Beyond Rankings: How the Age of AI Will Create a New Generation of Organic Growth Specialists

If you’ve worked in SEO for more than five minutes, you’ve probably heard the phrase “SEO is dead.”

It’s been declared deceased more times than a soap opera character.

Yet, somehow, it always lurches back to life. Usually, after another algorithm update, another conference, or another listicle titled “10 SEO Hacks That Still Work in 2025.”

But this time, it feels different. Because it is.

When OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman recently said:

“I feel like Chat GPT really makes you realize how unnatural it is to go to a static website to just read stuff... Just like static information, like a single fact that you're looking for that you're kind of mining through a big page that is kind of not relevant to what you actually want.”

He might as well have placed a polite “out of order” sign on the SEO industry’s front door.

The reality is simple: we’ve entered the age of generative search, and the ground beneath traditional SEO is shifting faster than Google’s next update.

The good news?

It’s a rebirth.

And for those willing to evolve, it’s the most exciting opportunity in two decades.

The Great Unranking

Let’s start with honesty.

Traditional SEO, the act of optimising pages for keywords, links, and rankings, is on borrowed time.

When Google’s AI mode fully integrates, and ChatGPT or Gemini becomes the default search interface for millions, “rankings” as we know them will become largely meaningless.

Yes, there will still be indexes. But the idea of position one? Gone.

AI doesn’t list; it recommends.

It doesn’t rank results; it generates answers.

And that small shift from ranking to recommending rewires the entire discipline.

The job isn’t to trick a search engine into preferring your page.

The job is to make an AI confident enough in your brand to mention you.

Welcome to Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). The art and science of increasing the likelihood of being surfaced by AI when buyers need what a brand sells.

But to understand where we’re heading, we need to understand where we are now.

The Rise (and Reality) of the SEO Hierarchy

Before we talk about the future, we need to be honest about where SEO stands right now.

The layers, the money, and the people who make it all work.

Because SEO isn’t one job; it’s an ecosystem.

A very clever, slightly chaotic, and surprisingly interdependent one.

1. The Big-Agency (or Client side) SEOs

These are the conductors of the SEO orchestra. They often direct human and organisational resources in an effort to improve large brand SEO..

They can manage multi-market retainers, translate boardroom objectives into search strategies, and coordinate the battalion of content writers, developers, and PR partners who do the heavy lifting.

Their skill is orchestration.

Big brands trust them because they bring structure, reports, and accountability...the language the C-suite speaks fluently.

At an agency level, these are agencies that people don’t get fired for hiring.

You’re not going to get fired if a big agency doesn’t deliver fantastic results, because they’re a big agency. And hiring them is largely part of a procurment process where a decision is shared.

There’s often a security in being part of a large agency and working as an SEO for big brands that have large brand and paid search budgets.

2. The SME and Local SEOs

This is the world of short-term focus on ROI.

It’s the world of the smaller-agency operators, the freelancers, the local heroes. Their clients are the plumbers, dentists, lawyers, and SaaS startups who live and die by leads.

Budgets? Tight.

Pressure? Constant.

ROI isn’t theoretical; it’s tomorrow’s payroll.

These SEOs are in the trenches and battling daily,

They write the blogs, tweak the code, build the links, manage the citations, and explain weekly why results take time.

They’re not cushioned by brand equity or enterprise dashboards; they’re accountable in real time.

It’s an unglamorous end of the industry, but it’s the most honest. It's where most of the SEO industry operates, with the small to medium enterprises and startup brands that are desperate to generate growth from any means.

It's here that ROI is one of the biggest conversations around SEO.

3. The SEO Entrepreneurs

Then there’s the wildcard layer.

The independent experimenters, affiliate builders, and digital pirates. They don’t report to clients; they report to revenue.

They spin up niche sites, test markets, and monetise whatever works. They’re half marketer, half hacker, half economist (yes, that’s three halves — they multitask).

While agencies focus on strategy decks, these individuals quietly build six-figure businesses by identifying algorithmic inefficiencies.

They’re the skunkworks of SEO where most “new tactics” are born before they become agency slides six months later.

The Money Behind It All

At the top, enterprise budgets pay for process, integration, and polish. In the middle, SME retainers pay for practicality and proof. At the bottom, entrepreneurs pay themselves in risk and reward.

It’s the same skill and result.

Visibility, sold in three different ways.

That’s the SEO industry today.

A hierarchy built on budgets, balanced by skill, and connected by one shared mission: helping businesses get found.

Everyone plays a role. Everyone depends on the others.

And that’s exactly why what happens next will affect all of them.

The Thanos Click for SEO

We've all seen the Thanos moment in Avengers.

With a click of the thumb, everything disappears, and sadly, this is likely to be what happens for SEO.

