SEO Isn’t Dead. But the Definition of Search Visibility Is Changing.

Saltwater’s Director of Digital Experience, Mark Miller, on what AI search means for brand visibility, authority, and the future of organic discovery.

TL;DR
• SEO hasn’t disappeared; it’s evolved. Real visibility now means showing up in traditional search engine results and being the source AI engines trust enough to cite, whether or not that visit ever happens.
• The fundamentals still matter most. Crawlability, fast load times, clean site structure, and content that actually provides answers to what people are searching for are still the floor, not optional extras.
• Brand credibility now has a direct line to whether AI engines cite you. PR, third-party validation, real expertise, and press coverage all factor into whether an engine decides your brand is worth quoting.
• Fewer, better pieces of content beat publishing at volume. Original research, a real point of view, and defensible data points are worth more than another piece of content that says what’s already out there.
• Measurement must expand past clicks and rankings. Marketing teams should track AI citations and topical presence, too—and give credit through multi-touch attribution even when a citation never turns into a visit.

Search is changing fast. As AI-generated answers become a bigger part of how consumers discover brands, marketers are questioning what it means for SEO, websites, and organic visibility.

To unpack what’s changing, we turned to Mark Miller at Saltwater, one of our sister agencies within Meet The People. Saltwater brings deep expertise in digital experience and search, extending the capabilities LOOMIS clients can tap into as part of the broader MTP network.

Is SEO Dead?

Every few years, someone declares SEO dead. It happened after Panda, after mobile-first indexing, after every major update that shook up the rules. It’s happening again now because of Google’s AI Overviews and AI engines like ChatGPT, and this time there’s real data behind the panic. Zero-click searches have climbed from 56% to 69% since AI Overviews launched, and more than two-thirds of all Google searches now end without a click, according to Similarweb’s own 2026 tracking.

None of that means search is going away. It means the job search has always done—connecting people with answers—has picked up a new layer. Rankings and organic traffic still matter. They’re just no longer the entire performance picture. The newer challenge is making a brand understandable, trustworthy, and useful enough that an AI engine chooses to cite it when it builds an answer.

We asked Mark whether that shift makes SEO obsolete.

Mark Miller, Director of Digital Experience at Saltwater:
“SEO is far from obsolete. It has simply evolved. For practitioners in the space, change is the norm. I always compare these moments to the swing of a pendulum. Things can feel like they’re really drifting away from core methodology, but eventually things swing back. Over the last decade, engine algorithms, new search experiences, designs, features, and even the way performance is analyzed and measured has forced strategy shifts and optimization innovation. Recently, Google put out a statement that I think really aligns with my perspective: ‘From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”

How Is Optimizing For AI Answers Different From Traditional SEO?

The old search experience was simple: query, results, click, website. Someone typed a question, scanned ten blue links, picked one, and landed on a page built to earn that click.

The experience AI search is building looks different: query, AI-generated answer, cited sources, maybe a click. ChatGPT cites about eight sources in a typical answer, and Perplexity cites closer to twenty-two . The competition has shifted toward becoming one of a handful of trusted sources, not just one link among ten.

We asked Mark what he thought the fundamental difference was between optimizing for AI answers and traditional search.

Mark Miller:
“The expectations of AI users are the biggest shift from traditional search. This has changed what good looks like in terms of content optimization. Users want things served up to them on a silver platter. They don’t want to dig. This has forced content owners to think more about the situational needs of their users and designing connected content experiences to answer them quickly and directly. It’s a departure from writing broad content loosely aligned with user intent, expected to function as a wide net to capture a searcher and crossing your fingers they find more detail on other deeper pages.”

Which SEO fundamentals matter more now?

It would be easy to read all of this as a mandate to throw out everything that used to work. It isn’t. Technical SEO, site architecture, relevant content, crawlability, backlinks, and search intent are still the foundation. .

What’s shifting is emphasis. Topical expertise counts for more, since AI engines weigh how deeply a site covers a subject, not just whether a single page ranks for a single term. Original information, data, research, or a genuine point of view nobody else has published, carries more weight than another summary of what’s already out there. And plain consistency, saying the same things about the same brand across every site and profile, makes it easier for both traditional search engines and AI engines to trust what they’re reading.

We asked Mark what traditional SEO practices have become even more important because of AI.

Mark Miller:
“Understanding your user deeply and ensuring your content helps them. This goes back to the principles of Google’s Helpful Content Update and prioritizing ‘creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.’ On top of that, making sure your content is ‘retrieval ready’ matters more than it used to. Meaning you have to pay more attention to things like having TL;DR summaries up top, a clear content hierarchy, fast load times, structured data, and uninhibited crawler access.”

Are SEO and Brand Authority Merging?

This is where the story gets bigger than SEO. If an AI engine is deciding whether your information is trustworthy enough to use in an answer, it isn’t really asking, “Did this page use the right keyword?” It’s closer to, “Does the broader information ecosystem suggest this organization actually knows what it’s talking about?”

That question pulls in a lot more than a keyword strategy. PR shapes how a brand gets described in the press and, increasingly, in the sources AI engines pull from. Thought leadership and original research give a brand something specific and citable to say, rather than a generic take on a topic everyone else is covering. Reputation and reviews signal, in aggregate, whether real customers vouch for a company. Expert content and third-party mentions extend a brand’s authority beyond its own website, into the kind of independent sources AI engines tend to trust. And the overall digital experience, how easy a site is to use and how clearly it answers questions, reflects back on all of it. SEO has always overlapped with those disciplines. AI search just makes the overlap impossible to ignore.

