Everywhere I look, the most interesting work in editing and research is not coming from the big publishers. It comes from individuals.
Do individuals now hold all the power and is the future of content on Substack?
When I spoke recently with Harry Clarkson-Bennett about publishers survive AII put forward the theory about individuals and how, historically, the brand made the journalist, but now the journalist makes the brand. Harry called it the reverse halo effect.
“There was a time when you could work for the Telegraph, the Times, the BBC, whatever, and the brand would elevate you. Whereas I think it would be like the reverse halo effect now. What you would have now is the brand working with the individual.”
Careful consideration of this change applies not only to news publishers, but to all brands, as SEO and AI search depend on the content and publication.
Talent leaves the building
The migration is well underway. Some journalists have been ousted by rounds of budget cuts as publishers’ revenues collapse. Others walked on, choosing Substack because it’s the only place they can produce their best work without an editor, traffic goals, or format that sucks the life out of them.
Paul Krugman left the New York Times after 25 years and now publishes daily on Substack. Jim Acosta left CNN and took his audience with him. Dave Jorgenson grew The Washington Post’s presence on TikTok to nearly 2 million, then left and surpassed his former employer within months.
I see this happening again in our industry with a move to Substack from Kevin Indig, Duane ForresterAnd Harry Clarkson-Bennettalongside others who are leading the way with extensive research and, in some cases, unique data.
In this new ‘reputation, not world ranking‘, it makes me think back to Google’s push for authorship as a ranking and short-term signal Google+. We have the impression that fatherhood has finally come to fruition, albeit in a different way, accelerated by its own means. failure in the fight against spam and with the disruptive launch of LLM chatbots.
Evergreen is no longer a strategy
This fits perfectly into something bigger that I’ve seen crumble in slow motion, which is the evergreen content strategy.
For 25 years, the model was simple. Find keywords with volume, post content that addresses them, and build traffic. It worked well and most publishing businesses were built on this foundation. And then came AI Overview and decimated this strategy almost overnight.
As Duane Forrester said“If your content can be entirely replaced by a summary, it has no moat. The summary becomes the product, and your page becomes the raw material that someone else’s system processes and rejects.”
The Reuters Institute Journalism, Media and Technology Trends and Forecasts Report 2026 found that publishers deprioritize evergreen content by 32 percentage points in favor of original investigations.
Harry Clarkson-Bennett also said: “Evergreen is not dead, but if you are creating content “just for SEO” I would kill it. »
At Search Central Live in TorontoDanny Sullivan pushed the PR message for Google when he defined non-marketable content as unique, specific and authentic, with marketable content being generic, repeatable material that anyone can produce. Commodity, which is anything an AI can put together from public information, and non-commodity content, which requires you to have actually done something, know something first-hand, or have a real opinion based on expertise.
So, the keyword-driven strategy is over and the informational content has been usurped by machines. What do we have left?
Look for real value that demonstrates real expertise. No expertise as EEAT checkbox. Expertise like the product itself.
Expertise doesn’t come with distribution, you have to build it
It’s all well and good to say that you need to create quality content that shows your expertise, but that doesn’t come with a built-in distribution model. Keyword-driven content did it. Publishing strategies now require a direct audience.
Newsletter subscribers, followers, members, people who come looking for you by name. This is why the Substack migration and the death of Evergreen are the same story. Individuals who create direct audiences are not doing so as a branding exercise. They do this because owned distribution is the only distribution that cannot be removed and it is the only way to ensure their visibility for the future.
Condé Nast considers Google Zero. As Harry described it, the idea is not that search traffic will literally reach zero, but that everything they create should still make sense to their audience and their business model, even if it did. This is now the right test for any content investment, whether you are a publisher or a brand.
LLMs can be a vital part of this strategy to support brand awareness and attract readers who want more than the summary. Readers who want more in-depth reading and research.
Stop thinking in linear keywords. Users don’t ask that way.
There is another habit that must accompany the old model: measuring visibility through a keyword lens.
People do not determine how they search in a search engine. They don’t type three words and scroll through 10 links. They have a conversation and ask for solutions. They add context, budget, constraints and follow-ups, and arrive at a conclusion in several rounds. It’s a completely different mindset, and it’s not one that a rank tracking tool can replicate.
Aleyda Solis, who also spoke at Search ‘n Stuff London in Junepublished the most rigorous approach I’ve seen to this problem.
His method is about creating a structured set of realistic prompts, grounded in real audience language from sales calls, reviews, and communities, then running them repeatedly across platforms to find where your brand appears, where it’s lacking, and what sources are shaping responses.
Attribution and measurement in AI search has been the only challenge for SEOs, and the only way to approach it is to step out of conventional thinking when it comes to linear keyword tracking and traffic measurement.
If we survived »(Not provided)” and Google deleting keyword data, which looked like a disaster at the time, we can survive by adapting how we rebuild metrics in this way.
Build around what only you can say
So, back to the question I opened with: Do individuals hold all the power?
Not everything. Brands still have resources, reach, and the ability to showcase their expertise on a scale that no individual can achieve. But the balance has shifted and the direction of travel is unmistakable. Trust is now about people, and the content that wins is the content that could only come from one person, from one set of data, from one set of experiences.
Smart publishers build their schedule around experts in their industry who can demonstrate this practical expertise. Brands have the platform and experts have the product (I’m resisting the use of the word influencer here as much as possible). If brands and individuals can respect and appreciate this partnership, then this relationship should be perfect.
Publishers become the portals and hub for expertise and information, and readers will choose brands that can deliver that expert variety carefully presented directly to them. This is a strategy we built at Search Engine Journal.
This is the brief for every content strategy here. Build around expertise, give your experts a name, a voice and a platform. Measure a direct audience, not borrowed traffic.
I believe that once this disruption is overcome, online publishing should be much better.
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