Navigating Search, Leveraging AI, and Balancing Human Connection with Greg Brooks of SearchTides

EPISODE SUMMARY
Greg Brooks, CMO of SearchTides, joins host Scott Todaro to explore how AI is transforming search strategies, why human connection remains critical in the digital age, and what the future holds for CMOs navigating these changes. From his unique background as a professional poker player to leading eight-figure marketing budgets, Greg shares insights on how he reads audiences, leverages data, and adapts to emerging technologies such as AI. This can’t-miss episode is packed with advice for marketing leaders looking to balance technology, creativity, and customer understanding.

GUEST BIO
Greg Brooks is an author and prominent figure in the digital marketing landscape, serving as a partner and CMO at SearchTides, which helps marketers generate more revenue in their most competitive channels. His role is pivotal in shaping the future of marketing strategies, leveraging Large-Language Models (LLMs), and navigating the AI-driven era of the internet. With an impressive track record, Greg has successfully collaborated with industry giants such as Home Depot, Zillow, Western Union, and FanDuel. The 60+ person team at SearchTides has cracked the code of multiple algorithms online, including Google, Facebook, and some GPT models, quantifying them into a few thousand ranking factors. They share their findings with the rest of the world at SearchTides.com and are spearheading the evolution into LLMs and AI-searching for the future.

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Welcome to another podcast edition of The Next CMO.

Today, I am joined by Greg Brooks. He has got a fantastic background today. He’s gonna talk about all kinds of wonderful things, not only search related, but AI. And then how do you actually deal with this as a marketing leader?

And so, Greg, he’s got an unbelievable background. And I think one of the things that’s most interesting about him was is that he is a former professional poker player. Now, as somebody that is an amateur poker player, this is a little scary. I don’t wanna play with him.

I have big had my clock clean many times. So, the one thing that he took away from it, I think he’s gonna share it with you today, is he learned how to read people. And I think anybody that really understands marketing understands that if you understand your audience at a detailed level, especially the psychographics of what makes them tick, that that is a huge skill that you can apply towards marketing. But, he’s done all kinds of things.

So he was one of the founders of Avocado Mattress, which is a successful business. He was an entrepreneur that got that up and running. He’s still doing it today.

And he has a background in managing fairly sizable marketing budgets up to eight figures at CommonBond.

And the other thing that he’s doing right now is he’s the CMO of SearchTides. And so he’s gonna talk to us quite a bit about AI, and search and your favorite vendor out there, Google, and what’s gonna happen with those guys. So without further ado, let’s turn it over to you, Greg. And if you wanna start talking about poker, you know, that’s great, or we can just dive directly into whether you think Google is dead.

The Art of Reading People

That’s great. Can I talk about whether Google’s dead and just make poker analogies as I go?

No. Yeah. Yes.

I think we would all understand that just further.

Yeah. No. Poker was really interesting. I got started off when I was in college.

I was trying to make some extra money to go visit my long-distance girlfriend at the time, and I played my freshman year of college for over two thousand hours. So I had kinda, like, software that tracked that, and I was terrible, Scott. The only difference between us, I literally was terrible for a longer period of time. And then one day, that just stopped happening.

Oh, no.

That’s unbelievable. It must have been fun, though.

It was fun, and it just felt like a big video game. And there’s numbers on a screen. There’s faceless opponents. I’m just trying to be the best. I think there were two types of really, quote, professionals.

One type was I’m trying to play a limit that I can win at. I’m just gonna sit there all day every day, and I’m just gonna keep trying to kinda trying to juice it. And the other one, which is the group that I fell into, was this really does feel like so much like a video game that I just wanna get to the high score, and I wanna get to the final level. And so I just got my butt beat constantly. And then when I started beating more people, then I would play harder for opponents, and it was just an endless cycle. Yeah.

That’s awesome. I have to ask one question.

What was your best read? When you were looking at people, what was the greatest tell? Especially if you could do it in context for all these wonderful marketers out there that seem to not really understand body language.

Okay. So, best read in context for marketers out there is a behavior shift. So it’s you are typically I’ll give you a couple of examples. If you ask somebody what their favorite color is, that’s essentially memory recall.

If you ask somebody what they ate for breakfast last week, that’s memory recall. If you ask somebody who is gonna lie to you, they’re no longer recalling memory. They’re gonna invent something. And so the way that they grab that information is gonna be different.

Everybody thinks it’s, oh, if somebody’s got their arms crossed, they’re uncomfortable. It’s first of all, that’s not a real thing you could be called.

