In this episode of The Visibility Brief, Yext SVP of Marketing Rebecca Colwell is joined by Leigh McKenzie, Director of Online Visibility at Semrush, to explore how one of marketing's most established roles is being fundamentally reshaped by AI.
For more than two decades, SEO meant understanding Google—how it crawled, how it ranked, and how to win clicks. But that playbook is no longer enough. AI is changing how people search, how answers are delivered, and how brands get discovered.
So what does the job of an SEO actually look like now? And how should teams evolve when visibility depends on much more than a website?
Drawing on his experience at Semrush, where he's had a front-row seat to the evolution of search, Leigh makes the case that SEO isn't disappearing — it's growing into something bigger, more strategic, and more cross-functional than ever.
The episode breaks down:
Why traditional SEO thinking is no longer enough
How consumer behavior is changing the search landscape
Why SEO is becoming a cross-functional discipline
Why your website is only part of the equation
How mass content and quick-win tactics can quietly hurt long-term visibility and trust
What SEO teams should stop, start, and rethink
If you're leading an SEO or marketing team and trying to understand how your role is changing, this episode will help you zoom out, rethink your priorities, and position yourself — and your brand – for what comes next.
Episode Links
Transcript
00:00:00.000 — 00:00:30.920 For the past 25 years, SEO has meant understanding Google how crawls, how it ranks, what it rewards. AI search is changing all of that, and few people have a better read on what comes next than my guest today. Leigh Mackenzie is a brand visibility strategist at SEMrush, a regular contributor to major industry publications, and someone who has spent his career on the cutting edge of how search actually works. Let's get into it.
00:00:38.720 — 00:19:42.240 Leigh, it is so great to have you on the Visibility Brief podcast before we dive into our conversation, which I'm really excited about. Tell me a little bit more about your background and how you got into search engine marketing and SEO.
Thanks, Rebecca. I'm happy to be here. So as any normal child, I grew up wanting to be a search engine optimizer. That was the goal from the very beginning. Um, no. I had been building websites, kind of interacting with the internet, figuring out how business businesses were able to, to generate revenue, get leads in the door from, I think, high school. So when I went to university, I decided to specifically focus on business IT or information systems. But I minored in digital marketing because I was really interested in just the marketing side of things combined with business technology. And as far as getting into SEO, that was a fairly random Craigslist find where a mentor, longtime boss, business partner of mine, Nick, was hiring for an SEO apprentice for his new agency, where he had a few clients and he needed somebody to just to throw out the keyword research, the content auditing, technical SEO.
So he basically just, um, threw me at it. I worked with him for, for several years, just learning just everything about SEO with a bunch of different business models, and then found my way here to working at SEMrush today. So you are a very credible SEO expert, and I love your LinkedIn content, by the way, if you're not if you're not following Lee on LinkedIn, please. Davis got some really, really great posts. And you had one almost a year ago that was talking about Google's innovator dilemma. And you basically said any SEO practitioner that is still doing things the old way, um, it's probably out of luck because Google just pulled the rug out from underneath them.
So let's just like flashback to a year ago. What did you mean by that in that post? So a year ago, almost to the day, I forget when exactly. In March 2025, Google released an update and they significantly increased the number of AI reviews that were present in search. That's where we started to see the significant drop off in clicks, where well, uh, impressions maintained, um, and started or continue to grow. I was just kind of increasingly shocked about how Google was reacting to the changing environment. They had really been kind of put back on their heels with ChatGPT and what OpenAI was doing, the market share that they were collecting, and just the risk of falling behind, losing out on the next generation of search. And I've just I've been fascinated with how like they've needed approach it, because their core business model at the end of the day is just use our products so we can sell you ads. That's that is why Google exists. And when it comes to AI reviews, as marketers like, I think we're still grappling with how we need to tackle that, that medium, how we need to get our businesses cited or recommended within the answer. If it is Google AI reviews or AI mode, or Gemini or ChatGPT. And I think for a lot of marketers, if they're not paying attention to the full scope of how their job, their their responsibilities have expanded, then they're going to get left behind. If they if everybody just if you're still clinging to the idea that this is just SEO, I just need to focus on the content on my website, the keywords that people are searching for. Then, yeah, you're really you're going to miss out on a lot of growth opportunity going forward.
