Archive for category: Search Engine Land

For the last few years, copywriting has been quietly written off.

Not with outrage. Not with ceremony.

Just sidelined. Replaced. Automated.

Words – the core material of SEO, landing pages, ads, and persuasion – were demoted during the traffic rush and later the AI gold rush.

Blog posts were generated. Product descriptions were bulked out. Landing pages were templated.

Content teams shrank. Freelancers disappeared. And a convenient narrative emerged to justify it all:

“AI can write now, so writing doesn’t matter anymore.”

Then Google made it worse.

The helpful content update, followed by AI Overviews and conversational search, didn’t just hurt SEO. It hurt the broader web.

It gutted an entire economy built on informational arbitrage – niche blogs, affiliate sites, ad-funded publishers, and content-led SEO businesses that had learned how to monetize curiosity at scale.

Now, large language models are finishing the job. Informational queries are answered directly in search. The click is increasingly optional. Traffic is evaporating.

So yes, on the surface, it sounds mad to say this:

Copywriting is once again becoming the most important skill in digital marketing.

But only if you confuse copywriting with the thing that just died.

AI didn’t kill copywriting

What AI destroyed was not persuasion. 

It destroyed low-grade informational publishing – content that existed to intercept search demand, not to change decisions.

• “How to” posts.
• “Best tools for” roundups.
• Explainers written for algorithms, not people.

LLMs are exceptionally good at this kind of work because it never required judgment. It required:

• Synthesis. 
• Summarization. 
• Pattern matching. 
• Compression.

That’s exactly what LLMs do best.

This content was designed to intercept purchase decisions by giving users something else to click before buying, often with the hope that a cookie would track the stop in the journey and reward the page for “influencing” the buyer journey.

That influence was rewarded either through analytics for the SEO team or through an affiliate’s bank account.

But persuasion – real persuasion – has never worked like that.

Persuasion requires:

• A defined audience.
• A clearly articulated problem.
• A credible solution.
• A deliberate attempt to influence choice.

Most SEO copy never attempted any of this. It aimed to rank, not to convert.

So when people say “AI killed copywriting,” what they really mean is this: AI exposed how little real copywriting was being done in the first place.

And that matters, because the environment we’re moving into makes persuasion more important, not less.

Dig deeper: SEO copywriting: 5 pillars for ranking and relevance

GEO isn’t about rankings

Traditional search engines forced users to translate their problems into keywords.

Someone didn’t search for “I’m an 18-year-old who’s just passed my test and needs insurance without being ripped off.” They typed [cheap car insurance] and hoped Google would serve the best results.

This created a monopoly in SEO. Those who could spend the most on links usually won once a semi-decent landing page was written.

It also created a sea of sameness, with most ranking websites saying exactly the same thing.

LLMs reverse this process. They:

• Start with the problem.
• Understand context, constraints, and intent. 
• Decide which suppliers are most relevant.

That distinction is everything.

LLMs are not ranking pages. Instead, they seek and select the best solutions to solve users’ problems.

And selection depends on one thing above all else – positioning.

Not “position on Google,” but strategic positioning.

• Who are you for?
• What problem do you solve?
• Why are you a better or different choice than the alternatives?

If an LLM cannot clearly answer those questions from your website and third-party information, you will not be recommended, no matter how many backlinks you have or how “authoritative” your content once looked.

This is why copywriting suddenly sits at the center of SEO’s future.

Dig deeper: The new SEO imperative: Building your brand

From SEO to GEO: Availability beats visibility

Search engine optimization was about visibility.

Generative engine optimization is about AI availability.

Availability means increasing the likelihood that your business will be surfaced in a buying situation.

That depends on whether your relevance is legible.

Most businesses still describe themselves in static, categorical terms:

• “We’re an SEO agency in Manchester.”
• “We’re solicitors in London.”
• “We’re an insurance provider.”

These descriptions tell you what the business is. 

They do not tell you what problem it solves or for whom it solves that problem. They are catchall descriptors for a world where humans use search engines.

This is where most companies miss the opportunity in front of them.

The vast majority of “it’s just SEO” advice centers on entities and semantics. 

The tactics suggested for AI SEO are largely the same as traditional SEO: 

• Create a topical map.
• Publish topical content at scale.
• Build links.

This is why many SEOs have defaulted to the “it’s just SEO” position.

If your lens is meaning, topics, context, and relationships, everything looks like SEO.

In contrast, the world in which copywriters and PRs operate looks very different.

Copywriters and PRs think in terms of problems, solutions, and sales.

All of this stems from brand positioning.

Positioning is not a fixed asset

A strategic position is a viable combination of:

• Who you target.
• What you offer.
• How your product or service delivers it

Change any one of those, and you have a new position.

Most firms treat their current position as fixed. 

They accept the rules of the category and pour their effort into incremental improvement, competing with the same rivals, for the same customers, in the same way.

LLMs quietly remove that constraint.

If you genuinely solve problems – and most established businesses do – there is no reason to limit yourself to a single inherited position simply because that’s how the category has historically been defined.

No position remains unique forever. Competitors copy attractive positions relentlessly. 

