Does your website suddenly lose visitors since ChatGPT, Gemini, and many more, launched and are absorbing almost Internet traffic ? Then you are not alone !
As Content Creators, especially text-based content, those Question-Answer AI are indeed big competitors when they changed reader’s behaviors from spending time on our websites for knowledge to get instant knowledge via chatbots. This results losing traffic, losing potential customers, orders and eventually income from websites. So, as a Content Creator, how should we adapt to this AI disrupt?
An uncomfortable truth is AI are trained with almost knowledge available on Internet, even from research papers so if you are trying to “teach” readers with fundamental terms and tutorials, it won’t attract readers anymore. Then, what to write now ?
1. Raising Questions instead of Showing Answers
AI are good as answering, because AI is trained for that purpose. In the past, people search and read a few articles on a few websites and summarize information themself. Today, AI read everything available then summarize for users. But, as a rule of success, knowing correct questions is always more important than knowing answers, and when AI is now a tool that can provide instant answers for almost every skills and jobs, what we need to do is to raise right questions!
Instead of write down answers then wait for users to visit when they search for information, we now have to try to trigger user’s brain by giving questions. And to bring questions to users, waiting is not anymore a suitable strategy. We have to be more active in engaging users. What strategy do you have in mind to actively engage readers ?
2. Real Life Stories
AI has no life, it is a simple truth. AI is a machine and it has no feel. It can’t have feeling such as excitement, happiness, afraid, scary or bitterness because it has no biology body with complex chemistry triggered per specific event like human.
When people does not read for knowledge, they read for empathy. People love reading what sounds like them. They seek voices that reflect their own doubts, struggles, hopes, and experiences because in those words, they feel understood. And to attract readers that is seeking for empathy, we need stories. This is where AI never can compete because it does not live. Content now have to be inspired from real life events instead of being another kind of academic textbook. A story of a how a product is used by real persons to solve a specific problem they met can attract more view than an article telling how awesome a product is. A story of building something can be more attractive than a description of what is built. Those stories are what an AI can not make, or at most, it only can make it up, because it does not experience through.
As information becomes abundant, authenticity becomes scarce. And scarcity creates value.
3. Lessons from Mistakes
Learning from mistakes is as important as learning from successes. AI’s answers are often built from patterns that survived, ideas that worked, and solutions that were eventually accepted. In simple words, it learns from the record of success. But the most valuable lessons usually come from the hard ways: failed projects, poor decisions, missed opportunities, and assumptions that turned out to be wrong. These experiences rarely fit neatly into any step-by-step guide which is easily generated from AI.
We, as a human nature, usually try to show up how perfect we are. It becomes worser when everyone uses Social Networks and on these Networks, we only show our good shots. And today, AI come as the most perfect entity. This trait built up an illusion of perfection and secretly put a pressure to be perfect on us – users of Social Network & AI. This perfectionism creates a distorted perspective of how life actually happen and when we found that we are not perfect – as a nature, we feel pains, unnecessary pains!
Mistakes are not what we accept from AI. But mistakes is what we accept from human. I myself observed that there very little articles teaching people from other’s mistakes. We analyze how someone or some company success a lot, and even deeply in details, but we rarely analyze failures they made before their successes. Only a few people actually realize those failures is the main story of later success. It is easy to see a path to a known destination, but to deal with traps and obstacles on the road is where lessons stay. This is where content should be more focus on. Beside revealing hidden lessons of successes, learning from other’s mistakes also help us to cure the need of being perfect, when we can observe imperfect people still achieve & success, even more than pretend-to-be-perfect people on Social Networks.
4. Reviews Products
We are living in an era that goods and products is more than human and a lot of marketing budget is spent to capture attention from buyers. Articles reviewing products is commonly found on Internet. This niche may still remain since AI can not use products in real life and give reviews. The best AI can do currently is to crawl reviews from other websites and summarize. But, I personally, feel that reading what a real human says about a product is still more convincing than read reviews from a chatbot. From personal experience, I also found a lot of fake reviews which is paid for or be a part of scam campaign. So if an AI also read these reviews, I can’t trust what AI suggests. So, content that reviews or compares products still be a good shot that stand against AI content.
5. New Experience
Beside knowledge, and seeking for empathy, people also read for exploring new worlds, to borrowing other’s perspective and experience. AI content can not attract this kind of readers. This is what we feel when read novels or watch movies: it allows us to immerse in a different world – which AI’s instant answers can’t do!
Apply that principle, content now have to shift from information providing to story-telling in a specific context: a country, a community, a company, a group or a real life constraint where writers actually experience. This sounds like a news reporter and indeed it is. This requires authors to go explore the world before making any good & real content. Writers have to actually build things, make mistakes, feel the learned lesson before having enough experience to convert to stories. This is where AI can not compete.
6. Collections
Remember content that starts with “Top 10 things that ….” ? Yes it is kind of content with highest engagement in content creator worlds. People love collecting things. Today AI can listing things really fast since it has broad knowledge and quick summarizing. However, AI has two limitations: it cannot reliably list things that are not present in its training data, and it does not verify the information it provides. A list generated in seconds may contain outdated entries, dead links, inaccurate details, or simply miss valuable items that are difficult to discover online.
This creates an opportunity for human writers. The value of a collection is no longer in the act of listing itself, but in the work behind the list. A valuable collection requires research, verification, curation, and maintenance. Someone has to search beyond the obvious results, check whether each entry is still relevant, remove outdated information, and continuously update the collection as the world changes.
In the AI era, a collection becomes more than an article. It becomes an asset. The future of collection-based content is not “Top 10 Things.” It is “The Most Complete, Verified, and Continuously Updated Collection.” That can be something readers will keep returning to, and something AI alone cannot easily replace.