Absolutely. I mean, I do think every function in marketing, perhaps every function in, in white collar business is changing. But I do think the role of an SEO practitioner is probably being disrupted more than anything else because it's such a frontline thing. I'm curious, when Google first started rolling out AI overviews, were they? My impression was that they were first doing it for things that had, um, low monetization opportunities. Right? Like if I just did a quick search for, you know, what time is it in this location? Um, it was going to serve up that answer in an AI overview versus something that they might be able to sell an ad for. I'm curious if you observe the same thing and if that is changing, like are different searches now showing up in AI overviews that that weren't a year ago.
Yeah, I think that that flow makes sense. Google was testing out the technology. They still weren't quite certain how they were going to deliver an AI answer almost instantaneously, which is what we've come to expect from a Google Serp. And starting with lower stakes, informational or middle of funnel content was a good place to start. They also, again want to protect the core business of getting you to click an ad so that you can, so that the business can pay money to Google and increase the stock price. Um, I think what we've seen over the last year is the technology has, has gotten more sophisticated, to the point where they're confident enough in bringing AI answers into the Serp experience directly for more commercial queries alongside, um, whether it's a local services grids or product grids, whatever monetization element they have, it's all kind of just being woven together because they're seeing from user behavior. If you're able to spend more time, get more research done in a shorter period of time, you're eventually going to click on an ad to go buy a product or fill out a lead form for a service. So they've just they've gotten more capable over the last few months, and we're still really just getting started.
I am fascinated by how quickly consumer expectations have shifted. Yeah we right. Like we all learned how to speak Google. So you you know restaurant near me. You speak in these you know little sentence fragments. Um, and then the shift to conversational search changed everything. And now we even have AI mode in Google where you can ask a full question or have a full conversation. I really want to dig into how the consumer shift is now changing the role of an SEO expert, um, and, and what that looks like. So before we get into that, I'm just curious, do you see this shift in consumer behavior just impacting Google or is it. Is it bigger than that? It's absolutely bigger than that.
I think as marketers, we we always need to kind of take a step back and think, how are we approaching this technology? How are we using it in our day to day? How like, what are the tools that we're using to try and understand our customers? But really, we also should be thinking about who are the customers that are typing things in. What are they? What are their pain points? What are they searching for? What do they need? And for me, like the first or like the last big change that happened for me was I introduced my dad to ChatGPT. He's a big fan of Google, loves sending me links from Google, like the direct search results, but it was like 6 or 7 months ago. I showed him ChatGPT and I showed him what was possible when he used a more conversational prompt. If he was very explicit with what he was looking for, adding a lot of context and his his mind was blown. I think I got a text from him a few days later that's like, I'm fully on ChatGPT now. I'm not going to use Google anymore. Wow. And it yeah. So it's just like there was that one light bulb moment where he saw what was possible, which I think is happening by the millions every day, and people are increasingly being exposed to the questions that they can ask and the type of results that they're going to get back. And again, we're still really just getting getting started. There's plenty of room to run.
Um, when it comes to the the framing, I do think this is this is way bigger than Google search is. Happens is is able to happen everywhere. Obviously Google is still the biggest player in the space from a commercial perspective and the user base, but ChatGPT has grown tremendously in the last few years. Um, the last I saw was over 800 million, either weekly or monthly users from around the world. And we have the other players like Claude and Perplexity. But people are really just they're searching everywhere and they're increasingly getting better answers with more contextually rich natural language prompts. That's right. And we just did a UX, just did a consumer research study. We're going to publish the results shortly. But one of the questions we really dove into is what kinds of questions are you asking in these conversations? And my hypothesis going in was that it was going to be either quick research or deep research, but it turns out it's both. And it's also comparison shopping. And, um, asking a quick question about when a business is open. And so it seems like in the past, perhaps consumers compartmentalized different channels for different types of searches based on their intent. Like, I'm going to use Google Maps to find something nearby. Um, maybe I use Instagram or TikTok to, like, passively discover something.
