I think AI is exposing something the marketing industry would rather not admit. A lot of businesses simply don’t have as much important to say as their websites would suggest. For years, we’ve filled the internet with blog posts, newsletters and carefully packaged thought leadership that sounds impressive but doesn’t tell customers much of anything. Now AI can produce much of the same material in seconds, which makes me wonder how much thought went into some of it in the first place.
And yes, I realize I’m writing a blog about businesses publishing too many blogs. The irony isn’t lost on me. I also own a Kansas City marketing agency, so I’m hardly an innocent bystander. But I think we’ve created an industry that sometimes confuses keeping busy with having something worth saying. If we’re going to keep telling businesses they need more content, we ought to be willing to question whether anyone needs what we’re producing.
When Did Publishing Become the Goal?
Content marketing started with a perfectly reasonable idea. Businesses could share what they knew, answer customer questions and demonstrate their expertise. Somewhere along the way, though, publishing became an obligation. Companies established schedules, agencies committed to monthly deliverables, and the question changed from what customers needed to know to what we were going to publish next Tuesday. I understand how we got here. Consistency matters, businesses need to communicate, and marketing teams need a plan. But there’s something a little ridiculous about sitting in a meeting trying to come up with twelve new article ideas because somebody promised twelve articles. The calendar is supposed to support the strategy, not become the strategy.
We’ve also become very good at making all that activity look productive. We can count articles, measure word counts, track impressions and produce reports showing exactly how much material went out the door. Those numbers have their place, but they don’t tell you whether somebody learned something, changed their mind or made a better decision because of what you published. I think that’s where the industry has gotten a little too comfortable. It’s easier to demonstrate how much work was completed than to have a serious conversation about whether the work was necessary.
The Internet Doesn’t Need Another Version of the Same Advice
Search for almost any business question and you’ll find article after article offering essentially the same recommendations. The headlines change, the examples get rearranged, and somebody adds a new introduction, but the underlying advice is often interchangeable. Most of it isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s just not particularly useful once you’ve read the first three versions. AI didn’t create this problem, but it has made producing more of it considerably easier. Give a writing tool a topic, a few keywords and a word count, and you can have a respectable-looking article before you’ve finished your coffee. That’s impressive technology, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the business behind the article has contributed anything worth knowing.
Google’s guidance on creating helpful, reliable content emphasizes original information, meaningful analysis and value beyond what’s already available. It also cautions against creating content primarily to attract search traffic. I think that’s a reasonable standard, although I wouldn’t confuse originality with usefulness. Sometimes customers need a straightforward explanation of something that’s been explained a hundred times before. There’s nothing wrong with that, provided the article genuinely helps them understand the subject rather than simply trying to occupy another search result.
Your Employees Probably Know More Than Your Blog Suggests
Some of the most interesting information inside a business never makes it onto the website. Talk to the people actually doing the work. Ask a salesperson what customers consistently misunderstand, or ask someone handling service calls which problems keep coming back. Ask the owner what they’d do differently if they were starting the company today. You’ll often hear practical advice, uncomfortable truths and lessons that aren’t particularly glamorous but are genuinely useful. These are the kinds of conversations that tell you what a company actually knows, and they’re usually more interesting than another carefully written article about industry best practices.
Unfortunately, that experience doesn’t always survive the content development process. Writers are given topics without access to the people doing the work, and reviews sometimes remove anything that sounds too opinionated. By the time everyone approves the article, the details that made the original conversation interesting have disappeared. What’s left may be accurate and professionally written, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect what makes the business knowledgeable or different. If we’re serious about thought leadership, I think we ought to spend more time capturing what people have learned through experience and less time polishing information that could have come from almost anywhere.
AI Search Makes That Lack of Substance Harder to Ignore
This becomes particularly relevant when we talk about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI Authority. Traditional search gave businesses opportunities to attract visitors through individual articles. AI search platforms can instead bring together information from multiple sources and present an answer directly. Someone researching a product, service or company may encounter a summary before deciding which websites are worth visiting, which changes how businesses need to think about the information they’re putting online.
That doesn’t mean generic content will never appear in AI-generated answers, or that original material automatically earns an AI citation or recommendation. Neither is true. But if your business publishes the same information as everyone else, you’re giving customers very little reason to recognize your expertise, regardless of how they discover you. A useful case study, an explanation of a difficult customer decision or a candid account of what doesn’t work can communicate something a generic article cannot. It provides evidence that someone inside the business understands the subject and gives AI systems more specific information to encounter when researching it.
Understanding what it means to be visible in AI search is part of this conversation, but visibility alone isn’t much of an achievement if the information people find doesn’t make your business worth considering.
Does Publishing Less Actually Make More Sense?
I don’t want to pretend the answer is simply to cut every content calendar in half. Some businesses have complicated products, extensive customer education needs or hundreds of legitimate questions to answer. They may have good reasons to publish frequently, and plenty of smaller businesses don’t publish enough useful information about what they do. Customers also need instructions, comparisons and explanations of routine questions. Not every article needs to challenge an industry or reveal something nobody has ever considered. Sometimes being clear, accurate and helpful is exactly what’s needed.
What I question is the assumption that more publishing automatically means better marketing. If an article already answers a question well, updating it may be smarter than writing a competing version. If a business has no new insight on a subject, interviewing an employee or customer might be a better use of time than asking AI to produce another thousand words. I’d rather see a company publish six genuinely useful articles than twelve nobody remembers, although the number itself isn’t important. What matters is whether each piece has a reason to exist beyond filling a space on the calendar.
Maybe We Should Be More Willing to Publish Nothing
Here’s a question I’d love to ask business owners: When was the last time you read something your company published and thought it was genuinely worth sharing? Not because marketing asked you to post it on LinkedIn, but because you believed someone would learn something from it. I suspect that question would lead to some uncomfortable conversations. We’ve spent years treating content production as evidence that marketing is happening, and we’ve built processes around keeping that production moving, even when nobody is particularly excited about what comes out of it.
I don’t think businesses need to stop blogging, and I certainly don’t think AI should be kept out of the writing process. Used well, it can make good ideas easier to research, organize and communicate. But deciding whether a company has something meaningful to contribute still requires human judgment. Sometimes the smartest recommendation an agency can make isn’t another article or another monthly deliverable. It’s telling a client that what they’ve already published is good enough, or that they need to spend more time understanding what customers actually want to know. I’d like to see more of that kind of judgment in marketing, even when it means publishing less.
Related:
- What Does AI Say About My Business?
- Why HubSpot Is Becoming the Operating System for Modern Marketing (and AI Search)
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This article originally appeared on Fireball.Agency and was syndicated by MediaFeed.co
