Build your SEO strategy as if search engines don’t exist

How would you get your brand discovered without a search engine? How would you make sure potential buyers learn about your brand, products, and the problems you solve?

You’d have to find your audience where they already spend time. You’d need to get your best ideas in front of them, create entry points into relevant conversations, and build relationships with people and platforms they already trust.

That might sound like a marketing strategy rather than an SEO strategy. But it’s what SEO requires. Search has changed dramatically in the past two to three years, and AI is accelerating that shift. 

The signals that help your brand perform in search increasingly come from what happens beyond your website — the people who mention you, the publications that reference you, the communities that discuss you, and the platforms where your expertise appears.

Take search engines out of the equation

Imagine the unimaginable. Tomorrow, Google disappears. Then what?

• You’d still have a product.
• You’d still need to reach your target audience.
• You’d still want people to know about your studies, your experiments, your product improvements, your customer stories, and the problems you can and do solve.

It would all be the same, in a way, except you wouldn’t be able to post your content in SEO-smart ways and then sit back and wait for rankings to bring people in.

Instead, you’d have to go back to pre-Internet marketing ways and find your audience where they already spend time. You’d need to create entry points into conversations. You’d need to put your best ideas directly in front of people.

Seriously, how would you go about doing this?

The lazy answer? Social media. But if we dig a bit deeper, we can discover SEO gold. 

Instead of asking, “How do we rank this page?” you start asking:

• Where does our audience already pay attention?
• Who already has their trust?
• Which communities shape their thinking?
• Which platforms influence their decisions?
• Which conversations should we be part of?
• What topics are they interested in?
• Which stories, studies, or examples are worth distributing?
• What questions are they asking?
• Where do we need to have a presence before someone ever searches?

Distribution is no longer optional

For years, many content creators treated distribution as an afterthought.

The process used to be:

• Make content that is better than competing content.
• Publish the article.
• Get it indexed.
• Build a few links to it.
• Wait for it to rank.
• Turn the free Google traffic into leads and buyers.

But that isn’t enough anymore.

That’s because AI Overviews are eating away at your clicks. AI Mode and other AI-driven search experiences are reducing the need for users to open a website and browse for information by providing it all wrapped up in a paragraph or two of summary. 

Recently, the user experience and the quality of the answers they provide have begun pushing past the problem of hallucinations that had made those platforms unusable before.

More and more users rely on AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, or Claude for quick, reliable answers.

As a result, search volume on the good old top keywords you were betting on might be dropping to close to zero.

What’s left for us as SEOs to do is to figure out distribution in general and to make certain that we leverage solid SEO work that actually covers things like:

• Indexability and crawlability.
• Internal linking.
• Semantics.
• Taxonomy.
• Content design and layout.
• Consistency.

The problem I see us having with these ideas is that we aren’t always aware of our discipline being just one, often small, part of the distribution process. 

If you look at the search everywhere optimization pyramid framework, owned content’s SEO might actually be the last thing you want to focus on these days.

Dig deeper: Content alone isn’t enough: Why SEO now requires distribution

What should platforms know about you?

If you want to teach platforms like Google, Perplexity, or ChatGPT something about your brand, you want to be consistent with the information they find about you.

• Does your website cover who you are and what you do properly?
• Is all of that information part of your About page on your site?
• Do you stress those same points in your social media activities and on your profiles?
• Are trade show descriptions about your brand reflecting the same information?
• Is it a theme you stick to even when being interviewed on podcasts or in public?
• How about on review sites? Is that information coming up as a match there as well?

A proper distribution process will provide you with multiple touchpoints to present important information with the consistency that’s required for AI to understand who you are.

Only consistent information will — consistently — stick with search platforms and LLMs.

Given the inaccuracies in AI visibility tracking, personalization through user context, location, and previous activities, it’s close to making an educated guess and getting directional insights, like share of voice over time.

What you can impact, though, is the input: 

• What information is available about your brand, and on which platforms? 
• Are those the ones being cited? 
• Are you on the podcasts your audience listens to? 
• Is your company featured in the magazines read by your buyers? 
• Is your brand popping up in newsletters your potential customers subscribe to and actually open?

What ranking pages now have in common

Look at the pages that perform well today. Many of them have things that generic SEO content can’t fake:

• Proprietary data.
• Original studies.
• Internal experiments.
• Customer stories.
• Product insights.
• Industry-specific findings.
• Founder or expert opinions.
• Examples from real work.

Check out Google’s content quality guidelines for a complete list of what they’re specifically looking for in top-notch content.

These assets are valuable because they aren’t interchangeable.

Anyone can write another “ultimate guide.” Not everyone can publish original data from their own customers, platform, process, or market experience.

