How ChatGPT Will… Eliminate TOFU Content? And, Google Sued by Chegg Over AI Overviews

0:00Tofu content. So just a brief recap for people. So tofu is top of the funnel content. So it might be like what is SEO for example. middle of the funnel might be like, you know, we can call it, you know, when should I look for an agency or something like that, right? Like an SEO agency or bottom of the funnel might be SEO agency in Los Angeles, right? That's very high intent. People are ready to buy at that time. So, you know, with SEO and content marketing in general, typically you would have top of funnel content in your stack because you want your site to gain more authority and things like SEO trends or sorry, trends type of content, statistics type content or tools typically will drive a lot of links.

0:40And you want things to drive links because you want your site to have more authority, right? But now the game is changing. And Will Reynolds actually wrote this on LinkedIn. So he said this, and I'm actually going to share this on my screen so you can see it as well. So Neil, can you see this? Yeah, I can now. Okay. So Will Reynolds said, I had a lead hit us up and select ChatGP as their source. I asked for his prompts and the result made my head spin. I'm thinking about that the chat GPT is only 1 % of my traffic statement through a new lens after watching someone prompting to get an answer. For Shere, which is his agency, to have captured this lead and been there as a brand for every part of his journey, we would have had to write, have written blog posts and rank these posts for each step of his decision-making process.

1:25So again, Tofu, Mofu, Bofu, right? A blog post, so this is one, these are four blog posts he would have had to make. one is a blog post addressing their problem two would be for this person that went from problem to what is a job to help with this that would be the next part so they have to find okay here's my problem okay here's the person doing a job for this third one would be he looked for an agency to help with the specific problem so i would have had to have a dedicated page explaining why we were the right fit and then fourth one would be a branded search leading to conversion so np digital for example or single grain for example so i bet he would have had five different searches leading to 20 to 30 sites visits over the course of weeks.

2:03Those 30 page views and all of our analytics tools vanished. He got no links. Now, he went from problem top of funnel to I might need an agency bottom of funnel in 40 minutes, not 30 days. His single chat GPT session handled all of that. No clicks, no deep dives into websites. The user gets a short list of agencies at the very end, searches for one, branded search matters, and converts in just one step. If this pattern scales, could chat gpt be gobbling up all of that top of funnel if so be real careful assuming that one percent is too small to pay attention to shoot holes through this idea i'm looking for points of validation and counterpoints i thought this would be interesting for us to discuss i don't think chat gpt and these lms will take up a top of funnel and there's one big reason why if you look at where people consume top of funnel content a large portion of it is the social web and on the social web whether it's Instagram, TikTok, YouTube etc people are consuming top of funnel content it doesn't mean that people aren't going to chat GPT or even Google AI overviews and getting answers to top of funnel but it's more so it depends on the platform and I think some people want top of funnel content on many of these platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube etc etc.

3:23On Google, we're still seeing a lot of top of funnel content being clicked on even with AI overviews being at the top. Dude, here, let me take you on a tangent, then let's come back for a second. I actually use deep research to analyze like, you know, clutch.co, the directory for agencies, right? You can actually analyze the categories or the blog posts or like, for example, they might have AI categories for agencies and CRM, for example. I wanted to see their content strategy for the last four to five years, and I wanted to map out a graph showing which they increased and how much content they had per category.

3:59And ChatGP Deep Research actually did that. So that's a little tangent that you guys can run there. That one actually worked pretty well. I don't know how accurate it is. But coming back to this, so I think that, But let me ask you this, Neil. Are you increasing or decreasing your blog output in 2025? Increasing. Increasing. Okay. So my take on it, because I think you made a good point, because the post that I just shared from Will, that was from LinkedIn. And I was reading some articles this morning, and it was shared by people from my team, but they came from X, for example, right? And so maybe we might be seeing less blog posts, but you're actually increasing it.

4:41But we might be seeing these LLMs pull more from the social graph. And that I think there's always going to need to be top of funnel content in some way, shape or form. I don't think it just goes away. I think the channel it comes from might change in terms of frequency, but I don't think it just goes away. Yes. And if you look at you and I, when we discuss marketing topics each and every single week, we're pulling a lot of top of funnel stuff from blog posts and the social web. It doesn't matter that there's loans out there that can answer a lot of top of funnel stuff. We still pull stuff from the social web.

5:15If you look at all the groups we're in and the articles that are being passed around, a lot of them are from the social web and they're just linking us to stuff that people are posting. If you look at Will Reynolds, you know what his post is, is a top of funnel posts. Where is it circulating? LinkedIn. It got quite a bit of use. Yep. All right. You want to pick the next one or I have a next one queued? Go for it. Okay. So I want to talk about how ultimately I feel like at least my observations with SaaS is nobody really knows what they're doing. And what I mean by that is I continue to see more and more competitors requesting demos for Carrot.

