8 ways marketers can compete with AI-written content

It doesn’t matter how much AI content improves; you won’t get seen if everyone else can produce the same kind of content at the click of a button. In the age of generative AI, marketers have to compete against AI content to even stand a chance of reaching target audiences, by excelling at everything AI can’t do.

Know the limitations of AI content

AI tools like ChatGPT can generate content quickly and their grammatical competence – both in accuracy and complexity – is constantly improving. The latest generative AI systems can pull information from multiple sources and essentially reword it into seemingly original text. This is great for research, summarising information, generating ideas and many other tasks.

In terms of content creation, there are fundamental limitations:

• Information accuracy: This is generative AI’s most obvious weakness and, potentially, one of its most dangerous, considering how confident it can sound when being completely wrong.
• Unique content: Generative AI essentially combines and rewords existing content from multiple sources – it can’t create anything truly original.
• Analysis: AI algorithms can repeat, reword and mix multiple pieces of information into a single piece of content, but they don’t understand information – so they can’t analyse multiple factors to produce unique insights or conclusions.
• Expertise: Tools like ChatGPT have access to vast amounts of information but they don’t have any subject expertise or experience to offer.
• Depth: Generative AI isn’t particularly good at going into any depth – it heavily relies on brief summaries of subtopics, lists, headings and single paragraphs.
• Creativity: AI can mimic and blend existing creative styles, to an extent, but it lacks the personal experience and emotional resonance that drives human creativity.
• Empathy: AI tools don’t understand your target audience or have the emotional capacity to empathise with their needs.

The key question hanging over AI content, at this point, is whether quality will improve. As AI churns out more repetitive content into its primary source of data (online content), this will encourage further repetition, including all of its information inaccuracies and other weaknesses.

Unless the likes of OpenAI can overcome this cycle, the quality of generative AI output is expected to decline as it outpaces content created by humans.

If, on the other hand, AI can solve its self-cannibalisation problem, marketers will have to fight harder to compete with AI content.

How to complete with AI content

Whatever progress AI content makes in the years ahead (if any), the key to competing against it lies in using AI’s weaknesses against itself.

1. Prioritise information accuracy

You’d think Google would have learned from its Bard launch where factual errors wiped $100 billion of Alphabet’s market value. Yet, here we are, in 2025, with Google having to re-edit its Super Bowl LIX ad because Bard’s successor, Gemini, made some outlandishly false claims about global cheese consumption.

For now, information accuracy is the Achilles heel of AI content and it’s also the foundation of building trust with your audience.

2. Optimise for the highest E-E-A-T standards

E-E-A-T has been a big talking point in SEO for a while now and it just so happens that those four pillars of content quality align with AI content’s biggest weaknesses:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authority
• Trust

AI algorithms can’t demonstrate experience or expertise because they don’t have any. More importantly, Google says trust is the most important component of E-E-A-T and how can anyone trust AI content that’s so often factually incorrect?

3. Data-driven insights and analysis

Back up every key point you make with insights and analysis from trusted sources. Don’t stop at simply repeating statistics and base-level interpretations, though. Analyse the insights themselves and offer valuable takes with actionable next steps for your target audience.

4. Extract unique value from information

Generative AI can repeat the same old information and cliches as well as anyone. What it can’t do is understand and contextualise multiple pieces of information and offer unique, big-picture interpretations. So, if you need to cover the topical basics in your content, extract unique value from the standard information. What does it all mean, what are the broader implications and what does your audience need to do about it?

5. Scale up competitor research

In the age of AI content, repetition means you’ll get lost in the noise. So, scale up your competitor research and constantly analyse what everyone is repeating – and what they’re missing.

6. Create purposeful content

Simply filling pages with information isn’t going to cut it against the flood of AI content. As people get more of their informational needs from generative AI, focus on what they can’t get from the technology.

Know what your audience really needs from your content as the landscape changes—entertainment, education, problem solving, etc.—and fulfil the right purpose.

7. Embrace the human touch

This is the perfect opportunity for brands to reassess how they interact with audiences. AI content has a certain (lack of) feel to it and a more humanistic brand voice is a great way to differentiate. Add the human touches your audience craves—authenticity, empathy, emotional resonance, etc.—and genuine engagement.

Lean into the strengths of each channel here. Use social media to connect and interact with audiences, encourage them to create user-generated content and feature them in blog posts – eg: your FAQs answered.

8. Ramp up multimedia content production

AI is pretty good at generating text, but it’s not so handy with other media types: images, video, audio, data visualisations, interactive content, live sessions, etc. Web experiences are increasingly multimedia with short-form video returning the highest ROI across social media in 2024. So, give your audience more of what they want – and what AI can’t.

Building visibility in the age of generative AI

Generative AI is setting a new minimum benchmark for content quality, but it’s also flooding the web with competing content. At the same time, the technology is reducing visibility opportunities in the form of AI Overviews and closed experiences like ChatGPT. Marketers aren’t only competing against rival brands anymore, but also the very tools and platforms we rely on for visibility.

As AI adoption increases, marketers need to offer target audiences what they can’t get from algorithms. At the same time, selecting the appropriate channels, refining targeting strategies and collecting the right data all become increasingly important.

The key positive for marketers right now is that AI disruption and the expansion of search beyond Google are opening up new opportunities. The challenge is implementing an agile, multichannel marketing strategy that can seize new opportunities as platforms embed AI into user experiences.

If you need help competing against AI content or building visibility in the age of generative AI, call us on 02392 830 281 or send us your details below.