Is Google Losing Search Volume Because of LLMs, and How to Use Grok to Make Money

0:00So he said last month live Datos answered a bunch of questions about search and AI The first question is, is Google losing searchers to AI? Oh, you know what? I can share my screen. I forgot we can do this. Hold on. I can share my screen now. Nice. Because we're virtual. Let me share. Okay, here we go. Do you see this? I do. Okay. So it says, the first question here is, is Google losing searchers to AI? Which I think is a great question. Number two, how do Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini stack up? I think that's a good one. Number three, what percent of users visit major AI tools each month, and is it growing?

0:36And I feel like, Neil, you might have an answer to the third one. But before I scroll down, do you want to answer any of these before I read? You can give the responses, but from what we see, and it could be different from his responses, the first one is we're seeing Google not necessarily lose people to AI platforms. we're seeing people use multiple platforms. We're still seeing Google's popularity. But at the same time, we're seeing popularity increase for chat GPT, perplexity, and all these other solutions out there. And Google's AI responses have drastically improved in the last few months compared to when they first launched them.

1:21So that was the first one. That's at least the data that we're seeing because when we look at average traffic going to websites that are doing SEO, we're not really seeing huge declines or anything like that. And if you look at it, look at this, the percentage of users on Chad G. Black City and Google, look, Google's not dying or anything. They're just using all the platforms. That's the biggest thing that we're seeing. Yep. I'm seeing the same thing too. And we do, I mean, I'm sure you have search filters for your Google Analytics so you can see which LLMs are increasing over time. Sure, we can say it's gone up 10, 15x in the last 12 months or so, but still a very tiny number.

1:56But I do believe that number is going to continue to exponentially go up because I don't know about you, Neil. Actually, I do know about you. You continue to use Google quite a bit. I use Perplexity a lot this past week and ChatGPT a lot this past week. And whenever I argue with my mom now, I just translate something into Mandarin and it just does my arguing for me. So that's another thing, yeah, which I'll bring up in a second. So here, let me scroll up here because I have multiple graphs here. Okay, so this chart, you want to read this one? Yeah, percentage of users on chat GPT and perplexity from 31st October 2024 to Jan 16, 2025.

2:34They did see a dip during the holiday period. But when you look at their growth from November to January, it's pretty much flat from percentage of users. Yeah, okay. All three services showed growth in average number of sessions per user over the year of 2024. So Google was 11.47 to 14.12. And that's Google, by the way, guys, this is still Google search. So when Neil says Google isn't dying. Have you seen this? That's a pretty insane number. it is though i still think google's dying but not in the way that people think google's not dying from loss of traffic they're dying from a loss of market share just like facebook facebook used to be the king of social media facebook still makes a ton of money they're just not number one and depending on the audience that you talk to some people say tiktok's number one some people say instagram's number one it really depends on the age group that you're going after and the content type that you're focusing on.

3:31But Facebook still makes a ton of money. And Google's market share went from it being the main solution to search to now there's 46.1 billion daily searches and Google has roughly 18 % of the market share. Does it mean Google's losing in popularity from a traffic standpoint? No, not really. But are they losing from a market share standpoint? Yes. And that's okay because there's still a ton of money to be made this is amazing look so chat chpd went from 0.43 um average number of sessions per user to 1.27 so it tripled and then perplexity went from 0.07 to 0.045 so you can see the growth over time um i think yeah you can just see this and then you can see chat chpd is rising um so this is interesting average number of sessions per user on chat chpd and perplexity chat chpd goes up a lot perplexity is going up um it's not as crazy of a hockey stick.

4:24And then I think the last graph we'll look at over here is stickiness factor. And then I think I'm going to read this article myself later. I'm going to save it over here. So the stickiness factor, those of you that can't see this right now, measures user engagement or retention by evaluating how frequently users return to a tool. It is often quantified using the DAU-MAU ratio. So DAU means daily active users. Monthly active users is MAU. And a higher stickiness factor indicates that a significant portion of users engage with the tool regularly, reflecting its ability to integrate into users' routines and maintain their interest over time.

