If 2025 one thing clear, it’s that search is changing faster than ever. And agencies, valued for their knowledge and expertise, need to adapt with confidence.
In this forward-looking webinar, SUSO’s Partner Growth Manager, Cara Corbett, is joined by our Head of Content, Jamie Stanley, and PR Consultant Andrew Bruce Smith from Escherman to unpack the trends set to define SEO and AI Search in 2026.
From shifting discovery models to rising client expectations, we explore what agencies need to know to stay ahead. We cover:
➡ The search changes that shaped 2025
➡ Our key predictions for SEO and AI Search in 2026
➡ How to navigate ongoing industry change with confidence
Scroll down to watch the recording.
Click here to access the presentation slides.
Webinar Transcript
00:00:00 –> 00:00:33
So yeah welcome everyone to today’s webinar the agency search roadmap of I’m Cara Corbett, Partner Growth Manager at SUSO Digital and today I’m joined by Jamie Stanley who’s our Head of Content and then a very special guest Andrew Bruce Smith who’s an AI, PR, and communications technologist, and also an agency consultant at Escherman. A little bit about Andrew. I’m in a really useful WhatsApp group chat that Andrew started when he posts the latest findings about AI and its applications and communication and marketing.
00:00:33 –> 00:01:17
So I personally know he’s super equipped to speak on this subject.
But Andrew, do you want to tell everyone a little bit more about who you are and your relationship with AI and search and SEO and take it away.
Yes, I’ll try and keep it hopefully mercifully brief. So I’ve worked in media, PR and communications for 40 years. But my interest in AI goes back even further. I studied at Edinburgh University in the early 1980s and discovered the book Girdle Escherbach. My company name is a pathetic homage to one of the names from that book. And that sparked a lifelong interest in artificial intelligence.
00:01:18 –> 00:02:02
I helped to found the CIPR’s AI panel. In relation to search, I’ve been getting my hands dirty involved in search for close to twenty years and have long advocated that the PR industry probably missed a trick very early on in not being more involved but yes cut a long story short those are common strands to the work consulting work and training work that I’ve been doing for the best part of the last 10 to 15 years Awesome.
Thank you, Andrew.
00:02:02 –> 00:02:33
Well, yeah, if one thing’s for certain, agencies have seen more change in the last twelve months than probably in the previous decade combined, from the rollout of AI mode to ChatGPT announcing that they’re going to start testing ads very, very soon. Today, we’re going to recap the turbulence that happened in 2025 and more importantly, go over our predictions for 2026 and then discuss how agencies can navigate another expected very fun year in search. So we’ll start by looking at the key 2025 updates that took the search industry by storm and made waves in our client work and reporting.
00:02:33 –> 00:02:43
And then we’ll move into our 2026 predictions covering everything from organic to paid, even agentic. And of course, what AI systems we think are going to dominate in the market this year.
00:02:44 –> 00:02:49
And finally, we’ll end on the very big question. How do agencies adapt to these changes with confidence?
00:02:50 –> 00:02:58
We’ll provide some practical advice to get you prepared and then take with you into Q&A and beyond. And don’t worry, we’re also going to have time for questions at the very end, as always.
00:02:58 –> 00:03:06
So feel free to pop those in the question box on the top right. I think it’s called comments. Put it up there in the top right and then we’ll address those at the end. Hopefully we’ll have time.
00:03:06 –> 00:03:43
All right. So 2025 was nothing short of turbulent right from the start.
So, Jamie, how about you kick us off in January where Google made some pretty major updates to their quality radar guidelines?
Sure. Yeah, exactly. We’ve, this is what in January, what we’ve quite artfully called the AI slop crackdown. Google updated their quality rate of guidelines to penalize low effort, low value AI generated content, as you can see on screen, which is again, quite a lofty way of saying they cracked down on AI content that ultimately wasn’t very good.
00:03:44 –> 00:04:15
Something important to understand here for both agencies and also for your clients is that this crackdown and just generally one thing that we saw throughout the year, that it doesn’t mean that you can’t use AI to write or generate content. Or that all AI content will get penalized. It just means that generic mass produced content that paraphrases existing search results without adding anything unique or any extra value could get flagged by their human reviewers and therefore not perform as well in the SERPs.
00:04:16 –> 00:04:44
For example, if your client is just using a prompt to, say, write a thousand word blog on SEO, then they will be at risk because there’s no art to that. There’s no extra added value to that. To survive, what they need to do, the extra layer they need on top of that is to add unique data, personal experience, or a really strong point of view that a machine simply can’t scrape from somewhere else, . Nice.
Andrew, do you have anything to add from a PR perspective?
00:04:45 –> 00:05:14
Well, other than the Quality Rater Guidelines document itself, I’ve been pointing out to PR professionals for over a decade that if they read nothing else, that was a really useful document to help them get from the horse’s mouth how Google frames what it believes is high quality content. In fact, it’s been there for a very long time. There’s a little section where it advises the quality raters themselves.
00:05:14 –> 00:05:54
If you’re trying to figure out who’s the entity or the person behind this piece of content, how can you go about satisfying yourself that they are truly trustworthy, authoritative, and it suggests go and see if they’re being written about in reputable media titles. So it’s always been the case that in an ironic way, positive media coverage has an indirect effect on influencing the quality rate themselves. And as Jamie quite rightly put it out,, Google said a couple of years ago, we’re not saying you can’t use AI. In fact, we don’t care.
00:05:54 –> 00:06:13
All we care about is the content being, appears to be being found useful by the end user. So if it’s high results and people click through and they don’t click back, which suggests they did find it useful, well, that’s fine. That’s fine as far as Google’s concerned.
