SEO Isn’t a Strategy—It’s an Outcome

For decades now, SEO has been treated as the very foundation of a robust digital marketing strategy.

You did your keyword research, you optimized your pages, you built backlinks.

You played the game the way the search engines wanted you to, and in return (at least in theory), you were rewarded with traffic.

But, to state the obvious, the landscape has shifted in big and substantial ways.

Search is no longer just ten blue links and a set of rankings.

Between AI overviews, generative search tools, and large language models, the way people find and consume information is evolving.

What once felt like a single pathway now feels more like a network of interconnected routes—many of which bypass your website entirely. (See: Preparing for a Zero-Click Internet)

In this environment, SEO and what we might call generative and AI-driven visibility are better understood as byproducts of something more fundamental: creating content that is valuable, distinctive, and relevant to actual human beings.

The Human-Centered Quadruple Win

When you approach content this way—when you focus on solving real problems, offering unique perspectives, staying relevant, and showing up consistently—you end up with a kind of quadruple win.

First, the discipline of creating and publishing sharpens your own thinking.

You have to organize your ideas and make them clear enough to share, which has just as much benefit for you as it does your readers.

Second, your audience gets something of value, which builds trust and credibility with them over time.

Third, your content naturally gains visibility in traditional search, because it’s worth finding.

And fourth, it’s more likely to be drawn into AI-generated answers and generative search results, simply because it has substance and stands apart from the noise.

This last point is worth noting: there’s no guarantee that your content will make it into a large language model’s dataset or a generative engine’s results. (And anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.)

But the odds increase dramatically when what you’ve created is distinct, useful, and deserving of attention.

Deserve What You Want

Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, put it this way in a LinkedIn post earlier this year:

“The best way to rank in Google was to be rank-worthy. Create the web page that should rank compared to the alternatives. Over time what should rank does rank.”

He connected this to a line from Charlie Munger:

“The best way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.”

It’s the same principle applied to different domains.

If you want visibility—whether in a search engine result or an AI-generated response—you have to deserve it.

And you deserve it by making something that meets a genuine need.

Applying the Byproduct Mindset

Of course, this doesn’t mean ignoring the technical side of SEO, even now.

Clear meta tags, descriptive alt text, and well-structured pages still matter.

But they’re hygiene, not the heart of the work.

The heart is in the substance:

• Creating original insights, frameworks, or data that can’t be easily replicated.
• Writing from a perspective that’s informed, clear, and specific.
• Maintaining a steady cadence so your work remains current and visible.

Search may be evolving, but the underlying truth hasn’t changed.

The surest way to earn visibility—in any form—is to make something worth finding.

SEO and generative/AI-driven visibility will follow, but they’ll follow because you started with people, not with the algorithm.