With brands that bet on scaling content quickly with AI taking a battering following recent Google updates, it’s now clearer than ever that quality over quantity wins.
Google is done rewarding content that could have been written by anyone, about anything, at any time. And Danny Sullivan was unusually helpful in spelling out exactly what they’re looking for – what he called “non-commodity” content.
After years of watching the SEO industry pump out content that is suspiciously identical to the five pages already ranking for the same query, it’s honestly not that surprising. Google has been signalling this direction for a long time. The difference now is that they’re actually doing something about it.
So what does ‘non-commodity’ content actually mean?
Commodity content is the stuff that fills most of the internet. It’s surface-level, widely available, and replicable by basically anyone – something that has accelerated with the advent of LLMs. It relies on general knowledge, recycled advice, stats, and images sourced from elsewhere. Because there’s nothing genuinely original about it, it struggles to stand out, and increasingly, it struggles to rank.
Non-commodity content is the opposite. It’s rooted in personal experience, professional expertise, and real-world application. It’s the kind of thing that only you could have written, because it comes directly from your background, your clients, your testing, or your research data. It can’t be easily replicated by a competitor without your exact experience behind it. And crucially, it can’t be replicated by AI either.
The days of producing content to fill ‘gaps’ are over if you don’t have something new to add. Simply amalgamating information from 20 different sources to create a 3,000-word-long article doesn’t mean you’ll be seen as an authority anymore by search engines or LLMs (unless you are a mega brand that dominates completely in this space, but even then, the gains might be short-lived).
That being said, I do think this type of content still has its place. For example, a marketing site might well have a blog post on the topic ‘ What is PPC?’. It can help with internal linking and topical authority, act as a resource to direct prospects to, and occasionally comes in handy for low-level link building. It doesn’t need to be anything groundbreaking. But it’s likely never going to rank well, so it’s not where you should be investing the most time and effort.
To put it bluntly: if you deleted your company name from the article and it could’ve been published by any one of your ten closest competitors, you’re producing commodity content.
This is what E-E-A-T is actually about
Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – have been part of their Quality Rater Guidelines since 2014. The extra ‘E’ for Experience was added in December 2022, and at the time, a lot of people treated it as a minor update. Slap an author bio on the page, add a link to their LinkedIn profile, and jobs a goodun.
That approach is not going to cut it anymore.
The distinction Google is now making is between content that describes experience and content that comes from it. Anyone can claim “as an expert in X, we recommend Y.” Non-commodity content doesn’t make the claim; it demonstrates it. It walks through a specific situation, names the variables, shows what happened, and acknowledges what went wrong before getting it right.
Think about the difference between an article that says “Top 10 lip stains” – and it’s just a list of the ‘best’ by aggregate reviews with a link to buy the product, versus one that says “Our beauty experts tested 15 lip stains to see which has the best staying power” – which tests how long they last after eating, drinking, kissing, and has photos and videos of how the products faired throughout the day. The first is commodity content. The second is something nobody else could have written without actually experiencing and documenting it.
Why AI content at scale is going to bite people in the arse
I’ve been watching this play out for a couple of years now, and the brands that went all-in on churning out AI-generated content at scale are already starting to feel it.
If your content strategy is based on producing the kind of content that AI can generate, then you are in direct competition with AI, and you will lose that competition every time.
What Google does need, and what it’s actively trying to surface, is original analysis, real-world proof points, and documented expertise that it can’t generate itself. That’s the content worth investing in. And it’s the content that’s going to hold its ground as AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity get better at summarising everything else.
The painful irony here is that using AI to scale up content was supposed to be an efficiency play. For a lot of sites, it’s turned into a liability as short-term gains are wiped out, which in some cases, is now impacting the entire domain.
How to actually produce non-commodity content
The good news is that if you’re doing genuinely interesting work, you’ve already got the raw material.
Stop regurgitating what’s already out there
If your research process involves looking at the top-ranking pages and rewriting what they say, you’re building on a foundation of commodity content. It doesn’t matter how well-structured your article is or how many times you’ve hit the target keyword. If the substance is the same as everyone else’s, it’ll be treated as the same.
Look at your daily work as a content source
Your best content ideas aren’t going to come from a keyword tool. They’re going to come from the client call where someone raised an objection you’d never considered before, the campaign that produced a completely unexpected result, or the process you spent three years refining that your competitors are still getting wrong. That stuff is gold, but most people never think to write it up. Make sure you check in with sales, product, account management, and customer service teams regularly to surface this information.
Show and tell
Stop telling people you’re an expert and start demonstrating it. Original data, documented case studies, first-hand testing, and specific examples with named outcomes are the things that signal genuine expertise. They’re also the things that get cited in AI-generated answers, which is increasingly where visibility is won or lost.
The human author advantage
There’s a decent argument that the explosion of AI content has made real human authorship more valuable than it’s ever been, not just as a trust signal, but as a genuine competitive differentiator.
If you’ve built up real expertise over a long period of time, published your thinking consistently, and connected your online presence to verifiable credentials and a track record people can check, that’s genuinely hard for a competitor to copy quickly. It takes years to build, but the hard work pays off.The sites that hold and grow over the next few years, both in organic search and LLMs, will be those that invest in content coming from real people with real expertise, backed by the kind of original, specific detail, not AI-generated slop that takes mere seconds to produce. It’s the only content strategy that has ever actually worked long-term, and now Google’s finally in a position to enforce it.