Google Stock Fell 12%. 99% Of People Don't Understand What This means!

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil starts with Google's stock falling 12% after earnings, the biggest drop he has seen after a report, and what it says about search. Eric walks through Granola's AEO workflow and how his team moved fast on a trend with an AI summit, plus why being too early can hurt. Neil shares tests on how AI agents pick local businesses, using a water softener search: review volume, fresh reviews, consistent messaging and comparison articles all shape who gets recommended. Eric demos the free AI visibility report, what it costs to run, and why Neil thinks fewer charts convert better. They finish on enterprise sales and booking more calls. AI search rewards brands that stay fresh and consistent. Key takeaways◾AI agents lean on review volume, freshness and consistent messaging◾Comparison articles help you get picked in AI answers◾Simpler reports with fewer charts can convert better Chapters00:00 Google stock falls 12% after earnings01:15 Neil on Google's valuation02:42 Granola's AEO workflow04:32 Hit trends fast: Eric's AI summit07:03 How AI agents pick local businesses09:00 Reviews: volume and freshness10:56 Why comparison articles win12:41 Free AI visibility report13:46 What the report costs to run14:45 Fewer charts convert better15:51 Enterprise sales and booking calls 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗟Welcome to Marketing School, one of the top business podcasts with over 61 million downloads. Each episode delivers actionable marketing tips and strategies from two entrepreneurs who truly practice what they preach. The show is hosted by Eric Siu, founder of Leveling Up and Single Grain, and Neil Patel, co-founder of Neil Patel Digital and recognized by Forbes as a Top 10 Marketer. 🎙️ Learn More About the Hosts Eric Siu – Leveling Up: https://www.youtube.com/@LevelingUpOfficial Neil Patel: https://www.youtube.com/@neilpatel 📩 Free Resources Ubersuggest: https://www.ubersuggest.com/ Answer The Public: https://www.answerthepublic.com/ ✅ Subscribe for Daily Marketing Insights!

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  Did you see how Google's stock tanked like 12%? They've never had this much of a tank after releasing earnings?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  No.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  People are afraid that AI is gonna kill Google Search. Because their ad revenue miss on Google Ads grew by 12% and it was a miss by a few percentage points and like, wow. People are making remarks like, they're showing signs of crack that AI is taking over Google Search. I'm like, in a bad economy, they still grew 12%. And their cloud revenue grew by, I think, 103%. And I'm like, is it me or are all these analysts just smoking crack? And they don't realize how many people still use Google?

• 1:14Speaker 00

  I hate to put it this way, Neil. Let me be very crude here. It's not you saying it. This is definitely me saying it. If 0.2% of the world work like this, the 99.8% of people, when they talk about this stuff, have no idea what they're talking about. That's just how, I'm oversimplifying it. But, so when you're talking about the ad, like, by the way, I'm looking at this 12% drop. By the way, they're a $3.46 trillion company. Their PE ratio is only 14, right? I'm like, huh, should it be time to buy some now, is what I'm wondering.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is a cheap stock. Keep in mind, their PE is inflated because of SpaceX.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, that's right, that's right.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Their PE is closer to the last time I checked, including stock-based compensation, because a lot of people exclude that from PE. But when you look at it fully burdened, again, not financial advice, you should double check, it's around 26, 27 times. But I still think that is very cheap, again, not financial advice, for a company that can grow, you know, 24% a year. If you're growing 20-plus percent a year at that scale, I think that's very affordable and you're talking about a company that's pretty much at roughly, you know, a half a trillion dollars in annual revenue, growing at that clip. How ridiculous is that?

