Why Your Brand Needs a Content Canon (Not a Cannon)
AI is collapsing the traffic model we once relied on. As answer engines replace search engines, fewer clicks are coming through, and the value is consolidating into scarce trusted sources.
That is not just my view. Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, told WIRED the same thing. Cloudflare powers and secures millions of sites, which gives him a rare vantage point on how information flows and where it breaks. His conclusion was clear: scarcity is coming back to the web, and the winners will be those who control unique credible content.
That line stuck with me. Last year, we at Victus Marketing recognized the same shift: Durable brands would need a defined canon and a trusted voice if they wanted to keep showing up. We started building Victus Advisors' content canon then, and the validation has been clear: Victus Advisors’ LinkedIn following has more than doubled in the past year.
My view as a marketer is that the highest-leverage move any organization can make right now is to build and curate its own content canon. (Or cannon if you absolutely insist!)
Why? Because answer engines do not browse the way humans do. They do not click, they do not sample, they do not compare tabs. They pull directly from a finite set of trusted inputs. If your brand is not part of that canon, your expertise may never surface. Worse, competitors or even anonymous AI writers may end up defining the answers in your place.
Distribution models will keep shifting, but every system still needs credible scarce trusted inputs. That means you need to:
Own the source of truth on your domain
Refresh it with clear authorship dates and rights
Package your proprietary data methods and case studies
Summarize your own work before someone else does
But what if my traffic is down 50 percent?
That is the reality many brands are already facing. You can do everything right, publish credible and original work, and still see organic visits decline as answer engines satisfy more intent directly on the page.
Here is the shift:
The win condition has changed. Success is no longer measured only in raw pageviews. You win when your expertise makes it into the answers themselves. Visibility is shifting from clicks to presence.
Relative performance matters. If you are down 50 percent but competitors are down 80 percent, you have gained ground. Scarcity raises the value of every credible source that remains in circulation.
The impact is downstream. Even if fewer people click through, being cited in AI answers reinforces your authority. It shows up later in direct visits, branded search, inbound leads and sales lift.
Winning does not mean traffic looks like 2021 again. It means your brand becomes one of the scarce trusted inputs the machines and people continue to draw from.
Whether you are in sports, recreation, the arts or mixed-use real estate, the principle is the same: if you do not own the inputs, you will not show up in the answers.
And let us not forget the human factor: strong writing, clear storytelling and original ideas. In a flood of machine-generated sameness, those qualities cut through and stick.
The rules are changing fast. If you do not own the inputs, you will not own the answers. That is the work we do at Victus Marketing: helping leaders define their canon, package their expertise and build the source-of-truth libraries that will keep showing up long after distribution models change again. Contact us to see how we can help you.
🔗 Full WIRED interview with Matthew Prince: https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-podcast-matthew-prince-cloudflare/
