Authority Hacker Podcast – AI & Automation for Small biz & Marketers

Hosted by Gael Breton & Mark Webster - Full Stack Online Marketers

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410

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Aug 2026

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About the show

The Authority Hacker Podcast has been a trusted resource in online business since 2016—voted #1 Marketing Podcast by Ahrefs and downloaded over 3.5 million times by marketers and entrepreneurs in 120+ countries. Originally focused on SEO, affiliate marketing, and online growth, our insights have helped 15,000+ business owners successfully scale through our training programs. But the game is changing. AI and automation are redefining how businesses grow, scale, and stay competitive. Now, we’re focused on helping small business owners and marketers navigate and use AI & automation to work smarter, not harder. 🎙️ New episodes every 2 weeks featuring: • AI tools & automations that make your business more efficient • Real-world strategies you can implement today—no fluff, just results • Behind-the-scenes insights from successful entrepreneurs • Candid discussions from hosts Gael Breton & Mark Webster, who have worked with Fortune 500 companies, built and sold multiple businesses, and generated millions in revenue If you want to cut busywork, automate what matters, and stay ahead in a world driven by AI, subscribe now and learn how to run a smarter, more efficient business—without drowning in tech overwhelm. ▶️ Watch the video podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AuthorityHackerPodcast/ 🎥 Best moments on: 👉 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/authorityhackerpodcast 👉 TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@authorityhackerpodcast 👉 YouTube Shorts - https://www.youtube.com/@AuthorityHackerPodcast/shorts 📩 Open to sponsorship offers. ✉️ Contact us: mark@authorityhacker.com

Listen to episodes

60 recent

August 21, 2026Episode 39250 min

Grok Bot Explained: AI Employees With Their Own PC

Send us Fan Mail rok Bot landed this week and a surprising number of people have already switched to it. Always-on AI agents, each with their own computer in the cloud, that you talk to like colleagues in Slack. It's the closest thing yet to a plug and play AI employee. It's also $200 a month minimum, you can't bring your own API key, and once you've built your setup on it you're locked in. So we put it up against Hermes, the open source agent that does most of the same job for a fraction of the price, and worked out who should actually use which. In this episode we break down: What Grok Bot actually does, and why non-technical founders love it The $200/month lock-in and why we call it a poisoned gift Hermes Bot Mode, the open source alternative (think Webflow vs WordPress) Gael's setup where Codex installs and runs Hermes on a VPS so he never touches the server Should solopreneurs bother, or stick with Claude Code and Codex ChatGPT Computer History, which records everything you do and then tells you what to automate The free mystery model beating Fable on coding tests The tech is good. The terms are the catch. 🔗 AI Accelerator: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator (Join before price goes up on Sept 1st) 💻 Learn Claude Code: https://www.authorityhacker.com/resources/learn-claude-code/

August 14, 2026Episode 39150 min

Google Can Now Accurately Detect Your AI Content

Send us Fan Mail If AI writes your content, that content is now traceable. The EU's watermarking law came into effect this month, and Claude is already leaving a hidden signature in every piece of text it generates. It's not hidden characters you can strip out. It's the word choices themselves. So even if you copy and paste the text, the signature survives. SEOs are panicking that Google will use this to penalize AI content. In this episode we break down: → How the watermark hides in word choices and survives copy/paste → What Google will realistically do with it as a ranking signal → Why Gmail could start flagging AI cold outreach as spam → Why the scariest warnings come from people with something to sell you → The new Authority Hacker MCP that plugs our membership into your AI agent The watermark is real. Most of the fear is manufactured. 🔗 AI Accelerator: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator 💻 Learn Claude Code: https://www.authorityhacker.com/resources/learn-claude-code/

July 29, 2026Episode 39047 min

Claude Opus 5 Is Here And I Hate Working With It

Send us Fan Mail Anthropic just shipped Opus 5, and on paper it beats their best models on nearly every benchmark. Then one of the first big reviews opened with "Opus 5 is here, and I hate working with it." Both things are true. We spent the week testing it inside our business to figure out which one matters for yours. In this episode we break down: → Where Opus 5 genuinely beats Fable (and where it makes more mistakes) → The one real unlock for marketers, interactive pages that replace blog posts → A full 3D game one-shotted into a single HTML file → Cheap specialist models on OpenRouter for volume work → The new ChatGPT voice mode that runs your Mac from your phone Use it where it's strong. Skip it where it's insufferable. 🔗 AI Accelerator: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator 💻 Learn Claude Code: https://www.authorityhacker.com/resources/learn-claude-code/

July 21, 2026Episode 38946 min

The Trick That Triples Your Claude Limits

Send us Fan Mail Gael can write a full blog post using about 7% of his weekly Fable limit. Most people use 50% doing the same job. The difference isn't a better prompt. He stopped letting the smartest model do the work at all. Fable briefs the task, Sonnet handles research, Opus makes the editorial calls, Codex writes the code. Fable just manages. With Anthropic cutting weekly limits by roughly a third, this stops being optional. In this episode we break down: → Why Fable is a project manager and not a worker → How to build a routing table so delegation happens automatically → Why spawning 100 subagents costs you more, not less → Running eight threads at once without losing track of them → OpenAI's new model names and what the ChatGPT and Codex merge means Token efficiency is about to be a job. Start learning it now. 🔗 AI Accelerator: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator 💻 Learn Claude Code: https://www.authorityhacker.com/resources/learn-claude-code/

