u/hazel-wood5

with everything going on, we all are still doing content, still writing, researching and publishing, and thats fine, we’re doing it as well..

but one thing is the most to note that the way of people used to search, and make purchase decisions has completely changed.. in just 2-3 years

so if our content is not adapted to it, we are already behind, and the reason of our content not working is not the ai, its the shift in customer behavior.

here’s my 2 cents on how we do it that i believe are still giving us roi on our content

1. Writing for topics instead of problems

There's a difference between "what is programmatic seo" and "how do i scale landing pages without a developer." one is a definition. the other is a real problem someone is desperately trying to solve. google and llms both reward the second type. write for the problem, not the topic.

2. Ignoring the bottom of the funnel completely, everyone

Wants tofu traffic. big numbers, easy to report. but bofu pages - feature pages, solution pages, use case pages - these are where actual signups happen. most sites have maybe 3-5 of them. that's not a content strategy, that's a homepage with extra steps.

i work with an seo agency auq, and we primarily work with saas companies. most brands when they come to us they’d already have the feature, solution pages.. but one of the most consistent wins we get early on is to expand on their feature/solution pages, going mroe deep and adding more bofu pages that has search demand and solves an actual problem.

one of my fav strategy, works every time

3. Treating every piece the same

A comparison page needs a completely different tone and structure than an educational blog. a landing page needs different signals than a listicle. when everything looks the same, nothing stands out to the algorithm or the reader.

4. No distribution plan

Writing a piece and hitting publish is not a strategy. if you're not actively distributing through linkedin, newsletters, reddit, youtube - you're basically throwing content into a void and wondering why nobody shows up.

5. Skipping original data

Anyone can write "5 seo tips for saas." not everyone can write "we analyzed 200 saas homepages and here's what the top 10% did differently." one gets ignored. the other gets shared, linked to, and cited by llms.

the fundamentals haven't changed. the execution bar has just gone way higher.

what's the biggest content mistake you see brands making right now? genuinely curious.

truth be told SEO is expensive.. and with llms and ai search shifts.. its a lot more expensive, with a lot of uncertainty

if you’re in saas, building yet, better to focus on getting sales than search rankings and citations. period. if you dont hv sales, or stable mrr, dont even read this post or any post regarding seo. just build out your important pages, reach out to your customers. you dont need people to find you, you need to find them.

if you’re at the stage where you need to build an inboung engine heres somethings that might help you -

(note: im not a guru or claiming to be an expert in all things these are my findings from working with b2b saas clients for 4+ years and working with a seo agency (AUQ,io) that serves mostly b2b saas and tech niches.. anything i share might change anytime, but for now this is whats been happening imo)

1/ Your website is the LAST PLACE not the first.

Unless you’re running aggressive paid ads, most of the time your website is the last place your visitrs will visit before making the purcase/conversion.

the user journey has changed most drastically, and even before ai, the traditional step by step funnel has been dead long before ai has come. with the abundance of information about anything was the reason. AI jsut made them easier to find.

so chatgpt or any other llms in my opinion cut the buying jounrey to a large extent, but i think primarily it has changed, even without the influence of AI.

users now discover your product in linkedin, facebook, twitter or insta, research them on youtube, ask specific details on ai llms, compare them on google, make decisions on reddit.. after everything when they are ready to move forward with their credit card, they go to the site. and we think our website is the one thats making us all the money - wrong.

classic mistake of last click attribution bias. if you’re running ads and/or serious about finding where your customers are coming from, highly recommended - usermaven or hockeystack, they will tell you what channes are actually driving revenue.

2/ off page seo is the most important than ever

yes, low quality links are dead. and again, this has been the case for a long time, even before the chatgpt launched. so not that ai has killed it. google itself has killed it

but does it mean you stop building links? yes and no.

in traditional sense, got some relevant traffic, has some keywords ranking, site looks nice, pay $100 and seal the deal days are loooong gone.

but now if you go to any llms and ask for your brand or main keywords, msot citations are from credible third party sources in the llms. emphasis on ‘credible’

just do 10-20 searches for your industry, see the pattern what sites are coming up and you’ll get the vibe. how to get links from them? same as before, offer something that makes them want to collab with you, either hook or by crook.

there are some (not all) Ai visibility tracker tools that gives you details of all the sources and citations list, like promptwatch i’ve seen group them really well and lets you filter. recently seen another tool more focused on finding reddit citations, so if you’re trying to engage in reddit might a shot - reddgrow ai

3/ LLMs and AI search engines follow our behavior pattern, we dont have to follow them

just about everything, if you see how any buyer would do research and make purchase decisions, llms and even google is doing exactly the same.

hence we need to chase the buyers and not dozens of llms and their algorithms.

its people who started to research more on the outer side of your website, be it reddit, youtube, linkedin, review platforms, third party ratings, listicles and hence llms and search engies started to focus on them as well.

not the other way around.

best investment you can make on your inbound marketing is to figure out where your audience is going, what they are looking for. you cant just get a tool and get these in your plate. you have to invest real time, and thoughts into it..

best is to TALK with people that fits your icp, least you can do is get sparktoro that can give some insights as well, from the early founder of moz, rand.

so thats my take, a bit long, but hope it helps founders who are struggling with marketing and inbound leads. its an uncertain channel for all brands, make wiser decisions.

google says geo is just seo. bing says the measurement problem is entirely new. both are worth reading, and honestly both are right - they're just talking about different things.

Google (May 2026):

essentially telling everyone to calm down. their ai features (ai overviews, ai mode) run on the same core search index via rag, so the fundamentals haven't changed.

seo is still relevant. geo and aeo are just seo for ai features, not a separate discipline

focus on non-commodity content - unique perspective, first hand experience, genuine expert insight. not recycled "7 tips for x" type stuff

things you can straight up ignore: llms.txt files, chunking content, rewriting pages specifically for ai, chasing inauthentic mentions, obsessing over structured data for geo

creating scaled pages just to capture every query variation violates their spam policy

technical basics still matter - crawlability, page experience, clean structure

one core test: would your visitors find this satisfying? if yes, you're on the right track

google's message is pretty clear - stop buying into geo hacks. most of them don't move ai overviews because ai overviews run on the same signals as regular search.

Bing (May 2026):

a much more technical and philosophical piece. bing's argument is that grounding for ai answers is a fundamentally different optimization problem from traditional search, even though both share the same crawling infrastructure.

traditional search asks: which pages should a user visit? grounding asks: what information can an ai system responsibly use to construct an answer?

the unit of value shifts from documents -> groundable facts with clear provenance

freshness failure hits differently - in search, stale content hurts rankings. in grounding, a stale fact produces a wrong answer

source attribution matters in a completely new way - not all indexed content carries equal evidentiary weight

abstention is now a valid outcome - if evidence is missing or conflicting, the system should say nothing rather than guess wrong

grounding operates in loops, not single queries - early retrieval errors compound through reasoning steps

bing is building a separate optimization layer on top of search, not replacing it

bing's message: the infrastructure is shared but the purpose is different. measuring citation quality is a genuinely new problem that needs new thinking.

My take:

the way we think about it at our agency auq, working mostly with saas brands - traditional seo is still the engine. geo is the instrumentation layer on top.

what that means practically: keep doing real seo, build genuinely useful content, earn real links. then separately track how your content actually gets cited inside ai answers. those are two different jobs and mixing them up is where most brands waste budget.

google just killed the shortcut tactics. bing built the measurement layer. both moves make sense when you read what they actually published.

disclaimer - not a guru, know it all guy, just a guy who has spent most of his career with search engine optimization and inbound marketing.. 

sure search is evolving, fastest than any other times in the search history, and we are adapting as fast we could, but when seeing some linkedin gurus or geo bros, to me often it sounds like they are moving backward than for ward, heres my 2 observations - 

1/ the llms.txt - doesnt it feel like the old days when websites had to add the ‘sitemap’ link in the footer in order to let the google bot to crawl the site better, then we evolved from it?

now that new search platforms has emerged, seems to me some marketers are trying to do the same old age seo, by renaming it the new seo while traditional seo is dead

even if it had correlation, i’ve never found myself adding it to any of the sites that i work on. and know that i work for a saas seo agency (auq) and most our clients are tech, b2b saas and dev tools - so most of their audience lives inside the llms and ai.. so geo is a major focus, but i couldnt find myself adding llms txt and dont think i ever will. sure it has come up in the conversations. never in execution, at least not for the projects that i handle

2/ This page is for AI LLMs - i have seen some very big brands, even some of our clients competitors adding ‘Ai bots read here’ or ‘for LLMs’ page where they describe their business in a way that they think search engines will understand better and cite them more.. 

this is by far seems bizarre to me. if it works well you never know, but doing it feels so cringe. so basically im considering Large Language Models not to understand my original page’s content, that i have to write a dedicated page for them to understand? 

so to me, its either that the llms are so incapable that they cant read and cite the pages, or your content is so bad that you dont believe any algos wont be able to understand lol

3/ Rewriting everything for llms: so this is the dumbest of all. by far. 

so im seeing people suggesting (while not implementing themselves on their sites) is that you convert your pages just like the llms would answer, like the question answer format. 

i think that just eliminates the whole reason why anyone might visit your website, brands that are doing it i feel making it harder for their audience to try out their product. 

lots of big brands converted their home page exactly like the replica of chatgpt, redesigned in just a couple of weeks.. guess what, it made their conversion worse. 

this is the classic ‘keyword manipulation’ that we all did in the 2015s.. just focusing on google’s algo, and doing the same now in 2026 

so again, are moving forward or backward with the llms and new seo? 

comparisons are one of the most untapped llm seo opportunities imo, most brands have them in the footer but don't emphasize them nearlyenough.

first, they are still designed for old school keyword ranking and not targeted for llms.

i'm not saying that's bad, but i think if i'm doing a comparison, i will speak for myself. i wont sit through a 5000 word article where i cant ask any questions and have no option but to consume it or switch through ten tabs to find my answer.

i would rather ask an llm based on my personal preferences, quick and convenient. i think most users think that way now.

second, most brands will have a few comparison pages in the footer when they start content marketing and then that's it. here i think the bigger opportunity lies.

every week theres something or other similar product launching. when they launch they'll do their marketing and all, and users want to compare them with familiar tools. so theres your chance to shine.

heres a practical example. at our seo agency (i work for auq) we've built a tool for tracking aeo/geo rankings. we mostly work with saas companies, and a big chunk of their audience are searching solutions in the ai models, so its a good product for us, even though the segment is well saturated.

but so we have built this and peec ai, profound, semrush, ahrefs are the big ones we can compare with. but every week theres new tools launching. just found out hubspot launched one this week, so obviously people are going to compare it with ahrefs, semrush, peec, profound etc.

you can do 2 brand comparisons, 3 brand comparisons, 4 brand comparisons mixing your brand with hubspot and any of the other tools in the niche.

while most of us are automating content, a lot of us are automating to produce garbage, to be honest. but if you create a nice format and solid structure for comparisons, then automate this to run 2-3 times every week for new tools and new mixes, this can be a super valuable asset for any brand, specially in saas and software.