Despite the ongoing rise of AI-powered search, one expert believes SEO is “far from obsolete”, particularly for brands looking to reach older, high-value audiences and secure visibility within Google’s increasingly prominent AI summaries.
His warning comes after leaders from across Australia’s marketing and media sector recently told B&T the line between paid and organic results on Google is becoming increasingly “blurred”. Ads on Google’s search pages appear almost identical to organic listings, and occupy far more of the first search results page than ever before.
Dean Harris, founder and director of brand research consultancy The Navigators, admits the search landscape is “shifting fast” but warns marketers who walk away from SEO risk cutting themselves off from a large segment of the market.
While Harris admits AI tools are gaining traction quickly, their adoption “remains uneven across demographics”, which is a key reason SEO is still essential.
“We’re still seeing a lot of people using search as a medium to gather information and define brands. But AI has risen rapidly as a consumer technology,” Harris told B&T.
Research conducted by The Navigators shows 43 per cent of Australians aged over 18 consider themselves regular users of AI tools, including platforms such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s Gemini. Within that group, 28 per cent are using AI daily.
“So, obviously, this technology has risen incredibly quickly,” he explained. “Many people are using this technology to help them navigate categories and surface brands and choices that are available to them. More importantly, they are relying on AI tools to understand their intention.”
AI is also changing how consumers process information.
“It’s the context in which people are looking for solutions using AI to make better recommendations than doing the legwork of clicking through links and assembling information from a disparate set of sources.”
Harris said this behaviour isn’t spread evenly across demographics.
“It’s much lower amongst Gen X and boomers,” he said. “This part of the population is still going to rely on traditional search.
“You’d be completely under serving that part of the market if you weren’t continuing to focus on SEO as a discipline.”
AI’s impact on research
AI tools not only influences discovery, the tools are increasingly shaping decisions themselves.
“There’s a lot less friction in the process than traditional search,” Harris said. “And as a result, marketers need to recognise AI tools as an entry point to discovering their brands.
“People are using these technologies to make comparisons and then to have the tools themselves recommend a solution.”
According to Harris, this shift has introduced a compressed decision making journey that shortens the buying process.
“Consumers are entering the discovery phase and coming out with a recommendation that they trust in a very short timeframe,” Harris said.
Trust plays a major role in this shift.
“We saw about 39 per cent of Australians have used these tools to help navigate a category, and 77 per cent of that group say they have a high degree of trust in the quality of the recommendation they’ve received,” Harris said.
“Unless your brand is being surfaced by AI tools as a viable alternative, you might not even make the shopping list.”
‘Most valuable bit of real estate’
As Google integrates AI-generated summaries into search results, Harris highlighted visibility is “shifting upward on the page” with SEO continuing to influence what appears there.
“Being in that AI summary is probably the most valuable bit of real estate now,” Harris said. “Having a good sort of SEO capability actually will help you turn up in that summary.”
Four in ten Australians have noticed AI summaries, and “a portion of those users are prioritising them over traditional links”.
Harris admits that SEO alone isn’t enough: “We’ve seen often that the citations aren’t even in the top 10 listed links.”
