A marketing career often feels like this. You build a strategy, execute it well, and wait for the foundation to shift. That is the nature of the game. If you want a clear example, look no further than the recent changes to SEO. Widespread integration of AI search across the web turned the rules of good SEO upside down. Actually, it did not turn them fully upside down; it turned them sideways. The principles still exist, and they include search intent, content depth, and topic clusters.
What’s a Topic Cluster?
A topic cluster is a hub-and-spoke approach to content: one central pillar page that covers a subject broadly, surrounded by supporting posts that each go deep on a piece of it and link back to the hub. The idea isn’t new. It started taking shape around 2013, when Google’s Hummingbird update taught search to weigh the meaning behind a phrase instead of just matching the words in it. HubSpot popularized the model a few years later, and it’s remained one of the most durable structures in content marketing since.
What’s changed is who’s reading the results. Keyword rankings alone don’t drive visibility anymore, and topic clusters matter more than ever, because AI answer systems now grade your site’s depth on a subject, not just one page.
Ch-ch-changes
Three major shifts have taken place over the last few years that have made a very big impact on the way we optimize for search
● The way people search for information is changing.
● Search engines have become better at interpreting and providing information.
● Search itself is no longer just a list of blue links. AI is now writing the answers.
Search engines used to be strict. In the early days of Google, you needed close to the exact right words in close to the right order, or you got nothing useful back. Type the wrong phrase, and the system had no way to guess what you actually meant because it was matching strings, not meaning.
That started changing with the same algorithm shift mentioned above. Hummingbird got the ball rolling in 2013, and RankBrain followed two years later, adding machine learning that could connect related searches and infer intent even when a query didn’t match anything Google had seen before. Voice search pushed things further. Devices like Amazon Echo, Google Nest, and Apple’s Siri got people talking to search instead of typing at it, so queries got longer and more conversational. Now AI search has added a third shift: instead of handing back a list of links, tools like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity write the answer directly.
Here’s the honest measure of how far that’s come. Truly, at one point, even typing a full sentence like “where’s the best place to get tacos around here? "Instead of something clipped like “tacos Joplin, MO," you would not have gotten valid results. Now you can say it out loud to your phone and get a solid answer in seconds.
The statistics are pretty staggering. Here are just a few that will help put this change into perspective
● There’s a bigger shift than voice alone: about 68% of Google searches now end without a click to any website at all, according to a 2026 SparkToro analysis.
● Roughly 27% of the global population now uses voice search on a mobile device.
● AI Overviews now show up on more than 20% of Google searches , a share that keeps climbing since they launched.
● More than 60% of all Google searches now happen on a mobile device instead of a desktop, changing how much space Google has to show an answer before a click ever happens.
● AI Overviews are already reshaping the numbers, too. One widely cited Ahrefs study found that when an AI Overview appears at the top of a Google search, click-through to the top organic result drops by 58%.
On top of that, tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity have become everyday research stops in their own right, often answering a question before anyone reaches a traditional results page at all. That shift directly affects your marketing strategy, and we'll come back to exactly how in a moment.
Are Keywords Dying?
No, keywords aren't actually dying. Keywords are still a very important part of your content strategy. But since search engines are getting smarter, the focus is no longer on the keywords but on the topics that those keywords fall under.
Let's walk through the SEO process that's been widely used by marketers for quite some time now.
It starts with doing extensive research on keywords that will match the topic of what you want your content to be about. You need something that is widely searched that won't be too difficult to rank for. This part of the process takes some time and is constantly being refined. You then use “long-tail” versions of these keywords to create keyword phrases. Those keyword phrases become the anchor that all of your content is tied to. You put it in the URL, the page title, the headers, and the body copy, plus the alt text on your images. The meta description doesn't directly influence rankings, but a strong one earns more clicks once you do show up. Do all of that well, and Google reads the page as a relevant match for that exact search.
