“ AI made it easy to publish but it didn’t make it easy to win”
For e-commerce merchants, more doesn’t always feel like progress anymore, especially when it comes to content. “We shipped forty pieces this month” looks impressive on a slide but when you check your store analytics the glow fades quickly.
AI has made it simple to publish at scale, what once took a week now takes merely a day.
Drafts are getting easier. Distribution is near instant. But the results just aren’t adding up.
Even the world’s largest publishers are seeing an unprecedented decline in visitors. Traffic and sales haven’t kept pace not because content suddenly stopped working, but because the distribution environment has shifted faster than how marketers have updated our playbooks.
McKinsey’s State of AI 2025 notes that 78% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, with marketing and sales among the top adopters. Raptive creators alone published 7.9 million articles in 2024, a staggering 37% more than the year before.
That’s how the commons of internet have been flooded; blogs, explainers, reports, all multiplying at the speed of light. Truly, content has never been cheaper to create, but easier to ignore.
The answer might be somewhere around in these places: distribution, attention, and trust. All three are being reshaped by platforms that reward in-feed consumption, in-place answers, and an audience that is growing wary of what feels machine-made and enormous amount of volume.
Shoppers can tell when a post feels like every other AI-generated guide, polished but hollow. As sameness floods the web, they tune out. For businesses this becomes deadly.
For merchants, that means your blog risks fading into the noise unless it carries a clear human signal: real stories, unique insights, a voice that feels genuine.
Yes, you might be publishing more than ever, but that doesn’t mean shoppers are following you back to your site.
Of course! audiences are still consuming content, just not where we want them to. They’re inside closed ecosystems: TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Reddit threads, Substack newsletters.
None of these or other platforms are willing to share their attention spans with us. Causing a zero-click internet for most of us.
The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 backs this up: In the U.S., 54% of people now access news through social media or video networks: overtaking both television (50%) and news websites/apps (48%).
TikTok is now the fastest-growing news platform globally; roughly one in three people use it, and about 17% use it specifically for news. That’s not a purpose it was ever designed for, unlike media organizations.
For most content marketers- you can be “reaching out” to people all day in-feed and still never see a session on your own domain.
And to be honest, when was the last time we actually clicked out of Instagram to read a full blog? Or scrolled past Google’s summary box to land on the publisher’s page? Data shows that it’s clearly not happening enough as it used to earlier.
And if traffic, the metric we’ve treated as gospel for two decades is no longer leaving the platform, we can expect the gap between production effort and business impact to only keep widening further.
When Google serves the answer right at the top, shoppers don’t bother clicking through to your site.
In March 2025, Pew Research tracked what happens when Google’s AI Overviews appear at the top of search results. When an AI Overview shows up, only 8% of people click through to a traditional site. Without it, that number jumps to 15%. That’s almost half your potential visitors gone before they even see your store.
So, if your charts feel lighter, that’s why. We’re living in the era of zero-click discovery: search gives answers in the results, social gives answers in the feed. Content is still being consumed, but not in ways we want to.
If this sounds abstract, look at the world’s biggest publishers. Press Gazette’s monthly traffic rankings for August 2025 showed that 49 out of the 50 biggest English-language news sites lost visitors compared to the same month in 2024.
The only one to grow?
Substack: up 49% to 123.8m visits. And the reason is structural: direct subscriptions, owned distribution, no algorithm in the middle.
Well, you may ask yourself- if the giants are bleeding traffic at this scale, what chance does the average brand blog have?
It’s clear that the more answers are being delivered directly on the platform, the fewer people are clicking out, and the economics of attention are shifting away from publishers.
Can it be about the shrinking attention spans?
Sort of! but let’s be precise.
The average attention span is 8.2 seconds. That’s about how long you have to convince someone that your content is worth their time.
And even when they do stay, it isn’t for long: Chartbeat’s Q2-2025 data shows average engaged time on articles at roughly 30 seconds, and they explicitly link the drop in search pageviews to AI summaries in SERPs.
It is as simple as this:
Every time we flood the web with another round of buying guides, comparisons, or “top 10” posts, the total pool of attention doesn’t get bigger. It stays the same.
Average time per piece drifts lower. It’s not that readers think your work got worse. It’s that everything looks the same, and the tap never turns off.
Neil Patel’s study highlights how fragile trust has become.
With 1.8 million visitors, he labelled a third of human-written articles as “AI-written.” Read time dropped by almost half.
Same articles, same words, the label alone was enough to make people disengage.
The issue isn’t just the shorter attention. It’s also weaker trust. We’re producing more, but in many cases, we’re also producing faster boredom.
Let’s say people do read your long-form content, do they act on it? Do they move closer to becoming potential customers?
That’s the real test. Because attention on its own doesn’t pay. What matters is whether the content drives action: a sign-up, a conversation, a step forward in the buying journey.
And this is where the gap shows. Discovery is shifting, trust is thinner, and attribution rarely tells the full story.
Even when content influences a deal, it often doesn’t appear in the dashboards we report. So, are teams publishing more to chase visible vanity wins?
Which leads to the uncomfortable questions: are we producing content to win customers, or just to prove we’re producing content?
There’s also the human side of all this: the AI FOMO loop. “If we’re not using AI everywhere, we’re behind.”
So, the reflex is to crank harder: 10× output, packed calendars, more product blogs, more buying guides, more “top 10” posts.
But the returns don’t match the effort. It’s not just you. Merchants everywhere are feeling the same strain:
More briefs, smaller deltas, fewer pieces anyone remembers.
Quality gets lost in the chase for quantity. A week’s work is now done in a day, so we judge ourselves by how much we publish, even though platforms no longer reward more.
Four forces explain why “more” feels like “less”:
That’s the loop: the fear that not publishing more content with AI means falling behind, even when the extra volume isn’t driving the metrics that matter.
To be fair, no one, not even Google, has pinned down exactly how much AI Overviews or AI-assisted content drive traffic declines. Google has pushed back on some third-party studies, and the truth is messy.
Still, some signals are hard to dismiss:
The precise percentages may be debated, but the direction of travel is clear.
If AI makes it easier to publish, but search and social give readers fewer reasons to leave, then more inevitably feels like less.
Long-form still matters, but it’s fighting uphill. Shoppers are harder to win over.
Maybe this isn’t about volume:
We’re producing at a scale we couldn’t have imagined three years ago. But instead of more sales, more trust, and more impact, we’re left with flatter metrics, shorter read times, and teams that feel busy, burnt, and strangely unsatisfied.
So, the real question isn’t whether you can produce more blogs or guides. It’s whether what you publish actually helps shoppers move closer to buying or if it’s just adding to the noise in an 8.2-second world?
If content reach feels like a mirage, smart play is to focus on numbers that actually move the business.
.jpg)
.jpg)
