The phone call no agency wants to get
Two of our clients rang us in September with the same problem: organic traffic had fallen off a cliff.
Both had been using AI content generation tools — platforms like BlogSEO and SEO.ai that promise to auto-create blog posts at scale by connecting to your keyword research tools. Both had ignored our warnings. And both had just been hit by Google’s August spam update.
One site lost 70–80% of its traffic. The other wasn’t far behind.
We’d flagged the risk months earlier. The clients saw short-term wins and kept going. Now we’re rebuilding from scratch.
This is what we learned — and what you need to know if you’re using (or considering) AI content tools for SEO.
How the AI content-at-scale trap works
The pitch is seductive: connect the tool to Ahrefs, SEMrush or Google Search Console. It pulls the keywords you’re already ranking for (or *could* rank for), generates articles targeting those terms, and publishes them automatically.
No writers. No editors. No strategy meetings. Just content, at scale, optimised for Google.
For a while, it works. Traffic ticks up. The tools are cheap. You’re publishing ten posts a week while your competitors publish two a month. You feel like you’ve found a shortcut.
Then Google’s algorithm catches up.
What Google actually saw
One of the affected sites had five sales pages and 650 blog posts created in a year.
Think about that ratio for a second. If your business only has five pages explaining what you sell, you probably don’t have a newsroom of ten writers working full-time. A small regional news agency would struggle to publish 650 original articles in twelve months.
Google knows that. And volume alone became a signal.
But the real problem wasn’t just quantity — it was quality, or the lack of it. The AI-generated posts weren’t marketing material. They were code. Keyword-density calculators dressed up as blog posts. Every article followed the same structure, hit the same talking points, and regurgitated the same information already covered by a hundred other sites.
There was no original research. No persona work. No consideration of where the reader sat in the buying journey. No brand voice. Just: “These are the keywords, therefore these are the elements we need to mention.”
The tools weren’t writing to help users. They were writing to tick boxes for Google. And Google noticed.
The August spam update and what it targeted
Google’s August 2024 spam update specifically targeted low-quality, auto-generated content published at unnatural volume. The algorithm didn’t need to read every word. It looked at patterns:
- Publishing frequency inconsistent with team size or business model
- Near-identical content structure across hundreds of posts
- Lack of original data, quotes, case studies or brand-specific insights
- Keyword targeting with no clear user intent or funnel alignment
Sites that had been riding the AI content wave for six or twelve months saw rankings collapse within days of the update rolling out. Some recovered partially by pruning low-quality pages. Others — including our two clients — are still rebuilding months later.
Why informational content is struggling (even when it’s good)
There’s a second, broader trend at play here: AI Overviews are decimating informational search traffic.
Over the last two to three years, we’ve watched informational queries (how-to guides, explainer posts, definition articles) lose click-through rate as Google surfaces AI-generated summaries at the top of the search results. Users get their answer without clicking through.
Transactional queries — product pages, service comparisons, vendor searches — are holding steadier. Clicks are down a bit, but nowhere near the collapse we’re seeing on informational content.
What that means: the old playbook of “write 50 blog posts and wait for traffic” no longer works. Top-of-funnel content has less ROI than it did two years ago. If your SEO strategy relies on high-volume informational posts, you’re playing a losing game.
The opportunity hasn’t disappeared — it’s moved. You need content that delivers value Google can’t summarise in three sentences at the top of the SERP. That means:
- Client stories and case studies with real numbers
- Proprietary frameworks and processes
- Contrarian or counter-intuitive takes backed by evidence
- Tools, calculators, templates — things people need to download or interact with
- Long-form content that builds trust and positions you as the obvious choice when the reader is ready to buy
And you need your transactional pages dialled in, because that’s where the traffic still converts.
The real problem: AI without strategy amplifies the mess
We’re not anti-AI. We use it every day — for research, drafting, editing workflows, image briefs, data analysis. But here’s the thing:
AI won’t fix your content strategy if you don’t have one.
Manufacturing plants can’t switch to AI-driven automation until they have clean, structured data coming from the factory floor. Same principle applies to marketing. If you don’t have your personas defined, your funnel mapped, your brand guidelines documented, your messaging hierarchy clear — feeding all that chaos into an AI tool just amplifies the mess.
You end up with 200 blog posts that all sound the same, answer questions nobody asked, and get ignored by Google and humans alike.
The AI era hasn’t reduced the need for marketing fundamentals. It’s increased it. You need to know your customer’s problem. You need a point of view. You need to understand where each piece of content sits in the journey from stranger to qualified lead.
Then — and only then — AI becomes a force multiplier. Without that foundation, you’re just making noise at scale.
What we’re doing now (and what you should check)
We’re rebuilding both affected sites with a different approach:
Audit and prune. We’re reviewing every AI-generated post and either deleting it, consolidating it with similar content, or rewriting it with original research and client-specific insights. Expect to cut 60–80% of the volume.
Define the foundation. Persona work. Funnel mapping. Messaging hierarchy. What problems do our clients solve? What language do their customers use? What objections come up in sales calls? This should have been done *before* publishing a single post.
Shift to quality over volume. Fewer posts. Higher value. Genuine expertise. If we can’t add something new to the conversation, we don’t publish.
Focus on transactional content. Product pages, service pages, comparison content, case studies. That’s where traffic still converts. Informational content supports it, but it’s no longer the primary driver.
Use AI as part of a workflow, not as the workflow. AI helps with research, drafting and editing. It doesn’t replace strategy, original thinking or human judgement.
If you’re using AI content tools — or considering them — ask yourself:
- Could a stranger tell your content apart from your competitors’?
- Does each post answer a specific question for a specific person at a specific stage of their journey?
- Do you have the marketing foundation (personas, funnel, strategy) in place before you automate?
- Is your publishing volume consistent with your team size and business model?
If the answer to any of those is no, you’re at risk.
SEO isn’t dead — but the lazy version of it is
SEO is changing, not dying. The knowledge graph that powers Google’s search results is the same infrastructure now driving Claude, Perplexity and every other AI search tool. Search functionality persists. The interface is shifting.
What’s dying is the shortcut mentality: keyword-stuff your way to the top, publish at volume, game the algorithm. Google’s spam updates are getting smarter. AI Overviews are changing what content gets clicked. And users have higher expectations than ever.
The businesses that win in this environment are the ones that treat content as marketing, not as code. The ones that understand their customers, have a point of view, and use AI to execute faster — not to replace thinking altogether.
If you’re not sure where you stand, let’s talk. We offer a free 30-minute strategy call — no pressure, no jargon, just honest advice on what’ll actually move the needle for your business.