Stop shipping soggy listicles 🌧️

_{Day 124/100}

Hey—It's Tim.

I’m chilling at Mt Baldy basecamp - 1,700 m up in B.C.’s South Okanagan.
Summit sits another five-hour grunt above me at 2,400 m.
I was gonna get to the top this morning…

(Technically it’s an Airbnb my girlfriend owns, but “basecamp” sounds tougher.)

Thunderstorms have been playing bumper-cars across the ridge all morning, so I ditched the dawn push, made enemy-strong coffee, and watched lightning audition for Metallica’s next light show.

While the clouds rehearse, I’m thinking about the other rumble: the urge to crank out an AI-generated “Top 15 Marketing Tools in 2025” listicle because “it only takes 3 clicks.”

Spoiler: that rumble ends in a landslide.

The Fastest Way to Torch Trust

Every time Google rolls out another spam-slash-helpfulness update, the algorithm gets better at sniffing out copy-paste listicles.

Their April finish-line report bragged about “45 % less low-quality, unoriginal content in Search results.” 

Translation: if your brand reads like a robo-thesaurus, you now fall 45 % faster.

Readers feel it too. They land on a page, skim three recycled bullets, and bounce with a new belief: you’re the company that settles.

Settling is contagious. Settling in content turns into settling in product, support, pricing. (At least that’s how it looks from the outside.)

This Is Fine 🔥 - But Your Rankings Aren’t

Google keeps repeating the same line:

What’s crazy is they’re lying to our faces.

They are killing all AI content. Because it’s lazy.
And I say this as the founder of Penfriend.
As an owner, a builder, a writer.

They are killing AI content.
And I agree with them.

However, Most teams hear the first half and miss the second.

So they ship a buffet of surface-level blurbs that:

• mention every tool in the category,

• link to nothing original,

• carry zero first-hand experience,

• and hope the word “comprehensive” buys forgiveness.

A week later they’re on page five wondering why “AI ruined SEO.”

It didn’t. Laziness did.

A More Durable Alternative (The BoFu Backbone)

1. Start at the bottom.
   BoFu content = buying-time content. Case studies, teardown demos, pricing comparisons. The stuff prospects read a day before they swipe the card. One solid piece here beats twenty generic listicles every time.
   

2. Front-load lived experience.
   Google’s E-E-A-T playbook is basically: “prove you were in the room.” Quote your analytics, embed screen recordings, tell me the exact setting you tweaked. Humans (and algorithms) both trust fingerprints over summaries.

3. Let AI save minutes, not meaning.
   Draft outlines, pull data, rewrite dull sentences — sure.
   But the editing time you save goes straight back into sharpening insight, adding proof, and sanding off robot edges. (Inside Penfriend, the BoFu workflow bakes this in: AI handles structure; you inject scars and screenshots.

4. Ship fewer URLs, update them more.
   Durable ≠ “never touch again.” The brands winning AI Overviews are the ones recutting the steak every quarter, not cloning new cows

Tiny Litmus Test

Before you hit publish, read the piece out loud and ask:

If the answer is “maybe 🥴,” you’ve got more climbing to do.

Thunder’s easing up. Time to see if the trail’s still there.

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "Can I become lightning proof?" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. If you’ve ever yelled “THIS IS FINE” at a sky full of lightning, hit reply with your favourite thunder-sound effect (⚡ KA-BOOM, KRACKA-THOOM, etc.). I’ll brand tomorrow’s climb after the best one—and send photographic proof if the clouds let me.

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Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.