Sophie Steffen put the question every marketer is currently losing sleep over to Tom Cox of Semrush Academy: with content production upended by AI, what actually influences positioning for SEO, GEO, and citations, versus what merely sounds good on a LinkedIn post? His answer, and Brian da Silva’s response from the social side, amount to an argument that the era of hacks is over.
The Noise Is the Point
Tom opens by capturing the sheer disorientation of the current advice cycle. He recounts a colleague who attended an event where one speaker stood up and declared listicles perfect for AI search, recommending everyone create them and appear on them – and the very next speaker told the room to scrap listicles entirely because they do not work. That whiplash, delivered from the same stage minutes apart, is the environment every content team is trying to operate in. The takeaway is not which speaker was right. It is that chasing individual tactics in this climate is a way to stay permanently dizzy.
The AI Operating System Is Just Good SEO
Semrush’s customer education team responded to the noise by building a methodology with in-house and industry experts – an approach Tom calls the AI operating system, which you can now search for. He is careful to frame it as an approach rather than a final answer, and the crux is almost anticlimactic given how everyone has spent two years declaring SEO dead.
“Strong SEO foundations. You need a site that is technically healthy, that has access to quality content, high-quality content that offers something new, that offers information gain, E-E-A-T. That’s a given. Those are the foundations.”
The genuinely new part is not technical at all. It is organizational alignment. The role of the SEO manager, once confined to keyword research and strategy, has expanded into something closer to diplomacy: getting product marketing, brand, and social into the same room to speak one consistent message everywhere. The reason is concrete and slightly alarming.
“You could search for your tool in Perplexity and it will say something very different than ChatGPT. It will say something very different to Claude, and none of it is what you want to be known for as a brand anymore.”
Clarity and visibility, Tom argues, now depend on consistency across social, third-party sites, and review platforms. The work is auditing how AI talks about your brand, how consistently you are mentioned versus competitors and for which topics, then showing that to your team to win buy-in and act collectively. It is not a tactic. As he put it, with the weariness of someone who has said it a thousand times: it is SEO, it is the long game, it is not something that gets results next week.
The Bar Went Up Because the Barrier Came Down
Brian arrives at the same destination by a different road. AI, he points out, lowered the barrier to publishing so far that anyone can produce something – poorly written, obviously machine-made, and instantly publishable.
“Now that the barrier is lower, the bar for content is super high. It’s super, super high.”
His evidence is firsthand and a little painful. LinkedIn is shifting from a follower-based feed to an interest graph that serves content based on what it thinks you will actually consume, and his own impressions dropped for two weeks while the algorithm re-sorted around quality. The rise of AI slop, in his telling, has made audiences crave the opposite – human craft, specificity, content built to be shared. Put Tom’s alignment argument and Brian’s quality argument together and you get a single uncomfortable forecast: the channels are converging on rewarding consistency and craft, which means the content teams everyone assumed AI would shrink are about to be busier than ever.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Tom Cox and Brian da Silva.
Tools Mentioned in the Interview
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
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