Every two weeks in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce. In each edition, we explore…

• The big picture: Algorithm black boxes let no light through  

• Job posts: A potpourri of marketing leadership gigs across AI & more 

• The meme is the message: You guys are getting paid?  

• Cocktail hour: The best at-home espresso martini you’ll ever have

The internet’s entropy era

Last week, Ahrefs content marketing leader Ryan Law did some really good content marketing and put out a 15-word post + screenshot that sent the notoriously combustious SEO internet ablaze. Hubspot, the darling of SEO and brand-owned media, had seen its traffic plummet 75% in the core update carnage. 

In and of itself, the Hubspot story is not that interesting. By most accounts, Hubspot is bleeding traffic largely on pages that were built strictly for esoteric search queries and had an unclear correlation to actually getting people to buy Hubspot. The decline in Hubspot SEO traffic also comes as the stock is up 100% over the last two years near all-time highs, pushing $40B in market cap. You’ll trade visits for dollars any day of the week.

That said, how it all went down reveals much more important truths about the current entropic state of the web.

Paradoxically, Hubspot’s traffic decline is a result of the company doing precisely everything Google asked them to do from ~2010-2022, almost too well. The company played the technical optimization and arbitrage game perfectly and in doing so, started to look more like a standalone media entity or affiliate publisher and less like a SaaS provider to the Google algo eye. 

So when Google came along with the helpful content update jazz to nerf affiliate media in favor of forums and--checks notes-- largely mediocre brand and software company blogs which theoretically reduce friction, Hubspot ironically was a victim and not a beneficiary. By and large, Hubspot lost traffic to other software companies that were a little less good at SEO. 

For the last two decades, SEO was at least a translucent, if often stupid game. Sophisticated practitioners would hustle for backlinks, write for keywords, and partake in all other forms of growth hacker indulgence to please the beast. Sometimes this was silly– which pork chili you cooked for dinner often depended on who wrote a better epoch about Grandpa Vlad wrangling wild boar in the Slovakian wilderness. But we kind of understood how the game worked.

Now, nobody really knows the rules. The algorithmic black box is darker than ever.

Welcome to the internet’s entropy era. Entropy and opaqueness are of course not inherently bad; just because we don’t get how it works doesn’t mean search is worse than what we deem familiar. But it does make critical errors in the machine seem considerably harder to fix.

The hopeful take here is that with the arbitrary guardrails down around how to structure content, “better” pieces that are less methodically SEO optimized will cut through the clutter. Weirder, bolder takes will find a way to bubble the top, whether surfaced by traditional search engines or LLMs.

The less hopeful take is that any semblance of reason in search will be shot to high hell. AI-generated slop that doesn’t honor a monogamous relationship with the truth will answer medical queries. You can almost see both of these narratives struggling against each other across all search engines today. 

If Google is now indecipherable to practitioners who have spent 20 years in the field, how LLMs choose to index content is little more than mysticism. Nobody really knows what type of content archetype, structure, or tone LLMs will gravitate towards. Some people have opinions and quasi-educated guesses. But lest anyone claim to be an LLM expert in our field, China just rendered them impotent by producing a brand new model for the price of a few Juan Soto at-bats.  

Hubspot won by playing SEO Moneyball. Now, you might as well swing for the fences on every pitch and see what the hell happens.  

Head of Product, Minneapolis Star Tribune 

Here’s a chance to lead product for arguably the most digitally innovative newspaper in America. Forward this to a friend in media.

SVP, Commerce & Retail Media, Dentsu 

One of the most respected advertising entities in the world is hiring for a slew of retail media exec roles from SVP all the way on down. Should tell you something about where the proverbial puck is going.

Chief Marketing Officer, Gorgias

Gorgias is a fascinating company in the AI space; it is simultaneously a challenger to massive late-stage CX software like Zendesk and Intercom and a potential incumbent against a wealth of new AI upstarts like Decagon. This will be a fascinating tightrope for a marketing leader to walk but a great CMO opportunity for a company with a stealthy amount of upside.

Business Operations Lead, Decagon 

Speaking of Decagon, they are fresh off a $100M Series A, hiring a ton, and gives “one of the first big AI application layer winners” vibes.

Senior Account Executive, Large Retail Accounts, Shopify

Shopify’s push to further own the enterprise continues, with this job touting a book of business that includes private equity-owned accounts. It can often feel like Shopify already owns the whole commerce world but there is all kinds of territory it has yet to conquer.

Director of Product Marketing, Affirm

Affirm is a quiet fintech comeback story, building a fascinating marketplace and potential retail media business on top of its core BNPL technology. No shortage of new stuff to take to market here.

Growth Marketing Lead, Paxos

Few companies are better positioned to benefit from crypto’s increasing legitimization as much as Paxos, a core infrastructure layer behind many enterprise crypto projects. If you want to do something in crypto that isn’t just based on “number go up”, this is it.

Senior Employee Relations Investigator, OpenAI

Just what kind of extracurricular stuff are they getting up to over there in OpenAI land? :P

The At-Home Espresso Martini 

There are few things in life I like more than an espresso martini. It’s a Four Loko with elegance and panache. I liked them before they were cool, while they were cool, and will love them long after. 

I make a few variations including a hazelnut (ft. Frangelico), a caliente (ft. Ancho Reyes), and an “oh crap, I’m out of coffee liqueur” (which uses a maple liqueur from a distillery in New Hampshire). But for you all, I’m sticking with my classic. Here goes:

• 1 oz vodka

• 1 oz Mr. Black coffee liquor (some notes on this below)

• .25 oz Cometeer condensed ice coffee (more notes on this below)

• 2-3 dashes Black Walnut bitters

• A hint of vanilla extract (hint, ALWAYS get this at Costco. Vanilla has the best economy of scale of any of their packaged goods)

Shake like an absolute maniac and enjoy.

Cometeer is highly concentrated so the flavor here is going to be strong. That’s what you want. You won’t get quite the perfect silky texture you get from using proper espresso but you also won’t have to brew espresso and I think the flavor is even bolder. If you really shake with vigor, it will be close enough texturally to real espresso. 

On the coffee liqueur, St George’s NOLA is by far my favorite for drinking on its own but it isn’t quite sweet enough to cut through here. Kahlua is a garbage sugar bomb syrup. Mr. Black splits the difference for me— too sweet to enjoy neat but perfect at balancing all the flavors in this drink.

Have three of these tonight and write your memoirs.