For 25 years, Google told websites to “just make great content,” and they’d sort out the rest. This advice was incomplete, problematic, and reductive, but also… sorta true. If you made 10X Content in 1997, 2007, or 2017, it often worked (at least, so long as you *marketed* that 10X content).

But, no more.

Google’s future is no longer indexing the web and making information universally useful and available, it’s wholesale, intentional, unrepentant, unfettered-by-the-law theft : the great digital enclosure of publishing. They haven’t been shy about this, but they’ve never been as loud and proud as they are now. “ We’re going to ruin the Internet,” is Google’s new rallying cry, though they’ll frame it as “AI search for the agentic era” (a meaningless jumble of words reminiscent of Andreesen-clueless autocomplete).

Google’s plan is elegant, simple, and evil:

  • Crawl and index the web’s content
  • Use their mafia-like power to force a prisoner’s dilemma paradox (i.e. if you don’t let them index your stuff, they’ll just take it from someone else and reward them with the scraps of traffic, branding, and potential business)
  • Use that content to train their models/power their answers
  • Make your work a redundant commodity (because everything published can now be found in a more convenient, familiar format inside Google’s interface)
  • Only send clicks when businesses either:

A) Pay them for ads

B) Offer something Google can’t provide directly in their AI-powered answer interface

You can see this for yourself in Google’s preview of their new search box:

Those fitness plans, recipes, structured calendars, and clever tips aren’t made by Google. They’re stolen. Repurposed. Averaged. And then presented as the search monopolist’s own work.

AI is, statistically, the least trusted, most hated technology of our lifetimes, but popular sentiment is doing nothing to halt its progress among the tech, business, and finance elite. Google’s embraced it whole-hog, and may even be willing to sacrifice their core ad revenue (through reduced clicks and CTR) to promote a world in which they and they alone own your Internet experience. Google no longer wants to be the gateway to the web. They want to be the web. And they may just have the power to force it down the throats of even the skeptical and unwilling billions of Internet users who hate AI, don’t trust Google, but cave to convenience.

Businesses and Creators Have But Two Solutions

Solution 1 is long-term. It’s going to take collective action, mostly voting, mostly in the United States, and I cynically suspect it won’t happen. Citizens would need to support politicians who’d empower the Department of Justice and FTC, hire states’ attorneys general, and nominate/elect judges to hold big tech companies accountable for the works they’ve stolen, trained upon, and presented as their own. Monopolies would need to be broken up (not slapped on the wrist with penalties that will only consolidate the industry’s exploitative power). Self-preferencing would need to be made illegal. And Americans, even as they slip into deeper economic distress, continue to vote like temporarily embarrassed billionaires. Soon, even overwhelming vote-count victories may not matter in a country where gerrymandering rules.

Solution 2 is short-term. It’s what every digital marketer, content creator, and business owner historically reliant on traffic from search must do to stay alive: build inimitable products.

Despite all the seeming wonders of Google’s new AI-powered, agentic, buzzword-laden search engine, it cannot invent ultrasonic chef’s knives. It can’t tailor a made-to-measure suit with an ocean of whimsical personality. It can’t thoughtfully curate gift boxes from local makers. It will never lovingly prepare the meal of your life. It won’t refine pottery techniques for thousands of years to make the perfect vase. Or paint scenes of everday life with the colors of time. Or source WWI-era Armagnac in order to serve your 98-year-old grandfather something older than him. Or hand-carve and paint tiny creatures who keep your trinkets safe. Or fill giant warehouses with stories and Objets d’art to delight visitors of all ages. It won’t mow your lawn or fix your roof or service your printer or manage your 401k.

