The constants nobody talks about

Your audience still needs to discover you. That's not changing. What changes is where they spend their time, and the platforms shift constantly. But the underlying need, to be findable where your people already are, is permanent.

Being present in the right place is only half of it. You also want to catch them in a moment when they are actually open to receiving your message. Not every moment is equal. Someone scrolling at midnight half-asleep is a different context than someone actively searching for a solution to a problem they are stuck on.

The filtering problem

Our brains are now extremely good at ignoring marketing. We are hit by thousands of messages every day. The filter has gotten stronger every year and it is not getting weaker.

This means the attention problem doesn't go away. It gets harder. And the solution doesn't change either: your message has to earn the stop. The scroll stop, the read, the click. That's what hooks are for. That's what visual storytelling does. Not tricks, but genuine pattern interrupts that signal "this is different, this is worth a second."

Attention is easy to lose

Getting someone to stop is one thing. Keeping them is another.

People are distracted constantly and they forget quickly. What felt relevant thirty seconds ago is gone. So the second challenge, which also doesn't change, is keeping them there once you have them.

Open loops work. Storytelling works. Visual cues that make someone want to know what happens next work. The mechanism is as old as campfire stories. The application changes. The principle doesn't.

The platform trap

Every platform wants to keep users on the platform. That is their entire business model. Fighting that is a losing game.

The smarter move is to work with it. Don't try to pull people off Instagram into your funnel the moment they see your post. Engage them on Instagram first. Lead them to more of your content on Instagram. On Substack, reference other pieces you've written. On a blog, use internal links that deepen the visit. On Reels, point people to other Reels in your profile.

Build the relationship where they already are. The platform will reward you for it. And your audience will trust you more for not immediately trying to drag them somewhere else.

The actual strategy for uncertain times

You cannot stay on top of every trend. A new one is always coming. The brands that chase each one end up exhausted and inconsistent, with no clear identity and no compounding momentum.

What you can do is take one step back and identify the principles that will still be driving decisions ten, twenty, fifty years from now.

Be discoverable where your audience already spends time. Earn the attention, don't just interrupt it. Keep people engaged once you have them. Work with platform dynamics rather than against them.

None of that is going out of style. Build your strategy on the things that won't move, and you'll have something that holds up no matter what changes next.

One of the best ways I’ve found to do so is by building a SEvO Pyramid for your brand!

Then we ran the page through a five-stage agentic RAG framework that Mike King at iPullRank made accessible last week with his Beyond RAG piece (thanks Mike!). The audit does not measure rankings. It measures whether your paragraphs would survive the set of decisions AI search systems now run between a customer’s question and the answer they output.

Our client lost the pairwise on that pricing sub-query to three competitors who ranked below them. All three would beat our client inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode for that exact question. Why. Because all three open their pages with a number. Our client’s page does not show a price anywhere.

What actually changed

Old SEO assumed one moment of truth. The SERP. You ranked or you did not. You got the click or you did not.

AI search runs five moments of truth before the customer sees a sentence. The assistant takes one question, breaks it into five to twenty smaller questions, picks a tool for each one (web search, structured data, calculator, maps), pulls top results, chunks each page into short paragraphs, runs a tournament between paragraphs from competing sources, and then grades the surviving draft for freshness, contradictions, and source diversity. Anything that fails any gate gets cut.

The paragraph is the unit of competition now. Not the page.

What we built

Mike’s article describes the process. We took the architecture and built an internal replica of sorts so we better see where a client’s content drops out. Same five stages: Planner, router, retrieval, pairwise reranker, critic. We feed it a target URL and a priority query. It runs the loop on real SERP data. It writes a trace showing the journey for that URL across every sub-question the planner generated. Where it surfaced. Where it made the pool. Where it won pairwise. Where it passed the critic. Where it ended up cited.

The trace becomes a sheet. Tab one is the report. Tab two has one row per losing pairwise verdict with the original passage, a rewrite, and a written explanation of which judging criterion the rewrite satisfies.

Two runs, one client

We ran it twice for the same brand.

Run one was their head term against the homepage. The target surfaced in 14 of 20 sub-questions. It won the pairwise on 5 of them. Every one of those wins came from a passage that named the brand’s unique accreditation in the first sentence. The losses had the opposite shape. The competitor’s first sentence named an age, a number, or a price. Our client’s first sentence said things like “Choose your … mode” or “Enrol today.”

