AI is changing how people search, how content gets discovered, and how buyers evaluate solutions. The truth is that nobody fully knows where all of this is going.
Every week there seems to be a new tool, a new prediction, or a new headline declaring that everything is about to change. If you’re feeling a little uncertain about what digital marketing will look like a year from now, you’re in good company.a
And that’s okay.
When I look at the organizations adapting best right now, they aren’t necessarily producing more content than everyone else. They’re doing a better job of capturing the expertise that already exists inside their organizations and turning it into thought leadership. While everyone else is trying to predict the future, they’re focused on sharing what they know today.
That thought struck me recently while watching an old SNL rerun with Nate Bargatze’s sketch, Washington’s Dream.
If you’ve seen the bit, Washington gathers his troops and leaders to explain his vision for the future of America. At first, it sounds like a classic inspirational speech about building a great nation. But then Washington starts describing all of the strange, illogical things Americans will eventually do, particularly with measurements and everyday systems. Yet somehow, through a combination of effort, experimentation, mistakes, and occasional brilliance, things kept moving forward.
As we approach America’s 250th birthday, I think there’s a lesson there for marketers.
We like certainty. We want to know which channels will win, how AI will reshape search, and what content strategy will guarantee results. But the reality is that we’re living through one of those moments where nobody has a complete roadmap.
The Search for the Perfect Formula
In the early days of SEO, everyone was trying to crack the code. Websites were “stuffed” with keywords. Articles repeated the same phrases over and over. Entire industries ended up publishing content that sounded nearly identical because everyone was chasing the same formula.
Today, we are seeing a different version of the same thing. Only now the conversation revolves around AI search, GEO, Answer Engine Optimization, Search Everywhere Optimization, FAQs and whatever acronym gets introduced next week.
It’s easy to see why so many people are searching for answers. Business leaders want to know where AI is headed. Marketing teams want to know what they should be doing differently. Everyone is searching for the playbook.
The reality is, those rules are still being written. Nobody fully knows where all of this is going. And that’s okay, because the companies that consistently win have never relied on formulas alone.
In fact, when I look at the organizations that are adapting best right now, I notice something interesting. They’re not always creating more content than everyone else. They’re simply doing a better job of capturing the expertise that already exists inside their organizations – their thought leadership. That expertise is often hiding in plain sight.
That expertise often shows up in places like:
- The questions sales teams answer on nearly every call
- The objections prospects raise before they are ready to buy
- The explanations customer service repeats again and again
- The details operations teams know but competitors rarely discuss
- The internal presentations, emails, and notes people create because the website does not answer the question yet
The Knowledge You Are Overlooking
One thing I have learned throughout my career is that some of the most valuable content in an organization never makes it onto the website. It lives in sales conversations, customer service calls, follow-up emails, and the explanations people give every day without realizing how valuable they are.
It lives in engineers, project managers, account executives, customer success teams, and leaders who spend their days solving problems and answering questions. They’re the ones talking with customers every day, hearing what’s confusing, seeing where people get stuck, and finding better ways to explain complex ideas. That’s the knowledge most companies already have but rarely share.
In many organizations, salespeople end up creating their own resources because the information customers need does not exist anywhere else. They build presentations, write explanations, and save email templates because they know prospects are asking questions the website never addresses.
Not because anyone failed. Because nobody stopped to capture what those teams knew.
When companies struggle with content, the issue is rarely a lack of expertise. More often, it is a lack of extraction. The knowledge exists, but the challenge is uncovering it.
Why Great Agency Relationships Still Matter
This is also where I think many organizations misunderstand the role of a marketing agency. The best agency relationships have never been about outsourcing expertise. They’re about uncovering it. A good agency doesn’t show up with all the answers.
Some of the most valuable work we do is not simply writing content or optimizing websites. It is helping organizations uncover expertise they did not realize they were sitting on.
Every department sees a different side of the business. Sales hears what prospects are worried about. Customer service hears what’s confusing or frustrating after the sale. Operations understands the day-to-day challenges of delivering great work. Put those perspectives together, and you have insights your competitors probably aren’t sharing.
A good agency helps ask the questions that reveal the answers already sitting inside the organization.
Your agency needs access to your expertise because no agency can be an expert in every industry—and they shouldn’t try to be. The best writers and agencies are experts at investigative writing: the art and science of drawing insights from subject matter experts and transforming them into compelling digital content.
Great writers don’t need to know everything about your business on day one. They know how to ask the right questions, uncover valuable insights, and translate your expertise into content that resonates with your customers. The strongest content is created when your industry knowledge and your agency’s storytelling and strategic expertise work together.
Where’s the Magic? AI and Humans Working Together.
The same principle applies to AI. There’s a tendency to position AI as either the solution to everything or the threat that will replace the work people do. Neither perspective feels particularly sane. What AI has done exceptionally well is expose something that was already true: The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input.
As someone who spends a lot of time helping organizations navigate AI, I find myself having the same conversation over and over again. AI is an incredible tool. It can help us move faster, process information, organize ideas, and even write. But it cannot replace expertise. It cannot replace perspective. And it certainly cannot replace experience.
