SEO Isn't Broken — It Just Changed Engines

A while back, an old friend of mine who runs a repair shop took me out to dinner.

We'd no sooner sat down than he started running the numbers: it used to be that he'd put 120,000 a year into ads, buy the keywords, and the phone never stopped ringing. This year his budget didn't shrink by a single cent, yet the phone had gone quiet.

He asked me: "Old classmate, now that AI has turned up, has this line of work gone belly-up?"

I told him: it hasn't gone belly-up. It just changed engines.

What Is SEO, Anyway?

Put plainly, it's making sure your business is right there in front of the customer, the moment they start thinking of you.

How did customers used to "bump into" you? By hammering keywords. Whatever phrase people typed into the search box, you spread those very words all over the place. The thicker you laid them down, the closer to the top you ranked. Back then, the search engine was like a word-counting machine, one that kept score of every last one.

Then AI moved into the engine. It stopped playing that way.

Now it weighs four things:

First, whether you've truly and fully answered the customer's question.

Second, whether people land on your page and sit down to read it — or turn around and walk away.

Third, whether your content and your website are genuinely well put together.

Fourth, whether the rest of the trade actually takes you seriously.

The word-counting machine leveled up, and along the way it learned to read minds.

The search engine no longer looks at what words you wrote. It looks at whether you've thought through the question your customer never said out loud.

Choosing the Topic: From "Hunch" to "Data"

The first job of any content is choosing what to write about.

How did that get chosen before? Entirely on feel — plus the rule of thumb: "See what our competitors post, and follow behind them."

AI flipped that. It opens the search history and lays it out for you: what people are actually asking, what they ask when they phrase it differently, and what they've asked a hundred times with no one ever giving a straight answer.

The first time I saw this kind of data, I stayed silent for a long while. These are the questions your customers keep circling in their heads, and nobody has written a single word about them.

You spend every day agonizing over what to post, when the data has long since put the answer somewhere you can actually see.

Choosing topics went from "going on a hunch" to "reading the data." Move that one step, and every move behind it follows suit.

Writing: AI as Your Assistant Editor

Topic chosen. Now — the writing?

In the old days, you'd write on feel, decide it read smoothly enough, send it out, and hear nothing back at all.

Now the tool hands you suggestions as specific as a seasoned editor:

• How to split this piece into subheadings so it reads the most smoothly.
• Which passage readers will stall on, and what they'll still be hunting for right there.
• Which two pieces were long overdue for linking to each other.
• The whole lane's been written to death, save for one corner that not a soul has touched.

You act on the first three. That last one might as well be pointing you toward a plot of land no one's tilled yet.

Reviewing: From "Waiting on the Monthly Report" to "Watching Today"

In years past, you couldn't tell whether a round of strategy was working until that end-of-month sheet finally came. And by the time it arrived, whatever head start you'd had was already cold.

Now you don't wait. The dashboard reports in real time:

• Are the people coming through the door the ones you actually want?
• At which step did they set the page down and walk away?
• Which keyword, in the end, even turned into an order?
• For the same article, how large a difference does reading it on a phone make, as opposed to on a computer?

When you find the step that's the problem, you fix it by mid-afternoon. Marketing isn't decided once a year — it can be quietly adjusted week after week.

Reviewing isn't done for the last day of the month. It's done for tomorrow.

Half the Work, AI Can't Do

Somewhere in here, somebody's bound to ask: if AI can do the writing, what's left for us?

Here's something I believe: a brand is remembered, more often than not, for one thing it said, the stand it took, that little streak of personality — far more than for where it ranks.

A ranking is something AI can compute in no time at all. But "you're the one who would say it this way" is something it can't write.

A brand's convictions, how it measures its words, what register it reaches for along with whom — these live in a person.

AI is the map, but you have to keep your own hands on the wheel.

The American Company Called Wingman

I'll make the point stand with an American company.

In New Jersey, there's a marketing firm called Wingman Planning that promotes local businesses. I asked the person who runs it whether they sense the trade has changed because of AI these days.

They answered: "We worked out a logic a long time ago, let me walk you through it."

A customer who comes in through one channel can just as quietly slip back out the same one.

All the channels are reaching for the same single person: the search learns what they truly want, so that message gets carried into the email, and the clicks on the email come back as feedback and send the next piece of content a layer deeper in the same direction.

What you searched for, what you received, what you saw — it's all one sentence: whatever you wanted is right here.

Take apart their "omnichannel" story and it comes to a single line: whichever path a new or returning customer takes, the same hands are waiting to catch them at the other end.

And the logic isn't obscure. Two roads that run alongside each other and hold on beat three roads where each one lets half slip through.

From Here, Search Gets More and More like a Chat

Here's a question I get a lot: is SEO even worth it anymore?

Watch today's results page. You ask a question, and it hands you back a whole paragraph without your ever clicking a thing.

The links will survive, though there'll be fewer of them. But the knack of "making the point well" won't lose a single point.

The person who can, in a few well-chosen sentences, answer the unspoken layers sitting in a customer's mind is the one who keeps a seat at the table.

So whenever someone asks me whether SEO is really worth it, I generally don't hurry to answer. I just turn the question back: what's your customer been asking you lately?

And Back to That Dinner

As we were getting up to go, he asked: "So when I get back, what do I do first?"

Don't rush to "buy keywords." Go back and do one thing: write down, one line at a time, every question each customer raised with you in the last three months. Then tape the pages up where you'll see them.

He didn't get it: "What's the point in writing them down?"

You'll realize it as you go: the real questions your customers were trying to ask are ones you never once answered. They weren't really after a "word" at all — they were carrying a sentence inside them, and that's a thing you've forgotten in the daily grind of running the business.

He thought for a minute, then said: "Fine — I'll write them as soon as I get home."

A week later he sent me a photograph. His white wall was covered in sticky notes, and a line written along the very bottom read:

"The three questions my customers ask the most, I'd never written a single one down. You had me hunt them out first. Old friend, this isn't marketing at all anymore — it's learning to know a person."

On the other end of the phone, I laughed.

The SEO game has knocked around for these ten-odd years: changed engines, changed algorithms, devised new plays, running back in circles until the whole circle loops back to that same old line: say what needs to be said, and keep people at heart.

The AI inside search engines understands people more and more. It only stands to reason, then, that the people who run businesses learn to understand them first.

May the thing you sit down to write be exactly the sentence your customer never said out loud.

That dinner was worth every minute.