Kevin's Take

Stop Panicking About LLM Traffic (And Start Worrying About Google's Scroll of Death)

Google's SERP has become a scroll-of-death nightmare. AI Overviews at the top. Then promoted posts. Then maybe some ads. Then more AI-generated content blocks. By the time organic results show up, your prospect is already halfway down the page. Even if you rank number one, you're in the second scroll zone. That's the problem killing your click-through rates, not ChatGPT.

Here's what I'm seeing with our clients: average position holding steady or improving, but traffic declining anyway. Why? Because position one doesn't mean what it used to. Google is monetizing every pixel of real estate above the fold, and organic listings are getting pushed into obscurity.

What You Should Actually Do

Keep investing in SEO. Double down on it, actually. Search volume isn't dropping. Intent-driven traffic is still the highest-converting channel most B2B companies have. But you need to get smarter about three things.

First, start educating yourself on AEO -- Answer Engine Optimization. Yes, it's coming. Yes, it will matter eventually. But treat it like an emerging channel, not a replacement strategy. Experiment with structured data. Test content formats that might get pulled into AI overviews. But don't reorganize your entire content operation around 1% of traffic.

Second, fight harder for visibility in traditional search. That means more aggressive bidding on branded terms. Better featured snippet optimization. Video content that can grab a different SERP position. Anything that gets you visible in that crowded first screen. Third, paid search is still a viable option to get seen. With real estate being at a premium, paying for position is required. And if you aren't paying for it, your competitors sure are. At the end of the day, if you aren't investing in paid search (brand and keyword), you are putting yourself at risk.

The Timing Matters

The Signal

10Fold Research: $1M Marketing Budget Is Now Table Stakes for B2B Growth — 10Fold

Original research from 10Fold shows that 90% of B2B tech companies with $100M+ in revenue now operate with at least $1M in annual marketing spend. The benchmark data reveals that seven-figure marketing budgets have shifted from exceptional to baseline across mid-market technology companies.

Why it matters:If you're running marketing at a $100M-$500M tech company with less than $1M in budget, you're now below the competitive baseline. This isn't about keeping up with the Joneses. It's about having enough fuel to run modern GTM motions across digital, content, events, and sales enablement. Use this data in your next budget conversation. The market just reset what "adequately funded" means.

Software Spend Will Jump 14.7% in 2026 to $1.4 Trillion — SaaStr

Gartner's updated 2026 IT spending forecast shows business software growing 14.7% to reach $1.4 trillion, significantly outpacing overall IT growth at 10.8%. This marks an acceleration from 11.5% software growth in 2025, signaling continued enterprise appetite for new platforms and tools.

Why it matters: Your prospects have budget. Their IT teams have budget. The macro story supports aggressive pipeline targets and deal velocity assumptions for 2026. If you're being conservative with growth plans because you're worried about enterprise spending, this data says otherwise. The money is there. Te question is whether your GTM motion is positioned to grab it before your competitors do.

On Our Radar

Scott Brinker's analysis shows 57% of the highest-rated marketing and sales software solutions are new to the market this year. If your stack feels stale, it's because the category is being rebuilt in real time.

Digiday research found marketers are shifting budget back toward brand in 2026 after revenues fell short of expectations in 2025. The pendulum is swinging away from performance-only strategies, and budgets are still growing despite the miss.

- HubSpot compiled 24 statistics on generative engine optimization that actually matter for marketing leaders. If you're still fuzzy on what GEO is or whether it's real, this is the primer you need. 

FROM THE TRENCHES

Several clients this quarter came to us asking for "nurture campaigns". We pushed back (gently) every time.

The Problem:

These teams wanted traditional drip nurture, automated email sequences triggered by form fills or list uploads. The logic was sound: we have a database, we need to activate it. But traditional nurture is brittle. It doesn't move with accounts that are actually in market. It doesn't adapt to buying signals. And it treats personalization like a mail merge instead of a strategy.

 

The Fix:

Drip nurture certainly has it's place. But more often than not now, we are recommending always-on signal-based outbound instead, built around key moments that matter. In several instances, we are helping to identify the buying signals for each client, funding events, hiring patterns, tech stack changes, content engagement, and wiring those triggers into their outbound motion. Then we layered in real personalization using those signals and synchronized everything with inbound activity and first-party data. The system stays live, adapts to account behavior, and only activates when an account shows intent.

 

The Result:

Higher-performing outbound across the board. Better response rates, shorter sales cycles, and actual pipeline attribution. In some cases, the data points to  3x improvement in meeting-set rates compared to traditional, static nurture programs. Some customers move on to kill their entire MQL nurture track and reallocated budget to signal infrastructure.

 

Read this:  How to Scale B2B Pipeline Without Scaling Headcount: A Signal-Based Outbound Playbook.