Read five articles on any commercial subject and you will notice they share a skeleton. Same definition paragraph. Same numbered list. Same closing paragraph about how it depends on your business.
This is not laziness. It is what the standard process produces, and the process is followed carefully by people doing their jobs properly.
The loop that creates it
- 1A tool identifies a term worth targeting.
- 2The brief is built from the pages currently ranking for it — their headings, their length, their subtopics.
- 3The writer, briefed on those pages, researches by reading those pages.
- 4The draft covers what those pages cover, slightly rearranged.
- 5It publishes, ranks somewhere, and becomes source material for the next person doing the same thing.
Every step is defensible. The output is a photocopy of a photocopy. And because everyone is running the same loop, the average quality of a results page drifts steadily towards the same article.
Why it is now a bigger problem than it was
Two things changed. Generating a competent summary became nearly free, so the supply of adequate articles is effectively unlimited. And search results increasingly answer the simple version of a question directly, which means the page that only contains the simple version has nothing left to offer.
What survives is the part that cannot be summarised from other summaries: specific experience, real numbers, an actual position on a contested question.
The way out is upstream
Research from sources, not from results
Original documentation, standards, regulators, your own data, your own support inbox. If every source in a draft is another blog post targeting the same term, the draft cannot say anything new.
Interview someone who does the work
Thirty minutes with a practitioner produces more distinctive material than a day of desk research. Ask what customers get wrong, what the standard advice misses, and what they would do differently with a smaller budget.
Take a position
'It depends on your circumstances' is true and useless. Say which option you would choose, for whom, and when you would choose differently. A page willing to be wrong is a page worth reading — and worth linking to.
What this does not mean
It does not mean being contrarian for the sake of it, or writing a personal essay where somebody wanted an answer. The structural, scannable format exists because it serves readers who are in a hurry.
Keep the structure. Change what is inside it. The reader who is in a hurry still prefers the version written by someone who has actually done the thing.
Worth remembering
- Briefing from the current results guarantees an article shaped like the current results.
- Research from primary sources and practitioners, not from competitors' blog posts.
- Take a position; 'it depends' is not an answer.
- Apply the swap test before publishing.
