The 20-Topic Test: How to Know If Your Content Strategy Would Survive Without Google
Zach Chmael
Head of Marketing
6 minutes
In This Article
Sit down and figure out the 20 topics you'd want to cover even if they got no traffic from search. What are the topics so important to your business that they must exist? What questions do your customers ask all the time? What principles and ethos define your brand? What's the one subject you know better than anyone else? Write that content. Then — almost as an afterthought — check if there's search volume behind it. This is the 20-Topic Test. And it's the single most important strategic exercise a founder can do in 2026.
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TL;DR:
🔍 Zero-click searches now account for 60% of all queries. AI Overviews are absorbing the clicks that used to be yours. The startups still building content strategies entirely around Google traffic are building on a foundation that's visibly eroding
📝 The 20-Topic Test: list the 20 topics you'd publish even if Google sent zero traffic — the topics so essential to your business that they must exist regardless of search volume
🏰 These are your moat topics: the content that builds brand, earns AI citations, drives email subscribers, and creates the proprietary depth competitors can't copy
🔄 Then cross-reference with search data. Where your moat topics overlap with keyword opportunity, you've found your highest-leverage content. Where they don't overlap, you've found your brand-building editorial
⚡ The best content strategies are built from conviction first and validated by data second — not the other way around
Zach Chmael
CMO, Averi
"We built Averi around the exact workflow we've used to scale our web traffic over 6000% in the last 6 months."
Your content should be working harder.
Averi's content engine builds Google entity authority, drives AI citations, and scales your visibility so you can get more customers.
The 20-Topic Test: How to Know If Your Content Strategy Would Survive Without Google
What Happens to Your Content Strategy When Google Stops Sending Clicks?
It's not a hypothetical. It's a Tuesday.
Sixty percent of searches now end without a click. On mobile, it's 77%. When AI Overviews appear, zero-click rates hit 83%. Google's own AI is absorbing the traffic that used to flow to your blog — summarizing your best content in a paragraph and giving the user no reason to visit.
Ryan Law, Ahrefs' Director of Content Marketing, said the quiet part out loud in early 2026: the Ahrefs blog — one of the most authoritative SEO content properties on the internet — is seeing steady organic traffic declines. If it's happening to Ahrefs, it's happening to you.
His advice was the most clarifying thing anyone has said about content strategy in years.
Paraphrasing: sit down and figure out the 20 topics you'd want to cover even if they got no traffic from search.
What are the topics so important to your business that they must exist? What questions do your customers ask all the time? What principles and ethos define your brand? What's the one subject you know better than anyone else?
Write that content. Then — almost as an afterthought — check if there's search volume behind it.
This is the 20-Topic Test. And it's the single most important strategic exercise a founder can do in 2026.
Why Most Content Strategies Are Built Backwards
The standard content strategy process goes like this: open a keyword research tool, sort by volume and difficulty, pick topics that look winnable, and write articles designed to rank for those terms.
This process produces content that's optimized for discovery and empty of conviction.
It's how you end up with a blog full of articles that rank for generic terms, generate anonymous traffic, and convert nobody — because the content was chosen by an algorithm, not by someone who understands the audience's actual problems.
The articles exist because a keyword tool said they should, not because your company has something distinctive to say about the subject.
In a world where Google reliably sent clicks to the top results, this was a viable strategy.
Volume in, traffic out. Simple arithmetic.
In 2026, that arithmetic is broken. AI Overviews are eating informational queries. Zero-click rates are climbing every quarter. The traffic you used to get from ranking #3 is now absorbed by the AI summary at the top of the page. And AI systems aren't citing the keyword-optimized article that says what everyone else says — they're citing the one with original perspective, proprietary data, and genuine expertise.
The content that survives the zero-click era isn't the content built around keyword volume. It's the content built around conviction — topics so essential to your business that their value doesn't depend on whether Google sends traffic.
The 20-Topic Test identifies that content.
How to Run the 20-Topic Test
This exercise takes 45-60 minutes.
It requires no tools, no keyword data, and no SEO expertise. It requires honest thinking about what your company knows, what your audience needs, and what you believe.
Step 1: Clear the Keyword Data From Your Mind
This is the hardest step.
Every founder who's touched content marketing has been trained to think in keywords. "Content marketing for startups" — 2,400 monthly searches. "Best AI tools for marketing" — 6,100 monthly searches. The numbers feel like validation. They're not. They're a crutch.
For the next 45 minutes, forget search volume exists. You're writing for an audience of people who already know you, already trust you, and are reading because they want to hear your perspective — not because Google sent them.
Step 2: Answer These Five Questions
Write your answers. Don't filter. Don't optimize. Just think.
What do your customers ask you in every sales call, demo, or onboarding session? Not what they search for on Google — what they actually ask you, face to face, when they're trying to decide if your product solves their problem. These questions are gold because they represent real buyer intent expressed in real language. And most companies never turn them into content.
