Search everywhere: An interview with Andy Mollison on the future of AI search innovation

Hi Andy, and a big welcome to the team. You’ve joined Varn at a pivotal moment for the industry. How would you describe the shift we are seeing from “old-school/traditional SEO” to the “search everywhere” world we are now in?

It’s exciting! SEO had been a bit ‘stale’ for a number of years with not much having changed and Google being so dominant. As an industry, we’re so used to change and innovation, that while it hadn’t become boring, it had become a bit predictable.

So, it’s nice to have something new to build towards. Being curious and wanting to figure out why things work is what makes good SEOs, so this is a great time in the industry for curious SEOs to shine through.

That being said, while AI search is the new shiny thing for most people, it doesn’t change a huge amount in terms of best practices and strategic guidance. The same rules apply in terms of creating great experiences for your users – if you’re not doing that, you were already behind, it’s just been amplified by AI search now.

With the way AI collects information and presents it to users, and all of the ways there are to search for information nowadays, we’re finding ourselves using the phrase ‘Search Everywhere’ much more often.

Whether that be on Google, TikTok or ChatGPT, the same rules apply: making your brand as visible as possible as a true authority, at the right part of the journey. Search is now about owning the entire discovery journey, not just the Google part of it. 

As our new Search & Innovation Director, and with all these big changes and challenges out there when it comes to search and discovery, what do you think is the single biggest “search myth” that you want to debunk for our clients this year?

I think the biggest search myth at the moment is that there’s a one-size-fits-all approach to AI search. There’s not!

There’s no getting away from the fact that good marketing is still (and always has been) good marketing. There’s no cheat sheet, there’s no quick win to being successful, you have to earn it.

While there are some basics to follow to make sure you’re being included in AI search, actually being successful requires hard work and good strategy.

Can you share what was it about Varn’s vision for 2026 that made you want to lead our innovation efforts?

The team at Varn are such data experts that we’re so well positioned to make the most of this changing market. With such expertise is analysing big datasets, now more than ever, this skillset is so valuable.

I love being challenged and working with a driven and determined team, so being able to work with such like-minded ‘ideas’ people makes it such an exciting team to lead.

It’s so rare to find a team that cares so much about the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’; we’re so intrigued by the change in the industry, and that’s exactly what clients need in this chaotic and everchanging market.

We talk a lot about AI visibility at Varn, and lots of people are now talking about GEO and Generative Engine Optimisation as the new industry buzzword. Plus, many brands are really nervous that AI search means fewer clicks to their websites. How do you think GEO and AI visibility should be considered to ensure that even if user behavior changes, our clients’ brand authority and commercial growth actually increase?

Measuring your performance in AI search is fundamentally very different to measuring performance in SEO, so there’s definitely some considerations to be made there.

While, yes, you are probably going to see less clicks to your website (especially for informational queries), the benefit is that users are going to land on your website further down the funnel, more well educated and ready to buy.

So, it’s really important that you’re measuring your market share (and sentiment) at that awareness stage to know how well positioned your brand is when your customers are doing that entry-level research.

We do this with our AI Visibility Framework and with AI tracking in general, to better understand the topics where our clients are performing, and where they need to do better. By breaking it down into topics we can help to identify opportunities and minimise threat from competitors.

Getting the AI search journey right means capitalising on those topics where users are already invested and already educated, and are much further down the sales funnel, and that’s ultimately a massive win for your conversion metrics.

So we know that search is really shifting, and people are searching on TikTok, Amazon, or YouTube and Reddit as well as Google and these new AI platforms like ChatGPT. How do you see your team at Varn helping our clients to show up exactly where their audience is looking, rather than just where it’s “easiest” to track?

Different industries and different target audiences have totally different footprints when it comes to the ways they search and the platforms they use. It’s all about being seen in the right place at the right time, and that’s where we can help.

It might not be that you need to create video content for every service or product for example, but there will likely be a part of your audience where being present on TikTok or YouTube is really important towards making a conversion.

At Varn, we’re so well positioned as data experts to understand exactly where you need to be visible in order to gain market dominance – and that’s going to be really important in this ‘Search Everywhere’ world – to have that insight about truly where your users are searching, and how and why, will really benefit creating the best marketing strategy for your business going forwards.