00:06:13 –> 00:06:55
But yes, the danger is, lazy use of AI they’re mediocrity machines so great you can churn out more content than is humanly possible because it isn’t really possible. But it won’t do any good because it’s the same as everybody else so why is a search engine gonna give any credence to what is exactly the same as what it’s already seen before. So yeah absolutely totally Well, then we had a bit of a break from major changes in search, or at least, yeah, none of the major ones that we want to go over. But about until May, when Google officially rolled out AI mode, its very first conversational search engine, and that started in the United States.
00:06:55 –> 00:07:23
So this new interface really moved users to that zero-click search default, with over ninety-four percent of searches in AI mode ending without a visit to a website, according to SEMrush data. The adoption was somewhat slow. In the first two months, the share of AI mode usage among Google search sessions increased from only 0.25% in early May to a little over 1% by early July. But since then, it’s been rolled out to over two hundred countries and has more than 75 million daily active users worldwide.
00:07:24 –> 00:07:58
So this update really changed the game for marketers because we inevitably saw dips in website traffic due to that zero click nature of the tool. So it really created more of a focus on mentions and citations as a KPI, which we’re seeing lots of people talking about now, over clicks and organic traffic, right? And just as an aside, AI mode is increasingly getting more personal. So Google just announced their personal intelligence feature, I think two weeks ago in AI mode. So that’s going to allow opted users to connect their Gmail and their Google photos, and then really give an added layer of that personal context for their responses.
00:08:00 –> 00:08:35
So yeah, the second half of the year is when things really started to heat up and we saw lots of changes related to infrastructure and agents.
Andrew and Jamie, which one of you guys want to take it? Do you guys want to talk about the Cloudflare news that happened in July?
Yeah, so I guess it was, shall we say contentious? Is that the right word, I suppose? So Cloudflare announced a new policy making AI crawler blocking the default setting on for websites on its platform, which is about 25% of all websites on the Internet.
00:08:36 –> 00:09:14
Billions and billions of sites, if we’re really thinking about it. This really marked the beginning of the end of the free-for-all scraping era. It meant that if your client’s website was hosted on Cloudflare, their content was blocked from showing up in AI responses and citations unless the permissions were manually changed in the backend. At the same time, Cloudflare introduced a pay-per-crawl feature, so giving publishers a new way to monetize and control who had access to their content. These changes forced many website owners to choose whether they wanted to be crawled for visibility or protect their IP.
00:09:15 –> 00:09:48
And just as an aside, in our analysis and our experience and talking to our clients and also having conversations with people who run sites, Plenty of websites are still blocking access to these bots and don’t even know about it. So as marketers, we really need to verify that this isn’t happening to our clients if they want their content to be visible or cited. So you could be doing everything right for AI Search. Obviously, AI Search is still an emerging discipline, if you, and we’re still working out all the ins and outs of it, and we’re still learning as we go.
00:09:48 –> 00:10:28
But it might mean that you’re doing everything right already and the sites aren’t getting any ar traffic because of some a change in the system connected to this to this Cloudflare update. And yeah it’s yeah the internet keeps you guessing I think it’s the it’s the is one of the main lessons to learn but yeah if you don’t know whether this is happening to your sites or your client sites yeah. Then I’d say tomorrow morning if not tonight double check you can also reach out to us if you don’t know how to do that Andrew, I know that you speak a lot about content publishers. And probably the impact on that in your industry is really great.
00:10:28 –> 00:11:15
So what do you think about that? Yeah, I think this is a subset of a broader challenge, particularly for media sites. They are caught in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, It’s been true for twenty years that the single biggest driver of traffic to any media site, anywhere, was Google Search. It was referral traffic from Google. In order to get that traffic, you have to allow Google to index your content. But that was the deal that was struck in, I guess it wasn’t a contract officially, but we let you index our content and in return, we get traffic, we can serve ads, we make money.
00:11:16 –> 00:11:59
That contact is been broken now, as is clearly happening with certainly AI overviews in Google. Hey, we’ll crawl your content, index it. Sure, we’ll use it to fuel an AI overview, but oh, wave goodbye to the volume of traffic you would have had in the past. With the likes of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, et cetera, you’ve got this distinction between allowing an AI vendor to crawl your content in order to index it so that they can then use that to potentially train a future version of the model, versus I’m allowing you to crawl it in order to capture content to provide the fuel to serve up an answer.
00:12:00 –> 00:12:35
So there’s a bit of a dilemma here. As I say, in the case of Google, it’s get indexed. And if you don’t let them index your content, well, you’re never going to appear in anything. So do you want to completely disappear? Well, no. But at the same time, the ever-ever decline in referral traffic. The Reuters Institute of Journalism report that came out a couple of weeks ago where they talked to media owners worldwide and the general consensus everywhere is they continue to expect to see a continuing decline in Google search referral traffic.
00:12:35 –> 00:13:13
I think the over the next two to three years was the figure that was banded around there. But yes, it’s a consideration, I guess, for anybody anywhere, which is, do we want our content to be accessible to AI search engines? And there are clearly pros and cons in terms of, yes, we clearly want that visibility versus do we want our IP to be freely given away to… Somebody else, namely an AI company, who will benefit from it to improve and train their models. Yep, definitely a dilemma for a lot of people.
00:13:13 –> 00:13:48
All right, moving on. One of the most critical trends of 2025 has been the absolute dominance of Reddit as a primary citation source. Pretty much across every major model, from Google’s AI mode to Perplexity, Reddit has emerged as a top cited domain, often outperforming traditional mainstays Wikipedia and YouTube. And when you think about it, it’s not surprising at all because LLMs are actively seeking out that human to human verification. So when a user asks for a recommendation or a fix, the AI treats a conversation between real people on a subreddit as more trustworthy than a polished brand page, for example.
00:13:49 –> 00:14:10
So for agencies, this means that your client’s visibility is also now heavily tied to their social proof footprint. If your brand isn’t being discussed authentically by real users in these communities, then you’re missing a massive layer on the new search ecosystem. So we’re telling our partners, you don’t just need to rank on Google anymore. You now need to be part of a conversation where both humans and the machines are looking for the truth.
