What Your Business Knows That AI Doesn’t: Avoiding the Commodity Content Trap

A phrase that has popped up in digital marketing recently is non-commodity content. What the hell’s that, you may be wondering. We explore the idea of commodity in content, inform you about the potential trap that awaits for AI generated content and show how your understanding of your business can make you stand out in a rapidly evolving marketing landscape.

If you spend any time on LinkedIn, you’ll be painfully aware of how many AI search “experts” have popped up with “I’ve sacked off my SEO / digital marketing agency and Claude does all my digital content now,” spiels, or “Here’s the ultimate prompt to get ChatGPT to lay the Golden Egg for your business” … and so on.

The problem is that after years of, what I now feel to be, surreptitious copyright theft by Google and the other LLM creators; AI and LLM usage has commoditised generic informational content. On a recent webinar I watched, Liv Day, of Digitaloft, argues that AI tools can pretty much churn out “half decent” generic content on almost any topic. This is its own problem, as it produces what she calls “consensus content”. Crudely put, it’s a mean average of content that already exists online rather than anything genuinely new. Here – information gain is zero!

Despite the many problems with AI (not least, its horrendous, environmentally clueless datacentres) it is unlikely to disappear from our lives in the near term. I do use it every day for research, clarifying ideas, structuring articles and processing large chunks of data. I don’t use it for churning out endless streams of articles and I don’t encourage clients to either.

Where brands opted to capitalise on AI models’ ability to churn out content for multiple long tail keyword¹ combinations, they were often successful for a while… until search algorithms began picking up on the click data. And the uncanny similarities between the formulaic articles soon became apparent to Google’s own AI overlords!

Websites that seemed to be riding high soon started crashing and losing rankings – in some cases becoming de-indexed completely. Notably, Reach PLC began to increase its publishing rate by adding an AI component, the “Guten tool”², to their journalistic output (they publish The Mirror, Express, Daily Star and a host of regional titles).

Massive volumes of low effort, trending and long tail topics started appearing in their titles. For a while it captured lots of low-funnel³, fairly high intent visitor traffic. Visitors who were so unimpressed by what they found… that they rapidly clicked away. Part of their traffic loss was due to the other side of AI search tech. That is AI Overviews stealing the traffic from the original website by putting the content into answers on the search results pages, but slop content also had a big part to play.

Further afield “Freshers Live dot com” and “Old Time Music dot com” played the AI content scale up game and rose to multiple millions of visits per month only for Google’s March 2024 Scaled Content Abuse policy to kick in. Within days – both sites were completely de-indexed. Visitor traffic and revenue simply vanished.

Ian Nuttall, an SEO researcher ran a check on what happened after that update. He announced his results a few days after the policy kicked in and for websites that had churned out Commodity Content Crap, the results were pretty brutal.

It was only 1.7% of the websites he monitored that got a kicking, but that small percentage represented more than 20 million monthly clicks and something in the region of £350k in lost advertising revenue for those website owners. This and further studies were highlighted in a Search Engine Journal article a few days later. 

These were big websites, but the impacts can easily be felt by small businesses if they try to short cut the content production process without adequate human, real-person oversight and editing to your brand’s genuine voice.

Back in 2022, Google’s Helpful Content Update raised the bar for content quality, as AI slop was already making inroads into search results. Further updates have gradually pushed search and AI systems into surfacing original, HELPFUL content that adds to the sum of knowledge in an industry. Liv Day’s point is that if content adds no new value, there is less reason for Google, ChatGPT or other recommendation systems to surface it.

“Non-commodity content” is the next step in the evolving model of Helpful Content. Ellie Wraith (Liv’s colleague) notes that Google guidance now explicitly encourages unique, original, expert-level material that goes beyond common baseline knowledge.

The old quality baseline has risen. Ellie Wraith says well-written, accurate content used to be the target standard, but AI has made that the minimum baseline rather than a differentiator.

Information gain is the new competitive advantage; the aim has become:

• adding new knowledge to your industry,
• lived examples of the work you do,
• personal experience that highlights problems and solutions,
• proprietary insights that come from your own experience in your field or
• expert interpretation of industry data that competitors cannot simply copy.

Uncopiable content performs because people notice it. It is based on YOUR expertise in YOUR industry. Liv Day explains that when Digitaloft publishes a client’s insider knowledge that nobody else is discussing, it tends to gain attention and visitor traffic, it encourages wider sharing and can open up significant digital PR opportunities.

I’m not being rude… honest! Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust are the components that we digital marketers recognise as critical in building a trusted brand online. That “Trust” part is under massive pressure in this increasingly AI driven era.

