The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489)

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 actually rewards. AI inclusion is an inheritance. It’s not an acquisition. City of Hope inherited their position from years of peer reviewed research, independent media, and an earned reputation with their patients. The AI was trained on all of that. Most GEO strategy, quote unquote, is sold as something you can acquire this quarter. But if AI inclusion is primarily inherited from prior fundamentals, that changes and should change your budget discussion, your budget conversation. AIs see a weak signal, a contradictory signal, or no signal, and it loses confidence in your brand. When an AI sees a strong signal, a clear signal, a coherent signal, that’s when you win. The brands who are showing up consistently today are showing up because they’ve built brands worth people asking for by name. This is what I mean when I say the brand is the prompt. But also brands that are worth answering by name, that the AI can confidently say, "As a concierge, I know the answer to your question. I know who you should be talking to." Winning in the long run isn’t just about what you do this quarter. It’s what you do for a long time. If you go to your AI of choice — it doesn’t matter if it’s Google Gemini, it doesn’t matter if it’s ChatGPT, it doesn’t matter if it’s Perplexity, it doesn’t matter if it’s Claude — go to the AI you like the most and ask it to describe your brand. Everything it gets right is a sign that you have a strong signal. Everything that it gets wrong or hedges on or isn’t quite clear on, that’s where you have a gap. And that’s your roadmap. You don’t need a vendor to do an audit. The AI itself is going to tell you this is what it knows to be true about you. That’s really, really key. Now the most common gap is when you say one thing about your brand and your customers are saying something else about your brand. It sees a difference between your statements and your customer’s reviews. That’s a huge contradiction, and that means the AI will lose confidence in you. It cannot confidently recommend you to a potential customer. Note that this isn’t just about the discussions happening on platforms that the AI trusts. It’s that you have never done the work to build review velocity for your business, that you haven’t worked to gain the earned media presence that gives the AI some corroborating evidence beyond just what you say on your site or beyond just what it sees in reviews. Neither of those gaps is going to get solved by a GEO vendor — immediately. Both are solved by doing the same things that improve your direct business: giving a better customer experience, gaining better reviews, and building clearer signal. I’ve worked with businesses to reduce their dependency on big tech companies over the last 15 years — through Google updates, through the emergence of OTAs, through social reach, and now AI. And what’s interesting is how this era looks similar to what I’ve seen before. In the book Digital Reset, I talk about a pattern that happens: a new discovery channel emerges. Something comes around and we go, "oh, this is cool, we should check this out." We get good results from it early. We test it and we see that this is really working, and usually at a pretty low cost. Over time, the platforms with legs grow more dominant. They build a bigger base of customers and often send more customers your way, usually at a pretty low cost. That’s super attractive. So you double down on that. You dive in even further until suddenly that becomes a major source of your business. But at that point, that puts them in a position of gatekeeping power. And as you’ve heard me say many times before, gatekeepers gonna gate. They have to. They are required to, because they owe it to their shareholders to monetize the traffic and the connection that they have with customers to grow their revenues and grow their profits and grow their shareholder value. And so what happens is the gatekeeper then raises the toll to you. This is a vicious cycle that occurs again and again and again. We’ve seen this repeatedly with search, with social, with mobile, with OTAs. It happens consistently. Every time there’s a new platform shift, there’s a window. It could be two years, it could be three years, it could be five years, where the new gatekeepers are still building their position and they haven’t yet started collecting the highest tolls they can. That’s huge because marketing leaders look at that and say, this is a great opportunity for our business. And that’s good. That actually is a good idea. We saw this, I’ll give you a real world example, with independent hotels and hotel brands. They had opportunities to build direct booking capabilities and direct booking connections with customers before OTAs became kind of non-negotiable. First before September of 2001. Then in the later 2000s. The ones that took advantage of those windows built direct websites. They built email lists. They built loyalty programs — either recognition programs or reward programs — to connect directly with customers and gain data. And they built direct revenue. The ones that didn’t do those things are still paying 20% commissions as table stakes for 35, 40, 50% of their business. That’s not a great place to be. The boutique hotels that appear in ChatGPT answers today for questions like "the best independent hotel in Charleston," or "the best independent hotel in Orlando," are there because of the reviews they’ve been gaining for the last 10 years, for the content that they’ve been publishing for the last eight to 10 years, for press coverage that they earned five or six or seven years ago, and every year in between. They’re not there because of some AI strategy. They inherited that position because they had an overarching brand strategy and an overarching strategy of how to connect with their customers directly every single time. The hotels that went all in on OTA distribution, the retailers that outsourced their audience to Facebook, the publishers who handed their traffic to Google — each of those folks made, I want to be fair, a rational decision in that moment. It wasn’t a mistake in the small terms. The problem was that they didn’t own anything when the platform changed the terms of the relationship. So the question that I would ask is whether we are seeing a different game or whether it’s the same game with slightly different rules. Spoiler alert, I think it’s the same game with slightly different rules. There are definitely new things happening here. Artificial intelligence, AI answer engines, and AI assistants and AI agents as they arrive, are weighing things like corroboration quality — is your story being backed up in other places — more than just "did you get a bunch of links." It’s much harder to game that with volume or technical tricks. In that sense, AI is doing what search has always supposed to be doing before they had to spend so much time fighting black hat SEO types and people trying to game the system. Candidly, one reason why I’m so bullish on Google is that they know what getting gamed looks like. I’ve argued that many of the AI answer engines right now are doing a speed run through Google’s search spam learnings, and that they’re going to have to make changes that Google’s been making for years. What hasn’t changed is expert authored content. You’re familiar with EEAT probably, from Google — Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust. Companies and businesses that have built that expertise and have built that authority and have gained that experience and have gained that trust are the ones doing well. What also hasn’t changed is independent validation and trusted platform reviews and a strong, well-regarded direct brand that follows from those. Those drove organic authority 10 years ago, and they’re driving AI inclusion today. Maybe you’ve heard me say before that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. That’s what we’re still seeing even with artificial intelligence. One thing to keep in mind here is a "do no harm" principle, a "first, do no harm" principle. If a GEO tactic is going to hurt your search performance, it’s probably not going to work for artificial intelligence either — and certainly not in the long term. The tactics that work for both are the same: quality content, earned external references, active review management. The brands that win in AI today are the ones that have inherited that position. The question you should be asking right now is not "how do we acquire AI visibility?" It’s "how do we build the brand that produces AI visibility as a byproduct of being a brand that AI values?" Now, if the fundamentals are this clear and the pattern is this consistent, why are 82% of companies still stuck in the value gap? Why don’t they just do the thing? Every new gatekeeper’s entry into the market included — and includes — a period where taking the shortcut looks like the smart play. In Google’s case, it was things like link building programs even before you had to pay for them. In social media’s case, it was building organic reach and building your follower count. In OTAs, it was things like low cost early commissions. And with AI it’s things like GEO vendors and AI content farms and churning out high volumes of low quality, low cost content so that you show up. But those all stop working at a certain point. They realize people are spamming this. So Google shuts that down. The social media channels say we need to actually earn money off of these folks, so we’re going to pull back the algorithm and change what your organic reach is. The OTAs are saying, we’re contributing a lot of business to your hotel, so we need to raise commission rates. What makes you think that the AIs are going to do anything different? We don’t know exactly when that will occur, but I’m really confident it’s coming because we’ve seen this happen again and again and again. Now, I want to be very fair to people who have gone down this path before and chosen that path. It’s not a scam. It’s a trap. It’s not a scam because it works — at least temporarily. That’s what makes it so dangerous. A scam would be easier to resist. You’re savvy enough — the people who’ve done this are savvy enough — to know that if you’re not getting value out of something, you would never put your efforts there, you would never put your money there. So the people who have taken these approaches are not fools. What they are doing is saying, "Hey, this is producing results for me. I should double down on this." That’s what makes it dangerous — the fact that it actually does work. The challenge is that you end up owning visibility, but not the relationship with the customer. The shortcut is always attractive exactly at the moment when you need it the most, because they’re helping you reach customers you haven’t reached before, usually at a relatively low cost. All that you see at that point is the upside. By the time the cost becomes visible, too many people find themselves in a position where they’ve built far too much of their strategy depending upon that thing. That’s not a great place to be. Marketing leaders need to think in terms of: when is this a genuine investment in our foundations, and when is this a shortcut dressed up as a strategy? I would think there are a couple of ways you would test this. The first is to ask whether this investment would matter if AI changed tomorrow. If we look at things like expert authored content or review velocity programs or first party data infrastructure or earned media from credible sources, those are going to improve your business regardless of which AI model is dominant six months from now, 12 months from now, 18 months from now. If the investment only works because of how ChatGPT works in Q2 of 2026, that’s probably a warning sign. The other test is: does this investment compound its value over time, or does it require a reset every couple of months? Shortcuts work. Foundations compound. A review earned today is in the training data for the next model update. Content that gets cited once tends to get cited again. First party data gets more valuable as you collect more of it from your customers. If an investment’s value has to be reinvested every time the platform updates, that’s a shortcut. If it compounds regardless of the platform updates, then you’re building a foundation for success long term. When you walk into your monthly review or your quarterly review and you’re making the case for the budget you need going forward, you should not be thinking in terms of "we shouldn’t invest in AI." That’s not what I’m saying here. You should be saying: we should invest in AI the way businesses that survive every platform shift invest. We should be investing in the things that improve our business and compound across every platform, not only in things that work for this particular algorithm or this