Content marketing is everywhere.
We do keyword research, analyse markets, and publish landing pages and blog posts.
The goal? To attract clicks, convert users, and climb the rankings.
But what happens when that stops working?
The internet is drowning in generic, AI-generated material. Search is becoming ambient, answer-led, and keyword-less. And search engines no longer need to crawl or rank your site to serve users. In fact, they’d often prefer not to.
In these ‘solved query spaces’, answers are synthesised. Content is commodified. The old tactics don’t work anymore.
If we want to reach and influence audiences, we need a new approach. We must stop treating content as a tool for visibility and start using it to solve real user problems.
Tomorrow, everything changes
I spend most of my time elbow-deep in websites, inspecting their code, architecture, performance, and accessibility. I look for flaws. I find slow JavaScript, bloated markup, broken links, and dodgy plugins. I see sites hosted on creaking servers and built by developers who never thought about (or were incentivised to care about) crawlability, discoverability, or speed.
These are real problems. And while fixing them will make a site faster, cleaner, and easier to index, they aren’t the biggest problems that most businesses face.
The real issues are strategic. Structural. Existential.
Too many businesses are running on autopilot. They have a strategy. Kind of. It usually looks like this: pick a channel, spend some money, drive some traffic, optimize conversion rates, and retarget everyone who bounced. Rinse and repeat.
That process, while deeply mediocre, has worked well enough for a decade. The bar was low. The tools were simple. The competition was equally lazy.
But that era is ending.
I see a storm on the horizon. And tomorrow, everything changes.
The internet is shifting under our feet. The platforms are evolving, the rules are changing, and most businesses are sleepwalking straight into irrelevance. If we keep blindly doing what we’ve always been doing, our businesses will fail.
Your content is (probably) garbage
Almost everyone does some form of content marketing, even if they don’t call it that. Websites, landing pages, product descriptions, blogs, support hubs, press releases, articles – it’s all content. It’s how we explain our products, tell our stories, and try to influence decisions.
In theory, content should be your differentiator. In a world where everything is becoming more commodified, where price, availability, and convenience are no longer competitive advantages, your content – your voice, your story – should be what sets you apart.
But instead, we get garbage.
Most content exists solely for SEO. It’s owned by the SEO team. It’s measured by how well it ranks. It’s produced for algorithms, not for humans. Which means it doesn’t educate, it doesn’t convince, it doesn’t build trust. It just ticks boxes.
Worse still, it actively harms your brand.
Just look at an average blog post, on an average website. Every dentist on the planet has at least one “8 great benefits of teeth whitening” style article, where the brand name shows up nine times, but none of the reasons say anything useful. Every mechanic has a “What is a car air filter?” definition style page that uses the term sixteen times (and has just as many interrupting popups), but barely explains what the thing actually does.
Who is this content for? What problem does it solve? Who’s reading it, then sharing it with friends? Would anyone miss it if it disappeared tomorrow?
Sure; you built an editorial calendar, picked your keywords, published your posts, and got the green light from your favourite SEO plugin. But did you create new value? Are those pages inherently useful? Almost certainly not.
Most company blogs are a dumping ground. They’re where all the odd-shaped bits go – content that doesn’t quite fit on the homepage or the service pages, or the main navigation. They become a mess of outdated news, limp case studies, SEO filler, and half-hearted “thought leadership”.
More often than not, this kind of content is just a shill. It’s you, talking about you, for your (theoretical) benefit, to an audience that doesn’t care.
If content is supposed to be the filling – the value, the substance, the reason the website exists – then why are we treating it like leftovers?
The process is lazy and broken
Here’s how most content gets made:
Someone runs a keyword report. They filter for high search volume and low competition. They paste everything into a spreadsheet. Then they produce content around those terms, hoping to climb a few spots in Google and scoop up some cheap traffic.
Except everyone else is doing the same thing. With the same data. From the same tools. For the same keywords.
