AI Search Optimization Horizon

I remember building my first website in the late 2000s. Back then, you stuffed the word "plumber" into the footer a few dozen times, submitted your sitemap to Google, and hoped for the best. Keywords were the only signal search engines had. If you wrote a sentence like "We are the best plumber in Boise" and repeated it enough, you ranked. It was crude, but it worked. Today, that approach gets your site penalized or ignored. Search engines now understand context, user intent