I'm a content marketer and I don't know WTF to do with AI search

Okay, so confession time: I'm a content marketer, and lately, I'm having a hard time keeping up with what's going on with AI search.

• Traffic has been going down—read: plummeting—for a while now
• My age-old ambitions of ranking page #1 on Google have seemingly turned to dust (RIP)
• Every SEO 'best practice' I thought I'd mastered is suddenly irrelevant by the time I open LinkedIn

So yeah, fair to say I'm freaking out a little. But as content marketers, we are going to rally.

Why? Because content isn't broken... it's just invisible in the old ways.

MISSING: Your content's visibility on search

*If found, please contact your friendly content marketer.

While I know it's a big ick saying the oh-so-AI-generated term 'ever-changing digital landscape', there has been a huge shift in the aforementioned d i g i t a l l a n d s c a p e.

Our website's don't show up like they used to, and as a result: neither does your content. 👎

For years, we lived and died by clicks, pageviews, and rankings. Page one of Google was the promised land, and if you were on page two? That just some easy optimization, baby.

Now? Content shows up everywhere without driving a single click. (Cue our internal screams.)

• Google AI Overviews
• Bing Copilot summaries
• Social platforms that you never want to leave
• Alexa blurting out your answer at 2am when you ask it something weird

Your content can still be seen, it just doesn't show up in the dashboards we've been trained to worship.

Case in point: one of my blogs that used to bring in 2K+ sessions a month now barely scrapes 500. But when I ran it through Perplexity? Boom, my article was cited in the first response. Traffic = dead. Visibility = not so dead.

Enter: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

SEO made you visible to search engines. GEO makes you visible to AI engines.

Our pals over in digital marketing have levers to pull here: schema, structured data, Core Web Vitals, metadata for days. You know, the techy stuff that they absolutely should be doing to make sure our stuff (and rest of website) is machine-readable.

But let's be real: I don't lie awake at night worrying about JSON-LD. That ain't me. Instead, I worry about whether anyone cares what I have to say anymore, and the fact I've based my ENTIRE career around creating content for people to read/see/engage with.

Schema like a cheeky structured FAQ section on a product page can work a treat, but when I tried the same thing on a thought-leadership blog? Nada.

Digital marketers, your website isn't broken. It's invisible. Here's how Optimizely can help your website get seen by your audience in the AI era.

The content shift AKA why I'm freaking out

Just call me Ariel, because this is a whole new world.

🪦 Old world = keywords ran the show

🌎 New world = search intent runs the show

🪦 Old world = we wrote for crawlers and humans

🌎 New world = we write for AI engines and humans

People want answers to questions, and they want them quick. Thanks to AI, they're getting them faster than ever. In fact, Sparktoro's research found that over 60% of Google searches now end without a single click (talk about buzzkill).

But, if all we do as content marketers is write 'answers' so AI can chew them up and spit them out, we lose the only thing we've got left: the human stuff.

Sure, AI can summarize, it can rewrite, it can mimic tone, and it can gather reviews and community feedback in seconds. But things it can't do:

• Tell a story about the time your campaign launch went hilariously sideways
• Have a unique opinion that makes people nod or yell at you in the comments
• Be vulnerable, a bit weird, and just genuinely human

It needs to be fed those things, and that's where your content can shine. And that, my friends, is the cure to my content marketing freakout.

Why we've got to go hybrid with our content strategy

Yes, we need AI-friendly structure—clear headers, executive summaries, FAQ blocks, clarity that machines can parse. That's table stakes now, but realistically not so different from our pure SEO days.

But we can't just stop there. Content without a POV is just Wikipedia with better formatting (damn those excessive citations).

The winning play here is layered content:

1) Give AI the clarity so you get surfaced

2) Give humans the heart so you get remembered

A blog that answers a question + shares your experience + takes a unique stance + doesn't have a heard-it-before/bland AF tone of voice? That's the stuff that no large language model can replicate.

E-E-A-T is bigger and better than ever, huns; we want to keep the people scrolling and engaged after all. Not everything has to be suited to a 20-second attention span these days.

The new kind of content wins: How to measure success today

I can't lie to you and say I won't get excited about my content getting clicks and sessions anymore. I will. But they are only half the story.

Now, content success looks like:

• AI engines citing or paraphrasing your work
• Content showing up in zero-click environments
• Engagement signals like saves, shares, mentions
• Conversations your POV has sparked in the 'real world'

Your content can still influence ws">out being clicked on, so yep, that's still a win. It's just a whole new world of visibility.

The best defense against AI sameness is human difference

Here's where I've landed. Algorithms are gonna keep algorithming, GEO is gonna keep evolving, and the dashboards we stare at will probably keep breaking our hearts.

But the best defense against AI sameness is human difference. That can be split into two perspectives:

• Human-to-human experiences: Content that feels alive, opinionated, and just plain real with stories that show vulnerability, perspective, and *actual* personality.
• Human-centered digital experiences: The moments that can't be replicated by AI summaries, like interactivity and gamification (I actually wrote about gamification vs AI recently, and spoiler: gamification wins for brand engagement).

Ann Handley has been saying it forever: good writing is about making your reader feel something. AI can't do that. I've seen the difference firsthand: the posts where I rant a little (potential understatement), share the f*ck-ups, or admit failure? They can quickly outperform those perfectly polish SEO pieces.

So yes, I'm still freaking out and a bit annoyed AI is stealing my spotlight... and you might be too. But if we double down on the content goodness that AI can't replicate—real human POVs and digital experiences that connect—we'll not only survive this shift, we're gonna thrive in it.

Get seen in the answer box, get conversions up, get in front of your target audience with Optimizely.