Here's a question worth sitting with: when's the last time you read something your own company published and actually thought, "that's worth sharing"?
Not posted-because-marketing-asked-you-to worth sharing. Genuinely-useful worth sharing.
A Kansas City marketing agency owner named in a recent piece on AOL raised that exact question, and it stuck with me. He admits something most of his industry won't: AI isn't creating a content problem. It's exposing one that's been sitting there for years.
A lot of businesses, he argues, simply don't have as much to say as their websites suggest. We've filled the internet with blog posts, newsletters and "thought leadership" that sounds polished but tells customers almost nothing. Now AI can crank out that same material in seconds. Which makes you wonder — how much actual thought was going into it before?
When Did Publishing Become the Goal?
Content marketing started out making sense. Share what you know. Answer real questions. Show people you understand your own business. Somewhere along the way, though, publishing turned into an obligation. Agencies promise twelve articles a month. Teams sit in meetings trying to invent twelve ideas to fill that quota. The calendar stopped supporting the strategy and became the strategy.
I get why this happens. Consistency matters. But there's something a little absurd about measuring success by word counts and impressions when none of that tells you whether a single person learned something or made a better decision because of what you published.
The Internet Already Has Enough of the Same Advice
Google's own guidance on helpful content pushes for original information and real value — not material designed purely to chase search traffic. Fair standard. But originality isn't the whole story. Sometimes people need something explained clearly, even if it's been explained a hundred times. The real test isn't "has anyone said this before." It's "does this actually help the person reading it."
Your Employees Probably Know More Than Your Website Does
This is the part that got me. The most interesting information inside most companies never makes it online. Ask a salesperson what customers always get wrong. Ask the person answering service calls what problem keeps coming back. Ask the owner what they'd do differently starting today. You'll hear honest, unpolished, genuinely useful stuff.
Then it goes through the content machine. A writer gets a topic with no access to the person who actually knows the answer. Reviewers strip out anything too opinionated. What comes out the other end is accurate, grammatically sound, and could have been written by anybody. That's the whole problem in one sentence.
AI Search Is Making This Harder to Hide
With AI search — the stuff people now call AEO or GEO — answers get pulled from multiple sources and handed to the reader directly, before they ever click a website. Generic content might still get swept into that summary. But if your business is saying the same thing as everyone else, you're giving an AI system, and a human, zero reason to remember you specifically.
A real case study. An honest account of a decision that didn't work out. A specific lesson from a specific mistake. That's the stuff that actually separates one business from another — whether a person finds it or an algorithm does.
Maybe Less Is the Better Strategy
I've spent years living by a simple question: what happens if I try it a different way? That's basically what's being proposed here. Not cutting every content calendar in half for the sake of it — some businesses genuinely have a lot to explain, and plenty of smaller ones don't publish nearly enough. But if an article already answers a question well, maybe update it instead of writing a weaker competitor. If there's no new insight to offer, maybe a ten-minute conversation with an employee beats another AI-generated thousand words.
Six articles people remember beat twelve nobody does.
The Real Question
The honest move, for any business, might be asking whether what you're about to publish needs to exist at all. That's an uncomfortable question for an industry built on keeping the pipeline full. But judgment — deciding when you actually have something worth saying — isn't something AI can do for you.
Sometimes the smartest thing isn't another post. It's admitting you've already said enough, and it's time to go learn something new before you say anything else.
Source: AOL.com
See also our earlier piece: Google Can Tell You You're Showing Up in AI Search. It Just Won't Tell You If Anyone Clicked.
