For years, the SEO playbook was simple: publish more, rank higher, capture more traffic. AI is rewriting that rulebook. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews now pull answers straight from the web and hand them to users without a single click through to the source. Publishing volume for its own sake doesn’t just underperform in this new landscape — it can bury your best work under a pile of generic content that neither people nor AI have any reason to trust.
Key Takeaways
- Volume alone no longer wins. AI search tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) reward specific, well-answered questions over high-frequency publishing.
- Depth beats frequency. Founders who cut publishing volume in favor of fewer, deeper pieces saw traffic and trust both improve — not decline.
- Proof beats claims. Real case studies, real numbers, and real client outcomes are what’s earning citations now, not generic advice dressed up as content.
- Authenticity beats automation. Content meant for humans (social posts, newsletters, brand voice) still needs a human behind it — AI-generated sameness is increasingly easy for both readers and algorithms to spot.
- Your SEO strategy needs a new goal. The old measure of success — publishing volume and keyword rankings — is being replaced by one that rewards depth, proof, and credibility inside AI-driven search.
- The real shift is the question you ask. Instead of “how much can we publish,” the founders here are asking “what do we know that nobody else can credibly claim — and can we prove it?”
So where does that leave founders who spent the last decade being told that more content equals more growth?
“Most businesses are told to create more content. But with AI changing how search works, is volume still the answer — or is it time for founders to think differently?”
We put that question to 15 founders and marketing leaders building across categories from healthcare to fulfillment to travel. Here’s what they had to say.
Create Durable Tools, Not More Posts
Just churning out articles doesn’t work like it used to. AI is changing search, so things like solid SEO frameworks or benchmark studies get picked up by both people and AI bots. At Elementor, I saw interactive tools and guides did way better. It’s not about how much you publish anymore, but about creating useful resources that last. That’s what actually helps web creators now.
Itamar Haim, SEO Strategist, Elementor
Share The Messy Truth From The Road
I’ve noticed in travel that actual stories about what really happened on trips work way better than just posting more often. When you share the messy details – like that time our client’s luggage got lost in Morocco or how we found that hidden beach in Thailand – people pay attention. They want the real stuff, not the glossy brochure version. Skip the generic posts and tell them what actually happens out there.
Marco Sancho, Polar Travel Specialist, Polar Cruises and Tours
Win With Deep, Clinician-Reviewed Guides
Volume was already a bad bet for us, and AI search made it worse. In a regulated category we can’t claim cures, so the only thing we can compete on is being genuinely useful — and a thin article on “5 probiotic benefits” was never going to beat a clinician-reviewed deep dive on bacterial vaginosis recurrence. Two years ago we cut our publishing cadence by more than half, paused the SEO cluster expansion we’d been chasing, and rebuilt the Learning Center around fewer, longer pieces written with our OB/GYN advisors. Organic traffic to those pages roughly doubled within a year, and they’re now the entry point for most of our new subscribers.
The shift was editorial, not technical. We stopped asking how many pieces we could publish this week and started asking whether a given article was the single best answer on the internet for a woman typing that question at 2am. Those are completely different briefs, and we’ve watched the deep guides get cited and surfaced far more often than the short posts ever did. If you’re a founder in a trust-sensitive category, pick the ten questions your customer actually loses sleep over and own them properly.
Hans Graubard, COO & Cofounder, Happy V
Give Specific Help, Not Generic Content
Look, I’m an orthodontist, so AI content strategies aren’t really on my radar. But the idea of quality over quantity clicks. When I was teaching, giving someone a specific guide for their problem worked way better than a generic handout. It’s the same for any business. Help your customer with what they need, don’t just make more stuff.
Dr. Nick Palmer, Founder, Orthodontics.net
Shift From Content Creator To Knowledge Owner
If bulk, thin, filler-stuffed content is still the backbone of your SEO strategy, AI search has already made that strategy obsolete. AI-driven search is increasingly built around genuine informational keywords and real, specific questions, not padded posts written to hit a word count. Founders need to stop thinking like content creators racing to fill a publishing calendar and start thinking like knowledge owners building something worth being cited for.
Ten years ago, publishing more content captured more search real estate almost by default. Today, AI models have already absorbed the internet’s entire library of generic advice, so producing more of the same doesn’t help grow. It just adds noise that neither a search engine nor a person has any reason to surface.
