The Future of SEO: Embracing AI Search
AI search is reshaping SEO, but core strategies remain vital for effective digital marketing.
Welcome back to David Rosam on Digital Marketing. How things have changed since I last wrote to you! Yes, it’s time to talk about AI and search—what you need to do now and where you can continue with the strategies and methods you’ve been using in 2024 and before. One crucial thing to understand is that it’s not all new in 2025, whatever some influencers have been trotting out.
This David Rosam on Digital Marketing provides a simplified overview of AI search and how it affects SEO. I’ll explore this further in upcoming issues.
AI search in a nutshell
Major search engines, such as Google, and Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, utilise their understanding of search queries and vast datasets to provide direct answers to users. This differs from the traditional list of web pages that may contain the relevant information—Google and other search engines place AI search results at the top of their SERPs, with traditional results following. AI search engines, like Perplexity, exclusively deliver AI-generated answers within a search engine environment, thus occupying a space between the two approaches.
AI search goes beyond basic keyword matching and aims to provide more relevant and complete results by considering the context of the search and the user's previous interactions. For example, if a user searches for "best restaurants in Liverpool," an AI-powered search engine might follow up with suggested queries like "what type of cuisine do you prefer?" or "what is your budget?" They may also give a detailed answer, sectioned into best restaurants, best asian restaurants, best Italian restaurants and so on, plus excellent choices at various price points.
Understanding your audience
Your starting point for AI search is where you start any marketing strategy. You need to understand your customer. Do your research, talk to customers and prospects, maybe use AI to analyse your customer data.
Content for informational searches
Content-wise, you should be working with informational searches rather than product purchase key phrases—AI answers tend not to feature products, although this may change. Dive deep into your customers' queries and use clusters of key phrases to create quality informational content to establish your authority and credibility.
Building a Brand
SEO for AI search benefits from building a strong brand presence across many media platforms, including websites, social media, video, and content-sharing platforms. Look for opportunities to spread and establish your brand.
Technical SEO for AI
Technical SEO remains important for AI search. You’ll need fast pages and respectable Core Web Vitals, of course. Ensuring AI bots can access and crawl the website by configuring the robots.txt file correctly and maintaining a well-structured site with internal linking are also essential for AI search optimisation. But schema markup plays a more important role now.
Emerging Trends: GEO and AIO
New trends like GEO (Google Entity Optimization) or AIO (AI Optimization) are emerging. At this stage of the game, I’m sceptical that they’re more than new brands for old SEO, something for agencies to sell and influencers to fill their YouTube channels. Sure, there is a shift towards a more user-centric and context-aware approach, but it’s often little more than what content-aware SEOs have been doing for some time.
And, it’s business as usual for Global Market Share
Much is made of Google’s share dropping below 90% in 2025, but 89.62% is still almost total search dominance. AI search is a small part of the market and a small, although significant, part of Google’s SERPs.
What’s the story?
Let me wrap up this short overview. While AI search is transforming the SEO landscape, many core principles remain relevant—and don’t forget traditional search’s continuing importance. Adapting to AI search involves understanding your audience, creating high-quality informational content, building a strong brand, and maintaining technical SEO best practices. With emerging ideas like GEO and AIO, it's important to approach them critically and not lose sight of proven strategies that deliver long-term value.
Thanks for reading. I hope I’ve given you something to think about.
Please let me know if I can help you with AI search or other aspects of your SEO or digital marketing. Reply to this email, email me directly at david@davidrosam.com or set up a time to talk.
David
David Rosam Digital Marketing
https://davidrosam.com