AI Became a Shiny Marketing Object All of a Sudden

There was a point when every new piece of technology seemed to need the word “smart” attached to it. Smart phones. Smart homes. Smart appliances. Smart televisions. Eventually the word became so common that it stopped telling us much of anything. Apparently, everything was smart, whether it actually did anything particularly intelligent or not. I think AI is going through much the same phase right now. Suddenly everything is AI-powered, AI-driven, AI-enhanced, AI-enabled or somehow “leveraging AI.” Open almost any business email these days and there is a good chance that AI will be somewhere in the pitch. The implication is usually pretty clear: whatever the company is selling must be better because artificial intelligence is involved.

That is where things get interesting.

AI itself is not the problem. Far from it. AI is becoming an enormously useful tool for businesses, developers, marketers, writers, designers and just about everyone else who has figured out how to use it properly. I use AI myself. It has changed the way I work, and I expect that change to continue. But there is a big difference between using AI as a tool and using AI as a marketing adjective. Those two things are not remotely the same, and I think businesses are going to spend a fair amount of money over the next few years learning that lesson.

We recently found ourselves on the receiving end of a rather aggressive sales effort involving an AI-based marketing service. The situation was not something we went looking for. A long-term client had become interested in the service and, as often happens when outside vendors become involved, we were eventually pulled into the conversation. The first contact was memorable for all the wrong reasons. We received an email informing us that we would be attending an online meeting the following week with a company we had never heard of. We had not requested the meeting. We had not agreed to it. We were simply informed that it was happening. That is an interesting way to begin a business relationship.

We declined. Then came another attempt. And another. At one point the question was essentially whether we could jump onto a meeting that morning. The persistence became the story rather than whatever it was the company was actually selling. Eventually we asked our client to put an end to the requests. That might sound like a story about an annoying salesperson, but that wasn’t really what caught my attention. What interested me was the larger marketing pattern behind it. The service was built around AI-generated content for SEO, which, on the surface, sounds perfectly reasonable. There are legitimate uses for AI in content development, research, analysis and search optimization. The problem was that the AI component seemed to be arriving before the fundamentals.

Our client’s website had not originally been built around search. Search engine optimization had not been a significant priority. There was little history of off-site optimization, and the site’s underlying authority was limited. In other words, there were some fairly basic things to address before dropping an automated content engine on top of the existing situation. You can generate a thousand articles with AI. If the website those articles are being published on has structural problems, weak positioning, poor information architecture, unclear services, weak authority and little reason for anyone to trust it, you haven’t necessarily solved anything. You may simply have created a thousand more pages.

And that is one of the things that gets lost when AI becomes the product rather than the tool. The conversation moves away from what are we actually trying to accomplish? and toward what can our AI system produce? Those are very different questions. I’ve spent years working on the other side of that equation through Denver web design and website development and SEO services, and one of the things experience teaches you is that websites rarely fail because somebody forgot to add another hundred pages of content. They fail because the pieces aren’t working together.

AI Is Not a Strategy

This is becoming particularly important in SEO. There is nothing inherently wrong with using AI to help create content. Pretending otherwise would be silly at this point. AI can be extremely useful for research, brainstorming, outlining, comparing information, identifying gaps, organizing large amounts of material and helping a writer get through the first stages of a project. It can also help us work through ideas much faster than we could a few years ago. But none of those things automatically create a successful SEO strategy.

Search is still about relevance, usefulness, authority, trust, technical accessibility, relationships between pieces of content and the overall quality of the website. The technology used to help produce the content is only one part of the equation. That’s why I wrote about AI SEO vs. Google SEO in the first place. The conversation isn’t really about choosing between “AI SEO” and “Google SEO.” It’s about understanding that search is changing while the underlying need for useful, credible information hasn’t disappeared.

This is also where the structure of the website matters more than people sometimes realize. A website isn’t simply a container into which you pour content. The architecture, navigation, page relationships, service hierarchy, internal links, technical foundation and conversion paths all tell search engines and users something about the business. A beautifully written article sitting on a poorly structured website isn’t suddenly going to fix the entire digital presence. Likewise, a technically perfect website with nothing useful to say isn’t going to become authoritative simply because it loads quickly.

This is why I keep coming back to the difference between information and evidence. Information is easy to produce. AI has made that even easier. You can ask an AI system to write 50 pages about Denver web design. You can ask it to produce 100 variations on a keyword. You can generate blog posts, social media posts, descriptions, summaries and FAQs almost endlessly. But none of that proves the company knows what it is talking about. The real question becomes: Why should anyone believe you?

That question existed before AI, of course. It has simply become much more important now that producing convincing-looking information has become so easy. That’s the larger issue I explored in The Difference Between Information and Evidence. The web has never had a shortage of information. What is becoming harder to find is information that has something behind it: experience, evidence, original thinking, actual expertise and real examples.

