Storytelling is still what creates trust.
I’ve been thinking about how much easier it is to produce content than it was just two years ago. In the age of AI, you can outline a campaign in the morning, draft a blog before lunch, and publish a landing page before the day ends, but storytelling is still what makes any of it matter. What once required weeks of coordination across marketing, leadership, and subject matter experts now moves in hours.
For organizations and businesses under pressure, whether it’s revenue targets, donor engagement goals, or board expectations, acceleration matters.
At the same time, something else has shifted.
As production becomes easier thanks to AI, differentiation requires more discipline. The barrier to publishing has dropped, and the bar for clarity has risen. We’re competing less for space and more for belief. And belief, whether someone is choosing a partner or supporting a cause, is built on trust.
Most marketing teams are already using AI, so the bigger question is whether strategic clarity is keeping pace. Clear positioning, a consistent narrative, and a point of view become even more important when producing the content itself gets easier.
AI is changing the other side of this too: how people find and research organizations. Someone may first encounter you through an AI answer, a search result, an article, or a specific page on your website rather than starting at the homepage. They’re piecing together an impression of you from those different encounters, often in an order you never planned for.
This is the structure I keep coming back to:
- Storytelling builds trust.
- Trust drives engagement.
- UX determines whether the story is experienced clearly.
- Design determines whether the story feels credible.
- SEO determines whether the story is discovered.
- AI, including AI-driven search, determines how the story is amplified, interpreted, and surfaced.
Everything downstream reflects the strength of the narrative upstream.
Storytelling First
Organizations are doing meaningful work. They have strong programs, capable teams, and real impact. But when you ask what they want to be known for, the answers often vary depending on who is speaking.
Storytelling aligns internally before it is expressed externally.
It clarifies:
- The specific problem you are committed to solving.
- The stakes behind that problem.
- The outcome you consistently deliver.
- The perspective you’ve developed through experience.
Strong storytelling has edges. It reflects choices. It signals focus. That kind of clarity takes intention.
Can People Move Through the Story?
Once the narrative is defined, user experience determines whether people can move through it intuitively.
Now the page someone lands on may be their first real interaction with you. A program page, service page, article, or case study has to make sense without assuming they’ve already visited your homepage.
Take a look at a few of the pages people commonly enter through. If someone landed there cold, would they understand where they are, why the information matters and where they might want to go next?
Thoughtful messaging can easily become buried under overloaded navigation, competing calls to action, and content blocks arranged without progression. The ingredients are there. The sequence isn’t.
Navigation often reveals the issue first. When menus reflect internal structures rather than audience priorities, visitors are left sorting instead of following. UX research consistently shows that as choices increase, decision time increases. More options create hesitation.
If you want to validate whether your navigation supports your storytelling, tree testing is a simple and revealing method. It tests whether users can find key information within your site structure before visual design even enters the equation. When people struggle to locate core services, programs, or resources, the issue is structural clarity, not copy. Tools like Lyssna or Optimal Workshop make this kind of testing accessible without a large research budget.
Page hierarchy reinforces direction. What to look for:
- Does your H1 communicate the central idea of the page?
- Do your H2s advance the argument?
- Is there a clear primary action?
Hierarchy signals importance. When structure aligns with narrative, the experience feels guided.
Clarity reduces cognitive load, and reduced cognitive load builds confidence.
Storytelling in the Age of AI: Does the Experience Reinforce the Message?
Design shapes perception before a single paragraph is read.
Typography, spacing, imagery, and layout influence how credible and cohesive an organization feels. People may not be able to name what is working or not working, but they feel it quickly.
Imagery that reflects your actual audience creates resonance. Generic visuals tend to blur distinction over time. Inconsistent templates weaken confidence. Animation can support emphasis, but it should serve structure and guide attention, not distract from it.
You can test whether the design is reinforcing your story:
- Heatmapping and session recording tools, such as Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity, show you where attention actually goes. If users consistently miss what you consider your core message or primary action, your visual hierarchy is likely out of alignment.
- Scroll depth tracking reveals how far users move through a page. If most visitors do not move beyond the first section of a key page, your opening narrative may be unclear, or the layout may not be earning their attention.
- Five-second tests can be surprisingly revealing. Try them on the homepage, but also on a few important entry pages. If someone sees the page briefly, what do they think it’s about? What do they remember? Is it what you hoped they would take away?
- Accessibility tools such as Lighthouse or Axe help evaluate readability, contrast, and component consistency. These are credibility signals, especially for mission-driven organizations that serve broad audiences. When accessibility issues surface, they often point to friction that quietly undermines trust.
