Informational content still worth it? Yes, here's why

native-ad-buyer

I've been in native advertising for years, and the recent AI overview panic has everyone telling me to ditch informational content and go all-in on commercial intent. But I'm not convinced. informational queries still build topical authority, attract backlinks, and introduce users to your brand early in the buying journey. The key is to stop writing generic articles that AI can already surface. Instead, add real experience, case studies, or unique insights that AI can't find anywhere. That content earns trust and supports your commercial pages through internal linking. Commercial intent converts faster, but without informational content, you're missing the trust-building step. So I'm still writing informational. what's your take?

coopplayer

Informational content is the velvet rope to your brand's VIP room. It doesn't just answer a question-it shapes how someone feels about you before they even think about buying. That early impression? Pure gold for brand perception.

The real trick is ditching the generic, soulless blog posts. Instead, pour in actual experience, a distinct point of view, or a visual storytelling angle that makes the reader stop scrolling. Commercial pages close the deal, but informational pieces build the trust that makes that close feel effortless.

Someone in the thread mentioned backlinks and authority-absolutely. But the aesthetic of trust is just as important. A beautifully structured, insight-rich article signals "we know our stuff" in a way that a sales page never can.

bigcoffee

Info content still pulls weight for top-of-funnel awareness and AI overview mentions. Basic definitions get absorbed, but original research and detailed guides keep driving measurable traffic. In my tracking, the high-effort pieces outperform by a wide margin.

budgetburner

The "just chase commercial intent" crowd misses the mechanism entirely.

Informational content never existed to capture clicks - that was a side effect. Its real job: earn the citations and backlinks that make your money pages rank. Cut it and you're sawing off the branch you're sitting on.

AI overviews changed the scoreboard, not the game. You're not optimizing for traffic anymore, you're optimizing for trust signals. Citations, impressions, authority flow - that's the metric now. The click on the informational query was always vanity. The link it earned? That paid the bills.

Stop measuring the wrong thing and the strategy becomes obvious.

miaaffiliate

Informational content is the backbone of any solid affiliate funnel. Commercial intent pages get the clicks, but informational content removes the friction. that's where the real trust is built.

it helps you:

Build topical authority so Google actually sends you the traffic worth chasing.
Answer early-stage questions before people even know they need a product.
Earn links and mentions that feed your site's authority passively.
Support your money pages through internal linking that actually makes sense.

The trick is not to rehash what's already everywhere. Instead of "What is digital marketing," drop a real case study, a specific breakdown from your own campaigns, or an answer that AI can't scrape. That's what earns the backlinks and the long-tail rankings that keep paying out.

dailygrind

The trust piece is the part that never shows up in the dashboard, and that's exactly why it gets ignored. Sure, you can pull up GSC and watch those informational queries for "what is X" or "how does Y pricing work" sit there with a 1% CTR and zero conversions, and someone on the leadership team will screen cap that and ask why we're wasting budget on it. But strip the content away and your commercial pages drop to almost nothing.

Three observations from running content for a FinTech product over the last few years:

The informational page is the handshake. It's the only page on the site a cold user actually reads before comparing you to three competitors on a review site. The commercial page gets the credit but the informational one gets the click.
The organic CTR data most people look at is incomplete. Someone in the thread pointed out that a "top of funnel" post on something like a margin calculator or fee breakdown commonly pulls in 5 to 10 times more conversions when you look at assisted conversions in Analytics instead of last click. That data exists but nobody bothers to pull it because it requires setting up a conversion path rather than glancing at the default report.
You can test this tactic in under a month, use Ahrefs to filter for "what is" and "how to" modifiers attached to commercial intent terms you already rank for, then put an internal link from the informational post to the commercial page using exact match anchor text. Track that commercial page's branded searches in GSC for six weeks. In my experience the lift happens around week 3.

Nobody opens a spreadsheet and sees "trust" as a KPI so it gets a pass. The reader of the commercial page doesn't need 20 pages of features and a demo request form. They need to feel confident your product won't be the one costing them money down the line. That's the job the informational content does, and there is no shortcut from a hero section to fit that gap.

native-ad-buyer

Thanks. doubling down on the info grind