00:14:13 –> 00:14:44
Now, we also have to look at major validation for the PR industry that came out in July when Muck Rack released a landmark study finding that 85% of links cited in AI generated answers were earned media sources. So this really confirms the fundamental role that PR plays in GEO, because we know that AI models rely on authoritative third party sources to establish credibility and generate trustworthy answers. So for our agency partners, this is really the ultimate proof that you can’t just SEO your way into an AI response anymore or at all.
00:14:45 –> 00:15:15
If your client doesn’t have a consistent stream of independent validation from third party sources, then they’re simply not going to have the authority that the models ChatGPT or Gemini are looking for. It really confirms that in 2026, PR has become one of the most important pieces to search visibility. Andrew, I’m going to pass that one to you because that’s your industry, your wheelhouse. Okay, I guess the first thing I have to say is that there’s a, in capital letters, big caveat that comes into play here.
00:15:15 –> 00:15:56
It would be lovely to think, yes, earned media is universally the top-sited source in AI search results. Of course, that isn’t necessarily true. It goes to the point that there’s so many different variables and factors involved that I always get slightly irritated when you see on LinkedIn somebody making some definitive claim about what is or isn’t the case, and you’re just gonna go, yeah, but that’s not really universally true. It might be true for a given subset of particular platform, a particular set of prompts, but it’s never going to be universally applicable.
00:15:56 –> 00:16:37
To go back to the other point about Reddit, Again, I would argue it isn’t necessarily true that it’s universally the number one source for everything. Yeah, it pops up quite a lot, but there’s enormous variability almost from day-to-day, week-to-week, was the Ahrefs study that came out, I think a couple of weeks ago, saying that the variability in the sources that Google uses to generate AI overview seems to change every 40-eight hours. Everything is in massive flux at the moment. And I know people want to have some stability and they want to have definitive answers.
00:16:37 –> 00:17:19
I know we crave that, but I think reality is we just have to really accept that we are, there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty here. Having said that, I think it is true that earned media in some shape or form clearly is really quite important in terms of whichever of the platforms and models are going to use to generate the outputs. So yes, it wasn’t just Muck Rack. There’s been other studies suggesting similar kinds of things there. Yeah, and just to add on your point about variability, there’s a really good study that just came out by Spark Toro or Rand Fishkin.
00:17:20 –> 00:17:50
And he did a study on the variability of the types of responses that people will get back. And you’d have to, I don’t remember the exact number, but you’d have to put in the same prompt essentially thousands of times to get the same list of brand responses back to you. So I recommend everyone. You never will. That’s the whole point. You’ll never get exactly the same answer. Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy.
Jamie, do you want to add anything on that? I think we, I think Andrew covered it.
00:17:51 –> 00:19:14
I think,, I can see some comments in the in the chat from Greg about Reddit and obviously I think Andrew just echoes the idea that this is not an absolute rule on Reddit. And obviously things are changing on a continuous basis I think the key thing with Reddit is that in every respect I would always re. And I said this to both of you separately always tread carefully with Reddit as a brand or anyone who’s gonna be looking at this strategically in that the whole reason why Reddit is seen. And we’re not just talking about AI search we’re talking about traditional Google as well you just have to look at the top the top page of Google results which we’ll get onto in a minute. But the fact that’s still happening we talk about AI search all the time but clients we’re speaking to are increasingly interested in how they can utilize Reddit. And I think that’s something that’s if you can find a definitive strategy that works there then you can you could be a billionaire tomorrow. Because it’s the whole the whole point of working on Reddit is that it’s incredibly hard to do because it’s all about authenticity and it’s all about what marketing. And if you can there’s something that generally marketers struggle to do is to act not marketers and if you do that on Reddit you’ll get banned. And you may even do much more harm than good so tread carefully and tread very strategically and really think about what you’re doing if you’re going to try. And approach that as a channel Maybe that’s a whole other separate webinar for another time.
00:19:15 –> 00:19:40
Jamie, take us into September of last year when Google made some changes to their parameters. I’d love to. So, yeah, this Google dropping a bit of a bomb, really, by I think I said this to you earlier, but I’ve never said this parameter out loud. So I’m going to I’m going to call it the one parameter rather than the ampersand num equals one parameter just because it’s. But it’s got disabled in September by Google.
00:19:42 –> 00:20:37
It was what this is the url parameter that allows top on the top one hundred Google results to show on one page so this caused a bit of a panic in lots of agencies. And among lots of data teams because Google search console impressions and rankings plummeted overnight which made for quite flawed client reporting so we didn’t get weren’t getting the same picture that we were before. And also if you looked at your reports from the first half of the year versus the second half of the year on the same graph they looked pretty terrifying. But it soon got even worse because Google then tightened the screws on the top one hundred as to sorry the top ten results tracking which made it almost impossible for popular rank tracking tools ahf cemetery unicorn to scrape rankings beyond page one This meant that lots of agencies. And lots of data teams had to consider capping reports between position ten and twenty.
00:20:37 –> 00:20:54
However, the industry didn’t stay down for that long. Rank trackers Ahrefs have found sophisticated workarounds involving pagination, multi-page requests, and that’s given us back that deep competitive data we need to prove long term SEO growth for our clients.
00:20:54 –> 00:21:31
But yeah, the whole question of how we prove the impact and the results of what we’re doing in an ever changing landscape is the thing that’s not new, but there have been some seismic shifts in the last few months that we’ve really had to maneuver around,, and really going to find a way to find a path through. Andrew, I know you have thoughts from a measurement perspective. Yeah, I think, well, as Jimmy’s alluded to, it was obviously the usual suspects in terms of keyword volume, metrics, numbers, SEMrush, et cetera.
00:21:31 –> 00:22:11
Anybody who had previously been relying on being able to get access to a hundred results in one go. Now you can’t. So in order to maintain the same level of data, you’ve got to perform ten times the number. I’m simplifying here, but ten times the amount of effort to get the same amount of information. So it’s going to increase costs and so on and so forth. So I guess technically the SEO tool vendors could have just raised their prices. But of course, that wouldn’t go down too well. But equally, I think in a bizarre way, I’ve long thought, what use is that?
00:22:11 –> 00:22:55
What use is it knowing that, oh, you’ve gone from position ninety eight to position seventy seven?, yes, it’s good to see that directionally where it’s going the right way. But ultimately, we all know unless you’re on that first page or even in the top three or four results, that’s really where you have to be. So maybe in some a bizarre way, but Google’s doing us all a favor by trying to de-emphasize agonizing over those sorts of numbers and getting us to really focus more on not just search visibility, but tying that to outcomes and just getting better to perhaps a more rigorous approach to demonstrating impact and value.
00:22:56 –> 00:23:34
Yeah, just to add one final thing on that, it may not make me very popular among some of my agency colleagues, but the fewer places there are to hide in the data, the better. And I think this is a very good thing in lots of ways, as long as we’re just reporting using the same parameters month to month. If you’re comparing one month where you had ten thousand in the top hundred to then not having any, it doesn’t look great. But what you’re doing rather than the stuff that you’re using to fluff out your reports. Totally. Okay.
00:23:34 –> 00:24:16
Moving on to October when the AI race really heated up with the rollout of ChatGPT Atlas, which is OpenAI’s browser, which definitely, if you’ve used it, you can see that you can use that conversational assistant and an AI agent in tandem with the web. This was pretty cool. However, it wasn’t the first agentic browser. By then, Perplexity had already released Comet in July.
Andrew, are you using either of these or are you just having Claude do everything for you? Well, I absolutely began using Comet back in, I think I got it in May because I was on an early, early beta program.
00:24:16 –> 00:24:53
Anyway, long story short, I switched from Chrome to Comet May last year, and I haven’t gone back. So I’ve said cheerio to Chrome for all this time. Now, of course, As we saw yesterday, Google’s hardly going to sit there doing nothing. So they’re obviously adding more and more agentic capability to Chrome. Obviously, we had the Atlas browser from OpenAI. Microsoft Edge is going to do the same. The agentic browser will be just a standard thing. I can’t see how it won’t be.
00:24:53 –> 00:25:36
I think in terms of its impact on search and PR, et cetera, it’s obviously from a user behavior standpoint, as more and more people know use agentic browsers clearly it’s going to affect how they interact with content I do all the time you go to a web page. And you think great I’ll I’ll just click the assistant button and say summarize the page or from a PR context analyze that page for sentiment entities. And a whole bunch of other stuff so that there’s a I think a Let’s be honest, we open up a page, we scroll, we read, we might click the odd link or two.
00:25:36 –> 00:26:04
That’s been the extent of our interaction really with websites since Netscape. And that’s clearly changing. I’m not part of the camp that says, well,, if you take agentic AI to its logical conclusion, who needs a website anymore?, just get your agent to go off and just do stuff. So you, the human being, don’t need to even sit there interacting with a browser.
00:26:05 –> 00:26:34
I don’t quite see that happening as a universal behavior in the next few minutes. But There are going to be some people who will go that route. But yes, the use, the exposure of everybody on the web through their browsers to AI agentry, if that’s the right way to describe it, I think is going to have quite a Profound impact on both user behavior, which in turn will have a knock-on effect clearly on so many things. Totally.
00:26:35 –> 00:27:09
Okay, moving on to November, when we hit that holiday gift shopping rush, both AI Mode and ChatGPT rolled out advanced commerce features that essentially turned them into personal shopping assistants. So for e-commerce clients, this meant a massive shift in how products were discovered and bought using AI. So Google introduced agentic checkout where users could track a specific item’s price and then even have Google complete a purchase for them once it hits that budget. They even integrated a let Google call feature where the AI calls local stores on user’s behalf to check inventory in real time.
00:27:10 –> 00:27:37
Now simultaneously, OpenAI launched its shopping research experience. So instead of users sifting through dozens of sites, They could now have a conversational research session where Chatubt builds a personal buyer’s guide, comparing everything from specs, reviewing quality sources and weighing trade-offs all within the chat interface. So this is really the end of the funnel reality that we’re now navigating in 2026.
Yeah, and we can see the situation developing in early January as well.
00:27:37 –> 00:28:11
So Bing, for those who don’t know, Bing Copilot caught up with AI Mode and ChatGPT by introducing agentic checkout features, which for those of us who love e-commerce and get obsessive over these things, this is huge. So it looks Shopify is actively working on improving the infrastructure for AI commerce. So they opened a waiting list for its new agenda, agenda plan, which is something that’s,, will,, will change could potentially change everything for millions of e commerce sites across the internet.
00:28:11 –> 00:28:39
And but The Google has also just announced its universal commerce protocol, which helps merchants and platforms share commerce catalog data consistently across Google services. So the whole process,, Andrew, you talked earlier about,, how,, agents can just go off and do things for you. But,, we’re sending robots to the shops now, which is,, in a and,, it’s I don’t know which direction it is going to be the dominant path to this.
00:28:39 –> 00:29:13
Cause there are so many different competing ways in which the whole process of buying things online is going to adapt over the next couple of years. But yeah, this, this is,, one of all of these areas are interesting, but for me, this is one of these things that I could just,, immerse myself in for days and just,, never come back and just come back as a jibbering wreck. But yeah, I think that you would add to this. No, I think,, It goes back to agentic browsers because Perplexity for a little while has been providing some of those e-commerce related agentic capabilities.
