- Essays
- 11 min read
- June 2026
SEO didn't die. It got a $320,000 job offer.
Why the AI companies supposedly killing search are quietly paying founder-level salaries to hire search people, and what that tells you about where your next customer actually finds you.
By The NowComms Team
There’s a post going round LinkedIn at the moment, the kind that gets reshared by people who half-agree with it. The gist: SEO is dead, AI killed it, stop wasting money.
Here’s the thing that post conveniently skips over.
Right now, today, Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, one of the AI tools supposedly burying search for good, has a job ad live for an SEO Lead. The salary is two hundred and fifty-five thousand to three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Read the job description and there’s a line where they say the person will own organic search “as search gets reinvented by AI.” It asks for experience in Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation. Those are the new names for getting recommended by the AI.
So one of the most advanced AI companies on earth is paying a founder-level salary to hire a search expert, and openly says the job is about search in the age of AI.
That is not what a dying industry looks like. It’s what an industry looks like when it’s moving house.
We’ve been sitting with this for a few weeks, partly because clients keep asking us a version of the same nervous question (do we still bother with SEO?) and partly because the honest answer is more interesting than either the “it’s dead” crowd or the “nothing’s changed” crowd will tell you.
So here’s the honest answer, in plain English, with the hype taken out.
01
Search didn’t go away. It moved house.
For about twenty years the deal was simple. You had a question, you typed it into Google, you got ten blue links, you clicked one. Businesses spent a lot of money trying to be the link you clicked.
That deal is quietly breaking.
More and more, the clicking just doesn’t happen. You ask ChatGPT. You ask Gemini. You read the AI summary at the top of Google and never scroll to the links underneath. The question still gets asked. The click that used to follow it increasingly doesn’t.
Gartner put a number on it: they expect traditional search volume to fall by about a quarter by the end of 2026. And by most measures, the majority of Google searches now end with no click to any website at all. People get their answer and move on.
This is the part worth sitting with. People aren’t asking fewer questions. They’re asking more, about more things, more casually, because asking an AI feels like asking a knowledgeable friend rather than doing research. What changed isn’t the curiosity. It’s that something now answers the question for them, and decides, on their behalf, who gets mentioned.
Which leads to the moment this stops being abstract.
02
The moment it gets personal.
Try this, if you haven’t. Open ChatGPT and type the question your ideal customer would type. “Best [your category] for [your kind of business].” Or “who should I use for [the thing you do]?”
Watch it answer. Confidently. By name.
If your company is in that answer, good. Quietly note who else is.
If it isn’t, as is often the case at first, there’s a particular small sting to it. You’ve just watched the tool your customers are increasingly asking recommend three of your competitors and skip you entirely. And here’s the worse part, the one that connects to something we’ve written about before: you can’t really tell why. The AI sounds completely sure of itself. It doesn’t show its working. We went deep on that confidence problem in a separate piece on AI flattery: the same trait that makes AI a smooth recommender makes it impossible to argue with.
This isn’t a fringe behaviour you can wait out. By 6sense’s most recent buyer research, the large majority of B2B buyers now use generative AI somewhere in their buying process. Not to make the final call, usually. But to build the shortlist. To decide who’s worth a closer look.
The shortlist is the whole game. If the AI doesn’t put you on it, you don’t get the meeting, and you’ll never know the meeting existed.
The question stopped being “where do I rank?” It became “does the AI trust me enough to say my name out loud?”
03
What “SEO” even means now (in plain English).
The acronym soup has got out of hand. SEO, AEO, GEO, LLMO, AI-SEO. A good chunk of those were invented in the last eighteen months by people who’d quite like to sell you a course about them. So let’s strip it back.
Old SEO had one job: be the link people click.
The new job is slightly different: be the source the AI trusts enough to name.
That’s it. That’s the shift. Not a new discipline that makes the old one worthless. The same job, pointed at a new reader.
