The AI Search Strategy That Actually Works

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.

0:25Neil Patel:LLMs are citing listicles more than any other content type. So Evertune AI ended up releasing a chart, and the chart breaks down the 6 ,000 most cited URLs per model on each platform for both March and April 2026. You want to guess what percentage of the time Gemini shows listicles? Or cites them? 75%. 65, close. Google AI mode is going down from here. Gemini was the highest, 65.1.

0:58Eric Siu:Okay.

0:58Neil Patel:Now we're talking about AI mode? Uh-huh. 45 %? 62.3.

1:03Eric Siu:Okay.

1:03Neil Patel:Perplexity is at 60.4%.

1:05Eric Siu:Uh-huh.

1:06Neil Patel:Google AI overview is at 55.2%. ChatGPT is at 50.1%. Co-pilot is at 39.8%. Okay. Right? So it just goes to show if you want to get sighted by one of these LLM platforms, the listicles are your best approach, but Google's actually been making changes to listicles. Have you been seeing they've been playing whack-a-mole to listicles? No. Yeah, so they're specifically going after self-published listicles, which is very different. And you and I have talked about this. Dude, people are going out there. We interviewed a marketer from a competing agency who ran their marketing, and I won't mention the marketing agency.

1:49Neil Patel:They're like, oh, we've crushed it for them. we created, I think it was almost 200 listicle articles on their own website. So they're ranking for a lot of agency terms. And we didn't end up hiring the guy because although it was impressive on the results, we didn't like the strategy and the tactic. We believed it was like a short term, short term, one trick pony in which if your whole playbook is, I'm just going to go create hundreds and hundreds of listicles on your own website. Well, of course, your own business is going to list your own company, your own products, your own services as number one compared to all your other competitors.

2:24Neil Patel:You agree you would be biased. Any business owner would be biased. Even if you felt you weren't the best, I don't know any business owner who wouldn't put themselves as number one. I mean, look at Amazon. They put their first product number one. Why would you not do that? You have the distribution. Exactly. And what it's causing is Google is just be like, whoa, this is just manipulated results. And they're just playing whack-a-mole at this point. but we're not seeing chat gpt going after him as hard or anywhere near it's more so google is going after and the key here is self-published listicle articles you know what's interesting here so the

3:00Eric Siu:fact that google is going after listicles the self-published listicles it's no different than how they played the game before they they already have the search spam team so they know exactly what to go after what's being manipulated and so when you and i saw this a couple years ago when it's happening, it's the same game. Because you know why? We've been whacked before. When we played this a very long time ago, this is 15 plus years ago, 20, 15, 20 years ago, we had played this game. And it was harder back then for Google search spam team to catch this, but they have to preserve the product. So they have that laid out.

3:30Eric Siu:The thing is Anthropic and OpenAI eventually will catch up too. And I think they'll have their own versions of search spam teams, but this has been no different, which is why we've been saying this since the beginning.

3:40Neil Patel:Yeah. These are terrible strategies. In marketing, I'm sorry, I'm eating some yogis that Eric got me, which I sadly got him addicted to.

3:48Eric Siu:No, yogis are great. It's just yogurt with fruit in the inside.

3:54Neil Patel:You get on Amazon.

3:54Eric Siu:We're not affiliated, but they're great.

3:57Neil Patel:So any marketing tactic that produces high short-term ROI, that's really easy to do. And that's a caveat. That's really easy to do. Usually nine out of 10 times won't last long. And as a marketer or a business owner, You should avoid those tactics. And you can look at them one by one. There may be some edge cases in which you should do them. But in almost all cases, you should avoid those tactics. The reason being is you're spending energy, time, money on these short-term tactics that will go away. And then what you'll find is two, three years later, all the effort and the money and the time you spent from previous tactics won't help you.

4:36Neil Patel:versus if you took the long-term approach, spent the time and money on strategies that don't produce the media ROI and are not that easy. But then three years from now, if you keep doing those kinds of strategies, the results start compounding and your ROI is much higher.

