AI Marketing in 2026: Why Visibility Belongs to AI-Ready Firms

The December 3, 2025, edition of MITechTV featured Michigan business leader and digital strategist Melih Oztalay, CEO of SmartFinds Marketing, in conversation with longtime host Mike Brennan. The segment, now posted at MITechTV YouTube Channel and as an individual episode at AI Marketing in 2026: Why Ranking Is Being Replaced by Being Referenced, explored one of the most pressing topics facing business leaders: how to prepare for AI marketing in 2026.

Over the past year, Oztalay has led an ongoing MITechTV series helping executives make sense of the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence on customer acquisition, visibility, and digital transformation. Brennan introduced the segment with a confession shared by many business leaders today: the world of AI is moving so fast that even technology journalists are struggling to keep up.

Oztalay agreed. He noted that while most professionals were still experimenting with tools like ChatGPT at the start of 2025, the pace of AI development had accelerated beyond what traditional consumer perceptions would suggest.

“ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are no longer new AI,” he said during the segment. “They are now old AI media.”

— Melih Oztalay

That observation shaped the theme of the discussion: AI is expanding faster than business literacy, and 2026 will widen the gap between organizations that merely adopt AI tools and those that build AI-first infrastructure.

2025 was the AI boom year — 2026 is the maturity test

As Oztalay explained, the explosion of AI-powered platforms in 2025 transformed how customers search, evaluate options, and make buying decisions. What was experimental a year ago has now become normalized.

“It’s mind-boggling,” he told Brennan. “There is so much investment in AI globally, not just in the U.S. We can’t even imagine what 2026 is going to look like.”

For the average business leader, this is both inspiring and uncomfortable. It means the mechanics of digital visibility — long defined by search engine optimization — are now being rewritten by generative systems that gather, interpret, and summarize content before buyers ever visit a website.

That led the conversation into the transformation of SEO itself.

SEO, AEO, and GEO — all happening at once

Oztalay broke the evolution down into three parallel categories:

SEO — the original search engine optimization
AEO — answer engine optimization, which rose after Google’s Hummingbird algorithm shift
GEO — generative engine optimization, driven by AI systems that extract and summarize content

“The big misconception,” he explained, “is that companies think they can skip the older layers and just focus on GEO. You can’t. All three run simultaneously.”

This remark was important, because many companies assume AI will replace SEO rather than expand it. Instead, Oztalay emphasized that generative engines are rewriting how visibility is achieved, but not eliminating its foundations.

This is where he introduced one of the most consequential observations in digital marketing today.

Ranking is being replaced by being referenced

For thirty years, SEO practitioners have rallied around one goal: ranking. According to Oztalay, that mindset is already outdated.

“Ranking is being replaced by being referenced.”

— Melih Oztalay

AI engines no longer reward keyword manipulation or page position alone. Instead, they reward authority signals such as citations, credible mentions, structured content, expert commentary, schema markup, and presence in trustworthy publications and platforms.

That shift has enormous implications.

Companies that rely solely on conventional SEO — keywords, backlinks, metadata — are losing ground, because AI agents determine credibility differently than search engines historically did. In fact, Oztalay suggested that CEOs should run a simple test:

Ask ChatGPT to list companies that do what you do.
See whether your company is included.
If not, ask why.

“You’ll get a long to-do list that tells you exactly what needs to change,” he said.

This is precisely why SmartFinds Marketing has been prioritizing structured content development, entity authority, and AI-readable frameworks through its AI transformation programs.

Why AI engines are the new discovery layer

During the interview, Oztalay noted that Google search volume and click-through rates are trending downward. He was careful not to exaggerate the decline — the search engine is not disappearing — but emphasized the directional meaning.

Meanwhile, AI engines are becoming the starting point for research.

“I ran a search in ChatGPT and then ran the same search in Google,” he explained. “ChatGPT gave me exactly what I wanted in seconds, including five specific websites. Google took 15 minutes to sort through.”

That anecdote highlights a structural shift: AI is triaging decisions before buyers ever arrive at a website. Consumers are not searching for rankings — they are searching for clarity, confidence, and relevance.

And AI gives it to them faster.

What happens after visibility? The customer journey must change too

Brennan then steered the conversation to implementation. If businesses improve their AI-driven discovery footprint, how should they improve conversion on their websites?

Oztalay described the second pillar of AI marketing in 2026: AI-driven customer journey mapping.

Getting traffic is no longer enough. Businesses must increase conversion quantity and accelerate conversion speed.

To do this, he outlined four interconnected tactical supports:

AI systems that track individual visitor behavior and stage progression
On-site AI chatbots that allow anonymous information-gathering before human contact
Heatmaps that reveal how real users perceive and interact with pages
A/B or ABC testing that identifies which version of a page actually performs best

This multi-layered orchestration enables companies to understand visitor intent in real time and dynamically adjust calls-to-action based on where visitors are in their buying journey.

“In 2026, the game is reducing friction and shortening decision time,” he said.

He also highlighted that customers may reach decision stages in one visit or over multiple sessions. AI helps determine timing, which means marketing teams must adjust how they sequence engagement.

Speed matters more than ever

The combination of GEO and AI-driven journey mapping produces a new strategic landscape:

Buyers trust AI inference
Buyers access content faster
Buyers expect answers immediately

Companies that cannot meet these expectations will not lose gradually — they will lose instantly.

In this new environment, delay functions as decline; hesitation becomes a competitive disadvantage.

This insight resonates with executives who have already experienced the speed shift firsthand: leads are hotter sooner, sales cycles compress overnight, and pipeline velocity can change in weeks rather than quarters.

SmartFinds Marketing, also active at SmartFinds Marketing on LinkedIn, is helping B2B brands adopt AI-first strategies across marketing, sales, and operations.

What CEOs need to do now

The segment ended with practical direction for executives who want to be ready for AI marketing in 2026 rather than react to it later.

Oztalay emphasized several priorities:

Build AI-ready infrastructure, including structured web content and schema that AI engines can easily interpret.
Develop entity-based authority signals through media placements, expert content, and strong digital reputations.
Align conversion rate optimization strategy with AI-driven behavioral analysis, heatmaps, and journey tracking.
Deploy chatbots, intelligence layers, and session analytics to understand and support visitors in real time.
Re-train marketing and sales expectations to reflect accelerated buyer decisions and shorter sales cycles.

Oztalay stressed that companies waiting for “later adoption” will find the cost of catching up far higher — two to three times the investment of companies that start in early 2026.

The Competitive Edge Will Belong to AI-Prepared Companies

AI marketing in 2026 will not reward the loudest companies — it will reward the most structured, referenced, and responsive ones.

Oztalay’s appearance on MITechTV illustrated the gap between merely installing AI tools and re-engineering digital systems to perform and scale inside a generative ecosystem.

As he reminded viewers, “Ranking is being replaced by being referenced.” That sentence may define the era better than any algorithm update ever has.

About SmartFinds Marketing

SmartFinds Marketing, led by CEO Melih Oztalay, brings more than three decades of experience helping companies navigate digital transformation. The agency specializes in AI marketing strategies, GEO search visibility, conversion rate optimization, content development, multimedia campaigns, and comprehensive B2B digital marketing programs. Based on a philosophy of continuous innovation, SmartFinds empowers businesses to build stronger customer journeys, increase revenue, and compete effectively in fast-changing markets. Learn more at SmartFindsMarketing.com.