The barrier to faking marketing expertise has never been lower but the penalty for it has never been higher.
In years gone by, if an agency wanted to look busy without doing genuinely good work, they still had to pay someone to write content or make changes to a website. That was a real cost and it put some ceiling on how much low-effort digital marketing work could get churned out and handed to a client as “done.”
That ceiling is basically gone now.
Anyone can generate a plausible-looking blog post, a service page, a set of “SEO-optimised” paragraphs, an “SEO” audit in minutes for close to nothing.
Here’s the part most people haven’t realised yet – it is now a time where it is the cheapest to fake genuine content creation or digital marketing executions. Even Google pushes users of Google Ads to switch all campaigns over to AI Max implementations, but it’s become the most expensive to actually rely on either fake content or poor execution.
I wrote recently about how marketing agencies bait and switch clients, the experienced person sells you, then the account gets handed to whoever’s cheapest to actually do the work. AI hasn’t changed that pattern. It’s made it worse, because now “whoever’s cheapest” doesn’t even need to be a junior person anymore. It can be no person at all and the output if it is written words can still look fluent enough to pass a quick glance or there is trust being placed in AI systems running ads.
Why the penalty side has changed too
This is the part that actually matters for your business.
Google’s own systems, and every major AI search tool alongside them, are getting sharply better at telling the difference between content built by someone who actually knows the topic and content built to look like it. I’ve written in detail about how AI search is changing how customers find your business, and the short version is this: AI Overviews and AI-driven search increasingly answer generic, informational questions directly, without ever sending a click to the website that “ranked” for it.
Generic content doesn’t just underperform anymore. Increasingly, it doesn’t get clicked on at all, even when it technically shows up and that assumes it even got indexed in the first place.
Google has also been explicit, not vague, about what separates content that survives this shift from content that doesn’t. At a Search Central Live event, Google’s own public search liaison laid out a specific framework: content needs to be unique, specific and authentic, a genuine viewpoint or information others can’t easily replicate, grounded in a real, particular situation rather than generic advice, demonstrating real first-hand knowledge.
Google’s own example made the point sharply: “Top 10 Things to Consider When Buying Running Shoes” is commodity content anyone could produce. “Why This Customer’s Shoes Collapsed After 400 Miles: A Wear Pattern Analysis” isn’t, because nobody without that actual customer, that actual pair of shoes, and that actual analysis could have written it. AI-generated filler is, almost by definition, the first kind. It can’t be the second.
This isn't theoretical, it's already showing up in real accounts
Across several real client audits I’ve done recently, the same pattern keeps appearing: branded search, people already searching for a business by name, is holding steady. Non-branded search, the discovery traffic that actually brings in customers who didn’t already know the business existed, is declining, and the decline is concentrated specifically in generic, informational content rather than the pages that actually reflect real expertise.
That’s not a coincidence across four separate, unrelated businesses. It’s the same underlying shift, showing up the same way every time.
It’s also worth knowing this isn’t limited to small businesses cutting corners. Big brands with real budgets have made the same mistake and paid for it publicly. “AI slop” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2025 for a reason, McDonald’s, Valentino and Gucci have all faced genuine consumer backlash over obviously AI-generated marketing in the past year.
A Harris Poll from mid-2026 found 63% of consumers say they’re less likely to buy from a brand they suspect used AI-generated advertising. That’s not a taste preference anymore. It’s a stated reason not to buy.
What this means for anyone paying someone else to do their marketing
If you’re paying an agency or a contractor for content, SEO or marketing execution right now, the two-minute check is more important than it’s ever been:
- Ask who’s actually writing it, and how. A vague answer is itself an answer.
- Look for the specific, not the generic. Real client details, real numbers, a real point of view you couldn’t get from a competitor’s site. If everything reads like it could apply to any business in the category, it probably was written to. If there are no specific case studies, opinion pieces or even posts on LinkedIn showing they are actively in the marketing industry then it should be investigated further.
- Check your own data, not their report. The same free tools that catch fake or generic execution are available to you directly, Search Console will show you exactly which of your pages are actually earning clicks, and which ones are quietly invisible despite technically existing.
- Don’t assume advice given is advice followed. I’ve written separately about why business owners only execute half their marketing advice, and about why keeping the same team on the same approach guarantees the same result. If nothing’s changed about who’s doing the work or how, don’t expect the outcome to change either, however good the plan sounds on paper.
The businesses that will actually benefit from AI making content production cheaper are the ones using it to move faster on genuinely original work, real case studies, real expertise, real specificity, not the ones using it to produce more of the generic content that’s now actively losing ground. If you’re not sure which one you’re currently paying for, that’s worth finding out before the next invoice, not after.
If you want a second opinion on whether what you’re currently paying for is genuinely working, get in touch and I’ll go through the real data with you.
