Oh, SEO... where will you go?

It seems like every digital marketer is asking this question in 2025, watching anxiously as the value of their search traffic crashes and burns. For some, it’s a withering waiting game. For others, they’re already in crisis mode.

Case in point: Just a few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal drove a big nail in the digital coffin, showing how chatbots are replacing Google’s traditional search and delivering what felt like a death blow to news and media publishers.

It's not hyperbolic to say that SEO is facing serious whitewater. Between the prevalence of Google’s AI Overview and the unabated rise of answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, zero-click search has become ubiquitous. In 2024, roughly 60% of Google searches ended without a click, and this year is on track to trounce that.

So where does that leave SEO? Have we reached the end of the proverbial search results?

Not exactly. But it is evolving.

While the underlying principles for optimizing websites are still sacred – and the foundations of schema and structured data are still immutable – the shift to answer engines is having a deep impact. This is leading to a sort of trifurcated ecosystem where Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are becoming essential legs to the SEO tripod.

Suffice it to say, brands are left with an enigma wrapped in an enigma. Even though traditional SEO is still relevant, it’s clear that the value quotient is shifting, and aiming for a higher ranking on the Google SERPs isn’t enough. Unfortunately, the proven crop of leading SEO tools can’t provide marketers with the critical insights to ensure that their brand is discoverable in generative AI answer engines.

But we’ve been to this dance before, and innovation finds a way. As someone who has leaned heavily on Semrush, Ahrefs, and even the “brute-force” indexing of Screaming Frog (a go-to for large-scale migration projects), I’ve been analyzing how legacy applications are adapting to the era of AI-generated search – and where new tools like Otterly are emerging to help bridge the gap.

Now, Conductor is revving up brand performance across this new breed of generative AI answer engines, and bringing a more complete solution to the table. The website optimization and intelligence platform recently introduced its new Conductor AI solution, which is purpose-built to empower marketing and digital teams with the tools and resources to ensure their brand is discoverable in generative AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini – as well as traditional search.

Billed as the only website optimization platform with end-to-end visibility workflows, Conductor AI provides a clear line-of-sight to your brand’s discoverability across the AI search frontier, going beyond citations and direct mentions. This promises to give back marketers the “missing link” of search data – and like traditional SEO tools, tell you how to measure visibility and maximize authority within these blossoming ecosystems.

Conductor AI also knows how AI and LLMs see your website, allowing it to spot critical topic gaps that can help align your content with audience intent and search behavior. It can also track AI LLM crawlers, monitor bot activity, and optimize your overall AI readiness.

This is more than a one-dimensional tool for passively analyzing activity. But then again, Conductor has long been a cut above the baseline products and feature sets available across the SEO and site optimization space.

I recently spoke to Wei Zheng, Conductor’s Chief Product Officer, about this new foray into AEO, GEO, and other three-lettered acronyms like Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience) – all new concepts that reflect this shift I’ve been documenting. She shed some light on the market drivers, and we covered some of the innovative features in Conductor AI that represent a game-changing moment for the company.

Translating the value of SEO in the AI era

Unlike many of her peers, Wei wasn’t cut from the marketing cloth. She’s a data fan, a Berkeley grad with a degree in computer science and a penchant for complex software systems. As such, she brought 20 years of deep technical experience – forged in Silicon Valley – to Conductor’s recent AI endeavors.

“I worked on data, machine learning, and AI before it was Gen AI or GPT,” she said. “If you think of technologies that help you understand data at scale, tools like Tableau, I kind of come from that stack where I talk primarily to CIOs or CTOs to manage that internal data the stack.”

Prior to Conductor, Wei walked firmly outside the corridors of SEO. Go back four years, and her knowledge of the SEO industry and the technologies behind it was limited to an agency responsibility in someone else's stack.

Coming to Conductor was a bit of a “happy accident” for Wei. In her own words, the technical horizontals had gotten a little stale, and she was interested in strategic product management that really bridged the gap between technical and business use cases. Now, that decision is paying off in both challenging and exciting ways – and she’s ready for more change ahead.

“The reason Conductor drew my interest was to help brands authentically tell their story through content, or what Seth calls ‘wisdom.’ It’s the ‘wisdom’ of the business.”

“Something big is about to happen to this industry,” she explained. “I think people generally don’t understand what the heck SEO actually is, right? A lot of people think it's how you game the search engine to find you. The reason Conductor drew my interest was to help brands authentically tell their story through content, or what Seth calls ‘wisdom.’ It’s the ‘wisdom’ of the business.”

Wei was referring to Conductor’s co-founder and CEO, Seth Besmertnik, who has promulgated this wisdom narrative alongside his mission to make marketing “useful to humanity.” As we continue to grapple with humanity’s place in an increasingly AI world, Wei keeps coming back to the strategic value of content to power what’s next.