I have seen companies publish article after article generated almost entirely by AI and then wonder why engagement drops or visibility declines. The answer is usually simple. AI can only work with what you give it. The magic is not in the tool alone. The magic is in the prompts, the questions, the context, and the expertise behind the request.
At the same time, I have seen clients crank out daily blogs written exclusively with AI and their traffic suddenly surges. How can this be? Nobody knows.
Maybe they’re in a niche with very little competition, so simply publishing content helps them get noticed. Maybe the person creating the prompts has unique industry knowledge or real-world experience that makes the content better. Or maybe the site had only five pages before and now has 100. Even if AI helped write them, those extra pages create more chances to show up in search results and attract visitors.
So while generating 365 AI blog posts a year may seem easy, managing, reviewing, optimizing, and maintaining that content is a completely different challenge. There is still a lot of backend work to be done on website content that many people never consider. Keyword strategy, metadata, schema markup, the list goes on. All “the things” that help search engines, and now AI search tools “find you”.
AI Can Create Content, But Humans Create Value
The reality is that AI models train on existing web data, so when a user asks an AI to write a blog post without original content, the tool simply regurgitates an existing version of what is already online.
In fact, according to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, 87% of B2B marketers claim that AI has helped with their content productivity as a whole, but only 39% report improved website performance.
Anyone can use AI to generate a high volume of generic content. The real value comes from combining AI with human expertise, firsthand insights, and deep industry knowledge to create prompts that produce something truly original and meaningful.
That’s why I continue to believe that human insight is what drives great content. People remain the differentiator—the source of the context, experience, and perspective that turns AI-generated output into superior, engaging content.
People Connect with People. They Always Have.
Recently, I spent time developing expanded thought leadership bio pages for our team. Not the standard executive biography that lists accomplishments and credentials, but a page designed to help people understand how our team thinks, what shaped their perspective, and what experiences influenced their approach to business.
Here are a few examples of Advanced Bio pages from our team here at Intuitive Websites:
Thomas Young’s Advance Bio
Ray Cameron’s Advanced Bio
Shelly Holdaway’s Advance Bio
Do Advanced Bio pages work? Nobody knows.
The intent is, people will spend time reading it and get to know us. Not because they really cared about where we went to school or how many years we’ve worked in marketing, but so they can connect with our stories and find common ground.
This may explain why buyers increasingly want to know who is behind the company before they decide whether to trust the company itself.
There’s something authentic about knowing the person you’re working with loves animals and has a dog named Teddy – and in fact, I do! I always chuckle when I read a bio that includes the family dog by name. (Bailey, Cooper, Luna, and Charlie are also solid choices for naming your canine btw.) Maybe it’s because when you read it, you connect. And isn’t that what we’re all searching for? Connection and trust?
Marketing Has Always Been a Marathon
The businesses succeeding today aren’t waiting for perfect clarity. They’re documenting expertise and answering those frequent customer questions. They’re sharing insights from the people on their teams who know their industries best and creating content rooted in their actual knowledge.
But that doesn’t happen by accident.
The organizations doing this well are supported by strong content teams that know how to uncover expertise, ask the right questions, and turn years of experience into content that customers actually find valuable. They understand that the goal isn’t to create more content—it’s to capture the knowledge already inside the organization and package it in a way that educates, builds trust, and drives action.
In a time when nobody can predict exactly how AI, search, and digital marketing will evolve, great content teams provide something far more valuable than certainty: a process for consistently turning expertise into thought leadership. And that may be one of the safest bets a business can make right now.
If the future of search feels uncertain, the next step does not have to be complicated. Start with the expertise closest to your customers.
- Ask sales what prospects are confused about.
- Ask customer service what customers keep asking.
- Ask operations what competitors rarely explain well.
- Ask leadership what perspective they wish the market understood.
- Turn those answers into useful, specific content
In the end, expertise ages far better than tactics..
Progress Has Never Been a Straight Line
Perhaps that is the lesson I have been reflecting on most as America approaches its 250th birthday. We often look backward and imagine progress as a straight line, but it was not. There were wrong turns, unexpected challenges, moments of uncertainty, and people figuring things out as they went.
Marketing works the same way. Progress doesn’t require having all the answers upfront. It requires moving forward, learning, adjusting, and continuing to build despite uncertainty.
Search algorithms will change. AI platforms will evolve. New channels will emerge. But customers will always need trusted information from people who understand their problems. The companies that build systems for capturing and sharing that expertise today will be far better positioned regardless of what the next version of search or AI looks like. Some innovations will change everything. Others will fade away. Most will eventually settle somewhere in the middle.
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The organizations that succeed will not be the ones chasing every trend. They will be the ones paying attention, listening, learning, building relationships, investing in their people, and staying focused on the fundamentals that do not change.
While technology will continue to evolve, human connection remains remarkably consistent.
Maybe Nate was onto something. We may not always know why we do the things we do. It may be confusing. The goal is to stay curious enough to keep learning, humble enough to keep listening, and confident enough to move forward anyway. After all, that is how progress has always happened – a burning desire for progress, a growth mindset.
Now that you’ve read my blog, enjoy watching this hilarious Nate Bargatze SNL sketch!
If you’re trying to uncover those insights, strengthen your thought leadership efforts, or create a content strategy that reflects what makes your organization unique, we’d love to hear all about it. Schedule a Conversation.
