Frontier content: How to survive online in the age of AI

Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel.

Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of the AI startup Vercel, recently coined the term “frontier content” to describe the type of information that helps website owners survive in the new AI era.

ChatGPT has stoked a boom in large language models and chatbots that ingest everything on the internet and can answer questions convincingly.

This is beginning to upend how information is consumed online. Search engines and social-media platforms have distributed most content. But AI models and chatbots could take over, creating a challenge for content creators.

If AI models and bots answer questions directly, users won’t visit websites and apps as much. These businesses will sell fewer subscriptions, and their advertising revenue may fall.

Rauch’s answer is to rely more on frontier content, which is a combination of exclusive, original information delivered quickly along with individual perspectives and experiences.

“The baseline to survive will be producing frontier content, having great content velocity,” he told me in a recent interview. Without that, he said, “you just became a fact in an AI summary.”

Closing the information gap

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, the most obvious and glaring deficiency was that it lacked up-to-date information.

The underlying AI models take at least three months to be trained on mountains of data. So recent information wasn’t included in the training process.

“In the following 18 months, the tech industry went haywire solving that problem,” Rauch said. “And it’s now an effectively solved problem.”

“Grounding” techniques, such as retrieval-augmented generation, are now popular additional steps to inject new information into the AI-model Q&A process so that users get fresher, more accurate answers.

At the ‘bleeding edge’

The result is that AI chatbots and similar tools can answer a lot more questions.

“AIs will be so knowledgeable in the vast majority of topics and news,” Rauch said. “What’s going to stand out the most to users of the internet is content that is at the very bleeding edge that the AIs have not been trained on and have not even received queries for yet.”

He said the best example of this is exclusive news or other original breaking information.

“The people that break that news are going to have a disproportionate advantage over the rest,” Rauch said. He added that AIs would have already ingested other types of content, so that would be a lot less valuable.

A new level of speed

Vercel helps developers build the user-facing parts of web applications, so the startup has deep experience with online content and publishing.

Rauch sees speed as another crucial part of surviving in the era of AI-powered content distribution.

“AIs still need to aggregate, summarize, consume, index,” so getting exclusive information online as quickly as possible is key, he said.

Rauch shared a recent example where he was looking for information about Nvidia’s quarterly results right when the chip giant was releasing its financials.

“I saw that MarketWatch had this real-time thing where it almost seemed like the journalist was typing as I was consuming the page,” Rauch said. “I’m very much attracted to that as a consumer, and that’s why I actually didn’t get an AI overview for that answer.”

Moving away from SEO

Rauch also sees a move away from search-engine optimization, where website owners obsess about how they rank in Google search results.

He said AI models and chatbots would form their own “opinion” on topics, based heavily on the frontier content that’s been used to ground them.

“Instead of just purely focusing on where you rank in terms of blue links, you have to shift to where you stand in terms of the frontier content that the AI has ingested that, therefore, forms its opinion,” Rauch said.

He describes this as “monitoring what’s in the mind of the AI.”

“We haven’t been confronted with this reality yet,” he added. “It hasn’t really fully sunk in for people.”

Unique perspectives and experiences

Rauch also predicted that when AIs know almost all the facts already, human perspectives and experiences will become more valuable.

A description of a new piece of software is likely to be handled by AI, but a developer’s own experience using this software will stand out.

“This is my experience with this piece of software; no one can deny that. Right? And this is not something that will be so subject to summarization by the AI,” Rauch said. “Actual opinions are going to be worth more.”