The Internet has changed. I keep saying this and I'll keep saying it until it lands differently than it does right now in most marketing orgs: it has changed, past tense, and we're still running plays designed for a version of the web that no longer exists.
For performance content—SEO, AEO, the stuff we write to rank and be cited—we're writing for bots. That's just the reality. Your prospects are asking detailed, specific questions in ChatGPT and Google before they ever touch your website. They're learning about you, your competitors, your category. And they're doing it on platforms that are increasingly zero-click, which means the click you used to get…might not come. What comes instead is a shaped impression of who you are.
Your narrative either shows up in those answers or someone else's does. You can measure it with tools like Profound and AirOps. The metric you're optimizing for is visibility, not traffic.
And then, when someone does show up on your website—through organic (lower volume than it's been in years), paid search, or direct—they already have a picture of you. Your job at that point isn't to introduce yourself. It's to confirm what they think they know and get them into the product. That means shorter forms. More video. Interactive tours. Tools that demonstrate instead of describe. The website has become a conversion environment in a much more deliberate way than it used to be because it doesn’t need to educate like it used to.
That's one half of the picture. The other half is that not all content is performance content, and I think this is where a lot of the existential panic is misplaced.
Thought leadership, insights, research—the stuff that earns media attention, shapes how your market talks about a category, builds a brand that people actually recognize—that content isn't just for bots to parse. It requires human interpretation. It requires someone with a point of view making a call about what the data means. Rand Fishkin, the team at Reforge, what Ramp is doing here, nobody is going to trust that kind of content if a bot clearly wrote it. It needs human interpretation. Someone with a point of view making a call about what the data means. The design matters. The interactivity matters. And ebooks as a lead gen format are pretty much cooked, which means someone needs to be thinking seriously about what replaces them.
Video is the other piece. It has been booming, and will continue to. If you haven't gotten good at visual storytelling yet, now is probably the time.
The tl;dr for everyone: I don't lie awake worrying about AI taking my job. I do think about the fact that the parts of the job where humans add value have moved. That's not an existential crisis. Figuring that out, to me, is just the work.
