AI Revolution: From SEO to User Intent Marketing

AIO, SGE, E-E-A-T... Each technological revolution adds a new batch of mysterious acronyms to SEO, making the discipline seem inaccessible. Yet, web marketing has never been so human-centric.

Last updated: October 2025.
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Reading Setting: Where you are bored.

The world of search engine optimization resembles a technical, impenetrable maze, a universe complicated by the multiplication of acronyms punctuating each stage of its evolution. First, SEO, SXO, and SERP. Then, YMYL, MUM, and E-E-A-T. And now, AIO, SGE, and LLM—all to designate technologies that are becoming less and less... technical.

If you've ever wondered how some sites end up at the top of search results while others disappear into the web's forgotten corners, and the answers you received only left you with a general feeling of vagueness or digital anxiety, this article is for you. It addresses all entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, and the curious who want to demystify SEO and its myriad acronyms, understand its role in the Internet ecosystem, and, above all, grasp the best practices for navigating the web's murky waters with confidence.

The language of web marketing seems increasingly technical as the discipline evolves, and yet, the frenetic changes in SEO and its associated acronyms are, in fact, only simplifying things. Because, why else would they exist?

Ready to dive into the Internet's shifting landscape? Follow the guide.

What is SEO and its associated terms?

Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of optimizing a website to improve its ranking in organic (i.e., non-paid) search results. In other words, it's about making your site more visible to Google, Bing, and other search engines (SE). It is therefore a natural part of any good web marketing strategy, which, as a reminder, is a set of actions deployed across digital channels to achieve business objectives, usually with a view to growth—it's always about growth.

SEO revolves around four fundamental pillars.

Crawl and Indexing

Before search engines can rank your site, they must find it. To do this, they send robots, sometimes called spiders or bots, which crawl your site to read its content. This is the crawl. Once the page is explored, it is stored in a huge database: this is indexing. Without this initial operation, your site is invisible. And if this basic step seems trivial to you, an action that doesn't depend on you and which you only have to leave in the hands of the SEs or to fate, know that this is not the case. Your site is not always crawled, or—worse—the SE sometimes decides not to index it after a crawl.

Keywords

These are the terms that users type into the search bar. Optimizing your content around relevant keywords is essential for precisely addressing the user's intent. Not using them is talking into the void—which, unfortunately, happens much more often than one might think.

The SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

This is the page you see after performing a search. It is composed of organic results, paid advertisements (clearly identified as such), and, for several years now, PAA, AIO, and KP. Your goal is to carve out your place among all these elements and appear where your link will capture the user's attention. Previously, the goal was the first spot in organic results or, failing that, one of the next four. Today, knowing where to position yourself to get the best CTR (Click-Through Rate) is more delicate: the position is less important among the multiple factors that trigger the click.

The Backlink

A backlink is a hyperlink published on one website that points to another. It is considered a vote of confidence. The more quality links you have pointing to your site, the more the search engines deem it relevant and reliable. One might think that backlinks are no longer as important as they used to be, since Penguin: well, they are. They are important in a different way, that's all.

These elements are interconnected and work together to determine the relevance and authority of your site: that's what SEO is. A versatile, global entity with multiple facets.

The Role of SEO in Web Marketing

SEO is not an optional add-on to a web marketing strategy; it is an essential component, a foundation upon which to build your online presence. Unlike paid advertising (Search Engine Advertising or SEA), which disappears as soon as you turn off the financial tap, SEO offers lasting results and enables organic growth.

It integrates with your digital marketing strategy and acts concretely through four different levers.

Generate Quality Traffic

SEO's primary goal is to attract relevant visitors to your site, namely, to generate traffic. If you sell musical instruments and a user searches for "how to learn guitar?", appearing at the top of the results for this keyword guarantees you a highly qualified visitor, already interested in your area of expertise. It's the opposite of trawling; here, we aren't sweeping wide, we are casting a targeted hook, custom-made for the fish that will feed your growth.