I’ve seen this play out directly with a client. We moved them from daily thin, padded blog posts a week to two genuinely useful, data-backed articles instead. Total output dropped by more than half, but traffic to the specific terms that mattered to their business grew, and their visibility improved in a market that’s become incredibly crowded. Depth earned them a seat at the table that volume never could.
Tom Edwards, Founder, Bit Quirky
Turn Real Incidents Into Valuable Case Studies
The ways to make content discovered online are evolving – it is no longer a question of quantity, but of quality. When I am helping to establish tech infrastructure we found we could turn real issues (running out of IPs or dealing with a breach this morning) into case studies that AI and humans can equally relate to. The advice: forget mass content production; use real examples and build out valuable unique resources if you want a profile.
Jake Brander, President, Brander Group Inc.
Publish Proof, Not High-Volume Content
I watched a DTC brand spend $40,000 creating 200 blog posts about shipping and fulfillment last year. Their organic traffic went up 12%. Their actual customer inquiries? Down. They’d built a content factory that Google liked but humans ignored.
Here’s what changed my thinking: When I was scaling my fulfillment company, we published maybe six pieces of content per year. But every single one came from a real problem a customer brought us. One article about reducing damage rates in frozen food shipping brought us three six-figure accounts because it showed we’d actually solved that exact problem. The content wasn’t optimized for search volume. It was optimized for proving we knew our stuff.
AI is exposing something founders should have known all along. Volume was never the answer. Proof is. When someone searches now, they’re not looking for your fifteenth blog post on “top fulfillment tips.” They want evidence you’ve done the thing they need done. ChatGPT and Perplexity are getting really good at sniffing out generic content that just restates what’s already out there.
I tell founders at Fulfill.com to flip the model. Instead of asking “what keywords should we rank for,” ask “what’s the one problem we solve better than anyone, and can we prove it with numbers?” Then create that single piece of content with real data from your actual business. When Nature Hills Nursery saved $334,000 working with a 3PL we matched them with, we didn’t write ten blog posts about cost savings. We wrote one case study with the real numbers and the actual warehouse manager’s quote.
The companies winning attention now aren’t publishing daily. They’re publishing proof. One founder I know puts out content quarterly, but each piece includes a spreadsheet, a video walkthrough, or a framework his customers can actually use. His conversion rate is 8x higher than competitors pumping out daily AI-generated posts.
Create less. Prove more. That’s the shift.
Joe Spisak, CEO, Fulfill.com
Own Knowledge And Build Credible, Unique Insights
Founders need to shift their thinking from content creators to knowledge owners, as AI has changed how we use content to gain competitive advantages. Ten years ago, publishing more content was an effective strategy for capturing as many search opportunities as possible. Today, there is so much generic content created by AI that there is little chance that creating this generic content will have a significant impact on your business or brand.
A far superior strategy would be to build a collection of unique, relevant insights and data points from real business experiences, customer behaviors, and company decisions. At LINQ Kitchen, our most valuable content is not the content that simply describes common, well-known information. It is the content that helps customers make better decisions when faced with unknowns.
While AI may provide more options for finding and accessing information, it will also place greater emphasis on credibility, as both individuals searching for information and search engines will need to determine which information sources are worthy of trust. Founders need to spend significantly less time trying to achieve a high frequency of new content publication and more time transforming their expertise, processes, and lessons learned into valuable content with a specific point of view.
Josh Qian, COO and Co-Founder, LINQ Kitchen formerly BestOnlineCabinets
Prune Thin Pages To Lift Quality
I started paying attention to how AI systems were treating my domain, and I noticed that each thin page I had published was diluting the quality signal of the whole site. So my content strategy now starts with one test. I want every page to hold up as if it were the only one someone ever saw from us.
On my own domain, thirty pages that each solve a specific problem clearly outperformed the larger library I used to maintain. That pushed me to look at how AI models decide which answer to surface. They seem to weight consistency of substance across a domain, so volume with uneven quality works against you.
I went back through everything and removed pages that existed only to fill a calendar. For each piece, I asked whether it was still doing useful work, and if I couldn’t justify it, I pulled it. The traffic barely moved, but engagement on the remaining pages improved.
