I spent years ghostwriting for outlets like Forbes and Entrepreneur, plus more church and nonprofits than I can count. Over a thousand articles, most of them with someone else’s name on top. And in all that time, the advice I gave clients never really changed. Write like a person. Say something only you could say. Stop trying to trick the algorithm and start trying to actually help the human on the other end of the screen.
I bring that up because I saw a post yesterday from someone grieving the “old” SEO strategies. Tired of chasing AI Overviews. Missing the days when you could just write something good and watch it grow.
Friend, I have news. Those old strategies never left. They’re the best SEO and AEO strategy on the table right now, and they always were. Great writing. A real point of view. Something true about your ministry, your mission, or your story that no one else has lived. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.
I write this section of the site for three kinds of people, and I’d guess you’re one of them. Faith bloggers and writers who want to be found by the people who actually need their words, without selling out the message to do it. Nonprofit communicators telling stories for organizations doing real justice work, who need content that serves the mission and not just a metrics dashboard. Church leaders and ministry workers who are tired of Christian marketing that feels like a sales pitch and want something that’s actually true instead. If that’s you, this one’s for you.
So what does a content strategy for AI search actually look like right now?
A content strategy for AI search still starts with a real person writing something worth reading. Google’s August 2026 spam update targeted scaled, templated, AI-stuffed pages with no human fingerprint. If you want to show up in AI Overviews and rank the old-fashioned way, write specific, experience-based content on topics you actually know, and let the keyword research guide the topic, not replace the writing.
Let me walk you through what I’m doing on my own site this week, and why.
Delete the junk on your site today
Here’s my rule, and it isn’t a gentle one. If a page doesn’t have anything on it a real person would miss, it doesn’t get to stay.
Go look at your site with fresh eyes. Not as the person who built it, but as a stranger stumbling in from a search result. Does this page teach me something? Does it sound like a human wrote it, or like it was assembled? If you can’t answer “yes, someone would miss this,” delete it. Today, not next quarter.
For a nonprofit it’s the event recap from three years ago that still ranks but sends people to a registration link that’s dead. For a church or ministry, it’s the sermon series page with no notes, just a title and a date. For a blogger, it’s the two-hundred-word post you wrote to hit a publishing schedule and never really meant.
I know how that feels. I’ve got old posts on Grace in the Margins that I wrote fast, on tired nights, that don’t hold up anymore. Deleting them isn’t giving up on the work. It’s admitting the junk was never doing the work in the first place.
Put a real human behind everything that’s left
For whatever survives the purge, non-negotiable, every single page needs a person attached to it. An opinion. A real experience. A screenshot you actually took. A name Google and your reader can trace back to an actual life.
On this site, that’s easy for me. Every post carries my byline, and it links back to my seminary training, my decade in ministry, and the fact that I’ve lived through most of what I write about. That’s not vanity. That’s the trust signal search engines and readers are both looking for now.
If you write for a nonprofit, this one matters even more than the SEO angle. A donor deciding whether to give doesn’t trust a page written by “the communications team.” They trust a program director who says, “here’s what I saw on a home visit last week,” with their name on it. And if you lead a church or ministry, this is your chance to be the opposite of the manipulative Christian marketing people are so tired of. A real name, a real opinion, a real photo someone actually took, that’s what honest looks like online. If your “About” page is thin or your posts are published under “Admin,” fix that before you fix anything else.
Toss the templates and check your numbers
Pull your indexed page count today. Actually do it, right now if you can. Then be honest with yourself about how much of that count is templated, spun, or built from the same five sentences with different nouns swapped in.
If most of your indexed pages are templates, your traffic is about to drop, if it hasn’t already. Templates aren’t inherently evil. A Bible study outline, a grant report format, a “here’s this month’s impact numbers” post, those are structures, and structure is fine. The problem is templates with nothing original inside them, the weekly devotional that swaps one verse into the same five sentences, the program page that describes every initiative in identical language with different nouns. A shell isn’t content. It’s a shell.
Stop guessing about what Google hasn’t said
The August 2026 spam update rolled out between August 18 and August 21, global, all languages. Google confirmed the rollout and confirmed almost nothing else, no companion blog post, no named target, no new policy. That silence has a way of sending people chasing rumors instead of fixing what’s actually broken.