What do you believe about your industry that most people disagree with? Every strong brand has contrarian convictions — perspectives that challenge conventional wisdom. These are your editorial positions. They're also the content that earns AI citations, because AI systems reward sources that provide a distinctive perspective rather than restating the consensus.
What has your company learned through experience that can't be found elsewhere? Proprietary insights from building your product, serving your customers, or operating in your market. The lessons that only come from doing, not from reading. This is the content your competitors' AI literally cannot generate — because the inputs don't exist in any training dataset.
If you could teach a masterclass on one subject, what would it be? Not your product — the subject your product exists to address. The problem space. The methodology. The framework. This reveals your deepest topical authority — the subject where you have a legitimate right to be the definitive voice.
What content would you create if your only distribution channel was an email list of 500 ideal customers? No SEO. No social. No algorithmic discovery. Just 500 people who perfectly match your ICP, reading your content because they chose to. What would you send them? The answer reveals what your owned audience actually wants — which is almost always different from what keyword tools suggest.
Step 3: Compile Your 20 Topics
From your answers, distill 20 specific topics. These should be concrete enough to become articles, guides, or essays — not vague themes.
"Content marketing" is a theme. "Why most startups quit content marketing after 10 blog posts (and what they should do instead)" is a topic.
Don't worry about whether they're "SEO topics." Don't check search volume. Don't think about keyword difficulty.
These 20 topics exist because they matter to your business and your audience, full stop.
Step 4: Classify Each Topic
For each of your 20 topics, assign one of three categories:
🏰 Moat Topics — Content that builds proprietary authority. Frameworks only your company uses. Lessons from your specific experience. Original data from your product or market. Contrarian positions that define your brand. These are your content moat — the articles competitors can't replicate no matter how fast their AI writes.
🎓 Teaching Topics — Content that demonstrates expertise by genuinely helping the reader. How-to guides, explanatory pieces, implementation frameworks. The content that earns trust by delivering value before asking for anything. These earn AI citations because AI systems prioritize sources that educate with clarity and authority.
🧭 Positioning Topics — Content that frames how your audience should think about the problem your product solves. Category-definition pieces. "Why X matters" arguments. The content that shifts the buyer's mental model so that when they evaluate solutions, your approach already makes sense. This is the editorial that builds pipeline before anyone visits your pricing page.
A healthy mix is roughly 6-8 moat topics, 6-8 teaching topics, and 4-6 positioning topics.
Step 5: Now — and Only Now — Check the Data
Open your keyword research tool. Look up each of your 20 topics. You'll find three outcomes:
High-conviction + high search volume. Jackpot. These are your highest-leverage content plays — topics you'd write anyway that also have keyword opportunity. Prioritize these in your content queue. Optimize for SEO and GEO. These are the articles that do double duty: building brand conviction while capturing organic traffic.
High-conviction + low/no search volume. These are your pure editorial plays. Write them anyway. They won't drive search traffic — but they'll drive email subscribers, LinkedIn engagement, AI citations, word-of-mouth sharing, and brand affinity. In a zero-click world, these are increasingly valuable because their value isn't dependent on Google's algorithm.
High-conviction + competitive keyword. Long-term plays. You believe in the topic and there's search demand, but the competition is fierce. Build toward these with cluster depth — write the supporting articles first, accumulate topical authority, then publish the pillar piece when you've earned the right to compete.
The topics you wouldn't write if Google wasn't sending traffic? Those are the ones to question.
If the only reason a topic exists in your strategy is keyword volume — if you have nothing distinctive to say about it, no unique perspective to offer, no proprietary insight to share — it's probably the zero-context content that AI Overviews will summarize and your audience will ignore.
Why This Test Reveals the Health of Your Entire Content Operation
The 20-Topic Test isn't just a topic selection exercise. It's a diagnostic tool for your content strategy's structural integrity.
If You Can't List 20 Topics: Your Brand Positioning Is Unclear
A company that can't identify 20 topics it cares about hasn't defined what it stands for. This isn't a content problem — it's a brand intelligence problem. Before you can create content worth reading, you need to know what your company believes, who it serves, and what it knows that others don't. If those answers are vague, your content will be too.
If All 20 Topics Are Generic: Your Differentiation Is Missing
If your 20 topics could belong to any competitor in your space — "how to do content marketing," "best practices for SEO," "marketing automation guide" — you haven't found your distinctive angle yet. The test should surface topics that only your company could credibly write. If it doesn't, dig deeper into your specific experience, data, and perspective.
If None Overlap With Search Data: You're Talking to Yourself
Conviction without market validation is a blog nobody reads. If none of your 20 topics have any search demand — no keyword volume, no related queries, no People Also Ask overlap — you may be writing about what matters to you but not what matters to your audience. The cross-reference with data should produce at least 8-10 topics where conviction and opportunity overlap.
If All 20 Are High-Volume Keywords: You Didn't Actually Do the Exercise
If every topic on your list happens to be a high-volume SEO target, you probably reverse-engineered from keyword data instead of thinking from conviction first. Rerun the test without the keyword tool open. The point is to find what you'd write even if search traffic never came — not to repackage your SEO strategy with a new label.
