Welcome to Shift Happens – the art, science, and chaos of modern marketing. Each episode unpacks the forces reshaping marketing from AI and data to privacy, creative and performance, and asks experts how they transform disruption into advantage. 

Nasser:  

Welcome to the show Orli. 

Orli:  

Thank you. Thanks for having me. 

Nasser:  

So recently we were asked, and I’m going to read this here – We’ve been investing in content for years, but it feels like less and less of it is getting found. With AI and new search tools everywhere, how should we rethink content? For years, content marketing has been about telling great stories, but now the real question is can these stories be found? So Orli, what’s really changed in how people discover content today? 

Orli:  

That’s a great question. I think the first thing that comes to mind is that discovery used to be a lot more linear. So, type a keyword, get a list, pick your link. And now it’s much more like a maze. So people are starting in Google – they might end up on TikTok, Reddit, a whole host of different platforms, and maybe finally confirm their choice through an AI overview or information they’re getting another way. And that path is far less predictable, which means that we need to start thinking a little bit differently in order to anticipate what users need. And get away from that one page, one keyword approach, which isn’t really working anymore.  

Nasser: 

Okay. So when you say think differently, what? What do you mean by that?  

Orli:  

The real shift is that discovery is now happening through systems that interpret information. So it’s not just about indexing it. It’s about how your content is structured. For AI, for context, for clarity. It’s if it isn’t structured properly, it’s going to be much more invisible than it used to be. So all of that really matters. And if your story isn’t good, we’re not really going to get anywhere to begin with.  

Nasser: 

All right. So if I were to summarize that, would it be fair to say that we used to write for algorithms, but now we’re writing for algorithms that think? 

 Orli: 

Yes, absolutely. And AI tools are rewiring or rewriting how discovery works. So, if your content isn’t structured to be understood by machines and humans, it’s basically disappearing into the void.  

Nasser: 

Okay. So it’s not that storytelling is necessarily dead, it’s just that it needs a new structure. What hasn’t changed?  

Orli: 

The fundamentals haven’t gone anywhere. And things like clarity, structure, both still matter. And you still have to understand what your audience is looking for. So before you start trying to impress them or sell to them, you have to know what they really want. And that is still really central to the stories that we’re telling. What’s really different is the environment. So not necessarily the essence, but whether content is being read by person or parsed by a model or summarized in an AI overview, it still has to communicate something real and something useful. So from that perspective, that hasn’t changed, and it probably isn’t likely to. And the brands that are winning right now aren’t necessarily louder, they’re just clearer.  

Nasser: 

And that’s interesting because there’s clarity and usefulness,  and that is subjective right? 

Orli: 

Certainly. 

Nasser: 

So how do you do that? How do you, be able to be both clear and useful to a wide variety of audiences? 

Orli: 

I think it starts with understanding who your audience is, not just where they live, their age, and how much money they make, but what drives them, what triggers them, what will help them make a decision. So a lot of the same things remain really crucial. It’s just about how we’re presenting information. So moving from optimizing for search engines to optimizing for sense making, and I actually don’t think that’s a bad thing. 

Nasser: 

No, but it’s interesting because you talk about things in the context of emotional connection. But we’re also talking about machines here. And so I don’t know how that makes me feel about, you know, the path to being discovered by machines is to have them connect with people better or proxy people better, I guess.  

Orli: 

Yes. In many ways, we’re teaching machines how to understand us, and that’s where a lot of the work is. So, we need to really understand our audience and the value that we’re delivering, or the brands are delivering in order to properly instruct the machines on how to perceive us.  

Nasser: 

I don’t know, it feels I just, you know, to think that we’re depending on people and people by, by definition, have very little understanding of other people most of the time. Okay, so what are you seeing as the biggest shifts in this search first model? 

Orli: 

Visibility is becoming much more holistic and authority is starting to look quite different. So it’s no longer about who can produce the most content – a conversation that we still frequently have with lots of, great clients and prospects that we talked to. But it’s also about who the web is recognizing as credible. So I mentioned the structured content we’re talking about, the structured data, expert validation, where we’re being talked about as a brand… All of that is feeding into how AI models and search systems are interpreting the brand, you. So we’re also seeing this rise of context signals. So the relationship between your content, your brand, that whole ecosystem is mattering much more than just ranking or winning for one specific topic or theme. 

And that means that it’s less about ranking one page and more about whether your brand is actually showing up as part of these conversations and has authority to speak on them. So in that way, both AI machines, people, they’re looking for answers, and we need to be able to provide them in a meaningful way.  

Nasser: 

It’s funny you should talk about authority in context because in the previous episode, we were talking to Dan Temby and, he was talking extensively about, high end menswear retailer. And I just thought that, you know, he’s not exactly the person I think about it as far as authority on that subject is concerned. But that’s neither here nor there. But what I take away from this is if you’re not part of the context, you’re not part of the result.  

Orli: 

Certainly.  

Nasser: 

So Orli let’s get practical. If I’m leading a marketing team today, what should I be doing differently to make sure my content gets found? 

Orli: 

I’d start by taking a look at how you and your team are thinking about visibility, and that might take a little bit of, shifting around. The goal isn’t to chase clicks anymore. We know that, it’s really to create content that gets interpreted correctly or how you would like it to be interpreted by both people and machines. 

So this means a few things. First, making sure that we’re answering questions directly. So don’t make readers or AI dig for the point. Designing for scanning, this also isn’t new, but is definitely important in this context. So headings, bullets, clean structure, all of the ideas that you’re bringing need to be structured in a way that, really flows for the user as well as the AI. And then connecting the dots, so your SEO content, local visibility, all of these efforts, are highly connected. They’re not separate disciplines. So, there’s one system that determines how findable your brand really is, and that’s all of them working together. So, in the end, expand what you measure. It’s no longer just going one place to understand performance, It’s tracking visibility inside of AI overview snippets and other discovery spaces, not just who clicked and drove track traffic to your site. 

Nasser:  

So that’s interesting. Like expanding what you’re measuring into things that are, in some instances measuring things that are unmeasurable? 

Orli:  

Definitely. And that’s making a lot of us, maybe a little uncomfortable, which is an interesting place to be, because gone are the days where you can just point to one KPI, one metric and say, look, we’re doing really well, right? Please hire us again.  

Nasser: 

Right. So how do you how do you overcome that? Like what? What does that new measurement framework look like?  

Orli: 

That’s a million question. But definitely it’s looking at multiple places that you’re showing up. So just as we talked about a bit earlier, that the customer journey is much more fragmented in some cases extended across different platforms, but also highly condensed depending on where users are finding their information. That means we have lots of opportunities to tell our stories, but we need to be really intentional and consistent about the brand stories we are telling. So brands winning right now understand that search isn’t a traffic source, it’s a trust signal. And you’re not just being ranked, you’re being represented.  

Nasser: 

Ooh, I like that.  

Orli: 

Come with a sound bite I know. 

Nasser: 

So can you kind of summarize this for me? Like are we are we seeing a big shift away from the fundamentals of what we’ve always said, good content and content for acquisition or for whatever reason from a business perspective matters? 

Orli: 

I wouldn’t say that the fundamentals have completely changed. They definitely haven’t disappeared. It’s more of an evolution. So we still need great stories. That’s what people respond to as well as AI. But now those stories have to live inside systems that make them more discoverable. So that ecosystem that we’re talking about. And brands that are leading the way, they aren’t necessarily louder, they’re just much more clear on their purpose, and they’re building content that meets user intent. 

That fits new language of search, still feels unmistakably human, even though it’s getting a lot more prescriptive in terms of how we need to respond. And that new skill set means being structured without feeling scripted or locked down in your content. So we’re not writing for algorithms or audiences anymore. We’re writing for both. And doing it well is what’s going to set us apart, really. 

Nasser: 

Orli Milstein, thank you very much for your time today.  

Orli: 

Thank you. 

Nasser: 

So here’s the shift. Great storytelling hasn’t lost its power, but if your content isn’t structured for discovery, it won’t be found. Search first storytelling means building content that answers real questions, works with AI driven search, and gets seen by the people who matter most. Now, make it happen. Follow Shift Happens where you get your podcasts, leave us a review and share your episode with your team. Thank you very much for your time today. I’m Nasser Sahlool.