Would AI kill SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic from search engines through the improvement of technical characteristics of the website and the content strategy. SEO aims to make websites more visible, relevant, and authoritative for the users and the search algorithms, by qualitatively answering all their questions. SEO is a dynamic and evolving field that requires constant adaptation and innovation, through the lifespan of the website.

However, with the rapid development and advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), some people in the SEO community wonder if AI will kill SEO in the future. There is a big discussion on this topic in public spaces, so I would try to answer this question from the perspective of someone who has already been in this industry for over 25 years.

AI is the ability of machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, and decision-making. AI has been increasingly applied to various domains, including search engines.

For example, Google’s AI system, RankBrain, is one of the main factors that determine the ranking of web pages. RankBrain uses machine learning to understand the intent and context of the queries and provide the most relevant and useful results. RankBrain can also learn from the feedback and behavior of the users and improve its performance over time.

Another example is Bing’s AI-powered chat mode, which can help users quickly get summarized answers and creative inspiration. Bing’s chat mode can understand and communicate fluently in the user’s language of choice, and generate imaginative and innovative content such as poems, stories, essays, songs, or pictures. Bing’s chat mode can also help users with writing, rewriting, improving, or optimizing their content, which is a great help to content writers, but anyway, human revision is mandatory to make the article as natural as possible.

So, would AI kill SEO? The answer is NO. AI would not kill SEO but rather transform it and improve it by giving SEO experts one more excellent tool to utilize in their everyday work. AI would not replace human SEO experts but rather empower them. AI would not make SEO obsolete but rather make it more important over time, and the importance of SEO would only grow as time goes on.

Here are some reasons why AI would not kill SEO, but transform it:

• AI would make SEO more user-centric. AI would enable search engines to better understand the needs, preferences, and behavior of the users, and provide more personalized and satisfying results. SEO experts would need to focus more on creating high-quality content that meets the user’s intent and expectations, rather than manipulating the search algorithms, which is a so-called "Black hat" SEO technique and is punishable by the algorithms.
• AI would make SEO more creative. AI would enable search engines to generate more diverse and engaging content that appeals to the users’ emotions and imagination. SEO experts would need to leverage AI tools to enhance their creativity and originality, rather than copying or duplicating existing content, which is a final point of SEO efforts, to create rich, unique, and purposeful content that would be useful for readers.
• AI would make SEO more competitive. AI would enable search engines to constantly update and improve their ranking factors and algorithms, and provide more accurate and relevant results. SEO experts would need to keep up with the latest trends and developments in AI, and constantly monitor and optimize their websites, rather than relying on outdated or static techniques.

In conclusion, AI would not kill SEO, but transform it. AI would not make SEO easier, but more challenging and rewarding. SEO experts would need to embrace AI as an opportunity, not a threat, and use it to their advantage, not disadvantage. AI would not be the end of SEO, but the beginning of a new era of SEO, for the specialists who know how to employ and utilize the new technologies.