Beyond the AI Hype: How SEOs Can Lead Through Change | Sophie Brannon
Hi! I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and in this episode of The Search Session, I’m joined by Sophie Brannon, SEO specialist and Co-Founder & Director of StudioHawk US. Together, we unpack how AI is reshaping the SEO landscape—not through hype or fear, but through grounded, practical experience. Our discussion is designed for those looking to navigate the changing landscape with clarity, skill, and forward-thinking strategy.
Key takeaways:
Big promises are everywhere — from overpromising visibility to clients to AI workflows that few SEOs have the time or skill to deliver.
StudioHawk’s clever methods for integrating AI into content creation, client sentiment analysis, and enhancing global oversight.
Automation should remove the checklist work, so SEOs can focus on crafting tailored strategies, understanding business priorities, and delivering real creative impact.
AI is becoming an essential add-on — not a replacement — as roles shift. People must learn to leverage AI tools, with technical fluency now a key part of the toolkit.
Effective tactics to influence how LLMs talk about brands and boost visibility in AI-driven spaces.
Insightful, real-world guidance on when to set AI aside and let human expertise lead the way in client work.
Most e-commerce brands — whether small or enterprise — aren’t prepared for agentic search, each facing distinct challenges.
Curious to hear how it all connects? Let’s get started.
Video Chapters
Transcript
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and today I'm welcoming a good friend of mine to The Search Session. She—because is a she—started SEO almost nine years ago. She’s so skilled, so good at her work, and scaled very fast through all the steps of what seems to be a great career.
She’s actually covering two roles: she’s the founder and CEO of MARO Digital in the UK, US, and Australia—as their LinkedIn page tells us. But she also quite recently founded and is now the director of StudioHawk US. In fact, our guest today is speaking with us from Atlanta. Hey Sophie, how are you doing?
Sophie Brannon: Hey, I’m good. Thank you so much for having me. How are you?
Gianluca Fiorelli: I’m fine. I just came back from an SEO mastermind in Dublin.
Sophie Brannon: Very nice.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It was a lot of fun, even though I ended up abandoning all the people who were going to celebrate the Global Search Awards. As a judge yourself, you know what kind of events those are—very glamorous. I couldn’t attend this time, but everything else is going well. So, how are things going in Atlanta?
Sophie Brannon: Things in Atlanta are good. Busy, busy. We're growing really quickly out here. It's a great market to be in. Just very busy. It's great.
Cutting Through the AI Hype and Overwhelm
Gianluca Fiorelli: And as I always ask my SEO colleagues when I start these conversations — how is SEO treating you lately?
Sophie Brannon: How is SEO treating me lately? It is a whirlwind right now, right? I mean, there is so much going on, so much changing. Everyone is talking about AI. Every conference you go to, every board member in every company in the world — it's like, what's going on with AI? What's happening? Are we optimizing for it? How can we show up in ChatGPT? All of this kind of stuff.
So it has been, like I say, a bit of a whirlwind, but it's an exciting time. There's lots to learn, lots to test, lots to play around with. So yes, it's just been hectic — more than normal. But it's the life of an SEO, right?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Totally. I mean, our life has always been quite busy, quite frenzied, but it definitely became even more so since ChatGPT came out — and like a snowball, all the other things that followed.
And as you were saying, everyone's talking about AI. We are too — here on The Search Session. But we try not to talk only about AI, because I think SEO is a bigger thing.
You recently talked about AI at Ahrefs Evolve. From the title itself, it was quite an interesting way to approach the topic. You were talking about the hype of AI, and in a few concepts, how do you define the hype in this so talked topic?
Sophie Brannon: Yes, it's a great question. And I think the main reason why I wanted to do the talk at Ahrefs Evolve around the hype—and how to cut through a lot of the noise—is because LinkedIn, X, all of these different platforms, they’re such a minefield right now.
Especially for junior, mid-level SEOs—even senior SEOs—whether they’re in-house, agency side, or a bit of both. They’re getting quite overwhelmed.
And for me, you know, there are people building these amazing tools. There are people saying SEO is dead. SEO is not dead. It depends on the day and posts you're consuming.
The whole point of the talk was basically to say: AI is here, it’s here to stay. Here are a few different ways you can leverage it to help in your day-to-day work—things that aren't some super complex, amazing tool that's going to replace your entire team or yourself with an AI robot. It's about real, actionable stuff.
So yes, it was really about cutting through some of that overwhelm more than anything, and focusing on the actionable use cases behind it, rather than just, “Oh my God, everything’s so scary, everything’s moving fast.” Because it is a scary world out there right now for a lot of people, so it’s about trying to cut through that a bit.
What’s Scaring SEOs About AI
Gianluca Fiorelli: What do you think are the scariest things about AI that people are panicking over—or at least what do you perceive from talking with other SEOs, agency owners, and so on?
Sophie Brannon: Yes, I think a lot of it is just—people think that AI is coming for their jobs, and they don't quite know how to necessarily leverage it. And also, because it moves so fast—you have a new version of ChatGPT or Claude or any of these platforms coming out all the time. And because it's moving so quickly, people are almost being left behind, wondering: “What's the best practice?”, “How does this thing work?”. “Oh, there's a new version—how does this work?”, “Is it different?”, “How does this align with what we already know?”