Ben Frederick MD, Founder, Dr. Frederick’s Original
Split AI And Human Content, Favor Authenticity
Founders will always want more volume. That will never change. But it is time they take a step back and think differently.
I believe there are two buckets for two different “readers”: the AI bucket and the human bucket.
The AI bucket is your AEO, SEO, and keyword related content. Maybe you’re creating a “Best platform for X” listicle to get cited by answer engines. Or maybe it’s a simple glossary term like “What is answer engine optimization?” These types of content, in my opinion, can be created at high volume, using AI. The caveat is that you don’t want to spam the web with hundreds of articles like this.
Why is it okay for AI to write this type of content? Because it’s not actually meant to be read by humans. It’s meant for AI crawlers. We create this content to be extracted by ChatGPT or by Google’s AI Overviews. Very rarely will a human actually read these types of post in the zero-click environment we now live in.
The other bucket (the “human” bucket) is the content that humans actually read. This includes social media content, landing page copy, newsletters, and so forth. These should have a human touch and not created by AI at scale.
LinkedIn thought leaders, primarily founders, are the biggest offenders. I see post after post from CEO X and Founder Y each day that all have the exact same voice and cadence because they are all written by Claude instead of the founder themself.
Audiences are becoming sensitive to AI-generated content and will tune it out. Rather than making a post every day using AI, founders should slow down. Start with three posts per week that have an authentic perspective and point of view. It doesn’t have to have perfect grammar or formatting. It just has to be real.
People still want to hear real takes from humans, not machines. So, be human! Even if it takes a little more time, the results from well-thought out, deeply researched piece of content will perform better than 5 pieces of AI slop every time.
Quinn Schwartz, Founder, Schwartz Marketing Lab
Keep Few Short, Up-To-Date Answer Docs
AI changed how information gets found, so quality matters more than quantity now. At Wonderchat, we stopped building huge content libraries. Instead, we write short, living documents for each major customer question and update them weekly. This helps AI find the right answers and our customers get what they need faster. My advice is to stop chasing content counts and just make a few great things you keep updated.
Vera Sun, CEO, Wonderchat
Use Volume Strategically, Personalize The Core Message
It’s definitely time for businesses to think differently. Volume is still a tactic because an AI is collecting its training knowledge based on consensus instead of power ranking quality content. There is a strategy where volume and a variety of different places is more valuable than volume on your website. The other strategy is to create really human, engaging, and personalized content directly for your target ICP and use AI to personalize one core message rather than to create a hundred different messages.
I published a recent blog about this here if you want to quote or link to it. https://avenue9.com/blog/how-to-engineer-ai-recommendations-for-your-business/
Mike Montague, Founder, Avenue9
Balance Quality With Coverage To Inform LLMs
As the founder of a 12-month-old startup, I still believe that content is all about finding the right balance across quantity and quality. We have seen in recent months many examples of Google penalising sites that just mass produce articles without consideration for the end user experience. At the same time, though, you have to ensure that you have minimum coverage of the keywords, phrases, questions, etc., that may be relevant to your business (not so much to rank in Google, but to ensure that large language models are aware of your product offering, how you are positioned in the market, your strengths, weaknesses, use cases, etc.) In the first twelve months of running Playwise HQ, more than 60% of our customers have come directly from finding us in large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude. This strategy does work. You just need to think differently about what the end outcome is of creating content. It’s not always to rank on page one of Google, but rather it’s to inform the large language models that you exist.
Paul Towers, Founder & CEO, Playwise HQ
Prioritize Original Value And Authoritative Case Studies
The days of using content quantity as an ineffective method for appearing on the search engine rankings are done! For many years I have observed brands developing a publishing schedule and focusing on keyword density, however, since the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) with its ability to deliver results that match your query, there is no longer any value in just creating a greater quantity of content. Today, search engines not only index the pages on your website; they also provide synthesized answers for users.
If your content is simply general or just based on the amount of content you have produced, AI may very well summarize it or simply overlook it completely in favour of other sites that are of higher authority and/or more interesting. Instead of developing a plan to create a specific number of articles, companies should instead focus on how they can create original value through their contributions. Since AI models have access to the entire internet, they’ve already learned everything you are learning. However, they cannot replicate the exact operational lessons about your customers, how you use your experience with clients to create unique patterns of behaviour or the nuances associated with the way you address the complexities of your industry.
