Would You Still Publish It?

Every week seems to bring another impressive demonstration of AI’s ability to produce content at extraordinary scale, another case study showing hundreds or even thousands of pages created in minutes, and another dashboard reporting dramatic gains in visibility. It’s easy to see why people are excited. So am I. What concerns me isn’t AI itself, but the growing number of businesses treating its ability to publish content at industrial scale as a content strategy. I’ve spent enough time working in search to know that every significant shift creates a new wave of tactics that promise to outpace everyone else. For a while, they often do. Then the platforms catch up, the shortcuts become liabilities, and the businesses that invested heavily in them are left wondering where all that visibility went.

That’s why I’d encourage anyone responsible for a marketing budget to stop for a moment before investing in an approach built around publishing AI-generated content at scale. It may look innovative, scalable and commercially attractive, and the early results may even be encouraging. But before you sign it off, I’d ask one simple question. Would you still publish that content if search engines and AI platforms didn’t exist?

I ask that question because I’ve watched this cycle repeat itself throughout my career. Every significant shift in search creates a new opportunity to exploit the platform. Businesses race to produce more pages, target more search queries and find faster ways to capture visibility. For a while, those tactics often work. Then the platforms evolve, becoming better at recognising the difference between content created to help people and content created primarily to satisfy search platforms.

AI hasn’t broken that cycle. If anything, it’s accelerated it. What worries me is that we’re beginning to mistake AI’s ability to generate content for evidence that generating more content is the right strategy. Those aren’t the same thing. Every major shift in search has tempted people to confuse exploiting the platform with serving the user. AI has simply made that temptation much harder to resist.

It’s undeniably clever from a technical perspective, and I don’t doubt the ingenuity involved in building what are, in effect, systems of mass production. But clever doesn’t automatically mean commercially sustainable. If your approach depends on search engines and AI platforms continuing to reward content simply because AI made it possible to produce lots of it quickly and cheaply, I’d be asking how confident you are that those incentives will still exist a year from now.

Google has spent the best part of three decades learning to distinguish genuinely useful content from content created primarily to manipulate visibility. It seems highly unlikely that the next generation of search platforms will decide quality matters less. If anything, they have an even greater incentive to reward information people genuinely trust. Researchers and practitioners such as Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe have been documenting how AI search, grounding and citation behaviour are evolving. The picture is still developing, but the direction of travel seems clear: search engines and AI platforms are becoming more sophisticated in how they decide what to trust, not less.

I think this is where many businesses are looking in the wrong direction. The most important change isn’t that AI can generate content. It’s that AI has changed the role content plays in search. For years, the best guides on the web were often the destination. Increasingly, they’re becoming the source material. That doesn’t make comprehensive content redundant, but it does change where competitive advantage comes from. Businesses still need that bedrock of content. They need to demonstrate the breadth of their knowledge, and AI is an extraordinarily powerful tool for researching, structuring and producing that material more efficiently. In many ways, that’s exactly what it should be used for. Where I think businesses are making a mistake is assuming that bedrock is enough.

The fact that AI can generate an answer doesn’t automatically make creating another version of that answer a competitive advantage.

The content most likely to earn trust, citations and meaningful differentiation is the content that adds something AI couldn’t have produced on its own. Not because it was written by a human, but because it contains experience, judgement, perspective and expertise that only the people inside the business can provide. Those are the qualities AI can help uncover, organise and communicate, but it can’t authentically invent.

If you’re responsible for deciding where your organisation invests its marketing budget, this is the point where I’d encourage you to stop for a moment. I completely understand why publishing purely AI-generated content at huge scale looks attractive. It promises speed, efficiency and visibility, and there are already plenty of examples of businesses reporting encouraging early results. If all you’re looking at is today’s dashboard, it’s easy to see why it feels compelling. I’d simply encourage you to ask a different set of questions. Would you still publish that content if search engines and AI platforms weren’t reading it? Does it genuinely help your customers understand what makes your business different, or does it exist primarily because you hope it will satisfy today’s ranking and citation signals? More importantly, are you investing in an approach that becomes stronger as search engines and AI platforms improve, or one that depends on them staying one step behind?

Those aren’t theoretical questions. Every search platform succeeds or fails on the quality of the information it returns. If users begin to associate those answers with repetitive content created simply because AI made it possible to publish at scale, trust erodes. If trust erodes, so does the value of the platform. That’s why I find it difficult to believe that today’s loopholes will remain tomorrow’s opportunities. I may be wrong. None of us has all the answers yet, and the pace of change means we’ll all have to keep learning. But if I were deciding where to invest today, I’d be looking for approaches that become more valuable as search engines and AI platforms get better at recognising quality, not ones that depend on them failing to catch up.

So where does that leave us? It certainly doesn’t leave me arguing against AI. Quite the opposite. I think it’s one of the most important technologies our industry has ever seen, and the businesses that learn to use it well will have a significant advantage. I’d use it to accelerate research, uncover opportunities, organise information, challenge assumptions and build the bedrock of content every business still needs. Used well, it makes good marketers faster, better informed and more effective.

Where I’d be cautious is confusing that bedrock with the finished product. Increasingly, factual explanations and competent summaries are exactly the kind of content search engines and AI platforms are able to generate for themselves. The opportunity isn’t to publish another version of what AI can already produce. It’s to communicate something that only your business can. That means capturing the conversations your technical director has with clients. The judgement your founder has developed over twenty years in the industry. The perspective your consultants have earned from solving real problems. Those are the things AI can help uncover, refine and communicate, but it can’t authentically create from scratch. That’s where I’d be investing.

The opportunity isn’t to publish more than everyone else. AI has already made that relatively easy. The opportunity is to communicate your expertise more clearly than everyone else. That’s a much harder challenge, and I suspect it’s one that will become more valuable, not less, as search engines and AI platforms continue to evolve. Before you invest in publishing AI-generated content at industrial scale, ask yourself one final question. If search engines and AI platforms disappeared tomorrow, would that content still be the way you’d choose to represent your business?