After the AI Breakthrough – Here’s the Next Chapter of SEO

When Techarenan News spoke with SEO expert Jorge Castro, founder of Growth Marketing Sweden, in October 2025, generative AI was just beginning to reshape how people search for information online.

Less than a year later, the transformation is underway, but perhaps not in the way many predicted.

According to Castro, the foundations of SEO remain intact. What has changed is the layer through which information is distributed and consumed.

“SEO still rests on the same fundamentals: Understanding user intent and exposing content that is semantically clear, technically indexable, and contextually relevant,” Castro says.

Beyond traditional search engines, companies must now also consider how their content appears in AI-powered answer systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

“The goal is no longer only to rank in the search results,” Castro explains. “It is also to become part of the underlying knowledge that generative systems use to synthesize answers.”

AI answers are changing how search works

Despite the rapid rise of generative AI, Google continues to dominate global search traffic. But the way users consume information is shifting.

Generative summaries and AI-generated answers increasingly resolve users’ questions directly in the interface, reducing the need to click through to websites.

“What we’re seeing is more interactions without further clicks,” Castro says. “Not necessarily a collapse in search demand, but a different way of consuming answers.”

This trend has accelerated the rise of so-called zero-click searches, where users get what they need without leaving the search results page.

For companies, this means success is no longer measured solely in traffic.

“Organizations now need to optimize not just for clicks, but also for visibility and brand presence in the interfaces where answers are consumed,” Castro explains.

The rise of AI agents

Another major shift on the horizon is the emergence of AI agents capable of performing tasks on behalf of users.

These agents can compare products, analyze reviews, and compile recommendations before a user even visits a website.

“Parts of the customer journey are moving from human research to machine analysis,” Castro explains. “Instead of manually comparing options, the user may simply approve a recommendation generated by an AI system.”

For marketers, this creates a new requirement: content and product data must be understandable not only to humans but also to autonomous systems.

“Information about products, pricing, specifications, availability, and reviews needs to be structured and machine-readable,” Castro says.

Measuring success in the AI search era

As search evolves, so too must the metrics used to evaluate marketing performance.

Castro suggests thinking in three levels:

1. Visibility – appearing in search results and generative answers where the brand is mentioned or referenced.
2. Traffic and behavior – how many users visit the site and what they do once they arrive.
3. Business outcomes – leads, revenue, customer value, and conversions.

“The final level is still the most important,” he says. “Even if more interactions happen without clicks.”

Preparing for an AI-driven marketing landscape

Looking ahead, Castro believes digital marketing will evolve into a hybrid ecosystem where traditional search, AI assistants, and autonomous systems coexist.

In that environment, companies must ensure their information is accessible not only to people but also to machines.

“Information about products, services, and expertise needs to be structured so that search engines, AI assistants, and even autonomous agents can interpret it,” he says.

Jorge Castro and Growth Marketing Sweden will attend Techarena in Almedalen 2026, speaking in a panel about marketing in the AI era.

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What companies should prioritize now?

Tips from Jorge Castro to companies that want to stay competitive in the age of AI-driven search:

• Build real authority in your niche
  Invest in expert-driven content, credible spokespeople, and long-term trust-building within your field.
  
• Structure your data for machines as well as humans
  Ensure that product information, specifications, and knowledge content are clearly structured so both search engines and generative AI systems can interpret and reuse the information.
  
• Diversify traffic and revenue channels
  Avoid becoming dependent on a single platform or interface by building multiple sources of traffic, visibility, and customer engagement.