Interview
The Gist
- AI’s impact on search and content discovery. Dom and Luis discuss how generative AI is reshaping SEO and content discoverability.
- Understanding AI Visibility Optimization (AIVO). Luis introduces AIVO as a new strategy focused on AI bot relevance, differing from traditional SEO.
- The future of marketing strategies. Exploring how marketers must adapt to stay relevant in a multi-player AI-driven environment.
In this episode of The Digital Experience Show, Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief of CMSWire, talks with Luis Fernandez, executive director at VML Enterprise Solutions and a regular CMSWire Contributor. They explore the rapidly evolving intersection of AI and search and how these developments are challenging traditional SEO strategies. Luis shares his insights on AI Visibility Optimization (AIVO), the new "rules" marketers need to follow, and how this shift will impact the industry.
Table of Contents
- The Digital Experience Show Transcript
- AI Bots, Personalization and the Changing Landscape
- Should Marketing Teams Embrace AI Crawlers?
- The Competitive Landscape of AI Search
- Dynamic Search Results and the Future of SEO
- Adjusting Strategies for an AI-Driven World
- The Evolving Role of AI in Content and Search
- The Shift Away from Source Credibility
- Navigating a New Marketing Landscape
- The Role of AI in Efficiency
The Digital Experience Show Transcript
Dom Nicastro: Hey everybody. Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief at CMSWire, back at it for another edition of The Digital Experience Show. And I'm so happy to have our guest here, especially because he is a CMSWire contributor making a lot of noise lately. Actually, Luis Fernandez, Executive Director at VML Enterprise Solutions, a global experience agency. What's going on, Luis?
Luis Fernandez: Hey, Dom, thank you very much for having me here. I was looking forward to this conversation as what we have been going on at CMSWire has been fantastic.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, absolutely. We're happy to have you regularly contributing, and one of your columns recently—and we'll share the link for everyone to read—has been very engaging. It talks about AI and search and how we’re intersecting with these trends. I have to say, as an editor of a media website, Luis, I’m scared, nervous, and confused. Our whole business revolves around SEO and content discovery. How are people going to find us? We’re heading down this path where AI is becoming a big part of the content discovery game, and it’s a lot to take in. But before we dive into that, can you give us a quick 30-second intro about yourself and your role?
Luis Fernandez: Sure thing. My current role is Executive Director at VML, where we help large enterprises with their technology needs—everything from branding to commerce, CMS, martech and beyond. I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years. My background is in engineering, so I’m very technical, and I also hold a master’s degree in finance and marketing. It's been over 20 years in this field, and it’s an exciting space to be in.
Dom Nicastro: That’s an interesting skill set. I find a lot of folks coming into marketing and customer experience have diverse backgrounds, like architecture or engineering. Somehow, it all ties back to marketing, which covers a lot of ground. But let’s get into it. Right now, I’m a marketer, and about 85% of my content discoverability is based on Google, maybe even more. Now we have generative AI entering the picture with tools like SearchGPT coming later this year. Where do I even start a conversation with my marketing team? How do we approach this?
Luis Fernandez: You’re right to feel nervous, and I think we all should be. This shift is going to change everything. Search as we know it won’t be as important as it was before. We’ve used search as a tool to achieve something, but AI is now going to give us extra meaning and new capabilities. Search will still be relevant, but it will look completely different. We’re entering a discovery process.
You mentioned ChatGPT, and I think a major distinction in this new era compared to the search engine era is that in the past, Google dominated the market share. If you were successful on Google, you were successful, period. If you weren’t, you weren’t in the game. Now, we’re going to have multiple players, each with its own set of rules. How marketers ensure their content fits into these new paradigms will be very interesting.
Related Article: Waving Goodbye to SEO: Why AI Visibility Optimization Is the Future
Dom Nicastro: Exactly, and that’s part of what we don’t know yet. You wrote about this in your CMSWire article—what content do AI bots favor? How do you get included in the mix? One term you introduced was AI Visibility Optimization (AIVO). Can you explain what that means?
Luis Fernandez: Sure. To understand AIVO, you first need to know what SEO is. SEO emerged as a way for companies to become relevant in search results. Early on, search engines needed help indexing information, so companies assisted with that. Then the tables turned, and companies had to convince search engines to include them in the search results. The core question remained: Are you ranking high in search results?
AIVO, on the other hand, is a completely different concept. It’s not about being highly ranked in search engines; it’s about being relevant to AI bots. These bots will have different "personalities," if you will—different synthetic emotions and ways of processing information. For governance, this will be a huge shift. If your content isn’t included in a bot’s conclusions or synthesized by it, you’ll be out of the game. People may still use search engines, but they’ll increasingly trust what AI bots provide.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, and one of the comparisons you made in your article really stood out. You said that SEO is like your old school buddy—it knows all the tricks and secrets. But AIVO is the new kid on the block, shaking things up. You also compared SEO to a GPS—it gets you where you need to go, but AIVO is like a self-driving car with fancy new features. That’s intriguing because when I get information from AI bots, I often wonder why I need to click on the source at all. It’s giving me everything, and while trustworthiness is a question, the usability is so much better than scrolling through 50 blue links.
