Forget Going Viral: This Is The Real Power Move For 2026
- Dec 22, 2025
- 3 min read
By Stephenie Zamora
If you’ve felt like the online space has been off lately, you’re not wrong. Since 2018, the digital landscape has been quietly shifting. Then COVID hit, causing a record number of new businesses to form (and more freelancers to start pitching their services), many of whom undercut the pricing of established businesses and service providers.
Now, with the rise of AI tools, AI summaries, and AI-generated everything, the online world is becoming even noisier and more chaotic, a mash-up of remixes and recycled ideas. More importantly, purpose-driven creators, entrepreneurs, influencers, and changemakers (the exact people trying to do something meaningful) are at the highest risk of getting lost in the noise.
Not because they’re not brilliant or their work isn’t needed, but because the rules have changed completely, and most people don’t even realize we’re playing a new game
Welcome to the Pivot Point, where creators face two massive threats:
The collapse of traditional online marketing: You can’t grow the way you used to on social media, nor can you even reach your existing audience. The algorithms are designed to serve the platform, and the attention economy is dying before our very eyes (even more so with the general distrust of media that AI has accelerated).
AI-generated content is overtaking humans rapidly: Now everyone can publish 100x more content with a simple prompt, which means the internet is drowning in content that all sounds the same. And the more AI content gets created, the more AI trains on itself, which is how we get the uncanny slop we’re already seeing everywhere.
The marketing gurus will tell you this means you need to “master AI” to keep up.
I’m here to tell you the truth: that’s incredibly shortsighted, and it’s exactly how talented creators will dilute or destroy the very work they’re trying to build.
The harsh reality is that:
A majority of consumers don’t trust AI.
People feel burned by faceless, fake, and recycled content.
AI is disengaging people from their own brilliance.
Instead of obsessing over how to “use AI better,” purpose-driven creators should be asking a different question: How do I build something that survives the current and upcoming shifts? Something that still works when the AI bubble bursts?
The answer to this is simple, but regularly overlooked because it doesn’t give the same instant dopamine hit and false sense of “success” that social media does:
Develop true thought leadership: This is different from content creation. It’s about intentionally developing and evolving your own conversations, frameworks, and unique takes that stand out from the noise (and in AI search and summaries).
Build SEO content funnels: AI search and summaries have not replaced the power of discoverability that search engine optimization allows. Search engines (and AI tools!) pull from the richest, most original, highly authoritative, and useful content online. You want to show up on Google and in AI overviews? You need a content ecosystem designed to answer the exact questions your right clients and customers are actually (and actively) searching for.
One of my old blog posts, written once, semi-optimized, and then forgotten, ranked on page one of Google for a keyword with 12,000+ monthly searches. For years. With zero maintenance.
That’s work that survives trends.
The people who thrive in the next era won’t be the ones who learned to prompt the fastest. They’ll be the ones who stayed engaged with their craft and made their work discoverable. And if you’re building something meaningful, something that challenges systems, changes lives, or creates culture, you owe it to your work to set it up for longevity.
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