SEO in the AI Era: My Strategies for Staying Ahead

Search is becoming an answer, not a destination

SEO is changing because people increasingly want an answer instead of a website. Google still dominates search, but AI assistants are taking a meaningful share of questions that used to begin with a results page. I see that in my own behavior. For a quick repair question, a decision, or a trivial fact, I often ask ChatGPT or Siri connected to it before opening a browser.

That does not mean traditional search disappears. It means marketers need a plan for both the current search engine and the systems that summarize and recommend information. The three distinct areas I focus on are using AI in planning, using AI in content creation, and preparing content so AI systems can find and trust it.

Keep doing the work that earns visibility

AI does not remove the need for useful source material. It makes weak material easier to reproduce. Build pages, videos, podcasts, and guides that answer real questions with experience and specificity. Use AI to research angles, organize information, and speed up production, but keep the judgment and original evidence in the work.

The same principle applies to YouTube and other search surfaces. People may discover you through a video, a podcast, or a recommendation inside an assistant. A durable presence gives those systems more material to understand and gives people a reason to trust the answer.

Prime the systems ethically

I call the next layer AI priming. The three Rs of AI priming are roundups, reviews, and rankings. A roundup can collect the strongest options in a category. A review can analyze what users are saying. A ranking can define transparent factors and score the options. These formats give an AI system structured material to retrieve when someone asks for recommendations.

There is an ethical line here. Real data, clear methods, and honest inclusion criteria make a roundup useful. Invented rankings and manipulated reviews merely make an authoritative-looking page. If I want my own podcast or product recommended, I should earn that position with evidence instead of cooking the books.

The near-term SEO strategy is therefore not to abandon search. It is to diversify where your expertise can be found, create genuinely useful source material, and make your proof easy to understand. AI answers will keep changing the interface. The marketer who keeps publishing trusted evidence can remain visible through the change.

