Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

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If AI is doing all the work — the writing, the research, the analysis — what happens to the people who are supposed to decide whether the work is any good?

Steve Cummins calls it the validator problem. And it’s not theoretical. It’s playing out right now in every marketing team handing a junior marketer an AI tool on day one and calling it onboarding.

In Part 2 of their conversation, Steve and Tim dig into the question that keeps Steve up at night: how do you build real marketing expertise when AI is doing the work you used to learn from? The answer isn’t what most people expect. It’s not about tools or frameworks. It’s about curiosity. And it turns out that’s much harder to teach than anyone wants to admit.

They also get into what actually changes a founder’s mind about focus, why the fractional marketing model is becoming essential for growth companies, and why simple still works even when the technology around it has gotten infinitely more complicated.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode The validator problem. What is the validator problem? Why does it keep Steve up at night? And, most importantly, what does it mean for every marketing team hiring junior talent right now? * The Foundation Capital workforce study. Four roles AI will need, and why one of them is already a problem. * How do you become a good validator if you’ve never done the work yourself? * Why curiosity is the single most important hiring attribute in an AI world. And why it’s almost impossible to teach. * Hire for attitude, train for skill. What that actually means in practice. * Why hiring only from within your industry is a mistake. What Tim’s experience in hospitality proves about starting with industry focus. * The five whys and other frameworks. Build critical thinking regardless of which AI tool is dominant. * What actually changes a founder’s mind about focus, tailored by personality type * The fractional marketing model. What it is, what it isn’t, and why Steve avoids the "fractional CMO" label * One final takeaway:* Pick three things and do them well

The Validator ProblemFoundation Capital identified four roles AI will need in the workforce: C-suite accountability, architects (who build the AI processes), relationship people (effectively salespeople), and validators. Those are the people who take AI output, iterate with it, check it, and validate it.

Steve’s concern: how do you get to be a good validator if you’ve never done the work yourself? The graphic designers and art directors who are genuinely good at their craft only got there by doing the grunt work and working their way up. Same with lots of other roles. If AI removes that learning layer, the risk isn’t replacement. Instead, it’s a tendency toward mediocrity, where validators who are "okay" at their job validate "okay" output, and nobody ever gets better.

Steve’s three-part answer:

Be critical while you work, not after. Don’t let the AI run in a black box and deliver output to you. Interrogate it as it works. Claude will show you its reasoning process. Read it and learn from it.
Run your own experiments. Start doing things you don’t fully know how to do yet. You won’t be great at it. That’s the point. That’s how you learn what good looks like.
Ask the right questions as a manager. Middle managers who push their teams to explain their reasoning, "why did you set it up that way, what context did you give it, what questions did you ask?”, are the ones who will develop genuine validators rather than AI button-pressers.

The Fractional Marketing Model — And Why Steve Avoids "Fractional CMO"Most growth companies need marketing strategy much earlier than they can afford a full-time marketing leader. That’s the gap the fractional model fills. Not just a consultant who writes a report and throws it over the fence, but someone embedded with the company a day or two each week, driven by their success, who knows the people and can bring a higher level of strategic thinking than a seed or Series A startup could otherwise access.

Steve’s issue with "fractional CMO" as a label: most small growth companies don’t need a CMO. A CMO deals with the board and investors. What they need is someone who can do the planning and roll their sleeves up. And too many people on LinkedIn calling themselves fractional CMOs have never even been a VP of marketing, let alone a CMO… or are simply doing consulting while they wait for a full-time job, which is a different thing entirely.

The real value of the fractional model is continuity. Being part of a team’s growth process over time, not just dropping in with an ICP, a couple of recommendations, and then moving on.

Resources Mentioned Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick * Range* by David Epstein * Steve Cummins on LinkedIn * The Marketing Mix Newsletter on Substack * Solent Strategies

Related Episodes* Steve Cummins: You Have to Start on Rented Land. Here’s What to Build While You’re There. — Part 1 of 2 (Episode 503) * Google Didn’t Kill Blogging. It Killed Borrowed Brand Equity. (Episode 502) * The AI Winners Didn’t Pivot. They Prepared. — Digital Reset Foundations (Episode 501) * The Complete Roadmap for Owning Your Customer — Part 3 of 3 (Episode 500) * Who Really Owns Your Customer? — Part 2 of 3 (Episode 499) * The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3 (Episode 498) * Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495) * The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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.

See Tim Peter in ActionWatch Tim Peter and Steve Cummins on the validator problem, why curiosity is the most important hiring attribute in an AI world, and why simple marketing still works, even when the technology has gotten infinitely more complicated.

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Technical Details for Digital ResetRecorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 32:11

Transcript: Steve Cummins: If AI Is Doing All the Work, Are You Building Skills or a House of Cards? — Part 2 of 2 (Episode 504)[TIM PETER]:
Last week, Steve Cummins and I talked about where the owned channel argument breaks down, how a marketing team of one actually uses AI day-to-day, and why you might have to start on rented land, but also need to be deliberate about what you build while you’re there.

This week, Steve and I get into something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and something that Steve calls the validator problem. Here it is in the simplest terms I can put it in. You know, if AI is doing more and more of the actual work, the writing, the research, the analysis, what happens to the people who are supposed to evaluate whether the work is any good? How do they build their skills?

This is not just about theory. This is playing out right now in every marketing team hiring a junior marketer and handing them an AI tool on day one. Steve has strong views on what that means for the people coming up in their careers, for their leaders, and for what curiosity actually means as a hiring attribute this year and down the road.

This is part two of my interview with Steve Cummins. I’m Tim Peter. This is the Digital Reset Podcast. Let’s dive in.

[TIM PETER]:
Probably the most misunderstood part of my book — and there’s probably something in this to the way I put it together — is, you know, I talk about Big Tech gatekeepers and how gatekeepers gonna gate and things like that. And I think people hear that and think it means you shouldn’t work with Google or you shouldn’t work with Meta or you shouldn’t work with LinkedIn or whatever the case is. And the subtitle of the book says "Beyond Big Tech," right? It doesn’t mean instead of Big Tech, right? Of course you’re gonna show up on Google. Of course you’re going to show up on the social media channels that are appropriate to your audience and your business and the like. That is a given. It is what do you do in addition to that that allows you to grow a customer base over the longer term…

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, it’s, it’s table stakes, right?

[TIM PETER]:
It’s table stakes, 100%, yeah.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
It’d be great if you could exist without them, but obviously they’re going to be a big part of business for — and that’s the first thing you gotta establish.

The other frustration I have when I first talk to founders — nearly every time, you know, I say, "What have you done for marketing?" They say, "Well, we did some Google Ads, but it didn’t really work out," right? Um, and I think because Google Ads is, once you’ve got a website and all that, Google Ads is the next easiest and the next — of course — um, but as with all these things, there’s a skill to it. You have to invest a decent amount of money to make it worthwhile. You have to have focus and all that. But it’s sort of like a bingo card when I’m talking to a founder for the first time. It’s like, at what point is he gonna bring up Google Ads?

[TIM PETER]:
100%. Yeah, yeah.

I wanna go back to your point about wearing different hats and especially earlier in your career, ’cause I wanna dive into this in just a second. Um, I love to tell the story about when I started my career. I actually worked for Charles Schwab during the dot-com boom. That’s a story I’ve told people for years. But one of the things I loved about the job was because it was the dot-com boom and because I was early in my career — you know, much like you were talking about, the advice you give about AI this month versus two months ago versus two months from now might change — the early days of the internet, the early days of the web, the early days of digital was a very similar thing. And what I loved about my experience at Schwab more than anything else was every three months there was a new opportunity to learn and grow, right? There was an opportunity to do something different, and it helped me a lot in my career.

It has helped me a lot in my career, that in those early days, you know, something new would come up and it’s like, "We’re gonna talk about search." And I’d go, "Oh, I wanna do that." And then, you know, they were like, "We’re gonna talk about email marketing." And I was like, "Oh, I wanna do that. Oh, we’re gonna talk about…" And I’m like, "I wanna do…" You know, just raising your hand. And I was probably the second or third worst at everything in the company, right? Like, you know, ’cause there were people who were really good at one specific thing. But because I was the second or third or fourth person at all of those things, I could backfill anybody. And it made me very employable over the course of my career ’cause I can go, "Oh, wait a second, I actually know something about this. Oh, I know something about this." Obviously, you tend to get more specialized at a middle part of your career. But for sure, it was definitely something that worked to my advantage, I think.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Um, so to this point of people early in their career — and I know this is something that is very, very near and dear to your heart at the moment — you know, you wrote that the validator problem keeps you up at night, right? How do people build expertise, um, early in their career specifically if AI is doing all the work?

[TIM PETER]:
Uh, I think about this one all the time, you know. But if you’re a one-person team using AI to cover channels that they don’t fully understand, are they building capabilities? Are they building for their long-term growth? Or are they building a house of cards?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah. So it’s been rattling around in my head for a while. I was in a session, they were talking about this study that had been put together by Foundation Capital, and there was a lot about the future workforce, but they identified four roles that they thought were gonna be needed, right? So first is the C-suite or chief accountability officer, to give direction and talk to the investors and all that. The architects, so how to build out these processes and build out these AI agents. Relationship people, so salespeople effectively, and then validators. So the idea that you’re running all these agents, you get output from them, and then these validators are the ones that take that, iterate with it, check it, validate it effectively.

[TIM PETER]:
Sort of the QA people, the quality assurance.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s probably not the right term, but functionally they’re the quality assurance.

My concern — I have a lot of concerns with that, but one of my big concerns is how do you get to be a good validator if you’ve never done the work yourself, right? It’s worried me for years ’cause I work with a lot of graphic designers, art directors. Some very good ones, but they only get to be good by doing the grunt work and the junior work and working their way up. So if we’re now taking out that level of experience, how do you ever get to be good? And then my fear with that is, well, then you just tend towards mediocrity because all of the validators are gonna be okay at their job, so they’re gonna validate okay stuff. So that was the theory behind it.

Um, so I think there’s a few things that you can do. One is when you’re using these AI tools, be very critical about them, right? So don’t set it up to do something and then let it do its thing in a black box and then deliver it to you. While you’re doing it, interrogate the AI, right? I’ll go back to, uh, to your potential sponsor, Anthropic. Um, you have to expand it in most cases, but it will tell you the process that it’s going through to do something, right? So you can look at that and learn from it.

You can run your own experiments. Before AI, if you can remember such a time, I always used to be a fan of — I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m gonna start anyway. I won’t be great at it. I guess this is your third and fourth best argument, right? I’m gonna learn as I do it, and it would then lead me to one of two things. Ideally, if I’m in a growth company, once I’ve done the basics and set up — let’s say it’s search — I can then hire somebody in to actually take it over and do it better. But I’ve learned more about it. I know who I need to hire. I’ve kind of set it up and kind of modeled the behavior for that person to come in. The other way that it helped me — I would come and hire somebody like you, Tim, which I have done in the past, to come and help me with SEO. But I know enough to talk to you knowledgeably about it, make sure that I’m bringing in the right person, and then have a good conversation about it, right? So how do we get people to that level?

And it’s curiosity. I hate to say this because that’s an undefinable thing, and I don’t know how you train people to do it. Um, you gotta be curious. You can’t put something into a black box, take out the answer, and go, "Okay, move on." Um, I think when I’ve managed people or mentored people, you get people to that point just by asking a lot of questions, right? Like, "Why did you do that? How did you do that? Did you think about doing this?" And you build that up. So I think a lot of it’s gonna be driven by, for as long as they exist, middle managers, to make sure that it’s not just "the machine has given me this answer," but, well, "why did you set it up that way? You know, what context, what questions did you give it?" And for certain things, I think you’re gonna be looking for people that have an interest in their own lives, right? So somebody’s an artist in their spare time? Well, they’re probably gonna be a good validator for graphic design. But the medals are gonna go to those who are curious and those who are willing to play around and dig into the details.

[TIM PETER]:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that’s right. You know, I picked this up a long time ago — this probably was Schwab, actually, where they always talked about you hire for attitude and you train for skill, right? You look for people who have the right kinds of attitudes of "I wanna learn. I wanna grow. I wanna find out new things." Um, and that has served obviously me well in my career, but also me well in finding people who were like-minded — not in the sense of a homogeneity of thought, but in the sense of having people who also shared certain values and certain kinds of approaches to things.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
I think that makes a ton of sense. It drives me nuts. I’ve worked for a number of companies that only want to hire people from within the industry, basically — particularly in sales. An awful lot in sales. I’ve always been of the mindset, find me a good salesperson and I can teach them the ins and outs of the industry any day over someone who’s been selling the same stuff for a different company for the last 10 years. But it’s a mindset. I think a lot of people who have only been in one industry just assume that there is some unique magic about it. I think actually the opposite is true. Bringing in outside views is a lot healthier for sure.

[TIM PETER]:
When I first moved into the hotel industry, you know, having come from first working in recording studios and then working for Charles Schwab, when I first moved into the hotel industry, I actually encountered a fair bit of that — both from people in the company who were like, "Well, you couldn’t know this. You don’t know anything about the hotel industry." And also when I wanted to hire people to bring in who I knew had specific skills in the early days of digital — with nothing but love and respect for many of the people I worked with — the hotel industry as a whole in hospitality were terrible at internet. I mean, they just were really, really… and genuinely, you know, there’s a reason why the Expedias of the world and the Booking.coms of the world and people like that got so big was because that’s what they actually focused on. Whereas the hotel industry, that wasn’t what they did, right? They just weren’t tech savvy as companies.

The other thing I would encourage people to do all the time — and it sounds like you do the same thing — is look to frameworks that encourage critical thinking. You know, I’m a big fan of the five whys, right? You know, why did this thing happen. Why did it happen? Okay, well, why did that happen? Well, why did that happen, right? And you just keep going deeper till you find a lever you can pull, until you really understand it.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that’s right. And those frameworks are valid whatever you’re working on. Um, so yeah, getting into that mindset.

The other thing I talk about a lot is books, right? Which is not an exciting area for a lot of people. I used to, in my interviews, when I was interviewing people, I used to always ask them, "Tell me about a good book that you’ve read?" And I gave up because the number of people where I’d get the deer in the headlights, and then they’d start telling me about a blog that they’d read or something. But I actually think books are having a little bit of a resurgence. The trick with that is a lot of these books can get outdated pretty quickly. So look for ones that are more about a framework or process. Um, a book that you and I, I think both like is by Ethan Mollick — he wrote it think three years ago now. He didn’t write about AI as it was at that moment. He wrote about the concepts behind it and how we should be thinking about it. Uh, I think there’s something in there about treating it like an alien. Still valid, right? So searching for those kinds of books that are about the frameworks and the mindsets — I think that’s another smart way to keep up with things.

[TIM PETER]:
Yeah, I apologize for the aside. I don’t wanna take what little time we have left for this, but just real quick — the mistake I made with the first draft of the book was it was much more about "how" as opposed to "how to think," right? Because literally I would write a chapter and an hour later some news story would break and I’d be like, "Well, there goes that chapter in the trash," right? Like, it just took me a long time to figure out, oh, I get how you actually write a book that actually has some potential staying power.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
I’m told the second book is much easier, Tim, so you’ll be fine.

[TIM PETER]:
I’m so sorry. I had a minor stroke there. I’ll be fine though. Um, all right.

I think we’ve kind of covered this a little bit, but, you know, we’ve both watched either well-funded companies or frankly companies that wish they were better funded try to spread their bets across every channel and call it a strategy. You know, what is the conversation that actually changes a founder or a CEO or the head of marketing — what changes their mind about focus, right? What drives the moment that matters in the room?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, I think a lot of it depends on the personality of that founder, CEO, VP, whatever it may be. So a lot of the founders I work with are product people, right? They are engineers, developers, or what have you. So in those cases, the conversation is, "Well, think about a product. Do you develop every feature you want in parallel at the same time? Or do you build a roadmap and you prioritize based on urgency, customer request," whatever it may be. So that might resonate with them. It’s like, "Oh yeah, you’re right. We shouldn’t be trying to do TikTok and Twitter and LinkedIn ads and events and podcasts." So that can hit sometimes.

Um, if it’s someone with more of a sales background, you know, "How did you get your first five customers? Was it by going and talking to everybody you’d ever met?" No. It was by identifying the specific group of people that are likely to buy and then targeting in on that. So I think you have to appeal to whatever their background is.

Now, if it’s a VP of marketing, CMO, whatever, it’s a little tougher. I think you have to understand why they feel as though they need to do everything, and it could be because of pressure from the top. It could be because they have not stopped and thought about what are they truly trying to achieve and who are their customers, right? So, you know, as marketers, we always talk about the ICP, right? The ideal customer profile. I tend to be dismissive of a lot of marketing theory because in startups you gotta move quick and you can’t spend a whole lot of time doing strategy. But the ICP makes a lot of sense ’cause it saves you an awful lot of time, both in targeting who you’re speaking to and where you’re spending your money. So I would always start out with that.

And it may be that for a head of marketing who’s all over the place, they haven’t done that or in a lot of cases I find they haven’t been allowed to do that. And sometimes coming in as a consultant from the outside, you are enabled to do that. You can say the thing that needs to be said. I think a lot of small companies used to just be so focused on the tactics, and they are now realizing you do have to have, albeit a thin layer of strategy or planning at the top, because marketing is so diverse now, right? And the other thing is, if it’s somebody that’s, funny you — you just talk about money. Like, where do you want to spend those resources? If you’re gonna give X amount of money and you want to have impact, you gotta tell me which of these three things we go spend it on. So I always bring it back to the three things. Let me do three things really well, and then we’ll worry about the other 20 things on your list.

[TIM PETER]:
Well, you know what I love about that story, Steve? It demonstrates why you are a great marketer. It demonstrates why I wanted you on the show, honestly — is that you’re modeling the very behavior you talk about as a marketer. You’re meeting the person you’re talking to where they are. You’re speaking in their language. You’re framing the problem in a way that resonates in their own language, right? Which is what we’re supposed to do as marketers and sometimes accomplish.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Well, and I think it helps. I started out as an engineer, right? I did not start out as a marketer. I worked for a GM once, and he would constantly point out that he was the only one in the room that had a marketing degree. I have an engineering degree, right? Um, but it does give you a different perspective, right? I mean, it helps me working with tech companies because I can grasp the technology fairly quickly, but I think it does also help that I haven’t always thought like a marketer, right? So it does make it a little bit easier to sort of put yourself in different frames.

[TIM PETER]:
Steve, one of the things I genuinely enjoy about our conversations is we could talk forever, frankly. And every time we talk, it’s like, why don’t we do this more often?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, 100%.

[TIM PETER]:
100%. So, to that point, what haven’t we talked about? What haven’t I asked you that you wished I had?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Well, I thought we might talk about AEO or GEO or whatever — having said that, not sure I want to talk about it because it is this minefield, and you are way more knowledgeable on it than I am. So I’m not gonna ask you to talk about that.

The one thing that I am seeing, which maybe others aren’t, is that there is a shift in expectations for marketing. And I think part of it is because of AI. I think part of it is just a general higher level awareness of what marketing is and what marketing can do. But, you know, what it’s meant for me is most of my career was running corporate teams. You know, I ran marketing at a division of Panasonic for a while. I’ve done it with smaller startup companies. But what I’ve realized is a lot of companies need marketing and marketing strategy much earlier than they can typically afford to do it.

Typically, companies would get into that — well, at some point I’m gonna be able to hire a director of marketing, VP of whatever, right? But oftentimes it was too late. Like, you need to start building that awareness much sooner than they were able to do.

Um, so this new model — a lot of people call it fractional CMO. I don’t like that phrase, um, for a couple of reasons. But this idea of being able to hire somebody on a part-time basis — so typically, when I work with companies, it’s a day a week. So what it means is I’m not there as a consultant, you know, writing a report and throwing it over the fence — I’m embedded with a company. I’m driven by their success. I know what’s going on. I know the people. And I can bring in that higher level of thinking than typically a startup — you know, a seed or even Series A startup — isn’t able to do. But I’m also not really a pure strategist, right? I can do the strategy, I can put together a plan, but I also am somebody that wants to execute on it, right?

Um, so that model, I think, is really helpful for growth companies. The way I often phrase it is, it’s for companies that know they need to do more with marketing, but don’t really know where to start. And if you hire a junior marketer, they are gonna tell you to do whatever the thing is that they know how to do, right? When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So I think it’s an interesting shift. It’s somewhat self-serving ’cause it’s what I’ve chosen to do. But one of the reasons I chose to do it is I have a low boredom threshold. I like to be involved in a lot of different things. And I’ve always got excited at this early stage of growth. I think it’s great to be able to help companies at that level of growth hopefully sort of get off the launchpad quicker.

Just quickly on my thing about fractional CMO — I don’t like it for a couple of reasons. One is most companies, at least smaller growth companies, they do not need a CMO. A CMO is all about strategy, dealing with the board, dealing with investors, whatever it may be. What they need is a director, or whatever — somebody who can do the planning and roll their sleeves up.

The other thing that drives me absolutely crazy, Tim, and this is LinkedIn again — the number of people I see on there that say they’re a fractional CMO, and oftentimes it’s one of two things. One, they’ve never been a CMO, never even been a VP of marketing, right? But, you know, they did a bit of marketing. And the other thing that drives me nuts is they’re actually not a fractional CMO. They’re somebody who is looking for a job, wants some consulting between times. I have no problem with that, but part of the value of a fractional CMO is you can be there through the growth curve of somebody, and if you’re looking for a job as well, you know, you’re not gonna be able to do that. As soon as you find a job, you’re gonna move on. Again, if you want to do consulting, have at it. But I truly believe the fractional marketing approach is about becoming part of a team and being a part of their growth process — and not just dropping in saying, "Oh, here’s your ICP. Here’s a couple of things you should be doing," and then moving on.

[TIM PETER]:
I love the rant. I agree with the rant 100%. I think you know my favorite clients are the clients that have been long-term engagements. My oldest client — one of the reasons, not one of the reasons, but a reason that I talk about hotels so often is my oldest client is a group of hotels. They’ve been a client literally since a week before I opened the door. 15 years now, right? Um, and it’s exactly that.

And it’s funny you tell the story about people who are just doing this while they’re waiting for a job. I literally had somebody ask me in the earliest stages of starting consulting — "Well, the reason we’re not sure we want to hire you is you’re just doing this till you get a real job, right?" And I was like, "No, I actually did this on purpose. This is what I wanted to do." But it took a little bit of time to convince people that that was actually intentional and not just doing this until a better gig comes along. I’m like, "No, this is the better gig."

And it’s tough. I mean, I still — I’ve been doing this three, four years now, and I still get the question from people. It’s like, "But if they offered you a full-time job, you’d take it, right?" "No. This is what I wanna do. This is what I enjoy doing." And there’s risks. There’s risks with everything, right? But no, this is what I chose to do. Um, and the other side I’ll say is it’s a tough job market out there, so in no way am I saying anything against anyone doing what they need to do. It’s the terminology and the approach is all I’m talking about.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
No, that makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense.

[TIM PETER]:
So I’ve got three — these are quick questions, we’ll wrap up here. But, uh, you know, first, just based on what you talked about — Steve, I think you know I’m a big fan of your work. I’m a big fan of what you do. I’m a big fan of the way you think about this, and I know you’re of great help and service to the clients you work with and the like. So I wanna help you actually find more people who are looking for that. Where can people learn more about you and all the great work you do?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Well, that’s very kind of you, Tim. Um, despite what I’ve said about LinkedIn, LinkedIn is still the "find me." Um, and I was one of those early adopters. My LinkedIn handle is actually just my name. It’s not SteveCummins73X12. It’s actually just Steve Cummins.

Um, the other thing I would say is — you said some nice things about my newsletter. It goes out every two weeks, talking primarily about B2B marketing. There’s been a lot of AI stuff in there recently, but I typically sort of tell a story about something that I’ve been dealing with, um, and then I also include what I’ve been reading this week, so I put a link out to something that I think is interesting for people. So it’s a Substack newsletter — if you just go to Substack, search either for my name or The Marketing Mix, which is the name of the newsletter. If you subscribe for that, I would be thrilled, and you’ll get a letter from me every two weeks.

[TIM PETER]:
Perfect. Perfect. And there will be links to all of those in the show notes, both on the website and on YouTube. But I love that it’s called The Marketing Mix because you’re also a bit of a mixologist. You’re somebody who really enjoys cocktails. So what’s your go-to recommendation for folks to enjoy during the summer for a cocktail?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
I do. So I should have said, the last thing on every one of my newsletters is a cocktail that I’ve either enjoyed or am recommending. Um, and there’s a marketing tip for you. The reason I put it in there is to give people an excuse to open the newsletter every week. And the number of people I run into that say, "Oh, you know, I saw your cocktail this week;” I don’t know if they’ve read the rest of it, but they always scroll down to the bottom.

Um, so, you know, summer cocktail, something called a Hugo Spritz, ’cause it’s very refreshing. It’s low alcohol. Um, so it’s basically prosecco, it’s elderflower liqueur — the St-Germain stuff you see in these funky bottles — a little bit of soda water, some mint if you’ve got it. Um, really nice and refreshing. My other go-to cocktail — I have a lot of go-to cocktails — since I suspect a lot of people who listen to this may be road warriors as well, my travel cocktail, which is also refreshing, nobody can screw this up and you can get it on pretty much any airline, is scotch and ginger ale.

[TIM PETER]:
Oh, sure.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Because, you know, you can’t screw it up. It’s pretty light, and that’s my go-to. When I get on a plane, that’s my mental thing of relaxing. If I get one of those then I’m good.

[TIM PETER]:
I do a bourbon and ginger, but yeah, it’s… you’re never gonna go wrong, right?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Absolutely.

[TIM PETER]:
Well, Steve, this has been just… first of all, it’s always a delight getting to catch up with you. It’s always a joy to chat. I’m glad we’re able to share it with folks this time around. But we’ve talked about a lot of things today. You know, if there was just one takeaway from today’s discussion that you’d like the audience to hear, what would that be?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah. I would say most of the stuff that you are reading about marketing and what you should be doing is intended for companies that have teams of five or 10 marketing people, right? And there are so many marketers out there that are a team of one, and they’re gonna feel as though, "Oh, I gotta be doing all of this," right? So the first thing to remember is a lot of these people have colleagues either side of them that are taking care of the blocking and tackling, which is you know, you’re also having to do.

Um, and then allied with that is this whole idea of just pick three things. Just pick three things and do them well. It’s not to say you don’t do any of the other stuff, but block out your calendar, make sure every week you’re doing something on those three things and building momentum and moving it forward. Marketing does not have to be as complicated as people think it is. You can make it very complicated, but the basics — like putting a cocktail recipe at the end of my newsletter — the basics still work. The technology around it’s gotten more complicated, but you know, just keep it simple. At least start simple.

[TIM PETER]:
What a great place to wrap up. Steve Cummins, it is again a joy to get to spend some time with you. Thank you so much for your time and for a great conversation, and we’ll chat soon.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Always a pleasure. Thank you, Tim.

[TIM PETER]:
If you want even more from Steve — and you should — you can find him in the same two places as last week. The Marketing Mix newsletter goes out every two weeks on Substack. Search Steve Cummins or The Marketing Mix, or you’ll find the link in the show notes. And yes, there’s a cocktail recommendation at the end of every issue, which based on the conversation Steve and I had today, I can confirm is really well-informed. If you want to work with Steve directly, you can find him on LinkedIn or at Solent Strategies. All the links, as always, are in the show notes.

This interview wraps up what I think has been a really solid stretch of episodes for the show. Uh, we started with the gatekeeper problem in episode 498. We worked through the roadmap in episodes 499 and 500, took a look at the historical view in episode 501, and validated it with Daniel Stanica’s research in episode 502. Now Steve has given us the practitioner’s view of what it all means for the people actually running marketing teams right now. Fun stuff for me, hopefully super useful for you.

I’ll be back next week with another episode. In the meantime, if you know a marketing leader who’s wrestling with what AI means for their team, send them this conversation — both parts of it. They’ll thank you for it.

You can find the show notes for today’s episode at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on building a brand that customers will ask for by name, my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," is the roadmap you need. You’ll find it on amazon.com and bookshop.org, and the links, of course, in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening today and every week. I genuinely appreciate all of your support, and I would not do this show without you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and as always, 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?

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The post Steve Cummins: If AI Is Doing All the Work, Are You Building Skills or a House of Cards? — Part 2 of 2 (Digital Reset Episode 504) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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Marketing exists to drive revenue. That might sound obvious. But given how obsessed many of us can be with AI tools, content calendars, and channel optimization, it’s a surprisingly easy fact to lose sight of.

Steve Cummins has spent more than 20 years making sure we don’t do that. He grew a B2B tech company to $75 million in revenue before acquisition. Their own VP of Sales said Steve took an unknown technology company to the point it was recognized as the global market leader. Today Steve works as a fractional marketing leader through Solent Strategies, helping startups and teams of one punch above their weight.

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Steve and Tim get into the questions marketing leaders are actually wrestling with right now: Where does the owned channel argument break down? How does a marketing team of one figure out where AI fits into their day-to-day, and not just in theory, but in reality? And if you have to start on rented land, what should you build while you’re there?

I hope you enjoy this candid conversation between two practitioners who’ve watched platform after platform change the rules on the businesses that depended on them.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode Where the owned channel argument breaks down. And how that aligns with the TPA “hub and spoke” framework * The B2B vs. hospitality distinction. Why earned media is table stakes in some industries and genuinely optional in others * The educational sale problem. What to do when your customer doesn’t know they have a problem yet * Why your toughest competitor is inertia. And what that means for how you position your brand * The three ways to approach AI right now. And why Steve and Tim are skeptical of most standalone AI tools * Why a marketing team of one probably shouldn’t be shipping code. And, most critically, what they should be doing instead * Why one paid AI subscription puts you in the top 10% of all users. And what that tells you about your business * The difference between genuine focus and going deep on rented land. More importantly, how to tell which one you’re doing * Sometimes you have to start on rented land. Here’s what to build while you’re there.*

Steve’s Three Ways to Approach AI Right Now- Use the AI already built into your current stack.

