All the AI Search Takes Are Wrong. Here’s Mine.

There’s been a lot of panic in the digital marketing community recently, especially with the Google I/O keynote, the May Core Update, and just everything that’s happening with AI and AI Search.

I absolutely hate the panic. Not because I don’t think it’s valid to worry, but because so much of it has been stirred up by fear mongering articles that are just trying to be clickbait and get attention. And so many people are just repeating the same thing over and over again without having a sophisticated take on it. And by sophisticated take, I just mean doing any actual critical thinking or analysis.

I’m not saying normal people like you need to be doing that. It’s the people writing these seemingly in-depth research articles that are putting this information out there. And they are doing a negligent — almost to the point of criminally negligent — job at it. And I think they’re just trying to stir up trouble in a way that is so unhealthy for society.

I have a clinically diagnosed panic disorder, so I know what real panic is and I know how awful it is. So I genuinely don’t know why anyone would be trying to synthetically incite that in other people.

I wanted to do a longer post that covers my full stance on all of the things everyone’s panicking about. We’re going to talk about the Google I/O 2026 announcements, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Agentic Search, the adjustments to AI and agents that can actually complete tasks, Google’s official guide on optimizing for AI Search, AI Search across different platforms, Zero Click Search, and the future of SEO and marketing.

A lot of people are going to want definitive statements on every single thing. And a lot of this stuff doesn’t have definitive statements yet. Before you go in expecting me to tell you the exact truth that’s going to last forever — no, I’m not, because that can’t happen. Instead, expect a critical discussion at a high level of what’s happening, what to do about it, and how at least I am going to be proceeding.

You can choose to agree with me or not. That is so okay.

The ultimate thing I want you to take from all of this though is that it is not the end of the world.

Everyone is talking about SEO is dead, blogging is dead, the sky is falling, blah blah blah. No, it’s not. This is not a moment where we need to be freaking out about that.

TL;DR: SEO is not dead. It is not dying. AI SEO is, to some extent, the same as SEO. Blogging is not dead. I don’t know exactly what the future of monetization will look like if things change massively — and I’m not even sure they will. And probably most controversially: I’m actually excited for Agentic Search.

Why I’m Not Panicking (And Why You Shouldn’t Either)

So many of these articles are mostly bullshit. Especially any that have a headline about “Google search is dead”, or “SEO is dead”, or “Google is dead”, or I don’t know, “Google killed the last unicorn” or something. They all have that same clickbait element to them.

Then you read them and their takes are either tepid water warm. Or they’re literally just repeating the first article that said it … which was also wrong.

Having watched the I/O keynote myself, having watched a number of the other sessions, and having kind of skimmed some of the others — I can say those articles are mostly bullshit.

I don’t think normal people should watch the keynote or even the other I/O sessions because they are boring as hell. For a company that has such dynamic products and some really solid speakers, it feels like they tell them to be as robotic as humanly possible. It is so hard to sit there and go through all of it!

But the people writing articles about it, at the very least, should have to watch the Keynote, pay attention, and take notes. Most of them very clearly haven’t, because they are regurgitating the same stale information.

Which is where we’re getting about 400 different articles that all say Google is dead.

Side note: They’re not even saying they’re own take right! Cause Google’s not dead. They keep reporting record profits.

What they’re trying to say is that Search is dead.

Which is also incorrect, because SEO is not about just Google search. Search exists on so many platforms.

So it is kind of feeding into Google’s ego to say that. And they’ve got a big enough head. We do not need to help inflate that.

I’m not panicking about any of it. Cause I’ve actually watched, listened, and studied the sources. Google announces new shit every year. And they don’t finish most of it. Half of what is being panicked about this year was announced and panicked about last year. Been there, done that!

I’ll wait to panic until things actually switch over to AI Mode fully or Agentic Search.

I suspect we’re a couple more I/O Keynotes away from that.

May Core Update

The Google Core Update just finished. Every year around this time, Google does an I/O Summit and there’s a May Core Update that tends to go along with it.

Core updates are major updates targeting different elements of the core foundations and principles of Google Search. They can have a massive impact. But they can also just cause some ripples. We never know until they happen.

I’m writing this after I actually delayed this post so I could dig into the update a bit first. I polled my SEO for Bloggers Facebook group and no one saw a massive jump or a significant fall to zero or a 90% traffic drop. Most said things were pretty average and steady on.

Before the update started, a lot of people immediately went into panic mode of “I’m going to lose everything” or “I’m going to gain everything back.” That all-or-nothing thinking because it is not healthy for you, not healthy for your business, and not healthy for you as a person. I think many people spend the 2-4 weeks that an update is happening during in complete panic mode. And that isn’t helpful for anybody!

Do I have an exact note about what happened with this core update? No, not yet. There’s not been detailed analysis done and I don’t currently have time to do one myself, so I’ll be relying on other experts for that.

What I have seen reported so far: the gambling niche felt it the most, but most other niches seem pretty stable even though there has been some ranking volatility according to different rank trackers.

I hope this update’s relative chillness helps people realize that Core Updates aren’t always magic wands that instantly boost or drop traffic. They can actually help improve the Search results without any extremes for quality publishers.

Google I/O

Every year in May, Google has their I/O. It’s their summit where they present what they’re working on and what’s coming for the year ahead. What you have to remember is that this is essentially a company presenting to almost their shareholders at this point. They’re trying to show off in front of their competition. It’s basically a pitch session where they are trying to over-promise and over-present things.

What I think is funny is the short-term memory that society has for this. Google “announced Agentic Search” a few days ago. And everyone lost their minds.

But they’ve been talking about the move to AI Mode being the primary Google Search experience since the 2024 I/O, at least. I remember doing a deep rundown of their I/O when I was sitting in Italy on vacation in 2024. They’re just presenting the same ideas with new wording and a new package cause they aren’t done with it yet.

AI Search has been here for well over a year now. AI Overviews have been here for years. Google’s push towards AI Search replacing the 10 blue links has been something they’ve been publicly working towards for years.

So I don’t really know why everyone’s losing their minds right now as though AI Mode is this brand new thing we never thought was gonna come. When ChatGPT really started getting big in 2023, people were already predicting the shift in Search. People just forgot about that, and now everyone’s screaming and running around like a chicken with their head chopped off.

Video credit: Google

What is worth noting from I/O: Liz Reid, Google’s VP of Search, said:

“We are entering the next chapter of Google Search where incredible AI features aren’t just in search. Google Search IS AI Search through and through.”

Google explicitly said at the same Keynote that they are NOT getting rid of 10 blue links anytime soon

Which is the part that got conveniently left out of about 400 articles…

We have a while to wait before we need to worry about traditional Google Search being “dead.”

Nina Notes on the “New” Things From I/O

• SynthID watermark AI content across Search and Chrome. Open AI is adopting it, too.
• Gemini Spark is a new personal AI agent for you that works with Search
• Search is multimodal and can bring different modalities in during the same conversation
• Search will be able to make dashboards, tools, and interactive planners
• Personalized Intelligence connects to your Workspace and gives you more personalized results
• Doc Live can let you interact with your Google Docs
• Daily Brief can create a morning rundown for you based on connected apps
• Universal Cart will help you shop by analyzing your needs and continually evaluating your cart to ensure you get what you need for your goal
• Google Pix for image and video editing

AI Mode and AI Overviews

Google’s AI Search is called AI Mode. They also have AI Overviews. They’re separate algos, and separate AI functions.

AI Overviews show up when you search something in traditional Search. This little thing pops up that is essentially a featured snippet — like we used to have — except now it actually amalgamates quotes or information from a few different sources.

And I will say, it’s not always the best about citing those sources. Shout out to Lily Ray, who has done the best job of anyone in our community advocating for publishers to get proper citations from Google and calling them out when AI Overviews have been an absolute hot mess. Because they have been.

AI Mode is more like a full-on AI agent you’re talking to. If we think of Kim Possible — if Kim’s beeping Wade on her earpiece or whatever the hell it was, Wade is going and doing the searches and figuring it out, he’s click-clacking, and then he’s repeating it back to her through her earphone. AI Mode is Wade. It’s the one doing that search and amalgamation and giving you the information plus sources.

The thing that’s different with AI Mode is that there’s no 10 blue links underneath it. It’s just text, and then it has your sources on the sidebar. You can keep asking additional questions cause it’s like a chatbot.

