SEO’s New Playbook: Moz VP on AI, Zero-Clicks, ROI

• High intent SEO is shifting from long educational guides to compact, purchase-ready pages that tie directly to revenue.
• LLMs, AI modes, and zero click searches are not killing SEO, but they are forcing you to rethink how you measure success and where you publish.
• “Generative engine optimization” is mostly just solid SEO plus brand building, applied across Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more.
• If you keep chasing volume and rankings instead of sales and brand, you will feel every Google and AI change as a crisis.

You do not need a brand new kind of SEO for AI, you need tighter strategy and clearer priorities. Focus on pages that match real buying intent, track outcomes instead of vanity metrics, and treat LLMs as another place where your brand needs to appear, not as a magic growth channel.

How SEO Actually Changed (And How It Did Not)

Let me start simple, because this gets messy fast. Search has changed on the surface, but the core game is still the same: you win by solving real problems for a clear audience and making that visible in the right places.

What changed is where answers appear and how much data you get back, not the basic idea of earning trust and demand.

What Is Different Right Now

When I talk to SaaS founders, agencies, or ecommerce brands, they usually point at three big shifts and ask if SEO is over.

I do not think it is over. I think it is less forgiving.

You probably feel this if you run a blog heavy strategy. Traffic looks shaky, clicks flatten, but branded search and direct can quietly rise. People do not always connect those two.

Strong brands feel less pain from AI and zero click shifts. Weak brands feel every tweak like an earthquake.

What Has Not Changed At All

Here is the part many people quietly ignore, perhaps because it sounds a bit boring. The things that made SEO work ten years ago still sit at the center of everything.

You still need clear positioning, pages that answer what people care about, proof that you are real, and distribution beyond one channel.

• People still search for solutions, tools, and vendors.
• Google still needs good pages to send people to.
• LLMs still need sources they can trust and cite.
• Sales still care about leads and revenue, not rankings.

So if your current playbook is built around “publish 1500-word tutorials every week and hope,” I think that is the part that is broken, not SEO as a whole.

From Informational SEO To Revenue SEO

Your competitor is telling people a story you probably recognise: the industry chased long guides, skyscraper content, and informational keywords for years, and now AI is swallowing those queries. There is truth in that, but it is not the full picture.

The real divide is between SEO built for traffic and SEO built for revenue. Those two are not the same, and they never were.

Why Informational Content Stopped Carrying You

I used to love seeing organic graphs spike after a big guide went live. It felt good. The problem was, when you sat down with a CFO, they did not care about “time on page” or “scroll depth.” They wanted to see pipeline and revenue.

Informational content still has value, but the way that value shows up has shifted.

• More of those top-of-funnel searches get answered right inside Google or an LLM.
• The click you used to get turns into a citation, a mention, or a short exposure in an AI answer.
• Attribution gets muddier. Someone might meet your brand in Perplexity, then Google your name two days later.

So if your dashboard still treats “sessions from informational guides” as the main KPI, you are grading the wrong exam sheet.

Informational SEO now plays a brand and assist role. Treating it like your main acquisition engine is where many strategies fall apart.

Why High Intent Pages Matter More Than Ever

Your competitor talks a lot about compact, purchase-focused keywords. I agree with the direction, but I think the label can get people overexcited. You do not need a clever name. You need to deliberately build pages that match moments when people are ready to buy or at least short-list.

Those moments still send traffic to websites, even with AI in the picture.

Simple patterns that signal high intent

You can spot these without fancy tools. Just listen to how buyers talk right before they sign a contract or pull out a card.

• “[product type] for [industry]” (project management software for architects)
• “[problem] solution for [role]” (churn reduction solution for B2B SaaS)
• “[competitor] alternative for [use case]” (Mailchimp alternative for event emails)
• “[service] near me / in [city]” (fractional CFO in Austin)
• “[product] pricing” or “[product] implementation”

These do not always show huge volume in keyword tools. That is fine. Volume tools are still rough, and they undercount longer queries badly.