Every major platform — HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe’s stack, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Riverside — is rolling out AI functionality. Start there. It’s in your existing subscription, you already know the platform, and it’s built to improve your workflows. This is where every marketer should begin.

Be skeptical of standalone AI tools.

A lot of these are still in development cycles. You may spend significant time helping them make their product better. Many will be acquired or disappear. Don’t build your processes on platforms that have only been around for three months.

Invest in agentic tools (and why Steve specifically recommends Claude Cowork).

Agentic tools run tasks, not just conversations. Steve’s real-world example: filling an entire column of LinkedIn pages for an ABM target list, in plain English, with no mistakes. For a team of one, this is where the real leverage is. And at $20 a month, there’s no excuse not to try it.

The Focus vs. Rented Land DistinctionTim and Steve spend time on a question that trips up a lot of lean marketing teams: the difference between genuine focus ("do two or three things really well") and using focus as an excuse to go deep on someone else’s real estate.

Steve’s answer: pick two or three things you can have an impact on, get very good at them, be consistent. Then, once you’re at roughly the 90% level, add a fourth. You’re constantly building the stack, not going infinitely deep on one channel you don’t control.

And if you do have to post on rented land: think carefully about the assets you’re creating there and where else they can live. The content you create for Instagram or LinkedIn can become a blog post, a newsletter section, a video script. You may have to do it because you’re posting on rented land. Make sure you’re using those assets for something else.

Resources Mentioned Steve Cummins on LinkedIn * The Marketing Mix Newsletter on Substack * Solent Strategies * Range* by David Epstein. One of Steve’s go-to books on the value of breadth early in your career * Claude Cowork. The agentic AI tool Steve and Tim recommend for marketing teams of one * Riverside. The recording platform used for today’s interview, which also includes built-in AI editing features

Related Episodes* Google Didn’t Kill Blogging. It Killed Borrowed Brand Equity. (Episode 502) * The AI Winners Didn’t Pivot. They Prepared. — Digital Reset Foundations (Episode 501) * The Complete Roadmap for Owning Your Customer — Part 3 of 3 (Episode 500) * Who Really Owns Your Customer? — Part 2 of 3 (Episode 499) * The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3 (Episode 498) * Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495) * The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Episode 489) * Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491) * Steve Cummins: If AI Is Doing All the Work, Are You Building Skills or a House of Cards? — Part 2 of 2 (Digital Reset Episode 504)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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.

See Tim Peter in ActionWatch Tim Peter and Steve Cummins discuss what AI actually means for lean marketing teams — and why the rented land argument doesn’t mean what most people think it does.

Free DownloadsWe have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

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Subscribe to Digital Reset* Subscribe on Apple Podcasts * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe on Amazon Music * Watch all episodes on YouTube * Subscribe via RSS Feed

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital ResetRecorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 28:23

Transcript: Steve Cummins: You Have to Start on Rented Land. Here’s What to Build While You’re There. — Part 1 of 2 (Episode 503)[TIM PETER]:
Marketing exists to drive revenue. That sounds obvious, but in a world obsessed with AI tools and content calendars and channel optimization, it’s a surprisingly easy fact to lose sight of.

My guest today has spent more than twenty years making sure that never happens. Steve Cummins has built marketing functions at companies ranging from Japanese tech giants to crowdfunded Danish startups. He grew an entrepreneurial IT business to seventy-five million dollars in revenue before it was acquired, and their own VP of sales said Steve took an unknown technology company to the point where it was recognized as the global market leader.

Today, Steve works as a fractional marketing leader through his firm Solent Strategies, helping startups and B2B companies punch above their weight. He also coaches and mentors people I think about often when I make this show: marketing teams of one.

What you’re about to hear is a candid, honest conversation about what AI actually means for marketing teams right now. There’s no hype here. There’s no fear here. It’s a practical reality of how a lean marketing function can use these tools to build something that lasts without handing ownership of your customers to yet another gatekeeper.

Today is part one of a two-part interview with Steve Cummins. I’m Tim Peter. This is the Digital Reset Podcast. Let’s dive in.

So, Steve Cummins, welcome to the show. I am so glad you’re here. You know, we’ve known each other for a long time. We’ve been I think friends for quite a while, have enjoyed working with one another over the years, and I’m just thrilled you’re here today.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Well, thanks Tim. Um, I, I would say I’m a longtime listener, first-time caller, I guess. Um, and yes, we’ve been in the trenches together a few times. Um, and you’re always kind enough to answer my calls when I need some help on, on SEO or whatever may be the, uh, the panic of the day.

[TIM PETER]:
Well, and vice versa. And I just, it’s always a pleasure to catch up with you. It’s fun that this time there’s gonna be an audience for it, so, uh, thanks for taking the time.

So you have just the best newsletter. I love your newsletter. I read it every month. It’s really great. Um, and you wrote recently that marketing exists to drive revenue and everything else is noise. Uh, as you know, I’ve been making a similar argument for owned channels for years. What I’m curious about is where would you push back on me? You know, because I think there’s a version of focus on what you own that becomes an excuse for avoiding the hard work of actually getting your content and getting your message in front of people, you know, distribution and the like. So in your view, where does the owned channel argument break down?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah. So first off, obviously that is a big oversimplification that, you know, marketing only exists to drive revenue. And I have to say that so I don’t get in trouble with all of my friends and colleagues in marketing. Really what I’m trying to say is, look, marketing doesn’t exist for its own sake, right? It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You are there to do certain things, and what it all boils down to is driving revenue. And I do think some marketers, particularly the talking heads that you see on LinkedIn, lose sight of that sometimes, and they just love to talk about marketing for marketing’s own sake. I’m not pointing fingers at you, Tim, but there are people out there that do that.

But to dig more into your question — where does the focus on owned break down? I think a lot of it depends on your domain or the industry you’re in, right? So I know you do a lot of work in hospitality and hotels. So in that world, there’s some very obvious places where people go on that first level of search, right? So could be Google Maps. That’s often how I search when I’m looking for — I go into Google Maps, and the listings are there. Maybe it’s TripAdvisor, you know, there’s a few other places. Restaurants, similar kind of thing.

So in that case, you know, the earned media is sort of a given, right? You have to do it, but it’s — of course — and then you can really focus on your owned media.

Now, a lot of what I deal with is B2B tech companies. So let’s take an example. One company I worked with, they do a fairly niche area of ed tech, educational technology, right? Something that goes into classrooms. So that first level where somebody might say, "Oh, I need this thing. Let me go find out about it," there’s not a lot of obvious places to go for that beyond good old-fashioned Google search, right? There’s not a platform like Yelp — there’s no, there’s no TripAdvisor. So you actually have to do a lot more work. Probably not even G2 or things like that — they don’t really cover that space. I mean, G2 is much more focused on software, right? So if you’re in hardware, industry websites, magazines is probably the closest you have for it. So you do have to do a fair amount of work on what little earned media there is out there.

And then the other thing is, there’s only any point in doing owned media if you can get somebody to that place. So again, in the case of hotels, somebody finds it on Google Maps or TripAdvisor. First thing I would do is go through to the website, right? So immediately you’re on it. And God bless you for that. I may be in the minority. I don’t know.

Um, but again, with a tech product, you know, how do you get somebody to your website in the first place? So something like a podcast might be, right? ‘Cause people are looking to find out more about ed tech, and maybe that’s how they find it. But I think it’s a lot tougher to get people to owned media. So yes, you should do owned media, but in certain areas, particularly where it’s a niche product, I think you have to do a lot more effort to build the blocks to get people to come to your owned media.

[TIM PETER]:
Well, and it’s an educational sale, right? I mean, for many of the kinds of things you’re talking about, sometimes people don’t know they have a problem in the first place, or they don’t know that they’ve got a need they’ve got to address. So there’s probably some work you’ve got to do just to get the message out of, "Hey, I don’t know if you know you have a problem." I mean, is that a fair…

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, you know, that’s something that I struggle with quite a bit actually, because I will talk to some companies and that’s what they want to do, right? Because it’s sort of marketing 101. Oh, you’ve got to define the problem and educate. However, a lot of the companies I deal with are startups, and in most cases, there’s already somebody established in that field and they’ve found a better way of doing it. Cheaper, smarter, whatever it may be. So should they really spend their time educating somebody on the problem when in reality they’re probably only gonna get found if somebody is looking at the bigger players in that field and then are looking for, oh, is there a better way of doing this?

So rather than trying to explain and solve the big problem, what I would then tell them to do is focus on the thing, on the part of the problem that you solve, right? So, you know, ’cause there’s other people out there frankly with much bigger budgets that are gonna talk about the bigger pie. So really focus in on that one bit, and maybe that’s how you get people to the website. Because then it’s more of that longer tail type search where somebody’s saying — so I’ll use the ed tech example again, right? So somebody knows that they need a screen share widget. So they go out there, there’s two or three big players out there. Those are the people they find. But actually they’ve got this one problem, and this one problem is that it’s very difficult to switch between Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Skype, right? And that’s actually the thing that this company is really good at. So you spend your time focusing on that so that when somebody starts searching, okay, I know these are the three people, but this is really the problem I have. That’s the bit that you’ve really got to get sharp on.

[TIM PETER]:
Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. I actually — you know me, I collect pithy phrases from all over the place. And one of the ones I talk about all the time is your toughest competitor is inertia, right? Your toughest competitor is people doing what they’ve always done, and that’s true if you’re a big guy, and it’s certainly true if you’re a small person. The analogy I would use in this case from the hospitality industry is, when you work with independent hotels, you certainly don’t have to educate people on what a hotel is, obviously. Um, but getting them to understand why would I stay with this interesting little, you know, 30-room boutique property in the city center versus the Marriott where I get my points and things like that. You know, they’ve done the heavy lifting of letting people know hotels exist. But why this hotel becomes the bigger challenge, right?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, and I think it’s the whole status quo thing, right? So another pithy phrase used to be, you know, you never get fired for choosing IBM. Now it’s probably, you know, you don’t get fired for running on AWS, right? So yes, that’s the thing that you’re trying to overcome for sure.

[TIM PETER]:
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So you mentioned a client in one of your newsletters whose in-house marketer is now shipping code, you know? And I’m hearing similar stories of folks who are actually building things hands-on themselves, vibe coding themselves and the like, right? And I do a fair bit of that myself. At many of the companies you work with, because they’re startups or because they’re early stage or because they’re a smaller player in a much bigger ecosystem, the marketing team might be one person, right? And I think that’s something a lot of people who listen to the show can relate to. You know, how do you figure out where AI actually fits into your day-to-day? And I’m not just talking like in theory, but like today, you know, what’s the honest answer?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
And I’ll be super transparent about this. I don’t know that I have the answer yet, right? So I’d love — um, one of the reasons I’m asking is ’cause I wanna know. Well, and because it’s constantly changing, right? The answer I would’ve given you a month, two months ago would’ve been different, and I’m sure it will be two months from now.

That particular instance — the marketer who’s shipping code — is probably a little bit of an outlier. So they’re a cybersecurity SaaS company, Series A, right? So they’re growing fast. Two-thirds of their employees are software developers. So the whole mentality, whenever I talk to the founder, he wants to know have I done this in Claude, right? Everything they do is in Claude. So for this particular marketer, it was just expected ’cause everybody else is doing everything in Claude and it was expected.

So I don’t think that is the answer. It’s not the answer right now for most marketers, and I’m not sure it’s ever gonna be. But particularly if it’s a team of one, which is very common, right? And oftentimes I work with companies where they have a junior marketer who’s very good at the doing, and I get involved to sort of help them with the planning and the strategy and what have you. You sort of need that layer between, you know, we’re doing a lot of things, and are we doing the right things moving forward.

So if you’re a team of one, first off, you probably don’t have the time to work out how to start coding stuff and ship it and all of that, unless you’re in a software-forward company. What I encourage people to do, I think there’s probably three ways you can look at AI at the moment.

The first is pretty much every software program platform that you use is rolling out AI functionality. So the simplest way to start using AI and benefiting from AI is, you know, whether it’s HubSpot, MailChimp, whatever it is you’re using, Canva, they all have AI built in. Some is good, some is not so good. But that’s the first thing. Play around with that because it’s already in your stack, you already know how you’re using it, and it’s probably there to help with your workflows. You and I are recording this on a platform called Riverside. Every week they’re rolling out new AI things that make the editing process easier. So every marketer can do that. It’s typically included in your existing subscription. So that’s the first thing to do.

Um, second thing is, and I’m less keen on this, is there are a lot of standalone AI tools out there that will tell you, you know, "We’ve developed this AI from the ground up. This is gonna solve your problem." Not a big fan of those because, A, they’re still in their development cycle, so you may spend a lot of time effectively helping them make their product better. B, a lot of them will go away. You know, they will get bought out, disappear, whatever, and you’ve just built your stack on that. So if you’re interested, play around with it on the side, but do not build your processes on these platforms that have only been around for three months. And I apologize to any of my clients that might actually have those products right now.

Um, but I actually think the big thing — and what I’m playing around with a lot at the moment — is agentic tools, right? So I’m a big fan of Claude Cowork. And I think for a lot of people, when they think of ChatGPT or Claude, they think about the chatbots, right? You go in, you ask a question, it helps you write, and that’s all very valuable, particularly for a marketer of one.

But Claude Cowork actually helps you run tasks, right? So a real simple case, two days ago, I was working with a client, we’re building out an ABM program for them, and very simple, I was building a list of potential targets, and I realized that I hadn’t filled out the column that had their LinkedIn page on. I just put it into Cowork. And if you haven’t used Cowork, what you realize is you just speak English to it. You just say, "Hey, I have this table. I need to fill in column B with LinkedIn pages," and off it goes and does it. And as far as I could see, there were no mistakes. There was four or five that it couldn’t find, and then I went and found those myself. So start simple, right? And I think Claude Cowork is $20 a month.

[TIM PETER]:
It is. That’s what I’m paying, yeah.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, exactly. Hopefully your company will pay for it. If not, pay for it yourself. I mean, really, for 20 bucks. So that would be my thing: first, features that are in your current stack, and second, invest in Claude Cowork. They all have similar things. I just think Claude Cowork is probably the best and easiest to use right now.

[TIM PETER]:
I completely agree with that, by the way. And while this episode is not brought to you by Anthropic and Claude, it could be if anybody out there is listening and wants to, you know, throw us a check… No, I’m kidding.

You know, the other thing I’ll say on that, a lot of people are very worried that they’re getting left behind on AI, right? I think you and I have talked about this before. And I have a couple of answers to that.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
First is, yeah, you probably are because we all are. It is just impossible to keep up. But the other thing I will say — and there was a really good chart published about this a few weeks ago — if you have a paid subscription to any of the AI tools, you’re in the top 10% of all users. And if you have paid for two AI tools, you’re in the top, I think, 1% or something crazy. So if you are playing around with it, if you are doing stuff with it, you’re already ahead of the game, and you’ve just gotta keep at it.

[TIM PETER]:
You know, I’m very fond of telling people, "Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides," right? We run into this all the time. I do work with the Conference Board, the Digital Marketing Strategy Council there, and we get together a group of digital marketers at Fortune 500 companies once a quarter or thereabouts to have conversations about what’s top of mind for them. And invariably what we find is that, you know, Person A on the council, when we’re talking about a specific topic, will be so far behind the average in the room. And then you go to another topic, and they are so far ahead of the average in the room, right? Nobody’s good at everything. You know, you just have to accept the fact that there’s things you’re gonna be better at, there’s things you’re gonna be worse at. Don’t let the things that you’re worse at be a hole you fall into or that distract you from what you should be working on. You know, you’re probably working on the right things most of the time, right?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
I think it’s true. And I tell you, LinkedIn is the worst for that, right? I mean, I do spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, more than I should. But…

[TIM PETER]:
Same, by the way. So if you truly believed what everybody told you they were doing on LinkedIn in terms of AI, you’d think you’re a Luddite compared to it. But people talk a good game, and to your point, they may just be very focused on that one aspect of it.

Which kind of leads to the next question I wanted to ask you because you have talked quite a bit about do a few things really well. You know, I have talked about own the channels that you build on, and to me those kind of feel like they’re the same argument or there’s a lot of overlap there, right? Fish where the fishing’s good, double down on where your opportunities are, things like that. Um, at the same time, I have seen people who I consider fairly smart use focus as a reason to go deep on a rented platform. You know, we’re gonna be on Instagram, we’re gonna be on LinkedIn, we’re gonna be on whatever channel is working right now and the like. So how do you help your clients, how do you help people you talk to, distinguish between genuine focus and just doubling down on someone else’s real estate, building your brand on rented land, and the obvious risks that that entails?

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
Yeah, so I think it is a challenge. There’s a fine line between focusing on a few things and going deep into two or three things, right? So when I say to people, "You’ve got to focus on one or two things," what I’m trying to avoid is spreading yourself so thin and trying to do so many things that basically you end up doing a lot of things not very well, right? So my thing more is about pick two or three things that you think you can have an impact on, that you have an interest in, ’cause I think it helps if you’re interested in these things. Get very good at them and be consistent with them.

But once you get to that level — and I don’t know what it is, let’s say it’s the 90% level — then you pick the fourth thing. So you’re constantly adding to the stack. So I think it’s diminishing returns to go deeper. It’s that T-shaped thing, right? Get very good at two or three things, but then broaden out.

And I think part of this came from my corporate career before I started consulting. Typically, I would join a company early on when there was maybe one or two marketers, and we would grow the company. And if you’re in that growth environment, the nice thing is if you take that approach, if you get very good at one or two things, then you get to hire somebody to take those things over and maintain and iterate. Meanwhile, you can move on to the fourth thing and the fifth thing. So yeah, I’m not a fan of going deep.

Whenever I’m talking to a new client or someone who’s asking me for help, I always do this first tier audit. You probably do the same thing, right? So I go look at their website, and one of the things I always do, I scroll down to the bottom to look at their social icons. Where are you telling your potential customers to go find out about you? And the number of people that I find that have five or six icons on there, right? They’re on LinkedIn and Twitter and Blue Sky and TikTok and all this, and then you go and click on each one of them, and the only thing they post on there was two years ago, three years ago. But you’ll find one. You don’t know what it is. It could be LinkedIn, could be YouTube, where they are very active. And so then it’s an easy conversation to say, "Look, you thought you would be able to handle four or five of these things. Let’s get rid of those other icons. Let’s get really good at the one you’re already active on. And when we think we’re ready with that, then let’s go to the second one."

I think you have to have that honest conversation. The other thing that I always laugh at is why they picked that one thing, right? Why did they decide that TikTok is gonna be the thing for them? And, you know, sometimes it’s rational. It’s very industry dependent. I worked with a company — it was actually really interesting. They had multiple businesses. One of them is hotels, and the other is a tax advisory business. Very different. Having my call with them, and they have a junior marketer who’s working on the hotel side of the business, and she’d just been brought over to the advisory side as well. And she’s telling him, "Oh, we’ve really got to do a lot on Facebook to get this." Now, they’re trying to bring in high net worth individuals to come in and do their tax advisory. You’re not gonna find those people on Facebook. But for this marketer, it was sensible for her. They’d been very successful with the hotel with Facebook, so therefore we’re gonna do that on the other one. So you also have to be very thoughtful about, once you decide you’re only gonna do two or three things, you may not find the perfect things to do, but at least make sure that they are logical.

[TIM PETER]:
It’s so funny you say this. I see this all the time for all kinds of businesses. And you know, why do we do it? "Well, ’cause our competitors do it, right?" Or because it’s the thing that the marketer happens to like personally, right? It’s their preferred social network or things like that. And plenty who do it for very rational reasons of we’ve done the research on our customers. But yeah, I love the way you’re thinking about focus.

I had to look it up — I apologize, but I couldn’t remember the source of the phrase — but there’s a phrase my dad used to use all the time about the guy who jumped on his horse and rode off madly in all directions. And that kinda doesn’t work out, you know? There’s a lot of that.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
You see I have a lot of books behind me. So one of my favorite books is a book called Range. Um, and it was sort of ahead of its time. I can’t remember the name of the author, but it’s called Range. And he talks about — it’s very trendy and very popular to be a specialist at something. But he’s done a lot of research into this idea that actually you’re much better off, at least early on in your career, being very broad and learning a lot of things. And then over time you can specialize into certain areas. But I’ve always thought of myself as a generalist, and I gotta say, in most of my career that has worked against me because people generally are looking to hire an SEO specialist or a social media person or a video person, and my thing has always been, well, I get bored easily. I like doing a bunch of different things, so I want to be able to turn my hand to whatever is the thing that’s needed, which is honestly why I’ve worked with a lot of small companies and startups because in that environment you have to do that anyway. Being able to wear a lot of different hats — knowing what hats to wear in the first place is actually a valuable skill, right?

Absolutely. I realize I didn’t answer part of your question as well, which is the whole rented — deep on rented. The only thing I would say is I think for a lot of smaller companies, you have to start on rented land.

[TIM PETER]:
100%. Yep.

[STEVE CUMMINS]:
But think about the content, or the assets that you’re creating for that rented land and what can you do with it, right? So are you creating videos? Are you creating written material that can be a blog? So you may have to do it because you’re posting on that rented land, but make sure that you’re using those assets for something else.

[TIM PETER]:
If you want more from Steve — and you should — there are two places you can find him.

First, his newsletter, The Marketing Mix, goes out every two weeks on Substack, where he covers B2B marketing with the kind of honest, real-world perspective you just heard today. Pro tip for you: there’s a cocktail recommendation at the end of every issue. You won’t want to miss it, and you’ll find the link in the show notes.

Steve is also on LinkedIn, as you might imagine. Just search Steve Cummins. You’ll find the link to his profile in the show notes, too.

And if you want to work with Steve directly, check out Solent Strategies. All the details for how you can get in touch with him are in the show notes for today’s episode.

Now, Steve and I only covered the first half of our conversation today. Next week, Steve and I get into something that I think is one of the most important questions in marketing right now: What happens to the people building marketing skills when AI is doing more and more of the actual work? Steve calls it the validator problem, and it’s something every marketing leader needs to think about very carefully. That’s part two coming at you next week.

In the meantime, if you know somebody who’s running a marketing team right now and trying to figure out where AI actually fits in their day-to-day, do me a favor, send them a link to this episode. I think it might save them a lot of time and a whole lot of second-guessing.

You can find the show notes for today’s episode, including all of Steve’s contact info, at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go even deeper on building a brand that customers will ask for by name, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, might be just what you’re looking for. You’ll find it on amazon.com and bookshop.org. Links in the show notes to those too, of course.

Thank you so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate all of your support. I would not do this show without you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and as always, 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 Steve Cummins: You Have to Start on Rented Land. Here’s What to Build While You’re There. — Part 1 of 2 (Digital Reset Episode 503) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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Google killed 79 out of 100 blogs. The median site lost 85% of its search traffic between 2022 and 2026. Not the worst blog in the study. The middle. Half did worse than that.

But this isn’t really a blogging story. It’s a story about what happens to any business that builds its customer acquisition strategy on borrowed brand equity, renting visibility from a platform — a gatekeeper — that eventually shuts the gate. Daniel Stanica’s research on 100 once-successful blogs was written as a warning and a way forward for bloggers. It also produced 100 real-world data points confirming the argument Tim Peter has been making for years.

In Episode 502 of Digital Reset, Tim breaks down what the data actually says, who’s really responsible (spoiler: it’s not ChatGPT), and what every business in his audience can do about it right now… regardless of where they’re starting from.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode Why this isn’t a blogging story. It’s a story about any business that depends on organic search — and gatekeepers more generally — for its revenue * Why AI didn’t kill these blogs’ traffic. Google did. AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% of all searches and, when they do, clickthroughs drop 58% * Why switching from Google dependence to AI dependence won’t save you. More importantly, Tim looks at what will * The four traits shared by 21 blogging survivors. Tim maps these directly to the three-pillar brand framework from Digital Reset * Why "your brand is the prompt" is the only sustainable response to a world where gatekeepers gonna gate (i.e., control discovery) * What your analytics dashboard is hiding from you right now. And why composition effects might be hurting you * The playbook for what to do next, no matter where your business is today*

What to Do Right NowPull your traffic composition by source for the last 12 months. Look at the share each source provides — not the totals. Then ask two questions:

What percentage comes from direct traffic, email and SMS, and branded search?
Is that number growing or shrinking?

That’s what tells you whether you’re building a relationship that only you can own.

Resources Mentioned* The Great Blogging Collapse: What Happened to 100 Successful Blogs? — Daniel Stanica

Related Episodes* The AI Winners Didn’t Pivot. They Prepared. — Digital Reset Foundations (Episode 501) * The Complete Roadmap for Owning Your Customer — Part 3 of 3 (Episode 500) * Who Really Owns Your Customer? — Part 2 of 3 (Episode 499) * The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3 (Episode 498) * Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495) * Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business (Episode 497) * The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Episode 489) * Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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.

See Tim Peter in ActionWatch Tim Peter break down why Google — not AI — killed 79 out of 100 blogs, and what every business depending on organic search needs to do about it right now.

Free DownloadsWe 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.

Subscribe to Digital Reset* Subscribe on Apple Podcasts * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe on Amazon Music * Watch all episodes on YouTube * Subscribe via RSS Feed

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital ResetRecorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 21:04

Transcript: Google Didn’t Kill Blogging. It Killed Borrowed Brand Equity. (Episode 502)Google killed seventy-nine out of one hundred blogs. The median blog site reviewed in recent research lost eighty-five percent of its search traffic. Not the worst blog in the list. The middle. Half actually did worse than that. And all of that in less than four years.

Daniel Stanica researched one hundred top blogs and found that between 2022 and 2026, they got slaughtered. Again, the median dropped by 85%. Sixty-five of the one hundred saw their overall traffic drop by fifty percent or more. Another fourteen dropped by an average of 36%. Only twenty-one grew.

That’s… bad.

You know, it’s also a problem for folks beyond blogs. Any business that’s dependent on organic search for its revenue is headed for the same fall. Large publishers have warned us about this issue for years. And it’s coming for every single business that depends on search.

I’d also argue that AI won’t save us because AI is just another iteration of the same issue. It’s a gatekeeper deciding who wins… and who loses.

This is the Digital Reset Podcast. I’m Tim Peter. Today we’re talking about how Google didn’t kill blogging, but how they’re killing the businesses whose model was built on borrowed brand equity. Let’s dive in.

Daniel Stanica put together some fascinating research that looks at what’s happened to one hundred top blogs between 2022 and 2026. And as noted before the break, most of them, seventy-nine of the one hundred, got crushed. The median blog in Daniel’s study lost eighty-five percent of its search traffic. And again, sixty-five of those hundred saw overall traffic fall by fifty percent or more. And that is all kinds of bad.

Now, as Daniel noted in his post, "this is a cohort study, not a representative sample." This is a quote. He said, "I am not claiming that two-thirds of all blogs on the internet lost their traffic. I am claiming something narrower and harder to wriggle out of: Of the specific blogs publicly celebrated as the model’s biggest winners, two-thirds lost the majority of their traffic."

Again, in my view, this story isn’t really about blogs or blogging. Give me a minute and I’ll get to what it’s really about.

One of my favorite bits in Daniel’s article, though, is where he noted four traits among the twenty-one survivors. He didn’t just say, "These folks survived." He called out what they’re doing well. They are, one, first-hand experience; two, owned audiences; three, a real product; and four, brand search. That’s genuinely useful information, and if you’ve listened to past episodes, it maps directly with advice I’ve offered in the past. Again, I’ll come back to that connection in just a few minutes.

What’s worth noting here, though, is that this story isn’t a "ChatGPT stole our traffic" story. ChatGPT didn’t steal their traffic. Google did. Google gave these folks life and then snatched it away. Let me say this again. AI didn’t kill these blogs’ traffic. Google did.

AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% of all searches on Google. Ahrefs published data in February that showed when AI Overviews appear on the search results page, click-throughs drop by roughly 58%. Worse, Google’s AI Overviews only cites the top pages in search about 38% of the time. That’s down half from 76% last year. In short, if your business depends on search engines, you’re in deep, deep trouble.

And switching or planning on switching from dependence on Google to dependence on AI probably won’t help you. Why not?

Well, first, none are stable platforms for brand growth right now. No single AI holds more than fifty percent of the market. Second, the rules of the road for each AI platform change almost daily. You know, for instance, Reddit’s citation share in ChatGPT fell from roughly sixty percent to roughly ten percent in just six weeks. So if you were depending on Reddit volume for helping you show up there, that’s just gone. Third, and most importantly, choosing this path means you’re just switching from one gatekeeper to another. You don’t get access to more customers. You’re still letting someone else decide who hears about you and who doesn’t.

AI isn’t the cavalry riding to your rescue. It’s just another gatekeeper seeking its chance to own your customers.

Yes, you want to show up in AI and you want to show up in search. They’re important signals to your customers that you’re a real, honest-to-goodness, trustworthy, reliable business. They also come with huge hurdles and more than a few strings attached.

I also want to be fair to the bloggers and other businesses who’ve built their businesses using these channels. As I talked about last week, these businesses were built by people who followed a highly functional playbook: Create high-quality content. Use search and social shares as low-cost distribution to drive awareness and traffic. Monetize that traffic. And double down on the kinds of content and distribution channels that worked best.

They didn’t do this because they were dumb. They did it because it worked. Right up until it didn’t.

