Hey👋,
I'm Giacomo

I don't buy individual stocks.
But the day OpenAI goes public, I’m buying. Immediately.

Here’s why:

1. It's already mainstream.
→ 10% of the world's adult population now uses ChatGPT.
→ It reached 1/3 of Instagram users, in less than three years.
→ Over 70% of all GPT conversations are non-work related.

2. Massive room for growth.
→ The 18-25 age group sends nearly half of all messages.
→ Growth in developing countries is exploding.

3. It's becoming the "Everything App".
It isn't just a chatbot anymore. It's the gateway to the web:

→ Personal Assistant: ChatGPT
→ Entertainment and social networking: Sora
→ Browser: Atlas
→ Shopping: Instant Checkout
→ App Store: GPT Apps (essentially the new Apple App Store)
→ Messaging: Group Chats (just announced!)

4. Huge potential for monetisation.
Yes, it still burns billions.
But it's already at $13B+ annual revenue.
Facebook took years to even make a single dollar.
OpenAI did it on day one.

The path is clear:
→ Ads (huge opportunity).
→ Commissions from checkouts.
→ More tiered subscriptions (free with ads, Lite?, Plus, Pro, Enterprise, etc).
→ Massive B2B potential.

Meanwhile...
The other Big Tech giants are too large and slow to keep pace.
Yes, even Google.
Gemini is growing fast but its market share is still a fraction of ChatGPT.

Many are trapped in the innovator's dilemma.
OpenAI doesn't fear any dilemma.

It managed to disrupt the most powerful companies on earth right where they were strongest: AI & machine learning.
Nobody else has ever done that.

What else should I add?

Microsoft is moving to the light side of the force.

It’s building a content marketplace where publishers and creators can sell their work directly to AI chatbots.

Auction or fixed price, still unclear.

Why this is a huge deal:

Publishers are getting crushed.
Search traffic is collapsing after “Google Zero”, or the so-called "death of clicks".

Less traffic means less ad revenue.

Meanwhile, AI chatbots keep using their content for free…
without even sending traffic back 😅.

This model is clearly not sustainable.

Sure, OpenAI has begun striking content licensing deals.
For example with the Financial Times.

But these are slow, maybe annual negotiations, while AI usage grows exponentially in the meantime.

At this point, publishers need a Big Tech giant to finally take their side.
If one moves, the rest will follow.

Problem is,
Microsoft’s marketplace would only feed CoPilot. 😐
And CoPilot is minuscule compared to the main players.

Still, it’s a start.
And Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI could make the ripple bigger.

Will it work?
Hard to tell.

But one thing is certain:
How this shift will evolve will either save the open web… or kill it.

Marketers, what can we learn from this chart?

1️⃣ Reddit alone gets 40% of all LLM citations.
That’s a massively skewed distribution toward the top.

2️⃣ The top-cited brands are huge, high-traffic websites.
LLMs clearly favour big names.
Makes sense, they’re statistical engines.
The more a brand is known, the more chances it shows up in the model’s training data.

3️⃣ Most of them are platforms.
Not publishers or blogs, not retailers, not producers.

So...

If you’re a small business,
forget about “LLM visibility.” That’s not your game.

If you’re a large business (but not in the top 20),
you can play. But keep in mind, platforms will still win.

If you’re in the top 20,
congrats, you made it.
But now hold that position tight, the challengers are more aggressive than ever.

Two obvious takeaways:

-> Be on all these platforms.
Reddit is the most cited domain, but it doesn’t have content of its own. It’s your content that will be surfaced!
Same story for most of the other top domains.

-> If you’re small, grow!
Sounds obvious, but it’s worth repeating.
How? online PR and wide-reach ads.

Stop making websites. You don’t need one.

All you need is a backend and an API.

Welcome to the future of the internet!
where users interact with your website without ever visiting it.

Sounds crazy?
Then take a look at ChatGPT Apps.

People can now:

find apartments to rent,
book hotels,
even play Spotify...

all without leaving ChatGPT.

The entire browsing and discovery process happens inside the chatbot.

