Why Top-of-Funnel Content Could Be Your Secret Weapon in 2027—But Only If You’re Ready to Adapt

Organic search clicks have fallen 42% since AI Overviews began expanding in Google Search, while LLMs continue to fully answer users’ informational queries in-platform. At the same time, AI content production has allowed publishers to flood SERPs with top-of-funnel (TOFU) articles at scale — meaning competition for blue links has gone up, even as available clicks have decreased.

Considering these factors, there’s a real question for content marketers: Is top-of-funnel content still driving traffic in any way that justifies writing it?

What happened to TOFU traffic over the past year

To get a high-level read on how top-of-funnel content is trending, I pulled Semrush’s organic traffic estimates for August 2026 and compared them to the same month a year earlier across 30 of the largest digital publishers spanning nine industries.

While third-party or panel-based data aren’t ideal for measuring precise traffic totals, they’re useful for getting a sense of general trends — which is exactly what we’re looking for here. Some of my sample domains included:

• Cloud/DevOps/IT: aws.amazon.com, ibm.com
• Consumer tech: howtogeek.com, pcmag.com
• Cybersecurity: crowdstrike.com, paloaltonetworks.com
• Data/CX SaaS: qualtrics.com, mailchimp.com
• Fintech/finance: investopedia.com, nerdwallet.com
• Healthcare: mayoclinic.org, healthline.com
• HR/people ops: bamboohr.com, gusto.com
• Legal: legalzoom.com, nolo.com
• Marketing/sales/SaaS: hubspot.com, salesforce.com

For each domain, I tracked URL performance year over year, then grouped pages into a rough TOFU estimate: any pages ranking for keywords that include “what is…” and “how to…”, plus any pages that include “guide” in their URLs.

YoY TOFU trends: YMYL declined, B2B tech improved

Across this sample of major publishers’ TOFU content, every domain in finance, healthcare, legal, and consumer tech publishing lost traffic over the past year. This includes glossary entries, “how to” articles, and guides — all declining in performance together.

Unsurprisingly, this pattern aligns with Google’s Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) categories, where AI Overviews show up most aggressively. These are the categories where Google assumes users want a fast, authoritative answer and don’t necessarily need to click through.

While this sample only reviews a top hierarchy of publishers, the industry trends certainly stand out. Even Legalzoom.com, whose sharp 90% YoY decline in TOFU content was an outlier, directly attributed its loss in traffic to changing patterns in Google Search, rather than any internal or site changes.

However, it wasn’t all bad for TOFU content. Every domain in cybersecurity and marketing/sales software improved during this window. Collectively, cloud infrastructure also ended up positive.

Comparing top-of-funnel to middle-of-funnel

But are these TOFU-specific patterns, or are they happening across the whole funnel?

I compared the same industries against other common standard markers of middle-of-funnel (MOFU) content — service/product comparison pages ranking for “vs.” and “best” keywords — to see if the funnel stage made a difference within a given industry.

The patterns were remarkably similar. In this sample of 30 of the web’s top publishers, TOFU and MOFU have been trending together in the same direction, either up or down.

4 major takeaways from YoY TOFU/MOFU trends

1. In 2026, success largely depended on industry

Curiously, TOFU and MOFU tracked similarly in every industry reviewed, meaning the funnel stage of a content strategy may matter less than industry and the audience a company serves.

2. TOFU in B2B tech is still a reliable strategy

The data suggest top-of-funnel content can remain a valuable strategy in certain B2B tech industries. It makes sense, since a B2B buyer researching a platform migration or a security vendor may spend more time with a topic and place more weight on demonstrated expertise than YMYL consumers looking up symptoms or a tax rate. Because B2B decisions often involve larger budgets and more consideration, users’ research will go deeper than a single AI Overview can satisfy.

And beyond AI Overviews — even for LLMs, B2B software and infrastructure topics may move fast enough that their training data can’t reliably keep up. When an LLM doesn’t already have the answer, it has more reason to search and cite the page that does, hopefully still encouraging a user click.

3. For YMYL companies, a turn to MOFU may not help

If there’s little difference between the top- and middle-of-funnel performance within an industry, a YMYL brand cutting TOFU budget in favor of MOFU content won’t sidestep the negative impact of AI Overviews and other forms of AI search.

4. YMYL decline likely goes beyond major publishers

If the YMYL decline held for the largest, most authoritative publishers, that’s a bad sign for smaller publishers. Research on AI Overview citations in YMYL topics shows Google’s summaries lean almost entirely on a small set of established domains (Mayo Clinic in health, Investopedia in finance, etc.).

If dominating AI Overview citations isn’t enough to protect the biggest names in YMYL industries, it’s hard to imagine smaller publishers, competing for a thinner slice of SERPs, are faring much better.