In last week’s episode, I explicitly outlined the platform trap and how smart people fall into it all the time. As I mentioned last week, we’ve seen it when Google updates their algorithm, social media sites collapse reach among your fans and followers, OTAs favor paid placements, and most recently with Google AI Overviews. It’s the same storyline every time. New platforms, generous early and expensive later.

Of course, it’s even worse if you’re caught in this trap. Because you’re not just competing with the platforms. You’re competing with the folks who didn’t get caught. Those 21 blogs that Daniel cited built something sustainable beyond big tech and have an advantage that new entrants — or old competitors rebuilding their business — have to overcome.

They’ve earned citations. They’ve earned their audience. They’ve earned the right to show up in their customers’ inboxes. And they’ve set the bar for what customers expect today.

The core element that ties those 21 survivors together is that they built distinct, memorable, desirable brands. Brand is the one thing that helps you grow beyond Google and the rest of its Big Tech brethren. In the age of AI, brand isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. Remember, your brand is the prompt. It’s something that bypasses the algorithm, and teaches AI assistants and agents which products, services, and experiences their users prefer without even asking. Your brand is the prompt means you’ve beat Google at its own game by building brands customers ask for by name.

You build that kind of brand by focusing on three pillars: Content is still king. All that’s changed is the kinds of content, and where it appears. Customer experience is queen. The relationship you earn with your customers is what makes you worth asking for by name. Data is the crown jewels. Your CRM, your email list, your first-hand knowledge about your customers’ cares, concerns, and interests is what lets you connect directly with customers — and without asking Big Tech for permission.

I wrote that in Digital Reset. And it’s exactly what Stanica’s survivors all demonstrate.

"Firsthand experience that can’t be AI-summarized" is "Content is King," simply stated using different words. The content that survived came from its creators’ own first-hand, lived experiences. Only they could create that content because they’re the ones who did the thing they blog about: they cooked the recipe, they designed the outfit, they traveled to the destination, they ran the business. Only real people can share real experiences.

Similarly, the way survivors shared their lived experiences represents "the customer experience" for a content business. They didn’t just answer a question; they shared their real-world experiences with audiences who wanted to know not just how… but the who who knows how. Anyone, including and especially an AI, can produce a "top 10 list." But a real human being, sharing a real human experience is distinctly different… and distinctly valuable.

"An owned audience" is "Data is the Crown Jewels." Period. The email list, the CRM, and, most importantly, the subscriber base who can’t wait for your latest post. The 21 survivors built direct connections with customers who valued their experience and expertise. And that connection continues to exist even after any algorithm changes.

"A brand name people search for by name" is "your brand is the prompt" and "beat Google at its own game by building a brand customers ask for by name" almost word for word.

By contrast, think about the 79 blogs who lost vast amounts of traffic. I recommended a simple, three-question test in episode 498 that tells you whether you’re in trouble or not. Think about these questions in connection with those bloggers: What percentage of their acquisition ran through channels they didn’t control? Was their direct traffic growing or shrinking? What was their 90-day alternative when Google changed the rules? Seems pretty likely what those folks would answer. And that’s the whole point right there.

One quick aside. In the data that Daniel showed, he found that of the 21 winners, 3 grew by an astonishing amount. So much so, in fact, that they skewed the data for everyone else. When you look at all 100, it looks like traffic "only" fell by 32%. What really happened though is that three grew a lot and the other 97 fell by more than 63%. The point being, don’t let a few winners distract you from the problem areas. I see this all the time. As I talked about in episode 497, one business had seen decent amounts of traffic and revenue year on year. In reality, their organic traffic had fallen roughly 20% and their paid traffic grew by 85%. So, yes, their overall numbers were OK. But their costs were up big time. The "composition effect," much like in Daniel’s study, was hiding the real story: Their profitability was about to get much worse.

Of course, the question, as always, should be, what can you do about this reality? And as I did in episode 500, I’d break it down by where you sit as a company.

If you’re in the first group we talked about, companies in real trouble today, bleeding revenue or profits, your first job is not "fix your SEO." It is to grow your CRM and direct traffic as much as you can. Look for specific opportunities to gain more direct traffic. Look at your analytics and determine the highest cost gatekeeper channel. Does it fail the owned demand test? If so, redirect at least some portion of your budget towards growing your email list or your first-party data about your customers. Also, encourage all site visitors and other contact points with prospects to opt into your email or SMS communications. Give them some incentive, say, a special benefit or a one-time discount in exchange for their contact information.

For companies whose business isn’t shrinking but isn’t growing much either, your approach is actually gonna be pretty similar. The one big difference is that you’re in a position to start thinking about content that no one but you can make. What experience and expertise do you and your team have that sets you apart from everyone else? What can you talk about that your customers want to hear about? Don’t think quantity. Focus heavily on quality. A single photo essay or video or podcast or written piece that encourages engagement, sharing, and most importantly, new subscribers, is more valuable, much more valuable, than ten or twenty or one hundred automated, mediocre, meh content pieces that no one cares about.

If your company is growing and optimizing, if you’re in the third category, keep that Reddit citation collapse story in mind. Even strong citations represent rented demand that might not last for long. Your job is a continued focus on building brand equity, growing branded search, gaining more information and insights about your customers, and accumulating positive ratings, reviews, and, yes, additional citations across an array of channels. Those will put you in front of more customers and likely will turn up in the next AI model updates. The best way to offset the risk that any one channel can hurt you is to appear in as many places as you can where your customers spend their time.

Daniel mentioned in his post that the problem was, quote, "A model that was a single, large, leveraged bet that Google would be the middleman, sending free clicks indefinitely to publishers in exchange for content. However, since 2023, Google has called the bet, and websites that leveraged this model became a liability rather than an asset."

Don’t be that guy.

Your job is to be a trusted resource customers will turn to whenever you’re the right fit for their needs. Your job is to be a brand that customers want to hear from. Your job is to build a brand that customers will ask for by name.

The last few episodes we’ve done here have walked you through precisely how you can do that. Episode 498 showed you the real-world cost when you don’t own your customers. Episode 499 helped you identify whether you really own your customers… or not. Episode 500 gave you the full roadmap of what to do about it. And Episode 501 laid out the historical pattern in detail. Today’s episode, well, that’s all about what it looks like when folks get it wrong. Daniel Stanica gave us 100 real-world examples without even knowing that they underlined the argument I’ve been making for years.

Don’t borrow brand equity. Build your own.

In fact, here’s what I want you to do right now. Pull your traffic composition by source for the last 12 months and look at how much share each provides. Then ask these two questions. One, what percentage comes from direct traffic, email and SMS, and branded search? And the second question is, is that number growing or shrinking? That will tell you whether you’re building a relationship that only you can own.

Again, don’t borrow brand equity. Build your own.

Next week, I’m going to talk with a brilliant marketer, Steve Cummins, all about what this means for the folks running marketing teams right now.

In the meantime, if you know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today, do me a favor. Send them a link to this episode. I hope they will appreciate it, and I know that I would.

You can find the show notes for today’s episode, as well as a full archive of our past episodes, at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go even deeper on building a brand that customers will ask for by name, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, might be just what you’re looking for. You’ll find it on amazon.com and bookshop.org, and of course, you’ll find the link in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate all of your support. I would not do this show without you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and as always, 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 Google Didn’t Kill Blogging. It Killed Borrowed Brand Equity. (Digital Reset Episode 502) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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The brands winning in AI right now didn’t pivot when AI arrived. They didn’t need to. Everything they’d built over years — direct customer relationships, earned reviews, credible content, clear brand signals — prepared them for this moment without even knowing it. The strength of their brand drives their success in AI.

That’s not luck. It’s a 15-year pattern that plays out the same way every time a new platform rises to dominance: they’re generous early and expensive later. It was true for Google, for social media, for OTAs. And it it will be true for AI.

In this Digital Reset Foundations episode, Tim Peter draws on 15-plus years of watching platform shifts to explain why intelligent, experienced marketing leaders fall into the gatekeeper trap again and again. Tim also explains why the businesses that navigate every shift without getting captured all have one thing in common: they never fully gave up the direct relationship with the customer.

New research from Daniel Stanica, tracking 100 once-successful blogs over four years, confirms this thesis. The median site in the study lost 85% of its traffic. That’s not the lower bound. That’s the middle of the distribution. Half did worse. These were sites that built their entire strategy around a gatekeeper… and then paid for it when the gatekeeper changed the rules.

The episode that predicted this outcome is the one you’re about to enjoy.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode* Why the brands showing up in AI recommendations today didn’t pivot to AI — they prepared for it years ago * What City of Hope’s 97% AI query share teaches us about what AI actually rewards * Why "AI inclusion is an inheritance, not an acquisition" and what that means for your budget conversation * The gatekeeper trap: why smart, experienced marketing leaders fall into it every time a new platform emerges * The critical difference between a scam and a trap… and why the trap is more dangerous * Two tests to determine whether your current AI investments are building foundations or just buying shortcuts * The one thing every business that has navigated every platform shift without getting captured has in common

The Two Tests: Foundation or Shortcut?Test 1: Would this investment matter if AI changed tomorrow? Expert-authored content, review velocity programs, first-party data infrastructure, and earned media from credible sources improve your business regardless of which AI model is winning six months from now. If the investment only works because of how a specific platform runs right now, that’s a warning sign your investment might not last.

Test 2: Does this investment compound its value over time, or does it require changes every few months? Shortcuts work. Foundations compound. A review earned today is in the training data for the next round of model updates. Content cited once tends to get cited again. First-party data gets more valuable the more of it you collect. If the value shifts every time the platform updates, it’s a shortcut. If it compounds regardless of platform updates, you’re building a foundation. One of those has a better future.

The 15-Year PatternEvery platform shift follows the same arc:

A new discovery channel emerges with generous, low-cost early access
Results come quickly and businesses double down
The platform reaches gatekeeping power
Tolls rise. Businesses scramble.

It happened with Google search. With organic social reach. With OTA commissions. And it’s happening now with AI. The window where the new gatekeeper hasn’t yet started collecting the highest tolls it can is real… and not unlimited. The businesses using that window to build direct relationships rather than deepen platform dependency are the ones giving themselves options when the window closes.

Key Data Points From This Episode* City of Hope shows up in 97% of AI queries for their category &mash without a “GEO strategy” — all because of decisions made years ago * Daniel Stanica’s research tracked 100 blogs over four years: the median site lost 85% of its organic traffic. Half did worse than that. * 82% of companies remain stuck in the AI value gap despite the pattern being well understood

Resources Mentioned* The Great Blogging Collapse — Daniel Stanica’s Research

Related Episodes* The Complete Roadmap for Owning Your Customer — Part 3 of 3 (Digital Reset Episode 500) * Who Really Owns Your Customer? — Part 2 of 3 (Digital Reset Episode 499) * The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3 (Episode 498) * Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495) * The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) * Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491) * The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488) * 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 TechTim 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.

See Tim Peter in ActionWatch Tim Peter break down the complete roadmap for owning your customer relationships, and see why nearly 14 years and 500 episodes of observing Big Tech platform shifts all lead to the same conclusion.

Free DownloadsWe 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.

Subscribe to Digital Reset * Subscribe on Apple Podcasts * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe on Amazon Music * Watch all episodes on YouTube * Subscribe via RSS Feed

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital ResetRecorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 26:31

Transcript: The AI Winners Didn’t Pivot. They Prepared. — Digital Reset Foundations (Episode 501)Over the last few weeks, I’ve laid out the roadmap for owning your customer in the age of AI.

One thing that I want to make clear that runs through the entire roadmap: AI rewards great brands.

The brands and businesses winning in AI didn’t pivot when AI came along. They didn’t need to. Everything they’ve done throughout their histories prepared them for this moment.

For all the talk of GEO and social media citations and AI agents and on and on and on, what’s really happening is that AI search, AI assistants, agents, and enterprises ultimately want to point their users to the brands that best meet their needs.

Google increasingly is modifying its search algorithms to do the same. So are social sites like Meta, Instagram, and TikTok, and AI spam filters do it in email, too.

I mean, imagine that you’re a consumer. All your AI tools are trying to show you things you might actually want to keep you in their ecosystem and to eliminate everything you don’t want to see.

That’s a problem for brands that aren’t built from the ground up for this world. That’s what the roadmap I laid out in episodes 498, 499, and 500 is all about.

The point of these episodes was to help you as you go forward. The point of this episode is to show you how we got to this moment. Because I’ve been making this argument for a long time. In many ways, it’s one of the core reasons this show exists in the first place.

And in the Foundations episode we’re gonna look at today, I draw on the 15-plus years of experience and evidence that explain why I believe what I do and why the roadmap works.

In this Foundations episode, I laid out why intelligent, experienced marketing leaders fall into the gatekeeper trap again and again: Because it works… right up until it doesn’t.

They’re not dumb. They’re not foolish. They may even be aware of the problem while they’re stepping into the trap. They also need to put heads in beds, butts in seats, feet in stores, products on shelves, eyes on their product, clicks to their carts, and continued usage after the sale.

There’s nothing wrong with doing what you’ve gotta do to make sure your business succeeds day in and day out, month after month. That’s okay.

And when gatekeepers make it so easy, so enticing to simply use the tools they give you, it’s no wonder folks get trapped. Hell, it’s amazing anyone ever gets out.

But we continue to see the effects of the trap time and again.

Rand Fishkin pointed folks to new research from Daniel Stanica that shows the collapse of traffic blog sites have seen over the last four years. Daniel reviewed 100 sites over this period and found that the median site had lost 85% of their traffic. That’s not the lower bound. That’s the median. Half did worse than that.

Daniel’s research reflects exactly what today’s Foundations episode predicted. These sites depended on gatekeepers, and now, today, they’re scrambling to rebuild their businesses.

I’ll have a full review of Daniel’s research and what you can do about it in next week’s show.

In the meantime, though, I hope you’ll take a moment to enjoy today’s Foundations episode that looks at how AI winners didn’t pivot, they prepared.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 501 of Digital Reset. 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 today, 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, but 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 customers’ 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 that are happening on platforms that the AI trusts. It’s not because they’re bad, but because you have never done the work to build review velocity for your business, it’s 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. That’s 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, then 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.

And 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 people look at that and 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 even. They had an opportunity, they had two opportunities, to build direct booking capabilities and direct booking connection with customers before OTAs became kind of non-negotiable. First before September of 2001. Then in the later aughts.

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, well, they found themselves in a tougher spot when the OTAs started raising commission rates and changing the rules of the game.

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 a period and includes a period where taking the shortcut looks like the smart play. In Google’s case, it was things like trading links, 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, "Hey, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 this thing, you would never put your efforts there. You would never put your money there.

So the people who have taken these approaches, the people who have worked with these channels are not fools. They’re not getting themselves scammed.

What they are doing is they’re saying, "Hey, this is producing results for me. I should double down on this. I should triple 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… and usually at a relatively low cost. That’s fantastic.

But 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 that’s dressed up as a strategy?

I would think there’s 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 you may want to consider 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, as you earn more of it from your customers.

If an investment 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 that you need going forward, and for the budget you’ve already spent, you should not be thinking in terms of "We shouldn’t invest in AI." That is not a thing I’m saying here.

You should be saying we should invest in AI the way businesses 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 gonna keep throwing money after money after money every time the algorithm changes.

So when we think about budget categories, are we talking about expert authored content that earns citations? A hundred percent. Are we talking about review velocity programs? A hundred percent. Are we talking about a first-party data infrastructure? A hundred percent. If we’re talking about people selling you, "You’re gonna appear in the AI and you’re gonna appear top every single time…" you might want to take a really close look at that. You might wanna 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. And 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, and through the collapse of reach on social media, on Facebook and places like that, and on 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 that you’ve eventually learned, "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 or 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.

Thanks so much for listening to today’s Foundations episode. We’ll be back with an all-new episode that dives into Daniel Stanica’s research next week.

In the meantime, if you know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today, do me a favor, send them a link to the episode. I know they’d appreciate it, and I sure would.

You can find the show notes for today’s episode, as well as an archive of all our past episodes, at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go even deeper on building a brand that survives and thrives in the age of AI, my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," might be just what you’re looking for. You’ll find it on amazon.com and bookshop.org. Links in the show notes, of course.

Thanks so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate all your support. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and as always, 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?

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Today marks our 500th episode. But all 500 episodes share one single thesis: the demand you own is more valuable than the demand you rent.

That’s what “Gatekeepers gonna gate” is all about. Any platform that send you customers will eventually charge you more for that revenue.

Episode 498 outlined exactly what that costs you. Episode 499 posed the real question you need to ask. This episode gives you the roadmap.

Most businesses fall into one of three categories when it comes to owning their customer relationships:

In trouble and bleeding margin every day
Growing, but too slowly to break free of Big Tech
Achieving strong growth and looking to optimize.

The playbook is different for each. But the fundamental law of digital remains the same for all three: Every platform that sends you customers eventually charges you more for them. That’s not a prediction. That’s what 25-plus years of digital history teach us. And it’s playing out again right now.

In Episode 500 of the Digital Reset Podcast, Tim Peter delivers the complete strategic framework for breaking out of platform capture, a complete roadmap for owning your customer, regardless of where your business is starting from today.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders* The one diagnostic that tells you which of the three categories your business belongs to and where to start * The Category 1 playbook: How to stop the bleeding when gatekeepers are already taking more than their share * Why "know your real cost" means actual dollars out the door, not just ROAS, CPC, or cost per acquisition * The Category 2 playbook: How to build direct relationships and brand authority when you’re growing but too slowly * Why a flat CRM list is actually a shrinking one and what to do about it * The Category 3 playbook: How to optimize for an AI-mediated world when your direct business is already strong * A real-world hospitality example of co-opetition done right: Pay once, almost never twice * The answers to the three questions Tim posed in Episode 498 you can put to work right now.

The Complete Roadmap: Three PlaybooksCategory 1 — Triage: Stop the Bleeding

Run the Gatekeeper Test on every active channel (Episode 495). Deprioritize highest-cost failures first.
Calculate your actual dollar cost (not ROAS or CPC) for your top paid channel. That’s your target to recapture over time.
Identify your single highest-value customer segment. Build a direct path to them, starting with email.
Apply Core and Explore: 80% on what’s working, 20% experimenting with direct channel growth.
Set a 90-day target: Direct traffic and email traffic measurably higher than today.

Category 2 — Build: Grow Direct Relationships

Run the Owned Demand Test on every current marketing investment (Episode 495). Deprioritize anything that fails all three questions.
Search your brand in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. The gaps are your content roadmap for next quarter.
Build branded content that drives engagement. Comments and shares are the signal AI platforms use to validate your authority.
Keep building your list. A CRM that isn’t growing is shrinking.
Shift Core and Explore from 80/20 to 75/25 or 70/30. Invest more in what builds the brand over time.

Category 3 — Optimize: Build What Platforms Can’t Own

Treat AI as a primary channel, not an afterthought. The brands AI recommends are the brands with the greatest authority signals.
Focus on ratings, reviews, and social engagement. Quality matters most, but volume helps too.
Develop branded content that gains traction and velocity in its own right.
Use first-party data to anticipate customer needs before they arise. Feed it into product and service development.
Apply the full coopetition mindset: Pay Big Tech for the first transaction where you need to, and almost never for the second.

The Diagnostic: Which Category Are You?Pull traffic data from your analytics platform and Google Search Console for each of the last 12 months. Then measure whether branded search and direct navigation traffic is growing or shrinking as a share of paid and total traffic and revenue.

Shrinking → Category 1. Start with the Gatekeeper Test.
Holding steady → Category 2. Start with the Owned Demand Test.
Growing → Category 3. Start with AI as a primary channel.

The Three Questions From Episode 498 — Answered1. What percentage of new customer acquisition runs through channels you don’t control? Now you know what to do, no matter what the number is. 2. Is your direct, organic, and email business growing or shrinking as a share of your total? Now you know which path to follow. 3. If your top acquisition channel changed its terms tomorrow, what’s your 90-day alternative? Now you have one.

Related Episodes* Who Really Owns Your Customer? — Part 2 of 3 (Digital Reset Episode 499) * The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3 (Episode 498) * Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495) * Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why (Digital Reset FOUNDATIONS — Episode 496) * Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business (Episode 497) * The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490) * The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) * Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491) * The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast) * SEO vs GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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.

See Tim Peter in ActionWatch Tim Peter break down the complete roadmap for owning your customer relationships, and see why nearly 14 years and 500 episodes of observing Big Tech platform shifts all lead to the same conclusion.

Free DownloadsWe 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.

Subscribe to Digital Reset* Subscribe on Apple Podcasts * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe on Amazon Music * Watch all episodes on YouTube * Subscribe via RSS Feed

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital ResetRecorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 19:04

Transcript: The Complete Roadmap for Owning Your Customer — Part 3 of 3Hi, and welcome to episode 500 of the podcast. Roughly every 10 days for the last 13 years and, oh, nine months or so, I’ve tried to bring you the best insights and information that I could about digital strategy and commerce.

During that time, I’ve refined the focus of the show around a core thesis. And that is the demand you own is more valuable than the demand you rent.

That led to my book, and it led us to change the title of the show from Thinks Out Loud to Digital Reset. And that led to this miniseries, the show within the show that led to today’s episode.

Why are we here today?

Well, in episode 498, I recapped the problem in detail. Gatekeepers closing the gates and driving up your costs to reach your customers. We’re seeing it on the P&L, and it’s increasing every single month and quarter right now.

In episode 499, I outlined the core question: Who owns your customer relationship, you or Big Tech gatekeepers?

Today, I want to lay out the roadmap you can use to drive more direct revenue and deeper customer relationships that hopefully will sustain you for the next 14 years and, oh, I don’t know, 500 more episodes.

You know, in my experience, companies usually fall into one of three categories as they come to this question. I’m going to talk about each of these in more detail after the break. I also want you to think about which category you belong to before we begin.

The first category are people who are, you know, we’re in big trouble right now, today. They’re looking to identify the problem, to triage the problem. These conversations happen all the time. People usually don’t call a doctor when they’re healthy, and they don’t ask consultants for help when business is booming. So as you might imagine, I talk with these folks every day.

The second are folks who are growing just slowly or not as much as they might like. They’re looking to build, to drive more revenue. Their business is okay, you know, not terrible, but not great. Again, these are also people I talk with regularly and usually for similar reasons. They recognize they’ve got a problem, and they’re looking for a way out.

The final category includes companies that are seeing strong growth. They’re looking to optimize, to reach new heights. And I’m happy to say I talk with these folks very often, too. Maybe not as much as the first two, but you’d be surprised how many of these people reach out to me. They tend to recognize two basic points. The first is that no matter how good things are, they might have blind spots they don’t want to surprise them later. And the second is that you can always use help to do better. I am always happy to have those conversations and freely acknowledge that I learn as much as I share during those conversations. It’s a win all the way around.

Regardless of which category you fall into, this episode is for you.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 500 of Digital Reset. Today, we’re uncovering the complete roadmap for owning your customer. Let’s dive in.

I’ve already listed the three categories companies tend to fall into around owning their customer. Before we get into how you address each situation, here’s how to know which one your business fits into.

Run the simple diagnostic test I shared in our last episode. Pull traffic data from your analytics platform and Google Search Console for each of the last 12 months. Then measure whether branded search and direct navigation traffic is growing or shrinking as a share of paid and total traffic and revenue. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.

Reviewing that small data set will tell you if gatekeepers are making you pay for a greater share of your customers’ attention, if you’re holding steady, or if you’re gaining a greater share of your customers’ attention over time.

Let’s start with the folks in the first category, the people who are already likely losing share to paid channels. There is a relatively simple playbook to follow. And in order, start by running the Gatekeeper Test I outlined in episode 495 for every active channel that drives traffic and revenue to your business. First, ask, "Are we using this platform to build our business or are we building our business inside this platform?" Then ask, "Who owns the data from our interaction with the customer?"

Any channel that fails both questions must become a lower priority for your business. There’s a saying I like, "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." Your goal is to get out of the hole. Depending on the share of revenue your business gets from these channels, it might be a little easier or a little harder to get out of that hole, but your goal over time is to deprioritize these channels from highest cost to lowest and shift the budget towards channels you have more control over, like your website, your CRM.

I am not suggesting that you quit these channels cold turkey. Rule number one always is "stay in business." During the pandemic, lots of companies I worked with had to hedge "best practices" a bit to ensure they kept the lights on. That is okay.

At the same time, if you’re already in a hole, you want to move away from the most expensive of these channels that fail both tests as soon as possible. Over time, its share of your business, your traffic, and revenue should fall as the share of business from direct channels grows. The point isn’t that its actual traffic and revenue decline. It’s that its importance does. That’s what moving beyond Big Tech looks like. It looks like you become less dependent on gatekeeper channels over time… because you do.

Here’s how you can do that. First, figure out the actual cost of your top paid channel. I don’t mean your return on ad spend or your cost per click or your cost per acquisition. I mean the actual honest dollars and cents amount you pay every month, quarter, and year because that’s money coming straight out of your pocket and going straight into the gatekeeper’s pocket every single day. That’s your target number to save over time.

Then make a note about your single highest value customer segment. Job one is to build a direct path to those customers, and usually the simplest way to do that is through email marketing. If you don’t have their email addresses, start asking for them today. Add an email form on your website. Get your sales and customer service teams to start asking for permission to email them. Create incentives around getting people to sign up to hear from you. That’s how you grow your list over time.

You can also apply our "Core and Explore" methodology. Focus eighty percent-ish of your efforts on what’s working most effectively for your business. The money those channels throw off should help you fund efforts to drive more direct business. And use the remaining twenty percent of your budget and efforts experimenting with ways to grow your direct business, your CRM, and your email list. Ultimately, that is your job right now. That is the whole job right now.

Set a ninety-day target for your efforts. At the end of ninety days, your direct traffic and email traffic should be measurably higher than they are today. That’s your goal. If you see those results, double down on them. And if not, and assuming seasonality isn’t the cause, go back to square one, pick another expensive channel, and try again. I know you can get there. We help companies do this every day. Today, it’s time for you to start.

Category two consists of those folks whose direct business isn’t growing. You’re sitting still. The playbook actually isn’t that much different from group one. It does require a slightly different focus, though.

In this case, you want to start with the Owned Demand Test that I outlined in episode 495. Look at every current marketing investment you’re making and ask three questions: One, does it create a direct relationship with your customer? Two, does it make your brand easier to ask for by name? And three, does it work after you turn off the investment? Any channel that fails all three is one that you need to deprioritize. Just as with category one, that doesn’t mean quit them cold turkey. Not at all. It just means that the channel’s share of your business should decline over time. In ninety days, growth in direct and email traffic and revenue should make the problem channel’s volume smaller as a share of your total. That’s always what you’re trying to do.

Second, search for your business in ChatGPT, in Gemini, in Claude, and Perplexity. What does the AI know about your business? What does it get wrong? And what’s missing? That’s your content roadmap for the next quarter. And your content plan must include not only creation but content distribution. Work on developing branded content that drives engagement on social media. You want customers to like, comment, and share. Use channels where your customers are active, like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok if you’re in B2C, and LinkedIn and YouTube if you’re in B2B. Those engagements, particularly the comments and shares, are a clear signal that validates your content to AI platforms and shows that you’re a brand worth recommending.

Third, continue building your list. The truth of any CRM is that if it’s not growing, it’s shrinking. Folks opt out, they move on, they no longer need your products and services. That’s okay. You don’t want to bother people who aren’t in the market any longer. You want instead to continually build a healthy list of people who want to hear from you, who look forward to hearing from you, and ultimately, who will buy from you.

Next and last, use your content to learn more about your customers and encourage them to share more about themselves with you. Then use what you learn about your customers in turn to create ever more personalized content and improve your segmentation in email or other CRM-delivered content.

You can also start shifting your "Core and Explore" from eighty/twenty to seventy-five/twenty-five or even seventy/thirty. Your goal is to invest more in activities that build your brand over time. You’re not just looking to be seen for a single transaction. You want to become a brand that customers will ask, and teach their AI assistants and agents to ask, for by name.

As for the folks in category three, well, congratulations. You’ve built a brand that’s working and working well. Your job now is to build on your successes and create an ever more sustainable brand.

Your primary goal is to focus on continuing your brand’s success in an AI-mediated world. AI can’t simply be an afterthought. It’s now a primary channel. The brands that AI tools recommend are the brands with the greatest authority signals. Your good work there already provides you a leg up on your competition. Keep your focus on increased quality and volume of your ratings, reviews, and social media engagement, and develop or expand your work with branded content that will gain traction and velocity in its own right.

As with category two, use the data that you get from this content to gain even deeper insights into what matters to your customers. Increasingly, you’re looking to anticipate their needs before they even know those needs exist. And feed this data into your product and service development process, too. That’ll improve the experience in every interaction customers have with your brand and help you build a stronger brand overall.

Finally, you should be interacting with Big Tech in a true coopetition mindset at this point. Big Tech and specific partners should exist as a tool for reaching customers who you can’t reach more cost-effectively on your own. The goal is that you might pay Big Tech for the first connection, but almost never for the second.

I can give you a real-world example of what that looks like. There’s a hospitality client of mine that gets a very small amount of business from Latin America. They don’t have the resources or, frankly, receive the volume that makes developing Spanish language websites, content, or email campaigns worthwhile. Just doesn’t. They’re happy to let Booking.com, Expedia, and Google metasearch deliver those guests the first time. They do, however, follow their guests’ home country privacy practices and ensure enhanced consent for opt-ins. They also work to learn more about their guests’ individual needs and address those specifically when those guests are on property. As a result, they’ve built some solid relationships with this segment and see some decent brand direct repeat business from these individuals. The benefit compounds to them over time. Is it a perfect solution? No, of course not. Nothing is. Is it more cost-effective and engaged with their brand long term? You bet.

