Google AI Mode is About to Get More Popular

In this episode, Eric and Neil unpack Google AI Mode’s Chrome integration and how 100M MAUs could ignite a new distribution flywheel—fueling ads, partnerships, and startup pressure. They compare Google’s gen video/image capabilities, debate the “free subsidized by ads” model, and analyze YouTube’s latest updates: TV-style ad swaps, title tests, AI Inspirations, collabs, dubbing, and creator discovery. They also reveal why topic choice beats flashy hooks, share a multilingual trend-mining workflow, explore agent tooling, and spotlight Carrot.ai. TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Google AI Mode, Chrome rollout, and the ads flywheel (02:45) Google’s gen video/image edge and “free” strategy (05:45) Big YouTube changes: ad swaps, title tests, Inspirations, collabs (10:50) Topic vs. hook, dubbing and global growth (15:40) Agents + trend mining playbook; sponsor: Carrot.ai 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗟 Welcome 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 Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe 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

  Oh, did you see how Google AI Mode is gonna get super popular now? It's already actually growing in popularity. They have over 100 million active users, but uh, they're integrating into Chrome. So it doesn't matter where you are on the web, you can get help from Google AI Mode for anything you want.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  The funny thing about this Chrome, this new Chrome now, it's basically what all these other browsers were doing. Uh, Comment, Dia, all these other ones, and it's like, oh, summarize this YouTube video. Oh, do this shopping for me on Instacart or whatever. And Google's gonna have, Chrome's gonna have so much more data on you now, that their ads are gonna become way stronger.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yes. I think Google AI Mode is gonna become extremely popular. It's gonna go from 100 million active users

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  to hundreds and hundreds of millions of active users, if not a billion really fast.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  I think Google's in a really good spot, dude. You got Quantum, you got Waymo, you got, you got, they're, they're in the lead.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Nano Banana, V3.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Everything.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have really good products. I was talking to an AI video creation company, Text Video. And I'm an investor in a fund, and the fund invested in this company, so they're just picking my brain. They do good revenue, not like a million, $2 million, like substantially more. They're not at 100, but you get the point, right? And we were talking to them, they're still growing at a really rapid pace. I was like, I'm like, your biggest threat? I'm like, you guys need a free version of your product, and I was like, you need this as quick as possible. And I'm like, your biggest threat is Google's video generation and image generation products are amazing. I think they're, I've used a lot of the ones in the space.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  I actually think Google has the best video and image generation products out there.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  I agree, and they're actually doing a better job of marketing these now because they have multiple Twitter accounts, one for Notebook LM, one for V, like, like, one for Nano Banana.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  And they're, they're actually getting a lot of impressions and they're cross promoting each other now. So they're starting to pick it up on the marketing side for these products.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but hands down, I was like, they're gonna crush you. And if you don't believe it, even if you're growing because the market's big, they're gonna crush you because they can just make everything for free.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Do the fact that if it costs them $2 billion to run it for free, but it generates them extra $10 billion in ad revenue, that's a huge profitable win for them.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  They'll do it all day, yeah.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  All day long.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  This is why, we, we talked about this, Google has one of the best distribution in the world. They're, they just suck that marketing for a little bit. They're getting better now. Uber, as an example, they're actually transitioning to this, uh, they're just, they have all this distribution. They're partnering up with like Waymo. They're trying to get Elon.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Uber's partnering with Waymo?

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, they, they, they partner up with Waymo. They're trying to partner up with like, uh, all the, the.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  You sure that's not Lyft? Lyft just did announce a partnership with Waymo.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  They're trying to partner up with autonomous vehicles now, and they're trying to partner up with different, different fleets. So imagine if you have like a fleet of cars in the future, you can add it to the Uber network. Um, and they're, they're, I think they're gonna try to convince Elon to do the same thing with robot taxis because it's like, it's a win, win, win for everyone, right? And their whole thing now is, is, you know, it's whatever humans need, we, we're gonna add it to our distribution network. So like Travis Kalanick, the, the, the co-founder of, of Uber. He has cloud kitchens, so they're adding that into Uber as well. And so it just goes to show you that distribution is very much king as long as you know how to market the stuff.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yes, and if you look at some of the biggest companies in the world, like the auto space, Uber's there, or transportation, they don't own cars. You look at Airbnb, they don't own any properties.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Dude, Marriott doesn't even own a lot of their hotels anymore.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Most of the hotel chains or a lot of the popular ones, like the Hiltons and Marriott's, the St. Regis's, although St. Regis, I believe is owned by Marriott. They have a licensing deal with the person who owns a property, like even here, we're in a Mandarin Oriental recording this. Do you know how much of the building the Mandarin Oriental owns?