I've said it before and I'll say it again but the SEO space the search engine optimization space is changing y'all and today I wanted to offer some practical guidance on how you should be thinking about SEO in the short term and the long term I have three distinct um that you should be looking at as far as how AI is going to impact SEO and what you should be doing about it now if showing up on the search engines is something that matters for your business or should matter to your business so without further ado let's dive into it welcome back to the AI driven marketer I'm Dan Sanchez and before we dive into it I just wanted to like review what we've talked about on previous episodes with a new chart that came out this week from Rand fishkin and I'm going to be sharing my screen here for all you audio listeners but I'll be talking through it of course but ran fishkin is like one of the ogs of uh search engine optimization of SEO uh when he's the founder of ma a big SEO uh software company and has moved on to start a new company called spark Toro and still monitor search and Google and has been a big critic of Google's for a long since I can remember but he shared this crossplatform share share of search report coming from data he scraped from a number of different sources and there's some you know looseness to the data but he's pretty D he's a pretty data driven guy so I trust this um talking about like the percentage of where people are searching online for answers and of course Google still dominates it the hugest biggest part of the pie YouTube being second we all know YouTube's the second biggest search engine and there's a little sliver for green uh for Bing right but to kind of give you a perspective like Google still makes up what like 83% of search Which is less than it used to be and YouTube is at 6.79% beinging is only 1.97 so 2% but chat GPT is now making up over 4% of search which remember was Zero just two years years ago uh and that's a big deal because that is a big sliver it's going to pass up YouTube probably by this time next year and that's got to be freaking Google out and I've talked about uh what I've thought about Google and different things on past episodes but I just wanted to start with this graph to show you like look Rand fishing's got some evidence that this this little sliver that is AI search is growing like this is this is something to consider because people and I've I've been saying this on LinkedIn people don't want websites when they're searching for something they want an answer and if AI is the best way of getting the answer they will do it every time people are not romantic about the way they get their answers they were fans of the Yellow Pages until Google came along and replaced that with a better way of getting the answer I think AI at I've noticed this in my own my own behavior as I've searched for more things I'm going to chat GPT first now for a lot of different things how to fix this washer what's wrong with my car how could should I be thinking about this problem what's the answer to this this one trivial fact that I want to know I'm just going to chat GPT over and over again now that it's baked better into Siri I just ask Siri and Siri go goes and gets it from chat GPT and delivers it up to me while I'm driving or have my hands busy with something it's just becoming a normal part of my life now if you're listening to this you're probably like me you're you're using AI more than the normal person so you probably see some of this Behavior changing in yourself too but we're not alone in the fact that ran fish can put out this pie chart with the chat GPT making up over 4% of the total share share of search Market it's like well like there it is it's it's starting to impact the world and I expect that that little black sliver on this pie chart will continue to grow year after year it's not like Google's going to die completely or traditional search there will probably be ways where people still want that but imag imagine it's grown to 4% without chat GPT even putting search as a dedicated feature in their product until recently so this is po this is pre them putting search in their product imagine how it's going to get when uh chat GPT is actually searching the internet for you and pulling the the few things that it couldn't just answer you itself so I expect this to grow dramatically and now before I get into like what I'm doing about it and why you should like maybe consider some of the routes that I'm taking for how to prepare as a marketer for SEO I have to give a cave I have to give some backstory because I know the people who are into SEO man they really care a lot about data they really care a lot about vigorous uh research to prove every single point they make I am not that person I am not the person I'm I'm a generalist I dig pretty deep into most categories but the the level of depth that like people who speak on SEO do I I don't do that I don't do the big research reports to validate empirically all the things that I'm going to be talking about but I do want to say that I do have some serious experience in ranking and writing content and seeing success with search engine optimization so let me go ahead and give you a quick little story just to put my SEO peers at rest like I actually I know a little bit about what I'm talking about I don't do the Deep research but I have done a lot of SEO work um I have to share my screen again so I'm got to walk through a little story here about in two two maybe 20 no I would say 2018 I discovered this group called income school if you haven't heard of them they are a YouTube channel but also a Blog and and a couple of social channels that were teaching people how to blog but in a very unique way unlike most SEO uh practitioners out there they were saying some very different things about how to rank on Google that really got me started on my real SEO Journey because I'd read all the stuff from Rand Fishin I'd read like The textbooks written on SEO and the technical things about it but I always read it and was like H this is it's not worth the time for me in order to do this because getting backlinks is just too big of a pain in the butt um but income School