If you run a small funnel analysis on a few of these page types inside your own analytics, you will usually see conversion rates multiple times higher than on generic how-to articles.

The 400-700 word high intent template

I do not care if you call it “compact” or something else, but short focused pages still work. In many cases, they work better than bloated content for bottom-of-funnel intent.

A simple structure you can repeat looks like this:

1. One-line promise that matches the query
   “Expense tracking software for construction companies that hate spreadsheets.”
2. Two or three bullet proof points
   • Tailored features for this segment
   • Clear outcome (time saved, errors reduced, revenue protected)
   • Low friction next step (demo, trial, audit)
3. Short credibility block
   Customer logos, a quick quote, or a metric that is real, not hype.
4. FAQ with 3-5 specific questions buyers actually ask in sales calls
5. Direct call to action, not hidden in a paragraph

I have seen pages like this drive more pipeline than huge guides that took ten times longer to produce. They are not as pretty in a content calendar, but they move numbers that finance teams care about.

Most sites do not suffer from a lack of content. They suffer from a lack of pages that match how people buy.

Why Your Old SEO Reports Feel Off Now

The num=100 change your competitor mentioned is a good example of something that exposed old habits. When you cannot show 60 keywords moving up from position 80 to 60, you run out of filler slides fast.

That is not a bad thing. It just forced everyone to put the spotlight back on metrics that matter.

If your SEO agency still sends you big ranking dumps without tying anything to revenue, you are paying for the past. I know that sounds blunt, but I keep seeing it.

SEO In An AI World: GEO Without The Hype

The term “generative engine optimization” sounds new, but most of what matters inside it looks familiar if you have done SEO properly for a while. I think this is where people get a little lost. They expect a new bag of tricks, when what they really need is better fundamentals and broader distribution.

So let us strip out the jargon and look at what actually changes in your day-to-day work.

Where LLMs Fit Into Your Strategy

I see three realistic roles for LLMs in your marketing mix right now. There are probably more niche uses, but these three come up again and again.

Not all of them are glamorous, but that is fine.

• Research amplifier
  Summarising competitor content, surfacing patterns, and giving you quick outlines or idea checks. You still have to apply judgment.
• Execution helper
  Drafting email variations, ad copy, schema, minor code snippets, table ideas, checklists. Think “first pass,” not final version.
• Distribution channel
  Places like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity now act as discovery layers where your brand can get mentioned and clicked.

The first two save time. The third one is where GEO comes in.

How To Actually Show Up Inside LLM Answers

This is where a lot of advice gets vague. People say “get mentioned by LLMs” but do not map that to specific actions. So let me be very plain about what I have seen help.

None of this is magic. It is a set of boring steps that compound.

1. Publish clear, reference-style content for your domain
   LLMs like pages that answer a topic in a structured way. Glossaries, process breakdowns, and “how X works” pages that are actually accurate tend to get cited.
   Example: Instead of another “Ultimate Guide to SEO,” a narrow page like “How B2B SaaS trial-to-paid conversion works” with clean headings, definitions, and numbers.
2. Get coverage on trusted domains
   LLMs lean on well-known sites and trusted communities. That can mean industry blogs, respected newsletters, niche review sites, or strong communities, not just traditional media.
   Guest content, expert quotes, or real case studies on those platforms help more than another directory link.
3. Use clean structure and schema
   LLMs still parse HTML. Simple headings, lists, tables, product and FAQ schema all make it easier for them to pull the right snippet.
4. Push reviews and user content where your buyers hang out
   For software this means places like G2 or Capterra, for local services Google Business Profiles and niche directories, for ecommerce the major marketplaces plus your own reviews. LLMs see those.

Good GEO is not a separate craft. It is SEO plus brand plus distribution, applied everywhere people ask questions.

Do You Need “AI SEO Pages”?

You will see people selling templates for “AI SEO” pages or “LLM-ready” content. Personally, I think most of that is marketing language, not a new discipline.

