Why AEO is Overhyped

0:00So we're talking about SEO. We might as well talk about why I think AEO is overhyped because if you look at the Ahrefs just posted yesterday SEO company. ChatGPT traffic is flat in November. And you look at Gemini 3, oh, they're starting to kind of take their users a little bit. Are you talking about ChatGPT referral traffic or the traffic for ChatGPT.com? The first one is traffic to ChatGPT.com. The second piece is referral. I don't think referral traffic has changed that much. So, yeah. So when you're saying ChatGPT traffic is flat from Ahrefs, they're measuring the traffic going to ChatGPT.com?

0:31Correct. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so, I'm not saying don't do AEO. I think we get a lot of people asking us for AEO. But the thing is, I think it's not even 1 % of traffic for ChatGPT. It's 0.25 % of web traffic is ChatGPT. And I remember talking to a pretty significant company a couple weeks ago. And the reason is, dude, if it's less than 1%, why is everyone just focusing on this brand new thing over here when search traffic is still 42 %? We're not saying search traffic is going to remain that way forever. But I do think right now people are over-allocating. And the game is actually search everywhere optimization, not just AEO.

1:06Yeah. If you knew the data I knew for ChatGVT, you would be shocked. Shocked in a good way or bad way? Bad way. So, like, even less. Yeah, I signed an NDA. Okay. It's one of the largest corporations in the world. Yeah. We'll just leave it at this is overhyped, yes? I don't think it's actually overhyped. I think it's here to stay. It's very powerful. I'm not talking about just the technology. I'm also talking about as a marketing channel. I think it's just early endings and people haven't figured out how to really monetize it. When I say overhype, hype is like for the short term in my mind. It's overhyped in short term.

1:47I'm not saying it's not going to work. We said this with AI in the beginning too, in general. I think AEO is underhyped in the long run and how few companies are focusing on it when they should. I think the revenue expectations from it in the short run are too high. But I think in the long run, they're underestimating because it doesn't matter who wins. You and I know this is the new format. You need to do SEO, AEO, whatever you want to call it, AI, SEO in the future to do well, no matter which platform is going to win. And I think the platform is not going to be winner takes all. I think it's going to be multiple players owning the space for different circumstances.

2:27And the best example I have for this is when I talked about the results for one of the campaigns, and I'm telling you, you would really be shocked. I was in this company's office and they were asking me which one is going to win, okay, ChatGPT or Google. And I'm like, they're both going to end up taking it. Like, I don't see it. I only use ChatGPT. So then I asked them a question. What social network do you use? What guests do you, if you had to pick one, what one do you think they would pick? Like in what context? Just generally use. like every day. I'll give you the answer. YouTube? They said Instagram.

3:07For me, it's YouTube. Okay. And they're like, I'm like, okay. So there's a lot of social networks out there. Your social network's Instagram, right? I'm like, do you have a TikTok account? I do, but I rarely ever log in. How often do you log in? I don't know, once every month or two. Okay. Do you have a LinkedIn account? Yeah. How often do you log in? A few times a month. Do you have a Facebook account? I do. How often do you log in? Maybe only once a week. All right. Do you use YouTube? Yeah, I use it every day. So I'm like, there's not one winner. You use it for different things. Do you use X?

3:45Yeah, I use X every single day. So I was like, so you're telling me you only use YouTube, but in reality, are you saying that YouTube is your social network, but you use a lot of social networks? And then I start talking about use cases versus Instagram versus YouTube. and they're talking about YouTube's a little bit different because YouTube offers things like makeup tutorials that Instagram doesn't. And I was like, you sure it really offers different types of content? I'm like, I bet you that makeup tutorial that you're looking for on YouTube is on Instagram. They're like, I don't know. So then I'm like, okay, show me something that you watch on YouTube.

