We went to SEO Week. Here’s what you need to know.

By the Real Chemistry Search Intelligence Team

Want the quick, skimmable version of our SEO Week takeaways? Explore the recap.

iPullRank’s SEO Week held in New York City the last week of April probably should’ve just been called GEO Week. Obviously we had to be there.

The conversation around AI search felt noticeably more sophisticated than it did even a year ago, which honestly makes sense given how quickly this space is moving. Nobody was really debating whether AI search matters anymore. That’s a given.

The conversations were much more about what happens next:

• How do these systems actually interpret brands and information?
• Why are some messages pulling through while others aren’t?
• How do you measure any of this in a meaningful way?
• And whose job is GEO even supposed to be within an organization?

What was especially interesting was how closely those conversations mirrored the conversations we’re increasingly having with pharma marketers and communicators right now.

A few themes from the week really stuck with us:

1. GEO is already moving beyond “best practices.”

One slide from Jeff Coyle, SVP of Strategy at Siteimprove (and co-founder of MarketMuse), made us get out our phones to take a screenshot:

“You can’t FAQ your way into winning.”

This really stood out, as several clients have reached out with questions like:
“So… we just need FAQs now?”

And I get why. We all got flooded quickly with GEO checklists, LinkedIn POVs, infographics and best-practice playbooks.

Add FAQs. Rewrite headers. Optimize for prompts. Make pages more conversational. Easy, right?

None of those are bad tactics. But one thing became clear throughout the week…the more sophisticated players are already well beyond them.

The sessions getting the most attention weren’t really about formatting tricks. They were about how AI systems connect information across entire ecosystems and question pathways.

That’s especially relevant in healthcare, where information is naturally fragmented:

• disease education in one place
• clinical data buried in PDFs
• patient and HCP content sometimes disconnected
• corporate and brand narratives living separately

Humans can usually piece that together.

AI systems often can’t.

That’s part of why pharma marketers and communicators are struggling to understand why some narratives and questions surface consistently in AI-generated answers while others don’t.

2. GEO is becoming a cross-functional challenge.

Bianca Anderson, organic growth strategist at Stellar Search Signals, said this:

“Ninety-one percent of AI citations do not come from your website. They come from third-party reviews, forums, press mentions, community, built by other teams with or without you”.

That line came up in conversations and sessions the rest of the week.

One question we keep hearing from pharma teams right now is:
“Whose job is this?”

Is it SEO?
Comms?
Brand?
Web?
Medical?
Analytics?
Corporate affairs?

The reality is probably some combination of all of them.

These systems are assembling understanding across entire ecosystems, not individual channels or teams. And for healthcare organizations, that creates a very different kind of challenge.

Many healthcare organizations still think in campaigns while AI systems increasingly organize information around interconnected questions, entities and intent pathways.

That disconnect matters.

One of the most striking examples all week also came from Coyle: A healthcare organization’s myth-vs-fact content was being misread because the myth itself lived in the header (H1) structure. The AI couldn’t distinguish “this organization is debunking this myth” from “this organization believes this myth.” It flagged the organization as endorsing the very claim it was trying to correct.

That was much more an interpretation issue than a visibility issue.

In healthcare, where small wording differences can materially change understanding, that matters.

3. Measurement still feels messy. Does anyone have an answer for ROI?

We’ll just say it. Almost nobody seemed fully confident talking about measurement yet.

Jori Ford, Chief Marketing and Product Officer at FoodBoss, said it best: “Subjective inputs yield subjective outputs. You get out of the tools what you’re putting into the tools.”

There are visibility scores everywhere now. Dashboards everywhere. Prompt tracking everywhere. But underneath it all, there’s still a lot of inconsistency around prompt methodology, reproducibility, citation interpretation and what even counts as visibility or authority.

A point that came up repeatedly is that most tools are measuring appearance, not mechanism. That distinction is huge.

Pharma marketers and communicators are already asking smarter questions than simple visibility tracking.

Less: “How visible are we?”

More:

• “Are we showing up in the right conversations?”
• “Are our core narratives actually pulling through?”
• “What questions are becoming associated with our brand?”
• “Which sources and ecosystems are shaping interpretation?”

That’s a much more interesting conversation than where we started.

If there was one thing SEO Week made clear, it’s that the industry has moved on from debating whether GEO matters. The more interesting question now is how these systems actually work and what it takes to show up in them in a way that actually means something.

Want to go deeper into what we heard at SEO Week? Explore the recap.

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