Optimize for Influence, Not Traffic | Matt Fish Freelance Marketing Consulting

In marketing, optimizing for traffic used to be more than enough. It used to signal success. Now, going down that same path will hold you back.

For most of my marketing career, I lived by three words: publish, rank, compound. It was essentially that simple. Back then, organic search rewarded quality and consistency, with returns that genuinely stacked up over time.

A solo operator with a clear point of view and a consistent cadence could reach the same audience as a Fortune 500 campaign. No ad budget. No PR retainer. Just well-written, optimized content that you pushed out on a consistent schedule.

That model made SEO a profession, content marketing a department, and traffic the high-level number that justified budget spend, not to mention raises and promotions.

That model is breaking down. The underlying infrastructure that made it work has been deliberately dismantled and will eventually disappear completely.

This post makes the case for what’s replacing it, and what building for the replacement actually requires in practice.

Why the Traffic Model Worked

For about two decades, traffic earned its trust as a metric for good reasons.

It was a legible proxy. It correlated with awareness, which in turn eventually correlated with pipeline. The chain was long and imprecise, but it held reliably enough for long enough that optimizing for traffic was a defensible bet.

Crucially, it was the only reliable way to reach a large audience without paying for every impression.

The rules were also clear enough to build a discipline and career around. You knew what good organic performance looked like. You could benchmark it, forecast it, and defend it in meetings with executives. That clarity matters when you have to scale quickly.

When finance asks what marketing produces, you need a number, and, for a long, long time, traffic was that number.

Why the Traffic Model Broke

In the past few years, Google’s implicit contract with publishers has collapsed.

The arrangement used to be: rank in search, get found. Publishers created the content inventory. Google sent the traffic. Publishers earned ad revenue when readers arrived. Google got the content that made its index valuable.

Both sides had a reason to maintain the relationship.

That arrangement has been replaced with a system that extracts user-generated content, synthesizes it into AI-generated answers, and routes the vast majority of clicks to properties Google benefits from financially.

Publishers now provide training data to the world’s most popular search engine, not helpful content that’s listed in an equal-opportunity index. The clicks that used to come from SERPs go elsewhere.

Every other owned distribution mechanism has or is drifting in the same direction:

Meaningful social reach requires paid amplification.
Email open rates are eroding as inboxes get smarter.
Content earns far fewer clicks when the answer surfaces above the fold (increasingly without a link attached).

The harder realization is what the collapse reveals about traffic itself: that it was always downstream of influence.

You could generate and scale traffic for a long time through technical optimization, keyword targeting, and volume, but what were they measuring beyond supposedly causal links?

As AI proliferation has proven, all those blog post views were, in many ways, empty-calorie interactions with your brand.

The question is no longer whether to beef up your content’s influence. It is how quickly you can make the shift. As Databox CEO Peter Caputa put it in his excellent newsletter post recently: “What works in each of these channels now depends on other people.”

When the channel controls distribution and extracts your content without routing the traffic, optimizing for that channel is the wrong problem to solve.

The right one? Building the thing traffic was always measuring: people who know your name before they ever search it.

Why Influence Is the Right Replacement

Before the internet made traffic measurable, B2B and B2C purchases depended on brand reputation.

Campaigns ran (and relied) on referrals, analyst relationships, and, most importantly, word of mouth from other buyers. The internet didn’t change how decisions got made. It just gave us a proxy metric we could optimize for.

When closed-loop attribution became standard in the mid-2010s, the definition of what counted as marketing narrowed dramatically. If you couldn’t tie a specific click to a specific contact record or closed deal, it effectively didn’t count.

I’ve worked on marketing teams that, unfortunately, suppressed legitimately great campaign ideas because the results wouldn’t be measurable to that degree. Success wouldn’t look neat and tidy in a PowerPoint, so it got cut.

But the reality is, influence shows up in the moments that move pipeline the most:

Someone describes your product to a colleague without being asked or paid to do so.
A partner independently publishes a case study about what they built on top of your platform.
A practitioner includes you in their tool stack post because you genuinely solved a problem.
A buyer searches your brand name because they heard it mentioned three times in the past month from people they trust.

None of those are “traffic events.” They may become traffic through branded searches or direct URL visits, but what converts those follow-up events into pipeline is influence. Nothing else.

This distinction matters most in B2B SaaS, where a single sale requires six to ten stakeholders to have encountered your name from sources they trust before a rep gets a first meeting.

