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The cost of producing a 1,500-word article has collapsed to somewhere near zero. That’s the supply shock, one my friend Mark Schaefer has talked about for years. The more interesting question today — the one most marketing leaders haven’t priced correctly yet — is what that collapse does to everything else. When a factor of production goes free and infinite, value doesn’t disappear. It shifts. And in marketing today, it’s shifted somewhere most content strategies aren’t looking. Academic evidence has seen this coming. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper using Pixiv data shows that generative AI is crowding out human creators. Ahrefs data shows that 86.5% of top-ranking pages now contain some amount of AI-generated content. And Graphite.io found that the total quantity of AI-generated articles probably surpassed the quantity of human-written articles published on the web within the last couple of of years. Additionally, research published in Nature on "model collapse" — the degraded outputs that occur when AI trains on AI output — singal a related, and more problematic reality for marketers: a "collapse to uniformity.” That’s the steady, unrelenting increase in “textual similarity” across the web since AI started publishing in the 2010s. Those similar, AI-generated outputs have accelerated ever since ChatGPT’s earliest models, and are projected to reach 90% saturation around 2035. If that forecast holds, we’re adding roughly 10 points of uniformity — bland, boring, blah content — every year. And that means the window for you to differentiate is not some theory. It’s real. And it’s closing on you right now. The result is two things happening simultaneously: AI-generated content is increasingly good enough that it saturates every channel. And human beings — who are, as I say, "pretty good b******t detectors" — are beginning to flag content they don’t like as "AI slop.” That second reality isn’t happening just when content was generated by a machine. It’s also happening when it doesn’t sound human enough, when it’s too corporate, too polished… too fake. It’s fairly likely that at least 25% to 30% of your customers will actively demand authenticity within the next two to three years… if they aren’t demeaning it already. My two-to-three year forecast isn’t pulled out of thin air — it’s the sheer math of 10 points of AI detection per year building off a base of roughly 10% today. This episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter identifies the three specific assets AI cannot reproduce: Proprietary data Original examples Your expert voice We also share a three-question framework for auditing whether your content strategy is actually building any of them. The closing argument is my own practice of writing our podcast scripts by hand, despite having AI tools running in the background: not because I can write faster than a machine. We all know that’s not true. Instead, it’s my experience, my beliefs, my humanity are the scarcest resource our content can put to work. That the distinction that matters — separating what is abundant from what is actually scarce. It’s the core claim I’m making this time. And it’s the one that will determine which brands still get seen in three years time… and which will have blended into the background. Key Insights for Marketing and Business Leaders Navigating AI Content in 2026 In this episode, we break down: AI didn’t kill content marketing — it repriced it. The cheap parts (generic explainers, commodity how-tos, undifferentiated articles) are now worth close to nothing, because anyone using AI can produce them in seconds. The expensive parts — your proprietary data, lived experiences, and genuine expert voice — have become more valuable, not less. Using AI won’t make you fail. But spending your content budget on the wrong side of that line will. "AI slop" is the uncanny valley of content — and your customers’ b******t detectors are already activating. People flag content as AI-generated not just when it actually is, but when it fails to sound human enough. As customers get increasingly sensitive to “AI slop” — probably by 10 points or so per year — the brands relying too heavily on overly templated, indistinct, and impersonal content will find themselves on the wrong side of a widening credibility gap. Somewhere between 25 to 30% of customers will demand clear authenticity in the next two to three years… if they’re not already. "Collapse to uniformity" is the structural threat underneath "AI slop." The Nature paper on model collapse gets most of the attention, but the follow-on research on “textual similarity” is the more immediately relevant fact. Content on the web keeps getting steadily more similar, and has only gotten worse ChatGPT emerged on the scene.. Researchers project 90% saturation by 2035 — roughly nine years away. That means the differentiation window is not just some theoretical abstract. It is measurable, and it is closing. The three assets AI cannot fake are proprietary data, original examples, and expert voice. Data that only you have about your customers, your market, and your industry is yours alone to report. Original examples from real customers carry the credibility of lived experience that no AI can generate. And an expert voice means being willing to make a specific, named predictions and opinions — ones you’re willing to be wrong about — because taking that risk is exactly what makes you worth listening to. Generic best practices and how-to content is dead. Your truth, your actual opinions, that you’re willing to own, is rare. Three questions will tell you where your content strategy actually stands. What is your ratio of proprietary to commodity content in the last 90 days? When a prospect asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity about your category, what specifically about your brand shows up — and is it something only you could have said? Who on your team is your named voice, and are you amplifying their signal or burying it it in generic content calendar outputs? The answers to those three questions are the most useful content audit you can conduct. The answer is not to publish less — it’s to publish more of what’s scarce. This episode is not about cutting volume. It’s about redirecting where you put your efforts. Publishing more of the content only you can produce — and less of the content that any AI could produce — is the allocation of time and resources that matters most. The brands that figure this out in the next two to three years are the ones customers will ask for by name. The ones that don’t will blend into the background. Whether you’re a CMO deciding where to concentrate your content budget in 2026, a marketing leader who keeps being asked about AI, or a brand that’s already noticed its content working less well than it did a year ago, this episode gives you the framework to understand why… and what you can do about it. AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless. (Digital Reset Episode 492) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The Single Biggest Myth in Digital: Content is Expensive (Thinks Out Loud Episode 275) Does Generative AI Crowd Out Human Creators? Evidence from Pixiv by Sueyoul Kim, Ginger Zhe Jin, Eungik Lee :: SSRN and Does Generative AI Crowd Out Human Creators? Evidence from Pixiv | NBER w34733.pdf 74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages) More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data | Nature [2404.01413] Is Model Collapse Inevitable? Breaking the Curse of Recursion by Accumulating Real and Synthetic Data and 2404.01413 Future of AI Models: A Computational perspective on Model collapse Three reasons why brand is more important in the AI Era – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} Mark Schaefer and The Most Human Company Wins – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} The most human company wins: A case study – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491) The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast) – Tim Peter & Associates The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) Why AI Gives Your Customer Different Answers… Every Time The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) – Tim Peter & Associates Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What Taylor Swift Can Teach You About Bypassing Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 393) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand whe

Your marketing goal should be to win no matter what happens in the digital space. Yes, the channels your customers choose first change all the time. We’ve gone through search and social and now AI. Just remember that tomorrow could be something else altogether. You don’t want to chase channels. You want a strategy that works no matter what. And that’s what the “Hub and Spoke” and “CORE” methodologies are all about. The CORE Methodology is a framework for choosing the right channels to market your company. Your “Hub and Spoke” is about how you use those channels — the spokes — to grow your hub (website, CRM, community). Together, both work to ensure you win no matter what. This Foundation episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter breaks down what you need to know so you can win no matter what happens with AI… or whatever comes next. Key Insights for Marketing Strategy Leaders Navigating the Shift to AI The spoke tax has expanded. When the original episode was recorded, your concern was Google’s algorithm changes. Today, it extends to zero-click AI search, ChatGPT ads, and social platform reach erosion. The gatekeeper problem has grown, not just changed. Your hub is now your primary AI defense. When AI gives your customers answers without sending them anywhere, only brand recognition that’s strong enough to generate direct/named search protects you. That’s the hub. And that’s what it matters. Prompt Brand Equity is your new SEO objective. How frequently your brand appears in AI responses must replace rank position as your key AI search metric. The Core and Explore methodology is the discipline you must adopt for building that frequency in a systematic way. Thinks Out Loud is now Digital Reset. The same show you’ve always loved. The same host you’ve come to know. Sharper focus on building your brand beyond Big Tech. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488) The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast) The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490) How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424) Partnerships Between Brands and Creators Will Define the Next Generation of Travel Marketing | HSMAI Americas Can Podcasting Help Your Business Bypass the Big Tech Gatekeepers? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 413) What Connects TikTok and the Hub and Spoke Model of Digital? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 299) Big Trends: Bundling, Unbundling, and Customer Acquisition (Thinks Out Loud Episode 411) How to Engage Your Hotel’s Secret Sales Force Where Content, Community, and Customer Experience Meet (Thinks Out Loud Episode 346) – Tim Peter & Associates Customer Experience is Queen? What Does That Mean? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 190) – Tim Peter & Associates Big Digital Marketing Trends: Customer Experience is Cool (Thinks Out Loud Episode 375) Content is King, Customer Experience is Queen (Thinks Out Loud Episode 188) – Tim Peter & Associates The Future of Email Marketing — Interview with Scott Cohen from InboxArmy (Thinks Out Loud Episode 410) Revisiting How to Escape Big Tech’s Web (Thinks Out Loud) The Rebirth of Trusted Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 307) – Tim Peter & Associates What Taylor Swift Can Teach You About Bypassing Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 393) Is Social Media Anti-Social for your Brand Now? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 391) How To Perform a Health Check for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 388) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 25m 35s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy Gatekeepers always offer you a shortcut, at least at first. That’s what I talked about in episode 489, and it’s why ChatGPT started charging brands $200,000 to advertise alongside answers that used to appear organically for free. That shortcut eventually becomes a toll road, always. I glossed over one key detail in that episode. The way out of the shortcut trap isn’t a better tactic. It’s a strategy. That strategy is what the episode you’re about to hear is all about. A quick note before we dive in. If you’ve been listening for a while, you may know this show as Thinks Out Loud. We’ve rebranded to Digital Reset. The same show. Same host. Sharper focus on what you actually need to navigate AI and digital change right now. The episode you’re about to hear was originally recorded in June, 2024 when everyone was worried about what Google might do next. I think you’ll find it’s aged remarkably well. The framework at the center of this episode is the "Hub and Spoke." The hub is the audience you own: your website, your email list, your direct relationships. The spokes are everyone else’s audience: search and social and AI and creators and employees and customers and press. The job of the spokes has always been the same: Grow the hub, not replace it, grow it. In 2024, that was a good strategy. In 2026, it’s survival. Your hub is your only durable defense against platform risk, including AI. So sit back and enjoy our foundation episode, “Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy.” Let’s do this. There are four ways to succeed: You either get more new customers, you know, reach people you haven’t reached before. You get your existing customers to spend more per purchase. Now, as I said last time, that’s more from a revenue perspective. From a traffic perspective, it might be that you get them to engage with more content each time they interact with your brand. Obviously, though, you only really care if they do that, if that’s going to lead to them spending more with you each time they purchase. You can get existing customers to buy more often. And again, if you think about the traffic side, it could be that you get them to interact with you more often. And of course you can do a combination of the other three. Get more new people who come to you and spend more each time, who come to you more often, and obviously that becomes, you know, a wind piled on top of a wind piled on top of a wind, and that’s a really, really good thing. If, though, you are worried about where you find these folks and how you reach these folks and you get them to do this, I always like to start with where you are first. Where does your traffic and revenue come from today? I assume that you’re using Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics or something along those lines to understand your traffic and revenue sources. Whenever I start with a new client, whenever we start with a new client, we tend to look at the last 13 to 18 months of traffic and revenue. Then, we might look at a shorter period like the last two or three months, and then we might look at the last few weeks, a week at a time, to get a sense of what’s going on. Looking at the longer periods helps you to understand if there’s any seasonality. You know, does your company get more business some times of the year than others? That can help you understand if there are different demand patterns or if there’s something that you can do differently to get more traffic and business at some points in the year. If you’re not accustomed to seasonality, if your business doesn’t have it, it’s pretty common in many businesses. I talk about hospitality a lot. Hospitality tends to have very well defined peak seasons, off seasons, and what are known as “shoulder seasons,” between the peak and off season. We also see it in B2B a lot more than you think, too, based on budget cycles, you know, things like quarter end, year end, start of the new year, that sort of thing.