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Like, less than ten percent?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Zero.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Oh, zero percent?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  It's a management deal.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Well, I am right, less than ten percent?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that's true. They, they, they don't own the building at all. A lot of the deals are management deals. And I know this because in my HOA, I got a notice saying, uh, for like the agenda, you know, discussion of the renewal of the Mandarin Oriental. And then right after is like, uh, approving the renewal of the Mandarin Oriental.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Cause the name was always changed. Like you used to live in a different, in a Mandarin in Vegas and it changed.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  To Waldorf Astoria. It was after the, not the PF Chang's, uh, what's a quick Asian fast food?

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Panda, Panda Express?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Panda Express? Uh huh. The Panda Express guy bought the Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas. He lived in the building too at the same time. He then changed it to Waldorf Astoria because he felt it would be better to draw in more people into the hotel.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Interesting. Did it work?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I don't know, cause when I sold my unit, cause it was part residential, as you know, uh, the bottom half was hotel. The residential was owned, of course, by the people who bought the properties. He bought the hotel side as well as the common areas. Um, I sold my unit when it was the Mandarin. And the, one of the main reasons I bought there is because of the Asian food and Indian food and it was this comfort food for me.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  So I visited, um, Alex and Leila when they were, I, I don't know if they're still there, but.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  They are there.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so to me it felt like the same thing. So I'm not sure if it changed.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  The restaurants have changed. I don't know if they changed a tea lounge and stuff like that, but, um, some of it's a little bit changed because they got rid of like the Asian theme.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Who knows? You always learn something new. Okay. Pick the, you know, you know what's interesting? Um, I, I want to talk about this real quick, because I, I don't know if you, you actually know about these changes, but did you see all the big changes coming with YouTube?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Are you talking about the creator stuff where you can now plug in ads like you do with, uh, television?