If you were a CMO, what is the one thing you would change about how you allocate your “search” budget to stay ahead of these changing behaviours?

I think if you’re looking at how you invest in your search marketing budget, your key areas are going to be influencing the things that you can control.

For example, you can control the messaging on your own website, the content that you put out and the words that you write. You need to know what you should be writing about, though, and therefore you need a good content strategy behind you. That’s nothing new and has been a backbone of good search marketing for many years.

However, what’s gone under the radar for a while and probably not been prioritised enough by most businesses in terms of search marketing, is Digital PR and off-page marketing.

Now that we have AI search effectively regurgitating the information it reads online, you need to make sure your online off-site presence is better than ever. This means ensuring your product or brand is positively placed in all of the crucial places that your customers could be researching. It’s not just customers researching now, it’s AI platforms gathering that data and using it for answers when a would-be customer is doing their research in an AI search engine.

You can control this, and with our data and digital PR teams, we can help to support you to understand where your presence is poor – and, how to fix it.

With “search everywhere” we are seeing that data can get very messy, very quickly. What should marketeers be looking at to make sure they can make informed decisions based on their data, and how should they actually measure the ROI of being visible?

The way users are interacting with AI search in particular means that we’re frequently seeing users visit a website with so much more knowledge than they ever had previously. They are so much more well educated with all of the research they can do before even visiting a website.

This means the user journey has changed; no longer will users necessarily read all of the information on your website, they might already know it. As such, it’s more likely than ever before that the ‘awareness stage’ content on your site might just not be part of the journey anymore – from a tracking perspective anyway. But, this doesn’t mean that information wasn’t hugely valuable for informing a customer before they even visited your site..!

Additionally, we’re seeing a mix-up of traffic sources too. “Zero click” is absolutely a thing, whereby users are getting so much information from AI search that they simply don’t need to visit a website to answer their questions anymore. Again, this doesn’t mean that organic search isn’t hugely valuable for your user journey!

Get used to reporting on overall website performance (conversions, revenue), rather than attributing to specific traffic sources. Organic search is going to be down on traffic if you’re comparing it to pre-AI search, that’s just a fact. All of your marketing needs to be working together towards the same goals, so “don’t judge a book by its cover”, and start getting more granular with your reporting.

You can use visibility metrics to understand how well you’re performing in AI search, to know if you’re truly being seen in the right places, before the user decides on which product or which service to choose. We use API scrapers to pull in this data for our clients, allowing us to expose where opportunities can be found, and also just to monitor if our clients are under threat for any specific topics.

What can our clients expect to see from the Varn innovation team in the next 6-12 months?

If we don’t innovate, we’ll get left behind, and so it’s such a crucial time in the industry for us to demonstrate our expertise.

As such, we’ve already made great work on numerous AI Visibility Framework projects for various clients. We’ve learned a lot already to be able to refine our process to be even more insightful and rewarding for clients. If you’re looking to truly understand where your brand is visible in AI search, and where it’s not, then this is a product that can really unearth some great findings.

We’ve also on the road to creating an Agentic Search Usability Audit to test how well websites perform with agentic AI users in mind – something that we see being adopted by several AI platforms in the not too distant future – ensuring your website can allow an AI to take a proper user journey all the way through to making a purchase or making a booking is going to be huge for e-commerce sites in particular, so we see this as being quite a priority for us to get right.

We’re also seeing a lot of clients with data issues, in particular following cookie consent changes. If your data isn’t accurate, measuring success becomes impossible. This has led to us investing in Server Side Tracking and Big Query products – reliable tracking of data is so crucial in today’s ‘search everywhere’ world, we can’t make assumptions and get away with it.We’re constantly keeping an eye on what’s developing in the world of AI search, and have our own Innovation team shaping the future of what’s considered gold-standard in terms of AI audits. If you have any ideas of data or audits you’d like to see us look into, please do get in touch.

Do get in touch with Andy at [email protected] if you have any questions about helping you show up exactly where your audience is looking and if you are ready to future-proof your search strategy you can also contact our expert team.