Your Brand Is Invisible in AI Search (Here's the Fix)

14 Jul 2026 · 17 min · 7 chapters

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In short

The episode argues that AI search and AI assistants can’t “see” your brand unless they’re connected to your real business data and signals. It claims most AI marketing fails because teams bolt AI onto functional tasks without changing the business core; 95% of AI transformation initiatives fail. Guests discuss how traffic can drop (e.g., fewer clicks from broad Google rankings) while revenue can still improve by targeting specific, high-intent terms and enterprise customers. They share examples like “how to get more Instagram followers” driving ~600k visitors/month but zero revenue. They also cite Kai-Fu Lee’s prediction that 50% of companies will need new leadership for the AI era.

Guests

Neil (MP Digital; SEO tools like Ubersuggest/AnswerThePublic; focuses on revenue/pipeline, outbound response rates ~6–9%) and the host (mentions HubSpot’s AI using customer data; tracks revenue dashboards daily).

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Understanding Traffic and Revenue Trends

0:26 to 1:34

Discussion on the relationship between traffic and revenue in digital marketing.

“And I also look at traffic and revenue as two different things.”

The Shift in Marketing Focus

1:34 to 4:12

Exploration of how businesses are adapting their marketing efforts in response to AI and changing market dynamics.

“And does it mean ranking on Google is bad?”

AI's Impact on Business Leadership

4:12 to 6:28

Discussion on the need for new leadership styles in the era of AI as predicted by industry experts.

“He's like, it can replace creativity in many ways.”

Technological Advances in Construction

6:28 to 7:57

Insights into how technology is transforming construction processes and its implications for adaptability.

“Uh, You never saw my Vegas house that I built, right?”

The Current State of Marketing Metrics

8:03 to 12:06

Analyzing how marketers are shifting their focus from traffic to revenue and customer retention.

AI Transformation Challenges

12:06 to 14:00

Discussion on the challenges and slow pace of AI transformation in large companies.

“These companies are all more than happy to hire outside people to help them with this.”

Analyzing Growth Trends and Revenue Multiples

14:00 to 14:44

Learn about the growth rates and revenue multiples of companies in the tech sector.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Eric Siu:Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

0:25Neil Patel:Your brand is invisible in AI search.

0:27Eric Siu:so can chat gpt find you when buyers ask so this is interesting because i'm speaking at moscon next week and i'm sure a lot of people are going to be talking about this so what do you do about it because like i look at your hrs traffic my hrs traffic i think we had a mutual friend that was looking at both of our traffic mine has gone down a lot i don't know about you but some of our competitors it looks like their traffic's going up so i just don't pay attention anymore to that. Yeah.

0:55Neil Patel:And I also look at traffic and revenue as two different things. Exactly. Our traffic has gone down some due to people click less from organic Google results. I would say even before all the AI stuff, our traffic started going down because we were ranking number one on Google for broad terms, like digital marketing, we're ranking high up on page one for search engine optimization and SEO and terms like that, but it wasn't driving revenue from our ideal customers. And we found that doing some of the things I've talked about earlier on how we're marketing drive a lot more revenue for our business in the long run.

1:33Neil Patel:And it's been super effective, but it's, you know, time consuming. It's a longer play. And does it mean ranking on Google is bad? No, I think it's great. It's just going after very specific terms. the keyword i got more traffic than anything else from on google in my life for my own website was how to get more instagram followers never zero yeah zero revenue from that i think at the peak from that one keyword i believe i was getting somewhere like 600 000 visitors or and it could be variations of that keyword like how to get more instagram followers bless you uh uh how to get more followers on Instagram, right?

2:16Neil Patel:So switching around, but it's the same thing. But I was getting somewhere around like 600 ,000 visitors a month from that keyword. And this is one blog post, guys. One blog post and not even the total amount of visits to the blog post, just those kind of terms. And it didn't drive any revenue. And this is like, it quickly taught me that more traffic doesn't mean more revenue. This is a long time ago that I learned that. So I switched the strategy to focus more on enterprise. Yeah.

