The platforms sending you customers today are systematically making themselves indispensable… and charging you more for that privilege every quarter. Organic channels are down 20–30% for many companies, across a wide array of industries. For many companies, paid channels are up 40–85%… or more. The businesses absorbing this shift aren’t “failing companies” making “bad decisions.” They’re led by competent marketing teams following a playbook that used to work, slowly trading margin for traffic while their revenue numbers give them no reason to look closer.

Today’s episode is Part 1 of a 3-episode series on what it actually costs when you don’t own your customer and what you can do about it.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders

In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

• Why even some businesses doing everything "right" are quietly bleeding their marketing margins dry
• A real-world client case where organic flipped from 2:1 organic to 2:1 paid in a single year… and nobody noticed until it was almost too late
• The gatekeeper trap: How platforms hook you, shift the rules, and then leave you scrambling
• Why Google, Meta, and Amazon can’t reverse course. Hint: Their investors won’t let them
• The fundamental law of the digital economy: every platform that sends you customers eventually charges you more for them
• Three diagnostic questions to assess your own exposure right now

The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3 (Episode 498) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

Related Episodes

• Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business (Episode 497)
• Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why (Digital Reset FOUNDATIONS — Episode 496)
• Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495)
• The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490)
• The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech

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

Past Appearances

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

Free Downloads

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

• A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you.
• Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:
  • Customer Focus
  • Strategy
  • Technology
  • Operations
  • Culture
  • Data

Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud

• Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
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Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital Reset

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

Running time: 18:16

Transcript: The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3

Organic channels are flat to minus thirty percent year over year. Paid channels are up forty percent or more, often a lot more. I talked with a business the other day that saw organic traffic plummet by over forty percent, and even more importantly, their revenue fall by more than thirty percent.

Even some businesses I know who are having great years, we’re seeing the same story hold true. One client of mine is having a massive revenue growth this year. They’re up over twenty-five percent year on year. They’re just paying for more of that revenue than ever before.

Big Tech gatekeepers are closing the gates.

As I talked about here on the show a couple of weeks ago, Google recently reported its most profitable quarter ever. Meta reported revenue growth of thirty-three percent. Amazon’s advertising services group grew twenty-two percent year on year, and over the last twelve months, it’s generated revenue of over seventy billion dollars. Almost all of these Big Tech gatekeepers’ growth was driven from companies like you.

Hell, Meta even acknowledged that their price per ad grew twelve percent in their most recent earnings call. None of these companies are admitting that they’re charging more on earnings calls. They’re bragging about it.

In many cases, not only are companies I talk with paying more to folks that they’ve worked with for years, they’re often paying for traffic and conversions that they never had to pay for before. Look at the continuing growth of metasearch for hotels. That has eaten into organic search in a big, big way. Similarly, the increasing budgets for paid social and creator partnerships have largely taken the place of organic social media for many businesses in a whole host of industries. These are entirely new line items in the budget that eat into your profitability.

The individual numbers change by business, by industry, by month, by quarter, but the overall pattern is the same. More traffic arriving later in the purchase journey and more from paid channels, no matter where the customer starts.

This is not just a warning sign. It’s so much more serious than that. One individual who I’m keeping anonymous for obvious reasons and with their permission, put it in stark terms. He said, "We can’t afford to go on like this." This isn’t a question of traffic or conversions or revenue. For many businesses, it’s a question of survival.

This is episode 498 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Today, we’re talking about what it actually costs when you don’t own your customer. Let’s dive in.

I was sitting in a monthly review with a relatively new client recently. On the surface, their numbers were fine. Not spectacular, but not terrible. Their revenue was slightly down year on year, just under 2%, but they’re in a tough segment, so it was, you know, "expected." I’m definitely putting some quotes around that word, but I mean, we’ve all been there, right? We know sometimes we’re gonna have a tough year.

Their total traffic was also down slightly more than 2%, and their conversion rate actually grew marginally. Direct navigation to their website was also up about 2%, and so was branded search. Overall, they thought that everything was very much in line with their expectations and as a result, thought everything was, you know, okay. They were prepared for this reality. It wasn’t a huge shock to them.

The truth is that their expected tough comparables year on year hid a much, much darker story. I mean, they were doing the right things. They were getting what they’d wanted. They were getting what they’d "expected." And under the hood, they are slowly bleeding their business dry.

Organic channels for this business, including search and social, were off by about 20%. Paid channels were up almost 85%. They were trading "free" traffic for paid traffic. The share of traffic literally flipped from two to one in favor of organic to two to one in favor of paid in a year. And because their revenue was holding steady, the marketing team hadn’t noticed it.

While I can’t share actual revenues or profits, safe to say that it’s a material difference in terms of their marketing’s profitability. The only "good news" here, and it’s not much of that, is that the CFO hadn’t really picked up on it yet either. We had a conversation the other day, the CFO and I, and the longer-term trend was news to her too. The mid-year review doesn’t sound like it’s gonna be much fun for anyone.

The client is far from alone. I’m seeing this everywhere. The pattern keeps turning up across almost every business I’m talking with these days. Some are a bit worse off, some are doing somewhat better. But when you look at the longer-term numbers, the general trend is the same.

And most of these businesses aren’t doing anything wrong specifically. In fact, they’re following a playbook that for a long time was fairly popular: They worked with platforms that offer reach that looks great early on. They optimized for the reach and conversions that those platforms offer. And because it works, in vernacular I’ve used myself many times, they were fishing where the fishing’s good. Their owned alternatives weren’t as urgent because everything "was performing," and I’m very much putting air quotes around that. And then fourth, the various platforms, algorithms, and fees shifted, mostly gradually, in a couple of cases suddenly, and now the business has to scramble.

This is a pattern I have seen again and again and again. This was the whole point of episodes 489 and 490 in early April. At its core, it’s the fundamental problem my book was written to address.

If you listened to last week’s episode, it outlined what AI search is doing to organic traffic right now and how it’s exactly the same pattern playing out in yet another part of the ecosystem.

The toll that gatekeepers charge isn’t a future risk. It’s happening right now.

The reality is that Google’s changes to the way they present search results, and Meta’s changes to the way they display your content on Facebook and Instagram, and LinkedIn’s changes to the way they display your content in your customers’ feeds, and on and on and on make it increasingly difficult for your brand and business to be seen without paying for that visibility.

Think about it from the perspective of the client I talked about a few moments ago. If their organic channels were even flat this year as opposed to down 20%, they’d actually have grown revenue year on year despite the fact that they’re facing a tough market.

It’s not going to get much better anytime soon either, not for them and probably not for you.

Again, if you listened to last week’s episode, Google proudly announced an array of changes like intelligent AI agents and a "Universal Cart" designed to engage customers and keep them inside Google’s ecosystem… and off your site. ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude have already delivered or are working to deliver comparable features. Social media has acted similarly for years, downplaying the reach of content with links and promoting content that keeps users engaged within their platforms. How many times have you been on LinkedIn and seen a post that included the words, "Link in the comments"? That’s just one more symptom of the reality we’re living with.

You want to bet that any of these guys are going to reverse course on this? I sure wouldn’t. They can’t. Their quarterly numbers, the ones that I cited before the break, are how they keep their investors happy. If Sundar Pichai or Mark Zuckerberg or Andy Jassy or any other Big Tech CEO, any other gatekeeper, regardless of their size, suddenly announced they weren’t going to monetize their traffic as aggressively any longer, or that they were looking for ways to drive more organic traffic and reduce paid opportunities, they might be fired even before the earnings call was over. You’d probably hear something like, "Uh, yeah, we’re experiencing technical difficulties," while they were escorting the now former CEO from the building… or shoving them out a window.

You’ve heard me say gatekeepers gonna gate many times, and given the context of what we’re talking about, let me explain it in a single short sentence: Every platform that sends you customers eventually charges you more for those customers. That’s it. That’s what gatekeepers gonna gate means in a nutshell. It’s shorthand for a reality that you live with today and will continue to live with for a long time to come, probably forever if we’re thinking about this critically. I didn’t coin that phrase as a throwaway line. Instead, it’s designed to describe a fundamental law of the digital economy.

That’s why the client I described earlier didn’t really make a mistake. It’s why they and any business that uses search or social media or other digital channels to find new business, you know, essentially all of them, isn’t wrong to partner with these folks either. It’s also why businesses aren’t stupid or wrong when they suddenly find themselves caught in one of the gatekeepers’ traps. You work with companies that provide value. That’s a good idea. And you continue working with them until they don’t provide value. That’s also a good idea.

Sometimes, though, the line between "provides value" and "doesn’t provide value" disappears, like the famous expression says, "slowly… then all at once." That’s what we’re seeing right now with organic versus paid channels.

I said on this podcast that organic search was still a key driver for many businesses as recently as six months ago. In some businesses, it’s still true. While we were certainly seeing some shifts towards ChatGPT and other AI platforms, Google still delivered — and may still deliver — the lion’s share of traffic, mostly via organic search for most businesses. It’s only in the last couple of months that it started to shift dramatically for many businesses. And of course, that shift is going to accelerate over time. Many businesses are seeing this problem today. Others won’t see it for a while yet. That’s okay. That’s super normal.

By the way, while I’m on this topic, I slightly misspoke last week, during the episode while I was talking about this very topic. I’d said at the time that, and this is a quote, "Within a couple of months, search will no longer send you large volumes of traffic every day. It might not send you traffic at all." My point wasn’t that Google will stop sending you large volumes of traffic within a couple of months. My point was that their new features launching later "this summer," that is, "in a couple of months," will be the reason Google stops sending you large volumes of traffic whenever or if that reality happens. I think it’s far more likely that Google shifts from large volumes of organic traffic to large volumes of paid traffic versus traffic or no traffic. For starters, a huge share of their revenue and profits come from folks clicking their ads. They’re not gonna give up that traffic until they have a proven way to offset the revenue they’d give up from all of the paid clicks that they get today.

Regardless, we need to acknowledge the world we’re living in. We need to understand that the share of traffic you’re getting and likely to get from free sources is declining. And once we’ve acknowledged those facts, we need to plan for what we’re going to do about it.

As we start to wrap up today’s episode, I’ve got three questions for you.

1. The first is what percentage of your new customer acquisition traffic and revenue runs through channels you don’t control?
2. The second, is direct and organic traffic growing or shrinking as a share of your total traffic over the last 12 months?
3. And the third is, if your top acquisition channel changed its terms tomorrow, what’s your alternative that you’re gonna have in place within the next 90 days?

If any of those questions produced an uncomfortable answer for you, next week we’re going to look at the single question that will help you reframe how you think about all three of those questions. And the week after that, episode 500 of this podcast, I’m going to give you the most complete map, the most useful path that I can draw for what you can actually do about it. Today is part one of three. I hope you’ll stay with me because I think this is the single biggest set of questions we need to be thinking about right now.

Again, to recap those:

1. What percentage of your new customer acquisition traffic and revenue runs through channels you don’t control?
2. Is direct and organic traffic growing or shrinking as a share of your total traffic over the last 12 months?
3. If your top acquisition channel changed its terms tomorrow or raised its fees tomorrow, what’s your 90-day alternative?

I hope you’ll stick with me as we go through the next couple of episodes and work this out.

In the meantime, if this episode gave you a clearer picture of the world we’re living in right now and how you can start thinking about your path forward, do me a favor. Send it to a colleague who’s currently struggling to figure this out for you and your business. It might save them and you from heading down the wrong direction.

You can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcasts.

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

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

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The post The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3 (Episode 498) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

For years, tech titans have chased the holy grail of "the everything app." It turns out we already had one: Google Search. But a massive shift is underway. Google is moving from a model that directs users to your website to one that answers queries, manages tasks, and completes purchases entirely within its own ecosystem… and entirely within the Search box itself.

Google’s I/O 2026 conference revealed a complete reimagining of the search experience. With the introduction of AI-powered Search agents, a multimodal Search box, and its cross-platform "Universal Cart," Google is making its play to become the ultimate destination, not just the gateway.

For businesses that have historically relied on search traffic to fuel their growth, the calculus has completely changed. Traditional search traffic volumes are already declining. Over time, they could drop precipitously, leaving brands like yours to contend with an environment where the world’s biggest gatekeeper owns your front door.

In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down exactly what Google’s latest I/O announcements mean for your customer acquisition strategy. He explores how Google is using AI to control user attention, why authentic web presence is more critical than ever, and how to build a resilient brand that means everything to your customers when Google — or anyone else in Big Tech — wants to be your customers’ “everything app.”

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders

In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

• Google is officially turning Search into the ultimate "Everything App." Instead of acting as a portal that sends users to your website, Google’s new AI-reimagined Search box is designed to anticipate intent and answer queries directly. Combined with 24/7 background Search agents and its new Universal Cart, Google’s ecosystem is built to keep users contained within its walls from discovery all the way through purchase.
• Google sets it straight: AEO and GEO are SEO. The day before I/O, Google published guidance clarifying that optimizing for generative AI features requires the same foundational best practices as traditional SEO. They debunked myths around needing special machine-readable files, Markdown, or specific AI schemas, emphasizing that high-quality, valuable, non-commodity content must remain your priority.
• The "Universal Cart" changes the e-commerce landscape. Operating across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, Universal Cart acts as an automated hub that tracks deals, price history, and stock alerts across multiple merchants. Google’s Universal Cart allows users to shop seamlessly without ever leaving Google’s ecosystem, fundamentally altering direct-to-consumer traffic patterns. That’s bad for Amazon. It could be even more dangerous for you.
• AI Max is removing advertiser control in favor of platform autonomy. Google’s transition from user-controlled Dynamic Search Ads to its AI Max advertising product signals a broader shift toward automated, platform-managed, “black box” ad campaigns. Gatekeepers are both raising your costs and lowering the transparency around connecting with your audience, making it crucial that brands evaluate their paid strategies closely.
• Authentic mentions and robust CRM data are your shield against gatekeeper tolls. While Google notes that inauthentic mentions aren’t useful, high-quality, authentic user-generated reviews across platforms like Google Local, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and social media are driving visibility in AI Overviews. Directly owning customer relationships via email, SMS, and exceptional first-hand customer experiences is the only way to bypass the gatekeeper tax.

Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business (Episode 497) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

Related Episodes

• Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why (Digital Reset FOUNDATIONS — Episode 496)
• Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495)
• One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Digital Reset Episode 494)
• Customer Experience is Queen? What Does That Mean? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 190)
• The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486)
• The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425)
• Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491)
• AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless (Digital Reset Episode 492)
• In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472)

Research and Source Links

Google SEO & AI Guidance

• Google’s Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search | Google Search Central  |  Documentation  |  Google for Developers — Official documentation from Google Search Central covering AEO/GEO integration and mythbusting optimization tactics.
• Why Reviews Matter for SEO: Google’s Hidden Ranking Signals | Straight North — Insights into how user reviews serve as powerful local ranking factors.
• Review Signals Gain Influence In Top Google Local Rankings — Exploration of why continuous user-generated content impacts organic and AI discovery.

Google I/O 2026 Announcements

• Google Search’s I/O 2026 updates: AI agents and more — Comprehensive overview of the 25-year upgrade to the search interface, agentic features, and multimodal inputs.
• Google Shopping introduces Universal Cart, agentic shopping — Details on the background-operating multi-merchant cart across Search, YouTube, and Gmail.
• Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch — Analysis of how zero-click searches and in-ecosystem answers alter traffic paradigms.
• Gemini Spark Is Google’s Response to OpenClaw’s 24/7 AI Agent | WIRED — Deep dive into Google’s background intelligence tools using Gemini 3.5 Flash.

Google Advertising Changes

• Google’s Dynamic Search Ads are upgrading to AI Max — Reporting on the platform’s shift toward automated asset generation and broad-match environments.
• Google Touts Its AI Ad Tech Adoption And New AI Max Features | AdExchanger — Product update details regarding the deprecation of advertiser-controlled Dynamic Search Ads.

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech

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

Past Appearances

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

Free Downloads

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

• A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you.
• Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:
• Customer Focus
• Strategy
• Technology
• Operations
• Culture
• Data

Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud

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Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks

Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud

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

Running time: 22:34

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 Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business

Did you notice how Google published marketer-friendly SEO guidance the day before its I/O conference? There is no way that their timing was accidental. It was choreographed to send a message, and that message could not be more clear.

I/O revealed Google’s new agentic tools, its "Universal Cart" for shopping and buying, and a brand-new Search box that no longer sends you traffic. It answers queries directly within Google. That completely changes the calculus for every business that’s relied on search traffic to drive their growth. Within a couple of months, Search will no longer send you large volumes of traffic every day. It might not send you traffic at all. Oh, it might be a place people can buy. But only if Google decides you’re worth showing at all.

Google has always been the real "everything app" that Big Tech titans and their wannabe contenders have promised for years. Now they’re making it official. Search is the interface that your customers will use to find information, research products and services, book travel or buy, well, anything or everything. That completely changes the calculus for every business that’s relied on search traffic to drive growth. Within a couple of months, Search will no longer send you large volumes of traffic every day. It might be a place people can buy. But only if Google decides you’re worth showing at all.

Today’s episode is longer than usual. That’s because there’s a lot to cover. Most importantly, it’s as clear a read as I can offer on what Google’s announcements mean for you and your business, what they’re not talking about, and what you can do to build a brand that can compete when the gatekeeper owns your front door. I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 497 of Digital Reset. Let’s dive in.

Google outlined how web and content teams can optimize their “websites for generative AI features on Google Search.” In short, they said that AEO and GEO ARE SEO. In a call-out that asked “What about AEO and GEO?” Google said simply, “From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”

Their biggest tips: “Apply foundational SEO best practices to generative AI search,” “Create valuable, non-commodity content for your audience,” and “Build and maintain a clear technical structure.” They also followed these up with a section titled “Mythbusting generative AI search: What you don’t need to do” that included ideas like: You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files markup or Markdown to appear in generative search. “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.” “You don’t need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search.” “Seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem.” And, “Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search, and there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add.” They did follow that one up by adding: “However, it’s a good idea to continue using it, [that is, structured data/schema.org markup] as part of your overall SEO strategy, as it helps with being eligible for rich results on Google Search.”

What makes this most fascinating is that Google dropped this new guidance the day before its I/O developer conference where they introduced, in their words, “the biggest upgrade to our Search box in over 25 years — now completely reimagined with AI.” They noted that the new Search box is, “Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete.” I’ll come back to that in a little bit.

The search box, “can search across modalities, using text, images, files, videos or Chrome tabs as inputs.” They also introduced “Search agents.” As their press release notes, “We’re entering the era of Search agents, where you can easily create, customize and manage multiple AI agents for your many tasks, right in Search. We’re starting with information agents. Operating in the background, 24/7, these agents intelligently reason across information to find exactly what you need at exactly the right moment.”

And they followed that up with an “intelligent, proactive shopping cart” they call “Universal Cart.” Their press release for that claims that “Universal Cart is an intelligent shopping cart and your new hub for shopping on Google. It works across merchants and across services, so you can add things to your cart while you’re browsing Search, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube or even reading your Gmail.” The release continues, “The moment you add a product to your cart, it gets to work in the background — finding deals and price drops, giving you insights on price history and alerting you when an item is back in stock.”

That alone is a ton. But notice what they’ve done here. They’ve told you how you can show up on Google. Not how you can drive more traffic to your site. Universal Cart and Information Agents and whatever other agents follow down the road aren’t designed to drive traffic. They’re designed to keep people within Google.

For years, tech titans have talked about the idea of “the everything app.” It’s what Elon Musk is trying to do with the hollowed out husk of Twitter he calls X. It’s what Mark Zuckerberg wants to do with its social apps, AI, and smart glasses. The everything app is the holy grail, designed to take over — and ultimately replace — your customers’ phones when they’re looking to connect with friends, find information, research products and services, book travel or buy, well, anything or everything.

I’ve said that those efforts were not likely to succeed because we already had an everything app. Search. Google Search, most specifically. Search already is the everything app. It’s where customers traditionally have started most of their browsing and shopping and buying journeys. Yes, sure, your customers learn about new ideas and solutions and products and services from influencers, creators, friends, and family on social. That’s true. It’s still true. But when your customers were ready to learn more, dive deeper, browse, book, or buy, they turned to search. They turned to Google. Google was the front door. Google was, for all practical purposes, “the everything app.”

