Google Search Is Winning Again

0:00Eric Siu:When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for. Before the first click, before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Stripe just gave AI agents credit cards. And I think this is a really big deal, Neil. because, and combined with Cloudflare, where Cloudflare allows you to just buy products using agents, I think, think about it this way, Neil.

0:37Eric Siu:If you wanted to spin up Cloudflare, you have your Stripe agent, okay, be able to purchase Cloudflare domains, for example, or other Cloudflare workers. You can spin up different pages that you want to, landing pages that you want to test rapidly. You can use like a design.md file and anything you wanted to test, you could have these agents just spinning them up, put them on a subdomain or whatever, get them up. Or you can even say, hey, let's test something programmatically. Let's get a bunch of these landing pages up or let's get a bunch of these pages up, see how they do. You can do that now.

1:07Eric Siu:You can rapidly test because these agents are able to purchase for you and you're able to kind of buy these workers quickly. So this guy, Ali Lehman, says this. I can't believe they're going to do it again. The last time Stripe shipped a primitive this big, it literally birthed the modern SaaS. Shopify, Substack, Gumroad, all your favorite indie hackers. Okay. So yesterday, Stripe shipped the spending version. Anyone can now get an agent to spend money on their behalf. If Stripes Payment API created SaaS, this spending API creates autonomous commerce. So you basically just make this concrete, okay?

1:36Eric Siu:So number one, AI ad managers. You connect your meta, Google, and TikTok accounts, set a monthly budget cap, and an agent runs your entire paid strategy, okay? Number two, AI procurement agents for e-commerce. They supply supplier prices, auto order when costs hit your threshold, sends you a morning summary of what was bought and why, And then you have AI travel agents that actually work. So they search, compare, book and pay with your budget rules. No more toggling between six tabs to save$40 on a flight. And then finally, you have AI bookkeeping agents. They will handle recurring operational payments.

2:07Eric Siu:Your business already makes every month contractor invoices, add account, top ups, subscriptions, etc. so i think we're just going to see more and more of this stuff um and just just looking at just looking at stripe just looking at uh looking at cloudflare and me just giving examples on the marketing and kind of seo cro side the possibilities are becoming more and more even more endless

2:30Neil Patel:dude i i agree but we'll end up seeing over time that my like if i could do one thing i wish i could wave a magic wand and skip a few years to see where technology is because i think life is going

2:43Eric Siu:to be so much better i think there's going to be a lot of abundance for everyone um so you know we at least for me i'm not going to speak for you neil um i am you know short term a little concerned for the world but long term i'm very excited so i just hope we get to the long term yeah dude i hope

2:58Neil Patel:we get to the long term as well um and i'm curious to really see how how it plays out with a lot of these governments. And the reason I say that is when you look at the marketing ecosystem right now, or let's actually go back to marketing ecosystem like 10 years ago, you mainly had just two main players. You had Google, and then you had Meta, right? I know Meta back then was not called Meta, but same thing. And if you look now, you have Google, you have Meta, you have OpenAI, you have, what is it called, TikTok, you have LinkedIn, and a lot of these smaller platforms have been growing like the LinkedIns, the Reddits.

3:35Neil Patel:And even though they're smaller, you kind of have to be on them because they have data deals with some of the other players like OpenAI and Google. So if you're not on the smaller channels, you don't do as well on the bigger channels. But because of monopolistic rules, you're seeing more and more separate platforms and you're not seeing like a Google early on being like, perplexity is great. Let's just go buy it for$10 billion. Like you're seeing the market becoming more and more fragmented. And even with search, it's people don't just use open ai or claude they also still use google and people you know i remember the vcs being like oh this is going to kill google google is dead google hasn't died it's potentially the most profitable or the biggest company by market cap uh wall street's embedding in the next week or so they're going to actually be bigger than nvidia we'll see if that happens but google's actually been growing in popularity and i haven't seen people being like oh i don't use open ai google gives me everything.