You’re not just competing. You’re cloning.
And the data you’re using? It’s flawed. Keyword volumes are rounded, aggregated, and wildly inconsistent. Cost-per-click metrics favour high-intent, high-competition queries. So you end up chasing the same “bottom of the funnel” keywords as everyone else, while ignoring the parts of the journey where people are actually researching and exploring. The parts where content could genuinely help.
Then the work gets handed off. Maybe to an intern. Maybe to a freelancer. Maybe to an agency. Maybe to an AI. Whoever’s writing the thing almost certainly doesn’t understand the product, the problem, or the person they’re writing for.
And the few people who do have that knowledge? They’re too busy. Or too cautious. Or too bad at writing. So they’re not involved. Nobody with insight is reviewing the output. Nobody with experience is shaping the narrative.
The knowledge is locked inside teams that don’t publish, and the publishing is done by people without the knowledge.
So what gets published is generic filler. Vague advice. Reworded summaries of what’s already out there. Stuff that ticks boxes, but doesn’t say anything new, interesting, or useful.
And even if it ranks? It doesn’t convert. It doesn’t build trust. It doesn’t answer questions or inspire decisions. It doesn’t move anyone.
It’s just word soup.
This isn’t marketing. It’s not even ‘SEO’. It’s just busywork.
Solved query spaces and zero-click futures
More and more, when people search, they don’t click anything. They don’t have to. Google shows the answer right there in the results. Summarised, synthesised, often generated on demand.
We call these “zero-click searches”. But that’s just the surface of a deeper shift.
Google isn’t just showing snippets anymore. It’s generating its own content – collated from the pages it’s already crawled, ranked, and learned from. It’s using AI to understand the shape of a query, evaluate the knowledge that exists around it, and produce an output that often makes your content unnecessary.
This is where we start to see “solved query spaces”.
A solved query space is a topic area where Google already knows enough to answer the majority of queries, confidently, without needing to send users anywhere else. The knowledge is already there. The concepts are stable. The variables are known.
And the scope is enormous. Google has a better view of your industry, your niche, and your competitors than you do. It sees billions of pages, updates in near-real time, and aggregates information across the whole web. It understands not just what people are asking, but how those questions evolve, how they relate to intent, and how content performs across different contexts.
You can’t outscale that. You can’t outrank that with another listicle.
Think recipes. Think definitions. Think simple how-tos and product comparisons. These are content categories where innovation is rare, nuance is minimal, and the demand is predictable. Once Google has ingested and understood enough examples, it can just fill in the gaps.
You can even see it invent answers for things that don’t exist. If you search for a recipe that doesn’t (and perhaps shouldn’t) exist – say, “blueberry and salmon spaghetti bolognese with peanut sauce” – it’ll generate one for you. Google can just ‘invent’ it, based on what it knows. It had consumed enough adjacent recipes to confidently synthesise a new one, in real time, based on pattern recognition.
This isn’t just trivia. It’s a warning.
Because if your website exists just to summarise information, or to aggregate things that already exist – if you’re just an intermediary (and maybe, even if you own or influence the inventory) – you’re increasingly redundant. Google doesn’t need you. It doesn’t need your blog post about whitening your teeth or your affiliate review of five power banks.
It can generate something faster, cleaner, and better.
And that’s not just a threat to your visibility. It’s a threat to the entire system.
We’re not just publishing low-quality content — we’re poisoning the well.
Every SEO filler article, every regurgitated how-to, every AI-written listicle pollutes the dataset. It teaches the system the wrong things. It makes search worse. It makes generative AI dumber. It buries nuance, originality, and trust beneath a rising tide of sludge.
We’re not just competing for attention anymore. We’re contributing to the decay of the very platforms we rely on.
So if you’re not adding value – if you’re not bringing new information, original insight, or real expertise – then you’re just more soup in the soup. And it’s getting harder to float.
