Was SEO Content Ever Good? JH Scherck on the AI Slop Debate

Ross Hudgens sits down with JH Scherck, founder of Growth Plays, for a refreshingly contrarian take on AI content. JH argues that with the right context and execution, AI already gets you 85–90% of the way to a strong B2B article, and that the real skill in 2026 is being the person who can take a B+ draft to an A+. 

Along the way he flips the industry's favorite critique on its head: was SEO content *ever* good? He makes the case that the bar was always low, and that it took removing humans from the equation for anyone to start caring about sentence construction and quality at all. 

Ross and JH also dig into where AI content genuinely works (dev tools, technical docs, location pages) versus where it falls flat, the telltale "it's 3 a.m. and your microservices are failing" intro pattern, why plugging more data sources into your workflow isn't differentiation, whether people will stop browsing websites and just chat with them, the perils nobody's discussing, how your product's history follows you around in LLMs, and why AI turns C players into more prolific C players rather than A players.

0:00 Getting 85% There: Where AI Already Beats Most Writers

4:45 The AI Doer vs. the AI Reviewer

8:48 "Was SEO Content Ever Good?" Rethinking the Slop Debate

12:24 What Actually Differentiates Content Now

16:13 Will People Stop Browsing and Just Chat With Your Site?

21:45 The Perilous Side of AI Content Nobody's Discussing

33:07 Maintenance Mode & Why Your History Follows You in LLMs

39:29 Educating Executives & Avoiding the "Slop Cannon"

48:12 Traffic Recovery, Brand Problems & Qualifying Clients Out

53:34 The Truth About ChatGPT Leads & Aggregate Citation Data

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