providers that customers’ AI assistants and agents use to build a consensus view of your brand and business. Key Takeaways for Leaders: The Consensus Principle: AI trusts patterns; consistent positioning across your website, reviews, and social channels is core to make sure AI recommends your brand. Customer Experience is Data: Reviews are no longer just for customers—they are training data for AI answer engines. Your response (or lack thereof) tells LLMs and AI answer engines how much you value your customers. Multi-Channel Accumulation: Discovery is expanding, not shrinking. For marketing, digital strategy, and e-commerce leaders in travel, hospitality, financial services, SaaS, and more, your "Digital Reset" means mastering the story the internet tells about your brand across platforms your customers use. Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Are chatbots the new social media? The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Episode 481) What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) Should Your Business Have a ChatGPT App? (Episode 479) What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) The New SEO? (Episode 469) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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 51s 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. Transcript: Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. So I wrote a piece the other day. I think people who watch this show regularly know that I sometimes contribute to a series on hospitality net that they call the World Panel, where we talk about various issues in hospitality marketing and in digital marketing more broadly. And there was a whole discussion around a question that keeps coming up again and again and again, which is, you know, is AI replacing search? Is AI replacing social? Are chat bots the new social media? And what struck me about this is we keep asking whether one channel replaces another. And that’s almost never how this works. Channels don’t die. They accumulate. And I can’t imagine that AI is going to replace them. It consumes them. And what I mean by that is it requires the information that comes from search and that comes from social in order to do what it does. So in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how you can stop chasing shiny objects. understand how discovery actually works right now, and then decide where you can focus so you don’t have to try to do everything. Sounds cool? Let’s dive in. So let’s talk about what happens with regard to new channels coming up. Obviously today we’re talking about AI, but previously we could have talked about search. Previously we could have talked about social media. If you think about it, we don’t see any channel completely wipe out another one all that often. TV did not kill radio. Some of you probably still listen to the radio pretty regularly. I hope you’re listening to this right now. Even podcasts didn’t kill radio. Social didn’t kill email. Texting didn’t kill email. Mobile didn’t kill desktop. Channels don’t. die. What happens instead is that our customers make changes in terms of validating their decisions. They need different sources. They look for different sources to check, particularly for purchases that are more complicated, purchases that are bigger, purchases that matter more in their lives. So what changes is not what channels get used, but how many sources our customers check. So obviously, when we talk about social and we talk about hospitality specifically, this is true in B2B, this is true in a lot of different industries. But we know that customers today check social media, they check influencers, they check online travel agencies in the case of travel, they check artificial intelligence, and all of those are growing. All of those are growing at the same time. This isn’t a one-off. This is something that’s changing every single day. When people care about a decision, they don’t look in fewer places. They look in more. So yes, AI is growing faster than any of those others, but all of them are growing. The funny thing is even TV grew a little bit year on year in terms of where customers look for validation of the answers that matter to them. And that’s a really important thing for you to think about. Because when we think about artificial intelligence, when we think about how it works with social or how it works with search, It’s a synthesis engine. You know, it isn’t just a place. I’m going to pick all that up. I got to take a sip of water. Ahem. So when we think about artificial intelligence, it’s not just another place for people to get inspiration for the things they’re looking for. That absolutely happens. I want to be really clear. That is a thing that occurs. What it also is, is it’s a synthesis engine. It is a place that brings together content from a variety of different sources and provides some context for your customers and provides some additional information for your customers. It helps them ask deeper and sometimes more meaningful questions that matter to them. But if you think about this for, you know, a minute. recognize that where AI gets its information, where it gains its understanding from what you say on your website, it gets it from what you say on social posts, it gets it from what other people say about you on social media and in social posts and in ratings and reviews. And it gets that information from other third party mentions. So that could be PR, it could be… you know, other kinds of press. could be other websites talking about you. It could be things like if you have an online travel agency or if there’s another kind of intermediary in your specific industry, mentions on those third party sites that tell the AI all about you and help the AI understand the content that confirms what it’s seeing in other places. So social still absolutely matters. still a crucial component of what you do with your business because it provides human signals on top of things that maybe you said about yourself or I don’t know, maybe had an AI write about your brand. Social provides human signals. It adds tone. It adds credibility. It adds consistency. You know, when we think about search engine optimization and generative engine optimization, GEO seems to be the name folks are settling on these days. Obviously, we’re not optimizing around keywords. We’re helping machines understand who we are. And there’s fancy words, you know, when we think about things like entity relationships and entity graphs and the like that help connect. the AI to your content and help make your content stand out or help your content be better interpreted, better understood by the AI. That’s really, really good. That’s really useful and something you need to think about. But we also have to recognize that artificial intelligence doesn’t replace social. It doesn’t replace your website. It doesn’t really even replace search. It learns from it. I’m going to talk about this in a future episode, I Google just reported it

I’ve never seen a single person with a tattoo for Marriott Bonvoy, the hotel brand’s “loyalty” program. Or, for that matter, for Hilton Honors (its loyalty program) or Wyndham Rewards (its loyalty program). Hell, I don’t have a tattoo for United Airlines MileagePlus, and I fly roughly 80,000 miles with the company every year. But I’ve see a ton of folks with tattoos for Harley Davidson. And Fender guitars. And Disney. And Lego. And Nike. Wouldn’t you think that more “loyal” customers would have tattoos for brands that depend on loyalty programs for their businesses? I know I would. The fact is that loyalty often isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And, in the age of AI, that’s a huge problem. Because if your customers aren’t willing to ask for your brand by name, you might be in real trouble. In this episode of the show, I take a look at: What customers really value Why AI makes actual loyalty more important than ever What you need to do to drive more loyalty from your customers in the age of AI And how you can set your business up for greater success long term. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Why Nobody Has a Marriott Bonvoy Tattoo… And Why That Matters in the Age of AI (Episode 482) & — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Belonging to the Brand Book – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Episode 481) Should Your Business Have a ChatGPT App? (Episode 479) Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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 08s 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. Transcript: Why Nobody Has a Marriott Bonvoy Tattoo… And Why That Matters in the Age of AI Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. I was honored to take part in a fireside chat at a hotel conference the other day, and at one point something I said got a much bigger reaction than I expected. I said that “I’ve seen a lot of Harley Davidson tattoos on people who love that brand. I’ve never seen a Marriott Bonvoy tattoo.” First, some folks in the audience laughed. So, you know, that’s nice. I’m not gonna lie. I think it’s a funny line too. Then the room got really quiet though. Like pin-drop quiet. Curious, no? Later, as I was signing books, person after person came up to me and said some version of the same thing. They said, “what you said really hit me because we spend so much time on loyalty, but we don’t really know our guests as human beings.” Now, don’t get me wrong, this story isn’t just about hotels. Every company that deals with customers is going to face some version of this same story. And that’s what I want to talk about today. Because in a world where AI assistants and agents are starting to choose hotels on behalf of guests, where AI assistants and agents mediate the conversation between you and your customers, the difference between a brand people care about and a brand that’s just another option on a screen is going to matter more than ever. Let’s dive in and look at this in detail. So there was an amazing audience at this conference, an amazing group of people & hotel marketers and revenue managers and customer experience teams and reservations folks and IT people & just a wide array of people all focused on how they took care of their customers. None of these people were, you know, “stuffy corporate types.” These are the folks who actually deal with customers with their guests when something goes wrong. They live in the trenches. Their job is to keep their customers happy every single day. So I obviously I made the crack about Marriott Bonvoy and then I talked to people afterwards. And literally, to a person, people kept wanting to talk about how they’ve got all of these profiles, they’ve got all of these accounts, but they don’t really know what matters to the guests on a given trip, during a given stay, during a given interaction. Does that sound familiar to you? Is that what it feels like when you’re talking to your customers? Because you’re not alone if that’s the case. Here’s the dirty little secret about loyalty in hospitality and in airlines and in retail and lots and lots more. Most loyalty programs are really about points. They’re really about how many rewards your customer’s gonna get. Real loyalty though, real loyalty to your brand. It’s about identity. It’s about customers who feel like you’re a part of them, who feel like you belong with them or not. That Harley Davidson versus Bonvoy line isn’t a joke. It’s a warning. People don’t get tattoos about discounts or perks or elite status. It’s just not a thing that actually makes them feel seen. What do they tattoo? Who they believe they are. In my book, Digital Reset, I share the story of how I realized that fact about brand tattoos. I used to go to this local brew pub where I lived, near where I lived & I didn’t live at the brew pub. I probably felt that way some days. But, you know, on nice Sunday afternoons we might stop by. And there was a group of Harley Davidson enthusiasts who would pull in after enjoying their weekly ride. This was something they did all the time. The group were, generally speaking, contractors and construction workers and folks like that. And as I wrote in the book, “…one dentist with the heart of a rebel yearning to break free.” But the thing is, that’s not a joke. He lived the concept of “live to ride, ride to live,” despite his otherwise, well, dentist-like demeanor. He didn’t like Harley Davidson. He lived Harley Davidson. This guy was a Harley Davidson rider, just like I’m a Fender guitar player or a Martin guitar player. Those speak to me. And many hotel brands — hell, many brands overall — don’t give their customers a story about themselves. They give a transaction. There are absolutely exceptions to this rule. Margaritaville Hotels and Resorts does this really well. 21C Museum Hotels, I think, does a great job of this. Very high end luxury hotels like the Ritz in London, the George V in Paris, or the Metropole at Monte Carlo, along with independent hotels like the Drover in Fort Worth, the Acoma House in Denver, and my friends and clients at the Wentworth Mansion, John Rutledge House Inn, King’s Courtyard, and Fulton Lane Inn all do this brilliantly. There are loads of examples outside hospitality too of brands that customers adore even though some aren’t very large companies. All of which should signal that it’s possible to do this no matter who you are or how big your company is. And that should give you hope. Because AI makes the fact that most businesses don’t do this, perilous for their long-term prospects. Okay, so why is this perilous? Why is this perilous for long-term prospects? Well, when an AI assistant or agent chooses your business, it chooses your company, it chooses your hotel if you’re a hotel, it’s not going to ask who has the best vibes. It’s going to ask which business meets criteria it can measure. Your brand runs the risk of being reduced to nothing more than a price, a location, an availability of your product or service or a room, or the points that you offer. You get turned into a commodity. Your brand becomes invisible. All that matters then is some very specific, tactical, practical, measurable summary. And that’s what scares me. Not AI, but what happens to brands that never build anything that people care about. I’ll repeat a mantra you’ve heard me say before: “Your brand is the prompt.” There’s actually a follow-on to that that I never really say out loud because if you don’t hear this, you should. “Your brand is the prompt… or you won’t exist.” That’s a huge, huge reality that you need to be conscious about. The other w

As I’ve mentioned in the past, last year was not about incremental change. Nope. It was all about dramatic change. We all started off last year “playing with AI.” Today? The question is if and when AI assistants and agents will be the norm for every interaction we have with our customers. What do we need to do to act accordingly? How do we create experiences that work whether we’re talking with human beings or with machines acting on behalf of those human beings? Most importantly, how do we build brands worth asking for by name when people might not see the brand until their AI picks it for them? In this “Best of the Show” episode, I try to answer these questions and place them into an actionable framework you can use, right now, and make sure your customers & and your business & both get to enjoy the benefits AI can bring. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) Here We Go Again: Marketing in Another Bizarre Economy (Thinks Out Loud 456) In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) Digital Reset: Build Customer Relationships Big Tech—and AI—Can’t Touch (Thinks Out Loud 458) Digital Reset is Here (Thinks Out Loud 461) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455) What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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 08s 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. Transcript: AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026  Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. This week looks a little different than normal. I’ve been traveling and speaking like mad, and instead of pushing out something rushed or half baked, I wanted to make sure you still got something that actually moves the needle for you and your business. Because as you’ve seen, marketing is at a turning point. AI is not just another trend. It is an entirely structural shift in how customers discover brands, how they make decisions, and how businesses like yours continue to grow. So today I’m bringing you one of the most important episodes. We’ve recorded a conversation that pulls together what changed, what matters, and what comes next for anyone responsible for growth, brand or customer experience. This isn’t a conversation about tools. It’s about how to make sure your brand still gets chosen when AI assistance and agents do more of the choosing. Even if you’ve heard this before, give it another listen with fresh ears, because the future I was talking about then is already here. Let’s dive in. If you think back to the beginning of 2025, we were asking very simple questions about what AI was going to do for us. We were asking things like, “Can AI write a blog post? Can it write a headline? Can it create an image?" Today, we’re already asking whether AI is going to replace the very concept of searching and “how soon AI will become your customer.” How soon the things that you will do will not be on behalf of the human, but on behalf of the artificial intelligence? And the big idea here is that this has not been a year of