OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent marks a change in how users interact with web pages and complete transactions. This could be the most consequential change to online interactions since the introduction of mobile browsing.

ChatGPT agent will be available today to Pro subscribers. Plus, and Team subscribers will have access over the next few days while Enterprise and Education users will gain access in a matter of weeks.

OpenAI ChatGPT Agent Overview

OpenAI ChatGPT agent is based on three core parts, OpenAI’s Operator and Deep Research, two autonomous AI agents, plus ChatGPT’s natural language capabilities.

1. Operator can browse the web and interact with websites to complete tasks.
2. Deep Research is designed for multi-step research that is able to combine information from different resources and generate a report.
3. ChatGPT agent requests permission before taking significant actions and can be interrupted and halted at any point.

ChatGPT Agent Capabilities

ChatGPT agent has access to multiple tools to help it complete tasks:

• A visual browser for interacting with web pages with the on-page interface.
• Text based browser for answering reasoning-based queries.
• A terminal for executing actions through a command-line interface.
• Connectors, which are authorized user-friendly integrations (using APIs) that enable ChatGPT agent to interact with third-party apps.

Connectors are like bridges between ChatGPT agent and your authorized apps. When users ask ChatGPT agent to complete a task, the connectors enable it to retrieve the needed information and complete tasks. Direct API access via connectors enables it to interact with and extract information from connected apps.

ChatGPT agent can open a page with a browser (either text or visual), download a file, perform an action on it, and then view the results in the visual browser. ChatGPT connectors enable it to connect with external apps like Gmail or a calendar for answering questions and completing tasks.

ChatGPT Agent Automation of Web-Based Tasks

ChatGPT agent is able to complete entire complex tasks and summarize the results.

Here’s how OpenAI describes it:

“ChatGPT can now do work for you using its own computer, handling complex tasks from start to finish.

You can now ask ChatGPT to handle requests like “look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news,” “plan and buy ingredients to make Japanese breakfast for four,” and “analyze three competitors and create a slide deck.”

ChatGPT will intelligently navigate websites, filter results, prompt you to log in securely when needed, run code, conduct analysis, and even deliver editable slideshows and spreadsheets that summarize its findings.

….ChatGPT agent can access your connectors, allowing it to integrate with your workflows and access relevant, actionable information. Once authenticated, these connectors allow ChatGPT to see information and do things like summarize your inbox for the day or find time slots you’re available for a meeting—to take action on these sites, however, you’ll still be prompted to log in by taking over the browser.

Additionally, you can schedule completed tasks to recur automatically, such as generating a weekly metrics report every Monday morning.”

What Does ChatGPT Agent Mean For SEO?

ChatGPT agent raises the stakes for publishers, online businesses, and SEO, in that making websites Agentic AI–friendly becomes increasingly important as more users become acquainted with it and begin sharing how it helps them in their daily lives and at work.

A recent study about AI agents found that OpenAI’s Operator responded well to structured on-page content. Structured on-page content enables AI agents to accurately retrieve specific information relevant to their tasks, perform actions (like filling in a form), and helps to disambiguate the web page (i.e., make it easily understood). I usually refrain from using jargon, but disambiguation is a word all SEOs need to understand because Agentic AI makes it more important than it has ever been.

Examples Of On-Page Structured Data

• Headings
• Tables
• Forms with labeled input forms
• Product listing with consistent fields like price, availability, name or label of the product in a title.
• Authors, dates, and headlines
• Menus and filters in ecommerce web pages

Takeaways

• ChatGPT agent is a milestone in how users interact with the web, capable of completing multi-step tasks like planning trips, analyzing competitors, and generating reports or presentations.
• OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent combines autonomous agents (Operator and Deep Research) with ChatGPT’s natural language interface to automate personal and professional workflows.
• Connectors extend Agent’s capabilities by providing secure API-based access to third-party apps like calendars and email, enabling task execution across platforms.
• Agent can interact directly with web pages, forms, and files, using tools like a visual browser, code execution terminal, and file handling system.
• Agentic AI responds well to structured, disambiguated web content, making SEO and publisher alignment with structured on-page elements more important than ever.
• Structured data improves an AI agent’s ability to retrieve and act on website information. Sites that are optimized for AI agents will gain the most, as more users depend on agent-driven automation to complete online tasks.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent is an automation system that can independently complete complex online tasks, such as booking trips, analyzing competitors, or summarizing emails, by using tools like browsers, terminals, and app connectors. It interacts directly with web pages and connected apps, performing actions that previously required human input.

For publishers, ecommerce sites, and SEOs, ChatGPT agent makes structured, easily interpreted on-page content critical because websites must now accommodate AI agents that interact with and act on their data in real time.

Read More About Optimizing For Agentic AI

Marketing To AI Agents Is The Future – Research Shows Why

Read the original announcement at OpenAI

Introducing ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

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Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed the question of whether AI will replace the need for SEO. Mueller expressed a common-sense opinion about the reality of the web ecosystem and AI chatbots as they exist today.

Context Of Discussion

The context of the discussion was about SEO basics that a business needs to know. Mueller then mentioned that businesses might want to consider hiring an SEO who can help navigate the site through its SEO journey.

Mueller observed:

“…you also need someone like an SEO as a partner to give you updates along the way and say, ‘Okay, we did all of these things,’ and they can list them out and tell you exactly what they did, ‘These things are going to take a while, and I can show you when Google crawls, we can follow along to see like what is happening there.’”

Is There Value In Learning SEO?

It was at this point that Martin Splitt asked if generative AI will make having to learn SEO obsolete or whether entering a prompt will give all the answers a business person needs to know. Mueller’s answer was tethered to how things are right now and avoided speculating about how things will change in a year or more.

Splitt asked:

“Okay, I think that’s pretty good. Last but not least, with generative AI and chatbot AI things happening. Do you think there’s still a value in learning these kind of things? Or can I just enter a prompt and it’ll figure things out for me?”

Mueller affirmed that knowing SEO will still be needed as long as there are websites because search engines and chat bots need the information that exists on websites. He offered examples of local businesses and ecommerce sites that still need to be found, regardless of whether that’s through an AI chatbot or search.

He answered:

“Absolutely value in learning these things and in making a good website. I think there are lots of things that all of these chatbots and other ways to get information, they don’t replace a website, especially for local search and ecommerce.

So, especially if you’re a local business, maybe it’s fine if a chatbot mentions your business name and tells people how to get there. Maybe that’s perfectly fine, but oftentimes, they do that based on web content that they found.

Having a website is the basis for being visible in all of these systems, and for a lot of other things where you offer a service or something, some other kind of functionality on a website where you have products to sell, where you have subscriptions or anything, a chat response can’t replace that.

If you want a t shirt, you don’t want a description of how to make your own t-shirt. You want a link to a store where it’s like, ‘Oh, here’s t-shirt designs,’ maybe t-shirt designs in that specific style that you like, but you go to this website and buy those t-shirts there.”

Martin acknowledged the common sense of that answer and they joked around a bit about Mueller hoping that an AI will be able to do his job once he retires.

That’s the context for this part of their conversation:

“Okay. That’s very fair. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so you think AI is not going to take it all away from us?”

And Mueller answers with the comment about AI replacing him after he retires:

“Well, we’ll see. I can’t make any promises. I think, at some point, I would like to retire, and then maybe AI takes over my work then. But, like, there’s lots of stuff to be done until then. There are lots of things that I imagine AI is not going to just replace.”

What About CMS Platforms With AI?

Something that wasn’t discussed is the trend of AI within content management systems. Many web hosts and WordPress plugins are already integrating AI into the workflow of creating and optimizing websites. Wix has already integrated AI into their workflow and it won’t be much longer until AI makes a stronger presence within WordPress, which is what the new WordPress AI team is working on.

Screenshot Of ChatGPT Choosing Number 27

Will AI ever replace the need for SEO? Many easy things that can be scaled are already automated. However, many of the best ideas for marketing and communicating with humans are still best handled by humans, not AI. The nature of generative AI, which is to generate the most likely answer or series of words in a sentence, precludes it from ever having an original idea. AI is so locked into being average that if you ask it to pick a number between one and fifty, it will choose the number 27 because the AI training binds it to picking the likeliest number, even when instructed to randomize the choice.

Listen to Search Off The Record at about the 24 minute mark:

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Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed the problem of how to approach content for achieving business goals, the wisdom of setting expectations, and observed that it may not matter whether a site is optimized if the content is already achieving its intended results.

