AI has transformed how people discover brands and make purchasing decisions. How your business adapts (or not) to this massive shift will largely depend on whether the C-suite views it as a temporary fad to be ignored, a disruption to be weathered, or an opportunity to be seized.

Executive teams might like to talk about innovation and risk, but in practice they can be a lot more cautious. Traditional SEO created a comfort zone for the C-suite built around a list of relatively clear inputs and outputs that appeared to provide a level of data-driven predictability. The arrival of AI, and AI Search, means the old SEO playbook will become increasingly unreliable.

As the CMO, it falls to you to champion the necessary changes in approach. Here are some arguments you can use to build your business case for an AI search strategy.

AI is changing consumer behaviour

Microsoft added Generative Search to Bing in 2023, transforming how many users search for and interact with information. Google announced their own advancement in AI Search at their I/O event in May 2024, before beginning the phased global rollout in May 2025.

Also in May 2024, Google embedded AI Overviews into its SERPs, giving users a quick summary of information without needing to click on any of the organic search results below.

Plus, search engines are no longer the only option, particularly for anyone wanting more specific, tailored, or nuanced answers. Students are using Copilot and Gemini to speed up research, complete with sources. Users are asking ChatGPT for how-to advice. Consumers are prompting Perplexity for solutions to specific problems, including product recommendations.

Your content isn’t just competing for clicks anymore. It’s competing to become the raw material AI systems use to generate their answers.

Search is undergoing a great decoupling

For decades, the formula for search success was straightforward: rank high, get clicks, drive revenue. Your marketing team could draw a clear line between keyword rankings and business results.

That model is breaking down. Higher keyword rankings and SERP impressions no longer correlate with increased website traffic.

This decoupling isn’t a temporary glitch. According to Gartner, AI chatbots and virtual assistants are set to reduce search engine usage by 25% by 2026.

It’s the new reality of how search works, requiring a complete rethink of the customer journey, as well as how your brand and your content fits within it.

AI-powered Search features now extract value from your content without always sending users to your website. When an AI Overview references your content to answer a query, you get the brand visibility (of sorts), but not the click. The brand touchpoint has still happened even if you can’t capture it with the usual SEO reporting.

How you frame, justify, and measure your search marketing activities internally will also need to change. SEO is still a part of the mix, but optimising your content for search engines and their ranking algorithms is no longer enough by itself.

The growth levers have changed

Brands that relied on organic search traffic alone to fuel growth will find this approach increasingly less effective. Traditional metrics such as rankings, traffic volumes, and click-through rates have become incomplete measures of SEO performance.

Volatile numbers, failed predictions, and inconclusive returns will quickly erode the patience of internal stakeholders.

And while your team celebrates last month’s keyword rankings, your competitors might already be capturing customers through AI-generated answers that cite their expertise or recommend their products, not yours.

Alternatively, you can frame AI search as an opportunity to get ahead of the competition. Lean into AI search with new metrics which align more closely with a multichannel, multimodal, customer journey that is less reliant on visits to your website. And cultivate the ideal conditions for LLMs to surface your content more often, establishing your brand as the go-to source in your industry or field of expertise.

Evolution, not revolution

A new AI search strategy should expand and evolve your SEO strategy.

This is particularly true when we’re talking about Google Search features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, where we’re still talking about your brand’s visibility within the SERPs.

The same team that built your organic search presence can also lead your AI search strategy. The work your SEO team does around content quality, technical optimisation, and brand authority building remains crucial. AI systems still need well-structured, credible content to reference and cite.

What the team focuses on and how they measure results will need to change. Instead of chasing rankings, the focus will be on building comprehensive topical authority. Instead of optimising individual pages for specific keywords, the focus will be on creating content LLMs can easily understand and extract information from.

Don’t be surprised if your SEO team is already aware that change is afoot. AI search is a hot topic in SEO circles. Even so, implementing the necessary changes may still require some training to acquire the necessary skill sets and collaboration to determine what an AI search strategy might look like in practical terms for your business.

These discussions will also help you to provide greater clarity and reassurances to your executive stakeholders as you strive for top-down alignment on goals, metrics, and an achievable roadmap.

Change won’t wait for you to be ready

In the early days of SEO, everything was built on speculation and experimentation. What worked evolved into best practices. Similarly, AI Search and LLMs are very much emerging technologies. Right now, we’re all researching, theorising, and experimenting for how best to optimise websites and content for LLMs.

In time, new methodologies and frameworks will emerge. But that doesn’t mean you have to wait to start making progress and build on your existing Search programs.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform search. It already has. The question is whether your brand will thrive from this transformation or be left behind by it.

Read our new e-book on how to create an AI search measurement strategy.