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You have probably experienced how AI has infiltrated almost every interaction you have on the internet, and certainly when it comes to browsing or searching the web. And with the advent of AI, I regularly hear the phrase 'SEO is dead', but is it? - or is it all just evolving? I am by no means an SEO expert; in fact, that is partly why I have been trying to understand what is happening to search as AI becomes increasingly involved in how we find information.
For years, the basic idea behind Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was reasonably straightforward: search engines had algorithms that decided which pages were most likely to answer our search. Businesses learned how to make their websites more visible to those algorithms through use of keywords, links, page structure, authority, fresh content, and all the rest.
Although that hasn’t suddenly stopped mattering, something else is happening alongside it. Here's what I am discovering ....
Traditional search largely gave us a list of places where we might find the answer. However, AI assisted search (even if you don't ask for it) is increasingly trying to give us the answer.
If you ask a question such as: 'how can a 40-person founder-led company improve its culture before scaling?' an AI system doesn’t necessarily look for a page containing precisely those words. Instead it tries to understand what you are really asking, assemble relevant information from different sources, judge which sources appear useful and credible, and construct an answer. And that is quite a change - and it potentially changes what we should expect our websites to do.
This doesn’t mean that everyone has suddenly abandoned Google for ChatGPT. According to industry stats, traditional search still dominates, but the distinction is becoming increasingly blurred. Google itself, and other search engines too, now provide AI-generated answers for a significant proportion of searches, whilst AI tools such as ChatGPT can search the web when they need current information. So, this isn’t simply a shift from one search engine to another; the nature of search itself is changing and we are moving from search-find-click-read towards ask-interpret-find-synthesise. And while nobody knows exactly where that will lead, it seems reasonable to expect that AI will increasingly sit between our questions and the websites, businesses, and other sources that provide the answers.
We have spent years thinking about how people find our websites - trying to divine the machinations behind the black-art that is SEO. And perhaps now, we also need to think about how easily people, and increasingly AI systems, can understand us once they get there. Can they readily work out:
I find that last point particularly interesting. Is the website just full of generic claims such as: customer-focused, innovative, trusted partner, delivering excellence, etc etc? Does it generate anything original or different - or is it just echoing what many other sources are saying? In both of these cases, it doesn’t give either a human reader or an AI system very much to work with; but, being specific about who you are, what you do, what you know, and how you think, does.
So, SEO isn't dead - it still seems to be important to have keywords and the other fundamentals of having a good website. But perhaps the objectives of website design are broadening and instead of asking only: “How do we rank highly for this search?” we need to also ask things like: “If someone (or an AI) was trying to answer a question for which we genuinely have useful expertise, would they recognise us as a credible source?”
That then leads to some practical questions you may want to ask about your website:
For years, many businesses have treated their website partly as a digital brochure and partly as something that needs to satisfy Google.
Ironically, the involvement of AI may be providing us an opportunity to ease up on the felt need to outwit the search algorithms. Instead it'll enable us to focus on making the website more useful to humans - as well as AI - and that truly represents the organisation’s knowledge, expertise, unique perspective, and credibility clearly enough that others can understand and use it.
So, SEO isn’t dead, but optimising just to be found may no longer be enough; we may increasingly need to optimise to be understood, trusted, and be recognised as useful. And that has got to be a good thing.
Ad Futurum
Graham