Hey there,

Welcome back to another Don’t Feed The Algorithm, your weekly dispatch from Averi — where we explore the intersections of marketing, AI and the future of work.

There's a quiet irony running through this week's news.

LinkedIn is now penalizing "AI-polished" content while every other platform races to integrate AI deeper into everything. Google just merged Gemini 3 into AI Mode, making follow-up questions seamless — which means traditional search behavior is officially on life support. OpenAI is testing ads inside ChatGPT at $60 CPMs, turning the "free" research assistant into prime real estate. And new data shows that posting less actually drives more engagement.

Meanwhile, the biggest study on AI citations (680 million+ analyzed) dropped a truth bomb: backlinks don't predict AI visibility anymore. Brand search volume does. The SEO playbook we've been running for a decade? Outdated.

The theme this week isn't "AI is coming." It's "AI already ate the map and drew a new one."

The rules are fragmenting. ChatGPT trusts Wikipedia. Perplexity trusts Reddit. Google AI trusts... a little bit of everything. There's no single optimization strategy that works across all of them — which means the marketers who win aren't the ones chasing every algorithm. They're the ones building brands strong enough to get cited everywhere.

That's the shift we're tracking. Not just what AI can do — but what it trusts, what it rewards, and what it quietly ignores.

Oh, and "GEO Strategist" is now a real job title. Roles are up 340% in six months.

The future is hiring. Might as well apply.

Let’s build.

— ZC & The Averi Team

We hit 1.68 million Google impressions this month using the Averi Workflow

That's not a client. That's us.

We didn't build Averi based on a guess — we built it from the exact content strategy that's driving our own growth. Same playbook. Same system. Now productized so you can run it too.

Here's what actually moves the needle:

→ Topical authority over content volume. 12 tightly clustered articles outperform 50 disconnected posts. Every time.

→ Internal linking that compounds. Not an afterthought — the architecture that tells Google (and AI) you own the topic.

→ Optimized for where buyers actually search. Google rankings. ChatGPT citations. Perplexity answers. If your content isn't built for all three, you're leaving visibility on the table.

We're not asking you to trust a pitch. We're asking you to try the system that took us from zero to nearly 2 million monthly impressions in just 10 months — while everyone else was arguing about blog post frequency.

The Free beta is live and new features are being shipped daily based on the feedback from readers like you.

— Averi Team

Scaling content as a startup is f*cking hard.

Most advice is either too generic or written by people who've never shipped anything claiming to be a guru.

So we’ve launched r/startupcontentlab: a Reddit community for founders, engineers & marketers who are tired of sifting through the hordes of articles that just want your ‘click’ and don’t actually help you to build content engines that actually drive growth.

This is a place for real strategy, AI workflows, what's trending, and honest conversations about what's actually driving growth (and what's not). Just people figuring it out and sharing what they learn.

If you're building content systems to scale your startup, you'll fit right in.

Join our Reddit Community for Startup Founders building Content Engines to grow their businesses:

10 Content Marketing Trends for 2026 (And What They Mean for Startups)

Content marketing in 2026 doesn't look like content marketing in 2024.

The shifts aren't incremental, they're structural.

How content gets discovered is changing (AI search). How it gets created is changing (AI + human workflows). How audiences expect to engage with it is changing (video, interactive, personalized).

And the data infrastructure underneath all of it is being rebuilt from the ground up (privacy-first, first-party).

For startups, this is both terrifying and clarifying.

Here are the 10 trends that will define content marketing in 2026, and what they mean if you're building a company.

We all know the industry loves to pretend it’s got it all figured out.

But here?

We tell the truth.

Every week, we’re asking you to share how things really work behind the scenes. Because getting better starts with getting honest.

Don’t worry, it’s a safe space.

Drop your vote.

KFC — "FCK" (2018)

In February 2018, KFC UK faced every fast-food brand's nightmare: they ran out of chicken.

A botched logistics switch from Bidvest to DHL created a supply chain catastrophe. Over 800 of KFC's 900 UK locations closed. Customers were furious. Some actually called the police. News outlets had a field day. The brand was hemorrhaging reputation by the hour.

The Move:

Within 24 hours of the crisis spiraling, KFC's marketing team locked themselves in a room with their agency, Mother London, and emerged with something no crisis playbook would ever recommend: a full-page newspaper ad featuring an empty KFC bucket — with the letters rearranged to spell "FCK."

Below it, a refreshingly human apology: "A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It's not ideal. Huge apologies to our customers, especially those who travelled out of their way to find we were closed. It's been a hell of a week, but we're making progress."

No corporate speak. No finger-pointing at DHL. No legal hedging. Just ownership, humor, and honesty.

The Result:

The conversation flipped overnight — from "KFC failed" to "KFC made the best apology ever." Brand perception scores, which had cratered during the shortage, rebounded within weeks and actually ended the year higher than pre-crisis levels. Net positive sentiment swung from -17% during the outage to +31% by year-end. UK market share climbed from 7.3% to 8.1%. The campaign won three Gold Lions at Cannes and the Grand Prix for Campaign of the Year.

