Content Strategy Has Shifted. This Time, for Good.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: your content strategy just died. And you probably don't even know it yet.
The symptoms are everywhere. Your blog traffic is flatlining. Social shares are down. Email open rates are stuck. But the real problem runs deeper than vanity metrics.
AI collapsed the marketing funnel.
People don't browse anymore. They don't click through 10 Google results. They don't share your carefully crafted LinkedIn posts. They ask ChatGPT a question and trust the first answer they get.
If you're not in that short list of sources, you don't exist.
The Game Changed While We Were Playing It
Gini Dietrich calls this shift "visibility engineering." She's the creator of the PESO model and has been watching this transformation unfold in real time.
Here's what she told us on a recent episode of the Bullhorns and Bullseyes podcast I co-host: "The way that LLMs are learning and the way that AI is answering questions is based on citation-ready content. Earned and owned are even more important today, even though you're not driving people to your website."
Think about that. The robots are scraping your content to answer questions. But they're not sending anyone to read it.
This breaks everything we thought we knew about digital marketing.
The old playbook went like this: Create content, optimize for search, drive traffic, convert visitors. It was a linear path from awareness to action.
That funnel is dead. Perhaps.
Welcome to the Discovery-to-Trust Flywheel
In the new reality, people discover you in fragments. They encounter your ideas out of context. They make decisions long before you know they're paying attention.
Your prospect might see a snippet from your podcast in an AI summary. They might find your quote in someone else's newsletter. They might hear your opinion referenced in a TikTok video.
This fragmented discovery means one thing: consistency across every channel isn't nice-to-have anymore. It's survival.
You can't have your social team saying one thing, your PR team pitching another angle, and your website telling a third story. In a world where people piece together their understanding of your brand from scattered touchpoints, mixed messages kill trust.
How LLMs Decide Who Gets Cited
Here's where it gets interesting. AI models determine credibility by looking for trust signals:
Are people sharing your content?
Do Substack authors quote you?
Are LinkedIn creators referencing your work?
Do TikTok news influencers mention your brand?
Are journalists including you as a source?
These aren't just vanity metrics anymore. They're the training data that teaches AI who to trust.
Gini put it this way: "What the AI is looking for is: are you credible and trustworthy? And we're determining that based on whether people are sharing your content, whether you have a good reputation on the internet, and whether you have media talking about you."
This is why the PESO model matters more now than when Gini created it in 2014.
Paid amplifies your authority signals. Earned provides third-party validation. Shared reinforces credibility at scale. Owned delivers the citation-ready assets that AI can scrape.
But here's the key: it all has to work together as one system, not four separate tactics.
The Content Strategy That Actually Works
Stop chasing keywords. Start answering real questions.
Gini's advice is beautifully simple: "Sit down and say, what kinds of questions do we get from sales, from customer service, when we're talking to customers, when we're talking to prospects? Create a list and then build thematic clusters around those lists."
This isn't theory. It's practical intelligence from the trenches.
Your sales team hears the same objections every day. Customer service gets asked the same questions every week. Those conversations are gold mines for content that actually matters.
But most companies ignore this treasure sitting in their CRM and support tickets. They chase trending topics and viral formats instead of solving real problems for real people.
Here's the shift: create content that demonstrates your expertise before anyone asks for it.
When a journalist needs a source, they'll remember your insights. When an influencer wants to reference best practices, they'll cite your framework. When AI summarizes your industry, your voice will be included.
Programming Your Reputation
We're not just managing reputations anymore. We're programming them.
Every piece of content you create, every interview you give, every quote you provide becomes part of the data set that AI uses to understand your brand.
The window to define this is closing. Early movers are already setting the baselines that others will be compared against.
If you're not actively programming your trust signals, you're passively allowing machines to write your reputation for you. And they might get it wrong.
The Measurement Problem
Here's the challenge: we don't have great tools to track whether we're showing up in AI answers. The analytics dashboards we're used to don't capture this new reality.
But structured trust leaves footprints. You can track whether you're getting quoted in earned media. You can monitor whether your content is being referenced by thought leaders. You can measure whether your owned content is generating the authority signals that AI models recognize.
The metrics matter less than the momentum. Are you becoming more recognizable in your space? Are you the expert people think of first? Are you building the kind of reputation that compounds over time?
Your Next Move
If you do nothing else this week, do this: audit the questions your customers actually ask.
Talk to your sales team. Review your customer service tickets. Look at your most replied-to social posts. Find the patterns.
Pick the most common question. Write one genuinely useful answer. Publish it where journalists and thought leaders can find it.
Then do it again next week.
This isn't about going viral. It's about becoming the reliable source that AI models learn to trust and cite.
The companies that understand this shift will own their categories. The ones that don't will become invisible.
Which future are you building?
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Article republished with permission, originally appearing in the Amplify & Aim newsletter.