Insights from 50+ Experts: Unraveling the Impact of AI on SEO

Curious about the intersection of AI and SEO?

Gain valuable insights from seasoned professionals immersed in the field. We’ve reached out to over 50 SEO experts, seeking their thoughts on the impact of AI on SEO.

Join us as we explore their expert perspectives, providing you with a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the world of search engine optimization.

Here are the questions we asked:

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• Honestly, the basics of SEO have always remained the same. Write great content that people want to read and share with their friends and colleagues.
  
  What has changed is how SEOs go about it. SEOs used to take a lot of shortcuts or try to trick or manipulate Google into thinking the content was good and that the links were good.
  
  Google fought back with various manual actions and algorithmic updates that devalued those spam efforts.
  
  So now most SEOs do the real thing by producing really good content that attracts those links.
  
  Other areas where SEO has changed from the early days might be more around structured data and vertical search. But overall, SEO is still pretty similar in concept.
• It is a bit hard to say without data yet, but if I had to guess, I think plugins will be a big deal in the short-term AI search revolution. Websites will rush to create plugins that allow the search engine to complete tasks on your website through their generative AI tools.
  
  I also think the content will continue to improve so that searchers using the new AI search features will want to dig deeper to learn more about your website. The good thing is that SEOs are amazing at adapting to change, and they will be just fine.

It’s having a huge impact in both good and frightening ways. The good is that you can use tools like ChatGPT to become extremely efficient in your SEO work.

It’s also making campaigns much more profitable because it can process and organize data, create content, and even help you develop solid link outreach pitches.

The value of ChatGPT is 100% based on the inputs you give it. You can’t expect it to work miracles. It’s only as good as the person using it. The more unpredictable/scary side is how it will impact Google.

With featured snippets, Google has already been stealing clicks for years, but this will take it to another level. Bard or any other AI algorithm they’re using will answer questions without users needing to click through.

So the most obvious action is to avoid keywords with simple answers like “What time is it in St. Louis?” You’ll need to use keywords that require investigation and multilayered questions.

It’s difficult to predict how SEO will evolve due to AI, but it’s likely that this will be the most significant disruption to our work processes, transforming the role of SEO in multiple ways.

In my opinion, the state of SEO has remained relatively consistent over the past five years, with only minor changes and updates occurring. However, the impact of AI may change that soon.

I see a short-term boost in productivity and a long-term, unknown impact on the profession. If we consider SEO as what we do today, at some point, it could be replaced by whatever is next.

As of my most recent knowledge update, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are having an increasing impact on the state of SEO. Google, for instance, uses AI algorithms like BERT and RankBrain to better understand the context of the content on web pages and provide more relevant search results to users.

Other important factors in SEO include mobile friendliness, site speed, high-quality content, and a good user experience. The rise of voice search through devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home is also impacting SEO.

This means optimizing for natural language queries and long-tail keywords is becoming more important. Looking ahead, AI will continue to play a significant role in SEO. Search engines will become even more sophisticated in understanding and interpreting content, user behavior, and intent. This means that creating high-quality, relevant, and user-friendly content will be more important than ever.

Additionally, as search engines get better at understanding and interpreting the context of content, there will likely be less emphasis on traditional ranking factors like keywords and backlinks and more emphasis on user experience and content relevance. It will also be important to optimize for new forms of search, such as voice search and visual search, as these technologies continue to evolve and become more widely adopted.

Ultimately, the future of SEO will involve staying adaptable, staying informed about the latest algorithm updates and technological advancements, and continuously optimizing your website and content to provide the best possible experience for your users.

I have been in the SEO industry since 2008 and have always thought the industry to be constantly evolving and rapidly changing. You have to continuously adapt to survive and to maintain market leader status in the search engines.

At the end of the day, the most successful SEO campaigns come from companies that embrace the latest advances in technology and adjust for algorithm updates. Long before ChatGPT, I implemented successful programmatic SEO campaigns that produced content at scale, leading to significant organic traffic growth for clients.

The age of AI is no different, and the leading brands will be those who are already using AI tools in their workflow. Utilize AI as leverage to scale your on-page content optimization in addition to optimizing for voice search and visual search platforms, as these are becoming common search tools for users.

While AI has great potential to supplement the technical SEO arsenal of tools, especially when it comes to coding and software development, AI solutions have the potential to greatly expedite implementation cycles. It’s worth bearing in mind that timely implementation can be an SEO-relevant factor.

