On the future of SEO in the of AI

In the last weeks, I've seen many in the SEO community voice their concern about their future as SEOs due to AI and Search Engines' Chatbots quick evolution.

Here's what I think about it, and why you shouldn't be worried *IF* you're strategic about it.

"Can further automation of SEO tasks w/ AI replace SEOs?"

It will if you're focused on "low level" and/or highly tactical tasks & you're a "one trick pony" who only does that single highly tactical or low level task. Eg: You generate title tags based on a list of keywords but you haven't selected the keywords, and don't know *WHY* they're being targeted with those pages that you're writing titles for. Recommendation: Understand the *why* of SEO tasks, become strategical, this is what ultimately drives real value in SEO processes.

Understanding "what" to do depending on the context to achieve the expected marketing/growth/biz goal by the business given the constraints / requirements.

Also, SEO stops being a "knowledge" problem and starts becoming an "execution" challenge very quickly in many bigger processes in bureaucratic scenarios/organizations. SEOs capacity to communicate, influence and coordinate stakeholders, as well as other "soft skills" become core to the success of the project in these cases. It will be *hard* for a bot to replace that Recommendation: Start improving those skills and position yourself to perform a key role in SEO execution success!

See how this will be an opportunity for many to evolve as specialists since technology kills some jobs but also creates other more "sophisticated" ones.

For example, While bookkeepers decreased with the rise of spreadsheets, accountants and financial analysts increased, see this.

On the other hand, I do believe in the opportunities to support/accelerate our SEO tasks by leveraging these new AI related functionalities without harming quality *if* you use them within a good validation framework.

I've shared about this: this article and this presentation and will do a webinar about it next week - if you don't, others will & you'll fall behind.

Also, even if G says they're ok with AI content, they have been doing moves to highlight the importance of "Experience" and real experts/authors. And in an era when content can be easily commoditized, you *want* to take it to the next level to differentiate with human expertise and become top in class to whether deserve to be in top positions or become *the* answer source that the chatbot will refer to. So again: leverage AI to advance your content faster while driving it with your human expertise to make it *best in class*.

Finally, I see our jobs as SEOs as "Findability" specialists working to surface, provide visibility & ultimately, traffic + sales to our clients products/services whatever the search interface & paradigm is used, and there will always be a need for that ??

Long life to SEO! ??????