But the asset itself is only half the story. The other half is distribution.

If you publish proprietary data and nobody sees it, references it, quotes it, discusses it, or builds on it, the impact stays limited.

But if you distribute it properly instead, it starts generating signals across the web. People mention it. Publications reference it. Communities discuss it. Videos summarize it. Newsletters link to it. AI systems may pick up the association.

That external footprint supports search.

Dig deeper: How to turn news articles into assets for AI search

---

This is where search everywhere optimization comes in

This is where search everywhere optimization becomes useful for organizing the work.

The idea is simple: Your audience doesn’t discover, compare, and decide only on Google. They move across platforms, listen to podcasts, read newsletters, scroll LinkedIn, watch YouTube, search Reddit, ask AI tools, see ads, follow creators, and ask peers.

Your strategy needs to account for all of these discovery paths. The search everywhere optimization pyramid provides a framework for doing that. You start by understanding where your audience spends time, then build the layers that help your message travel.

At a high level, those layers are:

• Audience research: Where does your audience actually spend time?
• Monitoring and alerts: Which conversations should you know about?
• Industry publications and third-party presence: Where can you borrow trust for your own site?
• Distribution: How do your ideas reach people beyond your own site?
• Own content: What assets do you create once the other layers are clear?

To this day, most companies start at layer five, cranking out content that nobody actually clicks. They create more content for their own site, then hope search engines reward it.

The more useful move is to build the first four layers first. Know your audience. Track their conversations online. Get into trusted third-party environments. Build distribution. Then create content that has a real chance to travel.

Use ads to accelerate distribution

Organic distribution can be your preferred channel. But don’t rule out ads as part of the distribution layer. Especially at the beginning, ads can be a shortcut.

Take Reddit as an example of how this works. Many subreddits are highly targeted. They contain exactly the audience you want to reach. But if your profile is new, or you don’t yet have enough trust in that community, participating organically can be difficult.

It’ll be much faster to build your mailing list off the back of a properly targeted Reddit Ads campaign than to start warming up a fresh user while navigating the algorithmic and moderation challenges. Reddit Ads can still get you in front of that audience.

The same applies elsewhere. Google Ads through YouTube and display campaigns can help you reach the right audience at the right time. Performance Max can play a role, depending on the setup. Meta Ads can help you target by interests, demographics, and connections to certain brands or individuals.

The point isn’t that ads replace organic distribution. They don’t. And often, it might be wise to wait for organic signals to stick out before pushing something through ads.

But if you remove search engines from the marketing mix for a moment, ads become one of the tools you can use to reach the audience directly. And that presence can still support the bigger goal: getting your brand, message, and expertise in front of the right people in the right context.

Dig deeper: Why paid search could be your AI search advantage

Other people’s audiences matter

For newer brands, one of the quickest and most efficient entry points into a new market is leveraging other people’s audiences (OPA).

Take email, as an example. Many marketers think about email only in terms of their own list:

• How do I grow my list?
• How do I increase open rates?
• How do I get more clicks from my next promotion?

Those questions do matter. But there’s another angle: other people’s audiences. Someone else almost certainly already has the audience you want to reach.

They may sell a related product. They may solve a different problem for the same customer profile. They may run a newsletter, private community, membership site, podcast, or content platform your audience already trusts.

That creates opportunities for collaboration. It can be as simple as reaching out and saying:

“Hey, I have this offer or resource. It could be useful for your audience. I can offer a kickback, create free training, or give you exposure to my network. Would you be open to including this in your next newsletter or exploring another way for us to get it in front of your audience?”

When I started my agency, one of the things that helped put my agency on the map was contributing SEO tutorial videos to private membership sites. They got free training content.

And me? I got exposure to a warm audience. And because the introduction came through a trusted platform, some of that trust transferred to my personal brand. That’s distribution.

It also builds your brand. Today, it can support SEO by creating relevant mentions, associations, and authority beyond your own website.

Your most sustainable SEO strategy

It’s easy to get trapped in a narrow view of SEO: keywords, rankings, pages, links, and technical fixes. Those things still matter, but they’re only part of how your brand gets discovered and understood.

If your entire SEO strategy depends on getting clicks from search results, it’s fragile. A stronger strategy helps your audience discover you across the places they already trust, while creating the signals search engines and AI systems use to understand your brand.

Your most sustainable strategy will always be to:

• Find your audience.
• Build the distribution layer.
• Create assets worth talking about.
• Get your ideas into the right conversations.

Then, let search engines and AI systems pick up the signals you’re creating everywhere else. That’s how search engine optimization becomes the more sustainable search everywhere optimization of the future.