To make inimitable products, you’ll need to:

  • Uncover the overlap in what you’re passionately capable of creating, what other solutions in the market fail to offer, and what people in that market desperately want.
  • Create that overlapping thing in a way that’s designed for Zero Click Marketing: it can be shown via short-form video, amplified with just a few images, easily described by a rabid fan, and made enticing though a brief summary atop an AI-answer.
  • Get the word out about your product through the channels where your audience pays attention: Social media, PR, advertising, search engines and AI answers (which are becoming one), and word-of-mouth (which may soon return to its 20th-Century position as the MVP of marketing channels)

I will never stop mourning what we lost: a web with powerful incentives for anyone and everyone to create great content. A web that, as a result, brimmed with useful information, incredible storytelling, and artful records of every kind (among, of course, millions of pieces of mediocre junk). It is a tragedy that American voters and the politicians they elected ceded this world to a few giant, disgustingly wealthy corporations in exchange for feigned subservience to their proto-fascist agenda.

But I’m also hopeful that this change, as brutal and wrong as it is, will forge a new incentive for a new kind of creation. The creation not of content, but of product. Physical goods, software, services, experiences… these are your only defense against Google’s ambitions. If you offer something that cannot be disintermediated, cannot be replicated with pixels or words on a web page, and is desperately sought-after by people who’ve heard about it, you might just be safe from the Zero-Click Web apocalypse Google’s so desperate to bring about.

So Content Marketing is Dead?

Am I ready to fully declare the death of content marketing? The death of content creation for the web? Not quite. I’m writing this piece on a blog, aren’t I? 😅 But the writing’s on the wall. Only a fool would double down on “make great content” (10X, 100X, or 10^100X) as the path forward.

If I had to give some (nearly) universal advice to the web’s creators, it would be this: ignore traffic. Make inimitable products. Shift your priorities away from “great content” on your own site and toward “great marketing” on the platforms where your audience pays attention. Influence is the new traffic. Impressions and engagement are the new top of funnel. Branded search volume is the new middle. Sales remains the true measure of success.

There’s one final, brutal takeaway from this dastardly upending of the status quo: Inimitable products may be defensible moats on which to build a web business, but inimitable content is not. Content as product is dying, and that death spiral is accelerating. The New York Times is just a games platform with a vestigial news and content appendage. Bloomberg makes money on terminals and uses the profits to fund their content machine (which then markets the business of commodities trading and helps to sell their inimitable product: the terminal).

Not every Substack newsletter will die. Not every Patreon creator will fail. Not every independent blog or subscription-funded publisher will go bankrupt. But most will need to find an inimitable product, a non-content-based product, to survive and thrive.

So What is Even the Point of Publishing Anymore?

Why does this blog post exist? Or this blog for that matter? If the things I’ve told you above are true, am I a hypocrite for writing this? Just another sleazebag marketer trying to sell their book?

Here’s why I still publish (sometimes), and why you might continue to do some (though probably much less):

  1. To influence search engines and AI tools (who will still need sources to train off and pull from for their traffic-stealing answers).
  2. To have a home base for an idea; something that can be cited and quoted and screenshot’d and referred back to as the original source, even if/when the platforms decay.
  3. To have a place where the most loyal, rabid, excited fans and subscribers can still access this content in its entirety, in its intended format, even if that group is 1/100th the size it once might have been.
  4. To distribute via email — one of the last owned channels where big tech’s power hasn’t yet removed value.
  5. To exercise longer-form, more thoughtful, bespoke creation of an idea that’s bigger than the few hundred character limit of social media. And, in doing so, illustrate that ability to those few people with longer attention spans, deeper care about the problem, and/or an incentive to consume something fully.

I expect this post to receive <5,000 visits, <500 from search, and <100 people who read every word. But if they’re the right ones, and if the piece (or the little bits of it that are re-posted/quoted/cited) creates external influence beyond that, it may still be worthwhile. Especially since, living behind this content, funding its creation, is an inimitable product.

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Thanks for laying it out so starkly like this, Rand, because yep, "theft" is the word I wish everyone was using. Just this week I heard of another friend who is giving up being self-employed because her search traffic has been utterly destroyed beyond the point her business can survive it.

Google has been doing the Charlie Brown with the football thing for a while now, but they're not even pretending any more. I'm angry for my friends, and utterly disgusted with those feckless parasites.

