The New Rules to Beat the SEO Algorithm in 2026

We just got done with an episode with Sam Parr. Sam is the founder of The Hustle, founder of the startup community, Hampton, and one half of My First Million. And even he, someone who spends all of his time with startup founders, is a little overwhelmed by AI. And one core part of AI, how do I get found in Chat, ChipT, and Gemini? In fact, Sam was wondering, is this even something I should care about? By the end of this episode, he wanted to sprint out the door. He had a whole notebook of all of these things he wanted his marketing team to do to make sure that Hampton was much more visible in Gemini and ChatGPT. And the reason is, is because that's where customers are going. That's where they're asking questions about your products and your services. And this is what this episode is all about. Let's get into this episode of Marketing Against the Green. I'm completely overwhelmed with AI. In Hampton, that's what everyone talks about is what they're doing with X, Y, and Z tool. And I can't keep up with it. But I do know that SEO is one of the ways that we've built our companies. And it's how HubSpot built their company. But I hear about AEO and I don't know where to start. And I'm frankly overwhelmed because I do see customers coming in from ChatGPT on my HubSpot dashboard and on Google Analytics. But I have no idea why we are coming up. And I want to come up more. Hamptons, it's like this incredible network of founders. And I think AI is kind of like a drug for founders because you can just put your builder hat on and go crazy building anything you want. But do they spend a lot of time obsessing about like, why I appear in ChatGPTE? Or why does the AI not give answers about my product or services? Or they're not yet thinking about that? No, it's like we have a channel called, I'm pulling it up called AI. And one of the biggest things that people are talking about is how Google's changing. I've just like looked up the word AEO and it's been mentioned 52 times in the last 90 days. So yeah, it's very, very popular. Google's gotten disrupted. I would say Google's blue links have been disrupted actually. Like that's one interesting thing about Google is like they're a benefactor. I actually wish I had thought about this logically about two years ago because I would have put more money in Google stock. their blue links were disrupted and they were a benefactor from their own links being disrupted. They're making tons more money. Are you guys able to say, has HubSpot's search traffic gone down? Oh yeah. We lost 140 million visits in a year. What percent is that? 80. No, it's not 80%. It was like 70. Wasn't it? Yeah. You're going to say it's not 80. And then you're going to go down to like 30. It seems a little crazy. That's not 80%. It was 80% on the blog. Yeah. Blog traffic dropped 8%. that you're that you're totally right on yeah you guys need a more than anyone dude we have been well there's a lot of interesting things that we learned through that process but it turns out if you just switch your attention to better quality and better conversions and you can kind of supplement this stuff what's been interesting is like i'm a huge nerd so i've been using um it's one of these words that i'd never pronounce but i spell h-a refs yeah a refs uh i use that religiously and now i'm like i need the tool that does this for ai all right so that's what we're going to show you today. So this is fantastic. That's basically the perfect setup. I think, Barry, you've built HubSpot AEO. I think you have basically done some work for Sam and put Hampton through the AEO tool. And maybe let's walk through what that looks like and get some initial feedback from Sam on his take on if this is interesting to him. So Sam, what we did was we actually set up a portal for you about a week and a half ago. And we did some prompt research. We actually asked a couple Hampton members about how they actually think about Hampton and like what they would search. So we wanted to actually show you like, what does the AI think about you and how like would actually users experience this? And I can be transparent here. I sold my company to HubSpot and I get paid by HubSpot to host a podcast, but my whole business, which you'll see is built on HubSpot. And so I want to know, is this on the dashboard that anyone can click on? We probably have to associate with your account, but we can get this set up for you. Anybody who's on a marketing hub pro or enterprise has access to this tool, or you can buy it standalone for 50 bucks. Sick. Wow. Okay. The first thing we did was we added a bunch of prompts. So what are the best founder communities for agency owners trying to scale past $10 million? What are the best peer groups for founders prepping to start a second company? What communities help founders stay accountable to growth and performance goals? We've got a bunch in here, but that's really the first step. Do I have to enter those? Yeah. So you can enter these yourself. You can click here to add prompts manually. You can associate them with different types of founders, whether you're looking for SaaS founders or whether you're looking for agency founders, you've got kind of different ICPs. And you can also, if you've got different offerings, right, whether it's like core, whether it's like chapter, whether it's the overall network, you can actually set this up based on different products and services. Just to be clear, because this was a question that came up a