My biggest takeaway from Cited was actually not about AI. The event covered a lot: AI search, content ROI, audience ownership, newsletters, discoverability, measurement. But the thing I kept coming back to on the way home was simple: as content becomes easier to do, it’s intentionality that makes things better than they used to be.
It’s not a comfortable message for an industry that is currently excited about how quickly AI is allowing them to produce. But it was a running thread almost the entire time I lived in it, and I left more confident than I found it.
A case of showing less
Products don’t need to be in every conversation. With AI making content creation faster and cheaper, the temptation to chase every trend, every cultural moment, every set of keywords is real, and worth resisting. Appearing everywhere does not build authority or relationships. In some cases it does the opposite.
The question you should ask before every brief statement is not “how can we get out of this conversation?” It is “do we have the right to be a part of it?” If the conversation isn’t really connected to your brand or your audience, forcing participation reads as disingenuous and draws resources away from areas where it could belong.
The point is to be more intentional about where you put your energy.
Having a field is all-encompassing
The brands I find most credible are the ones that have identified specific niches they can be in: a retailer that owns last-minute deals, a beauty brand that owns a certain category, a CPG brand that owns a specific consumer demand situation. The goal is not to be known for everything. To be known for something.
This is especially important now that AI search is becoming central to how audiences find content. AI systems are increasingly emerging from sources that demonstrate expertise and consensus among specific topics. Brands that are cited and emerging are not necessarily the ones that publish the most. They are the ones who have built a clear, consistent point of view around a defined set of topics.
That’s a significant change in how content strategy is built. Less about calendar entries, more about property ownership.
Rethinking what success looks like
If volume isn’t the goal, impressions, reach, and traffic as success metrics start to look like the wrong tools.
The signs to pay attention to are engagement, the quality of the conversation, audience behavior, and whether the right people found the content and acted on it. Access is still important, but access alone does not tell the whole story. If people aren’t engaging, commenting, sharing, or spending a meaningful amount of time on what you’ve done, it’s worth paying attention to regardless of impression count.
What surprised me most at Cated, given how much of the day was focused on AI, was how often the conversation returned to storytelling. Across the sessions on newsletters, brand journalism, AI visibility, and audience ownership, a consistent thread was that audiences respond to stories more than they respond to advertising content. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that as there is more content in the world, cross-cutting stories need to be better.
The message did not “create additional content.” It was “creating more meaningful content,” and knowing the difference between the two is where most content strategies converge or diverge.
Bottom line
Before the next brief, the next content calendar, the next campaign: is this a conversation we have the right to be a part of? And if the answer is yes, are we saying something we can only say?
Those two questions will do more to sharpen a content strategy than most planning processes I’ve seen.
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