Getting The Content Right

Anyone can write, but it’s hard to communicate in a way that meets the audience’s needs. One thing SEOs often get wrong is content, which remains the most important ranking factor in modern search engines.

A common mistake is publishing entire sentences that waste time. I think that happens when writers are trying to meet an arbitrary word count and providing context for the high volume keywords they want to rank for.

Martin Splitt started the discussion by asking how to go about writing content and shared his own experience writing content and getting it wrong because he was writing for himself and not for what the audience needs to read.

Splitt shared:

“…how would I know how to go about content? Because now I know who I want to address and probably also roughly what I want to do. But, I mean, that’s a whole different skillset, right? That’s like copywriting and probably some researching and maybe some lettering and editing, and wow. That’s a lot. I love to write. I love to write.

…But I love having a technical writer on the team. Lizzi is a tremendous help with anything that is writing. I honestly thought I’m a good, reasonably good writer. And then Lizzi came and asked three questions on a piece of documentation that I thought was almost perfect.

I basically started questioning the foundations of the universe because I was like, “Okay, no, this document doesn’t even make sense. I haven’t answered the fundamental questions that I need to answer before I can even start writing. I’ve written like three pages.

Holy moly, that is a skill that is an amazingly tricky skill to acquire, I think. How do I start writing? Just write what I think I should be writing, I guess.”

Writing is easy to do, but difficult to do well. I’ve seen many sites that have the SEO fundamentals in place, but are undermined by the content. Splitt’s experience highlights the value in getting a second opinion on content.

Site Visitors Are Your Inspiration

Mueller and Splitt next move on to the topic of what publishers and SEOs should write about it and their answer is to focus on what users want, encouraging to do something as simple as asking their readers or customers.

Mueller observed:

“I think, if you have absolutely no inspiration, one approach could be to ask your existing customers and just ask them like:

• How did you find me?
• What were you looking for?
• Where were you looking?
• Were you just looking on a map? What is it that brought you here?

This is something that you can ask anyone, especially if you have a physical business.

..It’s pretty easy to just ask this randomly without scaring people away. That’s kind of one aspect I would do and try to build up this collection of ‘these are different searches that people have done in different places, maybe on different systems, and I want to make sure I’m kind of visible there.’”

Set Reasonable Expectations

John Mueller and Martin Splitt next provide a reality check on the keyword phrases that publishers and SEOs choose to optimize for. It’s not always about the difficulty of the phrases; it’s also about how relevant they are to the website.

Mueller commented about what to do with the keyword phrases that are chosen for targeting:

“And then I would take those and just try them out and see what comes up, and think about how reasonable it would be for one of your pages, perhaps to show up there and how reasonable it can be, I think is something where you have to be brutally honest with yourself, because it’s sometimes tempting to say, “Well, I would like to appear first for the search bookstore on the internet.” Probably that’s not going to happen. I mean, who knows? But there’s a lot of competition for some of these terms.

But, if you’re talking about someone searching for bookstores or bookstores in Zurich or bookstores on Maps or something like that, then that’s a lot more well defined and a lot easier for you to look at and see, what are other people doing there? Maybe my pages are already there. And, based on that, you can try to build out, what is it that I need to at least mention on my pages.”

Mueller followed up by downplaying whether a site is search optimized or not, saying that what’s important is if the site is performing as well as intended. Whether or not it’s properly optimized doesn’t matter if it’s already doing well as it is. Some may argue that the site could be doing better, but that’s outside of the context of what Mueller was commenting on. Mueller’s context was a business owner who was satisfied with the performance of the site.

Mueller observed:

“I mean, it all depends on how serious you take your goal, right? If you’re like a small local business you’re saying, ‘Well, I have a website and I hear I should make it SEO, but I don’t really care.’ Then it’s like do whatever you want kind of thing. If you have enough business and you’re happy. There’s no one to judge you to say, “Your website is not SEO optimized.”

Listen to Episode 95 of the Search Off The Record at about the ten minute mark:

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In this week’s Ask An SEO, a marketing manager asks which SEO skills are most valuable to look for in candidates today, especially with AI in the mix:

“I’m a marketing manager who’s been tasked with hiring our first in-house SEO specialist.

With AI tools becoming more prevalent, what skills should I prioritize when interviewing candidates in 2025? Are traditional SEO skills still as valuable, or should I focus more on candidates who can work alongside AI tools?”

This is a great question, and one I imagine a lot of hiring managers in the marketing industry are asking themselves.

For years, we’ve been looking for SEO professionals with skills that will help our websites thrive in Google, Bing, and Yandex. But, what skill set is needed for the emerging markets of ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and Claude?

And what about keyword research, content creation, and technical audits? Are they still useful activities for SEO professionals to carry out manually when there are so many AI tools purporting to be able to do this for you now?

What Traditional SEO Skills Are Still Needed

We often think of skills within traditional SEO fitting roughly into three categories: technical, content, and authority-building. Are these still needed in the era of large language model (LLM) platforms and tools?

Technical SEO Skills

Ensuring that a website can be crawled, rendered, parsed, and indexed effectively by bots has been a staple of SEO for a long time.

If the bots can’t access the pages you want to have ranked, can’t read the content on them, or find the page to be unfriendly for users, you will struggle in the traditional search engine results pages (SERPs).

This isn’t all that different in the new world of generative engine optimization (GEO). Bots still need to be able to access content on your website, read it, and understand it.

Technical SEO skills will continue to be important to online visibility in the new era of organic discovery.

An excellent SEO will be someone who can utilize AI tooling to automate and speed up the checks they are already performing. The really valuable technical SEO skills will still be analyzing, prioritizing, and communicating the issues when they are discovered.

Good technical SEOs have been looking at ways to automate their processes using Python and Structured Query Language (SQL) for a while now.

AI is enabling them to do this quicker, and for those who are newer to those languages, to automate their processes more easily.

Hire SEO specialists who are excited to use AI tools to enhance their work, not replace it entirely.

You will still need SEO pros to be creative in problem-solving and working within the confines of your organization’s technology, resources, and capabilities.

Read more: 15+ Technical SEO Interview Questions For Your Next Hires 

Content Skills

AI-written content has been a hot topic for a couple of years now. Can AI replace human writers? Should you hire with content creation and marketing skills in mind, or can you leave that purely to AI now?

I would suggest that any SEO hire you make needs to understand how to craft engaging copy that clearly defines the brand and meets the needs of users at each stage of the buying journey.

This hasn’t changed much from when SEO pros brief writers and graphic designers in content creation. We still need SEO specialists to understand how to request engaging content, whether that be through AI or human creators.

The ability to define what will be engaging content through research (whether keywords or prompts) and how users engage with it (whether on the brand site or within the LLM’s answer) is still critical.

Read more: Generative AI And Social Media: Redefining Content Creation

Authority-Building Skills

Previously, there was an evolution in SEO from regarding authority building as getting backlinks by whatever means necessary, to acquiring links through engaging and relevant content.

For optimization in LLMs, the desire is more to cement a brand’s positioning and sentiment through mentions on other authoritative websites.

The skill set needed to acquire authoritative links through digital PR will not be that different from what’s needed to acquire mentions.

In fact, good digital PRs have recognized for a while now that brand mentions are valuable in their own right.

There is a need to understand the publisher who is being targeted, what they write about, when best to contact them, and how. This could well be automated to a good degree by AI.

However, the really excellent PRs build up relationships with their contacts, so they are front-of-mind when a story is breaking. This is something AI will struggle to replace.

When hiring for the digital PR side of SEO, look at their relationship-building skills in particular.

Read more: 3 Types Of PR & SEO Funnels That Will Maximize Conversions

Analytical Skills

AI has (thankfully!) taken much of the pressure off SEO professionals to be efficient mathematicians, proficient in Excel formulae, or, at least, having a good percentage calculator tool bookmarked.

Summarizing increases and decreases in key performance indicators (KPIs) is something AI can handle. It can highlight correlations between metrics and identify likely causes. AI can also summarize this all into a compelling report.

But, it still needs a human to determine if its recommendations are valid and a viable course of action.

A good SEO will be someone who can utilize the AI tools to draw conclusions and highlight issues, while retaining strategic oversight.

Strategy

That leads on to strategic skills. Good SEO pros will be able to utilize AI tooling for processes while drawing on their own deep contextual understanding and common-sense reasoning.

Hire SEO professionals who are adept at considering the moral and ethical implications of marketing and who can adapt to novel situations.

AI tooling will not be able to build trust with senior stakeholders. It will not be able to inspire and influence them. It definitely will not be able to manage egos and emotions like a good SEO has to.

