Ready Is a Binary; Decay Has An Address
Every channel is failing everywhere all at once. AI visibility looks like the cure. It's a small patch on a much bigger shift
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Google answers the question itself now, so website click through fell from 15% to 8%.¹ Meta is all doomscrolling. Conversion fell 11% and the cost of an actual lead rose 21%.² Trust in influencers seems to be declining by the day.³
Marketing has been engaged in whack-a-mole for years. Every algorithm change starts learning over. Every new tool arrives dressed as a solve but sends us down tactical rabbit holes. Eighty-one percent of marketers say they’re making more content than last year, seventy percent are making it with fewer resources, and more than half never use a third of what they produce.⁴
Marketing: the industry, the craft, the revenue generator -- whatever it is to you, whatever role you play in it -- the dread we feel as we open up our dashboards is increasing and seemingly universal. CMO tenure now runs a full year shorter than the rest of the C-suite, and the job keeps getting absorbed into chief revenue, chief commercial and chief customer roles.⁵
LLM visibility looks like a knight in shining armor. Get found inside the answer! The internet is being rewritten for bots and agents, and there’s an entire vendor category riding that horse into your inbox right now.
But, every dollar spent being legible to the machine is a dollar and an hour and a set of resources not spent on something that compounds. Visibility rents you a slot. When you stop paying, you stop appearing. It’s the same deal performance marketing offered, wearing new armor. And it’s not going to end better.
No Guts
Early in my career I sat in rooms with data scientists, product, and even legal, fighting over the weight of one variable against another as we built models out loud and collectively. Somebody defended a weighting, somebody else (respectfully) took it apart. We came out with a deeply nuanced understanding of our customers: who they were, what they wanted, why they behaved the way they did. I co-authored a patent. Me. A director in marketing responsible for the brand, not the data science. That was business as usual (at least the arguing part was).
At my next job, running marketing at a DTC start up, targeting was the algorithm’s business. Nobody expected me to have a point of view. In fact, it felt actively discouraged. The platforms would tell me who my customers were. My questions seemed to strike folks as... quaint. I wish I’d trusted my brain, my experience, and my gut. But, at least I have the hindsight.
The Second Shoe
A decade ago we gave away understanding the consumer and owning the customer. What’s on the table now is the person herself.
The agent does the searching, the comparing, and the buying. Twenty or thirty touchpoints of a purchase are compressed into a prompt and an API call. Brands get an order, not even the transaction. And, you don’t get to know why you won or lost any of it. The entire middle of the funnel, the part where someone decided they wanted you, is being handled by something that will never tell you what happened in there.
The knight is riding in to save an ecosystem in genuine distress but he’s armed for the wrong fight. Visibility inside the answer is worth having but nobody can reliably sell you how to get there. The tactic pushed hardest as table stakes, llms.txt, showed no correlation with AI citations across 300,000 domains.⁶ And, while you’re spending capital, human resources and tokens on being findable, everything else keeps sliding away.
Where Are You Losing Ground?
The market keeps asking brands if they’re ready. Ready for agentic commerce, of course. Somebody will sell you an answer but readiness is the wrong question. Readiness is somewhere you arrive. What’s happening to brands is decay.
Brands are losing ground in five places:
How you’re found.
How you’re compared.
Why you’re chosen.
What you own underneath the sale.
Who owns the customer after the box arrives.
The rate of loss depends on what you find underneath those pillars.
Channels you own compound over time, others stop working the day you stop paying rent. Most brands fund both without thinking one should have a different velocity. Some customers will keep choosing you on purpose. Others were always going to take whatever’s cheapest. Most brands don’t parse their audience that way anymore and, instead, defend both equally. Some partnerships would give you access or differentiation you couldn’t build alone with all the money in the world; but those feel like risky bets next to the tidy costs of another quarter of AEO retainer spend.
Magical Thinking → Critical Thinking
Everything you’re handed now is a black box. The algorithm decides and doesn’t tell you why (where, how, or anything else). The attribution report hands you a number you can’t check. The visibility vendor sells a score with three decimal places and an opaque proprietary method. Accept it or reject it -- that’s the whole menu. We have more marketing data than any generation before us and less ability to understand, let alone argue, with a single fact in it. We’ve had to believe it’s all magic.
Measuring decay, instead, requires a return to critical thinking. Take one piece of it: what you own upon receipt. Think about the experience of a new customer when your product was served up, not chosen. Think about the role of the install experience, the unboxing, the places where texture appears. How can we generate the kind of heat that might result in a brand being regarded, remembered, reordered.
Consider it, debate it, reimagine it. Or, decide that’s not where you’re going to make your mark. The understanding, consideration, and the discussion are the point. It’s raucous. It can even be fun.
What you get out the other side of the analysis is a sentence that travels: we are losing position with buyers at roughly this speed, fastest in these two places, and here is the evidence. That’s depreciation -- an asset being consumed faster than it’s replaced. Not a plea to believe in brand. A translation into the only language the rest of the building already speaks.
Save Yourselves
No one is riding in. Not the visibility vendor, not the next tool, not the dashboard you already stopped trusting.
Figure out where your brand leverage has moved and how fast and get yourself a map of what to protect, what to let go, and where the next dollar compounds instead of evaporating.
NOTES
Pew Research Center, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” July 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
WordStream/LocaliQ, “Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2025,” September 2025. https://www.wordstream.com/blog/facebook-ads-benchmarks-2025
Ad Standards with Caddle, “Attitudes Towards Influencer Marketing,” February 2026. https://adstandards.ca/wp-content/uploads/Caddle-Ad-Standards-Influencer-Marketing-Report-2025.pdf
XR and MX8 Labs, “State of Ad Ops,” June 2026. https://ppc.land/98-of-marketers-launch-campaigns-late-70-go-over-budget-xr-study-finds/
Spencer Stuart, “CMO Tenure 2026: Snapshot of an Expanding Role for Marketing Leaders,” January 2026. https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/cmo-tenure-2026-snapshot-of-an-expanding-role-for-marketing-leaders
Search Engine Journal, “llms.txt Shows No Clear Effect On AI Citations, Based On 300K Domains,” 2026. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/llms-txt-shows-no-clear-effect-on-ai-citations-based-on-300k-domains/561542/
Super interesting pov as always!