Stuck in the In-Between: Why Professional Services Firms Have to Run SEO and AI Search at Once

My co-founder Angie Kaminky and I spent three years rebuilding Clermont Partners, a professional services firm, around SEO. Not casually. We hired an agency, rewrote the site, and built a real thought leadership library over time. When it paid off, we were on the first page of Google for our target terms and 50% of new business was coming to us from inbound leads. We sold the firm on the back of that.

Then, as we were thinking about what to build next, we kept hearing the same thing from services founders: they were stuck in the in-between. SEO was not done. AI search had landed on top of it. Getting cited by AI search tools, what is now called AEO, or answer engine optimization, was a different game than ranking on Google. And on top of that, clients and prospects were starting to say something they had never said before: I found you on AI. Nobody had a plan for both channels at once. And nobody was helping them build one.

It was not that SEO had stopped working. It was that buyers had quietly opened a second front door. 60% of B2B buyers now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini in their buying journey, even as nearly all of them still run searches on Google.

That is not a trend line you wait out. That is a change in buyer behavior that has already happened. And it creates a specific, frustrating strategic problem for anyone running a professional services business: you cannot abandon SEO, because almost every buyer still searches and it builds the foundation. But you cannot ignore AI search, because most of them now run an AI tool right alongside it.

You are stuck in the in-between. Two channels. Two sets of signals. One content budget. Limited time.

That is exactly why Angie and I started Retrevia. We had built the playbook for one channel. We watched the second one emerge in real time. And we saw that most founder-led firms were going to get caught flat-footed trying to figure out both at once.

The good news: the fundamentals of both channels are more aligned than they appear. There are three things you can do right now that feed both at once, instead of running two separate programs.

01. Write Content That Only You Could Have Written

AI-generated content has always been a bad investment in professional services. It does not build trust with buyers making significant, strategic decisions. But it also used to at least be findable. That is no longer true.

Google's March 2026 update made explicit what had been building for two years: high-volume, AI-generated content that does not add genuine value will be deprioritized and flagged as spam. Meanwhile, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are increasingly selective about what they cite. They are looking for original perspective, specific claims, and experience-backed insights. Not overviews. Not listicles. Not content that could have been written by anyone.

What that means practically: one piece of content built on your actual point of view is worth more than ten generic posts about trends in your space. Write about the specific problem you see founders get wrong. Write about what you tried, what did not work, and what actually moved the needle. Take a clear position on something your competitors are still hedging on.

This is what both systems reward. Google rewards topical authority built over time around a focused subject. AI tools reward citable claims and distinct perspective. The same body of content that gets you ranked in traditional search is the same body of content that gets you surfaced in AI results. It is the same problem we wrote about in why most consulting firms aren't showing up in AI search results.

The firms winning in both channels are not publishing more. They are publishing things that only they could have written.

02. Build a Website That Speaks to Both Audiences: Buyers and Search Crawlers

Most services firm websites are written for two audiences: existing clients who already know what you do, and potential clients being pitched on a referral. Neither of those audiences needs to find you through search. The people you need to capture in search are strangers. They require different language.

Both Google and AI tools are trying to answer the same basic question: what does this firm actually do, who is it for, and can it be trusted? They are looking for clear signals, not polished marketing copy.

That means your website needs to do three things explicitly:

• State your specialty in plain language, in the headline, not buried halfway down the page
• Use the language your buyers use when they search and prompt, not the internal terminology you use with existing clients
• Make your expertise verifiable: case studies, outcomes, third-party mentions, specific industries and situations you have worked in

On the AI side, there is an additional layer: structured data and schema markup, which is code that labels what is on your page so machines can read it accurately. When AI tools crawl your site, they are parsing signals about what your firm specializes in and how credible that specialization is. Schema markup for your organization, your services, and any FAQ content helps those systems categorize and cite you accurately. Most founder-led firms have not done this.

Third-party signals matter for both channels. Mentions in industry publications, podcast appearances, directory listings, and partner sites all tell both Google and AI search tools the same thing: this firm is credible, and other sources agree. Getting cited outside your own site is one of the most valuable things you can do for visibility in both.

03. Ignore the Experts Selling You a Formula. Build a Dashboard Instead.

The firms that win in both channels do not follow a formula. They build a simple dashboard, watch what their own content is actually doing, and make small adjustments from there. The reason this matters: most founders go wrong by following so-called experts who sell canned frameworks. Post three times a week. Use these keywords. Structure every piece this way. Follow the formula and the tools or algorithms will reward you.

That advice is not designed for your firm. It is designed to be sold to thousands of firms at once. What works in search, both traditional and AI, is deeply specific to your content, your audience, your positioning, and how buyers in your particular niche actually search. There is no universal playbook. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

What actually works is slower and less dramatic: build a simple dashboard, watch what your specific content is doing, and make incremental adjustments based on what you see. Which pieces are driving traffic. Which ones are getting cited by AI tools. Which pages visitors land on and whether they stay. That data tells you more about your next move than any framework will.

This also means letting go of the idea that one piece of content will break through. It will not. There is no single blog post or LinkedIn article that is going to deliver a flood of inbound leads overnight. Search visibility, in both channels, is the result of a consistent body of work that compounds over time. The firms that win are making small, informed adjustments every month, not swinging for a viral moment.

For traditional search, the metrics that matter are straightforward:

• Which search terms are bringing people to your site
• Which pages they land on and how long they stay
• Which visits turn into contact form submissions or calls

For AI visibility, the signal set is different but trackable:

• Run direct queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews for the problems your firm solves. See if you appear. See who does instead.
• Track which content pieces are getting cited by AI tools
• Watch for AI referral traffic in your analytics, which now shows up as a distinct source channel

Three patterns to look for in your dashboard:

• You show up in Google but not in AI results. That usually points to a content specificity problem. Your pages are indexed, meaning they are in Google's database, but your content is not citable enough.
• You get AI citations but no conversions. That is a website language problem.
• You get neither. You are likely still too broad in your positioning.

None of that diagnosis is possible without the data. The dashboard is not the strategy. It is what makes the strategy improvable.

The In-Between Is Not Permanent, But It Is Now

At some point, AI search will become the dominant channel and the calculus will shift. But that is not today, and it is probably not next year. Right now, the buyers you want are using both channels. Some will find you through Google. Some will ask ChatGPT first. Many will do both.

The smart move is not to double your content budget or run two separate programs. It is to build a single content strategy grounded in clear positioning and real expertise, publish it consistently across your site and LinkedIn, and track what both systems are doing with it.

The firms that come out of this transition in the strongest position will not be the ones that reacted fastest to AI. They will be the ones that used this window to get their positioning clear, their content credible, and their measurement real.

That is the work. It is not glamorous, and there is no shortcut. But if you do it well, both channels start working for you at the same time.