We’ve been working with clients in SEO for decades, and one of the consistent themes in our strategies has been good hygiene — good SEO hygiene.
Over the years, we’ve seen clients and prospects chasing Google’s search algorithms in hopes of gaming the system and gaining an advantage. This rarely works. And when it does, it’s temporary — based on a single point-in-time change that doesn’t have lasting implications.
What Good SEO Hygiene Actually Means
When we talk about good SEO hygiene, we’re talking about covering all the bases: making sure your site has the right meta tags, the correct alt attributes, a proper heading tag structure, and well-written content. It sounds simple, but it’s where most sites fall short.
What we find time and again is that someone reads an article claiming “change your title tag to 35 characters and you’ll win the game,” and suddenly they want every page to have a 35-character title tag. These types of hacks don’t work. But if you ensure that your title tags are relevant, that they include an appropriate call to action, and that they connect to both the page content and the queries people are searching — then your title tag is well written, regardless of its length within reason.
So What Does This Have to Do with AI?
Right now, during the discovery phase of answering a question, large language models rely on search engines as a primary content source. As we’ve seen reported in Search Engine Land, LLMs reference search engine results extensively — they actually do quite a deep dive, running multiple layers of queries to answer even a single question.
What this means for businesses is that good SEO practices are still the name of the game. The fundamentals haven’t been replaced. If anything, they matter more now because your content isn’t just being evaluated by Google’s algorithm — it’s also being pulled into AI-generated answers.
SEO Activity Isn’t Being Replaced — It’s Being Expanded
Those core practices have been expanded, though. We now need to include things like llms.txt files, more robust JSON-LD structured data on each page, and a more intentional approach to HTML tag structure — which, to be fair, is a carryover from the way SEO has always worked when done properly.
In practice, what this means is that SEO activity doesn’t go away. It grows. We have to be more deliberate about the structure of our pages, the type of content we produce, and how that content is organized. We need to add files like llms.txt alongside the HTML sitemap and XML sitemap that have long been standard.
The businesses that treat AI as a reason to double down on SEO fundamentals — not abandon them — are the ones that will maintain and grow their visibility in this next phase of search.