Thoughts on the State of SEO and AI After Writing 3,000+ Articles for the Web

Most businesses are still optimizing for SEO 1.0 instead of SEO 2.0. SEO 1.0 (practices used for the last decade or so) mostly involved gaming the Google algorithm with keywords to improve search rankings. SEO 2.0 involves targeting social media platforms like YouTube, X, and TikTok as search engines in their own right. With large language models like ChatGPT becoming more and more like their own search engines by the day, gaming the Google algorithm is no longer as important as it once was.
Video is king. 99.99% of businesses would be better off if they invested in video content. Websites with video embedded perform better, and social media can amplify a video message to potentially millions of people.
AI has changed everything. Website traffic is down thanks to Google’s new generative AI summaries. Google search results have been flooded by LLM content for a few years now. It’s time to think about where customers actually live in 2025. In my opinion, a few moats to survive the AI wave include shortform video content, Facebook ads, and targeted YouTube videos with scripts.