Content isn’t dead, it’s just changed: A 2025 playbook for tech brands

Your content isn’t broken. The internet is.

Traffic’s tanking. AI’s stealing. Your best blog post just got paraphrased into oblivion and fed to a chatbot—with zero clicks, zero credit, and zero shame.

LinkedIn’s full of insights, opinions, and the occasional panic spiral dressed as strategy. SEO “best practices” have the shelf life of a ripe banana. And everyone from the intern to the CMO is wondering: What the hell are we even doing anymore?

But there’s good news: People still want content. They still read, research, compare, copy-paste, and share. It’s just that the bar for what earns attention has been raised. Torched. Launched into orbit.

So no, you shouldn’t stop doing content. But you don’t just need more of it; you need braver, sharper, harder-to-replicate content.

The kind of content that can’t be summarized by a bot. The kind that earns brand search, not just backlinks. The kind that says: We know what we’re talking about.

This guide is here to help you do just that. We’ll break down what’s working for content right now: from brand-building SEO to zero-click strategy, founder-led content, community-powered distribution, and content built for real reading experiences (yes, we mean RX writing).

Let’s get into it.

The TL;DR for your next content sprint

1. Optimize for zero-click visibility. Assume you’ll be quoted, not clicked. Structure accordingly.
2. Build topical authority, not just domain authority.  Go deep. Get specific. Let Google know what you're obsessed with.
3. Create unsummarizable content. Make it too layered, too human, too useful to flatten into a sentence.
4. Write for humans arriving mid-story. Every section should stand on its own and earn the scroll.
5. Turn internal resources into external assets.  Your best-performing content might already exist. It just needs a cover page.
6. Segment by use case, not just persona. Don’t write for titles. Write for the actual task they’re trying to do.
7. Play the brand search game. Get people searching for you, not just what you do.
8. Build emotional utility. Inform, yes. But also calm, reassure, and spark clarity.
9. Rethink SEO as distribution, not just rankings. You’re not just writing content for Google—you’re writing for everywhere people discover content.
10. Design for reader experience. Readability isn’t enough. Go full RX writing.

1. Optimize for zero-click visibility

Yes, your content still counts even if no one clicks. But Google’s AI Overviews have changed the game, and they’re everywhere. 

When someone searches for “how to improve mobile onboarding,” they’re getting a tidy summary at the top of the page, written by AI, pulled from your content, without the searcher ever landing on your site.

It’s what we call a zero-click search.

So what do you do when people stop clicking? You stop treating clicks as the only measure of success.

Here’s what to focus on instead:

✅ Become quotable. Structure your content to make it easier for AI to pull clean, authoritative snippets. That means:

• Lead with clear, declarative answers
• Follow up with an explanation or nuance
• Use subheadings that sound like questions

✅ Make answers obvious. Your reader (and Google) should know exactly what a section is about from the first sentence. If your insight is buried in paragraph three, it’s invisible to both.

✅ Use structured data and visual cues. Bullet points, charts, and tables are scannable, extractable, and more likely to show up in featured snippets or Overviews.

✅ Design for impressions, not just sessions. Yes, traffic matters. But showing up in a zero-click result still builds brand awareness. You might not get the click, but you get the association. Treat it like a mini-billboard.

✅ Change what you measure. Instead of just looking at pageviews, track:

• Scroll depth (did the people who did click stay?)
• AI visibility (e.g. via tools like Ziptie, tryProfound, or Peec.ai)
• Brand search volume (are people Googling your company more?)

2. Build topical authority, not just domain authority

Being “credible” isn’t enough—Google wants proof you’re obsessed.

Once upon a time, if your domain had enough backlinks and a decent crawl budget, you could rank for almost anything. Productivity apps? Sure. Remote team management? Why not. B2B SaaS onboarding UX for climate fintech in LATAM? Go wild.

But not anymore.

Now, Google wants a specialist. And AI search is following suit. Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity all value topical authority, which refers to how consistently and credibly you cover a specific subject area.

This means:

• Writing one blog post about “UX for enterprise onboarding” is cute
• Writing 12, from onboarding principles to “what your CISO cares about,” shows authority and expertise

So, how do you build topical authority?

✅ Pick a lane and live in it. Choose 2–3 core topics you want to be known for (and can speak on in depth). This is about what your ideal buyer Googles in a moment of panic.

