Search is no longer just about keywords. People now ask questions, and AI answers them.
A shopper looking for the perfect present might once have typed “best birthday gifts for friends” into Google. Now, they ask ChatGPT, “Birthday gift ideas for my girlfriend who loves home decor, but already has everything?”
The result isn’t a list of links but a single, conversational reply. It’s also a direct answer that quietly decides which brands people see and trust.
Because discovery no longer happens in traditional search alone, it’s starting to reshape how marketers think about visibility.
During a panel discussion at the Usercentrics 2025 Privacy-Led Marketing Summit, Leigh McKenzie, Director of Online Visibility at Semrush, and James Bentham, the Head of SEO at Havas Market UK, joined Usercentrics SEO Manager Yuliia Huzenkova to explore what this shift means for marketing leaders.
Their message was clear: Although this isn’t the end of organic content marketing or search engine optimization (SEO), marketers must move towards generative engine optimization (GEO).
Organic visibility is no longer just about ranking — it’s about relevance and trust. The marketers who understand that shift early will be the ones to shape how discovery works next.
The shift from search to discovery
For decades, Google shaped how people found information. Now, for the first time in ten years, its market share has dropped below 90 percent.
The reason isn’t a new competitor. It’s new consumer behavior.
In fact, a recent survey found that over half of consumers in the U.S. are now turning to AI first instead of search engines for specific tasks, like planning a vacation or comparing products. They’re moving beyond traditional search and into conversational discovery. As a result, Semrush projects that AI search traffic will surpass traditional search traffic by 2028.
This new way of searching changes the foundation of SEO. For years, the role of an SEO marketer was to understand what people were typing into search boxes and create content that met that intent. That meant researching keywords, building landing pages, optimizing for experience, and making sure they ranked.
McKenzie says the status quo has shifted, but there’s good news, too.
The goalposts have changed, and what we need to do to be successful has expanded. But we’re really well-positioned as technical and content marketers to lead this shift.
Huzenkova noted that intent is becoming more important as users shift from keywords to conversations, and Bentham agrees. “SEO has always sat at the intersection between content, technical, PR, and broader marketing,” he says. He expects the duties of an SEO manager to expand into optimization for social platforms, short-form video, and AI-powered answers, which are now all part of the same ecosystem of discovery.
Intent is what connects it all. People are no longer navigating search results; they’re conversing with algorithms. Brands must learn to show up wherever those conversations happen, whether in AI assistants, on Reddit, or on a trusted review site.
Credibility is the new currency for AI
This change also alters how visibility is earned.
AI systems don’t just pull facts; they assess a brand’s tone, credibility, and consistency to determine which brands sound reliable enough to feature in an answer. While SEO still matters, ranking organically in the top three positions for a given keyword may not be as crucial for AI search.
McKenzie describes it as a new layer of evaluation, reflecting a social shift towards the use of large language models (LLMs), including AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. In response to user queries, LLMs draw information from digital spaces that mention your brand, including company channels, social media, forums, and review sites.
“LLMs are looking at all the content on the internet, such as conversations on Reddit, social media, and YouTube videos. If you don’t have an overall positive customer sentiment, you’re going to run into problems,” McKenzie notes.
In other words, brands can’t bury negative feedback on page 10 anymore. If customers consistently say your support is impossible to reach, that surfaces in AI recommendations regardless of your messaging.
Such transparency is both a challenge and an opportunity. It forces companies to match the stories they tell with the experiences they deliver.
This makes quality control more important, not less. Although many are tempted to generate hundreds of pieces of content with AI tools, flood every channel, and hope something sticks, engagement with AI-generated content has already declined by 40 percent in 2024.
“Google has already started clamping down on this type of behavior,” Bentham warns. “We’re already seeing AI fatigue in some sectors among consumers. People can see when content is low-effort.”
Quality control is what keeps a brand credible, not quantity.
“Scale only matters if quality keeps up,” McKenzie says, adding that marketers should use AI strategically, with the human end consumer in mind.
“AI might help teams work faster, but it can’t replace insight or empathy. The companies that win in GEO will be those that use AI to amplify expertise, not automate it.”
Building your brand presence in generative AI
As generative search reshapes visibility, SEO marketers are finding practical ways to adapt, and it starts with experimenting with how natural language prompts impact discovery.
When Huzenkova asked how teams can start, McKenzie shared a few simple approaches. Step 1: Experiment with different LLMs.
“First, get familiar with these services,” he says. “Try converting shorter keywords into natural prompts. Instead of three words, think 15 to 20. Then test them in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and see which brands are mentioned.”
This exercise helps teams understand what content these models surface and which sources they trust.
“We’re seeing a lot of value in real customer conversations,” says McKenzie. “Google and ChatGPT are pulling in threads from Reddit, and people are spending time with long- and short-form content on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. That tells you where to focus your efforts.”
Bentham says that GEO requires collaboration beyond the SEO team, which can help surface messaging gems and insights into audience intent.
“It’s not just about building content and links anymore,” he says. “It’s about understanding what audiences value and working with PR, partnerships, and content teams to show up in the right places.”
Measuring what matters
If your brand’s visibility depends on reputation, then measurement has to evolve. This is especially true when attribution is becoming less certain.
“We’re moving toward a world with less certainty about attribution and traffic because of how many touchpoints there are in a typical customer journey,” McKenzie says.
For example, if a customer starts with an AI search, watches a product review on YouTube, checks comments on Reddit, and makes a purchase days later, traditional metrics and last-click attribution models miss most of that journey.
Instead, McKenzie and Bentham recommend that SEO marketers look for signals of presence:
- Brand visibility: How often your brand appears in AI answers or discussions
- Share of voice: How frequently your brand is mentioned compared to competitors
- Sentiment: How your brand is talked about across communities and channels
- Impressions: Evidence of inclusion in customer consideration
Unlike traditional search metrics, these signals account for the growing number of instances where consumers convert via an AI interface.
“Discovery, awareness, and even conversion might happen within a single interaction inside an AI model. At that point, we won’t capture any traffic,” Bentham says. “It’s a shift in how we perceive organic measurement.”
That shift requires a mindset change. Visibility is no longer limited to clicks or page views. It’s about being present in the right context, even if the path from awareness to conversion is invisible.
For performance marketers, that means balancing precision with trust and tracking what can be measured while respecting what can only be earned.
Discovery, awareness, and even conversion might happen within a single interaction inside an AI model. It’s a shift in how we perceive organic measurement.
What’s next for SEO marketers
Marketing and search will keep evolving as AI models are updated. But this next phase will feel different from the algorithm updates marketers are used to.
It will be faster, more unpredictable, and far more personalized.
“The volatility we’ll see with ChatGPT and Gemini is going to be significantly higher than what we were used to with Google algorithm updates,” McKenzie predicts. “We’re going to see an acceleration of adoption and refinement of how these tools are ingesting content from the web.”
If you’re among those SEO marketers who are curious and excited about the change, use it to your advantage.
Marketers who test prompts, observe how their brand appears in different AI tools, and coordinate messaging across SEO, PR, and partnerships will move faster along the learning curve.
McKenzie adds that now isn’t the time to pull back on marketing investments. “It would be a mistake to cut back now,” he says, explaining that the brands leading today in AI-driven visibility are the ones that kept building during uncertainty.
This means treating SEO and content as ongoing investments, not optional experiments. They are the foundations that ensure your brand keeps showing up as discovery moves deeper into AI.
If you’re navigating this transition, the opportunity is to see GEO not as a replacement for SEO but as its natural next step. The platforms may change, but the principle stays the same: Build something worth recommending.
Time to future-proof your martech stack for 2026, from tracking to trust. Find out how.