"Deleted 80% of blog posts, traffic doubled. Here's why."

How can we ensure AI sources cite our content? The truth is, we’re all still figuring that out. But most SEO fundamentals haven’t changed (and some matter even more in the AI era): ✅ Clear structure that puts answers first ✅ Citing original data and studies ✅ Adding unique insights, case studies, and experience ✅ Making content skimmable and schema-friendly To help you with creating content, I've created the Answer Engine Optimiser (AEO) GPT. It’s an advisor that helps teams improve the content they already create, making it more likely to surface in featured snippets, voice search, and AI-generated answers. It is by no means a replacement for good quality, human content. 🔹 It helps teams structure blogs so they’re more likely to show up in featured snippets, voice search, and AI-generated answers. 🔹 It balances SEO best practices with human readability, so content still feels natural and engaging. 🔹 It guides writers on building topical authority with clusters, FAQs, citations, and strong calls-to-action. It's free, so why not take a look. Link in the comments.

It's time to bring back your corporate blog – but not for the reasons you think. With the rise of AI, more users are replacing their traditional searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! with answers generated from LLMs. 55% of American users are now relying on AI results rather than search engines. The SEO game is changing. You don't need a business blog to drive traffic to your website, you need a business blog to train AI models. Blogs were once a popular way for businesses to communicate with potential customers. The content gamed search engines with an organic SEO. Dense with keywords, blogs provided useful information readers might share and drove web traffic to small business websites. If search engine traffic is down, what's the point of investing in a business blog? Artificial intelligence craves new content, and LLM model companies are scraping blogs for useful information. If you control the blog content, you can control the narrative: 💬 Influence large language models 🌱 Grow your business reputation 📡 Provide answers about your products 📝 Ensure you control your own narrative It's important to remember that AI scraping needs high quality content. Flooding the internet with low quality AI-generated content won't help you. The best strategy is building out a useful resource that large language models will soak up. 

I’ve mostly stayed quiet on optimizing content for AI. Not because I don’t have thoughts, but because most of the conversation feels too tactical, i.e. hacks, optimizations, quick wins. Much like most of the SEO discourse that wasn't helpful over the years because it didn't address more foundational issues. Tomorrow, I’m publishing something in my newsletter that I’m genuinely excited about. It’s less about tactics, more about the bigger shift we need to make in how we position ourselves and think about content in terms of being cited by AI. Let me know if you want the link to subscribe.

It's easy to get visibility in SERPs, AI Search, Perplexity, and GPT. We did it with just 3 hours of work a week and grew our web traffic from 0 to 11k in just 3 months. How? I built an AI worker specifically for AIO/SEO content marketing. This isn't a GPT Prompt guide. I don't have conversations with it. I give it one sentence orders like a line cook. "Article on this topic for this persona." It gives me results. It's a fully customized multi-agent system with vector memory, custom tool calls, and agent orchestration that handles a 10 phase and 100 step process. 1. research 2. strategy 3. writing 4. optimization 5. publishing I just released my complete guide on how it works. It covers: → How we're defending against AI Overviews eating our click-through → Scaling high-quality content without sacrificing E-E-A-T → Content attribution that my CFO Nicholas Byrd actually believes → The complete workflow from keyword research to published asset in under 5 minutes The worker we built isn't static. Joshua Silvia and I add new capabilities every 2 weeks. Latest addition: contextual internal linking (I just wrote down my process and it automated it). Coming next: automatic video creation. (Seriously.) If you're a Director of Content/SEO dealing with SERP volatility, quality-at-scale challenges, or attribution headaches this guide breaks down exactly how we solve it. Comment "SEO" and I'll DM you the guide.

I feel like Maury Povich here: Does Google actively punish AI-Generated Content? . . . According to the DNA test (an Ahrefs statistical analysis), when it comes to AI-Generated content on Google ... 📣 It DOES NOT actively penalize AI-Generated Content 🕺 This comes as a shock to most digital marketers, I'd bet There is a pervasive feeling that, if I use AI content on my site, Google will tank my rankings After Ahrefs analyzed over 600k pages from their database & their content to determine how much of the content on those pages is created/assisted with AI Here are some of the findings: ✅ Only 13.5% of pages in the top 20 of SERPs are written purely by a human ✅ Nearly ⅓ of pages in the top 20 of SERPs have substantial, dominant, or pure AI useage ✅ The Pearson Correlation Coefficient (shoutout my stats nerds) between SERP position & %AI is 0.011 - effectively no correlation between the two variables ✅ There is a slight preference in the top positions "more human" content, but it is just that very slight TLDR - Google doesn't actually care how you write your content, as long as it is well structured, unique, and helpful ... with extra emphasis on unique & helpful to hit the top positions.

