Build Once, Earn Forever: The ROI of Evergreen SEO in an AI-Powered World 

Want to get the most out of your content marketing budget? You should develop an evergreen SEO strategy.  When a piece of content is evergreen, it means that it won’t become outdated and will remain relevant forever (or at least for a very long time).  For example, things like definitions rarely change.  Therefore, a blog post defining a term like ‘marketing ROI’ will remain relevant indefinitely. Newbies to the marketing industry will always need to know what certain terms mean, and definition-style blog posts are their go-to for learning the lingo.  As a result, evergreen assets can generate indefinite amounts of traffic.  This remains true despite the popularity of AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.  The LLMs (large language models) and RAG (retrieval augmented generation) systems that power AI search tools favor content that’s foundational, explanatory, and durable – which are the exact qualities of evergreen content.  While chasing trends may generate spikes of immediate traffic, those types of posts don’t have much staying power.  We’re not saying that you shouldn’t cover the latest stories in your field, just that you need a strong foundation of evergreen pieces to squeeze the most ROI out of your content strategy.  In this guide, we’ll teach you how to produce evergreen content that performs well on search engines and AI tools, so stay tuned! 

What Evergreen Means in 2025 

Evergreen content has always been valuable, and that fact hasn’t changed in 2025.  Since these types of posts don’t become outdated, they continue to generate traffic well beyond the time they were published.  This is in stark contrast to content covering time-sensitive events and trends, which tend to fizzle out a week or two after publishing.  For this reason, content marketers have long sung the praises of evergreen content.  Research from Demand Metric found that evergreen assets have the potential to deliver 4x the ROI of seasonal or trend-based content.  While trending topics may have ridiculously high search volume at first, once the initial burst of traffic subsides, it won’t come back.  Evergreen topics, on the other hand, boast consistent search volume throughout the year, which is why they yield such a high ROI.  It’s like the difference between a beach bar that’s only bustling during summer (trending topics) and a ritzy Manhattan bar that gets steady business year-round (evergreen).  So, even if the search volume for an evergreen topic isn’t on par with a trending topic at first, you’re still better off developing the evergreen piece.  Remember, we’re not saying that publishing posts covering trends and news stories isn’t a bad thing.  Injecting your brand into the forefront of trending news stories is a fantastic way to increase your brand exposure and introduce your products and services to new audiences.  However, if you publish trending pieces alongside updating a strong foundation of evergreen posts, you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds:

	Evergreen pieces	Trending posts
Compounding SEO ROI	✅	❌
Consistent traffic and citations year-round	✅	❌
Large bursts of short-term traffic and interest	✅	✅
Establishes credibility and entity recognition on LLMs	✅	❌ (partially, but not as much as evergreen content)

AI Loves Evergreen: The Link Between Durable Content and Visibility

AI platforms have changed the way users search for information online, so is evergreen content still a viable SEO tactic? The answer is a definite yes, even now that tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews have transformed the search landscape.  The SEO game is now about ‘invisible influence,’ earning brand mentions, and getting cited and recommended by AI platforms.  Evergreen content fits right into this mix, as LLMs tend to surface (in response to user prompts) resources like:

• Ultimate guides and tutorials 
• Q&A and FAQ-style pages (and blog sections) 
• Learning hubs and knowledge bases 
• Schema-marked definitions 

If your website is loaded with these types of evergreen pieces, it’s highly likely that LLMs will cite your content for informative AI prompts.  That is, the kind of prompts that spark awareness at the top of your marketing funnel.  In that sense, every AI Citation becomes a soft introduction to your brand, slowly establishing credibility and building trust with your target audience.   

Want to earn more brand mentions and editorial backlinks to stand out in AI search results? Check out our Digital PR service!

