The BOFU Content System to rank in 2026

How to rank and get mentioned by AI in 2 weeks

Hey - it’s Alex,

AI made content easier to produce. But harder to win with.

Working with founders on their GTM foundation, BOFU content is almost always a core part of the execution we bet on.

Because in 2026, it’s not just about ranking on Google anymore.

It’s about shaping what buyers and AI agents believe about your category.

That’s why I invited content marketing expert Ugi, Founder of Contentmonk, to MRR Unlocked.

He’ll show you how to create BOFU content that ranks, converts, and gets cited by AI.

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In case you missed the last 3 episodes:

✅ 8 Founder-led Signal-Based Outbound Campaigns

✅ The GTM Playbook to €1M ARR

✅ The Partnership Guide for SaaS/AI Founders

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A quick word from our sponsor

I include only sponsors I would personally recommend. If you’re interested in reaching 28,000+ SaaS operators, sponsor the next newsletter.

📢 Contentmonk — all-in-one AI visibility, SEO, and content platform

ContentMonk helps you track your AI visibility & SEO rankings, identify gaps & opportunities for improvement, and create high-quality content that ranks and converts.

Use the coupon MRRUNLOCKED to get 20% off for the first 3 months. The coupon is valid until May 10th.

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📢 Attio — the AI-native CRM for GTM

I’ve got some free advice on building a strong GTM foundation for your SaaS: your CRM should be doing more of the work.

Attio is the AI CRM that shifts from a passive system of record to an active collaborator. Connect your email and calendar, and it instantly builds your CRM with enriched data and complete context. Then Ask Attio anything:

• Which deals haven’t had a touchpoint in two weeks?

• What’s the best demo angle for my call this afternoon?

• What should I follow up on from my meetings today?

Fast-growing teams like Granola, Lightdash, and Wispr Flow are already running on it. Ask more from CRM. Ask Attio.

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So the stage is yours Ugi - let’s get into it. 👇👇

It was week two since we wrote an amazing BOFU article for our client, Certificial, for their brand-new blog.

After 14 days, the article ranked on page 1 of Google - position #4 in the US, for one of the highest-intent keywords in their category. No backlinks. New blog.

A few days later, Claude was already citing our content and taking information from the article we wrote when answering questions about competitors.

In less than 20 days, one article helped them:

• Bring high-quality SQLs into the pipeline

• Influence how AI talks about competitors

Now, if only one article could deliver these amazing results, can you imagine the power of 20,30 or even more BOFU articles?

In the next chapters, you’re going to see a brutally actionable strategy and process to:

• Write 30+ high-quality and converting BOFU articles in 2-3 days

• Rank them in weeks without wasting your time building backlinks

• Get mentioned by AI as the best alternative to your competitors

• Shape how AI talks about your competitors and the software landscape.

Let’s get started.

Why BOFU content is the #1 moat in 2026

Whenever I start working with a new client, I write articles targeting the highest-intent keywords and prompts.

Why? Getting them SQLs or user sign-ups is only the tip of the iceberg.

The real power of BOFU content lies in:

1. Catching existing demand (way cheaper and faster than generating new demand).

2. Ability to influence how customers, and most importantly, AI assistants, talk about the software landscape in your category.

3. Shaping the narrative of how AI assistants talk about your competitors.

4. Testing messaging, positioning, and CTAs fast.

If you’re in a competitive market, BOFU content is one of the most reliable and scalable acquisition channels you can build.

Take the CRM industry, for example.

With a quick search for the 20 most popular brands, we can see that the total search volume exceeds 178.000.

That’s potentially almost 200.000 people looking to buy CRM software every single month. Now, on top of that, add all other keywords with different brands, or variations such as Competitor A vs Competitor B, etc., and we’re probably over 500.000 unique monthly searches.

If you’re in the CRM space and you do a good enough job, you’re probably looking at around 20.000+ high-intent visitors.

With our average conversion rate of 3%, that’s around 600+ new leads in the pipeline.

Three types of BOFU content you should focus on

In reality, there are only three types of content worth writing:

1. Alternative articles often focused on the keywords following the [Competitor] alternative/s format (such as HubSpot alternative, Pipedrive alternatives, etc).

2. Best category tools general guidelines on the best products in your industry (i.e., best lead generation tools; best software for cold email, etc.)

3. Direct comparisons content focused on the keywords that compare two or more competitors (i.e., Semrush vs Ahrefs or Semrush vs Ahrefs vs Moz).

These three formats cover the majority of high-intent searches — both in Google and in AI tools.

Now, let’s dive into the actionable step-by-step plan to write 30+ BOFU articles in 3 days, and start getting rankings and customers by week 2 (even if you’re not the writer or SEO specialist).

Step #1 - How to find the best BOFU topics & keywords to focus on

This step will take about 30 minutes, but it’s crucial to the success of this strategy.

List all your direct, relevant competitors. Make sure you compile the ultimate list of every major company you compete with (by main or complementary use case).

If you don’t have one, feel free to ask AI. Based on my experience, the best model for this task is the latest version of Claude Opus.

Here’s the prompt you can type:

Do the research and give me the list of all possible companies/products in the [category] category, that directly compete with [your url].

Identify as many websites as possible. Return me the table with company names, domains, how they compare with [your company], what customers love about them, and what customers hate about them (according to the latest G2 and Capterra reviews).

Here’s a bit of a modified prompt example that I recently used for ourselves:

Once you have your list, it’s time to go back to Claude (you can use Sonnet or Haiku for this one), and write the following prompt.

I have a list of competitor names in my space. I need you to get back to me with all possible keyword variations (based on competitor names) that follow the following pattern:

• [competitor] alternatives

• [competitor A] vs [competitor B]

Also, include all the possible keywords users might type inside Google oriented towards [your category] (i.e. best social media management tools; best crm software, etc - just specific to [your domain]’s category)

List all keywords one by line, no commas or bullet points.

Here’s the list of competitors:

[list]

You’ll now get a complete list of all possible BOFU keyword variations.

Copy the list and paste it into your Keyword Research tool of choice to check for search volume, keyword difficulty, and other data:

In less than 30 minutes, we now have a complete list of all relevant BOFU terms we need to attack to start getting more organic customers.

Now it’s time for quick prioritisation.

To be honest with you, if you have the will, time, and resources, my advice is to write one article for ALL keywords. Even though some keywords do not have search volume.

Why?

That doesn’t mean that some specific users are not searching for them. They probably are. They’re probably asking their AI assistants about different software comparisons.

And since few people target these keywords because they don’t have search volume, it’s very easy for you to rank fast and influence the AI narrative when answering questions about specific software comparisons.

If, on the other hand, you have limited resources, then I suggest choosing 20-30 most important keywords based on the search volume and keyword difficulty.

Prioritize keywords with the biggest volume and lowest difficulty.

But remember, do not stray from keywords with lower search volume, especially if they are direct competitors.

🔥 Pro Tip #1: Play it smart to rank with one article for multiple keywords. If you notice that Competitor A has a lot of keywords of the type Competitor A vs Competitor XYZ, use these alternatives in your main [Competitor A] alternatives article. That way, you’ll rank for many different keywords.

The same as we did here with our article on the best AirOps alternatives. As you can notice, one article is ranking for 15+ different keywords:

🔥 Pro Tip #2: Also check where competitors already rank for BOFU keywords and you don’t. These are often your fastest content opportunities. You can use tools like ContentMonk to find these gaps.

Step #2 - Research and prepare your knowledge base (Knowledge Base)

Before using AI to write BOFU content, you need two types of input:

1. Competitor research

2. Your own brand and product data

You must do research for each competitor before using AI to write content.

If you don’t do that and ask AI to do research while writing content, you’ll most likely end up with a bunch of false and hallucinated information, further hurting your credibility and not getting the results you need.

