Tim Peter & Associates

AI Won’t Save a Bad Strategy No Matter How Good it Gets (Digital Reset Foundations Episode 510)

Tim Peter — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

Um, what?

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why faster, cheaper, and easier content creation is not the same as customer acquisition
What AI can and cannot do for your business strategy
Why judgment matters more than the tools you choose
What Gil Amelio’s sinking ship metaphor teaches us about bad strategy
Which parts of marketing and customer acquisition will never change
Five signs that your business has a strategy gap instead of an AI problem
Four questions that help you find and close that strategy gap
When to ask how AI can help you execute faster, smarter, or better

Key Data Points

Three fundamentals remain constant no matter how capable AI becomes: understand your audience, solve real customer problems, and build trust and relationships.
Five symptoms point to a strategy gap:
- Traffic without conversions
- Greater output without greater reach
- Marketing and sales working out of sync
- Measurement focused on clicks instead of deals
- Busy teams moving in different directions
Four questions belong at the center of your strategy: Who are we trying to gain as customers? What problem are we solving for them? Where do they go to learn, decide, and buy? Why should they choose us?
AI should enter the process after you understand where you’re going, who you’re trying to help, and how you can best help them.

Digital Reset Framework: Strategy Before Tools

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

What You Should Do Now

1. Answer the Four Questions That Actually Matter

Who are you trying to acquire as customers?
What problem are you solving for them?
Where do they go to learn, decide, and buy?
Why should they choose you?

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

2. Look for the Signs of a Strategy Gap

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

3. Put AI to Work After You Set the Direction

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

Resources Mentioned

Fundamentals Matter: AI Can’t Save You From a Bad Strategy (original episode 455 show notes and transcript)
The State of AI: Global Survey from McKinsey
Gil Amelio
The origin of the quote about underestimating customers from Quote Investigator

Related Episodes

Buy the Book: Digital Reset

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

See Tim Peter in Action

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

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

Free Downloads

Content Distribution Checklist
Visit the Digital Reset resource center for more tools and frameworks.

Subscribe to Digital Reset

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

Contact information for the podcast: 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: 13:09

Transcript: AI Got Better. It Still Won’t Save a Bad Strategy.

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

I’d argue that will remain true effectively forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Um, what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You still need to solve real customer problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hate that quote for two reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the fourth is, why should they choose us?

Those are the questions that actually matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t wait to see what you do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google’s Most Valuable Search Is Your Brand Name (Digital Reset Episode 509)

Tim Peter — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:00:16 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why YouTube creator content makes customers 13x more likely to search for a brand and 5x more likely to buy
What the J.Crew and WeRoad TikTok results tell us about discovery, branded search, and purchase intent
Why it matters more what customers search for than where they search
What Google’s Attributed Branded Searches metric tells us about the value of brand demand
Why brand mentions on YouTube, Reddit, and across the web correlate with visibility in AI answers
Why customer experience sits at the center of what people and AI recommend
Three things you can do right now to improve what AI knows about your business
Why the future of SEO is getting customers to ask for you in the first place

Key Data Points

People who viewed YouTube creator content about a brand were 13x more likely to conduct a branded search and 5x more likely to purchase.
J.Crew got roughly a 6% lift in brand preference and search traffic and a 13% increase in purchases from TikTok ads, driving over $2 million in incremental revenue.
WeRoad saw a 22% increase in branded search and a 31% increase in booking intent from its TikTok campaigns.
95% of customers want to verify what they’ve heard about a brand before making a purchase.
Many of Tim’s clients are seeing branded search activity 20% to 35% higher over the last year, with stronger revenue following those searches.
Ahrefs found that more brand mentions across the web correlate with greater visibility across every AI platform it studied.

Digital Reset Framework: Prompt Brand Equity

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

What You Should Do Now

1. Find Out What AI Already Knows About You

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

2. Think About Where Your Content Lives

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

3. Give Customers an Experience Worth Recommending

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

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

Buy the Book: Digital Reset

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

See Tim Peter in Action

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

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

Free Downloads

Content Distribution Checklist
Visit the Digital Reset resource center for more tools and frameworks.

Subscribe to Digital Reset

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

Contact information for the podcast: 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: 13:03

Transcript: Google’s Most Valuable Search Is Your Brand Name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future of SEO isn’t about people finding you. It’s about getting them to ask for you in the first place. Social media mentions, those drive brand searches. AI recommendations, those drive brand searches. Content and experiences your customers tell their friends and family and fans and followers about? Yeah, those
lead to brand searches too. In short, Google’s most valuable search term… is your brand name, every time.

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

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

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

Google Just Built an AI Hotel Booking Engine. Independent Hotels Weren’t Invited. (Digital Reset Episode 508)

Tim Peter — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:39:56 +0000

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why Google invited zero independent hotels to its AI Mode hotel booking launch — and why the math makes their decision completely rational
The inventory calculation: how 10 partnerships gave Google access to essentially 100% of the bookable hotel inventory it needs
The commission reality: independent hotels routed through OTAs pay 15–25% per booking, and Google’s launch doesn’t change that
The second problem hidden inside the first: why Google may not show what it can’t sell — and what their own UCP FAQ does and doesn’t say about ranking
The double gatekeeper squeeze: how OTAs and Google are now stacked on top of each other in the distribution chain
Why MCP and UCP may not save independent hotels — at least not yet — and what to watch for
This isn’t just a hotel problem: if you’re in any industry with established gatekeepers, Google just showed you which route they prefer
What to do about it: the connectivity conversation, the brand conversation, and why both matter

The Inventory Math

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

Marriott: approximately 1.75 million rooms
Hilton: approximately 1.3 million rooms
IHG and Wyndham: approximately 1 million rooms each
Booking.com and Expedia: many millions of listings across hotel and alternative accommodations

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

The UCP FAQ Gap Worth Knowing

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

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

That gap is worth paying attention to.

The Pattern Beyond Hotels

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

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

What to Do About It

For independent hotels:

Talk to your technology partners — your PMS, CRS, and booking engine providers — about their plans for MCP and UCP connectivity
Engage your rep firms and industry associations (HSMAI, HEDNA, AHLA) to advocate for a seat at the table as Big Tech players make inventory sourcing decisions

For every business:

Identify who is speaking for independent businesses in your industry
Understand which technology partners should have connectivity with AI platforms on your behalf
Remember: connectivity gives you a chance to be seen. Brand gets you business.

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

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

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.

See Tim Peter in Action

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

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.

