For most of the last decade, the digital marketing funnel had a predictable shape. You built an audience on social media, posted content with links, and traffic came to your site. Enough to justify the effort. Enough to build a business around.
That funnel has a hole in it now.
Every major social platform — LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X — suppresses posts with external links. Systematically. The algorithm treats a spammy sales post and a genuinely useful article the same way, because both are trying to take the user somewhere else. Platform revenue runs on session time. Every outbound click is lost inventory, and their systems are built accordingly.
Organic reach on Facebook has been declining for over a decade — 16% in 2012, now less than 2%. LinkedIn followed the same curve. The data has been consistent and directional for years. What changed is that the gap grew wide enough that posting more frequently or writing sharper headlines no longer moves the needle.
Organic social media marketing works best for awareness and brand equity — building loyalty, staying present, and earning recognition through consistent engaging content that resonates with the right audience.
But when you train your audience to consume your content natively, you are also training them not to click. Keep that in mind when you need them to act. And resist the pressure to chase virality to compensate for suppressed reach — the audience a viral moment attracts is rarely the one you need, and the brand positioning you compromise to get there takes far longer to rebuild. Consistency of voice compounds over time. Stunts don’t.
Search & SEO remain the primary channel for intent-driven traffic – now optimized by AI. When someone types a question into a search engine, they are actively looking for an answer — that intent is the most valuable signal in digital marketing, and it still flows to websites. A well-structured piece of content that addresses a real question your customers are asking compounds in value over months and years. That is where your website earns its traffic, and where investment in depth and quality has a measurable long-term return.
Paid social has its place in the consideration and conversion stages, but it requires discipline. Ad fatigue has set in — people have become skilled at scrolling past ads on every surface, from Reels to sidebars to sponsored posts. Showing the same creative to the same audience stops working fast, and when it does it costs you more than budget. It costs you the goodwill you spent months building organically.
For conversion, search paid ads carry more weight because intent is already there. Someone searching is ready to be found. That is a fundamentally different moment than someone scrolling.
What’s changing is where that search is happening. A growing share of high-intent queries are now going through ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude and the answer comes back without a list of links to click. If your content is the source being drawn from, you still win that moment. If it isn’t, you’re invisible at exactly the point someone was ready to act. That’s the new SEO. It’s called LLMO, and most marketers haven’t caught up to it yet. The questions people ask these AI assistants are extraordinarily rich intent signals, richer than a search query, more candid than a click. Those signals are already being connected to advertising infrastructure through data-sharing arrangements (‘secure’ data clean rooms) between AI platforms and ad networks—environments that allow platforms to match your IP and intent to ads without technically handing over your identity.
The days of retargeting someone across every surface they touch are fading fast. Consumers have made their feelings about it clear. The more aggressively brands chased people, the more people learned to tune them out, block them, or resent them entirely.
Audit your content mix. If most of what you are publishing on social includes a link, you are spending energy the algorithm is designed to absorb. Shift that effort toward native social content, search-optimized site content, and paid campaigns with clear conversion goals.
Happy marketing! Stay tuned for ContentPAQ — our autonomous content engine with business intelligence built in.