I have been doing marketing work long enough to have absorbed one assumption without ever examining it: that the plan starts with Google. David Wilson gave that assumption a name, and then took it apart. He runs ads, SEO, social, data and AI at Zozimus in Boston, and he has coined a term for what replaces it.
One Playbook, and It Had Google on the Cover
“For the last twenty years, as marketers, digital marketers, we've all had one playbook, it said Google on it.”David Wilson
Paid or organic, it did not matter. You opened the same book. What broke it was not a Google algorithm change but the audience leaving: AI tools on one side, vertical video on the other, and the people who used to be searching in one place now spread across a dozen.
He calls the response Search Everything Optimization, and the important word is everything. His point from the data is that people are not only consuming content in these places, they are researching purchases in them.
The shape of the query changed too. Nobody types “best B2B software” into a box any more. They write a paragraph into a chat tool describing their company size, their constraint, and the outcome they want. That is a different thing to optimise for.
Where the Audience Actually Went
His favourite channel over the last six to nine months is YouTube, and his reason is not the one I expected. It is the second biggest search engine in the world, which everybody says. What follows is the interesting bit.
He has clients where forty percent of impressions now land on living room TVs. As he put it, that changes the conversation. A small business asking how to look bigger in its local market can, for the cost of some video production, show up on a television screen.
And the thing almost nobody does properly is the description. That is where you state the problem in the words people use when searching for it, then explain how you solve it, with a link. The same discipline carries across every platform you post on. Work out what your audience is trying to solve, then put the problem and the solution in the caption, the description, or the page copy.
Total Traffic and Valuable Traffic Are Moving Apart
I pushed him on whether Google is really losing, given how the numbers still look. His answer separated two things I had been treating as one.
Google keeps a large share for a generational reason: we have used it for twenty years and habits are slow. But the top of the funnel, the “plumbers near me” kind of search, is increasingly answered on the results page itself, with paid and organic pushed further down. Reaching that person is getting harder.
Meanwhile the comparison stage moved. Two car dealers. Two plumbers. Two agencies. That conversation now happens comfortably inside an AI tool, and it is worth far more than a generic category search. Lower volume, much higher value.
His summary was that Google may still hold the majority of the traffic while the valuable traffic quietly moves somewhere else. If that is right, a dashboard showing flat Google numbers is not reassuring. It is just not measuring the part that changed.
The Advice David Says is Already Dead
I asked what marketing advice is obsolete. He went straight at attribution, and specifically the belief that because something is digital, it can be tracked.
His example was domestic and completely ordinary. He finds something online, sends it to his wife in a text, she taps the link and buys. The site records direct traffic, because a message from an iPhone carries no source. What actually started that purchase might have been an Instagram ad he saw an hour earlier. No report will ever connect the two.
Look at your own analytics and the rise in direct traffic over the last eighteen months, along with the conversions and revenue attached to it. That is not a mystery. It is people sharing things privately, which is how recommendation has always worked, finally showing up as a category of its own.
I added the thing that irritates me most, which is that Search Console will show a small business about a thousand rows while the API will hand over twenty-five thousand. So the tool that most people use to decide which pages and keywords to work on is showing them a fraction of the picture, and not telling them it is a fraction.
What I Would Take Away From It
Find out what the AI says about your company before you optimise anything else. Treat the description field on every platform as search copy, not an afterthought. Stop judging the year on top of funnel volume, because that is the part being absorbed. And hold your attribution reporting loosely enough that you do not kill a channel it cannot see.
David's own starting advice for anyone overwhelmed by this was refreshingly small: connect an AI tool to your analytics and just ask it questions. Where are my customers coming from? What do my leads look like? Get a feel for what is actually happening before building any plan on top of it.