Your Website Won't Matter in 2027. Prepare Now. transcript

Your website is less powerful today than it was a year ago. And in another year, it's going to be all but useless at actually getting you more business. And that's because the way people find an expert like you and the way they decide who to work with are both happening somewhere else now. And if you're not showing up in those places, somebody else's name's going to come up instead of yours. And believe me, [music] I take no pleasure in saying any of that.

I spent almost two decades as a web designer and strategist. And I actually started this channel [music] to teach business owners how to get clients through their websites, but things are different now. So, let me show you why your website's days are numbered and what you need to build instead. So, let's start with what your website used to be able to do that it's getting worse at now. So, its first job was always just to get you found, usually through traditional SEO.

So, you'd work really hard to try and rank in Google. And then when somebody were to type in the two or three words that describe what you do, there you were, if that ever worked for you at all. And your website's second job was building confidence. You know, once somebody actually landed on your site, it had to say enough and say it well enough that they felt really good about picking you or at least good enough to fill out your form or book a call.

And that job lived or died on the words you used. you know, your site had to be written a certain way with really good copywriting that does the convincing before you ever got on the phone with anybody. But both of those jobs are kind of being outsourced to other places now. You know, people are going to AI instead of Google. And that behavior is changing everything. I've even started doing this myself. So it was about a year ago I was looking for a new accountant and I knew that I wanted one who specializes in people like me who sell courses and who are on YouTube and that's because I wanted them to be really in the know on my exact situation, right?

What I can write off, how I can save money and I wanted somebody in my corner who already knew all that stuff. So rather than just googling a bunch of accountants, I went to chatbt instead because I knew I could just tell it all my criteria and what I wanted and have it recommend a short list just for me, which sounded way better than just getting a bunch of search results of accountant websites that I'd have to, you know, sort through one by one.

So that's what I did. And Chad GBT gave me, I think, three names and I just set up meetings with all three of them. And [music] finding someone that specific used to mean having to, you know, know somebody who knew somebody. I'd have had to basically, you know, just ask around and hope the right name came back eventually. And this phenomenon is way bigger than just me. There's a guy named Jonathan Scardan who's got a gutter installation business in Tennessee, and almost all of his business comes through AI search.

Now, I'll tell you how in a minute, cuz it's probably not exactly what you'd guess, but this is spreading really fast. 43% of people have used an AI assistant to research something that they were about to buy. [music] And one in four people now say that AI is their main source for recommendations. And that's ahead of going to a company's own website. And the way people ask has changed, too. They're not just typing in, you know, [music] something simple like gutter guard installation near me in a search bar anymore.

They are literally laying out their whole situation as if they're having a conversation. And the AI already knows a lot about them because they've been telling it about their life and possibly their business for years now. And all the AI platforms have these really good voice features where you just talk to it rather than typing. And people are using it a lot, including me. You know, I pretty much just treat AI like a real assistant at this point that I can just talk to.

So this behavior of just opening up the app and asking for a curated short list of recommendations, it's only going to ramp up from here. So, if that's where people are asking about who to hire, that brings up the only question that really matters next, where is the AI getting its answers from? More than anywhere else, it's getting them from YouTube. And that used to be Reddit, but YouTube actually passed it last year.

So, YouTube is now the single most cited source in Google's own AI answers. And almost 30% of their AI answers have a YouTube video in them because the AI can tell everything you say in your videos. But why are those answers coming from YouTube? Every business already has a website and those sites already say what they do and who they work with. So why wouldn't the AI just grab everything it needs from those? And my best guess is just that it comes down to who owns the websites, right?

Anybody, including you or me, can say whatever we want on our own website. You wrote it. You published it. Nobody's checking on any of it. And the AI knows that and they know that you can kind of game the system if you wanted to. [music] Now, of course, the dumb thing is obviously you can say whatever you want in a YouTube video, too. But that video is just living on a site that you don't control. And don't forget, it's one of the biggest websites in the world.

And that alone, I think, just gives it more weight in their [music] eyes. And this brings me back to Jonathan, the gutter installation guy from before. So, his being recommended by AI was 100% because of his YouTube channel. He just made all of these different gutter guard comparisons and tests and installation tutorials. And some people actually found those videos and hired him directly from there, which is great on its own.

But the AI models also absorbed all of those videos, too. And they know what he specializes in now. They know what area he works in now. So when somebody in Tennessee asks Chat GBT or Gemini or Claude who should put in their gutter guards, his name keeps coming up. And all those recommendations, they trace right back to the videos. And by the way, I've got a free master class that's going to teach you how to build a channel that does this for your business.

It's called How to Attract Unlimited Clients on YouTube. And if you want to save your seat, just click the link in the description below. Okay, so websites got worse at helping new people find your business, but honestly that's only half the story. So there's a guy named Marcus Sheridan and he wrote one of my favorite business books of all time. It's called They Ask You Answer. And as far as I'm concerned, this guy is a content genius.

And about a year ago, he predicted that your YouTube channel is going to be more important than your website. And back when he said that, it didn't even have anything to do with AI. He was just talking about trust because people decide whether they want to work with somebody by whoever feels the safest and most familiar. And a website's just never going to do that the way a video can. Now, getting recommended by AI is way warmer than ranking in Google ever was because it feels picked out and curated for you.

