Seven Things 20 Years in SEO Have Taught Me About Business Visibility
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Written by Steve O’Brien, CEO & Director of SEO
Steve O’Brien is CEO and Director of SEO at Woya Digital and founder of Fleet Street News. With 20 years of experience in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and digital marketing, he helps businesses build authority, trust and visibility across Google, AI search platforms and the wider digital ecosystem.
Steve O’Brien has spent two decades building visibility for other people’s businesses, first as an independent SEO consultant, then as founder of SEO and AI visibility agency Woya, and now also through Fleet Street News, a guaranteed Digital PR platform. Twenty years in, he reflects on what has genuinely changed in search, why AI visibility has become the defining shift of his career so far, and the lessons that still shape how he advises clients in finance, healthcare, and other sectors today.
I entered the digital marketing industry in 2006, working under my own name before Woya existed as a company. Back then, people still reached for the Yellow Pages more often than Google, and “optimisation” mostly meant stuffing a page with keywords and collecting as many backlinks as you could, however you could get them. Twenty years into SEO, I run two businesses built entirely around helping companies get found, trusted, and chosen online, and I’ve watched almost every assumption I started with get rebuilt from scratch at least once, most recently by AI. Search has gone from ten blue links to answers that AI systems generate, summarise, and hand to someone directly, and that shift is as big as everything else I’ve seen combined. Here are the seven lessons that have held up through every single change.
1. Every update kills a shortcut, not the industry
I’ve worked through Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, the rise of mobile-first indexing, the local search boom, the content marketing years, the arrival of Digital PR as a serious discipline in its own right, and now the biggest shift yet: ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and conversational AI platforms answering questions before anyone reaches a website at all.
Each of these moments produced the same headline somewhere: “SEO is dead.” It never was. What actually dies each time is whichever shortcut the update was built to catch: thin content, spammy backlinks, keyword stuffing, and manipulated reviews. AI is doing the same thing again, just to a wider set of shortcuts and to businesses that never built real AI visibility in the first place.
The businesses that survive every one of these shifts are the ones that were never relying on the shortcut to begin with. I still make a point of getting to events like BrightonSEO every year, not because the fundamentals change that often, but because the shortcuts being closed down do. Right now, AI visibility is where most of that change is happening, and it’s great to talk about it.
2. A ranking tells you almost nothing on its own
If there’s one thing running an agency for this long has taught me, it’s that a page one position has always been a moment in time, not a result. But the gap between ranking and actually being seen has widened fast. SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data found that 68% of US Google searches in early 2026 ended without a single click, up from 60% just two years earlier. On queries that trigger an AI Overview specifically, the average zero-click rate climbs to 83%, compared with roughly 60% for standard queries.
I’ve seen businesses rank well on Google and still be entirely absent the moment someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for a recommendation instead, because they built for the algorithm and never built AI visibility alongside it. What actually holds up across both is broader than a ranking: technical foundations done properly, expert content, consistent information wherever a business appears online, genuine reviews, and credible coverage that backs up what the business says about itself.
3. AI Overviews have rewritten the economics of a click
This isn’t a theory. It’s measured. Pew Research Center analysed 68,879 real Google searches from a panel of US adults and found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked through to a traditional search result in just 8% of visits, compared with 15% when no summary appeared. Only 1% of visits clicked a link inside the AI summary itself, and users ended their browsing session immediately in 26% of AI summary visits, compared with 16% otherwise.
At the same time, the audience asking questions of AI systems directly rather than searching at all keeps growing. OpenAI reported ChatGPT reaching 900 million weekly active users in February 2026, more than double the figure from the year before. A business that only measures itself against Google rankings is measuring less and less of where its actual audience is now.
4. Treat search like revenue, not a task
Too many businesses still hand visibility off to someone and forget about it, treating it as a line item rather than a growth lever. That’s a harder habit to justify now that the return is being measured properly elsewhere. A 2026 Conductor survey of enterprise CMOs found that 97% of teams investing in AEO and GEO reported a measurable positive impact on the marketing funnel in 2025.
Two decades of client work have shown me the same pattern at every scale. The businesses that treat search and AI visibility as commercially central, tied directly to revenue, retention, and reputation, are the ones that invest properly and stay with it long enough to see it compound. The ones that treat it as a task chase whatever’s trending that month and wonder why nothing has moved a year later.
5. Third-party trust became non-negotiable
This is really why I built Fleet Street News. Search engines, and especially AI platforms, don’t just take a business’s word for its own credibility. They weigh what independent, credible third-party sources say about it too. That instinct isn’t new. Nielsen’s long-running global trust research has consistently found that upwards of 90% of consumers trust earned recommendations, from people they know or from credible third parties, above any form of paid advertising. Business overall still sits among the most trusted institutions globally at 64% trust, according to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, provided that trust is earned rather than claimed.
I built Fleet Street to be placement-led and fixed-price, with publication guaranteed within five days, precisely because that third-party validation has become one of the strongest AI visibility signals there is, particularly in the regulated sectors I’ve spent most of my career in: finance and healthcare, where every claim gets checked.
6. SEO, AEO and GEO are connected disciplines in SEO 2.0
This is where a lot of businesses get stuck, because they still treat SEO, AEO, and GEO as competing acronyms rather than one connected job. We’ve started calling it SEO 2.0, and it’s the thinking we build into every programme at Woya as the Woya Way. SEO is still the foundation, getting a site properly indexed and ranked. AEO structures what a business publishes so an AI system can lift it out and hand it to someone as the answer. GEO is the ongoing online authority work, including digital PR, brand mentions, and third-party signals, that gets a business actually cited inside an AI-generated response.
Businesses know this matters. That same Conductor survey found 94% of enterprises plan to increase AEO and GEO investment in 2026, yet only around 20% have started meaningful implementation so far. That gap between intention and execution is exactly where the advantage sits for whoever moves first.
So what do they mean?
SEO: Search Engine Optimisation – Gets you indexed and ranked in traditional search. The foundation of everything else.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimisation – Structures your content so AI systems surface it as the direct answer to a query.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation – Builds the authority that gets your brand cited inside AI-generated responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, plus AI friends.
7. The one thing that hasn’t moved
Every platform shift I’ve lived through has ultimately come down to search engines, and now AI systems, getting better at identifying who genuinely deserves to be recommended. That was true when the Yellow Pages was still the first instinct, and it’s true with AI visibility and generative search today.
I’m competitive by nature, on the track as much as in business, and the lesson from both is the same: define the objective, build the system properly, and execute with discipline rather than chasing whatever’s rewarded this quarter. Twenty years into SEO, that’s still the whole game. Get the trust right, on Google and in AI search, and the visibility follows it.
If you want an honest read on where your business actually stands, on Google and in AI search, book a call with the team at Woya Digital.
Read more from Steve O'Brien
Steve O’Brien, CEO & Director of SEO
Steve O’Brien is CEO and Director of SEO at Woya Digital and founder of Fleet Street News. With 20 years of experience in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and digital marketing, he has worked through major shifts in search, from early algorithm updates and local SEO to Digital PR and AI-driven discovery. Steve helps businesses build online authority, improve visibility and strengthen trust across Google, AI platforms, media coverage and the wider digital ecosystem. His writing explores SEO, AI optimisation, Digital PR, reputation signals and how businesses can adapt as the way people search, compare and choose brands continues to change. His mission is to help businesses become more visible, more trusted and better positioned for growth in the AI era.
