Authentic Marketing: AI Just Made Human Content Priceless
What Is Authentic Marketing?
Authentic marketing is the practice of building business growth and brand authority through marketing campaigns created by experienced professionals who use genuine expertise to connect with audiences.
Authentic marketing strategy focuses on truth, content that actually helps people, and real human experience to build trust that leads to long-term customer relationships (and sales). Experience itself is now a strong trust-building factor because someone can use AI to sound experienced, but be far from it.
In the age of AI, authentic marketing has become even more critical. When anyone can generate content with a prompt, the brands that stand out are those with real humans behind their campaigns. Professionals with verifiable experience will have the creative skills to help brands stand out as the Internet becomes filled with generic, AI-generated content.
The Authenticity Meaning Behind Marketing
To understand authentic marketing, we need to look at the words themselves. There’s a reason author, authority, and authenticity share the same root:
A person who begins or creates something.
An expert on a subject.
The quality of being real or true.
Source: Cambridge Dictionary
Before OpenAI, content creation required authors. Real people who planned, wrote, and authenticated content using their own ingenuity. The process of creating something original is what made someone an author. And authors, through their work, built authority.
This connection between authorship and authority is exactly why authentic content matters for successful SEO. It’s a marketing method with an average ROI of 826%. Google’s ranking systems are designed to prioritize content from authoritative sources, and authority comes from authenticity.
Why Authentic Marketing Matters
If you run a business, you know that trust is everything. Customers buy from brands they believe in, and belief comes from authenticity. But what does Google think about all this?
“Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to prioritize helpful, reliable information that’s created to benefit people… what we call E-E-A-T.”
— Google, Search Quality Rater Guidelines
What E-E-A-T Stands For:
Notice the “A” in E-E-A-T stands for Authoritativeness. This is not a coincidence. Google understands that real authority comes from real authors: people with genuine experience and expertise who create authentic content.
An authentic marketing strategy aligns your brand with these principles. When your content is created by experienced professionals, it signals E-E-A-T to search engines, which leads to better rankings. More importantly, it signals trustworthiness to your customers, which leads to more conversions.
of consumers say they need to trust a brand before buying from it. (CDP Institute)
The Problem: When Authentic Content Disappears
What happens when authors are replaced by robots? When anyone can create content from unverified experience? When it becomes easier to spread unreliable information from second-hand sources than to provide reliable content from first-hand experience?
Consumers become cautious.
| Age Group | Prefer AI Content Is Disclosed |
|---|---|
| 16–24 | 45% |
| 25–34 | 59% |
| 35–44 | 56% |
| 45–54 | 59% |
| 55+ | 71% |
| Total Adults Who Feel AI-Written News Is Bad | 78% |
Here’s what happens when you (or someone you hire) settle for convenience over quality marketing:
- You start to sound the same as everyone else 1,446 websites removed from search rankings in March 2024. 100% used AI-generated content. (Source)
- You start to look the same as everyone else 64% of respondents view AI writing as either impersonal, lazy, or uncreative. (Bynder)
- You get lost in a sea of competition 96.55% of content gets zero traffic from Google. Most businesses fail to differentiate. (Ahrefs)
Negative perceptions about AI content outweigh the positive
| Stat | Consumer Perception |
|---|---|
| 26% | would feel the brand is impersonal |
| 20% | would feel they are lazy |
| 18% | would think they are uncreative |
| 17% | would find them innovative |
Based on a survey of 2,000 consumers from the U.S. and U.K. (Bynder)
The Silver Lining
You are not like everyone else. Your business is unique, and because competition is high, business growth now largely depends on creative marketing. It’s the only thing that helps you stand out.
More importantly, creative content now depends on genuine authors because they know how to create new things, not simply copy and repurpose already existing things from others (which is essentially what AI does).
The more common inauthenticity becomes, the more valued authenticity will be. And the more everyone begins to do things the same way, the more you’ll stand out when you begin to do things differently.
The Evolution of Authentic Marketing Strategy
How experience and authenticity became the ultimate competitive advantage in the age of AI.
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2007–12
The Internet Accelerates
Mobile consumption, social sharing, and visual media transform how people discover and consume content online. The digital landscape expands rapidly as smartphones and social platforms become mainstream.
The Foundation: People begin consuming information at an unprecedented pace, generating massive amounts of data that would eventually train the large language models we know today. -
2013
Google Introduces E-A-T Guidelines
Google releases Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness as quality assessment criteria. Experience is implicit in expertise because real expertise was earned through years of practice, not mimicked through shortcuts.
