Hanan Ouazan
SEO isn’t going away anytime soon. Google continues investing heavily in classic SEO via AI Overview, their hybrid search format mixing generative AI results, web source citations, and sponsored links to preserve their massive SEO/SEA revenue stream. But with conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity redefining search, the rules are shifting. Stable rankings and static results pages are replaced by single, dynamic, context-driven answers.
This demands an extension of traditional SEO metrics (rankings, estimated CTR, organic share-of-voice) to new LLM-specific indicators: appearance rates in AI-generated answers, qualitative context assessment, and result variability. Moreover, tracking competitors won’t be enough. Brands must decode the influence games played by key sources such as media, reviews, and forums to move beyond passive observation.
Ultimately, the goal isn’t just monitoring results; it’s taking tangible, actionable steps to optimize content, messaging, and website structure, ensuring continuous improvement and competitive visibility in the GenAI-driven search landscape.
On the commerce side, OpenAI has initiated limited manual integrations of product catalogs with some major retail, luxury, and travel brands high-volume players. But these are merely MVPs, fundamentally non-scalable.
Scalability will inevitably require open standards like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), supported by giants like Google and Microsoft. MCP enables AI agents to directly access product catalogs without manual, custom integrations for each retailer, paving the way for scalable, universal integration.
This evolution will dismantle current price asymmetries, enabling instant, universal product comparisons by AI agents. Value creation will no longer reside in the website search experience itself, as fewer consumers directly visit websites, but will shift toward superior logistics and impeccable customer service.
Brands will seize this opportunity to reclaim strategic control from retailers as retailer interfaces become increasingly irrelevant. Retailers will need to reinvent their e-commerce proposition through flawless logistics execution and exceptional customer support, ensuring they maintain relevance and competitive edge in this transformed commerce ecosystem.
