Should we retire the dunk?

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

It’s time we retire the declining-organic-traffic-graph dunk post.

You know the ones. Ahrefs screenshot on LinkedIn. Line goes up, line goes down. Everyone rejoices because it confirms their beliefs about the world.

Surely we can do better. (In the spirit of not returning the slam dunk, I will not screenshot said dunk posts.)

I will immediately back down a touch here and say that there have been many great versions of these dunk posts with valid arguments. I have thumbs-upped my fair share. But at this point, those valid arguments have been made. Dunk competition over.

Outside of “it’s been done before”, here are some reasons why we can retire these posts:

Those graphs are not always accurate. With absolutely no shade meant to Ahrefs, Semrush, or whoever else, these “traffic” graphs are only a proxy for real traffic. We don’t have the actual traffic for these websites. SEO tools make estimates based on projected click volumes. And there are lots of reasons to believe they’ve become less accurate over time, given all the disruptions in AI search, parameter tracking, and other market volatility. A great example is the company I work at, Dock, where our “total traffic” wildly fluctuates based on our average ranking for million-impression search terms containing “dock”. Alas, we are not rolling in dough from “boat dock” money.

There’s a lot of confirmation bias going around. I’ve seen the same website’s declining traffic graph used to argue that: AI content is bad, SEO is dead, SaaS is dead, relying on freelancers is bad, firing freelancers is bad, something about stock prices, and dozens of other things. Crazy how many stories one little line can tell.

Didn’t we all agree that traffic was a vanity metric? Traffic is only a means to an end, and most traffic is worthless. Suddenly, all that worthless traffic is gone, and we’re using it to prove something. It’s very likely that most of these websites haven't lost their most valuable traffic, or that they’re getting more mentions in AI search and LLMs. At Dock, our traffic is way down, but our SEO-sourced pipeline is still up.

These companies saw it coming. I’ve seen ClickUp dunked on a lot. But I’ve also seen them ramp up their social presence significantly over the last 5 years. They even hired in-house actors(!). HubSpot is another example. But they’ve spun up an impressive newsletter and podcast network. Saying “I told you so” isn’t all that impressive when those companies told us first.

We don’t have all the info. On that note, we don’t know all the internal goings-on at these organizations, like budget shifts, strategic decisions, competitive pressures, investor pressures, etc. There are so many conflating factors that I’m not willing to guess at from the outside.

Experimentation is good. Many of these dunk posts are about companies going all-in on AI content. But there were many billion-dollar companies built on the back of programmatic SEO strategies (Zillow, anyone?). It only makes sense for some companies to experiment with AI-powered content—especially if you have little traffic to lose in the first place. Some companies will do really well with this, some will do terribly. One failure story does not immediately invalidate a tactic or channel.

Why are we rooting against our peers? Even though SEO (and content marketing to some degree) feels like a zero-sum game, it isn’t. The pie that we all share can grow and shrink. Sure, some of these strategies are spammy, and we should root for them to fail, but a lot of these sites we’re dunking on are run by teams of your peers who are just as hard-working and well-intentioned as you are. It’s easy to forget that when you’re only thinking of this in terms of blue links and orange traffic lines.

Okay, that’s two weeks in a row of me preaching about what not to do. Next week, I promise to get the bee out of my bonnet and have something positive to say.

Cheers,

- Eric

PS. We have an AMA coming up tomorrow with Kaleigh Moore in the Superpath Pro Slack that I’m very excited about. You can try Superpath for free via the link below to access that AMA 👇

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🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Jimmy’s Three Glorious Months in Product Marketing

On the heels of Jimmy’s recent blog post, What I Learned in My Three Glorious Months as a Product Marketer, Jimmy, Chloe, and I got together to talk about the overlap of content and product marketing.

In what can only be described as an extremely rare occurrence, we all agreed on something: product marketers are usually more embedded in an organization than content marketers—and content marketers should take note.

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