lot. The system created this first set of prompts. The system will suggest all these prompts for you. And if you work with HubSpot already, we actually know what your products are. We know who your ideal customers are. So all this happens within a couple of clicks. Wow. We just happened to set it up for you. If you were going through it, you would have seen this list of prompts. You would have read through them and say, yeah, I want to track this one. No, I don't want to track this one. Okay, cool. Yeah. So you can upload these prompts yourself. You can add individual prompts, or you can also generate with AI. So here you can actually say, okay, what is my ICP? So let's say B2C startup founders in the US. What's the product? Let's say core. Let's say we want kind of five prompts, and then we can actually pick a level of intent. So I think for you, most founders probably don't know about peer groups. It's like a new thing for many of them. They don't. They like, no, kind of, they know maybe a community. So let's call it awareness change. And then we'll go and generate the prompts. So these actually would be pretty specific to your customer base, kind of what stage there are. If you've got a lot of folks already educated, you're probably going to focus more down funnel on like consideration or decision or evaluation. So how do founder peer communities impact B2C startup growth? right so it's like kind of ri related questions uh what causes early stage founders to feel isolated while scaling i think that's a good question that i had a lot like okay this is not a good feeling you know when you're growing your company really fast when i was a founder and it could be questions related to that so for example if you were saying like i'm running my company and i'm lonely and gpt would say like well have you ever thought about using a peer group there's a bunch of really interesting ones like exactly so you could do that and then once we actually go and add these, we'll go and run this prompt against ChatGPT, against Perplexity, against Gemini. So you could actually see the answer in line here. And you can actually see which ones you appear in the response. So we can see here, we appeared in one third of the answers, and we're running these every single day. Every single day, we're sending these prompts to the answer engines. So here, what is the best founder community for agency owners trying to scale past $10 million. So in this run, we were not mentioned, but we can go back to the previous one. Rand mentioned this run. So yesterday they mentioned you. Today they did it. And that's because of the way the answer engines behave, what you can see here. They're actually ranking you. So the Chachapiti, the best one, agency owners club is the first one, agency owner network, and then Hampton here is ranked number four. Wow. This is awesome. Does it give you search volume? so that's a great question one of the most popular questions search problem doesn't actually work in aeo because a prompt on chat chupiti is like 23 24 words so there isn't actually volume because it's almost always like a very specific yeah prompt with all the context so it's actually much more about aiming for the long tail than it is actually aiming for uh high volume in the same way that you did in seo so in order to optimize for search i would just they say write good content and get links. And whatever good content means, that's a little bit of a black box. They just say valuable, whatever the hell that can mean at any given quarter. What do I have to do in order to rank for these? Like what's HubSpot going to tell me? Yeah. So what we do here is we're actually analyzing the citations. So if we go back to the prompt, you can actually see that this is the answer. And when you look at the answer, there's actually a bunch of links in here. And these links are called the citations. And these citations are how ChatGPT actually comes up with its response. So each answer has, you know, anywhere from like three to 15 sometimes links, right? We can see them spread all throughout the answer. Sometimes they're listed at the bottom. And so what we do is we're actually analyzing all the different sources that the answer engines used to come up with an answer. And so here we can see what are the different channels that actually influence the answers. And we can see that about 27% came from earned media. so like PR, 58% came from peers. So for example, other players that aren't direct competitors in your ecosystem that talked about founder communities, 5% came from competitors, about 6.5% came from UGC. So it gives us a map of all the different sources that are influencing the answer engine's visibility of your brand. This is crazy. Okay. And then you can go a click deeper and say, okay, I know I probably will now need to invest in PR because about 28%, 27.8% is earned media. 