The real shift: channels are merging, but your org chart isn’t
Scan those headlines and a pattern jumps out: social-first ranking strategies, the social-to-search halo effect, publishers bracing for a 40% drop in search traffic, AI reshaping funnels, and CLV modeling getting more attention than CPMs.
Underneath all of it is one high-signal shift:
the performance funnel has collapsed into a single, messy, multi-touch demand system – but most teams are still organized, measured, and budgeted as if search, social, brand, and CRM are separate worlds.
That disconnect is now a P&L problem, not a theory problem.
What’s actually happening in the wild
Three forces are colliding:
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Search is fragmenting and decaying as a predictable “bottom of funnel” channel.
Publishers expect search traffic to fall 40%+. Google’s SERPs are more AI, more answers, fewer clicks. “SEO is no longer a single discipline” is code for: you can’t treat SEO as a siloed craft with linear attribution anymore. -
Social is quietly becoming the new discovery + intent engine.
Short-form video, Reddit, Bluesky, influencers, UGC, and “superfans” are all doing the same job: creating demand and then driving branded search and direct traffic. That’s the social-to-search halo in practice. -
AI is compressing the funnel into a continuous loop.
“Adapt your entire funnel with AI” and “personalizing AI for a business” are really about this: you can now respond to signals in near real time across channels, but only if your data, creative, and decisioning are connected.
In other words: people don’t move from “awareness” to “consideration” to “purchase” in a tidy line. They see a TikTok, search you on Google, click a Reddit thread, watch a YouTube review, sign up for email, and then convert from a retargeting ad they think was “organic.”
But your budget, KPIs, and teams are still fighting over who “owns” the sale.
The cost of pretending the old funnel still exists
CMOs and performance leaders are feeling the pain in a few consistent ways:
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Overpaying for late-stage clicks.
Ahrefs’ “100 most expensive keywords” is a symptom: when you treat search as the main intent capture machine, you end up in a bidding war for the last click while ignoring the cheaper demand creation upstream. -
Misreading channel performance.
Social looks “expensive” on last-click. Brand campaigns look “soft.” SEO looks “volatile.” Meanwhile, your branded search and direct traffic are quietly doing the heavy lifting created by those channels. -
Under-investing in compounding assets.
Articles about “cannibalization,” “8,000 title tag rewrites,” and “37% more inquiries from conversion strategy” are all pointing at the same thing: owned surfaces (site, content, CRM) are under-optimized relative to paid. -
Teams optimizing against each other.
Social chases views. Search chases rankings. CRM chases open rates. Media buying chases ROAS. Nobody is accountable for total demand created and captured over time.
The winners over the next 24 months won’t be the brands with the best single channel. They’ll be the ones that treat channels as different angles on the same demand system – and organize accordingly.
Designing a modern demand system: four non-negotiables
You don’t need another framework. You need a few hard design decisions that force your org to behave like the market actually behaves.
1. Stop budgeting by channel; budget by demand job
Your customers don’t care if a touchpoint is “brand” or “performance.” They care whether it does a job for them at that moment.
A more useful budget structure:
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Demand Creation – Making more people care and remember you.
Channels: short-form video, influencers, Reddit and community plays, top-of-funnel content, brand campaigns, PR, entertainment partnerships.
Core metrics: reach in the right audience, branded search lift, direct traffic, new high-intent visitors, assisted conversions, view-through revenue. -
Demand Capture – Converting existing intent into revenue.
Channels: search (paid and organic), shopping ads, affiliate, marketplaces, retargeting, high-intent comparison pages.
Core metrics: non-branded and category search volume, conversion rate, CAC/ROAS, payback period. -
Demand Expansion – Increasing value from people who already bought or subscribed.
Channels: CRM, lifecycle automation, referral and “superfan” programs, loyalty, product-led growth loops.
Core metrics: CLV, expansion revenue, churn, referral share of new customers, “shakeout effect” (how many customers survive the early drop-off).
Then assign owners to jobs, not channels. Your “Head of Demand Creation” can move dollars between TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, influencers, and upper-funnel search without needing six steering committees.
2. Treat social as intent generation, not just impressions
The “social-to-search halo effect” is not a thought piece; it’s a measurement challenge.
If you’re serious about this, you:
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Instrument for branded search lift whenever you launch a social or creator push. Track:
- Branded search volume (and variants) before, during, and after campaigns
- Direct traffic trends
- New user share of site traffic
- Tag and segment “social-exposed” cohorts where possible (click IDs, promo codes, creator-specific landing pages) and watch their downstream behavior in CRM and product analytics.