On the content front, AI-driven tools can be used to create content, especially FAQ landing pages or technical guidelines. To some extent, AI can even be used to generate more in-depth articles, although, at the current level, human editing is still required in order to maintain high-quality standards.

This is primarily owed to the limitations imposed on commercially available AI solutions, such as lack of actual creativity, lack of compassion or understanding of emotions, lack of understanding of human language nuances, and limited comprehension of information, context, and bios based on the existing data input.

In the evolving landscape of SEO, we stand at a transformative juncture. As we transitioned from 2022, which I’ve dubbed the “year of updates,” marked by a barrage of Google’s impactful alterations in SERPs, to 2023, we’ve observed unprecedented and sustained volatility in SERPs.

Google is steering its course firmly with AI integrations. For SEOs to navigate this shift, a few strategies stand out:

• E-E-A-T Principle: While content is still king, the crown jewels are backlinks and digital PR, key determinants of E-E-A-T. As content creation scales up, especially with AI-driven tools, it’s anticipated that Google will discern and possibly devalue much of this AI-crafted content. Why? The non-scalable nature of backlinks and digital PR makes them invaluable, ensuring genuine quality.
• Cross-Platform Authority: A new intriguing move by Google is its experiment with showcasing social follower counts in SERPs. This signals a broader scope, where your brand’s footprint outside your primary website—especially on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube—gains prominence. SEOs should, therefore, diversify their efforts across these platforms.
• Branding Metrics: Brand-driven metrics like branded searches, social shares, and community engagement have consistently served as reliable indicators for Google. They are poised to increase one’s “E-E-A-T Score” further.

In this AI-driven era, the emphasis will increasingly shift to efforts that may be measurable but not easily scalable. It’s crucial for businesses to prioritize what Google values: genuine, hard-to-replicate efforts.

Instead of hopping onto the bandwagon of what everyone’s buzzing about, finding those unique niches and gaps that cater to Google’s preferences—and are not easily manipulated en masse—will be the game-changer.

The current state of SEO is in a constant state of flux and has been evolving rapidly over the years. As we progress, the turbulence in rank tracking has become more evident, with positions constantly shifting in search engine result pages. These days, it’s always in a constant state of flux.

One of the biggest game-changers for SEO is Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience)—generative AI in general—but from a Google point of view, it’s SGE. SGE adds generative AI capabilities to Google Search results and effectively cuts out the publishers and websites for a lot of queries.

Local SEO, e-commerce SEO, publishers—everyone will feel its impact. The old SEO playbook will be rewritten; it’s a brave new world with a new set of ranking factors, and everyone will need to adapt to this new evolution.

Looking ahead, the age of AI will continue to influence the evolution of SEO. One of the significant trends we can expect is the rise of personal assistants on our devices. These AI-powered assistants, such as voice-activated devices and chatbots, will take a substantial share away from traditional search queries.

Instead of typing queries into search engines, users will increasingly rely on interactions with personal assistants to generate responses for their specific needs. This shift to personal assistants and voice search (yup, voice search is making a comeback) will require a different approach to SEO.

Additionally, AI will play a more significant role in content creation and optimization. Machine learning algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data to identify user preferences and behaviors, enabling businesses to create more tailored and engaging content for their audiences.

We will also see a lot of spam on the rise. Google will get more aggressive with indexing, and we will see a lot of small publishers eventually give up.

AI has been around for a while and will be here to stay. As you look at how search engines have focused more on providing search results that are based on user intent, it is clear that they have been teaching their systems about our behaviors for years. This release is just our turn to play with their technology and use it to truly match wits.

As search engines master providing personalized results, the SEO community must pivot to be more intentional about the content that is being presented.

No longer will keyword stuffing and generic content be king for down-funnel users. The search engines know exactly what their users are looking for, and it is up to us to provide that value.

AI is already having a huge impact on SEO in many ways; however, I believe that going forward, the growth of AI is going to make these two things more important than ever:

1. Authorship—who writes your articles—will become far more important. Anyone can write an article on anything using AI, but if you can prove that you’ve got extensive knowledge and experience in your sector, then that is bound to count for a lot.
2. Style—being concise and to the point will become more important than ever. With AI content, you can churn out 100s of articles a week with no problem; however, users rarely want to read 1000 words when they’re looking for a quick, clear, and concise answer. Providing this will help you appear in Google’s SGE results and will make your content appear more trustworthy.

