Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

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

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

With customers increasingly turning towards AI to get the answers they need for their business, you might be rethinking the value your website provides to those customers — and to your business. It’s absolutely worthwhile to ask the question. The answer, though, might surprise you. In this episode of the podcast, Tim Peter looks at whether you still need a website in the age of AI, what its value is to your customers and your business, and, most importantly, how to make sure your website works for both in the longer term. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links To Succeed in Driving Direct Bookings, Invest in It New Year’s resolutions for digital marketers – Biznology (1) There Are Two Ways To Increase Direct Bookings for Your Hotel. One Of Them Has A Future. | LinkedIn The Role Of E-E-A-T In Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) E-E-A-T and Domain Authority: Foundation of AI SEO Success What Connects TikTok and the Hub and Spoke Model of Digital? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 299) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) – Tim Peter & Associates Pricing | RankScale Peec AI – AI Search Analytics for Marketing Teams LLMrefs – Generative AI Search Analytics – LLM SEO Tracker Track AI Overviews with Keyword.com SE Ranking Pricing Plans Pricing – Profound 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: 25m 06s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI Earlier this week, I spent time with a bunch of super smart folks, including chief digital officers and marketing professionals, having a spirited and healthy debate about the future of websites in the age of AI. Do we still want to invest in our websites the way we have? Hell, if customers are going to spend the bulk of their time interacting with AI answer engines and agents, do we even want to invest in our websites at all? The big question I came away with is this. Is it time to rethink your website? The answer is a resounding yes, but not in the way that you think. In this episode of the podcast, I’m going to look at the current state and future of your website and talk about how you need to rethink your website in the age of AI. I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 473 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. Okay, so this probably isn’t news to you, but we are experiencing a generational shift in customer behavior, much like we did with the web and mobile and social media. Moving too slowly when we think about how AI will impact our customers’ experiences with our brands online, obviously can put you in a terrible position, and could create all kinds of problems for you down the road. Moving too fast, on the other hand, can waste resources and budget. You could simply be there before your customers are ready. Here’s the reality of AI: Customer adoption of artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly, sometimes even without the customers realizing it. If you think about Google Search or Google Ads, customers are experiencing AI all the time. Obviously, AI Overviews offers a similar reality. Those AI responses just appear and give folks the answer they’re looking for. The point is that the number of customers who are using AI is only going to increase whether they know it or not. Now, when I think about that, obviously that creates the question of do we need a website? Do we need our website to do what it’s historically done if customers are already getting the answer? The first point is that I don’t think this is an "either/or" situation. I think this is a "both/and" situation. You can’t choose between an AI strategy OR a website strategy. You have to have an "AI and website" strategy. That means you’re going to have to fund both. You’re going to have to pay for both. The real question is, or the key to it really, is how you allocate that funding. Now, before I get into why your website will need this continued funding and the role that it plays in this integrated "AI + web" strategy, I want to talk a bit about the reasons against doing too much with your website. I’m not necessarily arguing for these. I am saying that we need to think about them. So, what are the cons of funding a website in the age of AI? The first that we must think about is, as you’ve heard me say for years, that your focus should be on "the painting, not the frame." That is, your focus should be on your content ("the painting") more so than the container that content sits in ("the frame"). And if customers can get to your content, whether it’s on your website or it’s through an AI agent or an AI answer engine, then who cares where it sits? Does it matter? That’s an important question and I think it does matter, but for reasons that I want to kind of hold off for a second. The second problem is that most websites are fairly generic and don’t do as much as we might like them to to differentiate our brand. The reality is websites kind of have to be generic if they’re going to offer a quality user experience. Customers spend most of their time on websites that aren’t yours. So if they come to your website and it doesn’t work like all the other websites in the world, they’re likely going to leave because they can’t figure out how to use it or they can’t find the content and the information that matters to them. Customers are already used to what a website looks like and works like. So by definition, having a good website means that you have one that kind of is commoditized, kind of looks and acts like all the other websites in the world. So that’s another argument against doing a lot of funding for your website, right? The last, of course, is that gatekeepers need new roads, as I think of it. You know, we know that Google is the primary gatekeeper of content on the web. We know that Facebook is the primary gatekeeper of social information, whether it’s on the original Facebook platform, whether it’s on Instagram, things like that. They kind of own that space. And we know places like TikTok and YouTube are the people who own the video space. But new gatekeepers like AI platforms, whether that’s Google Gemini, whether that’s ChatGPT, whether that’s Perplexity or Claude, or something we haven’t seen yet, they need to control this pipeline. They need to control the road so that they can install their own gates. We know this is coming. This is nothing new. I’ve been talking about this for a little bit and I’ll link to some of these in the show notes. But there’s a reason why ChatGPT has introduced its own browser, Atlas. There’s a reason why Perplexity has introduced its own web browser, Comet. They want to be the place customers start. One of the big questions I have is over time, AI going to be more like the internet, the platform on which everything sits, or is it going to be more like an app or more like a search engine where people go on the web? And I don’t know the answer to this one yet, but I know they’re acting a little bit more like they’re the search engine. They’re the place you start and they’re the gatekeeper who gets between your customer and your business. We’re going to have to see how this plays out, but if you build your business on an AI platform and they turn out to be more like a search engine than the internet, if they’re not just a place where lots of businesses can show up, then they become the next gatekeeper and that’s a real struggle for you. And that leads to one of the reasons why we need to think about your website as this enduring, non-negotiable place where your content will always live. Yes, it’s no longer the primary discovery channel, but it is a foundational asset and a point of control for your brand. Ignoring the direct web channel is a fatally flawed approach long term. I’m going to say that one more time because that’s really important. Ignoring the direct web channel is a fatally flawed approach over the long term. Your website is, has to, remain the singular authoritative source of content, not just for people, but also for AI agents and AI

I’m generally bullish on AI and its potential benefits for customers and brands. What I’m less bullish about are all the folks essentially telling you that AI will make you give up building meaningful connections between your brand and your customers. Without meaning to, they’re describing a world where every brand becomes a commodity. And, frankly, I simply refuse to go along. Instead, we need to do the work, right now, that will drive customers to ask for us by name. And that depends on building brands customers care about. In short, in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. Why is brand “the only thing” in the age of AI? Why does it matter? And what can you do to ensure customers ask for you by name? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Here are the show notes for you. In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links 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) 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 Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 14m 41s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing AI is starting to affect the relationship between our businesses and our customers. Some share of customers are asking questions using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, and MetaAI. And these questions are leading them to products and services and brands that meet their needs. Ideally, Those products, services, and brands are yours. But sometimes they’re not. And that has profound implications for the future of your business. Many people I respect are rightfully talking about all the ways your business might be in some trouble as customers shift to using AI or agents to find and choose the products and services they need. Those folks aren’t wrong to point out the challenge. Not exactly, no. But their discussion of where we’re headed leaves me a little itchy. Because far too many people talk about this shift to AI and this shift to your customers using AI to do all of their shopping and buying and engaging with brands as though it’s inevitable. As though the only way to win on AI is to be all in on AI—solely, purely. And, you know, that’s one thing you probably want to do some things with, but it can’t be your entire strategy. We can’t be all in at the expense of your website, your CRM, and your other owned channels or experiences. Too many of us have seen this movie before. And at least for me, I’m convinced that we have way more control over the outcome than most people are discussing right now. I refuse to concede this point. Let me state this right up front: AI will only hurt your relationship with your customers if you let it. The key to winning is to build a brand your customers want to ask for by name. Which is why in the age of AI, brand isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. This is episode 472 of The Big Show. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. Intermediaries in the digital space are nothing new. I grew up in the hospitality industry and watched intermediaries like Expedia and Booking(.)com get between our guests and our hotels all the time. They were the first big tech that I really experienced. They were the intermediaries that inspired the original research that led to my book, Digital Reset. I then watched these digitally-native powerhouses slowly lose share to the real Big Tech players like Google and Facebook or Instagram, which only drove the point home further. The lion’s share of Booking and Expedia’s marketing spend every quarter goes to Google and to social media like Instagram or Facebook. Quick aside:, the way, Kayak and Trivago’s core business is known as the travel industry as Metasearch. They display rates from a wide array of sources so that travelers can see how much they’d pay based on where they book their reservation. I’m deliberately not referring to Facebook as "Meta" to avoid confusion with the kinds of metasearch offered by Kayak and Trivago, which are owned by Booking(.)com and Expedia, respectively. Okay, so sure, AI is a different kind of platform. It’s a different kind of threat. It might be the first and only place your customers go to find what they need. But it’s not just a threat, it’s also an opportunity. In fact, I’d suggest that the interaction with AI is starting to look more like the interaction with phones than the interaction with, for instance, search. Your customers have a lot of apps on their phones. And many of these apps allow for them to search for different things. They have Google. They have Amazon. They have Temu. They have Shein. They have Safari or Chrome. They have YouTube. They have Instagram or TikTok—or I guess if they’re over 45, Facebook. They have Spotify. They might have Expedia or Booking(.)com. The point is that they choose the app that works best to find what they need in that moment. But they don’t start by opening the app. They start by picking up their phone. Consumers increasingly are treating AI like it’s a device. It’s where customers start before they choose the app or before they buy. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me that ChatGPT calls its integrations with other companies "apps," not integrations. They’ve partnered with companies like Expedia and Booking and Zillow and Spotify and Canva and Figma to offer apps within the ChatGPT experience. They’ve also launched its browser, Atlas, and it’s why they’re working on physical devices. They want to be the first place people go. This is why Perplexity has launched its Comet browser that, to quote the company, "works for you." Note the emphasis. It’s doing the work, not you, not your customer. The AI—or if you’d rather call it this, the agent that’s built into the browser—does the work. And there are others that are coming. These companies want and need to be the first place that customers start, every time, if they have any hope of replacing Google or Apple as the first place customers start every time. As I mentioned in the intro, that’s our opportunity: to be the place that people ask for when they pick up that phone when they pick up that app, when they look into the device, when they start the conversation with AI. That’s why AI will only hurt your relationship if you let it. The key to winning is to build a brand that your customers will ask for by name. I’ve said it another way in the past. I’ve said that the brand is the prompt. The last thing you want is for AI to turn your brand into a commodity. The last thing you want is to let AI turn your brand into a commodity, differentiated only by price or sales channels. That’s just not a way to win. You’ve heard it said for years, "don’t build your brand on rented land." And this just isn’t that much different from that perspective. I mean, sure, we’ll use these tools to increase the reach and awareness of our brands. But we cannot let AI replace our brands. Keep repeating to yourself that in the age of AI, "brand isn’t everything, it’s the only thing." We should be thinking of these tools as ways to build our brand, not replace them. Look at current customer behaviors. Customers ask AI questions, then come directly to your website by typing in the URL or by sear

Are you as sick as I am of hearing people claim that SEO is dead? I mean, c’mon. How is that we keep regurgitating the same foul nonsense to drive clicks, engagement, and a little bit of anger among the marketing community. I promise I’m not going to ask “is SEO dead?” or claim that “SEO is dead” or anything similar anytime soon. What’s also true is that how your customers search for what they need is changing — and quickly. Some folks want to call these changes GEO. Some call them AEO. Some call them AIO. I don’t think it matters what we call them. What matters is understanding how your customers’ behaviors are changing… and what you can do to ensure your customers find you whenever they’re looking. And that’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Want to know more about “the new SEO”? Then be sure to check this one out. Here are the show notes for you. Revisiting “The New SEO” — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The New SEO? (Episode 469) Parsing the $35M GEO Play: What’s Real and What’s Fundraising Theater ChatGPT is reportedly scraping Google Search data to answer your questions – here’s how OpenAI Is Challenging Google—While Using Its Search Data Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win for Big Tech? (Episode 468) AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) Revisiting The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud) – Tim Peter & Associates The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Revisiting Google Closes the Gate (Thinks Out Loud) The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) Google Closes the Gate on Marketers (Thinks Out Loud) Digital Reset: Build Customer Relationships Big Tech—and AI—Can’t Touch (Thinks Out Loud 458) AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455) Should You Use AI to Create Your Content? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 454) AI, Content, and Revenue: Why Clicks Are Overrated (Thinks Out Loud Episode 450) How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448) Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447) AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 437) Four Big Threats (Plus a Bonus Threat!) To Google’s Dominance Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 436) 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: 20m 26s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Revisiting “The New SEO”  One of the perennial questions, comments, and provocative blog post titles in digital marketing is that SEO is dead or something fairly similar. Let me tell you right up front, this episode isn’t one of those. What’s also true is that with the emergence of AI answer engines, we’ve seen more change in search over the last 10 months than over the last 10 years. Seriously. There’s been so much change that folks don’t even want to talk about the practice of showing up in these answer engines as SEO any longer. Instead, they want to call it GEO (for Generative Engine Optimization), or AEO (for answer engine optimization), or AIO (for, you know, artificial intelligence optimization). I still prefer to call it SEO, which to me means search experience optimization. It reflects the fact that people search in traditional search engines like Google, they search using artificial intelligence tools and they search on places like social media & and it reflects how those all work together. But, whatever. I’ll live no matter which name succeeds in the marketplace of ideas. The fact that no one can commit to a single comprehensive name at the moment suggests two points to me, though. The first is that we’re seeing big changes in search marketing, and more importantly in our customer’s search behaviors. The marketing world wouldn’t be spending so much time trying to figure out new names for a well-established practice of reaching their customers if reaching those customers wasn’t decidedly different from what had come before. The second is that we’re still in the very early days of learning about how to best meet the needs of those changing customers and of the tools that drive those changes. I’m Tim Peter, and we’re going to talk about the new SEO. Is SEO dead? Of course not. It’s also still a good time to revisit a prior episode of the big show that talked all about the new SEO. I hope you’ll enjoy it. It’s coming at you right now. My assumption when we talk about search is that you work for a business that sells things. I’m not going to talk about the publishing industry. It’s not my core area of expertise. It’s got an entirely different economic model. And the realities of what’s happening because of search in that industry are very, very, very different than what people who sell things are dealing with. So we’re not going to talk about those today. There are three big variables, though, around selling things. And they are: Customization. Whether you do very little customization or whether you do significant customization Pricing. Whether your price is fixed or variable Delivery. Whether your product is delivered instantly or is it delivered at some point in the future? Even if that point in the future is a little later today. These are true for products or services. They all kind of map onto those variables. And there’s lots of examples: If we think of software as a service, there’s usually not too much customization. There’s some pricing variability. And usually quick, if not immediate delivery. If it’s a hotel or restaurant reservation, again, there’s usually not a lot of customization. There’s some pricing variability. And it’s almost always delivered later, even if “later” is, you know, tonight. If you’re selling hats or guitars or clothing or some other merchandise, not a lot of customization, not too much pricing variability, and later delivery. Real estate, could be customization, if it’s commercial real estate, there’s a fair bit of pricing variability, and there’s later delivery. If we think about things like insurance or financial services, lots of customization, lots of pricing variability, and you can get it pretty much instantly. Or if you think about big things like kitchen installations or data center equipment or bespoke tailoring and consulting, lots of customization, lots of pricing variability, later delivery. Most businesses who are in these industries tend to want two things from their marketing: You want traffic. I’m thinking mostly online here, but phone calls and foot traffic usually are pretty good too. And the more important one, profitable revenue. Now, historically, over the last 20 years or so of digital, those tend to have gone hand in hand. I’d argue that they still probably do, despite all the conversations we’ve had about zero-click marketing lately. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in depth in a moment. For many businesses over the last decade, and certainly until this recent emergence of AI search, SEO was the way to get traffic and revenue. Most companies put a lot of effort into getting into the first page of search engines… which in practice meant the first page of Google. And that traffic converted. It generated enormous amounts of revenue. For many businesses I’ve worked with, 50%, 60% or more of the revenue was coming through search. For the first time in a long time, though, people are starting to question whether that’s a good thing, whether being so dependent on search is actually beneficial. They’re also starting to ask whether it’s enough. I genuinely believe that this is a super healthy question to ask. In fact, it might be the most important question that needs asking every single day. We don’t want to depend on any one channel or company for our traffic or our revenues. This is such an important point that I wrote an entire book about how to think and act beyond Big Tech companies like Google or Facebook for driving your traffic and revenue. I’ve also made the case for some tim