The only sustainable advantage is the ability to continually identify and colonize new ones.

This doesn’t mean becoming everything to everyone. Overextension dilutes brands.

It means being honest and explicit about the problems you already solve well.

This is something copywriters understand well. 

A good business or marketing strategist can help uncover new positions in the market, and a good copywriter can help articulate them on landing pages.

This is a key shift from semantic SEO to GEO.

You want LLMs to recommend your business to solve those problems.

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From SEOs’ ‘what we are’ to GEOs’ ‘what problem we solve’

Take insurance as a simple example.

A large insurer may technically offer “car insurance.” But the problems faced by:

• An 18-year-old new driver.
• A parent insuring a second family car.
• A courier using a vehicle for work.
• Are completely different.

Historically, these distinctions were collapsed into broad keywords because that’s how search worked. 

LLMs don’t behave like that. They start with the user problem to be solved.

If you are well placed to solve a specific use case, it makes strategic sense to articulate that explicitly, even if no one ever typed that exact phrase into Google.

A helpful way to think about this is as a padlock.

Your business can be unlocked by many different combinations. 

Each combination represents a different problem, for a different person, solved in a particular way.

If you advertise only one combination, you artificially restrict your AI availability.

Have you ever had a customer say, “We didn’t know you offered that?”

Now you have the chance to serve more people as individuals.

Essentially, this makes one business suitable for more problems.

You aren’t just a solicitor in Manchester.

You’re a solicitor who solves X by Y.

You’re a solicitor for X with a Y problem.

The list could be endless.

Why copywriting becomes infrastructure again

This is where copywriting returns to its original job.

Good copywriting has always been about creating a direct relationship with a prospect, framing the problem correctly, intensifying it, and making the case that you are the best place to solve it.

That logic hasn’t changed.

What has changed is that the audience has expanded.

You now have to persuade:

• A human decision-maker.
• A LLM acting as a recommender.

Both require the same thing: clarity.

You must be explicit about:

• The problem you solve.
• Who you solve it for.
• How you solve it.
• Why your solution works.

You must also support those claims with evidence.

This is not new thinking. It comes straight out of classic direct marketing.

Drayton Bird defined direct marketing as the creation and exploitation of a direct relationship between you and an individual prospect. 

Eugene Schwartz spent his career explaining that persuasion is not accidental – benefits must be clear, claims must be demonstrated, and relevance must be immediate.

The web environment made it possible to forget these fundamentals for a while.

AI brings them back.

Dig deeper: Why ‘it’s just SEO’ misses the mark in the era of AI SEO

Less traffic doesn’t mean less performance

Traffic is going to fall.

Informational traffic is being stripped out of the system.

Traffic only became a problem when it stopped being a measure and became a target. 

Once that happened, it ceased to be useful. Volume replaced outcomes. Movement replaced progress.

In an AI-mediated world, fewer clicks does not mean less opportunity.

It means less irrelevant traffic.

When GEO and positioning-led copy work, you see:

• Traffic landing on revenue-generating pages.
• Brand-page visits from pre-qualified prospects.
• Fewer exploratory visits and more decisive ones

No one can buy from you if they never reach your site. Traffic still matters, but only traffic with intent.

In this environment, traffic stops being a vanity metric and becomes meaningful again.

Every click has a purpose.

What measurement looks like now

The North Star is no longer sessions. It is commercial interaction.

The questions that matter are:

• How many clicks did we get to revenue-driving pages this month versus last?
• How many of those visits turned into real conversations?
• Is branded demand increasing as our positioning becomes clearer?
• Are lead quality and close rates improving, even as traffic falls?

Share of search still has relevance – particularly brand share – but it must be interpreted differently when the interface doesn’t always click through.

AI attribution is messy and imperfect. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying. But signals already exist:

• Prospects saying, “ChatGPT recommended you.”
• Sales calls referencing AI tools.
• Brand searches rising without content expansion.
• Direct traffic increasing alongside reduced informational content

These are directional indicators. And they are enough.

The real shift SEO needs to make

For a decade, SEO rewarded people who were good at publishing.

The next decade will reward people who are good at positioning.

That means:

• Fewer pages, but sharper ones.
• Less information, more persuasion.
• Fewer visitors, higher intent.

It means treating your website not as a library, but as a set of sales letters, each one earning its place by clearly solving a problem for a defined audience.

This is not the death of SEO.

SEO is growing up.

The reality nobody wants, but everyone needs

Copywriting didn’t die.

Those spending a fortune on Facebook ads embraced copywriting. Those selling SEO went down the route of traffic chasing.

The two worlds had different values.

• The ad crowd embraced copy.
• The SEO crowd disowned it.

One valued conversion. The other valued traffic.

We are entering a world with less traffic, fewer clicks, and an intelligent intermediary between you and the buyer.

That makes clarity a weapon. That makes good copy a weapon.

In 2026, the brands that win will not be the ones with the most content.

They will be the brands that return to the basics of good copy and PR.

The information era of SEO is over.

It’s time to get back to marketing.

Read more at Read More