The Future of SEO in an AI-Driven Digital Landscape

In this episode, host Vera Shafiq discusses the evolving SEO environment influenced by AI-driven search technologies. She emphasizes that while traditional SEO practices remain relevant, there is a growing need for marketers to adapt to newer AI tools like ChatGPT and diversified platforms beyond Google and Bing. Vera discusses the necessity of maintaining a comprehensive digital presence, optimizing for AI search results, and revisiting KPIs to better measure engagement and conversions. Additionally, she highlights the significance of voice and image search in the current landscape and provides actionable steps for businesses to future-proof their SEO strategies in light of these advancements. The episode aims to equip marketers with the insights needed to stay ahead of the curve in AI and SEO.

00:00 Introduction to the Evolving SEO Landscape

01:31 The Impact of AI on SEO

03:02 Traditional vs. AI-Driven Search

06:00 Expanding Beyond Google and Bing

08:52 Shifting Audiences and AI Adoption

11:24 Actionable Steps for Future-Proofing SEO

15:36 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Vera: 0:13

hello, and welcome back to the podcast where we have real and relevant discussions on franchise business, marketing, and technology. I'm Vera Shafiq, and today we are going to explore how the evolving digital landscape is being impacted by AI driven search and how SEO is evolving into something a little bit different than what we are used to as marketers. So I wanted to dive into the changing SEO environment. It's another hot button topic that I wanted to address here. And before we get started, I just wanted to acknowledge the fact that we are almost in March. This year is flying by. Does anyone else feel that way? We are almost Towards the end part of Q1, 2025 and what a year it's been so far. There's been so much in development in terms of AI. And while I don't like to focus too much into the AI side of things, because after all marketing is so much more than just AI, I do think that it deserves. A spotlight in some of the discussions and today's no exception. We are going to talk about how AI has affected the SEO landscape. So one of the most recent media discussions that has been going around is that HubSpot has lost 81 percent of their organic traffic to their blog in a year over year study. And as a result of this, we've been seeing a lot of memes and a lot of posts going around that SEO is dead and you know that SEO no longer works. I honestly don't think this is true. SEO is absolutely not dead. I think HubSpot knows why that happened and have addressed that. So that's actually not an issue at all. I think, I just think it hit the media and became a story. Because really people are panicking a little bit in terms of that the SEO performance that they're seeing. On their traffic, their organic traffic results specifically. Right now, I don't think there's any need to panic. I just think it's an, it's a matter of looking to the future and being prepared for how consumers are going to evolve the way that they interact. With search engines like Google and Bing, we're already seeing it. It's not happening everywhere right now. I think it's more of the early adopters, but I think as marketers, we just need to be ahead of the curve. And if you're already thinking about this, then I think you are ahead of the curve. So let's just talk about how search has traditionally been handled and then how we need to look at it going into the future. So, historically the channels or the platform, such as Google Bing YouTube, they have been like the top search engines for where people go to search for information, whether that be For news, for entertainment, for purchasing products, for how to do this, how to do that. That has been where we as marketers have put our focus in terms of, okay, we need to optimize for Google and Bing and then maybe YouTube as well. Now people are more and more starting to rely on AI search. Whether that be AI overviews within the Google platform itself or the Bing platform the AI equivalent of that or if people are going into chat GPT perplexity, that kind of thing, in order to search for things that they're looking for. More and more people are doing that, and I'm sure as a marketer you are doing that and you're probably One of the fewer percentage of people that are going into these AI platforms for searches rather than Google now. So I want to just point out that, mainstream America is probably not doing that. Those people that are doing that are those that are the knowledge workers. So when I say knowledge workers, I'm talking about marketers, the lawyers, the coders, like the software engineers, people who rely on knowledge in order to do their jobs. And they're realizing that AI is the way to go. And they're using AI for not just their professional, but for their personal use. However, this is going to proliferate and more and more people are going to start catching on to using chat GPT. And All the other platforms in order to get information. So as marketers, we just need to be aware of that and be ahead of the curve. On top of that, there are things such as voice search, right? Voice search has been around for many years. I did a podcast on voice search and how to optimize for voice at least three or four years ago. And so it's, that's nothing new. But with these LLMs being very semantically oriented, they understand natural language a lot better. And also, on top of voice search, with the ability to now do image search, which means we can give the LLM an image, or even a video, or even a live version of what our environment looks like, and the LLM can do a search based on that. These are the kinds of advanced functionalities and use cases that we need to start looking into as marketers. And that being said, the focus of SEO has expanded well beyond optimizing for Google or Bing alone. We need to start looking outside of Google and Bing. AI platforms, as we know them, are now actively searching for and accessing websites that are all over the internet. So not only are they accessing websites all over the internet, but they're also accessing the huge corpus of training data that they have been trained on. And incidentally, when we talk about a chat GPT or perplexity going to a website and pulling information from them, these are automated agent interactions now, so they are not going to show up in your Google Analytics traffic reports. They could potentially be showing up under bot traffic because these agents are technically bots. But just know that as more and more people start to use these AI tools for search, your GA traffic reports are going to look very different. More importantly, businesses now face the challenge of ensuring that their value proposition is effectively communicated across a wide array of digital environments, not just their owned channels, such as their website or their social media pages. So as a business now, you need to double down on things that you may have already been doing, but. Things like review sites and showing up as a citation on a high authority publication, even showing up on platforms such as Reddit, which I know has been an SEO strategy, but we know now that ChatGPT and all the others are scraping Reddit pages as well and pulling results from there. So I think we really need to expand our horizons and not spend so much time optimizing our websites, but also looking at the bigger picture and how our brand is represented across the whole web. A recent study by Buzzstream showed that LLMs actually may prioritize data from authoritative high domain authority publishers. So when they are pulling information, it showed that their training. Has been based on heavily curated data sets. And this means that getting your brand cited on high domain authority websites still makes sense. Generally speaking, your SEO strategy needs to look way further than the four walls of your owned properties. And so you need to be growing those tentacles, right? Many tentacles out into other sources of high quality information and publishers. So let's talk a little bit about shifting audiences and what that looks like for your brand. So we talked about how those knowledge workers are the ones that are really the early adopters of AI. We talked about people in IT, people in marketing, people who are lawyers or whose professions rely on research and other professional fields. And that also includes entrepreneurs and high net worth individuals. These are the types of groups of people that are increasingly exposed to AI search in both their work and personal lives. So if you are marketing for a brand, whose target audience falls into one of these cohorts, I really think that, there's more of an urgency to address the AI search impact of SEO. Incidentally, this will impact Frandev quite significantly because the franchise development audience, like prospective franchisees, that audience falls within those early adopters of AI search tools. For example, my husband and I, we were recently exploring franchise opportunities using ChatGPT. So we're looking at potentially buying a franchise and I thought let's use ChatGPT to give us some insight into what kind of brands we might be interested in looking into. So we engaged with the tool and conducted A detailed interview about our expertise, like what we are experts in and what our preferences might be in terms of purchasing a franchise. And chat GPT gave us quite a few well matched recommendations, but I'd be willing to bet that the recommendations that chat GPT gave us were biased towards the brands who have a wide presence across the web. The brands that have high reviews, testimonials, a lot of published content on high domain authority sites. Maybe on those franchise related publications, right? So while the recommendations that chat GPT gave us were excellent and really did match what we thought we would be interested in terms of purchasing a franchise, I think there was room for other brands to be showing up, but the reason that they didn't show up was that they were potentially not optimized. Enough for chat GPT to be able to find them. So this experience underscores the value of AI platforms as tools for decision making and market research, and also underscores the importance that we as marketers need to put into how we're showing up for these tools. So let's sum up some of the things that you can do in terms of an actionable next step to really make sure that your SEO strategy is future proofed for this shift in media consumption, right? First thing I would do is a comprehensive digital presence review. So evaluate your brand's messaging across all platforms. and ensure that your brand's value proposition, which is unique is consistently and accurately represented everywhere. So not just on your own website, not just on your own social media channels, but continuing on through high authority publications, franchise development sites, if you're interested in franchise development across your reviews ecosystem. On video platforms like YouTube and even on platforms such as Reddit, but you're even, this is table stakes, right? This is something that we've been working towards any way from an SEO perspective. I think you need to start really looking broader and understanding. Where you need to be featured in order to show up for these AI results. So in order to do that, and in order to see where you stand right now, I think the next step would be to engage with AI platforms yourself and pretend that you are a consumer of your brand. So actively test out how a ChatGPT or a Claude or a Gemini or a perplexity are responding to queries about your company's offerings. Get on the platforms, use the insights that you see to identify strengths and gaps in your current SEO strategy. For example, if I'm a plumbing franchise and I prompt ChatGPT to recommend a great plumber in my area, if my brand isn't featuring in the response, Then that means I've got some work to do. And I think at that point you can start to work towards, okay I'm not showing up in an AI search. What do I need to do? Where do I need to be featuring my brand in order for the platform to start to pick up on, on the things that, my brand is doing. And then the third action item I would say is you need to update your metrics and your KPIs. So recognize that traditional organic traffic metrics are probably going to decline. So if you continue to count organic traffic and rankings, these metrics are likely going to be declining. And that does not mean that your SEO isn't working anymore. What you really need to do is incorporate new KPIs That account for performance across diverse platforms and channels. You probably will want to start looking at direct traffic engagement and conversions as more of a focus, and also looking into lift KPIs to measure incrementally. How these organic strategies are adding to your your outcomes, your business outcomes. So I would definitely take a look at the metrics that you're measuring in terms of determining if SEO is successful or not, because those metrics are going to change. And as I mentioned, direct traffic might now start to be more important than ever because. That's the traffic that people are how they're getting to your website now through a chat GPT, for example. And then finally, you'll want to maintain a forward thinking approach and communicate it frequently to your executive team and franchisees. So really letting them know what your strategy is how you're approaching this new AI environment. And kind of giving them the trust and the confidence that you understand this new landscape of search and that you have a plan of action to implementing that and making sure that you are on the leading edge. Of this new shift. Well, thank you for listening to the podcast today. I hope today's discussion has provided you with a clearer understanding of the shifting SEO landscape and practical steps to staying ahead. Subscribe for more insights on franchise business, marketing, and technology. Until next time, stay informed and keep evolving.