CEO Warns: SEO Traffic Will Be Zero?

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Eric Siu and Neil Patel

Careers, Marketing, Business

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2026

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 and Eric break down the etiquette of podcast collaborations, why giving raw recordings drives reach, and how a give-to-get mindset shapes long-term wins. They share lessons from speaking at the Social Commerce Summit, including QR code lead capture tactics, why case studies supercharge AI sales presentations, and how to calculate ROI on paid speaking gigs. A practical episode on collaboration, lead generation, and choosing the right events to grow your business. Key takeaways ◾Give raw recordings to maximize podcast reach ◾QR codes turn talks into qualified leads ◾Pay-to-speak events can deliver 40x returns Chapters 00:00 Podcast collaboration etiquette 03:00 Give-to-get philosophy 06:26 Social Commerce Summit recap 06:46 QR codes for lead capture 09:00 Lead qualification tradeoffs 11:52 Community in the AI era 12:17 ClickFlow AI content break 12:48 Conversion stats from the event 14:14 Single brain and AI implementation 16:01 Adding case studies to presentations 19:30 Getting paid to speak 20:33 Paying to speak for ROI 22:36 Criteria for paid speaking events 24:11 Calculating speaking ROI 26:04 HubSpot Inbound and brand-building events 27:29 Repurposing speaking clips 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 Ubersuggest: https://www.ubersuggest.com/ Answer The Public: https://www.answerthepublic.com/ ✅ Subscribe for Daily Marketing Insights!

Transcript

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0:00.0	When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up?
0:04.5	Most companies have no idea.
0:06.2	And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did.
0:09.9	HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments, what the right answers buyers are looking
0:14.7	for.
0:15.6	Before the first click, before the first form fill.
0:18.6	That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out Hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. You see what the Condi NASCE CEO said? He's basically saying you want to act as if SEO is dead. So this is the part that everyone missed about Condi NASCE CEO. He is saying that you want to act as if SEO is dead. So I'm going to share
0:37.7	my screen right now so you all can see this and we can react to this, Neil. And then I'll go first
0:42.7	on this reaction. So look at what he's saying. So this dude, Roger Lynch, who's the CEO of
0:47.3	Condi Nast, I don't know if I'm pronounced that correctly, has directed all the company's brands
0:51.4	to operate as if search traffic to their properties will be zero.
0:55.1	He says the era of turning the search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone.
0:59.6	We took a snapshot of search results from seven or eight years ago, and what you saw were a few sponsor links, then the 10 blue links.
1:06.1	Do the same search today. You get an AI overview. Then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links, and get the sponsor stuff each of the last three years we would do our budgets and we put forecasts of
1:14.9	search traffic declining because we see the pattern of algorithm changes and generally those algorithm
1:20.3	changes were negative every year our search traffic was down more than we had forecasts so last year
1:24.7	i told mine teams assume there's no search. You have to have your
1:28.0	business plan as if search is zero. We don't expect to, we don't expect it to be zero. We expect to be a
1:33.3	single digit percentage of our traffic. So here's what I would say first and then Neil, let's get
1:37.2	your thoughts to. So my take on this is that I think it's a smart thing to act as if it was zero, but that doesn't mean you treat it as nothing.
1:47.1	Okay.
1:47.5	So you still treat it as part of your strategy, right?
	...

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