came into my life and started showing me through all their YouTube videos and eventually I paid for their $500 course and is honestly best one of the best $500 I've ever SP spent if you want to dig into SEO or like YouTube growth highly recommend incom school I am not paid by them I am not like I'm not going to put affiliate links I will put a link over to their website in case you want to check it out I'm just saying it as someone who's gone through their course and has paid for it for years like it's probably one of the best paid courses I've ever had because they continue to up improve it and make it better anyway so plug for them because well done they they stay on top of it but they had some of the best stuff on ranking that made it well easier and to do it the rank on number of Articles without doing any backlinking work so I put it to the test actually my whole website danz.com didn't start as danz.com it started as uh Vlog den.com because I was blogging about how to build home video Studios if you can't tell I'm in a home video studio now and I started my journey by blogging about it as I was learning about it and still some of my top ranking articles today are things like how to build a home video Studio I've even had friends ask me like oh they dug into how to build a video Studio I we surprised when my blog came up and they're like oh I know that guy um so I have some of the best content on the internet on how to build a home video Studio I've even built a whole course around it um so I started ranking for these things and then took it back to where I was working at the time which was this uh Christian University and SEO I took a team of interns based on what I'd learned on my own personal site and I started ranking and outranking things like Harvard Business review and all kinds of different authoritative sites I started outranking them based on what IID learned from income school which the general premise was like just right content that's 10x better than the top ranking articles and you'll probably outrank them if you do enough of it um that's the short and simple answer there's obviously a lot more to it but I started doing that I started writing the best content on the internet for a number of different keywords related to Home Video Studios and it freaking worked my personal website today I've I've kind of branched out from that topic but I've written about thought leadership marketing and marketing and all kinds of different topics now and I rank for a number of competitive keywords and I probably bring in about 20,000 page views a month just from organic search coming to my personal website so that was a little test I then scaled it with a team of about five students and I taught them how to write articles the income School way um and with our team of freshman students in this college working about 15 hours a week a piece we were putting out 10 to 20 articles a week and we we were writing so fast that we quickly ran out of topics to talk about for the niche topic that the university stood for um and that that site grew to 100 page 100,000 page views a month in rankings for that one little private Christian School when started a whole new website called just disciple to kind of hit all topics related to Christianity and we produced over a period of two years about 400ish articles and again my little team of interns or students who didn't know anything about writing content were able to write hundreds and hundreds of Articles this site at its peak grew to about 500,000 page views a month and traffic coming to all kinds of different posts from searching for Bible verses about X prayers for this uh what is this in the Bible like all kinds of Christian topics we ranked for and then advertise the university for so that was a big project and I've done more since them but this one's probably the biggest one that I still back point back to today and I did this all without backlinks all without uh any really thing technical just writing the best content we possibly could um on the topics very long mey articles again I did this with a team of freshman students and four of them were writers one of them was an editor spot checking the other writers is they wrote and would go through and make sure they got published on time um and that was our little system for a long time on how I and I trained them to write based on what I learned from my personal blog based on what I learned from income school so with that in mind that's kind of the perspective that I'm coming off of I've then trained others other companies and other writers on how to write in this style and have ranked many helped other companies rank for a number of different keywords even leveraging podcasts to create transcripts to create blog posts like all kinds of things um so I have some experience in SEO and how to rank sites and how to get a significant amount of traffic through search engine optimization I understand how the game is played I understand how it works um I've done all kinds of little link and and now I've done more link building and understand how that plays into the game too so that's kind of the backstory that's where I'm coming from and I want to talk about how AI is changing right so AI is shifting to this whole AI driven approach and there's actually three different levels if you will of how AI is impacting SEO and I've just pulled up this slide that just says how is AI impacting SEO I'm going to turn it into three different ways or approaches that I'm taking with SEO now uh that AI is impacting everything we do um so three different plans to consider there is AI planning AI content and what I'm calling AI priming so let's dive into all three three of those so let's start with AI planning so if you're doing any SEO work you should at least be using AI to help plan your articles in fact I made a custom GPT I make a lot of those to help you plan uh your SEO articles and I I use it to build substantial articles when I'm going to write them myself and not before we get into the AI how to use AI to write the content um if you're still writing it yourself as a writer or as a Content expert or a subject matter expert whatever like you should at least be using AI to speed up your planning because AI is exceptionally good at planning out the content I actually created a GPT called rank attack the SEO article planner in order to help you not only outline your article but to find who's currently ranking and how to create a competitive article that will outrank them yes AI is very good at this so let me show you a little bit about what this custom GPT does I will give I will put a link in the show notes if you want to have access to it again if you Subs subscribe to my newsletter I will give this to you for free and you can use it however you would like um but let me show you what this custom GPT does as a good example of how you could be leveraging AI in order to better plan your articles because you're going to win or lose the SEO game based on your planning not on your writing it's based on how well you position the article across all the competition is the hardest part of SEO in my opinion of discerning what is currently written what's missing and what people are actually looking for in order for you to find that position in order to take over everybody else and AI is very good at it so let me show you how this custom GPT works or the steps that it takes um first you just click to get started and asks you for the a the the keyword you would like to rank for for example I'm going to pull this up on my screen here um I'm going to walk through this conversation but say it out loud uh I put in AI marketing strategy that is a term I would like to rank for is I want to become more and more known for AI marketing right so very popular thing people search for as an AI marketing strategy it's not something I've currently written an article for but I will soon based on this outline um hopefully someone doesn't steal this from uh my video but if you do then I'll just find another angle and take over it from there I guess so it went and actually scraped the the searches in it uses Bing rather than a chat gpg search since that's still a little bit limited right now um it went and used Bing to search what is currently ranking for that it doesn't really matter whether it's b or Google but what the important part is is it's taking a sampling of what is currently ranking for AI marketing strategy and it went and found the usual suspects in Myspace which is a big blog from HubSpot Ai and digital marketing the complete guide by HubSpot right a corcia page otter.ai data camp and Gartner all have ranking articles and it did some analysis it wents it goes and creates a summary of each one and then does analysis of what they're all talking about and what's currently missing so it said these articles collectively cover the integration of AI and marketing practical obligations team training and Future Trends to differenti your article consider focusing on a niche aspect of AI marketing strategy such as ethical considerations aiid driven customer Journey mapping or case studies of successful AI implementations or specific uh Industries would you like to proceed to the next step I said yes honestly I put I could have provided it some guidance of what I thought was missing but I just went ahead and said yes for the case of this example and it actually gave me some angles that it would recommend taking in order to outrank them gave me five different angles to take here's the angles said based on the top ranking articles the search for search intent for AI marketing appears to be informational and action oriented users are likely hoping for and it gave me five different possible intents behind the search this is where AI is really good at Discerning what people are really looking for when they type in the search term that's the key that's the Crux of of SEO planning is Discerning what they really want and so it gave me a number of different options but the one I wanted that I thought I'm like huh this would be really interesting this it would stand out from the competition and it would hon honestly be something I would want to see is just I went with the second option practical guidance steps to deliver or Implement an AI marketing strategy most people looking for an AI marketing strategy are looking for not just an overview but practical steps for beginners but you don't have to call out beginners you can just say hey steps to develop this like how to you know um so the hypothesis he gave me a hypothesis and I went ahead and just said I just gave it back the number two the second one the Practical guidance uh route it then offered some title suggestions or incorporating the the key term in the titles that's the one place you got to make sure it shows up and I went through and looked at them all and I'm like hey I like the second title best how to build an AI marketing strategy that delivers results sounds very practical and stands apart from the other titles that are currently written it went and then built the whole outline based on its insights of what people are looking for based on what people are currently writing about and based on that title it created an outline that I've already given it instructions on the back end of this custom GPT on how to create good outlines it created an outline for then to guide uh and guide the writer in writing a blog post so that you know you're going to have a hit post this is AI or SEO planning at its finest um in this process used to take a number of steps and a lot of thought and time went into planning each keyword out now it takes less than 60 seconds to do a thorough plan with the th outline in order to get this done now you could then pass this over to another AI to write said content but if you really want this to be a hit humans still have to write this because you still have to be able to draw from personal experience pull real examples and really to really make this thing shine but it's honestly even if you did add give this to an AI to write this would still be a very solid it would be a much better article having given given it this this title this outline and the rest of the intent that it now understands um but if you were just going to at least use this for guidance it's going to be very strong and a very good way to start your SEO plans if you're currently still writing articles to