Contentless Marketing

Almost everybody relies to some degree on some form of content marketing. We do market and keyword research, and we try to spot opportunities. We build landing pages and write articles to try and boost our rankings, optimize our ads, get traffic, and convert visitors. So what happens when that stops working?

It’s time to ask hard questions about the value of our content. What purpose does it serve, when the internet is drowning in generic, AI-generated articles, when search is ‘ambient’ and keyword-less, and when Google has no incentive to crawl, index or rank our websites? How will brands compete for attention in solved query spaces, when search engines neither want nor need our content… when they can just synthesize content from what they already know?

Zero-click searches were just the beginning. If we want to continue to be able to access and influence an audience, we need to stop thinking of ‘content’ as something we just put on pages and ads to attract or convert visits. We need to start thinking more about how we use content to solve user problems. And that’s not going to be comfortable, quantifiable, or anything like the kind of content marketing you’ve encountered before.