Because here’s what hasn’t changed at all: the things that earn you that trust are the things good SEO always rewarded. Being clear about what you do. Being talked about by credible places. Laying your content out so the useful bit is easy to find and lift. Being genuinely worth recommending. None of that is new. What’s new is who’s reading: a machine deciding, in one shot, who to put in front of your customer, rather than a person skimming a results page.
The shift is real, by the way, not just loud. Searches for the new terms “answer engine optimisation” and “AI search optimisation” have been climbing steadily on our own keyword tracking over the past year, from near-zero to genuine monthly volume. People are looking for this because they can feel it happening to them.
So when someone tries to sell you “Generative Engine Optimisation” as a brand-new dark art, treat it the way you’d treat any salesperson who’s just discovered a new acronym. The fundamentals underneath are old and unglamorous. The audience for them changed. That’s the real story, and it’s less exciting than the pitch, which is usually a sign it’s true.
04
Why the AI picks one brand over another.
This is the part founders actually lean in for, because it’s where you start recognising your own situation.
AI systems don’t rank you the way Google’s blue links used to. They interpret you. They build a rough internal picture of your category: who the players are, what each one is for and who’s credible. When someone asks, they answer from that picture.
So the question stops being “where do I rank?” and becomes “what does the AI think I am, and does it trust me enough to say my name out loud?”
A few things shape that, and none of them are mysterious:
Can a machine tell what you do in one sentence?
If your homepage leads with “transforming possibilities” instead of plainly saying what you sell and who for, the AI has nothing clean to grab. Vague positioning was always weak. Now it’s invisible. This is why so much of our brand and positioning work starts with making a company legible before anything else. A machine can’t recommend what it can’t summarise.
Do credible places talk about you?
The AI’s picture of you is built partly from what other trusted sites say. If the only place that describes your business is your own website, you’re a single unverified source. If respected industry sites, directories and publications describe you too, you’re a fact the AI feels safe repeating.
Is your content shaped like an answer?
AIs lift cleanly-structured, genuinely useful answers to real questions. A page that clearly answers “what’s the best tool for X and why” is far easier to quote than a clever brand essay that buries the point.
Is it current?
Stale pages signal a stale business. Freshness is a trust cue.
Read that list back and you’ll probably feel the small click of recognition: oh, that’s why that competitor keeps getting named and we don’t. It usually isn’t that they’re better. It’s that they’re more legible.
05
The invisible moat.
Here’s the strategic version, for anyone thinking at the altitude of “where do I put next year’s budget.”
The companies sorting this out now are building something their competitors can’t see and can’t quickly copy: a settled position in the AI’s picture of their category. Once an AI consistently associates “best X for Y” with your name, that’s sticky. It compounds. It’s far harder to dislodge than a Google ranking, because there’s no single page to outbid or outrank. It’s a reputation baked into how the machine understands your whole space.
The companies ignoring it aren’t getting an alarm. That’s the trap. Their Google numbers might even look fine on the surface. But underneath, the highest-intent moment, the “who should I actually use” question, is increasingly happening inside an AI they don’t measure, recommending competitors they can’t see. The traffic doesn’t crash. It quietly fragments to places that don’t show up in the analytics they’re used to checking.
We’d gently resist the urge to call this a “moat,” because every LinkedIn post calls everything a moat. But it’s real, and it’s early, and early is the only time advantages like this are cheap.
06
What we’d actually do, if we were you.
Not a sales list. The genuinely useful version, most of which costs nothing but an afternoon.
Do the test.
Ask the major AIs the questions your customers ask. That’s your new rank check, and it’s free. Write down who gets named. That list is your real competitive set now, whatever you thought it was.
Make yourself legible.
Say what you do and who it’s for in one plain sentence, somewhere a machine will find it. Before any clever campaign. If a person can skim your homepage in five seconds and explain your business to someone else, a machine can too.
Earn mentions where the AI already looks.
A handful of credible, relevant places describing your business is worth more than another fifty pages on your own site. This is slow, unglamorous, and it works. It’s most of what proper SEO has quietly become.
Shape content as answers.
For every real question a buyer asks before choosing someone like you, have a clear, genuinely useful page that answers it. Not for the keyword. For the human, and the machine reading on the human’s behalf.
Keep a person in the loop.
Because the AI will, with total confidence, describe your business slightly wrong, with the wrong category, audience or an outdated fact, and someone has to notice and fix the source it’s pulling from. This is the same principle we keep coming back to: the AI does the reach, a human does the judgement. We made the fuller case in The Pause Between Prompt and Publish.
If you’d rather not do all that in-house, it happens to be most of what our SEO and organic visibility work is now pointed at. But the test at the top of this list, you should do today, by yourself, before you talk to anyone. Including us.
07
The honest catch.
Don’t read this as “burn down your Google SEO and chase the shiny new AI thing.” That’s the overcorrection, and it’s as wrong as ignoring the shift entirely.
The two aren’t separate games. The same clarity, the same credible mentions, the same useful content that gets you quoted by ChatGPT is what still earns you Google’s trust, and Google’s own AI summaries pull from the very same signals. You’re not replacing SEO with something new. SEO grew up, and the grown-up version happens to serve both the human and the machine at once.
The mistake isn’t doing SEO. It never was. The mistake is doing the 2019 version of it in 2026 and wondering why the AI never says your name.
So, back to that job ad.
The smartest, best-funded AI companies in the world are not firing their search people. They’re hiring them, at salaries that would make most founders blink, and writing job descriptions about search “getting reinvented by AI.”
That’s the tell. If the people building the future of search think it’s worth three hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year to get right, it’s probably worth one afternoon of yours to find out whether the AI can describe your business at all.
Go and ask it what you do. See if it knows. See who it recommends instead.
Then you’ll know exactly how much of this applies to you.
07
Questions people are asking about SEO and AI search.
Is SEO dead in 2026?
No, but the old version of it is fading. Traditional click-through search is shrinking. Gartner expects roughly a 25% drop in conventional search volume by the end of 2026, while AI tools answer more questions directly. SEO hasn’t died; its job has changed from “be the link people click” to “be the source the AI trusts and names.” The underlying skills, clarity, authority and useful content, matter as much as ever.
What is AI search optimisation, GEO, or AEO?
They’re new names for getting your business recommended by AI tools rather than just ranked on Google. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation; AEO for Answer Engine Optimisation. The acronyms are newer than the ideas. In practice it means making your business clear, credible, well-described by others, and structured so an AI can quote it confidently when someone asks for a recommendation.
How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?
Start by asking ChatGPT the questions your customers would ask and seeing whether it mentions you. Then work on three things: make what you do and who it’s for unmistakably clear, get credible third-party sites to describe your business (not just your own site), and publish genuinely useful answers to the questions buyers ask before choosing. AI tools recommend sources they can understand and trust.
Does SEO still matter if everyone uses AI?
Yes, and the two reinforce each other. The clarity, credibility and useful content that win AI recommendations are the same things that win Google rankings, and Google’s own AI summaries draw from the same signals. Abandoning SEO to “do AI” is a false choice. They’re increasingly the same work. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on where you stand, we’re happy to take a look.
What’s the difference between SEO and GEO?
SEO traditionally optimises to rank in a list of links a human chooses from. GEO optimises to be the source an AI selects and cites when it answers directly, often without showing a list at all. The methods overlap heavily; GEO simply accounts for the fact that, more and more, no human ever sees the list.
Written by the team at NowComms, a B2B marketing agency in the UK. We help founders and operators stay visible as the way people find businesses changes underneath them. If you’d like to talk it through, or you just want a second pair of eyes on what the AI says about you, come and say hello.
The rest of the piece
You’ve seen the problem. Here’s exactly what we’d do about it.
The second half is the practical part: what “SEO” actually means now in plain English, why the AI picks one brand over another, and the five things we’d do first if this were our business. Most are free, and you can do one of them this afternoon. Drop your first name and email to read on, and we’ll unlock the rest of the hub as it grows. No pitch, no follow-up call coming.
Related service: B2B SEO for Google and AI search
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