Why being human-focused may be the smartest marketing strategy in an AI-driven world.
There is something I find fascinating about the current conversation surrounding Google, AI, and the future of search. Everywhere I turn, business owners are asking the same questions.
How do we get Google to notice us?
How do we appear in AI-generated answers?
What do we need to change on our websites?
What does the algorithm want now?
These are reasonable questions. We all know visibility matters, and the way people discover businesses online is changing rapidly. What surprises me is how few people asking these questions have actually gone to Google itself to see what Google says matters.
Google has an entire website dedicated to helping developers and businesses understand how its search systems work. Buried among the technical documentation is a remarkably straightforward guide titled Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content.
I encourage every business owner to read it. Not just their SEO team, their marketing agency, or their website developer. You, the business owner.
Here is why: when you read through Google’s guidance, something interesting becomes apparent. Much of what Google is encouraging businesses to do has very little to do with trying to outsmart an algorithm. It has everything to do with understanding and serving human beings.
And in a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, I think that being human is more important than ever.
We Have Become So Focused on the Machines That We Are Forgetting We Sell to People
For years, the marketing industry has been teaching businesses how to optimize for search engines. We have studied keywords, backlinks, metadata, content length, page structures, and countless other signals. Entire industries have developed around trying to understand what Google rewards and how to improve visibility.
Some of that work is important. Search engines need to be able to discover, understand, and evaluate a website. Technical foundations matter, and Google explicitly recognizes that search engine optimization can be useful when it supports people-first content.
But somewhere along the way, the objective became confused with the process. We started writing for search engines instead of the people using them.
We created pages because a keyword had search volume, not necessarily because we had something meaningful to say about the subject. We published articles because someone told us Google liked fresh content. We added words because someone believed longer pages ranked better. We built websites around what we thought the algorithm wanted, often at the expense of what the visitor actually needed.
Now artificial intelligence has accelerated the problem. It has become remarkably easy to generate hundreds of pages of polished, technically competent content. Businesses can produce articles, FAQs, service descriptions, and entire websites in a fraction of the time it once required.
More content does not equal more value
We all know the ability to produce more content doesn’t mean we are producing more value. In fact, when everyone has access to technology that can generate similar information, the result can be an extraordinary amount of sameness. Sameness is not a particularly compelling reason for a customer to choose your business.
Google’s guidance begins with a series of questions designed to help website owners evaluate the quality and usefulness of their content. I find these questions interesting because they sound much more like the questions a thoughtful business owner should be asking than the technical requirements we normally associate with search optimization.
Google asks whether your content provides original information, research, or analysis. Whether it offers a substantial and useful explanation of the subject. Whether it provides insights beyond the obvious. Whether it adds meaningful value rather than simply repeating what other sources have already said.
What Google Is Actually Asking Businesses to Do - Write for Humans
If you own a roofing company, what do you know about roofing that comes from actually replacing thousands of roofs? What mistakes do homeowners commonly make? What questions should they ask before signing a contract? What differences in materials, climate, or installation practices might affect their decision?
If you operate a group of healthcare clinics, what have you learned from treating patients that would help someone understand their options? What concerns do patients bring to their first appointment? What misconceptions do they have? What information helps them make a more confident decision?
If you run a tax preparation business, what are the questions your customers ask every year? What situations create uncertainty? What can you explain that would genuinely make their lives easier? That is original value. It comes from experience, expertise, and the daily reality of serving customers.
Google also asks whether the content demonstrates knowledge of the subject and whether a visitor would come away feeling they had learned enough to accomplish their goal. It asks whether the page is something someone would want to share or recommend. It asks whether the information is trustworthy, accurate, and presented with care.
These are not instructions to repeat a keyword a certain number of times. They are questions about whether the information is worth someone’s time. Read that again if it did not stand out like a flashing red light when held against everything we have been told about traditional SEO.
Google Has Something Important to Say About Trust
One of the most interesting parts of Google’s guidance concerns what it calls E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Google is careful to point out that E-E-A-T is not a single ranking factor. Instead, its systems look at a range of signals to identify content that reflects these qualities.
But within that framework, Google places particular emphasis on one of the four elements. Trust.
Yes, trust is the most important element to Google. Not experience, not even expertise, trust. I think that deserves considerably more attention than it receives.
Trust is not something a business can manufacture simply by adding the right language to a website. It develops when the information people encounter is credible, consistent, useful, and supported by evidence.
Claiming expertise is easy. Demonstrating it is different. When a business openly explains how it works, answers difficult questions, shares its knowledge, and provides evidence to support its claims, it moves from asking for trust to earning it.
Google also encourages businesses to consider three questions about their content:
Who created it?
How was it created?
And why was it created?
The last question may be the most revealing.
Why does this page exist?
Was it created because the business has something valuable to share with customers? Or was it created primarily because someone identified a keyword opportunity and wanted more search traffic?
