Search marketing (SEO / PPC / affiliate)

The discipline of acquiring traffic and customers through search: organic (SEO), paid (PPC/SEM), and affiliate — its operations, strategy, and measurement. This is the traditional/performance half of the wiki; the ai-search-shift is the AI disruption of this discipline, and generative-engine-optimization its emerging successor sub-practice.

Traditional practice (sources here)

• SEO operations / governance — seo-commissioning-workflow: shift SEO “left” into a pre-creation commissioning process (intent → schema/eligibility signals → structure → validation → monitoring) rather than reactive post-launch fixes.
• SEO × affiliate alignment — seo-affiliate-alignment: coordinate organic + affiliate so affiliates don’t cannibalize branded traffic; reclaim branded rankings; canonicalize affiliate URLs.
• Paid-search measurement — b2b-ppc-metrics: incrementality over vanity metrics — marginal (not average) CPA, relative conversion values, marketing-mix modeling; “more conversions/ROAS ≠ more pipeline.”
• Paid-search automation — groas: an autonomous AI product that runs the whole Google Ads account for ROAS, sold as a full replacement for the PPC manager — the aggressive end of the automation trend, and a live test of the measurement caveat (it optimizes the very ROAS/conversion metrics b2b-ppc-metrics calls unreliable).
• Technical-SEO myths — hyphenated-domains-seo: Google (Mueller) confirms hyphenated domains carry no ranking penalty; the only real cost is user perception (spammy/typing/trust), not the algorithm — a reminder to separate algorithmic facts from folklore.

The through-line to the AI side

These traditional concerns don’t vanish under AI search — they mutate:

• Structured data / “eligibility signals” (SEO commissioning) become the machine-readable substrate GEO needs (brand-depth-ai-recommendations, customer-success-ai-readable-proof).
• Measurement gets harder: PPC’s incrementality problem (b2b-ppc-metrics) is the paid-side cousin of GEO’s opacity (you can’t see why an AI didn’t consider you — google-io-business-visibility).
• Affiliate reputational signals feed AI recommendations (seo-affiliate-alignment‘s LLM note).

So the wiki spans one continuum: traditional search marketing → its AI transformation (ai-search-shift) → GEO. Audience: SEO/PPC/affiliate practitioners, marketing leaders.

The operating model is changing too

Beyond tactics, the labor model of this discipline is being reallocated: commoditized SEO production (packaged keyword research, volume content, standalone on-page) no longer drives growth, shifting teams toward strategy/research/distribution capabilities — the seo-operating-model-shift (seo-no-longer-drives-growth).

Related

ai-search-shift · generative-engine-optimization · seo-operating-model-shift · seo-commissioning-workflow · seo-affiliate-alignment · b2b-ppc-metrics · groas · hyphenated-domains-seo