Digital Marketers (actually anyone online really) love to sensationalize. It gets eyeballs, gains interest, subscribers, potentially gets customers. Suggesting that your SEO is no longer going to work gets businesses scared and that fear drives sales.

After years of watching trends come and go, our advice hasn’t changed much: protect what’s working, stay skeptical of the hype, and let data lead. Here’s how we’re thinking about it right now:

1. Look at your data. Focus on the channels that are actually driving results — not the ones generating the most buzz.
2. Understand AI’s limitations before you pivot. LLMs often work with older data, most still pull from Google and Bing, and there’s no reliable way to measure AI visibility yet.
3. Remember the lag. LLMs often work with older data, and most still pull from Google and Bing. AI visibility is a long game.
4. Don’t expect clean metrics — yet. Tracking AI performance is genuinely hard — prompts, personalization, and localization make standardized measurement nearly impossible today.
5. Future-proof gradually. Keep doing what works (topical authority) while staying informed. Find a trusted source grounded in actual data, not hype.

Clickbait headlines have become the norm. TikTok videos calling for doom and gloom are prevalent. Cruise through YouTube and you’ll see screenshots of people with shocked looks on their faces exclaiming that the sky is falling. The reason for this is simple: unfortunately, it works. Especially online.

So, while I’m not suggesting everyone who does this as their screengrab in YouTube are actors, this sort of over-the-top strategy is a turn-off for me, but it gets the views even if the information isn’t actually accurate. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some good stuff out there; the challenge is knowing who to trust.

So, where to find who or what can you trust?

Not every source is created equal. Here’s how we think about it:

• Search and AI Search are generally reliable starting points. These platforms are built with trust signals baked in, which makes them more credible than social media on balance. That said, they’re not immune to manipulation — pay enough money and you can influence what shows up. We know this firsthand: early in our history, we did reputation management work, essentially engineering search results so the more favorable content outranked the bad. It worked, but it didn’t sit right with us, so we walked away from it. The point is, even “trusted” sources can be gamed but look for those with good success stories, those who appear in lists, those who are active and well received on linkedin. Check a variety of sources

• Referrals are old-school and still gold. Someone in your network vouching for a vendor or strategy carries real weight; they have skin in the game. Just keep in mind that some people recommend freely without much vetting, more to seem connected than to actually be helpful. A warm introduction is a starting point, not a guarantee.

• Data is our north star. Numbers don’t have an agenda. We manage a large portfolio of client websites, each with multiple data streams feeding into our analysis. We’ve built an internal reporting tool that pulls a high-level performance summary across those sources on a weekly and monthly basis — and for some clients, we have visibility into full business metrics beyond just web traffic. That full picture is what lets us cut through the noise and tell you what’s actually moving the needle.

When clients ask us how to “show up on AI,” our answer starts there: with the data, not the hype. We manage a lot of websites, all of which have data sources we tap into. We’ve even built a tool that provides a high-level summary of various data sources weekly and monthly. For some, we even have access to full business data. All of this is incredibly useful in helping us determine what is actually working for our clients.

So when I look at something like this stat breakdown:

The fact that Organic Search is driving the most revenue is a pretty compelling reason why I’m going to be pretty cautious in my approach to any significant shift in SEO. The data above is from May 2026. Despite all the “SEO is dead” posts out there, I’d be hesitant to agree when a client is performing this well on Search. 65% of their revenue for the month, is still coming from Organic Search. A couple of notes here. Perhaps the user had done their research on ChatGPT, learned about the company and then Googled the company. We don’t know. What I do know is that they have great search engine visibility (coincidentally also ai visibility for the matter) so we’re not going to be doing anything to negatively impact that. Many of may well have heard of the marketing company that tanked their rankings under the guise of aggressively targeting GEO. Don’t be like them.

Reminds us of the early days of SEO

Like the example above, there were often ways to try and game the system (hidden keywords!) but as is often the case, these were short term gains that would more often than not, result in a significant smackdown.

There was also a time in the early days of SEO, proving value to stakeholders was a challenge. One of the issues was that it took time to be able to show that our activities were worthwhile, and business owners are naturally impatient. We had keyword trackers and analytics (which, back then, actually told you which specific keywords people used!), but even those weren’t always enough. It wasn’t until leads and sales were directly tracked to Search that the lightbulb went on. For some, that was too long. Add to that, a decent chunk of those offering “seo services” were opportunists trying to cash in on the latest trend,

AI Visibility is dealing with the same growing pains SEO did in its early days — misinformation is rampant, and opportunists are everywhere. If someone is promising to “automate your GEO” or guarantee you’ll rank first in AI results, treat that as a red flag. There’s no reliable, standardized way to measure AI visibility yet, the honest answer is that nobody has fully cracked it.

There are tools emerging that take a run at it. Some track how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses, others monitor citation patterns or the queries that surface your content. Bing Webmaster Tools is probably the most useful right now — it surfaces citation data and grounding queries that give you a genuine signal. But even that falls well short of the kind of validated, repeatable measurement we have in traditional search. We’re watching this space closely, but we’re not ready to stake client strategy on any single tool’s numbers just yet.

Not quite an exact science

Even better is perhaps the referral data you get in analytics.

That’s great but typically it’s a pretty small portion of visitors, plus quite often people aren’t going to click on the source and come to the website. AI accounts for 1% of website traffic and typically high converting, but we do know prospects are using it heavily. Folks are most certainly doing and seeing a lot more about your brand that doesn’t even involve your website…certainly something to keep in mind if you’re looking to future-proof this part of your digital marketing strategy.

AI is incredibly exciting. We love it, and we’re “all in,” but we’re not making any knee-jerk shifts that would negatively impact SEO performance.

Learn as much as possible about GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), just make sure you can trust the source!