Yesterday’s antitrust ruling against Google could be the starting gun for a new era in digital marketing. For years, we’ve been conditioned to think in a binary: organic traffic versus paid traffic. We need to move beyond the narrow obsession with the channels that bring us traffic and start focusing on the traffic itself. I’m interested in what I’m calling Agnostic Traffic: an approach far more interested in who people are and how they behave than where they came from.
What is Agnostic Traffic? The “Who,” Not the “Where”
I want to think of Agnostic Traffic as a fundamental change in perspective. It’s a customer-centric philosophy that redefines a “good lead” not by the channel that delivered it, but by the human attributes and intent behind it.
It seems like long ago that marketing was obsessed with the basic “where.” We tracked URLs and mobile IDs. We valued a click from Google’s organic search more than a click from a niche forum, even if the person from the forum was a more qualified buyer. I felt like our dashboards and KPIs were built around channel attribution only.
The old model was channel-obsessed:
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Is this visit organic, paid, or social?
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What’s our cost-per-click on this platform?
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How do we rank #1 for this keyword?
The agnostic model must be more human-obsessed, asking more powerful questions about who people are and how they behave. Their intent.
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“Is this person an IT director trying to solve a specific security problem?” (Who)
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“What communities do they trust and what questions are they asking there?” (How)
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“How can we deliver undeniable value to them at the precise moment they are looking for a solution, regardless of the platform?” (Context)
In an agnostic framework, the source is just one data point. The real value lies in understanding the person’s motivations, their pain points, and their journey.
The Pillars of an Agnostic Strategy
Transitioning to this model probably requires building a marketing engine founded on three pillars that prioritize people over platforms:
Audience Ownership: If you focus on who a person is, the goal shifts from getting a click to building a relationship. Every interaction should be designed to move a person from a “rented” platform (like search or social) to an “owned” one (like an email list or a private community), where you can learn more about them directly.
Radical Diversification: Understanding how your audience behaves means you must be present where they are, not just where it’s easy to measure. This is inherently challenging because it’s more difficult to measure. It also probably requires a strategic expansion into the niche online communities, Substacks even more so than ever, and into industry newsletters and podcasts. In other words: lots and lots of content.
Content as the Universal Translator: In a multi-platform world, content is how you speak to people based on their needs and identity. An agnostic strategy would be a more flexible content engine that can address your audience’s specific problems (how they behave) in a format that resonates with who they are.
The Future is Attuned, Not Just Tuned-Up
I believe that the winners of the next shift will be those who become experts not in platforms, but in people. They will build something more resilient: a customer-attuned, platform-agnostic acquisition engine. They will stop chasing traffic and start building relationships.
And I really believe that content is a solution to delivering this.