Recently I attended a couple of workshops at Web Summit Vancouver, hosted by Profound AI, an AEO company that helps brands track and improve how they appear in AI-generated answers. The topic was “How Brands Stay Visible When AI Decides.”
In other words: how to get AI to talk about you, and talk about you the way you want.
One line from presenter Scott Schachter, Profound’s director of sales, neatly summed up the pressure of this new landscape:
“In order to win in the AI era, you need to build marketing for super intelligent agents. If I want to show up in their answers, I have to market to these agents. I need to deliver insights or teach these agents something that they’ve never learned before, and I need to create 10x of it.”
10x? Oof. Cue uneasy murmurs. During the question period, hands shot up, and one audience member asked what everyone was thinking: How do we produce that much without compromising quality or credibility? And where does it all go?
The answer: a lot of it will live on pages that human eyes never see, but generative AI systems comb for material. (Big brands like Nike already have pages on their website not intended for human eyes at all, Scott said, but geared to attract AI indexing.)
And guess what? You may not write much of this AI-focused content anyway – AI will probably do it for you, in a kind of bot-on-bot ouroboros, with an engineer at the wheel directing traffic.
But there’s an important caveat here: AI doesn’t know anything in a vacuum. Whatever ends up in those answers has to come from somewhere: a website, a source, a subject-matter expert, a human point of view.
As Scott’s colleague, Profound co-founder James Cadwallader, put it:
“We as human beings are just a fleshy API between reality and what an AI understands about the world. So how do you absolutely, unequivocally control what AI says and understands about your brand? You have to distribute the right information about your brand, products and services, and you have to do it in a way that AI understands.”
So, yes, we may need to start thinking of AI as a new kind of audience: one that reads, ranks, summarizes and recommends.
But ultimately, it all still comes back to the real audience: those “fleshy APIs.”
Actual people still need to trust you. They still need to understand what you do, why it matters and whether you’re the right fit for them. They may find you through different channels, with AI acting as the intermediary, but the end goal hasn’t changed: useful, credible, human communication.
Google searches are still happening, but clicks are another story
Nobody will be surprised to hear that AI is changing how people search online – for information, products, services and everything else.
Until recently, it’s been 99% Google keyword searches. Type in a few words (the average query is three or four), and you’d get back a tidy stack of blue links, ordered by relevance. Content marketers knew what to expect, and how to breadcrumb web pages to lure Google’s crawlers.
With the arrival of AI, suddenly this all feels like knob-and-tube wiring: it still works (sort of). But the real power lies elsewhere.
In May 2026, Google announced the biggest overhaul of its search box in more than 25 years: it’s now an AI-powered prompt box, not just a keyword field.
In some ways, it wasn’t surprising. Search volumes have gone up, but zero-click searches have also been on the rise. Research shows that the presence of an AI Overview in Google search results correlates with a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview. Brands are starting to see a dip in organic traffic from searches as a result.
But there’s another trend the industry is only starting to come to terms with: chatbots. Increasingly, users are asking ChatGPT, Claude and others for opinions on everything ranging from sneakers and pet insurance to barbeques and banks.
According to Scott of Profound, the average chatbot prompt is around 15 words, with four or five follow-ups.
Between a three-word Google search and 75 words of interactive conversation, there’s a lot of room for influence!
Which is why these dialogues have the potential to collapse the traditional marketing funnel. No need for separate stages – awareness, discovery, decision – when you can do it all in one place. And with AI chatbots consulting hundreds or thousands of sources at a time, you’re competing to be included in their answers.
AI marketing comes with baggage: human and environmental costs
Before we get too focused on what AI means for the future of content strategy, let’s call a quick timeout.
Because while AI is changing how people find information, it also raises serious questions about how that information is created, who benefits and what the broader costs are.
In some ways, AI feels like just one more in a series of “unprecedented” changes to the media landscape our team has ridden out over the last few decades (especially the journalists among us). To name a few: the dwindling of print media. The rise and fizzle of app-based publications. The social media boom, and later commercialization of social channels. Algorithm whiplash. The surge in short video.
We tend to grit our teeth, hold on tight and adapt. But even as we do the same with AI, we’re acutely aware of the drawbacks. As a certified B-Corp and purpose-focused agency, we can’t and don’t ignore them, from the water-gobbling, carbon-emitting spectre of data centres to the potential for labour disruption at a mass scale.
