The Content Strategist
For the past two decades, SEOs and content marketers played a fairly predictable game: Optimize for rankings, maximize share of voice against direct competitors, chase CTRs. Success meant earning the click and driving traffic back to your site. That model is breaking down. In AI-driven discovery environments, your content is no longer competing with other…
By many accounts, this past holiday season was a banner year for brands. Adobe Analytics found that 2025’s holiday spending hit record highs, despite slower growth than the 2023–2024 season. Overall, online spending from the start of November through the end of December hit $258 billion (6.8% YoY) in 2025. Behind those millions of searches,…
Schema markup sounds like something that belongs in a developer’s basement lab, right next to the blinking server rack and a stack of vintage Linux manuals. Most marketers treat it that way too: vaguely intimidating and probably dangerous to poke without supervision. But you don’t need to write code or summon an engineer to make…
For years, video lived in a kind of search engine limbo. Sure, you could optimize the title and description, maybe add some tags. But the content inside the video was a black box. Search engines couldn’t parse your eight minutes of carefully scripted content. That’s changing quickly. AI-driven video indexing, powered by large language models (LLMs),…
The half-life of online culture is shrinking, and marketing teams stuck on quarterly calendars are struggling to keep up. Case in point: A random audio clip on TikTok goes from niche ditty to global meme in two days flat. The brand that shows up two weeks later with the snippet in the soundtrack of a…
Remember when the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button was Google’s biggest gamble? Now, it’s their entire business model, and your traffic is the casino’s take. Your best-performing article still ranks #1, but traffic’s down 30%. Search your primary keyword and there it is: a Google AI Overview perfectly summarizing your content. No click required. Welcome to…
It usually starts the same way: A well-meaning marketing manager thinks they’ve found the perfect audience for their new product launch on Reddit. Brimming with hubris and optimism, they publish a post that’s equal parts jargon and manufactured hype. Five minutes later, the post is buried in downvotes and snark. It’s a cautionary tale replayed…
When I first started working in content marketing 15 years ago, the scope of what that work entailed was relatively narrow: blog posts, website copy, email newsletters, and the occasional e-book or oddball infographic. With the TikTok-ification of the internet, short-form video became a table-stakes part of the mix. Most of these assets lived squarely…
RIP, Google’s ten blue links. You weren’t perfect, but at least you were predictable. Google’s new AI Mode, currently in the midst of a phased rollout, is likely the beginning of the end of the SERP’s 20-year reign. In general, this new era of AI Search is nothing short of — to borrow a phrase…
