For most of its history, SEO has been a reactive discipline, being asked to “make it rank” once a site is built, with little input into the process.
Even crazier, most SEO professionals are assigned a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for which they are accountable, metrics tied to visibility, engagement, and revenue.
Still, they have no real control over the underlying systems that affect them. These metrics often rely on the performance of disconnected teams, including content, engineering, brand, and product, which don’t always share the same objectives.
When my previous agency, Global Strategies, was acquired by Ogilvy, I recommended that our team be viewed as building inspectors, not just an SEO package upsell added at the end, but involved at key phases when architects, engineers, and tradespeople had laid out the structural components.
Ideally, we’d come in after the site framing (wireframes) was complete, reviewing the plumbing (information architecture), electrical (navigation and links), and foundation (technical performance), but before the drywall and paint obscured what lies beneath.
We’d validate that the right materials were used and that construction followed a standard fit for long-term performance.
However, in reality, we were rarely invited into the planning stages because that was creative, and we were just SEO. We were usually brought in only after launch, tasked with fixing what had already been buried behind a visually appealing design.
Despite fighting for it, I was never a complete fan of this model; it made sense in the early days of search, when websites were simple, and ranking factors were more forgiving.
SEO practitioners identified crawl issues, adjusted metadata, optimized titles, fixed broken links, and retrofitted pages with keywords and internal links.
That said, I have long advocated for eliminating the need for most SEO actions by integrating the fixes into the roles and workflows that initially broke them.
Through education, process change, and content management system (CMS) innovation, much of what SEO fixes could, and should, become standard practice.
However, this has been a challenging sell, as SEO has often been viewed as less important than design, development, or content creation.
It was easier to assign SEO the role of cleanup crew rather than bake best practices into upstream systems and roles. We worked around CMS limitations, cleaned up after redesigns, and tried to reverse-engineer what Google wanted from the outside in.
But that role of identifying and fixing defects is no longer enough. And in the AI-driven search environment, it’s becoming obsolete.
Search Has Changed. Our Role Must Too.
Search engines today do far more than index and rank webpages. They extract answers, synthesize responses, and generate real-time content previews.
What used to be a linear search journey (query > list of links > website) has become a multi-layered ecosystem of zero-click answers, AI summaries, featured snippets, and voice responses.
Traditional SEO tactics, indexability, content relevance, and backlinks still matter in this environment, but only as part of a larger system.
The new currency of visibility is semantic clarity, machine-readability, and multi-system integration. SEO is no longer about optimizing a page. It’s about orchestrating a system.
This complexity requires us to transition from being just an inspector to becoming the Commissioning Authority (CxA) to meet the demands of this shift.
What Is A Commissioning Authority?
In modern architecture and construction, a Commissioning Authority is a specialized professional who ensures that all building systems, including HVAC, electrical, plumbing, safety, and lighting, function as intended in combination.
They are brought in not just to inspect but also to validate, test, and orchestrate performance.
They work on behalf of the building owner, aligning the construction output with the original design intent and operational goals. They look at interoperability, performance efficiency, long-term sustainability, and documentation.
They are not passive checkers. They are active enablers of success.
Why SEO Needs Commissioning Authorities
The modern website is no longer a standalone asset. It is a network of interconnected systems:
- Content strategy.
- CMS structure.
- Design and front-end frameworks.
- Analytics and tagging layers
- Schema and structured data.
- Internationalization and localization.
- Page speed and Core Web Vitals.
- AI answer optimization.
Today’s SEO, or whatever the latest alphabet soup acronym du jour is, and especially tomorrow, must be a Commissioning Authority for these systems. That means:
- Being involved at the blueprint stage, not just post-launch.
- Advocating for search visibility as a performance outcome.
- Ensuring that semantic signals, not just visual elements, are embedded in every page.
- Testing and validating that the site performs in AI environments, not just traditional search engine results pages (SERPs).
The Rise Of The Relevance Engineer
A key function within this evolved CxA role is that of the Relevance Engineer, a concept and term introduced by Mike King of iPullRank.
Mike has been one of the most vocal and insightful leaders on the transformation of SEO in the AI era, and his view is clear: The discipline must fundamentally evolve, both in practice and in how it is positioned within organizations.