Increase Authority and Credibility

A well-ranked site is perceived as a reliable and trustworthy source of information. By producing high-quality content, obtaining backlinks from recognized sites, and offering an excellent user experience, you strengthen your credibility with both users and search engines.

Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs

Organic traffic is free. Although optimization requires an investment of time or money, the long-term return on investment is often far superior to that of advertising campaigns. According to a 2023 study by BrightEdge[3], SEO generates over half of all website traffic.

Understand the Market and Consumer Behavior

Analyzing keywords and organic traffic gives you valuable information on what your potential customers are looking for, the questions they are asking, and the problems they are trying to solve. It's a goldmine for refining your offer and your content strategy.

Web marketing cannot be content with being a checklist of things to do, of which SEO would be a simple, almost mechanical component to apply; it is the lighthouse that guides lost navigators. Its best practices intervene to illuminate your path, help your site swim toward the surface, and keep its head above water.

Post-2024 SEO Best Practices: White Hat vs. Black Hat

The world of SEO is divided into two camps: the White Hat adherents, who strictly respect the search engine guidelines—because, yes, there are some—and the Black Hat practitioners, who try to manipulate algorithms for a quick but short-lived ranking, in other words—let's not mince words—the scoundrels of web marketing.

Black Hat: The Path to Destruction

Black Hat practices are appealing because they promise rapid results, which many entrepreneurs launching their site into the competitive WWW fiercely hope for, or are even financially dependent on. However, they always end up being very costly. Search engines, and particularly Google, have developed extremely sophisticated algorithms to detect these maneuvers.

Some examples of these practices:

• Keyword Stuffing: Excessively and unnaturally repeating a keyword in the content.
• Artificial Backlinks: Creating networks of sites to generate massive, irrelevant links to your own site.
• Hidden or Duplicated Content: Hiding text from users or copy-pasting content from other sites.

The consequences of Black Hat can be catastrophic. A Google penalty can lead to a brutal drop in your traffic, or even a complete de-indexing of your site. In 2024, the search engine intensified its actions against spam and Black Hat practices, stating that in recent years, 90% of phishing attempts have been blocked, according to its official blog[2]. The moral of the story is simple: if you try to cheat the system, you end up getting caught.

White Hat in the AI Era: Towards User Intent

If there is one undeniable difficulty behind the frenzy of acronyms symptomatic of SEO, it is the evolutionary aspect of the discipline. The technologies designed to detect, index, evaluate, and rank websites are constantly changing, and yesterday's quality indicators may be obsolete today—or only the way the SEs interpret them.

The Dawn of User Intent SEO: UX

Since Panda and Penguin, the goal of SEO has no longer been just to optimize for an algorithm, but to create an enriching experience for the user. The best practices rooted in this reality are simple to recognize: they are adorned with small "UX" or "UI" suffixes (User eXperience, User Interface). UX Writing, UX Design, UI Design—and all that jazz. These acronyms refer to a content strategy approach oriented toward the quality of the customer journey. It is sometimes called SXO (Search Experience Optimization).

Some fundamental principles of UX/UI:

• Search Intent: The priority is to understand what the user truly wants to find and to answer it comprehensively and relevantly.
• User Experience (UX): Google penalizes slow sites that are difficult to navigate and not optimized for mobile devices, which it identifies through the analysis of their Core Web Vitals.
• Authority, Credibility, and Trust: A site that demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness is largely favored by Google's ranking algorithms. This is the E-E-A-T acronym.
• High-Quality Content: Do not produce content for filler, and even less so to monopolize a mass of keywords with the idea of improving your ranking—that would be highly counterproductive. Think utility. Added value.
• Responsible Content (YMYL): Directly linked to E-E-A-T, the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) concept refers to subjects and web pages whose content could have a significant impact on a user's health, financial stability, or safety. Google applies extremely strict quality criteria to pages dealing with these topics (health, finance, law, etc.) to protect its users against inaccurate or harmful information. For YMYL content to be well-ranked, it must be written by qualified experts (E-E-A-T), based on reliable sources, and demonstrate impeccable transparency.

