How to outrun big brand budgets with effective storytelling

When AI first landed, copywriters and brand storytellers everywhere supressed the urge to panic. All the buzz told us that we were about to be replaced. Brand stories would now be told by super computers, and we’d all be redundant by lunchtime. Except that didn’t happen and hasn’t happened…yet.

There’s no doubt that AI is a handy helper for content creating. It helps nail social media posts faster, whips up a blog really quick and there’s no denying, it’s genius at helping out when you need to perfect a concept or strategy through a cloud of brain fog. But I feel like the initial excitement has flopped - for now at least. Because a lot of AI content, if served up raw, is really, really awful. It can affect your organic Search negatively too.

Even if you are a prompting pro, AI brand content can still feel a lot like AI brand content. If you’re reading a blog and suddenly feel overcome by cliché or too many perfectly formed sentences, chances are it’s been created by Chat GPT and uploaded in about 10 minutes. And if you spot any of those telltale extra-long dashes in the copy, stop reading immediately. High chance that the human in charge couldn’t be bothered to remove them. Lazy content is never a good brand strategy.

Return of the storyteller

I’m clearly one of many who’ve noticed the big, synthesised, inhuman flaw of AI. Indeed, the human storyteller appears to be back in fashion for now at least, with brands in the US paying $72k a year, on average, to the most skilled. The super-skilled are demanding salaries as high as $250K. While a small UK-based brand probably can’t stretch to this level of renumeration, being more human about telling their story and messaging is ironically where they may provide the most effective way to compete with the big brands.

Search likes humans

Bottom line today: handing your content over to AI is not a good plan. For while Google and AI-driven search engines are not penalising AI content as such, they are penalising the side effects of poor AI use. And this provides an opportunity for the smaller set up. You might not be able to churn out as much content as a giant brand or business, but you can make sure that everything you do produce is super high quality. By all means use AI to help you, but for goodness sake, leave the fact checking and finessing to a brand-fluent human being.

In 2026, we’re told that search engines are now highly sophisticated at detecting low-effort automation - what Google calls ‘scaled content abuse’ (at least that’s what AI just told me they call it). Google is now a would-be literary critic, using a framework called E-E-A-T to separate all the helpful content brands of all sizes are churning out, from repetitive old nonsense.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Experience: AI can synthesise a thousand articles - on dog grooming, for example. But AI has never washed fox poo off a dog or battled knots with a comb, and that’s always going to show. Google likes to see some experience - in other words, does your dog grooming blog read like it was written by someone who’s actually washed a dog in real life?

Expertise: Google wants to know that whoever - or whatever - has written the piece of content actually understands what they’re talking about. So, by all means, get AI to help but make sure you know what it’s talking about - and remember that the really high value expertise will come from you and your own experience. Resonate. Be relatable. Consumers want that.

Authoritativeness: Are you preaching AI originated facts out into the virtual ether or are you being cited by journals, mentioned on Reddit and linked to by industry peers? All this stuff provides the signals that say, ‘When this brand speaks, the industry listens.’ Google loves that stuff.

Trustworthiness: You can have all the experience and expertise in the world, but consumers still need to trust you. Let’s not forget that AI will make up facts to fill a gap (hallucinating is the fancy term). Fact checking is essential – as is being transparent. Consumers like me (and everyone else I’ve ever met so far) are getting increasingly fed up of being fed ‘perfect’ advice that’s also quite possibly fake.

Small brand, big on story

Small brands can’t match big competitors on ad budgets and volume of content creation, so it can feel like you're bringing a knife to a gunfight. But, like I say, resonance massively counts. So, how do you make your content stack stand out and be searchable – aside from not leaving it all to ChatGPT? The answer beyond nailing topics and optimising for search terms is: be more human.

At Nobull, we talk about storytelling all the time. It isn’t a fluffy buzzword; it’s the emotional and energetic baseline of any business that speaks to a customer as soon as they discover you. A consistent, engaging, HUMAN story is the only thing an algorithm can’t replicate, so use it to challenge the giants. It’s emotion, shared experience, real people, truisms. You get the gist? If you don’t, call us for a chat.

Smaller brands mustn’t rely on AI content- that’s the bottom line.  Use it as a tool for sure but trade some of that sterile AI efficiency for proper human storytelling. Prioritising raw, human experience over a constant flow of cold data, helps you create genuine connections with your customer that no algorithm can ever fake.

*AI confirms that this blog was 100% written by a human.