4:21They show me it and guess what? Within six minutes, I was able to find that video on Instagram. Instagram, their search feature sucks compared to YouTube, but I tried searching for it, couldn't do it. Then I ended up looking up the creator of it, had to scroll a lot, found that video from the creator. To make your point. Right? To make my point. Yep. And the point I was getting at to her, I was just like, you use different social networks for different things. X, she used it for news. People will use ChatGPT and Google and Gemini and Perplexity and all these other solutions. And I really look at Gemini as Google because most people that I know don't go to Gemini directly, but a lot of their stuff is integrated into Google.

5:06I'm assuming you agree with that. And I believe the social networks are going to have, I mean, the AI platforms, the LLMs, will have different use cases from Perplexity to ChatGPT to Google and so forth and so on. Just like how people have different use cases for social networks, even though they have access to a lot of the same information and content. So two things here. We should talk about some of our use cases for the different LLM platforms because you and I pay for everything. And then I want to talk about how Goldman Sachs talks about the real ROI from companies like JP Morgan, Chipotle, Target, and UPS.

5:37But so use cases, so real AI use cases I have from the different LLMs. ChatGPT is my go-to because it has memory, right? And so I store everything in there. I can think strategically or remember what I talked about with people we need to recruit or processes, things like that, okay? But what I use Claude for, right? So code I use for a code. Yeah. So code, when I want to analyze the data we have. So I've been doing this recently this week. I was like, hey, look at all the closed WAN deals from HubSpot and look at all the GONG transcripts tied to that. And tell me what people are talking about.

6:11And using the Ahrefs MCP, what keywords we should be going after. Okay. Also, with the closed loss deals, look at all the GONG transcripts. What are people's objections? What should we be optimizing for? Oh, also do a win-loss pattern to show me what the, like, for example, for our WAN deals, we have 34 touchpoints. Okay. For our lost deals, it's 60 % less. It's like, okay, that's some stuff that normally you can't get. Well, are you basing the lost deals based on when you lose it? Because if you look at the lost deals and if you lose it early on, you're not going to have the same touch point.

6:39I'm making a point. So we use Claude. We use Gemini. I use it for VO3. I use it for image generation. I use it for the Gemini Gems because you can pull from YouTube. I use it for Notebook LM. So my point is making your point too. It's like we have different use cases for these things. I'm curious, what are your use cases for the different ones? So I can break it down into two simple buckets. For personal stuff, I use ChatGPT. For business stuff, I use Google. That's easy. It's really easy because Google has more data. And I find in business, like if I'm asking tax-related stuff or corporate structures, Google tends to give me better responses than what I get from ChatGPT.

7:21They're similar, but sometimes chat GPT, I found this to be a little bit more inaccurate, which is too risky on those kinds of things. Personal stuff, I'm asking things like health, sleeping better, neck pain, stuff like that. And I use it because of the memory. So that way I don't have to keep going back and starting over. And I like perplexity. It's not necessarily an LLM because it uses the other ones, but I like it for deep research. It's really good for stock research and I want different charts and things like that and also like projections and all that. So I've tried it for that. I've tried Grok for that.

7:53And I've tried Google and Chad GPT. I found them all to be off when I'm trying to do that. I just want it to be directionally correct. Yeah. I want it to be 100 % accurate. That's the problem. Because if I'm going to make a trade based on the data, I don't want anyone sending me... I want to feel like 80 % good about it. But like Grok, I use Grok quite a bit. Like if someone tweets something with data, I just want to know. I want to hit the button to like verify it. So I'll use that. So there's different use cases for everything. But going back, uh goldman sachs reveals real ar ai goldman sachs reveals real ai roi from companies like jp morgan chipotle target and ups so we you and i we've been talking about like what's the true roi right so um i'll start here so let's start with jp morgan so they use ai to reduce head count growth while revenue climb so bank of new york that's not that specific but they bank of new york melon they built 117 ai solutions with 100 digital employees and then rocket Mortgage implemented AI to cut loan processing time from four hours to 15 minutes.