Things exist in yeah. Right? Like, how could you imagine? You’re like, this person doesn’t like this conversation. It is sixty-five degrees in this room. This person is cold. They’re wearing T-shirts and sandals.

So you have to it’s it’s about clusters, but really, it’s more about everyone is unique and does their own version. So what’s the baseline look like? And I think people are like that too. And marketers, if I’ve seen an ad five times and I get served an ad for the sixth time and I clicked on it, that is, like, really, really meaningful. That’s a meaningful behavior shift. So what does that mean, and what are the implications of that?

The Current State of Google and Search

Fantastic. So can you read Google at this point?

Yes. But for different reasons. We’re cheating with Google. We literally just we’ve scraped enough pages, and we’ve crawled enough search results pages where we just kinda really understand the odds and ends of the algorithm. But, yeah, now we’re reading it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It it’s interesting. Yeah. So what are you seeing with Google? I mean, obviously, they have the antitrust and monopolistic litigation. What are you seeing out there?

I think the biggest thing to really focus on is to think about people searching on the Internet for information, which is kinda what search is, and that’s what Google’s become. And to think about it in terms of how is that gonna evolve over time. And so, to answer your question, I think Google has gone from something like ninety-one point six percent of all relevant searches about a year and a half ago when all the GPT models started coming out. And after all the conversations about the obituaries and the death of Google, that number has decreased down to around ninety point six percent. So for sure, a decrease, but also still retaining the massive over majority, probably in the midst of the lowest overall sentiment about the future of Google.

So, I actually don’t see it going away. I actually think that Google has the opportunity to be the best AI result out of anything on the Internet, including OpenAI, including Perplexity.

And the reason is you have major publishers blocking GPT models and blocking Perplexity even though Perplexity has got a little loophole that they use.

But zero websites block Google. They want Google crawling every single page on their website, and Google therefore has access to this giant dataset that every single competitor does not. They also have access to another giant dataset that every single other competitor does not, and that’s all private and unlisted videos on YouTube. So if you put those two things together in a GPT race, which is truly about, like, the dataset for processing, Google has these two crazy advantages that can never actually be replicated.

And as this sub-industry kinda just gets further along, the skill in getting a GPT to quote learn is going to commoditize. And so the thing that’s gonna remain uniqueness is dataset. Now Google, so far with AI overviews, has been absolutely throwing away that advantage. So nobody is saying that it has to go a certain way. But I think when you get new technology and you get a lot of people who are struggling to figure out the old technology, they’re really quick to want to throw it away, and I think we are seeing a decent amount of that currently.

CMOs and AI Adoption

You talk about the new technology. Are you seeing a lot of CMOs out there that understand how to adopt AI, or were they seeing what the differences are between what they’re doing today with investing in search advertising?

You know, is there a big difference that you’re seeing?

I think that AI exists today as this overlay layer on top of marketing execution.

So I can do things twenty times faster if I’m using ChatGPT to help be a copilot with me in various capacities or Perplexity or something like that. In terms of using AI to fully replace, I don’t see as big of a gap because the equivalent is not human beings doing stuff. It’s mostly, like, software. So you have SaaS. Because if there was a big enough opportunity to this date where somebody wanted to make it easier for a human, we created software around that.

And so the AI is iterating on top of human. It’s like how companies are starting to build internal models to try to, like, cancel the need to use, some, you know, HubSpot or the need to use Salesforce.

So, like, that is where a lot of innovation is occurring. In terms of the technology that’s push-button where it makes your marketing better than where it was previously, that doesn’t exist yet. That will exist. In the future. That might be a ChatGPT 10.0 or 15.0 or something like that. It absolutely will exist. But technology historically has always been on top of the expertise, on top of the skill set that we have.

And so what CMOs really need to do is to empower their teams to use this everywhere, to use these tools everywhere, to use the technology everywhere because that’s really the greatest level of output.

Balancing Efficiency with Creativity

It’s interesting that you say that because one of the things that I’ve heard marketing leaders say is that, you know, this is great for my team, especially for writing messaging. You know, people will start it. They’ll get sixty, seventy percent there by starting with ChatGPT, but this really isn’t a tool necessarily for decision-making yet. And so I don’t think it’s impacted—in my experience with them, it has not impacted—the management level yet.

It may get there at some point where you’re starting to analyze data and just kicking out recommendations, but you’re still going to have that human interaction, and the human ultimately has to make the decision. You’re never gonna leave that to the computer to do it.

