The AI Search Strategy That Actually Works

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LLMs are citing listicles more than any other content type. So Evertune AI ended up releasing a chart, and the chart breaks down the 6,000 most cited URLs per model on each platform for both March and April 2026. You want to guess what percentage of the time Gemini shows listicles or cites them? 75%.

65. Close. Google AI mode is going down from here. Gemini was the highest, 65.1%. Okay. Now we're talking about AI mode? Uh-huh. 45%? 62.3%. Okay. Perplexity is at 60.4%.

Uh-huh. Google AI overview is at 55.2%. ChatGPT is at 50.1%. Co-pilot is at 39.8%. Okay. Right? Yeah. So it just goes to show if you want to get cited by one of these LLM platforms, the listicles are your best approach.

But Google's actually been making changes to listicles. Have you been seeing they've been playing whack-a-mole to listicles? No. Yeah. Yeah, so they're specifically going after self-published listicles, which is very different.

And you and I have talked about this. Like, dude, people are going out there. We interviewed a marketer from a competing agency who ran their marketing. And I won't mention the marketing agency.

They're like, oh, we've crushed it for them. We've created, I think it was almost 200 listicle articles on their own website. So they're ranking for a lot of agency terms.

And we didn't end up hiring the guy because – Although it was impressive on the results, we didn't like the strategy and the tactic. We believed it was like a short-term, one-trick pony in which if your whole playbook is, I'm just going to go create hundreds and hundreds of listicles on your own website. Well, of course, your own business is going to list your own company, your own products, your own services as number one compared to all your other competitors.

You agree you would be biased. Any business owner would be biased. Mm-hmm. Even if you felt you weren't the best, I don't know any business owner who wouldn't put themselves as number one.

I mean, look at Amazon. They put their first product number one. Why would you not do that? You have the distribution. Exactly. And what it's causing is Google is just be like, whoa, this is just manipulated results.

And they're just playing whack-a-mole at this point. but we're not seeing chat GPT going after them as hard or anywhere near. It's more so Google is going after, and the key here is self-published listicle articles. You know what's interesting here?

So the fact that Google is going after listicles, these self-published listicles, It's no different than how they played the game before. They already have the search spam team, so they know exactly what to go after, what's being manipulated. And so when you and I saw this a couple of years ago when it was happening, it's the same game.

Because you know why? We've been whacked before. Oh, wow. long time ago. This is 15 plus years ago, 20, 15, 20 years ago. We had played this game and it was harder back then for Google search spam team to catch this, but they have to preserve the product.

So they have that laid out. The thing is Anthropic and OpenAI eventually will catch up too. And I think they'll have their own versions of search spam teams, but this has been no different, which is why we've been saying this as a beginning. Yeah.

These are terrible strategies in marketing. I'm sorry. I'm meeting some yogis that Eric got me, which I sadly got him addicted to. No, yogis are great.

It's just yogurt with fruit in the inside. You get on Amazon. We're not affiliated, but they're great. So any marketing tactic that produces high short-term ROI...

That's really easy to do. And that's a caveat that's really easy to do. Usually nine out of 10 times won't last long. And as a marketer or a business owner, you should avoid those tactics.

And you can look at them one by one. There may be some edge cases in which you should do them. But in almost all cases, you should avoid those tactics. The reason being is,

you're spending energy, time, money on these short-term tactics that will go away. And then what you'll find is two, three years later, all the effort and the money and the time you spent from previous tactics won't help you versus if you took the long-term approach, spent the time and money,

on strategies that don't produce the media ROI and are not that easy. But then three years from now, if you keep doing those kinds of strategies, the results start compounding and your ROI is much higher. So we've all, well, I've always said this, that you want to do black hat things in a white hat way. So the way you would do this black hat thing in a white hat way is you would collaborate with other websites, okay?

And then maybe they would list you on their listicle. But the whole idea is you don't want to do the self-serving way. Because by the way, think of it this way. If you're an algorithm and you're like, whoa, people are really gaming this thing where it's like listicles are, if you're self-serving and everyone's doing it right now, it's pretty easy to identify if you're an algorithm.

So you're better off thinking about collaborating with other people, building long-term relationships, and then doing that type of strategy. Maybe it's less volume, but you do it with these high-authority collaborations. And the thing is, it's not even the link that you're going to get from it and the listicle at the end of the day. It's the relationship that you're going to get.

You're going to be able to get a lot more from that partnership. Yes. Yep. So by the way, on this note, because we're talking about GEO SEO right now, you know, it's interesting to me.

I spoke, I spoke to a couple of people recently, one person, these are both content creation tools. Okay. One dropped 80% in revenue. Okay. 80%. I'm not going to name names right now, but just, I'll just say content creation tool.

Okay. And I spoke to someone today. So some, a GEO tool was introduced to me today. Okay. And, Let me tell you about something else that pisses me off.

Last time I started the episode, someone pissed me off. Today, someone pissed me off again. You know what? I can only tell you this afterwards. But here's what happened.

So, you know, one of my friends introduced me to this GEO company, okay? And basically, I spoke with them, and they're like, I'm like... we start to call it's like oh yeah you know um we don't want to ask you for anything yet i'm like okay well tell me about your product so i don't really get much about their product okay and then they're like oh uh they tell they don't tell me much about the product i'm like okay so how's your traction right now you guys are looking to raise another one because they're looking to partner with me right they wouldn't tell me their traction they wouldn't tell me about the product i'm like so what do you guys want right and then they're like well you know we don't want to ask for anything we want to ask what you want first i'm like dude you're like pissing me off like you're like

I get on this call because my friend asked me to get on this call. And then, and then it's like, you don't tell me what you guys really do. You don't give me enough info. And then like, you don't tell me about your traction.

So how the F am I supposed to help you? Right. And then, and then you do this whole thing, like this old weird positioning thing where you're like, well, I want to help you first. I really want to cuss right now.

I'm just like, guys, you're really annoying me right now. And I said that on the call. And I'm just like, I'm giving you feedback right now. If you're going to take these calls in the future, you need to be specific about your ask because I have no idea how to help you right now.

But it's one of those content creation tools again. So then, but the thing is, my point of saying this is that these content creation tools seem to be going on a downward trend right now. And it's interesting because one person is like, they're done with that company. They're like, they don't want to work on it as much.

And then the other ones, like they're just starting out. So my point of saying this is, by the way, if that company is still listening right now, the one that got on the call with me,

I don't know if this is a space to get into. Dude, did you see Lily Ray's study on AI content creation and the websites that are using these tools and what's happened to their traffic? No, what happened? And she did an interview with Ross Hudgens, didn't she?

I don't know who the interview was. You know, Ross Hudgens was the first employee of SingleGrain. I wasn't here at the time, but he was the first employee of SingleGrain. I didn't know that.

So pretty much the title of it is like, AI content creates a rapid growth before a steep decline. So there's 220 websites that she was analyzing using tools to see what happens when you create tons of content using AI.

What ended up happening after a while, right? Keep in mind, content's been published. So they saw traffic increases from organic perspective. But when you look at the data,

From their peak, 54% lost 30% or more of their peak organic traffic, 39% lost 50% or more, 22% lost 75% or more. Within those declines, a reoccurring trajectory appears, a rapid growth in organic pages over six to 12 months, organic traffic peak within roughly three to six months of the content peak, and then a steep decline in traffic that erases most the gain and frequently drops below the prior baseline within the following year. So what's happening is companies are using AI to create a lot of content at volume.

It's causing traffic growth. But what they're missing out is from an SEO perspective, you're not just evaluated on a page by page basis. You're evaluated on your whole site. Right.

Think of it as an entity. And if you have a lot of junk on your website, it hurts the good pages that were written manually by humans. And overall, we're seeing or what she's seeing and we're seeing this at our agency as well.

traffic starts dropping more and more and more and you have this big messy website with tons of pages and you have to do a massive cleanup and it's very hard to recover the traffic it's interesting to me i mean i would say this if you're going to produce something like naturally there's like a half-life where you you start to that traffic is going to decline over time but i'm looking at the graphs that she has on this this page over here and we should be able to pull up pull this up for the um the clip but um I don't need to show the camera, but maybe I will show the camera. But you see these, these are pretty steep drop-offs.

