Project managers truly keep the Brafton bus from going off the road. Plus, they ensure our team uses the same roadmap and moves in the best direction. As a Senior Project Manager, Ashleigh Gardner is one of the key success drivers for our clients, always staying one step ahead of project demands and managing expectations for external and internal teams. 

In her own words, she fell into project management at the perfect time, finding her calling without knowing exactly what she was looking for. Here’s what you need to know about Ashleigh’s story and what makes her excel in this position. 

Turn Left: From Psychology to Agency Work

If you’ve ever chatted with Ashleigh or worked on a project with her, you’ve probably noticed how adept she is at reading situations and paying attention to small details in conversation. While this is simply part of the way she works, she also completed her undergraduate degree in Psychology and Communications in West Virginia, giving her a bit of insight into how people function. 

“While I’m not taking theory and putting it into practice, my study in psychology does come out in how I operate internally and interact with others,” she said. “Subconsciously, it’s something that has influenced how I measure work and respond to things.”

She found studying fascinating, but knew she didn’t want to pursue it as a career. Instead, she moved back home to Jamaica and joined a production house focused on TV advertising. After some time, Ashleigh took the opportunity to become an Operations Manager at a startup creative agency, securing her foot in the marketing door.

“Being part of building that agency from the ground up was a pivotal experience,” she said. “It helped me realize how much I enjoy working with creative teams to bring ideas to life and shape how audiences engage with content.”

This experience cemented her path in marketing and project/process management. She’d found what she truly excels at and what she enjoys doing.

“I don’t consider myself a creative, but I do love working with creatives,” she said. “I love seeing what they can do and how they bring a vision to life. And I love to create frameworks and systems that support the work and improve communication.” 

She later was an Account Manager at one of the Caribbean’s largest advertising agencies where she had a hybrid role that combined both account and project management responsibilities, further filling her rolodex with skills necessary to be a powerhouse for clients and internal teams alike. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world began to shift, as did her desire to explore opportunities outside of Jamaica. Living on a smaller island, she wanted to expand beyond local constraints and tap into more global opportunities. That search steered her toward remote opportunities, where she could collaborate with international teams, work across diverse brands and industries and continue growing both professionally and creatively. 

Falling Into Project Management

As luck would have it, Ashleigh came across Brafton on LinkedIn while exploring remote work — and in just the nick of time. She was hired in May of 2022 as a Project Manager, and then was promoted to Senior Project Manager a year later. 

“I was even considering relocating, but finding Brafton allowed me to stay in Jamaica while still gaining global exposure and collaborating with teams and clients around the world,” she said. 

While Ashleigh is cool, calm and collected during every interaction with clients and internal teams, she shared that she initially felt nervous stepping into an internationally focused role. Having previously worked exclusively with Caribbean-based clients, she knew she would need to navigate the nuances that come with different cultures, experiences and perspectives. But she embraced it with a clear sense of purpose. 

“It’s always been about creating space for other people to enter this field,” she said. “If I can help someone else get to the positions I’m in or bring the other person along, since I know how hard it is to enter certain spaces and rooms, it’s extremely important to me. I won’t give anyone a free ride, but I do think it’s crucial to help people see the opportunities available to them.”

Her passion for a marketing industry that reflects a wide range of voices, perspectives and ideas is evident in how she supports her coworkers, answers questions and approaches every situation. 

To complement her project management role, she completed a Master’s in Business Administration with a focus in Advertising. Her decision to go back to school was driven by her desire to gain more of a solid theoretical foundation in the field and deepen her strategic and business understanding of marketing work. 

She works on one of Brafton’s largest clients, helping them manage a massive amount of projects spread over multiple companies and growing their relationship. “Through strong delivery and collaboration, we’ve not only retained the business but expanded it, including additional work across associated brands,” she added. 

Because Ashleigh loves to problem solve and never backs down, even when things get tricky, Brafton has been a place for her to grow. 

“I’ve been constantly challenged in a way that encourages growth, and I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside a talented and supportive team.” 

A Day in the Life of Brafton’s Organization Connoisseur

One thing to note about marketing is that no two days are ever the same, which Ashleigh believes keeps things “dynamic and engaging, even on the more demanding days.” Wondering what a Senior Project Manager’s work looks like? For our leading lady, it’s a lot more behind-the-scenes tasks than you’d think. 

She ends each evening by going over the calendar for the next day and pre-planning what she’s expecting to work on and what people might need from her. During this time, she color-codes her internal notes and trackers and marks her calendar with helpful details to map out her day. This gives her a good framework and ensures she can log in in the morning and jump into the tasks ahead of her. 

During her day, she does administrative tasks such as note-taking during meetings and sending out dozens of emails to communicate with her team and clients. You’ll also find her mapping out project work and timelines, ensuring everyone has what they need to get the work done well, within scope and before the deadline. 

Lastly, she’s generally the final checkpoint for all creative assets, looking over all work to ensure quality control and adherence to expectations. Then, she ensures that work is put into the client’s hands. 

Ultimately, Ashleigh has learned to take each day as it comes, striving to be the best version of herself, no matter what. “Not every day is a 100% day, and I’ve learned to be okay with that,” she said. “Some days, you give 50%, and that’s enough — because it allows you to come back stronger the next day.”

Leaning on Strategic Relationship Building: Ashleigh’s Tips for Project Management Success

Success in project management doesn’t just come down to timelines and deliverables (while those are important); it’s about people. Ashleigh credits her effectiveness to her ability to build strong relationships, both internally and externally, and to adapt her approach depending on who she’s working with. 

Here are her tips for success:

• Know how different creatives work: No two creatives are the same, and it’s helpful to know how different people operate and produce the best work so you can get the best results. “You have to create parameters, but also give people the space to work in the way that works best for them,” she explained. Whether someone’s a night owl or thrives on structure, tailoring your approach helps ensure deadlines are met without sacrificing quality.
• Come prepared and build trust: For Ashleigh, preparation is everything. Showing up to meetings with context, solutions and a clear understanding of project goals helps establish trust with clients and teammates. 
• Don’t just flag problems, bring solutions: Challenges are inevitable in marketing, but she emphasizes the importance of being proactive. Instead of simply identifying issues, she always aims to present a potential solution. This keeps projects moving forward and reinforces confidence among stakeholders. 
• Adapt, don’t apply a one-size-fits-all approach: While understanding the fundamentals is essential, flexibility is what sets great project managers apart. Each client and team requires a slightly different approach, and being able to pivot is key to long-term success

Unwinding After Hours

When she logs off for the day and puts project management to rest, Ashleigh makes time to recharge. She loves to travel and is often either planning her next trip or enjoying one. In between adventures, she’ll scroll through Instagram or settle in for a binge-worthy show, whether it’s something new or a familiar favorite.

By combining structure with flexibility and creating intentional working relationships, she embodies what it means to be a modern project manager: adaptable, thoughtful and deeply committed to both people and process. 

And while the marketing world never really slows down, it’s people like Ashleigh that make sure it never spins out of control. 

The post How the Marketing World Keeps Spinning With Ashleigh Gardner appeared first on Brafton.

On many sites, these automated guests rival, and sometimes exceed, genuine user sessions. When this happens, overwhelming bot activity can significantly slow down your site. Real users are left staring at a 503 error, scratching their heads and wondering what 503 even means. 

The natural response is to block bot activity. They’re creating problems, so it’s time to kick them out. The problem is that not all bots are the same — and when we’re all aiming to be cited in AI search answers, blocking bots can have serious consequences on visibility.

“Bot management isn’t just a technical checklist, it’s a strategic lever for marketing and IT teams alike,” says Deryk King, AVP of Engineering at Brafton. “If you don’t know which bots are hitting your site and why, you’re flying blind on SEO, analytics and AI visibility.”

Bad actors can easily spoof trusted user-agent strings, which means simple allowlists aren’t enough to keep troublemakers out. That’s why the first step toward smarter bot handling is understanding exactly which crawlers are knocking on your digital door.

Understanding Which Bots Are Visiting Your Website

Before you decide whether to welcome or restrict a crawler, you need to know why it’s there. Classifying traffic by purpose helps you avoid over-blocking bots that drive visibility while tightening controls on those that create risks for your site.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of bots:

1. Search and Discovery Crawlers

Search engine bots like Googlebot and Bingbot crawl and index your pages so users can find you. If they can’t reach a page, it’s essentially invisible. That’s what robots.txt files are for — they indicate which URLs search crawlers can access. Having this guidance helps to manage the load these bots put on your servers.

You generally want to allow these bots while monitoring their crawl rate for server strain. However, keep in mind that some bots, like ChatGPT-User, fetch pages at a user’s request, which means they may bypass the rules set in your robots.txt. Since these user-initiated fetches can reach disallowed URLs, it’s important to understand which requests fall into this gray zone.

2. Marketing, Monitoring and Social Preview Bots

Beyond search indices, crawlers like AhrefsBot or Screaming Frog audit SEO health, monitor uptime and generate social previews. These bots are useful for marketers but can become bandwidth hogs if not managed. Evaluate their frequency, refine allowed paths and throttle or schedule visits as needed to balance insights with resource use.

3. AI Training and AI Grounding Crawlers

AI has introduced a new breed of crawler, each with a distinct purpose:

• Training crawlers harvest content to improve language models. Examples include GPTBot (OpenAI), GoogleOther, Amazonbot and Common Crawl. These are high-volume and can impact bandwidth and expose proprietary content.
  • Blocking them protects your data but removes it from future model training sets.
• Grounding/search crawlers fetch live pages for real-time AI answers and citations. Examples include OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot and Claude-Web.
  • Allowing them can boost brand exposure and referral traffic.

