# Transcript: Is Search Totally F**ked? What Do We Do Now?

**Date:** March 14, 2026 · 10:00 PM  
**Session:** [Is Search Totally F**ked? What Do We Do Now?](/sessions/2026-03-14/pp1148539-is-search-totally-f-ked-what-do-we-do-now)

## Summary

Noor Naseer and Rob Kurtz from Basis Technologies examine how AI is disrupting traditional search, showing that while Google still commands 84% market share, AI-powered search interactions are growing exponentially and consumer preference is shifting toward answer-forward experiences. They present data on declining click-through rates, zero-click interactions, and traffic losses for publishers, while arguing that search behavior itself isn't dying — only the tools and strategies need to evolve.

## Topics

`ai search` · `seo` · `generative engine optimization` · `answer engine optimization` · `zero click search` · `digital marketing` · `consumer discovery` · `paid media strategy`

## Key Takeaways

1. Tools die but behaviors persist — humans are wired to search, and that won't change even as the platforms and interfaces evolve dramatically.
2. Google search CTRs for top pages dropped from 56% to 31% after AI Overviews launched, representing a massive shift in how traffic flows to publishers and brands.
3. SEO, AEO (answer engine optimization), and GEO (generative engine optimization) should not be treated as separate silos but as one unified discovery strategy.
4. Paid media can reinforce authority signals for AI engines — YouTube completed views count toward organic view counts, signaling authority to AI search engines.
5. Search itself isn't cooked — it's marketers with misaligned expectations or who aren't prepared to adapt their strategies who will struggle in this transition.

## Full Transcript

Already been here prior to today? Okay, most people, okay, so you've been here, so it's not your first session, but I imagine you're very clear on what the topic of today is. We're here to talk about search. You know what? I just realized I don't have a clicker. Yes. Fantastic. Thank you, Rob. So we're going to be talking about search extensively today.

Thank you. And why is it that we specifically are going to be talking about it? Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is norna seer. I work at a company called basis, and I am focused on a team called Media innovations and technology, and my responsibility is to lean into areas of marketers and advertisers curiosity, and that includes naturally search in this current landscape, what's going on with AI, what's going on with AEO, Geo, and so many other topics pertaining to advertising.

And I am not going to be talking about it alone. I'm going to be talking about it alongside somebody who has a lot of

space, and that's Rob, yeah, absolutely, big nerd here. Thank you for having me and glad to be here at South by Southwest today. My name is Rob Kurt, so I'm a strategic business outcomes partner at basis, really, that means I specialize in client insight and strategy really evolving how we think about AI, how that's influencing the customer journey, as we'll see, and kind of how people are actually resonating it compared to traditional search and using AI in a lot of different ways.

So before my current role, I actually left a search programming basis, and I've been managing paid search and SEO in some form or fashion since 2005 so I have seen the evolution of Google and of search, and how it's actually being impacted today. And so in this presentation, I'm going to spend a lot of time kind of grounding us in what we actually need to be doing today to really optimize and rank, both for a visual search, which may or may not be dying, as well as AI search, and kind of thinking through as brands and marketers, what we really need to be focused on today. But before we do that, I would love the opportunity for us to introduce basis to you all. So just a little bit about it.

I know not everybody in this room is familiar. We're independently held ad tech company. And just to summarize what we do, because so many digital advertising players out there, programmatic advertising players are out there say, if I were to summarize it very quickly, we're focused on solving the big challenges with the advertising environmental space, and there's no shortage of them. And I've said this every year that I presented at South by Southwest, I used to work at an agency, and I found myself solving problems in the most convoluted and sometimes ridiculous ways, like the most time consuming ways.

So moving over to an organization that's trying to make things simpler and easier, that's something everybody needs. And of course, one of those areas of curiosity and consultation for us is the search space. So with that, we're going to hop over into the very brief agenda. What is it that we're going to cover when we're talking about what's going on with search. I'm just going to drop it into two main categories. One, we're going to talk about this landscape that we're currently in, and how are these tools redefining the way that consumers are seeking out information, and how we're able to reach audiences as well. And then, from the AI search trends perspective, we're going to be talking about, what are these new, modernized and modified search techniques that we need to bring to the table to ensure that our content is going to be as visible as possible, and that we again are going to be able to reach audiences effectively, knowing that for a number of reasons, that you all are here, that Things are changing.

So we're going to do a poll. I always do a poll of who's in the room. I need to know who I'm what, who here works in marketing, or specifically like digital marketing or advertising, okay, who doesn't? Okay, a decent volume of people do not.

I just want to ask a couple people, because just I'm curious. In the room, you raised your hand, what? What do you do? They're an artist, okay?

