An SEO Marketing Expert Is an Expert on Search: AI Is Good for You. Adapt

December 2, 2025

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

I found it interesting to learn that a marketer is an expert on search and retrieval. Why? The expert has accrued 20 years of experience in search engine optimization aka SEO. I wondered, “Was this 20 years of diverse involvement in search and retrieval, or one year of SEO wizardry repeated 20 times?” I don’t know.

I spotted information about this person’s view of search in a newsletter from a group whose name I do not know how to pronounce. (I don’t know much.) The entity does business as BrXnd.ai. After some thought (maybe two seconds) I concluded that the name represented the concept “branding” with a dollop of hipness or ai.

Am I correct? I don’t know. Hey, that’s three admissions of intellectual failure a 10 seconds. Full disclosure: I know does not care.

Agentic SEO will put every company on the map. Relevance will become product sales. The methodology will be automated. The marketing humanoids will get fat bonuses. The quality of information available will soar upwards. Well, probably downwards. But no worries. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.

The article is titled “The Future of Search and the Death of Links // BRXND Dispatch vol 96.” It points to a video called “The Future of Search and the Death of Links.” You can view the 22 minute talk at this link. Have at it, please.

Let me quote from the BrXnd.ai write up:

…we’re moving from an era of links to an era of recommendations. AI overviews now appear on 30-40% of search results, and when they do, clicks drop 20-40%. Google’s AI Mode sends six times fewer clicks than traditional search.

I think I have heard that Google handles 75 to 85 percent of global searches. If these data are on the money or even close to the eyeballs Google’s advertising money machine flogs, the estimable company will definitely be [a] pushing for subscriptions to anything and everything it once subsidized with oodles of advertisers’ cash; [b] sticking price tags on services positioned as free; [c] charging YouTube TV viewers the way disliked cable TV companies squeezed subscribers for money; [d] praying to the gods of AI that the next big thing becomes a Google sandbox; and [e] embracing its belief that it can control governments and neuter regulators with more than 0.01 milliliters of testosterone.

The write up states:

When search worked through links, you actively chose what to click—it was manual research, even if imperfect. Recommendations flip that relationship. AI decides what you should see based on what it thinks it knows about you. That creates interesting pressure on brands: they can’t just game algorithms with SEO tricks anymore. They need genuine value propositions because AI won’t recommend bad products. But it also raises questions about what happens to our relationship with information when we move from active searching to passive receiving.

Okay, let’s work through a couple of the ideas in this quoted passage.

First, clicking on links is indeed semi-difficult and manual job. (Wow. Take a break from entering 2.3 words and looking for a likely source on the first page of search results. Demanding work indeed.) However, what if those links are biased by inept programmers, the biases of the data set processed by the search machine, or intentionally manipulated to weaponize content to achieve a goal?

Second, the hook for the argument is that brands can no longer can game algorithms. Bid farewell to keyword stuffing. There is a new game in town: Putting a content object in as many places as possible in multiple formats, including the knowledge nugget delivered by TikTok-type services. Most people it seems don’t think about this and rely on consultants to help them.

Finally, the notion of moving from clicking and reading to letting a BAIT (big AI tech) company define one’s knowledge universe strikes me as something that SEO experts don’t find problematic. Good for them. Like me, the SEO mavens think the business opportunities for consulting, odd ball metrics, and ineffectual work will be rewarding.

I appreciate BrXnd.ai for giving me this glimpse of a the search and retrieval utopia I will now have available. Am I excited? Yeah, sure. However, I will not be dipping into the archive of the 95 previous issues of BrXnd “dispatches.” I know this to be a fact.

Stephen E Arnold, December 2, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Marketing, News, SEO

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.