AI won’t destroy SEO – but it will massively change the game

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Mark Twain is said to have told a newspaper reporter. The same could be said of search engine optimisation (SEO). Its death has been announced countless times. And yet, it’s still with us.

Will artificial intelligence (AI) be the nail in its coffin? Very likely not. Will it change SEO? I have no doubt that it will. But then SEO has evolved constantly and will continue to do so.

There are two sides to this story – how search engines will use AI to differently filter and present information; and how AI can help create content to aim at this moving target.

AI-driven summaries pose a new optimisation challenge

Google has recently launched new AI functionality for testing in its Search Labs. One of the key innovations is a top-level AI-driven summary of the results you’re going to find underneath. So, rather than piecing things together yourself from the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you get an automated overview and can ask questions to refine the results. Very handy for the person searching. And, of course, there will be affiliate links to purchase items associated with your search, going by Google’s announcement. 

This poses a new challenge for content creators: creating the kind of content and signposting it so Google can easily pick it up for its AI summaries. 

As SEO guru Neil Patel said in a recent blog, this means that while keywords, backlinks and other on-page SEO will continue to matter, matching search intent will become more important, as will a site’s overall user experience. 

So, content creators will need to imbue their writing, graphics and videos with more user insight and targeting than ever before. One consequence could be a growing need for in-depth explainers that can feed into such AI summaries.  

At the same time, there is a very real threat that users could drop off the SERP directly after perusing the summary, or follow a commercial link rather than scrolling down the SERP. This would obviously have a substantial impact on organic search. 

As a result, marketers could end up focusing more on long-tail keywords. Long-tail searches indicate transactional intentions. These users are your “warm leads”: actively in the market for your product or service. They are therefore more likely to look beyond the AI summary, for more in-depth information. They are a smaller group to target but ultimately easier to convert.

Using AI to crack SEO

Google has repeatedly said that it will penalise AI-generated content – but the company has also stressed that it doesn’t mind us getting a helping hand from AI in the process of creating high-quality content.

So how can AI help us?

Google’s mantra of E-E-A-T has dominated SEO content creation for some time, and the company has reiterated the continued importance of high-quality content that meets these requirements: 

📚 Expertise

⏳ Experience

🔨 Authoritativeness

👮 Trustworthiness 

AI tools can help find trending topics, keywords and topic clusters that your content should address. AI can help you identify the ‘white space’ in your topic area that nobody is talking about and that you could take ownership of. Or you could ask it to analyse the SERP to suggest the perfect word count or the types of questions your content should answer. 

You could even get AI to check that your blog meets Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.

What does the future look like?

The key takeaways for me are that AI is moving the goalposts in SEO – but that it can also be a hugely powerful tool in adjusting our aim in response. 

SEO, by its very nature, is constantly evolving, and this is just the latest catalyst for change. Only time will tell exactly where we end up, and it’s important for anyone publishing content online to keep a close eye and to keep pivoting.

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About the author: Andrea Willige is a Senior Writer and SEO expert at Formative Content. Connect with her on LinkedIn here.