Llms are being used for everything. Um, it's really curious that people aren't pigeonholing themselves into a specific use case for that. And so, um, I think that just ties in really very much with what you were saying about search search everywhere framing. And that's a huge shift in in your responsibility as someone who's who's. Who needs to make sure your brand appears where people are searching. So you recently said that consumers aren't necessarily researching anymore, but rather approving a decision or a recommendation that an LLM has provided. That's a huge change. So tell me more about that. Yeah. So I think the the, the a hook on that particular post is a little bit like BT. But the underlying idea I really strongly believe, to put it in context, I think the starting point for most searches, if you go back three years ago, was going to Google and typing in a relatively simple keyword and then doing a lot of clicking around, you were potentially clicking an ad, or you were you saw a featured snippet, but you were clicking through to multiple websites. It could have been a brand website, a listicle, maybe a YouTube video, but you were you were doing a lot of that research up front on your, um, on your own and building an answer in your own head about the next action you wanted to take.
When it comes to AI chat. We're asked. We're able to ask more complex, very detailed, contextually rich questions where we're giving a lot of that information up front so we don't have to click through to as many websites. And then when we get an answer, it has a lot of that research already done. It's the LLM has already done pulling either from its training data or with Live Search. A lot of those sources, so we don't need to visit them directly. We can if we want, if it's been cited and linked properly. But we're able to very quickly move to the next step of our process. And in terms of the technology, the point that I really wanted to make was that this is a generic AI in action where if you if you pay attention, um, in ChatGPT or Gemini, it's usually hidden behind, just like the pulsating icon where it's, it's thinking, depending on the complexity of the question, it's thinking, it's doing some background analysis to figure out what it needs to do.
There are some tools I love. The perplexity is very upfront with these are the actions that I'm taking. I'm deciding. Do I need to compare? Do I need to do live search? And then you can follow the logic. Each one of those logic trails is an agent kind of deciding what to do next. And as we ask increasingly complex questions or have more complex requests, there needs to be more agents involved doing that research, filtering for us and then delivering up an answer or in the near future, probably taking more actions on our behalf. It's really fascinating to to watch that logic. Uh, the train of thought thinking. I am curious, given this shift in how consumers are searching and how the LLM is answering that question, how has the role of the SEO professional changed? I think it's never been a more exciting time to be an SEO, and I say that as somebody working at a company that sells software in the space, um, we have the biggest opportunity to increase our role within the organization. We have maybe been siloed off to just the team that creates content, builds links and delivers organic traffic and organic conversions. But our role is way bigger than that now.
On one hand, I think we have the the best understanding of the technology, or at least what came before and how it's unfolding right now to be able to explain that to other teams. And really everybody's just interested in it right now. How do we get our brand recommended in AI answers? And we have to go to those other teams and say, here's the percentage of our work that we need to do that is related to content that we're publishing on our website. Here's why we need to be working with product more closely, or the customer success to make sure our landing pages or our knowledge bases up to date. Um, here's why we need to be coordinating or doing more with the partnerships team and the affiliate team, because a significant percentage of the citations come from external sources, not just your own website. And we're able to to kind of build that story if the team has the right mindset, if they want to take the responsibility they already have, and the the expectation to go and and build the business case for the company.
Overall, it sounds like you're suggesting that SEO professionals need to be collaborating significantly more cross-functional than they were before, and they have an opportunity to, um, to kind of be the center of that transformation. So who do you think they could be working with now that they weren't working with necessarily before?
So I absolutely agree with that. I think even before getting into the SEO team specifically, this is really a need for the entire organization to collaborate more intentionally. It's every single department within the company can contribute to building brand visibility to how you show up in AI. Answers. Um, it's not just the SEO team. It's not just the PR team or paid like it's all of these pieces need to come together and the organizations that have the most organizational alignment. The ones that are on the same page and working together are the ones that are going to be the most successful going forward. And again, I think the the SEO team in particular is the one that's able to is the team that's able to bring the data to build that story that everybody is asking for.
