You know I believe in SEO. A little “I told you so” never hurt, but only because it’s true. The digital world is shifting under our feet, and the way people search is mutating. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI bots; these aren’t just fads, they’re how people are already finding things. Google used to be the default. Now? Not quite so much. Nostalgia won’t save your business if no one can discover you where they’re looking. The real question is: are you playing this new game or waiting on the sidelines?
SEO still matters. But if you’re only optimizing for classic engines, you’re missing half the map. That’s where AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) comes in. It’s about sculpting your content not just for search results, but for answers. Are your keywords tight? Are you actually answering the question that AI models are trained to surface? Is your site structured in a way that supports intelligent agents? And beyond that, are you thinking about your brand’s presence on social, through an e-commerce storefront, or in the streams of data that AI crawls? These are your new battlegrounds.
So what are you going to do about it?
Fight the river or learn to flow with it? You must pivot and join the process.
The brands that win aren’t the ones pushing upstream; they’re the ones riding the current, gracefully, strategically. And if you want to stay ahead, you’ve got to evolve.
By the way, Adobe just made a huge move in this space by they’re acquiring Semrush. Yes, that Semrush!
In a roughly $1.9 billion all-cash deal. With that, Adobe is officially locking arms with search-data and AI-visibility intelligence. This isn’t just SEO consolidation, it’s a signal of where brand discovery is headed, riding the AI wave rather than fighting it.
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