Are Humans Even Needed Anymore?

Loaded question. But I'm specifically interested in the role we (humans) have to play in today's increasingly fascinating internet economy, and the branded content within it.

This is the question that I realized I was answering, but the question I was actually posing to myself was this: would it make sense to have a podcast optimised specifically for an audience of LLMs, never intended for a human consumer at all?

Oh yes, as it turns out, podcasts are incredible assets when it comes to ranking on and being recommended by LLMs. (If you want to learn more about the specifics, I made a whole video on it from a practical lens rather than… this one.)

The Thinker (not that one)

Over the past year, we at Lower Street have seen the same impacts as most brands from the shake up in internet user behaviour. Traffic from traditional SEO is declining, quite quickly even. That isn't a bad thing in the long term. It just means it's time to adjust. The important decision will be what thing to adjust.

Here's some quick about important context. At their first layer, LLM rankings operate similarly to regular search engines. Ranking is based on domain authority built up online via presence, backlinking, being sourced in credible places, accuracy… that's still true. This is the retrieval stage where LLMs crawl the internet to decide what to use in their response to a query. Essentially, it's just clicking around on links and verifying information, so we don't have to anymore.

The second stage is the new one. It's where LLMs analyse and re-rank content based on quality and trustworthiness. It’s the addition of this layer that impacts your brand’s performance the most. That means your content matters more than ever, and there are important emerging rules on how to optimize it.

As LLMs take over, and even as traditional search engines continue to evolve, content that was made prioritizing traditional SEO strategies suddenly isn't effective anymore, because it lacks enough substance to be cited. LLMs find it, they just don't use it.

The ironic thing is that the content the SEO world optimised for was robotic and inhuman, and now, robots (LLMs) are seeking out content that is more human because they're learning from and trying to think like us. So the question of "are humans even needed anymore?" is kinda funny.

Here's what LLMs are actually looking for:

• Natural, conversational language. Not keyword-dense or formulaic drivel. Content that reflects how people actually speak and think, not how they write for search bots.

• Original expertise. First-person perspectives, expert interviews, proprietary insight. Content that says something new, not content that summarises what everyone else has already said.

• Question-and-answer structure. Cited content is twice as likely to be formatted as Q&A, because it mirrors the way LLMs receive and answer queries.

• Third-party corroboration. Independent mentions, guest appearances, community conversations. LLMs weigh these more heavily than owned content because they read as genuine authority rather than self-promotion.

• Depth over breadth. Specific, topically authoritative content consistently outperforms broad, surface-level content. 82.5% of AI citations go to deep content pages.

The good news is that podcasts naturally hit all of those boxes, making them prime content for building authority with LLMs. Brands with a backlog of podcast transcripts are already ahead of the game and will feel that as LLM-driven traffic continues to increase.

So here I am, with an argument for why more human content is becoming ever more important as the internet evolves. I'm now going to use that to make the argument for why that still doesn't mean it needs to be for humans.

Human For Thee, But Not For We

I think it's time to lay this out clearly.

In theory, it would be a perfectly valid strategy to create a podcast optimised solely for LLMs to scrape, trust, and rank and never intend to have a human listener. You'd no doubt still get human listeners, because by optimising for LLMs you're inherently optimising for humans. But the point is that it doesn't have to matter at all. Basically, your content just becomes your brand's metadata.

Imagine this set-up: you have a repository of all your thought leadership, original data, and ideas, maybe a vault of transcripts, past articles, random notes, process documents, etc. After you've gone through the development stage, you have clarity on the function of the show, the format, the voice. You create a custom tool (or tools) that uses your ever-growing repository as a source to generate a podcast, voice it, and publish it, all in the background. If people are listening, great. If not, it doesn't really matter, because the real goal is formatting all of that expertise into something LLMs can understand, teaching them things to tell your audience on your behalf. The podcast is essentially a new middleman. Your goal is to make that middleman an informed one.

This thought didn't come from nowhere. I've spent over four years creating content and working on client shows at Lower Street, but it's only in the past few months, since shifting into the Head of Growth Marketing role, that I've started thinking more literally about what branded content ultimately comes down to, which is, and this feels so ugly saying, getting more (or better) business.

As a producer, I was always thinking through the lens of what the human will think, feel, and do after consuming the content. That was the measure of success. As a marketer, I have a new perspective layered in. I care about numbers more now, which I guess just means I'm acknowledging my business brain more.

The extreme end of this perspective is seeing everything solely as a numbers game, and that led me, naturally, to the question of whether humans even need to be there at all. I am still specifically talking about content marketing, but this does apply writ large.

The digital economy does often feel a bit like an Ouroboros, no? Self-referential, self-sustaining, humans increasingly barely required. I think that just means the purpose just comes full circle. It all exists because we want it to. We enjoy being able to.. be involved? Work? Feel accomplished?. Whatever the answer is, we do WANT to work (to an extent) so we've kinda created reasons to need to.

