Many in the SEO world, including gurus such as Joe Procopio, Eric Siu, and Neil Patel, are claiming search engine optimization is dead. Do they actually mean that, or is it more nuanced?
Well, to clarify, they don’t exactly mean SEO is dead, but rather that traditional SEO is not enough to compete.
With the new age of AI crashing in like a tsunami, those in the industry have little choice but to adapt. At every corner, you are met with AI: your friend talking about AI, your boss talking about AI, and even your boomer parents asking what AI is. You simply cannot escape it. At this point, you either join the wave or drown.
As AI creeps into almost every industry, it is also shaping those industries, especially SEO. The new term that was coined as a result is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).
What is AEO, anyway? Simply put, it’s the practice of optimizing your content so AI search platforms feature and cite you in their direct answers.
The problem regarding the topic of AEO is that people think it is entirely separate from SEO, which is flat-out wrong. AEO is built on the foundations of SEO, meaning that without SEO, there is no AEO.
All of these AI search platforms cite Google as a primary source in their answers, and it is Google that built the algorithm for what we know today as SEO. Saying SEO is dead is completely illogical because that would also mean AEO is dead.
Since we’ve cleared the air, we can establish that building strong SEO automatically means building strong AEO by default. That includes having highly authoritative backlinks, quality and original content, posting quality content regularly, having omnipresence online throughout different social media platforms, and being mentioned on major publishers. All of these equate to strong AEO and SEO.
To help you understand how AI changed traditional SEO, let’s look at the father of SEO, Google. Before, people on average would decide what business to choose based on the top three search results, but now, with Google Overviews, that changes everything. Now users can find an answer without clicking on a website, thus greatly affecting a business’s click rate. It also affects the behavior of how a user chooses a service-based business; i.e., a person won’t even bother scrolling down the page, but rather solely relies on whatever shows on the Google Overview.
Then there’s understanding how each AI search platform works and how it prioritizes sites. Google puts first those using their platforms, such as YouTube. ChatGPT prioritizes those using high-authority publishers. Some might want to ensure their site gets cited on all major AI search platforms. The problem is, according to Ahrefs’ study on 75,000 brands, only 14% among the top 50 showed in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.
That goes to show that you should not stress yourself to death to show up across all major AI citations because that is extremely difficult and illogical. It makes more sense to prioritize what is actually feasible. For those that don’t have a massive budget, it makes more sense to focus on Google AI Overviews than ChatGPT, since posting on YouTube and Reddit costs nothing compared to having to pay publishers in the hopes of showing up higher in ChatGPT. Also, let’s not forget according to Ahrefs' study, Google has 4x more searches than ChatGPT and sends 190x more traffic to websites than ChatGPT. The numbers speak for themselves on what platform you should prioritize your marketing strategy around.
In addition, AI changed how people go about technical SEO. For example, websites that heavily use client-side rendering, especially on their hero section containing the most important components of their website, greatly hurt their SEO and even more so their AEO, since ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI search crawler bots only see an empty page on page load and don’t render the JavaScript file that contains the actual content of a website. Google’s AI crawler does not have this problem, which is another reason for some to prioritize their SEO strategy around Google over other platforms.
As AEO is taking over the minds of those joining the wave and new to content/brand optimization, they are being completely blinded and fully sold that AI will provide all of their answers. As per the aforementioned, traditional SEO outranks AEO, therefore, neglecting building SEO foundations is like walking on a treadmill going backwards. It is ironic because those jumping on the AI train are the ones trying to get ahead, not the opposite.
If you can't tell by now, the strategy should be implementing both and knowing which search platforms to focus on.
Hopefully that should explain the state of SEO today and its evolution to its little brother, AEO.
In actuality, SEO is not dead; the game just changed with more updates.