OpenAI’s guidance allows you to permit OAI-SearchBot while blocking GPTBot, giving you more control over how bots use your content. Other platforms, like Anthropic and Perplexity, have similar distinctions.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet that outlines the impact allowing, throttling and blocking each has on various types of crawlers:

Evaluating Which Bots To Allow, Limit or Block

Treating every crawler the same can create risk and lead to missed opportunities. A smarter approach weighs each bot’s identity, behavior and business value.

“Marketers sometimes jump straight to the nuclear option, blocking entire user-agent families, only to watch their search traffic or AI citations evaporate,” says King. “Start with the least disruptive lever and tighten only where data shows abuse.”

It’s helpful to know some of the warning signs of suspicious bots. Some of the most common include:

• Abnormally high speed.
• Repetitive actions.
• Consistent 24/7 activity.
• Misleading identifiers.

User-Agent headers alone aren’t enough for identification, because bad bots can fake them. Instead, using reverse/forward DNS lookups and IP validation before granting access can help identify a bot’s true purpose. Big players, like OpenAI and Perplexity, also publish their IP ranges, which serve as helpful references.

“If a crawler won’t prove who it is, it hasn’t earned privileged access,” King explains.

Configuring Access Controls Without Creating Visibility Gaps

A layered defense is the best defense. Robots.txt, IP rules and web application firewalls (WAFs) each solve different problems. But no matter what your defense setup looks like, you should always monitor these systems to identify anomalies and build a greater understanding of the bots accessing your site.

Here are a few tips for implementing a layered defense against malicious bots while allowing beneficial ones in:

Use Robots.txt for Crawl Guidance

Robots.txt communicates with well-behaved bots, steering them away from low-value pages and reducing unnecessary load.

Implement Enforcement Controls

If robots.txt isn’t enough — and there’s a good chance it’s not — use firewalls, rate-limiting, CAPTCHA or honeypots to filter unwanted traffic. Be careful and go slow with these, though; overly aggressive blocks can cut off legitimate search features or partners.

Monitor and Adjust Over Time

No rule set should be static. Log analysis reveals which bots visit, how often and whether they align with your policies. Keep an eye out for new spoofing attempts, and adjust controls when it makes sense.

Handling AI Crawlers With More Precision

Search bots have always played a role in SEO, but it’s now more important than ever to understand and handle them appropriately. Decisions about allowing or blocking them impact both model training and AI citations.

Avoid Blanket Blocks

Blanket “Disallow: /*” directives aimed at AI can backfire. Different crawlers interpret robots.txt differently, and disallowed URLs can still be indexed if linked externally. Review each bot individually, verify IP ranges and document your rationale as you go. This helps you iterate in a meaningful way.

Legal and Policy Considerations

Crawler decisions may also carry legal weight: Copyright, data-use agreements and confidentiality all matter. Schedule regular reviews with marketing, SEO, legal and engineering stakeholders to ensure technical rules align with business goals.

Business Tradeoff Framework

Keeping all stakeholders on the same page regarding bot management helps clarify each decision. Here’s a 4-stage framework to determine how best to manage each bot accessing your site:

1. Define the bot’s purpose: Is it for training, AI-generated answers or something else?
2. Assess value vs. cost: Weigh expected traffic and exposure against bandwidth and compliance risks.
3. Set enforcement thresholds: Establish limits and automate allow, throttle or block decisions as needed.
4. Monitor and iterate: As bots are allowed or blocked from your site, monitor server loads, AI visibility and other metrics to understand the impact of your choices. Make changes as needed to support your overall goals for site functionality, visibility and speed.

Turning Bot Management Into a Smarter Website Strategy

AI search has established itself as a core pillar of brand visibility. As such, even the best policies must adapt and evolve to support long-term business goals.

Some unpredictable bot traffic is inevitable, but monitoring activity and implementing flexible governance helps brands stay in control.

Treat bots as distinct business partners — some welcome, some restricted, some blocked — to transform a shadowy source of traffic into a managed, measurable part of your strategy.

The post Different Types of Website Bots and Crawlers: How To Identify, Manage and Handle Them Strategically appeared first on Brafton.

We surveyed 163 marketing professionals, of whom 132 use AI in their workflows. From their responses, we sought to answer the question: What separates effective AI-assisted marketing from poor-quality AI content? 

In this blog, we’ll explore our key survey findings around how teams review, edit and enhance AI-generated content. We’ll also evaluate why reliance on AI output without essential human direction is a no-go and highlight practical steps digital marketers can use to produce high-quality content geared for target demographics.

What Our Survey Revealed About AI Content Review

The Most Common Ways Marketers Handle AI Output

Based on our survey results, here’s how the 132 respondents who actively use AI in their marketing efforts handle AI-generated content:

• 97 respondents fact-check and proofread all output. 
• 95 respondents edit it for clarity and brand tone.
• 85 respondents utilize it as a starting point for human creatives.
• 45 respondents augment AI content with insights from subject matter experts (SMEs).

An interesting takeaway is that most marketers combine multiple review stages instead of just one to improve content quality before publication. This suggests that marketing professionals in general tend to view AI as a collaborator instead of as a replacement for human-produced content.

The Good News: Few Marketers Publish AI Content Unedited

Why is this good news for you and your brand? Only six of the 132 respondents reported publishing AI output with minimal edits and checks involved. In other words, more than 95% of marketers using AI apply at least one layer of human review before content reaches their audience. 

While AI is an excellent tool for streamlining workflows, it still requires human oversight to ensure that it meets search engine optimization (SEO) best practices and user search intent. This is encouraging because the survey results suggest that concerns around quality and accuracy have actually prompted marketers to adopt disciplined workflows as AI usage gains more traction.

Why AI Output Should Never Be Considered Final Draft Content

There are several reasons why making AI output the be-all, end-all of your digital marketing efforts isn’t a smart move in the long run.

AI Still Struggles With Accuracy, Expertise and Originality

Our survey revealed that many respondents are concerned that relying too heavily on AI output could lead to a lack of original, accurate and authoritative digital content. 

When asked about their biggest concerns regarding AI-generated content quality, 87 respondents selected “The content is thin or generic-sounding” statement, making it the most common AI output concern by a significant margin. 

Additionally, 51 respondents worried about producing digital content with outdated or incorrect information, while 46 respondents said it takes too long to elevate AI-generated content to the level of quality and authority their audiences expect. Another 43 respondents feel that AI-generated content often fails to reflect their organization’s expertise.

What this tells us is that even as AI technology gets faster and more intuitive, marketers ultimately want to use AI as an assistant, not an author. 

The Cost of Publishing AI Content Without Review

While our survey revealed that a small minority of marketers are comfortable with letting AI output take the reins in content generation, there are several risks involved with publishing AI-generated content without careful review: 

• Compromising brand reputation.
• Customers losing trust in the content’s factual accuracy.
• Scaling content ahead of maintaining SEO quality.

Imagine that you’re a marketer who works for a B2B software company using AI to write a blog. The AI cites cybersecurity regulations, but its sources are outdated. After publication, prospects and your in-house SME notice these inaccuracies and question your company’s expertise. 

Even a few factual errors can damage credibility, reduce trust in future content and make potential customers less likely to view your brand as an authoritative source.

5 Best Practices for Managing AI Output

From stronger prompt engineering and fact-checking to brand refinement and SME input, these five best practices can help transform AI-generated first drafts into final pieces containing accurate, authoritative and audience-focused content:

1. Use AI as a Starting Point, Not the Final Product

One of the strongest themes in our survey was that most marketers view AI as a jumping-off point rather than a final destination. 

For example, these respondents might argue that an AI-generated blog that is edited or updated by a human can effectively narrow the focus and overcome writer’s block. The strongest content still comes from human marketers who build upon AI-generated foundations with strategic thinking, creativity and expertise.

2. Improve the Input Before Improving the Output

Creating better prompts with specific context and constraints equals better content generation — and reduced editing time in the long run. 

When using AI tools, consider including the following information in your prompts:

• Audience information.
• Brand voice guidelines.
• Desired format and structure.
• Relevant background context.
• Specific objectives for the content.

This approach seems to work well for one survey respondent, who said, “Custom GPTs trained on style and tone eliminate massive editing after [the content] has been created.”

As it happens, we’ve noticed this at Brafton, too; that’s partly what led us to create contentmarketing.ai, an AI platform designed to create content stringently based on brand guidelines.

3. Fact-Check Everything Before Publishing

Fifty-one survey respondents specifically identified hallucination tendencies and outdated or incorrect information as one of their biggest AI content concerns. For organizations operating in finance, health care, education or professional services, a single factual error can damage trust and undermine brand authority.

By implementing practical verification workflows, you can enhance the factual accuracy of your digital content exponentially.

4. Edit for Brand Voice, Clarity and Audience Relevance

AI has taken tremendous strides in emulating the human voice. However, one of the most common criticisms thrown at AI-generated content is that it sounds generic, failing to effectively capture the nuances of human storytelling and judgment.

With that said, concerns about off-brand messaging ranked much lower this time around than in our previous survey. This may indicate that marketers are becoming more effective at prompting AI systems and integrating brand guidelines into their workflows to improve readability and increase user engagement.

5. Add Subject Matter Expertise Wherever Possible

Our survey findings suggest that marketers are increasingly turning to SME collaboration for interviews, surveys, internal reviews, proprietary insights and original research to create content that AI alone cannot replicate.

