Okay, so apparently the new marketing advice is: make more content so ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews cite you. We need everyone to sit with that for a second, because we just spent the better part of five years telling people that “more content” wasn’t the answer to their growth problem — and now the audience for “more content” is a robot instead of a human, and somehow that made it sound smarter.
It’s the same advice, wearing a slightly more expensive outfit. Produce volume, hope the algorithm rewards you, never actually check whether any single piece of it did anything. And look, we get it — being cited inside an AI Overview feels like a win you can screenshot. But a screenshot isn’t a growth roadmap, and neither is a content calendar with forty items on it and zero of them tied to a number you trust.
Here’s the thing that gets lost in the AI-citation conversation: it’s not actually about AI. More content aimed at an algorithm you don’t control is the same mistake as more ad spend aimed at a funnel you don’t understand. It’s calories without nutrients. You can absolutely produce enough volume that something, eventually, gets picked up and quoted — the same way you can spend enough on ads that something, eventually, converts. Neither one tells you what’s actually carrying your brand, and neither one is a strategy.
We say it in our own content strategy: most brands aren’t under-marketed. They’re malnourished. Brand Macros™ exists because the fix was never “make more.” It’s “know which few things are actually carrying the brand, and feed those.” That’s true whether the audience deciding to notice you is a human scrolling LinkedIn or a language model deciding what to surface in an Overview. If you don’t know which of your five drivers is deficient, more volume just means you’re malnourished at a higher output.
So before you greenlight a content sprint aimed at getting quoted by a robot, audit what you’ve already published. What’s actually driving reach, conversions, or return customers right now? What’s dead weight? Most brands have never asked. That’s the audit we start with in every Brand Macros engagement, and it’s the same audit we’d point you to before you write one more piece of content for an audience you don’t fully understand yet.
Chasing citations without knowing what already works isn’t a growth lever. It’s the same blind-execution problem the industry has been selling for years, just pointed at a new judge.
Book Your Brand Macros Audit if you want to know what’s actually carrying your brand before you make one more piece of anything.