Why It satisfies the vibe:

Picture the AI crisis management tool reviewing this concept:

⚠️ "Profanity detected — brand safety risk: SEVERE" ⚠️ "Negative sentiment amplification — recommend neutral corporate statement" ⚠️ "Print media reach limited — suggest social-first apology video" ⚠️ "Legal review flagged: admitting fault increases liability exposure" ⚠️ "Humor during crisis historically decreases trust scores by 23%"

The algorithm would have spit out a forgettable press release, maybe a CEO video apology with carefully vetted talking points. Safe. Defensible. Instantly forgotten.

Instead, KFC trusted their gut, matched the tone to how humans actually feel when they screw up, and created a piece of communication so authentic it's still taught in marketing classrooms seven years later.

Sometimes the riskiest move is the safest one — if you actually know your brand.

Want to see more of the best marketed companies on the planet? 👇

Clay — Turning Sales Teams into Revenue Engineers

Clay is solving a problem every growth team knows but few can articulate: you don't need more data — you need the ability to actually use it.

Sales and marketing stacks have exploded into dozens of disconnected tools. Lead enrichment here. Intent signals there. Outreach sequences somewhere else. The result? GTM teams spend more time wrangling systems than closing deals.

The Backstory: Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan founded Clay in 2017 with a contrarian bet — they'd build for six years before growth mattered. While competitors raced to ship features, Clay quietly assembled 130+ data providers into a single platform. Their insight: sales teams didn't need another tool. They needed a development environment for revenue — a place where growth ideas could become automated workflows in hours, not months.

Key Innovation: Clay's platform combines AI research agents, real-time enrichment, and programmable workflows that let teams build custom "plays" without engineering support. OpenAI doubled their enrichment coverage from 40% to 80%. Rippling doubled cold email performance. The company essentially invented the "GTM Engineer" role — a hybrid of sales, marketing, and automation expertise that's now becoming standard at high-growth companies.

It's not about replacing salespeople with AI.

It's about giving growth teams the same leverage engineers have had for decades.

Quiet infrastructure. $100M ARR in two years.

The Great Citation Divide: What AI Actually Trusts

New research analyzing 680 million+ AI citations reveals a fragmented landscape — and a surprising twist on SEO wisdom.

The headline: Each AI platform has wildly different source preferences. And only 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Where each bot shops for truth:

🤖 ChatGPT → Wikipedia dominates (47.9% of top citations). Encyclopedic authority wins. News outlets and tech publishers (Forbes, G2, TechRadar) fill the gaps.

🔍 Perplexity → Reddit-obsessed (46.5% of citations). Real-time retrieval means fresh user-generated content and review platforms (Yelp, TripAdvisor, G2) get the spotlight.

🌐 Google AI Overviews → Diversified sourcing. Reddit (21%), YouTube (18.8%), Quora (14.3%), plus traditional authority signals still matter.

The plot twist for SEO diehards: Brand search volume — not backlinks — is now the strongest predictor of AI citations (0.334 correlation). Brand-building activities you thought were "disconnected" from SEO now directly impact whether AI mentions you.

What gets you in:

What keeps you out:

The bottom line: There's no single "AI SEO" strategy anymore. A Wikipedia push helps with ChatGPT but does nothing for Perplexity. A Reddit presence boosts Perplexity and Google AI but gets ignored by ChatGPT.

Pick your battles based on where your audience actually searches.

→ The Founders GEO Playbook

Strategy You Can Steal

The "Content Compound" Framework

Most startups treat content like isolated assets: write a blog post, publish it, move on, repeat. That's why most startup blogs are graveyards of orphaned articles that rank for nothing and convert no one.

Here's how to build content that actually compounds:

1. Start with one pillar, not ten posts

Pick ONE topic your ICP desperately needs to understand. Not "content marketing" — that's a category. Something like "how to build a content engine with a two-person team" or "getting your first 1,000 organic visitors as a B2B SaaS."

2. Build the cluster before you write

Map 8-12 subtopics that ladder up to your pillar. These become your supporting articles. Each one should answer a specific question AND link back to the pillar. Example:

3. Interlink like your rankings depend on it (they do)

Every supporting article links to the pillar. The pillar links to every supporting article. Supporting articles link to each other where relevant. This isn't optional — it's how you tell Google (and AI systems) that you're the authority on this topic.

4. Update the pillar quarterly

Your pillar page should be a living document. Add new stats, reference your newer cluster content, refresh examples. Google rewards freshness on comprehensive content. So do LLMs pulling from indexed pages.

The math: One pillar + 10 cluster articles + proper internal linking = more topical authority than 50 disconnected posts. And it takes the same amount of time to create.

This is exactly how Averi builds content strategies for startups — systematic clusters that compound, not random acts of content.

Did You Know? —  76.4% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages were updated in the last 30 days.

If your content is older than your last Netflix binge, the bots are already forgetting you.

Til next time,