“The answer is always content,” she stated. “But the content arm is busy creating all these assets, and SEO is almost like an afterthought. I create the stuff I talk about, and ask, ‘Are people going to find me? Is this going to show up in the search engines?’ I think AI changes this entire paradigm, which is, if you want to win in AI, or if you want to win in the age of search, you’ve got to start thinking about your content strategy and your AI generated content.”

As she noted, a huge swath of consumers are using ChatGPT, so if you want to stand out, you need to build a content strategy that’s hyper-optimized for what people are querying across the generative AI search engines.

“So for me, it was the realization of connecting AI with what we call SEO, keywords, rank tracking, and all the stuff that we do here, with the fact that it's actually about your content strategy and how well your content speaks to the search intent of the user.”

I agree that content is the key. But this new paradigm of acronyms – AEO and GEO – is creating some anxiety as marketers try to make sense of it all. As Wei explained, they share many of the same goals, but AI is forcing us to think differently about the overall approach to SEO as users shift to zero-click motions within answer engines like Google AI Overview. This is having a ripple effect on search strategy.

“Google is taking away a lot of your frontend traffic because it's answering questions that you previously may have optimized keywords for,” she said. “The expectation is that people are going land on your site and use your site navigation and experiences to view your content. But if the traffic isn't coming to you directly, then you're not going to be successful. I think the notion of ranking position one or ranking above the fold, all of these classic SEO metrics and signals, just aren’t as relevant in this new world.”

Enhancing visibility with Conductor AI

So how can marketers measure their reach in this new world? And how can they get any meaningful data from generative answer engines? As Wei explained, the focus should be on gauging brand presence within the generated responses – and this is precisely what Conductor is doing with its AI platform.

“AI isn’t showing you things to click on, it’s just giving you the answer,” she said. “And in those answers, you can parse out things like how many times your brand is being mentioned or what is being talked about. Is it positive? Is it negative? We're helping our users understand brand presence and sentiments.”

There are a number of key innovations in Conductor AI that are worth noting. I had a chance to see some of the early beta progress, which has coalesced into a visually compelling set of marketer-friendly tools. You can swing by their website for more detail on the specific features.

First and foremost, Conductor AI is tackling the answer engine conundrum with some rich insights. It enables you to track brand and topic visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, really delivering on the promise of demystifying AI search performance. You can measure your market share and access dynamic insights with an array of visual graphs. In this sense, it brings the best features of classic SEO tooling to the new age of AEO.

Search Engine Activity graph in Conductor AI. Source: Conductor website

There’s also a slick AI Topic Map, which helps you identify critical content gaps. With this innovative feature, Conductor AI effectively reads your content to build topics, evaluates authority in each, and orchestrates content strategies to elevate your readiness for AI.

As Wei explained, this is a must-have for content management and DXP vendors who are looking to enrich their marketing and editorial users with more insights.

“With AI Topic Map, we can show you a map of your website, the way that AI will visualize your content,” she explained. “I think this is going to be really exciting for CMS and DXP platforms to use AI principles to show you what the topical clusters are on your site, the way that AI sees it. Once you have this map, we can actually tell you, ‘Oh, you want to rank or be visible for these topic entities? You have content today that has this coverage over here in this semantic space.’”

AI Topic Map in Conductor AI. Source: Conductor website

Here’s another dynamite asset: As part of the platform, Conductor provides a content co-pilot that specializes in AI LLM visibility. It pairs rich industry data with real-time content and competitor signals, allowing you to automatically generate winning content and expand your output with confidence.

There are handy tools in Conductor AI for scoring and predicting the AI potential of your content, so you can produce more effective content at scale. You can also maintain compliance, address audience questions and intent, and optimize for AI bot discovery. Conductor AI can also instantly identify and suggest the best links for a page using a complete extraction of your site’s content, removing that manual burden from your list of to-dos.

Wei explained why the scoring capabilities are another game changer.

“It's not good enough just to create content or have AI generate content, you've got to be able to score it and see if it’s good enough,” she said emphatically. “Does it address the search intent of the user? Does it actually answer the specific, personalized prompts or queries that people are putting into the AI search engines? Does it improve your topical authority? These are the factors of the content score, so using our tools to evaluate your topical clusters can tell you, ‘OK, you have coverage.”

There’s long been a black box around what AI LLM crawlers are discovering on your site. Now, with Conductor’s AI Crawler Activity, you can monitor content for AI indexing in real-time, seeing when and where bots interact with your content – and how you can optimize to maximize discoverability.

Tapping a powerful data engine

As I previously mentioned, Wei is a “data guru,” and the same fanatical focus on data has driven Conductor’s innovation. From a product perspective, that was crystallized by the launch of the company’s state-of-the-art data engine in Q4 of last year.