rank on Google using it for planning is a solid way to go forward but that's not it right because we talked about three different ways to approach AI in your SEO efforts the other one is AI content like I said AI can then write this content um I will say that I've heard some great things from other SEO practitioners out there around AI generated content and how it can actually rank um I have not experienced this yet but I am doing some tests so let me show you a tool that I am currently using in testing to see how well it works it's called WP autol blog uh I got it as an appsumo deal like a onetime fee I think I paid a couple hundred bucks to give me access to write a couple hundred articles a month with this thing and it is a fun little tool that you can do some light keyword researches on um you can plan topic clusters but most importantly you can go ahead and schedule hundreds of articles for AI to knock out for you and then it will automatically post to your WordPress site so I have a number of different sites hooked up to this and I am testing probably three four different websites that I created from scratch to test to see how well it works because honestly I don't even want to post it to danz.com I have it hooked up but I haven't started posting AI content to that site yet because I don't know if it will help or like destroy the current rankings I have so I don't want to get it mixed up hence the test so I'm doing all kinds of tests one test that I'm doing is allb ver.com where I kind of like just duplicated danz.com the theme over and just started blogging and I I didn't spend a lot of time making it look pretty like I kind of threw together a basic logo for it um and it's creating content about the Bible I'm doing this topic because again remember my my background is I created just disciples so I know what ranks here I know what works I know there's a big a lot of people searching for biblical content around all kinds of different factors around what the Bible says about this versus about that prayers on this like it's it's a thing and it's not as as much as much volume as there is searching people searching for it it's not super competitive um so I have this just being filled up with articles a couple a day and I'm just letting that run on pure autopilot like I go in and check in on it every once in a while and this has been going and I'm still waiting for the rankings to come through it takes a while for rankings to come through on Google with the new site you know generally 6 to eight months so I'm still waiting to see how this test pans out when I find out and start seeing results I will share it with you and share the results of how it's going um the general rule of thumb with this is that the AI will not create great T content it will create okay content but if you think about the long tale of ranking you can throw out hundreds and hundreds of Articles find out kind of what hits and maybe what ranks on the first page is ranks is number seven or eight and then you can come back in with the human touch and double it down on making those posts actually good to be competitive but you're kind of essentially throwing out on auto let hundreds of lines into the water is figuring out which ones catch a fish and then optimizing it to throw that one line back out with that particular Bay right so this is kind of the approach that I've heard talked about in the SEO community and one that I'm giving a shot myself when it comes to creating AI content for the sake of ranking on Google but but there's one last thing that you should be considering that I'm testing still myself and we've talked about AI planning we've talked about AI content but let's talk about AI Prime right because search AI planning and AI content that's that's competing against what's currently working for search but remember search is changing so how do we prepare for that right how do we prepare for AI search engines taking over the traditional search route of going to Google or Bing well let's talk about that that's what I'm starting to call AI priming I'm sure that name will change I'm throwing out something though because it's no longer it's no longer just SEO it's not like manipulating the search engines to rake your article when the AI can read your article and just pull it up so how can you change what our bottom of the funnel searches um for things that you want to be found for in AI I've already heard from some VPS of marketing that they're getting leads based on people doing research for certain types of tools and then their company showing up in the results of the AI of what it's recommending of possible solutions and that people are then going to Google to go find the company and then become a lead for it that's AI priming you're not just ranking but you're actually being uh suggested by the AI as possible solutions and that's something all companies need to be considering right now or what are the bottom of the funnel because top of the funnel is going to change top of the funnel is going away people searching for how to do this like how to do AI marketing like they're searching on Google for that now but when they search AI for that and ask AI for an answer AI is just going to tell them they're not going to sort and not going to have to go to any websites to Source an answer for it and even if they do it's just barely like a little Source tag in the in the AI results page so what do you do when AI starts to deliver something else well AI is still going to be useful for bottom of the funnel or for specific recommendations for example I've done this many times where I've said like show me the best B2B podcast right and look at this it's pulled up a number of different podcast specific Solutions this is where AI priming is going to be a big deal in the SEO because this is the future right here people are all going to have their AI assistance and they're going to be looking for Solutions local things um or answers to their problems and sometimes Google in specific instances like this one I'm looking for specific recommendations um in this case I'm looking for a podcast to listen to on B2B marketing look at that B2B grow shows up that podcast that I used to host when I worked for sweet fish um I know it showed up because it's like one of the first things I tested when chat GPT came out two years ago and it still ranks but why does it rank this is where I'm going to pull some antidotal evidence of why B2B growth ranks even though it's not there are many podcasts that should be on this list that aren't on this list that actually get more downloads and rank higher than B2B growth in apple podcast um it doesn't matter what they are but I know that be there are a number of ones that aren't listed and some that shouldn't be listed um that are here that don't deserve to be here but why are they here right this is what's I'm calling now ai priming if you do a normal search for B2B podcasts on Google you'll notice that here like bdb growth this is the new cover art shows up in the search results and can be indexed here sometimes as a a cover out on top but often times if you go through all the things that are ranking what is it oh it's 30 plus like let me just look at the search results page and it says I see articles for 30 plus B2B marketing podcasts the 2024 list I see top nine B2B marketing podcasts in 24 the top B2B marketing podcast for 2024 top 40 B2B podcasts to listen to huh what are these they're all Roundup posts and these people who are sourcing these probably haven't listened to all of them because listening to 30 plus plus episodes across the dump bunch of podcast takes a lot of time so they probably just round this list up from somewhere else and added a few more onto it and then gave a basic analysis of each one that's how most of these po articles are created but if you go and look at these articles let me go ahead and open them up here because B2B growth was very early to the B2B podcast game they show up on a number of different lists oh privacy y'all all right and I know show up in this list of B2B marketing right I'm looking for B2B growth now let's just go do a search for it there it is B2B growth showed up on the first list does it show up on the second list B2B growth oh it didn't show up on the second website I'll share I'll save you from the suspense it shows up on a lot of these different websites if I can spell it doesn't show up on this one but I've gone through and looked through a number of different websites before and in the past uh bdb growth shows up for so many of these like Roundup posts and from a number of authoritative uh content sites and I can say that I think these Roundup posts are influencing the AI search engines as they go go through and do these uh for podcasts they see it mentioned all over the place so like even here in in chat GPT itself you can check the sources for how it pulled the list and you can go and check all the sources and I guarantee you the ones that are it's being recommended to you in this this almost like search engine results page from AI is because it's these podcasts are being showed up frequently in these Roundup posts you can go and check it yourself do the search B2B podcast go and check the sources and you'll see that B2B growth and these other ones are showing up a lot in these these uh results it's often similar to what is showing up in Google but instead of it being relied on like ranking actual ranking data from Spotify or from Apple it's just using the amount of times these podcasts are mentioned in these Roundup posts and I think this is a big part of the future of what I'm calling AI priming so right now I'm starting to focus more and more even for AI marketing podcast I'm trying to show up in a lot of these Roundup lists um and talking to people about it and creating my own in order for when someone searches for AI marketing podcast AI driven marketer shows up in the list both in Google multiple times but also in AI recommendations as Ai and chat GPT updates its sources because right now it's still based on information from a year ago but if it's going and pulling fresh rankings from either being or its new search engine it's going to be able to find my podcast on these roundups so some other considerations for AI priming is what I'm calling the three Rs of AI priming and that is roundups reviews and rankings all very similar but I think this is going to matter a lot to essentially manipulate it's kind of the negative way of putting it but let's say marketing persuading to have your podcast your products your Solutions or whatever the heck else you want it recommending to users to actually consider you as a possible option for uh the AI user as it's making recommendations for what what they're searching for so roundups are the easiest way to get started just pull together the top 10 or what you think are the top 10 if you want to go heavier find ways to grab actual data to make it stronger have have reviews pull some of the reviews do analysis of the reviews for example I could do analysis of reviews of the top 10 podcasts on AI marketing to break down what people are saying to bring some data to it or you can create ranking factors to rank them yourself maybe have a scoring system and how to score whatever the heck you're ranking so that again has at least the perception of being data driven even if you're making up the ranking factors and kind of cooking the books yourself I don't recommend doing that in an ethical way I'm just saying that there's ways this is how this game is going to be played there will be good actors actually throwing real data and doing a thorough thorough uh being thorough in their ranking factors and an analysis there will be bad actors manipulating the whole thing and just making it look authoritative so you have to be careful of that try to pull good data and have real ranking factors and real research that drives these kinds of roundups or rankings or reviews post um in an effort to Prime AI to Showcase your stuff so that's it that's where I'm currently at with SEO uh again we talked about how to use AI Marketing in your planning how to use AI Marketing in your content creation how to use AI priming in order to show up for search Eng now and when AI starts to take over the game in the future hopefully getting a a sense of what I'm doing as a marketer will help inform your own uh SEO plan in the near future