I've currently put most of my eggs into a basket marked "email list" (via Substack, for now), and I certainly don't trust the likes of Google to not try nobbling email next - but the personal connections I've made with my readers over the last half-decade have reminded me that yep, there are SO many people out there who feel starved enough for the wonder and thrilling fun of encountering genuinely awesome and authentically crafted creative stuff - and the more that the likes of Google clog up the tattered relics of their Byzantine empire with cynical, joyless garbage, the more urgent it will be to show those people that yes, the good stuff is still out there, it's still available to them, if they can only be shown how to find it.

That was a very long sentence. I think I need an editor.

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I love your long sentences. And I think your email-centric strategy, using social posts and attention to drive new readers/subscribers to you is one of the few avenues left available to niche publishers. Also agree that building the relationship directly with your subscribers/audience is the best way forward.

Don't discount Google entirely though! If I were in your shoes, I might consider making your subscription content available for crawling/indexing after 12-18 months or in teaser format or something like that. Even if Google is sending fewer clicks, you still want them to reference/include you in answers when possible (depending on... well, lots of things).

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M

Totally agree. Just when I mastered all the answers, they just changed all the questions.

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I read every word—thanks for the article. AI will never beat human-created content. Thanks, Rand

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Marketing has always been about showing up where potential customers are. (It's the "market" in go to market, right?)

Organic search dominated for a long time. Couldn't argue with the ROI. Publish content, get indexed, get found.

I keep thinking back to pre-internet marketing. PR, print, broadcast, out-of-home, events. They all had gatekeepers.

Attention was never free. Even with organic search, it was subsidized by advertising revenue .

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Back in 2003 there were countless printers, paper suppliers, ink specialists, print technicians, companies selling pre, post and press products and software. They were shocked at what they were seeing, experiencing, and feeling. The earth was shifting beneath their feet. Everything that was right and true about marketing was being challenged. Their livelihoods were at risk. Their incredibly hard-won special expertise, experience, insight, and networks were quickly devalued.

And Rand Fishkin had the vision to understand the wave coming, to intuit how to position a business for success in the post-print world, and to coach open-minded businesses on how to execute the playbook he was discovering. He was an optimistic and encouraging voice speaking out against the sturm und drang vomited up by the print industry. Implicit was the belief in a free and open internet, which would empower every company to reach its buyers directly.

Now the shoe is on the other foot, and his response is to call for government regulation to preserve the world in which he was successful.

As Camus said “Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic” and Herbert reiterated “There is in every revolution the moment when the revolutionaries become the new oppressors.”

Google was the engine of his success. Guess that changed.

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I am one that made it all the way through. I am glad I encountered you back in the good old days and continue to follow you!!

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Another point for shifting toward "great marketing" where the audience pays attention: for Gen Z, TikTok is already where you search, not just scroll.

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Count me amoungs the 100 that read every word. I don't totally agree with you, but appreciate your POV. Thanks for sharing.

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I don't believe Content Marketing will die, opinion-based content, expert analysis will thrive instead of basic question answering. A machine can only answer a question that has already been answered by someone else, only an expert can answer new questions. The informational needs of humans cannot be merely fulfilled by a machine.

If the machine is stealing that expert content, then I believe the creativity of the human will just need to invent a new delivery mechanism, maybe through email or something else, for human-to-human communication, with no algorithmic middlemen.

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M

The reason I will continue to read this blog is that I want your voice and opinions. I want the source, not the summary. To me, being well informed means that I have read the original, not the output from a game of telephone tag.

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This resonates a lot with what I’m seeing in SEO right now.

“Great content” has felt increasingly insufficient for a while... especially with AI summaries and zero-click journeys changing how visibility works.

The idea of “inimitable products” is a real shift. I also see a version of this for service businesses - where differentiation comes from lived expertise, outcomes, and proof, not just messaging.

SEO has moved away from optimising pages in isolation, towards building entities, reputation, and demand outside of search first... with search then following.

Content still matters, but more as an output of something stronger underneath it.

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Over the years, your personal journeys and deep felt insights…spotlighting signals/patterns in moving, evolving, digital systems, are insightful and, dare I say…inimitable:)

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