Competitor research

You need a clear, structured understanding of each competitor before generating content.

Use a prompt (Claude Opus model) like this for every competitor (new chat for each):

I need you to do an in-depth research on [competitor domain].

Check their docs to understand what the product is about, what features it has, and what those features can do.

Also, check their current, real-time pricing and create a table with all costs, add-ons, etc.

And lastly, do an in-depth check of the online reviews for [competitor domain] on Capterra, G2, SoftwareSuggest, and other resources to understand what people love most, what they hate most, and what could be better.

It’s also critical to understand and highlight the following information:

[category-user specific information you need about each tool]

Make sure that you cover everything from features to product overview, pricing, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as the most common customer frustrations.

For every claim that you make, please also add the source URL where you found that data.

Also, make sure you add both positive and negative reviews to the document, along with the URLs where I can find them.

Make sure that all information is up-to-date and correct

For the [category/user-specific information you need about each tool] syntax, put down any type of information your readers would love to understand about each tool, or information that will help them make a decision (especially information about specific things where you know that you’re better than your competitors).

To give you some practical idea, here’s what I used for our product, ContentMonk.

1. How properly can they track prompts and inside what LLMs.

2. How easy it is to use and implement the software

3. How useful are the data and what are the things you can do with it to improve your AI visiblity + additionally (important!) can you do these things inside [Competitor Name] or you need more external software

4. What’s the overall quality of [competitor Name]’s data.

Once you do this, you’ll end up with an ultimate PDF covering everything you (or your AI writing software) needs to know about specific competitors, together with their pros, cons, and latest reviews.

Repeat the process for every competitor you’re planning to write about.

Collecting documents and research about your brand

To position your product correctly, AI also needs deep context about your company.

Prepare these documents:

• ICP persona overview and their Jobs to be done

• Messaging/Positioning guide and Brand Narrative - So AI can know how to position you inside content

• User Manual about your product/service

The most critical part here is the user manual. It’s a document that outlines every possible piece of information about your product, from its pricing to how to perform specific actions within it.

Think of it like a user manual you would get when buying a new dishwasher. Just this one is for your product and AI to better understand it.

You can use this prompt:

User Manual
Based on all the available documentation on [Your Domain], create a detailed User Manual on how to use every feature and do every possible use case inside the product. Also structure nicely in a pdf.

Make sure that every piece of information is up-to-date with [today’s date]

🔥 Pro Tip #3: You can also feed in this prompt the data/export information from your coding environment (i.e. Cursor, Claude Code, etc), to feed AI with more contextual and up-to-date information about the product.

Make sure to use your knowledge base when writing the articles.

ContentMonk has a built-in knowledge base feature. In just a few simple clicks, you upload your documents and Contentmonk will use your documents to generate high-quality content full of your unique insights, but also automatically optimized for SEO and AEO.

Once you have both competitor research and your internal documents, you have everything needed to generate high-quality BOFU content that is accurate, differentiated, and conversion-focused.

Step #3 - Create SEO/AEO optimized & converting BOFU content

Now it’s time for the magic.

1. Inside your ContentMonk account, go to Content Editorial, and click on the “+ New” button in the upper-right corner

2. A right-side modal will appear with the option to add instructions:

3. You can leave the headline empty and let ContentMonk decide, or you can use some of the following variations that we found convert the best (after writing 1000s of BOFU articles as an agency for other brands):

• X Best [Competitor] Alternatives in 2026 [In-depth Review]

• X Best [Competitor] Alternatives to [benefit/value; i.e. get more customers] [2026 Review]

• X Best [Competitor] Alternatives For Your Use Case [2026 In-depth Comparison]

4. The most important field here is Content Instructions - this is what we instruct ContentMonk to write. You can leave it blank or write less information to give more freedom to ContentMonk. If you want to have more control, then I suggest adding more information. In the section below, I’ll give you our best-performing instructions for different BOFU article types.