You know, it feels like a real recommendation instead of just one company out SEOing another one. So people do tend to trust it more walking in, but they're still the one doing the picking. You know, when Chad GBT handed me those three accountants on a short list, all that really did was get them in the room with me. I met with all three of them and then I hired the one that I had the best conversation with, right? The one that I felt could actually help me the most.

And you can see that in the data, too. You know, 53% of people using AI say what they're mainly using it for is comparing their options and narrowing them down. So, the AI does that and then the person goes and makes the call themselves. But what are they making that call on? Well, they're not stopping at the AI's answer. You know, 85% of people who use AI still go doublech checkck what it told them somewhere else. In other words, they want to go deeper, right?

And going deeper means finding an actual expert talking the whole thing through. Ideally, somebody who's done this a long time with the stories [music] and the case studies and what happened with the person in their exact situation. All the stuff that would just get flattened out of an AI summary. And that expert they go looking for is you. This is what you do all day. The only problem is they can't watch you talk anything through [music] if you've never put anything on video.

And YouTube is where they go looking, right? Similar Web tracked 1.3 billion clicks out of AI chat bots in a single month. Guess what the number one place they went to next right out of the AI chat was? It was YouTube. More than Facebook, Wikipedia, and Reddit combined. And the part that I think is really telling here is where those visits came from. About 3/4 of them came from ChatGBT. Now, Google is ChatGBT's biggest competitor, and yet [music] it's still sending people over to YouTube, which Google owns.

And that just tells us that's what people want the most right after the recommendation. And them watching your video, that closes the gap cuz they get to see your face. They hear your voice. They watch how you think and how you go about the work. And by the time they get on a call with you, they feel safest choosing you, like they already know you. So Jay Hale owns a gym in California and even though his channel's really small, he did over a million dollars last year because when someone books a call after watching even just one of his videos, he closes about 70% of them.

And nothing about his channels exploding, his videos are just doing the selling for him before he ever gets on the phone. And even in the good old days of websites, they still couldn't do that the way a YouTube video can. All your website can give somebody is written words on a page. And even if those words are perfect, it's still just marketing copy. Your site won't really even be the tiebreaker between you and your competition anymore.

AI has made building a website so easy now. Both the writing and the design that pretty much every business website is just months away from being on a level playing field. You can have Claude write pretty amazing sales copy with personality. It might even be really persuasive and convincing. Then you can hand it over to Claude Design to actually design it and get the whole thing up and live in an hour or two. So what used to take months of time and real money investment, you can do it in an afternoon now.

So while you're doing that, so is everyone else. And the ones who haven't gotten around to updating their site with AI yet will be doing it sometime within the next year or so. So when everyone's site is great, having a great site stops being the reason for someone to pick you. You know, there has to be a new differentiator involved. And the one thing AI still can't fake is you. All the little human stuff that comes through when someone watches you work through a problem, that stuff's really hard to fake.

And that's the exact thing that people are trying to find before they hand somebody their money. And that's honestly the whole reason I pivoted this channel away from teaching websites and over to teaching this, right? I could see where things were headed and I was just like I need to get off this merrygoround and onto something that I actually know works and will work for a long time and I wanted to do that before it was too late.

So your website which used to be someone's first impression of you is down to being kind of the last step in the sales process now. And the piece that comes before it is your YouTube channel which means all this comes down to what's actually in your videos. So, for this to work, there are actually two kinds of videos you want to be making. The first kind is just answering the logistical questions that people are already asking about hiring somebody like you.

So, think of these as the same questions that you get on sales calls and in your email inbox over and over again before somebody decides who they want to go with. So, you want to just think of it as answering one question per video. And the biggest question you want to answer is price. Now, I already know what you might be thinking because I hear it all the time. So, some version of, "But if I put my prices out there, my competitors are going to see them.

Won't that be horrible?" Here's the thing. Um, your competitors probably already know or they can easily find out if they want. Any competitor who wants your pricing can fill out your form or hop on a call with you. And honestly, some of them probably already have. So, the only person you're actually hiding your prices from is the one who's trying to decide whether to hire you or not. And that's a really old school way of thinking about it because people have been able to find out what stuff costs online for at least 10 years now, right?

[music] They expect it. And with AI, they're going to expect the closest thing to a real number that you can give them. So, yes, make the pricing video. And when it genuinely does depend on, you know, different factors, you can still make it. You know, you just talk about what the factors are, what drives the price up, what brings it down. That's the shape of the answer the AI is going to want to give. Anyway, if you ask it how much a divorce costs, it's not just going to tell you one number.

It's going to tell you it depends on, you know, X, Y, and Z. So, the video where you walk through those factors is the thing that it's pulling [music] from. Now, the closer you can get to a real number, the better. But the factors alone are going to do a lot of the work for you. There's a family law firm in Michigan that has a video called, "How much does a divorce cost?" That's the whole video. They just answer it. Then you've got comparisons.