Subscribe to Digital Reset

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: 16:18

Transcript: Google Just Built a Hotel Booking Engine. Independent Hotels Weren’t Invited. (Digital Reset Episode 508)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Google Won’t Win By Selling AI. Neither Will Anyone Else. (Digital Reset Episode 507)

Tim Peter — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:33:48 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

The “AI is the internet” analogy, with a very specific meaning: Almost nobody made money providing the plumbing that powered the internet, and the same pattern seems to be playing out with AI right now
Who’s making money and why: Anthropic’s $559M operating profit, Google’s $63B search quarter, Amazon’s doubled “Alexa for Shopping” users… and what they all have in common
Who’s not making money and why: Meta’s soft quarter despite record revenues, and OpenAI’s ad revenue forecast versus the actual forecasted size of the chatbot ad market
The "super app" moment: Why Satya Nadella’s use of that phrase on an earnings call might be the most important thing Tim heard and why it mirrors the direction he predicted Big Tech will take in May
The one significant difference between the AI era and the internet era: Why it makes the analogy an analogy rather than a perfect repeat
The "two kids in a garage" risk: The biggest threat every major AI player faces right now
Three things to do with all of this”. And how you can get started right now

Key Data Points From This Episode

Anthropic Q2 2026: Operating profit of $559M; annualized revenue run rate of $65B. But its source is tools (Claude Code and Cowork), not foundation model access
Google Search Q2 2026: Revenue over $63 billion for the quarter
Amazon: Alexa for Shopping active users "close to doubling"; interactions up over 5x year-over-year
Meta AI: 60% increase in daily interactions, but lowest profits in over a year despite outstanding revenues… all due to AI CapEx spending
OpenAI’s optimistic ad revenue forecast: $100M ARR (March 2026), with $2.4B projected for 2026 and $100B projected by 2030, despite eMarketer’s projection that the entire US chatbot ad market will end up under $1B this year
Combined Big Tech AI capex 2026: Approximately $725 billion
OpenAI capex through 2030: Approximately $750 billion, 25% more than estimated earlier this year
Meta Q2 capex: Over $31 billion; full-year guidance $130 to $145 billion
Ben Thompson on Meta: "Expenses increased 55% while revenue increased 28%, and a lot of the company’s CapEx hasn’t started depreciating yet. I came away from the call a bit alarmed."

The Three Takeaways

AI is a tool, not the end game.

You almost certainly don’t need access to foundation models to create better products, services, and experiences for your customers right now. Core to your success is still providing value to your customers at a profit. As Mark Schaefer says: the most human company wins.

Big Tech wants to own the front door between you and your customers.

Mark Zuckerberg described agents working 24/7 on your behalf. Satya Nadella called Copilot’s TAM structurally larger than Office. Google showed its everything-app ambitions at I/O in May. They are not being subtle. Build your direct customer relationships, including email, SMS, and direct navigation, before gatekeepers put new tolls in place… or raise existing ones even higher.

Any of these players could win or lose.

AT&T predicted the future in 1993. They had cool commercials. They had an amazing tagline. And then… they didn’t deliver. Google has scale advantages. But AT&T had advantages too. Make sure your brand is the one customers ask for by name, just in case the company you’re renting land from ends up as an also-ran.

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

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.

See Tim Peter in Action

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

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.

Subscribe to Digital Reset

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: 22:20

Transcript: Google Won’t Win By Selling AI. Neither Will Anyone Else. (Digital Reset Episode 507)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

Your Customer Already Made Up Their Mind Before They Got to Your Website (Digital Reset Episode 506)

Tim Peter — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:48:35 +0000

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

The eMarketer AI usage ladder.. Six modes of AI adoption, what they reveal about your customers, and why 83% of people still aren’t using AI for shopping
Why AI-referred traffic engages more but converts less. Also see what that pattern actually means for your funnel (it’s not always what your analytics dashboards suggest)
Travel vs. retail vs. B2B. Why the same AI traffic behaves differently depends on whether the purchase is high-consideration or less so
The verification loop. Why customers check even when they trust the answer and why that level of trust doesn’t predict their verification behavior
The Amazon and eBay origin story. Reviews built e-commerce; here’s why history is repeating with AI
You’re not building on borrowed land once. You’re doing it twice. Why building on borrowed land twice makes gatekeepers even more powerful
Four specific actions to own the verification experience. Here’s how you can start fixing this right now

The Verification Gap in Numbers

Only 5% of consumers move directly from an AI answer to purchase (Yext)
62% immediately search Google after an AI recommendation (Yext)
58% visit the business website directly after an AI recommendation (Yext)
The 62% vs. 63% verification rates for high-trust vs. neutral-trust AI users. Trust level doesn’t predict whether someone verifies. It only predicts how.
AI-referred travel visitors convert 28% less often than other visitors while spending significantly more time on site (Adobe Q3 2026)
Trust in AI search answers has fallen from 82% to 54% in one year (Fractl)
51% of people don’t ever use AI (Pew Research, June 2026)
Review signals occupy five of the top six purchase influencers when customers verify (Yext)

The Four-Step Verification Audit

Step 1: Assess what AI says about your brand
Ask the questions in an incognito tab, without being logged in, in a different browser, and ideally through a VPN. You want to see what AI knows about your brand without it tailoring the response to you. Is it accurate? Is it up to date? Does it build confidence in your offerings?

Step 2: Audit the pages verifying customers actually land on
Not your homepage. The specific pages someone reaches after an AI recommendation. Do your room pages, product pages, or service pages answer "is this place actually as good as I heard?" — not just "what is this place?" Those are different questions. Most pages are built to answer the second one.

Step 3: Audit your review presence
Volume matters — but so does recency, accuracy, and specificity. An AI recommendation that leads to a review profile that hasn’t been updated in six months doesn’t build trust. It increases doubt.

Step 4: Check your branded search results
Search your brand name after asking an AI about your category. Click through to wherever those tools send someone who wants to learn more. Is it your website? An OTA listing? A review aggregator? Whatever site captures that click is capturing your verification traffic. If it’s not you, that’s the gap to close first.

The Problem with Building on Borrowed Land Twice

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

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

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

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Running time: 17:49

Transcript: Your Customer Already Made Up Their Mind Before They Got to Your Website (Episode 506)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Brands AI Recommends Give Customers Something Generic Content Never Could – Digital Reset Foundations (Episode 505)

Tim Peter — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 05:07:12 +0000

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 as “content shock.” The 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.

Earlier this summer, Daniel Stanica tracked what happened to 100 once-successful blogs between 2022 and 2026. The median site lost 85% of its search traffic. Sixty-five of the hundred dropped by 50% or more. Only 21 grew. When Stanica dug into what separated the survivors from the ones that collapsed, he found four traits: firsthand experience that can’t be AI-summarized, an owned audience, a real product, and a brand name people search for by name.

That research came out just over a month ago. The episode you’re about to hear was recorded months before that existed. The market has since delivered its verdict. It straight-up confirms the argument Tim made before the evidence arrived.