AI Bots, Personalization and the Changing Landscape
Dom Nicastro: On the analogy of the self-driving car, to me, it's also about the context. Search engines are like a GPS or maps that are context-less. Your bots are going to reach a level of personalization where they know you, your company, or your brand to an impressive, even scary extent. For instance, let’s say I'm selling computers. I’ll do my branding for different segments, targeting users specifically—students, designers, etc. Now, bots will start to understand, “Luis likes marketing, coding, command line tools, etc.” When I ask the bot for the best computer for me within a budget, it’s going to provide a highly relevant answer. If your product doesn’t make that shortlist, you're going to have problems. Yes, I may still use the blue link search on a search engine, but that’s more of a follow-up to a decision already in the making.
Luis Fernandez: Exactly. In the blue link world, the onus is on you to search, but in the AI bot world, it provides direct, instant answers. You can have a conversation with it, and as you continue the conversation, it learns more and more. For instance, with ChatGPT, you can maintain thread-specific conversations—keeping related questions within the same thread so it learns contextually. If I'm a marketer, I’m thinking about how UX, user experience, is vital. Navigating Google search results isn’t easy or always trustworthy. You have to be on page one, and sometimes you have to pay for that. But with AI, the UX is just so much better.
Dom Nicastro: It’s intuitive and a more human way of communicating. In marketing, there’s a lot of talk about omnichannel and multichannel strategies, but the real value lies in context. A simple example is when you call a friend in the morning, text them about the conversation later, meet for lunch, and then have dinner at another friend's house. You don’t care about the channels; you care that the context of your conversation carries through. With current tools, it’s possible but complicated, tough, and expensive. But with bots, this level of context will become the norm. The combination of ChatGPT with conversations on the phone is so engaging and insightful—it’s going to fundamentally change things. Younger generations won’t know search results as we do today. To them, search results will be something their dad used.
Should Marketing Teams Embrace AI Crawlers?
Dom Nicastro: Is it worth it? Is it valuable for marketing teams to allow AI crawlers on their websites? Should they enable AI to analyze their content and share it with potential audiences within the AI ecosystem? Or is it too early to commit to this? Brands, including us, are grappling with this decision. What’s your advice, Luis? Is it worth turning on that AI engine?
Luis Fernandez: Yes, I think it's definitely worth it—not necessarily because it offers immediate short-term benefits, but because it’s the direction things are heading. For marketers, the biggest challenge will be shifting their mindset from focusing solely on their owned content (websites, SEO) to external visibility. Bots may take your content into consideration, but they’ll cross-check with authoritative sites, expert recommendations, and even user-generated content like Reddit threads. If you want your controlled content to resonate, you have to think beyond your own properties and social media.
Dom Nicastro: But what do you gain from allowing AI crawlers on your site? Right now, there aren’t analytics for that, are there? In SEO, we have clear analytics—Google Analytics, growth metrics, etc. We see who clicked, what pages they viewed, whether it was bots or real traffic. But with AI bots, there’s no feedback like, “Hey, CMSWire, your site was featured in 4,500 AI searches this month.” It doesn’t exist yet, so there’s an argument that it’s too early to invest heavily in this unknown, right?
Luis Fernandez: Absolutely, and there are many moving parts. Analytics will take time to evolve, and measuring relevance or conversions will become fundamentally different and difficult to track. The major AI players will likely find ways to monetize this data, but organizations will also have their own AI models that are private. You’ll want your content included in their knowledge corpus even if you don’t see direct traffic. What’s also interesting is how people are already paying for ad-free experiences like ChatGPT and Gemini. This could shift the marketing focus from traditional advertising to something entirely new, which can be intimidating for marketers. It raises questions like, “How do I pay for traffic?” It’s going to be challenging, and nobody really knows how it’s going to play out. There will be a lot of trial and error, but this shift is inevitable.
Related Article: OpenAI Debuts ChatGPT Search: Has Online Content Search Changed Forever?
The Competitive Landscape of AI Search
Dom Nicastro: The reality, Luis, seems to be that we’re moving toward a world without a single dominant player like Google in the AI search landscape. OpenAI, with its impressive valuation and recent investments, is leading right now, thanks to its Microsoft partnerships. But there’s also Claude, Anthropic, and even Google itself trying to compete with its own AI offerings. Is there ever going to be an AI company equivalent to Google, which holds over 90% of the search market share?
