Informational keywords stopped monetising
Content strategies built on informational traffic were designed for a world where education led to purchase. That funnel has collapsed for most ecommerce verticals.
For a decade, the ecommerce content playbook was clear. Publish educational content targeting informational keywords. Capture top-of-funnel traffic. Nurture through the site. Convert.
That funnel has structurally collapsed.
The mechanism is the combination of AI overviews and zero-click behaviour. When someone searches "how to choose a running shoe," Google now serves an AI overview that synthesises the answer from multiple sources. The user reads it. They don't click. If they do click, it's on a shopping result, not an editorial piece.
Informational content still gets impressions. It still ranks. But the conversion path from "read a guide" to "buy a product" has been severed by intermediary systems that absorb the educational value and redirect the commercial intent elsewhere.
The data is visible in Search Console. Impressions hold or increase. Clicks decline. Click-through rates on informational queries have dropped 30-50% in most ecommerce verticals over the last 18 months. The content appears successful by ranking metrics and unsuccessful by commercial ones.
This doesn't mean content is worthless. It means the purpose of content has changed. Content now serves two functions: building entity authority that influences AI citations, and creating the kind of specific, mechanistic expertise that generalist AI systems cannot easily synthesise.
Generic guides get absorbed by AI. Specific operational insight gets cited by AI. The distinction determines whether your content strategy is an asset or a cost centre.