1. The buyer journey is compressing faster than teams realize

Agents and conversational interfaces are becoming the first step in discovery, and that changes everything about how people choose. A user who once read several articles before deciding now asks an agent and receives a confident, compressed answer in seconds. That speed collapses the entire research phase.

I believe this compression matters deeply because it removes many of the touchpoints brands used to rely on. When a buyer moves from confusion to clarity inside a single conversation, there is no space for wandering into your blog or comparing alternatives on long lists. You earn attention only when your product fits a very specific phrasing the user gives the agent.

AI engines are better at extracting exactly what the user wants. They can browse, summarize and pull high intent details faster than any human ever could. On top of that, we now have apps like Etsy and Zillow integrated directly into ChatGPT. Discovery and activation happen in one environment, and the old friction that once forced exploration simply disappears.

2. Product enrichment is becoming the new SEO leverage point

Brands need richer product descriptions than ever before. Thin content dies in this environment. Agents prioritize precise matches to prompts, not vague generalities. That means specificity becomes a competitive advantage.

I recommend treating product enrichment like a core SEO discipline. Add use cases, attributes, context, manual details, materials, formats and any descriptive data that help an agent match your product to a prompt. I have seen small brands win disproportionately because they described themselves with more clarity than big brands who still rely on name recognition.

In other words, this is not about stuffing keywords. It is about giving an agent enough granularity to answer “who is this for and why is it the right match”.

3. Authority still matters but relevance wins the early game

You might be wondering if traditional ranking signals still matter. They do, but the hierarchy has shifted. Authority, links and “credibility” signals still influence results, especially when an agent pulls from Google’s ranking logic. However, I believe we are now in a period where relevance outranks authority because agents have not yet built deep trust models of their own.

This creates a temporary window where small brands can win big by being more relevant and more explicit. I believe this window will close in a couple of years as large brands adopt the same precision and add their inherent authority advantage on top. For now, though, speed and clarity give smaller teams a genuine path to visibility.

4. Attribution will get messier before it gets better

Here’s an ugly truth: your traditional attribution models are dead in the AI search universe. Users will research everything inside agents and then only visit your site to convert. This means your analytics will credit Google or direct traffic while the actual discovery happened elsewhere.

I recommend treating attribution less like an answer and more like a direction of travel. Use experiments, visibility tracking and controlled cohorts to identify how agent presence influences revenue. You will not get exact certainty. You will get enough evidence to argue for budget, and that is what matters inside a leadership team.

This is also why SEOs must learn to communicate. Attribution will be ambiguous for a while, and teams need a narrative that explains why.

5. The hierarchy of SEO needs still rules the roadmap

Tyson asked what blueprint I would follow if I were an SEO director at a SaaS brand today. I told him I think about it as a hierarchy of needs. At the base you must have crawlability, indexation, renderability and a technically stable site. None of the AI optimizations matter if the basics are broken.

Above that, I would enrich product and feature descriptions so agents can understand the specifics. Then I would expand presence beyond the domain into platforms agents pull from. That includes communities, structured data repositories, review platforms and any place where long form user language helps an agent learn your brand.

At the top, I would run experiments to measure how visibility in these environments affects revenue. The sequence matters. AI will accelerate good SEO but cannot salvage broken foundations.