I open LinkedIn, and I can feel it before I’ve scrolled past ten posts.
The blur.
Post after post that sounds… the same. Same structure. Same cadence. My thumb keeps moving without me even deciding to.
We say it at Syrup all the time: we are selling to humans first. And somewhere in the last couple of years, a lot of B2B companies forgot that.
When AI content tools showed up, creating content became accessible to everyone (especially for folks like me who aren’t great writers). So we all cranked up the volume, right? More blog posts, more LinkedIn posts, more landing pages.
More, more, more.
But buyers can feel it, and they don’t stick around long enough to figure out if there’s anything real underneath.
And Google isn’t letting it slide either.
Not necessarily because it’s AI-generated, but because most of it lacks the depth and originality Google’s looking for.
A 16-month experiment from Search Engine Land tracked 2,000 AI-generated articles across 20 brand-new domains with no authority, no original expertise layered in, and zero human editing. Early results actually looked promising: strong indexing in the first month, impressions climbing, and keywords ranking. When I first read this study, I thought we were going to see a case for more AI content.
But wait… Around month three, almost everything collapsed. Only 3% of pages stayed in the top 100. The content was still indexed, but it just disappeared from anywhere a real person could find it. After 16 months, most sites never recovered.
This “shortcut” ended up being the long way around.
The tool isn’t the problem
A recent Ahrefs study actually found that over 80% of top-ranking pages now include some level of AI assistance, and Google has confirmed they don’t penalize content just because AI helped create it. The issue isn’t AI itself. It’s content that lacks expertise, originality, or a genuine point of view. AI just made it really easy to produce that kind of content at scale.
The Search Engine Land experiment didn’t fail because AI wrote the articles. It failed because nobody added anything worth reading.
Google has been telling us this for years: content without genuine expertise or an original point of view doesn’t hold, regardless of how it was made.
Okay, so how does this apply in our space?
B2B buyers are researching and building a mental shortlist long before they ever fill out a form or talk to your team. If the content they find along the way sounds like everything else, you’re not on the shortlist. Heck, you might not even be visible at all.
The content that actually stops the scroll right now? It’s the stuff where you can feel a real person on the other end of it. There’s an actual human in there with a point of view. That type of originality and clarity is what builds trust and keeps you in the running.
Volume isn’t the play anymore. Saying something only you can say is.
If you’re thinking about how your content strategy actually holds up right now, start with your messaging. Are you saying something that only you can say? Or does your content sound like every other company? We dig into that question more here.
And if you want to go deeper on what modern B2B marketing actually looks like when it’s working, our full resource is over here.
