What kinds of content still work now that AI can generate anything?

Three categories hold up. Original research, meaning surveys and insights drawn from your own systems and customer base, because a model cannot run your survey or read your platform data. How-we-built-it content, where engineers walk through the architectural decisions and trade-offs they actually made. And launch content that crisply explains what the product is, who it is for, how to start, and what it costs. Everything else is answerable by a chatbot.

Why do programmatic SEO glossary pages stop working?

Because the page has no unique data behind it. A template filled with generated definitions is a worse version of an answer a chatbot gives directly, so visitors bounce almost immediately. Programmatic SEO still works when each page carries something nobody else has, like real listings or real integration data. The technique is not the problem. Filling it with generated prose is.

What is how-we-built-it content?

An engineering account of how something was actually constructed, not a description of what shipped. It covers the architectural decisions, the trade-offs weighed, and the lessons taken from how the problem was solved before. Other engineers value it because those decisions cannot be inferred from documentation, which makes it some of the most useful material a technical marketing team can publish.

Is there any place left for AI-generated content?

Yes. Internal documentation is a reasonable use, and so are routine posts where nobody expects an original idea. The line falls at original thinking. If the piece depends on an insight that is yours, the writing has to be yours too, because readers can generally tell when the ideas are borrowed from a model rather than lived.

Should startups still write how-to tutorials and comparison posts?

They are a weak investment now. The answers that kind of content delivers come straight from an LLM, so a reader asks a chatbot instead of finding your page. A smaller company gets far more out of original research, engineering content unique to what they built, and launch content with strong positioning.

The content that can't be generated

This last year I've run several experiments with AI generated content. And they all sucked.

They sucked a lot.

The first thing I did was I created 700 glossary pages. All the stuff that you would do in the old Programmatic SEO era. It cratered all my numbers in terms of engagement and visitors on the website. Then I created a blog where I would dictate to AI, this is what I want the blog to say, these are the points I'd like to make, this is my learned experience. And then the AI would actually write the blog post. And those blog posts didn't perform. Sure, the ideas were mine, but the writing wasn't and people could probably tell.

An aside about AI content

Now, I'm not opposed to AI generated content. I think it has its place. Internal docs, sure. Maybe even most perfunctory blog posts, too. But blog posts where you have an original idea, I think that needs to come from you.

I write a lot of fiction (including a novel that's coming out in September 2026). Those words come from me. Those stories come from my heart and my experiences and observations. They run the gauntlet of real developmental, copy, line, etc. editing. So in the end, the words are mostly mine. But the stories and soul remain from me at all times.

Original research

So what actually works? What actually is the kind of content that matters that can't be generated?

The first kind of content that can't be generated is original research. Surveys. Information that you've gleaned from your own systems. If you have a lot of customers, what kind of information do all those customers generate? Think the Supabase State of Startups survey or the Carta data desk. What kind of trends and insights can you get from your customer base and how they use your platform? That kind of content always performs.

How we built it

The second kind of content that works is "how we built it" content. Get your engineering team to explain how they built a technology. It's not just this is what it is and this is what we've shipped. It's this is how we built it. These are the architectural decisions that we made. These are the things that we learned from history about how this was done in the past and how it needs to be done in the future. And that kind of information about the trade-offs and the real decisions that engineering teams make is the kind of thing that other engineers really love. And in developer marketing and technical marketing, that is invaluable information.

Launch content

And the third kind of content that works is the classic product marketing launch content. Content that crisply explains what the product is, who it's for, how to use it, how to get started, how much it costs. That kind of information really works as well, and it's all necessary, too.

What doesn't work anymore

So if I were to think about all the other kind of content that I could create. The how-to tutorials. The blog posts about a certain topic. Finding topic clusters to become an information expert.

That kind of content doesn't work anymore, because the answers that kind of content delivers just come from LLMs. You ask ChatGPT, ChatGPT tells you. Comparison content, ChatGPT figures it out for you.

I think there's a really good argument to be made that this kind of programmatic content can be generated for LLMs to crawl and index in a way that is invisible to your site visitors. And we will explore that in a later blog post.

But right now, it's pretty evident what does and does not work anymore.