THE SITUATION

2023 is the breakout year for generative AI, which is creating a content tsunami, but many believe that more human, value-driven content will stiLL win in the long run. Yet, there is no denying the rapid adoption of generative AI to create SEO content as well as the bigger questions we now confront —  Should brands embrace generative AI content for SEO gains? Can Google differentiate if everyone has authority? What does this mean for brands?

Generative AI will make everyone an authority.

Generative AI tools have been unleashed, and they have given SEO professionals and digital publishers the fever to create content faster, better, and smarter. Interestingly, all the AI tools compete with Google for information and content (and they generate both), and Google has answered with a generative AI tool of its own via the Bard experiment. Those of us who have tried these tools do feel a bit better, faster, and smarter, but can everyone really be an authority on anything? How did we get here?

Google is partly to blame.

Google’s success has been pinned on an algorithm that endeavors to identify content relevant to the query, and Google adapts and re-adapts the equation to be better, faster, and smarter, especially considering the capacity required to answer over 8.5 billion queries a day, and also considering how high the stakes are  — it is estimated that Google generated over $224 billion in ad revenue alone during 2022, and the revenue seems to trend up every year.

So, the ability to arbitrate content matters to Google in both search and advertising, and these objectives hinge on evaluating content. Google has developed a search bot that sniffs out and indexes content to prioritize content in search results and ad serves. As a result of these requirements, Google has placed enormous importance on content.

Enter generative AI, and things get exponential — AI will generate so much content that anyone can rapidly become an authority on any subject, from Google’s perspective. Brands will have to work much harder to be special in this new ocean of endless chatter, so what does all the sound and fury signify for brand value?

Ultimately, nothing.

With SEO driving content, and AI driving SEO, things get vapid fast. Let’s face it, there’s only so much to be said about sunscreen or vegan cheese. However, when stealthy SEO tactics tie these two topics to a bigger topic, say climate change, on a website, that site will benefit from new traffic, but that website may also invite an ocean of polarized opinions — and all of it has to be managed or the brand will be in jeopardy.

Publishers will also be under more pressure than ever to generate more content —taxing resources, devaluing topics, numbing the audience, and signifying a big brand nothing. Building genuine content authority while retaining a brand requires more expertise, finesse, and agility than SEO tactics can provide, but ultimately, brands have no real power to solve the problem of soooooo much artificially generated competition by following current SEO best practices and Google’s current rules.

“EAT”ing the false promise of Generative AI

Google publishes rules to help publishers communicate better with the bot. SEO pros adopt tactics to follow and to exploit these rules. One set of rules and requirements specifically offered by Google to help publishers achieve topical authority is Google’s EAT requirements.

The short version of how to achieve EAT: write several structured pieces of content about a single topic, driven by search data, and voila! Your site is an authority on said topic and a SERPs winner — until another publisher generates more content on the same topic. Fierce competition and fast AI content generation result in redundancy and dilution. This content tsunami is the false promise of generative AI. What is worse, as of now, much of what gets published does not even have to be read by a human to be rewarded by the bot.

The deal is dubious but some make it work, and, clever as Google may become at differentiating all this content, the resulting publishers’ AI-fashioned outputs are often a regrettable aggregation of the pedantic — without a digital détente, brand value will be collateral damage.

So what’s a brand to do? Follow the advice of some SEO gurus, and your brand will be throwing up a lot of new content just to see what sticks. Some SEO experts even recommend publishing a lot of content that isn’t related to the brand at all — continuing the experiment indefinitely. In essence, they make failing part of learning. The ugly truth: generative AI and SEO is an unholy marriage, and it is getting results.

Should we fail faster?

Building brand awareness does require things to speed up a bit. Brands cannot afford to sideline new ideas in an approval queue. The onus is on brands to move at the speed of culture and technology. At Elf Cosmetics, keeping ahead of culture is the priority, and their mantra is “fail faster”.

For Google the problem of generative AI is different. It is existential, and it could be expensive for Google to fix. So if we fail faster and add on to the generative AI pile, even if we can resuscitate brand value in some parallel, outbound efforts, the problem remains: once everything is published, everywhere, all at once, how will Google, or anyone, be able to sort it all out? As the power shifts to the generative AI publishers — will Google respond?

