Rushikesh Kella

  For more than three decades, marketers have been taught to start SEO with keywords. Find what people search for. Check the volume. Study the competition. Create the page. Optimise it. Rank it. That process worked remarkably well. But search has changed. People are no longer always typing two or three words into a search box and choosing from ten blue links. They are asking longer questions, adding context, comparing options, using images and voice, and increasingly asking AI systems to do the research for them. Google says the average AI Mode query is now roughly three times longer than a traditional search query, while more than one in six AI Mode queries involve non-text inputs such as images or voice. That creates a problem for the way many SEO teams still think. We are building content around keywords while our customers are searching around problems. The next generation of SEO will require something different. It will require AI agents that can understand search intent, conn...

  A performance campaign rarely collapses because nobody is looking at the dashboard. It usually collapses because someone sees the problem but does not know what to do next. That distinction is becoming increasingly important. For years, experienced performance marketers have built decision frameworks from thousands of campaigns. They know that a rise in CPA does not automatically mean the budget should be cut. They know that falling CTR can point to creative fatigue, while falling conversion rates may indicate a problem deeper in the funnel. They know when to change the audience, when to change the creative, and when to leave the campaign alone. The problem is that most of this knowledge lives inside the marketer's head. Agentic AI gives us a way to turn that experience into an operating system. Instead of using AI simply to generate ads, summarise reports or answer questions, marketers can build AI agents around the strategies they already use. The agent can continuously monitor...