Artificial Intelligence

The internet spent the last 25 years rewarding companies that could publish useful information. Artificial intelligence is changing the value of that information.

In a recent Instagram Reel, Glove Jones made an observation that should get the attention of every marketer and business leader: as search becomes increasingly agentic, the things most likely to survive and thrive are trusted brands, personalities, communities, proprietary data, and real experiences. His argument goes beyond another prediction that “SEO is dead.” We’ve heard versions of that headline for years, usually followed by SEO continuing to work just fine.

This shift is more fundamental. AI is making ordinary information abundant. It can find information, summarize it, compare sources, answer increasingly complicated questions, and now take actions on someone’s behalf. As information becomes easier to produce and easier to consume without visiting the source that created it, simply having information becomes less valuable.

For construction companies, that should change how we think about content, thought leadership, expertise, and ultimately the brand itself.

Because if AI can reproduce most of what you publish, why should anyone care that you published it?

Google isn’t killing the search box. It’s turning it into something much bigger.

There’s an important clarification to Jones’s premise. Google has not announced that it is eliminating its search bar. In May 2026, Google called its new AI-powered Search box the “biggest upgrade in over 25 years.” The new experience accepts text, images, files, videos, and even Chrome tabs, then reasons across those inputs. Google is also combining AI Overviews and AI Mode into a more conversational search experience.

More importantly, Google is building agents directly into Search. Information agents can monitor the web in the background, synthesize developments, notify users when something changes, and help them take action. Google is also expanding agentic capabilities into activities such as booking services and shopping.

The search box isn’t disappearing. The old relationship between the searcher, the search engine, and your website is.

For years, the basic bargain was relatively simple. Someone searched for something. Google displayed a list of websites. The person clicked a result, visited a website, consumed the information, and perhaps took another action.

Now the AI can increasingly sit between the user and those websites. It can research multiple sources, synthesize the information, answer the question, continue the conversation, monitor the subject, and eventually perform parts of the task. That changes what information is worth.

AI is turning information into a commodity

Consider how much construction marketing content follows essentially the same formula:

• “What is preconstruction?”
• “Five Benefits of Design-Build Construction.”
• “How to Choose the Right General Contractor.”
• “Why Safety Matters in Construction.”
• “Five Trends Changing Healthcare Construction.”

Most of that content wasn’t particularly differentiated before AI. Now a sophisticated AI model can produce a competent version of it in seconds, and it can also summarize 20 versions written by your competitors.

That doesn’t mean educational content suddenly has no value. Buyers still have questions, search still matters, and Google is very clearly continuing to send people to websites from its AI experiences. Google says AI Mode has already surpassed one billion monthly users, while AI Overviews exceeds 2.5 billion monthly active users.

What is changing is the value of commodity information. Google itself is telling website owners to pay attention. Its updated guidance for generative AI Search specifically emphasizes providing unique, non-commodity content rather than creating more interchangeable information.

That’s a pretty significant choice of words.

If you’re publishing something that 50 competitors could publish, and AI could write without ever talking to your team, you haven’t created much of a competitive advantage. You created more information.

The next content advantage is something AI can’t manufacture

This is where Jones’s framework gets particularly interesting. He identifies trusted brands, personalities, communities, proprietary data, and real experiences as assets that become more valuable as AI commoditizes information.

I would add another layer: perspective.

Information tells me what happened. Perspective tells me what you think it means. Experience tells me why you believe it. Proprietary data gives me evidence I couldn’t get somewhere else. Personality gives me a reason to remember who said it, and trust determines whether I believe you.

AI is astonishingly useful for information retrieval and synthesis. But when everyone has access to increasingly similar artificial intelligence, access to the tool doesn’t create much differentiation.

Your inputs do.

Construction companies are sitting on mountains of information nobody else has

This is where I think construction companies have an enormous opportunity. Most contractors possess extraordinary amounts of knowledge that never becomes marketing content.

Your preconstruction team knows what is happening to costs before most people in your market do. Your estimators see changes in subcontractor participation, pricing, labor pressure, material availability, and escalation. Your project executives know which decisions consistently cause schedule problems, while your project managers know where owners get frustrated.

Your superintendents have seen hundreds of good ideas look terrific on paper and fail in the field. Your teams know which design decisions create constructability problems, which procurement approaches work, which project types are changing, and where clients repeatedly waste money.

