Stop worrying about what it’s called, worry about what you need to do

Charlie says: “Forget the acronyms, particularly with AI search and SEO.

Let's stop focusing on what it's called and focus on what we need to do.”

Do acronyms not assist with articulating how SEO has changed?

“I don’t think that SEO has ever been a good description of what we do. It's always been a fairly inaccurate acronym, given that we don't actually optimize search engines; we optimize websites.

The term SEO has never been particularly accurate, but never more so than now. A lot of time, money, and effort have been spent debating whether or not we're still SEOs, whether SEO is dead, whether we should be called GEOs, LLMEOs, etc. It's a big waste of time.

It worries me how much time we're spending talking about these acronyms and not talking about what we should be doing. Who cares what the acronym is? The key is the work.

This constant obsession with SEO being dead or being called the right thing always comes back, whether it was after the death of link building or after Penguin and Panda. Obviously, the emergence of AI has exacerbated that. I don't think many other marketing industries are constantly talking about whether or not their acronym is accurate.

What we need to be doing is focusing on what's going to drive growth for clients.”

Do clients still ask about how much traffic you can bring in from Google and how many links you are able to build?

“KPIs are always going to be KPIs, but the problem with the acronyms is that clients are being distracted by that chat and wondering whether they are investing in the right channel. Should they still be investing as much in this channel if it's dead or dying?

They aren’t realising that things are just pivoting and moving, and there's still a huge amount of growth. If anything, this has created more growth areas for clients, and it's still organic. Obviously, the better description of what we do is organic search, but SEO is the one that's stuck.

It's been a busy time for consultants because we've been answering a lot of questions and allaying a lot of fears. Essentially, the question is the same: Should we still be spending this money, and how? That's why good agencies and consultants are more useful than ever, to make sure that clients know they're doing the right thing.”

Does a term like Organic Discovery Optimization better describe the role nowadays, because it extends beyond search?

“Absolutely. It's still organic, and it's still discovery. We've got all these extra services now that the clients can be discovered on. There might be fewer searches on Google and more searches on LLMs or via AI Mode, but it's still organic search marketing, and a lot of the principles are still the same.

There are new considerations, but we've had to pivot many times over the last few decades. The more credible SEOs have always been up for that challenge and found that interesting. If you’re a marketer who then chose SEO as your channel, you're probably well placed to roll with that. If you’re an SEO who’s reluctantly worked in the marketing sector, you might struggle because it will favour marketers who are SEO-focussed.”

SEO is still searched three times more frequently, but is the acronym GEO gaining any traction?

“It’s misleading. If you type ‘GEO’ into Google, a lot of the results have nothing to do with AI search, because it's an acronym that applies to other things.

Also, interest in the term ‘SEO’ will spike on Google Trends because of what's been happening, not necessarily because people are looking for a provider. Very few people looking for an SEO provider would be typing ‘SEO’ into Google anyway. That’s always been a bit misleading.

It's started to settle down now, but those Google Trends graphs comparing GEO to SEO are not indicative of the reality. The acronyms are fairly useless. It's about how we drive organic growth for our clients, without relying on paid channels. SEO principles are still hugely valuable there.

Currently, there are more searches on Bing than there are in AI search, but most SEOs don't spend much time optimizing for Bing. More people are using that search engine that no one cares about than there are on these platforms that are apparently going to take over now.

That may not be the case in the future, but it's our responsibility to optimize for where the searches currently are. You've got to be aware of the changes, but your KPIs and your contracts will be telling you to drive growth and conversion. It's your job to make sure that's happening where those users currently are. At the moment, the vast majority is still on those SEO channels: on Google, and traditional search engines.

I'm certainly not dismissing AI search, but I see it as a set of scales at the moment. Most of the users are still on Google. If that starts to change, you want to be AI-friendly, and you want to know what works. The challenge is obviously how to optimize for AI search without breaking your SEO. If you were to go out and build an AI search-friendly website that was completely best practice for AI search, it probably wouldn't perform too well in Google, and therefore, client revenue would probably plummet.

At the moment, most people aren’t finding that balance. They are obsessing over these acronyms and about what it is, rather than what they're doing and how much client time they're spending on that.”

Do you think that it will still be called SEO in five years’ time?

