12touches.com, Thursday, August 25th, 2026
Your Best Distribution Channel Is Already on Your Payroll
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.
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