4:52Eric Siu:So we've all, well, I've always said this, that you want to do black hat things in a white hat way. So the way you would do this black hat thing in a white hat way is you would collaborate with other websites, okay? And then maybe they would list you on their listicle. but the whole idea is you don't want to do the self-serving way because by the way think about think this way if you're an algorithm and you're like whoa people really gaming this thing where it's like listicles are are if you're self-serving and everyone's doing it right now it's pretty easy to identify if you're an algorithm so you're better off thinking about collaborating with other people building long-term relationships and then doing that type of strategy maybe it's less volume but you do it with these these you know high authority uh collaborations and the thing is it's not even the link that you're going to get from it and the listicle at the end of the day It's a relationship that you're going to get.

5:34Eric Siu:You're going to be able to get a lot more from that partnership.

5:37Neil Patel:Yes. Yep.

5:38Eric Siu:So by the way, on this note, because we're talking about GEO, SEO right now, you know, what's interesting to me? I spoke to a couple of people recently. One person, these are both content creation tools. Okay. One dropped 80 % in revenue. Okay. 80%. I'm not going to name names right now, but just I'll just say.

5:55Neil Patel:A content creation tool? 80%.

5:57Eric Siu:Okay. And I spoke to someone today. So a GEO tool was introduced to me today. Okay. and let me talk about something else that pisses me off last time i started the episode someone pissed me off today someone pissed me off again you know what i can only tell you this afterwards after we so but but here's what happened so you know one of my friends um introduced me to this geo company okay um and basically i i spoke with them and they're like i'm like we start to call it's like oh yeah you know um we don't want to ask you for anything yet i'm like okay well tell me about your product so i don't really get much about their product okay and then they're like oh they don't tell me much about the product.

6:34Eric Siu:I'm like, okay, so how's your traction right now? You guys are looking to raise another round because they're looking to partner with me, right? They wouldn't tell me their traction. They wouldn't tell me about the product. I'm like, so what do you guys want, right? And then they're like, well, you know, we don't want to ask for anything. We want to ask what you want first. I'm like, dude, you're like pissing me off. Like you're like, I get on this call because my friend asked me to get on this call. And then it's like, you don't tell me what you guys really do. You don't give me enough info. And then like, you don't tell me about your traction.

6:59Eric Siu:So how the F am I supposed to help you? right and then and then you do this whole thing like this old weird positioning thing where you're like well i want to help you first it's i really want to cuss right now i'm just like and i was like guys like you're really annoying me right now and i said that on the call and i'm just like i'm giving you feedback right now if you're going to take these calls in the future like you need to be specific about your ask because i have no idea how to help you right now and but it's one of those content creation tools again so then and but the thing is what my point of saying this is that these content creation tools seem to be going on a downward trend right now and it's interesting because one person is like, they're done with that company.

7:35Eric Siu:They're like, they don't want to work on it as much. And then the other ones, like they're just starting out. So my point of saying this is, by the way, if that company is still listening right now, the one that got on the call with me, I don't know if this is a space to get into.

7:46Neil Patel:Dude, did you see Lily Ray's study on AI content creation and the websites that are using these tools and what's happened to their traffic? No, what happened? And she did an interview with Ross Hudgens, didn't she?

7:57Eric Siu:I don't know who the interview was. Ross Hudgens was the first employee of Single Rain. I wasn't here at the time, but he was the first employee. I didn't know that.

8:03Neil Patel:So pretty much the title of it is like, AI content creates a rapid growth before a steep decline. So there's 220 websites that she was analyzing using tools to see what happens when you create tons of content using AI. What ended up happening after a while, right? Keep in mind, content's been published, so they saw traffic increases from organic perspective. But when you look at the data, From their peak, 54 % lost 30 % or more of their peak organic traffic, 39 % lost 50 % or more, 22 % lost 75 % or more. Within those declines, a reoccurring trajectory appears, a rapid growth in organic pages over 6-12 months, organic traffic peak within roughly 3-6 months of the content peak, and then a steep decline in traffic that erases most of the gain and frequently drops below the prior baseline within the following year.

