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This episode is sponsored by Calibrate iq. First, a disclaimer. In the interest of being transparent, I created Calibrate iq. It's my app and I built it because I wasn't satisfied with any of the other risk tolerance tools on the market. I found that other tools didn't work the way I wanted them to. They focus too much on risk preference rather than time horizon. They're clunky and overcomplicated and they're too expensive for what they do. And they aren't user friendly for clients. I designed Calibrate IQ to be simple, easy to use and low cost. It lets you send a single magic link to any client you want to survey. Clients fill out a simple survey that takes less than two minutes. Once that's done, you can automatically generate an investment policy statement instantly and deliver a beautiful branded report to the client. It lets you customize reports with your logo and brand colors and you can even add your own custom investment preferences to the questionnaire. If you're tired of expensive risk tolerance tools that overthink the process, try CalibrateIQ. It's $9 a month with a seven day free trial. Give it a try at CalibrateIQ app again. That's CalibrateIQ app. Hey everyone. Welcome to Ops and Impact, where we discuss operations and marketing for independent financial advisors building a lifestyle practice. I'm your host, Michael Reynolds and today we're going to talk search and AI. So specifically we're going to talk about this myth, this myth that AI is killing search and what financial advisors should actually do. So here's kind of the framing today. So there was a study recently, a report put out by SimilarWeb, which is a company that measures Internet traffic, one of the leading companies that does this. And this was actually shared by Rand Fishkin, who I follow religiously because he is a trusted voice in the world of search. He's the, back in the day, the co founder of Moz, which is one of the most respected companies in the space, in the world, really pioneering company in the world of search engine optimization. Still a great company. They morphed a little bit into some other things. But one of the leading companies, Rand Fishkin, one of the leading voices and he talks about this report and pulls out some key points that I think are extremely relevant for financial advisors. And one of those that that main point is that so many of us believe that AI is taking over Google and that search is dying as a result. And spoiler alert, the research shows the exact opposite. The research shows that search is actually growing faster than AI. And so let's talk about this a little bit and ultimately talk about what you as a financial advisor might want to do and where you might want to direct your efforts, and also why chasing AI hype can potentially hurt your marketing results. So let's talk about the numbers, just some raw numbers here first in this report, similar Web shared that AI chatbots like ChatGPT for example, grew from about 420 million monthly visitors to about 650 million. Pretty big jump. Sounds. Sounds big, right? Roughly a 60% jump. But that growth is already showing signs of slowing down a bit. And a big percentage on a small number is still a small number. Google search, by contrast, went from about 3.2 billion visitors to 3.3 billion. So only about a 2% jump, which sounds small, right? But here's the thing. That 2% jump added more brand new visitors than AI chatbots have gained in total altogether. So search still has about five times more visitors than every AI chatbot combined. So bottom line from a raw numbers standpoint is Google grew faster than AI. In addition to that, so did social media, so did online shopping through e commerce sites. So these are channels that everyone is forgetting about right now. Social media, for example, social media grew similar to search dramatically. Online shopping, people buying things online grew dramatically. News was a category that shrank a little bit, but news and just general media still almost three times bigger than AI chatbots in terms of visits. So everyone is ignoring all these channels and they're piling into AI and thinking that AI is everything. When in reality these other channels that interestingly enough might be considered old fashioned. It's funny to think that search and social media are old fashioned, but I guess I'm just saying that. But they've been around for a long time, but they are still growing faster and still make up a dramatically higher percentage of site visits and activity than AI at this point. So it's kind of a myth that everyone is switching to AI. Almost everyone who uses ChatGPT also uses Google. The number of people who use ChatGPT but not Google is really small. That report show just a very tiny fraction. People aren't trading Google for AI, for example. They're not swapping it out. They're adding AI on top of the Google they already use. So nobody's actually leaving Google, Nobody's actually stopping search activity. They're adding AI for certain things. But Google is still the dominant search engine and the dominant way people search for information. So again, the charts sometimes make it look scary if you just look at the percentages. But more than 5, 1.5 trillion searches now show an AI answer at the top. And so AI is being layered on top of search, but people are still going to search primarily as their first effort toward finding information. The AI mode visits have actually been dropping as well since March. They're not showing up as often. AI shows up inside regular Google search results, but it's not pulling people into some separate AI world. They're not doing an AI first search necessarily. So think about that when you're thinking about where to put your marketing efforts. Also, something else to think about. The AI race is pretty darn messy. Things are changing very quickly. So as of now, as of the time of this particular report, for example, the tools that are declining in popularity are Grok, Perplexity, Copilot, Deepseek. The tools that are rising this year are Claude and Gemini. Primarily. ChatGPT supposedly