What worked in content marketing 5 years ago isn’t as likely to work now. Araminta Robertson advises us to focus on bottom-of-funnel in 2026.

Araminta says: “Now, it's more important than ever to do bottom-of-funnel content to help appear for the right topics and the right keywords in Google, but also for LLMs.”

How do you describe the different stages of the funnel, and the content that is needed at each stage?

“It's really important to make that distinction because people have different definitions of what each stage in the funnel is.

To me, top-of-funnel content is for someone who's not aware. They are still very much at the beginning of their journey in terms of making a purchase. I work in the B2B payments and financial services sector, so I’ll use the example of an e-commerce site or merchant who wants to work with a payment provider and start accepting payments online.

At this stage of the funnel, they're still doing a lot of research. How do other companies accept payments online? What different business models are available? They're almost looking for inspiration, and they may not even have a problem yet. They're at a very early stage of their journey.

Middle-of-funnel, they are starting to be more aware that they have a problem. They're starting to do research on types of payment providers, what kind of payments they should be accepting, and what the flow should be. They're trying to understand exactly what the problem is, but they may not be looking for a solution just yet.

Bottom-of-funnel is someone who's aware they have a problem and is actively looking for a solution. In this case, they're looking for things like ‘top payment gateways,’ ‘how to accept payments online with Stripe,’ or ‘Stripe vs PayPal’.

What's key here is that it's non-branded. Often, people assume that the bottom-of-funnel is someone who already knows about your company and is trying to understand how the product works. That could be the case, but I would say that's after the buying journey, because they're already aware of your brand.

We're focussed on non-branded bottom-of-funnel: someone who doesn't know that your product exists and is actively looking for a solution to their problem.”

A key way to beat the competition is to learn from other industries. Rosemary Osuoha teaches us what we can learn from healthcare brands.

Rosemary says: “Healthcare brands can use AI and SEO to reach more patients using research papers.”

How can you use research papers to reach more users, and why is this particularly beneficial for healthcare brands?

“First of all, I'm a healthcare professional. I'm a pharmacist, and I also happen to be in SEO. I've been on both sides, from the healthcare perspective and from the SEO perspective.

From my experience, research papers are always published in academic journals, and that's it. That content is not always repurposed. I used to make that mistake, but over time I realised that this can be a real content engine.

Healthcare brands often invest heavily in research. There's always research work being done. There's always a new innovation or investigation. Sometimes, that research can be beneficial to patients, but they aren’t reading academic journals. Most of the time, patients will just Google their symptoms.

If you are not putting that research work where your patients are, you are losing money, and patients are not getting the right information from an authoritative source.

Besides healthcare brands, this is also relevant for any business that heavily invests in research work. You can take advantage of this if you do any form of research and produce data and statistics to back up the claims that you are making. Instead of leaving it in Google Scholar, you can also repurpose that into long-form content and redistribute it across different platforms like social media, YouTube, etc.

It's relevant to any businesses that carry out research, not just healthcare brands.”

Brandon Leibowitz talks about the importance of focusing on building topical authority in 2026 by creating in-depth content hubs that answer your audience’s questions better than anyone else. Talking points include: What are in-depth content hubs? How do you find your audience’s questions? What metrics do you use to ensure that you are answering the right questions? How do you know what type of content to use? What platform to use? How do you know that these are the right questions? How can you ensure that you are answering these questions better than anyone else?

One of the key challenges at the moment is to identify which tasks should be done by AI and which tasks should be done by a human. This is something that Ahmed Bhula explores.

Ahmed says: “Use AI as part of your SEO workflow, and involve the human element at every point.”

How do you decide what AI should do and what humans should do?

“Where there's administrative work – researching keywords, repetitive tasks, and auditing websites – there's always only one answer, and AI can do a really good job if you train those models for that.

On the other hand, when there's actual content, using AI for content is just repeating the same things that are already on the internet, and there's no human creativity behind that. From my experience, search engines don't like it.”

Valentina Stragliotto explores the idea that it’s also key to demonstrate expertise and trustworthiness through high-quality content.

Valentina says: “Focus on EEAT and high-quality content.

Also, use traditional SEO, as we always have.”

Is EEAT just as relevant for newer, AI search engines as it is for more traditional search engines?

“We have been talking a lot about GEO as opposed to SEO. After reading a few studies about it, I think that what we have been using for SEO is also applicable for GEO and optimization for these LLM systems.

I've been looking at the actions we have to take to optimize for LLM systems. Obviously, there is a big focus on domain authority and branding, which is something that has always been suggested. There have also been quite a few studies showing that there are particular actions related to EEAT and showing trustworthiness and expertise in your content, as opposed to being keyword-focussed and other things that we usually use.

Before GEO came into the world, we used to focus on EEAT because we wanted search engines to rank our content and, within the ranking factors, what we had to write for the users and demonstrate was our expertise. This is something that you also have to do for GEO.

You have to add statistics, you have to show expertise, you have to cite sources, and you have to make the content fluent, because the new way of searching is with a full-on question rather than a query keyword.

Obviously, there is the whole element of structured data, which is also very important because you want the bots to read your content more easily. Again, this has also been important over the last few years because of featured snippets and all the structured content that was appearing on search engines.

That’s why I say that this is a very similar trend; we’re just talking about it in a different way.”

Isa Lavahun explains that you can enhance the perceived authority of your content through real, human expertise.

Isa says: “Authority should be built on earned expertise.

What I mean by that is real experience and credible voices that can’t be easily replicated or automated. In the age of AI, the most humanised content is what’s going to give you competitive edge”

How does a person earn that expertise?

“As marketers, we all use experts. We use people who are either the face of the brand, founders, product leads, or sector specific specialists – from scientists to nutritionists.

Credible experts are always going to be better equipped to help answer the search queries people are looking for. This goes beyond standard EEAT practice because, when AI can produce technically sound content on any topic, expert-attributed content becomes your primary differentiator. Not just expert-reviewed or expert-informed, but expert-led and authored. They need to be front and centre of your content strategy.”

You’ve selected your content distribution opportunities based upon AI and where your audience resides, but your content should be written based upon real, authentic human experience, according to Greg Gifford.

Greg says: “Don’t get distracted by all of the AI content on the web.

A lot of people are choosing to use AI to write all of their content, but AI is just predicting words based on the content that is already out there. As more of it floods the web, AI is training itself on AI. It's like copying the same VCR tape over and over again, and the quality continues to get worse.

The way that businesses and marketers need to combat that is with real, authentic human experience. AI systems and models cannot replicate that.

Write your content with humans. Skip the stupid informational stuff. Share authentic experiences and reasons why humans vibe with your company. That's how you're going to win in the future.”

Nick Musica shares that the technical, on-page, and off-page. The expressions of those SEO building blocks have evolved over the years, but they remain the fundamental building blocks. Talking points include: What do you mean by “The expressions of those SEO building blocks have evolved over the years” What are the fundamental SEO building blocks of on-page? What are the fundamental SEO building blocks of off-page? Why do they remain the fundamental building blocks?