Your Best Distribution Channel Is Already on Your Payroll
12touches.com, Thursday, August 25th, 2026
Alan Shimel's argument that Google's AI Overviews are engineered to make the click unnecessary - his "Google Zero" - lands as hard on technology vendors as on publishers, because organic search was always rented distribution that merely felt owned. The largest untapped alternative is already on staff: a few hundred customer-facing employees, each publishing a weekly newsletter carrying the company's news section, is hundreds of trusted channels reaching the market with no algorithm in between. It succeeds where employee advocacy usually fails because the employee owns the asset, and the resulting traffic is attributable and rewardable per person. Enterprise IT is a small, circulating world: vendor people become customers, skilled customers get recruited into field roles by the engineers who worked with them, and the boundary between customers and network dissolves over a career. Publishing isn't self-promotion - it's the filtering you already do, done in public.
Ask a marketing leader who drives traffic to their website and you'll usually get some version of the same answer: search, paid, social, email, events. Rank well, buy well, post well, and the visits arrive.
That answer worked for twenty years. It is now expiring, and most of the people relying on it haven't fully priced in what comes next.
The click is being removed
In Google Is a Parasite. And Everyone Else Is Paying the Price, Alan Shimel - founder and CEO of Techstrong Group - makes the case bluntly. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode consume the reporting, research, interviews and analysis that others pay to produce, synthesize it into an answer, and serve that answer directly. The user gets what they came for. The site that created it gets nothing.