Content Marketing World Wil Renolds 2026
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[00:00:00] So it was around 2010, and I went on a journey and I started reading books. You know, it's funny, I think when you're in digital, we forget that sometimes some of the best marketing comes from people who were doing marketing way before digital existed. And then I started Looking at studies on the brain and how people make decisions.

And I learned things like people's brains fire off differently when you tell them they're drinking expensive wine versus cheap wine. Not their mouths, not what they say, their brains actually trigger differently even when the wine is the exact same and the only thing you've told them was that one version was cheaper, but it was actually the same version as the expensive one.

And I think once you start doing this digging, it starts making a lot more sense to how brands get built, right? Like how when you [00:01:00] look at like the Michelin Guide, you look at a guide that was launched in 1900, and 126 years later, that brand is standing for something. And you think, you know, for me, that journey on the books and the brains and the brands really helped me to reground myself back in 2010 and to be able to take an outside look at my own industry and say, "I think we can do a lot better."

I'm gonna have all kinds of links here and transcripts and whatnot for you to take this information and put it into your ChatGPT and say, "Hey, here's what Will thinks about AI and the future of AI and future of AI search. Let me put that into my instructions so when I am out there, uh, doing research, um, you know, asking Claude or ChatGPT to help me with AI, I kinda got Will in the back of my shoulder a little bit."

So the, the, the focus area for me is there's gotta come a [00:02:00] moment at which we decide we wanna do better marketing, not necessarily more. And right now it seems like everything with content is how do I do more for less? And very few of us are asking, "How do I do better?" And to me, it was the going back to the old ads like this that made me say, "Yeah, this is what great marketing looks like that understands a human, understands a consumer, understands psychology, and understands curiosity and what makes people ask themselves questions."

Or even positioning that took your negatives and turned them into like positives and owning your negatives in a way, which you'll see later. And then there's digital versions of this too, you know, Airbnb during the Sochi Olympics when people had horrible rooms. They found ways to reach out and to make real engagement, oftentimes with journalists who then covered their Sochi problems upside.

So I, I, I like these moments in marketing where people understand the bigger [00:03:00] person. And I think so often we're so at a moment of scale everybody that Who's getting rewarded in your company for testing and trying to do the least scalable thing? In this instance, I was giving out a bunch of those like, uh, today we call them Air Tags.

Back then we called them Tiles. And I was reminding-- I was trying to remind people of we want to build content that makes people feel like they found something they lost or something they were looking for. And I think somewhere along the journey, writing content became about a lot of things that weren't that.

And I'm even inspired by the, the things that Brave has done, where they say: Look, we're an alternative browser. What would make you switch to us? And they literally just answered every single person's question. There are thousands of comments back, and that resulted in real people changing their minds about using Brave versus [00:04:00] using Chrome.

And I call that hand-to-hand combat. And the reason why I call it hand-to-hand combat is so often we're using synthetic personas. We're using all these things. We have proxies for trust. We use search rankings or visibility as a proxy for trust, and we're not doing the hand-to-hand combat of listening to real people solve real problems that I believe later helps us to connect dots, but it also helps us to grow our intuition.

You know what doesn't help us to grow our intuition? Putting the word running shoes on a page one more time. You know what never helped us to grow our intuition? Having these directory sites that nobody listened to. And I think that when AI came along, I said, "Sweet, there's a new way to win." And I made an early bet, and that early bet was that Google had trained us to go out and search, go to all these websites, close all their pop-ups, close all their consent forms, read the [00:05:00] content, and then we had to use our brains to kind of assemble that answer together.

And AI search does that for us. It does all the searching for us, and it does the assembly, which then means our brains can jump right into the most important part. But when I start to think about those ads and the things that I had been studying and learning from people who just did tremendously awesome marketing, the question kept coming back was the challenge I have for you today.

Have you built one piece of content in the last year where direct or social outperformed SEO or GEO? Have you built a piece of content that someone remembered three years later? Have you? And I know there's so much change out there, but you know what doesn't change? How people make these decisions. We're still wired like humans.

And I think Jeff Bezos said this best. Everybody wants to ask him what's gonna happen in the next 10 years. Instead, [00:06:00] what he never gets is what's not gonna change. And I want to talk a lot about brands today because brands get hardwired into your brain. This is the Michelin Man. The Michelin Man is from a tire company.

That tire company has become the de facto global standard for the best food in the world, a tire company. Or if I were to ask you to name a luxury hotel chain, you know, you're gonna have brands hardwired into your brains, right? And I want to ask you, how much of your work is building hardwiring in the brains of humans?

And the reason why I think that's important is because the AI's brain is oftentimes mirroring much of that hardwiring that we see in humans. And unfortunately, hardwiring doesn't happen in a quarter or a month or week over week But many of us are rewarded for week over week, month over month, [00:07:00] or quarter over quarter results.