4:32Neil Patel:People just use multiple platforms just like they use multiple social networks. Yeah.

4:36Eric Siu:By the way, when I use Google now, so I do often click on AI mode. So I do often switch to AI mode very quickly just to ask follow-up questions. And I think they made it work for them. Like initially I was skeptical that AI mode would work. They made it work. And by the way, searches are continuing to grow still. And their AI usage is continuing to go up. I just think there's going to be more and more demand. We've talked about this concept before known as Jeven's paradox when something becomes available and abundantly available people actually use it more and more electricity for example or electricity then led to you know compounding of flight and that electricity led to the air conditioner right like there's all these things that we use we're going to find a lot more use cases with infinite intelligence we just don't know what it looks like yet and that's what neil's talking about we're excited because we don't know what the world's going to look like but when you have infinite intelligence man is it exciting because the things that we were constrained by before it's no longer constrained let me tell you one more thing, Neil.

5:26Eric Siu:So I was listening to a podcast with the Airbnb founder today on the, I think it's Invest Like the Best. Great podcast, by the way. Brian or Nathan? Brian, Brian. Yeah. So Brian, Brian Chesky was just talking about how, you know, it's, it's, it's, instead of thinking about managing people, he spends two to three hours a day on recruiting. Because if you just recruit the right people, you spend all your time on recruiting, you don't need to manage them, right? And Neil, you think about all the best people you worked with, all the best people I worked with, They don't need to be managed and they don't like being managed, right?

5:56Eric Siu:They like knowing which direction to row in and they're just going to row.

6:00Neil Patel:Dude, totally agree with you on that. If you hire the right people, it changes everything. If you hire the wrong people, it screws up everything. And I get why people say hire slow, fire fast. You don't want to hire too slow, but you definitely should fire fast. I do not like the concept of I'm going to let them learn their way into it. I found at least for me and my management style, which is I don't do much managing, it doesn't work. It doesn't work for me either. And I love doing that. It doesn't work at all. And to go back to Google, here's a quote from Sundar, the CEO. Alphabet's Q1 2026 earnings post Google search revenue at$64.4 billion.

6:41Neil Patel:This is, again, just Google search revenue. Up 19 % year over year. As Sundar tied AI experiences to higher search usage. Google is seeing searches grow. More people are using it than ever before. But that just goes to show the marketing ecosystem, what it's going to look like in the future, is going to be more options due to the European Union and the laws we have on monopolistic behaviors in America. You're going to see more platforms competing and companies and individuals using multiple platforms versus just one. And here's a kicker. I gave a corporate talk to one of the largest advertisers in the world.

7:21Neil Patel:I was in their office in Spain. They're all on the Microsoft suite. I said, hey, do you guys use Copilot? They're like, no, it's blocked. We don't use it. Even though they can, in theory, have access to it because of what they're paying for, they're like, no, we prefer these other AI platforms that they're using now. And they mainly are OpenAI and Cloud.

7:39Eric Siu:Dude, Neil, check this out. The fact that I can do this during a call right now is insane. So you're talking about the growth. I'm like, it'd be cool if we kind of just, you know, show people how it looks. Okay. So check this out, Neil. All right. You see this? Look, I was like, hey, draw a chart to show Google's revenue growth over the last four years. So next time when you talk about this data, just ask it to draw a chart for you. So I literally just put this in the search bar for Google and you can see Google's annual revenue growth from 2022 to 2025. So 2023 starts at, it's 283 billion. Okay.

8:09Eric Siu:Then it goes to, and maybe this is a little off on the chart, maybe 307 billion and then 350 and then 402 so 2022 again 9.78 percent growth so 282 to 308 which is 8.68 percent growth and then it grows 14 basically to 350 and then it grows it accelerates even more 15 in 2025 um so they're not slowing down and then i was like dude you know what why don't you just you know show me what it looks like from a quarterly standpoint and then you can do that right and then you can see it's moved up on the this little bar over here they're all kind of equal here and then

8:42Neil Patel:it kind of moves up. Isn't that interesting? It is. But what's more interesting for anyone who's watching this podcast episode, instead of just listening to it, you can see how Eric's using Google. Both him and I use Google like this as well as other LLMs like this. But this just shows why Google is actually growing in search volume and not dying. They've adapted and they've actually adapted really well and really quickly.