00:29:13 –> 00:29:57
I think it was Amazon that’s blocked Perplexity’s agents from accessing Amazon because they’re, hang on a minute, we don’t want your… Agent crawling our site and helping people to make decisions about what they may or may not buy. So again, it’s all part of the unbelievably dynamic and fluid situation that we find ourselves in. But even on a simplistic basis, I’ve got a little shortcut in my comic browser where if I’m on, say, an Amazon page looking at a product, I say, hey, Can you go off and just find any other additional unbiased, authentic, proper customer reviews and find other potential rival products?
00:29:57 –> 00:30:29
And five minutes later, the agent comes back and says, here you go. Oh, right.
Okay. That’s giving me a much more rounded perspective on the decision making process. Now, if I wanted to, I could say, look, go off. And once you’ve found what you think is the best one, just go and buy it for me. I’m not quite ready to do that, but technically, there’s no reason why somebody who wanted to couldn’t set up that process themselves. So yeah, it’s very interesting. Are you selling to the human being?
00:30:30 –> 00:31:07
Are you selling to the agent that the human being has briefed to go off and represent them out there in the great online e-commerce arena? Yeah. And one thing I will add, the importance of your product feed is now more important than ever, right? We’re moving away from that very fluffy marketing speak and product descriptions to now being very specific with the specs, the sizes, who it’s meant to be for, things that. That’s really what’s going to make you stand out. So that technical side is really, really important in AI e-commerce as well.
00:31:09 –> 00:31:41
All right, so it’s clear that there were a lot of major changes in 2025, and that wasn’t even all of them. We would be here all day if we went through all of them. But if last year was any indication, I think we can expect that 2026 will come with just as many if not more changes, especially as that AI race gets tighter and tighter. So with that in mind, let’s look ahead at some of our predictions for the year, our roadmap for 2026. It’s defined by several different pillars, as you can see on the screen. So, Jamie, maybe talk to us about the machine shaped voice. Yeah.
00:31:41 –> 00:31:47
So this I think anyone who spends as much time in the Internet as us is probably already noticing this.
00:31:47 –> 00:32:28
But what we’re seeing is that the general language and communication of the internet is changing in the way in the even at a very semantic level if you think about how we interact with AI search it’s more conversational. And it’s more much more asking questions rather than searching for phrases so as a result what we’re seeing is brands and copywriters and content producers. And whatever really leaning into that and So what’s happening is that because AI extracts and restates our content, we’re seeing a shift towards what we’ve called a very machine shaped voice, which is very concise, declarative, I think is the correct way to say that.
00:32:28 –> 00:32:53
I’ve only ever seen that written down and citation ready. Well, people are, in layman’s terms, people are writing for AI search rather than writing for traditional search or not simultaneously writing for traditional search and not writing with the same level of unique brand voice that we’re used to seeing. But to win here, agencies need to move to modular content.
00:32:53 –> 00:33:15
So apart from covering a topic in depth, which is still hugely important, you need to show expertise, you need to provide extra value, as we talked about before, writers also need to start structuring their content in reusable informational blocks, headlines, data points, CTAs tagged with metadata, so an AI agent can grab exactly what it needs quickly, and then repurpose it without having to change too much.
00:33:15 –> 00:33:31
You’re providing it in a format that the question it’s being asked, the correct format answer for the question that it has been asked, that it can grab quickly and then it can just immediately turn around and then hand back to its users.
00:33:31 –> 00:34:14
This all meeting in the middle and this slight homogeny of tone of voice is something that we’re going to have to bear with through the next year or so as people work out how this stuff works. But yeah, it’s something to keep an eye on because, yeah, it’s already creeping in. Nice. Let’s talk about reputation engineering over link building and agentic conversions. Which of you two want to take that one? Whoa. I’m happy to just kick it off. So in traditional Google search, the backlink was the main way that Google understood authority of your website and brand. It’s the easiest way of thinking about it.
00:34:15 –> 00:34:51
As AI search becomes more widely adopted in 2026 and beyond, the link itself becomes less important than the reputational signals required for AI visibility. So, there will be more demand for reputation management, not just with earned media, but also in places across the web, Reddit and reviews, as we’ve already spoken about before, obviously with the caveats that we’ve already mentioned. But it’s because LLMs need consistent messaging across the web to feel confident to cite or recommend a brand. There is no Position eight of ChatGPT, there is no page three of Perplexity.
00:34:51 –> 00:35:25
You’re either cited or you aren’t. But additionally, there will be more of a focus on highlighting those unique selling points that our clients can offer to make them stand out. Because standing out, they’re either citing you or they aren’t, as I’ve said to you before. So really, you just need to give them all the signals they can to show that you’re trusted, ahead of all of your rivals, I suppose. Nice. And how does original data and unique data play a point in that?
Andrew, maybe you want to speak a bit to that, focus on originality?
00:35:25 –> 00:35:38
Well, clearly from a PR and comms context,, reputation, I argue that is what PR and communication is all about, the management reputation.
00:35:40 –> 00:36:20
There was a little experiment that PR Week did in the UK last year where they went to chat GPT and I think they took the top thirty agencies from the top one fifty and simply went to chat and said, hey, for each agency, we’ll ask the question, is agency X any good? And then examined what came back. They got in touch before they wrote the piece. And I said, I’m glad you did, because as I said, in some cases it was nearly libelous what was coming back. And I said, well, bear in mind that you only perform that search once.
00:36:20 –> 00:36:32
If you performed it ten times, you’d almost certainly see a variation in what that synthesized answer came back with and the sources that we used.
00:36:32 –> 00:36:48
But for example, in one case, or in a couple of cases, for example, Glassdoor employee reviews seem to be having a massive impact on the response to that question and input.
