AI made content free. It made the plumbing worth ten times more.
2022 was the last year the volume play worked. What surfaces now is targeted content, and the engine underneath it.
2026 really is the year of marketing plumbing. Making sure we get the foundations, the technology stack, the processes, the handoffs. Because AI has essentially made content, communication, mass production, free. AI is making producing marketing cheap.
Back in 2022, our goal for a team of six was to get out one new blog post per week. That was coming from a content strategy, and the entire goal was to produce as much content as we possibly could in order to rank higher in Google.
Every single piece had to go through legal review, because we hadn’t worked with legal to define what needed review and what didn’t. So absolutely everything went to legal. We were mass producing content, and it was weighing heavily on our own team and on the legal team.
2022 was really the last year where the content volume play worked. You could do a bunch of link farms, guest posts on marketplaces, niche edits, link exchange groups. You could really beef up your meaningless backlinks. You could mass produce content, and you would reach your organic goals strictly through search. Google’s helpful content update landed in August of 2022, and by the March 2024 core update they were calling mass-produced pages scaled content abuse and treating them as spam.
That is the opening. The rest of the essay, and every one that follows, goes out on Substack.