58.8% is coming from peers. That's actually an area that I can influence. Why? Because I can reach out to those folks to talk about me. Or, but if you actually look at what are the pieces of content that are influencing it, what content types are we seeing? So we're seeing that 20% is actually just like general blog posts. We're seeing that how-to guides. So, right, this makes a lot of sense for founders. I think you guys have done different guides as well. is like 12%. The homepage is 11%. Listicles are 20%. Product page is 17%. This gives you essentially like a content strategy roadmap of what content to create but then also like where do you need to spread this content Because you essentially need to go and create consensus not just on your own blog You have to go and actually the answer is looking across many different sources. They're trying to create consensus. What does the peer mean? So peer is a product or service company that is not a direct competitor. Could that be like if Kip or Kieran has like a personal blog and they're like, Hampton's interesting. Here's why. What the answer engines are doing is they're trying to get a consensus of like what are actually the best options relative to this question. And so they want to go find across a diverse set of sources what seems to be the consensus winner related to this topic. That's badass. And then is UGC social? you just see it's social exactly so you just see it's social primarily focused here on reddit and youtube so those are the ones that we're seeing the most and nothing about twitter or linkedin or meta yeah and linkedin is the third meta we're not seeing yet meta and reddit twitter are not showing up wow okay great could you talk about um the differences between chat sputti and gemini because like youtube is pretty big for google's ai mode they're actually different so if you're trying to be visible in Chatipati or trying to be visible in Google's AI mode, it's quite different in terms of what they look for. Right. So it's interesting. A lot of this depends on kind of the data deals that these answer engines sign with different partners. So Google actually has a very big ecosystem. YouTube is within Google's ecosystem. And they actually want to send you to YouTube, right? Because it keeps you within you, Google. It keeps you actually like within their content ecosystem. And so YouTube is very big and also has a lot of great content. On ChatGPT, we're seeing them push Reddit a lot, right? So that ends up like they have a data deal with Reddit, they're sending folks a lot to Reddit. Google does this as well. But Google also has YouTube. YouTube is appearing in both, but just way more on Google because they're kind of incentivized to keep you within their ecosystem. We're seeing LinkedIn appear in both. Mostly like articles that you can post on LinkedIn rather than like posts. We haven't seen posts appear nearly as much. Do you guys have like a button I can click and you'll just go and solve these problems for me? If you're excited as Sam was in this episode to get going with AEO, you can go to hubspot.com slash AEO and try the same product for free for 28 days or buy it for $50 a month. Go check it out. I'd love to hear what you think. Drop a comment below. You can click the link in the description below for the tool. It'll take you right to HubSpot AEO. This is where recommendations come in. And the way we actually got to these recommendations is before we got acquired, HubSpot was XFunnels' customer. And not just HubSpot, many other big growth marketing teams. And we wrote recommendations for them. We did this over and over again to really figure out what's working and we experimented alongside them. So here we actually have recommendations and we're vetting these with experts, with our customers. We're spending a lot of time figuring out what these recommendations are and how to create them in a way that has the most impact. So if you look at these recommendations, this one, for example, a listicle. Create a listicle on invite-only founder peer groups to capture high-intent searches for SaaS scaling, pricing, exit decisions, and such. And here we actually give you like a mini content brief where we're actually doing kind of the keyword research, right? We're pinging some of our keyword data providers. what are the core keywords that we should have in this article so you can give this to a writer they can write and you know we'll be adding different tools to help you actually do that like if i put that into clod would i be punished for using an ai article about this so a refs actually has a ton of information about this hubspot has as well most content today starts being generated with ai but you want to make sure that there's like a ton of research that is pushed into it with like new facts and things like that and also probably have editors going so it's more like ai assisted rather than like totally totally totally ai right ai written human edited yeah the current ai search landscape feels like the kind of seo landscape of 10 years ago there was this cool story on reddit where this guy had like 10x his visibility through just mass listicles. He had managed to get like a hundred times more listicles all over the web that, and every kind of top 10 had his in the top 10. And he just saw this huge increase in visibility in Chachupiti. Part of that is because like Google kind of figured this out with page authority, like in Google's AI mode, they can like look at what's indexed and say, well, this was in the top 10. So it's an authoritative site given more credibility, but Chachupiti doesn't really have, this is an authoritative site, it kind of just looks at mass citation and then who it has like partnerships with, deals with. Yeah. And I think the other factor is that in AI search in general, relevancy for now matters more than authority. Meaning you're providing a piece of content that is answering the question and has content that is directly answering the question and there's more relevant than to the prompt. It's going to use that over like a high authority site. And that's why you're seeing these listicles and like small players actually, SMBs