Google Search Is Winning Again

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Before the first click, before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. stripe just gave ai agents credit cards and i think this is a really big deal neil because and combined with cloudflare where cloudflare allows you to just buy products using agents i think think about it this way neil if you wanted to spin up uh cloudflare you have you have

If your Stripe agent be able to purchase Cloudflare domains, for example, or other Cloudflare workers, you can spin up different landing pages that you want to test rapidly. You can use a design.md file. And anything you wanted to test, you could have these agents just spinning them up, put them on a subdomain or whatever, get them up. Or you can even say, hey, let's test something programmatically.

Let's get a bunch of these landing pages up or let's get a bunch of these pages up, see how they do. You can do that now. You can rapidly test because these agents are able to purchase for you and you're able to kind of buy these workers quickly. So this guy, Ali Lehman, says this.

I can't believe they're going to do it again. The last time Stripe shipped a primitive this big, it literally birthed the modern SaaS. Shopify, Substack, Gumroad, all your favorite indie hackers, okay? So yesterday, Stripe shipped the spending version.

Anyone can now get an agent to spend money on their behalf. If Stripe's payment API created SaaS, this spending API creates autonomous commerce. So you basically just make this concrete, okay? So...

Number one, AI ad managers. You connect your meta, Google, and TikTok accounts, set a monthly budget cap, and an agent runs your entire paid strategy, okay? Number two, AI procurement agents for e-commerce. They supply supplier prices, auto order when costs hit your threshold, sends you a morning summary of what was bought and why, and then you have AI travel agents that actually work.

So they search, compare, book, and pay with your budget rules, No more toggling between six tabs to save $40 on a flight. And then finally, you have AI bookkeeping agents. They will handle recurring operational payments.

Your business already makes every month. Contractor invoices, add account, top-ups, subscriptions, et cetera. So I think we're just going to see more and more of this stuff. And just looking at Stripe, just looking at Cloudflare, and me just giving examples on the marketing and kind of SEO, CRO side, the possibilities are becoming more and more, even more endless.

Dude, I agree. But we'll end up seeing over time. If I could do one thing, I wish I could wave a magic wand and skip a few years to see where technology is. Because I think life is going to be so much better.

I think there's going to be a lot of abundance for everyone. So, you know, we, at least for me, I'm not going to speak for you, Neil. I am, you know, short term, a little concerned for the world, but long term, I'm very excited. So I just hope we get to the long term.

Yeah. Dude, I hope we get to the long term as well. And I'm curious to really see how... how it plays out with a lot of these governments. And the reason I say that is when you look at the marketing ecosystem right now, or let's actually go back to marketing ecosystem like 10 years ago, you mainly had just two main players.

You had Google and then you had Meta, right? I know Meta back then was not called Meta, but same thing. And if you look now, you have Google, you have Meta, You have OpenAI.

You have, what is it called? TikTok. You have LinkedIn. And a lot of these smaller platforms have been growing like the LinkedIn's, the Reddit's. And even though they're smaller, you kind of have to be on them because they have data deals with some of the other players like OpenAI and Google.

So if you're not on the smaller channels, you don't do as well on the bigger channels. But because of monopolistic rules, you're seeing more and more separate platforms and you're not seeing like a Google early on being like, perplexity is great. Let's just go buy it for $10 billion.

Like you're seeing the market becoming more and more fragmented. And even with search, it's people don't just use open AI or Claude. They also still use Google. And people, you know, I remember the VCs being like, oh, this is going to kill Google.

Google is dead. Google hasn't died. It's potentially the most profitable or the biggest company by market cap. Wall Street's been betting in the next week or so.

They're going to actually be bigger than NVIDIA. We'll see if that happens. But Google's actually been growing in popularity. And I haven't seen people being like, oh, I don't use open AI.

Google gives me everything. People just use multiple platforms just like they use multiple social networks. Yeah. By the way, when I use Google now, so I do often click on AI mode.

So I do often switch to AI mode very quickly just to ask follow-up questions. And I think they made it work for them. Like initially I was skeptical that AI mode would work. They've made it work.

And by the way, searches are continuing to grow still. And their AI usage is continuing to go up. I just think there's going to be more and more demand. We've talked about this concept before known as Jeven's paradox.

