← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Who's Going to Dominate Search in the AI Era?
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
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Tyson Stockton
The way people discover products, services and brands is changing fast. AI assistants, generative answers, agent led interfaces are quickly replacing traditional search as a starting point for a user's journey. Nearly 60% of US adults visited a page with AI generated summer within the first month of 2025. That stat signals a massive behavioral shift. If the front door of your business is now an AI interface, how do you compete? How do you stand out when search becomes more of a conversation? You're listening to the Voice of Search podcast. My name is Tyson and today I'm excited to be joined by Kilian Dunn, founder of Telepathic. Telepathic helps brands build AI native SEO tools that help E commerce and SaaS brands gain visibility in emerging search platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Today, Kilian and I will explore who's going to dominate search in an AI area and how your brand can be one of them. Gillian, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:37]
Kilian Dunn
Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
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Tyson Stockton
Now, obviously this has been a heavy conversation, not just here on the podcast, but in the industry. So we all know our world in SEO is changing. The way people are engaging with search engines are changing maybe to kind of just set the stage for the listeners. Like, how are you seeing this evolution and how are you seeing the changes in the space that we compete in?
- [02:01]
Kilian Dunn
Yeah, there's so much, I think it's like arguably one of the most rapidly changing industries at the moment and so kind of everyone is scrambling to keep up and to understand what to do. And it's been chaotic, I think, for everyone. At the same time, I think maybe it's helpful for people to zoom out a little bit and think instead of kind of zooming in on the details and saying, okay, kind of like, how are things different this week from last? And thinking more about where are things going, what's the direction of things, and working under the assumption that this change isn't going to stop and if anything, it might even Accelerate further. The trend broadly is that AI agents are becoming more and more dominant and will be more heavily involved in more of the buying journey. I think the biggest trend at the moment is that buying journeys are being compressed. This has been happening for a long time. It started off like, let's say as we kind of move from a sort of a sales led go to market where you'll have someone hop on a bunch of different calls to kind of go through a buying purchase and down to the next kind of like product led growth became very popular where you could actually access a product without talking to a human. And we're seeing that happen more and more. That friction is being removed and that's taking a big leap Forward now with ChatGPT, where so much of that discovery process can happen in various different AI search tools. And so the work required to make your choice as to what to buy, it could be a software put or E commerce product or anything is being cut down. So much. So it's very interesting. Lots is going on.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's. It is a very exciting time for the industry. Obviously you have a lot of, you know, in some cases more fear, panic of the changes. But I feel like that change is something that like at least was one of the attractions to SEO or Search For Myself, where it's like you want to have that evolving landscape and that added complexity of change. So it's like, I feel like it's something that as an industry we should be pretty well prepared for operating in that state of change. And I love the advice too, of like not getting hung up in defining strategies necessarily for today with the rate of change, but more of the kind of Gretzky quote of like, where the puck's going versus where it is. But maybe kind of before we get too far into the future, I want to just double back a little bit on kind of your comment about the buyer's journey being compressed. Is that from your perspective? Because with each, I don't know, prompt or query, the user's gaining a broader sense of the answer, the context, or what do you feel is fueling that compression?
- [04:43]
Kilian Dunn
Yeah, I think we're more efficient at finding the information we need. So instead of having to look through lots of different pages, instead of having to search and explore lots of different options, the fact that AI search tools can be very specific at giving us a very direct answer to the very specific question that we have, it means that we find out exactly what we need. It probably ultimately means that we're also overlooking A bunch of different areas when we make a purchase, we're now not finding out about anything we might have come across but not actually looked for when buying something. But yeah, there's a lot of kind of consequences to that. And I think this is even taking a huge leap forward already in the last few days. Just Yesterday there was OpenAI's Dev Day and they've announced a kind of AI apps SDK. And essentially this allows you to push your app in ChatGPT that can be used directly from ChatGPT. And this has huge consequences as well. This is a huge cost to the buying journey as well. It makes that process even shorter. Again, where you don't even need to kind of like navigate to a website. You don't even need to go through a lengthy signup process. Instead you can access, let's say the examples they gave were like Zillow or Coursera or a bunch of other tools directly from ChatGPT. And so now the effort required to get the value of an app is just plummeting down.
