Thenuka is the co-founder and CEO of sunbeam, where he's building an autonomous agent for SEO, and daydream, an AI-native SEO agency.gettyOver the past few years, SEO solutions have evolved rapidly.Before the widespread adoption of AI began in 2022, we had SEO SaaS tools that assisted with tasks like content scoring and creating content briefs.Then, over the next few years, we saw the rise of AI-enabled tools that automated entire workflows from end-to-end, like keyword research and article creation, along with a new focus on AI search engines.Now, autonomous SEO agents that are capable of completing many of the same tasks as human SEO practitioners are beginning to take center stage.​ ​This is largely due to technological improvements that occurred toward the end of 2025, which laid the foundation for fully autonomous agents. High on the list are rapidly improving reasoning capabilities and the transition of agents into coding agents.From my perspective leading a company that builds autonomous SEO agents, I've found that many marketing leaders do not yet understand what the world of autonomous SEO will look like.What Autonomous Agents Can Do Now​Autonomous agents can handle virtually all of the duties expected of a human SEO practitioner. They can independently research what your top competitors are doing, formulate an editorial SEO plan, schedule entire content calendars and write code to fix your website’s technical SEO issues. ​​This changes the way SEO work is completed, mirroring a change more akin to the way software engineering work has morphed since the rise of coding models. The role of software engineers has shifted from writing code to architecting systems that allow coding agents to complete high-quality work, reviewing those systems and iterating on them for progressively better outputs.​Similarly, rather than spending time creating each piece of content, manually fixing technical SEO issues or building reports, the role of marketing teams will shift toward supplying the agent with the context it needs—access to CRMs, customer support tickets, analytics platforms—reviewing work completed by agents and building the processes and architecture required to manage the channel effectively.​However, as marketing teams adopt autonomous agents into their organizations, it'll be critical for them to negotiate which aspects of QA are handled by the marketing team versus the engineering ​team. Reviewing the content outputs of an agent can be effectively handled by marketing from end-to-end. When it comes to technical SEO, though, more collaboration and review may be required from engineering, given the risk of potentially breaking something on the website. What Autonomous Agents Mean For SEOThe future of SEO is likely to be one in which autonomous agents continuously compete against one another. As your brand targets a popular keyword or phrase in your industry, a rival agent is likely to take note and formulate their response to it. ​In a world where SEO becomes an agent-versus-agent competition, how do we think about the parameters for who wins? My view is that most core drivers of great SEO will remain as important, if not more so, in the next era of SEO. This is because Google still has the same ultimate North Star: creating the most helpful content and experiences for the user, regardless of whether that content is created by a human or an agent.While the way SEO is done will change, the fundamental outcome desired by Google should be the same: a high-quality, useful experience for users. This has been Google's official position on this issue for some time, as they've confirmed that they are "rewarding high-quality content, however it is produced" in their guidance on AI-generated content. ​​How To Prepare For The Next Era Of Search​Here are a few ways that marketing teams can prepare for an agent-versus-agent world:​​1. Build an understanding of the aspects of SEO in which agents have an advantage over humans. These will largely be tasks where a human could not replicate an agent's efficiency, whether due to bandwidth or the necessary speed of response.For example, agents will naturally be better at conducting competitor research because they can crawl your competitors and synthesize thousands of individual data points about their performance much faster than a human analyst.Humans, on the other hand, will excel at higher-level strategic direction. This means defining the audience to reach, formulating a higher-level strategy around which topical areas to focus on and crafting and ensuring compliance with brand voice and tone guidelines. ​​2. Deploy autonomous agents to handle the entirety of day-to-day execution to the greatest extent possible.Ramping up an agent is not entirely dissimilar to ramping up a human employee. Rather than chucking the entire function at the agent all at once, start incrementally. In your first week or two, aim to have the agent reliably and consistently produce a few high-quality articles before proceeding to scale. In order to nail quality, you may need to work with the agent to provide it with your brand tone and voice and access to internal data about the product. ​​3. Refocus your team to focus on a singular question: How do we create "alpha" in our SEO efforts? A common question I hear is "If other companies also leverage agents, won't we all write about the same thing?" This concern is valid, but this is where the role of human taste comes in. In order to create differentiated content, your marketing team should focus on bestowing the agent with access to unique, differentiated insights about your product, market and customer.This could come from ​calls with customers, insights into the minds of your team or several other sources. It should be information that is not already available to a large language model.​This is ultimately the model for what SEO in an agent-versus-agent world looks like. Most day-to-day tasks will be delegated to agents, while humans reskill and focus on architecting systems that identify unique marketing alpha. From there, your team members will work toward imbuing the agents with the ability to use that alpha in SEO campaigns from start to finish.​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?