When something becomes available and abundantly available, people actually use it more and more. Electricity, for example. Or electricity then led to compounding of flight. And that electricity led to the air conditioner, right?

Like there's all these things that we use. We're going to find a lot more use cases with infinite intelligence. We just don't know what it looks like yet. And that's what Neil's talking about.

We're excited because we don't know what the world's going to look like. But when you have infinite intelligence, man, is it exciting? Because the things that we were constrained by before, it's no longer constrained. And let me tell you one more thing, Neil.

So I was listening to a podcast with the Airbnb founder today on the, I think it was Invest Like the Best. Great podcast, by the way. Brian or Nathan?

Brian, Brian. Yeah. So Brian, Brian Chesky was just talking about how, you know, it's instead of thinking about managing people, he spends two to three hours a day on recruiting. Because if you just recruit the right people,

you spend all your time on recruiting, you don't need to manage them. Right. And you think about all the best people you worked with, all the best people I've worked with, they don't need to be managed and they don't like being managed. Right.

They like, they like knowing which direction to row in and they're just going to row. Dude, totally agree with you on that. Um, it, If you hire the right people, it changes everything.

If you hire the wrong people, it screws up everything. And I get why people say, hire slow, fire fast. You don't want to hire too slow, but you definitely should fire fast. I do not like the concept of I'm going to let them learn their way into it.

I found at least for me and my management style, which is I don't do much managing. It doesn't work. It doesn't work for me either. And I love that. I love doing that.

It doesn't work at all. And to go back to Google, here's a quote from Sundar, the CEO. Alphabet's Q1 2026 earnings post Google search revenue at $64.4 billion. This is, again, just Google search revenue.

Up 19% year over year. As Sundar tied AI experiences to higher search usage. Google is seeing searches grow. More people are using it than ever before.

But that just goes to show the marketing ecosystem, what it's going to look like in the future is going to be more options due to the European Union and the laws we have on monopolistic behaviors in America. You're going to see more platforms competing and companies and individuals using multiple platforms versus just one. And here's a kicker. I gave a corporate talk to one of the largest advertisers in the world.

I was in their office in Spain. They're all on the Microsoft suite. I said, hey, do you guys use Copilot? They're like, no, it's blocked. We don't use it.

Even though they can, in theory, have access to it because of what they're paying for, they're like, no, we prefer these other AI platforms that they're using at. And they mainly are OpenAI and Clop. Dude, Neil, check this out. The fact that I can do this during the call right now is insane.

So you're talking about the growth. I'm like, it'd be cool if we kind of just, you know, show people how it looks. Okay. So check this out, Neil. All right.

You see this? Look, I was like, hey, draw a chart to show Google's revenue growth over the last four years. So next time when you talk about this data, just ask it to draw a chart for you. So I literally just put this in the search bar for Google.

And you can see Google's annual revenue growth from 2022 to 2025. So 2023 starts at, it's $283 billion, okay? Then it goes to, and maybe this is a little off on the chart, maybe, $307 billion, and then $350, and then $402. So 2022, again,

9.78% growth. So 282 to 308, which is 8.68% growth. And then it grows 14% basically to 350. And then it accelerates even more, 15% in 2025. So they're not slowing down.

And then I was like, dude, You know what? Why don't you just show me what it looks like from a quarterly standpoint? And then you can do that, right? And then you can see it's moved up on this little bar over here.

They're all kind of equal here. And then it kind of moves up. Isn't that interesting? It is. But what's more interesting for anyone who's watching this podcast episode instead of just listening to it, you can see how Eric's using Google.

Both Tim and I use Google like this as well as other LLMs like this, but this just shows why Google is actually growing in search volume and not dying. They've adapted, and they've actually adapted really well and really quickly. Look at this. Alphabet has reported 11 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth year-over-year revenue growth as of Q1-2026.

That's just insane to me. Growth is driven by AI infrastructure, consumer AI products, and search query volume with Q1 2026 being the strongest quarter ever. I think what's amazing about Google is that people, like consumer, I think is very difficult. They have consumer and enterprise nailed down.

You don't have many companies that can kind of figure that out. So, and oftentimes those are the multi-trillion dollar companies like an NVIDIA or you think about like a Microsoft, for example. So anyway. Quick break for agency owners.

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Back to the show. All right. So I'm going to hear. Let me talk about this. So there's this creator play that takes brands from $5 billion to $100 million a year.

