AI as a Marketing Channel: The Search Engine Sunset

The Monumental Power of AI (Often Misunderstood)

We've all been exposed to the capabilities of AI. It's often misunderstood—even by those who built it. But there's no denying there's a massive shift happening right now in terms of engagement, marketing, sales, technology. How people find tools. How they solve problems.

The old ways of finding information are no longer relevant.

You don't look up a plumber in the Yellow Pages anymore. That's an outdated channel. Granted, you might go there to verify information—trust but verify—but that's not where you find information. Traditional forms of advertising don't really work anymore.

Bold Claim #1: Search Engines Are Losing Dominance

The bold claim we're making—which is yet to be proven unequivocally, but we feel will be proven in the next 10 years—is this:

Why are they losing dominance?

• They were built on infrastructure optimized for a different era.
• The value extraction model has reached its peak.
• Companies like Google have monetized every conceivable angle.
• They have too much friction. Too many clicks. Too much consumption. Society doesn't have time for that.
• AI provides a better user experience for many types of queries—instant answers without clicking through 10 links.

Bold Claim #2: Website Fatigue

People are sick of websites. They've been around for a long time. Users just want to know:

• What do you got?
• How much does it cost?
• Can I use it?

I don't need to scroll through 500 pages. I don't need to go through the traditional buyer journey. I don't need to download a piece of content and educate myself. We live in an instant gratification world.

Enter ChatGPT and AI Models: Still in Infancy

Here comes ChatGPT. Here come all the AI models. We're still in the infancy in terms of how we use this stuff. Some of us recognize the power and capabilities that are coming.

ChatGPT scaled to over 1 billion users in 36 months. Insane.

The Bell Curve of AI User Capabilities

One of the biggest epiphanies I had about AI early on: I showed it to my parents, my sister, and my dad. I had been using AI to do all sorts of crazy stuff, learning and sharpening my skills.

And they asked one of the most basic questions: "What's the weather like today?"

You're sitting here engaging with the most powerful technological advancement in the history of mankind, and the best thing you can come up with is "What's the weather like today?" You're sitting outside.

What this means: There's an entire spectrum. A bell curve in terms of user capabilities. You've got your power users. Then you've got early adopters that aren't quite there yet.

But as the market starts to learn and understand—as consumers start to learn how to use these tools effectively—they will start using them more and more for bigger problems. Problems that you can solve.

The Bet Marketers Must Make

For marketing teams, the bet you're making right now is:

Do I want to invest time, effort, energy, money into traditional channels like search and social? Or do I want to invest into emerging channels like AI?

AI—although there are hundreds of millions of users—is still an emerging channel. The method of consumption is still the screen, but what's behind the screen is wildly different.

Think about televisions. They've been around for quite some time. How we view TVs has changed dramatically. The undercurrent of simplification is always there. Consumer mindsets shift. Cable is on the chopping block. Subscription-based packages curated to the consumer have emerged.

You've got to adapt.

How AI Evaluates Brands: Trust

When we talk about AI as a channel, you have to make a bet. You have to signal to AI that you are the type of brand, the type of company that can be trusted.

That's how AI is going to evaluate brands: based on trust.

AI evaluated brands historically based on a lot of web crawling, scraping, searching, verifying, sourcing. They trained all their data on the internet. They took their best guess.

But the next wave of AI-generated training and content that AI is going to consume—in terms of relevance for the end user—is not going to come from traditional methods. It shouldn't come from traditional websites, because traditional websites were not built to communicate properly to AI models.

Your Best Salesperson Is AI

The Problem: Marketers Don't Know How to Engage AI

There's a lot of problems for marketers now. It's a big black box. Marketers don't know how to engage with these models properly and consistently to where they can get repeatable results.

As always, they've got an executive breathing down their neck: "Where's my results?"

Product-Marketing Alignment (Not Sales-Marketing)

What marketers have to do: You have to be pushing and getting aligned with product. Not sales. Product.

You've got to get aligned with product. You have to be in alignment with product so it enables product to reduce the friction for customers to sign up and start using your products.

All the offers that historically have done well? They're not going to do well in the era of AI.

