we're so accustomed to educational blog content and resource centres that we assume they're some innate part of the user journey, of digital marketing as a whole. but they are not: they are a product of very specific incentives created by one company (Google). and those incentives are disappearing.
we built these pseudo-blogs because it was fantastically lucrative to do so. a few pages of plain-text Wiki content and some Unsplash stock imagery were historically enough to earn thousands and thousands of visits. it was foolish to ignore large-scale content creation. it was the most predictable, most reliable, most profitable marketing channel.
but the incentives are changing. the rewards are changing. and if this current trajectory continues, we would be just as foolish to keep engaging in the same type of content creation.
Google doesn't like the "necessary evil" of sending traffic to publishers. in their perfect world, searchers endlessly cycle around Google properties and Google ads. sending traffic to a third-party website is a failure, because it takes people out of their ecosystem.
traffic was a necessary incentive to encourage content creation to fuel the Google machine. you make content, Google ranks it and rewards you with some portion of their search demand. but thanks to LLMs, Google is now impossibly information-rich. it has reached a point where it doesn't need to incentivise content creation. as we're seeing with their indexing slowdown, with their anti-programmatic content measures, it wants to REDUCE content creation. content creation is a threat to the search experience now, not a benefit.
traffic has suffered death-by-a-thousand-cuts for years, thanks to Google's search features and advertising. but this time is different. the social contract Google has made with publishers like you and me has broken. LLMs delivered the death blow.
content will remain innately valuable for helping potential customers. some topics are worth writing, even if they were rewarded with zero search traffic. explain why your company exists. cover the core information required to understand your product features. help customers use your product to get useful outcomes.
but that, done well, is a relatively small library of content. and most content marketing today has expanded far beyond those boundaries and into topics with very little relevance to the company's products and beliefs. it is just information arbitrage - and LLMs are much, much better at arbitrage than we are.
whatever the future of content marketing is, it does NOT look like corporate wikipedias covering every "how-to" and "what is" topic under the sun. content will remain core to marketing, but anyone who thinks they can ride out the next few years without big changes to their strategy is in for a shock.
we need to think bigger.
This post was originally shared by on Linkedin.