You know, all the, you know, do I do this or that kind of decisions that people are weighing out before they hire anybody. And there's a marketing agency called Impact that made one that's comparing hiring an agency to just building your own team in house. So that's an agency telling you when not to hire an agency. And that's exactly the kind of thing that makes somebody actually trust you. Then you've got your process videos, meaning what actually happens when somebody works with you.

There's a therapy practice in Austin that made a video on how to get ready for your first session. And their channels on the small side, somewhere around 6,000 subscribers, but that one video has over 300,000 views. [music] Then you've got timelines. you know, how long before somebody sees anything actually change? There's this SEO guy on YouTube who made a video called, "Why does SEO take so long to see results?" And he answers it as an agency owner.

And that's the exact kind of thing that every one of his prospects is already wondering about. And then we've got videos about how to choose, right? What to look for, what questions to ask, and what the red flags might be. This home building company put out a video with all the questions that you should ask before you hire a contractor. So, they're basically handing people all the exact questions to grill them with. But here's something really important to remember about all these videos.

Just because you're mostly making these particular kind of videos for the AI assistants to pick them up, you got to make them for people, too, right? It's sitting on your YouTube channel. People are going to see them. So, make them for the humans who are trying to decide who to go with, and then the machines will just end up getting everything they need anyway. They're smart. They can figure it out. So, that's all the first kind of video.

The second kind of video you want to make, I call these claim jumpers. So, these are the ones that just call out exactly what you specialize in and who you do your best work for. And there are three ways you can build both at the same time in your videos. And case studies are the most obvious one. You just want to tell the stories of your exact right client. Who they were, what you did together, and what changed for them.

We're talking real people getting real results. And you want that showing up over and over. across a lot of your videos. Your topic choices do it, too. You know, what you choose to make videos about tells people who you serve before you ever say a word about it. There's a financial adviser named Don whose whole channel is federal employee retirement questions. He never has to announce who he's for. His entire catalog does it for him.

And the third way is just mentioning the people you work with right inside your videos, the way it would come up if you were talking to someone in person. doesn't have to be a whole segment. It could just be a sentence here or there like, uh, you know, when I was working with this business coach last year who wanted to use YouTube to find more clients, what we found was dot dot dot. So, you do all of that for a while and the AI ends up with a really clear picture of who you do your best work for.

So, when that specific person describes their specific situation to the AI, you're really easy to pick out. And this is why niching down stopped being just generic marketing advice. And it's gotten really, really important now because when you're for everybody, there's no question that you're going to be the obvious answer to. And that's the whole reason my accountant search went the way it did. I didn't ask it for a good accountant.

I asked it for one who lives and breathes in the course seller in the YouTube world. And a generalist just never would have been the answer to my question, no matter how good they were. the specialist gets handed exactly the client they were built for. Now, you may have been hesitant to start on YouTube because you might figure that it takes forever to work. And honestly, that part is kind of true. YouTube's a long-term play and your people might not start to find you for, you know, 3 to 6 months, possibly longer.

But the math has changed here because even though it might take some months before your prospects start to find you, [music] the AI agents, they can start finding you and recommending you from day one. And there's a whole study on AI citations that backs this up, too. So whether or not a video gets cited in an AI recommendation has virtually no relationship to its views, its likes, or how big the channel even is. The machines are reading your video the day you post it and they don't care if it's got 20 or two million views on it.

So, what this means is you can start getting something out of YouTube right away. Maybe not exactly what you were expecting, but the point is those quiet early months might not be so quiet anymore. Okay, so now let's talk about what role your website still plays in all this. Because just to be clear, you do still need one. It just has a smaller different job to do. Now, you still need somewhere to send people and it's where the deal actually closes, right?

It's where they can get on your calendar, they can fill out your form or they grab your lead magnet and maybe end up on your email list. So, your website's job now more than anything else is to just not get in the way of that. Give people a really easy path to reach out, schedule something, or get on your list. And that means your site can probably get a lot smaller. You know, most businesses, if they're properly set up on YouTube, could go from a 30page kind of mega site down to a single landing page or a couple of them if you've got, you know, a few different offers.

And the reason is because the confidence already got built on YouTube. So, your site is allowed to be smaller and less salesy, still thought out, still written well, and still highlighting how you help your clients. And it should still look good, especially now that everyone else's site is about to look really good, too. It just doesn't have to work as hard at convincing cold traffic anymore. So, the question now is, how long do you really have at this point before your website stops working for you?

So, I predict over the next year, 12 months, whatever you want to call it, that a lot more of your competition is going to get the memo, that they can make their website look amazing with AI, and that some of them are going to start getting wise to how to game the new version of SEO, which is AI recommendations. If you remember, it didn't take most businesses too long to get really obsessed with Google rankings. And that's going to start happening even faster this time around.

Think of it like investing, right? Somebody who starts at 25 is going to retire way richer than someone who starts at 45. Not because they're smarter, the results just had more time to compound. So, we're about 12 months out, which means the move is to start today. And the fastest possible way to start is through my free master class. It's called How to Attract Unlimited Clients on YouTube. [music] That's going to walk you through the whole thing beginning to end.

So, click right here to save your seat and I will show you my entire YouTube strategy for 2027 and beyond.