This is a Digital Reset Foundations episode, revisiting Episode 492 — AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless, with a new introduction that connects the original argument with everything that’s happened since.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

AI didn’t kill content marketing. It repriced it. The cheap parts of content marketing are now worth close to nothing. The expensive parts — your proprietary data, lived experiences, and genuine expert voice — have become more valuable, not less.
"AI slop" is the uncanny valley of content. More importantly, your customers’ detection systems are already activating. People flag content as AI-generated not just when it actually is, but when human-created content fails to sound human enough.
"Collapse to uniformity" is the structural threat underneath "AI slop." Research forecasts the internet will hit 90% saturation of similar content by 2035 — roughly 10 points of uniformity per year. Your opportunity to differentiation using AI is real… and it is closing fast.
The three assets AI cannot reproduce: proprietary data, original examples, and expert voice. Being willing to be wrong publicly is often what makes you worth listening to as well.
Three questions that will tell you where your content strategy actually stands… and what to do with the answers.
The answer is not to publish less. It’s to publish more of what’s scarce and less of what’s already abundant.

The Three Assets AI Cannot Reproduce

Proprietary Data

Data that only you have about your customers, your market, and your industry is yours alone to report. No AI can generate it. It’s your story to tell… and you need to tell it if you’re going to stand apart from generic AI-produced content.

Original Examples

Real customers, real projects, real outcomes, real experiences. There’s a reason we talk about our hotel clients and the businesses we’ve worked with. No one else has those specific experiences. Those stories back up our thinking and research with real-world evidence that no one else can claim.

Expert Voice

A specific, named prediction or opinion, even one you’re willing to be wrong about. Taking the risk of being wrong is exactly what makes you worth listening to. Safe, generic best practices are abundant. Your actual informed opinion, owned publicly, is rare.

The Three-Question Content Audit

Before the next episode, run these against your own content strategy:

What is your ratio of proprietary to commodity content in the last 90 days? Are you building named assets that are yours alone, or generic outputs that any AI could produce?
When a potential customer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity about your category, what specifically about your brand shows up? Is it something only you could have said — or could it have been written by anyone?
Who on your team is your named voice? Are you amplifying their signal? Or are you burying it in a content calendar of undifferentiated output?

Key Data Points From This Episode

NBER research using Pixiv data shows generative AI is crowding out human creators
Ahrefs: 86.5% of top-ranking pages now contain some amount of AI-generated content
Nature research on model collapse and "collapse to uniformity": textual similarity across the web is projected to reach 90% saturation around 2035
At roughly 10 points of AI detection per year, 25-30% of customers will actively demand authenticity within two to three years… if they aren’t doing so already

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

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

Don’t miss Tim Peter’s 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.

See Tim Peter in Action

Watch Tim Peter break down why the brands winning in AI right now didn’t produce more content — and why the work you do in the next two to three years will determine whether you’re still visible when the window closes.

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

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: 24:18

Transcript: The Brands AI Recommends Give Customers Something Generic Content Never Could — Digital Reset Foundations (Episode 505)

The brands that AI recommends give their customers something generic content never could.

It’s critical you keep that fact in mind even as AI drives down the cost of content creation and curation. Yeah, you can use AI to put together all kinds of posts and pages and podcasts. But do any of those actually help your customers?

I’ve addressed this concept a couple of times in recent months, and the evidence keeps getting stronger. Earlier this summer, I covered research from Daniel Stanica that tracked one hundred once-successful blogs between 2022 and 2026. The results were devastating. The median site lost eighty-five percent of its search traffic. Sixty-five of the hundred dropped by fifty percent or more. Only twenty-one of those blogs grew.

When Daniel dug into what separated the 21 that survived from the seventy-nine that collapsed, he found four traits they had in common: firsthand experience that can’t just be summarized by an AI; an owned audience blogs could connect to directly; a real product; and a brand that their readers were willing to search for by name.

That research came out this year, just a couple of months ago. The episode you’re about to hear was recorded a couple of months before that research existed.

In the earlier episode, "AI Made Content Free: Here’s What Made It Priceless," I argued that AI has driven the cost of producing content to effectively zero. And that when anyone can create massive volumes of content for free, the value of your content doesn’t also fall to zero. Instead, the value shifts.

What’s become priceless isn’t just content. Instead, it’s what’s behind that content. Your own real lived experiences, your genuine relationships with your customers, your authentic, honest, expert voice, and the data that only you have about what matters to your customers in their lives every day.

Stanica’s hundred blogs showed what happens to generic content in reality. The blogs that collapsed built their businesses by churning out content that any AI could produce. They were optimizing for algorithms, not creating for people. The blogs that survived built their businesses on content only they could produce. The market told them what matters, and it’s telling you too.

Now, here’s what makes this more urgent than when I first recorded the original episode. We’re not just talking about blogs here. We’re talking about any business whose customer acquisition depends on content, which essentially is every business. Still. Content is king. It’s the first, most frequent, and sometimes the only interaction your customers will have with your brand before they buy.

The pattern in Stanica’s blog data is playing out with organic search, it’s playing out with AI recommendations, and it’s playing out in the verification behaviors that customers exhibit after they hear about your brand from an AI tool. The brands that AI recommends consistently, the ones that customers find and verify and choose, are the ones building something no one else can claim. Not more content. Not optimized content. Better content. More useful content. And most importantly, more authentic content. Content that only they can create.

That’s what we’re talking about here today. It’s one of the most important arguments I can make, and the market has now backed it up in ways I didn’t have access to when I first hit record. I think you’re gonna find it even more valuable today than it was the first time around.

I’m Tim Peter. This is Digital Reset Foundations, episode 505. 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 quote "largely do not appear in Google and ChatGPT." They also ignore "AI-generated/human-edited articles," while noting that quote, "they may be even more prevalent." Ya think?

Regardless, the market has responded about like you’d expect it to. When any input goes free, the scarce things become more valuable. In this case, the things that matter more than ever are human creativity, human connection, and human insight.

There’s a paper that got a lot of attention in the scientific community last year called "AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data." Published in the journal Nature. The researchers showed that when AI trains on data generated by AI, it gets progressively worse over time. The outputs become less accurate, less nuanced, less human. And eventually, the model collapses in on itself. An AI made of AI’s. That’s clearly a problem if you’re an AI company. It’s also a problem for your content marketing strategy if you’re relying on AI to generate all of your content. I’ll link to that research in the show notes as well.

The more immediately relevant research for you as a marketer is the follow-on work about "collapse to uniformity" and the steady increase in what researchers call "textual similarity" across the web since AI started publishing in the 2010s. 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, and I think it’s likely, we’re adding roughly 10 points of uniformity — bland, boring, blah content — every year.

And here’s what’s most interesting about that from a marketing perspective. That means the window for you to differentiate your content is not just some theoretical abstraction that might exist at some point in the future. It’s very, very real, and it is closing on you right now.

Of course, the deeper reason for all of this is that as AI-generated content reaches its saturation point — and I said saturation, not quality, those are different things — your customers begin to notice. And for a sizable chunk of your customers, they’re not going to like what they see.

Humans have always been pretty good at detecting inauthenticity. We know when people are being fake. We know when people are saying things that don’t sound right, that don’t feel right. And we can tell when content doesn’t sound human enough, when it doesn’t sound right, when it’s too corporate, too polished, too fake. And so humans increasingly are flagging content they don’t like as, and I’ll use the technical term here, "AI slop." And customers who don’t like your AI slop are not going to convert. They’re going to bounce and find somebody else.

Now, it’s also worth saying that all of this isn’t limited to content that was actually generated by a machine. It’s also happening when content doesn’t sound human enough. This is the uncanny valley problem for content marketing. Your customers want to deal with real human beings, and they want those human beings to create content that connects with them. And if AI slop, or what is sometimes referred to as "AI washing" — slapping some AI on your content to automate it — if that doesn’t connect with them, they will look for something that does.

The most relevant question you need to ask yourself is, over the next couple of years, how much of this is going to affect your customer base? Let me give you my prediction. 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.

Now, there are two things coming up over the next couple of weeks I want to make sure you know about. First, we’ve got an all-new episode next week that looks at the other side of the coin here — what happens when your customers find you via AI. They don’t just buy. They verify. And understanding what they do during that verification step, and what you need to have in place to make sure they choose you, is going to be really, really critical for your business going forward.

And then the week after that — we’re going to dive into Big Tech’s Q2 earnings. And given everything we’ve covered this summer — the gatekeeper cycle, the blogging collapse, the changing customer journey — I think you’re going to find that those earnings numbers look very, very familiar.

If this episode gave you a clearer picture of how to 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 for this episode, as well as a full archive of past episodes, at timpeter.com/podcasts.

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

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Steve Cummins: If AI Is Doing All the Work, Are You Building Skills or a House of Cards? — Part 2 of 2 (Digital Reset Episode 504)

Tim Peter — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:52:08 +0000

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

The validator problem. What is the validator problem? Why does it keep Steve up at night? And, most importantly, what does it mean for every marketing team hiring junior talent right now?
The Foundation Capital workforce study. Four roles AI will need, and why one of them is already a problem.
How do you become a good validator if you’ve never done the work yourself?
Why curiosity is the single most important hiring attribute in an AI world. And why it’s almost impossible to teach.
Hire for attitude, train for skill. What that actually means in practice.
Why hiring only from within your industry is a mistake. What Tim’s experience in hospitality proves about starting with industry focus.
The five whys and other frameworks. Build critical thinking regardless of which AI tool is dominant.
What actually changes a founder’s mind about focus, tailored by personality type
The fractional marketing model. What it is, what it isn’t, and why Steve avoids the "fractional CMO" label
One final takeaway: Pick three things and do them well

The Validator Problem

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

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

Steve’s three-part answer:

Be critical while you work, not after. Don’t let the AI run in a black box and deliver output to you. Interrogate it as it works. Claude will show you its reasoning process. Read it and learn from it.
Run your own experiments. Start doing things you don’t fully know how to do yet. You won’t be great at it. That’s the point. That’s how you learn what good looks like.
Ask the right questions as a manager. Middle managers who push their teams to explain their reasoning, "why did you set it up that way, what context did you give it, what questions did you ask?”, are the ones who will develop genuine validators rather than AI button-pressers.

The Fractional Marketing Model — And Why Steve Avoids "Fractional CMO"

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

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

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.

See Tim Peter in Action

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

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.

Subscribe to Digital Reset

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: 32:11

Transcript: Steve Cummins: If AI Is Doing All the Work, Are You Building Skills or a House of Cards? — Part 2 of 2 (Episode 504)

[TIM PETER]:
Last week, Steve Cummins and I talked about where the owned channel argument breaks down, how a marketing team of one actually uses AI day-to-day, and why you might have to start on rented land, but also need to be deliberate about what you build while you’re there.

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

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

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

[TIM PETER]:
Probably the most misunderstood part of my book — and there’s probably something in this to the way I put it together — is, you know, I talk about Big Tech gatekeepers and how gatekeepers gonna gate and things like that. And I think people hear that and think it means you shouldn’t work with Google or you shouldn’t work with Meta or you shouldn’t work with LinkedIn or whatever the case is. And the subtitle of the book says "Beyond Big Tech," right? It doesn’t mean instead of Big Tech, right? Of course you’re gonna show up on Google. Of course you’re going to show up on the social media channels that are appropriate to your audience and your business and the like. That is a given. It is what do you do in addition to that that allows you to grow a customer base over the longer term…

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, it’s, it’s table stakes, right?

[TIM PETER]:
It’s table stakes, 100%, yeah.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
It’d be great if you could exist without them, but obviously they’re going to be a big part of business for — and that’s the first thing you gotta establish.

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

[TIM PETER]:
100%. Yeah, yeah.

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

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

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Um, so to this point of people early in their career — and I know this is something that is very, very near and dear to your heart at the moment — you know, you wrote that the validator problem keeps you up at night, right? How do people build expertise, um, early in their career specifically if AI is doing all the work?

[TIM PETER]:
Uh, I think about this one all the time, you know. But if you’re a one-person team using AI to cover channels that they don’t fully understand, are they building capabilities? Are they building for their long-term growth? Or are they building a house of cards?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah. So it’s been rattling around in my head for a while. I was in a session, they were talking about this study that had been put together by Foundation Capital, and there was a lot about the future workforce, but they identified four roles that they thought were gonna be needed, right? So first is the C-suite or chief accountability officer, to give direction and talk to the investors and all that. The architects, so how to build out these processes and build out these AI agents. Relationship people, so salespeople effectively, and then validators. So the idea that you’re running all these agents, you get output from them, and then these validators are the ones that take that, iterate with it, check it, validate it effectively.

[TIM PETER]:
Sort of the QA people, the quality assurance.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s probably not the right term, but functionally they’re the quality assurance.

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

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

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

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

[TIM PETER]:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that’s right. You know, I picked this up a long time ago — this probably was Schwab, actually, where they always talked about you hire for attitude and you train for skill, right? You look for people who have the right kinds of attitudes of "I wanna learn. I wanna grow. I wanna find out new things." Um, and that has served obviously me well in my career, but also me well in finding people who were like-minded — not in the sense of a homogeneity of thought, but in the sense of having people who also shared certain values and certain kinds of approaches to things.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
I think that makes a ton of sense. It drives me nuts. I’ve worked for a number of companies that only want to hire people from within the industry, basically — particularly in sales. An awful lot in sales. I’ve always been of the mindset, find me a good salesperson and I can teach them the ins and outs of the industry any day over someone who’s been selling the same stuff for a different company for the last 10 years. But it’s a mindset. I think a lot of people who have only been in one industry just assume that there is some unique magic about it. I think actually the opposite is true. Bringing in outside views is a lot healthier for sure.