and startups have a much bigger opportunity than they may have in the SEO world. Can you help me decide how important this is to me? So like Hampton, we're, I don't know, 20 or 25 employees. Right now, our main channel of growth is basically me being a personality. And then also followed by we just started doing paid ads. And that's been really good. Search has not been something that we paid too much attention to because with a small business, you have to really focus, in my opinion, on only one or two growth channels at one time. And then you can expand for HubSpot. I assume it was search early on. And then now after 25 years or 20 years, they're like, let's do podcasts. Let's do YouTube. Let's do all these other things. And it's very, very effective. We made the decision that search optimization, that's not the highest priority because I just went to like search console. I'm like, how many people would potentially search this word? And it was like, this might be less impactful than the other stuff. Now, because this doesn't have visibility on the search volume, would you say that it's the same as using Google console? And then like, is it like plus or minus some percentage where it's like, well, Google search says that you're going to get like 10,000 people to your website this month if you nail it. Therefore, you could assume that AI is going to be two to three times that. Or is it something like, is there any framework? I always thought the search volume was a stupid and shitty thing to look at. Like, I think the TAM was always much bigger than what just the search volume on the face was. And I think if we were at HubSpot, in the early days of HubSpot, we wouldn't have done search if we just looked at search volume, right? A lot of that is that, a lot of that is like the search volume grew a lot over the decade. We were really good at SEO. And then we also just looked at the compounding nature of the long tail. And we're like, wow, like there's just so many small search terms that nobody has anything good for. If we can just rank for all of those, we actually can drive a huge amount of volume. And I think, Barry, one of the things you've talked about with AI search is like volume is like a little misleading. I think the other thing we've seen with AI search before I hand it back is like, Sam, is that the quality of traffic from AI search is drastically better. So people who come to HubSpot from like chat GPT or Google Gemini, they become customers like three to five X higher than like the 10 blue link search. yeah because like your friend is telling you like just do you go and look at our call recording sam you'll just see oh i had an hour-long conversation with chat gbt and it told me to buy hubspot at the end of it and so i would like to buy hubspot and one of the reasons why we actually built this in a way that maps problems to different levels of intent is because you'd go start in a blog post you'd like be aware you have a problem but now you become aware that there's a potential solution you'd go on reddit you try to see what people say maybe youtube at the end you'd end up on like a product page, maybe try a demo. Now that all happens in a conversation, right? So people are just convinced and they get all the recommendations tailored to their specific use case, which is also why we actually don't have volume, right? Because they're actually asking very specifically about their specific problems. Wow. I'm just trying to see how many customers we have gotten from search so far. This is crazy. By the way, that one insight, Kip, of saying, assume that it's significantly larger, that actually is kind of a game-changing insight because that's not how I operated. I think the trickiest thing companies, especially smaller companies, will have with this is search was a pretty trackable investment. And so you could say, oh, I'll do this amount of effort and I can see exactly how many clicks and customers I get back. The challenge is whatever you're seeing from ChatHPT in terms of referral traffic, the actual value to you is probably like 10, 20x more because you're not seeing all of the impressions. AI search is much more akin to like brand marketing where you're just trying to get massive amounts of impressions versus performance marketing where you really were trying to optimize for the click. I would expect like you get a fraction of the benefit from the clicks, but most of the benefit is the impressions. And that's much harder for a small business because you're like, well, I only really want to do the things that I can track. And I think smaller companies or just companies will have to get over that hurdle because this is where your consumer is moving towards. The flip side of that, though, is that the old world of Google SEO, which we thought was more trackable, but then Google obfuscated a lot of that traffic over the years. But it also took forever. Like if you started a blog, you did a bunch of that SEO stuff, it took like six to 12 months for most small businesses to actually get real meaningful traffic. Which is hard because you're like, I'm spending all this money. I'm getting no return. Exactly. On the ADO stuff, like we've posted YouTube videos that get indexed like the same day, start showing up in chat GPT, right? It's so fast. It's kind of what Barry, what you were showing earlier, where Hampton was mentioned one day and wasn't mentioned the next day, like the results are very dynamic. And so if you start doing things, you see that impact