incremental change. This has been a year of decoupling. We’re seeing the decoupling of finding from clicking. We’re seeing the decoupling of discovery from awareness. And we’re seeing the decoupling of our brands and our websites from the people who traditionally have used them. Now over the course of the last year, we’ve done 33 episodes of this show, and I’m going to try as best I can to synthesize those 33 episodes down into one actionable framework that you can use going forward. I’m going to cover a bunch of stuff. All of the realities that we’re seeing in terms of what’s happening with gatekeepers, why I think it’s ever more important that your brand is the prompt and in particular, why your digital reset is your core path forward in 2026. So let’s start with “Gatekeepers gonna gate." You’ve heard me say this a gazillion times on this show. Earlier this year, we talked about all of the different ways that Big Tech gets between you and your customers and all of the things that they do to build that relationship. Not for you, but for themselves. As you know, Big Tech isn’t here to help you find customers. Big Tech is here to help themselves find customers. They are here to keep customers within their ecosystem. Yes, they are dependent upon ads, so there will have to be clicks at some point in the process if they are going to make some money. What’s also true is that for many years when we think about search or we think about social, we’ve been in a reality where some of those clicks, some of the time, were free. Increasingly, we’re entering a world where every meaningful click for your business may be paid from these folks. In episode 467, we looked at the real story of zero-click search. And if Google provides an answer via an AI Overview or within Gemini, or ChatGPT provides an answer, or Claude provides an answer, or Perplexity provides an answer, your blue link, your organic search result doesn’t matter. That ship has sailed. Those days are gone. The reality is that you aren’t competing with other brands anymore. You’re competing with the platform’s desire and need to keep the user. You’re competing with Big Tech itself. Now, as you well know, that means that the cost of rented land is essentially going up. You’ve heard me say — you’ve heard lots of people over the years say — "don’t build your brand on rented land.” The reality now is that everything is becoming rented land. We’re in a crazy new world and it’s just going to get crazier. We know that Google is already testing ad products. We know that ChatGPT has tested some and may again and we just should expect more of that. We also know, as we discussed in episode 456 of the show, that we’re in a strange economy. Things might be tough in 2026. You can’t afford to pay a toll to Big Tech on every transaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 20 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 30 percent. It’s more expensive than you want to have to pay in an environment where you’re probably going to be competing for every last dollar and if every last penny. And so the key question that I think we have to ask ourselves, regardless of which member of Big Tech we’re talking about, is if Google or Meta or ChatGPT or Amazon, whomever, Expedia, Booking.com, Yelp, Yext, OpenTable, right? Any of these folks. If they turned off your traffic tomorrow, would your business survive another day? That’s the world we’re living in now and that’s the question you need to ask. If Google turned off your traffic tomorrow, how long could you survive? To me, that was the aha moment of the year. And it’s why I’ve become so convinced that your brand is the prompt. In an AI world, the notion of generic search, the notion of unbranded search is dead. If someone asked an AI for best hotel, the AI is going to choose the winner. You really don’t get a lot of say in that. If someone asked for a specific hotel, "Tim’s Hotel in Charleston," "Tim’s Hotel in Orlando," you are the only answer. That’s where you’re trying to get to. We need to think about our brand as the insurance policy that sets us apart from everybody else. As I mentioned in episode 472, "brand isn’t everything; it’s the only thing." Your brand is the only thing an AI cannot replicate. It’s the only thing it can’t answer in place of you, right? When somebody asks for you by brand, aure, the AI might hallucinate, but that’s going to tell the customer pretty quickly that that’s not giving them the answer they’re looking for. The other thing is your brand is a ment

We’ve all known it was coming, but OpenAI finally announced its long-awaited introduction of ads into ChatGPT. Now, you can buy your way into ChatGPT’s chats so your brand can be seen by potential customers when they’re having conversations relevant to your business. This is great, right? I mean, don’t you want to be the first company to sign up? Maybe. But, maybe there’s a bigger picture that we need to look at too. In this episode of The Digital Reset Show with Tim Peter, Tim looks at: What OpenAI announced about ads in ChatGPT… and what they didn’t OpenAI’s guiding principles for ads and how their ads will work at launch OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Go plan Insights into how ChatGPT ads might fit into your digital reset What Google is doing to maintain its competitive position in the digital advertising space What ChatGPT ads might mean for your business How you can use a “core and explore” methodology to put ChatGPT ads to work for your business And a whole lot more. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Podcast Episode 481) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links ChatGPT’s announcement about ads: Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT George Roukas’ brilliant comment on LinkedIn about customers explicitly training AI to avoid brands they’ve had bad experiences with. Genius. What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) Google Is Personalizing Some AI Overviews & AI Mode Answers Google Announces AI Mode Checkout Protocol, Business Agent Google Gemini Gains Share As ChatGPT Declines In Similarweb Data PDF link to original Similarweb study Google’s blog post “New ways to plan travel with AI in Search” The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Episode 425) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Google AI Mode Ads – Explore Guides and Articles Google Introduces Agentic Commerce Protocol & Direct Offers Ads In AI Mode Google Announces AI Mode Checkout Protocol, Business Agent Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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: 17m 28s 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. Transcript: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Episode 481) Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. Well, it’s happening. ChatGPT is putting ads in its chats. We’ve kind of all known this was coming for a while. They’ve announced that they’re going to "start testing ads in the US for the free and Go tiers." That’s a quote. And that Go tier is a new plan that they’re offering for eight bucks per month. OpenAI also mentioned that their "Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads." That’s also a quote and more about that later. We’ve all known that ads were coming to ChatGPT. The world of gatekeepers gonna gate essentially demands it. What we didn’t know was how those ads would work. And now we kind of do, at least in a few ways. The question is, what do ads on ChatGPT mean for your business? Should you participate in these? Should you use these? What are these ads good for? And most importantly, how should you think about ads and artificial intelligence overall for your business? This is episode 481 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. There are a few points that marketers should keep in mind for the moment when it comes to ads on ChatGPT. And I’m kind of going to go through these one by one. OpenAI says that, and this is a quote, "To start, we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation." I’m gonna be abundantly clear. I think that that is a capital G, capital T, good thing. Aligning ads with relevant answers ensures that customers continue to have a positive experience with your brand and a positive perception of your brand. You’re not interrupting them, you’re not getting in the way of what they’re trying to do, you’re simply enhancing that experience. That’s great on a number of levels. My colleague George Roukas pointed out on LinkedIn that customers at some point will be able to train their agents and AI assistants not to suggest given brands if they’ve had bad experiences with those brands in the past. That’s a huge deal. This obviously underscores my long-standing point that customer experience is queen. It also shows why it’s so important