How to Create Non-Commodity Content That Stands Out

Google’s recent attempt to define commodity vs. non-commodity content falls flat. If I’m being generous, it’s mediocre. If I’m honest, it’s practically useless. After a drink, I’d call it outright nonsense.

The examples they offer read like throwaway headlines you’d scroll past in Google Discover without a second thought. Maybe in a few years, that’s all that will remain, and Google is just preparing us for that bleak reality. Personally, I suspect their vision of “quality, interesting content” is simply misguided.

Take their “marble vs. grape juice” comparison,what a ridiculous title. At least they specify it’s a video. The shoe example isn’t terrible, but I have no idea how that translates into revenue for anyone. Then again, Google doesn’t care.

Here’s my take on creating truly unique, engaging content that still drives real business value,spoiler: it has nothing to do with grape juice.

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TL;DR

Commodity content is doomed for two reasons. First, it’s easily summarized because it’s been done to death. Second, it no longer generates meaningful revenue in a zero-click world. If you’re creating content solely for SEO with no unique angle, stop. You’re wasting money. Stop being just an SEO. Help other teams structure their workflows to extract maximum value across all channels, using tools like demand analysis. Google measures a document’s uniqueness with a custom “information gain” score at both the query and document level.

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Why Commodity Content Is Doomed

People behave like water,they follow the path of least resistance. That path rarely involves clicking through to a website, even if the answer they find is incomplete or inaccurate.

Commodity content,the bread and butter of evergreen SEO strategies for years,can now be efficiently summarized and synthesized by answer engines. So efficiently, in fact, that users are satisfied with a clickless search result.

Google itself admits this:

> “Focus on making unique, non-commodity content that visitors from Search and your own readers will find helpful and satisfying. Then you’re on the right path for success with our AI search experiences, where users are asking longer and more specific questions,as well as follow-up questions to dig even deeper.” , Succeeding in AI Search

This means we must redirect our efforts. We need to invest time in content that drives genuine value,content that AI cannot easily summarize, adds real user benefit, and hasn’t been exhausted by every SEO team on the planet.

Before creating any piece of content, ask yourself two questions: Are we doing this just for SEO? Are we adding anything unique to the existing knowledge pool? If the answers are “yes” and “no,” scrap it immediately. You no longer have the time, budget, or energy to waste on content that doesn’t deliver value.

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Does Search Volume Still Matter?

At the individual keyword level, search volume has been losing relevance for years. We simply can’t extract the same value we once did, and that trend won’t reverse.

However, search volume still signals demand. If you’re smart and use monthly data, you can help content, social, paid, and editorial teams understand when audiences genuinely care about a topic. Your role becomes guiding teams on when to create or update content, what it should cover, and,crucially,why interest is spiking at that moment.

Take searches for “family holidays” in Google Trends. There’s clear seasonality,spikes every January as people plan their summer breaks during the bleak midwinter. You should still prepare your core family holiday content for January. But don’t operate in a silo. Share that insight with social and travel teams so they know when to maximize value.

Planning and structure now take center stage. The old “create X, get Y” model of click-based marketing is dead.

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Commodity or Not Commodity

I wrote about this in “How to Do Evergreen Content in 2026 and Beyond”,which, ironically, is a fairly commodity topic. But the conversation has evolved. There’s new material to share. You can take commodity topics and make them non-commodity.

But that requires a level of understanding and expertise that genuinely elevates the subject. That means experience, uniqueness, and a platform. Your content needs to be discoverable, and the old SEO playbook is no longer sufficient.

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The Pillars of Non-Commodity Content

Uniqueness.

E-E-A-T.

Engagement.

Structure.

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Uniqueness

Uniqueness is the foundation of content that continues to drive value. Without it, there’s no E-E-A-T. You won’t earn shares, likes, comments, or quality backlinks.

You can make this as sophisticated as you like. If you have access to high-quality data sources like Similarweb, you can create proprietary metrics that elevate your content above competitors.

Here’s an example. Similarweb provides excellent engagement data at the site and app level. Combine pages per session, session duration, and bounce rate into a composite engagement score,something no one else has. Then correlate that score with third-party traffic data, branded search, or backlinks. That’s content that stands out, gets read, shared, and remembered.

It requires more effort. And as Google’s leaked documents confirm, effort is literally estimated and scored by the search engine. Things that are difficult to replicate are rewarded,unless they’re completely insane, in which case the opposite happens.

You won’t master this overnight. But Google has been preparing us for this shift for years. Declining youth engagement in search results suggests audiences have already moved on.

Not everyone has access to Similarweb. That’s fine. Creativity and quality research are more important,and more accessible,than ever. Free data sources like Google Trends (paired with Glimpse), Keyword Planner, and free tiers of tools like Ahrefs or Similarweb are abundant. Identify metrics and combine them to create something bigger and better.

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Google Quantifies Information Gain

Google holds a patent (US20200349181A1) called “Contextual estimation of link information gain.” It describes how the search giant may score the added value each document provides compared to similar documents.

> “In some implementations, information gain scores may be determined for one or more documents by applying data indicative of the documents, such as their entire contents, salient extracted information, a semantic representation across a machine learning model to generate an information gain score.”

