Liam Rogers is a former S&P Global industry analyst and current content marketer at Informa TechTarget. Recently, he spoke with us about AI in marketing, content credibility, and the future of content. It’s perhaps worth noting that these are his personal perspectives, not official statements from his employer, but they show us a deep dive into how an experienced marketer approaches the current changes in AI and content.
Background: From Analyst to Content Marketer
nDash: How does your experience as an analyst shape the way you think about content today?
Liam Rogers: I used to be an industry analyst for S&P Global. So, I’m accustomed to discussing emerging technology and staying up-to-date on the latest developments. That background taught me to think critically about new trends, even when information is incomplete.
Now, as a content marketer at Informa TechTarget, I still track how technology impacts the way people consume content. Historically, TechTarget is a media company at its core. Developments in AI are especially relevant because they influence how we create content and how audiences discover it.
How AI Is Reshaping Content Visibility
nDash: What are the biggest challenges for SERP’s in the AI-era?
Rogers: For me, visibility is the biggest issue. Generative AI is becoming a barrier to content, both in production and in discovery.
Take Google: its ad revenue is still strong for now, but that may change as AI overviews take up more space. Page one of the SERP already feels like page two, because you’ve got to scroll past ads and AI summaries before you see organic content.
That said, there still appears to be a correlation between SEO and AEO. If you rank strongly in search, you’re more likely to appear in AI overviews. Relevance seems to be an important factor, with summaries often pulling the most timely content.
I’ve experimented with tools like Otterly, which position themselves as a GEO tool, and they highlight another challenge: the models are constantly changing. Companies are experimenting with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where they pair an LLM with a proprietary database to provide hyper-personalized answers.
That approach is practical for product-specific questions. It also creates fragmentation, since every company develops its own model variation with its own guardrails. There are a lot of walled gardens, and many companies incentivize employees to stick to the one they’ve provided.
The optimization tools haven’t caught up. One of the biggest SEO vendors is still using vague language like “this factor might carry weight.” It feels a lot like the early days of AIOps in IT Infrastructure, where AI made recommendations but nobody fully trusted the black box. Currently, nobody really knows the rules, which makes marketers nervous and tools less trustworthy.
👉 Click here for more information about LLM optimization and AEO strategies: LLM Optimization Explained: Steps to Get Found by AI, Not Just Google – nDash.com
What Every Content Marketer Needs: Quality, Quantity, and Relevance
nDash: How do you define and ensure content quality in the age of AI?
Rogers: I put it into three buckets: quantity, quality, and relevance.
As a marketer, you need enough quantity to fuel campaigns, but you can’t ignore quality. If someone actually engages with your content, it needs to be good enough to keep you on their shortlist. And then there’s relevance: your content has to be timely and aligned with your audience. You’re missing the mark if you write about last year’s integrations while your audience is focusing on this year’s.
AI can help with scale, but it can’t replace human judgment. If your content isn’t strong to begin with, turning the volume up with AI just compounds the problem. There’s value in content and idea curation, and that’s still a human art.
👉 Click here for more information about balancing AI trends with content strategy: AI Trends from 2022 to 2024: What Content Marketing Managers Need to Know – nDash.com
Mindful vs. Mindless Content Consumption
nDash: What does “mindful” versus “mindless” content consumption mean?
Rogers: I used to call it voluntary and involuntary, but mindful and mindless feels more accurate.
Mindless is when you follow an algorithmic feed, like TikTok, and scroll without much thought. Mindful is when you’re seeking something out. In B2B tech, the stakes are high, so buyers tend to be mindful. If you’re researching a tool that could affect your budget and career, you’re not going to stop at an AI overview. You’ll dig deeper, read vendor content, look for analyst reports, and check customer reviews.
That’s why content credibility is still crucial. Even if AI creates more barriers between your content and your audience, the people who matter most will continue to seek out authoritative sources.
👉 Click here for more information about finding and vetting reliable sources: Best Practices for Finding and Vetting Sources – nDash.com
AI Outreach vs. Human Connection
nDash: Some argue that AI automation signals the death of email as a viable marketing channel. Is that an overstatement, or are we already seeing its decline?
Rogers: I don’t think email is dead, at least not yet. In fact, I think it still works.
