Using outdated and traditional SEO tactics centered around keywords and backlinks is not moving the needle anymore, as Google shifts toward AI-driven answers.
Organic visits are falling due to Google AI Overviews and zero-click searches, where users receive an answer directly in Google’s search result page and do not click to a website.
SEO is not dead, it just changed. To succeed in this new era of organic, brands and marketers will need to adopt structured, intent-focused content, increase trustworthiness, and join brand and user experience initiatives.
Integrated Approach
In today’s search environment, you must be everywhere your audiences are: Reddit, Quora, YouTube, and anywhere else that is relevant.
If your brand isn’t on those discovery channels, you won’t be able to get on them, and then it is time to get on.
User behavior has changed, and they are using different search engines or channels to search for information, products, reviews and more.
For example:
Reddit for other user opinions that have already used nearby products or services.
YouTube for tutorials and products reviews.
Instagram for discovery.
Amazon and Pinterest for product reviews and inspiration.
If your marketing strategy is built around only Google, then you are ignoring a portion of your target audience that is searching for your content, and it is invisible to them.
Enhance For AI Overviews
To rank for AIO, brands and marketers must focus on creating high-quality, authoritative content that directly answers user questions, is well-structured, and easy for AI to understand.
| Tactic | Overview | Best Practices |
| Write high-quality content. | Perform the research, and see what search queries show for AIOs. Find most demanded questions and give the answers with pure and virgin content that should be highly posses originality. | Update or modify the current content for AI Overviews by answering questions, and making it conversational, using quotes, and testimonials and updating headings. |
| Use single headings and brief paragraphs. | This will improve readability for humans and AIs. | Use headings, short paragraphs, and everyday language to enhance AI comprehension. |
| Mark up content with proper format data | This will enhance AI and traditional search engines’ ability to understand your content. | Use schema markup (FAQ Page, HowTo, Product, etc.). |
| Make AI bots in. | It will help your content to be crawled and cited by AI systems. | Use llm.txt and review your robots.text file to allow crawlers like OpenAI’s GPTBot and Google AI to crawl your site. Be sure to not block them. |
| Gain references on reputable sites. | This will help improve your authority and expand your brand reach. | Develop authoritative content with unique insights, publish guest articles, maintain an active presence on social media, be a guest on podcast shows, use internal links, and adopt PR strategies. |
| Fresh content. | AI chatbot’s love freshness.. | Change the content regularly with updates, new data, statistics, and original and valuable information for your end-users. |
| Monitor brand mentions. | Brands that are mentioned frequently across different sources of media (i.e. PR, blogs, social media, news media, YouTube forums like Reddit and Quora, and authoritative websites) tend to be mentioned by AI. | Use the Google Search Console, Brand24, and Mention.com to monitor what discussions are taking place online. |
Prioritize Branded Searches
Branded searches help shape your brand perception, connect engagement, and establish your brand’s visibility and authority for large language models (LLMs).
LLMs do not function like traditional search engines. LLMs look for user intent, context, and conversational relevance.
To increase brand presence, you must ensure that:
Your content is helpful and useful to your targeted audience.
You continue to demonstrate your expertise through thought leadership and provides original, unique, evidence-based insights, and is quoted throughout authority sites and forums.
You must have a good reputation.
By tracking brand mentions with brand tracking programs like Brand24 or Semrush, along with analyzing LLM-directed traffic using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and testing brand visibility across multiple formats and devices, you can adjust your approach.
Emphasize user intent driven topic clusters
We can see the evolution from keywords to relevance.
Optimize for holistic topics and users’ needs by creating comprehensive content that explores the various aspects of a topic while also anticipating users’ questions.
Use long-tail keywords and natural language to describe users’ intent. Tools like MarketMuse from Siteimprove do a fantastic job of this.
Smart content creation and optimization using AI
Google never discourge the AI-generated content but it shpuld be relevent and authentic.
Prior to LLMs (large language models) hitting the stage, content creation often involved manually writing and optimizing that took forever to draft a quality article that focuses on E-E-A-T (aka expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).
You can now set up content briefs, outline, draft content, edit it, and make it your own without a lot of manual legwork. Many AI content tools and platforms include ChatGPT within their service offerings and add in their so-called proprietary algorithms on top of it.
With AI usage, creating quality content is at a much faster pace and existing content optimizations are easier than before. However, I would hesitate to use AI technologies for content creation.
Here’s why:
There is a lot of content that repeats, and rinses what everyone else is doing. Your content needs to be different, educate your audience, and convince them that you’re the subject matter expert on a topic. Gaining trust with the audience to solve their problems is what you want.
The best type of content is written by humans with the help of AI to improve the quality of the work, engage people with it, and encourage others to share it.