For almost thirty years, one behaviour defined how businesses competed online.

They searched. And more importantly, they made sure they could be found.

Search Engine Optimisation became a boardroom conversation. Agencies built entire service lines around it. Nigerian brands invested in keywords, backlinks, metadata, and ranking strategies, all in pursuit of the same goal: page one of Google. Visibility was the metric. Discovery was the prize.

That era is not over. But it is no longer enough.

That is the central argument of a new paper by Vikas Mehta, a marketing strategist and thought leader connected to ASK Tech Ventures, titled “SEO Isn’t Dead. But It Isn’t Enough: Why Africa Must Think Beyond Search.” The piece, which has been circulating widely in marketing and technology circles, makes a case that deserves serious attention from every brand custodian, agency strategist, and digital marketing professional operating in Nigeria today.

The argument begins with a deceptively simple observation. Increasingly, people are not searching. They are asking.

They are asking ChatGPT. Asking Gemini. Asking Claude. Asking Perplexity. And when they ask, they are not simply looking for information. They are looking for judgement, recommendations, opinions, direction. As Mehta puts it, the shift may seem semantic. It is not.

The difference between being found and being recommended

Here is where the argument sharpens into something every Nigerian marketer needs to sit with.

A search engine presents ten results. An AI system may present three recommendations. Or one. The competitive dynamics of those two scenarios are fundamentally different.

In the search era, appearing on page one of Google meant visibility. In the AI era, being recommended by an AI system means preference. One earns attention. The other influences choice. And as AI systems become increasingly embedded in how consumers, businesses, and institutions make decisions, from choosing a product to selecting a university to identifying a service provider — the organisations that are being recommended will have a structural advantage over those that are merely discoverable.

Mehta cites Gartner’s prediction that traditional search engine volume will decline by 25 per cent by 2026 as users increasingly turn to AI chatbots and virtual agents. OpenAI, meanwhile, recently reported more than 400 million weekly active users. The behaviour shift is not coming. It is already here.

For Nigerian brands, the implication is direct. When a consumer or a business decision-maker asks an AI system “which Nigerian bank has the best digital experience” or “which Lagos agency should I use for my brand strategy” or “what is the most trusted FMCG brand in Nigeria”, who gets recommended? And why?

Most Nigerian organisations currently have no answer to that question. That may become one of the most significant blind spots of the next decade.

The alphabet soup problem, and what it reveals

One of the more revealing sections of Mehta’s paper deals with the chaos of terminology currently surrounding this emerging discipline. AIO. GEO. AEO. LLMO. AISO. AI Visibility. Different practitioners, different software providers, different analysts, all using different language to describe variations of the same underlying challenge.

For Mehta, this alphabet soup is not just evidence of confusion. It is evidence of infancy. Mature disciplines develop common standards. Emerging ones do not. And the fact that no single term has yet gained dominance is perhaps the clearest signal that the playbook for this space is still being written.

At ASK Tech Ventures, the term they have settled on, without claiming it is definitively correct, is AIO: AI Optimisation. Defined as the umbrella discipline concerned with how AI systems discover, understand, evaluate, and recommend organisations, individuals, and entities. Under that umbrella sit SEO, AEO, GEO, LLMO, and whatever methodologies are still to emerge.

The terminology will eventually settle. What matters more is the underlying shift in how success is measured, from discovery to recommendation, from being seen to being chosen.

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Why Africa and Nigeria is not late this time

This is the part of Mehta’s argument that should stop Nigerian marketing professionals in their tracks.

The familiar pattern of digital adoption in Africa has always involved a lag. Innovation happens in Silicon Valley. Frameworks are built in Europe. Playbooks are packaged and exported. African practitioners spend years catching up to standards that were set without them.

AIO is different. Nobody has been doing this for fifteen years. Nobody has a mature playbook for influencing AI recommendations. The discipline is so new that it cannot even agree on what to call itself. Which means that for perhaps the first time in a major digital discipline, African businesses and practitioners are not arriving late to a mature market. They are present at the creation of one.

For Nigerian marketing and advertising professionals, that is an extraordinary opportunity, and an extraordinary responsibility. The agencies, strategists, and brand custodians who move now to understand how AI systems evaluate and recommend Nigerian brands will not just be serving their clients better. They will be helping to write the rules of a discipline that the rest of the world is also still figuring out.

The question every Nigerian brand should be asking today

Mehta ends his paper with a question that cuts through all the terminology and methodology debate:

If AI were asked about your brand today, what would it say? Would it recommend you? Would it recommend your competitor? Would it understand what you do, position you accurately, trust you enough to include you in the answer?

For Nigerian brands that have spent years building digital visibility through SEO, social media, and content marketing, those questions demand honest answers. The work done to be findable is not wasted, it remains foundational. But findability and recommendability are not the same thing. And in an era where AI is increasingly the layer between organisations and the people they serve, the brands that understand the difference will be the ones that compete most effectively for the decade ahead.

SEO helped Nigerian brands become searchable.

The next generation of optimisation will determine whether they become recommendable.

The playbook is still being written. Nigerian practitioners have both the opportunity and the standing to help write it.

Source: SEO Isn’t Dead. But It Isn’t Enough written by Vikas Mehta