July 10, 2026
LLMs are turning search engines into synthesis engines. As zero-click searches rise and traditional SEO breaks down, brands must adapt. Fortunately, this shift toward AEO is a massive opportunity to put human strategy back at the center of discovery.
Katie Lukas | VP Group Experience Lead
For years we’ve watched as the algorithm has dictated SEO and even content strategy. It’s often been more of a numbers game than a question of helping people find what’s relevant and useful to them, especially if we look at the broader web as a whole.
Suddenly the ground is shifting under our feet.
We all know that LLMs are radically transforming the way many people are experiencing information. Fears of zero-click search behavior—where a user simply accepts the AI Overview at the top of their Google search results and doesn’t click on any of the links—abound. Website traffic is on the decline, while bot traffic increases in both frequency and demands.
At the same time, people are using their LLM interfaces as more than just search engines; they’re now synthesis engines. Whereas before, one had to tackle the laborious process of searching, sifting through the results for valid, relevant, and factual links (a task which has become ever more challenging as Google has produced less and less helpful results), reading and processing the information, and finally comparing results … today we have little robots that handle much of this burden for us.
Counterintuitively, at MERGE we think this could have the incredibly positive result of putting real human strategy back at the heart of search and content.
No longer can we simply watch the line graph in our analytics platform or rely on simplistic search rankings. Even site traffic isn’t always a reliable indicator of content value anymore. No—we’ll have to look through the eyes of AI to uncover what the real humans are looking for.
“Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said recently that bot traffic has passed human traffic for the first time, 57.4% of requests versus 42.6%” — Fast Company, June 2026
To chart a way through the ambiguity of how LLMs are interpolating and interpreting our content, we must turn to strategy. We must think through how we want our organizations to show up in the world. What questions do we want to be the answer to?
As with much of strategy, that exercise starts with us interrogating ourselves by considering:
It takes both business strategy and content strategy—alongside expert UX design—to identify the questions, address them in ways we see as essential for our audiences, and then deliver the answers in a way both AI and humans will see as relevant and important.
The Economist is addressing this by “experimenting with agent‑readable versions of content that already sits outside its paywall—chiefly marketing copy and B2B sales material—and restructuring those surfaces for AI answer engines.” — Digiday, May 2026
The answers to the above questions should shape how you craft (and maybe rewrite) your digital content from here on out. LLMs are already shifting how people engage with brands, especially in the upper funnel. People are coming because an LLM has already vetted you. By visiting your site, they're showing intent and taking the next step toward conversion. Engaging deeply with the questions that drive AEO and GEO, we will be able to create new conversations with our audiences—even if those conversations start off with an LLM.
Mechanization of search and discovery has been increasing for years, with arguably decreasing effectiveness for real people searching for information. So it feels a little ironic that the advent of AI has the potential to bring humanity back to search optimization. But sometimes, it takes a robot to remind us how to communicate like humans.
In the next part of this series, we’ll focus on the role of content strategy in this equation. In the third part, we’ll introduce some tactical exercises to help your organization start to build that AEO foundation.
