You may have heard me say that “gatekeepers gonna gate.” Well, Google’s AI Mode shows exactly what that looks like in practice. AI Mode is so disruptive to the way the web has worked for years that it looks like Google’s closing the gate on marketers, setting the stage to make a big move away from organic traffic and towards more paid traffic.

Google’s not alone, of course. Pretty much all the Big Tech gatekeepers are doing something similar.

What can you do about it? How can you make sure that Google’s not closing the gate on your brand and business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

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

Revisiting Google Closes the Gate (Thinks Out Loud) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links

• Google Closes the Gate on Marketers (Tim Peter’s Thinks Out Loud Podcast)
• The Brand is the Prompt (Tim Peter’s Thinks Out Loud Podcast)
• Lily Ray talked about How Google AI Mode Keeps Users in AI Mode | LinkedIn
• Michael Goldrich: Google Just Killed the Blue Links. What Hotel Teams Must Do to Stay Visible and Booked
• My LinkedIn post about Google slamming the gate shut in AI Mode for many businesses
• YouTube interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the future of search, AI agents, and selling Chrome
• Lily Grozeva’s post on LinkedIn that says “Most marketers still think AI Search is about content. It’s not. It’s about signals, and most of them live off your website.”
• What Connects TikTok and the Hub and Spoke Model of Digital? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 299)
• Digital Gatekeepers and the Death of Organic Traffic (Thinks Out Loud Episode 247)
• Whose brand does Google want to build? – Biznology
• Is Content Still King or Have the Gatekeepers Won? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 328)
• You Don’t Need a Website
• Revisiting How to Escape Big Tech’s Web (Thinks Out Loud)
• The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425)
• Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424)

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Transcript: Revisiting Google Closes the Gate

Hey, Big Thinkers. Welcome to the show. I’m Tim Peter.

Because of the rise of artificial intelligence, there’s been a lot of discussion around whether or not SEO is dead. Marketers and other business professionals have wondered what they need to do to “rank” among AI’s answers.

I’m not sure that’s the right framing, though. Because the problem isn’t about “showing up” in an AI answer — or at least, not the biggest problem. Most brands show up just fine when customers ask for you by name. The problem is getting customers to come to your site and interact with your brand even when you do.

Take Google’s AI Mode… please.

OK, ancient jokes aside, seriously, use AI Mode and search for some of your favorite brands or, better yet, yours. A link to those companies’ websites usually appears in the list over on the right (you can see a screenshot on my website for an example). But notice, there’s no link of note in the “main body content” even when I ask for it by name. You can click the little link icon in the body and Google will update the links in the sidebar. But that’s far from the long-standing experience of how things work on the internet. And, again, I’m asking for specific brands by name (which is otherwise always a good thing).

In short, Google has slammed the gate shut on marketers, making it harder for customers to come directly to your business. That’s a big deal. And it’s one that ultimately could be very bad for your business.

What can you do about it? How can you make sure that you find another way to connect now that Google’s closed the gate? This prior episode of the podcast takes a look — and offers some solutions.

Let’s dive in.

So today we’re gonna talk about AI Mode in the search. And Sundar Pichai was talking about this at I/O and he was talking about AI Overviews. He said, since launching at I/O last year, AI Overviews have scaled up. These are “over 1.5 billion users every month in more than 200 countries and territories.” He said that as people use AI Overviews, “we see they are happier with their results and they search more often.” He said “in our biggest markets like the US and India, AI Overviews are driving over 10% growth in the types of queries that show them.” And he followed that up by saying, “what’s particularly exciting is that this growth increases over time.”

He also said that AI Overviews are one of the strongest drivers of growth for visual searches in Google Lens and that Lens grew 65% year over year with “more than 100 billion” already this year. He didn’t say whether those were 100 billion users or 100 billion searches.

Regardless, one consequence that we’re seeing at the moment is that Google is keeping most of the traffic from those searches to itself. There’s been lots of people talking about this. Lily Ray over on LinkedIn talked about how Google AI Mode keeps users in AI Mode. My friend Michael Goldrich said “Google just killed the blue links. What hotels must do to stay visible and booked?”

I talked about the same thing over on LinkedIn, talking about how Google is slamming the gate shut in AI Mode for many businesses.

But that’s not what Google’s saying. In a recent interview with Nilay Patel, the link will be in the show notes, Sundar Pichai said that this is a quote, “Google is committed to continuing to send traffic to other websites and that users expect that from Google.” He also says that, “In five years, we will still send traffic to websites.:

Some folks seem to think Sundar Pichai is lying. Right? They’re like, I don’t think so, buddy. For instance, Lily Ray, this is a quote from her LinkedIn post, said,

“In my opinion, Sundar didn’t have great answers to Neelay’s questions about why AI overviews haven’t driven more traffic a year after launch. He, and the seemingly every Google spokesperson, claims that it sends traffic to a broader set of websites. At least all the evidence that most folks are seeing right now suggests that’s not the case.

