LEONSEO R.I.P.
Ten blue links used to be ten chances. Now there is often one answer, and either it cites you or you don’t exist.
If you rank on Google for the right keywords, customers will find you. Ranking is the whole game.
Where the clicks went
AI Overviews and chat assistants answer questions right on the page. "What is X" searches lost the most, because that’s exactly what language models are best at. The clicks that survive go to things a summary can’t replace: the tool, the booking page and the local operator who actually does the work.
Flip the playbook
Old: keyword-stuffed pages
New: a clear answer in the first paragraph, earned with real detail.
Old: 2,000 words of filler
New: specific numbers, real experience and a position you will defend.
Old: write for the crawler
New: write for a smart customer. The machines learned from humans and can tell the difference.
Old: hide the price, capture the lead
New: be the most useful answer on the topic.
The winners were always worth reading
The pages that win now are the ones that were always good: clear, specific and human. The losers are the people who were best at the old game. If your strategy boils down to "keywords with search volume", you weren’t doing marketing. You were exploiting a ranker’s blind spot, and the ranker just got eyes.
Will the AI cite you?
Tick everything that’s true of your site.
Rewritten from the original No Sacred Cows post for the LeonLink blog.
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