A quarterly look at emerging channels, top news, and trends. The purpose of The Tuning Fork is to keep us all fluent in what’s happening, and with client-ready talking points, so we can help our clients meet this moment.
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents
June 2026
June 2026
1. The death of the click-through is an Orchestra advantage.
This is a confusing, fast-moving moment for clients, and a big part of our job right now is guiding them through it. Here’s how I’m breaking it down:
Most Google searches now end without a click, and when an AI summary appears, almost nobody clicks the source.1 The traffic that used to be the point of coverage is gone. The content itself is the asset now, which is why Google pays Reddit a reported $60M a year for its posts, and the New York Times, while suing OpenAI, still licensed its archive to Amazon.2
That shift favors us. When content is the asset, the winners are those that can chart the landscape, create the content and orchestrate where it lands. In other words, coordinating data + insights + technical changes + earned and owned activities is now what really delivers impact for clients.
Showing up in AI answers is a stack:
Data: Pull the analytics on how a client actually shows up in AI today (Profound and similar tools).
Insights: Analyze that data for what’s really driving visibility.
Earned and owned: Use those insights to steer strategy. Owned does odd things now (press releases work again), and earned does too: sometimes the source that moves the needle isn’t NYT or WSJ but the one obscure blog a model happens to trust (an Arizona State University blog is somehow the definitive source on the last MLB lockout).
Build the client’s own cred. Make original content (proprietary research, data, a real point of view) no one else can produce, so the brand and its people get cited directly. Content & Writing is an underutilized Orchestra capability, we have incredible in-house journalists and writers who can craft best-in-class and insights-driven original content in the Integrated Marketing team. Email Susan Howson to learn more about it susan.howson@orchestraco.com.
Reach the right real humans. Get the narrative to the credible individuals (creators, newsletters, podcasts) whose audiences actually subscribe and pay attention. (More on them below.) And even though the primary reason is to reach real humans, now podcasts and video are increasingly feeding AEO, since their transcripts get cited by AI.3
Help your client see where they stand in this new world with our AEO offering.
2. LinkedIn is capturing budget and forcing authenticity.
In March, LinkedIn replaced its feed algorithm with an LLM (360 Brew) that reads your post and decides whether a human would care.4 It rewards saves and posts that match who you actually are; the old tricks (hashtags, links in the first comment, golden-hour timing) no longer move anything.
In May, it began cutting reach on “AI slop”: engagement bait, recycled thought leadership, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” tell. The platform is burying the generic ones.5
The money is following. B2B budgets keep shifting to LinkedIn, now a reported 41% of B2B ad spend, climbing as non-branded search declines.6 Notion moved from ~25% to ~40% of its influencer budget there; HubSpot is around 10%; B2B creator spend is climbing from tens to hundreds of thousands a year.7 And the paid money is going behind people, not pages: Thought Leader Ads, which promote an employee or exec post instead of the company page, run about six times more efficient than standard single-image ads on cost per click.8
How we action it:
The most useful framing I read, from a Link in Bio interview with Slate’s head of marketing9: the question now is less “how do we grow the brand page” and more “how do we grow our surface area on LinkedIn.”
The brand page is one piece; the ecosystem is employees, executives, creators, and comments together, and a real person tends to beat a polished corporate post. If your client needs an integrated LinkedIn Strategy or your client’s Chief Executive needs executive positioning, visibility and thought leadership, the Integrated Marketing team can help, email katharine.offinger@orchestraco.com.
Measurement is shifting from reach to depth. The 2026 algorithm ranks on depth signals (reading time, comment threads, saves, shares), and the platform now surfaces saves and sends in place of impressions as the numbers that track to pipeline.10
3. The credentialed individual is the new institution.
We already know trust moved from institutions to individuals. The useful part is getting specific about who owns each category, and where to look for who’s next within your client’s industry and target audience.
Substack
Substack
Individuals became the institutions.
Heather Cox Richardson (Boston College historian) runs the #1 newsletter at an estimated $5M+ a year. Gergely Orosz (ex-Uber engineer, The Pragmatic Engineer) and Lenny Rachitsky (ex-Airbnb PM, Lenny’s Newsletter) each passed a million subscribers in their niche, and Ben Thompson (Stratechery) and Casey Newton (Platformer) remain the reference points in tech analysis. Substack told the WSJ its top 10 accounts earn around $40M a year combined.11 To catch who’s rising before they break out, follow the fast risers on Substack’s leaderboard.
