Search through AI is the best news in many years

Translated from the original Spanish article.

For months now, much of the SEO debate has centered on the same fear: that AI will eat Google’s searches and leave brands invisible.

Or perhaps it’s that certain metrics can no longer be sold.

If we listened to that fear, with our projects at Kocoro ranking very well, we would have a lot to lose. I see it differently, though. In my view, search (or discovery) through AI is the best news in many years.

But for that we need to understand what this is all about, and why SEO was never about securing a position in a machine’s index.

Let me explain.

For twenty years, searching on Google—or any other search engine, for that matter—has been an exercise in compression.

We adapted our language to the machine: two, three, six keywords, and let the search engine guess the rest. And the idea that the search engine understands our search intent is fairly recent. Many of you will remember the odyssey of searching more than ten years ago.

In any case, fortunately, Google figured out how to serve us better results from a query of a few words, with no further context.

That said, this exercise still has structural limits. That’s why a single query bundles together a variety of different intents, and they all get the same ten results. Add the ads on top, of course.

With AI, the gesture is reversed. From the root.

People no longer shrink their intent—what they want to find—into a few words. They write it out in full, with nuance, the way they would tell it to a person. Especially for queries they feel are important and where they’re looking for a personalized answer. That way, the answer fits that specific intent.

Let’s talk examples.

Before, someone would type “running shoes” and get ten results served the same way to everyone: the person running a marathon, the person going for a walk, the person looking for a gift, the person who wants them to wear around.

In fact, for that kind of query, the results usually include category pages, so you can keep narrowing down and refining your path to the product you actually want.

Now they type “I’m looking for the best cushioned running shoes, suitable for knee pain, because I’m 40 (not naming names) and I want to train for my first marathon”.

A precise intent. A precise answer.

And what matters to us: the right brand, found by the right person.

That’s the underlying shift: for the first time, intent and result fit together. And that’s good for everyone.

Those of us who work in this field stop fighting for a spot on a generic list and start working to reach whoever truly needs us, right when they need us.

As it happens, those who understood—as we did—that SEO was never about showing up on lists, but about connecting with our audience’s intentions, are very well positioned in AI answers.