Is AI Rewriting SEO or Just Resetting the Fundamentals?

AI is forcing SEO to evolve fast, but Duane Forrester says success still comes from serving users, building trust, and learning continuously. Forrester has watched search evolve from meta keyword stuffing and penny clicks through mobile, personalization, AI, and LLMs. To him, it feels a lot like the industry's earliest days.

What Happened

In a Search Engine Land 20th anniversary interview published August 21, 2026, Danny Goodwin sat down with Duane Forrester, formerly of Microsoft Bing, to discuss how AI is reshaping search. Forrester compared the current moment to SEO's Wild West era, when rules were being written in real time. His core argument: the surface tactics change constantly, but the mission of serving users, building trust, and learning continuously has not.

Why This Matters for B2B Marketing Leaders in HR Tech and FinTech

Your category is crowded with AI-generated content chasing the same head terms. Forrester's point is a warning shot: trying to sit at the absolute leading edge of AI search, unless you work inside Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, or Anthropic, is a losing bet. What compounds instead is authority. In HR Tech and FinTech, where buying committees can span eight to twelve stakeholders and engagement cycles run nine months or longer, trust signals matter more than clever prompt engineering. If your content does not answer the actual questions your buyers ask, no amount of schema markup or LLM optimization will save you. The brands winning citations in AI answers are the ones with defensible expertise across the full demand spectrum.

The Starr Conspiracy's Take

Forrester is right, and the implication for your team is uncomfortable. Most HR Tech and FinTech marketing orgs are still running a 2019 SEO playbook with a fresh coat of AI paint. That does not survive the next 18 months. The winners will treat AI search as a distribution problem downstream of a much harder content problem: do you actually have expert answers to the questions your ICP is asking? We wrote about this shift in answer engine optimization for B2B because the mechanics of getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews reward depth, entity clarity, and topical authority, not volume.

What to Watch Next

Watch for AI search platforms to publish more explicit citation criteria over the next two quarters. Likely, we will see the first serious attribution data from Perplexity and OpenAI showing which domains get cited most often in high-intent B2B queries. That data will reset budget conversations fast.

Related Questions

Should we stop investing in traditional SEO?

No. Traditional SEO fundamentals (site architecture, crawlability, authoritative content) are the same signals AI search engines use to select citations. Cutting SEO investment now means cutting your AI search visibility later.

How do we measure AI search performance today?

Start with citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews for your top 50 buyer questions. Our guide to AEO measurement covers the specific metrics and tooling that matter for B2B categories with long engagement cycles.

Does Forrester think links still matter?

Yes, though he cautions that internal teams at search engines are highly compartmentalized. Links remain a durable trust signal, but they are one of several. Editorial mentions, entity associations, and consistent expert bylines carry increasing weight in AI-driven retrieval.