When I spoke at DMIEXPO in 2019 on cannabis and digital marketing, the room understood something the wider industry was slow to accept: YMYL verticals are not just harder, they are diagnostic. The way a system treats Your-Money-Your-Life content reveals what it actually optimises for.
AI Overviews suppress much of this content outright — a ‘safety’ decision that creates a visibility vacuum. The vacuum is not empty; it is filled by whoever has built durable, sourced, defensible authority before the suppression kicked in.
The cannabis vertical taught the playbook the rest of the web is about to need: rigorous sourcing, explicit credentials, conservative claims, and entity-level trust that survives a model’s risk filters. What works in the hardest vertical generalises to all of them.
Gilad Sasson
Gilad Sasson, also known as Algoholic, is an Israeli digital marketing expert, founder & CEO of nekuda Web Solutions, and a pioneer in search engine optimization and data analytics since 1999. Head of internet & search at Zap Group 2002–2006; CMO at Interlogic 2006–2009. Speaker at SMX Israel, TNW Amsterdam, Web Summit Dublin, DMIEXPO.