The real trend: channels churn, systems survive
Scan those headlines and you see the same movie on repeat:
- “The Death of Organic Reach”
- “AI-Driven Reset” for TV and social
- AI Overviews, AI Mode, native AI shopping, LLM SEO
- ChatGPT going ad-driven, new marketplaces, new formats
Every year, a new “end of” story. Every year, performance teams scramble, rebuild dashboards, rewrite playbooks, and swear this is the last time they’ll be caught flat-footed.
The pattern that actually matters: we keep building channel-first strategies in a world that is clearly moving to AI- and environment-first distribution. Platforms, feeds, SERPs, AI answers, TV interfaces – they’re all just different skins on the same underlying problem:
Can you profitably turn attention into action, no matter where the user starts?
If you’re a performance marketer, media buyer, or growth lead, your job is no longer “be great at Meta” or “be great at SEO.” Your job is to run a channel-agnostic performance system that survives:
- AI overviews stealing clicks
- Social feeds throttling reach
- TV and CTV getting an AI reset
- Chatbots and assistants becoming the new “homepage”
That system is the only durable edge left. Everything else is a temporary exploit.
Why channel-first thinking is now a liability
Most teams are still organized around channels:
- Paid social team
- Paid search team
- SEO/content team
- Lifecycle/email team
That made sense when:
- Attribution was mostly last-click and semi-believable.
- Feeds and SERPs were stable for 12-24 months at a time.
- “Owning a channel” meant you could ride a playbook for years.
That world is gone. Look at just the last 12-18 months:
- AI Overviews and AI Mode rewiring search behavior.
- ChatGPT and others testing native shopping and ad models.
- TV and streaming moving toward AI-driven planning and creative optimization.
- Organic social reach decaying while algorithms favor paid, UGC, and short video.
Channel-first orgs respond to each shift with:
- New “SEO for LLMs” task force.
- New “AI content” squad.
- New “CTV/AI TV” experiment pod.
You end up with a zoo of disconnected experiments, each with its own KPIs, its own “wins,” and no coherent view of whether the system is actually making more money.
The platforms are converging. Your org is fragmenting. That’s the problem.
The system that survives: four layers that don’t care about channels
Instead of thinking “SEO vs paid vs social vs TV,” think in four layers:
- Demand capture: People who already want what you sell.
- Demand creation: People who should want what you sell.
- Conversion system: Turning any visit or impression into revenue.
- Measurement spine: A way to tell if the whole thing is working.
Every new “trend” – AI answers, AI TV, native AI shopping, decaying organic – just plugs into one of these four layers. The tactics change; the architecture doesn’t.
1. Demand capture: stop worshipping specific surfaces
Demand capture is where AI is causing the most panic: SERPs changing, AI summaries stealing clicks, assistants answering instead of sending traffic.
The mistake is treating Google blue links as the thing you own. You never owned them. You owned:
- Being the most credible, specific answer to a commercial question.
- Having a frictionless path from “I have intent” to “I bought.”
In an AI-first world, demand capture looks like:
- Structured, machine-readable authority: Clean information architecture, clear product specs, pricing, FAQs, and policies that models can parse and quote.
- Brand and entity optimization: Consistent naming, categories, and claims across your site, feeds, and profiles so LLMs can confidently surface you as an example or recommendation.
- Owning high-intent surfaces, not just keywords: Shopping units, comparison widgets, native AI shopping, marketplaces, review sites, and vertical search – anywhere “ready-to-buy” users land.
- Fast, decisive landing experiences: If AI sends fewer but more qualified clicks, every page needs to behave like a high-intent landing page, not a brochure.
Your playbook for “SEO vs paid search vs AI Overviews vs ChatGPT recommendations” is the same: be the easiest, safest, clearest choice for someone already in-market.
2. Demand creation: build memory, not just impressions
While everyone argues about whether organic reach is “dead,” the real shift is simpler:
Algorithms now optimize for retention and watch time, not your calendar.
That’s true on:
- Social feeds (short video, UGC, Stories).
- Streaming and TV (AI-driven recommendations, dynamic ad insertion).
- AI assistants (what they keep surfacing as helpful, credible, popular).
Demand creation that survives this environment has three traits:
-
Memorable, repeatable story
Not “brand purpose” decks – a simple, sharp answer to:- Who is this for?
- What’s the core promise?
- What’s the one line people should repeat about us?
-
Format-native creative systems
You don’t need a new idea for every channel. You need a modular idea that can:- Be a 6-second bumper on CTV.
- Be a 15-30 second UGC-style TikTok or Reel.
- Be a static or carousel with a strong visual hook.
- Be a script for a chatbot or AI assistant demo.
-
Frequency with financial discipline
Demand creation is expensive if you treat it like “awareness” with no feedback loop. Tie it to:- Branded search and direct traffic trends.
- View-through and geo-lift tests.
- Incremental revenue at a blended MER/ROAS level.
The platforms will keep reshuffling the deck – AI TV, new social formats, creator integrations – but the job is stable: plant and reinforce a story that makes future performance cheaper.
3. Conversion system: the only compounding asset you fully control
While everyone obsesses over “AI prompts for social” and “LLM SEO,” the quiet compounding asset is still the same: your conversion system.
That includes:
- Landing pages and on-site flows.
- Checkout and pricing presentation.
- Email/SMS/on-site personalization.
- Chatbots and sales assistants (human or AI).
