AI Is Only Eating Half of Content Marketing. Don’t Ignore the Other Half.
Stop fighting AI for search traffic you’ll eventually have to pay for. Master the art of "Shaper Content" to define your category and own the answers AI gives your future buyers.
Welcome David, Danny, Ruth, Steve, Sean, Adam and 61 others this week. Next week I’m covering wait list + demand test strategies so hit reply if you have any tips, lessons or questions. I’d like to include them.
The guidance on optimizing for agentic search (AEO, GEO) is dizzying. It’s tactical, anecdotal and often conflicting.
Add an LLMs.txt file.
Actually don’t bother because the platforms ignore it.
Rewrite everything on your blog in Q&A format.
But content on your site doesn’t matter so focus on Reddit.
I came up through SEO in the early 2010s so this is familiar. When the platform is a black box, the community gets one result from one test and extrapolates it into the must-do tactic of the year.
I watched that cycle repeat for a decade and the results got predictable. The brands that won were guided by a clear thesis, making small adjustments as the market evolved. The brands that lost ended up like ClickUp, chasing tactics like scaling its blog to 7,000+ programmatically generated posts then losing 98% of traffic a year later.
Today I’m sharing a general approach to the AI search era and, more importantly, a framework for adapting it to fit your business, using Gong and a few other successful brands as guideposts along the way. So let’s start with how I think about content.
Shaper vs Chaser Content
Somewhere along the way “content marketing” became synonymous with a blog. Write a post for your ICP, sprinkle some keywords for visibility, and post it on yourdomain.com/blog.
AI has killed that.
But content marketing has always been much bigger than that. Don’t forget that Red Bull dropped someone from space as part of a larger content marketing engine.
In the startup world, content marketing also helps us define our emerging categories. We name a problem people feel but haven’t defined, then hand them the vocabulary they’ll use to evaluate every solution (including ours).
AI isn’t changing that.
Think about the content you produce as two types:
Chaser content captures existing demand. It chases the topics and phrases people are already using (”best CRM for startups”) and competes to be the answer. This is what SEO optimized for and what AI now does better than any single source.
Shaper content creates the demand that chasers compete for. It shapes a problem your buyer feels and teaches prospects, search engines and LLMs the language they’ll use to evaluate solutions.
Note: Content does other jobs — converting, retaining, etc. — but we are focusing on content’s go-to-market role in this piece.
AI search doesn’t erode shaper content. It actually amplifies it. The models answering your buyer’s questions in 2028 will be trained on whatever language your category settles on between now and then.
That means the play is the same one it’s always been, with much higher stakes.
The Shaper Content Playbook
1. Diagnose the Job
Do you own the language you’re using or are you renting it?
The answer probably depends on your category’s maturity. Most brands operate in Crowded Waters, where the language settled years ago. They have to compete for and pay to capture existing demand with words some other brand authored.
New categories carry the opposite burden and opportunity: you have to teach your audience the language first, but every term you seed becomes an unfair advantage later. When the category matures, you own the vocabulary and everyone else is bidding on it.
Gong got there after four years of a narrative war in Conversation Intelligence. So Gong ceded the category to its competitor and declared a new one: Revenue Intelligence, a term with zero search volume.
Then they put every ounce of content and budget into establishing it. (More on that later.)
Test it: Pull up your last ten content titles. For each, ask if a competitor could publish it verbatim with their logo on it? Every ‘yes’ is a piece competing for traffic that AI is quickly eroding. As the organic traffic shrinks, that’s traffic you’ll have to pay for in the future. And, arguably, if you have to pay for people to see your content, that’s not content marketing. It’s labor-intensive advertising.
Lesson: A category you don’t guide with language is one you’ll eventually have to pay to participate in. Unique perspectives differentiate, and language is where that starts.
Common misstep: SEO and AEO tools can only see questions that already exist so they will always steer you toward ‘renting’ vs owning the language.
2. Name the Question
The language you shape doesn’t have to be a category name. Moz shaped a metric, HubSpot shaped an “inbound” methodology, and Salesforce shaped an identity. Each of those, regardless of form, installs a question your buyer will be answering.
A category = “Which of these do we need?”
A metric = “What’s our number?”
A methodology = “Are we doing this right?”
In every case, the author of the language is the default source of the answer.
This matters 10x in AI search. A word is something a model can swap for a synonym. A question is something a buyer asks their assistant. When you participate in creating the question, you’re writing the prompts your future buyers will use.
That’s in part why “revenue intelligence” was successful. As Gong exec Udi Ledergor has shared in podcast interviews, “conversation intelligence” was easy for a CRO to delegate, but revenue intelligence had their job title in it. The phrase aligned with a question sales leaders couldn’t ignore: “What’s actually happening in our revenue engine?”
Test it: Write down several questions you want your buyers asking in two years. Then answer each one honestly. If a competitor could give the same answer today, cross it out. Whatever survives is an example of your first shaper content.
Lesson: Identify the key (future) questions before you pick the words to answer them. Gong, Moz, and HubSpot each own different kinds of language, but all three own the question underneath it.
3. Amplify Until They Say It Back
New language becomes a category standard when people with no incentive to help you start repeating it. That usage is what influences the human buyer and the LLM model. Competitor pages, analyst reports, podcast transcripts, Reddit threads… that’s the material AI answers are built from, and you want them written in your language.
But that doesn’t mean “build it and they will come.”
Gong didn’t hit publish on its “revenue intelligence” press release and wait for the market to adopt it. They treated it like a product launch then kept pushing it.
HubSpot relied on similar repetition. “Inbound marketing” is a conference, a certification, an academy and a book, all amplifying the same two words until the market adopted it.
One mention is a data point. Hundreds of consistent mentions across channels and sources you’ve seeded is a definition that people and LLMs can’t ignore.
Test it: Ask a popular AI chatbot “what is [your category term]?” and look at whose framing comes back. If it answers in a competitor’s words, or generic ones, you can see one of the amplification gaps to fill.
Lesson: The SEO era measured traffic. The agentic era measures influence: how often the answer comes back in your words.
Common misstep: Don’t lock your language so tightly with trademarks and branding that nobody else can use it. The point is broad adoption, which means language bigger than you, your product and your company.
Which Half Are You Holding?
AI is eating a lot of what we used to view as content marketing. That’s the bad news.
But if you’re building in an emerging category, your opportunity is the half that AI can’t erode. In fact, you win when AI learns from it. That’s the good news.
AI can synthesize 20 answers to a known question. It can’t name a question nobody has asked.
Whether that question is a category name, a metric, or a method, the naming job can still be yours. Every piece of shaper content you publish and amplify becomes the material that others (humans + bots) use when the category matures.
“How will AI cite our page?” ❌
“How will AI say it back in our words?” ✅
The first is a chaser question, and the organic version of that is going away. The second is a shaper question, and in your category, right now, it is wide open.
What are your challenges right now?
Hit reply to share the things you’re wrestling with in growth and marketing. If you’re stuck on something, I can probably share a lesson from someone who recently got unstuck from it.
The one thing I’d ask:
If the playbook today was helpful, send it to one person or team that it could also help. That’s who built this community, and that’s who belongs in it!