For instance, 43 respondents said AI-generated content fails to reflect their expertise. As such, 45% of respondents now augment AI output with human oversight by using SMEs to produce digital content that creates authority for their brands and differentiation from competitors. These outcomes align with a similar study done by the Anthropic Economic Index, which asserts that 57% of economic professionals use AI tools for augmentation, whereas 43% utilize AI capabilities purely for automation purposes in comparison.

Our survey outcomes suggest that you can improve AI output for content creation with a logical process involving:

• Prompting.
• Generating.
• Verifying.
• Refining.
• Enhancing.

4 Questions Every Marketer Should Ask Before Publishing AI Content

Before publishing AI-assisted content, marketers should follow a consistent review process by asking the right questions about accuracy, brand alignment, expertise and originality.

1. Is This Accurate and Up To Date?

While a helpful content production tool, AI is far from perfect. Human fact-checking is essential for checking AI-generated content, which often contains incorrect or outdated information at the best of times.

So, before you head straight to the proverbial presses and tell users to “Read all about it!”, you first need to verify every statistic, claim, quote or factual statement made in your content against reputable sources. 

Keep in mind that many AI tools don’t always have the latest information at their disposal. For instance, GPT 5-5, the latest version of ChatGPT, was released in April 2026 and has a knowledge base with information that’s as recent as December 2025. That’s why marketers must ensure that examples, regulations, industry trends and product information they include in their digital content are current and haven’t changed since the AI model they’re using was trained.

2. Does This Reflect Our Brand Voice?

AI tools tend to create content with generic phrasing, so always review your prompts for tone, style and messaging consistency.

By feeding AI tools with language examples and perspectives from your brand’s sources, you can help generate content that sounds uniquely like your organization and appeals to your audience in ways that best align with their expectations and pain points.

3. Would An Industry Expert Approve This Content?

The question you need to ask yourself is whether the AI-generated content you’ve prompted demonstrates genuine expertise or merely repeats widely available information that anyone could produce.

Look for opportunities to incorporate expert insights, examples or commentary that strengthen your content’s authority and reliability. By getting SMEs to assist, you can review key sections more thoroughly for accuracy, nuance and credibility.

4. Does This Provide Original Value For The Audience?

Another question you should be asking is whether the content offers unique insights, practical advice or perspectives beyond what AI could generate on its own. 

More importantly, does the piece you’ve created using AI answer audience questions more effectively than competing content? 

It’s possible to achieve true differentiation by creating helpful content that offers authentic, first-hand experience, customer insights or proprietary data that can’t be found anywhere else.

The Gold Standard for AI-Assisted Marketing Content

The survey findings point toward a consistent pattern among high-performing teams. Rather than relying on AI to replace human expertise, marketers are layering AI-generated content with multiple forms of oversight and insight. 

Based on the survey’s results, combining AI efficiency with human judgment can help marketers achieve a more sustainable, long-term content strategy that relies on: 

• AI for ideation and drafting.
• Human editing and fact-checking.
• SME augmentation.

Final Thoughts

It’s true: AI has accelerated marketing workflows in recent years, but effective output quality still needs that innate human touch. This is supported overwhelmingly by the survey respondents who favor review, editing and verification over blind AI automation and generation. 

Instead of viewing it as a replacement for human direction, the most effective marketers treat AI as an ally in the battle for generating high-quality, authoritative content that answers users’ search intent and speaks to their various pain points.

The time is ripe for using AI capabilities effectively and responsibly through repeatable review processes that blend creativity, accuracy, brand alignment and expertise.

The post AI in Marketing: How Should Marketers Handle AI Output? Lessons From Our Survey appeared first on Brafton.

If you’re struggling to identify what AI writing looks like and aren’t sure what makes human writing good, you risk leading your audiences on a straight and narrow path into “today’s fast-paced, rapidly evolving digital landscape,” where “artificial intelligence revolutionizes paradigm shifts.”

Heaven forbid, you might even ask them to “unlock their potential” and “delve deep into this synergy,” leveraging AI to maximize efficiency while “seamlessly synergizing workflows to avoid generating unoptimized, robotic content clutter.”

Oh, the humanity. Let’s not do that.

What Is AI Slop?

AI slop is mass-produced, devastatingly generic AI-generated content with precious, precious little depth to subsist on. If language had junk food, it’d be AI slop. Its repetitive, formulaic phrasing, sentence structures and choice of verbiage smothers the message beneath the words, and your audience along with it.

When large language models (LLMs) began assisting in the automation of digital content, we humans saw it as a strategic loophole. We began producing content farms to trick search engines’ algorithms, as well as fake images, memes and AI-generated videos to use as clickbait on social media platforms. The loophole backfired when this tidal wave of sludge pushed the search market to tighten the ropes on content quality. 

Here are some examples of sloshy AI I’ve come across recently:

• Low-effort TikToks: A video on the social media feeds that had “CTA:” written before the CTA in the closed captions. This is an example of AI slop.
• Misinformation: Fake scientific papers claiming that “rogue black holes” are going to consume the universe.
• Slop content: The word “tapestry” (which is impressively archaic in AI’s timeline, but still frequents in economic, communal, cultural and data references).

You’ll see a list of red flags to check your copy for later, but the preface to that list is: there’s no way to make it exhaustive. That’s because there is a level of subjectivity to AI slop. The more you work with AI, the more evident it becomes, though even humans can produce copy that sounds like AI slop in some form.

Now, AI tools do have their advantages. Using them is by no means wrong or bad. I’d encourage other writers to experiment and to use discernment as they do.

How AI Slop Impacts Content Quality and Brand Reputation

Many readers don’t mind AI-generated copy, provided it’s good. Good AI copy happens when a human edits and refines the work to achieve a natural, human-centric flow that generative AI’s perfectionistic tendencies don’t save space for.

If you’re just hitting generate and post, the risks are:

• Declining engagement metrics: People disengage when messages are delivered from some fantasmic linguistic void.  
• Lower trust and brand authority: Low-quality content damages your brand authority, and high-quality content fosters trust.
• SEO volatility: Google doesn’t penalize AI, but it does penalize poor-quality copy. AI SEO content writers do a great job at optimizing, but without a leash, they can cause more harm via messaging and voice.
• Lower conversion rates: If your readers don’t like your copy, you’re not helping them reach the end goal.
• Audience fatigue: Compelling copy keeps people engaged. Boring, brain-rot copy wears them out.
• Commoditization of brand identity: Your brand identity ceases to be an asset the moment it becomes interchangeable.
• Content indistinguishable from competitors: If AI is in charge of your brand voice, every man and his dog will sound like your brand, too. With 53% of marketers struggling to differentiate their content, it’s more critical now than ever before to protect your voice.

Brand aside, navigating these waters relies on the people using AI for digital content and the AI model itself. So, what can you do about AI slop — and who needs to hear this message?

The Avoidable Dangers of AI Slop (and How To Overcome Them)

For the sake of the argument, imagine a world with three types of people: 

1. Non-writers who are unfamiliar with AI content.
2. Writers who are unfamiliar with AI content.
3. Writers who are familiar with AI content. 

The first two groups are potentially the most vulnerable to AI slop. Here’s why:

Problem #1: Non-Writers Lack Foundational Writing Skills

If you’re not a writer, it’s hard to discern what makes good writing (and therefore identify when AI has produced bad writing). The concept is standard across any discipline, from science and architecture to infinity and beyond.

Solutions For Non-Writers

Read a book. No, seriously, if you’re not a writer and you’re using AI to generate copy, read a single book about writing principles and get some of the basics down. “On Writing Well,” by William Zinsser and “Writing Tools,” by Roy Peter Clarke, are the two I’d send your way, but there are a gazillion others out there that’ll tell you what you need to know.

Problem #2: Unfamiliarity With AI Copy = Limited Awareness

If you’re unfamiliar with AI content, it’s initially hard to recognize AI slop. At first glance, AI content usually does look fine. It’s after you’ve read about inanimate objects and abstract concepts doing things “quietly in the background” for the 27th time that you realize people — even those terrible at writing — are not that uninventive.

Solutions for AI-Newcomers

If you’re less familiar with AI tools, I’d suggest smashing out another AI article and using the time you saved writing it yourself to create some experimental AI-generated content. Ask for something like 10 social posts, a 1,000-word blog copy and a few 500-word blogs. Switch between popular platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to get familiar with the patterns. Those patterns are AI slop.

How To Identify Text-Based AI Slop

Here’s that list we were talking about. I could probably make this collection of AI tropes as long as the article itself, so use it as a baseline but not as an exhaustive reference. Here are some common, repetitive quirks and phrasings you might find in your AI-generated content:

• Zero unique examples: This includes anecdotes, first-party data or user-generated content.
• Excessive hedging: “In today’s fast-paced world…”
• Repetitive sentence structures: Including the “It’s not X; it’s Y” rhetoric.
• Formulaic lists of three: Such as, “By automating workflows, optimizing data and streamlining communications, organizations can…”
• Repetitive, ambiguous references: Often, they’re referring to something that happens in a professional environment on a “Tuesday afternoon.”
• Generic introductions and conclusions: Run-of-the-mill, low-quality content that’s screaming for depth.
• No strong point of view: AI’s sycophantic disposition leans to the center, rather than representing an opinion that someone might disagree with.
• Words that don’t mean anything: Think about “The compounding effect here is real,” and “That distinction matters.”
• Specific words that frequent AI copy: Some examples are fast-paced, secret sauce, quietly (more recent), paradigm shift, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, testament, realm and delve.
• Hypophoras mid-copy: Questions the AI will ask and answer immediately, like “And, honestly?” or “The catch?”
• Utterly made-up data: Gemini is the worst. It’ll give you a stat, link you to the “source” (which is actually just a Google search page), provide you a reference quote in that “source,” and the whole thing is a hallucination.
• Nonsensical cause and effect: Unabashed disinformation, including statements like, “By unlocking your creative freedom, you can learn about the market shifts impacting real businesses today.”

The last one’s especially insidious because if you’re not paying full attention as you edit the copy, it’s easy to gloss over. The words seem to flow, the reasoning seems logical — until you really think about what’s being said. These often show up when you’re either creating large blocks of text in one go, or iterating tons of small blocks of copy, say email subject lines or posts for social media accounts.

To throw a spanner in the works, remember that large language models are trained on human writing, so all of these patterns are genuinely human and are not forbidden from digital content in general. The idea is to identify them in your AI-generated copy and use critical discernment when you decide whether to keep them, reprompt or edit them out.

How To Avoid Creating More AI Slop While Still Using AI for Content

You can use AI to make your content. With 87% of other marketers using generative platforms for collateral, why wouldn’t you?  

As someone who’s used AI models a lot in copy creation (including this article), I’d probably generate between 5k and 15k words to hash out ideas, find synonyms, create better examples and straighten out my phrasing. In the final copy, I’d use about a max of 100 to 400 words generated by AI.

Here’s how to achieve polished, human-sounding copy without the shameless AI slop in your ChatGPT collab.

• Familiarity: Just get comfortable with the tools and how they behave. The increase in AI mentioned in marketing job listings increased from 30% to 37% between January and May 2026. Think of it as part education, part brand-protection and part future-proofing.
• Thoughtful editing: Don’t go to the supermarket hungry, and don’t edit AI writing when your brain is overloaded from generating copy. Take a break, stare at a tree. Go in with a fresh mind.
• Research: Always fact-check information produced by AI — especially in the GEO days, where accurate data supports your chances of mentions in generative search. It can help to find your stats first, rather than weaving supporting information in later. I’ve found Perplexity and Claude the most reliable. Also, watch out for ChatGPT-provided links; they contain a UTM tracking code at the end of the URL slug “utm_source=chatgpt.com.”
• Outlining: AI offers pretty generic outlines, so injecting human expertise and discernment early sets a solid direction for a human-centric article.
• Summarization: Works in two ways: ask AI to summarize your logic and verify whether it makes sense, or ask AI to summarize complex concepts to clarify your understanding as you’re writing. Especially useful for those thought leadership pieces, analysis and market reports.
• Ideation: At any stage in the article, check in with the chatbot for ideas to add direction, depth or address search intent. Always combine this with your own judgment.
• Identifying content gaps: GEO is also pushing us to write the answer first, then break into context and supporting data later. To ensure you comprehensively address search intent, ask AI for fan-out queries and missing information that could help you rank.

In my experience, using AI for copywriting doesn’t take less time. It can sometimes take more time. But it sure will strengthen your delivery and your arguments. The result is higher-quality copy, enhanced audience trust and engagement and increased brand authority.  

Good Writing Is Still the Standard. AI Only Changed Who Upholds It.

You can put a terrible driver in a Mercedes, and they’ll still be a terrible driver. You can put a good driver in a CarGPT, and they’ll still be a good driver. The key takeaway here is that the vehicle, like AI, will always be a tool.

The quality of the user journey you create with AI assistance depends entirely on your skill and awareness throughout the process. Happy wr-ai-ting!

Note: This article was originally published on contentmarketing.ai.

The post AI Slop: How To Avoid Adding to the Problem While Still Leveraging AI for Its Benefits appeared first on Brafton.

We hate it. We’re all afraid to lose our jobs and believe AI-generated content is always garbage.

… I’m joking. We actually love it. In fact, we’ve been using AI for years. We can do a whole day’s work in 15 minutes and spend the rest of the time playing computer solitaire and Minesweeper.

OK, that’s not the truth, either. The real real truth is nuanced. I know, I know. “Complexity” — how annoying. 

But it’s actually super interesting. Brafton surveyed marketing professionals to get to the bottom of how the industry feels about the technology on the tip of everyone’s tongues today. And the results are illuminating.

The State of AI Adoption in Marketing Teams

This is the second year Brafton has conducted a version of this survey. This year, we got even more respondents — 163 in total. You can read more about our methodology and results in our white paper. But here are the quick highlights:

• AI adoption is already widespread: More than 80% of marketers use AI tools in some capacity.
• Usage is expanding: Most teams are increasing their AI use.
• Users are largely self-taught: Formal training is uncommon, so most marketers are learning how to best use AI tools on their own.
• AI is useful for speed and scale: Marketers are boosting productivity by using AI to do tasks faster and complete more volume. Not as many have reported quality improvements or cost savings.
• Content creation is king: Marketers have found AI most useful for research, ideation and copywriting.
• Human oversight is standard: Marketers usually edit, fact-check or rewrite AI-generated content.
• Governance is playing catch-up: Many organizations lack formal AI policies.
• The future is human + AI: Most marketers see AI as a useful tool, not as a replacement for staff.

Who We Surveyed

Most of our respondents are marketing managers or directors (58%). Individual contributors (26%) and CEOs and executives (16%) follow. Over half of our respondents (52%) are marketing veterans (11+ years of experience). Mid-level and intermediate professionals each make up 18% of our respondents, while entry-level staff was the smallest group (12%).

What’s AI Good For?

Many people are asking this question. Including us. We asked marketers what they use AI for, and tasks related to content creation came up repeatedly. 

We’ll go more in-depth into what specific content creation tasks marketers are using AI for later in our series. (Teaser: “Generating website copy” isn’t particularly high on that list.) What we’re going to focus on here are the benefits.

Speed appears to be the name of the game, as 55% of respondents said AI has enabled them to complete tasks more quickly. This means marketers can swiftly move on to separate challenges; 46% of respondents said AI allowed them to “do more things.”

This highlights AI’s growing role as a force multiplier of productivity for marketing teams. Clearly, many have discovered how to make clear, measurable workflow improvements with AI.

But Is AI Actually Good?

For some, AI is clearly good at boosting productivity and facilitating faster completion of certain jobs. But what’s the quality of that work? Well, the quality might still be high, but only with human oversight.

Only 24% said AI has helped them improve the quality of their work. This quote from one respondent is representative of what we found:

“Quality: No. Time: Yes. We use it to summarize documents, which we could do [ourselves], but [AI] does it faster, even though errors are not infrequent. So it’s a good rough draft.”

AI tools enable many marketing professionals to work faster and do more. And those who haven’t discovered how to use AI to improve work quality may do so in the future; these are, after all, still relatively new tools for many. However, the fact that only 15.9% have reduced costs with AI suggests that CFOs and financial teams should be discriminating when deciding on AI tools to invest in.

Using AI Cautiously

Given that more than 80% of marketers are using AI, you might be tempted to say the industry has embraced these new technologies. But talk to marketing professionals, and “embrace” doesn’t seem the right word.

People have concerns, and so do marketers. Of course, there are broad questions about AI technology — its environmental impact, matters of privacy, eye-watering valuations of AI companies, etc. — but our survey elicited many marketing-specific issues. 

Top AI Concerns

A strong majority of marketers (70%) expressed that thin or generic-sounding content is a major worry. This was by far the most common issue mentioned. So while they’re happy with the efficiency gains, the idea of sacrificing quality or brand reputation was clearly a worrying one.

After questions of content, there’s a wide gap to marketers’ next top concerns. Here’s the breakdown:

One quote stood out: “The landscape will sound increasingly like AI ‘workslop’ until most people develop a distaste for any content that sounds remotely AI-aided.”

So, marketers are definitely using AI, but they’re clearly not entirely happy about it. But they’re also not blithely surrendering their agency over this content.

How Teams Are Handling AI Outputs

“AI slop” likely refers to content published with little to no oversight. Thankfully, this appears to happen rarely in marketing. Only 4.5% of respondents said they published AI content with minimal or no editing. Using AI for fact-checking and proofreading, revising for tone and clarity and as a jumping-off point in the creative process were the most common uses. 

Is AI Worth It?

While using a publicly available large language model (LLM) chatbot to scan a document or draft an outline can save a significant amount of time, marketers are wary of using AI for outputs that their customers or audience might actually see. This is why they almost always work to polish and verify outputs.

But over a third are also unhappy with how long this refinement process takes. So what’s the answer? Is AI limited to providing a slight improvement on certain tasks? Maybe. But perhaps it’s more likely that professionals are still learning to use these tools. Who’s to say that entering better prompts into an LLM won’t result in better outputs? Maybe simply telling the chatbot to use a “professional, B2B tone” could improve content.

Or maybe some teams are using the wrong tool for the job. LLMs are amazing, but they’re not marketing-specific platforms. This might explain why they tend to produce a bland voice, tropes and verbiage that every other LLM and entry-level copywriter relies on. But if professionals used a marketing-specific platform and employed a systematized flow of human checkpoints? Perhaps that would streamline the process of creating on-brand, factually accurate content.

The Skeptic’s Point of View

Some marketers are enthusiastic about AI, some are cautious and others are worried about the long-term ramifications. But even this range of perspectives doesn’t cover everyone in marketing. According to our data, it covers 81%.

The other 19%? This is the group that said they didn’t use AI in marketing in 2025. Most indicated that their companies have never used AI, while a handful (only 5 respondents) reported using an AI tool in the past but decided not to last year. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve all taken a lifelong vow to never use the technology.

Many of these respondents (43%) are simply unsure if they’ll use AI in the near future, while 33% said they have no concrete plans to adopt AI in 2026. Another 23% were more definitive in their intent to refrain from AI this year.