ChatGPT launched ads in its responses earlier this year. But they weren’t for everybody. They couldn’t be. Their ads came saddled with a $60 CPM and a $200,000 minimum spend. That pricing is roughly in line with prime-time NFL inventory. Naturally, the tightly-managed pilot started with only around 600 advertisers. OpenAI might be new to the gatekeeper game, but they sure understand how to collect a tax on the traffic they offer. According to CNBC, OpenAI’s ad pilot crossed $100 million in annualized revenue in under two months. Now, Search Engine Land is reporting that OpenAI is bringing self-serve access — and getting rid of the $200,000 minimum — this month. Early performance data around ChatGPT’s ads isn’t as simple as OpenAI’s robust revenue headline suggests. One trade publication put it bluntly: "ChatGPT’s first advertisers can’t prove their ads worked." The big picture is more complicated though. Yes, click-through rates are low and reporting tools have had challenges. But Criteo — the first ad-tech partner integrated with ChatGPT on the pilot — says that LLM-referred users convert at roughly 1.5 times the rate of other referral channels. Why? Because it looks like ChatGPT’s ads are a brand awareness channel, not a performance marketing one… at least for now. This episode of the podcast serves as the paid-media companion to Episode 489’s "The Long Game." The shortcut trap that Tim described in the last episode — where every new gatekeeper offers cheap access early, then raises the toll — is coming for AI. The question for you isn’t whether you should advertise on AI platforms. Instead, it’s what are you you’re building while the rates are still relatively low… and whether your brand has organic signal worth amplifying in the first place. This episode of the podcast delivers a three-question framework to help you make the right decision around ChatGPT’s ads. Tim also explains why OpenAI almost certainly will have to change how their ad model works — and why that might make now potentially the cheapest moment to learn how this channel will work for your business. Key Insights for Marketing and Business Leaders Navigating AI Advertising In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down: Self-serve access changes the conversation. ChatGPT ads launched with a $200,000 minimum spend — an enterprise brand decision by design. With self-serve confirmed for April (Search Engine Land, CNBC), this moves from a Fortune 500 budget question to a decision every marketing leader will face. Here’s what to know before that question lands in your next meeting. The performance reality is mixed. Early data shows low click-through rates but strikingly higher conversion rates for users who do click. Criteo, the first ad-tech partner in the ChatGPT pilot, reports LLM-referred users convert at roughly 1.5x the rate of other channels. This is a brand awareness channel, not direct response. Know which one you need before you commit. OpenAI has to change the model. That’s good news for early testers. ChatGPT’s $100 million in annualized ad revenue is impressive. It’s also 4% of 1% of Google’s annual search ad revenues. For OpenAI to reach the scale their investors need, they have to grow that number more than 2,500 times. The current format — ads shown to fewer than 20% of users, and even then only at the bottom of the page — is almost certainly not the final version. Which means right now may be the cheapest moment to learn how this channel works. Three questions before you commit a dollar. What does the AI actually know about your brand right now? Are you building something that persists after the campaign ends, or just renting visibility that falls to zero when you stop spending? And would the investment still matter if the platform changed its algorithm tomorrow? Those three questions are where your decision lives. AI advertising that compounds looks different from AI advertising that doesn’t. Campaigns that drive email capture, loyalty program enrollment, app downloads, or other forms of first-party data collection build assets that last long after your ad spend stops. That’s equity. Traffic to a website that returns to zero when the campaign ends is rent. Rent isn’t wrong; sometimes it’s necessary. But knowing which one you’re buying is mandatory. The long game applies in paid media too. The brands that will win aren’t the ones who wait. They also aren’t the ones who expected direct-response ROI from a brand awareness channel. They’re the ones who tested while it was cheap, drove direct relationships, and built first-party data assets that drive returns, again and again. Whether you’re a CMO deciding how to allocate a test budget, a marketing manager preparing for the question from your CEO, or a small business owner trying to understand what’s happening in AI advertising, this episode of the show gives you the framework to answer the right questions before you commit. The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links OpenAI ads pilot tops $100 million in annualized revenue in under 2 months – CNBC ChatGPT hits $100 million in ad revenue and is opening self-serve access in April – Search Engine Land Criteo Joins OpenAI Advertising Pilot in ChatGPT – Criteo ‘Still finding its feet’: Underwhelming early returns for ChatGPT Ads | Campaign US Advertising – Worldwide | Statista Market Forecast AI search ad spending will climb with consumer adoption US Digital Advertising Statistics & Market Data 2026 OpenAI CEO and CFO Diverge on IPO Timing — The Information The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488) Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Digital Reset Episode 487) The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) Best of the Show: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Digital Reset Episode 484) What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Digital Reset Episode 481) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 19m 59s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget Welcome back to the show. Last week I laid out the shortcut trap, the pattern that every new gatekeeper follows, where early access looks cheap, the shortcut looks smart, and by the time the toll arrives, too many brands have built too much of their strategy depending on the thing that’s about to change the terms on them. In particular, I focused on how the shortcut trap applies when you’re working to show up in AI answer engines. This week I want to talk about the paid media version of that story because that’s where the tolls that the gatekeepers want you to pay show up pretty much every single time. This isn’t some theoretical future scenario. OpenAI has had ads live on ChatGPT for roughly 600 advertisers since February. And those ads were not cheap. OpenAI required a $200,000 minimum spend and roughly a $60 CPM, about three times what you’d pay on Meta. Hell, that’s roughly comparable to what you’d pay for primetime NFL inventory. And it’s worked out well… at least for OpenAI. CNBC confirmed last week that this pilot they’ve been running has already crossed $100 million in annualized revenue in under two months. Search Engine Land is reporting that self-serve access and the elimination of the $200,000 minimum spend requirement is coming in April. I’m putting air quotes on that because we don’t have a firm date yet. But basically they should be live this month. And of course, Google has had ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews, at least in English, in roughly a dozen countries for some time. I’m going to limit today’s conversation to ChatGPT only. Google is Google after all. And we’ll get a much clearer picture of their situation in a few weeks at their upcoming earnings call.

I’ve got a big secret for you today: Brands winning in AI didn’t pivot to an AI-first strategy six months ago. Almost universally, they’ve been building direct customer relationships, earning independent reviews, and publishing content credible enough to be cited, usually for years. City of Hope probably didn’t start with a GEO strategy or an AI optimization consultant. But they still appear in 97% of AI queries for their category. Why? Because they made decisions 10, 20, and 30 years ago that continue to pay off today. AI inclusion, it turns out, is an inheritance. It’s something you build over time — and if you’ve been building the right things, the AI will find you. That raises two obvious questions: If the framework is this well understood — build credible content, earn independent reviews, make your brand signal clear — why are 82% of companies still stuck in the AI value gap? Why don’t they just do it? What do you do if you don’t have years to get better at this? We’re going to look at the second question in detail in next week’s episode. Today, we’re diving deep into the first one. And the answer to that first question is that companies often fall into a “shortcut trap.” Every new gatekeeper’s entry into the market comes with a period where taking the shortcut looks like the smart play. The challenge for many businesses is that the shortcut isn’t a scam — it works… at least for a while. And that’s what makes it dangerous. By the time its true costs becomes visible, too many businesses have built far too much of their strategy around it. They own visibility but not the customer relationship. This episode traces 15 years of how that pattern has repeated across a variety of platform shifts — Google, social, OTAs, and now AI. It also outlines two clear tests you can use to separate a genuine foundation investment from a shortcut dressing up as strategy. If you’re the one who has to explain your AI strategy at your next budget meeting, this episode highlights the pattern and the language you need to make the case. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders to Close the Gap In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down: Why AI inclusion is an inheritance, not an acquisition. City of Hope shows up in over 90% of AI queries for their category not because of any optimization strategy, but because of its commitment to peer-reviewed research, earned media, and reputation among its patients (i.e., customers). The AIs we take for grated were trained on that. And that’s why City of Hope wins. Too often, "GEO strategy" is sold as something you just go out and acquire this quarter. By thinking of AI inclusion as something inherited from prior — and, importantly, future — investment in your brand, that completely changes the budget conversation. The gatekeeper’s window — and why it’s finite. Every platform shift includes a two to five-year window where the new gatekeeper is still building its position and hasn’t yet started collecting the highest tolls it can. The companies that use those windows to build email lists, loyalty programs, revenue and direct customer relationships win. The AI window is open right now. It will not stay open forever. The same game, different rules at the edges. What’s new: AI weighs corroboration quality over link quantity, making it harder to game with volume and technical tricks. What hasn’t changed: expert-authored content, independent validation, trusted-platform reviews, and a strong direct brand both drove organic authority in the past and continue to drive AI inclusion today. If a GEO tactic would hurt your search performance, it probably won’t help your AI visibility either. The shortcut trap — and why smart businesses fall into it. The shortcut is always most attractive exactly at the moment when a new platform is getting established and the upside is visible… but the cost isn’t yet. It’s not a scam. It absolutely works — at least temporarily. You end up owning visibility but not the relationship. When the platform changes the rules, you own nothing. Two tests for your AI investment. First: would this investment matter if AI changed tomorrow? Expert-authored content, review velocity programs, and first-party data infrastructure continue to improve your business regardless of which model is dominant in 18 months. If an investment only makes sense for how ChatGPT or Gemini works in Q2 2026, that’s a warning sign. Second: do these investments compound, or do they require constant changes? Sure, shortcuts work. Foundations compound. A review earned today is in the training data for the next model update. The budget argument — in plain terms. Not "don’t invest in AI," but "invest in AI the way businesses that survive every platform shift invest: in things that improve the business and compound across every platform." Expert-authored content that earns citations, review velocity programs, first-party data infrastructure — yes. Anyone selling guaranteed placement in AI outputs — test small, make sure you own the result before you scale. Whether you’re in hospitality, retail, or B2B — and especially if you’re the person who has to answer "what’s our AI strategy?" while watching the platform landscape shift under your feet — this episode gives you 15 years of pattern recognition to work with. The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488) Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Digital Reset Episode 487) The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Episode 485) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 24:25 You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI Welcome back to the show. The brands winning in AI right now didn’t pivot to an AI first strategy six months ago. Almost universally, they’ve been building direct customer relationships, earning independent reviews, and publishing content credible enough to be cited for years. The AI didn’t teach them anything new. It just made visible who has done the work and who has been renting their results from the nearest gatekeeper. I’ve been watching this pattern play out for 15 years through Google algorithm updates, organic reach collapse on social media like Facebook and LinkedIn, increased commissions and take rates from intermediaries like online travel agencies and Amazon, and now the first wave of AI driven discovery. Each time the businesses that navigated the shift with the least damage had the same things in common: a direct relationship with their customers, an earned reputation that didn’t depend on any single platform, and data that they owned, literally owned. Here’s the thing. That framework isn’t complicated. Build credible content. Collect independent reviews. Earn the right to show up in your customer’s inbox. Make your brand signal clear. Most people listening to this show already know that. The question this episode answers is, if the formula is this well understood, why are 82% of companies still stuck in the AI value gap? Why don’t they just do this? The answer has everything to do with a trap that every new gatekeeper sets and that smart, experienced marketing leaders fall into anyway. I’ve watched it happen through four different platform shifts. I’d like to make sure it doesn’t happen to you on this one. This is episode 489 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. A couple of weeks ago, you heard me talk about City of Hope and the fact that they show up in 97% of AI queries for their specific category. Well, City of Hope did not have a GEO strategy. They didn’t hire an AI optimization consultant. They showed up in 97% of AI queries for their category because of decisions they made 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago or more. That should tell us something about what AI