particular artificial intelligence. One of those has a long-term opportunity for you. One of those means you’re going to keep throwing money after money after money every time the algorithm changes. When we think about budget categories: expert authored content that earns citations — a hundred percent. Review velocity programs — a hundred percent. First-party data infrastructure — a hundred percent. If we’re talking about people selling you, "you’re going to appear in the AI top every single time" — you might want to take a really close look at that. You might want to start small and test, because maybe they do know something. But you want to make sure you own the result, not just the visibility, before you double down there, before you try to scale this up. The businesses that I have watched navigate every platform shift without getting captured have all had one thing in common. It’s not that they saw the future first. It’s not that they were smarter than everybody else. It’s just that they never fully gave up the direct relationship with the customer. They built a long lasting brand platform, a long lasting customer relationship that survived and thrived every time the platforms shifted. They didn’t chase any short term wins at the expense of the long term opportunity. I have had this exact conversation through the Google updates, through the collapse of reach on social media, with hotels and OTA commissions, and now with AI. Some of this isn’t that I’m predicting the future. I’ve seen this and seen folks get burned by it plenty in the past, including me from time to time. This is hard won experience. You eventually learn, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t chase the ‘ooh, shiny object,’ but we should build something of lasting value." The folks I’ve worked with who’ve acted on these conversations and learned from them and applied them — and the folks who aren’t even clients who figured it out on their own — they’re the ones who are doing great and they’re the ones who have options to continue to improve over the long run. This is not some sophisticated, brand new AI strategy. It’s a 15 year pattern that keeps working no matter who the gatekeeper is next. And ultimately, that’s the place where you want to be. If this episode helped you think more clearly about where to put your budget this year, or gave you language for the conversation you’re about to have with your CMO or CFO, do me a favor — send this to a colleague who’s wrestling with the same question. That’s how these conversations get into the rooms where the decisions are made. You can find the show notes for this episode, including the research we discussed and the full archive of past episodes at timpeter.com/podcasts. And if you’re ready to go deeper on building a brand for the next platform, whatever it turns out to be, my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," offers the full framework. You’ll find the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening today and for all of the episodes you’ve listened to. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. Take Your Next Step Toward a Digital Reset “Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today? The Brief: Get the weekly email that turns these strategic ideas into actionable demand. Subscribe to The Digital Reset Brief The Book: Master the framework with Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Buy the Book The Experience: Need a bespoke digital strategy for your hotel, resort, SaaS firm, or financial services firm? 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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 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’s not either SEO or GEO. It’s SEO and GEO, SEO plus GEO. Second, and you’ve heard me say this many times that customer experience is queen. I’m kind of bundling the first two portions of our royal court of brand building here. You’ve heard me say many times in the book, Digital Reset, that content is king and customer experience is queen. Those are still true. What’s also true, is that your content has always included what others say about you. You have a secret sales force working for you — or for your competitors — based on what your customers’ experiences are and what they say about those experiences in social and in ratings and reviews. They’re telling their friends and family and fans and followers all about what they think about your products and services and your brand more broadly. If you’re in a category like hospitality or travel or any kind of B2C, what others say about you in public ratings and reviews plays a massive role here. You’re undoubtedly familiar. In B2B, the same is still true. It just tends to happen in private. It could be text or LinkedIn messages. It could be email. It could be on Slack or Teams channels or phone calls. But folks ask other folks, “Hey, what do you know about this company? What do you know about their products and services? Do they work well for you?” Your content has always included what others say about your brand and business. Well, the data seems pretty clear that those discussions influence whether or not you show up in AI responses. That’s something we just have to keep top of mind. You also want to keep do no harm in mind, too, because what people say about you, whether it’s public or private, drives awareness, interest and action among your potential customers. Ideally, that’s to your business’s benefit. But even a poor customer experience creates a narrative around your brand and one that you’ll fight against for a long time to come, especially in GEO. If “the concierge” is reading all kinds of bad things about your brand, guess what it’s going to know about your brand? We want to move to an era where your brand is the prompt. And if somebody types in your brand and the answer engine says, “Man, I don’t know about that brand…” that’s really, really, really bad for your business. Not just now, but over the long term. Making sure that when your brand is the prompt that the concierge has great things to say about you, about your brand, about your business, is a clear component of why customer experience is queen now more than ever. So seriously, take care of the queen. This really matters. Finally, if you had have some exposure to our Royal Court framework that I’ve talked about many times, you’ll know that I say data is the crown jewels. And I want to talk for a minute about what that means in this case. I’m seeing many businesses experience a big lift in branded traffic or conversions that don’t have an obvious source. Folks are just coming to your website or opening your app or reaching out to your sales team or sending you an email without starting on your site. They just kind of appear. And if they’re not doing that, well, you want them to, regardless of whether they’re doing that today or not. Listen to my prior points from a moment ago if you need more help on how you can do that. The question we want to be thinking about then is if people just show up, what metrics matter to your business? We can’t rely on the metrics we’ve used for a long time. Now is the time to get your KPIs and your metrics in order so that you can actually determine what is our current state and are we moving forward in a direction that we want to. Again, data is the crown jewels. They help you make better business decisions and take better care of your customers so that they actually have a better experience, so that you actually have a better shot of showing up more often. Clearly, we’re going to lose some visibility into what’s happening compared to what we’ve had for years. You might not get the same level of tracking or the same level of insights you’ve had in the past. That’s okay. We just need to keep track of the metrics that genuinely matter and help you make better business decisions. Now the first one should be obvious, it’s revenue, right? Are you seeing more revenue or less revenue? Ultimately, that is the final determinant of whether or not any of this is working for your business. If your revenue is going up, that’s probably a good sign that you’re doing the right thing. If your revenue is declining, that’s probably a clear sign that you need to do something different than what you’ve been doing up till now. So that’s a huge one you want to pay attention to. Of course revenue is a trailing indicator. It only tells you what happened in the past. It’s not necessarily all that predictive of what’s going to happen in the future. So another key performance indicator you want to watch is lead volume. That could include actual leads in a B2B context. It could also include the number of people who put items in their shopping carts in B2C or enter your booking engine in a hospitality context. Are people showing interest in engaging with your brand and your business in a commercial way? Do they want to talk to you? Do they want to hear from you? Pay super close attention to whether they are signing up for your email lists. Are they giving you their information for SMS? Are they saying, “I want to have a conversation with you, not just now, but in the future and want to hear from you directly?” Again, that’s a super, super huge sign about where your business is going to go in the future. We do a bunch of work with hospitality clients and we’ve determined that for your typical set of hotels, every new email address you collect is worth somewhere between five and thirty-five dollars in future revenue. So if that data isn’t showing up, if you weren’t collecting that data from your customers, it’s a pretty good sign that your future revenues are going to have some real problems. Again, data is the crown jewels here. It points to real future revenue. Another metric that matters a ton are brand searches. Are the number of searches for your brand in organic traffic shrinking or growing? If it’s shrinking, you’re likely not showing up in AI or traditional search near as much as you’d like to or need to. People aren’t finding you. They then aren’t then going to Google and ask for you. Again, review my prior points for what you can do about that. If you see those numbers rising though, it’s a pretty good sign that AI is likely surfacing you more often. AI is talking about you and people are learning about you to then come over to your website by searching you by name. That’s a really clear use case that we’ve seen customers do where they learn about you and then they go ask traditional search to help them find you and find your website. Hugely important. A more recent and more sophisticated way to watch this is something called prompt brand equity. This is a term that we’ve talked about a bunch; it’s something that I think matters a lot as we go forward. And of course, I’ll link to in the show notes other times we’ve talked about this. Now, prompt brand equity is not about where you rank in AI search results. It’s how often you show up at all. There’s some great research from Rand Fishkin that shows where you appear in AI answers is not at all predictable. You could be number one in one chat, number two in another chat, and number three in a third chat, even though you’re an equally good answer for all three chats, even if the prompt was precisely the same. It’s not predictable. And it’s not predictive of what’s going to happen with your business. The thing you want to keep in mind here is it’s not about where you rank. It’s does your brand appear at all? Do you ever show up? Don’t worry about tracking where you rank, but absolutely pay attention to whether or not you appear. There are a bunch of pretty good tools for measuring this metric right at the moment. Tools like Peec AI, seoClarity, FinSEO, SE Ranking, Profound, and Otterly all seem to get good reviews and good feedback for how well they measure the frequency of how often your brand appears. It’s probably worth checking out each of those to see what might work best for you. My point here isn’t to recommend one tool or another. Your specific needs may lean you towards one versus the other. My point is to strongly recommend that you keep track of whether or not your brand appears at all. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing whether in fact your brand is the prompt… or isn’t. Tracking how frequently your brand appears is a great way to learn whether or not your content marketing and GEO efforts work. If you’re showing up, that’s a good signpost that your content is being used by AI answer engines. And if not, well, then your content pretty likely isn’t doing its job. It’s critical to understand what’s working here and what isn’t. As I mentioned last week, we’ve moved from a world where you just needed to show up in a card catalog to a world where you need to convince a concierge that you’re the right choice. That’s why taking care of both traditional search and GEO matters. Your successful digital reset isn’t about fighting with machines. It’s about ensuring your brand signal is clear enough for those machines to find you. Because in this new era, your brand isn’t just a logo or a label… not that it ever was. It’s that your brand is the prompt — or it needs to be if customers will consistently find you no matter where they go looking. If this episode helped you make sense of some of the noise around SEO and GEO and about digital more broadly, do me a favor, send it to one of your colleagues who is currently staring at their 2026 budget and wondering what they should do next. You can find the links to the GEO tracking tools we discussed, the show notes for this episode, and the full archive of all past episodes at TimPeter.com/podcast. And if you’re ready to move beyond big tech for your business, my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, provides the roadmap to reclaim your demand. You’ll find a link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. Take Your Next Step Toward a Digital Reset “Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today? The Brief: Get the weekly email that turns these strategic ideas into actionable demand. Subscribe to The Digital Reset Brief The Book: Master the framework with Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Buy the Book The Experience: Need a bespoke digital strategy for your hotel, resort, SaaS firm, or financial services firm? Tim Peter & Associates can help you. Work with Tim The post The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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 customers asking the same question, what do you think is happening when your AI chatbot answers the same question from two different customers? Think about that for a moment. Let me give you a hospitality example. Let’s say you’ve got a guest who opens your hotel’s chat widget and asks, what’s the cancellation policy for a reservation that’s made between this date and this date? And your AI gives them an answer. An hour later, a different customer asks the exact same question because they’re staying during a high demand period. Your AI might give a slightly different answer. Maybe the window is 48 hours in one response and 24 in another. Maybe it says that there’s a charge for one and not for the other. Maybe amenities that are included get described differently. Maybe the rate quote shifts. Is that happening? Uh, almost certainly. Has anyone on your team actually measured it with any consistency? Almost certainly not. By the way, this is not just a hospitality problem, it’s a B2B problem too. It’s a retail problem too. If you are using an AI tool to help your sales team respond to prospect questions or using AI to handle initial customer service inquiries, the same inconsistency is baked into those responses. Your AI isn’t giving a consistent answer. It’s giving a distribution of answers, and your customers are sampling from that distribution. That’s an operational liability, not just a measurement inconvenience. In hospitality, especially where the expectation of guest forms before arrival is a huge driver of satisfaction. Or dissatisfaction and where dissatisfied guests write reviews that the AI then reads. And I don’t mean the AI on your website. I mean ChatGPT or Claude or Google Gemini or Google AI Overviews or AI Mode. This is a problem that you need to think carefully about. So if AI recommendations are this inconsistent, why is it that some brands do really well and others don’t? Why do some brands appear in almost every other response while others don’t appear in very many at all? And there’s a phenomenal example, just an amazing example from the research that I want to share. Rand’s team asked Google, specifically to recommend "West Coast cancer care hospitals" 71 times, and City of Hope appeared in 69 of those responses. That’s 97% of the responses. That’s not luck, that’s not some glitch in the algorithm. City of Hope appears in 97% of those responses because the AI’s confidence weight for City of Hope on the topic of "West Coast cancer care" is so high that it essentially has to include them. There’s too much validating information from too many credible independent sources pointing in the same direction for the AI to leave them out with any reasonable probability. I want to be fair here for a moment. There is a reality in Google searches where they refer to "your money or your life searches," things where it can cost somebody significant money or it can interfere with their health outcomes. Google is very careful in YMYL searches, "your money or your life" searches, not to include any business that could reasonably harm your money or your life. So it is possible, I want to be very clear, it’s very possible that this specific query ends up being a YMYL query, or because it’s a YMYL query, Google’s going to be particularly careful not to recommend a brand that it’s not highly confident about. It still underscores the point that the concierge wants to give the best possible answer, not just what gets the most links, not just what ranks number one, but what it knows is the correct answer. And what City of Hope is seeing is what high prompt brand equity looks like when it’s working. The inverse is also true. Brands that show up 5% or 10% of the time aren’t being penalized. They’re simply not validated enough. They’re simply not enough corroborating information about them for the AI to be willing to commit to the brand. Now, when I say validated or corroborated, I want to be specific about what that means. Because "post more content" isn’t the answer here. That’s not how you’re going to win. What AI systems are doing is triangulating. They’re looking at a variety of sources and they’re asking "Do multiple independent sources, sources that have no obvious reason to be aligned, point to this brand and only this brand—or mostly this brand—as a credible answer to this question?" Sure your own website says you’re doing great. That’s a data point, but it’s not necessarily a very high weight one. You are a biased source. What your customers say in reviews, that’s a higher weight signal. What industry publications and third parties say about you? Also a higher weight signal. What other expert sources cite you for, again, higher weight. They’re witnesses to your competence and your capabilities and your credibility. Digital witnesses backing up and verifying what the concierge, the large language model, knows about you. This. This is the reason that I say content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. It’s not just a branding concept, it’s an operating model that drives prompt brand equity. The content you publish establishes what you are about. It says, "this is who we believe we are." The experience you deliver generates the reviews and the word of mouth to validate that, that corroborates the other witness’s story. And the data, the first party signals that you own and the external signals that others generate about you is what the AI draws from to decide whether or not you are the brand it should include. When those three areas, the content, your customer experience, and your data, are aligned and consistent, the AI’s confidence weight for your brand goes up. The concierge can recommend you confidently. When those data points, when those three elements are contradictory or thin or absent, you’re the brand that shows up one time in 10. Your brand is the prompt, but for your brand to actually be the prompt for the AI to reach for you by name the way it reaches for City of Hope, it needs enough signal that it has no other choice of who to select. So practically, what do you do about this? I want to give you four things to think about this time around. First shift your measurement from rank to frequency. Stop worrying about whether you’re number one or number two in an AI response. That number will change constantly and tells you nothing at all reliable. What you want to track is if you run the 10 questions your customers most commonly ask across ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity, let’s say for 10 runs each, how often do you appear? That’s your baseline frequency. And you can use tools like Peec.AI or seoClarity or others to actually measure that for you. But run it again 30 days from now, 60 days, 90 days from now. If your frequency is going up, then your signals are strengthening. If it’s declining, then something needs your attention. I talked about many of these tools in episode 485, and I’ll link to them again in the show notes. But you can start measuring today for free with nothing but an hour and a few open browser tabs. If you’ve got people on your team, great. Set them to the same task. Take a few people, take 30 minutes and ask them to do it, and record those in a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet so you’ve got something to refer back to. Second audit your internal AI tools for consistency. While you’re worrying about showing up in external AI answers, go check what your own deployed AI is telling your customers. In fact, if you already have an AI chatbot, I would do this first. Take a look at the most frequently asked questions. Could be five, could be 10, but the ones that get asked regularly and the ones that your team already know the answer to cold and ask your chatbot each one 10 times. If the answers differ materially on anything that would affect a customer’s expectations, you’ve got an operational problem that’s creating review risk right now. And that’s actually more urgent than any GEO tactic because you’re creating a negative impression of your brand. Third, focus your content investment on increasing witnesses, credible witnesses, not just content volume. One piece of original expert authored content that gets cited and shared and referenced by independent sources does more for your prompt brand equity than 50 AI generated blog posts. The AI isn’t counting the number of pieces of content on your site. It’s weighting the content by the degree to which independent verifiable sources, credible sources, confirm what your content says. Write less. Make it more citable. Make it more original. Make it more authentic. Make it genuinely worth citing. That’s how you get cited more often. Fourth, treat review velocity as a strategic input, not just a reputation metric. Review velocity was always an important metric. This was always important. But AI makes it more true. Reviews are one of the highest weight external signals that AI systems draw upon, particularly if you’re in hospitality or a local business, or, uh, a customer service oriented business. Recent, detailed, specific reviews on Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp, your OTA listings are among the most direct inputs to prompt brand equity available to small, independent businesses. Larger businesses, the same is gonna be true for something like G2 because that’s where your customers go to talk about you. Getting 10 substantive high quality reviews this quarter does more for your AI visibility than almost any technical GEO tactic. And responding to those reviews where the systems allow you, all of them, not just the good ones, tells the AI that you’re a business that takes the feedback seriously. That’s a signal too. Okay, so those four tactics out of the way, here’s the bigger picture I want to leave you with. Over the last three weeks on this show, I’ve talked about three different stories that all come from the same root cause. I talked about the AI value gap, why 88% of companies use AI, but only 6% see significant results. I talked about agentic commerce and why even OpenAI wasn’t reasonably able to predict how soon AI driven transactions would happen. And now I’m talking about AI inconsistency, why the same prompt produces a different answer almost every single time. I’m going to say this as clearly as I can. Those are not three separate problems. They’re three symptoms of the same underlying condition. AI systems work by constructing a best guess answer from the available signals. The concierge wants to know. When the signals are weak or inconsistent or contradictory, its output is going to be weak and inconsistent and contradictory. When the signals are strong, deep, and consistent, the AI finds you. It commits to you. It recommends you 69 times out of 71 as opposed to one out of a thousand. The companies in the 6% who are closing the value gap, the businesses that appear consistently in AI answers, they’re not doing something exotic. They’re doing the fundamentals very, very, very well. They’ve got clear objectives. They’ve got strong content. They’ve got data they own and trust. And they have customer experiences that earn reviews that confirm what their content says. That’s the digital reset in practice. It’s not fighting the AI. It’s not chasing every new platform or tool or protocol. It’s making your signal clear enough that the machine finds you, no matter what form that machine takes, whether it’s Big Tech or AI or something else that comes down the road. It all works together. Do that well, and you’re gonna find yourself in a very good position for a very long time. Now, if this episode gave you a clearer picture of what prompt brand equity actually means and how you can build it, do me a favor. Send it to one colleague who is currently staring at your 2026 budget and wondering where they put their money, what we do next. It might send them from spending time or money on the wrong thing. Even better, send this to the person on your team who is currently reporting on AI rankings. Ask them "if this list changes 99% of the time, what are we actually measuring?" I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for this episode, including links to the SparkToro research, the brand visibility tools that I mentioned, and the full archive of past episodes at timpeter.com/podcasts. And if you’re ready to go deeper on making your brand the answer that AI reaches for my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," is the roadmap that you need. You’ll find the link in the show notes. Thank you again so much for listening. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. Take Your Next Step Toward a Digital Reset “Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today? The Brief: Get the weekly email that turns these strategic ideas into actionable demand. Subscribe to The Digital Reset Brief The Book: Master the framework with Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Buy the Book The Experience: Need a bespoke digital strategy for your hotel, resort, SaaS firm, or financial services firm? Tim Peter & Associates can help you. Work with Tim The post The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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 do well. Right? They’ve got free shipping, which doesn’t matter in travel. They’ve got, uh, warehouses, which don’t matter in travel, right? All of these things don’t play to their strengths, and at the moment they don’t play to ChatGPT’s. The third problem, the third reason, is about merchant adoption. At least according to some research, maybe a couple of dozen Shopify merchants actually integrated. That’s out of millions of Shopify merchants. Real world e-commerce doesn’t plug in the way that the developer demo suggests today. And I wanna be really clear, I’m talking about today. I do not want you to listen to this podcast, I don’t want you to listen to anything I’m saying here and think I’m saying that AI is overhyped or it, you know, this is never going to work. That is such an easy thing to say. And it’s wrong. It is wrong. It is not a thing I’m saying. What’s really happening, if I can borrow the classic podcast phrase, is that two things are true at the same time. What happened here, what has happened here is that ChatGPT checkout failed in its first attempt. I mean, we’ve all been there, right? But things like Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and ChatGPTs Agentic Commerce Protocol are still moving forward. Etsy and Wayfair are already transacting within Google AI Mode and in some cases in ChatGPT. Sabre, PayPal and MindTrip have an end to end agentic travel booking system that they anticipate is gonna happen in Q2 of 2026. By the way, Q2 of 2026—I’m recording this on March 11th—that’s, you know, weeks from now. So the direction is real. A company that controls payments, infrastructure. Ahem, Google with Google Pay, and Google Wallet, can do things that a company that doesn’t, OpenAI as of February, 2026/March, 2026, can’t do right now. Google’s integration with Siri and, as a potential consequence of that, their potential integration with Apple Wallet just underscores the opportunity that’s available to Google right now and others who do the work to make that happen. The timeline is what’s uncertain here, not the destination. It’s pretty clear where we’re headed. Last week I talked about the fact that Klarna made a very similar misstep. There’s a pattern we’ve seen before here. This is simply the Klarna moment for agentic commerce. You may recall in last week’s podcast, I talked about the fact that Klarna replaced 700 customer service agents with AI in February of 2024. The press again was all over this that, "Oh my gosh, this is the moment that AI is gonna replace all the people." Well, fast forward to spring of 2025, and the CEO of Klarna said "we went too far." The technology was real. The timeline for how long it took to deploy was wrong. The gap between the press release and the operational reality was enormous. I mean, that sounds familiar, right? You’ve seen this before. Agentic commerce is just following that same path. You know, the tech press that it was here, people on LinkedIn went nuts. OpenAI launched the feature. The feature didn’t work the way it was supposed to, and so it’s time to recalibrate a bit. Again, the lesson isn’t AI doesn’t work. The lesson as always is build your strategy around principles that hold, no matter which version of the technology wins. Lois McMaster Bojo is a sci-fi author. She wrote a book years ago called "The Vor Game." And the hero of the book, Miles Vorkosigan, learns that, quote, "the key of strategy is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to victory." The point is the same as what I’m talking about. You want to win no matter what happens, no matter which technology folks eventually adopt. Right now, executives across hospitality, retail, B2B are all being asked some version of "what is our agentic commerce strategy? Do we have one?" That is a reasonable question. That’s a really important question to think about and work on for your business. It’s also impossible to answer today because the infrastructure, who controls the checkout moment, which protocol wins—whether it’s Google’s UCP, OpenAI’s ACP, or something that has not yet been proposed—and finally, what your customers will actually do simply is unsettled. We don’t know yet. Here’s the thing. The fact that you can’t answer that question does not mean you can’t act. It means that you need to act in a way that doesn’t bet on any one specific answer. You have to bet so that all paths lead to victory. There’s a useful concept in strategy. You’ve heard this before. It’s called investing for optionality. You wanna give yourself options. Instead of betting on one specific outcome, you make moves that pay off across a range of outcomes. The right agentic commerce strategy right now is an optionality strategy. Do the things that make your business better today, and that also happen to put you in a position so that you do well no matter which version of agentic commerce actually arrives. So there are four things I think are valuable right now—or GEO, for AI search, for traditional search, and for direct business/direct bookings in hospitality and travel—that also will make you ready for agentic commerce when the infrastructure, you know, shows up. If your content has schema markup, if you’ve got schema markup on your site, AI systems in recommendation mode right now and in purchase mode, you know, sometime not too far down the road, can read about your system, about your inventory. They can read about your prices or your rates. They can understand your amenities and the benefits that you offer to customers. There’s data that suggests that sites with proper schema markup are cited in AI responses three times more often than those that aren’t. This isn’t something that’s speculating about the future. This is improving your GEO visibility this week. It also doesn’t hurt your traditional search either. Remember, a few weeks ago I talked about this idea of "first do no harm." This is a perfect "first, do no harm action." Help yourself today and help yourself in the future. The second thing you want to do, and we’ve talked about this as well, is review velocity on trusted platforms. Review how often people are talking about you. AI systems give a lot of credit right now to review recency and review volume on sources they’ve been trained to trust, whether that’s Google, whether it’s TripAdvisor, whether it’s Yelp, whether it’s industry publications, whether it’s social media. These aren’t just agentic commerce signals, by the way. They’re the same signals that drive business and AI search inclusion right now. Encouraging customers and guests to review you on the right platforms has always mattered. it now matters more than ever. It’s also another reason why customer service is queen now and always. The third thing you wanna think about, and this one is more about hospitality, though it has applications in other, um, spheres as well, other domains as well, and that is rate parity. Any tool, whether it’s an AI agent, a search result, or human browsing that finds a lower price on an OTA than on your direct channel sends the customer to another hotel or to an OTA. This isn’t a new problem. It’s just something that has become a much bigger problem. If Google for instance, doesn’t see that rate parity, you’re not gonna show up in AI overviews in AI mode. Pretty much all the time you’re gonna lose in meta search pretty much all the time. This is a prerequisite for any distribution strategy today, tomorrow, traditional, or agentic… period. The fourth thing you want to do is build direct relationships with your customers and collect first party data. You’ve heard me say that data is the crown jewels many, many, many times. This is probably the single deepest lesson from OpenAI’s walk back. The checkout moment is still resolved when customers trust you. And trust flows through relationships that don’t depend on a third party intermediary. The hotels that have direct relationships with past guests, clean CRM data and loyalty programs, that aren’t OTA dependent, have options when the distribution landscape shifts. That’s true, by the way, in retail, it’s true with B2B. When customers buy directly from you, when customers have a direct relationship with you and trust you, they’re more likely to come back to you again and again and again. The brand becomes the prompt. That’s where you want to live. The businesses and brands that don’t do this are at the mercy of whomever controls the next layer, right? And as we all know, they become gatekeepers and gatekeepers gonna gate. Everything I’ve just talked about is the entire argument, the whole argument of "Digital Reset." You cannot predict which gatekeeper will control the connection with your customer next. You can’t. It could be, uh Google. It could be Meta. It could be Amazon. It could be Perplexity. It could be ChatGPT. It could be Booking.com or Expedia. It could be AI agents. Each one has looked like the definitive answer at some point or other, or like they could be the definitive answer. Right now we don’t know which ones will. We don’t. We can’t. The companies that build direct relationships that own their data and invest in their hub, their own channels rather than their spokes, you know, platform mediated traffic, always have options when the landscape shifts. The ones that outsource their sales and marketing to somebody else don’t. You don’t need an agentic commerce strategy. You need a "direct relationship with your customers" strategy, one that makes you resilient to the next gatekeeper and the next channels that they support, regardless of when that happens or who that turns out to be. Fundamentally, that’s how you ensure all roads lead to victory. Now I’m gonna give you a real world example of this and how we’ve seen this happen in the past. Independent hoteliers have seen this story before. Early in the 2000s, the conventional wisdom was that OTAs were a great distribution channel. They gave you high visibility, no upfront cost, and you paid only on conversion. Properties leaned in, and a decade later, and found themselves in a situation where OTA commission rates had risen to 15 to 25%. Parity clauses had had grown so onerous that they really lost control of their own distribution. And the properties that had built their entire distribution strategy around an Expedia or a Booking.com found that they had no leverage to negotiate… and frankly, not a lot of direct channel to fall back on. By the way, the same thing happened again with Google and metasearch. The agentic commerce question is structurally the same thing. The question isn’t, "will AI agents book hotels?" They will, in some form. Sometimes today. And definitely eventually. The question is, when AI agents do book hotels, are they going to route through Google’s UCP, Booking.com‘s agentic layer, Sabre’s system… or something that doesn’t exist yet? Nobody knows! And that includes Google. And that includes OpenAI. But hotels that have built direct relationships with past guest data and loyalty programs and recognition programs, and direct booking engines with, realtime rates and availability, and a great guest experience, they have a seat at any of those tables. A hotel that is dependent on OTAs or on intermediaries for 35%, 40%, 50% of their revenue? They’re waiting to find out which intermediary is gonna control the world as they go forward. Mews called 2026 a make or break year for hotel transformation. But if you look at what they said, they didn’t talk about "Get your agentic booking infrastructure ready." Instead, they talked about, "Hey, get your systems, your data, and your teams AI ready before conversational search, and before AI agents and assistants move from experiments to everyday guest expectations." They’re telling you how to prepare. That’s what we’re talking about too, right? So there are three moves you can take right now that you absolutely should be doing. The first is to "run the agentic test" today. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. "What is AI saying about you?" Go to ChatGPT. Go to Google, Gemini. Go to Perplexity. Ask each one to recommend a business like yours or a property like yours in your market. Are you in the results? Do you even appear? We’ve talked about prompt brand equity; do you show up? Retail, B2B, hospitality. You all face the same question. Importantly, this is today’s question, not next week’s or next month’s or next year’s. This matters right now. What those AI assistants and agents surface in their recommendation reality today is what any future a agentic booking system or commerce system is going to start from. If you don’t appear, you’re not even in the game Second, audit your schema. Use Google’s free Rich Results Test, which I’ll link to in the show notes, and check whether your business gets it right. Do your inventory or your rates, or your prices, or your amenities or your room types, are they all correctly exposed via schema? This is free. It takes you maybe 15 minutes and it will improve your current AI search visibility, whether or not agentic bookings arrive today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. Third, always treat your direct channel as the asset that it is. You know, rate parity. A good, clean, very responsive booking engine, and a reason to book direct, a reason why guests should choose you, why customers should choose you, are prerequisites for any go-to market strategy, including agentic ones. If you don’t have this fixed today, no amount of schema markup is gonna matter when the agent does the price comparison. The honest answer to what’s your agentic commerce strategy is "we’re building a foundation that works regardless of how the technology unfolds." Because the last company that had announced a definitive answer changed course, they reversed themselves six months later. That is not ducking the question, that is the strategically correct answer. It’s the answer that your digital reset is built around. Build direct relationships. Own your data. Create great, customer experiences. And make your brand the prompt. Not because you’re predicting the future correctly, but because those investments pay off in every version of the future, including the ones that nobody predicted yet. If you want the full framework for how we think about this and how you can think about this, not just agentic commerce, but the whole gatekeeper problem that keeps shifting, I wrote "Digital Reset" specifically for you. The king, the queen, the crown jewels framework; the hub and spoke model; Your brand is the prompt. All of it’s in there, all of it developed in full. The link is in the show notes. Thank you so much for tuning in once again. I genuinely appreciate you being here. As you know, this show would not happen without you. You can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcasts. And if you know somebody who you think this episode would help, please share it with them. I’d genuinely appreciate it if you would do that. Until next time, I hope you have a spectacular rest of your week and a spectacular week ahead. Until the next time we talk, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. The post Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Digital Reset Episode 487) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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 didn’t have the right data or the right skills available — so that they didn’t waste time and resources along the way. Companies achieving value from their AI initiatives target growth and innovation, not just efficiency. They put in place well-defined success metrics that allow them to evaluate if they’re moving in the right direction or, you know, not. They create these metrics because they’re focused on business results, not just technology, not just AI, not just whatever the new shiny thing is. You’ve heard me talk many times before about how data is the crown jewels. Well, your metrics are one type of data. They keep you on course. They tell you when you’re succeeding, and they tell you when you’re not. Another type of data that matters is the data that your AI tools need to learn from. Companies succeeding right now make their data available to the tools that they’re working with. That data is a massive strategic asset. It’s what makes AI useful. They’re using AI to better understand their data and improve their products and services. And when they don’t have the data, they know that that’s not a place where AI is going to help them. Now another thing you’ve heard me say is that content is king. That’s still true. The funny thing about AI is we can use it to create content and that’s good. We also can use AI to help our content be better and that’s better. But weirdly, it’s not just about creating high quality content, though that’s important. It’s that you need to be careful when you use AI to create large volumes of content. I’ve long said that content isn’t expensive, but content that doesn’t convert is. Well, that needs a little bit of modification in the era of AI in which we live, because you can use AI to crank out a ton of content. What we’re finding though is that quality now matters even more than quantity, much, much more. Because it turns out that low quality content has a massive, massive cost to your business. Google hates low quality content. They think it’s spam. And I expect most of the other AI extra engines are working their way to that too. Lower ranking traditional search engines is a big deal — something I talked about during last week’s show when I was referring to “first do no harm” in your search engine optimization efforts. If you have low quality content, guess what happens? You don’t show up there and you hurt your overall appearance. In a very related way, you’ll also get less visibility in AI answer engines because they will not see your website as a trusted source. Now, does that mean that every piece of content needs to be created by human beings? No, no, definitely not. What it does mean is that someone, a person who can exercise judgment, must review your content to make sure it works well for its intended audience, to make sure it actually speaks in your voice and is quality. You can compare your content with Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines; I’ll link to those in the show notes. Those aren’t just what Google tells its quality raters. It’s also how those quality raters train Google’s various AI tools to recognize high quality content. We internally have actually built a series of instructions around using Google’s Search Quality Rater guidelines in our prompts when assessing client websites and content. Drop me a line if you want to learn more about that. But that’s how it all works together. It’s the right specific relevant time-bound goals to measure against. It’s content that answers your customers questions and shows up in both search and AI answer engines. It’s AI initiatives that are focused on improving customer experience and greater revenue. And it’s customer data, your company’s crown jewels, that power those insights and experience. So there are three questions I’d like you for you to think about this week that I think are really important: What is it that you want AI to do for your business? Is it drive efficiency or drive effectiveness? Keep in mind that focusing on effectiveness usually has better long-term payback. That’s what Klarna found out. Then, second, do you have the right first-party data infrastructure to make AI useful? If you don’t, that’s actually where you need to start. Third, and finally, are you planning to use AI to reduce your dependency on big tech, or are you just looking to save money? Again, one of those has a much, much better future ahead of it. As I mentioned in an episode a couple of weeks ago, Google saw its best quarter and year ever by applying AI to its ads product. And that’s cool, you would expect that from a Big Tech giant. Individual independent hotels can see the same results, though. Businesses of any size can. Size does not matter. Strategy does. A clear goal does. Content, customer experience, data, and execution do, too. AI is not a magic wand. It’s a mirror. It reflects the quality of your strategy and the depth of your data. If you’re just using it to crank out more content or check a box on mandated tasks by the C-suite, all you’re really doing is paying an AI tax on your brand’s future. The 6% of companies who win, the 6% who have closed that gap don’t have an AI strategy. They have a business strategy that AI makes possible. Focus on effectiveness, protect your data, and don’t let the pursuit of efficiency kill your customer’s trust. Because ultimately, your customer’s trust is what will make your strategy pay off in the long run. And that’s where we always want to be. If this episode helped you bridge that value gap for your business, if it helped you think about how you can bridge that value gap for your business, please do me a favor. Send it to one of your colleagues who’s currently staring at their 2026 budget and wondering how to make the numbers work. You can find the links to the McKinsey and Workday reports and everything else we’ve talked about in the show notes, as well as a full archive of all of our past episodes at timpeter.com/podcasts. And if you’re ready to move beyond big tech, my book, Digital Reset, is your roadmap to reclaiming your demand. Thank you so much for listening. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. The post The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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’s not either SEO or GEO. It’s SEO and GEO, SEO plus GEO. Second, and you’ve heard me say this many times that customer experience is queen. I’m kind of bundling the first two portions of our royal court of brand building here. You’ve heard me say many times in the book, Digital Reset, that content is king and customer experience is queen. Those are still true. What’s also true, is that your content has always included what others say about you. You have a secret sales force working for you — or for your competitors — based on what your customers’ experiences are and what they say about those experiences in social and in ratings and reviews. They’re telling their friends and family and fans and followers all about what they think about your products and services and your brand more broadly. If you’re in a category like hospitality or travel or any kind of B2C, what others say about you in public ratings and reviews plays a massive role here. You’re undoubtedly familiar. In B2B, the same is still true. It just tends to happen in private. It could be text or LinkedIn messages. It could be email. It could be on Slack or Teams channels or phone calls. But folks ask other folks, “Hey, what do you know about this company? What do you know about their products and services? Do they work well for you?” Your content has always included what others say about your brand and business. Well, the data seems pretty clear that those discussions influence whether or not you show up in AI responses. That’s something we just have to keep top of mind. You also want to keep do no harm in mind, too, because what people say about you, whether it’s public or private, drives awareness, interest and action among your potential customers. Ideally, that’s to your business’s benefit. But even a poor customer experience creates a narrative around your brand and one that you’ll fight against for a long time to come, especially in GEO. If “the concierge” is reading all kinds of bad things about your brand, guess what it’s going to know about your brand? We want to move to an era where your brand is the prompt. And if somebody types in your brand and the answer engine says, “Man, I don’t know about that brand…” that’s really, really, really bad for your business. Not just now, but over the long term. Making sure that when your brand is the prompt that the concierge has great things to say about you, about your brand, about your business, is a clear component of why customer experience is queen now more than ever. So seriously, take