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, stuff like that. So what do you, what have you seen so far?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I believe it starts rolling out, uh, end of Q4 fully, uh, and then, or it starts really rolling out sometime in Q4 and tw- uh, 2026, it's fully rolled out, I believe, Q1.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  The easiest way for everyone to think about this change when it comes to creators is, let's say a company hits up Eric and I to create a video and they pay us. And it gets, you know, you know, our average impressions that they're paying us for is, they're just paying us a flat fee. An average video of ours gets 10,000 views. This video gets 2 million views, they keep making money. When we just got paid one time. On the flip side, if Eric and I get paid one time and our average video gets 10,000 views, but this new video only generates 1,000 views. This, this advertiser is kind of screwed because they just paid you to create a video on them, even though you're mentioning it's sponsored and all that kind of stuff.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  And it got one tenth of the views that it normally does. And when you run videos, if you think about the way most people record videos, you just talk and you record and that's it. If you look at how TV shows are filmed, you film and they have cliffhangers right where there's commercial breaks, right? The good shows, the good producers tend to do that. And then they can swap in advertisers whenever they want. And just like the television networks, people stop paying you, swap it out with something else. The cool part in today's world and what the changes YouTube are making, it's going to be more like you have a TV media company where you can figure out where you want ads put in and swap them in and out.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  And people can buy impressions and work out deals. And I think it's less risk for the advertiser. And it also gives the creator more opportunities to monetize. In the last, I think it was three or four years, YouTube made an announcement that they paid out over a hundred billion dollars to creators. I don't know if you saw that.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  And I think this is just going to make creators more money and advertisers willing to spend more because it makes it more trackable and more transparent.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Cool. So I want to talk about, so that's a big one. But there's some couple of other big changes and maybe we can react to these changes. Cause some are, some are, I think really exciting as a creator. So right now with YouTube, you know, obviously you can do the thumbnail testing. So they have three, right?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Now you can do title testing with it as well.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  So you're going to have three that you can test and. Titles and your thumbnail, that's obviously the biggest indicator or the biggest way to get people to click. They also have inspirations coming too. So oftentimes people will have like, you know, they'll have a writer's block when it comes to new ideas. So these inspirations are AI generated. Look at what performs well on your channel and to look at what else is happening in your nation will give you ideas. I think that's great. Long form ad swapping you just talked about, short form product linking you can you can do with more accuracy now.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  And what I think is interesting, what's what's more exciting to you and me with this crappy marketing school, small YouTube channel? Is that we can add collaborations. So you and I, if we just add our marketing team or whatever as managers, they can just add your channel on my channel for this long form podcast on marketing school and we can add it as a collaborator, just like you would on Instagram. So what's gonna happen? This this marketing school YouTube channel would collect the revenue and then you and I would just pass over some of our reach to this channel and then it would grow, right? That's exciting to me for sure. I'm gonna test that for this channel. Once it works, obviously you'd be like, okay, I'm down. But you're like, I don't know about that. Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  No, the other thing that we've seen with YouTube, and this is an interesting stat that we've seen on our end. People try to optimize for the hooks, like with my channel. The videos that I don't have the best retention in the first like thirty seconds or a minute, like you know, with the hooks. Are the videos that tend to get the most views.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  That don't have a hook?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  No, that don't do the best with retaining people from the hook.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Cause you change the subject.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Sorry, I'm not understanding.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's say I create a video on SEO. Okay, and if I have a video that's like.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  You already know what's hap- you already know the SEO has changed, but this is what's gonna happen in twenty twenty six that no one's talking about. Okay, I considered that a decent hook.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, you got my attention.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Okay, I just came up with that on the spot.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  When I hook people really strong, my retention's better in the first thirty seconds or a minute or whatever you want to end up calling it.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Those videos tend not to get the most views.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  All my videos have a hook.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  But the ones that don't have the best retention.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  And the hooks aren't as strong.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  No joke, those videos tend to have the best uh overall views.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  That's interesting. Maybe human psychology is getting used to not wanting to see these sensational hooks and wanting to see something normal.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  It could be. When we start diving a little bit deeper, what we found is the videos that have the most views are on topics that people are the most curious about. And they're much more likely to watch the whole thing. Yes, there's still a high drop off at the beginning. But the retention throughout the rest of the video is fairly good.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  And it's better than the ones that I just hook them really strong.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And I think what's happening, because I'm not switching it. It's not like I'll, I'll use that hook that I just gave. And then talk about paid ads instead of SEO. Like I still keep it relevant to the hook or else then people are just gonna be pissed off at you and then give you a low, you know, thumbs down on everything.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  But what I found is more important than a hook, and this is at least for my channel. I need to look at more channels and get data on this. More important than the hook, more important than that thumbnail click through rate is what I found is people really want to watch the whole video because it's a topic that they truly care about.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's interesting. I, I think you're, we're gonna have to look at more data. Um, I will say though, when I watch stuff on like some stuff I'm interested, like AI marketing agents and people doing a screen share and it's like thirty minutes, I find myself watching the whole thing.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yes, but it comes down to what I found is it's.

• 12:09Speaker 00

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• 12:45Speaker 01

  It's more about the topic and is the topic interesting enough to your ideal audience where they're gonna watch a large chunk of it?

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Bingo. It is the topic that's number one, even over the thumbnail, the headline, it is the topic, the ideation. And I don't, I think even for us, I don't think we spend enough time on the topic ideation piece. For you, I think you guys do. I think we've gotten, we've kind of slipped from it and we're kind of going back to it. But two more things I want to talk about here before we move on. Dubbing. So dubbing has come out and I was listening to one of these influencers, I think Colin and Samir. He was switching between him in English and him in Portuguese and it was like pretty damn good. So dubbing's coming, we're gonna abuse that, right?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  They've been talking about that feature for a while.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  But now it looks good. Yeah. And then influencers inside Google Ads. So you're gonna be able to look for influencers that you want to hire inside of Google Ads.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, but the collaboration thing is the most exciting to me. I'm gonna test it for this channel and if it gets enough views, I'm gonna bother Neil to do it too.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  But yeah, I think the dubbing, because the problem I have right now for YouTube, we have offices in 20 something countries, I stopped tracking, and we generate a large chunk of revenue from outside the United States in non-English speaking countries. Of course, executives at a lot of these corporations that we work with speak English. Like we work with like Prudential in Brazil and Novartis, you know, the big pharmaceutical for those ZMPIC drug in Brazil as well. So even though the majority of Brazilians speak Portuguese, on the executive level in large corporations, most of them speak English, but when they're consuming content, marketing content or content that you were marketing,

