As search engines increasingly rely on AI-generated summaries and answer boxes to respond to queries directly on the results page, marketers across the industry are grappling with a quieter, more structural problem: a large share of websites still aren’t built in a way that lets these systems read them correctly in the first place.
For Olumuyiwa Ayodele Elegbede, a Marketing and SEO Manager at Vidi-Corp Ltd in the UK, that gap between how search increasingly works and how most in-house teams still approach it, is one of the more pressing issues facing digital marketing right now.
“There’s a tendency to treat AI Overviews and AI-generated answers as something happening to SEO from the outside, rather than recognising that the underlying fundamentals are what’s being tested,” Elegbede said.
“If your structured data is messy, your headings don’t reflect your content properly, or your pages are slow and hard to crawl, an AI system trying to summarise your page is going to struggle in the same way a search engine always did.
The difference now is that the cost of getting it wrong is higher, because you’re not just losing ranking position, you’re sometimes being left out of the answer altogether.”
His view is shaped by a fairly specific combination of training and experience. Elegbede holds a BSc in Computer Networks from the University of East London and an MSc in Data Science from the University of East Anglia, while working in marketing and becoming a member of the Chartered Institute of
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