In late 2020, Google announced Passage Indexing, or the ability to rank sections of a webpage separately rather than only scoring pages as a whole.
However, my experience was that in SEO, this failed. Broad pages like general FAQs simply couldn’t compete with highly focused, long-form content to rank well in organic search.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has made this a reality.
The Micro-Fact Advantage
AI platforms use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to break search results into smaller, self-contained chunks. This chunk-level retrieval bypasses the absolute need for page-level topical focus.
If your site contains a clear match for a hyper-specific prompt, the system may extract that chunk into its context window, regardless of the page’s overall theme.
Publish Facts, However You Can!
You’ll still want to focus on content for specific audiences, as topical authority is a real concept to keep in mind.
Your new objective is simple though: get valuable, direct answers onto your site however possible. Hub pages are still necessary to generally pass the initial retrieval phase, but they shouldn’t bottleneck you.
Publish anything you feel is worthwhile somewhere on your site, in whatever context. For example, this could be via general FAQs and even AI Info or loose notes pages, though ideally implemented through clear structures (headers w/ supporting, digestible content).
Surviving the AI transition means delivering tighter yet more flexible content… just get your facts live!