Thought Leadership Is Spam—ChatGPT Search Treats It That Way

I’ve got some hard news for startups and small businesses trying to stand out in the age of ChatGPT search. 

If your company brand isn’t an established name in your industry, customers are no longer going to trip over your company’s better offering on their way to your bigger and more established competitors and incumbents.

Yup. The dinosaurs won this round. But the evolution isn’t over just yet. You’ll just need to think differently. 

See, the rise of AI search has eviscerated the SEO-driven marketing prospects for startups and small businesses in a way that can no longer be denied. Now that the dramatic traffic drops in October 2024 and May 2025 made it clear that AI search was going to render SEO all but useless, capitulation has sent almost every upstart young company on a thought-leadership crusade of epic proportions.

Not a great plan.

But now that the kicking and screaming is over, and we can all see the error of letting Google dictate our fortunes, it’s time to have a serious discussion about what works in a post-SEO world.

Let’s just make sure we don’t compound the original mistake with a bigger mistake.

The Early Data on ChatGPT Search Is Clear—and Scary

I’m not a marketer. But I’ve spent my career building cool technology, mostly for startups, and packaging that technology in a way that makes it a must-have for my customers. So I know the SEO game.

I’m also an AI OG, co-inventing one of the first generative AI engines back in 2010. And over the past few years, I’ve been calling out the death of SEO, why AI is the primary cause of death, and all the while railing against the improper selling of AI by leaning on magic, lies, and fear.

For startups and small businesses, those concepts have smashed head-on, and the data is starting to become clear. 

In just two short years, ChatGPT search has eaten almost 10 percent of search traffic, up to 17 percent for the coveted younger demographics, and that curve shows no signs of flattening at over a billion queries a day. However, for transactional searches (as opposed to informational or creative searches), the damage to Google is minimal, for now, thanks to the world’s largest advertising company having incumbent strengths on the e-commerce and B2C side.

The Incumbent’s Advantage

Let’s put it on hold for a second that earlier this year Google also shoved in all its chips on AI search, and we’ll talk about traditional search versus AI search. 

A Google search has now become a certain kind of search. You go to Google when you have a foundation for your search, you have most of the context, and you need a missing piece. Example: You go to Google to search for Adidas shoes, and you get back all sorts of results.

You go to ChatGPT because you want to know why your feet hurt. You have a goal, but you have to put the pieces together. You will have follow up questions. And because AI search works off of consensus, at the end of the conversation you might be pointed to a popular line of wide-width Adidas shoes that might reduce your foot pain. 

You will then go to the Adidas website, but more likely you will go to Google or Amazon or Dick’s to search for and buy your shoes. That second search is transactional. Google or Amazon or Dick’s don’t care that your feet hurt.

ChatGPT does. And you know what’s “evolving” faster than SEO? ChatGPT search. 

This is why the incumbents aren’t getting hit as hard by the death of SEO, yet, but startups and small businesses can no longer get a link in edgewise. 

We’re still early in the game, but who among us thinks that AI adoption and market share is going to recede and not expand? It’s either jam your head deeper into the sand or start coming up with solutions.

Well, the solution is right there in front of us. We’re just doing it wrong.

The Internet Is Full of Thought Leaders – and Lies

Do you want to know why AI hallucinates? Because it was built on and trained on the unverified massive store of knowledge that is the internet. That and bad math.

I blame thought leaders, for the unverified info anyway, who for a decade have filled the internet with knowledge based on five keywords that they hoped would generate the most search traffic to their offering. 

Today, that same knowledge base is being flooded with AI-generated “thought leadership” that all says the same thing using slightly different words. Why? Because people keep saying that SEO isn’t dead, it’s only evolving, and that the solution is to write a 2,000-word post that does the job that five keywords used to do. 

Here’s what every startup and small-business founder has figured out in 2025: You can use ChatGPT to write a LinkedIn post about “The Future of [Your Industry]” that sounds exactly like what a thought leader would say.

But so can everyone else.

And so now there are 10,000 indistinguishable posts about AI transforming customer service, trends in fintech, supply chain innovation, and every other niche topic you can imagine.

Thought leadership has become spam. And AI search treats it accordingly.

But here’s what AI can’t generate.

Subject Matter Expertise Is Back, Baby!

Real expertise isn’t hot takes about niche industry trends. It’s 10,000 hours of industry experience that generated your company’s offering and separates it from the incumbents relying on brand and dying SEO to beat you to market share. It’s:

• Real-world stories from the trenches with specific numbers.
• Admitting what you tried and failed and why.
• Experiential depth that shows the work that leads to the benefits.
• Contrarian positions backed by experience.
• Calling out bullshit that nobody questions.

All of this in your own voice. 

Here’s the silver lining startup founders and small-business leaders can take from this cloud: ChatGPT has made it too easy to be a thought leader. Which means thought leadership is now worthless. Not dead like SEO. Not yet. 

One thing I learned way back in the dark ages of AI is that you can’t out-content the automated content machines. Their strength is in volume. If ChatGPT is doing now to thought leadership what we were doing back in 2010 to data science, well, we took out a lot of incumbents and posers along the way.

So stop trying to be a thought leader. Thought leadership is performative. It’s saying what you’re supposed to say in the way you’re supposed to say it.

Subject matter expertise is evidence. It’s diving into your work and spitting insights no one else can. It’s not hitting every potential customer all the time. That’s over. It’s hitting the right customers at the right time.

The good news? Most of your competitors and incumbents are still doing it the old way. They’re dinosaurs looking up at the asteroid and writing 2,000 words to tell everyone it’ll be fine.

I’m not trying to be a thought leader— I’m just writing about what I do. If that appeals to you, please join my email list and get notified when I write something new.