Every few years, someone proclaims the death of SEO. In 2025, with AI agents embedded in every browser, document and workspace, the question has resurfaced.
So, is SEO dead?
Short answer: no. But it is evolving.
Today, buyers aren’t just using Google. They’re turning to AI co-pilots like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and others to summarise vendors, compare options, draft RFPs, or answer specific questions about your product category.
These tools are now part of the buying unit. And so we believe that changes how B2B marketers need to think about search.
Google still matters, but it’s no longer alone at the table
Let’s start with what hasn’t changed:
- Great content still drives engagement.
- Technical health still impacts discoverability.
- Links, internal structure, and clean architecture still matter.
But here’s what has changed:
- Google is no longer the only discovery engine.
- AI answers increasingly sit above the fold, summarising multiple sources.
- Some AI tools bypass SEO rankings entirely, surfacing vendors based on inferred trust, structure, and topical relevance.
We’ve now seen examples where:
- Sites ranking top 5 in Google are missing from Perplexity for some relevant prompts.
- Start ups with little traditional SEO traction and very low domain authority appear in ChatGPT answers.
SEO as a discipline hasn’t died. But SEO used to be only about Google. So the context it lives in has fundamentally shifted.
It’s worth noting that in Google’s second quarter 2025 financial results, they saw advertising revenue grow to $71.34 billion – up about 10.4% from $64.61 billion the year prior. So it seems despite AI changing the search results page and the role out of AI mode in the US, Google is still thriving.
From search engine to co-pilot
B2B buyers are now assisted by AI co pilots embedded in tools they use every day. Microsoft Copilot, Notion AI, ChatGPT, Gemini in Google Workspace – these tools aren’t just for search tasks. They’re used to:
- Ask early-stage research questions
- Compare vendors by feature or reputation
- Draft outreach emails to suppliers
- Summarise websites, analyst reports or customer reviews
They are acting like virtual team members.
In some cases, they are the first touchpoint with your brand. That means they’re not just influencing buying decisions – they are shaping the journey itself.
But in other cases, they may not drive a discovery moment but just play a supporting role instead. It’s not about having to pick between ‘SEO’ and ‘GEO’ as if they are completely different unrelated things, but it is important to acknowledge some of the differences and stay on top of a brand’s visibility.
Sometimes it’s just about accuracy
Even if you don’t believe AI search tools are driving discovery moments and tons of new traffic, why would you not want to know how your brand is being talked about, and if the LLM’s understanding is accurate?
In the last few months we’ve seen some interesting examples of errors that needed correcting inside AI tools:
- We asked Perplexity to compare 3 software brands, and our client was incorrectly referenced as not being SOC 2 compliant when it actually is.
- We found one individual review in a Medium post from 6 years ago was being cited by ChatGPT to talk about another client, even though the review was out of date and related to a previous version of their product.
- One of our clients has a brand name similar to another company in an unrelated industry, and ChatGPT was incorrectly confusing them.
In all of these cases, we took steps to make critical corrections that were then reflected inside the respective AI tools.
It’s about balance
It’s not about having to pick between SEO or GEO – they are not independent from one another.
But we do believe every B2B software brand should now be considering their SEO and AI search presence side by side. Search is shifting, the Google search results page is changing and in some cases action is needed to really optimise a brand inside AI tools. A search strategy defined in 2025 should consider the full picture.