Inimitable Product is the New "Make Great Content" - SparkToro

Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro. For a quarter century he's helped people do better marketing (and held big tech's feet to the fire) through his blog posts, videos, books, and research.

Rand also co-founded Alertmouse, Snackbar Studio, Moz, and a hopelessly romantic marriage to bestselling author, Geraldine DeRuiter.

For 25 years, Google told websites to "just make great content," and they’d sort out the rest. This advice was incomplete, problematic, and reductive, but also… sorta true. If you made 10X Content in 1997, 2007, or 2017, it often worked (at least, so long as you *marketed* that 10X content).

But, no more.

Google’s future is no longer indexing the web and making information universally useful and available, it’s wholesale, intentional, unrepentant, unfettered-by-the-law theft : the great digital enclosure of publishing. They haven’t been shy about this, but they’ve never been as loud and proud as they are now. "We’re going to ruin the Internet," is Google’s new rallying cry, though they’ll frame it as "AI search for the agentic era" (a meaningless jumble of words reminiscent of Andreesen-clueless autocomplete).

Google’s plan is elegant, simple, and evil:

Crawl and index the web’s content

Use their mafia-like power to force a prisoner’s dilemma paradox (i.e. if you don’t let them index your stuff, they’ll just take it from someone else and reward them with the scraps of traffic, branding, and potential business)

Use that content to train their models/power their answers

Make your work a redundant commodity (because everything published can now be found in a more convenient, familiar format inside Google’s interface)

Only send clicks when businesses either:<br>A) Pay them for ads<br>B) Offer something Google can’t provide directly in their AI-powered answer interface

You can see this for yourself in Google’s preview of their new search box:

Those fitness plans, recipes, structured calendars, and clever tips aren’t made by Google. They’re stolen. Repurposed. Averaged. And then presented as the search monopolist’s own work.

AI is, statistically, the least trusted, most hated technology of our lifetimes, but popular sentiment is doing nothing to halt its progress among the tech, business, and finance elite. Google’s embraced it whole-hog, and may even be willing to sacrifice their core ad revenue (through reduced clicks and CTR) to promote a world in which they and they alone own your Internet experience. Google no longer wants to be the gateway to the web. They want to be the web. And they may just have the power to force it down the throats of even the skeptical and unwilling billions of Internet users who hate AI, don’t trust Google, but cave to convenience.

Businesses and Creators Have But Two Solutions

Solution 1 is long-term. It’s going to take collective action, mostly voting, mostly in the United States, and I cynically suspect it won’t happen. Citizens would need to support politicians who’d empower the Department of Justice and FTC, hire states’ attorneys general, and nominate/elect judges to hold big tech companies accountable for the works they’ve stolen, trained upon, and presented as their own. Monopolies would need to be broken up (not slapped on the wrist with penalties that will only consolidate the industry’s exploitative power). Self-preferencing would need to be made illegal. And Americans, even as they slip into deeper economic distress, continue to vote like temporarily embarrassed billionaires. Soon, even overwhelming vote-count victories may not matter in a country where gerrymandering rules.

Solution 2 is short-term. It’s what every digital marketer, content creator, and business owner historically reliant on traffic from search must do to stay alive: build inimitable products .

Despite all the seeming wonders of Google’s new AI-powered, agentic, buzzword-laden search engine, it cannot invent ultrasonic chef’s knives. It can’t tailor a made-to-measure suit with an ocean of whimsical personality. It can’t thoughtfully curate gift boxes from local makers. It will never lovingly prepare the meal of your life. It won’t refine pottery techniques for thousands of years to make the perfect vase. Or paint scenes of everday life with the colors of time. Or source WWI-era Armagnac in order to serve your 98-year-old grandfather something older than him. Or hand-carve and paint tiny creatures who keep your trinkets safe. Or fill giant warehouses with stories and Objets d’art to delight visitors of all ages. It won’t mow your lawn or fix your roof or service your printer or manage your 401k.

To make inimitable products, you’ll need to:

Uncover the overlap in what you’re passionately capable of creating, what other solutions in the market fail to offer, and what people in that market desperately want.

Create that overlapping thing in a way that’s designed for Zero Click...