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Hey, not financial advice, but would you rather have the S and P 500 or Google if you had to choose one?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Again, not financial advice, but I would choose Google over the S and P 500.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Okay, so let me just read a couple of things and we can get out of here, okay? So Google Search and Other hit 63.35 billion, up 12%, okay? Now, Microsoft Search and Advertising reached 6.55 billion, up 10%, okay? And then you have Amazon's AI managed campaigns. People using it are seeing 67% higher long-term ROAS and 29% lower new-to-brand CAC. So it seems, guys, there's nothing wrong with advertising. It's just all kind of going up and it's always continued to go up. And as long as humans are hanging out online, as long as agents are hanging out online, there's gonna be more and more transactions. So Neil, I didn't know about this. This is, thank you for this. I'm actually excited about this.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  We spread jam, okay, here says, Granola, a $1.5 billion company, increased monthly new users from AI search by 4,600% in just seven months. Here's the genius AEO workflow behind it. They started with buyer decisions, not keywords. So Granola mapped the questions people asked before choosing an AI meeting tool. Then they turned the same decisions into both Google Keywords and AI prompts, so they can measure where the brand actually showed up. And every prompt got diagnosed, okay, if Granola wasn't showing up, they asked why. Okay, so my bet here, Neil, I don't want to read all this stuff, but it seems like they probably pressed hard on a programmatic strategy.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Just creating articles for every single prompt.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they probably got, they're probably, they might get torched at some point. So let me just ask Grok to summarize this piece over here. And, okay, here we go. So their work, okay.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  So their workflow prioritized diagnosing why they lose specific prompts, distinguishing missing pages from week one, studying third-party sources of AI trust, and using an own claim-earn contest framework for target, okay, they targeted actions, including focused Reddit engagement. The attached screenshot demonstrates successful Granola ranked first for best AI meeting note taker for founders, highlighting bot-free recording and integrations as key advantages over Fathom and Firefly, okay? So

• 4:37Speaker 00

  they are number one.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm assuming they're just creating content at scale, mainly their own website. There's only so much you can get done on Reddit with that community if you're being self-promotional. So I'm assuming it's a lot of content on their own website, but that's not as, it works, but it's not as effective in the long run as getting other people to host that content on their website if you can convince them without paying them, which is a challenge, but that's ideally what you need to do, again, without paying them.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  By the way, so Neil's in Europe right now. I'm gonna be in Europe/Middle East next week. And I want to talk about this event that I did, because Neil spoke at my YPO Global Marketing Summit about a year and a half ago on his birthday. So thank you for that, Neil. And, you know, that one was actually harder to sell, I would say, right? So that event, you know, we had, I don't know, let's just call it like up to 180 people or so. But that took till the last minute to sell out. Now, here's the thing, this global AI summit that I'm doing, we sold out. It's like two weeks before we sold out, okay? It wasn't a lot of hard work. It was work for sure, but it wasn't that hard to get it to where it needed to be in terms of sales, right? Now, why is that? Number one, it's a trending topic, AI, okay?

• 5:51Speaker 00

  So you're gonna get more sales naturally, so if you have a good topic. Two, it's tied to an event where there's already gonna be like 1,000 people or so there already. And so sometimes, if the trend is there already, you gotta hit on it quickly. Because what I've also noticed, like, that applies to throwing an event. But that also applies to like my YouTube videos, for example. When I hit on a trend quickly, right, I can't wait. The moment I delay even two, three days, the video doesn't do as well. But if I hit on it immediately, it's gonna do really well, right? So my point is, if you can somehow, part of what you do is tied to being on top of trends or being on top of the news cycle, you can't wait on it and you have to go very quickly. And that's how this event got to be, got to be sold out. And the cool thing is with this one,

• 6:34Speaker 00

  you know, you have a much livelier audience too, where everyone's like, everyone just wants to learn. They're excited.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yep, the one thing to keep in mind with trends, if you're leveraging them from a marketing standpoint, you don't also want to be too early, because it's just not as effective. I remember listening to Eric give speeches on AI and he also would talk about AI agents. And I remember when he was doing this, maybe a year ago, I could be off on the timeline, but it was something like that, right?

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, HubSpot.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Not a lot of people, A, understood it and not a lot of people

• 7:12Speaker 01

  cared as much as I believe they should have. But now, if you talk about agents because of Muse and Dots and Grokba and all the kind of stuff out there, people are much more likely to pay attention and they're interested in the topic. So it's, you can be early, but if you're too early, what you'll find is it just doesn't resonate with people. So you just gotta figure out the right timing if you're gonna leverage trends from a, you know, marketing standpoint.

• 7:38Speaker 00

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• 8:20Speaker 00

  then check out Single Grain.com. That is my ad agency, again, www.SingleGrain.com. Check it out, and if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. By the way, Neil, what cool stuff have you done recently with marketing?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Uh, honestly, I haven't done tons of cool stuff other than play around with um algorithms, Muse, uh, Dots, Grokbot, etc., to try to figure out uh, how they recommend companies uh, when you're searching. So we started off doing tests with local listings. So for example, um, Mike moved to a new house in Las Vegas. Okay. In Las Vegas, the water is tough. So he wanted to schedule appointments for people to come in and get a water softener. He did one manually. The first person quoted seven thousand something dollars, call it closer to eight thousand. I think it was like seven thousand, six hundred.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Uh, had Grokbot uh, go and find companies that are good, reputable, that would ideally do it under five thousand dollars. Of course, people don't give quotes over the phone usually for home-related uh, improvements. So it scheduled the appointments from him in his calendar. He picked one of them. I believe the winner that he picked was forty-eight hundred dollars or something like that. But we've been going and asking a lot of the agents to do things for us when it comes to finding businesses, specifically service-based businesses. And we're really spending a lot of time analyzing their algorithms

• 10:00Speaker 01

  to figure out what factors they're looking for uh, for some of these businesses. Now with some of the factors, um, they're not in any particular order. We're still slicing and dicing a lot of the data. I'll put charts on it once it's all done. Uh, they're looking for a lot of reviews and not just the number of reviews, but they're looking for recency of reviews for a lot of the agents that we're seeing. So like if, if Eric has a thousand reviews, but I have a hundred reviews and I'm getting fifteen new reviews a month on a lot of variety of platforms and he's only getting one review a month. I'm just creating a hypothetical scenario here. They're actually looking at recency and seeing that, hey, this new company that's getting fifty reviews a month may be the up-and-comer.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  And even though they don't have a total uh, larger volume of reviews, it seems that people prefer them right now. The second thing is, is we see a big discrepancy on what they choose for companies that have

• 10:59Speaker 01

  strong messaging is the wrong word, but um, consistent messaging is actually the right word. Consistent messaging across all platforms. So we're doing tests with some of the local results because we know some of the businesses. Uh, if you have an inconsistent messaging on certain platforms, we're trying to figure out which platforms. We're actually trying to play some of the inconsistency, inconsistent messaging out there. We're noticing that they're not picking you. But the reason we're doing on a specific platforms is we're trying to figure out which uh, platforms they care for most when it comes to messaging, deciding, you know, if they're going to showcase your business or not. But consistent messaging is very important. If they see some inconsistent messaging, even if you have great reviews, great digital PR,

• 11:43Speaker 01

  um, we're seeing that they're not really choosing you because it's confusing them and they don't want to give a, a recommendation to someone that could just be off. Uh, third-party mentions are really massive. At all the content that we looked at, what ends up doing the best isn't just like someone mentioning you on a website. Uh, it could be posted on your own website. It could be posted on someone else's website, but it's actually the comparison-based articles. We're finding that drive a lot more appointments for local businesses from these agents than anything else. Like if you have a really detailed comparison article of you versus the competitors, but here's the kicker. If the comparison article is you and other competitors who aren't as well-known, it doesn't work.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  But if they're the main competitors, like let's say in your region, there's three main people that are known for roofing or three main people that are known for HVAC or cleaning services or whatever it may be. If your comparison article is around you and those other people, great, you're much more likely to pull up. But if you're putting one of those three in there and then a few unknown ones, it doesn't work and most of the time they're skipping it. They're looking, but if you're continually being compared to the main ones that they like, we're finding that they're pulling you way more often than these agents are recommending you.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Yep. So I think definitely take a look at Neil's study and I, I definitely think you should test and, and play around with this. But you know, as you're talking about this, the more I'm thinking about this, I'm like, if you're into AI, you're building skills right now, you kind of intuitively know that when you're building like a single brain or a company brain, you know that your, your most recent data, depending on what type of data you're looking at, is, is probably going to be uh, more relevant and there's going to be more weighted. And if you had, what Neil's speaking to too is the velocity of people talking about you as well. And if you think about it, like you're starting to build skills for yourself. It's like, well, yeah. And then it's like, well, that's obviously how people are going to, to, to build these algorithms as well, right? Um, and so the more you start to play with this stuff, the more you start to kind of be in tune with how people would build this stuff as well.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  I'm just saying that that's kind of a side effect and there's not real any, any, any uh, takeaway on that one. But I do have some takeaways for you, for, for you here. So we um, we have this, I, I was mentioning this free AI visibility thing that we built. We built this this week and we used uh, Jev images for, for this, right? And so let me just share my screen. So um, using Jev images and this, this re, this AI visibility report. So you can see it's grayed out over here. Okay? So it's like, oh, okay, you know, uh, single grain AI visibility report, you know, um, you're named in thirty-one percent of the answers. This is the biggest gap over here. Okay, well, uh, I, I want to see the full report. Like, well, you know what, what does that look like, right? So you know, Eric at uh, singlegrain.com, put that in there, right? And then you get the full report over here. Okay?

