Imagine you’re a DIY retailer. Your warehouse-sized stores stock everything from tools and paint supplies to garden furniture. And that’s before we get into your ecommerce operation. Chances are your website would contain a bunch of content covering everything from buying a power drill to landscaping a garden.

Of course, every other DIY retailer offers similar content, along with every tool manufacturer – not to mention every home improvement blog or affiliate site with an interest in power drills and screwdrivers, shelving brackets and pre-cut timber, potting mix and garden spades.

Perform a search using a typical DIY term – how to build a shed – and the organic results will list pages of virtually identical evergreen content. Similar titles, similar advice, and step-by-step instructions outlining a similar process. How many different ways can there really be to erect a shed?

For a long time, this approach clearly worked for a lot of brands. But perhaps not anymore.

When AI can respond to these same how to queries with detailed answers, summarising the same advice without driving a single click, the “publish and rank” model breaks down.

Earlier this year, the Reuters Institute found that media publishers expect search traffic from Google to fall by more than 40% over the next three years. As a result, they’re already planning to scale back on evergreen content.

More recently, Harry Clarkson-Bennett, SEO Director at The Telegraph, argued in an article for Search Engine Journal that the old evergreen model is breaking down.

For CMOs, the implications go well beyond a dip in traffic. Historically, a significant share of the content budget would go towards evergreen content, with the goal of extending the brand’s visibility into more organic search results, compounding rankings and increasing website visitors.

AI not only allows people to bypass those search results but also makes the click redundant. Suddenly, the cost-per-acquisition from organic search starts to look very different, making your content’s contribution to pipeline much harder to prove and future investment much harder to defend.

Evergreen content still has a place. Of course it does. But the formulaic, workaday approach many brands have historically taken to evergreen content needs to change.

The formula that used to work

For years, the formula was straightforward. Investigate what your typical customers search for online, identify the relevant keywords, look at what currently ranks on page one, and write something broadly similar to compete. If your site has enough authority and your technical SEO is in good shape, you might expect to rank somewhere in the same territory.

Using this tried and tested method, teams would map out entire content calendars. And over the years, this hub of evergreen informational content would grow into an SEO behemoth. The pages ranked. The traffic flowed. Job done.

But this approach isn’t about offering anything new. If a reader does get some value from one of these articles, it probably isn’t because it was better written or included any unique insight. More likely it was the first (and probably only) article they clicked on. Once they’ve got the information, once they know how to build that shed, why click on any others?

This is competitive SEO at its most blatant, where content is written for the algorithm, not the reader.

You might think I’m being judgmental. I’m not. The search volume was there, the methodology was proven, and the results were real.

In many ways, not having simple articles on highly relevant topics might appear odd, in the same way that you might be surprised if your dentist doesn’t have leaflets and wall posters providing advice on good oral hygiene. If you sell DIY sheds, it makes sense to have content on how to put them together.

This wasn’t laziness. It was just how the game worked. Your content didn’t necessarily need to be better than the competition. Your content simply needed to be present and competitive.

And that meant search results filled with near-identical pages, each one answering the same question and nothing more. All written to a formula, all pointing at the same keywords, all effectively interchangeable.

While this may have worked as intended, an unfortunate side effect was that too many teams began to see the value of their content purely in terms of rankings and traffic.

Did evergreen content ever really work?

Evergreen content might have boosted brand visibility; it might have even brought traffic to the page. It almost certainly answered the visitors’ question.

But none of those are business outcomes.

I’ve worked in SEO content for over a decade, and in that same time, I’ve seen the same problem time and again. A brand has a solid piece of informational content that ranks well and pulls in steady traffic month after month. But when you drill down into what it’s actually doing for the business, it’s much harder to get a clear answer. Is it attracting the right audience? Do they go anywhere else on the site? How does this content contribute to pipeline? Is there anything that connects these clicks to revenue?

Someone might have added a few obvious links to other pages – meaning wherever the copy lends itself to SEO-friendly anchor text. But they’re not thinking about whether these links make logical sense to the reader. They’re not thinking where the reader might want to go next, what they might want to know next. The customer journey becomes confused and disjointed.

The value of the content ends once the visitor lands on the page, mainly because the SEO team didn’t have any other outcomes in mind. Then again, if the performance of your team is measured in terms of rankings and clicks, why would they?

What you’re left with is content designed to do just one job, with no certainty that it’s even the right job.

What does evergreen content need to do now?