They're kind of having to adopt a whole new skill set in their heads, and they’re just like—this is what's difficult. They don't know where to turn, and they don't know what's true and what's not, because of all the overwhelm on these social platforms.
You’ve got someone telling you, “SEO’s dead, get a new job, do something different.” Then someone else is saying, “AI SEO or AEO, GEO, LLM SEO”—whatever you want to call it—” is exactly the same as traditional SEO”. And people just don’t know what the truth is between all these different points of view.
So I think that’s what the scary part is. No one has real answers. And a lot of this is a completely new learning curve. People had gotten quite comfortable. Everything we’ve done as SEOs has always evolved steadily, and that’s always been the case. Big algorithms roll out, things change over time—but this has been a real, quick, fundamental shift in technology that we haven’t seen in a long time. So I think that is really what’s scaring people.
A lot of it is like when voice search came in—or didn’t really come in. The hype around voice search and “voice is taking over” never really led to anything. Same with TikTok. It’s important to have visibility there, but it’s not taking over everyone’s SEO job.
But AI is a little different because people are adopting it at a really fast rate. So it’s that kind of uncertainty, I think, that everyone’s scared of.
Gianluca Fiorelli: You were talking about the learning curve. How steep is this learning curve for you?
Sophie Brannon: That’s a great question. It’s a big learning curve in terms of utilizing the technology. I think that’s the first thing: actually being able to use it as a user.
In terms of the learning curve around how it works, what we’re actually seeing is that this is like a 10-year-old Google. You can just spam it. That’s what works. Like, create a “What’s the best SEO agency in Australia” or “in the US”, list StudioHawk 10 times within that list or in a bunch of different listicles.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I was joking just a few minutes before we started recording this episode. I was saying online that listicles are the new guest blogging. I’m sure you also receive dozens of emails every day—not so much proposing links anymore, even if some link builders still do—but mostly proposing to be added to some unknown list on some unknown website, just for the sake of it.
Sophie Brannon: Exactly that. It’s almost like the LinkedIn messages you just constantly get via your web form, and things like that, selling you backlinks. Now it’s like 80% selling backlinks, 20% selling listicles. We’ll see how that levels out. It’s very interesting. But yes, I think it’s just very old-school SEO at this point. So we’ll see how that evolves.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I think there’s a part of all this that feels very 2010s SEO. And then there’s another part that’s more about the long-range effect of AI — everything related to semantics, to building knowledge graphs, to all this kind of entity optimization, which is not really new, but has become newly important now.
So these are two different steps. The first one is easier, but — as always — in SEO, there are easy things that can bring you success very fast, and sudden death just as fast. And the second are the others, that take time.
Overpromising and Practical AI Implementation
Gianluca Fiorelli: You were also saying something related — that there are so many big promises out there. Over-promising about the future of search with AI and what can be done thanks to AI as a tool.
So what are your thoughts on these huge, and many times unfulfilled, promises?
Sophie Brannon: Yes, great question. So the first thing — just talking about visibility in things like ChatGPT — there are a lot of SEOs and agencies out there that have jumped on the AI search. Now they’re GEO agencies or whatever they want to call them. They’re really leveraging it, and they’re pushing out all of these case studies like, “Visibility has grown by 10,000% year over year.”
It’s like — well, of course it has because no one was using it before. A lot of the numbers in those case studies are incredibly inflated because of how adoption rates have changed over the last year. So I think that’s one thing, in terms of overpromising clients when it comes to what’s actually achievable — I don’t think anyone really knows yet. There’s a lot of tracking and tools out there now, and more are coming out, so we can actually start getting some of this data. But you have to be a little bit careful with that.
And when it comes to actually utilizing the AI stuff — a lot of SEOs in their day-to-day don’t have time to build the kind of workflows people are talking about or posting all over LinkedIn. A lot of people don’t necessarily have the expertise to use things like NA10. They don’t have developer resources to help connect all the dots between different elements, to build out those workflows, or set up the webhooks and things like that.
For me, it’s really a combination of the overpromising we’re seeing in the industry and everyone jumping on the trend — “We’re a GEO agency,” “We’re doing all this AI stuff now” — when a lot of the fundamentals that people should have been doing in SEO for years (but probably weren’t) actually underpin a lot of it.
I also think a lot of the use cases of utilizing AI are sometimes overpromised, especially in terms of the quality these tools can deliver without human checks. And people just don’t have the time to build all this stuff. Sure, there are people doing amazing things with AI — things being built in their sleep — and they’re not having to hire for every single role that they might have had to do before, because they’re leveraging this technology. And that’s awesome. Efficiency is great — that’s what this technology is meant to bring.
But yes, I think there’s definitely a little bit of spookiness out there. Going with the Halloween theme — a little spookiness for a lot of people. They just don’t have the time to build these huge workflows as employees within their agencies who are actually going to do a lot of this work for them. And most of the time, they’re not that good either.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I think you touched on a really good point because, for instance, for me — as a consultant — it’s relatively easy to have the time to project and build a framework that can be used by clients. Sometimes those clients are also agencies. But I know that I always have to create a sort of light version of it.
