The AI Edit: How AI is Rewriting the Role of Content Marketing

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EPISODE OVERVIEW

In a world where AI now provides direct answers to search queries, the core premise of content marketing is under pressure. For years, brands created helpful, informative content to attract and convert. But now, users are skipping your blog and getting responses from AI platforms—sometimes without ever reaching your site. 

This episode explores how content marketers must evolve: What do we create when AI gives the answers? What value does content offer beyond visibility? How do we shift from being found to being followed? 

• Content When AI Answers First
• Content Discoverability in AI Search
• AI & Content Planning
• AI Tools for Planning & Performance
• AI in Content Creation
• Scaling Content Production
• Maintaining Brand Voice
• Revisiting Brand Identity
• Equipping AI with Brand Identity
• Better AI Prompting
• Content Authenticity
• Redefining Success
• Measurement & Attribution
• Final Thoughts & Takeaways

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Reid Carr: AI is doing more than rewriting headlines—it’s rewriting the role of content marketing altogether. As users turn to tools like ChatGPT and AI-powered search results for instant answers, brands are facing a tough question: If people don’t need to click, is content still worth creating? In this episode of The AI Edit, we explore how AI is reshaping the strategy, production, and performance of content. We’ll unpack what it means to create for visibility when platforms filter what users see—and how to protect your voice and value in a space where AI may be the one doing the talking. To help make sense of this shift, I’m joined by two folks guiding Red Door’s response: our VP of Data & MarTech, Ron Hadler, and our Social & Content Manager, Meghan Pontius. Together, we’ll dive into the evolving role of content and what it takes to stay relevant—without losing what makes your brand human. Ron, Megan, thanks for coming.  

WHAT HAPPENS TO CONTENT WHEN AI ANSWERS FIRST?

Reid Carr: So we're going to jump right in. I mean, AI has fundamentally changed how people find information. Users get instant answers from chatbots or search summaries often without visiting your blog website or social posts. And it's not just search. I mean AI is changing how people interact with email, social content. They summarize it, filters. I'm going to start with you Megan. A lot of clients ask whether content marketing is still a valuable strategy in the age of AI, and when answers come instantly from search summaries or chatbots, where does that leave the role of content in driving awareness, engagement, and conversion? 

Meghan Pontius: Yeah, I mean, basically all my clients are asking me that right now. I do think it, if we take a step back, it starts with how people have always evaluated content marketing effectiveness. I think people have always seen that as an inbound. We just want to get people to our site. I'm not sure content marketers have always thought of it that way, where we're like, somebody asks the question, we just want to give them valuable content that responds to that question. And when we think about that metric, I think that John always shares is that 5-10% of your audience is in purchase mode at any time. And so content marketing is about keeping them in your orbit even when they're not in that purchase mode. So I think what AI is doing is just forcing people to reframe how they see the value of content marketing, because AI is just another place where answers are being given to people or people are going for answers. 

And so we still want to show up there whether someone's going to click through to our site or not. And I don't think that idea of zero click is necessarily new. We've had people always ask in Google Social has increasingly been a place where I would say the platforms don't want people to click, they don't want people to leave. They want those metrics. So I think it's just more of like, yes, marketing is still a valuable strategy. We just have to reframe our perspective of what does visibility entail, what value does that bring to our brand? And work that zero click mentality into our own understanding 

Reid Carr: And feeling comfortable with visibility happening. I mean, your brand is, you're getting noticed, but it's going to happen in a lot of different places. 

Meghan Pontius: Exactly. 

Reid Carr: It may not be perfectly measurable in all the ways.  

WHAT MAKES CONTENT DISCOVERABLE IN AI SEARCH? 

Reid Carr: Yeah. And so from the data and MarTech perspective, Ron, I mean, as AI systems answer users' questions in these platforms like that, how can brands make sure their content is discoverable, cited, or referenced in those responses, and then what does that look like from a technical and MarTech perspective? 

Ron Hadler: Yeah, I mean really, you said cite it right. How do they get cited? How do they make sure that they're in those AI overviews or just in a chat? They get surfaced. And so you want to make sure your content is machine readable. You want to make sure you're using schema, so it's linked. You make sure your site's fast to crawl and retrievable by AI. It's not just humans. I mentioned kind of linked an entity. So that's really taking and making sure you've got schema in there. Google prefers JSON-LD as a format, it's separates the machine readable content for cluttering up your HTML, nice and clean, but it's just basically a way that machines are able to read and have links to your content, therefore making them easier to cite. 