Yes, Google will retaliate.

It is safe to say that Google will fight to remain the ultimate arbiter of relevance — Google has a trillion-dollar business to defend! It’s hard to say exactly how and when, but safe to say that Google always wins. Based on past bot updates answering past challenges for Google, we can speculate that a future update will exploit some matrix of social proof, authorship, attribution, and ‘quality’ over content authority. Unfortunately, brands get sidelined if they can’t adapt as quickly as Google can — SEO problems and Google problems are really brand problems.

So, how do we solve the problem of proliferation?

As a brand, you don’t exist if Google can’t see you, so you may be considering one of two rough roads at this juncture — follow the crowd, or wait for this to pass. There is another option — a rational, measured approach to building better visibility.

Google has always, and more consistently, valued quality inbound links. Shifting emphasis away from content and toward links in a future update is also a very logical option for Google’s inevitable retaliation. For brands, building links can be time-consuming and costly, but there are resources that can help. In link building, we see incredible potential in a new, unconventional approach that can burnish authenticity, illuminate value, generate visibility, and prevail in the long run.

Enter PR as a brand-building and link-building strategy, but with a twist.  PR has the potential to overcome the authority problem if infused with brand strategy and data. This combination results in good old link-building, but with more merit, and it’s good old PR but far more strategic. This value-added PR fosters a genuine output, and we see it as a better way forward out of this digital dystopia.

Conventional, outsourced link-building, like AI, suffers from a lack of humanity. PR is about relationships, particularly relationships with robust media websites. Those properties will tend to be in good standing with Google, so Google will value the links your brand gets from them. From our point of view, it is easy to see the ROI of this approach over seeding thousands of urls from any site that will cooperate, because when it comes to inbound links, quality matters — quantity is secondary. To achieve better visibility through PR, we just need to keep calm, carry on, and cross-pollinate disciplines.

Cross-pollinate your PR.

PR can rise above the noise when it is the output of a strong brand. The key requirement is a strong brand narrative — a narrative designed around a deep understanding of the audience’s asks, as well as an authentic voice to answer. The audience is always telling us what they want — we can see that in the data. When a strong brand is aligned to the asks, tactics can launch off a solid foundation and become significantly more effective.

This approach to solve the authority problem also requires that we cross-pollinate additional disciplines that don’t often meet, but can be aligned. Achieving the intersection of brand, data, topic, SEO and PR will generate genuine value, awareness, and optimization.

This new PR redefines news.

Solving the authority problem with PR can run up against the internal problem of organizational culture. The conventional PR process is to wait for news to happen, develop/deploy PR content, and wait for recognition. This can produce lackluster results, so the conventional PR effort often suffers from entropy — the enthusiasm fades, and resources get reallocated — all while the competition mounts.

At C&C Branding we realize that this new approach to PR is unconventional, but we also recognize that it has tremendous potential, and it pivots on new organizational thinking about what news is.

To identify news that delivers ROI, we need to measure what the world wants to know. Data helps us find the most opportune, brand-aligned gaps between the ask and the answer, as well as the gap between demand and supply. There is fertile news to be planted in those gaps.

Unfortunately, news is not often inspired by what the audience wants to know, so brands are missing out. This is a significant opportunity cost because there are massive, new veins of untapped traffic, generated by human curiosity, emerging all the time. Brands may be afraid of losing control of their narrative to the wild internet but genuine authority leadership can tame the noise to serve the brand. When we listen to the audience we find that it is much more powerful to join the conversation than it is to start the conversation.

We set out to add value to the conversation by combining the brand’s narrative, actionable data insights, and timely, brand-aligned topics to create a trifecta of value. We then map this strategy to audiences. By creating high-quality content at all of those intersections, the brand will be burnished, the right links will come, Google will reward you, and the reward will be based on merit. Plus, if used rationally, generative AI can help create efficiencies in these outputs without the downside. At C&C, we project that this optimal combination of strategy, data, technology and tactics is going to be rewarding for brands in the long run.

So take heart, the machines have not won, yet.

Raise your brand into the hearts and minds of your audience by embracing our unique approach. Technology and culture will change, but your brand can both adapt and stay human.

Let C&C activate your brand for the win — contact us today.