"You can think of it as the search singularity, and it’s the moment when we reach a critical mass of copycat content—when the search results become so swamped by samey blog posts and duplicative guides that the regular rules of content marketing break down."

"AI writing tools mean that the marginal cost of a blog post is nosediving from multiple skilled person-hours to minutes spent in a freemium SaaS product."

"In the near future, any company with a modest budget and a functioning internet connection will be able to pump out truly mind-numbing volumes of content."

"This is the difference between AI-assisted writing and AI-generated writing. The former will lift content marketing to new heights; the latter will trigger the “search singularity,” an implosion of homogenous, copycat content on an unparalleled scale:"

"To quote William Gibson, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”"

"It creates a simulacrum of good writing, something that looks good at first blush but falls apart on closer inspection."

"I agree—but this is also how the vast majority of the web’s SEO content is currently written."

"Spun content often falls foul of plagiarism detectors, and Google is good at detecting many forms of spun content (it’s been working at it since 2012)."

"When we think about search content, there’s obviously another marginal cost to consider: strategy."

"But to cut the Gordian knot, why bother with strategy when you can create hundreds of blog posts at a time?"

"SEO has always functioned as a game of call-and-response. It’s likely that Google will find new ways to exclude weak AI-written content from the SERP by devaluing traditional on-page signals and relying more heavily on signals like information gain (more on that below) and authority."

"Quality is a powerful differentiator today, but it’s about to become vastly more important."

"Your job is to create a vast gulf of quality between AI-generated content and your content."

"1. Focus on “information gain” in every article you create"

"One sure-fire way to maintain an edge over AI-generated search content is to write with information gain in mind"

"2. Diversify beyond search and invest in thought leadership"

"Thought leadership generates awareness and builds trust by sharing a company’s “earned secrets:” the unique experiences, insights, and perspectives that only that company has."

"Counter-narrative opinions (exploring why the status quo is wrong or flawed)"

"Personal narrative (sharing your own lived experiences)"

"Network connections (sharing the experiences of people within your network)"

"Data storytelling (revealing the insights hidden within data—yours, or publicly available data)"

"3. Share the same information but create a new experience"

"The core information—the story—is the same, but the experience is vastly different."

"Brand and personality are powerful forces. Even if you’re forced to compete with a dozen other articles, each sharing the same information, you can still create a unique experience that will appeal to your target audience."

"AI or not, these tactics—focusing on “information gain,” experimenting with thought leadership, and creating new content experiences—are growing more important for standing out from your competitors, carving out a lucrative niche in more crowded search results, and futureproofing your content marketing."

"1. Massive Increase in Competition for All Search Results"

"Publishing Frequency and Content Length Trend Upwards"

"Companies Will Be Less Discerning With the Keywords They Target"

"generative AI removes this constraint and creates an incentive to publish first, think later. Companies will be less discerning and more willing to tackle any keyword with a passing relevance to their product."

"Why bother with strategy when you can create hundreds of blog posts at a time? Why bother with prioritization when you can target every keyword? Why bother with competitor analysis when you can just copy your competitors in a fraction of the time?"

"Programmatic SEO Becomes Commonplace"

"there has always been a trade-off between content volume and content quality: publishing a thousand articles in a month usually requires a huge compromise on the relevance and uniqueness of the content."

"With GPT-4, that constraint may no longer exist. Add in GPT-4’s ability to write and troubleshoot Python scripts for web scraping, and it becomes clear that the barriers to entry for programmatic SEO are virtually zero."

"2. Google Prioritizes Off-Page Ranking Factors"

"Google will be incentivized to find better ways to distinguish between the same content."

"Off-Page Ranking Factors Become More Important"

"In the presence of copycat content — where the words on the page across competing articles are largely the same — Google could place greater emphasis on off-page ranking factors, like backlinks, as a means of differentiating between similar content."

"So I’d rather put my money on user-signals — are the users happy with this result?”"

"Bylined content may also become more important as Google puts more emphasis on the author of the content and less on the content itself."

"There are some situations where really what you value most is content produced by someone who has first-hand, life experience on the topic at hand.”"