The Standard: Expertise meant something. You couldn’t fake what you hadn’t lived. -
Nov 2022
AI Released to the Public
OpenAI launches ChatGPT, and the floodgates open. People begin producing content irresponsibly at scale using AI. Google releases its scaled content abuse policy, penalizing websites that produce unhelpful content at scale. Many AI writing tools actually use this as a selling proposition to those unaware of the negative implications.
The Shift: Expertise becomes something you can appear to have without ever earning it, leading to misinformation and deception. -
Dec 2022
Experience Becomes the New Standard
Google updates quality guidelines from E-A-T to E-E-A-T, adding Experience as the first measure of content quality. First-hand experience becomes the critical differentiator between authentic content and AI-generated noise.
The Response: Google recognizes that expertise alone isn’t enough. Experience is the only thing AI cannot replicate. -
2025
The Barrier to Entry Collapses
Content creation tools become accessible to everyone. Freelancers account for 38% of the U.S. workforce, with most identifying as writers. Content volume has risen dramatically while quality has dropped just as sharply.
The Problem: Anyone can create content, but content requires expertise and true expertise requires experience. -
2026+
Authentic Marketing Becomes Essential
E-E-A-T and authentic marketing strategies become essential for businesses that want to stand out, earn consumer trust, and grow. The competitive advantage belongs to those who can prove real experience and genuine expertise.
The Solution: Experience and authenticity are what separate the creative from the generic, the original from the copied. Business stagnation becomes business growth.
“People will recover in the timeline of knowledge the true value of an expert.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
How Experience Became the Standard
We live in a peculiar time. Everything is happening fast, so it’s hard to make sense of things until after they happen. Nobody can predict the future, but some can make sense of what happens when the future arrives.
In 2018, people heard of Artificial Intelligence but had no idea what it would actually be. At seventeen years old (the year was 2011) I would take open-source MIT courses on the theory of finance, sort of like a self-teaching regimen. I remember thinking what the next big investment would be. I came to a conclusion: AI was the next big thing and Google would be a pioneer.
I wasn’t wrong, but my conclusion didn’t do me much good, because Google’s stock was already selling at around $300 per share, and I couldn’t even afford to take a real MIT class. I realized that if I wasn’t already rich, then I couldn’t plan on getting any richer by investing in Google. And I now know that even if I could, I still wouldn’t be able to predict ChatGPT or OpenAI. Nobody would…
Who could have predicted that Artificial Intelligence would become a platform that anyone can use, and that people would use it to create content that would lead to unprecedented spam on the Internet? This caused Google to release scaled content abuse policies, and even update their quality guidelines to include Experience.
Since 2013, Google’s automated systems have helped determine ranking by using E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Then in 2022, they went out of their way to add an extra E to the equation: Experience.
E-A-T became E-E-A-T just one month after the release of ChatGPT. Why?
Because if someone sounds good enough, they can fake expertise, trustworthiness, and authority, and get away with it. However, it is impossible to fake Experience, even if AI sounds professional. This is because Experience is the only thing that verifies the other three (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
Marketing is all about information, and information is given to people through content. It makes sense for Google to include Experience in their content quality guidelines; otherwise, search results would be filled with misinformed, unhelpful pages created by people who don’t care.
Authentic marketing uses Experienced writers, managers, and specialists to create campaigns that establish your Expertise (your business), helping you gain Trustworthiness. This means earning trust from search engines so they can rank you better, and trust from people so that they will want to transact with you. This helps your business acquire more clients or customers.
When enough transactions come from trust, your business then attains genuine Authority. To get the best marketing results, you need to start with experience. You need to hire real authors to work on your marketing.
How AI Actually Helps Authentic Marketing
There is good news for marketing in the age of AI. Artificial Intelligence does have its place, and it will make the creative people even more creative. It will give authors the ability to go beyond what they would have otherwise been able to achieve.
For marketing campaigns, this means that truly experienced people will use AI to produce content that is more in-depth and user-friendly, leading to higher marketing success. Even writers who use AI will be able to produce better writing for marketing, because writing is not so different from thinking, and when Artificial Intelligence is used properly, it can help professionals who are already experienced flesh out ideas.
An author (another word for a creator) understands that creativity is revealed through the work, not planned through imagination. Many people have a misconception that AI will replace writers, but this is far from the truth. Artificial Intelligence will make the authentic authors and writers even more valuable because:
The demand for creativity will spike
Due to the decreasing barrier of entry that fills the internet with unhelpful and unoriginal marketing campaigns.
Ambitious businesses will pay top dollar
For authors who can tell a narrative through valuable content because they understand that the demand for creativity is set by the consumer, and meeting consumer demands will ultimately help their business get more customers.
having or showing good imagination or original ideas.
the quality of something created rather than imitated.
Why You Need Real Writers for Your Authentic Marketing Strategy
Artificial Intelligence will not replace writers; in fact, writers with some marketing skills will be able to use AI tools to produce better content than most marketers with some writing skills. This is because writing is an intrinsic part of the prompt, and the quality of the prompt determines the quality of the production; moreover, AI learns through conversation, and the soft skills that writers possess will allow them to train the AI to produce better results.
Conversation is the best way to provide context, and context is crucial for AI to produce a desired outcome. Since conversations with the AI must be written, writers will have the natural propensity to get better results from AI. This means more effective copy for your sales page, and higher-ranking blogs for your knowledge pages.
Without hiring experienced people, AI will actively weaken your marketing
of people would view brands negatively if they used AI. (Search Engine Journal)
Authentic marketing talent gives you an advantage
Businesses with experienced writers and designers pull ahead of the competition because they haven’t chosen quantity over quality. Their marketing is about providing value to people.
Brand is extremely important for marketing growth
AI cannot create a brand voice; in fact, it relies on the voice of human beings to understand a brand in the first place. Authors define your tone, personality, and positioning, build on it, and greatly surpass the inconsistent, robotic tone that sounds exactly like everyone else using a prompt to guide their communication.
You need to build a rapport with your customers
Humans understand other humans because experience is a human quality. Although everyone’s experience is different, the faculty of experience is what makes human beings connect when they communicate. Marketing is all communication; if you want more purchases, you need human experience to create and guide your marketing campaign.
Context is crucial, and a marketing strategy relies on it
Human experiences create context, and context is essentially information that goes on to create an effective marketing strategy. Without it, businesses fail to achieve an ROI. Target audiences differ across businesses and industries; moreover, consumer preferences change. Human beings can spot the change, but AIs cannot unless they are taught to do so.
Authentic Marketing Examples
What does an authentic marketing strategy look like in practice? Here are brands that have built their success on genuine human connection rather than AI-generated content.
Dove’s “Keep Beauty Real” Campaign
Taking a public stand against AI manipulation
In 2025, Dove continued pushing its “Keep Beauty Real” campaign, which includes a pledge to never use AI to distort women’s images. While other brands race to adopt AI for efficiency, Dove doubled down on authenticity by committing to show real bodies and real people.
Dove didn’t just avoid AI. They made their human-first approach a core brand value. This authentic marketing example shows that taking a stand on values can become a competitive advantage.
Helen Exley London
Family-focused video ads that feel real
This independent gift-book publisher achieved a 3,600% increase in sales year-over-year with stripped-back, family-focused video ads. No high production budgets. No polished scripts. Just authentic storytelling that resonated with their audience.
Success isn’t achieved through expensive videography or photography. Whatever you create must resonate with who you are talking to. Their authentic content proved that emotional resonance beats production value.
Square’s “For Every Kind of Dream”
Real customer stories, real impact
Winner of the 2018 Tribeca X Award, Square’s campaign featured real customers telling their stories. This included a former prisoner who started a secondhand goods business that now employs previously incarcerated women, and a former Syrian refugee who built a successful falafel shop.
According to the Tribeca X jury, the films showed “an extremely deft sense of craft in telling a compelling and richly human story while maintaining a strong brand message throughout.” Real stories from real people create authentic connections AI cannot replicate.
Airbnb’s “Belong Anywhere”
User-generated stories that build community
Airbnb’s storytelling focuses on the experiences of their hosts and guests. Their “Belong Anywhere” campaign featured real stories from users worldwide, emphasizing human connections made through their platform.
This authentic marketing strategy helped Airbnb differentiate itself from traditional hotels and create a sense of community among users. By letting real customers tell their stories, they built trust that no amount of AI-generated content could achieve.
Notice what these authentic marketing examples have in common: real people, real stories, and a commitment to transparency over polish. This is what separates brands that build lasting relationships from those that blend into the noise.
5 Steps to Create an Authentic Marketing Strategy
Ready to implement authentic marketing for your business? Here’s how to get started:
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1
Start with Real Experience
Your authentic marketing strategy should be built on genuine expertise. This means either creating content yourself (if you have the experience) or hiring professionals with verifiable track records. Check their published work, their authorship across multiple platforms, and their industry credentials. Remember: quality content matters, especially for SEO, and real authors can make a huge difference in your marketing campaign.