Skills That Help In Emerging Markets

Beyond the skills that we’ve long been looking to hire for in SEO, it’s important to find people who are able to thrive in a burgeoning environment.

Great SEO pros have been cultivating these skills throughout their careers. Bad SEO professionals have scraped by on second-hand knowledge and following templated procedures.

Experimental Approach

Make sure they have the ability to experiment and apply their learnings.

We’re entering a new phase of SEO where what worked before might not work again. There are no experts in GEO yet; we’re all having to learn as we go along.

Make sure your candidates are willing to learn from trial and error.

Understanding Of How To Work With Uncertainty

The days of following an audit template are both long-gone and a way off. We can’t just apply what we know from SEO directly to GEO.

We need to learn what works in those new platforms. That means good SEO pros are going to have to be comfortable with the uncertainty in their industry again.

Seasoned SEO professionals will remember back to this during their formative years in the industry, but newer SEO specialists will need to break free of the “this is what works for SEO” mentality and be OK with adapting on the fly more.

Ability To Problem Solve And Investigate

This means they will really need to be keen problem-solvers. SEO, at its root, has always been about problem-solving.

With the suite of AI tooling growing, the temptation to delegate critical thinking to a machine will be great.

However, SEO pros will still need to be able to take a step back, consider all the context and angles, and work toward a solution given the resources and constraints they face.

This means that they cannot rely solely on AI to help them.

Read more: LinkedIn Lists Top 15 In-Demand Skills, Makes Related Courses Free

Hire For Complementary Skills

The answer to your question is yes. To both.

You need someone who can work alongside AI tools as well as having traditional SEO skills.

The experience and qualities of a seasoned SEO professional will still be extremely useful in the emerging world of LLMs and AI tooling.

It would be a risk to your organic performance if you hire solely based on whether the candidate can utilize AI tools well.

However, you do want to make sure the SEO pro is using all of the advantages that AI can bring. They need to be able to adapt to new technology and processes.

How To Interview For SEO Skills That Complement AI Solutions

The curiosity about new technology. The desire to experiment and adapt. Having an open mind to change. These are all attributes of good SEO professionals that are more important now than ever before.

When considering whether an SEO professional is a likely good fit for your role, find out their approach to new situations.

See how they have adapted in the past to changes in SEO that needed a change of tactics.

Ask them how they have diagnosed and responded to algorithm updates, or expanded their skill sets to include social media search engines.

Summary

In essence, the need for traditional SEO skills is not diminishing. However, great SEO professionals will be those who can adapt their skill set to work in GEO, as well as make the best use of new AI tooling available to them.

Alongside that, problem-solving, experimentation, and a keen strategic approach are what to look for in your next SEO hire.

More Resources:

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If you’ve been affected by AI Overviews, traffic drops, or feel uncertain about SEO’s future, then this episode is for you.

Search Engine Journal’s Editor-in-Chief Katie Morton sits down with growth advisor and author of “Growth Memo,” Kevin Indig, to unpack the results of his latest AI Overviews study.

In this 35-minute episode, they discuss how it impacts search, SEO, and brand marketing in 2025.

Editor’s note: The following transcript has been edited lightly for clarity, brevity, and adherence to our editorial guidelines.

Table of Contents

1. 1. What AI Overviews Mean For Search, SEO & Brand Trust
2. 2. What The AI Overview Study Really Reveals
3. 3. Why Branding Matters More Than Ever
4. 4. The New Role Of SEO In A Changing Landscape
5. 5. Reaching People Everywhere Requires A Bold Shift To Other Platforms

What AI Overviews Mean For Search, SEO & Brand Trust

Katie Morton: Hi, everybody. It is I, Katie Morton. I’m the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal, and today I’m sitting down with Kevin Indig, who is a growth advisor to fast-growing tech companies and the author of “Growth Memo,” a fantastic newsletter.

We syndicate it here on Search Engine Journal, but sign up for it directly, too, because he has content exclusive to subscribers. It’s filled with smart insights every marketer needs to know.

Kevin, thanks for making the time today. The study was analyzed in March-April 2025 and published in May. We’ve had time to reflect, and today we’ll unpack the key takeaways.

We’ll start with the nuts and bolts of the study’s background, so listeners understand the context, and then go beyond the data to explore how marketers and companies, especially those frustrated by Google, AI Overviews, or traffic drops, can respond.

So, Kevin, can you summarize the study and share the main takeaways?

Kevin Indig: Thanks for having me on, Katie. It’s great to be here with you.

What The AI Overview Study Really Reveals

Kevin: The study came from a desire to deeply understand, from a qualitative perspective, how everyday users interact with AI Overviews.

In 2024, everyone was eyeing AI Overviews with curiosity, but traffic impact wasn’t significant yet. Then, at the start of 2025, everything changed. It became a “holy cow” moment – this was real and serious.

We asked 70 participants in the U.S., across different age groups, to solve eight tasks that covered dominant user intents: Finding a tax accountant, researching medical questions, shopping, etc.

We intentionally included queries that showed AI Overviews but didn’t tell participants to interact with them – we wanted unbiased behavior.

So, in a nutshell, the three most poignant results are:

1. Classic Organic Results Still Carry Weight

First of all – and this is no surprise – clicks are really rare when people see AI Overviews. That’s gotten through to everyone by now.

And yet, at the same time, classic organic results still have the majority of impact on people’s completion of user journeys.

Let me untangle that for a second: What we found is that people get their final answer – the final piece of information they were set out to get – 80% of the time from classic organic results. Not from AI Overviews, so that was encouraging.

2. High-Quality Clicks Happen In High-Trust Moments

Clicks are going down, but people still click. And each of those clicks has much, much higher quality than, say, in 2024 or before.

Because those clicks are to verify whether the results are accurate, to get human input from platforms like Reddit or YouTube, and to increase confidence in whether what the AI is saying is true.

And for us, that means it’s critical to be present in these high-trust, high-risk moments. I can unpack that a little more…

3. Audience Age Shapes AI Engagement

The third result I found very interesting is that there really is an age difference here. [Younger users] are much more receptive to AI answers. They’re much more active on Reddit and YouTube. Whereas people of a higher age will often just skip the AI answers because they don’t trust them.

You want to know who you’re talking to, who your target audience is. Ideally, what the age group is of your ICP or your target audience, and then make SEO decisions accordingly.

Why Branding Matters More Than Ever

Katie: Thank you for that. What I’d love to talk about next is branding.

I feel like big brands are a little safer with recent developments. If you already have recognition, you’re in a better spot. But if you’re a tiny brand with no recognition, you’re really behind the eight ball.

For the uninitiated or the uninformed, [you might wonder], why is that important? It’s about trust.

When someone sees your brand in an AI Overview, recognition boosts trust. If they click on an AI Overview or scroll to find organic results, they’re more likely to trust and click a name they know. A strong brand increases your chances.

But even strong brands can lose recognition. Mordy Oberstein and I talk about this a lot – he’s doing branding work now. Reputation is everything.

Mordy uses the example of Nike, which was once ubiquitous, but has lost some relevance. Younger generations aren’t as loyal or aware of the swoosh anymore.

So, for big brands, maintaining confidence and trust is critical. For small or new brands, or brands that never had strong recognition, can they still gain traction?

Kevin: You can get traction … but it’s really challenging.

One challenge is that multiple teams need to work together: product, innovation, marketing, support, supply chain. SEO doesn’t control all these variables. It’s always been a discipline of recommendations, relying on others to act.

So, you always were relying on other teams, and that has 10x’d now with AI. Because, as you said, brand, brand perception, and sentiment are so critical to how you appear in search results or answers.

And it goes back to so many different touch points with a brand, not just the logo that people see or the advertising, but also the product that they use, retention, all that kind of stuff.

SEOs need to show other departments where issues lie, using click-through rates, brand search volume, and engagement metrics as signals. They must communicate the story and rally other teams.

But that often runs into cost concerns. Asking for a new call center to improve support has big budget implications, and quantifying ROI is tough.

So, SEOs must push beyond the Google channel and influence company strategy. It’s incredibly difficult to influence.

Katie: Absolutely. And speaking of SEO being declared “dead,” I’ve heard that every few years in my 20 years in the industry, but this is the first time I’ve felt a credible threat.

SEO will never truly die. It’s discovery, and discovery is always needed, but it’s definitely changing. It used to be the most cost-effective marketing channel. Now, ROI is less certain, and budgets are contracting.

But there’s a silver lining. A lot of low-quality, general content meant just to drive mass page views is getting weeded out.

