The real pattern in all these headlines
Scan the headlines you just read and a theme jumps out:
- “The Death of Organic Reach”
- “Marketing Loves Declaring the End of Things That Still Work”
- “Top 10 PPC news stories” / “Core update is complete”
- “AI search strategy” / “AI Overviews” / “Entity-based SEO”
- “Brand-led growth beats performance marketing”
The industry is obsessed with declaring channels dead, crowned, disrupted, or reinvented by AI every six months. Meanwhile, the people actually responsible for pipeline and ROAS are stuck playing whack-a-mole with budgets.
The issue that matters now is simple:
you can’t run a serious growth engine on channel panic.
You need a way to make channel decisions that survives:
- AI search and AI Overviews
- Social organic decay
- Core updates and privacy shifts
- The “brand vs performance” pendulum
This is an operating problem, not a trends problem. Let’s fix the operating model.
The trap: reacting to headlines instead of your own economics
Most teams are running some version of this loop:
- Platform or publication declares a new “trend” or “death of X”.
- Leadership asks, “What’s our TikTok / AI / TV / influencer / SEO plan?”
- Budget gets yanked from whatever was working to “test the future”.
- Tests are underfunded, under-instrumented, and inconclusive.
- Six months later, repeat with a new headline.
The cost isn’t just wasted spend. It’s data poverty. Constantly resetting channels means you never build:
- Reliable CAC by channel
- Time-to-payback curves
- Creative wear-out benchmarks
- Incrementality baselines
In a world where AI is rewriting SERPs, feeds, and ad products monthly, the only real edge is your own data and your ability to act on it faster than competitors.
A durable way to think about channels in 2026
Forget “what’s hot” for a second. For performance operators, channels fall into four jobs:
- Harvest demand (capture people already looking)
- Create demand (make more people care over time)
- Accelerate consideration (move fence-sitters)
- Monetize attention (improve conversion and LTV)
Every channel you touch should be evaluated against these jobs, not headlines. Here’s how that maps to the current mess.
1. Harvest demand: search, branded queries, and “AI search”
Headlines: AI Overviews, AI Mode, core updates, localized SEO for LLMs, entity-based SEO.
Underneath the noise, one thing hasn’t changed:
people still type intent into boxes.
Whether that box is Google, YouTube, Amazon, TikTok, or ChatGPT, “harvest” channels are about:
- Being present when intent is expressed
- Owning your brand and category terms
- Protecting margin while you do it
Practical operating rules:
-
Separate “must-win” intent from “nice-to-have” intent.
Branded, high-intent, and bottom-of-funnel category terms get protected budget. Everything else earns its keep. -
Instrument for post-click, not just CPC/CPA.
With AI summaries and SERP clutter, cheap clicks often mean low intent. Track revenue per click and payback, not just form fills. -
Stop overfitting to today’s SERP layout.
Instead of chasing every SERP feature, build content that:- Is clearly about entities (brands, products, problems)
- Is fresh and updated (publish dates matter for AI visibility)
- Answers the “real” task, not just the keyword
-
Assume AI Overviews will skim your content.
That’s not a reason to quit SEO; it’s a reason to:- Invest in brand queries (people skipping the overview and going straight to you)
- Use content to drive email/SMS/app opt-ins where you control the surface
The job of “harvest” doesn’t die because AI rewrites the interface. Your operating system should survive layout changes.
2. Create demand: brand, video, and “things that still work”
Headlines: “Brand-led growth beats performance marketing”, “Marketing loves declaring the end of things that still work”, TV trends, influencer guides, organic reach is dead.
The pendulum has swung back: brand isn’t a dirty word in performance circles anymore. But the mistake now is treating brand as a vibe project instead of a growth input.
For operators, “create demand” channels should:
- Increase future branded search volume
- Improve click-through and conversion on performance channels
- Shorten sales cycles or reduce discounting
How to make this practical:
-
Track brand as a performance metric.
Watch:- Branded search volume and CPC over time
- Direct traffic and view-through conversions
- Lift in performance channel CVR after brand campaigns
-
Use creative that can live across both brand and performance.
The most effective teams are:- Running product demos as Reels, Shorts, TikToks, and paid social
- Cutting TV/CTV creative into performance assets
- Testing hooks and angles in performance first, then scaling the winners into “brand” buys
-
Measure incrementality, not just last-click.
For CTV, influencers, and upper-funnel social, you need:- Geo holdouts or audience holdouts
- Pre/post tests on branded search and direct traffic
- Lift studies where available (and sanity checks when they’re too rosy)
The operators who win here are the ones who treat “brand” as a demand-creation channel with a P&L, not as an aesthetic hobby.
3. Accelerate consideration: content, email, and AI assistants
Headlines: conversion strategy case studies, AI chatbots, SalesBot, email is broken, marketing calendars, content trends.