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Tyson Stockton
And I feel like another illustration of that could also be. And I forget the date that it was kind of announced, but like Etsy's kind of partnership with OpenAI from making purchases from it when you're thinking about establishing a strategy moving forward. So it's like we're coming into Q4 here. People are starting to start their annual planning for next year fiscal. Like it's a good moment to reset and to be thinking about like, you know, what does that roadmap and strategy look like in 2026? What would be kind of like the parameters of where we compete or the world that you see it, that you would be strategizing for looking into 2026.
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Kilian Dunn
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot I think like let's say for the Etsy example. So get Etsy are the kind of first case they're rolling out with. I know they work very closely with Shopify as well. So that will definitely come soon. I think let's say for like that E commerce case, what's happening is that your products can be found from even more places now. So we've got like kind of search everywhere optimization has been a common phrase. I think that's becoming. Everywhere is becoming even more broad, even more comprehensive. And so I think the win is to make sure that when you're describing yourselves and describing your products, that is a really kind of high quality description such that when that gets applied elsewhere, that's used in lots of different contexts. So I think what's important there is like really in depth descriptions being really thorough with details being really unique as well. And anything you describe, let's say, like, I don't know, it's for a very particular context or a very particular use case and so on. For an E commerce context, if you can kind of find a way that your particular product can match queries that others might not be thinking about, then that's definitely a win. So I think broadly most product descriptions are probably too short and too vague and I think we will see a big trend towards the opposite of that. We've already seen it a little bit with Amazon Search Optimization. If you look at the product on Amazon, it's super in depth, it's a bit gross. And maybe that will be a trend as to how things go. But they put in so much work into putting in all the right keywords and all the right terms that could possibly catch up to become your top result. And I think that will need to be done as well for AI search as well for E commerce.
- [08:33]
Tyson Stockton
That makes sense. And so just to elaborate a little bit further on that. So basically with the customization, with the personalization that comes with like an LLM or AI LED interface, you're kind of calling out the example of like within like a product page or something, having those unique specifics that then allows like we want some of these tools and systems to pick up on why it may be a fit for a niche problem use case rather than just kind of the broad catch all kind of generalist and in kind of like the progression of that, I would assume like content agents and having like specialized maybe content agents based upon Personas to write different portions of content. Like, is that partly how you see the development of those pages is through both the application of these tools in order to compete in them as well. Because I assume with that level of customization obviously there's a lot of legwork. So then the advantage of using some of these specialized systems and tools would have a strong place.
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Kilian Dunn
Yeah, exactly. I think Fraser is almost like product enrichment, which we're helping with already in terms of essentially taking a product that you have, maybe you could upload like a description or even images and so on a video, whatever it is, and then turning that format into a format that's really easily digestible and searchable for AI because it seems like at least based on what the kind of what we found from our own data and from the documentation that kind of OpenAI uses and so on and some of the other providers is they're Very much prioritizing, kind of like how closely your search term matches their query and so how closely your description matches what was asked. And so that means that things that Google gave so much attention to, like eat and domain authority and all these sort of things, they don't have that level of sophistication or maybe they might kind of kind of hop on the backs of Google for their kind of search parameter. But essentially it means that how reputable your brand is is becoming a secondary priority to how closely does your wording match the wording the customer is looking for.
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Tyson Stockton
I feel like it's also kind of like painting the narrative of like we're moving into this like agents as a primary user. And it's like, I mean, in some ways it's almost like a chicken before the egg scenario because it's like obviously you're needing them to respond and needing to basically like interact well with that in order to reach that end user. But like, how does your focus maybe shift or change? Like, are you still saying in SEO we've always been like, follow the user, follow the user, what's best for the user? Does this like have a paradigm shift to that kind of like classic SEO narrative of like chasing the user rather than the search engine? Like, how does this kind of impact the way you view that kind of like primary optimization efforts?
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Kilian Dunn
Yeah, it's interesting. I think the basics are still follow the user, but there might be a kind of next level or sort of like once you've kind of served that basic tier, then I think there is a potential scenario quite soon where we'll have a bit of a wild west like we had with Google before, where companies will be quite spammy and we'll gain the system a bit. And I think there'll be ways of using software to find quantity and quality until eventually quality drops. I think that will trend towards that relatively soon. So starting to see early signs of that. And I think there will be a relatively spammy phase that enters soon and it'll be up to the AI search tools to adapt to that. But also I'm curious for your thoughts as well. Do you think it's better to be very user centric or search centric or what have you found from the people you've spoken to?