You know what it is? No, 500 million to a billion? No, five million a year brands to 100 million a year. So this is called the Hudson Method. This is from Sean Frank from Ridge, okay?

So I have personally seen six brands restart growth using the Hudson Method. The steps, number one, seed hundreds of creators on TikTok, small, new accounts, no one famous, that's okay. Two, pay them per video plus commission, but heavily incentivize them to post lots of videos. Bonuses for posting 100 plus videos a month, okay?

Number three, take all the creative loaded into every ad channel. You just solved creative bottlenecks and unlocked infinite ad angles. Four, scale ad spend on everything while still paying the creators. Commission on ad sales, okay?

So it isn't about TikTok shop sales. It isn't about GMV max. It's all of it. You get free CPMs on TikTok. You get unlimited content and it jumpstarts the whole business.

More ads, more angles, more channels. I think that's the most important sentence. More ads, more angles, more channels. This is named after the legendary founder of Comfort, Hudson, all hail the UGC king.

I've seen this playbook run a few times. It can work. I've also seen it not work as well. It largely depends on if you have a really good product that works for consumers who, what we found, aren't willing to spend a lot of money.

Like if you're selling something for like $10, $20, $50, etc. If you're starting to sell things for like $200, $300, $1,000, we do not see it work as well.

Dude, can I speak? I think a lot of it has to do with good product first, which is you need good people to create a good product, right? You also need good people on the marketing side too that really understand the game with this, right? They need to understand what is that influencer game?

How are you supposed to see all that content and how do you scale it? Interestingly enough, Neil, let me show you something. So this guy reached out to me and I'm going to show you a video. He made a trailer for us because I want more good editing help.

Let me show you this. Neil, tell me what you think about this here. So let me hit play. Can you see this? Yeah. Okay, here we go. The younger generation is going to use Gemini way more than ChatGPT.

You're like a boomer if you use ChatGPT. Yes, and it's going to get shut down. We are going to start to see more one-person, billion-dollar companies with one employee. Chinese public sentiment towards AI is significantly more optimistic and trusting compared to the U.S. People in China, they're all lining up in public to learn OpenClaw.

If you tell your model to speak like a caveman, that saves you a lot on cost. So it's like, me code this now. Me need this. Yeah. I'm not even joking.

It's not like 50% of costs. I'm not even joking. This guy created 800 fake doctors to generate 1.8 billion in revenue with one employee. Have you heard about this?

Uh-uh. Dude, dude, Neil, what do you think? It's not bad, but I don't think it's going to generate much revenue, but I think it'll get views. My point is when you have a good editor that just knows what to do, you don't need to manage them.

That's my point. Right. And so that's all I'm saying with this. It applies to kind of the Hudson method as well. You need good people there. You need a good product.

Everything comes down to people. And I do believe going back to what Brian Chesky was saying, if you spend that two to three hours a day working with your recruiter on setting the tone for the top, you know, he said this. I want to set the tone for the top 200 people in the company, not just my executive team, the top 200. That is building true leverage.

And that's how we should all think about this. Dude, it is so hard to find really good people when you find them. I've done this. I started doing this more later in my career.

I hire them even if I don't need them right now. Like if I don't meet him in a year, I'll hire him still and just burn the cost. And people think I'm crazy and stupid for it. But I'm telling you, dude, when you're able to get that amazing like A-plus player, you get them because they don't come that often.

Let me just put it to you this way, Neil. Not you, Neil, but the audience. And by the way, Aman left a comment here. What is this about? Let me tell you what this video is about, man.

It's about making more money, dude. All right? Watch the rest of it. Okay, here we go. So what was I talking about? Oh. Wait. We were talking about A-plus players recruiting and burning the money ahead of time.

Okay, so let's break down some math. Thank you for that, Neil. So when it comes to A-players, you're like, okay, let's say an A-player, I'm going to use simple round numbers. Let's just use $100,000, okay?

Like a real A-player might cost you a million dollars. Okay, let's just put it that way. But I'm going to use $100,000 for the sake of this example, right? So you might be like, oh my God, I can't afford that.

$100,000 is too much money. We're not going to be able to do whatever X, Y, Z. But here's the thing. If that person can bring you $3 million because they're that damn good, okay, 30X return on that, okay?