Here were the top four reasons given for not using AI:

1. Moral, ethical and/or environmental concerns. 
2. Data privacy concerns. 
3. Lack of confidence in the quality of AI output. 
4. AI tools we’ve seen don’t fit our needs. 

One respondent spoke well of the underlying uncertainty and tension surrounding AI right now: “With AI continually plagiarizing work, and including vast amounts of information that it has taken without permission, it becomes quite difficult to use AI in a way that is ethical.”

The tech industry has long championed an ethos of “move fast and break things.” Some have rowed back on this idea, while others remain evangelists. And while this mindset has generated great wealth for a few companies — and has clearly produced impressive tools — it’s only natural that it’s left some folks distrustful of AI and the tech industry. 

Whether or not big tech and society as a whole resolve these ethical quandaries, the marketing industry seems confident that AI tools will only grow in importance. We asked, “What’s your outlook on the future of AI adoption in marketing?” Here were the most common responses:

• 59% — Incremental or gradual growth. 
• 13% — Cautiously optimistic.
• 11% — AI will continue to support marketers, but not replace them.

AI as the Ally — Not the Enemy

Marketers have not bought into grand claims of AI revolutionizing their industry within a year or two. But they have largely bought into the idea of AI as a fairly useful tool. Given the hype, both positive and negative, surrounding AI, it’s perhaps remarkable that marketing professionals have a largely pragmatic and reasonable position. 

As one respondent said, “I want to learn more — I really enjoy the creativity it helps me unlock, but am also nervous about losing my voice or style.”

That’s a great place to end for now, but there’s a lot more to say. Check out our other blogs in this series to delve further into the details of specific AI-related topics.

The post AI in Marketing: What Marketers Really Think appeared first on Brafton.

Someone still has to come up with a strong enough idea, create a brief, review the content, request revisions, get approvals, publish the asset and measure whether it actually performed. Multiply that across any number of campaigns, channels and stakeholders, and it’s easy to see why content operations could become untidy and confusing.

The term content supply chain sounds technical, but the idea is simple: A system that helps content move from idea to publication without getting stuck in bottlenecks along the way. Like a manufacturing supply chain, its efficiency depends on how smoothly information flows between stages.

Let’s look at where AI opportunities lie beyond production.

AI Isn’t the Entire Workflow

Content generation is the primary opportunity with AI, and a solid one at that if it’s done well. But that’s just one step in a much larger process. Content teams still need strategy, approvals, governance, distribution and performance reporting. If those parts of the workflow are fragmented, faster drafts are poised to create more work later on and even risk clogging the content conduit.

AI agents may eventually help automate parts of these workflows. Some already do. But many organizations are still focused on implementing generative AI effectively. And even the most sophisticated agents require a well-defined process to operate within.

Saving a couple of hours writing a blog post gains something. Eliminating bottlenecks across several workflows yields even greater gains.

The Real Opportunity Isn’t Faster Writing

AI has a way of exposing workflow problems that are already present. If content is difficult to find, AI won’t solve that. If approvals take weeks, AI can’t solve that either. If multiple teams are creating similar assets because nobody can reliably locate existing content, AI may actually make the problem worse by increasing output.

Start By Standardizing Processes

Start with standardization across the board, i.e., clear briefs, consistent templates, shared source material and organized content libraries. When those foundations are in place, marketers can better prepare for their AI processes with important context — the context AI tools need — to produce the most useful outputs possible.

If something is missing, teams might be more likely to end up with generic content, inconsistent messaging and more revision rounds than they planned for. The quality of the system — or the content supply chain — influences the quality of the outputs.

Then, Implement Guardrails & Governance

Greater productivity is the largest motivator for using AI. That’s why more than half of respondents to our latest AI in Marketing survey indicated that completing tasks more quickly was the best benefit of the technology.

Faster content is nice, but it also needs to remain accurate, compliant and aligned with the brand, which requires governance — and that aspect still lags. 58% of respondents said their organizations still lack formal governance structures. So, what’s the solution in the meantime while those catch up?

Strong governance can start small. Before the formal documents or adding more meetings or approval layers, the best systems build quality controls directly into the workflow.

Try using those same content creation AI tools to help identify inconsistencies and enforce standards. That frees up time for your human experts to focus their attention on other important aspects of the overall strategy or process, like technical claims, regulated content and thought leadership. This balance is what ultimately helps scale production without jeopardizing quality.

You Don’t Need an Enterprise Budget

The phrase “content supply chain” might bring to mind large enterprises with sophisticated technology stacks. In reality, the underlying principles apply to teams of any size.

If you’re a small team, start small: Identify one workflow that causes the most frustration. Maybe blog posts stall in review. Maybe localization takes too long. Maybe collaborators have a hard time tracking down the latest version of an asset. Even marginal improvements in visibility and governance can create meaningful gains long before a team invests in new platforms or complex automation.

What works for a handful of campaigns might break down when multiple teams, stakeholders or assets are involved. That’s typically the point where teams begin looking for technology that can bring workflows, governance and AI capabilities together in a single environment. The objective is to create enough structure that creative teams can spend less time managing processes throughout the supply chain and more time actually creating effective content.

Build the System First

AI has made content creation quicker, but quickness alone shouldn’t be the end goal.

Extracting the most value from AI requires not just having the tools, but building the systems that help content move efficiently between stages — from planning to publication and performance tracking. That’s the ultimate AI content supply chain.

Before investing in another AI tool, map your current content workflows. Identify where projects slow down, where information might get lost and where reviews create delays. For the most meaningful gains, fix those gaps, or similar ones, first. Once the foundation is in place, AI becomes far more effective at accelerating the work across stages.

Note: This article was originally published on contentmarketing.ai.

The post AI and the Content Supply Chain: Looking Beyond Faster Content To Create Stronger Workflows appeared first on Brafton.

Hootsuite’s latest Social Media Trends report asserts that AI tools for social aren’t optional anymore; however, authenticity on social media is what separates successful brands from the rest.

Used well, AI tools can amplify authenticity on social media rather than undermine it with generic content. The challenge isn’t creating more posts; rather, it’s creating content that reflects real expertise that audiences and AI discovery platforms alike can trust.

Authenticity Starts With Strategy

AI isn’t a shortcut to content. That mistake easily leads to generic posts. AI can accelerate execution, but it can’t tell you what matters to your audience or why your brand deserves attention.

As content cycles shrink and expectations around post performance increase, successful social strategies need to be focused. Rather than trying to maintain a presence everywhere, prioritize channels based on audience fit, business goals and their role in the customer journey. AI becomes significantly more valuable when it’s supporting a clear, focused strategy rather than compensating for the lack of one.

Find the Signals Behind Authentic Content

Authenticity isn’t something AI can generate on its own. It comes from understanding what your audience cares about and connecting those interests to your brand’s expertise.

AI can help analyze data gathered through social listening, audience research and performance reporting to identify recurring themes or questions across priority channels. From there, use segmentation — by audience, region or buying stage — to uncover patterns that matter on a more granular level.

Trying to force a pillar that doesn’t align with your intended audience rarely works. The strongest content pillars often reveal themselves naturally, where audience interests overlap with a brand’s unique value proposition.

Once those pillars are established, connect each one to a measurable business objective, whether that’s share of voice, engagement quality, lead generation or retention. And when it’s time to create content, AI can help scale within those strategic boundaries while keeping messaging aligned to audience needs.

AI, Social Search and Discoverability

Social platforms increasingly function as search engines. Users turn to LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to research products, solve problems and discover expertise. AI can help identify recurring audience questions, emerging search terms and language patterns that improve discoverability without sacrificing authenticity.

This visibility extends beyond social media itself, too. Large language models (LLMs) and AI-powered search experiences increasingly surface expert opinions and publicly available social content when generating responses. Publishing useful, authoritative content on social channels can reinforce a brand’s topical authority and increase the likelihood of citation within AI-powered search experiences.

As AI-driven discovery becomes more common, social content plays a growing role in shaping brand visibility beyond the platforms where it’s published. Thoughtful commentary and expert insights fit naturally on social platforms like LinkedIn and work to strengthen brand presence across the wider web.

Where AI Helps — and Where Humans Matter Most

AI excels at scale, speed and pattern recognition. Humans provide context, creativity and trust.

This distinction matters because audiences are increasingly skilled at spotting content that feels generic or disconnected from real experience. And they’re not afraid to call out posts they believe to be AI-generated and low-value either. That can harm brand reputation, which might be difficult to win back.

Expert social strategists should continue to own brand storytelling, cultural nuance, community engagement, executive thought leadership and any content that involves sensitive or regulated topics. Setting clear boundaries is the best way to support teams as they lean into AI as an amplifier of expertise. AI should never become a substitute for expertise.

How To Scale Authenticity Without Losing It

One of AI’s biggest issues is that, without the right system, it creates content that feels interchangeable. A strong system can help ensure every piece of content reflects strategic objectives and brand identity.

Building Better Briefs

Before generating content, create briefs that clearly define:

• Business objectives.
• Target audiences.
• Funnel stages.
• Key messages.
• Supporting proof points.
• Desired actions.
• Platform-specific requirements or nuances.
• Topics or claims to avoid.

The more context AI receives, the more likely it is to produce content that feels relevant to your brand and audience.

Turn Brand Voice Into Actionable AI Guidelines

Most brand guidelines were created for human writers. AI requires a more structured framework. Platforms like contentmarketing.ai help operationalize that structure by translating brand guidelines and voice into practical instructions, including approved terminology, sentence structure, preferred calls to action and more. Briefs are also embedded directly into the content creation workflow, which helps maintain consistency.