2:41Eric Siu:You know, I think it's also important to understand whatever Neil and I are talking about right now, it depends on your business. Because even with Neil, he's talking about the nuances of what channels works for him. And I'm also talking about the nuances, but also who he's selling to. And then also what we're selling is a little different at some times. And so for me, for example, what's going to work? Oh, LinkedIn's going to work. Okay. X is going to work. Doing webinars works. Doing events works. Doing dinners works as well. And then in a sense, doing these free pilots and outbound works for us too, right?

3:11Eric Siu:Because we send a lot of these different offers and our outbound response rates are like you know they're decent like six eight percent right now maybe even like nine percent so it's not bad it's not bad yeah when i used to send dms in other ways you know it was like 10 15 yeah yeah believe it at that um you're just speaking about google i thought that's really interesting do you know who kai fu lee is of course you don't so no i know you don't so who is kai fu lee kai fu lee was the ex-president of google so he said this this guy over here like my my he looks exactly like me right

3:42Neil Patel:Oh, you missed it. Here we are. Look, he looks exactly like me. No. I don't know how you think he looks like you. He looks very different than you. He doesn't.

3:57Eric Siu:But okay, so let me give you a little background on this guy. So Kai-Fu Lee, this dude, he spoke at a TED conference I was at quite a while back. And he was just saying, he had this prediction. He's like, you know, the one thing that AI can't replace is creativity. He actually said in this video, I was wrong. He's like, it can replace creativity in many ways. So he said that. So here's what he said. This is recent, right? And so this prediction might be wrong as well. But keep in mind, ex-president of Google China. He says, I predict 50 % of companies will need new leadership because the old management style won't work in the era of AI.

4:28Eric Siu:That's exactly why I'm seeing 95 % of so-called AI transformation initiatives fail. Most are bolting on AI palettes for functional tasks, but never touching the business core. And this is something that we're seeing quite a bit as well. So we should react to this. 50 % of companies will need new leadership because the old management style won't work in the era of AI.

4:47Neil Patel:50 % of new companies will need new leadership, you said?

4:52Eric Siu:Will need new leadership because the old management style won't work in the era of AI. I believe it.

4:57Neil Patel:I think a lot of people will have to adapt and are going to struggle to adapt. I also think it's business by business. Like some businesses, manufacturing, automating more of it, I don't think is as hard to adapt to.

5:10Eric Siu:I don't I don't know like to an extent yes but I saw a video today you saw open air release their 5.6 sol right and I saw a video of a Japanese farmer um that was he was initially like rolling up the greenhouse like to rolling up the the things for the the plants to air out and then he used uh 5.6 to come up with the machinery to plug everything in and it just rolls it up in the morning and rolls it down or like depending on the weather in the area that's cool that's cool right and that's that's manufacturing but I do think there's less disruption when it comes to manufacturing or like building the Emon that's being built over here, right?

5:42Eric Siu:Yeah, I think that's harder. I think it's going to take longer for that to happen. But I think we're talking about like truck driving and like, you know, drive like stuff like that may be faster. But I do think when we talk to there's certain clients that we have right now, and I'm sure you're seeing this like on that, we have single brain and single grain right now. So I can see two different things, right? So I'll just ask about our gong calls. So we can see what's happening with single grain. And it's like, yeah, you know, they don't want us to do anything AI, some clients nothing AI, right?

6:07Eric Siu:Because they're scared. I'm like, guys, why do you think that is? Like, oh, they're scared of it versus single brain more, more, more, more, more. Right. And so I would say it's, it's like, it's, I can see it moving up to like 50, 50. Um, and even within the company right now, which we're sitting here last week, I was like, I have two cultures right now. 50 for 30, 40, 50 % is kind of like, they don't want to adapt. The other 50 % is flying.