Those objectives are not always mutually exclusive. Useful content can certainly attract search traffic. The motivation matters because it influences what the business chooses to communicate. The customer can often feel the difference.
The Problem With Thinking the Customer Journey Begins at Google
There is another dimension to this conversation that I believe is being overlooked. Even if a business follows Google’s content guidance perfectly, it still needs to understand something fundamental about the people it wants to reach.
What caused those people to begin looking for a solution in the first place?
We have spent decades treating the search as the beginning of the customer journey because search is easy to observe. Someone types a query, visits a website, makes a call, or schedules an appointment. We can capture that activity, put it in a report, and attribute the conversion to a channel.
But the search is often not the beginning of anything. It may be the visible result of a decision process that has been developing for days, weeks, or even months.
Consider a homeowner who eventually searches for an HVAC replacement company.
Perhaps the process began when the house stopped cooling evenly. Maybe the homeowner noticed an increase in energy costs. Perhaps they read an article about heat pumps, saw a streaming television advertisement, spoke with a neighbor, or visited a manufacturer’s website.
Over time, they began to recognize that the problem might require more than another repair. They considered alternatives. They became familiar with certain brands. They developed expectations about cost, reliability, and service.
Eventually, they searched for a company.
If we only measure that final search, we may know how the customer contacted the business. We know very little about what made that business a credible choice. This is why I believe we need to think about marketing as the interaction between two distinct but interconnected layers: the Intent & Influence Layer and the Demand Capture Layer.
Human Behavior Doesn’t Begin With a Google Search
This is where our work understanding the Intent & Influence Layer and the Demand Capture Layer becomes particularly relevant. We have written extensively about these two interconnected layers because they help explain something traditional marketing measurement often misses: the behaviors that lead someone to a business frequently begin long before that person searches for it.
In the Intent & Influence Layer, people recognize problems, explore possibilities, encounter information, and develop preferences. By the time they reach the Demand Capture Layer, where Google excels at responding to expressed needs, much of the decision may already have been shaped. The final search is visible, but the experiences and influences that led to it often are not.
Google may capture the demand. That does not mean Google created it.
And this brings us back to Google’s own guidance about people-first content. If we want to create websites that genuinely serve customers, we need to understand more than the words they type into a search engine. We need to understand the human experiences, questions, concerns, and expectations that brought them there in the first place. That understanding should shape not only what we put on our websites, but also the advertising and information people encounter throughout their decision process.
Your Website Is Where the Two Layers Come Together
Again, we need to look to Google’s guidance about creating content for people. I believe one of the most overlooked roles of a business website is to connect the experiences people have before they arrive with the information they need once they get there.
Every interaction with your brand including every advertisement creates an expectation. If an advertisement tells a homeowner that a company can help them make a smart decision about replacing an aging HVAC system, the website should continue that conversation. It should explain the options, demonstrate expertise, answer the questions a homeowner is likely to have, and make the next step clear.
If the person instead lands on a generic homepage filled with stock photography, broad claims about customer service, and a large button asking them to schedule an appointment, something important has been lost. The advertisement recognized the person’s situation. The website did not.
The same problem can occur in the Demand Capture Layer. Imagine someone searching for an emergency plumbing company. They need immediate reassurance that the company serves their area, handles the problem they are experiencing, and can respond when needed. A beautiful website that makes them search through multiple pages to find that information is not providing a particularly good human experience.
Or consider a family evaluating a health and fitness franchise. An advertisement may emphasize personalized coaching and a welcoming environment, but the website may offer little information about the actual experience, the instructors, or what a new member should expect. The message and the experience are disconnected.
The best advertising, regardless of the layer in which it appears, should reflect what the prospect will actually find when they reach the website.
This is more than consistency in branding. It is continuity in the customer’s decision process.
Advertising should recognize the needs, interests, and concerns that make a person receptive to a message. The website should provide the evidence, information, and confidence that allow the person to move forward.
Sometimes that means answering a question. Sometimes it means demonstrating expertise. Sometimes it means explaining why a particular approach is different. And sometimes it simply means making it easy to speak with a real person.
The website should not be written as a collection of search terms. It should be designed around the human decisions the business wants to help people make. Every advertisement and every communication should reinforce that conversation.
AI Makes Human Expertise More Valuable, Not Less
There is an understandable temptation to respond to the growth of AI by producing more content.
If AI systems are answering questions, businesses naturally want to provide information those systems can discover and use. That is a legitimate objective. We are already seeing producing large quantities of generic information is not the same as becoming a valuable source of information.
Google’s own guidance makes this distinction. It does not prohibit AI-assisted content simply because AI was involved. It warns against creating large amounts of low-value content primarily to manipulate search rankings.
I think the broader lesson is even more important.
AI can help businesses organize information, explain complex subjects, improve accessibility, and communicate their expertise. These are valuable capabilities. But AI cannot manufacture genuine firsthand experience where none exists.
It cannot replace the insights that come from years of serving customers, solving difficult problems, understanding local markets, or recognizing why people make the decisions they do.