Podcasts
Podcasts
The old franchises still anchor the top (Joe Rogan, Crime Junkie, The Daily), but the fastest Q1 climbers are credentialed and practitioner voices consolidating their power: Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman (Huberman Lab), former lawyer and bestselling author Mel Robbins, NBA champion Carmelo Anthony (7PM in Brooklyn), and former NFL players Ryan Clark, Channing Crowder and Fred Taylor (The Pivot).12
And these shows are increasingly watched, not just heard: YouTube streamed 700M+ hours of video podcasts on TVs in a single month, and it’s now the top way people find new shows.13 Worth knowing the audiences differ, video skews younger and more male, audio skews older and higher-income, so the format is a targeting decision, not just a production one.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn
The individual now out-earns the company page across every category.
In AI it’s Allie K. Miller (ex-Amazon and IBM, 2M+ followers) and Wharton professor Ethan Mollick; in business strategy, NYU’s Scott Galloway, Steven Bartlett (The Diary of a CEO), and solopreneur Justin Welsh; in organizational psychology, Wharton’s Adam Grant; plus the executive tier posting as themselves, from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to founders like Sara Blakely.14
Everything above will move. There will be a new algorithm, new players, and new platform math by next quarter. The real skill isn’t knowing today’s answer, it’s understanding how these ecosystems actually function and keeping up as they shift, so we can help our clients not just win today, but win tomorrow.
Sources / Fun Reading (click to expand)
Sources / Fun Reading (click to expand)
Columbia Journalism Review, “The traffic apocalypse.” https://www.cjr.org/analysis/traffic-apocalypse-google-ai-overviews-killing-click-throughs-news-sites.php
Axios, “The New York Times signs first AI licensing deal with Amazon.” https://www.axios.com/2025/05/30/nyt-amazon-ai-licensing-deal
Podcast and video transcripts increasingly cited by AI engines, per eMarketer’s 2026 podcasting analysis (drawing on Bloomberg and Sounds Profitable). Directional; reflects how AI engines crawl transcribed audio/video. https://www.emarketer.com/content/faq-on-podcasting--video-s-rise--ctv-growth--what-means-advertisers-2026
Forbes, “The LinkedIn algorithm changed again: here’s what’s new for 2026.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/jodiecook/2026/01/12/the-linkedin-algorithm-changed-again-heres-whats-new-for-2026/
LinkedIn’s 2026 crackdown on low-quality / AI content, as reported across trade coverage (Engadget, TechRadar). https://www.engadget.com/2174163/linkedin-doesnt-want-your-ai-slop-anymore/
B2B ad-budget share to LinkedIn (~41%), per Dreamdata’s 2026 analysis. Directional benchmark from an ad-analytics firm, not an official LinkedIn figure. https://meet-lea.com/en/blog/linkedin-advertising-costs-roi-benchmarks
Digiday, “LinkedIn emerges as a serious player in the creator economy” (Notion, HubSpot budget shifts). https://digiday.com/media/linkedin-emerges-as-a-serious-player-in-the-creator-economy/
Thought Leader Ads efficiency vs. single-image ads, per ZenABM’s 2026 LinkedIn Ads benchmark. Directional benchmark; corroborated across multiple ad-buying sources. https://zenabm.com/blog/linkedin-ads-benchmarks
Link in Bio (Rachel Karten), “Treat LinkedIn like an ecosystem” (interview with Slate’s Christina Le). Note: the post is sponsored by Slate. https://www.milkkarten.net/p/treat-linkedin-like-an-ecosystem
LinkedIn’s shift to “depth signals” and surfacing saves/sends over impressions, per 2026 trade coverage (Ordinal, DigitalApplied). Consensus read across marketing sources, aligned with the official 360 Brew direction. https://www.tryordinal.com/blog/linkedin-marketing-news
Press Gazette, “The biggest Substack newsletters” (top-10 ~$40M confirmed by Substack via the Wall Street Journal; Richardson’s $5M+ is an estimate). https://pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/biggest-substack-newsletters-2025/
Triton Digital Q1 2026 U.S. Podcast Ranker (via BusinessWire). https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260519281442/en/
Video podcasts on YouTube/TV (700M+ hours in a single month; YouTube now the leading podcast discovery platform; video vs. audio audience skews), via Bloomberg and eMarketer. https://www.emarketer.com/content/faq-on-podcasting--video-s-rise--ctv-growth--what-means-advertisers-2026
LinkedIn creator rankings and follower counts compiled from public creator indexes (Favikon, Outx) and the individuals’ own profiles. Follower figures are approximate. https://www.favikon.com/blog/top-us-linkedin-influencers
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