The Crucial Thing Everyone Seems to Be Forgetting About Content Strategy in the Age of AI
The ongoing rise of AI search experiences has a lot of people rethinking their content strategy – and rightfully so. Adapting to changes is crucial if you want to keep up with your competitors.
So how do you evolve when things are changing so quickly?
Everywhere you turn, there are new tips and tricks for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), or whatever else you’d like to call it. But there’s a critical step that’s often left out of these recommendations. A reminder of the first thing you should ask yourself before making any strategy adjustment or overhauling your content:
“Does this make sense for my brand and will it resonate with my audience?”
How to Mindfully Adjust Your Content Strategy
I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it a million times more – there is no cookie-cutter formula for success. What works for one brand won’t necessarily work for the next. This is why you can’t have a knee-jerk reaction to the latest headlines or case study you see circulating online.
Are there ways to rethink and adjust your content with AI search in mind? Absolutely. Should you pivot your entire content strategy because a LinkedIn post said a brand saw a spike in visibility and impressions after publishing 15 new listicles? No.
Think About Your Audience
The first step you should take before making any kind of adjustment to your content strategy is to think about your audience.
How are they using answer engines? Are they even using AI for search? This gets tricky, of course, as platforms like Google continue ushering people into AI search experiences without a real choice. But keep in mind that while there’s a lot of noise from AI cheerleaders on social media, there are also a lot of people who are vocal about their frustrations and general anti-AI sentiments. So we do need to assume that not everyone is using AI, and some are going out of their way to avoid it.
I'm not saying you should ignore AI search. You can and should put yourself in a better position to get cited. Making your content friendlier to those AI platforms is important because, whether we like it or not, this is a new window of opportunity to be discovered.
But you can't wipe out your entire strategy and adjust your approach to cater just to those platforms. At the end of the day, the right content strategy is going to be putting out content that resonates with your target audience and provides actual value.
Think About the Long-Term Impacts
Another thing to consider before jumping into a new content strategy is any potential long-term ramifications.
It can be tempting to see low-hanging fruit and grab for it, thinking you’ll see immediate results. And to be clear, some tactics will give you immediate results. But there is no shortcut to success. And what you think is a shortcut now may end up doing more harm than good.
I can think of two relatively recent examples of these “quick win” tactics we’ve advised clients against – that Google has now cracked down on.
The first is publishing biased “best of” listicles that rank your product ahead of competitors with no solid evidence. This isn’t necessarily a new tactic, but started to come up often as AI search experiences took off. These can come across as misleading or spammy, and may lead to a significant drop in impressions and traffic, according to research published earlier this year by Lily Ray.
The second is using generative AI to write large volumes of content for the sole purpose of increasing your publishing cadence. I always stress to clients the importance of quality over quantity. One piece of solid, well-thought-out content that provides legitimate value to a user will do you more good than 10 half-baked blogs that don’t answer questions or provide valuable insights.
Seeing a huge increase in visibility means nothing if you get penalized for it a few months later and can’t recover. If your goal is long-term success, any shift in your strategy needs to be thought out and intentional.
Finding the Right Content Strategy
The most important part of your strategy is figuring out what questions and pain points your audience has and putting out the best possible content to address those. From there, after you’ve written your content, is when you can figure out what you should be doing to optimize for AI.
The bottom line is that the humans who are your potential customers always need to come first.
Looking for a content strategy refresh? Get in touch!
Meet the Author
Heather Monahan
Heather is our Content Manager who joined Cypress North in November 2022 and works out of our Rochester office. She brings more than a decade of professional writing experience to our digital marketing team.
Some of Heather's daily responsibilities include writing content for our clients' websites and landing pages, writing ad copy, copywriting, and copy editing. She also helps manage our agency's blog, newsletter, and other internal content writing. Since joining Cypress North, Heather has earned HubSpot certifications for content marketing, inbound marketing, SEO, and social media marketing.
Before joining Cypress North, Heather spent more than eight years as a journalist, working as a news producer and digital content producer for local TV news stations. She most recently spent six years in Tampa, Florida, where she helped lead the digital team and oversaw the station’s growing digital initiative. While in Florida, Heather won a regional Emmy for her work on an interactive digital program that provided live hurricane coverage.
Born and raised in the Rochester area, Heather graduated from St. Bonaventure University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication.
When she's not working, Heather can be found taking approximately a million daily pictures of her dogs, geeking out over the latest space news, reading, or sharing tales of her time in Florida. She also enjoys skiing and cheering on the Buffalo Bills - even when they make her sad.
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