What more could you need? Turns out that I was wrong about that. Oh, sure, Search was the front door to learning and browsing and buying. But, at some point in their journey, your customers clicked away from Google and ended up at your front door. Customers showing up at your site or in your app allowed you to build direct relationships with your customers, to encourage them to return… and to do that without clicking a link from somewhere else first. To do that without searching. And that was something that Google simply couldn’t allow. Remember, gatekeepers gonna gate.

Google didn’t get here all on its own, of course. Amazon has long been the first place people searched when they were shopping. Again, X and Meta have already been working on their interpretations of “the everything app” for some time. And then, along came AI. Google has lost a little bit of market share, and more than a little bit of mindshare, to ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude. Those AI tools offered better experiences and, at least at first, more complete visions of an “everything app” — though they didn’t say it out loud. What was happening was that your customers were able to go to their favorite AI app and chat, research, learn, and, sometimes, buy or book the products and services they wanted. They were becoming the new gatekeepers, the ones who might take a seat at Big Tech’s table… or take over the whole table for themselves. Again, that’s simply something that Google could not allow.

Google announced their most profitable quarter ever less than a month ago. They certainly weren’t going to let it be the most profitable quarter they ever would have. That’s why Search has to become the real “everything app.” That’s where agents and “universal carts” come into play. Google is making its bid to be the one place customers go when they’re seeking information, insights, products, and services… every single time.

You know that I think they’ve got a huge leg up in this arena. They connect with your customers in ways large and small every day. Sure, there’s Search. There’s also Gmail and Calendar, Workspace/Drive/Docs, Maps, News, Travel and Flights, and Cloud. Oh, yeah, Android and Chrome too. And don’t forget their deal with Apple to provide the default search and AI experiences on Apple’s hardware. That’s an incredible footprint that virtually no one else can touch.

Now, remember when I said I’d come back to how the new Search box is, “Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete”? A couple of weeks ago we looked at Amazon’s “Sponsored Prompts,” which are ads that show up as customers type their query. You pay to have your brand appear in suggested prompts. I don’t know. You could even call them, oh, I don’t know, “AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete.” Where have I heard that phrase before? Right… in Google’s press release announcing the new Search box.

Gatekeepers gonna gate.

Google has also been pushing its AI Max advertising feature for the last 7-8 months. About a month ago, they also said that they’re “upgrading Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max,” which is their nice way of saying they’re killing advertiser-controlled Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets, and campaign-level broad match settings in favor of AI-managed ads. Don’t worry about putting in place the messages and rules and restrictions governing how and where some of your campaigns appear. AI will handle that for you. And then let you know what a good job it’s doing. Gatekeepers gonna gate. They raise the cost of connecting with your customers. I called that out in my book Digital Reset. This is just the latest example.

This is the single biggest question you have to ask yourself: How do you lower the cost of reaching your customers when their AI — or anyone else’s — is the search box, the shopping cart, the everything app between you and your customers?

First, don’t panic. Yes, you’ve got work to do. And yes, some of it’s going to be annoying. But, if you offer products or services to your customers, your brand is built more by their experiences with those products and services than anything else. You’re a hotel? Guests will learn more about your brand during their stay than anything Google or some social media creator can tell them. You offer financial services? Your advice, counsel, caring, and performance show your clients what they need to know. You offer SaaS capabilities? Your customers are hands on with your products all the time. That experience is what they’ll remember.

Second, remember that your brand is the prompt. And that your brand is built on three core elements: Content is king, Customer experience is queen, and Data is the crown jewels.

There are some subtle shifts we’re seeing in these because of AI’s growth. For instance, content distribution — being seen on social media as well as driving customer-generated content like ratings and reviews — is every bit as important as the content you create yourself. While that isn’t especially new, the added emphasis on channels beyond your website and customer commentary is.

Google said in its generative search guidance that “Seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem.” They didn’t say — nor would they — that authentic mentions aren’t helpful. I’m seeing hotels and other businesses I work with show up in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude because they get continual and consistent high-quality reviews on Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, G2, and social media sites.

Similarly, your CRM data takes on added weight in this new world. When you talk with customers via email or SMS, you have an opportunity to bypass AI gatekeepers and build deeper, longer-lasting connections. Which, of course, brings us back to content that your customers will find it worth their while to read, listen to, or watch. As my friend Ed St.Onge likes to say, “The point of every second of your content is to earn another second of attention.” The flipside of that is that every second that isn’t worth your customers’ attention isn’t worth sending them.

This is one of the key reasons I don’t recommend using AI to create your content. If you’re not willing to spend time on crafting content that’s relevant and useful for your customers, why would you expect your customers to spend any of their time engaging with it?

Putting this all together, Google just delivered their version of the everything app. They also told you they still expect your content to train that app and provide it with the answers it will need to keep customers in their ecosystem. And they gave you guidance on how you can ensure your content does its job for their needs. You probably have to play that game, at least to connect with customers the first time.

The businesses that think beyond Big Tech know though, that the real win comes from building deep relationships between your customers and your brand. And that building those deep relationships depends on content worth their time and customer experiences they’ll rave about to their friends and family and fans and followers… and their AI assistants and agents. And by using data wisely to better inform those discussions and experiences with your customers.

Google wants to be the everything app. Your job is to build a brand that means everything to your customers instead.

If this episode gave you a clear picture of what Google’s long game looks like in practice and how you can play it more effectively, do me a favor — send it to a colleague who’s currently struggling to figure this out. It might save them — and your business — from going down the wrong path.

You can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcasts.

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

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

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The post Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business (Episode 497) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Last week, Big Tech reported its Q1 2026 earnings. Google achieved an all-time high for search queries and grew their revenue 22%. Amazon announced “Sponsored Prompts,” paid placements built directly into AI conversations. Meta raised its ad prices and increased revenue by 33%.

If you heard those numbers and thought, “How on earth did we get here?” this episode is your answer.

This is a Digital Reset Foundations episode: a conversation recorded in April that has become more useful, not less, now that the Q1 numbers have come in. The 15-year pattern described here is exactly what drove those earnings. The shortcut trap isn’t theoretical. It literally just showed up in Big Tech’s earnings calls.

And the counter to their dominance is right in front of you. The brands winning in AI right now didn’t pivot to an AI-first strategy six months ago. Almost universally, they’ve been building direct customer relationships, earning independent reviews, and publishing content credible enough to be cited — for years. City of Hope didn’t have a GEO strategy or an AI optimization consultant. They appear in 97% of AI queries for their category because of brand and customer experience decisions they made years ago.

AI inclusion, it turns out, is an inheritance. It’s not something you acquire in a quarter. It’s something you build. And if you’ve been building the right things, the AI concierge will find you.

This reality raises obvious questions. If the framework is this well understood — build credible content, earn independent reviews, make your brand signal clear — why are 82% of companies still stuck in the AI value gap? Why don’t they just do it?

The answer is the Shortcut Trap. Every new gatekeeper’s entry into the market comes with a period where taking the shortcut looks like the smart play. Link-building programs before Google’s Penguin update. Organic follower growth before social media algorithms changed. Low-commission OTA distribution before take rates and paid placements climbed. AI content farming today.

The shortcut isn’t a scam. That’s why it works… at least temporarily. That’s also what makes it dangerous. By the time the cost becomes visible, too many businesses have built far too much of their strategy around it, and they own the visibility but not the relationship.

This episode traces 15 years of that pattern across four platform shifts — Google, social, OTAs, and now AI — and draws two clear tests that separate a genuine foundation investment from a shortcut dressed up as strategy. Google’s search revenue didn’t grow 22% because they got lucky. Amazon didn’t build sponsored prompts by accident.

The window is still open. But it won’t stay open indefinitely. If you’re the one who has to walk into a budget meeting and explain your company’s AI strategy, this is the episode that gives you both the pattern and the language you need to make your case.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders to Close the Gap
In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

• Why AI inclusion is an inheritance, not an acquisition. City of Hope shows up in 97% of AI queries for their category not because of any optimization strategy, but because of decades of peer-reviewed research, earned media, and patient reputation. The AI was trained on all of it. Most "GEO strategy" is sold as something you can acquire this quarter. If AI inclusion is primarily inherited from prior fundamentals investment, that changes the budget conversation entirely.
• Why the Q1 earnings weren’t a surprise and what that means for your budget. Google’s all-time high search queries, Amazon’s sponsored prompts, Meta’s 33% revenue growth: none of this is random. It’s the same gatekeeper cycle playing out again, this time with AI as the distribution layer. The businesses that understood this pattern before the earnings call are the ones building direct relationships now, while the window is still open.
• ”The Window” and why it’s finite. Every platform shift includes a window of two to five years (and possibly shorter) where the new gatekeeper is still building its position and hasn’t yet started collecting the highest tolls it can. Independent hotels has had several of these windows — roughly 1999-2001 and again in the 2010s — to build direct booking capabilities before OTA placement became non-negotiable. The ones that used those windows built reliable, high-performing email lists, loyalty programs… and direct revenue that follows from those actions. The AI window is open right now. It will not stay open indefinitely.
• The same game, different rules at the edges. What’s new: AI weighs corroboration quality over link quantity, making it harder to game with volume and technical tricks. What hasn’t changed: expert-authored content, independent validation, trusted-platform reviews, and a strong direct brand drove organic authority a decade ago. They still drive AI inclusion today. And if a GEO tactic hurts your search performance, it probably won’t help your AI visibility either.
• The Shortcut Trap: Why smart businesses fall into it. The shortcut is always most attractive exactly at the moment when a new platform is getting established, the upside is visible , and the cost isn’t yet clear. It’s not a scam because it works… at least temporarily. You end up owning visibility but not the relationship. Then, when the platform changes the rules, you own nothing.
• Two tests for any AI investment. First: would your investment matter if AI changed tomorrow? Expert-authored content, review velocity programs, and first-party data infrastructure improve your business regardless of which model is dominant in 18 months. If an investment only makes sense for how ChatGPT works in Q2 2026, that’s a warning sign. Second: do your efforts compound, or do they require continual investment? Yes, shortcuts work. But foundations compound. A great review earned today is in the training data for the next model update.
• The budget argument in plain terms. Not "don’t invest in AI," but "invest in AI the way businesses that survive every platform shift: invest in things that improve your business and compound across every platform." Expert-authored content that earns citations, review velocity programs, first-party data infrastructure? Yes. Anyone selling guaranteed placement in AI outputs? Fine. But start small, test, and make sure you own the result before you scale.

Whether you’re in hospitality, retail, or B2B — and especially if you’re the person who has to answer "what’s our AI strategy?" while watching the platform landscape shift under your feet — this episode gives you 15 years of pattern recognition and the live proof from Q1 2026 earnings to work with.

Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why (Digital Reset FOUNDATIONS — Episode 496) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

• The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489)
• Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495)
• One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Digital Reset Episode 494)
• 55% of People Hate AI: How to Use it Without Losing Your Customers (Digital Reset Episode 493)
• AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless (Digital Reset Episode 492)
• The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490)
• The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech

Don’t miss Tim Peter’s new book, 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"

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Transcript: Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why

Last week, we looked at Big Tech’s Q1 earnings. Google hit all-time high profits. Amazon is building sponsored prompts into AI conversations. Meta raised its ad prices and grew its revenue thirty-three percent.

If you heard that episode and thought, "How did we get here?" This episode is the answer.

This is a Digital Reset Foundations episode, a conversation I recorded in April that I think is as useful right now as anything I could record brand new this week.

The reason I’m bringing this one back is simple. Big Tech’s Q1 earnings didn’t surprise me. After you hear this, they won’t surprise you either.

Big Tech has built their businesses to extract more money from you and your business every single day. Gatekeepers gonna gate and all that.

Here’s the episode. I think it’ll be worth your time whether you’ve heard it before or not. Let’s dive in.

Welcome back to the show. The brands winning in AI right now didn’t pivot to an AI first strategy six months ago. Almost universally, they’ve been building direct customer relationships, earning independent reviews, and publishing content credible enough to be cited for years.

The AI didn’t teach them anything new. It just made visible who has done the work and who has been renting their results from the nearest gatekeeper. I’ve been watching this pattern play out for 15 years through Google algorithm updates, organic reach collapse on social media like Facebook and LinkedIn, increased commissions and take rates from intermediaries like online travel agencies and Amazon, and now the first wave of AI driven discovery.

Each time the businesses that navigated the shift with the least damage had the same things in common: a direct relationship with their customers, an earned reputation that didn’t depend on any single platform, and data that they owned, literally owned.

Here’s the thing. That framework isn’t complicated. Build credible content. Collect independent reviews. Earn the right to show up in your customer’s inbox. Make your brand signal clear.

Most people listening to this show already know that. The question this episode answers is, if the formula is this well understood, why are 82% of companies still stuck in the AI value gap? Why don’t they just do this?

The answer has everything to do with a trap that every new gatekeeper sets and that smart, experienced marketing leaders fall into anyway. I’ve watched it happen through four different platform shifts. I’d like to make sure it doesn’t happen to you on this one.

This is episode 489 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in.

A couple of weeks ago, you heard me talk about City of Hope and the fact that they show up in 97% of AI queries for their specific category. Well, City of Hope did not have a GEO strategy. They didn’t hire an AI optimization consultant.

They showed up in 97% of AI queries for their category because of decisions they made 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago or more. That should tell us something about what AI actually rewards. AI inclusion is an inheritance. It’s not an acquisition.

City of Hope inherited their position from years of peer reviewed research, independent media, and an earned reputation with their patients. The AI was trained on all of that.

Most GEO strategy, quote unquote, is sold as something you can acquire this quarter. But if AI inclusion is primarily inherited from prior fundamentals, that changes and should change your budget discussion, your budget conversation.

AIs see a weak signal, a contradictory signal, or no signal, and it loses confidence in your brand. When an AI sees a strong signal, a clear signal, a coherent signal, that’s when you win. The brands who are showing up consistently today are showing up because they’ve built brands worth people asking for by name. This is what I mean when I say the brand is the prompt.

But also brands that are worth answering by name, that the AI can confidently say, "As a concierge, I know the answer to your question. I know who you should be talking to."

Winning in the long run isn’t just about what you do this quarter. It’s what you do for a long time. If you go to your AI of choice — it doesn’t matter if it’s Google Gemini, it doesn’t matter if it’s ChatGPT, it doesn’t matter if it’s Perplexity, it doesn’t matter if it’s Claude — go to the AI you like the most and ask it to describe your brand.

Everything it gets right is a sign that you have a strong signal. Everything that it gets wrong or hedges on or isn’t quite clear on, that’s where you have a gap. And that’s your roadmap. You don’t need a vendor to do an audit. The AI itself is going to tell you this is what it knows to be true about you. That’s really, really key.

Now the most common gap is when you say one thing about your brand and your customers are saying something else about your brand. It sees a difference between your statements and your customer’s reviews. That’s a huge contradiction, and that means the AI will lose confidence in you. It cannot confidently recommend you to a potential customer.

Note that this isn’t just about the discussions happening on platforms that the AI trusts. It’s that you have never done the work to build review velocity for your business, that you haven’t worked to gain the earned media presence that gives the AI some corroborating evidence beyond just what you say on your site or beyond just what it sees in reviews.

Neither of those gaps is going to get solved by a GEO vendor — immediately. Both are solved by doing the same things that improve your direct business: giving a better customer experience, gaining better reviews, and building clearer signal.

I’ve worked with businesses to reduce their dependency on big tech companies over the last 15 years — through Google updates, through the emergence of OTAs, through social reach, and now AI. And what’s interesting is how this era looks similar to what I’ve seen before.

In the book Digital Reset, I talk about a pattern that happens: a new discovery channel emerges. Something comes around and we go, "oh, this is cool, we should check this out." We get good results from it early. We test it and we see that this is really working, and usually at a pretty low cost.

Over time, the platforms with legs grow more dominant. They build a bigger base of customers and often send more customers your way, usually at a pretty low cost. That’s super attractive. So you double down on that. You dive in even further until suddenly that becomes a major source of your business.

But at that point, that puts them in a position of gatekeeping power. And as you’ve heard me say many times before, gatekeepers gonna gate. They have to. They are required to, because they owe it to their shareholders to monetize the traffic and the connection that they have with customers to grow their revenues and grow their profits and grow their shareholder value. And so what happens is the gatekeeper then raises the toll to you.

This is a vicious cycle that occurs again and again and again. We’ve seen this repeatedly with search, with social, with mobile, with OTAs. It happens consistently.

Every time there’s a new platform shift, there’s a window. It could be two years, it could be three years, it could be five years, where the new gatekeepers are still building their position and they haven’t yet started collecting the highest tolls they can.

That’s huge because marketing leaders look at that and say, this is a great opportunity for our business. And that’s good. That actually is a good idea.

We saw this, I’ll give you a real world example, with independent hotels and hotel brands. They had opportunities to build direct booking capabilities and direct booking connections with customers before OTAs became kind of non-negotiable. First before September of 2001. Then in the later 2000s.

The ones that took advantage of those windows built direct websites. They built email lists. They built loyalty programs — either recognition programs or reward programs — to connect directly with customers and gain data. And they built direct revenue.

The ones that didn’t do those things are still paying 20% commissions as table stakes for 35, 40, 50% of their business. That’s not a great place to be. The boutique hotels that appear in ChatGPT answers today for questions like "the best independent hotel in Charleston," or "the best independent hotel in Orlando," are there because of the reviews they’ve been gaining for the last 10 years, for the content that they’ve been publishing for the last eight to 10 years, for press coverage that they earned five or six or seven years ago, and every year in between. They’re not there because of some AI strategy. They inherited that position because they had an overarching brand strategy and an overarching strategy of how to connect with their customers directly every single time.

The hotels that went all in on OTA distribution, the retailers that outsourced their audience to Facebook, the publishers who handed their traffic to Google — each of those folks made, I want to be fair, a rational decision in that moment. It wasn’t a mistake in the small terms. The problem was that they didn’t own anything when the platform changed the terms of the relationship.

So the question that I would ask is whether we are seeing a different game or whether it’s the same game with slightly different rules. Spoiler alert, I think it’s the same game with slightly different rules.

There are definitely new things happening here. Artificial intelligence, AI answer engines, and AI assistants and AI agents as they arrive, are weighing things like corroboration quality — is your story being backed up in other places — more than just "did you get a bunch of links." It’s much harder to game that with volume or technical tricks.

In that sense, AI is doing what search has always supposed to be doing before they had to spend so much time fighting black hat SEO types and people trying to game the system. Candidly, one reason why I’m so bullish on Google is that they know what getting gamed looks like. I’ve argued that many of the AI answer engines right now are doing a speed run through Google’s search spam learnings, and that they’re going to have to make changes that Google’s been making for years.

What hasn’t changed is expert authored content. You’re familiar with EEAT probably, from Google — Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust. Companies and businesses that have built that expertise and have built that authority and have gained that experience and have gained that trust are the ones doing well.

What also hasn’t changed is independent validation and trusted platform reviews and a strong, well-regarded direct brand that follows from those. Those drove organic authority 10 years ago, and they’re driving AI inclusion today.

Maybe you’ve heard me say before that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. That’s what we’re still seeing even with artificial intelligence.

One thing to keep in mind here is a "first, do no harm" principle. If a GEO tactic is going to hurt your search performance, it’s probably not going to work for artificial intelligence either — and certainly not in the long term. The tactics that work for both are the same: quality content, earned external references, active review management.

The brands that win in AI today are the ones that have inherited that position. The question you should be asking right now is not "how do we acquire AI visibility?" It’s "how do we build the brand that produces AI visibility as a byproduct of being a brand that AI values?"

Now, if the fundamentals are this clear and the pattern is this consistent, why are 82% of companies still stuck in the value gap? Why don’t they just do the thing?

Every new gatekeeper’s entry into the market included — and includes — a period where taking the shortcut looks like the smart play. In Google’s case, it was things like link building programs even before you had to pay for them. In social media’s case, it was building organic reach and building your follower count. In OTAs, it was things like low cost early commissions. And with AI it’s things like GEO vendors and AI content farms and churning out high volumes of low quality, low cost content so that you show up.

But those all stop working at a certain point. They realize people are spamming this. So Google shuts that down. The social media channels say we need to actually earn money off of these folks, so we’re going to pull back the algorithm and change what your organic reach is. The OTAs are saying, we’re contributing a lot of business to your hotel, so we need to raise commission rates.

What makes you think that the AIs are going to do anything different? We don’t know exactly when that will occur, but I’m really confident it’s coming because we’ve seen this happen again and again and again.

Now, I want to be very fair to people who have gone down this path before and chosen that path. It’s not a scam. It’s a trap.

