Ask a News SEO: Dan Oshinsky

AI has arrived in the email inbox. What should publishers do? We talk to Dan Oshinsky about the best approaches

Sep 22, 2026

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, here, reporting live from beautiful Calgary, Canada! We’re back from a whirlwind week spent presenting at Alberta’s premier magazine conference and exploring the mountains. We did an 18 kilometre hike up one of Canada’s best trails, saw TWO (!!) bears and only had approximately 10 diet cokes. A winning week all around. 🐻

This week: AI is everywhere — including the inbox. We talked to Dan Oshinsky, founder of Inbox Collective, about the ways artificial intelligence may be coming for what was once an intimate place, and how publishers can prepare.

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Let’s get it.

THE INTERVIEW

WTF is SEO?: AI has come for the inbox, once thought of as the last place that it could reach. How should publishers think about this change?

Dan Oshinsky: The AI inbox is the third big change in email in the last 25-plus years.

Everyone got into email in the late 90s, early 2000s. Then, there was the rise of the mobile inbox between 2007 to 2010 with the first BlackBerry, then the iPhone. Now, there’s this. There haven’t been a lot of changes for email. As a result, a lot of publishers have been a little bit lazy with their strategy compared to what they might do with SEO, where there’s so much change constantly.

With email, it’s been the same thing. And for the first time in a long time, people have to really think about their strategy and produce something that is genuinely useful, that people want to make time for.

The good news with the AI inbox is that if you produce good stuff, you’re going to be okay. The mediocre emails, the emails that people sometimes read, those people are in a lot of trouble in the AI inbox. But if your content is really good, and people make space for you on a regular basis, you’re gonna be just fine.

WTF is SEO?: For the publishers, what is the best defence against being ‘punished’ in an AI inbox?

Dan Oshinsky: Adding personality, adding voice and making sure the content feels hugely relevant to readers is really important. The rise of the creator space — platforms like Substack and Beehiiv — coming into the mix five or six years ago meant brands like The New York Times said, “our competition isn’t just The Washington Post anymore. It’s Isaac Saul, a guy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a newsletter called Tangle breaking down what the news.”

Creators or independent newsletters forced a lot of people to step up their game. Because of that, some of the impacts of this AI inbox will be lessened. People aren’t going to react in a panicked way to that.

That said, there are still lots of very mediocre newsletters. Some of them will face a little bit of reckoning.

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WTF is SEO?: If I have a great email product, how do I tell people about it? What are my off- and on-site efforts?

Dan Oshinsky: It was definitely easier to get someone to sign up 10 years ago. There was less competition. When I first started at BuzzFeed, just having a non-terrible newsletter meant people were shocked. That’s changed a lot.

Now, levers to pull are high value touch points on your website: registration walls, after someone pays to subscribe for your product or starts a free trial, having a welcome flow where they can sign up for more newsletters. Think about events or lead magnets to collect an email address. Partnerships with other organizations are super important: if there are other newsletters to work and collaborate with, that can help you grow. Paid — email and social — is becoming a bigger piece of the puzzle, too.

Some things that once worked, like a sign-up box at the bottom of stories, won’t work as well in 2026 as it did in 2015.

WTF is SEO?: What are some of the signals an AI inbox could be picking up on?

Dan Oshinsky: It’s very much a mystery box. They [email vendors] don’t say. Historically, what it’s been based on is some sort of positive engagement: an open, a click, a star, moving it to a folder, replying or forwarding it. Something that says this email was unusually valuable and I took action as a result.

My expectation is that it will probably be something similar in the future — that the AI is looking for some sort of positive engagement. And the reverse is true, too: an unsubscribe, marking as spam, deleting emails or just ignoring them would be negative signals.

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WTF is SEO?: Saturation seems like a real thing in email inboxes. Is there too much saturation to build an audience?

Dan Oshinsky: That’s been the fear for 15 years. “Everyone gets too many emails.” People working in the media oversubscribe. We’re not the norm.

I tell teams, “Go ask your cousin, your mom, your friend how many newsletters they subscribe to.” The answer is often one or two.

Media people tend to oversubscribe and there’s a little bit of panic there. But, it does come back to making your email unusually relevant. Have a really high bar for your email. Ask, “if we’re going to send a newsletter today, is it really going to resonate with a reader? Or am I just sending something to send something?”

Some teams send a couple of breaking news alerts a day, regardless of whether it’s really breaking news, because people tend to click. But, that strategy can run its course real quick, and it’s going to backfire.

Don’t worry too much about the saturation, especially for newsletters if it’s going to be something that’s incredibly important to you — related to your job or industry — or a topic that you are passionate about. People make time for those sorts of things.

WTF is SEO?: How important is authorship for a newsletter? And what do you recommend to your clients when it comes to voice?

Dan Oshinsky: To showcase an author, you can do it a bunch of different ways. I’ve seen teams add headshots and a byline at the bottom of a newsletter, or a little note at the top of the newsletter that says, “Hi, so-and-so, here’s today’s date and what’s in today’s issue.”

Some brands have the people who write the newsletter in the header image, so the first thing you see when opening the email is a face. But even just writing it in a style that makes it clear that there is a person behind it is good.

I also have always recommended that you have a person in mind when you write. Visualize the person who is sitting down to read this thing. As you read and edit the newsletter, ask: “Did I really write for them? Would this be useful for them?” Or will they say, “No, no thanks, there’s nothing in it here for me”? Having that person in mind is super important.

Outside of the inbox, there’s the tough to prove, but definitely real effect of being in other places, and showing up in front of folks. Being in the algorithmic channels — YouTube, social media, etc. — and showing up there, even if people don’t directly convert from there. Being in a person’s feed matters.

The anecdotal evidence I have is that if you see and engage with someone on Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn, you might sign up for their newsletter as a result. It’s not direct, but there is definitely that effect.

Whatever you’re doing — but especially if you’re doing email, and you’re focused on the newsletter space — trying to find ways to build a little bit of extra loyalty beyond the inbox is important. It just reinforces whatever you’re doing in the inbox.

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WTF is SEO?: What do you wish you knew about the inbox earlier in your career?

Dan Oshinsky: I’ll give you the joke answer and the real answer.

I got the job at BuzzFeed because I interviewed with them and they said, “we don’t have a job for you, but you seem interesting, come back to us and pitch something.” I came back with newsletters. It’s been a very good career choice for me, but I may have considered different options — like private jet reviews or something a little more luxurious.

The real answer is that some of this stuff comes back to just remembering that you are writing for a single person. Even if you are writing a newsletter for The Guardian, or The Athletic with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers, at the end of the day, there’s one person reading your email in their inbox, in bed, or at work or in line at Starbucks.

You don’t write for an audience of millions because you’re not a concert performer. You write for an audience of one. The more you keep that in mind, the better your email tends to be.

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