Its mission was simple: Solve data challenges that have held the search industry back. It does this by seamlessly connecting audience, search, technical, competitor, content, and customer integrated data (GA, GSC, etc.) with Conductor’s leading proprietary global dataset and real-time content signals.

Running on this new data foundation, Conductor AI equips marketers with fast and flexible workflows that keep teams productive and competitive. Plus, by layering on best-in-class AI techniques like retrieval augmented generation (RAG), Conductor AI has all the context it needs to deliver high-impact insights.

"Great AI requires great data, it’s a simple truth,” Wei said. “Conductor has ten-plus years of data and insights on what makes content successful in search. That also means ten-plus years of experience learning how to leverage this data, transforming it into actionable content strategies and feedback on how they perform, so we can continuously refine and optimize for even better results.”

Harnessing data is a big part of delivering on the promise of AI. But as Wei implied, Conductor’s complete ecosystem – it’s magic, if you will – is what brings it all together and makes the output actionable.

“With our new unified dataset making it all instantly retrievable, purpose-built prompts specially engineered for AI visibility and authority, and real-time monitoring on top, we are redefining what’s possible when it comes to content quality and insight accuracy.”

Why it matters

Some days, it feels like AI is leaving a wake of ruin behind it. Brands and enterprise leaders are having to rethink everything. Vendors are having to retool everything. And practitioners are facing existential questions about an uncertain future on both the marketing and development sides of the tech industry.

But viewed through a positive lens, AI is bringing awesome power and potential to every layer of the stack. And I continue to marvel at the ingenuity of humans that are bypassing the blockers to unlock the promise of greater automation, insight, and growth.

Conductor offers that latter view, providing a great template for how innovation can solve key problems in the new age of AI. Condutor effectively stitches together the missing parts of the SEO data fabric, giving back marketers a critical part of their toolset. The features in its AI platform are simple yet robust, equipping users with some beautiful visual UX that will feel familiar within the pantheon of SEO tools.

The capabilities, when taken as a whole, also feel cumulative – like an integrated ecosystem where each feature leads to the next, complementing the overall motion towards greater insight and action. This is especially true when you factor in the more expansive set of capabilities that come with Conductor’s content creation and technical site health monitoring.

From a CMS and DXP perspective, platforms like Acquia are already utilizing Conductor, delivering a suite of capabilities that includes its Writing Assistant – a content optimization tool that utilizes data-driven SEO signals and integrates with industry-leading models like GPT4 – and SERP insights from its Content Guidance service.

As Wei explained, the partnership with Acquia has taught them a lot, but it was generally frictionless – and that bodes well for future partnerships and platform integrations. But the big “aha” moment came at the editor level, where Acquia could see the potential to be more proactive when injecting SEO and AEO into the authoring workflow.

“Our initial conversation with Acquia started with our Writing Assistant,” she said. “They were like, ‘Holy Cow.’ They were building a new kind of SaaS version of Drupal, but their editor didn’t have any wisdom about content scoring, search, intent, or topical authority. They understood that you don't want to write content, then somewhere in the later stages, go optimize your stuff. You’ve got to start creating content with that in the beginning.”

According to Wei, Acquia now integrates with Conductor’s API, so every time content gets loaded, Conductor AI’s wisdom engine operates in the background, giving users recommendations and suggestions and scoring their content as they go. That’s super powerful.

“We go to market by being the ‘AI wisdom co-pilot’ to the CMS workflow," she said. "At the point where you're generating content or writing content, we want to be right there, right on the surface you're working on. And we want you to have the capability to measure all of it.”

As Wei said, DXPs have traditionally been composed of foundational technologies, from DAMs to CDPs. But SEO was never really at home in this mix – it was more of an add-on or an integration, much like Google Analytics. For this reason, Conductor has embraced the category moniker of a “website intelligence and optimization platform,” one where SEO, AI search, and other facets of modern digital marketing are becoming more foundational.

“We see ourselves as a big component of a DXP,” she said, “and that's the way we want to go to market, as that wisdom layer.”

Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m impressed with Conductor AI's holistic approach. It’s still early days, but the company's past performance and reputation speak volumes about where this could lead. There’s also a lot of potential for content practitioners and digital marketers via their enterprise toolsets. Conductor's go-to-market is at least partially focused on CMS and DXP integrations, so be on the lookout for more pairings at the platform level.

The AI race is on, and revving up your performance with AI answer engines has never been more critical. Whether you’re a marketing pro or a CMS/DXP vendor, I recommend booking a live demo.

Looking for guidance on Conductor? Talk to an expert.

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Conductor AI ‘Revs Up’ Brand Discoverability in Generative AI Answer Engines