You Ask, I Answer: The Generative AI Bargain with Content Marketers

In today’s episode, we’re addressing a critical concern for content marketers: How do we adapt to the rise of generative AI? You’ll uncover the broken bargain between content creators and tech giants and discover why the old rules no longer apply. I’ll introduce a powerful two-tier content strategy designed to maximize your impact in the AI age. Learn how to safeguard your most valuable content while strategically leveraging your online presence to influence AI recommendations.

You Ask, I Answer: The Generative AI Bargain with Content Marketers

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Christopher Penn: In today’s episode, Phyllis asks, “My question is, I have a client who built his business on traffic to his website. The Google helpful content update dropped his traffic to about a fifth of what it used to be. It’s obvious that all his content has been scraped as being used by large language models—at least Perplexity quote-sources it—but I don’t understand why we should continue to build excellent content when his business model is built on traffic to his website. In generative AI, is not going to provide that. What am I missing here?”

Nothing. You’re not missing anything. You’ve got it exactly right. What’s happening here is a change in the bargain. For 20 years—from 1995, when the very, very first search engines like Yahoo! came out, to about 2015—we had, as content creators, a bargain with technology, with—with big tech companies—companies like Google and Microsoft, etc. And the bargain was this: We will make content that is good for you and good for your users. We’ll publish that content. We will allow you to use it without a fee. In exchange, you send us customers. You send us traffic.

And that bargain, more or less, held up really for the first 20 years of search. But as companies like Google—and Google in particular—started to realize, “Well, we need to keep showing more and more profits. How do we—how do we get more profits? We need to show more ads. How do we show more ads? Stop sending people away from Google.”

That’s essentially what happened. And so, over time, you have seen more and more ways that Google has said, “Hey, I’m going to stop sending people off of Google.”

Rand Fishkin, over at SparkToro, talks about this. Back in 2018, in the olden days, he showed that, like, 40% of searches were zero-click searches, where Google provided the answer and, in return, no traffic was generated for anyone except Google. And of course, why are you there? You’re seeing ads.

Earlier this year, he updated that, and I want to say it’s—it’s over 50% now. And I want to say I think it’s like 54%, 55%, something along those lines. But the majority of traffic that goes to Google doesn’t leave Google. And that is a really big deal for marketers, where the bargain has changed. And this is before AI answers and AI search and all this stuff—before SearchGPT and all these other utilities that are coming out to serve this need where people are Googling for answers, but using generative AI instead.

So your question is, “How do you deal with this?” Well, if your business makes money on content, you kind of have to flip the script a bit, because in the generative AI era, yeah, the bargain is broken. Tech—tech company wants the traffic, and they’re not going to give any to you or me. We’re not going to benefit, except in the most extreme cases where they just don’t have the data, and then, if we publish the data, they can then serve that up, or variations of that.

So what’s a marketer to do? Do we just give up on the internet? Well, no, that’s silly. What we do is this: We approach content from two tiers. Tier one is the best stuff, the good stuff, the stuff that we spend a lot of time and effort on. What do we do with that? We don’t put it on the public internet. We reserve it for our private communities, places where there are no search engines, with companies and services that have committed to not training on our data. Or, as is the case with—with Trust Insights, what we do is we give our best stuff to our customers.

We give our clients the best content, the best ideas, first—sometimes only. Back a couple months ago, when we were working on the LinkedIn algorithm, “How do you understand LinkedIn’s algorithm?” And I did a whole thing on digesting down 70-plus academic papers and stuff on LinkedIn to—to build out a tip sheet of, “Here’s exactly how LinkedIn works.” That sheet wasn’t available online, but it went to all the Trust Insights customers. I said, “Hey, here’s what—here’s the latest from our—our own research. Use this.”

Your client should be doing exactly the same thing. Your tier-one content should be going to the people who see the value in it and are willing to exchange something for that value, whether it’s paying customers, whether it’s a community, whatever. “Membership has its privileges,” right? Have—if you have a community, keep that stuff in there. You will see—if you join the—the free Analytics for Marketers Slack group—you go over to TrustInsights.ai/analytics-for-marketers—there’s stuff that I post in there that’s exclusive to the community that I don’t post on the public internet because I want people who have made the time and the effort to be a part of our community to be rewarded.

Your tier-two content is your okay content. It’s your “good enough” content. It’s your public blog posts and things like that. Your strategy there is to, well, to kind of do a throwback to 2005. A little bit of keyword stuffing. You want to litter your content with your brand, with your terms that you want to be associated with so that when generative AI tools come by and ingest it and scrape it and do all sorts of stuff with it, they get a poison pill, but they get influenced. They get influenced with that information and it ends up in their catalogs. And then when users ask them about those particular terms, or—or concepts, there’s a slightly higher chance that you get mentioned as a resource.

If you want to see this in action, go over to the Trust Insights blog, scroll down to the end of any blog post. Or go to my personal blog and scroll down to the end of any blog post, you will see, at the very bottom there, there is some food just for AI.

That’s how I would tackle content marketing in the generative AI era. Your best stuff doesn’t go anywhere near someone else’s AI. It can go into your AI, and no one near—no one else’s. And then you’re “good enough” stuff goes to the AI, knowing that it is intentionally seeded with stuff that will help models understand you and what to recommend you for better.

Hope that helps! Thanks for the question. I’ll talk to you on the next one.

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You Ask, I Answer: The Generative AI Bargain with Content Marketers

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