You’ll note that across all three categories of businesses that I’ve just talked about, one point holds true, one core underlying point holds true. Every platform that sends you customers eventually charges more for them. That’s the essence of the phrase, "Gatekeepers gonna gate." It’s not a prediction, it’s a fundamental law of the digital economy. It’s been true for more than 25 years, and I’m confident it will remain true for years to come.

The only sustainable response you have in that world is to make any platform introduction a one-time cost, not a recurring one. Your job is to own the second interaction, own the third, own the data, own the relationship. That’s what the last 500 episodes of this podcast have been about. That’s what the book is about, and that’s what this roadmap is designed to help you do for your business.

As I wrap up this episode, I want to look at the three questions from a couple of weeks ago one more time:

What percentage of new customer acquisition runs through channels you don’t control? Now you know what to do no matter what the number is.
Is your direct organic and email business growing or shrinking as a share of your total? Now you know which path to follow.
And if your top customer acquisition channel changed its terms tomorrow, what’s your 90-day alternative? Now you have one.

The goal has never been to make Big Tech go away. The goal is to never need them twice. That’s thinking beyond Big Tech.

Thank you so much for listening today and for all your support over the last 13 plus years and 500 episodes. It means more to me than I can ever say.

If this episode, if this show, gives you a clearer picture of the digital economy and how you can succeed in it, please do me a favor, send it to a colleague you think it will help. It would mean so very much to me.

You can find the show notes for this episode, including a link to the book, at timpeter.com/podcasts.

Thank you again for listening. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and take care everybody. 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 Complete Roadmap for Owning Your Customer — Part 3 of 3 (Digital Reset Episode 500) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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If asked, “Who really owns your customer?” most marketing leaders would answer the instantly: "We do." But ownership isn’t a feeling. It’s a real, powerful, measurable outcome. For most businesses right now, the honest answer is much more complicated than they’d like to admit.

In Part 2 of this three-episode series, host Tim Peter shifts from diagnosing the cost of platform dependence to the single biggest question that reframes the entire discussion: who actually owns the relationship with your customer? Do you? Or does the platform that sent those customers to you? Your answer to this question determines whether you’re building demand for your business… or renting it. And one of those has a much, much brighter future.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders* Why "get off Big Tech" is the wrong answer and what co-opetition actually means in practice * The critical distinction between paying for an introduction once versus paying for the same customer again and again * What platform capture really looks like… what it costs (30–40% of every transaction, every time) * The five ownership signals that tell you whether you’re building direct relationships or just renting access * Why branded search growth is the output signal that matters most, especially in an AI-mediated world * How Big Tech’s own earnings calls give you free competitive intelligence about your customers’ digital lives * Three actions you can take today to honestly assess your ownership position

The Five Ownership SignalsInput signals — what you’re building:

CRM and email list growth rate
First-party data depth

Output signals — whether it’s working:
3. Direct traffic as a share of total traffic
4. Branded search growth
5. Direct traffic and branded search revenue

Data Points Outlined in This Episode* Platform capture costs: Stephanie (manufacturing) paid 30–40% of every transaction. David (hospitality) paid 20–25%. Both paid every single time. * Every email address collected represents $5–$15 in future revenue on the low end; up to $1,000 or more on the high end. * For hotel clients specifically: email addresses are worth at least $8–$30 each in future revenue. * Brands showing up in AI recommendations today are almost universally the brands with the strongest branded search signals.

Three Actions You Can Take Today1. Pull your direct traffic share for the last 12 months. Is it growing or shrinking? 2. Check your CRM growth rate for the last two to three quarters. Is it accelerating or flattening? 3. Search for your brand name in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. What do the AI tools know about you — and where are the gaps?

Related Episodes* The Complete Roadmap for Owning Your Customer – Part 3 of 3 (Epsisode 500) * The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3 (Episode 498) * Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business (Episode 497) * Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495) * Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491) * The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490) * The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) * The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast) * 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)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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.

See Tim Peter in ActionWatch Tim Peter in conversation on digital strategy, customer acquisition, and what it actually means to build a business beyond Big Tech.

Free DownloadsWe 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 on Apple Podcasts * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe on Amazon Music * Watch all episodes on YouTube * Subscribe via RSS Feed

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital ResetRecorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 22:05

TranscriptIn our last episode, I went deep on what it costs when you don’t own your customer relationship using real dollars, real margins, and real CFO meetings. This week, I want to build on that point with a question that reframes the entire discussion, and that is: who owns the relationship with your customer, you or the platform?

Most marketing leaders would answer that instinctively and without any real hesitation: "We do!" I want to spend the next fifteen to twenty minutes showing you why that answer is almost always more complicated than it sounds and more importantly, what you can do about it.

This is part two of a three-part series. Episode 500 next week is where I’ll draw the complete roadmap. But to get there, you need to answer this question first.

I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 499 of the Digital Reset Podcast. Let’s dive in.

Before I answer the question, I want to be clear about something. The argument that I’m making, the argument I’ve made for years in person, in meetings, and in my book is not "Get off Big Tech." That’s not realistic, and sometimes, frankly, it’s not even desirable.

You’ll note the subtitle of my book is "Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech." Big Tech is part of the solution. Marketing beyond Big Tech acknowledges what you’ll do in addition to how you put Big Tech to work.

Chapter 9 of the book talked about it in detail, and it’s something called "co-opetition." It’s where you both compete and cooperate with all kinds of businesses. That’s the real relationship every business has with Big Tech right now and probably always will.

Paying for the first transaction, for an introduction to a customer is fine. Even paying Big Tech is fine. They have massive audiences and significant data on how to reach the right customer in the right moment. Paying for that introduction the first time you talk to a customer often is the most cost-effective decision available to you.

I’m going to go a step further, a step beyond, if you will. If you cannot cost-effectively reach a customer the first time on your own, it’s completely rational, and it’s a really good idea to pay Google or Meta or an AI platform to make that introduction for you. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend and all that. That’s not dependence. That’s smart, clever use of a distribution network.

I’ve got clients who’ve successfully leveraged Big Tech to test new ideas or new markets. They do it all the time. That’s what Big Tech is for.

The mistake isn’t using them the first time. The mistake is using them to reach that same customer on their second visit, their next purchase, and every subsequent interaction you have with them.

Paying once is smart. The mistake is in the repeat, is in going back for more and paying again and again. That’s not going beyond Big Tech. That’s capture. That’s platform capture.

In my book, I tell the stories about Stephanie and David, who are leaders of two different businesses, one in manufacturing, one in hospitality, and the fact that it costs Stephanie roughly 30 to 40% and David between 20 and 25% for every single transaction, every single sale, and pretty much every single time.

They were spending money, big money for those sales. But what they hadn’t done was build direct relationships with their customers. They paid those fees again and again and again only to keep the customer in the hands of Big Tech gatekeepers.

In David’s case, the hotel was profitable, but only just. In Stephanie’s case, the business was on the verge of failure. I mean, this was serious, serious business. And in both cases, they were spending money for every transaction, not for driving long-term connections with their customers.

Just imagine giving away even 20% of every sale every time. What do you think your business would look like in 12 months?

Their reality, what they were living with, is what Big Tech platform capture actually looks like. That’s the risk. Not that you use these platforms, but that you never build an alternative that works for your customers and works for your business today and long term.

The funny thing is Big Tech itself gives us a possible roadmap for how to break free, how to go beyond that platform capture. Because Big Tech doesn’t just connect you with your customers. There’s at least one other thing Big Tech gives you that most businesses ignore.

They define what your customers’ digital lives look like. The way Google surfaces answers and has focused on mobile for years. The way ChatGPT and Claude handle conversations. The way Amazon structures discovery and continually improves speed for delivery. The way Expedia puts its emphasis on available inventory, photos, and reviews.

Those are all signals about your customers telling you how they want to find and buy the things that matter most in their lives. That’s a huge opportunity for you to learn from and take advantage of.

Similarly, there’s a reason I consistently recap Big Tech’s earnings calls. I’m gonna do that again in just a few weeks. They’re required to tell investors the truth about the state of their businesses and what they’re doing to drive customer behaviors long term, as well as what they’re doing to adapt to changing behaviors they had nothing to do with.

The earnings calls episodes have nothing to do with finances, really. They’re a real look at the reality of our customers’ digital lives, of their digital experiences, and how those are evolving quarter after quarter, straight from the mouths of the people most actively working to shape that reality. That seems like something we all might wanna pay attention to, no?

And that’s before we talk about the many blog posts and white papers and interviews and insights they all publish in the hopes of selling their vision of the future to investors, to regulators, and to customers alike.

The statements that Big Tech makes, the data that they share, the stories that they tell, the changes they make to their products and services all provide an opportunity for you to learn what your customers want and a roadmap for how to meet your customers where they are. Study what Big Tech does, then apply it in ways that are specific to your business and to your customers’ needs. They’re giving you competitive intelligence for free. Use it.

If you’re working with Big Tech, if you’re in coopetition with them, the question I might ask is: how do you know whether you’ve been building direct relationships with customers or whether the platforms own those relationships and you’re simply renting access? I think this is one of the most crucial questions you can ask for your business.

There are five ownership signals I find valuable when you’re working to figure this out. Two of them tell you what you’re building today. The other three tell you whether what you’re building is working.

So let’s start with the what you’re building signals. They are, one, CRM and email list growth rate. You know, it’s important to understand the size of your email list, of your CRM list. Understanding the rate at which it’s growing, though, is essential.

A growing list means customers are actively choosing a direct relationship with you, whether it’s the first time they’ve talked to you or after they’ve come through Big Tech the first interaction. It doesn’t matter where they found you. It matters that they choose to continue to talk with you going forward.

Every customer you add to your own list is a customer you can reach again in the future without paying the platforms, without paying Big Tech for that access. You’re lowering, or if you wanna sound fancy, amortizing the cost of the first interaction across every interaction that follows, and that’s what driving down your cost of customer acquisition over time really looks like.

We’ve done research with a wide array of clients and have found that every email address you collect represents, on the low end, between maybe five and fifteen dollars of revenue, in future revenue, and on the high end, as much as a thousand dollars or more in future revenue.

Yes, I know, two orders of magnitude is a pretty wide variation. That’s largely because of significant differences between, say, a mid-scale hotel charging two hundred and fifty dollars a night and a SaaS company that charges tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

But let’s just look at hotel clients for a second. We typically see that email addresses are worth roughly between eight and thirty dollars each. Now, that’s still pretty wide variation. Rate plays a huge role in that, but it gives you a sense of the actual economic value of growing the list over time.

The second attribute you care about, the second signal you care about, is first-party data depth. In addition to email addresses, do you know enough about your customers using data they gave you directly to reach them, to serve them, and to make decisions about them without some platform intermediary’s help? If the answer is no, then yeah, the platform pretty much owns the relationship.

The types of data we’re talking about could include things like birthdays or anniversary dates if we’re talking about a B2C company, or things like purchase timing and budget for B2B companies. First-party data isn’t just about ensuring privacy compliance. Obviously, that’s super important. But first-party data is a core strategic asset for your business longer term. You’ve heard me say data is the crown jewels. It powers your company’s future growth. The businesses that have first-party data are having fundamentally different conversations with their customers and with their C-suite than the ones that don’t.

Email and CRM growth rate and first-party data depth are input signals that are super important to see where you’re going in the future. There are also three output signals you can pay attention to.

The first is direct traffic as a share of total traffic. Direct traffic, and especially direct traffic growth, means your brand is strong enough that customers seek you out without going through a platform intermediary first. They just show up on your website or open your app.

If your direct traffic is shrinking, even, and especially when your total traffic is growing, that means you’re becoming more dependent on Big Tech, not less. You’re falling into the shortcut trap that gatekeepers like to set.

The second thing you want to look at is branded search growth. When customers search for you by name, not by category, not by product type, but by your actual brand name or brand names, product names, for instance, that’s a huge signal that you’ve built something the platform can’t own.

Branded search growth is often the output signal I look for the most. It tells you that customers have specifically decided you’re worth looking for. It’s a direct relationship, even when Google or DuckDuckGo or ChatGPT technically is in the middle of it.

And here’s why it still matters in an AI-mediated world, because it’s still incredibly valuable. The brands showing up in AI recommendations today are almost universally the brands with the strongest branded search signals. The AIs have learned and continue to learn to recommend from the same data Google’s been collecting for years.

Yes, the search experience has moved from one of card catalogs to concierges, but the concierge is still relying largely on the same underlying information that the card catalogs have done for years. I genuinely don’t expect that to change all that soon.

The third signal you want to think about is direct traffic and branded search revenue. Now, this may sound like it’s most applicable to B2C or DTC brands, and there’s some truth to that, but there is a B2B opportunity here as well, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

Traffic share is absolutely a big deal. It’s so important. Revenue from that traffic is a much, much bigger deal. A business that has increasing direct traffic that then doesn’t convert to direct revenue doesn’t have a platform dependence problem. They have a brand trust problem. Knowing the difference matters because you want to make sure you’re clear about which one of those problems you’re working to solve.

Now, I said this might sound like it’s an opportunity mostly for B2C companies, but even in B2B, we’ve got some great frameworks that can help you assign true economic value to your direct and branded search traffic. So drop me a line if you want to talk about that. I’m happy to help there.

There is one uncomfortable truth we have to talk about as we go down this path. Each of these five signals does take a little bit of time to build. They take a little bit of investment and a little bit of effort to build. That is a fact.

Meanwhile, Big Tech and the people who want to be Big Tech can send you customers and revenue right now. That’s what makes the shortcut trap that gatekeepers use so attractive, so effective… and so dangerous.

In episodes 489 and 490, and I’ll link to both in the show notes, I walked through each gatekeeper shortcut trap in detail. Here’s the short version. Your chosen platform looks generous early. They give you stuff that works right now. That makes the shortcut look smart, and by the time they start ratcheting up the tolls, you’ve built too much of your strategy around something you don’t control.

Those five signals I just described are how you measure whether you’re building your way out of that cycle or digging yourself deeper into a hole.

I wanna be fair here, I really do. Using the platform isn’t the problem. Every business I’ve worked with, every business I work with, that has navigated platform shifts successfully has used Big Tech platforms throughout that. Some still do to reach customers they can’t reach more effectively on their own. That is okay.

The difference is that they also built direct relationships in parallel every single time. They paid for the introduction and then did the work to make sure they never had to pay for that same customer twice, or worse, more than twice.

So the question remains, who owns the relationship with your customer? You or a Big Tech platform?

If you’ve looked at those five signals honestly, you may find yourself having a more complicated answer than you did, you know, 15 to 20 minutes ago. And that’s the whole point right there.

Here’s what you can do about this today.

First, pull your direct traffic share for the last 12 months. Is it growing or is it shrinking?

Two, check your CRM growth rate for the last two to three quarters. Is it speeding up? Is it accelerating or is it flattening?

And three, search for your brand name in ChatGPT, in Gemini, in Claude, in Perplexity. What do the AI tools know about you and where are the gaps?

What you learn from those three actions will tell you so much more about your actual ownership position than any analytics dashboard you might have.

Next week is going to be this show’s 500th episode. I want to be very clear, though, I am not planning to use that as a celebration. I’m planning to use it as a document of where we need to go from here. Everything that I can think of, everything I’ve watched work across 500 episodes and 15 plus years of platform shifts is going into one episode. It’s the complete map. It’s part three of three, and I genuinely hope I’ll see you there. I hope you stick with us for it.

In the meantime, if this episode gave you a clearer picture of the world we’re living in right now and how you can start thinking about your path forward, do me a favor. Share it with a colleague who’s currently working to figure this out. It might save them and your business from heading in the wrong direction.

You can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on making your brand the answer that AI reaches for every single time, my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," is a roadmap that you can use today. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening. I genuinely appreciate you tuning in week after week after week. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you next week.

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 Who Really Owns Your Customer? — Part 2 of 3 (Digital Reset Episode 499) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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The platforms sending you customers today are systematically making themselves indispensable… and charging you more for that privilege every quarter. Organic channels are down 20–30% for many companies, across a wide array of industries. For many companies, paid channels are up 40–85%… or more. The businesses absorbing this shift aren’t “failing companies” making “bad decisions.” They’re led by competent marketing teams following a playbook that used to work, slowly trading margin for traffic while their revenue numbers give them no reason to look closer.

Today’s episode is Part 1 of a 3-episode series on what it actually costs when you don’t own your customer and what you can do about it.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders

In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

Why even some businesses doing everything "right" are quietly bleeding their marketing margins dry
A real-world client case where organic flipped from 2:1 organic to 2:1 paid in a single year… and nobody noticed until it was almost too late
The gatekeeper trap: How platforms hook you, shift the rules, and then leave you scrambling
Why Google, Meta, and Amazon can’t reverse course. Hint: Their investors won’t let them
The fundamental law of the digital economy: every platform that sends you customers eventually charges you more for them
Three diagnostic questions to assess your own exposure right now

The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3 (Episode 498) — Headlines and Show NotesShow Notes and LinksRelated Episodes

The Complete Roadmap for Owning Your Customer – Part 3 of 3 (Epsisode 500)
Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business (Episode 497)
Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why (Digital Reset FOUNDATIONS — Episode 496)
Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495)
The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490)
The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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.

See Tim Peter in ActionWatch Tim Peter in conversation on digital strategy, customer acquisition, and what it actually means to build a business beyond Big Tech.

Free DownloadsWe 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 on Apple Podcasts * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe on Amazon Music * Watch all episodes on YouTube * Subscribe via RSS Feed

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital ResetRecorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 18:16

Transcript: The Real Cost When You Don’t Own Your Customer — Part 1 of 3Organic channels are flat to minus thirty percent year over year. Paid channels are up forty percent or more, often a lot more. I talked with a business the other day that saw organic traffic plummet by over forty percent, and even more importantly, their revenue fall by more than thirty percent.

Even some businesses I know who are having great years, we’re seeing the same story hold true. One client of mine is having a massive revenue growth this year. They’re up over twenty-five percent year on year. They’re just paying for more of that revenue than ever before.

Big Tech gatekeepers are closing the gates.

As I talked about here on the show a couple of weeks ago, Google recently reported its most profitable quarter ever. Meta reported revenue growth of thirty-three percent. Amazon’s advertising services group grew twenty-two percent year on year, and over the last twelve months, it’s generated revenue of over seventy billion dollars. Almost all of these Big Tech gatekeepers’ growth was driven from companies like you.

Hell, Meta even acknowledged that their price per ad grew twelve percent in their most recent earnings call. None of these companies are admitting that they’re charging more on earnings calls. They’re bragging about it.

In many cases, not only are companies I talk with paying more to folks that they’ve worked with for years, they’re often paying for traffic and conversions that they never had to pay for before. Look at the continuing growth of metasearch for hotels. That has eaten into organic search in a big, big way. Similarly, the increasing budgets for paid social and creator partnerships have largely taken the place of organic social media for many businesses in a whole host of industries. These are entirely new line items in the budget that eat into your profitability.

The individual numbers change by business, by industry, by month, by quarter, but the overall pattern is the same. More traffic arriving later in the purchase journey and more from paid channels, no matter where the customer starts.

This is not just a warning sign. It’s so much more serious than that. One individual who I’m keeping anonymous for obvious reasons and with their permission, put it in stark terms. He said, "We can’t afford to go on like this." This isn’t a question of traffic or conversions or revenue. For many businesses, it’s a question of survival.

This is episode 498 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Today, we’re talking about what it actually costs when you don’t own your customer. Let’s dive in.

I was sitting in a monthly review with a relatively new client recently. On the surface, their numbers were fine. Not spectacular, but not terrible. Their revenue was slightly down year on year, just under 2%, but they’re in a tough segment, so it was, you know, "expected." I’m definitely putting some quotes around that word, but I mean, we’ve all been there, right? We know sometimes we’re gonna have a tough year.

Their total traffic was also down slightly more than 2%, and their conversion rate actually grew marginally. Direct navigation to their website was also up about 2%, and so was branded search. Overall, they thought that everything was very much in line with their expectations and as a result, thought everything was, you know, okay. They were prepared for this reality. It wasn’t a huge shock to them.

The truth is that their expected tough comparables year on year hid a much, much darker story. I mean, they were doing the right things. They were getting what they’d wanted. They were getting what they’d "expected." And under the hood, they are slowly bleeding their business dry.

Organic channels for this business, including search and social, were off by about 20%. Paid channels were up almost 85%. They were trading "free" traffic for paid traffic. The share of traffic literally flipped from two to one in favor of organic to two to one in favor of paid in a year. And because their revenue was holding steady, the marketing team hadn’t noticed it.

While I can’t share actual revenues or profits, safe to say that it’s a material difference in terms of their marketing’s profitability. The only "good news" here, and it’s not much of that, is that the CFO hadn’t really picked up on it yet either. We had a conversation the other day, the CFO and I, and the longer-term trend was news to her too. The mid-year review doesn’t sound like it’s gonna be much fun for anyone.

The client is far from alone. I’m seeing this everywhere. The pattern keeps turning up across almost every business I’m talking with these days. Some are a bit worse off, some are doing somewhat better. But when you look at the longer-term numbers, the general trend is the same.

And most of these businesses aren’t doing anything wrong specifically. In fact, they’re following a playbook that for a long time was fairly popular: They worked with platforms that offer reach that looks great early on. They optimized for the reach and conversions that those platforms offer. And because it works, in vernacular I’ve used myself many times, they were fishing where the fishing’s good. Their owned alternatives weren’t as urgent because everything "was performing," and I’m very much putting air quotes around that. And then fourth, the various platforms, algorithms, and fees shifted, mostly gradually, in a couple of cases suddenly, and now the business has to scramble.

This is a pattern I have seen again and again and again. This was the whole point of episodes 489 and 490 in early April. At its core, it’s the fundamental problem my book was written to address.

If you listened to last week’s episode, it outlined what AI search is doing to organic traffic right now and how it’s exactly the same pattern playing out in yet another part of the ecosystem.

The toll that gatekeepers charge isn’t a future risk. It’s happening right now.

The reality is that Google’s changes to the way they present search results, and Meta’s changes to the way they display your content on Facebook and Instagram, and LinkedIn’s changes to the way they display your content in your customers’ feeds, and on and on and on make it increasingly difficult for your brand and business to be seen without paying for that visibility.

Think about it from the perspective of the client I talked about a few moments ago. If their organic channels were even flat this year as opposed to down 20%, they’d actually have grown revenue year on year despite the fact that they’re facing a tough market.

It’s not going to get much better anytime soon either, not for them and probably not for you.

Again, if you listened to last week’s episode, Google proudly announced an array of changes like intelligent AI agents and a "Universal Cart" designed to engage customers and keep them inside Google’s ecosystem… and off your site. ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude have already delivered or are working to deliver comparable features. Social media has acted similarly for years, downplaying the reach of content with links and promoting content that keeps users engaged within their platforms. How many times have you been on LinkedIn and seen a post that included the words, "Link in the comments"? That’s just one more symptom of the reality we’re living with.

You want to bet that any of these guys are going to reverse course on this? I sure wouldn’t. They can’t. Their quarterly numbers, the ones that I cited before the break, are how they keep their investors happy. If Sundar Pichai or Mark Zuckerberg or Andy Jassy or any other Big Tech CEO, any other gatekeeper, regardless of their size, suddenly announced they weren’t going to monetize their traffic as aggressively any longer, or that they were looking for ways to drive more organic traffic and reduce paid opportunities, they might be fired even before the earnings call was over. You’d probably hear something like, "Uh, yeah, we’re experiencing technical difficulties," while they were escorting the now former CEO from the building… or shoving them out a window.

You’ve heard me say gatekeepers gonna gate many times, and given the context of what we’re talking about, let me explain it in a single short sentence: Every platform that sends you customers eventually charges you more for those customers. That’s it. That’s what gatekeepers gonna gate means in a nutshell. It’s shorthand for a reality that you live with today and will continue to live with for a long time to come, probably forever if we’re thinking about this critically. I didn’t coin that phrase as a throwaway line. Instead, it’s designed to describe a fundamental law of the digital economy.

That’s why the client I described earlier didn’t really make a mistake. It’s why they and any business that uses search or social media or other digital channels to find new business, you know, essentially all of them, isn’t wrong to partner with these folks either. It’s also why businesses aren’t stupid or wrong when they suddenly find themselves caught in one of the gatekeepers’ traps. You work with companies that provide value. That’s a good idea. And you continue working with them until they don’t provide value. That’s also a good idea.

Sometimes, though, the line between "provides value" and "doesn’t provide value" disappears, like the famous expression says, "slowly… then all at once." That’s what we’re seeing right now with organic versus paid channels.

I said on this podcast that organic search was still a key driver for many businesses as recently as six months ago. In some businesses, it’s still true. While we were certainly seeing some shifts towards ChatGPT and other AI platforms, Google still delivered — and may still deliver — the lion’s share of traffic, mostly via organic search for most businesses. It’s only in the last couple of months that it started to shift dramatically for many businesses. And of course, that shift is going to accelerate over time. Many businesses are seeing this problem today. Others won’t see it for a while yet. That’s okay. That’s super normal.

By the way, while I’m on this topic, I slightly misspoke last week, during the episode while I was talking about this very topic. I’d said at the time that, and this is a quote, "Within a couple of months, search will no longer send you large volumes of traffic every day. It might not send you traffic at all." My point wasn’t that Google will stop sending you large volumes of traffic within a couple of months. My point was that their new features launching later "this summer," that is, "in a couple of months," will be the reason Google stops sending you large volumes of traffic whenever or if that reality happens. I think it’s far more likely that Google shifts from large volumes of organic traffic to large volumes of paid traffic versus traffic or no traffic. For starters, a huge share of their revenue and profits come from folks clicking their ads. They’re not gonna give up that traffic until they have a proven way to offset the revenue they’d give up from all of the paid clicks that they get today.

Regardless, we need to acknowledge the world we’re living in. We need to understand that the share of traffic you’re getting and likely to get from free sources is declining. And once we’ve acknowledged those facts, we need to plan for what we’re going to do about it.

As we start to wrap up today’s episode, I’ve got three questions for you.

The first is what percentage of your new customer acquisition traffic and revenue runs through channels you don’t control?
The second, is direct and organic traffic growing or shrinking as a share of your total traffic over the last 12 months?
And the third is, if your top acquisition channel changed its terms tomorrow, what’s your alternative that you’re gonna have in place within the next 90 days?

If any of those questions produced an uncomfortable answer for you, next week we’re going to look at the single question that will help you reframe how you think about all three of those questions. And the week after that, episode 500 of this podcast, I’m going to give you the most complete map, the most useful path that I can draw for what you can actually do about it. Today is part one of three. I hope you’ll stay with me because I think this is the single biggest set of questions we need to be thinking about right now.

Again, to recap those:

What percentage of your new customer acquisition traffic and revenue runs through channels you don’t control?
Is direct and organic traffic growing or shrinking as a share of your total traffic over the last 12 months?
If your top acquisition channel changed its terms tomorrow or raised its fees tomorrow, what’s your 90-day alternative?

I hope you’ll stick with me as we go through the next couple of episodes and work this out.

In the meantime, if this episode gave you a clearer picture of the world we’re living in right now and how you can start thinking about your path forward, do me a favor. Send it to a colleague who’s currently struggling to figure this out for you and your business. It might save them and you from heading down the wrong direction.

You can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on making your brand the answer that AI reaches for every time, my book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," is the roadmap you’re looking for. You’ll find the 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

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For years, tech titans have chased the holy grail of "the everything app." It turns out we already had one: Google Search. But a massive shift is underway. Google is moving from a model that directs users to your website to one that answers queries, manages tasks, and completes purchases entirely within its own ecosystem… and entirely within the Search box itself.

Google’s I/O 2026 conference revealed a complete reimagining of the search experience. With the introduction of AI-powered Search agents, a multimodal Search box, and its cross-platform "Universal Cart," Google is making its play to become the ultimate destination, not just the gateway.

For businesses that have historically relied on search traffic to fuel their growth, the calculus has completely changed. Traditional search traffic volumes are already declining. Over time, they could drop precipitously, leaving brands like yours to contend with an environment where the world’s biggest gatekeeper owns your front door.

In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down exactly what Google’s latest I/O announcements mean for your customer acquisition strategy. He explores how Google is using AI to control user attention, why authentic web presence is more critical than ever, and how to build a resilient brand that means everything to your customers when Google — or anyone else in Big Tech — wants to be your customers’ “everything app.”

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders

In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

Google is officially turning Search into the ultimate "Everything App." Instead of acting as a portal that sends users to your website, Google’s new AI-reimagined Search box is designed to anticipate intent and answer queries directly. Combined with 24/7 background Search agents and its new Universal Cart, Google’s ecosystem is built to keep users contained within its walls from discovery all the way through purchase.
Google sets it straight: AEO and GEO are SEO. The day before I/O, Google published guidance clarifying that optimizing for generative AI features requires the same foundational best practices as traditional SEO. They debunked myths around needing special machine-readable files, Markdown, or specific AI schemas, emphasizing that high-quality, valuable, non-commodity content must remain your priority.
The "Universal Cart" changes the e-commerce landscape. Operating across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, Universal Cart acts as an automated hub that tracks deals, price history, and stock alerts across multiple merchants. Google’s Universal Cart allows users to shop seamlessly without ever leaving Google’s ecosystem, fundamentally altering direct-to-consumer traffic patterns. That’s bad for Amazon. It could be even more dangerous for you.
AI Max is removing advertiser control in favor of platform autonomy. Google’s transition from user-controlled Dynamic Search Ads to its AI Max advertising product signals a broader shift toward automated, platform-managed, “black box” ad campaigns. Gatekeepers are both raising your costs and lowering the transparency around connecting with your audience, making it crucial that brands evaluate their paid strategies closely.
Authentic mentions and robust CRM data are your shield against gatekeeper tolls. While Google notes that inauthentic mentions aren’t useful, high-quality, authentic user-generated reviews across platforms like Google Local, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and social media are driving visibility in AI Overviews. Directly owning customer relationships via email, SMS, and exceptional first-hand customer experiences is the only way to bypass the gatekeeper tax.

Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business (Episode 497) — Headlines and Show NotesShow Notes and LinksRelated Episodes

Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why (Digital Reset FOUNDATIONS — Episode 496)
Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495)
One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Digital Reset Episode 494)
Customer Experience is Queen? What Does That Mean? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 190)
The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486)
The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425)
Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491)
AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless (Digital Reset Episode 492)
In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472)

Research and Source Links

Google SEO & AI Guidance

Google’s Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers — Official documentation from Google Search Central covering AEO/GEO integration and mythbusting optimization tactics.
Why Reviews Matter for SEO: Google’s Hidden Ranking Signals | Straight North — Insights into how user reviews serve as powerful local ranking factors.
Review Signals Gain Influence In Top Google Local Rankings — Exploration of why continuous user-generated content impacts organic and AI discovery.

Google I/O 2026 Announcements

Google Search’s I/O 2026 updates: AI agents and more — Comprehensive overview of the 25-year upgrade to the search interface, agentic features, and multimodal inputs.
Google Shopping introduces Universal Cart, agentic shopping — Details on the background-operating multi-merchant cart across Search, YouTube, and Gmail.
Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch — Analysis of how zero-click searches and in-ecosystem answers alter traffic paradigms.
Gemini Spark Is Google’s Response to OpenClaw’s 24/7 AI Agent | WIRED — Deep dive into Google’s background intelligence tools using Gemini 3.5 Flash.

Google Advertising Changes

Google’s Dynamic Search Ads are upgrading to AI Max — Reporting on the platform’s shift toward automated asset generation and broad-match environments.
Google Touts Its AI Ad Tech Adoption And New AI Max Features | AdExchanger — Product update details regarding the deprecation of advertiser-controlled Dynamic Search Ads.

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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 AppearancesRutgers Business School MSDM Speaker Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of “Digital Reset”

Free DownloadsWe 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

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Transcript: Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your BusinessDid you notice how Google published marketer-friendly SEO guidance the day before its I/O conference? There is no way that their timing was accidental. It was choreographed to send a message, and that message could not be more clear.

I/O revealed Google’s new agentic tools, its "Universal Cart" for shopping and buying, and a brand-new Search box that no longer sends you traffic. It answers queries directly within Google. That completely changes the calculus for every business that’s relied on search traffic to drive their growth. Within a couple of months, Search will no longer send you large volumes of traffic every day. It might not send you traffic at all. Oh, it might be a place people can buy. But only if Google decides you’re worth showing at all.

Google has always been the real "everything app" that Big Tech titans and their wannabe contenders have promised for years. Now they’re making it official. Search is the interface that your customers will use to find information, research products and services, book travel or buy, well, anything or everything. That completely changes the calculus for every business that’s relied on search traffic to drive growth. Within a couple of months, Search will no longer send you large volumes of traffic every day. It might be a place people can buy. But only if Google decides you’re worth showing at all.

Today’s episode is longer than usual. That’s because there’s a lot to cover. Most importantly, it’s as clear a read as I can offer on what Google’s announcements mean for you and your business, what they’re not talking about, and what you can do to build a brand that can compete when the gatekeeper owns your front door. I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 497 of Digital Reset. Let’s dive in.

Google outlined how web and content teams can optimize their “websites for generative AI features on Google Search.” In short, they said that AEO and GEO ARE SEO. In a call-out that asked “What about AEO and GEO?” Google said simply, “From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”

Their biggest tips: “Apply foundational SEO best practices to generative AI search,” “Create valuable, non-commodity content for your audience,” and “Build and maintain a clear technical structure.” They also followed these up with a section titled “Mythbusting generative AI search: What you don’t need to do” that included ideas like: You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files markup or Markdown to appear in generative search. “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.” “You don’t need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search.” “Seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem.” And, “Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search, and there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add.” They did follow that one up by adding: “However, it’s a good idea to continue using it, [that is, structured data/schema.org markup] as part of your overall SEO strategy, as it helps with being eligible for rich results on Google Search.”

What makes this most fascinating is that Google dropped this new guidance the day before its I/O developer conference where they introduced, in their words, “the biggest upgrade to our Search box in over 25 years — now completely reimagined with AI.” They noted that the new Search box is, “Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete.” I’ll come back to that in a little bit.

The search box, “can search across modalities, using text, images, files, videos or Chrome tabs as inputs.” They also introduced “Search agents.” As their press release notes, “We’re entering the era of Search agents, where you can easily create, customize and manage multiple AI agents for your many tasks, right in Search. We’re starting with information agents. Operating in the background, 24/7, these agents intelligently reason across information to find exactly what you need at exactly the right moment.”

And they followed that up with an “intelligent, proactive shopping cart” they call “Universal Cart.” Their press release for that claims that “Universal Cart is an intelligent shopping cart and your new hub for shopping on Google. It works across merchants and across services, so you can add things to your cart while you’re browsing Search, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube or even reading your Gmail.” The release continues, “The moment you add a product to your cart, it gets to work in the background — finding deals and price drops, giving you insights on price history and alerting you when an item is back in stock.”

That alone is a ton. But notice what they’ve done here. They’ve told you how you can show up on Google. Not how you can drive more traffic to your site. Universal Cart and Information Agents and whatever other agents follow down the road aren’t designed to drive traffic. They’re designed to keep people within Google.

For years, tech titans have talked about the idea of “the everything app.” It’s what Elon Musk is trying to do with the hollowed out husk of Twitter he calls X. It’s what Mark Zuckerberg wants to do with its social apps, AI, and smart glasses. The everything app is the holy grail, designed to take over — and ultimately replace — your customers’ phones when they’re looking to connect with friends, find information, research products and services, book travel or buy, well, anything or everything.

I’ve said that those efforts were not likely to succeed because we already had an everything app. Search. Google Search, most specifically. Search already is the everything app. It’s where customers traditionally have started most of their browsing and shopping and buying journeys. Yes, sure, your customers learn about new ideas and solutions and products and services from influencers, creators, friends, and family on social. That’s true. It’s still true. But when your customers were ready to learn more, dive deeper, browse, book, or buy, they turned to search. They turned to Google. Google was the front door. Google was, for all practical purposes, “the everything app.”

What more could you need? Turns out that I was wrong about that. Oh, sure, Search was the front door to learning and browsing and buying. But, at some point in their journey, your customers clicked away from Google and ended up at your front door. Customers showing up at your site or in your app allowed you to build direct relationships with your customers, to encourage them to return… and to do that without clicking a link from somewhere else first. To do that without searching. And that was something that Google simply couldn’t allow. Remember, gatekeepers gonna gate.

Google didn’t get here all on its own, of course. Amazon has long been the first place people searched when they were shopping. Again, X and Meta have already been working on their interpretations of “the everything app” for some time. And then, along came AI. Google has lost a little bit of market share, and more than a little bit of mindshare, to ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude. Those AI tools offered better experiences and, at least at first, more complete visions of an “everything app” — though they didn’t say it out loud. What was happening was that your customers were able to go to their favorite AI app and chat, research, learn, and, sometimes, buy or book the products and services they wanted. They were becoming the new gatekeepers, the ones who might take a seat at Big Tech’s table… or take over the whole table for themselves. Again, that’s simply something that Google could not allow.

Google announced their most profitable quarter ever less than a month ago. They certainly weren’t going to let it be the most profitable quarter they ever would have. That’s why Search has to become the real “everything app.” That’s where agents and “universal carts” come into play. Google is making its bid to be the one place customers go when they’re seeking information, insights, products, and services… every single time.

You know that I think they’ve got a huge leg up in this arena. They connect with your customers in ways large and small every day. Sure, there’s Search. There’s also Gmail and Calendar, Workspace/Drive/Docs, Maps, News, Travel and Flights, and Cloud. Oh, yeah, Android and Chrome too. And don’t forget their deal with Apple to provide the default search and AI experiences on Apple’s hardware. That’s an incredible footprint that virtually no one else can touch.

Now, remember when I said I’d come back to how the new Search box is, “Designed to anticipate your intent, it also helps you formulate your question with AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete”? A couple of weeks ago we looked at Amazon’s “Sponsored Prompts,” which are ads that show up as customers type their query. You pay to have your brand appear in suggested prompts. I don’t know. You could even call them, oh, I don’t know, “AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete.” Where have I heard that phrase before? Right… in Google’s press release announcing the new Search box.

Gatekeepers gonna gate.

Google has also been pushing its AI Max advertising feature for the last 7-8 months. About a month ago, they also said that they’re “upgrading Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max,” which is their nice way of saying they’re killing advertiser-controlled Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets, and campaign-level broad match settings in favor of AI-managed ads. Don’t worry about putting in place the messages and rules and restrictions governing how and where some of your campaigns appear. AI will handle that for you. And then let you know what a good job it’s doing. Gatekeepers gonna gate. They raise the cost of connecting with your customers. I called that out in my book Digital Reset. This is just the latest example.

This is the single biggest question you have to ask yourself: How do you lower the cost of reaching your customers when their AI — or anyone else’s — is the search box, the shopping cart, the everything app between you and your customers?

First, don’t panic. Yes, you’ve got work to do. And yes, some of it’s going to be annoying. But, if you offer products or services to your customers, your brand is built more by their experiences with those products and services than anything else. You’re a hotel? Guests will learn more about your brand during their stay than anything Google or some social media creator can tell them. You offer financial services? Your advice, counsel, caring, and performance show your clients what they need to know. You offer SaaS capabilities? Your customers are hands on with your products all the time. That experience is what they’ll remember.

Second, remember that your brand is the prompt. And that your brand is built on three core elements: Content is king, Customer experience is queen, and Data is the crown jewels.

There are some subtle shifts we’re seeing in these because of AI’s growth. For instance, content distribution — being seen on social media as well as driving customer-generated content like ratings and reviews — is every bit as important as the content you create yourself. While that isn’t especially new, the added emphasis on channels beyond your website and customer commentary is.

Google said in its generative search guidance that “Seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem.” They didn’t say — nor would they — that authentic mentions aren’t helpful. I’m seeing hotels and other businesses I work with show up in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude because they get continual and consistent high-quality reviews on Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, G2, and social media sites.

Similarly, your CRM data takes on added weight in this new world. When you talk with customers via email or SMS, you have an opportunity to bypass AI gatekeepers and build deeper, longer-lasting connections. Which, of course, brings us back to content that your customers will find it worth their while to read, listen to, or watch. As my friend Ed St.Onge likes to say, “The point of every second of your content is to earn another second of attention.” The flipside of that is that every second that isn’t worth your customers’ attention isn’t worth sending them.

This is one of the key reasons I don’t recommend using AI to create your content. If you’re not willing to spend time on crafting content that’s relevant and useful for your customers, why would you expect your customers to spend any of their time engaging with it?

Putting this all together, Google just delivered their version of the everything app. They also told you they still expect your content to train that app and provide it with the answers it will need to keep customers in their ecosystem. And they gave you guidance on how you can ensure your content does its job for their needs. You probably have to play that game, at least to connect with customers the first time.

The businesses that think beyond Big Tech know though, that the real win comes from building deep relationships between your customers and your brand. And that building those deep relationships depends on content worth their time and customer experiences they’ll rave about to their friends and family and fans and followers… and their AI assistants and agents. And by using data wisely to better inform those discussions and experiences with your customers.

Google wants to be the everything app. Your job is to build a brand that means everything to your customers instead.

If this episode gave you a clear picture of what Google’s long game looks like in practice and how you can play it more effectively, do me a favor — send it to a colleague who’s currently struggling to figure this out. It might save them — and your business — from going down the wrong path.

You can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on making your brand the answer that AI reaches for every time, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, is the roadmap you’re looking for. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

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.

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 Google’s Everything App: What I/O 2026 Means for Your Traffic, Your Brand, and Your Business (Episode 497) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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Last week, Big Tech reported its Q1 2026 earnings. Google achieved an all-time high for search queries and grew their revenue 22%. Amazon announced “Sponsored Prompts,” paid placements built directly into AI conversations. Meta raised its ad prices and increased revenue by 33%.

If you heard those numbers and thought, “How on earth did we get here?” this episode is your answer.

This is a Digital Reset Foundations episode: a conversation recorded in April that has become more useful, not less, now that the Q1 numbers have come in. The 15-year pattern described here is exactly what drove those earnings. The shortcut trap isn’t theoretical. It literally just showed up in Big Tech’s earnings calls.

And the counter to their dominance is right in front of you. 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. City of Hope didn’t have a GEO strategy or an AI optimization consultant. They appear in 97% of AI queries for their category because of brand and customer experience decisions they made years ago.

AI inclusion, it turns out, is an inheritance. It’s not something you acquire in a quarter. It’s something you build. And if you’ve been building the right things, the AI concierge will find you.

This reality raises 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?

The answer is the Shortcut Trap. Every new gatekeeper’s entry into the market comes with a period where taking the shortcut looks like the smart play. Link-building programs before Google’s Penguin update. Organic follower growth before social media algorithms changed. Low-commission OTA distribution before take rates and paid placements climbed. AI content farming today.

The shortcut isn’t a scam. That’s why it works… at least temporarily. That’s also what makes it dangerous. By the time the cost becomes visible, too many businesses have built far too much of their strategy around it, and they own the visibility but not the relationship.

This episode traces 15 years of that pattern across four platform shifts — Google, social, OTAs, and now AI — and draws two clear tests that separate a genuine foundation investment from a shortcut dressed up as strategy. Google’s search revenue didn’t grow 22% because they got lucky. Amazon didn’t build sponsored prompts by accident.

The window is still open. But it won’t stay open indefinitely. If you’re the one who has to walk into a budget meeting and explain your company’s AI strategy, this is the episode that gives you both the pattern and the language you need to make your 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 97% of AI queries for their category not because of any optimization strategy, but because of decades of peer-reviewed research, earned media, and patient reputation. The AI was trained on all of it. Most "GEO strategy" is sold as something you can acquire this quarter. If AI inclusion is primarily inherited from prior fundamentals investment, that changes the budget conversation entirely.
Why the Q1 earnings weren’t a surprise and what that means for your budget. Google’s all-time high search queries, Amazon’s sponsored prompts, Meta’s 33% revenue growth: none of this is random. It’s the same gatekeeper cycle playing out again, this time with AI as the distribution layer. The businesses that understood this pattern before the earnings call are the ones building direct relationships now, while the window is still open.
”The Window” and why it’s finite. Every platform shift includes a window of two to five years (and possibly shorter) where the new gatekeeper is still building its position and hasn’t yet started collecting the highest tolls it can. Independent hotels has had several of these windows — roughly 1999-2001 and again in the 2010s — to build direct booking capabilities before OTA placement became non-negotiable. The ones that used those windows built reliable, high-performing email lists, loyalty programs… and direct revenue that follows from those actions. The AI window is open right now. It will not stay open indefinitely.
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 drove organic authority a decade ago. They still drive AI inclusion today. And if a GEO tactic hurts your search performance, it probably won’t help your AI visibility either.
The Shortcut Trap: Why smart businesses fall into it. The shortcut is always most attractive exactly at the moment when a new platform is getting established, the upside is visible , and the cost isn’t yet clear. It’s not a scam because it works… at least temporarily. You end up owning visibility but not the relationship. Then, when the platform changes the rules, you own nothing.
Two tests for any AI investment. First: would your investment matter if AI changed tomorrow? Expert-authored content, review velocity programs, and first-party data infrastructure improve your business regardless of which model is dominant in 18 months. If an investment only makes sense for how ChatGPT works in Q2 2026, that’s a warning sign. Second: do your efforts compound, or do they require continual investment? Yes, shortcuts work. But foundations compound. A great 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 your 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? Fine. But start small, test, and 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 and the live proof from Q1 2026 earnings to work with.

Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why (Digital Reset FOUNDATIONS — Episode 496) — Headlines and Show NotesShow Notes and Links* The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) * Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset 495) * One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Digital Reset Episode 494) * 55% of People Hate AI: How to Use it Without Losing Your Customers (Digital Reset Episode 493) * AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless (Digital Reset Episode 492) * The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490) * The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechDon’t miss Tim Peter’s new book, 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 AppearancesRutgers Business School MSDM Speaker Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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- Strategy
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Transcript: Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s WhyLast week, we looked at Big Tech’s Q1 earnings. Google hit all-time high profits. Amazon is building sponsored prompts into AI conversations. Meta raised its ad prices and grew its revenue thirty-three percent.

If you heard that episode and thought, "How did we get here?" This episode is the answer.

This is a Digital Reset Foundations episode, a conversation I recorded in April that I think is as useful right now as anything I could record brand new this week.

The reason I’m bringing this one back is simple. Big Tech’s Q1 earnings didn’t surprise me. After you hear this, they won’t surprise you either.

Big Tech has built their businesses to extract more money from you and your business every single day. Gatekeepers gonna gate and all that.

Here’s the episode. I think it’ll be worth your time whether you’ve heard it before or not. Let’s dive in.

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 "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.

That conversation was from April, a few weeks before Big Tech’s earnings confirmed every pattern I described.

You and I both know that Google’s search revenue didn’t grow 22% because they got lucky. Amazon didn’t build sponsored prompts by accident.

This is the same game being played by gatekeepers, and you’ve got the same window available to you, at least for now.

Next week, we’re going to get specific — what AI search is doing to your traffic right now and the framework you can use to make sure you’re on the right side of it.

If this episode gave you a bigger picture, a better picture of what the long game looks like in practice and how you can play it more effectively, do me a favor — send it to some colleagues who are currently staring at their 2026 budget and wondering where they should put their money. It might save them and your business from spending it on the wrong things.

You can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcast.

And if you’re ready to go deeper on making your brand the answer that AI reaches for every time, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, is the roadmap you’re looking for. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

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 Big Tech’s Q1 Wasn’t a Surprise — Here’s Why (Digital Reset FOUNDATIONS — Episode 496) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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Pundits spent the last year-plus predicting that AI would kill Big Tech. Big Tech’s Q1 2026 earnings suggest they might have missed that meeting.

Google’s search queries hit an all-time high because of AI, not in spite of it — and their search ad revenues grew 19% as a result. Meta’s revenues grew 33% while the price per ad climbed 12%. Amazon introduced Sponsored Prompts, letting brands bid to appear inside prepackaged AI queries in Rufus. And Azure and Google Cloud grew 40% and 63% respectively, at least some of that fueled by payments from OpenAI, Perplexity, and all the other AI companies supposedly disrupting them. The “disruptors” are funding Big Tech incumbents.

As Philipp Schindler said on Google’s earnings call, AI gives Google the ability to monetize searches that were previously too complex to sell against. In other words, Google just told its investors that AI is helping them make money in places they couldn’t before.

And, y’know, Google was already pretty good at making money.

In this Digital Reset episode, Tim Peter breaks down what Q1 2026 earnings actually reveal about where the gatekeeper economy is heading, shares a client story about what it costs to wait too long, and offers you two diagnostic tests you can run this week to find out whether your spend is building owned demand… or if you’re just renting the same customers over and over again.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders

The "AI will kill Google" narrative is over. Google’s Q1 results weren’t just strong. They were powered by AI. AI Overviews and AI Mode drove search to an “all-time high.” And they opened new ad inventory on longer, more complex queries that Google previously couldn’t monetize. AI isn’t Google’s disruption. AI is Google’s next growth engine.
Amazon Sponsored Prompts are a flashing red sign most marketers are missing. Amazon is letting brands bid to appear in prepackaged AI prompts inside Rufus, prompts like "What makes [Brand X] a healthy choice?" Amazon didn’t build a search ad. They built a paid answer embedded in a conversation. Every platform providing an AI interface is going to follow this model. Guaranteed.
The AI challengers are paying to build Big Tech incumbents. Azure grew 40%. Google Cloud grew 63%, with profits up over 200% year on year. Some meaningful portion of that growth comes from OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, and others paying for compute and processing power. The disruptors are writing checks to the companies they’re supposed to be disrupting.
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol is worth watching closely. Google’s Philipp Schindler named the new members of their commerce infrastructure council: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe, along with founding members Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic are not on that list. The companies building the next commerce layer have already decided who’s at the table… and who isn’t.
Every paid return visit is training your customers’ AI agents to route around you. When repeat customers come back through a gatekeeper, you pay interest on a relationship you already earned. Worse, their behavior teaches their AI assistants and agents to treat the gatekeeper as your customer’s preferred path. The cost isn’t just something you pay on this one transaction. You pay it on every future one too.
The Gatekeeper Test and Owned Demand Test tell you exactly where you stand. Two practical frameworks for auditing every channel you currently spend money on, including: Who owns the data? Does your investment keep working after you stop spending? Answering those questions tells you whether you’re building your business… or if you’re building the platform’s business.

Whether you’re a marketing leader in hospitality, travel, B2B services, or e-commerce, this episode gives you a clear read on what Big Tech’s Q1 2026 earnings mean for your customer acquisition strategy, and what you must do before Q2 grows the gap further.

Google Has Turned Organic Discovery Into Paid Rediscovery (Digital Reset Episode 495) — Headlines and Show NotesGoogle Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing You (Digital Reset Episode 495) — Show Notes and LinksRelated Episodes

The New Gatekeeper Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Ep. 490)
The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Ep. 489)
The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Ep. 488)
The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Ep. 485)
In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Ep. 472)
One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Ep. 494)

Research and Source Links

Google

Alphabet Q1 2026 Earnings Release (PDF) — Official press release with full financial results referenced in this episode.
Alphabet (GOOGL) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript — The Motley Fool — Full transcript including Sundar Pichai’s and Philipp Schindler’s remarks on AI-driven search growth, the "previously really difficult to monetize" quote, and the Universal Commerce Protocol.

Amazon

Amazon Q1 2026 Earnings
Amazon Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript
Sponsored Products Prompts and Sponsored Brands Prompts — Amazon Ads — Amazon’s official announcement of Sponsored Prompts, the new format appearing inside Rufus AI queries discussed in this episode.
Amazon Sponsored Prompts: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How Brands Should Act — BirdDog Agency — A practical explainer on what Amazon’s new format means for brand advertisers.

Meta

Meta Reports First Quarter 2026 Results — Meta Investor Relations — Official press release covering the 33% revenue growth and 12% increase in price per ad referenced in this episode.
Meta (META) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript — The Motley Fool — Full transcript of the April 29, 2026 earnings call.

Microsoft

Microsoft FY26 Q3 Earnings — Press Release and Webcast — Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 2026 (calendar Q1 2026) results, covering the Azure 40% growth figure discussed in this episode. (Note: Microsoft’s fiscal year runs July–June; their FY26 Q3 covers the calendar period January–March 2026.)

Further Reading

Ben Thompson/Stratechery’s view of Google/Meta earnings — Ben Thompson’s platform economics analysis referenced in this episode in the context of Amazon Sponsored Prompts and Google’s AI advertising upside.

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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 AppearancesRutgers Business School MSDM Speaker Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

Free DownloadsWe 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 Digital Reset* Subscribe in iTunes * Subscribe in the Google Play Store

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital ResetRecorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 15:22

You can subscribe to Digital Reset 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 Digital Reset using the player at the top of this page.

Transcript: Google Search Hit an All-Time High… And It’s Costing YouThe customer you rent will always cost more than the customer you own. No one understands that better than Google.

Pundits have spent the last year-plus predicting that AI would kill Google and blow up Big Tech. Apparently, Big Tech missed that meeting.

Big Tech’s Q1 earnings prove that that narrative is dead. Gatekeepers aren’t falling behind, far from it. They’re finding new ways to charge you for conversations with customers before those customers ever learn your name.

Google search queries hit an all-time high — that’s a quote — in Q1 because of AI, not in spite of it. Sundar Pichai said it himself that "AI experiences are driving usage." Google’s revenue grew 22% year on year. Search ad revenue grew 19%. Search contributes more than half of all Google’s revenues. And all of this happened even though its network ad revenues fell 4%.

Let me drill down on that point even more clearly. Google is making money from ads on its own sites, even as other sites that depend on Google ads for their businesses lose traffic and revenue. Google’s getting richer and grabbing a bigger slice of the pie.

Similarly, Amazon emphasized a phrase you might want to take note of. They called it "sponsored prompts." They’re letting advertisers — that is, folks like you and me — bid to show up in prepackaged prompts for products or brands directly in Amazon’s Rufus search agent. I particularly love the example they show: "What makes flakes from Nutrition Co. a healthy choice?" It’s brilliant. They’re showing product benefits as part of the prompt.

And as CEO Andy Jassy said on their earnings call: "If you look at any of these agentic experiences, they tend to be multi-turn conversations where you’re not interacting with one search and getting an answer. You tend to find that you’re asking questions, you’re narrowing questions. And in that process of having multi-turns, there are multiple opportunities to surface relevant products to customers, many of which will be organic and some of which will be sponsored. And it also gives rise to opportunities like sponsored prompts."

As I said, that’s brilliant. I mean, that is — as long as you’re willing to pay for it. I’ll bet that they’re not the last Big Tech brand to make tools like this available, or to gain the new revenues that follow. As Ben Thompson at Stratechery pointed out, "We’ll see how this works, but to the extent that it does, it’s a bullish take for Google as well." I completely agree. I couldn’t agree more.

On that same track, Meta’s revenues grew 33% with more than 8 million advertisers using the company’s creative tools to build their ads. Meta’s ad impressions grew by 19%. But the more important number is that their price per ad grew 12%. They’re making ads more effective and charging you more to enjoy those benefits.

I’m going to take it for granted that OpenAI and other AI — ahem — disruptors will try to compete. They’re fighting for their seat at Big Tech’s table too. They want to be gatekeepers also. Except keep in mind that Microsoft Azure grew by over 40% and Google Cloud grew an astonishing 63%. Google Cloud’s income — that is, its earnings, its profits — grew by over 200% year on year. All of that at least in part because of revenue they’re collecting from folks like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic.

One throwaway line by Philipp Schindler also caught my attention. He mentioned some new members that have joined their Universal Commerce Protocol Tech Council: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, along with Salesforce and Stripe, and founding members Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair. Notice any companies missing from that group? Here’s a hint. Their names rhyme with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic.

You’ve heard me say this before: gatekeepers gonna gate. Google and the rest of its Big Tech brethren don’t look like they’re in trouble. Quite the opposite. They’re building more gates between businesses like yours and your customers. And they’re charging you more every time you use these platforms to connect with your customers. They didn’t produce quarterly results like these because they’re charging folks like you less to reach your customers.

In today’s episode, we’re looking at Big Tech’s Q1 2026 earnings and what you need to do to ensure that their gains don’t come at your expense next quarter. I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 495 of Digital Reset. Let’s dive in.

Every time a customer comes back to you through paid Google search or Meta ads or Expedia or Booking.com or Amazon — wherever — you’re paying interest on a relationship that you failed to own the first time they found you. It costs you money to talk to someone you already know. Those customers’ behaviors are starting to teach their AI assistants and agents where and how they prefer to find the products, services, and brands they need too. And if they’re always going through a gatekeeper — if customers always go through a gatekeeper first — they’re teaching those AIs that you’re not their first choice, ever.

I had a client a few years back that hired me to help them gain more customers directly and bypass Big Tech gatekeepers. At least, that’s what I thought they wanted.

We worked together for months, but over time I began to realize that I was failing. I could not convince them that they needed to change what they were doing.

The resistance made sense in theory. They got a healthy share of their revenue from third parties with no "upfront cost." I’m deliberately not naming the gatekeepers to protect that client’s anonymity. But the revenues they gained came with a heavy total cost: around 22% of each sale. As the client saw it, they only paid that 22% when the business materialized. Never mind that those sales cost them millions of dollars every year without fail. Millions.

And keep in mind that these so-called "partners" didn’t contribute 100% of their revenue. They paid those millions and had to find the rest of their business through other channels. Just far too often, not their own.

Changing their behaviors required upfront investment that, for whatever reason, I simply couldn’t convince them was worth the risk. And so we eventually decided that we should go our separate ways. Most of the team that I worked with either left or was let go. And last I heard, the company’s in a deep hole and hasn’t yet figured out a way out of it.

That’s not just about them, though. It’s a big flashing red sign in Big Tech’s earnings this quarter that shows what’s coming for you.

Yeah, sure, Google might not cost you twenty-two percent — at least not yet. And maybe ChatGPT is relatively affordable… at the moment. But if you’re paying for every customer every day, every time, it adds up. And fast.

Google is used by pretty much everyone on the planet. They didn’t grow their search ad revenues nineteen percent by finding another billion people to start searching. They did it by getting people to search more often, showing ads more often, getting people to click on those ads more often — or, as Philipp Schindler’s comments suggested, a little bit of each.

As he noted on Google’s earnings call: "We see AI Overviews and AI Mode continue to drive greater Search usage and growth in overall queries, including in commercial queries… with the ability of AI to better understand intent… I think there is upside… and overall, understanding that we have at Gemini on intent has just significantly expanded our ability to deliver ads on longer, more complex searches that were previously really difficult to monetize."

In other words, Google just told its investors that AI is helping them make money in places they couldn’t before. That’s not future risk. It’s literally what drove their earnings last quarter.

They’re going to put themselves between you and your customers for an increasingly large share of customer activity. And you’re gonna pay for it. They just said that out loud. So is Amazon. So is Meta. So are Expedia and Uber and DoorDash and all of the rest. So are the AI companies. That’s the game they’re playing.

If you’re playing by their rules, you’re already losing. It’s time you change your game.

How? My former client never really asked that question. Not really. Here’s what I wanted them to do.