care of the queen. This really matters. Finally, if you had have some exposure to our Royal Court framework that I’ve talked about many times, you’ll know that I say data is the crown jewels. And I want to talk for a minute about what that means in this case. I’m seeing many businesses experience a big lift in branded traffic or conversions that don’t have an obvious source. Folks are just coming to your website or opening your app or reaching out to your sales team or sending you an email without starting on your site. They just kind of appear. And if they’re not doing that, well, you want them to, regardless of whether they’re doing that today or not. Listen to my prior points from a moment ago if you need more help on how you can do that. The question we want to be thinking about then is if people just show up, what metrics matter to your business? We can’t rely on the metrics we’ve used for a long time. Now is the time to get your KPIs and your metrics in order so that you can actually determine what is our current state and are we moving forward in a direction that we want to. Again, data is the crown jewels. They help you make better business decisions and take better care of your customers so that they actually have a better experience, so that you actually have a better shot of showing up more often. Clearly, we’re going to lose some visibility into what’s happening compared to what we’ve had for years. You might not get the same level of tracking or the same level of insights you’ve had in the past. That’s okay. We just need to keep track of the metrics that genuinely matter and help you make better business decisions. Now the first one should be obvious, it’s revenue, right? Are you seeing more revenue or less revenue? Ultimately, that is the final determinant of whether or not any of this is working for your business. If your revenue is going up, that’s probably a good sign that you’re doing the right thing. If your revenue is declining, that’s probably a clear sign that you need to do something different than what you’ve been doing up till now. So that’s a huge one you want to pay attention to. Of course revenue is a trailing indicator. It only tells you what happened in the past. It’s not necessarily all that predictive of what’s going to happen in the future. So another key performance indicator you want to watch is lead volume. That could include actual leads in a B2B context. It could also include the number of people who put items in their shopping carts in B2C or enter your booking engine in a hospitality context. Are people showing interest in engaging with your brand and your business in a commercial way? Do they want to talk to you? Do they want to hear from you? Pay super close attention to whether they are signing up for your email lists. Are they giving you their information for SMS? Are they saying, “I want to have a conversation with you, not just now, but in the future and want to hear from you directly?” Again, that’s a super, super huge sign about where your business is going to go in the future. We do a bunch of work with hospitality clients and we’ve determined that for your typical set of hotels, every new email address you collect is worth somewhere between five and thirty-five dollars in future revenue. So if that data isn’t showing up, if you weren’t collecting that data from your customers, it’s a pretty good sign that your future revenues are going to have some real problems. Again, data is the crown jewels here. It points to real future revenue. Another metric that matters a ton are brand searches. Are the number of searches for your brand in organic traffic shrinking or growing? If it’s shrinking, you’re likely not showing up in AI or traditional search near as much as you’d like to or need to. People aren’t finding you. They then aren’t then going to Google and ask for you. Again, review my prior points for what you can do about that. If you see those numbers rising though, it’s a pretty good sign that AI is likely surfacing you more often. AI is talking about you and people are learning about you to then come over to your website by searching you by name. That’s a really clear use case that we’ve seen customers do where they learn about you and then they go ask traditional search to help them find you and find your website. Hugely important. A more recent and more sophisticated way to watch this is something called prompt brand equity. This is a term that we’ve talked about a bunch; it’s something that I think matters a lot as we go forward. And of course, I’ll link to in the show notes other times we’ve talked about this. Now, prompt brand equity is not about where you rank in AI search results. It’s how often you show up at all. There’s some great research from Rand Fishkin that shows where you appear in AI answers is not at all predictable. You could be number one in one chat, number two in another chat, and number three in a third chat, even though you’re an equally good answer for all three chats, even if the prompt was precisely the same. It’s not predictable. And it’s not predictive of what’s going to happen with your business. The thing you want to keep in mind here is it’s not about where you rank. It’s does your brand appear at all? Do you ever show up? Don’t worry about tracking where you rank, but absolutely pay attention to whether or not you appear. There are a bunch of pretty good tools for measuring this metric right at the moment. Tools like Peec AI, seoClarity, FinSEO, SE Ranking, Profound, and Otterly all seem to get good reviews and good feedback for how well they measure the frequency of how often your brand appears. It’s probably worth checking out each of those to see what might work best for you. My point here isn’t to recommend one tool or another. Your specific needs may lean you towards one versus the other. My point is to strongly recommend that you keep track of whether or not your brand appears at all. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing whether in fact your brand is the prompt… or isn’t. Tracking how frequently your brand appears is a great way to learn whether or not your content marketing and GEO efforts work. If you’re showing up, that’s a good signpost that your content is being used by AI answer engines. And if not, well, then your content pretty likely isn’t doing its job. It’s critical to understand what’s working here and what isn’t. As I mentioned last week, we’ve moved from a world where you just needed to show up in a card catalog to a world where you need to convince a concierge that you’re the right choice. That’s why taking care of both traditional search and GEO matters. Your successful digital reset isn’t about fighting with machines. It’s about ensuring your brand signal is clear enough for those machines to find you. Because in this new era, your brand isn’t just a logo or a label… not that it ever was. It’s that your brand is the prompt — or it needs to be if customers will consistently find you no matter where they go looking. If this episode helped you make sense of some of the noise around SEO and GEO and about digital more broadly, do me a favor, send it to one of your colleagues who is currently staring at their 2026 budget and wondering what they should do next. You can find the links to the GEO tracking tools we discussed, the show notes for this episode, and the full archive of all past episodes at TimPeter.com/podcast. And if you’re ready to move beyond big tech for your business, my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, provides the roadmap to reclaim your demand. You’ll find a link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. Take Your Next Step Toward a Digital Reset “Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today? The Brief: Get the weekly email that turns these strategic ideas into actionable demand. Subscribe to The Digital Reset Brief The Book: Master the framework with Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Buy the Book The Experience: Need a bespoke digital strategy for your hotel, resort, SaaS firm, or financial services firm? Tim Peter & Associates can help you. Work with Tim The post SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge (Episode 485) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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 innovation across our ads ecosystem is core to every aspect of our product portfolio, from targeting, bidding, creative, measurement, and across campaign types.” In short, Google is using AI. It’s heavily integrating AI into its core product to make that product better and better and better. Google’s ads alone produced four times more revenue than OpenAI did. Google is building an AI-enabled company, an AI-native company, and they’re reaping the rewards from it. In a blog post talking about how the company is reinventing ads for the new era of search, Google’s VP and GM of ads and commerce Vidya Srinivasan wrote, “In 2026, this shift is turning search into a more powerful tool for discovery where ads can inspire an answer all at once. We aren’t just bringing ads to AI experiences in search," she writes. She said "we are reinventing what an ad is." She goes on to say, "Take AI Mode, for example. It offers new opportunities for businesses to fit naturally into the conversation. That’s why we’ve spent the past year testing new ad formats that bridge inspiration and action." Google is clearly integrating ads directly into AI Overviews and AI Mode that makes those a holistic part of the conversation with customers. That aligns with my idea that search is moving from being a card catalog to being a concierge. Google clearly intends ads to be part of that experience. Again, gatekeepers gonna gate and you’re the one paying the toll. Now this might end up being more like a local business providing a spiff to the concierge for recommending their shop, then paying to present a separate card in the catalog the way ads have worked up until now. The net result to you though is the same. You’re paying for that traffic. You’re paying for that customer. We’re already seeing brands get on board with this approach. Marriott, Etsy, and Wayfair are already selling directly in AI Mode in Gemini. Google also claims that Shopify, Target, and Walmart are coming soon. And as you’ve probably heard, Google also introduced its universal commerce platform to, quote, “standardize how businesses connect with AI agents across the entire shopping journey.” That’s powerful. It might get expensive for you, too. Now, Srinivasan’s blog post and Google’s earning call ignored at least one big wild card that we want to an eye on, that you want to keep an eye on. I haven’t seen anything where Google tells us how much of its ads revenue came from AI Overviews or AI Mode. They also haven’t told us how often searchers see AI Overviews or explicitly select AI Mode where they click the link to go into AI Mode. Google’s earnings release claimed that its Gemini app has more than 750 million monthly active users. And though sources vary on this, it’s likely that ChatGPT is somewhere in the rough ballpark of maybe one billion monthly active users. I’d call that a win in OpenAI’s favor at the moment, but not a massive one, not one that Google can’t overcome in time. I strongly suspect that AI Overviews and AI Mode are bigger than both of those, really, and very possibly bigger than both of them combined. We know that Google gets in the ballpark of maybe five trillion searches every year. If we just straight line that, that means they’re getting around 417 billion monthly searches. And given that most users search between three and four times per day, some quick back of the envelope math suggests that Google search has somewhere between three-and-a-half billion and 4.6 billion monthly active users. Though the numbers on this are a bit sketchy, AI Overviews appear somewhere around 40 to 60% of the time on searches. Again, it seems most likely given these numbers that that’s the people’s most common source of AI interactions. We just need Google to confirm that. I’d surely like it if they would. Now, it’s possible that the numbers are worse than they’d like, and that’s why they haven’t said anything yet. It’s also possible that they’re holding back on that until they’re ready to drop a huge number on us, like the five trillion number they shared. Time will tell, I guess. You can bet I’m going to be keeping an eye on that. So the state of AI and digital, at least by Google’s reckoning, is great. It is huge. I think the financial data shows that they are undoubtedly winning the long term race. It definitely shows that they’re not losing it. The last takeaway then is what you should do about it. And I’ve got a few quick points I’d like you to keep in mind. First, remember that we’re moving from an era of card catalogs to an era of concierges. Search doesn’t point people to an answer. It tells them what the answer