The Future of User-Oriented SEO: AI

Since the advent of AI, we talk about LLM, SGE, and AIO: many acronyms to designate nothing more and nothing less than AI-generated content technologies to answer user queries, which now feed the SERP—among other things.

The proliferation of technical terms surrounding SEO makes web marketing seem impenetrable, but the arrival of AI actually tends to simplify SEO—in its implementation, not in its results. Gaining traffic and growing online is indeed increasingly difficult: the world is such that online competition only intensifies, AI or no AI. Places are expensive, competitors are numerous, and search engines and their technologies are the Cerberuses of the SERP: you must convince them that you are the best in your field, and they are becoming more and more stringent.

Concretely, what makes SEO simpler in the age of AI is that machines are looking for authenticity. For expertise. For transparency. For humanity. And they are good at evaluating all that.

Post-2024 SEO therefore gives pride of place to the intuitive. Are you fumbling in the development and deployment of your post-2024 content marketing? Let your expertise speak; it is your best authority asset (E-E-A-T). You know nothing about acronyms, Panda, or Penguin? Don't worry about the Google menagerie, just write. Choose your themes well, cover unresolved subjects, structure your content properly, proofread carefully, and if you are satisfied with the quality of your creation, it is very likely that the AI will be too.

Should we really do without technical optimization, schema markup, netlinking, well-placed Hn tags, and keyword analysis? No, of course not. We don't have to do without it, but we can do without it. Content that is not optimized is not necessarily ineffective content. It is less effective content. Less profitable, less performing. But it still constitutes a lasting capital and can be recycled or optimized later. And, the more the AI refines its understanding of humans, the more authentic content is likely to be valued for online authority. So, don't be intimidated by the acronyms, and put your expertise on digital paper.

The web marketing of tomorrow belongs to humans.

What Future for SEO in User Intent Marketing?

The early years of search engines were disarmingly simple. Google's PageRank algorithm ranked pages based on their popularity, measured by the number and quality of backlinks. The more inbound links you had, the better you ranked—it was the golden age of Black Hat.

Then, over the years, the algorithms became increasingly intelligent to combat abuse and get closer to the user's real intent. Updates like Panda (for content quality), Penguin (for links), and Hummingbird (for semantic intent) transformed the discipline. Voice search brought its share of challenges, forcing experts to optimize for more natural, conversational language.

Today, it's the era of AI, and it rhymes with cognitive, heuristic, intent—human behind the click. New models, such as MUM, are capable of understanding the context and intent behind a query, far beyond keyword analysis. The real turning point is the integration of generative AI directly into the results page, creating the Zero Click environment that gives marketing professionals—myself included—raised on CTR a cold sweat.

Yet, AI acts as an enabler for SEO. Rather, as the great grim reaper of technical SEO in favor of a more direct, intuitive, and, in fact, more accessible SEO. The new models unequivocally reward content that demonstrates absolute expertise and reliability and penalize technical subterfuges more severely. The goal is no longer to decode the machines to try to slip through the net, but to focus on authority: your business expertise, your value.

We can rename it SXO, GEO, or optimization for LLMs, but the fact is simply that SEO is finally becoming what it has always been intended to be: the most logical, most ethical discipline of web marketing.

Final Word: A Bit of Philosophy

Ultimately, the history of SEO has been nothing more than a quest for identity.

After wandering through the technical jungles of PageRank, after flirting with the mirages of Black Hat, Artificial Intelligence brings us back, through a historical irony, to our starting point: the human behind the screen. It is not algorithmic sophistication that saves us, but our own authenticity.

AI, by becoming an uncompromising guardian of quality, has forced content to be stripped down to be nothing more than what it should be: an honest, reliable, and comprehensive answer to an intent.