Commodity vs. Non-Commodity Content Types

See where your content type falls • Adjust the levers • Close the commodity gap

Content Format

Adjust the Levers

FocusMixed focus

Broad topicSpecific situation

AuthenticityDesk research

Desk researchFirst-hand

OriginalityGeneric take

Generic takeUnique POV

AudienceFor anyone

For anyoneFor someone specific

// Verdict

HIGH COMMODITY RISK

Listicle is currently rated high commodity risk with an average lever score of 1.25 out of 3.

Why non-commodity content is having a moment

Google Search Central’s documentation first referred to the concept of “non-commodity content” back in May 2025, but the phrase barely made its rounds until April 2026, when Google’s Danny Sullivan shared a couple of slides about it at Google Search Central Live Toronto. When it was first mentioned, it was within the context of creating helpful content.

So why is non-commodity content making a strong comeback when the phrase barely stuck the first time?

A few reasons:

LLMs need to rely on human experiences to aggregate the consensus. They can’t experience things the way humans can.

LLMs can’t access proprietary or non-public data, which powers original research or data-driven interactive tools.

For very niche questions that lack a corpus of content, LLMs can only resort to guessing a response.

There will still be a need for human-created content for humans — that’s my definition of non-commodity content. This becomes even clearer when you look at which content types map to commodity and non-commodity territory.

The content types with the highest commodity risk are listicles and glossaries, with comparison pages considered borderline commodity. These formats either aggregate information from different sources (i.e. listicles and comparison pages pull from product or service pages, which LLMs are great at), or lean on established facts (i.e. glossary pages).

On the other end of the spectrum, non-commodity formats include opinion and product review articles. That also tracks with the kind of content people actively seek out on social platforms like Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

A deeper analysis to follow — stay tuned.

Methodology

I compiled 10 unique content formats that SEO and marketing teams typically create. Each format was scored against 4 criteria — focus, authenticity, originality, and audience — to determine how the “average” version of that content type would score. There were 4 judges, including myself, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Each LLM was given the same prompt twice in separate incognito tabs to keep the output objective, then the scores were aggregated into the final results.