With AI and LLMs shaping how people search for and find information online, SEO could be the very thing you need to ensure your brand remains visible to anyone looking for what you have to offer.
It’s the backbone of your brand’s visibility in AI-powered environments.
From voice assistants to chatbots, from smart home devices to LLM-powered search experiences, the strength of your brand’s online presence now influences if and how your business gets mentioned.
If you’re feeling (understandably) uncertain about the future of search, this post will show you why investing in SEO is still worth it.
But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page.
What Role Does SEO Play in AI-Powered Search Experiences?
No doubt, you’ve noticed AI creeping into more traditional search experiences. With Google’s introduction of AI Overviews (and more recently AI Mode), traditional SEO that focuses on optimizing for search engine algorithms can feel somewhat irrelevant.
The days of focusing on keywords, content, and links might well and truly be over. But not because SEO isn’t worth doing. Rather, the way people search for and find information online is shifting radically.
For a long time, the definition of SEO was boxed into meaning “Google optimization”. It hardly concerned itself with anything outside what was required to rank on Google because, frankly, audiences didn’t really search elsewhere.
We’re now seeing the first meaningful shakeup to Google’s hold over online search. For the first time in the last ten years, Google’s search market share dipped below 90% in late 2024 and has stayed below it since.
With new, disruptive technology (like ChatGPT) becoming an increasingly popular way people search, SEO needs to go back to its fundamental roots which are platform agnostic.
It’s about helping your brand become visible everywhere people search, even if that isn’t on Google.
Instead of maintaining the limited view that SEO is about fixing technical issues, writing content, and building links, it’s now about understanding where your audience looks for information and how they go about it.
And it’s about ensuring your brand shows up (accurately) along the way.
In a way, SEO is now coming to mean “search everywhere optimization”.
Why SEO Is Important (Now More Than Ever)
If you don’t invest in SEO at a time when AI is rewriting and summarizing your brand in responses, you risk:
- Letting your competitors control the narrative and winning more visibility
- Allowing AI to hallucinate and present false information about your brand
- Your brand fading from view in some of the highest-converting channels
If you’re a marketing professional who needs to convince leadership or other non-SEO decision makers that it’s still worth investing in this channel, here are the top reasons you can mention to back up your proposed strategic direction.
1. SEO remains a high-converting channel earning high-intent traffic
SEO has long been one of the most reliable and cost-effective ways to drive conversions, and that hasn’t changed.
What sets SEO apart from most other channels is intent.
People using search engines are actively looking for answers, products, or solutions. They’re not just browsing or passively consuming content. They’re actively in research or decision-making mode.
The more invested someone is in finding a solution, the more money they are likely to spend on the right solution.
For instance, I tracked one of my search experiences when buying a laser cutter. I started with the intention of wanting to make cool things, then spent 17+ hours researching the best machine to buy.
Here’s what the journey looked like in numbers:
SEO is the only marketing channel that deeply understands where, how, and why people search for what they do. Without SEO, you’d miss key insights into your best potential customers.
Intent is a powerful factor that should not be underrated. It leads to higher-quality traffic.
Visitors who arrive from organic search are more likely to convert because they’re already motivated. They’re seeking you when they’re ready to spend money on a solution you offer, not the other way around.
2. SEO ensures LLMs present your brand favorably and accurately
When thinking of SEO as “search everywhere optimization”, LLMs have become an essential platform to optimize for brand visibility.
However, it’s not about doing whatever you can to “influence” an LLM’s inputs (training data) and outputs (responses). Actively trying to manipulate either of these is a cybersecurity risk and what black hat LLM optimization looks like.
What you should be focusing on instead is ensuring that your brand is:
- Showing up for the right topics
- Being summarized accurately
- Considered a trusted source
If you’re having trouble getting buy-in for SEO initiatives, take a look at how your brand shows up in AI responses compared to competitors. There are plenty of new tools being created to track LLM visibility, like Ahrefs’ Brand Radar:
You can also use such tools to show your boss:
- How closely your brand is connected to the main category of products or services you offer
- If competitors get more visibility for your target topics and categories than you do
- If LLMs show incorrect information about your brand for topics you want to lead
- Potential gaps or topics where LLMs do not mention you (but you want to be seen)
SEO skills help solve these gaps and challenges, ensuring that LLMs represent your brand accurately and favorably.
3. SEO powers your online brand visibility beyond Google
SEO has always been platform-agnostic, which means it can be done anywhere people search.
When Google ruled search experiences, it was easy to simply focus on optimizing for the ten blue links it featured as prominent organic search results. Today, AI has changed the landscape—even on Google.
AI assistants like Siri, Alexa, Gemini, and ChatGPT now act as intermediaries between your brand and your audience. AI agents are also increasingly running more searches on behalf of your audience in personal and professional contexts.
Google’s search results are also being completely transformed due to AI’s ability to deliver faster answers and information summaries to searchers.
These technologies all rely on search engines and their data sets to find and serve up-to-date answers.
We’re seeing the following types of protocols and features shaping the future of search. Without an SEO specialist who understands how your brand can be in the search datasets they reference, you’ll struggle to get visibility where it matters:
- Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is an AI framework that combines the strengths and data from traditional search indexes (generally from Google and Bing) with the generative capabilities of LLMs to provide up-to-date AI-generated responses.
- Grounded AI results connect an AI model’s output to verifiable sources of information. Often, models are provided access to search-based data sources (like search indexes or maps) to ground their responses.
- Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol allows AI agents to communicate with each other to help users complete more tasks effectively. Agent-based workflows enable AI agents to run searches and use search data when providing recommendations or completing tasks.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open web standard that defines how AI chatbots, agents, and systems can use external tools and systems. Existing search-based MCP servers allow AI tools like Claude to pull Google search results without needing an API.
- AI-powered search experiences are transforming how people interact with Google. AI Overviews provide direct, summarized answers to searchers. AI Mode introduces conversational search experiences directly in Google. Audio Overviews is like voice search 2.0 with AI reading out responses.
These protocols and features enable machines to search on behalf of humans. They also frequently use search data from Google and Bing to provide better responses and recommendations to humans.
If you don’t focus on getting your brand in search indexes, you will likely not be included in any AI-powered search experiences.
Put simply, the future of search is fragmented, but SEO is still the glue. It ensures your brand is not just findable, but favorable, wherever your audience turns to AI for answers.
4. SEO compounds and grows stronger the longer you invest in it
Historically, one of SEO’s greatest strengths is that it builds momentum and compounds over time.
The more consistently you invest, the stronger your results become.
Unlike paid channels, those results don’t disappear when your budget dries up.
This holds true in a future of AI-powered search, too. Any activity you invest in to organically grow your brand, reach audiences on more platforms, and diversify your traffic sources will compound over time, earning you more visibility and loyalty from high-intent audiences that are ready to buy from you.
Each blog post, landing page, and product description acts like a digital asset, earning visibility, links, and trust over time.
The key, however, is to avoid commoditized content that doesn’t add value to your audience.
In fact, Google’s latest content guidelines specifically mention non-commodity content as a path forward for publishers:
SEO ensures you’re there whether someone is searching for a product, comparing solutions, or asking a question your business is perfectly positioned to answer, not just today, but tomorrow and beyond.
5. SEO actively builds your online brand authority and trust
SEO is no longer just a traffic driver. It’s a brand-building engine.
When your business consistently shows up in search results for high-value queries, it creates a perception of authority. The more people see your brand on other platforms too, the more familiar they become with it.
There’s a strong body of research indicating that 60% of people prefer to buy from brands they are familiar with. When unfamiliar with a brand, they trust influencer recommendations and organic results significantly more than paid ads (with specific demographics actively avoiding or blocking ads).
Even though AI is reshaping search experiences, these patterns in consumer preferences remain relevant.
Searchers trust brands they see often and associate visibility with credibility. The more you show up across top-of-funnel questions, mid-funnel comparisons, and bottom-of-funnel product searches, the more your brand becomes the go-to solution in your category.
And it all adds up to: greater trust, stronger authority, and a presence that compounds across every phase of the buyer journey, no matter where people are searching.
All in all, people will keep searching for answers, recommendations, and solutions. If you don’t invest in showing up where they’re looking, you leave the door open for someone else (a competitor, a copycat, or even an AI hallucination) to tell your story for you and possibly misrepresent your brand in the process.
