You’ve probably noticed your team asking their GPT-of-choice questions instead of Googling and searching through pages and pages of content for an answer. It’s faster, your team is getting more done, and your clients are doing it too.
We’re seeing a shift away from the traditional living-and-dying by keyword rankings and are now reframing how we think about SEO entirely. This doesn’t mean throwing the old playbook out the window, but we do have to look at things differently.
SEO-ers have always been kind of like Terminator; getting things done, moving as quickly as possible, and churning out a ton of content that rehashes the same core concept (anyone remember Genesys?) Ironically, with the growing amount of bot traffic online, we’re actually a lot closer to Dune. Yes, there’s some new tech to learn, but our goal is to explore ideas fully and to take the time it takes to get there… even if the 150-minutes-per-film pace is a little off-putting at times. I for one, love it.
Here’s the difference between how a human and a chatbot search:
In general people have always searched in fragments (there’s a great College Humor/Dropout sketch about this), so we’ve had to optimize for searches like:
“Where to get deep fryer” or “kitchen equipment Toronto”
But people are learning to ask much longer, more detailed questions to LLMs like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. Now searches start like this:
“Where can I find the most affordable deep fryer for my restaurant in Toronto?”
And then, the chatbots go on to make dozens of searches, by combining the keywords in the user query with their data on the user. Even if you don’t mention your location, if your LLM “knows” where you are, your search for “deep fryers” becomes a search for “deep fryers for sale in Toronto”, “Toronto deep fryer store”, “kitchen equipment retailer”, and many more similar searches, all behind the scenes.
You can also verify this on your own. The next time you ask an LLM to search, watch the actions it makes. You can actually see how it interprets your input into new searches!
The first big change is that it used to be enough to have one or two articles on a given topic. In fact, Google punished websites with large amounts of duplicate content. This is still important! It’s bad practice to have spammy, unoriginal content. But, the wide range of searches that a single input on a LLM makes means that the more content has a higher chance of being scraped and served to the user (your potential customer).
This matters because the way to “win” AI search is becoming a balance of a numbers game and a quality game. You still can’t just bloat your website with lackluster content, but your same-old four page layout (homepage, about, services, and contact) are missing out on a ton of traffic.
People skim. We scan for bold text, short paragraphs, and punchy headlines. And, we bounce if we don’t find the answer in the first 100 words. This is why traditional SEO content is repetitive, uses lower grade-level writing, and front-loads keywords like they’re going out of style.
Chatbots read comprehensively. They ingest whole pieces of content, and serve whatever answer is scored highest to “satisfy” their user. So how do you know if your content is going to score well?
Chatbots reward depth and specificity. Using our deep fryer example, at the time of writing, I can see 130 million results when I just search “deep fryer”. But searching for “what is the best commercial deep fryer for sale in toronto” brings that number down to below 400 thousand. Now think about how much deeper we can get – let’s talk about cook time, fryer baskets, fitting it into the space, and so on.
This is why chatbots search using long-tail keywords; it takes a lot of energy to filter through data, so the winners are the ones publishing the best content in these smaller ponds.
So this brings us to the most important question: do you design your website for people or for bots?
The answer is yes.
You can’t create a winning SEO strategy by accident. And with the rapid changes in the way search works, so many companies are grasping at new ideas and acronyms to make something work. I’ve heard people say “Generative Engine Optimization, Human-First/Reader-First Optimization, Artificial Intelligence Optimization”… all to end up just talking about the same things that we’ve always said are best practises.
The key to your SEO is to think about everything in terms of “authority”. As a professional in your industry, you have the authority to speak about what you know. Your website is the place to share that knowledge, and search engines reward you for doing so with impressions and clicks.
Our example of a deep-fryer retailer might include some content like:
Once you’ve started to build up content, you should notice patterns in how things group together. At Giant Shoe, we group our content by the services we offer. This means that we have “hubs” for:
When someone asks a chatbot about something in your content hub, it is more likely to land on your website because you’ve demonstrated a broader knowledge of the topic.
And when a human lands on your site, they find many resources, instead of one lone article. They can spend more time on your site (which signals higher authority, as a bonus!) and might even return on their own in the future.
If you’ve been doing SEO the right way, by focusing on answering real questions, building authority, and writing with depth, you’re already ahead. The shift that companies are making toward chatbot-aware content is just a confirmation that what we’ve always done has always been the right way.
At Giant Shoe Creative, we’ve been building content for clients across industries for years. If you’re ready to deepen your SEO strategy and prepare for how people (and machines) are actually searching, let’s talk.