[TIM PETER]:
When I first moved into the hotel industry, you know, having come from first working in recording studios and then working for Charles Schwab, when I first moved into the hotel industry, I actually encountered a fair bit of that — both from people in the company who were like, "Well, you couldn’t know this. You don’t know anything about the hotel industry." And also when I wanted to hire people to bring in who I knew had specific skills in the early days of digital — with nothing but love and respect for many of the people I worked with — the hotel industry as a whole in hospitality were terrible at internet. I mean, they just were really, really… and genuinely, you know, there’s a reason why the Expedias of the world and the Booking.coms of the world and people like that got so big was because that’s what they actually focused on. Whereas the hotel industry, that wasn’t what they did, right? They just weren’t tech savvy as companies.

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

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that’s right. And those frameworks are valid whatever you’re working on. Um, so yeah, getting into that mindset.

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

[TIM PETER]:
Yeah, I apologize for the aside. I don’t wanna take what little time we have left for this, but just real quick — the mistake I made with the first draft of the book was it was much more about "how" as opposed to "how to think," right? Because literally I would write a chapter and an hour later some news story would break and I’d be like, "Well, there goes that chapter in the trash," right? Like, it just took me a long time to figure out, oh, I get how you actually write a book that actually has some potential staying power.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
I’m told the second book is much easier, Tim, so you’ll be fine.

[TIM PETER]:
I’m so sorry. I had a minor stroke there. I’ll be fine though. Um, all right.

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

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, I think a lot of it depends on the personality of that founder, CEO, VP, whatever it may be. So a lot of the founders I work with are product people, right? They are engineers, developers, or what have you. So in those cases, the conversation is, "Well, think about a product. Do you develop every feature you want in parallel at the same time? Or do you build a roadmap and you prioritize based on urgency, customer request," whatever it may be. So that might resonate with them. It’s like, "Oh yeah, you’re right. We shouldn’t be trying to do TikTok and Twitter and LinkedIn ads and events and podcasts." So that can hit sometimes.

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

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

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

[TIM PETER]:
Well, you know what I love about that story, Steve? It demonstrates why you are a great marketer. It demonstrates why I wanted you on the show, honestly — is that you’re modeling the very behavior you talk about as a marketer. You’re meeting the person you’re talking to where they are. You’re speaking in their language. You’re framing the problem in a way that resonates in their own language, right? Which is what we’re supposed to do as marketers and sometimes accomplish.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Well, and I think it helps. I started out as an engineer, right? I did not start out as a marketer. I worked for a GM once, and he would constantly point out that he was the only one in the room that had a marketing degree. I have an engineering degree, right? Um, but it does give you a different perspective, right? I mean, it helps me working with tech companies because I can grasp the technology fairly quickly, but I think it does also help that I haven’t always thought like a marketer, right? So it does make it a little bit easier to sort of put yourself in different frames.

[TIM PETER]:
Steve, one of the things I genuinely enjoy about our conversations is we could talk forever, frankly. And every time we talk, it’s like, why don’t we do this more often?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, 100%.

[TIM PETER]:
100%. So, to that point, what haven’t we talked about? What haven’t I asked you that you wished I had?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Well, I thought we might talk about AEO or GEO or whatever — having said that, not sure I want to talk about it because it is this minefield, and you are way more knowledgeable on it than I am. So I’m not gonna ask you to talk about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[TIM PETER]:
I love the rant. I agree with the rant 100%. I think you know my favorite clients are the clients that have been long-term engagements. My oldest client — one of the reasons, not one of the reasons, but a reason that I talk about hotels so often is my oldest client is a group of hotels. They’ve been a client literally since a week before I opened the door. 15 years now, right? Um, and it’s exactly that.

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

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

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
No, that makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense.

[TIM PETER]:
So I’ve got three — these are quick questions, we’ll wrap up here. But, uh, you know, first, just based on what you talked about — Steve, I think you know I’m a big fan of your work. I’m a big fan of what you do. I’m a big fan of the way you think about this, and I know you’re of great help and service to the clients you work with and the like. So I wanna help you actually find more people who are looking for that. Where can people learn more about you and all the great work you do?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Well, that’s very kind of you, Tim. Um, despite what I’ve said about LinkedIn, LinkedIn is still the "find me." Um, and I was one of those early adopters. My LinkedIn handle is actually just my name. It’s not SteveCummins73X12. It’s actually just Steve Cummins.

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

[TIM PETER]:
Perfect. Perfect. And there will be links to all of those in the show notes, both on the website and on YouTube. But I love that it’s called The Marketing Mix because you’re also a bit of a mixologist. You’re somebody who really enjoys cocktails. So what’s your go-to recommendation for folks to enjoy during the summer for a cocktail?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
I do. So I should have said, the last thing on every one of my newsletters is a cocktail that I’ve either enjoyed or am recommending. Um, and there’s a marketing tip for you. The reason I put it in there is to give people an excuse to open the newsletter every week. And the number of people I run into that say, "Oh, you know, I saw your cocktail this week;” I don’t know if they’ve read the rest of it, but they always scroll down to the bottom.

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

[TIM PETER]:
Oh, sure.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Because, you know, you can’t screw it up. It’s pretty light, and that’s my go-to. When I get on a plane, that’s my mental thing of relaxing. If I get one of those then I’m good.

[TIM PETER]:
I do a bourbon and ginger, but yeah, it’s… you’re never gonna go wrong, right?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Absolutely.

[TIM PETER]:
Well, Steve, this has been just… first of all, it’s always a delight getting to catch up with you. It’s always a joy to chat. I’m glad we’re able to share it with folks this time around. But we’ve talked about a lot of things today. You know, if there was just one takeaway from today’s discussion that you’d like the audience to hear, what would that be?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah. I would say most of the stuff that you are reading about marketing and what you should be doing is intended for companies that have teams of five or 10 marketing people, right? And there are so many marketers out there that are a team of one, and they’re gonna feel as though, "Oh, I gotta be doing all of this," right? So the first thing to remember is a lot of these people have colleagues either side of them that are taking care of the blocking and tackling, which is you know, you’re also having to do.

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

[TIM PETER]:
What a great place to wrap up. Steve Cummins, it is again a joy to get to spend some time with you. Thank you so much for your time and for a great conversation, and we’ll chat soon.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Always a pleasure. Thank you, Tim.

[TIM PETER]:
If you want even more from Steve — and you should — you can find him in the same two places as last week. The Marketing Mix newsletter goes out every two weeks on Substack. Search Steve Cummins or The Marketing Mix, or you’ll find the link in the show notes. And yes, there’s a cocktail recommendation at the end of every issue, which based on the conversation Steve and I had today, I can confirm is really well-informed. If you want to work with Steve directly, you can find him on LinkedIn or at Solent Strategies. All the links, as always, are in the show notes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Cummins: You Have to Start on Rented Land. Here’s What to Build While You’re There. — Part 1 of 2 (Digital Reset Episode 503)

Tim Peter — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:04:36 +0000

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Where the owned channel argument breaks down. And how that aligns with the TPA “hub and spoke” framework
The B2B vs. hospitality distinction. Why earned media is table stakes in some industries and genuinely optional in others
The educational sale problem. What to do when your customer doesn’t know they have a problem yet
Why your toughest competitor is inertia. And what that means for how you position your brand
The three ways to approach AI right now. And why Steve and Tim are skeptical of most standalone AI tools
Why a marketing team of one probably shouldn’t be shipping code. And, most critically, what they should be doing instead
Why one paid AI subscription puts you in the top 10% of all users. And what that tells you about your business
The difference between genuine focus and going deep on rented land. More importantly, how to tell which one you’re doing
Sometimes you have to start on rented land. Here’s what to build while you’re there.

Steve’s Three Ways to Approach AI Right Now

Use the AI already built into your current stack.

Every major platform — HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe’s stack, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Riverside — is rolling out AI functionality. Start there. It’s in your existing subscription, you already know the platform, and it’s built to improve your workflows. This is where every marketer should begin.

Be skeptical of standalone AI tools.

A lot of these are still in development cycles. You may spend significant time helping them make their product better. Many will be acquired or disappear. Don’t build your processes on platforms that have only been around for three months.

Invest in agentic tools (and why Steve specifically recommends Claude Cowork).

Agentic tools run tasks, not just conversations. Steve’s real-world example: filling an entire column of LinkedIn pages for an ABM target list, in plain English, with no mistakes. For a team of one, this is where the real leverage is. And at $20 a month, there’s no excuse not to try it.

The Focus vs. Rented Land Distinction

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

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Steve Cummins on LinkedIn
The Marketing Mix Newsletter on Substack
Solent Strategies
Range by David Epstein. One of Steve’s go-to books on the value of breadth early in your career
Claude Cowork. The agentic AI tool Steve and Tim recommend for marketing teams of one
Riverside. The recording platform used for today’s interview, which also includes built-in AI editing features

Related Episodes

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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.

See Tim Peter in Action

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

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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: 28:23

Transcript: Steve Cummins: You Have to Start on Rented Land. Here’s What to Build While You’re There. — Part 1 of 2 (Episode 503)

[TIM PETER]:
Marketing exists to drive revenue. That sounds obvious, but in a world obsessed with AI tools and content calendars and channel optimization, it’s a surprisingly easy fact to lose sight of.

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

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

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

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

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

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Well, thanks Tim. Um, I, I would say I’m a longtime listener, first-time caller, I guess. Um, and yes, we’ve been in the trenches together a few times. Um, and you’re always kind enough to answer my calls when I need some help on, on SEO or whatever may be the, uh, the panic of the day.

[TIM PETER]:
Well, and vice versa. And I just, it’s always a pleasure to catch up with you. It’s fun that this time there’s gonna be an audience for it, so, uh, thanks for taking the time.

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

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah. So first off, obviously that is a big oversimplification that, you know, marketing only exists to drive revenue. And I have to say that so I don’t get in trouble with all of my friends and colleagues in marketing. Really what I’m trying to say is, look, marketing doesn’t exist for its own sake, right? It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You are there to do certain things, and what it all boils down to is driving revenue. And I do think some marketers, particularly the talking heads that you see on LinkedIn, lose sight of that sometimes, and they just love to talk about marketing for marketing’s own sake. I’m not pointing fingers at you, Tim, but there are people out there that do that.

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

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

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

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

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

[TIM PETER]:
Well, and it’s an educational sale, right? I mean, for many of the kinds of things you’re talking about, sometimes people don’t know they have a problem in the first place, or they don’t know that they’ve got a need they’ve got to address. So there’s probably some work you’ve got to do just to get the message out of, "Hey, I don’t know if you know you have a problem." I mean, is that a fair…

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, you know, that’s something that I struggle with quite a bit actually, because I will talk to some companies and that’s what they want to do, right? Because it’s sort of marketing 101. Oh, you’ve got to define the problem and educate. However, a lot of the companies I deal with are startups, and in most cases, there’s already somebody established in that field and they’ve found a better way of doing it. Cheaper, smarter, whatever it may be. So should they really spend their time educating somebody on the problem when in reality they’re probably only gonna get found if somebody is looking at the bigger players in that field and then are looking for, oh, is there a better way of doing this?

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

[TIM PETER]:
Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. I actually — you know me, I collect pithy phrases from all over the place. And one of the ones I talk about all the time is your toughest competitor is inertia, right? Your toughest competitor is people doing what they’ve always done, and that’s true if you’re a big guy, and it’s certainly true if you’re a small person. The analogy I would use in this case from the hospitality industry is, when you work with independent hotels, you certainly don’t have to educate people on what a hotel is, obviously. Um, but getting them to understand why would I stay with this interesting little, you know, 30-room boutique property in the city center versus the Marriott where I get my points and things like that. You know, they’ve done the heavy lifting of letting people know hotels exist. But why this hotel becomes the bigger challenge, right?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, and I think it’s the whole status quo thing, right? So another pithy phrase used to be, you know, you never get fired for choosing IBM. Now it’s probably, you know, you don’t get fired for running on AWS, right? So yes, that’s the thing that you’re trying to overcome for sure.

[TIM PETER]:
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So you mentioned a client in one of your newsletters whose in-house marketer is now shipping code, you know? And I’m hearing similar stories of folks who are actually building things hands-on themselves, vibe coding themselves and the like, right? And I do a fair bit of that myself. At many of the companies you work with, because they’re startups or because they’re early stage or because they’re a smaller player in a much bigger ecosystem, the marketing team might be one person, right? And I think that’s something a lot of people who listen to the show can relate to. You know, how do you figure out where AI actually fits into your day-to-day? And I’m not just talking like in theory, but like today, you know, what’s the honest answer?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
And I’ll be super transparent about this. I don’t know that I have the answer yet, right? So I’d love — um, one of the reasons I’m asking is ’cause I wanna know. Well, and because it’s constantly changing, right? The answer I would’ve given you a month, two months ago would’ve been different, and I’m sure it will be two months from now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[TIM PETER]:
It is. That’s what I’m paying, yeah.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, exactly. Hopefully your company will pay for it. If not, pay for it yourself. I mean, really, for 20 bucks. So that would be my thing: first, features that are in your current stack, and second, invest in Claude Cowork. They all have similar things. I just think Claude Cowork is probably the best and easiest to use right now.

