What CMOs Need to Know About SEO in the AI Era

Featuring insights from John Henry Scherck, Founder of Growth Plays

Somewhere between the headlines declaring the “death of SEO” and the breathless hype over GenAI, CMOs are left holding the bag. You’re still on the hook for pipeline. Still navigating AI disruption. Still expected to make the numbers work — without a clear playbook for what’s next.

That’s why I called in the ringer: John Henry Scherck.

John Henry isn’t just one of the smartest minds in organic and performance marketing — I’ve worked with him at nearly every CMO seat I’ve ever held. At Front. At Hopin. At AudiencePlus. He’s been part consultant, part therapist, and occasionally the only voice in the room saying the hard (but right) thing: that “traffic” isn’t the same thing as trust.

So what do CMOs need to know about search right now? We covered a lot in our conversation, but here are a few themes that stood out:

AI Is Reshaping the Playing Field—But Not Killing the Game

John Henry dropped a great quote from Ryan Law at Ahrefs:

“SEO is the worst it’s ever been. It’s also still likely your best marketing channel.”

Yes, clicks are down. AI summaries and overviews are gobbling up space before a user ever hits your site. But the demand for B2B solutions? Still there. Still discoverable. Still searchable — if you know what kind of content actually matters.

It turns out, we’ve been treating all traffic like it’s equally valuable. And it’s not.

“If someone needs to Google ‘what is a performance improvement plan,’ they’re probably not qualified to buy your HRIS.”

So much of what we used to call “top of funnel” was actually outside the funnel — unqualified, uninterested, and often unmeasurable. That’s what AI is now consuming. The real signal — the content that solves jobs to be done, speaks to high-intent use cases, or shapes emerging categories — is still incredibly valuable.

Brand Is Becoming a Performance Channel

This might be the biggest unlock for CMOs stuck between brand and demand.

We’ve treated these two as separate disciplines, even at AudiencePlus (ironic, I know). We wrote SEO anchor pages we didn’t believe in. We optimized for robots, not resonance.

And John Henry pushed us again and again — to write what we actually believed.

Because here’s the truth: Google has learned what buyers want. And what they want is trust. And trust comes from brand.

“Google doesn’t want you to win traffic. It wants the most trusted, probable answer. And that answer is almost always a brand.”

So yes, brand drives performance. Especially now.

GenAI Search, GEO, and the Great Saturation

We talked a lot about GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — the idea that AI models are becoming the new interface for search. Instead of ranking your site, they summarize your expertise. Instead of sending you traffic, they consume your content and generate a “best guess” response.

Scary? Sure. But here’s the catch: it still rewards the same thing Google always has.

“If you’re everywhere on a topic, it would feel weird for the model not to recommend you.”

He calls it “surround sound SEO.” It’s not about ranking one page. It’s about being present in every conversation about the thing you do. Owned. Earned (yes, PR is back). Rented. Community. Media. Word-of-mouth.

You want to be the most likely outcome — like Apple in computers. That comes from saturation, not hacks.

Why AI Labs Are Launching Browsers (And Why It Matters)

As if things weren’t shifting fast enough, companies like OpenAI and Perplexity are now launching their own browsers. At first glance, this might feel like a land grab to compete with Google — and in some ways, it is. But the real play is deeper: data ownership.

As John Henry pointed out, companies like Cloudflare are now blocking AI scrapers by default. And when models can’t crawl your site, they lose context. These new browsers are a workaround — a way for AI labs to directly observe user behavior and collect proprietary, first-party data.

Why should CMOs care? Because the interface for discovery is changing. If these AI-native browsers gain traction, your website traffic may no longer be the front door. The browser itself might become the brand filter.

The takeaway: You can’t rely on owned channels alone. Your content needs to live where your audience already is — and it needs to show up with authority in multiple formats, multiple contexts, and multiple environments.

A Caution on the Hype Cycle

It would’ve been easy for John Henry to fear-monger his way to bigger contracts.

“The sky is falling! GEO is everything! Hire us now!”

But instead, he was refreshingly grounded.

We both agreed: this moment is real. And yes, a lot of roles will change. But most of the “marketing jobs” being automated were never the work we got into this field to do.

Writing the same 50 blog posts with slightly different keywords? Gone.
Tactical toil, fake email jobs, ad console tedium? Goodbye.
What remains? Taste. Judgment. Creativity. Strategy. Humanity.

The Human Element: Marketing in the Intelligence Age

We ended on something that felt personal. Both of us — after years of scaling, building, and burning out — have found ourselves rethinking the work.

What is our role as marketers in this next chapter?
What’s still uniquely human?
What should we spend our time doing?

For me, I believe brand humanity is the next charter of the CMO. Not as soft, arts-and-crafts fluff — but as the premium differentiator in an AI-driven world.

The brands that win will be the ones that build trust, evoke emotion, and create belonging. The ones that say something real. That spark movements. That people want to be part of.

And the CMOs who win? They’ll be the ones who learn how to orchestrate the transactional with AI while doubling down on the human.

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Thanks again to John Henry for kicking off this new series with so much insight and honesty. If you’re feeling disoriented by all this, you’re not alone. But there is a way forward — and I think it starts by reconnecting with the parts of marketing that made us fall in love with it in the first place.

More soon.

—Anthony

🎥 Catch the full episode of my conversation with John Henry below.