is the default. But even ChatGPT is shrinking a bit as others are growing. That could change on a dime. Sometimes certain AI tools come out with a new version and a new update and suddenly it's better and people flock to it and back and forth. And so if you try to bet on one winning AI tool, you're betting on a race where the leader just keeps changing on a dime. These things change very quickly. So again, I think it's particularly interesting that Claude and Gemini are growing and Gemini is obviously from Google. And so Gemini being integrated with search is really interesting because if we target search, we're already targeting Gemini. So keep that in mind as well. Also, AI use is really dependent on business sector. So AI use is really prominent in people that work in tech, in marketing, in software. They're really plugged into AI. They're using it a lot, very heavily. But consumers looking for professional services, which is obviously the category that we fall into as financial advisors, not as much AI activity. Sometimes we're in this echo chamber. A lot of advisors that at least I network with are very tech savvy and sophisticated and tech forward and business savvy. And we're like, oh, AI is everything. Latch onto this bandwagon. And I'm guilty of that. I build apps with AI all the time. I love it, I think it's fun. But the average consumer is not in that same echo chamber. So think about how they actually use the Internet and again, retail and consumer goods, people looking for stuff, online products and services. It's maybe 20 to 30% AI. The rest is still search, social and media, brand PR social media activity and of course, good old fashioned search. Google search. If you put all your eggs into the AI basket, maybe it makes sense if you were in tech, but we're not. We're financial advisors targeting primarily consumers in kind of a broad sense. And so it doesn't necessarily make sense to target so heavily everything into AI when these other channels that are forgotten nowadays really have the bulk of the activity for consumers. So what should we actually do as financial advisors? I say number one, keep investing in search engine optimization in Google. It's still the biggest channel, it's still growing, and it's still where clients look for financial answers and financial advisors. So that's still number one. Search engine optimization is still my pick for the primary online tactic or strategy to dig into. And you don't have to choose between Google and AI. If you win on Google, you're going to reach AI as well. So many of the same principles that work for search engine optimizations also work for AI. The same good content works for both. Clear, trustworthy articles, Getting quoted in media, getting backlinks from that, putting clear FAQs in your articles. It's a great way to add AI optimization to your already great search engine optimized articles. And you're going to get quoted more often in those AI answers if you do these things. So all of the stuff you're doing for search engine optimization and making your website and your content really clear and focused is going to be great for AI. So you don't really have to pick necessarily. Also take a look at the attention that everyone else is ignoring. Social media like LinkedIn for example, even Facebook. My in laws are on Facebook all the time. And guess what? Retirees love keeping up with family on Facebook. So that could be a great audience for those of us who focus on retirees. Email newsletters. A lot of people are ignoring email. Make a great email newsletter and you could reach people's inboxes where other people might be ignoring them. Blogging still helpful. A few episodes back I talked about how blogging is still very relevant. It's very true. That helps you win on search and of course AI is part of that, you know. So treat AI as kind of an enhancement, not necessarily the main thing you should be concerned about to the exclusion of everything else. And especially since the leaders change so fast. Today it's Claude and Gemini, tomorrow it could be ChatGPT's back on top or GROK could have some crazy update that makes it really popular. Who knows, right? This is my take on it. Don't abandon search, don't abandon social media. If anything, potentially lean more heavily into that. And so I love this again this LinkedIn post from Rand Fishkin where he brought some sanity into this kind of overhyped conversation around AI. AI is real. It's worth paying attention to. Obviously, AI is everywhere, but Google search is still the number one source of people looking for information online. It's still growing and you can win on search by following those tried and true search engine principles and optimizing your site accordingly. I do have some episodes on search engine optimization, depending on your market and kind of which category you fall into. So go back to near the beginning of this podcast. You'll find those episodes and they're going to be really relevant to this discussion. All right, so keep that in mind and hope that helps as you're kind of thinking through where to focus your efforts. With that, feel free to reach out to my on my consulting website for Advisors, which is MichaelReynolds.com I've had a number of advisors start to reach out more and more saying, hey, I've got some help. A few things I do. Actually, just to give you a little side note, I'm a great second pair of eyes for a second opinion. Had advisors reach out frequently saying, hey, I've got a marketing consultant I'm working with. They've got some search engine suggestions for me. SEO suggestions, but maybe they don't focus in the advisory space. Can you review this report and give me feedback or can you do an SEO audit for me to compare? Stuff like that? I'm happy to do. I do an hourly rate for consulting for that. Super simple. Happy to do ad hoc work like that. So feel free to reach out if I can help. And again, that's on my website@michaelreynolds.com you can find out how to do that there. All right. As always, happy you joined me today and glad you're here. Thanks for joining me. Have a great day. See you next time. SA.