It’s not a scam because it works — at least temporarily. That’s what makes it so dangerous. A scam would be easier to resist. You’re savvy enough — the people who’ve done this are savvy enough — to know that if you’re not getting value out of something, you would never put your efforts there, you would never put your money there.

So the people who have taken these approaches are not fools. What they are doing is saying, "Hey, this is producing results for me. I should double down on this."

That’s what makes it dangerous — the fact that it actually does work. The challenge is that you end up owning visibility, but not the relationship with the customer.

The shortcut is always attractive exactly at the moment when you need it the most, because they’re helping you reach customers you haven’t reached before, usually at a relatively low cost. All that you see at that point is the upside. By the time the cost becomes visible, too many people find themselves in a position where they’ve built far too much of their strategy depending upon that thing. That’s not a great place to be.

Marketing leaders need to think in terms of: when is this a genuine investment in our foundations, and when is this a shortcut dressed up as a strategy?

I would think there are a couple of ways you would test this.

The first is to ask whether this investment would matter if AI changed tomorrow. If we look at things like expert authored content or review velocity programs or first party data infrastructure or earned media from credible sources, those are going to improve your business regardless of which AI model is dominant six months from now, 12 months from now, 18 months from now. If the investment only works because of how ChatGPT works in Q2 of 2026, that’s probably a warning sign.

The other test is: does this investment compound its value over time, or does it require a reset every couple of months?

Shortcuts work. Foundations compound. A review earned today is in the training data for the next model update. Content that gets cited once tends to get cited again. First party data gets more valuable as you collect more of it from your customers.

If an investment’s value has to be reinvested every time the platform updates, that’s a shortcut. If it compounds regardless of the platform updates, then you’re building a foundation for success long term.

When you walk into your monthly review or your quarterly review and you’re making the case for the budget you need going forward, you should not be thinking in terms of "we shouldn’t invest in AI." That’s not what I’m saying here.

You should be saying: we should invest in AI the way businesses that survive every platform shift invest. We should be investing in the things that improve our business and compound across every platform, not only in things that work for this particular algorithm or this particular artificial intelligence. One of those has a long-term opportunity for you. One of those means you’re going to keep throwing money after money after money every time the algorithm changes.

When we think about budget categories: expert authored content that earns citations — a hundred percent. Review velocity programs — a hundred percent. First-party data infrastructure — a hundred percent. If we’re talking about people selling you, "you’re going to appear in the AI top every single time" — you might want to take a really close look at that. You might want to start small and test, because maybe they do know something. But you want to make sure you own the result, not just the visibility, before you double down there, before you try to scale this up.

The businesses that I have watched navigate every platform shift without getting captured have all had one thing in common. It’s not that they saw the future first. It’s not that they were smarter than everybody else. It’s just that they never fully gave up the direct relationship with the customer.

They built a long lasting brand platform, a long lasting customer relationship that survived and thrived every time the platforms shifted. They didn’t chase any short term wins at the expense of the long term opportunity.

I have had this exact conversation through the Google updates, through the collapse of reach on social media, with hotels and OTA commissions, and now with AI. Some of this isn’t that I’m predicting the future. I’ve seen this and seen folks get burned by it plenty in the past, including me from time to time.

This is hard won experience. You eventually learn, "hey, maybe we shouldn’t chase the ooh, shiny object, but we should build something of lasting value." The folks I’ve worked with who’ve acted on these conversations and learned from them and applied them — and the folks who aren’t even clients who figured it out on their own — they’re the ones who are doing great and they’re the ones who have options to continue to improve over the long run.

This is not some sophisticated, brand new AI strategy. It’s a 15 year pattern that keeps working no matter who the gatekeeper is next. And ultimately, that’s the place where you want to be.

That conversation was from April, a few weeks before Big Tech’s earnings confirmed every pattern I described.

You and I both know that Google’s search revenue didn’t grow 22% because they got lucky. Amazon didn’t build sponsored prompts by accident.

This is the same game being played by gatekeepers, and you’ve got the same window available to you, at least for now.

Next week, we’re going to get specific — what AI search is doing to your traffic right now and the framework you can use to make sure you’re on the right side of it.

If this episode gave you a bigger picture, a better picture of what the long game looks like in practice and how you can play it more effectively, do me a favor — send it to some colleagues who are currently staring at their 2026 budget and wondering where they should put their money. It might save them and your business from spending it on the wrong things.

You can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcast.

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

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

The post Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why (Digital Reset FOUNDATIONS — Episode 496) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Pundits spent the last year-plus predicting that AI would kill Big Tech. Big Tech’s Q1 2026 earnings suggest they might have missed that meeting.

Google’s search queries hit an all-time high because of AI, not in spite of it — and their search ad revenues grew 19% as a result. Meta’s revenues grew 33% while the price per ad climbed 12%. Amazon introduced Sponsored Prompts, letting brands bid to appear inside prepackaged AI queries in Rufus. And Azure and Google Cloud grew 40% and 63% respectively, at least some of that fueled by payments from OpenAI, Perplexity, and all the other AI companies supposedly disrupting them. The “disruptors” are funding Big Tech incumbents.

As Philipp Schindler said on Google’s earnings call, AI gives Google the ability to monetize searches that were previously too complex to sell against. In other words, Google just told its investors that AI is helping them make money in places they couldn’t before.

And, y’know, Google was already pretty good at making money.

In this Digital Reset episode, Tim Peter breaks down what Q1 2026 earnings actually reveal about where the gatekeeper economy is heading, shares a client story about what it costs to wait too long, and offers you two diagnostic tests you can run this week to find out whether your spend is building owned demand… or if you’re just renting the same customers over and over again.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders

• The "AI will kill Google" narrative is over. Google’s Q1 results weren’t just strong. They were powered by AI. AI Overviews and AI Mode drove search to an “all-time high.” And they opened new ad inventory on longer, more complex queries that Google previously couldn’t monetize. AI isn’t Google’s disruption. AI is Google’s next growth engine.
• Amazon Sponsored Prompts are a flashing red sign most marketers are missing. Amazon is letting brands bid to appear in prepackaged AI prompts inside Rufus, prompts like "What makes [Brand X] a healthy choice?" Amazon didn’t build a search ad. They built a paid answer embedded in a conversation. Every platform providing an AI interface is going to follow this model. Guaranteed.
• The AI challengers are paying to build Big Tech incumbents. Azure grew 40%. Google Cloud grew 63%, with profits up over 200% year on year. Some meaningful portion of that growth comes from OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, and others paying for compute and processing power. The disruptors are writing checks to the companies they’re supposed to be disrupting.
• Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol is worth watching closely. Google’s Philipp Schindler named the new members of their commerce infrastructure council: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe, along with founding members Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic are not on that list. The companies building the next commerce layer have already decided who’s at the table… and who isn’t.
• Every paid return visit is training your customers’ AI agents to route around you. When repeat customers come back through a gatekeeper, you pay interest on a relationship you already earned. Worse, their behavior teaches their AI assistants and agents to treat the gatekeeper as your customer’s preferred path. The cost isn’t just something you pay on this one transaction. You pay it on every future one too.
• The Gatekeeper Test and Owned Demand Test tell you exactly where you stand. Two practical frameworks for auditing every channel you currently spend money on, including: Who owns the data? Does your investment keep working after you stop spending? Answering those questions tells you whether you’re building your business… or if you’re building the platform’s business.

Whether you’re a marketing leader in hospitality, travel, B2B services, or e-commerce, this episode gives you a clear read on what Big Tech’s Q1 2026 earnings mean for your customer acquisition strategy, and what you must do before Q2 grows the gap further.

Google Has Turned Organic Discovery Into Paid Rediscovery (Digital Reset Episode 495) — Headlines and Show Notes

Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset Episode 495) — Show Notes and Links

Related Episodes

• The New Gatekeeper Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Ep. 490)
• The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Ep. 489)
• The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Ep. 488)
• The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Ep. 485)
• In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Ep. 472)
• One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Ep. 494)

Research and Source Links

Google

• Alphabet Q1 2026 Earnings Release (PDF) — Official press release with full financial results referenced in this episode.
• Alphabet (GOOGL) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript — The Motley Fool — Full transcript including Sundar Pichai’s and Philipp Schindler’s remarks on AI-driven search growth, the "previously really difficult to monetize" quote, and the Universal Commerce Protocol.

Amazon

• Amazon Q1 2026 Earnings
• Amazon Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript
• Sponsored Products Prompts and Sponsored Brands Prompts — Amazon Ads — Amazon’s official announcement of Sponsored Prompts, the new format appearing inside Rufus AI queries discussed in this episode.
• Amazon Sponsored Prompts: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How Brands Should Act — BirdDog Agency — A practical explainer on what Amazon’s new format means for brand advertisers.

Meta

• Meta Reports First Quarter 2026 Results — Meta Investor Relations — Official press release covering the 33% revenue growth and 12% increase in price per ad referenced in this episode.
• Meta (META) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript — The Motley Fool — Full transcript of the April 29, 2026 earnings call.

Microsoft

• Microsoft FY26 Q3 Earnings — Press Release and Webcast — Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 2026 (calendar Q1 2026) results, covering the Azure 40% growth figure discussed in this episode. (Note: Microsoft’s fiscal year runs July–June; their FY26 Q3 covers the calendar period January–March 2026.)

Further Reading

• Ben Thompson/Stratechery’s view of Google/Meta earnings — Ben Thompson’s platform economics analysis referenced in this episode in the context of Amazon Sponsored Prompts and Google’s AI advertising upside.

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech

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

Past Appearances

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

Free Downloads

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

• A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you.
• Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:
  • Customer Focus
  • Strategy
  • Technology
  • Operations
  • Culture
  • Data

Subscribe to Digital Reset

• Subscribe in iTunes
• Subscribe in the Google Play Store

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital Reset

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

Running time: 15:22

You can subscribe to Digital Reset 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 Digital Reset using the player at the top of this page.

Transcript: Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You

The customer you rent will always cost more than the customer you own. No one understands that better than Google.

Pundits have spent the last year-plus predicting that AI would kill Google and blow up Big Tech. Apparently, Big Tech missed that meeting.

Big Tech’s Q1 earnings prove that that narrative is dead. Gatekeepers aren’t falling behind, far from it. They’re finding new ways to charge you for conversations with customers before those customers ever learn your name.

Google search queries hit an all-time high — that’s a quote — in Q1 because of AI, not in spite of it. Sundar Pichai said it himself that "AI experiences are driving usage." Google’s revenue grew 22% year on year. Search ad revenue grew 19%. Search contributes more than half of all Google’s revenues. And all of this happened even though its network ad revenues fell 4%.

Let me drill down on that point even more clearly. Google is making money from ads on its own sites, even as other sites that depend on Google ads for their businesses lose traffic and revenue. Google’s getting richer and grabbing a bigger slice of the pie.

Similarly, Amazon emphasized a phrase you might want to take note of. They called it "sponsored prompts." They’re letting advertisers — that is, folks like you and me — bid to show up in prepackaged prompts for products or brands directly in Amazon’s Rufus search agent. I particularly love the example they show: "What makes flakes from Nutrition Co. a healthy choice?" It’s brilliant. They’re showing product benefits as part of the prompt.

And as CEO Andy Jassy said on their earnings call: "If you look at any of these agentic experiences, they tend to be multi-turn conversations where you’re not interacting with one search and getting an answer. You tend to find that you’re asking questions, you’re narrowing questions. And in that process of having multi-turns, there are multiple opportunities to surface relevant products to customers, many of which will be organic and some of which will be sponsored. And it also gives rise to opportunities like sponsored prompts."

As I said, that’s brilliant. I mean, that is — as long as you’re willing to pay for it. I’ll bet that they’re not the last Big Tech brand to make tools like this available, or to gain the new revenues that follow. As Ben Thompson at Stratechery pointed out, "We’ll see how this works, but to the extent that it does, it’s a bullish take for Google as well." I completely agree. I couldn’t agree more.

On that same track, Meta’s revenues grew 33% with more than 8 million advertisers using the company’s creative tools to build their ads. Meta’s ad impressions grew by 19%. But the more important number is that their price per ad grew 12%. They’re making ads more effective and charging you more to enjoy those benefits.

I’m going to take it for granted that OpenAI and other AI — ahem — disruptors will try to compete. They’re fighting for their seat at Big Tech’s table too. They want to be gatekeepers also. Except keep in mind that Microsoft Azure grew by over 40% and Google Cloud grew an astonishing 63%. Google Cloud’s income — that is, its earnings, its profits — grew by over 200% year on year. All of that at least in part because of revenue they’re collecting from folks like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic.

One throwaway line by Philipp Schindler also caught my attention. He mentioned some new members that have joined their Universal Commerce Protocol Tech Council: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, along with Salesforce and Stripe, and founding members Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair. Notice any companies missing from that group? Here’s a hint. Their names rhyme with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic.

You’ve heard me say this before: gatekeepers gonna gate. Google and the rest of its Big Tech brethren don’t look like they’re in trouble. Quite the opposite. They’re building more gates between businesses like yours and your customers. And they’re charging you more every time you use these platforms to connect with your customers. They didn’t produce quarterly results like these because they’re charging folks like you less to reach your customers.

In today’s episode, we’re looking at Big Tech’s Q1 2026 earnings and what you need to do to ensure that their gains don’t come at your expense next quarter. I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 495 of Digital Reset. Let’s dive in.

Every time a customer comes back to you through paid Google search or Meta ads or Expedia or Booking.com or Amazon — wherever — you’re paying interest on a relationship that you failed to own the first time they found you. It costs you money to talk to someone you already know. Those customers’ behaviors are starting to teach their AI assistants and agents where and how they prefer to find the products, services, and brands they need too. And if they’re always going through a gatekeeper — if customers always go through a gatekeeper first — they’re teaching those AIs that you’re not their first choice, ever.

I had a client a few years back that hired me to help them gain more customers directly and bypass Big Tech gatekeepers. At least, that’s what I thought they wanted.

We worked together for months, but over time I began to realize that I was failing. I could not convince them that they needed to change what they were doing.

The resistance made sense in theory. They got a healthy share of their revenue from third parties with no "upfront cost." I’m deliberately not naming the gatekeepers to protect that client’s anonymity. But the revenues they gained came with a heavy total cost: around 22% of each sale. As the client saw it, they only paid that 22% when the business materialized. Never mind that those sales cost them millions of dollars every year without fail. Millions.

And keep in mind that these so-called "partners" didn’t contribute 100% of their revenue. They paid those millions and had to find the rest of their business through other channels. Just far too often, not their own.

Changing their behaviors required upfront investment that, for whatever reason, I simply couldn’t convince them was worth the risk. And so we eventually decided that we should go our separate ways. Most of the team that I worked with either left or was let go. And last I heard, the company’s in a deep hole and hasn’t yet figured out a way out of it.

That’s not just about them, though. It’s a big flashing red sign in Big Tech’s earnings this quarter that shows what’s coming for you.

Yeah, sure, Google might not cost you twenty-two percent — at least not yet. And maybe ChatGPT is relatively affordable… at the moment. But if you’re paying for every customer every day, every time, it adds up. And fast.

Google is used by pretty much everyone on the planet. They didn’t grow their search ad revenues nineteen percent by finding another billion people to start searching. They did it by getting people to search more often, showing ads more often, getting people to click on those ads more often — or, as Philipp Schindler’s comments suggested, a little bit of each.

As he noted on Google’s earnings call: "We see AI Overviews and AI Mode continue to drive greater Search usage and growth in overall queries, including in commercial queries… with the ability of AI to better understand intent… I think there is upside… and overall, understanding that we have at Gemini on intent has just significantly expanded our ability to deliver ads on longer, more complex searches that were previously really difficult to monetize."

In other words, Google just told its investors that AI is helping them make money in places they couldn’t before. That’s not future risk. It’s literally what drove their earnings last quarter.

They’re going to put themselves between you and your customers for an increasingly large share of customer activity. And you’re gonna pay for it. They just said that out loud. So is Amazon. So is Meta. So are Expedia and Uber and DoorDash and all of the rest. So are the AI companies. That’s the game they’re playing.

If you’re playing by their rules, you’re already losing. It’s time you change your game.

How? My former client never really asked that question. Not really. Here’s what I wanted them to do.

First, you have to acknowledge the reality of what gatekeepers truly cost you. It’s okay to use them the first time you talk to a customer, especially if it’s someone you can’t reach more easily on your own. But if you’re paying every time you talk to your customers, you’re digging a deeper and deeper hole for yourself. So maybe let’s not do that.

There are two tests you can and should use when evaluating partners and the role they play for your business. And I mean real partners.

The first test is our Gatekeeper Test. Ask yourself two questions for every channel you’re working with right now.

One: Are we using this platform to build our business, or are we building our business inside this platform?

Two: Who owns the data from this interaction with our customer?

If you’re using the platform to build your business and you own the data, congratulations. That’s a core part of your hub. It’s the place that allows you to connect directly with your customers. If you’re building your business inside the platform but you own the data, that’s usually okay too. Just pay attention if the platform starts changing the rules or raising the rent.

If you’re using the platform to build your business but you don’t own the data, you might not actually be building your business. You’re building the platform’s business.

If they own the data — regardless of where you’re building — it’s not your customer. It’s theirs. You’re renting demand. And rented demand is always going to be more expensive than owned demand in the long run.

The second test you want to put to work is the Owned Demand Test. It’s very simple. You ask these three questions:

One: Does your investment using this platform create a direct relationship? Does it lead customers to come directly to you the next time around?

Two: Does your investment make your brand easier to ask for by name?

And three — most importantly — does the investment keep working once you stop spending?

The more you answer yes, the better off you are. And if it’s no up and down the list, you’re not building owned demand. You’re renting it. Again, one of these has a brighter future.

It’s okay to rent traffic once in a while, but it’s a bad idea to rent demand month after month after month. As Big Tech’s Q1 earnings prove, the difference between those two compounds to their advantage every single quarter.

You know that gatekeepers gonna gate. So my question for you is simple. Before you spend another dollar with a gatekeeper this week, run the Owned Demand Test on that channel. If it fails all three questions, you know what you need to do.

And if you know someone else who needs to hear this, send the episode their way. It might save them, their business, and you a world of trouble.

Thank you so much for listening today. You can find the show notes for this episode and the full archive of past episodes at timpeter.com/podcasts.

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

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

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The post Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset Episode 495) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

The thesis behind Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech was simple: the companies that stop renting their customers from Big Tech and start building direct relationships, owned media, and a genuine brand signal will have more control over their growth — and pay less for it over time. One year after Digital Reset launched, the evidence is in. The thesis holds up. In fact, given how fast AI has reshaped content, discovery, and customer trust in the past twelve months, it held much more decisively than even I expected.

This episode is an honest look back on what the book got right, what we learned, and three questions every marketing leader should be asking their team this week. BONUS: There’s a gift for readers and listeners at the end.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders
In this episode, author and episode host Tim Peter breaks down:

• The thesis held. AI made it more urgent. When Tim wrote Digital Reset, the gatekeeper argument was grounded in history. A year later, ChatGPT has launched ads. Perplexity has launched ads. AI answer engines are paying Google and Amazon and Microsoft for the infrastructure to get a seat at the gatekeepers’ banquet. The pattern is identical to what search, social, OTAs, and a whole host of others have done before. The prediction wasn’t just right — it’s playing out in real time.
• Content got cheap. Your voice got priceless. AI has driven the cost of creating content to zero. That means your customers are now drowning in passable, but bland, boring, blah AI-generated commodity content. Businesses finding that their content stands out more today than a year ago are the ones with a clear point of view, original data and examples, and a trustworthy human voice. Content is still king… with one important caveat.
• Great customer experiences are now training your customers’ AI agents. AI inclusion is inherited from the work you’ve done for your brand. When customers have great experiences, they tell their friends, post reviews, and share photos. In doing so, they teach their AI assistants the brands they prefer. In an agentic world, brands that aren’t customer favorites right now will find it even harder to become favorites later… because the AI may never recommend them in the first place.
• The gatekeepers still gonna gate — new players are working to join the club. The playbook hasn’t changed. The players are just adding new capabilities as new entrants seek their seat at the gatekeepers’ table.
• The big surprise: validation matters more than volume. The book emphasized content quality and distribution. What the year revealed is a third variable that deserves more weight: validation. One genuinely original, expert-authored piece of content that gets talked about, cited, and shared by other people does more for your AI visibility than 50 competent-but-forgettable posts. AI doesn’t count your content — it weights it by how many trustworthy, verifiable sources validate that your content is worthwhile. Write less. And make what you write genuinely worth citing.
• Three questions that tell you exactly where to start.
  • First: what percentage of your content could only come from you? If the answer is less than 50%, you’re too focused on commodity content.
  • Second: what message is your use of AI saying to your customers right now? Are you using it to help them, or just to produce more slop faster? One of those has a future.
  • Third: what does AI say about your brand when someone asks? Go try it in an incognito chat. Whatever it gets right is a sign that your signal is working. Whatever it gets wrong is your roadmap.

