A successor to the much missed Hack/Hackers series looking at how tech and journalism can come together to do great things, it was unsurprisingly dominated by conversations about AI.
The point about what is valuable about the content we produce was also core to my old colleague Steven Wilson-Beales‘ session on SEO / GEO / AEO / AIO / whatever you want to call it, and what a “zero click” web could look like in practice.
Key points:
– You need differentiation
– You need to add value
– You need to be accessible, relevant, and credible
It’s almost as if E-E-A-T is still a thing!
Also, the lesson we should all have taken from the last decade and a bit of chasing search and social algorithms is simple – diversify.
Don’t get over reliant on any one traffic source. Don’t chase the algorithm, because the algorithm is changing faster than ever – and with AI search, will increasingly adapt it’s findings to every individual.
And a top tip – given AI tools have been trained on existing content, you need to take a careful look at your archives. If they don’t answer the potential needs of an AI bot in query fan out mode, they may need an update.
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But the absolute key point – and this speaks to a lot of the work I’ve been doing behind the scenes lately – It’s no longer enough to focus your SEO / GEO efforts on optimisation of individual pages.
You need to see your content as part of a broader system – because the bots are no longer looking for just one page to rank at the top of a list, they’re looking for the right information to answer the query. If they can’t get it from you, they’ll get it from someone else. (Or just make it up…)