We're waiting for Google to either switch on AI mode by default or adopt a version of ChatGPT.

And like most Google updates, one day it will be normal and the next it will be chaos. But in that chaos, there's going to be an interesting opportunity.

This switch is inevitable, (as Thanos would say). The problem is that we don't really know when it's happening, which is causing a lot of disruption in the SEO force.

But the reality is that when the switch happens, people will need direction, leadership and skill.

The problem is that people will want to know how to be recommended. They will be looking for solutions and answers, and right now, SEOs represent the best saviours possible for this situation.

However, I do not believe this role will be recognised as SEO.

I do not believe that this role will align with the traditional definition of SEO.

I think something new will emerge from the ashes of SEO.

A new role for a new time.

Enter the Organic Growth Strategist/ Specialist

In the AI era, every business will want one thing: to be recommended.

When users ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Google or Perplexity for “the best accounting software,” or “a marketing agency that gets results for beauty brands,” those systems will look for signals of credibility, fame, and trust.

That’s where the new career begins.

The Organic Growth Strategist/ Specialist

After reflecting on this shift, it’s clear that most SEO professionals will transition into organic growth strategists.

There will be differences in how this role takes shape, but ultimately, this is what businesses will seek.

Organisations want organic growth, and the key distinction is that while you can pay for growth through advertising, paid search, or whatever new AI-driven ad platforms Google invents. True organic growth comes from being recommended naturally.

Above all, brands will crave ‘organic’ AI recommendations that drive genuine, sustainable revenue growth.

That growth will only come through somebody understanding which levers need to be pulled.

For businesses, this is a whole new world.

And businesses will need people to direct them, showing them what needs to be done.

This role combines SEO, growth hacking, brand strategy, and analytics.

It's about uncovering the jobs that need to be done and translating them into meaningful action, which I think will make this a spectacular role for the future.

I'm using "organic growth" as the title because that's what people will want.

They want growth without paying for incremental media spend, and I believe that is the future of our industry: becoming focused on the growth brands want and the tools to drive it.

This might be unfamiliar territory for many people in SEO, presenting an exciting opportunity for you to learn.

You're going to have to acquire new skills for this future, which is fine.

But...right now, SEOs represent organisations' best opportunity to solve these problems because we live in search, and search is where the change is going to happen.

We are best positioned to activate this role and generate these results for the future.

But where will we work?

What does the office of the future of our industry look like?

Goodbye Office, Hello Imagination Factory

Another shift is where (and how) this work happens.

The SEO agency of the future won’t be a bullpen of analysts staring at rank trackers. It will be a creative laboratory, part newsroom, part think tank.

Most work will be conducted remotely, utilising voice typing, transcription tools, and generative assistants to automate research, reporting, and ideation.

Agency offices will shrink, becoming more about our brains and less about our output of words on a screen or code in an interface.

Physical spaces for thinking, not typing.

I think this is an interesting and exciting point. I use voice typing for everything now. I haven't written in ages. I don't write emails anymore. I don't write Slack messages.

I don't write articles. I speak them, and I have a range of processes that take my words and make them meaningful outputs.

But that process at scale?

You can't constantly talk to a computer and expect others to get on with their work. And nor do we want to replicate the chaos of a call centre? I don't think that's helpful either.

As a result, I think people will spend most of their working time at home. This brings economic benefits for everybody.

Agencies don't need big offices as staff are not there ‘all the time’ or at the same time.

Agencies will also experience a reduction in staff, as they require fewer personnel to handle less typing.

So you can already see the efficiencies in agencies themselves.

But this also changes how agencies need to present themselves.

Because if you're presenting yourself as somebody who can generate growth, you need to present yourself as a brand itself. This is something I've discussed before in other articles.

So I think the pressure for agencies of the future is to become brands that are visible and have an identity.

And part of that is the costly signalling of having an environment that is genuinely exciting to go to.

You won’t work in it most of the time, but when you do go there, you’ll be going there to have sessions in relation to strategy and ideas.

These very locations are there to inspire the human mind and to help humans tap into great strategy, to discuss and collaborate with each other.

They should be places where people go to talk with each other, not machines.

And yes, these places are where clients will want to go because the office itself embodies your brand and values. It’s going to mean a lot about the type of business you are.

And it’s not just that.

The type of marketing you do as an agency will be reflected by the office premises you have.

Working in these agencies won’t feel like a job; it’ll feel like engineering fame.

If most of our work is done with computers, when we come together as humans, the environment will be massively important. No more sitting in an office in silence with each other or sitting staring at a computer.

You will be maximising the human time that you have together, making brains work, becoming excited and passionate about what we do.

The idea of technology and AI is to help us eliminate the drudgery of our tasks by inputting data into machines.

