Search is changing, folks!
People are no longer typing fragmented keywords into Google, scanning only the first page, and choosing whichever title looks least aggressively like nonsense filler content.
They’re now asking full questions, actually typing out real sentences
They’re describing situations, giving the machines context and meaning.
They’re requesting comparisons, recommendations, explanations, summaries, plans, instructions, and decisions.
And instead of a boring list of ranked pages, AI is searching across sources, interpreting information, assembling responses, deciding which ideas deserve to become part of the answer, and presenting it all conversationally instead of as a list of links. Damn gamechanger, it is!
But, for you marketers, classic search engine optimization ain’t dead. Technical performance still matters. Crawlability still matters. Structure still matters. Authority still matters. Links still matter. Being understandable to machines still matters. But, the aim is evolving.
It’s no longer enough to rank. You need to become part of the answer. And that’s now the big mystery.
The great problem marketers are facing
Sorry, but AI now makes your content strategy obsolete.
Anyone can produce a competent summary in seconds. Anyone can create ten tips, seven strategies, five best practices, or the ultimate guide to practically anything.
Agencies are about to become unimaginably efficient at producing content nobody needed in the first place, which means the advantage cannot simply be more.
It has to be better. Not “better optimized” in the traditional sense. Better at being useful. Better at being precise. Better at being trustworthy. Better at being worth finding.
And that, my friend, is where I made up a dumb little framework for AI content strategy. It’s the 3X Framework. (It was XXX, but that seemed like porn, so 3X it became)
Experience. Exactness. Expertise.
From what I’ve figured out about AI search so far, the strongest content tends to accomplish three different things: It creates an experience worth having. It answers something exactly. And it demonstrates expertise that cannot be manufactured by rearranging everybody else’s sentences.
Exactness makes content retrievable.
Expertise makes it believable.
Experience makes it worth choosing.
Together, they create the kind of content both humans and intelligent systems have a reason to value.
Experience: Was this worth the person’s time?
Experience is the human result of the content. It’s what happens inside the reader after they find it.
Did it make them think? Feel? Laugh? Reconsider something? Actually do something?
That’s experience, and experience matters because information alone has become cheap.
AI can do a lot of things nowadays, but what it cannot naturally produce is the consequence of having lived through something.
It has not watched a leadership team accidentally destroy the culture it keeps publicly celebrating. It has not failed miserably and lived to tell the tale. It has not actually used a product or held a brand in its hands!!!
It can describe those moments. It can imitate them. But it does not experience them.
Humans do.
That experience creates stories, tensions, emotional detail, humor, contradictions, examples, and observations that cannot be found by summarizing the first page of search results.
This is not about turning every article into a memoir or storytime. Nobody needs a deeply personal childhood reflection before learning how to change a furnace filter.
Experience must serve the search.
Sometimes the best experience is a clear answer delivered immediately. Sometimes it’s a detailed story showing what happens when theory meets an actual organization filled with actual people behaving irrationally.
The format changes. The obligation does not. The content must fulfill the person who found it.
That’s the distinction between information and value.
Information tells people something. Value changes what they can understand, decide, feel, or do next. Good content now must be a value exchange.
Too much search content confuses volume with value. It assumes that longer means more comprehensive, more comprehensive means more useful, and more useful means more likely to rank. But, experience is not measured by how long someone remains on the page because they cannot find the answer. It’s measured by whether finding the page was worth their time, like this article clearly is for you.
Exactness: Is this precisely what they were looking for?
For years, search content was built around keywords, but AI search is increasingly built around needs.
A keyword is what someone types. A need is what they’re actually trying to resolve.
Exactness means understanding the actual question and answering it with enough specificity that the person does not need to excavate the useful part from beneath a mountain of general information.
This is the difference between “How to improve your marketing strategy” and “How should a regional healthcare organization measure brand advertising when the patient decision may occur six months after the campaign?”
Specificity makes content more useful to the human and more understandable to the machine attempting to retrieve an answer.
But, you cheater, exactness doesn’t mean robotically repeating the exact phrase someone used. It doesn’t mean creating 400 nearly identical pages for every imaginable keyword variation. It doesn’t mean writing “branding agency for healthcare organizations in New England” seventeen times until someone believes it.
Exactness is not repetition; it’s resolution, as in it resolves the exact problem or answers the exact question.
Expertise: Why should anyone believe you?
Expertise is probably the most abused word in marketing.
Everyone is an expert now – a goddamn thought leader. The internet surely doesn’t suffer from a shortage of authority signals. It does suffer from a shortage of demonstrated authority.
Expertise is useful, relevant knowledge and it shows up in the details. It’s the examples, the mistakes, the unusual observations. It’s the ability to actually explain something with nuance.
With expertise and firsthand experience comes insights, data, examples, stories, sources, methods, outcomes, watchouts, dates, credentials, and all those things that prove this was the right thing for the AI to reference.
Know your shit, show your work.
That’s it. Simple formula, right? Be exact, be an expert, be extraordinary, and maybe AI will find you.