In that scenario, influence doesn’t close deals. It creates the conditions under which deals become closeable.

The funnel this model implies looks like this:

Top: Impressions and engagement earned through other people’s channels (partners, advocates, media, community, etc.).
Middle: Branded search volume, the compounding signal that influence is converting into legitimate buyer intent.
Bottom: Revenue, the only measure of marketing performance, and I don’t care who says otherwise.

What I’ve noticed lately is that branded searches — the signal that will quickly replace other metrics by which MQLs have historically been graded — have gone up by noticeable margins. Other topical searches? Crashing and burning, and will continue to do so.

Rand Fishkin frames the argument at the channel level:

“AI is, statistically, the least trusted, most hated technology of our lifetimes, but popular sentiment is doing nothing to halt its progress among the tech, business, and finance elite. Google’s embraced it whole-hog, and may even be willing to sacrifice their core ad revenue (through reduced clicks and CTR) to promote a world in which they and they alone own your Internet experience. Google no longer wants to be the gateway to the web. They want to be the web. And they may just have the power to force it down the throats of even the skeptical and unwilling billions of Internet users who hate AI, don’t trust Google, but cave to convenience.”

The solution is clear: stop optimizing for the channel and start building the conditions that make people talk about you without being asked.

How Do You Build Influence Now?

Here are four crucial steps I believe brands must take to overcome the soon-to-be-extinct traffic from search engine referrals.

The good news: You can apply them with what are essentially old-school advertising rules.

You’ll see what I mean:

Build a product worth talking about

It should go without saying, but the greatest equalizer in the world is a world-class UX, rather than keyword stuffing or SERP hacks.

In the post-SEO world, the prerequisite for influence will be a product with benefits and scope specific enough that describing it not only delights whoever is listening but also reflects well on the person describing it.

Copy-paste SaaS products or services will quickly become obsolete as AI usage and sophistication continue to skyrocket. End users can already build live artifacts, real-time dashboards, and mini-apps on their AI platform of choice.

Why would they pay you even more money to use yours?

To successfully answer that question, your product needs to land on solid ground against three criteria: what you can legitimately deliver (not just flap your gums about delivering), what the market currently fails to offer, and what buyers urgently need.

The intersection is where unparalleled experiences will surface. If a competitor can replicate it or an AI answer can summarize it, your ambition is too small. Expand it before investing further in distribution.

This is all as much a marketing question as a product question, and those two departments should collaborate on a genuine long-term answer, not just window dressing.

If the honest answer to “Would someone describe this to a friend without being asked?” is no, the solution isn’t hiding in the content calendar.

Design every statement for other people’s mouths

The test for whether an idea or commodity is memorable is whether someone is able to rattle off its benefits to a friend or colleague without being prompted (or, let’s be honest, trapped on a demo call with them).

In other words, teams must build towards the moment when a prospect or customer says, “You have to check this out.”

That requires something specific enough to be noticed, different enough that the description doesn’t collapse into some version of “it’s like [insert competitor here] but a bit better/cheaper,” and valuable enough that passing it on also makes the referrer look like a hero.

Think of movie quotes. Pre-Internet, pre-franchisization of everything, you heard about cult classics or sleeper hits on DVD through (here we are again) word of mouth and, more precisely, friends who wouldn’t stop quoting a movie you hadn’t seen at you. That’s what happened with Anchorman, Borat, and on and on.

Through their influence, you knew you just had to be in on the experience, and that feeling made you shell out for a ticket or a rental. It’s human nature, and it’s not that complicated.

Influence, as it turns out, is never one-way traffic, either. It’s a circular, perpetual motion.

Make branded search your primary health metric

The next obvious question, given how laser-focused you should be on your brand’s influence in the marketplace, is how to measure it. For web-related queries, that means optimizing for branded searches rather than traffic.

This reasoning is fueled by several realities:

As your supporter community grows, so too will prospects not as familiar checking out your brand online. They have no idea what you offer or how you can help them specifically, but they’ve heard of you, and that’s what matters as a first step.
If AI overviews and citations don’t have a more precise reference, they tend to serve your homepage as a source for whatever branded response is generated in a conversation with an end user. This reality can be used to your advantage.
Branded traffic typically converts at a much higher rate than non-branded traffic, which brings us back to the idea of blog views as vanity numbers. More and more people are getting the information from your top-of-funnel content through AI summaries, rather than reading anything themselves.