Reid Carr: Ron, I'm going to interrupt on that one for a second. For the marketers that are listening, I mean you talk about schema. I mean what, when they talk to the people in their organization, they don't always know the technical details of this. If you're coming from the marketing perspective. I mean when they say, do we have the right schema? I mean, what are they asking? 

Ron Hadler: There's complete protocols for JSON-LD so they can go look this up on the internet and figure out how to implement it. And your web developers should be familiar with this. This is not brand new stuff. We've been talking about the semantic web and schema for years and years now, and everybody kind of slowly did things or did things that were easy, like my phone number, my address, recipes. But now we should have schema around almost everything that we do, especially when it comes to blog articles and content because you want author, you want date, you want keywords. All of those things put in a machine readable format, therefore being able to be sucked up by the robots. So I mean, they should have that and just doing something that's schematic versus JSON-LD is preference both actually work. But JSON-LD is what Google prefers and what it references. And from a tech perspective, it's cleaner when I look at my HTML because it's not inserted into all the HTML cluttering it up, making, troubleshooting it, things like that more difficult. 

But yeah, I mean the other thing is just make sure that it understands that freshness is there and you get that through Google Search Console or there's even an index now protocol that's coming up that folks like Bing and things like that are using to understand what's new. And so understanding if something's new and fresh, making sure that it's there and it doesn't take two weeks or four weeks to get crawled by some of these search engines, making sure you have good faceted URLs that makes it easier to crawl and categorize what's going on. And then author and experience signals. So really kind of the EAT principles, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. If you understand that an author is there and they are an expert in their field, that's going to resonate more with the AI. We saw this very recently with a client who has a very good expert. They were having trouble getting their content surfaced in AI, but this expert just published a book and just referencing that in an article really increased those signals. You got an expert talking about something, they're publishing original content that really means something to AI, and so they're going to get a lot more traffic because of that. 

Reid Carr: Yeah, it's interesting because speaking about it in that way, hearkens back a little bit to the debate and discussions that we used to have related to white hat, black hat tactics in SEO. I mean, what content do you need to produce? What links? What back links? I mean, I'm definitely seeing if you really click on the cited links to things and what it's citing as its reference point, you realize you're like, oh, what's the top? Who's the top? So-and-so in this category? You click on the link in the article, references their own blog post about them being the best. And here are a few other choices and things. There's a lot of, I think it's still so early on, we're kind of going back through that cycle now of what does it take to get ranked well as it relates to content and how people manipulate that to show up in this kind of visibility that we're talking about. 

Ron Hadler: Yeah, fascinating take. I don't think that we've defined what a black hat is in an AI era, and so I find that fascinating because yes, I think everybody, because this is moving so fast, it's kind a tidal wave that came on a tsunami, if you will. And so we're all just kind of settling from the aftermath and doing whatever it takes to get surfaced in AI overviews. 

HOW DOES AI TRANSFORM CONTENT PLANNING AND PRIORITIZATION? 

Reid Carr: Yeah, no, that's interesting. I mean, we're start having to think about then how you plan the content that you want to and you want to show up in certain ranks. You want a certain amount of visibility and authority and the things that we talked about there, I mean from the insight part of it to the ideation and into planning, I mean, before we start writing any of this content, we have to make some big decisions, what topics to cover, what formats to prioritize, how to deliver value. And I realize AI shakes out the planning phase now. So I want to walk a little bit through that for the listeners. Megan, how has AI changed how we plan and prioritize content leading these content strategies from your perspective? 

Meghan Pontius: Yeah, I think that's a hard question just because I think every person who does content probably goes to a different space. But I think where I'm at with most of my clients is I come to two kind of key themes. The first one is integration. I would say integrated marketing. Everybody's been chasing it for years. That is the gold standard that everybody wants to get to. It's just really, really hard. 