4:59So you can see for Google stickiness in the yellow line over here, stickiness factor is 20%, and then it goes up all the way up to 30%, and then it's kind of dropped into the middle like 25 % or so. And then ChatGPT rose from about 10%, peaked at a little over 20%, and still is close to 20 % right now. um so i think look although the average stickiness of google remains higher 25.35 percent compared to chachipiti 16.78 percent chachipiti stickiness grew at a faster rate so they're seeing a lot more retention um and earlier what i just told you i use it to argue with my mom i use it to do research for my eyes because my lasik my eyes hurt like hell it recommended the right thing like it does a lot of stuff for me um so i mean i find i'm using it more because there's more utility than I'm getting from it.

5:45That's all. Yeah. And I still find that when I use chat GPT, for example, like if I'm asking very detailed questions, I was asking a question earlier today on the number of algorithm updates that Google has performed over the last, you know, 10 years. And I wanted the number for each year. And keep in mind, I pay for my chat GPT subscription. I don't know what it cost maybe a few hundred bucks a month. I think 200. Like the responses are just terrible for some of these things. And what I find is when you're doing research, sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's a big miss. And this is why people use multiple platforms.

6:25I got the data from Google and it was much better. It took me call it 15, 20 minutes, but I got it and it was much more accurate than going to chat GPT. And heck, I even did a Google search and I got the rough answer in less than a minute because I just went to images and there were some charts and there was one of Moz, but Moz was missing two of the years for the algorithm updates. But they had the majority more than the last 10 years. But either way, it was just a rough data point for me because I was looking this up to the fact that someone was asking me like, oh, no, Google isn't actually making more algorithm changes over time.

7:01They're making less and less. I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure they're making more. And I was doing a Google search for it, but Chad GPT failed me at it. And the point I'm making isn't that chat GPT is better than Google or vice versa. It's people are going to use multiple platforms because they're better at different things. Here, we're going to do two things. One, I'm going to tell you a use case for Grok that I think you'll really like because you like money. Two, I'm going to tell you some, let's talk about some of the stupidest things that people say when it comes to AI. And this was triggered by one thing that my mom said the other day.

7:32And I love my mom, obviously, but a lot of people say this and she said this comment as well. but um here so do you pay for uh do you pay for uh x premium or or grok yeah okay so that's like 20 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month or something like that but um so although it may be on an annual plan so it's a little bit discounted could be um so grok 3 is um that's their x's llm basically so they launched this uh this giga cluster and i think it has like 200 000 you know gpus um the the latest NVIDIA or something like that. So basically, Grok3 has a version where it does deep research and it also does thinking for you.

8:15And so imagine this, Neil, if I want to take a look at the 10Ks for Omnicom, for example, this agency holding company, okay, I can have Grok3 pull up deep research for that. And then I want it to do thinking for me. So then I'll say, okay, after you've done the deep research on the 10K, tell me what the return on invested capital was and tell me if you think this type of a holding company model is going to be viable in the next five to ten years given AI, right? It actually breaks down all the numbers for you. And it's basically like an investment analyst, right? And I started using it in that way.

8:47So I think that's interesting. But do you have any comments on that before we start to talk about some of the stupidest things that people say? Oh, he's doing it. See, he could help himself. I'm actually asking Grok a question, the same one I asked Chad GPT this morning. and it's researching let's see how good their deep research is you know Grok I don't know if you saw the roll up that they did I believe it was yesterday where you can now just talk to it and it just answers you back in voice for everything oh that's great I'm going to try it yeah I believe you get to download the mobile app I have the standalone app I get blocked from Twitter after 9am to 7pm yeah but already from what i can tell because i'm using grok's deep search it takes a while but i'm assuming that the results are going to be better than chat gpt's uh results for what i spend 200 a year uh i don't know about that the deep research is is pretty good on chat gpt too but um i think i don't know grok has we'll see what the i mean obviously grok's pulling from the internet and it's pulling from x as well and then um chat gbd is pulling from the internet too so i do find perplexes deep research pretty good too i think it just depends on the use case because chat gbd does ask you to it does ask you clarifying questions um to me i feel like grok does a good job with the investment analyst pieces um and like you can do like a like you can basically do like someone tweeted to say it's like oh uh mckinsey consultant as a service um financial analyst as a service.

