Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
SEO is a fast paced ever changing industry and those that work inside of it constantly need to adapt to survive to the whims of search engines such as Google and Bing. This statement is now more true than ever with the rise of AI, the way SEOs interact with their work has changed forever. Integrated AI Machine learning, MCPs and Chatbots now mean tasks that once took weeks or months can now be completed in a matter of hours or days. Many in the SEO industry are frightened by the way that AI is being used to automate many tasks, leaving the question; is there a future for the SEO industry?
How GEO impacts the future of SEO
The immediate answer to how AI is going to shape the future of the SEO industry is already upon us with Generative Engine Optimisation. GEO is essentially a new branch of SEO that is focused on optimising content for generative answers engines, such as AI Overviews and ChatGPT, rather than traditional search engines.
SEOs will need to pivot to learning how to optimise for GEO, as more and more users (especially of a younger generation) are turning to chatbots to answer any queries they might have online. While traditional search engines remain the default for most people, studies show that roughly 37% to 50% of consumers regularly start their research or purchase decisions with AI tools rather than standard Google searches, as per Danny Goodwin for Search Engine Land.
Optimising for GEO is not too dissimilar from optimising your content from SEO however they both have their own set of priorities. Some main aspects of optimising for GEO include:
- Frontloading answers – Write directs answers to users questions in your content so they can be pulled out and extracted by chatbots
- Writing conversationally – Matching how people use language in their chat prompts
- Format for machines – Use bullet points, tables etc. that chatbots can easily scan for information to extract
- Add statistics and citations – Make sure to link to authoritative pages and use accurate data points so AI sees your content as credible
Why the Industry is safe from AI
How about further beyond into the future, say 10, 20 years, what will the landscape for SEO look like then? Here at Intelligency, we believe that the industry will adapt but we don’t believe it will be wiped out. SEO may become obsolete and evolve permanently into GEO, but the question remains will AI permanently take over the sector and we believe the answer to that is no.
Companies that hand over all their SEO operations to AI run the risk of producing generic, low quality content that is duplicated causing their rankings to drop, and while the use of chatbots is rising, traditional search still has a massive grip on the market meaning any significant ranking drops will see a steep decline in business.
Even if businesses become more reliant on AI in the future (which is already happening) ultimately if they are competing for customers online, there will always need to be a n SEO to feed the information to the AI that it needs to make SEO decisions and to control the output, avoiding hallucinations. The SEO industry may adapt, change and become more reliant on AI over the years, but it will survive.
