About the Author
Corey Morris is the President and CEO of VOLTAGE, a search marketing and website agency for expertise-driven organizations. He has spent more than two decades in digital marketing and SEO, and he wrote the book on the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP), the planning process VOLTAGE uses with clients. Corey has published more than 150 articles and expert contributions across Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes over nearly a decade, and he still writes regularly for the first two. His Search Engine Journal articles alone have been read nearly 1.7 million times. He has spoken at SMX, Digital Summit, and SMPS. He's also a sought-after podcast and media guest, with more than 75 speaking, podcast, and media appearances. He served as an officer on the board of the global search marketing trade association, founded a Kansas City search marketing conference, and was named the 2019 KCDMA Marketer of the Year.
AI search pushes many teams into a tactical trap.
Whenever search engines introduce a major shift, the marketing industry reacts with a wave of tactical checklists. We saw it with mobile optimization, we saw it with voice search, and we are seeing it again right now with the rise of conversational AI and large language models (LLMs).
As visibility metrics fluctuate, many teams feel pressured to immediately “do something” and hunt for a quick fix to regain control. They find lists of groundbreaking new rules online and start applying them to their websites, so suddenly every single page has a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section and every blog post is rewritten in a rigid Q&A format. Teams begin experimenting with prompt injection tricks or stuffing entity mentions into their copy just to simulate authority.
These are tactical responses to a strategic problem. Treating digital marketing as an assembly line of best practices is a guaranteed way to waste your time and budget, and you cannot checklist your way to measurable business outcomes, especially in an environment as complex as AI-driven search.
Cookie-cutter tactics will not save your visibility.
Digital marketing is an investment that requires active management. When you apply standard best practices without profiling your specific audience or aligning with your overarching business goals, you are flying blind.
Tactics like forcing your content into micro-chunks or spinning up programmatic AI content at scale might occasionally deliver a temporary boost in impressions, but they often backfire. Algorithms are explicitly designed to reward actual human expertise and original thought, and sites that rely on shortcuts can enjoy a brief spike in vanity metrics before being penalized and losing their long-term credibility (Lily Ray’s recent example related to “listicles”).
If you deploy these tactics without considering your sales cycle, you also risk using the right tactic for the wrong problem. A tactic that works brilliantly for a consumer brand selling low-cost products will absolutely fail for a business-to-business (B2B) professional service firm selling high-stakes engagements, which is why you have to prioritize strategy over tactics.
Uncertainty calls for a structured, strategic approach.
We cannot bury our heads in the sand and ignore emerging technologies, and we have to innovate and adapt, but that innovation needs to happen within a defined framework that protects your core return on investment (ROI).
If you want to move beyond the checklist and work through AI search changes safely, you need a structured approach. Here is how we build agility into our execution.
1. Return to the strategy phase.
When new AI features completely alter a search results page, many marketing leaders panic and abandon their strategies entirely to chase a new shiny object. A true change in direction is a recalibration rather than a chaotic teardown.
Before you launch a new tactic, return to the Strategy phase of the START Planning Process. Talk to your sales team and understand why deals are stalling, reevaluate your target audience, and confirm that your ideal customer parameters have not shifted. Do the necessary research to understand how AI search affects your specific buyers before you spend a single dollar on execution.
2. Focus on what AI cannot replicate.
Instead of trying to outsmart the algorithm with formatting tricks, focus your execution on what AI models actually need to generate good answers, which is original data, unique methodologies and human experience.
If you want to be cited as a primary source by an LLM, explore publishing proprietary data, annual industry studies or unique surveys that give the ecosystem a reason to reference your brand. You can feature quotes from actual subject matter experts within your organization and cite reputable sources. These are signals of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) that Google cares about, and you cannot fake them with a checklist.
3. Use controlled experiments.
To balance consistency with the need to innovate, we categorize our execution into distinct buckets, and one of the most important buckets is Experiments.
An Experiment is a point of induced risk for the sake of learning. When you hear about a new AI optimization theory, you do not immediately overhaul your entire marketing department or search marketing effort. Instead, you define a controlled experiment.
Allocate a specific and limited amount of budget and time to test the new tactic safely. Define exactly what success looks like before you begin, and measure the results against actual business impact. This allows you to test the waters while your core revenue-driving campaigns continue to run uninterrupted.
Strategic discipline is your best defense in AI search.
The businesses that will win in the AI search era will be the ones that maintain their strategic discipline, and a long list of optimization tricks won’t stand in for that.
Do not accept a generic checklist from an agency or a blog post that has not taken the time to understand your margins, your sales cycle and your goals. Ask for clarity, rely on your documented digital marketing plan, and keep your tactics explicitly subordinate to your strategy. If you want help building an AI search plan around your goals, our AI search team can help.