First, you have to acknowledge the reality of what gatekeepers truly cost you. It’s okay to use them the first time you talk to a customer, especially if it’s someone you can’t reach more easily on your own. But if you’re paying every time you talk to your customers, you’re digging a deeper and deeper hole for yourself. So maybe let’s not do that.

There are two tests you can and should use when evaluating partners and the role they play for your business. And I mean real partners.

The first test is our Gatekeeper Test. Ask yourself two questions for every channel you’re working with right now.

One: Are we using this platform to build our business, or are we building our business inside this platform?

Two: Who owns the data from this interaction with our customer?

If you’re using the platform to build your business and you own the data, congratulations. That’s a core part of your hub. It’s the place that allows you to connect directly with your customers. If you’re building your business inside the platform but you own the data, that’s usually okay too. Just pay attention if the platform starts changing the rules or raising the rent.

If you’re using the platform to build your business but you don’t own the data, you might not actually be building your business. You’re building the platform’s business.

If they own the data — regardless of where you’re building — it’s not your customer. It’s theirs. You’re renting demand. And rented demand is always going to be more expensive than owned demand in the long run.

The second test you want to put to work is the Owned Demand Test. It’s very simple. You ask these three questions:

One: Does your investment using this platform create a direct relationship? Does it lead customers to come directly to you the next time around?

Two: Does your investment make your brand easier to ask for by name?

And three — most importantly — does the investment keep working once you stop spending?

The more you answer yes, the better off you are. And if it’s no up and down the list, you’re not building owned demand. You’re renting it. Again, one of these has a brighter future.

It’s okay to rent traffic once in a while, but it’s a bad idea to rent demand month after month after month. As Big Tech’s Q1 earnings prove, the difference between those two compounds to their advantage every single quarter.

You know that gatekeepers gonna gate. So my question for you is simple. Before you spend another dollar with a gatekeeper this week, run the Owned Demand Test on that channel. If it fails all three questions, you know what you need to do.

And if you know someone else who needs to hear this, send the episode their way. It might save them, their business, and you a world of trouble.

Thank you so much for listening today. You can find the show notes for this episode 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 you’re looking for. You’ll find a link to that in the show notes, too.

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

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The thesis behind Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech was simple: the companies that stop renting their customers from Big Tech and start building direct relationships, owned media, and a genuine brand signal will have more control over their growth — and pay less for it over time. One year after Digital Reset launched, the evidence is in. The thesis holds up. In fact, given how fast AI has reshaped content, discovery, and customer trust in the past twelve months, it held much more decisively than even I expected.

This episode is an honest look back on what the book got right, what we learned, and three questions every marketing leader should be asking their team this week. BONUS: There’s a gift for readers and listeners at the end.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders
In this episode, author and episode host Tim Peter breaks down:

The thesis held. AI made it more urgent. When Tim wrote Digital Reset, the gatekeeper argument was grounded in history. A year later, ChatGPT has launched ads. Perplexity has launched ads. AI answer engines are paying Google and Amazon and Microsoft for the infrastructure to get a seat at the gatekeepers’ banquet. The pattern is identical to what search, social, OTAs, and a whole host of others have done before. The prediction wasn’t just right — it’s playing out in real time.
Content got cheap. Your voice got priceless. AI has driven the cost of creating content to zero. That means your customers are now drowning in passable, but bland, boring, blah AI-generated commodity content. Businesses finding that their content stands out more today than a year ago are the ones with a clear point of view, original data and examples, and a trustworthy human voice. Content is still king… with one important caveat.
Great customer experiences are now training your customers’ AI agents. AI inclusion is inherited from the work you’ve done for your brand. When customers have great experiences, they tell their friends, post reviews, and share photos. In doing so, they teach their AI assistants the brands they prefer. In an agentic world, brands that aren’t customer favorites right now will find it even harder to become favorites later… because the AI may never recommend them in the first place.
The gatekeepers still gonna gate — new players are working to join the club. The playbook hasn’t changed. The players are just adding new capabilities as new entrants seek their seat at the gatekeepers’ table.
The big surprise: validation matters more than volume. The book emphasized content quality and distribution. What the year revealed is a third variable that deserves more weight: validation. One genuinely original, expert-authored piece of content that gets talked about, cited, and shared by other people does more for your AI visibility than 50 competent-but-forgettable posts. AI doesn’t count your content — it weights it by how many trustworthy, verifiable sources validate that your content is worthwhile. Write less. And make what you write genuinely worth citing.
Three questions that tell you exactly where to start.
- First: what percentage of your content could only come from you? If the answer is less than 50%, you’re too focused on commodity content.
- Second: what message is your use of AI saying to your customers right now? Are you using it to help them, or just to produce more slop faster? One of those has a future.
- Third: what does AI say about your brand when someone asks? Go try it in an incognito chat. Whatever it gets right is a sign that your signal is working. Whatever it gets wrong is your roadmap.

Whether you’re in hospitality, travel, B2B services, or anywhere else Big Tech has its hand in your pocket — and especially if you’re the marketing leader who has to defend your AI strategy while customers are growing more skeptical by the month — this episode gives you a clear-eyed, evidence-based picture of where the industry stands one year into the Digital Reset era.

One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Digital Reset Episode 494) — Headlines and Show NotesGet Your Anniversary GiftAs a thank-you to everyone who bought the book or has been listening to the show, Tim is giving away free signed bookplates and Digital Reset bookmarks — no obligation — to anyone who’s purchased a copy of Digital Reset. Sign up in May and they’ll go out throughout the month.

Sign up for your signed bookplate and bookmark here

Show Notes and LinksRelated Episodes

AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless. (Ep. 492)
55% of People Hate AI: How to Use it Without Losing Your Customers (Ep. 493)
The New Gatekeeper Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Ep. 490)
The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Ep. 489)
The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Ep. 488)
The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Ep. 485)
In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Ep. 472)
SparkToro: How Consistent Are AI Recommendations?
McKinsey: The State of AI

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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 AppearancesRutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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Transcript: One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption ProvedWelcome back to the show.

My book, "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech," is celebrating its first anniversary this month.

I do not plan to spend this episode telling you how great the book is or why you should run out right now and pick up a copy, though I’d be thrilled if you did.

Instead, I want to spend our time together today asking: was the thesis right? Does the book’s central idea hold up given how quickly customers are adopting AI? And how do any changes that we’ve seen over the last year shape what you should do next?

I’m not going to make you wait until after the break for the answer to the first one. The answer is "Yes." The thesis, the central idea at the core of the book, remains true. In fact, as AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, of our customers’ lives, the central idea becomes even more true and more important for your business. So, yay, well done me, I guess. Okay.

In all seriousness, while the thesis and the book as a whole definitely hold up a year after publication, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some nuances and points of emphasis that we need to discuss. There are. And that’s what I’m talking about here today on the show.

In this episode, I’m going to break down what "Digital Reset" got right, what surprised me along the way, and what you should do right now to put those lessons to work for you, your brand, and your business.

I also have a special gift for readers and listeners at the end of the episode. If you hang with me for a few minutes, I’ll let you know what it is and how you can get your gift.

This is episode 494 of the Digital Reset Podcast. I’m Tim Peter. Today we’re looking at one year of "Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech." Let’s dive in.

Writing a book about anything related to digital has one massive challenge. The digital ecosystem moves fast, like crazy fast. I started my first draft of the book before ChatGPT dropped, so you can imagine that could have killed the book before I even get started.

Instead, what it did was remind me to bet on what won’t change — the ideas and the concepts that work, no matter what Big Tech — or any aspiring members of that club — do to get between you and your customers.

My bet was that owning your customer relationships, building a brand worth asking for by name, focusing on content and customer experience to build those relationships with your customers, and being responsible stewards of customer data as you put it to work, are critical to reducing your dependency on Big Tech. And I bet that reducing that dependency would matter more over time, not less. So how’d that work out? Well, I’d say pretty well, actually.

We’ve seen a number of examples over the past year that illustrate why those continue to make sense.

First: content got cheap, but your voice became priceless.

As I mentioned in the book and in a bunch of recent episodes, AI has driven the cost of creating content to zero. The book argued that content has never been expensive, but that content that doesn’t convert is. What has become even more important is that the AI age is not only further driving down the cost of making content — it’s making developing your own distinctive, unique, and most importantly, authentic voice, priceless.

Your customers are drowning in a deluge of passable, but kind of average, bland, boring, blah, AI-created commodity content. They tolerate it most of the time, but they don’t care about it. They don’t seek it out, and they don’t give it any more time or attention than, well, frankly, the amount of time it took AI to spit that content out. That seems fair, if you ask me.

In some cases, we have seen that your customers actively hate AI-generated content, and increasingly they hate the companies that use AI — whether it’s for content creation or just about anything else. About half of customers feel that way.

What customers do want is content that speaks to them and their needs. That tells them something genuinely insightful, interesting, new, entertaining. They want to hear from people they trust. That’s why businesses that have invested in a clear point of view, that demonstrate their values, that share data and insights they’ve gained from original research and direct experience, and that do all of this with a trustworthy, original human voice, are finding that their content stands out more today than it did a year ago.

So yeah, content is still king, with one small caveat that I will come back to in just a couple of moments.

Second: great customer experiences matter even more than they did.

I have long argued that nothing will build your brand more than great customer experiences. Your customers are your business’s secret sales force. They share their favorite experiences — and even more so their truly terrible experiences — with their friends and family and fans and followers on social media. As I said in the book, "your brand is only as good as its last five reviews."

I’ve long told stories about how the single most important first impression guests get when they check into a hotel is what their room smells like. If you were to walk into a room and think it smells pleasant, or at least unnoticeable, you are more likely to return to that hotel. By contrast, if you walk into a room and it smells less than okay — it’s not downright funky — you are probably not ever coming back. In fact, if it smells bad enough, you’re not even going to complete your stay at that hotel, that trip. I mean, really. If you’re like me, you’re going to head back to the lobby and either ask for a different room or just book a different hotel in the elevator on your way out the door.

What I didn’t know at the time when I wrote the book, what I couldn’t have known, is how much AI would turn to social media and reviews to validate the content you create and share on your own channels — your business’s hub. I couldn’t have known how much AI would turn to social media to learn what other people think of that content.

The result of that is that AI inclusion is inherited from the work you’ve done all along. This is hugely, massively, crazily important to your business. Focusing on great customer experiences might be the single most important work you can do in the age of AI, because when customers have a great experience, they might tell a few friends, they might post a review on social media or on a ratings and review site. They might share photos or videos that tell your brand story. But what their behavior absolutely does is teach their go-to AI which brands they prefer.

When we enter a world where AI assistants and agents do the work for your customers, those assistants and agents will favor the brands their users like best. If you are not one of their favorites today, it will be even harder to become one of their favorites later — because their AI assistants and agents may never recommend you in the first place. So yeah, customer experience is queen for sure, and the queen’s rule is even more powerful than before.

The third big lesson that holds true is: the gatekeeper’s still gonna gate.

I am not going to spend much time on this one. You’ve noticed that Google and Amazon and Meta and Apple and Microsoft remain the biggest players in the game, and that the cost of using them to reach your customers continues to rise. Sure, ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity are angling for their turn at bat. They want to get in the game and they are making headway there. You’ve also likely noticed that ChatGPT has introduced ads on its platform. So, for that matter, has Perplexity. Showing up organically in their answers is getting more challenging over time.

They’re also paying more to the gatekeepers we’ve known for a long time — to Google and Amazon and Microsoft for things like processing and partnerships. Huh, funny. It’s almost like all of these companies are following a playbook that we’ve seen again and again and again. Oh wait. That’s right. They are.

I told you this wouldn’t be a victory lap, so I’m going to leave this point right here. I also feel obligated to say that this reality was entirely predictable and we should expect more of this over the coming months and years. Gatekeepers gonna gate. It’s what they do.

Now, what surprised me — and this is big, because there was at least one thing that surprised me over the last year, and it’s related to content. I told you before there’d be a caveat. This is the caveat.

While I talked about the importance of content distribution in the book, it really was focused on getting content you create onto spokes, like search and social media and such. And while I talked about getting your customers to participate in creating content as your secret sales force with ratings and reviews, I did not foresee how big a role user-generated content would play in convincing AIs which brands to surface and show their users.

I’ve talked about AI as a concierge, not a card catalog, in recent months. AIs don’t just look up an answer when they’re asked questions — they know the answer. They’ve learned the right answer from reading every piece of content that they can find about your brand and your business.

That, of course, means that creating great customer experiences is more important than ever, as I’ve already mentioned. It also means that your content has almost no value in the mind of AI concierges if other folks aren’t talking about that content, if they aren’t citing that content, if they aren’t sharing it with their friends and family and fans and followers. The content just is sitting there. It’s a lump, right?

I took it for granted that links weren’t as powerful as they once were. We know that AI is learning the value of content in its own right. That’s absolutely true. What I missed was how powerful other people talking about your content — whether they linked to it or not — would be. How large a role that would play.

The book talks about creating great content. That’s still true, still valuable. But it could talk more about building authority, about building content that is worth other people talking about. Crafting one genuinely original, unique, insightful, expert-authored piece of content with a distinctive voice will do so much more to generate interest, citations, and crucially AI visibility, than 10 or 20 or 50 or a hundred moderately competent, but meh, blog posts ever will.

As I said in an episode of this show not that long ago: "’Post more content’ is not the strategy. AI isn’t counting the number of pieces of content on your site. It is weighting them by the degree to which independent verifiable sources confirm what your content says. Write less. Make it more citable. Make it more original. Make it genuinely worth citing." I guarantee that emphasis will be in any future editions of the book for sure.

Now, what you should do differently starting this week is really pretty key. I’ve talked about what’s held up and what’s surprised me over the last year since the book dropped. The real question is what you should do differently — and how soon you should do that.

To answer the question, you have to ask some other questions.

First, ask: what percentage of your content could only come from you? You’ve got great data. You’ve got great stories about your customers, your guests, your clients. You’ve got your own distinctive point of view about what has happened, what is happening, and what you think will happen. You should be sharing those. If less than 50% of your content could only come from you, you’re focused far too heavily on commodity content and not nearly enough on building a brand voice worth listening to. You cannot win with commodity content. Why would you even try?

Second: ask what message your AI use is sending to customers right now. It is abundantly clear that somewhere between a quarter and a half of customers actively hate AI usage by the companies they work with. Over time, I’m going to suspect they’re going to shift that hate from AI directly to your brand and business. I don’t even think that’s that much of a prediction. I think that’s happening right now. This isn’t about whether or not you use AI. It’s about the message you send about how and why you use it. It’s about whether that use benefits your customers, your community, and the world at large. Are you using AI to make better, safer, more useful products, services, and experiences for your customers? Or are you using it simply to slash costs and churn out a whole big load of AI slop? Your customers can tell the difference. And then they’ll tell you what they think about it, either by saying really gnarly stuff about you on social media, or by no longer choosing you at all.

Third: what does AI say about your brand when people ask about you? This is by far the easiest thing for you to do right now. Pick an AI tool of your choice, then ask it what it knows about your brand. Whatever it gets right will demonstrate where your efforts right now are paying off. The information it gets wrong is a sign of where you’ve got work to do. This doesn’t require you to conduct a big formal audit or hire a consultant to help you. Take a few minutes, though, and you’ll have a quick sense of where you need to get started now.

One quick caveat I would add: AI tools increasingly personalize their answers. So you might want to try doing this using a temporary or incognito chat just to make sure it’s giving the most common answer to you. In either case, though, it is an enlightening and really effective exercise to see what AI knows about you.

One last point before I wrap up this episode that I have to make is to say a deep and heartfelt thank you to all of the folks who bought the book, who listened to the podcast, or who work with us at TPA. I want to say thank you to everyone who shared their experiences on LinkedIn or in email or on texts. I genuinely appreciate all your support. You all made the book happen. You make this podcast happen. You make the business work. I would not be able to do any of this without your support. And on behalf of the team, I just want to say thank you very, very much. This anniversary belongs to you as much as it does to me.

I mentioned at the top of the show that I’ve got a gift for readers of the book or anyone else who’s interested. I’m giving away signed bookplates and bookmarks to anyone who’s purchased a copy of the book. There’s a link in the show notes for you to sign up and provide your details to receive a free signed bookplate for your copy of Digital Reset and a Digital Reset bookmark too. Just sign up in May of this year and we’ll get those out to folks throughout the month.

There’s a place for you to opt into other communication, but we are only using this data to send the bookplate and bookmark, and then we’re going to purge it from our database. There are no long-term obligations. This is just a pure thank you from me to you.

It would also mean the world to me if you joined in the celebration. Feel free to post a picture of yourself with your copy of the book and tag me on LinkedIn or BlueSky, and please share your favorite insight or takeaway. I would love to hear what worked for you in the book. It means so very much to me.

As always, if you know someone who would benefit from this episode, do me a favor and share it with them. I very much appreciate that, and I’d like to think that they would too.

If you’re a marketing leader in hospitality or travel or services or anywhere else that Big Tech has its hand in your pocket, and you want to talk through how to bypass Big Tech more effectively, I’d love to talk. My contact info is at timpeter.com.

All that said, thanks again for listening. I genuinely appreciate your support every week. 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 One Year of Digital Reset: What a Year of AI Disruption Proved (Digital Reset Episode 494) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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Your customers hate AI. The numbers are hard to ignore. A Quinnipiac University poll found that 55% of US adults believe AI will bring “more harm than good,” up from 44% just a year ago. Booking.com‘s research puts 26% of consumers in the “AI detractor” category, actively opposed to using it. NBC News found that nearly half of those surveyed hold a negative view of AI.

This isn’t a niche concern. It’s a mainstream sentiment. And if you’re still planning to use AI to grow your business, it’s your problem to solve.

What makes this more than a PR challenge is that many of the criticisms are valid. There will be job disruptions. Deep fakes and misinformation are real. Environmental and energy costs are escalating. And when corporate leaders publicly predict 20–30% unemployment in the next few years while announcing layoffs “because of AI,” they’re making your customers’ concerns worse, not better.

This episode is about what you can actually do about it. Tim offers four practical steps that let you use AI in ways that don’t put you on the wrong side of the backlash.

Key Insights for Strategic Leaders
In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

The AI favorability gap is widening. It’s a business problem, not just a PR one. 55% of US adults now believe AI will cause more harm than good, up from 44% a year ago. 26% of consumers actively oppose AI. These aren’t fringe opinions, they’re how your customers feel. If you’re using AI to grow your business, you need a strategy for addressing this, not a plan to wait it out.
Customer criticisms are built on valid ground. Job disruptions are already happening. Deep fakes and “nudify” apps demonstrate real harms. Environmental costs are real. Acknowledging the validity of your customers’ concerns isn’t a weakness. It’s your only honest starting point. Companies that dismiss concerns as irrational are setting themselves up for a backlash that’s entirely avoidable.
History offers hope, but doesn’t dismiss the short-term. Technology has been disrupting jobs since before the telephone operator. The US workforce today is more than three times larger than when “Desk Set” — a 1957 film about office workers afraid computers would take their jobs — came out. That’s the long run. As Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead. Your customers need to pay rent in the short run too. Both things can be true. And you must acknowledge those very real concerns.
Four steps to use AI without losing your customers. First, follow the law — disclosure requirements around AI are evolving rapidly, and you need competent counsel to understand your exposure. Second, understand the message you’re sending: are you helping or hurting your workforce, your community, your customers? Third, develop your own voice. Content quantity is not the goal, content quality is. Know what you want the output to sound like and feel like before you ask AI to help create it. Fourth, and most importantly: be human.
“Be human” is not a platitude — it’s the only durable strategy. Your job in marketing, sales, and customer experience is to create customers: to connect with people in ways that make them want to work with your business. That job doesn’t change when you use AI. If you’re not using AI to make your customers’ lives better, you need to ask yourself what on earth you’re using it for.
You are sending a message when you use AI. Make sure it’s the one you mean to send. Customers are already choosing not to work with businesses because of how those businesses approach AI. Ignoring their concerns won’t make them go away. It will only make it look like you don’t care. And then AI won’t be the thing the customers hate. They might just hate you too.

Whether you’re in hospitality, B2B, retail, or services — and especially if you’re the leader who has to answer “what’s our AI strategy?” while customer sentiment is moving in the wrong direction — this episode gives you a practical framework for using AI in ways that build trust rather than erode it.

55% of People Hate AI: How to Use it Without Losing Your Customers (Digital Reset Episode 493) — Headlines and Show NotesShow Notes and LinksResearch and References

The CEO Preaching Straight Talk About AI and Job Losses — WSJ
Verizon CEO: AI Is Coming for Your Job, ‘and Everyone Knows It’ — Inc.
NBC News AI Research — March 2026 Poll
Booking.com Global AI Sentiment Report 2025
The more young people use AI, the more they hate it — The Verge
AI Chatbots: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) — YouTube
Sabotage — Wikipedia
Desk Set — Wikipedia
Paul Virilio — Wikiquote
All Employees, Total Nonfarm Employment by Year — US Bureau of Labor Statistics (FRED)

Related Episodes

We Owe It To Our Customers to Make Their Lives Better (Thinks Out Loud Episode 361)
In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472)
Building a Human Brand in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud Episode 398)
AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless (Ep. 492)
Hub and Spoke Strategy: Building Traffic Beyond Any Single Platform (Ep. 491)
The New Gatekeeper Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Ep. 490)
The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Ep. 489)

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Transcript: 55% of People Hate AI: How to Use it Without Losing Your CustomersWelcome back to the show.

I’m sure you know this, but a significant group of folks hate AI. Not, “I’m not sure if I like AI,” but viscerally, passionately hate AI.

Booking.com conducted research and found that while 49% of consumers have a positive view of AI, 26% — one in four — are what they call AI detractors. They’re actively opposed to AI.

NBC News has new research that adds to the story. In their study, 22% have a “very negative” view of AI. Another 24% have a “somewhat negative” view. Again, that’s almost half of everyone surveyed has a negative view of AI.

The Wall Street Journal piled on and noted “…in a Quinnipiac University study of 1,400 adults in March, 55% said they felt AI would bring more harm than good, up from 44% in a poll last year.”

So yeah, that’s bad.

This sentiment is breaking through to the mainstream. John Oliver had a fantastic, funny, and fearlessly heartfelt segment this past week on the very real harms of AI chat. While the episode was less about the business costs of AI and more about the societal costs, it spoke to the very real fears that roughly half of America feels right now, half of the country feels right now. The episode is worth watching in its entirety, even if you don’t agree with everything Oliver said. In fact, it might be most worth watching, especially if you don’t agree with everything Oliver said. It’s important for you to hear what people think about AI.

At the very same time, lots of corporate C-suites are pushing AI everywhere, along with “crediting” AI with helping them save all kinds of money, often through job reductions. There was another Wall Street Journal article where Verizon’s CEO Dan Schulman, quote, “has predicted 20% to 30% unemployment within the next two to five years.” I love personally that he added, “I think being authentic, being realistic, telling the truth as best as you can…” is important.

Which, I mean, I applaud his sentiment. Being authentic was a fairly crucial point in last week’s episode. But, jeez, dude. Read the room. Saying that “change is necessary, but it can be difficult,” doesn’t exactly make folks feel warm and fuzzy, especially if you’re talking about depression-level unemployment. Like that’s not the positive message that I think you think it is.

I have to make a disclosure here, by the way. I’ve done work with Verizon in the past. They’re not currently a client, uh, but they could be again, unless they really hate this episode.

The point is that there’s a very real backlash that customers feel about artificial intelligence. They’re concerned about what it means for them in their day-to-day lives. 55% of people don’t think AI will do “more harm than good” because, you know, they’re excited to see what happens. Seriously.

And many of the criticisms of AI are valid. As I talked about last week, “AI slop” didn’t become a term because people love AI content and can’t get enough of it.

So if an increasingly large number of people hate AI, if an increasingly large number of your customers have real valid concerns about AI and its use, and you are still planning to use AI to help your business become more effective and efficient, then you’ve got a real problem on your hands. Not a potential problem. A genuine, real, honest to goodness problem right now.

The question then is what do you do about this problem? This is episode 493 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Today we’re talking about the AI backlash and what you can do about it. Let’s dive in.

As I mentioned before the break, various reports claim that 22% of people surveyed have a very negative view of AI, while another 24% have a somewhat negative view. 26% of people consider themselves AI detractors — they’re actively opposed to AI. And fully 55% of US adults believe that AI will cause more harm than good. That’s bad enough, but you need to know that that number was 44% a year ago. So the story for AI is not getting better.

First, we have to consider the fact that many criticisms of AI are built on valid points. To get a big one out of the way, there will be job disruptions. It’s not likely that there will be — we are seeing this in real time. Company after company is either laying people off because AI can do those jobs, or they’re saying that they’re laying people off because AI can do those jobs. I think the latter is more common than the former. I think they’re looking for something to blame the job losses on other than, you know, the economy or trying to save money or things along those lines, or trying to grow profit. But no matter what the reality is, AI is the bad guy. That’s not going to make your customers feel all that great about AI.

And if we’re being totally honest, of course AI is going to make some jobs go away. Technology of any kind always does.

I’ve told the story many times about my grandmother, Marie. Marie was a telephone operator, which at the time was one of the most common jobs for women in the country. She and her sister, when they were 24 and 26, were the only people working in their household during the Great Depression. The Depression had put their father — my great-grandfather — out of work. My grandmother and her sister paid for their family’s rent and utility bills and groceries. Today, the job that paid for their rent and utility bills and groceries doesn’t exist. They were the only two telephone operators I’ve ever met in my entire life. Technology made that job go away, period.

I want to be fair — there is a happy ending to that story. I’m going to come back to that a little bit.

So it’s safe to say that technology and automation and artificial intelligence will affect jobs for sure. There are also very real and very serious issues related to AI being used to create deep fakes and other types of misinformation, such as things like “nudify” apps and other more broad concerns. These uses are obviously terrible. Terrible. Horrible.

I’m not going to spend much time on these other than to say that anyone using AI to harm others — either individually or at scale, either as a human or as an enterprise — should be prosecuted and punished. Full stop. Period.

I am not trying to brush the criticism aside. It’s a real problem and it’s one that we need to do more to fix. But it’s going to take politicians and prosecutors to make that problem go away. It’s also not something that any credible business is doing, and if they are, they should be prosecuted and punished for it too.

Additional criticisms about electricity usage and environmental concerns also have a number of well-founded bases. I’m doing a bunch right now to learn more about this topic. I don’t feel super qualified at the moment to speak about it at any length.

What I do know is true is that you’ve heard me quote the philosopher Paul Virilio many times, who said, “when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.” Another part of that quote continues: “Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” That’s 100% true. That’s why I use the quote so often. It was true when the internet and mobile and social came along. I’ve lived through this story a number of times in my career, and some of you probably have too.

Of course, this reality is far older than just the internet. One of my family’s go-to holiday movies, “Desk Set,” stars Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and is about office workers at Christmas time worried that computers will take their jobs away. That movie came out in 1957, so almost 70 years ago. And no, I didn’t live through that one.

You probably also know that the word “sabotage” came about when a group of French workers who wore wooden shoes — they’re called “sabot” in French — interrupted production at their factories. I’m a little sad about this, but there’s a famous story that they threw their “sabots” into the machines to slow them down or wreck them, and that story apparently appears to be false, and I’m so bummed about that because that is a great story.

At any rate, though, the first use of sabotage to mean slowing down work came about very late in the 19th century and was undoubtedly inspired by fears of automation, machines, taking away jobs. Given that that was roughly 130 years ago, this is not a new problem. I am confident you could find earlier examples of workers who feared technology would take their jobs away. You know, as Maslow told us, people wanting to be able to pay rent and buy food is a fairly fundamental concern throughout human history.

The fact that we’ve heard these concerns before, strangely, gives me hope. We have lived through this problem in the past. And generally it’s worked out okay in the longer term. Yes, we still have concerns about the internet and social and mobile, mostly related to misinformation and social connections. But losing your job because of one of those technologies generally isn’t one of them.

I told you there was a happy ending around the telephone operator story. The truth is that even though telephone operator was one of the most common jobs for women roughly a hundred years ago, and today that job no longer exists, there are more women working just in the top 10 careers today than all of the women who worked when my grandmother was a telephone operator. A hundred years of technological development have created far more jobs, even in just 10 fields, than existed back then. And that’s true for men too, of course. The fact is that there are more than three times as many people working in the US today as there were when “Desk Set” came out 70 years ago, despite the 70 years of technological advancements since then. We’ve done more than survive that shipwreck. We’ve thrived because of technology.

Of course, that only matters if AI doesn’t make your job go away. Having more jobs in the long run is great. Your customers — and you — have to pay rent and buy food in the short run too, right? As Keynes famously said, “in the long run, we’re all dead.”

I am not trying to be provocative or morose about this. Instead, it’s one of those cases where two things can be true at once. The first is that AI isn’t a problem in the longer term, at least related to jobs. Probably. And the second is that we need to come up with solutions to help our customers, our communities, and our employees in the short term too.

The fact is — the truth is — that I’m not afraid of AI. If I’m afraid of anything, it’s the people using AI and making rules around AI that scare me more. Human beings, unfortunately, are very good at finding ways to be terrible to one another. As I’ve said in the past, terrorists have committed atrocities all around the world over the last few decades, and probably before that, without using AI. Sure, AI may help them do those things more successfully in the future, but the point still holds. They didn’t need AI to come up with some of these really awful things.

The real risk isn’t that AI is going to put everyone out of work. The real risk is that some CFO will — and my bigger concern is that they do so without helping people along the way. That’s what I think your customers care about more than anything else.

So yes, AI might create and is creating new risks. Your customers’ concerns exist because of how we use the tool and what steps we take — or don’t — to address those risks. That’s the reality. That’s what you’re dealing with.