Over the last three weeks on this show, our fearless leader, Tim Peter, covered three big ideas. These are: The AI value gap. Why 88% of companies are using AI, but only 6% are seeing real results. ChatGPT’s agentic commerce retreat. Why even OpenAI couldn’t predict how quickly consumer behavior and operational reality would push back. AI inconsistency. Why the same prompt produces a different brand recommendation more than 99% of the time, making any specific AI ranking, effectively, a coin flip. Those are not three separate problems. They’re three symptoms of the same underlying condition: a weak brand signal. The brands that show up consistently — City of Hope appearing in 69 of 71 AI responses, not 2 of 71 — have built something the machine can’t easily ignore. The question this episode answers is how they’ve successfully done this. When this episode first aired, Tim called it the "first, do no harm" framework: the bridge between traditional SEO and the emerging world of generative engine optimization. He introduced the shift from a world of card catalogs to a world of concierges. He laid out why content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels also works as an operating model to drive prompt brand equity for your business. And it’s a framework that has been validated in every episode that followed. One thing has changed since the original recording: the SparkToro research Tim mentioned at the time has since been published in full, covering 2,961 prompts by 600 volunteers across nearly two months of runs using ChatGPT, Claude, and Google. The numbers confirmed everything the original episode predicted… and then some. If you are staring at your 2026 budget wondering where to place your bets, this is the blueprint. Key Insights for Strategic Marketing Leaders In this episode, Tim breaks down: Why your mantra must be SEO plus GEO — not SEO versus GEO. This includes the "first, do no harm" framework for bridging traditional search and AI-generated answers. It also looks at why protecting your existing organic position is the prerequisite for any successful GEO strategy. Your secret sales force. Your customers’ ratings, reviews, and word of mouth have always been part of your content. They’re now also among the highest-weight signals AI systems use to decide whether your brand deserves to be an answer. Content is king. Customer experience is queen. Data is the crown jewels. Yes, this is something you’ve heard about before. But now it’s more than a branding concept. It’s also a working operating model. These three elements build confidence for AI to consistently include your brand in their responses. Prompt brand equity: the metric that actually matters. Your position in any given AI response is a coin flip. Instead of tracking rank, frequency across a wide array of runs is the number you want to track. Tim also offers a Quick Look at tools like Peec.AI, seoClarity, SE Ranking, Profound, and others that can measure prompt brand equity for you right now. Metrics that matter in a zero-click world. Revenue, lead volume, brand search trends, and prompt brand equity frequency. Tim provides a clear overview how to track what’s working even as traditional attribution gets increasingly unreliable. Your blueprint for 2026. We’re seeing a shift from card catalogs to concierges, a shift that should reframe every budget conversation. Tim explores what this means for how you invest your marketing budget this year… and beyond. Whether you’re in hospitality, retail, or B2B &mdash and especially if the last three episodes left you with a framework but not the foundation — this episode makes everything click. Want to learn more? Here are the show note for you. The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Episode 485) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Ep. 487) Why AI Gives Your Customer Different Answers… Every Time GEO vs. AEO vs. AIO vs. SEO on Google Trends Rand Fishkin proved AI recommendations are inconsistent – here’s why and how to fix it Are Citations in AI Search Affected by Google Organic Visibility Changes? AEO And GEO: Google’s Outbound Traffic Down 33%: The GEO Revolution Is Here Airbnb says traffic from AI chatbots converts better than Google LinkedIn abandons traditional SEO as 60% traffic loss forces radical strategy shift The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) 7 Best AI Search Visibility Tools for Enterprises (2026) Tools mentioned in this episode: Peec AI – AI Search Analytics for Marketing Teams seoClarity – AI Search Optimization Platform Finseo – AI-Powered SEO Tools for Next-Gen Search Optimization SE Ranking – AI SEO Software Profound – Optimize Brand Visibility in AI Search AI Search Monitoring Tool – Track ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AIO Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 18m 08s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge Welcome back to the show. Over the last few weeks, we’ve taken a deep dive into some of the uncomfortable realities about the state of AI. I’ve looked at why 88% of companies are playing with these tools while only 6% are actually seeing significant value. I call that an AI tax, the time and money spent fixing machine mistakes and chasing efficiency at the cost of customer trust. Last week, we saw how deep that rabbit hole goes. And I discussed how AI recommendations change more than 99% of the time, proving that if you’re chasing a specific ranking in ChatGPT or Claude, you’re basically bidding your strategy on a coin flip… on a series of coin flips. And before that, we saw OpenAI pull back on agentic commerce features because operational complexity and customer behavior don’t always align with the tech press hype. These are not three separate problems. They’re symptoms of a weak brand signal. As we’ve seen, the brands that show up consistently, like City of Hope showing up 97% of the time, do so because they’ve built a foundation of corroborating stories, of digital witnesses, that the machines just can’t ignore. So how do you actually build that foundation for your business? How do you move from chasing the shiny object to investing for optionality? Today, I want to revisit a foundational episode that maps exactly how you show up when the world moves from card catalogs to concierges. This is the "first, do no harm" framework that bridges the gap between traditional SEO and the new world of GEO. If you are staring at your 2026 budget, wondering where you can place your bets most successfully, this episode is the blueprint for you. This is Digital Reset with Tim Peter. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. So I think we all agree it’s unbelievably important that you show up in AI answer engines. What I’m not sure we completely agree upon is the fact that you need to show up in SEO still too, in traditional search. I want to give full credit to SEO expert Lily Ray for this idea, but we want to think about the fact that first, “do no harm.” Forget for a moment how you show up in AI answer engines. Of course you want to do that. I also suspect, and see this with my own clients, that for most businesses, even in a world of zero-click searches, Google still represents a significant, and probably your largest, single source of traffic. So the first thing you want is don’t do anything that screws up what Google gives you. This isn’t an SEO versus GEO question. It’s SEO plus GEO. Remember, you don’t get the plus if you mess up one side of the equation or ot

Rand Fishkin’s team ran 2,961 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI. 600 volunteers, 12 different prompts, two months of runs. They wanted to answer one question: how often do you see the same list of brand recommendations twice, even with the exact same prompt? The answer? Less than 1% of the time. The odds of seeing the same list in the same order are closer to one in a thousand. Most conversations about AI inconsistency treat it as a measurement problem: how do I know if my brand is showing up? That’s a legitimate question. But it’s not the only question. And it might not even be the most important one. If AI systems give different recommendations essentially every time, the same inconsistency is already baked into every AI chatbot you’ve deployed — your hotel chat widget, your B2B sales assistant, your customer service tool. Most teams have never measured it. And some of those inconsistent answers are already driving negative reviews for your brand and business. This episode connects three stories Tim has covered over the last three weeks — the AI value gap, the uncertain timeline of agentic commerce, and now AI inconsistency — showing that they all stem from the same underlying condition. It also explains what City of Hope, appearing in 69 of 71 AI responses for "West Coast cancer care hospitals," tells us about how you can fix this problem for your business. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders to Close the Gap In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down: The full SparkToro/Gumshoe.ai research — and what it actually means. Rand Fishkin and Patrick O’Donnell ran nearly 3,000 prompts with 600 volunteers. The list of brands recommended changed more than 99% of the time. Here’s why that reframes everything about how you should be tracking AI visibility. The operational problem most people are missing. AI inconsistency isn’t only a marketing measurement challenge — it’s a liability inside your own deployed tools. Your AI chatbot may be giving materially different answers to different customers right now. And, it’s almost certain that no one on your team is measuring that. City of Hope: what 97% consistency looks like. Why City of Hope appeared in 69 of 71 AI responses for "West Coast cancer care hospitals" and what that reveals about how AI decides which brands it’s willing to commit to — and which ones it isn’t. Why "post more content" is the wrong strategy. How AI actually works: triangulation across independent sources, why your own website is a low-weight signal, and what "digital witnesses" means for building prompt brand equity that holds up. The King, Queen, and Crown Jewels operating model. Content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels, not just as a branding concept, but as the mechanism that drives the AI’s confidence in your brand. Four moves to make this week. Shift from rank to frequency measurement. Audit your deployed AI tools for consistency before worrying about external AI visibility. Build credible witnesses, not content volume. And treat review velocity as a strategic input, not just a reputation metric. Whether you’re in hospitality, retail, or B2B, this episode is for anyone who’s deploying AI in a customer-facing role… or who’s who’s being asked to report on AI visibility and wants a better sense of what they’re actually measuring. The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links NEW Research: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products; marketers should take care when tracking AI visibility – SparkToro Rand Fishkin proved AI recommendations are inconsistent – here’s why and how to fix it Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Ep. 487) The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) SEO vs GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge Peec.AI — AI brand visibility measurement seoClarity — AI search visibility and GEO tools Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 22m 01s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. I’ve talked about a concept called "Prompt Brand Equity" for a while now, the idea that what matters in AI search isn’t where your brand ranks. It’s whether you show up at all, whether your brand shows up at all. And I mentioned some early research from Rand Fishkin at SparkToro, shows that AI recommendation lists were unpredictable. You could be number one in one chat and number three in the next, even with the exact same prompt, by the exact same person. Well, the full research is out now, and the numbers are much more striking than I expected. Rand’s team ran 2,961 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI with 600 volunteers over two months. The question they were trying to answer, how often do you see the same list of brand recommendations twice, even if you run the exact same prompt over and over? The answer? Less than 1% of the time. I want to say that again. Less than 1% of the time do you see the same list twice. In other words, practically never. That has real consequences for how you measure your business’s AI visibility and for how you think about the AI tools that you’ve already deployed in your own business. And for the ROI gap that I covered on episode 486, which if you missed it, was about why 88% of companies are using AI, but only 6% are seeing significant value from it. It turns out that these trends, these traits, these facts are connected. Today I want to get into how. This is episode 488 of Digital Reset with Tim Peter. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. Okay. Let me start with what the research actually found, because the headline number undersells it a little. Rand Fishkin partnered with Patrick O’Donnell at a company called Gumshoe.ai. They recruited 600 volunteers to run 12 different prompts, things like "recommend headphones under $300," or "what are the best project management tools." They ran these through ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini, Google AI, over and over for two months, nearly 3,000 runs in total. And what they found is this: the list of brands recommended changes more than 99% of the time. The odds of seeing the same list in the same order twice are closer to one in a thousand. That’s nuts, right? So I wanna be fair about what this means and what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that AI is useless. It doesn’t mean that brand mentions in AI are random and it definitely doesn’t mean you should give up on showing up in AI answers. Far from it. What it means is that where you appear in any given AI response, whether you’re number one or number three, tells you essentially nothing. That position is random. It’s not predictive of anything to you or to your business. The useful metric isn’t rank. It isn’t where you show up. It’s frequency. How often does your brand appear at all, across a large sample of runs on the questions that matter to your customers. That number tells you something real. That number is, of course, prompt brand equity, not position, frequency. I mentioned Rand’s early work on this in episode 485 when I talked about how we’ve moved from a world of card catalogs to a world of concierges. The new data just puts specific numbers into what we already expected. The picture is much clearer now, and if I’m being really honest, a little more dramatic than I expected. Now, here’s what I think is the most under-reported part of the story, and it matters a lot if you are in hospitality or honestly, if you’re in any business that has deployed AI in a customer facing role. When people talk about AI inconsistency, they almost always frame it as a marketing measurement problem. You know, how do I know if my brand is showing up? And it’s a legitimate question. I’ll get back to that in just a moment, but it’s not the only problem here. The second problem is operational, and it’s happening right now in your business. If AI systems give different recommendations essentially every time to cus

OpenAI launched in-chat checkout in September 2025, promising that users could shop and buy directly inside ChatGPT. Analysts forecast trillions in sales. Then, just last week, the company pulled back: near-zero sales, a dozen merchants integrated out of millions, and a consumer base that was happy to research in ChatGPT but wanted to buy somewhere familiar. Expedia and Booking Holdings stocks rose on the news. So what does this tell us about agentic commerce — the idea that AI agents will act as buyers, completing purchases on customers’ behalf? It tells us that the direction of agentic commerce is real… and the timeline is not. The question then is what do you do when you can see where we’re headed, but not when we’ll get there. That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders to Close the Gap In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down: OpenAI bails on its shopping plans. What actually happened with OpenAI’s checkout walkback, and why it matters. The similarities with “the Klarna pattern.” OpenAI’s pullback is another example of the Klarna pattern—overstated capability claims followed by operational reality. The deal with Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Why Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol is in a different position (and very much worth watching longer-term). The power of optionality in strategy. What "investing for optionality" means when you can’t predict which platform wins. How to win in any case. Four tactics that improve your business today and position you for any version of agentic commerce—whenever it actually works. How the aligns with “gatekeepers gonna gate.” Why this is the same gatekeeper problem independent hoteliers have been solving for 20 years. Whether you’re in hospitality, retail, or enterprise marketing—this episode is for anyone being asked "what’s your agentic commerce strategy?" and isn’t sure what to say. Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Digital Reset Episode 487) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links OpenAI Scales Back Shopping Plans for ChatGPT — The Information OpenAI Kills In-Chat Checkout After Near-Zero Sales — Awesome Agents ChatGPT to Scale Back Agentic Commerce Amid Users ‘Browsing Without Buying’ — Performance Marketing World OpenAI Just Blinked: Nobody Seems to Want to Shop Inside ChatGPT — Spree Commerce OpenAI’s Shift Shows Travel Is Too Complex for Quick-Fix Distribution — PhocusWire ChatGPT Bails on Direct Bookings, Sending Expedia and Booking Stocks Soaring — Silicon Review Lengow Blog — What Went Wrong with ChatGPT Checkout Google Blog — Agentic Commerce Tools & Protocol Google Makes Etsy and Wayfair Items Shoppable Within Agentic AI Search — Retail Brew Google Ads Chief Details UCP Expansion — Search Engine Journal March 2026: The Month Agentic Travel Gets Real — OAG IDC — Agentic AI Will Redefine Travel and Hospitality in 2026 Travel Brands Are Building AI Agents for a Consumer That Doesn’t Exist — Skift OpenAI Recalibrates E-Commerce Ambitions — OpenTools AI Structured Data’s Role in AI Search Visibility — Search Engine Journal How Structured Data Schema Transforms AI Search Visibility in 2026 — Medium Mews — 2026 is Make-or-Break for Hotel Transformation The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) – Tim Peter & Associates SEO vs GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) Best of the Show: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Podcast) Best of the Show: What ‘Your Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Podcast) Revisiting Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Podcast) Digital Reset: Build Customer Relationships Big Tech—and AI—Can’t Touch (Thinks Out Loud 458) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) – Tim Peter & Associates Google Schema Testing Tool Why Amazon Is Going to Launch a Search Engine (Thinks Out Loud Episode 345) What’s Amazon’s Travel Offering Really About? (Travel Tuesday) Gartner: AI agents to command $15 trillion in B2B purchases Strategic Predictions for 2026: How AI’s Underestimated Influence Is Reshaping Business The Vor Game: Lois McMaster Bujold: 9780671720148: Amazon.com: Books Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 23m 55s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. OpenAI launched a feature in September of 2025 called Instant Checkout. The idea behind it was really simple. You could browse for a product inside ChatGPT, and buy it right there without ever leaving the chat interface. The press loved it. The tech press just went nuts. Everybody on LinkedIn said, "Oh my gosh, this is the best thing ever." Analysts said that it would disrupt Google Shopping.  Gartner forecast that by 2028, 90% of B2B purchases will be handled by AI. Last week… OpenAI pulled the plug. They’ve gotten near-zero sales from it. A dozen merchants integrated with it out of millions. OpenAI hadn’t built the state sales tax infrastructure and it turned out that users, consumers, customers are happy to research inside ChatGPT. They just don’t wanna buy there yet. In the travel space, Expedia and Booking Holdings stocks went up on the news. The OTAs, the online travel agents that were supposed to be disrupted by this got a lifeline. Here’s what I want to do today, though. I’m not going to tell you that agentic commerce isn’t coming. It is. The direction is clear. But instead, I wanna talk about what you do when you genuinely cannot predict the timeline. Because we can’t. OpenAI just proved that. And the right answer to that uncertainty isn’t to freeze. It’s also not to build your strategy around the next big press release. It’s to do the things that make your business better today, and also happen to prepare you for any version of the agentic future when it actually arrives. This is episode 487 of Digital Reset with Tim Peter. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. Here’s what happened. In September of 2025, OpenAI announced that they were going to make it possible for people to be able to book reservations right in ChatGPT. They said that people would be able to buy things from folks like Wayfair right in ChatGPT. They were working on a big integration with Shopify so that people could buy right within ChatGPT. And here we are six months later—this is early March, 2026—and they’re pulling back from this. They’ve announced "we are not gonna do this." And there are three reasons why this happened. And let’s start with the most important one and always the most important one, which is customer behavior. Customers were browsing, they weren’t buying. People today use ChatGPT, the way they use Google. They research and they narrow down their options, and then they complete their purchase somewhere that they trust. It’s not an implementation issue that they’re working through here. This is a behavioral reality. The second big reason is operational complexity. Payments require tax infrastructure. They require fraud prevention, refund handling, and consumer protection and compliance. OpenAI had built, well, none of it yet. For travel specifically, there’s also all the liability issues, cancellations, disrupted trips, customer service complaints, et cetera. PhocusWire called it too complex for quick fix distribution. These aren’t bugs that OpenAI is going to patch right away. They’re fundamental hard problems of commerce that Amazon and Expedia and Booking and lots of other folks have spent the last 30 years solving. In travel specifically, Amazon has attempted more than once to build a commerce platform only to back off because, well, it’s hard and it doesn’t really align with what they

8% of companies have adopted AI. Only 6% are seeing "significant" value. That leaves a staggering 82% value gap most businesses face. If your team feels like they are running faster just to stay in place, you aren’t suffering from a tech problem — you’re paying an "AI Tax." In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down the data from McKinsey, Section, and Workday to reveal why the C-Suite thinks AI is a miracle while the front line sees it as a burden. More importantly, he talks about what you can do to close the gap for your business. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders to Close the Gap Acknowledge the Productivity Paradox: 76% of Execs claim AI saves them 4–8 hours a week, while 40% of workers say it saves them nothing. This disconnect is where strategy goes to die. Avoid the "Efficiency Trap": Chasing "more with less" often leads to "more noise for less impact." We look at the Klarna case study and why cutting costs too fast can erode the very brand equity you’ve spent years building. Move from Tasks to Objectives: A mandate to "use AI for 20% of tasks" is a vanity metric. Real leaders set business goals (occupancy, conversion, satisfaction) and let AI earn its keep as a tool to reach them. Protect Your Crown Jewels: AI is a commodity; your first-party data is not. The 6% who win are those who feed their specific, proprietary data into the models to create a "moat" that Big Tech can’t cross. The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The State of AI: Global Survey 2025 | McKinsey CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story. – WSJ Klarna plans to hire humans again, as new landmark survey reveals most AI projects fail to deliver | Fortune MLQ.ai | AI for investors The Single Biggest Myth in Digital: Content is Expensive (Digital Reset Episode 275) Is Content a Strategic Product for Your Business? (Digital Reset Episode 319) Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines — PDF Link SEO vs GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) Why AI Won’t Kill Search — It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Digital Reset Episode 482) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 16m 24s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Welcome back to the show. 88% of companies use AI. 88% of companies use AI. Only 6% see significant value from AI. 6%. That is a massive 82% gap between those who use AI and those that actually get value from its use. 82%, for those of you who don’t love math, is a lot of percent. It’s hard to have a whole lot more percent than that. That gap was first reported by McKinsey towards the end of last year. And in the three months since the report dropped, I’ve had conversations with C-suite and digital leaders at companies ranging from the Fortune 100 to individual hotel owner/operators that usually tell me something strikingly similar. Lots of companies are "playing with AI" or "testing AI" in some portion of their business or other. They’re mostly looking to drive efficiencies, to do more with less. Despite these efforts, they’re mostly not seeing the value. They’re falling into that 82% value gap too. What we’re going to talk about today is what lives in that gap and how you can get to the other side of it. This is Digital Reset with Tim Peter. I’m your host, Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. Okay, so there’s an 82% AI value gap. That is 100% real. There’s also a big gap between the people who see real gains from AI and those that don’t. The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks back on a research study from a group called Section that found 76% of C-suite execs thought AI was saving them “at least four to eight hours each week.” Essentially one in five claimed that they saved more than 12 hours per week using AI. By contrast, 40% of non-management workers said that AI didn’t save them any time at all. Another 27% said that it saved them less than two hours per week. Only 14% said that it saved them greater than four hours a week. So that’s 76% of execs versus 14% of line employees saving more than four hours. That’s a 62% productivity gap. As the article notes, “A new report from the business software company Workday goes so far as to call frustrations with the technology an AI tax on productivity. Though 85% of the roughly 1,600 employees it surveyed reported saving one to seven hours a week by using AI, much of the time was offset by having to correct errors and rework AI-generated content.” Think about those numbers I’ve just talked about. Those are huge differences. An 82% value gap. A 62% productivity gap. An AI tax that employees are paying. What in the world is happening here? First, let’s unpack McKinsey’s 82% value gap. Note that AI does produce value every day. And admittedly, a small number, 6%, see “significant” value. There’s also a larger share who see some value, just not at “significant” levels. Similarly, think about the AI tax on productivity that 62% of workers see here. It’s not a question of does AI work. It’s far more about how and where the folks that get the value put AI to work. I am seeing too many companies, you know, “play around with AI” or “test AI” without clear plans, clear objectives, and a clear strategy for what they really want AI to do. The McKinsey data says it. I see it every single day. I know of companies whose execs delivered mandates to their team, things like, “Everyone will use AI for X percent of their tasks,” and similar such messages. That’s not a strategy. It’s not even a goal, really. It’s more of a hope of what could be. What it lacks is a strategic underpinning. You might remember Klarna famously announced a couple of years ago that, “AI did the work of 700 human agents and does it much faster.” As their CEO said in December 2024, "I am already of the opinion that AI can do all of the jobs that we as humans do." Less than five months later, they reversed course and started hiring again in serious numbers. And the reason is simple. They moved too far, too fast, and with too little thought about what they really needed. I didn’t say that, by the way. The company CEO, Sebastian Semetkowski, said it himself. MLQ.ai had a write-up where they wrote, "We went too far, he said, noting that the focus on efficiency and cost ultimately reduced the quality of the company’s offerings and eroded trust with customers." Let’s start with the fact that companies that get the most out of AI, by contrast, have a clear strategy in place for what they expect of their AI efforts. They’ve got well-defined objectives they want to reach. And those objectives aren’t, “We want to use AI 50% of the time.” Their objectives are specific. They’re relevant. They’re time bound. Consider this hotel client of mine. They want to drive more occupancy, put more heads in beds. They want to increase the revenue they achieve from their guests. They want to increase guest satisfaction and retention. They want to lower their costs for achieving these. And they want to accomplish this within a particular time frame. I want you to notice something about those objectives. Did you notice how none said, “by using AI?” You know why? Because it doesn’t matter if they achieve those goals with AI or without it. It matters if they get more customers, keep those customers happy, encourage those customers to provide more positive ratings and write more positive reviews, and reduce their operational costs while they do that. That’s how their hotel succeeds. That’s how their business succeeds. Of course, they then looked at AI for ways to meet those objectives. And they were super willing to rethink internal processes where it made sense to do so. But the conversation started with strategic objectives and a strategy for how to get there that included AI, not “use AI and hope for the best!” They were also realistic about where AI might not work — usually because they di

There is a lot of mixed information out there regarding how to rank in the age of AI. In this episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter, Tim cuts through the noise to explain the transition from traditional Search Engine Optimization to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). While the tools are changing rapidly, the core mission remains the same: ensuring that your customers’ “digital concierge” knows exactly who you are and why you’re the right choice for your customer. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders ”Do No Harm": Before chasing new AI trends, ensure you aren’t breaking what already works. Traditional SEO still drives the majority of traffic for many businesses and, more importantly, often provides the foundational data that AI models use to understand your brand. The Reality of GEO: Whether you call it AEO, AIO, or GEO, the practice of appearing in AI answer agents is still maturing. Recent data shows that even major players like LinkedIn are seeing significant shifts in traffic patterns, making it essential to track your visibility in AI Overviews and agents. Your Brand is the Prompt: In the "Age of the Concierge," AI doesn’t just look for links; it looks for brand consensus and context. If the AI gets your brand details wrong, it’s a sign your digital signal is weak. Your goal is to build a brand so distinct that customers ask for it by name — effectively making your brand the search prompt itself. The Toolset for 2026: Showing up requires measurement. Tools like Peec AI and seoClarity are becoming the new standard for measuring "share of model" and visibility within generative engines. Customer Experience is Queen: AI agents are becoming more efficient at converting traffic than traditional search. This means your website must be optimized for "the handoff" — providing clear, structured information that an AI agent can easily digest and present to a human being… otherwise known as your customer. SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links GEO vs. AEO vs. AIO vs. SEO on Google Trends Rand Fishkin proved AI recommendations are inconsistent – here’s why and how to fix it Are Citations in AI Search Affected by Google Organic Visibility Changes? AEO And GEO: Google’s Outbound Traffic Down 33%: The GEO Revolution Is Here Airbnb says traffic from AI chatbots converts better than Google LinkedIn abandons traditional SEO as 60% traffic loss forces radical strategy shift The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) 7 Best AI Search Visibility Tools for Enterprises (2026) Tools mentioned in this episode: Peec AI – AI Search Analytics for Marketing Teams seoClarity – AI Search Optimization Platform Finseo – AI-Powered SEO Tools for Next-Gen Search Optimization SE Ranking – AI SEO Software Profound – Optimize Brand Visibility in AI Search AI Search Monitoring Tool – Track ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AIO Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface and edited in Ableton Live 12 Suite. Running time: 20m 29s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge Welcome back to Digital Reset with Tim Peter. There is so much mixed information about what’s going on with AI tools and most importantly, what you need to do to show up in AI answer engines. That’s "mixed information," by the way, not "mis-information". I don’t think people are lying. OK, mostly nobody’s lying. I bet somebody is though. The truth, though is that we’re still in the very early days for so much of what is going on with artificial intelligence. And so it’s hard to authoritatively state that this is the absolute one and only possible truth about the way that AI works and that AI answer engines work. As you might imagine, I’m somewhat skeptical about that framing that there’s only one possible answer here. First, up until recently, most digital marketers couldn’t even agree on what to call the practice of showing up in AI answer engines. Some called it GEO, some called it AEO, some called it AIO. Oy! If you don’t know what your practice is called, if you don’t know what you’re actually working on, that’s a damned fine sign that the practice itself isn’t very mature. For now, I’m calling it GEO. At least judging by Google Trends data, GEO appears to be the winning term. It looks like a pretty clear winner. If I’m being honest, I don’t really love the term GEO. I fully admit to thinking that doing right by search engines generally benefits AI and that it’s all SEO in the end. I appear to be losing that argument though. Such is life. More importantly, these tools are evolving and fast. What’s true today may be less true weeks or even days from now. You can’t go a day or more without some new change being made or some new change being announced by the big players around these tools. What is most important is making sure that AI answer engines and AI assistants and AI agents know about your brand and your business. It’s why I’m so keen on this concept that your brand is the prompt. It’s easiest to ensure you show up if your customers and their AI assistants and agents ask for you by name. Regardless, you want, and need, these tools to surface your brand and recommend you to their users. That’s even more critical as we move towards agentic interfaces, which are coming. Your brand has to appear as an option or else you simply don’t exist. We’ve moved past an age of card catalogs into an age of concierges. As I talked about last week, I think that Google’s AI Overviews are the biggest single AI that most customers interact with regularly. And I expect that growth to continue. So there’s a ton of overlap, not only between your SEO and GEO goals and efforts, but also in terms of how your customers might find and experience your brand in the immediate term to midterm. My goal today for this episode isn’t to tell you how you show up. Instead, I want to talk about some foundational elements that matter as you work to show up, that ensure your brand and your business benefit, no matter how these tools evolve and change over time. I want to make sure you can tell where it’s important to focus your energies and where it’s not as you help your customers find you. This is episode 485 of The Big Show. Today we’re talking about SEO and GEO in the age of AI. Let’s dive in. So I think we all agree it’s unbelievably important that you show up in AI answer engines. What I’m not sure we completely agree upon is the fact that you need to show up in SEO still too, in traditional search. I want to give full credit to SEO expert Lily Ray for this idea, but we want to think about the fact that first, “do no harm.” Forget for a moment how you show up in AI answer engines. Of course you want to do that. I also suspect, and see this with my own clients, that for most businesses, even in a world of zero-click searches, Google still represents a significant, and probably your largest, single source of traffic. So the first thing you want is don’t do anything that screws up what Google gives you. This isn’t an SEO versus GEO question. It’s SEO plus GEO. Remember, you don’t get the plus if you mess up one side of the equation or other. As you read GEO advice, as you listen to GEO experts, as you listen to people talk about this, you need to ask yourself, “does this have the potential to hurt our current organic situation?” If the answer is no, go ahead and do it. Do it immediately even. If the answer is yes, well, don’t ignore it outright. Instead, then ask, “okay, how do we gain the benefits of this recommendation while also keeping our existing SEO position — or better yet, improving that existing SEO position?” Again, it