Sophie Brannon: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: The light version is usually the one that can give you good enough results — I mean, really good enough, not just something basic. And the other version is: whenever you have time, try to do this — with a case study, build it properly, in order.
Because that’s what, for instance, I’ve been really into recently — the idea of clustering content very well, in order to earn stronger and more durable topical authority.
So I have two ways to do this. One is with the support of AI, to facilitate the clustering work — which is fine, correct, and can deliver strong results, as I’m seeing. And the other one is the ideal version — but maybe only for the person who really wants to push, go faster, and, in my opinion, be future-proof — by building knowledge graphs, emerging knowledge graphs, in the long term. Which can be quite expensive, quite slow in the beginning — but then it can pay off, because it’s just maintenance and helps you work better and faster. So yes, I totally hear you.
How StudioHawk Uses AI Day-to-Day
Gianluca Fiorelli: But, talking from your agency’s point of view — how are you, at StudioHawk, for instance, integrating AI into your daily work? Into your workflows? Usually, it's about doing things faster, but maybe you're also starting to try something more sophisticated than just improving speed?
Sophie Brannon: Yes, absolutely. We're using it at a whole range of levels within the agency.
So, from everything like you said — doing things a little bit faster. For example, creating content briefs for either our content team or for clients. If we were to do a lot of that manually, like we had to do back in the day, it would maybe take a good hour to do all the research, put together the structure, do the keyword research, create the page titles, the meta descriptions, and at scale, that really adds up. So, obviously, doing that via AI briefs, while still making sure we have human oversight — is all about speeding things up.
But on top of that, we’re also using it more for understanding client sentiment as well. So, looking at the emails that our clients are sending through to our SEO specialists, and having oversight on some of those in terms of the sentiment — if there’s any form of neutral or negative sentiment based on the context of the email, then a senior or a team lead gets notified. That way, we can jump on the problem before it even becomes a problem.
It’s helping us put out a lot of fires with clients — where, before, we might not have had that kind of visibility. So that’s been great.
And then we’re also really starting to understand a lot of our own marketing workflows as well — building out loads of automations across the board, connecting different systems together. All of that is just so that, from a management perspective, we’re able to have much more visibility.
Because now StudioHawk is global — we’re over 110 people across four different offices, in three different countries, in completely different regions and time zones.
And while we all operate individually — so the US runs the US, the UK runs the UK, Australia (Melbourne and Sydney) runs Australia, and the APAC region — it’s giving us more of that general global overview now as well.
It’s giving us more insight from a board level, from a global level, to make sure we know what’s going on under the hood because you can’t be completely across the 500 to 1,000 clients we have globally, at every single touchpoint.
So, having some form of automation and AI to tell us things like “Are they happy?” “Are they not?” — and being able to jump on these things sooner rather than later — yes, it’s really something we’re starting to leverage at every point.
Guardrails: Human Creativity in the Loop
Gianluca Fiorelli: And another question — which sometimes I ask myself. You, as an agency, as you were saying, have a lot of clients. But one of the downsides, for instance, of creating stuff with AI is that it tends to standardize the output. So that, say, client X and client Y— if you’re not really controlling the work — you could end up proposing basically the same thing to both.
So that’s what you call putting the human into the loop. But what about the creativity that humans can bring? At what point, and how much of it? How do you control the output of AI to insert the right, correct creativity for the client?
Sophie Brannon: Yes, that’s a great question. And I think this is where, you know, AI will never actually take over completely. It may change what our day-to-day looks like — because SEO has always been very much a checklist exercise for a lot of people. It’s, you know: Is your page title optimized? Check. Does your meta description have a keyword and a call to action? Check.
Does the H1 include the main target keyword? Check. And that’s really kind of old-school SEO that we should have moved away from a long time ago.
I think AI is now helping us do a lot of that checklist stuff more easily and faster, so we can actually focus on the bigger-picture, creative, strategic work — where we make a much greater impact because, like you said, AI pushes out a lot of generic stuff. Even if you really focus on giving specific points within the prompts to tailor them to the client, it is really important, like a garbage prompt gets garbage back. Same as anything to do with crawling content: garbage in, garbage out. It’s just how it goes.
But we’re making sure that we’re leveraging AI to make things faster for us when it comes to some of the day-to-day chores — the ones that don’t need that element of creativity. Then, we’re using our human side for things like empathy with clients, creativity within the strategy, strategic thinking at a broader scale, and really understanding the core of the business — what their priorities and objectives are. They’re going to be really where SEO goes. It’s going to be more of that creativity and strategic thinking, rather than just ticking off checklist items.
Sophie’s Personal AI Habits
Gianluca Fiorelli: Great. And you personally — how do you adopt AI in your daily life?
Sophie Brannon: In my daily life? I was actually quite a late adopter. I was very anti-AI for so long.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Really?
Sophie Brannon: I was just like, “This is another hype, it’s going to be another voice search.” I was really late to the voice search game, too. But I love my Alexa now — so, you know. I was quite anti-AI, but I was always kind of testing.
