Michael Walrath

speaker
398 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Michael Walrath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Interestingly, clicks, conversions, website visits, driving directions, all the other metrics that we measure stayed the same.
So they did a really good job of carving off for their AI overviews the unmonetizable queries, the stuff that wasn't going to click on those driving directions or those websites anyway.
And that was very clever, right?
Because I think what it allowed them to do is go out with a talk track that said, hey, look, we're delivering AI overviews 20%, 25% of the time, and we see no monetization difference.
Right.
Of course, if you select all the unmonetizable queries, you're not going to see a monetization difference.
And so the question is now...
can you deliver an AI experience that feels much, you know, that doesn't have all the ads and monetization around it and not see, you know, on more on higher intent on shopping queries or these other more high intent localized queries and not see a, a, and I think the answer is, is definitively no.
Right.
To me, it comes down to a capital allocation question, which is, are you willing to invest in revenue loss to maintain the customer value?
experience at the same time that you're plowing unbelievable amounts of money into CapEx to win the AI race.
I think it's a fascinating landscape and it'll be really interesting to see how they adapt.
Yeah, that's a big question.
And fortunately, we've got some time to dig into it.
I think the first thing is this notion of the clicks and the conversions and they're flat and that's okay.
This is a temporary phenomenon.
So if you believe that ChatGPT and Perplexity and Grok and others are going to ultimately win query share, question share from Google over time, then what's going to happen is there will be another shoe here, which is those clicks and conversions and traffic and awareness and all those things that come from the Google SERP page and the local pack and things like that.
They will eventually decline if those other AI experiences take share.
That's just a certainty.
And so what I think marketers are really focused on at the heart of your question is like, so how do you de-risk the fact that your primary source of traffic and your primary source of discovery may disappear?
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