Meanwhile, marketing publishes “Five Reasons to Hire a General Contractor Early.”

We can do better.

The knowledge inside your company is an asset. Marketing’s job should increasingly be to extract, organize, analyze, package, and distribute that knowledge—not merely generate another month of content for the editorial calendar.

Proprietary research becomes a moat

This is one reason I’m increasingly bullish on primary research for construction brands. AI can summarize a report, but it can’t retroactively conduct the research your company never did.

Imagine a healthcare contractor surveying 100 hospital facility executives about their capital-program priorities. A higher education contractor could analyze five years of campus construction trends across its region, while a multifamily contractor could publish original research about the causes of preconstruction delays.

A specialty contractor could analyze hundreds of completed projects to identify which design conditions correlate with change orders. A GC could use its estimating data—carefully anonymized and aggregated—to provide insights about escalation, subcontractor participation, procurement timing, or market-sector capacity.

Suddenly the content isn’t merely competing for search traffic. It becomes the source other people discuss.

That distinction becomes increasingly valuable in an AI-mediated internet because AI systems still need material to learn from, synthesize, reference, and cite. Google is even expanding features designed to make original reporting, influential sources, firsthand perspectives, creator insights, social discussions, and trusted sources more visible within its AI experiences.

Don’t just answer the existing question better.

Create information that didn’t exist before.

Real experience is becoming more valuable, too

Construction has another competitive advantage that many industries would love to have: you actually build things. You have real projects, clients, problems, decisions, mistakes, innovations, and lessons.

Unfortunately, contractors often sanitize those experiences until nothing interesting remains. A typical project profile says the project was challenging, collaboration was important, the team worked together, and everyone was proud of the finished building.

Great. So did everybody else’s.

Real experience gets much more interesting when you’re willing to explain what actually happened. What did the team discover during preconstruction? What assumption turned out to be wrong? What did you change? What almost caused the project to miss its deadline?

What did the superintendent see that nobody else did? What did you recommend that saved the owner money? What would you do differently next time?

Those answers have fingerprints on them. AI can imitate the structure of a case study, but it cannot have spent 18 months solving the problem your team solved.

Google appears to understand that distinction as well. Its May 2026 Search updates specifically expanded the visibility of firsthand perspectives from public discussions, social media, creators, and communities.

Experience isn’t an SEO trick. It’s evidence that you’ve actually done the work.

Founder-led and expert-led brands have another advantage

Jones also points toward the growing importance of personalities, creators, podcasts, YouTube, Instagram, and founder-led brands. Construction companies should pay attention.

For years, many contractors have intentionally removed personality from their marketing. Websites speak in a corporate collective voice. Executives rarely publish opinions. Subject-matter experts are hidden three clicks deep on the team page, and social media mostly consists of project photos, employee anniversaries, safety lunches, and golf tournaments.

The company may employ brilliant people, but you would never know it from the outside. That’s a missed opportunity in an internet increasingly filled with machine-generated sameness.

People follow people. They remember the estimator who explains why a common budgeting assumption is wrong, the healthcare construction executive who has a strong point of view about phasing occupied renovations, and the superintendent who teaches young project managers what drawings don’t tell them.

The goal isn’t to turn your CEO into an influencer. The goal is to let expertise have a face.

Your brand should make its experts more visible, and those experts should make the brand more credible.

A point of view is harder to commoditize than information

This may be the biggest opportunity of all. Too much construction thought leadership doesn’t actually contain much thought.

It explains, summarizes, and reports, but it rarely argues.

Real thought leadership should occasionally make someone say, I hadn’t thought about it that way.

Perhaps your company believes GMP contingency is routinely misunderstood. Perhaps your superintendent thinks architects should involve field leadership earlier. Perhaps your preconstruction leader believes an accepted industry practice is wasting owners’ money, or your CEO believes the industry’s approach to workforce development is fundamentally broken.

Those perspectives won’t appeal to everyone, and that’s part of what makes them valuable.

AI is exceptional at synthesizing the consensus. Brands have an opportunity to provide the informed perspective that moves the conversation beyond it.

That doesn’t mean manufacturing controversy for attention. A/E/C has enough chest-beating without adding another executive trying to become the construction industry’s newest LinkedIn provocateur. It means having informed opinions backed by experience.

Community may become more important than audience

There is another important distinction in Jones’s framework: community. An audience consumes what you publish. A community interacts with it, contributes to it, challenges it, discusses it, and eventually builds relationships around it.

For construction companies, community doesn’t have to mean building a giant Facebook group. It might be a quarterly roundtable of healthcare facility leaders, a breakfast series for architects and developers, or a research panel of higher education capital-program executives.

It could be an annual benchmarking study where participants receive deeper findings, a podcast that becomes a gathering place for people working in a specific market, or a newsletter that clients actually forward because it consistently teaches them something.

The technology will continue changing. Platforms will rise and fall. Algorithms will get rewritten.

Relationships between people are much harder to disrupt.

Stop asking AI to create your expertise

There is an irony in all of this. AI is one of the most powerful marketing tools construction companies have ever had. I use it. A/E/C CMOs will use it extensively. It can accelerate research, identify patterns, organize information, improve workflows, analyze data, repurpose content, and dramatically increase what a small marketing team can accomplish.

The mistake is using AI to manufacture expertise you don’t possess.

If your content strategy becomes asking ChatGPT for “20 blog topics for a commercial contractor” and publishing whatever comes back, you’ve simply found a faster way to become indistinguishable.

Use AI to amplify your expertise. Use it to interrogate your proprietary data, help subject-matter experts organize their thinking, turn a 45-minute interview with a superintendent into several useful pieces of content, analyze research responses, find patterns across years of project information, and challenge an executive’s argument before publishing it.

AI should make your company’s unique knowledge easier to extract and distribute. It shouldn’t become the source of the knowledge.

The future internet may be AI for utility and humans for meaning

Jones describes the emerging split particularly well: AI for utility, humans for meaning. I think he’s onto something.

When I want a quick comparison, calculation, definition, summary, itinerary, or synthesis, AI is remarkably useful. But humans still want to know who has actually been there, whose judgment they trust, who has a perspective worth hearing, who discovered something new, and who understands their world.

They also want to know who can tell the story and who they want to work with.

That’s why the rise of AI doesn’t make branding less important. It makes Magnetic Brands more important.

A magnetic construction brand isn’t merely visible. It possesses enough expertise, distinction, credibility, personality, and trust that people deliberately seek it out, remember it, recommend it, and want to hear what it has to say.

In a world drowning in perfectly competent information, competence alone won’t create much gravity.

What construction marketers should do now

Don’t respond to AI Search by producing twice as much content. Produce more content that could only come from your company.

Interview the experts hiding inside your organization. Conduct original research. Analyze your own data. Develop a point of view. Tell better project stories. Put knowledgeable people in front of cameras and microphones. Create communities around the markets you serve. Publish experiences rather than generic explanations, and invest in building a brand people recognize before an AI agent ever recommends a list of contractors.

SEO still matters. Your website still matters. Technical optimization still matters. Google itself is continuing to build ways for AI Search users to discover and visit original websites and trusted sources.

But optimizing commodity content isn’t a durable strategy when the machines themselves can manufacture commodity content.

The competitive question is changing from “Can Google find us?” to “Do we have something worth finding?”

That’s a much harder question, and it’s also a much better one.

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Sources

Glove Jones. Instagram Reel discussing the shift toward agentic search and the increasing value of trusted brands, personalities, communities, proprietary data, and real experiences. Reel: DYm93z3NgGL.

Google. “A New Era for AI Search,” May 19, 2026. Google describes its new AI-powered Search box as its largest upgrade in more than 25 years and outlines information agents, agentic capabilities, and generative interfaces in Search.

Google. “New Opportunities, Control and Insights for Website Owners,” June 3, 2026. Google recommends unique, non-commodity content for visibility in generative AI Search and reports more than one billion AI Mode users and 2.5 billion AI Overviews users.

Google. “New Ways to Find Your Favorite Sources and Original Content in AI Search,” May 27, 2026. Google describes features emphasizing trusted sources, original content, creator insights, and firsthand perspectives.

Google. “5 New Ways to Explore the Web With Generative AI in Search,” May 6, 2026. Google discusses surfacing authentic voices, original content, social discussions, and firsthand sources within its AI Search experiences.