AI, SEO & Content Marketing: analysis by Karine Abbou

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Speaking at SEO Square, one of France's leading SEO events, Karine Abbou offered her analysis of content strategy trends for 2025 in the age of generative AI.

She explained that the web has undergone 3 major evolutions that have transformed the Internet's business model:

  • the transition from a search engine to an answer engine,
  • the proliferation of online content
  • and the emergence of conversational agents powered by AI.

These changes are upending content marketing practices, forcing brands to rethink their approaches. In this article, we summarize Karine Abbou's findings on these new content marketing paradigms, and reveal her key recommendations for adapting your strategy to the context of generative AI.

SEO 2025: where do we look for information today?

In 2012, the integration of the knowledge graph into Google's search results (SERPs) marked a minor revolution. Internet users no longer simply found links to content, but answers - or elements of answers - directly in the search engine.
Tendances marketing de contenu 2025

With the arrival of Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE ) or AI Overviews (AIO), on the one hand, and the widespread use of a new method of searching forWith the arrival of Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) or AI Overviews (AIO), on the one hand, and the widespread use of a new information search method derived from ChatGPT (now available via other generative AIs), it's no longer just the search experience that's evolving, but SEO too. And radically.

The end of SEO in 2025?

Of course, keywords aren't dead, and neither is SEO. Marketing professionals will continue to think in terms of keywords. However, they will also have to rethink how this content reaches users, and what they expect from it.

The customer journey, i.e. the way in which a user clicks, buys and ends up with you, has been completely transformed.

Karine Abbou

If we want to keep a critical eye on this branch of marketing - and Karine Abbou is one of those who does - this evolution may well be beneficial for all users, and for Google. To win the content race, everything and its opposite is written, taken up, plagiarized, reformulated, diverted, distorted... So much so that the web has become cacophonous.

Today, the volume of content on the web has become indecent, and it's not going to stop, since generative AI makes it possible to create even more content in profusion. But if everything has already been written and created on every subject, how am I going to stand out from the crowd?

Karine Abbou

 

This question, raised by Karine Abbou, was topical 10 years ago, and will still be 10 years from now. But perhaps the ability of marketing teams to answer it is becoming an increasingly critical issue. Generative AI is now probably involved in the overwhelming majority of content published on the web. And probably mainly from a single tool: ChatGPT. So, while creating content has become easy, standing out from the crowd has not.

Will SEO in the generative age create a content soup?

The web is becoming a copy of itself, since all LLMs will be trained on the same content.

Karine Abbou

This renewal in the way information is sought is happening little by little, and it's possible that some companies will manage to carry on as if nothing had happened for a few years yet, but marketing teams who make this choice may bitterly regret it in 10 years' time.

A wet-finger horizon? Clearly. But just think:20 years ago, universal search didn't exist, a SERP was just links to websites. With the technological acceleration we're currently experiencing, imagine what search will look like in 10 years' time.

In fact, the switchover is already underway:

Today, the statistics are unanimous, whatever the author: nearly 60% of Google searches result in no clicks at all. And the icing on the cake is that of the 40% of searches that do generate clicks, 30% go directly to Google properties (YouTube, Google Images, Google Play, Knowledge graph...).

So Karine Abbou asks us, "How do you design a content strategy knowing that no one will ever click on the link to that content again?"

Here are some answers.

Tips for renewing your marketing strategy in 2025

The rules of search are changing, so how can you adapt your content marketing strategies to maintain, or even increase, your sales performance?

What are the priorities for your content strategy in 2025?

For Karine Abbou, the logic of content creation in 2025 should be based on 2 priorities:

  • Determine the new perimeters of clicks - There will still be clicks tomorrow, but how can we ensure that we are positioned on queries that "click"? Ask yourself the question of the intentions behind your target queries. Are you looking to rank onInformational queries (awareness issues), Commercial queries (brand positioning issues) or Transactional queries (direct commercial issues)?
  • Increase brand awareness - Positioning yourself ahead of a query is more important today than ever before. Your targets need to know and recognize you before they even formulate their requests in a search engine or LLM. It is therefore essential to reinvest in branding as part of a top-of-mind strategy, whether online (high value-added content, open source strategies, etc.) or offline (distinctive and differentiating discourse, press relations, print campaigns, etc.).

The structuring of a web page has completely changed, as all natural results are pushed down. What stands out more and more - and this is how Google will operate in the future - are these IA overviews. The number 1 challenge is to understand how the new click perimeter will be determined.

Karine Abbou

 

5 new ways of thinking about content

Accepting that marketing can be one-eyed

The multiplication of data has given rise to tracking fever. Attribution has become a totem, and anything that can't be measured has been put to bed. Perhaps, paradoxically, technology will enable marketing teams to take a step back from the numbers. Perhaps by 2025, or 2026, more companies will see sales results not as the sum of marketing actions, but as the result of an overall strategy.

The reality is that attribution marketing as we knew it is broken. The national sport of linking your content to business results, traffic, leads, sales... and precisely attributing each conversion to specific touchpoints, is largely over. We now need to measure content performance in a much more holistic way.

Karine Abbou

 

Creating awareness / notoriety

Awareness is the first stage in any commercial relationship. At the end of the day, it's often the company's product that has the best sympathy or trust capital that is chosen. But there's only one way to win the competition that takes place in every buyer's mind when the final choice is made: work on branded content to raise awareness and stand out from the crowd.

Developing content around your brand doesn't mean talking only about yourself. It simply means looking for opportunities to develop brand awareness around and within your industry.

Karine Abbou

 

Forget TOFU content

Karine Abbou says it well:
There will come a time when AIOs will provide just about every answer you can imagine on top of the funnel content. So that means you need to focus much more on mid funnel content, which is much more product-focused content, much more on "how do you use my product", comparisons with your competitors, tutorials, webinars...

 

Breaking new ground

In an SEO era where pages are becoming increasingly similar, originality is gaining ground. In fact, Google has integrated the notion of " information gain " into its algorithm: adding more information to a page than the competition has become a factor in SEO performance.

There's a notion called information gain. It's very important in the U.S., and was patented by Google in 2020, and is now integrated into recent updates. In a nutshell, Google is able to compare your page with other content pages that have been created on the same theme, the same subject, and measure whether you've really brought something new to the conversation.

Karine Abbou

 

Think of content as a workflow (content factory)

Content marketing is still too often thought of as a single-purpose content production machine. Produce, Distribute, Forget: if the life of your content can be summed up in these 3 stages, take advantage of 2025 to change your habits and move towards more complete content workflows.

Working in a workflow and organizing your tasks along the lines of a content factory will enable you to produce more content, and reinforce your thematic credibility in the eyes of search engines on your key subjects.

A piece of content, for example, can be used once as a white paper, then segmented into articles, re-segmented into posts for social networks, or merged with other content to provide a broader vision, or a different angle... You get the idea.

Now all you have to do is organize it!

Content workflow is the obvious part of your content strategy. What concerns whom? Who creates the content? What is the creation process? What tools are used? How do you measure its effectiveness over time?

Karine Abbou


Can we use AI to produce SEO content?

Although it raises many questions about the heterogeneity of future search results pages, the integration of artificial intelligence into SEO content production has become a common and effective practice. According to a study conducted by Semji in partnership with HubSpot:

  • 86% of companies currently use generative AI in their content marketing strategies,
  • 72% of professionals use it specifically for content marketing,
  • 65% rely on this technology in their SEO practices.

The main benefits identified by professionals include productivity gains (44%) and creative support (40%). In concrete terms, 56% of respondents estimate that AI saves them between 1 and 5 hours per week, while 13% report a gain of more than 5 hours per week.

However, AI does not replace human expertise. It acts as a facilitator by generating draft content, but requires human intervention to ensure the relevance, originality and authenticity of texts. As Karine Abbou points out, humans must prepare the ground for AI by curating information and injecting their business expertise into content.

So, how do you integrate AI into your content production routines? 3 key steps emerge to effectively combine AI and content marketing:

  1. Data preparation: Identify reliable and relevant sources of information to feed AI, thus guaranteeing the quality of the content generated.
  2. Human supervision: Proofread and adjust texts produced by AI to maintain an authentic voice and avoid inconsistencies or factual errors.
  3. Ongoing training: Make your teams aware of the capabilities and limitations of AI, so as to optimize its use while preserving editorial quality.
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