Search is changing quickly, and uncertainty around AI search, answer engines, citations and zero-click searches has left some companies questioning how much they should continue investing in SEO.
Freezing budgets or taking a "wait and see" approach might feel prudent. But organic trust and authority take time to build, and putting SEO on hold can create a momentum deficit that becomes increasingly expensive to recover.
The author knows agency owners and brand search leads who have seriously questioned whether they want to stick around — there's a lot to track and adapt to.
On the flip side, plenty of firms meet the uncertainty with a glass-half-full mentality, accepting that unknowns are part of the territory and nerding out over tests and new learnings.
SEO and AI visibility don't have an on-and-off switch. A colleague recently compared them to a vending machine: you can't put a dollar in and expect a predictable number of dollars to come back out.
Organic trust and authority compound over time. When you pause your efforts, you create an opportunity for others to fill the gap.
Be patient with expectations, knowing that organic growth takes time, without becoming paralyzed in execution.
If the dust eventually settles, stopping now could mean spending considerably more time and money to regain your baseline authority than you would have spent maintaining it, testing, learning, and building advantages along the way.
You need to find the balance between sacrificing your search foundation and falling into operational paralysis.
Traditional search results, newer AI search features, and emerging AI models all rely on consistent signals of trust and authority.
If you stop updating content, auditing technical aspects, or engaging in ways that build authority signals, your site becomes stale and less attractive to bots and your target audience.
These soft costs may not show up clearly on a dashboard.
You don't want to be talking about an empty funnel months from now and what you wish you'd done.
The author was recently asked in a large boardroom about the unknowns around AI optimization — whether to keep investing or pause until the definitive tactics are known.
We don't need to know every tactic or "trick" or exactly how AI algorithms or answer engines work. We need to stay focused on the fundamentals that support visibility across AI and search engines: original content, data, E-E-A-T, and content that fills the funnel.
Budget time and resources for testing and experimentation while monitoring where others are seeing success. But we can't abandon the foundations as we do so.
If your budget has already been reduced or reallocated, factor in what the author calls trigger events. Keep the lights on as much as possible while watching for them:
A trigger event is any force or friction that can significantly impact the ROI of your efforts, at whatever level or baseline you're operating.
These events should prompt you to look at current tactics, revisit strategy, and evaluate what should change. Sometimes you stay the course. Other times you make changes through a strategic lens.
Even in more "stable" SEO days we should have been testing. It's as important as ever now.
Something that works may not last forever. One highly acclaimed industry thought leader might have data that directly contradicts another, and they might both be right.
Lily Ray shared data suggesting popular listicle strategies may be backfiring, with some authors left out of their own industry lists — while the author is still seeing one show up prominently for a client's competitor.
Dedicate even a small amount of time or money to experiments. Don't make the tests your overall strategy, but don't cut them either.
Waiting for the search landscape to settle could be riskier than staying the course in uncharted waters.
That's hard to quantify and share with marketing, corporate leadership and other stakeholders. Waiting can lead to lost momentum and falling behind.
If you can quantify that risk, you can make the case for continuing to invest, keeping up with competitors who aren't pausing and optimizing for AI systems that aren't standing still either.
Use the vending machine analogy with executives. "You can't put a dollar in and expect a predictable number of dollars back" names the most common misconception in SEO budget conversations.
Quantify the three soft costs: share of voice lost, recovery cost, pipeline impact. Documenting even estimates for what the dashboard omits is what makes budget defensible.
Reject "wait until we know the definitive tactics." That is the boardroom answer: original content, data, E-E-A-T and funnel content stay valid without knowing how the algorithms work.
If budget is already cut, build the trigger event list first. Minimum maintenance plus watchfulness beats a full stop, and defining in advance what prompts a review is the key part.
Never zero out the test budget — the first line cut and the one that shouldn't be, per the author.
Accept contradictory industry data as normal. As with Lily Ray's listicle data versus the author's own observation, both can be right. Adjudicate with your own data.
Translate it into financial framing — see How SEO Lowers Blended CAC.
Prioritise what maintenance survives a cut — Rescuing Pages That Quietly Lose Rankings and The Data-Backed Case for Content Pruning both help.
Organic trust and authority compound over time, so pausing lets others fill the gap and makes regaining baseline authority far more expensive in time and money than maintaining it. The author calls this a momentum deficit.
Loss of market share or share of voice, longer recovery times and greater future investment, and the overall impact on sales or pipeline from failing to stay current and adapt.
Any force or friction that can significantly impact the ROI of your efforts — shifts in internal priorities, competitor changes, or major algorithm and LLM changes — used as a signal to revisit tactics and strategy.
Not every tactic or how the algorithms work, but the fundamentals supporting visibility across AI and search: original content, data, E-E-A-T and content that fills the funnel — while still budgeting for testing and experimentation.
To apply what you just read to your own site, start with a free audit of where things are now.
A strategist replies within 24 hours on business days.
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