Anita Moorthy

My TL has many people begging X to copy Substack's newest feature that detects AI slop. The implications of this feature are huge for anyone doing AEO/SEO. Many of us are secretly worried "what's the point of social media anymore... it's all AI slop and soon only bots will be reading it anyway!" And while it may feel like AI slop is inevitable the story is far from finished. A few more data points that suggest platforms are fighting back harder than most people realize: 1. Reddit is scrubbing 25,000 spammy posts and comments a day (a day!), 20% more than a year ago due to better detection technology. 2. YouTube recently unveiled a label for AI generated videos. 3. LinkedIn itself flags AI-generated images. 4. Credit to Elon for being early on this - Twitter/X is apparent removing 300,000 spam accounts per day! These aren't coordinated but they're all arriving at the same conclusion: human attention is the asset, and anything that degrades it degrades the business. And lest you feel the battle is lost, worth remembering Napster from the 90s... Ah, the halcyon days of the 90s. Grunge, hip-hop, Seinfeld and Friends, back when we looked at each other's faces instead of phones... but I digress... Anyway, it seemed like everyone was pirating music, CD sales were way down, and the music industry wasn't sure how to shut down a distributed system like Napster/KaZaa. But the labels, who hated each other, came together, partnered with Apple Music, and used every power (including Congress) to fight piracy and won. We now pay for music (ad supported or via subscription) and music piracy is far less a thing because the legitimate path of listening to just about any song in the world is easier than stealing. I suspect social platforms are moving toward their version of that. Not a world where AI content disappears. The cat-and-mouse game probably never ends. But rather a world where first-hand, original, clearly human content becomes easier to trust — and easier to surface — than the automated alternative. The legitimate path becomes better than the shortcut. That's how Spotify beat piracy. That's where this is heading. Over on LinkedIn, Leigh McKenzie recently shared that original research is outranking AI-written content on Google, "not by a little… by a lot." So — if your AEO strategy is built on AI-generated volume, you're essentially betting against platforms with existential motivation to shut that down. And AI generated content doesn't just risk lower reach, but potential penalties and bans. The better AEO strategy, albeit harder, is to get your experts and execs creating real content. Rocksalt AI makes this less painful. (Unabashed plug... but hopefully useful if you're reading the above and worrying how to get your internal experts more visible in social.)

Most startup founders avoid crowded markets. But my experience at HubSpot taught me that entering one may be unavoidable—and how you compete can determine whether you become a unicorn or disappear into the noise. In 2011, HubSpot was a rocket ship that owned the very idea of Inbound marketing — by design. Co-founders Brian and Dharmesh had deliberately avoided the marketing automation space because it was a red ocean, full of incumbents like Marketo and Eloqua. The strategy worked beautifully, until it didn't. And the lesson on how they course corrected is timely for the AEO space and anyone building a unicorn. The conviction to stay out of marketing automation came from a book they loved at MIT Sloan: Blue Ocean Strategy. At HubSpot, we even spent years downplaying marketing automation as overkill — useful only once you were well-known, but to get found you needed inbound. By March 2011, HubSpot was fresh off a Series D from Sequoia, generating 40,000 leads a month on a top-10 business blog. But behind the headlines, the management team was worried sick. Monthly churn was 3.5%. LTV:CAC was 1.7:1, well below the 3:1 benchmark needed for a healthy SaaS business. That's the year Brad Coffey, our brilliant strategy chief, built the "Mary, MOFU, Monetization" plan (the alliteration courtesy of haiku king and COO JD Sherman): Mary: Focus on Marketing Mary, the mid-market persona, vs. Owner Ollie, the SMB persona we'd historically sold to. MOFU: Build a robust email marketing and marketing automation offering. Monetization: Introduce second-axis pricing so customers paid more as they saw more success. A year later, CPO David Cancel and his crack team had shipped a killer MOFU offering. Churn dropped to ~2%. NRR crossed 100%. A few years after that, HubSpot IPO'd. So, why did HubSpot plunge into the red ocean that was MOFU and how did it win? Turns out, inbound was the sizzle that got customers in the door. But email and marketing automation was the steak that kept them. HubSpot had to enter the red ocean of marketing automation if it wanted to be a valuable marketing platform. But because of the blue ocean path they'd built first, they entered with a full-funnel offering that pure-play marketing automation solutions simply didn't have. That was their edge. My read is that if you want to build a monster company you are going to enter a red ocean as that's where the big market is. The question is what differentiator you bring so you can stand out and win. I think this same story is playing out with AEO/GEO right now. Every founder I talk to wants to know how to rank in ChatGPT. There are 100+ AI visibility tools and every agency is selling AI visibility audits. Talk about sizzling! But there's a catch: 67% of ChatGPT's citations come from sources you can't directly influence — Tim Soulo at Ahrefs found that after analyzing a billion data points. And AI overviews reshuffle sources every 2 days while barely changing the answer. Meanwhile, a NYT study of 27 million AI responses found Reddit was the most cited website for solution-seeking prompts, ahead of YouTube, Wikipedia, and news. And LinkedIn is now the 5th most cited source by ChatGPT, up from 11th a few months ago. So what's the steak in 2026? I think it's showing up where buyers actually spend their attention — LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube — so when they go to the LLM, they ask about you by name. Not as sizzling as AEO. But it's the steak that will actually deliver leads -- now and in the future as LLMs evolve to trust UGC content more than corporate blogs. This is why we're rethinking how we approach AEO at Rocksalt — entering the red ocean, but from a very different angle. More on that soon.

Who reads TechCrunch or tech pubs anymore? 18 months ago I almost made an expensive mistake because publications were useless on the AEO hype. I couldn't tell if it was snake oil or legit. What saved me: two LinkedIn posts from experts - Eli Schwartz and Lily Ray - that grounded the discussion in SEO fundamentals. I got lucky my LinkedIn feed surfaced the posts (I often miss Eli's posts even though we're connected). So I've built a free email digest that highlights the most relevant and important LinkedIn conversations in your industry. Sign up in 1 min at rocksalt.ai 3 interesting notes...