SEO is Dead. (And I actually feel fine about it.)
For twenty years, the playbook was boring but reliable: stuff keywords into a page, beg for backlinks, and pray you land in Google’s “10 blue links.”
That era is over. Done.
With ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s new AI Overviews, we aren’t optimizing for search engines anymore. We’re optimizing for generative engines (GEO). And really? It’s about time. The goal isn’t to get a click anymore—it’s to be the specific answer the AI spits out.
If your business isn’t in the AI’s “context window”—think of it as its short-term memory—you basically don’t exist. Harsh, but true.
So, how do we actually handle this? (Because ignoring it definitely isn’t a strategy.)
Here is what I am telling our clients right now. It’s not a perfect science yet, but it’s working.
- Stop thinking in “Pages.” Start thinking in “Chunks.” Old-school SEO was all about writing these long, meandering guides just to trap keywords. But AI models use this process called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to slice content into tiny pieces. If a lone paragraph on your site can’t stand alone as a fact, the AI usually just skips it.
So, flip the script. Don’t bury the lead. I tell everyone: start every section with the answer. If you answer the query in the first sentence, you get cited. If you ramble? You get ignored. Also, feed the machine data. Real data. AI models are desperate for unique stats because they treat them as primary sources. Give them what they want. - You have to help the thing “Think” This is the part most people miss. AI agents aren’t just copy-pasting; they’re trying to reason through a problem. You have to build the logic for them.
I have seen it called “Reasoning Scaffold” (fancy term, I know). But it just means structuring your content like a logic problem: Problem → Diagnosis → Solution. Numbered lists are huge here. If you give the AI a step-by-step list, it will often just grab it and use it as the answer. It’s lazy, in a way. Use that to your advantage. - Consistency is the only Backlink that matters Remember begging for backlinks? We can stop doing that. Now, trust comes from corroboration.
AI works on probability. It’s essentially guessing what’s true based on repetition. If it sees your pricing is “$500” on your site, on LinkedIn, and on Crunchbase, it decides that fact has a high probability of being true. You are literally teaching the web who you are. - If it can’t read you, it can’t cite you. Technical SEO used to be a “nice to have.” Now it’s the price of admission.
If you aren’t using Schema Markup (basically a label maker for your code), the AI doesn’t know what it’s looking at. And please, for the love of god, stop hiding content behind “click-to-reveal” buttons. If the crawler can’t see it immediately, it assumes the page is empty.
The bottom line? Stop obsessing over ranking position. The new metric is Share of Voice.
How often is the AI talking about you? Is it using your data? That’s the only game in town now. It’s messy, and it’s fast, but if you start optimizing for answers instead of clicks, you’re going to be fine.
