Rethinking SEO in the Age of AI with Sebastien Edgar

Organic search is in the middle of one of its biggest shifts in years. AI search and, AI Overviews, LLM-driven answers, and new discovery models are quickly replacing the era of "blue links and steady rankings" – and most marketing teams are still figuring out what good SEO looks like on the other side of a change where priorities shift is from traffic volume to qualified intent.

To make sense of it, we sat down with Sebastien Edgar, Liferay's VP of Digital Marketing, who has led organic discovery at Square, served as the SEO team lead at Searchmetrics, and consulted with brands across enterprise scale and complexity. In this conversation with Christoph Ebert, Sr. Manager Global Content & Web, Sebastien breaks down how the playbook is evolving, where the real levers are, and how paid and organic should actually work together in 2026.

Key Takeaways

• AI is adding to search, not replacing it. ChatGPT and AI Overviews are layering new visibility surfaces on top of traditional search, not eliminating organic traffic.
• Top-of-funnel is shrinking, not vanishing. Many sites have lost 30–60% of informational traffic, but revenue often holds steady because that traffic was rarely qualified to begin with.
• The two highest-impact levers right now are site structure and digital PR / backlinks. Internal linking and external mentions both feed visibility – including in LLM training data.
• Paid and organic operate on the same canvas. Treating them as one coordinated strategy unlocks faster experimentation, smarter budget allocation, and stronger conversion learnings.
• Prompt tracking is directional, not definitive. It's a useful benchmark for how LLMs see your brand, but accuracy and scale aren't there yet.
• Global organic strategy is a resourcing problem first, a tactics problem second. Centralized teams need aligned local resources – or they end up with no one to ship the work.
• Vibe coding is becoming indispensable for marketers. Tools like Vercel's v0 let strategists visualize ideas, test landing page concepts, and turn notes into stakeholder-ready presentations.

Beyond Blue Links: A More Strategic SEO

Five years ago, SEO was hyper-tactical. Few teams reported into a CMO, "VP of Search" was a rare title, and most of the work happened in isolation from the rest of marketing. Today, the discipline has been forced to grow up. AI Overviews and LLMs have stripped away easy informational traffic – but they've also pushed organic teams to think more strategically about qualified content, conversion, and how SEO connects to every other channel – including AI-powered capabilities that are reshaping how content gets discovered and served. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) has emerged alongside traditional SEO as teams look to capture visibility in AI-generated responses, not just ranked results – and platforms like Liferay now offer an AEO-ready CMS built specifically for this shift.

As Sebastien puts it, the playbook has changed – and anyone still optimizing like it's 2020 will feel it.

Two Levers That Move the Needle

When asked which levers matter most today, Sebastien doesn't hesitate: site structure and digital PR. Internal linking aligns the website with how users (and crawlers) actually navigate intent – and site structure and internal linking remain among the highest-impact levers inside any enterprise CMS. And in an LLM world, external mentions and high-quality backlinks have a new job to do – getting your brand into the data these models are trained on. This is where Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) comes in: earning the kind of external mentions and authoritative backlinks that feed into the training data LLMs draw from. Link building, perhaps surprisingly, is back.

Paid + Organic: Same Canvas, Different Brushes

One of Sebastien's favorite topics is the artificial wall between paid and organic search. Both channels operate in the exact same search results page – yet most organizations run them as separate fiefdoms. He outlines three places where coordination pays off: testing brand-term incrementality, using paid as a "relay race" partner while organic ramps, and leveraging paid as a fast conversion-testing platform whose learnings flow back into the main site – the kind of content marketing and demand generation alignment that high-performing marketing teams are building around.

Measuring What Matters in an AI World

Rank tracking still has value – directionally. Prompt tracking is emerging but inaccurate, with the same prompt often returning very different answers across runs. Sebastien's stance: take all the data, treat it as directional, and don't let any single signal become the whole story. For teams navigating AI search, the priority shift is from traffic volume to qualified intent.

