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In an AI World, Is SEO Dead?
Now that Google searches will present AI "summaries" instead of traditional results, does SEO even matter any more?
In an AI World, Is SEO Dead?
Now that Google searches will present AI "summaries" instead of traditional results, does SEO even matter any more?
by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • social media)
Today's News
SEO • Did Google’s AI Just Kill the SEO Industry?
There was a time when SEO was simple.
You’d just decide on a keyword you wanted to rank for — say, “personal injury lawyer” — and you’d spam that on all your web pages.
But Google caught on. So then we starting putting our keywords in the footer of our web pages, in tiny print, with the font color the same as the background.
There was the “keyword in the headers” trick, the “keyword in the meta description” trick (which, actually, never worked), and on and on.
Was “Zero-Click” the Canary?
Google had some tricks up its sleeves too. Perhaps the one that shook up the SEO industry the most was its pivot to the “zero-click” strategy. You’d search for “how old is vin diesel” and it would give you the answer at the top of the search results page. (He’s 56, by the way.) No clicking required, although at least there were search results pages below if you wanted to dive deeper.
Now, the SEO industry may be facing its most challenging period ever — being simply cut out of the loop, and replaced by AI.
Think of it like those “zero-click” summaries, but smarter, more personalized to the searcher, and more detailed. This has been in testing under the name Search Generative Experience for a year; it’s rolling out in the U.S. this week.
Wired Magazine tested this new version of Google, and here’s what they found:
In response to the query “Where is the best place for me to see the northern lights?” Google will, instead of listing web pages, tell you in authoritative text that the best places to see the northern lights, aka the aurora borealis, are in the Arctic Circle in places with minimal light pollution.
It will also offer a link to NordicVisitor.com.
But then the AI continues yapping on below that, saying “Other places to see the northern lights include Russia and Canada’s northwest territories.”
Hallucination Hell
Not to mention: AI sometimes just makes things up.
Last year, a writer for The Atlantic asked Google to name an African country beginning with the letter “K.” Google’s AI (which, to be fair, was using ChatGPT at the time) couldn’t even come up with Kenya. “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa,” it said, “None of them begin with the letter ‘K.’ The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.”
So — how do brands get their content in front of people if Google is simply copying what you have on your site and showing it to people?
Is SEO, as we know it today, dead?
Is SEO Dead? Moz’s Chief Scientist Weighs In
Tom Capper leads the search science team at Moz — one of the oldest and most respected SEO platforms. I spoke with him earlier today.
Is SEO dead?
Absolutely not. People have been predicting the death of SEO. It's kind of a joke within the industry, like SEO is dead for a long, long time.
Some people might remember when featured snippets came out. And again, you had this sort of suddenly this thing at the top of search results that was pushing the organic down. There was a lot of doom saying, I would see this moment as quite similar to that one where it's going to change SEO, but it's not going to kill it.
Ultimately, people are still looking to Google and similar platforms to to find businesses, to find services.
And there are still ways to win at that game or not. When Google returns these AI generated results, they do come with source links.
Is there anything that marketers can do to optimize their web pages so that we get into these AI generated answers and become a source link? It's not perfect, but at least we can get something. Can we do anything to optimize our pages for that?
I almost want to say don't try to optimize for it as it is now, because this is going to change too rapidly. The kinds of places where these appear, Google says they're driving clicks. I want to wait and see on that.
I'm really not convinced that these results are driving that much traffic to websites. So I don't think it's a great use of your time right now to be trying to appear in these results.
AI, of course, hallucinates and makes things up. What can we do if Google's AI results at the top of the search pages get something about our brand wrong?
Right now, there's not a lot you can do about it. Obviously, you can [use] robots.txt [to] block the AI. Google has a Google extended user agent which you can block, which means that their model can't ingest information from your site.
But that doesn't mean that they can't hallucinate about your brand because your brand is mentioned in all kinds of places.
Right now, I would say there is nothing you can do, and that is a problem.
I wish there were a tag that said “no hallucinate” that we could put in our in our meta tags.
Yeah. Don't mention me or something like this. But even then, would you take that? Probably not.
Like you'd rather you don't want to completely exclude yourself from being listed in like a list of products or something like this. So, yeah, it's tricky.
Long term, was this the right play for Google?
I think this is a misstep under investor pressure.
Basically, there's a lot of pressure on Google right now to be appearing to match and compete with what OpenAI and Microsoft are doing. But I don't think this is an improvement either for Google or for their for their users.
My main worry for SEO is not that SEO becomes an irrelevant tactic or something like this. It's that Google may destroy their own moat here. There is a danger here to to the ecosystem as a whole.
If Google is making big missteps and this looks like it, it might be one.
Watch the Full Unedited Interview
The Final Word
It’s as though Google took the index cards for the screenplay it’s been writing for the past 25 years and tossed them into the air to see where the cards might fall.
Also: The screenplay was written by AI.
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