Tom Critchlow, a longtime search marketer with extensive experience, recently shared his thoughts on the current state of the SEO industry, saying that AI search is changing business priorities in ways that expose inherent weaknesses in SEO today. This transformation means that search marketing professionals must evaluate the services they offer to better align with what is useful for today’s modern search surfaces.
Brand Marketing: The Hidden Pillar of SEO
Google’s algorithms have long relied on signals from user behavior. Google’s founders said that PageRank could “be considered a model of user behavior”, demonstrating that user behavior in relation to content was important to Google in the very dawn of Google.
What people respond to most online are brands. You could say that people are hardwired to respond to products and service providers they are already familiar with. This phenomenon is called familiarity bias, a tendency to prefer things with which one is already familiar. Getting potential site visitors aware of a brand is a powerful marketing activity, and this approach fits perfectly with what we know about Google’s algorithms for 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 constantly says that the fundamentals of SEO remain the same. Critchlow’s take on AI Search goes further to show that SEO is more like a foundation.
Critchlow explained:
“And that highlights something very important, which is that I think GEO, AI Search, is much more like brand marketing than SEO, in my opinion.
Right now, there’s obviously a technical, crawling, indexing foundation that’s kind of the same, or the same type of discipline, right?
This is just as important before as after.
It is at this point that Critchlow develops the idea that what is built on this foundation goes beyond just traditional SEO, implying that failing to anticipate this shift could pose a career risk.
People who generate results are not SEOs
Critchlow continues his thoughts, building on the idea of SEO as a starting point and going further to say that AI search results are not determined by SEO. He describes this as being a contrarian, that is, someone who has an opinion contrary to what is commonly accepted. But as you’ll see, Critchlow’s ideas are grounded in a more practical view of what determines ranking in traditional and AI search.
Here Critchlow examines the questions all SEOs need to ask themselves as the industry transitions to an AI-driven post-search environment:
“But a lot of what you do, let’s go 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 it, right?
And so, and that, I’m a little bit of a contrarian, so forgive me, but it was true in classic SEO and I think it’s increasingly true in the GEO world.
The people who determine SEO results are not, by and large, SEO professionals.
This is painting with a broad brush and there are exceptions. …In both the old world of SEO and the world of GEO, the people who determine results are the brand, product, PR, and editorial teams, not the SEO teams.
And that was true in a classic SEO world. And I think that’s going to become more and more true in a GEO world.
If I’m a CEO and I look at my organization and I ask myself, 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 will depend a bit on what type of business it is and what industry you’re in, but there is a real risk for the SEO industry, which was also a risk in the days of classic SEO…
…Because again, SEO has done a great job of saying we need to produce quality content. We have to have a good brand. We need to have strong brand research. We need to be mentioned in all these places. We must have a positive reputation.
But does an SEO team do any of these things? In most organizations, the answer is no.
In most organizations, these results belong to other teams. It’s a real risk, I consider it a career risk.
Take away
Critchlow’s observations raise many questions that SEOs need to consider today:
- Who drives SEO results today in AI Search?
- Is there a risk for the SEO industry as GEO becomes more important?
- What is SEO emphasizing that organizations should be doing, and does SEO actually own these activities?
- Who owns the results that matter in most organizations, and how should SEO fit into them?
- If SEO isn’t driving the results that matter, is there a career risk, or should SEO transform to encompass more?
Looked at another way, it could be that we are in a liminal state where we are neither here nor there, where what SEO was is transforming and becoming something else.
