Orchestrate Your SEO: Stop Optimizing, Start Leading
▼ Summary
– AI adoption is widespread but has minimal impact, with few organizations achieving scale and most executives reporting no significant revenue growth.
– SEO professionals are being asked to lead GEO initiatives due to their core skill of empathy for both search engines and users.
– GEO requires a third empathy for the incentives of AI companies, which prioritize adoption and usage over accuracy.
– SEO’s evolution involves orchestrating cross-team collaboration and aligning with business outcomes rather than focusing on traditional metrics.
– The future of SEO/GEO lies in using empathy to create clarity across platforms and teams, moving beyond optimization to enterprise-wide orchestration.
While headlines suggest a looming “AI winter” with limited large-scale impact from generative AI, a quiet revolution is underway within forward-thinking enterprises. SEO leaders are now being asked to guide GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, not due to technical mastery over large language models, but because their core skill of empathy has become the enterprise’s most critical asset. This evolution moves beyond traditional metrics toward orchestrating clarity across platforms, teams, and customer journeys.
The narrative around AI adoption appears contradictory at first glance. Research indicates widespread experimentation with generative AI, yet meaningful business impact remains elusive for most organizations. What these broad statistics miss, however, is how certain functions are rapidly adapting to new opportunities. Digital strategists with search optimization backgrounds are finding their empathy-based approach perfectly positions them to navigate this new terrain.
Search optimization was never truly about keywords or technical manipulations. At its heart, SEO has always been about practicing empathy on multiple fronts, understanding both what search platforms fundamentally want and what human users actually need. Platforms prioritize engagement and revenue, while users seek frictionless solutions. The emergence of generative AI introduces a third dimension: understanding the growth-driven incentives of the companies building these systems, who prioritize adoption and usage above all else.
The familiar advice to “just create good content” often masked a more complex reality. Algorithmic systems historically rewarded specific signals like backlinks rather than objectively assessing quality. With generative AI, similar limitations apply, these systems recognize patterns rather than discerning true value. Acknowledging this reality allows for more sophisticated strategy development.
This shifting landscape is already transforming internal collaborations. Functions that previously resisted SEO initiatives now embrace GEO pilots when framed as strengthening how AI systems interpret company offerings across digital touchpoints. The same teams that blocked outreach requests suddenly become collaborators when the conversation shifts from traditional search to generative engine alignment.
Empathy extends beyond mere visibility. When visitors arrive through any channel, the critical question becomes whether their entire journey has been optimized. The focus shifts from keyword optimization to journey optimization, considering whether the right message appears at the right moment with minimal friction. This holistic approach blurs traditional disciplinary boundaries between SEO, conversion rate optimization, and user experience.
Practical implementation requires speaking the language of internal stakeholders. At leading technology companies, this means collaborating across departments with specific value propositions:
Product Marketing teams respond to visual demonstrations that show rather than tell Communications and Client Success departments value case studies addressing specific buyer needs Public Relations teams understand the importance of consistent messaging across third-party platforms Account Executives provide invaluable intelligence about customer conversations, objections, and decision drivers
This cross-functional alignment represents just the content layer of opportunity. The next frontier involves developing enterprise-wide ontologies, curated data structures that ensure every team and system describes the company consistently, creating the foundation for effective AI interpretation.
Enterprise teams are turning to SEO professionals because they offer clarity in a fragmented landscape. Without centralized leadership, GEO initiatives become disjointed, product teams optimize for features, PR focuses on reputation, and analytics generates endless dashboards without strategic alignment. The organization needs someone who can balance platform requirements with user needs while turning ambiguity into coordinated action.
The modern digital strategist must embrace leadership beyond technical optimization. This means admitting unfamiliarity with every technical detail while confidently orchestrating the right people around shared outcomes. If reporting still revolves primarily around traffic and ranking dashboards, the function has already fallen behind what enterprises truly need, strategic orchestration rather than metric monitoring.
The fundamental question isn’t whether SEO remains relevant, but whether practitioners will expand their role to meet new demands. This discipline is no longer about optimization, it’s about using empathy to orchestrate clarity across increasingly complex digital ecosystems. The mandate exists, and if search professionals don’t claim it, other functions inevitably will. The real question becomes whether this function will remain confined to traditional boundaries or evolve into something significantly more impactful.
(Source: Search Engine Land)
