How ChatGPT Will… Eliminate TOFU Content? And, Google Sued by Chegg Over AI Overviews

In episode #2927, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the traditional marketing funnel (Tofu, Mofu, Bofu) and how AI tools like ChatGPT are changing the way consumers interact with content. The conversation also touches on the competitive dynamics in the SaaS space, the analysis of YouTube strategies through MrBeast's app, and the recent lawsuit by Chegg against Google regarding traffic loss. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES (00:00) Understanding the Funnel: Tofu, Mofu, Bofu (03:11) The Impact of AI on Content Marketing (06:12) Navigating Competition in the SaaS Landscape (09:12) Analyzing YouTube Strategies with MrBeast's App (11:52) Chegg vs. Google: The Lawsuit and Its Implications (14:52) Diversifying Traffic Sources for Sustainable Growth Prefer single topic episodes? Head over to our YouTube channel. To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric's ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel, @ericosiu Instagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal, and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. Tofu content, so just a brief recap for people. So tofu is top of the funnel content, so it might be like, what is SEO, for example?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Middle of the funnel might be like, you know, we can call it, you know, when should I look for an agency or something like that, right? Like an SEO agency. Or bottom of the funnel might be, um, SEO agency in Los Angeles, right? That's, that's, that's very high intent. People are, you know, ready to, to, to buy at that time. So, you know, with SEO and content marketing in general, typically you would have top of funnel content in your stack because you, you want your site to gain more authority. And, and things like SEO trends, or sorry, trends type of content, statistics type of content or tools typically would drive a lot of links. And, you know, you want things to drive links because you want your site to have more authority, right? But now the game is changing, and, um, Will Reynolds actually wrote this on LinkedIn, so, he said this, and I'm actually going to share this on my screen so you can see it as well.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  So Neil, can you see this?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I can now.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  Okay, so Will Reynolds said, "I had a lead hit us up and select ChatGPT as their source. I asked for his prompts and the result made my head spin. I'm thinking about that the ChatGPT is only 1% of my traffic statement through a new lens after watching someone prompting to get an answer." For Sheer, which is his agency, "To have captured this lead and been there as a brand for every part of his journey, we would have had to write, have written blog posts and ranked these posts for each step of his decision-making process." So again, tofu, mofu, bofu, right? A blog post, so this is one, these are four blog posts he would have had to make. One is a blog post addressing their problem. Two would be for this person that went- From problem to what is a job to help with this, that would be the next part. So they have to find, okay, here's my problem. Okay, here's the person to do the job for this.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Third one would be, he looked for an agency to help with the specific problem. So I would have had to have a dedicated page explaining why we were the right fit. And then fourth one would be a branded search, uh, leading to conversion. So NP Digital, for example, or Single Grain, for example. So I bet he would have had five different searches, leading to twenty to thirty sites of visits over the the course of weeks. Those thirty page views and all of our analytics tools vanished. He got no links. Now, he went from problem, top of funnel, to I might need an agency, bottom of funnel, in forty minutes, not thirty days. His single chat G P T session handled all of that. No clicks, no deep dives into websites. The user gets a short list of agencies at the very end, searches for one, branded search matters, and converts in just one step.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  If this pattern scales, could chat G P T be gobbling up all of that top of funnel? If so, be real careful, assuming that one percent is too small to pay attention to. Shoot holes through this idea. I'm looking for points of validation and counterpoints. I thought this would be interesting for us to discuss.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  I don't think chat G P T and these other arms will take up a top of funnel. And there's one big reason why. If you look at where people consume top of funnel content, a large portion of it is the social web.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  And on the social web, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc., people are consuming top of funnel content. It doesn't mean that people aren't going to chat G P T or even Google A I overviews and getting answers to top of funnel. But it's more so, it depends on the platform. And I think some people want top of funnel content on many of these platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc. Um, on Google, we're still seeing a lot of top of funnel content being clicked on, even with A I overviews being at the top.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Dude, here, let me take you on a tangent, then let's come back for a second. I actually use deep research to analyze, like, you know, clutch.co, the directory for agencies, right? You can actually analyze the categories or the blog posts, or like, for example, they might have AI, AI categories for agencies and CRM, for example. I wanted to see their content strategy for the last four to five years, and I wanted to map out a graph showing which they increased and how much content they had per category. And ChatGPT deep research actually did that. So that's a little tangent that you guys can run there. That one actually worked pretty well. I don't know how accurate it is. But coming back to this, so I think that, let me ask you this, Neil.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Are you increasing or decreasing your blog output in 2025?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Increasing.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Increasing, okay. So my take on it, because I think you made a good point, because the post that I just shared from Will, that was from LinkedIn. And there's, I was reading some articles this morning, and it was shared by people from my team, but they came from X, for example, right? And so maybe we might be seeing less blog posts, but you're actually increasing it.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  But we might be seeing these LLMs pull more from the social graph, and that I can, I think there's always going to need to be top of funnel content in some way, shape, or form. I don't think it just goes away. I think the channel it comes from might change in terms of frequency, but I don't think it just goes away.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yes, and if you look at you and I, when we discuss marketing topics each and every single week, we're pulling a lot of top of funnel stuff from blog posts and the social web. It doesn't matter that there's LLMs out there that can answer a lot of top of funnel stuff. We still pull stuff from the social web. If you look at all the groups we're in and the articles that are being passed around, a lot of them are from the social web, and they're just linking us to stuff that people are posting. If you look at Will Reynolds, you know, what his post is, is a top of funnel post. Where is it circulating? LinkedIn. It got quite a bit of views.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Yep. All right. You want to pick the next one, or I have a next one queued?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Go for it.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Okay, so I want to talk about how.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Ultimately, I feel like at least my observations with SaaS is nobody really knows what they're doing. And what I mean by that is I continue to see more and more competitors requesting demos for Carrot. And it's such an obvious thing to me because Neil, when you have someone request a demo for, let's say, one of your products, and it's a CTO, or it's a senior solutions architect, you know they're doing competitive research. And that just signals to me that a lot of these B2B account-based marketing softwares or products, this morning I had a CEO from a semi-competitive company reach out and say, "Hey, we're doing something in a similar space. We should chat." What do you want to chat about? Right? I don't want to chat. What do you want to chat about? Right?