I want to, like one more person, tell me what you do. You're right here. I run a software company. Run a software company. Okay?

So retire creativity, different spaces. I think there's a lot of different reasons to be curious about this, because search affects, honestly, everything. I've said this in the past, not in the context of my work, but I said it in a very different context. It was at a wedding, and I had a reason why I said it. And I said Google is essentially, God knows everything, because we're sharing so much with search engines all the time.

So there's, there's plenty of curiosity out there. I've got some more build questions to ask folks who are in the digital marketing and advertising space, who here specifically is responsible for anything that ladders Back to Search, okay, people who are here specifically search contingencies. So with that, I've got a question, honestly for everyone. I'm sure people have an opinion on this. Is search totally in trouble? Is it cooked? Is it chopped? Like what is the situation with search right now? So let's do I'll just ask this broader question.

Do you think search is in in in trouble. And wait before you answer. There's, there's two variations in the question, do you think that they're in big trouble, or do you think that it's in trouble? So first, I'm going to go in big trouble.

We got some hands who thinks it's just in trouble. Okay? Majority of people who thinks it's not in trouble at all, no problem. Okay, okay, you got a variation, I would say, like, big trouble and no trouble was like, probably equivalent, actually.

Now I didn't contextualize the question at all. What I did do is I just asked, generally speaking, what do you think? And something that Rob and I have been talking about is the fact that overall, is it what's going on with the search providers? Is it what's going on to marketers who want to plug into these spaces? There's many different ways to interpret this question, and that's what we're going to lead into today. So what's happening in search?

I'm sure there's no shortage of folks that are looking at headlines. We're not going to read each one of these, but we know that traditional search, which once had dominated, is shifting in many ways. We're seeing this AI traffic on the rise, and that there's more and more zero click activity taking place, which is naturally where I think a lot of marketers and advertisers have not just curiosity but concern. Then we have something like this on that we have on the screen. We've got this ranking of top sites with the greatest decrease in SEO. So over on the left, I know not everyone has seen all of these sites.

These are kind of mid tail sites for people with that advertising slash digital marketing world. I even remember some of these sites from my consideration set lists back, oh God, I don't want to admit that I used to build consideration set lists. And they're seeing this massive decline in terms of how much web traffic has pulled down from 2024 to 2025 as a result of these like shifting trends on the flip side, where they're seeing the largest increase. What's the top ranked site is chat GBT. So not, not exactly a surprise given the conversation we're having today.

Also, we wanted to highlight that there is no shortage of visibility around how much we as just general consumers are being encouraged to do this type of alternative consumption because of what you know. And Rob is going to talk about this a whole bunch as well, but we want to search. But we want to search in many instances as efficiently and effectively as possible. And this ad from perplexity for especially for any squid game fans, I think this is, this is going to resonate. I'm going to go ahead

and play this. I'm play

this Hello. Answer three questions. Temperature drop, wow. You. Mr. Lee, he just says, I'll pop your lubetu,

number one, detergent and vinegar will get it right out of the detergent and vinegar. We'll get

it right out. Me. So I think that was really a beautiful depiction of what it is that leads to us sometimes wanting to evade the messy middle, which I think is terminology that's oftentimes being used in the search space, where you have to go through those blue links if you want to answer fast, then you're leaning towards AEO.

And this is a beautiful use case for when you may want to be doing that. And I think more and more of us, on the day to day, are encountering those circumstances. Some folks in the room may have seen this at the Super Bowl, but we also want to share the other side. Where are there other areas of concern that we have? And it's that are we going to start having AEO and geo be impacted in big ways with ads coming to these spaces, and what are our feelings about that? We're not going to do deep exploration into this for the purposes of today's presentation, because we want to focus on strategic suggestions and frameworks. But we did want to share this commercial just as just to see the other side of the coin. So let's go ahead and play this.

How do I communicate better with my mom? Great question. Improved communication with your mom can bring you closer. Here are some techniques you can try. Start by listening really. Hear what she's trying to say underneath her words. Build conversation from points of agreement. Find a connection to shared activity, perhaps a nature walk, or the relationship can't be fixed. Find emotional connection with other older women on Golden encounters, the mature game inside that can I hubs with roaring cougars. What would you help me to create your profile? What's the difference

between me and you? Okay, so ads are coming to AI, but they're not coming to quad, which is interesting.

We'll talk a little bit more about that down the pathway. It's just interesting to say we're not planning on monetizing this right now, which you know, for some of the ups in the room, we're looking to take advantage of these spaces. But we'll leave that there, and I'm going to hand over the reins to rob to talk more about the landscape. Yeah, absolutely.

