Will AI Replace SEO?
Despite the proliferation of zero-search results and the impact they’ve had on website traffic, AI will not replace SEO; rather, it will help evolve it. This means that from 2025 onward, SEO will need to incorporate zero-search results into its strategy, not necessarily to gain direct traffic, but to build E-E-A-T signals that help ranking and online visibility in general.
SEO has evolved. There are AI overviews, sponsored ads, featured snippets — all of which usually appear above organic ranking, and answer questions without clicking. Search optimization is no longer just about getting clicks — it is also about building brand awareness that leads to more customers without immediate clicks.
Now that AI is present, that brand awareness needs to be created by building authority through experience.
Authoritativeness is a ranking factor for SEO, but it does not increase organic search traffic directly; rather, it helps increase it indirectly. Ranking for featured snippets and AI overviews result in brand recognition and signals authoritativeness. These signals are both assigned and recognized by search engines like Google, which can help websites rank in different areas of search — areas that would have gone undiscovered without zero-click results.
AI can, in fact, open up more opportunities for SEO. So, will AI replace SEO? Not even close, let’s dive in.
Will SEO Stay Relevant With AI?
Yes, but not in the same way as before. SEO will no longer be about just getting more traffic; on the contrary, the future of SEO relies on building authoritativeness through experience because AI has made experience the most important factor for separating the real from the fake.
In December 2022, just 1 month after the release of ChatGPT, Google updated its quality rater guideline to include Experience alongside Expertise, Authority, and trust. After more than 10 years, E-A-T became E-E-A-T just as AI was widely released to the public.
This is because AI can sound like an expert, can mimic authority, and even gain the trust of people, but it has no experiences of its own. Through feeding it data, it simply borrows the expression of experiences others have. Experience—true and unique experience—will be the future of SEO as AI progresses.
How Will AI Affect SEO?
AI will make helpful content more valuable because it will be harder to come by. Helpful content is the number one ranking factor for SEO. As the internet becomes filled with AI-generated content, quality content created for real people will prosper in SERPs.
Just two years after Google updated its quality rater guideline to include Experience, it also released its content scale abuse policy. Coupled with its regular Helpful Content Updates, Google now penalizes content created at scale with the intention of manipulating search engines.
Although it doesn’t outright say that AI should not be used for content, the only way to produce content at scale is with AI. Interestingly enough — and to the disadvantage of people who pay — many AI writing tools and even agencies provide low-quality content at scale. So, not only will the presence of AI make the distinction between good-quality and low-quality content more pronounced, but it will also differentiate the good SEO services from the bad ones as automation progresses.
Did you know that human written content outperforms AI? Learn more here: AI vs Human Writing
Will AI Replace SEO Experts?
It’s impossible for AI to replace SEO experts because the AI prompts that provide SEO output require human input in the first place. For better or worse, the involvement AI with SEO is determined by the person using the AI tool, and only a person can be an SEO expert. On the other hand, an AI is not an expert, it is a tool, and whether or not someone is truly an SEO expert depends on the depth of SEO strategy they provide.
This includes creating and publishing content, keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink outreach, and more. As it currently stands, some AI tools don’t even recall a previous conversation that a user has had with them, let alone possess the capability of doing multiple SEO functions in sync.
What Exactly is AI in SEO?
AI is to SEO what Electric Vehicles are to Toyota. Toyota is the largest car company in the world, just as Google is the largest search engine in the world. Toyota adopted electric vehicles because there is a demand for them, just as Google adopted AI to meet the demand of users. This demand comes in the form of AI overviews. AI overviews help Google meet the demand of users by answering questions quickly and efficiently; therefore, AI is a change in SERP assets that SEO should now account for.
Moreover, SEO is helping AI grow too. AI provides responses to anything and everything it is asked. It will generate a response and pull up sources from optimized search results that help verify its explanation, contributing to the spread of helpful information on Search Result Pages (SERPs).
