What replaces your old toolset

Generative AI and automation are bringing excitement to some SEO professionals and anxiety to others. With 87% of Americans reading AI summaries, you’re falling behind if you’re not adapting your toolset to this trend.

Moving from rigid enterprise tools to agile, AI-driven ones positions you as a forward-thinking authority with clients or your employer.

This how-to will help you guide clients, employers, or your team through that shift.

Here’s what an old SEO stack looks like

SEO practices remain relevant because the company’s generative AI features are rooted in:

• Core search ranking systems.
• Quality systems.

Here’s a traditional “SEO stack”:

Rank trackers

Tracking keywords used to be every campaign’s heartbeat. Add target keywords, monitor SERP positions, and higher rankings would drive more search traffic. But rankings have fragmented over the last few years.

SEOs are now tracking:

• AI Overviews
• Local packs
• Shopping carousels
• And so much more.

A third-place local pack ranking might drive two or three times more traffic than a number one AI Overview ranking.

Keyword tools

What are people searching for? With a crystal ball, you could optimize for specific queries and target certain groups. Keyword research lets you write content that matches those queries and user intent.

You’ll choose keywords based on:

• Difficulty
• Search volume
• Intent
• Other factors

Dozens of options help you find keywords for campaigns, and some competitors had more access to keyword data than others.

Lagging search volume data may have hurt your campaign, but it still showed past performance.

For example, you might target a keyword with 10,000 monthly visits. But just because it reached that volume last month doesn’t mean it will perform the same this month. Volume could double or fall to a tenth of last month’s level.

The problem in today’s search environment is that a keyword with tens of thousands of clicks in 2022 may now appear in an AI Overview. Zero-click searches may steal your traffic, making some once high-click queries irrelevant or not worth the same investment.

Even if search volume hasn’t dropped, the opportunity has.

Site audit tools

Crawlers still crawl your site and interpret its content. Getting a complete picture of how these crawlers see your website has always been crucial to SEO.

Audit tools help you identify:

• Broken links
• Redirect issues
• Missing metadata
• Slow pages
• Thin content
• Other issues on your site

But don’t put these audit tools on the shelf just yet. You’ll still need them to know whether your site is technically healthy. Crawl audits don’t guarantee that your content will surface.

Factors such as brand mentions are crucial signals for inclusion in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Unfortunately, many site audit tools in your old stack lack mention-tracking functionality.

So while…