Luis Fernandez: I don’t think so, Dom. There will be many players, and even within those, the rules and parameters will change. I've been experimenting with comparisons between Nikon and Canon, for example. If you ask which is better and use tailored parameters in your bot, you’ll get different results compared to the generic ChatGPT response. This touches on a significant issue: bias in AI. It’s going to be a major topic, not just ethical bias, but the kind that impacts consumer decisions. People might end up buying a Nikon or a Canon based on the AI’s feedback.
Dynamic Search Results and the Future of SEO
Dom Nicastro: I noticed that, too. Canon came out on top in my tests. The comparisons were thorough, asking if I wanted further analysis, specs breakdowns, etc. It’s like Google’s “People Also Ask” section, but that now feels outdated. It all changed after November 29, 2022—my 45th birthday—when Google still felt relevant. The next day, November 30, ChatGPT launched, and everything shifted. So, where do marketers go from here? We’re not ready to abandon our SEO strategy; our business relies on being on page one of Google. When do we see a real shift? Will SEO remain essential?
Luis Fernandez: It’s going to be a gradual transition. SEO will still be important—Google is still the dominant player. But over time, while your SEO KPIs might look good, the return on investment might not follow as expected. Subtle shifts will start happening, and marketers need to recognize this. We’re already seeing it in content creation. The way we create content today is fundamentally different from two years ago. Content creators are now more like directors, curating and overseeing content generated by AI. This is necessary because, while AI is powerful, it’s not perfect and mistakes can be costly. Eventually, we may trust AI more, but for now, content creators need to ensure accuracy.
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Adjusting Strategies for an AI-Driven World
Dom Nicastro: That’s a great point, Luis. Even prompt engineering has become a significant field with job opportunities and training courses popping up everywhere. Looking ahead, we’re hearing about SearchGPT potentially launching in December. The moment it does, marketers will dive in and start testing it like they do with Google. They’ll ask, “Are we ranking for ‘customer experience’?” or check if their site shows up in searches like “new Ford Edge specs.” But I don’t think AI search results will be static like Google’s. We have articles, like one on Marketo, that’s held a spot on page one for nearly a decade. I don’t think that’s going to happen with AI bots. The results will be more dynamic, changing frequently. What do you think?
The Evolving Role of AI in Content and Search
Dom Nicastro: I think at the beginning, it's going to be very fluid. But even with SearchGPT, the concept of searching is going to be different. If someone has never heard of Marketo, they’ll look it up on Google to get a definition or ask ChatGPT, “What is Marketo?” and receive a summarized response. The importance of being on the first two pages of Google, which was a big deal for the last 20 years, is changing. If a user already knows what Marketo is and asks, “How can I connect Marketo with my CDP?” the bot synthesizes that information to fit their specific needs. The relevance of traditional search as we know it will shift.
The Shift Away from Source Credibility
Dom Nicastro: And who’s to say that when we search with AI bots—ChatGPT, Claude, Anthropic, or even Google—we’ll even bother clicking the source link? I think most consumers will be content to stay within the bot, copy and paste the information, and move on. They won’t care about the source like journalists do. We need sourcing and credibility, but the average consumer will be satisfied with just the AI answer.
Luis Fernandez: I agree. This will make it difficult for marketing teams to justify their budgets because there won’t be metrics to show that an effort was successful. If nobody clicks anything, it’s invisible. There will be a period of uncertainty—should you stop doing what you’re doing? It’s possible what you’re doing is working well, but you won’t have traditional analytics to back it up. This gap presents a big monetization opportunity for providers. Brands will pay for insights like, “What’s the sentiment of my brand? How often do I show up in results? How can I be more relevant?” But at first, it’s going to be chaotic.
Navigating a New Marketing Landscape
Dom Nicastro: It’s going to be a free-for-all. Marketing teams will test and experiment, trying to track whether their content is being surfaced by AI. They’ll switch between SEO and AI strategies, figuring out which works better. This has been such an enlightening discussion, Luis. Maybe in a year, people will look back and say, “Wow, they nailed it,” or, “Everything’s changed.” Final question: what can our readers expect from you in 2025? Any new topics you’re excited to cover?
Luis Fernandez: Absolutely. I’m working on articles about the importance of digital doubles—how AI could replicate decision-making processes similar to that of CEOs. Imagine having a digital double of a CEO making decisions for your company. I’m also focusing on the experience of developers within organizations and how AI will impact their work. While many tasks will be replaced, good technical workers will still be essential. One concern I have, which could be unfounded, is that we’ll see a generation of developers relying heavily on tools like ChatGPT. That could be challenging.
The Role of AI in Efficiency
Dom Nicastro: I could be a developer right now with the help of ChatGPT! It’s efficient. Thank you so much, Luis, for joining us on The Digital Experience Show on CMSWire TV. We look forward to more of your insights and columns on CMSWire.com. Thanks for being here.
Luis Fernandez: Thank you, Dom, and thanks to everyone. Looking forward to the next time.
Dom Nicastro: Sounds great. See you then!