Leverage Internal Expertise For Discoverable Social Content

AI is most valuable when it helps brands surface and scale expertise that already exists within the organization. Rather than creating more content for the sake of publishing, the goal should be transforming valuable insights into social content that audiences can discover, engage with and learn from.

AI note takers have become pretty incredible at this. So, off the back of meetings, standups, training sessions or lunch-and-learns, turn to those AI notes for insights to inform social campaigns.

Branch One Idea Off Into Multiple Assets

Equipped with those notes, determine a solid angle or idea, and leverage AI again to generate platform-specific post variations or to develop messaging angles for different content formats and audience segments. For example, LinkedIn audiences respond well to industry insights, while Instagram users might be more likely to engage with visual storytelling.

AI can help scale your experts’ voices while preserving their original perspectives.

Many of Brafton’s own social posts begin as internal conversations. For example, ongoing discussions within our SEO team about video’s role in SEO and GEO eventually became a blog post and a series of social assets, like this one:

It’s a similar story with this short-form video, which came about after an informative internal lunch-and-learn led by Brafton’s AVP of SEO, Philip Weafer:

Measuring Trust, Reach and Business Impact

With trust and credibility as the ultimate goals, measurement has to go beyond surface-level engagement and vanity metrics. Likes and impressions do provide useful signals — and it’s certainly OK to track them. But they seldom tell the full story.

Strong social measurement should connect profile activity to business outcomes, including website traffic, lead generation and customer acquisition. It should also reveal whether content is actively building authority and trust, which means tracking engagement quality, shares, comments, profile visits, branded search activity and referral traffic.

Done well, social measurement should become a recurring feedback loop that not only evaluates performance but also identifies successful content patterns and feeds those insights back into future social media content planning.

Building a More Authentic Social Presence With AI

The brands that succeed with AI on social media won’t necessarily be the ones publishing the most content. They’ll be the ones using AI to amplify expertise, strengthen authenticity and increase discoverability across social platforms, search engines and AI-powered experiences.

AI can help brands move faster, but speed alone rarely builds trust. Authenticity and authority are the foundations of successful social media strategies.

TL;DR: Don’t just look to publish more content or automate more workflows. Combine audience insight, authentic storytelling and intelligent AI use to create stronger relationships with communities, build authority and improve discoverability wherever people search for answers.

Note: This article was originally published on contentmarketing.ai.

The post Designing an AI-Supported Social Media Strategy That Preserves Authenticity appeared first on Brafton.

Marketing to the wrong audience is a bit like that.

Even when you do everything right, it always comes out all wrong. You never quite get the results you’re looking for. To see a real audience engagement impact, you have to align every tactic, from paid media placements to organic social listening, with the needs of the people who matter most.

Because the first rule of marketing is “know your audience.” It was the law of marketing back when the wheel was the hot new thing, and it will be the law of marketing on the spaceship to Mars. In other words, marketing strategies evolve, but the foundation — understanding audience wants, motivations and behaviors — never changes.

What Is an Audience Profile?

An audience profile is a fictitious character you model after a member of your target audience. This single document might include age, gender, location, job title and any number of psychographic traits that paint a vivid picture of the human you’re trying to reach.

Anyone can list attributes of their audience in a Google Doc or write them out in a creative brief. But if you’re really trying to understand whom you’re marketing to, you need to create a well-rounded representation of a real person. An audience profile provides the nuanced audience insights that tell you why someone clicks, converts or bounces away.

You might also hear audience profiles referred to as an “audience persona” or “target audience profile.” Both are correct. 

“Target market,” on the other hand, would be wrong. A target market is broader than your target audience profile. It contains many audience personas.

“Buyer persona” would also be wrong. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of a buyer, like so:

It’s an important distinction because your audience is bigger than just buyers. You have many readers who can influence buyers. Sometimes the path to lead generation starts with them. An audience profile helps you recognize and nurture those crucial influencers before they ever speak to sales or customer service.

This is particularly true in B2B markets. It can be difficult to get the ear of a busy decision-maker. In some cases, getting the attention of an influencer who already has a decision-maker’s ear may be your only path to purchase.

Consumers are a little easier to target directly, but you still need audience profiles in B2C markets. Even if the person you’re selling to is the same person you’re marketing to, the art of sales and marketing are very different. A bank, for instance, would approach a potential mortgage customer differently before the point of sale than during or after it.

The Steps to Creating an Audience Profile

Audience profiling is crucial for crafting a successful marketing campaign. If you know whom you’re talking to and what they care about, you can build messaging around their interests and pain points. Done right, profiling audience segments can: 

• Improve customer service interactions.
• Boost marketing and advertising performance.
• Elevate overall brand perception.

But how, exactly, do you get to know your audience? Let’s look at the key steps involved in developing audience profiles:

1. Collect Data About Your Target Audience

Start with quantitative data. The two most valuable sources of insight into your target audience are:

• Google Analytics: Audience analysis is easy with Google Analytics. You can obtain demographic information about website visitors, including their approximate location, age, gender, interests and type of device. You can also dig deeper to understand which demographics engage with which segments of your site, at what rate they convert and on which pages. You can even figure out which channels specific audience segments arrived through — social media, search, paid advertising, email, etc. Platforms such as Audience Analysis Sprinklr can supplement GA data with social listening metrics to show where your audience spends time across networks.
• Your CRM: A CRM tool is much more than just a way to manage your customer base; it’s also a living record of the interactions that led up to a sale. The data in your CRM sharpens your sense of what industries convert at the highest rate, how leads first approach your company and other clues about how to attract the ideal customer. You can also use tools that integrate your CRM with email marketing to manage your sales and marketing efforts from a single platform, as your CRM data can be useful for marketing. This information can help shape your audience profiles and inform broader marketing strategies.

Google Analytics makes it easy to drill down into user data and create a demographic profile of your target audience.

Then there’s the qualitative research. This is a combination of your instincts and insights from your sales, customer service and marketing teams.

2. Identify Your Audience’s Needs and Pain Points

Once you know your target demographics, you’re ready to start drilling down into their needs and pain points. This step is essential if you want to define target audience expectations and tailor marketing strategies that actually resonate.

Again, your CRM can be incredibly helpful in identifying the reasons your existing customers approached your brand.

• What problems were they trying to solve?
• What pain points did they encounter with other solutions they tried?
• What did they find most useful about your product or service?

Another valuable source of data is keyword research. You can use a tool like Ahrefs, Moz or Semrush to figure out which search queries your market rivals are ranking for. This is a very data-driven way to discover topics, issues, needs and pain points that your potential audience cares about that weren’t even on your radar yet. Combined with paid media insights, this research enables precise audience targeting and helps you create segments that convert.

3. Round Out Likes and Dislikes

Any data about a person’s interests, values, likes, dislikes, attitudes and personality traits falls under the umbrella (bumbershoot if you’re British) of psychographics. These psychographic clues improve marketing relevance and ensure every piece of content feels tailor-made for the reader.

It’s really important to know how to package the messaging you send out into the world — what type of language you use, what values you espouse, what sort of imagery you use and so on.

All of these are important elements of branding, but they’re also key aspects of your audience profile. Audience profiling helps creative teams choose visuals, tone and offers that align with core customer motivations.

One of the great things about developing audience profiles is that you can start to get a sense of where your company’s branding may be getting stale or out of touch with your audience.

A word to the wise: Do not deprioritize psychographics. They can have a direct impact on how relevant your content feels to your audience. They can also have a direct impact on the bottom line. For example, according to PwC’s 2024 Voice of the Consumer Survey, consumers are willing to pay an average of 9.7% more for sustainably produced goods — and 80% say they’d pay a premium for sustainable products overall.

Psychographic data is a little harder to put your finger on and will likely require some qualitative research. Start by figuring out who the influencers are in your target industries. What do they care about? Also, look at what blogs or magazines the audiences in your most prevalent demographics and industries flock to. Evaluate the general culture, preferences and attitude of your existing customers.

You can use hard numbers collected through customer surveys, web analytics, Google Trends and keyword research to supplement and support your efforts. These extra data points improve audience insights and ultimately lead to improving audience engagement across every channel.

4. Put It All Together

Once you’ve done your research, you can start putting together some audience profiles. Think of this as building audience profile blueprints that everyone — from copywriters to product managers — can reference.

Here’s an approximate template we’ve used in the past, followed by some examples:

Key Demographics

• Age range:
• Gender:
• Common job title(s):

Key Psychographics

• Likes …
• Dislikes …
• Strives for …
• Values …

Challenges

• [Try to list 3 to 5.]

Preferred Channels

• For content consumption:
• For first contact:
• For browsing:

Preferred Content Types

• [List as many as are applicable.]

These documents help you create detailed personas that you can point to whenever you launch new marketing campaigns. Over time, you’ll see how each audience profile influences outcomes like click-through rates, lead quality and lifetime value.

Audience Profiles Examples

B2B Audience Profiles

B2C Examples of Audience Profiles

For more help, check out our Persona Development Services. Our strategists specialize in helping brands create detailed personas that fuel smarter marketing strategies and stronger customer service experiences.

5. Make Changes As Needed

At long last, we arrive at the final step in creating audience profiles. Remember: Your audience changes, and so must your profiles. Regular refreshes guarantee that your marketing strategies and customer service workflows remain relevant.

Depending on how frequently your market changes, you may have to update your audience personas often or very rarely.

Rapidly evolving, heavily disrupted industries may see frequent shifts in customer expectations based on what technologies or service models become available.

Even in industries that don’t change too frequently, it’s important to be mindful of how the audience changes. Mindsets shift as time passes and as the world changes. Clinging to old representations of customers will at best leave you looking a bit out of touch, and at worst, create some serious marketing mea culpas.

