Everywhere I look, the most interesting work in publishing and search is not coming from the big publisher titles. It is coming from individuals.
Do individuals now hold all the power, and is the future of content to be found on Substack?
When I spoke with Harry Clarkson-Bennett recently about publishers surviving AI, I put forward the theory about individuals, and how historically, the brand made the journalist, but now the journalist makes the brand. Harry called it the reverse halo effect.
“There was a point in time where you could work for the Telegraph, the Times, BBC, whatever it would be, and the brand would bring you up. Whereas I think it would be like the reverse halo effect now. What you’d have now is the brand working with the individual.”
Looking closely at this shift applies not just to news publishers, but to all brands, because SEO and AI search are dependent on content and publishing.
The Talent Is Leaving The Building
The migration is well underway. Some journalists have been pushed out by rounds of cuts as publisher revenue collapses. Others have walked, choosing Substack because it is the one place they can produce their best work without an editor, a traffic target, or a format squeezing the life out of it.
Paul Krugman left The New York Times after 25 years and now publishes daily on Substack. Jim Acosta walked away from CNN and took his audience with him. Dave Jorgenson built The Washington Post’s TikTok presence to nearly 2 million, then left and was outperforming his old employer within months.
I’m seeing this replicated in our industry with a shift to Substack from Kevin Indig, Duane Forrester, and Harry Clarkson-Bennett, alongside others leading the way with deep research and, in some cases, unique data.
In this new ‘reputation not rankings world‘, it makes me think back to Google’s push for Authorship as a ranking signal and the short-lived Google+. It feels like authorship finally has come to fruition, albeit in a different way, accelerated by their own failings to address spam and with the disruptive launch of LLM chatbots.
Evergreen Is No Longer A Strategy
This segues neatly into something bigger that I have been watching collapse in slow motion, which is the evergreen content strategy.
For 25 years, the model was simple. Find keywords with volume, publish content that answers them, and build the traffic. It worked well, and most publishing businesses were built on this foundation. And then along came AI Overview and decimated this strategy almost overnight.
As Duane Forrester said, “If your content can be fully replaced by a summary, it has no moat. The summary becomes the product, and your page becomes the raw material that someone else’s system processes and discards.”
The Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report found publishers deprioritizing evergreen content by 32 percentage points in favor of original investigations.
Harry Clarkson-Bennett also said, “Evergreen’s not dead, but if you’re creating content ‘just for SEO,’ I’d kill it.”
At Search Central Live in Toronto, Danny Sullivan pushed the PR message for Google when he defined non-commodity content as unique, specific, and authentic, with commodity content as generic, replicable material anyone could produce. Commodity, which is anything an AI can assemble from public information, and non-commodity content, which requires you to have actually done something, know something firsthand, or hold a real opinion grounded in expertise.
So, a keyword-first strategy is over, and informational content has been usurped by the machines. What do we have left?
Pursue real value that demonstrates actual expertise. Not expertise as an E-E-A-T checkbox. Expertise as the product itself.
Expertise Doesn’t Come With Distribution, You Have To Build It
It’s all well and good to say, create great content that shows expertise, but it doesn’t come with a distribution model built in. Keyword-focused content did. Publishing strategies now requires a direct audience.
Newsletter subscribers, followers, members, people who come looking for you by name. It is why the Substack migration and the death of evergreen are the same story. The individuals building direct audiences are not doing it as a branding exercise. They are doing it because owned distribution is the only distribution that cannot be taken away and it’s the one way to future proof their visibility.
Condé Nast is planning for Google Zero. As Harry described it, the thinking is not that search traffic will literally reach zero, but that everything they create should still make sense to their audience and business model even if it did. That is the correct test for any content investment now, whether you are a publisher or a brand.
LLMs can be an essential part of that strategy to support brand awareness and drive readers who want more than the summary. Readers who want the deeper read and the research.
Stop Thinking In Linear Keywords. Users Don’t Prompt That Way.
There is one more habit that has to go with the old model, and that is measuring visibility through a keyword lens.
People do not prompt the way they search in a search engine. They do not type three words and scan 10 links. They have a conversation, and they ask for solutions. They add context, budget, constraints, and follow-ups, and they arrive at a conclusion over several turns. It is a different mindset entirely, and it is not one a rank tracking tool can replicate.
Aleyda Solis, who also spoke at Search ‘n Stuff London in June, has published the most rigorous approach I have seen to this problem.
Her method is to build a structured set of realistic prompts, grounded in real audience language from sales calls, reviews, and communities, then run them repeatedly across platforms to find where your brand appears, where it is missing, and which sources shape the answers.
Attribution and measurement in AI search has been the one challenge for SEOs, and the only way to approach it is to break out of conventional thinking for linear keyword tracking and traffic measurement.
If we survived “(Not Provided)” and Google taking away keyword data, which felt like a catastrophe at the time, we can survive adapting how we rebuild measurement in this way.
Build Around What Only You Can Say
So, back to the question I opened with: Do individuals hold all the power?
Not all of it. Brands still have resources, reach, and the ability to showcase expertise at a scale no individual can. But the balance has shifted, and the direction of travel is unmistakable. Trust now attaches to people, and the content that wins is the content that could only have come from one person, one dataset, one set of experiences.
Smart publishers are building their schedule around experts in their industry who can demonstrate this hands-on expertise. Brands have the platform, and experts have the product (I’m resisting using the word influencer as much as possible here). If both brands and individuals can respect and appreciate this partnership, then this should be the perfect relationship.
Publishers become the portals and hub for expertise and information, and readers will choose brands that can deliver that expert variety neatly packaged directly for them. This is a strategy we have built at Search Engine Journal.
That is the brief for every content strategy from here. Build around expertise, give your experts a name, a voice, and a platform. Measure a direct audience, not borrowed traffic.
My belief is that once we get through this disruption, online publishing should be far better for it.
If you want to be part of discussions with industry leaders like Loren Baker, Brent Csutoras, myself, Katie, Heather, Matt, Roger and the amazing talented team here at SEJ, then check out SEJ Pro and be part of the new community where conversations happen before they become industry news.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