Run two was a different priority query against a product page. The target surfaced in 9 of 20 sub-questions. The interesting finding came from three sub-queries where a different page on the same domain ranked instead of the strategic page. A blog post ranked for the head definitional query. An activities page ranked for the project-ideas query. A safety guide ranked for the safety query. The brand was visible across the topic. The strategic page was not. Internal linking from the blog ecosystem into the course page would close that gap in days.

The pattern behind the losses

Almost every pairwise loss flips on a 90-minute copy edit.

In this example: Lead with the named entity. Put the number the system obviously wants, a price, or a quantified scope condition in the first 15 words. Make the paragraph self-contained, so it reads as a complete answer even if you copy it out and paste it into a blank doc. Add a “Last updated” line. The reranker is not subtle. The criteria are public, repeatable, and predictable.

The bigger change is mental, not technical. Stop optimizing pages. Start optimizing the heading + first sentence under every heading. Pages do not compete in AI search. Paragraphs do.

The honest caveat

We cannot see inside Google’s planner, ChatGPT’s reranker, or Perplexity’s critic. Mike is direct about this in the piece, and his solution makes sense. Build your own observable copy of the loop and calibrate it against the visible parts of production systems like Deep Research. That is what our harness does. It is a proxy, not a replica. But a proxy you can read beats a black box you cannot.

The retrieval-once playbook is over. Five gates per question is the new default. If your team is still arguing about position tracking, they are measuring the wrong thing.

Mike King’s Beyond RAG is worth your hour if you make a living from organic search and more and more from your brand’s visibility in AI.

Most people building a brand online start the same way. They create a website, write blog posts, wait for Google to send traffic, and hope the right people eventually show up.

I did this too. On multiple brands. And for a long time, it worked.

It doesn't work the way it used to. And even when it did work, it was slow.

There is a faster path that most people overlook because it feels like it's reserved for "established" people. It isn't.

The thing nobody in your industry tells you

Every industry organizes itself around a small number of trusted publications. In SEO and marketing, I've been reading Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and SE Roundtable for almost two decades. In woodworking there are guild magazines. In software, dev journals. In car detailing, niche outlets. Whatever space you're in, a handful of publications exist that your ideal clients read regularly and trust.

Those publications need content. Most of them actively look for contributors from their industry.

That single fact is the shortcut.

What you actually get when you publish there

A byline in one of those publications does several things at once that would take you years to replicate on your own.

You borrow credibility. When an editorial team publishes your piece, peers and potential clients treat it differently than a blog post on your own site. It signals your ideas were evaluated and found worth sharing.

You borrow distribution. Industry publications often have tens of thousands of subscribers, many of whom are exactly the buyers you want to reach. You access that entire list without having built it yourself.

And you get something less obvious: a reason to reach out. A published piece is a natural conversation starter with past clients, prospects, anyone you want to reconnect with. "Thought you might find this relevant" is a much warmer opener than anything else in your outreach toolkit.

Why this matters more right now

The old playbook relied on a chain: write blog posts, earn Google rankings, get traffic, convert leads. That chain is breaking. AI Overviews answer questions on the results page. People discover brands on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack. They stay on those platforms until they are ready to buy, and only then come to your site.

Waiting for Google to send people to you is a passive strategy in a world that has already moved on.

Publishing in places where your audience already spends time bypasses that problem entirely. You show up where they are, in something they already trust, before they ever search for you.

How to actually get in

Most publications have a contributor submission process. The inbox can be deep. Two things help.

The first is a genuinely specific pitch. Not a broad topic anyone could write. An angle only you can credibly argue, backed by real experience or data from your work.

The second is a relationship with someone already on the contributor team. Most publications list their contributors. Connect with them, ask how they got started, build something real. An internal endorsement moves you from the pile to the front of the queue.

The first piece is the hardest. Once it is published, subsequent pitches are much easier to place.

Where this fits in the bigger picture

At SEOLeverage, we call this Layer 3 of Search Everywhere Optimization. It sits above the foundational layers of having a strong website and engaging in online conversations, and below the broader distribution work of building your own audience channels.

It works best when you already know your audience well and have something real to say. The publication amplifies what is there. It does not create it from scratch.

But if your content is not reaching enough of the right people right now, and you are waiting for an algorithm to fix that, this is one of the fastest ways to change the trajectory without starting over.

It makes sense on the surface. Traffic drops. AI launches. People connect the dots. But that story is incomplete, and if you're building your strategy around it, you're solving only part of the problem.

