In an article I co-authored with philosopher Nevia Dolcini, we explored action and agency at different levels of a goal hierarchy, distinguishing between relatively lower- and higher-level goals (Gozli & Dolcini, 2018; see also Gozli, 2019). For example, considering coffee-making as a higher-level goal, filling the machine with water, adding coffee beans, placing the mug, and turning on the machine are relatively lower-level goals that make the higher-level goal possible.
Let’s use the distinction here in thinking about content optimization. The point I’m going to arrive at by the end of this short piece will most likely be familiar to you, especially if you work with content, but I hope the path of arriving there will bring a fresh perspective to our thinking. Old conclusions sometimes need the energy of new premises.
When we optimize content for SEO, AEO, AI search, etc., it may seem as if we’re performing a set of mechanical tasks. But those tasks are motivated by (and meaningful in the context of) the higher-level purposes they serve. This matters especially in changing search environments, where content optimized with today’s mechanics may soon become fragile.
At the proximal level, optimization involves concrete, easy-to-measure adjustments. Keywords, headings, metadata, internal links, schema, page structure, readability, answer formatting. These are the near-at-hand mechanics that increase the chance of discoverability. They help search engines, AI tools, and users understand what a page is about and how it connects to other relevant content.
Proximal goals are not ends in themselves. The ends are higher-level goals. Relevance, clarity, usefulness, trust, alignment with user intention. Addressing the higher-level goals requires asking, “What is the person actually trying to understand, compare, do, etc.? What would make the content (more) helpful?” These questions are difficult to answer from a distance. To pursue higher-level goals well, we need contact with the audience. These could be actual responses from users, conversations with readers, attention to analytics. Qualitative and quantitative insights are both helpful because they keep our understanding of user intention grounded in real behaviour.
Optimization, like any other action, becomes superficial when it’s mechanical, based on formulae, mindless of the purpose those formulae are meant to serve. Keyword density, internal linking, structured headings matter insofar as they support relevance, help users navigate, help them find the content they’re looking for. A page might satisfy many of our optimization standards and still fail if it doesn’t help the user make sense of the question that brought them there.
The pull toward lower-level goals is especially strong when we are detached from the audience. In the absence of user feedback, analytics, direct observation, it is easy to gravitate (or fall!) toward what is easiest to accomplish. The lower-level practices are attractive because they are concrete. But precisely for that reason, they can also distract from the harder interpretive work of understanding the user.
This distinction has become more important now because search behaviour and search technology continue to change. SEO, AEO, AI summaries, conversational search, and recommendation-driven discovery all reward content in somewhat different ways. The technical rules will keep shifting. Platforms will further revise how they identify, summarize, rank useful content.
That makes it risky to optimize based only on the currently established mechanics of visibility. Content that’s built to satisfy today’s algorithms is vulnerable to changes in those algorithms.
An excessive focus on lower-level practices may prevent us from recognizing that the search environment itself has changed. If we are too absorbed in inherited checklists and familiar heuristics, we miss changes in how users search or how they decide which sources to trust.
Content work that’s mindful of user intention is less dependent on the specific characteristics of today’s means of discovery. It is not immune to change, but it is better positioned to survive change because it is organized around purposes that subsist across different search environments.
Effective optimization requires attention to the relatively lower-level work that is easier to standardize (for now!) and accomplish, and at the same time to the higher-level goals that require human judgment, experimentation, contact with the audience. It also requires seeing the open-endedness of our optimization practices. Concrete practices are important, but their value depends on the purposes that motivate them. Optimization is, partly, the application of current standards. But it’s also the (re)formulation of those standards by goals that can persist across changing environments.
References
Gozli, D. (2019). Hierarchies of purpose. In Experimental psychology and human agency (pp. 41–62). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20422-8_3
Gozli, D. G., & Dolcini, N. (2018). Reaching into the unknown: Actions, goal hierarchies, and explorative agency. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, Article 266. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00266