Patents don’t guarantee active use. But if they’re frequently cited, recently updated, and have worldwide applications, that’s a strong sign of importance. Similarly, “ranking factors” aren’t absolute. SERPs and topics vary wildly, which is why we have subtopics like local SEO, YMYL, and others. What matters for one query may not matter at all for another. That’s the nuance of this job,and why trial and error remain essential.

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Consider the Four E’s

Your content needs a purpose. Yes, it must convert,that’s the business goal. But it also needs a purpose for people. Is it designed to entertain or educate? As audiences turn away from news and commodity content, this matters more than ever.

What we now call commodity content was never designed to do either. It was built solely to make money. Over time, anything substandard that Google propped up for profit has died. This is the next wave of that same evolution.

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E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T has taken criticism lately, and not without reason. But the premise is sound. It’s not unreasonable for readers to expect the author to be a real person with genuine knowledge and an online presence. Google absolutely tracks authorship and entities,there’s plenty of evidence for that.

Google has built and maintained its Knowledge Graph for decades, and entities have been the backbone of news SEO for years. E-E-A-T requires you to connect the dots and remove ambiguity,a process called disambiguation. Doing this isn’t incredibly valuable on its own, but it’s foundational, especially in today’s internet landscape.

E-E-A-T projects must add value. The problem with using experts, showcasing expertise, proving you test everything, creating video, and making an industry effort is now twofold: it’s expensive and less valuable than ever.

Having a genuine expert build an industry profile,a platform from which their content can be shared and that reduces reliance on search,is a strong moat. If they’re a legitimate expert who knows how to structure great content and showcase expertise, you’re onto a winner.

That’s why commodity content is doomed. People don’t care about it, and it no longer drives value. Find ways to make non-commodity content truly valuable to your business. If it isn’t driving trackable value, ignore it. Move on. Be ruthless, brave, and interesting. Content created just for SEO has diminishing returns,especially if you do it the same way you have for the past decade.

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Engagement

I’ve always believed that links should be a happy byproduct of creating and sharing brilliant work. I’ve never actively built links. I’ve just focused on writing interesting content, making semi-libelous jokes, and getting out there in the industry.

That’s essentially Google’s definition of link building. In their ideal world, links are earned by doing beautiful things. I’m the poster boy for white hat SEO in that scenario.

The problem is, people need to make money, and links still drive rankings. So there’s a market. And as any student of the scriptures knows, buying and selling links is the oldest recorded profession.

Either way, my inbox is full.

Your content must fulfill a need. We’re moving away from straight-laced content being able to do that for publishers. Traditional ad revenue and the volume model are failing. You won’t drive subscriptions with “what time is x” or “how to tie your shoes.”

I hope this is a good thing for SEOs and publishers. I want us to focus on content that genuinely improves people’s lives,content that makes them smile or think. Content that makes people angry has driven numbers for a long time, but anger isn’t the emotion you should aim for.

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Measurement

You need to measure quality engagement, both on-site and off-site.

On-Site Keep it simple:

• Session duration
• Bounce rate
• Link clicks
• Pages per session
• Comments
• Read time

Off-Site This depends on the platform and purpose, but focus on:

• Links
• Shares
• Comments
• Saves
• Watch time

Track metrics that clearly indicate whether people truly care about what you’re creating. Clicks are dying, so measure something more valuable and less depressing. Create a composite metric that gives you and your creators a clear target. Make their job easier by guiding their content with straightforward, meaningful metrics,not just page views.

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Structure

Structure isn’t sexy, but it matters. If you think LLMs represent the pinnacle of content consumption, know that models are more likely to cite content from the top or bottom of a page due to their inability to follow an argument properly. This is called the lost in the middle effect.

Unless the entity and topic are repeatedly referenced throughout the page. But I shouldn’t have to tell you that’s a bad idea,your content will become unreadable to real people.

Proper structure is critical. People have expectations and accessibility needs. In traditional commodity content, they want their question answered immediately. If you satisfy that,and your intro isn’t terrible,you might earn a longer session, a click, or even a conversion.

Non-commodity content accessed via search should still be intent-driven, possibly more so if we believe Google’s theory about more qualified users with longer-tail queries. So follow a coherent page structure:

• Answer the questionLogically answer queries in the appropriate format,text, video, image, list,and make it highly consumable. The argument section is where LLMs tend to lose accuracy in citing and referencing content, which is not unlike people. You don’t need to constantly restate the entity,that could be seen as keyword stuffing. But be clear, concise, and accurate to make consumption easy.—Different Consumption StylesPeople consume content in different ways. Broadly, I see four types:
• Scanners: The majority. Too lazy or busy to read everything, but satisfied by headlines, bold text, bullet points, and headers. They treat a page like a map, not a story.These groups likely cover over 90% of people. There are also fact-checkers who skip the narrative and go straight to citations, data points, or the “About Us” page. And community-readers who scroll to the bottom to see reactions before deciding if the content is worth their time,a trait more common among younger audiences.Your content should satisfy all of them. It must:
• Answer the questionYou might think it’s beneath you, but if you don’t optimize for scanners and answer seekers, you risk losing up to 80% of your potential audience within seconds. That’s why front-loading,putting the most important information at the top,and using clear hierarchies are vital in modern writing.—That’s it. Thanks for reading, as always.More Resources: Read Leadership in SEO. Subscribe now.Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock