It’s easy to feel like the SEO world is being tipped on its head lately. Every week brings a fresh wave of new methods, technical jargon, and AI acronyms. I've worked on Whiteboard Friday videos for a good few years now. And I've seen tactics cycle in and out of favor. But if you look beneath the surface, you'll find that the new tactics are often the same core fundamentals SEOs have spent years mastering. 

In this roundup, I've pulled together several recent Whiteboard Friday episodes that explore AI search tactics, workflows, and a thought piece to leave you with. If you need a quick catch-up on all things AI & Search, this is the best place to start! 

You can’t assume that ranking well in traditional search automatically gets you a spot in AI search. In fact, there is hardly any overlap between organic rankings and AI Mode citations. 

"We only see a 12% overlap between the top 10 URLs featured in the regular organic and the top 10 featured URLs cited in the AI Mode rankings."

For anyone ranking in the bottom half of the SERPs, it's not great news. AI mode is selecting slightly higher-ranked URLs from a broader set of queries, rather than selecting the full top 10 for a single query. This is because of the fan-out functionality, which we'll learn more about further down in this post. 

Watch the full episode and download the high-res whiteboard.

To my content strategy people out there, the days of the SEO heist are well and truly over. But there are still plenty of opportunities in the world of content if you want to win the visibility game. In the words of Chima-the-wise: 

"You need to stop thinking like an SEO, and start publishing like a journalist." 

We've arrived squarely in the land of brand affinity, a strategy harnessed by leveraging our old friends: thought leadership, unique research, and digital PR. An effective flywheel that marketers have used for years. But if you're new to the game, you need to focus on original experiments and research that people want to share and cite. If you‘ve been in SEO for a while, it’s nothing you wouldn’t have already heard. You know the old saying: Stop writing for bots and start writing for humans.

In this Whiteboard Friday, Chima Mmeje tells you straight, exactly what you need to avoid when you’re creating content in 2026. 

Watch the full episode and download the high-res whiteboard.

Top-of-the-funnel content remains an important part of your organic search strategy, especially for specific intents and industries. While you might not be able to measure results with a single click or a single click that converts anymore, high-quality, authoritative content builds brand trust, earns AI citations, and serves as a strategic asset for acquiring and distributing link equity to key product pages. But importantly, in a world of AI fluff and AI slop, you shouldn't use AI to write your content, but to support your writing game plan. 

"Use AI, but not to generate the whole article. Use it to refine ideas, add metaphors, add examples, do the research, get the outline, but inject that with your original ideas."

In this Whiteboard Friday episode, Andy Chadwick shares his personal framework for speeding up content creation while keeping your original voice front and center.

Watch the full episode and download the high-res whiteboard.

AI search results are an important part of the buyer journey, whether it's an AI Overview in Google search or a response to your prompt about different ways to repair a dishwasher pump. Google is searching for more than what you typed. It's called query fan-out, and it runs dozens of related searches behind the scenes to help build a complete topic in anticipation of your next query. 

Understanding these categories helps you anticipate your audience's needs more effectively and create content that appeals to them, LLMs, and search engines.

Download the complete list and save it for future reference. 

Learn more about how LLM models work.

SEOs and brands can influence their visibility in AI-generated answers by proactively building citations. You can reverse-engineer AI responses to identify which publications are being cited and then use proactive outreach to secure brand mentions in those sources

Charlie Marchant explains that, since AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini cite specific sources, marketers should research which prompts lead to those citations, then reach out to those publications to gain brand mentions and contextual relevance. 

"More and more people are actually starting their buyer journey in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI platforms. ChatGPT alone has around 2.5 billion searches every day. And perhaps we care a little bit about the demographics of who is actually searching in those platforms."

Download the high-res Whiteboard Friday graphic. 

I'm leaving you with one last resource, which was personally a delight to be part of, and I think provides a fantastic palate cleanser for all the workflows, strategies, and urgency we see in the industry. 

"Britney emphasizes that to use AI effectively, you have to be willing to embrace failure because it's the 'yellow brick road of using AI.' The process is inherently experimental and should be treated as such. She advises thinking like an engineer, which means breaking down problems into small, manageable chunks and being specific in your prompts. Avoid the "magic engine" mentality where you provide a vague prompt and expect a perfect result."

The real value of AI in 2025 lies in data analysis and task automation rather than simple content generation. In this Whiteboard Friday Revisited, Britney Muller revisits her 2020 predictions to provide a grounded framework for moving past the hype and AI slop by adopting an engineering mindset—breaking down complex problems into small, automatable steps while keeping human expertise at the center.

I hope this rollup has left you feeling more informed and excited about how you can automate your processes effectively.