00:36:48 –> 00:38:12
But the broader point is that, and this is true of search as well, that reputation is increasingly filtered through the lens of what people get back in response to their questions, either through Google, either through just vanilla Google or through AI mode or through chat GPT or Perplexity or claw, whichever model tool rather you’re working with. So it raises some big questions for the world of comms which well what can we do if we discover that there seems to be a rather alarming response to those sorts of inputs. But what can we do to change or influence what those AI platforms are saying say saying about us and again we’ve already seen people say oh yeah we know hire us. And we will we’ll go in and we’ll sort it for you thing I’m thinking really I’m not quite convinced that it’s that simple. But at the same time doing nothing I suspect is not an option either but yes long and short of it is that increasingly people are whether we it or not They are choosing to accept the answers they get back from an AI tool as gospel.
00:38:14 –> 00:38:55
Well, in fact, I think it was a Microsoft study, wasn’t it? And they seem to suggest that there’s a age disparity in that younger people are far more likely to be using AI, and they’re also far more likely to accept what it tells them. Very impressionable, yeah. So there is that, there is that. So fair. Okay, as for agentic conversions, with advanced features rolled out by major LLMs, websites need to be prepared for those AI agents taking action on behalf of users purchases. And even reservations, already touched on this a little bit, but to be clear, this isn’t only going to affect e-commerce brands, right?
00:38:55 –> 00:39:27
It’s not just gonna be agents making purchases of certain products on a site. This change is also going to affect subscription-based and reservation-based businesses as well. There’s even something to say that humans won’t visit websites at all pretty soon, but that’s obviously debatable. We’ve talked about that. But they might just have an agent go and gather information about a service or a business for them, right? So in this case, as I mentioned earlier, we need to make sure that our clients’ websites are technically sound and accessible so that these agents or bots can get the information that they need.
00:39:27 –> 00:39:58
I think that’s a good segue to speak about technical SEO, schema markup. Andrew, I know that was something that you wanted to talk about. I’ll pass that over to you. Yeah, if we take schema markup,, schema markup is not new, but quite rightly, it’s long been regarded as something that people should pay attention to and implement. But of course, it has historically been something that you clearly would need to rely upon people with the technical competence to do it.
00:39:58 –> 00:40:10
I’ve talked about schema markup to PR people for a long, long time, but I knew what the next point would be. They go, well, I haven’t got the first clue about how to go about doing it, and I’m not going to do it.
00:40:10 –> 00:40:56
So let’s just move on, shall we? But increasingly, it’s all tied in where if it’s machines that we’re communicating with, then anything we can do to help the machine, as it were, not to oversimplify it,, understand,, not just what the content is about, but who are the entities behind it. So schema.org has been around forever, and that’s loads of good information there about the labels, the schemas that are in use today. But ironically, I would argue that from a reputation standpoint, making sure that both humans and machines understand who you are, what do you want to be known for?
00:40:57 –> 00:41:37
And making sure there’s clarity consistency of that where wherever possible I think it’s interesting now of course that anybody not just a PR person but anybody who wants to could say to any AI tool well Here’s the page. Using schema.org as your reference point, could you suggest to me what a schema markup for that page might look like? And they’ll look at it and go, oh, what does it mean? Well, ask it to explain it to you, and it will. And then, you can copy and paste that schema code and just stick it in the HTML. Because it’s not there for humans, of course.
00:41:37 –> 00:42:12
It’s there for crawlers, agents, and bots to go, oh, great. That absolutely clarifies who you are what the content is about so the thinking being of course that the more helpful you make it to crawler the more likely that it’s your content that is going to be considered worthy to rank or rather to be considered for being included in the synthesized response that the ultimate audience will see.
00:42:12 –> 00:42:42
Not just important for AI search, but also important for traditional Google takes up a lot of extra space on that search engine results pages, which,, we want to take up as much space as possible. But yeah, I’ve mentioned this on previous webinars before we did one with Josh from Profound. And there’s a really important one for PR professionals. There’s a news article schema. So if you’re,, you’re putting out press or you’re putting out news articles, That’s just something right then and there that should be in every communications professionals tool belt.
00:42:43 –> 00:43:21
Okay, so moving over to one of the more significant shifts that we’re preparing our partners for, the convergence of paid and organic budgets into a single AI visibility strategy. So OpenAI announced it’s starting to test out ads in the US for ChatGPT’s free and Go users. But it’s unclear at the moment how brands can start participating in these tests. There’s very little information. What I do know, I saw an article, I think it was yesterday on Search Engine Journal, where they were saying that the cost per impression is going to be about three times higher than meta. So stay tuned to that. But I personally think that, sorry?
00:43:21 –> 00:43:53
I was going to say, the figure I saw was it was sixty dollars, a CPM rate of sixty dollars. Yeah. So I hope you guys have deep, deep pockets. But I personally think that for the time being, ChatGPT might just hijack Google’s sponsored results and then show brands that are already bidding in Google ads for now, because right now they’re constantly using Google’s framework for pretty much all of their features, particularly for grounding their responses. If you put in something in a ChatGPT, they’re going to do a query fan out and they’re going to go on to Google’s index and search the web that way.
00:43:53 –> 00:44:22
But there’s also been some research, I believe it was Kevin Indig that did it, that showed that in their shopping feature, they’re using Google Shopping directly, the responses that are showing up in the responses on ChatGPT are almost one to one with the ones that are showing up in Google Shopping. So pretty funny. But I think the industry is going to move away from keyword based PPC and then instead bid on certain relevant topics or entities instead.
00:44:22 –> 00:44:48
For example, when a conversation is happening about places to visit in Mexico City, for example, maybe an ad could pop up to book a hotel in a certain area or a specific tour could be advertised. And of course, with the newest agentic checkout features in ChatGPT, AI mode and co-pilot and integrations with Shopify, it’s very likely that these LLMs might introduce sponsored product listings, capturing users right when they’re asking the AI to help me decide.
00:44:48 –> 00:45:28
Data shows that while AI platforms might drive lower traffic volumes to websites, the conversion rates are typically up to five times higher with the data that we’re seeing because that intent is so much more deeper, right? A lot of the times people are using these chatbots and they want to make a purchase right away. So anything to add on PPC or paid search from either of you? Well, just from a PR and communications perspective, I guess the age old thing, isn’t it? Well, your own media, so you don’t pay for anything. The minute you’ve mentioned paying for anything, oh, well, that’s marketing, that’s advertising.
