The Death (and Rebirth) of TOFU: What It Means for Copywriting in the Age of AI

For more than a decade, top-of-funnel (TOFU) content marketing followed a familiar script. Companies published endless “How to” guides and “What is” explainers, crammed with keywords, backlinks, and neatly optimised headings. HubSpot perfected the formula. Everyone else followed it. And for a long time, it worked. I mean, I did it myself.

But that era is over.

Earlier this year, HubSpot themselves reported an 80% drop in traffic, pointing directly to Google’s AI Overviews as the reason. This announcement confirmed what many of us working in content strategy and copywriting already suspected – the old TOFU model had collapsed.

For copywriters, this is more than a warning sign. HubSpot built its reputation on the inbound playbook, and if even they can’t outrun AI Overviews, it shows how fragile TOFU traffic has become for everyone else. In my mind, the lesson is that copywriters need to help clients pivot away from chasing clicks toward building authority in formats AI can’t replicate.

At Brand New Copy, I’ve seen my own website traffic drop by around 74% since June 2025 after experiencing a period of growth when I was (as always) focusing heavily on inbound marketing. My traffic has since tailed off to what it was at the start of the year.

Needless to say, I’m a bit bummed. My website traffic hasn’t been this badly affected since Google’s Penguin rollout in 2012 (albeit on a different domain).

Answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini have essentially separated visibility from clicks. Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs called it “The Great Decoupling,” where impressions no longer guarantee visits, and even the best-optimised guides vanish into generic AI-generated summaries.

This matters to copywriters because it forces a new way of thinking about funnels. Impressions no longer guarantee visits, so copywriting’s value is now in uncovering the insights that stand out when visibility and traffic are no longer linked (think EEAT).

The Original TOFU Marketing Model, How It Has Changed + a Wee Experiment

The traditional TOFU model was built on scale. You identified a keyword, wrote a 2,000-word article, sprinkled in semantically related terms, chased backlinks, and published. With enough repetition, you could compete in search results against almost anyone.

The result was a flood of content. By 2020, the internet was clogged with near-identical guides on everything from “How to create a marketing plan” to “What is cloud computing?” Each article slightly different, none particularly original.

For businesses, it became a bit of a dilemma: if you didn’t publish, you lost visibility to competitors. If you did publish, you became one more voice in the noise.

Then came the shift. Google’s AI Overviews began surfacing direct answers without clicks. Answer engines began providing summaries that cut out the source entirely. What Ryan Law described as a “decoupling” meant that visibility no longer guaranteed traffic. The old TOFU strategy became obsolete almost overnight.

I’ve seen this play out first-hand at Brand New Copy and with many of my clients, who’s content strategies have relied heavily on publishing useful informational content, only to have their once-reliable pipelines clogged.

In fact, in June, when I first started noticing the impact of AI Overviews on my own traffic, I conducted an experiment. I took two TOFU keyword phrases that I didn’t rank for and wrote two in-depth guides using Google’s Quality Standards as the benchmark.

I gathered unique insights from no less than 16 other copywriters, and I published How to Become a Copywriter (on 5^th June 2025), and How to Find Copywriting Clients (on 23^rd June). According to Semrush, both keyphrases have an ‘‘easy’’ keyword difficulty rating of 24% and ‘N/A’ respectively.

I knew from previous experience that when I published these types of posts, they would typically land on Google’s first page from about positions 5-10 within a few days (with some carefully-pointed internal links).

However, 3 months on and the posts are sitting at positions 50 and 32, driving no traffic to my site whatsoever. Likewise, all my TOFU content efforts since then have only saw my traffic declining further.

For me, one thing has become clear from all these recent changes – scale for scale’s sake is no longer a winning game.

The Rise of Answer Engines

If Google’s AI Overviews disrupted traffic, answer engines rewrote the funnel entirely.

Ask ChatGPT something like “how to hire salespeople”, or “things to consider when purchasing car insurance”. What you’ll see is the problem in action – a clean, helpful answer, but no links, no citations, no brand mentions. Your perfectly optimised “Ultimate Guide” might as well not exist.

This is the uncomfortable reality. Most basic top-of-funnel queries will never include brand mentions again. For copywriters and marketers, this forces a rethink. We can no longer assume the funnel begins with a Google search that drives traffic to a blog. Instead, the funnel now begins in conversations with AI.

I know this is true because it’s already playing out in my business. A client in the energy sector recently told me they discovered Brand New Copy by asking ChatGPT to “recommend a copywriter with sustainability experience in oil and gas.” That’s the new TOFU in action.

Your brand’s visibility is no longer tied to whether you rank on page one of Google, but whether you’re referenced by an answer engine in response to a natural-language question.

Data, Distinction, and the New Rules of TOFU

So, if informative content (that can be answered in an AI Overview) is being stripped away from websites, what survives? My prediction is data.

As Noah Greenberg, the CEO of Stacker points out in his recent article, The New Top of Funnel: How AI is Rewriting TOFU, AI tools do cite sources when an answer requires original, recent, or frequently updated data.