I assume most people know that Google makes almost all of its money from ads. And, in practice, those ads are based on clicks. Paid clicks. That fact means that Google can’t survive in a zero-click world. While that same reality is not (yet) true for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI answer engines, they’re almost certainly going to need some form of ads—again, probably clickable ads—to fund their operations. For example, ChatGPT alone is planning to invest over 1 trillion dollars in their compute and infrastructure. That’s “trillion.” With a “T.” Some quick back-of-the-envelope math says that, at $20 per month, they’d need to sign up roughly a quarter of the world’s population—and keep them paying for a couple of years—to cover that cost. That seems… unlikely. So, does zero-click search forecast a world where Google is doomed? Does it mean the entire ad-based world is over? And, most importantly, what does zero-click mean for your business? That’s what “Revisiting the Real Story of AI and Zero-Click Search” on the podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. A Revisiting the Real Story of AI and Zero-Click Search (Thinks Out Loud Podcast) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) The New SEO? (Episode 469) Exploration–exploitation dilemma – Wikipedia Revisiting The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud) – Tim Peter & Associates Traffic Is Down; Revenue Is… Up? – SparkToro Revisiting AI is Eating the World (Thinks Out Loud) Google Earnings Q2 2025 PDF Link Google briefs brands on AI Mode ads ahead of Q4 rollout Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha The Zero-Click Future: How Customer Behavior is Rewriting Digital Strategy – Becoming Radical | Podcast on Spotify Tim’s LinkedIn post about zero-click marketing — or, y’know, marketing AI in Search: Driving more queries and higher quality clicks The Future Of Search: 5 Key Findings On What Buyers Really Want AI Search Currently Drives Less Than 1% of Traffic To Most Sites, Google Is Still Dominant, and Watch The Long-term Risk of Igno Google and Bing Tests Search Title Expansion, Colors & Location Moves From Ranking to Reasoning: Philosophies Driving GEO Brand Presence Tools Google briefs brands on AI Mode ads ahead of Q4 rollout Industry Pioneer Reveals Why SEO Isn’t Working & What To Refocus On AI Search Changes Everything – Is Your Organization Built To Compete? How LLMs Interpret Content: How To Structure Information For AI Search Why Your SEO Isn’t Working, And It’s Not The Team’s Fault 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 IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 19m 22s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Revisiting the Real Story of AI and Zero-Click Search  Hi, and welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. A few weeks ago I talked all about artificial intelligence and zero click search and the connection between those two realities. And at the time I predicted—or I shouldn’t even say, predict; I forecast—that Google was still in a pretty good position relative to OpenAI, relative to ChatGPT… and that we would know more when people came back from school. Well, people are back from school and people are back from summer vacation, and it looks like that forecast, that concept, is holding up. Google and ChatGPT’s data, according to the SimilarWeb, seem to be holding relatively steady, more or less. There’s minor movement and definitely something to watch, but nothing crazy yet. What’s also true is that people using ChatGPT still are creating a lot of opportunities for your brand to be seen, for your business to be seen. That then shows up at your website either as organic branded search or as direct navigation—people just coming to your website. And that’s why I think this is a really good time to revisit that discussion from a couple of weeks ago all about the real truth of AI and zero-click search. So I hope you’ll enjoy as we revisit the real story of AI and zero-click search, coming at you right now. I want to talk about the reality of search marketing today. And this episode is very much a follow-up from last week’s discussion about the rise of a agentic AI among your customers. You don’t need to listen to last week’s episode for this one to make sense. But I’d like you to be aware that I’m building on a ton of assumptions that explored in gory detail last week. If you’ve got questions about those assumptions, you definitely want to check out last week’s episode. It’s also a little less future focused and much more focused on our current reality, maybe where we’re going to be for the next six months or so. As I talked about last week, things could change at any time. So some of this may not age perfectly, but I think the bigger picture holds true. I don’t think we’re going to see a massive shift in customer behaviors in the next three to six months. I explained the systemic reasons why that’s the case last week. For one additional piece of evidence why I think that’s so, look at the public freak out that happened when ChatGPT, when OpenAI released its GPT-5 model this week. And more importantly, how the company backtracked and made its legacy models available to customers. Customers don’t typically accept change all that fast. We saw that play out in the most pure way possible over the last few days. What’s also true is that while I think that this stuff is going to hold true for the next, you know, three to six to maybe nine months, I could absolutely be wrong about this. As I mentioned last week, keep our core and explore methodology in mind. Focus 80% of your efforts on your core and about 20% of your efforts to see if things are changing. And that way, that should help ensure that you’ve got your bases covered in either case. Regardless, this comes back to the bigger picture of where are we with search? And is Google losing? Is AI taking their business? Is zero click killing us? Well, it’s complicated. First, data for the last couple of months is potentially very misleading. I’m not convinced that the current data — that is data from June, July, and August — tells us as much as we might think it does. We know that use of ChatGPT and other AI tools is highest among younger people and better educated people. And there’s one large group of people that falls into both of those buckets, and that is students, particularly high school and college students. They’re not in school right now, and they are heavy users of these tools. When we look at data from similar web or Google trends, we see that OpenAI’s traffic declined in July, and the gap between Google and OpenAI got wider. Over the last few weeks, that gap seems to have shrunk a tiny bit, which does align with kids heading back to school. So there’s some evidence that suggests that’s right. What it also suggests is that any boost you see in ChatGPT’s numbers in the next month or two might be driven largely by students and not by the larger market. Maybe. Why does that matter? Well, it depends on what you’re selling. If students represent a large share of your customer base, then those numbers could be very meaningful to you. If they don’t, if you sell to a broader market than just students, then it means that activity by those student groups is going to make it tougher to see what’s genuinely happening with your actual customers. Non-commercial activity — or at least commercial activity unrelated to your business — might mask your reality. Now, normally I’d tell you to simply pay attention to your analytics, but there’s two problems with this approach. The first is that your analytics might not tell you the whole story if you’re not doing the work to appear in AI answers right now. I’m going to come back to this a little later in the show, but it’s an important point. The second is that customer behaviors seem to follow a pattern right now of what’s called “explore and exploit.” This is a super common behavior am

OpenAI just introduced Instant Checkout and apps in ChatGPT, allowing customers to buy products and services directly within the AI. This is, as they say, “the next step in agentic commerce.” It’s genuinely a capital-B, capital-D, Big Frickin’ Deal. No doubt about it. At the same time, some folks might be rushing to claim these a whole new world, or a complete upending of commerce as we know it. I’m… not convinced. Instead, I’m concerned that too many people are going to trade the Big Tech intermediaries we face today with a different set of intermediaries. Yes, ChatGPT is giving us the tools to transact directly in their platform. That’s good. How we use them, though, and what they mean for our businesses is what our job is all about. So, what is the meaning of Instant Checkout and ChatGPT apps? What is the right way to approach these tools? And, ultimately, how can you use them to benefit your business today… and in the longer term? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Introducing apps in ChatGPT and the new Apps SDK | OpenAI Stripe powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and releases Agentic Commerce Protocol codeveloped with OpenAI ChatGPT apps are live: Here are the first ones you can try | The Verge Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol | OpenAI Agentic Commerce The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) AI Is Eating the World, But Who’s Paying for Dinner? (Thinks Out Loud 464) How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448) 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 Biggest Risk to Your Business? Becoming a “Hidden Intermediary” (Thinks Out Loud 267) 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 You might also enjoy this webinar I participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: 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: 15m 04s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. ChatGPT launched two new features this week that every marketer and e-commerce professional must know about. The first is Instant Checkout, which allows users to buy directly from Shopify and Etsy. They’ve also open-sourced their Agentic Commerce Protocol, that, as they say, "lets AI agents, people, and businesses work together to complete purchases." Very cool concept. OpenAI built the protocol with Stripe and "leading merchant partners to be powerful, secure and easy to adopt." Notably, the company calls this the next step in agentic commerce. So maybe we’re going to start talking before too long about A-commerce — agent commerce or agentic commerce — and maybe less about E-commerce. Time will tell, but it’s definitely something I’m going to be watching. The second big announcement is apps in ChatGPT, which is a way for users to connect directly with apps that they use regularly right within ChatGPT itself. You don’t have to leave your chat session. You can simply have the app, do things for you. The idea is that you can have customers interact with your company via a ChatGPT app without ever leaving the ChatGPT experience. Some of the folks they’ve launched with our Spotify, Canva, Figma, Zillow, Expedia, Coursera, and Booking.com. They also state that Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable, Target, Peloton, TripAdvisor, and others are coming. I’m seeing a large number of thoughtful, well-considered articles and posts that talk about the meaning of these two innovations for your brand and business. I’m also seeing some unhinged recommendations that, you know, you must sell on ChatGPT today or risk losing your business to those that do. I mean, it’s not 100% wrong. There is some risk there. But the recommendation as being the thing you absolutely have to do is a bit misguided. And part of the reason those recommendations are misguided relates to a recent interview that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave about where he sees apps and instant checkout going. And no discussion of these developments makes sense without taking those comments in his interview into consideration. So what’s really going on here? What really matters to your