We are returning bit by bit to strong online communities. Google clearly favors ads and does not have a proper model in place to make it worth our while to produce unique, quality content.

So content marketing will find new distribution channels. Making content available and understandable by bots will center around schema markup more than ever. SEO is evolving in an astounding manner thanks to AI. We’re in for a bumpy ride, but it’s also going to be an exciting one.

On the surface, AI hasn’t changed SEO that much yet. However, due to Google’s SGE and Microsoft’s steady investments in Bing Chat, I currently see SEO on the brink of a state of transformation. The trend we’ve been seeing for several years now—that the meaning of the term “SEO” is kind of blurring and search engine optimization is becoming more and more of an inter-disciplinary skill—supposedly will pick up speed.

For example, some plausible theories suggest SEOs should work more closely with Digital PR departments as well as leverage the opportunities of influencer marketing … why?

Because an entity’s authority “(think: off-page signals like earned and relevant backlinks, customer reviews on GBPs and other platforms, and the overall public discourse around a brand)” is supposed to become much more important in times of AI-enhanced search results,

An excellent article by Olaf Kopp, written for Search Engine Land, coined the term “digital authority management” for what an SEO’s work might look like in the future: The SEO would not only be an expert for SEO-related tasks and data but would also function as a middleman between different departments whose work can contribute to the overall digital authority of a brand.

According to Olaf Kopp, an SEO in the role of a Digital Authority Manager would »plan and promote efforts to generate algorithmically measurable signals of topic leadership and brand positioning. In addition, this role is responsible for the consistency of the signals and the digital sentiment around the company.«

If you ask me, he and others with similar ideas make a plausible point here. It may well be that SEO will become less of a set of rules and rather about examining and realizing data-backed measures that strengthen a brand as an entity across as many channels as possible, including but by no means restricted to the brand’s own website.

We continue to see search engines continue to double down on artificial intelligence. It was recently introduced through Microsoft that Bing now provides an interactive chat search experience.

I suspect Google will follow suit quicky. This will very likely result in traditional organic search results being further pushed down the ‘SERP’ making top 1-3 rankings even more important.

Presently, the landscape of SEO is in constant flux as search engines consistently improve their ability to comprehend and rank websites.

Previously, SEO used to be all about technical stuff like using specific keywords and getting lots of other sites to link back to yours. But these days, there has been an increasing emphasis on user experience and the quality of content.

Today, AI (artificial intelligence) is playing a bigger role in how search engines work, which means even more changes for SEO are probably on the way.

Thanks to AI-driven algorithms, searches will get better and better at figuring out what users are really looking for online. So SEO experts need to focus extra hard on making sure their content hits the mark and satisfies user’s needs while still being unique!

In my opinion, the 3 pilars of SEO will remain unchanged for the years to come.

1. Content Relevancy & Search Intent: Google is in the business of delivering the best answer to any question, your goal is to produce this best answer, creating quality content is the key and if AI can help, it also require quality visual and video content, which become more and more costly to produce.
2. On-Page & Technical Optimization: The process of making and optimizing the content on your web pages so that it appeals to both search engines and users.
3. Authority (Off-Page SEO): ultimately when few competitors have good content and equality optimized website (On-Page SEO), it’s the contender with the most authority (Backlink, Mention, Review) that will rank number one.

To be honest, I believe the current state of SEO is much the same as it has always been. If your technical SEO fundamentals are solid, your content is keyword targeted, serves a purpose, and answers user intent, plus you run quality link-building campaigns, then you’ll be successful.

AI has brought two main things to SEO, which are changing how SEOs operate. The obvious one is content. AI allows you to write, summarise, and edit at scale. This saves SEOs time they previously would not have had. The negative here is the influx of poor AI content.

The second thing is that AI is changing workflows in general. For example, my calendar is now automated, as is my task scheduling to a certain degree. This again saves me time. And time is money.

That’s a question that I could spend hours answering haha, and it’s also way too early to tell exactly how things will change. They certainly will change, but how precisely depends a lot on how AI technology within search engines evolves. AI technology integrated within search is still in the very early stages.

As things become more advanced, we’ll see what we are offered within search and where and how people use it. We SEOs have long been used to constant changes (even though this one is quite dramatic), but we’ll adapt like we always have.

Regardless, the core of SEO will stay the same in that creating high-quality, helpful content is at the heart of successful SEO.

