There’s a trend in some SEO and GEO circles to demonize AI content. Much of that argument is self-serving. It protects an old business model, confuses production with quality, and misses where the value of writing is moving.
AI has made the production of words incredibly cheap, creating an inconvenient commercial problem for anyone whose margin depended on those words being expensive.
That changes the economics of content and raises a more important question: What is content worth when the words themselves are cheap?
How SEO turned content into a business model
When I go online and listen to the SEO industry talk, it’s clear that many agencies weren’t really selling SEO. They were selling advertising.
SEO, in its purest form, was a response to Google monetizing search through paid placements. The commercial logic was obvious: identify the searches businesses were paying Google to appear for, then earn the strongest organic positions for those terms.
Reduce paid-search dependency. Generate demand without paying for every click. Make more money.
That model still makes sense. But over time, SEO went in another direction: content. Create content, get rankings, get traffic, and maybe convert some of those visitors into marketing-qualified leads.
I’m not going to debate the rationale. There are many ways to build an audience or a list, and SEO was often an expensive way to do so. But traffic was a metric that sold retainers.
Content was perfect for the retainer model because it took time to produce. Writers were abundant. Salaries stayed relatively low. Agencies could charge handsomely for production. Clients got a stream of deliverables and a traffic graph. Everyone was happy.
Then AI made the production of words incredibly cheap. And that creates an inconvenient commercial problem for anyone whose margin depended on those words being expensive. Some of the hatred of AI content starts there.
Dig deeper: From content creation to content orchestration: How agentic AI changes the role of content strategists
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Was the AI content boom worth it?
We’ve all seen the AI content mountain. SEOs and AI writing tools posted case studies showing enormous traffic growth from publishing thousands of pages. Then some of those sites lost the traffic just as spectacularly.
On a graph, it looked like Mount AI Slop. The industry response was predictable. “See. We told you not to do it.” Then came the recovery audits.
But there’s a question that rarely gets asked: Was it worth it?
If a company generated millions of visits while content production costs collapsed, the answer can’t be decided by staring at the final downward line on a chart. You would need to know what the content cost, what it generated and whether the economics worked.
That’s marketing. Inputs. Outputs. Return. Moral panic about who typed the sentences doesn’t answer those questions. Yes, the AI content kings shouted at the top of their lungs at the peak and went silent on the way down.
That doesn’t mean the content wasn’t worth creating with AI. The risk of a penalty might have paid off. We won’t know whether it worked.
And that’s the thing about content: For all the arguments about how it’s created, people rarely stop to talk about what content is supposed to do and whether it achieved the goal.
Dig deeper: AI made content a commodity, but you can harness expertise to stand out
Content is a weak force
We need to be realistic about what content does. SEOs who advocate a content-first strategy are, in part, in the advertising business. Content exposes people to information intended to influence what they know, think, or do.
Like advertising, it’s usually a weak force. How many people read one article, leap out of their chair and shout, “I must buy that software immediately”? Not many.
People are busy. They have children, jobs, bills, football teams, and a washing machine making a noise it definitely wasn’t making last Tuesday. They aren’t walking around desperate to consume your 2,000-word “ultimate guide.”
Howard Gossage’s old line still works: People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.
Most SEO content failed that test long before ChatGPT arrived. It was 2,000-plus words of absolute dullness created because a keyword tool said a phrase had 1,300 searches a month.
That doesn’t mean we should stop creating content. Content is cheap. It can create attention, nudge buyers, explain products and give people reasons to choose you.
The question is what’s worth saying and how best to say it.
Human slop vs. AI slop
One of the strangest assumptions in the AI content debate is that human writing is somehow automatically good. It isn’t. I’ve paid thousands for content. I’ve been paid thousands to create it. I’ve also bought and produced content for peanuts.
There’s always been human slop. The $10 article existed long before generative AI. So did the $35, 1,000-word article based on no research, no experience, no original information, and no interesting point of view.
Spend more, and you usually bought more time. More research. More thought. More editing. Better writing.
But AI changes the economics of that process. Research that once took hours can happen much faster. Drafting can happen faster. Rewriting can happen faster. Critiquing can happen faster.
So “I don’t use AI” isn’t automatically a badge of quality. It can also mean: “I’m slower and more expensive.”
And this leads to a real-life story about a friend of mine who has a “Head of” role in a SaaS company. He needed to create content for the brand, and so he needed a writer. What came back was the writer’s day rate and a hefty price tag for the content project.
So he did what anyone fluent in AI can do: He built an AI content process and got content that was “good enough.” Their internal team can now take that content, enhance it and make it special at a far lower cost.
Admittedly, this presents a challenge for writers. But that same challenge will apply to everyone in knowledge work. If you want to use the stamp of “human-written” as part of your work ethic, then you’ll equally face a battle when it comes to pricing.
