For the last 20 years, digital marketing had one goal: drag a human across a "threshold", onto your website, so you could control the message and sell the product.

In 2026, the threshold is gone.

In this episode, Jono Alderson argues that we have entered the era of "Marketing to Machines." We are no longer optimizing for clicks; we are optimizing for the AI agents that intermediate the web.

We discuss why 90% of websites are now "Zombies" (technically online but functionally dead), why AI models treat marketing fluff like an allergen, and why the future of SEO isn't about meta tags, it's about "Upstream Engineering."

In this episode, we cover:

[00:00] The Death of the Threshold: Why the era of "interrupting humans to get them to your site" is over.
[02:24] The Surface-less Web: Why your brand is no longer just your domain, but an aggregation of everything said about you on the web (Reddit, YouTube, 2013 microsites).
[06:52] The "Zombie Web" Theory: Why "commodity content" (like generic dentist blogs) is worthless to an LLM that has already memorized the facts.
[11:05] The Machine Immune System: Why AI models view persuasive copywriting and sales fluff as "noise" or hallucinations to be filtered out.
[16:40] The Incoherence Penalty: How machines spot the gap between your marketing claims ("We love customers") and your reality (bad Reddit reviews).
[20:30] The llms.txt Trap: Why creating a separate "agent-friendly" version of your site won't work (and why machines won't trust it).
[22:50] MCP (Model Context Protocol): Is this the future of how websites communicate?
[28:14] Upstream Engineering: The new SEO. Why you need to optimize your return policy, logistics, and customer service instead of your title tags.
[33:05] The Timeline: The best and worst-case scenarios for the web in the next 5 years.
[38:39] How to Survive 2026: One final piece of advice for optimizers.

Links & Resources:

Connect with Jono: jonoalderson.com
Follow Jono on LinkedIn

---
If you want to go deeper on this, I write about it weekly at No Hacks Substack. Subscribe!

How to Read More (and Better) in 2026

Zero to Well-Read

Outro

The AI-powered Podcast Player