Tom Critchlow, a longtime search marketer with deep experience, recently shared his opinions of where the SEO industry is today, saying that AI Search is changing business priorities in a way that exposes the weaknesses inherent in SEO today. This transformation means that search marketing professionals need to evaluate the services they offer in order to align better with what is useful for today’s modern search surfaces.

Brand Marketing: The Hidden Pillar Of SEO

Google’s algorithms have long relied on user behavior signals. Google’s founders said that PageRank could “be thought of as a model of user behavior,” showing that user behavior relative to content was important to Google at the very dawn of Google.

What people respond to most online are brands. People could be said to be hardwired to respond to products and service providers they are already familiar with. This phenomenon is called Familiarity Bias, a tendency to prefer things one is already familiar with. Making potential site visitors familiar with a brand is a powerful marketing activity, and that approach aligns perfectly with what we know about Google’s algorithms relative to Navboost and branded search.

SEO Fundamentals Are A Foundation

In an interview with Ross Hudgens, Critchlow observed that the foundations of SEO remain the same in AEO/GEO. Google consistently says that the fundamentals of SEO remain the same. Critchlow’s view of AI Search goes beyond that by showing that SEO is more like a foundation.

Critchlow explained:

“And it points to something very important, which is I think that GEO, AI Search, is much more like brand marketing than it is SEO, in my opinion.

Right now, there is an underpinning, obviously, of the technical foundations and crawling and indexing that is kind of the same, or the same kind of discipline, right?

That is equally important before and after.”

It is at this point that Critchlow develops the idea that what is built on top of that foundation goes beyond just classic SEO, with the implication being that failing to anticipate this change could pose a career risk.

People Who Drive Outcomes Are Not SEO

Critchlow continues his thoughts, building on the idea of SEO being a starting point and going further by saying that the outcomes in AI Search are not driven by SEO. He describes this as contrarian, which is someone who holds an opinion contrary to what is commonly accepted. But as you’ll see, Critchlow’s ideas are founded on a more practical view of what drives ranking in both classic and AI Search.

Here Critchlow considers the questions that all SEOs need to be asking as the industry transitions to a post-Search AI-driven environment:

“But a lot of what you do, back to that question of like, okay, you put in a prompt and you say, do you recommend brand A or brand B?

And it says your competitor.  What do you do about that, right?

And so like, and this, I’m a little contrarian, so forgive me, but like this was true in classical SEO and I think is increasingly true in the GEO world.

The people that drive SEO outcomes are not SEO professionals, by and large.

It’s painting with a broad brush and there are exceptions. …Both in the old SEO world and in the GEO world, the people that drive out the outcomes are the brand, product, PR and editorial teams, not the SEO teams.

And that was true in a classical SEO world. And I think it’s going to be increasingly true in a GEO world.

If I’m a CEO and I’m sat looking at my organization and I’m like, who’s going to do this GEO thing for me?

• Is it the SEO team?
• Or is it the brand team?
• Or is it the product team?

And your answer to that question is going to depend a little bit on what kind of business it is and what industry you’re in, but there’s a real risk for the SEO industry, which was also a risk in classical SEO days…

…Because again, SEO has done a great job of being like, we’ve got to produce great content. We’ve got to have a good brand. We’ve got to have like strong branded search. We’ve got to be mentioned in all these places. We’ve got to have like positive reputation.

But does an SEO team do any of those things? In most organizations, the answer is no.

In most organizations, those outcomes are owned by other teams. That’s a real, I think of that as a career risk.”

Takeaway

Critchlow’s observations raise many questions that SEOs need to consider today:

• Who drives SEO outcomes today in AI Search?
• Is there a risk for the SEO industry as GEO becomes more important?
• What does SEO emphasize organizations should do, and does SEO actually own those activities?
• Who owns the outcomes that matter in most organizations, and how should SEO fit into that?
• If SEO doesn’t drive the outcomes that matter, is there a career risk, or should SEO transform to encompass more?

Looked at another way, it could be we are in a liminal state where we are neither here nor there, where what was SEO is transforming and becoming something else.

Watch the interview here:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-search-is-exposing-seos-risk-of-losing-geo-outcomes/581805/