Content marketing often focuses on topics that appeal to the widest possible audience. In this way, target audiences discover the company’s website and, for example, subscribe to a newsletter in the next step. The content is aimed at the beginning of the customer journey.
However, these topics are often quite banal. As a result, it has been clear for some time that it will be increasingly difficult for this type of content to serve its purpose.
The zero-click search phenomenon
Google, for example, has long answered many queries directly on the results page, without the need for clicking. These zero-click searches now account for about a quarter of all searches.
In other words, it is already possible for Google to take tips, facts, figures and other information from your post and present it directly to users. You will be listed as the source. But there’s no money in that.
AI-powered search engines and specialized chatbots
AI-powered search engines take this concept to the next level. Thanks to powerful language models and other advances, they provide comprehensive information for every query.
Examples include Perplexity, Arc Search, Microsoft’s Copilot in Bing, and, to a lesser extent, search engine start-up Kagi, which integrates AI capabilities into a classically structured search engine. And, of course, Google is working on it, too.
Such services no longer just answer simple questions (How high is the Eiffel Tower?), but also more complex ones (What makes the Eiffel Tower so special?). As a result, you get the facts, images, and other information you want. Or you can have the most important findings from the search results summarized at the touch of a button.
OpenAI’s “GPTs” take a similar approach: they are specialized versions of ChatGPT that can access special expertise and use formats other than text for their answers, such as a map.
Radical disruption is likely
Content marketers are not the only ones affected by this shift. In Smart Content Report #4, we pointed to this article on Engadget. It raises the question: How are websites going to make money in the future if the readership is mainly made up of AI bots and human users are hardly going to bother to visit a separate website? This testimonial in the New York Times goes in a similar direction.
Here on LinkedIn, Martin Goldmann painted a bleak picture of the future. He sees a lot of content formats disappearing. Advice articles, lists of tips, recipe databases and the like have no future.
What to do now?
As I wrote about ChatGPT last spring, “I think the first thing content teams need to do is understand which questions are more likely to be answered by an AI assistant, and where the best opportunities exist for human-generated content.”
For example, it’s more important than ever to emphasize personality and individuality. After all, AI assistants have no experience of their own, no perspective of their own, no opinions of their own. But these will still be in demand in the future.
Another option is to use content formats that an AI assistant cannot provide in a meaningful and credible way: interview, essay, commentary, and many others. Martin Goldmann, on the other hand, sees video as a way to differentiate yourself as a human from the bots.
Last but not least, it’s about community building. Once you have built a following, those people will (hopefully) turn to you, not an AI.
Conclusion
Having said all that, it will take some time for such AI-powered tools to become mainstream. We don’t need to change our content strategies here and now.
But we do need to start thinking about the implications and how we, as content marketers, are going to respond.