Ever read five different “thought leadership” articles and realise you’ve actually just read the same one… five times?
“In today’s fast-paced digital landscape…”
“Businesses must leverage data-driven insights…”
“Content is king.”
If your eye just twitched, you’re not alone. We’re in the middle of AI content fatigue, and a lot of brands are quietly training their audiences to scroll straight past them.
Have you ever thought to yourself, “Where did all the humans go?” halfway through a doom scroll?
Well, same bro, same.
It’s been fascinating watching AI-generated content unfold. Equal parts impressive, unsettling, and mildly hilarious (breakdancing gorillas, anyone?). But now we’re turning a corner. We’re swimming in a pool of the same computer-generated takes and quietly craving actual human brains again. New ideas. Real opinions. Give us controversial takes or spicy debates again!
We’re all thinking it. We’re all longing for it.
And this isn’t just a vibes problem - AI content fatigue has real consequences for how you show up (or don’t) in search, AI overviews, and in your audience’s memory.
So let’s talk about why everything suddenly sounds ChatGPT-ed, and how to bring the humans back.
AI hasn’t just made content faster. It’s made SEO advice suspiciously familiar.
You Google “SEO tips” and open a few tabs. One promises 7 tips. Another goes for 10. Someone gets ambitious and offers 21. But as you skim them, you realise they’re all saying the same thing: do your keyword research, optimise your meta tags, improve page speed, build backlinks, create quality content, measure results, repeat.
Different sites. Different brands. Same checklist.
I had a day recently where I opened about eight “SEO in 2025” blogs to prep for a client chat, and halfway through tab four I genuinely forgot which site I was on. I was bouncing between logos thinking, “Did I click back? Is this the same article? Am I in some kind of SEO Groundhog Day?” Similar headlines, same tips, TL;DR summaries that echo each other at the end. At one point I scrolled up just to confirm I wasn’t still on the first blog. That was the moment I realised it’s not just AI writing the same thing - the whole modern world is hitting copy paste on their AI generated answers.
When every “SEO tips” article sounds like it was written by the same politely enthusiastic robot, your brand voice quietly disappears into the noise. It’s like every marketer copied the same “SEO guide” template and just swapped in their logo and a few screenshots. That’s AI content fatigue in a nutshell - lots of marketing content, very little originality or flavour, and zero reason for anyone to remember you as the source.
It’s 10,000 flavours of ice cream, and they’re all vanilla.
I don’t know about you, but personally, a unique flavour like pomegranate-lime would be a million times more memorable than vanilla - any day of the week!
Here’s the spicy bit: the problem isn’t just AI. It’s how we’re using it.
I even caught this in the wild with a brand I really like. I was reading one of their new blogs, and normally I can hear the writer’s voice in my head, but halfway through I immediately picked up that the tone was off.
The topic was fine. The advice was fine. But the voice? Gone. Full zombie mode.
It was like someone had run their personality through a corporate-speak filter: all edges sanded off, all jokes removed for safety. Maybe a new intern on their team played it too safe… but most likely, AI took a ‘pistachio dark chocolate’ content idea and churned it into a ‘plain vanilla beige’ piece we’ll all quickly glaze over and forget.
Most readers can sense AI content even when they can’t prove it, and they just quietly stop enjoying it.
If your brief is basically, “Create a plan for X that’s suitable for everyone,” AI will swim in the most average part of the internet and hand you something safe, sensible, and forgettable. Whether it’s a travel itinerary, a meal plan, or a morning routine for productivity, you get the same template with slightly different nouns plugged in. Anyone else already half asleep?
No context, no stance, no story. Just a long, friendly, algorithm-approved Wikipedia hug.
Even when AI gives you something with a bit of edge, humans can still “polish” it into corporate oblivion. Strong opinions get softened. Jargon gets added for “professionalism”. Personality gets stripped out because “that’s not our tone”.
The result? AI wrote it, then humans made it slightly worse.
Can we please go back to the part where we start plugging human opinions and lived experience back into the process?
Content teams are so scared of being controversial, specific, or niche that they default to neutral and bland. AI loves neutral and bland - it’s literally designed for the middle of the bell curve. The problem is that your audience doesn’t remember the middle. They remember the spiky bits: the opinion, the real story, the blunt truth that makes them go, “Oof… but also, fair.” They respect transparency, and the elements that make us human.
“Who cares if it’s a bit generic? At least it’s done.”
Short term, sure - the task is ticked off and everyone moves on.
Long term, that mindset quietly undermines your marketing, your SEO, and how AI systems choose which content to surface.
Here’s what actually tends to happen when everything you ship sounds like everyone else:
AI content fatigue isn’t just a vibe problem. It shows up in your visibility, your trust, and your performance.
The good news: this is fixable.
