Webinar Recording & Insights: Search Has Changed: What Every Marketer Needs to Know About Staying Visible in an AI Era

Webinar Recording & Insights

In our recent Digital Doctors’ webinar, Search Has Changed: What Every Marketer Needs to Know About Staying Visible in an AI Era, we explored how search has evolved from a ranking-based system into an answer-led experience, and what that shift means for marketers responsible for visibility, performance and decision-making.

This session wasn’t designed to sell a solution or introduce another acronym. It was designed to provide a clear, practical explanation of how search visibility has evolved, how AI fits into that evolution, and what that means for marketers responsible for performance and decision-making.

You can watch the full webinar recording below.

Watch the Webinar

What’s Actually Changed

Historically, search visibility was largely defined by rankings. If you appeared prominently on page one, you were visible and often trusted by default.

Over time, search engines evolved into trust systems, prioritising quality, authority and usefulness. At the same time, the search experience itself became more answer-led, with summaries, snippets and rich features appearing before users clicked through to websites.

Generative AI builds on this evolution.

Rather than presenting options, AI systems interpret questions, summarise information, and deliver confident answers. These answers increasingly shape understanding and shortlisting before a website visit happens and sometimes instead of one.

Visibility is no longer confined to results pages. It now exists wherever answers are created.

Why Rankings Alone No Longer Tell the Full Story

Traditional SEO metrics remain important, but they no longer capture the full picture.

AI-generated summaries, particularly inside Google, can absorb much of the user’s intent, reducing clicks even when rankings remain strong. At the same time, AI assistants outside Google are being used to explore options, compare providers and frame decisions earlier in the journey.

This creates a disconnect that many teams are now experiencing:
Performance looks stable, but outcomes feel weaker.

The issue isn’t necessarily SEO relevance of impact- it’s that influence is shifting upstream.

The Risk of AI Invisibility

One of the most important concepts discussed in the session is AI invisibility.

AI invisibility occurs when brands are absent from AI-generated answers, meaning they aren’t mentioned, compared or framed when understanding is first formed.

When that happens:

• Decisions are shaped without your brand
• Competitors define the category narrative
• You enter the journey late, judged against expectations you didn’t set

This risk is difficult to detect using traditional reporting, because it happens outside rankings and traffic data. But its impact is real and growing.

What Still Matters

None of this replaces SEO.

Strong SEO foundations remain essential for eligibility: ensuring your content can be found, understood and included in the first place. Clear content, authority and consistency still underpin visibility, for both search engines and AI systems.

What’s changed is how that visibility needs to be understood and measured.

SEO determines whether you can be included.
AI determines how you’re interpreted once you are.

Making Visibility Measurable Again

As visibility moves into AI-driven environments, marketers need new ways to understand:

• Where they’re included and where they’re absent
• How they compare to competitors
• How their brand is being described
• Which sources influence AI confidence

That’s why we introduced Prism by Fingo, a framework designed to surface these signals and connect them back to decisions teams can act on, alongside traditional SEO reporting.

Watch the Full Session

If you’re responsible for search visibility or digital performance and want a clear, non-technical view of how AI is reshaping discovery, the full webinar is available to watch on demand.