I was about to publish detailed content to our website when I realized that every methodology, framework, and proprietary approach I post becomes training data for AI models, redistributed without attribution and stripped of context. So I stopped, and we’ve actually been unpublishing, pulling our thinking down from public URLs. If you’re anyone whose competitive edge is how you think about problems, I’d encourage you to go back through everything you’ve shared and ask yourself two questions: Am I okay training the world on this? And is it more valuable to me published, or unpublished?

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I spent the better part of a month defining our services at my companies. It consumed a lot of my time refining offerings, articulating methodologies, structuring what we actually do when we walk into an engagement. The kind of work that forces you to think clearly about your own value. I was about to publish it all to our website, but then I stopped and said to myself, “hmm, maybe not.”

Because the moment I thought about posting detailed service descriptions, frameworks, and methodologies to a public URL, I realized what that actually means in 2026. I’m not just informing potential clients, I’m training everyone. Every crawler, every model, every competitor’s AI assistant. All of it gets a free education in exactly how we think, how we structure work, and what makes our approach different.

That would mean that all my thinking that I’ve spent years developing through hard-won experience, is now part of the soup. Redistributed without attribution, stripped of context, and served up to anyone who asks the right question to a chatbot. I decided I wasn’t okay with that.

The Line Has Moved

This tension has been building for me for a while. I publish openly, a lot. My Ragsdale Framework for Autonomization is out there for anyone to read because I genuinely want to share that mission with the world. Some ideas are meant to be open and shared. But there’s a difference between sharing a mission and handing over the playbook.

There was a time, and honestly not long ago, when I would have published everything, including detailed service breakdowns, diagnostic approaches, and proprietary methods. The logic was always the same: the real value is in the practitioners, not the documentation. You can read the recipe, but you still need the chef.

That logic doesn’t feel quite right anymore. AI hasn’t replaced the practitioners, but the economics of publishing have fundamentally changed. When you put a detailed methodology on your website, it used to sit there waiting for the right human to find it, read it, appreciate the depth, and call you. Now it gets ingested, recombined, and redistributed without your awareness. All your hard-won thinking becomes part of the general supply of knowledge, stripped of your name and context.

So the line has moved for me. And it’s moved a lot.

Unpublishing

We’ve been quietly doing something that might seem counterintuitive for a company trying to grow. We’ve been unpublishing. Taking things down. Moving detailed content behind conversations rather than URLs. Keeping the “what we do” and “who we help” visible, but pulling back the “how we do it” into proposals and direct engagement.

Does this mean nobody can figure out what we do? Of course not. A prospect could feed our materials into their own AI. A competitor could piece things together from our public writing, our talks, our client conversations. Information finds its way.

But there’s a meaningful difference between leaving the front door open and making someone walk around to find a window. We’re not trying to build a vault, but we’re also no longer leaving the blueprints on the porch.

Can I Delay the Inevitable?

Let me be honest about this: Can I stop a bot from reading everything I’ve ever written and summarizing it for anyone who asks? No. Can I prevent the general trajectory of AI absorbing expertise and making it more accessible? Absolutely not.

But I also don’t buy the narrative that says work is optional in two years. I think we’ll be working, and the work in my domain, digital services, enterprise autonomization, operational design, is largely intellectual. Pattern recognition developed over years. Knowing which questions to ask and in what order. The judgment calls that don’t show up in any framework diagram.

That kind of work has value precisely because it’s hard to replicate. So maybe I shouldn’t be making it easier by publishing every detail of how it’s done.

The Inventory I’m Asking You to Do

If you’re a consultant, a firm, a service provider, or anyone whose competitive edge is how you think about problems, I’d encourage you to do what I did. Go back through everything you’ve published, including your website, blog, white papers, and your LinkedIn deep dives. All of it. And for each piece, ask yourself two questions.

First: Am I okay with this training the world on this?

Some things, yes. Your perspective. Your values. Your point of view on where your industry is headed. That stuff builds trust the way it always has, and it should stay public. But the methodology? The frameworks? The step-by-step breakdowns? The things that took you years and hundreds of engagements to develop? Think hard about those.

Then the second question, which is the one that actually forces a decision: Is this more valuable to me published, or unpublished?

Because there’s a real calculus here. If something you’ve written is actively generating attributions, if people are citing it, linking to it, referencing you by name because of it, then maybe the exposure is worth more than the protection. That content is working for you. Keep it out there.

But if it’s just going into the soup? If it’s being absorbed and redistributed without your name attached, then the AI training ecosystem is getting all the value and you’re getting none. And the few real humans who actually sit down and read your methodology page with intent? They’re probably already warm prospects who would have engaged with you whether it was public or not. So you’re giving away maximum IP for minimum return. That content might be more valuable behind a door than on a URL.

A lot of what we publish falls into that second category. We just never had a reason to question it before.

This Isn’t About Going Dark

I want to be clear that I’m not hiding, and I’m still writing. I’m still sharing provocations and perspectives. I’m still putting my thinking out into the world. But I’ve drawn a new line between what I share to start a conversation and what I share inside one. The mission is public, but the methods are earned.

The truth is that everything that’s already been published is already in the soup. That ship has sailed. But if you’re serious about protecting what comes next, it might be worth structuring your content intentionally so that the parts most valuable to your services remain with you.

Twenty years of internet culture taught us that transparency is the highest professional virtue. And in many ways it still is. But transparency was built on an assumption that giving away the recipe would make people come to your restaurant. That assumption is broken now because the recipe gets absorbed into every kitchen overnight.

So take the inventory and decide what’s mission and what’s method. And for the things that represent your real intellectual property, the hard-won, deeply developed thinking that makes you you, consider whether a public URL is still the right home for it.

Are you okay training the world? If the answer is no, then let The Great Unpublishing begin.

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Marc Ragsdale is the Founder of Kaamfu and Architect of Enterprise Autonomy. He’s spent his career building systems that help organizations work, and lately, he’s been rethinking what to share about how.