business? And where should you get started? This is episode 471 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. I want to start the discussion around apps in ChatGPT and Instant Checkout by pouring a little bit of cold water on the early hype. These tools are interesting, but they’re kind of just okay at the moment. You can absolutely, 100% see the vision of where OpenAI is headed, where ChatGPT is headed, and it’s conceptually very cool. They’re also not the most intuitive to install or use for most people. My friend, Brad Brewer, said on LinkedIn that "they should have waited" and, this is pretty harsh, but I think it’s spot on, "This feels more like $500 million dollar vaporware." Another friend of mine, Michael Goldrich, stated that "they’re still pretty unusable… the squeeze isn’t worth the juice."" In general, I agree. Where I disagree — not with Michael and Brad — but with some of the other posts that I’ve seen and some of the other thoughts that I’ve seen, is about what the purpose of these apps truly is. Put simply, Instant Checkout and apps in ChatGPT do not exist to help your business They exist to help ChatGPT’s business. Don’t believe me? Well consider this Sam Altman was interviewed by Ben Thompson of Stritechery and he said two things that I think everybody needs to pay close attention to. The first and this is a quote As long as you let the merchant have the direct relationship with the consumer… it’s a better user experience, it’s better for the merchant.” The second thing he said was, “If we ever start doing anything that is not our best effort to get the user to the best answer, trust in ChatGPT… would fall precipitously.” I’m going to say that one again because it’s really important. "If we," that is, ChatGPT, "ever start doing anything that is not our best effort to get the user to the best answer, trust in ChatGPT… would fall precipitously." Now, I want you to think about it for a moment because both of those quotes cannot be true at once. And I can prove it. You can prove it. You can see it for yourself based on how various apps work. I connected both the Expedia and Booking.com apps to my ChatGPT account. It’s not the most intuitive process, as I mentioned earlier, but I was able to do it. And then I asked ChatGPT to search potential travel dates for me. While it churned on its answer, I wondered which app would it choose? After all, I’d installed both Expedia and Booking.com. Was it going to give preference to one over the other? Would it show me a comparison with rates that they each show to give me a sense of where I might get the better deal? I honestly couldn’t wait to find out. And then its answer came back. And what it did was… neither. When I asked ChatGPT to book a hotel that met my needs for a potential trip, it told me to book directly through the hotel’s website. It literally said "that’s often the best price and inventory.” It did this despite it being unable to pull prices from the hotel’s booking engine. It also gave me the property’s phone number if I’d rather call, which, I mean, as somebody who’s always encouraging hotels and other businesses to get customers to buy directly from you, woohoo! That’s a big win. Booking direct, buying from the source wins the day, at least for the moment in ChatGPT. The problem as it happens, was that I made a mistake when I used ChatGPT’s Expedia app. On Expedia’s page announcing the app, they give a couple of different steps and step three says that I need to, "ask Expedia for a flight or place to stay. Example, Expedia find me hotels in New York for October 12th through 15th." Again, the usability of these apps could have been a lot clearer. I didn’t understand that I had to tell ChatGPT which app to use

Google has now added agentic AI to Chrome and in its Search Labs. Google has enormous reach with these tools, which means your customers could start using them almost any day. The question is, what happens to your content? Will agents replace the content you’ve worked so hard to create and curate, giving customers answers to their questions? In shortt, will agentic AI kill your content marketing? I’m not convinced. More than that, I believe we must actively work to make sure that doesn’t become true. 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. Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Go behind the browser with Chrome’s new AI features 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 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 You might also enjoy this webinar I participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: 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 00s 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: Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? Hi everyone and welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. Google has just released new agentic AI capabilities in its Chrome browser. And it’s entirely possible that those capabilities will upend the entire content economy. If agents make decisions for your customers, will your content marketing still be as important? This is coming fast. This is real right now. And we cannot simply bury our heads in the sand hoping for the best. I don’t think agents are the end of your website or the end of your content marketing or, candidly, the end of your brand. I think they’re an evolution of where we’ve been. More importantly, I believe it’s in our best interest to make sure that our content and our websites remain within our control, not just now, but for the longer term. I also believe that surrendering our content to other channels or to generative AI alone is a huge mistake, one we’d be well served to avoid making. Why is that? What’s the big deal about agentic AI and content? And what can we do about it? This is episode 471 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. Something that is universally true is that agents need content. I’m going to assume for reasons that I’m going to get into a little bit later in the show that agents will want the best content that they can get their hands — or little AI agent brains — on every single time. Sure, they can make up their own content using generative AI to create answers that probably make sense. They can also source it from social media, from user generated content. Generative AI and social sites or UGC are 100%, absolutely potential sources. In fact, I think they’re more than potential sources. They are likely to be actual sources some of the time. The challenge for your brand and for your business is that you don’t control either of those. But that’s okay because there’s another issue and that’s the challenge these sources represent to agents. The challenge for the agents is that each of those other sources have some inherent trust issues. And I don’t think that’s a small challenge. I think that’s a pretty big problem. Is the content that they find or create accurate? Is the content true? Does it have biases? Yes, content on your website will also have a bias, but that’s a known bias. The answer engine can take those biases for granted and attempt to adjust its expectations for them. Unknown biases, the type that might sneak into GenAI content or on social media sites? Those are a lot tougher to figure out. Was the content on the UGC site written by an experienced customer? Or was it written by a competitor or maybe a former employee with an axe to grind? Figuring out whether or not those content sources meet the standards that they have to set for quality content is really challenging. And I’m going to come back to this in just a moment, so hang tight. I expect that the content they’ll rely on will be a combination of sources. It’ll be your content, what you say about your products, your services, and your solutions to customer problems. It will also be UGC, user generated content that validates what you say. And some of it might be generative AI when that adds to the overall content experience for the person who’s actually interacting with the answer engine. Next, agents will need a place to go to find that content. That could be your brand’s social presence. Sure, absolutely. It also raises the issue for you that social sites might preference somebody else’s brand, somebody else’s content over yours for any number of reasons. Could be commercial reasons, could be quality reasons, could be they just like them better. Who’s to say? You just don’t have the control then. Social sites like that also raise the issue of whether or not the page where the answer engine finds the content: if it’s genuine or not; if it’s a genuine and trusted source of content about your brand, your products, your services. Again, is that content accurate? Is it true? Is it free of unknown biases? That’s the problem with content on sites other than those that belong to brands. That’s been true for a while. Instead, it’s better for the answer engines if they find the content they need on a trusted source, something like, oh, I don’t know… a website? Then they can also use user generated content to test the brand’s contents claims against. So while you’ll undoubtedly use social media and other resources to put your content in front of both customers and AI answer engines, you also will always need a place where your content can always be found. Always. I’m going to say that again. Always. In short, you’ll still need a website. I do think it’s incredibly likely — in fact, it’s almost certain — that the definition of a website will change. You’ll probably use more structured data, or tools like a model context protocol server (MCP), to make your structured data more accessible to AI answer engines. Your web pages — your entire website — also might be more dynamic, exposing only content that’s most relevant in the moment to the actual human beings who visit your site. None of those factors though mean that your website goes away. It simply evolves. If you think that my point about websites evolving is wishful thinking, we actually have a real world case that followed this exact model. We’ve seen this movie before. Google and other traditional search engines have given more weight to brands and trusted domains in their algorithms in recent years to prevent spammers and scammers from taking over their search results. Those algorithms increasingly favor large, well-known brands as trusted sources of information. That’s why larger sites have been winning in search more often and why smaller sites have had a harder time cutting through. Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines have specific sections advising their quality raters to evaluate the reputation of the website, not just the page, placing particular emphasis on validating that other sites also speak well of the business or the website. They want to be sure that they’re getting information and that they’re learning from the most trustworthy sources in every case. Similarly, Google’s ongoing focus on EEAT — that’s experience, expertise, authority,

Whether you want to call it SEO, AEO, AIO, GEO, or something else altogether, it’s clear that search is changing… or is it? Yes, customers are using AI answer engines much more often. Yes, Google and other “traditional” search engines are responding by adding more AI answers into their results. The question, though, is how much you ought to change how you do what you do to answer your customers’ questions. Is search as we know it completely different? Or do some fundamental truths remain that we still need to to keep in mind? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. The New SEO? (Episode 469) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Parsing the $35M GEO Play: What’s Real and What’s Fundraising Theater ChatGPT is reportedly scraping Google Search data to answer your questions – here’s how OpenAI Is Challenging Google—While Using Its Search Data Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win for Big Tech? (Episode 468) AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) Revisiting The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud) – Tim Peter & Associates The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Revisiting Google Closes the Gate (Thinks Out Loud) The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) Google Closes the Gate on Marketers (Thinks Out Loud) Digital Reset: Build Customer Relationships Big Tech—and AI—Can’t Touch (Thinks Out Loud 458) AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455) Should You Use AI to Create Your Content? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 454) AI, Content, and Revenue: Why Clicks Are Overrated (Thinks Out Loud Episode 450) How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448) Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447) AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 437) Four Big Threats (Plus a Bonus Threat!) To Google’s Dominance Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 436) 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: 20m 15s 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 New SEO? I’ve spent most of my career in search marketing. I think of myself as a strategic search expert versus, for instance, a hardcore technical SEO expert. I’ve led many search marketing teams. I’ve built search engines. And I surround myself with the smartest people I can when it comes to search. One of those folks is Bill Hunt, who’s a friend and a colleague I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of times over the years. Bill had such a cool piece on his blog the other day about artificial intelligence company Profound receiving a $35 million Series B investment. And more importantly, about the “profound” (heh) changes that that investment signals for the SEO industry. You should read every word of Bill’s piece. I will link to it in the show notes. I take issue with a couple of minor points, but generally you will never go wrong listening to Bill. More broadly, there’s a lot of debate going on in the moment about what SEO even is or isn’t right now because of the emergence of artificial intelligence and large language models. You know, people call it GEO, AEO, SEO, AIO… oy! You know, for what it’s worth, I prefer the term Search Experience Optimization — i.e., keep SEO — or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). The name’s not the most important thing, I’ll respond just fine to whichever one you want to call it. What’s important is how we use these tools. And the question I have is, have we entered an all new area of SEO, or is there a little more hype here than we’d like to admit? Most importantly, what do we do about the current reality when it comes to search? This is episode 469 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. My assumption when we talk about search is that you work for a business that sells things. I’m not going to talk about the publishing industry. It’s not my core area of expertise. It’s got an entirely different economic model. And the realities of what’s happening because of search in that industry are very, very, very different than what people who sell things are dealing with. So we’re not going to talk about those today. There are three big variables, though, around selling things. And they are: Customization. Whether you do very little customization or whether you do significant customization Pricing. Whether your price is fixed or variable Delivery. Whether your product is delivered instantly or is it delivered at some point in the future? Even if that point in the future is a little later today. These are true for products or services. They all kind of map onto those variables. And there’s lots of examples: If we think of software as a service, there’s usually not too much customization. There’s some pricing variability. And usually quick, if not immediate delivery. If it’s a hotel or restaurant reservation, again, there’s usually not a lot of customization. There’s some pricing variability. And it’s almost always delivered later, even if “later” is, you know, tonight. If you’re selling hats or guitars or clothing or some other merchandise, not a lot of customization, not too much pricing variability, and later delivery. Real estate, could be customization, if it’s commercial real estate, there’s a fair bit of pricing variability, and there’s later delivery. If we think about things like insurance or financial services, lots of customization, lots of pricing variability, and you can get it pretty much instantly. Or if you think about big things like kitchen installations or data center equipment or bespoke tailoring and consulting, lots of customization, lots of pricing variability, later delivery. Most businesses who are in these industries tend to want two things from their marketing: You want traffic. I’m thinking mostly online here, but phone calls and foot traffic usually are pretty good too. And the more important one, profitable revenue. Now, historically, over the last 20 years or so of digital, those tend to have gone hand in hand. I’d argue that they still probably do, despite all the conversations we’ve had about zero-click marketing lately. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in depth in a moment. For many businesses over the last decade, and certainly until this recent emergence of AI search, SEO was the way to get traffic and revenue. Most companies put a lot of effort into getting into the first page of search engines… which in practice meant the first page of Google. And that traffic converted. It generated enormous amounts of revenue. For many businesses I’ve worked with, 50%, 60% or more of the revenue was coming through search. For the first time in a long time, though, people are starting to question whether that’s a good thing, whether being so dependent on search is actually beneficial. They’re also starting to ask whether it’s enough. I genuinely believe that this is a super healthy question to ask. In fact, it might be the most important question that needs asking every single day. We don’t want to depend on any one channel or company for our traffic or our revenues. This is such an important point that I wrote an entire book about how to think and act beyond Big Tech companies like Google or Facebook for driving your traffic and revenue. I’ve also made the case for some time on the podcast, on the blog, on social media, about the risks that emerge when you’re too dependent on Google or any other channel for too much of that traffic and revenue. And yet, for many businesses, Google still contributes either a plurality or an outright majority of your traffic. You still see a lot from Google, even now, even in this changing environment. If you’re one of those businesses, and Google loses — if Profound is right — and Google loses in the marketplace, you lose too. So that’s what makes this post that Bill wrote so interesting and so important. Beca

While Judge Amit Mehta has imposed penalties on Google for its anticompetitive behavior, I’m convinced that the big winner in the antitrust trial is… Google. And, to a lesser extent, the rest of Big Tech wins, too. Confused? Don’t be. What did Judge Mehta’s ruling say? Why do I think Google won more than they lost? And, more importantly, what does all of this mean for your business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win for Big Tech? (Episode 468) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Judge Mehta’s Google Antitrust Remedies: Threading The Needle Between Overkill And Underkill (includes PDF link to ruling) Google says pay for AI-powered search dominance | Tim Peter posted on the topic | LinkedIn The future of AI-powered Search marketing – Think with Google Why "Zero Click Marketing" Isn’t the End of the World | Tim Peter posted on the topic | LinkedIn I don’t care what anyone says, Google won its search antitrust trial. Sure, the court said they were a monopoly. But its remedies will do little to stop Google’s continued gatekeeping. | Tim Peter posted on the topic | LinkedIn The tech antitrust renaissance may already be over | The Verge The limits of AI agents | Tim Peter posted on the topic | LinkedIn AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Revisiting Google Closes the Gate (Thinks Out Loud) Google holds illegal monopolies in ad tech, US judge finds | Reuters 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: 23m 03s 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: Google’s Antitrust Case: A Win for Big Tech? (Thinks Out Loud 468) Welcome to the show. I’m Tim Peter. A few weeks ago, I talked about which of the Big Tech companies are most likely to win in the AI space. My leading candidates in order were: Google Amazon OpenAI/ChatGPT Microsoft Meta Apple As I said at the time, “Google has an added challenge in terms of its anti-trust situation, which is a big deal and could trip them up massively. They might be able to buy their way out of this, you know, with major fines or, I don’t know, contributions to presidential libraries or some nonsense like that, but we don’t know.” Well, we’ve just learned the first set of penalties Google will face for its anti-competitive behavior. And I don’t care what anyone else says. Google won. Yes, they still face another antitrust ruling and the adtech case later this month, but at least in this first one they got off super easy. Most importantly, the judge’s ruling ensures that Google stays a prominent and probably dominant player in search and artificial intelligence. I’m going to get into why in just a moment. But the real question is what this means to you, and what do you do about this reality? In other words, how do you make sure you don’t lose when Google wins? This is episode 468 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. So first, what happened in the trial? There is lots to unpack. Judge Amit Mehta mostly went with the lightest penalties he could have. Google really got off super easy. And if you think it’s just me saying that, The Verge reported on the large number of Google’s critics who were not happy with the ruling. Similarly, Google’s stock price shot up between 8-9% after the ruling came out. So Wall Street certainly thinks they won. Wall Street certainly wasn’t going to push up the stock price if Judge Mata had wanted Google to sell off, you know, Chrome or Android, for instance. You should read through the ruling if you get the chance. Certainly parts of it. It’s super clear. And it gives great insight into how Google’s business works, both today and going forward. I’d debate a few minor points about the overall marketplace and how Google responds to it and who’s likely to win and why, but generally it’s as good a primer as you’re going to see. Essentially, the judge ruled that Google has a monopoly in the market for general search engines — what they call GSEs all throughout the ruling — and that Google illegally leveraged that monopoly to hurt competition. To remedy the situation, the judge ruled that Google needs to face several penalties. There are several penalties, several remedies that they have to deal with. The judge ruled that several of the recommended penalties from the plaintiffs from the Department of Justice and some of the other folks involved went too far and didn’t address the core problems of Google’s anti-competitive behavior. The two major ones that the judge ruled are that Google doesn’t have to sell off the Chrome browser and that it doesn’t have to sell off Android. Those are enormous sources of data for Google. They’re hugely important in terms of it learning how customers behave. But