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Most content marketing teams are still optimising for clicks. The problem is that search is shifting towards mentions, and the playbook that drove organic growth five years ago is no longer enough.
Josh Spilker, Head of Search Marketing at AirOps, has led organic growth at high-growth SaaS companies, including ClickUp, where he turns content and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) into a serious revenue driver.
Josh joined Charlie Marchant, CEO of Exposure Ninja, on The Growth Leaders Series to talk about why information gain content is becoming essential for visibility, where SaaS brands can win in AI Search, and how content engineering is a scalable growth system.
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The Power of Information Gain Content
AI Search platforms like AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT are making generic informational content increasingly redundant.
Josh Spilker’s answer at AirOps is to invest in what he calls “information gain content“: original research, data-backed reports, and genuine thought leadership that gives people something new to cite and share.
At AirOps, this takes two forms:
- The first is research content, producing reports and data studies that offer unique insights rather than repackaging what already exists.
- The second is leadership content built around original ideas, such as Josh’s 10X Content Engineer.
The 10X Content Engineer post gave language to something the market was already experiencing but struggling to name: the shift from traditional content production to building connected, AI-powered content systems. The response validated the concept immediately.
As Josh Spilker puts it: “We had CMOs share it with their SEO and content teams. Then folks were coming to us about, ‘Well, how do I get started becoming a content engineer?'”
But information gain content only lands if it covers what your audience cares about. Josh is direct about where the best content ideas come from: sales calls.
“I would say to really look at what your customers are asking about on sales calls. Because the queries that people are putting in LLMs are based a little bit off of what the traditional Google searches were, but those are a lot longer and with context.”
Charlie shared an example of this. After running a batch of Exposure Ninja sales call transcripts through AI, the team identified a recurring question from prospects: Do the top Google results always appear in ChatGPT answers for similar queries? That single pattern, surfaced across five to eight calls, became the basis for an original research piece.
The takeaway is straightforward. Information gain content is most effective when it sits at the intersection of original insight and genuine audience demand.
The Middle Funnel Is Where SaaS Brands Win in AI Search
Much of the panic around AI Search has focused on top-of-funnel traffic: informational queries being answered directly in AI Overviews, ending in a zero-click search.
But Josh Spilker’s view, drawn from years of building comparison and alternative content, is that the middle funnel is where the real opportunity lies, and where LLMs are doing the most active citing.
For fast-moving industries like SaaS, finance, and tech, where products, features, and competitors change constantly, LLMs have to retrieve fresh information from the live web. That is precisely where middle funnel content lives.
As Josh Spilker puts it, “These middle funnel and bottom funnel pages are being cited quite a bit by LLMs.”
This means the middle funnel is becoming one of the most strategically valuable areas of content marketing.
Rather than focusing exclusively on traffic volume, marketers should be thinking about how their brand appears when buyers are actively evaluating solutions. The businesses that consistently publish, maintain, and refresh this content are giving AI platforms more opportunities to reference them during high-intent buying journeys.
Just as importantly, Josh argues that search itself has expanded rather than contracted. Buyers are no longer following a linear path from Google to website to purchase. They move between Google, ChatGPT, AI Overviews, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other platforms as they validate decisions.
The brands that appear consistently throughout that journey are the ones most likely to win.
Content Engineering Turns Content Into a Growth System
If information gain content is the destination, content engineering is the system that makes it scalable.
Historically, content production followed a relatively linear workflow. Teams conducted keyword research, created a brief, assigned a writer, published the article, and moved on to the next project.
AI has fundamentally changed that process.
Today, content creation involves connected workflows that combine research, planning, production, optimisation, repurposing, distribution, and content maintenance. Rather than treating every piece of content as a standalone asset, content engineering treats content as a system.
At AirOps, webinars provide one of the clearest examples.
A single webinar is no longer just a webinar. It becomes a title-generation workflow, a registration page, an email sequence, a transcript, a social media campaign, a recap article, a series of video clips, a collection of key quotes, and eventually a source of future content ideas.
The objective is not simply to create more content. The objective is to create systems that allow expertise to scale, which will become a defining capability for modern marketing teams.
What This Means for Your Growth Strategy
Josh Spilker’s approach at AirOps is built on a set of principles that translate directly to any SaaS or B2B content team navigating a fast-changing search landscape:
- Invest in information gain content. Generic informational content is increasingly commoditised. Original research, data-backed reports, and thought leadership that introduces new ideas are what get cited, shared, and remembered.
- Mine your sales calls for content ideas. The questions your prospects are already asking in sales conversations are the same ones they are typing into LLMs. That is where your most relevant content opportunities are hiding.
- Prioritise and refresh your middle funnel. Comparison, alternative, and evaluation content is being actively cited by LLMs in high-velocity industries.
- Build systems, not just content. The volume and consistency of output required in 2026 cannot be sustained through manual processes. Mapping your content workflow and automating the repeatable parts is the foundation for scaling without sacrificing quality.
- Treat LinkedIn as a search channel. LinkedIn posts and Pulse articles are appearing in AI Overviews and being cited in LLM answers. Start thinking about LinkedIn content with the same intent-driven mindset you bring to blog content.
If AI Search is changing how buyers discover and evaluate solutions in your industry, your content strategy needs to evolve with it. Book a consultation call with our team, and we will provide recommendations based on a live review of your marketing, website, and goals.
About The Growth Leaders Series
The Growth Leaders Series is a mini podcast series from Exposure Ninja. In each episode, Charlie Marchant sits down with a growth leader from one of the world’s most innovative brands to explore how marketing leaders are adapting to changes in search, AI, demand generation, and brand growth.
