Noise vs signal: AI in marketing
Essay June 19, 2026

Noise vs signal: AI in marketing

In 2023, Coinbase put out a report with a big number: more than half the Fortune 100 were building blockchain projects. It sounded like the future was already here. A few years later, almost none of it shipped. Try naming one.

That’s how a hype cycle works. Everyone is building, almost nothing lands, and there’s a lot of noise in the middle.

We’re in the AI version of that now. Same headlines, just louder. AI will take your job, your agency, your whole team by Friday. The layoff posts are the loudest. A company cuts costs, blames AI in the press release, and it spreads. Some of it is real. A lot of it is just a story that makes a cost decision sound clever. Easy to repeat, hard to check. That’s noise, and it tells you nothing about your own work.

So I stopped reading predictions and looked at what AI has already changed. Not next year. Now. Things you can see in your own numbers this month.

1. People stopped searching and started asking

Search used to be keywords. “best running shoes” You’d scan ten blue links and pick one.

Now people type the whole question, and get one answer back. No links. No scanning. The query got longer, and the click disappeared.

Around 60% of Google searches now end without a single click, and when an AI answer shows up at the top, that number jumps past 80%. The person asked, the machine answered, and your site never saw them.

2. Everyone is starting to sound the same

This one’s harder to measure but you can feel it everywhere.

Everything reads the same. Same rhythm, same clean sentences, same “it’s not this, it’s that” structure. I can say that the average quality of content went up but the originality went to zero.

The thing that’s actually scarce now is a real opinion. Something a model wouldn’t write on its own.

3. AI agents are using your website. Your analytics can’t see them.

This is the one we pay the most attention to.

It’s not always a person browsing your site anymore. Sometimes it’s an AI agent, sent by someone, reading your pages, checking your prices, sometimes buying.

Here’s the problem. Most analytics were built to track people. Cookies, browsers, tags in the page. Agents don’t work that way. They hit your server, do their thing, and leave nothing in your dashboard. So you’re getting traffic you can’t see at all.

The point

Noise tells you AI is coming for everything. Signal tells you the few things that already changed.

How people find you has changed. What they read all started to sound the same. And there’s a new kind of visitor on your site your tools were never built to catch.

We are trying to help people with the third. Let me know if you want to see it for yourself.

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