When ChatGPT became an overnight hit in late 2022, the creative results were … not exactly inspiring.

“Slop” became a word repeated in every boardroom as the least imaginative among us saw AI as an opportunity to flood the internet with thoughtless, machine-generated content.

But that era has run its course. Not because reading all that slop is a bad experience for consumers (it is). And not because machine-generated content at scale saps your marketing teams of their agency and motivation (though it does). 

Slop is over because it doesn’t work. 

While I’ve been heads down running AirOps for four years, I’ve been obsessing over what does work. 

I’ve spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of marketers and CMOs in this time. I’ve been embedded with teams at companies like Carta, Webflow, and Ramp. It has made me something of an expert on AI-driven anxiety, even in my own life. 

(I set aside three hours a day to read AI developments and news. It helps. Mostly.)

When I talk to our customers, I see why other short sighted approaches are losing. When I speak to the dozens in our content engineering cohorts, I see how the thoughtful and the creative are fighting back. 

Not just fighting back, but winning. 

The volume posters won the first battle, I’ll give you that. But the artists and creatives are winning the war. They are sustaining business growth in this new era while keeping their creative conscience. 

Here’s how:

The 3 Principles of Durable Quality Content

First, let’s be clear about the generational opportunity in front of us.

Organic as a channel is changing more every six months than it has in the last ten years. And traditional search usage is at its lowest in decades. Much of what you know as “marketing” is becoming obsolete.

Rather than panic, let’s be real: search engines haven’t been exactly vanguards of quality lately. 

(Do you like writing SEO candy like “Best makeup brands” that conveniently includes your company?)

AI and AEO are creating a new game. The rules are less clear, but there are also fewer incumbents. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to vault established players and establish yourself and your brand in the minds of your audience.  

Here’s what is winning:

Principle #1: Information-gain content

LLMs reward proprietary research and original data coupled with an authoritative and expert voice. This is “information-gain” content. Short term thinkers see this and think of this as friction to be avoided. But thoughtful marketers see this as an opportunity.

A shockingly low amount of the world’s information is online. You have untold amounts of insight in your mind, your company’s culture, its documentation, and your ability to connect disparate threads of information from your unique vantage point. 

Companies like Carta, Ramp, and Apollo are embodying this principle and connecting their internal datasets, call transcripts, and expertise to produce content that is getting noticed by LLMs and buyers. 

The audience coming in through LLMs is high quality. Webflow sees a 6x higher  conversion rate from AI-sourced traffic. Provide your audience and the LLMs with net-new information they couldn't find elsewhere. That’s the multiplier.

Principle #2: Humans in the loop

Every single AirOps customer creates with a human in the loop of the production process. Anyone who says they’ve fully outsourced creation to an AI may be telling the truth. But anyone who tells you they’ve successfully outsourced creation to AI is lying. 

Current AI technology is incapable of producing something of lasting value on its own. LLMs and humans alike ignore this work produced at scale. 

The marketer is now also a systems designer. We aren't replaced by AI, we thoughtfully direct it. We use it to bring the research and creativity to meet us where we are, using our expertise and humanity to create something new and lasting. Companies like Klaviyo are creating new content engineer roles, part editor, part systems designer to meet this opportunity .

We’re seeing winners direct their effort toward unearthing original insights and then design systems to get those insights into consumable formats at a fast clip. Speaking of…

Principle #3: High-velocity Updates

Both SEO and AEO are converging to reward depth, specificity, and (here’s the key) freshness. It’s the biggest growth lever you didn’t know you could pull.

The short-sighted see this and they produce thousands of blog posts each month hoping to game this approach. I can tell you I’ve seen this and it does not work. It erodes your brand and actually harms your long-term visibility in LLMs. Our customers have reported that any gains seen in the short term are quickly lost as the low-quality content stagnates. 

Instead, the winners are finding topics that require fresh information and then constantly updating their existing content as new knowledge is gained. When the LLMs look, they see information that’s current. And when humans look, they see a brand that cares enough about its work to ensure it’s accurate.

One of our customers, Chime, used AI and human editors to accelerate their updating process. Now, in the time it used to take to update a single post, the team is able to update nine. Another, Docebo, traded an army of writing contractors publishing at high volumes for an AI-assisted update-first approach where a select number of posts are flagged and then rapidly updated whenever traffic to them drops by >20%.

This shifts AI usage away from “publishing more” and instead focuses it on “learning more.” The AI can find what needs to be updated, search internal knowledge sources to suggest what should be included, and enable the marketing team to deliver quality updates more quickly. Creatives can focus more on original insight and less on churning posts into a CMS.
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Fight Anxiety with Action

On this new day, we are five minutes past midnight. This is building an airplane in 1905 or a rocket in 1959. We can’t begin to predict where this is all heading.

But you should see the above principles and notice a theme: The future is not shaping up to be robots making things for robots. It’s not slop all the way down. No, AI is paradoxically empowering our humanity. It’s freeing up trapped information in our organizations and rewarding thoughtful net-new information.

Train your team on the principles mentioned here. (This is what we do in our content engineering programs). Creativity, original research, constant iteration are the name of the game, not one-off tactics and tweaks. 

And if you think you’re too late, I can tell you that we have customers where 10% of their customers come from LLMs. And we have others where it’s only 0.5% and growing. We have customers that 20x’d traffic in 60 days due to a mix of first mover advantages and repeatable experimentation structures.

Consider this a wake-up call. It’s time to get up off the fainting couch and build the future you want to see.

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