immediately versus the old school search days where it took a long time to get like crawled and indexed and finally included. YouTube might be a better way to drive up your visibility Like that the interesting thing about AI searches Because you not looking for a link you looking for a mention Like old Google you really obsessed about links. New AI search, you just care about citations, which people mention you for the product or service you want to appear. And because YouTube is such a prevalent platform and startup founder stories is such a huge market channel fit for YouTube, it almost makes you think that your secret sauce could be in YouTube and video versus traditional text-based content. This is going to sound like a HubSpot ad. And to the listener, I have no problem criticizing HubSpot. So if you guys want me to make fun of HubSpot, I will. Please do. You have to me many times. I'm on HubSpot now and I use the Breeze tool and I just asked them, how many of our users came from AI traffic visitors? So in like the last three months, we've had 1,200 people come from ChatGBT. It's actually probably way bigger. And that was what Kieran was saying earlier, We're like, you actually can't track because people will like look you up on chat GPT. We'll pop the browser. Okay. And go to joinhampton.com. So I want to explain that to everybody watching. Well, that there's 1200 visitors that you described, Sam, is somebody who clicked one of those citation links in a chat GPT conversation and went directly to the Hampton website. There's tons of times you're showing up in chat GPT or Gemini where there's no links. And then they're actually going to go and enter your website directly or search for you in Google or find you a different way. Or they're just going to remember you. Then they're going to see a video or something down the road. And they're like, oh, yeah, I remember chat. You told me about this. Now I'm going to go check it out. And so that's why, Barry, you're saying that the impact is much bigger than just those 1200 visits. Not that those 1200 visits aren't really important and aren't meaningful from a customer perspective. It's just beyond that. Hey, how big of a deal is this? Like, is this sort of like, you know, arguably Amazon was built on the backs of Google ads and search. And then like more recent examples that didn't turn out well was like Wish.com created $10 billion of value off of Facebook ads because they mastered it. HubSpot built a tens of billions of dollar company in part because you pounced on search. Are you guys seeing that this is like an equal opportunity as that? Yeah. So let me tell everybody a story. We have what we call a board offsite every fall, Sam, where we bring customers and partners and CEOs like Toby from Shopify was there this fall. And we had a roundtable with a bunch of our agency partners. And one of them was like, I just got to tell you all, AEO is the most important thing that has happened to my business in the last 10 years. he's like i have been working non-stop i've built out 3 000 different articles around my aeo strategy and i'm seeing my customer acquisition skyrocket and i think that that is what is happening for the early adopters one because the channel's early and it's less competitive as kieran was saying it's still a little bit of the wild wild west in that there's not all these like super sophisticated algorithms which makes it more which makes it way more fun which means like you can literally like just look at the recommendations tab in the app in the HubSpot AEO app like that Barry showed you and just start doing that stuff and you will see the numbers move because it's not like right now with search engine optimization it's like oh well Google changed the algorithm yesterday and I did all this stuff but it didn't really matter that's not the case in this AEO thing so for us we look at it as like a top marketing strategy we've been resourcing it heavily building custom tooling we've got a big team of people working on it and been working on for like the last 24 months. Okay, so when I started the hustle, like I didn't care about search at all. I just said, I'm gonna make sure that like the technical aspects of my website are fine, meaning it loads fast enough. And it was like, you just use the right headlines and tag your images correctly. Boring, like checkbox stuff. So that takes two minutes. The second thing that we would do is we would just write content that always went viral. And we did like really good blog posts. And because of that, we did the third thing, which is we got tons of backlinks. And because of that, I don't know if you guys noticed this So when you guys bought us, there was still a lot of opportunity with our search, but like a lot of the really hard work was just done. And so we did okay with search accidentally. Is that the case with this stuff, which is as long as I just create good content, then I will show up? Or is it like early, early search, which is I can sort of, for lack of a better word, game it, or I can like play the game and get a lot of results? If I was like your marketeer, I think there are three things I would likely focus on. I think the first one is that you just need more niche content. So like in the old world, a page might have like two to three applicable keywords. And you're like, okay, I just want anytime these two to three keywords are used in Google, this page should appear. And I do all my optimization around that. When you're saying content, do you really