Why are brands rethinking visibility?

Search is breaking and reforming. Social is fragmenting. Even platforms that were once trusted staples of digital strategy - from Web Browsers to LinkedIn to Instagram - are either being regulated, being sold off (in the case of Google Chrome, potentially), or pivoting so fast they’re barely recognisable.

This past few weeks, the clearest theme across all of the noise and goings on has been this:

Visibility is no longer something you earn. It’s something you negotiate.

What do I mean by that? Well, Google is now letting users choose "Preferred Sources" for AI Overviews - a feature that looks empowering on the surface, but actually reflects a problem: the algorithm no longer knows who to trust.

So much content is AI-generated, or on increasingly unregulated and unmoderated platforms, that Google is wary of saying who is absolutely right and wrong. After years of rigid algorithms, the SERP is in danger of turning into something resembling a social feed; an echo chamber of views and opinions just like ours.

Meanwhile, publishers and SEOs alike are seeing organic traffic continue to decline, even as content quality (and, er, quantity) rises.

And it’s not just Google.

LinkedIn is expanding newsletter access, but also hinting at a Premium tier for SMBs, suggesting the end of organic reach for B2B is possibly in sight. Threads just hit 175 million users, but brands are still hesitant to get involved. Indeed, the platform feels like the living definition of the “if a tree falls” adage.

Add into that ongoing issues around TikTok, or privacy on Meta, got a digital ecosystem in which the rules are changing faster than strategies can adapt.

Yet, with all that changes, the solutions remain largely the same; produce relevant, quality content, and gain the trust of your audiences. You might need to pay more to play, but you probably already knew that.

Organic reach on company pages on platforms has been <5% for over a decade now; if you don’t have a paid social strategy, you likely don’t really have a social strategy. The same has largely applied in search now for quite some time.

The difference now is that the changes we’ve been navigating on social are creeping in to other platforms as well. How necessary is SEO in an era of preferred sources? Presumably this will only push people more and more towards PPC.

All absolutely fascinating, if not a little daunting.

Further Reading

Google claims that invalid ad traffic is down 40%, which is excellent news; however, advertisers aren’t so sure that’s true, with murky reporting and lower levels of delivery.

As alluded to above, LinkedIn is expanding its newsletter tools, but a Premium tier is coming.

Instagram has been forced to pay a very hefty biometric privacy settlement in Illinois - a reminder that data misuse, or failure to look after it, can have real world consequences.

We’ve been here many times before in this newsletter, but a reminder that SEO isn’t just about your website anymore with a good piece in Search Engine Land this week.

That’s it! If you found this interesting, I would appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and colleagues.

If you’re feeling particularly generous and enjoyed this edition, I won’t stop you from buying me a coffee. Otherwise, I’m now back from my summer break, so I’ll see you next week 🫶