- [12:34]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, I mean it's a little bit of both in my mind. Like, I think to your point, like your ultimate North Star should still be the user because even if you're needing to act through these agents to be present and kind of just to like have a Seat at the table, so to speak. You're still then looking at like a traditional consumer behavior element. And I see like a lot of the strategy of search shifting more towards those like traditional fundamentals of like consumer behavior as like more like textbook kind of like, I don't know, I want to say just like theories, but it's like more of that kind of like foundational element. I do think that to your point, like we need to be thinking in a broader sense and when we're looking at, you know, whether it's performance tracking and things like that level of variance of user experience will only continue to progress and change. And I think from that you're still aiming at the user. It's more of like, okay, I just need to get, get on the field, get like a seat at the table. Which, you know, you still have fundamental things that we've been working with in search for a long time, such as indexation, health, what's, you know, I mean, there's been a lot of Talk lately about JavaScript rendering again. So it's like even though the world's changing rapidly, it's like we're still hitting back on these same kind of like principles and conversation that we've been having. It's just, you know, a new flavor to it, a new twist to it. So I'm very much in the belief that like the fundamentals of the game has not changed. The same kind of characteristics and elements that have fueled strong performers in search, I think are there. It's just now the strategy shifts a little bit, the tactics shift a little bit. How you're prioritizing efforts will shift, but is not necessarily saying my approach from a baseline is changing. So I think user still remains your North Star now you kind of just have another layer in between in reaching that end user.
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Kilian Dunn
Yeah, and like there haven't been that many usability studies yet on AI search. Like I think Kevin Indig from Growth Mamo, he's done a good one but like there aren't many. So still there's a lot of research to be done as to sort of how is user behavior actually receiving these changes and are people happy with them? What's the kind of common flows in that search journey?
- [15:13]
Tyson Stockton
Which, I mean, this is slightly off topic, but I've been really curious on this one, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on it too. So we all know and with whether it's the DOJ trials or Google's API leak nav boost, we know engagement metrics are used within it. Obviously it makes a ton of sense. It's almost like a grading system. I feel like on did they get the results right from a ranking order? But as more and more of that experience is happening within the actual interface, how would those KPIs of Navbus then kind of evolve? Like are we still looking at things like click through rate from the serps time on page depth into the site or will it be a little bit more of time on page from within the actual search experience? And so I'd be curious to see like what are your thoughts on how user engagement metrics would be used from Google or emerging kind of like AI search engines?
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Kilian Dunn
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think there's maybe a question as to one, how will the KPIs you showed track evolve versus the second question of how will the KPIs people actually mostly do track evolve? I think in terms of what we should, we should still do our best to tie it to revenue and do our best to maybe be a bit more open minded as to what to go for. So I think general visibility and impressions and kind of like maybe brand sentiment overall will become more and more important. But I think there is a risk that SEOs, particularly those who are inexperienced or under pressure, might optimize for some of the wrong things. I think a few years ago we saw a trend where a lot of marketing was being replaced with sales like AI SDRs and SDRs generally and kind of like optimizing to most investments that would have gone to marketing, went to sales and there was kind of a year of the brand crisis, as they say in 2024. I think TrustRadius said this where basically a lot of companies were optimizing for sales essentially because the ROI was much more measurable and the results weren't necessarily better. But it was saying, hey, if I put this money into outreach or this money into generating leads or our sales funnel, cool, we can really easily attribute that. Whereas in marketing, okay, hey, let's say our brand has gotten better. That's really, really tough. And so I think companies will need to be a little bit patient and say, hey, we're going through discovery phase, we're going to try some experiments, we want to stand out and we have to put our best foot forward. But attribution is going to be more tough. There are more places that people are looking and because searching is becoming more low friction, we're seeing that instead the number of places we are searching is increasing. So it's not necessarily, we've probably heard like it's not necessarily that Google's traffic isn't really down. Instead it's just overall search traffic has increased. So the pie has gotten. Google haven't lost their portion of the pie. The overall pie has gotten bigger and added to. So it means that for a buyer they are looking in more places, they have more touch points before they make a decision. Which makes things like attribution a nightmare. What's a common flow that we hear about a lot is users will do nearly all of their research process in ChatGPT or perplexity or wherever and then cool. Found my brand of choice, I'll type it into Google. Google gets the direct referral and the attribution goes to Google. But in fact it was a bunch of other sources and so on. So it's going to be really tough. I think it's going to get tougher. It's very interesting to see how it evolves.
