A personal reflection on writing, patience, and the unexpected life of the 37 Europe Travel Guides
By Lassi Pensikkala
I didn’t plan to “win” anything.
When I wrote about SEO and Google Bard in 2023, I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to understand what was already happening — quietly, beneath the noise.
At the time, the internet was full of panic:
- AI will replace writers
- SEO is dead
- Google will destroy small sites
I didn’t feel panic.
I felt curiosity.
And maybe something else too:
a sense that clarity would matter more than cleverness.
I never wrote for algorithms
I’ve worked in travel for most of my adult life. Long before blogs, before SEO tools, before affiliate links. Travel was concrete then. You knew places because you had been there — not because you researched them.
When I started AmerExperience and later the 37 Europe Travel Guides, I wrote the same way I always had:
- Calmly
- Slowly
- From memory and experience
- Without urgency
I didn’t chase trends.
I didn’t publish daily.
I didn’t try to “game” Google.
I simply documented Europe the way I knew it.
At the time, that felt almost naïve.
The strange thing about time
Here is something most SEO discussions ignore:
Time is a ranking factor — but not in the technical sense.
Time reveals intent.
Over the years, the 37 Europe Travel Guides didn’t explode. They didn’t go viral. They didn’t generate instant traffic spikes. What they did instead was stay.
I updated them.
I corrected them.
I added clarity.
I removed fluff.
Sometimes months passed without writing anything new.
And yet, slowly, something changed.
When AI arrived, I didn’t change my behavior
This is the part that still surprises me.
When Google started integrating AI more deeply into search — summaries, overviews, contextual answers — I didn’t rush to “optimize for AI.”
I did nothing dramatic.
I kept doing what I had already been doing:
- Updating old guides instead of chasing new ones
- Improving structure and readability
- Making sure links worked
- Making sure the content made sense
While many sites reacted with fear, my content suddenly felt… relevant.
Not because it was new — but because it was coherent.
What actually happened with the 37 Europe Travel Guides
Let me be precise and honest here.
I’m not talking about overnight success or magical growth curves.
What I can say with certainty is this:
- The guides began appearing more consistently in search
- Individual country and city pages started ranking on their own
- Old posts — some written years earlier — resurfaced
- Google AI Overviews began referencing exactly the kind of content I had written
The traffic became steadier, not louder.
More importantly:
- People stayed longer
- People downloaded the guides
- People trusted the site
That trust is visible — even without analytics.
You feel it in how a site breathes.
AI didn’t reward volume — it rewarded coherence
This is the core lesson.
AI doesn’t care how often you post.
It cares whether your site makes sense as a whole.
The 37 Europe Travel Guides work because:
- They belong to one clear ecosystem
- They follow a consistent logic
- They are written in one voice
- They don’t contradict each other
AI is extremely good at detecting internal consistency.
And internal consistency comes from thinking, not optimization.
I didn’t “use” AI — I aligned with it
Looking back, the irony is obvious.
I didn’t build AmerExperience for AI.
AI arrived and recognized it anyway.
Why?
Because AI favors the same things humans do when they are calm and attentive:
- Clear structure
- Honest language
- Useful information
- A sense of direction
In that sense, AI didn’t change the rules.
It simply enforced them.
What this taught me about writing (and aging)
There’s a personal layer to this too.
As you get older, you stop rushing.
You stop trying to prove things.
You start trusting accumulation.
The 37 Europe Travel Guides are not impressive because they are many.
They are impressive because they exist together.
They form a map — not just of Europe, but of a way of thinking:
Slow. Structured. Grounded. Human.
AI didn’t erase that way of thinking.
It amplified it.
If I had to give one piece of advice
To travel writers, bloggers, publishers — especially those feeling left behind:
Don’t ask:
“How do I rank?”
Ask:
“Would this still make sense if someone read it in five years?”
If the answer is yes, you’re already aligned with the future.
Final reflection
SEO didn’t die.
Writing didn’t die.
Experience didn’t die.
What died was noise pretending to be value.
The 37 Europe Travel Guides survived not because they were clever —
but because they were patient.
And patience, it turns out, is very compatible with AI.
