In the age of AI answers, how can content marketing evolve beyond the click?

Content marketing, when done in the right way, can inform and educate audiences while positioning a business as an authority on topics relevant to its product or services. When carried out hand-in-hand with SEO, content marketing also puts a brand’s website in front of users who have relevant questions or are searching for information on a related topic.

However, the increasing use of generative AI to address search queries – whether through Google’s AI Overviews or newly-launched AI Mode, ChatGPT’s search functionality, or another generative AI-powered search engine – has upended this system. Users now often receive what amounts to a bespoke piece of content addressing their query, and while this features links to sources that the information was drawn from, data has shown that users are clicking through at greatly-reduced rates.

What does this paradigm shift mean for the role of content marketing? Should marketers rethink their approach to content? From the renewed importance of trust to how to measure success, I spoke to a number of experts to get their thoughts on content marketing’s future in an AI-powered search era.

Content marketing is about building trust more than ever

Far from diminishing in importance or prominence in the age of AI search, “Effective content marketing becomes increasingly important as AI platforms continue to grow,” argues Bill Sebald, founder and managing partner at Greenlane Search Marketing.

Moreover, he points out, “Visibility in AI environments isn’t just a traffic opportunity – it’s a trust-building mechanism. If AI consistently chooses your brand as the best answer, that repeated exposure compounds into long-term credibility and brand preference.”

For visibility in AI answers and overviews, Google’s principle of E-E-A-T – Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust – is widely thought to be more crucial than ever as these are all signals that AI systems use to select the most reliable and credible sources.

“AI can surface your content even if you’re not ranked on the first pages,” says Sebald. “Instead, you earn visibility through content originality, clarity, and being cited across the web—signals closely tied to Google’s E-E-A-T framework.”

Kashif Riaz, SEO lead at TecHouse, adds that searchers often have lower trust in AI answers for ‘YMYL’ verticals – “Your Money or Your Life”, a concept used in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines to identify content that can impact people’s health, happiness, stability, or safety, such as content relating to finances, health, or societal welfare.

“For niches like YMYL … people don’t really trust AI answers,” he notes. “They want to see who is behind the answer and they prefer to visit websites to read [about a topic] in more detail.”

Branded content is now encountered closer to the point of conversion

While traditional content marketing once played a more top-of-funnel role in ranking for broad, information-gathering and unbranded queries that users would conduct before narrowing their focus, search experts have noted that AI-generated summaries and answers have moved into this role for many searches.

Although this means a dwindling of visibility and traffic from these terms, the visits that brands do see tend to be from users closer to the point of conversion. “With Generative AI delivering instant summaries across search engines and LLMs, users are now reaching brand-owned sites only at the conversion stage,” says Gracia Novoa, Senior Digital Expert at Fox Agency.

“This makes optimised product and service pages, along with gated content strategies, essential – not just for traffic, but for authority and data protection.” She also emphasises the role of earned media in bolstering brand visibility within AI responses, given that it offers a strong additional trust signal. “[B]oosting owned content with credible earned mentions has never been more important.”

Dan Peden, Solutions Director at Journey Further, adds that while there may be a decline in volume, “the quality of remaining traffic [brought about by AI-generated responses] will improve.

“Users have already done their research (via AI) which puts them much closer to the moment of action and leads to higher conversion. … The first step is understanding your current visibility and adapting your strategy to cater to the new world.”

Can marketers optimise for ‘query fan-out’?

One of the reasons that AI responses can condense the search journey in this way, enabling – as Ann Smarty, co-founder at Smarty.Marketing, puts it – a “1-month decision-making process [to take place] in a minute”, is because the individual searches that would have led to an informed result are being carried out by the AI tool on a user’s behalf.

This was spelled out by Google in its AI Mode announcement in May 2025, which used the term ‘query fan-out’ to describe this technique. In the words of Elizabeth Reid, Google’s VP, Head of Search, query fan-out involves “breaking down your question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously on your behalf”. ChatGPT appears to employ a similar method for research-oriented questions.

Smarty gives the example of a user query for the “best organic skincare brands to try”, which might produce fan-out queries for the best-known brands, brands for sensitive skin, most affordable brands, and those with “unique specialties”, such as plant-based or cruelty-free brands.

Thinking about how to rank for possible related queries is nothing new for SEOs and content marketers – there has always been a need for businesses to consider their search presence across multiple axes and not just target the most ‘obvious’ terms or searches.

