What is Commodity Content?
Commodity content is content where the reader does not care who produced it. Definitions, how-to steps, integration lists and comparison tables all count. It still needs to exist, because buyers search for it, but it carries no premium. Since AI made production nearly free, commodity content became the entry fee for being visible rather than a reason to be chosen.
Think about a bag of sugar. You have probably never checked which farm it came from. You wanted sugar, the shop had sugar, you bought sugar. Now think about a frying pan. You do not want a handmade one, you want one that works and does not cost £200 (well most people anyway!).
Some purchases are about who made the thing. Most are not. Content works the same way, and Team 4 uses commodity content as the name for everything sitting in the second group.
What makes content a commodity?
Content becomes a commodity when the reader gets the same value from it regardless of who wrote it. The information is settled, the format is standard, and the author adds nothing the reader could not get somewhere else.
In B2B SaaS, that usually covers:
- Glossary and definition pages
- How-to and setup instructions
- Feature and integration list pages
- Basic comparison tables
- Category explainers that repeat what the category already agrees on
None of that is a criticism. Someone searching "what is CIS deduction" wants an accurate answer in thirty seconds. They are not looking for a personality. Giving them a clean, correct page is good marketing.
The mistake is treating that page as an advantage. It is not. It is a shelf-stocking exercise.
Google already uses this language
This is not a term we invented in a vacuum. Google's own guidance on succeeding in AI features tells publishers to prioritise valuable, unique, non-commodity content (Google Search Central, 2026).
That phrasing matters. Google is drawing exactly the same line: there is content that anyone could produce, and content only you could produce. The platforms are optimising for the second kind because the first kind now exists in effectively unlimited supply.
Is commodity content bad for SEO?
No. Commodity content is necessary for SEO and useless as a differentiator, which are two separate things.
You need it because buyers run those searches, because it gives you topical coverage, and because AI search engines pull definitions and how-to answers constantly. Skip it and you are invisible for a chunk of your category's vocabulary.
What it will not do is make anyone choose you. Nobody has ever booked a demo because a glossary page was well written. So the question is not whether to produce it. The question is how little it should cost you.
Cheap, fast, accurate, live. Then move on.
How do I know if I'm producing commodity content?
Run one test on any page: could a competitor publish this exact page, change the logo, and have it still make sense?
If yes, it is commodity content. Price it accordingly.
The test catches a lot of things people are proud of. Long educational blog posts about the category. Round-ups of industry trends. "Ultimate guides" without any unique insight that summarise what everyone already knows. All of it passes as legitimate content marketing and all of it fails the logo test.
Commodity content versus content only you could make
The second column is where the money should go, because it is the only column AI cannot flood.
The expensive bit in the middle
Between the two columns sits the tier that quietly eats most B2B SaaS content budgets: the post that took a human three days to write and still says what everyone else says.
It costs like premium content and performs like commodity content. It has all the production overhead of something original with none of the scarcity. Team 4 sees this on most content audits, and it is usually the single biggest line of waste in the plan.
Two speeds work. Cheap enough that the cost does not matter, or good enough that only you could have made it. The middle is where budget goes to die.
Why this matters more in AI search than it did in Google
AI search engines are far more selective about what they quote than Google is about what it ranks. One study of 548,534 pages found ChatGPT cites only around 15% of the pages it retrieves (AirOps, 2026).
Being findable is now the easy half. Being worth quoting is the hard half, and commodity content is by definition the least quotable material you own, because a hundred other pages say the same thing. The pages that get cited are the ones carrying a number, a result or a position nobody else has.
That is the whole argument for splitting your content into two speeds. Getting your commodity layer indexed keeps you present in AI search results and AI Overviews. Building genuinely scarce content is what gets you named as the recommendation.
Frequently asked questions
Is commodity content the same as AI-generated content?
No. Commodity content describes what the content is, not how it was made. A human can spend three days writing commodity content, and often does. AI is simply the cheapest way to produce it now, which is why the two terms get confused.
Should I use AI to write commodity content?
Yes, with a human check for accuracy and brand consistency. Commodity content is the clearest use case for AI in a content plan, because speed and cost matter more than voice. Save the human hours for the work AI cannot do.
How much of my content plan should be commodity content?
There is no fixed ratio, but the test is budget rather than volume. Commodity content can be a large share of your published pages while taking a small share of your spend. If it is eating significant hours, something is wrong with how you are producing it.
Does commodity content still get cited by AI tools?
Sometimes, for straightforward definitional questions where any accurate answer will do. It rarely gets cited for recommendation or comparison questions, which are the ones that produce pipeline. Entity optimisation helps your commodity pages get picked up for the former.
About Team 4
Team 4 is a B2B SaaS marketing agency in London. We build Inbound Engines for seed to Series B software companies: SEO, GEO, content, paid media and CRO run as one system and measured against pipeline rather than traffic. If your content plan is full of the middle tier, that is usually the first thing we cut. See whether a specialist B2B SaaS agency is right for your stage.
