What does the future of SEO look like? I get this question a lot from people I work or have worked with.

Publishers are already noticing reduced organic traffic. I think the challenge is twofold:

  1. Early adopters have started using ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude etc. instead of Google Search for more and more queries
  2. Google has rolled out AI answers, which means there are more zero-click queries.

For publishers relying on ad revenue, this threatens the entire business model (they need people on their actual website to make money from ads).

But for companies whose primary goal is lead generation, like B2B SaaS companies, it’s a slightly different story. For years, organic traffic has been super important, because relying on paid ads alone is too expensive. But if AI-generated summaries replace clicks, what should we optimize for?

Over time, being mentioned in AI chat responses may become more important than “ranking in Google” or getting organic search traffic.

The Gemini ‘grounding data’ analysis by Dan Petrovic suggests that Google’s AI sometimes pulls real-time data from Search results to generate answers, particularly when confidence in a response is low. This makes me think that the same content we use to rank high in search engines may also drive brand mentions in LLMs.

In other words, while buyer behaviour changes from Search to Chat, content creators for b2b companies may not need to adjust our strategies as much. The only things we need to ensure are:

  1. Our content is well written, up to date, and clear
  2. Search engines and LLMs alike can access and crawl our content

If we do that, we will still get organic traffic (albeit less), and we will get mentioned in the answers LLMs give to users when prompted something like: “What is the best tool to get marketing data into a data warehouse?”. Being part of the answer for those type of commercial questions, (which come in unlimited variations) is crucial.

So maybe the future of SEO isn’t so dire after all. If you work in SEO, your job is still the same: create useful content, deliver a great user experience, and serve the full funnel—not just the top. Because if you consistently deliver value, you’ll still rank. And more importantly, in this new LLM-powered world: you’ll be part of the answer.