For years, content marketing largely operated on a simple assumption: if businesses published enough useful material around the subjects their customers cared about, search engines would reward them with visibility. Artificial intelligence has complicated that picture, although perhaps not in the way many people assume. The businesses that appear best positioned for the changes taking place are often not those producing the greatest volume of content, but those able to communicate genuine expertise, clear opinions and real-world experience. The technology is changing rapidly, but the importance of knowing something worth saying may actually be increasing.
Over the past few years, I have found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the way many businesses approach content. That discomfort is not directed at the people involved, because in most cases there is no shortage of effort, investment or good intention. Marketing teams are working hard, agencies are delivering what they have been asked to deliver and leadership teams are often making perfectly reasonable decisions based on the information available to them. The difficulty, at least from my perspective, is that many of the assumptions sitting underneath those decisions no longer seem entirely aligned with the way search itself is changing.
A familiar pattern appears repeatedly. There has been some keyword research, perhaps a technical audit and often a programme of ongoing blog production. Rankings are monitored, traffic is reported and content calendars gradually fill up with ideas for future articles. None of these activities are inherently wrong. In fact, many of them formed the foundations of successful search strategies for a long time. Yet when I sit down with business owners or marketing teams and ask what role the content is genuinely playing within the commercial life of the organisation, the answers often become much less certain.
What strikes me is not necessarily that there is too little content. More often, there is plenty of it. The issue is that the content itself can become strangely disconnected from the expertise sitting inside the business. One article follows another, usually informed by search data, keyword tools or competitor activity, but over time the website begins to feel more like a publisher of information than a reflection of the organisation behind it. The people who genuinely understand the subject matter often become increasingly absent from the actual content that is supposed to represent their expertise.
I think this has happened for understandable reasons. For many years, the dominant advice within search was relatively straightforward. Identify the terms people search for, create content around those terms and publish consistently. To some extent, that advice worked. Search engines needed content, and businesses that produced useful information frequently benefited from increased visibility. The problem is that success gradually became measured by the production process itself. More articles became better than fewer articles. Publishing regularly became more important than saying something distinctive. The mechanics of content production slowly started to outweigh the expertise that the content was supposed to communicate.
This is where I have increasingly begun to think about what might be described as commodity content. By that I mean content that is factually correct, reasonably well written and entirely competent, but which could just as easily have been produced by almost anybody. It answers a question, explains a concept or summarises a topic, yet tells us very little about the organisation publishing it. Remove the company name and there is often very little left that reveals a particular perspective, a body of experience or a genuinely informed point of view.
The arrival of modern AI systems has simply made this issue more visible. If a large language model can now produce a perfectly serviceable article on a subject within seconds, it forces us to ask a slightly uncomfortable question about the content many businesses are currently producing. If the article on your website says little more than what a general-purpose AI system already knows, what exactly is the reader gaining from visiting your website in the first place? The challenge is not that these systems are producing poor information. In many cases they are producing reasonably good information. The challenge is that they expose just how much business content has gradually become focused on information rather than expertise.
Increasingly, the question I find myself asking is not whether a piece of content targets the correct keyword or addresses an identifiable search opportunity. The question is whether that content could plausibly have been written by almost anybody. If the answer is yes, then it becomes difficult to argue that the content is genuinely helping the business communicate what makes it valuable. It may still attract visitors, it may still rank and it may still satisfy certain search queries, but it risks becoming disconnected from the very expertise that the organisation is trying to sell.
Perhaps the issue is not that businesses have been producing too little content. It may simply be that, for many years, we have rewarded a type of content that increasingly struggles to communicate what businesses actually know. The changes currently taking place within search may not be reducing the importance of demonstrable expertise at all. They may simply be exposing how important it has always been.