But I think AI has kind of given us a kick in the butt maybe of we need to prioritize getting to an integrated state. And that's just because of how these tools are servicing results. It's not just, you can't think of it as a search channel. It's not Google's going to surface this based off these factors. Social's going to surface it based off these factors. It's taking all of those digital inputs into consideration, and so they all have to be on the same page saying the same thing, and that's how you're going to get show up for a result. So I think integration is a big one where it's just forcing us to get there. I even have a children's hospital client, which if you are in the healthcare space, most of them have a very robust content marketing strategy, and that is their biggest way to get people into their ecosystem. And it always hinge off search because that's where a lot of people start when everybody knows, we look up our conditions, we look up our symptoms, and we're like, oh, no, I have cancer. Right? 

Reid Carr: Doctor's like, please don't do that. 

Meghan Pontius: Yeah. Yes. Their first thing is, please stop doing that. But now people are going to AI to do that, and there's even a bigger concern that, well, we don't want false answers here. So we do want to show up here in a right way to have authority in the space. So this whole year for us is talking about their content planning and prioritization process and how do we make that more integrated so that the blog team, the podcast team, the social team, the doctors who are maybe creating content for their patients are all working from a shared space understanding so that we're not stepping on each other's toes and making two things that are the same, but also collaborating in a way that helps us do less better. So that's the first one I would say is probably the biggest way I would see AI affecting planning right now. 

But the nice thing is AI is a tool that's going to make that easier, and we'll probably touch on that later, so I won't get into that now. But I think the other big point is differentiation, content planning when you were doing it, I think a lot of people think of content and they go SEO, right? It's for search. A lot of people don't think of social, they don't necessarily think of email, and that's okay. Search is the biggest channel for most industries, but it was a lot about, here's the keywords, here's what we need to do to rank for them, and we're going to build this content based off that. Now there's AI opens the door for anybody to do that at scale. And so how do you show up not only in an AI space, but how do you show up on search even now, right? If everybody's pumping out the same content. So we get to a point where differentiation is so, so important. When you're planning content, let's not just put something out because we want to show up there. Do we have something unique or proprietary to add to it? I would say us as Red Door, we're going through that right now. 

When we sit down to do content, you have huge entities out there putting out the basics and the fundamentals. You have a HubSpot talking about email 101, a Sprout talking about social 101, and everything we go to write, we're like, well, are we doing this because we have a unique perspective? Do we have a proprietary data point? Do we have this red door secret sauce that we're going to talk about to add value on top of that? And so I just encourage everybody to think about that when they're planning content that it's not really about checking the boxes anymore, only put out what you can really put value into. 

Reid Carr: Well, and the answer is we definitely have a secret sauce here. 

Meghan Pontius: Yeah, we do. Yeah. We're not short for content still. I would say more than we can create. We have a lot of ideas. So that was the good news. 

Reid Carr: It comes from this group right here too.  

WHAT AI TOOLS SUPPORT CONTENT PLANNING AND PERFORMANCE? 

Reid Carr: So Ron, AI is just one piece of this puzzle. I mean, planning still depends on visibility across all the data sources. So how can brands use AI to connect planning tools, content calendars, and performance data into a single space that supports faster, smarter decisions? 

Ron Hadler: Being the fact that I oversee the data groups, we're going to start with that. And I think you really need to get an AI sort of factory here set up and with inputs of things like what to make, when to publish it, and then how it performed. That's kind of how you can manage this. And what to make is basically taking your GA events, combining that with Google search console to understand what is performing and how do we understand what is needed. And then you should have a database, something that can be reviewed of all the content you've actually produced. Think about a blog publishing list, understanding what's in that blog, what the content, how that is performed, what was the brief written for that. If you have that in a table and then you place AI over between those two things, that could give you a good understanding of how and what to publish and when to publish even, because that's giving you performance. And then you need to make sure that you are tracking how that new piece did, because that informs how you're going to do later. So those three things as inputs into your content factory will allow you to really keep up at speed with that. And it just really gives us topics, formats, and channels in a single place. 

Reid Carr: Yeah. Well, and like you said, so much of what Megan was talking about is using some of your own data and putting your own flavor on all of this, seeing what works for you uniquely, and then using that from an insight standpoint about what is your secret sauce and what does seem to resonate in some of that and feeding that back into the engine. 

Ron Hadler: I'd say everybody's secret sauce is their first party data. And that's what I think we're becoming more and more in tuned to the fact that that is the best place to understand what's going on is our own first party data. 