How evergreen content impacts the AI search funnel 

Let’s consider an example where a piece of evergreen content feeds brand awareness.  Imagine that a user asks Perplexity something like, “What are the basics of SEO?” To generate an answer, its LLM synthesizes basic definitions and concepts from a trusted SEO company’s evergreen Learning Hub (like ours).  This provides the user with a concise mini-lesson and gives our brand a shout-out at the same time.  That’s how evergreen content can fuel the top of your marketing funnel on LLMs, but can it also contribute to the middle and bottom? In other words, will evergreen content help persuade LLMs to directly recommend your brand to customers? The answer is yes, but with a caveat.  Evergreen content feeds the entity layer associated with your brand.  LLMs use a process called ‘named entity recognition’ (NER) to distinguish people, places, things, organizations, and more.  Basically, the more LLMs see your evergreen content:

1. Covering a defined cluster of themes (building topical authority through content clusters) 
2. Getting cited by other brands in your field 
3. Ranking well on search engines 

The more they will:

1. Associate your brand with your niche (like associating an SEO website with prompts related to SEO and digital marketing) 
2. Trust your brand as an authority figure in your field 

This makes it more likely that LLMs will recommend your products and services to their users, but you also need: 

• Positive reviews on multiple platforms online 
• Community discussion (Reddit and Quora) 
• Authoritative mentions on third-party sites (roundups, price guides, etc.) 

When you combine these trust signals with the durable digital footprint evergreen content provides, it makes it much more likely that your brand will be recommended by LLMs during the decision-making stages (i.e., the middle and bottom of your marketing funnel).  This is an incredibly advantageous position to hold in the current search landscape.  Why is that? Almost 60% of consumers use AI platforms to assist with online shopping, and they trust AI’s recommendations more than those of their own friends and family!  If you’re positioned to appear in LLM-generated recommendations, you’ll tap into a compounding revenue stream – and you won’t have to do much upkeep once it starts flowing. 

High-ROI Evergreen Formats to Focus On 

Next, let’s take a closer look at the top evergreen content formats.  These are the gifts that keep on giving, the types of content that will generate traffic and LLM citations long after you hit ‘publish.’

Ultimate guides and tutorials 

Guides and tutorials are excellent forms of evergreen content, so long as the topics they cover won’t become obsolete soon.  For example, a guide teaching users how to soothe a crying baby is evergreen. Babies have behaved the same way since the beginning of humanity, so the advice will remain sound for years to come.  Conversely, a guide on how to use the latest version of Salesforce (a CRM that’s frequently updated) would not be evergreen.  Remember, you want your evergreen guides to remain relevant for more than a few months.  Brainstorm the tasks and concepts inside your niche that are not subject to frequent changes. This is why definition posts tend to be a safe bet, like ‘The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Digital Marketing Lingo’ as an example. 

Resource hubs 

Building a learning hub is an excellent way to build a library of evergreen content. Even if some of your pieces are subject to changes (like software updates), periodically updating these posts will keep them fresh.  Once again, do your best to ensure that the topics you cover will stay relevant for a long time.  As a bonus, these hubs are also great for educating new prospects, in turn building their trust and (hopefully) earning their business. 

Q&A and FAQ-style pages 

Lastly, you should create Q&A and FAQ-style content, either by itself or included as individual sections in other posts.  Most importantly, and this goes for all your content, you should include structured data like semantic HTML and schema markup. Essentially, these ‘special labels’ make it easier for LLMs to parse your content and cite it with confidence.  Check out this guide to learn more about structured data for AI SEO. 

Measuring Evergreen Content’s ROI Over Time 

Evergreen content is a long-term investment, so you should treat it like one. That means your KPIs should reflect the long-lasting nature of evergreen assets.  Here are some tips for measuring ROI:

1. Measure the organic search traffic for evergreen pieces over a 6 - 24 month period. 
2. Track your visibility in Google’s AI Overviews using tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. 
3. BrightEdge’s AI Catalyst will tell you how often you’re appearing in AI citations compared to the competition. 
4. Manually test prompts you’ve targeted with evergreen content and see if your brand gets cited. 
5. Monitor engagement metrics like dwell time and scroll depth to see if your content keeps users on the page.
6. Divide the total spend on creating evergreen content by the leads/sales generated by it. This will let you track your cost-per-lead (CPL) efficiency. If it drops over time, your evergreen content is doing its job. 

Concluding Thoughts: Evergreen SEO’s Impact in 2025 

Evergreen content is extremely important in 2025. LLMs are attracted to it, and evergreen pieces can keep generating leads and sales well into the future.  With an airtight evergreen strategy alongside the rest of your content, you’ll be positioned to succeed in the new AI-dominated search landscape.  Would you rather leave your SEO strategy to battle-tested experts like us? HOTH X is our 100% hands-free service, so don’t wait to sign up!