SEO is the primary driver of brands, businesses and organizations of all types and sizes. Customer journeys beging with search. And, organic search delivers 53% of all website traffic.

Think about it, whenever you want to go somewhere, do something, find information, research or buy goods/services – what's the first thing that you do? It's probably involves a click.

How people search is fragmented and businesses are struggling to keep up with the pace of change. While Google may represent over 84% of all searches most business leaders aren't aware that 61% of Americans start their product search on Amazon verses the 39% who begin on a search engine like Google.

Unlike other marketing channels, SEO work is sustainable. Think of SEO like an ecosystem. As long as you care for the individual parts the system sustains itself with minor maintenance requiired from you. However, when a paid marketing campaign ends, so does the traffic. f

The bottom line is that SEO is foundational to your business. Yes, it's a marketing channel but the most successful businesses budget SEO as a capital expense because they understand that SEO is elemental to consistent market share. Without a strong SEO plan your business simple can't compete.

Start-up AI search-bot companies seek to one day carve out a slice of the massive web search market that Google has so thoroughly dominated for 30 years.
Large Language Model (LLM) AI search-bots represent a fundamentally different approach to retrieving content from the web. Google works by matching search queries with relevant sites that its web crawlers have found and indexed, then ranking those content sources based on their popularity and other factors. AI “answer engines” (as one start-up, Perplexity, terms them) leverage the language skill of LLMs to understand queries, then assemble customized, conversational answers based on content from millions of web pages.
Learn more in this 4-minute read from contributor Mark Sullivan's article in Fast Company.