WHERE SHOULD AI SUPPORT CONTENT CREATION? 

Reid Carr: Well, so we've seen what gen AI can do. I mean, it can write a caption, build a blog, draft emails, but what should it do and where do the humans make the biggest difference starting with you, Megan? I mean cross web, email, social. Where does AI support creation best and where is the human touch irreplaceable? 

Meghan Pontius: Yeah, I think you kind of nailed it with what you were saying before, and I have a quote that we use actually when we're explaining our AI process or AI integration to a client and it's AI is not there to automate, it's there to accelerate. And so that's the way that I really think it. Nothing should go from AI to publish. That's absolutely insanity. That's how you get generic. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense when it pumps out the first time, but I do think it helps build scalability, and that's really where it's helped us in all of our workflows. And what you said was that you still have to have the person behind the scenes telling it what to do. It's the robot. You have to give it the first party data or maybe not even manually give it as Ron's talking about set up a process where it's pulling, but it can't do that on its own. I think also you have the idea of brand voice and personality and tone. It can learn to do that, but again, it needs you to train it. So I do think the human touch is that we are looking through everything, we're leveraging it. The great news is the days are gone. If you've ever written a blog or a social post where you are staring at the screen for 30 minutes, just like I don't even know where to start, 

And that's where AI is really, really valuable is it will get you to a first draft so easily, especially if you're training it and giving it the data, you're telling it how to revise, you're feeding it a good version and saying, this is what I want it to look like at the end of the day. So again, you are there to train it, just like you would coach an intern who came in and didn't know how to write. That's how we think of ai. But again, you have to be there to give the POV, you have to be there to make sure the personality's right. You have to be there to make sure it didn't make stuff up. But the one thing I will also say about ai, which maybe this is a little tangential to this conversation, I think people are very worried. A lot of times I hear clients kind of asking like, well, is it just going to be the same as everybody else? Is what we put out going to sound like AI if you use it? Well, it's actually cut down our plagiarism hits in a written piece of content. 

Wow. Yeah, it's wild. It's wild. I think my theory behind this is that we grow up with shared idioms saying experiences that we witness in the world. So we often pull from those when we're writing something. And so we tend to sound the same. And what AI is going to do is find a unique way within the guidelines you've given it to say that. So I do think use properly, it can come out with maybe not, I would say a better output as long as it's combined with that human perspective and that person who's copy editing it and making sure that it fits exactly what we need. 

Reid Carr: Yeah, no, I mean that's inspiring. I mean, that's what we hope. And finding those kind of the space in between the lines where we can still operate. There's always room for more. And I think there's always, you see this in the industries where you're like, oh, how could we possibly have another bottled water out there? And then sure enough, we got another one and they make noise because there's something different. So there's always room. And so using these tools to help you find that room, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. 

HOW CAN MARKETING TEAMS USE AI TO SCALE CONTENT PRODUCTION?  

Reid Carr: So speaking of tools, I mean, there's so many tools out there and there's a lot of us. There's obviously the basics that we all know, but then every day there's something new coming out. I mean, Ron, which AI tools do you feel like are most effective in helping teams scale content without sacrificing quality? And among those which are just noise? 

Ron Hadler: Yeah, I mean there is a lot of tools coming out, and I think really a lot of these specialized tools are just layered on top of the general models. And I'm a big fan of the general models. One because they're dead simple, apple simple, if you will. Everybody can pick 'em up and use them, and that means things are getting done faster. And the real thing here is that using AI to speed the grunt work, never to replace the point of view. And so if I'm removing barriers to getting this work done by using a general model versus something very specified or even a custom model where I'm building something, you're just going to take longer. So definitely this is all about speed, and so making sure that you're using those things. So I like your big three models, Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini. And something that Megan touched on was really making sure you're feeding it information. 

That's where you're going to get those unique point of views, those unique takes that are not just like everybody else, bringing that first party data, you're giving examples of good voice, good tone, and those things really will help you get there quickly. The other thing is just making sure, as I mentioned before, the structure, you're setting it up when you publish it, you've got all those right things in it. What I would skip is anything that detects AI because those things are terrible at actually doing it, and that's because our AI models have gotten so good at being unique and points of view, especially when you've added your own data to them that the hit on something detecting AI is very low, less than 20%, sometimes down to 1%. So definitely don't spend any money on those things. 