that ChatGPT’s ads not give bad vibes to potential customers. For as much as I’ve talked about the downsides of negative reviews on social and other places online, I hadn’t really thought about how damaging it might be if your customers taught their agents never to buy from you, never to recommend you, ever. So that’s a really great point, George. I really appreciate you bringing that one to the conversation. It’s definitely food for thought as you consider ChatGPT’s ads. Now, another piece of good news is that I’ve always been a fan of search ads because they’re tied to what customers are looking for. Google didn’t make roughly $400 billion last year by ignoring what their customers literally asked them for. Google Ads is one of the most successful products in history simply because it actually solves a problem in a moment of need. ChatGPT, following a similar approach, makes loads and loads of sense for them. It also has the potential to make loads and loads of dollars for OpenAI, too. I think it’s a really, really smart play. So cool, that’s the good news portion of the program. I don’t want to say the next bit is the bad news portion. It’s that there are a lot of unknowns. There is no indication yet of whether the ads in ChatGPT will link to your web presence or whether they’ll keep customers within the ChatGPT environment. I will tell you, I know which one I’m betting on long term. You know, you may receive brand awareness, you may receive organic traffic or branded search volume from people finding you in these ads, but you still might not get many clicks or, you know, any clicks. Time will tell if they’re going to limit these solely to businesses connected via ChatGPT’s apps and whether that’s going to happen at launch or whether that’s going to happen in the future. I’m not gonna have much else to say on this one until we see how the ads work in practice, but you can bet I’m going to be watching. Speaking of, ChatGPT has stated a number of principles around how they believe ads should work as part of their environment and why it matters so much to them to maintain user trust. I think that’s great. I genuinely believe in this. And I believe them. Just like I believe that Google honestly meant “Don’t be evil” back when they used to say that. You know, keep OpenAI’s words I just said a moment ago in mind. “To start,” they said. Keep that mind. This is a test. They don’t know how ads will work for users in practice, maybe not even as much as we do. It’s tough to predict too much about what you should or should not do in terms of their ads because they don’t really exist yet. They’re announced, but we haven’t seen them. What their ads product will look like when it launches and what it will look like 90 days later could be radically different. I’m going to bet it will be. At launch, they’re going to limit ads to ChatGPT’s two lowest priced tiers, free and the eight bucks a month one. At launch, the ads will only appear at the bottom of the chat. So you can bet I’m going to review what they’re actually doing maybe 30 days, 60 days and 90 days after launch to see whether any of that has changed. To say nothing of what might happen six months down the road or a year down the road I have a pretty, pretty high degree of confidence that if ChatGPT’s ads don’t satisfy advertisers’ demands for traffic or contribute meaningfully to ChatGPT’s bottom line, they’ll almost certainly make sure those ads are featured much more prominently. Now, it took a long time for Google’s ads to become as prominent as they are today. If you do a Google search, they’re all over t

Apple just signed a billion-dollar deal to have Google’s AI power Siri and other AI experiences on its devices. This is a huge blow to OpenAI. It’s also fairly meaningful for your business too. Why is that? What does the Apple/Google AI deal mean for your business? In this episode of The Digital Reset Show with Tim Peter, Tim looks at: Why the Apple/Google AI deal is another sign that gatekeepers gonna gate What this deal means for OpenAI and ChatGPT What the deal also means for your business How you can be sure to succeed in the longer term no matter what happens with Apple, Google, OpenAI, and all the rest Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. What Google and Apple’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Joint statement from Google and Apple How Apple Is Buying an AI Strategy From Google Apple is genius for tapping Google to fix Siri and Apple Intelligence – Fast Company Apple, Google strike Gemini deal for revamped Siri in major win for Alphabet | Reuters The LinkedIn post that inspired this episode. Feel free to join the conversation there: Post on LinkedIn Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474)* Blow for OpenAI in Germany as court rules song lyrics used illegally | dpa international A consumer watchdog issued a warning about Google’s AI agent shopping protocol — Google says she’s wrong | TechCrunch Alphabet hits $4 trillion valuation as AI refocus lifts sentiment | Reuters Google Gemini Gains Share As ChatGPT Declines In Similarweb Data Similarweb study PDF link Google Announces AI Mode Checkout Protocol, Business Agent Google Is Personalizing Some AI Overviews & AI Mode Answers What’s next for AI in 2026 | MIT Technology Review Google: Don’t make “bite-sized” content for LLMs if you care about search rank – Ars Technica Google announces AI Overviews in Gmail search, experimental AI-organized inbox – Ars Technica Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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: 18m 07s 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. Transcript: What Google and Apple’s AI Deal Means for Your Business Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. You may have seen the news that Apple has signed a deal to have Google provide AI capabilities for Siri and its devices. As New York Magazine put it, “Apple is buying an AI strategy from Google.” And I posted on LinkedIn about why this is really, really bad news for OpenAI and ChatGPT. But this isn’t a story about Apple or Google or OpenAI or anyone else, really. It’s a story about your brand and your business and why this matters. Why? What makes this deal matter to you? I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 480 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. My first reaction when I saw the Apple/Google AI news was that OpenAI, the folks that make ChatGPT, is screwed. And let’s be clear, I still think that, by the way. It’s just not the most important part of the story. To get to the most important part of the story though, takes a little bit of setup. And here’s why. I have argued for a while that OpenAI is in big trouble. OpenAI and Google, along with others, can only drive adoption of their core AI technologies by offering customers useful capabilities, getting those capabilities into customers’ hands, and then finding a way to make revenue and profits from that. Those are the three legs of the stool anytime you offer a product or service: utility, distribution, and monetization. ChatGPT clearly provides utility. But its distribution and monetization plans have been, well, to put it mildly, lacking for some time. I talked about this a few episodes ago, which I’ll link to in the show notes, but that’s why they have introduced a browser and they’re talking about making physical devices. They need a way to put their tools in more customers’ hands, sometimes literally. The deal that Google and Apple have just announced absolutely destroys one of their best paths forward for distribution and monetization, which would have been to develop a deep partnership with Apple. Google has taken that away. Clearly Gemini was always going to be the default on Android devices, right? Google simply wasn’t going to use someone else’s AI on their hardware. Now Gemini is going to be the default on Siri and more importantly, more broadly on iPhones and Macs and AirPods and Apple watches and Apple’s ecosystem overall. Being the default matters. There’s a reason that Google pays Apple over $20 billion per year to be the default search engine on iPhones and iPads. That’s how they ensure that customers use their products on Apple devices. People use defaults way more than we’d like to think. Safari is one of the top browsers in the world because it’s the default. Apple Mail is one of the top email tools. And even Apple Maps gets more use than you might expect. Regardless of what the stories tell you, there’s a lot of folks out there using Apple Maps. I’d originally assumed that being the default was so important that Google was going to pay Apple to be the default. Apparently not though. According to some of the stories I’ve seen, Apple’s going to pay Google about a billion dollars. And while that might sound like a lot of money, Fast