🔎 How we'll ever find anything in 2026
Happy New Year to everyone but the cluttered, toll booth-laden feeds that don't work anymore.
2026 showed up this week. So before another calendar year speeds past this newsletter, I hope you’re all taking care of yourselves in this latter half of a truly chaotic decade. I anticipate this is going to be a chaotic year for many of us — so I just wanted to wish you all well and share a bit about where my head is at.
First, in case you haven’t been watching me at my day job, I put a list up in December with ecommerce trends I expect to see shaping how things are getting bought and sold online in the year ahead. That was for an online retail industry audience, but it touched on a few points that are relevant more widely.
Specifically, one thing that has my attention in the media world is the so-called Google Zero idea that organic search traffic will diminish to the point of being negligible. That would be driven by search engine users seeing AI-generated responses that don’t require clickthroughs to original sources, all but rendering traditional search results irrelevant.
I’m a skeptic of this maximalist take on where things are trending. Yet, at the same time, I do see truth in the direction with which this vision aligns. News media outlets, much like online retailers, have long depended on organic search as a major channel for discovery. Many companies in both arenas have reported difficulties of late, with rising opportunities in traffic from AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Optimizing content for these AI tools is not necessarily as straightforward as it is for Google Search and Bing. However, some best practices do seem to carry over, possibly because ranking well in traditional search may boost visibility in AI platform citations.
Personally, after living through the highs and lows of Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms as web traffic sources in the 2010s, my bias is toward dispersing dependency and avoiding over-reliance on any single channel or platform where algorithms can change or toll booths can be implemented overnight.
That said, I’ve found the new opportunities in traffic from AI platforms to be an interesting challenge — and one where I’ve seen some fun results while keeping traditional search visibility and social video channels alive.
If you’re dealing with any of the same challenges, I’d love to chat.
In the meantime, back to the original spirit of Sidebars. Here are some quick recommendations.
Side reads and watches
“Pluribus” on Apple TV, which is one of those shows that keeps drilling deeper each episode and Sean T. Collins has been reviewing the Dickens out of on Decider
“Make It Ours,” the Virgil Abloh biography by Robin Givhan, chronicling the late polymath’s journey out of Illinois, into the fashion world, and beyond
Side shoutouts and links to friends
“The Forgotten Five,” a gorgeous new character-driven comic that my indefatigable friend Alex Segura has been serializing in collaboration with his fellow writer Sara Century and artists Pat Kennedy and Dean Kotz
Pop Heist, just one of the true pleasures of pop culture reading online today, thanks in no small part to the interviews, articles and reviews some of my former colleagues have been contributing over there
Justin Aclin’s newsletter, where my talented and thoughtful pal has been interviewing other creatives about how they do what they do and plugging in his own observations