This is the least sexy part of the funnel and the most under-optimized. Everyone is busy chasing AI search while:
- Welcome flows are generic
- Sales sequences are misaligned with intent
- On-site content doesn’t match ad promises
Meanwhile, AI assistants (from ChatGPT to brand bots) are quietly becoming the “middleware” between your traffic and your sales team.
Practical plays:
-
Fix the obvious conversion leaks first.
Before you add new channels:- Audit top 10 landing pages for message match, speed, and clarity
- Run basic CRO tests on forms, CTAs, and proof placement
- Clean up email flows that still talk like it’s 2017
-
Treat AI chat as a performance surface, not a toy.
For brand-owned bots:- Give them a clear job: qualify, route, or transact
- Train them on your best-performing sales calls and FAQs, not generic copy
- Track bot-assisted revenue and time-to-first-response as core metrics
-
Use content to move people one step, not ten.
Map content to stages:- Problem-aware: “Why X keeps breaking”
- Solution-aware: “Options for fixing X”
- Product-aware: “How we fix X differently”
Then align retargeting, email, and sales outreach to those stages instead of blasting everyone with the same deck.
This is where a lot of “brand vs performance” arguments quietly disappear. If your mid-funnel is tight, brand spend looks better and performance spend scales cleaner.
4. Monetize attention: creative systems and LTV
Headlines: AI marketing examples, AI employees, broken ecommerce emails, sales automation workflows, predictive analytics.
Everyone is talking about AI as a way to “scale content” or “build AI employees”. The real question for operators is:
does this make each impression more valuable over its lifetime?
That breaks into two jobs:
- Make creative and messaging learn faster
- Increase revenue per acquired user
How to make that real:
-
Build a creative testing spine.
Instead of random creative chaos:- Define a small set of hypotheses per month (e.g., “urgency vs social proof vs education”)
- Use AI to generate variants, not strategy
- Standardize naming and tracking so you can actually learn across campaigns
-
Tie AI tools to specific funnel metrics.
For example:- AI subject line testing → open rate and revenue per send
- AI product recommendations → AOV and repeat purchase rate
- AI bidding or budget pacing → margin and payback period
If you can’t point to a metric, it’s probably a toy.
-
Obsess over payback and LTV:CAC, not just CAC.
With AI-driven ad inflation coming (and already here in some verticals), cheap acquisition without strong LTV is a trap. Build:- Simple cohort views (by month and channel)
- Basic segmentation (first product, geography, device)
- Reactivation and cross-sell flows that are actually personalized, not just “Hey, it’s been a while”
From channel panic to a channel operating system
The point isn’t to ignore trends. It’s to run them through a stable operating system so you’re not rebuilding your plan every time a blog publishes “Top 10 Trends for 2026”.
Here’s a simple OS you can actually run:
Step 1: Classify every channel by job, not format
For each channel you use or are considering (Google Search, Meta, TikTok, SEO, CTV, influencers, email, AI chat, marketplaces):
- Primary job: Harvest, Create, Accelerate, or Monetize
- Secondary job: if it does more than one
- Primary metric: the one number that matters for that job
Example:
- Google Search non-brand → Harvest → CAC/payback
- CTV → Create → branded search lift + geo holdout revenue lift
- Email → Accelerate/Monetize → revenue per subscriber per month
- AI chatbot → Accelerate → qualified opportunities created
Step 2: Set guardrails before you test the shiny stuff
Before you move budget into “new”:
-
Define non-negotiables.
For example:- Never cut branded search below X impression share
- Maintain minimum spend on your top 2 proven channels unless CAC blows out by Y%
-
Cap experimental spend.
A simple rule: 70% proven, 20% scaling, 10% experimental. The exact numbers can move, the structure shouldn’t. -
Give tests a real chance.
“We tried it for two weeks” is not a test. Define:- Minimum spend or impressions
- Clear success/fail metrics tied to the channel’s job
- What you’ll do with the result (kill, park, or scale)
Step 3: Build a simple, recurring channel review rhythm
You don’t need a 40-slide QBR. You need a tight, recurring loop:
-
Weekly:
- Check anomalies (CPC spikes, tracking breaks, obvious winners/losers)
- Reallocate within channels (campaign to campaign, creative to creative)
-
Monthly:
- Review performance by job (Harvest, Create, Accelerate, Monetize)
- Decide what moves from experimental → scaling or scaling → proven
- Kill at least one thing that’s “fine” but not compounding
-
Quarterly:
- Revisit your channel mix against business goals (margin, growth rate, payback)
- Decide which 1-2 “trend” bets you’ll actually commit to for the next quarter
How this helps you survive the next wave of “X is dead”
AI search will keep evolving. Organic reach will keep getting squeezed. New ad formats will keep showing up with shiny case studies.
With a channel operating system built on jobs and economics, your response to the next big headline is no longer:
“We need to be on this.”
It becomes:
- “Which job would this do for us?”
- “What metric would we hold it to?”
- “What budget bucket would it replace if it works?”
That’s how performance marketers, media buyers, and growth leaders stay sane in 2026: not by predicting which channel will “die” next, but by building a system that doesn’t care.