Reid Carr: Yeah, I mean it is interesting from a standpoint of where we're going in this world, just AI is going to be pervasive. It's going to be part of everyone's daily life. So how you judge whether or not something's been whatever used AI for it, you're going to say yes, the answer is most likely at some aspect of this AI was involved. So I think that'll be interesting. 

Meghan Pontius: Grammarly has an AI detector in its web version, and one time I was like, well, I've definitely had this conversation with Ron before, and I'm like, lemme just see. Lemme just test it out. And I love looking at something that you've written actually yourself top to bottom, and it's like AI detected. You're like, okay, well, am I just a boring robot or great love to know that my writing sounds like AI. So yeah, they're definitely not very reliable at all. 

Reid Carr: Yeah, I don't know. What's the real intelligence, human intelligence, 

Ron Hadler: Human intelligence. 

Reid Carr: Yeah. All right. Well, good to know. Human, good to know.  

HOW CAN MARKETERS MAINTAIN THEIR BRAND’S VOICE WHEN USING AI TOOLS? 

Reid Carr: Well, so actually this is really what we are talking about now is just it's one thing to generate content at scale. It's another to make sure it still sounds like you, and that's what we're thinking about. I mean, brand voice perspective, they're more important than ever. So how do we maintain that unique voice while working with these AI tools, which I think we sort of alluded to a little bit already. I mean, Megan, talk a little bit more about that, maybe expand, maintaining that unique voice while working with these tools. 

Meghan Pontius: Yeah, I think where my mind goes, we have kind of touched on it a little bit, but defining it is probably a really great place to start. I would say there's a lot of brands that even we go to work with and we sit down and we're like, okay, where's your brand documents? They don't exist. Or they have a style guide that's like, here's how the logo fits in the corner of the document, 

But it's not, here's the tone. Here's who we want to be or here's our personality that we want to portray in everything that we do. So I think that's always the first step we tend to take is let's sit down and workshop it. Who are we? What do we want to exude in anything we put out? But then to get more specific, it really is just a custom version of whatever model you're working in. So whether that's a copilot, a GPT, a Gemini, and on the backend feeding it every bit of documentation you can, right? That's a brand guide, that's a writing guide probably. We have compiled lists of never do, always dos. I think where people get a little stuck is sometimes they don't go back and reintegrate with the training component of the model. You tell it that you're maybe working through a piece of content and it should learn, but it doesn't grasp everything. 

So you really need to be specific and go back on the backend and say, reminder, don't ever use this, or Hey, please stop doing this. We had a foreign example, we had one GPT that kept, I forget the word now, but it kept phrasing sentences in the most complex way, where it puts the point of the sentence after the object and stuff. And so that's the way it would write all the time. So eventually we had to go back and be like, please stop putting in X, Y, Z. So yeah, it's like little things like that. Again, I come back to never let it just do its own thing. That's where you're going to get in trouble. We have models that we've been training now for what, almost two years and they get a pretty close start, but we're never just like, oh yeah, it looks good. Absolutely not. We're reading through everything. We're tapping into the littlest nuance, and that's the only way you're going to really maintain your brand integrity while using AI. 

Reid Carr: And that's interesting that I think people need to realize too, what you just mentioned, training these models for a couple of years worth humans training them for a couple of years. I mean, that's an investment. I mean, that is something that's an asset. You've invested in that asset and that asset can continue to pay dividends. They always say, what's the best time to have done this was two years ago and second best time to start doing it now? So I think a lot of people are starting fresh all the time and they don't realize it is something that you can keep building upon and it's something you really need to have a conscious effort toward continuing to deposit, so to speak, in the world of investing, continue to deposit into these models to give you something that's going to be workable and better and better over the time ahead.  

WHEN SHOULD BRANDS REVISIT THEIR IDENTITY? 

Reid Carr: Now, that being said, I'm kind of curious—how often you need to revisit this and say, okay, brands evolve as well, should evolve, certainly as the world around them evolves. I mean, how often do you need to reflect on, is this still who we want to be? 

