It has been a big week of announcements over in Google-World. I’ve seen quite a few overblown reactions online, including “SEO is dead.”, “F@#$ Google & AI, AI is taking over the world”, “Search as we know it, is OVER.” So, I wanted to share an update on what was talked about this week, my take on it, and where we go from here.
To Recap:
Google held its big annual product event this week, and search came out of it looking pretty different. A new search box, AI agents that work in the background for users, results that build themselves on the fly. Alongside it, Google published a guide telling site owners how to show up in all of this.
There were literally a hundred updates that were announced during this week’s search conference, but here are the most meaningful to share:
- The search bar got its first major redesign in 25 years. It accepts text, images, files, even videos, and suggests smarter follow-up questions as people type.
- AI Mode now has over a billion monthly users. It’s the default experience more and more of your customers are using to research before they ever land on your site.
- Search agents are launching this summer. Users can set up agents that monitor the web 24/7 for things they care about, a specific model coming back in stock, a price drop on something they’ve been watching, a new listing matching their criteria. The agent pings them when something changes.
- Personal Intelligence connects search results to a user’s Gmail, Photos, and soon Calendar, so what they see is shaped by what Google already knows about them.
Translation for you: Google is hella nervous about falling behind in the LLM race and wants more people to use their search engine as an AI tool. Because of this, we should expect more and more people to conduct high-funnel research directly in search, with less of it spilling onto your site. The good news is that when they do come to your site, they’re further down the funnel and more ready to act.
What does this mean for SEO? Google addressed this very topic this week in an official statement:
Google’s official position is “Don’t overthink it, keep doing SEO the way you’ve been doing it.” Their AI features are built on top of the same systems that rank regular search results, so the fundamentals still apply. Clean technical setup, content that’s genuinely useful and written by people who know the subject, accurate business information, and structured product data.
They also told site owners to ignore a handful of newer tactics floating around online. Specifically, you don’t need to write content in a special way just for AI to read it.
We should trust Google right? Google always tells us the complete truth, right? Right??
Don’t get me wrong, I believe there is quite a bit of truth to Google’s claims. The basics are still the basics. A fast, well-structured site with genuinely useful content is the price of entry. If that’s not in place, nothing else works. And I would also agree with Google that many of the “hack the system” strategies you see posted on social media are a waste of time and resources. But where I would push back is that AI optimization IS a different game to an extent, and that has to do with getting robots to read your site vs. humans. I should also mention that , when it comes to how we approach SEO, Google’s guide only covers Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot are all making their own decisions about what to cite and recommend, and they don’t all work the same way. Some industry voices, including a sharp critique from Mike King at iPullRank, pointed out that treating Google’s word as the whole story leaves you optimizing for one platform when your customers are using five.
The other thing worth saying out loud: how your brand shows up in AI answers often has less to do with your website and more to do with everywhere else you exist online. Third-party reviews, forum mentions, industry publications, and video content. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been researching auto-specific AI behavior through the process of entering hundreds of prompts across multiple chat tools, and I have seen this to be true. These external sources have always mattered, but they matter even more now that AI systems are pulling from all of them to generate recommendations. FYI – I will have more to share from that research soon, so keep an eye out for it!
So what is LTD Connect’s response? What are we doing?
As I mentioned, the basics are still the basics. We can’t afford to lose sight of that, trying to chase every cheap trick that some SEO “specialist” posts about online. Quality content & technical SEO still matter. But we can’t afford to remain stagnant either. After all, search is changing.
The good news is that LTD Connect has already been changing and always will be. In addition to our current SEO/GEO/AEO work for our clients, here are a few things we are currently focused on:
- Writing tighter. AI systems pull specific passages out of pages, not whole pages. Content that makes one clear point per section gets cited more reliably than long sections that try to cover everything at once.
- Investing in presence beyond your sites. Reviews, third-party write-ups, etc. This is the work that shapes what AI says about you when someone asks.
- Measuring differently. Rankings still matter, but so does whether you’re being cited and mentioned across AI answers. We’re actively building this into how we report on our clients’ SEO.
The Short Version…
Search is changing faster than it has in years, and the playbook is genuinely expanding. But none of that means the work we’ve already done was wasted. The foundations still feed everything new on top. What’s changing is the surface area, and we’re adapting how we work with our clients to match it.
Written by LTD Connect Director of Data and SEO Aaron Bunner
