Tom Critchlow, a longtime search marketer with deep experience, recently shared his opinions of where the SEO industry is today, saying that AI Search is changing business priorities in a way that exposes the weaknesses inherent in SEO today. This transformation means that search marketing professionals need to evaluate the services they offer in order to align better with what is useful for today’s modern search surfaces.
Brand Marketing: The Hidden Pillar Of SEO
Google’s algorithms have long relied on user behavior signals. Google’s founders said that PageRank could “be thought of as a model of user behavior,” showing that user behavior relative to content was important to Google at the very dawn of Google.
What people respond to most online are brands. People could be said to be hardwired to respond to products and service providers they are already familiar with. This phenomenon is called Familiarity Bias, a tendency to prefer things one is already familiar with. Making potential site visitors familiar with a brand is a powerful marketing activity, and that approach aligns perfectly with what we know about Google’s algorithms relative to Navboost and branded search.
SEO Fundamentals Are A Foundation
In an interview with Ross Hudgens, Critchlow observed that the foundations of SEO remain the same in AEO/GEO. Google consistently says that the fundamentals of SEO remain the same. Critchlow’s view of AI Search goes beyond that by showing that SEO is more like a foundation.
Critchlow explained:
“And it points to something very important, which is I think that GEO, AI Search, is much more like brand marketing than it is SEO, in my opinion.
Right now, there is an underpinning, obviously, of the technical foundations and crawling and indexing that is kind of the same, or the same kind of discipline, right?
That is equally important before and after.”
It is at this point that Critchlow develops the idea that what is built on top of that foundation goes beyond just classic SEO, with the implication being that failing to anticipate this change could pose a career risk.
People Who Drive Outcomes Are Not SEO
Critchlow continues his thoughts, building on the idea of SEO being a starting point and going further by saying that the outcomes in AI Search are not driven by SEO. He describes this as contrarian, which is someone who holds an opinion contrary to what is commonly accepted. But as you’ll see, Critchlow’s ideas are founded on a more practical view of what drives ranking in both classic and AI Search.
Here Critchlow considers the questions that all SEOs need to be asking as the industry transitions to a post-Search AI-driven environment:
“But a lot of what you do, back to that question of like, okay, you put in a prompt and you say, do you recommend brand A or brand B?
And it says your competitor. What do you do about that, right?
And so like, and this, I’m a little contrarian, so forgive me, but like this was true in…
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
