The Most Expensive Content Is the Kind Nobody Believes

A CEO I work with recently asked me a version of a question I’m hearing everywhere: “Our agency wants to use AI for most of our content. They say it’ll cut costs by 40%. Should we do it?”

On the surface, the math makes sense. Content is expensive. AI makes it cheaper. Faster. More of it.

But that math is missing a variable. And it’s the one that actually determines whether your marketing works at all.

Trust.

The Content Flood Nobody Asked For

Right now, 74% of new web pages contain AI-generated material (Ahrefs, 2025). Three out of four pages. That’s not a trend. That’s a takeover.

And your potential customers are swimming in it. Every blog they land on, every LinkedIn post in their feed, every email in their inbox sounds like it was written by the same robot having the same midday crisis.

They’re not reading it. They’re scrolling past it. Not because they consciously think “this is AI.” They think “this company doesn’t know me.” And they leave.

Your Audience Is Running One Direction. Most Marketers Are Running the Other.

Here’s the disconnect that should keep every CEO up at night:

Consumer preference for AI-generated content has dropped from 60% to just 26% in under three years (Billion Dollar Boy, 2025). Meanwhile, 79% of marketers are increasing their investment in AI content.

Read that again. Your audience is running away from it at the same rate your marketing team is running toward it.

When people perceive content as AI-generated, trust drops to 50% (Raptive). Half. And trust isn’t some soft metric you can afford to ignore. It’s the thing that turns a prospect into a customer, a customer into a repeat buyer, and a repeat buyer into someone who refers their friends.

For companies in the $5M-$30M range, this isn’t an abstract concern. You don’t have the brand equity buffer of a Coca-Cola. You can’t absorb a trust hit and keep rolling. Trust is your growth engine. And you’re letting your content strategy erode it.

The Sameness Tax

Here’s what I see working with growing companies every day: the real cost of AI content isn’t that it’s bad. It’s that it’s the same.

When a prospect visits three companies’ websites and all three sound identical, they don’t pick the best one. They pick the cheapest one. Or the one a friend recommended. Your content just became irrelevant to their decision.

Differentiation is already hard for a $10M company. When your content sounds like everyone else’s content because you’re all using the same tools to say the same nothing, every other marketing dollar you spend becomes less effective. Your ads drive traffic to a website that sounds generic. Your emails land in an inbox full of identical messages. Your LinkedIn posts blend into the same beige feed.

That’s the sameness tax. And most companies don’t even know they’re paying it.

The Opportunity Is Wide Open

Here’s the part that should actually make you optimistic.

73% of B2B decision-makers say they trust thought leadership more than traditional marketing materials. But less than half say the thought leadership they actually consume is any good (Edelman-LinkedIn, 2024).

The bar is on the floor. And it’s there because most companies stopped trying to clear it.

That gap between what buyers want (real thinking from real people who understand their problems) and what they’re getting (recycled AI-generated “insights” that could apply to any company in any industry) is your competitive advantage. If you’re willing to do the work.

What to Do Instead

I’m not anti-AI. I use AI tools in my own work ever. This isn’t about going back to hand-chiseling every blog post on stone tablets.

It’s about knowing the difference between using AI as a tool and using it as a replacement for thinking.

Here’s where to start:

Talk to five customers this week. Not a survey. An actual conversation. Ask them what made them choose you over the other option they were considering. The answer they give you is worth more than 50 AI-generated blog posts, because it’s real. It’s specific. And it’s something your competitors can’t replicate because they didn’t bother to ask.

Read your own content with fresh eyes. Pull up your last five blog posts or marketing emails. If you swapped your company name for a competitor’s, would anyone notice? If the answer is no, you have a sameness problem. And no amount of AI-generated volume is going to fix it.

Make trust a decision filter. Before you publish anything, ask: does this build trust with the specific person we’re trying to reach? Not “does this fill our content calendar” or “does this hit our SEO targets.” Does it make someone feel like we understand their world? If it doesn’t, it’s not saving you money. It’s costing you something you can’t buy back.

What I’m seeing this month: Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year, driven almost entirely by “AI slop.” Mentions of the term increased ninefold last year, and 82% of those mentions were negative (Brandwatch, 2025). Meanwhile, more companies are quietly adding “written by humans” labels to their content. Whether or not that tactic has legs, the fact that it’s emerging tells you something about where audience expectations are heading.