Cups and Pentacles, anchors for visibility when Google is silent
Silence is the scariest thing. That moment when you open your statistics and, even though the site is technically perfect and the optimization tool traffic lights are all green, the traffic isn’t coming. Or worse, it fluctuates without any apparent logic, unrelated to the actions you’ve taken.
In the Magazine, we called it the night of the “Moon”, the moment of transition when the algorithm became opaque and the old levers of SEO—the exact keyword, the static position—seem to spin their wheels because the ground beneath our feet has changed. Standing by and watching the darkness is not a strategy; once you have overcome the initial uncertainty, you need the weapons to react, two ancient levers that you may have sometimes neglected to guard with the necessary strategic attention, considering them accessory: the fluid emotion of the Cups and the brutal concreteness of the Coins.
Metaphor aside, you must acknowledge one condition: search is no longer the stable center around which visibility revolves. And so you must stop waiting passively for users to find you and go and get them where they dream (Social), and you must have the structural courage to pay for the stability (Ads) that organic traffic alone no longer gives you.
Pentacles and Cups: when attention meets reality
Our journey now takes us to the Minor Arcana, which speak of daily choices, balance, and the concrete management of the forces at play. This is the moment when you stop observing what is happening and start to understand where to intervene.
The suits of Cups and Pentacles open this passage and describe the point at which we decide today whether a brand remains visible or is absorbed by the noise. The Cups tell how attention arises, before research and often far from the SERP. The Pentacles show what happens when that attention must be sustained, made continuous, defended in a market that no longer guarantees organic stability.
How many times have we said it? Today, users come into contact with a brand while scrolling through TikTok, watching an Instagram story, or listening to a creator explain a problem they recognize as their own. They are not looking for a solution on Google, but are registering a name, a promise, a tone. They are deciding what is worth remembering.
If that first contact remains isolated, it disappears. Within a few hours, it is covered by other content, other faces, other responses. This is where most visibility is consumed today, not because it is not generated, but because it is not sustained.
The emotion that prepares and the investment that consolidates
In the Magazine, we clearly address this divide, which shifts the way you evaluate the effectiveness of your actions. It no longer makes sense to ask whether “social media works” or whether “it is worth investing in ADS,” because the real question is whether you are using these tools to support the same signal, with consistency and continuity.
Cups do not produce rankings, they do not guarantee immediate clicks, they do not fill dashboards. They produce familiarity. They ensure that when the user encounters that brand again, they do not perceive it as foreign.
Money is about what makes that familiarity repeatable. Frequency, coverage, continuity. Investment serves this purpose: to keep a message visible when organic traffic no longer ensures stability, when SERPs compress clicks, when platforms decide who to show and for how long.
In reality, there is no emotional phase first and then an economic phase. The two overlap, influence each other, and correct each other. If you capture attention but don’t reinforce it, the work is wasted—you create content that works, but it evaporates without a trace. If you reinforce it without having created recognition, it becomes paid noise, attention that does not turn into memory.
Our Magazine—and our approach at SEOZoom—invites you to work on both fronts: with social media, you build the criteria by which the user selects what matters; with ADS, you reduce the randomness with which that selection remains visible over time. It is at this point of balance that visibility is played out today, which arises when the user sees you before searching for you, and is consolidated when you manage to return to their eyes several times, without depending on the mood of an algorithm.
The seed of cups: when the user does not search for you, but encounters you
For a decade, we have worked on the rock-solid certainty of informed demand. The deal was clear: the user has a need, they type it into Google, and we make ourselves found. There was no mistake in that method; it was a faithful reflection of how the web worked.
Today, however, that paradigm has changed. Active search has not (yet?) disappeared, but it has been joined—and, among younger age groups, cannibalized—by passive discovery. Users don’t start their day thinking about your product; they come across it by chance while scrolling through a feed on TikTok, are inspired by a reel on Instagram, or seek human validation in a discussion on Reddit.
In the Magazine, we associated this phenomenon with the suit of cups, the element of Water, because that’s exactly how traffic behaves today: it’s fluid, emotional, pervasive. It doesn’t follow straight, predictable lines, but floods the spaces where people spend their time consuming stories. If you stand still and wait for the query in the search bar, you lose the entire market segment that decides before searching. The game has shifted to validation: the user sees, trusts the creator, validates the idea in the comments, and only then, perhaps, searches for the brand. If you don’t capture that emotional moment, your technical authority on Google comes too late.
The end of the linear funnel and the Discovery paradigm
Forget the neat funnel you had in mind: Search > Click > Conversion. That world no longer exists. Today, we live in the era of Discovery Commerce, a market that moves huge figures, reaching $1.2 trillion.
The difference is subtle but devastating for those who do classic SEO: purchases are born out of inspiration, not explicit need. The data we have collected: for Generation Z, platforms such as TikTok are not “social,” they are primary search engines. Almost half of users between the ages of 16 and 24 use TikTok instead of Google to find new places, ideas, or products.
