The content strategy built for a search engine that didn’t exist yet
In 2022, we told a South African insurance brand to stop chasing traffic.
They had a solid product — direct-to-consumer vehicle add-on cover, competitively priced, genuinely useful. And like most brands in their space, they were running a content programme built around awareness. Top-of-funnel. High search volume. Broad educational keywords. The kind of strategy that looks impressive in a monthly report and produces almost no buyers.
We pushed back. Not because we had some prediction about what search would look like in three years. We pushed back because bottom-of-funnel content is just better business.
The industry was doing the same thing, badly
Here’s what short-term insurance content looked like in 2022: articles explaining what comprehensive cover is, how no-excess options work, why you need roadside assist. Genuinely useful content. Also genuinely useless for driving sales.
The audience for that content is curious, not ready. They’re doing background research. They won’t convert today, probably won’t convert next month, and when they do convert they may not remember where they read the explainer. You’ve educated a buyer for a competitor.
The industry default was volume. Lots of articles. Broad terms. Moderate rankings. The logic was: build awareness now, capture buyers later. It sounds reasonable. It rarely works cleanly.
We made a different call. We focused almost entirely on decision-stage content — people who already knew they needed cover and were comparing options, checking terms, looking for reasons to trust or reasons to walk away. Fewer articles. Sharper targeting. Every piece written for someone who is three clicks from buying.
What bottom-of-funnel actually means in practice
It doesn’t mean salesy. Decision-stage content isn’t advertising. It’s the content that appears when someone searches “is [product type] worth it” or “what’s not covered” or “how do I claim.” Those are buying signals. The person asking is already in the market.
We built content around those queries. Specific, honest, detailed. We answered the hard questions directly — including the ones that might put someone off, because a well-informed buyer who doesn’t convert is better than a poorly-informed buyer who converts and then churns.
The body of content we built from 2022 through 2025 had one consistent characteristic: it was written for people who had already decided to buy something and were deciding what. Not people who were deciding whether to buy at all.
That focus required saying no to a lot of content that felt logical. We turned down high-volume awareness topics. We cut articles that would have performed well on paper. We kept the brief narrow.
Then AI search arrived
In 2025, the search landscape shifted significantly. AI Overviews started appearing at the top of Google results for insurance-related queries. Perplexity and ChatGPT citations became a meaningful source of referral traffic. The nature of how people find and evaluate information changed.
For most brands in this client’s space, that shift was damaging. Their traffic declined. Their rankings felt less reliable. The top of the search page now belonged to AI-generated summaries, not the organic listings they’d spent years building.
For this client, the opposite happened.
The content we’d built — specific, high-intent, decision-stage — turned out to be exactly what AI systems cite when they answer purchase-intent queries. Not because we’d predicted that. Not because we’d optimized for it. But because content that genuinely answers a buyer’s specific question is valuable to a human reader and to an AI pulling sources.
The brand now appears as a cited authority in AI-generated answers for insurance-related queries. Competitors who had spent three years building awareness content are essentially invisible in that environment. Their broad, educational content doesn’t get cited. It doesn’t answer the specific question. It was built for a different job.
Discipline beats prediction
This is the counter-intuitive part. We didn’t win this because we saw AI search coming. We didn’t make some clever bet on the future of content. We won it because we made a defensible decision about what kind of content builds genuine authority — and we held that position consistently for three years when there was pressure to do something flashier.
In 2022 and 2023, there were quarters where the traffic numbers looked modest. Awareness-first content would have delivered bigger volume numbers. It would have looked better in slide decks. We had the conversation about scope more than once.
What saved the programme was a clear brief: we are not trying to reach everyone. We are trying to reach the person who is deciding right now. Every piece of content either serves that person or it doesn’t get written.
That discipline — not prediction, not insight about AI, just clarity about who the content is for — is what turned a three-year content investment into a competitive moat.
What this means for your content strategy
Most content strategies are built around what’s achievable. Volume targets. Ranking opportunities. The keywords your team can realistically compete for. Those inputs aren’t wrong, but they’re not the right starting question.
The right starting question is: who is actually going to buy from us, and what are they searching for in the 48 hours before they pull the trigger?
If you can answer that specifically — not “people who need insurance” but “people comparing excess waivers on vehicle cover who haven’t committed yet” — you have a brief. Everything else follows.
You will write fewer articles. They will be more specific. Some of them will rank for queries with very low search volume. That’s fine. Low volume, high intent, right buyer. That’s the combination that produces revenue.
The companies who built bottom-of-funnel authority in the last three years are now the cited authorities in AI answers. The ones who chased traffic are wondering why their content investment isn’t paying back.
The window to build that authority isn’t closing, but it’s compressing. AI systems cite sources they’ve seen consistently. They favor specificity. They reward content that actually answers the question, not content that covers the topic.
Start with the buyer. Build for the decision. The search engine — whatever form it takes in two years — will find you.
