"Content is king" is the title of the essay Bill Gates published on Microsoft's website on 3 January 1996: he argued that much of the real money on the internet would be made from content, as it had been in broadcasting. For SEO the phrase still holds, with a correction that almost nobody adds: Google rewards content that brings something new, and of the roughly 14 billion pages analysed by Ahrefs, 96.55% don't get a single visit from Google.
So yes, content is king. But most content rules over nothing.
Everyone repeats "content is king". Nobody measures it.
On 10 October 2026 we read page one of Google UK for "content is king" on a smartphone: one result is the site of a company called Content is King, one is a LinkedIn post, one is a Quora thread from 2018 and one is a page in Dutch. The AI Overview at the top sums up the first idea of Gates's essay. Nothing on the page, in the snippets we read, mentions the paragraph that matters.
Meanwhile, inside companies, the phrase leads to three mistakes we come across often:
- publishing to "keep the blog alive", one post a week on topics nobody searches for;
- rewriting page one in different words, in other words adding a tenth copy of an answer Google already has;
- measuring words instead of evidence: 2,000 words without any data of your own are worth less than 600 with a test nobody else has run.
So does content matter or not?
It does. And we see it in the projects we work on.
Macropix, a Milan-based maker of custom LED screens, was in position 88 on Google Italy for "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising monitor) in 2020. In 2025 it's in position 2, and for "ledwall" (LED wall, 4,400 searches a month in Italy) it went from absent to first place. No technical trick: one page for every thing its customers search for (here's the Macropix project).
Sunscape develops solar farms and looks for land all over Italy. In March 2026 it launched an architecture of regional pages: in six months its monthly organic impressions went from 329 to 5,809.
In both cases the work was the same: writing the pages that were missing, not rewriting the ones that already existed.
In this guide:
- what Gates actually wrote, including the sentence that predicts YouTube;
- the three reasons content carries weight in rankings, with Google's own documents;
- why 96.55% of pages get no traffic and what the others do differently;
- a test on three UK SERPs: which sources the AI Overview actually cites;
- four questions to ask before you write any piece of content.
Let's start.
What Bill Gates actually wrote in 1996 (and the paragraph nobody quotes)
The essay "Content is King" came out on 3 January 1996 on Microsoft's website. The argument is in the first line: "Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting."
Everyone knows that much.
Then Gates gives an example that reads as if it were written for people doing SEO today. A magazine, he says, can't just take what it has in print and move it online as it is: "If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video."
Put simply: if you ask someone to read on a screen, you have to repay them with deep, extremely up-to-date information they can explore however they like. With audio. And "possibly video".
Sound familiar?
It's close to the definition of helpful content Google uses thirty years later. And the "possibly video" turns up again further down, when we count the sources cited by AI answers on Google UK.
A detail worth a smile: the essay's original address on microsoft.com now returns a 404 error (checked on 10 October 2026). The text survives only thanks to the copy kept by the Web Archive. We'll come back to this at the end.
Why content is important for SEO (three reasons you can check)
Content is important for SEO because it's the only thing Google can match to a search: ranking systems read the text, headings, images and video on a page and decide which question it answers. Without content there's nothing to rank.
Put like that, it's obvious. The three concrete reasons are less so.
1. Google says so in black and white
The Google Search Central page on content opens by saying that "Google's automated ranking systems are designed to prioritize helpful, reliable information that's created to benefit people". The page was last updated on 5 October 2026.
Further down there's a list of self-assessment questions. The first one on content is this: "Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?" Original is the word that carries the weight.
2. Google removed almost half of the copied content
With the March 2024 update, Google set itself the goal of cutting low-quality, unoriginal content in its results by 40%. In April, once the rollout was complete, it announced the actual figure: 45% less (Google's blog). The same update brought in three new spam policies, including one on "scaled content abuse": producing pages at scale, by hand or with AI, purely to rank.
Content matters so much that Google built a system to throw out the poor stuff.
3. In the UK, almost everything goes through Google
In September 2026 Google had 91.39% of searches in the UK, Bing 6.08% (Statcounter). And according to Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report, 94% of people aged 16 and over have internet access at home and use it, and Google Search reached 82% of UK online adults in May 2025.