Not “best SaaS platforms”—too broad.  Try “how to do research sprints with a product team of one.”

💡 Pro tip: Use internal conversations as a compass. What’s your sales team explaining over and over again? What docs are collecting dust in Notion? That’s your niche.

✅ Bring in the experts (yes, real humans). Topical authority is partly a matter of content, but it’s also a matter of who the content comes from.  Google is now better at associating named authors with subject matter. That means subject matter experts (SMEs) are a critical part of your content structure.

Where to find SMEs:

• Past customers who’ve lived the problem
• Guest contributors with niche followings
• LinkedIn creators with strong topical overlap
• Your own team (PMs, SEs, CSMs, that one brilliant analyst who lives in Figma)
• Industry forums (Reddit, Slack groups, Discord)—the lurkers are often the smartest

Use their input for:

• Quotes and lived experiences
• AMA-style blog formats or Q&A recaps
• Ghostwritten bylines (yes, that’s ethical if done right)
• Webinar follow-ups (repurpose, repurpose, repurpose)

🤫 Inside note: I usually interview my colleagues when I’m writing about, well, writing—take a look at this snippet from “How to write how-tos” as an example:

✅ Build topic clusters, not content graveyards. Start with a “pillar” piece—your definitive guide to a core topic. Then, spin it into:

• How-tos
• Use-case breakdowns
• Decision frameworks
• Common mistakes
• Updated versions for different personas

Link everything. Interlink. Crosslink. Embed. Make it feel like a living, breathing web of knowledge!

✅ Use webinars, events, and interviews as source material. Don’t treat events as one-off campaigns—they’re content goldmines. Webinars, podcast interviews, and product demos are live takes from people who already know things. Break the transcripts into shareable snippets, quote speakers, and turn insights into long-form content with narrative and structure.

Also, AI doesn’t (yet) crawl webinars as deeply. Your blog still does a lot of the heavy lifting for discoverability. Make it work harder.

3. Create unsummarizable content

If your content says the same thing as everyone else, there’s no reason for the reader to visit your site. They’ve already heard what you’re saying.

So what is unsummarizable content?

It’s content that’s too layered, too contextual, or too nuanced to collapse into one answer. In other words, even if it’s quoted in an AIO, the full version still matters.

Think of it like this:

• A textbook summary gives you a bullet point.
• Unsummarizable content makes you want (need!) to read the whole chapter.

So, how do you create content that still earns attention, even when summaries steal the spotlight?

✅ Add original thinking—not just “best practices.” AI can summarize what’s already known. So don’t stop at common advice. What are you seeing in your space? What does your team disagree with? Where do your customers get stuck?

Example: Instead of “5 ways to improve onboarding,” try: “Why onboarding best practices don’t work for SaaS tools with long sales cycles”

Make it specific. Make it yours.

✅ Use real stories and lived experience. AI can’t replicate personal context. Humans can.
Use customer quotes, behind-the-scenes lessons, internal research, or firsthand insight and anecdotes from your team.

✅ Break the pattern. AIOs love structure. So when you only focus on structure—lists, tidy intros, clear definitions—they can easily lift and reuse your content.

What helps:

• Story-driven intros: start in the middle of a moment
• Juxtapositions: “We thought this would work. It didn’t.”
• Layered arguments: not just “this is good,” but why it matters for different audiences

Write like a real person explaining something complex to another person. Don’t write like a textbook.

✅ Offer value that requires context. The best kind of content can’t be understood from a pull quote. It needs examples, frameworks, “if/then” logic, or decision points that make someone want to see the whole piece.

Think:

• Decision trees or matrices
• Case study breakdowns with analyses
• Templates that come with setup steps
• Comparisons between approaches, not just pros/cons

✅ Design with AI visibility in mind—but with humans at the center. You don’t need to game the system. You need to collaborate with it, without letting it flatten your voice.

• Add summary-friendly sections. Think “What is [x]?”, FAQs, how-tos, definitions, and TL;DRs. These help AIOs understand and cite you, but they also help skim-readers get their bearings.
• Include stats, quotes, and crisp lines worth lifting. Don’t bury your strongest insights in paragraph four. If something is worth quoting, format it like a standalone takeaway.
• Use structured formatting. This means H2s and H3s that say something, lists that group related ideas, and schema markup when relevant. (Think how-to schema, FAQ schema, or product markup.)

