My current thinking on AI SEO

My current thinking: I'm seeing 100% AI agencies emerge on the market.

• Their grasp of SEO is often very approximate,
• And yet they manage to attract prospects thanks to the hype around AI (and the shift of search to LLMs).

Why is getting a site to appear in AI more complex than you'd think?

SEO depends on too many complex factors for a model based only on AI to be reliable.

Your SEO performance will depend on:

• Google's updates on AI content
• your ability to stick to your content roadmap
• but also what competitors will produce on their own sites

I don't believe in a full-AI strategy, because the number of ranking factors makes it impossible to build a reliable model. That's why I rely on an operational method, building an SEO strategy for the AI era through a semantic grid, instead of the illusion of total automation.

And even if a model could be defined, you would still have to get through the SERP originality filter, that is, become result X on a competitive SERP.

Today, a perfectly optimised page is no longer enough to rank on a keyword, and that is also why so many sites remain absent from answer engines.

Google isn't waiting for an 11th result any more. It's waiting for the one that finds the content gap on the query.

This year I worked on a tool that gave the probability of ranking on a keyword.

I stopped for the reason given above: you can't properly define a ranking probability.

Adding AI because of a need, not FOMO – My SEO approach is based on continuous improvement

That is, each client improves the whole. The client who joins today helps me improve the next client's strategy, and the next client helps me improve the following one's, and so on.

I add AI for one reason only: to be more effective. The proprietary tooling behind this approach is the SEO prompts I use every day.

AI saves me time, but that is never the goal.

The reason? Because AI looks for the best of the average. I don't want my strategy to be the result of the average of everyone else's results.

So if I add a series of prompts to my process, it's only to do better with AI a task I was already doing very well by hand.

I rarely create a task I wasn't doing before.

The problem with consultants is that they wake up one morning, tell themselves they don't really use AI after all, and that they urgently need to find a way to add a prompt or two.

Except they don't know where to start, because they aren't starting from a need, but from the fear of missing a need they haven't identified.

Conversely, many confuse putting a layer of AI on their SEO with putting AI everywhere to replace their thinking. A world where absolutely everything would have to be automated.

So what I try to do is always start from a need I have, from an action I take regularly and where I add value, and where AI lets me add an extra layer of information, speed or quality.

In practice:

• I don't use any semantics tool, so I have to find a way to build AI into my process to improve the semantics of my content.
• I don't have time to scroll Reddit and see what's being said on my client's topic. I create a prompt that pulls posts back for me (with a link so I can check) that I could include on my page.
• The way to build an FAQ is changing too. Copying Google's People Also Ask no longer works (everyone already does it). You need a more thorough collection system, with decision-stage questions rather than informational ones. So I created a prompt that lists the most frequently asked questions in my market.

Once again, the goal is never to save time (even if, in the end, you do), the goal is always to improve quality.

I'm not trying to replace the work of collecting information, but to use AI to reach information I didn't know existed until the AI suggested it.

A few SEO use cases using the power of an LLM

Outside of SEO use, I build custom GPTs to improve my knowledge of a market or subject, to bring in sourced figures and feed my content with interesting information you can't find anywhere else on the SERP (Custom GPT).

I also create dedicated bots for each client topic, to have unlimited access to an expert (Notebook LM + Custom GPT).

I work on prompts to generate charts you can't find elsewhere (Perplexity deep search).