Design expresses hierarchy visually. It reinforces what matters most. It supports tone.
Intentional design builds confidence, and confidence builds trust.
SEO and AI Search: What the Data Should Tell You
Design plays a big role in the impression people form once they arrive. Search influences which parts of the story they find in the first place.
Analytics can give you clues about whether people are finding what they expected and whether the story is holding their attention. But there isn’t one “good” engagement number that applies to every page.
The job of the page matters.
A contact page, event-details page, or quick-answer resource might do its job in 20 or 30 seconds. Someone spending that same amount of time on a detailed service page, case study, or long-form article may tell you something very different.
In GA4, average engagement time measures the time your site is actually in focus for the user, so I tend to look at it alongside what the page is supposed to accomplish rather than on its own.
As a rough directional guide:
- Under 30–40 seconds: On a quick-reference page, contact page, or simple informational page, that may be perfectly reasonable. On a detailed service page, program page, case study, or article, consistently low engagement could be a reason to look closer at whether people are finding what they expected.
- Around 60–120 seconds: On deeper content such as an article, service overview, case study, or detailed program page, this can be a useful sign that people are spending time with the content. I’d still look at scroll depth, key events, and what they do next before calling it a success.
- Bounce rates around 40–60%: These can be a useful reference point, but I wouldn’t treat the range as a universal definition of good or bad.
- A bounce rate above 70%: I’d pay attention if this is happening on a page that is supposed to move someone deeper into the site, start an application, generate an inquiry, encourage a donation, or support another important next step. On a page designed to answer one very specific question, a high bounce rate may be far less concerning.
This is where context becomes more useful than the benchmark itself.
A service page getting 90 seconds of engagement but no inquiries may still have a problem. A resource page with 25 seconds of engagement and a high exit rate might be doing exactly what it was created to do.
And for a nonprofit, the signals you care about may be different again. A program page might need to lead someone toward eligibility information or an application. A campaign page may need to drive donations. An advocacy article may be successful because it gets read and shared even if the visitor never visits another page.
In Google Search Console, look at the queries and pages getting impressions and clicks:
- Are your strongest queries connected to the topics you actually want to be known for?
- Are several pages showing up for very similar searches when one stronger page might do the job better?
- Are there important topics where you’re getting impressions but very few clicks?
If traffic increases while conversions remain flat on high-intent pages, visibility may be improving faster than persuasion. That’s a reason to look beyond rankings and traffic and ask what happens once someone arrives.
AI adds another layer. When your organization appears in an AI-generated answer, how is it being described? Which pages or ideas are getting surfaced? Does that version of your organization resemble the story you think you’re telling?
Over time, a clear body of content around the topics you genuinely know and care about makes it easier for both people and search engines to understand what your organization is about. Your audience responds to that consistency too. They start to recognize the ideas you come back to and associate your organization with a particular problem, cause, or point of view.
That kind of recognition takes time, but it’s part of how trust gets built.
The Age of AI Means Acceleration with Standards
AI tools accelerate drafting, iteration, and support structure.
The outcome depends on the framework guiding them.
Clear narrative pillars keep content focused, so be disciplined about terminology.
There’s also a more basic question worth asking before AI helps us create the next piece: do we actually need it? Some organizations already have years of content sitting on their websites. Making production faster can make that problem worse if we keep adding without looking at what’s already there.
Sometimes the better move is to update something, combine a few things, or retire content that no longer has a job to do.
That’s where guardrails matter.
- Define three to five narrative pillars and map your content to them.
- Choose your terminology carefully and use it the same way across pages.
- Look for something you can update or combine before creating another page on the same topic.
- Refine sections that express perspective manually.
- Frame prompts around real audience intent, not just volume.
The Bottom Line
The tools will continue to evolve, search will continue to change, and AI will keep reshaping how content is discovered, interpreted, and surfaced.
What tends to remain more constant is the way people evaluate credibility. They notice whether the language is clear, whether the experience feels coherent, and whether the structure, design, and messaging seem to belong together.
People may meet your organization through a page you published yesterday, an article you wrote three years ago, a search result, a social post, or an AI answer, and you won’t always control the order they encounter those things in. What you can influence is how well those pieces hold together and whether they leave people with a recognizable understanding of who you are and what you care about.
That means being clear about what you want to be known for, being thoughtful about what you keep publishing, and making sure the website, content, design, and experience continue to support that story over time. The language and context will naturally change from one touchpoint to another, but people should still be able to recognize the same organization underneath it all.