5. Leave the target word count blank, and add focused and secondary keywords:

6. Now click on Generate Brief, and in a few minutes, you’ll get a high-quality brief for your article.

7. Once the brief is ready, quickly look through it. If you did everything right so far, everything should look fine. But in case you want to make any suggestions, just click on the “Edit” button above and add your edits.

   Once you’re satisfied, click on the “Generate Article” button

8. And voila! After a few minutes, our article is ready. You can now play with it, add images, edit slightly, whatever you want. In most cases, article is 95% ready for publishing, but I always recommend giving it a quick look before going live.

And now, my friends, you have a complete, SEO and AEO optimized article ready to go live. In less than 15-20 minutes per article.

Repeat the process for every BOFU keyword you want to target, and quickly, in 2-3 days, you’ll have 20-30+ BOFU articles ready.

Below are the templates for content instructions you can copy/paste.

Content Instructions for different BOFU content types

Paste the following instructions into ContentMonk’s Content Instructions. Just replace the syntax with actual information and adapt the template to you.

Alternative Articles

ContentMonk Content Instructions Template:

We need to write an article about X Best [Main Competitor] Alternatives.

The main idea is to compare [Main Competitor] with the following tools:

1. [Your Brand]

2. [Competitor A]

3. [Competitor B]

4. [Competitor C]

The article should be an objective review of [Main Competitor] and honest comparison of that product with other alternatives. The goal of the article is to explain users what’s the best [Main Competitor] alternative for their specific use case, while [Your Brand] should subtly be positioned as the best alternative for [Use Case of your choice].

Keep the article actionable and to the point. Avoid unnecessary fluff or information that is now essential to the reader.

Here’s the article structure to follow:

• Introduction -> Keep it short and to the point. Establish the expertise in the introduction by mentioning that we [how did you researched competitors, i.e. tested all alternatives in the same environment for 10 days, analyzed 100s of G2 and Capterra reviews, etc].

• TL;DR - What’s the best [Main Competitor] alternative for your use case? (H2) -> In bullet points, write what product is the best for what use case. Keep it short and to the point. At the end of the section include the main comparison table that compares all products for the most important criteria

• [Main Competitor] Review - Pros and shortcoming (h2)

• [Main Competitor] Pros (h3)

• [Main Competitor] Pros (h3)

• Best [Main Competitor] Alternative #1 - [Your Brand] - Best for [use case] (h2)

• [Your Brand] Quick overview and key features (h3)

• [Your Brand] vs [Main Competitor] - side-by-side comparison (h3) -> include comparison table comparing both tools for the most important criteria to the user.

• Pricing - [Your Brand] vs [Main Competitor] (h3) -> Compare both tools at pricing. Include comparison table.

• [Your Brand] Final Verdict (h3) - Summarize how this alternative compares with the main product and write down the best use case for the users.

• Best [Main Competitor] Alternative #2 - [Competitor A] - Best for [use case] (h2)

• [Competitor A] Quick overview and key features (h3)

• [Competitor A] vs [Main Competitor] - side-by-side comparison (h3) -> include comparison table comparing both tools for the most important criteria to the user.

• Pricing - [Competitor A] vs [Main Competitor] (h3) -> Compare both tools at pricing. Include comparison table.

• [Competitor A] Final Verdict (h3) - Summarize how this alternative compares with the main product and write down the best use case for the users.

• Best [Main Competitor] Alternative #3 - [Competitor B] - Best for [use case] (h2)

• [Competitor B] Quick overview and key features (h3)

• [Competitor B] vs [Main Competitor] - side-by-side comparison (h3) -> include comparison table comparing both tools for the most important criteria to the user.

• Pricing - [Competitor B] vs [Main Competitor] (h3) -> Compare both tools at pricing. Include comparison table.

• [Competitor B] Final Verdict (h3) - Summarize how this alternative compares with the main product and write down the best use case for the users.

