SEO in the Age of AI: What’s working according to Industry Leaders

SEO is becoming GEO, because search behaviour is changing.

Users are moving beyond traditional search engines and increasingly turning to generative AI tools for answers, summaries, recommendations, and comparisons. Instead of typing fragmented keywords, people are asking complete questions and expecting synthesized responses. That shift alone forces SEO to adapt, and that makes search patterns change, not just on generative AI engines, but on search engines, like Google, too.

As search rapidly shifts toward AI-generated answers, businesses need to start thinking beyond traditional SEO. If you’re not optimizing for how AI systems interpret, summarize, and reference your content, you risk being invisible in the next wave of discovery.

At the same time, the way we do SEO is fundamentally changing. Content creation, keyword research, clustering, and competitive analysis are all becoming AI-powered. We’re using AI to accelerate performance analysis, extract insights faster, and identify opportunities at scale. Workflows are becoming more automated and more efficient.
But automation alone won’t win.

Human oversight will make or break on-page SEO. AI can generate structure and speed, but credibility, differentiation, and brand voice still require strategic direction. Technical SEO remains as critical as ever clean architecture, structured data, and crawlability are what allow both search engines and generative systems to trust your content.

The biggest shift will be in talent. Traditional SEO roles focused on content writing will evolve toward AI prompting, workflow design, and system optimization. Professionals who can architect and manage AI-driven SEO systems will be in high demand, while those who rely solely on manual content production may need to reskill.

Recommendation for business leaders: Invest in AI-powered SEO workflows now and prioritize human oversight for quality, credibility, and technical health. Equip your teams with the skills to manage AI tools effectively the businesses that adapt fastest will define search visibility in the AI era.

“SEO can’t be relied upon to be a traffic factory anymore for your website. AI search has complicated the journey from 10 blue links and clicks to mentions in answers and the likelihood that users stay within the platform. We saw the impact of this accelerate last year with the rollout of AI overviews; our clicks reduced by -23% in the last 6 months of 2025. In practice, there’s nothing that can be done to change this; it’s simply a matter of shifting user behaviour.

But these shifts do make it a very exciting time for SEO and now GEO too. For a start, generic, samey content will become less and less relevant. AI sets the bar way higher for high-quality content, especially at the top of the funnel, where SEOs were previously praised by executives for driving large amounts of traffic. Often, without much consideration of whether the traffic was actually relevant, or led to assisted conversions.

Now the focus will shift to relevancy and actually bringing something new to the conversation. We at Cognism were already ahead of this, having many unique content resources such as our demand gen playbook and new proprietary data reports, which we launched last year. We know that Large Language Models (LLMs) love to cite data and draw on expertise to fill in gaps in their own internalised training knowledge. But what’s more, we know that our ideal customer profile will really resonate with content resources like this.”

In today’s digital landscape, we are witnessing an unprecedented paradigm shift. Until recently, the customer journey began almost invariably on Google or Social Media. Today, we are seeing the birth of a new funnel: Conversational Discovery. Users are no longer just looking for links; they are seeking direct answers. This shift is fundamentally rewriting the rules of online visibility.

The way people discover brands is increasingly dominated by direct queries posed to AI assistants. Instead of manually comparing a dozen websites, consumers now ask: “Which skincare brands are safe for sensitive skin?” or “What are better alternatives to Brand X?”

AI synthesizes information from across the web to provide a few curated options. At that moment, a significant portion of the decision-making process is already complete. For eCommerce, competition is no longer just about winning the click, it’s about the honor of being included in the AI-generated response.

AI does not prioritize ad budgets, nor does it artificially promote products. Large Language Models rely on aggregated web signals to understand brands as entities. Without SEO, that context is missing, rendering a brand invisible to the algorithms.

To be recommended, a brand must maintain a clear public positioning that answers critical questions: What problem does it solve? Who is it for? What makes it different?

To remain relevant in this new ecosystem, I have defined seven strategic pillars that every brand must address.

AI relies heavily on third-party validation, prioritizing the internet’s collective consensus over a brand’s self-published claims.

Focus on mentions in niche publications, founder interviews, and inclusion in independent “top lists” or comparisons.

External validation is the fuel for AI recommendations.
AI reads information structures to understand contextual relevance. Your website must be organized not just by product categories, but by needs and specific use cases.
Structures like “For road running” or “Office solutions” help AI associate your brand with the concrete search scenarios of your users.