In terms of how I use it day to day, ChatGPT is great. I actually love it as a tool. Whenever I’m trying to do something more informational, I go straight to ChatGPT.
I’ve also got a lot of friends who are working on their own small business side hustles, and they’re using ChatGPT and other AI tools to really develop business ideas. Or, for example, one friend is selling prints on Etsy, so she’s using it for inspiration. A lot of the time, it’s more about informational and instructional intent.
Or sometimes, if I know I’m in a bad mood and I’m about to email a particular person in a not-so-great way, I’ll say, “Hey, can you just rewrite this email for me so I sound less like a nasty person? That would be great.” So I use it for that too.
And I also love playing around with the vibe coding stuff — that’s quite new for me. I just like testing new things and experimenting as the tech gets better and better. So yes, in my day-to-day, I’m using it to speed up anything I can automate — things that used to take me way too long.
Especially now, because I’m doing SEO, running the business, training the team, I’m across everything — across two different regions at different points, plus all the traveling and speaking I’m doing. So anything I can automate, I do — I’m using it for pretty much every part of my life at this point.
Evolving Roles: “AI + Something”
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, and I imagine — this is something that came up when I had a conversation here with Joanna Lord — she was saying that she sees the future of agency roles evolving into “AI plus something” titles. So, for instance, from classic content marketing strategist to AI marketing strategist, or something like that.
So how do you see the evolution of several kinds of professions — including the ones you direct within the agency — with the contribution of AI? Are they going to change so much that we won’t even recognize them anymore, or are they just going to evolve without forgetting what came before?
Sophie Brannon: I think it’s definitely going to be an evolution. We’re already starting to see changes in job titles. Some of the roles out there now are things like SEO and GEO Director, and titles like that. There’s always a little add-on. But I do think it’s always going to be just an add-on.
I don’t think it’s ever going to 100% replace SEO. I think SEO is easy for businesses to understand — not necessarily how it works, but what it is, fundamentally. And then GEO, AI search — whatever you want to call it — is going to be an additional layer on top of that.
That being said, I think when it comes to employing people, making sure they have a hunger for learning this new technology, as part of their role— that’s probably what’s going to change. Because they need to leverage this tech, if they’re not efficient or staying ahead, they're ultimately going to start getting left behind.
So I think, when it comes to employees generally, making sure they’re utilizing AI, leveraging it, and trying to stay ahead of the game — that’s going to be really important. For agencies, for in-house brands — that’s really what they’re going to be looking for.
And we’re already seeing that reflected in a whole bunch of job descriptions as well. Before, you just needed proficiency in Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint. Now, it’s going to be about utilizing ChatGPT and all of these kinds of tools. It’s just going to be that additional kind of toolkit — an add-on — that people are going to need.
Winning Brand Visibility in LLMs
Gianluca Fiorelli: And let’s say a client comes to you and says, “Okay, we’re already relatively good in terms of visibility on Google, but we want to improve what LLMs are saying about us — to obtain more visibility across a wider range of potential conversations, like on ChatGPT, for instance and especially if we start thinking of LLMs also as an online reputation management tool.
We were talking earlier about listicles, but it’s not just that — it’s also about being presented as the brand: a brand to trust, a brand to try, a brand with authority, and so on.
So, considering the classic SEO strategy — for example, in online reputation management — the typical approach would have been to create content in order to push all the others below the second page. This isn’t really possible with LLMs, because everything is going to pop up anyway. So if this were a brainstorming session with your team, where would you start?
Sophie Brannon: Great question. I think, with the way things are going now, SEO is finally — as it should have been all along — being seen as part of the holistic marketing strategy.
Rather than SEO being over here as its own separate channel, it’s now being pulled into brand, social, and all of these other areas — which is where we should have been before.
So, where should you start? Obviously, it depends — standard SEO stuff— but it depends on where the site is at the moment. Are they already owning their niche? I think that’s step one. Are they the biggest brand in their niche? If they’re not, how can we help increase their brand visibility?
And that’s when you start looking at things like: What are they doing on their socials? Do they have any kind of video content? Because now that’s starting to show up a lot more. What does their structured data look like? Do LLMs — which is another argument in itself — actually read schema? I think they do. I’m not going to have that argument here, but I know Mike King said something similar in one of his webinars. So yes, that’s a whole different story.
But structured data — making sure that the context is there. Digital PR is going to be huge. That really took off, especially in the UK around 2020, when we started seeing a lot more agencies pop up with that offering.
But with the prominence of brand mentions, brand visibility, and growth, you need to look beyond just traditional metrics like “Has our organic traffic increased?” Also, look at things like: “Are more people searching for our brand directly?” Because a lot of what SEO does also influences branded as well as unbranded search — and people forget that quite a lot. And then that will obviously feed into all of the other brand marketing strategies as well.
Looking at opportunities on Reddit now — you do have to be quite careful with this. It’s not as prominent in things like ChatGPT as it was previously, and it’s kind of a whole realm of its own. You can’t just go on there and start selling — you’ll get absolutely torn apart on Reddit. It doesn’t work like that. But seeing if you can have a presence on there or what your presence currently looks like—a bit of reputation management.
Because what we’re seeing is that if you’ve got one really bad Trustpilot review, that’s the one that seems to get surfaced within LLMs, as opposed to the 10,000 good ones you’ve got. So, really managing all of that together is important.
Then, how SEO feeds into that is about making sure you have the right topical coverage, the semantic variations, too. Making sure that everything you're writing about is really owning your niche and covering all of those different areas.
Because a lot of the time, SEO content strategy was just about chasing keyword volume — that was essentially the whole point of what we were doing. Whereas now, it's much more about asking: “What are all the questions people are asking — and could possibly ask — about this product, this service, this particular tiny variation of the product?” And making sure you have enough content and context around that on the website, too.
But where should you start? I think it’s benchmarking. It’s like: “What are we showing up for?”, “What are we not showing up for?” and “How can we then do that?”
And then that will feed into the actual strategy itself, in terms of channels. Is it digital PR? Do we need to double down on brand visibility? Are brand mentions getting referenced in all of these huge publications? Great — we get some backlinks, so good SEO too.
And then we look at structured data on the site. We look at what they’re doing from a social strategy point of view — their video content, their YouTube — all of this kind of stuff, and how that integrates into a broader, overarching marketing channel.
Reddit, Forums & the Schema Debate
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, and when you were talking about Reddit, I was thinking about how much LLMs — but also Google — are substantially inflating its importance. I mean, Reddit was always a relatively strong social media forum and UGC environment in the U.S.
Sophie Brannon: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: But now, because so much of the market is using Reddit data for training, it’s forcing marketers to start using Reddit even in countries where it’s not widely used. I’m thinking of Spain — where we’ve had, and still have, a very famous Reddit-style forum called Forocoches because it was born as a forum about cars, then exploded to all the topics. It’s working well because it’s cited by Google in link search results, also from AI Overviews, sometimes in discussions and forums.
But yes, Reddit — now everybody’s thinking about Reddit. But in this specific case, it’s not only about LLMs, but also about discussions in forums, for instance. Sometimes I think people — better, marketers — are lazy because there are so many forums, especially if you’re in a specific niche, that are popping up and being presented. And maybe they’re even easier to approach when trying to engage redditors or to start conversations and build relationships with true experts in your niche. And that can lead to more beneficial effects later on.
That just popped into my mind because, sincerely, I never used Reddit — until I was basically obliged to.
Sophie Brannon: Absolutely. I’m exactly the same. I have never used Reddit until it really started taking off in the SEO world. I was like, “Oh, I guess I should probably see what all the hype’s about.”
But SEOs ruin everything. I think we all kind of own that — like with FAQ schema. The FAQ schema doesn’t show up in SERPs anymore because we all overused it.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Well, it’s starting to repop — to show up a little more now in search results. Like the classic suggestion you get when you ask ChatGPT or Gemini, “What should I do to be more visible in LLMs?” — and it says, “Use HowTo schema.” But, for example, HowTo schema is now deprecated by Google. So, if you also want to have rich results for HowTo, schema is not going to work.
But returning to the schema part — not to ignite another debate here, but for me, it’s quite silly. I mean, discussing whether LLMs are reading schema or not completely misses the point. Even if they don’t read it, the schema is still really valuable — because it’s about semantics. It works alongside semantic, HTML, and all those elements.
The new browser from OpenAI, for example, is even using ARIA tags to understand how a page is working. So all this labeling is still useful.
In the case of schema, it’s especially good because it can act like a draft for the things we could use. And doing so, even if it’s not being read as schema, by using it, you’re still delivering structured content — to LLMs, to Google, to whatever platform is consuming that page.
Sophie Brannon: I know. Honestly, I feel like we’ve all just done a really bad job — SEOs, as a collective. We’ve done a really bad job because when all this stuff started coming out, we were in such a prime position to own this space — to really lead and define what it means for brands. And instead, we spent more time arguing about whether it’s called GEO, LLM SEO, AI SEO, or AEO.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Well, I also discovered that because I was reading recently — I saw “GEO,” so I went back to the original paper on Arxiv, which was written by prestigious academics. But none of them have ever actually tried to rank a website — so, respectful, sure, but it's all very theoretical.
And in that paper, they talk about SEO like it’s 2010 again. That’s why all these LLMs are telling you we’re moving away from keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing? I mean, I don’t think anybody’s doing keyword stuffing anymore.
And then I was reading another piece — it caused quite a polemic when it was published — and someone suggested an acronym I’d never seen before, but I actually think it’s pretty good: AIVO — AI Visibility Optimization, which is actually a solid description of what we’re doing. So if you’re looking for a new acronym, remember that one too: AIVO.
Sophie Brannon: Yes, no, definitely. But that’s exactly what I mean — there’s just been so much arguing about acronyms instead of focusing on positioning. I get it — we didn’t necessarily know how it all worked at first, and everyone’s reverse-engineering things now. We’re talking about relevance engineering and all this kind of stuff — but we should have at least been the owners of that space.
Then that Verve article came out, or something like that, and about how that just crossed all of the brand. That’s when the hype and worry came about that SEO is going to be dead — but we should have owned that and say: “No, this is an evolution.” But instead, we were too busy arguing among ourselves over all these different kinds of things.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, exactly. I think we spent too much time trying to reboot what people were saying — instead of owning our own terminology, our own space. And I think, even if SEOs won’t admit it, we’ve been a bit afraid to present ourselves as “SEO” because of the bad reputation the term has picked up over the years. So, okay — we moved away from SEO. Back in the day, all SEOs became content marketers. Then they became something else and now we’re pretending again — this time GEO. Like that meme: put the mask on, and it’s still SEO underneath.
Sophie Brannon: Literally.
When NOT to Use AI
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, going back to AI — when do you think AI should never be used when working with a client?
Sophie Brannon: When should it never be used? That's a great question. Obviously, anything involving personal data — I’ve seen some interesting things happen when it comes to AI, so that’s one thing.
I think, strategically — anything strategy-wise — I just don’t see the value in it. I see the value in inspiration from it, but it just gets it wrong so often. And it still hallucinates at a really high rate. I think Vectara did a study, and off the top of my head, I think GPT-5 has a hallucination rate of around 1.4%, and Gemini 2.5 is at 1.1% — or maybe the other way around. Don’t quote me exactly on that — I don’t have the study in front of me. But we’re still hallucinating at a pretty high percentage.
So I think AI should never be used when it comes to real, in-depth strategic thinking. And anything creative — realistically, we’re the ones who think outside the box. All AI is doing is leveraging things it’s already learned from what already exists. So if we want to do something different — while we can take inspiration from that — those ideas ultimately need to come from ourselves. Otherwise, chances are, it’s already been done before. So it’s more like going down that route.
And I think that’s really where the human element of this is going to stay. Client relationship management — that’s going to be huge still. Like, AI’s great for automating weekly updates or email sends and stuff like that. But having that one-to-one, understanding the client, having the empathy — if they’ve had a bad day, actually dealing with that.
Same goes for in-house — obviously, I’m speaking from an agency perspective now, but I was in-house for two years as well — and it’s that connection between different teams internally that’s just as important. Like if you are, for example, in e-commerce — connecting with product merchandising teams, connecting with customer service teams — doing all of that on a personal level can really help you leverage your strategy way more than what AI can necessarily do.
It can utilize all of the data they’re giving you and spit that back out. But having more of those in-depth discussions, understanding the customer, understanding all of those kinds of things — that's a human-level thing, in my opinion. Other people may disagree with me.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I totally agree. In fact, I spend quite a bit of the first call with a client talking about the business — everything besides SEO, AI, visibility, and so on. It’s really about trying to understand how the business works, who the people are, and how I can connect with them — for instance, people in customer care, the head of production if it’s B2B, even an engineer — just to learn the language as a whole.
And what I like to use when it comes to creativity is AI for lateral thinking — trying to connect things. Maybe it’s because I’m Italian — we tend to use a lot of metaphors and allegories to explain things. And so sometimes I like to think — okay, let’s take something and connect it to something else that seems totally unrelated, and now we can use them together. So, AI can either tell you “you can’t do it,” or, because it has such a big knowledge base (in brackets) of everything, it can — and because it works with language, you can find those connections and then interpret creativity through how AI works.
Sophie Brannon: Yes, definitely. I think as well, from my side, another reason or area where I don’t like to leverage AI too much is when I’m training juniors. And the reason for that is because I want them to think for themselves. When they’re just literally plugging every question they can think of into AI — instead of actually trying to think things through — they’re not expanding their knowledge in the same way they would if they were actually problem-solving.
Now, don’t get me wrong — it’s great that you can just plug something into ChatGPT. It saves me a hell of a lot of time. Like when I can’t find one little comma in my HTML that’s screwing everything up — I just ask, “Find this for me.” Whereas before, I’d have to manually go through line by line — like eight years ago, or even three or five years ago.
So, it’s great to have that, but I really want to make sure my juniors can think for themselves and then add the AI layer on top. That’s one of my fundamentals.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, like when people in school still do math with a calculator instead of just asking Google Images and LLMs to solve the problem.
Sophie Brannon: Yes, because we’re getting lazy — and like, that’s great, it’s cool that we have all of this technology — but you still need to have a brain. So, you know, use it. I think getting juniors to leverage AI in certain situations, but not every situation, will also help them better problem-solve when they come up against the same issue, but in a different way.
Because every industry, every niche, and every website is going to be completely different. The way you do something for one client is not necessarily how you’re going to do it for others. Best practices are great — but they don’t always apply in exactly the same way across the board.
There are some things that do, of course — but not everything. So making sure that they can actually go in, think for themselves, problem-solve, and then use AI to find the final solution — that’s what I’m looking for. So yes, it’s more like actually “use your brain”.
Agentic Search & E-commerce Readiness
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, always try to pump up your brain. And just a quick thought about the future. I mean, we know this present is quite unstable — it’s changing every day. But even if it feels far away, it was just December 2024 when Google started talking about the agentic search, and now it’s the new thing inside the AI ecosystem that is really starting to push — with the MCP, NA10, and so on. You, as an SEO who also works a lot with e-commerce — how ready do you think e-commerce businesses are for this evolution toward agentic search?
Where their website isn’t just a place to be visited by a human, but actually becomes a big database — a catalog that tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and maybe in the future even Google are going to come and talk with the AI, and do all the things for the user who’s using their platform.
How do you think businesses are understanding this shift — which seems like it’s going to be the future?
Sophie Brannon: I don’t think they’re prepared at all, if I’m being completely honest. A lot of them don’t even have good analytics tracking set up — most of it is junk. And they don’t have things like their Merchant Center optimization — or even a proper Merchant Center feed — set up or optimized. And organic shopping has been around for God knows how long now. So are they ready for agentic checkout? Probably not.
They’re lucky in some cases — like Etsy is already integrated with ChatGPT’s agent checkout. And Shopify either is or is going to be very soon — I can’t quite remember the dates. So some of that will already be automated for them, and that will help.
But there are still so many legacy issues out there. Sites are still being built completely in JavaScript, everything client-side rendered instead of server-side rendered — and just all of these basic technical issues.
I think as SEOs and people working in this industry — even just marketing managers — we’re so tunnel-visioned on “AI is the future, AI this, AI that.” Like, we’re basically AI bros ourselves at this point. But I was reading a study recently that said something like 66% of Americans have never used an LLM or ChatGPT — and that was only published in the last couple of months.
So I feel like we still think this is what everyone is using or is going to use right now. That being said, I completely agree that AI Mode will probably become the default for Google Search. I don’t think people are going to be happy about it, but I do see it happening. I also see more of the agentic checkout stuff coming — and that’s already been confirmed. It’s going to be a core focus.
But I don’t think the majority of, especially smaller e-commerce brands, are ready at all — mostly because some of the fundamentals they haven’t got right either.
So this is where, you know, SEO is in a really good spot — and SEO's not dying — because we’re in the prime position to be helping these businesses and helping these brands get ready, but also to fix a lot of the fundamental stuff as well that’s going to help their traditional SEO.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, and I was thinking — in the U.S., maybe the small businesses weren’t ready, and usually, they’re not. Sometimes, they don’t even know how to use the same Google Business page correctly.
But SEO can really help them. For example, small independent e-commerce brands — even local ones. Many times, these are shops running on Shopify or Etsy. So I think it will actually be more problematic for big brands in terms of adjusting everything and integrating all the agentic operations with monolithic e-commerce systems and stores.
Also, because they’re slow, with a long chain of decision-makers, and sometimes they have major issues with legacy code.
Sophie Brannon: Yes, absolutely.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So that's why, in this case, maybe a smart small business could actually make the big jump
Sophie Brannon: Yes, a hundred percent. I completely agree with that. And I see it a lot now when we’re working with enterprise accounts — there is so much bureaucracy, so many teams that are completely split up. Everyone’s got to make a decision and have an input, and they’re all in different regions, and everything has to be async.
And it’s like, “Guys, we’re just trying to add some content to a collection page. It’s not that deep. We do not need five or ten people chiming in here — we will be okay”.
So yes, from a technical standpoint as well, so many of these sites are on custom CMSs, or have loads of legacy technical issues and bloated code and things like that.
And then, there are other issues too — like, they don’t necessarily want to be sharing their data with AI. That’s something I’m seeing more and more in highly regulated industries — naturally. But if they’re not able to share any of this stuff, and that becomes the default search, that’s going to cause problems too.
So yes — you’re totally right. It’s not just small businesses that aren’t ready. These enterprise companies, if they’re not already starting to work toward this, they’re going to get left behind. Because ultimately, they need to be moving fast — and that’s really tough at the enterprise level.
The Fireside Questionnaire
Gianluca Fiorelli: Indeed. So, let’s stop talking about AI — let’s talk about you. As I was saying in the introduction, you’ve been in SEO for about nine or ten years now. And before that, your work was mostly in journalism. In fact, at the end of that phase, you were a journalist for a music magazine.
So, how was the experience of being a journalist? And how much of that journalist is still alive in your SEO work today?
Sophie Brannon: Oh my God, yes. I loved being a journalist; it was awesome. I think the only reason I left the field was because it was almost too competitive, and also because I moved out of London, and there just wasn’t that much out there after that. So, you know, that was really hard.
But no — I loved it. I’m hugely passionate about music and always have been. So for me to get into that field in the first place was amazing. I was being sent left, right, and center to all of these different shows and gigs for all my favorite bands. I was at festivals all the time — as an 18-year-old, that was phenomenal. I was living my best life, super young. So I loved it.
How much of a journalist is still in me? I still love the content creation side. I’m definitely not so interested in the political stuff I was doing at one point — not really bothered by any of that anymore. That’s a whole different story, let’s not even get into that.
But yes, for me, I still love the content stuff. If there’s any opportunity for me to jump into any form of content — or if a client sends back content edits — sometimes I’ll be like, “I’m just going to make a few changes,” and jump in there. Shouldn’t be doing it, but it’s great fun.
Journalism was such a cool opportunity, and there are quite a few of us in the SEO field, I’ve found out, who kind of ended up moving into it. I was doing multimedia and magazine journalism — so a bit of online too — and then we discovered a bit of SEO and all kind of pivoted straight into the SEO world.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, like me a few years earlier — when moving from just having our website while working in television. Multimedia was harder because internet connections were still quite slow. But yes, we started to understand that there was something called SEO. So that’s why, then I moved to SEO too, without having the opportunity to stay in the television world.
