BoFu wins, tropes, Hermes & watermarking
I really don’t have a good title for this one, but there are a lot of useful information about AI and BoFu content inside.
Hey!
Long time no see. I’ve been packed with client work for the last few months (a good thing to have!) but now my energy is finally getting better to write here again.
I’ve been struggling with my health for the last 15 years and am finally mostly healed so I should be more regular with the newsletter. I just published something about my illness if you’re curious.
Anyway, I have a LOT to talk about and will do so in the next few weeks but wanted to start with some quick news.
Best way to get rid of AI tells
I talked about how to avoid generating AI slop before, and since then I’ve found a great website listing all the AI tells and it provides a Markdown file you can just copy into all your projects: https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md
It’s a must-have!
Google spam update
There’s a new Google update to reduce spam and bad SEOs are panicking like always.
“AI content will 100% get websites nuked.”
AI content made with proper context, passes as 100% human written in Pangram, and is useful to the reader won’t get nuked.
But most marketers are too lazy to do the bare minimum.
2x growth rate with BoFu
In my last newsletter, I was talking about making good comparison content. Thanks to these changes, one of my clients has 2x their growth rate year-over-year.
Traffic from BoFu content grew by more than 700% while top-of-funnel content is cratering because of AI search… And middle-of-funnel content still kinda works.
New website for Customer Fitted
I’ve updated my agency website with a new design, new copy, and focusing again only on BoFu to make it easier to grasp even though I do a lot more with my clients.
Check it out: https://www.customerfitted.com/
My AI marketing agent
I now have a Hermes (OpenClaw alternative) set up on a VPS. It’s available 24/7, uses my ChatGPT subscription and my SuperGrok (via X Premium+) subscription so no expensive API usage.
Researching information about competitors takes a long time, so having a dedicated machine to do it eases the load on my aging Mac.
And GPT 5.6 Sol and Grok 4.6 are now as good for content generation as Opus. No reason to keep my Claude subscription anymore.
I’m also using Linear to manage tasks for my agent and I find it much more productive than to use a chat interface.
I’ll share a lot of my processes in the future, it’s so interesting I can’t wait to tell you!
Watermarking
Anthropic released a blog post about watermarking AI-generated content and I wanted to touch quickly on that.
According to the EU AI Act, providers (Anthropic and other labs) have to watermark what they generate.
But a detected mark only shows an AI was involved at some point, it does not claim the AI authored the whole thing or originated the ideas.
And deployers (us, professionals) don’t have to visibly disclose AI use most of the time.
So it’s pretty much as bullshit as AI detection tools.
Finally, the EU AI Act asks providers to mandate in their terms-of-service that users not remove the watermarking.
Manually editing what you got from AI? Forbidden! The situation is just absurd at this point.
Daring Fireball has a great in-depth post on the subject as well as a follow-up that you should read.
Using AI for marketing isn’t an option anymore. Most people are pretty poor writers and they’d get better results with AI. But also small companies have to compete with much bigger ones and they can’t do that without AI.
So your best bet is to learn marketing engineering and avoid the common pitfalls of AI.
That’s my goal for this newsletter going forward. I’ll share skills, MCPs, tools, and my processes on how I build content systems with AI for B2B SaaS companies.