A few years ago, every organization needed a search engine optimization strategy (and they still do). Now there’s a new must-have climbing just as fast: a plan for artificial intelligence.
This isn’t the part where we warn you that the robots are coming for your job. They’re not. What’s changing is quieter and more useful: how people find information, how content gets made, and what visitors expect when they arrive. The opportunity is to make your organization easier to find, your team more effective, and your website more helpful.
We think about it in three parts:
Getting found when the search box is a chatbot
The way people search is changing fast. Instead of typing keywords into Google, people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity full questions. Around a third of desktop searches now show a Google AI Overview before the blue links appear, and when that happens, far fewer people click through.
Sit with that: it changes the whole funnel. Your next visitor might never scroll a page of results, and might just ask a chatbot and take it at its word. They may never visit your home page to learn about you, and instead may rely on results from whatever large language model (LLM) they are using. So the bar has moved: your content must be clear, trustworthy, well-organized, and easy for AI to read and cite. Technical SEO still matters, but the job now includes making sure your expertise is found and cited by the tools people turn to first. We help clients get ahead of that today.
Working smarter, with your people in charge
The best results come from people and AI side by side. AI handles the grunt work: drafting, summarizing, floating ideas, writing image descriptions, speeding up repetition. What it can’t do is understand your mission, know your audience, protect your brand, or notice when it’s confidently, cheerfully wrong. That part is still yours.
So we help clients build workflows that keep people in charge:
- AI guidelines for content editors
- Brand and tone guardrails
- Prompt libraries worth using
- Editorial sign-off and accessibility reviews
- Training on when to lean on AI, and when not to
Here’s what that looks like. A recent migration needed alt text for thousands of images. By hand, that delays launch by weeks. Instead, AI drafted every description, and our team reviewed, edited, and approved each before it went live. The site launched on time, accessibility intact. AI did the volume. People did the thinking.
Building a website that does more of the work
AI is also changing what your website can do for visitors. We’re helping clients add features like:
- AI-powered search that understands questions, not keywords
- Chat that guides visitors straight to answers
- Smarter content recommendations
- Better ways to surface expertise buried in a big site
Picture a student on an academic program page who opens search and types, “What are the requirements for this program?” A traditional search engine shrugs and returns broad admissions pages. A well-built AI experience knows that “this program” refers to the page they’re on and returns the exact requirements with links to the source. It feels less like digging through a filing cabinet and more like being shown around by someone who knows the place.
Behind the scenes, we lean on AI too.
We put AI to work in our own process as well, always to support our people rather than stand in for them. Take content strategy. Recently, we reviewed more than 5,300 pages for a client. A first pass at that scale used to take weeks; with AI, we did it in hours. Then our strategists do the part that counts, asking whether each page still earns its place, whether it should stay, change, or go, where the accessibility and SEO gaps are, and what’s quietly confusing people. It’s the same in development: AI handles the repetitive coding and testing, which frees our developers for the harder, more interesting problems, which is where the real value lives anyway.
So, where do you start?
There’s a lot of noise about AI. Some are sure it’ll replace every job; others won’t touch it. The truth sits in the middle: AI is powerful, but only as good as the person holding it. You don’t have to do everything at once. Most organizations begin with a few honest questions:
- Can people find us in an AI-first world?
- Are our teams using AI safely and well?
- Where could AI make our website more useful?
- How do we move faster without letting quality slip?
The answers look different for everyone, and that’s fine. The point is to start asking. AI is already reshaping how people search, work, and learn, and we’d love to help you make the most of it, with people at the center.