Beyond aesthetics, your homepage serves as your brand’s identity card for AI crawlers. It must unequivocally explain who you are, what you sell, and who your target audience is.

Vague or exclusively visual messaging drastically reduces the model’s chances of semantic understanding.
The footer functions as a strategic summary. Utilizing it to include main categories, FAQ pages, guides, and clear business context provides AI with a logical structure to index quickly. It is a high-value area for information hierarchy.

A static site is perceived by AI as having low relevance. Conversational search engines favor active sources.
Regularly review evergreen guides, expand category descriptions with rich details, and update FAQ sections based on real customer inquiries.

AI aggregates information from diverse sources. The same topic should exist as text, video, audio (podcasts), and explanatory images.

Each format creates a new public reference point that bolsters brand authority in the eyes of the algorithm.
Inconsistency creates semantic confusion. Your brand description and differentiators must be conceptually identical across your website, social media, PR, and marketplaces.
A unified voice allows AI to categorize you correctly and recommend you with confidence.

The transition toward an AI-influenced digital environment does not signal the end of SEO; rather, it marks its definitive maturation. We have moved past the era of technical “hacks” and keyword stuffing into an age where authority and semantic clarity are the only currencies that matter.

In 2026, success depends on a brand’s ability to project a coherent, validated image across the entire web ecosystem. AI acts as a trust synthesizer. It won’t recommend a product simply because it exists, but because it understands, based on external signals and internal site structure, that the brand is the optimal solution for a specific need.

The brands that will dominate the market are not necessarily those with the largest ad budgets, but those that successfully become authoritative educational resources.
The challenge for marketers is now twofold: they must build impeccable experiences for human users (UX) while simultaneously providing a digestible data architecture for AI engines.

Ultimately, SEO in the AI era is about your total digital footprint. If you want AI to talk about you, you must first ensure the rest of the internet is already doing so in a clear, structured, and relevant way.
The future belongs to brands that don’t just appear in searches, but are chosen by algorithms as the most reliable recommendation for the user.

For years, SEO professionals have heard the same prediction: “SEO is dying.” Yet every time the industry evolves, SEO adapts and becomes even more strategic. The rise of AI is simply the latest and fastest transformation.

The real question today is no longer “How do we rank higher on Google?” but rather “How do we remain visible in an ecosystem?”

AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are changing how people access information. Instead of presenting users with a list of links, they increasingly provide direct answers. This shift may reduce traditional click-through traffic, but it does not eliminate the need for high-quality content.

In fact, AI systems still rely on the open web as their primary source of information. This means SEO is evolving from simply optimizing pages to building credible digital authority.

One of the biggest risks today is the explosion of AI-generated content. While AI tools make content creation easier, publishing large amounts of unedited or low-quality AI content can quickly damage a website’s visibility.

The core principle of SEO remains unchanged: quality and uniqueness matter. Content created for real users, backed by expertise and credibility, will always outperform content created only for algorithms.

AI does not replace SEO professionals. Instead, it gives them a new role: those who learn to use AI strategically will treat it not as a competitor, but as a powerful partner.

AI-based tools are essential in SEO at this point. They do not replace the specialists behind the desk, but help them complete repetitive tasks faster.

Strategy, research, and implementation are crucial to the success of an SEO campaign, and this cannot be done by AI, at least not to the extent that a specialist can. We won’t reach a point where AI completely replaces the SEO specialist. When competitors depend on AI, the differentiating factor will be humanity.

As for claims that AEO/GEO/AIO and so on will replace SEO, my opinion is that they are premature. At its core, SEO is a set of best practices to help bots crawl (technical SEO), understand what information is on the page (on-page SEO), and build a good reputation for the business (off-page SEO).

With minor methodological differences, such as AI bots crawling in chunks of about 350 words, the implementation of the same set of best practices will also yield AI visibility. If you win in SEO, you win in GEO.

We’re experiencing the biggest shift in how people search for information since Google launched. Even before ChatGPT, users were already migrating: searching TikTok for recipes, appending “Reddit” to Google queries, turning to YouTube for answers. With mass AI adoption, this fragmentation has accelerated.

I’m fairly certain Google will stop being the default starting point. Instead, people will use AI to begin their search journey, then continue on whatever platform fits their intent best.Does this mean SEO is dead? No, it’s more alive than ever. SEO is Search Engine Optimization, not Google Optimization. As long as people search for information online, brands need experts to capture that organic demand.

The shift for brands is clear: stop fixating on Google clicks alone. Map where your audience actually searches, match content to the expected medium (video, podcast, infographic, long-form article), and think multi-modal visibility, not just rankings.

SEO in the Age of AI: A New Dimension

SEO used to be simple. You picked a keyword, optimized a page, and matched one intent. That era is over.

Modern SEO is multidimensional. When someone searches today, they are not just typing a query. They are coming with a situation, a location, a level of urgency, a budget constraint, a specific use case. The same problem looks completely different depending on who is asking and why. Good SEO now has to account for all of that at once.

Search itself has changed too. It is no longer query-based. It is conversation-based. People are asking AI tools full questions and expecting full answers. And those AI tools are not pulling from one trusted source. They are looking for consistent patterns across multiple platforms and environments. If your brand only shows up in one place, you are invisible to that process.

This is why brand authority has shifted. It is not built by ranking number one for a keyword anymore. It is built when your brand keeps showing up, across different contexts, for the same problem. A YouTube walkthrough, a Reddit thread, a well-structured blog post, a video testimonial, a solid internal linking structure. Each one adds a signal. Together they create trust.

And none of this works without a strong traditional SEO foundation. Fast pages, clean site structure, solid on-page fundamentals. That part has not changed. It is just no longer enough on its own.

The brands that will win in AI-driven search are not the ones with the most backlinks. They are the ones that have built a recognizable, consistent presence across the places where their audience actually lives.

When television sets began appearing in living rooms in the late 1940s and 1950s, many experts, advertisers, and the general public predicted the imminent death of radio. Instead, radio adapted and found new formats, audiences, and purposes.

The same conversation is happening today with SEO. Many experts say SEO is dying because of AI, but that view misunderstands how the web ecosystem works.

So, I think that SEO is still the foundation of online discovery. It’s where most web visibility comes from, and it’s also the ecosystem AI systems rely on when generating answers. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is simply the next layer, focusing on making sure your brand and expertise appear inside AI-generated responses from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews.

Here are the GEO tactics I believe companies should start prioritizing:

Build strong topical authority by publishing consistent, high-quality content around your main expertise so AI systems associate your brand with specific topics.

Structure content for extractability, using clear headings, concise explanations, and direct answers that generative systems can easily summarize or quote.

Strengthen brand signals across the web through mentions, digital PR, expert quotes, and partnerships so your brand appears in the sources AI models learn from.

Close information gaps about your brand or products by making sure accurate, up-to-date information exists online and across multiple trusted sites.

Actively monitor and measure AI visibility by testing prompts in AI assistants, tracking whether your brand is cited in AI answers, analyzing referral traffic from LLMs, and monitoring brand mentions in AI-generated responses.

The companies that will win are the ones that keep strong SEO fundamentals while learning how to optimize for the AI systems increasingly shaping how people discover information.

At the same time, this is still an evolving landscape. AI search is developing fast, and the rules are far from settled. The smartest approach is to stay adaptable, keep experimenting, and watch closely how search and discovery evolve over the next few years.

Why search is no longer just about Google

In the past, SEO has been tied to one simple behavior: people search on Google, and brands compete to appear among the blue links. The model is changing.

Users expect direct answers instead of lists of websites, and AI powered assistants are becoming a natural part of how people discover information, compare products and make decisions. This shift doesn’t mean SEO is disappearing. But it does mean that search is evolving because it happens ‘’everywhere”, not just in traditional search engines.

One of the biggest changes we see today is how people interact with search. Instead of typing short keyword queries and browsing multiple websites, users now ask conversational questions and expect a clear, synthesized response. AI tools summarize information, compare options and even make recommendations.

People use these tools for different reasons. Some rely on AI for research before making a purchase, others for learning or gathering information and others use it as part of their daily work (to write code, draft content, solve technical problems). Regardless of the use case, the impact on search behavior is clear: users expect faster answers and less friction.

This is not only related to AI, but the attention span has gone down in the past years, especially in digital contexts. Scroll era, constant information flow, and everyday stress all contribute to this reality. The conclusion is simple: we need to adapt our marketing strategies.

Brands are still competing for user attention, but the way we capture that attention has changed. Content must remain original and valuable, but the structure of that content matters more than ever. Instead of long blocks of text, information should be organized in a layout that AI systems can easily interpret (often in formats such as Q&A).