AI is a tool. It’s not a writer, not a strategist, and definitely not your brand.
Your real AI strategy isn’t which tool you use - it’s where humans plug in around it. If you want to beat AI content fatigue and stop sounding like everyone else, you need humans in three key places: before, during, and after the AI.
Before you open an AI tool, be intentionally clear on your strategy, and ask yourself what you actually believe about the topic. Where do you disagree with the usual “10 tips” advice? What real examples or results do you have? What would you say to a client or colleague in a real conversation, not in a brochure?
A fun check is: “If this answer came out of my mouth on a Zoom call, would I feel confident… or slightly fake?” If it’s the latter, you’ve got more thinking to do before you hit “generate”.
Then feed that into AI with intent: “Use this point of view, these examples, and this tone. Avoid generic intros, and don’t sit on the fence.”
You’re not asking AI to think for you. You’re asking it to support the thinking you’ve already done.
Rule of thumb: Strategy first, tools second.
(If your first move is “open ChatGPT”, we’ve already skipped a step.)
If a sentence could live on any competitor’s site, it’s not strong enough for yours.
Use things AI and competitors can’t fake: your own campaign data, real customer stories (with permission), firm opinions, and concrete how-to detail. That’s the kind of human-led SEO content that’s more likely to stand out in search results, and to be useful enough to show up in AI summaries.
For AIO (artificial intelligence optimisation), make sure your content clearly answers real questions, for example:
If a user (or an AI assistant) can skim your page and walk away with clear, specific answers, you’re doing it right.
(If they walk away thinking, “Pretty sure I’ve read this three times already today,” you’ve got some human-ing up to do.)
Yes, still use keywords - just make sure they’re aligned with what people actually search for in your space. In this context, that might look like SEO strategy for small business, content marketing for SEO, SEO content strategy, or how to prioritise SEO tasks. Just don’t stop at sprinkling them into headings.
Structure your content so humans and machines can both understand it. Answer specific marketing questions clearly. Use headings and short paragraphs. Give concrete examples and honest opinions about what actually works.
That’s how you optimise for SEO and AIO at the same time, without turning your marketing content into keyword soup.
The magic isn’t AI or humans on their own - it’s in the mix. It’s how you design the workflow between them.
Some of the best ideas I’ve worked on didn’t come from a prompt. They came from someone in a meeting saying, “Okay, this is probably a terrible idea, but…” That’s how you get the good stuff.
This blog is actually one of those moments. We were in a content brainstorm and it turned into an animated rant about AI content being so generic and drowning out the spicy, raw, opinionated humans in the world. It was probably the most excited we got about any topic idea all month. AI couldn’t have written that rant, even if it tried.
It’s those moments - the half-rant about a trend everyone secretly hates, the “what if we just told people this sucks now” idea, the story about a campaign that bombed and what you learned from it - that give content its heartbeat. I’ve never seen an AI tool recreate that energy. It can remix what already exists, but it doesn’t know what it felt like to be in that messy meeting where everyone was tired, overcaffeinated, stressed to the brim, and suddenly brutally honest. That’s where the magic usually happens.
So, here’s a good rule of thumb: Use AI for speed and structure: to draft outlines, generate first passes, suggest subject lines, repurpose content into different formats, and help with things like schema markup. Then let humans bring the edge and expertise: the stories, tension, brand personality, “we tried this and it did not work” honesty, and the “oh damn, that’s actually helpful” moments.
Think of SEO and AIO as guardrails that make the content discoverable and understandable, not as rules that flatten it into something bland.
The question isn’t, “Should we use AI for content?”
It’s, “Where do we refuse to let AI be the final editor of how we sound?”
AI isn’t the villain. Blandness is.
AI content fatigue happens when we hand everything over to the model and quietly edit ourselves out of the process. The fix isn’t to go full stone-age and burn the prompts. It’s to put humans back in charge of the thinking, the stance, and the voice.
If you’re tired of vanilla and ready for actual flavour, it’s time to turn generic AI-generated content into something your audience - and the algorithms - actually remember.
If you want a practical next step, try this:
I did a version of this on a client’s content once and basically played “Ctrl+F shame bingo” with the phrases they leaned on a little too often. It was… humbling. The more I looked, the more I found the same safe lines popping up everywhere.
AI didn’t create that sameness, but it definitely makes it easier to keep repeating it on autopilot instead of crafting actual, unique branded language and tone. That was the moment it really clicked: AI isn’t just amplifying our good habits, it’s also happily amplifying the lazy ones.
Remember: Small edits, big difference.
And if you want to zoom out from content and look at your wider AI-driven marketing game, a good next stop is our blog on keeping your marketing strong amid AI disruptions.
So, what’s the first beige page you’re going to fix?
Terri combines creative design with strategic marketing to shape Insight Online’s brand and communications.