• 7:03Speaker 00

  You want to see the features? You want to see what we're building? What's on our product? I don't want to chat about shit, dude. So it just goes to show you that in a world where it's very easy to copy features and you already have customers, your job is to retain them. So if you have, if there's a really good feature out there, it's a good idea, you should copy as quickly as possible. And that's what I would be thinking about as well. But it just goes to show me at least that we're all kind of just figuring it out as we go, and that's just what life is.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Hey Eric, I'm interested in copying you. You want to chat about this?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  It's like straight up, it's like, "No, I don't want to chat about this. Uh, no, thank you. Take care. Have a good one."

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yep. So that's what it is. I just, that's, I guess that's my little rant, but that's also my little observation too.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I've noticed similar things too. Dude, even in the agency world, how many people hit us up that want to talk numbers and our growth strategies and sharing them? It's like, what's the point? We're just helping our competitors grow.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  You know, we had, um, I'm not going to name names here, but we had, um, somebody that's really well-known, he's a well-known creator, hit up one of, um, one of our mutual friends and, um, he was like, "Hey, I, oh, multiple times this has happened to my friends. We just want to, can you introduce me to this person? I just want to trade notes with them." So then I would go to this person and say, "Hey, this person wants to..." He's like, "Dude, I don't want to trade notes about shit, dude." Like, and he doesn't care how, this person doesn't care how prominent or popular the other person is, he just doesn't want to. And at a certain point, when you can get to a "I don't give a crap" point, that's a good, that's a good part to be in, in your life, because you just don't need to take calls for the sake of taking calls. That's the end of my rant.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I'm with you. You also gotta do what's best for you, your team, your family, and put them first versus the competition. And some people look at it like, "Oh, it's a community. We should share everything that we're learning." No, I do not want to share stuff with my competition. I want to beat my competition.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Yep. Dude, speaking of competition, Mr. Beast is a very competitive guy. Um, I wanted to talk about if his new app, his new YouTube app, is worth a damn. So, he has an app called View Stats. Have you used it?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  I have used View Stats in the past. It's an old app, though. No, it's not new. It's a social bling competitor.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  It's a social bling competitor on the internet, but I have his app on my phone now, so it's in test flight right now. So, it's not available to the public. So, um, I asked the person who runs View Stats, he has like a CEO that runs it, um, he gave me access to it. So, I was playing around with it. I actually started in- inputting your videos, um, into it. And it shows how many, how many A/B tests that you're running for your videos. Um, it shows me if you have a one out of ten. Uh, one of ten is basically, uh, number one out of the last ten videos that you made. Um, and so, to me, it's a really good YouTube app because it tells me things that YouTube Studio doesn't tell me. I can do competitive research very quickly, and I can keep track of my own channel or other channels to see how they're doing. And so, I can do this on the go. Um, and previously, I didn't have something like that. So, um, I think it's interesting.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  And I promised them that I would talk about it. So, here, let me show you an example. So, can you see my screen? You can see this, right?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Sure.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is the, this is Mr. Beast's channel over here. You can see how it's trending over time, right? Um, and you can see the estimated revenue. You see that at the bottom?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Uh, now I do estimate revenue of two to seven million. That's a lot of money. Good for him.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Okay. And then you can see his most recent video. Oh, oh, this is cool too. Sorry, one second. Um, I hope they don't kill me for saying this, but okay. You see the bottom where it says longs versus shorts? I think this is important too, because earlier we talked about you have-