For example, we used to rank for “What is E-E-A-T?” and get tons of unqualified traffic. With AI Overviews answering those general queries now, traffic is down, but the remaining traffic is far more qualified. That’s better for conversions.

It’s hard for publishers who relied on brute-force clicks. But for us, shifting away from programmatic and toward advertisers aligned with our audience, like SaaS, has worked. The industry is changing massively.

So, what do you think is next for SEO and marketing?

The New Role Of SEO In A Changing Landscape

Kevin: You hit it on the head. SEO is contracting; budgets are down, leadership confidence is down, and when people leave, their roles often aren’t replaced. SEO has died and reinvented itself many times.

I see that we’re using a lot of SEO also for AI visibility optimization. I do expect that to change, but however you flip it, we are in a transition period. And the problem with transition periods is that they’re hard to navigate. You lose orientation, and it’s painful.

Once you settle at a new baseline, you just run around a little headless, and you try to find your way. And then slowly, things kind of start to settle back in.

And so I’m very confident that whatever we’re going to call this, we’re going to settle into a new baseline. It might take a while. This is not going to stop in the next six months – probably not twelve months. But it’s hard to predict when.

Based on how quickly models improve and how quickly humans adapt to them, that will decide the pace of this transition.

However, there are also many opportunities in transitions. You can reinvent yourself. And that’s where, as SEOs, we might lose the SEO budget, but maybe we gain some brand budget, which has been much, much bigger in the past.

You see companies spending millions of dollars for multi-year contracts for a tiny logo that sits somewhere on a Formula 1 car. These things happen all the time.

There’s a big opportunity for SEO to detach from that unwanted profiling as a performance channel – detach ourselves from being a performance channel, and become much more of a brand channel, influence channel, presence channel – whatever you want to call it.

New metrics. New levers. Deeply rooted in SEO. And effective and powerful, but kind of in a new design, right? Like SEO 2.0. Whatever you want to call it.

And I do agree with you. I also see people who’ve been in the game for a long time stepping out. Totally get that. I see young people losing a bit of confidence.

But I will also say that I would like (but wouldn’t admit) that there’s a little part of me that’s kind of excited for all this change.

Because it’s an opportunity to kind of reshuffle the cards, find out new stuff, maybe find some secrets, and kind of reverse engineer what’s going on.

When you look at the last just 10 days where multiple people and companies found new ways to reverse engineer what queries Gemini uses and ChatGPT uses, I’m like, man, it’s awesome to see how adamant the industry works on developing the new playbook, dissecting how these mechanics work and LLMs work, and finding new ways.

So, I have high confidence, and I also have a lot of empathy for all the pain and the kind of problems that this industry is going through. But again, I see us coming out the other side at some point in like a new design – and with a lot of impact.

Katie Morton: I love it. I agree with the empathy as well. Because everyone in marketing, it seems, has lost their mind a little bit over the past year or two with these shifts in traffic.

But that Wild Wild West environment is also really exciting because there are going to be all of these developments.

And if people are calm and they persevere and they do the work to figure these things out, either for themselves or to watch what those researchers are finding, people will be okay, right?

Kevin: We always are. Sorry to cut you off there, but there’s a really important point to make here that I didn’t make – and that is: It’s not just search that’s changing.

SEO is at the forefront of AI. At the absolute forefront. Because it’s about words, and it’s about search, and search is kind of the biggest interface between AI and humans right now.

So it’s not just search that’s changing. Marketing is completely changing. And like, all of our lives are completely changing.

Sure, this will take years to trickle through, maybe not even to the degree we’ve thought of it, but it’s pretty clear that AI is at least as revolutionary as the internet. Maybe even the most revolutionary invention that humanity has made so far.

So let’s not forget: Everything is changing. It’s not just us SEOs. It’s all the channels. It’s marketing as a whole.

Modes and levers are disappearing, and new ones are coming up. We’re feeling it deeply in SEO, as being kind of the front line of AI. But make no mistake, this will trickle through to all the paid channels, product, everything.

Everybody is in a state of shock right now, trying to figure out what the new branches are to hold on to and then build on top of. Marketing as we know it is over. LLMs are transforming how they reach us.

Katie: This affects every channel. At SEJ, we’ve collapsed editorial and marketing into one integrated team. It used to be SEO and editorial here, marketing over there, and no one really talked. That doesn’t work anymore.

Now, everything is more cohesive and focused on the ICP and conversion. It’s better for customers and for teams.

Kevin: 100%. I talk to all my clients about this. SEO and paid search should’ve always been connected, but they were siloed, same with product, email, social, etc.

I mean, look: Realistically and ideally, SEO and paid (or paid search) have always been connected at the hip. But I’ll tell you, at least across almost all the companies that I’ve worked with, they were siloed.

The same exists with all these other teams, like product marketing or social media, conversion, and email – all that kind of stuff.

Now’s the time to rip off the band-aid. There can be small teams of maybe an SEO, an editor, an email person, a social person, and maybe a very technical person who can quickly prototype new apps, programs, or tools.

The biggest challenge now is internal red tape. AI is a speed catalyst, but companies’ old workflows slow them down. Big organizations are stuck.

I’m urging clients to form these multi-disciplinary units under one manager, one roof, one mission.

Reaching People Everywhere Requires A Bold Shift To Other Platforms

Katie: Awesome. One last point: other platforms. For too long, people relied too heavily on Google. Diversifying traffic sources – ads, social, newsletters – is now essential. Holistic marketing is the future. What are you seeing [that is] working right now?

Generally speaking, where do people live these days? Where are humans hanging out, and where do we find them? What are the success metrics that you’re seeing?

Kevin: The short answer is: Everywhere.

Katie: Good luck, everyone. Okay, good night. That’s the show!

Kevin: No, but the reality is, everywhere. There’s this interesting paradox. I need to coin this term somehow, but this interesting paradox that basically all the social networks are growing. And new ones are popping up, right? TikTok – I mean, it’s not that new anymore, but it’s still growing. Reddit is becoming much more of a household name now.

And so you ask yourself, what gives? Sure, linear TV’s down, okay. But how is this possible? And the reality is: People are online all the time – speaking for a friend – and they use a lot of platforms at the same time.

So, the best teams, or the companies that are making a big impact, they have this surround sound effect that they’re creating, where they’re present in a lot of places. They engage authentically, say, on Reddit.

When good companies engage on Reddit, it doesn’t feel like marketing. It’s not marketing, really. It’s much more like trying to be helpful, more like customer support or success.

That’s why these people are generally very well-suited to interact on Reddit. They truly add value. They’re truly part of the conversation.

Brands are repurposing their content in a very thoughtful and high-fidelity way, where maybe they create a blog article, turn it into a video, turn it into clips, which then turn into questions they answer on Reddit. There is this kind of everywhere strategy. AI really helps with that.

And I will also say it’s typically not companies that are getting stuck at the quantification-of-impact question. The reality is that steering an organization or a company toward that multi-channel effect – or that surround sound effect – takes a swing.

It takes a leader to say, “Okay, we’re going to spend some money and take six months, and we’re going to invest in Reddit and YouTube, and we’re going to wait for the results to come in. We’re not going to sit there every day refreshing the dashboard asking, ‘How many sales have we generated yet?’”

It takes a bit of a swing. And so it’s defining for this era, for this transition period, where it’s much harder to project and forecast where you’re going to land with some of these things.

It takes judgment and taste and a certain degree of risk-taking to invest in these channels and functions, and being comfortable, or at least okay, with waiting for some of the results to come in and being able to measure them later.

I’m not saying you should wait a year or two. But give it two quarters, maybe three quarters, and experiment with some of these channels.

So, that’s where people are – people are everywhere. It’s not enough to just have one shot at one platform. You need to be kind of everywhere.

And repurposing can help. Using AI with some of these things helps. But at the end of the day, you need to take a swing.

Katie: Very wise, Kevin. One of those things that I found highly annoying is that you can run these experiments, and you’re going to wait for your results, and then before your experiment is even done, everything’s changed again.

Kevin: Exactly. Predictable methods are gone. You take swings, and some won’t connect because conditions change. The best leaders, the best teams – a lot of times, they take a lot of swings.

Because some of those swings will hit full force, and it’s kind of a skill to build.

Katie: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. We’ve implemented monthly experiments at SEJ. Every department runs one. It could be layout, content type … constant iteration. I tell the team: soft knees. Be ready to shift. There’s no “set it and forget it” anymore.

Kevin: Yes, yes. On point. Allow people to fail. Another good skill is being able to take meaningful risks. I’m not saying bet the farm, but as a leader, if you want to encourage your people to take risks, let them.

