Reports of SEO’s demise are, once again, greatly exaggerated
People have been saying “SEO is dead” with depressing regularity over the 29 years since the term was first coined. Every time Google released a new update (remember Penguin, anybody?), the doomsayers would state that the SEO bubble had burst. When smartphones came out, people said that not only was SEO dead, but websites would soon become obsolete in the face of apps.
It’s safe to say that SEO survived all of these upheavals, a little different each time, but strong as ever. What died were easy “tricks” to win the organic race. Google’s regular updates are designed to support websites that follow Google’s advice (such as make your website for the users, not the search engines, offer a good experience, don’t try to fool us), and penalise those who deliberately break those rules. So, a black hat loophole being plugged by Google might have meant some sneaky trick no longer worked, but that didn't invalidate the rest of SEO.
But surely AI is different?
No. Sorry, but no. I mean, AI is different in many respects, and it’s a potentially game-changing technology for the whole world to grapple with. But it isn’t killing SEO. In fact, with the rise of chatbots and AI-powered search, good SEO is just as important as ever. And it’s easy to prove.
What is the most common tool used to train AIs? Search results.
What is the most common website cited by AI chatbots? Google (except Copilot, which, being made by Microsoft, cites Bing more often).
What is the most common place for AI tools to look for something when you ask it something it’s not sure about? Google.
If you aren’t in the organic search results, you’re unlikely to be found by these AI agents. Being cited in AI Overviews or AI Mode on Google might not necessarily drive traffic to your website, but it’s a genuine sign of trust that you know what you are talking about.
What makes a website attractive to AI is exactly what makes it attractive to search engines.
Is the content understandable, accessible, authoritative, and does it demonstrate real experience and expertise?
Is the website clear about what it is about? Is it trying to obfuscate its real purpose?
Does the site offer a genuinely good experience to users?
That last one is something that AI can’t necessarily tell on its own, at least not yet. Google can know that, because they collect an awful lot of information about an awful lot of people and how they interact with websites. One of the ranking factors for Google is site performance taken from real user interactions. That’s information that isn’t available anywhere else, and one reason why AI depends on search engines to find good websites.
But I was told AEO/GEO needed me to make changes to my website!
It honestly might, but if you do good SEO, then you don’t really need to do any more. If you’ve been advised to add an llms.txt file, go for it. It won’t help (based on numerous real-world tests). Creating a whole duplicate of your website in plain text for the AI? Don’t bother. We went through this with AMP for mobiles, and the truth is that a well structured website is still your best bet.
Rewriting your long blogs to take advantage of “chunking” to make it more easily digestible for AI might help, but there’s no evidence that addressing readability issues following centuries old rules for writing wouldn’t help. It probably would have helped before AI came along, but it will help more now.
The truth is, many of the people pushing AEO/GEO “fixes” for your website are looking to cash in on the craze for AI. At the moment, there is nothing to suggest that AI requires anything other than good SEO. And while traffic from AI chatbots may be increasing for many websites, the simple fact is that it’s still a fraction of the traffic from search engines. Yes, the trends show that AI traffic is growing and search traffic is decreasing, but there’s a long way to go to assume AI will supplant search.
My traffic disappeared, though
This is a complex one. Yes, when AI Overviews were rolled out, they resulted in a drop in clicks to websites from organic search. This was likely not the catastrophe it appeared for many websites, as those visitors were those least likely to actually convert into a paying customer. AI Overviews “pinched” information from your website and presented it to the user in the search results page, so they didn’t have to click.
However, if all that the user wanted was some information, then they were unlikely to do more than look at your site anyway. We’ve covered this previously, and it’s still a concern for a lot of businesses. If your website is selling something, then it’s unlikely to be the end of the world. If your website is selling advertising space (news and blogs, for example, running ads), then this is genuinely catastrophic, and Google’s response to the matter has been pretty much to shrug and say, “whoops,” (although they did introduce Discover as an apology).
What is likely to be the problem is that you’ve previously skated by with SEO that was good enough. Unfortunately, the emergence of AI caused Google to run a lot of new updates to their search engine, and what was “good enough” now isn’t. The good news is that your almost good enough SEO is close to be actually good, and it won’t take much to get back to where you were. You just need to figure out what caused the drop.
Recovering from the change and preparing for the future
One of the most common issues facing websites is that with AI, you’re not dealing with a simple algorithm, and it can make judgment calls on the value of your content. This means actively removing old content that doesn’t make the grade. We know how painful this might be, but it’s gone from an asset to an anchor. Beyond that, make sure your structured data is accurate, website and page structure are straightforward, pay attention to your CWVs, and don’t neglect outreach for backlinks (unless you’re good at making organically shared and cited content).
Going forward, the next generation of AI agents will be carrying out more complex tasks for users. We’re already seeing Google testing agentic shopping, and the next steps will be booking hotels and flights. As these processes come online, the agents will be setting out what you need so their AI can interact with your system. Google worked with a lot of merchants to develop the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), so it’s likely that will become the standard. This is despite not yet being adopted by any other AI chatbots, Amazon, Ebay, or Meta, as the alternative is for multiple systems to compete, which serves nobody’s interests.
Other agentic actions will probably need their own protocols (unless the UCP is expanded to cover more actions), so there will be a clear way of allowing AI to interact with your services. Once again, this is a case where content creators are losing out to those who offer tangible products and services. While AI has been repeatedly accused of stealing the hard work of those whose job is the written word, or music, art, and video, companies selling physical products or offline services are now in a position to truly profit from the AI revolution.
