What happens if Google disappears tomorrow
One algorithm update can upend your entire business if you're reliant on one channel for growth
"If your business model still relies on search traffic, whether from traditional search or AI-powered results, it’s time to rethink - and fast.
More publishers are now focusing on direct audience relationships through newsletters, forums, podcasts and similar channels.”
A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll let that graph + quote from Kevin Indig’s recent article sum up the introduction to the topic of today’s newsletter far better than I could have:
Multichannel presence is no longer a nice-to-have, but has become a requirement for businesses to succeed in 2025 and beyond.
Sponsor: HockeyStack
Your CEO just slacked you: "We have our board meeting in 2 days. Send me a slide with what's working + anything they need to know."
Did your palms get sweaty reading that?
Or is this an easy ask because you can easily get to this info already?
I'm neurotic about forecasting + tracking performance. I have reports upon reports and dashboards upon dashboards.
So when Emir over at HockeyStack asked me what my perfect dashboard would look like, I immediately started geeking out. And when they sent this dashboard mock-up back to me, I was in nerd heaven 🙌
July just wrapped up. And it's also never too late to add some solid reports or views to your dashboard, so hopefully this provides some inspiration to any of you who are looking to level up your dashboarding game.
Practice > theory
When I sat down to write this, I was going to share this from a “what I learned” perspective. I haven’t done something at the comprehensive level I'm aiming for like this before, but I changed my mind. Let’s learn together.
What follows is me actively going through this in real time. What data I’m grabbing in other windows. How I’m prompting AI to help me with this analysis. How my prompts are/aren’t doing and the refinements that I make to them along the way. My goal is that this is something you can take + tweak for your company to perform the same analysis.
On that note, let’s get started…
Prompting AI to get ready to help
I want to understand my company's presence across anywhere you can track. The company is [company name] [website]. We sell [product/service] to [ICP] seeking [desired outcome].
Help me write a comprehensive prompt I can give to you that has me providing you with the details you need to know about my company and our overall presence, details about the market we serve so you can understand where they spend their time, do their research, and engage with providers like my company, and any other details that you need.
The reason behind this is that building a business off of one platform is riskier than ever. Google used to own the majority of search, but that's quickly fragmenting to LLMs like ChatGPT, to YouTube, Reddit, and many others.
My ultimate goal here is to de-risk this from happening to us. I don't want to be reliant upon Google search to drive business, I don't want to be reliant upon LinkedIn's algorithm to show up in front of our prospects, etc. This is where I want you to help do an analysis of where we show up relative to our market's attention.
Let me know if this helps. Please ask any clarifying questions and then provide a synopsis of my ask back to make sure we are on the same page before proceeding.
From here, the AI replied back to me with some clarifying questions:
About [company]
What are your primary goals for this analysis? (Brand awareness, lead gen, thought leadership, etc.)
Which channels are currently your biggest drivers of traffic and leads? (e.g., organic search, paid ads, LinkedIn, referrals, email)
Which content assets do you already have? (Blog posts, webinars, podcasts, videos, downloadable resources, case studies)
Do you have any existing data on where customers discover you today? (UTM data, CRM lead source data, survey responses)
Do you already track competitor presence across channels? If so, which competitors matter most?
About Your Market
Who are your ICP personas? (Job titles, seniority levels, industries served)
Where does your audience spend their time online—forums, communities, events, or tools? (e.g., LinkedIn groups, [ICP]-specific Slack communities, podcasts)
Which industry publications, influencers, or platforms do they trust for insights and trends?
What are the top keywords/topics your audience searches for when they’re looking for solutions like yours?
About Your Business Data
Do you have analytics tools set up? (Google Analytics, Search Console, LinkedIn Analytics, HubSpot, etc.)
What performance metrics can you share? (Traffic sources, lead source breakdown, conversion rates by channel)
Desired Output
Do you want just an audit of your presence today, or recommendations on where to expand (e.g., new channels, partnerships, content types)?
Should this analysis include competitors, or just [company]?
Are you looking for quantifiable gaps (e.g., SEO rankings, share of voice) or qualitative opportunities (e.g., thought leadership on emerging platforms)—or both?
I provided responses to each of the questions, and this is where I started geeking out seeing the prompt it recommended I use to begin the analysis. I am FAR from an AI-expert. TBH, I’m a prompting novice. I know it’s not a strong suit of mine, yet. So as I work on improving this muscle, instead of guessing at what works, I ask the LLM to make a comprehensive prompt for me to feed back into it.
Win-win.
LLM gets the extensive prompt it needs to get the output I’m seeking. I get a crash course in how to prompt better.
