AI, SEO, and How To Simplify Your Content Strategy
AI isn't rewriting the fundamentals of digital marketing. It’s making them matter more.
The mood was tense, but the question seemed routine enough.
On May 7, 2025, in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., where Google was defending itself in the remedies phase of its antitrust trial, a Google lawyer was asking Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, about search trends. Then Cue said something that made the courtroom pause.
“For the first time ever in over 20, I think we’ve been at this for 22 years, last month, our search volume actually went down,” Cue testified. A beat. Then he added: “That has never happened in 20 years. If you ask what’s happening, it’s because people are using ChatGPT. They’re using Perplexity. I use it at times.”
This wasn’t just any executive talking about search trends. This was the Apple executive who manages the company’s $20 billion annual revenue-sharing deal with Google. The same Eddy Cue who admitted during his testimony that he’s “lost sleep” over the possibility of losing that Google partnership.
And he was essentially saying that for the first time ever, people were starting to choose AI tools over Google search.
The market reacted immediately. Google’s stock plummeted over 7%, wiping out more than $100 billion in market cap in a single day.
Look around, and you’ll find more evidence of search disruption. Google’s share of search has slipped from around 93% in late 2022 to less than 90% today. Meanwhile, 400 million people are using ChatGPT weekly as of early 2025, and that momentum is clearly building.
But hang on a second. How big of a deal is this, really?
Google still processes around 14 billion searches every day. That’s 5 trillion searches a year. Whatever’s happening at the edges with AI tools, it’s worth remembering: Google search is still massive compared to everyone else. And for now, it’s still where people go when they need answers before they take action.
Still, Wall Street is spooked. For the first time in years, Google trades at a discount to the S&P 500, a multiple that clearly reflects uncertainty about both the regulatory overhangs and what this newfangled AI thing means for Google’s core search business.
Nobody Panic
So there’s a lot going on inside this whole “AI vs. search” thing right now.
And if you run a company that depends on digital marketing to drive growth, it’s understandable if you’re feeling a little twitchy. Like:
“Oh no, search is dead and AI is the future, we need to change everything.”
Or maybe:
“Wait, is Google about to vanish? Should we pivot our entire content strategy to optimize for robot readers instead of human ones?”
This is a normal and increasingly common reaction.
Also, it’s probably wrong.
Yes, AI and search are now competing for clicks and attention. Yes, for the first time, Google has a real challenger on its hands.
But here’s what you need to keep in mind while you’re panic-scrolling LinkedIn for the latest AI takes.
These platforms aren’t just competing. They’re also converging.
And that convergence is making the fundamentals of good content strategy more important, not less. Which is not what the “you need to pivot everything to AI” hot takes out there would have you believe.
So if you’re considering nuking your entire content strategy, or if you’re getting ready to sprint into your next board meeting with a PowerPoint titled “Our 15-point AEO Strategy for 2H 2025”, maybe take a breath.
Because here’s what hasn’t changed. This whole content thing is still about being the best answer on the internet for your customers.
That’s the game. That’s always been the game.
And if anything, playing that game well is about to matter even more.
How AI and Traditional Search Are Converging
To me, this all comes down to a simple question: Are people looking for something different on AI tools vs. traditional search? Thankfully, smarter people than me have the data to answer that question.
According to industry analysts, most queries going to AI chatbots today are exploratory rather than transactional. People tend to use tools like ChatGPT for early-stage research (learning and exploring) while they still rely on Google when they’re closer to making a purchase decision.
But here’s where it gets interesting: When people do use AI tools for buying decisions, the questions they ask look strikingly familiar to those that show up in high-intent search.
Take this recent post from Cody Schneider, fellow internet marketing guy, agency owner, and a good, if slightly cryptic, follow on Twitter and Linkedin:
Anecdotal? Sure. Suspiciously lower-case? Maybe. But if these are the straightforward, high-intent buying questions people are pumping into AI…
what is best [x] software
[x] vs [y] software
best [x] software for [y use case]
[x] software with [y feature]
…it's hard not to see the overlap with more traditional low-funnel, high-intent search terms that have always mattered on Google .
In other words, AI might be handling most of the browsing phase today, while Google still owns the buying phase. But when AI does get more commercial queries, they’re converging on the same high-intent keywords that drive SEO strategy.
And both channels are starting to reward the same kind of content: clear, specific, and genuinely useful at the moment of decision.
Why High-Intent Keywords Still Run the Show
So what’s the implication for marketing teams?
Whether Google maintains its dominance or AI tools continue to grab more market share, the basic SEO work you’ve always done to rank for high-intent terms is exactly what will help you show up in AI-generated search, too. Even though most AI queries today are early-stage or more exploratory, the commercial questions people do feed into these tools align with the same high-intent keywords that matter for Google.
Let’s break this down in terms B2B marketers care about:
Cost: Broad terms like “project management software” are expensive and slow to rank for. You’re competing with billion-dollar vendors, SEO farms, and affiliate mills. High-intent phrases like “best software for managing video feedback”, while they may not get as much traffic, are way more approachable, winnable, and affordable.
