The beau­ty of contradictions

Robots are not that alive and search engines are not that dead

As Rory Suther­land often says, it makes sense to look for things that don’t. 

We’re liv­ing in stu­pid times and it’s very hard for any­one run­ning a busi­ness to sep­a­rate truth from fan­dom, oppor­tu­ni­ty from hype, opti­mism from wish­ful think­ing, and fear-mon­ger­ing from fact-based con­cerns. We need to train our­selves to question.

Truth is usu­al­ly some­where in the mid­dle. There are two ubiq­ui­tous top­ics you’ll find in any 2025 pre­dic­tion from every tech bro, dig­i­tal prophet, fear­mon­ger or doom­say­er out there. Let’s find the (mid­dle) ground in all that hot air.

Pre­dic­tions & con­tra­dic­tions 1: AI or Die

Since Chat­G­PT entered our lives we’ve been immersed in this mantra-like obses­sion about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and a future that will leave us behind unless we change, right now, by adopt­ing all of their tools, regard­less of their util­i­ty, or else. This is not about tech­nol­o­gy. It’s about mon­ey, pow­er, and grow­ing the Ponzi Scheme before investors find out. I’ll prove it to you easily. 

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, Arti­fi­cial gen­er­al intel­li­gence (AGI) is a type of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) that match­es or sur­pass­es human cog­ni­tive capa­bil­i­ties across a wide range of cog­ni­tive tasks. That’s an out­stand­ing achieve­ment. Almost god-like, if you want to delve into the philo­soph­i­cal ram­i­fi­ca­tions (I won’t).

Do Microsoft or Ope­nAI share that def­i­n­i­tion? That ambi­tious, piv­otal mile­stone in human history?

If they were sell­ing 100B of fid­get spin­ners, they’d call it break­through tech. It’s just mon­ey. It’s a rigged game.

It’s a race for dom­i­na­tion based on lies, loss­es, lob­by­ing and leapfrog­ging from one fool to the next. 

We’re pour­ing 500B into a com­pa­ny that’s not mak­ing mon­ey at all and call­ing it ​“growth”.

Pre­dic­tions from big dogs like PwC’s might end up being cor­rect, but as of today, there are way too many ​“will”, ​“might”, ​“could” and ​“has the poten­tial to”. It will be hard for you to find a seri­ous study (not an adver­to­r­i­al) com­par­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty before and after. Until then, it’s all aspirational.

Buu­u­ut…

At the same time, we can’t ignore the fact that all of these large scale foun­da­tion mod­els are eff­ing amaz­ing. It’s much more inter­est­ing to research con­ver­sa­tion­al­ly via Per­plex­i­ty than to enter stuff on Google (more on that in a minute) and have to find your way around a dozen arti­cles. Deal­ing with spread­sheets, sort­ing data, com­bin­ing options, research­ing, test­ing, proof­read­ing. The appli­ca­tions are almost count­less. We use it every day for pret­ty much any­thing except, sur­pris­ing­ly(?), con­tent generation. 

Any­one with­out a tech­ni­cal back­ground can start join­ing dots with no-code plat­forms like N8N and build their own, very tai­lored appli­ca­tions that are unique for their needs and ways of work­ing. We’ll see AI being applied dif­fer­ent­ly to each ver­ti­cal. Sup­ply chain man­age­ment is already feed­ing huge amounts of data for AI to pro­vide improve­ments that can move the nee­dle through opti­miza­tion and per­for­mance and/​or cost reduc­tion. These are excit­ing and fun times, too.

So yes, to everything:

• This tech­nol­o­gy is here to stay
• We need to adapt to it and adopt it as soon as possible
• We need to learn how to nav­i­gate the non­sense tsuna­mi we live in
• And we shouldn’t expect it to be a life-chang­ing tech that will help you con­quer your market

It might be. We just don’t know yet. 

Pre­dic­tions & con­tra­dic­tions 2: Search Engines are dead

Some even say con­tent strat­e­gy is dead. 

Check this screen­shot (source) from Ryan Law. Hub­spot, the absolute king of con­tent, the coin­ers of the ​“inbound” term, are wit­ness­ing their organ­ic traf­fic plum­met from a peak 6M ses­sions to 800k. 

There are many fac­tors that con­tribute to this down­fall of content.