Given that, I come back to the question of what do you do about it? What can you do if half of your customers hate AI? How can you use AI in ways that make your customers not hate you too?

And it’s a big question. It’s not one that has a simple answer. There are, however, four steps I’d think about.

First, follow the law. You know I’m not a lawyer. You know I don’t pretend to be one. I have no interest in being one. There are a number of disclosure laws on the books around AI in the US and in the EU, individual states in the US. You should be talking with competent, qualified counsel to understand your risks and appropriate responses for your business. Don’t ever break the law by mistake. Know what you’re doing, assess your risks, and act accordingly.

Second, understand the message that you’re sending with your company’s AI use. Verizon’s CEO talked about the ways that they’re investing in reskilling their employees, investing to help their employees reskill and help them deal with the shifting AI landscape. That is a great idea. Super cool, and something worth celebrating. They’re investing, quote, “a $20 million career transition and retraining fund for the ‘age of AI’,” unquote. That’s roughly $1,500 per person they’ve laid off. And while that may not sound like a huge number, it’s a good start. Frankly, it’s about $1,500 more than what many companies are doing.

So, I don’t know, maybe they’d want to lead with that versus “AI is gonna take away 30% of all the jobs.” Call me crazy.

When you choose to use AI, are you helping or hurting your workforce? Are you helping or hurting your community? That’s the question you should be asking. If you’re helping, how clear is it that that’s what you’re doing? How clear do you make that to your customers and to your community? There is no one-size-fits-all approach here. I can’t tell you in a single podcast episode exactly the words you should say or exactly when you should say them. But if you want to discuss on an individual level, give me a call.

The reality is you are sending a message when you choose to use AI. You need to make sure the message is the one that you mean to send.

Third, and very much to that end, develop your own voice for your brand, your business, and yourself, even when you’re using AI. Too many people — I talked about this a lot last week, so I don’t want to belabor the point — but too many people are using AI to turn out lots of content. Remember that content quantity is not your goal. It never should be. Content quality is.

Let’s just start with your voice. What is it that matters to you? What are your company’s values? What do you do? Why do you do what you do? And how do you convey that in your content and in your customer experiences every time a customer connects with you? How does that shine through in your day to day interactions?

Then when you’ve got that settled — then and only then — can you ask, how can AI help us do this more effectively or more efficiently? Because it’s only when you know what you want the output to look like, to sound like, to feel like, that you can say whether or not it’s doing a good job of reflecting you and your brand and your values.

If your goal is lots and lots and lots of cheap content, well, sure, AI can do that. But you’re creating commodity content by definition, and nobody gives a crap about commodity content.

If your goal instead is “tell a great story about our customers, their lives, and how our business helps them lead better lives,” then you have something where AI might be able to help. My favorite hospitality clients do this naturally. They want their guests to have a great experience and a comfortable, safe space to sleep or get some work done, or reconnect with their partners and kids, day after day after day. AI can become a tool to help do that better, not “the big scary monster coming to take all the jobs away.”

By the way, I need to note that while this might sound like I’m talking only about B2C businesses, B2B is also about making your customers more effective and efficient at what they do too. You are helping the folks who purchase your products and services do their jobs better, make better products and services for their customers. The same point about your values and your voice apply.

Which leads me to my final point. It’s also the most important point. And it is this: be human.

Your job is to create a customer, to connect with people in ways that make them want to work with your business. That’s what your job is in marketing and sales and customer experience every day.

I am confident that we are already seeing customers who won’t want to work with some businesses because of their approach to AI use and the impact of AI on their employees, their customers, and their community. Again, you need to ask, why are we using AI? How does it help us create better experiences for our customers? How does it help our customers in their lives?

I said sometime back that we owe it to our customers to make their lives better. I still believe that. If you’re not using AI to make your customers’ lives better, what on earth are you using it for?

None of what I’ve talked about is me saying don’t use AI. Far from it. I use AI all the time to solve all kinds of problems for my business and for my customers’ businesses. But it starts with saying, use AI in ways that are beneficial to your customers, your communities, your teams. Think about what you can and should disclose and in what ways you should do that to help your customers understand how and why you use AI. Again, maybe legal frameworks don’t require you to disclose your use, but does it make you a better member of your community if you do that?

It is clear that some customers hate AI. And it’s clear that even more have concerns about AI. It’s also clear that those concerns are built on valid points — they start from a ground truth that we need to acknowledge. We don’t know exactly how AI will affect the job market. We don’t know its long-term costs in terms of the environment or intellectual development. We are conducting real-time experiments at scale that will change the world we live in. And we have to be honest — just because we’ve seen similar shakeups in the past from internet and mobile and social, and going all the way back to the 19th century, doesn’t mean that it will all work out all right in the end this time. I’m willing to bet it will. But we know that there will be shipwrecks for sure along the way. Nothing ever comes without some costs, especially in the short term.

Your job is to acknowledge your customers’ concerns. Your job is to listen and learn from them about what they care about. And then your job is to help your customers understand what you’re doing to address those concerns. Ignoring their concerns will not make them go away — it will only make it look like you don’t care. And then AI won’t be the thing the customers hate. They just might hate you too. So maybe let’s not do that.

If this episode gave you a better picture of how you should approach AI for your business, do me a favor — send it to a colleague who’s working on AI for your organization. You might save them a world of trouble.

You can find the show notes for this episode 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 you need. You’ll find the 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.

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The cost of producing a 1,500-word article has collapsed to somewhere near zero. That’s the supply shock, one my friend Mark Schaefer has talked about for years. The more interesting question today — the one most marketing leaders haven’t priced correctly yet — is what that collapse does to everything else.

When a factor of production goes free and infinite, value doesn’t disappear. It shifts. And in marketing today, it’s shifted somewhere most content strategies aren’t looking.

Academic evidence has seen this coming. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper using Pixiv data shows that generative AI is crowding out human creators. Ahrefs data shows that 86.5% of top-ranking pages now contain some amount of AI-generated content. And Graphite.io found that the total quantity of AI-generated articles probably surpassed the quantity of human-written articles published on the web within the last couple of of years.

Additionally, research published in Nature on "model collapse" — the degraded outputs that occur when AI trains on AI output — singal a related, and more problematic reality for marketers: a "collapse to uniformity.” That’s the steady, unrelenting increase in “textual similarity” across the web since AI started publishing in the 2010s. Those similar, AI-generated outputs have accelerated ever since ChatGPT’s earliest models, and are projected to reach 90% saturation around 2035.

If that forecast holds, we’re adding roughly 10 points of uniformity — bland, boring, blah content — every year. And that means the window for you to differentiate is not some theory. It’s real. And it’s closing on you right now.

The result is two things happening simultaneously:

AI-generated content is increasingly good enough that it saturates every channel.
And human beings — who are, as I say, "pretty good bullshit detectors" — are beginning to flag content they don’t like as "AI slop.”

That second reality isn’t happening just when content was generated by a machine. It’s also happening when it doesn’t sound human enough, when it’s too corporate, too polished… too fake.

It’s fairly likely that at least 25% to 30% of your customers will actively demand authenticity within the next two to three years… if they aren’t demeaning it already. My two-to-three year forecast isn’t pulled out of thin air — it’s the sheer math of 10 points of AI detection per year building off a base of roughly 10% today.

This episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter identifies the three specific assets AI cannot reproduce:

Proprietary data
Original examples
Your expert voice

We also share a three-question framework for auditing whether your content strategy is actually building any of them.

The closing argument is my own practice of writing our podcast scripts by hand, despite having AI tools running in the background: not because I can write faster than a machine. We all know that’s not true.

Instead, it’s my experience, my beliefs, my humanity are the scarcest resource our content can put to work. That the distinction that matters — separating what is abundant from what is actually scarce. It’s the core claim I’m making this time. And it’s the one that will determine which brands still get seen in three years time… and which will have blended into the background.

Key Insights for Marketing and Business Leaders Navigating AI Content in 2026

In this episode, we break down:

AI didn’t kill content marketing — it repriced it. The cheap parts (generic explainers, commodity how-tos, undifferentiated articles) are now worth close to nothing, because anyone using AI can produce them in seconds. The expensive parts — your proprietary data, lived experiences, and genuine expert voice — have become more valuable, not less. Using AI won’t make you fail. But spending your content budget on the wrong side of that line will.
"AI slop" is the uncanny valley of content — and your customers’ bullshit detectors are already activating. People flag content as AI-generated not just when it actually is, but when it fails to sound human enough. As customers get increasingly sensitive to “AI slop” — probably by 10 points or so per year — the brands relying too heavily on overly templated, indistinct, and impersonal content will find themselves on the wrong side of a widening credibility gap. Somewhere between 25 to 30% of customers will demand clear authenticity in the next two to three years… if they’re not already.
"Collapse to uniformity" is the structural threat underneath "AI slop." The Nature paper on model collapse gets most of the attention, but the follow-on research on “textual similarity” is the more immediately relevant fact. Content on the web keeps getting steadily more similar, and has only gotten worse ChatGPT emerged on the scene.. Researchers project 90% saturation by 2035 — roughly nine years away. That means the differentiation window is not just some theoretical abstract. It is measurable, and it is closing.
The three assets AI cannot fake are proprietary data, original examples, and expert voice. Data that only you have about your customers, your market, and your industry is yours alone to report. Original examples from real customers carry the credibility of lived experience that no AI can generate. And an expert voice means being willing to make a specific, named predictions and opinions — ones you’re willing to be wrong about — because taking that risk is exactly what makes you worth listening to. Generic best practices and how-to content is dead. Your truth, your actual opinions, that you’re willing to own, is rare.
Three questions will tell you where your content strategy actually stands. What is your ratio of proprietary to commodity content in the last 90 days? When a prospect asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity about your category, what specifically about your brand shows up — and is it something only you could have said? Who on your team is your named voice, and are you amplifying their signal or burying it it in generic content calendar outputs? The answers to those three questions are the most useful content audit you can conduct.
The answer is not to publish less — it’s to publish more of what’s scarce. This episode is not about cutting volume. It’s about redirecting where you put your efforts. Publishing more of the content only you can produce — and less of the content that any AI could produce — is the allocation of time and resources that matters most. The brands that figure this out in the next two to three years are the ones customers will ask for by name. The ones that don’t will blend into the background.

Whether you’re a CMO deciding where to concentrate your content budget in 2026, a marketing leader who keeps being asked about AI, or a brand that’s already noticed its content working less well than it did a year ago, this episode gives you the framework to understand why… and what you can do about it.

AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless. (Digital Reset Episode 492) — Headlines and Show NotesShow Notes and Links* The Single Biggest Myth in Digital: Content is Expensive (Thinks Out Loud Episode 275) * Does Generative AI Crowd Out Human Creators? Evidence from Pixiv by Sueyoul Kim, Ginger Zhe Jin, Eungik Lee :: SSRN and Does Generative AI Crowd Out Human Creators? Evidence from Pixiv | NBER * w34733.pdf * 74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages) * More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans * AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data | Nature * [2404.01413] Is Model Collapse Inevitable? Breaking the Curse of Recursion by Accumulating Real and Synthetic Data and 2404.01413 * Future of AI Models: A Computational perspective on Model collapse * Three reasons why brand is more important in the AI Era – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} * Mark Schaefer and The Most Human Company Wins – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} * The most human company wins: A case study – Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} * Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491) * The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast) – Tim Peter & Associates * The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) * Why AI Gives Your Customer Different Answers… Every Time * The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) – Tim Peter & Associates * Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) * The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) * What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482) * AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) * What Taylor Swift Can Teach You About Bypassing Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 393)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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 AppearancesRutgers Business School MSDM Speaker Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

Free DownloadsWe 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.

Subscribe to Digital Reset (formerly Thinks Out Loud)* Subscribe on Apple Podcasts * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe on Amazon Music * Watch all episodes on YouTube * Subscribe via RSS Feed

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Past Insights from Tim Peter ThinksTechnical Details for Digital Reset (formerly Thinks Out Loud)Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 21m 52s

Transcript: AI Made Content Free. Here’s What It Made Priceless.Welcome back to the show.

A few years ago, I made the claim that content wasn’t expensive. Instead, I said that content that doesn’t convert was expensive.

Today, that’s not really true either. Not because you want content that doesn’t convert. I mean, really.

But AI has essentially driven the cost of producing content to zero. You need a 1,500-word article or a 15-second video? A quick prompt, and you’ll have what you need within minutes, if not seconds.

Sure, there’s some nominal cost to you for the AI platform you’re using. And crafting a solid prompt might take you a few minutes, assuming you don’t already have an effective process or a library of prompts to work from. Both of those are still orders of magnitude cheaper than what content creation used to cost.

Hell, according to Ahrefs, 74-plus percent of all newly created web pages contained AI-generated content.

I mean, I know I use AI all the time as part of my workflow, and I’m pretty sure if you’re watching or listening to this episode, you do too. That’s part of the point.

When everyone has access to the same tools, when the tools become part of our ambient reality, the outputs of those tools become ambient reality too. We are all contributing to the flood every day, all by ourselves.

Now, before we get started, I want to be clear. Today’s episode is not anti-AI. I use AI. Clearly I’m in favor of it. Instead, it’s about the costs of marketing and where we want to and need to invest our budget and time.

For example, I had Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT doing work in the background while I was writing this script. And they took less time to complete their tasks than even writing this introduction did.

So why did I bother writing the intro at all? Why not just let AI do it?

And that gets to the core of what we need to talk about today. Because the volume of effectively free content that’s flooding the internet has driven up costs somewhere else. As content has become free and abundant, something else — something more critical — has become expensive and scarce.

And that something else, when done well, is what will differentiate your brand and it will help you stand apart in the marketplace.

That something else is what AI can’t reproduce. It can’t generate. It can’t hallucinate. It can’t fake.

Your lived experiences, your real-world relationships, your personal touches with your customers, and a genuine voice all your own are what actually are worth cultivating. When content becomes a commodity, your human connection to your customers becomes the most scarce asset of all.

Building that asset, growing it, and nurturing it is what is going to set you apart in a flood of free, fake content. In fact, I’m going to argue in this episode that you’ve got no more than two to three years to get this right. And getting it right is what will make your brand one customers will ask for by name today and in the future.

This is episode 492 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in.

It’s abundantly clear that AI-generated content is here and that it’s absolutely flooding digital spaces every single day. You do not need me to tell you that. You see it every single day.

If you’re interested in some of the economic underpinnings though, there’s a National Bureau of Economic Research paper from Kim, Jin, and Lee, published earlier this year, that used Pixiv data and shows that generative AI crowded out human creators. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Similarly, research last year from Ahrefs said that "86.5% of top-ranking pages contained some amount of AI-generated content." That’s a quote. While I have a few quibbles with their methodology, I’m relatively convinced that a fairly healthy chunk of content on the web involves AI in its production somewhere along the way, just as their research found. And again, I’ll link to their research in the show notes.

Finally, some research from Graphite.io claims that, and this is a quote, "The quantity of AI-generated articles has surpassed the quantity of human-written articles being published on the web." They claim, contra Ahrefs’ findings, that these articles "largely do not appear in Google and ChatGPT." They also ignore "AI-generated/human-edited articles," while noting that "they may be even more prevalent." Ya think?

And yes, I’ll link to their research in the show notes too.

The point is that AI-generated content is everywhere online. It’s a core part of how content comes into being today. Most of that content is, at minimum, pretty okay, and some of it is actually quite good. I’m willing to bet that you are seeing that same reality.

At the same time, AI-generated materials are so common now that we’re starting to see a bit of a backlash lately, with lots of folks talking about "AI slop" showing up in search and on their social media timelines.

That slop critique hints at the problem. It kind of gets at the core of the problem. It’s a flashing red light that says, "we need to start doing something different." And I’m going to come back to that in just a minute.

Before I do though, there’s one other signal that I have to address that shows why we need to think beyond AI content. It’s called model collapse, and it points to a likely reality your "free" content faces longer term. In fact, it’s something you might even be dealing with today.

The basic principle behind model collapse came from a paper published in Nature by Shumailov and his team — all the way back, way, way back in July of 2024 — so less than two years ago. It found that, and this is a quote, "indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models."

In simple English, what their research showed was that training artificial intelligence on AI-generated content generally leads to increasingly bad outputs over time, much the same way that making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy will get blurrier and blurrier until eventually the output is unusable. Shumailov’s team rightly worries that as large language models get trained on the increasing amounts of AI-generated content on the web, those LLMs will produce worse results over time. That concern seems 100% valid if we agree about the photocopy example, right?

It’s also apparently not likely to happen in practice. Because follow-up research from Gerstgrasser, Schaeffer, Day, and Rafailov shows that as long as there’s at least some original human data in the model — you know, like all the web content produced before ChatGPT emerged — we’re probably fine.

But — and this is a key point — there is a related term we do need to think about. It’s called "collapse to uniformity." A group of researchers, while testing the idea of model collapse, discovered that, and again, this is a quote, "textual similarity has been steadily increasing since 2013, with a significant acceleration from 2018 to 2022, coinciding with the public release of…" ChatGPT’s earliest models. So that would be ChatGPT 2.0 and ChatGPT 3.0.

They go on to say that "the ecosystem may reach 90% saturation around 2035," and then just get worse from there.

While 2035 may sound like a long way off, that’s less than nine years from now. If you are younger than say 50, that will occur in your career. Also, if we’re going to hit 90% in less than nine years time, it suggests that we’re hitting some percentage of it today. And I suspect that we’re going to see an increase of roughly 10 points every year from now until then. I mean, if you think about it, that’s just logical. If we’re going to be at 90% roughly nine years from now, we’ll be at 80% eight years from now, and 70% seven years from now, and 50% five years from now, and 30% three years from now.

Which is where the AI slop criticism becomes so critical.

Human beings generally are pretty good — and I’m gonna use a technical term here — they’re pretty good bullshit detectors. Sure, not everyone’s good at it to an equal degree. And sure, we all have our blind spots where we can get fooled. I know I do. But human beings are generally pretty good at sniffing out when something sounds fake.

If you’ve ever heard of "the uncanny valley" in video games or CGI, it’s where a human face looks very close to real, but not close enough, and people find it disturbing. Our brains just won’t let us accept it as real. Think about a movie like The Polar Express. It just weirded people out because it was in that uncanny valley — close to real, but not quite close enough.

AI slop, to me, is the uncanny valley of AI-generated content. AI-generated content sometimes doesn’t sound human enough and sets off your customers’ bullshit detectors, and they flag it as AI slop. They’re the first 10% this year noting that something seems off in what companies and creators they’re listening to are saying.

The funny thing about this is that sometimes people online accuse creators of AI slop even when a human being actually created the content. And it’s not because it was AI-generated. It was because it didn’t sound human, or at least human enough. It was too corporate. It was too polished. It was too fake.

I’d argue as more people get wary about the text patterns and speech patterns of AI, they’re going to also get more wary of corporations and creators relying on heavily polished statements. Marketing thought leaders — including people like me — have claimed for years that it’s important to be authentic when you speak to your customers.

If we’re picking up 10 points of AI detection every year, it’s likely that a healthy chunk of customers — 25 to 30% — will demand that you be real, that you be clearly real, in the next couple of years, if they’re not already demanding it of you today. That’s where I got that two-to-three year number in the intro.

By the way, as a quick aside, I cannot talk about this topic any further without referencing my very good friend, Mark Schaefer. Mark has written extensively on this topic and has influenced my thinking significantly. His mantra about how the most human company wins in the age of AI echoes in my brain almost every single day. I cite him in my book. He’s just a key, key speaker on this topic that you want to know about. I’m going to link to some of his thoughts in the show notes, and I would encourage you to check those out and follow him regularly.

At any rate, that’s why focusing on human connection to your customer isn’t just scarce. It’s the most precious asset you can build. Your voice — the true you — is the most precious asset you can build.

That’s why your content can no longer just be a generic explainer or a how-to video. They’re dead. They don’t work anymore. They don’t matter.

Instead, you have true, scarce, valuable assets that your content must put to work today. What are they? Well, they include several things.

The first is proprietary data. Data that you have, that you can see, and that no one else can about your customers, your market, your industry, and the world at large is something that no one else can talk about with the genuine expertise and insight that you bring to the table. It’s your story to tell, and you need to tell it if you’re going to stand apart from generic AI-generated drivel.

The second are original examples. Talk about what you’ve lived in real life — your customers, your projects, your outcomes, your experiences. There’s a reason I talk about my hotel clients and other businesses I’ve worked with on this podcast, and that’s because no one else has those specific experiences. They back up my thinking and research with real-world examples that no one else can claim. It works for my business. It’ll work for yours too.

The third, of course, is expert voice. Your expert voice. Did you notice my two-to-three year timeline that I mentioned earlier? That’s my opinion. I don’t have anything other than my expertise, my experience, and my assessment of the data that exists to back that up. I could be wrong. I could absolutely be wrong. Maybe it’s four years. Maybe it’s one and a half years. I don’t know, but I’m willing to put my name on it and make a prediction to stand out from the crowd. I’m willing to take the risk of being wrong because I believe it will help you now and it will help you in the future. And candidly, because it will help others know who I am too. If I’m right, everybody wins. If I’m wrong, I will either learn and improve — or no one should listen to me anyway. Right? Period.

Together, those three attributes help me build a connection with my clients and listeners to the podcast and audiences on social media. They all work together to build the Digital Reset brand and to foster a community of like-minded individuals who are committed to learning and growing together. That same approach can work for you too.

Here’s how I would do it.

Start by asking yourself three questions this week.

First, what is our ratio of proprietary to commodity content over the last 90 days? Are we building named assets all our own, or just generic outputs that any AI could produce?

Two, when a potential customer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity about our category, what specifically about us shows up? Is it a reference that could have been written only by us? Or could it have been written by anyone? One of those is better for your brand long-term than the other, as you might expect.

Three, who on our team is our named voice? Are we amplifying their signal? Are we boosting their signal? Or do they get buried in the content calendar of just generic stuff we put out there? Think about which of those has a future too.

One big takeaway these questions should point you to is to focus on what makes you… you. What makes your brand stand apart? What makes you distinct? What makes you different from anyone else in the space — and different enough that people will listen to you, and different enough that eventually people will give you money? Not for your content, but for the solutions and products and services that you offer. That’s where you want to live. That’s where you need to live — because in two to three years, if you don’t already live there, you are in big, big trouble.

Also, I don’t want you to listen to this episode and necessarily think, "we need to publish less content." I mean, sure, this is about quality over quantity. Absolutely true. But it’s about publishing more of what’s scarce and less about publishing what’s already abundant.

That’s why I wrote the introduction to this episode — and the whole episode, for that matter. Not because I can write faster or cheaper than artificial intelligence. I can’t.

But because only I can produce the most scarce resource of all: me. For better or worse, when you’re hearing these episodes — when you’re watching them on YouTube or listening to them on Spotify — you’re hearing my experiences, you’re hearing my data, you’re hearing my voice. And that will be true today, two to three years from now, and for as long as you’re willing to keep listening.

AI did not kill content marketing. AI will not kill content marketing. What it’s done is make the cheap parts worthless and the expensive parts crucial. Your job is to know which is which. Your job is to put your focus on the parts that are crucial. And it’s to do that now and in the longer term too. And if you get that right, you don’t have to worry about the next two to three years or the next nine. You’ll be in great shape no matter what happens.

If this episode gave you a clearer picture of how you should approach content marketing in the age of AI, do me a favor. Send it to a colleague who’s thinking about that problem for your business. You might just save them from going down the wrong path.

You can find the show notes from this episode as well as the full archive of all past episodes by going to 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 you need. You’ll find the link for that in the show notes too.

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.

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Your marketing goal should be to win no matter what happens in the digital space. Yes, the channels your customers choose first change all the time. We’ve gone through search and social and now AI. Just remember that tomorrow could be something else altogether. You don’t want to chase channels. You want a strategy that works no matter what. And that’s what the “Hub and Spoke” and “CORE” methodologies are all about.

The CORE Methodology is a framework for choosing the right channels to market your company. Your “Hub and Spoke” is about how you use those channels — the spokes — to grow your hub (website, CRM, community).

Together, both work to ensure you win no matter what. This Foundation episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter breaks down what you need to know so you can win no matter what happens with AI… or whatever comes next.

Key Insights for Marketing Strategy Leaders Navigating the Shift to AI

The spoke tax has expanded. When the original episode was recorded, your concern was Google’s algorithm changes. Today, it extends to zero-click AI search, ChatGPT ads, and social platform reach erosion. The gatekeeper problem has grown, not just changed.
Your hub is now your primary AI defense. When AI gives your customers answers without sending them anywhere, only brand recognition that’s strong enough to generate direct/named search protects you. That’s the hub. And that’s what it matters.
Prompt Brand Equity is your new SEO objective. How frequently your brand appears in AI responses must replace rank position as your key AI search metric. The Core and Explore methodology is the discipline you must adopt for building that frequency in a systematic way.
Thinks Out Loud is now Digital Reset. The same show you’ve always loved. The same host you’ve come to know. Sharper focus on building your brand beyond Big Tech.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy (Digital Reset Foundations 491) — Headlines and Show NotesShow Notes and Links* The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) * The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) * The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488) * The Foundation: From Card Catalogs to Concierges — Your SEO + GEO Blueprint (Digital Reset Podcast) * The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) * The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490) * How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424) * Partnerships Between Brands and Creators Will Define the Next Generation of Travel Marketing | HSMAI Americas * Can Podcasting Help Your Business Bypass the Big Tech Gatekeepers? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 413) * What Connects TikTok and the Hub and Spoke Model of Digital? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 299) * Big Trends: Bundling, Unbundling, and Customer Acquisition (Thinks Out Loud Episode 411) * How to Engage Your Hotel’s Secret Sales Force * Where Content, Community, and Customer Experience Meet (Thinks Out Loud Episode 346) – Tim Peter & Associates * Customer Experience is Queen? What Does That Mean? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 190) – Tim Peter & Associates * Big Digital Marketing Trends: Customer Experience is Cool (Thinks Out Loud Episode 375) * Content is King, Customer Experience is Queen (Thinks Out Loud Episode 188) – Tim Peter & Associates * The Future of Email Marketing — Interview with Scott Cohen from InboxArmy (Thinks Out Loud Episode 410) * Revisiting How to Escape Big Tech’s Web (Thinks Out Loud) * The Rebirth of Trusted Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 307) – Tim Peter & Associates * What Taylor Swift Can Teach You About Bypassing Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 393) * Is Social Media Anti-Social for your Brand Now? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 391) * How To Perform a Health Check for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 388)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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 AppearancesRutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

Free DownloadsWe 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

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Technical Details for Thinks Out LoudRecorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 25m 35s

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Transcript: Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke StrategyGatekeepers always offer you a shortcut, at least at first. That’s what I talked about in episode 489, and it’s why ChatGPT started charging brands $200,000 to advertise alongside answers that used to appear organically for free. That shortcut eventually becomes a toll road, always.

I glossed over one key detail in that episode.

The way out of the shortcut trap isn’t a better tactic. It’s a strategy. That strategy is what the episode you’re about to hear is all about.

A quick note before we dive in. If you’ve been listening for a while, you may know this show as Thinks Out Loud. We’ve rebranded to Digital Reset. The same show. Same host. Sharper focus on what you actually need to navigate AI and digital change right now.

The episode you’re about to hear was originally recorded in June, 2024 when everyone was worried about what Google might do next. I think you’ll find it’s aged remarkably well.

The framework at the center of this episode is the "Hub and Spoke." The hub is the audience you own: your website, your email list, your direct relationships.

The spokes are everyone else’s audience: search and social and AI and creators and employees and customers and press. The job of the spokes has always been the same: Grow the hub, not replace it, grow it.

In 2024, that was a good strategy. In 2026, it’s survival.

Your hub is your only durable defense against platform risk, including AI. So sit back and enjoy our foundation episode, “Win No Matter What: The Hub and Spoke Strategy.”

Let’s do this.

There are four ways to succeed:

You either get more new customers, you know, reach people you haven’t reached before.
You get your existing customers to spend more per purchase. Now, as I said last time, that’s more from a revenue perspective. From a traffic perspective, it might be that you get them to engage with more content each time they interact with your brand. Obviously, though, you only really care if they do that, if that’s going to lead to them spending more with you each time they purchase.
You can get existing customers to buy more often. And again, if you think about the traffic side, it could be that you get them to interact with you more often.
And of course you can do a combination of the other three. Get more new people who come to you and spend more each time, who come to you more often, and obviously that becomes, you know, a wind piled on top of a wind piled on top of a wind, and that’s a really, really good thing.

If, though, you are worried about where you find these folks and how you reach these folks and you get them to do this, I always like to start with where you are first. Where does your traffic and revenue come from today? I assume that you’re using Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics or something along those lines to understand your traffic and revenue sources.

Whenever I start with a new client, whenever we start with a new client, we tend to look at the last 13 to 18 months of traffic and revenue. Then, we might look at a shorter period like the last two or three months, and then we might look at the last few weeks, a week at a time, to get a sense of what’s going on.

Looking at the longer periods helps you to understand if there’s any seasonality. You know, does your company get more business some times of the year than others? That can help you understand if there are different demand patterns or if there’s something that you can do differently to get more traffic and business at some points in the year.

If you’re not accustomed to seasonality, if your business doesn’t have it, it’s pretty common in many businesses. I talk about hospitality a lot. Hospitality tends to have very well defined peak seasons, off seasons, and what are known as “shoulder seasons,” between the peak and off season. We also see it in B2B a lot more than you think, too, based on budget cycles, you know, things like quarter end, year end, start of the new year, that sort of thing.

Getting a sense of that picture is really important because it can point you to traffic sources that you can build on, or revenue sources that you can build on.

