What Survives The Next Update? Stop Chasing AI Search Hacks

“Traffic you can’t hold is not growth.”

Murat’s view of search comes from two very different experiences: five years inside Google’s Search Quality team and years spent helping companies scale, including Brainly. The first one taught him how ranking systems are built, manipulated, and protected. His experience with companies taught him that traffic without retention or business value is not sustainable growth.

That combination shapes how he sees AI search today. Rather than treating it as a replacement for SEO, he sees it as a new channel with its own behaviour, metrics, and risks. According to him the winners will not be the companies chasing the newest GEO trick, but those building systems that survive change.

Stop Panicking About the Wrong Number

One of Murat’s strongest arguments is that companies are still measuring the wrong things. Traffic drops create panic, even when business outcomes improve.

Much of the traffic now disappearing was transitional and informational. Users may get an answer before reaching a website, but that does not automatically mean the brand has lost value. What matters is whether the remaining interactions are more meaningful and whether they lead to revenue, qualified leads or stronger brand consideration.

The new scorecard, therefore needs to go beyond clicks. Brand mentions, sentiment, conversion quality, and the topics with which a brand is associated inside AI responses are becoming increasingly important.

AI Search Is a New Channel

Murat does not believe AI search is replacing organic demand. It is splitting it.

People still have problems to solve, questions to answer, and products to evaluate, he explains. What changes is where that demand is expressed.

“If you just take the SEO thinking and operate the same way, it doesn’t work,” he warns. Companies need to understand the mechanics of the new channel before deciding how to invest in it.

Get Very Good at the Boring Stuff

The brands winning in AI search, according to Murat, tend to share three characteristics: they are legible, corroborated, and worth citing.

That means creating information around specific claims, structuring it clearly enough for machines to understand, and offering something distinctive enough to deserve a citation. AI systems still rely on training data, but they also use retrieval and grounding to access information from search.

It is not a glamorous shortcut. As he puts it, successful companies become “very good at boring stuff” and keep doing it for a long time.

Shortcuts Leave Footprints

His years inside Google’s Search Quality team also make him unusually sceptical of shortcuts.

Rather than listing GEO hacks that work today, he argues that such lists become liabilities as soon as platforms learn to detect them. Tactics that are cheap, easy to scale, and widely copied leave patterns behind.

“Don’t leave footprints,” is Murat’s simplest advice. If the value of an action comes mainly from exploiting the mechanism rather than helping the reader or customer, it is probably a hack with a limited shelf life.

Growth Needs Better Judgment, Not More Tactics

For Murat, sustainable growth is less about choosing between quick wins and long-term strategy and more about using each at the right moment.

“You need to use fast growth and early signals to buy your runway for the long-term big projects,” he explains. Quick wins can help secure executive trust and financial support, but they should never become the strategy itself.

That thinking will shape his SERP Conf. Rome talk as well. Rather than offering another list of tactics, Murat plans to focus on how he builds hypotheses, tests them, interprets incomplete information, and decides which opportunities are worth scaling.

As he puts it, the real value lies “not in the tactics, but in the judgment about which bets deserve investment and which are distractions.”

Watch the full interview to learn more about AI visibility, prompt tracking, and the decision-making frameworks Murat uses to turn uncertainty into sustainable growth.

Ready to Build AI Search Growth That Lasts?

Join Murat at SERP Conf. Rome 2026 on October 16 and hear the methodologies, tests, and real-world thinking behind his approach. Come for the ideas, stay for the conversations with the people actively shaping what search becomes next.