By: George Lamelza, Chief Marketing Partner
For most of my career in digital marketing, one of the first questions clients have asked has been, “Where do we rank on Google?” I understand the question because I check rankings too. If I wanted Incend Media to rank for “higher education marketing agency,” I would probably search it occasionally, and if we were not on the first page, I would want to know why.
The problem comes when that one phrase becomes the scoreboard for an entire campaign. A college president may be researching declining enrollment, a marketing director may be trying to understand AI search, and an admissions team may be looking for ways to increase campus visits. Eventually they may decide they need an agency, but the agency search may be one of the last searches rather than the first.
If all we care about is the obvious phrase, we are waiting at the bottom of the funnel. I would rather be useful while the buyer is still trying to understand the problem.
One search is not the whole market
The obvious keyword still matters, but it is only one way a buyer can describe a need. People search by problem, application, comparison, location, cost, specification and sometimes by terminology that people inside the industry would never use. Search volume can also be misleading. A phrase with modest volume may be commercially important when one qualified inquiry is worth tens of thousands of dollars. I would rather reach a small number of people who can actually buy than a huge audience that never will.
Google is giving us a clue
Google has publicly described query fan-out in its AI search experiences. In plain English, one question can lead its systems to run related searches across subtopics and sources before building an answer. That matters because the old picture of one keyword producing ten links is no longer the whole story. One question can become a research project, and a company with useful information across the subject has more opportunities to become part of that research.
Topical authority matters more than the new terminology
Semrush recently called part of this “Topical Gravity.” The underlying idea is good: stop looking only at isolated keywords and prompts and look at whether a brand is developing authority across the larger subject. Maybe the term sticks, or maybe this is another marketing attempt to make fetch happen. Either way, topical authority is not new, and AI search is making its value easier to see.
Semrush reported that roughly 85 percent of the ChatGPT topic categories it studied did not have a clear brand owner. That tells me this is not settled territory. Businesses still have an opportunity to establish what they should be known for, but they need to do it with useful information rather than a pile of generic pages.
Start with the business, not the content calendar
I would not begin with a quota for blog posts. I would begin with the products and services that matter financially, the people who buy them, the problems that cause those people to start looking, and the questions that come up before the sale. Those questions are the raw material for search strategy because they reflect the real buying process.
A keyword tells us one way somebody may describe a need. A topic gives us the larger conversation surrounding it. The job is to understand that conversation well enough to create useful pages, articles, FAQs, comparisons, examples, videos and other resources where they genuinely help.
The website has to show what the business actually knows
Search engines cannot see what your people know unless some version of that knowledge exists where they can find it. A company can have decades of experience and still look thin online if its important services have a few generic paragraphs and its best knowledge lives only in the heads of employees.
This does not mean every question needs a new article. Sometimes the answer is a better service page, a technical resource, a comparison, a case study, an FAQ or a stronger explanation on an existing page. The goal is not to create pages for the sake of creating pages. The goal is to create enough useful evidence that people, search engines and AI systems can understand what the company knows and does.
More AI content is not the answer
AI makes content production incredibly easy, and that is both useful and dangerous. Anybody can generate a large number of articles quickly, but the internet does not need more generic material that says the same thing as everything already there. Google’s current guidance emphasizes useful, original, non-commodity content, which lines up with what I see in practice.
The best material usually comes from the business itself. Attorneys know the questions clients ask. Engineers know what fails in the field. Doctors know what patients misunderstand. Admissions teams know what students and parents worry about. Salespeople know which objections stop deals. AI can help organize and communicate that knowledge, but it should expose the expertise rather than pretend to be the expertise.
The website is only part of the evidence
The website remains the foundation, but buyers move between Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, reviews, social networks, videos, business profiles, industry publications and other sources. Search and AI systems can encounter a company in many of those places too. That means the story needs to be consistent. If the website says the company is known for something but almost nothing else reinforces that association, the digital footprint is weak.