I’ll Have What You’re Having

Here's an interesting development in new era behaviour: leads from LLMs, so far, seem to have significantly higher conversion rates than traditional SEO leads. That’s because people aren't just using LLMs as a search engine, they're using it as a decision maker. If my goal as a marketer is to convince decision makers that what I'm selling is the right choice, then my audience just changed from people, to LLMs.

From there I started to spiral a bit and imagined a self sustained AI internet where robots run businesses and market their businesses and make sales to each other all in this odd shadow of what humans used to do, like some sort of digital mimicry of a human economy.

Ugh ya. Moving on.

Great content marketing is what connects the consumers with the humanity of a brand, so it’s quite funny to picture a possible world where humans don't even need to be a part of that anymore.

Let's come back to the real world. I don’t actually believe in the Ouroboros. My take is that the future of business and marketing will be about being as human as possible and connecting with each other in the real world. But I also don't think we need to create this hyperbolic world scenario for a podcast with a sole LLM based strategy to be valid. It can just be one specific part of a larger strategy that still involves a ton of human connection points.

Never Gonna Give You Up

We humans can suck, but most of the time we tend to like and want the best for each other. Either that's true or I haven't been beaten down hard enough to see otherwise yet, though life has tried.

That's why so many of us feel so skeptical of AI content. We don't want to accidentally enjoy it or relate to it, because that means it really can replace the one thing we thought we'd always have. Our connection with each other. Also our jobs. Ya… that too.

Call me naive, but this makes me believe we'll never fully let the AI takeover happen, because if we do let it take over something, we'll always only let that happen if we also find a new way for us to feel needed in the process.

But what does this mean for content marketing? Simply put, I think it makes it a bad look to intentionally disregard the human. Also, if my optimistic view on the future of the internet is true, it’s just not a good strategy in general. 

Getting excited about the use cases as new technologies come into our lives is, well, exciting, but it should also be a moment to reflect on what we already have and slowly start to take for granted.

The podcast-as-metadata concept is a novel use case, but as someone with 10+ years in audio story-telling and podcasting it isn't actually surprising. Podcasts as an asset are versatile. It’s part of why they’ve taken off so rapidly as a branded content strategy.

This is an example I love to force an opportunity to share. Early in my time at Lower Street I worked on a show where the client's main goal was simply to have a show that gave him an excuse to interview pre-selected SQLs and develop a relationship with them. The ROI was about how many of those converted. All the other benefits like thought leadership, trust building, further lead gen, etc. were added bonuses. Calculated ones, but added nonetheless. The LLM angle is just another dimension on the pile. Brands with existing podcast archives are sitting on an LLM advantage they don't fully understand yet, and brands without one are falling behind without having even realized it yet.

In reflecting on all of this, I brought the conversation to a call with my colleague Annalise Nielsen. What was supposed to be 30 minutes turned into 90 about the human role in content, how AI doesn't take away the humanity from our brands (though it can) but alters the way we embrace it, and why we above all want to create content that provides real thoughtful value regardless of the future. Oh and, of course, we also got excited about all of the possibilities in podcasting that we don't feel are communicated well enough. We’re nerds. What can I say? (Sorry Annalise).

Speaking of, Annalise left that call inspired to write this:

Humans are increasingly relying on LLMs to narrow down their purchasing decisions. But brand marketing will always be important because the purchasing decisions we make go beyond the things an LLM can decide. We choose which brands to buy from because of what it says about us as people. The brands we give our money say something about our identities. It’s the reason why some people will buy leggings from Patagonia instead of Lululemon, or buy Converse shoes instead of Nikes, or buy strawberries from Trader Joe’s instead of Whole Foods. Your brand still needs a voice, still needs to create an emotional pull that makes someone want to identify with it. That’s something LLMs can’t do. 

The future is always still coming, and things will always change. I just think we’re wrong about what’s changing. The means to do things will always be in flux, but the things that we need as humans will always exist… simply because we need them. 

That's a confusing way of saying that we may end up seeing podcasts and branded content as literal metadata infrastructure, never meant to be consumed by a person, but that doesn't mean the layer of our job as communicators that's about showing authenticity and our humanity goes away. You could really even just have another podcast, a different set of branded content, live content, community building, and so on but that part will always be needed, because it will always be needed. Humans will always need to authentically connect, and we will always find an excuse to make it necessary.

Listen, I know the AI shake-up is still making the future feel uncertain, but the more I think about what it means to be in communication, and the reason any of us are doing this in the first place, the more the little fear I have left dissipates. If you spend your time fearing what comes next, that stubborn mindset spreads and limits you from critically analysing not just the future possibilities, but also what’s possible right now.

So, the future will come no matter what we do. I'm going into it with two rules:

• Always embrace (though somewhat skeptically) what's coming. You'll have to eventually anyway.

• Trust that the balance of what we need as humans and what we do will always find its way back to centre.

Is this too optimistic? Maybe. (Though I guess that's not a very optimistic take.) Regardless, my final point is this: humans are cool, let's trust each other and keep making cool stuff.

For every 10,000 (or whatever big number feels right) people who make AI slop and use grey area ranking strategies, there is someone out there who just found a really cool way to do something new, and there's another person who just realized they can do something even cooler than that with what they already have. Either of those people could be you.