And so as we know, as we saw with those two commercials, AI is really rewiring kind of this consumer theory and how we treat search and how we actually search. You saw the complexity commercial. You know, the actor actually didn't visit one website in his search journey, and that's we're seeing that more and more now, and that's called Zero click share, or zero click interactions. And we have a lot of stats digging into that and how to combat that, if that's happening to your brand or publication. So kind of rooting us in our ability to search.

Search is just a innate human behavior. We are curious by nature. We have got some stats coming up and some really rudimentary examples that we have really been wired to search since the beginning of time. Now, search is a huge deal, and because we're wired to search, it is basically the biggest thing that we do as a society. 159,000 searches for Google's happen every single second. That is mind boggling. And in fact, Google, of course, being the majority of those, still has around an 84% market share here in the US. And if we expand that globally, it's actually closer to 90 to 95 and then, given that we are again, innate searchers, we're so curious, we want to search wherever we're at.

So it makes perfect sense that search actually or mobile devices make up the vast majority of searches nowadays. So it's then no surprise that search also drives the largest share of media aspect. And what's fascinating is that search actually has been the leader in terms of where dollars were going since 2011 that's a long, long time from a digital media standpoint. You can see this chart from emarketers. We racked up 2025 where search actually landed, in comparison to a lot of the larger digital media channels, still number one. Of course, what's mind boggling, and again, this is very recent data, with all the activity and human behavior we're seeing from Ai search already know that E marketer, when we're looking at 2029 get those media plans ready. Search still is projected to be the largest share of where your dollars are going to go, and nobody's ever been fired for putting their dollars into search.

You're literally reaching people who are raising their hand looking for an exact product or service that you have you are trying to attain. But one question I would have here is the same search engines that are getting those dollars in 2029 the same search engines that are getting those dollars today. I think that's where we actually might see a lot of disruption. So I mentioned that kind of the evolution of search, and I think a really good motto to explain this is tools die, but behaviors persist.

We have this transient nature about us to be able to move from tool to tool. If our life is becoming easier, we're not using rocks as wheels anymore. We've evolved. We know how to take care of what we're what our nature is telling us our curiosity and using tools that obviously help us get to that experience and much more consumer friendly and candidly, just fast and easy. Sometimes we're lazy. We just want information. As soon as we have that thought pop in our head, so we're no longer really relying on this town crier, if we would, that's that would be a really slow way of getting information.

We're not relying on Yellow Pages or phone books anymore. We had this thing called search engines or search portals that were developed that really allowed us to have that instantaneous like, oh my gosh, I can get this information and have my fingertips experience. It was wonderful. And now we are evolving, and at the very early stages of this, into this AI generative experience. So obviously this is becoming a more answer forward experience.

Again, going back to the verb, likes that he had the user did not even visit one website, and in fact, got all the information he was looking for. So for those who aren't as familiar with search in the room, just kind of going over the three arrows using a little bit of a Swifty term here. So we started with a directory driven era. This was pre Google. You actually had to opt your website into these directories in order to be found, and they were very rudimentary, oftentimes not even looking at the actual keywords in your content. Over time, they did evolve, but ranking for these directories was so easy, you could do a lot of what's now known as Black Hat edits and just keyword stuff your way to the top of these directories then came along, kind of where we're in now, and potentially where we're probably leaving with this more traditional algorithmic search.

So it's still keyword based, of course, but it's also incorporating in your kind of personalized habits. What are your prior web searches? What are the prior pages you visited online, where brick and mortar retailers have you gone because you have your phone in your pocket, logged in Google at all times, so they know everything about you, and they're incorporating that into your organic results. And then in the future, like I mentioned, we're in this AI era, this experience and where everything is going to be answer forward, it's also diversifying, where we're actually seeking out information, and I've got some staff upcoming on that, and it's just becoming easier.

Consumers are actually preferring this method of search well over even the traditional kind of 10 Blue Link experience that Google historically is providing. So this leads us to brand discovery, and kind of a lot of the times happening outside of search. I'll turn it over to Nora to go through next

couple I'll quickly mention that brand discovery is essentially happening everywhere. Now we want a search engine wherever we go, and if we want to just click to the next slide to illustrate exactly that point, this will build. There we go. If you can think of a platform or a website you enjoy, you have an expectation that there is a search engine, like a powerful, algorithmic search engine, that is embedded into it. And these are all examples of where that's happening effectively. I'm sure many people in this room remember not too long ago, Instagram algorithm for search not that great, and it was painful, right?

So they put in a lot of effort to improve their search engine, and so have a lot of these other players and that, again, that's the baseline expectation. Absolutely, when you think AI search, of course, you're thinking chat, TPT perplexity, even when Google's rolling out, but this truly represents what we're talking about today. So kind of, to put this point into more context, when we're looking at Gen Z and where they're actually starting their search, you know, it doesn't start the same way that millennials or Gen X, or kind of the boomer generation, starts their search when they're looking for things like maybe news, how to educational questions. Sure, Google is actually still the priority there. Gen Z is opening Google up first for these searches. But what about entertainment, location specific questions looking for the best food in your area?

Gen Z is not opening Google. In fact, they are running to social media and performing their search there now that the experience has become so much better and again, ingrained in this AI model that gives users the best recommendation for what they're looking for in this process. What about retail people opening up Google for that absolutely not Gen Z specifically is going straight to retailers like Amazon to perform their retail searches. So you really need to think as a brand and a marketer, where, if you are in any of these categories, where you're optimizing for your content and discovery visibility,

also this search is increasingly becoming multi modal.

So you think about old school search, what do we think of I mean, I remember going to the librarian and being educated on Boolean search, because it was all text driven. Now things are changing. Being able to also put in inputs that are image based, audio based, video based, we have now more expectations to that being accessible to us from an input perspective, but increasingly also from an output perspective. So got a example here, and this is for meta Ray bands before we play this.

Does anybody have meta Ray Bans in the room? Anybody recording this on meta Ray bands

got we got a couple folks who do. I think this is, I mean, Matt has been trying real hard to solicit these glasses, and so have a lot of other folks that are offering some version of glasses or goggles or whatever you want to call them. I think this is the first time that it's starting to really resonate with folks, and this is a pretty effective commercial at demonstrating some of the potential that's out there. So let's go ahead and play

thing, a quick mention.

And this is, like an unnecessary aside, I think that the trouble with the glasses that are with shades are like creep right like, right away, there's a fear that somebody has. They're doing this actually, I think I don't work for meta, so I don't know this for a fact, but I believe now they have the clear glasses, so I think it reduces the creep factor and check that I need to be checked on that. I believe that's it, because moving on. Okay, so Google still rules, but search is going rogue, so let's go ahead and highlight this.

And I think we've mentioned this a little bit earlier. From a search market share standpoint, Google's obviously King, and has been for a long time, obviously being important, relevant. But Everything pales in comparison that we're not questioning. It's this, the second chart over here, that's highlighting that there is so much more regular use of search activity, search like activity that goes beyond Google in significant quantities, right?

So we're looking at chat GPT, which is, you know, come out of seemingly nowhere in a very fast period of time, taking up a big piece of where we're doing search and followed by AI summaries, technically a separate product from traditional search, followed by social media, voice assistance and so forth. And by comparison to the chart on the left, where you see everything paling in comparison. On the right, you see it doesn't it's significant, and it's growing Absolutely. And we know search is unquestionably high. There's almost 2 trillion interactions happening within that environment. And when we were doing some research just to see, well, how is AI search being used? How are all those things that nor just went over being incorporated into the consumer journey? It's still pretty small, but 55 billion interactions.

And in fact, as we were giving our research this actually, this stat was updated to over 100 billion interactions, and the growth rate is really what we want to call out here. So AI and these top AI chat bots and generative tools are growing at an incredible rate. So you can see it almost doubled just over the course of a year where search actually has remained relatively stagnant and hasn't really grown that much year over year. Okay, so, yeah, this is a belt salt line.

This one, so we're going to highlight here the fact that people do prefer AI powered certs for a number of reasons. So over on the left, we're highlighting the tabulation of they did this. They did this survey of respondents to say, where do you prefer certs to be taking place. And on the left, they're highlighting many of the more traditional, sub traditional products, some of the other products that are out there where we can be conducting and collecting information so editorial content, articles, blogs, retail sites, brand sites, review sites, and so on and so forth.

It's amounting to roughly a quarter of where that search activity can take place. In terms of preference number two is search engines, and we mean traditional search engine products followed by AI powered search at the top, notably at the top, at 44% so that is where people already have a strong preference. We can talk more about it, because there are different reasons why we use different types of areas for collecting information and going through a purchase journey, but just acknowledging the fact that so much of it is happening is important. Also two other points over here that the majority of search users rely on AI summaries at least 40% of the time.

I believe this is from eMarketer, so the majority of users are using it 40% of the time. What should we note about that? It's a significant it's a significant amount of time that they're relying on it, but it's not yet the majority, and that's because there are several instances in which traditional search or other types of search still have important application or AI summaries, is just not the end of the story. There's more activity that we want to partake in, which is a part of our larger narrative. But then there's also a point, like this one, where Gartner is projecting a 25% decrease in search engine volume this year, which, you know, corals spots with a lot of what we're seeing out there.