It basically goes nothing in the orange line. And you also see the number of organic pages disappearing. At least this is from like an Ahrefs index. So all that to say is, it's been the same since the beginning.

Like Neil and I have been doing SEO for a while. You publish poo-poo, you end up with poo-poo traffic. Definitely. Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads and landing pages, you can't do it on LinkedIn ads right now, but you can do it with Carrot.

It's www.carrot.ai. Again, karrot.ai. And we'll see you on the other side. So you have a prediction here. You get three in a row here, Neil. So you have a prediction here.

This would be four in a row. Is it four in a row? Yeah. Four in a row. I messed the numbers up. Neil's on a streak. Neil, just for months and months and months, added no topics at all.

And today he had a random ballot of inspiration. Yeah. So my prediction is Google will look more like ChatGPT and ChatGPT will look more like Google in the future. What do you mean by that?

So when you think about Google, people associate Google with traditional search. I'm not talking about it from an engineering perspective, but if you're looking at just LLMs and usage from people using it purely for search, ChatGPT is the winner. By far, it has the majority of usage. I'm assuming you agree with that statement if you're excluding AI overviews.

The second winner is Google. They're in the number two place with AI overviews, Gemini, et cetera. AI mode, yeah. AI mode, et cetera. But most people associate Google search with just traditional search in which, hey, you're going to get

some blue links and some videos and maybe an AI overview. You can go to AI mode to see more or you can go to Gemini. You can do Lens on your phone, but not that many people use it. They're at roughly 20 billion searches a month right now for Google Lens, which I know seems like a lot.

But to put it in perspective, Google is getting around 13.7 billion searches a day. Just, you know, people just typing in some queries. So the 20 is not bad, but it's not a big chunk percentage wise.

And that, again, is monthly. And Google just made some new announcements. They changed their search box and made it an intelligent search box. It's the biggest change to the search box in 25 years.

So I don't know if you saw what they just released today. No, I didn't see the product releases today. So it's actually really cool. And if you see my screen, I'll play the video because I know Noah can see the camera there.

Yeah. So just for the editors, by the way, when we're showing this stuff, we have a link column for this. We should show these in the videos. Yeah, so in this example, for anyone who's just listening, in Google search box, imagine a plus before you type in the queries.

So in the search box, it's pretty much elongated oval. And on the right side, you have the search button. Now imagine now on the left side, you have a plus button.

So you can click the plus and you can click on anything, AI mode, create images, or gallery, where is it? Let me see the options actually again. Yeah, AI mode, create images, deep search, canvas, gallery, camera, files. So for example, you can click on gallery and you can select two or three items that you like.

Let's say it's a dress and that's what Google's using in this example. So the searcher could select two dresses And then it highlights those two images. And then you add in text.

The example here is, help me find a similar dress, but in this color scheme instead. So they showed one dress image, one color scheme image. Click search. Google showed all the similar dresses, but in that color.

And that's an example of what Google's doing with search and AI. And that's just skimming the surface. They're getting really in-depth. Even with their new search feature, you can actually build an app just typing in a prompt into their search feature.

Yeah, it's called Seamless Google Search to AI Mode. Uh-huh. Yeah. So this is something that launched many back in January, but it's now fully live. Okay, cool.

So, yeah, I mean, all that to say is this kind of reinforces this is not investment advice. By the way, my dad was asking if you had to pick one stock from the Magnificent Seven, what would you pick right now? I said Google because they're on a tear and they're clearly profitable and they've clearly been continuing to innovate.

So, by the way, this... So you have this other piece over here. Google lets you build your own app within Google search using agentic coding. Is there something else you wanted to go deeper on there?

No, I thought it just shows and it goes more with the narrative that Google is really going after OpenAI and Claude and they're integrating a lot of these features.

And I was talking to my brother-in-law the other day. We were talking about businesses. I was like, you know, the business that I believe is massive right now that not too many people...

I haven't really seen anyone build it yet, is a consulting company that just focuses not on AI integration because there's already too many of those, that just focuses on token optimization and fee reduction.