So if you want to show up early in the journey – if you want to earn trust, build recall, and influence decisions before people are even ready to buy – then you need to change more than your strategy.
You need to change your approach to content itself.
Stop chasing clicks, and start (actually) solving problems
So what do you do instead?
You stop chasing traffic. You stop trying to game rankings. You stop optimising for the shallow end of the funnel.
Instead, you solve problems.
You go upstream. You talk to real people. You figure out what confuses them, what frustrates them, what they wish they’d known sooner. You listen for the questions they’re not quite sure how to ask – the hesitations, the half-formed thoughts, the unmet needs.
And then you make content that helps. Not content that sells. Just content that’s useful.
Don’t make ranking the objective – that’s the outcome when you get everything else right. When you educate. When you explain. When you walk with them. When you become the guide they didn’t know they were looking for.
That’s how you earn trust. That’s how you build preference. That’s how you become the brand people remember when they’re finally ready to act.
And there’s a hidden benefit no one talks about.
When you show up early, you’re not just earning trust – you’re insulating that trust.
You’re reducing the likelihood that someone will go elsewhere. You’re keeping them out of comparison tables, away from review roundups, and off your competitors’ radar. You’re giving them fewer reasons to start searching again. They’re less likely to wander.
That’s not just helpful. That’s powerful.
Be the first click
There’s a popular mantra in SEO: “Be the last click.” It’s neat. It’s measurable. It makes sense – give people the perfect page, the perfect answer, so they don’t need to keep searching.
But it assumes they’ve already made it through the journey.
It assumes they’re already at the bottom of the funnel – informed, confident, and ready to act. It ignores all the pain, frustration, confusion and work they had to do to get there.
Because most people don’t just search once, click once, and convert. Real journeys are messier. They span multiple devices, sessions, sites, and days. Most of those experiences suck; because everyone’s chasing the same end point. Everyone’s fighting to be the last click, while ignoring everything that came before.
So be the first click.
Don’t wait until someone is “in market.” Don’t just show up when you’ve got something to sell. Be there earlier. Be helpful when they’re lost. When they don’t know what to Google. When they’re not sure what to believe. When they’re still trying to make sense of the space.
That’s when people need you most.
And here’s the deeper shift: stop being customer-centric.
Because customers are only ever a small slice of the total audience. They’re the outcome. They’re who get filtered through the system. But the system is changing.
If you want to influence the customers – the in-market audience – you first need to be useful to the whole audience. You need to be audience-centric.
That means publishing content that helps the curious, the passive, the problem-aware-but-not-solution-ready crowd. It means making things that are genuinely interesting, helpful, and worth sharing.
Because that’s how you win at the gatekeeper level.
That’s how you convince Google – and every other AI-powered filter – that your content deserves to be surfaced. That your site deserves to be visible. That you’re a source worth returning to.
It’s also how you grow influence. How you earn links from journalists. How you get quoted, bookmarked, retweeted, remembered.
When you show up for the audience – consistently, generously, and without a sales agenda – you earn the right to show up for the customer.
Become a publisher
If you want to serve your audience – not just your customers – you need to stop thinking like a marketer, and start thinking like a publisher.
The phrase “become a publisher” has been floating around marketing circles for years. But most brands never got past the surface.
They created a blog. They hired a content person. They published some posts. Maybe they ticked off a few SEO checklists.
But they didn’t become publishers.
Because publishing isn’t about having a blog. It’s not about pushing out content regularly or meeting a quota. It’s not about format – it’s about mindset.
To publish, properly, means to think editorially. To approach content like a newsroom or a magazine would. To ask: what does our audience actually need to know? What hasn’t been said? What’s timely, insightful, controversial, or important?
It means creating things that don’t already exist. That couldn’t just be generated or paraphrased by an AI. That show perspective, judgement, and taste.
Real publishers pursue original research. They cite sources. They interview experts. They write with bylines and faces. They validate ideas before they hit “publish”.
They don’t just rewrite what’s already out there. They create inputs, not summaries.
They have editors. Review cycles. Standards. They care about tone and structure and clarity.
And they understand the responsibility of shaping the narrative in their niche. They know that their content isn’t just there to attract – it’s there to influence.
If you want to compete in a world where generative AI can rewrite anything in milliseconds, you can’t be derivative. You have to say something new. You have to say something only you can say.
That means surfacing the humans inside your company. The subject-matter experts. The analysts. The founders. The people who’ve seen things, built things, fixed things. That’s your moat.
If your content doesn’t have a face, a voice, or a point of view – it’s probably not publishing. It’s probably just content.
And once you’re creating content worth reading – and worth sharing – you need to think carefully about where it lives.
Because Google isn’t the only place people search anymore. And it’s definitely not the only place they make decisions.
You have to compete elsewhere, and everywhere
It’s easy to think SEO means Google. That “search visibility” means blue links on page one.
But the way people search is changing.
TikTok is undeniably a search engine. Reddit is a search engine. YouTube, Amazon, LinkedIn – they’re all search engines too, in their own ways. Maybe Tinder is a search engine, too.
Your audience is already there. They’re asking questions. They’re comparing options. They’re learning how to do things. They’re finding solutions long before they even think to visit your website.
If you’re only optimising for Google, you’re not just missing out – you’re invisible.
Because people don’t trust every platform the same way. They go to Reddit for honest, unfiltered opinions. They go to YouTube for walkthroughs and demos. They go to TikTok for fast, practical tutorials. They go to Amazon to see what’s in stock and how it’s rated. Each platform plays a different role in the journey.
So your content needs to be native to those spaces. Helpful in context. Optimised not for rankings, but for usefulness. That might mean short videos, comment replies, forum posts, or product guides; not just another blog article.
This isn’t just diversification. It’s a surface-area strategy.
You’re not building a funnel. You’re building outposts. Strategic content placements across the platforms where your audience already spends time, learns, and makes decisions.
And here’s the kicker: when you do that well, it often comes full circle. Because Google increasingly surfaces those other platforms in its own results. Reddit threads. YouTube videos. TikTok videos. If your content lives there – and earns attention there – it’s more likely to appear in traditional search too.
Which means you’re not just creating more surface area. You’re reinforcing your presence across the entire ecosystem.
So, stop publishing content and hoping it gets found. Start building content that already knows where it belongs.
The old playbook told you to build a site and wait. The new reality is that attention is fragmented, journeys are unpredictable, and search is everywhere.
If your strategy hasn’t evolved to meet that, it’s not a strategy. It’s a liability.
In summary
Stop producing content that doesn’t create value. Stop writing pages that no one would miss if they disappeared tomorrow.
Because the bar has moved. The game has changed. And if you’re still clinging to the old playbook – publish, rank, convert, repeat – you’re not just falling behind. You’re becoming invisible.
Start thinking about the role of content in your business. Not as decoration. Not as lead bait. But as the product. As the experience. As the thing that makes people trust you, remember you, and come back when it matters.
Content isn’t a channel. It’s your interface with the world.
So raise your standards.
Build content that serves the whole audience – not just the tiny sliver who are ready to buy.
Build content that works wherever people go to learn, search, and decide – not just in Google.
Build content with editorial integrity, human perspective, and a point of view – not just keywords and filler.
Be useful. Be trustworthy. Be human.
And above all, be early.
Show up before anyone else does. Solve problems before they’re well-defined. Be the voice that helps someone feel less stupid, less lost, less alone.
That’s how you earn attention. That’s how you build a brand. That’s how you become unforgettable.
And if your content isn’t making the internet better, it probably shouldn’t exist.
So set your content playbook on fire.
And then build something that actually works.
This article was originally published on Jono Alderson’s website (as Contentless marketing) and is republished with permission.