Why Informational Content Still Matters in the AI Search Era
Travel Example Planning a Trip to Valencia, Spain
Over the past two years, a dramatic shift has taken hold in the world of SEO and content strategy.
Faced with declining traffic to blog posts, explainers, and how-to pages, many website owners, publishers, and even seasoned SEOs are scaling back their efforts on informational content. Some are going a step further — blocking AI bots or placing their content behind paywalls.
The reason seems obvious: Google’s AI Overviews, Gemini-powered answers, and conversational results often absorb informational intent without generating a click. For many brands, the return on time and investment for top-of-funnel content has plummeted. Rand Fishkin famously described this lost traffic as "vanity traffic", attention with no conversion.
But the reaction to abandon or de-prioritize informational content is deeply shortsighted.
In the AI Search era, informational content hasn’t become obsolete, it has evolved. Its function has shifted from being merely a traffic driver to becoming a strategic asset for:
Visibility in AI-generated results
Brand awareness and salience
Building entity-based topical authority
Staying top-of-mind across the search journey
Reinforcing user- and model-based memory within Google’s ecosystem
Below are five compelling reasons why investing in high-quality, fresh informational content remains crucial, using the example of a brand that helps travelers plan trips to Valencia, Spain.
1. Informational Queries Still Dominate Search Behavior
Informational queries, those beginning with “what,” “how,” “why,” or “best way to”, still account for over half of all Google searches. According to Semrush and SeoClarity informational intent makes up between 50–60% of search volume. The Google AI Overview free tool of AWR, then, is showing us that informational queries trigger AIO’s answers in 72,62% of the cases.
If a brand stops creating informational content, it effectively opts out of the exploration phase of the search journey, which is the very phase that leads to brand discovery, trust formation, and eventual conversion.
In our example, if a site like the fictional TravelValencia.com does not appear for:
“What to do in Valencia in 3 days”
“Where to stay in Valencia for couples”
“Is Valencia safe for solo female travelers”
…then it’s unlikely to be considered when the same user later searches:
“Best boutique hotels in Valencia”
“Flights from Madrid to Valencia”
By not owning informational moments, the brand disappears from the user’s awareness, and potentially, from Google’s understanding of the brand’s relevance to the topic.
2. Visibility Builds Awareness and Memorability
In today’s SERPs, visibility is no longer limited to the ten blue links.
Instead, it extends to:
AI Overviews
People Also Ask (PAA)
Things to Know
Image and Video Packs
AI Mode follow-ups
Being seen in these features, even without receiving a click, builds familiarity and trust.
For a travel brand like TravelValencia.com, repeated exposure in Google’s AI-generated answers to queries like:
“Best time to visit Valencia”
“Valencia in November: what to expect”
“Must-see museums in Valencia”
…contributes to:
Brand recognition
Typed-in traffic
Branded + informational queries (e.g., “TravelValencia family itinerary”)
This is what marketing scientist Byron Sharp refers to as mental availability: being remembered when a related need arises.
Informational content is the vehicle through which a brand earns that memory.
3. Memory Compounds Into a Visibility Flywheel
Visibility leads to exposure. Exposure leads to memory. And memory — both human and machine-level — compounds into a visibility flywheel within the Google ecosystem.
In the context of Google, memory manifests in two key ways:
1. Human memory: A user who sees your brand multiple times begins to associate it with relevance and authority.
2. Machine memory: Google personalizes search results using:
Signed-in user behavior
Click history
Chrome browser activity
Time-on-page metrics
The Visibility Flywheel in Action:
A user searches “Valencia best neighborhoods” and sees TravelValencia.com featured in a snippet or cited in an AI Overview.
A few days later, they Google “family-friendly hotels in Valencia.” Because they remember your name and engaged with your site, your content is elevated, either explicitly through personalization or through natural prominence in SERPs.
Later, they search “how to get from Valencia AVE train station to old town,” and your brand appears again, this time because of reinforced engagement signals from their own Google profile.
Over time, this user-specific memory becomes a compounding loop:
Visibility → Engagement → Personalization → More Visibility.
If you’re consistently showing up in the user’s journey, Google notices, and so does the user.
4. Informational Content Builds Authority, Trust, and AI Citability
When Google composes AI Overviews, it relies on content that is:
Citable
Trusted
Contextually relevant
Topically comprehensive
It can cite landing pages or PLPs or PDPs if they have an informational component like FAQs, but for the Commercial and Transactional intents, albeit growing, the frequency of AIOs still is under 50%. The normal, as we saw before, is Google selecting informational resources that:
Are structured for clarity
Use schema markup
Show real expertise
Contain unique insights, comparisons, or explainers
For TravelValencia.com, content like:
“Top 10 day trips from Valencia by train”
“What is the Fallas Festival and why it matters”
“Best beaches in Valencia ranked by locals”
…has a much higher chance of being:
Quoted in AI Overviews
Cited in the “Things to Know” section
Used as source material in AI Mode
This is where Google's concepts around E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) become central. Informational content remains the best vehicle to signal all four qualities at once.
