What is an AI-First Content Strategy?

AI-first content strategy: using generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to guide your content writing, editing, and strategy.

You might already be doing this in parts, but for those who aren’t, it’s a full rethink of how content gets planned, produced, optimized, and scaled.

With generative AI tools in the mix, you can brainstorm smarter, plan faster, publish more, and continuously refine what you create.

Do more, better.

What Makes a Strategy “AI-First”?

An AI-first strategy puts the AI model of your choice by your side. A handy copilot you can lean on to speed content creation, research, and analysis.

Your new copilot will handle the heavy lifting, from generating first drafts and summarizing data to localizing content for different audiences, freeing up your human team to focus on the high-level strategy, creative direction, and quality control that only a human can provide.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Planning

Generative AI tools help you spot rising queries, identify what your competitors are missing, and align your content strategy with what people will be searching next, not just what they’re searching now. With the right prompts, artificial intelligence can surface new angles, uncover semantically related terms, and even suggest content formats based on user intent.

Just be careful: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and the rest aren’t a substitute for an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. They don’t have direct access to live search data, backlink profiles, or traffic trends.

What they can do, however, is make working with that data faster and easier if you know how to combine them.

You don’t need to touch an API to get value. Just export your keyword lists, competitor reports, or top-performing content from Ahrefs or Semrush and paste that into something like ChatGPT.

With the right prompts, you can ask AI to:

• Group keywords into logical topic clusters.
• Identify low-hanging fruit opportunities.
• Spot content gaps by comparing your rankings to a competitor’s.
• Suggest internal link structures.
• Recommend post formats based on SERP intent (listicle, how-to, comparison, etc.).

This is a huge time-saver for content strategists juggling large datasets.

And if your team has the technical skills? You can integrate ChatGPT with Ahrefs’ API (or other SEO tools) to build custom workflows. For example:

• Pipe in live keyword data and have ChatGPT prioritize topics based on keyword difficulty or CPC.
• Feed in a list of content URLs and ask AI to analyze titles, headings, and structure against SERP leaders.
• Automatically generate briefs, outlines, or meta descriptions based on imported data sets.

Production

Disclaimer: In this subsection, I’m not trying to act as the content police. You do you. I’m just offering some friendly advice: pure AI content, that’s not edited or redrafted by a human, isn’t to the taste of Google nor human readers.

Sure, generative AI tools can help draft outlines, suggest headlines, rephrase paragraphs, and generate entire first drafts. But be careful. Prompting AI, copying and pasting into your CMS, and hitting publish isn’t going to cut it on two main fronts:

Google

Google views pure AI content as low-effort or spam content and is less likely to reward it algorithmically. I say less likely because pure AI content does rank, no doubt, but as Glenn Gabe puts it in the below X post, “it works until it doesn’t work.”

Don’t take Glenn’s example as a one-off. There are many examples of sites being hit algorithmically because their content doesn’t pass Google’s sniff test. Worse, doing this at scale risks going against Google’s spam policies, specifically the scaled content abuse policy, which could earn you a manual action, something I’m sure we’d all like to avoid (ahem, Jake Ward).

To really drive the point home, Ahrefs just recently put out a study, analyzing 600K web pages. They found that pure AI content rarely reaches the number one spot on Google’s SERPs, and in fact, Google has a preference for “more human-created or lightly AI-assisted content.”

Target Audience

So, what about your audience? Well, like Google’s algorithms, they probably won’t vibe with pure AI content either. Internet users are increasingly recognizing the language and cadence that AI outputs follow (you’re probably getting good at this yourself), and many don’t appreciate being fed what is being widely perceived as low-effort, hallucination-prone content.

Think about it: Would you read and find value in something that you suspect has been copied and pasted from ChatGPT? No? Your audience feels the same way.

Sure, use ChatGPT or Gemini to spin you up a first draft. But don’t go hitting the publish button just yet. Get in there, inject some personality, fact-check, and make sure it’s truly valuable to your readers.

Optimization

Once your content is drafted, generative AI tools can help refine and edit it for clarity, structure, and search performance, speeding up your workflow. You can use AI to:

• Audit content against search intent, aligning it with what users (and search engines) are on the hunt for.
• Analyze competitor pages to identify missing angles, underused subtopics, or opportunities to differentiate.
• Generate schema markup or suggest where to apply structured data for better SERP visibility.
• Polish tone, readability, and flow, helping content sound more natural and on-brand, especially when scaled across writers or teams.

Distribution and Performance

Oh, and AI doesn’t stop its helpfulness when you hit publish. You can also use it to:

• Personalize content experiences for different channels or audiences.
• Repurpose the copy for social, email, and other marketing assets.
• Automate content distribution through scheduling tools.
• Analyze content performance over time and recommend next steps.

Benefits of an AI-First Content Strategy

Okay, so what are the main benefits of an AI-first content strategy? Observe:

Faster Content Production at Scale

Whether you’re building out blog content, product pages, or social campaigns, generative AI helps you create more with less effort.

• Automate first drafts to accelerate your publishing cycle.
• Redraft existing content with updated data or refreshed tone.
• Reduce bottlenecks in your editorial process by helping writers and strategists start with something instead of a blank page.

Smarter Decisions with Actionable Insights

Beyond drafting, AI is super handy for pulling insights out of data, numbers, and even mountains of qualitative feedback.

It can even spot trends in what your audience is saying on social media, analyze sentiment from customer reviews, and help you understand exactly what content is resonating with your audience, all in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

You could also:

• Identify content gaps across your site and within your competitor set.
• Use actionable insights from trend data, search behavior, or performance metrics to refine your editorial calendar.
• Forecast emerging opportunities and fine-tune your content planning in real-time.

This makes your strategy less reactive and more predictive, especially when paired with data from tools like Ahrefs or Google Search Console.

More Relevant and Personalized Content

Audiences expect more than generic blog posts; they want content that speaks to their specific interests, goals, or stage in the funnel. AI systems help you meet that demand by:

• Tweaking messaging based on audience segment, device, or channel.
• Generating personalized content variations for email, social, or landing pages.
• Analyzing behavioral data to deliver more relevant content experiences at scale.

The result? Content that feels custom-built without adding an unnecessary amount of manual effort to every touchpoint.

Tools That Power AI-First Strategies

For this thing to be successful, you need the right tools.

Below are three categories of tools that support different stages of an AI-powered content marketing strategy:

AI for Content Creation

This is where most marketers start. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can be used to:

• Research topics, go deep on nuance, and uncover unique angles.
• Generate outlines, blog post intros, or first drafts.
• Repurpose long-form content into social snippets, FAQs, or email copy.
• Rewrite existing assets to target new audiences or channels.
• Translate and localize content for international markets.

Land on the right prompts, find a solid workflow, and content creation just got a whole lot easier.

AI for Optimization and Distribution

Once you’ve landed on a first draft, AI can help refine it and get it in front of the right audience, faster and more strategically.

Tools like Surfer SEO, Clearscope, and MarketMuse assist with SEO optimization, helping your content match user intent, improve keyword targeting, and compete more effectively in the SERPs.

Meanwhile, tools like FeedHive can automate and personalize distribution:

• A/B test headlines and CTAs.
• Generate email subject lines and ad copy.
• Schedule and optimize social posts based on performance predictions.

AI for Content Intelligence

To keep improving your content strategy, you, of course, need data, and that’s where AI-powered insights tools come in.

Platforms like Breeze (HubSpot’s collection of AI tools) help you:

• Analyze top-performing competitor content.
• Track shifting topics and search behavior.
• Uncover keyword opportunities and customer needs.
• Monitor brand mentions and content gaps over time.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Alright, quick TL;DR:

• AI-first = a content strategy centered around AI, not just supplemented by it.
• It helps you create faster, smarter, and more personalized content.
• But it still requires human oversight, strategic direction, and SEO fundamentals to work well.

From content marketing strategy and SEO optimization to scalable production workflows, our team works with brands and agencies building the next generation of AI-first content strategies.

Head over to our LLM SEO services page, and let’s get you sorted.