He gives the example of asking: “Which counties in the U.S. are at highest flood risk?” and you’ll see FEMA or LawnStarter studies cited as sources. Or ask “What percentage of Americans plan to travel this summer?” and you’ll often see Morning Consult or Statista mentioned.

In other words, the new TOFU belongs to those who can say something new, not say it louder.

But let’s be realistic, not every SME can hire economists or statisticians to generate proprietary data. However, that doesn’t mean they’re locked out of the new funnel. Distinction comes in many forms:

• Publishing customer insights that no one else has.
• Creating benchmark reports based on anonymised client data.
• Turning case studies into micro-datasets (e.g., “this campaign lifted conversions by 47%”).
• Developing proprietary frameworks and methodologies.

This is where copywriters come in. We’re translators of business insight into credible narratives. We take what’s unique about a company, like its results, its perspective, its experience, and we turn it into copy that earns citations and trust.

I developed the BNC Method to help wrap a framework around this approach. It’s a five-part process: Brief the Business Case; Frame the Funnel; Structure the Story; Manage the Messaging; and Craft the Copy. It ensures that copy is built on substance that carries through to every stage of the funnel.

In other words, you don’t always need “big data”, you need meaningful data.

How Copywriters Can Reclaim the Funnel

So, how do businesses adapt, and what role do copywriters play?

Here’s a practical playbook:

Step 1: Audit what you already know

Most companies sit on data they overlook: customer surveys, onboarding questions, campaign metrics, operational benchmarks. These are gold dust for building original insight.

Step 2: Identify what matters externally

Not all data is useful outside the business. A copywriter can filter what carries weight in the wider market.

Step 3: Translate into stories

Raw data doesn’t speak for itself. Insight-led storytelling (whether it’s a benchmark report, a thought leadership article, or a sharp case study) is what makes it meaningful.

For example, when I worked with an international energy company on their annual report, the raw data was vast. On its own, the numbers risked overwhelming readers. My role was to translate them into a clear, compliant narrative that spoke to multiple stakeholders. The outcome was a report that positioned the company as both accountable and forward-looking.

> You can read the full case study here

Step 4: Structure for answer engines

Clear subheadings, direct answers, and concise definitions improve the chance of being cited by LLMs. It’s no longer about gaming the algorithm SEO-style, but about respecting how information is consumed.

Step 5: Layer with strategic messaging

The difference between information and insight is strategy. Businesses need copy that ties their data and stories back to value propositions, authority, and brand promise.

I’m seeing this first-hand in my own client projects. Increasingly, brands aren’t just sending me briefs. They’re asking me to help write the brief. They want someone who can connect the dots between their goals, their market, and their message. And that’s strategy, not wordsmithing.

This is why I created The Strategic Copywriter’s Toolkit, a resource designed to help early-stage copywriters think strategically before they write. Because the future of TOFU is about identifying the right insights and packaging them in ways that AI, audiences, and decision-makers recognise as valuable.

Measuring Success in the Answer Engine Era

If the funnel has changed, so must our metrics.

The old measure of success was traffic. How many clicks did a blog attract? How many visitors landed on a page?

In the answer engine era, those numbers matter less. The new metrics will be:

• LLM citations: Are your insights being referenced by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini?
• Brand association: When people ask for recommendations, does your brand appear in the shortlist?
• Media pickup: Are journalists citing your data in articles?
• Pipeline quality: Are the enquiries you receive more qualified, because they already trust your authority?

I’ve already started noticing these signs at Brand New Copy. Being mentioned in ChatGPT queries has led to direct client conversations. Case studies I wrote years ago are being rediscovered and cited. The pipeline looks different. It’s smaller in volume, but stronger in intent.

Moving forward, I think businesses who measure only traffic will miss this. Whereas those who measure visibility and authority will be more likely to thrive.

Clarity Over Noise

So, top-of-funnel content no longer belongs to whoever can publish the most blog posts or capture the most keywords. It belongs to those who can deliver unique insights, tell meaningful stories, and anchor their authority in something AI can’t fabricate – real experience.

For copywriters, that’s both the challenge and the opportunity. Clients need help uncovering the meaning in their data and its impact.

At Brand New Copy, I’ve seen how valuable this can be. Nowadays, the most successful projects are the ones that clarify a company’s value, translate it into credible narratives, and deliver it in formats that audiences and algorithms trust.

Looking ahead, I predict three things will happen in response to AI Overviews:

1. Content budgets will rebalance – Businesses will spend less on high-volume blog content and more on research, reports, and thought leadership articles that builds authority. In two to three years, the average content budget could look smaller in quantity but heavier in quality.
2. LLM visibility will become a KPI – Just as teams once tracked media mentions or backlinks, they’ll soon monitor whether their brand is cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Early tools for this are already emerging. In fact, Semush has one for £99 a month.
3. Copywriters will evolve into strategic partners. Our role will be less about providing words and more about helping businesses connect raw data, customer insights, and strategy into narratives that cut through AI-driven noise.

Change always creates uncertainty, but it also creates opportunity. Copywriters who embrace the new TOFU, grounded in data, distinction, and strategy will not only stay relevant, but they’ll become indispensable partners to the businesses navigating this next chapter.