The landscape of content marketing has undergone a dramatic shift. As I watched a recent Marketing Against the Grain short featuring Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan, their insights resonated deeply with challenges I’ve observed across the digital marketing space.
Simply creating “quality content” is no longer enough to win at SEO. The game has fundamentally changed, and marketers who don’t adapt will find themselves buried in search results.
The New Content Reality
What struck me most from the discussion was how context has become everything in content creation. We’ve moved beyond basic search queries like “what is the best CRM” to highly specific searches that include industry, company size, budget constraints, and other contextual factors.
This evolution means that for each customer persona and problem you address, you need dozens—if not hundreds—of content variations. As Bodnar points out, you now need “an answer for what is the best X considering that I am a manufacturing company in New Jersey. We’ve been around for ten years. We’re spending a lot of money on paid ads.”
This represents an explosion in content requirements that traditional methods simply cannot satisfy. The days of a lone blogger cranking out articles are over if you want to compete at scale.
The Content Scale Problem
Let’s be honest about what this means for businesses:
- Creating 100-300 high-quality pages for super long-tail terms is now the baseline
- Each page needs to address specific contextual factors for different audience segments
- Traditional content creation methods can’t keep pace with these demands
- Even resource-rich companies like HubSpot struggle with this volume using conventional approaches
I’ve worked with companies of all sizes, and I can tell you that this content scaling challenge is universal. The organizations that recognize this shift early and adapt their strategies accordingly will gain significant advantages.
Building AI-Powered Content Systems
The solution, as highlighted in the discussion, lies in systematic approaches to content creation. Your job as a growth marketer or SEO professional has evolved from simply “creating content” to “building systems for great content.”
This means developing AI-powered systems that can:
- Generate highly specific content at scale
- Maintain quality standards across all outputs
- Address the contextual nuances that modern searchers demand
- Adapt to changing search patterns and user needs
Having implemented AI in my own content strategies, I can confirm this approach works when done thoughtfully. The key is not to view AI as a replacement for human creativity but as an amplifier that allows your best ideas to scale.
“How do I build AI powered systems that will produce really great content at scale that is highly specific?” – Marketing Against the Grain
This question should be at the center of your content strategy discussions. The marketers who answer it effectively will dominate their niches.
Finding the Right Balance
While embracing AI-powered content systems, we must remember that technology alone isn’t the answer. The most successful approaches I’ve seen combine AI capabilities with human strategic oversight.
Your competitive advantage will come from how you direct these systems—the unique perspectives, data, and expertise you feed into them. AI gives you scale, but your knowledge gives the content value.
The companies winning at SEO today aren’t necessarily those with the biggest content teams, but those who’ve built the most effective content systems. They’ve found ways to address the explosion of contextual search queries without sacrificing quality or authenticity.
As search engines and user expectations continue to evolve, your ability to build and refine these systems will determine your organic visibility. The question isn’t whether to adopt AI-powered content creation, but how quickly and effectively you can implement it.
Are you still trying to meet today’s content demands with yesterday’s methods? If so, it’s time to rethink your approach and start building systems that can scale with the ever-expanding universe of search queries. Your SEO success depends on it.