And this is why the office of the future agencies is critical, along with their agency brands, for success.

But if we have the role and the office...what’s the new KPI?

Fame: The New KPI

That word, fame, will define this new era.

Brands will compete to become famous to both AI and humans.

Fame to an AI means being the most cited, trusted, and contextually relevant source.

Fame to humans means being remembered, recognised, and talked about.

And they’re not mutually exclusive — they’re the same goal seen from two sides.

When a large language model recommends your brand, it’s reflecting the same reputational signals that drive human trust: recognition, reliability, and authority.

Fame becomes measurable, and measurable fame becomes the growth engine.

That’s the future: Fame Engineering.

But what do the KPIs of this look like?

In reality, the two biggest KPIs are simple: the volume of brand search you gain and the volume of buyer-intent search.

People searching for you and clicking through to your buyer-intent resources – that is the key.

Your buyer-intent resources might be your sales pages, your product pages, or another relevant piece of information that is highly useful on the consumer journey.

However, since we are selling organic growth, it can only come from increased searches for your business or visits to the assets that drive sales.

And those are the two critical KPIs for the growth we need to increase: the amount your brand is being searched for or the amount of traffic to your high-revenue business assets.

But how do we achieve this? We need to move from a channel-based approach to a capability approach.

From Channels to Capabilities

As AI blurs the lines between search, social, and content, agencies will cease to define themselves solely by channels (“SEO,” “PPC,” “social”). Instead, they’ll define themselves by capabilities:

• Creative Storytelling
• Brand Fame and Distinctiveness
• Agentic Search Accessibility
• AI Integration
• Public Relations
• Copywriting.
• And more.

SEO, paid search, and social media marketing are all channels. But brands don't want channels, they want growth.

And in an AI world, that channel obsession doesn't lead to that.

You'll need a range of skills to deliver the outcomes people want.

What you can do for somebody is probably more important than what you are.

But what does that mean for your role? How do you adapt for this future?

A Brighter Future (If You’re Ready for It)

The new roles are broader. The tools are more powerful. The work is more creative.

And where you head in this future is going to be up to you.

Because in truth, SEO doesn't have a right to access this future. We need to fight for that right. A talented copywriter, content marketer or PR can easily stake a claim to the world of organic growth.

But right now, as an SEO, you have this opportunity to prepare yourself for this future.

I'm going to outline where I feel this future lies.

Technical SEO

For the more technical SEO, I believe your future lies entirely in agentic search and agentic commerce. I believe this is also where your future lies if you're an e-commerce SEO.

Understanding the APIs, how search interfaces work, how agents purchase, and making life easy for those purchases is likely to be something that a technical and e-commerce specialist will thrive in.

And, being frank, I think that's a great opportunity.

If I were you, as a technical SEO, I would be rushing towards this landscape and learning everything I could about it today.

SEO account managers.

If you sit on the account management side of SEO, organic growth specialists and strategists will be your domain.

Here, the biggest leap is going to be moving from a traffic-obsessed mantra to a growth-obsessed one, to understanding how the levers work and which levers need to be pulled in order for a brand to become recommended.

You can become the glue, the person who brings different capabilities together, understanding what is needed to cause the most impact.

Content Marketers

If you’re a content-heavy SEO, copywriter, or writer, you’re in for a great future. In a world with less traffic, we’ll need to do more nudging: writing content that prompts buyers, reminds them you exist, and builds fame, feeling, and fluency.

I call this nudge content—content that nudges buyers into action.

This content is your newsletters, your white papers, your PDFs, your sales assets, your online pages, and your email marketing.

It is the direct mail of the future.

It is modern copywriting. It is modern content marketing. And this will be a huge channel for people. Every brand and every agency will need specialists who can do this.

PR’s

The art of PR and publicity drives generative engine optimisation. PR drives the kind of growth that you want.

Yes, advertising will also be key, and this is another subject for another day.

But let's make it clear: GEO, as it's known now, is all about PR. It is 75% of PR activity.

So agencies are going to need PR staff, the people who can get the attention from the ever-decreasing number of journalists.

Growth Entrepreneurs

And the final bucket I call growth entrepreneurs.

These are the same SEO entrepreneurs we discussed earlier —your agency owners, the people looking to capitalize on this growth. I believe there are fantastic revenue opportunities here.

As an agency owner, you will need to create agencies for the future—agencies that are brands. For entrepreneurs, there will be opportunities for tools, publications, and more. I believe there are numerous opportunities in the future of search.

But the future of search is really around brand and business growth, less about SEO.

Once we shift our focus from search to growth, we can all be aligned.

And that’s where the real opportunity begins.

I’m excited for the future.

Are you?

Andrew Holland