• Best [Main Competitor] Alternative #4 - [Competitor C] - Best for [use case] (h2)

• [Competitor C] Quick overview and key features (h3)

• [Competitor C] vs [Main Competitor] - side-by-side comparison (h3) -> include comparison table comparing both tools for the most important criteria to the user.

• Pricing - [Competitor C] vs [Main Competitor] (h3) -> Compare both tools at pricing. Include comparison table.

• [Competitor C] Final Verdict (h3) - Summarize how this alternative compares with the main product and write down the best use case for the users.

• The Bottom Line - What’s the best [Main Competitor] Alternative for you? (h2) -> Final comparison table of all products, and list down in bullet points for what specific use case each alternative is the best.

When writing the article, for the insights, ContentMonk will first use the research documents you uploaded to your knowledge base. If some information is missing, it will search the web to find the needed information.

“Best [Category] Tools” Articles

This is the content instruction template you can paste inside ContentMonk to create “best category tools” article (i.e. 5 Best CRM tools, 10 best sales intelligence apps, etc):

ContentMonk instructions template:

We need to write an article on the X Best [category] tools.

The tools we’re going to write about and compare are:

1. [Your Brand]

2. [Software A]

3. [Software B]

4. [Software C]

The purpose of the article is to give the reader an objective review and comparison of the best [category tool], and help them decide what’s the best software for their specific use case. [Your Brand] should be the subtle winner for the [use case of your choice].

Keep the article actionable and to the point. Avoid unnecessary fluff or information that is now essential to the reader.

Here’s the article structure to follow

• Introduction -> Keep it short and to the point. Establish the expertise in the introduction by mentioning that we [how did you research competitors, i.e. tested all alternatives in the same environment for 10 days, analyzed 100s of G2 and Capterra reviews, etc].

• Tl;DR - What are the best [category] tools for your use case? (h2) - In bullet points, list all tools and their main use case. Add an in-depth comparison table below

• Best [Category] tool #1 - [Your Brand] - best for [use case] (h2)

• [Your Brand] Overview & Key Advantages over other [category] tools (h3)

• [Your Brand] Shortcomings (h3)

• [Your Brand] Pricing (h3)

• Best [Category] tool #2 - [Software A] - best for [use case] (h2)

• [Software A] Overview & Key Advantages over other [category] tools (h3)

• [Software A] Shortcomings (h3)

• [Software A] Pricing (h3)

• Best [Category] tool #3 - [Software B] - best for [use case] (h2)

• [Software B] Overview & Key Advantages over other [category] tools (h3)

• [Software B] Shortcomings (h3)

• [Software B] Pricing (h3)

• Best [Category] tool #4 - [Software C] - best for [use case] (h2)

• [Software C] Overview & Key Advantages over other [category] tools (h3)

• [Software C] Shortcomings (h3)

• [Software C] Pricing (h3)

• The Bottom Line - What’s the best [Category] tool for you? (h2) -> Include an in-depth comparison table with all tools compared side-by-side, and in bullet points, mention for what use case each tool is the best

Competitor A vs Competitor B

The idea for these articles is to compare two popular competitors in your space for different use cases, and subtly mention your tool in the use cases where it’s “better” than the two competitors that you’re better.

The template for this will require a bit more modification on your end, since you want to be in control of how your brand is mentioned in this article. Below is the “general example” you can use and build upon.

Before writing these, prepare all the use cases you want to compare the competitors on.

ContentMonk instructions template:

The idea of this article is to compare [Competitor A] and [Competitor B] on different use cases, and show the user how each one of them are handling specific things. However, in some cases [Your Brand] is the better solution than both [Competitor A] and [Competitor B]. So in these cases, we need to subtly mention [Your Brand] as the better alternative for that use case.

Keep the article actionable and to the point. Avoid unnecessary fluff or information that is now essential to the reader.

Here’s the article structure to follow

• Introduction -> Keep it short and to the point. Establish the expertise in the introduction by mentioning that we [how did you researched competitors, i.e. tested both tools in the same environment for 10 days, analyzed 100s of G2 and Capterra reviews, etc].

