Not long ago, SEO publishing followed a familiar rhythm inside most brands and agencies. A keyword list would land on a content desk, writers would produce drafts at a steady pace, editors would refine the copy, and teams would publish pages into a CMS using a predictable checklist that included headlines, metadata, internal links, and basic schema. The output often sounded similar across brands because it was designed to satisfy one primary judge: Google’s ranking systems.
In 2024 and 2025, that workflow is being reshaped from multiple directions at once. Generative AI has significantly reduced the time and cost needed to produce SEO content, while search itself is evolving in how content is discovered, summarised, and sometimes consumed without a click. As a result, SEO content teams are no longer just publishing more pages. They are rethinking how, why, and for whom content is created in the first place.
One way to understand the scale of this shift is by looking at the broader web. In 2025, Ahrefs reported that more than 70 percent of newly published web pages showed signs of AI generated content. This does not automatically imply low quality, but it does signal that AI assisted publishing has become mainstream rather than experimental. For SEO teams, the challenge has shifted from gaining speed to maintaining distinction. When everyone can publish quickly, differentiation becomes the real constraint.
This is especially relevant in India, where digital discovery is fragmenting rapidly. According to recent surveys, a significant portion of Indian internet users now rely on AI powered tools and conversational interfaces to find answers. As a result, traditional search behaviour is no longer the only path to visibility. Users may encounter summaries, comparisons, or recommendations without ever landing on the original page that produced the information.
Priti Murthy, President at GroupM Nexus, has noted that performance today hinges less on raw rankings and more on relevance and contextual value. She has said that as generative systems deliver answers in real time, brands must focus on creating high value content that aligns with intent and conversational discovery, rather than producing pages solely for search engines.
This change is visible in how SEO strategies are being planned. Many teams are moving away from content calendars built purely around keyword volume and difficulty. Instead, they are organising publishing around intent clusters. The question is no longer which keywords to target, but what users are trying to achieve and how best to help them achieve it. That might mean a guide, a calculator, a comparison page, a video, or a product explainer rather than a traditional blog post.
Ashutosh Sharma, Head of SEO at Madison Media Loop, has described this shift as a move from ranking optimisation to answer optimisation. According to him, AI driven search systems prioritise intent and context over exact keyword matches, which forces brands to think beyond page level SEO tactics.
Inside organisations, this has led to a new kind of publishing stack. Before AI, scaling content typically meant adding writers or outsourcing production. Today, many teams are scaling by redesigning workflows. AI tools generate first drafts and outlines, while humans handle editing, fact checking, tone, compliance, and originality. Publishing has become faster, but also more layered.
This layered approach is not optional. In a separate Ahrefs survey, content teams using AI reported publishing significantly more pages per month than those that did not. However, the same teams also reported spending more time on review and quality control. Speed has increased, but so has the risk of repetition, inaccuracies, and thin content.
These risks are not theoretical. Google’s major search updates in 2024 explicitly targeted scaled content abuse and unoriginal pages. Google stated that its systems were designed to reduce the visibility of low quality, repetitive content at scale. For teams relying heavily on AI, this has made quality controls essential rather than optional.
In India, agencies and in house teams are responding by adding stronger editorial guardrails. Drafts are now checked not just for plagiarism but for usefulness. Editors ask whether a page adds new insight, reflects Indian context, avoids generic phrasing, and includes verifiable information. In many cases, AI drafts serve only as raw material rather than finished output.
Neha Bawa, Director of Brand Marketing at Techmagnate, has said that SEO strategies today must extend beyond text and keywords. According to her, trust signals, multimedia content, and contextual relevance are now central to how content performs in search and discovery environments.
Another major change influencing SEO publishing is the rise of zero click experiences. Research published in 2024 showed that users were significantly less likely to click on traditional search results when AI summaries were present. This has implications beyond traffic numbers. SEO success is increasingly measured by whether content is cited, summarised, or referenced by AI systems, not just whether it ranks at the top.
As a result, many SEO teams are designing content to be more extractable and understandable. Pages are structured more clearly, definitions are tighter, and answers appear earlier. Structured data, tables, and concise explanations are becoming standard not just for rankings but for machine interpretation.
Srikant Rajasekharuni, Director at Redmatter Integrated Marketing, has pointed out that this places more responsibility on brands to understand user needs deeply. He has said that optimisation today requires understanding not only what users search for, but how they think and what problems they are trying to solve.
The effects of AI driven publishing differ across industries. In e commerce and D2C, AI is being used to scale category pages, FAQs, and buying guides, often across multiple languages. The strongest performers are not the brands publishing the most pages, but those offering clear differentiation through images, comparisons, and product clarity.
In fintech, AI accelerates the production of educational and support content, but compliance and accuracy checks have become more rigorous. Pages that perform well tend to include calculators, real world examples, and transparent explanations rather than generic advice.
In B2B SaaS, AI has changed the cadence of publishing rather than the strategy. Teams publish more integration pages, documentation, and support content, but invest heavily in proof based assets such as case studies and original research summaries that cannot be easily replicated by generic AI output.
In media and publishing, the tension is sharper. Faster publishing can increase reach, but errors carry reputational risk. Many publishers are reinforcing editorial review processes and clearly defining how AI can and cannot be used in content creation.
Across all these sectors, the skills required for SEO publishing are changing. Teams now need editors who understand search intent, SEO leads who understand storytelling, analysts who connect content to business outcomes, and reviewers who can identify hallucinations and subtle inaccuracies.
AI has not removed the need for human judgement. It has made that judgement more important.
The next phase of SEO publishing will be shaped by two opposing forces. AI will continue to make content creation faster and cheaper. At the same time, search and discovery systems will continue to raise the bar for what deserves visibility. Clicks may decline, but expectations around accuracy, usefulness, and trust will increase.
The teams that adapt successfully will be those that stop treating SEO as a volume race and start treating it as a publishing discipline. They will still publish more content, but they will do so with clearer intent, stronger review systems, and a deeper understanding of how both humans and machines consume information.
AI has changed how SEO content gets published. It has not changed the need for credibility.
Disclaimer: All data points and statistics are attributed to published research studies and verified market research. All quotes are either sourced directly or attributed to public statements.
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