Making Content in the AI Era: Stop Betting on Traffic

A while back, a friend who works in content marketing came to see me.

He looked worried. "We've published more than 800 articles over the past few years," he said. "We've been living off search traffic, and it's been pretty comfortable. But in the last year or two, traffic keeps sliding. It's down nearly half."

I asked him: have orders dropped?

"No, not really. They're holding steady."

Interesting. Traffic cut in half, orders unchanged.

What does that tell you? It tells you those 800 articles probably never sold anything for him in the first place.

Traffic is a vanity metric. When it rises, you think it's doing the work — but the real work is being done by someone else.

Today I want to talk about this: in the AI era, the entire playbook of content marketing may need to be swapped out.

Informational SEO, as a Strategy, Is Over

Conclusion first.

For the past decade-plus, content marketing had a standard routine: pick a keyword, write an article, publish, promote, rank, collect traffic, convert a small fraction of it. Then repeat.

That routine is breaking down.

Why? Because AI now writes the answer directly into the search results. A user asks a question, the AI serves up a summary, they read it and leave — they never click through to your site.

Have you thought about what that means?

It means you're racing to answer against a machine that has "read the entire internet." Users are asking known questions, and nobody answers known questions faster or more completely than AI.

Write "how to choose a coffee machine" and AI generates an article in three seconds. Write "a beginner's guide to personal finance" and AI generates one in three seconds too.

When everyone can generate a competent article in three seconds, "competent" itself no longer signals anything.

So informational SEO — earning your living by answering known questions — is finished as a growth strategy.

Is search content still useful, then?

Yes. But its role has changed. It's more like customer service and sales support: the customer has already decided to buy, searches, finds your product page, and your content clears away the last few doubts to close the conversion.

It's the last touch before the goal. It's not what makes people remember you.

So who is?

Let's Be Honest: All Content Marketing Is Advertising

Let's say it plainly.

A company making content is in one of two situations: either you're in the publishing business, and the content itself is the product; or you're doing marketing, and content is the means.

The overwhelming majority of companies are in the second camp.

And in the second camp, your content is, in essence, advertising.

Not banner-style advertising. Advertising in the scientific sense of the word: helping the brand build "mental availability."

What's mental availability?

It's whether you pop into someone's head when they walk into a buying situation. If they think of you, and feel that buying from you is easy, you've already won half the game.

The advertising analytics firm System1 has studied this: advertising drives profit growth through three things — Fame, Feeling, and Fluency.

Fame is broad recognition. Feeling is positive emotional association. Fluency is recognizing you at a glance, without having to think.

If each piece of content you publish contributes nothing to those three, you're just going through the motions. You look busy, and none of it helps growth.

SEO teams obsess over optimizing clicks. But clicks were never the goal.

Being remembered is.

When Pull Stops Working, Switch to Push

Content marketing used to run on pull.

A user searches, you rank near the top, and you pull them from the search engine onto your site.

That channel is narrowing. For transactional, high-intent searches, pull still matters. But the pull of informational content is being dismantled by AI, piece by piece.

Which is why push now matters more.

What's push? It's refusing to wait for users to come find you — putting your content in front of them. Through media, partnerships, events, ads, communities: deliver the content into their field of view.

Here's the interesting part: there's a reversal hiding inside it.

Ten years ago we all said the internet had killed the gatekeepers. Social media and search engines gave everyone a fair shot at visibility.

And now? The gatekeepers are all back. Algorithms are gatekeepers. Media are gatekeepers. Top creators are gatekeepers. AI itself is a gatekeeper.

When channels flood, selection tightens. That's a law.

Visibility Has Become the Scarce Resource

Kevin Kelly made a point in The Inevitable: work that goes unseen has no value.

How much is an undiscovered masterpiece worth? Zero.

His reasoning: as creation tools get better, the number of works grows exponentially, and every new work adds noise. In a world of infinite supply, filtering becomes the dominant force. Recommendation algorithms, editors, social networks — they decide who gets seen.

It used to be that production was scarce, and good work surfaced on its own. Now production is abundant, and whether you get found depends on your network, your signal, and your ability to amplify.

Put it in economics terms: the supply curve has shifted dramatically outward while demand hasn't moved. Human attention is finite.

Supply approaches infinity, attention stays constant — so the probability of being discovered keeps falling.

"Being found" has therefore shifted from a technical problem (how to optimize rankings) to an economics problem (how to compete for scarce attention).

In a world of scarce attention, what's the hard currency?

Distinctiveness, and distribution.

Waste Is a Signal

Which brings us to a concept I love. Rory Sutherland explains in Alchemy: purely rational behavior doesn't convey much information.

Think about wedding invitations.

The rational choice is to send an email — instant and free. But most couples choose thick paper, gold-embossed lettering, textured envelopes, even a wax seal.

Expensive, and slow.