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12:39It's still loading. This is your first time using Grok, huh? No, I've used it before. Grok three. yes the first time using grok 3 oh see we got to use it with neil on on this call okay neil while while the deep research pulls up okay um let me tell you some of the stupidest things that i hear from ai and you tell me if you even if you disagree with me or or tell me some other stupid things that you hear so one stupid thing is this um as i was debating with my mom um because we like to argue about stupid things uh so she's like you know you can't really um you know ai is inaccurate. I've heard from my friends that AI is inaccurate.

13:16So you shouldn't trust it all the time. I was like, mom, that is the equivalent of saying you shouldn't search for knowledge because it may be inaccurate. Like, how does that make any sense? Right. And so I hear that pretty often in the workplace. It's like, oh, and then the other thing I hear is, oh, just this past day, I think it was like, oh, Eric. Yeah. You know, Eric, you use AI too much. That's also the equivalent of saying, Eric, you search for knowledge too much. Right. And so I'm just like, dude, no knowledge is perfect like you tell me one source neil where you can find perfect information aside from like science or math maybe there's no perfect information you're you're gonna have to make decisions for yourself so when people say that that just seems to me come from a place of either ignorance or fear yeah and by the way gra came back with response their deep research did not tell me counts uh instead it just it it gave me a lot of bullet points filing update count the description and you know talking about parasite seo and patterns and i'm like this has nothing to do with algorithm updates on an annual basis but all right and my question was pretty clear and then when i just asked it not using deep search on how many algorithm updates it's like 2024 two updates 2023 two updates i'm like no there's more than two updates you know i'm like Even if you look at the major updates for some of these years, like 2020, there's more than one major Google update in a year.

14:48I don't know the exact number for 2020, but there has to be more than one Google update. How many major Google updates in 2020? Let's see. Google released three major core updates in 2020, Jan, May, and December. And this is just core updates. and this is from AI Overviews. When I'm looking at Grok, it says one update in December. But ChadGPT was better. Google actually gave me the best results. ChadGPT next, and then Grok. Yeah, I think it just, like, one, this will all get better over time. And then two, sometimes you have to use different tools in the tool set. It's no different than using a hammer versus a Phillips screwdriver or things like that.

15:32So, you know, it's good for what it is right now. This is the problem with AI. Markers believe, at least some markers that I talked to, like I was at a B2B event, and some markers believe, oh yeah, it's just going to take over everything. The way AI works, as you and I already know, is taking all the information from the web and giving you output. How much crap do we see on the internet that's just off? How is the AI going to know that just something is off or not? It's not like the AI has been doing marketing for 20-something years and it just knows something is just off of intuition and experience.

16:03I'm not saying it won't get better over time. I genuinely believe it will, but it's hard for an AI to determine if something is bullshit or valid. And when you see a lot of bullshit around the Internet and you see a lot of signals that are false signals, it's not easy to remove them. And I had a good friend who used to work at Google and they left and now she works somewhere else at another big tech company. I believe it's actually Microsoft. And we were talking about fake information the other day. and she was telling me she's like dude since google's inception we try to remove results from the first page and even the second page that were just false and inaccurate but she's like you know how hard that is because one person's opinion can differ very drastically from another person's opinion and a great example of this is politics is trump the right candidate or is harris the right candidate is you know germany just finished their election did the group that win was it were they right or were they wrong is someone good to be the FBI director or is a vaccine good for you or bad for you and Eric and I aren't trying to get political but the point I'm getting at everyone can relate to these subjects because you know when you talk to people there's a wide variety of opinions which skew the data on the internet which make it hard for a grok or chad gpt or google ai overviews to just give you the answer and take this in smaller formats for things like marketing, where there's also a lot of opinions or not just health or finance and investing and pretty much most things that you're going to have issues of people saying one thing or another.

17:40Yep. 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 And that being said, you know, we'll have some other things to throw your way in the near future. So catch you later.