Content Governance Strategy for the AI Era

Without a solid content strategy in place, AI-generated content is just noise. Without governance, it’s noise pollution.

Generative AI (GAI) promises the ability to produce more content quickly and cost-effectively. But overlooking the investment required to maintain content, or failing to maintain content properly, can cost an organization more in the end. To truly harness the power of GAI, you will need a comprehensive content strategy, one that includes a robust governance model.

AI is Changing the Way We Create & Consume Content 

The internet has been expanding at an astonishing rate for quite some time and AI is only making growth faster. Some even estimate that by 2025 as much as 90% of online content could be generated by AI. 

Overwhelmed by the impending deluge? Don’t worry, there are AI tools to help with that, too. Solutions like thegist.ai and InfoNgen can give you summaries of emails, headlines and Slack notifications. And with Google and Bing embedding GAI within their search engines, you won’t have to visit the resulting webpages. Instead, you can get a summary right on your search results page. 

Zero-click search results are a well-established trend, but while previously organizations could optimize their content for Google’s rich results, synthesized search results provide less control. With GAI-powered search, any content is ripe for synthesis — including old and outdated content. The best way an organization can ensure their content is well represented on search engine results page? High quality and well-maintained content.

Your Organization Needs a Content Governance Strategy for AI 

While older content could be buried deep within your site and hard to find by the average user, machines can uncover it quickly. In fact, it’s safe to assume that any information or content your company has published previously can be found and used in AI-generated search results. This raises the potential for conflicting or out-of-date content negatively impacting your brand’s online presence or confusing customers. And, since low-quality content on your site hurts your domain authority and ability to rank, now more than ever, you need to stay on top of your content and keep it relevant. 

But what If your organization is using GAI to crank out more content, faster? Without a solid governance and maintenance strategy in place, you’ll soon have a compounding problem. So how can you avoid that and take advantage of AI? Here’s a (human-generated) plan to consider:

Step 1: Set Clear Content Intentions

For your content to cut through the noise and sheer volume of AI-generated content, it will need to be useful, authentic and impactful. Before you fire up ChatGPT or Jasper to crank out a series of blog posts, make sure you have a clear vision of what your content will do for you and your audience. What questions must it answer? What tasks must it enable? Before you begin, make sure you:

• Understand your users and target audience, aligning your content to their needs
• Perform keyword research and optimization
• Identify gaps in content to anticipate questions and search queries
• Ensure content engages readers to reduce bouncing
• Test and iterate content to ensure the information returned by AI search includes your organization or product as part of the response 

We recommend against taking a shortcut around this step before diving into GAI. With that said, GAI can speed up many of these tasks with a human at the helm.

Step 2: Implement a Reliable Structure & Tagging System for Your Content 

Not only is it important to ensure that machines and users can discover and make sense of your content, but it’s also important to make sure your content team can find, update and archive it. 

Structuring and tagging your content so it’s easy to find can also help you repurpose existing content. If your CMS allows for content reuse across pages, formats and channels, you can greatly increase ROI on your content. In addition to increased efficiency, this also ensures consistent messaging, no matter how or where users engage with your content. To take advantage of these solutions, your content strategy should include:

• A well-structured sitemap that helps search engine crawlers navigate through content and understand its hierarchy
• A content reuse strategy that enables you to effectively repurpose and redistribute your content across pages and platforms, boosting the efficiency with which your editorial staff can update content
• Content modeling that defines the structure and relationships of your content, ensuring that you can attach crucial metadata for findability
• An intuitive tagging taxonomy for organizing and classifying content, making it easier for humans and machines to search for and find relevant information

Step 3: Determine How You Will Keep Content Updated

GAI may make creating new content cheaper and easier, but it also adds to the volume of content you must maintain, since regularly auditing and maintaining your content is crucial for SEO. Pruning outdated content can protect your domain authority and regularly updating existing content can provide a lift in its search ranking. 

Rather than using GAI to churn out new content, invest more effort into reinvigorating existing content. Use data to tweak your language to align with the terms your users search, refocus on high-traffic keywords, and adjust internal links. Crucial steps to consider include: 

• Determine content objectives and supporting metrics needed to provide high-value insights 
• Decide how you will collect user feedback on content and incorporate those results into your decision making
• Define how frequently you will review your data and take action
• Set a schedule to ensure you regularly perform holistic content audits to ensure consistency, quality and relevance

Consider AI in Your Content Strategy

The good news: Just as GAI can speed up content creation, it can also make content governance and strategy definition more efficient and impactful. GAI will continue to transform the way we engage with content, and if we are intentional with how we use it, that could be a very good thing.