Only the final action, the payment or transaction, happens outside (for now).

This changes EVERYTHING.

Traffic acquisition is dead. 💀 
You don't need traffic anymore.

All you need is to be featured in ChatGPT Apps.

Here’s what’s going to happen next:

- ChatGPT Apps will become the new App Store.
- Apps will compete for ranking, organic or paid.
- Users will choose the app they trust.
- Or GPT will choose for them based relevancy to the conversation.

A new marketing ecosystem is rising.

Think of...

Sponsored placements.
Apps PPC.
Pay-per-conversion.
Organic app ranking.

We’re witnessing the birth of a new internet,
and the dawn of a whole new era of digital marketing.

"Hey baby, I got a bonus, let's go celebrate!"
"Well done, how much?"
"1,000,000,000,000 dollars."

It sounds so insane that actually makes sense.

To get the cash, Elon Musk must:

- Raise Tesla’s valuation to $8.5tn (twice the most valuable company today).
- Boost earnings to $400bn, about 24× what it earns now.
- Sell millions of Optimus robots.
- Sell millions of autonomous driving subscriptions.

Will he make it?

I think so. I don’t see why not.

The only real risk here, is Musk himself.

What if something happens to him before that?
He almost died at least twice.

How much is Tesla worth without Musk?
Probably just a fraction of today’s valuation.

Maybe close to nothing actually.

Remember,
Tesla is already one of the most overvalued stocks in America.
P/E ratio 298.3.

For context,
NVIDIA is at 53.5, and Meta at “just” 27.4.

So the Musk premium is already priced in.

But if he actually delivers, the world will be a much happier place.

Millions of robots doing our work.
Cheap transportation.
No road accidents.
No city pollution.

We’ll definitely get there, sooner or later.
I was in China recently and I got a glimpse of this future.

The only question is when,
and whether Tesla will be the first to get there.

Yesterday at Analytics Summit, someone asked the amazing Simo Ahava how he envisions web analytics in the next 5–10 years.

His answer was spot on:

“I don’t know what’s gonna change, but I do know what’s not going to change: team silos and broken collaboration.”

True.
But it got me thinking…

💡What if we won’t even have a “web” to analyse anymore?

What if there are no browsers, no websites.

At least not in the way we know them today?

What if the future of the internet is an omnipresent LLM chatbot, a single interface that is the internet?

In that world, brands won’t build websites or apps.

They’ll just make great products, and market them through chatbots.

Think of partnerships. Licensing deals. Sponsored results.

Imagine booking a flight:
“Hey ChatGPT, book me a flight from X to Y.”
“Sure, here’s your booking.”

Maybe the backend is Booking.com, but I’ll never see it.

At that point, “web” analytics becomes brutally simple:
“How many bookings did ChatGPT send us this month?”

Unless your brand is strong enough that people ask explicitly:

“Book me a flight with Booking.com.”

Then, once again, what truly matters is your brand. Nothing else.

This is the essence of the AI Marketing revolution unfolding before our eyes, right now.

Can’t wait to see how this unfolds!

The best quote I’ve ever read.

And it couldn’t be more relevant in the age of AI.

Yesterday I said we should treat LLMs like a real human audience.

Just like with people, advertising can influence what LLMs “think” of our brand.

But here’s the problem:
we can’t see who they “are.”

We can’t target audience segments, like we do with real people.

So performance marketing, just like a laser in a pitch-black room, won’t be effective.

Brand building then becomes the smarter play to create "mental availability" inside LLMs.

The goal is to make sure you’re known, salient, and more “popular” than competitors. So will you come to “mind” when users ask about your space.

Performance marketing has massively risen in relevance in the last 20 years.

But now it's losing ground:

-> GDPR and the cookie collapse
-> AI chat disintermediating search
-> AI "stealing" traffic from websites and display ads impressions

The foundations of data-driven performance are being questioned.

That’s why brand is back!

But it’s shouldn't be brand versus performance. It never should have in fact.

They work together, now more than ever.

