Hey friend,
Suppose a content team does everything right. Clean pages, real research, keywords with actual intent behind them. And the traffic keeps sliding.
So they publish more, refresh what’s decaying, and it holds for a quarter before sliding again. Nothing was done badly.
The loop content strategy ran on for a decade, find the question, write the best answer, rank, get the traffic, is coming apart, because AI Overviews now answer the question before anyone clicks.
Which means content strategy has to answer two things instead of one: what deserves to exist, and what still creates value if nobody clicks. This is the workflow I use for both.
Let’s get into it.
The question worth keeping
Here’s the filter I run everything through now:
Will this still create value if Google sends zero clicks?
It’s uncomfortable, because a lot of what we call good content only ever worked because search rewarded it. Take the clicks away, and there’s nothing underneath.
The things that survive the question tend to be the same things: research nobody else has, a genuine point of view, content that does a job at the moment someone is deciding, and formats that live somewhere you own.
Content calendars often don’t survive that question. That’s the useful part. Run yours through it and see what’s left.
That’s the whole shift, and it’s narrower than “AI killed content.” AI search is unkind to content that could have been written by anyone. It rewards content that could only have come from you, formatted so a machine can lift it.
Onwards and upwards,
Sreyashi 🌻
If you want this applied to your own site, that’s what my 1:1 calls are for. I’ll go through your data before we talk, and we’ll work out which layer is actually broken rather than starting from scratch.