Searches for "AI search" are already running at nearly two-fifths the volume of "SEO" itself, and the industry is scrambling to keep up.
Tim Soulo sits down with Ahrefs content marketer Louise Linehan, who mined LinkedIn and Reddit discussion, and validated it against 18 months of Keywords Explorer data to surface the five AI search trends marketers are actually talking about:
- the race to prove AI's ROI
- optimizing for readers that are bots
- zero-click survival strategies
- the never-ending GEO-versus-SEO debate
- programmatic SEO's risky resurgence
When the clicks are vanishing and the industry can't agree on what replaces them, what's still worth optimizing for?
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(01:00) The Method
(05:56) Trend 1: Proving the ROI of AI (and the New Reporting Wave)
(17:00) Trend 2: Agent Optimization: llms.txt, Markdown, Accessibility Trees
(23:30) Trend 3: Zero-Click Search and the Crocodile Mouth
(30:52) Trend 4: GEO vs SEO
(36:00) Trend 5: The Programmatic SEO Resurgence
(39:15) Rapid-Fire Predictions: Watermarks, Agentic Commerce, Negative GEO
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Where to find Louise:
Louise Linehan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-linehan/
Where to find Tim:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/
X: @timsoulo
Website: https://www.timsoulo.com/