So if you were to take a block of content and put it at the bottom of a page, I don't think any of us would say that's hardwiring. Look here at Banana Republic. It's just formulaic, right? It's zombie content. It's got the same amount of words in each paragraph almost. It's got the word ethically made over and over again.

And I bet if I asked you before showing you this, is Banana Republic a brand that you would associate with ethical and sustainable jeans? You would probably say no. But yet, by putting this block of content at the bottom of the page, they were able to trick the proxy for human trust because they're a big enough brand and search enables this to happen.

And this is why search is broken and why search on AI is the long-term win. The people that put blocks of content at the bottom of pages that say the same thing over and over again in a formulaic [00:08:00] way will never build this. They will never be the people that created a piece of content that stands the test of time.

And I'm thinking when I was seeing this, I was like, man, this is awesome. AI search is gonna be a forcing function for our whole industry to level up. But for many of us, our blogs have continued to stay the land of misfit toys. Andy Crestodina did a study. Over all these years, people believe that we're at an all-time low of blogs delivering strong results.

All-time low. And we're at an all-time high of I don't know if the blog is delivering results. And I'm going, "My blog is crushing it. What do you mean?" And I think the reason why is because we've gotten in this rinse, wash, and repeat formulaic approach of success. We have been rewarded for that success, and it doesn't work nearly as well in an AI world.

So I'm in the SEO space. If you were to name a popular SEO news source, [00:09:00] think about a brand that you're like, "Okay, that brand I see a lot." They're now a curator for you, and this is another thing I think is so important. In a world of infinite content, these people who curate for you have become more valuable Those brands you just thought of that are brands you would listen to, people you would listen to, they're hardwired just like the Michelin Man.

So the first thing I want you to think about is where are you getting traffic from hardwired sources? 'Cause that is very good. Very nice. And Search Engine Land is probably, I would say, the most popular trade publication in my space. Back in 2023, five visits. 2024, 100 visits. And then 2025, look at that big bump.

Now, the reason why I'm showing you this is because when we started doing custom, unique research and data-driven posts, that got us on their radar. It was a fundamental shift we had made. But then [00:10:00] once we got on their radar for those, they started also picking up our opinion pieces. Same thing with Ahrefs, same thing with Semrush And if you go, "Wait, Will, are you literally in front of me bragging about 183 visits?"

I'm like, "Heck yes, I am." Because when you win over curators who are trusted, Ahrefs is a curator. Semrush is a curator. Search Engine Land is a curator. Lily Ray is a curator. Mike King is a curator. Rand Fishkin is a curator. That's telling me that the stuff we're doing is working. And when it works, I get more confidence in myself as a marketer, not a generative engine optimization marketer or an SEO marketer, as a marketer overall.

And that is what I'm optimizing for now. How do I increase my confidence that I know how to put things into the world that make the curators believe? All right. So this is our moment as a, as a, as an industry. [00:11:00] And like, if you were to peel back the layers and see what we did, we just started producing a bunch of content faster over and over again, and it was all top this and best this.

So, you know, you turn to the true curators in your industry, the true people that everybody is keeping an eye out for, and you go, "They're gonna lead the way." Do you know all of these folks? You probably know four or five, but there's one that stands out that no one really usually knows. And one of them earned his space on this slide deck because he put himself at the top of an article that caused tons of AI engines for years to put him in the same stratosphere as the biggest leaders in our industry.

And it's even still working to this day on certain sites like Grok, where it's saying, "Hey, he's an early leader in this space." I speak at almost [00:12:00] every major conference in our industry. He's never spoken at one of them. So the AI's like, "Make a fool of me once, cool. You're not gonna make a fool of me twice."

So now when I put things into AI and I ask it these questions, it goes... Look at what it says. Evan Bailyn speaking credential. It went out and did deep research on all the other people and said, "Oh, yeah, Aleta speaks in 30 countries. Cyrus speaks 14-plus years and is globally booked. Lily Ray, hundreds of events.

Me, hundreds of events. Ross Simmons, hundreds of events. Zero But he scaled it. Oh, he's top this, top this, top that, and he crushed me. As Pedro Diaz said, you're not scaling content. What he was scaling was disappointment. So he was winning the generative engine optimization game, and I was losing. But I was winning the hearts and minds game.

The zombie content doesn't get shared. This wasn't the kind of content that made people say, "I want to put that [00:13:00] guy on stage." And we've seen Ramp do it with their, their business dining guides. It's like, why would you even write this content when Michelin exists? And if you're gonna write it, write it in a way that separates you from them.

I think this is why we believe the blog delivers strong results is at an all-time low, because we've been writing zombie content. You know, that content that's formulaic, lifeless, and ignorable. And I'm gonna ask you, instead of doing 100% ignorable content, let's do 10% memorable. It's okay if 90% of your work has to be the day-to-day blocking and tackling.

Let's make today the day we start making it one, two, 3%. And the other thing I want you to realize is there's so much more value beyond the visit. The problem is, is we're looking at the low numbers from an AI search in terms of traffic, and we're valuing it on a click basis, and I think that's the mistake.

One, I'm gonna walk you through how these things convert better. Then I'm gonna walk you through how when you win over humans, [00:14:00] there are tools that let you harvest their social data. Then we're gonna-- I've obviously shown you already how these press relationships have helped me to get on stage. They've helped me to get my team members on stages.

They've helped me to get my team members posted in some. And it's even helped me a little bit with recruiting. But let's first start- Let's first start with the value beyond the visit. So direct converts to contact form two and a half times better than organic search. Social converts six times better than organic search, and referrals is three X greater.

So off the bat already, one visitor from these places has to be worth more than one visitor from organic search. Has to be, because people are more likely to sign up for my newsletter. And assuming that I'll have a bunch of agents signing up for my newsletters from these places, I'm believing the data that I have.

Now, one of the things I love to do is to just drop into Claude, because I store all my data [00:15:00] there, prompts like these. And what it gave me out was every URL that I had, how often was I winning on organic search, AI, referral sources, and social. And then what I did is I said, "Let me put in a value for a human visitor that comes from social, direct, versus an algorithmic visitor, which is like Google search or AI search."

And then it said, "All right, so when I look at all your blog posts and the value that you created just purely based on analyzing the value from a click value standpoint on SEO and AI search, this is the value of your different posts this year." But when I allowed myself to layer in and add on top the value of a social visitor, and remember, those social visitors sign up [00:16:00] more, the value of a referral visitor, and those people sign up more, I'm now able to say, "Wait, some of these same posts have a lot more value."

My click-through rate update went from a $2,000 value to a $13,000 value because I'm adding it-- 'cause it didn't just crush for Google, it also crushed for humans. And then I added this all together, and you can see that the value I'm driving my organization is three X higher when I include the human impact.

So one of the things that I've been talking about here, and I try to tell and share with people, is how do you start to get good at predicting the future of where this is gonna go? So the first thing is, is this thing good for users if every website did it? Is the first question I always ask myself. And you could see those low-quality listicles.

If every website did it, it wouldn't work. All right, how quickly can a user switch? So let's just say [00:17:00] ChatGPT is constantly recommending First Page Sage or another website. How hard is it for me to try Claude or Grok or Gemini or Perplexity? It's six keystrokes. Okay? The next question you have to ask yourself is, make a bet on how long this is gonna work.

And then you've got to say, "Hey, I don't think this is gonna work for a year, past a year." Then what are you doing today to offset that? Because now what you actually have is risk, and I'll show you what that looks like in a bit. And the other thing I like to be tongue in cheek about is they have unlimited employees.

They can throw unlimited employees at the problem. And I say that to also say, how easy is it for you to see the pattern? Because if it's easy for you to see the pattern, then it's gonna be really easy for an AI to do the same. So let's get out of this quick win game we're playing, because this is what it looks like when you're playing marketing Whac-A-Mole.

You find something that works, [00:18:00] and then you get hit, and then it works again, and then you get hit. I don't know about you, I don't like my marketing to look and work this way. So now let's talk about some new KPIs. We've already talked about influence, influential publications. Ask people in your company, "What are the influential publications in our industry?"

Ask your clients that question, and then go into Google Analytics and be like, "Am I getting any traffic from those?" Because if you can't win in those places, you're not gonna win over their hearts and minds. It will be impossible. But the other side of this... Oops, sorry. Um, so one of the ways that I've been tracking this consistently is AlertMouse.

It's a great tool. It's much better than Google Analytics, and you can track your brand. And what it lets you do is track your brand over time across the places that you care the most about. And if that number's not growing, good luck getting hardwired into the, into the brain of these AIs. [00:19:00] The other thing is, does a thought leader love your content?

People know their thought leaders in their industry. You know them here. Many of them are on stages here. Many of them are participating here. You know these people How often are they sharing your content? Here's Rand Fishkin two days ago sharing something that I had put together. That's huge. It's a, it's a vote of confidence.

Here's Lily Ray posting that as well. You want to see what my traffic looked like as a result? I will show that to you. Those two endorsements in part led to us having by far the most successful blog post on our website, and it just happened three days ago. I think query fanout is the next big thing that we've got to start to focus in on.

There's the old ChatGPT, right? I'm looking for a geo agency leading the industry, and what ChatGPT would do is it would go out and search for best geo [00:20:00] agency top, and it would look for these things. And those low-quality listicles could win. But the AI is over that. The new ChatGPT goes out and does, also does web search queries, but it's putting in names of brands it already has hardwired, and this, I'm telling you folks, the same way you get your brand to be hardwired into people's brains, I believe it is similar to the same way you would get brands to be hardwired in the AI's brain.

