Here's what nobody in SaaS marketing wants to admit: most of your content is indistinguishable from your competitors'.
Same topics. Same structure. Same recycled advice from the same SEO playbooks. The only difference is your logo in the header.
Google noticed. And they're done rewarding it.
The Shift That Changes Everything
Google's E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) isn't new. But how aggressively they're enforcing it is.
The extra "E" for Experience was added in December 2022. Since then, I've watched smaller blogs written by practitioners consistently outrank massive corporate content operations. Not sometimes. Regularly.
A solo founder sharing how they actually solved a problem beats a 50-person content team publishing generic guides. A product manager explaining a real workflow beats an agency writer who's never used the software.
This isn't a fluke. It's the new reality.
Why This Matters for B2B SaaS
Most SaaS companies have been playing content marketing wrong. They hire writers who don't use their product, don't understand their customers, and definitely don't have battle scars from solving the problems they're writing about.
The content looks professional. It hits the keyword targets. It checks all the SEO boxes.
And it's getting crushed by someone's Substack.
Here's why: Google can now detect the difference between someone who's done the work and someone who's summarizing other people's work. The signals are everywhere:
Specific details that only come from experience. Generic content says "improve your onboarding flow." Experienced content says "we reduced time-to-value from 14 days to 3 by moving the integration setup before the team invite step."
Opinions that come from actually trying things. Generic content presents all options as equal. Experienced content says "we tested Segment, RudderStack, and building our own. Here's why we chose RudderStack and what broke in the first month."
Mistakes and failures alongside wins. Generic content is relentlessly positive. Experienced content includes the part where everything went wrong and what you learned from it.
Google's systems are getting better at recognizing these patterns. And users have always recognized them. They just click differently.
The Content Farm Collapse
For years, the SEO game was about volume. More pages, more keywords, more content. Programmatic content at scale. AI-generated articles polished by editors. Massive content operations designed to cover every possible search query.
That strategy is dying.
Not because Google announced it. Because the results are changing. I'm seeing sites that built their entire traffic strategy on volume getting quietly decimated. Not by penalties. Just by better content ranking above them.
The sites winning now share common traits:
Named authors with real credentials. Not "Content Team" or "Staff Writer." Actual humans with LinkedIn profiles, published work, and verifiable experience in what they're writing about.
Content depth that only comes from doing. You can tell within 30 seconds whether someone has actually implemented what they're teaching. The specificity is different. The edge cases they mention. The warnings they include.
A clear point of view. Generic content tries to please everyone. Experienced content takes positions. It says "this is wrong" and "here's what actually works." It has opinions because the author has earned them.
How SaaS Companies Should Respond
If you're running content at a B2B SaaS company, this shift is either a threat or an opportunity. Depends on what you do next.
Stop outsourcing expertise. Your best content won't come from freelancers who've never used your product. It'll come from your product team, your customer success managers, your engineers, your founders. The people who actually know things.
Yes, they're busy. Yes, they're not "writers." Doesn't matter. A rough draft from someone with real experience is worth more than a polished piece from someone without it.
Build author authority deliberately. Every piece of content should have a named author with a real bio. That author should be building their presence outside your blog too. LinkedIn posts. Podcast appearances. Conference talks. The goal is for Google (and readers) to recognize them as a genuine expert.
This isn't vanity. It's infrastructure. Author authority compounds over time and transfers to everything they publish.
Go deeper on fewer topics. The volume play is over. The depth play is just starting.
Instead of 100 thin articles covering every keyword in your space, publish 20 pieces that are definitively the best resource on their topic. Content that practitioners actually bookmark and reference. Content that other sites link to because it's genuinely useful.
Document your actual work. The most valuable content a SaaS company can create is documentation of real decisions, real implementations, real results. Case studies with actual numbers. Post-mortems on what didn't work. Behind-the-scenes looks at how you built features.
This content is impossible to fake and impossible to replicate. It's your moat.
The Opportunity Nobody's Taking
Here's what I find fascinating: most SaaS companies are sitting on a goldmine of E-E-A-T content and doing nothing with it.
Your support team answers the same questions every day. Those answers, expanded into proper guides, would outrank most of the generic content in your space.
Your product team made hundreds of decisions about how to build your software. Those decisions, explained with context, would be valuable to everyone in your industry.
Your customers figured out workflows and integrations and use cases you never imagined. Those stories, told properly, would attract exactly the prospects you want.
This content exists. It's just trapped in Slack channels and Notion docs and people's heads. The companies that figure out how to extract it and publish it will own their categories.
The Long Game
E-E-A-T isn't a tactic you can fake. That's the point. This is why I always advocate for building systems over chasing tactics.
You can't hire an agency to manufacture experience. You can't use AI to generate genuine expertise. You can't shortcut your way to authoritativeness.
You have to actually know things. You have to actually do things. You have to actually help people.
For companies that have been doing the work, this is vindication. Your expertise is finally being recognized as the asset it always was.
For companies that have been gaming the system with content volume and keyword optimization, the reckoning is here. The old playbook doesn't work anymore.
What To Do Monday Morning
If you're running SEO at a B2B SaaS company, here's where to start:
Audit your author pages. Do your content authors have real bios? Real credentials? Real presence outside your blog? If not, fix it.
Identify your internal experts. Who in your company actually knows things that your audience needs to learn? How can you get their knowledge into content?
Review your content for experience signals. Read your last 10 blog posts. Can you tell they were written by someone who's done the work? Or could they have been written by anyone with access to Google?
Pick one topic to own completely. What's the one thing your company knows better than anyone else? Build the definitive resource on it.
The companies that take E-E-A-T seriously will build sustainable organic traffic that compounds over time. The ones that keep publishing generic content will wonder why their traffic keeps declining.
Google is rewarding real expertise. The question is whether you have any to show.