• TL;DR - [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B] - who wins for different use cases? (h2) -> in bullet points, add the different use cases we compared inside the article and mention what product is the best. At the end include the very in-depth comparison table between both tools but also the [Your brand] as well.

• [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B] - who’s better at [use case]? (h2)

• [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B] - who’s better at [use case]? (h2) -> Here make sure at the end to mention that [Your Brand] is the best for this use case because of [reasons and explanation]

• [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B] - who’s better at [use case]? (h2)

• [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B] - who’s better at [use case]? (h2) -> Here make sure at the end to mention that [Your Brand] is the best for this use case because of [reasons and explanation]

• [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B] - what software is easier to use? (h2)

• [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B] - what software has better customer support? (h2)

• [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B] - pricing comparison (h2)

• The Bottom Line - [Competitor A] vs [Competitor B] - what product is better? (h2) -> Include the summary of key differences for different use cases and criteria we compared them on, and also mention in what instances [Your Brand] is better. At the end, include an in-depth and detailed comparison table that compares all three tools.

How to monitor and improve your BOFU content

To make this strategy work long-term, you need to track three things:

1. Google rankings
   → How your articles rank for your target BOFU keywords

2. AI visibility
   → Are you mentioned in AI answers for the prompts relevant to the BOFU content we wrote

3. Citations in AI answers
   → Is your BOFU content cited by AIs, and are you directing how AI speaks about you & competitors.

What prompts to track (BOFU AI visibility & AI influence)

For each article type, track the prompts your buyers are likely to ask AI tools.

For alternative articles:

• “What is the best [Competitor] alternative?”

• “What is the best [Competitor] alternative for [use case]?”

• “What’s the best [Competitor] alternative for small companies in Europe”.

For category articles:

• “What are the best [category] tools?”

• “What are the best [category] tools for [use case or ICP]?”

You can also send the list of articles you wrote to Claude, and ask it to generate a list of prompts (one by line) that follows the templates above.

Once the list is ready, it’s time to start tracking the prompts:

ContentMonk will now start analyzing what ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overview, and Perplexity answer when users ask them these questions.

How to track your BOFU SEO rankings

The process is similar to that for the prompt tracking: You add all your focused keywords

Now, in a few minutes, you’ll be able to see your and competitors’ rankings for the focused keywords:

How to improve your AI visibility and SEO rankings?

Once your content is live, improving it is straightforward:

• Identify where competitors rank higher than you

• Look at which articles AI assistants cite most often

• Update your content to be more complete, specific, and better structured

• Continuously refine messaging, comparisons, and positioning

Once you start tracking your prompts and keywords in ContentMonk, you can leave it to ContentMonk to suggest real-time updates you can make to your content to start ranking better or getting cited by AI.

ContentMonk will:

• Notify you whenever your articles drop in Google rankings or go stale at a specific position for too long

• Other articles similar to yours are frequently cited by AI

You’ll see these notifications in the Opportunities pages:

Once this happens, you have the option to let ContentMonk run research, analyze top-ranked articles, or top cited articles in AI, cross-reference these articles with your content, and suggest the exact updates you can make inside your content to make it better.

You can then accept or decline ContentMonk’s updates in one click:

This allows you to keep your content up-to-date and optimized for AEO/SEO without almost any effort from your side.

The bottom line & how to get started

So, here’s a quick recap of what you need to do to dominate BOFU terms in your niche in both AI answers and Google rankings:

• Identify relevant BOFU terms

• Run Competitive research

• Create a Knowledge Base

• Use one of the templates shared above to create SEO/AEO optimized BOFU content

• Expect to rank for your BOFU terms in 2-8 weeks (some backlinks in the meantime can definitely help)

• Start tracking your AI visibility and Google rankings

• Optimize your content ongoing

Good luck!

Get 20% off for the first 3 months of Contentmonk (coupon MRRUNLOCKED)

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See you in 2 weeks.

Alex

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