SEO is dead. Long live Search Agent Marketing.

If your business performance relies on SEO or SEM, prepare yourself for shock and disruption.

One day very soon the trickle of people using genAI search tools will become a flood.

Which means your company will need to target LLMs - in other words ‘market to machines’ - rather than the infinitely more predictable search engine algorithms we’ve been used to dealing with.

And just like marketing to human beings, there is a lot of imprecision and unknowns in the mix when it comes to LLMs.

Right now, even the experts who are building the models cannot explain how their LLMs are selecting some companies and products in preference to others, as the CEO of Perplexity explains below:

“All these things are yet to be fully understood, to be very honest with you, in terms of how the ranking works [and why] the AI is preferring to rank one over the other,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told Fortune in an exclusive interview on Monday. “Is it the number of reviews? Is it the ratings exactly and where the rankings are coming from—like what people are saying on different platforms about their product? There’s a lot of distillation and condensing going on here.”

This is not something that’s coming, it’s happening to many customers already, and the solution is far from clear.

What is clear is that we need to lean in and understand this much more deeply. Which means it’s exciting - the unknown always is.