The decline in organic search traffic started years ago. We were just too comfortable to notice.

The years we got away with it

Google kept sending traffic. Not because the fundamentals were strong, but because the shift was slow enough to ignore.

Then COVID hit. Every website that had a remotely relevant audience saw a surge. Lockdowns, stimulus money, bored people with laptops. It looked like growth. It wasn't. It was a mask.

When the pandemic tailwind disappeared, the underlying trend showed up. And it looked like a cliff.

Where the traffic actually went

People didn't stop searching. They changed where they search.

And that started years ago.

Amazon became the default starting point for product discovery. Not Google. If someone wants running shoes, they go straight to Amazon. If they want a couch, same thing. Google lost the top of the e-commerce funnel years ago, quietly and permanently.

Social media took over discovery. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. People find brands, products, and ideas there now. They don't type a query into Google to discover something new. They scroll.

E-commerce businesses read the room. They went all in on Meta Ads. Not because Google failed them overnight, but because the math had been shifting for a long time and Meta was where the buyers were.

What we're living through now

This is a market correction.

Not a catastrophe. Not an AI apocalypse. A correction that was clearly foreseeable if you were watching where consumer behavior was actually going.

Some thought leaders like from SparkToro (no affiliation) have seen this coming years ago, while many of us kept pushing for Google traffic.

The businesses that are panicking right now built everything on a channel that was already showing cracks. The AI Overviews narrative is convenient certainly true as >50% drops in Click-Through-Rate for a #1 ranking hit hard. However, the structural shift towards discovery on other platforms was already done.

When ChatGPT came out, about a month or two later, I started to see the shift happening: Random forums, blog posts, etc. suddenly were the source of what ChatGPT would say about a brand. I created PlatformLeverage back then and started helping clients prepare for a multi-platform strategy. Today we help clients with our main brand, SEOLeverage, in the context of Search Everywhere Optimization, to get in front of decision-makers where it matters!

Understanding the real cause matters because it changes what you do next. You don't fight a market correction by yelling at Google. You adapt to where discovery actually happens.

That part is worth thinking about carefully.

You built a stage but forgot the roads.

Content is not a publishing problem. It’s a distribution problem. And most businesses skip distribution entirely because they’ve been sold the idea that good content spreads on its own.

It doesn’t.

The layer most content strategies ignore

I’ve been building out what I call the SEvO Pyramid - Search Everywhere Optimization - a five-layer framework for getting found across every platform where your buyers actually spend time.

Most content advice starts at Layer 5: “create your own content.” Blog posts, videos, newsletters, podcasts. That’s where everyone starts because it feels productive.

But Layer 5 is the last layer for a reason. It only works when the layers beneath it are already in place.

Layer 4 is Distribution. And it’s the layer almost nobody builds.

What distribution actually means

Distribution isn’t “posting your article link on three social channels.” That’s broadcasting. Broadcasting is noise.

Real distribution is a system. It has four working parts:

1. Initial distribution

Identify the 4-6 platforms where your buyers actually consume content. Not where you’re comfortable posting. Where they’re paying attention. Send every piece of content into those channels within 24-48 hours of publishing, in the native format of each platform. LinkedIn wants a short punchy take. A Reddit community wants genuine contribution, not a link drop.

2. Format adaptation

One article becomes five assets. A blog post becomes a carousel. A podcast clip becomes a short video. A video transcript becomes a newsletter section. The idea travels. The format adapts.

3. Community distribution

There are communities (forums, Slack groups, Facebook groups, subreddits) where your buyers already gather. Become a real participant. Contribute answers. Then, when it’s genuinely useful, reference what you’ve written. Not as promotion. As a resource.

4. Evergreen reactivation

This is the one nobody does. Set up alerts (Google Alerts, social listening, community monitoring) for the topics you’ve written about. Every time someone asks a question your content answers, you respond with genuine value and point them to the resource. Your content keeps working instead of aging in a folder.

The conveyor belt model

Think of it this way. Most businesses treat each piece of content like a one-time event. Write it. Publish it. Move on.

But the goal is to build a conveyor belt. A structured, repeatable workflow where every piece of content moves through a sequence: initial channels, format adaptations, community placements, periodic reactivations. Not all at once. Not manually. Systematically.

A piece of content that enters that conveyor belt will reach your audience multiple times, on multiple platforms, in multiple formats, over multiple months. That’s compounding. That’s what makes content “work.”