Again, that doesn’t mean to blindly shoot in all directions. You want to have some thought behind that, some judgment. You want to be critical. But there has to be a point at which you let go.

Katie: That is a really perfect point. We tie experiments to north-star metrics. For us, one is newsletter subscriptions, so most of our experiments support that. We’ve seen great success, not always in raw traffic, but in conversions and revenue.

Kevin: Amazing. Congratulations on that.

Katie: Thank you. All right, Kevin, any parting remarks before we head out?

Kevin: I’m hearing a lot of very concerned SEOs. Concerned about “How do I tell this story?” or “How do I manage my boss or leadership in this time where traffic is down?”

I want to send out some courage. This is one of the biggest shifts I’ve lived through in my life. I would bet it’s probably the same for most, if not all, of the audience.

So, this is maybe the time to make some changes and have some grace about finding a new playbook.

I’m seeing a lot of SEOs very scared about this. I get the initial fear. But again, this is such a substantial, fundamental change. It’s okay for things to look different. It’s okay for you not to have the answer right now. Be honest with leadership. Push back if needed.

Katie: Focus on new metrics, not just UVs or PVs, but ones that connect to business goals. That’s where the story of success will be told.

Kevin: Exactly.

Katie: Thanks again, Kevin. Where can people find you?

Kevin: growth-memo.com, or just search for “Growth Memo.” That’s my main hub.

Katie: Awesome. We’re at searchenginejournal.com. See you next time!

Kevin: Thanks for having me.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

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The old rules no longer apply. It’s time for a smarter, AI-ready playbook.

AI-driven search is changing the landscape fast. Organic traffic is dropping, visibility is shrinking, and traditional SEO tactics are losing their edge. If you’re still following yesterday’s strategy, you’re already behind.

Join Siteimprove on July 23, 2025 for an exclusive webinar with Zoe Hawkins and Jeff Coyle. Learn how to evolve your SEO approach and content planning to thrive in a world where AI now plays a central role in search.

Here’s what you’ll walk away with:

• A breakdown of how AI is changing enterprise SEO.
• Why trust and authority now matter more than keyword volume.
• How to adapt to high-intent, low-volume traffic behavior.
• Practical ways to optimize your content for AI search without losing authenticity.
• The latest tools and frameworks for predictive content planning.

Why this session is a must:

We can no longer rely on the same tactics that worked before. This session gives you an inside look at how SEO must evolve to stay effective in the AI-first future.

Register now to stay ahead of the curve. Can’t attend live? Sign up anyway and get the full replay delivered to your inbox.

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Google’s martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed how long it takes for SEO to have an effect. Google’s John Mueller explained that there are different levels of optimization and that some have a more immediate effect than other more complex changes.

Visible Changes From SEO

Some SEOs like to make blanket statements that SEO is all about links. Others boast that their SEO work can have dramatic effect in relatively little time. And it turns out that those kinds of statements really depend on the actual work that was done.

Google’s John Mueller said that a site starting out from virtually zero optimization to some basic optimization may see near immediate ranking changes in Google.

John Mueller started this part of the conversation:

“I guess another question that I sometimes hear with regards to hiring an SEO is, how long does it take for them to make visible changes?”

Martin Splitt responded:

“Yeah. How long does it take? I’m pretty sure it’s not instant. If you say it takes like a week or a couple of weeks to pick things up, is that the reasonable time horizon or is it longer?”

John answered with the really old “it depends” line which is kind of overdone. But in this case it really does depend on multiple factors related to the scale of the work being done which in turn influences how long it will take for Google to index and then recalculate rankings. He said if it’s something simple then it won’t take Google much time. But if it’s a lot of changes then it may take significantly longer.

John’s explanation:

“I think, to speak in SEO lingo, it depends. Some changes are easy to pick up quickly, like simple text changes on a page. They just have to be recrawled and reprocessed and that happens fairly quickly.

But, if you make bigger, more strategic changes on a website, then sometimes that just takes a long time.”

See also: Google On Link Algorithms and How Long for Links to Work

Impact Of Website Changes

Martin Splitt asked Mueller measuring the effect of changes to an entire  website, with different text, different images.

Here’s Martin’s question for context:

“Yeah, that’s true. Okay, so I need a way of measuring the impact of my changes. I don’t know, if I make a new website version and I have different texts and different images and everything is different, will I immediately see things change in Search Console or will that take some time?”

Mueller responded:

“It depends on how big the website is. But, if you’re talking about something like a homepage, maybe one or two other pages, then probably within a week or two, you should see that reflected in Search. You can search for yourself initially. That’s not forbidden to search for yourself. It’s not that something will go wrong or anything. Searching for your site and seeing, whatever change that you made, has that been reflected. Things like, if you change the title to include some more information, you can see fairly quickly if that got picked up or not.”

Next Stage Of SEO: Monitor Progress

Mueller then says that a good SEO should monitor how the changes they made are affecting the rankings. This can be a little tricky because some changes will cause an immediate ranking boost that will last for a few days and then drop. My opinion, from my experience, is that an unshakeable top ranking is generally possible if there’s strong word of mouth and other external signals that tell Google that the content is trustworthy and high quality.

Here’s what John Mueller said:

“I think that’s something where a good SEO should be able to help monitor the progress along there. So it shouldn’t be that they go off and make changes and say, ‘Okay, now you have to keep paying me for the next year until we wait what happens.’ They should be able to tell you what is happening, what the progress is, give you some input on the different things that they’re doing regularly. But it is something that is more of a longer term thing.”

Mueller doesn’t go into details about what the hypothetical SEO is “doing regularly” but in my opinion it’s always helpful to be doing basic promotion that boils down to telling people that this content is out there, measuring how people respond to it, getting feedback about it and then making changes or improvement based on those changes.

For content sites, a great way to get immediate user feedback is to enable a moderated comment section in which only comments that are approved can show up. I have received a lot of positive feedback from readers on some of my content sites from what’s in the comments. It’s also useful to make it easy for users to contact the publisher from any page of the site, whether it’s an ecommerce site or an informational blog. User feedback is absolute gold.

Mueller continued his answer:

“I think if you have a website that has never done anything with SEO, probably you’ll see a nice big jump in the beginning as you ramp up and do whatever the best practices are. At some point, it’ll kind of be slow and regular more from there on.”

Martin Splitt expressed how this part about waiting and monitoring requires patience and Mueller agreed, saying:

“I think being patient is good. But you also need someone like an SEO as a partner to give you updates along the way and say, ‘Okay, we did all of these things,’ and they can list them out and tell you exactly what they did. ‘These things are going to take a while, and I can show you when Google crawls, we can follow along to see like what is happening there. Based on that, we can give you some idea of when to expect changes.’”

Resgier for the webinar: The New SEO Playbook: How AI Is Reshaping Search & Content

Takeaways:

SEO Timelines Vary By Scale Of Change

• Simple on-page edits may result in quick ranking changes.
• Larger structural or strategic SEO efforts take significantly longer to be reflected in Google rankings.

SEO Results Are Not Instant

• Indexing and ranking recalculations take time, even for smaller changes.

Monitoring And Feedback Are Necessary

• Good SEOs track progress and explain what is happening over time.
• Ongoing feedback from users can help guide further optimization.

Transparency And Communication

• Effective SEOs regularly report on their actions and expected timeframes for results.

Google’s John Mueller explained that the time it takes for search optimizations to show results depends on the complexity of changes made, with simple updates being processed faster and large-scale changes requiring more time. He emphasized that good SEO isn’t just about making changes because it also involves tracking how those changes affect rankings, communicating progress clearly, and continuous work.

I suggested that user response to content is an important form of feedback because it helps site owners understand what is resonating well with users and where the site is falling short. User feedback, in my opinion, should be a part of the SEO process because Google tracks user behavior signals that indicate a site is trustworthy and relevant to users.

Listen to Search Off The Record Episode 95

See also the story from 2021: Google’s John Mueller answers how long SEO takes for new pages.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Khosro

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Google’s Search Off The Record podcast discussed when a business should hire an SEO consultant and what metrics of success should look like. They also talked about a red flag to watch for when considering a search marketer.

Hire An SEO When It Becomes Time Consuming

Martin Splitt started the conversation off by asking at what point a business should hire an SEO:

“…I know people are hiring agencies and SEO experts. When is the point where you think an expert or an agency should come in? What’s the bits and pieces that are not as easy to do while I do my business that I should have an expert for?”

John replied that there is no one criteria or line to cross at which point a business should hire a consultant. He did however point out that there comes a certain point where doing SEO is time consuming and takes a business person away from the tasks that are directly related to running their business. That’s a point at which hiring an SEO consultant makes sense.

He said:

“Yeah, I don’t know if there’s a one-size-fits-all answer there because it’s a bit like asking, when should I get help for marketing, especially for a small business.

You do everything yourself. At some point, you’re like, ‘Oh, I really hate bookkeeping. I’m going to hire a bookkeeper.’ At that point where you’re like, ‘Well, I don’t appreciate doing all of this work or I don’t have time for it, but I know it has to be done.’ That’s probably the point where you say, ‘Well, okay, I will hire someone for this.’ “

SEO Should Have Measurable Results?

The next factor they discussed is the measurability of results. Over more than twenty-five years of working in SEO, one of the ways that low-quality SEOs have consistently measured their results is by the number of queries a client site is ranking for. Low-quality SEOs charge a monthly retainer and generate a report of all queries the site has ranked for in the previous months, including garbage nonsense queries.

A common metric SEOs use to gauge success is ranking positions and traffic. Those metrics are a little better, and most SEOs agree that they make sense as solid metrics.

But those metrics don’t capture the true success of SEO because those ranking positions could be for low-quality search queries that don’t result in the kind of traffic that converts to leads, sales, affiliate earnings or ad clicks.

Arguably, the most important metric any business should use to gauge the effect of what was done for SEO is how much more revenue is being generated. Keyword rankings and traffic are important metrics to measure, but the most important metric is ultimately the business goal.

Google’s John Mueller appears to agree, as he cites revenue and the business result as key measures of whether the SEO is working.

He explained:

“I think, for in SEO, it kind of makes sense when you realize there’s concrete value in working on SEO for your website, where there’s some business result that comes out of it where you can actually measurably say, ‘When I started doing SEO for my website, I made so much more money’ or whatever it is that goal is that you care about, and ‘I’m happy to invest a portion of that into hiring someone to do SEO.’

That’s one way I would look at it, where if you can measure in one way or another the effects of the SEO work, then it’s easier to say, ‘Well, I will invest this much into having someone else do that for me.’”

There is a bit of a problem with measuring the effects of SEO. The effects on sales or leads from organic SEO cannot always be directly attributed. People who are obsessed with data-driven decisions will be disappointed because it’s not always possible to directly attribute a lead from an organic search. For one thing, Google hides referral data from the search results. Unlike PPC, where you can track a lead from an ad click to the sale, you can’t do that with organic search.

So if you’re using increased sales or leads as a metric, you’ll have to be able to at least separate attributable paid search from earnings, then guesstimate the rest. Not everything can be data-driven.

Hire Someone With Experience

Another thing Mueller and Splitt recommended was to hire someone who has actual experience with SEO. There are many qualifying factors that can be added, including experience monetizing their own websites, ability to interpret HTML code (which is helpful for identifying technical reasons for ranking problems), endorsements and testimonials. A red flag, in my opinion, is hiring someone from a cold call.

John Mueller observed:

“Someone else, ideally, would be someone who has more experience doing SEO. Because, as a small business owner, you have like 500 hats to wear, and you probably can figure out a little bit about each of these things, but understanding all of the details, that’s sometimes challenging.”

Martin agreed:

“Okay. So there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for this one, but you have to find that spot for yourself whenever it makes sense. All right okay. Fair.”

Red Flag About Some SEOs

Up to this point, both Mueller and Splitt avoided cautioning about red flags to watch for when hiring an SEO. Here, they segued into the topic of what to avoid, advising caution about search marketers who guarantee results.

The reason to avoid these kinds of search marketers is that search rankings depend on a wide range of factors that are not under an SEO’s control. The most an SEO can do is align a site to best practices and promote the site. After that, there are external factors, such as competitors, that cannot be influenced. Most importantly, Google is a black box system: you can see what goes in, you can observe what comes out (the search results), but what happens in between is hidden. All search ranking factors, like external signals of trustworthiness, have an unclear influence on the search results.

Here’s what Mueller said:

“One of the things I would watch out for is, if an SEO makes any promises with regards to ranking or traffic from Search, that’s usually a red flag, because a lot of things around SEO you can’t promise ahead of time. And, if someone says, “I’m an expert. I promise you will rank first for these five words.” They can’t do that. They can’t manually go into Google’s systems and tweak the dials and change the rankings.”

Listen to Google’s Search Off The Record podcast here:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Peshkova

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An ecommerce SEO audit is a 360-degree review of your website’s SEO performance in terms of technical setup, on-page optimization, site structure, backlink profile, and more.

Think of it like a routine check-up for your online store.

Instead of waiting for traffic to drop or sales to slow down, you can proactively find and fix problems before they spiral into revenue leaks.

Done right, an SEO audit helps you:

• Identify ways to improve rankings and user experience
• Detect issues affecting your organic performance
• Protect and sustain long-term growth

More importantly, this audit creates an SEO strategy grounded in data, not guesswork.

In this guide, I’ll break down a 4-stage process for conducting an ecommerce SEO audit.

I’ve also prepared a free audit workbook to help you document findings, prioritize fixes, and drive measurable results.

Core Components of an Ecommerce SEO Audit

Unlike a traditional website audit, a well-rounded SEO audit for ecommerce focuses on five key components.

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO ensures search engines can find, crawl, and index your website.

It prevents critical issues like:

This is important for ecommerce websites since URL structures and large inventories can create crawlability concerns.

2. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO allows search engines to understand the content and purpose of each page on your site.

A strong on-page setup includes title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and more.

It also covers internal linking patterns to ensure link equity flows to your most important pages.

3. UX and Performance

This part of the audit evaluates:

It helps optimize your UX, so visitors can easily navigate your store, stay longer, and convert.

4. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO looks at external signals that influence your site’s authority, such as:

Put simply, off-page SEO covers everything outside your website that shows search engines you’re a trustworthy brand.

5. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis assesses how your site stacks up against other brands.

Benchmarking your performance against competitors helps you find gaps and opportunities to outrank competitors on organic search.

Now that you know what to audit, let’s walk through how to do it — step by step.

We’ll break it down into four practical stages that map back to the core components.

Download our free audit workbook to better understand every step and implement them for your business.

Stage 1: Can Google Find My Store and Products?

A good ecommerce SEO audit starts by checking whether search engines can actually find, crawl, and index your pages.

No matter how well you optimize pages, they won’t rank or drive traffic if they’re invisible to search engines.

In short: This stage lays the groundwork for everything else that follows.

Here’s what to look for in this stage:

Check If Your Pages Are Indexed in Google

A web page becomes visible in search results and starts ranking only after it’s added to a search engine’s index.

Start your audit by heading to Google Search Console (GSC) to review the index status for your pages.

Open your GSC dashboard and go to the “Pages” report under the index section.

The report will list all non-indexed pages with specific reasons:

• Discovered – currently not indexed
• Crawled – currently not indexed
• Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
• Page with redirect

If pages aren’t added to Google’s index, it could be due to issues with page quality, crawl budget, or duplicate content.

Use the “URL Inspection” tool to learn why a page isn’t indexed yet.

In this example, the URL has been discovered but not indexed.

Press the “Request Indexing” button to manually submit a page for indexing.

Ensure Key Pages Are in Sitemap and Crawlable

A clean, accurate sitemap helps search engines discover your most important pages.

Your sitemap should include hierarchical URLs for all types of pages, like categories, products, product versions, and more.

Here’s what an ecommerce store’s sitemap looks like:

Check whether your sitemap is updated automatically whenever you add new pages.

Open Google Search Console and go to the “Sitemaps” section.

This report shows when your sitemap was last submitted and read by Google. It also highlights the status and number of URLs discovered.

At the same time, check your robots.txt file.

This file tells search engines which parts of your site they shouldn’t crawl.

Go to yoursite.com/robots.txt to see if you’re unintentionally blocking any pages or folders.

You can use Google’s robots.txt Tester to validate your setup.

Identify and Fix 4xx/5xx Errors That Hurt Visibility

Check your HTTPS status codes to discover pages with 4xx or 5xx errors.

These errors explain why search engines can’t access your pages.

Use tools like Screaming Frog and Semrush Site Audit to check your HTTPS status codes.

Here’s how to do it with Semrush:

Go to the Site Audit tool, and add your domain.

Follow the steps in this guide to configure and customize your Site Audit project before running the crawl.

When you’re ready, hit “Start audit.”

Once the results are in, navigate to the “HTTPS” part of the audit overview.

Here, you’ll see any issues with HTTPS status codes and how to fix them.

You can also go to the “Crawled Pages” section in your report and filter data based on status codes.

For example, I applied the “Issue Status” filter to find pages with broken or blocked status codes.

Here are the filtered results showing all the pages meeting this criteria:

Review all the pages showing errors and plan ways to fix each type of error.

For example, if a page showing the 404 error is outdated and no longer needed, you can remove it from your sitemap.

Use Canonical Tags to Avoid Duplicate Content

Ecommerce sites often struggle with duplicate content due to multiple product variants or filtering options.

This can confuse search engines and affect your rankings.

That’s why canonical tags are important to tell search engines your
preferred version of a page.

For example, the athleisure brand Alo Yoga uses canonical tags for color variants, such as:

• Steel grey: airlift-intrigue-bra-steel-grey
• Anthracite: airlift-intrigue-bra-anthracite

To prevent search engines from seeing these pages as duplicate content, each product variant includes a canonical tag pointing to a single, main product URL.

Use free canonical checker tools like Detailed to check whether all product variants are canonicalized to the main URL.

Stage 2: Do People Discover and Visit My Pages?

Your next step is optimizing your pages to rank well and appeal to searchers.

Focus on improving how your listings appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) and matching them to the right search intent.

This optimization can boost impressions, traffic, and, ultimately, revenue.

Here’s what to check in this stage:

Optimize Titles and Meta Descriptions for Clicks

Title tags and meta descriptions are often the first thing searchers see.

Are yours compelling enough to earn the click?

For example, when I search for “healthy soda,” I find this page by Zevia Soda.

The title tag emphasizes its main value proposition: Zero Sugar Natural Flavored Soda.

And the meta description doubles down on this, highlighting zero calories and the variety of flavors.

Use Backlinko’s free SEO checker to find any critical issues here.

Add any page and hit “Check SEO” to get started.

Here’s how the tool flags issues related to your page’s title, headings, meta description, and other elements:

Add Structured Schema for Rich Results

Schema markup with tags like Product, Review, and FAQs can enhance your listings with rich snippets.

Visual cues like pricing, ratings, discounts, and delivery details simplify the shopping experience and can boost CTR for your pages.

Here’s how they look:

Google’s Rich Results Test is a helpful tool to validate your schema markup with all these elements.

For example, I ran a test for a hair oil product page to see what kind of rich snippets it has.

The report indicated that this page has four snippets, but some of them are invalid.

On further analysis, I discovered that one of the snippets is missing the review and rating fields.

This product listing won’t qualify for full rich results unless you add such required fields to your schema.

That’s how you can review schema markup for individual pages.

To check the schema for all your pages, revisit your Site Audit report on Semrush.

In the Overview section, you’ll see data for the “Markup” category.

Press “View details” to get deeper insights about your site’s schema.

For example, the report shows:

• Number of pages with markup
• Kind of schema markup for all pages
• Type of structured data available for your pages.

Map Target Keywords to the Right Pages

Another crucial task in this stage is checking whether your keywords align with the actual user behavior and intent.

Map each page to its target keywords and search intent.

Evaluate this map to find pages targeting the wrong keywords or intents. Here’s an example:

You can also run a Google search for your low-ranking keywords and see the kind of pages appearing in SERPs.

Then, compare these top-ranking pages with your content to find areas of improvement.

Optimize Images and Add Alt Text

Your online store can drive significant traffic by optimizing images and multimedia assets.

Image optimization can:

I searched “blue ceramic dinner plates” to see this in action.

Below the usual product listings, the images section also shows product listings for people to browse more options.

As a part of your audit, check whether your images have relevant file names and keyword-rich alt text.

Semrush’s Site Audit report will also flag images missing alt text attributes.

Stage 3: Are Visitors Staying and Buying?

The next part of your audit explores how shoppers interact with your site and whether they convert or bounce.

You want to know:

• Are people spending enough time in your store?
• Are they dropping off after viewing one product?
• Is something in the user journey causing friction?

If people constantly leave your store without buying, your site’s UX might need help.

Here’s what to check in this stage:

Improve Load Times and Mobile Usability

Slow pages = Poor experience = Higher bounce rate.

An ecommerce site audit reveals which pages are loading slowly and need your attention.

It also tests your website’s responsiveness across different screens, especially mobile devices.

Google PageSpeed Insights is a trusted tool for evaluating your store’s user experience based on Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading speed
• First Input Delay (FID): Tracks time to interactivity
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Checks visual stability during load

Here’s an example report I generated:

This page failed to meet the benchmark for a good user experience for mobile devices.

Remember to check the page speed specifically for mobile since Google’s mobile-first indexing approach prioritizes mobile devices.

Simplify Page Design and UX

Design plays a crucial role in instilling confidence among potential customers.

When you deliver a frictionless user experience with good design elements like CTAs, trust badges, and accessible navigation, users stick around for longer.

This sends powerful signals to search engines and improves SEO metrics like dwell time, page views, bounce rate, and more.

In fact, our ranking factors study reveals that pages with a higher “time on site” tend to rank higher in Google.

Fix Pages Targeting the Same Keyword

Ecommerce sites often have multiple pages targeting the same keyword, like category filters or similar products.

As a result, many pages compete against each other for a keyword.

Since search engines can’t decide which page to rank higher, your rankings are diluted.

Refer to your Site Audit report to find errors pointing to duplicate content and identify:

• Near-identical pages competing for the same keywords
• Variants (color, size) are published as separate URLs

Add Internal Links to Boost Relevance

Strategic internal links create logical paths between pages, keep users engaged longer, and distribute authority.

So, even if searchers land on one of your blog posts, they can find their way to a relevant product page and make a purchase.

Here’s how Tonal, a fitness equipment brand, does this in its articles:

Stage 4: Where Am I Behind My Competitors?

In the final stage of your ecommerce SEO site audit, broaden the scope and look at the competition.

If a competitor ranks above you for key terms or earns better backlinks, they’re claiming traffic that could be yours.

So, understand your competitive landscape to identify missed opportunities for your SEO efforts.

Audit and Strengthen Your Backlink Profile

Backlinks are another critical ranking signal.

If you operate in a competitive category, backlinks can have a decisive impact on your organic visibility and traffic.

Start with a backlink audit to see where you currently stand.

This audit will help you discover:

• High-authority domains are already linking to your site
• Toxic or spammy links that may hurt your rankings
• Pages earning the most backlinks (and why)
• Opportunities to reclaim or build new backlinks

You can also benchmark your backlink profile against competitors and plan the next steps.

I used Semrush’s Backlink Gap tool to compare Fabletics’ backlink profile with two competitors.

You can add up to four main competitors and press “Find prospects.”

The tool will analyze every site’s backlinks and show you curated prospects for your site.

You can find the best, strong, weak, shared, and unique domains that link to your competitors but not to you.

For Fabletics, the tool suggests domains like healthline.com, usnews.com, americanexpress.com, and more.

Use this data to prioritize outreach or content partnerships for your link-building efforts.

Uncover Keyword Gaps and Ranking Opportunities

Use tools like Semrush’s Keyword Gap or SimilarWeb to see which keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t.

This can help you:

• Identify new content opportunities
• Strengthen underperforming pages
• Reclaim rankings for keywords you’ve lost visibility on

Focus especially on high-intent, bottom-funnel terms that drive conversions, not just traffic.

For example, let’s say a competitor ranks for “buy minimalist running shoes.”

If you sell the same type of product but don’t appear in search, that’s a clear gap — and a chance to win back visibility.

How to Prioritize SEO Issues You Identify in a Site Audit

When you’re looking at a laundry list of issues from your SEO audit, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

Everything looks important. Where do you even begin?

Our SEO audit workbook automatically calculates the priority level based on every issue’s impact, effort, and scope.

Impact

Find out how fixing an issue will move the needle for your business.

• Will it increase traffic, rankings, or conversions?
• Or, will it go largely unnoticed by search engines and shoppers?

The easiest way to determine impact is by looking at which pages are affected.

If high-revenue category or product pages are at stake, it’s a high-impact problem.

But if the problem is restricted to low-ranking blog posts, then the stakes are lower.

Effort

Once you’ve categorized issues on a scale of low to high impact, consider the effort required to fix each one.

Realistically calculate effort in terms of time, technical complexity, and capacity required to resolve a problem.

Scope

Scope looks at scale.

Estimate how big the problem is by checking if it’s:

• Isolated
• Page-level
• Site-wide

And if it’s a page-level concern, you want to zoom into the type of pages affected.