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Hold it still. Okay, longs is thirty-four percent, shorts is sixty-six percent. Okay?

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Yep. Which is interesting, right? Because, um, you can see which channel is focused on shorts or longs and, and if, you know, if you decide if you want to compete or not. Okay, here's his latest video.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Wow, I spent 100 hours inside the parents. That's cool. At the same time, like Patrick career with in Mexico, I don't know where you are, Tulum. I'm assuming all his traffic is from shorts. I don't know when he created a long.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  You want me to pull it up here? I'll pull it up in a second. But this Mr. Beast graph over here, you can see the the red line goes way higher than the gray part, which is what he standard. That's his standard performance. And what I like the most is Neil, when you look at the rank for this video, do you see the rank? It's a two out of 10, right? So it's a top two.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, okay, I see it. Two out of 10.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Yep. And at the bottom, you can see the thumbnail test that he's running and the title test that he's running.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Well, he's running no title test. He's running one thumbnail changes and then he has two A V tests going.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he spends like $10,000 supposedly per thumbnail. So. It's good to, I mean, when you when you compete, when you're competing with people, you can look at what their strategy is. And that to me, when I use view stats, when you use the desktop version, you can find outliers and you can look for things that have performed really well, certain ideas, and you can repackage it for your own niche. And I think, I actually think that's what you're, the contract that you're paying, I think that's what they're doing to find great ideas. And then they're just sending you a bunch of thumbnails and you can save a bunch of thumbnails in this thing too. So should we look for look for Patrick real quick before we move on?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I already know 100% of his traffics from shorts because that's all he creates.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  That's correct. So he's got 500K subs now. Here, check this out. So he has. Look, it's all gray, which means it's all shorts.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, 8.7 million last 30 days. He gets a lot of views. He talks about random interesting facts that, you know, get people hooked, even me, like, I'll watch some of this stuff. That I think pigs pollute more than nuclear waste stations or something like that.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  It's like random topics. You're like, huh, let me actually watch this video and learn why.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  You know, if he if he went all in on this and then just did long form, I think he would do really well. But that's not his main business. He's got a really interesting business coming and I'll let him reveal that when he wants to reveal it. So.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Alright, you pick one.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Alright, so next, let's talk about how Google is being sued by Chegg, Chegg, Chegg? Uh, the book company for AI overuse hurting their traffic and revenue. Isn't it crazy how someone's like, you screwed up my organic traffic, I'm gonna sue you now. It's just like, uh, it's their platform, they can rank whoever they want, this is your problem.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  That was my immediate reaction. It's like all, when people sue Google, it's like, oh, like, you didn't diversify your, your business and you relied completely on Google and then now you're gonna blame them? You're, you're, you're biting the hand that feeds you? Like, are you stupid? Like, a lot of people do that, by the way. I'm just like, people just don't like to be held accountable.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  They don't like being held accountable. It's so silly. And people have this notion, oh yeah, I, I didn't reverse my traffic sources, I did bad as managing as a CMO or CEO, and we're gonna sue Google, but at the same time, because I don't know if you saw the financial articles or articles on the financial sites, they're looking to alternative solutions on what they should do with the company. This is like, oh, you should have diversified your traffic sources earlier on, this is your problem. And it sucks to them, I'm not, I'm not hating on it, it's just reality.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, this is what we see, we've seen over the years with affiliate marketers, right? Once they lose their, their traffic channels, then they start to, they start to kind of go crazy and they start to make phone calls to us, right? Um, so I'm looking at the law, the, the Chegg statement here, so it says, while we made significant headway on our technology, product and marketing platforms or programs, 2024 came with a series of challenges, including the rapid evolution of the content landscape, particularly the rise of Google AI O, or AI overviews, which as I previously mentioned, has had a profound impact on Chegg's traffic, revenue and workforce. So, then he says, okay, here's three core arguments, I can only see the first two over here. So first, um, they're filing a complaint for reciprocal dealing,