the judge ruled that those were well outside the scope of the general search engine market. So Google gets to keep them and keep using them as they always have. That’s huge. The penalties the judge did impose are as follows. First, Google has to give what are called qualified competitors access to some of its data. I’m gonna get into this a lot in a moment. As the ruling states, this is a quote, “the size of Google’s index gives it a key competitive advantage over existing small GSEs like DuckDuckGo and emerging companies in the GenAI space like ChatGPT.” Witnesses testified to what is known in the industry as the 80-20 problem. “Building a search index that can answer 80% of queries is capital intensive, but attainable in the short to medium term.” This is a sub-quote within this. They said “you can get to 80-20 pretty quickly.” And they described ChatGPT’s goal, “…to answer 80% of queries with its own search index and the difficulties associated with answering the remaining 20%.” Now back to the main part of the ruling, “…it says answering the remaining 20%, which comprises long tail queries is particularly challenging because it requires the index to contain very specific and often obscure sources.” Here’s another sub quote, “When sources are less common, we may not even know that they even exist and we may thus not discover what makes the best source.” Apple’s Eddie Cue during the trial noted, “to me the only thing that’s keeping them [and he’s talking about ChatGPT here]… the only thing that’s keeping them from potentially doing that again is growing their search index. They have to get better at the search index part. They’re very good at their LLMs. You know, they’ve already built large language models that are as good or better than most. What that will do is give a product is create a product that gives better results, new capabilities. You know, those are things that people are interested in today.” That’s a big deal. So we’re going to get into this in some detail in a little bit. Another ruling that the judge made was that Google still gets to pay companies like Apple, Samsung, Mozilla/Firefox, and Opera for making Google the default search engine in their mobile phones and browsers. While it might seem like a good idea to stop these revenue sharing payments, the biggest losers, if they were to do that, would be… Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, and Opera, and almost certainly consumers of their products. And it wouldn’t hurt Google at all. Quite the contrary. They’d get to keep billions — tens of billions! — of dollars every year. As the court rightly points out, Google’s facing greater competition in the form of AI products from folks like ChatGBT or Perplexity or Microsoft’s Copilot or Claude than it’s faced in years. What he did require was a bunch of data sharing. The court wrote that,“Google sees long-tail queries in orders of magnitude greater than its next closest rival, Bing. Because it sees such queries far more often, Google is more adept at answering them. Data sharing remedies thus can help to close the sizable advantage Google has in answering long-tail queries, thereby improving product quality and attractiveness to new users.” There’s a sub-quote in this that says, “unless you’re sharing tail queries, the information is not terribly useful for a search engine

For all the talk about zero-click search, folks seem to keep overlooking one of its key consequences: How Google (and others) will make money. In short, Google can’t survive in a zero-click world. Their entire business depends on clicks. Paid clicks. The shift towards zero-click results signals a genuine turning point for how you think about marketing your business, in part, because it will absolutely grow your costs for acquiring new customers. So, what’s the real story behind zero-click search? Does it forecast a world where Google is doomed? And, most importantly, what does it mean for your business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Exploration–exploitation dilemma – Wikipedia Revisiting The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud) – Tim Peter & Associates Traffic Is Down; Revenue Is… Up? – SparkToro Revisiting AI is Eating the World (Thinks Out Loud) Google Earnings Q2 2025 PDF Link Google briefs brands on AI Mode ads ahead of Q4 rollout Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha The Zero-Click Future: How Customer Behavior is Rewriting Digital Strategy – Becoming Radical | Podcast on Spotify Tim’s LinkedIn post about zero-click marketing — or, y’know, marketing AI in Search: Driving more queries and higher quality clicks The Future Of Search: 5 Key Findings On What Buyers Really Want AI Search Currently Drives Less Than 1% of Traffic To Most Sites, Google Is Still Dominant, and Watch The Long-term Risk of Igno Google and Bing Tests Search Title Expansion, Colors & Location Moves From Ranking to Reasoning: Philosophies Driving GEO Brand Presence Tools Google briefs brands on AI Mode ads ahead of Q4 rollout Industry Pioneer Reveals Why SEO Isn’t Working & What To Refocus On AI Search Changes Everything – Is Your Organization Built To Compete? How LLMs Interpret Content: How To Structure Information For AI Search Why Your SEO Isn’t Working, And It’s Not The Team’s Fault 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 Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 18m 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: AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story AI and the reality of zero-click search go hand in hand. And while I think that the response to these, this idea of zero-click marketing, is a good one, this is the bigger picture. So what is the bigger picture? What is the deeper meaning of artificial intelligence and zero-click marketing? I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 467 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. I want to talk about the reality of search marketing today. And this episode is very much a follow-up from last week’s discussion about the rise of a agentic AI among your customers. You don’t need to listen to last week’s episode for this one to make sense. But I’d like you to be aware that I’m building on a ton of assumptions that explored in gory detail last week. If you’ve got questions about those assumptions, you definitely want to check out last week’s episode. It’s also a little less future focused and much more focused on our current reality, maybe where we’re going to be for the next six months or so. As I talked about last week, things could change at any time. So some of this may not age perfectly, but I think the bigger picture holds true. I don’t think we’re going to see a massive shift in customer behaviors in the next three to six months. I explained the systemic reasons why that’s the case last week. For one additional piece of evidence why I think that’s so, look at the public freak out that happened when ChatGPT, when OpenAI released its GPT-5 model this week. And more importantly, how the company backtracked and made its legacy models available to customers. Customers don’t typically accept change all that fast. We saw that play out in the most pure way possible over the last few days. What’s also true is that while I think that this stuff is going to hold true for the next, you know, three to six to maybe nine months, I could absolutely be wrong about this. As I mentioned last week, keep our core and explore methodology in mind. Focus 80% of your efforts on your core and about 20% of your efforts to see if things are changing. And that way, that should help ensure that you’ve got your bases covered in either case. Regardless, this comes back to the bigger picture of where are we with search? And is Google losing? Is AI taking their business? Is zero click killing us? Well, it’s complicated. First, data for the last couple of months is potentially very misleading. I’m not convinced that the current data — that is data from June, July, and August — tells us as much as we might think it does. We know that use of ChatGPT and other AI tools is highest among younger people and better educated people. And there’s one large group of people that falls into both of those buckets, and that is students, particularly high school and college students. They’re not in school right now, and they are heavy users of these tools. When we look at data from similar web or Google trends, we see that OpenAI’s traffic declined in July, and the gap between Google and OpenAI got wider. Over the last few weeks, that gap seems to have shrunk a tiny bit, which does align with kids heading back to school. So there’s some evidence that suggests that’s right. What it also suggests is that any boost you see in ChatGPT’s numbers in the next month or two might be driven largely by students and not by the larger market. Maybe. Why does that matter? Well, it depends on what you’re selling. If students represent a large share of your customer base, then those numbers could be very meaningful to you. If they don’t, if you sell to a broader market than just students, then it means that activity by those student groups is going to make it tougher to see what’s genuinely happening with your actual customers. Non-commercial activity — or at least commercial activity unrelated to your business — might mask your reality. Now, normally I’d tell you to simply pay attention to your analytics, but there’s two problems with this approach. The first is that your analytics might not tell you the whole story if you’re not doing the work to appear in AI answers right now. I’m going to come back to this a little later in the show, but it’s an important point. The second is that customer behaviors seem to follow a pattern right now of what’s called “explore and exploit.” This is a super common behavior among decision making strategies. People do this in all kinds of realms. What explore and exploit means in this specific case is that a fair number of folks are using AI for exploration. They’re engaging with AI to answer questions, to learn, to get exposed to new ideas, and yes, to find products and services they like — hotels, restaurants, clothing, technology, and so on. However, at the same time, they can’t really buy through these tools (e.g., agentic AI) yet, at least not easily or consistently. Again, see last week’s episode for more on this topic. Instead, when they’re ready to buy, when they’re ready to exploit what they’ve learned, they’re likely to navigate directly to you or search for you by brand name. And we’re seeing lots of companies that we work with getting significant increases in clicks and click-through rate on brand in terms of Google Search Console, as well as big lifts in “direct/none” traffic in their analytics. In other words, customers coming directly to the site. But only after they found the brand during their explore activity. This is critically important when we talk about the zero click search situation. Notice I called it a situation. I didn’t call it a problem. At least not yet. The reason is because today it’s only a real problem for certain industries. If you’re in publishing, for instance, or some other industry where your revenues are directly tied to your traffic, you do have a proble

