The death of the case study

When I was early in my career, I often looked at case studies with uninterest. If I wanted to test software, I'd just do it. There's a limited time cost to me, I could install it, see if it works, and if it doesn't, just move on.

Now, 10 years later, it's a bit different, priorities have shifted and I do look at case studies for software with some weight. I do want to know how our peers are using the software and what benefit they got out of it, a 15 minute read is faster than installing or setting up an account.

Now case studies aren't really what you typically consider "technical content", but I can assure you, a good case study is a mix of marketing and a mix of explaining how a problem was solved with software.

The problem now though is that case studies are now the cannon fodder of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization; the AI version of SEO), and sure; case studies are also SEO bait, but in the era before AI summaries, people did read them.

Most case studies I come across now have become unreadable. There are a few funded startups that sell you essay autogenerators to boost SEO and because of it, you get the exact same AI generated drivel that you;d see in a Google result summary but overindulgent and spread over multiple paragraphs and partitions.

Of course this is intentional, this is what the Google summaries base their content on, one could say technical content in general is being watered down to become AI bait, similar to how cooking recipies have a long essay before the actual recipe to get SEO points.

With so much non-content to trick AI scrapers into indexing your content, the stuff is barely proofread, the sales team just hope people would see the brand names using the product as enough of a case to use it. One such case was so bad I experienced, the essay kept referencing my employer's CEO as an regular engineering employee.

Now look - I wish I had AI when I was a student for sure, I'd love to not write essays -- but now that I have to read them for a living (and sure, I can get an AI summary), it really seems that I lucked out to live in an era before this.

Of course there was plenty of badly written work in the past, most engineers don't know how to write beyond a engineering doc, but in an era where even the marketing staff is forced for "efficiency" sake to push our AEO content, I feel like it can be a superpower if you know how to properly condense, summarize and write technical content in your own words.

Side comment; AI summaries

A summary is used to get a taste of the content, not a replacement of it. If you rely on AI summaries and not look deeper, it probably means that content wasn't worth in longform to you regardless.