8:50It's not bad. Okay, let's go to Target. Did I say Target? Target uses AI for forecasting across the organization. Home Depot implements AI across supply chain and stores. And then Walmart built four super agents for customers, employees, and advertisers. And then you have UPS, which saved 38 million liters of fuel. That's pretty hefty, right? AI processes 90 % of cross-border transactions. And then JP hunt automated 100 ,000 hours of work across operations. So we're starting to see real ROI, Chipotle, huge improvements in kitchen automation, right? So I think that the savings, maybe it's not quite apparent yet, but I think we're starting to see it.

9:26I think we're really going to start seeing the savings going into 2027. I think companies are starting to implement it. And when you look at what they're implementing, it's still a small fraction of their business. I think we're really going to start seeing it in 2027 because I know people are worried about the deteriorating job market, which in theory, the CME watch group's predicting what, like an 89 % chance is 89 %? That there's a Fed rate cut? Yeah. Let's see, 87.2%. And I really look at it from a perspective of you're going to start seeing the impact more in 2027. I think there's also going to be new jobs created and it's not going to be as catastrophic as people are thinking, just like we've seen in past with history.

10:09I could be wrong. You know, I'm not the smartest person out there, but I do believe people are going to just have to learn new skills. It's going to impact jobs. They're going to have to learn new skills and start doing new things. Let's talk about this piece because on one end, the Elon podcast I heard, let's just take a small detour for fun. If you were to pick two stocks right now, not financial advice, guys, what would you pick? Yeah, again, not financial advice. My two favorites. Because we did this a couple months ago. Right now.

10:39Google.

10:43Google's the easy one for me.

10:48The number two is a toss-up for me, and I'll tell you why. It would either be Microsoft or Netflix. Okay. Wow. Netflix, because I think they've really won that market when it comes to streaming content. It's about Warner Brothers today. Yeah. I don't know if that's going to go through. Yeah. But whether they buy that deal or not, I really do think Netflix has won that mind share from the perspective of you just stream content there. And people are really hooked on it. It's a new version of TV. The reason it's a toss-up between that and Microsoft is with Microsoft, they really have their grip. I'll pick Microsoft as number two.

11:28They have their grip on the corporate ecosystem, and I don't see that going away anytime soon. The reason I am reluctant about Microsoft is their products aren't that great for a lot of them, but we tend to use them because of the - Bundling. Bundling and the pricing. But some of their products, like Teams isn't as good as Slack. Yeah. But I'm okay with it because it's a lot cheaper than paying for Slack and Zoom. Yeah. I would go Google, number one, because you and I know Google well. I mean, the data that they have, the gem, like they're just, like they're on a rampage or tear right now. The TPUs, all these things, right?

12:02Waymo, all these things. I would go Tesla number two because of robotics. And I think that's, if he gets it right, like Elon gets it right, that's going to be huge. Interesting enough, when Elon did that interview with the other guy, he doesn't actually hold anything. He doesn't invest. He's like, I just like to build things and build on top of that. But he's like, if I were to pick, it would be Google because of how far they are with AI right now. And his number two is NVIDIA, which is interesting. So anyway, this leads to the final topic that we have. Wait, let's go back really quickly. You talked about Elon.

12:33I'm assuming you love it heavily because of robots and the future is going there. I just watched an interview with Boston Robotics, Boston Dynamics CEO. Boston Dynamics used to be owned by Google at one point. Then it got bought by SoftBank. Now it's 80 % owned by Hyundai and then 20 % by SoftBank. Okay. Did you know when Elon, he mentioned this on CNBC, did you know when Elon's been doing the showcasing of the Tesla robot, a lot of it is powered by humans? I didn't know that. And did you know the Boston Dynamics versions are not powered by humans? That's okay. They're much further along. That's okay.

