In March, I hosted an intimate roundtable event at The Farmhouse in Mackworth, bringing together a small group of marketers and business owners from across the region to talk honestly about what AI is doing to their SEO strategies, their marketing, and their businesses in general.
No slides. No sales pitch. Just a proper conversation over lunch.
We had people from industries as different as ventilation manufacturing, made-to-measure furniture, and professional football, which, it turns out, makes for a much more interesting discussion than a room full of people from the same sector nodding at the same problems.
(And yes, the Derby County vs Nottingham Forest debate did come up. We moved on fairly quickly.)
Here is what we actually talked about.
Organic traffic is down. But is it the disaster it looks like?
This was where we started, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Pretty much everyone round the table had seen a drop in organic traffic over the last year or so. The reason is well-documented: more people are starting their search journey in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews rather than clicking through to websites directly.
The frustration is real. You put months of work into your site and your content strategy, and then the click-through rates drop anyway.
But the conversation quickly shifted to something more useful: does the drop in clicks actually translate to a drop in business? For at least one person at the table, the answer was no. They had a customer contact them and say they had searched via AI, found them, and weren’t interested in going anywhere else. That is a warm lead who arrived with confidence already built. The SEO work hadn’t been wasted. It had just worked differently.
The broader point is one I keep coming back to: clicks are not the goal. Sales and enquiries are. If AI is filtering out the tyre-kickers and sending you higher-intent visitors, that might not be a bad trade, even if the vanity metrics look worse.
Reviews and directories matter more than ever
One of the clearest themes from the morning was the role that third-party platforms are now playing in AI-generated answers. When AI tools like Claude or Google’s AI Overviews summarise your business, they are pulling from review platforms, directories, and high-authority sites. Your own website is one input among many.
That means your Trustpilot profile, your Google reviews, and your presence on sector-specific directories are no longer just nice-to-haves. They are part of your SEO strategy whether you treat them that way or not.
One attendee raised a specific challenge here. Their business is B2B, but the reviews appearing in AI results were from end consumers who had used their clients’ products rather than theirs.
Negative reviews from a part of the supply chain they have no direct relationship with were surfacing and damaging their reputation in search. That is a real problem, and one I do not think many B2B businesses are thinking about it yet.
The advice we discussed: audit what AI is actually saying about your business right now. Search for your brand name in ChatGPT and Perplexity. If the output includes misinformation, outdated content, or review platforms you have neglected, you now know where to focus.
There is also a relatively new technical approach worth knowing about called llms.txt. Similar in concept to robots.txt, it is a file you can add to your website to help AI tools better understand what your pages are about and what you would like them to surface. However, it’s not confirmed that major AI platforms currently use this file for ranking or citation algorithms, so view it more as a simple proactive step that may help to move the needle marginally.
The SEO fundamentals have not changed as much as you might think
A question that came up a few times, in different forms, was whether all the SEO work done to date is now redundant. The answer is no.
FAQs still matter. Structured, well-organised content still matters. Earning genuine links from credible sources still matters. Being listed on the right directories still matters. What has changed is the way that work gets surfaced to your potential customers. The underlying logic of building authority and trust has not shifted.
What does need to shift is where you put your attention. Optimising purely for click-through rate is a losing game in 2025. Optimising for being the answer to a question, whether that answer is served in a traditional result, an AI overview, or a tool like Perplexity, is where the focus belongs.
AI in the business: where people are actually getting value
After lunch, the conversation moved away from SEO and towards something broader: how people are using AI inside their businesses day to day. This was probably the most candid part of the day.
The standout example came from the furniture and bedroom space. One attendee had used AI image generation to create product visuals for an entirely new product line before a single physical unit had been built. They launched the page with AI-generated CGI images, drove organic traffic to it, and sold their first unit before the prototype even existed. Since then, they have used the same approach to show customers what their bespoke designs would look like in their actual rooms, using real photos run through AI to produce realistic renders. What would previously have required expensive CGI is now done in minutes.
The same business had also automated the process of routing enquiries to the right franchisees based on postcodes and territories, a task that had been eating a full day a week of someone’s time and is now almost entirely handled by a custom GPT running alongside Zapier.
The honest takeaway from that conversation was that the biggest wins with AI tend to come from identifying a specific, repetitive, time-consuming process and asking whether it can be partially or fully automated. Not from trying to use AI for everything at once.
The culture problem is harder than the technology problem
This was probably the most honest moment of the day. Several people round the table, including me, acknowledged that getting teams to actually adopt AI is harder than finding AI tools that work.
The fear of job replacement is evident, even if it is mostly unfounded for the types of tasks we were discussing. People who have never opened ChatGPT do not know where to start, and if the message coming from leadership is just “use AI more” without practical demonstration or training, nothing changes.
The model that resonated most: human-led, AI-actioned, human-reviewed. AI accelerates the middle part of most workflows. The judgement, the relationships, the understanding of context – those stay human. A sales team that builds genuine rapport with customers is not replaceable by a quoting tool. A marketing manager who understands the brand is not replaceable by a content generator. But both of them can do more in the same amount of time with the right tools in place.
One person put it well: when the calculator arrived, it did not replace mathematicians. It just meant they could do more, faster.
The social media conversation
We also spent time on social media strategy, which wandered into some useful territory around how different platforms are rewarding different behaviours. The general consensus was that native content performs better than cross-posted content, that the algorithms on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn have diverged more than the platforms admit, and that the real unlock for most businesses is the frequency and authenticity of what gets posted rather than the production quality.
The football club perspective on this was genuinely interesting. Content that converts casual fans into season ticket holders is not the same content that keeps existing supporters engaged. The audience segmentation challenge is real, and AI tools can help with the analysis and ideation even when they are not the right fit for the actual content creation.
Want to join the next one?
We plan to run more of these roundtable events throughout the year. The format works precisely because it is small and honest. There is no agenda other than a useful conversation, and everyone in the room leaves with something they did not have before.
If you are a marketing manager or business owner and you want to be considered for a future roundtable, get in touch. We would love to have you.
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