SEO is dead. Get ready for AIO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t the game it once was. For the past few decades, SEO informed countless decisions that marketers and copywriters made when building a website—from the overarching content strategy down to the specific word choices used in each heading to search-engine marketing to get to the top of the page.

But the large language models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and their peers are upending how we think about search and, in turn, how we build websites. ChatGPT already fields more than 2.5 billion search queries a day—still a fraction of Google’s 13 billion daily searches, but a steadily growing slice of a particularly valuable pie.

Google’s response has been to introduce AI-powered summaries for search results, the latest in a series of efforts to cannibalize their core product: search (and, more importantly, paid search).

Sure, the summaries provide links to the source material, but those links are going largely unclicked: a Pew study found users are much less likely to follow a link that’s presented in an AI summary than when no AI summary is present.

It’s all a part of “zero-click search.” Like any other web service, Google, Copilot, ChatGPT and others want to keep users within their ecosystems as much as possible. By scraping content from websites (including yours) and displaying it in search results (albeit with some considerable accuracy issues), they’re extending the amount of time users spend within the controllable, trackable and analyzable confines of their, not your, product.

You may have already noticed a drop in Google traffic to your website in the past year. While that traffic is unlikely to return, opportunistic “artificial intelligence optimization” (AIO) services have cropped up with the promise of getting your site ranking higher in AI search results. Website builders such as Wix and Squarespace are even offering pointers for how to make your site AIO-friendly.

Before you go rushing to hire an AIO agency or rebuild your website from the ground up, ask yourself these questions and the implications for your marketing strategies.

1. How will AIO affect my search branding?

Even if you’re OK with trading search traffic for visibility in AI results, that brand visibility is largely out of your control. For starters, there’s no guarantee an LLM will get the facts of your business right. Misinformation is rife: in a 2025 study, ChatGPT encountered a 67% hallucination rate when fed straightforward news excerpts—and that’s far from the worst-performing platform of the bunch.

For now, AI results are much more oriented around text than images. Compared to the search results of yore, the icons for brand logos are even smaller and harder to find, often shunted to footnotes (as on ChatGPT and Copilot) or to a sidebar (Google). Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode will display product photos—if they are tagged with descriptive alt text on your website and otherwise optimized to meet Google’s search and shopping criteria—but these are often found much further down in the results than they would be via traditional search.

AI is also influencing search behaviours in ways that can affect your brand. The trend toward more detailed searches based on human speech patterns is accelerating away from the simple two- or three-word strings we would clunkily type into our phones or laptop keyboards. But until Google’s Keyword Planner shows us which questions lead to your business appearing in AI results, we’ll be operating somewhat in the dark here.

The reality is that you have to think about your brand in the same way that an AI crawler would. In other words, all that beautiful web design and imagery on your site is for naught; text rules the day. Ask yourself:

• How am I describing my business on my website?
• Am I including relevant geographic, pricing or technical information that searchers would use to narrow down their queries?
• Am I using alt text to convey relevant information found in photos or other images?
• How do my products or services answer the questions that customers are asking Google, Perplexity, ChatGPT or Copilot?
• How are other sources talking about my brand—and how can I get these third parties to talk about my brand in a favourable light?

You’ll need to strike a balance between crafting unique, information-rich messaging that can be scraped by AI crawlers while maintaining a coherent brand voice for the, uh, more “organic” users of your website.

2. How will AIO affect my SEO strategy?

We all remember the days of keyword stuffing and other sketchy marketing tricks attempting to hack Google’s search algorithms. Many websites became casualties of their own SEO efforts, sacrificing a consistent and authentic brand expression to a digital strategy that chased search results above all else. Google got wise to the shenanigans and punished flagrant offenders while updating its algorithms to reward well-credentialed, back-linked content.

Some technical aspects aside, the best practices for AIO are already covered by a comprehensive SEO strategy: copywriting that’s concise, conversational and answer-driven (kind of like the content you’re reading right now!); websites that are logically structured and easy to crawl; reviews and links that burnish your credibility and authority. If you’re following current recommendations, keep doing it and don’t waste your marketing budget on another consultant.

What you should change (if you haven’t already) is how you interpret your website’s analytics. Click-through rates from your search efforts could already be suffering. But clicks have always been a relatively crude metric for understanding how and why people interact with your website. Not all clicks are created equal. It could be that you’re losing some low-impact clicks from users looking for basic information that can be readily found via an AI summary while traffic from users more likely to purchase your services or wares has remained stable.

You won’t know unless you contextualize any search-related metrics with conversion metrics to determine whether your SEO strategy is still supporting your business goals.

3. How will AIO affect my digital marketing strategy?

If AI results dilute the impact of your branding and divert users away from your website, you may want to balance that out with a robust presence on the more branding-friendly digital properties. In this context, social media becomes even more important than it already is: it’s where you have much more control over your visual identity and your brand voice.

These platforms are built on eye-catching visuals and thought-stirring copywriting—the backbone of any brand, as true today as it was in the time of fast-talking radio ads and full-page magazine placements.

While LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook are all pursuing zero-click strategies of their own, they at least provide you with analytics to help you understand who’s seeing and engaging with your content. So don’t look at your website traffic in isolation; engagement on social channels can be just as valuable in terms of winning hearts and minds.

And, of course, as of this writing, the AI platforms are beginning to introduce monetization opportunities—we’ll keep you posted as these roll out!

4. How will AIO affect my content strategy?

For expertise-driven businesses—especially in the B2B space and information-heavy industries—content strategies remain an essential means of reaching target audiences. As with SEO, the more high-quality content you have on your website, the better your chances are of appearing in AI search results.

If you’ll excuse the repetition, the answer to solving answer engines is right there in the name: provide answers that demonstrate your knowledge and experience. In-depth blogs, FAQs and whitepapers are exactly the kinds of content that can accomplish this.

One big caveat: the PDFs MUST be set up to be accessible via proper heading and tagging protocols. If done well, bots will crawl your whitepapers, case studies and reports as if they were websites unto themselves, operating on the same text-oriented navigation principles that screen readers use to help sight-challenged users.

Making PDFs accessible is time-consuming (our agency can help you with this!), especially if you’re working with an existing document instead of starting from scratch, but doing so is now a more worthwhile endeavour than it has ever been before.

What’s inescapable is that you still need to put your content in front of humans and have those people engage with it to impact your rankings. Social media (and to some extent, email marketing) is the key to this engagement. Whether organic or paid, a link click from LinkedIn, Reddit, X or any of the Meta properties is invaluable if it results in your content being consumed—even more so if those users share your content with their networks, review your product or service, and, ideally, backlink to your content on their website.

And so we find ourselves back at the question that has dogged digital marketers since the first utterance of the phrase “content strategy”: How do we get people to engage with our content?

With so much AI-generated content flooding blogs and LinkedIn posts—completely sullying the beloved em dash in the process—fresh, professional copywriting is arguably more necessary today than it was just last year. The stilted, uncanny nature of ChatGPT-sourced text has lowered expectations, giving your brand the opportunity to speak to your audience in fresh and fulfilling ways.

Cut the cliches. Take a buzzsaw to the buzzwords. Spice up a wall of text with original photography and dynamic design. Stake out a perspective that shakes assumptions. Go deep on proprietary research and weave it into a narrative instead of turning data points into the boring old bullet points. Do something different.

Or if you’re looking for help, give us a call—our graphic design, content creation and digital strategies can keep you in the game, even as the goalposts continue to move.