Whether you’re in hospitality, travel, B2B services, or anywhere else Big Tech has its hand in your pocket — and especially if you’re the marketing leader who has to defend your AI strategy while customers are growing more skeptical by the month — this episode gives you a clear-eyed, evidence-based picture of where the industry stands one year into the Digital Reset era.

One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Digital Reset Episode 494) — Headlines and Show Notes

Get Your Anniversary Gift

As a thank-you to everyone who bought the book or has been listening to the show, Tim is giving away free signed bookplates and Digital Reset bookmarks — no obligation — to anyone who’s purchased a copy of Digital Reset. Sign up in May and they’ll go out throughout the month.

Sign up for your signed bookplate and bookmark here

Show Notes and Links

Related Episodes

• AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless. (Ep. 492)
• 55% of People Hate AI: How to Use it Without Losing Your Customers (Ep. 493)
• The New Gatekeeper Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Ep. 490)
• The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Ep. 489)
• The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Ep. 488)
• The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Ep. 485)
• In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Ep. 472)
• SparkToro: How Consistent Are AI Recommendations?
• McKinsey: The State of AI

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech

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

Past Appearances

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

Free Downloads

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

• A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you.
• Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:
  • Customer Focus
  • Strategy
  • Technology
  • Operations
  • Culture
  • Data

Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud

• Subscribe in iTunes
• Subscribe in the Google Play Store

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks

Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud

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

Running time: 20:36

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: One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved

Welcome back to the show.

My book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," is celebrating its first anniversary this month.

I do not plan to spend this episode telling you how great the book is or why you should run out right now and pick up a copy, though I’d be thrilled if you did.

Instead, I want to spend our time together today asking: was the thesis right? Does the book’s central idea hold up given how quickly customers are adopting AI? And how do any changes that we’ve seen over the last year shape what you should do next?

I’m not going to make you wait until after the break for the answer to the first one. The answer is "Yes." The thesis, the central idea at the core of the book, remains true. In fact, as AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, of our customers’ lives, the central idea becomes even more true and more important for your business. So, yay, well done me, I guess. Okay.

In all seriousness, while the thesis and the book as a whole definitely hold up a year after publication, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some nuances and points of emphasis that we need to discuss. There are. And that’s what I’m talking about here today on the show.

In this episode, I’m going to break down what "Digital Reset" got right, what surprised me along the way, and what you should do right now to put those lessons to work for you, your brand, and your business.

I also have a special gift for readers and listeners at the end of the episode. If you hang with me for a few minutes, I’ll let you know what it is and how you can get your gift.

This is episode 494 of the Digital Reset Podcast. I’m Tim Peter. Today we’re looking at one year of "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech." Let’s dive in.

Writing a book about anything related to digital has one massive challenge. The digital ecosystem moves fast, like crazy fast. I started my first draft of the book before ChatGPT dropped, so you can imagine that could have killed the book before I even get started.

Instead, what it did was remind me to bet on what won’t change — the ideas and the concepts that work, no matter what Big Tech — or any aspiring members of that club — do to get between you and your customers.

My bet was that owning your customer relationships, building a brand worth asking for by name, focusing on content and customer experience to build those relationships with your customers, and being responsible stewards of customer data as you put it to work, are critical to reducing your dependency on Big Tech. And I bet that reducing that dependency would matter more over time, not less. So how’d that work out? Well, I’d say pretty well, actually.

We’ve seen a number of examples over the past year that illustrate why those continue to make sense.

First: content got cheap, but your voice became priceless.

As I mentioned in the book and in a bunch of recent episodes, AI has driven the cost of creating content to zero. The book argued that content has never been expensive, but that content that doesn’t convert is. What has become even more important is that the AI age is not only further driving down the cost of making content — it’s making developing your own distinctive, unique, and most importantly, authentic voice, priceless.

Your customers are drowning in a deluge of passable, but kind of average, bland, boring, blah, AI-created commodity content. They tolerate it most of the time, but they don’t care about it. They don’t seek it out, and they don’t give it any more time or attention than, well, frankly, the amount of time it took AI to spit that content out. That seems fair, if you ask me.

In some cases, we have seen that your customers actively hate AI-generated content, and increasingly they hate the companies that use AI — whether it’s for content creation or just about anything else. About half of customers feel that way.

What customers do want is content that speaks to them and their needs. That tells them something genuinely insightful, interesting, new, entertaining. They want to hear from people they trust. That’s why businesses that have invested in a clear point of view, that demonstrate their values, that share data and insights they’ve gained from original research and direct experience, and that do all of this with a trustworthy, original human voice, are finding that their content stands out more today than it did a year ago.

So yeah, content is still king, with one small caveat that I will come back to in just a couple of moments.

Second: great customer experiences matter even more than they did.

I have long argued that nothing will build your brand more than great customer experiences. Your customers are your business’s secret sales force. They share their favorite experiences — and even more so their truly terrible experiences — with their friends and family and fans and followers on social media. As I said in the book, "your brand is only as good as its last five reviews."

I’ve long told stories about how the single most important first impression guests get when they check into a hotel is what their room smells like. If you were to walk into a room and think it smells pleasant, or at least unnoticeable, you are more likely to return to that hotel. By contrast, if you walk into a room and it smells less than okay — it’s not downright funky — you are probably not ever coming back. In fact, if it smells bad enough, you’re not even going to complete your stay at that hotel, that trip. I mean, really. If you’re like me, you’re going to head back to the lobby and either ask for a different room or just book a different hotel in the elevator on your way out the door.

What I didn’t know at the time when I wrote the book, what I couldn’t have known, is how much AI would turn to social media and reviews to validate the content you create and share on your own channels — your business’s hub. I couldn’t have known how much AI would turn to social media to learn what other people think of that content.

The result of that is that AI inclusion is inherited from the work you’ve done all along. This is hugely, massively, crazily important to your business. Focusing on great customer experiences might be the single most important work you can do in the age of AI, because when customers have a great experience, they might tell a few friends, they might post a review on social media or on a ratings and review site. They might share photos or videos that tell your brand story. But what their behavior absolutely does is teach their go-to AI which brands they prefer.

When we enter a world where AI assistants and agents do the work for your customers, those assistants and agents will favor the brands their users like best. If you are not one of their favorites today, it will be even harder to become one of their favorites later — because their AI assistants and agents may never recommend you in the first place. So yeah, customer experience is queen for sure, and the queen’s rule is even more powerful than before.

The third big lesson that holds true is: the gatekeeper’s still gonna gate.

I am not going to spend much time on this one. You’ve noticed that Google and Amazon and Meta and Apple and Microsoft remain the biggest players in the game, and that the cost of using them to reach your customers continues to rise. Sure, ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity are angling for their turn at bat. They want to get in the game and they are making headway there. You’ve also likely noticed that ChatGPT has introduced ads on its platform. So, for that matter, has Perplexity. Showing up organically in their answers is getting more challenging over time.

They’re also paying more to the gatekeepers we’ve known for a long time — to Google and Amazon and Microsoft for things like processing and partnerships. Huh, funny. It’s almost like all of these companies are following a playbook that we’ve seen again and again and again. Oh wait. That’s right. They are.

I told you this wouldn’t be a victory lap, so I’m going to leave this point right here. I also feel obligated to say that this reality was entirely predictable and we should expect more of this over the coming months and years. Gatekeepers gonna gate. It’s what they do.

Now, what surprised me — and this is big, because there was at least one thing that surprised me over the last year, and it’s related to content. I told you before there’d be a caveat. This is the caveat.

While I talked about the importance of content distribution in the book, it really was focused on getting content you create onto spokes, like search and social media and such. And while I talked about getting your customers to participate in creating content as your secret sales force with ratings and reviews, I did not foresee how big a role user-generated content would play in convincing AIs which brands to surface and show their users.

I’ve talked about AI as a concierge, not a card catalog, in recent months. AIs don’t just look up an answer when they’re asked questions — they know the answer. They’ve learned the right answer from reading every piece of content that they can find about your brand and your business.

That, of course, means that creating great customer experiences is more important than ever, as I’ve already mentioned. It also means that your content has almost no value in the mind of AI concierges if other folks aren’t talking about that content, if they aren’t citing that content, if they aren’t sharing it with their friends and family and fans and followers. The content just is sitting there. It’s a lump, right?

I took it for granted that links weren’t as powerful as they once were. We know that AI is learning the value of content in its own right. That’s absolutely true. What I missed was how powerful other people talking about your content — whether they linked to it or not — would be. How large a role that would play.

The book talks about creating great content. That’s still true, still valuable. But it could talk more about building authority, about building content that is worth other people talking about. Crafting one genuinely original, unique, insightful, expert-authored piece of content with a distinctive voice will do so much more to generate interest, citations, and crucially AI visibility, than 10 or 20 or 50 or a hundred moderately competent, but meh, blog posts ever will.

As I said in an episode of this show not that long ago: "’Post more content’ is not the strategy. AI isn’t counting the number of pieces of content on your site. It is weighting them by the degree to which independent verifiable sources confirm what your content says. Write less. Make it more citable. Make it more original. Make it genuinely worth citing." I guarantee that emphasis will be in any future editions of the book for sure.

Now, what you should do differently starting this week is really pretty key. I’ve talked about what’s held up and what’s surprised me over the last year since the book dropped. The real question is what you should do differently — and how soon you should do that.

To answer the question, you have to ask some other questions.

First, ask: what percentage of your content could only come from you? You’ve got great data. You’ve got great stories about your customers, your guests, your clients. You’ve got your own distinctive point of view about what has happened, what is happening, and what you think will happen. You should be sharing those. If less than 50% of your content could only come from you, you’re focused far too heavily on commodity content and not nearly enough on building a brand voice worth listening to. You cannot win with commodity content. Why would you even try?

Second: ask what message your AI use is sending to customers right now. It is abundantly clear that somewhere between a quarter and a half of customers actively hate AI usage by the companies they work with. Over time, I’m going to suspect they’re going to shift that hate from AI directly to your brand and business. I don’t even think that’s that much of a prediction. I think that’s happening right now. This isn’t about whether or not you use AI. It’s about the message you send about how and why you use it. It’s about whether that use benefits your customers, your community, and the world at large. Are you using AI to make better, safer, more useful products, services, and experiences for your customers? Or are you using it simply to slash costs and churn out a whole big load of AI slop? Your customers can tell the difference. And then they’ll tell you what they think about it, either by saying really gnarly stuff about you on social media, or by no longer choosing you at all.

Third: what does AI say about your brand when people ask about you? This is by far the easiest thing for you to do right now. Pick an AI tool of your choice, then ask it what it knows about your brand. Whatever it gets right will demonstrate where your efforts right now are paying off. The information it gets wrong is a sign of where you’ve got work to do. This doesn’t require you to conduct a big formal audit or hire a consultant to help you. Take a few minutes, though, and you’ll have a quick sense of where you need to get started now.

One quick caveat I would add: AI tools increasingly personalize their answers. So you might want to try doing this using a temporary or incognito chat just to make sure it’s giving the most common answer to you. In either case, though, it is an enlightening and really effective exercise to see what AI knows about you.

One last point before I wrap up this episode that I have to make is to say a deep and heartfelt thank you to all of the folks who bought the book, who listened to the podcast, or who work with us at TPA. I want to say thank you to everyone who shared their experiences on LinkedIn or in email or on texts. I genuinely appreciate all your support. You all made the book happen. You make this podcast happen. You make the business work. I would not be able to do any of this without your support. And on behalf of the team, I just want to say thank you very, very much. This anniversary belongs to you as much as it does to me.

I mentioned at the top of the show that I’ve got a gift for readers of the book or anyone else who’s interested. I’m giving away signed bookplates and bookmarks to anyone who’s purchased a copy of the book. There’s a link in the show notes for you to sign up and provide your details to receive a free signed bookplate for your copy of Digital Reset and a Digital Reset bookmark too. Just sign up in May of this year and we’ll get those out to folks throughout the month.

There’s a place for you to opt into other communication, but we are only using this data to send the bookplate and bookmark, and then we’re going to purge it from our database. There are no long-term obligations. This is just a pure thank you from me to you.

It would also mean the world to me if you joined in the celebration. Feel free to post a picture of yourself with your copy of the book and tag me on LinkedIn or BlueSky, and please share your favorite insight or takeaway. I would love to hear what worked for you in the book. It means so very much to me.

As always, if you know someone who would benefit from this episode, do me a favor and share it with them. I very much appreciate that, and I’d like to think that they would too.

If you’re a marketing leader in hospitality or travel or services or anywhere else that Big Tech has its hand in your pocket, and you want to talk through how to bypass Big Tech more effectively, I’d love to talk. My contact info is at timpeter.com.

All that said, thanks again for listening. I genuinely appreciate your support every week. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

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The post One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Digital Reset Episode 494) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Your customers hate AI. The numbers are hard to ignore. A Quinnipiac University poll found that 55% of US adults believe AI will bring “more harm than good,” up from 44% just a year ago. Booking.com‘s research puts 26% of consumers in the “AI detractor” category, actively opposed to using it. NBC News found that nearly half of those surveyed hold a negative view of AI.

This isn’t a niche concern. It’s a mainstream sentiment. And if you’re still planning to use AI to grow your business, it’s your problem to solve.

What makes this more than a PR challenge is that many of the criticisms are valid. There will be job disruptions. Deep fakes and misinformation are real. Environmental and energy costs are escalating. And when corporate leaders publicly predict 20–30% unemployment in the next few years while announcing layoffs “because of AI,” they’re making your customers’ concerns worse, not better.

This episode is about what you can actually do about it. Tim offers four practical steps that let you use AI in ways that don’t put you on the wrong side of the backlash.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders
In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

• The AI favorability gap is widening. It’s a business problem, not just a PR one. 55% of US adults now believe AI will cause more harm than good, up from 44% a year ago. 26% of consumers actively oppose AI. These aren’t fringe opinions, they’re how your customers feel. If you’re using AI to grow your business, you need a strategy for addressing this, not a plan to wait it out.
• Customer criticisms are built on valid ground. Job disruptions are already happening. Deep fakes and “nudify” apps demonstrate real harms. Environmental costs are real. Acknowledging the validity of your customers’ concerns isn’t a weakness. It’s your only honest starting point. Companies that dismiss concerns as irrational are setting themselves up for a backlash that’s entirely avoidable.
• History offers hope, but doesn’t dismiss the short-term. Technology has been disrupting jobs since before the telephone operator. The US workforce today is more than three times larger than when “Desk Set” — a 1957 film about office workers afraid computers would take their jobs — came out. That’s the long run. As Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead. Your customers need to pay rent in the short run too. Both things can be true. And you must acknowledge those very real concerns.
• Four steps to use AI without losing your customers. First, follow the law — disclosure requirements around AI are evolving rapidly, and you need competent counsel to understand your exposure. Second, understand the message you’re sending: are you helping or hurting your workforce, your community, your customers? Third, develop your own voice. Content quantity is not the goal, content quality is. Know what you want the output to sound like and feel like before you ask AI to help create it. Fourth, and most importantly: be human.
• “Be human” is not a platitude — it’s the only durable strategy. Your job in marketing, sales, and customer experience is to create customers: to connect with people in ways that make them want to work with your business. That job doesn’t change when you use AI. If you’re not using AI to make your customers’ lives better, you need to ask yourself what on earth you’re using it for.
• You are sending a message when you use AI. Make sure it’s the one you mean to send. Customers are already choosing not to work with businesses because of how those businesses approach AI. Ignoring their concerns won’t make them go away. It will only make it look like you don’t care. And then AI won’t be the thing the customers hate. They might just hate you too.

Whether you’re in hospitality, B2B, retail, or services — and especially if you’re the leader who has to answer “what’s our AI strategy?” while customer sentiment is moving in the wrong direction — this episode gives you a practical framework for using AI in ways that build trust rather than erode it.

55% of People Hate AI: How to Use it Without Losing Your Customers (Digital Reset Episode 493) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

Research and References

• The CEO Preaching Straight Talk About AI and Job Losses — WSJ
• Verizon CEO: AI Is Coming for Your Job, ‘and Everyone Knows It’ — Inc.
• NBC News AI Research — March 2026 Poll
• Booking.com Global AI Sentiment Report 2025
• The more young people use AI, the more they hate it — The Verge
• AI Chatbots: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) — YouTube
• Sabotage — Wikipedia
• Desk Set — Wikipedia
• Paul Virilio — Wikiquote
• All Employees, Total Nonfarm Employment by Year — US Bureau of Labor Statistics (FRED)

Related Episodes

• We Owe It To Our Customers to Make Their Lives Better (Thinks Out Loud Episode 361)
• In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472)
• Building a Human Brand in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud Episode 398)
• AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless (Ep. 492)
• Hub and Spoke Strategy: Building Traffic Beyond Any Single Platform (Ep. 491)
• The New Gatekeeper Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Ep. 490)
• The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Ep. 489)

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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.

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

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Transcript: 55% of People Hate AI: How to Use it Without Losing Your Customers

Welcome back to the show.

I’m sure you know this, but a significant group of folks hate AI. Not, “I’m not sure if I like AI,” but viscerally, passionately hate AI.

Booking.com conducted research and found that while 49% of consumers have a positive view of AI, 26% — one in four — are what they call AI detractors. They’re actively opposed to AI.

NBC News has new research that adds to the story. In their study, 22% have a “very negative” view of AI. Another 24% have a “somewhat negative” view. Again, that’s almost half of everyone surveyed has a negative view of AI.

The Wall Street Journal piled on and noted “…in a Quinnipiac University study of 1,400 adults in March, 55% said they felt AI would bring more harm than good, up from 44% in a poll last year.”

So yeah, that’s bad.

This sentiment is breaking through to the mainstream. John Oliver had a fantastic, funny, and fearlessly heartfelt segment this past week on the very real harms of AI chat. While the episode was less about the business costs of AI and more about the societal costs, it spoke to the very real fears that roughly half of America feels right now, half of the country feels right now. The episode is worth watching in its entirety, even if you don’t agree with everything Oliver said. In fact, it might be most worth watching, especially if you don’t agree with everything Oliver said. It’s important for you to hear what people think about AI.

At the very same time, lots of corporate C-suites are pushing AI everywhere, along with “crediting” AI with helping them save all kinds of money, often through job reductions. There was another Wall Street Journal article where Verizon’s CEO Dan Schulman, quote, “has predicted 20% to 30% unemployment within the next two to five years.” I love personally that he added, “I think being authentic, being realistic, telling the truth as best as you can…” is important.

Which, I mean, I applaud his sentiment. Being authentic was a fairly crucial point in last week’s episode. But, jeez, dude. Read the room. Saying that “change is necessary, but it can be difficult,” doesn’t exactly make folks feel warm and fuzzy, especially if you’re talking about depression-level unemployment. Like that’s not the positive message that I think you think it is.

I have to make a disclosure here, by the way. I’ve done work with Verizon in the past. They’re not currently a client, uh, but they could be again, unless they really hate this episode.

The point is that there’s a very real backlash that customers feel about artificial intelligence. They’re concerned about what it means for them in their day-to-day lives. 55% of people don’t think AI will do “more harm than good” because, you know, they’re excited to see what happens. Seriously.

And many of the criticisms of AI are valid. As I talked about last week, “AI slop” didn’t become a term because people love AI content and can’t get enough of it.

So if an increasingly large number of people hate AI, if an increasingly large number of your customers have real valid concerns about AI and its use, and you are still planning to use AI to help your business become more effective and efficient, then you’ve got a real problem on your hands. Not a potential problem. A genuine, real, honest to goodness problem right now.

The question then is what do you do about this problem? This is episode 493 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Today we’re talking about the AI backlash and what you can do about it. Let’s dive in.

As I mentioned before the break, various reports claim that 22% of people surveyed have a very negative view of AI, while another 24% have a somewhat negative view. 26% of people consider themselves AI detractors — they’re actively opposed to AI. And fully 55% of US adults believe that AI will cause more harm than good. That’s bad enough, but you need to know that that number was 44% a year ago. So the story for AI is not getting better.

First, we have to consider the fact that many criticisms of AI are built on valid points. To get a big one out of the way, there will be job disruptions. It’s not likely that there will be — we are seeing this in real time. Company after company is either laying people off because AI can do those jobs, or they’re saying that they’re laying people off because AI can do those jobs. I think the latter is more common than the former. I think they’re looking for something to blame the job losses on other than, you know, the economy or trying to save money or things along those lines, or trying to grow profit. But no matter what the reality is, AI is the bad guy. That’s not going to make your customers feel all that great about AI.

And if we’re being totally honest, of course AI is going to make some jobs go away. Technology of any kind always does.

I’ve told the story many times about my grandmother, Marie. Marie was a telephone operator, which at the time was one of the most common jobs for women in the country. She and her sister, when they were 24 and 26, were the only people working in their household during the Great Depression. The Depression had put their father — my great-grandfather — out of work. My grandmother and her sister paid for their family’s rent and utility bills and groceries. Today, the job that paid for their rent and utility bills and groceries doesn’t exist. They were the only two telephone operators I’ve ever met in my entire life. Technology made that job go away, period.

I want to be fair — there is a happy ending to that story. I’m going to come back to that a little bit.

So it’s safe to say that technology and automation and artificial intelligence will affect jobs for sure. There are also very real and very serious issues related to AI being used to create deep fakes and other types of misinformation, such as things like “nudify” apps and other more broad concerns. These uses are obviously terrible. Terrible. Horrible.

I’m not going to spend much time on these other than to say that anyone using AI to harm others — either individually or at scale, either as a human or as an enterprise — should be prosecuted and punished. Full stop. Period.

I am not trying to brush the criticism aside. It’s a real problem and it’s one that we need to do more to fix. But it’s going to take politicians and prosecutors to make that problem go away. It’s also not something that any credible business is doing, and if they are, they should be prosecuted and punished for it too.

Additional criticisms about electricity usage and environmental concerns also have a number of well-founded bases. I’m doing a bunch right now to learn more about this topic. I don’t feel super qualified at the moment to speak about it at any length.

What I do know is true is that you’ve heard me quote the philosopher Paul Virilio many times, who said, “when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.” Another part of that quote continues: “Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” That’s 100% true. That’s why I use the quote so often. It was true when the internet and mobile and social came along. I’ve lived through this story a number of times in my career, and some of you probably have too.

Of course, this reality is far older than just the internet. One of my family’s go-to holiday movies, “Desk Set,” stars Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and is about office workers at Christmas time worried that computers will take their jobs away. That movie came out in 1957, so almost 70 years ago. And no, I didn’t live through that one.

You probably also know that the word “sabotage” came about when a group of French workers who wore wooden shoes — they’re called “sabot” in French — interrupted production at their factories. I’m a little sad about this, but there’s a famous story that they threw their “sabots” into the machines to slow them down or wreck them, and that story apparently appears to be false, and I’m so bummed about that because that is a great story.

At any rate, though, the first use of sabotage to mean slowing down work came about very late in the 19th century and was undoubtedly inspired by fears of automation, machines, taking away jobs. Given that that was roughly 130 years ago, this is not a new problem. I am confident you could find earlier examples of workers who feared technology would take their jobs away. You know, as Maslow told us, people wanting to be able to pay rent and buy food is a fairly fundamental concern throughout human history.

The fact that we’ve heard these concerns before, strangely, gives me hope. We have lived through this problem in the past. And generally it’s worked out okay in the longer term. Yes, we still have concerns about the internet and social and mobile, mostly related to misinformation and social connections. But losing your job because of one of those technologies generally isn’t one of them.

I told you there was a happy ending around the telephone operator story. The truth is that even though telephone operator was one of the most common jobs for women roughly a hundred years ago, and today that job no longer exists, there are more women working just in the top 10 careers today than all of the women who worked when my grandmother was a telephone operator. A hundred years of technological development have created far more jobs, even in just 10 fields, than existed back then. And that’s true for men too, of course. The fact is that there are more than three times as many people working in the US today as there were when “Desk Set” came out 70 years ago, despite the 70 years of technological advancements since then. We’ve done more than survive that shipwreck. We’ve thrived because of technology.

Of course, that only matters if AI doesn’t make your job go away. Having more jobs in the long run is great. Your customers — and you — have to pay rent and buy food in the short run too, right? As Keynes famously said, “in the long run, we’re all dead.”

I am not trying to be provocative or morose about this. Instead, it’s one of those cases where two things can be true at once. The first is that AI isn’t a problem in the longer term, at least related to jobs. Probably. And the second is that we need to come up with solutions to help our customers, our communities, and our employees in the short term too.

The fact is — the truth is — that I’m not afraid of AI. If I’m afraid of anything, it’s the people using AI and making rules around AI that scare me more. Human beings, unfortunately, are very good at finding ways to be terrible to one another. As I’ve said in the past, terrorists have committed atrocities all around the world over the last few decades, and probably before that, without using AI. Sure, AI may help them do those things more successfully in the future, but the point still holds. They didn’t need AI to come up with some of these really awful things.

The real risk isn’t that AI is going to put everyone out of work. The real risk is that some CFO will — and my bigger concern is that they do so without helping people along the way. That’s what I think your customers care about more than anything else.

So yes, AI might create and is creating new risks. Your customers’ concerns exist because of how we use the tool and what steps we take — or don’t — to address those risks. That’s the reality. That’s what you’re dealing with.

Given that, I come back to the question of what do you do about it? What can you do if half of your customers hate AI? How can you use AI in ways that make your customers not hate you too?

And it’s a big question. It’s not one that has a simple answer. There are, however, four steps I’d think about.

First, follow the law. You know I’m not a lawyer. You know I don’t pretend to be one. I have no interest in being one. There are a number of disclosure laws on the books around AI in the US and in the EU, individual states in the US. You should be talking with competent, qualified counsel to understand your risks and appropriate responses for your business. Don’t ever break the law by mistake. Know what you’re doing, assess your risks, and act accordingly.

Second, understand the message that you’re sending with your company’s AI use. Verizon’s CEO talked about the ways that they’re investing in reskilling their employees, investing to help their employees reskill and help them deal with the shifting AI landscape. That is a great idea. Super cool, and something worth celebrating. They’re investing, quote, “a $20 million career transition and retraining fund for the ‘age of AI’,” unquote. That’s roughly $1,500 per person they’ve laid off. And while that may not sound like a huge number, it’s a good start. Frankly, it’s about $1,500 more than what many companies are doing.

So, I don’t know, maybe they’d want to lead with that versus “AI is gonna take away 30% of all the jobs.” Call me crazy.

When you choose to use AI, are you helping or hurting your workforce? Are you helping or hurting your community? That’s the question you should be asking. If you’re helping, how clear is it that that’s what you’re doing? How clear do you make that to your customers and to your community? There is no one-size-fits-all approach here. I can’t tell you in a single podcast episode exactly the words you should say or exactly when you should say them. But if you want to discuss on an individual level, give me a call.

The reality is you are sending a message when you choose to use AI. You need to make sure the message is the one that you mean to send.

Third, and very much to that end, develop your own voice for your brand, your business, and yourself, even when you’re using AI. Too many people — I talked about this a lot last week, so I don’t want to belabor the point — but too many people are using AI to turn out lots of content. Remember that content quantity is not your goal. It never should be. Content quality is.

Let’s just start with your voice. What is it that matters to you? What are your company’s values? What do you do? Why do you do what you do? And how do you convey that in your content and in your customer experiences every time a customer connects with you? How does that shine through in your day to day interactions?

Then when you’ve got that settled — then and only then — can you ask, how can AI help us do this more effectively or more efficiently? Because it’s only when you know what you want the output to look like, to sound like, to feel like, that you can say whether or not it’s doing a good job of reflecting you and your brand and your values.

If your goal is lots and lots and lots of cheap content, well, sure, AI can do that. But you’re creating commodity content by definition, and nobody gives a crap about commodity content.

If your goal instead is “tell a great story about our customers, their lives, and how our business helps them lead better lives,” then you have something where AI might be able to help. My favorite hospitality clients do this naturally. They want their guests to have a great experience and a comfortable, safe space to sleep or get some work done, or reconnect with their partners and kids, day after day after day. AI can become a tool to help do that better, not “the big scary monster coming to take all the jobs away.”

By the way, I need to note that while this might sound like I’m talking only about B2C businesses, B2B is also about making your customers more effective and efficient at what they do too. You are helping the folks who purchase your products and services do their jobs better, make better products and services for their customers. The same point about your values and your voice apply.

Which leads me to my final point. It’s also the most important point. And it is this: be human.

Your job is to create a customer, to connect with people in ways that make them want to work with your business. That’s what your job is in marketing and sales and customer experience every day.

I am confident that we are already seeing customers who won’t want to work with some businesses because of their approach to AI use and the impact of AI on their employees, their customers, and their community. Again, you need to ask, why are we using AI? How does it help us create better experiences for our customers? How does it help our customers in their lives?

I said sometime back that we owe it to our customers to make their lives better. I still believe that. If you’re not using AI to make your customers’ lives better, what on earth are you using it for?

None of what I’ve talked about is me saying don’t use AI. Far from it. I use AI all the time to solve all kinds of problems for my business and for my customers’ businesses. But it starts with saying, use AI in ways that are beneficial to your customers, your communities, your teams. Think about what you can and should disclose and in what ways you should do that to help your customers understand how and why you use AI. Again, maybe legal frameworks don’t require you to disclose your use, but does it make you a better member of your community if you do that?

It is clear that some customers hate AI. And it’s clear that even more have concerns about AI. It’s also clear that those concerns are built on valid points — they start from a ground truth that we need to acknowledge. We don’t know exactly how AI will affect the job market. We don’t know its long-term costs in terms of the environment or intellectual development. We are conducting real-time experiments at scale that will change the world we live in. And we have to be honest — just because we’ve seen similar shakeups in the past from internet and mobile and social, and going all the way back to the 19th century, doesn’t mean that it will all work out all right in the end this time. I’m willing to bet it will. But we know that there will be shipwrecks for sure along the way. Nothing ever comes without some costs, especially in the short term.

Your job is to acknowledge your customers’ concerns. Your job is to listen and learn from them about what they care about. And then your job is to help your customers understand what you’re doing to address those concerns. Ignoring their concerns will not make them go away — it will only make it look like you don’t care. And then AI won’t be the thing the customers hate. They just might hate you too. So maybe let’s not do that.

If this episode gave you a better picture of how you should approach AI for your business, do me a favor — send it to a colleague who’s working on AI for your organization. You might save them a world of trouble.

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

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

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

Take Your Next Step Toward a Digital Reset

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

• The Brief: Get the weekly email that turns these strategic ideas into actionable demand. Subscribe to The Digital Reset Brief
• The Book: Master the framework with Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Buy the Book
• The Experience: Need a bespoke digital strategy for your hotel, resort, SaaS firm, or financial services firm? Tim Peter & Associates can help you. Work with Tim

The post 55% of People Hate AI: How to Use it Without Losing Your Customers (Digital Reset Episode 493) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

The cost of producing a 1,500-word article has collapsed to somewhere near zero. That’s the supply shock, one my friend Mark Schaefer has talked about for years. The more interesting question today — the one most marketing leaders haven’t priced correctly yet — is what that collapse does to everything else.

When a factor of production goes free and infinite, value doesn’t disappear. It shifts. And in marketing today, it’s shifted somewhere most content strategies aren’t looking.

Academic evidence has seen this coming. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper using Pixiv data shows that generative AI is crowding out human creators. Ahrefs data shows that 86.5% of top-ranking pages now contain some amount of AI-generated content. And Graphite.io found that the total quantity of AI-generated articles probably surpassed the quantity of human-written articles published on the web within the last couple of of years.

Additionally, research published in Nature on "model collapse" — the degraded outputs that occur when AI trains on AI output — singal a related, and more problematic reality for marketers: a "collapse to uniformity.” That’s the steady, unrelenting increase in “textual similarity” across the web since AI started publishing in the 2010s. Those similar, AI-generated outputs have accelerated ever since ChatGPT’s earliest models, and are projected to reach 90% saturation around 2035.

If that forecast holds, we’re adding roughly 10 points of uniformity — bland, boring, blah content — every year. And that means the window for you to differentiate is not some theory. It’s real. And it’s closing on you right now.

The result is two things happening simultaneously:

1. AI-generated content is increasingly good enough that it saturates every channel.
2. And human beings — who are, as I say, "pretty good bullshit detectors" — are beginning to flag content they don’t like as "AI slop.”

That second reality isn’t happening just when content was generated by a machine. It’s also happening when it doesn’t sound human enough, when it’s too corporate, too polished… too fake.

It’s fairly likely that at least 25% to 30% of your customers will actively demand authenticity within the next two to three years… if they aren’t demeaning it already. My two-to-three year forecast isn’t pulled out of thin air — it’s the sheer math of 10 points of AI detection per year building off a base of roughly 10% today.

This episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter identifies the three specific assets AI cannot reproduce:

• Proprietary data
• Original examples
• Your expert voice

We also share a three-question framework for auditing whether your content strategy is actually building any of them.

The closing argument is my own practice of writing our podcast scripts by hand, despite having AI tools running in the background: not because I can write faster than a machine. We all know that’s not true.

Instead, it’s my experience, my beliefs, my humanity are the scarcest resource our content can put to work. That the distinction that matters — separating what is abundant from what is actually scarce. It’s the core claim I’m making this time. And it’s the one that will determine which brands still get seen in three years time… and which will have blended into the background.

Key Insights for Marketing and Business Leaders Navigating AI Content in 2026

In this episode, we break down:

• AI didn’t kill content marketing — it repriced it. The cheap parts (generic explainers, commodity how-tos, undifferentiated articles) are now worth close to nothing, because anyone using AI can produce them in seconds. The expensive parts — your proprietary data, lived experiences, and genuine expert voice — have become more valuable, not less. Using AI won’t make you fail. But spending your content budget on the wrong side of that line will.
• "AI slop" is the uncanny valley of content — and your customers’ bullshit detectors are already activating. People flag content as AI-generated not just when it actually is, but when it fails to sound human enough. As customers get increasingly sensitive to “AI slop” — probably by 10 points or so per year — the brands relying too heavily on overly templated, indistinct, and impersonal content will find themselves on the wrong side of a widening credibility gap. Somewhere between 25 to 30% of customers will demand clear authenticity in the next two to three years… if they’re not already.
• "Collapse to uniformity" is the structural threat underneath "AI slop." The Nature paper on model collapse gets most of the attention, but the follow-on research on “textual similarity” is the more immediately relevant fact. Content on the web keeps getting steadily more similar, and has only gotten worse ChatGPT emerged on the scene.. Researchers project 90% saturation by 2035 — roughly nine years away. That means the differentiation window is not just some theoretical abstract. It is measurable, and it is closing.
• The three assets AI cannot fake are proprietary data, original examples, and expert voice. Data that only you have about your customers, your market, and your industry is yours alone to report. Original examples from real customers carry the credibility of lived experience that no AI can generate. And an expert voice means being willing to make a specific, named predictions and opinions — ones you’re willing to be wrong about — because taking that risk is exactly what makes you worth listening to. Generic best practices and how-to content is dead. Your truth, your actual opinions, that you’re willing to own, is rare.
• Three questions will tell you where your content strategy actually stands. What is your ratio of proprietary to commodity content in the last 90 days? When a prospect asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity about your category, what specifically about your brand shows up — and is it something only you could have said? Who on your team is your named voice, and are you amplifying their signal or burying it it in generic content calendar outputs? The answers to those three questions are the most useful content audit you can conduct.
• The answer is not to publish less — it’s to publish more of what’s scarce. This episode is not about cutting volume. It’s about redirecting where you put your efforts. Publishing more of the content only you can produce — and less of the content that any AI could produce — is the allocation of time and resources that matters most. The brands that figure this out in the next two to three years are the ones customers will ask for by name. The ones that don’t will blend into the background.

Whether you’re a CMO deciding where to concentrate your content budget in 2026, a marketing leader who keeps being asked about AI, or a brand that’s already noticed its content working less well than it did a year ago, this episode gives you the framework to understand why… and what you can do about it.

AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless. (Digital Reset Episode 492) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

• The Single Biggest Myth in Digital: Content is Expensive (Thinks Out Loud Episode 275)
• Does Generative AI Crowd Out Human Creators? Evidence from Pixiv by Sueyoul Kim, Ginger Zhe Jin, Eungik Lee :: SSRN and Does Generative AI Crowd Out Human Creators? Evidence from Pixiv | NBER
• w34733.pdf
• 74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages)
• More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans
• AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data | Nature
• [2404.01413] Is Model Collapse Inevitable? Breaking the Curse of Recursion by Accumulating Real and Synthetic Data and 2404.01413
• Future of AI Models: A Computational perspective on Model collapse
• Three reasons why brand is more important in the AI Era – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}
• Mark Schaefer and The Most Human Company Wins – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}
• The most human company wins: A case study – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}
• Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491)
• The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast) – Tim Peter & Associates
• The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489)
• Why AI Gives Your Customer Different Answers… Every Time
• The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) – Tim Peter & Associates
• Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483)
• The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484)
• What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482)
• AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478)
• What Taylor Swift Can Teach You About Bypassing Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 393)

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

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Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks

Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud

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

Running time: 21m 52s

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Transcript: AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless.

Welcome back to the show.

A few years ago, I made the claim that content wasn’t expensive. Instead, I said that content that doesn’t convert was expensive.

Today, that’s not really true either. Not because you want content that doesn’t convert. I mean, really.

But AI has essentially driven the cost of producing content to zero. You need a 1,500-word article or a 15-second video? A quick prompt, and you’ll have what you need within minutes, if not seconds.

Sure, there’s some nominal cost to you for the AI platform you’re using. And crafting a solid prompt might take you a few minutes, assuming you don’t already have an effective process or a library of prompts to work from. Both of those are still orders of magnitude cheaper than what content creation used to cost.

Hell, according to Ahrefs, 74-plus percent of all newly created web pages contained AI-generated content.

I mean, I know I use AI all the time as part of my workflow, and I’m pretty sure if you’re watching or listening to this episode, you do too. That’s part of the point.

When everyone has access to the same tools, when the tools become part of our ambient reality, the outputs of those tools become ambient reality too. We are all contributing to the flood every day, all by ourselves.

Now, before we get started, I want to be clear. Today’s episode is not anti-AI. I use AI. Clearly I’m in favor of it. Instead, it’s about the costs of marketing and where we want to and need to invest our budget and time.

For example, I had Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT doing work in the background while I was writing this script. And they took less time to complete their tasks than even writing this introduction did.

So why did I bother writing the intro at all? Why not just let AI do it?

And that gets to the core of what we need to talk about today. Because the volume of effectively free content that’s flooding the internet has driven up costs somewhere else. As content has become free and abundant, something else — something more critical — has become expensive and scarce.

And that something else, when done well, is what will differentiate your brand and it will help you stand apart in the marketplace.

That something else is what AI can’t reproduce. It can’t generate. It can’t hallucinate. It can’t fake.

Your lived experiences, your real-world relationships, your personal touches with your customers, and a genuine voice all your own are what actually are worth cultivating. When content becomes a commodity, your human connection to your customers becomes the most scarce asset of all.

Building that asset, growing it, and nurturing it is what is going to set you apart in a flood of free, fake content. In fact, I’m going to argue in this episode that you’ve got no more than two to three years to get this right. And getting it right is what will make your brand one customers will ask for by name today and in the future.

This is episode 492 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in.

It’s abundantly clear that AI-generated content is here and that it’s absolutely flooding digital spaces every single day. You do not need me to tell you that. You see it every single day.

If you’re interested in some of the economic underpinnings though, there’s a National Bureau of Economic Research paper from Kim, Jin, and Lee, published earlier this year, that used Pixiv data and shows that generative AI crowded out human creators. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Similarly, research last year from Ahrefs said that "86.5% of top-ranking pages contained some amount of AI-generated content." That’s a quote. While I have a few quibbles with their methodology, I’m relatively convinced that a fairly healthy chunk of content on the web involves AI in its production somewhere along the way, just as their research found. And again, I’ll link to their research in the show notes.

