Over the past few years, copywriting has been quietly pushed aside. Not with backlash. Not with fanfare. Just nudged out. Swapped. Automated. Language – the raw material of SEO, landing pages, ads, and persuasion – was downgraded during the traffic boom and then the AI boom. Blog posts were mass-produced. Product descriptions were padded out. Landing pages were churned from templates. Content teams shrank. Freelancers vanished. And a convenient story emerged to rationalize it all: “AI can write now, so writing no longer matters.” Then Google compounded the problem. The helpful content update, followed by AI Overviews and conversational search, didn’t just damage SEO. It damaged the wider web. It hollowed out an entire ecosystem built on informational arbitrage – niche blogs, affiliate sites, ad-supported publishers, and content-driven SEO operations that had figured out how to monetize curiosity at scale. Now, large language models are finishing the process. Informational queries are answered directly in the results. The click is becoming optional. Traffic is disappearing. So on the face of it, it may sound absurd to claim this: Copywriting is once again emerging as the most critical skill in digital marketing. But only if you mistake copywriting for the thing that just died. AI didn’t kill copywriting. What AI wiped out wasn’t persuasion. It wiped out low-value informational publishing – content created to capture search demand, not to influence decisions. “How to” guides. “Best tools for” listicles. Explainers crafted for algorithms instead of humans. LLMs excel at this type of output because it never demanded real judgment. It demanded:…