And now for the final prompt…
Comprehensive Prompt You Can Give Me
Here’s a single prompt you can copy/paste into a future chat to give me all the details I need:
Prompt:
*"I want you to audit [company]’s overall market presence and help de-risk our dependence on any single platform.
[Company] [website] is a [software/service] for [ICP] [outcome seeking].
Our primary goals are [goal #1] and [goal #2]. Right now, our biggest lead drivers are [channel 1], [channel 2], and [channel 3]. We have a strong content engine that includes blogs, webinars, podcasts, videos, downloadable guides, and case studies.
We track [competitor 1], [competitor 2], and [competitor 3] minimally as competitors.
We have analytics set up (Google Analytics, Search Console, LinkedIn Analytics, HubSpot, etc.) and can share relevant metrics like traffic, lead source breakdown, self-reported attribution, and conversion rates.
Our ICP includes [various ICP datapoints].
I’d like you to:
Audit where [company] currently shows up across search, social, owned, paid, and earned channels.
Map out where our ICP spends the most time and attention, including trusted communities, influencers, podcasts, and publications.
Identify where we are over-reliant on specific channels.
Provide recommendations on where to expand and why, ranked by impact and effort.
Provide a repeatable framework for us to track our omnichannel presence quarterly.
If you need any analytics data (traffic, lead sources, rankings, etc.), just ask and I’ll provide it.
Please complete the audit in 5 steps:
Map current visibility across search, social, owned, paid, and earned channels
Analyze where our ICP spends time, overlaying that with my attribution data
Identify risk areas
Provide channel expansion recommendations, prioritized by effort vs. impact
Create a quarterly framework to track channel diversification over time
Alongside this prompt, I provided a table containing our self-reported attribution results, broken out by quarter from the previous 8 quarters.
Step 1: Map current visibility across search, social, owned, paid, and earned channel
Initial Observations
✅ Top 3 channels: [channel 1], [channel 2], [channel 3] account for ~78% of all mentions
✅ Emerging channels: [channel 4], [channel 5], [channel 6]—all notable sources of discovery
✅ Smaller but valuable: [channel 7], [channel 8], [channel 9]—while low in count, these are high-trust environments
Following this, it provided me with a detailed breakdown of our current:
Search + organic presence
SEO footprint
Keyword targeting
Visibility gaps
Social + community presence
LinkedIn
Reddit
Podcasts
Owned media + content
Analysis of our content library
Analysis of our thought leadership material
Earned + review sites
Analysis of awards from places like G2
Analysis of reviews from places like G2 and Capterra
Then it summarized it all into a table, breaking down each channel by our current strengths and gaps/risks.
But back to the mindset of “no prompt is perfect,” I noticed that some of the insights/recommendations it provided back were incorrect or were missing the appropriate data to make a helpful recommendation. Using this as a cue, I jumped back in with the following message:
I'm going to provide you with some more context to inform the analysis you've provided above. It was helpful to see, but I have other data that will make this output better for me. I'd like for you to ingest the below items and re-run the analysis you provided above using the additional data + context as part of it.
[Section]
[Relevant details][Section]
[Relevant details]
And VOILA - an updated output taking in the additional information and incorporating it into the various channels already found to recalibrate strengths, gaps/risks, and updated recommendations for me moving forward.
Now to go a level deeper and look at keyword ranking + podcast SEO analysis and marrying that with ICP platform behavior. I prompted the LLM with the following:
I want to dig into two areas here. Can you help research + analyze the following for me?
Keyword ranking + podcast SEO analysis. Where are we currently showing up? Where aren’t we showing up?
ICP platform behavior. Identify all of the channels that our ICP spends time on. These could be LinkedIn/Facebook groups, subreddits, Slack groups, newsletters, podcasts, forums, etc.
And what follows are some more detailed items that make this even more actionable for me. Responses speaking to things like:
[Company]’s site clearly targets high-intent queries, such as:
“[long-tail keyword]”
“Talent Intelligence Platform vs. ATS”
Gap: There’s minimal SEO investment around podcast-related queries or forum-style searchers
Opportunities:
Include full transcripts and embed SEO-rich content (show notes, guest profiles).
Create content assets like blog posts derived from key episodes (“[episode 1]” or “[episode 2]”) optimized for search.
Step 2: Analyze where our ICP spends time, overlaying that with my attribution data
Building off of question #2 in the last prompt, the conversation segued into better understanding where our ICP spends their time and cross-referencing that with our own data to determine if we were/weren’t showing up well in those places.
What was neat to see from my data-nerd and slight OCD tendencies was how cleanly the LLM broke this ask up so I could easily understand it. Here’s what it looked like:
🧠 Top Platforms & Communities
Based on industry norms for [ICP], these are key spaces:
Podcast Listening – Especially Becoming a Hiring Machine (Loxo’s podcast), plus guest appearances on shows like [Podcast 1] or RecruitingDose***.
Forums & Q&A Sites – Reddit (r/recruiting, r/humanresources), Quora, Slack communities like [Community name] or niche ICP Discords.
Newsletters & Thought Leadership Sites – [Newsletter 1], [Newsletter 2]; often syndicated via email.
YouTube for Video Learning – Searching for ICP tactics (EG: “best [category]”, “[ICP segment + outcome]”).
Review & Comparison Sites – G2, TrustRadius, Gartner; also niche review aggregators.
***I need to come back to this and highlight a MAJOR point here. “RecruitingDose” is a podcast that DOES NOT EXIST.
The LLM hallucinated right here. I’m not calling this out as a “Gotcha!” moment to the LLM and turn this newsletter around to say this is why you shouldn’t use AI. It’s simply to say this is exactly why AI is a supplemental tool for us to use, not a replacement for our own ability to think.
ALWAYS REVIEW OUTPUTS AND CORRECT THEM BEFORE ACTING.
Alright, back to the output…
📊 Alignment with Attribution Data
Your self-reported attribution reflects attention distribution:
[Channel 1] (XXX mentions)
[Channel 2] (XXX mentions)
[Channel 3] (XXX mentions)
[Channel 4]/[Channel 5]/[Channel 6] (XXX mentions combined)
These align well with ICP behavior—heavy research activity, passion for peer recommendations, and growing use of community and AI discovery tools.
Then it shared the following table with me to quickly illustrate each fo the channels, how much our ICP uses them, our presence on them today, and the opportunities for us to better leverage that channel.
And following this, it gave me a wrap-up of findings + recommended actions:
✅ Updated Insights & Actionable Steps
🔑 Key Findings
You rank strongly for core [keyword grouping 1] & [keyword grouping 2] searches.
The podcast has scale and credibility but is under-indexed for search and cross-promotion.
ICP attention aligns with search, social (LinkedIn), community forums, and podcast content.
🚀 Recommended Actions
For SEO & Podcast:
[Recommendation 1]
[Recommendation 2]
[Recommendation 3]
For Community/Forum Engagement:
[Reddit recommendation]
Monitor forum questions about [category] tools and answer with value (linking to resources).
For Industry Thought Leadership:
Write guest posts or appear in [newsletter 1] and [newsletter 2].
Offer newsletter cross-promotion or co-branded content with [recognized ICP thought leaders].
For Video Presence:
Publish 2–3 minute clips from podcast guests on YouTube, tagged and titled for ICP search queries.
Promote as LinkedIn video content.
Step 3: Identify risk areas (to be continued…)
That’s a lot for today. In these first two steps alone there are tons of points I want to go deeper into (and there likely are for you as well), so I’m going to sit right here + nerd out for a bit as I pull on these various threads.
I’ll be back next week to cover the second half of the steps from the original prompt, so stay tuned then as I’ll cover:
Identify risk areas
Provide channel expansion recommendations, prioritized by effort vs. impact
Create a quarterly framework to track channel diversification over time
Today’s takeaway
If there’s one thing I want you to take away from today’s newsletter, it’s the “aha” moment I had when I first read Kevin’s newsletter earlier this week.
If your business relies primarily on one channel, you’re running on borrowed time.
Multichannel presence is more important than ever. Attention is only getting more fragmented and where people go to learn + seek answers is branching away from Google to multiple other platforms.
And alongside finding where that attention is being spent, it’s noisier than ever. Throwing more noise into that mix isn’t what will help you stand out. Having a unique point of view (POV) and a strong brand that the market wants to be associated with are going to become the new moats we can build.
Also:
This is me “showing my work.” I’m still figuring out how best to prompt LLMs, which threads to pull more on, how to refine queries, etc. If you’ve done something like this before or have recommendations/tweaks to this, let me know! I can include that either in next week’s edition or in one the following with a “v2” on all of this using the collective knowledge of the group.
Replies to this go directly to my personal inbox + I promise I read every single one :)
Book quote of the week
“An effective leader’s responsibility is not to always be the authority figure with an answer at the ready. Rather, our work is to ask the right questions.”
- A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Ourselves, by Ari Weinzweig
See you next Saturday,
Sam
P.S. What’s a prompt or series of prompts you’ve been geeking out with lately?
One of the important pieces here is making sure you are correcting LLM's on their instructions and then initial feedback. They get it wrong, often, but it's like teaching a toddler, they get it right after a few lessons. Same here, once you TRAIN the LLM on your queries and intent, they become much more adept at providing valuable feedback and guidance for what you are trying to achieve.