AI and SEO - some thoughts

I thought, seeing as everyone else is weighing in on the AI vs SEO debate, that we would throw our hat into the same ring. There is a lot of information out there now - from very silly doom-mongering (although who hasn’t heard “SEO is dead” every day for the last 10 years, right?) to people saying that this isn’t a problem and burying their heads in the sand.

Fundamentally the change has happened - AI is a regular part of many people’s workflows and adoption of AI tools will only continue. This is helped in part by Google being caught completely off guard by OpenAI and pushing as hard as they can to get AI in search, irrespective of how helpful or valuable it is. 

But what does that mean for your SEO? What does it mean for the future of your website - or indeed, the future of the internet? Has SEO died? Do we just leave it up to the machines now?

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Why SEO isn’t going away

It’s my belief after many years in the industry that this is just another shakeup of how we do SEO. Some people are calling it GEO, AIO, whatever - doesn’t really matter what you call it. At its core, SEO is and always will be, getting yourself visible wherever your customers are searching for the products and services you provide. That’s it.

Before Google we had the Yellow Pages. If you’re old enough to remember this, people used to change the names of their companies to something like “A&A Plumbing Ltd” so they’d show up first when people looked up a plumber. This was pre-SEO, pre-internet - but the principles that we use today to rank on Google or get cited by an AI are exactly the same - we just have better tools, more reach, more commercial value.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the boom in AI tools shows us one very clear thing - people are still looking for information. They are looking for products and services. ChatGPT just gave them a slightly easier way to find those products and services.

The future of SEO will be getting cited in AI overviews, in ChatGPT/Perplexity responses, etc. That’s not to say Google will go away - they’ve got a $175bn cash cow in search and they won’t give that up easily. But fundamentally Google will have to move with the times and that means more AI, less of the traditional blue links. That’s just the way it is.

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What this means for your website

Bizzarely, despite the fear mongering, I actually see this as a good thing. Because for years, SEOs were able to pull the wool over client’s eyes by saying “yeah, this top of funnel blog post with absolutely no commercial value but 2000 searches a month is ranking #1. We’ve done our job, now the retainer’s going up 50%”. Well, that’s not going to be able to happen any more.

SEO is going to become far more commercially focused. It’s going to be about visibility and how we translate that visibility into financial benefit for our clients. If we just say that we’re visible in LLMs, that isn’t going to help us win new clients or even help the clients that we’ve got. Visibility is great, but it’s like reporting on impressions as a KPI now - good as a leading indicator of where things are going, but fundamentally if the clicks don’t come, there’s no commercial value.

So what this might mean is less traffic. But just because traffic is going down doesn’t mean people are finding you.

Before:

Publish a 2000 word blog post on a particular subject. Get some traffic, maybe once in a blue moon that traffic will convert into an enquiry or a sale.

Now:

Get cited by an LLM when someone is looking for something very specific. The pre-qualification is done within the LLM. By the time they visit your website, they’re primed and ready to buy.

The data supports this - there are few studies out there that show AI traffic is of much higher quality. This makes sense - because people don’t use AI the way they use search engines. On Google you might be trying to rank for “best boots for hiking”. But on ChatGPT people are going to say “I’m going up the mountain on the weekend and I need a new pair of hiking boots. Recommend me a pair of blue boots, in size 10, that are lace-up and have memory foam soles and are under £100.” 

Which user would you rather have on your website if you have that product?

People will always need to find information - it’s up to us to be able to get it in front of them

The state of play now in July 2025 is that while AI is shaking up the industry, less than 1% of most of our clients’ website’s traffic is coming from AI. We’re being cited quite a lot. There’s something like 14 billion queries run a month on Google, and 1 billion a month on ChatGPT. Like it or not, AI is well behind Google in terms of adoption, no matter what people on LinkedIn are saying.

This means that traditional search is very much still alive, still commercially valuable and still worth focusing on. 

People will always need to find you. People will always need to buy your products and services if what you’re offering is worth buying. People will always need to find information. You can provide that information, get cited, and capture the sale. As SEOs, we’ve now got a great opportunity to dominate another conduit - for 25 years it’s just been Google. Now there’s someone else on the scene; and it’s a great opportunity to get more traffic for our customers. 

So - we can sit here and worry about how traditional search is changing - or we can go out there and dominate LLMs. And it’s doable - we’re doing it.

If you want to chat about how we might be able to help you improve your visibility in AI to capture more traffic and sales - let’s talk.

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