And the only way you defend that hefty price tag is by bringing something other than just words to the table. What that is, I don’t know, but AI slop isn’t primarily a writing problem.
It’s an absence-of-ideas problem. There’s always been plenty of slop long before AI came.
AI simply makes us question the value and, indeed, the cost of content and the roles of humans in the process.
Dig deeper: Slop antibodies: The link between AI slop, watermarking, and commodity content
Why bother with content creation at all?
AI Overviews and AI Mode are reducing the old certainty that producing a page will result in a click. Search Engine Land reported this year that across a dataset of 64 publisher sites, organic search clicks had fallen by 42% since AI Overviews expanded.
So why bother creating content? Because content is your voice. It’s how your company places information into the world.
You can explain what you believe.
- What your product does.
- What it doesn’t do.
- Why you make something a certain way.
- What ingredients you use.
- What expertise you possess.
- What you’ve learned.
- What you disagree with.
Humans can read it. Search engines can index it. AI systems can encounter it. Journalists can reference it. Customers can share it.
None of that guarantees distribution. If you never say anything, you give the market very little to work with. You’re invisible until you communicate.
And if the objective of content is communication, why should we obsess over whether the first draft came from fingers on a keyboard or a language model?
The writer’s AI dilemma
This is where writers face the real problem. If AI can research and draft increasingly well, what exactly are we paying a writer to do?
The answer isn’t “type.” We’re paying for thinking. Research direction. Experience. Taste. Observation. Argument. Customer understanding. Original information. Editing. Judgment.
We’re paying someone to decide what deserves to exist. That changes the value chain.
In old-school SEO, the keyword often dictated the article. Type it into Google. Look at what ranks. Produce something similar, usually longer. Writers were effectively servicing the keyword.
In a world interested in original, non-commodity information, writers become more valuable upstream.
- What should this brand talk about?
- What does it know that others don’t?
- What does the market misunderstand?
- What can we publish that changes how somebody sees the category?
- What would we create if the company had to spend £10,000 promoting the piece after publication?
Those are better questions than, “How many words should this article be?”
Writing becomes more consultative. The unit of value moves from production to thinking.
Dig deeper: Human experience optimization: Why experience now shapes search visibility
The scarce resource is ideas
There’s another reason writing with AI matters. Writing is hard. Plenty of people have extraordinary experience, expertise, and ideas but struggle to express them in polished prose. Others simply don’t have the time.
For most of history, that was a barrier. AI lowers it.
Someone can speak an idea into a phone and turn it into a coherent article. A busy parent can finally develop the murder mystery that’s been sitting in their head for 10 years. An engineer who writes terribly can explain something brilliant. A business can turn decades of internal expertise into the industry guide it always wanted to publish.
Why would we want fewer of those ideas in the world simply because the person behind them can’t construct elegant sentences unaided?
The scarce resource is no longer words. It’s ideas worth communicating.
That doesn’t mean AI won’t create mountains of crap. Of course it will. But humans already solved that problem centuries ago. We stop reading.
J.K. Rowling, Robert Galbraith, and who gets to decide what is good
And finally, consider J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone began with a tiny Bloomsbury hardback print run of 500 copies, around 300 of which went to libraries and schools.
That little book eventually became one of the biggest publishing phenomena in history, spawning films, merchandise, attractions, and an enormous global franchise.
So Rowling is obviously a great writer. Except publishing is never that simple.
Years later, she submitted The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Publishers rejected it. One even advised “Galbraith” to take a writing course.
When the novel was eventually published under the pseudonym, it received good reviews but modest sales. Contemporary reports put hardback sales at around 1,500 copies.
Then Rowling’s identity was revealed. The book shot to No. 1.
Same book. Same sentences. Same ideas. Different context.
That doesn’t prove quality is meaningless. It proves that quality isn’t some objective substance poured into a manuscript by a human author.
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The value is in the ideas
Readers decide what they value. Distribution matters. Fame matters. Context matters. Ideas matter.
Humans get those calls wrong all the time. Hollywood spends hundreds of millions on films involving talented writers, directors, actors, producers, and executives. Some are still spectacularly bad. No AI required.
Writing with AI matters because machines can reduce the cost of turning thinking into communication. That lets us test more ideas, express expertise faster, and give more people access to the written word.
AI will expose people with no ideas because cheap production makes their emptiness easier to scale. But it will also empower people with exceptional ideas who previously struggled to communicate them.
That’s the trade. The question isn’t whether AI wrote something. It’s whether it was worth writing and reading.
We’re already reading content created with AI every day. The machine can help produce the words. The human still needs to provide a reason for them to exist.
Welcome to the idea economy.