Here’s what we do know, and it comes from people who spent weeks tracking the damage, not from anything Google confirmed by name. Glenn Gabe at GSQi dug through several case studies from sites hit by the update, and a pattern showed up again and again. Scaled, programmatic pages built by the thousands. AI-generated text stuffed onto thin, interchangeable pages. Turn-key affiliate setups with no human fingerprint anywhere on them, sometimes no product photos, sometimes no evidence anyone ever looked at the page before it published.
You’re probably not running a turn-key affiliate mill. But the same pattern shows up in smaller, gentler forms. A ministry newsletter that auto-generates a weekly post from a template with the scripture reference swapped in. A nonprofit blog where every program update reads like it came from the same fill-in-the-blank form, because it did. Smaller scale, same problem.
I wrote a while back about the weight of willful blindness, how much easier it is to look away from an uncomfortable truth than to sit with it. That instinct shows up in SEO too. It’s tempting to read one blog post about a “quick fix” and apply it to your whole site instead of doing the slower, harder work of asking what’s actually thin here. Chase the real problem, not the rumor.
Why this is actually good news for your AEO and SEO strategy
Here’s the part that should feel like relief instead of pressure. If you want to show up in an AI Overview, you write something the AI, and your competitors, genuinely cannot produce. Not because you found a trick. Because you lived something they didn’t, because you sat with someone your organization served, or led a congregation through something hard, or showed up for your readers in a way no one else has.
I will say this until I’m blue in the face. It is not about quantity. It is about quality.
Hire a good storyteller if writing isn’t your gift, even part time, even one program story a month. Find the search terms and topics your actual audience is asking about, use real data instead of guesswork, and then build the content up from there, not the other way around. Content that serves your mission and content that performs well in search are not competing goals. They’re the same goal, done honestly. Stop overcomplicating this. Stop replacing your creatives with robots. Robots are tools. You still need skilled, discerning humans to point those tools at the right target and know when the output isn’t good enough yet.
That’s the whole shift, honestly. Not “AI bad, human good.” It’s “robots are tools, and tools don’t get to make the decisions.”
A gut check for your own site
Before you close this tab, pull up your site’s page list and ask four questions about each one. Would a real person miss this page if it vanished tomorrow? Can a reader tell a specific human wrote it, opinions and all? Is there anything templated hiding here with nothing original inside it? And if you write for an organization, does this page actually serve the mission, or was it only ever serving a metrics dashboard?
Wherever the answer is no, that’s your to-do list. Not someday. This week.
I’ve made peace with the fact that some of what I’ve published doesn’t deserve to stay up, and that letting it go is part of taking the work seriously. If you’ve been putting off a similar cleanup on your own site, consider this your nudge. The site that survives the next update won’t be the one with the most pages. It’ll be the one where every page was worth writing in the first place.
Hope Turner holds an M.A. from Dallas Theological Seminary and has spent over a decade in ministry, alongside years of professional writing for outlets ranging from Forbes to church websites across the country. Read more about her work on the About page, or dig into the ideas behind slowing down and doing the harder, truer work in her Beyond Comfort Workbook.
Quick answers
What was the Google August 2026 spam update? A global, all-language spam update that rolled out August 18 to 21, 2026. Google confirmed it happened but didn’t name specific targets or introduce new policies.
Do I need to delete pages to recover from a spam update? If pages are thin, templated, or interchangeable with thousands of others, yes. Recovery generally requires actually removing or substantially rewriting that content, not just tweaking metadata.
What’s the difference between SEO and AEO? AEO, or answer engine optimization, focuses on getting cited or summarized inside AI-generated answers like AI Overviews. The underlying strategy is nearly identical to good SEO: original, specific, well-organized, human-written content that answers a real question well.
Do nonprofit program pages count as thin content? Only if they’re interchangeable. A program page with a specific story, real numbers, and a named staff member behind it is exactly the kind of content Google and AI search want to surface. A program page built from the same template as fifty others, with only the program name changed, is thin regardless of how good the mission behind it is.