[TIM PETER]:
I completely agree with that, by the way. And while this episode is not brought to you by Anthropic and Claude, it could be if anybody out there is listening and wants to, you know, throw us a check… No, I’m kidding.

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

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
First is, yeah, you probably are because we all are. It is just impossible to keep up. But the other thing I will say — and there was a really good chart published about this a few weeks ago — if you have a paid subscription to any of the AI tools, you’re in the top 10% of all users. And if you have paid for two AI tools, you’re in the top, I think, 1% or something crazy. So if you are playing around with it, if you are doing stuff with it, you’re already ahead of the game, and you’ve just gotta keep at it.

[TIM PETER]:
You know, I’m very fond of telling people, "Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides," right? We run into this all the time. I do work with the Conference Board, the Digital Marketing Strategy Council there, and we get together a group of digital marketers at Fortune 500 companies once a quarter or thereabouts to have conversations about what’s top of mind for them. And invariably what we find is that, you know, Person A on the council, when we’re talking about a specific topic, will be so far behind the average in the room. And then you go to another topic, and they are so far ahead of the average in the room, right? Nobody’s good at everything. You know, you just have to accept the fact that there’s things you’re gonna be better at, there’s things you’re gonna be worse at. Don’t let the things that you’re worse at be a hole you fall into or that distract you from what you should be working on. You know, you’re probably working on the right things most of the time, right?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
I think it’s true. And I tell you, LinkedIn is the worst for that, right? I mean, I do spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, more than I should. But…

[TIM PETER]:
Same, by the way. So if you truly believed what everybody told you they were doing on LinkedIn in terms of AI, you’d think you’re a Luddite compared to it. But people talk a good game, and to your point, they may just be very focused on that one aspect of it.

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

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, so I think it is a challenge. There’s a fine line between focusing on a few things and going deep into two or three things, right? So when I say to people, "You’ve got to focus on one or two things," what I’m trying to avoid is spreading yourself so thin and trying to do so many things that basically you end up doing a lot of things not very well, right? So my thing more is about pick two or three things that you think you can have an impact on, that you have an interest in, ’cause I think it helps if you’re interested in these things. Get very good at them and be consistent with them.

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

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

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

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

[TIM PETER]:
It’s so funny you say this. I see this all the time for all kinds of businesses. And you know, why do we do it? "Well, ’cause our competitors do it, right?" Or because it’s the thing that the marketer happens to like personally, right? It’s their preferred social network or things like that. And plenty who do it for very rational reasons of we’ve done the research on our customers. But yeah, I love the way you’re thinking about focus.

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

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
You see I have a lot of books behind me. So one of my favorite books is a book called Range. Um, and it was sort of ahead of its time. I can’t remember the name of the author, but it’s called Range. And he talks about — it’s very trendy and very popular to be a specialist at something. But he’s done a lot of research into this idea that actually you’re much better off, at least early on in your career, being very broad and learning a lot of things. And then over time you can specialize into certain areas. But I’ve always thought of myself as a generalist, and I gotta say, in most of my career that has worked against me because people generally are looking to hire an SEO specialist or a social media person or a video person, and my thing has always been, well, I get bored easily. I like doing a bunch of different things, so I want to be able to turn my hand to whatever is the thing that’s needed, which is honestly why I’ve worked with a lot of small companies and startups because in that environment you have to do that anyway. Being able to wear a lot of different hats — knowing what hats to wear in the first place is actually a valuable skill, right?

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

[TIM PETER]:
100%. Yep.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
But think about the content, or the assets that you’re creating for that rented land and what can you do with it, right? So are you creating videos? Are you creating written material that can be a blog? So you may have to do it because you’re posting on that rented land, but make sure that you’re using those assets for something else.

[TIM PETER]:
If you want more from Steve — and you should — there are two places you can find him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Didn’t Kill Blogging. It Killed Borrowed Brand Equity. (Digital Reset Episode 502)

Tim Peter — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:56:06 +0000

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why this isn’t a blogging story. It’s a story about any business that depends on organic search — and gatekeepers more generally — for its revenue
Why AI didn’t kill these blogs’ traffic. Google did. AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% of all searches and, when they do, clickthroughs drop 58%
Why switching from Google dependence to AI dependence won’t save you. More importantly, Tim looks at what will
The four traits shared by 21 blogging survivors. Tim maps these directly to the three-pillar brand framework from Digital Reset
Why "your brand is the prompt" is the only sustainable response to a world where gatekeepers gonna gate (i.e., control discovery)
What your analytics dashboard is hiding from you right now. And why composition effects might be hurting you
The playbook for what to do next, no matter where your business is today

What to Do Right Now

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

What percentage comes from direct traffic, email and SMS, and branded search?
Is that number growing or shrinking?

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

Resources Mentioned

The Great Blogging Collapse: What Happened to 100 Successful Blogs? — Daniel Stanica

Related Episodes

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.

See Tim Peter in Action

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

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.

Subscribe to Digital Reset

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: 21:04

Transcript: Google Didn’t Kill Blogging. It Killed Borrowed Brand Equity. (Episode 502)

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

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

That’s… bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t be that guy.

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

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

Don’t borrow brand equity. Build your own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

The AI Winners Didn’t Pivot. They Prepared — Digital Reset Foundations (Episode 501)

Tim Peter — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:57:18 +0000

The brands winning in AI right now didn’t pivot when AI arrived. They didn’t need to. Everything they’d built over years — direct customer relationships, earned reviews, credible content, clear brand signals — prepared them for this moment without even knowing it. The strength of their brand drives their success in AI.

That’s not luck. It’s a 15-year pattern that plays out the same way every time a new platform rises to dominance: they’re generous early and expensive later. It was true for Google, for social media, for OTAs. And it it will be true for AI.

In this Digital Reset Foundations episode, Tim Peter draws on 15-plus years of watching platform shifts to explain why intelligent, experienced marketing leaders fall into the gatekeeper trap again and again. Tim also explains why the businesses that navigate every shift without getting captured all have one thing in common: they never fully gave up the direct relationship with the customer.

New research from Daniel Stanica, tracking 100 once-successful blogs over four years, confirms this thesis. The median site in the study lost 85% of its traffic. That’s not the lower bound. That’s the middle of the distribution. Half did worse. These were sites that built their entire strategy around a gatekeeper… and then paid for it when the gatekeeper changed the rules.