4. Write for humans arriving mid-story

Almost no one is reading your content top to bottom like a novel. They’re arriving:

• From an AI Overview that quoted section 3
• From an internal search on your Help Center
• From a Slack link that jumps to a header halfway down
• From a chatbot or email that only pasted one paragraph

And if they don’t find their footing fast? They bounce.

So what do you do? You design every section to stand on its own, and still earn the scroll. Here’s how: 

✅ Front-load every section with a clear point. Don’t bury the lead. Each subhead should feel like a mini-entry point, and each paragraph should open with a why-it-matters line.

👍 Good: “Here’s why most onboarding flows lose users before day three.”

👎 Bad: “In this section, we’ll explore onboarding strategies…”  (You already lost them.)

✅ Make subheads informative. Your headers aren’t labels. They’re hooks and signposts.  People use them to decide whether to stop or keep scrolling.

👍 Say: “Why zero-click searches aren’t a traffic death sentence”
👎 Don’t say:  “Search trends 2025”

Rule of thumb(s-down): If your subhead could live on a generic blog, it’s not helping you.

✅ Use light context resets. Don’t assume the reader saw the first three sections.  Give them a subtle cue—just enough to reorient them.

“Most onboarding strategies assume you’ve got a product team of five. But what if you don’t?”

It’s not repetition. It’s reader empathy.

✅ Add signposts and visual breaks. Use short summaries at the start or end of sections. Use bolded insights, callouts, quotes, or TL;DRs.  Let the scanner become the reader. If someone lands here cold, can they still find their way?

5. Turn internal resources into external assets

What’s more valuable to your audience:
A) Another “7 trends shaping the future of product design” post
B) A Notion doc your team actually uses to run research sprints, shared publicly

You know the answer.  Resources beat rhetoric—every time.

You already have resources your audience would find helpful. They’re buried in Slack threads, wikis, Miro boards, pitch decks, sales one-pagers, and onboarding templates. You’re swimming in content that’s been validated by use.

Now you just have to pull it out. Package it. Publish it.

✅ Clean it up (but don’t over-polish it). People don’t want glossy. They want useful. Keep the voice human and add a quick note on how/why you use the resource. Give context, not just a download link.

✅ Tell the backstory. What made you build this thing? What problem did it solve?  This turns a resource into a resource with authority. It also makes it more fun to read. “We built this after realizing half our product feedback was coming in 3 weeks too late. Now it’s step one in every sprint.”

✅ Wrap it in a blog or landing page. Let SEO and social do their thing. Don’t just tweet the doc—give it a home on your site. Frame it, explain it, and link it into your content ecosystem.

✅ Give it a headline that says “here’s the solution.” No one’s searching for “Our internal research operations checklist.”  They are searching for:

“UX research kickoff template (free Notion doc)”
or
“How to keep product feedback from getting lost (steal this workflow)”

Remember, this kind of content earns backlinks without asking because it’s genuinely useful. It’s something people want to reference—a working doc, a time-saving template, a behind-the-scenes process that’s already been validated by your team. 

That kind of resource does someone else’s job for them. It helps them sound smarter, work faster, or explain something better. And when your content makes them look good, that’s when they link to you—no outreach needed.

6. Segment by use case, not just persona

“Marketing Molly” isn’t real, but her third failed product launch is.

We’ve all seen the slide:

Marketing Molly, 34
Lives in Austin.
Drinks matcha.
Wants “streamlined content solutions.”

Great. But what does that actually tell you? Nada.

Personas like this are high-level composites, so they’re often helpful for messaging or sales, sure. But when it comes to content strategy—especially for AI-driven search or product-led growth—they’re too fuzzy to guide anything useful.

What you need to do is segment by use case.

Wait, what’s the difference between a persona and a use case?

👤 Persona: who they are (“A product manager at a fintech startup”)

💡 Use case: what they’re trying to do (“Trying to launch their first in-app feedback survey without annoying users”)

Personas are about identity. Use cases are about intent. And intent is what drives search, reads, clicks, and conversions.

Let’s break that down with an example. Say you offer a user research tool.

