{"id":20151,"date":"2026-09-23T04:16:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T08:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/advertisingweek.com\/aw360\/?p=20151"},"modified":"2026-09-20T16:21:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T20:21:12","slug":"agencies-are-rebuilding-search-teams-for-the-ai-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/advertisingweek.com\/aw360\/news\/agencies-are-rebuilding-search-teams-for-the-ai-era\/20151\/","title":{"rendered":"Agencies Are Rebuilding Search Teams for the AI Era"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Cosima Compton, Director of SEO and GEO Communications, Intero Digital<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every search team I\u2019ve 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\u2019s taking the traditional agency org chart down with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s because generative search doesn\u2019t return a list of links; it returns an answer<\/em>. Google\u2019s AI Overviews<\/a>, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini synthesize a response and cite (or don\u2019t 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<\/a> 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\u2019ll be seen as the answer to a search. That\u2019s why so many agencies are rethinking who owns visibility and how those teams are structured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From rankings to entities<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The old SEO team optimized pages for exact-match keywords. The team we need now optimizes your brand\u2019s 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\u2019s not a job SEO can do by itself. It draws on SEO\u2019s technical and structural fundamentals, PR\u2019s third-party validation and citation-building, paid media\u2019s audience and intent data, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One analysis of GEO best practices<\/a> mapped out how each discipline now feeds a single shared outcome:<\/p>\n\n\n\n