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In AI search, content still matters because it can influence the answers AI systems generate even when fewer users click through.
Why create content anymore? AI is just gonna train on that data and then give the answer directly to the user without sending anyone to my website.
I get this question all the time. In fact, I recently had Claude analyze all my TikTok comments, and this was the question that came up most often.
And it's true. Fewer people are visiting websites because more people are getting their answers from ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews. But the truth is, website visits was never the goal.
And right now, you might be thinking, TJ, what are you talking about? Of course that's the goal. But hear me out.
I think we've been trained to think that clicks was always the goal. But that's just because in the old economy, that was the primary way that you got influence.
The truth is, influence is all you ever really cared about. If you're selling a product or a service, the goal is to influence them to buy that product or service. You're running ads or affiliate sales on your website.
You're selling that influence to another company.
The truth is, if you're not trying to influence people to change their mind, you wouldn't be creating content in the first place. So the real question is, does AI make it harder to influence people with your content? I would say unequivocally, AI makes it way easier.
But AI is gonna train on my data, and then it's just gonna summarize my answer. Great. You get to influence the most powerful technology in human history.
But people aren't using search engines anymore. No one's gonna find my content just going straight to the AI. Well, guess what.
For most queries, the AI is then going and using that same search engine. Search engines are never going away. They're just being used by the AI, and humans are going up one level.
Should still be creating content to be found in search engines. It's just that now you're trying to be found by AI using the search engine. And that actually makes it way easier, because AI does way more searches and looks through way more content.
Where humans might look through a couple results, AI will look through hundreds.
So ranking in that result set is now the easy part. The hard part, or at least what should be the hard part, is creating content that's relevant to what the AI is searching for. The reason that part's also still easy is that very few people are actually tracking what the AI is searching for.
Use a tool called Peak Dot AI for our clients. But if you do this, if you actually look at what pages the AI is citing, it's never been easier to influence search results.
So I say let the AI eat your content. We've entered a new golden age of content creation.
In AI search, content still matters because it can influence the answers AI systems generate even when fewer users click through.
Create content that AI systems can find, cite, and use to answer buyer questions instead of measuring content value only by direct website visits.
This source is connected to AI Content Strategy.
AI is gonna train on my data, and then it's just gonna summarize my answer. Great. You get to influence the most powerful technology in human history.