I’m live from the Industrial Marketing Summit, hosted by Trew Marketing and Gorilla 76, in Austin. Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro, Alertmouse, and Snackbar Studio, and the long-time face of Moz and the SEO industry, opened the event with a great reality check for marketers: our traffic playbook no longer reflects how buyers actually discover and evaluate brands.

If your strategy is still “post a link, pray for a click, and track it in GA4,” Rand has a word for you: Farkakte (Yiddish for “it’s a mess” or maybe a little more aggressive than “it’s a mess”). Between AI Overviews and social algorithms that “tax” outbound links, the era of easy web traffic is over.

But don’t be too scared. There is opportunity, too! Here are my key takes on what he had to say and what you can do to leverage what is happening in our industry:

1. The “Alligator Graph” is real: Search volume is hitting record highs, but organic clicks are plummeting. Google is keeping the traffic for itself via AI and “Zero-Click” snippets. There are ways to capture that zero click – and it’s all about what we do best as marketers and content marketers. Consistent, valuable content across channels.
2. Your Home Page has moved: It’s no longer your URL. It’s your LinkedIn feed, your Google AI result, and your Reddit mentions. That is where the “first impression” happens now. Most don’t even ever make it to your home page. That’s really interesting. And scary.
3. The “Link Tax”: Rand says that social platforms now actively penalize posts with outbound links. If you want reach, provide the value inside the feed. (And in your emails, too!)
4. Search is a Behavior, not a Channel: People aren’t just “Googling.” They are searching on YouTube, Reddit, and inside ChatGPT. Your goal is to be the “Recommended Entity” wherever they look.
5. Email is the last “Owned” fortress: It’s the only channel that hasn’t declined in 30 years. Repeating what I said before – stop forcing the click; put the substance directly in the email body.
6. The 1:10 Rule: For every 1 visitor to your site, 10 are getting to know your brand on platforms you don’t control. If you only measure the 1, you’re missing 90% of your impact. We must figure out how to measure those other 9.
7. Direct Traffic is a Ghost: Slack, WhatsApp, and TikTok often show up as “Direct” traffic. You are likely reaching far more people than your analytics suggest.
8. Revenue > Traffic: It is now common for traffic to go down while sales go up. If people are searching for your company by name, you’ve won the mindshare that AI can’t steal.
9. Your People are the Front Door: On LinkedIn, personal profiles reach significantly more people than company pages. To win in 2026, you must push your subject matter experts to the front and stop hiding behind a corporate logo.

There you have it. It was a great opening to this year’s Summit – worth the price of admission on its own (along with the later-in-the-night karaoke with new friends).