Jessica Bowman has spent more than 20 years figuring out how to make SEO work inside large organizations.
Now she thinks AI is turning visibility into a challenge that SEO – and even marketing – can’t solve alone:
- “The SEO team is not going to be the ones that can take it to the finish line in every case. In fact, I think marketing and search PR type of activities are going to hit a glass ceiling, and then it’s going to be the rest of the organization that determines the future of revenue.”
From UX to one of the first enterprise SEOs
Bowman didn’t set out to build a career in SEO.
She was working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in user experience and project coordination when her role was eliminated. While looking for another position inside the company, a product manager gave her an assignment: Figure out this thing called search engine marketing.
Bowman researched it and returned with her first SEO audit.
A week later, management asked whether she thought SEO could be a full-time job.
Her answer: “Yes, there’s five years of work in there.”
They gave her the job.
At conferences, Bowman would ask other search marketers how they handled developers and other internal teams. Most couldn’t help because they worked with smaller businesses.
So Bowman learned through trial and error how to get SEO implemented across a large organization – a problem that would eventually become the focus of her career.
The danger of winning the short game
Early SEO could be surprisingly simple.
Bowman summarized the prevailing formula as optimized content plus links plus crawlability equals high rankings.
Some companies generated a large number of thin pages targeting individual keywords. The strategy worked — until Google became better at evaluating quality.
Bowman remembers being brought into companies where revenue was dropping, and employees were being laid off because the business had relied heavily on those strategies.
Their financials, she said, were built on “what was not a good, solid strategy”:
- “It was just a working revenue-generating strategy for a season of time. We played the short game and in some cases lost the long game.”
Her own approach was to put on what she called her “Google engineer hat.”
- “If I were a Google engineer, how would I code it? And that was how I always designed the strategy going forward.”
AI is becoming a buyer adviser
Bowman sees two broad types of AI responses: retrieval and advice.
The first retrieves and communicates what the AI knows. The second involves the system making judgments, determining fit and recommending products or brands.
- “In essence, they are the world’s most sophisticated buyer advisor,” Bowman said.
Those recommendations can incorporate information from well beyond a company’s marketing.
Bowman has seen AI systems use customer complaints, software release notes, earnings calls, vendor case studies, and employee reviews when discussing companies and products.
She described one retailer she struggled to get ChatGPT to recommend. When Bowman eventually asked ChatGPT directly about the company, she said it discouraged her from shopping there.
Bowman said ChatGPT pointed to complaints about product quality, inconsistent materials, returns, and refunds.
- “That’s not something marketing can solve. That is completely operational.”
Her advice to companies:
- “You need to look at operations as a growth opportunity.”
Get comfortable with zero-click success
The change also affects how SEO teams measure success.
One of Bowman’s clients put it this way: “We have to be comfortable with zero click.”
- “This is not about the revenue and the clicks. This is about: Are we visible when people ask? Are we mentioned? How are we described?” Bowman said.
Bowman recently compared how AI described one client with its competitors. The client was described positively, but competitors received stronger language about where and why they excelled.
- “We need to know where are we winning in narratives, where are we not winning in narratives, where is there positive sentiment, negative sentiment, where are our competitors just sounding better than us,” Bowman said.
How AI forms opinions about brands
Figuring out what shapes those narratives won’t always be straightforward.
- “It’s not that I’ve identified patterns. It’s they’re identifying patterns,” Bowman said.
Those patterns come from what AI systems encounter in the public record, she said. In some niche B2B markets, Bowman has seen AI draw conclusions despite there being relatively few comments about a company or product.
The responses can also change from user to user – and during the same conversation.
A brand recommended at the beginning may disappear as the AI system learns more about what a buyer needs.
Bowman experienced this herself while shopping for a HEPA vacuum. ChatGPT didn’t recommend the model with the strongest reported suction because it knew from previous conversations that she had dealt with an illness associated with fatigue. It determined the heavier vacuum might not be the best fit.
- “It shows how it’s really considering your context. The context it knows about you, not just what you asked for. You are training a true buyer advisor when we think of LLMs.”
Bowman expects those recommendations to have significant consequences for brands.
- “Revenue will completely recalibrate based on what AI is saying,” she said.
The next rung for SEO leaders
Bowman believes SEO leaders should prepare organizations for a future in which their teams won’t control every factor influencing AI visibility.
She also wouldn’t be surprised to see more SEO teams move outside marketing as their work becomes increasingly dependent on operations.
Bowman sees an opportunity for SEO leaders who are good at working across departments.
- “There’s finally a next rung on the career ladder,” Bowman said.
Search is exciting again
Bowman has lived through more than two decades of changes in search.
She remembers the early days of the industry as a smaller community where some of the best insights came from talking with other SEOs at conferences about what was working.
People were “hungry for the hunt,” she said – trying to figure out what worked and what would come next.
Now she feels that excitement returning.
- “I’m excited again. This is thrilling. I think this is the biggest new thing we’ve seen.”
Her advice for SEO leaders approaching AI visibility is to stop assuming the new discipline will work like the old one.
- “Instead, just look at it for what it is.”
