Content pillars: how to pick them, test them, and build an AI content system on them
Content pillars decide what you become known for, so pick them on purpose and check every quarter that your published work still follows them.
A plain-text version of this site for AI assistants is at https://contengi.com/llms.txt, with the full product documentation in one file at https://contengi.com/llms-full.txt. Every page is also available as markdown by adding .md to its URL.
TL;DR
- Content pillars are the three to five recurring themes a brand publishes about, picked where your expertise meets the problems your buyer is trying to solve.
- A solo founder should start with three. Each pillar needs enough posts behind it for readers, Google, and LinkedIn's feed to connect your name with the topic.
- A pillar earns its place when you can list 10 post ideas for it and point to the source material behind them, like customer calls or your own data.
- Pillars drift. Check every quarter which topics search engines and readers associate you with, and compare that with the pillars you chose.
- Written into an AI knowledge base, each pillar becomes a set of rules for briefs and drafts, which keeps AI-assisted content on topic and on brand.
Walk into any supermarket and you can find the bread without asking. Content pillars do the same for your audience: after a few weeks of posts, people know what you talk about and what to expect next, and so do the systems deciding who sees your work.
Below: how many pillars to pick, how to test them, our own set as a worked example, and how to turn them into instructions an AI content system can follow.
What are content pillars?
Content pillars are the handful of core themes every piece of content you publish belongs to. Each one sits where something you know well meets something your reader cares about, and together they decide what you become known for.
The term often gets mixed up with pillar pages. A pillar page is an SEO structure: one broad page linked to a set of focused cluster pages, a topic cluster model that grew out of HubSpot's own content team testing in 2015. A content pillar is bigger than a page. It's a theme that holds blog posts, LinkedIn posts, newsletters, and videos, and a pillar page can be one piece inside it.
How many content pillars should you have?
Three to five, and a solo founder or one-person marketing team should start with three. Every extra pillar splits the same weekly hours across more topics, so each of your pillars need more time before it sticks.
Google and LinkedIn both reward focus. Google's people-first content checklist asks whether your site has a primary purpose or focus, and it flags producing lots of content on many topics in the hope some of it performs. LinkedIn's rebuilt feed uses large language models to work out what a post is about and match it to members' interests, including people you've never connected with. A narrow set of themes makes you easier to match, and it's the backbone of any LinkedIn content strategy.
How to choose your content pillars
Start with what you can talk about without notes
List the topics you could discuss for 20 minutes on a call with no preparation. That's your expertise, and expertise is the raw material a competitor can't copy. Cut anything you'd need to research from scratch every time.
Match each topic to a buyer problem
For every topic, write the problem it solves for your reader, in their words. "Content engineering" is our topic. "I can't produce enough content without it sounding like a robot wrote it" is the reader's problem. If you can't write that second sentence, the topic interests you and won't pull an audience.
Keep one pillar for the business itself
Decisions, mistakes, and numbers from inside your company make the posts people remember. Founders skip this pillar more than any other, and it does the most for trust when you're building a content strategy as a founder.
Run the 10-post test
Write 10 post ideas for each pillar in one sitting. If a pillar runs dry at four, it's too narrow, so merge it with a neighbour. If the ideas for two pillars keep overlapping, they're the same pillar with two names.
Then note where the substance for each idea comes from, such as a customer call or your own analytics. Ideas with nothing behind them turn into rewrites of whatever already ranks.
Content pillars examples: how we set ours
Here are Contengi's own pillars, taken from the brand knowledge base our content system writes from.
| Pillar | What it covers | Where the substance comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Content engineering | What the role is, the skills it needs, and how a content marketer moves into it | Stefan Maritz's years leading content teams and building our own workflows |
| Content operations in 2026 | Rebuilding content marketing around AI so a small team can ship like a big one | Running Contengi's own content operation |
| Transcripts plus AI | Turning calls, podcasts, and webinars into on-brand content at volume | The transcript workflows we run every week |
| Playbooks and how-tos | Knowledge bases, answer engine optimisation, and agentic workflows, step by step | The playbooks the platform runs on |
A one-person shop selling coffee equipment might run brewing guides, sourcing stories, kit comparisons, and running a small shop. The test is the same: each pillar needs an expert behind it and a buyer question in front of it.
Why content pillars drift, and how to catch it
What you publish slides away from your pillars over time, because you write about whatever feels urgent and search engines reward whatever happens to rank.
We saw this on our own site. When we checked which contengi.com pages Google showed most over the last three months, the top two were a roundup of content marketing reports and a post about removing Claude watermarks. Neither belongs to content engineering, the pillar the whole company is built around. Both posts do their job, but right now they shape what Google associates us with more than our lead pillar does. A little awkward for a company that tells people to stick to their pillars.
The fix is a quarterly check. Tag every piece in your content calendar with one pillar, then compare those tags with what Search Console and LinkedIn analytics show people engaging with. When one pillar is starving, next month's calendar goes to it.
How content pillars feed an AI content system
Pillars do their best work written down as instructions. An AI drafting tool knows nothing about your themes until you tell it.
Give each pillar its own entry in your brand knowledge base for AI: a one-sentence point of view, the reader problem it solves, approved sources, two or three posts that show the standard, and the angles you'll never take. Every content brief then names its pillar, so the draft inherits your opinion and examples instead of a generic summary of the topic. Edit what comes back before it ships, and run it through an AI slop cleaner to catch the phrases that give AI drafts away.
Pillars help in AI search too. AI Overviews and AI Mode can issue several related searches across subtopics to build one answer, so a pillar covered from several angles gives you more chances to be cited. Check that those pages read cleanly to machines as well, using the AI bot view.
Your content pillars checklist for this week
- Write each pillar as one sentence with an opinion in it, for example "any marketer can learn content engineering without writing code".
- List 10 post ideas per pillar and merge or drop any pillar that runs dry before you get there.
- Note the source material for every idea, such as a call recording or a support thread.
- Tag every calendar row with one pillar so you can see the balance at a glance.
- Add each pillar to your AI knowledge base with its point of view, sources, example posts, and the angles it never takes.
- Book a 30-minute review in 90 days to compare your pillar tags with what people engage with.
Frequently asked questions
What are content pillars?
Content pillars are the three to five core themes all your content belongs to. They sit where your expertise meets your reader's problems, and they decide what you become known for.
How many content pillars should I have?
Three to five. Start with three if you're a solo founder or a small team, and add a fourth once you can keep the first three going every week.
What are some examples of content pillars?
Ours are content engineering, content operations in 2026, transcripts plus AI, and how-to playbooks. A small coffee equipment shop might use brewing guides, sourcing stories, and kit comparisons.
What is the difference between content pillars and pillar pages?
A content pillar is a theme that spans every channel you publish on. A pillar page is one long web page at the centre of an SEO topic cluster, linked to more focused pages, and it can sit inside a content pillar.
Should my content pillars be the same on LinkedIn and my blog?
Yes, keep the themes the same and change the format. A LinkedIn post and a blog post on the same pillar reinforce each other.