• 14:52Speaker 00

  meaning that Google forces companies like Chegg to supply our proprietary content in order to be included in Google's search con, uh, search function. Are, are you really forced to sur, uh, really?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Are you forced to?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  You, you, you can, no index.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Google bot. Yeah. Um, second is monopoly maintenance, or that Google unfairly exercises its monopoly power within search and other anti-competitive conduct to muscle out companies like Chegg. I don't think they tried to focus specifically on Chegg because Chegg is like a fart or a pimple on their butt, so not sure if they're trying to do that.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Dude, this is Chegg's problem. And Google does not have a monopoly over search. There's Instagram that has a really popular search, 6.5 billion searches a day. Amazon's at 3.5 billion a day. ChatGPT is at a billion. Google controls roughly 18% of the market share. That is big, don't get me wrong, but there's many different types of searches. Five years ago, I could see them making this argument. Today's world, no.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  That being said, though, I can see the courts trying to go after Google for this. Just because, you know, it could be a statement that that, you know, these senators want to make, right? So I can see that angle and then potentially what happens is the settlement. So that's where I see it going.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the way I end up seeing this is

• 16:12Speaker 01

  with checking what they're doing. It's, you know, like when you look at Google and what they're doing. I think Google was the one who VP there said when like Gen Z goes to perform a search, they tend to go to TikTok and Instagram first. Chegg is actually ideal for our college students, if I'm not mistaken. I haven't been to the website in ages. So they should have been optimizing search on ChatGPT, on Instagram and all these other platforms that their customers use instead of just focusing on Google, because even Google has admitted they tend to go to those platforms before Google for Gen Z at least.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Yep, 100%. So I think it sucks, but I think the lesson here for everyone is nail one traffic source first and then start to diversify as quickly as you can. Because if you're gonna, you don't want to be at the whim of one channel.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yes. And this is why Eric and I do everything from podcasting to we both wrote books, we create videos, we do shorts, we wrote blog, we write blog posts. We don't stop writing blog posts. We both speak at conferences, even though we slow down on it. We take an omnichannel approach because it's the only way to grow in today's world.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Yep. And I think we've both been open to it. I mean, you and I both started in blogging back in the day.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  You much, much longer than I have. I think you were blogging for probably already when I first met you. Okay, so when I first met you was 14 years ago or 15 years ago. You were probably blogging maybe even five, seven years before that. Yeah, so all Neil knew at the time, because there weren't all these other channels, was literally blogging slash SEO, right? So Neil had to change specifically, whereas for me, these other channels started to come out already at the time when I started to blog more. So you have to keep an open mind and you have to... If there's one thing that Neil has, he's not going to hold anything too sacred. The idea of sunk costs doesn't really apply to you, Neil, because you spent two years building that home and you had the most beautiful background ever and you still got rid of it within 30 days. So sunk costs don't matter to you.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  No. I look at the long-term picture and whatever is going to produce the best results, I'll do it and just push emotions to the side.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Alright, so that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. And there will be no more Agency Owners Association. We'll save that for another Marketing School episode. And that being said, you know, we'll have some other things to throw your way in the near future, so catch you later.