• 14:29Speaker 00

  So this is nothing more to me than a lead magnet. Now, this used to cost you more to do, but when you have the power of like a Jev, you can do this very quickly now, right? And so instead of it costing, you know, uh, a dollar, two dollars, three dollars to do this and, and you know, having someone analyze this for you, uh, you can do this for a couple of cents, right? So that's one example of, of this working. And by the way, when I share Jev, this is our Jev account, seven hundred eighty-six million tokens, okay? Four hundred sixty-eight thousand requests and thirty-one dollars spent, right? And so by the way, you can do a lot more with this. You can make like a competitive ad, uh, a competitive ad tracker as well if you want to. Um, so a ton of different ways to, to, to play this.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  But another thing that we built is um, now instead of having a talent team source for us, we just have this talent bot source and better than any recruiting agency I've worked with, better than any recruiter I've ever worked with. But it's literally sourcing us people for point zero zero four five nine pennies. Okay? So it's not even a penny, it's a fraction of a penny, right? And it's, it's, it's finding their information that way. But I'm, I'm literally staring at the bot right now. I'm like, whoa, it, it's like, it's, it's actually sourcing people and it, it actually, these people pass our bar. So if you're looking for AI-native people, you got to run something like this. Um, and it, it just makes things easier because your, your AI players only want to work with AI-native people. They don't want to work with non-AI-native people for most companies.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  You want to hear something interesting with Legion? We tested a free AI visibility report to capture leads. We've tested a lot of stuff to generate leads for agencies and then you end up selling them. We've also tested a lot of stuff for B-to-B lead generation. Um, the more it's report-looking and the more charts and the information you get, we typically see a decreasing close rates from the leads.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Yep. So here's what happened.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  People don't want tons of information. You, you have to figure out, it sounds bad, a mousetrap to get people in. But we found that typically if you're giving them too much information on a specific topic and you're going really granular, it doesn't convert well into closed revenue. Not for all B-to-B, but in most cases we find that simpler things, less of a reporting format, more of like there's a glaring problem and showing them where there's a problem or like, hey, there's uh, eight things you can do to fix it. Here's a top two or three, set up a call to get the rest. We find that kind of stuff to work much better from a lead capture and a close ratio.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yep. So here's exactly what I told my team this morning. Okay? And then let me show you this too. So um, I'm actually good to show you something from Jen Abo, who I, I really like the stuff that she shares um, with, when, when it comes to enterprise sales. So she shares a lot of interesting stuff with enterprise sales, right? So literally at the very end, the more technical your pitch, the, the faster you've delegated down the chain of command, right? You want to make it simple and, and call out the issues. And so what I had called out to the team, I was like, look, just call out the gaps that they have. You don't need to send them like the complete report. And if they want to talk to us, you can just send them like, hey, here's the benefits of, of getting on another chat, right? But the, the key thing is this, you start out running this and then what happens afterwards is you iterate, right? You don't just build it once, you build, you measure, you iterate. And that's what I've continued to communicate to, to um, the people that we, the people that we work with.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  But to Neil's point, the more technical your pitch, in this sense, it's not a pitch, right? But it is fairly technical. There's a lot of stuff going on. But I will say this, it's, we, we just launched it this week and literally it's, it's booking us calls, right? These are actual hand raiser sales calls. There's a company, I think it's like nine hundred twenty-seven million in revenue or something like that. So pretty good, right? That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow.