by Paige Craft | May 26, 2026 | AEO / SEO, Branding, Search Strategy
Most people treat & and “and” as interchangeable. Same word, different outfit.
They’re not the same.
“And” is a conjunction, it joins things that are separate. I’m researching astrology and herbs — two things I happen to be doing, no implied relationship between them.
The ampersand signals something different. It says the things it connects are one entity. Not two things joined together. One thing, expressed as two.
Ben & Jerry’s isn’t Ben and Jerry. It’s a single thing that contains a & in its identity. Same with H&M. A&W. Barnes & Noble. The ampersand is doing real semantic work — it tells you how to read the relationship before you’ve even finished the name.
I’ve cared about this for years as a typography thing; lately I care about it for a different reason.
Google and AI answer engines are trying to understand what things are — not just which words appear near each other. That’s the whole premise of the knowledge graph, and it’s increasingly how AI systems decide what to surface when someone asks a question. They’re looking for entities: coherent, consistent things they can point to with some confidence.
A brand that uses & in its name and then spells it out as “and” in its schema markup, its title tags, its social profiles — that inconsistency is noise. It makes the entity harder to recognize. Harder to recognize means harder to surface.
The typographic choice and the SEO choice are the same choice. Most brands just don’t know it yet.
The practical version of this is simple: be consistent. If your brand name contains an ampersand, use it everywhere, the same way, always. If it uses “and,” same thing. You’re not just maintaining a style guide. You’re reinforcing a signal about what your brand is — and that signal is being read by systems that decide whether you get found.
Typography has always carried meaning beyond aesthetics. It’s just that now the audience includes machines, and they’re less forgiving about inconsistency than humans are.
The ampersand was doing entity work before we had a word for it. 💃🏻
Paige Craft is a web strategy and growth leader specializing in SEO, AEO, and GEO for B2B SaaS. She has opinions about typography that turn out to be surprisingly useful.
by Paige Craft | May 20, 2026 | Search Strategy
Most B2B SaaS content strategies have the same problem: they're built to produce content, not to answer questions.
The result is a graveyard of articles that exist because someone needed to hit a publishing quota—not because anyone was searching for them.
The Volume Trap
Here's what the wrong approach looks like in practice.
A marketing team identifies a list of keywords. They assign articles. Writers produce long-form content—2,000 words, 3,000 words—because word count signals effort and effort signals value. Keywords get threaded in. The content gets published. The counter goes up.
Repeat.
It's content as output. There's no real goal beyond more. More articles, more pages, more surface area. The KPI is volume, so volume is what gets optimized for.
The problem is that search engines have been getting better at this for years—and AI has accelerated the reckoning. You can't keyword-stuff your way to authority anymore. You can't produce 300 articles about this and that and expect them to do anything if they weren't built with a user on the other end.
What "Intent-Driven" Actually Means
Intent-driven content has a purpose. It answers a real question. It gives a user something they were actually looking for.
Before a single word gets written, one question should be asked: What is the goal with this piece?
Not "what keyword does this target." Not "how long should this be." Not "how does this fit the editorial calendar."
What is the goal? Who is this for? What do they need to know, decide, or do after reading it?
If you can't answer that clearly, you're not ready to write it.
Intent-driven content also lives inside a system. Before I develop a new piece, I look at the content architecture: How does this work with what's already on the site? Where can it expand once it's published? Do its future branches—the follow-on content it should naturally connect to—answer questions users are actually asking?
Content isn't a standalone asset. It's a node in a network. If it isn't connected to anything and doesn't lead anywhere, it's just words.
The Real Cost of Getting It Backwards
Here's what I see when teams get this wrong: high traffic, low everything else.
Lots of clicks. No form fills. No conversions. No pipeline.
The articles are there—hundreds of them in some cases—but they're not doing anything because they were made for the company, not the audience. They were built to satisfy someone's content KPI, not to help a buyer make a decision.
That's the tell. When content serves the company's reporting needs instead of the user's actual question, it performs accordingly. It sits. It stagnates. It generates impressions and bounces.
Traffic is not the goal. Pipeline is the goal. And traffic that doesn't convert isn't a growth engine—it's a distraction.
What the Shift Actually Looks Like
When teams get this right, the change isn't about writing differently. It's about deciding differently—before the writing starts.
The shift is: architecture before output.
You map what exists. You identify the gaps between what you have and what your audience is actually searching for. You ask what questions are going unanswered, what objections are going unaddressed, what moments in the buyer journey have no content to meet them.
Then you build toward those moments—deliberately, with each piece connected to the ones around it and pointing toward the ones that should come next.
The content that comes out of that process is shorter, sharper, and harder to produce—because it requires thinking, not just writing. But it converts. It earns citations. It builds topical authority over time instead of decaying into the archive.
That's the difference between content that performs and content that exists.
The Question Worth Asking
If you mapped every piece of content on your site right now and asked "who was this actually for and what were they supposed to do with it"—how many pieces could you answer that clearly?
That gap is where the work is.
Intent-driven content isn't a content type or a format. It's a standard. Every piece either meets it or it doesn't. And the ones that don't aren't neutral—they're diluting the authority of everything around them.
Build less. Build it with purpose. Let the architecture do what volume never could.
by Paige Craft | May 8, 2026 | AEO / SEO, Search Strategy
This is a follow-up to my earlier piece, The internet got what it deserved—and how to fix it. It stands alone, but the two are better together.
Dead Internet Theory, if you haven't gone down that rabbit hole, goes something like this: the internet is mostly bots now. Fake engagement, AI-generated slop, sockpuppet accounts running at scale. Real humans are a dwindling minority, screaming into an automated void.
The conspiracy version is a bit paranoid. But the feeling it describes? That one's real.
Here's what I think actually happened.
A few years ago, I was making videos for social media. Talking to my audience. Being authentic. Genuinely, actually authentic. And the tactic worked the way it's supposed to. People replied like the video was made just for them. Deeper connection, they said. Like I was speaking directly to them.
And it made me feel really weird.
Not because I was lying. It was my real voice, my actual thoughts. But I was broadcasting something designed to feel personal to many people at once. When someone felt truly seen by a video I made for everyone, I felt the machinery underneath it. I eventually stopped making them. Not because the strategy failed. Because it worked.
That's Dead Internet Theory. Not bots replacing humans. Humans optimizing themselves into bots.
We do this. Humans. We build something, we find the exploit, we scale the exploit until the thing we built doesn't work anymore, and then we're genuinely surprised. Content farms, keyword stuffing, 2,000-word guides written to rank and never to help—those aren't aberrations. They're the logical endpoint of a system that decided attention is money, volume drives attention, therefore maximize volume at any cost. The dishonesty was always incentivized. We trained the machines on that web. Then we were surprised when the machines sounded hollow.
That's the passive version of the problem. Nobody meant to do harm. They just chased the wrong metric long enough to hollow everything out.
The active version is darker.
Russian bot networks. Coordinated inauthentic behavior. AI-amplified smear campaigns that spread faster than any correction ever could. Comment sections flooded with accounts that don't exist, pushing narratives that serve someone's agenda. These aren't machines acting autonomously. These are humans, with specific goals, deploying bots as weapons against your ability to know what's real, against your trust in other people, against the basic functioning of shared information.
Dead Internet Theory gets blamed on AI. But AI is just the latest tool in a project that's been running for years. The project is: make you uncertain enough that you stop trusting anything, and then fill that vacuum with whatever the person holding the firehose wants you to believe.
That's not a glitch. That's a feature.
What makes the dead internet feel dead is that you can't tell anymore. Not just human versus bot. You can't tell if anything in front of you was made for you, or made to approximate you closely enough that you'd keep scrolling, keep doubting, keep clicking. The simulation of connection and the simulation of truth have both been optimized past the point where you can find the real thing underneath.
And then the pandemic happened. The in-person communities a lot of us had, or were building toward, didn't come back the same way. Division got state-sanctioned. The desire for gathering, for actually being somewhere with people, got complicated in ways that haven't fully untangled. And the internet was there. It was always there. Offering connection at scale to people who had fewer and fewer places to find it.
That's not a small thing. That's also not a comfort.
Honestly, writing this piece felt weird too.
I've been second-guessing my own vocabulary for years. I think in a certain register and I've learned, slowly and annoyingly, that using it makes people disengage. So you start editing before you even open a document. You swap the precise word for the accessible one. You round off the edges. And at some point you look at what you've written and it's technically yours but it's also been processed for an audience that may or may not exist, on a platform you didn't design, optimized for attention you're not sure you want.
That's before we even get to AI.
There's something uncomfortable about showing up online personally, using my real experience and my actual ambivalence, knowing it also functions as content. Knowing it might perform. I wrote this because I meant it. And I'm aware that "I wrote this because I meant it" is exactly what optimized content sounds like.
I don't know how to fully escape that loop. I'm not sure anyone does right now.
What I do believe is that building honestly, content actually for humans and not for the performance of them, is the only thing that doesn't eventually rot. I believe that structurally, not just ethically. It's what builds trust that doesn't need to be re-earned every algorithm update.
And I'm also aware of the world that belief has to exist inside. The data being harvested. Platforms consolidated into fewer and fewer hands with clearer and clearer agendas. Infrastructure increasingly owned by people who are not neutral about what it's for. We built systems we didn't fully understand, and we keep being surprised when someone finds the exploit. Humans are very good at building things. We're not as good at anticipating the consequences of what we've actually built.
Being offline has become a privilege for some and a death sentence for others. So we're here. Showing up in a system we didn't fully choose, trying to do something real inside it.
For me, right now, that means building things that are honest. Not because it fixes everything. Because it's the only part I control.
This piece was copy edited with AI assistance. The thinking, the discomfort, and the social media videos I quit making are mine.
by Paige Craft | Apr 22, 2026 | AEO / SEO, Search Strategy
Search · AI · Web strategy · 4 min read
Let's start with the thing everyone's saying out loud in Slack and not yet saying in their marketing decks: AI search makes stuff up sometimes. It hallucinates. It confabulates. It says your product does something it doesn't, cites a study that doesn't exist, or just confidently gives someone the wrong answer in a very convincing tone.
Valid. That's real. I'm not here to gaslight you about it.
But here's the part we skip over: AI didn't invent misinformation on the internet. It inherited it. It learned from a web that spent fifteen years optimizing for algorithms instead of humans. A web full of 2,000-word articles written to rank, not to help. FAQ pages stuffed with questions nobody actually asked. "Comprehensive guides" that take four scrolls to say what one sentence could.
We built a web for bots. Then we got mad when the bots believed it.
This is a bit like blaming autocomplete for your typos. Technically fair. Also, look at your keyboard.
AI search—Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, all of it—works a lot like academic citation. It's looking for sources that are clear, authoritative, and genuinely useful. It wants to know: does this page actually answer the question, or is it just near the question? Does this entity have a real point of view, or is it performing one for search engines?
That's not a new standard. That's what good web strategy always required. We just had a decade where you could cheat, and a lot of people did, and now the bill is due.
Here's where it gets interesting—and honestly, kind of exciting if you're a certain type of person (hi).
The fix is not a hack. The fix is just... building it right.
A site that works for humans and machines isn't two different sites. It's one site built with both in mind from the beginning. Clear structure. Real answers to real questions. Content that knows what it's trying to do and says so. An entity—you, your company, your product—that exists coherently across the web so AI systems have something solid to point to.
The meta-joke here is that this whole essay is an example of exactly that. It's written for you—an actual human who is curious or skeptical or both—and it's also structured so that an AI answer engine can find the thesis, understand the argument, and surface it when someone asks "why does AI search get things wrong?" That's not a trick. That's just what good content does when you stop pretending the audience is only human.
And the part I want to push back on hardest: you don't have to wait until everything is perfect to start. The old SEO playbook said: do your keyword research, build your content calendar, execute for six months, measure. Very waterfall. Very 2018.
The new version is: build with intent, iterate in public, improve as you learn. Plan and execute at the same time. Your site doesn't need to be finished to start earning trust—from people or from machines. It needs to be honest, useful, and structured well enough that both audiences can tell what you're trying to say.
The internet isn't broken. It's just been optimized for the wrong reader. We can fix that. One actually-useful page at a time.
That's what I do. I figure out why websites aren't working—which is almost always because they're talking to a search engine instead of a person, or honestly because someone didn't think of either of those in the first place—and I fix them in a way that lasts. Not because AI is forcing the issue. Because it was always the right thing to build.
It just took the machines to make that obvious.
Paige Craft is a web strategy and growth leader specializing in SEO, AEO, and GEO for B2B SaaS companies. She's been building for AI answers since before that was a thing anyone called anything. She's currently at Firespring and open to senior in-house roles. paigencraft@gmail.com
