• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

Remember when the Yellow Pages -- the massive, printed book with local business names, addresses and telephone numbers -- was the primary resource for this information? Search engines are on their way to becoming this fossil, according to the CEO of a global digital marketing agency.

Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO at VaynerMedia, told Bloomberg TV: “We are in the early stages of the search engine looking like the Yellow Pages."

Many companies in the Fortune 5000 are in trouble, he said, because a huge percentage of their business relies on search. They managed to get their Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio (LTV:CAC), and that’s what they use to drive intent.

Google and others like Microsoft are trying to replace and update that search with AI to keep that business. But companies, especially Google, will never again have the opportunity to control as much market share as search, he said.

Many companies -- from Meta to OpenAI and Perplexity -- will replace what Google once had. AI will turn search into a fragmented ecosystem.

"People who have been lazy and overpaying for their brand value on search need to understand they are in trouble and need to start creating demand, [as well as] learn how to win the SEO game in AI," he said. "AI optimization is about to become a whole new game."

Artificial intelligence (AI) engines still take information from the web, from places like Reddit. Some, but not all, have the ability to reason based on that web information.

Reasoning is required in order to run a successful AI engine.

Collectively companies are underestimating the enormity of this shift, Vaynerchuk said.

Noam Dorros, director analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice, believes CMOs should not abandon traditional search fundamentals.

“CMOs and their teams should not get overexcited about one platform over another, and instead closely follow the traffic and behavior patterns of their key customer segments, while creating budget and time to test new capabilities or opportunities in the broader

Similarweb, known for its web data and analytics, on Wednesday launched Similarweb AI Agents, a suite of digital AI experts that let businesses change how they analyze AI SEO trends.

The agents are trained on the real-time data from across 100 million websites, 4 million apps, 5 billion search keywords, and 20 million companies.

Each agent is designed for a specific business function, from AI-based SEO and content planning, sales outreach, and trend discovery. The agent can correlate and summarize tremendous amounts of data faster and better than humans.

Or Offer, CEO of Similarweb, wrote in a blog post that these agents are not another chatbot or generic assistants.

The launch is just the beginning. Additional agents under development for in the coming months include Shopper Intelligence; Stock Intelligence; Web Intelligence for competitive intelligence, share of voice, advertising insights; and Sales Intelligence to support lead generation.