And then you just take a percentage of the savings that you save. So think of like AWS and cloud. Right. During back in the day with AWS and a lot of these cloud computing companies, there were companies that said we would help you optimize your cloud architecture.

So instead of spending one hundred thousand a month, you now spend fifty thousand dollars a month and they would take a percentage of the savings. I think there should be a similar business for tokens in which someone helps you optimize your token expenditure because there's a lot of companies that are spending millions and millions, some even tens of millions, and I bet you there's many that are spending hundreds of millions because the supposed rumor is Anthropics now around $45 billion in ARR.

So if someone just helped you with that reduction and their fee was a percentage of the savings, I think that's a win-win model and that business would blow up even though it's boring and ugly. Here's what I'll say about that. So two things tied to Chamath. I have two things on Chamath today.

There's a Chamath episode. So I spoke to a guy who basically... is a leader at a $2 billion a year company revenue. Okay, $2 billion revenue. So pretty sizable, right?

And he actually worked with Chamats 8090. So initially Chamats 8090 company was a company that said, hey, we're gonna help eliminate all of your costs on like Salesforce and all these things right now. And bear in mind, this company is spending like $25 million a year on software. So they're like, okay, maybe we can chop $5 to $7 million a year.

That's a good amount, right? And so they work with Chamath's company for a year. And, you know, apparently it didn't work out because it was too complex to make those. And I was like, okay, so how would you have paid them?

Well, they were going to take a percentage of the savings, right? And this isn't token savings exactly, but this is cutting on software costs. And that didn't work out initially. So here's what I will say, though, because...

He has found a model that does work for him. That model didn't work initially. So maybe this token optimization model might work. I think it's still more of like a, it could be an add-on service.

I don't know if it's going to be kind of the primary service. Could work, right? But what I really wanted to get into here was actually on Chamath saying, if you're running a consulting business and you're deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization, I'm looking at you, PwC and Accenture, you are letting the fox into the hen house. OpenAI and Anthropic are openly funding and starting competitors to you while also using your usage to drive more success for them.

This is not a failure on their part, but a failure on your part. So consulting businesses that understand this are adopting a control plane that allows them to arbitrate where tokens go and who generates tokens for them. So controlling the tokens, Neil, is controlling the spice like Dune. Right.

So this was a key pillar of 8090's global partnership with EI. And we're close to another global partnership, but we're taking control of token generation and can direct them to any model provider, which is kind of what you're talking about, actually. So, yeah, a little bit different. I saw his tweet out there.

I think he's more so going after like the Accentures and the McKinsey's and, you know, pinpointing how they're helping build open AI and Claude with all their customers and all the data and all the spend. I do agree that, again, I don't think that's all that AD90 does. But to my point, what I just made earlier, I think token optimization and token routing is going to be a core service that companies have. And I actually think you're going to have it.

I think I'm going to have it too as a service. I don't know if we're going to have it as a service. I genuinely believe that the larger players will eventually, I'm not saying in the short run, eventually will help you fine tune and reduce the cost for you and do it in the most economical way. If you look at AWS,

You take your cloud bill. They try to do reserved instances. They have consultants. They try to help you save on the bill. And we've even been pitched by Google.

Hey, switch to Google Cloud. We'll help you save X, Y, and Z on infrastructure and all of that. And that's why I believe that The LLMs themselves or the AI companies will try to save you as much money as possible in the long run, because if they don't, a competitor will come by like a Google and say, hey, we can do similar things and we can do it for half the token price.

And here's how. And then you're going to start seeing a lot of companies switch. I have two thoughts, two more thoughts on tokens. I was talking to a founder today and we're just, it was like 30 minute talk just on AI, right?

And we're just like, dude, OpenAI and Cloud are so smart because you know what? You paid $200 a month and it's like, you feel like it's an all you can eat buffet and you're just going to town every day, right? But inevitably what's going to happen in the next year or two is they're going to have you so hooked on it. It's like, you're going to have to pay more.

And I was like, okay, fine. Let's pay more, right? Because it's so damn good. And we will end the episode on that. Goodbye.