9:06Eric Siu:Look at this. Alphabet has reported 11 consecutive quarters of double digit growth year over year revenue growth as of q1 2026 um that's just insane to me uh growth is driven by ai infrastructure consumer ai products and search query volume with q1 2026 being the strongest quarter ever i think what's amazing about google is that people like consumer i think is very difficult they have consumer and enterprise nailed down you don't have many companies that can kind of figure that out so and oftentimes those are the multi-trillion dollar companies like an nvidia or um you think about like a microsoft for example so anyway Good stuff.

10:05Eric Siu:Your ops team will thank you. Back to the show. All right. So I'm going to hear. Let me talk about this. So there's this creator play that takes brands from$5 million to$100 million a year. You know what it is? No,$500 million to a billion? No,$5 million a year brands to$100 million a year. So this is called the Hudson Method. This is from Sean Frank from Ridge. Okay, so I have personally seen six brands restart growth using the Hudson method. The steps. Number one, seed hundreds of creators on TikTok, small, new accounts, no one famous. That's okay. Two, pay them per video plus commission, but heavily incentivize them to post lots of videos.

10:49Eric Siu:Bonuses for posting 100 plus videos a month. Okay. Number three, take all the creative loaded into every ad channel. You just solved creative bottlenecks and unlocked infinite ad angles. Four, scale ad spend on everything while still paying the creators. Commission on ad sales, okay? So it isn't about TikTok shop sales. It isn't about GMV Max. It's all of it. You get free CPMs on TikTok. You get unlimited content and it jumpstarts the whole business. More ads, more angles, more channels. I think that's the most important sentence. More ads, more angles, more channels. This is named after the legendary founder of Comfort, Hudson, all hail the UGC king.

11:24Neil Patel:I've seen this playbook run a few times. It can work. I've also seen it not work as well. It largely depends on if you have a really good product that works for consumers who, what we found, aren't willing to spend a lot of money. Like if you're selling something for like$10,$20,$50, etc. If you're starting to sell things for like$200,$300,$1 ,000, we do not see it work as well.

11:49Eric Siu:Dude, can I speak? I think a lot of it has to do with good product first, which is you need good people to create a good product, right? You also need good people on the marketing side too that really understand the game with this. They need to understand what is that influencer game? How are you supposed to see all that content and how do you scale it? Interestingly enough, Neil, let me show you something. So this guy reached out to me and I'm going to show you a video. He made a trailer for us because I want more good editing help. Let me show you this. Neil, tell me what you think about this here.

12:18Eric Siu:So let me hit play. Can you see this?

12:21Neil Patel:Yeah. Okay, here we go. The younger generation is gonna use Gemini way more than ChatGPT. You're like a boomer if you use ChatGPT.

12:28Eric Siu:Yes, and it's gonna get shut down. We are gonna start to see more one-person, billion-dollar companies with one employee. Chinese public sentiment towards AI is significantly more optimistic and trusting compared to the U.S. People in China, they're all lining up in public to learn open-claw. If you tell your model to speak like a caveman, that saves you a lot on cost. So it's like, me code this now. Me need this. I'm not even joking. Like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not like 50 % of costs. I'm not even joking. This guy created 800 fake doctors to generate 1.8 billion in revenue with one employee.

13:00Eric Siu:Have you heard about this? Uh-uh.

13:02Neil Patel:Dude, dude, Neil, what do you think? It's not bad, but I don't think it's going to generate much revenue, but I think it'll get views.

