Climbing the Marketing Mountain After the AI Avalanche

One trail still reaches the summit…

We’ve all seen it. You open LinkedIn with your morning coffee and scroll through a blizzard of copy-paste thought leadership, clickbait, and AI comments. The images all share the same glossy faces, and “personalized” DMs know what’s on your LinkedIn profile and little else. Half the videos feature someone reading a script a robot wrote in a hurry. The other half feature the robot itself, wearing a human avatar like a Terminator robot. They’re all worthless.

We’re being buried under an avalanche of AI Slop.

Content used to be king because knowledge was power in the information age. AI swallowed that knowledge whole and turned it into a commodity that’s faster to produce than it is to read.

We can now make more marketing than our audience can consume.

Trust, on the other hand, hasn’t kept pace. It requires credibility, reliability, authenticity, and generosity, and those things take time to build. AI is fast, and trust is slow.

Without a Human-First AI Marketing® strategy and a strong level of trust to support the weight of all the new content, AI has created an avalanche of slop.

The Marketing Mountain Trail Map

Before AI, the marketing mountain had plenty of roads, trails, base camps, and sherpas. You could take the content marketing route, the pay-per-click switchbacks, or the outbound expedition. Blogs, newsletters, social media, PR, webinars, and white papers all kept you moving uphill. There were plenty of marketing sherpas to guide you. Experienced marketers who had summited with multiple companies through a variety of channels.

My favorite base camp was the Digital Summit, a cozy spot where marketers and influencers pitched their tents together and helped each other acclimate to the next altitude of growth. It was a different time just 3 years ago.

The very top of the marketing mountain was always hard to reach, but a good business with a competent marketer could at least climb above the profitability tree line and enjoy the view.

The AI Blizzard of 2023

Then the AI storm rolled in at the end of 2023, and the blizzard of content blinded everyone.

Content marketing got buried. The river of leads from Google froze solid as buyers started asking AI and getting answers without clicking anything. Robots replaced the human sherpas, confidently hallucinating directions that sounded good enough. Outbound got a double case of frostbite as AI SDRs started firing off cold messages while other AI started filtering them out.

By 2026, more than half of online searches end with zero clicks. Over half the internet is now created by AI, and over half the traffic to those pages comes from agents, bots, and crawlers. Human traffic to websites has fallen more than 80% for most sites.

The whiteout conditions were enough to blind the best marketing strategies and crush established systems.

Thin Air at Altitude for Successful Organizations

I’ve watched this happen here on LinkedIn. More than a decade ago, I co-wrote a book that LinkedIn itself picked up and published, teaching salespeople how to use the platform. Back then, building a network was pretty simple, your connections actually saw your posts, and reaching out to them was fairly easy. DMs got answered, people met IRL, and referrals helped each other grow.

Over the years, the algorithm drifted toward pay-to-play, controversy, and clickbait. My network kept growing while my reach kept shrinking. Today, maybe 10% of the people I’m connected to will ever see this post. It feels like someone sucked the oxygen out of the room.

When I scroll the feed, I mostly find clickbait content and AI comments with nothing of substance. Oh, and don’t forget the video influencers doing TikTok-style videos…

When was the last time you actually got something of value out of your feed? When was the last time you got business from LinkedIn?

That’s the cruel physics of this mountain now. The higher you climb, the thinner the air gets, and the more you need to know exactly what you are doing.

You can still get value out of your network and find business on LinkedIn and other channels, but the environment has changed.

The Wrong Gear

Most bad AI implementations start with the mistaken assumption that AI will replace marketers.

AI isn’t making the avalanche of slop. People are!

Marketers who misuse AI will certainly make themselves less relevant. Marketers who bring rich human context and a real strategy will become superhuman at their jobs.

The tool is the same. It’s the strategy that determines whether it works.

Most companies treat AI like a vending machine. They insert a prompt, collect a blog post, publish it, and wonder why nothing moves. McKinsey found the real reason organizations aren’t winning with AI sits in the corner office. Leaders duct-tape AI onto broken workflows, run endless pilots that never scale, feed the machine vague input, and measure success by the volume of output. We’ve collectively been using AI to do dumb things faster.

There is no vending machine at the top of marketing mountain, nowhere to plug it in. The best marketing can only be made by humans.

AI marketing is the Groupon problem in new hiking boots. When Groupon arrived, local businesses gave away half their revenue on two-for-one deals that made no strategic sense. AI hype makes the same promise of easy scale, but not lifetime clients. If you aren’t careful, it drains your margin and your momentum before you realize what happened.

When a human-first strategy leads, good things can still happen.

• AI personalization can lift email open rates by 10-20% and click-throughs by 20-50%.
• AI-assisted workflows can double content output without adding headcount.
• AI lead scoring can improve accuracy by up to 30%.

When we do the thinking first, put our clients first, and respect our employees’ judgment over AI, the results still show up. Most leaders struggle because that work is harder than just leaning into the AI hype and promises of making money while you sleep.

Why Smaller Climbers Move Faster

I believe small and mid-sized businesses have the advantage on this mountain. Enterprises are hauling billion-dollar expeditions up routes that may dead-end. Solopreneurs travel so light they can’t afford to scout new trails. SMEs sit in the sweet spot, with enough resources to invest in strategy, systems, and people without betting the whole business.

Big companies win with scale, speed, price, and budget. Small companies win with trust, solving a specific problem for a specific audience with more personalization than any enterprise can deliver at volume. Add AI to that while keeping the human touch, and suddenly you’re carrying big-brand firepower without the bloated team and big ad budget.

Racing to the bottom on speed, price, and the latest AI hack is a fast slide down the mountain when you make a misstep. Left to its own devices, AI creates a regression to the middle, a crowded ledge of similar voices telling similar stories on the same loose rocks.

Your Grandparents’ Trail Is the Only One Left.

One path to the summit remains open. Modern digital marketers forgot about it, but your grandparents walked it every day. Reaching back and grabbing the hand of a real human and helping them get to the next level. One at a time, meeting them where they are, and guiding them through the buyer journey.

Building trust, building relationships, and securing yourself and your strategy to the fundamentals of human psychology and communication…

Those fundamentals haven’t changed in a hundred years. Sure, direct mail needed a headline that grabbed attention. TV commercials needed an emotional hook to keep your hand off the remote. Word-of-mouth needed a story worth repeating. However, humans have always bought from people they know, like, and trust.

AI-assisted marketing must play by the same rules.

At Avenue9, we define Human-First AI Marketing as automation that amplifies authenticity.

AI should expand your reach, sharpen your consistency, and increase your capacity while turning up the volume on your own voice. That’s why I created the A9^Factor, a three-stage trail map to the top of marketing mountain.

• Human-First Strategy gives you audience clarity, an authentic brand voice, and a unique offer.
• AI Marketing Systems handle channel mapping, conversion architecture, and your content engine.
• Scalable Storytelling turns sales stories, trust signals, and context circles into the kind of reputation buyers repeat to each other.

Strategy sets the route, systems carry the weight, and stories bring other climbers along with you.

The avalanche only buried the shortcuts. The trail built on trust is still open. You just have to do the hard work of navigating it.

Ready to find your route up the mountain?

I have room for two more 90-day Strategy Accelerator sprints before 2026 closes out. Together, we’ll figure it out.

Claim one of the two spots by talking to me, a real live human. DM Mike Montague or contact me here.

Fresh snow has one big advantage:

Every footprint shows.

The way to win in 2026 and beyond is to be unmistakably human. AI leaves its digital watermark everywhere, but only humans leave an impression.

As for me, I’m still posting this for those 10% of real humans who will read this, for now, because the people who find you on a hard trail tend to stay for the whole climb.

Let’s climb together.