We constantly check our beliefs next to the best in the business. It’s a component of our continual internal study, especially pertaining to output from AIMCLEAR’s storied Marketing AI Lab. This article is us sharing from our team’s daily research logs. We feature quotes, links, and priceless tidbits mined from practitioners we respect, their perspectives from September 2025 through January 2026, mapped against what AIMCLEAR believes re: multi-surface organic brand discovery. This Part 1 is focused predominantly on organic discovery. Next week we’ll share Part 2, which jams on modern paid performance media. Part 3 will close the loop sharing radical merged tactics to build brands customers can’t ignore.
TL;DR
- Premise: What AIMCLEAR believes about today’s organic discovery (SEO, AEO, AIO, E-I-E-I-O) fearlessly vetted researching 15 of the sharpest minds in marketing. The click economy is dead. Here’s what replaces it.
- Expert pals: Kevin Indig, Lily Ray, Jono Alderson, Bastian Grimm, Will Scott, John Shehata, Aleyda Solis, Ryan Jones, Jes Scholz, Andrea Volpini, Duane Forrester, Jordan Koene, Michael King, Eli Schwartz
- Verdict: Convergent thinking, unique, individual takes
- Shifts:
- The click economy is dead
- Brand authority determines AI inclusion
- Technical SEO is survival infrastructure
- The old playbook is a liability
- Quoted first beats ranking first
- Authenticity is a moat
- The surfaceless web: systems, not surfaces
- Traffic is down because of clicks, not impressions—demand isn’t gone
- Your next customer might not be human
- New metrics: (Not really, it’s back to the future.)
- Visibility over traffic
- Multi-surface visibility
- Brand salience over keyword positions
- LLM perception drift
- Business outcomes over vanity metrics
- Bottom line: Done freaking out. Now let’s get busy.
Let’s introduce you to our very groovy friends and share what they’re saying about this moment in marketing history, as reflected in their public activity. We’ll follow by detailing what AIMCLEAR believes and how our organic discoverability practice is run.
Kevin Indig: End of the Click Economy
Kevin Indig is a Growth Advisor and the curator of the Growth Memo newsletter, which reaches over 23,000 subscribers. He previously led SEO at Shopify, G2, and Atlassian, and he’s become one of more compelling voices in our industry. Kevin’s core argument is that SEO is still effective for the bottom of the funnel, but click volume from SEO is a thing of the past. In his August 2025 Urllo webinar, he said it plainly: “SEO now functions more like a brand awareness and influence channel than a bottom-of-funnel conversion engine.” That’s a fundamental repositioning of what we do. The data behind this claim is stark. Kevin’s research shows that AI Overviews generate roughly 1% click-through rates. Nearly 65% of searches now end without a click to any website. If your entire model depends on that click, you’re building on sand.
Kevin’s November 2025 piece “Budget SEO for Capacity, Not Output” co-authored with Amanda Johnson laid out the new framework: marketing leaders need to stop funding SEO for clicks and start designing budgets around brand authority in AI-first search. His November 4, 2025 Growth Memo put it even more directly: “The currency of the AI world is visibility.” Kevin’s framework for new metrics includes impressions (especially in AI Overviews), share of voice, and brand mentions in community platforms (Which AIMCLEAR has been evangelizing for 20years). Kevin’s December 2025 post “LLM Traffic is Shrinking” revealed that the monthly growth rate of LLM traffic dropped from 25.1% in 2024 to 10.4% in November 2025, showing that even the AI referral traffic isn’t the salvation some hoped for. Kevin’s December 9, 2025 piece “Scoring My 2025 Predictions” provides a masterclass in intellectual honesty, showing what he got right about AI deployment, what he got wrong about agentic adoption speed, and what that means for 2026 strategy. Gotta love a person who is as rigorous in self-evaluation, reason #2,474 we love Kevin.
AIMCLEAR has operated according to these concepts for 20 years (and I for 35 years), which is why we did not have to shift focus much. Call it what you will: Brand Discoverability Systems, Integrated AI Attention Mapping and Brand Growth, Brand Relevance Optimization, Brand Signal Orchestration, Search & AI Presence Engineering, Integrated Discovery, Owning the Discovery Layer, Building Relevance Across the paid media and organic universe, Signal Orchestration: Building Brands Customers Can’t Ignore, Engineering Full Funnel & No Funnel Visibility- just don’t call the next generation of organic late for dinner :).
Great marketing has always sought the sort of authoritative mentions and expert citations that (today) teach AI systems you belong in the answer.
Lily Ray: The Vicious Cycle and What Actually Wins
Lily Ray is VP of SEO Strategy and Research at Amsive. She’s become one of the most trusted voices on E-E-A-T and on what Google actually rewards when evaluating expertise and authority. Lily has a concept she calls “the vicious cycle of SEO,” and it’s essential for understanding where we are right now. At SEO Week 2025, she explained it this way: “SEO tends to follow somewhat of a predictable cycle. First, SEOs find some cool tactic, then Google works on systems to counteract it. This is what I refer to as an SEO gold rush.”
The AI content flood is the latest tactic to fail this cycle. In her December 2025 interview with PPC Land, she observed that “generative AI has intensified the cycle, flooding results with repetitive, low-value content.” Lily predicts “a huge crackdown” on AI spam in 2026, and frankly, we’re already seeing the early signs of that [Marty note: THANK HEAVENS]. Her Tech SEO Connect 2025 summary from December 5, 2025 is required reading. Lily documented how blogs and opinion content now lead in citation type because AI is “lazy” and seeks established frameworks of analysis. User Generated Content is a critical information class, with Reddit as the #1 cited source and YouTube as the second most cited across aggregated AI models.
Her June 2025 experiment, “Which AI Search Tools Are the Most Gullible?” demonstrated just how quickly you can influence LLM answers. Lily’s fictional “SEO rankings” were incorporated by Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, and ChatGPT within 24 hours of publishing. This shows both the opportunity and the vulnerability in the current system. So what does win? Lily’s answer is unambiguous: authenticity, original research, strong personal brands, and trust. “Building strong personal brands, publishing true expertise, leveraging social platforms, and creating research that can’t be copied are key ways to stand out.” Lily’s perspective on the new KPIs: “SEO is no longer just about rankings and traffic. It’s about how much brands and their products/services and people are mentioned within large language models and also the sentiment around them.”
Jono Alderson: The Surfaceless Web
Jono Alderson is an independent technical SEO consultant and structured data expert who keeps publishing the kind of deep technical analysis that separates signal from noise. Jono’s framing of the current moment is poetic and precise. In his October 30, 2025 piece “Optimising for the Surfaceless Web”, he wrote: “The web we built had surfaces. We could design them, decorate them, and fight for space upon them. That web is gone. There are no more surfaces—only systems.”
Think about what Jono’s take means for how marketers work. The traditional content playbook assumed surfaces: pages that ranked, snippets that appeared, results that users clicked. Jono argues that we’re now optimizing for systems that retrieve, reason, and synthesize. Every day, the surface of the web is scraped, compressed, and folded into the models that power the systems we increasingly rely on. In that process, most of what we publish doesn’t survive contact. His September 24, 2025 piece “Machine Immune Systems” pushed this further: “The future of marketing isn’t storytelling. It’s engineering trust into the systems that machines depend on.” And in “Stop Selling” from September 3, 2025, he was even more direct: “Stop trying to make every page a conversion engine.”
Jono’s June 25, 2025 piece “Everything is Now Opaque” at Search Engine Land captured the paradigm shift: “You’re not optimising for a visitor anymore. You’re trying to be included in a model’s reasoning.” Marketing used to be a game of visibility with dashboards and attribution models. That era is over. Intelligent systems now mediate how people discover, evaluate, and interact with brands. His October 25, 2025 piece “The Hotmail Effect” offers a fascinating counterpoint: in an era of AI-generated polish, authentic human signals like an old Hotmail address might actually be trust indicators rather than red flags. We engineered trust as a design problem for a generation. Now the signals are inverting. In Jono’s view publishing original research, expert interviews, and breaking information, the kind of content that establishes genuine authority, and can’t be replicated by AI systems scraping existing material.
Bastian Grimm: The Crawl Budget Crisis and Technical Resurgence
Bastian Grimm is CEO of Peak Ace AG and the 2019 European Search Personality of the Year, When Bastian says something works, it’s because he’s tested it at scale. His core warning is about the crawl budget crisis. In his Majestic “SEO in 2025” interview, Bastian explained: “Right now, we have this content explosion. It’s creating real challenges for Google. They’re struggling to crawl and index it all.”
This warning was validated by the May 2025 “indexing purge,” when millions of pages were deindexed. The assumption that Google can and will crawl everything you publish is simply wrong. Google’s updated documentation from December 19, 2025 states that crawl budget is “the set of URLs that Google can and wants to crawl,” and “wants” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Meanwhile, GPTBot’s share jumped from 5% to 30% of crawl activity, adding another layer of complexity.
Bastian’s priorities for surviving this environment are fundamentals: XML sitemaps, canonicalization, and internal linking hierarchy. He put it this way: “XML sitemaps are a strong signal for Google—also from a canonicalization standpoint. Internal linking makes a big difference.” The December 2025 core update has been described as “the most significant indexing disruption in Google’s history.” Sites with poor internal linking got hit hardest. Three core updates plus one spam update in 2025 alone demand rapid adaptation. Speed of adaptation is now a competitive advantage.
At AIMCLEAR, we’ve responded by tripling down on technical hygiene for every client engagement. The fundamentals have always mattered but now savvy execution is crucial in ways that directly affect whether AI systems can parse and trust your content.
Will Scott: The AI Sandwich Method and GEO
Will Scott is founder of Search Influence and the SMX instructor for Generative Engine Optimization. He’s developed practical frameworks that demystify GEO for agencies trying to figure out what actually moves the needle. Will’s framework shows how link building has shifted: “Then: Backlink quantity. Now: Source authority and AI partnerships.” Links aren’t completely obsolete, but the execution has changed dramatically. What matters now is entity mapping, structured data, and semantic clarity.
Will defines Generative Engine Optimization as “the methodology for getting your expertise featured when AI search engines answer questions in your industry.” That’s a clean, actionable definition that agencies can actually work with. His “AI Sandwich Method” is a most practical framework:
- Layer 1: AI-Powered Discovery, using AI tools for research and ideation
- Layer 2: Human Strategy and Expertise, the irreplaceable strategic thinking and industry knowledge
- Layer 3: AI-Assisted Implementation, using AI to scale the execution
Search Influence explicitly lists entity audits, entity optimization, and schema markup as core services. This is exactly how AIMCLEAR approaches AI integration. We don’t let AI replace human strategy, rather to to multiply human capability. Will’s framework validates that approach and gives it a memorable, branded, structure.
John Shehata: The Panic Year Ends, the Execution Year Begins
John Shehata is CEO of NewzDash and GDdash, and founder of NESS (the News and Editorial SEO Summit). He knows more about how news and editorial content performs in search than almost anyone breathing. John’s framing of the moment is perfect: “2025 was the panic year. 2026 is the execution year.” Media leader confidence dropped from 60% in 2022 to 38% in 2026, according to Press Gazette.
John’s data on traffic sources is essential context. NewzDash analysis of more than 400 publishers shows that 67.51% of publisher Google’s traffic now comes from Discover, not Search‚ up from 37% in 2023. Chartbeat data for roughly 2,000 publishers confirms this at 68%. The search traffic most publishers built their businesses on has fundamentally shifted. The panic was real and now it’s time to execute. His prescription is multi-surface visibility. He argues that “visibility is not only about blue links. AI answers, social feeds, and UGC threads decide which brands get attention.” The Reuters Institute reports that YouTube is now the number one platform publishers plan to invest in for 2026, with a net score of 74.
Aleyda Solis: Google SERPs as Product Listing Pages
Aleyda Solis is founder of international SEO consultancy Orainti and curator of the SEOFOMO Newsletter. She continues proving that technical excellence and human expertise beat shortcuts every time. Aleyda’s observation about e-commerce search in her May 2025 piece “The State of Ecommerce SEO” is striking: “Literally, Google SERPs have become the ultimate PLP. We have the navigation right there, the sidebar, the PDPs.” The Popular Products feature now appears in more than 71% of mobile SERPs for product queries. Google has essentially become a storefront.
Aleyda’s argument about strategic alignment is essential for agencies. In her Advanced Web Ranking interview from January 2025, she explained: “SEO has become more strategic. It’s about aligning efforts with the overall brand, marketing strategies, and product goals. SEO professionals are now expected to think and act like marketers and product managers.” SEO without business context alignment is pointless. On the tactical side, Aleyda emphasizes long-tail query focus. As AI pushes users to refine their searches, queries with 8+ words are 7x more likely to get AI Overviews according to Semrush data from November 2025. “Target and focus more on answering the long tail queries of your users.” The opportunity is in the long tail.
Her advice on reporting resonates with how AIMCLEAR approaches client communication: Our reports should move beyond tables of SEO metrics and instead focus on storytelling, explaining what’s happening, why, and how we’ll achieve the client’s goals. Data storytelling beats raw metrics tables.
Ryan Jones: Brand Search Volume as the North Star
Ryan Jones of Razorfish has been pushing the brand search volume thesis hard, and the industry is catching up. His argument is that branded queries are becoming a more reliable signal of success than positional rankings, given that positions fluctuate wildly. Industry sources confirm that “Google trusts brands that users search for directly” and that “brand search volume is one of the most trusted signals.”
His tool, SERPrecon compares your site against competitors using the same methods search engines use – vectors, machine learning, and natural language processing! (English language only) Compare search results over time and identify the factors that led to ranking changes.
Ryan’s critique of traditional keyword research is important. On LinkedIn, he’s been vocal: “Keyword research based on historical data is outdated. It’s only one piece of the puzzle, and it won’t help you rank in AI.” On link building, Ryan aligns with the industry consensus that tactics are dead, not the practice. BuzzStream’s 2025 research puts it clearly: “Link building isn’t dead. But the old playbook is.” Backlinko’s December 2025 analysis confirms: “lazy, spammy, spray-and-pray link building is absolutely dead,” but quality link building remains valuable.
AIMCLEAR has never focused on link building as a primary KPI- yet our clients get tons of links. Go look at who has linked to this blog over the years. Earning great links is a byproduct of stellar storytelling, PR, and publishing content, tools, processes, social posts, etc., and being highly valuable to users. Great links are similar to earned media, a natural byproduct of greatness, paid and organic amplification.
Jes Scholz: Quoted First Beats Ranking First
Jes Scholz, an SEO futurist and growth marketing consultant, has articulated what might be the cleanest reframe of the current moment: “Search is no longer about ranking first; it’s about being quoted first.” That single sentence captures something essential about where we’re headed. Rankings still matter. Data shows that ranking number one gives you a 33% chance of AI Overview citation according to Omniscient Digital, but the goal has shifted from positional dominance to citation authority.
In her December 4, 2025 Near Media podcast appearance, Jes discussed the emerging consensus around brand salience, not keywords, as what determines visibility. She emphasizes brand salience across all Google surfaces: Discover, News, Jobs, Shopping, and AI answers. The conversation has moved from “how do we rank for this keyword” to “how do we become the brand that AI systems want to cite.”
Andrea Volpini: Your Next Client Isn’t Human
Andrea Volpini is the CEO of WordLift, with more than 25 years in the semantic web and AI. He’s been building structured data solutions since before most of us understood why they mattered. Andrea’s provocation is the most forward-looking claim in this entire collection. In his May 2025 piece “Future-Proofing Your Content”: “By February 2027, AI agents will guide over $1 trillion in annual global e-commerce purchases—representing 10-15% of the $9-10 trillion market. Your next client isn’t human; it’s an AI agent.”
Think about the implications. If Andrea is right, we’re not just optimizing for search engines or even AI answer systems. We’re optimizing for AI agents that will make purchasing decisions on behalf of users. That’s a fundamentally different paradigm. Gartner calls this transition SEO 3.0: classic search results give way to agentic experiences where autonomous systems discover, judge, and transact. His September 30, 2025 piece “OpenAI Product Feeds” demonstrates how optimization has shifted “from ‘listing’ to ‘reasoning input'” where content becomes “evidence” for AI reasoning. With OpenAI’s commerce feed, we’re no longer optimizing static listings for a SERP; we’re supplying machine-readable context to an assistant that negotiates intent in real time.
Andrea has also introduced “agentic friction” as a diagnostic metric, measuring how easily AI agents can accomplish tasks on your site. His October 9, 2025 LinkedIn post introduced the concept: just like human browsers, AI agents come in all shapes and capabilities. This is exactly the kind of forward-looking measurement framework that separates practitioners who are ready for the next wave from those still fighting the last war.
Duane Forrester: Architect of Semantic Intent and Trust
Duane Forrester, the former Senior Product Manager at Bing and author of the highly respected book How To Make Money With Your Blog, has long been an “elder statesman” of search. While others panicked during the 2025 “indexing purge,” Duane’s long-standing thesis on Digital Knowledge Management became an industry survival guide. One of Duane’s core philosophies is that search has moved from “strings to things,” from matching keywords to understanding entities.
In late 2025, Duane released his most pivotal work yet: The Machine Layer: Helping Businesses Stay Visible, Trusted, and Relevant in the Age of AI-Driven Search. This book is a manifesto for the “Answer Economy,” arguing that the “Click Economy” is dead. In his recent January 2026 discussions, he noted: “Google and AI agents aren’t looking for websites anymore; they are looking for facts they can trust enough to repeat.”
Duane sees the goal as being the authoritative source that populates the AI’s knowledge graph. If your data isn’t structured for machine consumption, you don’t exist in the “Surfaceless Web” that Jono Alderson describes. Duane posits that in an era of AI hallucinations, “Trust is the only currency that doesn’t devalue.” In his “Duane Forrester Decodes” Substack, he explains that brands must pay a “Trust Tax” by over-investing in verified facts, structured data, and third-party citations to prove their legitimacy to LLMs.
In his October 2025 Search Engine Journal piece, “Vector Index Hygiene: A New Layer Of Technical SEO,” Duane warned that your competitive edge now comes from “embedding discipline.” It’s no longer just about traditional technical SEO; it’s about how your data is ingested into vector databases. Duane argues that we must optimize for the “Agentic Journey.” This means ensuring that when an AI agent asks, “What is the best price for X near me?”, your business data is structured via Schema.org so the agent can “transact” without ever visiting your UI.
Jordan Koene: LLM Perception Drift
Jordan Koene is CEO of Previsible and former head of SEO at eBay. He coined a term that may help define 2026 measurement: “LLM perception drift.” In his December 8, 2025 Search Engine Land article “Why LLM Perception Drift Will Be 2026’s Key SEO Metric”, Jordan defined it as “the month-over-month change in how AI models reference and position brands.” Today isn’t so much about rankings as about how AI systems perceive your brand over time. Using data from Evertune, which tracks brand visibility within model outputs, Jordan focused on the project management software space, comparing September 2025 to October 2025. The results show how rapidly AI brand perception is evolving- tools like Atlassian surged while Trello, Slack, and Monday.com posted notable drops. These movements reveal that AI brand perception is dynamic and measurable.
His critique of traditional metrics is precise: “Traditional SEO metrics measure what search engines decide to display. But LLMs don’t index, they synthesize.” Traditional metrics aren’t obsolete, but they’re incomplete without AI metrics. Jordan’s October 27, 2025 piece “The Future of SEO Teams: Human-Led, Agent-Powered” on the job market is equally important. Content-focused SEO positions declined 28% in 2025. LinkedIn found a 37% drop in SEO job postings in Q1 2025. The specialized roles of “SEO writer” and “link builder” are dying. What’s growing is versatile strategists who blend technical, analytical, and creative capabilities. “The best SEO leaders aren’t hiring specialists, they’re hiring aptitude.” Jordan’s operating model for the future: “Human-led, agent-powered.” The question isn’t “Will AI replace me?” The question is “How can I use AI to multiply my impact?”
AIMCLEAR has been amplifying humans with AI for years, helping our team be their best, most creative, effective, efficient, and badass selves.
Michael King: Relevance Engineering and the Death of Checklist Culture
Michael King is CEO of iPullRank and Search Engine Land’s 2025 Search Marketer of the Year. His SEO Week conference has become the gathering place for practitioners who still believe in rigor. Michael’s concept of “Relevance Engineering (r19g)” represents a fundamental repositioning of what SEO practitioners do. His keynote at SEO Week 2025 laid it out: “This isn’t traditional SEO. This is Relevance Engineering. Visibility is a vector.”
Michael’s technical insight about passage-level optimization is crucial. His May 27, 2025 piece “How AI Mode Works” explains: “AI Mode introduces passage-level retrieval instead of page-level indexing.” This means your content is being evaluated at the paragraph level, not just the page level. The retrieval systems use cosine similarity and vector embeddings to determine relevance—if you have a cosine similarity close to one, that means highly related; close to zero means not related.
His critique of the industry is sharp: “SEO is a checklist culture. Think about your audits. You’re missing a lot of stuff because you’re just like, oh, yeah, the best practices say this.” Checklist culture is dead because AI systems don’t care about your checklist; they care about relevance. In an interview, he asked: “Do you all really want to stay the janitors of the web? This is our moment to really stand up and be something different.” Michael’s work uncovered evidence from Google leak documents about “siteFocusScore,” an actual metric based on “site2vecEmbeddingEncoded” compressed vector embedding. This is the kind of technical depth that separates signal from noise.
Eli Schwartz: Traffic Is Down Because of Clicks, Not Impressions
Eli Schwartz is author of *Product-Led SEO* and growth advisor to Tinder, Coinbase, Zendesk, and Shutterstock. His framework for thinking about organic growth as a product function rather than a marketing tactic has influenced how AIMCLEAR structures engagements.
Eli’s September 4, 2025 piece “AI Hype and the Enduring Reality” cuts through the panic: “Search traffic is down because of clicks, not impressions. Yes, traffic is down, but that’s because of the enormous changes and efficiency that Google has added to search results. But traffic is not down because users have suddenly stopped searching.” This distinction matters enormously. Impressions remain stable. Demand hasn’t disappeared. Google has just gotten more efficient at satisfying queries without clicks. Understanding this helps marketers respond strategically rather than panicking.
Eli’s advice on vanity metrics in his GTMnow piece “How to Do SEO Right in 2025” is blunt: “Traffic is a vanity metric. Rankings don’t pay the bills. Great SEO shows up in CAC, leads, pipeline, and revenue.” He emphasized mid-funnel content as the opportunity, queries that aren’t obviously transactional but directly impact purchase decisions. The example: “difference between South Beach and Miami Beach,” that’s a middle-funnel query that directly impacts a purchase decision.
His Product-Led SEO philosophy: “The most potent form of SEO is a product or service that, by its very nature, creates a valuable experience for the user.” Eli’s most important nuance: “Not every company should invest in SEO. If people aren’t actively searching for what you sell, you’re shouting into the void.” Context matters. One-size-fits-all SEO advice is over.
AIMCLEAR’s Perspective
We’re preparing for a world where your next customer isn’t human. Google’s just announced “Universal Commerce Protocol”, a standard language for AI agents (like Gemini) to browse, negotiate, and buy on behalf of humans. By early 2027, AI agents will severely impact annual e-commerce purchases. Marketers are optimizing for search engines, and autonomous agents that will discover, evaluate, and transact on behalf of users. That’s a fundamentally different paradigm, and it requires thinking about “agentic friction”: how easily can AI agents accomplish tasks on your site? Content has become evidence submitted to systems that reason in real time.
Mythogenesis is the art of making brands beloved and immortal. We help build brands that endure, legends that live in the minds of humans and machines alike. Brands that survive every platform shift, every core update, every technological upheaval are the ones that earned their place in culture through genuine value, authentic expertise, and stories worth retelling. They became part of how people understand their category. When you build a brand that people genuinely love, that experts cite without being asked, that communities reference organically, you’re earning permanence. Algorithms change. Platforms rise and fall. AI systems will be rebuilt and retrained. A beloved brand persists because it’s woven into the fabric of how the world thinks about what it does. That’s mythogenesis: building something that outlasts everything.
The click economy is dead, and we’re not mourning it. When AI Overviews generate teensy click-through rates and nearly a high percentage of searches end without anyone visiting a website, clinging to traffic as your north star metric is a strategic failure. AIMCLEAR has always focused on what actually drives business outcomes in this environment: visibility, brand authority, and citation-worthiness. The currency of the AI world is visibility, impressions in AI results, share of voice, brand mentions across community platforms. We’ve been evangelizing this for two decades, hell since before the internet, which is why we didn’t have to pivot when the ground shifted under everyone else.
Technical SEO is a survival infrastructure not a commodity. The May 2025 indexing purge wiped out millions of pages. The December 2025 core update was described as the most significant indexing disruption in Google’s history, and sites with poor internal linking got hammered. Crawl budget is at Google’s discretion. Sitemaps, canonicalization, internal linking hierarchy- these fundamentals determine whether AI systems can even find, parse, and trust content. We’ve tripled down on technical hygiene across every client engagement because the margin for sloppiness has vanished.
Brand authority determines AI inclusion, (almost) full stop. The most popular brands receive exponentially more features in AI Overviews than smaller sites. Google trusts brands that users search for directly. This means branded search volume has become one of the most reliable signals of success, likely more reliable than positional rankings that fluctuate wildly week to week. The question has shifted from “how do we rank for this keyword” to “how do we become the brand that AI systems want to cite” and customers remember at purchase time. Being quoted first now matters more than ranking first.
The old playbook is a liability. Keyword research based purely on historical data won’t help brands rank in AI. Link building as a spray-and-pray tactic is absolutely dead (though earning quality links through stellar storytelling and genuine value remains powerful). Checklist culture, running the same audit against the same best practices, misses the point entirely because AI systems don’t care one rat about your dumb checklist. They care about relevance at the passage level, evaluated through vector embeddings and cosine similarity. Your content is being judged paragraph by paragraph, not page by page.
Authenticity and original thinking are competitive moats. AI has flooded the web with repetitive, low-value content, and a massive crackdown is coming. The winners will be research, expert interviews, breaking information, the kind of content that establishes genuine authority and can’t be replicated by systems scraping existing material. User-generated content has become a critical information class, with Reddit as a highly regarded source along with YouTube cross-aggregated AI models. Community presence isn’t optional anymore.
Publisher traffic has fundamentally restructured. Most publisher traffic from Google now comes from Discover, not Search, up from less than half in 2023. Platform publishers plan to invest aggressively in YouTube this year. The search traffic that entire business models were built on has shifted underneath them. Multi-surface visibility across Discover, News, Shopping, and AI answers isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s mandatory for anyone serious about organic discoverability.
(Nascent, Perhaps Temporary) New metrics are emerging, and we’re building around them. LLM perception drift—the month-over-month change in how AI models reference and position brands—is becoming a defining measurement for 2026. Traditional SEO metrics measure what search engines decide to display, but LLMs don’t index; they synthesize. We need both: the fundamentals that ensure discoverability, and the AI-native metrics that track how machine perception of your brand evolves over time. The tools are catching up. The frameworks are solidifying. The panic year is over. Now we execute.