Finally, some research from Graphite.io claims that, and this is a quote, "The quantity of AI-generated articles has surpassed the quantity of human-written articles being published on the web." They claim, contra Ahrefs’ findings, that these articles "largely do not appear in Google and ChatGPT." They also ignore "AI-generated/human-edited articles," while noting that "they may be even more prevalent." Ya think?

And yes, I’ll link to their research in the show notes too.

The point is that AI-generated content is everywhere online. It’s a core part of how content comes into being today. Most of that content is, at minimum, pretty okay, and some of it is actually quite good. I’m willing to bet that you are seeing that same reality.

At the same time, AI-generated materials are so common now that we’re starting to see a bit of a backlash lately, with lots of folks talking about "AI slop" showing up in search and on their social media timelines.

That slop critique hints at the problem. It kind of gets at the core of the problem. It’s a flashing red light that says, "we need to start doing something different." And I’m going to come back to that in just a minute.

Before I do though, there’s one other signal that I have to address that shows why we need to think beyond AI content. It’s called model collapse, and it points to a likely reality your "free" content faces longer term. In fact, it’s something you might even be dealing with today.

The basic principle behind model collapse came from a paper published in Nature by Shumailov and his team — all the way back, way, way back in July of 2024 — so less than two years ago. It found that, and this is a quote, "indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models."

In simple English, what their research showed was that training artificial intelligence on AI-generated content generally leads to increasingly bad outputs over time, much the same way that making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy will get blurrier and blurrier until eventually the output is unusable. Shumailov’s team rightly worries that as large language models get trained on the increasing amounts of AI-generated content on the web, those LLMs will produce worse results over time. That concern seems 100% valid if we agree about the photocopy example, right?

It’s also apparently not likely to happen in practice. Because follow-up research from Gerstgrasser, Schaeffer, Day, and Rafailov shows that as long as there’s at least some original human data in the model — you know, like all the web content produced before ChatGPT emerged — we’re probably fine.

But — and this is a key point — there is a related term we do need to think about. It’s called "collapse to uniformity." A group of researchers, while testing the idea of model collapse, discovered that, and again, this is a quote, "textual similarity has been steadily increasing since 2013, with a significant acceleration from 2018 to 2022, coinciding with the public release of…" ChatGPT’s earliest models. So that would be ChatGPT 2.0 and ChatGPT 3.0.

They go on to say that "the ecosystem may reach 90% saturation around 2035," and then just get worse from there.

While 2035 may sound like a long way off, that’s less than nine years from now. If you are younger than say 50, that will occur in your career. Also, if we’re going to hit 90% in less than nine years time, it suggests that we’re hitting some percentage of it today. And I suspect that we’re going to see an increase of roughly 10 points every year from now until then. I mean, if you think about it, that’s just logical. If we’re going to be at 90% roughly nine years from now, we’ll be at 80% eight years from now, and 70% seven years from now, and 50% five years from now, and 30% three years from now.

Which is where the AI slop criticism becomes so critical.

Human beings generally are pretty good — and I’m gonna use a technical term here — they’re pretty good bullshit detectors. Sure, not everyone’s good at it to an equal degree. And sure, we all have our blind spots where we can get fooled. I know I do. But human beings are generally pretty good at sniffing out when something sounds fake.

If you’ve ever heard of "the uncanny valley" in video games or CGI, it’s where a human face looks very close to real, but not close enough, and people find it disturbing. Our brains just won’t let us accept it as real. Think about a movie like The Polar Express. It just weirded people out because it was in that uncanny valley — close to real, but not quite close enough.

AI slop, to me, is the uncanny valley of AI-generated content. AI-generated content sometimes doesn’t sound human enough and sets off your customers’ bullshit detectors, and they flag it as AI slop. They’re the first 10% this year noting that something seems off in what companies and creators they’re listening to are saying.

The funny thing about this is that sometimes people online accuse creators of AI slop even when a human being actually created the content. And it’s not because it was AI-generated. It was because it didn’t sound human, or at least human enough. It was too corporate. It was too polished. It was too fake.

I’d argue as more people get wary about the text patterns and speech patterns of AI, they’re going to also get more wary of corporations and creators relying on heavily polished statements. Marketing thought leaders — including people like me — have claimed for years that it’s important to be authentic when you speak to your customers.

If we’re picking up 10 points of AI detection every year, it’s likely that a healthy chunk of customers — 25 to 30% — will demand that you be real, that you be clearly real, in the next couple of years, if they’re not already demanding it of you today. That’s where I got that two-to-three year number in the intro.

By the way, as a quick aside, I cannot talk about this topic any further without referencing my very good friend, Mark Schaefer. Mark has written extensively on this topic and has influenced my thinking significantly. His mantra about how the most human company wins in the age of AI echoes in my brain almost every single day. I cite him in my book. He’s just a key, key speaker on this topic that you want to know about. I’m going to link to some of his thoughts in the show notes, and I would encourage you to check those out and follow him regularly.

At any rate, that’s why focusing on human connection to your customer isn’t just scarce. It’s the most precious asset you can build. Your voice — the true you — is the most precious asset you can build.

That’s why your content can no longer just be a generic explainer or a how-to video. They’re dead. They don’t work anymore. They don’t matter.

Instead, you have true, scarce, valuable assets that your content must put to work today. What are they? Well, they include several things.

The first is proprietary data. Data that you have, that you can see, and that no one else can about your customers, your market, your industry, and the world at large is something that no one else can talk about with the genuine expertise and insight that you bring to the table. It’s your story to tell, and you need to tell it if you’re going to stand apart from generic AI-generated drivel.

The second are original examples. Talk about what you’ve lived in real life — your customers, your projects, your outcomes, your experiences. There’s a reason I talk about my hotel clients and other businesses I’ve worked with on this podcast, and that’s because no one else has those specific experiences. They back up my thinking and research with real-world examples that no one else can claim. It works for my business. It’ll work for yours too.

The third, of course, is expert voice. Your expert voice. Did you notice my two-to-three year timeline that I mentioned earlier? That’s my opinion. I don’t have anything other than my expertise, my experience, and my assessment of the data that exists to back that up. I could be wrong. I could absolutely be wrong. Maybe it’s four years. Maybe it’s one and a half years. I don’t know, but I’m willing to put my name on it and make a prediction to stand out from the crowd. I’m willing to take the risk of being wrong because I believe it will help you now and it will help you in the future. And candidly, because it will help others know who I am too. If I’m right, everybody wins. If I’m wrong, I will either learn and improve — or no one should listen to me anyway. Right? Period.

Together, those three attributes help me build a connection with my clients and listeners to the podcast and audiences on social media. They all work together to build the Digital Reset brand and to foster a community of like-minded individuals who are committed to learning and growing together. That same approach can work for you too.

Here’s how I would do it.

Start by asking yourself three questions this week.

First, what is our ratio of proprietary to commodity content over the last 90 days? Are we building named assets all our own, or just generic outputs that any AI could produce?

Two, when a potential customer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity about our category, what specifically about us shows up? Is it a reference that could have been written only by us? Or could it have been written by anyone? One of those is better for your brand long-term than the other, as you might expect.

Three, who on our team is our named voice? Are we amplifying their signal? Are we boosting their signal? Or do they get buried in the content calendar of just generic stuff we put out there? Think about which of those has a future too.

One big takeaway these questions should point you to is to focus on what makes you… you. What makes your brand stand apart? What makes you distinct? What makes you different from anyone else in the space — and different enough that people will listen to you, and different enough that eventually people will give you money? Not for your content, but for the solutions and products and services that you offer. That’s where you want to live. That’s where you need to live — because in two to three years, if you don’t already live there, you are in big, big trouble.

Also, I don’t want you to listen to this episode and necessarily think, "we need to publish less content." I mean, sure, this is about quality over quantity. Absolutely true. But it’s about publishing more of what’s scarce and less about publishing what’s already abundant.

That’s why I wrote the introduction to this episode — and the whole episode, for that matter. Not because I can write faster or cheaper than artificial intelligence. I can’t.

But because only I can produce the most scarce resource of all: me. For better or worse, when you’re hearing these episodes — when you’re watching them on YouTube or listening to them on Spotify — you’re hearing my experiences, you’re hearing my data, you’re hearing my voice. And that will be true today, two to three years from now, and for as long as you’re willing to keep listening.

AI did not kill content marketing. AI will not kill content marketing. What it’s done is make the cheap parts worthless and the expensive parts crucial. Your job is to know which is which. Your job is to put your focus on the parts that are crucial. And it’s to do that now and in the longer term too. And if you get that right, you don’t have to worry about the next two to three years or the next nine. You’ll be in great shape no matter what happens.

If this episode gave you a clearer picture of how you should approach content marketing in the age of AI, do me a favor. Send it to a colleague who’s thinking about that problem for your business. You might just save them from going down the wrong path.

You can find the show notes from this episode as well as the full archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcasts.

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

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

Take Your Next Step Toward a Digital Reset

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

• The Brief: Get the weekly email that turns these strategic ideas into actionable demand. Subscribe to The Digital Reset Brief
• The Book: Master the framework with Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Buy the Book
• The Experience: Need a bespoke digital strategy for your hotel, resort, SaaS firm, or financial services firm? Tim Peter & Associates can help you. Work with Tim

The post AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless (Digital Reset Episode 492) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Your marketing goal should be to win no matter what happens in the digital space. Yes, the channels your customers choose first change all the time. We’ve gone through search and social and now AI. Just remember that tomorrow could be something else altogether. You don’t want to chase channels. You want a strategy that works no matter what. And that’s what the “Hub and Spoke” and “CORE” methodologies are all about.

The CORE Methodology is a framework for choosing the right channels to market your company. Your “Hub and Spoke” is about how you use those channels — the spokes — to grow your hub (website, CRM, community).

Together, both work to ensure you win no matter what. This Foundation episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter breaks down what you need to know so you can win no matter what happens with AI… or whatever comes next.

Key Insights for Marketing Strategy Leaders Navigating the Shift to AI

• The spoke tax has expanded. When the original episode was recorded, your concern was Google’s algorithm changes. Today, it extends to zero-click AI search, ChatGPT ads, and social platform reach erosion. The gatekeeper problem has grown, not just changed.
• Your hub is now your primary AI defense. When AI gives your customers answers without sending them anywhere, only brand recognition that’s strong enough to generate direct/named search protects you. That’s the hub. And that’s what it matters.
• Prompt Brand Equity is your new SEO objective. How frequently your brand appears in AI responses must replace rank position as your key AI search metric. The Core and Explore methodology is the discipline you must adopt for building that frequency in a systematic way.
• Thinks Out Loud is now Digital Reset. The same show you’ve always loved. The same host you’ve come to know. Sharper focus on building your brand beyond Big Tech.

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

Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

• The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425)
• The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486)
• The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488)
• The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast)
• The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489)
• The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490)
• How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424)
• Partnerships Between Brands and Creators Will Define the Next Generation of Travel Marketing | HSMAI Americas
• Can Podcasting Help Your Business Bypass the Big Tech Gatekeepers? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 413)
• What Connects TikTok and the Hub and Spoke Model of Digital? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 299)
• Big Trends: Bundling, Unbundling, and Customer Acquisition (Thinks Out Loud Episode 411)
• How to Engage Your Hotel’s Secret Sales Force
• Where Content, Community, and Customer Experience Meet (Thinks Out Loud Episode 346) – Tim Peter & Associates
• Customer Experience is Queen? What Does That Mean? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 190) – Tim Peter & Associates
• Big Digital Marketing Trends: Customer Experience is Cool (Thinks Out Loud Episode 375)
• Content is King, Customer Experience is Queen (Thinks Out Loud Episode 188) – Tim Peter & Associates
• The Future of Email Marketing — Interview with Scott Cohen from InboxArmy (Thinks Out Loud Episode 410)
• Revisiting How to Escape Big Tech’s Web (Thinks Out Loud)
• The Rebirth of Trusted Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 307) – Tim Peter & Associates
• What Taylor Swift Can Teach You About Bypassing Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 393)
• Is Social Media Anti-Social for your Brand Now? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 391)
• How To Perform a Health Check for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 388)

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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.

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

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Transcript: Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy

Gatekeepers always offer you a shortcut, at least at first. That’s what I talked about in episode 489, and it’s why ChatGPT started charging brands $200,000 to advertise alongside answers that used to appear organically for free. That shortcut eventually becomes a toll road, always.

I glossed over one key detail in that episode.

The way out of the shortcut trap isn’t a better tactic. It’s a strategy. That strategy is what the episode you’re about to hear is all about.

A quick note before we dive in. If you’ve been listening for a while, you may know this show as Thinks Out Loud. We’ve rebranded to Digital Reset. The same show. Same host. Sharper focus on what you actually need to navigate AI and digital change right now.

The episode you’re about to hear was originally recorded in June, 2024 when everyone was worried about what Google might do next. I think you’ll find it’s aged remarkably well.

The framework at the center of this episode is the "Hub and Spoke." The hub is the audience you own: your website, your email list, your direct relationships.

The spokes are everyone else’s audience: search and social and AI and creators and employees and customers and press. The job of the spokes has always been the same: Grow the hub, not replace it, grow it.

In 2024, that was a good strategy. In 2026, it’s survival.

Your hub is your only durable defense against platform risk, including AI. So sit back and enjoy our foundation episode, “Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy.”

Let’s do this.

There are four ways to succeed:

1. You either get more new customers, you know, reach people you haven’t reached before.
2. You get your existing customers to spend more per purchase. Now, as I said last time, that’s more from a revenue perspective. From a traffic perspective, it might be that you get them to engage with more content each time they interact with your brand. Obviously, though, you only really care if they do that, if that’s going to lead to them spending more with you each time they purchase.
3. You can get existing customers to buy more often. And again, if you think about the traffic side, it could be that you get them to interact with you more often.
4. And of course you can do a combination of the other three. Get more new people who come to you and spend more each time, who come to you more often, and obviously that becomes, you know, a wind piled on top of a wind piled on top of a wind, and that’s a really, really good thing.

If, though, you are worried about where you find these folks and how you reach these folks and you get them to do this, I always like to start with where you are first. Where does your traffic and revenue come from today? I assume that you’re using Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics or something along those lines to understand your traffic and revenue sources.

Whenever I start with a new client, whenever we start with a new client, we tend to look at the last 13 to 18 months of traffic and revenue. Then, we might look at a shorter period like the last two or three months, and then we might look at the last few weeks, a week at a time, to get a sense of what’s going on.

Looking at the longer periods helps you to understand if there’s any seasonality. You know, does your company get more business some times of the year than others? That can help you understand if there are different demand patterns or if there’s something that you can do differently to get more traffic and business at some points in the year.

If you’re not accustomed to seasonality, if your business doesn’t have it, it’s pretty common in many businesses. I talk about hospitality a lot. Hospitality tends to have very well defined peak seasons, off seasons, and what are known as “shoulder seasons,” between the peak and off season. We also see it in B2B a lot more than you think, too, based on budget cycles, you know, things like quarter end, year end, start of the new year, that sort of thing.

Getting a sense of that picture is really important because it can point you to traffic sources that you can build on, or revenue sources that you can build on.

It is sometimes easier to increase the traffic you get from existing sources, than it is to find or create entirely new sources of traffic and revenue. If you’re already getting traffic and revenue from a specific source, that’s a pretty good sign it’s something that works for your customers. And then it becomes more a question of how do we grow that source rather than “Oh my gosh, we don’t get any traffic outside of Google. Where do we go?” So it’s always a good place to start to look at the reality and understand are there any seasonal patterns that play into that. Are there times where you can expect more traffic or less traffic just as a natural consequence of where that comes from and of your customer’s natural behaviors?

The next thing that you want to do is ensure that you have a content calendar. Now, I talked in the last episode quite a bit about understanding your customers as well as you possibly can and what your customers pain points are.

We love doing this because it allows us to line up specific messages with specific seasonality where it exists. Again, if you don’t have seasonality, don’t worry about it, but there are natural things that occur during the course of your business year or occur in the natural course of your customers lives that might lead them to look for your product and service more often.

That’s really important then that you have a calendar that aligns with that. And we always think in terms of a “rock/pebbles/sand” approach.

Your rocks are the big items, the things that you know will happen, and you can plan those out weeks or months or maybe even a year in advance. You know, again, if I’m going to use the hospitality example, summer is a peak period for many, many companies, for many, many resorts, for many, many hotels. If you’re a ski resort, we know ski season is a big peak period. Well, we can put a rock saying, we need to start talking about this X weeks before, months in advance, even a year in advance.

If you’re a B2B company, maybe it’s a big trade show that occurs every year. We worked with a software company for years that went to Dreamforce every year, and that was a rock, because they knew when it occurred. If you’re, I don’t know, a restaurant, and you know the Super Bowl is going to be in your town next year, you can start planning your content for that.

Now, because we already know when that’s going to occur, we already know when there’s going to be more demand in your market. You then start to fill the calendar with pebbles.

And the pebbles are little things, smaller things, more tactical, but messages that you want to dribble out over the course of the year, that fill in some of the spaces between the rocks, right? If you think about we’re putting rocks, pebbles, and sand in a jar, you put the rocks in first, and then there’s spaces between them, and that’s where the pebbles go.

And you can plan those weeks, or even a couple of months in advance. Usually about 90 days is pretty typical.

And then the sand is small little tactical stuff. Maybe they’re social media posts. Maybe they are little blog posts or quick little videos that you’re going to put up on your website. And those get sprinkled in where there’s space.

It’s okay if you have a period where you don’t have anything to say. Just make sure that you’re doing that intentionally, you’re choosing not to speak there, you’re choosing not to create content and put it out there because it doesn’t work for your customer at that time of year. It’s only a mistake if you completely ignore your customer’s behaviors and you’re not taking advantage of it.

Now, one of the reasons that search has worked for so long is because everyone searches and they’re literally telling you what’s most important to them. Google didn’t get to an $80 billion per quarter revenue company, a $300-plus billion annual company in revenue, by ignoring what people typed into the search box every day.

Instead, they listened to those, they interpreted those searches, and they gave customers what they were looking for both in the search results and in the way they’ve modified the search results over the years to put the information in front of customers quickly and easily. That’s how we’ve ended up in this place in the first place.

Look at your site search, if you have it, as well as the terms that are driving traffic to you because those are the things that customers are saying are important. You can use tools like Google Search Console, you can use tools like Google Analytics to look at your site search. You can use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to look at the types of terms that your company and your competitors rank for to get a sense of the kinds of messages and the kinds of information that your customers are looking for.

Now you’ll note, in all of this, we haven’t talked about channels yet. We’ve always been talking about how do we understand our customer, how do we understand our objectives, how do we understand our content. And the reason is because the channel and the format come last.

First, you have to understand who are you talking to and what do they need to hear you say? Then you can think about “Where do I say this and in what form do I say this?”

We have always used a framework called “Hub and Spoke,” where the hub are things you control, and the spokes are things other people control.

One way to think of it is, your audience is the hub, and the spokes are other people’s audiences, you’re leveraging other people to help you reach those folks.

The hub is your audience. It’s the people who are actively seeking you out. It’s your website. It’s your app. It’s your email list or your CRM. And I’m going to come back to that in more detail in a minute.

But I want to start in detail talking about the spokes. The spokes are other people’s audience. And the job of the spokes is to grow the hub. You don’t just go out on the spokes for no reason. Ideally, you turn those spokes into customers. But when you turn them into customers, even if they buy on a spoke, you should have some contact information for them that goes into your CRM, which allows them to come back to your website or your app the next time directly without being on a spoke.

So the spoke is where we’re working with other people’s audiences. Google, obviously, has long been the biggest. It’s the whole reason we’re having this conversation.

Obviously, social is huge too. So that could be Instagram, it could be Facebook, it could be TikTok if you’re B2C, if you’re selling directly to consumers. It might be LinkedIn if you’re a B2B company, selling to businesses. You know, LinkedIn is my go to social network, but they are places where you connect with other people through other people.

It also doesn’t mean you’re creating your own content. You may be partnering with creators who have a big audience, or have, I shouldn’t even say “a big audience;” they have “the right audience.” They’re talking to your customers.

So you might partner with creators. You might work with them to say, “Hey, can you help us craft a good message for our customers who you also happen to be talking with?” That could be a partnership. It could be something where you’re paying them. It could be where you’re commenting and engaging with others content, but to be a valuable member of the community first. You’re not just going in there and saying, “Hey, let me jump into your conversation and promote me.” It could be you’re engaging with them in a really effective way by being a member of their community and then letting that organically grow into people knowing about you from that over time.