But we have to consider both of these points at once, also this point another kind of scary point from the standpoint of advertisers, Google search, CTRs of top pages have fallen since AI overviews launched in May of 2024 so you can see over on the left, in year one, which was 24 CTR on average, was 56% and then in year two, which was last year, it fell to 31% that's a 25% drop, right? And seeing that kind of CTR drop isn't exactly exciting for marketers who are depending on it or have expectations around traditional search products. Yeah, absolutely. Getting into stats that, I think, a little bit scarier in terms of real applications for this drop and kind of this uptick in zero click Share interactions. TechCrunch actually just came out with some really good data on news organizations and news websites and aggregated the trends of traffic in comparison to this zero click share.

So what we're seeing is that, especially at the launch of these AIOs or AI overviews in 2025 that traffic Precipitately dropped at the at that kind of Dawn of when that was rolled out, and when we actually overlay this zero click share that we're seeing on Google, it perfectly aligns. And this is something that we obviously need to be more aware of. What's the type of content you want to be found for? Are you part of that answer? Are you really relying on that traffic, like these news organizations to actually generate users, maybe to sell ads? And so this is something that you have to take into consideration when you're going and creating your content, your discovery systems.

A really good example of this is with future PLC. So in a recent disclosure, they own a variety of publications, Tom's guide, Mary Claire, tech radar, dozens of other sites and publications. They just said that in 2019 67% of their traffic was driven by traditional Google search. What do you think it is today with fast forward, it's only 27% of their overall traffic, an extreme drop just in a few years. So this really represents being able to identify this trend early on and then analyze what you need to do about it to hopefully combat that pretty significant drop in your overall traffic, and not just traffic.

Google search is one of the most qualified traffic sources out there. These are, again, people raising their hand looking for product, service, news, information that ideally you're really well suited to answer. Definitely want to point out here, though, that all is not lost. So future actually really pioneered what we know now as kind of these advanced SEO tactics like AEO Geo, and they even deployed some paid to really reframe how they were driving traffic to all of their publications and they optimize their content, actually leaned into this AI experience to be the answer.

Part of their media kit actually promotes how they are being found and being sourced as the answer in AI search, and that's led to a tremendous uptick in how people are actually finding their publications and their content through channels like Google discover, and so they've actually been able to supplant a lot of the lost traffic that they're not seeing from organic search. Okay, so we want to talk at a very high level a little bit about how these legacy storage strategies are going to demand us to be thinking differently. So we're just going to talk about the thinking aspect for a moment with a little metaphor over here. But right before we get into that, just want to talk about the consumer journey, but uniquely the search journey. And if I was going to have a single point that's worth mentioning about this evolution of search, it's that the consumer wants a combination of two things.

They want confidence in the information that they are obtaining, but they also want control. And the thing about some of these new products is that it feels sometimes, especially in earlier iterations, like we don't have the same level of so those things do need to evolve. It is kind of a case for the messy middle where you do have control and confidence, because you are playing such an important role in making sure that you are doing the audit on the information that you are securing. So from a brand's perspective, you've got a little football metaphor in here.

Brands are being intercepted, and what does that mean? What is it that we need to be thinking about first, just thinking about who holds the ball, and in this case, we mean identifying who is talking about your brand across a variety of different platforms. And there is more and more. This isn't new, right? I think this is something a lot of advertisers and marketers have an appreciation for just given the proliferation of search, social, third party sites, right? Social listening is nothing new, but I think a lot of advertisers have not been holding true to evaluating it at the rate that they need to, especially given this current era that we're in, followed by acknowledging what it is that they're saying, how it is they're saying it, and in relation to that, taking the ball back to what extent can be a part of those conversations, and understand how we need to evolve in our category, as a business, as a brand, and highlight information on our own site, or partake in those other spaces.

Absolutely And so kind of to Nora's point. All of this is really starting with really discovery. We need to reframe, kind of our strategic imperative, regardless if we're optimizing for content, coming up with paid campaign initiatives in rooted in this moment of discovery, where, how and when do you want your content to be found and surfaced. So I'm going to go through this very briefly, because we actually have a strategic framework at the end of the deck that I think is a lot more detailed in how you could actually combat some of the loss of Google traffic, or loss of visibility and discoverability in this new state of AI.

So with that, we have SEO, of course, it's the foundation of what we know in terms of just optimizing your site for discovery, if these bots, both traditional search and AI, can't even access your website, well, you're probably screwed. So you want to make sure that you have that foundational level of edits so your site is accessible. Then now what's being rolled out, you probably see any trades is this new AEO or answer engine optimization and geo generative engine optimization. So AEO is really all about it.

It's been around for a long time. We were deploying these tactics for Google's quick answers 10 years ago, and that's why they're proven to drive some success here, because it's really about being the answer. And then with geo, it's not about necessarily being the answer. It's about being the source you want these AI engines, and even as traditional search evolves to actually come back and reference your content again and again. And so you end up being part of this AI narrative, as opposed to just being this quick answer, which you focus on with AEO.

And then one thing that you don't see talked about a lot is really reinforcing this with paid media. So this gives us the opportunity to really, again, spur a lot of that discovery that you may not be participating in anymore, if you've not even found in Google search, or if these AI search engines aren't recommending you your product or service. But then it can also reinforce and backfill a lot of that content. Paid Google search is actually still a really great mechanism here, even though it is also seeing a lot of the zero click Share interactions that we're seeing with organic search.

The great thing about paid Google search, oftentimes is you're buying it on a CPC or a CPA model, cost per click or cost per action, and in that regard, if somebody does a search sees your ad doesn't click, you pay $0 for that interaction. So it still is one of the most efficient things you can do to backfill traffic loss due to organic search. We'll go into more detail in terms of what we recommend in a little bit. One thing I want to hammer home, too is just the ability to not think through SEO, Geo, apo even paid in silos. And I really challenge everybody in here to think as these is just one strategic imperative that you're building your discovery framework for so that you can take you to really optimize where you need to be.

What type of content are you talking are people talking about for you that you want to be found for? And that has repercussions in all of these different touch points, when you're viewing Google page search as an instance, when you're controlling the keywords, making sure you're getting on you know, queries and prompts that you want to be found for, maybe that you're not being shown organic search right now,

yeah, just as we shift over to the points I was going to mention on the previous slide, like so often, I think we think we know this. We think we know that, yes, at this point, we've thought about it as a marketing or advertising organization or entity or agency, that we should be thinking about these things simultaneously. We're advising our clients to do so. But I think so often people are not thinking about it.

Where do we have all of our teams aligning together? Are we actually making sure that these things are being considered simultaneously? Sometimes people are often they're not, because you have different entities or organizations or teams working on them independently, and now is really not the time to do that. Now's the time to collaborate, absolutely.

So now kind of taking a little bit of a left turn, I think, before we dig into how to optimize for AI visibility and kind of answer that question search in trouble or not really understanding at a very high level how these AI search engines work and how they're really aggravating the data that obviously they're ending up recommending in their Answer engine generation. So it all starts with how these engines, or these llms are ingesting the data, and how they're getting so smart over time, and so they're kind of collecting, chunking, embedding. All of these have a lot more meaning behind them than what we go into today. But what I want you to take away here is that they're not just visiting your site via your little spider bot machine, looking at the keywords and then leaving, they're now able to actually understand the semantics of your site, the themes that you're trying to convey, and they're actually being able to associate that with the rest of the content on your website, as well as everybody else's content websites.

And so that's how it's really formulating a more thorough, thoughtful answer from compared to regular, traditional search, then we have this relatively newer piece, kind of this retrieval, or retrieval augmentation generation rag, where, basically, this is just a fancy way of saying, AI is now double checking itself, so it's starting to formulate the answer based on the prompt you just gave it, and it's looking at its model data, but it's also looking, in real time, doing searches on behalf of your yourself, basically almost like as a mini agent, to make sure that the type of content that it's about to provide as a recommendation is still valid. This is really cutting down on hallucination, hallucinations in the AI search results space. It's why we're not seeing glue in recipes quite as much as we used to this environment. And then, of course, the presentation, this is really from a consumer standpoint, where we see the differentiation from traditional search versus AI search, with AI search is very much answer forward.

And again, it's happening in a variety of different apps and platforms. But really what consumers resonate really well is that it's just getting to the punchline. It's doing the due diligence for you. That might be a scary thing. Candidly, you're not having to go click on those 10 blue links and really do your own research. And obviously these brands, these websites, these publications, are seeing that lack of traffic because AI is not just providing the answer in a really robust manner. So we have some screenshots here.

It's too small to review, but you can really just get the idea of kind of the difference between a traditional search result and these AI results. Even when AI overviews is still present, you can still see it's very much rooted in kind of that traditional 10 Moon link format. The same thing goes for image and video. Commerce is something that's really upcoming. I think the AI search is still figuring out the best way to kind of serve these up and even have the opportunity to book direct in these engines over time. But as you really look at these examples. One thing is extremely clear. The AI search is giving you very robust recommendations or answers. It's giving you a lot of data points to kind of back up those answers. Oftentimes we're not double checking them, as we used to still recommend that time to time, depending upon what you're searching.

