In our ongoing series on generative engine optimisation (GEO), we’ve looked at key terms you need to know about this new strategy for being found online, current stats about AI’s impact on search-generated web traffic, considerations for content marketers facing a possible ‘Google Zero’ and how some content pros are adjusting their tactics to reduce their dependence on traditional Google search.

But all of these topics point to a bigger issue: trust.

Can you trust that any marketing strategy today will attract your desired audience to your content? Can you trust that the outputs of AI search and features such as Google’s AI Overviews will accurately reflect your organisation’s messaging? And can your target audience trust your content?

The growing use of GenAI lies at the bottom of all of these questions. There’s been no shortage of complaints about how Google’s growing reliance on AI has enshittified search. And even if updated large language models (LLMs) mean that Google is no longer suggesting using glue on pizza, further fine-tuning is unlikely to completely eliminate the risk of so-called hallucinations.

There’s not much that content marketers can do to reduce the risk that AI-driven search engines and chatbots might return inaccurate or misleading information about their organisations. But they can avoid contributing to the exploding volumes of AI slop online with a careful approach to their own content creation. And that means ensuring that the content you produce is trustworthy.

Whether or not you use GenAI to brainstorm, research or develop your content, you need to make sure that what you create is:

• Authentic – that is, it conveys your/your organisation’s principles, beliefs and voice
• Unique – you want to send messages that grab and hold people’s attention, not bland, ‘mid’ and unmemorable content
• Up to date – you send the wrong message to your audience when you share outdated research or when your website or news pages haven’t been updated in a year or more
• Legal and compliant – so no plagiarism or misleading guidance
• Accurate – this means everything from accurate spelling and grammar to verified statistics, authenticated quotes and correct URLs

There’s a growing number of reports about organisations that didn’t take such precautions: see here, here, here, here and here. And every one of these incidents represents a break of trust between the organisation and its intended audience.

It’s a growing trend that’s worrying many people.

After tracking attitudes towards online communication for 25 years, the World Internet Project in 2023 reported that public sentiment in the US had ‘deteriorated from hopeful in 2000 in an almost continuous decline’: “In 2023, only 41 percent held the belief that communications technology made the world a better place,” wrote Jeffrey Cole, founder and director of The Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg. “This is down a full 24 points since we began tracking the question in 2000. Fifty-nine percent felt the effects were negative or neutral.”

One Redditor recently even posed the question, “What happens to commerce, trade, sustainability, logistics, infrastructure, etc. as greater portions of the population simply cannot afford the risk of using the internet anymore?”

At a time when people are asking questions like that, content marketers need to prioritise trustworthiness more than ever – both in the methods they use to connect with their audiences, online and off, and in the content they produce.