Brittany Trafis: AI Search as a New Channel Beyond SEO

The line Brittany Trafis keeps coming back to is that AI search is not SEO 2.0. She built Soarion Digital as an AI-native agency rather than an agency with AI bolted onto the side, and she has a test for whether yours has done the same. Ask three questions past the pitch and see what is underneath. Key takeaways Treat it as a channel, not a version number. Her analogy is running Facebook ads exactly like Google ads and wondering why nothing works. Schema matters again, for a different reason. Not validation for its own sake, but what the markup tells a model that is in a hurry. Monitoring tools are a signal, not a measurement. Her one hard data point is referral traffic that actually landed on the site. AI search is the first channel in years where a small business genuinely starts level. She has clients with a quarter of a competitor’s budget showing up more often. Rebuild the workflow, do not retrofit it. Steps that ran to twenty-five now run to about four, because she started from what it should be. On this page A new channel, not a new version What schema is for now Monitoring is a signal, not a measurement Why small businesses are actually in this race Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper A new channel, not a new version The number one piece I say is AI search is not SEO 2.0.— Brittany Trafis She is not dismissing the foundation. Keywords, technical health and links still underpin the whole thing, and she says so first. The objection is to treating the new surface as an extension of the old one and then measuring it with the old scoreboard. It would almost be like when Facebook ads came out, if you were to say, I’m just going to run it like Google ads. Well, that wouldn’t work.— Brittany Trafis Her diagnostic for buyers is the useful part. If your agency says it has AI search covered, ask three more questions. She thinks the answers will reveal an SEO programme with a new label on the invoice. What schema is for now The most practical stretch of the interview is about markup, and it inverts twenty years of habit. Google trained the industry to satisfy a rigid specification. A model is reading for meaning and moving fast. What the LLM cares about is what is that schema telling me?— Brittany Trafis An FAQ block is the example she keeps returning to, because a question and its answer are exactly the shape of the thing being looked for. Adjusting schema, she says, can move citatio...