Sophie Brannon: Absolutely.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Curiosity — why did Studiohawk choose Atlanta as the place to stay?
Sophie Brannon: That’s a question we get all the time.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I imagine!
Sophie Brannon: We love Atlanta. So — typical story — you’ve got a Brit and an Aussie flying around and going, “Where do we put our office?” Right? We know we want to go to America. Cool. The only places we really knew were New York and LA.
We went to New York — lots of agencies expand out to New York, it’s a huge hub for everything. But it’s really expensive. Like, we realized when we started tooting up a lot of the numbers that you’d kind of hit a ceiling quite fast. And expansion gets really difficult when you’re up against that level of cost — cost of living, office space, staff, talent — all of it is really expensive.
Then we obviously looked at LA as well. But where I’m coming from — the UK — that’s quite a journey in. And all of the time zone differences, and it also wasn’t quite a culture fit for who StudioHawk is and who we like to hire — which is very, we call them “wholesome nerds” — and that isn’t really the LA vibe. So we were then like, “Okay, cool, but we don’t really know where to go from here. Maybe this isn’t gonna work.”
And then a friend of Harry’s talked about Charlotte and was like, “Why don’t you come down to Charlotte, check this out?” Charlotte was a little bit too small, and we were like, “Okay, still isn’t quite right.”
And then someone said, “What about Atlanta?” Now, everything we’d ever heard about Atlanta wasn’t particularly positive — because of, like, all of its history and things like that. And we were like, “Don’t know about that...” And we turn up and we’re looking around and we’re like, “Wow, this actually is perfect.” It’s got amazing transportation hubs — like it’s got the busiest airport in the world, which is amazing. Amazing colleges and universities — you’ve got Georgia State, Georgia Tech — so it’s awesome for junior recruitment. Cost of living is lower, so we were able to get set up and not hit the ceiling as fast as we would have done in New York or LA.
The weather’s lovely, which is obviously a big thing — like, I’m coming from England, rainy and miserable and dark and cold all the time, other than maybe one month of the year. So we were like: “Get some sunshine, we’re right near Florida”. Really cool cities and connections around here as well. So we’ve got like Nashville close by, Charlotte close by, Florida’s obviously super close as well. So that was amazing to have all of these extra connections.
And yes, like we started talking to people here — everyone’s super friendly, super nice — and we’ve got access to a lot of the country. If you’re based kind of in New York, you kind of stay in New York, Philly, New Jersey — like that’s kind of your client hub.
Because Atlanta’s up and coming as well — I think it’s projected to grow 40% in the next 10 years. It’s kind of a huge tech hub. Lots of companies are leaving Silicon Valley. We’re able to now kind of expand throughout the rest of the U.S., so it’s super interesting.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And in fact, now that I remember — I still love to watch a lot of movies, a lot of series — not just because of my past working in that sector, but if you have the patience to look at all the closing credits, Georgia is always there. A lot of things are shot in Georgia.
Sophie Brannon: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So usually, when a country, in this case a state, is a place where the movie and series industry, the entertainment industry is going — for instance, it was Vancouver 15, 20 years ago or right now, even Spain or Ireland — usually it’s a sign that not only is it a great place where you can find so many different locations to shoot, but also because it’s a growing industry to support.
Sophie Brannon: Exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And that’s also something that usually is an indicator of relatively good wellness and growth. So yes, interesting. I was thinking of Atlanta because it’s substantially super. I know that it is the major hub in the States, and also substantially in the world. From Atlanta, you can go everywhere, because it’s in the middle. And milder weather than Chicago. Chicago in the winter must be horrible.
Sophie Brannon: Absolutely. So yes, it’s great. We’re set up now, the team’s growing, and we’re, like I say, very busy.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I’m really happy because I’ve known you for so many years now, and it’s a real pleasure to see you — personally and professionally — growing and bringing your skills also to this new country. Let’s reconquer the States for the British.
Sophie Brannon: We are coming back, guys!
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly. Okay, thank you very much for being our guest today. I hope to see you soon in real life — and maybe soon, let’s say in the future, again in The Search Session — to see what’s happened during these months.
Sophie Brannon: Amazing. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been great fun.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And thank you to all of you for being here, watching us, and especially listening to the great things Sophie has shared with us.
And now the classic YouTuber thing: remember to ring the bell and subscribe to the channel so you’re not going to miss any new episode. Bye-bye!
Podcast Host
Gianluca Fiorelli
With almost 20 years of experience in web marketing, Gianluca Fiorelli is a Strategic and International SEO Consultant who helps businesses improve their visibility and performance on organic search. Gianluca collaborated with clients from various industries and regions, such as Glassdoor, Idealista, Rastreator.com, Outsystems, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, Vegetables by Bayer, Visit California, Gamepix, James Edition and many others.
A very active member of the SEO community, Gianluca daily shares his insights and best practices on SEO, content, Search marketing strategy and the evolution of Search on social media channels such as X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and through the blog on his website: IloveSEO.net.
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