Headlines about “37% more inquiries” or “73% of ecommerce emails are broken” are all pointing at the same thing: most teams are pouring paid and organic effort into leaky funnels.
A channel-agnostic conversion system has three rules:
-
Every traffic source gets a purpose-built path
Stop sending everything to the homepage or one “best practice” PDP.- High-intent search/AI traffic → fast, proof-heavy, objection-killing pages.
- Cold social/TV → education-first, story-led flows with soft CTAs.
- Retargeting and CRM → urgency, offers, and social proof tuned to known behavior.
-
Lifecycle is treated as a performance channel, not an afterthought
With acquisition costs rising and AI intermediaries multiplying, owning the relationship matters more:- Fix broken triggered flows before you add new campaigns.
- Use behavior-based segmentation, not just demographics.
- Test offers and narratives in email/SMS first; then roll winners out to paid.
-
AI as an interface, not a strategy
Chatbots, AI sales assistants, and “personalization engines” are just new ways to route users through your existing logic:- Map your decision trees and objections first.
- Then let AI handle routing, FAQs, and low-stakes conversations.
- Measure them on incremental revenue, not “engagement with the bot.”
Platforms will keep taxing you more for reach. Your conversion system is where you quietly win that margin back.
4. Measurement spine: from channel ROAS to system economics
The more AI mediates discovery and distribution, the less you’ll be able to trust:
- Last-click attribution.
- Platform-reported ROAS in isolation.
- “Organic vs paid” as cleanly separate buckets.
Assistants, AI answers, and cross-device consumption blur everything. If you keep optimizing channel-by-channel, you’ll:
- Turn off “unprofitable” upper-funnel that feeds your branded search.
- Over-credit retargeting and branded terms.
- Underinvest in the creative and formats that actually move blended revenue.
A modern measurement spine is boring but non-negotiable:
- North star: blended MER or payback
Track marketing efficiency ratio (revenue / total marketing spend) or payback period at the business level. That’s your “is the system working?” metric. - Incrementality over precision theater
Use geo-lift, holdouts, and simple experiments where possible. You don’t need perfect; you need “directionally right and fast enough to act.” - Channel reporting as diagnostics, not truth
Let platform ROAS guide creative and audience tweaks, not budget allocation in isolation. - Creative and message-level tagging
Tag by idea (offer, angle, promise) across channels. Then you can see which narratives work everywhere, not just which ad account had a good week.
When the next AI surface launches – new shopping unit, new assistant, new TV buying tool – you don’t need a new attribution religion. You just plug it into the same spine and ask: does this improve our system economics?
How to reorganize your team around the system, not the channel
You don’t have to blow up your org chart tomorrow, but you should stop pretending that “Paid Social Manager” vs “SEO Manager” is the long-term game.
A more resilient structure for the next 3-5 years looks like:
-
Acquisition (demand capture + creation)
Owns:- Media planning and buying across all paid channels.
- Search (paid + organic), social, CTV, and emerging AI surfaces.
- Top- and mid-funnel creative testing.
-
Conversion & Lifecycle
Owns:- Landing pages, CRO, onsite experimentation.
- Email/SMS, triggered flows, retention programs.
- Chatbots/assistants and sales enablement flows.
-
Creative Systems
Owns:- Brand story, visual identity, and messaging hierarchy.
- Modular creative templates for all major formats.
- Asset ops: versioning, tagging, and reuse across channels.
-
Data & Measurement
Owns:- Event tracking, pixels, and server-side infrastructure.
- Incrementality tests, MMM (if relevant), and reporting.
- Maintaining the “single source of truth” for performance.
People can still have channel specialties, but they operate inside a shared system with shared goals:
- Blended MER or payback targets.
- Incremental revenue or profit, not just ROAS screenshots.
- Cross-channel creative and message performance, not siloed wins.
What to actually do in the next 90 days
To make this real – not another “2026 trends” deck – pick a few moves and ship them.
Week 1-2: Audit your system, not your channels
- List your top 3-5 demand capture surfaces (e.g., Google search, Amazon, brand search, AI answers if you have data, marketplaces).
- List your top 3-5 demand creation surfaces (e.g., Meta, TikTok, YouTube, CTV, influencers).
- Map where they all dump traffic: which pages, which flows, which lifecycle programs.
- Overlay your measurement: what do you actually trust today?
Week 3-6: Fix the biggest leaks first
- Identify the 1-2 highest-volume entry points and run focused CRO sprints.
- Audit triggered emails/SMS: fix broken links, outdated offers, missing segments.
- Standardize UTM and creative tagging by idea/offer so you can compare across channels.
Week 7-12: Add one AI-era bet per layer
- Demand capture: Improve structured data, FAQs, and product detail depth so you’re more quotable by AI answers and more trustworthy in high-intent search.
- Demand creation: Build a modular creative system for one core narrative and deploy it across at least two channels (e.g., TikTok + CTV, or Meta + YouTube).
- Conversion: Test one AI interface where it actually matters – e.g., a guided selling chatbot on a high-intent page – and measure incremental revenue, not novelty.
- Measurement: Run a simple geo-lift or holdout test on a major channel to calibrate platform-reported performance against reality.
The headlines will keep screaming about the death of this channel or that tactic. Let everyone else chase the obituary of the month.
Your edge is simpler and much harder to copy: a channel-agnostic performance system that turns whatever the platforms invent next into just another input.