A must watch brief but crucial insight about AI optimization and timing! One simple thing to do is look at your referral traffic in Google Analytics and see if ChatGPT, perplexity, copilot, Gemini, etc...are sending you traffic yet and how much. In my opinion, the real promise of AI is deep personalization - so truly focusing on being the most useful solution for a narrow audience will end up being where the big wins are found.
Answer discovery is a broader job than SEO. If we commit to following the customer where they get answers, the question around is SEO dead doesn't matter anymore. Questions aren't dead, people might just be getting answers in new places. Your job is to find out if YOUR customers are shifting behaviors to new places, that could be TikTok, Amazon, private WhatsApp Groups, or yes...perplexity or ChatGPT. It's time to get into the "answers for my customers" business and be more open than ever on where that journey takes you. I would love someone who looks at customer data and says...I'm sticking with Google optimization because I looked at the data and it's telling me my customer isn't there enough...yet, but when they cross X threshold I'll start investing 5% of my time, then at Y threshold 10%. Investing in AI search too early (before your customers make the switch) could be problematic.