Have you seen anything on what I would call the more strategic side of marketing or innovation side of marketing that you would see a marketing leader use AI for? Or is it primarily for tactical execution of projects and writing projects and messaging things along those lines?

I think you can use AI tools for project planning and creation the same way that you can use them for execution. I think that there’s an asterisk next to anything with data because then you have companies saying, “That’s sensitive. I don’t want that being—you know, that’s nonpublic.” And that’s true on one hand, and on the other hand, it’s also marketing leaders who are just like, “I wanna still be important for as long as possible. My stuff can’t be…”

So I think, like, I think, eventually, it’s just gonna all get there, which is okay because, ultimately, it’s just about being able to use the printing press when it came out, being able to use a more automated selling solution when that came out.

You can tell I was not present during the industrial revolution. So my references to selling is not—it’s not on—it’s not the same. But, that’s typically where things wind up being.

And there is this sort of mental and emotional change that I think is gonna be required in a lot of leaders—and for sure marketing leaders too—because this was kinda what was happening during COVID.

Shifting Metrics and Mindsets

I mean, what was the big metric that you as a leader… What was the metric that said how important you were? And it was headcount. How much headcount do you have? How many people do you have under you?

That was the big metric. You know, the more, the more important I am. And then what happened with AI? What does that do? Shrinks headcount. What does that do? Decreases the rate at which you increase headcount.

So what you actually have are these, like, incentive structures where someone doesn’t want that to be the case because they feel good with more headcount. But in reality, it’s gonna be better for the business. And, oops, you know, what are we gonna do? So I think there’s a little bit of that too.

Without a doubt. I’ve always said that CMOs measure their worth based on the size of their team and the size of their budget. So if you cut their team and you cut their budget, they feel worthless.

And, you know, it’s interesting because if they measured themselves on ROI, then that would be the ultimate measurement. So actually having smaller, more efficient teams generating more ROI for the business is actually what an executive is supposed to do.

And I think this is where a lot of marketing leaders lose sight of what’s really important to the business, and they get involved in, like, building an empire.

If you do that, you’re probably gonna end up just like the other marketers that are gone within one year, nine months.

The Future of CMOs and Excellence in Marketing

So let’s talk about… I mean, as a marketing leader, you know, you’ve done a lot of things in the last ten years, and you have a background in business. You’ve got the entrepreneurial experience too. So just CMOs, like, thinking broader. What does the future look like for these CMOs that, you know, are trying to adopt the technology?

We had a discussion earlier, and I thought it was kind of interesting where you thought the future was going. I’d like you to share it here on the podcast.

Yeah. Absolutely. I think that if you think about what technology does, it creates more consumer choice.

And it’s—I’ll give you one example with content. So there were three television stations when TVs came out. Then there were thirteen channels. Then fifty channels. Five hundred. And now we have millions and millions with all different social media channels.

The thing that made that possible was I went from needing an entire studio fully staffed on a few different floors in a giant office building to this device that I walk around with anyway. And so what that leads to is it leads to more consumer choice.

Because now I don’t just have three or fifty or five hundred channels to choose from. I get to go into the niche of my niche of my niche of things that I’m excited about.

AI, Consumer Choice, and Marketing Differentiation

And I think we’re gonna see something similar happen due to AI in the business world. I think it’s already starting from the layoffs two years ago, last year, you know, any future layoffs that are happening.

Rehires are not happening at the same rate because there’s just an expectation that output is gonna just get better per person, and AI tools are going to enable that to happen. And I think there’s validity to that.

The flip side of that is that you’re now gonna have one or five people be able to create companies that used to take five or thirty people to create. You’re gonna have that one all-star. Well, now they’re like four all-stars, and they’re gonna maybe hang out with three other friends who are like that too. And they’re gonna enter a market.

And so I think you basically get two things. You’re gonna get the Costco from Idiocracy, which is just a giant, giant company that keeps on getting bigger. And then on the other side of it, you’re gonna have a lot more companies competing for, quote, the rest of the market.

And so as a consumer, this is good for me because I now get more individual choice. But as a company, it’s gonna get more challenging to acquire someone.

And so, therefore, I need to vocalize what my values are and who I’m right for and really call that out in a more meaningful way and just get this megaphone and shout it from the rooftops everywhere.

Closing Thoughts

Greg, I could do this with you all day. This has been an incredibly insightful discussion.

It’s great to be at SearchTides. That’s where you’ll find him.

We look forward to the next episode. Greg, maybe we’ll tap you in another six months for another discussion. This was enlightening, and we’ll see what ends up happening with AI and Google.

Thanks again, Greg, and tune in next time!