5:57And it's such an obvious thing to me because, Neil, when you have someone request a demo for, let's say, one of your products and it's a CTO or it's a senior solutions architect, you know they're doing competitive research. And that just signals to me that a lot of these B2B account-based marketing softwares or products... This morning, I had a CEO from a semi-competitive company reach out and say, hey, we're doing something in a similar space. We should chat. What do you want to chat about? I don't want to chat. What do you want to chat about? You want to see the features? You want to see what we're building?

6:30What's on our product? I don't want to chat about shit, dude. It just goes to show you that in a world where it's very easy to copy features and you already have customers, your job is to retain them. If there's a really good feature out there, it's a good idea. You should copy as quickly as possible. That's what I would be thinking about as well. It just goes to show me at least that we're all just figuring it out as we go. That's just what life is. hey eric i'm interested in copying you you want to chat about this yeah yep yep it's like straight up it's like no i don't want to chat about this uh no thank you take care have a good one yep so that's what it is i just that's i guess that's my little rant but that's also my little observation too yeah yeah i've noticed similar things too dude even in the agency world how many people hit us up that want to talk numbers and our growth strategies and sharing them and And it's like, what's the point?

7:22We're just helping our competitors grow. You know, we had, I'm not going to name names here, but we had somebody that's really well-known. He's a well-known creator. Hit up one of our mutual friends. And he was like, hey, I, oh, multiple times this has happened to my friends. We just want to, can you introduce me to this person? I just want to trade notes with them. So then I would go to this person and say, hey, this person wants to trade. It's like, dude, I don't want to trade notes about shit, dude. And he doesn't care how this person doesn't care how prominent or popular the other person is.

7:56He just doesn't want to. And at a certain point, when you can get to a I don't give a crap point, that's a good part to be in in your life because you just don't need to take calls for the sake of taking calls. That's the end of my rant. I'm with you. You also got to do what's best for you, your team, your family, and put them first versus the competition. and some people look at it like, oh, it's a community. We should share everything that we're learning. No, I do not want to share stuff with my competition. I want to beat my competition. Yep. Dude, speaking of competition, Mr. Beast is a very competitive guy.

8:29I wanted to talk about if his new app, his new YouTube app is worth a damn. So he has an app called ViewStats. Have you used it? I have used ViewStats in the past. It's an old app though. No, it's not new. It's a socially competitor. It's a social media competitor on the internet, but I have his app on my phone now. So it's in test flight right now. So it's not available to the public. So I asked the person who runs ViewStats. He has a CEO that runs it. He gave me access to it. So I was playing around with it. And I actually started inputting your videos into it. And it shows how many AB tests that you're running for your videos.

9:04It shows me if you have a one out of 10. One of 10 is basically number one out of the last 10 videos that you made. And so to me, it's a really good YouTube app because it tells me things that YouTube Studio doesn't tell me. I can do competitive research very quickly and I can keep track of my own channel or other channels to see how they're doing. And so I can do this on the go. And previously I didn't have something like that. So I think it's interesting. And I promised them that I would talk about it. So here, let me show you an example. So can you see my screen? You can see this, right? Yeah, that's cool.

9:35Okay, so this is Mr. B's channel. channel over here you can see how it's trending over time right um and you can see the estimated revenue you see that at the bottom uh now i do estimate around two to seven million that's a lot of money good for him okay and then you can see his most recent video oh this is cool too sorry one second um i hope they don't kill me for saying this but okay you see the bottom where it says longs versus shorts i think this is important too because earlier we talked about hold it still longs is 34 % shorts is 66 % which is interesting because you can see which channel is focused on shorts or longs and you decide if you want to compete or not here's his latest video wow I spent 100 hours inside the parents that's cool at the same time Patrick who you're with in Mexico I don't know where you are Tulum I'm assuming all his traffic because from shorts, I don't know when he created a long...

10:33You want me to pull it up? Here, I'll pull it up in a second. But this MrBeach graph over here, you can see the red line goes way higher than the gray part, which is what he's standard... That's his standard performance. And what I like the most is, Neil, when you look at the rank for this video, do you see the rank? It's a 2 out of 10, right? So it's a top 2. Yeah, okay, I see it. 2 out of 10. Yep. And at the bottom, you can see the thumbnail test that he's running and the title test that he's running. Cool. Yeah. Well, he's running no title test. He's running one thumbnail changes, and then he has two AV tests going.

11:07Yeah, and he spends like$10 ,000 supposedly per thumbnail. So it's good to – I mean, when you're competing with people, you can look at what their strategy is. And that to me, when I use VueStats, when you use the desktop version, you can find outliers, and you can look for things that have performed really well, certain ideas, and you can repackage it for your own niche. and I think I actually think that's what you're um the the contract that you're paying I think that's what they're doing to find great ideas and then they're just sending you a bunch of thumbnails and you can save a bunch of thumbnails in this thing too um so should we look for look for Patrick real quick before we move on yeah I already know 100 % of his traffic's from shorts because that's all he creates that's correct so he's got 500k subs now here check this out so he has awesome look it's all gray which means it's all shorts yeah 8.7 million last 30 days he gets a lot of views he talks about random interesting facts that you know get people hooked even me like i'll watch some of this stuff that i think pigs flute more than nuclear way stations or something like that yeah it's like random topics you're like huh let me actually watch this video and learn why you know if he if he went all in on this and then just did long form i think he would do really well but that's not his main business he's got a really interesting business coming and I'll let him reveal that when he wants to reveal it.

