Fifteen years ago, doing SEO properly meant looking beyond just the top ten blue links. You had to think about organic rankings, local packs, business profiles, video platforms - each engine had multiple surfaces with different rules. Nobody complained, they mapped the surfaces, figured out what the algorithm wanted, and optimised accordingly.

Fast forward to today. A new AI model launches every week, each one powered by different underlying systems. ChatGPT offers web search, reasoning, memory, tool use. Claude has Sonnet, code execution, artifacts. Gemini brings massive context windows, grounding, image generation. The list keeps growing.

Every single one of these has multiple capabilities: remembering data, executing code, building internal representations for the user.

And what are most people optimising for? Getting cited in a text response.

That's like only chasing the blue links in 2005 while ignoring maps, images, and shopping. You're leaving eighty percent of the surface area untouched.

Here's what we're not doing but really should be:

Optimising for the reasoning layer
These models reason over your data. If your page contradicts a competitor's, the model has to reconcile that. How do you make the AI reason well with your content, not just parrot one snippet? We never consider this.
Optimising for tool-calling
Agents-like code assistants or plugin-capable chatbots-can call APIs. If you make your site usable by an agent, you've created a moat nobody else is working towards.
Optimising for memory
Each model models you and your preferences into context. On the web, you ask users to bookmark you - a direct appeal to save your site. The AI equivalent is earning a place in its memory. That's massive: the model remembers user preferences across all future interactions. Every time someone asks a question in your space, you're already in the context window. Earn the AI bookmark.
Optimising for multi-turn
Each turn is a separate retrieval and reasoning step. If your content only covers the first query but not the follow-ups, you lose the conversion mid-conversation. Don't let the AI steer the user away.

The surface mapping we should be doing:

Old SEO: 'This keyword → web result + map pack + image carousel + shopping.'

New equivalent: 'This intent → retrieval source + reasoning path + tool-calling opportunity + memory persistence + multi-turn flow.'

It's more complex, sure, but also more flexible. A surface you own that nobody else is optimising for is a surface with zero competition.

We have this rich ecosystem of surfaces inside every model - retrieval, reasoning, tool-use, memory, multi-turn - and everyone's back to putting all their eggs in the retrieval basket.

The opportunity lies in the other capabilities. They're wide open because nobody's building for them yet.

One thing that keeps me up: the 'remember us in memory' part. Bookmarks were mostly one-to-one. What does one-to-many look like with memory?

And yes, I know some people might say I'm making assumptions about what SEOs are and aren't doing. But from what I see day to day, most are still thinking in 2005 terms.