"One of Google’s patents already offers a speculative solution to the problem of copycat content: information gain scores, rewarding articles for bringing new information to the discussion and penalizing those that don’t."

"Creating content that complements and builds on existing articles"

"Experimenting with risky framings and angles"

"Incorporating original research into content"

"3. Massively Reduced Returns From Search"

"More Zero-Click Searches"

"Generative AI is likely to accelerate the “maturation” we’re seeing in search: greater competition seeping into all but the smallest of niches, fewer uncontested keywords, and a continued reification of search in favor of big, established brands. SEO will require more effort for smaller returns."

"Build team strength in areas beyond just “writing.”"

"Develop your own flavor of “information gain.”"

"Diversify beyond search. Imagine a worst-case scenario where traffic from SEO disappears: how would you build your business?"

"It’s a place where you really can “thought lead”: sharing your ideas and beliefs in a way that influences the way real people think — and buy."

"These types of results are not unusual for many companies’ Twitter efforts. Perhaps they don’t care about ROI, or more likely, ROI is too complicated and opaque for anyone to ever be held to account."

"But, as we’ve written before, the reader “would be happier to get the value right here, on their terms, in whatever space they’ve chosen.”"

"1. Build Equity in Your Personal Brand"

"The Twitter equivalent is “people follow people.”"

"There’s a serendipitous benefit to personal branding. You can impart a halo effect on your company by shining a light on the company operations by retweeting branded content (and adding your own layer of context) and reminding your followers that there are real, breathing people on the other side of that company name and logo."

"2. Distribute Ideas, Not Blog Posts"

"But the ultimate goal of marketing is trust-building, persuasion, and helping people to hear, understand and believe in our ideas — so what does it matter whether that idea is contained in a blog post or a tweetstorm?"

"Effective social requires you to create platform-native content: content that is tailored completely to the channel it is shared on."

"3. Play to the Algorithm (Sometimes)"

"One observation about Twitter: dumb roundups of “free tools” and “Google Docs tips” usually perform better than smart, nuanced ideas."

"In the same way, great Twitter accounts leverage “dumb” tweetstorms to improve the performance of better content:"

"Twitter makes it particularly easy to identify top-performing topics, trends, and content types. Just pick an influencer of choice, use one of Twitter’s handy advanced search operators, and you can tap straight into a playbook of proven tweets."

"4. Use Social Dynamics to Incentivize Engagement and Amplification"

"Mentions and quote-retweets create powerful social incentives. The person creating the tweet benefits from the implicit association with the people they tag; as the tweet gains traction, the people featured have incentive to keep the snowball rolling."

"Most companies have indexed heavily on the “media” portion of that descriptor at the expense of the “social” and “network” parts. They pump out content in prodigious quantities and forget that Twitter users care more about personal connections and enjoying themselves within the app than they do about branded content and blog posts."

"One of the simplest (and best) content marketing strategies is to write about pain points — the ugly problems your product is designed to solve."

"Many products solve problems for users, not buyers."

"Painful problems don’t always have lots of search volume."

"You will — eventually — run out of immediate pain points to solve."

"Many companies start their content operations by focusing on pain points. As a result, many companies find themselves quickly bottlenecked by these three problems."

"Traditional pain points are frustrating problems that can be solved by your product. These can be thought of as first-order pain points: the pain points most immediately and directly related to the thing that your product does."

"But for every company and product, there is also an entire constellation of second-order pain points."

"We find these by zooming out from our first-order problems to explore the bigger, broader environment in which they live."

"Useful keywords are hard to map, and if such keywords exist, they would likely generate very unqualified traffic."

"But for their target audience — growing startups — there’s an obvious second-order pain point that is comorbid with these spreadsheet frustrations: making a first finance hire."

"Writing about making a finance hire provides a concrete access point to the right audience at the right time."

"It shows that Equals “gets” their audience’s problems and that they understand the macro challenges that accompany the micro one of outgrowing spreadsheets."

"Every product has access to an entire constellation of second-order pain points, and these can provide access to a far larger audience and a natural route of progression for companies that feel like they have “run out” of topics to cover."

"So talk to your customers and ask: what are the related problems that occurred around the time you purchased? Where do we fit in the bigger, broader challenges you’re wrestling with?"