Companies should consider creating case studies and original thought pieces as their new content creation strategy. The focus should be creating a content piece that addresses a search query so thoroughly that the search engine considers the source an authoritative and credible authority on that subject. Stop chasing the number of articles you can produce and instead chase the clarity of your message. The companies that succeed will be those that provide the human experience that AI is good at summarizing, but is unable to actually replace with human intelligence.
Amit Agrawal, Founder & COO, Developers.dev
Earn Trust With Specific, Experience-Backed Answers
I’ve been running a specialist orthodontic practice since 1995 and have seen every marketing trend come and go. What I’ve noticed is that the practices still standing — and growing — aren’t the ones who published the most. They’re the ones patients actually trust before they walk in the door.
For me, that trust gets built through specificity, not volume. When I write about early intervention for children or why a specialist orthodontist handles cases differently than a general dentist, I’m drawing on 30 years of seeing those exact situations in the chair. That kind of content can’t be faked or scaled — and AI can tell the difference, because patients can tell the difference.
The question I ask myself before publishing anything is: does this answer something a real patient sitting across from me has actually asked? If not, I don’t write it. My practice runs on personal continuity — I see every patient at every appointment myself — and the content I put out should reflect that same standard.
Volume was always a shortcut. AI just made the shortcut shorter. What it can’t replicate is the founder who has genuinely done the thing they’re writing about.
Dr. Nick Kotsomitis, Orthodontist & Founder, NK Orthodontist
The Bottom Line: Depth, Proof, And A Point Of View
Fifteen founders, working in categories as different as orthodontics, fulfillment, travel, and women’s health, arrived at strikingly similar conclusions. AI hasn’t just changed where content shows up in search — it has changed what content is worth publishing at all.
Three themes run through nearly every answer here. First, depth beats frequency: clinician-reviewed guides, a tightly pruned set of focused pages, and a handful of quarterly deep dives all outperformed the old habit of publishing for its own sake. Second, proof beats claims: real case studies, real numbers, and real client outcomes are what both AI systems and skeptical readers are increasingly rewarding over generic advice. Third, authenticity beats automation: content written for people to read still needs a human behind it, even as AI takes over more of the content built purely to be indexed by crawlers.
None of this means founders should stop publishing. It means the question worth asking has changed. Instead of “how much can we put out this month,” the founders in this piece are asking “what do we know that nobody else can credibly claim, and can we prove it?” That’s a harder brief than filling a content calendar, but it’s the one that’s actually working.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does publishing more content still help you rank in AI-powered search?
Not on its own. Search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews prioritize content that answers a specific question thoroughly and credibly, rather than sites that simply publish at high frequency. Several founders in this article cut their publishing volume and invested in fewer, deeper pieces, and saw both traffic and trust improve as a result.
What is AI search optimization, and how is it different from traditional SEO?
Traditional SEO focuses on ranking a page within a list of search results. AI search optimization (sometimes called AEO or GEO) focuses on getting your content cited or summarized inside an AI-generated answer, where users often never click through to the source at all. That shifts the goal from ranking for keywords to becoming a source the AI trusts enough to reference.
How much content should a startup realistically publish each month now?
There’s no universal number. Quality and specificity matter more than a set cadence. Some founders here publish only a handful of deeply researched pieces a year; others keep a small set of living documents updated weekly. The common thread is that every piece has to justify its own existence.
What makes a piece of content more likely to get cited by an AI answer engine?
Original data, first-hand experience, and a clear, thorough answer to a specific question tend to perform best. Generic explainers that just restate what’s already widely published online give an AI model little reason to prefer one source over another.
Should founders still write their own content, or is it fine to use AI tools?
Several contributors draw a distinction: content meant to be read by people, like social posts, newsletters, and brand voice, benefits from a genuine human perspective, while structured reference content aimed at AI crawlers can be produced more efficiently with AI assistance. The risk is when everything starts to sound the same.
How can a smaller business compete with larger content libraries in AI search results?
By owning a narrow set of questions completely rather than trying to cover everything. A handful of well-researched, experience-backed pages that fully answer the questions your actual customers ask can outperform a much larger library of shallow, general content.