Recently with AI Overviews — I’ve had this for a few months but it definitely varies based on location — if you click anywhere on the overview it expands to be full screen. Which annoys me because I do that by accident constantly. And then it lets you ask additional questions, which automatically pulls you into AI Mode whether or not you selected it at the top.

Google talked about this at I/O because they’re trying to funnel people toward AI Mode.

This year alone, pre-I/O Keynote, I’ve seen at least five articles from people who work at Google mentioning this — in interviews, cited in articles, podcast appearances. AI Search is here to stay. So I don’t know why people are surprised that Google is prioritizing it.

Video credit: Google

Now, there are two areas with AI Mode/Overviews where I fully feel publishers’ frustrations:

One: the AI Overviews especially, but AI Mode as well, have been a hot mess. And that’s partially because Google is launching these things in competition with others.

With Google Search most of us don’t remember when it initially launched and we weren’t trying to optimize for it. And so we kind of forgot or forgave them because they were also a smaller company back then. Right now they are in that stage of like 13-year-old Nina, who’s just learning to do makeup and for some reason only draws one line of ice blue eyeliner right under her eye and then leaves the house like that. And then maybe a month later learns about concealer and is now bright orange.

That’s where they’re at now.

They aren’t at the Nina who could do professional costume makeup and was going to school with five different eyeshadow variations blended together and a full beat. They are at the beginning. And that’s important to remember.

They’re doing the development and testing really publicly this time. They are a bigger company with a massive amount of income. And so we judge them more harshly for it, which I think is very valid. Especially when billions of searches are done every single day and we don’t want them testing live on all of that. And when those searches are the foundation of many businesses’ marketing strategies.

Two: AI Overviews have significantly altered search. Featured Snippets also had tons of people hate them when they first came out for the same reason — stealing traffic from publishers. But they helped users. I do think AI Overviews have the potential to do that in many cases. However, a lot of publishers, myself included, got a lot of traffic from keywords that could be answered in a sentence. I have an article about whether SEO keywords are case sensitive that got me a lot of traffic for a long time. It’s now in AI Overviews and doesn’t get me a ton of traffic, but I still get a citation for it. That one never really moved the needle for me income-wise. But for some people, these posts were the foundation of their traffic strategy.

I do think Google started putting AI Overviews on way too many things way too quickly. Especially since they started doing this right after the HCU. And when they started very blatantly pulling — stealing, I would argue — images from publishers and adding them to widgets without citations and without credit. That is incredibly bad. So again, shout out to Lily Ray.

But overall, the panic about AI Overviews and AI Mode that came anew from the I/O Keynote? It’s totally unfounded because they’ve been here. Everyone has been given notice. It’s kind of like people being like “oh wait, I need to pay my credit card bill” when there’s been a countdown happening. It’s not pleasant — just like paying your credit card bill, let’s be real — but it is something that we have been warned about.

Analysis: Growth Memo analyzed 846,000 real Google sessions and found that AI Mode and AI Overviews actually produce completely different user behaviours. In AI Mode, 88% of users took the AI’s shortlist as-is, 74% picked the first result, 64% clicked nothing. In AI Overviews, users spread their cursor across 83% of the viewport and about half of all scrolling went backwards — they’re comparing, revisiting, re-evaluating. Those are two completely different things requiring two completely different approaches.

AI Mode and AI Overviews cite the same URLs only 13% of the time.

So if you’ve been optimizing exclusively for AI Overviews, you might be completely invisible in AI Mode. They are not the same algorithm.

And AI Mode isn’t coming quickly.

They announced it last year as though it was going to be the main thing by now and it’s still not.

The reason is pretty simple and I don’t see people talking about it enough: there are no ads in AI Mode yet. Google can’t make money there yet. They aren’t going to fully switch over until they figure out how to monetize it. Cause they’re a business first.

Agentic Search

People have gotten really lazy. Let’s just admit that. Most of us have a short attention span thanks to TikTok. We expect things in like 6 seconds or less and we don’t want to have to do heavy lifting if we don’t have to. I mean, how many people have an Alexa to turn off a light that’s like a metre away from them?

Agentic Search is kind of a natural progression of that.

It’s where an AI is actually going to do the Searching for you.

ChatGPT introduced Tasks close to a year ago now. It was the beginning of AI agents who can actually take actions on your behalf, basically autonomously, at future dates and times.

For example, I’ve had a Task set to pull SEO news from the last 7 days, once a week. I don’t have time every single day and there’s always new news. So it goes through and grabs all of that for me and makes me essentially a mini newspaper of just what I want to know about.

With Claude and the advancement of ChatGPT agents, we started getting more sophisticated things — agents that could actually go in and analyze your Instagram statistics, cross-reference them with trends, and give you a report of “here’s what you should do more of next week.” Yes, that is an agent I built for myself. And I never use it because I don’t really post on Instagram, lol.

Every single person I’ve talked to about Agentic Search has said some version of “oh my god I want that, I need that, I wish I had that.” And that’s something we have to keep in mind. Google is addressing a real want and real need.

Someone who’s like “I want to book a trip to the Galapagos but I’m overwhelmed with the amount of searches involved and I don’t want to have 47 tabs open” is dying to have this! And I hope you’re seeing the common pain points everyone uses for products and services — I have worked with well over 500 students over the last year talking about pain points for offers, and the 47 tabs line shows up constantly. You can’t be upset that this is arriving when it directly assists the pain points y’all are already filling your sales pages with.

And honestly, for me, this is great!

I’m going to book a one-week cottage for me and my friends as my treat. But I absolutely hate searching for hotels, cottages, Airbnbs, whatever. I always put it off till the last minute and then I screw myself over because you get last-minute price increases. Now, I can go into an AI agent and say “here are my specifications for a cottage, go find options.” I actually did that already, but with my sister because she works near the area I’m thinking of. And I’ve had my assistant do something like this for work travel I’ve done recently. I’ve used two different human “agents” to do this. And no one bats an eye at that.

But when you have an AI doing it and combing through the results for you, then it’s bad?

People are seeing this as a negative because they’re thinking about the wrong part of their buyer journey and the wrong type of audience member.

Let’s think specifically of the cottage example. I’m not going to book through an affiliate link — cottages in this region don’t tend to be on affiliate platforms anyway. But I know the region. I know what I want. I’ve been there basically every summer my whole life. So I don’t need a blog post to read comparisons. Maybe if this was a hotel or a resort I wasn’t familiar with, yes, I would have it amalgamate options — and then I’m going to go look at actual reviews from humans more critically. I’ll spend more time engaging with that person’s content. And I foresee that resulting in way stronger connections where, if that person piques my interest, I’m getting on their email list or booking through their affiliate link.

The people who aren’t going to click through to sources are the same people who go to Wikipedia, trust it point blank, and then fail their essay. Everyone I spoke to — family members, friends across different age groups — said they’re going to use AI for the base amalgamation of info, but they’re going to go click and look at the thing themselves. Because no one, so far, trusts AI enough to make purchases through it.

ChatGPT tried to launch an in-platform commerce feature where you’d just shop directly within ChatGPT. No one used it. So it shut down.

People used it for discovering and comparing, and then they’d leave to purchase from the original source. Or they’d search the brand name plus “review” to get real human takes first. A recent survey found that 77% of consumers use AI for shopping research but 31% won’t let AI actually make purchases on their behalf. That trust gap is real!

Looking at the examples Google showed at I/O, the agentic actions are things like: get an alert when a specific shoe launches, monitor for flight deals, hunt for apartments matching your specs. These are the action parts of the buyer journey. Not the awareness, information, or desire parts. Those still need your content.

Even in the Nike shoe example they demonstrated, it had Search results! It wasn’t just saying “here’s a shoe and here’s me talking about it.” It said “here are sources.” And even if they didn’t have sources, your affiliate cookies should still track if someone comes back through their IP to complete a purchase — unless you’re dealing with a one-day cookie like Booking.com, but that’s always been a problem.

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/original_videos/information-agents-search.mp4#t=0.001

There’s actually a real opportunity here that I think people are sleeping on: creating a freebie or paid resource around how to use the Google Agent to save money on travel or make bookings easier. It’s not here yet, so get prepped for when it comes. Even now, you can do this with ChatGPT Search or Claude. If you can have that out there as an offer, you can work with the AI changes instead of against them.

