Ahrefs’ Tim Soulo recently posted that AI is making publishing evergreen content obsolete and no longer worth the investment because AI summaries leave fewer clicks for publishers. He posits that it may be more profitable to focus on trending topics, calling it Fast SEO. Is publishing evergreen content no longer a viable content strategy?
The Reason For Evergreen Content
Evergreen content can be a basic topic that generally doesn’t change much from year to year. For example, the answer to how to change a tire will generally always be the same.
The promise of evergreen content was that it represents a steady source of traffic. Once a web page is ranking for evergreen topics, publishers basically just have to make sure that it’s updated if the topic has changed in some way.
Does AI Break The Evergreen Content Promise?
Tim Soulo is suggesting that evergreen content, which can be easy to answer with a summary, is less likely to send a click because AI summarizes the answer and satisfies the user, who may not need to visit a website.
Soulo tweeted:
“The era of “evergreen SEO content” is over. We’re entering the era of “fast SEO.”
There’s little point in writing yet another “Ultimate Guide To ___.” Most evergreen topics have already been covered to death and turned into common knowledge. Google is therefore happy to give an AI answer, and searchers are fine with that.
Instead, the real opportunity lies in spotting and covering new trends — or even setting them yourself.”
Is Fast SEO The Future Of Publishing?
Fast SEO is another way of describing trending topics. Trending topics have always been around; it’s why Google invented the freshness algorithm, to satisfy users with up-to-date content when a “query deserves freshness.”
Soulo’s idea is that trending topics are not the kind of content that AI summarizes. Perplexity is the exception; it has an entire content discovery section called Perplexity Discover that’s dedicated to showing trending news articles.
Fast SEO is about spotting and seizing short-lived content opportunities. These can be new developments, shifts in the industry or perceptions, or cultural moments.
His tweet captures the current feeling within the SEO and publishing communities that AI is the reason for diminishing traffic from Google.
The Evergreen Content Situation Is Worse Than Imagined
A technical issue that Soulo didn’t mention but is relevant here is that it’s challenging to create an “Ultimate Guide To X, Y, Z” or the “Definitive Guide To Bla, Bla, Bla” and expect it to be fresh and different from what is already published.
The barrier to entry for evergreen content is higher now than it’s ever been for several reasons:
- There are more people publishing content.
- People are consuming multiple forms of content (text, audio, and video).
- Search algorithms are focused on quality, which shuts out those who focus harder on SEO than they do on people.
- User behavior signals are more reliable than traditional link signals, and SEOs still haven’t caught on to this, making it harder to rank.
- Query Fan-Out is causing a huge disruption in SEO.
Why Query Fan-Out Is A Disruption
Evergreen content is an uphill struggle, compounded by the seeming inevitability that AI will summarize the content and, because of Query Fan-Out, possibly send the click to another website that is cited because it offers the answer to a follow-up question to the initial search query.
Query Fan-Out displays answers to the initial query and to follow-up questions to the initial search query. If the user is happy with the summary to the initial query, they may become interested in one of the follow-up queries, and one of those will get the click, not the initial query.
This completely changes what it means to target a search query. How does an SEO target a follow-up question? Maybe, instead of targeting the main high-traffic query, it may make sense to target the follow-up queries with evergreen content.
Evergreen Content Publishing Still Has Life
There is another side to this story, and it’s about user demand. Foundational questions stick around for a long time. People will always search “how to tie a bowtie” or “how to set up WordPress.” Many users prefer the stability of an established guide that has been reviewed and updated by a trusted brand. It’s not about being a brand; it’s about being the kind of site that is trusted, well-liked, and recommended.
A strong resource can become the canonical source for a topic, ranking for years and generating the kind of user behavior signals that reinforce its authority and signal the quality of being trusted.
Trend-driven content, by contrast, often delivers only a brief spike before fading. A newsroom model is difficult to maintain because it requires constant work to be first and be the best.
The Third Way: Do It All
The choice between producing evergreen content and trending topics doesn’t have to be binary; there’s a third option where you can do it all. Evergreen and trending topics can complement each other because each side provides opportunities for driving traffic to the other. Fresh, trend-driven content can link back to the evergreen, and this can be reversed to send readers to fresh content from the evergreen.
Trend-driven content sometimes becomes evergreen itself. But in general, creating evergreen content requires deep planning, quality execution, and marketing. Somebody’s going to get the click from evergreen content, it might as well be you.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Stokkete