Agentic AI is almost certainly going to be huge… and probably soon. Early versions of agentic AI already exist today. Some of them even work pretty well. And the early data suggests customers are OK with the idea of agentic AI. Those facts lead to a few key questions for you: What’s driving — or limiting — adoption of agentic AI? When will we see agentic AI reach large customer groups? Which companies in the agentic AI space are best positioned to win? What will customer adoption of agentic AI mean for your business And, most importantly, what should you do about this shift? Some of these questions have easy answers. Some… less so. In this episode of the podcast, I try to break down what’s going on with agentic AI, when your customers might make the switch, and lay out a few ideas that you can put into practice, today, to ensure you can succeed both today, and whenever agentic AI breaks big. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 466) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Amazon Locks Down Against Google’s AI Shopping Agents — The Information Project Mariner – Google DeepMind Meredith Whittaker from Signal on the privacy implications of agentic AI, shared by @keithfitzgerald.bsky.social on Bluesky Booking.com Releases The Global AI Sentiment Report Personal Superintelligence by Mark Zuckerberg Mark Zuckerberg Just Declared War on the iPhone Why Amazon Is Buying Bee, an AI Bracelet That Records Everything You Say – WSJ A letter from Sam & Jony | OpenAI OpenAI recruits legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive to work on AI hardware in $6.5B deal | AP News A ChatGPT Screenless Phone Could Be Coming, as OpenAI Reportedly Eyes Jony Ive’s AI Startup – CNET OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome Revisiting Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? Gatekeepers Gonna Gate: Apple, Google, and Antitrust (Episode 258) A Far Too Quick Look at the Metaverse, web3, and the Future of Digital (Episode 349) AI Is Eating the World, But Who’s Paying for Dinner? (Episode 464) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Episode 425) – Tim Peter & Associates Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Episode 424) Diversifying Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Episode 430) Digital Reset: Marketing Beyond Big Tech Google Loses its Antitrust Case: Why That Matters for Your Business (Episode 429) 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 Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 24m 21s 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 Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 466) Hi, and welcome back to the show. Over the next few weeks, I plan to talk about the future of customer experience in digital. Search, of course, is the dominant paradigm for customer experience. If search wasn’t the most common experience, Google wouldn’t be the 800 pound gorilla that scares the crap out of every other beast in the jungle. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, and soon, agentic AI, Google is in a precarious position. My friend Mike Moran wrote me a thoughtful note about the risks that agentic AI in particular presents to Google, and I think he’s mostly right. I also think that it’s a very complicated and more than a little uncertain situation. And it’s tough to explain without first talking about what is and isn’t likely to happen and why I think that. So today I’m going to talk about the adoption of agentic AI, its likely effects on customer behaviors, and what that might mean for your business. Full disclosure, this one might get a little long, so I hope you’ll hang with us throughout. I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 466 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. What’s the big deal about agentic AI? So the basic idea, if you’re not familiar, is that agentic AI can perform a wide array of tasks. It can adapt to a variety of situations and it can make decisions on your behalf without requiring you to provide much, if anything, in the way of oversight. In short, it’s an AI assistant that takes care of things that maybe you don’t have the inclination, the knowledge, or most commonly the time to do yourself. The two examples I see of agentic AI that people share all the time are having an agent plan a vacation for you or researching some particularly thorny business challenge. You simply set the agent to the task and within a short period, usually a couple of minutes, it’s taken care of everything for you. In the vacation example, for instance, it would provide you with your completed reservations and an itinerary. You just go where you needed to go. In the business research situation, it would give you a checklist and a guide for how to address the problem. And in some cases, it may have already completed some of the tasks itself, like emailing vendors or team members, that sort of thing. These tools already exist today. These are not science fiction. Some of them are pretty good and getting better. I mean, most aren’t, but they’re real and they’re coming in a much bigger way — and probably relatively soon. Which leads to a few big questions. The first is what’s driving or limiting adoption of these tools? The second is when will we see these reach large customer groups? When will customers ultimately start using them, you know, every day? The third is which companies are best positioned to win? And the fourth, and most importantly, is what will their use mean for your business and what do you do about it? I think anytime you talk about new technology, there are always three main pillars that either drive or limit, depending on your point of view, adoption. There may be others, but this tends to cover the bases. They are: The capabilities or utility of the tool The distribution of the tool, that is, does it have access to markets, and… Its monetization, how the is tool paid for. I think that the answers to most of the other questions — the timing to reach mass adoption, the company’s best position to win, and to a lesser degree what they mean for your business — all follow from the adoption question. Put more simply, until these tools are used by a meaningful segment of your customers, a meaningful set of your customers, the rest of the questions really don’t matter. I also want to be super upfront that I suspect that adoption, mass adoption, could occur literally any day now. Digital has long shown us that customer adoption follows what I always call Hemingway’s “bankruptcy pattern.” You know, “How do you go bankrupt? It happens slowly, then all at once.” We’re in the slowly moment right now. But all at once could happen at any time. People could wake up tomorrow, realize that these tools provide better capabilities or better utility, and just simply switch instantly. To talk about these each in a little more detail, capabilities and utility is still not perfect for most of these. Now, one of the biggest things limiting the utility of these tools today is their access to data and their access to websites. We’re seeing things where these tools have to work with the web as it is. And some people may not want that to happen. For instance, Amazon is restricting Google’s Mariner, which is one of their agentic AI platforms, as well as others by using its robots.txt file — which, if you’re not familiar, is a tool that many websites use to tell search engines what they can and can’t do on a site. It’s to be determined whether or not agentic AI will always follow those rules, but it certainly could be a problem for them. I strongly suspect Amazon will almost certainly do some level of IP based filtering to write blocking specific IP addresses to prevent these tools from working with their data, right? Because they want to they want their tools to work with their data, not other people’s. It doesn’t look like companies like WalMart or Shopify are doing that yet. We’re going to have to see how that will play out. What’s absolutely true though, is that agentic AI needs to wo

Unlike a lot of folks, I’m not convinced that AI agents are the end of brands. Sure, there’s a risk. But I still believe most customers will choose brands that work for their needs & and will train their agents, as those evolve, to pick their preferred options in many cases. Of course, getting customers to train their agents that you’re the right choice isn’t something you can wait to do when (or if) agents become available. Instead, it’s something you can (and should!) do right now. Even better, it works for your brand and business… right now. What’s not to love about that? In this episode of the podcast, I take a look at why brands will continue to matter, why “the brand is the prompt,” and what you need to do to get customers to ask for you by name. Want to learn more about it? Here are the show notes for you. The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) Michael J. Goldrich | LinkedIn Tammie Carlisle, CHDM | LinkedIn Mark Simchock | LinkedIn Peter Syme | LinkedIn Pedro Colaco | LinkedIn Steve Cummins | LinkedIn What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447) The Only Way to Succeed Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 444) AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) How Google Loses (Thinks Out Loud Episode 442) AI Is Eating the World, But Who’s Paying for Dinner? (Thinks Out Loud 464) Google Closes the Gate on Marketers (Thinks Out Loud) Is It Impossible for Marketers to Keep Up With AI? (Thinks Out Loud 459) AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455) What If I’m Wrong About AI and Marketing Jobs? (Thinks Out Loud 453) AI and the Future of Marketing and E-commerce — How You Stay Relevant Google vs. ChatGPT: Who’s Really Winning… And Why It Matters for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 451) Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448) Predicting the Future of Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 445) When Will AI Get Good at Marketing? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 446) 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 You might also enjoy this webinar I participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: 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: 23m 48s 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 Brand is the Prompt Every few months, I like to revisit prior episodes of the podcast for two reasons: Update and provide context based on changing realities. Give myself a little creative refresher… a “reset,” if you will. The idea is to see if I’ve got a new perspective on a topic and share the latest, while building on existing materials. Sometimes, though, the topic changes so fast, I can’t wait several months to revisit it. Instead, it requires a new look in just weeks. That’s the case this time around. I’m revisiting an episode called The Brand is the Prompt from mid-June. And the reason is because of how quickly customer behaviors are shifting around AI and how much buzz the idea of zero click search is getting. To me, AI and zero-click search are two sides of the same coin. Because, in both cases, it’s entirely likely that your customers got the answers they needed, then had no reason to visit your website or any other component of your digital presence. Their “search” — in the broadest sense of the term — is done. That behavioral shift has led to excessive heartache and headlines about how many aspects of our day-to-day life as marketers and commercial leaders are doomed: SEO is dead Brands are dead Your business is dead. And so on. In my view… that’s all bullshit. Seriously. I don’t believe for a minute that customers are going to stop seeking out brands and businesses and experiences that matter to them. I don’t believe for a minute that customers aren’t going to choose brands and businesses and experiences they trust. Sure, they may turn to AI or search — zero click or otherwise — for new ideas and inspiration. But they’re also going to remember the brands and businesses and experiences that they liked and loved. They’re going to ask for those again and again, by name. They’re going to teach their agents about those preferences so that their agents recommend the brands and businesses and experiences they want. In my view, there’s a word for marketing