If one of your customers is looking for an answer, that's almost always where they look. And to answer them, Google needs a page that says something.
Read next: why SEO matters for a business.
96.55% of pages get no visits from Google (so content itself isn't the king)
Ahrefs analysed about 14 billion pages in its Content Explorer database: 96.55% get no traffic from Google. The study dates from December 2023, with the page updated in August 2026, and the author warns that the sample leans towards sites of higher-than-average quality. The real figure is therefore probably worse.
Ahrefs identifies three causes, and none of them is about "writing well":
- nobody searches for the topic: even in first position, a search that doesn't exist brings zero visits;
- no site links to the page: backlinks remain correlated with traffic and rankings;
- the intent doesn't match: a product page for "best yoga mats" loses to reviews, even with more links.
So content alone isn't enough?
No. The king is content that answers a real question, in the format Google already rewards, with something worth linking to. The rest is an archive.
That's why, when we take on a blog, the first thing we look at in Search Console is how many pages have had at least one click in the last twelve months. Often the most useful work is taking away, not adding: we explain this in the guide to content pruning. The difference between publishing and ranking is the subject of SEO and content marketing.
How much of your content is part of the 96.55%?
You've just seen why almost every published page gets no visits from Google. Let's look at your site in Search Console together: we'll tell you which content is working, which should be merged or removed, and which pages are missing for your customers' searches.
Book a strategy consultationOne page for every customer question (the Macropix case, from 88 to 2)
For a manufacturer, "content is king" means something specific: every product, every version and every application has its own page, because customers search for them one by one.
At the start Macropix had a single "Products" page. Today it has one for LED walls, one for the indoor version, one for the outdoor version and one for totems. Plus a page for every major installation, from the LED wall at CityLife in Milan to the stands for Fuorisalone, Milan Design Week's city-wide programme.
Each page answers a different search. The result, measured with Semrush in July 2026 on the "ledwall" keyword group on Google Italy:
| Domain | Share of voice on the "ledwall" cluster |
|---|---|
| macropix.it | 25.55% |
| amazon.it | 18.08% |
| hddsvision.it | 10.17% |
| dominodisplay.com | 4.33% |
An Italian manufacturer ahead of Amazon on the searches for its own category. With the right pages, not with an advertising budget.
How long did it take?
Five years on the most competitive category keywords: "monitor pubblicitario" went from position 88 in 2020 to 2 in 2025. There's a separate guide on realistic timescales, how long it takes to see SEO results; the full method is in the guide to SEO for manufacturers.
Sunscape is the fast-forward version of the same principle. People selling land search with the name of their area, so the site needs pages by region. From March 2026, in six months, keywords on page one went from 1 to 38 out of 143 tracked and monthly organic clicks from 46 to 195 (the Sunscape project).
In neither case did anyone write "one post a week". What got written was the missing page for a search that existed.
Is content king for AI answers too? (our test on three UK SERPs)
According to large international studies, Google's AI answers mostly cite pages that are already on page one. In the UK SERPs we measured, on the other hand, only one cited source in 26 was in the organic top ten, and about one in five was a YouTube video.
First, the international data. Ahrefs analysed 1.9 million citations in 1 million AI Overviews: 76.10% of cited pages are in Google's top 10, and 14.40% sit beyond position 100 (Ahrefs, July 2025, market not stated). And the effect on clicks is heavy: with an AI Overview on the page, the first result loses 58% of its CTR on average (Ahrefs, February 2026: 300,000 keywords, desktop CTR for December 2025, market not stated).
And in the UK?
We didn't find a UK-specific study on this. So on 10 October 2026 we ran a small test with DataForSEO: three searches about content, Google UK, on a smartphone. All three showed an AI Overview that could be read in full, and we counted the sources it cited:
| Search (Google UK, smartphone) | Sources cited in the AI Overview | Of which in the organic top 10 (same URL) | Of which YouTube videos |
|---|---|---|---|
| seo content | 10 | 0 | 1 |
| content is king | 8 | 0 | 0 |
| seo copywriting | 8 | 1 | 4 |
| Total | 26 | 1 (4%) | 5 (19%) |
Three searches is a small sample: it's a hint, not a law. But two things stand out.