The "Search Bar" isn’t dying; it’s evolving into an expensive gated community. In this episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter (formerly Thinks Out Loud), Tim breaks down the economic reality of Google’s bananas $400 billion year. Despite the hype surrounding AI as a "search killer," Google’s 17% growth in search ads proves that the 800-lb. gorilla still dominates the discovery landscape. We are also witnessing a structural shift from the “Age of the Card Catalog” to the “Age of the Concierge.” AI assistants and agents are turning into “context engines,” consolidating and connecting brand signals from across the web to provide direct recommendations rather than just lists of links. To survive this latest phase of your customers’ "Digital Reset," brands must move beyond Big Tech dependency and reclaim their demand through clear, consistent content and experiences. And they must become brands customers will ask for by name. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders The Economic Scale: Google’s growth in 2025 was larger than the total annual revenue of OpenAI, reinforcing that Big Tech continues to lead in the marketplace. The Concierge Reality: It’s been clear for a while that discovery has moved from "finding links” to "receiving recommendations.” The reality is that AI trusts brand consensus — what it finds out about your brand everywhere — over marketing claims on just one or two channels. This is a profound shift and one that marketers must address today. The Tax on Discovery: With ad revenue reaching $82 billion in a single quarter, the cost of "buying back" your customers via Big Tech continues to rise. Keep repeating, “Gatekeepers gonna gate.“ Your Brand is the Prompt: In the “Age of the Concierge,” the only signal a machine cannot fabricate is a clear, consistent, human brand identity. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Google Earnings Q4 2025 OpenAI CFO says annualized revenue crosses $20 billion in 2025 | Reuters “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) Digital advertising trends for 2026 – Think with Google Marriott brings hotel bookings directly into… • Hospitality.today Marriott (MAR) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript – AOL Alphabet earnings, Q4 2025: CEO’s remarks Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) Q4 FY2025 earnings call transcript Number of ChatGPT Users (January 2026) Google Search Statistics 2026: Search Habits Revealed Now • SQ Magazine Google AI Overview Statistics: 2026 Trends and Impact | Heroic Rankings New Data: Google AI Overviews Now Appear in 60% of Searches Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Episode 481) What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface. Running time: 17m 43s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. As a marketer and digital strategist, there’s one source of Intel that I love to check out all the time, and that is Big Tech’s earnings calls. Big Tech tends to know more about what’s going on with our customers than anyone. Where they’re making and spending money tells us more about the state of digital and where it’s headed than just about anything else we can look at. Usually when I do this, I look at the Frightful Five as a collection. I want to see Amazon. I want to see Google. I want to see Facebook. I want to see Apple. I want to see Microsoft. Sometimes I even share thoughts from folks like Shopify or Spotify or Expedia or Booking.com to get a bigger picture of the state of digital. This time, though, I’m going in the opposite direction. I’m only looking at the 800-pound gorilla that scares every other beast in the jungle. And that is Google. I’ll get into some of the details of Google’s earnings and what they mean in a few minutes. For now though, it’s enough to say that Google had a giant, massive, mammoth quarter. Almost $114 billion in revenue, an 18% increase year on year. That is, in a word, bananas. If it’s not immediately obvious, Google’s financials make all the chatter about them losing market share and mind share to OpenAI and ChatGPT look, well, downright silly. I don’t mean to diss ChatGPT, they fired the first shot of the AI revolution. But as the saying goes, money talks and, well, other stuff walks. And Google is making serious money. Another thing to recognize is that Google’s earnings mostly come from ads, which means that their 18% growth is pulled straight from your pockets. They’re charging more tolls in more places to more businesses and reaping the rewards. Gatekeepers gonna gate, don’t you know? What else can we learn from Google’s earnings? What do their earnings mean for your business in reality? And what can you do to succeed in a world still controlled by the baddest beast in the entire jungle? This is Digital Reset with Tim Peter. Let’s dive in. So yeah, Google got that bag last quarter, as the kids say. They generated $114 billion in revenue in Q4, up 17%. They also pulled in more than $400 billion in revenue for the year, their biggest ever, up 15%. By the way, quick aside, I’m not trying to manage your portfolio. I’m only looking at this through the lens of where are your customers interacting with AI? All right, not stock advice, please. Anyway, 15% growth is great when you’re a $25 million company. That would represent an extra $3.75 million in sales. I mean, that is good work, right? Yeah. Okay, Google pulled in almost $53 billion in extra sales last year. To put this in context, OpenAI made over $20 billion in revenue in 2025, according to their CFO. That means that Google’s growth in 2025 was two and a half times OpenAI’s total revenues. If you want your first big takeaway from this, it’s that Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Google also made $82.3 billion in revenue from ads in Q4, up roughly $9.8 billion year on year. That’s about a 13.6% increase. That $82.3 billion is fully 72% of Google’s total revenues. Hell, search alone represents 55% of Google’s total revenues. As CFO Ruth Porat said it best on their earnings call, “Search revenues really reflected broad-based growth across verticals. Search remained the largest contributor to revenue growth.” Google’s ad growth happened despite lots of folks claiming that the company was under serious threat from OpenAI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others. Now, not to keep kicking OpenAI in the teeth, but YouTube and Google Network — that’s the non-search ads portion of Google’s advertising platform; it contributes just 16.9% of the company’s revenue — generated $7 billion more in the quarter than OpenAI did all of last year. Damn. Let’s just not forget though where that revenue came from. It came from you. When you hear that Google had a great quarter or year, just remember it’s that it’s your ad dollars that paid for that. They’re collecting a toll from you to reach your customers. Google is in very good shape long-term here, built on your ad dollars. Now, I’m not saying that OpenAI is doomed, though I did hint at it at that towards the end of last year. What I am saying is that they’ve got a long way to go if they’re going to compete head to head with Google’s money machine. And all of that is before we talk about Google being the AI underneath the hood for Siri on Apple devices, which I broke down here on the show last month. So that’s two big takeaways. The third major takeaway is that Google is using AI to improve its ad products in a big, big way. Philip Schindler noted on Google’s earnings call that, and this is a quote, “AI innov

Summary: In this episode, Tim Peter explores why we need to stop asking if AI is a replacement for social or search, and start seeing it for what it truly is: The Context Engine for your customers. As Tim explains in the episode, AI doesn’t just find links. It’s not a social site where your customers hang out. AI is a Context Engine that synthesizes your website, your social signals, your content, and your reviews to create a context that guests and agents trust. The discussion outlines why social media and search remain critical as "human signal" providers that customers’ AI assistants and agents use to build a consensus view of your brand and business. Key Takeaways for Leaders: The Consensus Principle: AI trusts patterns; consistent positioning across your website, reviews, and social channels is core to make sure AI recommends your brand. Customer Experience is Data: Reviews are no longer just for customers—they are training data for AI answer engines. Your response (or lack thereof) tells LLMs and AI answer engines how much you value your customers. Multi-Channel Accumulation: Discovery is expanding, not shrinking. For marketing, digital strategy, and e-commerce leaders in travel, hospitality, financial services, SaaS, and more, your "Digital Reset" means mastering the story the internet tells about your brand across platforms your customers use. Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Are chatbots the new social media? The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Episode 481) What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) Should Your Business Have a ChatGPT App? (Episode 479) What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) The New SEO? (Episode 469) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 16m 51s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. So I wrote a piece the other day. I think people who watch this show regularly know that I sometimes contribute to a series on hospitality net that they call the World Panel, where we talk about various issues in hospitality marketing and in digital marketing more broadly. And there was a whole discussion around a question that keeps coming up again and again and again, which is, you know, is AI replacing search? Is AI replacing social? Are chat bots the new social media? And what struck me about this is we keep asking whether one channel replaces another. And that’s almost never how this works. Channels don’t die. They accumulate. And I can’t imagine that AI is going to replace them. It consumes them. And what I mean by that is it requires the information that comes from search and that comes from social in order to do what it does. So in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how you can stop chasing shiny objects. understand how discovery actually works right now, and then decide where you can focus so you don’t have to try to do everything. Sounds cool? Let’s dive in. So let’s talk about what happens with regard to new channels coming up. Obviously today we’re talking about AI, but previously we could have talked about search. Previously we could have talked about social media. If you think about it, we don’t see any channel completely wipe out another one all that often. TV did not kill radio. Some of you probably still listen to the radio pretty regularly. I hope you’re listening to this right now. Even podcasts didn’t kill radio. Social didn’t kill email. Texting didn’t kill email. Mobile didn’t kill desktop. Channels don’t. die. What happens instead is that our customers make changes in terms of validating their decisions. They need different sources. They look for different sources to check, particularly for purchases that are more complicated, purchases that are bigger, purchases that matter more in their lives. So what changes is not what channels get used, but how many sources our customers check. So obviously, when we talk about social and we talk about hospitality specifically, this is true in B2B, this is true in a lot of different industries. But we know that customers today check social media, they check influencers, they check online travel agencies in the case of travel, they check artificial intelligence, and all of those are growing. All of those are growing at the same time. This isn’t a one-off. This is something that’s changing every single day. When people care about a decision, they don’t look in fewer places. They look in more. So yes, AI is growing faster than any of those others, but all of them are growing. The funny thing is even TV grew a little bit year on year in terms of where customers look for validation of the answers that matter to them. And that’s a really important thing for you to think about. Because when we think about artificial intelligence, when we think about how it works with social or how it works with search, It’s a synthesis engine. You know, it isn’t just a place. I’m going to pick all that up. I got to take a sip of water. Ahem. So when we think about artificial intelligence, it’s not just another place for people to get inspiration for the things they’re looking for. That absolutely happens. I want to be really clear. That is a thing that occurs. What it also is, is it’s a synthesis engine. It is a place that brings together content from a variety of different sources and provides some context for your customers and provides some additional information for your customers. It helps them ask deeper and sometimes more meaningful questions that matter to them. But if you think about this for, you know, a minute. recognize that where AI gets its information, where it gains its understanding from what you say on your website, it gets it from what you say on social posts, it gets it from what other people say about you on social media and in social posts and in ratings and reviews. And it gets that information from other third party mentions. So that could be PR, it could be… you know, other kinds of press. could be other websites talking about you. It could be things like if you have an online travel agency or if there’s another kind of intermediary in your specific industry, mentions on those third party sites that tell the AI all about you and help the AI understand the content that confirms what it’s seeing in other places. So social still absolutely matters. still a crucial component of what you do with your business because it provides human signals on top of things that maybe you said about yourself or I don’t know, maybe had an AI write about your brand. Social provides human signals. It adds tone. It adds credibility. It adds consistency. You know, when we think about search engine optimization and generative engine optimization, GEO seems to be the name folks are settling on these days. Obviously, we’re not optimizing around keywords. We’re helping machines understand who we are. And there’s fancy words, you know, when we think about things like entity relationships and entity graphs and the like that help connect. the AI to your content and help make your content stand out or help your content be better interpreted, better understood by the AI. That’s really, really good. That’s really useful and something you need to think about. But we also have to recognize that artificial intelligence doesn’t replace social.

