SEO in the Age of AI Search: What Still Works

What actually changed

Search did not die; clicking did, for a growing slice of queries. Informational searches increasingly end in an AI-generated answer, while commercial and navigational searches still produce clicks. Strategy follows that split.

What still compounds

• Technical health. Crawlable, fast, well-structured sites feed both rankings and answer engines. Schema markup now does double duty.
• Genuine expertise. Content with specifics, data, and lived experience survives because engines and models both reward verifiability.
• Commercial-intent pages. Comparison, pricing, alternatives, and use-case pages keep earning clicks because the searcher still needs to act.
• Digital PR. Mentions and links remain the corroboration layer that makes engines trust your claims.

What stopped working

Thin keyword-stuffed posts written to hit a volume target, content farms chasing every adjacent query, and word-count worship. The model reads the substance, and there is none.

The modern allocation

Spend roughly half your organic effort on classic SEO aimed at commercial intent, and half on AEO: answer-shaped content, FAQ schema, entity consistency, and being the cleanest source an assistant can cite. Measure both: rankings and traffic on one side, assistant citations and branded demand on the other.

Frequently asked questions

Should I stop publishing informational content?

No, but change its job. Informational content now builds entity authority and citations rather than clicks, so write it to be quoted, not just visited.