For years, SEO was reactive, often called upon to “make it rank” after a site’s launch, with minimal involvement in the initial stages.
SEO professionals are typically held accountable for key performance indicators (KPIs) linked to visibility, engagement, and revenue, yet they lack control over the systems affecting these metrics. These metrics often depend on the performance of various teams, including content, engineering, and brand, which may not share the same goals.
When Global Strategies, my previous agency, was acquired by Ogilvy, I suggested that our team act as building inspectors. We should be involved early, not just as an SEO upsell after the fact, but during crucial phases when architects and engineers lay out the structural components.
Ideally, we would step in after the wireframes are complete, reviewing the information architecture, navigation, and technical performance before the final design obscures the underlying structure.
We would ensure the right materials are used and that construction aligns with long-term performance standards.
However, in reality, we were rarely included in the planning stages, often brought in post-launch to fix issues buried beneath a visually appealing design.
This model made sense in the early days of search when websites were simpler, and ranking factors were more forgiving.
SEO practitioners identified crawl issues, adjusted metadata, optimized titles, fixed broken links, and retrofitted pages with keywords and internal links.
I’ve long advocated for integrating SEO fixes into the roles and workflows that initially broke them through education, process change, and CMS innovation.
Yet, SEO has often been seen as less important than design, development, or content creation, making it easier to assign SEO the role of cleanup crew rather than embedding best practices into upstream systems and roles.
But the role of identifying and fixing defects is no longer enough. In the AI-driven search environment, it’s becoming obsolete.
The Evolving Role of SEO
Search engines today do more than index and rank webpages. They extract answers, synthesize responses, and generate real-time content previews.
The traditional search journey has transformed into a multi-layered ecosystem of zero-click answers, AI summaries, featured snippets, and voice responses.
While traditional SEO tactics like indexability, content relevance, and backlinks still matter, they are now part of a larger system.
The new currency of visibility is semantic clarity, machine-readability, and multi-system integration. SEO is no longer about optimizing a page; it’s about orchestrating a system.
This complexity requires us to transition from being inspectors to becoming Commissioning Authorities (CxA) to meet these demands.
Understanding Commissioning Authorities
In modern architecture, a Commissioning Authority ensures that all building systems function as intended. They validate, test, and orchestrate performance, aligning construction output with design intent and operational goals.
They focus on interoperability, performance efficiency, long-term sustainability, and documentation, acting as active enablers of success.
SEO Needs Commissioning Authorities
Modern websites are networks of interconnected systems, including content strategy, CMS structure, design, analytics, schema, and more.
- Content strategy
- CMS structure
- Design and front-end frameworks
- Analytics and tagging layers
- Schema and structured data
- Internationalization and localization
- Page speed and Core Web Vitals
- AI answer optimization
Today’s SEO must act as a Commissioning Authority for these systems, involving themselves at the blueprint stage, advocating for search visibility, and ensuring semantic signals are embedded in every page.
The Rise of the Relevance Engineer
A key function within the CxA role is the Relevance Engineer, a concept introduced by Mike King of iPullRank. This role focuses on optimizing for semantic alignment, passage-level competitiveness, and probabilistic rankings.
The Relevance Engineer ensures content is structured for AI consumption, addresses layered user intent, and reinforces topical authority and entity associations.
This role is akin to a systems integration specialist, ensuring that all systems function cohesively within an innovative environment.
Relevance Engineering is more than a title; it’s a mindset shift, emphasizing that SEO must live at the intersection of information science, user experience, and machine interpretability.
From Inspector to CxA: Role Shifts
| SEO Pillar | Old Role: Building Inspector | New Role: Commissioning Authority |
| Indexability | Check crawl blocks after build | Design architecture for accessibility and rendering |
| Relevance | Patch in keywords post-launch | Map content to entity models and query intent upfront, guided by a Relevance Engineer |
| Authority | Chase links to weak content | Build a structured reputation and concept ownership |
| Clickability | Tweak titles and meta descriptions | Structure content for AI previews, snippets, and voice answers |
| User Experience | Flag issues in testing | Embed UX, speed, and clarity into the initial design |
Future of SEO
As AI reshapes search behavior, SEO professionals must adapt. We need to understand how content is deconstructed by large language models and ensure our information is structured for synthesis.
We must advocate for knowledge modeling and encourage cross-functional integration between content, engineering, design, and analytics.
The next generation of SEO leaders will be systems thinkers, semantic strategists, and digital performance architects who advocate for organizational, infrastructural, and content changes to thrive.
By embedding structured, AI-ready practices into the workflow, they enable content teams, developers, and marketers to perform better and more efficiently.
The Relevance Engineer and Commissioning Authority roles are strategic leverage points that unlock exponential impact across the digital organization.
Cyberset can help you navigate this evolving landscape with services like Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing. Explore our Website Design and WordPress Web Design services to ensure your site is ready for the future of search.