I don't have a percentage, but I feel like it's m- it's close to 60 to 70%. And there again is the idea that my AI visibility was down. I was losing, but my confidence was growing. And why was my confidence growing? 'Cause I was getting covered by these people. I was getting mentioned by these people. So I think one of the things you should start thinking of is, are you scraping the thought leaders in your industry's content to see if they're mentioning you?

And the [00:21:00] tool that I use is PhantomBuster. I can take people's activity, extract them out and say, "What is my thought leadership content score?" If I can't get people whom the AI already knows and believes are the leaders in my industry to mention my content, then I am distanced from what the brain sees as the right way to do or the right way to give an answer to someone.

You can also extract Twitter, you can extract all these different places. So now-- And they also have an NCP, which I love, because it's pretty easy to use PhantomBuster to scrape out these websites of the influential people to see who are they mentioning the most. Are they mentioning the most the people that are my competitors?

Are they mentioning my stuff once in a while? And now you can go back to a leader and say, "Look, this competitor of ours is 10X-ing the amount of authentic, natural mentions that we are [00:22:00] from the top 10 voices in our space." Given these query fan-outs and they're hardwired to these thought leaders' brands, if I don't start writing stuff that makes those people win or that don't make those people wanna share it, then we're not gonna win.

And I think that's the tough conversation that all of us as marketers need to have with our leadership I don't foresee a world where ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude are gonna go back to searching top geo agency is the best way to do it. I just don't see that happening. And that's the problem, is we're being rewarded for content we can build in minutes, not content that hardwires people to our brands.

And I think all of us have to have this step back and this question of, what does a high trust content strategy even look like? I'll tell you what it doesn't look like. Fighting over LLMs.txt, fighting over these individual one tactic that works one week or works one month and then goes away later. I think that's the big problem.

We built this [00:23:00] ugly page and it spiked in terms of citations, and it was awesome back in like May or April, uh, back in May or April. But then it's trended down over time and it's almost like no- it's like a nothing burger now. There's one or two prompts. It's still very valuable, but we updated this in May.

It's now October. We haven't updated it. Guess what we trained the AI to do? To go find another new source that's not always the official source or the source that we wanted. So now we've gotta go back and fix this obviously. Um, but it's like, you know, these tactical things that we do sometimes cause spikes and people think we did a great job, but then they don't always last is my point.

And you know what does last? And I've also already shown you creates six X the value, getting shares from people on social So don't leave here today like a zombie. I want you to all ask yourself, "Do I have a KPI for trust? And [00:24:00] am I willing to build one?" Because the storm is coming. Whether Perplexity has a trust score, whether Google has a warning label on its results saying, "Don't trust these results," these things are coming.

The query fan-outs is the ultimate we don't trust the average content on the web move. What percentage of the fan-outs have your brand or your thought leaders in them? Start running prompts and looking at the fan-outs to see is your brand mentioned or is it your competitor's brand mentioned? And remember, it's hardwired like the Four Seasons is hardwired.

I, I think I will go to my grave thinking the Four Seasons is a luxury hotel. Good luck unwiring that. But I will tell you that you still have to strike a balance, because I typed in I'm looking for a generative op- engine optimization agency with real thought leadership. And ChatGPT says, "Hey, you don't want people who has the best geo agency landing page.

That's crap." And then it goes out and it finds Schmidt, [00:25:00] Schmidty who says, "I'd be skeptical of the agencies." And I'm like, "Okay, great." So I clicked on the link and they say, "Can you trust a best geo agencies list?" And they go, "No." And then they put themselves at number one on the list. You gotta be freaking kidding me, right?

This is what our industry is doing. I think our industry is still looking for low quality... They wouldn't call them low quality. Tactical, small tricks that will win in the short term but lose in the long term, and I see it happening. So now in query fan-out, I say the same prompt, and look at the brands that are hardwired.

iPullrank, Seer Interactive, Amsif, and I will say Om- Om- Omniscient Digital I think did a lot of listicles. InMails does a lot of listicles. But before, all of these were listicle companies, and now they're starting to slowly remove themselves like Marty in Back to the Future. So go forth and do great work.[00:26:00] 

Make some percentage of your time today striving for greatness. I want you to look back at your career and be able to say yes to this question. And I will tell you, short-term tricks will never be this. And I think if you do that work, you're gonna be more confident in yourself as a marketer, because you're not only gonna get hardwired with humans, you're also gonna get hardwired with the AI.

And that means you're gonna win on the AI search we're all being asked to win for, and also when humans get to that content. They are going to subscribe to your newsletters more. They're going to have a higher conversion rate than search ever did. Thank you so much for your time and your attention. I appreciate all of you.

Let's go forward and share those wins