However, at least when searchers are using AI Mode, Deep Search, or similar, it means that marketers need to consider not just what users might be querying related to their brand but how those queries could be broken up into individual searches – in effect, considering the entirety of a search journey in one go.

“[Optimising for fan-out queries is] in fact, not as difficult as we think,” says Riaz. “For marketers, they should approach it like creating content hubs, where the goal is to write content that satisfies user intent – [such as by] answering all the possible questions on the website that a user might be interested in.

“Or we can say that instead of focusing on keywords we have to look for the topics that are relevant to each other.” For this, Riaz recommends making topical maps with high levels of internal linking between topics, “so that crawlers can fully understand the linkage.”

Smarty adds that, “It is not just about content … Fan-out queries can be used as content ideas, [and also as] sales funnel optimization ideas, new product ideas and new product positioning strategy ideas. … This gives you a better insight into how your brand and its competitors are positioned based on different fan-out directions.”

“AI is breaking the link between visibility and visitation”: Measuring content success in the AI era

If the role of content marketing in search is shifting away from top-of-funnel traffic-driving and click-through rate (CTR), what should the new metrics of success be? Fox Agency’s Gracia Novoa puts forward that, “Brands should measure their ability to influence decisions and to generate meaningful citations within AI-generated responses. … Appearing in AI summaries has become less a traffic driver and more a credibility signal and a marker of industry leadership.

“This requires layered, original, and expert-led content that goes beyond what already exists, leveraging first-party data and expert insight to develop topical authority.”

Bill Sebald adds that in the era of AI search, “AI is breaking the link between visibility and visitation, making some traditional metrics obsolete for gauging content success. … CTR is useful for performance creatives (ads, email, SERP snippets), but not for AI-surfaced content aimed at educating, influencing, or establishing thought leadership.”

He suggests a range of new metrics for marketers to monitor including: AI citation frequency, branded search volume growth, engagement (“time on page, scroll depth, copy interactions, and conversion behaviour”), content share of voice versus competitors, citation growth, and assisted conversions (using multitouch attribution to measure the downstream impact of AI citations).

“The click isn’t dead; it’s just part of the new search landscape, rather than the entire goal,” he concludes. “The content that earns attention without a click is winning a new game.”

The click isn’t dead; it’s just part of the new search landscape, rather than the entire goal.

– Bill Sebald, Greenlane Search Marketing

Can paid search offer more predictability?

With more competition than ever surrounding the coveted space at the very top of the search results, should marketers also be leaning more heavily on paid search for exposure? Ann Smarty puts forward that,

“This answer hasn’t changed much, in my perspective. I’ve always been in favour of doing both because one doesn’t replace the other:

• Paid search lets you test queries and buying journeys (and generate sales quickly)
• Organic signals stay with you forever, allowing for longer-term, more diverse visibility.”

Journey Further’s Dan Peden agrees: “While [paid search] guarantees visibility in an environment where organic clicks are falling, it should be seen as complementary rather than a replacement. AI’s impact is more fundamental than that.

“Brands that unify their [paid and organic] strategies and focus on delivering human-first content—content that’s consistent, compelling, and useful—will find themselves not just surviving but thriving in the AI-powered search era.” He also emphasises the importance of thinking about the wider landscape of what constitutes ‘search’ – which isn’t limited to search engines.

“Platforms like Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, and TikTok are now major discovery and decision-making points. Businesses need to think holistically about visibility across all these ecosystems, not just traditional search engines, if they want to stay relevant in the evolving customer journey.”

Content marketing’s future may be about problem-solving

Ann Smarty points out that at present, the way that people use search engines and AI tools are not one in the same, despite their increasing overlap. “It looks like people are more likely to prompt [LLM platforms] with ‘tasks’, i.e., “do this”. In the long term, this will definitely impact conversions and bottom lines when more and more consumers start relying on LLM agents to make buying decisions on their behalf and then even do the actual buying.

“To prepare for that [future], businesses need to start putting their products in the ‘problem-solution’ context, i.e., “I need to achieve this. What can I do?” It is less about keywords and more about starting with the problem that your products actually solve. It is a more product-driven, customer-centric approach.”

Peden also states that the shift to conversational AI-generated answers in search “introduces a new form of consumer value. It’s not about who screams the loudest, but who solves the problem best.

“AI doesn’t care about your brand equity or your ad spend if your content doesn’t help users make better decisions. Brands that provide relevant, consistent, high-quality, and distinct content will win.”