Zero Clicks #6: The LLMedium is the message

Every week in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce.

SEO is dead… or so says the thinkboi-industrial complex, which has moved on to romanticizing a new concept called large language model optimization or LLMO. The concept is exactly as it sounds— optimizing content to be discovered and cited by both LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, plus search interfaces built on top of those LLMs like Perplexity. It’s an interesting idea that has gained new steam with the release of Hubspot’s AI Search Grader.

But let’s pump the brakes for a second. For most marketing and media leaders, obsessing over LLMO has the energy of the broke man who is really worried about unrealized capital gains taxes on households with >$100M net worth. The notion that AI will kill conventional SEO anytime soon is nonsense, systematically debunked nicely here by Daydream founder Thenuka Karunaratne.

For now, the term LLMO is simply a dinner bell that immediately summons a couple of hundred Accenture consultants eager to feast on the insecurities of FORTUNE 1000 marketing leaders. While Open AI and Anthropic are hemorrhaging billions of dollars, large consulting firms are absolutely printing money from the Gen AI boom.

Even though the timeline is greatly exaggerated by thirsty HubSpot product marketers and consultants, large language model optimization will slowly start to creep into marketing strategy. This raises an interesting question with massive macro ramifications for the future of the internet.

Will optimizing for discoverability by LLMs create a better or worse information ecosystem than the one created by 25+ years of search engine optimization?

The question is particularly pertinent as we currently live in the golden era of slop, best defined by Packy McCormick in his “Make The Internet Fun Again” essay:

"Slop is the newly popular term for the garbage you see in tweets, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and websites more broadly that is so superficial, mediocre, and banal that the only reason people could possibly create it is to drive some metric they’re optimizing for: likes, views, clicks, whatever.

When algorithms embrace the dogshit, or the dogshit contorts itself to please the algorithm, the whole visible internet turns to dogshit. Good content and good businesses get drowned out by good optimizers, and that’s bad for us all."

Google’s market dominance is the single most important variable in the mass proliferation of slop. While SEO isn’t inherently a bad concept or industry, I shudder to think about how many articles and blog posts were made narratively worse to index on Google. So much of the craft of writing over the past two decades has been sacrificed on the Google guillotine.

Thus, ultimately it’s not the medium of search that matters here so much as the sheer introduction of competition. So long as there are one or two Leviathan players who dominate search, an inordinate amount of brainpower will be spent trying to game their algorithm, regardless of whether their form factor is blue links or AI-powered synopses.

But if LLMs can lead to a verticalization of search, slop will lose a considerable amount of power. Imagine a world in which there are even 5+ search interfaces that command significant market share. Each has its own proprietary algorithms, interfaces, and definitions of what constitutes “helpful content.”

In that world, what the hell do you even optimize for? In that world, good content drowns out good optimizers, which is great for us all.

Senior Director, Head of Trading, Dotdash Meredith 

Sitting in the D/Cipher ecosystem, this role reads a lot more like an executive position at a technology platform than a publisher but… that’s the point.

If the era of mass-scale digital media is to survive in any form, it’s going to have to combine cookieless targeting capabilities with clear and obvious intent. Among the massive holding companies, DDM is best positioned for this future… even if D/Cipher feels like it should be an extension of a retail media network. But as far as media execution gigs go, it’s hard to imagine one more intellectually stimulating than this.

Director, Product Marketing, ILIA Beauty

I’m fascinated by the trend of great consumer brands hiring product marketing leads. In an era of hyper-commodified growth marketing tactics, nailing the minutiae of product positioning is paramount and is where the best talent will be deployed.

ILIA has long been both a product and marketing pioneer– its former and current digital leads are the best in the game. This is a 99th percentile commerce opportunity.

Growth Manager, Create Wellness

It’s impossible to imagine an archetype of a brand better positioned to grow in this market than Create. The company commands a premium price point, is a naturally quotidian subscription product, rides the coattails of (or is perhaps accelerating?) massive adoption of creatine by laypeople, and features a founder with a built-in distribution advantage (Dan McCormick edits Not Boring, his brother’s enormously popular tech newsletter that I referenced above).

On the heels of a $5M funding round from Unilever Ventures, the company is adding a few key team members in New York across levels. The job I’ve highlighted here is for the person with their hands on the keys of all growth channels– the best school of hard knocks in all of marketing.