The Day The Giant Died

If you’re building a business online, it’s important to understand how the internet works to some degree, wouldn’t you agree?

Yesterday I learned something, that seems to be, pretty big to me.

First, a bit of context.

When I started marketing online, I could write a blog post in the right way, and often, it would show up on the first page of Google for the search term I was targeting.

And even if it didn’t show up on the first page, I could search for it in a certain way and I could find it.

Recently I started to notice that

A) My new posts were not showing up on the first page of Google (which could be explained away with the highly competitive SEO landscape), but more strange was

B) I couldn’t find my post ANYWHERE regardless of how I searched for it, even though it was fully published online.

This fact, in combination with the increasing rate at which I found myself using A.I. to find answers instead of Googling for them, caused me to start to think that blogging for leads & traffic was a dying and soon to be dead strategy.

I made a note to myself that blogging would still be a good strategy for following up with my email subscribers and providing value, but dead, dead, DEAD for traffic and leads.

Yesterday I learned something BIG, that explains everything I mentioned above and may provide an interesting twist to any business owners ongoing marketing strategy.

This week, I read a shocking fact, from a paid newsletter I subscribe to.

Google has betrayed us.

It used to be that Google would index all the pages on the internet. (Indexing just means that it sends out little computer spiders every day to crawl the web & find what’s out there).

Once your page was indexed by google, it could be found in the search results.

I learned that some time ago, Google STOPPED crawling all the pages.

For any search term, you’ll see about 40 pages of results and they’ll tell you there are about a million results for that search term.

If you scroll through all 40 pages, often, google will just start looping you back through what you’ve already seen.

Where is the rest of the content?

YOU CAN’T FIND IT WITH GOOGLE

This means that Google is choosing to show you what it thinks you want to see, but more importantly, is hiding a vast amount of online pages that it flat out doesn’t find or put in the search results.

This explains why some of the recent searches I’ve done for may pages are no where to be found in the search results.

Let me repeat: Google is NOT indexing all of the available online content.

This, combined with the fact that A.I. is summarizing results, in my opinion, makes “Googling” something almost worthless.

This week, X.AI sent shockwaves around the world with the release of its new Large Language Model Grok 3.

This company started YEARS behind other A.I. ventures like OpenAI, Google’s Gemini and Claude to name a few, and none the less, Grok 3 blows them all away on all the key performance metrics.

Who cares and what does this have to do with me as a marketer?

THE BIG INSIGHT

The newsletter I mentioned above, revealed that Grok 3 has a little super power that they didn’t even mention on the reveal livestream.

It searches and analyzes ALL published pages online, as well as breaking x posts to find and bring you information.

Let me repeat for clarity.

Google does NOT search (index) all pages online, Grok 3 does.

Yesterday I updated the about page on my blog. I wrote some things into my story that I’ve written no where else online.

I asked Grok 3 “Who is Paul Hutchings” in the ‘Deep Research’ mode and it came back with a VERY comprehensive description of me.

THE KICKER

It included data from the updated page from yesterday. 🤯

Google would have taken weeks to maybe, index this update, and there’s a good chance it wouldn’t be indexed at all – and people would not be able to find this data online.

Grok 3 found it and displayed it, INSTANTLY.

But wait, there’s MORE!

It included reference links to where it found the information (including a link to the page I updated, my page).

Make no mistake about it, the trend of people using A.I. to find information is only going to increase due to the far superior information accessing experience.

The knee-jerk reaction to this fact, as a marketer, would be to concluded there is no point in creating high value content online for traffic & leads because there’s nothing in it for me.

Couple that with the fact that Google wasn’t even making an attempt to include your content in the A.I. results it was giving people.

I just gave you an example of how I updated a piece of content on my website and it was INSTANTLY found and displayed, with links to my website via Grok 3.

This means that Grok 3 is a new and BETTER search engine for both the user AND the content creator.

Publish a great piece of content, and be INSTANTLY found in Grok with links to your site.

Google is dead to me, and will continue to die for others who see what’s happening with the wizard behind the curtain.

Search, however just got resurrected and transfigured into something, much, much better for the searcher and the provider of information.

Moving forward, if you and I both decide to create high quality, accurate and helpful information that serves the searcher, Grok 3 will use what we create to answer questions and give us credit, instantly.

Since Grok 3 is designed to be maximally truth seeking, all we have to do is continue to be a source of fresh, cutting edge, useful information for our audiences, and we’ll have a seat at the new search table.

Thanks for reading and hope you found this useful.

Would love to hear your thoughts below.

PS: Shout out to Brian Roemmele for tipping me off to this huge insight via his newsletter over at https://readmultiplex.com.

PPS: As of this writing, Grok 3 is FREE to use for a limited time. I recommend giving it a whirl.