Keywords have been the heart of SEO for years. Companies have spent countless hours (and dollars) mastering the art of keyword strategy in an endless struggle to rank on search engine results pages, and good grief, did some of them get good at it! To those that did, do not fear. You will still maintain authority as a source of information on those keywords. But while they will still play a big role in the way you plan your content, it's time that we, as marketers, stop thinking about our content in terms of just words.
Topic Clusters Are Also Your AI Strategy
Let’s sit with this one, because it’s moving faster than almost anything else in our industry right now.
Traditional Google results used to be the whole game. Not anymore. Remember that 58% click-through drop from a few sections back? That’s not a one-time blip. The same Ahrefs study shows it’s up from a 34.5% drop measured just a year earlier. Add in that ChatGPT alone now pulls something like 900 million weekly users, and you’ve got a real shift in where people actually go looking for answers.
Here’s the part that actually changes what you do. AI tools don’t hunt for one perfect page. They break your question into smaller pieces and pull the best answer to each piece from wherever they can find it, sometimes stitching together five different sources in a single response. Writing the single best page on a keyword isn’t enough anymore. What gets you cited is depth, a cluster of connected, authoritative pages an AI system can keep pulling from, even on questions you never wrote a headline for.
That’s the same work that builds your authority with Google. Real pillar pages backed by real cluster content. Now it earns you something more too, a seat at the table when AI decides who gets quoted. Rankings still count. But showing up inside the answer is becoming just as valuable as the click, sometimes more, because it puts your name in front of someone the exact moment they’re asking the question.
The Importance of Topic Clusters
We’ve already made the case for why topic clusters matter: for how people search now, for how AI decides what to cite, and for your own content strategy. Here’s the part we haven’t covered yet, the actual mechanics of how one gets built.
Here's what's happening when you search for an answer. Google is searching for the topic of the inquiry. When it finds a piece of content that matches the topic, it then checks to see if the source of that content has authority on the topic. If you have multiple pieces of content supporting the same topic that are linked together, Google recognizes that, and it returns your content in the search results. This new way of organizing content is called a topic cluster. The goal is to anchor your content to a topic, not just a keyword.
Building one starts with two parts, pillar pages and cluster content.
A pillar page is the foundation on which a topic cluster is built. Pillar page content is long-form. We're talking 3,000 to 5,000 words because it completely covers the topic in a broad manner. It's intended to answer questions about the topic while leaving room for more detailed posts (cluster content) to further describe specific branches of the topic. This cluster content allows for an in-depth look at a specific branch of the topic. This is where keywords come into play. Using keywords that support your topic, you can build content around your pillar page. Here's the key part. Each piece of cluster content must hyperlink back to the pillar page using anchor text that includes the pillar's target keyword. That intentional linking structure signals Google that your content is interconnected, and it's what actually creates the topic cluster.
For example, if the topic was “baseball,” the pillar page would consist of all things baseball (its history, how it's played, the culture, etc.), while cluster content might consist of things such as “how to throw a wicked curveball” or “understanding the rules of America's greatest pastime.” Each of those posts would link back to the main baseball pillar page. The pillar page acts as a guide to the basics of baseball, and the cluster content takes a deeper look into the specifics of a branch of baseball.
Get this right, and you're not just building something Google can crawl and rank. You're building the same kind of depth AI systems pull from when they're deciding whom to cite, which is exactly why this matters twice as much as it used to.
I know that this is a lot to take in. Just keep in mind that it's fairly new for everyone. It is a positive change for both marketers and those we are trying to reach. We believe that with these changes, the future holds easier searches, higher quality information, and an overall better user experience with search.
As our team dives deeper into this new way of doing things, we will share what we learn, along with examples of our own topic clusters. So stay tuned, because we are just getting started.
If you want a system that keeps your content organized around topics instead of scattered one-off posts, that's exactly what we built the SOAR System to do.
Check out our SOAR system.
*We'd like to tell you that ALL businesses are concerned with growth, but only a Sith deals in absolutes.
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