Crazy Wisdom
Stewart Alsop III | AI, Consciousness & Technology
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Episode #567: SEO is Dying and AI is Rewriting Marketing from Scratch
In this episode, Stewart Alsop sits down with Mark Quadros, founder of GrowthOG and former link-building agency owner, for a wide-ranging conversation covering the state of Facebook ads and paid marketing, the decline of traditional SEO and backlink building in the age of AI, how Google and Cloudflare are jockeying for position as AI search reshapes the internet, and the messy economics of AI-generated video versus real footage (including Mark's work with Google Omni and Epidemic Sounds). They also get into monetization shifts across YouTube, Substack, and TikTok, the "reality disturbance" thesis behind Stewart's show with his father, and where video content and AI video ads are headed next. Find Mark Quadros on X @dherealmark and at his website, markxquadros.com.Timestamps00:00 Stewart welcomes Mark Quadros, discussing his shift from link building to GrowthOG and diving into Facebook ads and paid marketing. 05:00 They explore AI psychosis and how AI-driven discovery is replacing traditional Google search behavior. 10:00 Talk turns to bloated b2b ad budgets and why large companies struggle to adapt efficiently to AI. 15:00 Mark shares his Bitcoin background, the "every company becomes a bank" theory, and his agency's slow decline. 20:00 Deep dive into AEO, llms.txt, Cloudflare, and concerns over AI companies scraping the open internet. 25:00 Conversation shifts to video, FFmpeg, open-source tools, and Mark's years living in Thailand. 30:00 Mark recounts YouTube demonetization of AI content and pivoting back toward b2b clients. 35:00 They unpack ghostwriting, ethical writing tensions, and how backlink value was really priced. 40:00 Discussion of Google and YouTube killing old SEO playbooks, tied to shifting interest rates. 45:00 Mark details pricing AI video ads, working with Google Omni and Epidemic Sounds, blending real footage with AI. 50:00 Closing thoughts on the "reality disturbance" thesis and the value of human connection over AI.Key Insights Link building is dying but not dead. Mark's SEO agency business peaked around 2022 working with brands like monday.com and HubSpot, but AI has steadily eroded the value of backlinks. There's still budget for links, just far less than during the gold rush years of 2018-2022.Big companies waste money because they can't track it. B2B companies spending $2-500M+ a year in revenue often can't account for where ad and vendor spend actually goes. Once a budget exists, it gets allocated regardless of efficiency, especially in large organizations too bureaucratic to figure out AI.AI is changing product discovery itself. Instead of searching Google and choosing from options, people now get AI recommendations directly, shifting the entire model of how consumers find products, which threatens the search-and-link economy that powered SEO for two decades.The open internet may be closing. Concerns about Anthropic, OpenAI, and China scraping content freely, including old books, have pushed creators like Stewart to restrict access to older podcast episodes. This marks a cultural shift away from the openness that defined the early internet era.AEO and llms.txt are the new frontier, and nobody fully understands them yet. Much like early SEO in 2001, there's a new discipline forming around how AI agents discover and read content, but no established playbook exists, leaving even experienced marketers uncertain.AI-generated video is a high-effort, low-margin trap. Mark found that fully AI-generated ads were nearly unprofitable given the time needed to get results right, while blending real human footage with AI-altered environments (using tools like Google Omni) produced better, faster, more believable results.YouTube's AI demonetization wave hit creators hard. As AI-generated content flooded YouTube, the platform cracked down broadly, devastating even legitimate animators and renderers. This pushed Mark to pivot away from consumer video tools back toward serving his existing B2B client base.
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