This means that the user sees a video, trusts the creator, validates the idea through community comments, and often buys directly there, or searches for the brand by name immediately afterwards. If you’re waiting for them to arrive on your landing page optimized for “best [product],” you’ve already lost. Your competitor has intercepted them three clicks earlier, working on emotion and social validation. Social networks now act as validation engines: if you don’t exist there, your authority on Google is worth half as much, because you are missing when trust is formed.
Listen to the flow to feed SEO
Many SEOs still look down on social media, delegating it at best to a separate team or considering it a channel for pure branding. This is a serious strategic mistake, as we have been saying for over two years now: social signals today anticipate and influence organic positioning; they are the antechamber of SERP. The trends that are exploding today on TikTok in a “disorderly” way will be tomorrow’s structured search queries on Google. What’s more, almost one in ten SERPs features at least one URL from a social network.
It is in response to this urgency that we have developed the entire Social section of SEOZoom, a predictive intelligence hub that goes beyond vanity metrics and allows you to see where the water is going before it reaches the valley.
For example, with Social Trends, you can intercept topics that are trending on TikTok and Instagram before they even become search volumes on Google, while with Monitor Profiles, you can measure the real health of your brand and the engagement of your competitors.
But the ultimate integration comes with Social Opportunities, which tells you exactly for which intents and queries Google has stopped showing web pages in order to directly reward social content. This tool tells you which of your keywords the algorithm is already choosing to show social results (TikTok videos, Reddit discussions) directly on the first page, when it prefers a video or thread over an article. It’s an immediate operational signal: Google is telling you that for that intent, the user wants visual content or a human opinion, not a text article. Insisting on responding with a three-thousand-word written guide when the algorithm is asking for a visual experience (cups) means working against the market. You need to produce the content that the user expects, in the format they are already consuming.
The seed of pentacles: planting solid roots in unstable ground
If cups help you intercept those who are not looking for you, coins serve to secure those who have found you.
Let’s be honest: organic traffic is wonderful, but today it is volatile, and entrusting your entire company’s turnover to the mood of a Core Update or the sudden appearance of an AI Overview box that steals clicks is a business risk you cannot afford.
You need stability, such as that guaranteed by the Earth element of the pentacles seed, which we have “paired” with advertising investment in the magazine—not as a “plan B,” but as a supporting structure, the only lever you can control down to the millimeter to ensure continuity of presence.
Acquiring real data in an opaque market
Working only organically means accepting to move in an increasingly vast gray area, between disappearing cookies, increasing not provided data, and fragmented user paths that Google Analytics struggles to reconstruct. In the chaos of the Moon, the only certainty is that you pay.
There is a value of money that is often ignored: the truth of the data. Advertising breaks through the opacity, because when you invest, you buy clean data. Every euro spent on Google Ads or Meta Ads not only generates a click, but also provides immediate and unequivocal feedback on what really works: which headline gets clicks, which persuasive lever converts, which audience segment responds.
You can’t treat advertising as a tax to be paid to Google or Meta, because it’s the purchase of a space of truth, it’s the only way to turn on the light and see user behavior clearly, acquiring reliable information that organic alone often hides from you or returns late.
Paid intelligence that drives organic
The real strategic change we propose with SEOZoom, however, is to stop treating SEO and ADS as separate silos. They need to talk to each other. Your paid strategy must become the Research & Development department of your SEO.
That’s why we created Ads Insight, the tool that turns your competitors’ advertising spend into your biggest free search asset.
The principle is cynical but effective: every campaign that has been active for months is an experiment that someone else has already paid for you. If a competitor is investing heavily in a specific keyword or pushing a particular landing page, they are giving you information that has been validated by the market. With Ads Insight, you collect these signals—copy, angles of attack, value propositions—and bring them into your organic strategy. Instead of guessing and hoping to rank, you use this reliable data (other people’s “money”) to save time and build your organic strategy, replicating what works and occupying the spaces that others are paying to occupy.
It’s SEO that stops being theory and becomes industrial intelligence.
The direction is clear, but the guide is missing
At this point in the journey, we have recovered two key pieces of the map. We have understood how to use emotion (cups) to help us be discovered in the chaos and how to use budget (denari) to give us stability and reliable data in an opaque market.
But emotion and money alone are not enough. You can have the highest social traffic in the world and the largest advertising budget, but if your site is not technically capable of speaking the language of new Artificial Intelligence and if you do not have a single director capable of unifying all these signals into a coherent strategy, you risk wasting resources in the wind.
To close the circle and truly dominate 2026, you need the coolness of logic, the strength of action, and a fixed point to look at. That is, the Swords to cut through the noise of AI, the Wands to ignite the strategy, and the Star — the knowledge of data — to never lose your bearings. This is the last chapter of our journey in the Magazine, and it is what will make the difference between those who navigate by sight and those who know the route.