00:45:28 –> 00:46:00
So the comms and the PR budget doesn’t get a sniff of it. And I’ve long advocated that’s not right. If you’re managing organic social, for example, Why shouldn’t you also manage the paid budget? Why is somebody else running that and always treating it as a totally separate and non-integrated aspect of it? The simple fact is that whether we it or not, this has been true, I think, for so long now, that if you want to guarantee visibility anywhere, well, you can. You’d have to pay for it.
00:46:02 –> 00:46:32
And again, I think historically, PR communications has seen itself as not having to,, pay immediate costs, but you earn the right to have that visibility. But I think at the same time, in its broadest sense, if you’re responsible for managing your reputation, why shouldn’t PR and comms also have access to and perhaps take over those paid budgets as well?
00:46:34 –> 00:47:18
On social, certainly, I’ve long advocated that it’s comms that should run the show for both organic social and paid social but that’s just me call me self-serving yeah okay. So there’s a couple other things here I want to I want to wrap up the predictions in about two minutes Andrew and these last ones are yours. So Claude Co-work, Claude Code and then that little bit about earned media. I’ll be very quick I guess something happened over the Christmas break. Because a lot of people obviously use that Christmas break not to eat more mince pies, but to say, hey, this Claude Code thing, I keep hearing it’s quite good. So I’m going to try it out.
00:47:18 –> 00:47:50
And then suddenly from that, Anthropic built Cowork for normies in ten days. Long and short of it, again, this is an example of the pace of tech change. It’s agentic AI, the ability to instruct your tool just to go off and do stuff for you, whilst you can now go off and do something else perhaps more useful, interesting. I think it opens up the possibility of being able to manage.
00:47:50 –> 00:48:29
Rather than having this back and forth interaction with a chatbot, it’s instructing going to building or whatever things to work on your behalf so it’s got implications both as end users consumers but also from a work a work perspective this week’s big thing or the last two weeks of course is claude bot spelt c-l-a-w-d-b-o-t which has now been renamed because it sounds anthropic didn’t the similarity to Claude. Yeah, again, that’s just a further reflection of this. Agelytic AI was talked a lot about last year.
00:48:30 –> 00:48:44
And yes, there are lots of impressive demos, but I don’t think we’ve crossed into the mainstream. I think we’re already seeing the real world impact of that already before the end of the first month of the year. So I suspect we’ll see more and more of that occurring.
00:48:45 –> 00:49:38
Earned media, again, call me self-serving, but I think it’s true that it does reinforce the idea that a focus on continuing to try and gain positive media coverage online is still absolutely vital people assuming that well does just who reads this stuff anymore well okay maybe not as many human beings might read it overtly and directly that is me to say it ceases to contribute any value at all And given the obvious role it plays in providing a lot of the fuel for AI driven search responses, then yeah, as I say, call me biased, but I think it’s still really important. Perfect.
00:49:38 –> 00:50:10
All right, moving on to some little tidbits of advice. So Andrew, you obviously work with many consultants and agencies. So given what you’re hearing from them on a day to day basis, and obviously, we’re seeing tons of change happening last year, but also what we’re expecting, what’s one piece of advice that you’d to give to help them navigate everything flawlessly? Wow, flawlessly. As flawlessly as possible. Yeah. Well, I think it’s interesting, isn’t it?, here we are three years in from the launch of ChatGPT.
00:50:11 –> 00:50:57
And I think it’s true to say, certainly within the PR world, certainly in the PR agency sector, it’d be hard push to find an agency that doesn’t use AI in some shape or form. I would argue that even now, on the whole, it’s still being used in a rather rudimentary fashion. There’s still an awful lot more that people could be doing, but obviously they don’t know. So I think there’s still a bit of a gap between the capability of the technology and human beings ability to just wrap their head around it and obviously practically implement that into their own day to day workflows.
00:50:57 –> 00:51:35
I think often as well, people get very distracted by this whole idea of what’s the best tool? And it’s, well, there is no one best tool that can handle everything. And even if there was, it probably wouldn’t be tomorrow. So that’s just a fact of life, that you have that constant chopping and changing. You’re much better off, I think, going back to first principles and understanding, well, why does our agency exist? What is the value that we believe we’re bringing to the party? What are the needs of the clients and the prospect base that we target?
00:51:35 –> 00:52:15
And you reverse engineer back from that to understand, well, In an idea world, this is the capability, this is the offer, this is the proposition of value that we can deliver and then figure out from that. And it’s not just the tech, of course, is it? It’s the mix of human beings. It’s clearly impacting roles, simplistic level. Some people might say, well, who needs junior personnel anymore when, quite frankly, all the tasks they perform can be done by AI agents at a fraction of the cost? Okay, well, good luck if you decide to get rid of all your juniors or have a hiring freeze.
00:52:16 –> 00:52:59
Because, yeah, your story got, I think, longer-term issues there. On the other side… Clearly, there has to be a reframing, a refactoring of what the human being does in relation to the technology. I guess all I’d say is that most people think that everybody else is racing ahead of them. They think, oh, we’re behind. It’s, trust me, you’re not. And even if you were, your ability to rapidly catch up, I think, is definitely possible. Perfect. Okay, Jamie, quickly, you obviously work more on the content side of things. So do you have any advice for agencies that are trying to navigate some of these changes?
00:53:00 –> 00:53:31
Yeah, I think the most succinct way I can put it is just take a beat. Because at the moment, everyone’s diving full on into AI search. And as we’ve said, we’re still working out the exact things and answer this. Even if you take the most optimistic prediction from, I think it was Semrush last year said that the AI search will overtake Google search by, I think it was Q one to 2020 eight. Now we can debate that how whether that’s take that as, even if we take accept that’s still two years away.