The 10-20 rule

You don’t need a hundred pieces of content. You need 10 to 20 cornerstone assets - the pieces that capture your most important ideas, answer your buyers’ biggest questions, and reflect what you want to be known for.

Build those. Then run them through the distribution system. Reference them constantly. Let them become the anchors that everything else points back to.

Where to start

If you’re creating content right now without a distribution system, stop adding new content for a month.

Instead:

• Map the 4-6 platforms where your buyers actually are

• Pick your 10 best existing pieces

• Build a simple distribution workflow for each

Set up one or two topic alerts for evergreen reactivation

The content you already have can work a lot harder than it currently is.

The stage is built. Now build the roads!

Input metrics dashboards flip this. They track the work that produces the results, not the results themselves. And once you make that shift, you start managing your marketing the same way a serious athlete manages a training program.

The gym analogy nobody in marketing talks about

Imagine you want to get stronger. You could obsess over your bicep measurement every morning. Step on the scale daily. Track your body fat percentage with precision. None of that tells you what to change in your training.

Or you could track how often you go to the gym, which exercises you do, how many sets, how much weight. Now you have something to work with. You see a plateau, you adjust the inputs. You see progress, you know what drove it.

Marketing works the same way. The output metrics (traffic, leads, revenue) are the bicep measurement. The input metrics (how many articles published, how many industry publication pieces submitted, how many distribution steps executed per piece) are the workout log.

Most dashboards skip the workout log entirely.

What makes input metrics different

Input metrics track what you can actually control.

You cannot control whether a piece of content ranks on page one. You can control whether it gets written, edited, published, and distributed properly. You cannot control whether a Facebook group post gets seen by thousands of people. You can control whether you show up in those conversations consistently, week after week.

This matters even more in an AI-driven environment. When AI models are deciding which brands to cite, which experts to reference, which content to surface in an AI Overview, the output is increasingly unpredictable. What you can control is the quality and consistency of what goes in. Garbage in, garbage out. The input is the lever.

Waikay is building specifically around this idea: analyzing what feeds into AI systems, helping optimize content structure, entity connections, and the data that influences how models represent your brand. That is input optimization at the AI layer.

The execution gap that kills most strategies

Here is something that almost never gets discussed in marketing strategy conversations.

The gap between “we decided to do this” and “this actually got done” is enormous. Most marketing strategies fail not because the ideas were bad, but because execution was inconsistent.

It is one thing to say you want to build a content library of 100 articles. It is something entirely different for those articles to get written, reviewed, published on the website, and distributed across channels. The sad reality is that a huge percentage of content briefs, strategy documents, and content calendars end up sitting in a Google Drive folder for months. Eventually, they become irrelevant. Nobody tracks that this happened, so nobody fixes it.

An input metrics dashboard forces the question: did this actually get done?

Did the article get published on the site or is it still in the folder? Did the distribution checklist get completed or did we just hit publish and move on? Did the guest post for the industry publication get submitted this month or did it slip again?

These are uncomfortable questions. That is exactly why they are valuable.

The Search Everywhere Optimization Pyramid is an input problem

The Search Everywhere Optimization Pyramid is a framework I use with clients to structure visibility across every platform where their audience searches, not just Google.

The pyramid has five layers: audience platform research, alert system, industry publications, distribution, and your own content channels. Each layer has to be built and maintained.

The moment you start managing this seriously, you realize it is almost entirely an input tracking problem.

Take the industry publications layer. The idea is to contribute regularly to established publications in your space. For my agency SEOLeverage, that means writing for Search Engine Land. Contributing to a leading media outlet in your industry gives you third-party credibility that your own blog simply cannot replicate. When a prospect checks you out and sees your byline on a well-known industry publication, the dynamic changes. On top of that, established outlets have their own distribution layer already set up which every contribution of yours will leverage to reach more people.

But “write for industry publications” as a strategy only works if you actually do it consistently. One article every six months produces almost no compounding effect. Consistent contribution, tracked and measured as an input, produces credibility that builds over time.

Same with the distribution layer. Every piece of content you create should go through a defined distribution process. When we publish something, the process might include creating a video about it, writing social posts and scheduling them multiple times, writing a related piece for Search Engine Land, republishing on Medium, running paid ads on Meta, and writing a version of it here on Substack.