June 10, 2026Episode 38847 min

5 Boring AI Automations Making Us 7 Figures

Send us Fan Mail We run a seven figure business with two people and zero employees, and the reason is none of the flashy AI stuff you see on social media. It is the boring internal work: a support bot that helps members while we sleep, a database that flags which customers are about to cancel, and onboarding that runs itself at 6am every day. In this episode we open up the actual systems and show you exactly how each one is built. Join our free live webinar on Tuesday 16th June: https://authorityhacker.com/webinar In this episode we break down: → The WhatsApp onboarding skill that replaced a daily manual chore → How Gael shipped a full course's notes, images and thumbnails from one prompt → The $12/month server running our support bot 24/7 (and how it is protected from prompt injection) → A Supabase data warehouse that tells us which members are at risk of cancelling → The cancellation flow that drafts personalized save offers in seconds Automate the boring stuff. That is where the money actually is. 🔗 AI Accelerator: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator 💻 Learn Claude Code: https://www.authorityhacker.com/resources/learn-claude-code/

June 5, 2026Episode 38741 min

What Actually Changed In Claude Opus 4.8

Send us Fan Mail A lot of people refused to leave Claude 4.6. 4.7 felt off, the writing got worse, and their skills stopped behaving like they used to. Opus 4.8 dropped, and that feeling is gone. We ran it through our real marketing skills. Meta ads, carousels, LinkedIn copy, a full one-shot website. Same prompts, same skills, just the new model. Here is how much better it actually is. In this episode we break down: → Why so many people refused to upgrade past 4.6 → Opus 4.8 vs 4.7 on real Meta ads (judge the concept, not the image) → The copywriter who can finally leave 4.6 behind → A one-shot website with GPT-image backgrounds built in → Why it is the best all-rounder now, even if Codex still codes harder Not a revolution. Just the model that finally has taste again.

May 21, 2026Episode 38650 min

Business Owner Gets His Claude Code Setup Roasted

Send us Fan Mail I let my co-founder roast my Claude Code setup live on this episode. He didn't hold back. Five months in, I thought I had it pretty dialed. Turns out my Claude.md is missing the most important thing, my folder structure is making my life harder, and I'm still manually triggering tasks Claude could just do for me. We go through the whole audit and the specific fixes I'm making this week. In this episode we break down: → Why Gael now says start on the Claude Desktop App, not VS Code → The "drift" problem nobody warns you about at 5 months in → The one rule every Claude.md needs so it maintains its own documentation → Why CLI beats MCP for Notion, Google Workspace, and more → How to stop being the manual trigger and let scheduled routines do the work → The "we're done" pattern that makes your skills get better as you use them If your Claude Code setup feels like it's slowly drifting out of sync, this is the audit you needed. 🔗 AI Accelerator: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator 💻 Learn Claude Code: https://www.authorityhacker.com/resources/learn-claude-code/

May 1, 2026Episode 3851 hr 0 min

GPT-5.5 vs Claude: I Switched For 7 Days

Send us Fan Mail GPT-5.5 dropped last week and the internet hasn't shut up about it. Switch now. Drop Claude. Move everything to OpenAI. So Gael actually did it. He swiped completely to Codex and GPT-5.5 for a week, ran the same business prompts on both models, and compared the real outputs side by side. The verdict isn't what you'd expect from the hype cycle. In this episode we break down: → Why GPT-5.5 is more thorough but Claude still wins for marketers → The two-engineers analogy that explains where each model shines → How GPT-5.5 gives you 3x more usage on the $100 plan → Real head-to-head test: same brief, very different ad creative → Why you don't have to "marry" one LLM (and how to use both) → Inside the new Codex desktop app and where it beats Claude → Why people are moving back to Opus 4.6 from 4.7 → Meta finally releases an MCP and CLI for ads → DeepSeek's new V Fall model and why it matters Don't get distracted. Pick the right tool for the work in front of you. 🔗 AI Accelerator: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator 💻 Learn Claude Code: https://www.authorityhacker.com/resources/learn-claude-code/

April 22, 2026Episode 38456 min

We Just Tested ChatGPT Image 2

Send us Fan Mail We just tested OpenAI's new image model and generated a YouTube thumbnail of Gael that looks more real than he does. No cutouts, no Photoshop, one prompt. This isn't a marginal upgrade. On the LLM Arena benchmark, GPT Image 2.0 jumped over 300 Elo in a single release. That's roughly 3x the jump we got from Nano Banana Pro. Production-grade ads, fake Ahrefs dashboards, editable photos of you in places you've never been. All from plain text prompts. In this episode we break down: → The AI-generated thumbnail that looks too real → Making production ads and fake SEO dashboards in one prompt → Why graphic design just hit its ChatGPT moment → The +300 Elo leap and what it actually means for marketing → Claude Design, persistent dashboards, and the GPT 5.5 rumor If you run any AI workflow that generates images, stop and swap your model. This is the shift. 🔗 AI Accelerator: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator 💻 Learn Claude Code: https://www.authorityhacker.com/resources/learn-claude-code/

April 17, 2026Episode 38353 min

Why Everyone Says Claude Opus 4.7 Is Mid

Send us Fan Mail A month ago Anthropic could do no wrong. Now every AI commentator is piling on Opus 4.7 just hours after it shipped. In this episode we cut through the noise: the model is mostly a side grade, but the new Claude Desktop app, auto mode, and a WordPress integration that unlocks fully automatic SEO are the real upgrades this week for business owners. In this episode: ➤ Our theory on why Opus 4.7 feels weaker than the benchmarks suggest (hint: new "Mythos" safeguards) ➤ Auto mode: the biggest quality of life win for non technical users, safer than bypass permissions ➤ Vibe coded websites that still let your clients manage their blog in WordPress ➤ How Claude Code is about to do real, measurable SEO on your site automatically ➤ The new Claude Desktop app vs VS Code: which one your team should actually use Want to learn how to vibe code websites, run Claude Code properly, and automate the stuff we talk about every week? Join AI Accelerator here: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator/