Lesson 1: The New SEO Landscape
AI removed the content bottleneck. Google changed the rules. This course shows you how to win, using AI to move faster while creating content people actually want.
For years, the SEO playbook was simple: find keywords, write content, build links, repeat. The bottleneck was production. Most companies couldn't publish enough to compete.
Then AI removed the bottleneck.
Suddenly anyone could generate a 2,000-word blog post in three minutes. Companies that struggled to publish once a month started publishing daily. The web got flooded with content that looked like content (proper headings, decent grammar, reasonable length) but said nothing new.
Google noticed. And they changed the rules.
The game shifted from "can you produce content?" to "can you produce content worth reading?" This course shows you how to win, using AI to move faster while creating content people actually want.
What Actually Changed
Some things are genuinely different now.
Volume stopped being a moat. When anyone can publish at scale, publishing at scale isn't a competitive advantage. The companies winning at SEO now aren't the ones publishing the most. They're the ones publishing content that's clearly better than what already exists.
Generic content became invisible. Google got dramatically better at identifying content that just rephrases what's already ranking. If your post reads like a summary of the top 10 results, it's not going to outrank them. You need a reason to exist.
Quality signals got more weight. Google's algorithm updates have consistently emphasized rewarding genuine expertise over content optimized purely for search. The next lesson covers exactly what those signals are.
User behavior became a bigger factor. Content that doesn't satisfy searchers gets demoted. Google is watching what happens after the click.
AI Overviews changed the game. Google's AI Mode (launched fully in 2025) now provides AI-generated summaries for many queries. The June 2025 core update adjusted how organic results rank alongside these AI summaries. Content that's easily replaceable by a simple AI answer gets less visibility. To earn clicks, your content needs to offer something the AI summary can't: depth, perspective, or expertise that goes beyond basic facts.
What Stayed the Same
Not everything changed. The fundamentals are still fundamental.
Keywords still matter. You still need to write about things people are searching for, using language they actually use. The research process is the same. It's what you do with the research that changed.
On-page optimization still matters. Clear titles, logical structure, fast load times, mobile-friendly design. These are table stakes, not differentiators, but you still need them.
Internal linking still matters. Probably more than before, actually. When Google is trying to understand what your site is about and whether you're an authority on a topic, your internal link structure is a primary signal. We cover this in depth in Lesson 12: Internal Linking.
Intent matching still matters. If someone searches for a comparison and you give them a tutorial, you lose. This was always true. It's just more aggressively enforced now. Lesson 6 covers how to get this right.
The Real Shift
Here's the thing most people miss: AI didn't change what makes content good. It just made it harder to fake.
Good content always meant content that genuinely helps the reader. Content with real information, clear structure, honest perspective. The difference is that before AI, you could get away with mediocre content if you were willing to produce a lot of it. Now you can't.
This is actually good news if you're a founder or small team. You don't need to outproduce big companies. You need to out-think them. You have expertise they don't have. You have opinions they're too corporate to express. You have specific experience with problems your audience actually faces.
AI is a tool that can help you move faster. But the thing that makes your content rank isn't the AI. It's the insight you bring that the AI couldn't generate on its own. We'll cover how to use AI effectively in Lesson 9 and how to edit AI output in Lesson 10: The 5-Pass Editing Framework.
What This Means for Your Strategy
If you're building an SEO strategy in 2026, you need to internalize this shift: the goal isn't to produce content. The goal is to produce content that's demonstrably better than what already exists for your target keywords.
The next lesson covers exactly what "better" means: the specific quality signals Google rewards and how to build content that hits them.
Next: Lesson 2: What Google Actually Rewards Now
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