Everybody says SEO is dead ❌ , but no one is telling you what platforms actually matter now. So here's the answer: ⬇️ I've been tracking where AI actually pulls information from when it generates responses. The data is eye-opening. ➡️ Reddit appears in 40% of AI citations. Wikipedia hits 26.3%. YouTube 23.5%. Even Yelp shows up in 21% of references, and Amazon in 18.7%. And if you're wondering "why do these percentages add up to more than 100%?". That's because AI cites multiple sources per response. Translation? Your content strategy just shifted completely. ✅ The new SEO playbook: → Get your expertise onto discussion platforms (Reddit, Quora, industry forums) → If you're sticking with your website, format everything as clear Q&A → Stop optimizing for Google crawlers, start optimizing for AI training See the pattern? AI doesn't just scrape content - it prioritizes conversational, problem-solving formats that directly answer questions. While everyone's still chasing traditional keyword rankings, smart companies are already positioning themselves where AI actually looks for answers. Photo by Jake Ward

The Lighthouse Keeper's New Companion: Navigating the AI Seas of SEO Remember the solitary lighthouse keeper, diligently scanning the horizon, guiding ships through treacherous waters? That's been the SEO specialist for years manually adjusting, optimizing, and watching the search tides. But what if the lighthouse now has an AI co-pilot? Imagine a vast ocean of information. Traditional SEO was about meticulously charting those waters, placing buoys (keywords) and ensuring your ship (website) was visible. Now, AI is like a hyper-intelligent sonar system, constantly mapping the depths, predicting currents, and even guiding new, faster routes to the shore. It's no longer just about being found by the search engine; it's about being understood and being the best answer for the AI. The AI Lighthouse Keeper is learning to: Predict the Fog: Anticipate algorithm changes and user intent shifts before they happen. Automate the Beam: Use AI to generate content ideas, analyze competitor strategies, and even draft optimized copy at scale. Guide the Fleet Smarter: Understand not just what users search for, but why and how they want their answers delivered (text, image, video, summary). Illuminate the Unknown: Discover untapped opportunities in voice search, visual search, and AI-powered conversational interfaces. This isn't about AI replacing the keeper; it's about equipping them with an incredibly powerful tool. Those who learn to work with this new companion will not just weather the storms, but sail further and faster than ever before. Are you ready to co-pilot your SEO strategy with AI? 灯塔

Hypothesis - it's an American generational employment problem: 1. Innovation (AI) has become implied requirement for raises and promotions. 2. Loyalty isn't well rewarded for early career and mid-career employees. 3. The brunt of losses becomes someone else's problem as you replicate your "success" where-ever you go. 4. The people who "fix" tech debt pre-emptively do not have an easy way to quantify the ROI of their work. Too little credit is given to those who maintain and clean and expand the website, slightly better every day.

One of my concerns with using AI copy, even if its human edited/revised/improved- We’re assuming Google can reliably tell the difference between AI and human-written copy. A lot of brands and SEO agencies are chasing some invisible threshold where AI content is “human enough” to avoid penalties or ranking drops. As if that line is clear, or even real. Here’s what I find more likely: Google is big enough, and most websites are small enough, that it can afford to get it wrong. As AI detection becomes more aggressive, real businesses with good practices will still get swept up and devalued because their content is perceived as AI. At Coalition Technologies, we’re actively testing how viable and sustainable AI-assisted content really is. One of the advantages of a performance-focused agency at our size is that we can test at scale across industries and strategies to see what actually works. If you've been hit (like many) by algorithmic penalties (or something close to it) due to AI generated content, OR you're concerned about your use of AI content, reach out!

Early and growth stage founders, stop overthinking LLMs & AI SEO. It’s like being at the seed stage and worrying about the problems of going public. That’s not today’s problem — it’s a future, manageable one. 👉 Right now, your biggest challenge isn’t AI. It’s a content gap. 👉 You don’t have enough content to build topical authority. 👉 Without that, you won’t rank for the terms you care about. The playbook is simple: Create more content. Cover your gaps. Build topical authority. Research shows: when your SEO foundations are solid, much of “AI SEO” takes care of itself. If your content marketing isn’t mature yet, don’t obsess over AIO. Focus on the foundations — not the tomb at the top.