Original & citable content

Spencer Thursfield · Last reviewed 2026-08

This pillar gives the site its name. When an AI system can generate a competent generic summary of any topic in seconds, the only content worth retrieving is content the system could not have written. The businesses worth citing put something of themselves on the page.

Google's current guidance names this: it wants non-commodity content, meaning first-hand, specific material, in contrast with generic summaries "that could have come from anyone." This is good news for a small business, because a working potter, plumber or coach holds evidence no content farm can fake: real jobs, real prices, real failures, real photographs.

• Commodity content is now free, and worth what it costs. The generic "5 tips" article competes with the machine that summarises it. Official recommendation
• Experience is the moat. How you do the work, what it costs, what goes wrong: material only you can publish. Official recommendation
• Evidence beats adjectives. Dates, quantities, named methods, photographs of real work. Precise claims are the claims an AI can quote without risk. Strongly supported
• Whether original evidence increases citation is our hypothesis H3, registered and under test. Emerging

In this pillar

• Commodity vs non-commodity contentlive
• Turning experience into source materiallive
• First-party research · Case studies · Substantiating claims · Quotable statistics · Definitions · Comparisons & methodology · Updating & correctingplanned