00:53:31 –> 00:54:06
And all that means is that Google search is here and AI search will eventually level with it and then overtake it in two years time. So don’t discount this. If your content is still ranking properly and optimized properly for traditional search, you should never overlook that in favor of AI search. Obviously, you should be trying to do both, and we’re still trying to work out how we can do both most effectively. But there are still billions of people over here. Don’t discount them for the new shiny thing. And also, we were mentioning earlier, these AI search systems are running a lot of the times on Google’s traditional index.
00:54:06 –> 00:54:45
So definitely don’t discount it. Andrew, really quickly, we have another slide. One very quick point, which is simply that, yes, don’t forget that even now, not every Google search triggers an AI overview. So in which case, your template links are still very important. We can debate the extent to which AI overviews do appear, but they’re not they’re not one hundred percent of the time. And it’s definitely not fifty percent yet. So, yeah, absolutely. I think throwing traditional SEO out the window is not be a good idea. Lovely. Okay. And then I would say the biggest advice is to stay up to date with the changes as possible.
00:54:45 –> 00:55:17
So whether that means subscribing to AI search newsletters ours, there’s some other good ones that I follow, SEO FOMO by Aleda Salas, Kevin Indig’s growth memo. And then following these contributors on LinkedIn, oftentimes I find that they’re the first ones to be posting about any changes. And a lot of them are actively doing that research and shaping the insights that we’re using to know what’s working and what’s not. I also recommend getting involved in communities with other agencies, trying to navigate the same changes in AI. I mentioned, Andrew has an awesome WhatsApp group that I follow.
00:55:18 –> 00:55:55
I think most of it is probably run by AI at this point, but lots of really great advances in AI search. But we also have a free SUSO partner club. This is one of the most valuable resources for agencies who are trying to get up-skilled. We offer AI search or GEO workshops completely free to their clients. We do free trainings. We have a twenty four seven help desk that connects you to our SEO specialists directly for any technical questions. And then we also do free white labeled visibility and SEO audits for your clients to get an understanding of how they’re currently performing and what opportunities there are to improve their visibility.
00:55:55 –> 00:55:59
So join today for free. If you haven’t yet, I’d love to work with you.
00:55:59 –> 00:56:38
And there’s a QR code in the next slide to do that. We also have a link to our article ten SEO and AI search predictions for 2026. And then if you’d to connect with the very talented Andrew on LinkedIn, highly recommend you do that. We barely have time for questions. We got two minutes. I know we had some activity in the chat. I’m glad we made it to the end without going over. So that’s good. But yeah, please feel free. There’s a couple minutes here left. If you want to leave a comment in the top right, we can answer any questions that you guys have right now. I know Hugo had one about ChatGPT still using Bing.
00:56:38 –> 00:56:51
That hasn’t happened for a while now. They effectively switched over to SERP API, which technically uses both Google and Bing, but in a lot of the research and what people are seeing, they’re not seeing a lot of Bing anymore.
00:57:03 –> 00:57:15
Well, while we’re waiting, a quick question for you both. Who do you guys think is gonna come out on top of the AI search race? Google, Perplexity, ChatGPT, who’s gonna be the dominant?
00:57:18 –> 00:58:01
I don’t know, I feel, I’m saying this as a content person rather than someone who’s as okay with the technical side of this is as Andrew. But it feels they all operate in different ways and they all are seemingly preferred doing different things well so it’s not just a case of when Google was going up against I don’t know ask jeeves or whatever where it’s who’s who’s bringing me the best the best results it’s how you want to how you want that information to be delivered to you. And the things you’re looking for, depending on which,, maybe if you use it as much as we do, but at the same time, it’s hard to tell if any of those platforms are going to be really suited to doing things in a universal way.
00:58:02 –> 00:58:42
And I’m sure they’re all trying to work it out, but I’m not giving you a very committed answer here, but I just think it’s very difficult. It’s too early to know if they can make this a universal experience. That’s fair.
Andrew, do you have any thoughts or do you agree with Jamie? Well, other than I find it amusing when people are saying,, maybe eight months, two years ago, oh,, Google’s dropped the ball in AI and,, they’re going to get wiped out in search. I was thinking, no. No. So of course, anything’s possible, I guess, technically.
00:58:43 –> 00:59:25
But in terms of winners and losers, Google, I think, is going to continue to dominate, certainly, for the foreseeable future, which is not to discount the fact that, of course, the rise of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, et cetera, used as search engines is continuing to rise at a very, very impressive pace. But yeah, it’s SEMrush’s… Prediction, who knows? Prediction’s tough, particularly about the future. Most predictions are wrong. Except for ours. Except for ours. Except for ours, yes. Well, when’s the last hour of our lives?
00:59:25 –> 01:00:08
Yeah no it’s I think the honest answer is that I know people want an easier life but the reality is that we have to accept you’re going to have to continue to factor in Google as well as the chat between the rest of the of the of the of the lineup that’s that’s just a hard a hard reality that yeah the answer is inconclusive from everybody but as my as my fiancee says to her students she’s a teacher when she doesn’t know the answer to something she goes we just don’t know and that’s fair and that’s fair Okay, I think we will end it there. We are two minutes over.
01:00:08 –> 01:00:42
I know there’s a couple of stragglers still left in here, but I did not see any other questions come in. But if you do have any questions, I said, join the partner club. You can get direct access to our AI search and SEO specialists. Follow Andrew on LinkedIn. You can chat with him there. Jamie,, we’ll send over this deck after this call. His contact info is there if you have any questions for him as well. But we’ll wrap up there. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us. And enjoy the rest of your Thursday for you folks in London. Enjoy your evening in Chicago, the rest of you. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you so much.
01:00:42 –> 01:00:42
Bye. Thank you. Take care.
