When I look back over the last 20 years of working with founders, owners, and executives on content and brand, I see the same pattern repeat itself every few years: something becomes easy, everyone does it, and then the value of that “something” drops to almost zero.
That is exactly what’s happening with generic content right now.
A few years ago, paying someone to write a 1,000-word blog post with surface-level advice could still move the needle. Today, that same piece might as well be invisible. Not because content is dead, but because generic content is now the cheapest, most abundant, and least trusted asset on the internet.
Let me walk you through why that is happening, how it’s already affecting your brand (often in ways you can’t see yet), and what the smart brands are doing differently.
I’ll speak plainly, as I would if we were sitting across a table and you were asking, “Should we still invest in content—and if yes, what kind?”
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Generic content was scarce once. Now it’s infinite.
In the early 2000s, getting any reasonably coherent article online was an advantage. There weren’t enough good websites to answer every question, so Google rewarded almost anything that looked relevant.
I remember working with a mid-sized B2B company in 2008. We published maybe two blog posts a month, nothing extraordinary by today’s standards. Yet those posts ranked, brought in leads, and built authority. Why? Because competing content simply wasn’t there. Scarcity created value.
Today, the situation is reversed.
With AI tools and content mills, the cost of producing 50 “10 Tips to Improve X” articles is close to zero. Every generic angle has already been written, copied, summarized, and rephrased a hundred times.
When something becomes almost infinite in supply, its price and perceived value approach zero. That’s basic economics applied to content.
The internet no longer has a “content shortage.” It has a relevance, trust, and originality shortage.
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Users are becoming blind to sameness
I often tell founders: don’t benchmark your content against your own previous work—benchmark it against your customer’s attention span.
The average user has trained themselves, subconsciously, to filter out patterns:
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Title formula: “X Ways to Do Y” — detected as generic
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Structure: same intro, same list, no real story — dismissed
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Tone: vague, polished, and “safe” — considered untrustworthy or unhelpful
Let’s be honest: you’ve done this yourself. You click a link, scan for 5 seconds, and know instantly if the piece is:
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Written from experience, or
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Repackaged advice that could be from any blog on earth
Think about how many articles you’ve opened in the last month that felt like they were written by a committee, not a person with real scars and real wins. That is generic content. It reads “correct” but not convincing.
The user doesn’t consciously say, “This is generic.” They just close the tab and never return.
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Search engines are actively devaluing generic content
For years, companies played a game:
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Find keywords
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Assign them to writers
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Generate “SEO articles”
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Repeat
It worked until it didn’t.
Google and other search engines have a simple goal: keep users satisfied so they keep using search. When 10 search results all show nearly identical content with the same headings, same advice, and same depth, users get frustrated. So search engines have been forced to adjust.
You can see this in:
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Core algorithm updates that reward depth, expertise, and originality
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The rise of “helpful content” policies: content needs to demonstrate real experience, not just summarize other pages
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Better detection of pattern-based articles and AI-spun text
I worked with a SaaS company that pumped out over 400 blog posts in two years. Traffic grew for a while, then plateaued, then dropped sharply after an algorithm update. When we audited their content, 80% of the articles were:
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Interchangeable with competitors’ posts
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Obviously written to “rank,” not to help
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Not tied to any real internal expertise
We consolidated, deleted, and rewrote around the founders’ and team’s actual knowledge. Within months, the traffic and leads recovered, but only after we treated content as a reflection of expertise, not a commodity.
Search engines are catching up to what users already feel: generic = low value.
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Generic content doesn’t build brand, it erases it
Founders often ask: “If the content is helpful, does it matter if it’s generic?”
Yes, it does. Because you’re not just competing for clicks—you’re competing for memory.
Look at a few brands that built real content engines:
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HubSpot: They didn’t just write “What is inbound marketing?” They owned the narrative. They spoke from their philosophy, data, and product point of view. Their content felt specific to them.
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Basecamp (now 37signals): Their content is opinionated, sometimes controversial. You can’t mistake a Basecamp essay for something written by a random freelancer. Whether you agree or not, you remember it.
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Patagonia: Their content isn’t just about “how to choose a jacket.” It ties back to their environmental stance, their activism, their reason for existing.
In contrast, generic content sounds like this:
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“In today’s fast-paced world…”
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“Businesses must leverage digital transformation to stay ahead of the curve…”
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“Customers expect more than ever before…”
These lines could appear on any website, in any industry, anywhere. When every company sounds the same, no one stands out.
From 20 years of observing this, here’s the pattern:
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Brands that lean on generic content blend into a grey mass.
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Brands that inject their beliefs, data, stories, and real voice into content become reference points in their category.
Generic content doesn’t just fail to add value; it actively dilutes your positioning.
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AI has multiplied the problem—but it’s not the root cause
Let’s address the obvious: AI has made bad content faster to produce.
Before AI, you still had content farms producing thousands of low-quality posts. AI just democratized this. Now anyone can do it, almost for free.
But here’s what most people miss: AI didn’t invent generic content; it simply exposed how much of it was already generic.
The reason the value of generic content is dropping is:
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There’s more of it than ever.
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There is less patience for it than ever.
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There are better alternatives than ever (expert podcasts, niche newsletters, practitioner threads, high-quality videos, communities, etc.)
In other words, AI accelerated the decline of generic content’s value, but the underlying direction was already set.
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Decision-makers need more than “information”; they need confidence
If you’re selling to founders, executives, or owners, remember this: they are not short on information. They are short on trusted perspectives.
In my conversations with leaders, these are the questions behind their content consumption:
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“Who really understands this problem?”
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“Who has done this in the real world, not just in theory?”
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“Who can I trust to guide me, not just educate me?”
Generic content answers “what” and sometimes “how,” but rarely “why this way and not that way, based on real experience.” That missing layer is where trust is built.
This is also why thought leadership is not about sounding smart—it’s about being specific:
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“Here’s what worked for us and why.”
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“Here’s what failed and what we’d do differently.”
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“Here’s where I disagree with the mainstream narrative.”
That level of specificity is exactly what generic content cannot produce.
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The cost of generic content is hidden, but very real
Many executives still think: “Even if generic content doesn’t help much, it doesn’t hurt either, right?”
From what I’ve seen, it does hurt. Here’s how:
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It burns time and budget
Teams spend hours reviewing and polishing content that will never win trust, rank meaningfully, or be remembered. -
It fills your site with noise
When a prospect visits your blog and sees endless surface-level posts, they subconsciously downgrade your expertise. You look like another company “doing content” because someone told them to. -
It confuses your positioning
If your content doesn’t consistently reflect your angle, your philosophy, your hard-earned lessons, your brand becomes fuzzy. People can’t articulate what you stand for or why you’re different. -
It lowers internal standards
If “publishing something” is the goal, quality inevitably drops. Over time, even your best people stop trying to contribute meaningful content because the bar is set at “volume, not value.”
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What high-value content looks like now
To be clear: content itself is not losing value. Generic content is.
What holds value—and is actually increasing in value—is content that is:
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Rooted in lived experience
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Impossible to fully copy
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Tied directly to your product, customers, and point of view
You can see this in the way strong brands operate:
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Stripe: Their content goes deep into developer and financial infrastructure topics, often with a level of detail and clarity that comes from being in the trenches, not rewriting others’ posts.
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Shopify: Their best content doesn’t just say “start an online store.” It walks through real merchant stories, data, and tactics seen at scale in their ecosystem.
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Notion: They highlight actual user workflows, real teams, and unique use cases. Their content and their product stories blend together.
Notice the pattern: their content is an extension of their DNA, not a generic “industry tips” blog that any competitor could copy.
In my own work with brands, the content that consistently performs has these traits:
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It names real mistakes and real wins (“Here’s how we lost a big client by doing X—and what we changed.”)
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It is specific to the company’s context (“In our space, this tactic failed because…”)
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It’s written or shaped by people who actually do the work, not just write about it
This kind of content is harder to create. That is exactly why it still has value.
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How founders and executives should respond
If I had to condense 20 years of watching this landscape into a few practical directives, they would be:
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Stop measuring success by “number of posts”
Shift from volume to impact:
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Which content pieces actually drive qualified leads?
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Which posts are referenced in sales calls?
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What do customers mention back to you?
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Tie content directly to your unique advantage
Ask:
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What do we know that most of our competitors don’t?
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What have we seen go wrong over and over in our industry?
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What do we believe that not everyone agrees with?
Build content around those questions. That’s where defensible value lives.
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Get your real experts involved
Your best content will come from:
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Founders who can articulate vision and lessons
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Product leaders who understand trade-offs
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Sales and customer teams who see real objections and real use cases
You can use writers or AI to polish and structure. But the thinking must come from inside the business.
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Be willing to delete or ignore low-value content
Cleaning your content is like cleaning your product roadmap:
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Remove what doesn’t serve a purpose.
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Focus on what clearly ties to strategy and differentiation.
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Treat AI as an accelerant, not an author
AI can help you:
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Draft outlines
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Rephrase, shorten, or expand
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Explore angles
But if you use it to generate “filler,” you’re just adding to the ocean of zero-value content. The real value is in what only you can add: the insight, the judgment, the real stories.
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The bottom line: the market has moved on
To sum it up plainly:
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Generic content is dropping to zero value because it’s now cheap, abundant, predictable, and easy to ignore.
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Users are more skilled at filtering noise than ever before.
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Search engines are actively discarding shallow, repetitive material.
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Decision-makers don’t reward “information” anymore; they reward clarity, perspective, and courage.
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Brands that keep publishing generic content are training the market not to listen to them.
If you’re leading a company, you have a choice to make right now.
You can:
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Continue to produce what everyone else is producing, hoping volume will win.
Or you can:
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Decide that every piece of content carrying your logo will reflect lived experience, sharp thinking, and a clear point of view—even if that means publishing less often.
From what I’ve seen, across industries and over two decades, the second path is where the long-term winners come from.
The era of being rewarded just for “having content” is over.
The era of being rewarded for having something real, specific, and hard to copy to say—that is just beginning.