Icky vs converting listicles
This is how you get those results with alternatives guides.
You’re reading ‘Inside Product-led Content’ — weekly-ish, 2-min reads on building a high-converting product-led content library by me, Masooma 🤓
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Because AI has made it painfully easy to mass-produce shallow product listicles that:
Sound suspiciously identical
Don’t help buyers decide anything
Product listicles have entered their copycat era.
But the one we published for a client back in December ranked #1 in some three days:
And ChatGPT started citing it for key prompts like “why do companies switch from [competitor ABC]”
Now, four months in, the alternatives product guide still sits #2 on Google and is contributing to the leads my client’s Product-led Content (PLC) library drives.
So how did we stop our listicle-style guides from turning into AI slop and use them for what they truly are: high-conversion assets in a PLC library.
I’m not gonna sugarcoat it: we put in the work 💪🤓
Instead of stuffing in generic feature comparisons, we mapped features to our target users’ actual desired outcomes.
So, not just a flippant “has workflow automation” mention when introducing an alternative tool. Instead, we covered the depth of workflow automation offered. For example:
Does the tool offer simple “if this, then that” automation or multi-step workflows with dependencies and approvals?
Can non-technical teams build those automations themselves, or does every workflow need engineering help?
And who actually benefits from those automations — small teams or enterprises?
The idea is to look at the depth behind each feature relevant to the target reader.
Because buyers evaluating tools aren’t comparing feature checklists anymore.
They’re trying to picture: “Will this actually work for the complexity of my team?”
I also manually (yes, in this AI era) went through Reddit threads and third-party review sites to understand:
Why people switch from alternatives
What frustrates them
Which team is each tool actually best for
Where each product starts breaking down
This changed the entire guide.
[P.S. I did this on top of my client’s buyer documentation — as we discussed in the last issue: strong buyer understanding is an unskippable part of product-led content.]
Because good product-led content doesn’t just compare tools.
It helps buyers recognize themselves in the buying decision.
That’s why it ranked fast.
And why LLMs keep pulling from it months later.
Trust me when I say:
AI visibility gets easier when you build your content around buyer decisions, not keyword variations.
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I’d say I’d give you my iced Spanish latte… but let’s not get carried away!
Oh and you’re in good company, habibi — marketers from some of the best SaaS brands are reading this right alongside you:
