They’re Not Listening? Maybe You’re Not Leading.

Is it the Execs, or is it you?

I’ll start by saying respond as you like. My expectation is to get a bunch of negative comments, disagreement, maybe even some outright anger. Certainly I’ll be dismissed by some (many?). I’m OK with that.

I’ve been on a steady diet of Metallica, the Tragically Hip, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden today. I’m frayed and angsty—and leaning into it.

After I published The 12 New KPIs For The GenAI Era article, most of the feedback was what I’d hoped for — curious, motivated, and full of smart follow-up questions.

But a few responses hit a different note.

And let me be clear: I don’t need everyone to agree with me. I welcome pushback, discourse. The conversations these comments sparked were thoughtful, professional, and deeply engaging. Every single person I spoke with was sharp and respectful.

But the pattern in the responses triggered something I’ve been worried about for years. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this isn’t happening industry-wide. I can’t claim to know what’s playing out inside every company.

Still, I can’t unsee it, this trend. So I’m diving in, following a hunch — no punches pulled.

This isn’t about individuals. It’s about what these comments represent. If anything I say hits a nerve… maybe sit with that for a second. Ask yourself why.

Here’s the reality: SEO is changing. You don’t have to like it. You don’t even have to agree — though frankly, you’d be wrong.

And no, it’s not changing someday. It’s already happening — and at a pace unlike anything I’ve seen in 25+ years in this industry.

The change isn’t linear. It’s exponential. Every cycle moves faster, demands more, and compounds the pressure to evolve.

And the responses I saw? They all circled the same bullseye:

“These metrics are too complicated.”
“Leadership won’t get it.”
“I could never pitch this to my exec team.”
“They’d never understand it — or care.”
“If I brought this to my CEO, I’d be fired.”

And that’s when it clicked.

I’ve been watching this evolve for more than two decades — from helping Fortune 100s at Microsoft, to guiding SMBs at Bruce Clay Inc., to advising Fortune 500s at Yext. I’ve spoken at hundreds of conferences, answered thousands of emails, and responded to tens of thousands of inbound questions from SEOs and marketers trying to make sense of what’s next.

And I can tell you: this trend didn’t start with AI. It’s been building for years. What’s different now is how fast it’s accelerating — and how many SEOs are still hoping it’ll slow down.

The problem I’m seeing isn’t that your executives are ignoring you. Or don’t want to hear new things from you.

The problem is they’re still operating off a mental model from 2016 — and you’ve done nothing to update it.

You stopped teaching.
You stopped translating.
You created a situation where you became a voice, not the voice.
You stopped showing your company that SEO has changed — because you figured if they didn’t ask, it wasn’t your problem.

Well, it is.

Because part of this job — and it always has been — is education. Not just sideways to your devs or down to your content team. Upward. Across leadership. Into the boardroom.

And somewhere along the way, many SEOs just stopped doing it. They got tired. Or safe. Or maybe just too busy.

And now?

Your CEO still thinks traffic = success.
Your CMO still thinks “ranking #1” is the goal.
Your product team is launching features that depend on content — and no one invited SEO to the table.

Because no one told them they needed to be there.

That’s not on them.
That’s on you.

Maybe I’m dramatizing this a bit, but you get the point, I think.

SEO has always required constant growth and learning, and yeah, some translation — but now it demands re-education.

You have to walk in and explain that the game changed. That engines aren’t just crawling and indexing — they’re chunking, embedding, retrieving, and summarizing. That what gets seen, what gets cited, what gets surfaced... isn't based on old-school keyword matching. It’s based on retrievability, coherence, and signals of machine-level trust. More content doesn’t mean success now. The right content is more important.

And yes, that sounds complex. (It is.)
But you know what’s more complex?

Trying to hit KPIs that no longer map to how search works.

So don’t simplify to stay safe. Don’t dumb it down so you won’t get push back.
Push forward.

Show your leaders what modern authority looks like in an AI-dominated world.

Teach your comms team why schema matters more than slogans.

Help your analysts understand why “impressions” are a poor proxy for presence in multi-modal answers.

Because if you don’t lead this? No one else will.

And the longer you wait, the wider the gap gets between what your execs think SEO is — and what it actually is evolving into.

So let me say it clearly:

If your leadership team still thinks SEO is just traffic and rankings…just Google and Bing…
That’s your fault.

The world of search has moved on. Google’s not what it was. ChatGPT is becoming the default interface for a generation. Perplexity is legit on the map. CoPilot is embedded in everything in the Microsoft ecosystem. Consumers are meaningfully asking AI for answers, not searching and scanning URLs. The way people find answers is radically changing.

And your SEO plan? Still mapping keywords to copy, cranking out pages, begging for indexing, pasting in Schema like it’s magic fairy dust. (How’s that working out, by the way? It was never about rankings—it was always about understanding.) Still running audits based on signals from ten years ago so you can give your devs and UX team another backlog of “SEO fixes”?

I know—people are exhausted. Constant change is hard. The need to educate, re-educate, and do it again? It grinds you down.

But this is tech. Evolve or die. That’s the deal.

Oversimplifying? Doesn’t work. Dumbing it down? Doesn’t help. Taking shortcuts? Doesn’t scale.

It’s time to grab another gear.

Now, the good news:

If you caused this problem, you can also fix this problem.

But only if you step up.
Not with another audit. Not with hand-wringing.
With leadership.

Because if you want a seat at the table —
act like the one who built the table.

Many of you are. Literally the foundation of the SEO efforts in your businesses!

PS. I’ve had several people comment about this or reach out directly to note what is apparently a perceived pain point. The words “chunk” and “chunking”. These folks believe that mentioning that to executives would be problematic, “laughable” one person even said. So let’s dig in…

A “chunk” is just a retrievable section of content that an AI model can understand and use on its own. It’s not slang—it’s infrastructure.

In the world of generative AI search systems, chunking is how systems split, embed, and store content for semantic retrieval. This is a foundational step in systems like RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), which power engines like Perplexity, Arc, and even internal enterprise AI tools. These are industry standard phrases used every day in LLM, GenAI, and semantic retrieval ecosystems.

For those from the traditional SEO world: you’ve heard this concept before. Google refers to a similar unit as a “passage,” most notably in their 2021 passage ranking update. In that context, Google crawls an entire page but may rank a single passage independently if it best answers the query.

So what’s the difference?

Google still indexes the whole page, and passages are surfaced at query time as part of broader ranking logic.

GenAI starts by breaking content into chunks, embeds them into vector space, and retrieves only what’s most semantically relevant—often without needing the full document.

Educate, don’t placate.