13:08I don't think it's going to be winner take all, but I would go with Tesla. I agree with you. And did you know like Boston Dynamics already has tons of robots in warehouses and corporations that are leading the path? I'm not saying they're going to win. I agree with you. It's just they don't have the cachet as let's say Tesla does. Yeah. I would also go Tesla too because of Robotaxis, right? So Robotaxis, robotics, all that stuff. So anyway, let's move to the last topic here. So this is the final one. So this is it's always good for us to talk about things where we have like a like a I might have an argument with somebody earlier this week.

13:39Right. Like I feel strongly about this. But my take on this is no, your job is not safe from A.I. Like so one of the debates I had was like, oh, you know, but my job is safe because I'm going to be talking to people all the time in the human to human connection. Absolutely. I agree with that. Human to human connection is important. but would I rather take Neil with human to human connection or Neil with human connection plus AI like it's equivalent it's no different to me like if you say um you're it's clear to me that if you don't want to learn AI you're just saying to me uh Neil I don't want to come to work with a laptop I don't want to come to work using the internet today I don't want to use electricity that is what's the equivalent of and I don't think 99 % of jobs I think are like I'd rather pick someone with AI versus not and one of the debates that we were having was just like oh but like no So, you know, we have other things to focus on right now.

14:29Like, so should we wait like two more years, three years? How long should we wait? It's a terrible way to think. I think those kind of people are the ones that are going to get passed by by others and other corporations. Yeah. And then it's kind of like they'll kind of just throw it to the side and joke like offhandedly, like as if nothing's going to happen. But again, can I work for you if I don't know how to use the Internet? No, you can't. Yeah. Do I think you need to be the best person with AI? No, but as a human, you need to try to improve yourself and continually learn more and get better and adapt with where the future is going.

15:02Now, here's a question, philosophical one. Here's how you guys are doing at MP Digital, but what level of training are you going to do for AI for your people? I don't know. That's a question I have to ask our CEO. My co-founder and I are really different. it yeah we tend to just hire the people that already have good knowledge and already already using it because i don't want to have to tell people hey do this and do that i want people who are bringing something to the table and be like oh i've been doing this cool stuff that you guys haven't even seen yet you should check this out because they're like self-motivated yeah those are the people i'm hiring i'm not really trying to hire people that i had to convince to use ai and train them up, I'm hiring more so people right now that are good to go.

15:53And they're bringing stuff to the company and teaching our organization new ways we could be using AI that we never thought about that they're using already. So the way I see this is we want to hire the best of the best people, right? We want to hire people that have high agency who are biased to action. Well, the thing with me is like, it's never been easier to find the people who have the biased action because before it's like, oh, what are you learning? Can you show me some case studies, whatever. Now it's just like, hey, what are you doing with AI? So what would you do for us? How much are you spending per month out of pocket?

16:20Some of the people I interview,$500 a month. Someone we talked to earlier,$2 ,000 a month. So I'm not saying you need to spend$2 ,000 a month, but it's very clear. If we want the best of the best, then that should be one of the first things that we look at. And then one of the pushbacks that I get is like, oh, well, how are we going to find these people? They're not available everywhere. Of course they're not. High agency, bias to action people are in short supply always. Yes. And you got to go hunt them out. They tend not to apply for jobs. Exactly, exactly. What's the winning formula for 2026?

16:49There is no winning formula. Think of it as cooking spaghetti. Try new channels and experimentation. Be open-minded. Take the spaghetti, throw it against the wall. Whatever sticks usually means it's cooked. So think of your marketing that way. Throw it against the wall. Whatever's starting to get traction, double down on that, whatever's not. Push it off to the side and get back to it later. But you got to keep experimenting, trying new things. And you got to do it at a faster clip than you were doing it in 2025 or even 2024. Just because AI is causing people to move so fast, look at these venture-funded companies now.

17:20People now expect the norm to be zero to 30 million or 50 million in revenue in like five months, six months. That is not normal. But they're assuming that, and that's all because of AI. Yeah. All right, guys, that's it for today. Catch you later. Bye.

17:42Thank you.