TL; DR
- The internet isn’t dead—it’s haunted. Bots now make up the majority of traffic, inflating metrics and warping decisions.
- Don’t chase phantom spikes. Shift from vanity metrics to human signals (qualified replies, dwell time, real pipeline).
- Build “proof-of-work” content: original data, named experts, receipts, and visible provenance.
- Rewire the PESO Model©: Owned (proof stack) → Earned (receipts, relationships) → Shared (smaller rooms, real convo) → Paid (verified attention).
- Make your brand easy to verify and hard to fake—prove it, sign it, share it, keep your receipts.
How to Manage Your Brand on the Dead Internet
Have you seen those videos of animals jumping on people’s trampolines in the middle of the night? The first one I saw was of raccoons, which is totally feasible—and I almost fell for it. But then I saw a bear, some deer, a coyote, a fox, and a moose. All we needed next was a unicorn! Those are very obviously all AI-generated.
Sure, they’re fun and harmless (who doesn’t want to see videos of animals jumping on trampolines??), but it’s a subtle glimpse into a dead internet.
A dead internet, you say? Does that mean a world without the internet?
Not necessarily.
It’s more that we begin to live in a world where AI and bot-generated content has surpassed human-generated content.
The dead internet theory was once a conspiracy theory found on the fringes. But it has slowly generated more attention because of the rise of AI-generated content.
A 2025 “Bad Bot” report estimates that 51% of all web traffic is created by bots. 51%!
And, as we discussed last week, we’re already in a spot where bot-generated crises are nearly half of all content around the topic. Even he-who-shall-not-be-named in the White House continues to share deep fake and AI-generated content on social media.
Which is why this isn’t a “sky is falling” message—it’s a “it’s time to change your playbook” message.
If bots now outnumber humans, then being seen online requires verifiable proof you’re human, useful, and real.
The internet isn’t dead; it’s just crowded with ghosts. And we thought ghosts weren’t real. (Well, except for Rose, my SIL’s ghost. She was definitely real.)
What Is the Dead Internet Theory
Last week, we discussed bot-inflamed crises and this crazy world we live in. Well, my friends, it doesn’t get happier or shinier. No unicorns and rainbows coming from the internet right now (except for maybe Life of a Showgirl, which I loooooooove; controversial, I know…fight me!).
The “dead internet” theory began on the fringes: a suspicion that most of what we read online isn’t written for people or by people at all—it’s bots talking to bots while platforms and ad tech applaud the noise as engagement.
We know that the incentives of the modern web reward volume over value, automation over expertise, and velocity over verification.
And now more than half of what you find online is created by bots. What happens next year, when we rise to two-thirds? And the year after that, when it’s three-fourths? And then, as a content creator, I’m among only 1% of actual humans producing content?
It’s scary and it’s sad. What will I do with my life if I’m not creating content? Bake sourdough? Crochet? Ride my bike even more?
The result isn’t a dead internet so much as a ghosted one—crowded with synthetic signals that look like success on dashboards but fail to move real humans.
It is our job, then, not to mourn the old web; it’s to make work that ghosts can’t fake and machines can verify.
That means publishing original research, citing real sources, showing your receipts, attaching names and credentials, and maintaining a visible chain of custody for media.
Create content for both audiences: signals that help algorithms recognize authenticity, and stories that help people feel it. If you do that—if I do that—we will always be able to continue creating content.
The Symptoms You’re Already Feeling
You’re likely already experiencing the symptoms. Decreased traffic. Decreased organic search. Dashboards that are gaslighting you. Higher bounce rates. Lower time on pages. Your social engagement is eerily the same (LinkedIn is a hotbed for this right now). Distribution is getting harder and harder. And the cost per conversion has increased.
All of this creates trust drift. Audiences don’t announce, “I’m leaving the public internet now.” (Well, most don’t anyway… some announce and then are back two days later.)
Most just stop engaging where the noise lives.
The good news is that people still want to hear from you!
They start opening your emails again. They spend time in member communities and private groups. They DM your founder or your customer service team instead of replying in public. They show up at events and webinars.
Create the opportunity for meaningful interactions in smaller rooms. Go back to the basics.
Why Marketers and Communicators Should Care
Outside of the sheer change this is creating in how we reach our audiences, there are four reasons you should care:
- There is a real cost to believing the wrong numbers.
- Synthetic heat has real-world consequences.
- Reputation itself becomes more fragile in a ghosted internet.
- Simple waste.
Let’s go through each of them.
The Cost of Believing the Wrong Numbers
The cost of believing the wrong numbers is real.
When bots pad your reach and your clicks, the first casualty is judgment.
Teams celebrate charts that rise while revenue stalls, and budgets drift toward the channels that are easiest to game.
It’s not incompetence. To this point, we’ve been able to believe the data. Dashboards are persuasive, and when they glow, they steer decisions.
But we have to correct for synthetic attention now. If we don’t, we’ll quietly defund the work that actually moves people and quietly double down on the work that flatters a spreadsheet.
Look at what happened to poor Cracker Barrel. They reacted to a fire created by bots—and their VP of marketing and their agency ended up getting fired as a result.
Synthetic Heat Has Real Consequences
The second risk is velocity. Synthetic heat accelerates real-world consequences.
The Cracker Barrel example shows you exactly how it works. The bots manufacture early outrage, and then the humans and headlines take it from there.
Last week, I gave you a good playbook to help ensure you don’t get caught up in the same thing. I will caution you again to create between now and the end of the year because in our current environment, a rumor can outrun your response by hours, and “wait and see” becomes “watch it burn.”
If you don’t have a plan to verify media, authenticate sources, and respond with facts, you’ll be negotiating your reputation with ghosts who never sleep.
Reputation is More Fragile
Reputation itself becomes more fragile in a ghosted internet.
Deepfakes and out-of-context clips shrink the distance between “that didn’t happen” and “we’re trending for it.”
The old playbook—issue a statement, correct the record, wait for tomorrow’s news cycle—assumes a human-paced web.
Today’s loop is machine-paced.
Your credibility must be operationalized in advance, including identifiable experts, traceable content, and a clear chain of custody for your brand’s words and visuals.
Simple Waste
And then there’s simple waste.
We start spending money on non-human impressions. Influencer fees chasing fake engagement. Social teams optimizing for likes that never lead to a call, a demo, a signup, or a purchase.
This is an opportunity cost you won’t get back.
Every dollar that props up phantom performance is a dollar not building the owned assets, relationships, and communities that compound.
I’m definitely not suggesting you abandon the internet, but this is why the PESO Model© is even more important today.
With it installed as your marketing operating system, you will know what to look for in your data, you’ll make the most informed decisions, and you won’t be caught in a bot-created crisis.
The brands that will win are the ones that make themselves easy to verify and hard to fake—where every pitch, post, and placement carries proof it came from a real person who knows what they’re talking about.
That’s why this matters now: not because the internet is dead, but because it’s crowded with ghosts, and it’s going to get even worse.
Rewriting PESO for a Dead Internet
We’ve spent the entire year refining the PESO Model (again) to account for AI and how your brands appear in search results.
We’ve talked about PESO as your operating system, including visibility engineering, structured trust, AI as your new brand persona, and navigating a zero-click, zero-share world.
It’s no longer enough for you to build a program that integrates marketing and communications.
Now you have to re-engineer each channel to be verifiable human and authentic—and do your best to stand out on a dead internet.
Start with Owned Media
I always recommend starting with owned in any PESO Model program, and this is no exception.
Think about owned media as your foundation and your fortress. It’s where everything you do is verifiable and factual.
Publish with a “proof stack” baked into the page: author identity and credentials, methodology notes in plain language, links to primary sources, downloadable artifacts, and a changelog that timestamps updates.
Mark it for machines with structured data, authorship schema, and media provenance where feasible.
Mark it for humans with clarity about what’s new, what’s opinion, and what’s measured.
Build cornerstone resources that are hard to counterfeit because they’re interactive or operational—calculators, checklists, annotated exemplars, micro-courses.
Then protect your best work from being strip-mined by making the experience of your site the product: internal linking that tells a coherent story, related assets that go deeper, and clear next steps that move a visitor from curiosity to commitment.
Your website will remain your hub.
Earned Media is Next
From here, you can either move to earned or shared media, but because we know LLMs learn from owned and earned media, I recommend you go to earned next.
Never have relationships been more valuable. And not just with traditional media journalists, but with bloggers, newsletter authors, podcasters, and social media influencers. Build your relationships now so that, when the bots take over (and they will!), you can go to those humans to tell your story and ensure a crisis doesn’t develop.
As you do that, keep in mind that no one needs one more opinion. Your earned media relationships need sources who reduce uncertainty.
Lead with your receipts: original datasets, trends pulled from your product briefs, customer cohorts willing to go on the record, spare but shareable visualizations that make a story easier to tell.
Put a named expert in front of it and meet deadlines predictably.
When the next synthetic flare-up hits your category, you can make a phone call, and they will take it because you built a track record of being right and being reachable.
Shared is Next
What I love most about all of this is shared has to move back to building relationships. You know, the stuff we did in the beginning, as we were learning how to connect with other humans on the internet.
The main feed can still be useful for discovery, but your outcomes will come from smaller rooms where identity is clearer and conversation is slower: customer communities, private groups, Slack channels, Patreon/Discord memberships, creator collabs with audiences who actually talk back.
As you think about this shift, you’ll want to design for replies over reactions. Ask questions that require expertise to answer and reward the people who show it.
When something performs in public, ferry the discussion into the spaces you own so it doesn’t evaporate into bot-churn.
Shared becomes the way that you can carry proof-of-work to the people who care, then carry their feedback back to the work.
End with Paid
And last, but certainly not least, is paid.
You can no longer be concerned with the lowest cost per impression. Cheap reach is where counterfeit attention hides.
Shift the buy to environments that can prove a person was there and doing something. Private marketplaces, direct deals with premium publishers, and contextual packages beat the open exchange lottery.
Pay super close attention to buying time and intent. This means the vanity metric we’ve been railing against for years—clicks, views, and impressions—really don’t matter any longer.
Optimize your content and your spend to dwell time, interaction, scroll depth, and qualified site actions. These are signals bots can’t fake.
Don’t Let Your Brand Become a Ghost
The internet isn’t dead. It’s haunted. And haunted houses don’t scare off the people who show up with flashlights, floor plans, and friends.
This is less about mastering new hacks and more about raising the standard.
Build assets that ghosts can’t fake, mark them so machines can verify, and distribute them where humans still linger.
Do that consistently across PESO, and your metrics will get smaller before they get stronger—then they’ll start compounding in ways a dashboard full of synthetic applause never will.
The playbook is simple: prove it, sign it, share it with real people, and keep your receipts. In a ghosted internet, the brands that win won’t look the busiest. They’ll look the most real.
© 2025 Spin Sucks. All rights reserved. The PESO Model is a registered trademark of Spin Sucks.
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