Well, if you pay $1 million for someone, someone's like, oh my God, how is this person making $1 million? That's so unfair. That's not good to society, whatever. No, but if that $1 million a year person is adding $100 million a year in value or $200 million a year,

Yeah, that's a good deal, man. So everyone's trying to get a good deal at the end of the day. Just think about it that way. People would be stupid not to pay for a good deal, and that's how we look at A players.

If you find that amazing person where you just know that they got it, Neil, and you're having an amazing conversation, and you're kind of like, damn, this person's smarter than me as well, you should pull the trigger. Yes. And the best part about them is it doesn't take any time out of your day because once you hire them, you don't need to manage them. If you have to manage them and tell them what to do, they're not an A player.

They're not even a B player. Yep. Dude, you know what I'll also tell you as well, man, like, um, I was reading, like, it's also helpful. Oftentimes a lot of these A players are creating content.

So I've been reading a lot of content on how like ramp created like this one product, right? I reach out to the person that wrote that article. And then yesterday the CTO and I were on the call and we had an amazing conversation and we're going to start doing some stuff together because I just don't want to wait. And yeah,

That's the thing. When you're out there, the other meta lesson from a marketing standpoint is if you're out there creating content, people like to say you increase your surface area of luck. That's what you're doing. And then when I got on the call with him, I was like, oh, dude, the ramp thing is not even what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about you. I want to talk about you helping us, right? And that's how these things go. So Neil, I don't know about you, but I often, I have a list on my Apple Notes where I'm just like, these are people to hire, right?

And so these are all people that I want to hire. Maybe I can't hire them all at the same time right now. But I always keep that list. And then what I do, Neil, is every six months or so, every three to six months, I just find, hey, how are things going, man?

Hey, how are things going? What can I do to help? How are things going? Right? And sometimes, Neil, you even have to wine and dine these people. Like you take these people out to dinner with their wives as well because their wives have to approve you as well or their spouse.

I don't know how you've seen it. Share your experiences. With taking people out? Yeah. So when you're recruiting someone, you have to sometimes, if it's like someone top level, you have to get the spousal buy-in as well.

Maybe you haven't seen it. This looks new to you, but I've had to do that before. Yeah. The spouse part I know in which sometimes they want their – I haven't had to actually talk to the spouses, but sometimes their spouses, you know, like they'll be like, oh, I want to talk to my wife or my husband before I make my decisions.

But the taking people out, I never had to do that part. That was a part that, you know, was a left – came out of left field for me. Like I've never had to like whine and dine or take them to a baseball game or do whatever. Like it's just more so either I can convince them on the phone or I can't.

Yep. So let me pull this up real quick. Let's make a switch. So I do want to talk about Coinbase. So Coinbase, by the way, they reported a 5% decline year on year to Neil's point earlier.

I think trading volumes have gone down maybe 25, 30% or so. So Coinbase crypto exchange, I think Neil's searching it up right now. It's also getting more competitive because other people let you buy the cryptocurrencies like Robinhood at no fees from my understanding. Really?

Can you Google that too? Yeah. I don't think Robinhood does Robin... could charge you to buy crypto. I'm pretty sure it's free. There's no trading fees.

No, really? Yeah, commission-free trading. Wow. Yeah, there's no fee to buy or sell cryptocurrency. But the way they make money is the spread. Like if you're trying to sell your stock at 130 and they can find a buyer to buy it at 131, they make money, right?

And they do really well for that. But if you want to buy on Coinbase, from my understanding, let's see, Coinbase, they charge for cryptocurrency. uh let's see yes coinbase charges fees they charge an arm and a lake yes it's really fun coinbase pro is cheaper i don't know if it is anymore but i think for coinbase one so coinbase one has no fees but you it's you're paying like 200 bucks or 300 bucks a month or something like that but there's no fees switch to robin hood and it's free i have no solution you just saved me 3600 this is great that's a lot you pay 200 a month or 200 a year

I think it's here. Just Coinbase one cost. How'd I save you $3,600? No, I think it's $300. Yeah. Okay. It's $3,000 a year. Yeah. So $300 a month or $3,000 a year.

I paid the $3,000 for the year. Yeah. So you usually cancel and switch to Robinhood and just get your trading for free. Yeah. They both make money off of spreads, so why not just take it for free?

