The Role of Your SEO Team Needs to Change

After two days at BrightonSEO listening to countless talks on AI search, a thought that’s been germinating for months finally came into bloom: the role of SEO teams needs to fundamentally change. 

For years and years, SEO teams and agencies have occupied a strange and unique niche in the marketing world. They’ve often been tucked away in the shadows, doing mysterious things with websites - occasionally surfacing to ask for more budget or to warn against whatever the IT department is about to do. 

It has, for the most part, been a rather self-contained endeavour. SEO has traditionally required people who know how to pull a small and very specific set of levers in very specific ways to drive outsized impact. We - and I absolutely consider myself part of the SEO community - tweak code, polish metadata, edit content and build elaborate networks of internal and external links. 

The Changing Role of SEO in an AI-Driven World

But as AI search continues its exorable march - with ChatGPT usage exploding, new platforms such as Perplexity threatening to disrupt everything, and Google doing its best to lean into its ubiquity to outflank OpenAI - that will no longer be enough. 

Don’t get me wrong, all those things still need to be done in the era of the answer engines. The evidence is clear and widely agreed upon: strong technical foundations and high-quality, original on-site content are absolutely critical to help AIs understand your brand. 

But the evidence is equally clear that offsite signals are just as critical to AI search performance - how your brand is discussed in social media, debated in online communities, regarded in reviews and ratings, and covered on relevant influential websites is key. 

The simple truth is this. Your website will not be the primary driver of your AI search performance; how your brand is regarded across the internet will be. And the last thing we need to do is treat that as only an SEO problem. 

Some of the SEO old guard are opening their tried and tested SEO toolboxes looking for relevant tools that can help them ‘get their sites ranking in AI search’. Digital PR, which has matured into a respectable and valuable craft since the bad old days, is handed another new dawn. ‘Do digital PR’ they say, ‘to get your website ranking in AI search’. 

Another set of SEO sages have taken up a different banner. ‘Build brand’ they cry, without offering any real explanation of what that means. That’s about as helpful as saying ‘do marketing’. If anyone reading this has sold a major above the line brand campaign with the sole purpose of driving search engine performance I would LOVE to hear about it. 

It is not, for the most part, brand websites being used as sources by AI search engines – it’s editorial sites, social platforms, YouTube… It’s sites you cannot control directly at a scale you cannot influence with simple hacks. 

From Optimisers to Brand Strategists

To drive performance in AI search, you need to optimise not just your website, but how the entire internet perceives you. 

Most digital PR campaigns - aside from the rare-as-hens-teeth-super-viral-smash-hits-that-were-actually-mostly-down-to-dumb-luck campaigns - are usually a drop in the ocean of brand building compared to the impact on human beings of well-executed paid advertising and, well, traditional consumer PR. That’s why big brands spend big doing those things every year - it changes perceptions, drives awareness and demand at scale, influences behaviour more than a single story on Mail Online will ever do.  

This is where the role of SEO teams needs to change. We will still need to optimise websites and create wonderful original content. But we can’t optimise how the whole of the internet sees our brands just by using the same old SEO toolkit. 

Instead of being activators - tweakers of code, optimisers of content and deployers of campaigns intended to generate backlinks - we in the SEO community need to elevate ourselves to the role of media consultants. 

Organic search experts need to work hand in hand with brand strategists, media planners, paid social teams, influencer teams, traditional PR teams, analytics teams to collaboratively shape the whole of a brand’s owned, earned, shared and paid media activity to pull the new set of levers AI search demands. We need to be experts who can really communicate. 

SEO Must Collaborate to Drive AI Success

Far from narrowing the remit of SEO, this opens thrilling new opportunities for search experts to work with and add value to other specialists and generalists too. Because if SEO people are not at these tables, well then, your AI search performance is just dumb luck, like a dude skateboarding down a road drinking that brand of cranberry juice I can’t remember the name of. 

That though, will not be an easy change for an industry that’s traditionally been viewed as geeky and esoteric. Successful SEO people in an AI-search future will still need to be brilliant technically, understand complex, fast-moving data and how it influences business outcomes. They still need to understand the nuances of human search behaviour and what valuable; high-quality website content looks like. But they also need to be expert communicators, able to simply, clearly and convincingly explain to non-specialists specifically how and why they need to evolve what they do. 

Only a small proportion of the levers needed to drive AI search performance are solely in the hands of SEO people.  

No one team can pull all those levers themselves, brands can only succeed by influencing senior marketers in other specialists to do things differently to drive search performance. That’s always been the case in SEO. We’ve always had to influence UX teams, dev teams, PR people. But now that role is more important than ever - winning the support and buy in of disparate teams across the marketing spectrum is now critical. Sometimes they don’t get it, sometimes they’re not interested, and to be honest sometimes SEO people have not done a good enough job of telling the story as to why. 

So we in SEO need to look at our own skillsets too. Our storytelling needs to improve - massively. We must get better at using complex data to clearly explain what needs to happen, why, and what impact it will deliver. We need to be able to land our points with people who are not from our world. 

It’s like when the Mad Men needed to learn to talk data, just in poetic reverse. 

It’s a golden opportunity for organic search specialists to reframe their role in marketing - to step up and lead in a new era where search engines provide answers, not just results. 

Implications for brands: 

• Invest in detailed analysis of AI search proficiency vs competitors 

• Bring organic search experts into strategic media planning 

• Introduce AI search-based KPIs to paid media, PR and social teams 

• Ensure website technical set up and content is designed for both AI search and traditional search performance 

• Understand the impact of search visibility beyond driving web traffic 

Implications for SEO teams & agencies 

• Level up teams’ ability to communicate to broader marketing stakeholders 

• Invest in detailed analysis of AI search proficiency vs competitors 

• Elevate strategies to look beyond traditional SEO capabilities 

• Focus on business outcomes rather than traditional SEO metrics 

• Develop whole-brand measurement frameworks beyond last click