That is a lot of steps. And every one of them is an input. If you are not tracking whether they happen, most of them quietly stop happening. The distribution layer collapses, and you wonder why content is not performing.

The attribution trap and why it makes dashboards dangerous

There is a deeper problem with output-only dashboards, and some of the smartest people in marketing have been making this point for years. Marketers like Rand Fishkin, Amanda Natividad, or Tim Soulo have all written and spoken about this. The problem is simple: not everything can be tracked. And the things that cannot be tracked are often the most impactful:

• What is the value of a reply you wrote in a Facebook group three years ago that has now been seen by hundreds of thousands of people?

• What is the value of a YouTube live session where thousands of people first encountered your thinking and now associate your name with a specific way of solving a problem?

• What is the value of appearing in a list of vendors that a prospect compiled during their research phase, two years before they were ready to buy?

None of these show up cleanly in your analytics.

What typically happens is that someone eventually searches your brand name, finds your site, and converts. Google Analytics records it as organic search or direct traffic.

The Facebook post from three years ago, the YouTube video, the industry publication byline that put you on their radar in the first place: gone. Invisible.

This is last-click attribution at work. The dashboard only sees the final step. It misses the entire journey that made that final step possible.

The response to this is not to stop measuring. It is to stop pretending that the things you can measure are the only things that matter. An input metrics dashboard acknowledges reality: you cannot always track the impact, but you can always track whether the work happened.

What an input metrics dashboard actually tracks

The specifics depend on your strategy, but here is how I think about it across the layers of the pyramid:

Audience and alert layer: How many alerts are active? How many conversations did you engage with this week? How many relevant threads did you reply to?

Industry publications layer: How many submissions this month? How many pieces published in external publications year to date? Is the submission cadence consistent with the target?

Distribution layer: For each piece of content published, how many distribution steps were completed? Video created: yes or no. Social posts written: yes or no. Scheduled for republishing: yes or no. Industry publication version submitted: yes or no.

Your own content channels: Articles published to the site versus sitting in draft or in a folder. Substack posts published. Videos uploaded. Reddit threads contributed.

None of these are vanity metrics. They are the leading indicators. Output metrics are lagging indicators. By the time the output metrics tell you something is wrong, you are already months behind.

The practical shift

This is not complicated to start. You do not need a sophisticated tool. A simple spreadsheet tracking what you committed to doing each week and whether it happened is enough to begin.

The harder part is the mindset shift. Most marketing reporting is built to justify past decisions, not to improve future inputs. When you start tracking inputs honestly, you often discover that the brilliant strategy from last quarter was only half-executed. That is uncomfortable. It is also the most useful information you can have.

Track what goes in. Optimize what goes in. The outputs will follow.

That is what an input metrics dashboard is actually for.

The full breakdown is here: https://seoleverage.com/blog/search-everywhere-optimization-pyramid-framework/

Here is the short version:

Layer 1: Audience Platform Research
Before you create a single piece of content, you find out where your audience actually goes to research, compare, and decide. Not where you assume they are. Where they actually are. This shapes every other decision in the pyramid.

Layer 2: Alert System
You set up alerts for competitor mentions, industry challenges, and key terms in your space. You get notified when a relevant conversation is happening, then you go participate in it. No content created. Just presence, built in real time, at zero cost.

Layer 3: Industry Publications
You contribute to established publications in your space. For us, that is Search Engine Land. For you, it might be a trade journal, a major industry blog, or a podcast with your buyer's attention. Third-party credibility is something your own blog cannot manufacture.

Layer 4: Distribution
Most people think about distribution after they have published something. The pyramid puts it before. You build your distribution infrastructure first. So when you do publish, it lands.

Layer 5: Your Own Content
This is where your blog, newsletter, and social posts live. At the top of the pyramid, not the bottom. By the time you are creating your own content, you know your audience, you have credibility, and your distribution is ready to carry it.

Why this changes the game

When you build the pyramid in order, your own content is not a shot in the dark. It is the last piece of a system that has already been validated.

You know what your audience cares about because you researched it. You know what resonates because you tested it in third-party publications and real-time conversations. You have distribution in place because you set it up before you needed it.

Content creation becomes easier, faster, and far more effective.

The businesses that struggle with content marketing are almost always starting at Layer 5 and expecting it to work without the four layers underneath it.

Build the foundation first.

*I go deeper on each layer of the pyramid and the full methodology at https://seoleverage.com/blog/search-everywhere-optimization-pyramid-framework/

Best,

Gert