In this week’s episode of Local Search Tuesdays, I dive into how AI is rapidly reshaping the world of digital marketing. From the days of losing keyword data in Google Analytics to the rise of AI-driven search and query fan-out, the way we track visibility and conversions is evolving fast. I break down what this shift means for marketers, why traditional SEO still matters, and how businesses can prepare for a future where influence—not just visibility—is the key to success.
Video Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, we’re going to talk about a really important topic: how digital marketing is changing because of AI.
If you’ve been in digital marketing for long enough, you probably remember the collective freak-out way back in 2011 when Google stopped showing keyword data inside of Google Analytics. The whole “not provided” thing was a big roadblock, but we still figured out how to work around it - we just had less insight into how customers found us.
AI is basically doing the same thing at a more extreme level. Even without keyword data in Google Analytics, we could use other data points to figure out how to get more visibility online. We could do a bit of research to see what was ranking in searches and then reverse engineer what was going on. We could check for content gaps on a site, write new content to fill the holes, see how it would start to show in search results, and then how it would get some traffic, and eventually how it would result in conversions.
As digital marketers, we taught our clients about the important metrics to track: ranking, impressions, impression share, and most importantly, website traffic and conversions.
And now, with the advent of AI overviews, AI mode, and LLM searches, everything we’ve been tracking for years no longer matters.
We’re fast approaching a reality where people don’t browse websites anymore. AI systems will control how people find and interact with businesses and brands. Right now, it’s mostly LLM summaries and recommendations, but soon it will be AI agents making personalized recommendations or even making purchases for us.
The entire model for how we track marketing will cease to exist. The AI systems work completely differently than how humans search for and interact with brands.
If you haven’t heard of it yet, you need to learn about the concept of “query fan-out”. A user will enter a single query in the system, but then the AI system breaks that query into multiple related sub-queries so that it can provide a better-informed and nuanced response.
Rank tracking won’t matter, because every query response will be personalized and be based off of multiple sub-queries that are then consolidated into a unique answer.
Jono Alderson, one of the smartest technical SEOs on the planet, said it best in a recent post on his site: “When everything is opaque, the job isn’t to be seen, it’s to be unignorable”
We’re no longer trying to optimize for a single search engine algorithm that’s used by humans in a fairly predictable manner, we’re trying to be included in the reasoning path used by an AI model.
Instead of publishing content to get clicks, we’ll need to publish content that will hopefully show up somewhere in the query fan-out so that the AI system will list us as a citation or a reference.
It’s not all doom and gloom - the number of people looking to buy your product or service hasn’t changed. Your potential customers are still out there, they’re just going to be finding you in ways that we can no longer track. You’ll get a conversion and have zero clue what led to that conversion.
What matters in the future won’t be visibility in search results, it will be brand influence. Your site will exist as a delivery vehicle presented to the AI systems, and hopefully, your content will influence the answer delivered by the system.
Having the best product or service or the best team won’t matter if the AI systems can’t see those facts. Also, those facts need to be backed up, which means the information needs to exist in multiple locations.
You don’t have to worry about Google penalties anymore; you have to worry about not being included in the reasoning path. You need to build brand redundancy. Multiple voices should be saying the same things about you on multiple platforms.
But also, don’t forget - traditional SEO is still important. Yes, AI is changing things, and the market share is growing, but the vast majority of searches still happen in traditional Google searches. We’re in this weird position of flux where we should be working on both sides. For most verticals, the vast majority of traffic will still come from traditional Google searches conducted by humans… But the change is coming, and you should start getting ready for it now.
That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, have a happy and safe Fourth of July weekend, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
