A Candid Assessment Of AI Search & SEO – Search Engine Journal

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A frank examination of SEO as it’s practiced today and 5 key takeaways to know. Read this before the start of the new year.
Search marketing is undergoing dramatic changes, with many debating whether SEO is on its way out as AI Search rises in popularity. What follows is a candid assessment of what is going on with SEO and search engines today.
An SEO school by a group called Authority Hackers recently announced their closure, emphasizing that it’s not because SEO is dead but due to the collapse of the content site model. They cited three reasons for this situation. The following is not about the SEO school, that’s just a symptom of something important going on today.
Google Updates is one of the reasons cited for the decline of the content site model. Here’s the candid part: If the Google updates killed your publishing site, that’s kind of the red flag that there’s something about the SEO that needs examination.
Here’s the frank part: Search-engine first websites have been getting crushed all year long. Search-engine first SEO begins with keyword research, is followed by stealing content ideas from competitors, scraping Google’s SERPs for more keyword phrases then granularly mapping those keywords to headings, titles and content.
That’s not audience research, that’s search engine research. Search engine research creates Made For Search Engine websites. Worst of all, that process is unchanged from the way SEOs used to create sites for Google over 20 years ago. The only way to make it more old school is to promote it with directory links and expired domains.
This doesn’t describe the SEO for all websites that lose rankings. But that old school strategy for SEO is endemic right now and, speaking candidly, people need to rethink their strategies because it’s pretty  obvious that:
A. It’s resulting in people-first content.
B. People who overly optimize that way are getting crushed in the SERPs.
The other reason cited by the SEO school is the “AI content tsunami.” I’m not sure what they mean by that because the phrase can mean a lot of things. Does it refer to Google getting overwhelmed by AI content spam? There’s been a lot of that in the early part of 2024 and the latter part of 2023.
Or is that a reference to AI content sites overwhelming the publisher who cranks out two articles a week? Well, that has something to do with the connection to site authority and content production.
The third reason for the decline of the content model is the dramatic changes to Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Now this, this is a valid reason, but not for the reasons most SEOs think.
The organic SERPs have, for the past 25 years, been dominated by the top three ranked positions, with about 20-30% of the traffic siphoned off to Google Ads for search topics that convert. That’s the status quo: Three sites are winning and everyone else is losing.
AI Overviews has not changed a thing. AIO doubled down on the status quo. According to BrightEdge research, the top ranked websites in AIO are largely the same as the organic top ranked websites. What that means is that three sites are still winning and everyone else is still losing.
The biggest change to the SERPs that most SEOs are missing is what I previously mentioned, that made for search engine websites have been getting wiped out all year long. That’s related to the people-first signals that Google uses, but there are other signals mixed in with those, in addition to quality signals that come after the ranking signals selected candidate pages for ranking.
One thing that’s been relatively constant for the past twenty years of SEO is that a drop in ranking is unlikely ever just one thing. Sometimes it’s just that another site is better.
If you’ve only been doing SEO for five or ten years, it’s understandable how the recent changes seem dramatic. But when you’ve been in it for 25 years as I have, dramatic changes are the norms and are absolutely expected. Dramatic change is the status quo.
The Google medic update was a significant realignment of query understanding which changed what kinds of sites ranked for various queries.  It was one of the largest departures from ranking web pages for semantic context (word and phrase level) and a shift toward topical context (what topic a page is about).  This was a hugely dramatic change.
We can go further back in time to the Penguin update that wiped out thousands of websites, including big brand websites. It was the last time Google inflicted actual penalties on a massive scale. Sometime after the Penguin algorithm Google switched from mass-penalties to ranking sites where they deserve to rank and ignoring the links.
The Google Florida Update was another dramatic update that affected thousands of websites, including a large number of innocent sites. There are many theories about what the Florida Update was about but one thing that everyone agrees with is that it was a massive change in how websites were ranked.
This is what I mean when I say that when you’ve been doing SEO as long as I have then you come to expect change and roll with them. The problem is that the SEO industry tends to settle into a specific way of doing things and search engines pass them by and that’s when SEOs say things like, “I’m doing everything right but Google isn’t ranking me anymore, it’s unfair.”
It’s not surprising to me that sites that were heavily planned around keyword-research are experiencing dramatic change in rankings.  It’s way past time to start thinking in terms of topics and topicality.
Someone started a discussion with two sentences that said AEO is the new SEO and that ChatGPT was quickly becoming the leading search engine, inspiring well over a hundred responses. The discussion is in a private Facebook group called AI/ChatGPT Prompts for Entrepreneurs.
AEO is a relatively new acronym meaning Answer Engine Optimization. It describes AI Search Optimization. AISEO is more a more precise acronym but it sounds too close to E-I-E-I-O.
Is AEO really a thing? Consider this: All AI search engines use a search index and traditional search ranking algorithms. For goodness sakes, Perplexity AI uses a version of Google’s PageRank, one of the most traditional ranking algorithms of all time.
People in that discussion generally agreed that AEO is not a thing, that AI Search Engines were not yet a major challenge to Google and that SEO is still a thing.
All is not upside down with the world because at least in that discussion the overwhelming sentiment is that AEO is not a thing. Many observed that ChatGPT uses Bing’s index, so if you’re doing “AEO” for ChatGPT you’re actually just doing SEO for Bing. Others expressed that the average person has no experience with ChatGPT and until it’s integrated into a major browser it’s going to remain a niche search engine.
There was one person insisting that Perplexity AI was designed as an AI Search Engine, completely misunderstanding that Perplexity AI uses a search index and identifies authoritative websites with an updated version of Google’s old PageRank algorithm.
AI has been a strong search engine factor in Google since at least 10 years. Longer if you consider that Google Brain began as a project in 2011.
AI in search feels new but it’s not new. The biggest difference isn’t in the back end, it’s in the front and it’s changing how users interact with data. This is the big change that all SEOs should be paying close attention to.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO, evolving along with the search engines by keeping up with the latest …
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