AEO: Is content marketing obsolete?
The content conveyor belt that powered fifteen years of marketing is over.
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The content conveyor belt that powered fifteen years of marketing is over. Most companies are treating this like a minor algorithm update. It is not.
For years, creating SEO content was a reliable, straightforward process: write useful content, search engines index it, people find you in search results, and a small but predictable percentage of them click a CTA to convert. For some sites, the content wasn’t perfectly aligned with the buyer journey, but the math worked well enough that companies “invested” in SEO by writing content. Faster SEO growth was achieved by publishing more content.
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Some tried to shortcut this with programmatic SEO, but the intent was still the same: content = traffic, which led to conversions.
Everything has changed
Marketing has changed, but many agencies and marketing teams are refusing to acknowledge it. Instead, they are treating a structural collapse as if it were a minor algorithm update. AEO is being framed as a modification of search that just needs different content. To ensure that agencies can monetize this change without just selling content under a new SKU, they are also recommending additional “AEO best practices” FAQ sections, citations, and punchy answers ideal for LLMs. At its core, the AEO motion is just more content.
This approach is wrong, and content marketing will never be the same. LLMs are a structural argument against the way content marketing has functioned for the last fifteen years, because the engine is now a content platform itself. Up until the introduction of ChatGPT in Bing and then AI Overviews, search engines were just directories.
Answers to queries came from one of the ten results presented on a results page. Those results belonged to companies, creators, and publishers who had invested in building something worthwhile to be found. This created a symbiotic economy centered on destination websites. Content was the bait, traffic was the currency, and the website was the place where that currency was spent.
In that traditional model, the “click” was the fundamental unit of value and the most ideal leading SEO metric because even when a user didn’t buy anything on their first visit, the website could collect their pixel data, their cookie, and perhaps their email address, which could lead to a downstream conversion.
Search visibility does not guarantee a click
Now the argument for even having a website, let alone content, is tenuous. Users get answers to their queries immediately on typing a question in the search without needing to click anything. There might be a few citations in the results or on the sidebar, but the AI response wouldn’t be a good one if you had to click to learn more. This is why the loss in search clicks is not made up for by just being shown in an AI Overview.
The conversation either continues within the AI’s window or the user gets what they need and leaves. A website, regardless of how much effort you spent on keyword targeting, internal linking, and “high-quality” content, effectively ceases to exist in that interaction. The LLM response is the pillar page that content marketing teams and agencies love to sell.
The industry’s response to this has been a masterclass in cognitive dissonance. Content marketers built entire careers producing exactly the kind of structured data that AI is best at summarizing without providing any attribution or referral traffic. The current “AEO consulting” advice is essentially: keep doing exactly what you were doing, but make it easier for the machines to extract.
Does LLM visibility matter?
The wisdom of the social media crowds is telling you to optimize to be a “source,” even if that means no one ever actually visits your site. This ignores the basic economic reality of business. You did not write content so that an LLM could summarize your hard work for free to keep a user on someone else’s platform. You wrote it to drive engagement, lead generation, and revenue. When the mechanism breaks, the whole chain collapses.
Many companies right now are watching content budgets produce visibility that generates no sessions, or sessions that generate no leads, because the buyer got their question answered by the AI before they ever hit a landing page. No amount of structured data or schema markup makes a broken business model structurally sound again.
When I consulted for Tinder, they had never built product pages for their various paid subscription plans. Existing users who wanted to understand the packages had to leave the site entirely. Those third-party sites then sold that same traffic back to Tinder as affiliates or redirected users straight to a competitor. Tinder was funding its own competition by exploiting a content gap that never appeared in an SEO dashboard. This is the kind of problem content marketing should have always been solving.
For years, I have claimed that much of the content on company blogs today has no value because it was produced purely to capture search traffic. These articles were written for keyword volume, not for a human who actually needed to understand the topic. They were a means to an end.
So, should content marketing exist?
Yes. But the product explanation problem is now every company’s problem. Not for Google, or so an LLM can summarize it and keep a user on someone else’s platform. Explanatory content is for people already on your website who are trying to figure out whether your product solves their problem. Solving user problems should have always been the motivation, but there were misaligned incentives: SEO teams and agencies were rewarded for traffic rather than conversions.
Visualize the journey that follows when someone sees your brand mentioned in an AI response. The user land on your site with a specific need already in their head, and if your content doesn’t answer it, they leave. They aren’t clicking back to a search results page, but back to the AI with another prompt that might surface your competitor instead.
LLMs own discovery now, but they cannot sell. AI Mode and Overviews cannot walk a skeptical buyer through their specific anxiety about switching vendors. (ChatGPT and Gemini can, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.) It cannot explain why your pricing model works the way it does or show the emotional reasons your products are the best fit. That job still belongs to you, and the only place you can do it is your website.
The content that matters now is written for someone who already knows you exist. Actual product education that assumes the reader is a real person with a real problem who will go somewhere else the moment you waste their time. These are not keyword-optimized blog posts or AI-formatted slop for easier machine extraction.
So yes, content marketing is still necessary, but the KPI is not search rankings or clicks. It’s sales and user experiences. Your user is the one who buys, not the search engine.
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