Empty Casts: SEO Lessons from a Weekend on the Water

I spent two days on the water this past weekend and landed more quality fish than I had in any trip in years.

Here’s the thing: it was the first time I’d ever fished either of those places. A high-country lake on Saturday. A river I’d been wanting to try on Sunday. New water on both days — no local intel, no muscle memory for these specific spots, no idea what was working.

And the fishing was extraordinary.

What carried me wasn’t familiarity with the water. I had none. It was years of skill that transferred. Somewhere across thousands of casts on other water, I’d learned to read current and structure in a way I couldn’t articulate but my hands knew. I’d switch flies before I consciously registered the hatch coming off. I’d move thirty yards down the bank because something about the seam just looked wrong for what I was throwing.

The skill arrived quietly — and on water I’d never seen before. And it arrived the same way my SEO work shifted this past year.

The empty-cast phase

Most of what we call “getting good” at something is just an enormous pile of attempts that didn’t work, sorted into patterns your nervous system eventually stops needing to think about. The skill is portable. The water changes; the way you read it carries over.

For SEO practitioners right now, that portability is everything. AI Overviews changed which queries even get clicks. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude started citing sources in ways the old Google playbook never anticipated. Clients walked into Q1 expecting their keyword strategies to keep performing, and they didn’t.

If you’re in that phase — running audits that surface the same handful of issues, writing recovery decks that don’t quite land with the CMO, watching old top-five rankings slide off a cliff — you are not behind. You are casting into water that has fundamentally changed. Everyone is. The practitioners landing fish right now are the ones whose skills transfer.

What actually shifted in my process

Vague encouragement doesn’t catch fish, so I’ll be specific about what changed in my own work this past year.

1. Recovery decks now lead with revenue, not traffic. Leadership doesn’t care that you lost 30% of sessions. They care that the queries you lost were the ones bringing in qualified leads. The deck has to lead with that math, not with a rank tracker chart.
2. Technical audits are built around what AI crawlers can parse. Schema isn’t optional anymore. Clean entity markup isn’t a nice-to-have. The pages that show up in AI citations look structurally different from the pages that ranked in 2021, and the pattern becomes obvious once you’re looking for it.
3. AEO and GEO live in separate work streams. They reward different things. Answer Engine Optimization is about being the cleanest, most parseable answer to a specific question. Generative Engine Optimization is about being one of the trusted sources an LLM pulls from when synthesizing across queries. The briefs are different. The KPIs are different. Bundling them is how teams end up doing neither well.
4. CRO is part of the SEO workflow, not a separate practice. The traffic still coming through to top-ranking pages is more valuable than ever — fewer visits, higher intent. If you’re not running a conversion review on every page that’s holding onto its rankings, you’re leaving the easiest revenue on the table.

Your confidence fly

In fly fishing, your confidence fly is the one pattern in your box you trust when conditions are tough and nothing else is working. You tie it on, you make the cast, and you stop second-guessing yourself.

That’s the idea behind everything I’m building here. SEO right now needs more confidence flies — files, frameworks, and deliverables practitioners reach for without hesitation when the ground is moving under them.

The frameworks I now use on every client engagement — the audit format, the recovery proposal, the AEO + GEO strategy template, the CRO tracker, the metadata framework, the SOW — those didn’t exist a year ago. I built them in the middle of the empty-cast phase, when I needed a way to keep client work moving while the playbook was being rewritten in real time.

Each one is a piece of the gear I wish I’d had eighteen months ago. They are not theoretical. They are the working templates I open on a Monday morning when I’m scoping a new engagement.

Where to start