I sometimes reel as politicians and unscrupulous entrepreneurs test boundaries in search of a headline or a few more dollars (Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Trump and Farage – I’m looking at you!). Tim Berners-Lee’s dream of the internet making the world’s knowledge available to everyone has been subverted by those with the deepest pockets and most avaricious egos. Almost everything that we see online now has to be looked at twice to understand whether it is genuine or fake.

In the webinar, Ellie Wraith described this as a “trust void” where authorship, ownership and credibility are scrutinised more heavily because more discerning audiences question whether content is authentic or AI-generated. In another webinar released just over a year ago, in June 2025, Daniel Foley Carter guested on the The Search Session, (hosted by Gianluca Fiorelli on the Advanced Web Ranking blog). They were mostly discussing how the SEO industry is under pressure. That is not, in itself, very interesting to the average Cumbrian based business owner.

However, Dan did say something about “trust signals” and “Authority” online, halfway through, that is important for business owners to grasp.

“So, when it comes to things like AI Overviews and AI Mode, I don’t think that they need to look beyond traditional things. And I think the biggest thing for them is trust, and we all know that that comes back to links and brand mentions and brand citations, and then any aggregated behavioural data over time. And I was testing AI Overviews so much, and it just kept coming back to links. I tested a lot of things.”

This is a bloke who tests obsessively – so his opinions carry more weight than mine. The webinar can be found here.

Brands need to appreciate this and start working towards strengthening their own EEAT credentials. Real people and verifiable experts matter more now than ever as AI search technologies are clearly favouring strong brands. It means working – or getting me to work – at winning backlinks from other websites. It means you are not going to show up if you simply regurgitate AI slop that rehashes other people’s work. If you previously had good traffic and clickthrough, that is going to decline and with it your revenue!

It’s an argument that has been eloquently explained in this webinar: that content becomes more believable and far less likely to be categorised as “commodity” when attached to named individuals, whose visible profiles support their experience. Then if PR mentions you, points to you and other websites throw a link to you your authority grows and you are more likely to show up in recommendations.

This interpretation is supported from multiple angles by such people as Daniel Foley Carter (as mentioned above), Mark Williams-Cook, Lily Ray and Andrew Holland (I’ve linked to their LinkedIn content because these are people who are working with large customer lists and big websites so they have much larger datasets, from which to distinguish and understand patterns of content success – and they are worth following in their own right).

PR, in the print and cyber environments, is a huge element of building up a brand’s reputation, so that content published by your brand isn’t perceived by people or search tech as being a commodity rehash.

The shrinking pool of genuine journalists, in reputable news publications, who could be contacted in a PR campaign, are now having to check experts’ authenticity more carefully than ever. An interesting observation that came up in the webinar was the regular aspect of the workflow where digital PR teams now have to build up the proof that their quoted experts are real people. This sometimes gets as basic as asking clients to update their LinkedIn profiles (a scenario I ran into last week, doing some basic citation work for a client in a competitive industry in Cumbria!).

Their personal profiles had been gathering dust for nearly a decade and despite having had it pointed out 4 or 5 years previously, that their Company Page had not been claimed – it was still lying there untouched and unloved! They still seem to think that a basic content refresh and a few citations will be enough to regain their previous prominent position against some new, switched on competitors who are starting to eat away at their profits.

I am still trying to get them to see the value of investing in telling the story of how their company made their services so affordable, overcame multiple hurdles and created a unique mix of services for businesses and private clients. Oh, help me Lord 😉

No… but you need to add value to the conversation. In this article I hope the value is in bringing a precis of a long webinar to the attention of a few people in Cumbria who would have missed the insights from this very interesting webinar hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward of Search With Candour. This is no longer about rankings or impressions; it’s about real business enquiries and growing your revenue.

There was so much good solid information in this and the other referenced webinar that there will be one more post to follow, in which I will try to give you practical ways that you can make use of this theoretical material. Look out for Part 2: Strategies for Creating Unique, Non-Commodity Content That Makes You The Obvious Choice” which will be published next week.

1. Long tail keywords are queries where the user types or speaks a longer query which indicates that their question is generated by a higher level of interest in the topic. E.g. “best business coach in Cumbria” instead of just searching for “business coach”.
2. Guten Tool was the AI tool developed by Reach PLC to take a human authored article and then spin it out into multiple regional flavoured variations. It stung them badly.
3. Low funnel searches are searches that have high “buying intent”. The searcher seems to be getting close to decision time on a purchase or action. E.g. “best price for Wild Country Friend 3 near Carlisle”. Many of these types of queries are getting quite close to the conversational queries that AI is designed to respond to.