But if you really look, if you look from a marketer and advertising perspective, and each point here, you can absolutely see this is a perfect place for an ad, perfect place for a sponsored recommendation, intermixed with kind of these more native or organic recommendations that these AI tools are uploading. Okay, so we're going to take a quick look at a little bit about this middle that I mentioned, the messy middle, and how that's evolving, and looking at it from the standpoint of the purchase funnel. So how is this being changed as we increasingly turn towards these AI search products and chat bots and what have you? And we're expecting a lot of change quickly, if we haven't already seen it today. So just at a high level, like again, thinking about this purchase model, we feel a need in the past, it was all us, including today.

You've got to start things off in the future, things might be kicked off with a chat bot on our side, building a consideration set list, you know, get getting into the weeds of what it is that we want to find out there, because we know we want something today, we're already starting to see chat bots lean into that, or these AI search opportunities and more of that. Moving into the future, we want to go ahead and limit that and lean into very specific recommendations after looking at a longer list, more expectations, even right now to be assisted to leverage some of that AI search, you want to do an evaluation again, same pattern there, and then finally, the making of that purchase. You know, purchase is oftentimes so incredibly personalized. We always expect that we're the ones who are going to, you know, rip the cord on that, or, you know, press the button, what have you.

But we're expecting very soon that we are going to finally be comfortable with AI and surge playing that critical role in enabling that final part of the funnel. So what now is search screwed? Does everybody start to formulate an idea? Got more? We've got more. So quick mention here, and I realize we're really tight on time over here, just what's happening with the future of search, right?

This is the question of the day. Let's acknowledge the challenges, right. Discoverability is lacking for so many of the reasons that we already cited, followed by and there is declining volume like that can't be debated. And if you report to anybody that is responsible for marketing and is concerned about that, yes, like those are valid concerns that have led to the question of the day. So you can call it whatever you want, as far as what's happening with search, you fill in the blank, as far as how challenging it is.

Ultimately, this goes back to something we mentioned at the top. The model has been disrupted. The underlying human behavior has not we will continue to search. I think of this as very similar to a presentation I did a couple of years ago about the cookie list future and how many clients were concerned about the fact that the cookies are going away. How are we going to do attribution? How would we target in impactful and meaningful ways people still use the internet. There isn't a good reason to stop advertising as a result of these the infrastructure changing. We will still leverage search, we're just going to leverage it differently, and ultimately, we're going to show something in just a minute. I know we're tight on time, but we're going to show a pretty extensive Google ad that's highlighting what they're doing to fill the gap.

We'll get to that in a second. But also we wanted to mention this. It's kind of interesting. There was a search engine utilization decline after the pandemic. So of course, there was this big, big incline in 2020 because people were spending so much time at home really getting acquainted with their computers, and that flew into 2021 as we were coming out of the pandemic.

We're seeing that decline over a series of years, and interestingly, with this pickup, again, some of that has to do with the time we were in on a global level. But it also seems that search engine utilization is on an incline for reasons that go beyond our concerns about this decline in search. So something to make of. So here is this lengthy Google ad.

It's 90 seconds, so it feels long, but the thing to take away from it is that there are a lot of new opportunities that are being brought to the table, and whether it's Google or anybody else who has a strong position in the search space, they are doing a good job of highlighting how many different ways they are incorporating new fangled, AI oriented products into traditional search. So let's go ahead and watch this again. It's a little bit long. So

much. It. I do to make it stronger? To make it stronger, consider Adding more triangles to The design. Multi world

be so they're highlighting that multimodal component in there too.

But again, 00, fear about what's going to happen to their infrastructure, because they are ready and reinforcing so many products. So we're going to run through this real quick, the strategic framework, absolutely. This is a nice lead behind kind of after reviewing everything that's changing, evolving, we're not seeing it, maybe in technical numbers, we're seeing the behavior, how consumers are incorporating AI into their daily life, how this kind of adjusting and really disrupting the consumer journey so similar to what we walked through before, kind of giving you more high level points on really how to position yourself, your brand, your product and service, to really be able to gain visibility, gain discovery, both in traditional search and in this new frame called AI experience. So again, I mentioned earlier, this starts with the foundation of SEO.

If you're not doing SEO well right now, you're definitely behind. This is your opportunity to really ensure that your core web vitals are up to date, that you're maximizing the visibility and the ability for these spiders bots machines to be able to actually access the content on your website. So a really good recommendation here, from a Priority Action standpoint, is to make sure that you're really keeping one specific topic per page, really kind of honed in that's going to help the AI engines really understand what you're talking about on, you know, every page of your website, you want to obviously have very clear keyword usage in a natural language in your headers. And then, I think, more importantly, getting a little bit more advanced, making sure that you have the right metadata and schema set up, so that you're actually telling these engines what and how they should be using your data.

