- Kiera Carter
- Sep 30
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 3
If you only look at LinkedIn, you might think "SEO is dead" or that search marketing has become obsolete.
But on the ground, at conferences like brightonSEO, marketers are leaning into generative engine optimization (even if they can’t agree on an official name) and experimenting with AI search. And many are succeeding: there’s no doubt that SEOs have the skills to take companies into this new era of search.
The challenge is doing this in a corporate environment, where we can’t just play around with new tools and methods at our whim, where we need buy-in from executives who may or may not “get” it, where we need to rethink our goals and navigate different stakeholders.
In short: we need to build up our soft skills.
That was a core theme in many of the talks at this year’s brightonSEO San Diego, a conference featuring over a thousand professionals across search and digital marketing. Here’s how they suggest navigating AI search within your organization.
Start collecting data about your audience
Mellissa Jensen, Director of SEO at Cisco, first established whether her audience cared about these platforms. (Here’s how to find out if your target market is using AI.)
This was low-pressure in the beginning. She set up reporting for four different engines. And every morning, she took a look to see how—and if—her audience was using the platforms. Then, she worked with her sales team to see if any bookings were coming in from LLMs. At first, there wasn’t a lot, then it started to pick up.
“Once we started getting bookings, that's what got the attention of executives,” she said in her talk. “It gave me permission to survey our customers and ask, ‘what are you doing on these platforms? What are you looking for?’” These results gave her the signal she needed to start putting resources together and build out a plan.
Approach your plan like a diversified portfolio
Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor, believes now is the best time to take big swings, “especially when everyone else is so worried about the bottom line that they’re clinging to best practices," he said in his talk. “But you need to do it in the right way.”
Gray said this means two things:
You can’t take random, reckless swings
You need leadership to fund the swings you’ve identified as worth the risk
To get buy-in for these big, calculated swings, you’ll need to present your plan to stakeholders in a language they understand. “What they understand is portfolios, so you need to present a balanced portfolio,” he says. Here’s what that looks like...
60% of resources go to bread and butter: Core activities that consistently generate revenue.
25% go to green shoots: Emerging initiatives that have shown traction but haven't yet matured. “There’s more risk than bread and butter but still decent ROI,” he said.
15% go to moonshots: “These probably won't work, but if they do, it will be so good for us. It’s the moonshots that put companies on the map.”
Build trust through transparent reporting
Brie E Anderson, owner of BEAST Analytics, spoke about how to increase client trust by providing clear, transparent reporting you can easily act on.
“The problem is that we've been sharing our internal reports with external people,” she said. If you’re doing this, you’re essentially asking clients to do your job for you. It’s our job to look at the data, tell the client what the data says and how we will act on it, she said.
Anderson suggests using internal reports for analysis and decision making, then translating that data into a separate, external report for clients.
In the external report, include your KPIs at the top, then address the objective immediately after, before the client can get to it. You’re essentially saying, “hey, I’m not hiding anything. Revenue is down.” Anderson explained that this disarms clients and builds trust.
In the next section, tell them why and what you’ll do next, including one thing you’ll test. “You’re not going to pick seven things to test. You’re going to pick one,” she said. The report should say something like, “based on our findings, this is what I recommend we do next.”
Be proactive about education
“We’re in the midst of one of the biggest platform shifts ever, as big as web to mobile,” Andrew Yan, co-founder and CEO at AthenaHQ, said in his talk. When you think of it that way, it’s reasonable for there to be some growing pains and misinformation among stakeholders. “Its easy for leadership to point to the traffic numbers and say, ‘hey, traffic is down. What’s up?,’ but it’s another step to help leadership understand the nuance of AI search.”
That’s our job as search marketers. And it might mean adjusting our KPIs for LLMs and educating leadership about the differences between Google and AI search, most likely both.
Create a playbook for the entire organization
Everyone in the organization has a role in generative engine optimization, and that’s a new challenge for search marketers used to working autonomously.
Once Jensen’s team established their metrics and KPIs, they built out a playbook for every relevant team. “I thought this was really important for us at Cisco because we’re a pretty large org— 90,000 people—and everybody has an opinion about what to do and how to do it,” she said.
But the playbook distilled all of their learnings in one place and provided a map with a north star. This is helpful when she’s talking to a leader in another department. “I take out the playbook and drop them down into their domain,” she said. She also pulls them back out so they can see the whole picture, including why their piece matters to the larger organization.
This playbook is 125 pages long, so she doesn’t expect leadership to look at the whole thing. “But the fact that I have it, and they have access to it, gives them confidence in our ability to move the organization forward.”
Nikki Lam, Head of SEO at NP Digital, seconds this team effort. “Go meet with content, PR, and social media and figure out how you can start rowing in the same direction,” she said. “Figure out what works, figure out what doesn’t work, and bring those learnings with you before you decide to get into all of these platforms. Once you have learnings and success, then you build and scale from there.” Importantly, “this approach gets you buy-in and builds confidence,” she said.
Ground your goals in reality
AI marketing expert and consultant Britney Muller asks an important question when marketers come to her with vague goals like, “we want to use AI to help with marketing,” “we want to use AI to generate leads,” or “we want to use AI to handle customer service.”
Her response: “What do you mean?!”
“We have to get specific,” she said. “AI isn’t a magical thing. It’s a really specific technology that we need to pipe into a workflow to make sense.”
In the customer service example, hopefully they come around to something like, “use AI to categorize support tickets by urgency and route them to appropriate departments.” That’s specific.
As you and your team are leaning into AI to help with your goals, perhaps in tandem with senior leaders in your company, it’s important to consider your regular tasks and workflows and how AI can improve them. “AI is not a hammer and everything a nail,” she said. “Working with AI is not the goal. The goal is solving valuable real-world tasks that you regularly do.” (Check out the prompts and workflows from her keynote here.)
From there, “have the courage to implement imperfectly,” she said. “The road to AI success is truly paved in failure. AI researchers know this. Data scientists know this, but we as an industry really have a lot to learn when it comes to AI. We can’t wait for the perfect path to emerge, because it won’t.”
If you've noticed a theme, it's that a thoughtful approach to experimentation and scale is crucial. A smart AI search strategy is about leading with intention and grounding your plan in data and cross-team collaboration, not following hype or taking short-sighted swings that don’t make sense for your audience or brand.