I’ve never seen a single person with a tattoo for Marriott Bonvoy, the hotel brand’s “loyalty” program. Or, for that matter, for Hilton Honors (its loyalty program) or Wyndham Rewards (its loyalty program). Hell, I don’t have a tattoo for United Airlines MileagePlus, and I fly roughly 80,000 miles with the company every year. But I’ve see a ton of folks with tattoos for Harley Davidson. And Fender guitars. And Disney. And Lego. And Nike. Wouldn’t you think that more “loyal” customers would have tattoos for brands that depend on loyalty programs for their businesses? I know I would. The fact is that loyalty often isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And, in the age of AI, that’s a huge problem. Because if your customers aren’t willing to ask for your brand by name, you might be in real trouble. In this episode of the show, I take a look at: What customers really value Why AI makes actual loyalty more important than ever What you need to do to drive more loyalty from your customers in the age of AI And how you can set your business up for greater success long term. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Why Nobody Has a Marriott Bonvoy Tattoo… And Why That Matters in the Age of AI (Episode 482) & — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Belonging to the Brand Book – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Episode 481) Should Your Business Have a ChatGPT App? (Episode 479) Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471) AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 16m 08s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Why Nobody Has a Marriott Bonvoy Tattoo… And Why That Matters in the Age of AI Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. I was honored to take part in a fireside chat at a hotel conference the other day, and at one point something I said got a much bigger reaction than I expected. I said that “I’ve seen a lot of Harley Davidson tattoos on people who love that brand. I’ve never seen a Marriott Bonvoy tattoo.” First, some folks in the audience laughed. So, you know, that’s nice. I’m not gonna lie. I think it’s a funny line too. Then the room got really quiet though. Like pin-drop quiet. Curious, no? Later, as I was signing books, person after person came up to me and said some version of the same thing. They said, “what you said really hit me because we spend so much time on loyalty, but we don’t really know our guests as human beings.” Now, don’t get me wrong, this story isn’t just about hotels. Every company that deals with customers is going to face some version of this same story. And that’s what I want to talk about today. Because in a world where AI assistants and agents are starting to choose hotels on behalf of guests, where AI assistants and agents mediate the conversation between you and your customers, the difference between a brand people care about and a brand that’s just another option on a screen is going to matter more than ever. Let’s dive in and look at this in detail. So there was an amazing audience at this conference, an amazing group of people & hotel marketers and revenue managers and customer experience teams and reservations folks and IT people & just a wide array of people all focused on how they took care of their customers. None of these people were, you know, “stuffy corporate types.” These are the folks who actually deal with customers with their guests when something goes wrong. They live in the trenches. Their job is to keep their customers happy every single day. So I obviously I made the crack about Marriott Bonvoy and then I talked to people afterwards. And literally, to a person, people kept wanting to talk about how they’ve got all of these profiles, they’ve got all of these accounts, but they don’t really know what matters to the guests on a given trip, during a given stay, during a given interaction. Does that sound familiar to you? Is that what it feels like when you’re talking to your customers? Because you’re not alone if that’s the case. Here’s the dirty little secret about loyalty in hospitality and in airlines and in retail and lots and lots more. Most loyalty programs are really about points. They’re really about how many rewards your customer’s gonna get. Real loyalty though, real loyalty to your brand. It’s about identity. It’s about customers who feel like you’re a part of them, who feel like you belong with them or not. That Harley Davidson versus Bonvoy line isn’t a joke. It’s a warning. People don’t get tattoos about discounts or perks or elite status. It’s just not a thing that actually makes them feel seen. What do they tattoo? Who they believe they are. In my book, Digital Reset, I share the story of how I realized that fact about brand tattoos. I used to go to this local brew pub where I lived, near where I lived & I didn’t live at the brew pub. I probably felt that way some days. But, you know, on nice Sunday afternoons we might stop by. And there was a group of Harley Davidson enthusiasts who would pull in after enjoying their weekly ride. This was something they did all the time. The group were, generally speaking, contractors and construction workers and folks like that. And as I wrote in the book, “…one dentist with the heart of a rebel yearning to break free.” But the thing is, that’s not a joke. He lived the concept of “live to ride, ride to live,” despite his otherwise, well, dentist-like demeanor. He didn’t like Harley Davidson. He lived Harley Davidson. This guy was a Harley Davidson rider, just like I’m a Fender guitar player or a Martin guitar player. Those speak to me. And many hotel brands — hell, many brands overall — don’t give their customers a story about themselves. They give a transaction. There are absolutely exceptions to this rule. Margaritaville Hotels and Resorts does this really well. 21C Museum Hotels, I think, does a great job of this. Very high end luxury hotels like the Ritz in London, the George V in Paris, or the Metropole at Monte Carlo, along with independent hotels like the Drover in Fort Worth, the Acoma House in Denver, and my friends and clients at the Wentworth Mansion, John Rutledge House Inn, King’s Courtyard, and Fulton Lane Inn all do this brilliantly. There are loads of examples outside hospitality too of brands that customers adore even though some aren’t very large companies. All of which should signal that it’s possible to do this no matter who you are or how big your company is. And that should give you hope. Because AI makes the fact that most businesses don’t do this, perilous for their long-term prospects. Okay, so why is this perilous? Why is this perilous for long-term prospects? Well, when an AI assistant or agent chooses your business, it chooses your company, it chooses your hotel if you’re a hotel, it’s not going to ask who has the best vibes. It’s going to ask which business meets criteria it can measure. Your brand runs the risk of being reduced to nothing more than a price, a location, an availability of your product or service or a room, or the points that you offer. You get turned into a commodity. Your brand becomes invisible. All that matters then is some very specific, tactical, practical, measurable summary. And that’s what scares me. Not AI, but what happens to brands that never build anything that people care about. I’ll repeat a mantra you’ve heard me say before: “Your brand is the prompt.” There’s actuall

As I’ve mentioned in the past, last year was not about incremental change. Nope. It was all about dramatic change. We all started off last year “playing with AI.” Today? The question is if and when AI assistants and agents will be the norm for every interaction we have with our customers. What do we need to do to act accordingly? How do we create experiences that work whether we’re talking with human beings or with machines acting on behalf of those human beings? Most importantly, how do we build brands worth asking for by name when people might not see the brand until their AI picks it for them? In this “Best of the Show” episode, I try to answer these questions and place them into an actionable framework you can use, right now, and make sure your customers & and your business & both get to enjoy the benefits AI can bring. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467) Here We Go Again: Marketing in Another Bizarre Economy (Thinks Out Loud 456) In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472) The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466) Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470) Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) Digital Reset: Build Customer Relationships Big Tech—and AI—Can’t Touch (Thinks Out Loud 458) Digital Reset is Here (Thinks Out Loud 461) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455) What Changed in AI and Marketing This Year, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (Episode 478) Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 19m 08s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026  Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. This week looks a little different than normal. I’ve been traveling and speaking like mad, and instead of pushing out something rushed or half baked, I wanted to make sure you still got something that actually moves the needle for you and your business. Because as you’ve seen, marketing is at a turning point. AI is not just another trend. It is an entirely structural shift in how customers discover brands, how they make decisions, and how businesses like yours continue to grow. So today I’m bringing you one of the most important episodes. We’ve recorded a conversation that pulls together what changed, what matters, and what comes next for anyone responsible for growth, brand or customer experience. This isn’t a conversation about tools. It’s about how to make sure your brand still gets chosen when AI assistance and agents do more of the choosing. Even if you’ve heard this before, give it another listen with fresh ears, because the future I was talking about then is already here. Let’s dive in. If you think back to the beginning of 2025, we were asking very simple questions about what AI was going to do for us. We were asking things like, “Can AI write a blog post? Can it write a headline? Can it create an image?" Today, we’re already asking whether AI is going to replace the very concept of searching and “how soon AI will become your customer.” How soon the things that you will do will not be on behalf of the human, but on behalf of the artificial intelligence? And the big idea here is that this has not been a year of incremental change. This has been a year of decoupling. We’re seeing the decoupling of finding from clicking. We’re seeing the decoupling of discovery from awareness. And we’re seeing the decoupling of our brands and our websites from the people who traditionally have used them. Now over the course of the last year, we’ve done 33 episodes of this show, and I’m going to try as best I can to synthesize those 33 episodes down into one actionable framework that you can use going forward. I’m going to cover a bunch of stuff. All of the realities that we’re seeing in terms of what’s happening with gatekeepers, why I think it’s ever more important that your brand is the prompt and in particular, why your digital reset is your core path forward in 2026. So let’s start with “Gatekeepers gonna gate." You’ve heard me say this a gazillion times on this show. Earlier this year, we talked about all of the different ways that Big Tech gets between you and your customers and all of the things that they do to build that relationship. Not for you, but for themselves. As you know, Big Tech isn’t here to help you find customers. Big Tech is here to help themselves find customers. They are here to keep customers within their ecosystem. Yes, they are dependent upon ads, so there will have to be clicks at some point in the process if they are going to make some money. What’s also true is that for many years when we think about search or we think about social, we’ve been in a reality where some of those clicks, some of the time, were free. Increasingly, we’re entering a world where every meaningful click for your business may be paid from these folks. In episode 467, we looked at the real story of zero-click search. And if Google provides an answer via an AI Overview or within Gemini, or ChatGPT provides an answer, or Claude provides an answer, or Perplexity provides an answer, your blue link, your organic search result doesn’t matter. That ship has sailed. Those days are gone. The reality is that you aren’t competing with other brands anymore. You’re competing with the platform’s desire and need to keep the user. You’re competing with Big Tech itself. Now, as you well know, that means that the cost of rented land is essentially going up. You’ve heard me say — you’ve heard lots of people over the years say — "don’t build your brand on rented land.” The reality now is that everything is becoming rented land. We’re in a crazy new world and it’s just going to get crazier. We know that Google is already testing ad products. We know that ChatGPT has tested some and may again and we just should expect more of that. We also know, as we discussed in episode 456 of the show, that we’re in a strange economy. Things might be tough in 2026. You can’t afford to pay a toll to Big Tech on every transaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 20 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s 30 percent. It’s more expensive than you want to have to pay in an environment where you’re probably going to be competing for every last dollar and if every last penny. And so the key question that I think we have to ask ourselves, regardless of which member of Big Tech we’re talking about, is if Google or Meta or ChatGPT or Amazon, whomever, Expedia, Booking.com, Yelp, Yext, OpenTable, right? Any of these folks. If they turned off your traffic tomorrow, would your business survive another day? That’s the world we’re living in now and that’s the question you need to ask. If Google turned off your traffic tomorrow, how long could you survive? To me, that was the aha moment of the year. And it’s why I’ve become so convinced that your brand is the prompt. In an AI world, the notion of generic search, the notion of unbranded search is dead. If someone asked an AI for best hotel, the AI is going to choose the winner. You really don’t get a lot of say in that. If someone asked for a specific hotel, "Tim’s Hotel in Charleston," "Tim’s Hotel in Orlando," you are the only answer. That’s where you’re trying to get to. We need to think about our brand as the insurance policy that sets us apart from everybody else. As I mentioned in episode 472, "brand isn’t everything; it’s the only thing." Your brand is the only thing an AI cannot replicate. It’s the only thing it can’t answer in place of you, right

We’ve all known it was coming, but OpenAI finally announced its long-awaited introduction of ads into ChatGPT. Now, you can buy your way into ChatGPT’s chats so your brand can be seen by potential customers when they’re having conversations relevant to your business. This is great, right? I mean, don’t you want to be the first company to sign up? Maybe. But, maybe there’s a bigger picture that we need to look at too. In this episode of The Digital Reset Show with Tim Peter, Tim looks at: What OpenAI announced about ads in ChatGPT… and what they didn’t OpenAI’s guiding principles for ads and how their ads will work at launch OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Go plan Insights into how ChatGPT ads might fit into your digital reset What Google is doing to maintain its competitive position in the digital advertising space What ChatGPT ads might mean for your business How you can use a “core and explore” methodology to put ChatGPT ads to work for your business And a whole lot more. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Podcast Episode 481) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links ChatGPT’s announcement about ads: Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT George Roukas’ brilliant comment on LinkedIn about customers explicitly training AI to avoid brands they’ve had bad experiences with. Genius. What Apple and Google’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) Google Is Personalizing Some AI Overviews & AI Mode Answers Google Announces AI Mode Checkout Protocol, Business Agent Google Gemini Gains Share As ChatGPT Declines In Similarweb Data PDF link to original Similarweb study Google’s blog post “New ways to plan travel with AI in Search” The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Episode 425) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Google AI Mode Ads – Explore Guides and Articles Google Introduces Agentic Commerce Protocol & Direct Offers Ads In AI Mode Google Announces AI Mode Checkout Protocol, Business Agent Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using the travel rig: Shure SM57 Cardioid Dynamic Instrument Microphone and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 17m 28s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Episode 481) Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter. Well, it’s happening. ChatGPT is putting ads in its chats. We’ve kind of all known this was coming for a while. They’ve announced that they’re going to "start testing ads in the US for the free and Go tiers." That’s a quote. And that Go tier is a new plan that they’re offering for eight bucks per month. OpenAI also mentioned that their "Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads." That’s also a quote and more about that later. We’ve all known that ads were coming to ChatGPT. The world of gatekeepers gonna gate essentially demands it. What we didn’t know was how those ads would work. And now we kind of do, at least in a few ways. The question is, what do ads on ChatGPT mean for your business? Should you participate in these? Should you use these? What are these ads good for? And most importantly, how should you think about ads and artificial intelligence overall for your business? This is episode 481 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. There are a few points that marketers should keep in mind for the moment when it comes to ads on ChatGPT. And I’m kind of going to go through these one by one. OpenAI says that, and this is a quote, "To start, we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation." I’m gonna be abundantly clear. I think that that is a capital G, capital T, good thing. Aligning ads with relevant answers ensures that customers continue to have a positive experience with your brand and a positive perception of your brand. You’re not interrupting them, you’re not getting in the way of what they’re trying to do, you’re simply enhancing that experience. That’s great on a number of levels. My colleague George Roukas pointed out on LinkedIn that customers at some point will be able to train their agents and AI assistants not to suggest given brands if they’ve had bad experiences with those brands in the past. That’s a huge deal. This obviously underscores my long-standing point that customer experience is queen. It also shows why it’s so important that ChatGPT’s ads not give bad vibes to potential customers. For as much as I’ve talked about the downsides of negative reviews on social and other places online, I hadn’t really thought about how damaging it might be if your customers taught their agents never to buy from you, never to recommend you, ever. So that’s a really great point, George. I really appreciate you bringing that one to the conversation. It’s definitely food for thought as you consider ChatGPT’s ads. Now, another piece of good news is that I’ve always been a fan of search ads because they’re tied to what customers are looking for. Google didn’t make roughly $400 billion last year by ignoring what their customers literally asked them for. Google Ads is one of the most successful products in history simply because it actually solves a problem in a moment of need. ChatGPT, following a similar approach, makes loads and loads of sense for them. It also has the potential to make loads and loads of dollars for OpenAI, too. I think it’s a really, really smart play. So cool, that’s the good news portion of the program. I don’t want to say the next bit is the bad news portion. It’s that there are a lot of unknowns. There is no indication yet of whether the ads in ChatGPT will link to your web presence or whether they’ll keep customers within the ChatGPT environment. I will tell you, I know which one I’m betting on long term. You know, you may receive brand awareness, you may receive organic traffic or branded search volume from people finding you in these ads, but you still might not get many clicks or, you know, any clicks. Time will tell if they’re going to limit these solely to businesses connected via ChatGPT’s apps and whether that’s going to happen at launch or whether that’s going to happen in the future. I’m not gonna have much else to say on this one until we see how the ads work in practice, but you can bet I’m going to be watching. Speaking of, ChatGPT has stated a number of principles around how they believe ads should work as part of their environment and why it matters so much to them to maintain user trust. I think that’s great. I genuinely believe in this. And I believe them. Just like I believe that Google honestly meant “Don’t be evil” back when they used to say that. You know, keep OpenAI’s words I just said a moment ago in mind. “To start,” they said. Keep that mind. This is a test. They don’t know how ads will work for users in practice, maybe not even as much as we do. It’s tough to predict too much about what you should or should not do in terms of their ads because they don’t really exist yet. They’re announced, but we haven’t seen them. What their ads product will look like when it launches and what it will look like 90 days later could be radically different. I’m going to bet it will be. At launch, they’re going to limit ads to ChatGPT’s two lowest priced tiers, free and the eight bucks a month one. At launch, the ads will only appear at the bottom of the chat. So you can bet I’m going to review what they’re actually doing maybe 30 days, 60 days and 90 days after launch to see whether any of that has changed. To say nothing of what might happen six months down the road or a year down the road I have a pretty, pretty high degree of confidence that if ChatGPT’s ads don’t satisfy advertisers’ demands for traffic or contribute meaningfully to ChatG

Apple just signed a billion-dollar deal to have Google’s AI power Siri and other AI experiences on its devices. This is a huge blow to OpenAI. It’s also fairly meaningful for your business too. Why is that? What does the Apple/Google AI deal mean for your business? In this episode of The Digital Reset Show with Tim Peter, Tim looks at: Why the Apple/Google AI deal is another sign that gatekeepers gonna gate What this deal means for OpenAI and ChatGPT What the deal also means for your business How you can be sure to succeed in the longer term no matter what happens with Apple, Google, OpenAI, and all the rest Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. What Google and Apple’s AI Deal Means for Your Business (Podcast Episode 480) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Joint statement from Google and Apple How Apple Is Buying an AI Strategy From Google Apple is genius for tapping Google to fix Siri and Apple Intelligence – Fast Company Apple, Google strike Gemini deal for revamped Siri in major win for Alphabet | Reuters The LinkedIn post that inspired this episode. Feel free to join the conversation there: Post on LinkedIn Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) “Gatekeepers Gonna Gate” is Gonna Kill ChatGPT (Episode 477) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474)* Blow for OpenAI in Germany as court rules song lyrics used illegally | dpa international A consumer watchdog issued a warning about Google’s AI agent shopping protocol — Google says she’s wrong | TechCrunch Alphabet hits $4 trillion valuation as AI refocus lifts sentiment | Reuters Google Gemini Gains Share As ChatGPT Declines In Similarweb Data Similarweb study PDF link Google Announces AI Mode Checkout Protocol, Business Agent Google Is Personalizing Some AI Overviews & AI Mode Answers What’s next for AI in 2026 | MIT Technology Review Google: Don’t make “bite-sized” content for LLMs if you care about search rank – Ars Technica Google announces AI Overviews in Gmail search, experimental AI-organized inbox – Ars Technica Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: [email protected] Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 18m 07s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: What Google and Apple’s AI Deal Means for Your Business Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. You may have seen the news that Apple has signed a deal to have Google provide AI capabilities for Siri and its devices. As New York Magazine put it, “Apple is buying an AI strategy from Google.” And I posted on LinkedIn about why this is really, really bad news for OpenAI and ChatGPT. But this isn’t a story about Apple or Google or OpenAI or anyone else, really. It’s a story about your brand and your business and why this matters. Why? What makes this deal matter to you? I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 480 of The Big Show. Let’s dive in. My first reaction when I saw the Apple/Google AI news was that OpenAI, the folks that make ChatGPT, is screwed. And let’s be clear, I still think that, by the way. It’s just not the most important part of the story. To get to the most important part of the story though, takes a little bit of setup. And here’s why. I have argued for a while that OpenAI is in big trouble. OpenAI and Google, along with others, can only drive adoption of their core AI technologies by offering customers useful capabilities, getting those capabilities into customers’ hands, and then finding a way to make revenue and profits from that. Those are the three legs of the stool anytime you offer a product or service: utility, distribution, and monetization. ChatGPT clearly provides utility. But its distribution and monetization plans have been, well, to put it mildly, lacking for some time. I talked about this a few episodes ago, which I’ll link to in the show notes, but that’s why they have introduced a browser and they’re talking about making physical devices. They need a way to put their tools in more customers’ hands, sometimes literally. The deal that Google and Apple have just announced absolutely destroys one of their best paths forward for distribution and monetization, which would have been to develop a deep partnership with Apple. Google has taken that away. Clearly Gemini was always going to be the default on Android devices, right? Google simply wasn’t going to use someone else’s AI on their hardware. Now Gemini is going to be the default on Siri and more importantly, more broadly on iPhones and Macs and AirPods and Apple watches and Apple’s ecosystem overall. Being the default matters. There’s a reason that Google pays Apple over $20 billion per year to be the default search engine on iPhones and iPads. That’s how they ensure that customers use their products on Apple devices. People use defaults way more than we’d like to think. Safari is one of the top browsers in the world because it’s the default. Apple Mail is one of the top email tools. And even Apple Maps gets more use than you might expect. Regardless of what the stories tell you, there’s a lot of folks out there using Apple Maps. I’d originally assumed that being the default was so important that Google was going to pay Apple to be the default. Apparently not though. According to some of the stories I’ve seen, Apple’s going to pay Google about a billion dollars. And while that might sound like a lot of money, Fast Company’s Mark Wilson put it best. He said “Apple just straight up robbed Google.” Wilson continues by saying that, ”…increasingly, AI is a commodity. That’s one reason that, for Apple, this deal with Google is a steal. While headlines focus on the shocking nature of Google-powering Siri, it’s a fact that I suspect most iOS users will forget about in day-to-day use as they encounter more and more touchpoints of ‘Apple Intelligence.’” I completely agree. I’ve been saying for some time that AI isn’t a product all by itself. Instead, it’s more like the internet or social media. It’s an enabler that makes other products or services better. Apple’s revenues already are around $400 billion. And now it’s going to have even better AI-powered products for the low, low price of one-quarter of 1% of its annual revenues. That is dirt cheap. Even better for Google — forget the billion dollars that they’re going to get from Apple — is that they already have a way to pay for this. Google prints money. Their Ads platform is one of the all-time great revenue generation machines in history. It’s turned them into a company valued at more than $4 trillion. That’s trillion. With a T. That’s an astonishing amount of money, the highest market capitalization for any company ever. Now Google’s introduction of AI to consumers and their use of AI within their Ads platform simply make that machine, that revenue generation machine of theirs, even more effective, even more valuable. They’re already starting to add personalized ads into AI so they can get even more money here. Yes, it’s for the user’s benefit. If we have to see ads, I would argue we’re absolutely better off seeing ads we’re interested in What’s also true is that we’re more likely to click on ads that we’re interested in and drive more revenue for Google. These guys did not get to a $4 trillion valuation by mistake. Again, they know how to turn traffic into money. And as I’ve already said, this is a huge blow to OpenAI in the longer term. And that’s why this matters to your business. Because this is another example of gatekeepers gonna gate in action. OpenAI is getting shut out by gatekeepers cutting off its access to customers. That’s what gatekeepers do. They’ve done it to brands large and small for years. Of course they were going to gatekeep the next company trying to gain access to their club. That’s what they do to you too. Your brand is almost certainly downstream of these gatekeepers. It probably has been since many of these folks came into existence. You’re well aware that Google and Apple make money by standing