Brand lights up the room.
Performance laser targets once the lights are on.

Brian Chesky couldn’t have said it better.

🔔 Stay tuned!
More AI Marketing pills next Wednesday.

The biggest marketing revolution of the past 20 years is happening right now.

You guessed it, It’s about AI 😅.

We’ve officially entered the Age of AI,
and the rules of marketing are being rewritten in real time.

What used to work, just doesn’t anymore.

Most marketers are still playing the old game with new tools.
That’s a mistake.

I’ve been spending a lot of time researching this shift.
Now I want to share my findings with other business leaders like you!

So, starting tomorrow, every Wednesday,
I’ll share actionable insights on how to approach Marketing in the Age of AI.

With particular attention to advertising and performance marketing.

🧠 Wednesdays will focus on strategic insights.

On other days I will continue sharing news and more tactical ideas.

If you’re a marketer or business leader trying to make sense of the chaos,

👉 follow me and hit the 🔔 not to miss any post!

The first post of the series drops tomorrow. Can’t wait!

This is how ChatGPT kills a small business.

It is a real story, and a warning for every online marketer and business owner.

Guide to Lofoten runs guided tours in the Lofoten Islands, northern Norway.

For years, they nailed SEO and digital marketing.
They brought traffic to their website and sold their tours.

Now, their business is collapsing before their eyes.

Their revenue came 50/50 from:

- Website content monetisation (display ads, paid articles etc)
- Guided tours

The first half is gone.
GPT took their website traffic.

Why visit a travel blog when a chatbot gives you the same answers instantly?

The second half is dying too.
Their tours barely show up online anymore.

💡 Because ChatGPT hardly mentions small websites for transactional conversations. There is growing academic evidence of this.

It prefers popular platforms, like GetYourGuide in this case.

Which take high commissions.
And that’s their small business' margin gone.

Two possible ways out:

1️⃣ Advertising
→ very expensive because competing against giants.

2️⃣ Becoming famous content creators (300k+ followers?)
→ possible, but brutal in the crowded travel niche.

No easy fix. Maybe no fix at all.
Their business model is simply becoming obsolete.

And that happens. It always has during technological shifts.

Bur for us marketers, two lessons stand out:

1️⃣ Info businesses are dead.
2️⃣ Aggregators thrive in the age of AI.

It's easy to see why.

Aggregators provide a large source of organised structured data, perfect to feed AI algorithms.

Of course, not all businesses are aggregators.
But they can look like one, or possibly work with one.

Think of SEO structured data, or retail media.

Adapt or die, as always.

Sunday thoughts: is our golden age ending? 🌍

A mandatory read if you want to understand our times.

Nothing to do with AI or Marketing. Yet, everything to do with all the rest.

It’s helped me put things into perspective… and realise how lucky I am to live right now, in Europe, in this moment of history.

Ours is a golden age,
no questions about it.

Comparable to Ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, or even Song China.

But cracks are starting to show.

Every golden age has three fundamental elements in common:

- Free and open society
- Rule of law
- Peace

That’s the foundation for individual inventiveness and innovation.
And it’s exactly social and technological innovation that sparks a golden age.

Ours, clearly, is driven by technology.

But there’s one more thing golden ages share.

They never last.

Today, open society, rule of law, and peace are being seriously tested.
Without them, our golden age won’t survive.

The trigger of decline is simple: fear.

When fear of decline outweighs belief in progress, decline becomes inevitable, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But look at how far we’ve come in just a few decades.
And how much more we can still achieve.

Decline isn’t imminent.
And it’s definitely not inevitable.

Take one example:
the golden ages of the past produced some of humanity’s greatest minds, philosophers, artists, statesmen etc.

Yet none of them, over thousands of years, ever questioned the role of women in public life or the existence of slavery.

Now think of today.
And we still have a long way to go!

At this point it’s on us.

To choose between fear of decline or faith in progress and peace.
And if we choose the latter we need to protect it at all cost!

So in a sense yes, this post is also about AI.
Because this technology might just be the spark of an even better golden age.

If we want it to be. ⚡