The multibillion-dollar question I’m often asked is: Will a critical mass of consumers shop and check out on Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity?

Consumers’ loyalty to convenience makes a “yes” most likely. Thirty-eight percent of US online adults, according to Forrester’s Retail Topic Insights 1 Survey, 2025, checked how fast products would arrive before ordering. If the likes of Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity build, buy, or partner for Apple Pay-like checkout and Amazon-like fulfillment, paths to purchase will forever change.

GenAI Reenergizes The SEO Solutions Market

Search engines’ potential to become full-funnel one-stop shops makes search engine optimization increasingly significant. But unlike search engines, which are top of mind for CMOs and now CFOs, SEO is relegated to the weeds of schema markup, sitemaps, log files, and crawlers. SEO’s marketing problem, based on its reputation for tediousness, technical difficulty, and low return on effort, hamstrings SEO processes. Thirty-eight percent of B2C marketers, according to Forrester’s Q2 2025 CMO Pulse Survey, cite “getting buy-in from various SEO stakeholders, including content, IT, and paid search” as their greatest SEO-related challenge.

That’s changing as vendors across the SEO landscape increasingly automate content and technical SEO workflows, precisely measure SEO’s short- and long-term impacts, and adapt to AI-integrated search. The Forrester Wave™: Search Engine Optimization Solutions, Q3 2025, evaluates the top seven vendors in the SEO market on criteria spanning their current offerings and strategies. You can chat with our Wave using Izola and customize the Wave to identify vendors that match your particular criteria.

Our Wave rewards vendors that deftly balance SEO’s new-fashioned priority — adapting content and site structure to grow visibility across ChatGPT and Perplexity — with SEO’s perennial problems, including the difficulty of evangelizing and implementing SEO across IT, content, and paid search stakeholders. It validates vendors that put SEO in context of the broader media mix, have robust local and international SEO capabilities, and deepen their moats around predictive and generative AI.

The reenergized SEO market will burgeon as organic-first expertise engines like Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity dramatically reshape traffic patterns and media mixes. Feel free to reach out with questions, feedback, and to learn more.