I like my Coinbase One card, which gives me up to 4% Bitcoin rewards for my credit cards. Does Robinhood have a card with the ability to earn crypto? Let's see. All right.

Robinhood as a 2026 offers credit cards that allow you to earn rewards, which can be utilized for cryptocurrency, particularly with their gold and premium platinum card.

They have 3% cash back. The Platinum One launch offers 5x cash back. Gold crypto rewards. People can dig in if they want. But like, dude, this is how I believe it's actually better to market.

Instead of spending a lot of money on ads and even SEO and GEO and emails and all this stuff, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. But if you can just take a model like Robinhood and do more at a better price, your marketing goes much further and you don't have to do as much marketing to grow much quicker. And you can just see it in stock price. Like if you look at Hood, the last I checked, they were close to $100 billion company.

What are they right now? 68. So their stock is down. It was at 152. They're now at 75. So yeah, they were over 100 billion at one point. Call it 68 right now.

If you look at Coinbase, it's a $50 billion company. So I think it's a better mousetrap. I think there's also something to learn from what Robinhood has done. So they have, I think, five or six companies

uh, business lines that do over a hundred million a year. So you have nine figure businesses. Um, and when you, as you get bigger and bigger, the more kind of products and services that you offer, the more value you can provide to your customer, the more you're able to retain them and the more you're able to grow. Um, so I'm not saying that, Hey, you should, let's say you're listing your agency owner right now.

You should have like 10 different services at once. I'm not saying that, but once you start to feel like you're capping onto one area, you just start to add more services. Right? So I, like, I know some people that are really good in one area, like influencer marketing, for example.

Well, Okay, you start to get a bunch of people in. It's like, hey, I see angles for other areas too. How can you upsell and cross sell over there? And then that's how you can really expand.

Because if you stay, let's say I was just someone doing YouTube agency. I can grow it to a certain level. But if you really want to expand, you're going to have to think about, oh, how do I start to help with making ad creative? How do I start to manage the ads as well?

How do I add all these other loops and these workflows in there to add more value? Because that's ultimately how you make more by adding more value. Yeah, and interestingly enough, both of them actually have that. So Robinhood has 11 divisions that generate over $100 million a year in revenue.

Coinbase has 12 divisions that generate over $100 million in annual revenue. But what you're getting at is a really key point for anyone who's trying to do marketing and specifically scale up ads. When you're trying to scale up your ads, you're going to hit a ceiling and you can keep testing different creatives, but sometimes you just can't spend more without just having diminishing returns. A prime example of this, which we talked about in a previous episode, was eBay.

When you spend $2.5 billion on sales and marketing to only get a million new users, you're spending a little bit too much and you should probably cut it back. And it may be better to have 900,000 users and spend a half the cost, right? Like there's a point where just spending that extra dollar just has massive diminishing returns.

So an easy way around this is not, yes, you want to keep testing new creatives and keep tweaking your ads and trying to fine tune so you can scale them, but there is limits. But an easy way around this that a lot of people do in marketing is they create more divisions. So example with Eric, he has carrot, he has single brain, he has single grain. So now you have three different divisions and he probably has even more that he can spend marketing dollars and ad dollars on.

Right. Another example of this is if you look at my ad agency, NP Digital. Yes, we have multiple products and services like Eric does, but we also have multiple regions. So I can do marketing in the United States.

I can do marketing separately in Canada. I do marketing separately in Portuguese just for Brazil. I can do marketing separately in Montreal in Canada on the French side. I can do marketing in France.

in French. And I can do that in 20 plus countries, which is where we're in. And that allows us to scale faster without having to try to just max out the United States, which gets very costly and creates massive diminishing returns in your marketing. This is why companies expand product line and geography.

I think the key point is really there's one word that sticks out. The word is optimization. At a certain point, you can no longer optimize. You have to think about the other word, expansion, right?

And so, again, but also, if you're just starting out right now, Neil and I, we're not just saying, hey, just go try to expand right now. You got to...

If you have something that's working well and it's not tapped out yet, you should optimize that a little more. And then maybe once you feel like you're maybe 80% there, you can start to think about other areas. Because both, I think Neil and myself have made the mistake of scaling too quickly. Premature scaling actually kills startups.

You just got to be very careful. I've made that mistake one too many times. But that being said, yeah, we'll talk to you guys later. Bye.