Quality beats quantity when marketing to humans
The media landscape is ever more fragmented and content more copious. Generative AI has been a mixed blessing in this regard, with a proportion of marketers and publishers using the power of LLMs to spin out more and more stuff.
The rationale is that semantic search is now good enough to work through all your web content, understand it, then slice and dice it for the searcher (see GEO). If you are a retailer, why present a neat list of product features when you could just as quickly generate a rich but uncanny 500-word yarn about provenance and craftsmanship? The more pertinent question is, what does the user want from your page? Likely it’s authority, concision and performance, not flannel and bloat.
Social media, too, feels bloated. Brands have traditionally shown up with a sales message on every platform. Too many marketers have been occupied by ‘posting’ rather than understanding communities.
But the smartest have realised that quality beats quantity. Shouting loudest and most often is not a sustainable way to break through the noise with owned content.
‘Attention at all costs’ is no match for true authority over the subject matter.
So what does that actually look like?
Create what AI can’t
Building the profiles of trusted, internal experts can help cut through across content and social. As can sharing primary data and insights for which AI can only cite your brand.
Aim for topic authority
The long tail of conversational search rewards content that answers real user questions.
Google’s query fan-out technique works by “breaking down your question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously on your behalf”. The task then, for marketers, is to build topical authority by understanding the types of questions users are asking. Content must be well-structured and directly answer these questions if brands are to earn citations. But, as per Google’s helpful content guidelines, marketers must ‘avoid creating search engine-first content’. The search giant offers some useful questions for self-reflection, but the long and short of it amounts to whether marketers see rankings and traffic as their chief motivation, rather than creating expert content that meets the needs of in-market customers.
Marketers in some cases have to find a balance between filling their sites with copy they think LLMs will neatly parcel up, or judiciously using schema markup to point the crawlers in the right direction.
As social becomes more search-driven, too, the focus is on delivering for your core audience. Meta now allows users to shape their Reels feed by adding or removing topics (‘Your Algorithm’). Your content “needs to make it obvious where it fits,” says CTI Head of Social Eimile Kerrigan. “Trying to be everything for everyone has never worked brilliantly, but now it actively works against you.”
Have clear roles for each platform
Presence only matters if it adds value. Be where your customers are, but only if they want you to be. And only if you have the resources to turn up in a way that best represents your brand.
Redefine what reach looks like
Views and clicks mean nothing unless they are qualified. Reaching millions of users is useless if these people are not currently, or ever will be, in the market for your product.
This is an excerpt from CTI Digital's report, 2026 Trends: Marketing in the Age of AI.
Content marketing manager at CTI, Ben is a writer and editor with 15 years experience in the marketing industry.