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SEO Is Coming For AI
Illustration by Kate Walker
SEO firms like Growtika, Fabric, and Embarque are pivoting to offer services they describe as the SEO of the AI era — essentially, influencing chatbots to surface their brands over others in search results.
Why It Hits: For the past 20 years — when brands’ visibility lived or died by where they appeared in Google Search — strong SEO was critical to e-commerce success. But AI is now depressing traditional Google traffic and fundamentally changing how people search for products, services, and recommendations. Firms that can give brands a leg up in the Wild West of chatbots could see a surge in business.
Behind The Code: As a publication that lands directly in your inbox every day, we don’t worry too much about SEO… but just about every other company you know does.
And chatbots are now changing the game.
SEO firms claim they can game AI by creating listicles (and naming their client as the best), boosting brand presence on blogs and articles (hyperlinks no longer required), or curating reputations on YouTube and Reddit (chatbots tend to favor UGC content).
They also use more sophisticated tactics, such as manipulating the code behind “Summarize with AI” features (Microsoft has called it “recommendation poisoning”) or deploying AI agents to boost visibility and reputation across the internet.
Testing is now the name of the game. Fabric, for example, runs thousands of synthetic prompt queries to track how often clients appear in results, and then provides brands with recommendations on what to change.
Final Prompt: SEO has always involved a degree of guesswork, but the complexity of AI is making that guesswork even more pronounced… which means many firms may dupe brands into believing a tool is more effective than it really is. What does matter, though, is the broader conversation around a brand across the entire internet ecosystem. That means going broadly viral may be more important than ever — not for the engagement or likes, but simply because people are talking about your brand or product.
Next Generation: With the conversation around a brand now mattering more than the metrics, expect companies to shift marketing dollars toward their PR divisions. No wonder every tech company is suddenly so interested in media.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.