Going Global Without Going Sideways

Scaling organic globally sounds simple and almost never is. Sebastien shares a hard-earned lesson from Square, where a centralized team structure left him without local resources when budgets shifted – severely limiting what could ship in key markets. The takeaway: align team structure with how the company actually operates, prioritize ruthlessly based on Total Available Market (TAM) and search opportunity, and lean on agencies for quick wins in tier-two markets – the same principles that underpin a scalable global organic strategy built on a flexible enterprise platform.

The AI Tool Every Marketer Should Be Using

Sebastien's daily must-have? Vibe coding – particularly Vercel's v0. For visual thinkers and web strategists, the ability to turn an idea, a set of notes, or a CRO brief into something you can actually see is, in his words, indispensable.

 

Watch the Full Conversation

Below is the full interview with Sebastien Edgar. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
 

Christoph Ebert: Hi everyone, and welcome. Organic search is in the middle of one of its biggest shifts in years – moving beyond blue links and into AI-driven answers and new discovery models. Today I'm joined by Sebastien Edgar, VP of Digital Marketing. Hi Sebastien. We're going to talk about what good SEO actually means these days, and how web and search strategies are evolving in response.

Sebastien, let's first ground the conversation. Tell us a bit about yourself, your professional experience, and your role at Liferay.

Sebastien Edgar: Absolutely – thank you so much for having me. Great to be here in Vienna for our sales and digital kick-off as well.

A little bit about myself: I just started recently as VP of Digital Marketing at Liferay. Before that, I was working with you on a consulting level, which is what I've been doing for the last few years. Prior to that, I was the Global Head of Organic Discovery at Square – not super well-known in Europe, but it's Jack Dorsey's second company, the one he founded next to Twitter. And before that, I actually worked for a German company, Searchmetrics, where I was the SEO team lead.

Christoph: You have a little bit of German language experience.

Sebastien: Yes – I forgot to mention that. Before Searchmetrics I was living in Germany, working for a company called InterNations, an expat social network. I was there for about three years, and that's actually where I got my SEO career started, as a link builder. I'd send something like 50 cold emails a day: "Hey, we're InterNations, we have this product, can you link to it?" I did that for about four months.

Christoph: And emails were still manual back then?

Sebastien: Oh yeah. There was probably some automation around, but back then not much – and the company likely didn't have the infrastructure to sustain it anyway.

Christoph: Maybe next interview we'll do in German?

Sebastien: We'll see – I'll need to study a bit more first.

Christoph: If you look back a few years, search was largely about blue links, rankings, and steady optimization over time. Today search looks very different, and that has altered how teams need to think about SEO. How has the shift from blue links to AI-driven search engines changed what winning in organic search actually means?

Sebastien: Definitely. If I think back five or so years ago, SEO was very tactical – even the name itself, "search engine optimization," is all about tactical optimization. It was less strategic. SEO was part of marketing, of course, but very few SEO leaders ever reported to a CMO. You wouldn't really find a "VP of Search" five years ago.

A lot of SEOs maybe didn't realize the power of working with other teams or didn't realize the omnichannel approach SEO requires. Today, things have completely changed. Let's take a step back and look at how the landscape is different.

One of the things is obviously the LLMs that came on board – not just ChatGPT, but also how Google has changed with AI Overviews. A lot of people think the LLMs are stealing traffic or clicks from Google. That's not entirely true. What's happening is that LLMs are adding on top of search. They're a new opportunity – not killing off search, but adding an additional area of visibility, focus, and potential optimization.

What has drastically changed in the work that we as SEOs need to do is the fact that Google now has its own AI products in search – AI Overviews. Anything informational, top-of-funnel content, is slowly withering away. Most websites have seen something like a 30 to 60% decrease in their organic traffic, and everyone's freaking out about it. But for a lot of companies, revenue hasn't necessarily gone down that much, if at all – because the traffic Google was bringing them was purely top-of-funnel, purely awareness.

So what does that mean in terms of strategy? Number one – and this is nothing groundbreaking – it means less focus on top-of-funnel and informational content. I'm choosing my words carefully: I say less focus, not no focus. A lot of SEO gurus on social will say you shouldn't focus at all on top of funnel because Google has taken that traffic. It's not gone. It's just a matter of how you prioritize it as part of your strategy.

If I look at competitor traffic, you see that, for example, the glossary section – which we've talked about a little bit – used to drive maybe 100,000 clicks a month. Now maybe it's down to 40,000 or 50,000 clicks. But that 40 or 50,000 still exists. You'd have thought it might have vanished completely, and most people assume it has. At Square, creating glossaries and top-of-funnel directories was one of my key traffic-driving initiatives.

What's different now is that you do want to find more qualified content sources – that's 100% true. And that has probably led a lot of search marketers to put more effort into figuring out which topics and pages should actually convert. One great example is even the work we're doing internally at Liferay: figuring out what exactly buyers are asking, and how to create content that fulfills that specific need. Five years ago, was it as top of mind as today? Probably not. Should we have been doing it then? Absolutely. But what AI has done is give us organic marketers a wake-up call: your work shouldn't just be top-of-funnel traffic generation. There's a lot more to do to bring in qualified traffic.

One last thing on top-of-funnel and organic search: at the end of the day, organic search can still be an awareness channel. Think of a brand putting a billboard on the side of a highway. That's just pure awareness. Probably 80 to 90% of the people seeing it aren't relevant – you can't really measure it. But when companies put millions and millions of dollars into that, no one bats an eye. When organic search asks for $50,000 a year for traffic-driving initiatives, suddenly we're like, "No, no, no, that's too much money." Come on. That's a bit ridiculous.

So there is a world where awareness-driven organic still exists, but it shouldn't be your sole focus. You want to figure out what specifically the buyer is asking, and think a lot more in terms of how organic search can play a role with other channels – campaigns, demand gen, distribution. Even if you create content through an organic search lens, how do you make sure it gets promoted and reused for other channels and campaigns? To boil it down: the playbook has changed. The strategy and optimization playbook hasn't, for those who haven't noticed they need to change.

Christoph: You've already mentioned some of the levers. There are so many – that's a challenge in itself. From your perspective, what are your top two most impactful levers today for a strong global organic strategy?

Sebastien: Let's see. I don't want to say content strategy, because for me that's not a lever – it's just part of the work. So let's go in with the assumption that you're dealing with a website that's technically sound and has some kind of content strategy in place.

Looking back at my consulting work with Liferay and other clients, the number one I kept focusing on was site structure and web strategy. Basically: how do you make sure you connect every single piece of content, every page on the site? Make sure there are no silos. Make sure that the pages linking to another page are logical – the ones with the highest organic search opportunity, but even outside of organic, the pages that bring you the most revenue. The very branded ones should be linked closer to the home page.

One client I worked with last year wasn't really global, but they were massive – billions of indexable pages. The only work we did together was site structure and internal link optimization. Nothing else. Not technical, not content. Just hyper-tactical internal linking and web strategy. For an enterprise site at that scale, it matters. But even at Liferay – the first thing I did was look at technical, look at content, and right after that, the site structure. I realized that if we could align what people are searching for with the navigation, that's a winning strategy.

For number two, it's somewhat related because it's also about linking: digital PR and backlinking. The reason this is my number two – which might surprise some people – is that these days you need to find ways for LLMs to include you, specifically in their training data. This has become really top of mind for a lot of search marketers. So backlinking and link building are kind of coming back, which I'm not a huge fan of, but it can be fun.

This ties back to my point about aligning all channels. As part of marketing, let's just make sure all our partners are actually linking to us and talking about us – whether through campaigns, newspapers, whatever. It's pretty tactical in essence, but the strategy is: how do we get as many people as possible talking about our brand? So number two is maybe better said as external awareness, more than just link building or backlinking.

Christoph: The disclaimer is, of course, high-quality backlinks. We're not talking about an absolute renaissance of link farms.

Sebastien: That's a really good clarification. 100%.

