Evolve Your SEO Team for AI Search: Skills, Strategy & Roadmap
The article highlights a fundamental shift in SEO, moving beyond traditional rankings to optimizing for visibility in AI-powered search and answer engines. This evolution is driven by AI search's ability to extract passages, synthesize information, and deliver instant answers from diverse sources. AI SEO expands traditional practices, focusing on securing brand mentions and citations within AI-generated responses.
Key benefits include ensuring continuous brand presence in an evolving search landscape and leveraging new avenues for discovery. However, this shift introduces challenges, as traditional SEO skills are no longer sufficient. The article identifies a skills gap stemming from changes like whole-web signals, entity recognition, passage-level retrieval, conversational search behavior, and a “zero-click reality” where users get answers without visiting websites. Different AI platforms (e.g., ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude) also retrieve and display information uniquely, requiring platform-specific understanding.
Seven essential AI SEO skills are outlined: understanding AI retrieval, writing for AI extraction (e.g., self-contained content passages), building AI-readable structure (schema, internal linking), tracking AI performance (citation frequency, sentiment), optimizing off-site signals (reviews, forums), platform-specific optimization, and query intent mapping (longer, conversational queries). To acquire these, teams can “Build” (upskill existing talent), “Buy” (hire new, specialized talent), or “Borrow” (outsource for niche or short-term projects), with most adopting a hybrid approach. Risks include skill concentration and ineffective training.
A three-phase roadmap is proposed: “Foundation” (1-3 months) for assessment and piloting; “Acceleration” (next few months) for strengthening capabilities and building workflows; and “Scale” (next six months) for integrating proven methods and solidifying roles. Success is measured by metrics like AI Visibility Score, citation frequency, brand mention rate, and sentiment, often tracked using tools like Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit.
(Source: https://backlinko.com/seo-team)
