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AI & SEO: SEO is Evolving — Are You Keeping Up?

  • Christie Wade
  • Aug 21
  • 3 min read

Brands optimising solely for Google ranking algorithms will be left behind. Fast.  


ChatGPT v Google
ChatGPT v Google

SEO has always been an evolving beast, but the pace has accelerated over the last few months aligned with rapid changes in new tools and consumer behaviour.  


This is a guide to the next evolution of SEO - where proven best practices meet new approaches to help you win across: 


  • Search engines (including AI Overviews) 

  • Social platforms 

  • AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. 


Search Experience Optimisation: Winning on Search Engines, Social Media, and AI.


For years, Google Search has been almost the sole player in consumer discovery - the place where nearly every buying journey began.  


While traditional Google Search remains dominant (and you can’t afford to take your eyes off it), the landscape is shifting fast. Discovery is more fragmented than ever, with the full Search Experience spanning not only search engines but also social media and AI tools that act as both discovery engines and purchase drivers.  


What hasn’t changed is consumer intent: people are still searching for your products and services as solutions to their problems. Our job as marketers remains the same—to ensure our brands show up wherever our consumers are. 

 

Search Engines ranked, AI answers.  


Optimising for search beyond Google and for experiences beyond your website is driven by understanding customer needs, hidden behind semantics. You need to be building broad deep content organised around topic clusters that comprehensively answer all relevant questions about your product or service, and clearly demonstrate why it’s the best choice. SEO extends beyond your website to encompass the full story of your brand across the internet. 

 

SEO Foundations still matter. 


Traditional SEO underpins everything. It’s the engine powering both Search and AI information retrieval.  


At Connected, we have always taken a holistic SEO approach, anchored by 4 pillars:  

  1. Technical 

  2. Relevancy 

  3. Authority 

  4. User Experience 

 

The New AI Visibility Playbook.  


SEO is evolving from a ‘fixed’ set of tactics aimed at Google, to a ‘living’ ecosystem across multiple discovery platforms. 


While the core pillars of Technical, Relevancy, Authority, and User Experience still matter, today’s marketers must weave these fundamentals into a broader strategy that responds to real-time engagement and AI learning. 


Winning requires flexibility: strong foundations combined with tailored optimisation for each platform, continually refined by performance data and shifting consumer behaviours. 


Beyond Traditional SEO: The AI Advantage 


To thrive in this new landscape, you must build on traditional SEO fundamentals with AI-ready tactics: 


Technical Excellence: Ensure your site is flawlessly crawlable and uses structured data that helps AI understand and trust your content. 

  • Schema markup and structured data is more important than ever before  

  • Multi-modal technical readiness (machine-readable across text, image, video, audio) 

  • Keep across emerging AI signals (eg. llms.txt file - currently speculative, not yet a standard). 

Human and AI Relevancy: Craft natural, conversational content that answers initial and follow-up questions (fan-out queries), organised around connected topics rather than isolated keywords. 

  • Natural language and conversational content – optimise for AI conversation-styles 

  • Move beyond keywords – focus on broader topics using semantics, entity mapping (connected concepts), and topic clusters 

  • AI Seeding: create summaries specifically designed for AI assistants to easily discover and reference 

  • Build out content that AI loves to cite: FAQ blocks, comparison tables, lists, and how-to guides  

  • Multi-modal content optimisation (videos, images, audio) 

  • Platform specific optimisation (Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Instagram, TikTok) 

  • Continuous content lifecycle management: regularly updating, refreshing, and pruning content to maintain relevance and authority in AI discovery 

Expanded Authority: Build trust not just through backlinks but via expert authorship, social sentiment, and widespread brand mentions across forums and niche communities. 

  • Strong author profiles with expertise, and trustworthiness clearly represented 

  • Reputation & sentiment management across social, forums, reviews, and the open web 

  • Distributed authority presence: industry news, directories, niche forums, social mentions beyond backlinks 

User Experience Everywhere: Design content that delivers answers instantly—even without clicks—across devices, with accessibility and voice in mind. 

  • Answer-first UX: structuring content to be useful even without a click (rich snippets, featured answers)

  • Cross-device and multi-modal accessibility (voice friendliness, keyboard navigation, readable captions)

  • Design now for a world where customers may never visit your website.

Tracking & Measurement: The Real Test 


To win in this new search ecosystem, you must measure what matters. AI-driven traffic is growing exponentially, but is it converting? Are your AI mentions and content citations increasing?  


Tip: Ask ChatGPT what it knows about your brand and competitors. How does it compare you – what features does it mention and what sources is it citing? Are you closing content gaps that affect your AI visibility? If you haven’t started doing this, now’s the time. 



SEO & AI Visability: Don't be left behind!


Every Connected client has a live AI Dashboard tracking AI-referred traffic, landing pages and paths, demographics, and conversions — revealing trends across industries, company sizes, and strategies in real time.  

 

Need help getting started? Contact Connected Media for an audit of your AI discoverability readiness. 

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