If you write persona-first content, it might look like:  “What is UX research?”—a primer for product managers. That’s useful, sure. But it speaks broadly to who they are.

Now shift to use case-first content. This time, you're solving a specific problem they're actively trying to fix. Your content might look like:

•  “How to run a research sprint with no researchers on your team”
•  “What to ask in an in-product survey (plus templates)”
•  “How we validated a feature idea in 48 hours”

See the difference? The first version is a label. The second is a lifeline. One targets the job title. The other targets the job-to-be-done. And that second group? They’re way more likely to convert—because you’re meeting them in the moment that matters.

7. Play the brand search game

Let’s start with the basics. What is brand search, exactly?

It’s the number of times people look for your brand name in Google (or elsewhere).

• “Notion templates”
• “Airtable vs Google Sheets”
• “dslx content examples” ← manifesting 🪄

These searches tell Google (and AI) that your brand is:

• A known entity
• A relevant player in your niche
• A good bet for featured answers or AI snippets

In other words, search engines don’t just trust pages anymore. They trust brands.

So how do you win the brand search game?

✅ Create content people remember and reference. Don’t just focus on writing rankable content. Write citable content. Build quote-worthy, link-worthy, screenshot-worthy content that ends up in Notion docs, Slack threads, and pitch decks.

✅ Invest in founder-led or expert-led content. People follow the people behind the brands they love. Your founder, your head of product, your lead designer—they all carry topical authority. Put them on LinkedIn. Let them write. Ghostwrite for them if you must. Just don’t let your brand become faceless.

✅ Show up in surprising places. Get your name into the long-tail ecosystem. Think:

• Podcasts: Pitch niche, topic-specific shows—not just the big names. Lead with a POV or story the host’s audience hasn’t heard 10 times already. Bonus points if you can offer a case study, data story, or behind-the-scenes learning.
• Guest posts: Offer a finished draft or detailed outline that plugs a content gap for the site. Make it clear you’ve read their content and understand their audience. Link naturally—one, maybe two times.
• Event decks: If your team is speaking at an event, make the deck public. Include a resource link or mini-site with extras. Then optimize the deck title and description for search, because people will look for your slides after a talk.
• Community threads: Join the platforms your audience already lives in—Slack groups, Reddit subs, and Discord servers. Don’t lead with links. Lead with help. Answer questions, drop insights, and when the timing’s right, link to something you’ve written that genuinely adds value.
• YouTube comments (yes, seriously): When someone drops a relevant video on running a user research sprint, leave a thoughtful comment that builds on it. Not “great vid!” but “we tried this at [company] and it cut our time in half. I shared the template here if it is helpful [link].” That’s not spam. That’s public problem-solving.

✅ Use campaigns to spike branded search. And no, that doesn’t mean creating a gated whitepaper, sending a few nurture emails, and calling it a day. A real campaign is something memorable, something that makes people Google you. It should be shared, screenshot, and dropped in Slack threads. It should make people want to know who you are, not just what you sell.

That could be:

• A bold rebrand
• A useful newsletter
• A spicy LinkedIn post that goes viral
• A free tool that solves one annoying problem
• A teardown of how you built a product internally

Run your campaign → make people curious → they look up your brand → now you’re in the brand search game

8. Build emotional utility

Most content in your space is probably technically “useful.”  It gives tips. It answers questions. It says “optimize this” or “do more of that.” But usefulness isn’t what makes content memorable. Emotion is.

• Did it calm the readers’ panic?
• Did it make them feel seen?
• Did it validate what they were already thinking?
• Did it save them from making an expensive mistake?

That’s emotional utility. Here’s how you can do it: 

✅ Start with emotional insight. What’s the feeling behind the search? “Content strategy for SaaS” might mean there’s fear of decline, pressure to prove ROI, or someone’s trying to impress a CMO. “User research template” might mean panic before a meeting, or a solo PM winging it. Write to that.

✅ Use tone to guide emotion. Calm where there’s overwhelm. Reassurance where there’s self-doubt. Confidence where there’s noise. Playfulness where there’s burnout. You’re not just writing to inform, you’re writing to regulate.

✅ Anticipate the reader’s emotional arc. They arrive frustrated. You meet them with clarity.  You deliver insight. You leave them empowered. Structure your content to guide that progression like a tiny emotional UX journey.