mean like just like blog posts? Like a blog post, like a web page. A web page could be a super detailed product page, could be a blog post, could be a listicle, could be a web page. Yeah. And now because Chachapiti and Google AI mode is conversational, you actually might need a hundred variations of searches. So like for me, if I was your marketer, I'd be like, OK, I'm going to pull my community. I'm going to see what the most frequently asked questions are. like what were the questions you were asking prior to becoming a Hampton member that we did a great job of answering and I started to create like niche content around each of those questions then I think the other thing that is coming back is like modern PR and you actually have a huge advantage here because you have a community with incredible stories I've read a lot of the stories that you put out from your community but like getting some of those placed in traditional like real publications they have you know fortune all of these kind of publications get in those stories and like authoritative publications will be useful for you and then i think youtube like i think that you already have a huge presence on youtube yourself but you could imagine you have multiple youtube channels youtube channel and getting a ton of citations let's just say i have my own youtube channel that's sort of like starter story or something like that yeah exactly yeah you could have like a hampton youtube channel that's telling different user stories that are answering all of these like questions related to the prompts that you're tracking and those are all going to get cited and indexed as part of this i assume then that ai reads the transcripts and consumes it does and the jimini model actually can watch the video too even beyond the transcript this gives me so much fomo by the way like that's like my cortisol levels like right because i'm like oh it's early i gotta do this well it's super early the thing i would just for everybody watching it for you, Sam, that I would probably advise on, you said maybe like 10 minutes ago, it's like, hey, I believe that if you're running a small business, you got to focus on your growth channels and you got to have a couple primary channels for growth. One of the things I think we're trying to communicate to you and everybody watching today is that for AEO, it's influenced by all the other channels. It's influenced by how you show up on YouTube or Reddit or the LinkedIn posts. So like you could drastically change how you show up in chat GPT by just like running like an influencer campaign with 10 founders on LinkedIn who publish articles about their like Hampton journey, right? But that is kind of the antithesis of that growth focused channel mindset that I think was dominant over the last 10 years of being a founder, where actually now you kind of have to show up on a broader set of places, which is a very different way of thinking about your marketing strategy. Do you guys have recommendations on tools that can do or help me do a lot of this work like for example um you guys just bought starter story so starter story for the listener is uh an amazing youtube channel and podcast about like starting companies but what a lot of people don't realize this is that the secret to starter story is that pat walls the founder is more of an engineer than a content creator and he's got the most streamlined process i've ever seen in my life took us through it's really oh my god it's beautiful it's a piece of art and so like using his process i think he has a three-person team two-person team he's able to create three super high quality quality videos a week and i think he only works five hours a week like on like creating the content and the rest is just on managing the team but anyway my point being is do you guys have any cool tools that i can go ahead and like use to help me get all this stuff done yeah i mean you should use hubspot for a lot of it sam like we have a brand new reddit integration so that you can do all of the reddit engagement and show up in threads and identify threads to show up in same you can obviously distribute to youtube tiktok so part of just like your social strategy can run through hubspot i think what pat has done on the back end is built some automation with cloud code to basically repurpose content in basically the repackaging automation around that i think like this is the interesting thing content is 67 percent of engineering discipline now and then like 30 percent of craft discipline And so what he's built is a whole system to have a core piece of content. And then when that content is tripping over a certain threshold, it kicks off a bunch of agents who are able to create different variations of that content and promote them across different platforms. And then he can cluster it all together and see how that topic performed. It's pretty awesome, actually. That tool is actually a tool he built in Cloud Code. But I think for your purposes, I think a lot of that you'll be able to do in HubSpot and the YouTube part. I think YouTube in and of itself is like just a hard investment to make. It is. We actually have some really awesome video tools that we released to actually help you both on YouTube and on TikTok to actually be purplished. I will generally say like even the extreme content automation stuff that the Starter Story folks have built is not actually that necessary yet. Like you got to be pretty far along to get leverage of that. Like just some of the basic work on Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, and some webpage content will take you very far. for hubspot which youtube channel do you think is the most impactful for you guys for driving business i mean i think it's probably yours i haven't looked at the most up-to-date data but i yeah it's yours uh it's yours the general hubspot channel and then this show those are the top three and then which one's the most efficient like highest converting i think marketing against green is highest converting but only because my first million has a far bigger broader audience The reason I asking is because like on one hand you said like do videos on these stories But on the other hand you like well just a bunch of silly guys talking about business can also yeah but i think both work sam it like you got these podcasts and then additionally we have another high performing channel that is just like how-to tutorials of like how you solve use cases and problems using hubspot and that's really valuable for a lot of the kind of lower funnel ai search stuff if people are actually looking to do something specific or looking to do something specific in HubSpot, right? This is where Barry, you were showing earlier the different funnel stages and how you think about prompts by those funnel stages. And that kind of informs it as well. Dude, this is crazy. I feel a huge sense of overwhelm at the moment. Like there's so much opportunity. And then the other side is like, there's so much opportunity. I'm so excited. I will tell you, Sam, most of the customers we talked to, Barry, I want you to chime in. It's like, they're actually just kind of disenfranchised from the last era of marketing. They're like, oh man, I'm doing all this email marketing and this traditional Google SEO, and it's not working like I thought it would. And then we talk to them, we do exactly what we did with you, with them. And they're like, oh, that shit, that is so much better. Like, I feel like I'm in control. I feel like this is this thing that's growing. I know what to do. Barry, you've talked to like hundreds or thousands of companies about this at this point. Is that the right picture or am I missing something? Yeah, I think we had a playbook that was running for a while and customers got the hang of it. It took them a while, but then they did for marketers. And now that playbook is changing, right? And I think up until now, it's taken a little while until the tools have actually kind of reshaped around the new playbook. And that's what we're trying to do here, right? To make it really, really easy, as easy as it was to run inbound to now run this new playbook. And that's really kind of the whole purpose of what we built here. So can I ask you guys one more question? I think this is for me and the listener. okay i'm a small business owner i only have let's say a three or four person marketing team and right now they're working on one or two channels that are effective you said that google has a tool where i can like type in something search console give me a guess search console sorry um so is there a way that i can make a decision on whether this should be a top priority using some type of data because what you said was it's search console times a certain amount of numbers. But is there something that like, think about the listener who's not the business owner, who has to make the argument? Is there any data that I can use to make the argument that yes, this is needle moving? Those 120 clicks over three months is probably about 100 to 140,000 impressions. 200 clicks over three months, right? Yeah. So that equals how many impressions? That's about 100 to 140,000 impressions. That's the range. So for however many clicks you've already gotten assume that there's a hundred times more pressure. Exactly. I would say this is a tricky thing right now because open AI are given impression data as part of their new ad platform because we're a beta user. And that's why I can give you kind of a range because we are actually able to reverse engineer from clicks into impressions. And so when you can actually start to like use the ad platform part, you can start to see what volume is there for things that you want to appear for. But organically, it's harder. I don't know if you have a better answer, Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, there is that gap. I think the thing that I've been tracking is, like, how many weekly active users are we seeing on ChatGPT and on Gemini? And like, how does that relate to my business? And so ChatGPT is at like 900 million, and that's been going up steadily. Gemini is now, I think, like 500 million or so. It's like 25% of market share overall. So, you know, for us more than anything, just like our customers actively putting this into their workflow. And if the answer to that is yes. And like, if your founder communities are talking about it, then the channels keep going up. I want to answer this slightly differently, which is like, if I was that marketer, what would I do? You're making the question of like, how would they sell it in? How did they get their company to believe that this is one of the priorities they should care about? I think if I were your marketer in Hampton right now, Sam, I would come to you and I would say, hey, I want to spend a couple hundred dollars a month. I want to go and use an AO tool like the Subspot AO tool. And I want to get a set of prompts. We just track to understand how our visibility is trending. I then want us to use some call recording