6:29Neil Patel:Yeah, dude. Uh, You never saw my Vegas house that I built, right? I saw it in a video and then you left. Yeah, I sold it. Yeah. Neil built this house for two years. It was a beautiful house and he left in a month. Go ahead. That house, we hired a company that showed me a video of how in a factory, they use technology to build the frame of your house. And then it just plugs in place and they're bringing it over in truckload. So that way your construction happens much faster. We did it. And it was like this new age technology. Like imagine doing framing of a house, but it's done by a computer and machines.

7:05Neil Patel:And it's just done really quickly. And then they just bring over wall by wall. And then people just connect them together like a Lego set. We paid for that. It works so well that it took double the length to do the framing than if we did it all manual. Now, it doesn't mean that technology sucks. It just means with certain things, like Eric was saying with construction, things will just take quite a bit longer to adapt.

7:29Eric Siu:I'd rather go with proven at that point versus like trying something brand new. Unless it's like, oh, we're going to save you 90%. Then maybe I'll try to brand new thing. What did they promise you?

7:39Neil Patel:They promised me they would build me a home in less than a year.

7:43Eric Siu:All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called MP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer to Public. all you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side

8:03Neil Patel:what is it usually two years three years two to three yeah yeah it depends if it's a cookie cutter home you can do it pretty quickly but if it's custom let's call it two years yeah you know

8:12Eric Siu:it's funny you're just talking about the mindset people and like you have a mindset person that works with you right now i do uh-huh i'll just leave it at that oh yeah oh oh not an employee

8:23Neil Patel:yeah you're just saying like a contractor yeah yeah yeah the same mindset person you know yeah

8:27Eric Siu:yeah yeah same mindset person yeah by the way speaking of which so we're recording in my conference room usually we're recording neil's i've been getting good comments about how much nicer this room is by the way and in the clips and bigger well you have the window you have sunlight you know i have a nice background here and all that but um so one thing i've noticed is that when we use overlap to make like little clips two minute clips three minute clips like honestly you should your team should do the same thing they should just use overlap and make two three minute clips because this is where we have our conversational takes spicy take sometimes they do well on on x some of them will get you know tens of thousands of views some of them even a hundred thousands plus um and that that's i think it's it's a nice way to play the game i i think we've cracked x um we haven't cracked linkedin like do you even look at your linkedin

9:13Neil Patel:do i look at any of my social media probably not uh no not too often yeah you don't check it you check anything you only check the your revenue dashboards though yeah yeah i do log into x to

9:24Eric Siu:check news but i don't actually check my own stats yeah so all that to say is like i think um this is our if you guys are thinking about how we're thinking about it from a b2b services standpoint it's this is our pillar content our pillar content is either this or a youtube video like a youtube long form you record shorts natively i went back to doing that you know what's what's been helping doing the little we have a little skill now that where we have a resource a comment to get this right that's working really well for us too um and so we're going to push more aggressive people have been getting banned for that just really it's up depending on the software solutions you

9:58Neil Patel:know your whole profile really be careful with it many chat uh many chat should be okay it should be okay but i've seen some people get in trouble with it and their profiles having issues yeah so

10:09Eric Siu:fyi yeah we use many chat for it i mean they've they seem like they have a good relationship with meta for a while but um anyway there's a speaking of meta there's always a meta way of doing things

10:19Neil Patel:when it comes to growing so yeah dude i i just think that all the stuff that's happening with marketing now that when i go to events people are starting to come to the realization that they need to start looking at more bottom of funnel and you just mentioned it you're just like hey do you look at your social media they're like i bet you look at revenue reports you're like neil looks at revenue reports, which is very accurate. And I look at them quite frequently. And I get them pretty much daily, or at least bank balances I get daily. And I can quickly see pipeline and all that kind of stuff and deals close.

10:55Neil Patel:And I get email alerts on a lot of this kind of stuff. But what we found is, or what I found when I go to conferences now, before people used to be like, oh, how do I get more traffic? What's the best traffic source? What's the best hack? Now, people are slowly starting to shift to, hey, I really need to grow my revenue. I need to increase the LTV of my customers. I need to reduce churn. They're still talking about marketing, but they're starting to think in the right quote unquote mindset because they're starting to optimize for the numbers that really matter. And for the longest time, when you talk to marketers, even though finance people and executives working at organizations still optimize for the bottom line numbers, marketers still mainly focus on top of funnel.