Christoph: Of the two – site structure and digital PR – which is usually harder to get right?

Sebastien: Interesting question. It depends on the complexity. For site structure, you might need engineers to help you make changes. You don't really know how much work is required until you have the meetings, and once you do, it's about getting into the sprint cycle and making sure resources are allocated.

If the company you're working for understands SEO, it's usually relatively easy. In my experience, most developers actually enjoy SEO activities – they understand the importance.

Link building is purely a budget thing. You don't really want to do it in-house. There are agencies that do it so much better. Back in my Germany days, we did it in-house – I inherited a program with five or six interns rotating every six months. In hindsight, I'd just hire an agency and use the headcount budget for something else. The work is tough, and agencies have outreach programs and processes already in place. There's no reason to do it in-house. So it's a pure budget thing – and whenever you deal with budget, it's constrained.

Christoph: Let's go back to search results. From a user's perspective, paid and organic blend into one experience. Inside organizations, though, the two channels are often owned by different teams – which can make collaboration harder than it should be. How do you see paid and organic working together, and what's the ideal balance?

Sebastien: For sure – it's one of my favorite things to do. People realize this but don't think about it more: paid and organic search operate on the exact same canvas. The toolset is different, the brushes are different, but the environment is identical. So why wouldn't you align the two as much as possible? There's so much potential if you do it properly.

There are a few ways to look at it. The obvious one is paid branded versus organic branded – figuring out incrementality between both. There are a lot of reasons to invest in paid branded. If you're in an ultra-competitive niche and your competitors are bidding on your branded terms, there's some logic. But you want to test it – not just for traffic incrementality but for conversion. Maybe you're losing a few clicks, but those who skip the ads and click on your home page in organic are actually making you the same money. Then you could save tons of paid budget by turning it off, or at least minimizing it.

Another area is non-branded. Paid and organic can play a really good relay race. On transactional topics where organic can't yet rank, paid can come in to be present in the SERP while SEO does its thing. Paid is immediate; organic might take 6 to 9 months. There are tools that automate this whole process – you connect your account, they analyze your rankings, see where you rank #1 with no competitors, and automatically pause your ads there. If you're not visible organically, they increase your budget on that term. It's a great use of AI – super efficient.

The third area where collaboration pays off is using paid as a conversion testing platform. You get results much faster than organic, so you can play around a lot with landing page design and conversion triggers. The learnings can then apply to your main website.

Christoph: With search evolving, so is how we measure success. The primary signals used to be rankings. People are experimenting much more now, trying to understand what they have to do for visibility. What's your take on prompt tracking versus traditional keyword rank tracking?

Sebastien: Interesting. I still track keywords. A lot of people in the industry are against it, but I'm someone who wants as much data as possible, even if it's not perfect, even if it's just directionally valuable. As long as it's not the only thing I look at, I'll take it. So I'm all for tracking rankings through tools.

Obviously, for my own website I'd go to Google Search Console, because that's your own proprietary data – a lot safer and more accurate. But for competitive research, of course you want to use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. They give you a pretty good benchmark of how you're performing and what potential traffic you might get. The tough part is personalization – results are so personalized by location and behavior. Even logged into my SEMrush or Ahrefs account for Liferay, our reports might say we rank #3 for "DXP" – great – but in some locations the SERP is completely different. What that tells me is: directionally, we're doing pretty well for that term.

My view on prompt tracking is kind of the same. It gives me an idea of how LLMs are looking at my brand and the results they're returning. Again, it's directional. The problem with prompt tracking is that, honestly, it's pretty inaccurate. There are studies coming out where you can ask the same prompt many times and get pretty much different results every time. So it gets really inaccurate. But I still want to do it – I still want to get that benchmark.

These days too, there's no scale with prompt tracking. Most tools, you're lucky if you can track 1,000 or 2,000 prompts. And then making sure those are actually prompts people are asking? We're not really there yet. So there's some value, but it's still pretty experimental.

