No, AI Won’t Kill The SEO Star

Ever since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, the entire SEO community has been embroiled in seemingly endless debate on how AI will impact search engine performance, traffic, and, ultimately, the SEO industry. 

I’ve seen it all before, of course. The discourse around whether or not SEO will be ‘killed’ by AI reminds me a heck of a lot of the discussion about how social media platforms or Quora will impact Google from 10-15 years ago.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that search engines are much more resilient than we tend to give them credit for.  

What The Impact of AI Has Been So Far on SEO

In April 2023, 5 months into the AI revolution and Google’s traffic was still going strong. That month, search platform Google.com generated approximately 83.9 billion visits, down from 88.6 billion platform visits in the previous month but still well ahead of 2022’s traffic.

While Google has announced that AI will play a major role in their search results in the future, so far that hasn’t been deployed just yet. It’s clear that AI will allow for more personalized results which will deliver a more tailored user experience moving forward. 

But despite the hype, the ‘AI’ label is a bit of a misnomer. ‘AI’ tools like ChatGPT or Bard aren’t actually intelligent. They can pass the bar exam but not the Turing test. 

This is critical to understanding the impact that ‘AI Chatbots will have on search engines. The Turing test, for those of you that don’t know, involves a human evaluator who engages in a natural language conversation with both a human and a machine. The evaluator is not told which is the human and which is the machine. If the evaluator is unable to distinguish between the two, the machine is said to have passed the Turing test and demonstrated human-like intelligence.

Anyone who has used an AI Chatbot knows that they just don’t pass the Turing test yet. In fact, the limitations of technology like ChatGPT and Bard should be obvious to anyone who has used them – they’re not all that smart and won’t be for quite some time.

AI’s ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ Problem

As more and more content marketers and SEO professionals turn to AI to write content, the quality of AI will consistently drop as AI inevitably begins ingesting its own content. Just like a copy of a VHS always had artifacts and was of lower quality than the original so too will AI Chatbots eventually return answers of diminishing quality. This is the real problem that AI faces in the near future. 

You can think of AI Chatbots and Search Engines as having a one-sided relationship skewed in favor of the Search Engine. AI Chatbots index websites and use search engines as a massive sitemap for the internet. If Search Engines aren’t serving quality results, AI Chatbots will have a difficult time providing coherent, useful answers to queries. 

AI Chatbots need search engines. Search engines don’t need chatbots.

Now, consider you’re Google. You’ve built a multi-billion dollar business serving the most reliable search results. Your name is synonymous with search quality and, in fact, this is the reason why none of your competitors has ever come near to stealing your marketshare.

Given that your team has briefed you about the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ situation, what would you do? Will you jeopardize what your entire company has been built around and potentially risk losing tons of users to an upstart offering a ‘pure’ search experience? Or will you ensure that high-quality content continues to be of value to your search engine’s index, knowing full well that what is being indexed will eventually be fed back into your AI Chatbot and prioritized to ensure both the Chatbot and search results are of the highest value?

User Habits Aren’t So Easily Changed. AI Won’t Replace Google Search (Anytime Soon)

When I was a teenager I used to be big into the imageboard culture that largely pre-dated (and still co-exists) with Reddit. I used to type in the name of a particular imageboard every day for several years. Now, even 18 years later, I still type it in out of pure habit. 

This is because user habits aren’t easily changed. Now how many of you have turned to Google for search results for most of your adult lives? I reckon most of you. 

While I can attest, at least anecdotally, that I now use AI extensively in my own marketing research, the truth is that I still visit Google at least half of the time I have a question. It all comes down to the type of answer I’m looking for. If I’m looking for a quick response, I’ll use the chatbot, if I’m looking for something long and insightful, I’ll turn to Google.

But I’m also a power user, an early adopter, and just about every other nerd label you could assign to someone. I don’t see the mainstream actually coming anywhere close to using AI as much as I do. In fact, some studies show that less than 2% of the adult population thinks ChatGPT would be useful to them.

How I Stopped Worrying About SEO Algorithms Altogether

The algorithm will always change. There’ll always be a new way to manipulate or exploit machine learning to obtain better results. 

Let’s assume the worst happens and, for some unforeseen circumstance and suspension of logic, AI Chatbots completely replaced Search Engines. Worse comes to worst, SEO will warp to LLMO – although I highly doubt that’ll happen. 

Content, especially written content, will never disappear. Traffic may die down for websites that aren’t providing much value in the long term – but that’s a trend that’s been going on for decades now. 

If you want to improve your search traffic – focus on high-quality content. Focus on the type of content that others will want to link to. Build your reputation as an authority in your niche and you’ll find success.

As I’m writing this we’re not even a year into the AI Chatbot revolution but I already am starting to see the limitations.