Lily Ray 😏@lilyraynyc
Google recently reminded everyone that "non-commodity content" is what wins in search, meaning content with a unique perspective, real E-E-A-T, and genuine lived experience. (BTW, this is an extension of what Google has been promoting in its quality guidelines for years.)
I made a half-joke the next day that many marketers' first thought would be: "How can I automate non-commodity content with AI?"
Real talk: the entire point of non-commodity content is that it requires what AI alone can't deliver: real human experience, real expertise, real mistakes, real product testing, real opinions, real emotions, etc. These are the kinds of insights that only come from actually living through something, and the valuable "human" stuff that other humans actually want to read.
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines made a change a couple of years back to emphasize the amount of "effort" that goes into building a page. While content creation and scaling have become dramatically easier with AI, I don't see Google's fundamental approach changing much. If anything, this leveling of the technological playing field raises the bar for what truly helpful, original content looks like.
If a piece of content can be built with a few button clicks and a 25-minute Claude session, there isn't a lot of effort or originality behind it, even with the best possible workflows and a polished-looking deliverable.
Take product review sites as an example - as this is a category where Google has become extremely strict when it comes to evaluating content quality. The better-performing product review sites actually buy the products, test them for weeks or months, take their own photos, film side-by-side comparison videos, and document genuine pros and cons from hands-on use. A single piece of content like that can take *days or even weeks* to produce. That's real expertise, real experience, and real effort, and it's exactly the stuff that AI can't replicate.
What will stand the test of time, and what I believe search engines and AI assistants will continue to promote, is the hard work being done by sites with real humans providing their opinions, their experiences, their humor and authenticity, and years of detailed expertise. The kind of evaluations only a human can do.
If there's a middle ground where AI assists the process and creates efficiencies, but the content is still truly evaluated and generated by genuine human expertise, then *that's* the happy medium worth chasing.
But my concern is that - in the spirit of AI - many companies will try to automate something that fundamentally shouldn't be automated. They'll build "non-commodity content" workflows and miss the entire point of why users prefer it.
The sites that succeed long term are the ones with real human evaluation happening throughout the process. That part can't be automated. By design, it takes time and effort. That's what makes it good content in the first place.
