As brands respond to AI search, walls crumble between paid and organic

“Unless you have that shared goal… your strategies are going to be at odds,” said MacGurn, who spoke at Digiday’s Media Buying Summit this week in Nashville.

Since Google debuted its Overviews feature in May 2024, brands have turned to SEO teams to understand changing search user behavior. “All the data points that we’re seeing is that those queries are significantly larger than they’ve ever been. They’re much more contextual,” noted Patrick Stal, global chief marketing officer at HelloFresh.

In recent months, though, agencies have begun wielding organic and paid capabilities in closer coordination – using organic search expertise to identify overlooked keywords, or to deliberately bid against search queries that might yield an Overview summary. 

Digitas isn’t the only agency knocking down partitions between departments. “Brands… that have [a] strategy that integrates SEO and paid [are going] to be able to basically dominate whatever queries actually drive revenue for them,” said Lavall Chichester, evp of SEO and AI optimization at Barkley OKRP and MissionOne Media, who also spoke at the Summit.

Meeting the moment, Chichester said, meant moving on from old divisions in which “the paid ads teams sits over here, and the SEO team sits over here, and they do not talk,” he noted.

More than half of U.S. adults (52%) use generative AI tools like ChatGPT for searches, according to one survey published by Elon University. Google’s Overviews feature appears on an increasingly large proportion of search result pages; 50% of Google searches trigger an AI summary, according to McKinsey. Crucially, Overviews now appear on 49.6% of results pages for informational searches, and 14.8% of commercial searches, according to media agency NP Digital.

The impact of AI search upon marketing strategies has become an acute concern for execs in recent months. 87% of marketing chiefs say their board or CEO has asked them to create an AI search response strategy, according to a Brandlight survey of 500 CMOs conducted by Censuswide.

“We are increasingly seeing clients integrate LLM-adjacent disciplines to tackle the challenges of AI search,” said Andy Arnett, head of search at agency Incubeta.

“At the moment, paid search teams are optimizing bids against a landscape they can only partially see and SEO teams are chasing rankings on a results page that’s been reshaped by AI Overviews and generative features,” said Philip Thune, CEO of Adthena. “When both channels are disrupted at the same time, keeping those teams siloed stops making sense.”

Org charts will remain unchanged, at least on paper. In practical terms, they’re sharing information and measurement tools, and SEO expertise is feeding into keyword bidding strategies.

Organic and paid search teams are increasingly working across “joint data, joint briefs, shared reporting, and aligned KPIs,” said Thune. 

The zero-click search era has also prompted the launch of dozens of search evaluation tools like Profound and Scrunch. Meanwhile, marketing agencies haven’t been far behind. Stagwell media agency Assembly, for example, partnered with startup Emberos to launch a “Search+” solution earlier this week, per Adweek.

On Feb. 26, Adthena established an AI Overview Index pooling data covering the appearance of Overviews, ads that appear adjacent to them and other AI search trend data for the U.S., U.K. and Australian markets. The tool grants teams a combined perspective covering both paid and organic search activity, and it’s part of its efforts to merge the disciplines.

“Brands that are still running PPC and SEO as two separate functions are essentially flying half-blind in both directions,” said Thune.

Digitas’ MacGurn suggested a “holistic” approach to search might in time draw in PR and affiliate expertise, too. “If you have an inherently different set of KPIs for your paid search strategy vs. your organic strategy, and you have two measurement plans, two learning agendas, you’re never going to meet in the middle. You’re never going to have true synergy,” she said.