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Native.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  It's in their native language and when you talk in English, it just screws up your reach in all these countries.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  So I think this is gonna work out well, long term.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't wait to dub my video and I'm hoping it's the same video, same URL.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  It's the same video, same URL, yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  In all the languages.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, literally, there's just that you just switch to the language and I think they're already by default, they're in Portuguese or whatever, right? It's just gonna go to that. And I think that's gonna drive more business and more, I think it's gonna drive more brand awareness long term too.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, here's a hack that a lot of people aren't doing. One thing that we've been doing is we crawl and we use AI for this. I don't know what AI tools my team's using for this. But what they do is they look at all the languages that are outside of English. That has marketing related videos. It maps out how many views a video is getting. And it looks for a disproportionate amount of followers to views. So like someone having a thousand YouTube followers and then the video getting ten, twelve thousand views. And that topics made some topic in marketing. It's recent, like when I say recent, last thirty to sixty days. It does really well in those countries.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  And then we look at the English variations AI does and it tells us which videos haven't been done in English yet. And that gives us ideas for topics for us to create videos in the United States that could potentially be viral hits. Because if they got ten thousand views with only a thousand followers. We'll do like, let's say if it's talking about AI mode before a lot of other people aren't, it has a unique take. We may be like, oh, we have a different take and a better take because of Chrome and all the integrations. We're going to do a video on AI mode and we're going to do a different spin on it. Because we think this is what's going to actually change AI mode for marketers. And then we'll do a video on it and we've seen a really high hit rate from that. And when I say a high hit rate, around like forty percent of it, forty percent of the time, it doing really well.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  That's high. And by the way, the, if you want to build a YouTube trending topics agent, like what Neil's talking about. I just talked to the CEO of Lindy the other day, right? And basically you can use natural language now, so text to agent. So you could dictate what you want and you know, these workflow tools like N A N, all these things, you have to like make these things and click them around. Literally, I just dictate what I want. After the podcast, I, I, I, first time I did a podcast in a while where I interviewed someone, right? I just wanted to max out what I can learn. And he's like, yeah, all you need to do is dictate out, I was dictating out, I was editing my agents, all of my agents got better. And I was, so the thing that you just mentioned, you guys can just take this transcript, whatever Neil just said. Dump it into Lindy, tried for free, he's not paying me to say this, right? But it's, it's pretty crazy where this is going. And now I'm just, I kind of want to spend, this is why I'm, I'm leaving my Vegas trip early.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  I want to go home and I want to make agents tomorrow, but um. It's exciting because he said at his company, he's like, he's like, yeah, we're all in the office. I was like, so you guys are in the office five days a week? Oh, he said, no, no, no, six days a week. I'm like, okay, so what are your people doing all the time? He's like, all of my people, thirty percent of the time, they're building agents, sometimes even more than that. They're just using this text to speech thing, thinking about all their problems, all the annoying things. And I'm like, wow, you guys can use whatever you want. You can use Linde, I'm sure there's other tools you can use. But the thing that the YouTube trending topics, the international one Neo just mentioned, just take this transcript, guys, and go have at it.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, we found it to work. And when I say forty percent of the time it's working, like forty percent of the time when we tested it.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  It hits.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Uh, gets over a hundred thousand views. We tested it for me and it's either two or three other people.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Uh, one of them is in the beauty space. One of them is in the automotive space, not like car repair, but more like exotic cars and talking about like cool, I don't know, like, not hot rods, but like the Lamborghinis, the Ferraris, but not like, uh, here's the latest Ferrari, more like, uh, here's a tuned up Ferrari.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  You know, and like, look what it can do. But yeah, we found that forty percent of the time it gets more than a hundred thousand views when we do it.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  You know, your, your recent videos, it's all like your, your, your surprise faces like.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Are they?

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Or the thumbnail must be, I'm guessing.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  The thumbnail is you like, whoa, like, yeah, yeah. It's, I'm gonna go look at it right now, but go ahead, you can pick the next one.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Uh, let's talk about this one, uh, why framing is everything.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Wait, hold on, guys, just look at this.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Dude, the last two are me like, oh my god.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, but they, but they did well. I mean, the, the last one here, um, well, once two, two days ago, twelve K and the other one's two hundred K views. But look, look, look, look, there's more, there's more. You're just, you're constantly shocked.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Okay, wait, what's the one, the perplexity SEO, how many did that get?

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Ninety-nine K views.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  The one on the top right?

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Uh, top right is seventeen K views.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Okay, what's the one after the chat GPT opportunity?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  This one?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Uh, chat GPT is thirty-six K.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Okay, and the one on the very right, old Google dead?

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Uh, eighteen K.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  So I, I was trying to see if there's a pattern in which my shocking faces get more views or not, but there isn't.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's no pattern, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow.