Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome to Simple Wins. I’m your host, Adam OLeary.
You know, in this line of work, you consume a lot of content. You watch webinars, you read reports, you listen to other experts. And most of the time, it reinforces what you already know. But every once in a while, you come across something that doesn’t just add a new piece to the puzzle—it feels like someone just turned on the lights and showed you the entire picture of the puzzle you’ve been trying to solve in the dark.
That happened to me this week. I was watching a video by Neil Patel. Now, if you’re in marketing, you know Neil. He’s been a fixture in the SEO and digital marketing world for years. But this wasn’t just another “5 SEO tips” video. The title was something like, “SEO has already changed. Here's what's coming next in 2026.”
And folks, I have to tell you, it was a masterclass in connecting the dots. It wasn’t just speculation; it was a cold, hard look at the financial and behavioral forces that are reshaping the internet right under our noses. So today, I want to walk you through what I learned from Neil Patel. This is my synthesis, my takeaway, after watching his breakdown. And I’ll be sure to quote him directly so you know what’s coming from him and what’s my own reflection.
The central thesis, the big ""aha!"" moment for me, was this: **We are not just moving towards AI-powered search; we are entering a completely new ecosystem where the very concept of a “search result” is being replaced by an “AI answer.”** And this changes the game from being *found* to being *chosen*.
But Neil didn’t just state that. He built an ironclad case for *why* this is inevitable, and it all comes down to one thing: money. Sustainable business models. He started with a analogy that just clicked for me.
He said, and I’m quoting directly here: **“Every service you've ever loved eventually needs to make money. And that's not a betrayal. It's just how sustainable systems work.”**
He compared it to walking into a Costco and getting free samples. Those aren’t random acts of kindness; they’re marketing. It’s a value exchange. You get to try something, and the store gets a chance to make a sale. He pointed to magazines mixing editorial and ads, and movies with product placement. We understand that trade-off. The digital world is no different. Radio had commercials, TV had ads, social media introduced sponsored posts. AI search is simply the next platform in that natural progression.
This reframed the entire “ads in AI” debate for me. It’s not a corruption of some pure, altruistic technology. It’s the inevitable evolution of a service that starts free. And Neil laid out the fundamental economics with brutal clarity: **“When you're not paying money for something, your attention becomes a product. That's not sinister. It's just math.”**
The math, as he showed, is staggering. He cited that ChatGPT, by September 2025, had over 700 million weekly active users, but only 4% of them pay for subscriptions. That means 672 million people are using it for free. And providing that service costs OpenAI a fortune. Server costs, model training, support. The money has to come from somewhere.
This is where Neil’s analysis went from interesting to absolutely compelling. He presented what he called the “financial pressure cooker” at OpenAI. He quoted OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, who posted on social media: **“Insane thing. We are currently losing money on OpenAI Pro subscriptions. People use it so much more than we expected.”**
Think about that. The *premium, paid-for product* is losing them money. Neil then mentioned that internal documents show OpenAI doesn’t expect to be profitable until 2029. A company valued at $300 billion, burning through cash, with investors expecting a return. How does that math work? There’s only one way to monetize 672 million free users at scale: advertising.
And then Neil pointed to what he called the “smoking gun”: the hiring of Fiji Simo as the CEO of Applications at OpenAI. This wasn’t just any hire. Simo spent over a decade at Meta, where she led the launch of ads on the News Feed. Before OpenAI, she was the CEO of Instacart, building their advertising platform. Neil’s point was razor-sharp: **“When a company hires someone whose entire career was built on creating and scaling multi-billion dollar advertising platforms to run their consumer applications, that's not an accident. That's a signal.”**
He backed this up with data, saying documents from April 2025 show OpenAI forecasting $1 billion in revenue from free user monetization starting in 2026. This, he noted, was a complete reversal from just four months earlier when the company said it had no active plans for ads. The trajectory is set. 2026 is the year.
But it’s not just OpenAI. This is a tectonic shift that is forcing even the most powerful company on the internet to break its own golden goose. Google. Neil explained that for 25 years, Google’s model was simple: you type a search, get links, and Google gets paid when you click a sponsored result. That model generated over $200 billion last year alone.
But user behavior is changing. People are going to ChatGPT and Perplexity for conversational answers. Google’s response? They’re not fighting it; they’re owning it, even if it means cannibalizing their own business. Neil said Google is already testing ads in its “AI mode” and “AI overviews,” with a full rollout expected before Q4 of 2025.
And this is where the strategy gets fascinating. The targeting is shifting dramatically. Neil explained it like this: Instead of advertisers bidding on a keyword like “project management software,” they will now reach someone **“who is having [a] complete conversation with AI about their remote team challenges, integration needs, and specific budget constraints.”**
This is a fundamental shift from what he called **“link-based search to answer-based search.”** Google’s AI will provide direct answers and embed ads within those responses. It’s a defense mechanism. As Neil put it, **“Google is disrupting themselves to prevent others from disrupting them.”**
Okay, so the platforms are changing. Why should we, as marketers and business owners, care? This is the second half of what I learned from Neil, and it’s where the practical, actionable insights come in. The rules of visibility are being rewritten.
In traditional SEO, you competed for rankings. You wanted to be in the top 10 blue links. In the new world of AI search, you compete for citations. You want the AI to *choose* you as the authoritative source it cites in its answer.
Neil illustrated the difference in user behavior perfectly. A traditional search is short and keyword-focused: “Best CRM software.” But an AI-mode search is a conversation. He gave this example: **“I'm running a 15 person marketing agency and need a CRM that integrates with Google Sheets because that's where we run a lot of our accounting reports and we want advanced reports and the cost has to be under $200 a month. What are my best options?”**
That single query is a goldmine of intent. The AI knows your company size, your specific needs, your budget. And your ads will trigger based on that entire conversation context, not just a keyword. But more importantly, the AI won’t just list links. It will *recommend* answers. It becomes a digital gatekeeper. **“If the AI doesn't trust your content enough to [cite] you, you're invisible. If it does trust you, you're not just getting traffic, you're getting endorsement.”**
That word—*endorsement*—is critical. A click from a blue link is a transaction. A citation from an AI in a direct answer is a recommendation. It carries immense authority. This means our content strategy has to evolve from being “keyword-rich” to being “authority-rich.” We need to create content so comprehensive, so well-structured, and so trustworthy that AI systems see it as the definitive source for a given topic.
And Neil provided data to show why focusing on this *now* is so urgent. He said a study of 300 businesses by his company, NP Digital, found that **“Chat GPT drives 87% of AI traffic and 82% of AI-driven sales.”** All the other platforms combined account for less than 20% of the revenue. The opportunity is massive and currently underpriced, because most brands are still optimizing for yesterday’s search landscape.
The lesson I took away is that 2026 isn’t a distant future; it’s the finishing line of a race that has already started. The platforms are building the advertising infrastructure right now. Neil’s final point drove this home. He referenced Perplexity’s own announcement about introducing ads, where they stated: **“Experience has taught us that subscriptions alone do not generate enough revenue to create a sustainable revenue sharing program... Advertising is the best way to ensure a steady and scalable revenue stream.”**
The evolution is, as Neil said, **“not just inevitable, it's already unstoppable.”**
So, what does this mean for me, for you, for anyone with a website or an online business? My biggest takeaway from Neil Patel’s video is that we need to stop thinking like SEOs and start thinking like publishers for an AI audience. Our goal is no longer to rank for a term; it’s to become the most citable, quotable, authoritative source in our niche. We need to anticipate the long-tail, conversational questions our customers are asking and provide the best possible answers. We need to structure our content so that AI can easily understand and reference it.
The game has changed. The front door to the internet is no longer a search bar with ten blue links. It’s a conversation with an AI. And in 2026, the brands that win won’t be the ones who are simply found. They’ll be the ones who are chosen as the answer.
Thank you for listening. I’m Adam OLeary, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
