How to Build Something That Stands Out in a Sea of AI Noise
It was July of 2024 when I received yet another notification from my hosting company that my website traffic had exceeded the allowed limit. I was annoyed because I assumed it was bot traffic created by some spammer for whatever nefarious reason.
I logged into my analytics account, ready to confirm my suspicions, only to find myself dumbfounded. I was seeing nearly 500% more traffic, all going to one specific blog post. A post I had written three years earlier, when I’d decided it was time to focus on SEO (search engine optimization) to drive organic traffic to my personal brand site and blog.
It never occurred to me that I could be ranking because I’d abandoned that site a year later when I realized it was time for my work to evolve into a new brand and business model. I’d only written a few optimized pillar posts (high-quality anchor posts for a specific keyword bucket), and I hadn’t even fully optimized them or written any supporting content.
Still, one of those pieces ranked on the first page of Google, in position five, for a keyword that over 12,000 people search for monthly.
Fast forward to the spring of 2025, when we finally launched the new parent brand and website, along with four consumer brand verticals focused on different points of the life-purpose journey. I’d completed extensive keyword research and launched our Pinpoint Your Purpose vertical with three extremely well-crafted, high-value, and strategically structured pillar posts. These posts were designed to overtake what was already ranking for each keyword, with more and better content.
And wouldn’t you know it, within three months, those pieces were already ranking, two of them on pages two and three of Google for keywords that are rated moderately difficult.
The reality is that since 2018, the digital landscape has been quietly shifting. Then COVID hit, causing a record number of new businesses to form (and more freelancers to start pitching their services), many of whom undercut the pricing of established businesses and service providers.
Now, with the rise of AI tools, AI summaries, and AI-generated everything, the online world is becoming even noisier and more chaotic, a mash-up of remixes and recycled ideas. More importantly, purpose-driven creators, entrepreneurs, influencers, and changemakers (the exact people trying to do something meaningful) are at the highest risk of getting lost in the noise.
Not because they’re not brilliant or their work isn’t needed, but because the rules have changed completely, and most people don’t even realize we’re playing a new game.
Welcome to the pivot point, where creators face two massive threats:
The collapse of traditional online marketing: You can’t grow the way you used to on social media, nor can you even reach your existing audience. The algorithms are designed to serve the platform, and the attention economy is dying before our very eyes (even more so with the general distrust of media that AI has accelerated).
AI-generated content is overtaking humans rapidly: Now everyone can publish 100x more content with a simple prompt, which means the internet is drowning in content that all sounds the same. And the more AI content gets created, the more AI trains on itself, which is how we get the uncanny slop we’re already seeing everywhere.
The marketing gurus will tell you this means you need to “master AI” to keep up.
I’m here to tell you the truth: that’s incredibly shortsighted, and it’s exactly how talented creators will dilute or destroy the very work they’re trying to build.
The harsh reality is that:
A majority of consumers don’t trust AI.
People feel burned by faceless, fake, and recycled content.
AI is disengaging people from their own brilliance.
Instead of obsessing over how to “use AI better,” purpose-driven creators should be asking a different question: How do I build something that survives the current and upcoming shifts? Something that still works when the AI bubble bursts?
The answer to this is simple, but regularly overlooked because it doesn’t give the same instant dopamine hit and false sense of “success” that social media does:
Develop true thought leadership: This is different from content creation. It’s about intentionally developing and evolving your own conversations, frameworks, and unique takes that stand out from the noise (and in AI search and summaries).
Build SEO content funnels: AI search and summaries have not replaced the power of discoverability that search engine optimization allows. Search engines (and AI tools!) pull from the richest, most original, highly authoritative, and useful content online. You want to show up on Google and in AI overviews? You need a content ecosystem designed to answer the exact questions your right clients and customers are actually (and actively) searching for.
Just like my old blog post, written once, barely optimized, and fast-forgotten, ranked on page one of Google for a keyword with 12,000+ monthly searches. For years, with zero maintenance.
That’s work that survives trends.
The people who thrive in the next era won’t be the ones who learned to prompt the fastest. They’ll be the ones who stayed engaged with their craft and made their work discoverable. And if you’re building something meaningful, something that challenges systems, changes lives, or creates culture, you owe it to your work to set it up for longevity.
