This article, in shortAI has changed how people find and evaluate information. To keep showing up, treat SEO as an intelligence system: model intent, structure your knowledge, publish original proof, and measure influence as well as clicks. Build the muscle now, and your visibility will compound even as search evolves. |
Search used to be ‘simple’.
People typed a bunch of keywords, scanned a list, and clicked a result. Now, a new layer of intelligence sits between your audience and your content. That layer doesn’t just find pages. It interprets intent, assembles answers, and, when it can, gives people what they need without a click.
Essentially, it is an editorial gatekeeper who reads every submission before deciding what readers will see. Except, the gatekeeper is now a machine that understands meaning and not just keywords.
If the search experience is improved, no-click search is becoming a significant problem for brands trying to gain visibility through organic sources.
When someone asks an assistant for the best vendor, the most reliable framework, or the quickest way to achieve a result, will your brand be included in the answer? Or will you be invisible because a machine could not understand or trust your content enough to reuse it?
And so, on the one hand, it’s getting more difficult to get visibility. And on the other, too many content teams are betting on the wrong horse to gain more visibility and only use AI to do the same old tasks faster, and with a lot less brain work.
As a result, they generate longer keyword lists, produce more outlines, and ship more pages.
The cost? Output goes up. Outcomes often do not as the surge of average content online suggests: everyone is starting to sound the same, relying on the same sources and AI-generated content gimmicks.
For you, reading this, now is an opportunity to turn this situation to your advantage.
This read should give you ideas to strengthen your SEO performance and use AI not just to increase efficiency, but to increase your chances to make it out on top.
Here's what I’ll cover (click to jump):
Classic SEO treated keywords like the unit of value. AI parses entities, relationships, and context. That means a page is not evaluated as a pile of phrases. It is evaluated as a piece of a larger topic graph.
In other words, if your content is unique and tells a coherent story, you’ll increase your chances to appear in search results. However, if your content is shallow and/or is simply a sum of existing information that’s already out there, it will remain hidden in the depths of the internet.
Generative answers now sit on top of results.
They can summarize the landscape, extract steps, and cite a handful of sources. Sometimes the answer is good enough that the search ends there.
Sometimes the summary acts like a guide and people still click. Either way, the first impression belongs to the assistant.
You are competing to be reused by the model, not only to be ranked by the index.
At this point, I need to mention that you don’t need to adopt new SEO best practices to hack your way in. Google even states that “specific optimization isn't required for AI Overviews” and recommends sticking to the SEO fundamental best practices.
Having said that, and considering the above-mentioned new challenges, you need to make it as easy as possible for Google bots to find and flag your content as relevant for specific search patterns.
That means clear metadata and headings, consistency, and relevant bridges between your pages. Think of it as removing as much friction as possible to make your original content easier to parse.
Which leads me to my next point. As great as AI can be to generate well-written pieces out of thin air, winning at SEO and GEO cannot come from automation alone.
Yes, it is tempting to celebrate efficiency.
For instance, things that used to take a couple of hours, like a thorough keyword research or outlining a blog article, can now be done in seconds.
As a content marketer, I call this progress. But, to paraphrase good ol’ Uncle Ben, with great(er) power comes great(er) responsibility, and if you go faster in the wrong direction, you’ll end up nowhere, faster.
My recommendation is simple. Don’t fall into the volume trap and don’t think AI can replace human content creation.
Even though you can literally generate content in seconds, it won’t bring any value to your readers if you don’t spend the time to make it yours. Instead, use AI to map the real questions people ask, categorize them, and work on unique answers only you can provide.
Instead of delegating everything to AI, from A to Z, and risking producing shallow content, feed AI with your original thoughts and work from it. We can break it down into 4 steps.
Want a concrete use case?
I wrote down how I use AI in my own workflow and asked AI to help me present it in a clearer and more intelligible way by splitting the next 4 steps into: what you should do yourself, and what you should delegate to AI.
What you should do yourself
Start by mapping how your audience actually thinks about the problem you solve. Review sales calls, support tickets, product feedback, and other relevant information. All reveal how people express real intent. Better even, talk to your customers to establish and or refine your jobs-to-be-done.
Summarize and cluster what you find by meaning. You’ll start to see recurring themes like effort, risk, integration, timelines, trade-offs, and proof.
Need a bit of structure for it? Try our customer research templates!
Turn those patterns into a content blueprint:
What you should delegate to AI
What you should do yourself
AI can draft, but it can’t decide what you believe or what you’ve learned. Your experience and point of view are what make your content worth reading.
That often means creating three types of assets:
“If you have an unpopular opinion, AI isn’t going to be able to write that for you quite yet because it’s taking pre-written things it was trained on, and finding the next best word or sentence to say about it.”
— Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist Officer at Gong (Growth Hub Podcast, Ep. 110)
I repeat, do not outsource the judgment to AI. A human editor should always decide whether a piece says anything new, answers the real question, and reflects your brand’s way of thinking.
What you should delegate to AI
What you should do yourself
The traditional approach to optimization was to publish, wait, and then tweak title tags. The new way is to create learning loops.
After you publish something, watch how people interact with it. Where do they drop off? Which examples get quoted in social posts or sales calls? What content gets referenced internally? Update accordingly and keep a log of those edits so you can connect cause and effect over time.
What you should delegate to AI
What you should do yourself
Speed without standards creates chaos. Protecting your brand means putting the right rules in place.
What you should delegate to AI
In short, AI can give your content workflow speed and reach, but you need to supply the insight, direction, and judgment.
Treat AI as your research assistant, not your replacement. The brands that win will be the ones that blend human expertise with smart automation, not the ones that hand the keyboard over completely.
Do not outsource the judgment. A credible human editor should decide whether the piece says anything new, whether it answers the real question, and whether it reflects your brand’s way of thinking.
Psst! We also shared thoughts on how to best approach new domains in the age of AI. More on this here.
Now that AI can use your content to provide answers your target audience seeks, clicks don’t tell the whole story. This means you need to ensure you are a frequently mentioned source of truth on the various topics you can have authority on.
What’s more, the companies that will win are not the ones that publish the most. They are the ones that publish the most useful, most legible, most reusable knowledge in their category, and they do it with a system that keeps learning.
We specialize in that. We have a fantastic track record for strategizing, shipping, and optimizing content that stands out and generates engagement.
If you seek a partner to do just that, reach out!