Conversion: Someone searching “Trello vs Asana” is probably getting closer to being ready to buy. Someone searching “project management software” is browsing. High-intent terms attract buyers, not tourists.
Focus: You don’t need 100 pages. You need 10 that answer 10 real questions your buyer is asking when they’re in-market.
High-intent keywords convert better, often cost less to cover, and give you tighter feedback loops. For B2B companies under $100M in revenue, this isn’t just smart… it's kind of the only rational place to focus.
So if this is so obvious, why do so many marketing teams mess it up?
The $20K Mistake
Most B2B teams will spend 3–6 months and $20,000+ on SEO consultants to arrive at a finite list of search terms they want to rank for. They’ll get buried in competitive analysis, search volume reports, and keyword difficulty scores. They’ll build elaborate content calendars and buyer persona maps.
Meanwhile, companies using the simpler approach are already ranking and converting.
The difference? Simplifiers vs. complicators.
SEO attracts more complicators than any other marketing channel. And yeah, some complexity is warranted. SEO is technical, changes constantly, and just got a little messier and more confusing thanks to this whole AI thing.
But most B2B teams let this bias towards complexity turn them into SEO tourists instead of SEO strategists. They monitor rankings when they have time, skim blog posts about algorithm updates, and never commit to the specific search terms they want to win.
This is what a real SEO strategy is all about: drawing a line in the sand and committing to a short, manageable, measurable list of keywords focused on the kinds of searches that bring you customers, not tire-kickers.
Sadly, most companies are still guessing what those searches actually are.
The Real Shortcut: Stop Guessing What Customers Ask
Instead of paying tens of thousands for an SEO agency, most B2B companies would be better served by (a) learning what their actual prospects ask when they’re in a buying process and then (b) making sure those questions are answered before their prospects ever meet a salesperson.
Grab 10 sales call transcripts. Feed them into ChatGPT. Ask for a list of the questions your prospects actually ask.
Ask ChatGPT to stack-rank those questions by frequency and buying intent. A directional answer here is fine for most. Ask the AI to translate the questions into high-intent SEO terms you should target. If needed, use an SEO tool to run spot-checks on the terms to make sure you can actually rank for them (if you don’t already).
Pick one high-intent topic from that list. Use AI to build a 3-5 question interview guide that digs into the problem or question behind the topic that resonates with your customers deeply and urgently.
Interview an internal expert who can explain the topic clearly. Go deep. If you’re not saying “tell me more about that” at least five times, you’re not digging enough.
Feed the transcript back into ChatGPT to draft a clear, helpful blog post. Give it guidelines for structure, tone and voice. Iterate a bunch until it’s clear and sounds like you.
Run it through one final filter. Ask the AI to read it like a skeptical industry insider and flag what would make it sound like it was written by a marketer instead of someone who actually solves the problem.
This approach works because it starts with real customer language from real conversations, not SEO theory or search volume data. When you optimize for the questions customers actually ask, you’re simultaneously optimizing for both AI tools and traditional search.
This is how you take the convergence we talked about earlier in this article and make it work for you.
The One Thing That Still Has To Be A Little Complicated
There is one area where some complexity is unavoidable: Technical SEO.
You can pick the perfect keywords and write incredibly helpful content, but if your website’s technical foundation is broken (i.e., page speed, mobile responsiveness, internal linking, and site structure) even the best content won’t save you.
Take page speed, the biggest killer. Google switched to mobile-first indexing starting in 2018 and completed the transition in 2023, so what really matters is how fast your pages load on phones. Google measures how fast your page loads (LCP), how quickly it responds to interactions (INP), and how much it jumps around while loading (CLS). Their logic is brutally simple: if your largest content element takes more than 2.5 seconds to load on mobile, most people will bounce before seeing your content. And Google knows it.
This kind of punitive throttling hits B2B software companies especially hard, whether your traffic is coming from Google or AI tools scraping the top results. We love product demos, customer logos, and high-res screenshots. Unless that media is formatted and structured correctly, it can tank your page speed, which can tank your rankings, which can tank your traffic no matter how good your content is.
Reality check: Run your top five pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights, focusing on mobile scores. If anything scores below 70, you’re probably losing rankings before anyone even sees your content. Fix it before writing another post.
Once the technical foundation is in place, you can focus on the next great piece of content with more conviction that you’ll actually get credit for it.
Final Thoughts
Everyone’s a little uneasy about AI killing search. But that’s not the real story.
The real story is that AI and search are converging around the same thing they’ve always rewarded: helpful, clear answers to real buyer questions.
If you’re focused on high-intent keywords, creating genuinely useful content, and keeping your site technically sound, you’re already playing the right game. And while the details of that game are always evolving, the core principles behind them probably won’t change that much.
So here’s your move:
Stop guessing what customers care about. Go to the source material and figure it out for yourself.
Stop writing for the algorithm. Write to help your buyers make sense of your market, and to answer questions real people are already asking about your category.
Stop worrying about AI vs. Google. Do the kind of work that wins in both.
Simplify. Focus. Be relentlessly helpful.
That’s your content strategy. Whether you’re talking about search, AI, or both.
Don’t overcomplicate it.