You can’t move these days for articles about AI. Apparently, it’s the cure for all ills, will transform every business and is making people like me redundant.
I’m not convinced.
Anyone telling you SEO is dead because of AI (spoiler alert, it isn’t), simply doesn’t understand how AI currently works.
As an experiment recently, I asked several AI tools how they generated their answers.
What I wanted to know was that as they are all derived from a database which is a snapshot of the internet at some point in the past, how could they provide an up-to-date answer to a question like who won the Premiership in 2025?
ChatGPT, as the fifth biggest website in the world and the most popular AI tool currently, provided this answer:
“ChatGPT now offers real-time web browsing features for Plus and Enterprise users. This allows the model to access and provide information on current events beyond its training data, ensuring more up to date responses.”
All the other AI tools I checked (bar Claude which said it can’t search the web or access real time information) use the internet to find the answers.
So, all of them do the same thing; they do what you or I would have done previously and do lots of searches to try and find the best, right answers. The advantage, however, is that they do this at speed. So, what might have taken you a couple of hours to research previously can now be done in a matter of minutes.
And that’s progress.
But, when you ask how the AI tools determine what information to use, the answers become interesting.
They all said they have no access to the proprietary ranking algorithms of the search engines, nor could they ‘see’ the backlinks that point to a website.
In short, all of them piggyback the search engines to determine which information they should show in their results.
Which means that the way websites rank on the search engines matters a great deal.
So, how do you get your website to rank on the search engines?
Might I suggest that Search Engine Optimisation would be a useful technique?
Moreover, when you dig a bit deeper you find that ChatGPT and Perplexity use Bing search results, not Google. In fact, Gemini is the only one that uses Google results, so now there is a really good reason for optimising for Bing search as well as Google search.
And when you go even further down the rabbit hole and ask the AI tools how they select their information from the search results they find on Bing and Google they tell you that it boils down to:
- Relevance to the query
- Authority and trustworthiness of the source
- User engagement metrics
- Freshness of content
- Technical SEO factors (e.g., page speed, mobile friendliness)
All of which pretty much describes the work that good SEOs are doing for their customers.
By optimising your website for real people, those who will be your customers, you will also be optimising for the search engines and for the AI tools.
So, whilst AI can do a lot of things, what it can’t do is spend any money with you.
AI has no pockets, no disposable income and is frankly indifferent to the products or services you sell. It couldn’t care less. Neither do the search engines for that matter.
Optimise for people and as any good SEO will tell you broaden your strategy, so you are not totally reliant on the search engines.
They don’t care about your business, only their customers, (that’s you and me) who want the right answer in under half a second. And they’ll use your content to provide it whether you like it or not.
All of which suggests to me that the need for SEO is more pronounced than ever, don’t you think?
