Everywhere I look, the most interesting work in publishing and search doesn’t come from the major publishers’ titles. It comes from individuals.
Do individuals now hold all the power, and will the future of content be found in Substack?
When I spoke to Harry Clarkson-Bennett recently about publishers surviving AI, I put forward a theory about individuals, and how historically, the product made the journalist, but now the journalist makes the product. Harry called it the reverse halo effect.
“There was a time when you could work for the Telegraph, the Times, the BBC, whatever, and the brand would lift you up. Although I think it would be like the opposite halo effect now. What you might have now is a brand that works with individuals.”
Paying close attention to this change does not only apply to news publishers, but to all types of products, because SEO and AI search depends on the content and publication.
Talent Is Coming Out Of The Building
Migration continues. Some journalists have been driven out by periods of cutbacks as publishers’ incomes fall. Some have gone for a walk, choosing Substack because it’s the one place they can produce their best work without an editor, a traffic target, or a life-straining format.
Paul Krugman has left the New York Times after 25 years and now publishes daily on Substack. Jim Acosta left CNN and took his audience with him. Dave Jorgenson built The Washington Post’s TikTok presence to nearly 2 million, then left and outperformed his former employer within months.
I see this repeating in our industry with the transition to Substack from Kevin Indig, Duane Forrester, and Harry Clarkson-Bennett, and others who are leading the way with deep research and, in some cases, unique data.
In this new world of ‘reputation not rankings’, it makes me think back to Google’s push for Authorship as a ranking signal and Google+ for a while. It feels like ownership has finally come true, albeit in a different way, hastened by their failure to deal with spam and the disruptive introduction of LLM chatbots.
Evergreen Is No Longer A Strategy
This fits right in with the big thing I’ve been watching slowly fall apart, which is the evergreen content strategy.
For 25 years, the model was simple. Find keywords with volume, publish content that answers them, and build traffic. It worked well, and many publishing businesses have been built on this foundation. Then AI Overview came along and ended this strategy almost overnight.
As Duane Forrester said, “If your content isn’t fully replaced by an abstract, it’s useless. The abstract becomes the product, and your page becomes something raw for someone else’s system to process and discard.”
The Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report found publishers favoring evergreen content 32 percent in favor of original investigation.
Harry Clarkson-Bennett also said, “Evergreen isn’t dead, but if you’re creating ‘just SEO’ content, I can kill you.”
At Search Central Live in Toronto, Danny Sullivan pushed Google’s PR message when he described non-property content as unique, specific, and authentic, with property content as generic, repeatable that anyone can produce. Commodity, which is anything AI can compile from public information, to non-commodity content, that requires you to actually do something, know something first-hand, or hold a real idea based on technology.
So, the original keyword strategy is over, and the information content has been taken over by machines. What is left?
Pursue real value that reflects real technology. It’s not as professional as the EEAT checkbox. A masterpiece like the product itself.
Expertise Doesn’t Come With Distribution, You Have To Build It
It’s all well and good to say, create great content that showcases the technology, but it doesn’t come with a built-in distribution model. Keyword focused content created. Publishing strategies now require a specific audience.
Newsletter subscribers, followers, members, people who come looking for you by name. That’s why Substack migration and the death of evergreen are the same story. People who build target audiences don’t do it as a marketing exercise. They do it because the distribution of ownership is the only distribution that cannot be removed and it is the only way to ensure their visibility in the future.
Condé Nast plans for Google Zero. As Harry explained, the assumption is not that search traffic will literally reach zero, but that everything they do must make sense to their audience and business model even if it does. That’s a fair assessment of any content investment now, whether you’re a publisher or a brand.
LLMs can be an important part of that strategy to support brand awareness and drive students who want more than just a summary. Students who want to study in depth and research.
Stop Thinking About Linear Keywords. Users Don’t Call It That Way.
There is another practice that should be consistent with the old model, and that is measuring visibility through the keyword lens.
People don’t name how they search on a search engine. They typed three words and scanned 10 links. They discuss, ask for solutions. They add context, budget, limitations, and follow-up, and come to a conclusion in a few turns. It’s a completely different concept, and it’s not a quality tracking tool that can replicate it.
Aleyda Solis, who also spoke at Search ‘n Stuff London in June, published the strongest approach I’ve seen to this problem.
His method is to build a structured set of real-world data, based on the audience’s real language from sales calls, reviews, and communities, and then use it repeatedly across platforms to find out where your product is coming from, where it’s not, and what sources are shaping responses.
Attribution and measurement in AI search has been one challenge for SEOs, and the only way to approach it is to break out of the conventional thinking of keyword tracking and traffic measurement.
If we survive “(Not Provided)” and Google takes the keyword data, which felt like a disaster at the time, we can survive by adapting how we rebuild rankings this way.
Build Only What You Can Say
So, back to the question I opened with: Do individuals hold all the power?
It’s not all. Brands now have the resources, reach, and ability to display expertise on a scale that individuals can. But the balance has shifted, and the way forward is clear. Trust now sticks to people, and effective content is content that could only come from one person, one set of data, one set of experiences.
Smart publishers build their program with experts in their industry who can demonstrate this hands-on expertise. Brands have a platform, and experts have a brand (I resist using the word influencer as much as possible here). If both brands and individuals can respect and enjoy this relationship, this should be a perfect relationship.
Publishers become portals and centers of technology and information, and readers will choose brands that can bring that expertly packaged variety directly to them. This is a strategy we developed at Search Engine Journal.
That’s a summary of all the content strategies from here. Build professionally, give your experts a name, a voice, and a platform. Measure specific audiences, not borrowed traffic.
My belief is that once we get past this disruption, online publishing should be much better for it.
If you want to be a part of conversations with industry leaders like Loren Baker, Brent Csutoras, myself, Katie, Heather, Matt, Roger and the incredibly talented team here at SEJ, then check out SEJ Pro and be part of a new community where conversations happen before they become industry news.
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