Your approach to evergreen content needs to be more strategic. Ask yourself why you’re producing it, what it needs to achieve, and how it will deliver more value to readers than all the similar content already out there.

1. Know what your customers really care about

While keyword research might tell you what people are searching for, it doesn’t reveal what specific customers hope to achieve, or what they need to understand before acting.

Your sales team knows the real objections. Your customer service team knows the real issues. What can they tell you about your customer’s pain points?

Use those conversations to inform your content calendar, not keyword data alone.

2. Add something readers can’t find anywhere else

Go beyond the headline answer. Bring in expert perspective, provide deeper research, or explore the subject from a different point of view. For example, you might frame the content around a specific use case or scenario some customers will relate to.

3. Define the commercial outcome up front

Each piece of content should have a clearly defined purpose before anyone starts writing. Not something vague and largely unmeasurable, like “build awareness”, but a specific next step you want readers to take.

You can’t expect every piece of content to drive customers straight to a product page to buy. A reader who has just skimmed a top-level introduction to a topic is at a very different stage of the journey than a reader who has spent time with a detailed, long-form piece of content.

If you’ve already mapped out the typical customer journey, you can tailor each piece of content – and its purpose – to the reader’s likely intent and level of interest. Match each call to action to the ideal next step, whether that’s signing up to the newsletter, registering for a webinar, watching a case study, or downloading an action guide.

4. Connect the dots for the reader

My golden rule in content is this: Never lead a visitor to a dead end where the only action they can take is to hit the back button or click the X. You want visitors to move forward, not back – and certainly not out.

Give them something else to think about, something else to read, more links to follow, whatever it takes. However, your links and CTAs need to make strategic sense for your business as well as logical sense to the reader.

If you’ve identified the most influential questions your content needs to answer at each stage, you should have a reasonable idea about where the reader might want to go next to help further nurture the journey.

5. Build authority your competitors can’t easily replicate

When AI can summarise straightforward information in seconds, any evergreen content that exists solely to answer the same broad question is pretty much redundant.

What AI can’t replicate are the exclusive insights, expert perspectives, and individual experiences that only your brand can access.

Find the subject matter experts within your business. Identify any valuable intelligence you might be able to draw from your mountains of anonymised data. Capture interesting case studies with enough detail to bring theoretical ideas to life in more relatable ways.

6. Go deeper, not wider

The old evergreen content formula was about quantity; a constantly growing library of content on as wide a range of (keyword-driven) topics as possible – usually achieved through simple listicles and how to articles.

AI search doesn’t care about how many topics your content covers. When it needs to generate a detailed answer to a user query, AI tends to surface content from sources with lots of consistently detailed content on the same subject, rather than individual pages targeting different keywords.

Instead of a volume play, your best strategy is to invest more resources in producing fewer, more detailed pieces. Focus on publishing strategic assets and then build further content around those pieces.

Start with what you already have

Don’t panic. Rethinking your evergreen strategy doesn’t mean writing off everything you’ve already produced.

Once you’ve gathered your customer intelligence and identified the core topics to focus on, carry out an audit of what currently exists. Identify which assets still work beyond just rankings and traffic. Crucially, you need to understand why. For each piece, ask:

  1. Does it directly relate to a customer pain point?
  2. Does it add something genuinely useful?
  3. Does it have a defined commercial role?
  4. Does it connect to the rest of the buyer journey?

What you’ll likely find is that some content is worth building on, some is worth updating, and some has simply served its purpose and might be safely archived. The goal from here is to ensure every single asset is working as hard as it should.

Look for opportunities to refresh, expand and enhance these assets and prioritise them according to how much work is required. Add some expert commentary, flesh out the details, update the data – there are plenty of ways you can build on what you already have. You could even incorporate video or other rich media to make more complex topics easier to digest.

These updated assets then become the foundations for your future evergreen content plans. Increase the authority of what you already have by creating a cluster of related pieces that interlink and reinforce each other, strengthening your chances of being cited by AI systems.

Evergreen content isn’t dead. Far from it. The issue wasn’t that the content was evergreen, delivering ongoing business value for months or even years with no obvious expiry date. The issue was that a lot of supposedly evergreen content was low-value and derivative, so that the rise of AI search effectively gave it an expiry date.

Focus on good, solid content capable of attracting readers and AI citations alike and your investment in evergreen content will start to make sense again.

Ready to make your content work harder? Get in touch to find out how SALT can help: [email protected]