The relevance of blogs in the age of AI-driven search.
I recently worked with a client whose knowledge of his trade could fill a small library. Countless solutions, proven processes, and an understanding of materials that can only be learned from decades of experience.
His website tells people what he does. But what about everything he knows?
When Searching Became Asking
For years, search engine optimization (SEO) focused on helping Google understand websites. Businesses targeted keywords, built service pages, and competed for rankings. I spent many years writing this exact content.
Those things still matter, but people increasingly search by asking a detailed question, describing a problem, or comparing possible solutions.
And they're asking AI.
Instead of searching for "custom cabinetry Pennsylvania," someone might ask, "What's the best material for built-in cabinets in a humid basement?"
Or, "Can a woodworker reproduce the trim in my 100-year-old house?"
Here's what's different from five or ten years ago.
Traditional search largely presented a ranked list of websites for people to explore. AI-powered search can go further, breaking a complicated question into smaller searches, gathering information from multiple sources, and assembling an answer. Google's own guidance on AI search reflects this shift, emphasizing useful, original content and firsthand expertise.
This has given rise to another term: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)—the practice of making content more likely to be discovered, used, and cited by AI-powered search systems.
That means your website isn't just competing for clicks; it can also become one of the sources used to answer a question.
A small woodworking shop with a particularly useful explanation of historic moldings might be referenced alongside a national manufacturer or an established industry publication.
Being cited in an AI-generated answer doesn't guarantee a website visit, much less a customer. But it creates another opportunity to be discovered, one based on the relevance of your knowledge rather than the size of your advertising budget.
Your website can become discoverable not only through what you sell or how much you spend on advertising, but through what you know.
You’re Already Paying for the Platform
Businesses spend big money trying to get folks to visit their websites. Advertising, sponsored listings, social media campaigns—these are all designed to bring potential customers to a platform they're already paying to maintain.
Don't overlook what the platform could be doing on its own.
Every question you answer, process you explain, or project you document creates another opportunity to appear in a search. And unlike an advertisement, that content doesn't disappear when you stop paying to promote it.
Creating good content takes time and expertise, and organic visibility is never guaranteed. But a useful article can continue working quietly in the background for years.
Social media has its place, but there's a fundamental difference; a social media post depends largely on a platform's feed and algorithms to reach people, and its visibility can be fleeting. A blog lives on your own website, where useful articles can be discovered through searches long after they're published.
And while social media generally rewards a steady stream of new material, a well-maintained blog can build value over time. The two can work together, but they serve different purposes.
You're already investing in the website. Why not make it work harder?
All That Knowledge Sitting in Someone’s Head
Most experienced professionals know far more than their websites reveal.
A cabinetmaker understands which materials behave badly in certain conditions. A landscape designer knows why plants thrive in one location and fail ten feet away. A weaver knows why one fiber or structure works for a project while another doesn't.
These people answer questions, troubleshoot problems, and make informed decisions every day. What they know seems perfectly ordinary to them.
To someone else, it may be exactly the information they've been searching for.
A blog offers a place to share that knowledge where search engines and AI-powered tools can discover and reference it. An article about cabinet materials might answer questions a services page never addresses. Another about matching historic moldings could introduce the business to an entirely different audience.
And those articles can connect naturally to relevant services, projects, and other resources through internal links. This helps visitors find their way from a question to a possible solution while helping search engines understand the relationships between pages.
The result isn't simply more content; it's a website with more ways to be discovered and more useful information once someone arrives.
It's your website working overtime.
The Great AI Content Contradiction
Here's where things get a little bit ridiculous.
As search systems grow ever more capable of finding and presenting detailed information, businesses are being encouraged to produce enormous quantities of AI-generated content.
More articles. More posts. More pages. More words, with fewer people involved.
The result is an internet crowded with AI slop: recycled advice, generic explanations, blatant errors, and polished articles that contribute very little to the knowledge base.
The problem isn't necessarily the use of AI in content; I use it to pull sources and ideas together, and to help structure written content.
The problem begins when producing content becomes more important than having something worth saying.
AI can explain how wood expands and contracts. A cabinetmaker with thirty years of experience can explain why a particular installation failed, what they learned, and what they'd do differently.
One is information. The other is knowledge shaped by experience.
Search systems don't necessarily favor human-written content, but they're designed to surface useful, relevant information. Original insights and firsthand experience can offer something that isn't readily available elsewhere.
That's precisely what experienced professionals have to offer.
But who decides what's worth saying?
Businesses are reducing or eliminating the roles of writers, editors, designers and content professionals at a time when thoughtful communication is becoming more valuable.
I have firsthand experience here, unfortunately. Ask me what happened to an entire industry when ChatGPT went public.
The assumption seems to be that if software can produce the words, the work is done. But producing words was never the whole job. Never mind the enormous body of human work that made that production possible in the first place.
Experienced content professionals ask questions, recognize what's interesting, challenge assumptions, identify gaps, and understand how to communicate information to a particular audience. They often recognize the value of knowledge that a business owner considers completely ordinary.
Removing those people doesn't eliminate the need for those decisions; it simply leaves them to someone else or leaves them unmade. And we can see the results in the AI slop flooding the internet.
We spent years teaching machines to write for us, then started eliminating the people who know what is worth writing about.
We can change that.
Maybe the Answer Is to Be More Human
Not every business needs a blog, and surely nobody needs another generic article about the five benefits of choosing a service.
But many businesses are overlooking one of their most valuable resources: everything they've learned by actually doing the work.
Start with questions customers ask repeatedly. Explain the decisions behind an interesting project. Share a mistake, an unexpected discovery, or something experience has taught you to do differently. Then connect those articles to the rest of your website so readers can discover what you offer.
You don't need to publish constantly. You do need to publish something useful.
And here's the opportunity for smaller businesses: you don't necessarily need a massive marketing budget to become a source of information. A small, independent business publishing deep knowledge of a particular subject can be referenced in an AI-generated answer alongside much larger companies with enormous marketing budgets.
There's no guarantee your content will be selected, but the opportunity exists because of what you know, not how much you spend on advertising.
That's a pretty compelling reason to put some of that knowledge on your website.
I can help.
I build websites and blogs that make better use of what you know, with thoughtful content, clear structure, and search visibility built in.
