The Agency Playbook for Surviving the Agentic AI Era

Search is moving from queries typed into a box to conversations held with systems that understand intent, context, and outcomes. People no longer look for pages. They look for solutions, guidance, and confidence that they are making the right choice.

Agentic AI pushes this shift further. Instead of waiting for instructions, agents act on goals. They discover information, compare options, trigger workflows, and adjust based on feedback. For digital leaders, this means visibility is no longer only a ranking problem. It becomes a problem of influence inside AI systems.

SEO now touches product, data, knowledge management, and experience design. This playbook explains how to prepare for that shift, build capability, and lead change.

Search Is Becoming AI-Mediated

AI systems have become the layer between users and the web. They read content on behalf of users, make selections instead of requiring users to browse, and influence decisions in ways that search pages once did.

This shift changes how people interact with information. Users now ask broader, more complex questions, expecting systems to understand nuance and intent. The traditional act of navigating through links is giving way to direct answers and immediate actions.

Content can no longer be designed solely for human readers. It must also be structured in ways that AI systems can interpret accurately and confidently. In this environment, trust and evidence carry more weight than keywords or search optimization tactics.

Winning in search today means becoming part of the models that shape decisions, not just appearing in the results.

What Agentic AI Means For SEO And Digital

Agentic AI is changing how people discover and choose brands. Discovery now depends on how well models learn from your content, the paths users take on your site, and the external signals that establish credibility. These systems decide when your brand is relevant, based on what they understand and trust.

During evaluation, AI compares your product, price, quality, reviews, and suitability for a given user against other options. It looks for proof, tests claims, and weighs real signals over marketing language.

When supporting decisions, AI doesn’t just provide information. It actively guides users toward what it considers the best fit. Your brand might be brought forward or quietly passed over, depending on how well it matches user needs.

In this landscape, SEO is no longer just about publishing content. It’s about shaping how AI systems perceive your brand and when they choose to recommend it.

New Operating Model For SEO

The future of search brings marketing, product, and data teams into a shared effort. Success depends on how well these areas work together to shape how AI systems perceive and present your brand.

The key is building structured knowledge that AI can easily process and apply. Instead of designing for clicks and views, focus on creating journeys that help users complete tasks through the systems guiding them. It’s also critical to train these systems with the right brand messages, supported by clear evidence and consistent proof points.

Ongoing visibility requires monitoring how models reference your brand, how they rank it, and how they reason about its relevance. This means continuously refining the signals you send, improving your content, updating product data, and reinforcing trust in every interaction.

The goal remains clear and hasn’t really changed from our technical goals for SEO. Make it easy for AI agents to understand, trust, and ultimately recommend your brand.

Maturity Model

The goal is not automation alone. It is intelligence and improvement at scale.

Technical And Data Foundations

To prepare for agentic SEO, organizations need more than traditional content systems built for publishing. They need strong foundations that help AI systems understand, evaluate, and act with confidence.

This starts with clarity, which means crafting messaging that is consistent, accurate, and easy for machines to interpret. Structure is also essential, requiring content, data, and signals to be organized in ways that align with how AI systems process and reason through information.

Key components of this are:

• Structured data that turns content into machine‑readable knowledge.
• Knowledge graphs that explain relationships between products, categories, and needs.
• Taxonomy and naming standards to ensure consistency across pages, feeds, and assets.
• APIs and automation for publishing and optimization, so agents can trigger updates.
• Clean product and service data, including specifications, pricing, and availability.
• Evaluation systems to audit AI outputs and detect hallucinations or misalignment.
• Identity and trust signals, including reviews, authority, certifications, and product proof.

This calls for a shift from simply building web pages to creating a well-organized information architecture. The goal is to structure information in a way that AI systems can easily navigate, understand, and apply.

In practice, this means bringing together product data, content metadata, and customer intent into a single, connected system. It involves defining the key entities your business represents, such as products or services, and mapping how they relate to what users are trying to accomplish. Content feeds and structured data should reflect the actual state of the business rather than just marketing language.

Equally important is creating feedback loops that show how AI systems interpret and reference your brand. These insights help you see where your content is being used, how it is being understood, and whether it is guiding users toward your brand. With this information, you can keep refining what you share to improve how systems recognize and recommend you.

Instead of asking, “How do we rank for this query?” leaders will ask, “How do systems understand us, trust us, and act on our information?”

KPI And Measurement Model

Traditional key performance indicators still hold value, but they no longer capture the full picture. Rankings and session metrics continue to provide insight, yet they now exist within a broader framework shaped by how AI systems retrieve, interpret, and act on information. Ranking reports will sit alongside AI retrieval dashboards, and session counts will be evaluated alongside metrics focused on task completion and user outcomes.

In my opinion, you should also be looking to monitor:

• Share of voice in AI assistants.
• Retrieval and inclusion rate in AI answers.
• Brand alignment and brand safety in model outputs.
• Presence in multi‑step reasoning chains.
• Task completion and conversion paths from AI systems.
• Cost per automated workflow and cost per agent‑driven action.
• Model education, data freshness, and trust scores.

As measurement evolves, the focus moves from tracking visitor numbers to understanding how AI systems shape decisions. To navigate this shift, leaders should design metrics that reflect influence within these systems. Visibility will measure whether the brand is appearing in AI-generated responses and assistant-led interactions.

Accuracy will assess whether the brand is being represented correctly and safely across touchpoints. Trust will reflect whether AI systems choose your content and signals over others when making recommendations. Action will capture whether AI-driven experiences result in tangible outcomes like leads, bookings, or purchases. Efficiency will show whether AI agents are reducing manual effort, improving speed, and delivering better user experiences.

Success will no longer be defined by visibility alone but by a brand’s ability to perform across discovery, decision support, and operational impact.

Talent And Capability Model

Agentic SEO is not a standalone skill set, it draws from a mix of disciplines that span marketing, data, and product. Success in this space requires a collaborative approach, where expertise is integrated rather than siloed.

Future-facing teams bring together SEO and content strategy, data and automation engineering, product and user experience thinking, as well as governance and prompt development. Legal and compliance awareness also play a critical role, ensuring that outputs remain responsible and aligned with brand and regulatory standards.

These teams operate in cross-functional pods, organized around delivering customer outcomes rather than managing individual channels. This structure allows them to move faster, adapt to change, and create more cohesive experiences across AI-driven platforms.

Modern SEO teams include several key roles. The SEO strategist focuses on how AI systems search, retrieve, and rank content. The data engineer manages the integrity of structured content, metadata, and live data feeds. The automation specialist builds the workflows and agents that connect information to user actions. The AI evaluator audits model outputs to ensure accuracy, brand alignment, and safety. The product partner bridges SEO efforts with real user journeys, making sure that discovery leads to meaningful interaction and conversion.

As this approach matures, teams will spend less time producing content manually and more time designing the systems, signals, and experiences that guide AI behavior and improve how users discover and engage with the brand.

The First 90 days

Days 1 To 30: Foundation And Alignment

• Audit content, data, and search performance.
• Map where AI already touches customer journeys.
• Identify gaps in structure, trust signals, and data quality.
• Set goals for AI visibility and agent‑driven workflows.

Days 31 To 60: Build And Test Pilots

• Launch structured data and knowledge base improvements.
• Test AI‑assisted content and QA pipelines.
• Introduce early agent monitoring for SEO signals.
• Create evaluation benchmarks for AI accuracy and brand safety.

Days 61 To 90: Scale And Govern

• Deploy automation in high‑impact workflows.
• Formalize model governance and feedback loops.
• Train cross‑functional teams on AI‑ready processes.
• Build dashboards for AI visibility, trust, and conversion.

Future Outlook

Search will not disappear. It will merge into tasks, journeys, and decisions across devices and interfaces. Brands that train AI systems, structure knowledge, and build agent‑ready operations will lead.

The winners will not be those who automate content. They will be those who help users and systems make better decisions at speed and scale.

More Resources:

• Explaining Agentic SEO To The C-Level
• Ex-Microsoft SEO Pioneer On Why AI’s Biggest Threat To SEO Isn’t What You Think
• State Of SEO 2026

Featured Image: Collagery/Shutterstock

I’m carefully watching the development of agentic SEO, as I believe over the next few years, as capabilities improve, agents will have a significant impact on the industry. I’m not suggesting this will be a seamless replacement of talent with a highly capable machine intelligence. There is going to be a lot of trial and error, but I do think we are going to see radical shifts in how the online space operates. Not unlike how automation transformed manufacturing.

Marie Haynes has long been a well-known expert in the industry who shared her learnings on E-E-A-T and Google’s algorithm through her popular Search News You Can Use newsletter.

A few years ago, Marie made the decision to retire her SEO agency and went all in on learning AI systems, as she believes we’re at the beginning of a profound transformation.

Marie wrote a recent article, “Hype or not, should you be investing in AI agents?” about what SEOs need to understand about this rapidly developing space. So, I invited her to IMHO to dive more into this topic.

Marie believes AI will radically change our world for the better, and she believes every business will have AI agents.

You can watch the full interview with Marie on the IMHO recording at the end, or continue reading the article summary.

“The idea that we optimize for appearing as one of the 10 blue links on Google is already gone.”

Experimenting With Gemini Gems

Marie’s practical advice for anyone wanting to understand agents is to start with Gems:

“If you take one thing from this conversation, it’s to try to create some Gemini Gems,” Marie emphasized. “Eventually I’m fairly certain that these gems will morph into agentic workflows.”

To illustrate, she shared a process she called her “originality Gem,” which contains a 500+ word prompt that captures how she evaluates content, along with examples of truly original content in its knowledge base.

“We’re not far from the day where all of my processes that I do for SEO can be handled by agentic workflows that occasionally pull on me for some advice,” Marie said.

The Power Of Chaining Agents

The next progression and real potential come from chaining agents together to create agentic workflows.

The power that this gives opportunity to is that we can use our knowledge and experience to teach AI like a team of assistants to do the work that can be automated.

We would then orchestrate the process and, like a conductor, sit and guide the agents to perform the work as we become the human-in-the-loop to review the output.

Once we have downloaded our knowledge to the agents, and the systems work, we can scale ourselves to handle exponential clients.

“Instead of me handling just a small handful of clients, all of a sudden I could have a hundred clients and do the same work because it’s all going through my workflow,” Marie said.

The challenge here is the skill in prompting the agents and constructing them to achieve the desired output.

“The future of our industry is not about optimizing for an engine, but about acting as the interface between businesses and technology, and we will be the human experts who teach, guide, and implement AI agents.”

Why Gemini Over ChatGPT

I asked Marie why she focuses on Gemini over ChatGPT, and her response was based on futureproofing: “The main reason why I use Gemini is not to accomplish things today, but to grow my skills in what’s coming tomorrow.”

Marie went on to explain that “Google’s got a whole ecosystem that you can see it coming together like right now,” and she believes that Google will be the winner in the AI race.

“I think that Google is going to win the game. I think it’s always been their game to win. So I make it a point to use Gemini as much as I can.”

Transformations Will Follow The Money

Marie’s prediction for the next few years is for workflows to become embedded. “Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said this way back in March, that, in two to four years, every agentic workflow will be deeply embedded into our day-to-day work.”

However, she thinks the real transformations will come when businesses start making money from agentic workflows.

“It’s wild how many trillions of dollars are being spent on developing AI, yet there’s not a whole lot of financial output at this point,” Marie noted, referencing a McKinsey study showing 95% of businesses using AI aren’t making money from it yet [Editor’s note: McKinsey was 80%; MIT said 95%].

“It’s very similar to SEO. There was a day where there were just a small handful of people who figured out how to improve on Google. Once people started making good money from understanding SEO, there was a lot of attention. Tools were created and a whole industry popped up. I think that’s going to happen again. Will it be within the next 12 months? I don’t know. I feel like it might be a little bit longer.”

What SEOs Should Do Now

Overwhelm is a real issue to be aware of, and with developments moving so quickly, there is a huge learning curve to essentially retrain. Even for those working on this full-time.

Marie made a commitment when she went all in on AI research. “I made it my full-time job to stay on top of what’s happening, and even I get overwhelmed with all the stuff that’s happening with AI,” she explained.

Marie’s advice is to keep learning, keep trying things, and experiment with writing prompts.

“The next time you go to do a task, try to create an agent that would do this for you,” she suggested. Even if you don’t finish, you’ll learn skills for the next attempt.

Also, persevere instead of taking the first failure. “Try to figure out what they can do, instead of just telling everybody, ‘Oh, it can’t do this.’ Find ways you can use it.”

For development teams, she recommends vibe coding with tools like Google’s Anti Gravity or AI Studio. “You can deploy a whole website without even knowing any HTML,” Marie said.

She also advocates for deep research reports using either Gemini or ChatGPT to analyze how competitors are using AI, providing immediate value to clients while building skills.

The Future Of SEO

Marie referenced Sundar Pichai calling AI technology more profound than fire or electricity in its impact on society. Despite acknowledging her bias after investing significant time in understanding AI, she maintains there’s going to be societal disruption.

“Being able to understand what’s happening in the world and distill it down to what’s important to your clients will be a superpower,” she said. Although, she does admit, there is still a lot of learning and grey areas to move through as we navigate the edge of technology.

“If you’re feeling lost, you’re not alone because imagine right now we’re sort of at the forefront of all of these changes happening.”

For those who do persevere, there will be significant rewards. Eventually, business owners will be clamoring for people who can explain AI and implement it. The professionals who develop these skills now will be extremely valuable in the future.

“The people who know how to use AI, know how to create agents, and know how to make money from AI are going to be extremely valuable in the future.”

Watch the full video interview with Marie Haynes here:

Thank you to Marie Haynes for offering her insights and being my guest on IMHO.

More Resources:

• AI Has Changed How Search Works
• Marketing To AI Agents Is The Future – Research Shows Why
• Ex-Microsoft SEO Pioneer On Why AI’s Biggest Threat To SEO Isn’t What You Think

This post was originally published on Shelley Edits.

Featured Image: Shelley Walsh/Search Engine Journal

Many SEO agency owners have a vision of growing their business, building a model that drives recurring revenue without having to sacrifice their time, energy, or sanity.

Unfortunately, many agency owners get stuck in a plateau. They hit a ceiling on how many clients they can manage, yet don’t have the cash flow to hire a team. What’s an ambitious agency owner to do?

In this guide, I’m sharing my growth strategies as a 10+ year SEO agency owner – from how to expand to new markets to how to implement a sustainable, scalable agency model.

A CEO’s Secret To Scalable SEO

How did a hopelessly distracted C student grow a 100-person global SEO agency?

Well, it wasn’t through “growth hacks”, offshoring, or selling courses.

It was through a passion for the craft: 30,000+ hours obsessing over the algorithm, speaking to clients, testing strategies, and doing the work.

There is no shortcut.

But there is a mindset.

It’s a mindset that’s attentive to the needs of real business owners. One that’s future-forward, recognizing the unique challenges business owners face today. And a mindset that’s creative in crafting an SEO service that helps business owners overcome these challenges.

This starts with understanding the market, finding the gaps, and bringing something unique to the table.

Here’s how to do that.

1. Trim The Fat

Very often, we agency owners get stuck in a rut of managing a high volume of low-paying clients. This burns out our resources and makes it very difficult to scale.

If you can’t take on more, higher-paying contracts, you have very little room to grow. That’s when it’s time to “trim the fat”, so to speak.

First, identify the clients that are causing the biggest headaches for the least amount of contract value.

• How much time is being put into managing those clients?
• Are the time, energy, and resources worth the measly revenue for your business?

Next, identify your best clients – not just in terms of money, but the client-agency relationship.

• What are the characteristics that make working with them enjoyable?
• Are these types of accounts profitable?
• If so, what is the margin?

The tough news is that you will likely need to let some of the difficult clients go. But this is just to make space for more enjoyable, lucrative projects. Doing so also opens up breathing room for you to get more creative with your service offerings.

2. Remove The Operational Bottlenecks

Besides time-consuming clients, there are likely other factors that are hindering your agency’s growth. This could be the lack of team resources to take on new projects, a lack of skills to reach that next caliber of service, or a lack of time on your part to bring it all together.

This is the time to take a good, hard look at your agency structure, resources, and processes.

Here are a few common issues that can lead to inefficiency (and, ultimately, stagnation) in your business:

• Lack of scalable systems to facilitate a seamless client intake to service to retention model.
• Poorly defined roles for your team members, leading to confusion and churn.
• Reliance on manual processes, slowing down the speed of service and creating bottlenecks in fulfillment.
• Insufficient team training, leading to poor service quality.

Identifying the bottlenecks is the first step in fixing them. Trust me, this isn’t just about good housekeeping; if your agency works like a well-oiled machine, it’s better positioned to expand to new markets and take on more clients.

3. Assess The Financial Health Of Your Agency

Now it’s time to get your financial house in order. The last thing you want to do is start selling SEO to new markets without first establishing a profitable, sustainable revenue growth model.

If available, look at your agency’s past 2+ years’ Profit and Loss statements.

• How much revenue is your agency generating year after year?
• What are your expenses?
• Are you charging enough to offset the costs of personnel, software, your salary, etc.?

Analyze your financial reports to look for inefficiencies.

• Is there a history of overspending?
• Underearning?
• Inconsistent cash flow?

This activity isn’t meant to deter you from expanding to new markets; rather, it’s a practice of taking a look at your business financials and making data-informed decisions.

