You’ve probably seen it in clickbait titles on Youtube and on digital marketing websites. SEO is DEAD. This ominous phrase makes digital marketing novices quake with anxiety – sewing the doubt that maybe they’ve chosen the wrong path, and that, like their tech-adjacent software engineer buddies, their jobs too will be taken by AI. The reality is, much like the assertion that eventually AI will inevitably turn on humans and destroy us all, the idea that AI will kill SEO not only gives too much credit to AI, but also glances over what SEO actually means.
SEO means Search Engine Optimization. So, Google and Bing right? Wrong. Every content hosting application, including social media websites, is a search engine. When content is able to be labeled, tagged, indexed and ranked by some algorithm, there is a search engine at work there, and thus, optimizing for that search engine to capture keyword volume will always be a thing. I don’t care if it’s TikTok, Youtube, Pinterest or even Deviantart, there are people searching for things everywhere, and if there is some kind of value to be derived from capturing those searches, then there will be some search engine optimization going on.
So back to the claim that ‘SEO is dead’. This apocalyptic utterance has been murmured many a time before amongst the sheepish hordes of digital marketing townsmen, in lieu of threat after threat posed by their masters – Google and Bing. Alas, the threat is typically overblown – the “people also ask” answers for example were supposed to end SEO as we know it, and we found, of course, that it tended to provide just as useless of information as any top of page result, and that any seasoned searcher would soon learn that their simplicity and positioning did not translate into any more truthiness than the listings they represented below the fold. Then there was this idea that too many ads above the fold would make organic search irrelevant, which of course, we realized, only applied to highly competitive short-tail keywords, which may have been a shocking loss to the old guard of SEOs, but was just business as usual for us that came up in say, the last ten years.
Now, of course, we have the onset of AI and the impending doom that Chat GPT, Bing AI and eventually Google Bard will bring. Oh, the horror. People won’t scroll, they won’t look for other information – they’ll just take what they’re given at face value and move on. All of our hard work optimizing articles for 6 word long tail keywords and for highly specific commercial searches will be laid to waste. People will always find exactly what they are looking for in that one search, and it will always provide the best information. It’s over for us boys.
If you haven’t used Chat GPT, Bing Chat or even Google Bard – specifically for search, you should. You should search a bunch of different stuff. Not just factual stuff, but commercial queries like ‘best beach towels’. You will quickly realize that, just like search itself, the information that these AI bots have access to is outdated, skewed, often incorrect, and most importantly, manipulated. Yes, it may be shocking, but guess what, just like you and I, the AI relies on search engines to get it’s information – and just like you and I, the information that we access is often skewed, outdated, incorrect and most importantly, manipulated for the purpose of promoting a product or service.
So, just as search engine results have been completely manipulated by SEO’s, the AI bots will be completely manipulated by SEOs. What else could they rely on? Wikipedia, which is struggling to stay alive as is, cannot keep up with the pace of new information or cannot be updated with information that has been agreed upon by the masses to be objectively ‘true’.
If you ask Google Bard where it gets its information, it tells you it gets its information from ‘the real world’, ‘the web’, and its own thoughts and insights. If you ask it to elaborate on what those real world datasets are, it tells you ‘Google Search’ aka the web, something called ‘the common crawl’ , which it defines as ‘a massive dataset of text and code that is crawled from the web’, ‘wikipedia’ and ‘books’. It also likes to note that it gets information from Google search live, so unlike chat GPT, it keeps up with current events and news.
So… Google AI is replacing Google with… Google search, Wikipedia, and datasets from which it learns language models. So the death of SEO is being brought on by something that relies on SEO itself, and just as shaky, the arbiter of all truth, Wikipedia. Hm.
We know that Chat GPT was heavily reliant on Reddit conversations for both its information and language models. So basically, we are afraid of SEO being replaced by algorithms that rely on both social networks, (Reddit) and Google search, (manipulated by SEO’s) for both how it works and where it gets its information. And.. we’re afraid?
I would posit that things will continue as they always have. For sure, AI bots will suck some of the traffic away from Google search, but just as the quality and thus reputation of organic search has been soured by SEO’s the average joe will eventually realize, that like Google search, the AI bots information is not only always correct, but is manipulated, and therefore will search out information from several sources, bringing them effectively back to search.
So I think that, as long as there is subjectivity on any subject, and as long as people’s opinions differ, and as long as there are new questions about a subject, new angles to take or new lights to shine on a thing – SEO will always exist. ‘SEO’ is in effect not an activity that can be turned on or off, killed or brought back to life – it is something that, as long as information exists on the internet, and people are using the internet to look for information, will always exist, and will always be there for the ambitious and enterprising to tap into.
‘Chasing the SEO’, a saying used by Youtubers, will never cease to exist, and as long as there are users out there searching, no single source of information, not even an all-knowing chat bot, will replace the discerning human mind that has any inkling of critical thought. Sure, there will always be those that take the first shining truth presented to them on a silver platter as given, but as disinformation becomes more rampant and the average consumer of information becomes more discerning – there will always be room to slip your long-tail optimized article or video in there, asserting your place in the anarchistic maelstrom of information that exists on all search engines – from Google to TikTok.