The episode that predicted this outcome is the one you’re about to enjoy.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why the brands showing up in AI recommendations today didn’t pivot to AI — they prepared for it years ago
What City of Hope’s 97% AI query share teaches us about what AI actually rewards
Why "AI inclusion is an inheritance, not an acquisition" and what that means for your budget conversation
The gatekeeper trap: why smart, experienced marketing leaders fall into it every time a new platform emerges
The critical difference between a scam and a trap… and why the trap is more dangerous
Two tests to determine whether your current AI investments are building foundations or just buying shortcuts
The one thing every business that has navigated every platform shift without getting captured has in common

The Two Tests: Foundation or Shortcut?

Test 1: Would this investment matter if AI changed tomorrow? Expert-authored content, review velocity programs, first-party data infrastructure, and earned media from credible sources improve your business regardless of which AI model is winning six months from now. If the investment only works because of how a specific platform runs right now, that’s a warning sign your investment might not last.

Test 2: Does this investment compound its value over time, or does it require changes every few months? Shortcuts work. Foundations compound. A review earned today is in the training data for the next round of model updates. Content cited once tends to get cited again. First-party data gets more valuable the more of it you collect. If the value shifts every time the platform updates, it’s a shortcut. If it compounds regardless of platform updates, you’re building a foundation. One of those has a better future.

The 15-Year Pattern

Every platform shift follows the same arc:

A new discovery channel emerges with generous, low-cost early access
Results come quickly and businesses double down
The platform reaches gatekeeping power
Tolls rise. Businesses scramble.

It happened with Google search. With organic social reach. With OTA commissions. And it’s happening now with AI. The window where the new gatekeeper hasn’t yet started collecting the highest tolls it can is real… and not unlimited. The businesses using that window to build direct relationships rather than deepen platform dependency are the ones giving themselves options when the window closes.

Key Data Points From This Episode

City of Hope shows up in 97% of AI queries for their category &mash; without a “GEO strategy” — all because of decisions made years ago
Daniel Stanica’s research tracked 100 blogs over four years: the median site lost 85% of its organic traffic. Half did worse than that.
82% of companies remain stuck in the AI value gap despite the pattern being well understood

Resources Mentioned

The Great Blogging Collapse — Daniel Stanica’s Research

Related Episodes

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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: 26:31

Transcript: The AI Winners Didn’t Pivot. They Prepared. — Digital Reset Foundations (Episode 501)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve laid out the roadmap for owning your customer in the age of AI.

One thing that I want to make clear that runs through the entire roadmap: AI rewards great brands.

The brands and businesses winning in AI didn’t pivot when AI came along. They didn’t need to. Everything they’ve done throughout their histories prepared them for this moment.

For all the talk of GEO and social media citations and AI agents and on and on and on, what’s really happening is that AI search, AI assistants, agents, and enterprises ultimately want to point their users to the brands that best meet their needs.

Google increasingly is modifying its search algorithms to do the same. So are social sites like Meta, Instagram, and TikTok, and AI spam filters do it in email, too.

I mean, imagine that you’re a consumer. All your AI tools are trying to show you things you might actually want to keep you in their ecosystem and to eliminate everything you don’t want to see.

That’s a problem for brands that aren’t built from the ground up for this world. That’s what the roadmap I laid out in episodes 498, 499, and 500 is all about.

The point of these episodes was to help you as you go forward. The point of this episode is to show you how we got to this moment. Because I’ve been making this argument for a long time. In many ways, it’s one of the core reasons this show exists in the first place.

And in the Foundations episode we’re gonna look at today, I draw on the 15-plus years of experience and evidence that explain why I believe what I do and why the roadmap works.

In this Foundations episode, I laid out why intelligent, experienced marketing leaders fall into the gatekeeper trap again and again: Because it works… right up until it doesn’t.

They’re not dumb. They’re not foolish. They may even be aware of the problem while they’re stepping into the trap. They also need to put heads in beds, butts in seats, feet in stores, products on shelves, eyes on their product, clicks to their carts, and continued usage after the sale.

There’s nothing wrong with doing what you’ve gotta do to make sure your business succeeds day in and day out, month after month. That’s okay.

And when gatekeepers make it so easy, so enticing to simply use the tools they give you, it’s no wonder folks get trapped. Hell, it’s amazing anyone ever gets out.

But we continue to see the effects of the trap time and again.

Rand Fishkin pointed folks to new research from Daniel Stanica that shows the collapse of traffic blog sites have seen over the last four years. Daniel reviewed 100 sites over this period and found that the median site had lost 85% of their traffic. That’s not the lower bound. That’s the median. Half did worse than that.

Daniel’s research reflects exactly what today’s Foundations episode predicted. These sites depended on gatekeepers, and now, today, they’re scrambling to rebuild their businesses.

I’ll have a full review of Daniel’s research and what you can do about it in next week’s show.

In the meantime, though, I hope you’ll take a moment to enjoy today’s Foundations episode that looks at how AI winners didn’t pivot, they prepared.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 501 of Digital Reset. 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 today, 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, but 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 customers’ 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 that are happening on platforms that the AI trusts. It’s not because they’re bad, but because you have never done the work to build review velocity for your business, it’s 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. That’s 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, then 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.

And 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 people look at that and 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 even. They had an opportunity, they had two opportunities, to build direct booking capabilities and direct booking connection with customers before OTAs became kind of non-negotiable. First before September of 2001. Then in the later aughts.

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, well, they found themselves in a tougher spot when the OTAs started raising commission rates and changing the rules of the game.

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 a period and includes a period where taking the shortcut looks like the smart play. In Google’s case, it was things like trading links, 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, "Hey, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 this thing, you would never put your efforts there. You would never put your money there.

So the people who have taken these approaches, the people who have worked with these channels are not fools. They’re not getting themselves scammed.

What they are doing is they’re saying, "Hey, this is producing results for me. I should double down on this. I should triple 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… and usually at a relatively low cost. That’s fantastic.

But 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 that’s dressed up as a strategy?

I would think there’s 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 you may want to consider 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, as you earn more of it from your customers.

If an investment 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 that you need going forward, and for the budget you’ve already spent, you should not be thinking in terms of "We shouldn’t invest in AI." That is not a thing I’m saying here.

You should be saying we should invest in AI the way businesses 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 gonna keep throwing money after money after money every time the algorithm changes.

So when we think about budget categories, are we talking about expert authored content that earns citations? A hundred percent. Are we talking about review velocity programs? A hundred percent. Are we talking about a first-party data infrastructure? A hundred percent. If we’re talking about people selling you, "You’re gonna appear in the AI and you’re gonna appear top every single time…" you might want to take a really close look at that. You might wanna 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. And 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, and through the collapse of reach on social media, on Facebook and places like that, and on 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 that you’ve eventually learned, "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 or 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.

Thanks so much for listening to today’s Foundations episode. We’ll be back with an all-new episode that dives into Daniel Stanica’s research next week.

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

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

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

Thanks so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate all your support. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and as always, 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 The AI Winners Didn’t Pivot. They Prepared — Digital Reset Foundations (Episode 501) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.