- [18:58]
Tyson Stockton
Okay, so to that last point, and I completely agree where it's like even in my own behavior I'm doing a lot of that discovery phase within an AI interface. Doesn't matter, ChatGPT, Gemini, AI mode, whatever. But from that if we go back to earlier of optimizing or strategizing for today versus tomorrow, if I'm looking at the operation of things today, I would be saying like okay, within those AI experiences there's going to be more of a traditional marketing advertising kind of strategy where I'm looking more for that kind of brand reputation, sediment towards it general presence. But it's like in my mind it's like a little bit of like a branding play where you're hitting a wide audience. Yeah. You're having very specific use cases to show up to those unique kind of prompts and complexities to it. But then you still have the tail end that it is, that direct point of purchase, lower funnel type query that's going to be like your money pages or whatever, like high converting product pages, things like that with kind of like the progression of agents, people making purchases. And I assume you know we're on the cusp of having more advertisements within these like experiences. Do you see that strategy kind of like shifting over like this next year or like do you think like yeah, that's probably the place that we're going to be in for the next 12 months or like when do you think we need to re question that kind of like tail end, bottom funnel presence on traditional versus like in these newer experiences?
- [20:47]
Kilian Dunn
I think there definitely will be a questioning phase. I think the methods that exist now in terms of running high scale simulations or experiments with very long tail searches does work now works well. We've seen it be very successful and I think that will continue for a fair while. Not super soon will that get replaced, but I do think it will be replaced maybe a year or something like that sort of timeline. I think the kind of interesting aspect of where this is going is a lot of talk is about okay, hey, how will my query be really personalized to me, I think lots of tech roles I talk to and so on saying, hey, these AIs will have full context on you and they'll be able to know exactly what you need and you just need to basically do almost nothing and it will find the right product for you. Less of a believer of that. I don't think personal context is that easy to extract. The good example is Google. Google has absurd levels of context on us and the height of sophistication that's gotten to is search history. Have you written the exact same term in then? Okay, yeah, we'll put in that term again. That's it. I think there's a degree of people not wanting it, but there's also a degree of it's really hard to extract what is meaningful from all of your previous activity. It's becoming easier, but still really, really hard. And so I think that personalization aspect will be tough. What I do think might be interesting, and this is probably where these AI search tools could become huge cash cows, is if they start extracting moments when you show that you are really high intent and then flag that person for you as being a potential buyer. Let's say, hey, I need a personal bank and someone searches, I'm looking for a personal bank for someone in my demographic and you show a really high intent level for that. Then if they lock that in your system and share that data with it, could be Chase or Mercury or whoever, that's stupidly useful information for those companies. And I could easily see companies paying huge amounts of money for that. And I could imagine that lots of the AI search tools will be willing to share that information. So I don't necessarily think search will be hugely personalized, but I think intense signals from that could definitely be extracted from that.
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Tyson Stockton
That makes a lot of sense. I feel like we keep kind of seeing this pendulum swing where as we're discussing this, we're highlighting essentially this. I think it almost reminds me of a resurgence of relevance, factors over authority, where it's like there's going to be more customization, there's going to be more context in the prompt. So then there's potential for a greater variety. You hit it on earlier product enhancements, content enhancements that are going to speak to those unique kind of applications or like use cases is you know, swinging back more towards this like relevance piece. Do you see like it coming back around where it's like these systems go down the path of having something hyper, hyper relevant to the user, the query, the prompt. But then at some point there's going to need to be this like pendulum swing back to like authority credibility. Like some of these like EAT type factors. Like how do you see kind of like that authority playing like down the road?
- [24:16]
Kilian Dunn
Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think it still will be super important. I think SEOs will still need to think about all those relevant factors, like what they've done for Google for so long. I think. Yeah, like we're seeing it with kind of OpenAI pairing with let's say the Google or Bing and so on and anthropic with Brave. Essentially this is just a way of extracting Google or Brave's EAT model. They're just extracting this ranking system of domains and so on. They already have access to all the information they need. They already have access to, to like they can already scan a bunch of different places for let's say real time information. But the key is actually choosing what is the most valuable, most credible. And that credibility algorithm as we know is really sophisticated. And so kind of climbing on the back of that I think is important. And so I think a lot of still the same practices that SEOs must do will continue in terms of backlinking and in terms of increasing your visibility across a bunch of different social platforms and in terms of having clear signals that people like engaging with what you're doing. So let's say low bounce rates and so on. I think these will all still be really crucial.
- [25:31]
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. One other piece. As we look into how everything's changing and evolving, there's been this trend over the years and more recently where although Google is still sending more traffic to the open web, more and more of that traffic is being captured by the top players and the big brands in the space. Rand's done a fair amount of research on it. It's been a conversation for quite some time. One of the things that I think is particularly interesting about these shifts is it feels like for some of the like, maybe smaller brands that are able to mobilize, move quickly, get a jump on kind of this new direction, they can get an inside lane. So it's almost like there's an open angle for more competition within search. Do you see this as like a kind of a continuation that hey, like with all this hyper specialization there is an opportunity for more diversity amongst websites rankings. Like it's not just going to be like the big box players that are dominating the search results but like more room for variety of players. Like do you see that kind of continuing in that direction or do you think like we are going to still see this like dominance of big brands within search?
- [26:58]
Kilian Dunn
Yeah, I think AI search has definitely helped smaller brands. There is less emphasis on traditional brand credibility than there was and I think this will decline a bit where essentially big brands will eventually stabilize. We'll figure out what works as well and there'll be some degree of consistency and they will kind of catch up and find all the best practices and have the resources to be more sophisticated when they figure out what works best. But I think there will be a phase of months and small number of years where small brands definitely can get a head start and definitely can capture a bunch of the low hanging fruit. So I think it's particularly important for small brands to lean into the AI angle.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, yeah, it's like that, that open inside lane.
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Kilian Dunn
I agree.
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Tyson Stockton
Like it only feels like it's going to be open for a short period more. It's like search has become so much more general. I think in a lot of conversations, like I've heard more executives, CMOs, CEOs asking questions about search and I think one, it's a great opportunity for SEOs from a career perspective because you have this added awareness. But it's like that kind of angle before everyone's kind of all moving in this direction. Feels like it's only going to be open for so long.
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Kilian Dunn
Absolutely. But I think it's a great opportunity for SEOs as well because I think almost all parts of marketing are converging towards this area. I think AI search is eating into all facets of marketing. It could be like documentation or it could be even kind of website optimization and so on and it could be E commerce and even some aspects of sales. All of these are getting eaten into by AI search. And so SEOs who are forward looking have a huge opportunity to expand their domain responsibility. And so I think the Trend is that SEOs are becoming a lot more strategic, a lot more kind of like research based on as opposed to necessarily doing a lot of manual work and doing a lot of execution work. The research phase is particularly important and the result of that I think is a Lot of the hires that are made for SEO are becoming more and more senior, which is a great thing. And it means that there's an opportunity for top SEOs to get compensated with responsibility and payment and so on. Really well. So I think as a trend, SEO is becoming more high level and sophisticated and so on, which is really cool to see 100%.
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Tyson Stockton
And I mean anecdotally I feel like last year when we did our SEO jobs study where we looked at like, you know, what SEO jobs there were, what were the trends in it? Of course there's some areas that were decreasing and I know, you know, there's a lot of SEOs out there that, you know, have been looking for quite some time. But like the areas that we saw growth were in those more senior director and above type positions. And so I think although there's a lot of competition out there, there is a glass half full component of some of the roles leveling up, having that more kind of higher ceiling almost like in the industry.
- [30:15]
Kilian Dunn
Yeah, I think it's also becoming more technical as well. There's more of a need to run very specific experiments. Whereas a very narrow question that needs answering and having the tooling or access to the tooling and the understanding to be able to find that answer is, is becoming a huge win.
- [30:33]
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. And pace that we need to be operating in with that, it's like the pace of those tests and experiments is just going to further increase in my mind. Well, with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Killian Dunn from Telepathic for joining us. If you'd like to contact Kilian, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes or go on over and check out his company's website@it's telepathic.com. if you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO content marketing knowledge in your podcast, hit the subscribe button on your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed soon. So with that, that's all for today. Thanks for stopping by and we'll see you in the next episode. Sa.