On Wednesday, June 24, 2026, the event “SEO in the AI Era”, a discussion on how Artificial Intelligence is rewriting the rules, was held with great success at the Alexander Innovation Zone (AZK) facilities in Thessaloniki. The discussion featured Takis Dimitrakopoulos, Founder & Managing Director of Gravity-Labs, and George Christaras, Software Engineering Leader at Deventum, with Michalis Litsardakis, Founder of Quality Consulting Services, serving as moderator.
The End of Predictability and the Rise of GEO
Mr. Christaras described the fundamental shift currently taking place in research: we are shifting from a deterministic model of ten “blue links” to an unpredictable environment, where an LLM can provide a different answer to the same question or search query each time. This shift has given rise to two new fields of optimization, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which now aim to ensure visibility within AI-generated summaries. As highlighted at Google I/O 2026, the reality is now “Cited or Invisible”: when a brand is not mentioned in an AI summary, the click-through rate can drop by as much as 61%. Mr. Dimitrakopoulos added that “zero-click” searches now account for approximately 70% of queries, putting various industries at risk, foremost among them publishers and news media.
Content Quality and the Myth of Measurement
Mr. Dimitrakopoulos argued that the era of content written solely for keywords is over, as Artificial Intelligence now rewards content with genuine E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authenticity, Trust). Mr. Christaras expressed skepticism toward current “AI visibility” measurement tools, characterizing them as “sampling noise,” since only 20% of brands remain visible across five consecutive queries. Mr. Dimitrakopoulos proposed systematic “stress-testing” of prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, emphasizing that a mention within the content of an answer is worth much more than a simple source link.
Ethical Issues, Potential Risks, and the Future of Agents
Mr. Dimitrakopoulos referred to “Positioning Risk,” describing a case in which an artificial intelligence system ultimately recommended a competitor due to unclear brand positioning. The speakers also discussed the shift toward “Agentic Commerce”: companies that will soon be “selling” to digital agents that will scan the web and make purchasing decisions. A prerequisite for this was considered to be the transition to “machine-readable” websites, using protocols such as Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).
Conclusion: Trust as a Foundation
The event concluded on a note of cautious optimism. As Mr. Dimitrakopoulos summarized, the challenge for every business is no longer how to “rank high” on Google, but how to build trust as a foundation through a consistent, multichannel presence. Mr. Christaras concluded by noting that the goal is not to optimize an existing process, but to completely redesign it for an era in which “being present” is now the only way to exist.
