Remember when ranking on Google felt like proof that you were doing something right?
You’d refresh your dashboard, see a keyword climb a few spots, and feel a small rush of validation.
We all started to play the same game… and SEO started to lose its soul. We stopped asking why we were writing, and started obsessing about what keyword we should write for. Search engines results became a predictable landfill of “10 best” lists and “ultimate guides” that all sounded the same.
We called it optimization. But really, it was mimicry dressed as mastery.
Now, we’re standing at the start of a new chapter—AI search, generative discovery, whatever you want to call it—and I can already see the same reflex creeping back in.
Marketers are asking:
“How do we show up in ChatGPT?”
“What format of content is AI more likely to cite?”
“What’s our GEO/AEO strategy?”
In inventing new acronyms and creating different dashboards, we’re on the verge of missing the point once again.
SEO wasn’t the issue. Neither is AI.
The problem is how we treat every new discovery channel like a system to hack instead of a space to help.
Marketers have created a reflex to optimize first, understand later.
We chase visibility before clarity.
I’ve seen clients spend weeks tracking keyword movement that didn’t change a single sales conversation.
A few weeks ago, Benjamin Houy, the founder of Lorelight, shut down his startup—a platform built to help brands “optimize for AI search.”
The tech worked, and the idea made sense. But customers kept churning because the insights didn’t change what they actually needed to do.
After studying hundreds of AI responses, they found that the brands most often cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity had one thing in common: they were already creating content that was clear, credible, and genuinely helpful.
No secret formula or “GEO” framework. Just good marketing.
He closed the company with a line that stuck with me:
“There’s no such thing as an AI optimization strategy separate from brand building.”
Still, that doesn’t mean how people search the internet hasn’t changed.
According to this Ahrefs study that keeps pumping on my LinkedIn feed, nearly a third of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages have zero traditional search visibility, while most of the rest come from Wikipedia, homepages, or evergreen educational content.
This is a reminder that the rules of visibility are already changing, and they’ll keep changing. Because it’s the nature of how human behavior evolves with technology—and marketing adapts to it.
At Kalungi, we’ve been rethinking our process through what we call syntropy: clarity and useful order.
Cris wrote about this recently: how syntropic writing starts from a signal, not a keyword.
A signal is that spark that makes someone say, “Ohhh, that helps.” It might come from a client question, a hard lesson, or a pattern you keep seeing in your ICP’s challenges.
When you write from signals:
AI tools can then help you scale and structure that clarity, but the signal comes first.
You might still be stuck in keyword-obsessed thinking if:
These old habits belong to a time when discovery was simpler than it is now.
If you want your team to think syntropically, stop rewarding entropy. Don’t swap one vanity metric for another. AI citations can turn into the new keyword rankings if you’re not careful.
Stop obsessing on keyword rankings. Ask what your buyers are learning from you this week, and measure how clearly your content moves real people closer to a decision:
Those are the metrics that show content is being understood and trusted, not just getting views.
Every few years, marketing finds a new system to game. But every time we chase the mechanics, we lose sight of the meaning.
The next algorithm to untangle it’s in our own heads; the one that equates optimization with progress.
If you want to stay visible in this new era, start where syntropy starts: with a real signal worth sharing. Not a keyword or a prompt, but a moment of clarity that helps someone see something differently.
Take one piece of content from your backlog and ask:
“What was the original signal behind this?”
If you can’t find it, that’s your next rewrite.
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