This is why SEO, AEO, GEO, public relations, reputation and social media increasingly overlap. SEO helps search engines find and understand the company. AEO focuses on being useful when someone wants an answer. GEO is newer language around visibility in generative AI. I would not tell a business owner to build three separate worlds. Google itself says the fundamentals of good SEO still apply to generative AI search.
## Being part of the answer happens before the final search
The traditional marketing funnel makes this look cleaner than it really is. A buyer does not necessarily search once, click a website and convert. The same person may read an AI Overview, ask ChatGPT a follow-up question, watch a video, check reviews, visit two competitors, search a company name and return several days later. By the time the lead appears in analytics, much of the decision may have already happened somewhere else.
That makes attribution harder, but it also gives us a useful way to think about authority. How often did the buyer encounter the company while making the decision? If the first encounter happens only when the person is ready to call, the company entered the conversation very late. If useful information from the company appeared while the person was defining the problem and comparing options, the company had time to become familiar before the sale.
This is one reason I do not believe SEO should be separated from the rest of marketing as neatly as it once was. A useful article can support organic search, become a source for an AI answer, give a salesperson something worth sending, provide material for LinkedIn and reinforce the same subject on a business profile. The content is not valuable because it filled a slot on a calendar. It is valuable because it helps the company become easier to understand across the places where buyers are doing research.
Proof does not require turning clients into a prospecting list
We see this in active campaigns, although I am intentionally careful about naming clients publicly. A competitor does not need a convenient list of which companies we work with, what we are targeting and where the opportunities are. Client strategy is the client’s business.
What I can say is that we have seen highly specific content move into strong Google positions shortly after publication when it matched a legitimate area of the client’s business and filled a real information gap. We have also seen client websites begin appearing as sources in AI-generated answers around priority products and services. Those observations matter because they show that this is not simply a discussion about what search may become someday. The change is already visible.
I would never promise that every article will rank quickly or that every company will be cited by an AI system. Search does not work that way, and neither does good marketing. What we can do is build the conditions that make those outcomes more likely: clear business information, strong technical foundations, useful subject coverage, real expertise and consistent signals across the web.
Authority compounds when the pieces actually connect
One useful page can rank, but a durable search presence is usually built over time. A strong service page gives related educational content somewhere meaningful to point. An article can answer a question and lead naturally into a commercial page. A case study can provide proof for several related topics. A leadership post can reinforce the same expertise on LinkedIn. Search Console data can reveal the next question people are asking.
When those pieces are planned around the business rather than produced randomly, the work starts to compound. Instead of having isolated pages chasing isolated phrases, the company develops a connected body of information around the subjects that matter commercially. That is the part of topical authority I care about most because it is difficult for a competitor to copy with one page or one campaign.
The scoreboard needs to get bigger
I still care about rankings, Search Console, impressions, clicks, traffic, leads, and conversions. We still want page one, and we still want number one. I simply want more context.
Beyond an individual ranking, I want to know whether we are gaining visibility across related searches and seeing new, relevant queries appear. I want to see important pages being discovered and understand whether AI systems are accurately connecting the company with the subjects that matter to its business. We should also be looking at whether people are finding the company earlier in their research process and, ultimately, whether that visibility is turning into calls, forms, appointments, applications, quote requests, or sales.
Traffic for the sake of traffic does not pay anybody’s bills. Authority has to connect back to the business.
Where I think this is going
I have worked around websites and digital marketing long enough to know that the terminology will keep changing. SEO has been declared dead more times than I can count. Now we have AEO, GEO, LLMO, topical gravity and whatever gets named next month. I am less interested in winning the acronym contest than I am in building something durable.
If a company has a strong website, clearly communicates what it does, publishes useful information based on actual experience, builds depth around the subjects that drive revenue and develops a credible presence beyond its own website, I like its chances. That worked before ChatGPT, it works today, and I suspect it will work after whatever comes next.
The question I think every business should start asking is not only, “Where do we rank?” It is, “When someone is researching the products, services and problems that matter to our business, are we part of the answer?” If the answer increasingly becomes yes, the company is building something much more valuable than a single keyword ranking.