is. That’s the way search works in 2026. I’d recommend that you regularly prompt your favorite AI to tell you about your brand. Better yet, prompt all of them. Try something along the lines of, “imagine that you’re a strategic advisor for the industry your business is in with a 180 IQ. Forget what you know about my relationship with my brand. Tell me the truth about this brand.” See what those AIs say about you. Ask them to cite their sources. Those answers will help guide you to where you have a strong presence and where you have work to do. Pay attention in particular to anything that these tools get wrong. Those are clear signs that the data about your brand in that area is either outdated or often non-existent. That provides you with a roadmap of what you need to improve on if you’re going to get recommended by the concierge. Finally, Google makes money because they know what customers want and need. They’ve built product after product because customers literally told them what they wanted when they searched. That’s how the company became a verb. Customers don’t just search, they Google, right? That’s the idea behind your brand is the prompt in action. Obviously your brand likely isn’t going to become a verb. I get that. I don’t want you to think like I’m living in some fantasy world where we’re all gonna get, you know, “Tim-ed” tomorrow. But conducting a successful digital reset for your company is all about creating a brand experience that customers will ask for by name. And it’s much easier than you think. Look at the amount of branded search traffic that you get today in Google Search Console or Bing Search Console. Clearly, some folks already know to ask for you by name. You’ve done the work already that makes that happen. Now it’s about building on that success for the next generation of customers. If you get that right, you might not end up with $114 billion in quarterly revenue, sorry to say, but you’ll end up with a sustainable long-term business no matter where your customers ask for you. And I think that’s a takeaway we all can live with. So the final takeaway here isn’t that Google is too big to beat, they’re not too big to compete with. It’s that the rules of the game have shifted some. We’ve moved from a world where you need to just show up in a card catalog to a world where you need to convince a concierge that you’re the right choice for your customers. A successful digital reset isn’t about fighting machines. It’s about ensuring your brand signal is clear enough so that the machines find you when your customers need you. If this episode helped you cut through the noise a bit, please do me a favor. Send it to one colleague who is currently staring at their 2026 budget, wondering what to do next. You can find the show notes and the full archive of these shows at TimPeter.com/podcasts. And if you’re ready to move beyond Big Tech, my book, Digital Reset, provides the roadmap to reclaim your demand. You’ll find the link in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. Take Your Next Step Toward a Digital Reset “Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today? The Brief: Get the weekly email that turns these strategic ideas into actionable demand. Subscribe to The Digital Reset Brief The Book: Master the framework with Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Buy the Book The Experience: Need a bespoke digital strategy for your hotel, resort, SaaS firm, or financial services firm? Tim Peter & Associates can help you. Work with Tim The post The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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. It doesn’t replace your website. It doesn’t really even replace search. It learns from it. I’m going to talk about this in a future episode, I Google just reported its earnings for 2025 and for Q4 of 2025 and had a monstrous year. was above $400 billion in revenue for the first time. Search ads grew 17% year on year, right? So they’re getting great growth here because customers are using those channels just as AI is. all working as part of a whole in terms of how your customers understand your brand and your business and how they can actually find the products and services that work best for them. AI is a part of that for sure, but so is social. So is the experience your customers have with you so that they can tell a story about your brand and business on social media. So we need to think about how we operate in this new world. I am still a big believer that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. It’s something I’ve talked about many times in the book and things along those lines. We have to think about what we’re doing today with content. We’re not just publishing content. We are, that’s core, but that content creates signals. It creates signals that artificial intelligence can understand and interpret to learn about us. that content creates signals in the social media. It helps customers understand us better when they come across us. And it might plant some seeds that when they’re talking about us on social, they’re talking about the things we’d like them to talk about, about our brand and our business. Those signals have to represent what matters to our business, what we stand for, what benefits we provide to our customers. And it’s things like consistent positioning. Who are you and what do you stand for? It includes things like engagement and replies. When customers are talking about you on social, are you engaging with them? Are you commenting back? Are you part of a conversation? or you’re just letting it happen to you. When customers are leaving reviews, the reviews and responses matter a ton. I said for years that when you were replying to a review on social media, weren’t, excuse me, replying to a review, you weren’t replying to a review for the reviewer. You were replying to a review for the person who read that review. Well, now the person reading that review is an AI, right? The person is an artificial intelligence. So your response helps validate again the kinds of experience you offer your customers to the AI. I’m going to come back to that in one more place in just a moment. But signals look like consistent positioning, engagements and replies, reviews and responses, and of course, any third party validation that other people say about you. Now I said I was gonna come back to reviews and responses. Again, I mentioned a moment ago, content is king, customer experience is queen. Customer experience is where those reviews come from and those reviews are being ingested by artificial intelligence. So what the AI reads about you in those reviews is what it knows to be true about you just like was true for customers when they read those reviews. So it’s really important that you give the kind of customer experience that will cause people to write a good review about you or at minimum least not write a bad review about you, right? Because if they write a bad review, what is the AI going to know about you? If they write a great review, what is the AI going to know about you? And if you respond to those reviews, actually skip that, if you don’t respond to those reviews, what is the AI going to know about you? It’s going to know you’re the company that doesn’t reply to its reviews. You’re the company that doesn’t care about what people say about your brand of business. Whereas if you do reply, it shows you care. It shows that those reviews matter to you. And that’s another signal that we need to pay attention to. The reason that this matters so much is because AI trusts patterns and it trusts consensus. It knows what it sees about you everywhere. And if what it sees about you everywhere is people say, hey, this place is great. This business is amazing. They take care of their customers. They create great experiences. Guess what it’s going to say about you. Hey, this place is great. Hey, this place cares about its customers. Hey, this place provides great experiences. You see how those all connect. If you’re in hospitality specifically, that’s why what it says about your brand, what it says about your property, online travel agency, or in reviews, or in social mentions, and what you say about yourself in your owned content on your website, all reinforce or contradict one another. And that’s true regardless of the business you’re in. But if your website says one thing and your social media says another and your reviews say something else, the AI either doesn’t know who to trust or it’s going to believe the reviews. But I would bank on it’s going to be more of the former than the latter. OK, so here’s how I would encourage you to think about this. We need to move away from asking the question which channel wins. We instead should say what story exists about our brand, about our business on the Internet? What story is the Internet telling our customers and their AI assistants and agents about our business? It’s absolutely a good idea at this point to be doing the work to show up in AI. You want to be, you know, doing, setting up the right schema on your website and on your appropriate pages. You want to also make sure that you’re, you know, if you’re testing an MCP server or you’re feeding your data to an AI directly, that’s something worth testing. What we don’t want to do is chase the fastest growing channels at the expense of the channels that continue to produce visibility and awareness and revenue for your business. And that includes search and social. What actually differentiates your brand and what will differentiate your brand and AI is clarity, consistency, and your humanity. You’ve heard me say many times, your brand is the prompt. All of these things put together show why your brand matters more, not less in an era of AI. If there’s one thing that I hope you take away from this, it’s this. AI does not make social media, search or content less important for your business. It makes clarity and consistency and customer experience more important. The brands that show up when AI assistants and agents start making recommendations won’t be the ones that are chasing after every new channel. They’ll be the ones that consistently show who they are, what they stand for, how they take care of their customers, and why they’re worth choosing, no matter where a customer starts their interaction or starts their journey with your brand or business. If this episode has made you think about a brand you work on or someone on your team who’s wrestling with these questions, please do me a favor and send them a link. Make sure you tell them why it stuck with you too. That’s how these conversations spread. I want to remind you that you can find the show notes and the full archive of our episodes at TimPeter.com/podcasts. And if you want to go deeper on this idea, my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Custom Requisition Beyond Big Tech, expands on how brands, platforms and AI intersect. You’ll find the links in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. I really do appreciate you. And in the meantime, till we’re together again, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. Take Your Next Step Toward a Digital Reset “Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today? The Brief: Get the weekly email that turns these strategic ideas into actionable demand. Subscribe to The Digital Reset Brief The Book: Master the framework with Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Buy the Book The Experience: Need a bespoke digital strategy for your hotel, resort, SaaS firm, or financial services firm? Tim Peter & Associates can help you. Work with Tim The post Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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 actually a follow-on to that that I never really say out loud because if you don’t hear this, you should. “Your brand is the prompt… or you won’t exist.” That’s a huge, huge reality that you need to be conscious about. The other way you will get found by AI assistants and agents is for your customers to teach them that you’re the one that they love. You’re the one that they want. You’re the one that makes them feel like who they believe they are, who they are meant to be. Part of doing this well depends on having great data. That’s absolutely true. It matters for the AIs too. But making this happen depends two big steps. The first is you have to drive data fluency among your team. And by data fluency, I don’t mean the ability to read reports. I mean that your team uses data about your business and about your customers to curate great experiences for those customers. I’m gonna have more to say about this point in just a moment. As part of that data fluency, it’s critical that you help your team — whether they’re on the front lines, in the C-suite, or anywhere in between — to understand that when they’re putting data to work, they really, really, really have to be very conscious of the difference