I’ve never seen a clearer breakdown of where things are going than this one.

I think one of the biggest things that will shift is the movement from knowledge being in weight to knowledge being a combination of reasoning and retrieval; it feels like the average person doesn’t recognize the shift from the SEO that existed in the past to the future meaning of visibility in the new SEO than any other shift that may occur because rankings are now an irrelevant consideration when looking at visibility; there is, however, an element of being selectable as opposed to getting a ranking.

Once you have external sources providing the grounding for systems to utilize as they respond to their users (like GPT-5); the real competition will be which sources earn the trust of the users and become part of the set of information that is utilized in delivering an answer; this will be an entirely different game than simply competing for a position on Google.

Another interesting fact that I have noticed is that the pages that come up with the answers to the users’ queries frequently are not the ones that performed best with traditional SEO; rather they tend to be pages that provide clearly structured topics or content that answer the user’s specific question very directly and contain content that is easy for systems to interpret and utilize.

I also see that the shift in moving away from holding knowledge with retrieval was likely a design choice because it helps keep the responses fresh and reduces the potential for errors in the retrieval of the knowledge being used; the process of creating content will be different because of this.

While I do see the future of SEO becoming less of a way to build trust and develop relationships with niche brands and larger publishers, I am not sure how the impact of these changes in SEO will impact smaller niche brands compared to larger publishers because smaller brands will probably not receive as much trust from these systems.