Article's Content
Article's Content
Welcome to Volume 249 👋
Happy Thursday!
In this week’s newsletter, we cover:
- 💪 Brands Are Losing BoFu Control: Here’s How to Get It Back
- ☁️ Cloudflare Launches the Pay-Per-Crawl Era
- 👀 The Latest in B2B SaaS This Week
- 🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
- ➕ The Best Content Across the Web
Let’s get to it.
💪 Brands Are Losing BoFu Control: Here’s How to Get It Back 💪
Your most valuable prospects are making purchase decisions on a platform where you have zero visibility or control.
Reddit now ranks for over 27.9 million commercial intent keywords, generating nearly 200 million organic visits monthly for bottom-of-funnel queries. Those high-intent “best CRM software” and “Salesforce vs HubSpot” searches that used to land on your comparison pages? They’re happening in Reddit threads you’ve never seen.
This shift leaves marketers with no attribution data, no visibility into brand narratives, and no control over the conversations shaping purchase decisions. Not only that, AI tools like ChatGPT are training on these discussions, amplifying these community conversations into thousands of future buying decisions.
But here’s what most brands miss: this major threat is also the biggest bottom-of-funnel opportunity in years.
This week I break down Ross’s Lurk, Listen, and Leap strategy. It’s a 3-part pioneering framework successful brands use to recapture that high-intent traffic and shape the conversations that matter most:
- Lurk: Identify where high-intent prospects research purchase decisions by analyzing Reddit’s SERP dominance and mapping relevant subreddit discussions about your brand.
- Listen: Monitor authentic customer sentiment, pain points, and competitive positioning in community threads to understand real buyer concerns and product feedback.
- Leap: Engage strategically through employee accounts, branded subreddits, and retargeting ads to influence narratives and recapture dark conversion traffic authentically.
Check out the full breakdown for real examples, tactical implementation steps, and the specific metrics that matter.
🏔️ Digital Olympus Amsterdam: Get 30% Off Your Ticket (While You Can) 🏔️
Clear out your back-to-school schedule because Ross is taking the stage at the Digital Olympus Event in Amsterdam on September 11 as the opening keynote.
Digital Olympus is a conference built around breaking the old marketing patterns that just don’t work anymore. You’ll hear from experts with decades of experience about how they’re shaping the future of our industry.
Ross kicks things off with a keynote on “The Evolution of Content, Creativity & Digital Marketing in the Age of AI” followed by presentations from leading marketing experts like:
- Sanae Boukhana – Global Head of Digital Marketing at DHL Express
- Kevin de Wit – Senior Client Partner EMEA at Reddit (ex-Spotify)
- Lindsay Brennan – Global Head of Marketing and Demand Generation at ABB
- Dimitri Leontidis – Social Media Expert (ex-TikTok)
For those who really want to get the most out of this experience, attendees with Mastermind Tickets get access to sessions where you tackle challenges in real time with small groups of experts.
Use the code JoinRoss30OFF for 30% off (only valid until the end of July).
Book your ticket before prices go up!
☁️ Cloudflare Launches Pay Per Crawl to Restore the Web ☁️
The agreement that existed between websites and search engines—they crawl and scrape our content, we get web traffic in exchange—has fundamentally changed over the past year.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince recently explored the extent of this change:
A decade ago, Google sent back 1 visitor for every 2 pages it crawled. Now it’s 1 visitor for every 18 pages, thanks to AI Overview. And AI companies are skewing these ratios even further.
OpenAI’s bot crawls 1,500 pages for every visitor it refers to a site. For Anthropi, that ratio is 60,000 to 1.
Cloudflare recently launched a solution to the AI content consumption problem: Pay per crawl.
According to Cloudflare, the system (which is currently in Beta) lets publishers use the rarely-implemented HTTP 402 “Payment Required” response code to charge GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and other AI crawlers for access to their content.
Naturally, many major publishers and large tech companies that have lost traffic due to AI (and even filed lawsuits) have already signed up. There’s serious interest among large-scale content creators in monetizing AI access to their site.
A turning of the tables, so to speak.
But according to Pavel Israelsky, this is a more complex situation than meets the eye. He highlights the potential SEO and GEO implications of barring the bots from your web content:
- SEO won’t be immediately impacted since traditional search crawlers remain unaffected, but publishers now have unprecedented control options.
- GEO will be deeply affected as restricting training data will limit AI models’ foundational understanding of topics and domains.
- Models develop biases toward sources used during training, which means sites that are invisible during training are less likely to be referenced.
I’m sure there’ll be more to this story in the coming weeks and months as Google, OpenAI, et al. adjust to this move by Cloudflare. But for now, it seems like there’s hope for content creators.
Sponsored by: ClickMinded
Build Your Digital Marketing Strategy in Minutes
Calling all creators and marketing leaders!
ClickMinded’s free marketing strategy tool helps you build a custom digital strategy packed with actionable insights and ready-to-use resources.
You’ll walk away with all this:
- Target Persona Insights: Understand exactly who you’re marketing to
- Funnel Optimization Tactics: Fix leaks and boost conversions
- Channel-Specific Ideas: From SEO to email, get tactics that work
- Export-Ready Slides & Docs: Present your plan to your team or clients
- 90+ Templates, SOPs, and AI Prompts: Get started today
It’s fast, practical, and completely FREE.
🚨 New Podcast Alert: How Marketers Can Thrive During Budget Cuts & Downturns 🚨
A new episode of The Ross Simmonds Show just dropped, and if you’re facing shrinking budgets but still need to deliver results, this is exactly what you need to hear.
This week, Ross tackles one of the most pressing challenges marketers face today: thriving when resources are scarce.
While most marketers retreat during economic downturns, Ross reveals why these moments are actually hidden opportunities for strategic professionals who know how to pivot. He breaks down the mindset shifts, tactical approaches, and proven strategies that separate the survivors from the thrivers.
If budget cuts have you feeling stuck, this episode will show you how to turn constraints into your competitive advantage. Here are some key takeaways:
- Mindset matters most: The best marketers stay calm and use budget constraints to clarify what actually drives results. Limitations don’t kill creativity, they sharpen it.
- Avoid the big three mistakes: Don’t cut brand investment entirely, over-invest in expensive paid channels, or play it safe by copying competitors.
- Zero-budget tactics that work: Repurpose your top historical content across LinkedIn carousels, Reddit posts, and YouTube Shorts. Use first-party data to fuel thought leadership.
- Double down on existing customers: Turn your current customers into brand advocates through community building and VIP content. Word of mouth can’t be budget-cut.
- Think evergreen, not quick hits: Create assets that compound over time and focus on material that drives long-term ROI rather than immediate gains.
Catch this latest episode of the Ross Simmonds Show on Apple or Spotify for the complete playbook on marketing through uncertainty.
👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week? 👀
- 🧠 Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin, acquires Windsurf | TechCrunch
- 🇩🇪 Germany Leapfrogs UK To Lead European VC Investment In Q2 As Region’s Funding Settles | Crunchbase News
- 📍 Google Local Ranking Documentation Updated | Search Engine Roundtable
- 🤝 Walnut Launches First-Ever Interactive Deal Room, Redefining How B2B Teams Buy and Sell | PR Newswire
- 🔒 Following YouTube, Meta announces crackdown on ‘unoriginal’ Facebook content | TechCrunch
🎤 Ross Takes the Stage at BrightonSEO San Diego🎤
Ross is taking the stage as a keynote speaker at BrightonSEO San Diego 2025, and he’s tackling one of the biggest challenges facing marketers today:
Content Distribution in the Age of AI: How to Make Your Content Spread
Search is no longer confined to Google. Your audience finds content through Reddit threads, TikTok comments, LinkedIn posts, YouTube Shorts, newsletters, niche communities, and now through AI-powered search tools.
In his keynote, Ross will reveal how to build a repeatable and scalable content distribution engine that combines proven tactics with AI tools to get your content in front of the right people, at the right time.
What you’ll walk away with:
- Tactical strategies for teams of any size
- AI-powered tools to amplify your content’s reach
- Frameworks for multi-channel distribution that actually work
- Real-world examples of content that travels further than ever
Whether you’re a solo marketer or leading an entire department, this session will transform how you think about getting your content seen.
Ready to level up your distribution game?
Grab your tickets to BrightonSEO San Diego and secure your spot for what promises to be one of the event’s most actionable keynotes.
🧠 This Week’s Brain Food 🧠
Ever spend a “relaxing” evening bouncing between Netflix, catching up on email, and answering notifications from several platforms, only to end up feeling weirdly exhausted and unsatisfied?
Author and journalist Brigid Schulte has a name for this: time confetti.
It’s what happens when our downtime gets chopped into microscopic pieces. Each interruption is seemingly harmless, but collectively steals our time and mental presence. It can break a single hour of leisure time into 5-6 minute fragments that are too short for real relaxation or meaningful engagement (take a look at this thought experiment to see for yourself).
I like the concept of time confetti because it captures how our smartphones and devices turn what used to be solid blocks of restorative downtime into scattered, stress-inducing moments that leave us feeling more time-poor than we actually are.
The fix? Personally, I wouldn’t know.
But apparently it’s blocking out chunks of pure, tech-free leisure time and guarding them like they’re client meetings. Take a walk without your phone. Eat lunch away from your computer. Read an actual book. This way, instead of confetti, you’ll have a whole sheet of leisure time.
Want to sponsor our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS founders and marketers today.
🏅 Twitter/X Thread of the Week
Thinking about stop investing in informational content due to AIOs/LLMs? Think again By Aleyda Solis
🎖️ LinkedIn Post of the Week
Brand Radar (by Ahrefs) is the ONLY tool that lets you study “AI visibility” across multiple brands and verticals. Instantly. By Tim Suolo
🎖️ Reddit Post of the Week
What newer SEO strategies are you actually using to deal with AIO/GEO? In r/SEO
🤳🏽 Nice Finds You Should Binge
- AI’s fourth wave is here — are enterprises ready for what’s next? | VentureBeat
- The most underrated B2B channel? Your newsletter | MarTech
- How Universities Can Use Data-Driven SEO to Win Over New Students | Carnegie X Foundation
- Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab valued at $10bn after $2bn fundraising | Financial Times
💻 Job Postings Worth Checking Out
Looking for a new opportunity? Here’s a round-up of some exciting job openings in the B2B SaaS space.
- Foundation: Reddit Specialist
- Foundation: B2B Content Marketing Strategist
- Foundation: Content Creator
- Foundation: Content Marketing Manager
- Foundation: Applied Research Specialist
- Foundation: Director of Digital Marketing
Want us to include your job postings in our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS professionals today.
🎧 What We’re Wired Into This Week
Fred again.. – Rooftop Live (Arun’s Roof, London)
This SaaS news smattering is brought to you by Ethan Crump!
If you have any feedback, suggestions, or ideas you want to see in this newsletter, feel free to email Leigha Henderson at leigha@foundationinc.co. We’re always looking for ways to improve and provide the best B2B SaaS marketing resources.
Have a great weekend!