These changes challenge us as content creators to make content that’s actually persuasive and helps people make decisions, so they largely don’t need agents to take those actions for them — unless they have to wait for something like a flight deal, which we usually don’t make affiliate income on anyway.

Where Agentic Search is actually a threat to your income is if your entire business is a countdown to when the newest iPhone drops. Or if your content is just “here are the top 10 news items of the week” with no reaction, no opinion, just a one-liner for each. That’s not really a business anyway….

If you own your income source though, I see this actually helping your audience find you better and find your offers better.

The TikTok-ification of Search

AI Search on all platforms is essentially becoming personalized. That’s its goal: to be an agent that understands its user and can customize things for them.

We’ve had a small version of this with Google for years. If you’re logged in, your results are slightly different from someone else’s. It’s why SEOs like me recommend that when you’re trying to get a general unbiased view of your positioning, you search incognito to give you the blank slate version of Google.

What we’re seeing now is a shift toward Search that already understands the context you’d otherwise have to type out. This is something Google actually demonstrated on stage at an I/O Keynote, I believe in 2025. They showed somebody using AI Mode to search for a girls’ trip in Nashville. And it then did what’s called a Query Fan Out to run multiple searches all at once. Things to do in Nashville overall, things to do in Nashville bachelorette party, best Nashville group activities, bachelorette activities — it started adding on all those extra layers automatically. And it also had personalization, where one of the friends in the group was a picky eater, and it adjusted for that.

As someone who’s coeliac, I freaking love this!

Back in 2023 when I drove across North America with my dog (you know, when I was supposed to move to Slovenia and then it fell through the night before, so I just impulsively decided I’d do a six-month road trip with the only suitcase of items I owned, my service dog, and my 12-year-old car … and I didn’t think I had ADHD 🤣), we were in Banff and I searched for “dog-friendly places to eat.” The top three articles made me scroll about 3,000 words in before I finally got to a single restaurant.

With AI Search, it would scroll for me. It would already know I’m coeliac and take that into account. Maybe I hate barbecue, so it knows not to recommend that. It could even know exactly where I am from the location settings.

What used to be 10 searches can be done in one.

That is really fucking efficient and really fucking good for the user.

Is all of it perfectly accurate yet? No, not at all! But AI Search is ultimately trying to give the best user experience by actually understanding the person doing the searching. And for us as creators, it’s really important to be a trusted source that people come back to time and time again. Because if the algo is going to show people their favourite things — much like an Instagram or TikTok feed shows you the people you follow the most — it’s going to start noticing that someone goes back to She Knows SEO over and over again. And when they ask an SEO question in the future, it’s going to try to pull that information from my site for them first, before going to other sources.

⚠️ I do think there’s a risk of creating echo chambers here, which Google already has issues with. So this could make it far worse. I hope something is done to combat that.

That is a HUGE opportunity for people who build real audiences. And a real risk if you’ve been building on the assumption that every visit is from a stranger who doesn’t know you. It puts the onus on us to make sure that if someone comes to your site once, they want to come again and again and again.

It’s that vibe of you want to invite someone over for a dinner party, not for a quick meal and then throw them out the back door. We want to focus on the lifetime value we offer our readers, not just the lifetime value they provide us. Because I think all too often we frame everything in terms of the value we get out of them, like we’re trying to wring every dollar out of a sponge. But why should that sponge spend money with you if you’re not being adaptive and creating a great experience?

And something more of y’all need to start considering: how do you create an experience that gets people back to your site? Kind of like a cookie for affiliates. They find you, come to your site — and then what? Why do they keep coming back? How can we prove to this AI Search engine that you are a trusted source for this person?

Google has a whole preferred sources thing where you can ask your audience to mark you as a preferred source. I haven’t really covered it because I think it’s a bit of a flash in the pan and I’d rather you spend your time building your audience’s trust, not demanding it.

Query Fan Out is something I’ve gone the most in-depth on with my Profitable Part-Time Blogger students this year. We did a full rundown of how it works, with clear examples and free tools you can use to actually mimic query fan-outs and see in real time what sites like ChatGPT Search are finding for your topic, without needing to touch any code. (Previously you had to go into the code to do it. Not anymore!)

To optimize for Query Fan Outs, write content for your ideal audience and get as specific as humanly possible. “Best restaurants in Toronto” isn’t that beneficial to anybody. “Best budget-friendly restaurants for coeliacs in downtown Toronto” is really strong because there’s a clear audience, a clear problem, and a clear unique perspective. Having even just the best coeliac restaurants in Toronto is fine, but adding those extra layers of specificity is what shows up in AI Search.

Basically, a site full of general listicles is dead. If all of your posts can have a number at the front or “ultimate guide” tacked on, they’re not going deep enough. You don’t have something that’s reviewing the individual hotel. You don’t have something giving that hyper-specific focus on who this is for. And that nuance is what’s showing up in AI Search.

Is Email Going to Influence Search?

Amongst all the clickbait fear mongering about AI Search ruining the internet or Google dying or it being the end of every publisher ever, iPullRank published a really interesting case study.

Much like when NotebookLM first launched and no one talked about it because everyone was too obsessed with ChatGPT making images of their dogs into Pixar posters (which, yes, is cute, and I did it, but it should not have taken away from how valuable NotebookLM was and still is), this case study sort of got buried.

They analyzed 1,922 AI Mode responses across 3 accounts with different levels of personalization: one blank slate, one researcher’s actual account with 28 years of Google history, and one created and fed specific information to track what signals got picked up.

Interestingly, Gmail influenced Search results the most.

Brand mentions in emails — not even links, just mentions, including brands they made up that had no online presence whatsoever — were cited more in AI Mode results for that person. If you think about it, that makes sense! If people let you into their inbox, that’s pretty intimate. It’s not as intimate as literally inviting you into their actual home, but it’s a pretty protected space, unlike social media, where it’s expected to face a ton of different people and sources. And Google has realized that there is a lot of trust that has to be built for someone to let you into their inbox.

This comes back to something I think is going to be huge: email collaborations as an SEO strategy. Not just for list growth, but because getting your brand mentioned consistently in someone’s inbox — in front of an engaged audience who actually reads those emails — might literally be influencing how much AI Search deems you an “authority” for readers.

Can it turn into something weird, like the time you once complimented a pie at a relative’s house and for the next 20 years they make that exact pie every time they see you and suddenly you’re eating a chocolate plum pie every day of your life and you hate it? Yeah, it could. I hope there will be some guardrails around that.

Your email list is not just a list of people to sell to. It might be a search signal.

Most AI platforms now having connectors to your email, your calendar, even your banking — which is a whole other conversation. But personalization can happen from all of these apps as we let AI learn more about us. My assistant knows that when I ask her to book a hotel I typically stay at IHG hotels because that’s where I have points. That is the only platform I get emails about hotel points from. I would expect AI Mode to similarly understand this.

⚠️ If you’re anti-AI and thinking email is your safe zone, Gemini is running inside most Gmail accounts right now because people either don’t know how or don’t bother to turn it off. Microsoft Copilot is running in a lot of others. And many people are building agents that go through their email, analyze it, and organize it. AI is going to see your data. I’m just putting that out there.

Start an email list. Build it. Nurture it.

And email collaborations with other creators in your space might become a more important part of your strategy than they already are.

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Sponsorship Income in the Age of AI

I am seeing a trend where brands are coming back to valuing long-form content the most. Blog posts and YouTube videos are taking off for people who own their income source, like course creators. They’re proving to be the spaces that are getting them the most long-term ROI. Brands are understanding that.

I’m seeing it from bigger brands — DMOs, tourism boards, local businesses, the brands that most of us pitch for one-to-one work. Cody of Travel Manitoba gave a great talk on why brands need to care about AI and AI Search when I was at the Travel Media Association of Canada Conference in April. You can read my full breakdown of that session here.

Cody was firsthand teaching brands — and he works for Travel Manitoba, so he’s one of those brands — why they need to work with creators to train AI on accurate information about their brand and destination. They don’t want misinformation in the AI answers about their brand. That’s going to lose their audience.

Other creators mentioned at a conference they were at recently that brands were specifically asking them for blog posts and sponsored articles — not for the pageviews, but because they want to train the AI.

Basically people were panicking that if they can’t get the impressions, brands won’t want to work with them. But the opposite is actually true. Brands aren’t caring about your impressions. They’re caring about the impressions that are kind of untrackable — the ones from showing up in AI Search. They’re valuing the fact that you are an expert training resource for AI, and that can help AI understand their business.

