Agencies Are Rebuilding Search Teams for the AI Era

By Cosima Compton, Director of SEO and GEO Communications, Intero Digital

Every search team I’ve worked with over the years was built around the same assumption: A search engine returns a list of blue links, a human scrolls through them, and the job is to earn a spot near the top. That version of search is dying, and it’s taking the traditional agency org chart down with it.

That’s because generative search doesn’t return a list of links; it returns an answer. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini synthesize a response and cite (or don’t cite) a handful of sources, usually without sending a click at all. And the sources that get cited are becoming far less predictable than they used to be. One set of studies aggregated from Profound, SE Ranking, and Ahrefs found the overlap between AI citations and top-10 organic rankings falling anywhere from 17% to 54% depending on the study, down from roughly three-quarters in mid-2025. Ranking well no longer means you’ll be seen as the answer to a search. That’s why so many agencies are rethinking who owns visibility and how those teams are structured.

From rankings to entities

The old SEO team optimized pages for exact-match keywords. The team we need now optimizes your brand’s entire ecosystem (on-site, industry publications, community forums, social media, and paid media) for entities (any definable person, thing, or idea within your industry) to build associations an AI model can recognize and trust, across dozens of sources at once. That’s not a job SEO can do by itself. It draws on SEO’s technical and structural fundamentals, PR’s third-party validation and citation-building, paid media’s audience and intent data, and more.

One analysis of GEO best practices mapped out how each discipline now feeds a single shared outcome:

• SEO builds the structured, evergreen answers models prefer to cite.
• On-site content deepens the expertise signals models look for.
• PR supplies the third-party validation that makes a brand trustworthy to a model.
• Social amplifies those signals in real time.
• Paid media and syndication fill visibility gaps where organic presence is thin.

When I look at how our best-performing client programs are staffed today, they’re not staffed by siloed channels. They’re staffed for centralized strategy to support this dependency chain.

New KPIs, new titles

The metrics are shifting as fast as the org charts. Rankings and organic sessions are giving way to citation share of voice, AI referral traffic broken out by platform, and how accurately a model describes a brand when asked about it directly. Some agencies are starting up dedicated AI monitoring functions, which is essentially a listening desk for how brands appear across models. This role simply didn’t exist just a few years ago.

That urgency is warranted. Industry benchmarks suggest that measurable AI-referred pipeline impact typically starts to show up between month four and six of a coordinated program, with early citation gains visible in three to four months. Clients are going to ask about that timeline whether an agency has restructured to deliver against it or not, so titles are changing, too. “GEO strategist,” “visibility strategist,” and “AI search analyst” are showing up in places where “SEO manager” used to be the only option.

Where skepticism is warranted

Not everyone agrees that the old structure is broken, and to an extent, there is validity to this reasoning. The fundamentals of SEO are still relevant, including technical optimization, site architecture, link authority, and topical depth (which could be seen as justification for not tearing up an org chart). This view holds that AI search represents a fundamental restructuring of how answers get generated and attributed but that the technical foundations agencies have spent years building remain just as relevant inside that new layer, framing GEO as an extension built upon traditional SEO rather than a replacement for it.

I’d put it this way: The agencies that are furthest ahead right now aren’t necessarily the ones that renamed their teams the fastest. They’re the ones that had already invested in building topical authority for their clients before any of this started and are now extending that investment rather than starting from scratch.

That’s the tension I expect to shape agency pitches over the next year: rebuild vs. extend. But regardless of which side an agency lands on, the current is moving in the same direction. Search isn’t organized around clicks anymore. The agencies that are still budgeting, staffing, and reporting as if it is are the ones that will be the most exposed the next time a client asks the only question that matters now: Are we visible in the answer?

Author Bio:

Cosima Compton is Director of SEO and GEO Communications at Intero Digital, where she bridges client strategy and execution across multichannel digital marketing, from SEO and paid media to visibility in generative search. She specializes in helping brands show up not only in traditional search results, but also in the AI-driven answers that today’s buyers increasingly rely on.