“Stop the Slop” It’s As Much Strategy, As It is Content

Category Design keeps your communications clear, distinctive, and discoverable — in an ecosystem full of machine-made filler.

In January, Almond Breeze released a campaign starring the Jonas Brothers that mocked AI-generated content. The joke: two marketing agents pitch the band on doing “more work with less work,” then roll a reel of cheap, AI-generated ads. The Jonases decline the pitch, and it’s assumed you would too.

They weren’t the only ones. The same month, Equinox and Aerie both ran ads built on the same idea — that what’s real and human is the thing worth trusting. Companies like iHeartMedia started placing a “guaranteed human” promise across its output, citing its own finding that 90% of listeners want media made by people. 

These brands placed the same bet: that audiences want something human. 

It’s not a hard bet to understand. Research from Imperial College London shows that as much as a third of new web content each month was partly or wholly AI-generated. Another study by Graphite put this number closer to 50%. 

A lot of this content is forgettable “AI slop” — the same listicles, the same “thought leadership,” the same product explainers. People have noticed, and they aren’t impressed: a recent study by Klaviyo revealed that 51% of APAC consumers frequently spot AI-generated content, but only 5% trust it from brands (the lowest globally).

Platforms have also started to react, with LinkedIn now working to detect and down-rank posts it judges to be AI-generated. For anyone whose job is to build a company’s reputation, this raises a bigger question: not ‘should we use AI’ but ‘how do we use it?’

Slop is a point-of-view problem

The reality is: slop isn’t really an AI problem. It’s a point-of-view problem.

AI is very good at producing competent, plausible, on-brand-sounding text. What it can’t do is decide what you believe, what problem you’re solving, or what you want your market to understand that it doesn’t already. A clear point of view, starts with a problem, and often articulates it in a way that the audience hasn’t thought about. It’s as much around creation as it is about clear content. When a team is clear on those things, AI is a fast way to draft and scale them. When a team isn’t, AI becomes a way to manufacture volume, and volume without a point of view is more or less the definition of slop.

Where the clarity comes from

Category Design looks at defining the problem your market hasn’t fully explained or named yet — and the new category that answers it — rather than fighting to be a slightly better version of something that already exists.  

The distinction is between thinking different and thinking better:  “Better” keeps you competing on features inside someone else’s category, while different means describing a problem your audience may not yet realise it has, and leading them to a new way of seeing it. Airbnb didn’t sell cheaper rooms; it named and described “community-based hospitality” and built a new market around it.

You will always be in a category. Your choice is whether you define it, or let someone else define it for you. 

The practical by-product of doing that work is a single source of truth. Once you’ve settled on the problem you want to own, the point of view behind it, and the language you use to describe it, you have something to measure every piece of communication against. Does this post advance the category narrative or dilute it? Is this the language and terminology that we own, or a subtext anyone could have written? A team aligned around a clear category doesn’t have to reinvent its message each time someone opens a document — and that blank-page vacuum is exactly what slop rushes in to fill.

Consistency is a big part of the heavy lifting. When the CEO, the marketing team, and the sales team all describe the problem the same way, communications get clearer, positioning holds together, and you become easier for both people and algorithms to recognise.

Why this matters for search

You might assume that flooding the web with AI-assisted content is at least good for visibility, but the data points the other way. Graphite’s own analysis found that AI-generated articles tend to underperform in search, and that top-ranking pages are still overwhelmingly human-written or heavily human-edited. 

Now factor in how people actually search today. Gartner expects traditional search volume to fall by roughly a quarter by 2026 as answer engines absorb informational queries. Deloitte estimates 29% of adults will start their daily searches with an AI summary this year, and more than 40% of buyers now ask an AI assistant for recommendations before using a search engine. When these tools answer, they don’t return ten options. They name a few, drawn mostly from third-party sources they treat as authoritative.

This changes what visibility actually requires. Answer engines decide which company fits a problem based on how the market describes you — so a clear, distinctive category gets filed and recommended, while generic content often gets left out.

Avoiding slop and winning visibility aren’t two goals — they’re one.

The clarity that comes from owning a category is what makes your communications distinctive enough to cut through the noise, and recognisable enough for the systems now shaping discovery to choose you. 

Three key takeaways

Slop is not a content problem. It’s a strategy problem.
Most AI-generated content fails because it lacks a distinctive point of view. AI can write a blog post, draft a LinkedIn article, or summarise a report. It cannot decide what problem your company should own, how the market should think about it, or why that perspective matters. That’s the role of Category Design.

The companies that win won’t publish more. They’ll mean more.
As the volume of content explodes, audiences are becoming more selective about what they pay attention to. Distinctive ideas will increasingly determine who earns attention. A clearly defined category gives organisations a common language that scales across teams, channels, and markets — creating the consistency that both people and algorithms recognise.

Category leadership is becoming a search advantage.
The shift from search engines to answer engines changes the rules of visibility. AI recommends a handful of companies it recognises as relevant and authoritative. Those with a clear category position are more likely to be surfaced, while those producing generic content risk disappearing from the answer altogether.

A final thought, on avoiding the slop

The “not just a ___, it’s a ___” sentence construction has long been the calling card of AI-generated slop — more than quadrupling from around 50 mentions in 2023 to over 200 in 2025. Techcrunch claims “it’s symbolic of how reliant these companies have become on AI.”

So next time you hit publish, ask yourself one thing: would this clearly sound like us if you took our logo off it? If not, you’re not building a category — you’re feeding the slop.

Learn more about designing and leading your category at www.out-position.com

Also published in e27: