I recently read an interesting article in Search Engine Land about how marketers are responding to AI search. One statistic caught my attention. Even as marketers begin thinking about how their companies show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI tools, 81% still call what they’re doing SEO.

There are already plenty of new names being proposed for it. GEO. AEO. LLM optimization. I’m sure we’ll come up with a few more before this all shakes out. But I’m not convinced most businesses need to spend much time worrying about what we call it. They need to understand what is changing for their customers.

For years, the search process was pretty straightforward. Someone needed something, went to Google, typed in a few words and received pages filled with choices. Businesses spent a lot of time and money trying to make sure they appeared high enough on that list to get noticed. That’s the world SEO was built around.

AI changes that experience. Increasingly, people aren’t just asking a search engine to help them find information. They’re asking AI to help them understand the information, sort through the alternatives and sometimes recommend what they should do.

That may sound like a subtle difference. But it is not.

Imagine someone looking for a new IT provider. They could go to Google and search for IT companies in their area. If we’ve done our job well, D2 IT might appear in the results. They see our name, visit our website, look around and decide whether we’re worth a phone call.

But what happens when that same person asks ChatGPT, “Who are the best IT providers for a midsized company like mine? Compare them and tell me why I should consider each one.”

Now we have a very different situation. Before that person ever visits our website or talks to anyone at D2, AI may already have introduced us, described what we do, compared us to somebody else and influenced whether we make the cut.

Which leads me to a question I think every business should be asking right now:

What does AI know about us?

The research cited by Search Engine Land suggests this isn’t something we need to worry about someday. We need to address it right now. Sixty-six percent of the marketers surveyed said they had already used an AI tool such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity to research a marketing vendor or agency. Among C-suite marketing leaders, the number was 81%.

Your customers may already be doing the same thing to you.

Before they call, they may be asking AI who you are, what you do, how good you are at it and how you compare to your competitors. The important question isn’t whether somebody in marketing has figured out which new acronym to put on the budget. The important question is whether the answers your prospective customers receive are accurate and whether your company is showing up in the conversation at all.

That doesn’t mean everything we’ve learned about SEO suddenly goes out the window. A good website still matters. Good content matters. Clear information matters. Credibility matters. What other reputable sources say about your company matters. In fact, some of those things may become even more important as AI tries to develop an understanding of your business from information it can find and trust.

What does need to change is our thinking about the customer journey. We’ve spent years trying to make it easy for customers to find us. Now we also need to think about whether AI can understand us well enough to accurately represent us when those customers ask for help.

Start With Your Customer

This is where I would begin, and it doesn’t require a big AI initiative.

Think about your customers. What questions would they ask if they had a problem your company could solve? How would they describe that problem? What would they want to know before deciding who could help them?

Then go ask AI.

Don’t just search for your company name. Ask the questions your customers would ask. See which companies come back and why. Ask about your competitors. Ask AI to compare you with them. Ask what your company is particularly good at. Ask who it would recommend under different circumstances.

You may like what you learn. You may find some holes. You may discover that AI has a pretty good understanding of your company but doesn’t associate you with an important service you provide. You might even discover that a competitor is showing up for something you do better than they do.

Any of those answers are useful because now you’re looking at AI search from the customer’s side of the table.

The Search Engine Land article reports that marketers are already putting an average of 24% of their search or content budgets toward AI search visibility. I’m not suggesting every business should immediately move a quarter of its SEO budget somewhere else. This market is moving too quickly for that kind of blanket advice.

I am suggesting that customer behavior is changing, and that’s worth paying attention to.

There will be consultants who will tell you that you need a completely new strategy for GEO, AEO or whatever acronym wins next month’s popularity contest. Some of them may be right. But before we make this more complicated than it needs to be, I’d start somewhere much simpler.

Start with your customer.

Find out how they are beginning to use AI. Ask the questions they are likely to ask. See what AI tells them about you. Then use what you learn to decide what needs to change.

We’ve spent a long-time helping businesses get found on the internet. AI adds a new wrinkle to that challenge, but I don’t think it changes the fundamental objective nearly as much as some people would have us believe.

We still want the right customer to find us, understand us, and trust us.

We just have another place where that first introduction needs to happen.

Tony Olson

President

D2 Worldwide