“At the end of the day, it’s all just SEO. I'm not saying that's 100% true because there are new disciplines and new things we need to be aware of technically. We're always adapting our technical templates and content strategy templates, and we're always evolving how we optimize.

That's what's been called SEO. It's never been the perfect acronym for what we do, and it still isn't, but people will still be looking for SEO providers in five years.”

How do you future-proof your strategy to try and cover all the different bases that are part of organic discovery now?

“We have a briefing system that we’ve been developing for about 15 years, which has always been about optimizing technically and from a content perspective to make sure that you’re ticking all of the SEO boxes.

If you’re a savvy marketer, you’ve got one eye on AI search and you’re making recommendations to optimize for that, based on the information we do have, without breaking the SEO work that you’re already doing.

There are ways to do that. There are data sources that you can get from Gemini, where you can look at your fan-out queries and chunk optimization. It's about using all those data sets to optimize for both environments without breaking either. At the moment, the onus is still very much on driving SEO traffic. However, if you can do that whilst optimizing for LLMs and AI Mode, using fan-out query data, then you should try to do that.

If you were to create a template that was solely AI-friendly, then it probably wouldn't be too good for SEO. At the moment, it’s about enhancing your briefing documents and enhancing the amount of data that you have.

We have more data at our disposal than we've ever had, which should be an SEO’s dream. We have traditional keyword data, data from tools, and now we have all this fan-out query data, which is really interesting. A lot of it overlaps and is very similar to things like People Also Ask data. A lot of it isn't.

We have more data that helps us to be good marketers. If you're evolving your briefing and evolving your strategies to be SEO-first and AI-friendly, then you'll be future-proofing those websites.”

How do you prioritise what needs to be done?

“That's all about liaising with your clients. The best SEO strategies are where the client and the SEO consultant or agency are aligned and are being pragmatic with their data.

Even from a traditional SEO perspective, we've never used every single keyword from Keyword Planner or every single People Also Ask term. What we've done is look for the themes, look at what the user's looking for, and then optimize accordingly for that.

The same principles apply to AI search. We've got all that fan-out data, and we're not going to go out of our way and try to optimize for every single passage in Gemini, but we're going to highlight those trends.

What can you create good content for, and how do you optimize that in an AI search-friendly way? That principle hasn’t changed too much. The best SEOs are the ones who are pragmatic with data and find the most elegant way to utilize it.”

Can the same piece of content be optimized effectively for both AI and users at the same time?

“That's the challenge, but I think it can be done.

Another principle that will overlap between SEO and AI is looking at search intent and what kind of content you're serving. If you have a heavily informational website, this stuff's a bit easier because you can publish large amounts of data and content. You can look at FAQ-style content, which will work quite well with chunk optimization. From that perspective, you can probably use quite a lot of data.

If you're an e-commerce website, you're fairly limited as to what you can put on your website. You need to be a bit smarter, and that's where it will be a challenge. You can still look at FAQ-style content, using the conversational terms that you get from fan-out queries.

It has become more challenging, but it’s about being pragmatic with the data, liaising with the client, and figuring out the most elegant way to present that for both SEO and LLMs.

A lot of the time, the answer will be the same. Some content will work well for SEO and for LLMs, and some won't. It will be interesting to see how this pans out; whether there will be content that is designed only for LLMs and content just for search engines, or there will be ways to present that for both.”

How do you establish the most likely intent for an article that you intend to produce?

“It's still very much tool-based, which is a typical SEO task. A lot of the time, it's obvious. When it's not obvious, you have to go on how the results for those terms are being presented by the search engine – or even your LLMs. I'm sure those tools will start to evolve.

With LLMs, a huge proportion of that traffic will be conversational and therefore informational – until we get AI Mode everywhere, with the commercial grids and e-commerce-style results. We can't start analysing that data until we get it.

I will still be using my trusted SEO tools to help guide me in the right direction in terms of intent. Sometimes I'll disagree with that and carry out a manual search to confirm it. If you’re working with large sets of data, the traditional tools work pretty well for identifying that search intent.”

Charlie, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Don't get distracted by the noise. Don't worry about the acronyms. Good organic search marketing is still good organic search marketing.

Keep using the data and being pragmatic. Spend more time concentrating on growth than arguing about whether SEO is dead and chatting about acronyms.”

Charlie Whitworth is Lead Consultant at Whitworth. Find out more over at WhitworthSEO.com.