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14:36So next let's talk about how Google is being sued by chug chug chug uh the book company for ai overviews hurting their traffic and revenue isn't it crazy how someone's like you screwed up my organic traffic i'm gonna sue you now it's just like uh it's their platform they can rank whoever they want this is your problem you can be immediate reaction it's like all when people sue google it's like oh like you didn't diversify your your business and you relied completely on google and then now you're gonna blame them you're you're biting the hand that feeds you. Like, are you stupid? Like a lot of people do that, by the way.

15:11I'm just like, people just don't like to be held accountable. They don't like being held accountable. It's so silly. And people have this notion. Oh yeah, I didn't reverse my traffic sources. I did bad as managing as a CMO or a CEO. And we're going to sue Google. But at the same time, because I don't know if you saw the financial articles or the articles on the financial sites, they're looking to alternative solutions on what they should do with the company. It's just like, oh, you should have diversified your traffic sources earlier on. This is your problem. And it sucks to them. I'm not hating on it.

15:45It's just reality. Yeah. Well, this is what we've seen over the years with affiliate marketers, right? Once they lose their traffic channels, then they start to kind of go crazy and they start to make phone calls to us, right? So I'm looking at the Chegg statement here. So it says, while we made significant headway on our technology, product, and marketing platforms or programs, 2024 came with a series of challenges, including the rapid evolution of the content landscape, particularly the rise of Google AIO or AIO reviews, which, as I previously mentioned, has had a profound impact on Chegg's traffic revenue and workforce.

16:18So then he says, OK, here's three core arguments. I can only see the first two over here. So first, they're filing a complaint for reciprocal dealing, meaning that Google forces companies like Chegg to supply our proprietary content in order to be included in Google search function. Are you really forced to serve? Really? No. Forced to? You can hide Googlebot. Yeah. Second is monopoly maintenance or that Google unfairly exercises its monopoly power within search and other anti-competitive conduct to muscle out companies like Chegg. I don't think they try to focus specifically on Chegg because Chegg is like a fart or a pimple on their butt.

16:57So not sure if they're trying to do that. Dude, this is Chegg's problem. And Google does not have a monopoly over a search. There's Instagram that has a really popular search, 6.5 billion searches a day. Amazon's at 3.5 billion a day. Chad GPT's at a billion. Google controls roughly 18 % of the market share. That is big, don't get me wrong, but there's many different types of searches. five years ago I can see them making this argument today's the road no that being said though I can see um the courts trying to go after Google for this um just because you know it could be a statement that um that you know these senators want to make right so I can see that angle and then potentially what happens is the settlement so that that's that's where I see it going yeah but but the way I end up seeing this is uh with checking what they're doing it's you know like when you look at google and what they're doing i i think google was the one who's a vp there said when like gen z goes to perform a search they tend to go to tiktok and instagram first cheg is actually ideal for college students if i'm not mistaken i haven't been to the website in ages so they should have been optimizing search on chat gpt on instagram and all these other platforms that their customers use instead of just focusing on google because even google has they tend to go to those platforms before Google for Gen Z at least.

18:23Yep, 100%. So I think it sucks. But I think the lesson here for everyone is nail one traffic source first and then start to diversify as quickly as you can. Because if you're going to, you don't want to be at the whim of one channel. Yes. And this is why Eric and I do everything from podcasting to we both wrote books. We create videos. We do shorts. We write blog posts. We don't stop writing blog posts. We both speak at conferences, even though we slow down on it. We take an omni-channel approach because it's the only way to grow in today's world. Yep. And I think we've both been open to it. I mean, you and I both started in blogging back in the day.

19:06You much longer than I have. I think you were blogging for probably already when I first met you. Okay, so when I first met you, it was 14 years ago or 15 years ago. You were probably blogging maybe even five, seven years before that. Yeah. So all Neil knew at the time, because there weren't all these other channels, was literally blogging slash SEO, right? So Neil had to change specifically. Whereas for me, these other channels started to come out already at the time when I started to blog more. So you have to keep an open mind. And you have to, if there's one thing that Neil has, he's not going to hold anything too sacred.

19:38The idea of sunk costs doesn't really apply to you, Neil, because you spent two years building that home and you had the most beautiful background ever and you still got rid of it within 30 days. So sunk costs don't matter to you. No, I look at long term picture and whatever is going to produce the best results, I'll do it and just push emotions to the side. All right. So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. And there will be no more Agency Owners Association. We'll save that for another Marketing School episode. and that being said, we'll have some other things to throw your way in the near future.

20:12So catch you later.