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I just had a conversation with a client that sounded a lot like conversations I've had with other small business owners. It has to do with misconceptions of what their marketing content is supposed to do (and be).

My team writes content for this client’s website. We publish consistently, building toward a specific goal: content that AI search engines can find, understand, and use to answer the questions people type into ChatGPT or a Google search bar. This is different from the way we used to do content marketing because the rules governing the role of content in marketing have changed in the AI-search era.

But here's what happens on an all-too-frequent basis: The client reads a draft and says something like, "I wouldn't say it that way," or "I don't think all my customers are going to want to read this one." Then she decides she needs to spend some time on it, do some rewriting herself. The marketing becomes burdensome for her, and she ends up paying for services she's not getting the full benefit of, because A) she's redoing the work, and B) the article ends up sitting on her desk, unpublished.

So what is happening here? A few things. First, she knows her business better than anybody, so she's caught up in thinking of all the ways she does things and explains things and the lens through which she sees her business—as an extension of her. She's also judging each piece of content as if it needs to appeal to and hold the attention of a large audience of human readers, all of whom are assessing whether or not the content "sounds like her."  The problem is that her perceived responsibility to be the "Explainer in Chief" is getting in the way of producing both the quality and quantity of content needed to capture attention in today’s very crowded online world. She is not unique in this regard. This tendency runs through every business owner, myself included. You can't invest so much of yourself in such a demanding pursuit as business ownership without a strong sense of, well, ownership.

So I asked her this question:

"Do you insist that every piece of jewelry you consider carrying is something you'd personally love to wear?"

She laughed. "No," she said. "That would be absurd." If she only stocked pieces she'd wear herself, she'd unnecessarily limit her inventory and fail to appeal to people with different tastes from her own.

"Okay," I said. "Do you require that every piece be able to appeal to 90% of your customers in order to stock it?"

No again. If that were the bar, she said, she'd have almost nothing to sell. Her customers want different things: some want bold statement pieces, some want something they can wear to work every day, some are buying a gift for someone else entirely. She plans her inventory around a broad audience and trusts that each piece, even the ones she'd never wear and even the ones only a fraction of her customers would choose, earns its place because it adds up across the whole collection.

"So here's my question," I said. "Why is your marketing content being held to a standard you don't even hold your product to?"

Why does every article on her website need to sound like her own speaking voice to count as legitimate? Why does she expect every single piece to be something the majority of her readers would actually sit down and read? She'd never apply that standard to a necklace, but she is applying it to a paragraph. 

This is a common misconception that’s worth addressing, because it isn't unique to jewelry stores, and it isn't unique to this client. Small business owners consistently hold their marketing content to standards they'd never dream of applying to their actual products or services. And the result is that they write far less than they should, far less often than they should, and they lose ground to competitors who figured out a while ago that this isn't how the marketing game works anymore.

The Rules Have Changed

Unfortunately, this issue isn’t theoretical. It’s urgent. For years, most small businesses built their traffic on some mix of local search and search engine marketing: showing up in Google search results, ranking for the right local terms, getting found when someone typed in "jewelry store (or whatever) near me." Social media played a stronger role for many very small businesses. But whichever channel got the credit, both relied on rules business owners understood: keywords, hashtags, and relentless posting on social media.

Now the rules have changed. Somewhere between 60% and 70% of Google searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website at all, because the answer just shows up on the results page, generated by AI. When an AI-generated answer appears above the search results, that number climbs into the eighties. Businesses across all industries are experiencing measurable declines in visibility and traffic, and it has nothing to do with any changes they made on social media or anywhere else. AI search has shifted the ground under our metaphorical feet.

How big of a deal is this? Research shows that organic click-through rates drop roughly 61% when an AI Overview appears on a search results page, and the zero-click rate for those queries runs 80-83%. So a business that was getting 500 monthly organic views and loses 40% of them to an AI overview is down 200 views per month. On the other hand, businesses that are cited in those AI-generated answers see about 35% more organic clicks and considerably higher conversion rates than those that aren't.

What does that mean for a small business owner who hasn't changed their marketing approach in years? It means that they are suddenly watching leads and foot traffic dwindle, ultimately reducing revenue. The businesses that figure out how to get found by AI search, and figure it out soon, are going to pull ahead of the ones still curating every piece of marketing content as if it were a fireside chat with the owner. The gap between marketers who understand the new dynamics and those who don't is widening every day.

What AI Search is Looking For

So if a search engine isn't judging your content the way a reader would, what is it judging? Two things, mostly: how recently you've published, and how consistently you post new, helpful information. AI search tools have a documented preference for the most current content. On ChatGPT, a large share of the pages it cites most often were updated within the last 30 days. Same with Perplexity and Google's AI-generated answers.

Without any other way to gauge whether the content they are offering is valid, AI engines use recency and frequency as signals of whether a business is still open, active, and worth trusting. A business that posts on a steady schedule is perceived (by the search engines) to be current and reliable. A business that hasn't touched its site since last year gets a question mark. This may not be a fair interpretation of how the business is actually doing, but it's the way the algorithms work. And the algorithms are in charge of your visibility online.

So the goal and purpose of content creation has changed. You're not building the kind of relationship a novelist builds with a reader who comes back book after book. You're demonstrating, on a reliably consistent basis, that you exist, that you're open, and that you have something useful to say in response to the questions your customers ask. 

Of course, frequent publishing only works if what you're posting actually answers real customer questions. A new date stamp on the same old page doesn't fool an AI engine. The content still needs a real answer, written the way your customer would ask the question, in the language they'd actually use to search. So frequency and consistency get you onto the search engine’s radar. But only clear, direct answers get you cited in search results.

Put another way: It doesn’t matter if the answer sounds the way you speak or says the kinds of things you usually say. The only thing that matters is that the questions you answer are questions your customers are likely to ask.

Here's something else important to note: Even when your content does show up at the top of a search result, the majority of people who see your reference will never click through and read your article. Oh, they might skim it. But what they will certainly do is register that you exist, that you're active, and that you're the answer to the question they asked. Then they'll look for your address, your phone number, or your hours. The data support this: visitors who click through from an AI-generated answer become customers at several times the rate of typical search visitors because, by the time they click, they've already made their decision. Your content did its job well before they ever landed on the page.

Change Your Expectations

The jewelry analogy I offered earlier isn't just about letting go of the idea that you must personally approve of every piece of content and produce content that people universally want to read. It's also important to start planning your content the way you plan your inventory.

You need each piece of marketing content to fill a gap in a collection built for a range of different customers. So now apply that to your content calendar: instead of asking "what interesting article can we come up with this week," "what article would people like to read," or "would I say it this way," ask "does this answer a question a customer is likely to ask?" Instead of asking "would 90% of my readers want to read this," ask "does this add something to the collection of answers my business offers across a whole range of topics?" Some pieces in the jewelry case are old and unusual. Some are safe and reliable. Some are bread-and-butter stock items. Others are rare gems. But each one earns its spot by contributing to the whole, not by being individually and universally beloved.

Move the Bar for Approval

Of course, to succeed in this wild wild west of the internet, you have to move your bar for approval. Not lower it. Change it. It's still important to write clear content that provides helpful information, and ideally that content is literate (this is a reflection on your brand, after all).  But the number of people who need to personally love the content for it to deliver marketing value is startlingly close to zero. Hold your content to the standard of satisfying only yourself, and you'll publish once every six months, if that, because everything has to clear a bar only you can reach. Hold it to the standard of clear, useful, consistent, and literate, and you can publish every week without agonizing over a single sentence.

But! If you're thinking that you can rely on AI to produce this regularly published, consistent content, think again. AI engines also prioritize original content. Research shows that both Google and answer-engine research prioritize content built on "genuine expertise, distinct points of view, and original research," rating that content well ahead of generic material. They are also suppressing mass-produced material (Google actually calls this "scaled content abuse"). So if yours is the only interesting, original, literate content available in a sea of AI-written drivel, yours will be the content that is cited. You see, AI is terrific for searching through millions of words in milliseconds, but it's not so great at producing those words in creative and unique ways.

So it comes down to this: If your team can produce content that answers questions customers might ask—even if it's not something you would have written yourself or would want to read—but is published 200% more often than you'd otherwise manage, this beats a handful of perfect articles sitting on a site that looks abandoned. AI search rewards the businesses that figure this out. It has no way of rewarding a business that's still waiting for the perfect sentence.

The jeweler's case doesn't need every piece to be their favorite. Your website doesn't need every article to be the one you'd frame. It needs to be full, current, and honest about what you sell, and it has to be helpful to people searching for answers. That's a standard you can actually hit every week. And that's the whole point.

And About Losing, Then Reclaiming, the Plot

One of the reasons trade shows are so instructive is that they compress market dynamics into a time-bound, physical space. For a few days, market elements that usually play out at a distance from one another show up in the same building. Buyers, sellers, educators, service providers, logistics teams, security, food service, marketing, operations …  all of it running at the same time, under the same constraints, with real money and real relationships on the line. Then it packs up and goes away.

When a trade show works, you can feel it without needing a spreadsheet to tell you so. All the parties are excited to go, not just because it’s at a spa or in a fun city. They are excited about the event itself. Inside the event, conversations are taking place everywhere. The right people seem to keep finding one another. Time feels well spent. When it does not work, it’s just as apparent, even if no one can quite put their finger on why. There is movement, noise, activity, but something feels off. Artificial even.

My marketing company does mostly B2B marketing, which includes managing trade shows. We have recently taken on responsibility for a new show, and we’ve been struck by how clearly this environment exposes problems that exist not only in trade events, but in marketing in general. The problem is about what happens when you stop seeing the world through your primary customer’s lens, and what it takes to find your way back.

Trade shows are often described as serving two audiences. Exhibitors and attendees. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Exhibitors are the primary customers of a trade show. They fund it. They assume the risk, pay for the booths, the infrastructure, the marketing, the education, and the experiences. Attendees create the value for exhibitors, which makes them essential, but always and only in relation to exhibitor success.

When that relationship is understood and respected, trade shows are remarkably effective. When it starts to blur, shows begin making decisions that feel reasonable one at a time, but collectively undermine the very ecosystem they depend on.

Over time, many shows have drifted in this way. Not because anyone set out to fail them, but rather, because it is easy to confuse activity with progress.

Our most recent show provides some good examples of this. To sell more booths, the show opened the door to exhibitors whose products were more at the fringes of the core category. Those exhibitors, understandably, attracted buyers who were primarily interested in those peripheral products. Over time, the center of gravity shifted, and the vendors who had built the show found themselves becoming less central to it.

Another example - and this is true of a lot of shows - is that to increase attendance, they leaned into exhibitors that offered discounted goods. Attendance numbers improved, but the buyers who arrived were shopping for price, not building supplier relationships. The economic profile of the floor changed, and core exhibitors felt it immediately.

Education, experiences, and events were added to create excitement and energy. Rooms may have been filled and schedules may have seemed busy, but the content and timing were not always designed with exhibitor outcomes in mind. Less qualified buyers showed up for the experiences and education. People were pulled off the floor during times when buying conversations should have been happening. There was a lot of action, but not enough exhibitor value.

None of these choices were irrational. Each one made sense on its own. But trade shows are not collections of independent decisions. They are systems. And systems respond to incentives, not intentions.

And that’s why trade shows are a great analogy for the point I’m trying to make: this is not just a trade show problem. It’s a marketing problem.

The same pattern shows up in product businesses all the time. When companies design everything through the lens of their immediate buyer, say a retailer or distributor, without deeply understanding the end consumer, they produce products or services that seem promising, but they don’t sell. They meet specifications, but don’t generate desire.

When companies design everything through the lens of the end consumer, without understanding the retailer or distributor, they produce offerings that are hard to stock, hard to explain, hard to price, or hard to support. The product may be compelling in theory, but it fails in the distribution channel.

This is the central challenge of B2B businesses. You are not serving two markets independently. You are serving one market through the lens of the other.

Direct-to-consumer businesses do not face this particular tension. Their challenge is different. They design for one customer, one decision maker, one set of expectations. B2B requires balance. Positioning, pricing, packaging, education, logistics, marketing, and delivery all have to work for multiple parties who do not share the same incentives.

Trade shows simply make that balancing act impossible to ignore.

It is tempting to blame the pandemic for the struggles many trade shows experienced. The disruption was real, and the impact was significant. But the pandemic did not create the problem, because trade shows were already suffering in the years before 2020. Sure, the pandemic removed momentum and stripped away habit and routine. And when that happened, many shows were forced to confront a question they had not answered clearly in a long time. 

Who is this show actually for?

When that question is not answered, everything downstream becomes guesswork. Marketing messages lose their impact, education offerings lose coherence, and the exhibitor mix becomes unfocused. The result may be loss of attendance, or it can be the wrong attendance. Either way, the show loses value.

Rebuilding a trade show in this environment is not about adding more: more categories, more events, more excitement. The only way to rebuild is to go back to the original value proposition: What do our primary customers (the exhibitors) need, and how do we deliver that? 

Who should be on the floor? Why should they be there? What kind of business does the show exist to support? And what does not belong, even if it looks like traffic or fun?

A trade show is a temporary city. It has infrastructure, governance, traffic patterns, neighborhoods, and gathering places. The purpose of the show determines who the inhabitants of the city should be. Marketing does the work of attracting those inhabitants, while design and messaging communicate valueand valuesand help avoid identity creep. Sales finds the right people to open the shops. Education provides the knowledge necessary for community prosperity. Events and activations aren’t just for fun - they also influence traffic flow. And both education and events help reinforce a sense of community. 

When those elements are designed through the primary customer’s lens, the city works because it feels intentional. Exhibitors do business, attendees feel their time was well spent, and everyone gains monetary and network value.

When those elements are not designed through the primary customer’s lens, the city still exists. But the people who fund it slowly decide not to return.

Good marketing, whether for a trade show or a business, does not chase attention for its own sake. It attracts the right attention. It focuses on relevance and fit to deliver results. Good marketing is not performative. It doesn’t create activity to look hip or feel busy. It creates alignment so the right things can happen.

Trade shows make this visible because everything happens at once. But the lesson applies far beyond the show floor. When you design products, services or experiences through the wrong lens, growth might still happen, but it will happen in a way that eventually undermines the system supporting it, causing traffic to stall, margins to decrease, or leading to a shift in customers that ultimately aren’t the right ones and can’t support long-term health.

When you design through the right lens, you build something that is more resilient and far more likely to compound over time.

Trade shows, at their best, are not just marketplaces. They are reflections of how well an industry understands itself. And when they are rebuilt with clarity and intent, they can once again do what they were always meant to do. Bring the right people together, for the right reasons, in a way that creates value long after the city disappears.