A business that has been doing something for twenty years has something an AI system cannot manufacture simply by generating another article. AI can help that business explain what it knows, organize what it knows and communicate it more effectively. But the underlying experience still has to come from somewhere. That is the distinction I think we’re going to be talking about more and more as AI-generated material becomes almost indistinguishable from ordinary marketing content. The question won’t simply be “Was this written by AI?” The more useful question will be “Is there anything real behind it?”

Suddenly Everything Is AI

The other thing that has happened is that AI has become an extraordinarily convenient marketing word. A company can take an existing product, add an AI feature, rename a few things and suddenly the marketing department has a whole new story to tell. AI-powered. AI-driven. AI-enabled. AI optimization. AI automation. AI intelligence. The words sound impressive. Sometimes they represent something genuinely useful. Sometimes they represent a meaningful technological improvement. And sometimes they are little more than a shiny coat of paint.

The buyer doesn’t necessarily know which one they’re looking at. That is the problem. There is nothing wrong with marketing a legitimate AI capability. If your software can actually analyze something that previously required hours of manual work, say so. If it can identify patterns humans routinely miss, explain how. If it can improve forecasting, automate a tedious process or help a company make better decisions, demonstrate the result. That’s useful marketing. What isn’t particularly useful is simply telling someone that a product is powered by AI and expecting the letters “AI” to do all of the persuasive work.

We’ve seen versions of this in web design for years. There is always a new technology, platform, framework or buzzword that is supposed to change everything. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. But the underlying business question remains the same: Does this help the client accomplish what the client actually needs to accomplish? That’s one reason I have never believed that technology alone is a substitute for good website design and development. The technology matters, but what you do with it matters considerably more.

We should be asking better questions. What does the system actually do? What does it replace? What does it improve? What does it require from the client? What information does it use? How is the output evaluated? Who is responsible for correcting it when it is wrong? What measurable difference does it make? And perhaps most importantly, what would this product do for me that I couldn’t reasonably accomplish another way? Those questions cut through an awful lot of AI marketing very quickly.

The Shiny Object Problem

Technology has always had a shiny-object problem. A few years ago it was mobile apps. Before that it was social media. Then it was big data, blockchain, cloud computing and whatever the latest conference presentation happened to be calling revolutionary that week. There is always something. The technology itself is rarely the problem. The problem happens when businesses begin pursuing the technology because everyone else is talking about it rather than because it solves a specific problem.

AI is particularly susceptible to this because the technology is genuinely impressive. That makes the marketing easier. You don’t have to explain exactly what the system does if everyone already assumes that AI must be incredibly powerful. The technology carries some of the sales pitch for you. And that can create some very strange buying decisions.

A business owner hears that competitors are using AI. Then someone tells them that they need AI for SEO. Someone else says they need AI-generated content. Another vendor says they need AI-driven advertising. Another says their website needs AI. Pretty soon the business owner is spending money on AI without ever stopping to ask what business problem they’re actually trying to solve.

That’s backwards. Start with the problem. Then determine whether AI is the right tool. Not the other way around.

The same principle applies to SEO more broadly. A company doesn’t need SEO because SEO is fashionable. It needs search visibility because customers need to be able to find it. It doesn’t need content because a marketing consultant promised a certain number of monthly articles. It needs useful content because prospective customers have questions, search engines need context, and the business needs to establish why it deserves attention. Our approach to Denver SEO starts from that larger picture rather than treating content production as the strategy itself.

AI Can Be Extremely Good

None of this is an argument against AI. Quite the opposite. I think AI is going to become one of the most useful technologies businesses have ever had access to. We’re still relatively early in figuring out what it can actually do well, and the capabilities are changing quickly enough that some of the things that seem unusual today will probably be completely ordinary a few years from now.

I’ve personally found it useful in ways that would have sounded ridiculous a few years ago. It can accelerate research. It can help work through complicated ideas. It can identify patterns. It can help with development. It can challenge an assumption. It can take a rough concept and help turn it into something usable. That’s powerful. But the usefulness comes from the combination of human judgment and machine capability.

That’s the part that gets lost in the marketing. AI doesn’t eliminate the need for judgment. In many situations it increases the value of judgment because there is now so much more material to evaluate. If anything, I think we’re heading toward a world where knowing what not to publish becomes just as important as knowing what to publish.

That is particularly true online. The internet does not need another 5,000 generic articles explaining what SEO is. It needs businesses to explain what they have actually learned from doing SEO. It doesn’t need another generic article about web design trends. It needs people who build websites explaining what actually happens when those decisions meet real businesses, real customers and real budgets.