And one recommendation I have that's still very early on in development is incorporating llms text files, and this is actually kind of the new robots or sitemap text file that actually allows these AI engines to really come to your website, absorb the data and leave in a very efficient manner, making it dirt easy for them to be able to know what the type of content themes that you're talking about,

the mentions on AEO, and what's happening over there, and reinforcing a point that we brought up multiple times. That's where we're looking for, the direct quick answer on just give me, give me the down and dirty real fast. That's what I'm looking for. And there's a lot of things that a lot of advertisers and marketers have already been doing, but now it's more important than ever to make sure you're showing up in AEO.

So doing those quick answer blocks via Q and A and FAQ, a lot of marketers are already doing it. You're probably not doing it enough. You're not thinking of enough questions. What are new things we need to expand into? I think so often we're doing something, we need to be doing a little bit more.

And then Geo, which we've also already discussed a whole bunch this by comparison of the quick and dirty we're looking for, the long the, you know, the really academic, lean in so we can be cited, referenced and showing up in those AI responses, but also in G geo responses as well. There's a number of different things to consider, to consider when we're showing up as an authoritative source. This is the more complicated thing to do. This demands more of a marketing team, of a content team, to do this level of labor, to bring a really qualified position on so many different things pertaining to a brand.

And of course, we have, we'll have this as a leave behind. You can take a closer look at what doing that work is really going to entail Absolutely. And I think once you've done all these things really well, still using paid as a reinforcement tool is absolutely a priority in today's age, making sure that you're really accelerating the discovery reinforcing authority signals you have the opportunity, at least right now, to use paid to actually show AI that you are an authoritative figure. Your brand's authoritative your product service is the leader in your category. So you can really supplement kind of the organic search loss through paid like I mentioned, with paid search, but then you can actually bring that out and even align your product and services with AI adjacent kind of tactics.

We have, performance Max, AI Max. We'll go into more detail on the next slide. But YouTube is a phenomenal opportunity here when you run you specific YouTube ads and you get completed video views, as long as that video is actually publicly available on your channel, those video views count towards your organic video view count. So all of a sudden, now even a video that you just deployed looks like it has a tremendous amount of viewership, and that is absolutely an identification signal to these AI search engines of authority.

And who do you think they're going to pull from and recommend when somebody is looking for that product or service that that video can answer? So going into a little bit more detail on what we recommend from a paid standpoint, kind of going through some specific channels and ad types. Of course, starting with Google, still the behemoth, and they have a variety of ad products that allow us to really lean in to this AI search experience, AI Max and performance Max, while you're losing some control at times with the keywords of the audience, actually allows us to put ads directly in the AI overviews, or even the AI mode experience, something we're currently testing right now, Bing and Microsoft ads, good old Microsoft ads. We've seen a pretty substantial increase in Bing overall traffic things to copilot.

And they also have a product named performance max that does very similar to what Google Performance Max does. You can use a variety of creatives, and it serves in a variety of different places, search, video, display, etc. But the great thing about their performance Max tool, just like Google's performance Max tool, is that it allows you to actually serve ads in the copilot search experience. And so this, especially if you're a B to B marketer, is a phenomenal opportunity to really place your brand for discovery in that environment.

And then we all know, I'm sure you've seen it in the trades. You've seen the TV commercials chat GPT coming out with their own ad versions here. And so as they continue to refine and roll these out, these are obviously going to be fantastic ways to really interject your brand, product or service into the conversation in that native AI conversational environment. But then there's some AI tools that are not going with ads right now. Perplexity, although they dabbled with ads, are pulled back and are, as of right now, saying no to ads. Same with Claude. I think we're going to keep watching this space very closely. Are they saying no no to ads right now, as they continue to build their tool sets? Probably. Are they saying no to ADS forever? That's yet to be seen. I highly doubt it. There's no way that they're going to say no to ADS forever, just not even a chance go forward to the last slide.

And if anyone has any questions and people want to line up, we've got a couple minutes for those. Minutes for those. But I will make this point. I'm not going to read these points on this slide, but I want to say something else, as far as whether or not search is act cooked, chopped, in trouble, whatever the case may be, search itself is not the infrastructure is evolving appropriately. It is marketers that have misaligned expectations or who aren't prepared to change, who will probably be screwed in the short term. So convincing advertisers to show up differently and prepare in this interim era is really what anybody needs to do, and just continue to stay informed, right?

There's so much evolution. That's why we're not hearing about that many products as frequently as we would otherwise like, because of the stability that allowed Rob to do search work for two plus decades, right? There were so many kind of standard products out there. So we're getting ready for a new era, and that's where we're going to land the plane for today.

And I thank everybody for joining for this session. If people have questions, actually, we do have to hit it one more time. There's something before people leave. If you want the slides, you can scan this QR code so you can get the slides I forgot about that some people probably might have

wanted those. I love the photos, though. I just want to see those.

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*Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6*

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