The Content Problem: Everyone's Asking AI the Same Thing

Here's the problem. Line up 50 brands. Say, "Hey, I need you to create content on project management." There's 50 marketing teams.

They're all going to go to ChatGPT and ask it to write article after article about project management.

And then AI is going to look at all 50 brands and say:

The Underwater Basket Weaving Analogy

Think about it this way:

Take something you know better than your friends and family. Let's call it underwater basket weaving. I'm the world's expert. I know everything there is to know about it.

I sit 10 people down. I teach them about underwater basket weaving. I offer up information for free. I'll generate content about this topic for free that I can give back to you.

Now, 9 of those people ask me for my insights and generate articles about underwater basket weaving using what I told them.

How do you think I'm going to view those 9 articles? Pretty poorly, right? Where did that information come from? It came from me. It came from all the sources of content creators from a prior era.

But then there's the 10th person.

The Untapped Source: Domain Experts

That 10th person decides to do something different. Instead of asking me what I know about underwater basket weaving, they go to their network. They have their people—their colleagues, their connections—provide them with new information. Authentic information. Well-curated and organized information about underwater basket weaving.

At the end of the contest, I look at 9 people who have given me the same crap I already knew—the crap I already extracted in formats that were basically kind of old.

Then I've got this 10th one that comes to me with:

• New information
• Organized information
• Better information

Domain Sourcing (Not Crowdsourcing, Not Thought Leadership)

The untapped sources of content are the domain experts who have stayed out of the public domain.

This is not thought leadership. Thought leadership was a term used in the early 2000s, 2010s, where a handful of people had forward-thinking ideas. That doesn't matter anymore.

It's not crowdsourcing either.

It's domain sourcing.

What is your domain? What do you know about? Can you articulate it in a way that's interesting and different, but also in a way that AI can understand? So AI can put you near the top.

The Solution: Voice-Based Domain Extraction

You have to communicate the right way. You have to structure it the right way. You have to get information from your people in a simple and effective way.

How do you do that? Through voice.

What We're Building: The Platform Solution

We are working on a solution that will solve a lot of these problems.

What it does:

1. Takes information that is pulled and extracted from your domain experts
2. Organizes it in a way that is useful for AI
3. Delivers that information to the various models
4. Tracks that information and reports back how it's being received and digested
5. Structures information to give you protection in terms of competitor coverage
6. Gives you opportunities to highlight things that might be new opportunities

How It Works

Our platform plugs into your current website. We generate a new subdomain—ai.yourcompany.com or whatever you choose.

Then we feed your content to the language models in a way that is properly structured, consistently. We give you opportunities to curate new content: market leadership, thought leadership, crowdsourced domain expertise.

Best of all: We give you an opportunity to convert customers.

The Future: AI-Optimized Search (AIS)

It used to be SSO (single sign-on). That's still viable. But there's a new acronym coming—something like AIS (AI-Integrated Search)—some way to quickly add your brand to users' boards of topics and tools.

It's almost inevitable: There's going to be a paid element for search queries and citing of sources.

When somebody says, "Can you tell me about underwater basket weaving?" AI will list out sources. It's going to do some bidding. It won't go to Google first and ask who's number one.

Stay Ahead of the Game

You plug in. You're going to get instant value—even if you don't see instant results. That could just mean you're not ready yet. If you're already getting some results from it, great.

But you've got to stay ahead of the game.

It's a Race (Not a Race to the Bottom)

Some might say it's a race to the bottom. I used to think that way. But I don't think it's a race to the bottom because that would assume there's an end.

I think it's supply and demand. Survival of the fittest.

If you can run faster and further and provide more value, people will pay for that. If you can provide less friction, people will pay for that.

Conclusion: We Have an Amazing Opportunity

We're going through a transformation. It's an evolution of merging channels. We're in an era where everything is changing.

You've got to be ready. You've got to identify the signals and the problems that need solving, solve them faster, and communicate that value faster.

That's it. It's a race.

We have a wild, amazing opportunity here. We're going to be working with customers and helping them plug in.

And we'll see what happens.