AI Is Stealing Your SEO Traffic: Here's How to Fix It

The era of rinse-and-repeat SEO is over. 

Blog posts are competing with really smart bots, and video content isn’t just a fun little side project; it’s becoming increasingly necessary to keep your strategy fresh.

We chatted with Amy Lecza, Director of Content Marketing and SEO at Toast, to discuss the shifts she saw coming and how she’s leading the charge to adapt. In this conversation, she breaks down exactly what’s working, what’s not, and what content teams need to be doing right now to stay relevant and thrive in the AI search era.

This interview is part of G2’s Industry Insights series. For more content like this, subscribe to G2 Tea, a weekly newsletter with SaaS-y news and entertainment.

Inside the Industry with Amy Lecza

Can you walk us through your career journey and how your experiences prepared you to strategize in this new era of AI-driven content?

My career hasn’t been linear. I am very much driven by a desire for continual growth and I get a lot of satisfaction from digging into big, complex problems. I spent the first several years of my career building content marketing and SEO foundations, then took a detour to pursue some personal passions. 

I went to culinary school and cooked in restaurants for a few years. The restaurant industry is tough, and it will challenge everything you think you know about efficiency, communication, and prioritization. I took those lessons back to the corporate world and have been leading content marketing teams for the last eight years. 

We’re in such an interesting moment right now, and AI has certainly turned a lot of content marketing and SEO on its head in the last couple of years. It has forced us to examine our programs, teams, and outputs against a model that is constantly evolving. We’re challenged to showcase true value in the content we create and distribute, centering our brand differentiators and fighting to capture even shorter attention spans. 

How have you seen traditional SEO content performance change in the last year, and how has that shaped your team’s focus?

It’s no secret that Google’s AI Overviews and, to a lesser degree, generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are changing traditional search behaviors. I know my own search behaviors have changed as a result of these algorithmic updates. Businesses are feeling that, too. 

For years, SEO was done a certain way, and now we have to adapt. There’s less search demand in some areas, and people are getting their questions answered in the AIOs. Brands are challenged to stand out and to create content that is truly compelling and unreplicable. For my own team, we’re spending more time developing content in multiple formats with perspectives and data that only we can provide. We believe this type of content will be able to withstand future algorithmic changes. 

You’ve shifted your content strategy to prioritize video. What prompted that move, and what signals told you it was time?

The search engine results page (SERP) has changed and is still changing. We’re seeing videos appear on page one above the fold very often — for brand and nonbrand terms. This isn’t some great mystery. We can look at our own search behavior to help us understand why. Platform algorithms for YouTube, TikTok, and others are getting better. Questions once answered with blog articles can be answered differently with video. 

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Businesses can be hesitant to truly invest here because the cost is higher and the attribution can be murky, which makes executives wary. But if we’re talking about putting brand value front and center, and leading with differentiation, we need a way to clearly articulate our perspectives, and video allows us to get there. Videos are also very useful to distribute through other channels, so there’s a ton of value for other teams to make use of this content. 

How are you measuring success with video versus traditional written content? Any unexpected results so far?

Attribution and measurement of video content is challenging. I think this speaks to what probably all marketers are feeling — that single-touch attribution is a thing of the past, and we’re spending a lot of time and resources trying to develop more advanced multitouch journeys across platforms. It’s tricky! 

Right now, because we’re still in the foundation-building phase, we’re measuring with platform metrics (views, subscribers, watch time, engagement rate, etc.) and we have a few hypotheses about views to site visit conversions that we’re testing. We're focusing on measuring higher quality views and video's overall impact on the SERP - are we ranking on YouTube for keywords that are important to us. But if anyone out there has truly cracked video to funnel attribution, please feel free to reach out! 

Initial results have been really positive, and we’ve been able to take some lessons to help us build out the rest of the roadmap for the year. In a lot of ways, it has challenged me to return to centering storytelling in content creation. 

Do you think there's still a place for high-intent, search-driven content, or is that window closing?

Yes, absolutely. I think that nailing the middle of that Venn diagram requires marketers to really dig into their customer and prospect journeys to understand what type of content: 1, cannot be found elsewhere, 2, your brand has the unique right to win in, and 3, demonstrates true value for your intended audience. 

This may lead your team to create new content types, like tools, templates, videos, etc., that are more helpful than purely promotional. 

What do you think next year will look like for content marketing teams in tech?

Looking into my crystal ball, I think the next year is going to present a sink-or-swim opportunity for brands to use content to differentiate their web presence. AI will continue to get better, and individuals will get better at using AI, which I think will lead to even more low-quality content flooding the internet, and hopefully some standout content rising to the top. 

I think we’ll see more of a return to “traditional” marketing tactics deployed in innovative ways. Brands will be fighting for newsletter, webinar or event, and core site attention. 

Web tools will continue to evolve, and their creation will be accelerated with AI. Proprietary data, and the distribution of that data, will be even more important than it is now to cementing brand image, growth, and consideration. 

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Follow Amy Lecza on LinkedIn to learn more about her journey in content marketing and SEO.

Edited by Supanna Das