How the 20-Topic Test Connects to Your Content Engine
Your 20 topics aren't a content calendar. They're the strategic layer that sits above your content calendar — the convictions that inform what your engine recommends, what you approve, and what you prioritize.
In a content engine, this works mechanically:
Brand Core captures the beliefs, positioning, and audience intelligence that generate your 20 topics. The voice, the perspective, the ICP pain points — all of it feeds the convictions that make your content distinctive.
Strategy Map organizes your 20 topics into a strategic architecture — mapping them to pillars, connecting them through clusters, and identifying where each topic fits in the larger authority-building plan. Your moat topics become pillar pages. Your teaching topics become supporting articles. Your positioning topics become editorial content that defines your category.
Content Queue cross-references your conviction topics with keyword data, competitive gaps, and trend signals — surfacing the high-conviction + high-opportunity topics that should be published first. The queue doesn't replace your 20-topic convictions. It prioritizes them based on data.
Analytics close the loop. Which conviction topics resonate? Which drive email signups, AI citations, and pipeline? Which need more cluster depth? The performance data feeds back into the Strategy Map, refining your understanding of where conviction and audience demand overlap — making each quarterly rerun of the 20-Topic Test sharper than the last.
Library compounds the intelligence. Every conviction-driven article you publish deepens the brand context available for future content. Your 50th article on a moat topic isn't just another piece — it's informed by the accumulated intelligence of the 49 that preceded it.
The 20-Topic Test isn't a one-time exercise. It's a quarterly practice that recalibrates your content engine's strategic layer — ensuring the system produces content that's both data-informed and conviction-driven.
The Content That Survives Any Algorithm Change
Here's the deeper truth the 20-Topic Test reveals: the content that survives isn't the content optimized for today's algorithm. It's the content that would matter even if the algorithm disappeared tomorrow.
Google has changed its algorithm thousands of times. AI Overviews restructured the SERP. ChatGPT and Perplexity created entirely new discovery channels. LinkedIn became the #2 most-cited domain in AI search. Every platform, every algorithm, every discovery mechanism changes.
What doesn't change: the value of content that teaches something useful, shares something original, and comes from a perspective worth hearing.
Your 20 topics are the topics that pass that test.
They're the articles that earn email subscribers, get shared in Slack channels, get cited by AI systems, get referenced in investor conversations, and get remembered by the people who read them — regardless of which algorithm sent them there.
In the zero-click era, that resilience isn't a nice-to-have. It's the only content strategy that compounds through every platform shift, every algorithm update, and every new discovery channel that emerges.
Build your list. Cross-reference with data. Publish the overlap. And never let a keyword tool tell you what your company should believe.
Start building your content engine →
Related Resources
FAQs
What is the 20-Topic Test?
The 20-Topic Test is a strategic exercise where you identify the 20 topics you'd publish even if Google sent zero traffic — the topics so essential to your business that they must exist regardless of search volume. Then you cross-reference those conviction topics with keyword data to find where strategic importance and search opportunity overlap. The result is a content strategy built on conviction first and validated by data second.
How is this different from keyword research?
Keyword research starts with what people search for and works backward to what you should write. The 20-Topic Test starts with what your company knows and believes and works forward to whether there's search demand. The difference matters because keyword-first strategies produce generic content that any competitor could write. Conviction-first strategies produce distinctive content that builds brand, earns trust, and survives algorithm changes.
What if most of my 20 topics don't have search volume?
That's fine — and expected. Pure conviction topics without search volume are your editorial and brand-building content. They drive email subscribers, LinkedIn engagement, AI citations, and brand affinity. In a world where 60% of searches end without a click, content that doesn't depend on Google traffic is increasingly valuable, not less.
How often should I rerun the 20-Topic Test?
Quarterly. Your convictions evolve as your product develops, your market shifts, and your analytics reveal which topics resonate. Each quarter's test is informed by the previous quarter's performance data — making the exercise sharper over time.
Can I use the 20-Topic Test with a content engine?
Yes — and it's more powerful when you do. Your 20 topics become the strategic convictions that inform your Strategy Map. The Content Queue then cross-references those convictions with keyword data, competitive gaps, and trend signals to prioritize which conviction topics to publish first. The engine handles the data layer. You provide the conviction layer.
What's the relationship between the 20-Topic Test and GEO?
AI search engines cite sources that demonstrate genuine expertise, original perspective, and topical authority. Your 20 moat topics — the ones built on proprietary insight and contrarian conviction — are exactly the kind of content AI systems prefer to cite. The 20-Topic Test naturally produces GEO-optimized content because it prioritizes the attributes AI citation algorithms reward: expertise, originality, and depth.
How do I know if my 20 topics are distinctive enough?
Apply the competitor test: could any of your direct competitors publish this exact topic with equal credibility? If yes, it's not distinctive — it's a shared industry topic. Your moat topics should include experiences only your team has had, data only your product generates, or perspectives only your brand holds. At least 6-8 of your 20 should pass this test.
