How Agencies are Evolving with the AI Search Era

Search isn’t dying, it’s multiplying. The biggest debate that’s run through the industry for decades is finally being put to rest. With the rise of the AI Search era, agencies that are not only surviving, but scaling (rapidly) are using this era to their advantage.

I’ve brought on successful Search leaders and Agency Owners onto the Agency Growth Club podcast, and, today’s article covers things a little differently. My latest episode pulls highlights from a few of my favourite responses to the AI Search era, and how teams are responding to it.

Across this roundup:

• Jason Hennessey (Hennessey Digital) argues GEO is 70% the same SEO fundamentals with a new 30% of AI-specific complexity layered on
• Charlie Clark’s agency (Minty Digital) now tracks clients being found on Google, AI search, and YouTube simultaneously
• Ashley Liddell’s agency (Deviation) runs “search everywhere optimization” as a trademarked framework
• Andrew Prince (Redfin/Rocket) notes Bing clicks are still climbing even as AI-referred revenue grows

The throughline: budgets are rising because winning now means showing up everywhere intent lives, not picking one channel.

Jump to a section:

• 0:00 Intro: Why 2026 Is the Most Exciting Year in Search
• 0:53 GEO Is 70% SEO Fundamentals, 30% New
• 3:02 Are Clients Still Skeptical of AI Search?
• 5:01 Why Search Budgets Are Going Up, Not Down
• 6:25 Is SEO Dead? A Panel Splits on the Camps
• 8:05 Bing Clicks Are Still Rising: The Data Behind the Skepticism
• 9:32 The Generational Gap in Who Actually Uses ChatGPT
• 11:27 Google vs. 10 Answer Engines: Where Search Goes Next
• 13:09 “Search Everywhere Optimization” and the Travel-Client Case Study
• 15:41 YouTube SEO as the New Content Repurposing Channel
• 18:05 Search Everywhere vs. Traditional SEO: What Actually Changes
• 19:56 Brand Search Over Non-Brand: The Biggest Client Ask Right Now
• 21:39 Should Agencies Replace Their Teams With AI?
• 22:51 Building an Agency With Software Margins: The “Kite” Framework

Key takeaways

• Jason Hennessey frames the AI-search shift as roughly 70% foundational SEO: content, authority, citations, technical infrastructure, with a new 30% of AI-specific complexity agencies have to relearn.
• Hennessey says Hennessey Digital is now fielding calls from clients who signed their biggest cases after discovering the firm via ChatGPT rather than Google.
• Andrew Prince (Head of AI Search across Redfin, Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Loans, Rocket Money, and Rent.com) says Bing referral clicks are still climbing on some properties, and points out over 95% of ChatGPT users still also use Google, evidence traditional search isn’t disappearing yet.
• Michael Ryan’s agency, Ink Digital, had a luxury hotel client say he found them on three separate channels, Google, AI search, and YouTube, before ever booking a call.
• Ashley Liddell’s agency, Deviation, runs “search everywhere optimization” as a trademarked framework connecting SEO, social search, digital PR, and brand building around user intent and journey stage, not individual keywords.
• Brands are now asking agencies to grow brand search and preference inside AI conversations, not just non-brand rankings, a shift Ashley Liddell calls “completely alien” next to SEO’s historical focus.
• On AI replacing agencies: Jonathan Dane argues AI already handles conditional-logic tasks like paid media rules well, but the durable value agencies offer is deciding what happens next once the automation runs.
• Dane built KlientBoost‘s proprietary software, Kite, around three pillars, financial acumen, innovation, and goal-driven pacing, to give clients an objective, defensible answer to “how good are you, actually,” instead of a vague “performance marketing” claim.

Why I Put This Episode Together (0:00)

Rather than giving you my own take on where search is going, I decided to do something different this time. I pulled the best answers I’ve gotten from guests on the show this year — on budgets, pricing, what clients are now asking for, and how to stay ahead, and put them all in one place.

If you’re running an agency, or you’re in-house trying to work out what to bring to your clients next quarter, this one’s worth your time.

GEO Is 70% SEO Fundamentals, 30% New (0:53)

I asked Jason Hennessey (Founder, Hennessey Digital) about the moment ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews arrived and everyone started asking the same question: is SEO dead?

He told me reverse-engineering how these models actually work changed his answer:

“Say it’s 70% is kind of the foundational SEO stuff with content and authority and citations and technical infrastructure of websites, right? But that other 30%, it’s like, okay, that’s the stuff that we got to figure out again.”