So our performance metrics and the way we show we’ve done a good job for these partnerships are going to fundamentally have to shift. Because we don’t currently have any way of proving we showed up in the results and got those impressions other than the clicks we get to our site.

Good news: Google has now rolling out generative AI reporting to Google Search Console, which shows us the pages that had impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode. And I wonder if that’s going to be something our sponsorship partners start caring about more. It is beta tester only right now (boo!), but it’s coming!

I bring up sponsorship specifically because it is a way to leverage your brand for another business where you get paid upfront. You’re kind of being used as a billboard — and like I said before, as a research resource for that brand. It’s essentially closer to influencer marketing, which is the shift we’re already seeing. As AI Search creates more of a personalized “for you” feed, much like social media, it makes sense that some income models will start to mirror those on socials.

Creators who figure out how to market this angle early, before others really understand how to present it as a unique selling point for their sponsorships, are going to have a real edge.

AI Search Across Different Platforms

We talk about AI Mode and AI Overviews a lot, but there are tons of different AI Search platforms. There’s ChatGPT Search (which they’ve called a couple different names), Claude (which doesn’t have one singular search function but does access the web), Gemini, Perplexity, and so many others. When I say “AI Search” I do generally mean all of them. I call out AI Overviews separately because they’re their own thing with quite a different format. But the others all have some core components they share, even if they all have different algorithms.

I personally focus the most on ChatGPT because it’s the most common one being used for AI Search by regular people at this point, based on the data. Especially because logged out, you can still do some pretty solid searches (although being logged in massively changes the results in terms of what gets cited and the quality and depth of information).

Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity all do it, too. They all have different models powering them and training them, which means there are different places you should consider indexing your content to get cited by them.

For ChatGPT Search specifically, it’s kind of a mix of Google and Bing at this point. It used to just be a wrapper for Bing but it no longer is. It has it’s own functions.

Some reports say that it mirrors Google Search or combs Google Search. But a study looking at NYC hotels found that 87% of ChatGPT citations aligned with Bing’s top results — not Google’s. Bing rank predicted ChatGPT visibility better than Google position did. So if you want to show up in ChatGPT, you need to win in Bing for your relevant queries, not just Google. That’s why I recommend indexing your site on both.

Stopping AI bots from crawling your site with something like Cloudflare does seem to suppress some level of AI Search indexing. But not all of it, because Google’s algorithm is already scraping your site for regular search results, which feeds AI Mode. And from a study analyzing 68 million AI crawler visits, sites that allow AI crawling average 527 human sessions versus 165 for non-crawled sites. That’s a 3x difference.

I haven’t done an in-depth study on how Claude searches the web specifically, or how Gemini does. Most of the research has been concentrated on ChatGPT Search, and my own studies have been very concentrated there, too. But I think the most important thing you can do to understand how these platforms work is actually just use them. Start noticing patterns, start testing things, and see what occurs. And begin with the platforms you use yourself.

I do a lot of demos and people always gasp at different screens and I’m like “have you used this?” Like, yeah, sometimes it pulls up an image from search. Sometimes it pulls a video. Sometimes text and video together. It always shocks me that people want to use these platforms to get traffic or income, but they don’t actually use them themselves to see what’s happening.

If you don’t use it at all — and I’m not telling you to become a heavy adopter — you won’t understand it. Even just a couple of cursory searches once a month is going to tell you way more about how to show up there than any tracker will.

Tracking Your AI Search Performance

All of the AI Search trackers are bullshit trying to steal your money.

I am a little bit salty about this, but I have the same opinion I had of regular rank trackers back when everyone was obsessing over whether their keyword went up or down one position day to day. I think it’s a waste of your time and money. But even more so in this case, because at least the old rank trackers were actually tapped into the search API to get that information. These AI trackers aren’t even connected to any Search API for most of these platforms. The data they’re giving you is an approximation of what you could show up for in some synthesized environment, not what a real person is actually getting. And given how personalized AI Search is, what a real person gets varies wildly anyway.

Here’s what is actually useful instead to track your results:

Google Search Console now has generative AI reporting — it was literally being added as I was writing this section. It shows you the pages getting impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode. Right now it only shows impressions, not clicks, which I think is annoying because they keep telling us clicks from AI Overviews are like 40% more valuable. But we do have some data now and it’s free.

Google Analytics — in your traffic sources, under organic search, you can drill in to see sessions broken down by source. AI traffic shows up in there. Google has added a new filtered view for it and with Microsoft Clarity you can now select all the AI sources from a dropdown without memorizing a weird code string. From there you can see which pages of yours got actual clicks from any AI platform. You can also cross-reference it with your Search Console data — GSC gives you impressions, GA gives you clicks — so you approximate your click through rate.

Bing Webmaster Tools — I’m a massive fan. Bing has been crushing it and Microsoft Clarity has been really strong too. Set both up. They’re free and Bing Webmaster connects with one click to your Google Search Console. What’s cool about Bing Webmaster is that it shows you the Query Fan-Out queries — the keywords the AI actually searched, not the full thing the user typed in. We essentially get the keyword the AI searched rather than the full prompt. That’s actually really interesting data because you get to see how AI is interpreting your content.

Semrush has done the best job in the third-party tool space of building out real AI Search data. There are still limitations — as there are with any tool — but it at least gives you the most data and the most ways to adapt to it. If you’re going to use any tool, I’d recommend Semrush. I’m sad KeySearch doesn’t have any AI Search attempt yet — seems like they’re focused on a Pinterest tool — but Semrush is definitely dominating here.

And I will say it again: use the actual platforms. Even just a couple of searches a month. You can’t optimize for something you don’t understand, and you definitely don’t understand it if you’ve never used it yourself.

Google’s Official AI Search Optimization Guide

Google released an official guide on how to optimize for AI Search a couple weeks ago. And I don’t think it got talked about, because its thunder got completely stolen by the I/O announcements.

This is the first time Google has given us any official data about AI Search and what they’re looking for. We’ve had people like John Mueller and Sundar Pichai saying bits and bobs here and there, but this is an actual guide. However, like any official guide from Google, it has its holes. We always have to take it with a grain of salt, because the algorithm adapts so quickly that any guide goes out of date fast. And they don’t really want to share every nuance of the algorithm. That’s when the spammers show up and ruin the user experience for everyone, and then the whole ship sinks.

What the guide basically says: create content that a real human would want to read.

So it needs to be readable. Formatted well. Shouldn’t have clashing colours or JavaScript elements constantly scrolling and appearing as you scroll and then disappearing so you can’t scroll back up. This is something I’m seeing especially with Showit sites and Claude-coded sites right now, and they are fucking awful.

I want to get on my high horse for a second here: if I scroll your website and there are panels that appear and then disappear or get overlaid so it’s impossible to scroll back up and see something — or if it’s impossible to scroll quickly and actually see all the text content on your website — that is a bad user experience. And those pages are not going to show up well in AI Search because they’re not optimized for a person to actually read them.

I am seeing a lot of very inaccessible websites, a lot of websites with insane JavaScript elements that make no sense, terrible page speed, and no mobile optimization that are usually being coded right now with Claude by people who do not understand how to code. And those websites are not going to show up in Search. I don’t care how pretty you think it is. If it’s inaccessible, I think that makes it ugly as hell. And so does AI Search.

Google also says that your content needs to be something people actually want to read. No one wants to read Wikipedia. What people need from your content is clear opinions, unique experiences, and things that you’re actually excited to be talking about. Even this very long ass article — which I will fully admit I voice-memoed into my phone and then pulled the transcript and had AI just tweak the misspellings — even this is full of my own thoughts, opinions, and perspectives, as well as synthesizing the information that’s out there in a way that, let’s be real, AI Search is not going to be able to do. AI doesn’t have my expertise and my history and my understanding of the industry. And it’s not going to swear or use ridiculous analogies as much as I do 🤣

Their guide is giving us best practices overall. It’s not a definitive bible for exactly what to do, and it doesn’t go into the smaller intricacies of the algorithm. I actually think the reason they put it out when they did is because of all the spammers telling people to do dumb-as-shit stuff to show up in AI Search that is going to massively hurt their site and business. Like stuffing 100 FAQs at the bottom of a post. Or adding broken llms.txt files that Search doesn’t even check.

On the llms.txt thing, apparently there could be some element of truth to it mattering in the future for agents, but not for normal AI Search? I will wait until it’s actually proven to be something we need before I tell anyone to bother with it.

I think it’s a good sign that Google is paying attention to the bullshit being shared out there. I don’t hold my breath that it means they’ll do more of this. It feels like a once-a-year Christmas treat, if that. But it was a good thing that they did, and I want to give them their props for it.

Zero Click Search

Zero Click Search is a term I was introduced to by Rand Fishkin, who helped with the Google algorithm leak back in 2024. And I’m not sure if he came up with it or just popularized it, but he’s the person I think of when I think of that term. He recently released a book by that name, which I haven’t read yet but it’s on my list.

Zero Click Search is the idea that people will search something, AI will give them the answer, and then they will not need to click anywhere. And Google has talked about this too. They’ve said that even if you recover from a core update that knocked you out, traffic numbers will not be the same as before. Because the way that users search has fundamentally changed and the way that the algorithm behind Google’s answers functions has fundamentally changed.

Now, I think Zero Click Search is mostly about informational queries. Someone realistically is not going to be able to make a purchase without clicking something. And they’re not able to take any action without clicking. I also don’t think it accounts for the fact that the click might actually be back to the search bar to ask additional questions or to navigate throughout Google.

The idea is that someone would search something like “can I drink the tap water in Toronto” or “can my dog eat lettuce?” — they would get the answer and then leave. They don’t need to search anymore. And to some extent I believe that is the case with certain terms and certain intents.

But it’s not enough for others. Like for me, I’m not going to trust AI Overviews telling me whether my dog can eat lettuce. I’m going to click into a number of sites to see what vets actually say, what dog nutritionists say, what other pet parents have said, whether there are any choking hazards — because I massively care about my dog’s health. But if I’m searching for how long eggs can stay in the fridge because I took them out of the container and now I have no idea what’s happening — I’m going to trust the weird AI Overview that tells me to do the float test, to be honest with you. Which I think I saw on a science TV show once and haven’t actually done because I never have eggs in my fridge for myself. They’re only for Theo.

What we’re going to have here is a real disparity in intent. Depending on what the person is doing and what they’re looking for, a yes or no is enough for some people and not enough for others.

Google keeps saying that searches are up massively. And I’m like, yeah, I have to search four times to find the thing I need or want. So I don’t think quantity of searches should be the thing you’re trying to go for. Especially when you’re saying you’re so helpful now that people don’t really need to leave Google — okay, are you, or are you just trapping them in a haunted house they can’t leave? For some searches it’s definitely the latter. For others I do think it’s the former.

Any business model that was solely based on traffic for income is going to sink faster than the Titanic. Probably already has. Traffic-focused income models prioritize an attention economy. What’s happening now with AI Search is that we’re not going for attention — we’re going for trust. Building almost a relationship with your audience. Not being a one-click wonder when it comes to search, which was really what was happening with the old 10 blue links before the HCU, where people just prioritized that first visit, stay for at least 30 seconds to get some ad revenue, and get the fuck out.

We don’t want our users to feel that way. We want our users to feel appreciated and welcomed. And I do think AI Search is going to help make them feel that way to some degree.

So if your whole business was like “what animals start with the letter B” or the hints for today’s Wordle, with a bajillion ads and text randomly thrown in to fill the page — yes, you should be worried. In fact, I don’t know how you haven’t been wiped off the mat entirely already.

But if you actually have a business and a brand, then Zero Click Search shouldn’t matter to you in terms of your bottom line. Because it’s not about pure traffic numbers — it’s about the quality of traffic. It’s about brand awareness. It’s about the fact that this is now a billboard for your business.

People need to see a business many, many times now before they’ll make a purchase — I think the number is something like 60-something touchpoints now, up from a much smaller number back in the Mad Men era, though I can’t find that specific study anymore. If anyone has it, please send it to me. The point is: having the AI that someone comes to trust citing you — even just with a brand mention, even without a click — is adding to their awareness of you and building your authority with them.

So there is still a place for search. But if we’re only prioritizing AI Overviews for our strategy, we’re in the wrong. Google themselves have said they’re moving toward AI Mode as the focus — although not yet, and AI Mode isn’t even fully here yet. I believe two years ago they were saying it was going to be the new thing. And we’re still waiting. I’m okay to keep waiting, especially as they develop this.

To future-proof yourself the most: try to focus on AI Search overall as a platform, across the different platforms, not just a singular one. Because we don’t know which one is going to dominate or last, and we don’t know the ways they might branch off over time.

A Variety of Thoughts About Other Elements of AI & SEO

Honestly, there’s so much that has happened with AI Search and search generally that it’s hard to figure out what to mention and what not to mention. I could go even deeper and get into the different entities and into the code and we’d be here all day.

So I’ll save that for the professionals — and don’t worry, there’s going to be a massive list of citations at the end of this of all the key sources, although I can’t even begin to remember all the articles I’ve read over the last few months. There are definitely people I’ve missed.

Commodity vs Non-Commodity Content

This came up recently because Google did a separate talk — not at their own I/O keynote — that covered it. And people have asked me about it a number of times. I think it’s not the clearest way Google has said something, which is very funny because they always tell us to optimize for real people. And then they don’t.

But this basically went over the type of content that works with AI versus the type that doesn’t.

Commodity content is content with no personal perspective or opinion. Something like “here is a list of 10 hotels” the way Booking.com would give you. “Here are 5 SEO tips” with no backstory, no examples, no explanation. Basically the Wikipedia or WikiHow version of content. That is essentially what AI itself can give people. So of course it doesn’t really need us for that. That’s why commodity content isn’t what drives traffic for us anymore.

Now I do want to be clear — you should still have some of that on your website. You still need something that covers the cursory elements, like “what is SEO.” But then you need to go in depth within that content. That’s where your value is. You’re probably going to get less traffic for those general posts than you used to, and even before this update they were hard to rank for. Specificity has always been really, really valuable.

Non-commodity content isn’t necessarily more specific. It’s just more human. And the examples given at this talk — which I saw from screenshots of slides that kept getting blurrier and blurrier as people kept screenshotting the screenshot, which I thought was entertaining — showed different headlines that would work for commodity versus non-commodity. At its core, it didn’t necessarily change the content itself. It changed the way the content was marketed.

So you might take “10 on-page SEO elements your site needs” — boring title — and turn it into “I added these 10 things to my webpage and started ranking better.” Because the AI knows you’re referring to on-page SEO. You no longer need exact match things all over the place, although it’s still best practice to have the keyword somewhere in your title even if it’s a little bit hidden or spaced out.

The way I think of non-commodity content: it’s content with an opinion. Content with perspective and some element of storytelling. The title doesn’t matter fully — it’s more about the core content inside the piece. But yes, SEO titles do impact results to some extent. I’m not going to adjust my whole content strategy to only have “I did this, here’s how” style titles because we do want some of the instructional and informational elements as well for a well-rounded business. It’s just about adding a perspective or opinion.

There was an article from The Verge a long time ago about a printer — “This printer is the best. Just buy the damn one.” Does it say the number of printers they tested? No. Does it say who it’s for specifically? No. Does it say the year? No. But it has a clear perspective. And you can have that simply by adding a word or two to your titles.

Not everything can be like “this chicken casserole recipe is going to make you sue your parents for feeding you anything else as a child.” Like, no, that doesn’t make sense for every title. Although I would find it very funny if someone wrote that as a real SEO title and I would like to see it. Please send it to me even if it’s not about chicken casserole.

I think the point gets masked when people try to create a formula or replicate things. SEO is no longer a formula. It’s no longer a perfect checklist of “use this exactly this many times.” SEO now is a more complicated conversation. It is actually connecting with another human. There’s an element of PR with brand authority. There’s an element of strong copywriting. There’s an element of sophistication that makes it very hard to gamify, which is a response by the algorithms to a demand from users for better quality content.

Brand Authority is the New Domain Authority

Brand authority is essentially the new version of domain authority. And I’ve been saying this since 2022.

I said it on my Niche Pursuits episode in 2022. People told me it was dumb or it didn’t matter. I was like, no, it definitely does. And once again I was proven correct. I just need to say “I told you so” once in a while — I could say it a lot more but I’ll keep it to this.