Company’s Mark Wilson put it best. He said “Apple just straight up robbed Google.” Wilson continues by saying that, ”…increasingly, AI is a commodity. That’s one reason that, for Apple, this deal with Google is a steal. While headlines focus on the shocking nature of Google-powering Siri, it’s a fact that I suspect most iOS users will forget about in day-to-day use as they encounter more and more touchpoints of ‘Apple Intelligence.’” I completely agree. I’ve been saying for some time that AI isn’t a product all by itself. Instead, it’s more like the internet or social media. It’s an enabler that makes other products or services better. Apple’s revenues already are around $400 billion. And now it’s going to have even better AI-powered products for the low, low price of one-quarter of 1% of its annual revenues. That is dirt cheap. Even better for Google — forget the billion dollars that they’re going to get from Apple — is that they already have a way to pay for this. Google prints money. Their Ads platform is one of the all-time great revenue generation machines in history. It’s turned them into a company valued at more than $4 trillion. That’s trillion. With a T. That’s an astonishing amount of money, the highest market capitalization for any company ever. Now Google’s introduction of AI to consumers and their use of AI within their Ads platform simply make that machine, that revenue generation machine of theirs, even more effective, even more valuable. They’re already starting to add personalized ads into AI so they can get even more money here. Yes, it’s for the user’s benefit. If we have to see ads, I would argue we’re absolutely better off seeing ads we’re interested in What’s also true is that we’re more likely to click on ads that we’re interested in and drive more revenue for Google. These guys did not get to a $4 trillion valuation by mistake. Again, they know how to turn traffic into money. And as I’ve already said, this is a huge blow to OpenAI in the longer term. And that’s why this matters to your business. Because this is another example of gatekeepers gonna gate in action. OpenAI is getting shut out by gatekeepers cutting off its access to customers. That’s what gatekeepers do. They’ve done it to brands large and small for years. Of course they were going to gatekeep the next company trying to gain access to their club. That’s what they do to you too. Your brand is almost certainly downstream of these gatekeepers. It probably has been since many of these folks came into existence. You’re well aware that Google and Apple make money by standing between you and your potential customers and charging you for access to those folks via ads or their app stores, the revenue share that they get in the app stores. That $20 billion that Google pays Apple for search and the

ChatGPT has opened up its app platforms to all businesses. In general terms, that’s a Good Thing. Seriously. The question is whether this general good thing is specifically good for your and your business. In this episode of the podcast, host Tim Peter looks at ChatGPT’s apps and addresses the following questions: Are ChatGPT apps good for your business or not? What are the risks of using ChatGPT apps for your business? How can you minimize those risks and get the long-term benefit for your business from ChatGPT apps? What are your immediate next steps if you’re interested in trying ChatGPT apps to reach customers? All that and more in this episode of the show. Here are the show notes for you. Should Your Business Have a ChatGPT App? (Episode 479) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT | OpenAI App submission guidelines Introducing apps in ChatGPT and the new Apps SDK | OpenAI The Biggest Risk to Your Business? Becoming a “Hidden Intermediary” How Intermediaries Drive Up Your Costs: 5 Ways to Protect Yourself (Travel Tuesday) The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of “Digital Reset” Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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: 19m 17s 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. Transcript: Should Your Business Have a ChatGPT App? You probably saw the news right before the holidays that ChatGPT has opened up its apps to, well, essentially everyone. I think that this is a good news story generally and one that also illustrates where we’re likely to head long term. Because I’m really comfortable that we’ve all seen this movie before. In my view, we’re definitely headed for another gatekeepers gonna gate reality. Why? Well, that’s what this episode is all about. I’m going to look at ChatGPT apps, as well as the future landscape of apps in Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and talk a bit about what those mean for your business today and longer term. I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 470 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. So yeah, ChatGPT now lets developers submit apps to their platform. That is almost certainly a good news story. It’s certainly far more good news than bad. It’s very cool. It levels the playing field for most businesses. One of the biggest problems in my opinion of the launch of apps in ChatGPT was that it really favored large companies. It was limited to large companies. And it heavily skewed towards intermediaries like Zillow, OpenTable, Expedia, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, DoorDash, Instacart, and Spotify. Y’know, gatekeepers of some size or other. But by opening apps up to the world — and of course with moderation to ensure that your app meets their various guidelines — now apps in ChatGPT aren’t just for Expedia and Booking and Zillow and the like any longer. There are some downsides, and I’m gonna come back to that shortly, and more importantly, what you can do about those downsides. But overall, this is a really good thing. This is really, really beneficial and puts you, at least in theory, on an even playing field with some of the biggest players in many different verticals. Another huge benefit is that it’s almost always great when potential gatekeepers are forced to compete with one another. You have more opportunity to show up and usually have lower cost to do so, at least in the short time, when there two or more big players in a space. So having ChatGPT provide all these different apps puts a little bit of pressure on Google in some ways that could make your costs lower there in the near term. When ChatGPT limited the apps to its partners, it automatically positioned them as gatekeepers. And that’s not great. Why? Well, say it with me now: Gatekeepers gonna gate. One of the reasons that Google and Facebook and Amazon have gotten away with treating businesses and advertisers and sometimes computers like crap for so long is that there really isn’t another significant player in the areas they work in to keep them from treating people like crap. Back in the dark ages of hospitality and commerce, the very early 2000s, Expedia was a bit of a bully to hotels in the United States because Expedia simply didn’t have a credible competitor to prevent that from happening. When Booking.com showed up in the US, though, suddenly Expedia became a much better partner and the overall ecosystem has been healthier for it over the long term. And of course, both Booking and Expedia really became great partners once Google became a major player in the hospitality value chain. So “yay, competition!” One final positive for apps existing is that they provide marketers and e-commerce folks and businesses overall a much better path to make sure that they show up on ChatGPT. There will be less uncertainty, less guesswork around how you can actually appear on ChatGPT. A lot less smoke and mirrors and I would assume a lot less BS around the kinds of, “you have to post on Reddit three times a day to show up” nonsense we’ve all seen far too often over the last year or two. In short, apps on ChatGPT are a positive development overall, in my view. Of course, every silver lining has a cloud, right? We’d be foolish to overlook the potential downsides here and what they mean for your business. The biggest downside is that early adopters will probably get some quick wins, but longer term discovery is going to be a challenge for everyone. Why? I’m glad you asked. Let’s say that some tiny share of the 200 million actively maintained websites in the world, maybe 1-2%, deploy MCP servers to expose their content and data to apps in ChatGPT and to other AI agents or answer engines. For comparison’s sake, by the way, there’s roughly 2 million apps in Apple’s App Store and maybe 3 to 4 million in Google’s App Store. So, you know, 1-2%. That two to four million apps matters. Remember when I said that ChatGPT is going to moderate the apps allowed into its app store? There is no universe where that moderation is anything other than automated. There will be far too many apps for human moderation to be the norm. That’s what Apple and Google do today. And I’m going to come back to that in just a second. I think this is going to be true for pretty much all the AI answer engines, by the way. This isn’t just about apps and ChatGPT. Today there is a community maintained MCP Registry and some private MCP registries to find MCP servers so that, you know, various tools can find MCP your servers. But what happens when the number of servers scales up to the single digit millions, if not the tens of millions? Human moderation starts to break once you get past a certain point. Take Wikipedia, for example. Wikipedia has about 50 million articles. They are also the first to acknowledge that many of those 50 million articles are pretty low quality and they have almost 300,000 editors. Okay, in practice, there’s only a few thousand who are super active, but still it illustrates the problem. You don’t want a whole bunch of low quality crap if you’re ChatGPT or if you’re Perplexity or if you’re Claude. You don’t want apps coming through that just aren’t going to be all that good. There is simply no way where ChatGPT or any other serious player lets that happen with apps on their platform. No way, no how, nuh-uh. I’m 100% confident on that one. So how are apps or MCP servers going to get discovered? Well, the likely volume strongly implies that there’s going to have to be some sort of search engine, an MCP server search engine, an AI answer engine app search platform. And that implies another gatekeeping opportunity. ChatGPT is going to become that by default for apps on its platforms. They have to, or the experience is gonna be total garbage and people won’t use ChatGPT. We just know that. I’m pretty confident the same is goin

Anyone who’s read my writing or listened to the show knows that I’m generally bullish on the potential benefits of AI for customers and brands. Where I’m far less bullish is when “experts” tell you that AI will prevent you from building meaningful connections between your brand and your customers. Whether they mean to or not, they’re describing a world where every brand becomes a commodity. And, frankly, I simply refuse to go along. That view is simply nonsense. Brands exist so that customers can easily identify the products and services they know and trust. That was true 100 years ago. It will be true 100 years from now. Or, at least, it will be if we do the work, right now, that will teach customers to ask for us by name. Getting that right depends on building brands customers care about, that they’ll love, that they’ll demand. Put simply, 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 “Best of the Show” episode is all about. Here are the show notes for you. Best of the Show: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) Best of the Show: What ‘Your Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Podcast) What Amazon’s Perplexity Lawsuit Means for the Future of AI and Marketing (Episode 476) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Trivago – Wikipedia Metasearch engine – Wikipedia AI at Meta The Biggest Risk to Your Business? Becoming a "Hidden Intermediary" The Hotel Marketing and Distribution Trend You Care About Most This Year Revisiting “The New SEO” (Podcast) The Hidden Factor OTA’s Use to Get Between You and Your Guests (Travel Tuesday) – Tim Peter & Associates Most Popular Apps (2025) – Business of Apps Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) ChatGPT Atlas OpenAI’s Sam Altman hypes mystery ChatGPT device — ‘It’s so beautiful, a case would be a crime’ | Tom’s Guide These are the ChatGPT-powered AI devices that OpenAI might be working on | TechRadar Comet Browser: a Personal AI Assistant This new AI browser lets you set up ‘Skills’ to take on your everyday tasks – how it works | ZDNET Top AI Web Browsers Benchmark Including ChatGPT Atlas The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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: 15m 49s 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. Transcript: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing The single biggest story in marketing and customer acquisition this year has been artificial intelligence. That’s no surprise for anyone listening to this show. What I think is a shock and a surprise, though, is that more people don’t recognize why AI makes building your company’s brand more important than ever. AI is already disrupting relationships between customers and your brand. Right now. Today. And the typical advice around what you should do is to make sure you show up in the answer engines. That’s fine. You should do that. It’s also not enough. Let me state this right up front: AI will only hurt your relationship with your customers if you let it. The key to winning next year — and beyond! — 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. Customers use ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok,MetaAI, Google Gemini — and, more critically, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode every single day. These tools lead your customers to products and services and brands that meet their needs. Ideally, the products, services, and brands these AI platforms offer are yours. Unfortunately, far too often, they’re not. The discussion of where what that means for your business often misses a crucial point. Because many of the people talking about this shift to AI and this shift to your customers using AI for shopping and buying and engaging with brands as though the only way to win on AI is to appear in AI — solely, purely. You want to appear there, of course. But it can’t be your entire strategy. We can’t be all in with AI the expense of your website, your CRM, and your other owned channels or experiences. We can’t be all-in with AI at the expense of building a brand that customers are willing to ask for by name. How did Google get so dominant? How did Facebook? How did Amazon? Because for many businesses, they focused on appearing on those channels without working equally hard to get customers to engage directly. I refuse to concede this point. Again: 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. In this Best of the Show, I looked at why in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. I hope you’ll enjoy it. 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 t

The holidays are a great time to catch up on some of the big ideas we’ve covered on the podcast this year. And one of the biggest is the notion that “Your brand is the prompt.” That idea is even more important now that ChatGPT has opened access for any business to release their own app on the ChatGPT platform. Once businesses start taking advantage, your biggest problem won’t be getting ChatGPT to find you. It will be getting them to show you instead of the millions of other businesses who also want ChatGPT to show them. If only there was a way that companies could stand apart. If only there was a way to ensure customers found you, every single time. Oh, wait. There is. It’s called building a brand. I’ve studied how we can build brands beyond Big Tech for over 20 years. That’s the core of what my book Digital Reset is all about. Building a brand that works in the age of AI is exactly what “your brand is the prompt” really means for your business. And it’s what this Best of the Show episode of the podcast is all about. We hope you’ll enjoy revisiting this topic. We’ll be back with new episodes after the holidays. In the meantime, here are the show notes for you. Best of the Show: What ‘Your Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Tim Peter’s quick thoughts about ChatGPT opening apps to all on LinkedIn OpenAI opens ChatGPT to third-party travel apps • Hospitality.today Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT | OpenAI In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) Mark Schaefer on the most important "soft skill" in the AI Era where he talks about Amazon limiting the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day. The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) My original post about “The Brand is the Prompt” on LinkedIn Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) The New SEO? (Episode 469) AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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: 22m 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. Transcript: Best of the Show—What ‘Your Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business  2025 reinforced many of the lessons from my book, Digital Reset. One of the biggest revelations is the idea that “your brand is the prompt.” In the book I talked about why your brand is a moat that protects you from competitors and gatekeepers alike. Well, news from ChatGPT highlights exactly how important this is. You see, just last week ChatGPT announced that it’s opening up its app store to essentially anyone. I’m going to have a full show about this after the holidays, but I think we’re overlooking one key point when we only look at the upsides of ChatGPT making apps available to any business. Turns out that there are almost a billion websites in the world, roughly 200 million of them actively updated. If we assume that even one-tenth of those actively updated sites makes their content available as an app, that would create essentially 20 million apps within ChatGPT’s App Store. That’s 20 million apps that ChatGPT would have to index and curate and expose when customers asked for the services or needed the services that those apps provide. That’s not going to be managed by human beings. It’s going to be managed algorithmically. There will be — there will have to be — some form of “app store optimization” that you or your team will need to learn for you to have any chance of potential customers finding your app. Don’t believe me? Well, that’s how showing up in Apple and Google’s mobile app stores works today and they only have roughly two and 4 million apps, respectively. Put another way, visibility today depends on an algorithm when we’re talking about a scale, roughly one-tenth the size of the apps that ChatGPT will likely have. Now in our best of show episode that we’re revisiting today, I shared a story from my friend Mark Schaefer, who noted earlier this year that, Amazon has limited the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day. As I said at the time: 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. This isn’t only about books. Extrapolate that to every piece of content that you create for your brand: Every webpage Every blog post Every social media post Every email Every SMS. That’s what I said at the time. What I didn’t share then was ChatGPT apps, or those on any other AI platform, because mostly they didn’t exist at the time. Sure, we knew they were coming. But most of the business implications were largely hypothetical. Well, they’re here now and it is time to take those hypothetical implications seriously. The good news is that there’s an easier way to ensure you get found among ChatGPT many, many, many apps, and that is that “your brand is the prompt.” When you create a brand experience that customers and clients and guests love so much, they’ll seek you out by name. And “your brand is the prompt” is the topic of today’s Best of the Show episode. We’ll discuss what your brand is the prompt really means for your business. I hope you enjoy it. 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 goi

2025 has not been a year of incremental change. We’re living through dramatic changes. Most marketers and e-commerce folks started the year “playing with AI.” Now we’re considering when it will replace everyday interactions with our customers. This much change, this fast, requires us to take a moment and reflect on what we’ve learned in the last year, why it matters for our businesses, and what we need to do to deal with whatever comes next. That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Most importantly, I try to wrap up these lessons into an actionable framework you can use, today, and make sure your business gets the benefits of AI, not just the costs. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) Here We Go Again: Marketing in Another Bizarre Economy (Thinks Out Loud 456) In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) Digital Reset: Build Customer Relationships Big Tech—and AI—Can’t Touch (Thinks Out Loud 458) Digital Reset is Here (Thinks Out Loud 461) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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 39s 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. Transcript: What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. As the year wraps up, I wanted to do something a little different than what I usually do. This is not a "best of" episode and it’s not about tools or trends or predictions. Instead, it’s about the ideas that kept coming up no matter what was going on in the headlines or the news all year long. Because when I look back at 2025, we talked about AI, we talked about Google, we talked about content and SEO and brand and platforms and jobs and just a whole host of things. But underneath all of that, we were really talking about three big ideas: Who decides? What differentiates you? And who controls the relationship with your customer. So this episode is a recap of what changed this year, why it matters more than most people realize, and what I think you should do about it going into next year. This is episode 478 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. If you think back to the beginning of 2025, we were asking very simple questions about what AI was going to do for us. We were asking things like, “Can AI write a blog post? Can it write a headline? Can it create an image?" Today, we’re already asking whether AI is going to replace the very concept of searching and “how soon AI will become your customer.” How soon the things that you will do will not be on behalf of the human, but on behalf of the artificial intelligence? And the big idea here is that this has not been a year of incremental change. This has been a year of decoupling. We’re seeing the decoupling of finding from clicking. We’re seeing the decoupling of discovery from awareness. And we’re seeing the decoupling of our brands and our websites from the people who traditionally have used them. Now over the course of the last year, we’ve done 33 episodes of this show, and I’m going to try as best I can to synthesize those 33 episodes down into one actionable framework that you can use going forward. I’m going to cover a bunch of stuff. All of the realities that we’re seeing in terms of what’s happening with gatekeepers, why I think it’s ever more important that your brand is the prompt and in particular, why your digital reset is your core path forward in 2026. So let’s start with “Gatekeepers gonna gate." You’ve heard me say this a gazillion times on this show. Earlier this year, we talked about all of the different ways that Big Tech gets between you and your customers and all of the things that they do to build that relationship. Not for you, but for themselves. As you know, Big Tech isn’t here to help you find customers. Big Tech is here to help themselves find customers. They are here to keep customers within their ecosystem. Yes, they are dependent upon ads, so there will have to be clicks at some point in the process if they are going to make some money. What’s also true is that for many years when we think about search or we think about social, we’ve been in a reality where some of those clicks, some of the time, were free. Increasingly, we’re entering a world where every meaningful click for your business may be paid from these folks. In episode 467, we looked at the real story of zero-click search. And if Google provides an answer via an AI Overview or within Gemini, or ChatGPT provides an answer, or Claude provides an answer, or Perplexity provides an answer, your blue link, your organic search result doesn’t matter. That ship has sailed. Those days are gone. The reality is that you aren’t competing with other brands anymore. You’re competing with the platform’s desire and need to keep the user. You’re competing with Big Tech itself. Now, as you well know, that means that the cost of rented land is essentially going up. You’ve heard me say — you’ve heard lots of people over the years say — "don’t build your brand on rented land.” The reality now is that everything is becoming rented land. We’re in a crazy new world and it’s just going to get crazier. We know that Google is already testing ad products. We know that ChatGPT has tested some and may again and we just should expect more of that. We also know, as we discussed in episode 456 of the show, that we’re in a strange economy. Things might be tough in 2026. You can’t afford to pay a toll to Big Tech on every transaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 20 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 30 percent. It’s more expensive than you want to have to pay in an environment where you’re probably going to be competing for every last dollar and if every last penny. And so the key question that I think we have to ask ourselves, regardless of which member of Big Tech we’re talking about, is if Google or Meta or ChatGPT or Amazon, whomever, Expedia, Booking.com, Yelp, Yext, OpenTable, right? Any of these folks. If they turned off your traffic tomorrow, would your business survive another day? That’s the world we’re living in now and that’s the question you need to ask. If Google turned off your traffic tomorrow, how long could you survive? To