If you’re anything like me – nerdy, obsessive, suspicious – you’re already trying to work out if this piece has been written by AI.

That instinct is understandable. A recent study by SEO platform Ahrefs found that 74.2% of new web pages contain AI-generated content. Robots are writing a majority of what you read. That’s creating a crisis in confidence.

It’s not that AI-generated content is badly written. (Let’s be honest: ChatGPT is better at stringing a decent paragraph together than many blog writers.) It’s just that the content AI produces tends to be shallow, unoriginal and – at its worst – objectively incorrect.

B2B content is now produced at unprecedented scales, and very little of it is worth a tinker’s fart. Whitepapers that spend 5,000 words saying nothing. Copycat blogs that regurgitate the same three stats. ‘Thought leadership’ that neither thinks nor leads. It’s page after page of magnolia meh.

When I worked in journalism, we called this kind of thing ‘churnalism’: cut-and-pasted pieces that spoke loudly but said little, and had no real purpose beyond filling space and baiting cheap clicks.

Your audience has adapted to this era of landfill content by second-guessing everything they read. The result is a credibility crunch.

But you can still get audiences to drop their scepticism, pay attention and take you seriously. You don’t shout louder – everyone’s already yelling at max volume. Instead, you change how you build and present ideas.

Big opinions. Demonstrable expertise. Incisive originality. Reliable evidence and total honesty. Right now, those are the only dependable ways to turn readers into customers.

Here’s how you make it happen.

1. Start with a real-world dilemma

A lot of weak and boring content is framed around a broad theme: ‘sustainability’; ‘transformation’; ‘the future of [whatever]’.

Themes such as these are shapeless and forgettable. But dilemmas? They’re specific and relatable. And content that helps your audience make confident decisions is irresistible.

So try framing your piece around a choice your target audience actually makes:

“Should I invest in cloud migration now, or extend the life of our existing tech?”

“Is it smarter to invest in product innovation, or expanding into new markets?”

“Am I better off head-hunting specialist talent, or upskilling the current workforce?”

Try capturing the audience’s conundrum in a single line, as above. If you can’t do that, you don’t yet have the focused outline of a piece. Go back and pare things down until you have a straightforward question that your content will answer for the audience.

That straightforward question is your guiding light. It shapes the structure of your piece, the evidence you’ll need to gather, the experts you’ll need to interview, and the call-to-action it’ll close on.

Anything that doesn’t help the reader with their conundrum gets cut. Be extra-brutal in order to be useful.

2. Run your mouth, but back it up

Strong opinions are always welcome. A 2024 Edelmen survey of 3,484 B2B decision-makers found that 73% were more swayed by thought leadership than by beautiful brochures.

Thought leadership, when done well, demonstrates expertise, reasoning and a confident perspective. A brochure, by contrast, is pure salesmanship, making it much easier to disregard.

But strong opinions with nothing to back them up? Less appealing. For every big claim you make, you need to show your working out.

That evidence might come from first-party research, case studies, customer interviews or third-party data. Just make it credible, don’t bury it in the appendix, and lay it out in plain English.

There’s a tried-and-tested pattern to reassuring your readers that you’re both informed and trustworthy.

• State it: explain the claim you’re making.
• Show it: the evidence that supports the claim.
• Explain it: what the evidence means in context.
• Limit it: explain where the evidence doesn’t apply.

And if you don’t have any supporting evidence, just say so. You can still run a piece built solely on expert judgement – just label it as such. Highlight your relevant experiences and professional credibility, and make those your foundation of trustworthiness.

It’s fine if the reader disagrees with your assertion, provided they can see how and why you arrived at it. Whether your opinion is based on research or professional insight, it should have an objectively solid foundation. Otherwise, why should anyone listen to you? Would you listen to you?

One last thing on proof: the more specific you can be, the more convincing you’ll be. ‘Customers prefer faster support’ is beige wallpaper. ‘Sub-three-minute response times cut churn by 18% across 142 accounts’ earns trust because it’s concrete and evocative.

3. Resist bullshitting

Just to be clear: I’m not accusing you of being a liar. I’m sure you’re as honest as the day is long.

It’s just that most of us have grown accustomed to occasionally [cough] bending the truth in order to bolster a professional opinion or position. We cherry-pick facts. Use stats selectively. Quote people out of context.

It’s not lying, as such. But it is blagging. Spinning. Bullshitting.

A 2024 survey of 2,000 UK adults by the Government’s Behavioural Insights Team found 59% believed they could spot misinformation online. The majority of us pride ourselves on our ability to whiff out BS – which means your readers do, too. Show you respect them by being visibly and unimpeachably honest, and in return you’ll earn their trust.

With zero bullshitting to back you up, you may have to work a little harder to make your points land. But it’ll be worth it. 

Here are the bullshit-avoiding basics:

• Keep charts honest: sensible scales, no tricksy axes, no visual gymnastics.
• Explain insider terms. Watch out for any internal jargon you’ve long since stopped noticing.
• Provide sources for any stats, with links and sample sizes.
• Delineate facts and opinions – readers should always know which is which.
• If you’ve used lots of stats and data, consider including a short, standalone limitations section, covering scope, methodology and any known biases.

That last one is underrated. Stating limits signals seriousness. (It also stops your sales team from getting into legal trouble by inadvertently over-claiming, based on your content.)

Being fully honest doesn’t make you look weak. It makes you look rigorous.

It’s a good idea to get your designers to build repeatable components for evidence-based content: pull quotes for key stats; a standard chart style; a boxout for methodology.

This consistency will help build trust across your content, and also ‘trains’ your in-house teams to produce work to the same exacting standard.

AI isn’t going away – so the credibility crunch isn’t going away either.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini et al will continue flooding your audience’s feeds. Your job is clear: counteract the flood of filler with content that addresses dilemmas, that shows its working out, and that gets specific without gaming the facts.

All that extra effort is going to make you stand out, and it’s going to make you persuasive – even to readers who arrive as nerdy, obsessive and suspicious as me.

Need some help getting your content to cut through in the AI era? Get in touch – let’s chat!