Partner | Klaviyo

Must-read industry content

The Great Blogging Collapse: Read this full article!

This analysis of 100 once-successful blogs found the median site lost 85% of its organic traffic between 2022 and 2026, highlighting how Google's updates and AI Overviews have upended the traditional SEO-driven blogging model. It's not all bad news and shows what thriving blogs are doing to grow.

Scalable Detection of Adversarial Synthetic Slop and Coordinated Media Abuse: Cool research from Google.

Platforms are getting better at identifying AI content, even when each piece looks unique. Using AI to churn out content at scale is risky, as detection systems evolve beyond duplicate-content checks to evaluate behavior, originality, and coordination patterns.

Creator Partnerships Must Now Be Part of Your B2B Content Strategy

Search used to mean typing something into Google and clicking a blue link.

Now it means a bunch of things: asking ChatGPT a question, scrolling TikTok, or checking what a subreddit says before you buy anything.

And the content that appears across the web has almost nothing to do with your on-site blog copy anymore (this doesn't mean abandon your company blog, though).

But here's what’s changed and why investing in creator partnerships is essential to your B2B content marketing strategy right now.

Google stopped trusting brands the way it used to

Reddit is the biggest tell here. One report found the platform's US search visibility nearly tripled in a year. Another found its traffic jumped 39% year over year, driven almost entirely by Google surfacing more forum threads for the same queries that previously returned branded landing pages.

Reddit now appears in the "Discussions and Forums" section (which you see well before organic listings) for the vast majority of product review searches.

One analysis showed that Discussions and Forums appear in 77% of product search queries, with Reddit appearing in nearly all of them.

What does this tell content marketers? Someone Googling "best running shoes for flat feet" is now more likely to land on a thread full of strangers arguing about Brooks versus Hoka than on a brand's own buying guide. Google decided real people talking is more useful than brands talking about themselves.

And Reddit was just the opening move. Google has been indexing social platforms more deeply across the board, surfacing posts, videos, and discussions from LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram directly inside search results, meaning your LinkedIn updates and YouTube videos can now show up on page one right alongside your website.

Google made the "creator" part explicit in June 2026, launching Search profiles, which are dedicated, claimable pages within Search for creators with real followings on YouTube, Instagram, X, or TikTok so their work gets surfaced as its own trusted source.

LLMs pull from an entirely different playbook

If you thought AI search would at least behave like old Google, it doesn't. Research on ChatGPT citation patterns found the vast majority of what gets cited comes from pages that don't even rank in the top 20 on Google. Domain authority barely matters. What matters is whether the content answers a specific question clearly enough for an AI system to lift and attribute it.

And informational content earns roughly six times more citations than promotional content, according to one industry analysis of citation patterns across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Guess what informational, non-salesy, "here's what actually happened when I tried this" content sounds like?

A creator talking about a product.

People search in many places other than Google

This is the part that should really get content marketers paying attention. Adobe's 2026 research found 49% of US consumers have used TikTok as a search engine. Gen Z users say video tutorials, product reviews, and influencer recommendations are what they're actually looking for when they search there.

And it's not staying contained to TikTok. Google itself now folds TikTok videos, YouTube Shorts, Reddit threads, and Instagram posts directly into its own results. Search Engine Land has been tracking this as "social search visibility. This is the idea that a single piece of creator content can now show up in three places at once: on the platform itself, inside Google's results, and as a source an AI system pulls from when generating an answer.

The platforms just confirmed it themselves, and Kaleigh Moore named it

If you want proof this isn't just content professionals reading tea leaves, look at what Google and LinkedIn shipped this spring.

Kaleigh Moore laid out the timeline for us in early June. Between May 6 and June 10, Google updated AI Mode and AI Overviews to name the actual person behind cited social posts and forum threads (complete with names, handles, and communities) and rolled out features like Preferred Source badges and Highly Cited labels that reward original, trusted voices.

Moore calls this the Source Signal Stack: the farther a signal sits from the brand, the more weight it carries. A company blog matters, but an executive publishing under their own name carries more credibility, while an independent creator, analyst, or forum expert carries even more because those signals are harder to manufacture.

So what does this mean for how you build content strategy?

Brand-published content still matters. Someone still has to own the facts, the framework, the definitive version of the story. But if that's the only layer of your content strategy, you're optimizing for a search environment that no longer exists.

Creator marketing isn't the awareness play you budget for after the "real" content strategy is done. It's the layer that gets you cited in an AI Overview, shows up in a Reddit thread Google decided to trust, and answers the question someone typed into TikTok instead of Google. Brands that are only investing in their own owned content are increasingly invisible in the places where their audience is asking questions.

If your 2026 content plan doesn't have a creator layer built in, it's missing the layer doing most of the heavy lifting right now.