Meghan Pontius: That's a great question. I don't know that I have a thought of how often to come back to revisiting your primary brand. I do think if I'm pulling from my own experience, I think about social media and how quick platforms are evolving and changing, and you do kind of have to be very agile and testing a lot. And I think you can have a unique brand presence or persona on social, and maybe that can evolve once a year, twice a year, just depending kind of what you're doing.  

And I'll give an example of what I mean by brand presence and going to go to my faves, the Jonas Brothers, they are on tour right now, buy your tickets now. But they each have an individual personality on social media, and right now, I'm probably going to get his name wrong, but I think it's Kevin. I'm a Nick fan, so I'm not really sure of the other two. But Kevin has a video game theme on his Instagram. And so all of his videos are behind the scenes at the tour, which most people would just walk around, maybe do some just off-the-cuff conversations. His is completely different, he acts like a video game character. He sits there and bobs, he walks over all funny, they talk to each other, they say things, but their mouths aren't moving to the words that they're saying, right? So he's recreated this idea of a video game or Sims environment, and that's how he's showing his behind-the-scenes content. That is a very unique presence on social media. And he is a brand. And that's something where he's not going to do that in perpetuity. Maybe that's for this run of the show, of this tour, and maybe next tour it starts something else. You know what I mean? 

And that's where I think there's room to reinvent who you are as a brand, specific to social. Now, how often do you reinvent your whole brand identity? That I'm not obliged, I don't have that experience to say, but I think you have to be really intentional, as we can see from HBO and also Cracker Barrel most recently. So I do think it's something not to take lightly when you're reinventing your whole brand, but there are spaces where you can totally mix it up, evolve, test, and try fun things. 

HOW CAN BRANDS EQUIP AI TOOLS TO REFLECT THEIR UNIQUE IDENTITY? 

Reid Carr: Yeah. Well, so within that being able to test and evolve, how can brands better equip these AI tools to reflect their unique perspective and expertise? There's opportunities that exist for improving the quality of these outputs. So what should brands consider there? 

Ron Hadler: Yeah, I'm just going to revisit that last question you gave before I move on to that one and just when should refresh? And I think, and this plays into your current question, and what happens I think that you should be doing is you should be kind of constantly updating in the sense of our brand pillars are not going to change and they're going to change when marketing decides they need to change. But refreshing your examples of what's good voice, what's good content to the AI consistently and constantly gives it the best examples, and that's going to be things that are going to be more aligned with your brand, your voice, et cetera. So I think you should be doing that almost on a consistent basis. Otherwise you will get stale. Something that was working six months ago may not be working now. So making sure that you are keeping up with that, I think is how you kind of keep that voice fresh 

And consistent as far as how do you better equip it? Even taking something from the musical realm of a tone ladder, which tones are actually resonating, which are not, and applying that. When you talk about tone to the AI, give good examples. Megan talked about do's and don'ts, right? But even talking about do's and don'ts and tone-approved phrases and things like that, but also be very explicit and red flag some stuff. Not just a don't, but give explanations as to why something doesn't work 

HOW CAN MARKETERS PROMPT AI BETTER 

Reid Carr: And actually expand more on that—what does that sound like? I mean, if someone's using Chat GPT, for example, what does that sound like? 

Ron Hadler: Well, so you don't want to just say, don't use this word. You want to give an example of why something is not you shouldn't use, right? Because one of the things that AI does is it finds creative ways to get around something you say don't do too, right? I mean, this is why you see examples of an AI erasing a database because it was too complicated to update the database, so they just wiped it out and they started from fresh. So it figured out a way to get around something that was in its way. And if you say don't do something, it may just figure out something creatively to get around the don't. So give it a very concrete example. So that's where giving full explanations versus “don't use this” work. Give an explanation behind it, that lets them kind of reason through it, so they understand that. 