11:38Neil Patel:You know why? Partly because we're in a zero interest rate

11:40Eric Siu:environment for so long where money was free just go go go go go so you hear from the finance people just go go go and then the marketers assume that's supposed to be like that forever but it's no long

11:50Neil Patel:it hasn't been like that for a while you know they may increase interest rates in the u.s right some of the other countries i think australia increased their rates yeah we'll see but hey

11:57Eric Siu:warsh has a new strategy so we'll see what happens yeah work with mark andreason my good friend mark andreason's there now so uh so anyway um but this other piece over here 95 of ai transformation is failing and you know what in this um ai executive group where it's again it's we're talking multi billion company multi-billion dollar companies are are in there um i don't see a lot when they're talking about ai transformation it's like they these people have like uh not these people exactly but chief ai officer or head of ai transformation whatever and then when i talk to them it's like oh yeah you know 12 people out of 8 000 people uh are ai pilled in the company so it's going to happen a lot slower.

12:34Eric Siu:But here's the good thing. These companies are all more than happy to hire outside people to help them with this. And it's just going to drag out for a long time to this implementation. That's one piece of it. The other piece I want to show you, Neil, is this. So these charts over here, there's this engineering survey. Okay. So this surveyed 1000 engineers. Okay, so 1000 engineers. and now here's what it says agents are getting agent teams using agents 89 are giving them right permissions now up from 52 a year do you know what that means uh no okay so what level of tool permissions do you give your agents so imagine you have like a hermes or something like that so right permissions in which they can go and actually make changes they can execute correct yeah so right humans with human in the loop it's it's uh like 61 and then right access independently without human approval 24 read only cannot make changes and then we don't use agents internally so 89 this is up from 52 last year wow it's only gonna get which means this people are gonna have to invest more in security more in governance yes more in permissioning i think

13:42Neil Patel:that's a that's a very good service to have neil well this is also why all the security stocks are crushing it right now i don't know if you've seen that my tennis coach was like i bought crowd strike okay i have a few friends who own crowd strike i haven't owned i don't own crowd strike stock um and i'm not saying you should or should not but if you look at their one year they're up 54.54 all right that's a pretty big number you agree with that right if you look at their quarterly revenue they're growing at 25 so yeah their growth has actually accelerated okay but when i still i look at their numbers like you look at a crowd strike annually it's called 4.8 billion in revenue there were 205 billion dollars what's the multiple on revenue yeah the multiple on revenue is 40 times roughly and it's not multiple on revenue it's not even

14:44Eric Siu:earnings call it like 35 or something like that yeah crazy yeah so anyway that's it for today we'll talk to you later goodbye

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Neil and Eric dig into AI search visibility: why your brand may be invisible when buyers ask ChatGPT, how organic click behavior is changing, and what still moves revenue. They react to Kai-Fu Lee's prediction that 50% of companies will need new leadership and that 95%+ of AI transformations fail, then break down a survey showing 89% of teams now give AI agents write access, up from 52%, and what that means for security, governance, and permissioning.

Key takeaways
◾Track visibility in answer engines, not just Google
◾95% of AI transformations fail by bolting AI on the edges
◾Agent write-access is exploding, so is the security opportunity

Chapters
00:00 Your brand is invisible in AI search
04:27 AI leadership shift (Kai-Fu Lee)
10:20 Bottom-funnel marketing wins
12:50 AI permissions and security

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Welcome to Marketing School, one of the top business podcasts with over 61 million downloads. Each episode delivers actionable marketing tips and strategies from two entrepreneurs who truly practice what they preach. The show is hosted by Eric Siu, founder of Leveling Up and Single Grain, and Neil Patel, co-founder of Neil Patel Digital and recognized by Forbes as a Top 10 Marketer.

🎙️ Learn More About the Hosts
Eric Siu – Leveling Up: https://www.youtube.com/@LevelingUpOfficial
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