The Jeff Payne Show

Send us Fan Mail In 2018, Google's search team gave an internal presentation that told engineers not to discuss how clicks are used in search, except on a need-to-know basis. One line said it plainly: Google has a public position. That deck, now a public court exhibit from the U.S. antitrust case against Google, changes how every business owner should hear the words “Google says.” In this episode, Jeff Payne pairs it with a second exhibit from 2016 that shows what Google actually measures: wh...

Send us Fan Mail A client asked for a video. Their internal team said they could handle it, and they did: music, motion, smooth transitions, a confident voiceover. What it didn't have was the company. Not one project, not one person, not one reason for a customer to choose them. In Episode 86, Jeff Payne unpacks a prediction making the rounds, that the highest-paying job in tech will soon be marketing, and turns it into a question for CEOs and business owners: now that AI has made production ...

Send us Fan Mail An AI answer named three companies. Two of them weren't anywhere in its sources. In this episode, Jeff Payne explains why being missing from an AI answer can mean two very different things. A citation gap is a publishing problem: the AI pulled from pages, and none were yours. A mention gap is a reputation problem: the AI names brands based on their external record, and no page on your own site can close it. Both appear under the same label in a visibility report. They need op...

Send us Fan Mail I was 40 seconds from buying two egg peelers. The bundle was selected, the payment buttons were on the screen, and the decision was made. Then I did something I have started doing without really thinking about it — I asked Gemini, an AI agent, whether the storefront was legitimate. Gemini answered in nanoseconds. And it never left the page to provide me with an answer. It didn’t research the company. It read what the seller had already published and found several things that ...

Send us Fan Mail Last month a man was crowned king in a stadium in England — robes, throne, full ceremony, fifty thousand people in attendance. None of it happened. Three weeks later, the largest AI systems in the world were describing that ceremony not as a rumor but as background, the way you’d mention where somebody went to college. The stunt itself is the boring part. Jeff breaks down the mechanism underneath it: the difference between a claim, which a system can weigh, and a premise, whi...