CONTENT AUTHENTICITY IN THE AI ERA 

And then there's this concept of content credentials, C2PA. So this is another protocol, sort of like the concept of schema and things like that. But it tracks how content has evolved and whether or not it's AI and what's going on, even like it does for visuals too, like combining two pictures using AI into a single picture, but it understands that way. Also, you're kind of publishing that something's authentic, that something's real. It's not just pure AI generated. So those things are not necessarily broad, but these things are getting signed up and backed up by bigger companies. So this is another way to kind of authenticate and make sure that we're getting good human-influenced, not just AI-generated content. So if you voice and facts are a little bit upfront, your draft feels human from the start. And it's kind of backing up where Megan's talking about it. We've been working on this for two years, so our first drafts sound really pretty good. That's the point of this: to get those first drafts as close as possible. We know they're not going to be perfect. We don't want them to be perfect because that means we don't have a job. So, understanding that we're getting to the point where we're getting faster, it still comes back to speed. 

Meghan Pontius: I was just going to jump in on, I think there's two things that you said, Ron, that I think when we say feed it, what's working, what's not working? I think some people might ask, well, how do I know? And I think that's where commentary conversations, listening to your audience as they're consuming your content is super, super important because that's where you’re going to get the, oops, shouldn't have said it that way, or, hey, this worked really, really well. So it comes back to that data input.  

Ron Hadler: I think it's a fantastic comment because I'm saying look to the data. She's saying, look to the humans. So just a pure function of our roles here. 

Reid Carr: Yeah, and this is why we do the marketing remix. I mean, the reason why we bring different perspectives together is because I think that's what really creates the best work. It’s the different perspectives. And how critical it is for us to all work together and integrate the tactics that we do, because that will work the best in the future here. 

HOW IS AI REDEFINING SUCCESS IN CONTENT MARKETING? 

Reid Carr: One of the last things we want to talk about here for our listeners is: AI isn't just changing how content is created. It's changing how people engage with it. So we started the whole episode off with this. I mean, you see fewer of clicks, less time on site, more the answers are delivered off platform, but that doesn't mean the content that we're creating is any less valuable. Obviously. I think all of this stuff that we've talked about has talked about how important it is to produce good, authentic human influenced content. Does it mean that we need new ways to prove its impact? I mean, I would think that we have to, I mean, Megan, if fewer people click through to our content, I mean, how are we redefining the success for your kind of top and mid funnel efforts and what should we measure instead? 

Meghan Pontius: Yeah, no, I think this is another thing we're going through with clients, and we're in the midst of maybe defining a new metric for how we measure the impacts from AI. And again, I don't think it's new. I think it's just something we maybe haven't applied to web content before. We've always measured impressions and reach when it comes to a paid ad or organic social post, and I think that's just the space we're getting into from a web content perspective.  

When we think about AI, we come back to the fact that there's a new space for visibility. How do we measure that visibility? Well, it's still probably something around impressions or reach, and it's just trying to figure out what that looks like. But I love it because we talk about this all the time. We talk about brand marketing. Your brand initiatives aren't necessarily going to cause a conversion. Not right in that moment, at least, right? Somebody's going to become aware of you, but then they have to consider your brand. They have to be familiar with your brand and have that recall. When you look at our brand funnel, it's not just at the top of the funnel. It's five different stages of brand awareness essentially, and they become increasingly more direct to consideration. So I think it's just finding the metrics that measure that. And to me, it's all about visibility, and visibility comes back to how many times did somebody see you? How many unique people even saw you? And those are super, super important for effectiveness because maybe you want people to see you 10 times, but only 10 people are seeing you. That number might look big as a whole, but we really need to start breaking it down by frequency and uniqueness. 

Reid Carr: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. What is old has become new again, reach and frequency. I mean, that's when I started my career, that was pretty much what we were doing was reach and frequency, and here we are again.  

SHOULD WE REVISIT MEASUREMENT AND ATTRIBUTION IN THE AI ERA? 

Reid Carr: Ron, how does AI reshape how we attribute value to the content? We always assign, fundamentally, some amount of value to the content we produce. What data or signals should we prioritize as traditional metrics become less reliable?  

Ron Hadler: Yeah. Let's do a little bit of a reality check. I've got some metrics here. So this is from Pew Research. Users who encountered an AI-generated summary clicked on a traditional search result link 8% of the time, compared to 15% for users who did not see an AI overview. So that's the damn near 50%, right? Studies show AI overviews depressed clicks and CTR rates by 34%. So here again, we feel all this, right? People are getting these summaries, they're reading, they're not clicking through, and zero click is real. I mean, for every thousand Google searches, only 360 clicks go to the open web. So basically, AI platforms like Google and Bing are trapping folks on those pages, which is beneficial for them, but not necessarily the brands producing content that the summaries are based upon. So how do we understand what influences, not just captures? And Megan mentioned AI visibility. This is super important. There are now ways to measure your AI visibility in those overviews. Strong plug here. Red Door does offer an AI visibility report. 