You can go back and listen to that episode and look at posts in my Facebook group from back then to see how I was talking about this all the way back then.

What I always said: focus more on getting links from authorities in your space that are authorities to your actual audience. Authorities that real people deem are authorities. Authorities that actually get visible eyes on them — people looking and clicking on that link, not just the link sitting there for AI to comb. Real people coming to your site from that link.

And that’s become even more true now, where now it doesn’t even need the link. A mention is plenty. Because AI can comb the internet and understand like a human — “this company mentioned She Knows SEO, that’s the SEO thing that Nina runs, that’s a brand authority boost for her there.” Just the way your audience would be like “oh hey, I know her, that’s Nina” and put the connection together in their head. AI can as well.

It actually makes it easier for us now, especially when you’re doing things like HARO link building, getting press mentions, doing collaborations where people talk about you on social media, or talking about you in their email. And I have a theory that email collabs are going to become huge — not just for list growth and traffic, but as a way to grow your brand authority over time, because your brand is being mentioned in someone’s inbox over and over again to an audience that trusts them. And that’s a big boost for you.

Brand authority is about PR as SEO. It’s about building the kind of reputation that compounds.

Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive said this really well at SEO Week recently: “Marketing was never just to be seen or be visible. You had to turn that visibility into something — believing something about your brand. And then they ultimately have to choose you.” It’s three stages: Seen, Believed, Chosen. Getting a ranking doesn’t mean job finished. Job’s not finished. He tested a brand that ranked well in Google for “ethical jeans” but appeared in zero AI answers about sustainable fashion. Why? Because nobody actually believed they were ethical. Nobody was saying that about them anywhere. Rankings without trust and belief outside your own site = invisible in AI.

There’s also what’s being called the “bland tax” — if your content is too generic and too similar to everything else, AI just synthesizes it all into one undifferentiated answer and strips the attribution entirely. Your work becomes free training data with no credit back to you. The fix is real differentiation. An actual methodology, an actual framework, an actual point of view that only you have.

The Cyrus Shepard study of 400 sites found that sites gaining organic traffic shared five characteristics: they offered a product or service, they allowed task completion, they had proprietary assets, they had tight topical focus, and they had strong branded search volume. All five together gave a 69.7% win rate. Zero of them together: 13.5%. That’s not a checklist to tick off. That’s a description of what an actual brand looks like.

Let me make this real with two examples.

📌 Case Study: A Local Dog Rescue

Earlier this year I worked with a local dog rescue on their SEO. Three blog posts, a slight restructuring of their E-E-A-T elements, and making the website readable for literal human eyes — things like giving pages actual titles and adding headings so it wasn’t just 500 words of 10-point font in one giant chunk.

They went from under 1,000 page views a month (mostly from Instagram shoutouts) to 8,000 page views a month. They went from page 4 to page 1 for their biggest search terms. Just from updating their business schema.

I went back recently to cuddle some corgi mix puppies — they look like little foxes, I was not not going. Half the people in the room told me they found the rescue from Google, on one of those three search terms. The nonprofit now gets significantly more leads every single day, including for a new service I suggested that has become their primary income stream helping cover vet bills for the sick puppies they rescue.

Three blog posts. Some basic technical cleanup. That’s audience-first SEO working in 2026.

📌 Case Study: My Anonymous New Site

I started a new site last summer before a conference. About 17 posts. I basically haven’t touched it since because I’ve had no time.

It’s ranking number one for most of those posts. On page one for the rest. Showing up in AI Overviews and AI Mode for a range of terms. All three of its affiliate review posts are performing. In April alone it made $200 from a single affiliate with about 1,000 page views — and that affiliate doesn’t even have a dedicated review post on the site yet.

No backlinks purchased. No PR campaigns. Wildly inconsistent attention from me.

What I did: wrote content for a specific audience with a specific problem. Went deep. Wrote like a human with opinions. Didn’t chase a formula.

That’s it. Monetization is possible right now. Anyone telling you otherwise isn’t watching it work.

She Knows SEO has continued to thrive over time. Two newer sites — one for a business that already has offers and one that doesn’t — are also taking off and making money.

If you treat this like you are at the forefront of something new — which you are — the competition is low because people are scared away from it. That is an opportunity!!

What Does the Future of Monetization Look Like for Online Business Owners and Bloggers?

I don’t know.

That’s my short answer. Genuinely, I don’t know.

But I think there are a lot of exciting potential ways to make money in this new AI world. And right now the best approach is to treat it like you are a micro-influencer on social media. Not in the sense that you need to show up every day and dance to trending TikTok sounds or dress up like the Lorax or something. More that you need to curate a community that is really built on trust, who trust your opinion and perspective, and then you need to be sharing things that you actually use and can show that you are using.

Nano and micro-influencers — a lot of them with under 10,000 followers on all their social accounts combined — are making bank. And the way they do it is by having multiple income sources. A trusted community that comes back to them. Direct affiliate setups with individual companies, less so with aggregators like Amazon — more like “I love this product, I spoke to the company, we set up an affiliate link with a discount code, go use that.” And a lot of times the discount code tracks the affiliate anyway so it’s even easier for your audience.

I think this is much more about: Nina talked about dog crocs so much, I need to buy dog crocs, I’m going to use Nina’s affiliate link for that. Which I don’t have, because this company still doesn’t think I’m in their niche enough or talk about it enough to become an ambassador, which is what they call it. So if anyone knows them, tell them that I need to get in there. Or just start spamming them on Instagram. I guess.

And then I think the key element is that you can’t have your entire income rely on traffic. Actual brick-and-mortar businesses do not rely on foot traffic as their revenue model. Malls let everybody in. You can wander around and look at stuff. But they make their income off of purchases. Window shoppers do not make them money until they become shoppers. I think we need to focus way more on community and on owning your income sources, where you sell something directly to your audience.

Influencers start to sell merch. They sell their own branded items that connect with their audience. And actually it builds more community — when your audience is wearing your shirt day to day or using your mug, they’re also part of this little in-group and that matters a lot. You also see bigger influencers creating something specifically related to their business — apps, tools, software. I’m building a SaaS tool right now that’s an extension of this brand. It’s so fucking cool and I can’t wait for you guys to see it. I’m hoping we can launch the first version of it by Christmas. Stay tuned.

Back in 2023 I got invited to Nathan Barry and Rachel Rogers’ mastermind in Nashville where they were talking specifically about bloggers. There was one guy who had a healthy drinks and recipes site that ultimately made a bunch of canned sauces that ended up in grocery stores. He sold that brand and he made a ton of money. He started with content, built an audience, and then his audience said “I can get your meal plan and make what you say, but I actually just want you to make it for me.” So he started selling it small batch, then farmers market style, then grocery stores, then got bought out. You can think of your business as small potatoes that can only earn ad traffic money or $500 a month from a $5 ebook. Or you can think big picture that there are ways to package and profit that you haven’t considered.

Rachel also mentioned someone whose hair was a signature part of their brand identity, to the point where their audience was constantly asking what products they used. And it got me thinking, because I get asked all the time about what dye I use for my purple hair. I do it myself at home because I cannot sit in a salon for six hours — my neck would break. So I regularly risk turning Theo and my entire bathroom purple to maintain the purple. Because that’s a part of my brand, I could actually partner with the hair dye I actually use and add that as an element to my brand.

Deanna Giulietti, who is a huge TikTok personality, did this with Conair hot rollers — she used them in a couple of videos that went really viral, and they ended up creating a limited-edition version with her face on them. And then she was an ambassador for a bit. That’s going to get you a lot more name recognition and brand awareness than having Google ads on your website or trying to get people to click your Amazon link to buy dog shampoo so you can get ¢3.

I’ve also spoken to multiple people who attend the invite-only Mediavine conference — for publishers making over $1 million a year in ad revenue via Mediavine. And the ones making the most money have a single brand. Not just a business. A brand. A clear audience. A clear reason why someone would come to them specifically. I say this a lot — “why the fuck should someone listen to you? Who are you to tell me this?” — and I think that needs to be the foundational question for your whole business, not just your about page.

And I think that there’s an element here for monetization where you need to become a source that your audience seeks out. Not one they stumble upon. One they actually look for.