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2
Define Your Authentic Brand Voice
AI cannot create a brand voice. It can only mimic patterns. Work with your team to define what makes your brand unique: your values, your tone, your perspective on your industry. Document this so that every piece of authentic content reflects who you actually are, not who you think you should be.
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3
Create Content That Helps, Not Just Sells
Authentic content marketing focuses on providing genuine value. Address your audience’s pain points, answer their questions, and share insights they can actually use. When you consistently help people, they begin to trust you. And trust leads to business.
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4
Be Transparent About AI Use
If you use AI tools to assist your content creation, be honest about it. Remember: 78% of adults feel AI-written news is bad, and most consumers across all age groups prefer disclosure. Use AI as a tool to enhance human creativity, not replace it. Don’t try to hide it.
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5
Measure What Matters
Authentic marketing isn’t just about immediate sales. Track brand sentiment, customer loyalty, and long-term engagement. These metrics tell you whether your content is building the trust that leads to sustainable business growth, not just quick conversions that disappear.
Common Authentic Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Even well-intentioned businesses can undermine their authentic marketing efforts. Here are the pitfalls to watch for:
Faking Experience You Don’t Have
AI makes it easy to sound like an expert on topics you know nothing about. But Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines exist specifically to catch this. If you lack expertise in an area, either develop it or partner with someone who has it. Pretending never works long-term.
Using AI Without Human Direction
AI is a tool, not a replacement for strategy. Without human direction on context, angle, and psychology, AI generates marketing campaigns that are ineffective or don’t provide an ROI. The prompt matters, and prompts require human insight.
Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality
The internet is flooded with content. Publishing more won’t help you stand out. Publishing better content that demonstrates genuine expertise and provides real value will. Google’s site reputation abuse policy specifically targets websites that produce unhelpful content at scale. One excellent piece of authentic content outperforms ten generic ones.
Inconsistent Brand Voice
When you outsource to the cheapest option or rely entirely on AI, your brand voice becomes inconsistent. Customers notice when your blog sounds different from your social media, which sounds different from your emails. Consistency builds trust; inconsistency erodes it.
Ignoring Consumer Sentiment
The data is clear: consumers are skeptical of AI content and value authenticity. Ignoring this sentiment because AI is “more efficient” is a short-term decision with long-term consequences. Your audience’s preferences matter more than your convenience.
Authentic marketing is what happens when humans don’t lose control to AI
AI accelerates production. But authentic marketing comes from real human beings understanding your customers, and more importantly, understanding the role of Artificial Intelligence in creating successful marketing campaigns in a world where competition is fierce, and everyone wants to be a winner.
Work With an Authentic Marketing Agency
At InspiringClicks, we practice what we preach. Every piece of content is created by experienced professionals with verifiable expertise. We use writers with high Google Authorship who know how to create authentic content that ranks and converts.
Our approach combines immediate PPC results with long-term SEO growth because your marketing shouldn’t disappear when your ad budget drains. We build content that establishes your authority, earns consumer trust, and drives sustainable business growth.
Your competitors are all sounding the same. Don’t make the same mistake. Make your brand stand out with authenticity. Speak with us today.
Does InspiringClicks Use AI?
InspiringClicks uses AI as a tool, not as a means. The strategy, context, and even the writing is derived from real humans because creativity is a human faculty.
Using AI to create valuable content actually requires more work than creating content from scratch without it. The AI needs to be taught, constantly shaping the content to go in the direction where it is most effective. But the result of using AI as a tool, although more time-consuming, creates better content because it helps flesh out ideas.
Creativity is a matter of communication, and the ability to constantly communicate with the AI leads to even better creation; however, the person using it must be creative in the first place; otherwise, AI won’t be helpful. But it is led by the human, and this is a skill that takes time to learn in and of itself. In other words, the people who know how to use AI most effectively are actually the people who are professional writers because they can quickly and effectively communicate through text.
There are many things that signal rankworthiness. One of them is who wrote the article, and whether the article is helpful (which also means original, insightful, and in-depth). Purely AI-generated content will almost always produce content that is copied, unoriginal, and therefore unhelpful, because it scrapes content already on the internet.
Real value requires real human writers, and the value of a piece of content relies on that person’s ability to reach more depth in the article. That depth relies on the level of expertise that person has. We will never use AI to create content. We create the content using AI as a tool to structure the layout and help flesh out ideas. But even those ideas come as a requisite of the strategy that our professionals develop and communicate to the AI and other professionals on the InspiringClicks team.