 ✅ Say the thing they’ve been thinking. Want instant connection? Drop a line that names their internal monologue. “You’re publishing 4 blogs a month, and still feeling like it’s not enough. We’ve been there.”

💡Here’s how we do it at dslx: check out Ray’s raw thoughts, spicy takes, and strategy-packed breakdown in our blog post on the future of content marketing.

‍

9. Rethink SEO as distribution, not just rankings

The old assumption:

SEO = Get to page one → Get traffic → Get signups

But SEO doesn’t work that way in 2025. AI Overviews are eating up SERPs. Search intent is splintering. Clicks are dropping. Featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, shopping modules, video embeds—you’re lucky if your organic result even gets seen.

But that doesn’t mean SEO is dead. It means you need to stop treating SEO like a scoreboard and start treating it like a distribution engine.

But, what’s the difference? 

Old SEO thinking:

“We need to rank #1 for ‘best product research tools.’”

New SEO thinking:

“We need this blog post to show up:

• In AI Overviews
• In snippets
• In chatbot citations
• In internal search
• In newsletters
• In Reddit threads
• In ‘search this site’ results
• And maybe, sure, on Google too.”

Ranking isn’t the main goal anymore. Visibility, trust, and utility across surfaces is.

How to do this:

✅ Design content for discoverability across channels

SEO isn’t just for Google. Optimize for:

• Internal site search (refresh your old blog posts and give them new metadata)
• AI assistants (make your definitions pull-quote ready)
• Knowledge bases (yes, help docs need SEO love too)
• YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Slack threads, etc.

Ask, “Where else could someone discover this—and how do we make it easier to find there?”

✅ Embed content into product and lifecycle flows

Your best content might never rank, but it can still sell.

Examples:

• Inside your app: Link to a how-to post or FAQ next to a feature people often struggle with. Context = conversion.
• Onboarding flows or product tours: Embed content that helps users get value faster, like a template, guide, or workflow explainer.
• Nurture emails: Instead of linking to a generic “Book a demo” page, send readers to a blog post that educates, solves a real problem, and builds trust.

Suddenly, your “underperforming” blog post is doing pipeline work.

✅ Measure reach by topic, not just URL. Stop judging content by how one page performs. Track performance by:

• Topic clusters
• Branded queries
• Cross-channel impact (social, organic, referral)
• Mentions in third-party sites or communities

A blog post that ranks #9 but gets quoted in 3 podcasts and included in a Notion swipe file? That’s a win.

10. Design your content like UX: reader experience first (RX writing)

No one’s reading your post because they want to.  They’re reading it because they need to. To solve a problem. Win an argument. Impress their boss. Meet a deadline. So if your content makes them work harder than they already are, they’re out.

That’s where RX writing comes in—reader experience writing. It treats content like product design: structured for clarity, led by empathy, and optimized for speed, emotion, and skimmability.

We break it down in this guide to RX writing for B2B SaaS writers—but here’s the short version:

✅ Start with empathy. What’s your reader feeling before they land on your page?  Frustrated? Under pressure? Bored out of their mind?

✅ Front-load the good stuff. Put the punchline first. Don’t make your reader dig through six paragraphs to get to the actual insight. No one has time for that.

✅ Increase your ROR (rate of revelation). Every paragraph should deliver something new:

• A stat
• A story
• A shift in thinking
• A moment that makes the reader go: “oof, true.”

✅ Use negative space like a pro. No one wants to read a wall of text. Use line breaks, callouts, visuals, quotes. Let your writing breathe.

📍 Where do you go from here?

Google’s shifting. AI is summarizing. Attention is fraying. And what worked six months ago already feels stale.

But here’s the good news: You don’t need to chase the algorithm.

You just need to build the kind of content that earns attention—even in a zero-click, AI-everything world.

The kind of content that’s:

• Rooted in experience
• Shaped by empathy
• Sharpened by use cases
• Designed for humans and machines

And if you need a partner who can help, look no further. That’s exactly what we do at dslx. We write high-performing, high-trust content for companies who are tired of playing the volume game—and ready to make every word count.

✨ Strategy-backed
✨ Story-first
✨ AI-aware, human-always

Let’s make something your audience actually wants to read—and your team is proud to ship. 

📬 Say hi or steal a few more ideas from the blog!