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In today’s newsletter,
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Google still runs search. Here's what the data actually shows.
How Blossom grew from Shopify to Walmart
Tired of news that feels like noise?
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Distribution decoded
Google still runs search. Here's what the data actually shows.
Rand Fishkin just published a study on 2025 US search market share, and the numbers are worth a look if you've been hearing a lot of noise about AI replacing Google.
When you factor in platforms beyond traditional search engines, Google's share sits closer to 70% than 90%.
That's still nearly 3 out of every 4 desktop searches. Combine every prompt across ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, and the rest, assume every one is a search equivalent, and Google still comes out ahead by a wide margin.
Amazon, Bing, and YouTube each pull more desktop search activity than ChatGPT.
Despite all the buzz.
None of this means AI search doesn't matter.
But if you're rebuilding your SEO strategy around AI visibility while your Google, YouTube, or Amazon presence has gaps, you're solving the wrong problem first.
Action Summary:
Read Rand Fishkin's full study and note which platforms your buyers actually use
Open Google Search Console and check where your current search traffic comes from
Pick the one non-Google platform (YouTube, Amazon, Bing) most relevant to your audience and audit your presence there before touching your AI search strategy
Credit: Aleyda Solís
Live Workshop — Starting in ~1 Hour
Mastering AI agents for organic traffic over the next decade
Ankur Modi (ex-Meta, ex-Amazon systems architect, NASDAQ IPO veteran) is hosting a live session at 10am EST today with open Q&A.
The topic: how AI decides which brands it trusts — and what that means for your traffic over the next decade.
He'll cover why AI-mediated discovery is accelerating, why large brands are actually harder for AI to interpret than smaller stores, and what infrastructure you need to win when AI agents become the dominant acquisition channel.
No recording. Live Q&A at the end — bring hard questions.
Bonus: 10 attendees who stay until the end get a free AI-visibility audit (how AI reads your catalog today, which pages get cited, where the gaps are).
Claim your free seat (check your junk email for the meeting link)
Pod bites
How Blossom grew from Shopify to Walmart
Sarah Vilenskiy started Blossom as an eczema brand. It didn't work. Eczema sufferers have been burned too many times. They come in skeptical before they've even tried the product.
She pivoted to dry skin. Broader problem, more open buyers. Sales started moving.
Here's what fueled each stage after that.
$0 to $10k/month: Find the niche you can actually speak to. Sarah has severely dry skin and is allergic to 49 out of 60 things on a standard allergy test. When she stopped selling to customers she didn't understand, the connection was instant.
$10k to $100k/month: Dial in the full funnel before scaling spend. UGC Meta ads got buyers in. But she knew five extra dollars per order meant she could outspend competitors. Email flows and CRO came before touching the ad budget.
$100k to seven figures: Be willing to kill what got you here. Meta CPMs went up 14% in a single month. She pulled back 90%, leaned into retail, tested direct mail, built SEO. The founders who stall keep doing what worked before and wonder why it stopped.
One thing she'd tell anyone not yet on Amazon: fix that now. Blossom spends under $100 a day on Amazon ads and it drives 30% of daily revenue, almost entirely from Meta spillover.
Action Summary:
Survey current customers and ask why they bought — if you can't repeat their words back, your niche isn't tight enough
Before increasing ad spend, check if one extra conversion per 100 visitors changes your numbers — fix that first
List on Amazon if you aren't already, to capture search volume your Meta ads are already generating
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In early 2024, Sam Altman told Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian that he and his tech CEO group chat had a "betting pool" on when the first one-person billion-dollar company would appear.
"Which would have been unimaginable without AI," Altman said, "and now will happen."
Matthew Gallagher made it happen.
$20k. His house in LA. Two employees. $401M year one. $1.8B projected this year.
Since that story broke there have been allegations. FDA letters. Fake doctor ads. Deepfake images. He's disputed parts of it.
We're not here to litigate that.
What we are here to look at is what was actually built. Because regardless of the controversy, a company was set up and run by two people.
A website was built.
Ads were created and launched.
250,000 customers were supported.
Performance was tracked and reported on daily.
Orders were routed to fulfilment partners automatically.
None of that required a team. None of it required him to be in the middle.
And he is not the only story. At YC right now there are two-person companies running workflows that used to need teams of 20. Ecommerce founders doing $4M with no agency, no designer, no media buyer. The team sizes keep shrinking. The output doesn't.
So how does that actually work?
Because he is obviously not doing this through a ChatGPT chat window.
When people talk about autonomous systems it sounds incredibly technical. Agentic workflows. AI orgs. Automated pipelines. The jargon is designed to make this feel out of reach.
It isn't.
At at the core of every system like the ones these founders are running sit only three things.
Context. Skills. Tools.
That's the entire stack. That's what's running underneath every story like Gallagher's. Three things assembled correctly, connected to each other, with a trigger that fires automatically so no human needs to start it or move it forward.
If you fundamentally understand these 3 concepts, you are already ahead of 99% using AI today.
Today we're breaking down exactly what those three things are and how to build your first one.
The only three things that matter
Strip away every buzzword and every "autonomous AI" post you've seen on LinkedIn. What's actually underneath a working system is three things:
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