Nasser:

Welcome to Shift Happens, I’m Nasser Sahlool. Today on Shift Happens, I’m joined by Thom Lodge, Associate Director of SEO. Thom works with brands every day to help them stay visible as search shifts towards AI answers, summaries, and recommendation style results.

In this episode, we’re unpacking why SEO success looks different now, and we’ll walk through a six step process for AI ready SEO, a practical framework teams can use to stay visible, credible, and chosen even when influence happens without a click.

Hey Thom, welcome to the show.

Thom:

Thanks, Nasser. A pleasure to be here.

Nasser:

So, Thom, it’s 2026 and everything has changed. So now everyone’s an SEO expert. Everyone’s a tourist, right?

Thom:

It seems that way. Right? We’ve had kind of had a while of kind of being left alone to do our thing. And now everyone has decided that they know the best way to do it. It’s an interesting time to be alive as an SEO.

Nasser:

It reminds me of, this analogy. So, as a guy with great taste, I know that the best, superhero movies are obviously the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, right? And there’ll be no debate on this subject.

And while the third one is not my favourite, there’s this great line where the bad guy Bane, has kind of trapped Batman, and they’re down in the sewers, and Batman kind of kills the lights, and Bane goes, I’m not going to do the whole Tom Hardy voice, because, I mean, I can’t do that. But he goes, oh, you think darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark? I was born in it, moulded by it.

So, is that how you feel, or do you feel like a creature of the dark Thom?

Thom:

In general? Yes. Yeah, I think it’s a funny, it’s an interesting one. I was saying this to someone the other day that there’s, a lot of people coming into kind of organic tactics that maybe haven’t yet been shaped by the years, kind of plugging away during title tags and things like this.

And I think then it can seem overwhelming because it’s a sudden shift into the things. Whereas I think this is why SEOs naturally ended up taking over whatever acronym we want to call. This is because we understand the levers, and they’re largely the same.

Nasser:

You’ve earned your stripes, right?

Thom:

Yeah, I’ve done my fair share of canonical tags.

Nasser:

So one thing I should mention to anyone listening or watching is Thom is amongst the most progressive and curious SEO people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and has really been experimenting on the forefront of how things are changing because they are changing quickly.

AI answer summaries, fewer predictable clicks. So, in one sentence, Tom, what’s the biggest shift the brands need to understand about SEO right now?

Thom:

It’s moved away from answers and it’s to perception, now. So, we can’t just answer the question. We have to be the answer to the question.

Nasser:

Okay. So if you were to summarise when you say be the answer, how do you get to do that?

Thom:

This is where things have really shifted, Nasser. I think it used to be as SEOs, we had the levers to pull. We could optimise clusters of content. We could optimise a page and hope that would shape the answer for us.

Now, answers are synthesised by LLM, by AI overviews. And so we need to understand what goes into an answer to be able to then be that answer and to be part of the answer. So it’s less about now just strategically putting content out there. It’s more about understanding where it fits with your user’s journey to allow that to have the best chance of being surfaced.

Nasser:

So, Thom, let’s get into the six step process that you’ve built and your team has built for AI-ready SEO. It begins with an AI readiness audit. Audit’s a big word and a scary word. What does it actually include?

Thom:

We start with the basics. So kind of a traditional list audit. Can it be accessed and understood? But it does go further than that. It looks at – is the content clear enough to be actually summarised accurately? Are you showing expertise and trust? And then actually we look further than the site. So we look at offsite signals, looking at whether they are consistent. So reviews, listings, third party signals. And there’s authoritative mentions within the LLMs.

Nasser:

So that’s interesting because you know, when I’ve thought of a traditional SEO audit it tends to get very, very technical very quickly. Can this broad ecosystem actually accurately interpret the brand?

Thom:

It can. We end up with actually a really interesting, prioritised road map that not only looks at, let’s say, canonical tags, it looks at what will really drive the changes to AI systems and how they interpret trust, and then eventually service brand.

Nasser:

All right. So, once we conduct our audit, we now need to create content that AI can easily interpret. What does interpretable mean in this context?

Thom:

It means clarity and structure. So AI leans towards pulling content from a page that’s direct in its answer. So does it actually answer the question? Organise with headings. People like that, AI likes that. If it’s written in plain language, I think easy readability is great. And then is it actually talking to the person who’s asked the question.

So it kind of all has to combine together to give that right answer in the right way.

Nasser:

So kind of like your answer, for want of a better word.

Thom:

Right.

Nasser:

So give me a practical example of this please.

Thom:

So, if you bury your answer within lots of language – I think brands, you know, we like to import brand style onto some landing pages where actually we can add brand over the top of text. But actually, if you bury it, AI might just miss that answer.

It might just be reading all the noise and then not pull out the actual answer we want. So your page needs to lead with that clear statement. It needs to then support it with the details of that – can have audience specific examples there too. It means AI can get it out easily. It means it can reliably get that out without doing loads of extra work.

Doing things in topic clusters too. So interlinking pages that work as a unit helps, because that means that it can get to those answers quickly. It also means that it’s linked when it’s in the corpus. So yeah, I think it’s about kind of answer and then the fan out after it.

Nasser:

Plain language. I love that if you’re a company that does paper shredding and everybody knows that its paper shredding, don’t insist that it’s document destruction. Right?

All right. So, on that point you get to step three, which is using the existing search performance as an AI roadmap. So what’s the move here? How do you use, any existing or historical performance information as that roadmap?

Thom:

It allows us not to start from zero really. It allows us to understand what’s already performing well. We can kind of overlay onto that what the brand’s already known for, meaning that we’re using that – pages that rank, topics that we’re already performing strongly in. You can even go to where you’re already being surfaced in.

I mean, starting from ground zero is more difficult. You might be a challenger in that space. So, understanding where you’re already going. And then that’s where we can really leverage that out and perform quickly.

Nasser:

Okay. So if you already have a baseline in terms of how you’re performing in traditional search, and isn’t it insane that we’re talking about traditional search now as opposed to AI driven search?

What usually causes the gap to how brands can perform in AI driven experience?

Thom:

From what we’re seeing, now we’ve all we’ve got more data now than the initial bit, but I think we’re seeing it’s kind of it’s not actually relevant. So there are some brands that we work with who you just presume it’s a no brainer that they’d be in LLMs for these things, but actually sometimes it’s structure and the relevance to those answers, as we said before.

Right. Like sometimes pages aren’t answering the question. So your content might be good, but do you have clarity on answers? Is your formatting easy for things to get out? Topic coverage. Did you just go… We only need one page and LLMs might need 5 or 6 to answer the question. So it kind of falls to refinement rather than actually reinvention. It does depend on the brand and the context and performance, but I think we don’t have to tear everything up. Often, it’s building on what we have already.

Nasser:

So step four is one of my personal favourites. Because it speaks to authority and relevance. I remember going to conferences and the SEO folks would stand up and say, well, just build engaging content and you’re like, okay, so how do I do that?

But this is about learning from community and conversational language. Why does that matter more now?

Thom:

Yeah, it allows us to communicate with that natural way of asking questions. We know the prompts are now much larger than traditional kind of keywords that people put into Google.

So we’re in that conversation with people. So comparison questions are really where this kind of takes off to understanding people’s routes to, to answering. And AI prompts look like that, right. They begin in this comparison stage often. So understanding the patterns, means we can kind of get in during that comparison.

Or what Google used to call the messy middle is fundamentally now done in an LLMs. We can get in there by understanding what it looks like through community engagement.

Nasser:

So communities are basically like an early warning system for intent.

Thom:

Exactly. Yeah. You can then map out the questions that probably people are asking in AI, and you can do that before you left out the answers altogether.

Nasser:

So step five is a controversial one, because, it speaks to an area that a lot of brands, especially those that have grown up in performance, tend to think of as, nice to haves. And that is about treating video and engagement assets as search signals.

So what do brands typically get wrong with this?

Thom:

I think as an SEO, I’m probably as guilty as anyone here. But yeah, I think video has been seen for a very long time as a “nice to have” and that some brands do it well, some brands are like, we just do some video and I think it’s often treated as awareness content.

And I think actually now video shifted all over the funnel, from awareness, discovery, all the way to decision making. So it can do different jobs, from explaining products to showing an expertise of a brand. And it aligns with how people actually get information quickly, visually and in different places.

Nasser:

So the question isn’t, do we need video? It’s how does video support visibility and understanding?

Thom:

Yeah. So exactly, if your audience is looking for confidence, a video can really do that with clarity. Clarity in the current age is a real advantage. It gives you strong signals into models, but also it’s a real challenge to retain your brand voice while things are getting synthesised and pushed out into answers.

Nasser:

Just hopefully you’re actually good at video, right?

So step six, the final step is an interesting one because it sounds fundamental and that’s about reinforcing local and trust fundamentals. Why is this still crucial? Why is this still a conversation?

Thom:

I suppose it’s because at base, LLMs aren’t like a super brain hanging in a corner, they are a system. And they rely on foundational signals, especially for local. So they just they need consistency. They need accuracy. They need that strong review base. And they need your location to tell what you do.

They’re still the building blocks, they have been for 20 years of local search really. And it hasn’t changed. AI doesn’t replace it, but it does make it more important because the system now is synthesising rather than people exploring. So we need to give it the reliable inputs.

Nasser:

So the fundamentals are still the foundation, but now they’re feeding more services.

Thom:

Exactly.

Nasser:

So here’s the shift…SEO success isn’t just about traffic anymore. It’s about representation across a myriad of different platform surfaces and systems. As search becomes more AI-driven, the brands that win won’t just be the ones that rank, they’ll be the ones that systems can understand, trust, and include. And the path forward is practical.

Follow the six steps. Start with an AI readiness audit. Build interpretable content. Use your existing winners as a roadmap. Learn from common conversational intent and communities. Treat video as a visibility asset and reinforce local and trust fundamentals.

Now make it happen. Follow Shift Happens. Leave us a review and share this episode with your team. We have content that you can reference if you want to go deeper. There’s an article, that Thom and his team have written, as well as a webinar that he delivered, which goes into a lot of what we talk about in a lot more depth with our friend Jenna. The links are going to be in, the post below. So, make sure that you, click on those and get deeper into this.

If you have any questions for the podcast, email us at shifthappens@dacgroup.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Thom, thanks for joining us today.

Thom:

Thanks for letting me out the dark.

Nasser:

Welcome to the light side, it’s warmer out here. Stay a while. Thank you for listening, I’m Nasser Sahlool, thank you for joining us on Shift Happens.