AI Is Not Clickless Search

Ai versus SEO: Venn Diagram

Stop it.

Stop treating marketing for AI as an evolution of SEO. It’s not.

AI isn’t search without the clicks. It’s a completely different category of earned media and information discovery.

In traditional organic search, users type a keyphrase, get a list of links, and then click those links.

When using AI, users type a plain language question. The AI goes and fetches information. Then they read it. Maybe they click. Maybe they don’t.

So stop:

  1. Trying to squeeze clicks out of a mode of information discovery that discourages them.
  2. Look for alternative SEO methods that somehow help with AI visibility. Lots of SEO techniques help with AI share of voice, but you need to take a huge step back. AI requires great SEO. It also requires smart earned media strategies unrelated to most of the SEO cheese we rely on.
  3. Chasing onsite content quotas. Language models will never, ever reward quantity. It’s not how they’re built.
  4. Thinking in terms of AI “rankings.” Rankings imply consistency, where everyone enters a similar query. When every “query” is slightly different – AI is a plain-language interface – there are no “rankings.”
  5. Pretending “content” means “crap we crank out for rankings.” I know you won’t, but I had to try.

And start:

  1. Working to capture share of voice with great communications, information, and creativity.
  2. Teaching the shit out of everything. See 1.
  3. Providing a high return on time invested for folks who encounter you. See 1 and 2.
  4. Monitoring how AI talks about you instead of where you “rank” in an AI “result.”
  5. Working hard (really hard) to get real people talking about you and your brand everywhere, rather than vomiting blog posts on your site or carrying out bulk guest posting schemes.

I’m not promising flowers and rainbows. I’m not ignoring the fact that right now, AI is wholesale theft. But it’s here, people like it, the tech giants are adopting it. And it is an opportunity.

More thinking coming soon. But I’ve heard a few too many folks talking about AI “optimization” like it’s an extension of the hacks we’ve all used in SEO. This little post should ease the pressure in my medulla.

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