Prioritization Framework

Here’s how you can prioritize issues based on impact, effort, and scope:

• Priority 1 (Quick wins): Resolving these concerns can lead to significant SEO gains without draining resources
• Priority 2 (Can be urgent): Some of these issues need attention because they can affect your key revenue drivers
• Priority 3 (Rarely urgent): Automating or handling these issues in monthly cycles is a good bet
• Priority 4 (Low impact): Spending resources on these time-consuming tasks can delay more meaningful work

Here are a few examples to see this prioritization framework in action:

Troubleshooting Guide

We created a quick guide listing the solutions for some of the most common SEO issues for ecommerce stores.

When you’re ready with a prioritized list, refer to this guide to find potential causes and solutions quickly.

Build a Store That Google (and Shoppers) Love

Your online store has untapped potential.

A structured SEO audit gives you clarity to realize this potential.

It pinpoints where you’re losing traffic, which pages are underperforming, and what fixes will move the needle.

Work through our ecommerce SEO audit checklist to identify issues and implement solutions.

And when you’re ready to level up your strategy, check out our guide on the best strategies for ecommerce SEO.

It’s packed with examples, workflows, and tools to help you turn organic traffic into your best-performing channel.

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For most of its history, SEO has been a reactive discipline, being asked to “make it rank” once a site is built, with little input into the process.

Even crazier, most SEO professionals are assigned a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for which they are accountable, metrics tied to visibility, engagement, and revenue.

Still, they have no real control over the underlying systems that affect them. These metrics often rely on the performance of disconnected teams, including content, engineering, brand, and product, which don’t always share the same objectives.

When my previous agency, Global Strategies, was acquired by Ogilvy, I recommended that our team be viewed as building inspectors, not just an SEO package upsell added at the end, but involved at key phases when architects, engineers, and tradespeople had laid out the structural components.

Ideally, we’d come in after the site framing (wireframes) was complete, reviewing the plumbing (information architecture), electrical (navigation and links), and foundation (technical performance), but before the drywall and paint obscured what lies beneath.

We’d validate that the right materials were used and that construction followed a standard fit for long-term performance.

However, in reality, we were rarely invited into the planning stages because that was creative, and we were just SEO. We were usually brought in only after launch, tasked with fixing what had already been buried behind a visually appealing design.

Despite fighting for it, I was never a complete fan of this model; it made sense in the early days of search, when websites were simple, and ranking factors were more forgiving.

SEO practitioners identified crawl issues, adjusted metadata, optimized titles, fixed broken links, and retrofitted pages with keywords and internal links.

That said, I have long advocated for eliminating the need for most SEO actions by integrating the fixes into the roles and workflows that initially broke them.

Through education, process change, and content management system (CMS) innovation, much of what SEO fixes could, and should, become standard practice.

However, this has been a challenging sell, as SEO has often been viewed as less important than design, development, or content creation.

It was easier to assign SEO the role of cleanup crew rather than bake best practices into upstream systems and roles. We worked around CMS limitations, cleaned up after redesigns, and tried to reverse-engineer what Google wanted from the outside in.

But that role of identifying and fixing defects is no longer enough. And in the AI-driven search environment, it’s becoming obsolete.

Search Has Changed. Our Role Must Too.

Search engines today do far more than index and rank webpages. They extract answers, synthesize responses, and generate real-time content previews.

What used to be a linear search journey (query > list of links > website) has become a multi-layered ecosystem of zero-click answers, AI summaries, featured snippets, and voice responses.

Traditional SEO tactics, indexability, content relevance, and backlinks still matter in this environment, but only as part of a larger system.

The new currency of visibility is semantic clarity, machine-readability, and multi-system integration. SEO is no longer about optimizing a page. It’s about orchestrating a system.

This complexity requires us to transition from being just an inspector to becoming the Commissioning Authority (CxA) to meet the demands of this shift.

What Is A Commissioning Authority?

In modern architecture and construction, a Commissioning Authority is a specialized professional who ensures that all building systems, including HVAC, electrical, plumbing, safety, and lighting, function as intended in combination.

They are brought in not just to inspect but also to validate, test, and orchestrate performance.

They work on behalf of the building owner, aligning the construction output with the original design intent and operational goals. They look at interoperability, performance efficiency, long-term sustainability, and documentation.

They are not passive checkers. They are active enablers of success.

Why SEO Needs Commissioning Authorities

The modern website is no longer a standalone asset. It is a network of interconnected systems:

• Content strategy.
• CMS structure.
• Design and front-end frameworks.
• Analytics and tagging layers
• Schema and structured data.
• Internationalization and localization.
• Page speed and Core Web Vitals.
• AI answer optimization.

Today’s SEO, or whatever the latest alphabet soup acronym du jour is, and especially tomorrow, must be a Commissioning Authority for these systems. That means:

• Being involved at the blueprint stage, not just post-launch.
• Advocating for search visibility as a performance outcome.
• Ensuring that semantic signals, not just visual elements, are embedded in every page.
• Testing and validating that the site performs in AI environments, not just traditional search engine results pages (SERPs).

The Rise Of The Relevance Engineer

A key function within this evolved CxA role is that of the Relevance Engineer, a concept and term introduced by Mike King of iPullRank.

Mike has been one of the most vocal and insightful leaders on the transformation of SEO in the AI era, and his view is clear: The discipline must fundamentally evolve, both in practice and in how it is positioned within organizations.

Mike King’s perspective underscores that treating AI-driven search as simply an extension of traditional SEO is dangerously misguided.

Instead, we must embrace a new function, Relevance Engineering, which focuses on optimizing for semantic alignment, passage-level competitiveness, and probabilistic rankings, rather than deterministic keyword-based tactics.

The Relevance Engineer ensures:

• Each content element is structured and chunked for generative AI consumption.
• Content addresses layered user intent, from informational to transactional.
• Schema markup and internal linking reinforce topical authority and entity associations.
• The site’s architecture supports passage-level understanding and AI summarization.

In many ways, the Relevance Engineer is the semantic strategist of the SEO team, working hand-in-hand with designers, developers, and content creators to ensure that relevance is not assumed but engineered.

In construction terms, this might resemble a systems integration specialist. This expert ensures that electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and automation systems function individually and operate cohesively within an innovative building environment.

Relevance Engineering is more than a title; it’s a mindset shift. It emphasizes that SEO must now live at the intersection of information science, user experience, and machine interpretability.

From Inspector To CxA: How The Role Shifts

Looking Ahead: The Next Generation Of SEO

As AI continues to reshape search behavior, SEO pros must adapt again. We will need to:

• Understand how content is deconstructed and repackaged by large language models (LLMs).
• Ensure that our information is structured, chunked, and semantically aligned to be eligible for synthesis.
• Advocate for knowledge modeling, not just keyword optimization.
• Encourage cross-functional integration between content, engineering, design, and analytics.

The next generation of SEO leaders will not be optimization specialists.

They will be systems thinkers, semantic strategists, digital performance architects, storytellers, performance coaches, and importantly, master negotiators to advocate and steer the necessary organizational, infrastructural, and content changes to thrive.

They will also be force multipliers – individuals or teams who amplify the effectiveness of everyone else in the process.

By embedding structured, AI-ready practices into the workflow, they enable content teams, developers, and marketers to do their jobs better and more efficiently.

The Relevance Engineer and Commissioning Authority roles are not just tactical additions but strategic leverage points that unlock exponential impact across the digital organization.

Final Thought

Too much article space has been wasted arguing over what to call this new era – whether SEO is dead, what the acronym should be, or what might or might not be part of the future.

Meanwhile, far too little attention has been devoted to the structural and intellectual shifts organizations must make to remain competitive in a search environment reshaped by AI.

Suppose we, as an industry, do not start changing the rules, roles, and mindset now. In that case, we’ll again be scrambling when the CEO demands to know why the company missed profitability targets, only to realize we’re buying back traffic we should have earned.

We’ve spent 30 years trying to retrofit what others built into something functional for search engines – pushing massive boulders uphill to shift monoliths into integrated digital machines. That era is over.

The brands that will thrive in the AI search era are those that elevate SEO from a reactive function to a strategic discipline with a seat at the planning table.

The professionals who succeed will be those who speak the language of systems, semantics, and sustained performance – and who take an active role in shaping the digital infrastructure.

The future of SEO is not about tweaking; it’s about taking the reins. It’s about stepping into the role of Commissioning Authority, aligning stakeholders, systems, and semantics.

And at its core, it will be driven by the precision of relevance engineering, and amplified by the force multiplier effect of integrated, strategic influence.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Jack_the_sparow/Shutterstock

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