A bit of context before I get into it:
Many of my clients have been asking me about SEO and AEO lately.
- What do AI Overviews mean for their content?
- Should they still be writing blog content?
- Is anybody clicking on anything anymore?
- Do the blue links still matter?
Honestly? I don't have a definitive answer. Anyone who tells you they do is either selling something or hasn't been paying attention.
But I've spent an embarrassing number of hours down this rabbit hole over the last year - reading the research, listening to the practitioners actually moving the needle. A recent episode of HubSpot's Marketing Against the Grain podcast was the one that pushed me from "interesting" to "I think I'd actually bet on this."
Disclaimer: Not a certainty.... A bet.
Quick story:
Last summer, I worked with a good friend of mine, Mandi, on her brand/marketing for her performance physical therapy clinic in Columbus, OH.
Her clients are fitness athletes - the people doing butterfly pull-ups and snatching their bodyweight before most of us have even finished our 1st cup of coffee.
Mandi wants to keep growing her practice. Not by burning six figures on Meta ads or paying an agency to run "thought leadership" through ChatGPT.
To be clear, Mandi did not ask me to write a newsletter about her business. I just heard the podcast and immediately thought of her business model... which is, I'm told, what brand strategists do for fun. ๐
For content, if I were Mandi, here's where I'd start.
Most PT practices in her niche are writing things like:
- 5 Shoulder Exercises to Reduce Pain
- 7 Ways to Strengthen Your Knees
- How to Avoid Back Pain When Lifting
Here's what I think will actually get her found in a search world run by AI Overviews:
- Shoulder Pain During Butterfly Pull-Ups: How We Got Jess Back to Her First RX Open
- The Friday Night Lights Deadlift Session That Kept Derailing Sam's Training
- The High-Rep Pull-Up Benchmark That Kept Wrecking Alex's Shoulders (And What Finally Fixed It)
Same general topic. Completely different signal.
The first list is the most replaceable content on the internet. An AI Overview will summarize it in 3 sentences and the user will never click. (Which is, technically, a great branding strategy for AI Overviews...)
The second list carries context, stakes, and a specific person on the other end.
Someone reads "Shoulder Pain During Butterfly Pull-Ups" and thinks that's literally me! You can't summarize a story into oblivion the way you can summarize a tip.
The Pattern
This is the most common content mistake I see - across industries, across firm sizes, across budgets. They publish "5 Ways to Reduce Tax Liability" or "What to Look for in a Commercial Insurance Policy" and wonder why nothing converts.
The content isn't bad. It's just not theirs. It's the same content their 3 biggest competitors are publishing - usually with the same stock photo of 2 people shaking hands in front of a window or conference table. (You know the photo... ๐ฌ) It could have been written by anyone.
Meanwhile, the most valuable content the firm has - the actual stories of how they fixed a specific problem - never makes it to the website.
It lives in the partners' heads. It lives in proposal narratives nobody reuses. It lives in 9pm emails to referral sources that get sent once and forgotten.
The Experiment
1 / List the real moments
Not "shoulder pain" - "butterfly pull-ups + shoulder pain". For a firm, not "tax planning" - "the S-corp owner who realized in November they'd been underpaying themselves all year."
2 / Turn each into a case-driven answer page
1 specific person. 1 specific mess. What you saw, what you tried, what failed, and what finally worked. (And yes, get permission before you tell their story over the internet... or anonymize it!)
3 / Do just enough SEO for 2026
Use the phrase a real person would actually type. Put it in the title, first paragraph, and URL. Lead with a 40-60 word answer block so AI can pull from it cleanly. (Yes, you're now writing partly for the robots. They are reading. They have opinions.)
4 / Group pages into small topic clusters
A hub around "overhead shoulder pain in high-intensity training" - not one monster post about gym injuries.
For a firm: a hub around "S-corp election mistakes" or "commercial GL policy gaps."
5 / Measure what actually matters
Not raw traffic. Are the right people finding it? Do they feel seen? Does it move them faster toward a consult?
AI Implementation Idea
The part I'm most interested in here though isn't really the content.
It's the workflow we can build underneath it to make the content process simpler.
Today, we have all the capabilities to build a small internal web app / AI assistant - trained on the business's brand strategy, content framework, and tone of voice.
Here's how I see it working:
Step 1: After a session, a PT drops in rough notes - the athlete's background, the movement that triggered the issue, what they'd already tried, what finally worked.
Step 2: The AI would be trained to return 5-10 hyper-specific title ideas, guessed search phrases, a clean outline, suggested internal links, and a rough draft.
Step 3: The PT edits in 20 min instead of writing for hours.
A case-to-content assistant, persay.
The brand strategy = the operating layer.
The AI = the production assistant.
Without the strategy, you've just bought a faster way to produce content that sounds like everyone else...
Ok... so how do we translate this to your firm?
I know most of you don't run a PT clinic. But you see the same kinds of problems repeatedly. Every business does!
3 quick translations:
Accounting firm: Instead of "How to Choose a CPA," try "The Manufacturing CFO Who Realized in October She'd Been Filing in the Wrong State for 3 Years"
Insurance agency: Instead of "5 Things to Look for in Commercial Coverage," try "The Contractor Who Found Out at 11pm on a Saturday that His Equipment Wasn't Actually Covered."
Law firm: Instead of "Understanding Non-Compete Agreements" write "The Sales VP Who Couldn't Take the Job Because of a Clause Her Lawyer Told Her Not to Worry About."
Skip the generic, replaceable content. Mine for the stories and meaningful moments that are already happening day-to-day in your business, and write about those.
That's all for this week :)
Dani
P.S. Here's a peek at how Mandi's team documents and shares patient stories. I'm obsessed. They're already primed for the AEO era.
P.P.S. If you're in the Columbus area, you're a fitness athlete (CrossFit, Hyrox, etc.), and you need a PT who actually understands why you care about getting back to RX on the WOD, check out affiliatept.com. (If that sentence made no sense to you, you're not her target audience. Which, honestly, is the entire point of this newsletter.)