I've Been Building For This Quietly For Two Years. Here's the Question You Should Be Asking Yourself.

When Google's VP of Search called their latest update "the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since it debuted over 25 years ago," my first reaction wasn't surprise. It was relief.

Not because I have it all figured out, nobody does. But because I'd already spent the better part of two years quietly reshaping how I work around exactly this. The search box turning into a destination that answers, books, and builds instead of a doorway that sends people elsewhere. AI surfacing the sources it trusts instead of the pages that ranked. I'd been betting on it. So when the announcement landed, it felt less like an earthquake and more like a forecast I'd already packed for. Also let's be honest, I have not been quiet about this.

I'm writing this because I suspect a lot of you got hit by that announcement differently. And I'd rather you interrogate your own practice now, on your terms, than get blindsided in a leadership review six months from now. So I'm going to walk through a few of the shifts I made — not as a victory lap, but as a set of questions for you to hold up against your own work.

I stopped treating referral traffic as the scoreboard. Have you?

A while back I made a decision that felt heretical at the time: I stopped letting organic sessions be the headline number in how I judged whether the work was working.

Here's what pushed me. I watched zero-click climb quarter after quarter and realized in a WTF moment I was about to be in a position where my traffic could decline while my actual influence grew — and I'd have no way to tell that story if sessions were my only language. Now that Google has shipped AI Overviews to 2.5 billion people a month and an AI Mode that answers a billion users without sending most of them anywhere, that decline isn't a risk. It's the design.

So the question I'd put to you: if your organic sessions drop 18% next quarter for reasons that have nothing to do with your performance, can you walk into your leadership meeting and tell a story that isn't an apology? Because if referral traffic is still your headline metric, you can't. You'll be blamed for the mall closing while everyone forgets the mall is now inside Google.

I'm not telling you to ignore traffic. I'm asking whether you've built a way to measure success that survives traffic going down. I had to. You might want to start.

I shifted my energy to the only thing that compounds. Where's yours going?

Once I accepted that referral traffic was structurally leaking, the next question was obvious: what grows instead?

For me the answer became branded search and entity authority (thank you Mordy Oberstein for your inspirations on this) — being one of the small handful of sources an AI model reaches for when it synthesizes an answer in my domain. Not ranking number one for a keyword. Being one of the three to seven sources the machine can't build its answer without. So that's where I started pointing my efforts: showing up consistently, across many trusted places, saying what I actually need to and what we do well, in our own voice, with points of view nobody else has.

This is the part I'd most want you to sit with. For two decades, our entire craft trained us to chase the exact words people typed and engineer pages to capture them. That muscle is now working against you if it's the only thing you're doing. The model doesn't care about your keyword density solely. It cares whether you're a recognized entity it can trust.

So look at your own calendar, your own budget, your own quarter. How much of it is still going toward capturing search demand with optimized pages — and how much is going toward becoming the kind of brand a machine surfaces because it already trusts you? If the honest answer is "almost all of it is still the old way," that's not a failing. That's just the gap between where the craft was and where it's going. But it's a gap you now know about, which means you own what you do next.

I said this back in January, in a piece I called "2025 was the year AI got loud. 2026 is the year brands get real." I meant it then as a prediction. I'm restating it now as an instruction. The loud phase is over. The question is whether your brand is real enough that the machine vouches for you.

I stopped trusting Google's guidance. Let me tell you exactly why.

I'll say the quiet part out loud: I don't trust Google's marketing guidance. Not because anyone there is lying, and not as some edgy contrarian pose. I distrust it for a boring, structural reason — Google is a business, and businesses don't hand competitors the playbook.

This clicked for me years ago, but the moment I started running my own sites across multiple AI surfaces — not just Google's — was proof. You're going to see guidance from Google, and from a chorus of marketers echoing it, telling you not to bother with things like LLMs.txt, content chunking, or structuring your work to be cleanly extractable by AI. The framing always sounds reasonable: just write for humans, don't overthink it.

Here's the thing I noticed. Those exact techniques — the ones Google waves you off of — are what get you cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, every AI tool that isn't Google. Which means the guidance to skip them isn't neutral advice about what works. It's advice about what works for Google. And those are not the same thing.

That's the whole reason for my distrust, and I want to be precise about it: Google's recommendations are optimized for Google's outcomes, not yours. When the company benefits from you staying inside its ecosystem and ignoring the surfaces eating its lunch, its "best practices" are going to quietly steer you away from the work that helps its competitors — even when that work is exactly what helps you. A company protecting its moat will always tell you the moat is for your own good. Of course it tells you not to optimize for the tools that threaten it. What else would it say?

So I learned to run every piece of Google guidance through one filter before I act on it: does this serve me, or does it serve them? Pretty much the same thing I do anytime anyone asks me to do something. Sometimes the answer is genuinely "both" — a lot of their technical SEO advice is still sound because clean, fast, well-structured sites help everyone. But on anything that touches the AI search wars, I assume the recommendation is written from Google's side of the table until proven otherwise. ChatGPT alone reported 900 million weekly users earlier this year. I'm not leaving that surface on the table because the incumbent suggested I should.

The question for you isn't whether Google is trustworthy as a company. It's whether you've built the habit of asking whose interest any guidance serves — especially the guidance that sounds the most generous. The advice that costs you the most is rarely the advice that sounds self-serving. It's the advice that sounds helpful while quietly protecting someone else's business.

What I'd actually have you do today

I don't write things I can't turn into action, so here's what the shifts above look like as homework — for me and for you.

Start tracking three things this week, alongside your traffic, not instead of it. Branded search volume: how many people search for you by name. It's the trust scoreboard, it compounds, and it's the number you bring to leadership instead of apologizing for sessions. AI Overview and AI Mode citations: go ask the AI the questions your customers ask, and see whether your name comes back. The gaps are your roadmap. And brand-building itself: treated as the search strategy it now is rather than the soft line item it used to be.

None of this changes overnight, and that's exactly why it's dangerous. Slow shifts don't set off alarms. They just quietly make a playbook stop working while everyone's still running it. The marketers who win the next three years are the ones who absorb this now — and honestly, the signal's been flashing since ChatGPT and the wave of new platforms started rewiring discovery several years ago. This update just turned the volume all the way up.

I started rewiring roughly two years ago and I still feel a step behind some days. So I'm not writing this from a finish line. I'm writing it from a little further down the same road you're on, turning around to say: the thing in the distance is real, it's closer than it looks, and the best time to start adjusting your practice was a while ago. The second best time is today.

Don't be confused. Be early. The window's still open — it's just closing.