The tools are deployed. The licenses are paid. And if you’re a senior SEO or GEO practitioner right now, you’re probably using AI every day – for drafts, for summaries, for first passes at content that used to take twice as long. That’s real productivity, and it’s not nothing. It’s also not the return the investment is capable of producing. And the gap between what you’re getting and what’s available isn’t a tool problem. It’s a mode problem. A peer-reviewed study published at the 2025 ASIS&T Annual Meeting by Tim Gorichanaz at Drexel University gives that problem a name (h/t to Shari Thurow for pointing me at this paper!). Analyzing 205 real-world ChatGPT use cases, Gorichanaz identified six distinct modes in which people actually use AI: Writing, Deciding, Identifying, Ideating, Talking, and Critiquing. The data came from Reddit and skews Anglophone, which limits its generalizability, but the taxonomy it produced maps uncomfortably well onto how most practitioners are actually working.…