What is content for anyway?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, or are the sort of person who simply doesn’t care about content marketing (in which case you may want to hit the back button), you will be aware that AI summaries at the top of search results are having an impact on how much through-traffic is delivered from those results pages.

That makes perfect sense. If a question gets answered at the top of the page then the requirement to keep looking disappears. And the data backs this up. That data is neatly summarised in this piece on Digital Content Next (which inspired this post). Specifically:

• A Carnegie Mellon University study demonstrated that outbound organic clicks fell 39.8% when AI overviews appeared above search results on Google

• Pew Research Center found that only 8% of Google search result visits resulted in a click on an organic result when an AI overview appeared

• Ahrefs found that AI summaries reduced clicks on the top organic result by 58%

That last figure really puts things into context. The #1 ranking for a key term on Google* used to be a holy grail. Years of work and thousands (and thousands) of dollars would go into securing and maintaining that spot. And the majority of that work, and the traffic that flows from it, has been taken away overnight.

Organic traffic as we knew it is never coming back

All that is bad news for a lot of marketing organisations. And it is only going to get worse. Two reasons immediately spring to mind.

First, the numbers above almost certainly reflect a certain amount of learned behaviour. You search, you see a result you like, you click. We’ve been doing it for years, and plenty of people are probably still doing it out of habit. Over time, fewer and fewer of those people will do things the old way.

Second, AI assistants are already cannibalising search volumes. This is harder to prove with numbers, but I suspect every single reader of this piece has experienced it directly. More specifically for marketers they are cannibalising the “top of the funnel” searches that until now have been our bread and butter. And if you are expecting traffic from within those answers to add up to much: I have a bridge to sell you.

If I want a general overview of a subject, I know that an AI assistant will provide it faster and with less fuss than searching, choosing a result, and hoping it does the job (and isn’t too biased). That strikes at the heart of the B2B marketing engine. It risks rendering vast volumes of content designed to trap the top of the funnel and deliver organic traffic completely redundant.

So what do I do now?

Short answer: rethink why we create content and what purpose we expect it to serve. 

Let’s say the important bit out loud first. For B2B marketers the days of creating content specifically to game search engine (or AI) results are, in my opinion, effectively over. It will carry on in zombie form, undertaken by people who can’t let go of something that used to work, “generals preparing to fight the last war” as Clemenceau (allegedly) said. Don’t be one of those people.

Before moving on, the inevitable caveats: In intent-laden searches (both B2B and B2C), SEO is most definitely still a thing, although for how long is debatable. And of course getting mentioned in AI summaries themselves when appropriate should be considered a core objective for most marketing departments. Although let’s be honest, that is largely a function of factors beyond the control of most organisations. 

But in most cases, what I would call ‘top of funnel content optimised for search’, is living on borrowed time.

So what does that leave us with? I’ll tell you: 

Content doing the job it was always best at doing.

I remember a time before SEO existed (yeah, I know). Back then we understood what content was for: it was an article, advertisement, video or presentation that persuaded a third party toward our point of view. 

It was one person speaking to another. It was directional, in the sense that it had a specific belief it wanted to impart to that person. And if done well, it naturally increased the authority of the organisation that produced it. It made people want to buy. 

You might already know those people. You might send the content to people you know, or that might be interested. You might even pay to put the content in front of them. 

What you didn’t do was create content to convince a machine to surface you at the top of a list of search results in order to deliver traffic, that you then turned into leads. 

Smart marketing teams are going to get back to that world.

I am still a believer in the ‘one killer piece of content’ theory. It has proven effective throughout history, from Martin Luther nailing his latest blog to the church door in 1517 all the way to Dollar Shave Club in 2012. 

Content teams should strive to think in the same way. Forget about search, other than in specific circumstances. Understand with absolute clarity what you want to communicate. And speak as a human, addressing a human. 

That doesn't mean distribution does not matter. Of course it does. Kevin Costner slowly going mad in a field in Iowa has a lot to answer for. If you build it, you still need to figure out how to tell people about it. But build it first to do the job it was intended to do. Then think about how to spread the word.

That is what great content in the post SEO era will look like. 

*I know it doesn’t work like that, but play along for the moment