Christoph: Let's go back to the global aspect. Achieving organic growth and scaling it sounds straightforward in theory, but in practice it's complex – different markets, different languages, different maturity levels, different local priorities. What's your approach to balancing global priorities while making sure each country and region gets the right attention?

Sebastien: Very, very complex. Number one: you need resources. You need a team in place, or at the very least a good agency. You need some in-person folks – at minimum coordinators or specialists by locale – otherwise you're not going to get anywhere.

The number one strategic principle is: understand the total addressable market for each region, plus the total addressable search volume. It's an alignment of broader market opportunity and organic search opportunity. But there's also team size and team initiatives.

I can tell you a story from Square. My team was global, with people everywhere reporting into me. At one point, the team structure was different. I was one of the few orgs in the company that was centralized – meaning every single person in a local market reported into me or my team. The France manager, the Spain manager, the Ireland manager all reported into my team. The equivalent field marketers or product marketers reported into their local org, which rolled up to the CMO – but never to a VP of Product, for example.

Then what happened is too many cooks. The budget got reallocated, and the France budget got killed. They moved France people elsewhere. Because I was centralized, I had no internal resources in France to help me publish pages or work with product. Our ability to roll anything out for France became very, very limited. That's a lesson I learned the hard way: you can build your own team, but if your partners aren't aligned with how you've built it, you're not set up for success.

Number two: let's say everything is aligned. Everyone's still going to want your attention. Even at Liferay, I just started as VP and I'm getting Slacks like, "Oh, great, you're here – can you help me with this? Can you help me with that?" I have to be the bearer of bad news: "Look, we will help you – it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. These are our priority markets based on this data, and this is when we think we'll be able to provide support based on the scale of our team." It's a balancing act of all these different factors.

Christoph: You already answered my follow-up – how do you keep the regions on board when you have to say "yeah, but not right now"?

Sebastien: Prioritization. It's a tough one because you never want to say no, and you want to grow the company globally. I don't like prioritizing one country over another, because I know if I defer, I might not be getting as much from that country as I could. But it's just the reality of resources.

That's why you have to be smart with how you balance internal headcount and agency headcount. An agency can help with smaller quick wins. Maybe a tier-two market just needs help with content localization or content creation – that's an easy way to engage your agency. So it's also about figuring out the quick wins and smaller levers you can pull for other markets, without tearing your hair out or burning all your bandwidth.

Christoph: Sebastien, to close things out, I'd like to bring this back to the day-to-day reality of being a marketer. The obligatory AI question, of course: what is your favorite, must-use AI tool to become a better marketer?

Sebastien: Let's see. My current favorite is anything vibe coding. I'm a huge fan of using Vercel's v0, in two different ways.

Number one: I'm a very visual person. I need to see an idea reflected in some kind of diagram for my brain to work. What Vercel and these vibe coding apps have allowed me to do is visualize my ideas. Think about CRO – designing a landing page. You can put the entire structure in a Google Doc, but my brain just won't work with that. I won't be able to see it or understand it. Vibe coding lets me put in the structure, give requirements, and actually see how it looks. I used to do this manually before vibe coding – literally in PowerPoint, wireframing.

That was the only way I could work. Now, especially if you're a web strategist, vibe coding is indispensable. It really, really helps. Every time I've done it – at Liferay or with clients – the lightbulb immediately goes off: "Oh yeah, now I see how the page looks. Now I understand your strategy. Makes sense. Let's do it." I've seen a lot of success from there.

The other use is similar but for notes and summarization – an easy way to create more. For a previous client, I created an entire presentation on AI search. I just took all my notes – everything I'd written down – and fed it into Vercel. It didn't just create slides; it visualized my notes, and it did it so perfectly that I just added the screenshots to the presentation and presented it to the client. It structured everything beautifully and made it visually appealing. I'm a huge fan, and I think every marketer should be using it day to day.

So, guys out there: Vercel!

Christoph: Sebastien, thank you very much for the great insights. I really enjoyed this conversation. We'll have more in the future.

Sebastien: Loved it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks, everyone.