TL;DR: Many CMOs are still running a 2018 SEO playbook in a 2025 world, leading to diminishing returns. The reality is that AI Overviews and conversational search have fundamentally changed the game. Modern SEO leaders are shifting their focus from producing high volumes of blog posts and chasing backlinks to engineering citable, "chunkable" content and building distributed trust across the entire digital ecosystem. This is the new frontier of what we at Mercury call Generative AI Optimization (GAIO).
I am James, CEO of Mercury Technology Solutions.
I have conversations with Chief Marketing Officers every week, and a common theme of frustration is emerging. They are investing in SEO, following the established best practices, yet seeing their traffic and influence erode. The most critical thing I can tell them is this: you are not losing traffic because your content is bad; you are losing it because your playbook is outdated.
You're still optimizing for a world that no longer exists. Google has changed. AI has changed. The customer journey has fundamentally changed. Ranking #1 on a traditional search results page is a hollow victory if no one clicks, if the AI gives the answer directly, or if you are completely invisible in the new conversational interfaces like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini where your next customers are forming their opinions.
It's time to retire the old playbook. Here’s a look at the outdated mindsets holding marketing teams back and what modern SEO leaders are doing instead.
The Shift: From Traditional SEO Mindsets to Modern GAIO Strategies
This table provides a clear, at-a-glance comparison of the outdated thinking versus the modern, strategic approach required to win in 2025.
Outdated Mindset (2018 Playbook) | Modern Reality & Strategic Pivot (GAIO Playbook) |
"We need more blog posts." | AI summarizes everything. The modern approach is to create "chunkable" and citable content, as LLMs extract passages, not entire pages. |
"We need more backlinks." | Backlinks still matter for foundational authority, but AI now cites a wider array of sources. The modern approach is to build citability across forums, glossaries, and comparisons. |
"Let's target keywords." | The old game of targeting a single keyword with a long blog post is over. The modern approach is to optimize for prompts by understanding how your audience asks questions in AI. |
"Topical authority = 50 blog posts." | Old SEO focused on building topic clusters on your own site. The modern approach is to build distributed trust by getting mentioned in answers across the entire web (G2, Reddit, etc.). |
"We need to fix meta titles and H1s." | While basic technical SEO is important, it's irrelevant if your content can't be extracted. The modern approach is to structure every page like you're feeding an LLM, using TL;DRs and FAQ blocks. |
A Deeper Dive into the New Playbook
Outdated Mindset #1: “We need more blog posts.”
- Old Thinking: "If we publish four articles a week, our traffic is guaranteed to grow."
- Modern Reality: AI tools summarize and synthesize information, making content quantity largely irrelevant. A high volume of generic content adds to the noise, it doesn't cut through it.
- The Modern SEO Pivot: The focus must shift to creating "chunkable" and citable content. Since Large Language Models (LLMs) don't "read" pages but rather extract key passages, every section of your content must be engineered to be a perfect, standalone answer.
Outdated Mindset #2: “We need more backlinks.”
- Old Thinking: Backlinks are the primary driver of authority and rankings.
- Modern Reality: Backlinks still provide a crucial signal of foundational authority, but they are no longer the only—or even most important—factor for visibility in AI. Google's AI Overviews and other platforms are now citing sources from forums like Reddit, industry glossaries, detailed comparison pages, and structured Q&A sections.
- The Modern SEO Pivot: The goal is to build citability, not just link-based authority. This involves a broader strategy of getting your expertise mentioned and referenced across the entire digital ecosystem, a core tenet of our Mercury SEVO (Search Everywhere Optimization) Services.
Outdated Mindset #3: “Let’s target keywords.”
- Old Thinking: Pick a keyword, write a 2,000-word blog post, build links, and wait to rank.
- Modern Reality: The new game is about understanding how your ideal customer profile (ICP) asks conversational questions inside AI tools. The best practitioners are now reverse-engineering AI answers to understand the underlying logic.
- The Modern SEO Pivot: You must optimize for prompts, not just queries. This means creating content that directly answers the complex, multi-faceted questions your audience has. Our Mercury Muses AI can be a powerful tool here, helping to anticipate and generate content for these conversational prompts.
Outdated Mindset #4: “Topical authority means writing 50 blog posts on one subject.”
- Old Thinking: Build massive, interlinked topic clusters on your own website and hope to establish authority.
- Modern Reality: True authority in the AI era is about distributed trust. It's about being mentioned authoritatively across a wide range of trusted third-party platforms, including G2 pages, Reddit posts, Product Hunt, and even your own help documentation.
- The Modern SEO Pivot: Focus on building a presence and earning mentions wherever your audience seeks information. Being cited as a solution on a trusted review site can be more valuable than five blog posts on your own domain.
Outdated Mindset #5: “We need to focus on optimizing meta titles and H1s.”
- Old Thinking: On-page technical SEO is the most critical factor.
- Modern Reality: While basic technical hygiene is important, it will not save you if your content cannot be easily extracted or summarized by an AI.
- The Modern SEO Pivot: You must structure every page as if you are feeding an LLM. This means incorporating TL;DR summaries, dedicated FAQ blocks, headers based on specific use cases, and maintaining clean, logical paragraph structures. Our Mercury Content Management System (CMS) is designed to make this type of structured content creation intuitive and efficient.
Conclusion: Lead the Revolution, Don't Be a Victim of It
If you are leading a marketing organization in 2025 and are still running a 2018 SEO playbook, you are not just missing out on traffic—you are missing the entire AI distribution layer, which is rapidly becoming the most important channel for discovery.
At Mercury Technology Solutions, we partner with CMOs and their growth teams to rebuild their SEO strategies from the ground up for this new reality. Our Mercury LLM-SEO (GAIO) services are built on this modern playbook, designed to move beyond outdated tactics and build sustainable, authoritative visibility in the places that matter now. The choice for marketing leaders today is stark: adapt to this new reality or be rendered irrelevant by it.