That’s also where branding comes into the conversation. A business isn’t simply a collection of keywords and landing pages. It has a personality, a reputation, a visual identity and a reason for existing. AI can help produce language and images, but it doesn’t automatically create a meaningful brand. That still requires decisions. Our work in Denver logo design and branding is ultimately about that same underlying problem: giving a business something recognizable and coherent rather than simply generating more material.

The Technology Doesn’t Make the Work Good

One of the easiest traps to fall into is confusing production speed with quality. AI can make certain kinds of production dramatically faster. That does not mean faster production automatically creates a better result. If anything, it can expose weaknesses much faster. A weak idea can now become a finished-looking article in minutes. A mediocre website concept can be expanded into dozens of pages. A questionable marketing strategy can be wrapped in impressive terminology and presented as an automated solution.

The result can look remarkably polished and still be wrong.

That is why businesses need to become better consumers of technology rather than simply more enthusiastic consumers of technology. If someone tells you their platform uses AI, that’s fine. Ask what the AI actually does. If someone tells you their SEO system uses AI, ask what happens to the website before the AI starts producing content. If someone tells you AI will dramatically improve your marketing, ask how that improvement will be measured. If someone tells you AI will save you money, ask where the savings actually occur.

And if someone tells you that everyone needs this because AI is the future, I’d probably ask one additional question: Why do I need it today?

That’s not being anti-technology. That’s being a buyer.

It is also the same reason I don’t think businesses should approach their websites as disposable marketing containers. A website is still one of the primary places where a potential customer decides whether a company looks credible, understands its business and deserves further consideration. AI can help us build, analyze and improve that experience, but it doesn’t remove the need for a thoughtful website strategy. If anything, the flood of automatically generated material makes a strong website foundation even more important.

The AI Label Will Eventually Stop Being Special

There is another reason I think this conversation matters. Eventually, AI won’t be special. It will simply be part of the software. We don’t generally market websites today by announcing that they use databases. We don’t sell word processors by emphasizing that they use processors. We don’t tell people that their email application is “internet-powered” as though that alone is a reason to buy it.

At some point, AI will become another underlying technology.

The interesting question won’t be whether something uses AI. It will be whether it uses AI well. That is a much higher bar.

And I suspect that as the market matures, the companies that survive won’t necessarily be the ones shouting “AI” the loudest. They’ll be the ones that can demonstrate that their technology produces better outcomes. The companies that can show what changed, why it changed and what happened afterward will have a much easier time making their case than companies whose entire pitch is essentially a collection of AI-related adjectives. And that raises a much bigger question than how effectively AI can be marketed: how quickly should the technology itself be advancing? That is becoming an increasingly serious discussion among the people building these systems, which is why I recently looked at the growing debate over how quickly AI should advance.

That’s one of the reasons I’m increasingly interested in how AI changes the way people discover businesses in the first place. Search is no longer just a matter of typing a phrase into Google and clicking through ten blue links. People are increasingly asking AI systems questions and expecting an answer that incorporates multiple sources. That makes getting a company mentioned in AI search results a different kind of challenge from simply stuffing another keyword onto a page.

And again, the answer isn’t simply “create more AI content.”

The answer is to become worth mentioning.

Don’t Be Impressed by the Acronym

This may be the simplest way I can put it. Don’t buy something because it says AI on the label. Don’t reject something because it says AI on the label either. Look underneath it. What does it actually do? What problem does it solve? What evidence exists that it works? What does it require from you? What happens when it gets something wrong? And what does the company selling it understand about your business beyond the fact that it has an AI product to sell?

Those questions are going to become increasingly important because AI isn’t going away. The opposite is happening. AI is moving into websites, search, marketing, development, customer service, analytics, advertising, design and virtually every other part of the digital ecosystem. The technology will continue getting better, and businesses will continue finding useful ways to apply it.

That’s a good thing.

But the arrival of better tools doesn’t eliminate the need for good thinking. It makes good thinking more valuable.

The shiny-object phase will eventually wear off. “AI-powered” will stop being enough to get anyone’s attention. Buyers will become more sophisticated. Businesses will become more skeptical. And companies selling AI-based services will eventually have to do what every other technology company has always had to do: prove that the thing actually works.

That may ultimately be the best thing that happens to AI marketing. Because once everyone can generate content, generate images, generate code, generate strategies and generate explanations, the generation itself becomes less interesting. What matters is what happens before and after the generation. What did you know before you started? What decision did you make? What did you create? Did it work? What changed? What did you learn? And can you show somebody else the evidence?

That’s a much more interesting future than simply putting “AI” in front of everything.

Until then, don’t be afraid to ask questions. And don’t let a shiny acronym make the decision for you.

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