No matter how a patient finds you, it’s important you’re there, everywhere and visible, so you can be a recommendation regardless if it’s Google making it or ChatGPT.
The world is changing. It’s already changed. Google’s not the core player anymore, searchers now flock to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and TikTok – and where your patients go, we must follow.
Search is not falling apart, it’s just fracturing, segmenting and changing.
Patients don’t stop wanting products or stop searching overnight; they’re still there, but they’re no longer in one place – and they don’t want information the same.
The positive news? Agencies like ours know how to react. We’ve been expecting this for 10 years and planning for it, studying it. SEO has not changed; the principles remain the same: create valuable content, solve the right problems, be original, earn trust and build authority.
We’ve helped our clients stay ahead of the curve for years. Whether it’s a new Google update or the emergence of AI SEO, we’ve planted strong and stable roots for our clients so they never slip out of search or get left out of new models.
Because let’s face it, if you’ve been wiped out with new updates and new systems, you never had a strategy in the first place; you had a shortcut.
AI is causing a slight change in search behaviour, but not consumer behaviour. Users experimenting with LLMs and Generative Search do so for zero-click answers and product comparisons – meaning they’re seeking information. They’ll still cross over to search engines for deeper research and shopping.
AI speeds up content research, briefs, competitor audits and audience profiles, which is great for busy teams like us. But it does not replace strategy, critical thinking and human thought/experience. AI helps us do SEO faster, but we still need to understand the intent to plan long-term.
Only 22% of marketers currently track AI visibility, despite the shift in behaviour, showing a large gap between behaviour & strategy. We track and optimise for AI SEO daily to see where our clients are being mentioned.
GEO is the next step for us SEOs, to ensure your content and brand are trusted and mentioned in the right places to show up in AI-generated answers. We’ve adjusted our tactics to ensure you’re not just visible in SERPs but in LLMs too.
AI SEO is important, but it hasn’t replaced Google, yet. Even with 52% of users using ChatGPT to find answers online, with 27% turning to generative AI for half of their searches, it may seem like a worrying shift in a short amount of time, causing Google to incorporate more AI models into their structure and search.
But AI search is not perfect – and if we’ve realised it quickly, users will too. At the moment, the developing tool still has many limitations, which is why we’ve not put all of our eggs in the AI SEO basket. Google is still very much in charge, still owning 75% of the global search share. Chat GPT is only 2.96% of search traffic.