9:02Neil Patel:So what's happening is companies are using AI to create a lot of content at volume. It's causing traffic growth. But what they're missing out is from an SEO perspective, you're not just evaluated on a page-by-page basis. You're evaluated on your whole site, right? Think of it as an entity. And if you have a lot of junk on your website, it hurts the good pages that were written manually by humans. And overall, we're seeing, or what she's seeing, and we're seeing this at our agency as well, traffic starts dropping more and more and more. And you have this big, messy website with tons of pages, and you have to do a massive cleanup, and it's very hard to recover the traffic.

9:45Eric Siu:It's interesting to me. I mean, I would say this. If you're going to produce something naturally, there's like a half-life where you start to, that traffic's going to decline over time. But I'm looking at the graphs that she has on this page over here, and we should be able to pull this out for the clip. But, you know, I don't need to show the camera, but maybe I will show the camera. But you see these, like, these are pretty steep drop-offs. It basically goes to nothing in the orange line. And you also see the number of organic pages disappearing. At least this is from, like, an Ahrefs index.

10:12Eric Siu:So all that to say is, you know, it's been the same since the beginning. Like, Neil and I have been doing SEO for a while. You publish poo-poo, you end up with poo-poo traffic. Definitely. Yep. Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads and landing pages, you can't do it on LinkedIn ads right now, but you can do it with Carrot. It's www.carrot.ai. Again, k-a-r-r-o-t.ai. And we'll see you on the other side. So you have a prediction here. You get three in a row here, Neil. So you have a prediction here.

10:41Neil Patel:This would be four in a row.

10:42Eric Siu:Is it four in a row? Yeah. Four in a row. I missed the numbers up. Neil's on a streak. Neil, just for months and months and months, added no topics at all. And today he had a random ballot of inspiration. Yeah. Yeah.

10:52Neil Patel:So my prediction is Google will look more like ChatGPT and ChatGPT will look more like Google in the future. What do you mean by that? So when you think about Google, people associate Google with traditional search. We know from a, I'm not talking about it from an engineering perspective, but if you're looking at just LLMs and usage from people using it purely for search, ChatGPT is the winner. By far, it has the majority of usage. I'm assuming you agree with that statement if you're excluding AI overreviews. The second winner is Google. They're in the number two place with AI Overviews, Gemini, etc.

11:27Neil Patel:AI Mode, etc. But most people associate Google search with just traditional search in which, hey, you're going to get some blue links and some videos and maybe an AI Overview. You can go to AI mode to see more, or you can go to Gemini. You can do Lens on your phone, but not that many people use it. They're at roughly 20 billion searches a month right now for Google Lens, which I know seems like a lot. But to put it in perspective, Google's getting around 13.7 billion searches a day, just people just typing in some queries. So the 20 is not bad, but it's not a big chunk percentage-wise. And that, again, is monthly.

12:09Neil Patel:And Google just made some new announcements. They changed their search box and made it an intelligent search box. It's the biggest change to the search box in 25 years. So I don't know if you saw what they just released today. No, I didn't see the product releases today. So it's actually really cool. And if you see my screen, I'll play the video because I know Noah can see the camera there.

12:33Eric Siu:Yeah. So just for the editors, by the way, when we're showing this stuff, we have a link column for this. We should show these in the videos.

12:38Neil Patel:Yeah, so in this example, for anyone who's just listening, in Google search box, imagine a plus before you type in the queries. So in the search box, it's pretty much elongated oval. And on the right side, you have the search button. Now imagine now on the left side, you have a plus button. So you can click the plus and you can click on anything. AI mode, create images, or gallery. Where is it? Let me see the options actually again. Yeah, AI mode, create images, deep search, canvas, gallery, camera, files. So, for example, you can click on gallery, and you can select two or three items that you like.