Mike King’s perspective underscores that treating AI-driven search as simply an extension of traditional SEO is dangerously misguided.
Instead, we must embrace a new function, Relevance Engineering, which focuses on optimizing for semantic alignment, passage-level competitiveness, and probabilistic rankings, rather than deterministic keyword-based tactics.
The Relevance Engineer ensures:
- Each content element is structured and chunked for generative AI consumption.
- Content addresses layered user intent, from informational to transactional.
- Schema markup and internal linking reinforce topical authority and entity associations.
- The site’s architecture supports passage-level understanding and AI summarization.
In many ways, the Relevance Engineer is the semantic strategist of the SEO team, working hand-in-hand with designers, developers, and content creators to ensure that relevance is not assumed but engineered.
In construction terms, this might resemble a systems integration specialist. This expert ensures that electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and automation systems function individually and operate cohesively within an innovative building environment.
Relevance Engineering is more than a title; it’s a mindset shift. It emphasizes that SEO must now live at the intersection of information science, user experience, and machine interpretability.
From Inspector To CxA: How The Role Shifts
| SEO Pillar | Old Role: Building Inspector | New Role: Commissioning Authority |
| Indexability | Check crawl blocks after build | Design architecture for accessibility and rendering |
| Relevance | Patch in keywords post-launch | Map content to entity models and query intent upfront, guided by a Relevance Engineer |
| Authority | Chase links to weak content | Build a structured reputation and concept ownership |
| Clickability | Tweak titles and meta descriptions | Structure content for AI previews, snippets, and voice answers |
| User Experience | Flag issues in testing | Embed UX, speed, and clarity into the initial design |
Looking Ahead: The Next Generation Of SEO
As AI continues to reshape search behavior, SEO pros must adapt again. We will need to:
- Understand how content is deconstructed and repackaged by large language models (LLMs).
- Ensure that our information is structured, chunked, and semantically aligned to be eligible for synthesis.
- Advocate for knowledge modeling, not just keyword optimization.
- Encourage cross-functional integration between content, engineering, design, and analytics.
The next generation of SEO leaders will not be optimization specialists.
They will be systems thinkers, semantic strategists, digital performance architects, storytellers, performance coaches, and importantly, master negotiators to advocate and steer the necessary organizational, infrastructural, and content changes to thrive.
They will also be force multipliers – individuals or teams who amplify the effectiveness of everyone else in the process.
By embedding structured, AI-ready practices into the workflow, they enable content teams, developers, and marketers to do their jobs better and more efficiently.
The Relevance Engineer and Commissioning Authority roles are not just tactical additions but strategic leverage points that unlock exponential impact across the digital organization.
Final Thought
Too much article space has been wasted arguing over what to call this new era – whether SEO is dead, what the acronym should be, or what might or might not be part of the future.
Meanwhile, far too little attention has been devoted to the structural and intellectual shifts organizations must make to remain competitive in a search environment reshaped by AI.
Suppose we, as an industry, do not start changing the rules, roles, and mindset now. In that case, we’ll again be scrambling when the CEO demands to know why the company missed profitability targets, only to realize we’re buying back traffic we should have earned.
We’ve spent 30 years trying to retrofit what others built into something functional for search engines – pushing massive boulders uphill to shift monoliths into integrated digital machines. That era is over.
The brands that will thrive in the AI search era are those that elevate SEO from a reactive function to a strategic discipline with a seat at the planning table.
The professionals who succeed will be those who speak the language of systems, semantics, and sustained performance – and who take an active role in shaping the digital infrastructure.
The future of SEO is not about tweaking; it’s about taking the reins. It’s about stepping into the role of Commissioning Authority, aligning stakeholders, systems, and semantics.
And at its core, it will be driven by the precision of relevance engineering, and amplified by the force multiplier effect of integrated, strategic influence.
More Resources:
- How Enterprise Search And AI Intelligence Reveal Market Pulse
- This Is Why AI Won’t Take Your Job (Yet)
- The State Of AI In Marketing
Featured Image: Jack_the_sparow/Shutterstock