I highly recommend having a health cash reserve to help you manage unexpected costs and/or potential setbacks as you expand to new markets. Change can come with some unpredictability, so the more you can give yourself a cushion, the better.

4. Identify High-Growth Markets

By this point let’s assume your agency is financially sound, you have the space to take on new clients (because you have trimmed the fat), and have put systems in place to facilitate growth. How do you identify the hot new markets for expansion?

One way is to “stay in the know” by monitoring industry trends and news. Outlets like our very own Search Engine Journal are great at covering emerging markets, technologies, SEO applications, and more.

Another source of market research is Google Trends, where you can spot a rise in search volumes and emerging keywords. For example, at the time of writing this article, there was a significant uptick in topics related to law and government.

I also recommend reading industry reports and surveys to see what’s new in the market. For instance, Forbes often covers ‘emerging markets’ by location, demographics, and industries.

Look for opportunities that indicate increasing and sustained growth. For example, the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on the upswing for quite some time, while others (like all the craze about Instagram Threads) fizzle out.

5. Look For The Gaps

Look for opportunities in which your competitors have yet to capitalise on a new market or growth trend. If you’re able to beat them to the punch, you’ll be better positioned to win the lion’s share of the market.

There are a few ways to do this. For one, you can be the first to launch a service offering to a new/emerging market. However, another way to “fill the gap” is to offer a different take on an existing service/model.

For example, say there’s been an increase in demand for SEO services by tree removal service providers as a result of local storms (this has really happened).

In the midst of other marketing agencies pushing generic SEO packages, perhaps you offer a “storm-response” -focused digital strategy, including rapid content updates and pay-per-click ads emphasizing emergency services.

This really requires you to think outside the box (remember, Mindset) to figure out 1) what the market needs, 2) whether you can be first to fill the gap, and 3) what makes you different from other SEO providers.

6. Restructure Your SEO Offering

Scaling up your SEO agency requires adaptability. Stagnation is a real agency killer. To maintain an upward trajectory, you need to make some changes to your SEO service offerings.

For example, AI has been a hot topic for quite some time. While many agencies claim to leverage AI to streamline the content creation process, your claim to fame could be that you don’t use AI, and instead offer a customized content model to provide additional value to businesses.

Or perhaps instead of offering soup-to-nuts SEO services, you realize Content is the most profitable, so you niche down to focus on content strategy and blogging.

Restructuring your services doesn’t necessarily need to mean changing what you offer, though. It could mean changing how you offer it.

Like if you typically provide customized SEO strategies (that change month to month), perhaps you find it more economical to offer out-of-the-box SEO plans that include the main components most businesses need to see traffic growth.

In my own SEO agency, Hennessey Digital, I noticed where some of our services were “good to have” but not “need to have”, or even services clients never ended up subscribing to.

We focused on the services that provided the best results for clients. And we are constantly adapting to the times, incorporating new technologies and strategies.

7. Build A Scalable Team

The truth is, it’s very difficult to grow your SEO agency with a team of one. At some point, you will need to bring on support, not only to manage the growing client load but also to offset gaps in your own skillsets.

A great entrepreneur can recognize their constraints and see the strengths in others. New team members contribute new ideas, new ways of doing things, and new processes to help economize your business.

They may also have insight into the new markets you are looking to expand to. For example, if your agency has historically worked with home services providers, and now you’re looking to expand to law firms, hiring a Marketing Manager with experience in the legal industry could be a huge benefit.

Start by identifying the top 3 challenges your business is currently facing — and how hiring a skilled team member could offset these challenges. If the cost of hiring is easily offset by the new revenue brought in, it’s a done deal!

Maybe you can’t hire someone full-time right away. That’s okay! Consider outsourcing to start and then scale up incrementally as your business grows.

Scale Your SEO Agency With Confidence

Scaling up an SEO agency comes with its challenges, from resource limitations to difficult clients to financial constraints.

But most of these can be mitigated by proper planning, trimming the fat in your business, and shifting your mindset from solopreneur to CEO.

It’s what’s allowed me to grow my SEO business from a solo practice to a global agency. And while that didn’t happen overnight, it was made easier once I was able to identify the gaps in my own skill set and find great people to inject creativity into my business.

Every agency owner is capable of scaling up — just look for those gaps and bring a fresh take to the market!

More resources: 

• How Brands Can Have Successful Agency Relationships [Part 1]
• 5 Ways To Leverage Business Coaching To Grow Your Marketing Agency
• A Guide To Essential Tools For SEO Agencies

Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock