The End of Search Engine Marketing

I’ve been “waiting” over 10 years for this to happen.

When I first started my marketing journey in 2013, I began by helping companies with Google AdWords, now Google Ads.

Companies paid me to help them rank higher on Google Ads and reduce the cost per click.

As I grew my company, I brought on experts to help with SEO.

Companies paid me to rank higher on Google’s natural search results, local search results and the coveted “people also ask” section.

Google was the best way for buyers to find companies who could help them solve their problems.

Google was the match maker.

And it created a huge number of jobs:
👉 Ad copywriters
👉 Ad optimizers
👉 A/B testing software and consultants
👉 SEO / PPC software like Semrush, Moz and ahrefs
👉 Landing page designers
👉 Conversion optimization experts
👉 Technical SEO experts
👉 Top of funnel content writers

And like many, I build my agency on meeting the demand to rank higher on paid and organic searches.

But in the back of my mind, there was always a problem:
People are searching for companies who can help them solve their problems.

They are NOT searching for companies who:
❌ Paid to rank higher on paid ads
❌ Paid companies to rank higher on local SEO results
❌ Paid companies to be in the coveted “people also ask” section
❌ Paid companies to rank higher on organic SEO results.

And now with GenAI, tools like ChatGPT, allow buyers to find those companies, WITHOUT using search engines like Google and Bing.

With AI, buyers are not doing keyword searches in ChatGPT, they are having long and complex conversations with their AI tools to:
✅ Ask for solutions to their specific problems
✅ Find vendors who can provide solutions
✅ Research, compare and analyze products and services

It's important to understand this:
𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒔𝒆 𝑨𝑰 𝒕𝒐𝒐𝒍𝒔 𝒈𝒐 𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉 𝒘𝒆𝒃𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝒇𝒊𝒏𝒅 𝒂𝒏𝒔𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒊𝒕𝒔 𝒖𝒔𝒆𝒓.

To adapt, companies need to shift from paying agencies for higher ranking on search engines and instead invest in writing AI ready content by:
✅ Truly understanding their target audience, their problems, their requirements, and why they need to solve the problem.
✅ Getting authentic answers by interviewing the engineers and experts who built and designed the services and products to solve the customers problems
✅ Writing website articles that educates and helps people solve problems.

Marketing has changed (again).

And the “new way” to acquire new customers is not changing after Google rankings

Instead we need to publish authentic and helpful information for the AI tools.