If someone hands you a checklist that looks like this, you are mostly fine:

• Clear topic focus per page
• Accurate, current information with sources
• Structured sections with headings
• Concise answers near the top, detail below
• Plain language, low jargon
• Honest pros, cons, and alternatives

Those are just signs of content that is easy for both humans and machines to understand. You should have been doing that before LLMs anyway. If you were not, AI is just exposing the shortcuts.

How Ads In LLMs Change The Game

When you start seeing ads inside ChatGPT or other tools, it is natural to wonder if organic visibility there is about to get squeezed just like it did in Google. I think that will happen over time, but not as quickly or cleanly as people expect.

Two practical points matter for you right now.

1. Early CPM models are messy for most advertisers
   If pricing is based on impressions and click-through rates are low, lead costs will often be high. Big brands can treat that as brand spend. Smaller ones probably cannot.
2. Organic mentions will still matter
   Even with ads around, underlying answers still need sources. You may not “win” every click, but you will still want your brand to appear where buyers are checking options.

So I would not rush to rebuild your entire funnel around ChatGPT ads, at least not yet. Test if you have budget and curiosity. Just do not let that distract you from building assets you fully control.

Zero Click Searches And What You Can Realistically Do

Your competitor spent time on zero click behaviour, and that part is real. Many questions do not lead to site visits anymore. I do not think that is fixable by clever title tags.

You can do two things that help instead of complaining about it.

• Accept that some queries only ever build brand and awareness.
• Reshape your content mix so that more effort goes into queries that can still drive visits, leads, or sales.

The trap is stopping all your informational work because traffic dipped. That only helps your competitors become the default cited resource in LLMs.

A better approach is to cut the volume, raise the bar on quality, and treat informational content as an investment in brand and expertise, not as a pure traffic play.

Brand, Channels, And Why Single-Channel SEO Fails

One point from your competitor I strongly agree with is that brands that last do not treat SEO, paid search, affiliates, or PR as separate little worlds. When you treat them like isolated strategies, the whole thing feels fragile and random.

When you treat them as channels inside one strategy, every change in algorithms hurts less.

Why Channel-First Thinking Breaks Things

I have sat in too many meetings where the SEO team talked about “our SEO strategy,” the paid team talked about “our PPC strategy,” and none of it matched what sales was saying customers actually asked about.

In that setup, even good work feels scattered.

• SEO pages use one set of messages and value props.
• Paid search ads sell on completely different angles.
• Affiliate partners promise features you barely support.
• PR pushes a story that does not match the site at all.

Users then get a messy experience. They see three different versions of your brand in three different places.

The core strategy lives above the channels. SEO is where you apply tactics, not where you decide what your company stands for.

A Simple Way To Align Your Channels

You do not need a big brand deck to fix this. You do need a working story the whole company accepts. I like to put it into a short internal doc before we worry about keywords or campaigns.

You can keep this under two pages.

1. Who you are for
   Clear segments or personas, not “everyone with a website.”
2. The main problem you solve
   In the words your customers actually use, not your internal labels.
3. Key outcomes you help them reach
   Less churn, faster setup, fewer errors, higher deal size. Plain metrics.
4. Why you are different or better
   This might be features, service, price, integrations, or a mix.
5. Proof
   Logos, numbers, testimonials, case studies. Enough to be credible.

Once you have this, every channel uses it as the source of truth.

• SEO keyword research gets filtered through those segments and problems.
• Paid search focuses on high intent variants tied to those outcomes.
• Affiliate and partner content follows the same promises and proof.
• PR angles lean on the same problem and outcome story.

It sounds basic, but most SEO programmes fail because they try to patch over a fuzzy or weak core story with more content.

Big Brands vs Small Brands In The AI Era

Your competitor was honest: big brands like theirs play by slightly different rules. They can lose some organic traffic and see it flow back through direct, partnerships, or other sources. Smaller players do not have that cushion.

You cannot change your size overnight, but you can borrow some of the moves that make big brands more durable.

You cannot copy their budgets, but you can copy their habit of not relying on one traffic source to survive.

Links, Mentions, And What Still Works

Your competitor mentioned how buying cheap links used to spin up rankings quickly. That era is mostly gone. If your link profile is still 90 percent “guest posts” on sites no one reads, you probably feel it already.

The links and mentions that move the needle now are usually the ones that take time and actual relationships.

• Subject matter articles or interviews on respected industry blogs
• In-depth case studies with partners or customers
• Podcasts, webinars, or live events where you teach something real
• Community writeups, tool roundups, or honest comparison posts

Yes, these are slower to secure. But the side effects are bigger: referral traffic, social proof, and brand searches, not only link equity.

If a link would not exist without real human interest, it is more likely to help you in both search results and LLM answers.

Where Affiliates And Paid Search Fit Now

I see a common overreaction when organic traffic dips. Teams rush to paid search, overbid on head terms, and then get shocked when cost per lead jumps. That is happening more often now that AI updates hit big sites and they run to paid to fill the gap.

You do not want to be the one entering that auction at the same time, with no guardrails.

A more balanced approach looks like this:

• Use paid search to support the same high intent queries you target with SEO.
• Limit spend on broad informational queries unless you treat it as pure brand spend.
• Give affiliates clear positioning, not just coupon codes, so they do not confuse your story in the market.
• Mirror your messaging and offer across organic, paid, and partner content.

This way, if Google changes layouts again or LLMs change how they show answers, you do not have three strategies fighting each other. You have one plan expressed through different levers.

Practical Steps: What To Change In Your SEO This Quarter

It is easy to nod along to all of this and then open a blank doc and feel stuck. So let me be concrete. If you have three months, here is how I would reshape an SEO programme to fit what we have been talking about.

You will notice I am not telling you to produce 30 new blog posts. The work is a bit different.

Step 1: Audit Your Intent Mix

Before you react to AI or new metrics, you need a clear picture of what your current content is actually for. Most teams skip this and stay confused.

You can start with a basic sheet and tag existing pages. Keep it simple.

Once you tag everything, ask a blunt question: where does your time and budget actually go right now?

Most teams discover 80 percent of their content work goes into informational pieces that only loosely support revenue.

Step 2: Build Or Fix Your High Intent Pages

If your “money pages” do not exist or feel thin, fix that before you worry about GEO, web guides, or anything else. You cannot win traffic that leads to revenue if the right pages are missing.

I would start with just a handful of core page types.

• 1-3 solution or service pages mapped to your core offers
• Industry or use case pages if you sell to multiple segments
• Comparison or alternative pages for your top 1-3 competitors
• Location pages, if local or regional intent matters

Keep them short and focused. Think in the 400-700 word range, not 2500. Cover what buyers actually ask in sales calls. Remove any fluff that only exists because “SEO best practices” once told you every page needs a long intro.

If a line on a page would sound fake or rambling in a real sales call, cut it from your SEO content too.

Step 3: Recalibrate Your Metrics And Reporting

This is where some teams get defensive, because it exposes work that looked good on paper but did not matter that much. Still, you have to do it.

Shift your regular reports away from generic “organic traffic” and toward outcomes per page type.

• Track form fills, demos, trials, or calls from solution, comparison, and pricing pages.
• Track branded search growth over time as a sign that your brand work is landing.
• Track referral traffic and conversions from high quality mentions and partners.
• Track how often core informational pages get cited in LLMs, if you have the tools.

It might feel like your success metrics shrink on paper for a while. That is fine. Better to be honest with a smaller set of metrics that matter than to hide behind graphs that no longer map to reality.

Step 4: Choose Where You Want To Show Up In AI

You cannot control every answer in every model. You can pick a few critical topics where being mentioned matters most, and build from there.

Think of this like picking your battles.