What I took from this:

• Treat GEO as an extension of the SEO investment you’ve already made, not a separate discipline you’re building from scratch.
• Budget specifically for that “new 30%”, hiring, tooling, process changes, rather than assuming your existing SEO systems will cover AI-specific visibility on their own.

Are Clients Still Skeptical of AI Search? (3:02)

I wanted to know whether Jason was still educating clients on AI search, or whether that battle’s basically won at this point. His answer stuck with me: educate first, or a competing agency will do it for you.

“In the absence of you not educating, you’re at the mercy of another agency that comes in… that educates your clients and potentially pulls your clients away.”

He pointed to Hennessey Digital’s monthly webinar (a few hundred attendees, every time) as the mechanism, the same education-led model the firm was built on with his books Law Firm SEO and Honest SEO.

Why Search Budgets Are Going Up, Not Down (5:00)

Travis Tallent (Founder, Daynova AI) gave me two reasons search budgets are climbing, not shrinking:

• Paid search placements are expanding inside Google
  • So you need more spend just to hold the same outcomes
• SEO itself has gotten a lot more complicated
  • Moving from a website-centric discipline to one that spans Reddit, TikTok, Amazon, and YouTube all at once.

He also flagged something worth passing on to your own clients: YouTube budget usually sits with the creative team, but it needs to be paired with the search budget now, not managed separately.

Is SEO Dead? A Panel Splits on the Camps (6:23)

Amir Alsayegh (Global Head of SEO/AEO, Crocs) opened this one by rejecting the binary “SEO is dead” framing outright.

His argument: search and AI haven’t replaced each other, they’ve dissolved into each other. The underlying behaviour: people searching for answers, hasn’t changed. Only the interface has.

Bing Clicks Are Still Rising: The Data Behind the Skepticism (7:57)

Andrew Prince, who heads up AI search across Redfin, Rocket Mortgage, Reddit, Rocket Loans, Rocket Money, and Rent.com, pushed back on Amir a little:

“I’ll slightly contradict that in that they want speed of information, but they also want the accuracy of it. And I’m not sure we’re completely there yet on the AI side.”

He backed this up with a first-party signal: Bing search and click volume are trending up on some of his properties, and over 95% of ChatGPT users are still also using Google. His read: the shift to AI-first discovery is real, but it’s not total. Not yet.

The Generational Gap in Who Actually Uses ChatGPT (9:33)

Sophie Brannon (Co-Founder & Director, StudioHawk) contrasted that with people in our industry, who “use it all day every day” and have their own Claude agents and workflows running, a good reminder that our own habits aren’t representative of the wider market.

She also pointed out that commercial and transactional search intent is still largely happening on traditional search engines at the final purchase point, even as informational intent keeps shifting toward AI search.

Google vs. 10 Answer Engines: Where Search Goes Next (11:30)

I asked Charlie Clark (Founder, Minty Digital) where he sees search sitting in two years.

He told me he initially expected ChatGPT to take over the category outright, then revised that view, he’d predicted last year that ChatGPT growth would hit a wall, and he says that’s now playing out.

His read: Google, social, TikTok, and ChatGPT are all collapsing into “the same realm,” and the real challenge becomes forecasting and planning across all of them at once, since most of the tools we’ve got aren’t built for that yet.

The Travel-Client Case Study: Found on 3 Platforms Before Booking (13:09)

Michael Ryan (Founder, Ink Digital) walked me through how travel-client strategy has changed now that people research trips across TikTok, YouTube, and multiple LLMs before booking anything.

He gave me one example that’s stuck with me: a luxury hotel prospect told him on a discovery call that he found the agency on three separate platforms (Google, AI search, and YouTube) before he even decided to book that call.

“So he found us on three different platforms, and obviously all of those platforms together enabled him to make that decision.”

What I took from this:

• Ask your new leads directly how they found you, across every channel, not just the last-click source, it’s the fastest way to see cross-channel influence you’d otherwise miss.
• Plan content for repurposing from the start: one blog post should be scoped to also become a YouTube video, a short-form clip, and a newsletter segment.

YouTube SEO as the New Content Repurposing Channel (15:41)

Michael told me YouTube is newer territory for his agency, but it’s built almost entirely from content they were already creating elsewhere, the same material that’s been going out on LinkedIn for years is now being reworked into scripts with a specialist B2B YouTube partner.