me, that was the aha moment of the year. And it’s why I’ve become so convinced that your brand is the prompt. In an AI world, the notion of generic search, the notion of unbranded search is dead. If someone asked an AI for best hotel, the AI is going to choose the winner. You really don’t get a lot of say in that. If someone asked for a specific hotel, "Tim’s Hotel in Charleston," "Tim’s Hotel in Orlando," you are the only answer. That’s where you’re trying to get to. We need to think about our brand as the insurance policy that sets us apart from everybody else. As I mentioned in episode 472, "brand isn’t everything; it’s the only thing." Your brand is the only thing an AI cannot replicate. It’s the only thing it can’t answer in place of you, right? When somebody asks for you by brand, aure, the AI might hallucinate, but that’s going to tell the customer pretty quickly that that’s not giving them the answer they’re looking for. The other thing is your brand is a mental shortcut for your customers. It forces the AI to surface your business. That becomes even more important when we think about agentic AI, something I talked about in episodes 466, something I talked about in episode 470. We’ve moved from talking about chatbots to talking about agents. We’re entering a world where AI isn’t just software and programs that talk. They’re software that does. They’re software that acts. W

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. “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) OpenAI is a loss-making machine, can it outlast the bubble? | Windows Central ChatGPT and the end of learning – by Lakshya Jain Yann LeCun Has Been Right About AI for 40 Years. Now He Thinks Everyone Is Wrong. – WSJ OpenAI’s Sam Altman hypes mystery ChatGPT device — ‘It’s so beautiful, a case would be a crime’ | Tom’s Guide Google executive sees AI search as expansion for web | Reuters AI bubble a “key downside risk” to US economy, OECD warns The AI bust scenario that no one is talking about CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: The AI Bust Scenario That No One Is Talking About The AI-Bubble’s Most Likely Endgame Looks to Be Not Apocalypse, But an Awful Lot of Useful Compost Six reasons to think there’s an AI bubble — and six reasons not to The Future of the Metaverse? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 363) Meta’s Zuckerberg plans deep cuts for company’s metaverse efforts – Los Angeles Times Cryptocurrency Prices, Charts And Market Capitalizations | CoinMarketCap Bitcoin price today, BTC to USD live price, marketcap and chart | CoinMarketCap Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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. Transcript: “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT 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 bee

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. What Amazon’s Perplexity Lawsuit Means for the Future of AI and Marketing (Episode 476) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Why every AI search study tells a different story What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) The New SEO? (Episode 469) AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) Google Says You Should Not Use AI To Create Content… Kind Of (Thinks Out Loud 457) – Tim Peter & Associates AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455) AI, Content, and Revenue: Why Clicks Are Overrated (Thinks Out Loud Episode 450) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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. Transcript: What Amazon’s Perplexity Lawsuit Means for the Future of AI and Marketing 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

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. The Five Things I’m Thankful For This Year (Episode 475) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Simple Tips to Improve your LinkedIn Feed LinkedIn Hack: How to Curate Your LinkedIn Activity Is It Impossible for Marketers to Keep Up With AI? (Thinks Out Loud 459) Digital Marketing Resources for Your Digital Reset – Tim Peter & Associates Learning With AI Falls Short Compared to Old-Fashioned Web Search ChatGPT and the end of learning – by Lakshya Jain We Owe It To Our Customers to Make Their Lives Better (Thinks Out Loud Episode 361) Why AI Makes Customer Experience Even More Important for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 427) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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. Transcript: The Five Things I’m Thankful For This Year 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. 5. New Social Media Experiences 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: Bluesky, which is sort of like Twitter, but not quite. It’s a little less commercial, so I spend more time there personally, but it’s still a pretty good site. Reddit, which obviously I bet a lot of you use. The easiest way for me to think about Reddit is that it’s not a single social network. It’s a whole bunch of them wrapped up in a single place. So it’s really more about how do you curate Reddit to be the feed that you need to see. YouTube goes without saying a great place to learn. A biggie for me is WhatsApp and other group chats with some super smart friends. More on those folks in a minute. Email newsletters, and believe it or not, RSS feeds — talk about not new. I’ve been subscribed to various email newsletters and RSS feeds for years. You can subscribe to ours in the show notes. But the point is I’ve become far more intentional about how I’m using these to curate those set of feeds from sites or newsletters that help me learn and grow about in the topics that I care most about. And of course LinkedIn. And let’s be fair, it’s so easy to bash LinkedIn. It can be filled with pondorous amounts of self-promotion or absurd amounts of fluff. But if you curate your feed well — and I’ll link to some tips that I found useful in the show notes — you can make LinkedIn a far more dynamic, far more interesting and far more fabulous source of continuous learning. 4. How Easy Digital Makes it to Crate an Environment of Continuous Learning 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: Customer behaviors SEO/GEO/Answer Engine Optimization CRM Content marketing Leadership How AI is shaping any or all of these 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 Shir

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. What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Mark Schaefer on the most important "soft skill" in the AI Era where he talks about Amazon limiting the number of books that a person can self-publish to three per day. The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) My original post about “The Brand is the Prompt” on LinkedIn In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) The New SEO? (Episode 469) AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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. Transcript: What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business 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: Every webpage Every blog post Every social media post Every email Every SMS. 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 o

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. Revisiting Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Tool From Making Purchases – Bloomberg Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) Chrome: The browser you love, reimagined with AI What is agentic AI? Definition and differentiators | Google Cloud The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) The New SEO? (Episode 469) Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win for Big Tech? (Episode 468) AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) Agentic AI In SEO: AI Agents & The Future Of Content Strategy (Part 3) Research Shows How To Optimize For Google AIO And ChatGPT Google Search Labs gains Agentic capabilities in AI Mode How Google’s AI updates to Chrome threaten brands – Ad Age Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech 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. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud 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. Transcript: Revisiting Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? 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: They realize that Perplexity’s success borrows Amazon’s content without doing the work of adding to or improving that content. Amazon knows that Perplexity’s agent prevents Amazon from offering a distinct, branded customer experience… which hurts Amazon’s long-term brand value. And, of course, Perplexity gains a ton of data about how customers browse and shop and buy — all at Amazon’s expense. 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