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Design social creative for search spillover:
- Repeat distinctive brand cues so people remember what to search for
- Use phrases you actually want appearing in autocomplete and related searches
- Seed category terms you can rank or bid on profitably
The question is no longer “What’s my ROAS on TikTok?” but “What happens to my total branded and category demand when I turn TikTok on or off?”
3. Build an AI-assisted, not AI-dependent, funnel
AI headlines are everywhere – funnel adaptation, generative engine optimization, semantics boosting AI citations by 642%. The risk is turning AI into another siloed initiative instead of wiring it into how demand moves.
For operators, the useful line is simple:
AI should compress feedback loops, not replace strategy.
Three practical AI jobs that pay off now:
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Signal detection across channels.
Use AI to:- Cluster search queries, social comments, and support tickets into themes
- Spot new category language and objections early
- Flag creative concepts that over-index with high-CLV cohorts
Then feed that back into creative briefs, landing pages, and product messaging.
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Variant generation with human curation.
Let AI draft 20 versions of a hook, headline, or ad angle; your team picks 3 that are on-brand and strategically relevant. This is how you scale testing without outsourcing your voice. -
Decision support for media and lifecycle.
Use AI models to:- Predict which new cohorts are likely to become high CLV and justify higher CAC
- Recommend channel mix shifts based on real-time performance and saturation
- Trigger lifecycle flows based on behavior, not just time-based drips
The CMOs who win here are the ones who ask: “Where can AI remove delay and waste in how we create, capture, and expand demand?” Not “What’s our AI story?”
4. Align measurement with how people actually buy
The old measurement stack (last-click, channel ROAS, siloed dashboards) was built for a world where search did the heavy lifting and social was “top of funnel.” That world is gone.
A modern demand system needs three layers of measurement:
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Macro: business outcomes.
- Revenue, profit, payback period
- CLV and CLV:CAC by segment
- New vs. returning customer mix
This is where the “shakeout effect” matters: early churn can make a seemingly great CAC look awful on a 12-24 month view.
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Meso: demand health.
- Branded and category search volume trends
- Direct traffic and type-in rate
- Share of new customers coming from referral, organic, and brand terms
- Engagement with owned content and communities
These tell you whether you’re actually building a demand engine or just renting traffic.
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Micro: channel and creative performance.
- Per-channel CAC/ROAS, but with multi-touch or data-driven attribution, not just last-click
- Creative-level performance (hooks, formats, topics)
- Path analysis: common sequences of touches before conversion
Then you enforce one discipline: no optimizing a channel in isolation if it harms demand health or CLV. Killing a “low ROAS” YouTube series that drives huge branded search lift is how you quietly stall growth.
What CMOs and performance leaders should do in the next 90 days
You don’t fix this with a re-org deck. You fix it with a few specific moves that force behavior to change.
1. Rewrite ownership and incentives
- Appoint clear owners for Demand Creation, Demand Capture, and Demand Expansion with shared targets on revenue and CLV, not just channel metrics.
- Tie bonuses to blended CAC and payback, plus leading indicators like branded search and referral share, so teams stop gaming single-channel numbers.
- Make one leader explicitly accountable for “signal integration” – turning insights from search, social, CRM, and support into a single backlog of tests.
2. Run one cross-channel demand experiment
Pick a single product, market, or segment and:
- Launch a coordinated push: creators + short-form video + Reddit + top-of-funnel content
- Instrument branded search, direct traffic, and new user share before and after
- Align search, site, and CRM to capture and nurture that spike in interest
The goal is not a perfect case study. The goal is to prove, with your own data, that social and content are not “awareness” – they are demand machines that your search and CRM teams should be planning around.
3. Deploy AI where it obviously reduces waste
- Use AI to audit your existing funnel messaging: identify duplicate pages, cannibalized keywords, and inconsistent offers across ads, landing pages, and emails.
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Stand up one AI-assisted workflow each for:
- Creative testing (variant generation + human curation)
- Audience insights (clustering queries, comments, and tickets)
- Lifecycle triggers (behavior-based, not just time-based)
- Measure success in hours saved, tests run, and lift in key KPIs – not in “AI coverage.”
The uncomfortable but useful mindset shift
The old game was: pick a channel, out-optimize competitors, and ride it until it decays.
The new game is: design a system where channels amplify each other, AI shrinks your feedback loops, and your org structure matches how people actually buy.
The operators who treat “social vs search vs AI” as a turf war will keep fighting over a shrinking pie.
The ones who treat them as parts of the same demand system will quietly take everyone else’s customers.