AI is not replacing SEO

Despite the growing anxiety that AI will replace SEO, Google remains one of the most used discovery platforms. The difference is that an additional layer has appeared in the user journey.

Users can now begin their discovery process in AI assistants, gathering insights or comparing options before visiting a website. This is why we need GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) optimizing for visibility in AI-generated responses.

Everything brands have done to optimize for Google (strong technical foundation, clear website structure, high-quality content) remains essential. GEO does not replace SEO, it builds on top of it.

Make sure the website allows AI systems to access and read the content, implement correctly structured data and offer a clear overview of the brand on your own website first of all (what products or services you offer, who is the client, what differentiates your products from alternatives). And go beyond that. The clearer your digital footprint is, the easier it becomes for AI to interpret and recommend a brand.

What others say about your brand matters

Just like backlinks have always been important for SEO, LLMs look for external mentions across the web. Reviews, discussions, and recommendations in neutral environments contribute to how trustworthy a brand appears. Reddit, Wikipedia, forums and Youtube are platforms AI frequently relies on to generate responses. Visibility today is no longer limited to ranking in search results. Brands need to build a strong presence across the broader digital ecosystem

At its core, both SEO and GEO aim to achieve the same goal: satisfying user intent with relevant answers. Because of this, high-quality content is still king, but the bar is higher. Brands must demonstrate experience, expertise, authority and trust more than ever. Content should not rely on vague statements or generic explanations. It should include concrete insights, real examples and original perspectives that provide value beyond what already exists online.

In many ways, the dynamic resembles academic publishing: the more a source is cited, referenced, and use by others, the more authoritative it becomes. Authorship is just as important then. Articles written by identifiable experts (with clear bio and proven experience) contribute to credibility. Pages that were often overlooked in the past, such as “About us” or “Contact”, now need to be at the top of your priority list when it comes to optimization. These sections act as a brand’s digital identity card.

Can AI replace human creativity, know-how and tailored strategies?

While AI is a powerful tool, it still has significant limitations. Don’t ask it why ,,cheese is not sticking on pizza” or you will be told to “add glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness”.

It can help automate tasks, accelerate research, and increase operational efficiency. But creativity, strategic thinking and domain expertise remain for now fundamentally human strengths. AI depends on reliable sources from which it can gather and synthesize knowledge.

From my experience, the most effective approach combines AI-generated efficiency with human oversight. Ignoring AI means losing efficiency and falling beyond competitors. But relying solely on AI means producing generic content that lacks originality and insight. It is often still quite easy to recognize content that was generated entirely by AI without meaningful human input.

The future of search is already taking shape

Artificial intelligence is not a passing trend. It represents a fundamental shift in how users interact with information online. The rapid adoption of AI tools has already pushed giants like Google to accelerate their own AI-driven developments in order to maitain market share.

As these technologies continue to evolve, for marketers and SEO professionals, the challenge is not whether to adapt, but how quickly we can adjust our strategies to remain visible wherever search happens.

Search is undergoing its biggest shift since the rise of Google. For years, SEO largely meant competing for visibility in a list of ten blue links. That model is now changing as AI-driven search is reshaping how people discover information.

One of the clearest shifts is the rise of AI-generated answers and zero-click searches.

Search engines increasingly synthesize information directly on the results page, which means users often get answers without visiting a website. As a result, visibility is now defined by more than rankings or traffic. It increasingly depends on whether a source is considered reliable enough to be referenced by AI systems.

At the same time, discovery is expanding beyond traditional search engines. People now look for information across a wider ecosystem that includes AI assistants and alternative platforms. Tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity are becoming part of daily information searches. Social platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, and forums like Reddit are also increasingly used as search engines, especially by younger audiences.

In this context, many in the industry now describe this shift as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The future of search will likely be less about optimizing for a single platform and more about building authority across a broader information ecosystem.

Our experience with clients from the US market helped us better understand how GEO works before it became mainstream. One aspect we can confirm is that a successful GEO strategy depends on multiple trust signals appearing across the web.

Websites will remain important because they are still the primary source of structured knowledge that search engines and AI models rely on. However, visibility will increasingly depend on how consistently a brand’s information appears across search engines, AI systems, knowledge graphs, and social platforms.

SEO is not disappearing. It is expanding.

For SEO professionals, the challenge ahead is learning how to optimize for both people and AI.