At a minimum, we would recommend reevaluating your audience personas once a year — along with your buyer personas — to make sure they’re still relevant. Continual audits ensure you’re spending marketing and advertising dollars wisely and that your efforts to define target segments stay sharp.

Key Takeaway: Figure Out Whom You’re Talking to Before You Open Your Mouth

Content marketing — and most other forms of digital marketing — is all about giving something of value to your target audience. If you can do that continually, they’ll start to look to your brand as a trusted and reliable source of information.

But before you can achieve any of that, you need to know who “they” are. Audience profiling helps bridge this gap, enabling you to create audience-centric messaging that resonates across channels and drives measurable results.

Take an interest in who your audience is, and they’ll be much more likely to take an interest in what you have to say.

Otherwise, you’ll forever be barking up the wrong tree — always searching, never finding.

Editor’s Note: Updated June 2026.

The post How To Create an Audience Profile in 5 Steps (Infographic) appeared first on Brafton.

Luckily, there are plenty of free social listening tools out there you can use. Today’s leading social listening tools are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), offering advanced features such as AI-powered sentiment analysis, trend detection and real-time crisis alerts. These AI capabilities help brands quickly understand the tone of conversations, spot emerging trends and respond proactively to potential issues before they escalate.

What Is Social Media Monitoring?

Social media monitoring, or social media listening, is the identification and extraction of online conversations that mention your brand. In other words, it’s the practice you rely on to monitor brand buzz and conduct rapid social search across the digital landscape. But how can you possibly monitor all of the online conversations out there? Without the right tools, social media managers could spend countless hours scrolling feeds and still miss critical insights, especially when attempting to track brand mentions at scale. Luckily, social media listening tools — or social media monitoring tools — bring AI to the table. AI-powered analysis and alerts act like your 24/7 response team, helping you understand sentiment more completely and act on it with more confidence.

What’s a Social Listening Tool?

If you’re familiar with how search engines work, you already have a basic idea of how a social media monitoring tool works. Search engines send crawlers to scan the internet and find content that matches search queries. Similarly, social media monitoring tools spread out across social channels to identify every brand mention that they can. Modern platforms complement this with real-time monitoring functionality, meaning you receive actionable notifications the moment a relevant conversation appears online. The system collects and stores data so your social media marketing team can respond to questions, concerns and feedback and conduct social media analysis and reputation management reporting.

Why Is Social Listening Important?

Social media monitoring and social listening are essential for any brand. Customer reviews and data will reveal important information about your target audience, but they leave out an important part of the story. By pairing traditional surveys with always-on social listening, you gain a continuous pulse on customer feedback that can refine your content strategy, guide product updates and even inform executive decision-making.

AI-powered features have revolutionized social listening. With AI-driven sentiment analysis, brands can quickly gauge the emotional tone of thousands of conversations. Automated trend detection helps you spot shifts in public perception or identify viral moments, while real-time AI crisis alerts ensure your team is notified instantly when a potential issue arises. 

Social media listening is important because it:

Improves Customer Service

Often, if a customer is unhappy with a product or service or if they have a question, they may try to reach the brand on social media instead of emailing them or going straight to their website. When this happens, it’s essential that your brand notices and responds. Ignoring this type of outreach — whether accidentally or on purpose — is sure to make a potential customer feel neglected. But responding will make them feel heard. 

Social media monitoring platforms that offer real-time alerts empower your support teams to jump into conversations immediately, transforming potential complaints into public victories. 

Assesses Brand Awareness

You can’t improve your brand awareness without first gaining an understanding of how it’s already performing. Social listening helps with brand monitoring because it gives your company data on where the most conversations about your brand are taking place, and where there needs to be more awareness. 

Let’s say consumers are raving about your company all over Instagram, but they’re quiet on X (formerly Twitter). That may mean that you need to increase your engagement on X to reach a larger audience. 

In the same way, analyzing historical data can reveal whether awareness efforts on Facebook-Instagram campaigns or Instagram-LinkedIn cross-promotions are actually moving the needle.

Keeps Tabs on Brand Reputation

Social media monitoring will also give you valuable insight into the general sentiment toward your company. People turn to online conversation for many reasons — whether they’re happy, angry, confused or curious about your company, they may convey their feelings through a social media channel. Effective reputation management hinges on the ability to track brand mentions, identify sentiment trends and intervene quickly if a negative conversation begins to snowball. In the event of a viral complaint, real-time monitoring supports proactive crisis management, allowing you to craft a timely response before the issue escalates.

So now that we’ve gone through how useful and important social media monitoring is, let’s talk about how to do it affordably. Luckily, there are several social listening tools on the market you can try and test to identify the solution that best suits your brand. When evaluating tools, social media professionals should confirm that each platform can monitor brand sentiment, deliver real-time alerts, archive historical data and integrate seamlessly with broader social management systems such as publishing dashboards or CRM suites.

20 Free Social Listening Tools To Try

1. Google Alerts

If you aren’t already using Google Alerts, you should be. They couldn’t be easier to set up, and they inform you of when your brand is mentioned in news story titles. If someone posts a blog or article about your company on a social media channel, magazine or other online platform, you’ll get an email notification. This will help you keep tabs on the bigger topics of discussion related to your brand. In addition, you can configure multiple alerts to track brand mentions, competitor names or industry keywords for a lightweight form of real-time monitoring.

Free to Use

2. Fedica

Beyond tracking hashtags and keywords, this tool also keeps you in the loop with timely email alerts for brand mentions and keyword notifications, as well as opportunities for identifying leads and measuring reach. Geo-targeted trending topics serve as a valuable resource for elevating your content to match the interests of specific locations. Plus, gain a competitive edge by comparing your competitors’ followers and zeroing in on lucrative niches through in-depth analysis of X lists, accounts or conversations. Fedica also stores historical data, making it easier to revisit past campaigns and understand long-term engagement shifts across social media platforms.

Free to Use — but paid plans are also available.

3. Google Analytics

You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics before, but its advanced (and of course, totally free) capabilities are always worth a mention. This tool provides detailed insights into user behavior, peeling back the layers beyond clicks and page views to reveal what genuinely captures user interest. With real-time metrics, you’re equipped to make data-driven decisions on the fly, while long-term trend analysis supports your overarching digital strategies. When paired with social media monitoring data, it helps close the loop between off-site conversations and on-site conversions — a must for any social media management report.

Free to Use

4. Google Trends

This tool keeps an eye on the pulse of global search behavior, revealing not only what people are searching for but also the intent behind their queries. Dynamic visualizations give you a quick read on trending topics, while deep-dive data mining allows you to uncover nuanced patterns that could inform your content creation, product development or overall marketing strategies. Because it covers both search and social signals, Google Trends is an excellent companion resource for social search planning.

Free to Use

5. Buffer

Equipped with a multifaceted analytics dashboard, Buffer zeroes in on engagement metrics across Instagram, Facebook, X and LinkedIn. You get to dive deep into meaningful conversations, hashtag effectiveness and the organic versus paid reach of your boosted posts. With daily updated reports and actionable insights, Buffer empowers you to listen, engage and make strategic adjustments in real time. It also doubles as a social media management hub, allowing you to seamlessly publish, respond and monitor brand activity in a single interface.

Free for Individuals to Use

6. Kwatch.io

Kwatch.io offers a free social listening solution that tracks brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags across multiple social media platforms. Its AI-driven dashboards provide sentiment analysis, trend detection and competitive benchmarking. Kwatch.io is a great option for small businesses and startups looking to harness the power of AI without a hefty price tag.

Free Plan Available

7. Metricool

Metricool is a social media analytics and management tool that includes social listening features in its free plan. It allows you to monitor conversations, analyze sentiment and track brand mentions across popular platforms. The intuitive dashboard makes it easy for marketers to visualize data, identify trends and optimize content strategy.

Free Plan Available

Get a Quick Snapshot with Demos and Free Trials

Next up, we’ve got tools that let you try before you buy. These aren’t forever-free, but it’s a chance to see how these tools stack up and if they’re worth your money in the long run. So why not take them for a spin and find out if they fit your brand’s needs?

9. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a powerful social listening platform that uses advanced AI and machine learning to deliver deep insights into brand sentiment, emerging trends and competitor analysis. Its AI-powered features include visual analytics, trend prediction and real-time crisis alerts, making it a favorite among enterprise and mid-market brands looking for robust media monitoring and reputation management.

Free Demo Available

10. Brand Mentions

Brand Mentions is exactly what its name implies and more. This free social listening tool searches the internet for your brand name in online conversations. Once the mentions are located, the system collects and organizes them into categories that coincide with trends. Therefore, the result you get when you use Brand Mentions is a convenient, streamlined report on all of the conversations in which your brand appeared across X, Facebook, YouTube and more. The platform’s real-time alerts function ensures your team can immediately address customer feedback and safeguard reputation management efforts.

Free trial for 7 Days

11. Konnect Insights

With Konnect Insights, you’re not limited to social media. This tool means you don’t miss out on any conversation and listen to your customers’ voices across the web. You can analyze customer data and gain real-time market intelligence so you can fine-tune your marketing strategies and make informed business decisions. Konnect Insights also allows you to keep an eye on competitors and understand what’s successfully engaging their customers, so you can gain a competitive edge. Features like sentiment analysis and crisis management dashboards add extra layers of protection.

Free Trial for 14 Days(or Book a Demo)

12. Emplifi

Emplifi is a customer engagement platform that lets you optimize the customer experience with stronger social media marketing solutions. From a single intuitive interface, it allows your business to unify its teams so they can research, schedule and publish content across all popular social network platforms. With real-time insights, you’ll be able to make quicker, data-led decisions. In addition, Emplifi archives historical data to help you benchmark performance and track brand growth over time.

Book a Personalized Demo

13. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a social media content analysis tool with an impressive number of social listening capabilities. This tool allows you to search the internet for any mention of your brand. BuzzSumo will compile engagement metrics for each social media post — like views, likes, clicks, shares and more. This way, you can find out not only which channels contain the most conversations about your brand, but also where the lengthiest and most interesting conversations are taking place. The added layer of influencer discovery makes it a smart addition to any content strategy roadmap.

Free Trial for 7 Days

Dive Deeper With Extended Free Trials

Alright, let’s get into the next batch of tools that give you more time to play around — think 2 weeks to a whole month of free trials.

14. Facelift

Facelift is a social listening tool that works across all social media networks. This tool allows you to create authentic content that achieves a wider reach and boosts conversion rates. It provides data-driven insights to better engage your customers and understand your social impact. Built-in reputation management modules help monitor brand sentiment and facilitate swift crisis management when negative chatter surfaces.

Free trial for 2 Weeks

15. Sendible

Sendible is one of the leading social media management platforms for companies aiming to effectively manage their social media. Sendible’s automation features simplify the process of driving interactions and building a loyal following. With data-rich social media reports, you’ll be able to offer accessible insights into your social campaign’s progress. You can also configure listening streams to track brand mentions across Facebook-Instagram feeds, Instagram-LinkedIn reels and beyond.

Free Trial for 2 Weeks

16. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a brand monitoring tool that enables your company to manage its brand reputation, find mentions with social listening features and monitor competitors. This all-in-one social media analytics platform provides sentiment analysis reports and helps you to find influencers in your industry to create meaningful relationships and generate new leads. Comprehensive dashboards combine real-time monitoring with historical data visualizations so you can spot long-term sentiment changes.

Free Trial for 2 Weeks

17. Mention

When you use Mention, you type a term into the search bar — likely your brand name or a term very closely related to your company — and the tool scours the internet and fetches all mentions of that term it can find. These might be in the form of social media posts, blogs, news articles, images or video content. It gathers this information and presents it on one convenient platform. Real-time alerts allow you to step in whenever customer feedback indicates brewing issues, making it easier to protect brand integrity.

Free Trial for 30 Days

18. Brand24

Delve beyond basic tracking with a tool powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Brand24 sifts through an extensive range of online conversations across news platforms, blogs, social media and more. It taps into 25 million sources in real time, offering you a comprehensive view of your brand’s online presence. Advanced sentiment analysis segments mentions into positive, negative or neutral categories, providing a detailed emotional landscape surrounding your brand. Creating reports is simplified, with AI-generated word clouds and key metrics that offer actionable insights. What’s more, language barriers are non-existent, thanks to support for 108 languages. Combined with social media management dashboards, these insights keep every stakeholder informed.

Free trial for 2 weeks

19. Zoho Social

This robust tool helps you manage conversations by focusing on core keywords, brand hashtags and product reviews. Get real-time insights through customized dashboards that feature columns for @mentions and keyword searches, in-depth hashtag tracking and more. Filters let you hone in on specific activities across several social media sites, while CRM integration helps you label and track valuable leads. The platform’s crisis management view aggregates negative messages so you can prioritize responses and safeguard your reputation.

Free trial for 15 days

20. AgoraPulse

Agorapulse is a social media marketing and CRM suite that supports agencies, business owners and marketers in social media management. This platform offers publishing, reporting, monitoring and team collaboration tools, as well as an established inbox to help you stay organized, save time and easily manage your social media accounts. Pairing these capabilities with built-in social listening streams transforms Agorapulse into a holistic social media management hub.

Free Trial for 30 Days

21. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an intuitive platform that provides smarter, faster, scalable social media solutions for businesses. From Brafton’s first-hand experience with this tool, we can safely say that it effectively lets you better equip your teams, enabling them to enhance real-time collaboration, boost audience engagement, streamline publishing workflows and form well-informed, strategic business decisions with extensive social insights. Its real-time monitoring streams, advanced sentiment analysis and crisp reporting make Sprout Social a go-to option for organizations serious about long-term reputation management.

Free Trial for 30 Days

22. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media platform management tool with a subsection for social listening called Hootsuite Insights. This tool provides a space where you can view and respond to social media posts that mention your brand. Surfing every social media channel for brand mentions would take far too much time and effort. Hootsuite, luckily, compiles all the posts and lets you engage with them in one easy-to-use tool. Real-time alerts ensure that critical customer feedback or potential crisis management scenarios never slip through the cracks.

Free Trial for 30 Days

Harness the Potential of Social Listening Solutions

Social listening tools could just be the necessary tool you need to take your marketing tactics to the next level. We recommend trialing these resources to determine which one offers the most intuitive platform for your business. Once you’ve determined the right solution, it might be worth taking the plunge to increase your brand awareness and watch your customer engagement soar. By embedding always-on social media monitoring workflows into your daily routine, you’ll be able to track brand sentiment, capture authentic customer feedback and pivot quickly whenever trends shift, ensuring your organization stays ahead of the conversation.

Editor’s Note: Updated June 2026.

The post Boost Your Content Strategy With These 20 Free Social Listening Tools appeared first on Brafton.

What Do We Know About the May 2026 Core Update?

According to Google, the latest core update was a “regular update.” It began on May 21 and ended on June 2, affecting all regions and languages on a global scale. 

Much like its March counterpart, the May rollout didn’t target a specific industry, content type or ranking signal, but instead affected Google’s ranking systems. This core update coincides with Google launching Gemini 3.5 Flash on May 19, which will power its AI Search features.

May’s 2026 core update rollout phase took just under 12 days to complete, which is in line with the March core update. Despite the six-week gap between the two, industry professionals describe May as “heavier” than March in terms of its significant effect on AI search and overall website visibility and ranking.

What Was the Goal of Google’s May Core Update?

In Google’s own words, this latest core update was “designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.” 

In layman’s terms, the goal was for Google to analyze its search algorithms, particularly with rewarding highly authoritative content that provides value to users.

What Else Happened Alongside This Core Update?

As part of this core update and beyond, Google also performed other search refinements, including the launch of its Search Generative AI performance reports in GSC. This new feature will give websites an overview of their overall visibility in the top SERPs, including AIO and AI Mode.

Overall, this refinement further signals Google’s continued efforts in 2026 to balance AI-generated responses with greater visibility and higher rankings for brands and digital content.

How Has Google’s May Core Update Impacted Websites?

While the May core update is reshaping Google’s AI search capabilities and improving users’ search experiences, it has significantly impacted many websites in the process. One of the major consequences was higher ranking volatility and fluctuations occurring in the first 24 hours after Google completed its core update’s rollout phase.

This level of ranking volatility is common during Google’s core updates. As the search engine recalibrates its interpretation of content quality and relevance, some sites may experience visibility gains while others see declines. What these fluctuations may indicate is Google’s continued reassessment of how well site content aligns with evolving quality standards and user expectations.

What Does Google’s Latest Core Update Mean for Websites in 2026?

The good news is that Google isn’t penalizing sites, but rather rewarding web pages based on their valuable user content. This presents an opportunity for brands currently struggling with low search visibility to create better content and increase their ranking positions in the top SERPs.

What Can Brands Do To Improve Search Visibility and Rankings?

In the meantime, Google offers some core update advice to help websites improve their AI search visibility amidst the May core update rollout: 

Create Valuable Content

The song remains the same for digital marketers, content creators and publishers alike: Make content that’s highly personalized and authoritative that answers user search queries. If your site’s already doing this, you can head out now (just kidding, keep reading, pretty please).  

Google’s lesson for all content ranking category types is simple. Site pages that provide thoughtful insights, unique perspectives from subject matter experts (SMEs), practical advice or dynamic research have a better chance of achieving higher search visibility across various AI platforms ahead of surface-level content that can easily be replicated or summarized by AI systems.

Optimize Sites for AI Search Visibility

Brands should also focus on creating content with clear page structures, descriptive headings and well-organized text and visuals to ensure that AI-powered search engines can effectively interpret, cite and reference it through curated responses.

Despite many brands moving toward markdowns to future-proof their sites, Google warns against this, Roger Montti, writing for Search Engine Journal, reported.  Simplifying HTML code that reduces unnecessary text and visuals in this context might actually remove valuable information from search engines, which can affect site rankings and overall visibility. 

Analyze Site Data Strategically

Aside from creating valuable content, Google also advises brands to wait about a week after the May core update’s rollout completion before analyzing GSC data and comparing it with data obtained in the week preceding the initial rollout.

Performing data analysis a day or two after the rollout period begins isn’t likely to show tangible or logical data to further evaluate site performance in terms of branded search growth, citation frequency within AI-generated results and overall engagement trends. Instead, waiting a full week can ensure a clean comparison window of how sites were affected in the week of June 8-12, in particular.

What Google’s Core Update Signals About the Future of AI Search Visibility

Google’s May core update signals to brands that users’ search experience remains paramount in 2026 and will most likely affect site rankings if their web pages and content don’t effectively answer search queries. 

Instead of viewing this as an obstacle, businesses can adjust their SEO strategies to meet the growing demand for AI search and continue creating valuable content that’s highly personalized and authoritative to effectively answer users’ search queries.

Brands that consistently produce high-quality content and demonstrate expertise are likely to be better positioned in the top SERPs as AI-powered search experiences continue to evolve throughout the year.

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