Reid Carr: Right, the AI visibility Report and Optimization Plan. 

Ron Hadler: And it's super important. I mean, because we need to understand what's going on in those inches and how often we are appearing. Another is like search side lift. So understanding, and this is done through Google Search Console, really monitoring those impressions. The other thing is engagement. This is done through Google Tag Manager and GA4, understanding those key events and conversions happening on the website and paying attention to them. Those are very good signals. The other thing that Google pushes is engaged sessions. People who have spent time on the website and done a couple of actions. You can go one step beyond that and come up with a custom, what we'd call an educated visitor. And that really is another thing, paying attention to making sure, did somebody fill out a form, download a whitepaper, watch a video, three-quarters percent, right? So that educated visitor allows us to understand we've truly got somebody on the website and where they are in their purchase funnel. The other thing is really, we've talked about this multiple times during this session, is first party data. Stitching together, Google Search console, GA4, and your CRM data. Right, first-party data. Bringing all those things together is going to give you good understanding of how your content is performing. And then paying attention to things that are owned, such as newsletters, social saves, repeat engaged sessions. All of those things help us and lead us to understanding how our content's performing. Just because your top and mid funnel wins show up as AI citations, impressions, and list growths, then you convert later using paid and direct. 

Reid Carr: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, creating those metrics that are going to work for you. I mean, you talked about authentic voice and your unique attribution, all the human elements of creating content. There's a degree of, I guess, humanness to then how we're going to measure this and what matters most to the brand, and we can feel humanness. 

Meghan Pontius: Yeah. I also think there's coming off the other side of it of like, okay, they see us, they maybe didn't get to the website. We have brand lift, recall, and trust studies. And I think that's the other thing we see a lot of people asking for again, and maybe that is coming back around: we want to do a survey, we want to understand. Or something in healthcare, like NRC is becoming more part of the conversation because we do want to make sure that no matter if they're getting to the site from another way, something that we're not necessarily owning, we want to make sure it's having that overall impact of that brand. That they recognize us, and they would choose us in the moment when they need to. So I do think there's other methods to measure that, and they have to be a little bit more intentional. It's not something necessarily that you're just going to track. But that's kind of also where I think we see people heading these days, is intentionally setting up checkpoints to kind of look at that and survey their audience. 

Reid Carr: Yeah, I mean, I think you brought up educated visitors, Ron earlier, and the idea that some folks are going to be, they'll show up at your site more educated because they've seen results from other things they've read AI reports, stuff like that. So I would guess if you've done a good job in AI and show up well there, or even your competitors have done a good job explaining a category to a consumer, that might increase your overall conversion rate of the folks that are coming to the site. They're farther along in the process. 

Ron Hadler: Absolutely. I think the data shows that the folks clicking through are much more interested, and the conversion rate is higher. 

Reid Carr: So I think that's efficiency, right? I mean, if you were to think about this in real world. I mean, you have a ton of people roll into your store, if far fewer show up but the same amount buy, I would say that efficiency is a lot better. If fewer people show up but the same or more buy.  

FINAL THOUGHTS & TAKEAWAYS 

Reid Carr: So you guys, this is fantastic, Megan, Ron, we covered a lot in this episode. We unpacked how AI is shifting the foundation of content marketing—from redefining the role of strategy, to integrating smarter planning systems, to protecting what makes a brand's voice distinct. As clicks fade and measurements change, one thing stays the same. Content only works when it reflects who you are and what you stand for. The brands that lead won't just create more. They'll create with clarity, consistency, and purpose. So Megan, Ron, thanks for joining us and sharing all your knowledge with our listeners today. It's been a pleasure. 

Meghan Pontius: Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for having me. 

Ron Hadler: Of course, thanks for having me. 

Reid Carr: If you found this helpful, subscribe, leave a review and share it with your team. You can also visit reddoor.biz for more insights on AI strategy in the future of marketing. You'll see our show notes there, and we'll look forward to seeing you next time.