SEO Is Drowning in AI Noise. Here’s How to Stay Focused.

It’s LLMs.txt this week.

AI Overviews last week.

Before that, it was AI Mode rollouts in the US.

Every few days, a new headline drops — and suddenly, everyone’s wondering if their SEO strategy is already obsolete.

The flood of updates creates pressure.

Your team feels it.

Your CMO feels it.

And if you own growth or pipeline, you’re expected to react fast.

But here’s the thing:

High-growth companies don’t win by reacting to noise. They win by focusing on what matters.

The Risk Isn’t Missing the Next Big Thing.

It’s Losing Track of the Right Ones.

Leadership sees the LinkedIn chatter and starts asking:

• Should we block or allow LLM crawlers?
• Are we behind on AI content?
• Is SEO still worth investing in?

Valid questions. But answering them too quickly — or building your roadmap around them — is a fast path to distraction.

Because despite the noise, the fundamentals haven’t changed:

• You still need to rank for queries that drive revenue
• You still need to be referenced in places your buyers trust
• You still need to build assets that compound over time

What has changed is the volume of distractions — and the lack of a filter.

Ruthless Prioritization Is the Only Strategy That Scales

You don’t need to be early to everything.

You need to be early to the right things.

That’s where ruthless prioritization comes in.

It’s not about doing less. It’s about doing what’s aligned with:

• How your buyers search
• Where your revenue comes from
• What your team can actually execute

Use this filter:

If a tactic doesn’t check at least two of the following, it waits:

✅ Solves a real blocker right now

✅ Drives revenue or conversions in the next 1–2 quarters

✅ Matches real search and buyer intent

✅ Builds strategic value over time

Everything else is noise.

The Highest-Impact SEO Work Often Looks Boring

You don’t need a flashy AI use case to move numbers.

You need execution that compounds.

Examples:

• Rewriting 5 key product pages to match search and buyer language
• Retiring 200 dead URLs to clean up crawl budget
• Improving internal linking logic on bottom-funnel pages
• Shipping one high-leverage content asset aligned with a conversion goal

These aren’t viral.

But they move the right metrics.

And they build trust with leadership — because they show your team knows what matters.

Your Strategy Should Adapt. Not Drift.

Adaptation is good. Chasing trends is not.

When your roadmap shifts with every tweet or product launch, you’re not adapting — you’re drifting.

Prioritization is what grounds you.

It protects your team’s focus.

It turns SEO into a revenue engine, not a checklist no one believes in, a trap Chris Green explains well in his post on SEO checklists.

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Is Your SEO Strategy Focused — or Just Reacting?

I work with growth leaders and CMOs to refocus SEO strategy around what actually moves revenue.

No noise. No trend-chasing. Just smart execution, based on leverage.