Six years ago, as lockdown dragged on, I spent most of the day shuffling around my apartment like a lonely astronaut.
But I kept working. And I helped partners like LMNT create a whole lot of science content.
Back then, the formula was simple. More high-quality content = better page ranks = steady brand growth.
But the game has changed. More content now means more AI-generated content. And despite the claims of unscrupulous marketing weasels, squeezing out 100 posts in 45 minutes doesn’t build authority. It dilutes it.
Think about it this way. When anyone with a Claude subscription can spin up content like they have a warehouse of junior copywriters in their pocket, the bar for building trust with consumers goes way up.
So how do you stand out in the content arms race?
Not with more. With better.
There’s an opportunity here. With most teams stuck in search-era thinking (“I’ll use my AI to blast out content and save budget”), brands embracing the new authority formula will strengthen their positioning. And positioning will be everything in the coming years.
The new authority formula isn’t anti-AI. It just recognizes that AI accelerates human expertise rather than replacing it.
For example, my team uses AI to compliance-check all the content we produce. But it took careful calibration to make it work without neutering marketing claims. Even now, it’s not fully automatic. Draft the content … AI compliance check … Human specialist review … AI compliance check again … Publish.
And that’s just risk mitigation. What brands really care about is growth. A few bullets show why human expertise remains the key ingredient.
- Growth depends on positioning
- Positioning depends on authority
- Authority depends on depth and POV (that’s what the algorithms look for)
- Depth and POV depend on human expertise (AI isn’t the X factor here)
Who do you want guiding your authority system? Human experts who use AI as an accelerator? Or non-experts who use AI to blast out five dozen posts and hope they get lucky?
How brands answer will determine who wins in the post-search era.
I help wellness brands grow through science-backed strategy and content.
If you’d like support on your next stage of growth, you can reach me here.
