Pfizer has moved its SEO and “AI discoverability” work fully in-house, building the capability in about 60 days, according to a LinkedIn post from its VP of performance media, Joshua Palau. That included new hires, among them Kinesso’s former director of SEO.
The reasoning, per Palau: generative AI is reshaping how brands are “discovered, understood and trusted.” Pfizer declined to elaborate beyond the post.
It’s not alone in reorganizing around that premise. Georgia Pacific and U.S. Bank have recently stood up internal teams, while Adobe, Hertz, T-Mobile, Lowe’s and Skims are hiring for roles that combine SEO with AI discoverability. As U.S. Bank CMO Michael Lacorazza put it, practitioners increasingly believe “we have more experience than the consultants do… because we’re living it day to day.”
The backdrop is a shifting search landscape. eMarketer forecasts that 26.4% of the U.S. population will use generative AI for search this year, up 12.7%. Jellyfish says some clients have seen unbranded search traffic drop between 30% and 70%—a wide range, but enough to get attention.
Agencies and consultancies are seeing the downstream effect. Brandtech Group’s Ed Lee said eight global clients have brought SEO and AI discoverability in-house in the last nine months; Boots is among them. Typical setups: central teams of five to ten people, organized in a hub-and-spoke model. Brandtech also offers a tool, “Share of Model,” to track visibility in AI-driven search.
There’s also a growing layer of vendors pitching ways to “win” AI search. Not everyone is convinced. The pitch for in-housing, according to consultancy Overline, comes down to speed and control—especially when the alternative is, as Lee put it, “a table tennis rally with your agency.”
Read more at Digiday.