There is a strange hysteria that sweeps through the marketing industry every time a new AI model drops. Yesterday it was Gemini 3. Today, it will be whatever OpenAI push out next.
The reaction is always the same. Breathless excitement. Endless LinkedIn posts. Instant predictions of revolutions that will apparently reshape everything in our professional world within weeks.
And, right on cue, the most surprising reaction came from Sam Altman.
With one casual comment, he effectively patted Google on the back and congratulated the team for a job well done.
This is the equivalent of handing the ball to the opposition on the halfway line.
Google did not need the endorsement. It already enjoys the advantage. It has owned the underlying infrastructure for years and has been ahead in large language models far longer than anyone likes to admit.
So yes, Gemini 3 is impressive. Yes, the demos are slick. Yes, the precision and reasoning are better.
But none of this is the real story.
The more profound shift is not about how good Google’s models are.
It’s about what happens when these models become the default interface for the internet and the way consumers navigate their biggest decisions.
Because while everyone celebrates the model, nobody is analysing what the interface will do to marketing.
The truth is simple. AI search will not reward the best content. It will reward the loudest brands.
The entire premise of optimisation is disintegrating beneath our feet, and the two big research reports published recently, one from Marketing Week and Google and the other from WPP Media and Oxford Saïd, confirm exactly why.
These papers were pitched as guidance for leaders trying to make sense of the AI era but in reality they simply underline a deeper strategic shift.
The future will not be won by better metadata. It will be won by influence. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that understand that search is no longer about matching documents to queries.
Search is about priming consumers and AI long before the query ever appears.
The End of Ten Blue Links
Let us start with the obvious.
The interface of search is changing. It will not be ten blue links for much longer.
We all know this even if nobody is willing to say it directly. Google is already nudging users into AI Mode.
Most people do not know what to do with it yet but that will change the moment Google makes it the default. The company has done this many times before. It waits for behavioural friction to lessen and then flips the switch.
The Marketing Week and Google AI Search Playbook spells this out clearly.
Two billion people are already exposed to AI Overviews every month, YES…Two billion.
The future is not hypothetical, it is underway. And AI Overviews are only the beginning.
Search is getting visual. Search is getting conversational. Search is getting longer and richer. People are typing full sentences as if they are talking to a real shop assistant. Suddenly, the complexity of human questions is exploding.
This alone should be the wake up call every marketer hears.
Because if the questions become more complex, the answers will not come from static pages optimised around artificially neat keywords.
They will come from AI interpreting huge volumes of signals. Not content sprinkled with keywords. Not articles constructed by tools. Signals.
Everything your brand has ever said, shown, published, promoted, or had said about it.
This is the shift most SEO and GEO professionals do not yet understand.
The AI layer discovers everything when it needs to. It joins everything up.
Your job will not be to optimise what you publish. It will be to produce so much signal about your brand that AI cannot help but notice you.
That when someone asks for something you have a paid solution for, you become fused into the answer.
The Death of the Optimisation Fantasy
If the Google report tells us where search is going, the WPP Media and Oxford Saïd report tells us why brands will need to behave differently.
It is among the most important behavioural science papers of the year because it spells out a brutal truth.
Optimisation is tinkering at the edges of a process that has already been decided long before anyone enters a search query.
Their analysis of more than one million purchase journeys reveals that 84 percent of purchases are already pre-decided through brand priming before any active shopping begins.
The number never drops below 70 percent in any category. This means most people already know what they want before they even start looking.
So while marketers obsess over capturing demand in the moment, the reality is that the battle was won or lost months or years earlier.
This is the hammer that smashes the fragile logic behind SEO. If people already know the brands they prefer, then the businesses that have already built the strongest priming will dominate the results surfaced by AI.
Because AI will use the same behavioural reality humans use. It will present the most relevant, familiar and contextually powerful brands first.
The WPP paper also reveals the huge differences in receptivity to messaging.
Twenty three percent of the population is almost impossible to influence.
Ten percent is hyper receptive.
Everyone else sits somewhere in between.
That means you cannot rely on a single channel, a single piece of content, or a single campaign.
Influence is fragmented. Attention is fragmented. Touchpoints vary widely in effectiveness across categories.
And the most influential touchpoints in converting primed demand are not paid channels at all.
They are owned, shared and earned.
Google Says the Same Thing From the Other Side
While WPP comes at it from behavioural science, the Google and Marketing Week report arrives at the same conclusion through search behaviour. But it frames the problem in a way every marketer needs to take seriously.
Scott Sinclair at Google makes one statement that should be burned into every strategy deck for the next five years.
The biggest growth opportunity is not in the demand you can already see. It is in the millions of new searches happening every day.
This is the death of the keyword.
This is the death of tidy search volumes and predictable content calendars.
If people are asking questions that no one has ever asked before, you cannot optimise for them.
You cannot hope to capture demand with the same tools you used last year.
The only way to appear is to build a brand that is everywhere.
Because if your brand is everywhere, AI will know who you are. If AI knows who you are, you stand a chance of showing up in unpredictable moments of consumer curiosity.
Why Influence Beats Optimisation
This brings me to the real strategy shift every marketing leader now faces.
In the past SEO was about matching. You matched pages to queries. You matched keywords to intent. You matched content to algorithms.
That is gone. Completely gone.
AI search will behave like the world’s biggest influencer with perfect recall. It will observe everything. Every image. Every review. Every mention. Every article. Every video. Every social post. Every press release. Every comment. Every Q and A.
It will consume your brand the way an influencer consumes PR packages except on a scale so enormous we struggle to comprehend it.
And just like an influencer it will give attention to the brands it hears from the most.
Not the most insightful brands. Not the most optimised brands.
The loudest brands. The most active brands. The most consistently present brands.
This is why the future of search is not an optimisation problem.
It is a communications problem.
The brand that wins is the brand that produces the most fitness signals about itself and distributes them everywhere.
If classic SEO was about doors into a website, AI search is about a flood of brand evidence into the ecosystem.
Why You Must Become the Market Stallholder
When I was a kid, I loved visiting the market stalls in the seaside towns we visited on holiday. Among the racks of discount shirts and mismatched toys, there was always one person with a microphone performing a product demonstration. Usually for something like a slicer or a kitchen gadget.
They did not wait for people to approach. They pulled the crowd in.
They brought the product to life. They told stories. They chopped vegetables at high speed. They created energy. And eventually they closed the sale.
This is the future. AI is becoming the crowd. Your brand must be the stallholder.
You cannot stand at the back of the hall and hope people wander to your table.
You must become the noise in the room. You must become the activity.
Publish. Announce. Demonstrate. Document. Photograph. Promote. Tell stories. Get into the media. Get into influencers’ feeds. Get into customers’ reviews. Get into the conversations that surround your category.
This is not SEO.
This is fame engineering.
It is the systematic production of brand presence at scale.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Take a hotel in Jamaica. In the old world it would write a few landing pages. Maybe a guide about local attractions. A handful of blogs per year. Nice photography. Basic SEO.
In the new world that is completely inadequate.
The task is to create constant evidence of your brand.
If the hotel has a beach, you publish hundreds of images of that beach. Different angles. Different times of day. Different experiences. If the hotel has great food, you tell stories about the chefs. You publish menus. You film dishes. You review recipes. If the hotel hosts weddings, you build articles, videos, guides and case studies about the weddings. You do not create this because users will search for it. You create it because AI will absorb it.
Then you go further. You get travel bloggers to visit. You get influencers to stay. You get guests to leave reviews. You secure coverage in travel media. You produce behind the scenes content. You talk about your renovation. You talk about your staff. You talk about your sustainability work. You publish updates every week. You create a river of signals. Not a pond. A river.
Because AI is consuming everything.
The Real Future of Search
The WPP report shows that consumers decide long before they search. The Google report shows that queries are exploding into new, unpredictable forms.
The interface is becoming conversational. The trigger points are becoming broader. The context is becoming more personal.
The only logical response is volume. Volume of communication. Volume of presence. Volume of brand signals.
The brands that win in the AI era will be the loudest brands.
Not the noisiest in a shallow way but the ones generating constant, high quality evidence of who they are and why they matter.
Influence first. Reach second. Priming always.
This is not the age of optimisation. It is the age of influence.
And if you want to appear in AI search you must become unavoidable.
Andrew Holland
Originally published on LinkedIn on 19 November 2025.