It is sometimes easier to increase the traffic you get from existing sources, than it is to find or create entirely new sources of traffic and revenue. If you’re already getting traffic and revenue from a specific source, that’s a pretty good sign it’s something that works for your customers. And then it becomes more a question of how do we grow that source rather than “Oh my gosh, we don’t get any traffic outside of Google. Where do we go?” So it’s always a good place to start to look at the reality and understand are there any seasonal patterns that play into that. Are there times where you can expect more traffic or less traffic just as a natural consequence of where that comes from and of your customer’s natural behaviors?

The next thing that you want to do is ensure that you have a content calendar. Now, I talked in the last episode quite a bit about understanding your customers as well as you possibly can and what your customers pain points are.

We love doing this because it allows us to line up specific messages with specific seasonality where it exists. Again, if you don’t have seasonality, don’t worry about it, but there are natural things that occur during the course of your business year or occur in the natural course of your customers lives that might lead them to look for your product and service more often.

That’s really important then that you have a calendar that aligns with that. And we always think in terms of a “rock/pebbles/sand” approach.

Your rocks are the big items, the things that you know will happen, and you can plan those out weeks or months or maybe even a year in advance. You know, again, if I’m going to use the hospitality example, summer is a peak period for many, many companies, for many, many resorts, for many, many hotels. If you’re a ski resort, we know ski season is a big peak period. Well, we can put a rock saying, we need to start talking about this X weeks before, months in advance, even a year in advance.

If you’re a B2B company, maybe it’s a big trade show that occurs every year. We worked with a software company for years that went to Dreamforce every year, and that was a rock, because they knew when it occurred. If you’re, I don’t know, a restaurant, and you know the Super Bowl is going to be in your town next year, you can start planning your content for that.

Now, because we already know when that’s going to occur, we already know when there’s going to be more demand in your market. You then start to fill the calendar with pebbles.

And the pebbles are little things, smaller things, more tactical, but messages that you want to dribble out over the course of the year, that fill in some of the spaces between the rocks, right? If you think about we’re putting rocks, pebbles, and sand in a jar, you put the rocks in first, and then there’s spaces between them, and that’s where the pebbles go.

And you can plan those weeks, or even a couple of months in advance. Usually about 90 days is pretty typical.

And then the sand is small little tactical stuff. Maybe they’re social media posts. Maybe they are little blog posts or quick little videos that you’re going to put up on your website. And those get sprinkled in where there’s space.

It’s okay if you have a period where you don’t have anything to say. Just make sure that you’re doing that intentionally, you’re choosing not to speak there, you’re choosing not to create content and put it out there because it doesn’t work for your customer at that time of year. It’s only a mistake if you completely ignore your customer’s behaviors and you’re not taking advantage of it.

Now, one of the reasons that search has worked for so long is because everyone searches and they’re literally telling you what’s most important to them. Google didn’t get to an $80 billion per quarter revenue company, a $300-plus billion annual company in revenue, by ignoring what people typed into the search box every day.

Instead, they listened to those, they interpreted those searches, and they gave customers what they were looking for both in the search results and in the way they’ve modified the search results over the years to put the information in front of customers quickly and easily. That’s how we’ve ended up in this place in the first place.

Look at your site search, if you have it, as well as the terms that are driving traffic to you because those are the things that customers are saying are important. You can use tools like Google Search Console, you can use tools like Google Analytics to look at your site search. You can use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to look at the types of terms that your company and your competitors rank for to get a sense of the kinds of messages and the kinds of information that your customers are looking for.

Now you’ll note, in all of this, we haven’t talked about channels yet. We’ve always been talking about how do we understand our customer, how do we understand our objectives, how do we understand our content. And the reason is because the channel and the format come last.

First, you have to understand who are you talking to and what do they need to hear you say? Then you can think about “Where do I say this and in what form do I say this?”

We have always used a framework called “Hub and Spoke,” where the hub are things you control, and the spokes are things other people control.

One way to think of it is, your audience is the hub, and the spokes are other people’s audiences, you’re leveraging other people to help you reach those folks.

The hub is your audience. It’s the people who are actively seeking you out. It’s your website. It’s your app. It’s your email list or your CRM. And I’m going to come back to that in more detail in a minute.

But I want to start in detail talking about the spokes. The spokes are other people’s audience. And the job of the spokes is to grow the hub. You don’t just go out on the spokes for no reason. Ideally, you turn those spokes into customers. But when you turn them into customers, even if they buy on a spoke, you should have some contact information for them that goes into your CRM, which allows them to come back to your website or your app the next time directly without being on a spoke.

So the spoke is where we’re working with other people’s audiences. Google, obviously, has long been the biggest. It’s the whole reason we’re having this conversation.

Obviously, social is huge too. So that could be Instagram, it could be Facebook, it could be TikTok if you’re B2C, if you’re selling directly to consumers. It might be LinkedIn if you’re a B2B company, selling to businesses. You know, LinkedIn is my go to social network, but they are places where you connect with other people through other people.

It also doesn’t mean you’re creating your own content. You may be partnering with creators who have a big audience, or have, I shouldn’t even say “a big audience;” they have “the right audience.” They’re talking to your customers.

So you might partner with creators. You might work with them to say, “Hey, can you help us craft a good message for our customers who you also happen to be talking with?” That could be a partnership. It could be something where you’re paying them. It could be where you’re commenting and engaging with others content, but to be a valuable member of the community first. You’re not just going in there and saying, “Hey, let me jump into your conversation and promote me.” It could be you’re engaging with them in a really effective way by being a member of their community and then letting that organically grow into people knowing about you from that over time.

I wrote a piece of research for meta platforms and HSMAI a few years ago during the pandemic on how you can research your other creators and learn about other creators and work with other creators over time. I definitely recommend you checking that out. I’ll have the link in the show notes. But the point is that you’re letting the creators help tell a positive story on your brand’s behalf.

Another type of creator you might want to think about are your employees. I’ve worked with many companies who’ve had great success with an employee engagement program where you’re leveraging your employees social networks to talk about your products and services. You help your team understand what they should be talking about, you provide them some guidelines, you provide them some content assets, and you provide them some recognition for the work that they do. Could be a thank you, could be they win an internal contest, it could be that they get a, you know, a bonus or something along those lines. But it’s all about engaging the employees in telling a positive story.

I will be very clear, this works better for some companies than others because sometimes your employees are very representative of your company and sometimes they’re not, so you have to be clear about that. But when it works, it can work tremendously well and you’re increasing your network by the size of your total employees times the size of their network.

The other great form of engagement that you can work with as creators are your customers. Your secret sales forces, I call them, when they talk on ratings and review sites. You’ve heard me say a billion times on this show that customer experience is queen. And the reason that’s so is you want to create an experience that your customers want to talk about, that they want to talk about positively to their network.

The average person on social, whether it’s your employee, whether it’s your customer, has about 200 friends and family and fans and followers on social. So, how are you engaging them to tell a really positive story about your company and about your business? Well, you’re doing that through the experience that they get.

You also can look to PR. Are there, you know, and when I say PR, we can talk about traditional journalists or we can talk about people who are, you know, creators and what they’re doing. How are you creating a great experience that they want to share, that they want to talk about? Your goal is to build a community of people who want to tell a positive story on your behalf, whether that’s journalists, whether that’s creators, whether that’s employees, whether that’s customers.

All of these are people who have an audience that you can build off of. And of course, there’s all sorts of other things you can do. Direct mail, loyalty programs, conferences and trade shows, trade organizations, traditional advertising, paid media, etc. But the point is, you’re looking for the ones that work for your business and help you connect to your customers.

Another thing you might want to look at is what types of content do your customers engage with? Are they engaging with written articles either on your own site like a blog or on using other people’s audiences like a spoke? Are you writing in a trade journal if you’re a B2B company? Are you writing it, you know, are you getting coverage in a An online magazine if you are a B2C company.

You can do things like polls. You can do things like video and images and audio, like, I don’t know, podcasts. Now, I want to be very clear. You don’t necessarily need to do the video. You don’t necessarily need to do the audio. You don’t necessarily need to do the poll. Those can be great places to partner with creators who do that well.

The reality, though, is you want to give the people who create those something worth talking about. So, for instance, if you’re doing a podcast, why are you a good podcast guest? You find somebody who is a podcaster who speaks to your audience. What makes you a good guest?

I get pitches every day from people who say, Oh, we’ve got somebody who’d be a terrific guest for your podcast. And it’s clear they’ve never listened to the show once. Not at all. They don’t understand the show. They don’t get the show. And they’re saying, we’ve got somebody who wants to come on and talk about, you know I don’t know, women’s fashion. Nothing against women’s fashion, but it’s clearly not something we have anything to do with. They’re not being a good part of the community.

Another thing you can do is think about images. Think about things on Pinterest or Instagram. Now, the term infographics? Nobody uses any longer, but the idea of beautiful data visualizations still always works as a content mechanism. I have clients who have tremendous success with this. If you have research that’s important to your customer and you can package it in a way that’s beautiful, folks will share it on your behalf. You could do this in B2B with “Here’s something you want to know about the market today.” You can do it in B2C. You know, “Here’s a hot trend in—I don’t know—women’s fashion that you really should know about.” Right?

But the point is you’re trying to engage other people’s audience. And the way you’re going to do that is engage those people to want to share your story. You have to give them something. You have to give them a hook that’s going to be interesting to them.

The thing that you want to remember is the point is to get it to grow your audience, your hub. That’s the job of any of these spokes. And there’s a model we use for picking these. You’re not going to do every single one of these. I’m just giving you, you know, ten different high level ideas. The reality is you don’t have the resources to do all ten. So keep in mind what we call “Core and Explore.”

Remember when I talked about where your traffic and business comes from today, where’s 80% of that? What’s the 80% that’s most important to you? That’s where you should be putting most of your efforts. That’s your “Core.”

Then spend maybe 20% of your time on “Explore,” finding new channels, finding new opportunities. You’re not exploring for its own sake, though. You want to find things that can become part of your core over time.

And we use a framework that I call CORE to choose those:

Customers
Outcomes
Resources
Execution.

So, Customers. Are your customers on that channel? Do they use or interact with that channel regularly?

Outcomes. Is this an effective platform for delivering your key message? Can it help you reach more of the people you want to reach and drive more business? And most importantly, does it actually drive more business? As you test it, are you seeing positive business results from it?

Resources. Do you have the knowledge and the skills needed to use this platform effectively? If not, how will you close those gaps? That’s a great place where working with a creator can work for you because they already know how to close those gaps.

And of course, Execution. What is your plan? What are your next steps to get started?

So as you evaluate potential channels, look at “Customers, Outcomes, Resources, Execution (CORE),” and determine which ones work best for you.

Once you’ve answered those questions, take your plan out and test it. And as you learn, see if you can make it part of your core activities. Ultimately, that’s where we’re going to go.

Now you’ll note in all this I haven’t talked about search because my concern is how Google is going to change search over time. I also want to be clear, search isn’t completely going away.

What’s also true is that the best way to beat Google at its own game is to have customers search for you by name. Every single one of these activities that I’ve mentioned could actually increase your search traffic. The difference is, customers won’t be looking for, you know, “generic service near me,” “hotels near…,” or, “restaurants near…,” or “businesses who solve X problem.” They’ll be searching for you by name. And that’s the long game.

Because then no matter what Google does, you win:

If search clicks, if search traffic starts to decline because of the changes Google makes to the user experience, you’ll be building long term brand equity and social connections and your email and CRM capabilities and your community that allows you to connect with customers through other people’s audiences and through your own hub.
And if search continues to drive lots of traffic, well, you’ll get more of that too. So you win no matter how you slice it. Which is ultimately the goal we’re looking for.

So to recap everything we’ve talked about the last two weeks

Think in terms of do we understand our customers?
Do we understand where our traffic and revenue come from and can we build on those?
Do we have a content calendar that works?
Are we working on using the Spokes to grow our Hub?
Are we testing about 20% of the time using a “Core and Explore “approach and looking to move those channels into the core by evaluating them from a Customers perspective, from an Outcomes perspective, from a Resources perspective, and from an Execution perspective?
And remember, finally, that it’s okay if people keep searching for you, and you keep turning up in search, especially if they search for you by name, because then you win no matter what Google does.

And that’s the whole point of this, is to make sure that no matter what anybody does, you’re still in a position to succeed. I can’t wait to see what you do.

I want to close this episode with something I said at the end of the original recording. I think it’s very much worth repeating. The best way to beat any gatekeeper at their own game is when customers ask for you by name. It is not about relying on a platform. It’s not about buying ads, just your brand by name every time.

That was true of Google in June of 2024. It’s true of ChatGPT in April, 2026, and it’ll be true of whatever comes next. The long game doesn’t change.

If you want a practical playbook for playing that long game in an AI first world, check out my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. The link is in the show notes at timpeter.com/podcasts.

Also subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming and connect with me on LinkedIn. Just search Tim Peter. Or email me at podcast@timpeter.com. I always love hearing from you.

This has been Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Thanks for being here. I’ll talk with you next time. Take care everybody.

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ChatGPT launched ads in its responses earlier this year. But they weren’t for everybody. They couldn’t be. Their ads came saddled with a $60 CPM and a $200,000 minimum spend. That pricing is roughly in line with prime-time NFL inventory. Naturally, the tightly-managed pilot started with only around 600 advertisers.

OpenAI might be new to the gatekeeper game, but they sure understand how to collect a tax on the traffic they offer. According to CNBC, OpenAI’s ad pilot crossed $100 million in annualized revenue in under two months.

Now, Search Engine Land is reporting that OpenAI is bringing self-serve access — and getting rid of the $200,000 minimum — this month.

Early performance data around ChatGPT’s ads isn’t as simple as OpenAI’s robust revenue headline suggests. One trade publication put it bluntly: "ChatGPT’s first advertisers can’t prove their ads worked."

The big picture is more complicated though. Yes, click-through rates are low and reporting tools have had challenges. But Criteo — the first ad-tech partner integrated with ChatGPT on the pilot — says that LLM-referred users convert at roughly 1.5 times the rate of other referral channels.

Why? Because it looks like ChatGPT’s ads are a brand awareness channel, not a performance marketing one… at least for now.

This episode of the podcast serves as the paid-media companion to Episode 489’s "The Long Game." The shortcut trap that Tim described in the last episode — where every new gatekeeper offers cheap access early, then raises the toll — is coming for AI.

The question for you isn’t whether you should advertise on AI platforms. Instead, it’s what are you you’re building while the rates are still relatively low… and whether your brand has organic signal worth amplifying in the first place.

This episode of the podcast delivers a three-question framework to help you make the right decision around ChatGPT’s ads. Tim also explains why OpenAI almost certainly will have to change how their ad model works — and why that might make now potentially the cheapest moment to learn how this channel will work for your business.

Key Insights for Marketing and Business Leaders Navigating AI Advertising
In this episode, Tim Peter breaks down:

Self-serve access changes the conversation. ChatGPT ads launched with a $200,000 minimum spend — an enterprise brand decision by design. With self-serve confirmed for April (Search Engine Land, CNBC), this moves from a Fortune 500 budget question to a decision every marketing leader will face. Here’s what to know before that question lands in your next meeting.
The performance reality is mixed. Early data shows low click-through rates but strikingly higher conversion rates for users who do click. Criteo, the first ad-tech partner in the ChatGPT pilot, reports LLM-referred users convert at roughly 1.5x the rate of other channels. This is a brand awareness channel, not direct response. Know which one you need before you commit.
OpenAI has to change the model. That’s good news for early testers. ChatGPT’s $100 million in annualized ad revenue is impressive. It’s also 4% of 1% of Google’s annual search ad revenues. For OpenAI to reach the scale their investors need, they have to grow that number more than 2,500 times. The current format — ads shown to fewer than 20% of users, and even then only at the bottom of the page — is almost certainly not the final version. Which means right now may be the cheapest moment to learn how this channel works.
Three questions before you commit a dollar. What does the AI actually know about your brand right now? Are you building something that persists after the campaign ends, or just renting visibility that falls to zero when you stop spending? And would the investment still matter if the platform changed its algorithm tomorrow? Those three questions are where your decision lives.
AI advertising that compounds looks different from AI advertising that doesn’t. Campaigns that drive email capture, loyalty program enrollment, app downloads, or other forms of first-party data collection build assets that last long after your ad spend stops. That’s equity. Traffic to a website that returns to zero when the campaign ends is rent. Rent isn’t wrong; sometimes it’s necessary. But knowing which one you’re buying is mandatory.
The long game applies in paid media too. The brands that will win aren’t the ones who wait. They also aren’t the ones who expected direct-response ROI from a brand awareness channel. They’re the ones who tested while it was cheap, drove direct relationships, and built first-party data assets that drive returns, again and again.

Whether you’re a CMO deciding how to allocate a test budget, a marketing manager preparing for the question from your CEO, or a small business owner trying to understand what’s happening in AI advertising, this episode of the show gives you the framework to answer the right questions before you commit.

The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490) — Headlines and Show NotesShow Notes and Links* OpenAI ads pilot tops $100 million in annualized revenue in under 2 months – CNBC * ChatGPT hits $100 million in ad revenue and is opening self-serve access in April – Search Engine Land * Criteo Joins OpenAI Advertising Pilot in ChatGPT – Criteo * ‘Still finding its feet’: Underwhelming early returns for ChatGPT Ads | Campaign US * Advertising – Worldwide | Statista Market Forecast * AI search ad spending will climb with consumer adoption * US Digital Advertising Statistics & Market Data 2026 * OpenAI CEO and CFO Diverge on IPO Timing — The Information * The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AI (Digital Reset Episode 489) * The AI Coin Flip: Why AI Gives Every Customer a Different Answer (Digital Reset Episode 488) * Agentic Commerce: ChatGPT Bails on Its Shopping Plans (Digital Reset Episode 487) * The AI Value Gap: Why 82% of Companies are Failing to Gain from AI (Digital Reset Episode 486) * Best of the Show: In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing * The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Digital Reset Episode 484) * What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Business (Digital Reset Episode 481)

Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big TechTim 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.

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Transcript: The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing BudgetWelcome back to the show. Last week I laid out the shortcut trap, the pattern that every new gatekeeper follows, where early access looks cheap, the shortcut looks smart, and by the time the toll arrives, too many brands have built too much of their strategy depending on the thing that’s about to change the terms on them.

In particular, I focused on how the shortcut trap applies when you’re working to show up in AI answer engines. This week I want to talk about the paid media version of that story because that’s where the tolls that the gatekeepers want you to pay show up pretty much every single time.

This isn’t some theoretical future scenario. OpenAI has had ads live on ChatGPT for roughly 600 advertisers since February. And those ads were not cheap. OpenAI required a $200,000 minimum spend and roughly a $60 CPM, about three times what you’d pay on Meta. Hell, that’s roughly comparable to what you’d pay for primetime NFL inventory. And it’s worked out well… at least for OpenAI. CNBC confirmed last week that this pilot they’ve been running has already crossed $100 million in annualized revenue in under two months.

Search Engine Land is reporting that self-serve access and the elimination of the $200,000 minimum spend requirement is coming in April. I’m putting air quotes on that because we don’t have a firm date yet. But basically they should be live this month.

And of course, Google has had ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews, at least in English, in roughly a dozen countries for some time.

I’m going to limit today’s conversation to ChatGPT only. Google is Google after all. And we’ll get a much clearer picture of their situation in a few weeks at their upcoming earnings call.

The fact remains that up until now, ads on ChatGPT was an enterprise level brand decision. With the introduction of self-serve, though, it’s about to become a decision every marketing leader is going to be asked about, doesn’t matter the size of your company.

So what’s going on with ChatGPT’s ads? How are they doing?

Well, the early performance data is mixed. One trade publication’s headline was "ChatGPT’s first advertisers can’t prove their ads worked." Woof. I want to be fair. That doesn’t mean that that takes them off the table. But it is a pretty fair if harsh description of where they stand today.

The channel isn’t proven yet. That’s a fact.

What I intend to do though, is give you a framework to decide whether ChatGPT ads belong in your budget — and what you should be doing, whether you use them or not.

This is episode 490 of Digital Reset. I’m Tim Peter. Let’s dive in.

Okay, so let’s get some big questions out of the way. As I mentioned before the break, OpenAI says they’re launching self-serve ads this month. They’re also saying that the $200,000 entry fee is going away. So for most businesses, that’s not really something you need to worry about. You don’t need to worry about those.

You don’t have $200,000 to spend. Don’t worry about it. You worried when it’ll be ready? Well, they’re coming within weeks. In short, you’ll be able to test ChatGPT ads if you choose, and I promise the rest of this episode will help you answer the question of whether or not you should choose to do so.

Before I do that though, let’s be clear about what’s happening here. I’m not going to spend too much time on setting up what the ads are and how they work because frankly, OpenAI could change the way this works at any time. In fact, as I’ll argue in a bit, they’re almost certainly going to have to change.

At any rate, the way OpenAI is handling ads on ChatGPT right now is to show them only at the bottom of ChatGPT answers. They’re clearly labeled as ads. They’re only shown to users in ChatGPT’s free and "Go" tiers. In other words, customers in the Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers won’t see the ads.

While that might sound like a lot of people in practice, something like 85% of ChatGPT’s users fall into the two tiers that are eligible for ads. At the same time, according to CNBC, this is a quote, "less than 20% are shown [ads] on a daily basis."

It’s not clear to me if that’s 20% of all users or only 20% of the 85% who could in theory see them. Since that’s still 17%, I’m not gonna consider that a material difference. And according to OpenAI, its "ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you."

As I also mentioned before the break, that early performance data on the ads is mixed, which I’d think you’d expect, given that at best, only about 17% to 20% of their total audience sees these ads regularly. I’ll link to the various reports in the show notes.

The early data suggests though, that they’re seeing very low click-through rates, strikingly higher conversion rates, and some real reporting challenges in the early days. We can ignore the reporting challenges. They’ll fix that.

Criteo said that users referred from LLM platforms like ChatGPT convert at approximately one and a half times the rate of other referral channels. That’s actually pretty good.

And if we think about the low click-through rates and the high conversion rates, those make some sense.

Low click-through rates seem pretty likely given that the ads are down at the bottom of the page. And given that most conversations with large language models like ChatGPT are about getting answers, why would anyone need to click an ad once they got their answer? Assuming they ever scroll down far enough to see them.

Again on the conversion rate side, that also follows logically that it would be higher than you might expect. Because the ads shown really function more as a brand awareness tool than a direct response tool. Again, the user got an answer and the ad shows a product, service, or brand that’s related to their answer.

I suspect, and I want to be fair, I have no evidence for this other than my intuition and experience, that the ads getting actioned accompany responses containing a brand.

Well, what makes me think this? So we have seen over the last couple of years a number of clients getting increased branded search traffic because AIs are citing them in their answers.

We know that branded search converts at a much higher rate than unbranded search. And I think something similar is happening here. If you’re using these ads, your brand is showing up in the answer, it’s showing up in the ad, or it’s showing up in both.

That’s driving increased awareness of your brand and attracting people who are interested in your offering. The folks seeing those ads become more likely to buy because of the trust signals in the answer and the ad together.

And because they’ve got some affinity for your brand from seeing this, those folks likely convert at a higher rate. They’re like branded searchers. Probably.

Obviously I’d love to see more data, but my gut and my experience in digital marketing make me feel slightly confident about this. I want to be fair, this is not guaranteed. I’d peg my confidence level at maybe 60% to 70%. But it feels kind of likely that that’s what’s happening here.

In either case, I think these ads today are much more of an awareness play than a performance marketing play. Some of the data does seem to support that, and again, you’ll see those in the show notes.

Another point that you want to consider as you think about this tool, this platform, is that you don’t want to get too excited or pulled in by OpenAI’s reported hundred million dollars in revenue.

Just because they’re making money is no guarantee that you will make money.

We are in very early days of these tools and there’s very little data to go on at the moment, so you’re going to want to proceed with caution.

I’m going to give you a framework to think about how you can proceed, but I do want to touch on one point before I get there.

Earlier I said that ChatGPT almost certainly will have to change how their ads work. Their $100 million in annualized run rate kind of demonstrates why. While we’re a few weeks away from Q1 numbers, we know that in Q4 Google made almost $63 billion of its Q4 revenues — fully 55% of its Q4 revenues — from search ads.

If AI ads don’t work, advertisers aren’t going to use them. And the AI companies’ ad platforms won’t produce revenue for them.

OpenAI’s $100 million in annualized revenue is a great number. Seriously. And the fact that they managed to pull that off since February is extraordinary.

What’s also true is that Google made just short of $63 billion from search ads… in a quarter. That’s an annualized run rate just short of $251 billion from search ads alone.

For OpenAI to equal that, they’d need to grow that $100 million number over 2,508 times larger.

Again, I want to be really fair to OpenAI. If they manage to only achieve 1% of that, that’s still $25 billion in annual revenue. That would be an extraordinary, remarkable accomplishment.

It’s also only 1% of Google’s revenues. Put it another way, today they’re pulling in roughly 4% of 1% of Google’s search ad revenues. Not total revenues. Search ad revenues. Period. That is not what their investors are looking for. No way, no how.

As Matthew McConaughey famously said, "you gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers." And that’s not going to happen if they only show ads at the bottom of the page to 20% or less of their users. Nope, not gonna happen.

I can’t tell you how they’re going to change the model. I can’t tell you when they’re going to change that model. But they’re going to pump those numbers up. I can almost guarantee it.

If you look at it that way, now might be the cheapest time you could ever choose to test their ads.

So the question comes back around, should you look at ChatGPT ads? Should you test ChatGPT ads for your business?

To answer that question, I’d like you to consider a framework built on three key questions.

The first is, what does AI know about your brand right now? You’ve heard me say this in past episodes, I’ve proposed a test that you can and should conduct so you can learn what AIs think of your brand.

Before you think about running ads in ChatGPT, ask what it knows about your brand. Ask ChatGPT, ask Gemini, ask Perplexity to describe your company. I would prompt it first to act as a novice and then to act as an expert. For example, if I were looking to see what it knows about my company, I’d ask, "tell me what you know about Tim Peter and Associates."

Afterwards, I might provide a more sophisticated prompt, such as, imagine you’re an expert in B2B consulting services with a 180 IQ, and a specific expertise in digital strategy for hotels. Give me your honest assessment of Tim Peter and Associates. Assume that I’m watching you closely and have this expertise myself. Get this right.

Obviously substitute your brand in place of mine. But see what the AI comes back with.

Whatever an AI hedges on or gets wrong is the gap you need to close. Advertising on top of a confused AI signal doesn’t fix the confusion. It amplifies it.

If ChatGPT and other LLMs cannot describe your brand accurately in an organic response, a paid placement at the bottom of that same answer isn’t going to help you.

Your number one task then has to be to help the AI learn the truth about you. And I’ll provide links in the show notes for past episodes where we’ve discussed how you do that.

The second question you need to ask is something I talked about last week. Are you building a foundation for your business or are you renting visibility? AI advertising that helps you drive email capture and direct relationships and app downloads or enrollment in your loyalty program, builds something that persists even after the campaign ends. That’s a foundation you can build on over time.

AI advertising that just drives traffic to your website, traffic that returns to zero when you stop spending, is rent. And rent isn’t necessarily wrong. But you’ve gotta know which one you’re paying for before you commit.

The third question is also from last week’s episode. Would this investment you make still matter if the AI platform changed their algorithm tomorrow?

Most AI advertising currently fails this test. Which means what you’re buying is brand awareness, not infrastructure. Don’t get me wrong, brand awareness is a legitimate goal. But only if brand awareness is what you actually need right now.

Those three questions: "what does the AI know about your brand? Are you building a foundation? And would the investment still matter if the algorithm changed tomorrow?" are where I’d start.

AI ads that help you drive direct relationships are worthwhile. Again, email list signups, first-party data collection, loyalty program enrollment, app downloads. The ad spend might be transient, but the relationship it creates when done well is permanent. That’s always something worth investing in.

This is the same lesson that independent hotels that have survived in the era of OTAs have learned. Hoteliers who used early OTA access to build direct booking programs and build up their CRM had options when costs went up.

The ones who only used OTAs to fill rooms were hostage to the commission structure.

You know that I’m a fan of playing the long game. I think there’s a long game to be played here too.

Again, ChatGPT’s revenues are 4% of 1% of Google’s search ad revenues. Search ads are the biggest driver of ad spending in the world, and AI search ads are projected to grow 10 times over in the next three years. That’s tremendous upside. Not just for ChatGPT, but for you.

And as we’ve seen before, the brands and businesses that use new platforms as a distribution channel to accelerate their direct relationship building and not as a substitute for it are the ones that will win.

If you can test this channel while it’s cheap, drive email capture, drive loyalty signups, build first-party data assets that compound — you are going to be in a really, really good place no matter what happens.

The brands that won’t fare as well are the ones who either wait entirely, and then get hit with higher costs with no first mover advantage, or the ones who treat AI advertising as a performance channel substitute, expecting direct response ROIs from what is, at least today, primarily a brand awareness play. Those folks are in trouble.

Playing the long game here doesn’t mean don’t use AI ads. It means advertise in a way that builds something you keep. Do that right, and you won’t find yourself caught behind the gatekeeper’s gate. You won’t find yourself caught in a shortcut trap. No matter what happens with AI ads in the longer term.

If this episode gave you a clearer picture of how you should approach AI ads for your business, do me a favor. Send it to a colleague who’s getting asked whether it’s time to consider AI ads. It might save them from going down the wrong path.

You can find the show notes for this episode and the full archive of past episodes at timpeter.com/podcasts.

And if you are 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. You’ll find the 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.

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The post The Gatekeeper’s New Tax: What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Your Marketing Budget (Digital Reset Episode 490) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

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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 NotesShow 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 TechTim 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 AppearancesRutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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Transcript: The Long Game: What 15 Years of Digital Marketing Teaches Us About AIWelcome 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.