Search engine optimization (SEO) has long been a critical part of digital marketing and communications because, to be discovered, organizations have needed their websites and content to rank highly in search results. Early SEO strategies were crude by today’s standards, involving tactics such as keyword stuffing and indiscriminate link exchanges. Then Google came and changed the rules, rendering older SEO tactics obsolete. Today, AI represents another sea change. And just as Google required revised SEO strategies, AI is now forcing a similar shift in how organizations must approach digital marketing.
Surveys show many people now use AI as their first-stop tool for finding information. A 2025 poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research revealed that 60% of Americans use AI to find information at least part of the time. A 2026 survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 57% of teens use chatbots to search for information. And Bain & Company found that while 56% of people still use search engines as a primary tool, 44% either start their search with an LLM or combine them with search engines. There is also a generational divide: For millennials and Gen Z, use of search engines as the primary tool drops to 42%, and their speed of adopting AI tools is roughly twice as fast.