A slower week for a change.

Being out of town for a few days, I got a chance to enjoy reading about AI news and not worry about implementing it all.

Not yet anyway.

Topics for this week:

• AI Marketplace

• Doubling Down

• Leveraged Growth

• New Code Buddy?

• New Social Media

AI Marketplace

Answer Engine Optimization or “AEO” is a new term I heard on a podcast a few weeks ago.

Everything used to be all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which really meant trying to show up at the top of Google searches.

But a number of stats are flying around claiming Google searches are down a huge percentage because people just ask ChatGPT (or whatever AI) instead.

If that’s the case, then businesses are trying to make sure their websites get picked up as an answer from an AI instead of the number 1 Google result.

It probably doesn’t hurt to still be in the top spot for Googling, but if ChatGPT or other “Answer Engines” like Perplexity, Claude, or even Google’s Gemini will provide links to sources, might as well try to be the link the AI provides.

OpenAI is taking this a step further by releasing the Agentic Commerce Protocol:

No need to click a link to go to a Shopify site, just buy right there within the conversation.

This felt particularly relevant as I’ve been working on a marketplace of sorts with Wave.

Wave isn’t using AI conversations yet, but this Agentic Commerce Protocol seems like a pretty big opportunity in general.

If a new online shop is able to build a website with favorable “AEO”, it could have AI models automatically suggesting and selling their items without a single Google search.

It’s a wild time for the internet.

Get the feeling there will be plenty more shifts in how things work as AI manages the internet more and more for us.

AI’s buying and selling with other AI’s, no humans required.

We’ll see how quickly the Agentic Commerce Protocol takes off and how much more purchasing people will be doing directly within their AI conversations.

Or if the AI’s will be doing the purchasing as well…

Doubling Down

I was out of town for the majority of the last 7 days so I was not as active on social media, though I’m still not super active in general.

But despite the travel and distraction, both of my core focuses continued to grow.

The YouTube channel grew by 28 subscribers with zero uploads, and the Skool community grew even more, gaining 33 members in the last 7 days.

“Doubling down” is the phrase that keeps running through my head when I see these numbers, but this realistically isn’t even a doubling-down situation.

I’ve been posting 1 video a week for a good stretch now.

I could easily septuple down just with YouTube shorts alone, posting 7 days a week, and probably see at least a 2-3x return in growth.

The path is becoming clearer.

More time on YouTube, less time on low-paying projects.

Leveraged Growth

Another theme that’s been popping up along side “doubling down”, is “leverage”.

I quit a full-time job a couple years ago with that idea in mind, thinking I understood what leverage was.

I was “trading time for money” at a job because there’s no scalability.

Somehow I have fallen back into the same trap, working for clients that pay flat rates with no leverage to be found.

Part of the problem was following trends online, whatever the hot business model was at the time.

Dropshipping, crypto, web design agency, now automation agency.

None of them were really my idea, just someone else’s.

And none of these were leveraged activities.

They were all ways to make money upfront to funnel that money into leveraged projects.

YouTube so far has been the only thing that I’ve stuck with that’s actually a leveraged activity - and this newsletter (thanks for reading/skimming/opening 😉)

Of course not everything can be leveraged, but I could be prioritizing more leverage than prioritizing clients out of obligation at this point.

So that’s the big pivot.

Build more leverage for myself.

The doubling or septupling down on YouTube would be a great start.

But another one that’s popped up lately is SEO or the concept of “AEO” from earlier.

YouTube is a great source of traffic, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to build a YouTube channel for every project.

If I do end up vibe coding a few projects of my own, SEO or AEO may still be a viable way to get traffic to those new tools I end up building.

The great indie-hacker-turned-vibe-coder @levelsio has said despite his large X following, only about 5% of his app traffic comes from social media, the majority is a result of “pSEO” or “programmatic SEO”.

He automates the creation of pages on his websites based on what people search for which leads to him ranking higher in searches in general.

Very smart approach, and I don’t know how I’ve never seen the term “pSEO” before until this week.

Armed with YouTube and pSEO, I think there’s a good possibility to leverage some traffic into a few of those website ideas I’ve been kicking around…

New Code Buddy?

I’ve gone back and forth on Claude unfortunately.

For a long time, Sonnet 3.5 was my primary coder for Wave.

But after a while, I got tired of it constantly changing things that didn’t need to be changed, and when new model upgrades released, I ended up switching off of Sonnet entirely.

I think I tried Sonnet 4.1 when it first came out but still felt like I was getting better results with Gemini Pro 2.5 and GPT-5 at that point so I really haven’t used any Anthropic models in a few months now.

This week Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5 claiming it to be the best coding model in the world.

Being on vacation, I haven’t done much coding so I haven’t had a chance to test it myself but overall it seems positively received.

Sonnet 4.5 has climbed it’s way to tied for 1 in Text and tied for 4 in WebDev on LMArena so it’s clearly testing well.

It’s priced closer to GPT and Gemini at $3 for input and $15 for output which is much more sustainable than Claude Opus’s pricing.

I’ve seen a few people say Sonnet 4.5 is better than Claude Opus which was Anthropic’s most powerful model until now.

So I’ll be anxious to try it out.

I’ve been switching back and forth between Gemini Pro and GPT-5 recently so we’ll see if Sonnet 4.5 is able to bump one of those out.

More vibe coding planned for next week which will be the perfect opportunity to try it out.

New Social Media

The original release of OpenAI’s Sora was a big deal when it came out.

It was one of the first AI video models to actually look real at times.

Sora quickly fell behind with a number of huge updates since then.

Currently Google Veo 3 probably still holds the lead for most realistic video generation, but this week OpenAI announced Sora 2:

Kind of hard to believe some of those clips of Sam Altman aren’t actually Sam Altman.

Those look real.

The voice is just a little off, a slight hint of AI robotic sound, but I’m sure most people wouldn’t even notice.

Sora 2 has stepped their game way up since the first model, which was impressive to begin with.

This new version looks on par with Google’s Veo 3.

But maybe the bigger deal is that OpenAI is taking a TikTok approach.

They’re slowly releasing Sora 2 through the Sora app for iPhone only, and invite only.

If you get invited, you get 4 codes to invite others.

And the app is focused on creating a feed of AI videos only for you and your small group of friends, not the entire internet.

Overall I think it’s a smart approach - get dedicated followers first, then use network effects to grow rather than release to the masses.

Plus this saves them from “melting gpus” by not letting a large percentage of the internet generate videos constantly for the next few weeks.

I’m guessing they’re trying to also capture the TikTok/Instagram Reels crowd to better establish their own social media platform so we’ll see if it sticks.

Most of our phone screen time may be on the “Sora” app in the next few years unless they have another product-line name planned for a social media platform.

If this long-term vision succeeds in reaching Facebook-level adoption, it would make their app the first truly AI-based social media app.

Haven’t gotten an invite yet so I haven’t been able to try Sora 2 out myself.

Hoping I’ll have an update about it next week.

And that’s it for this week. AI marketplaces, AI social media, and leveraged priorities.

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Let me know what else I missed! I’d love to hear your feedback at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected].

Thanks for reading!