Take a look at your most recent content. If you extracted this content from your channels, changed the names, and injected it into the channels of one of your competitors, would anyone know the difference?
This post looks at content created by human SEO experts, and my generative AI colleague Bredebot. And how to differentiate your content from that of your competitors. (Inserting a wildebeest isn’t enough.)
Several years ago
Several years ago (I won’t get more specific) I was a writer for a company’s blog, but I didn’t own the blog. Frankly, I don’t think anyone did. There were multiple writers, and we just wrote stuff.
One writer had the (apparent) goal of creating informational content. The writer would publish multiple articles, sometimes with the same publication date.
The posts were well-researched, well-written, and covered topics of interest to the company’s prospects.
They were clearly written with a focus on SEO—several years ago, AEO didn’t exist—and were optimized for keywords that interested the prospects.
The goal was simple: draw the prospects to the company website with resonating content.
What could be wrong with that?
This week
Now it’s 2025, I’m writing for the Bredemarket blog, and I own the blog and control what is in it.
But I’m not the only writer. I brought a new writer on staff—Bredebot. And like a managing editor, I’ve been giving Bredebot assignments to write about.
As of Sunday August 31 (when I’m drafting this post), the next three Bredebot posts to be published are as follows (subject to change):
- Move Over, Authentic AI: Why You Shouldn’t Overlook AI’s Role in Modern Marketing
- Power Up Your Sales: A CMO’s Guide to Sales Enablement (with a Wink and a Nudge)
- What Is Liveness Detection? Let’s Re-Examine a Sentence
Bredebot just finished writing the sales enablement and liveness detection posts Sunday afternoon, and they blew me away.
The posts were well-researched, well-written, and covered topics of interest to Bredemarket’s prospects.
And while I’m not as much of an SEO/AEO expert as my colleague from several years ago, the posts do feature critical keywords. For example, the references to Chief Marketing Officers are intentional.
The goal is simple: draw prospects to the Bredemarket website with resonating content.
What could be wrong with that?
Next week
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that:
Any other company could publish identical content.
My colleague from several years ago could produce identical content for any firm in that particular industry. Or some other writer could produce identical content.
Moving to the present day, my esteemed competitor Laurel Jew of Tandem Technical Writing could (if she wanted to; she probably wouldn’t) log in to her favorite generative AI engine and churn out bot-written posts on sales enablement and liveness detection that read just like mine—I mean Bredebot’s. Especially if she reverse engineers my prompts and includes things like “Include no more than one reference to wildebeests as marketing consultants and wombats as customers of these marketing consultants.” Once Bredebot has been easily cloned, game over.
As I noted Sunday, a correlation in which two bots use the same source data ends up with the same results.
Perhaps I could mitigate the risk by using a private LLM with its own super secret data (see Writer) to generate Bredebot’s content, but as of now that ain’t happening.
Another way to mitigate the risk is by careful prompt tailoring. I experimented with this in the pre-Bredebot days, back when Google Gemini was still Google Bard, and I told it to assert that “Kokomo” is the best Beach Boys song ever.
But in the end, no matter what data you use and what prompt you use, a generative AI bot is not going to produce anything original.
Another reason that humans should always write the first draft.
(Although philosophers may question whether even humans can produce anything original; they say there is nothing new under the sun.)
But at least attempting to control the strategy behind your content helps to ensure that you are differentiated from everybody else.
So what of my pal Bredebot who is incapable of original thought or differentiation? For now I will continue the experiment.
Bredemarket 