But that "waste" is itself the message. It tells the recipient: this matters deeply to us.

It's brilliant, really. Inefficiency is the signal.

Marketing works the same way. When anyone can generate a competent article in seconds, "competent" says nothing. Ten thousand companies publishing a summary of the same topic amounts to nobody publishing anything.

But if one company does its own original research, prints a limited-edition physical report, hosts an event around it, and distributes it strategically — the signal is entirely different.

The effort itself is part of the message.

Let me give you an example. How did MrBeast get big early on? He counted, on camera — into the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands.

Is that rational? Not remotely. Inefficient and painful.

But the pain was the hook. It proved the investment and created the memory. That content spread because it was "worth talking about."

There's a layer of economics underneath, too. The economist Sherwin Rosen studied the "economics of superstars": markets reward the most recognizable participants disproportionately.

If your odds of being chosen rise from 1% to 2%, the result can double. Fame compounds. In crowded markets, the most-recognized option takes a huge share of the pie and keeps reinforcing its position.

So the goal of this era should no longer be "optimization."

It should be fame.

How Do You Build Fame?

So how, concretely, do you build fame? Paul Feldwick offers four components in Why Does The Pedlar Sing?, and I think they work directly as a framework.

First, what you make has to be interesting in itself. Second, it has to reach enough people. Third, it has to be distinctive and memorable. Fourth, the public and the media have to want to spread it voluntarily.

One at a time.

Create new information first — don't rehash old information.

Proprietary data research, original surveys, an annually updated index, experiments run in public, tools that solve real problems, limited-run physical objects, events that convene a specific crowd.

Let me tell you an old story. You know the Michelin Guide, right? A tire company made a restaurant guide — and ended up building a cultural authority.

Awards, industry rankings, annual reports, indices — these are all content marketing. They're fame engines.

The key is perceived effort. A limited-print book mailed to 100 target customers can carry more weight than 1,000 blog posts.

The expense is the meaning.

No budget? Then attack the smallest market.

Interesting work without distribution is invisible. Media coverage, partners, paid placement, events, physical mailers, community reshares — all of it is distribution.

What if the budget is thin? Focus on one clearly defined small audience and dominate it. Plenty of tech companies that later became great started by ruling one small community before expanding outward.

This is where PR and content marketing converge: earned media widens reach, paid media accelerates, community activation keeps the fire burning.

Be distinctive — and show up again and again.

The great failure of informational SEO content is sameness. Ten articles answering the same question, all looking identical.

Sources of distinctiveness: an annual report that shows up every year, a rating system of your own, instantly recognizable visuals, a consistent voice, a tool people use out of habit, an award that belongs to you.

Fluency boosts recall. Recognizing you on sight saves cognitive cost. Distinctive assets that recur, compound.

But you have to keep showing up. Stop, and you fade from memory.

Design sharing. Don't beg for it.

You can't force people to share, but you can design for sharing. When content carries social currency, when sharing elevates the sharer, when participation pays off, when access has a threshold — spreading takes care of itself.

Referral mechanics, limited slots, public recognition inside a community — they all give it that push.

The core, in one sentence: the message must flow freely from person to person. Only what gets passed on can compound. If it can't be passed on, everything is zero.

A Five-Step Playbook for Heads of Search

Getting practical: if you run search or content, here are five steps.

Step one: separate infrastructure from fame. Keep maintaining the infrastructure for high-intent search as usual — product page optimization, conversion support, clear answers to the questions that need answering. But stop treating the volume of informational content as brand growth. Audit your content assets: which ones are building mental availability, and which are just plugging holes.

Step two: shift budget toward originality. Proprietary research, data collection, creative projects. In an era when everyone can generate a competent summary, originality is the leverage. Budget probably needs to move from the quantity of content to the depth of creativity.

Step three: decide distribution before making content. Before you start, answer: who is this for? How does it reach their eyes? Which gatekeepers matter? Which media might care? Design the reach backward from those answers.

Step four: build distinctive assets. Create reusable formats that grow into your brand: an annual index, a recurring event, a recognizable report structure, a named methodology. Consistency creates fluency.

Step five: measure fame, not just traffic. Branded search volume, direct traffic growth, share of voice — and, if you can get it, unaided brand awareness.

Traffic doesn't qualify as a North Star. If your content doesn't raise the probability of being remembered at the moment of purchase, it isn't doing its job.

Epilogue

Back to my friend.

I finally told him: those 800 articles weren't written in vain — their era has simply passed. From here on, the content operation needs to be reorganized around business logic: keep the search infrastructure, and throw your main effort into building fame.

AI will take over mediocrity. That's bad news for the mediocre, and good news for people who take the work seriously. Humans get freed up to do what machines can't fake: new information, new experiences, new events, new signals.

Information is infinite. Attention is not.

The value of being discovered is overtaking the value of being published.

The winners will be the brands that actually get remembered.

May you be one of them.