For at least a decade, the SEO industry has lagged behind Google, mainly due to advancements in AI and, recently, the rise of generative AI. SEOs have been following the same best practices playbook, but Google has been operating on a completely different level. The big picture is that people don’t know what they’re doing, AI is rewriting SEO strategy, and the industry’s future will look very different.
This is one of the key reasons that events such as SEO Week (a new conference that began in April 2025 in NYC) are vital. As SEO is redefined, industry leaders have the responsibility to elevate its role, becoming the valued discipline and channel that brands need to help them navigate the evolution of Organic Search. bringing together industry innovators in Marketing, Data, and SEO, as well as specialists in AI disciplines, is necessary to ensure professionals gain the technical understanding and strategic insights needed to stay ahead in the future of Search.
A Flawed Ecosystem
Even before the advent of AI, SEO best practices were often shaped by business incentives rather than by what actually worked. One of the biggest misconceptions in SEO is that more content automatically means better performance or that lengthier content ranks better. That’s never been true.
Another example is link building. The industry has always approached it as a numbers game. However, leaked Google documents, patents, and other sources confirm that Google stratifies its index into different quality tiers. Consider that if you secure just five links from high-quality sources, you can outperform someone with 100 low-quality links.
Volume-based strategies are easier to sell—whether the promise is “We’ll write 50 blog posts” or “We’ll get you 500 links.” But in reality, those metrics don’t align with what drives impact. And now, with generative AI shifting the landscape even further, the goalposts have moved once again.
AI and the Changing Face Of SEO
AI is shaking things up in so many ways, but a couple stand out as especially significant.
AI Overviews are changing how Google delivers information. But the bigger picture is that ChatGPT is potentially emerging as a new way for people to find information. Google has been forced to react instead of controlling the direction of the search market. ChatGPT offers a way for people to access information quickly, personalized to their search query. As a tool to generate AI content, It is also flooding the internet with sloppy, low-quality writing.
In response, Google is rolling out new features, aggressively tweaking its algorithms, and cracking down on content quality. As a result, sites are losing traffic—even ones that have been historically strong. But here’s the catch: conversions aren’t going down. The data suggests that Google is actually sending more qualified visitors to sites—people who only click through when they’re ready to take action. Instead of driving empty traffic, AI Overviews may be filtering out casual browsers and delivering users who actually intend to engage.
Simultaneously, Google’s quality updates, such as the Helpful Content Update, are getting more aggressive. This is causing false positives, impacting the visibility and rankings of sites that aren’t necessarily low-quality. My theory is that Google is dialing up the weight in terms of user engagement metrics. Low-quality AI-generated content likely causes high bounce rates. Therefore, sites with similar signals could get caught in this crossfire, hence the false positives. It’s like panning for gold—you’re trying to filter out worthless sediment, but sometimes, valuable nuggets get washed away too.
Recognizing Search is a Branding Channel
As ChatGPT competes to become the market-dominant Conversational Search platform, Google must provide an equally instant answer to a query. AI Overviews reduce the need for users to click through to the source website, reducing that site’s Organic Search traffic.
We don’t have clear visibility of how many clicks are going to AI Overviews or whether an AI Overview is consistently present for a given query. But we know click-through rate curve metrics are changing.
At the same time, ChatGPT is driving minimal referral traffic, meaning brands won’t be relying on it for direct conversions. Instead, it will function more as a branding channel, one where being referenced is valuable for credibility but doesn’t necessarily translate into visitors.
Search has always been a branding channel, but we don’t usually consider it that way. We think of Organic Search as a performance channel because it performs so well. But if you look at click-through rate curves, they’ve never added up to 100%. That doesn’t mean users had a bad experience; it just means they might have found what they needed by scanning the search results, even before featured snippets or AI Overviews came into play.
With traffic dropping, there is increased pressure for brands to become the answer in Search, and I expect more companies will start treating SEO as a branding play. My agency has had clients who specifically wanted featured snippets—not to drive sales but to build mindshare. I suspect more people will take that approach moving forward.
Search Mechanics: How SEOs Can Stay Relevant
Understanding how Search works is more important than ever. Historically, SEO has been more of an abstraction on top of information retrieval. We’ve been power users of search engines and experts in things like server configuration. But now, we must go deeper as an industry and grasp how search engines operate.
Right now, so much information is available about how generative AI works, specifically how retrieval-augmented generation functions. SEOs can look to open-source versions of what Google’s doing with AI Overviews and start to see the mechanics behind it. It’s like watching a hibachi chef—it’s all happening right in front of you. If SEO professionals take the time to learn the mechanics–technical and semantically–, it can give them a huge advantage in SEO strategy and performance moving forward.
Understanding generative AI is crucial. Using the right tools, you can scale and do SEO much faster and more effectively. There are tools like AirOps, which automate workflows and still allow for human review. And Profound which monitors brand visibility in conversational search platforms. With these tools, you can quickly generate valuable content and monitor performance, especially if you’re pulling in your own data or using top-tier sources to feed into large language models.
These models have dramatically improved, with new updates almost every month. I’m not saying you should chase every shiny new tool out there, but SEO tends to be a space where we rely on a truth until an algorithm update changes it. However, generative AI is actively evolving.
Before ChatGPT, Search was getting pretty boring. It felt like nothing had happened for years. Then Google released the Transformer, the technology ChatGPT is based on, OpenAI used it to accelerate generative AI, and Google suddenly had to step it up. Now, tech and marketing across the board are changing drastically.
So, understanding how these shifts are rolling out and how they’re changing search behavior is worth the time and effort to stay relevant. Now, SEO professionals and businesses must rethink their approach to visibility—focusing less on pure performance and more on brand presence in an AI-dominated search ecosystem.
