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18h • Traffic Generation
Is "Customer-Centric" Content Dead? Surviving the May 2026 Algorithm
For years, the marketing advice I was given told me: it's not about you.
Don't talk about yourself. Talk about how you help. Lead with the transformation, not your story. Keep yourself out of it because people don't care about you, they care about their problem.
And I listened. I scrubbed myself out of my content, and ended up with content that could have been written by anyone.
Then Google dropped its May 2026 broad core update, and suddenly the whole game flipped.
Google is now actively filtering out content that lacks discernible personal experience. You must demonstrate your expertise, or genuine identity behind the content you create.
The algorithm is no longer asking "are the keywords right?" In this brave new way of being it is now asking "who wrote this, what have they done, what do they know and do they know what they're talking about?"
Which means the experts who told me to keep myself out of it were, accidentally, setting me up to be invisible.
So is customer-centric content dead?
Not exactly. Writing for your reader is still the right instinct. From my understanding of this new change, the problem was never caring about my audience. The problem was disappearing in the process of doing it.
There's a difference between content that serves the reader and content that erases the writer.
For a long time, I thought putting myself in my content was self-indulgent, that it got in the way of the message. What I didn't realise was that I am a crucial part of the message.
The lived experience, the hard-won opinion, the specific perspective that only comes from actually doing the work that I do is now the signal Google is actively looking for.
Search is now harder than it was (and it was hard!) but that may not be a bad thing for people who are serious about what they're building.
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Is "Customer-Centric" Content Dead? Surviving the May 2026 Algorithm
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