We asked Mark whether SEO and brand building are becoming more intertwined than they used to be.

Mark Miller:
“Absolutely. All facets of your digital ecosystem should be aligned on how they talk about your brand, differentiate it, and provide value to your users. Helpful content should be accessible at every opportunity. Being the brand with the answer and openly addressing your customers’ questions and concerns builds trust. Customers buy from those they trust, and recent research backs that up. Nearly 90% of consumers now say they’ll pay more for a brand they trust, according to Edelman’s 2026 brand trust research. These trust exercises don’t just lift your brand perception; they also improve your SEO.”

Should Brands Publish Less Content?

For a long time, the content playbook rewarded volume. Publish enough keyword-targeted articles and eventually one of them ranks. That approach gets a lot less compelling in a world where anyone, including a competitor with no real expertise, can generate an enormous amount of generic content in an afternoon.

The advantage shifts toward information only your organization can credibly produce: proprietary research, expert perspectives, customer data, case studies, original frameworks, first-party experience, and clear answers to complex questions.

We asked Mark whether AI makes it more important for brands to produce fewer, better pieces of content.

Mark Miller:
“Quality over quantity. Use other signals like updating outdated content and leverage the ‘last modified’ element to get content crawled and reindexed at scale. The days of writing a blog post for every keyword variation are long gone. Search engines are too smart, and users have become too lazy. When faced with tough decisions like ‘which of these near-identical blogs should I read,’ users can now have AI decide for them. Don’t put them in that position in the first place. Put in the time, write unique, compelling, and shareworthy content that adds value. Google defines this as ‘non-commodity content.’

In a world where more and more content feels like it’s designed just to convince you of something, these real, proven, defensible experiences and data points stand out. Reddit is a good example of what happens when that trust gets tested at scale. Profound’s own citation data shows Reddit is the single largest source behind both Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity, at times accounting for close to half of a platform’s top cited sources, though that share shifts as platforms adjust how much weight they give community threads versus original expert content. The concept holds either way: AI engines reward sources that read as genuinely authored and specific, not manufactured at scale.”

What Should Marketers Measure Now?

Traffic and rankings aren’t going away as metrics, but they stop being the whole picture the moment a meaningful share of your audience gets its answer without ever clicking through. The newer additions to the dashboard: AI citations, share of voice inside AI answers, branded search volume, visibility around priority topics, referral traffic from AI platforms, presence relative to competitors, and how accurately your brand gets represented when it does get cited.

Mark Miller:
“When measuring the impact of your SEO efforts, the name of the game today is to diversify. Just looking at rankings or organic traffic acquisition doesn’t cut it anymore. We’ve expanded what we track into five buckets: AI engine visibility, competitive visibility, traditional search performance, website health and technical readiness, and revenue or pipeline influence. Arguably more important than what you measure is how you measure it. Moving toward a multi-touch attribution model that leverages real first-party data should be one of the leading goals of mature businesses looking to grow. AI engines and chatbots now let users access website content without ever visiting the site. Crediting the right channels for the influence they have on converting customers directly impacts your ability to model, forecast, and allocate spend against them.”

In practice, that means treating AI citation tracking as a near-weekly discipline, since citation share can swing meaningfully in a matter of weeks, while technical health audits, schema coverage, and attribution modeling run on a steadier monthly or ongoing cadence. The tools differ by team. The principle doesn’t: match how often you measure something to the pace of the channel.

What Should Brands Do Now?

None of this is useful if it stays theoretical. We asked Mark what he’d tell a marketing team, prioritizing the next twelve to eighteen months.

Mark Miller:
“If you’re advising a marketing team preparing for the next 12 to 18 months, here’s what I’d tell them to prioritize:
1. Make a concerted effort to deeply understand who your customers are today, and why they may or may not need your product or service. Sounds simple, but it’s often overlooked, especially for mature brands.
2. Position your brand as the best option for your unique mix of customers, through both demonstration of expertise and experience, to earn trust. This takes rock-solid, shareworthy content.
3. Optimize your platforms for good UX to remove friction and then measure it closely. The last thing you want is to pay to acquire a customer and fumble the conversion because they can’t find where to click on what they want. Consistent user testing and user journey analysis, leveraging first-party data, is the secret sauce here.”

None of that is a hack. It’s the same discipline that has always separated brands that compound their visibility over time from the ones chasing whatever the algorithm rewards this quarter. AI search just raised the stakes on doing it well.

MARK MILLER is director of digital experience at Saltwater a digital experience agency and part of the Meet The People network. Mark has spent over a decade at Saltwater, moving from digital marketing specialist to leading the agency’s optimization and digital experience practices, with a focus on SEO, AI Engine Optimization, and user experience. Before Saltwater, he ran search programs at Swell Media and worked in marketing consulting. Mark’s work centers on helping brands become sources that search engines, AI platforms, and customers understand, trust, and choose, whether that means a technical SEO fix, a content strategy, or a full site experience rebuilt around how people actually make decisions today.

LOOMIS is a leading challenger brand advertising agency based in Dallas, specializing in campaign development, digital, social, mobile, and user experience. As part of Meet The People (MTP), an international network of independently operated agencies, LOOMIS offers clients access to specialized talent, technology, and capabilities across the network.

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