To view branded searches, open Google Search Console and pull your branded query impressions for the last 90 days. That number is your influence baseline. Set a monthly tracking cadence and treat flat or declining branded search as a pipeline warning.

If you’re publishing consistently and branded search is not growing, the gap is upstream. Word of mouth is not converting. Partners are not amplifying. Community presence is thin.

Logically, the fix can’t be more of the same. Instead, you should consider a shift in the narrative about why they’re looking you up in the first place.

Publish to anchor influence

Relatedly, publishing volume no longer matters, or at least not in the way that it used to.

You should still publish as often as you can, but the E-E-A-T quality considerations must take precedence over just getting as many shots up as you possibly can.

If you can’t have both, prioritize quality.

What that means in practice will depend on your brand’s goals. Just know that publishing volume is only part of the equation, regardless of what you’re writing about. You also need to invest the time in distribution (i.e., repurposing content across different platforms and mediums).

For each piece you do publish, ask one question before it goes live: Will a practitioner cite this, share it in a channel, or build on it? If the honest answer is no, go back to the drawing board.

The worst thing you can do in the new world of AI-first influence is assuming that copy-pasting the same content that targets the same keywords will get you to this reframed goal. Trust me, it won’t.

The formats that still compound are deep guides that earn AI citations, email-distributed posts that reach an audience already paying attention, and high-specificity pieces that solve a real problem well enough that practitioners share them without being asked.

Everything else fills a calendar and earns nothing. Don’t get yourself caught on that hamster wheel. Publish less, distribute more deliberately, and let your advocates lead the amplification.

What This Requires Organizationally

The reframe has no teeth without legitimate, all-hands-on-deck structural change.

Four shifts that matter:

Marketing and product share the advocacy brief. If the product isn’t generating unprompted mention, marketing cannot fix that with content. “Are people talking about us without being asked?” belongs in product reviews, not just campaign postmortems.
Partnership programs get resourced as marketing infrastructure. Not sales support. Not a fallback for a team that missed quota. The partner program is where influence scales. It requires dedicated investment, co-marketing channels, and a clear reason for partners to build rather than just resell.
Reporting evolves to capture influence signals. Branded search volume growth. Partner-sourced pipeline. Share of voice in relevant communities. Unsolicited mentions in industry publications. These sit alongside conversion metrics. They require leadership conviction to fund because they won’t appear clean in a last-click attribution model.
Content shifts from volume to depth and longevity. Fewer pieces. Longer shelf life. Distributed through owned channels and partner networks rather than optimized for crawlers that increasingly won’t deliver traffic anyway.

None of this will happen in 24 or 48 hours. Influence accumulates the way trust accumulates, through repeated contact with something worth talking about, distributed by people with something to lose if the recommendation is wrong.

That’s slower than publishing a content calendar. It’s also harder to reverse-engineer, which is the entire point.

We, as marketers, spent two decades chasing one or more numbers that were nothing more than proxies for something deeper.

Traffic told us people were finding us. Influence tells us people are looking for us because someone they trust said our name before we ever reached them.

One is a channel metric. The other is a market position. Build for the latter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is traffic dead?

No. Traffic is still a downstream outcome worth measuring as a secondary window into prospect behavior. That said, chasing traffic through volume publishing and technical SEO is less effective than it once was. Building influence through partnerships, community, and word of mouth drives branded search volume, direct visits, and more qualified inbound leads.

What is the fastest way to build influence in a new category?

Partners and community move faster than content. Find ten practitioners who already have credibility with your target audience and give them something worth building on top of. A case study from a credible practitioner carries more weight than a hundred optimized posts because it’s someone else’s reputation on the line when they publish it.

How do you measure influence without a large budget?

Start with branded search volume in Google Search Console. Track month-over-month growth. Monitor unsolicited mentions in relevant communities: Slack groups, Reddit threads, LinkedIn comments. Count partner-sourced deals in your CRM. These are imperfect signals, but they’re more directionally accurate than pageviews.

Does this mean stopping SEO investment?

Only if you’re treating SEO as a traffic machine. The parts of SEO that still compound are the ones that earn citations: authoritative content practitioners reference, deep guides that surface in AI-generated answers, and brand building that drives branded search directly. Technical optimization also helps, but they matter less than producing something people actually cite.