5. Recency Enhances Brand Salience and AI Inclusion
Recency plays a dual role in AI Search:
For AI systems:
AI Overviews and Gemini frequently prioritize recently updated sources
Retrieval-augmented models favor content published or refreshed in the last 6–12 months
For humans:
People recall recent encounters better than older ones
Recent content is more likely to appear in follow-up queries, especially if the user is actively planning a trip or comparing options
If your article on “Valencia Fallas Festival Tips” was last updated in 2021, and your competitor refreshed theirs for 2025, theirs will likely be:
Cited in the AI Overview
Clicked more often
Remembered more clearly
In sum, fresh informational content sustains brand salience in both machine-generated responses and human cognition.
Strategic Execution: How TravelValencia.com Can Succeed in AI Search
To operationalize all of this, brands must move beyond random blog posting and embrace a structured informational strategy.
Here’s a proven 7-step framework for content success in the AI Search era:
1. Design a Brand Ontology
Map your entire knowledge space:
Events, destinations, transport, local cuisine, accommodations, traveler types
This gives you an entity-aware content model, making your site compatible with how Google and Gemini understand topics.
2. Identify Key Entities
List the people, places, and concepts tied to your domain:
“Turia River Park,” “Albufera,” “Fallas,” “Metro Valencia,” “City of Arts and Sciences”
These should appear across guides, FAQs, images, and structured data.
3. Build a Taxonomy
Group your entities into hierarchical categories:
“What to Do” → Museums, Parks, Day Trips
“How to Get Around” → Public Transport, Car Rentals, Walking Tips
A solid taxonomy enables internal linking, contextual surfacing, and semantic reinforcement.
4. Map Queries per Entity
For each entity, perform keyword mapping via:
PAA boxes
Related searches
AI suggestions in Gemini and Google
Search Console data
Include:
Query refinements (“family things to do in Valencia”)
Fan-outs (“Valencia vs. Seville in March”)
Reformulations (“Is Valencia walkable?” → “How easy is it to walk in Valencia?”)
5. Cluster Into Topical Content Hubs
Structure content into semantic hubs like:
“Valencia for Families”
“Cultural Events in Valencia”
“Budget Travel in Valencia”
Each hub includes:
A pillar page
6–10 supporting articles
Internal linking also to related pages in the I want to buy, but I need information (Commercial intent), I want to buy, and I know what (Transactional intent), and “I want to go” (Navigational intent)
Schema types like FAQ, Articles, Author, Brand, et al
Visuals and/or video
6. Adapt for Persona, Sentiment, and SERP Feature
Align each piece with:
Persona (solo traveler, couple, family)
Sentiment (relaxation, adventure, culture)
SERP type (video, listicle, image, FAQ, comparison)
Example:
For "best paella spots in Valencia," a comparison table may outperform a narrative blog post.
7. Format for AI and Write for Humans
Write in semantic chunks (aka short self-concluding paragrahs), where each section:
Has a clear topic
Can be independently quoted
Offers value and context
Add:
Schema markup (FAQ, HowTo, Article)
Metadata and semantic HTML
Unique angles that show real experience
Conclusion: Visibility, Memory, and Authority, Not Just Clicks
The informational content you publish today may not earn the same traffic it did in 2018 — but it plays a more valuable role than ever.
It is your:
Entry point into AI-generated answers
Anchor for brand salience
Tool for building trust and authority
Path to entity consolidation
Fuel for future discoverability
Google’s AI-powered surfaces are not a threat to informational content — they are a new environment that demands adaptation, not abandonment.
The brands that win are the ones who show up in the moments before the moment of decision — and that’s what informational content is uniquely built to do.
Article by
Gianluca Fiorelli
With almost 20 years of experience in web marketing, Gianluca Fiorelli is a Strategic and International SEO Consultant who helps businesses improve their visibility and performance on organic search. Gianluca collaborated with clients from various industries and regions, such as Glassdoor, Idealista, Rastreator.com, Outsystems, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, Vegetables by Bayer, Visit California, Gamepix, James Edition and many others.
A very active member of the SEO community, Gianluca daily shares his insights and best practices on SEO, content, Search marketing strategy and the evolution of Search on social media channels such as X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and through the blog on his website: IloveSEO.net.
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