I wrote a piece of research for meta platforms and HSMAI a few years ago during the pandemic on how you can research your other creators and learn about other creators and work with other creators over time. I definitely recommend you checking that out. I’ll have the link in the show notes. But the point is that you’re letting the creators help tell a positive story on your brand’s behalf.

Another type of creator you might want to think about are your employees. I’ve worked with many companies who’ve had great success with an employee engagement program where you’re leveraging your employees social networks to talk about your products and services. You help your team understand what they should be talking about, you provide them some guidelines, you provide them some content assets, and you provide them some recognition for the work that they do. Could be a thank you, could be they win an internal contest, it could be that they get a, you know, a bonus or something along those lines. But it’s all about engaging the employees in telling a positive story.

I will be very clear, this works better for some companies than others because sometimes your employees are very representative of your company and sometimes they’re not, so you have to be clear about that. But when it works, it can work tremendously well and you’re increasing your network by the size of your total employees times the size of their network.

The other great form of engagement that you can work with as creators are your customers. Your secret sales forces, I call them, when they talk on ratings and review sites. You’ve heard me say a billion times on this show that customer experience is queen. And the reason that’s so is you want to create an experience that your customers want to talk about, that they want to talk about positively to their network.

The average person on social, whether it’s your employee, whether it’s your customer, has about 200 friends and family and fans and followers on social. So, how are you engaging them to tell a really positive story about your company and about your business? Well, you’re doing that through the experience that they get.

You also can look to PR. Are there, you know, and when I say PR, we can talk about traditional journalists or we can talk about people who are, you know, creators and what they’re doing. How are you creating a great experience that they want to share, that they want to talk about? Your goal is to build a community of people who want to tell a positive story on your behalf, whether that’s journalists, whether that’s creators, whether that’s employees, whether that’s customers.

All of these are people who have an audience that you can build off of. And of course, there’s all sorts of other things you can do. Direct mail, loyalty programs, conferences and trade shows, trade organizations, traditional advertising, paid media, etc. But the point is, you’re looking for the ones that work for your business and help you connect to your customers.

Another thing you might want to look at is what types of content do your customers engage with? Are they engaging with written articles either on your own site like a blog or on using other people’s audiences like a spoke? Are you writing in a trade journal if you’re a B2B company? Are you writing it, you know, are you getting coverage in a An online magazine if you are a B2C company.

You can do things like polls. You can do things like video and images and audio, like, I don’t know, podcasts. Now, I want to be very clear. You don’t necessarily need to do the video. You don’t necessarily need to do the audio. You don’t necessarily need to do the poll. Those can be great places to partner with creators who do that well.

The reality, though, is you want to give the people who create those something worth talking about. So, for instance, if you’re doing a podcast, why are you a good podcast guest? You find somebody who is a podcaster who speaks to your audience. What makes you a good guest?

I get pitches every day from people who say, Oh, we’ve got somebody who’d be a terrific guest for your podcast. And it’s clear they’ve never listened to the show once. Not at all. They don’t understand the show. They don’t get the show. And they’re saying, we’ve got somebody who wants to come on and talk about, you know I don’t know, women’s fashion. Nothing against women’s fashion, but it’s clearly not something we have anything to do with. They’re not being a good part of the community.

Another thing you can do is think about images. Think about things on Pinterest or Instagram. Now, the term infographics? Nobody uses any longer, but the idea of beautiful data visualizations still always works as a content mechanism. I have clients who have tremendous success with this. If you have research that’s important to your customer and you can package it in a way that’s beautiful, folks will share it on your behalf. You could do this in B2B with “Here’s something you want to know about the market today.” You can do it in B2C. You know, “Here’s a hot trend in—I don’t know—women’s fashion that you really should know about.” Right?

But the point is you’re trying to engage other people’s audience. And the way you’re going to do that is engage those people to want to share your story. You have to give them something. You have to give them a hook that’s going to be interesting to them.

The thing that you want to remember is the point is to get it to grow your audience, your hub. That’s the job of any of these spokes. And there’s a model we use for picking these. You’re not going to do every single one of these. I’m just giving you, you know, ten different high level ideas. The reality is you don’t have the resources to do all ten. So keep in mind what we call “Core and Explore.”

Remember when I talked about where your traffic and business comes from today, where’s 80% of that? What’s the 80% that’s most important to you? That’s where you should be putting most of your efforts. That’s your “Core.”

Then spend maybe 20% of your time on “Explore,” finding new channels, finding new opportunities. You’re not exploring for its own sake, though. You want to find things that can become part of your core over time.

And we use a framework that I call CORE to choose those:

• Customers
• Outcomes
• Resources
• Execution.

So, Customers. Are your customers on that channel? Do they use or interact with that channel regularly?

Outcomes. Is this an effective platform for delivering your key message? Can it help you reach more of the people you want to reach and drive more business? And most importantly, does it actually drive more business? As you test it, are you seeing positive business results from it?

Resources. Do you have the knowledge and the skills needed to use this platform effectively? If not, how will you close those gaps? That’s a great place where working with a creator can work for you because they already know how to close those gaps.

And of course, Execution. What is your plan? What are your next steps to get started?

So as you evaluate potential channels, look at “Customers, Outcomes, Resources, Execution (CORE),” and determine which ones work best for you.

Once you’ve answered those questions, take your plan out and test it. And as you learn, see if you can make it part of your core activities. Ultimately, that’s where we’re going to go.

Now you’ll note in all this I haven’t talked about search because my concern is how Google is going to change search over time. I also want to be clear, search isn’t completely going away.

What’s also true is that the best way to beat Google at its own game is to have customers search for you by name. Every single one of these activities that I’ve mentioned could actually increase your search traffic. The difference is, customers won’t be looking for, you know, “generic service near me,” “hotels near…,” or, “restaurants near…,” or “businesses who solve X problem.” They’ll be searching for you by name. And that’s the long game.

Because then no matter what Google does, you win:

• If search clicks, if search traffic starts to decline because of the changes Google makes to the user experience, you’ll be building long term brand equity and social connections and your email and CRM capabilities and your community that allows you to connect with customers through other people’s audiences and through your own hub.
• And if search continues to drive lots of traffic, well, you’ll get more of that too. So you win no matter how you slice it. Which is ultimately the goal we’re looking for.

So to recap everything we’ve talked about the last two weeks

• Think in terms of do we understand our customers?
• Do we understand where our traffic and revenue come from and can we build on those?
• Do we have a content calendar that works?
• Are we working on using the Spokes to grow our Hub?
• Are we testing about 20% of the time using a “Core and Explore “approach and looking to move those channels into the core by evaluating them from a Customers perspective, from an Outcomes perspective, from a Resources perspective, and from an Execution perspective?
• And remember, finally, that it’s okay if people keep searching for you, and you keep turning up in search, especially if they search for you by name, because then you win no matter what Google does.

And that’s the whole point of this, is to make sure that no matter what anybody does, you’re still in a position to succeed. I can’t wait to see what you do.

 I want to close this episode with something I said at the end of the original recording. I think it’s very much worth repeating. The best way to beat any gatekeeper at their own game is when customers ask for you by name. It is not about relying on a platform. It’s not about buying ads, just your brand by name every time.

That was true of Google in June of 2024. It’s true of ChatGPT in April, 2026, and it’ll be true of whatever comes next. The long game doesn’t change.

If you want a practical playbook for playing that long game in an AI first world, check out my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. The link is in the show notes at timpeter.com/podcasts.

Also subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming and connect with me on LinkedIn. Just search Tim Peter. Or email me at podcast@timpeter.com. I always love hearing from you.

This has been Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Thanks for being here. I’ll talk with you next time. Take care everybody.

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ChatGPT launched ads in its responses earlier this year. But they weren’t for everybody. They couldn’t be. Their ads came saddled with a $60 CPM and a $200,000 minimum spend. That pricing is roughly in line with prime-time NFL inventory. Naturally, the tightly-managed pilot started with only around 600 advertisers.

OpenAI might be new to the gatekeeper game, but they sure understand how to collect a tax on the traffic they offer. According to CNBC, OpenAI’s ad pilot crossed $100 million in annualized revenue in under two months.

Now, Search Engine Land is reporting that OpenAI is bringing self-serve access — and getting rid of the $200,000 minimum — this month.

Early performance data around ChatGPT’s ads isn’t as simple as OpenAI’s robust revenue headline suggests. One trade publication put it bluntly: "ChatGPT’s first advertisers can’t prove their ads worked."

The big picture is more complicated though. Yes, click-through rates are low and reporting tools have had challenges. But Criteo — the first ad-tech partner integrated with ChatGPT on the pilot — says that LLM-referred users convert at roughly 1.5 times the rate of other referral channels.

Why? Because it looks like ChatGPT’s ads are a brand awareness channel, not a performance marketing one… at least for now.

This episode of the podcast serves as the paid-media companion to Episode 489’s "The Long Game." The shortcut trap that Tim described in the last episode — where every new gatekeeper offers cheap access early, then raises the toll — is coming for AI.

The question for you isn’t whether you should advertise on AI platforms. Instead, it’s what are you you’re building while the rates are still relatively low… and whether your brand has organic signal worth amplifying in the first place.

This episode of the podcast delivers a three-question framework to help you make the right decision around ChatGPT’s ads. Tim also explains why OpenAI almost certainly will have to change how their ad model works — and why that might make now potentially the cheapest moment to learn how this channel will work for your business.

Key Insights for Marketing and Business Leaders Navigating AI Advertising
In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

• Self-serve access changes the conversation. ChatGPT ads launched with a $200,000 minimum spend — an enterprise brand decision by design. With self-serve confirmed for April (Search Engine Land, CNBC), this moves from a Fortune 500 budget question to a decision every marketing leader will face. Here’s what to know before that question lands in your next meeting.
• The performance reality is mixed. Early data shows low click-through rates but strikingly higher conversion rates for users who do click. Criteo, the first ad-tech partner in the ChatGPT pilot, reports LLM-referred users convert at roughly 1.5x the rate of other channels. This is a brand awareness channel, not direct response. Know which one you need before you commit.
• OpenAI has to change the model. That’s good news for early testers. ChatGPT’s $100 million in annualized ad revenue is impressive. It’s also 4% of 1% of Google’s annual search ad revenues. For OpenAI to reach the scale their investors need, they have to grow that number more than 2,500 times. The current format — ads shown to fewer than 20% of users, and even then only at the bottom of the page — is almost certainly not the final version. Which means right now may be the cheapest moment to learn how this channel works.
• Three questions before you commit a dollar. What does the AI actually know about your brand right now? Are you building something that persists after the campaign ends, or just renting visibility that falls to zero when you stop spending? And would the investment still matter if the platform changed its algorithm tomorrow? Those three questions are where your decision lives.
• AI advertising that compounds looks different from AI advertising that doesn’t. Campaigns that drive email capture, loyalty program enrollment, app downloads, or other forms of first-party data collection build assets that last long after your ad spend stops. That’s equity. Traffic to a website that returns to zero when the campaign ends is rent. Rent isn’t wrong; sometimes it’s necessary. But knowing which one you’re buying is mandatory.
• The long game applies in paid media too. The brands that will win aren’t the ones who wait. They also aren’t the ones who expected direct-response ROI from a brand awareness channel. They’re the ones who tested while it was cheap, drove direct relationships, and built first-party data assets that drive returns, again and again.

Whether you’re a CMO deciding how to allocate a test budget, a marketing manager preparing for the question from your CEO, or a small business owner trying to understand what’s happening in AI advertising, this episode of the show gives you the framework to answer the right questions before you commit.

The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

• OpenAI ads pilot tops $100 million in annualized revenue in under 2 months – CNBC
• ChatGPT hits $100 million in ad revenue and is opening self-serve access in April – Search Engine Land
• Criteo Joins OpenAI Advertising Pilot in ChatGPT – Criteo
• ‘Still finding its feet’: Underwhelming early returns for ChatGPT Ads | Campaign US
• Advertising – Worldwide | Statista Market Forecast
• AI search ad spending will climb with consumer adoption
• US Digital Advertising Statistics & Market Data 2026
• OpenAI CEO and CFO Diverge on IPO Timing — The Information
• The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489)
• The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488)
• Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Digital Reset Episode 487)
• The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486)
• Best of the Show: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing
• The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Digital Reset Episode 484)
• What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Digital Reset Episode 481)

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.

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

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Transcript: The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget

Welcome back to the show. Last week I laid out the shortcut trap, the pattern that every new gatekeeper follows, where early access looks cheap, the shortcut looks smart, and by the time the toll arrives, too many brands have built too much of their strategy depending on the thing that’s about to change the terms on them.

In particular, I focused on how the shortcut trap applies when you’re working to show up in AI answer engines. This week I want to talk about the paid media version of that story because that’s where the tolls that the gatekeepers want you to pay show up pretty much every single time.

This isn’t some theoretical future scenario. OpenAI has had ads live on ChatGPT for roughly 600 advertisers since February. And those ads were not cheap. OpenAI required a $200,000 minimum spend and roughly a $60 CPM, about three times what you’d pay on Meta. Hell, that’s roughly comparable to what you’d pay for primetime NFL inventory. And it’s worked out well… at least for OpenAI. CNBC confirmed last week that this pilot they’ve been running has already crossed $100 million in annualized revenue in under two months.

Search Engine Land is reporting that self-serve access and the elimination of the $200,000 minimum spend requirement is coming in April. I’m putting air quotes on that because we don’t have a firm date yet. But basically they should be live this month.

And of course, Google has had ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews, at least in English, in roughly a dozen countries for some time.

I’m going to limit today’s conversation to ChatGPT only. Google is Google after all. And we’ll get a much clearer picture of their situation in a few weeks at their upcoming earnings call.

The fact remains that up until now, ads on ChatGPT was an enterprise level brand decision. With the introduction of self-serve, though, it’s about to become a decision every marketing leader is going to be asked about, doesn’t matter the size of your company.

So what’s going on with ChatGPT’s ads? How are they doing?

Well, the early performance data is mixed. One trade publication’s headline was "ChatGPT’s first advertisers can’t prove their ads worked." Woof. I want to be fair. That doesn’t mean that that takes them off the table. But it is a pretty fair if harsh description of where they stand today.

The channel isn’t proven yet. That’s a fact.

What I intend to do though, is give you a framework to decide whether ChatGPT ads belong in your budget — and what you should be doing, whether you use them or not.

This is episode 490 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in.

Okay, so let’s get some big questions out of the way. As I mentioned before the break, OpenAI says they’re launching self-serve ads this month. They’re also saying that the $200,000 entry fee is going away. So for most businesses, that’s not really something you need to worry about. You don’t need to worry about those.

You don’t have $200,000 to spend. Don’t worry about it. You worried when it’ll be ready? Well, they’re coming within weeks. In short, you’ll be able to test ChatGPT ads if you choose, and I promise the rest of this episode will help you answer the question of whether or not you should choose to do so.

Before I do that though, let’s be clear about what’s happening here. I’m not going to spend too much time on setting up what the ads are and how they work because frankly, OpenAI could change the way this works at any time. In fact, as I’ll argue in a bit, they’re almost certainly going to have to change.

At any rate, the way OpenAI is handling ads on ChatGPT right now is to show them only at the bottom of ChatGPT answers. They’re clearly labeled as ads. They’re only shown to users in ChatGPT’s free and "Go" tiers. In other words, customers in the Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers won’t see the ads.

While that might sound like a lot of people in practice, something like 85% of ChatGPT’s users fall into the two tiers that are eligible for ads. At the same time, according to CNBC, this is a quote, "less than 20% are shown [ads] on a daily basis."

It’s not clear to me if that’s 20% of all users or only 20% of the 85% who could in theory see them. Since that’s still 17%, I’m not gonna consider that a material difference. And according to OpenAI, its "ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you."

As I also mentioned before the break, that early performance data on the ads is mixed, which I’d think you’d expect, given that at best, only about 17% to 20% of their total audience sees these ads regularly. I’ll link to the various reports in the show notes.

The early data suggests though, that they’re seeing very low click-through rates, strikingly higher conversion rates, and some real reporting challenges in the early days. We can ignore the reporting challenges. They’ll fix that.

Criteo said that users referred from LLM platforms like ChatGPT convert at approximately one and a half times the rate of other referral channels. That’s actually pretty good.

And if we think about the low click-through rates and the high conversion rates, those make some sense.

Low click-through rates seem pretty likely given that the ads are down at the bottom of the page. And given that most conversations with large language models like ChatGPT are about getting answers, why would anyone need to click an ad once they got their answer? Assuming they ever scroll down far enough to see them.

Again on the conversion rate side, that also follows logically that it would be higher than you might expect. Because the ads shown really function more as a brand awareness tool than a direct response tool. Again, the user got an answer and the ad shows a product, service, or brand that’s related to their answer.

I suspect, and I want to be fair, I have no evidence for this other than my intuition and experience, that the ads getting actioned accompany responses containing a brand.

Well, what makes me think this? So we have seen over the last couple of years a number of clients getting increased branded search traffic because AIs are citing them in their answers.

We know that branded search converts at a much higher rate than unbranded search. And I think something similar is happening here. If you’re using these ads, your brand is showing up in the answer, it’s showing up in the ad, or it’s showing up in both.

That’s driving increased awareness of your brand and attracting people who are interested in your offering. The folks seeing those ads become more likely to buy because of the trust signals in the answer and the ad together.

And because they’ve got some affinity for your brand from seeing this, those folks likely convert at a higher rate. They’re like branded searchers. Probably.

Obviously I’d love to see more data, but my gut and my experience in digital marketing make me feel slightly confident about this. I want to be fair, this is not guaranteed. I’d peg my confidence level at maybe 60% to 70%. But it feels kind of likely that that’s what’s happening here.

In either case, I think these ads today are much more of an awareness play than a performance marketing play. Some of the data does seem to support that, and again, you’ll see those in the show notes.

Another point that you want to consider as you think about this tool, this platform, is that you don’t want to get too excited or pulled in by OpenAI’s reported hundred million dollars in revenue.

Just because they’re making money is no guarantee that you will make money.

We are in very early days of these tools and there’s very little data to go on at the moment, so you’re going to want to proceed with caution.

I’m going to give you a framework to think about how you can proceed, but I do want to touch on one point before I get there.

Earlier I said that ChatGPT almost certainly will have to change how their ads work. Their $100 million in annualized run rate kind of demonstrates why. While we’re a few weeks away from Q1 numbers, we know that in Q4 Google made almost $63 billion of its Q4 revenues — fully 55% of its Q4 revenues — from search ads.

If AI ads don’t work, advertisers aren’t going to use them. And the AI companies’ ad platforms won’t produce revenue for them.

OpenAI’s $100 million in annualized revenue is a great number. Seriously. And the fact that they managed to pull that off since February is extraordinary.

What’s also true is that Google made just short of $63 billion from search ads… in a quarter. That’s an annualized run rate just short of $251 billion from search ads alone.

For OpenAI to equal that, they’d need to grow that $100 million number over 2,508 times larger.

Again, I want to be really fair to OpenAI. If they manage to only achieve 1% of that, that’s still $25 billion in annual revenue. That would be an extraordinary, remarkable accomplishment.

It’s also only 1% of Google’s revenues. Put it another way, today they’re pulling in roughly 4% of 1% of Google’s search ad revenues. Not total revenues. Search ad revenues. Period. That is not what their investors are looking for. No way, no how.

As Matthew McConaughey famously said, "you gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers." And that’s not going to happen if they only show ads at the bottom of the page to 20% or less of their users. Nope, not gonna happen.

I can’t tell you how they’re going to change the model. I can’t tell you when they’re going to change that model. But they’re going to pump those numbers up. I can almost guarantee it.

If you look at it that way, now might be the cheapest time you could ever choose to test their ads.

So the question comes back around, should you look at ChatGPT ads? Should you test ChatGPT ads for your business?

To answer that question, I’d like you to consider a framework built on three key questions.

The first is, what does AI know about your brand right now? You’ve heard me say this in past episodes, I’ve proposed a test that you can and should conduct so you can learn what AIs think of your brand.

Before you think about running ads in ChatGPT, ask what it knows about your brand. Ask ChatGPT, ask Gemini, ask Perplexity to describe your company. I would prompt it first to act as a novice and then to act as an expert. For example, if I were looking to see what it knows about my company, I’d ask, "tell me what you know about Tim Peter and Associates."

Afterwards, I might provide a more sophisticated prompt, such as, imagine you’re an expert in B2B consulting services with a 180 IQ, and a specific expertise in digital strategy for hotels. Give me your honest assessment of Tim Peter and Associates. Assume that I’m watching you closely and have this expertise myself. Get this right.

Obviously substitute your brand in place of mine. But see what the AI comes back with.

Whatever an AI hedges on or gets wrong is the gap you need to close. Advertising on top of a confused AI signal doesn’t fix the confusion. It amplifies it.

If ChatGPT and other LLMs cannot describe your brand accurately in an organic response, a paid placement at the bottom of that same answer isn’t going to help you.

Your number one task then has to be to help the AI learn the truth about you. And I’ll provide links in the show notes for past episodes where we’ve discussed how you do that.

The second question you need to ask is something I talked about last week. Are you building a foundation for your business or are you renting visibility? AI advertising that helps you drive email capture and direct relationships and app downloads or enrollment in your loyalty program, builds something that persists even after the campaign ends. That’s a foundation you can build on over time.

AI advertising that just drives traffic to your website, traffic that returns to zero when you stop spending, is rent. And rent isn’t necessarily wrong. But you’ve gotta know which one you’re paying for before you commit.

The third question is also from last week’s episode. Would this investment you make still matter if the AI platform changed their algorithm tomorrow?

Most AI advertising currently fails this test. Which means what you’re buying is brand awareness, not infrastructure. Don’t get me wrong, brand awareness is a legitimate goal. But only if brand awareness is what you actually need right now.

Those three questions: "what does the AI know about your brand? Are you building a foundation? And would the investment still matter if the algorithm changed tomorrow?" are where I’d start.

AI ads that help you drive direct relationships are worthwhile. Again, email list signups, first-party data collection, loyalty program enrollment, app downloads. The ad spend might be transient, but the relationship it creates when done well is permanent. That’s always something worth investing in.

This is the same lesson that independent hotels that have survived in the era of OTAs have learned. Hoteliers who used early OTA access to build direct booking programs and build up their CRM had options when costs went up.

The ones who only used OTAs to fill rooms were hostage to the commission structure.

You know that I’m a fan of playing the long game. I think there’s a long game to be played here too.

Again, ChatGPT’s revenues are 4% of 1% of Google’s search ad revenues. Search ads are the biggest driver of ad spending in the world, and AI search ads are projected to grow 10 times over in the next three years. That’s tremendous upside. Not just for ChatGPT, but for you.

And as we’ve seen before, the brands and businesses that use new platforms as a distribution channel to accelerate their direct relationship building and not as a substitute for it are the ones that will win.

If you can test this channel while it’s cheap, drive email capture, drive loyalty signups, build first-party data assets that compound — you are going to be in a really, really good place no matter what happens.

The brands that won’t fare as well are the ones who either wait entirely, and then get hit with higher costs with no first mover advantage, or the ones who treat AI advertising as a performance channel substitute, expecting direct response ROIs from what is, at least today, primarily a brand awareness play. Those folks are in trouble.

Playing the long game here doesn’t mean don’t use AI ads. It means advertise in a way that builds something you keep. Do that right, and you won’t find yourself caught behind the gatekeeper’s gate. You won’t find yourself caught in a shortcut trap. No matter what happens with AI ads in the longer term.

If this episode gave you a clearer picture of how you should approach AI ads for your business, do me a favor. Send it to a colleague who’s getting asked whether it’s time to consider AI ads. It might save them from going down the wrong path.

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

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

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

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I’ve got a big secret for you today: Brands winning in AI didn’t pivot to an AI-first strategy six months ago. Almost universally, they’ve been building direct customer relationships, earning independent reviews, and publishing content credible enough to be cited, usually for years.

City of Hope probably didn’t start with a GEO strategy or an AI optimization consultant. But they still appear in 97% of AI queries for their category. Why? Because they made decisions 10, 20, and 30 years ago that continue to pay off today.

AI inclusion, it turns out, is an inheritance. It’s something you build over time — and if you’ve been building the right things, the AI will find you.

That raises two obvious questions:

1. If the framework is this well understood — build credible content, earn independent reviews, make your brand signal clear — why are 82% of companies still stuck in the AI value gap? Why don’t they just do it?
2. What do you do if you don’t have years to get better at this?

We’re going to look at the second question in detail in next week’s episode. Today, we’re diving deep into the first one.

And the answer to that first question is that companies often fall into a “shortcut trap.” Every new gatekeeper’s entry into the market comes with a period where taking the shortcut looks like the smart play.

The challenge for many businesses is that the shortcut isn’t a scam — it works… at least for a while. And that’s what makes it dangerous. By the time its true costs becomes visible, too many businesses have built far too much of their strategy around it. They own visibility but not the customer relationship.

This episode traces 15 years of how that pattern has repeated across a variety of platform shifts — Google, social, OTAs, and now AI. It also outlines two clear tests you can use to separate a genuine foundation investment from a shortcut dressing up as strategy.

If you’re the one who has to explain your AI strategy at your next budget meeting, this episode highlights the pattern and the language you need to make the case.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders to Close the Gap
In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

• Why AI inclusion is an inheritance, not an acquisition. City of Hope shows up in over 90% of AI queries for their category not because of any optimization strategy, but because of its commitment to peer-reviewed research, earned media, and reputation among its patients (i.e., customers). The AIs we take for grated were trained on that. And that’s why City of Hope wins. Too often, "GEO strategy" is sold as something you just go out and acquire this quarter. By thinking of AI inclusion as something inherited from prior — and, importantly, future — investment in your brand, that completely changes the budget conversation.
• The gatekeeper’s window — and why it’s finite. Every platform shift includes a two to five-year window where the new gatekeeper is still building its position and hasn’t yet started collecting the highest tolls it can. The companies that use those windows to build email lists, loyalty programs, revenue and direct customer relationships win. The AI window is open right now. It will not stay open forever.
• The same game, different rules at the edges. What’s new: AI weighs corroboration quality over link quantity, making it harder to game with volume and technical tricks. What hasn’t changed: expert-authored content, independent validation, trusted-platform reviews, and a strong direct brand both drove organic authority in the past and continue to drive AI inclusion today. If a GEO tactic would hurt your search performance, it probably won’t help your AI visibility either.
• The shortcut trap — and why smart businesses fall into it. The shortcut is always most attractive exactly at the moment when a new platform is getting established and the upside is visible… but the cost isn’t yet. It’s not a scam. It absolutely works — at least temporarily. You end up owning visibility but not the relationship. When the platform changes the rules, you own nothing.
• Two tests for your AI investment. First: would this investment matter if AI changed tomorrow? Expert-authored content, review velocity programs, and first-party data infrastructure continue to improve your business regardless of which model is dominant in 18 months. If an investment only makes sense for how ChatGPT or Gemini works in Q2 2026, that’s a warning sign. Second: do these investments compound, or do they require constant changes? Sure, shortcuts work. Foundations compound. A review earned today is in the training data for the next model update.
• The budget argument — in plain terms. Not "don’t invest in AI," but "invest in AI the way businesses that survive every platform shift invest: in things that improve the business and compound across every platform." Expert-authored content that earns citations, review velocity programs, first-party data infrastructure — yes. Anyone selling guaranteed placement in AI outputs — test small, make sure you own the result before you scale.

Whether you’re in hospitality, retail, or B2B — and especially if you’re the person who has to answer "what’s our AI strategy?" while watching the platform landscape shift under your feet — this episode gives you 15 years of pattern recognition to work with.

The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

• The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488)
• Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Digital Reset Episode 487)
• The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486)
• The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Episode 485)

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.

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

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Transcript: The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI

Welcome back to the show. The brands winning in AI right now didn’t pivot to an AI first strategy six months ago. Almost universally, they’ve been building direct customer relationships, earning independent reviews, and publishing content credible enough to be cited for years.

The AI didn’t teach them anything new. It just made visible who has done the work and who has been renting their results from the nearest gatekeeper. I’ve been watching this pattern play out for 15 years through Google algorithm updates, organic reach collapse on social media like Facebook and LinkedIn, increased commissions and take rates from intermediaries like online travel agencies and Amazon, and now the first wave of AI driven discovery.

Each time the businesses that navigated the shift with the least damage had the same things in common: a direct relationship with their customers, an earned reputation that didn’t depend on any single platform, and data that they owned, literally owned.

Here’s the thing. That framework isn’t complicated. Build credible content. Collect independent reviews. Earn the right to show up in your customer’s inbox. Make your brand signal clear.

Most people listening to this show already know that. The question this episode answers is, if the formula is this well understood, why are 82% of companies still stuck in the AI value gap? Why don’t they just do this?

The answer has everything to do with a trap that every new gatekeeper sets and that smart, experienced marketing leaders fall into anyway. I’ve watched it happen through four different platform shifts. I’d like to make sure it doesn’t happen to you on this one.

This is episode 489 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in.

A couple of weeks ago, you heard me talk about City of Hope and the fact that they show up in 97% of AI queries for their specific category. Well, City of Hope did not have a GEO strategy. They didn’t hire an AI optimization consultant.

They showed up in 97% of AI queries for their category because of decisions they made 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago or more. That should tell us something about what AI actually rewards. AI inclusion is an inheritance. It’s not an acquisition.

City of Hope inherited their position from years of peer reviewed research, independent media, and an earned reputation with their patients. The AI was trained on all of that.

Most GEO strategy, quote unquote, is sold as something you can acquire this quarter. But if AI inclusion is primarily inherited from prior fundamentals, that changes and should change your budget discussion, your budget conversation.

AIs see a weak signal, a contradictory signal, or no signal, and it loses confidence in your brand. When an AI sees a strong signal, a clear signal, a coherent signal, that’s when you win. The brands who are showing up consistently today are showing up because they’ve built brands worth people asking for by name. This is what I mean when I say the brand is the prompt.

But also brands that are worth answering by name, that the AI can confidently say, "As a concierge, I know the answer to your question. I know who you should be talking to."

Winning in the long run isn’t just about what you do this quarter. It’s what you do for a long time. If you go to your AI of choice — it doesn’t matter if it’s Google Gemini, it doesn’t matter if it’s ChatGPT, it doesn’t matter if it’s Perplexity, it doesn’t matter if it’s Claude — go to the AI you like the most and ask it to describe your brand.

Everything it gets right is a sign that you have a strong signal. Everything that it gets wrong or hedges on or isn’t quite clear on, that’s where you have a gap. And that’s your roadmap. You don’t need a vendor to do an audit. The AI itself is going to tell you this is what it knows to be true about you. That’s really, really key.

Now the most common gap is when you say one thing about your brand and your customers are saying something else about your brand. It sees a difference between your statements and your customer’s reviews. That’s a huge contradiction, and that means the AI will lose confidence in you. It cannot confidently recommend you to a potential customer.

Note that this isn’t just about the discussions happening on platforms that the AI trusts. It’s that you have never done the work to build review velocity for your business, that you haven’t worked to gain the earned media presence that gives the AI some corroborating evidence beyond just what you say on your site or beyond just what it sees in reviews.

Neither of those gaps is going to get solved by a GEO vendor — immediately. Both are solved by doing the same things that improve your direct business: giving a better customer experience, gaining better reviews, and building clearer signal.

I’ve worked with businesses to reduce their dependency on big tech companies over the last 15 years — through Google updates, through the emergence of OTAs, through social reach, and now AI. And what’s interesting is how this era looks similar to what I’ve seen before.

In the book Digital Reset, I talk about a pattern that happens: a new discovery channel emerges. Something comes around and we go, "oh, this is cool, we should check this out." We get good results from it early. We test it and we see that this is really working, and usually at a pretty low cost.

Over time, the platforms with legs grow more dominant. They build a bigger base of customers and often send more customers your way, usually at a pretty low cost. That’s super attractive. So you double down on that. You dive in even further until suddenly that becomes a major source of your business.

But at that point, that puts them in a position of gatekeeping power. And as you’ve heard me say many times before, gatekeepers gonna gate. They have to. They are required to, because they owe it to their shareholders to monetize the traffic and the connection that they have with customers to grow their revenues and grow their profits and grow their shareholder value. And so what happens is the gatekeeper then raises the toll to you.

This is a vicious cycle that occurs again and again and again. We’ve seen this repeatedly with search, with social, with mobile, with OTAs. It happens consistently.

Every time there’s a new platform shift, there’s a window. It could be two years, it could be three years, it could be five years, where the new gatekeepers are still building their position and they haven’t yet started collecting the highest tolls they can.

That’s huge because marketing leaders look at that and say, this is a great opportunity for our business. And that’s good. That actually is a good idea.

We saw this, I’ll give you a real world example, with independent hotels and hotel brands. They had opportunities to build direct booking capabilities and direct booking connections with customers before OTAs became kind of non-negotiable. First before September of 2001. Then in the later 2000s.

The ones that took advantage of those windows built direct websites. They built email lists. They built loyalty programs — either recognition programs or reward programs — to connect directly with customers and gain data. And they built direct revenue.

The ones that didn’t do those things are still paying 20% commissions as table stakes for 35, 40, 50% of their business. That’s not a great place to be. The boutique hotels that appear in ChatGPT answers today for questions like "the best independent hotel in Charleston," or "the best independent hotel in Orlando," are there because of the reviews they’ve been gaining for the last 10 years, for the content that they’ve been publishing for the last eight to 10 years, for press coverage that they earned five or six or seven years ago, and every year in between. They’re not there because of some AI strategy. They inherited that position because they had an overarching brand strategy and an overarching strategy of how to connect with their customers directly every single time.

The hotels that went all in on OTA distribution, the retailers that outsourced their audience to Facebook, the publishers who handed their traffic to Google — each of those folks made, I want to be fair, a rational decision in that moment. It wasn’t a mistake in the small terms. The problem was that they didn’t own anything when the platform changed the terms of the relationship.

So the question that I would ask is whether we are seeing a different game or whether it’s the same game with slightly different rules. Spoiler alert, I think it’s the same game with slightly different rules.

There are definitely new things happening here. Artificial intelligence, AI answer engines, and AI assistants and AI agents as they arrive, are weighing things like corroboration quality — is your story being backed up in other places — more than just "did you get a bunch of links." It’s much harder to game that with volume or technical tricks.

In that sense, AI is doing what search has always supposed to be doing before they had to spend so much time fighting black hat SEO types and people trying to game the system. Candidly, one reason why I’m so bullish on Google is that they know what getting gamed looks like. I’ve argued that many of the AI answer engines right now are doing a speed run through Google’s search spam learnings, and that they’re going to have to make changes that Google’s been making for years.

What hasn’t changed is expert authored content. You’re familiar with EEAT probably, from Google — Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust. Companies and businesses that have built that expertise and have built that authority and have gained that experience and have gained that trust are the ones doing well.

What also hasn’t changed is independent validation and trusted platform reviews and a strong, well-regarded direct brand that follows from those. Those drove organic authority 10 years ago, and they’re driving AI inclusion today.

Maybe you’ve heard me say before that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. That’s what we’re still seeing even with artificial intelligence.

One thing to keep in mind here is a "do no harm" principle, a "first, do no harm" principle. If a GEO tactic is going to hurt your search performance, it’s probably not going to work for artificial intelligence either — and certainly not in the long term. The tactics that work for both are the same: quality content, earned external references, active review management.

The brands that win in AI today are the ones that have inherited that position. The question you should be asking right now is not "how do we acquire AI visibility?" It’s "how do we build the brand that produces AI visibility as a byproduct of being a brand that AI values?"

Now, if the fundamentals are this clear and the pattern is this consistent, why are 82% of companies still stuck in the value gap? Why don’t they just do the thing?

Every new gatekeeper’s entry into the market included — and includes — a period where taking the shortcut looks like the smart play. In Google’s case, it was things like link building programs even before you had to pay for them. In social media’s case, it was building organic reach and building your follower count. In OTAs, it was things like low cost early commissions. And with AI it’s things like GEO vendors and AI content farms and churning out high volumes of low quality, low cost content so that you show up.

But those all stop working at a certain point. They realize people are spamming this. So Google shuts that down. The social media channels say we need to actually earn money off of these folks, so we’re going to pull back the algorithm and change what your organic reach is. The OTAs are saying, we’re contributing a lot of business to your hotel, so we need to raise commission rates.

What makes you think that the AIs are going to do anything different? We don’t know exactly when that will occur, but I’m really confident it’s coming because we’ve seen this happen again and again and again.

Now, I want to be very fair to people who have gone down this path before and chosen that path. It’s not a scam. It’s a trap.

It’s not a scam because it works — at least temporarily. That’s what makes it so dangerous. A scam would be easier to resist. You’re savvy enough — the people who’ve done this are savvy enough — to know that if you’re not getting value out of something, you would never put your efforts there, you would never put your money there.

So the people who have taken these approaches are not fools. What they are doing is saying, "Hey, this is producing results for me. I should double down on this."

That’s what makes it dangerous — the fact that it actually does work. The challenge is that you end up owning visibility, but not the relationship with the customer.

The shortcut is always attractive exactly at the moment when you need it the most, because they’re helping you reach customers you haven’t reached before, usually at a relatively low cost. All that you see at that point is the upside. By the time the cost becomes visible, too many people find themselves in a position where they’ve built far too much of their strategy depending upon that thing. That’s not a great place to be.

Marketing leaders need to think in terms of: when is this a genuine investment in our foundations, and when is this a shortcut dressed up as a strategy?

I would think there are a couple of ways you would test this.

The first is to ask whether this investment would matter if AI changed tomorrow. If we look at things like expert authored content or review velocity programs or first party data infrastructure or earned media from credible sources, those are going to improve your business regardless of which AI model is dominant six months from now, 12 months from now, 18 months from now. If the investment only works because of how ChatGPT works in Q2 of 2026, that’s probably a warning sign.

The other test is: does this investment compound its value over time, or does it require a reset every couple of months?

Shortcuts work. Foundations compound. A review earned today is in the training data for the next model update. Content that gets cited once tends to get cited again. First party data gets more valuable as you collect more of it from your customers.

If an investment’s value has to be reinvested every time the platform updates, that’s a shortcut. If it compounds regardless of the platform updates, then you’re building a foundation for success long term.

When you walk into your monthly review or your quarterly review and you’re making the case for the budget you need going forward, you should not be thinking in terms of "we shouldn’t invest in AI." That’s not what I’m saying here.

You should be saying: we should invest in AI the way businesses that survive every platform shift invest. We should be investing in the things that improve our business and compound across every platform, not only in things that work for this particular algorithm or this particular artificial intelligence. One of those has a long-term opportunity for you. One of those means you’re going to keep throwing money after money after money every time the algorithm changes.

When we think about budget categories: expert authored content that earns citations — a hundred percent. Review velocity programs — a hundred percent. First-party data infrastructure — a hundred percent. If we’re talking about people selling you, "you’re going to appear in the AI top every single time" — you might want to take a really close look at that. You might want to start small and test, because maybe they do know something. But you want to make sure you own the result, not just the visibility, before you double down there, before you try to scale this up.

The businesses that I have watched navigate every platform shift without getting captured have all had one thing in common. It’s not that they saw the future first. It’s not that they were smarter than everybody else. It’s just that they never fully gave up the direct relationship with the customer.

They built a long lasting brand platform, a long lasting customer relationship that survived and thrived every time the platforms shifted. They didn’t chase any short term wins at the expense of the long term opportunity.

I have had this exact conversation through the Google updates, through the collapse of reach on social media, with hotels and OTA commissions, and now with AI. Some of this isn’t that I’m predicting the future. I’ve seen this and seen folks get burned by it plenty in the past, including me from time to time.

This is hard won experience. You eventually learn, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t chase the ‘ooh, shiny object,’ but we should build something of lasting value." The folks I’ve worked with who’ve acted on these conversations and learned from them and applied them — and the folks who aren’t even clients who figured it out on their own — they’re the ones who are doing great and they’re the ones who have options to continue to improve over the long run.

This is not some sophisticated, brand new AI strategy. It’s a 15 year pattern that keeps working no matter who the gatekeeper is next. And ultimately, that’s the place where you want to be.

If this episode helped you think more clearly about where to put your budget this year, or gave you language for the conversation you’re about to have with your CMO or CFO, do me a favor — send this to a colleague who’s wrestling with the same question. That’s how these conversations get into the rooms where the decisions are made.

You can find the show notes for this episode, including the research we discussed and the full archive of past episodes at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on building a brand for the next platform, whatever it turns out to be, my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," offers the full framework. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

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

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