What might be genuinely new monetization territory coming: revenue sharing with AI platforms for content used in training (Cloudflare has been testing this — I personally wouldn’t yet because I haven’t seen it become sustainable and I don’t know what it does to your search results, but it’s worth watching). Publishers getting paid to create content that trains AI, because long term these models need human expertise. Paywalled and subscription content becoming more normalized. And things we literally haven’t thought of yet.

I go back again and again to the same core principle: own your income source. Have something your audience buys from you directly that you control. You’re never going to get 100% of the revenue because payment processors exist, but you want to be the majority beneficiary. Not the smallest slice.

And I’ll highlight PPTB again because that’s exactly what I help you build — an offer your audience will actually want to purchase, set up with the search-powered business framework so your audience finds it organically and purchases every day without you needing to run launches constantly or post on socials every day.

Join the waitlist for PPTB here.

The free workshop is June 25 — learn more here.

The Future of SEO and Marketing With Practical Next Steps

What does all of this mean for the future of websites, blogs, online business, digital marketing, SEO, AI SEO, GEO, whatever the hell you want to add into this mix?

Again, I don’t really know. But I’m excited. I am genuinely excited for what comes next because we are real-time at the forefront of something new.

Now that something new could crash and burn. There’s a lot of talk about AI bubbles bursting, and I could definitely see that happening because it is an unsustainable business model in terms of how much it costs to run. Google is spending $180-190 billion in capex on this. However, Uber has also been an unsustainable business model and it’s been around since I was in undergrad. Which I cringe to say was over 10 years ago now. An unsustainable business model somehow sustains itself, lol.

But it could also crash and burn, or AI Search could become its own thing separate from 10 blue links, and then someone like Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, or any of the others could rise up and take over that area of search. We could get two completely different forms of search entirely — kind of like having Instagram versus TikTok, where yes they’re both image-based or now video-based platforms, but they’re completely different and what works on one doesn’t work on the other.

It could also be something where we start to move toward a closed web. This was brought up as a discussion point by someone at T-Bex Alaska at a speaker roundtable — are we on the precipice of the death of the open web? And I don’t know, but we very well could be, especially with more and more people wanting to get paid for their output. Which is justified. And not just giving their content for free to a platform that then profits off of it. There have been many jokes about people being like “I’m going to start this platform and everyone’s just going to give me their content for free and be okay with it” and then someone says “I think they’re going to want to get paid” and the response is “nah, they definitely won’t.” And that has been true for a long time. But that relationship is shifting.

Or it could become something completely different that I have no idea about. I’m personally very excited to see what happens. Digital marketing is a fun challenge and it’s always adapting and that’s what I love about it.

SEO is not just Google. I have mostly focused on Google in this post because of the keynote and because of how much of the conversation is Google-centric, but search actually happens everywhere. Pinterest has always been a search engine. There is a search element to Instagram and TikTok. Not necessarily on Instagram’s internal search because Instagram’s internal search is terrible, but there is an SEO element there that gets picked up by ChatGPT Search and Google. YouTube is a search engine. Threads and Twitter to some extent can be search engines, although Threads search is incredibly bad.

Basically anywhere with a search bar is a search engine. Anything that is amalgamating content is a search engine. And because of that, SEO strategies continue to be the most valuable thing you can learn. Because once you understand how it works and what to look for, you can adapt it to any platform. It is how I’ve gone viral on every single social media site, within multiple niches, even LinkedIn at this point, which is wild to me because I don’t enjoy it over there. And it’s how I’m able to rank four times for the same keyword because I have different versions of the same content on different platforms, each cited as a separate source.

Search is not dying because search is not Google. Humans continue to search. If you go to a library, you’ll search for a book. If you go to a grocery store, you’ll search for the New Zealand chocolate because it is undoubtedly the best chocolate in the world and I will fight anyone who disagrees with me on that. Whittaker’s is the best mass-produced chocolate brand there is. And we want things to be as easy as possible to find, so you need to optimize to be easier to find, to be easier to understand, and to be an easy choice.

And that is just marketing.

SEO requires the best quality of content because it is actually assessing your content. It’s not just looking at one picture or a hook or whatever. It’s looking at topical depth. And as a yapper — this was a three-hour voice memo to create — it is the only place where you can go into that depth. But also it makes things so much easier to find. Even if you prioritize social media, even if you prioritize YouTube, even if you prioritize email marketing, people want to be able to reference and return to content.

I will go back to an affiliate to try and find where they mentioned something. If it was in a story that has disappeared, I might have to DM them to get their link. And many people aren’t going to do that because they want the thing immediately. Or I’ll try to go to their website and search there, and 99% of the time they have not repurposed their content to their website. Searching within someone’s TikTok to watch 30 seconds of multiple TikToks to find which one they mentioned the thing in is really frustrating. Whereas having a blog post I can easily search is so much better for user experience.

Text is easier to return to, easier to find, easier to repurpose. It has an insanely long shelf life. That’s not going away.

The future of search is ultimately going to be dictated by users and not by businesses. Because at their core, these platforms have to serve users, otherwise no one is going to use them, and they would make no money. And they are businesses unto themselves. So they are trying to satisfy user experience and user intent.

And honestly, I think what could kill search far more than AI is the sheer bajillion number of sponsored results that now show up in every search result. Where there used to be two or three, there are now like four at the top and four in the middle. That is ridiculous. And it is 100% prioritizing advertisers over actual users. That’s where there is a potential that something completely new could rise up. ChatGPT came out of left field and has been taking the largest chunk out of Google’s search market share that we’ve ever seen any single site take in the 25 years Google has been the king. And that’s definitely putting them on the back foot and making them rush some of these things to compete.

I don’t teach SEO because I can’t do socials, for the record. As I said, I have gone viral on every platform. I had a week where I was just experimenting and on Threads, Instagram, and TikTok for two different businesses with very different niches, I went viral with over 20,000 views for most posts and over 100,000 for a few of them. I know what I’m doing with socials. I just like doing them for fun once in a while.

SEO is my sustainable business system that lets me be chronically ill, lets me have my side quests, and lets me launch when I feel like launching. Like this launch coming up that I’m so fucking excited for. My team and I genuinely considered whether I was giving too much away at the free workshop and needed to charge for it. I ultimately pushed for it to be free. And I get to do that because my business is set up to keep running.

She Knows SEO still gets 15,000-30,000 page views a month, mostly from Google, and I haven’t properly touched this site since 2023 because I’ve been busy actually teaching. I’m still ranking number one for tons of things. I show up in AI Overviews for things I optimized for before AI Overviews even existed. Because I’ve always focused on writing for you guys and making sure my content is of the most benefit to you all.

And even my content that isn’t optimized for search — stuff I write as emails that people are like “oh I want to send this to someone” or “I want to refer back to this” — I just make into a blog post. And it is user-focused enough that they still continue to rank and bring me traffic. Then I internally link to keep people on my site and continue providing value with high-value freebies and my free SEO community on Facebook.

While other people would send you a two-line email like “buy this course to learn about AI SEO,” I’m over here sitting on my couch with Theo huffing beside me because he wants some peanut butter — recording this insanely long voice memo to turn into whatever this is. Because I think that’s important to help and support.

You need to think of your audience as a community and not as a quick cash cow. Think about them kind of like friends — how you can support them the way you’d have give and take in a friendship where sometimes you’re supporting them more than they support you. So invest the time into your community. Not just into courses and tools and software. The time. My search-powered business framework gives you enough time off from content creation to actually do that — a 10-hours-a-week system with six weeks off throughout the year.

I see the future of SEO and digital marketing really being built around community and custom interactions. Less refined content in a way — not sloppy, but clearly made by a human with a specific perspective. AI can be super refined and can clean things up for you. But we want personality. We want perspective. And on TikTok for years the best content has always been the stuff that’s a little bit crunchy and not the best filmed. We’re noticing that more and more with YouTube now too — the highly produced insanely edited stuff isn’t performing the same way anymore. More personal, talk to a camera, maybe a bit wind-blown.

The highly produced version in SEO was that keyword-stuffed version where it was too surface level and too “I’m a CEO who doesn’t want to show who I am.” Fuck professionalism. Be yourself. Be who you are. I want to feel like I’m having a conversation with you with every blog post I read on your site. I want to understand why you are the person I should listen to every time I read something on your site.

I’m sure that if you’ve been in my community for a minute and I asked you what affiliate example I’d give, most of you would say dog crocs. And if I asked what TV genre I watch you could probably land somewhere in the right ballpark. And that’s because you’ve actually gotten to know me through this long-form content, whether or not you realized it was happening.

People DM me cute dog videos. People tag me in highland cow content. People reply to my emails about their own dogs and businesses. That’s a community. And it’s what makes this sustainable no matter what any algorithm does.

Put your audience first. Put your algorithm like fourth.

Algos respond to humans. If you’re focusing on people, you will be ahead of the game!

Tough Love

If you’ve read all of this and you’re like “SEO is dead, I’m going to keep going out there and writing articles that are fear-mongering bullshit” or you’re going to comment on every single Facebook post about anything to do with SEO and say “fuck Google I hate them” or “Google destroyed my business or whatever” — for years and years — then just fucking give up already. Like, genuinely. Why are you still doing this?

If you’re saying SEO and blogging are dead, just stop doing it. Simple as that.

You’re allowed to vent. You’re allowed to worry. That’s totally valid. But it’s the people who stay stuck in the idea that they were personally victimized by an algorithm — which is not how algorithms work — or who are still bitching and moaning about something that happened in 2022 or 2023, and I still see them in Facebook groups or on Threads commenting on everything and just putting more negativity into the world.

You can cry about something a few times. But if you’re going to cry about it all the time, at some point I’m like — just leave.

It is so valid to feel your feelings. But I want you to move out of the space of woe is me, because if it is so awful then yeah, genuinely quit. But if it’s not, then you need to take action. And you can’t take action if you are constantly like “this thing hates me, this thing hates me, this thing hates me.” Because if you have that perspective, you’re not going to succeed, period. You’re not studying it, you’re not engaging with it, you’re not analyzing it — you’re just giving yourself an excuse that it’s not your fault. And if you are holding yourself back by doing that, it is your fault. So stop.

I know so many people who did hate Google for getting hit by the HCU or whatever. And then they pivoted. And then they were fine. They moved on to Facebook pages, to Pinterest, to Instagram, to YouTube. Or they buckled down, fixed their SEO, and became a fucking business. In fact, I know someone who was nearing a million dollars a year in ad revenue from Google traffic, lost basically all of it, and has since replaced it — with two different income sources they own and one new traffic source. They added extra elements that buoyed them up.

I know others who added sponsorships, ambassadorships, custom affiliates, or built a new software or system. The main common denominator in every success story I’ve seen is that they owned their income source. They added something in where they are the one getting the money. Whether it’s a service, a product, a membership, a physical product, an app, a software, anything. I literally know people who have done it all.

If you have legitimate critiques — and there are legitimate critiques, about how Google treats publishers, about AI companies using content without fair compensation, about the explosion of sponsored results that I genuinely think is more dangerous to search than AI ever has been — then say your legitimate critiques like Lily Ray does. Say them to the people who can actually do something about it. Don’t whisper them under your breath in the hallway. Go to the principal and tell them something is fucking wrong. Tag Google. Attend their keynotes and comment directly to them so they can see it. Interact with their heads of search on social media. Write open letters about these things to your community and to Google for them to see.

But don’t just like, host another funeral every week for something that isn’t dead. I would find it really morbid and frustrating if every time I came to visit you, you had dug a grave or tried to host my funeral. I’m going to stop coming to visit you.

And I think that could happen with AI and Google… jkjk. Kind of…

Ultimately my focus here isn’t about making the best Google that can be, because I don’t work for them. I’m going to critique them the same as Lily Ray and say they’ve got work to do, and they definitely could do better in terms of supporting the publishers who have basically built their infrastructure for them.

My focus is on you making an income because that is my goal here — that everyone has a profitable business that allows them to follow their fun.

I’ve been so fortunate to be able to do that. And it has changed my life and I want the same for every single one of you.

Traffic sources will change and come and go. It’s why I update PPTB whenever the strategy shifts or when I find a better or more efficient way to do something. It’s why I am constantly testing a variety of sources so I can have the best system for you. And it has continued to be SEO for me — leading people to email, and then having sources that lead to your paid offers.

A blogger is just someone who has a blog. Every online business should have a blog. And every blogger should see themselves as an online business owner. Because if you’re making money or you want to make money, you are a business owner.

Thank you so much for letting me yap about all of this. I’m sure I missed some stuff and didn’t cover everything completely, because it’s just impossible to do so. If you have questions or comments, I’d love for you to bring them to [my free Facebook group]. That way everyone can learn together — responding to one email lets only me see it and doesn’t let us have an open discussion.

The world is really hard right now. Online business is always challenging and it’s especially hard when the world is rough. So you’re doing a fucking amazing job. There’s so much to keep up with and it can feel so overwhelming and I get it. Fuck all those people who are adding to your stress by making panic and making you feel like the world is ending when it actively isn’t ending. Or even if it was, it wouldn’t be because of a search engine switching things up a little bit.

Take care of yourself. Take breaks from SEO news — and honestly from all news, I would recommend. Make sure you are nurturing yourself first because your business can’t exist if you don’t. It is literally your job not to burn out when you run the business. Don’t treat this like some race or some speed-reading championship.

When major things happen, don’t worry — I will do my best to interpret and analyze them for you.

And thank you again for being part of my community and allowing me to run this fucking amazing business. I hope to see you at the free workshop on June 25.

And I would love to see you in Profitable Part-Time Blogger, which opens June 25-29. It’s a limited-time period so we can have a group cohort together to learn as a community.

But even if you don’t attend either the workshop or join PPTB, that’s fine. I just love having you around.

And if you have a cute dog, send me dog photos anytime you want to 😉

What to Do Now

If you skimmed, here’s the actual actionable version:

• Stop consuming panic takes. Spend that energy observing what is actually changing in your niche and in your own data.
• Build your email list and nurture it. Not just as a direct communication channel — it is becoming a genuine AI search signal for your audience.
• Make sure AI crawlers can access your site. Check your robots.txt and Cloudflare settings. GPTBot and ClaudeBot should not be blocked if you want to show up in AI Search.
• Set up Bing Webmaster Tools. One click from Google Search Console. Free. It matters more for ChatGPT visibility than most people realize.
• Set up your AI tracking in Google Search Console and Google Analytics. The data is there now. Use it.
• Write for a specific human with a specific problem. The more specific and the more clearly your perspective shows, the better you are positioned across all AI Search and traditional search.
• Own your income source. Build something your audience buys from you directly. Traffic is a means, not the end.
• Use the platforms you’re trying to show up in. A few AI searches a month will tell you more than any rank tracker ever will.

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Sources + Further Reading

Full annotated source list coming as a companion resource — too many to fully list here but the ones referenced throughout this post are below.

• Marie Haynes’ Google I/O 2026 Keynote Notes
• Liz Reid, Google VP of Search — “A New Era for AI Search”
• Google’s Official AI Search Optimization Guide
• iPullRank — “Your Inbox Might Be the Next AI Search Signal”
• Growth Memo — “Users Behave Differently in AI Overviews vs AI Mode” (846,000 sessions)
• Search Engine Land — “Why Your Content Doesn’t Appear in AI Overviews”
• Search Engine Land — Bing/ChatGPT NYC Hotels Case Study
• Search Engine Land — “Human Content is 8x More Likely to Rank #1” (Semrush, 42,000 posts)
• Search Engine Land — “SEO Isn’t Just About Being Seen” (Wil Reynolds, Seer Interactive)
• Search Engine Land — “The Hidden Bland Tax That Could Erase Your Brand from AI Search”
• Search Engine Land — “Google Zero Misses the Real Problem” (Will Scott)
• Search Engine Journal — “What 400 Sites Reveal About Organic Traffic Gains” (Cyrus Shepard)
• Search Engine Journal — “68 Million AI Crawler Visits Show What Drives AI Search Visibility”
• Search Engine Journal — “Google Gemini Sends More Traffic Than Perplexity”
• Rand Fishkin / SparkToro — “Inimitable Product is the New Make Great Content”
• Ahrefs — “How to Rank on ChatGPT”
• Petra Labs — “How Access Surface Shapes LLM Search and Citations”
• Lily Ray / Amsive — ongoing AI Mode analysis and publisher citation advocacy
• SERoundTable — May 2026 Core Update coverage
• Ante Tatarovic — LinkedIn post-update AI Overview data

All sources here. (It’s a Google doc, cause it’s longgg. Turns out it’s 127 articles and 63 research papers/case studies.)

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