Only 1 source in 26 was also in the organic top ten: a YouTube video that is the second organic result for "seo copywriting" and is also cited by the AI Overview. On the other two searches, zero. The 76% Ahrefs found doesn't show up here.
5 sources in 26 were YouTube videos, four of them on "seo copywriting" alone. Thirty years on, Gates's "possibly video" is a regular source for Google's AI answers on how to write content.
The practical consequence: to get cited, an article on its own may not be enough. You need the same content in more than one format (we cover this in how video helps SEO and in the guide to types of content). It's the work we do in our SEO for AI answers service.
What "content is king" doesn't mean (three wrong readings)
"Content is king" doesn't mean that whoever writes the most wins. Here are the three wrong readings we hear most often.
"The longer, the better"
Google doesn't use word count as a signal. What counts is depth relative to the question: a definition may need 600 words, a technical comparison 3,000. The figures are in the guide to the ideal length of a blog post, and the keyword percentage myth is taken apart in our test on 29 articles about keyword density.
"You just need to publish often"
Ahrefs's 96.55% is largely made up of pages published on a regular schedule. Frequency without search demand fills the archive, not the SERP. Verified figures on blogging and content marketing are collected in our content marketing statistics.
"With AI I can produce three times as much"
Google doesn't demote a text because a language model wrote it. It demotes mass production with no value, which since 2024 has had a precise name in its policies: scaled content abuse. What the studies say about indexing, rankings and clicks is in AI content and SEO.
How to tell whether a piece of content deserves to exist (four questions before you write it)
A piece of content deserves to exist if it passes four questions, before you even open the document. They're the same ones we asked ourselves for this article.
- Is anyone searching for it? You need a search with recurring demand, even if it's low. "Content is king" gets about 90 searches a month in the UK (Google Ads, average of the last twelve months): not many, but steady.
- What format does Google reward for that search? If page one is full of guides, write a guide. If it's full of service pages, an article won't get through.
- What am I bringing that the others don't have? A client's data, a test, first-hand experience. Here it's the Gates paragraph nobody quotes and the count on three SERPs.
- Who will link to it, and from where? From outside, if there's a figure worth citing. From inside, always: every new page should get links from the ones that already rank.
If any of the four answers is no, that content isn't a king. It's a cost.
The writing technique itself (titles, headings, internal links) is in the guide on how to write content for SEO, and the way Google assesses who is writing is explained in the guide to E-E-A-T. If you'd rather start from the keywords in your own market, our SEO consultancy starts from exactly these four questions.
FAQs about content is king and SEO
Bill Gates, in the essay "Content is King" published on Microsoft's website on 3 January 1996. He argued that much of the real money on the internet would be made from content, as it had been in broadcasting, and that people reading online must be rewarded with deep, up-to-date information.
Yes, but only for content that answers a real question with something original. Of the roughly 14 billion pages analysed by Ahrefs, 96.55% get no visits from Google, and after the March 2024 update Google reported 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in its results.
It depends. Without content there's nothing to rank, but between two pages that answer the same question well, links remain one of the factors that make the difference. Ahrefs names the lack of backlinks as one of the three reasons pages get no traffic.
No. Google doesn't demote a text because of how it was produced, but it treats as spam the mass production of pages with no value for the reader (scaled content abuse), whether done by hand or with AI.
It depends on the search. Word count isn't a ranking factor; what counts is covering the question better than the results already on page one. A definition may need a few hundred words, a technical comparison several thousand.
Summary (and why Gates's essay is still online)
Content is king: Bill Gates, 3 January 1996.
Content matters because it's the only thing Google can match to a search.
But 96.55% of pages don't get a single visit.
The winner is the missing page, for a search that exists.
In the UK AI answers we measured, about one source in five was a video.
One detail almost nobody in our industry notices. Gates's essay is the clearest proof of its own argument: thirty years on everyone quotes it, because he was the first to say it. Yet the original page on microsoft.com no longer exists. If the Web Archive hadn't saved it, the most quoted piece of content in digital marketing would today be a 404.
Updating, redirecting and keeping the URL alive are part of the content. Without maintenance, even the king disappears.
Until next time!