13:09Eric Siu:My point is when you have a good editor that just knows what to do, you don't need to manage them. That's my point. Right. Um, and so that's all I'm saying with this. it applies to kind of the Hudson method as well. You need good people there. You need a good product. Everything comes down to people. And I do believe going back to what Brian Chesky was saying, if you spend that two to three hours a day working with your recruiter on setting the tone for the top, you know, he said this, I want to set the tone for the top 200 people in the company, not just my executive team, the top 200 that is building true leverage.

13:38Eric Siu:And that's how we should all think about this.

13:41Neil Patel:Dude, it is so hard to find really good people when you find them. I've done this uh i started doing this more later in my career i hire him even if i don't need him right now like if i don't need him in a year i'll hire him still and just burn the cost and people think i'm crazy and stupid for it but i'm telling you dude when you're able to get that amazing like a plus player you get them because they don't come that often let me just put it to you this way neil

14:09Eric Siu:uh not you neil but the audience and by the way amon left a comment here what is this about let Let me tell you what this video is about, Matt. It's about making more money, dude. All right. Watch the rest of it. Okay, here we go. So what was I talking about? Oh, wait.

14:25Neil Patel:We were talking about A-plus players recruiting and burning the money ahead of time.

14:28Eric Siu:Okay, so let's break down some math. Thank you for that, Neil. So when it comes to A-players, you're like, okay, let's say an A-player, I'm going to use simple round numbers. Let's just use$100 ,000, okay? Like a real A-player might cost you a million dollars. Okay, let's just put it that way. But I'm going to use$100 ,000 for the sake of this example, right? So you might be like, oh my God, I can't afford that. A hundred grand is too much money. You know, we're not gonna be able to do whatever X, Y, Z. But here's the thing. If that person can bring you$3 million because they're that damn good, okay, 30X return on that, okay?

15:00Eric Siu:Well, if you pay a million dollars for someone, someone's like, oh my God, how is this person making a million dollars? That's so unfair. You know, that's not good to society, whatever. No, but if that million dollar a year person is adding$100 million a year in value or$200 million a year, Yeah, that's a good deal, man. So everyone's trying to get a good deal at the end of the day. Just think about it that way. People would be stupid not to pay for a good deal. And that's how we look at A players. If you find an amazing person where you have, you just know that they got it, Neil, and you're having an amazing conversation.

15:28Eric Siu:And you're kind of like, damn, this person's smarter than me as well. You should pull the trigger.

15:32Neil Patel:Yes. And the best part about them is it doesn't take any time out of your day because once you hire them, you don't need to manage them. If you have to manage them and tell them what to do, they're not an A player. They're not even a B player. Yep.

15:44Eric Siu:Dude, you know what I'll also tell you as well, man? Like, um, I was reading, like, it's also helpful. Oftentimes, a lot of these A players are creating content. So I've been reading a lot of content on how like ramp created like this one product, right? I reach out to the person that wrote that article. And then yesterday, the CTO and I were on the call. And we had an amazing conversation. And we're going to start doing some stuff together, because I just don't want to wait. And that's the thing. When you're out there, the other meta lesson from a marketing standpoint is if you're out there creating content, you people like to say, you increase your surface area.

16:13Eric Siu:of luck that's what you're doing and then when i got on the call with him i was like oh dude the the ramp thing is not even what i want to talk about i want to talk about you i want to talk about you helping us right and that's how these things go so neil i don't know about you but i often i have a list on my apple notes where i'm just like these are people to hire right and so these are all people that i want to maybe i can't hire them all at the same time right now um but i always keep that list and then what i do neil is every six months or so every three to six months i just find hey how are things going man hey how are things going what can i do to help how are things going right and sometimes you even have to wine and dine these people like you take these people out to dinner with their wives as well because their wives have to approve you as well or their spouse um i don't know how you've seen it share your share your experiences with taking people out yeah so when you're recruiting someone you have to sometimes if it's like someone top level you have to get the spouse spousal buy-in as well maybe you haven't seen it this