Content Strategy
A content strategy is the plan that decides which content you produce, for whom, in what order and toward what goal — before a single piece gets written. It ranks topics, sets a publishing sequence and defines what "done well" looks like, instead of letting a blog calendar fill itself. In an AI-visibility context, the plan has to serve two audiences at once: the people who read your pages and the AI assistants — ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini — that summarise or cite them.
Why content strategy matters
Without a plan, content accumulates rather than compounds: a blog post here, a landing page there, none of it building on the last. A strategy starts by answering three questions up front — who you're writing for, what they actually ask, and which of those questions you're positioned to answer better than anyone else. That ordering matters more than ever now that a large share of searches never produce a click at all. Pew Research, tracking real browsing behaviour across roughly 68,879 Google searches, found people clicked through to a traditional result in only 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared on the page, versus 15% without one — roughly half the click-through rate. Ahrefs separately measured a 58% drop in average click-through rate for the #1 organic result once AI Overviews entered the picture, across 300,000 tracked keywords. A content strategy that treats being read as the only goal is optimising for a shrinking share of the outcome; one built around being the source an AI assistant chooses to cite protects visibility even when nobody clicks.
How it works
Start with the questions people are actually typing into Google and asking ChatGPT — not the keywords you'd like to rank for. Group those questions into topic clusters: a comprehensive pillar page that covers the subject end to end, surrounded by shorter pieces that go deep on one sub-question and link back to the pillar. From there you fix format, tone and a publishing cadence you can actually sustain. For AI visibility specifically, the strategy has to prioritise citability: direct, unambiguous claims; facts a reader (or a model) can verify; a heading structure a crawler can parse without guessing. What it should not include is content written specifically "for AI" as a separate track — Google's own Search Central guidance is explicit that no special markup, schema, or AI-facing file changes how AI Overviews or AI Mode treat a page, and that writing a separate version of your content for AI systems is the wrong move. One plan, one set of pages, built to be clear enough that both a person and a model can use them.
Common mistakes
The most common failure is writing about yourself instead of the reader's question — company history and product features where the searcher wanted a cost, a comparison, or a decision framework. A close second is spreading thin: ten shallow posts on adjacent angles where three thorough ones would have covered the ground. Content also goes stale, and staleness is expensive twice over — it loses reader trust and it loses model trust, since freshness genuinely factors into what gets surfaced. The newest mistake is chasing AI-specific tactics that don't do anything. Google's John Mueller confirmed in 2025 that no Google Search system reads or acts on an llms.txt file, and an Ahrefs analysis of roughly 137,000 sites that published one found about 97% saw zero measurable referral traffic tied to it. Time spent maintaining a file no engine reads is time not spent making the underlying page more citable — which is the part that actually moves the needle.
Relation to generative engine optimisation
Content strategy is the plan; generative engine optimisation (GEO) — a term introduced by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Karthik Narasimhan, Ameet Deshpande, Tanmay Rajpurohit and Ashwin Kalyan in their 2024 paper, presented at ACM SIGKDD — is one of the disciplines that plan has to account for. GEO matters because getting cited by an AI assistant is not the same contest as ranking in Google: Ahrefs found only about 6–8% overlap between the URLs ChatGPT cites and Google's top 10 for the same query, with roughly 80% of ChatGPT's citations not appearing in Google's top 100 results at all. A strategy that only optimises for classic rankings is fighting the wrong battle for AI visibility. What does correlate with getting cited is being mentioned elsewhere on the web: an Ahrefs study across roughly 75,000 brands found web-mention frequency correlates with AI citation rate at about 0.664, roughly three times stronger than the 0.218 correlation for backlinks. A content strategy aimed at AI visibility should budget deliberately for earning mentions — not just links — alongside the on-page work.
Example
A regional window-installation business notices it never comes up when someone asks ChatGPT about window replacement in its area. Instead of adding more blog posts at random, it builds a strategy: it lists the ten questions customers actually ask a salesperson (What does a window replacement cost? When is triple glazing worth it? How long does installation take?) and writes each one as a clear, fact-based answer page, tied together by one pillar guide on window renovation. A few weeks later it starts showing up as a cited source when people ask AI assistants about window replacement in its region — not because it added any special AI markup, but because its pages answer the actual question more directly than its competitors' do.
Common questions
What is the difference between content strategy and content marketing?
Content strategy is the plan: it sets goals, defines the target audience, and decides which topics get covered in what order. Content marketing is the execution — actually writing, designing and distributing that content. Strategy answers why and what; marketing handles how and where.
Do I need an llms.txt file or special schema as part of my content strategy?
No. Google has stated plainly that no special markup, schema, or AI-specific file is required for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and Google's John Mueller has confirmed that no Google Search system reads llms.txt files at all. Put that effort into clearer, better-structured, more fact-based pages instead — that's what actually gets cited.