in a “zero click” world. It’s called “MARKETING.” It’s about differentiating your product or service. It’s about building awareness and interest and desire and action. It’s about connecting with customers as human beings and helping them address their needs and solve their problems. It’s about being a trusted resource in their lives. In short, it’s about building a brand people want to ask for by name. And it’s something I’ve summarized as “The brand is the prompt.” Take a few minutes and check out this past episode of our podcast, “The Brand is the Prompt,” then let me know what you think. It’s coming at you, right now. As I mentioned before the break, I’ve got this new theory that I’m thinking about to ensure that you don’t get burned by customer shift to AI agents. That idea is “the brand is the prompt.” Marketers need to make their brand top of mind so that customers and AI agents explicitly ask for you and they ask for your business by name. There are number of supporting predicates behind my argument. The first is that AI tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Google’s Project Mariner—which is Google’s AI agent platform—won’t always, and don’t always, surface brands or links. It’s going to be tougher and tougher for you to get seen. Another is that getting into AI answer engines can be challenging… and it’s certainly evolving. Yes, we are seeing fairly strong correlation that shows that sites that rank well in Google also tend to get mentioned more often in large language models. But, first, that’s not a one-to-one relationship by any stretch. Just because you rank number one doesn’t necessarily mean you will be the first thing mentioned. And second, there’s no guarantee that that current behavior will remain true over time. Another huge challenge that we need to keep in mind is that I’m fairly confident that AI agents will favor their own ecosystems. Google will point you to Google assets. Amazon will point you to Amazon assets. If you’ve got an agent that’s made by ChatGPT, they’re going to point you to other OpenAI assets in all likelihood, at least a fair bit of the time. That’s the problem we’re dealing with in traditional search today. I think by now you’re probably pretty familiar with the idea that “gatekeepers gonna gate.” And if you’re not, I would strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. The link is in the show notes, of course. My conclusion from these various principles is that we need to work towards a situation where customers want to prompt AI with your brand, not a generic product. So if I say “book me a room at the John Rutledge House inn (full disclosure: John Rutledge House Inn is a client) the John Rutledge House Inn wins. By contrast, if I say “book me a hotel,” that specific hotel loses… as do lots and lots and lots of other hotels that weren’t asked for by name. If you don’t build brand preference today, you risk commoditization and longer term, irrelevance. Your brand must be built today across experiences that appeal to people, that appeal to AI agents, and over time, appeal to hybrid experiences. So I mentioned that I posted this on LinkedIn the other day and I got an amazing number of replies and some really strong counter arguments. And I want to walk you through these and see what you think. So the first counter argument came from my friend Michael Goldrich who said that AI agents will do the prompting, not the user. Basically his argument is that AI agents will be proactive, they’ll be personalized, and they’ll be connected to your data; things like your loyalty programs, your email and your calendar, other things like that. So the agent

Google seems scared. Customers seem ready to jump. Behaviors are shifting fast and furious. While I tend to think Google is in the best possible position to win the AI wars, they’re also the fattest target for startups like OpenAI. The Mary Meeker report illustrates many of the ways that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic threaten the Big Tech status quo. But, increasingly, Google’s own actions also show that they’re concerned. My suspicion is that their data — which they have more of than anybody — isn’t giving them much comfort. (That’s only a suspicion; I could definitely be wrong there. Again, though, their actions are speaking fairly loudly all on their own). Regardless of who wins, it’s possible that marketers will pay the price. You’ll need to adapt to a rapidly changing marketplace, one where you customers will interact your brands in entirely new ways. So, who’s paying for dinner now that AI is eating the world? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Revisiting AI Is Eating the World, But Who’s Paying for Dinner? (Thinks Out Loud) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links AI Is Eating the World, But Who’s Paying for Dinner? (Thinks Out Loud 464) Mary Meeker Trends — Artificial Intelligence BOND PDF link Tech prophet Mary Meeker just dropped a massive report on AI trends – here’s your TL;DR | ZDNET What the 2019 Mary Meeker Internet Trends Report Means for Digital Marketers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 248) What Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trends Report Means for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 220) Breaking Down the Mary Meeker 2015 Internet Trends Report: Thinks Out Loud Episode 125 Content is King, Customer Experience is Queen (Thinks Out Loud Episode 188) Digital Reset: Marketing Beyond Big Tech Google Closes the Gate on Marketers (Thinks Out Loud) Is Apple Dropping Google? What Does That Mean For Your Business? (Thinks Out Loud 460) Is It Impossible for Marketers to Keep Up With AI? (Thinks Out Loud 459) AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455) Best of Thinks Out Loud: Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? AI and the Future of Marketing and E-commerce — How You Stay Relevant Google vs. ChatGPT: Who’s Really Winning… And Why It Matters for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 451) How To Run Your Business As If Google Didn’t Exist (Thinks Out Loud Episode 298) Four Big Threats (Plus a Bonus Threat!) To Google’s Dominance Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 436) Revisiting Google Big AI Problem (Thinks Out Loud) Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) Is Google Doomed? And Other Top Digital Trends for 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 408) Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) 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 IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 23m 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: Revisiting AI Is Eating the World, But Who’s Paying for Dinner? Google’s running scared these days. It’s almost like they’re looking over their shoulder and afraid of what they see. Situations like these always, always remind me of the Hemingway quote about how people or companies in this case go broke: “slowly, then all at once.” We are in the “slowly” phase at the moment, and “all at once” feels like it’s right around the corner. And that reminded me of an episode from a little earlier this year that asked, “AI is eating the world, but who’s paying for dinner?” It was based on the recent Mary Meeker AI report, which outlines the ways in which the world is changing, not just for marketers but for the overall market. I’m going to have a lot more to say in the next few weeks about the state of AI and marketing, a big picture view of how AI and zero click marketing are combining to make this the most interesting — and challenging — time that marketers have had to face in quite a while. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more on that topic. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy as we revisit this look at AI is eating the world, but who’s paying for dinner? It’s a little bit longer than our typical episode, but I think you’ll find it worth your time. So let’s dive in and check it out. Coming at you right now. You know, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last, I don’t know, two or three or four years, you’re probably aware that AI is moving faster than anything we’ve ever seen before. But underneath the hype, there’s a problem nobody’s talking about. Who’s going to pay for all of this? Like, where does the money come from? And most importantly, what happens to marketers when the bill comes due? That’s a really critical lesson that I think we need to think about as we go forward as marketing and customer acquisition folks. This is episode 464 of The Big Show. Today we’re talking about how AI is eating the world, but who’s paying for dinner? Let’s dive in. So I’ve been reading the Mary Meeker report for the last 24 hours or so. Longtime listeners of the show and readers of the blog know how much I love Mary Meeker’s report. If you’re not familiar with Mary Meeker, she’s a venture capitalist. She’s been around for a long time. She was an early investor in Facebook. Super, super smart woman. Tremendously, tremendously smart team she’s put around herself. And I devour her report every single time it comes out. It is a massive report this year. 340 pages almost entirely focused on artificial intelligence and what it means for the world today. Now, you know that this show literally started out as a place for me to think out loud. That’s where the title came from. This episode is going to be a little bit along those lines, in part because I’m going to be digesting this report for a couple of weeks. Again, this is a 340 page report. There’s a lot in there, some of which are not so relevant to marketers and e-commerce professionals, and some of which are very relevant. But… I want to talk about her key finding as it matters to you today, which is that AI adoption has outpaced the internet, mobile, and even cloud adoption curves. ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly users in just 17 months. That is faster than any technology we’ve ever seen. So AI is not some future thing. You know that. It’s here. It’s now. It’s beginning to become baked into the customer journey. What’s also true is that those numbers require some clarification. First, adoption is not constant by age group. Sam Altman, who is OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said this, he said, “a gross simplification is older people use ChatGPT as like a Google replacement. People in their 20s and 30s, use it like a life advisor.” That’s a big difference. That’s a huge deal in terms of how customers use these tools. The second key thing that you want to take away is that adoption might not be as broad as you might think. People who listen to the show, people who I interact with on social media and the like, we’re all fairly early adopters. So I think we think people have really taken this too hard. And it’s not that they haven’t. Again, adoption has been huge. But today they’re spending maybe 18 minutes per day on ChatGPT by “USA active users.” Now that’s up from roughly seven minutes per day in less than two years. Side note, the Meeker report doesn’t show exact numbers, just ranges in 10 minute increments. The current number is definitely a bit below 20 minutes per day, but it’s getting close to there. And the earlier number was definitely more than five minutes per day, but far fewer than 10. So, you know, seven. Also, “active users” isn’t clearly defined in the report, so we’re not 100% sure how they mean or what they mean by active users. Another chart in the report shows that the average session duration is a little over two minutes and that the average user has about seven to eight sessions per day, roughly double what it was less than two years ago. So again, tremendous growth. These are impressive numbers. My favorite stat