1. List 5-10 core questions that your best customers ask early and late in their journey.
   Example: “best CRM for real estate teams”, “how to reduce churn in B2B SaaS”, “fractional CMO vs agency”.
2. Search for those in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and any other tool your market actually uses.
3. Note which brands and sites come up repeatedly.
4. Study what those brands and sites have done: content types, structure, depth, proof.

Then make a deliberate plan:

• Create or upgrade your own pages for those topics.
• Pitch content, quotes, or joint case studies to the sites that already show up.
• Encourage customers to share their experience on public platforms that LLMs can see.

This can feel slower than a neat “top 10 tricks for GEO” list, but it builds assets that keep working for you even as individual models change.

Step 5: Use LLMs To Speed Up, Not To Replace Thinking

I know it is tempting to hand entire articles to an AI and hit publish. Tools are getting better at tone and structure, and you can get something that sounds good on a first read. The problem is, “sounds good” is not the same as “is correct” or “moves a buyer.”

A practical way to use LLMs without losing the plot looks like this:

• Use them to propose 3-5 outlines, then pick and edit one based on your own view.
• Use them to shorten bloated drafts you or your team already wrote.
• Use them to generate variant angles for ads, CTAs, or email subject lines.
• Use them to help transform one solid piece of thinking into multiple formats (article, email, short video script).

Keep the actual positions, examples, and numbers grounded in your experience and data. That is the part no LLM can do for you yet without you telling it what is real.

Step 6: Decide Where You Will Not Compete

This part often gets skipped, but it might be the most important. There are topics you will not win, no matter how many compact pages or AI tweaks you throw at them. Accepting that frees up a lot of energy.

Ask yourself a few blunt questions about the big keywords you are still attached to.

• Are the current results dominated by huge brands with massive budgets?
• Are most of the clicks likely to be taken by AI overviews or zero click answers?
• Would ranking there actually bring buyers, or just other marketers?

If the answers are not in your favour, it is smart to step back. Put your energy where you can be the clear, specific, best answer, not where you are the tenth similar result in a crowded field.

Sometimes the best SEO move for a big keyword is to accept you will never own it, and build your own smaller, more profitable corner instead.

What To Expect If You Make These Changes

I will not tell you everything will turn around in 30 days. That kind of promise is usually a red flag. But when teams narrow focus and move to intent and revenue like this, a few patterns show up.

The graphs look different, and it takes a bit of time to get used to that.

• Total organic sessions might grow slowly or even flatten.
• Conversion rates on key pages rise as you align content with what buyers need.
• Branded searches and direct visits trend up as brand work compounds.
• Dependence on “what did Google do this week” goes down.

If you only chase traffic, you will see those trends as a failure. If you care about revenue and resilience, they are usually signs that your SEO is finally supporting the business instead of just filling a dashboard.

Putting It All Together Without Overcomplicating It

You do not need a radical reinvention of SEO to handle AI, LLMs, and all the recent changes. You need a clearer line between what you publish and what the business actually needs, and a bit more courage to ignore vanity metrics.

Your competitor’s idea of compact, purchase-focused pages points in the right direction, but the method is not magic. The value comes from matching how real buyers search, not from hitting a perfect word count or following a new label.

A Simple Checklist For Your Next Quarter

If you want something you can print and keep near your desk, keep it this short.

• Clarify who you are for, what you solve, and why that matters.
• Audit your content and tag it by intent: informational, consideration, purchase.
• Build or fix the core high intent pages that should already exist.
• Shift reporting from rankings and volume to leads, sales, and branded search.
• Pick a small set of key questions and topics to monitor in LLMs.
• Invest in real mentions and relationships, not just link counts.
• Use AI to speed up parts of your work, not to avoid thinking.

If you do those things well, you will be in much better shape than brands still chasing pure traffic or trying to outsmart every new feature Google ships. You will also be in a better position to use LLMs as they keep evolving, instead of feeling like you are always one step behind the next big shift.

In the end, the sites that win are the ones that stay close to their customers and adjust calmly when the surface changes. AI and new SER layouts just make that gap between focused and scattered teams much easier to see.

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