Talk of a “search apocalypse” has dominated industry conversations since the emergence of generative AI, with many predicting the demise of the traditional search engine. Some forecasts add fuel to the fire, with Gartner, for example, projecting that traditional search engine volume will decline by 25% by 2026 as users turn to AI chatbots.
Looked at another way, however, the result is not less searching, but more searching in more places.
“The search apocalypse is a catchy headline, but I don’t think we’re at the apocalypse for search,” said Dan Toplitt, EVP, head of search and digital experience at KINESSO, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “In fact, search is probably more thriving than it ever has been in its history.”
A holistic, multi-platform view
According to Toplitt, marketers must now approach search with a media planner’s mindset, identifying all the various touchpoints where their audience is engaging with content. This marks a significant departure from the historical approach of concentrating budgets and optimization efforts on just a couple of dominant search engines. The agency world itself is adapting, with parent company IPG Mediabrands consolidating its data and tech units under the KINESSO brand last year to form a more unified entity.
“Search has been historically looked at as there are a couple of partners, a couple of engines that are taking up all of the search volume that exists and that’s where we go deploy our search budgets,” Toplitt explained. “But in reality, the new search order is that those searches are happening everywhere.”
The challenge for advertisers is to follow the audience wherever they go, a journey that now spans a much wider digital landscape than before. “People are searching on social platforms, on retail platforms, on AI platforms, on the traditional search platforms,” he added. “So you need to have a more holistic multi-platform view to your search strategy.”
Measuring the ‘dark search’ universe
This new, fragmented order creates measurement and attribution headaches. As new platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity enter the mix, traditional metrics become less reliable. Some of these platforms, Toplitt noted, are either new to the search game or lack the robust measurement tools marketers are accustomed to.
“The measurement that’s coming from some of these platforms is potentially limited, in some cases almost non-existent,” he said. Toplitt described a phenomenon of “dark search,” analogous to dark social, where a vast amount of user engagement happens within closed ecosystems that are impossible to track. “You have all these engagements within a search ecosystem that are not attributable.”
For marketers, this means recalibrating the value of certain metrics, such as keyword rankings, and focusing instead on connecting activities back to core business outcomes. “Finding ways to connect the activities in search and the metrics that you’re getting out of your search marketing programs to driving business objectives, that’s the key part of the attribution question for search marketers,” Toplitt said.
SEO in the age of AI
With the ground shifting, what is search engine optimization anymore? Is it now a battle to influence AI training data rather than mastering traditional SEO? Toplitt believes it is a blend of old and new, cautioning against the hype that an entirely new discipline is required. The core principles remain, but the tactics are evolving.
“The AI models are trained on what they’re trained on and they’ll be updated over time, but that change doesn’t happen as frequently as content is produced,” he said. “The same tactics in essence are applied.” While the change feels dramatic, some industry analysts predict a more gradual fusion, with AI discovery tools expected to merge more seamlessly with traditional search over the next few years.
Toplitt urged a pragmatic perspective, warning against the impulse to declare all previous knowledge obsolete. “What we see in the market conversation at the moment is there’s some conversation around an entirely new capability and that is taking it a little bit too far in our opinion,” he concluded. “It’s part of the same strategy. It’s just there’s specific tactics that you might deploy that weren’t relevant or even existing a few years ago.”
You’re watching “A Beet.TV Leadership Summit with IPG Mediabrands at Advertising Week 2025, presented by Kerv, Samsung Ads, The Trade Desk & Teads” For more videos from this summit, please visit this page.