He was clear that the goal isn’t view volume: reaching the right decision-maker at low view counts is enough for YouTube to pay for itself in a B2B context.

“Search Everywhere Optimization”: Inside Deviation’s Trademarked Framework (18:02)

Ashley Liddell (Founder, Deviation Agency) drew a distinction I found genuinely useful: “search everywhere” as a buzzword other agencies have picked up versus “search everywhere optimization” as Deviation’s own trademarked framework, connecting SEO, brand building, digital PR, and social search around user intent and journey, rather than gamifying individual AI/LLM answers.

Here’s how she put the technical difference from traditional SEO:

“The search everywhere mindset is our idea and it’s our approach to connecting the dots between the platforms and the channels… it’s our framework if you like.”

Her framework optimises for the user’s journey at the time, not for individual target keywords.

Brand Search Over Non-Brand: The Biggest Client Ask Right Now (19:19)

Ashley told me the industry has historically been built around winning non-brand search, but the biggest shift she’s seeing right now is brands asking how to become more seen and preferred inside AI conversations, effectively asking agencies to grow brand search, which she calls “completely alien” relative to SEO’s traditional focus.

The second shift she pointed out: clients increasingly want one strategic layer connecting search, social, PR, and branding, instead of separate disconnected efforts.

Should Agencies Replace Their Teams With AI? (21:39)

I asked Jonathan Dane (Founder, KlientBoost) the question I know a lot of you are quietly asking yourselves: should agencies cut their teams and just rely on AI agents instead?

His answer: AI is already well-suited to conditional-logic tasks, the kind of “if this is true, do this” work that sits inside paid media, and ad platforms are going to keep building this natively (he pointed to Meta’s announced “Andromeda” release as an example). Where he thinks agency value survives: deciding what happens after the automated step runs, and what you offer next as a differentiator.

Building an Agency With Software Margins: The “Kite” Framework (22:51)

Jonathan connected the difficulty of growing an agency to margin structure, he’d read an article arguing the future of agencies looks like software companies with software margins. He told me KlientBoost built its own proprietary software, Kite, around three differentiators:

1. Financial acumen, rebalancing budget allocation across channels (SEO, paid, CRO) based on what’s actually driving the client’s real goal, whether that’s leads, sales, or retention.
2. Innovation, tied to a goal-driven approach, tracking pacing between current performance and the target KPI, since how far off-track a client is dictates whether the fix is a small dial-turn or a bigger structural change.

“It creates this level of accountability that [clients] usually don’t see… we can say we have an X NPS score and we hit X percent of these goals for this service every quarter.”

That’s the kind of objectively defensible answer I think every agency should be able to give.

Related Reading

• About Us, Search for Hire’s Process
• Case Studies

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

Is SEO dead now that AI search exists?

No, and every guest on this roundup told me the same thing. SEO and AI search have merged rather than one replacing the other. AI platforms synthesize answers faster, but the underlying SEO signals — content, authority, citations, technical infrastructure — still largely determine what those platforms surface.

Why are search budgets going up instead of down?

Two drivers, per my guests: expanding paid search placements inside Google requiring more spend for the same results, and SEO itself now spanning far more platforms (Reddit, TikTok, Amazon, YouTube) than the website-only focus of a decade ago.

What is “search everywhere optimization”?

It’s Deviation Agency’s trademarked framework, which Ashley Liddell walked me through — connecting SEO, social search, digital PR, and brand building around a user’s intent and journey stage, rather than optimizing for individual keywords in isolation.

Are brands asking for anything they never asked for before?

Yes — multiple guests told me brand search and AI-conversation preference is a new client request, a reversal from SEO’s historical focus on non-brand rankings.

Will AI agents replace marketing agencies?

Jonathan Dane’s take, and one I agree with: AI already handles conditional-logic execution (like paid media rules) well, and platforms will build more of this natively. What we retain as agencies is deciding what to do next once that automation has run.

Do people still use Google, or has everyone switched to ChatGPT?

Both, per Andrew Prince’s data: Bing referral clicks are still rising on some properties he tracks, and over 95% of ChatGPT users also still use Google — a long transitional period, not a sudden full switch.

How is YouTube factoring into SEO strategy now?

Michael Ryan’s agency treats YouTube as a repurposing channel for content already built for LinkedIn, optimized for reaching the right B2B decision-maker rather than chasing view count.