for any sales calls and customer calls to understand how they're mentioning finding us on chat GPT and Jim and I. And I want to see how those things are trending over the course of a month, a couple months, maybe 90 days, and how those trends, I think, are impacting our business without like doing much work. And then if you're like, oh, wow, I noticed that there's a correlation in our sales cycle getting faster or customers closing with the mentions of Hampton on ChatGPT or on Google Gemini, then it might be an interesting signal that we should really lean in and spend more time and effort. You need to have some baseline and some tracking here. I think almost any business of scale is probably going to have to have kind of a basic operation here. You might not be able to say anything because you're public. But is there any information that, Kip, you could say of like, well, our blog was getting this. And what's interesting is that we have noticed that we're getting two times as much AI visits as we have from our blog. So like, if you're getting this much through Google, assume that AI will be blank more if you do it right. So there's a couple of things I think I can't say. One is like at the highest level of abstraction, we told you that Google search visits had gone down at the start of the show, right? Our revenue growth rate is going up. What I can tell you is we figured out how to replace those visits with higher quality traffic. A lot of that coming from these AI answer engines. And we're verifying that through this tool. What we've used in Excel before and our own like basically call transcripts and searching the call transcripts that our sales reps are having. So that's one, I can tell you for sure. The second thing I can tell you for sure is that the people who come to us from AI search directly become customers at like three to five X rate, but they also become customers like an order of magnitude faster because they've done their whole research and consideration process with that AI search. I think like the other stat is that that's now become like our number one indicator of likeliness to buy is the fact that they've actually used AI search somewhere like in their experience because these customers are just so much further down the funnel this is crazy i'm like taking sam i got a question for you like taking these notes of what i got to go do yeah what are you gonna go do now i'm going to run to my co-founder like this is how founders work they like i just saw something amazing change everything no no i'm gonna uh well first of all i need to get this and dive in so i i'm on hubspot right now i see that i have access very well with this today i think he'll get this over to you so i want that and then second i'm going to set it up for the next like 30 days i'm going to track this for some reason i just totally dismissed this where i didn't even think this was going to be a thing to focus on and then i went and used the breeze tool to see like man i'm getting like a lot of traffic like what's the world look like if i 5x that and is it worth like how much revenue will that make therefore it might be worth assigning one person to this correct so i'm gonna go and dive deep on the data that you guys show uh and again then i'm gonna figure out is this worth doing well first of all if you end up figuring out that it's worth doing and end up doing it we'd love to have you back in a couple months and hear about the journey and what was good what was bad what was easy what was hard it's crazy i just hired another hubspot specialist we just hired a full-time guy to help us with our hubspot and run it because now we have hundreds of thousands of leads in there. And we're trying to optimize it to be even better. We're getting past stage one or stage two stuff. And now I'm getting to stage three. And this is something that I'm going to run by. I need you to figure out how to keep an eye on this and figure out what we should do. We love it. Thanks, Sam. Thank you for joining us. Good luck at Hampton. God bless you guys. See you. This was awesome. Thank you. I want to tell you about a podcast I love. It's called Nudge. It's hosted by Phil Agnew. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals, and it's the UK's fastest growing business podcast. What I love about it is that the Nudge listeners love no fluff, no BS, evidence-based marketing tactics they get in each episode. You're gonna wanna listen because this is like an MBA's worth of insight in every single podcast. And entrepreneurs, you're gonna love the show because it's filled with repeatable, proven studies, not hearsay, not one-off success stories. marketers you're gonna love it because it discusses the psychology behind great marketing and what marketers are getting wrong listen to the nudge wherever you get your podcast this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated whoa i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a task from three days ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better hey everyone you know Kieran and I have been doing the podcast for a while now we've been at this for a couple years we love it we could not be happier to be doing this but we wanted to take things to the next level we want to level up the impact we're having with marketing against the grain so the next step of our journey is something we're really really excited about we're going to launch the marketing against the grain newsletter. 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