If it’s a human-free zone, Digital Marketing 2.0 just won’t work

For years, digital marketers focused on Google search results. Success was measured through rankings, impressions, clicks, and website traffic.

But the rise of AI-powered answer engines is changing how everyone finds information, evaluates solutions, and makes purchasing decisions. That’s as true for corporate decision-makers looking at significant investment as it is for you and me looking for a new recipe.

Instead of clicking through to websites, users are increasingly receiving direct answers from AI systems. The result is a growing decline in traditional search click-through traffic—even when brands continue to rank highly in search results.

When someone asks an AI assistant a question, they don't receive a page of links, but a general summary, with an answer often generated without requiring the user to visit any website at all (though links may be presented for reference): or not search, but answer engine optimisation (AEO).

This phenomenon is creating what many marketers are now calling "zero-click search,” where AI overviews and snippets resolve queries with no need to interact with brands at all.

A lot of B2B companies have struggled with what to do about this—we have had conversations with companies where website traffic has fallen off a cliff. In this new age, is there any purpose at all in creating content?

A move to authority

The usual answer to this is an acceptance that your content needs to be not a high-ranking Google Search answer (or sponsored result), but a trusted source for these Answer Engines. Instead of asking, "How do I rank first?” The mission now should be,” How do I become a trusted source that AI systems reference and synthesise?”

Which is the right answer… but misses out a fateful step: how does that trusted source content get created?

What is troubling is that a lot of players think, “By ChatGPT.” Which really isn’t an answer that’s going to help you at all. In April, brand visibility management platform Semrush noted that using AI for content production has become standard practice, but that the question most SEO teams need to be asking is how well it works.

To find out, it analysed 20,000 keyword results and 42,000 blog posts—and found that of those 42,000 pages, position 1 results are 8x more likely to be human-written.

It also found that content classified as 100% AI-generated appeared in the top spot just 9% of the time. A separate analysis from global professional editing and proofreading agency Proofed concluded that “AI can simulate the language, but it can’t provide true experience or the specific, credible details that distinguish a real subject-matter expert from an AI model”—and that, “With SEO content, this authenticity gap can be particularly costly.”

They’re far from the only commentators sounding this alarm bell. In late 2024, IT industry analyst group Gartner was happy to agree that GenAI-produced content will be a big part of the digital marketing mix (“traditional search engine volume will drop 25%, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents”)—but in the very same study warned that, “Companies will need to focus on producing unique content that is useful to customers and prospective customers”—and that to work, your content has to continue to demonstrate “search quality-rater elements such as expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness”.

The analyst group returned to the problem earlier this year, predicting that the real winners out of AEO will be, perhaps surprisingly, those long-battered members of the marketing chain, the trade and other press: “By 2027, mass adoption of public LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will drive a 2x increase in PR and earned media budgets” as “AI search engines favour citing earned, shared, and organic owned content over paid”. 

A beautiful, but lifeless, desert?

You may or may not agree—but surely the implication is that generic, vanilla words you can get by the metre from GenAI to populate your websites or comms payload is unlikely to get picked up by AEO engines. Why? It’s always letter perfect and convincing, no?

It is—but it isn’t what you have to say about the problem, it's what everyone else is saying about it. Sarah Lafferty is director and co-founder of a hi-tech PR agency called Round Earth Consulting. She told us, "The breakneck pace of AI development, misinformation, and budget pressures all conspire to make some B2B tech companies draw the flawed conclusion that commissioning professional marketing content is no longer necessary. 

“In fact, the opposite is true. AI summaries, like search before them, draw upon and give priority to content that provides authentic expert insights and anecdotes, appears on authoritative sites, is widely read, shared, and commented on by humans. Five minutes spent on LinkedIn reveals the extent to which B2B buyers are increasingly railing against generated content. Empty, cliched prose is at best ignored and at worst, dangerously erodes brand trust. And while fewer people are starting with search, most AI summaries now list sources, so buyers will often click through to articles and online content to check provenance, quality and veracity.”

It may be that you have already been persuaded that GenAI can generate the kind of content you need, and that there is no need for use of third party experts or internal content creation people anymore. As lovers of technology, we agree that soon we may well indeed have AI that will help make the creation of that kind of content more than the very basic stuff you get from a free chatbot. 

Paul Briggs is Managing Director of a B2B content company called Media Mantra. He says, “While AI often gets criticised for job losses and high energy use, it has powerful positive applications. In digital marketing, AI now enables fast, personalised content creation for different buyer personas and sectors—analysing real-time trends and turning existing materials into relevant pieces, with human oversight for authenticity. 

“As a former journalist, I see AI like Iron Man’s Jarvis and armour: incredibly capable technology that still needs a human (Tony Stark) for direction and soul. Done right, it’s a genuine gamechanger.”

Which end of the centaur do you want to be?

Sure. But we’re not there yet.

We contend that there is still absolutely a place for human-driven, even if AI-enabled or supported, business content creation that is based on YOUR products, YOUR unique views on the market, and YOUR credibility.

We would also point out that you use content in the first place to engage customer interest in a very, very noisy global market now. If you use Ai thoughtlessly to generate material that answers a buyer's question but gives them no need to enter the digital sales funnel with you, then what have you done? Provided a public service and answered a query that can never lead to a meeting with a qualified lead?

That's a question you must ask yourself. But times are tight and not getting any less so. Activity that just feeds an AI and stops there is not useful to you. Creating the inputs for that AI that has no flavour of what you do as opposed to everyone else is similarly pointless.

Credibility is getting more important, not less so, in the new digital marketing. Letting someone else be the face of that is commercial suicide.

That—or you try and hope everyone starts using DuckDuckGo instead when they are researching a new product or project.

Let’s give you the content that leads not to a superficial AEO paragraph, but actual conversations and so, conversions—and you need to create, own, and nourish the EEAT, the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness metrics that AEO lives on.

Believe you me: Sam Altman isn’t going to do that for you.

And certainly not for free.