Email is still a part of daily life. However, there’s a lot more noise coming into inboxes. There’s hype about AI SDRs conducting prospecting and outreach 24/7 across multiple time zones. The problem is that if you already have weak data or sloppy outreach, AI just amplifies bad practices. You can “speed run” by burning through your whole lead list with no results. I’ve seen pilots of these tools fail because they scale the wrong behavior.
At the end of the day, deals are still made on a human-to-human basis. AI can accelerate the early stages, but ultimately, decision-making always comes down to people.
👉 Click here for more information about how AI is reshaping content marketing workflows: Content Marketing in 2024 and Beyond: AI Marketing Strategies and Content’s Place in It – nDash.com
Why Replacing Writers with AI Risks a Race to the Bottom
nDash: Is cutting headcount to invest in AI-generated content a sustainable strategy?
Rogers: Honestly, it feels like a dog eating its own tail. If you flood the internet with AI-generated content and then the AI starts training on that, the quality of the content tends to decline.
I compare it to MP3 files back in the 2000s. Every time you copied a file, it got more compressed until it sounded terrible. That’s the risk with AI if it trains on itself: the output degrades.
The internet is vast, so it’ll take time before that becomes obvious, but the risk is real. And right now, people can still spot content that’s obviously AI-written. Right now, humans add tonality, perspective, and anecdotes that AI can mimic to a point, but not truly replace.
👉 Click here for more information about freelancers capturing authentic company voice: Can Freelancers Capture Your Company’s POV in Content That Isn’t Strictly About Your Company?
The Future of Credibility in Content Marketing
nDash: How does credibility fit into the future of content?
Rogers: Credibility is becoming the most important factor.
Anonymity and privacy were once part of the internet’s appeal, but now it has become a liability. If you don’t put your name and credentials behind content, you lose trust. You can see this tension with the “dead internet theory,” the idea that bots are communicating with bots, and human presence is diminishing.
People still want credible sources. They’ll reach out to the New York Times, TechCrunch, Reddit, or industry analysts because those names carry significant weight. For content marketers, that means trust signals and authorship will matter more than ever.
👉 Click here for more information about credibility, trust, and source reliability: How the NaNoWriMo AI Debate is Shaping Professional Content Creation – nDash.com
Which Channels Still Work for Content Marketers?
nDash: X is dead. Which marketing channels do you still consider effective?
Rogers: For me, Twitter—or X—has been dead for a while. LinkedIn remains strong, and email continues to perform well.
So I don’t think those channels are dead. The concern is whether they’ll stay effective in the future. One interesting development was Cloudflare suggesting that publishers could charge AI companies for crawling content. If that model takes hold, it could completely reshape the economics of content. CDNs are in a unique position to offer that kind of disruptive model, so it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
👉 Click here for more information about building authentic engagement on platforms that still matter: Posts vs. Articles: Elevating Your LinkedIn Content Strategy – nDash.com
What Makes a Trusted Freelancer Invaluable
nDash: What makes freelance relationships work?
Rogers: At my last company, we worked with a computer science professor who freelanced for us. We could give him a broad topic, and he’d do the research and deliver a solid draft. Then we’d add the company and product-specific details.
That kind of relationship is invaluable. You know the person will deliver every time. The hard part is finding people like that, especially in B2B, where you need someone who knows marketing and IT. That’s where platforms like nDash are helpful, because they make it easier to connect with those trusted freelancers.
👉 Click here for more information about building long-term relationships with freelance writers: What Every Content Marketer Needs to Know About Hiring Freelance Writers – nDash.com
Why Credibility Will Outlast the AI Hype
nDash: Critics say consumers can spot AI’s influence a mile away, making ‘enhanced, not replaced’ a weak defense. How would you counter that view?
Rogers: AI will continue to change how people discover content, but credibility and trust remain timeless. A strong piece of content with a clear point of view, backed by expertise and experience, will always rise above generic output when it matters. For content marketers, the opportunity lies in using AI as an enhancer, not a replacement, and focusing on building lasting trust with their audiences.
Credibility: The Content Marketer’s Most Valuable Asset
At nDash, we believe in highlighting the voices of marketers who are shaping the conversation. Liam’s perspective underscores an important truth: in the future of content, credibility and quality will remain the cornerstones of success.