1. Google sucks. Big time.
2. Also Google doesn’t care about you, your con­tent, if it’s good and rel­e­vant, and if it should, pure­ly based on its mer­its, be shown to the end vis­i­tor. It cares about push­ing ads, because they rep­re­sent +70% of its rev­enue. It’s not mak­ing more mon­ey because it’s bet­ter, or peo­ple use Google now more than ten years ago. It’s just because it’s more inva­sive and expen­sive, all at the expense of your content’s best interest.
3. Add AI research to the mix. Top of fun­nel con­tent tends to be very eas­i­ly and impar­tial­ly resolved by Chat­G­PT, Per­plex­i­ty, Claude, or what­ev­er your favorite chat­bot is. Users are los­ing a rea­son to drill down into the answers and vis­it a website.
4. And very much in tune with the ​“two oppos­ing ideas can be right” mantra, AI is also mess­ing with every­thing as com­pa­nies are irre­spon­si­bly falling into spam tech­niques of all sorts and pub­lish­ing lit­er­al­ly mil­lions of pieces of crap, auto­mat­ed con­tent on a dai­ly basis. The Dead Inter­net The­o­ry is no longer a theory. 

And yet! Noth­ing is ever that simple.

• Tim Soulo from Ahrefs shows us where the miss­ing traf­fic went. So Hub­spot is screwed by the cur­rent state of things, yes. But it’s also los­ing fights with oth­er brands doing a bet­ter job at con­tent, fair and square.
• Peter Capu­ta from Data­box shows us how traf­fic gen­er­at­ed from AI search results are mean­ing­less.
• And Mr. Law comes back to rethink his own post and bring some sense into the discussion.

And once you read it all, the con­clu­sion is simple: 

The days of hav­ing ​“easy-ish” #1 key­words are over. Google is not a reli­able chan­nel. We’ve known that for a long time. Any busi­ness that’s based on some­one else’s busi­ness is aware that’s a lia­bil­i­ty. Oth­er than that, noth­ing changes. Good con­tent is a must-have. It’s just busi­ness. And sales. And rela­tion­ships. And you need to have a voice, and com­mu­ni­cate it effec­tive­ly, and have some shit to say. The old black. The always black.

SEO will get hard­er but will still be there. Incen­tives are a very tricky thing, and you can rest assured that Google doesn’t want you to take your mon­ey else­where, so this will con­tin­ue to change. 

It’s not ​“the death of…” any­thing. It’s just ebbs and flows. 

Sim­ple. Qui­et. Good work.

For SMBs the only way to grow is through con­sis­ten­cy. There’s only so much you can do at the same time. And tech­nol­o­gy can reach incred­i­ble veloc­i­ty, but our abil­i­ty to adopt and learn new tricks is limited. 

• Take ​“dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion” (what­ev­er that means) seri­ous­ly. Not as a start and end project, but as a prac­tice. Prac­tice, adop­tion and evo­lu­tion.
• Don’t let tech folks sell you bloat­ed tools you don’t need, or mag­i­cal solu­tions that promise things they can’t prove. Demand case stud­ies and take the time to make sure that’s exact­ly what you’re look­ing for.
• Pick one or two things. Try them on pilot pro­grams. Mea­sure results. Then scale. Don’t get into a 2‑year ​“any-ERP-brand”inte­gra­tion night­mare just because ​“they have new AI tools” or ​“my com­peti­tor has it”. Some­times your com­peti­tors are just morons and you’re bet­ter off doing nothing.
• And build great con­tent. Will it work on Google? I don’t know. But it will help you estab­lish your posi­tion in the mar­ket, cre­ate trust with your ide­al cus­tomers, and pro­vide tools to your sales team to get results.

It’s bud­get time!

Quick fig­ures in case they can help as you jot num­bers for the year:

• Your mar­ket­ing bud­get should stay around 10% of your rev­enue. If you’re bold­er or grow­ing fast, that’s great. If you had a dis­ap­point­ing 2024, that’s even a stronger rea­son to pro­tect that 10%.
• Not hav­ing a mar­ket­ing bud­get or hav­ing one under 7% is equal­ly use­less to gen­er­ate business.
• Rough­ly 40% of that bud­get goes into salaries (in-house, free­lancers, out­sourced, it’s the same thing — people’s time you have to pay for)
• Sales and tech­nol­o­gy expens­es are part of the mar­ket­ing bud­get. This leads to a big­ger con­ver­sa­tion, also for anoth­er day: Mar­ket­ing and Sales should be the same team.

Just hang on in there

As is often the case, the only way out is through. Of course, if you need help mak­ing plans and set­ting pri­or­i­ties, you can con­sid­er our Blue­print ser­vice.