Weirdly, I don’t think he’s lying. I think we need to remember how Google makes money. Google makes most of its money from ads, the overwhelming majority of its money from ads. Of course they’re going to send the traffic to websites. The difference is that this traffic is going to be paid traffic, not organic and definitely far from free.

We’ve seen this playbook from Google in the past. Think about how much they’ve increased ad loads in search results over the last bunch of years, over the last decade. For those in the hotel industry, Google introduced metasearch listings—that is ads by another name, paid metasearch listings—that showed prices from OTAs, online travel agencies, like Expedia and Booking.com. If you were a hotel, you absolutely could have your hotel website appear there too, as long as you paid Google.

Google replaced organic traffic with paid traffic. And ironically, most hotel owners and marketers thought that was a victory. They thought they’d won because suddenly we can compete against the Expedias and Booking.coms of the world.

Just imagine how giddy we’ll all be when Google allows you to buy ads alongside AI Mode answers. We’ll be thrilled, right? And we’ll reward them. We’ll buy those ads. We will reward them for putting another gate between us and our customers. It’s what we’ve done every other time.

By the way, just as a quick aside, their ability to monetize these tools is going to slow down the rollout. It is probably the thing most likely to hurt their ability to beat ChatGPT or Perplexity or any other competitor. I don’t think that’s gonna happen, but that’s the thing most likely to make them stumble because they can’t get rid of the goose that lays the golden egg without replacing it with another goose. Anyway, I don’t wanna go down that rabbit hole this episode… rabbits, goose, geese, pardon all the farm animals today. I promise I’ll come back to it another time. Back to the point at hand.

Lily Grozeva has a great post on LinkedIn that says most marketers still think AI search is about content. It’s not. It’s about signals and most of them live off your website. What Lily is talking about and what she’s saying here is that she says, “if you’re not referenced somewhere else, you’re not understood by the AI, you’re invisible.” And she advises people to, “make a map of influence. Use tools like Perplexity or Peak AI or SparkToro to understand where your audience hangs out and how the LLMs use this information to train themselves.”

She continues saying, “then build your presence there in podcasts, LinkedIn, Reddit threads, guest quotes, third party coverage.” And she concludes, “you’re not trying to rank, you’re trying to be recognized.”

I love that phrase. You’re not trying to rank, you’re trying to be recognized. We need to keep this in mind. I agree with Lily’s point of view almost 100%. The key word there is “almost.”

Nothing that Lily uncovered in her research is wrong, so far as I can tell. I absolutely agree that you have to make sure your web presence includes places where your customers hang out. These are the spokes of your hub and spoke strategy. If you’ve listened to the show before, you’ve heard me talk about spokes. You’ve heard me talk about the hub and spokes. I’ve got links in the show notes about how you can put these to work. Or if you want, you can see chapter five of my book available on amazon.com and also linked to in the show notes.

The fact remains, you need to build direct relationships with your customers. You need to provide the kinds of human centered, helpful content that answers customers’ questions. And you need that content to exist where your customers are. That includes spokes like LinkedIn or Instagram or Reddit threads or what have you. You also can’t rely solely—and solely is the important word here—on third-party sites, or else you’re letting other folks control your access to customers.

By the way, this isn’t just Google’s strategy, right? We know that gatekeeper is going to gate. Many of the links in today’s show notes are from brilliant people who I admire and they’re posting their content on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn itself is part of the problem. You can’t see this content without a LinkedIn account. And most folks aren’t duplicating their content and comments on their own sites. I know I’m not most of the time. Instead, we are putting ourselves behind their gates and thanking them for the privilege of being seen.

What blows my mind is when you link to a post on LinkedIn, if you just copy and paste, the title of the link is “Post Feed | LinkedIn.” Not who posted it, not what it’s about, just an anonymous, amorphous LinkedIn post in a generic LinkedIn feed on LinkedIn. Remind me again whose brand you’re building here.

Again, it’s our job to be seen. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google doing this or LinkedIn doing this or Instagram doing this or TikTok doing this. Your content plays a key role. It has to be seen. But it has to belong to you. So not just the spoke and to be fair, not just the hub. This is hub and spoke. You need to make sure you’re using both or else it doesn’t matter where you show up, you’re still not going to get traffic, you’re still not going get the kind of brand awareness you need, and you’re certainly not going to do it for free.

Once you get people to engage with you, you need to create deep, meaningful experiences that encourage your customers to search for you and recommend you by name to their friends and family and fans and followers.

And as you build these relationships, you need to convince your customers that you’re worthy and trustworthy to share their data with you so you can keep the conversation going. Otherwise, you’re going to be stuck behind Google’s gate praying for them to introduce more ads so that you can pay to be seen. Or LinkedIn’s gates, or Instagram’s gates, or TikTok’s gates. Google and the rest are trying to close the gate on marketers. Your job is to make sure your customers are willing and want to jump over those gates to reach you.

And I can’t wait to see you do it.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 463, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, by the way, I’d love to suggest the number one new e-commerce book on Amazon.com called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. Pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I would genuinely appreciate it.

With all that said, thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back next week with a new episode, and until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. Take care now.

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