More Articles, Same Problem
“I never felt like ‘publish more’ is ever the solution.”
— Abhishek Iyer, founder of ACME.BOT
If you or a content team you’re on are publishing more articles to hit more keywords and reach more people, it’s a familiar instinct. While intuitive, it’s also wrong. Despite output increasing, the pattern content teams are seeing is their results plateauing or becoming narrower. That’s because as AI Overviews capture some decisions earlier in the decision-making journey and take up more real estate, McKinsey estimates 20–50% of traditional search traffic could now be at risk. So while volume isn’t going to solve your problem, that’s not the real issue. Because more of the same content is not driving traffic anymore. What’s really going to help is differentiation — the thing that AI wouldn’t cover in three summarized sentences. The real difference maker isn’t how much you post. It’s what you know that no one else has said.
Why Volume Alone Does Not Drive Traffic
You can’t grow site traffic with just content volume alone, though there is a connection between publishing more and growing site traffic. After approximately 11 posts per month, your blog traffic does begin to flatten. While you’re still publishing, your impact per article decreases.
A fascinating case study from Ahrefs. In August 2023, a site ramped up content steeply. (This is exactly what most teams do.) Within a few weeks, traffic tanked. Not flatlined. Declined. More output, worse results.
The reason is AI overviews. Google is absorbing informational queries before a user even taps on them. Wikipedia research shows that receiving overviews drastically decreases English Wikipedia’s daily traffic to articles by about 15%—with thinner informational content taking a bigger hit. Wikipedia’s learned that definitional queries, simple how to posts, or commodity answers are the first to get eaten up by an AI overview. Publishing more of them only creates more thin content for Google to pull and won’t help.
Consider this – volume doesn’t matter if you’re refilling a bucket with a hole. Similarly, no matter how many articles you produce, you’ve lost clicks for a query AI is able to answer.
The solution to this is not publishing faster. It’s publishing something AI can’t.
The AI Slop Tell: Hedged Content Nobody Cites
“If a real human was really in the loop, the entire article would have reflected that. Strong stand instead of hedged AI pieces.”
— Abhishek Iyer, founder of ACME.BOT
AI-generated content often lacks conviction. It doesn’t have battle scars or take a strong stance. It hedges claims, and uses safe both non-committal language. It neither convinces nor offends.
“The tell is the AI hedge vs not.”
— Abhishek Iyer, founder of ACME.BOT
Just sprinkle a quote into an AI copy and you still have a hobgoblin of hedged slop that’s technically accurate but emotionally inert. That flatness is the tell—nobody who’d actually done the work wrote this.
SurveyMonkey’s Thought Leadership report states that 68% of respondents agree that true thought leaders have expert knowledge from hands-on experience. Content that’s hedged implies that it’s from the opposite perspective— like someone who’s read about or regurgitates research vs. someone who’s lived with the problem.
Google shares this view. The company has explicitly called out commodity content as low-value. What will survive the AI Overview disruption is not the sheer volume of your content, but the unique angle that an AI search engine may not have been able to generate on its own. That’s really the difference that matters.
What Search Actually Rewards Now
Google’s examples clearly show the difference: “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers” is a commodity. “Why We Waived the Inspection” is not. One is a template any AI can generate. The other has real stakes attached.
| Commodity Content | Non-Commodity Content |
|---|---|
| Generic, interchangeable | Firsthand decision with consequence |
| AI replicates easily | Harder to commoditize |
| Buried in AI Overviews | Surfaces as “explore new angles” |
One defining quality that overperforming Pages surviving AI Overview disruption share is a general all-around differentiated, more difficult-to-replicate content.
- Case studies and original research are some of the pieces Google’s ‘Explore new angles’ feature surfaces. The feature’s position at the top of the UX and expectation that users delve into unique angles and takeaways hints at how it works.
- Case studies, original research, and contrarian takes or firsthand accounts can’t be compressed into a neat AI summary like a listicle can.
- Instead of publishing a ton of content to your site, plan to go deep on each page to build topical authority. Five highly relevant pages on a topic will help you perform better than fifty generic ones that don’t provide new insights.
One strong opinion beats ten hedged takes.
The Real Job: Surface the Business’s Sharp Opinions
Differentiated content won’t just fall from the sky. It’s created when you pull out what your leaders actually think – the views & opinions of a company that you can’t outsource to an AI.
Problem: Volume without vision. A lot of content ops teams just crank out pages without tapping into genuine leadership insights. Any business is built on taking a strong position — yet many blogs read like they were passed by legal.
Solution: Interview for conviction. You can ask your founders, “What would you say if you had no constraints on alienating anyone?” That’s essentially what your content will be. For example, McKinsey routinely pairs its expert commentary with proprietary survey data from senior executives to anchor its thought leadership.
Problem: Safe, hedged takes. A lot of biz blogs default to playing it safe — “here are five tips,” “best practices for.” They’re readable, forgettable, and replaceable.
Solution: Commission original research. Whether it’s proprietary data or a groundbreaking case study, original research cannot be replicated by AI and can become non-commodity content. Thought leadership is distinguished by its unexpected views.
Problem: Voice disappears in production. Authentic perspective gets flattened somewhere between brief and draft. But a content operation that understands the business and its opinions—like ACME.BOT—can help make sure that doesn’t happen.
In reality, a content specialist’s job is to make sure the business’s perspective actually makes it onto the page.
Fix the Strategy, Not the Schedule
You don’t need faster workflows — you need purposeful velocity. Quality, relevance, and measurable impact have to stay intact even as you speed up the process. Before you start writing more articles, look back at the content you’ve already published. Is it differentiating you from your competitors to the point they’d find it impossible to publish? Or could any company in your space write the same articles? Google has made it very clear that just because a site has a ton of pages doesn’t mean it’s higher quality. The reality, however, is probably a bit further upstream where pages with actual traffic are creating content that is highly differentiated or unique in a way that makes it difficult for AI to copy exactly. In other words, they’re writing from a real point of view that is informed by real editorial conviction and first-hand experience. The job here is to get your perspective from leadership and incorporate it into your work. Everything else is just moving words around.