--- title: Try Being More of a Loudmouth description: Propllr's April 2026 newsletter, featuring commentary on the latest Google algo update and encouragement to experts wary about sharing their thoughts. image: https://blog.propllr.com/hubfs/PR%20NL%20-%20April%20blog.jpg --- [![](https://blog.propllr.com/hubfs/raw_assets/public/Propllr_2025/images/2024/logo.svg)](https://propllr.com/) - What We Do - [Public Relations](https://propllr.com/pr-for-startups/) - [Content Marketing](https://propllr.com/content-marketing/) - What We’ve Done - [Case Studies](https://propllr.com/case-studies/) - [Client News](https://propllr.com/client-news/) - What We Think - [Blog](https://blog.propllr.com/) - About - [About](https://propllr.com/about/) - [Life at Propllr](https://propllr.com/life-at-propllr/) - [Contact](https://propllr.com/contact/) - What We Do - [Public Relations](https://propllr.com/pr-for-startups/) - [Content Marketing](https://propllr.com/content-marketing/) - What We’ve Done - [Case Studies](https://propllr.com/case-studies/) - [Client News](https://propllr.com/client-news/) - What We Think - [Blog](https://blog.propllr.com/) - About - [About](https://propllr.com/about/) - [Life at Propllr](https://propllr.com/life-at-propllr/) - [Contact](https://propllr.com/contact/) # Try Being More of a Loudmouth By [Brenna Lemieux](https://blog.propllr.com/author/brenna-lemieux) | April 22, 2026 ![](https://blog.propllr.com/hs-fs/hubfs/PR%20NL%20-%20April%20blog.jpg?width=730&height=500&name=PR%20NL%20-%20April%20blog.jpg) One time, in grad school, I looked up from the one-millionth draft of a poem that wasn’t working and thought, out of nowhere: you don’t have to try to be pretty. All you have to do is look like yourself. Turns out, that’s also great advice for marketing a business in the era of AI (jump to the last section for more). What's ahead: - Confident shouters vs. hesitant experts - What Google’s algo update means for you - A primer on AI watermarks ## Loud overconfidence vs. quiet expertise A Threads user recently described AI output as having a “[mic-drop style](https://www.threads.com/@lauraschaeferwriter/post/DXAHTqhEXBL?xmt=AQF0Fcwhv1Wbhn6DAwgM598y3vvYAGHBb1a0ZgSnK44bKg),” which resonated with a lot of people. It’s quippy. It’s confident. It has an air of delivering the final word. Content in this style tends to get amplified because it lends itself to soundbites and retweets and fervid agreement (or disagreement). Unfortunately, it usually doesn’t sound the way actual expertise does. Expertise is nuanced and complex and rarely lends itself to quips. It involves caveats and footnotes and clarifications and context. It doesn’t lead to 10 foolproof takeaways because by the time you need an expert you’re past the point where foolproof takeaways are useful. This is a compounding problem because the pseudo-experts (and the AI outputs emulating them) sound so *confident*, which makes real experts think they are not expert enough to spout off in public. Real experts have doubts. They don’t want to make pronouncements because there's always more to the story. They hesitate; they imagine their more pedantic peers commenting to point out things they didn’t mention. This means they often end up saying nothing. And that lets the confident slopsters take up all the more space. All to say: if you’re an expert involved in a B2B tech company, there's a good chance you could benefit from being a little louder in public. (By which I mean places like opinion articles, podcasts, social media, and your company’s blog or YouTube channel.) This is doubly true if you’re Midwestern, either by birth (lucky!) or choice (smart!). But you may feel like online spaces are already too crowded with people shouting about their big, brilliant discoveries. And you know what? They are. But they need more soft-spoken experts. They need more people who aren’t willing to gloss over the details because the details are where the devils hide. And look: I know it’s hard to clear that initial hurdle of sharing your opinion when nobody asked for it. But when you do, you show your target audience how you think, how you interpret things, and therefore what they can expect from working with you. This is gradual, non-viral work that lets them get to know and trust you over time. And when it’s time to choose a vendor, your name will be top of mind. ## New Google algo just dropped… And so did a lot of websites’ rankings. What's different this time is what the algorithm now rewards and penalizes. Anything that can be summarized by Google’s LLMs and therefore served on a SERP is doing worse. Anything that can’t be (currently) handled in a SERP is doing better. ([Great analysis here](https://signal.zyppy.com/p/winning-google).) This is a doubling down on the move toward zero-click SERPS. For example, a lot of news sites aren’t faring well. AI can summarize news (and is apparently [even rewriting headlines](https://rsf.org/en/usa-google-claiming-editorial-right-it-does-not-have-rewriting-news-headlines-its-search-results)), so why would you bother sending a person to an actual news website (seems to be the logic)? The five website characteristics correlated with better performance post-update (per the analysis above): 1. The site offers a unique product or service. 2. Users can do something on the site. 3. It covers a niche area of expertise. 4. It has unique proprietary assets. 5. It positions and promotes its brand such that it becomes an online destination. Put differently: stop trying to be the best in your category and start being the only *you*. Ways to get there: focus on your products (specific vs. general), your founders or SMEs, your company name, your firsts and onlies, your unique differentiators. At Propllr, we’ve got the Trust Engine (which is chugging across your screen right now). Zillow’s got the Zestimate. Figure out what you do differently than your competitors. Name it. Own the name. Become the destination for that specific thing. This isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s a smart branding move, regardless of anything else. ## AI watermarks: you get what you pay for with scaled content Maybe you’ve seen folks posting screenshots of how their “scaled” content production made their traffic soar. Or maybe your feed is tuned so that you’re seeing more of the longer-term case studies where [traffic crashes shortly after the initial rise](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bogdan-babiak_you-generate-content-with-ai-you-get-traffic-activity-7437517405871824896-18xQ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAm302oBGZRs6Qz1K7XB5C-l0PoaqnYAT48), when Google realizes a website is publishing slop. With this new update especially, Google [limits traffic to sites with lots of AI-generated content](https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/scaled-content-abuse-google-march-update-ai-pages-decimated) because it deems that content minimally useful. Fair enough. BUT HOW DO THEY KNOW IT’S AI? One possible answer: AI watermarking. Google, for example, uses a watermarking system called [SynthID](https://ai.google.dev/responsible/docs/safeguards/synthid) that embeds signals into its AI outputs (image, audio, video, and text) that signal it was created by Google’s AI tools. The image watermark is a pixel-level thing that [can’t be detected](https://aiimagedetectors.net/synthid) by the human eye and is tamper resistant (against cropping, compression, screenshots, etc.). The text watermark is pretty ingenious: it’s a “token probability adjustment,” meaning it’s built into the text generation formula rather than the words themselves. You can disrupt the watermark with heavy editing, but at that point, why not just write the thing yourself? I don’t know whether Google’s algorithm includes a parameter that checks AI watermarks at this point. But I do know that the existence of these watermarks means that using AI to scale content generation with the goal of ranking on Google is a losing strategy. If your AI-generated content is genuinely useful to your audience, that’s a different story. Maybe you don’t need to worry about Google. But if you’re aiming to be helpful *and* perform well, it’s best to invest in hand-crafted content. --- ICYMI: we wrote on the blog this month about [how PR can shorten your sales cycle](https://blog.propllr.com/how-pr-can-shorten-your-sales-cycle). TL;DR: when you invest in building a solid reputation for your brand, your internal champions at customer organizations don’t have to spend much political capital to recommend you. 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