Effective TOFU content strategies in 2027

Past success or challenges don’t guarantee future performance — positive or negative — especially for SEO in the tumultuous 2020s. But certain trends are worth noting. Beyond industry, several high-level TOFU strategies appear promising for success in the coming year.

Local search that appeals to local needs

Recent studies have shown promising consistency for local search traffic. They note that, since LLMs still lack reliable location awareness and Google’s AI Overviews appear far less often for local queries, site posts still play a significant role in the local search user experience.

Even so, in 2027, an ideal local SEO strategy will likely go beyond programmatic location pages to provide helpful, meaningful content tailored to the unique needs and interests of each service area.

TOFU digital tools

Interactive tools also seem promising. My recent Search Engine Land analysis comparing organic and LLM-referred traffic found that plain educational how-to content (a classic TOFU format) gets cited by LLMs only about 12% of the time. Since LLMs and AI Overviews are already good at writing generic how-to content, they give little reason to send anyone to read yours.

However, ungated online tools, like specialized industry calculators and screeners, are a different story. In that study, nearly every tool page picked up at least some AI Search traffic, and summaries recommended a specific tool by name when asked for an assessment or evaluation.

Tools are one of the few TOFU formats that AI summaries can cite but won’t reproduce on their own. That alone makes them worth prioritizing in any content strategy.

Real SME expertise

AI Overview responses are quick, generic, and anodyne. By design, they’re unlikely to take a compelling position, make pointed critiques, draw on firsthand experience, use humor, give interesting “hot takes,” or connect concepts to a truer, messy reality. We’ve all seen firsthand how LLMs can flatten even interesting topics into a short, staid summary.

The “what is X” article, either written or informed by a human SME (who’s run the process, made mistakes, formed nuanced opinions about tradeoffs, and genuinely cares), will read differently from an AI summary assembled from five existing explanations.

And at the very least, taking advantage of your organization’s SME expertise in your content process can be a short path to original data or insights — which makes your site far more likely to get cited by AI in the process.

The artificial elephant in the room: Scaled AI content

It’s impossible to discuss top-of-funnel strategy without addressing the elephant in the room: hyper-scaled AI content generation, a tactic some publishers are now treating as a standard TOFU practice.

On the surface, it’s easy to see why marketing departments have adopted the approach. Where AI writing is “strongest” is precisely where most TOFU content lies: generic, topical, informational articles. It’s a fairly low-effort automated lottery ticket for potential traffic gains.

Yet for fully automated, AI-scaled content, even the most meticulously prompted (and least rapacious) strategies may be in trouble. It’s due to a few converging trends:

AI writing quality improvements are slowing

It’s far too early to suggest we’ve reached a plateau in any of AI’s capabilities, but few would be willing to argue that the model-to-model improvements for written content haven’t slowed over the past year.

Studies show that AI content requires heavy human involvement and per-article prompting to perform. Even a heavily “humanized” AI writing style provides limited value beyond what AI Overviews and LLMs already provide users.

Tools are increasingly calling out AI copy

Claude now watermarks its output, and Pangram has been rolled out across Substack. AI detection infrastructure is gaining traction, and users may increasingly expect it as an integral part of their web experience.

Beyond these tools, we’re also getting better at AI detection as increased exposure highlights the telltale patterns, tics, limitations, hallucinations, and common annoyances of AI writing.

Google may be changing its mind about AI content

Most notable for those considering developing or continuing scaled AI content strategies is whether Google changes its stance on not penalizing AI writing. Google has been aggressively cracking down on scaled content in successive updates.

Already, these spam updates appear to be going beyond Google’s long-standing ranking levers of tracking downstream engagement signals, monitoring on-page performance, and weighing backlink signals.

There’s little reason to think content marketers should avoid the use of AI in writing altogether. Studies consistently show AI-enabled human content performs strongly — and in some cases, most strongly.

Yet fully automated, highly scaled AI content appears to have little long-term value.

Dig deeper: The micro-macro shift: How to measure AI visibility now that precision is gone

So, is TOFU worth writing in 2027?

Over the past year, TOFU content in certain B2B industries has shown consistent traffic growth, and its performance has tracked closely with supposedly more-evergreen MOFU content.

Local SEO remains a stable avenue — particularly specialized service guides written with a strong awareness of area interests and needs. But if your industry falls under YMYL, troubling trends mean you may, at the least, want to reassess expectations.

And regardless of your industry, publishers need to recognize that competition across SERPs has gotten far fiercer. To drive actual clicks, your content now has to beat your competitors, as well as AI Overviews and LLMs, on increasingly bloated SERPs.

At least for now, the best strategy for your content is to ask yourself the question publishers should always ask:

Does this page deserve to be published?