Add emerging concerns around mental health, cognition, misinformation, bias and trust, and it’s fair to say we lose sleep sometimes about where it’s all headed.
Yet here we are. AI isn’t on the fringes anymore. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index found that AI adoption continued to rise in 2025, with 88% of surveyed organizations reporting AI use, up from 78% the year before. The same report found that 70% of organizations used generative AI in at least one business function.
Gallup reported in April 2026 that, for the first time in its tracking, half of employed U.S. adults said they use AI in their role at least a few times a year, up from 46% the previous quarter.
So where does this leave content teams? Cautiously moving forward; carving out space between keeping pace and getting swept up by the hype. We’re watching the shifts closely.
Content marketing in the current AI landscape and what you should know
These are some recent AI trends in the content space that we’re clocking, along with some takeaways from the Profound workshop mentioned above:
The role of content teams is moving upstream.
As AI makes basic content easier to produce, the sweet spot is shifting to strategy: identifying the right questions, extracting subject-matter expertise, shaping a distinctive point of view, structuring information clearly and building trust across channels.
Content has two audiences: human and AI.
Human readers still need useful, engaging, trustworthy content. But AIs also need clear, structured, current information they can digest, summarize and cite. Content strategy has to consider both.
Generic posts are a waste of human time.
AI can already produce basic explainers and surface-level summaries, so don’t bother. What stands out is experience-based, rooted in real, unvarnished voices and specialist expertise.
The general public is getting a lot better at spotting AI.
This is actually great from our perspective – people are craving real human voices! It’s also a warning sign to those of you cranking out AI-generated content with abandon. A brand can lose credibility fast if it’s seen over-relying on AI. We’ve written about AI “tells” before, and much of that is still true. The difference lately is, more people are noticing.
One example is the overused sentence framing of “It’s not X, it’s y” – a giveaway being called out frequently these days. And LLMs still love their long dashes; so much that many of us have stopped using this once-trusty workhorse of punctuation. RIP the m-dash.
Content volume matters, but only when it’s useful and specific.
AI may be a content-hungry beast, but the answer isn’t to flood the Internet with AI slop. Instead, focus on adapting what you know into strategically modular, question-led content: FAQs, comparison pages, product explainers, local or sector-specific guides, use cases, transcripts, summaries and other decision-support pieces that respond directly to what audiences are asking.
Content recency matters more than ever.
AI-generated answers tend to reward current information, especially in fast-moving categories, so content teams need to treat updates and refreshes as part of the strategy, not an afterthought.
Content is becoming infrastructure.
Webinars, podcasts, YouTube videos, interviews, FAQs and even sales call transcripts can all become source material for AI-visible content. Together, these kinds of assets can become a kind of knowledge base that helps people and bots understand what a brand does, who it helps, what it knows and when it should be recommended.
Measurement is still catching up.
Search traffic has gotten a little messy lately, and visibility is harder than ever to attribute than traditional search traffic, paid ads or email conversions. Brands may need to start tracking new indices such as mentions, citations, share of answer. But the attribution picture is still imperfect and will be for some time.
What’s after what’s next: planning ahead as the ground shifts
AI may be here, but nothing about the future is inevitable, either, especially when it comes to culture and technology. Lately we’ve seen a growing backlash to AI, in our industry and society at large.
In our own hometown of Vancouver, B.C., protest recently erupted over a recent announcement of two planned AI data centres in the city.
Another revealing example: university graduation season just passed in North America, and with it came a flurry of viral videos, of students booing commencement speakers who mention AI. It’s hard not to feel second-hand cringe watching those speakers squirm, after so confidently extolling AI’s virtues. Talking points that would earn ovations at Chamber of Commerce lunches are dropping like lead on young people facing down the AI job revolution.
What to take away from all this? Well, you have to read the room. As important as it is to adapt to new tools, it’s just as important not to mistake technological momentum for audience buy-in. And if people are rejecting AI in any numbers, your strategy should be ready to adapt.
Things will certainly keep shifting as public opinion evolves, governments introduce more guardrails, and people find new spaces to communicate, human to human. Which always seems to be where we wind up.
Need a partner for your next era of content creation?
AI may be changing search, SEO, discovery and the way audiences encounter brands. But the goal is still the same: clear, useful, human communication that builds trust.
We help organizations make sense of the shifting content landscape. Let’s talk!