When every competitor has access to similar AI tools, the ability to generate polished language becomes less of a competitive advantage. The differentiator becomes the knowledge behind the language and the thoughtful demonstration of trustworthiness.
A business that understands its customers deeply has something meaningful to communicate. A business that understands the questions people ask, the concerns they have, the alternatives they consider, and the experiences that shape their decisions can create information that is genuinely useful.
AI can help deliver that information more effectively. The value begins with human understanding. I use AI all the time to help develop these articles, but the thoughts behind it are mine. AI is the productivity tool, not the answer.
In a world where everyone can produce content, the advantage shifts to those who have something worth saying.
What I Would Encourage Every Business Owner to Do
Before investing in another round of website changes designed to satisfy the latest theory about Google’s algorithm, I would encourage business owners to do something much simpler.
Read Google’s own guidance.
Then look at your website as though you were a prospective customer encountering your business for the first time.
Does the website explain what makes your company different, or does it sound like every competitor?
Does it demonstrate the expertise your team has developed through actual experience?
Does it answer the difficult questions people ask before making a decision?
Does it provide useful information even when the visitor isn’t ready to buy?
Is the information accurate and current?
Can visitors understand who is behind it and why they should trust it?
Is the website easy to navigate, and can people accomplish what they came to do without unnecessary friction?
And perhaps most importantly, does the website reflect the expectations created by your advertising?
These are not just SEO questions. They are business questions.
I would also encourage business owners to spend time understanding what happens before customers contact them.
Ask customers what caused them to begin looking for a solution. Find out what alternatives they considered. Learn what information was helpful, what created uncertainty, and why they ultimately chose your business.
Talk to the people who answer your phones, meet with prospects, and handle customer questions every day. They often understand the decision process better than anyone looking at a marketing dashboard.
Then use that knowledge to inform both your advertising and your website.
The objective is not to generate more traffic. It is to create a more relevant and useful experience for the people most likely to benefit from what your business offers. Traffic and clicks do not necessarily equal revenue. Revenue comes from real people choosing you.
None of this eliminates the need for sound technical SEO, good website architecture, or an understanding of how search systems discover and evaluate information. Those things still matter. Technical optimization should support the value of the content, not become a substitute for it.
To be clear, no checklist, including Google’s, guarantees visibility. Search rankings depend on many factors, and the competitive environment continues to evolve.
What people-first content does provide is a foundation that makes sense beyond any single algorithm or platform. It builds the foundation for trust in who you are.
The Future of Marketing May Be More Human Than We Think
We are entering a period of extraordinary technological change. Artificial intelligence is altering how people find information, how businesses communicate, and how marketing systems identify and reach potential customers.
The temptation is to respond by becoming even more focused on the technology. We want to understand the algorithms. We want to know what AI systems are looking for. We want to find the next optimization technique that will give us an advantage. I understand that instinct. I have spent much of my career working with technology and data, and I believe the capabilities available to us today are extraordinary.
What we often forget is technology is a tool. Its value depends on what we are trying to accomplish with it. Technology by itself never saved anyone.
In marketing, our objective has never really been to generate a click. It has been to connect a business with someone who has a need that business can fulfill. In this AI driven world, the website click has become a vanity metric. The message you create about who you are is delivered across multiple opportunities and platforms.
The Intent & Influence Layer helps us understand when those needs are developing and how information shapes the decisions people make. The Demand Capture Layer helps us connect with people when they are ready to act. The website brings those experiences together by providing the information, evidence, and confidence people need to move forward.
When these pieces work together, marketing becomes more than a collection of channels competing for attribution. It becomes a coordinated effort to understand and serve customers throughout their decision process.
That is why I find Google’s people-first guidance so relevant right now.
We have spent years teaching businesses to write for search engines, structure content for algorithms, and measure success through clicks. Now AI has made it possible to produce more content, faster, than at any point in history.
I truly believe we have been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking how to make Google understand our businesses, perhaps we should be asking how well we understand the people we want to reach.
What causes someone to begin looking for a solution?
What influences the businesses they consider?
What makes them trust one provider over another?
And when they finally arrive at our website, does what they find reinforce everything that brought them there?
Google’s own guidance offers a remarkably simple starting point: create something genuinely useful for people.
The technology will continue to change. The way people search will continue to evolve. AI will become increasingly sophisticated. Let’s not lose site that people will still have problems to solve, decisions to make, and reasons to trust one business over another.
The businesses that succeed in an AI-driven world won’t necessarily be the ones that understand the machines best. They’ll be the ones that use the machines to understand and serve people better.
The most interesting part of the AI search discussion to me is that Google has been telling us to focus on people all along.
For business owners who want to explore Google’s guidance firsthand, I recommend reading Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content from Google Search Central. It is worth reading not simply as an SEO resource, but as a framework for evaluating how effectively your business communicates with the people it wants to serve.
By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm