Making your website work is no longer about SEO (search engine optimisation) – it’s about SXO (search experience optimisation).

At least, that’s what you might think if you’ve started seeing SXO pop up in online digital marketing or content strategy articles this year.

But a lot of what is SXO is actually based on proven ways of designing for digital engagement.

What SXO is

SXO isn’t a new idea. It was being talked about in 2019, for example, in Thomas Leonetti’s SXO is the new frontier blogpost on Medium. 

Leonetti highlighted SXO as the outcome of increasingly sophisticated search engines pushing marketing focus towards user intent in search and user-centred experiences.

The message behind shifting from SEO to SXO is familiar in user experience design (UX). There’s been a tug-of-war since the 1990s. 

Traditional marketing approaches applied to digital (‘get more clicks!’) have gone up against the approach of user experience design (UX), based on understanding user behaviour to create online satisfaction.

But SEO isn’t really dead. 

Think of your strategy as SEO can bring people in, but SXO can engage people in an experience with you.

How SXO differs from SEO

When you use SXO you’re not just optimising to get ranked in Google or to get more traffic. 

You use SXO to get meaningful engagement by meeting people wherever they are in their experience of your organisation:

• • from search to interaction

• • across all of your digital channels, including social media

• • for wherever people search online, including social media, marketplaces, forums such as Reddit, YouTube and TikTok, as well as search engines, generative AI and chatbots

• • across all of the touchpoints on someone’s online journey

In truth, Google trends shows SXO is still barely surfacing as a search term. Many more people worldwide still search for ‘search engine optimisation’ or ‘search engine ranking’. 

However, SXO has been rising in the past few months as a search term, potentially fuelled by the rise in articles in 2025.

So what’s changed? Why is SXO being talked about now? 

The answer – AI, and its seismic impact on, not just search, but the way that the web works.

Why AI has changed, not only search, but the web

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s recent comments about AI and the zero-click internet demolishing the existing business model of the web seem extreme, but are well-founded. 

 

The zero-click internet is shorthand for the way that generative AI gives people answers to their questions online. That might be from, for example, Chat GPT or a Google search page, without having to click on a website.  

Google’s AI overviews, which started rolling out worldwide in the summer of 2024, dramatically displayed this shift.

AI overviews summarise answers to a search query at the top of the search results page. They use the top 10 to 12 websites according to what Google ranks as quality content – no matter what keyword strategy you use. 

 

Google’s relationship with web content creators has also changed. 

Prince highlighted that it used to be that for every two pages Google scraped, a website would get a visitor, but now getting a visitor takes six scraped pages. In the meantime, the crawl rate hasn’t changed.

Take back control with user needs-powered SXO

All of the recent shifts mean businesses are asking, understandably “so how do I get people to visit my website?”

But that’s the wrong question.

In the era of AI, what to ask so your digital channels can meet your goals is “why do people need my website, or any of my digital channels?”

What people need from content online is content that’s easy to find, understand, consume and use. That’s based on repeated user research, user testing and data analysis,

You can help people get the information they need with content that:

All of this is UX design basics. It’s the approach that Llibertat has made work in government, health, education, charities and across the public, private and third sectors. 

Adopting UX is what can give you the power to make SXO work in an AI-powered world.

How to use SXO to make your digital content succeed

Before you get the most out of SXO, you need to:

• • adopt the right mindset to meet the challenge of AI-powered search

• • develop SXO content that’s easy for AI and search engines to understand at a glance

• • get your team working together to maximise SXO
    
    
    

Get the right mindset for using SXO

You need to change the way you think so you can make SXO. 

Think big, think holistically, think substance (rather than clickbait), but also think about what you focus effort on and where.

1. It’s not about clicks, visits or interactions – it’s about understanding where someone is on their journey, for example searchers who aren’t aware of you or engagers who might convert into customers.

2. It’s not about one channel. You need to design the whole journey to meet people where they are, including when they might not be on your website or social media.

3. Your goals need to be user-centred – if your goals don’t match what people who use your content or digital products need, then you can’t design for SXO optimisation.

4. Reviewing website performance has to become continuous digital improvement, meaning you keep checking your website and social media performance, reviewing content and watching how users behave, including on third-party content platforms.

5. Topical authority matters more than having lots of content – focus on the core needs of your users and design content around those key topics or questions.

6. Long-tail keywords matter more than top keywords because of semantic search – search engines looking to understand user intent and the context of the query rather than literal matches to words while people search using natural language rather than keywords.

7.  Quality matters more than quantity – forget churning out yet more content and focus on EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), which is what Google uses to value content – content made by humans, not AI.

Develop AI-friendly content

Using UX principles and content design can make your content easy for AI, search engines to skim, scan, understand and use.

Try this easy step by step to UX content design:

1. Identify user needs with user research and data – who your users are, or the users you want, what they need and why.

2. Use the needs you’ve identified to map out user intent (goals) across the touchpoints on their user journey so you can tailor your content to matching changing intent, for example looking for information, comparing options, making a choice.

3. Test out your ideas with prototype content, conversation flows and product journeys, and iterate based on what you learn.

4. Go live with changes on a small scale first to see what works best.

5. Keep learning and improving, using user testing, live feedback and data – ideally including real-time data and tools that capture session recordings, heat maps of user interaction and navigation).

When you create or improve new content make sure it:

• • answers relevant queries in an accurate and concise way within the first few sentences

• • uses simple, plain, natural language to match the words and phrases people use everyday

• • is easy to navigate, so it’s intuitive for people to take the next step according to what they need from you

• • is structured logically so it’s easy to scan, using bullet lists and short paragraphs

• • uses structured data (such as schema) to add clarity or context

• • is authoritative, adding depth and substance to the topic

• • is authentic and credible, including, where relevant, author credentials and bio
    
    

Get your team working together

Ultimately, you need to change how you work to make SXO work. 

UX that creates user experiences that work is collaborative, transparent and agile, and that means SXO needs to be.

You’ll need:

• • agreed governance for your digital publishing (who gets to say no to what, when and where)

• • clear and easy communication

• • joined up ways of working
    
    

1. Build your teams to include different disciplines working together – SEO experts alongside user experience designers, developers, user researchers and performance analysts.

2. Be purposeful about what you communicate, when and where, and choose communication channels internally that everyone can use, without overwhelming anyone. Tools that visualise tasks, projects and roadmaps all help, such as Trello, Monday.com or even virtual post-its on a shareable online Miro board.

3. Design workflows, organisation structures and content operations so that everyone involved in creating, publishing, distributing content across all your channels knows when, where and how they fit into the process. You can’t join up the journey for users if, for example, you have a marketing team, a social media team and a website team that each don’t know what the others are doing.

Most of all, don’t panic.  

Everyone is learning how to adapt to the AI world.

Take the first step with SXO and think of it as going with the flow, because who knows where AI will take us next.