Most of the other departments just haven't really thought about how do robots index or crawler content, um, how like, why do I need to care about this just because it wasn't part of what they were doing before, but now it's all being pulled together. It's all being synthesized in real time when customers are asking questions. So I think the the SEO team needs to find a way to to build that business case up to their boss, the CMO, the CEO, and just make an intentional effort to collaborate with all of the different departments. And you can likely just prioritize what are the most important ones for your business. Is it paid? Is it partnerships? Is it on site activity or off site? Well, it sounds like a lot of what you're saying is having accurate, consistent data across all of these channels is is super important for your AI visibility and for accuracy. It's almost like in the past, one piece of information that was inaccurate. Maybe it could be something like your business hours or your menu items or whatever it is. If that's off over there, it's okay. But now that one piece of discordant information could actually have a really big impact on your visibility. Um, it's almost like I'm an a cappella choir, and everyone's perfectly, you know, perfectly intuitive. And there's one person who's not pitching. It just throws the whole the whole thing off. Yeah. And I think we used to be able to get away with that in the past because that that old blog post that said, we close at 5 p.m. ET every day, but now we close at nine like that. Nobody ever saw that. But now LMS might be coming across it for whatever reason. And considering that a canonical source of truth.
So the SEO team again is the the team that's able to pull all of this data together and show what what is being cited by the LMS for the the different AI chats that we care about and which are the ones that are up to date, which are the ones that are out of date. How do we tackle that problem and how do we prevent that issue from becoming or repeating itself going forward? Absolutely. So the role is changing a bit, and I'm really curious who do you think is in a better position, a legacy practitioner who has, let's say, 20 years of experience or someone who is fresh to the SEO space? So let's start with legacy legacy practitioners. What advantage does someone who has, let's say, 15 years of experience, bring to the table? And what might a blind spot be in this new environment? I think experience has a like there's a ton of value in having experience. I say that as somebody with about ten years of experience in the industry, It's not quite 20.
The first big thing is we've a lot of SEO professionals have been through a lot of different changes. AI and AI search feels like the biggest one by far, but we can go back to different, um, areas of search where things have changed. People have lost their minds and thought it was the end of SEO. SEO was dead. Um, and for the most part, we've just leveled up the way we do our work. The best SEOs have figured out how to approach their job more effectively, um, and place it into context with the way the web has worked for a longer period of time. And I think I've seen that over the last two years as as somebody that works at an SEO software company, um, we're looking at the longer, um, horizon here.
Um, we're not just focused, hyper focused on AI visibility. We don't want to publish thousands of blog posts because it might work in the short term for some AI visibility project, but it's going to ruin the way Google considers our website from an SEO perspective, it'll. It'll lead to indexation problems or authority problems. So we're mindful of like. We wouldn't do that because it's bad for SEO. It's also spammy and maybe. It'll have some short term value but don't do that. So I think having that historical context where you know, what might work and what the risks are is really helpful. I've seen a lot of people new to the industry come in, and they're excited about some brand new AI visibility tactic. Um, they're excited about meta descriptions for the first time, or they want to publish a lot of programmatic content, and they're just viewing it from the lens of this is what makes sense when you're trying to show up in ChatGPT, not how great businesses have been thinking about it for a long period of time.
So I think experience has a lot to a lot of value to play. As long as you also acknowledge that things are changing, your job is not the same as it was three years ago or five years ago or ten years ago. You need to think bigger about the role and the value you can bring to the business. Are there things that a more experienced SEO practitioner needs to stop doing?
00:19:43.600 — 00:22:23.860 I think in general, we should all reconsider our best practices. If if we've just been doing something for a long time because that's what our our checklist, our audit documents have said we should do. Everybody should be open to to new ideas and potentially leaving some ideas behind. So I don't really have anything in mind other than, um, yours.
The role of the CEO needs to be bigger than the website. If you're not thinking about how you're showing up off site in third party sources, then you're thinking too narrowly. Your job needs to be shifting to be a broader split of on site and off site activities. In general, I'm a fan of rethinking playbooks all the time. It's like, um, I think it's impacting all of us in that sense. Let's talk about people who are maybe just starting in their careers. So, um, talked a little bit about the enthusiasm they might have for like a fresh tactic or technique that might actually have a downstream impact. That's that's negative. What advantage does a new practitioner bring or what competitive edge might they have? I think just having a fresh, fresh perspective is always really helpful. Um, I'm also particularly intrigued by people that are testing out new workflows. I've been playing around with cloud code and thinking about how can I? Maybe I've done something within the UI of SEMrush for the longest time, or using a spreadsheet and now thinking, how can I do this in a different way? Um, still being very mindful of the input data that I care about. If it's a technical crawl or my Google Analytics, my Google Search Console, Google Ads data, my SEMrush data, I still need to trust that I'm not just asking Claude to to invent problems that don't actually exist, but then just thinking about new workflows. How can.
I'm intrigued about like the the bespoke dashboards or automated reports that I want to be able to build from scratch. And for somebody if whether they're just starting their career and they've been kind of using these tools natively, um, for their personal life, like being able to bring that to the profession is a really interesting opportunity. And just in general, like approaching things with a fresh perspective, but again, not looking for shortcuts, not trying to think, oh, I could just publish a thousand blog posts and get a lot of visibility for the long tail prompts that I care about. So we we need to find a balance of kind of the old heads in the new perspectives. So we're moving into our final segment, the stop start rethink segment, kind of a power, um, like quick round. So to close this out, if I am leading an SEO team, um, what is the one thing we should stop doing?
00:22:25.140 — 00:26:13.650 I think you need to stop focusing on traffic as a primary KPI. You should still include it as part of the story that you're telling. But we're moving to a world where people are just not going to be visiting websites in the same way they're going to be doing more of their research in AI chat tools. We're moving to a world where AI agents are going to be doing a lot of the the research for us. They're going to be interacting with our content, with our brands. Um, way more than than humans are. So traffic going down is not a problem. Um, make sure you change the expectations for your your leadership, your stakeholders, so that you're providing value, your your improving brand visibility in other ways. You're still driving business results, but traffic is something that we should stop reporting on as a primary KPI. Yes, I fully agree with that one. Um, it's really uncomfortable though. It's just been our our benchmark for so long. Um, what is one thing we should start doing? I think just experimenting a lot more. So if if you've been doing if you've had a playbook that you haven't updated or there's a workflow that you've been doing manually, just think about ways where you can experiment, learn more, potentially fail quickly, but doing it in a risk adjusted way so you're not trying something out that that's going to cause drastic problems down the line, but just being more experimental.
Go play with cloud. Cloud. Go figure out a way to build a brain for your brand, where you're collecting all of the context in a way where it's this is the source of truth that we want to refer to. How can we create content or landing pages or whatever it might be for your brand more efficiently and effectively? Excellent. And what is one thing they should rethink entirely? I think a lot of companies need to rethink how they're set up in terms of the way the marketing organization has been configured a lot of companies. A lot of departments have very siloed activities. They've been focused on KPIs that don't really intersect with other departments as much. I think a lot of companies need to figure out a way to orient it around a more centralized brand visibility score, where the input, like you have some of the inputs that you'll be able to track. But there's also some things that we're not going to be fully confident in because there's a lot of, um, unseen conversational behavior happening in chat or it's views showing up on YouTube or people talking about us on Reddit, but starting to reorganize around a new Northstar of brand visibility. Oh. Excellent recommendation.
Um, Leigh, this was a wonderful conversation. And if you want to hear more from Lee again, I recommend, uh, following him on LinkedIn. Is there any other place we can, um, consume more of your thought leadership or content? Definitely follow me on LinkedIn. That's kind of where the breaking, um, stuff that's coming out of my mind starts. But I'm also publishing a lot on the SEMrush blog. Uh, we're building more content on a weekly basis on YouTube and really just trying to figure out all of these changes together. I think we've got the right team, we've got the right product, and now we just need to go and build a lot of content out for our audience to consume.
That's incredible. Well, we've been a SEMrush partner for many, many years, and we're also using it ourselves. And our team discovers interesting new things every day. Um, using that tool, um, to increase our brand visibility. So thank you for that. And thank you for joining us today. We really appreciate your insights.
Yeah. Thank you. Rebecca.
That's a wrap on this episode of The Visibility Brief. If you found this useful, subscribe, leave us a review or send this to a colleague who needs to hear it. We'll see you next time.
