I’ve been watching something shift in real time across every client analytics dashboard we manage.
Traffic from Google is down. A lot.
AI overviews are eating the click. People are asking ChatGPT or Perplexity for answers instead of scrolling through ten blue links. And when they do land on a page, they’re not always coming from a search engine anymore—they’re coming from a recommendation buried inside an AI-generated response that scraped your site without leaving a fingerprint.
The old playbook—keyword optimization, backlink strategies, technical SEO—still matters. But it’s no longer enough. You can do everything right structurally and still disappear, because the systems deciding who gets cited and who gets ignored are playing by different rules now.
Being optimized used to be the whole game. Now the question is whether you’re worth citing.
Volume Isn’t the Answer Anymore
Everyone’s racing to produce more content faster. The logic makes sense on paper—if visibility is harder to earn, you flood the zone. More blog posts. More social updates. More clips. More everything.
But here’s what I’m seeing in practice: the brands producing the most content aren’t the ones getting traction. The ones producing the right content are.
I had a conversation recently with a client who was frustrated because their competitor seemed to be everywhere—posting daily, running campaigns, showing up in every channel. Meanwhile, our client was publishing maybe once a week, and they felt like they were losing ground.
So we looked at the data.
The competitor had volume. Our client had depth. The competitor’s content was getting seen but not remembered. Our client’s content was getting shared, cited, and referenced months after it went live.
One was chasing the feed. The other was building a foundation.
In any vertical, content quality drops off steeply once you get past the first few percent of creators. I’ve watched that pattern play out across industries for years. And what separates that top tier from everyone else isn’t budget. Talent, in the traditional sense, isn’t it either.
The difference is taste.
What Taste Actually Means
A mentor of mine used to frame this as a question of taste. And I think they were right—but not in the aesthetic sense most people assume.
They weren’t talking about design preferences or stylistic choices. Taste, the way they meant it, is understanding how to do the job your content does in your audience’s life in the most refined, elegant, enriching way possible.
Most brands start with what they want to say. The ones with taste start with what their audience needs to hear in they method they most enjoy hearing it.
When you understand the job your content needs to do, you stop chasing engagement for its own sake. You stop trying to be everywhere and start being useful where it matters.
Taste is the ability to see your content from the receiver’s perspective before you hit publish.
I spent years in radio before I moved into digital strategy, and that discipline—thinking from the listener’s side of the signal—carried forward into everything I do now. You can’t see your audience when you’re broadcasting. You can’t watch their face or read their body language. You just have to know what they need and trust that if you deliver it clearly, they’ll stay tuned.
No framework hands you that instinct. It grows out of empathy paired with repetition. You watch what works. You notice what doesn’t. You adjust.
Two Different Muscles
Here’s where most brands stall: they confuse two completely different skill sets.
You need a product or service that fulfills what it promises in your customers’ lives. That’s step one. If what you’re offering doesn’t actually solve the problem, no amount of storytelling will save you.
But step two is just as critical: you need the tasteful, honest storytelling that moves people from problem-aware to solution-aware. You need to meet them where they are and guide them to where you can help.
These are different muscles. And the brands that try to do both without recognizing the distinction end up stuck.
I see this all the time with mission-driven organizations. They’re deeply expert in what they do—healthcare, community services, nonprofit work—but they haven’t built the muscle for translating that expertise into content that resonates with the people who need it most.
I don’t say that as a criticism. Building the thing and explaining the thing require different orientations, and very few teams are built for both.
The fix isn’t complicated. You start small. You audit what you already own—your website, your platform, the places where you control the message. You make sure that foundation is solid. Then you figure out how to amplify it across the channels where your audience actually spends time.
But you don’t skip the foundation work. You don’t chase the feed before you’ve built something worth finding.
What AI Is Actually Changing
The AI content wave goes deeper than tools that write faster. The whole way people find and consume information is shifting.
When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, they’re not clicking through to compare ten different sources. They’re trusting the system to surface the right answer. And that system is making decisions based on what it scraped, how authoritative the source appears, and whether the content is structured in a way that makes it easy to extract and cite.
You can’t game that the way you could game traditional SEO. There’s no transparency. The platforms don’t tell you how you’re performing relative to competitors. You can’t buy your way to the top of the results.
What you can do is make sure your owned content is useful and actually authoritative. You can invest in being cited by trusted sources—journalists, influencers, platforms where real people are having real conversations about your industry.
You can build the kind of presence that makes you the obvious reference when someone needs an expert perspective.
The brands winning right now are producing better content with more intention—not more of it. They understand that volume without taste is just noise. And in a landscape where everyone has access to the same tools, the same formats, the same distribution channels, the only real differentiator is whether you understand what your audience is actually looking for—and whether you can deliver it in a way that feels honest, helpful, and human.
Taste Is a Practice
Nobody’s born with taste. You develop it the way you develop any practice—through attention and repetition.
You start by paying attention to what your audience does, not just what they say. You watch the analytics. You notice which pieces get shared, which ones get ignored, which ones people come back to months later.
You ask better questions. Not “How do I rank higher?” but “What job is this content doing for the person who finds it?” Not “How do I get more traffic?” but “What happens after someone lands on this page?”
You stop optimizing for the algorithm and start optimizing for the human on the other side of the screen.
That shift takes patience. It means letting go of the shortcuts that used to work, and building something that lasts instead of something that performs well for a week and then disappears.
But it’s the only path that compounds over time.
I work with organizations that don’t always have massive budgets or full-time content teams. They can’t compete on volume. So they compete on usefulness. On depth. On being the source people trust when they need an answer.
A small budget turns out to be a forcing function. It makes you better at the thing that actually matters.
Where to Start
Audit your owned platform. Your website. Your core presence. The place where you control the story.
Make sure it’s fast, and make sure it works for the people who need it most—not just the people you wish were looking.
Then make sure there’s a slice of that platform designed for the journalists, the influencers, the people who might cite you. Press materials. High-quality images. Plain-language explanations of what you do and why it matters. Everything they need to tell your story accurately.
You’re not going to snap your fingers and suddenly be authoritative in AI search results. You’re not going to game the system. You’re going to do the slow, unglamorous work of being useful and worth citing.
And over time, that compounds.
The brands that understand this are building something durable. The ones still chasing volume are burning resources on content that won’t matter six months from now.
Taste is the long game. It might be the only one left worth playing.
