Top-of-Funnel Content Is Dead. Product Updates Are Your New Growth Channel.
I was trying to figure out how to configure ACH payments in Shopify. I Googled it and landed on one of those classic top-of-funnel blog posts. You know the type: 2,000 words explaining what ACH is, written to rank for “ACH payments explained,” designed to capture anyone vaguely curious about the topic.
I didn’t need to know what ACH is. I needed to know if a specific tool could handle my specific setup inside Shopify.
I did what everyone does now: I opened ChatGPT, gave it the context of my business, and asked which tool I should use.
That SEO blog post? Irrelevant. The tool that won the recommendation had product content detailed enough for the LLM to match it to my situation.
The old playbook is dying
For a decade, SaaS marketing meant writing top-of-funnel content. “What is {concept}?” posts. “Top 10 {category} tools” listicles. “Ultimate guide to {buzzword}” pages. All designed to capture search traffic and funnel it toward your product.
That worked when Google was the starting point for every buying decision.
It’s not anymore.
Buyers are increasingly going to LLMs with highly contextual questions. Not “what is project management software” but “I have a 12-person engineering team using Linear and GitHub, shipping weekly, and we need a way to communicate changes to customers without adding meetings. What should we use?”
The LLM doesn’t care about your top-of-funnel blog post, in fact it probably hates them. It only cares about whether it has enough information about your product to recommend it for that specific situation.
Product marketing is the ascendant discipline
A co-founder I spoke with recently put it perfectly: “Product marketing is the ascendant discipline in marketing now. Writing about your product and what it does is how you’re found.”
In the old world, you’d never write a blog post about a minor bug fix. There’s no SEO value in “we fixed an edge case in our Slack integration.” No one’s searching Google for that.
In the new world, someone absolutely is typing into their LLM: “I use Slack and keep running into this problem with notifications from {tool category}. Which tools handle this well?”
If you’ve published detailed content about your Slack integration, including fixes and edge cases, the LLM can recommend you. If you haven’t, the LLM won’t include you in the result.
Every feature. Every integration. Every fix. Every comparison. They all matter now because you can’t predict the context someone will ask about.
The permutation problem
Here’s what makes this challenging: LLM queries come with context you can’t predict.
A prospect’s LLM knows their entire tech stack. When they ask for a recommendation, the LLM searches for products that integrate with their specific combination of tools. Your product might be perfect for them, but if you haven’t published content about that specific integration or use case, the LLM has nothing to work with.
One founder described it this way: “You need content for every different permutation of your product and everything you integrate with. Every problem it might solve, every technical feature, how it connects into every tech stack.”
That’s a lot of content. Far more than any marketing team could write manually at the pace needed.
Why product updates become growth content
This is where the shift gets interesting. Your product updates, the changes you’re already shipping, are exactly the kind of content that feeds LLM discovery.
Every feature you launch is a potential match for someone’s contextual query. Every integration you add is discoverable. Every bug you fix addresses a pain point someone is asking about.
Only if you publish it. In detail. With enough context for an LLM to understand when to recommend you.
The companies that win this game are the ones that treat every shipped change as a piece of marketing content. Not because they’re gaming the system, but because detailed product information is genuinely how buyers find products now.
The compound effect
A company that publishes detailed updates about every feature, fix, and integration builds a deep catalog of product content. Month after month, the surface area of what LLMs know about them grows.
A company that publishes a quarterly changelog with five bullet points stays invisible for 90% of possible queries.
The gap compounds. The first company gets recommended more often. More customers mean more feedback. More feedback drives better product decisions. Better product means more updates to publish. The flywheel spins.
Meanwhile, the traditional SEO company is still writing “What is {concept}?” posts that LLMs answer without ever sending traffic to anyone’s site.
The shift is already here
This shift is already happening. Buyers are already asking LLMs for product recommendations instead of Googling. The companies that recognized this early and invested in detailed, comprehensive product content are already seeing the results.
The question isn’t whether this shift will affect your business. It’s whether you’re building the content catalog that makes your product discoverable in this new world, or whether you’re still writing top-of-funnel blog posts for a search engine that’s losing its monopoly on discovery.
Your product updates serve double duty now: they keep existing customers engaged and help new customers find you.
If you want to turn every shipped feature into discoverable product content but don’t have the bandwidth to write it all, let’s have a chat about how Changebot automates the creation and distribution of detailed product updates.
