✍️ what content can only you publish?

Word on the LinkedIn street is that AI search is the next big thing.

Word on that same street is that someone has already figured out exactly how to win it. 

We’re not so sure.

So instead of chasing another AI hot take, we sat down with Noah Greenberg, CEO and co-founder of Stacker, whose team spotted some of the earliest signs of how AI search was changing content discovery, to ask a simple question:

What kind of content actually matters now?

His answer wasn’t another acronym or optimization hack. It’s a question all brands should be asking themselves.

Let’s get into it. 

Most conversations about AI search start with the wrong question.

How do we optimize our content for AI?

It’s an understandable place to start given AI search is so new. Every week there’s another acronym, another framework, another LinkedIn guru explaining how to get Claude to recommend your brand.

But after talking with Noah, we think there’s a better question to ask first.

What content can only your company publish?

AI models don't decide who to trust (they’re robots, remember?). Instead, they have to reconstruct trust.

They surface the brands, ideas, and sources the broader internet already treats as authoritative.

That means the companies most likely to earn AI visibility aren’t creating more content. They’re creating content nobody else could.

For most companies, that advantage falls into one of two buckets.

Camp 1: “We have data”

Many companies have access to information nobody else can publish.

GoodRx studies patient outcomes. Carta turns customer data into industry research. Nobody else has access to those inputs. That's what makes the resulting content uniquely valuable.

As Noah puts it, “We have data, and we’re going to tell the stories from that that no one else can.”

Camp 2: “We have expertise”

Not every company has proprietary data they can share. But every company certainly has years of experience solving the same customer problems.

Those lessons become the kinds of guides, opinions, frameworks, and stories your customers used to get from trade publications.

“You need to become an authority in your customer’s mind, so that when you want to sell them something, they trust you,” says Noah.

Turn your advantage into AI visibility

Knowing your company's content advantage is only the first step.

In the full playbook, Noah shares the 4-step experiment he recommends for getting started — including why your customers’ AI prompts look nothing like their old Google searches and what that means for the content you should create.

Read the playbook.

Campaigns that got us talking: 1 tournament. 16 local stories. Reuters sent photographers to every World Cup host city. The result wasn't 16 versions of the same event. It was Miami's Latin American culture, Boston's embrace of Scotland's Tartan Army, and neighborhood watch parties across Los Angeles.

AI spotlight: Readers notice more than words. They notice structure. University of Maryland and Google DeepMind researchers found they could distinguish AI-written stories from human-written ones with 93% accuracy based on structure alone. AI favored predictable plots and relied heavily on physical metaphors. Human writers left more room for ambiguity, surprise, and inference. The moral of the story? Don’t spell out the moral of the story.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: 

Client: Make the logo bigger.

Agency: Say less.

When most sponsors fight to make their logo as visible as possible, Cerveza Aguila made visibility the incentive. The bigger fans let Aguila’s logo appear on Colombia’s official 2026 FIFA World Cup jersey, the bigger the discount they received.

Our Marketing Minute series continues! We started these social interviews in Cannes and loved it so much we’re keeping the format going. 1 minute with a marketing leaders + 1 idea worth stealing.

If you know someone who’d make a great guest for upcoming feature, hit reply and nominate them.

• Every cleat brand arriving at the same shade of pink.

• FIFA hiding sponsor logos so aggressively it accidentally creates better guerrilla marketing.

• Turning hydration breaks into ad breaks. (S/o to Telemundo for refusing to play along.)

• The Kalshi + Polymarket World Cup gold rush. (We have notes.)

Reuters didn't engineer local relevance into their World Cup coverage. They just sent photographers to find what was already there. Noah Greenberg made the same point from a different angle: The content that wins is the content only your company can create.

What can only your company publish?

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

The first Google Doodle appeared in 1998 as a stick figure announcing the team was away at Burning Man. In other words, one of the biggest companies in the world started its brand storytelling journey with an out-of-office message.

Not saying the next storyarb offsite needs a homepage takeover. Just saying … the precedent exists.