between being cool and being creepy. You’ve undoubtedly heard me talk about the creepy line before and why it’s so dangerous to get too close to that line, or worse, cross it. The example I always use is this. Let’s imagine you’re visiting a resort with your favorite traveling companion. Doesn’t matter who it is, but you’ve opted in. When you get to the resort, you opt in to receive updates w hile you’re at the property. And your first full day on the property, you get an alert for a two for one margarita special at the pool. Now, when you say that, when you get an alert that pops up on your phone that says, “hey, we have two for one, a two for one special on margaritas,” do you think that’s cool or do think that’s creepy? Remember, you opted in to receive these alerts. Most people, when I ask this question, will say, “that’s cool.” Occasionally, some will say, “no, no, that’s a little creepy.” OK, I’m going to give you the same scenario again. You’ve opted in all that jazz. You say, “I want this. I want to hear this.” And then you get an alert that says, “Hey, we saw that you and your traveling companion each had seven margaritas last night. How about a Bloody Mary to help you recuperate from that decision?” Is that cool or is that creepy? Usually people find this one creepy… even though the business’s ability to execute that experience relies on essentially the exact same data as the first one: We know you like margaritas. But you can see how the first one demonstrates data fluency in action, while the second one demonstrates that your company is full of creeps. Only when you get that first part right does it make sense to do the second thing that you have to do, which is invest in technology integrations that put that data in front of your team so that they can demonstrate good judgment and demonstrate good value to your customers. Now, I can’t speak to every industry on this next point, but I can say that hospitality’s biggest flaw — and biggest superpower — has always been its people. Hotels and resorts have notoriously been behind the curve on technology. The technology investments sometimes lag, particularly when you’ve got a lot of hotels to deal with in your company. We hide that limitation behind human beings. We’ve been using people to paper over broken systems and still provide great experiences to guests for as long as I can remember. Other industries can actually learn a lot from hospitality in that regard because you need to invest in great people or you need to invest in great tech. If you scrimp on both, that all the guarantees that you’re going to end up as a commodity that nobody loves… because nobody will ever get a great experience. Worse, they may get a terrible experience and tell all their friends and family and fans and followers on social media about it. And then you’ve hurt the next generation of consumers, the next generation of customers. Then what are the AI tools going to know about you? That you do a really bad job. So that’s a lose, lose, lose proposition. What gave me the most hope after this session at this event I attended was how many of the event attendees who came up to me at the book signing and said, “we want to do this better.” These weren’t cynical burnt out execs or disgruntled frontline folks. These were sharp, sophisticated business leaders who care so much about doing right by their customers. And “leaders” in this case had nothing to do with their job title. It had everything to do with their commitment to creating brand experiences that their customers will always remember, that customers will ask for by name — and that customers will teach their AI assistants and agents to choose each and every time. The future of your business is not about smarter machines. It’s about whether you use those machines to give your people more room to be human. I can’t guarantee your customers will rush right out and get their brand tattooed on their bodies. But you might just build a brand your customers will ask for by name. And that’s pretty damn good too. If this episode made you think about someone on your team or a brand who you work with, send them a link and tell them why it stuck with you. That’s how these conversations spread. You can find the show notes for today’s episode and the full archive at TimPeter.com/podcasts. If you want to go deeper on this, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, expands these ideas into a practical framework that you can apply. Links are in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate you doing that. This show would not happen without you. If you have ideas for things you’d like to hear about here on the show, make sure you drop me a line at podcast.timpeter.com. I’d love to hear from you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. The post Why Nobody Has a Marriott Bonvoy Tattoo… And Why That Matters in the Age of AI (Episode 482) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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? When somebody asks for you by brand, aure, the AI might hallucinate, but that’s going to tell the customer pretty quickly that that’s not giving them the answer they’re looking for. The other thing is your brand is a mental shortcut for your customers. It forces the AI to surface your business. That becomes even more important when we think about agentic AI, something I talked about in episodes 466, something I talked about in episode 470. We’ve moved from talking about chatbots to talking about agents. We’re entering a world where AI isn’t just software and programs that talk. They’re software that does. They’re software that acts. When an AI agent is shopping for your customer, your emotional branding may not work, but your authority does. The data you have about your customer, the data that helps you talk to what your customer’s needs are, does. Your content becomes so much more important, not just in terms of being distinct, though that’s important. But it makes it important that your content actually answers the questions your customers have. In episode 449, I talked about the death of content marketing. And I said, know, AI will only kill content if your content is generic. If an AI can write your content, maybe you don’t need to publish that content unless it’s answering a very specific question. Your content has to be a 24x7x365 salesperson and a 24x7x365 customer service rep. It has to answer the questions your customer has and many of those questions have to be about your values: What do you stand for? What sets you apart? What is your specific point of view? When we think about the digital reset and how that plays into that — and obviously this is something I talked about in episode 458, 461, 473 — your digital reset is the core of my new book and it’s something I spent the back half of the year talking about. What you want to remember is that your reset isn’t about ignoring AI. It isn’t even about ignoring gatekeepers. It’s about bypassing them. It’s about thinking beyond them every chance you get. And we’ve talked about this many, many, many times that what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to have content, customer experience, and data that allows you to connect with your customers directly. So I’m actually going to flip these on their head for a moment because first we want to talk about data. If you don’t have a direct line to your customers, whether it’s email, whether it’s SMS, whether it’s snail mail to your customer, if you can’t talk to them directly, you don’t own your business. A gatekeeper does. You also need to own the experience. If your website, if your app, if however your customer is connecting with you isn’t distinct and isn’t easy for them to use and doesn’t solve their problem, you’re never going to give them a reason to come back. They’re not going to remember you. Your site isn’t a brochure. It isn’t content just for content sake. It’s a utility. It solves a problem. And it might be that the AI is what interacts with that site. But at a certain point, they may come to your site and the site needs to be something that’s so useful they’ll want to come back again or at least direct their AI to it the next time that they have a problem that you can solve. You also want to make sure that it’s designed to capture data from the customer and give them a good reason to want to give you their data and continue the conversation. Hugely important. You want to give them a reason to come to you that an AI cannot summarize in a paragraph. And of course, all of this has to do with owning trust. In an age of AI fakes, a deep fakes, of AI slop, humanity, the thing that sets you apart, is a premium product. It’s a thing that your customers will remember. You need to be not just known, you need to be loved. You don’t just need to be found, you need to be sought out. That’s crucial. You’ve got to share your face. You’ve got to share your values. You have to tell them the why behind the what. Because that’s going to be crucial for customers saying not just, "help me find a thing," but “Help me find your thing. Help me find you." It’s really about focusing on fundamentals, building a deep, meaningful, lasting relationship with your customers. As I said in episode 455, AI can’t save you from a bad strategy. This isn’t about looking for the ChatGPT prompt of the week. It’s about looking for how to make your customers’ lives better. It’s the only strategy that is truly future-proof. Think of your favorite brands, ever. The brands you know and trust and love more than anything else. You don’t have to go ask an AI to help you find something like that. You already know them. You might tell your agent, go there, go get this for me from the people who I like. But you don’t have to ask the AI what the answer to the question is. You know the answer to the question. That’s what you want your customers to do with your brand too. So 2025 was the year that we realized the era of SEO and social as we knew it is, if not over, certainly coming to an end. What takes its place is an era of brand autonomy, an era of brand differentiation and brand distinction and brands that customers ask for by name. Your brand is the prompt. And I think there’s really three immediate actions as you go into 2026. First, take a look at all of the places where you rely upon rented land today. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google, it doesn’t matter if it’s Meta, it doesn’t matter if it’s TikTok, it doesn’t matter if it’s LinkedIn. If one of them were to change their algorithm tomorrow, how long would your business survive? You need to understand how vulnerable you are so that you can start to take the actions necessary to reduce the risk to your brand. The next is that you need to focus your brand on being remembered, not just found. What are the things that set you apart in terms of your values, in terms of your face, in terms of your voice, in terms of your utility that genuinely differentiate you from anybody else in the marketplace? You also need to think about your owned assets in detail. Are you investing in your email list? Are you investing in your SMS communications? Are you investing in ways to contact your customer directly and making them want to contact you directly? This isn’t about, you know, "hey, let’s scam them into giving us data they don’t want to give us." It’s about being a place they can’t wait to give us data that they want to talk to. Invest in those and so that you can grow a connection with your customers over the long run. We know that gatekeepers are gonna gate it’s what they do But they can only put those gates in front of people who don’t have direct relationships with their customers. It is time for you to stop being somebody on the wrong side of the gate. It’s time for you to be a destination unto yourself. It is time for you to be the brand that is the prompt. And if you do that all throughout 2026, I’m confident you’re going to do just fine. Show Wrap-Up and Credits  Thanks so much for taking some time to check out this episode. If there’s one thing that I want you to remember, it’s this: The brands that win will be the ones most worth choosing. If this episode helped you see what’s changing in marketing, what’s really happening in marketing, please do me a quick favor and follow and subscribe to the show wherever you’re listening. That way you won’t miss what’s coming next, and it will help more people like you find this conversation. If you’re watching on YouTube, please leave a comment, hit like, tell me what stood out for you. Those signals really do shape what we do here and help make the show a better experience for everybody. We’ve got new episodes on the way with some practical ways to put these ideas we talked about today into action. Until then, stay curious, stay strategic, and be excellent to each other. I’ll talk with you soon. The post AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.