Alina Benny on the Only SEO That Matters Now

SEO’s old playbook is losing ground. AI-generated summaries are now answering a growing share of questions before users even click a link, making “showing up” in search results less of a win and more of a participation trophy.  

That’s a shift Alina Benny, Aura’s head of content and SEO, has been watching up close. With years in performance marketing, she’s seen SEO evolve from a quick-hit traffic tool to now also include Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).  

Rankings alone don’t cut it anymore. The real work is creating multi-format content with statistics, expert quotes, original research, and tool comparisons. This is content that meets users where they are across search, social, and other platforms. At Aura, she’s putting that philosophy into action, shaping how the cybersecurity brand is discovered where AI determines what users see first.  

From Engineering to SEO Leadership  

Alina’s path into marketing wasn’t linear. Raised in Kerala, India, she studied electronics and communication engineering at Cochin University of Science and Technology before pivoting to tech marketing.  

Her early break came at Sales Hacker, a B2B sales media brand later acquired by Outreach, where she became second-in-command to the VP of marketing. She ran daily content operations and editorial workflows, helping the site grow from 19,000 to over 100,000 monthly organic sessions.  

From there, she joined Nextiva, scaling the company’s blog traffic by more than 500%. Alongside her in-house roles, she has advised companies like Figma and Gong, mentored marketers through First Round Capital’s Fast Track program, and judged the 2025 Digiday Content Marketing Awards and Women in Content Marketing Awards.  

Rethinking SEO  

For Alina, traditional metrics like SERP rankings no longer tell the full story. With nearly half of search results now showing AI-generated summaries, a page can be “seen” without being clicked. This is what some analysts are calling visibility without visitors.  

Her answer is learning how generative engines find and present information, then seeing how your website can inform that. This means anticipating the “Fall of the Blue Links” and creating the kind of content LLMs like to reference. She treats SEO and GEO as complementary: one powers search rankings, the other AI citations. That perspective shapes her team’s experiments. If a tactic pays off in both 

worlds, it’s a safe bet. If it only makes you look good in an AI summary but doesn’t help readers or improve search, it drops down the list.  

Aura’s internal tests found that LLMs pull most reliably from clear, declarative language. LLMs don’t read content the way people do. They break text into tokens and process it in chunks, which means you can’t really hack the system with markup. Each model slices content differently, so “chunk optimization” isn’t  

something you can control. If your content has straightforward answers, with research and examples, both people and machines are more likely to use it.  

Off-page signals matter too. Mentions across trusted domains and “best-of” lists raise the odds of being cited. Internally, Aura has shifted from tracking only keywords to leaning on real customer conversations, using them to fill gaps where competitors show up in AI answers but Aura doesn’t.  

Measurement has also evolved. Rankings still matter, but now the team checks whether AI assistants cite Aura, monitors when hallucinated links appear, and redirects those URLs to the correct pages. This focus on higher-intent content has paid off for Aura. Despite a drop in traffic, subscriptions from organic continue to rise year over year. SEO and GEO may not be the same, but Alina’s advice is simple: focus on content that’s genuinely useful to people, because that’s what both humans and machines like.  

Search Success in the Future  

According to Alina, SEO success now means influencing AI-generated answers as much as ranking on Google. That calls for content designed in ways LLMs can easily use — clear sections, primary data, and credible sources they can reference. The caveat is that AI search keeps evolving, but for teams willing to keep up, GEO presents a practical way to stay visible across both human and machine audiences.