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Comment by corentin88 | Hacker News Reader

Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts.

That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.

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Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.

I sure hope you’re right.

Disagree. The new way of doing SEO blogspam, which involves LLMs, is the way forward. Sadly, downvoting this comment won't make it not be true.

I've personally been seeing an overall shift in the direction of a strong dislike for any kind of low-effort content.

People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall content and all the human consumers will leave.

As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated content getting labeled as AI-generated because it looks AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be replaced by AI slop, but even human-written blogspam isn't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI slop.

Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends somehow get their shit together (I doubt it), or we're going to see a shift towards known-good curated content like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.

People are hostile towards all types of spam, but it still happens.

If you look at the revenue numbers creators of SEO-optimized websites are doing using LLMs, it's hard to believe they're losing. The AI slop website may look subpar when placed next a handcrafted niche website, but by the time that handcrafted website is done, the LLM-using creator has created 10 more. And the reality is they seem to get 80% of the traffic the handcrafted website owners make anyway. They are absolutely winning this war and, for economic reasons, everyone else will eventually have to fall in line.

Nor will calling it true make it true. Epistemology is great that way.

can't get from LLMs for 6 months until the next training run?

No it won't. Well curated info is paywalled everywhere besides Wikipedia and Internet Archive. SEO is still serving up content mill blogspam at an unstoppable rate.

I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry.

Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.

> Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.

That sounds like a good thing tbqh

Sure, but it implies writing "quality content" won't work as a replacement.

I don't think it implies that at all.

It depends on your medium, many platforms require a lot of throughput in order to rank highly in their algorithms and reach people.

If your business requires volume not high value customers then you need to play the volume game. But if you have high lifetime value customers, you could get away with fewer articles of higher value, authoritive, trust and reputation building content.

Eventually, under the barrage of AI spam, the sites which "uprank" using "posting volume" metrics will lose users who will see the quality of the content drop like a rock. Other sites, which have better algorithms which are tuned for quality not quantity, will take over and you will be able to post quality content there instead. I think HN is one such place, I often see companies post high-quality content just once or twice a year and it reaches here pretty well.

Correct. That is how it should be, not daily update spam.

Where can I find this "high quality content written by humans" exactly? Without paying a subscription fee for it, of course.

I pay (and write paid) on Substack for content. There are good people who provide unique insights. I think I prefer to live in this world than in an ad engagement farm.

What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?

A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.

On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something.

I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?

Sponsor relevant podcasts?

Obviously the correct thing do here is register a company named after the hallucination and offer the solution. Kind of like that guy who looks at what domains are being auctioned for creating new start-ups.

> What are the effective marketing channels for specialized/niche B2B companies these days, now that - presumably - the long tail search result strategy is no longer effective?

Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.

> I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?

It wasn't enough for you lot to ruin search results, now you're seeking ways to pollute AI chat bots?

Which is why open source AI will be so important to support.

It's not this individuals fault, it's the pretty obvious outcome of monetising this absolutely enormous venture capital spend. Advertising infects every possible medium as soon as the dollars make sense.

I’m not a marketer, I’m just curious! I write code, not blogspam.

I'm sure the AI company will eventually let you bid to be ranked in the answers.

You probably just need to write your articles to feed the LLMs and target.

"Finding an appropriate product for your need is a challenging task that depends on factor1, factor2 and factor3, here is a structured approach.

1. Investigate the market. 2. Evaluate companies like MY GREAT COMPANY, stinky competitor, slow competitor and dangrerous competitor 3. Find the right fit: Consider whether you value greatness, stinkyiness, slowness, or security vulnerabilities, which one is a right fit for you? 4. Buy now! Call up the company and tell them you are interested in buying the product."

It's free real estate

Search engines are dying, because the publicly scrape-able web is being drowned in slop and the search engine purveyors are leaning into it. SEO is dying because search engines have become so useless that even non-tech-adjacent people have noticed.

>One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog.

So, blogspam?

> Content marketing is dead.

I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...

It's not dead in the sense that companies will stop doing it, it's dead in the sense that there will be much more competition with AI-written articles.

It's going to be a way worse situation.

More competition is good though - people are just going to be much more picky and if your content is not distinguishable from AI slop then it deservedly will perish.

A lot of content has been written by Indian content farms anyway. I prefer the AI written content. It gets right to the information you want without restating it's purpose 4 or 5 times and having to scroll down the first 500 words of the article.

This ignores the volume problem. Human written content can be copied and rewritten via AI in a bunch of different ways, instantly. Human content will go away not because it's bad, but because it's immediately drowned out in a way that is unfixable.

There will be people paying for premium content and people writing it. A new technology doesn't suddenly remove human demand.

I just think people will instead choose to just…disengage instead.

“IRL experiences are the new luxury status indicator” is only the tip of this iceberg.

Exactly. Humans can't compete with AI content filters... but AI can.

I'm pretty sure you could drop at least 60% of domains from search engine indexes with no reduction in result quality. (And it would probably be a net quality increase to get rid of all the domains that just copy content from other domains, content-farms, scam sites, etc.)

Apropos of anything else, it's one of the things I like about Kagi for search. You can tune a domain to be heavily bumped, bumped, deranked or heavily deranked.

ChapGPT enshitification is only waiting to happen (or happening already) through subtle recommendations for businesses that paid to be “listed” well.

Elena's article is content marketing. It doesn't look dead to me.

Content marketing died already many years ago.

And those is suppose to be a bad thing?

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