Modern SEO is more intertwined with marketing than ever before. Before the digital age, marketing efforts were focused on winning customers. When search engines and social media platforms were in their infancy, their basic algorithms were often manipulated by marketers. But times have changed.

Today, Google and other platforms have become adept at selecting content that genuinely helps and supports users. Attempting to unravel the workings of these sophisticated algorithms is like chasing a moving target.

With Google alone making over 7,000 updates to its algorithms annually, it’s impossible for a human to keep up with and fully understand all the changes. Even if someone somehow managed to crack the code, the reality is that it would be a fleeting victory, with the algorithm shifting multiple times a day.

So, the focus of today’s SEO is simple: prioritize people. Always think about the human user first. Then, and only then, optimize for search engines. In other words, instead of trying to outsmart the algorithms, it’s far more effective to create content that meets your audience’s needs and delivers value. This user-centric approach is the essence of modern SEO.

In my opinion, SEO is at an inflection point in its utilization. The industry is in an awkward place, where programmatic methods of content production, which have been useful for decades, are frowned upon all whilst Google regurgitates content directly from publisher’s pages onto SERPs, at length, without credit.

For most, the strategy shouldn’t have changed much, the goal still remains to offer breadth and depth of content that meets user demand and attracts high volumes of relevant links from trusted domains.

But for enterprise sites with hundreds of thousands or millions of pages, there’s a computational resource race taking place, between AI enjoyers and Google. Some publishers produce swathes of high-quality programmatic content to feed Google’s ranks and in turn, train its LLMs. Others need better control to stop Google and other bots from scraping their content. Robots.txt needs an overhaul.

If answers to search engine queries will be rendered by LLMs, then we need to invest in good content. Good content will not be generated by AI/LLMs (lest they just become an echo chamber) but by real experts contributing new content to the topic.

Those who don’t cut corners now will survive the shift to LLMs answering queries in the search engines.

SEO is alive and fun!” This tagline captures the spirit of the SEO Video Show, which I refer to often. I genuinely believe SEO is a dynamic field that continues to evolve and can never die, even in this age dominated by artificial intelligence.

In my opinion, E-E-A-T – experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – will gain even more importance in the age of AI. Why?

Because these factors capture the actual experiences and perspectives of real people, which is something AI is starting to understand more deeply.

The Google SGE interface is an excellent example of this. Google is adding a conversational experience that integrates user-generated content from platforms like Reddit and Quora with a new “Perspectives” filter and, from what I’ve seen in the beta, includes a “Perspectives” snippet in the search results.

For me, the future of SEO isn’t just about optimizing web pages; it’s more about optimizing how your brand interacts and responds to various topics on platforms rich in user-generated content like Reddit and Quora.

That’s the direction in which I see SEO evolving in the age of AI.

The latest generative AI technology is definitely changing SEO. However, no matter what AI is involved…the SEO fundamentals still apply.

Robots still need to go out on the web to find the information that exists. Robots have to process that information to figure out how to display it. How the information is displayed might change with things like Google’s SGE and Bing’s conversational search.

The tactics we use to work with new AI tools might change a bit too. But the harder SEO work remains and will continue to remain making sure robots are able to find the right information on your website and make sure robots make the right decisions about what to do with that information.

That means, now and going forward, it is important to resolve any technical issues that prevent robots from accessing the website and improve the website’s content.

If anything, these efforts will become more important because we might have more than just Googlebot to think about in the future if ChatGPT, Bing, or other tools are able to earn a bigger market share.

With the advent of LLMs like Chat-GPT and Bard, we’ve entered a new phase where the “winner takes all”. SEO will certainly change and that means that new tools will need to be developed to answer the challenge of being visible in voice search, LLMs.

Right now we have simple tools like crawling software to simulate the interaction with Google and users. The future will require SEOs to have access to SEO-GPT-like tools to help their clients and brands keep up.

The current state of SEO is a dynamic landscape driven by rapid changes in search engine algorithms and user behavior. As SEO professionals, we’ve experienced the challenges posed by Google’s relentless updates, prompting us to devise innovative solutions.

Three major disruptors have significantly impacted the landscape of the SEO industry, leaving a lasting mark:

1. E-E-A-T and Evolving Content Landscape:

The introduction of E-E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) by Google and the challenges tied to content production have reshaped priorities for SEO professionals. Content creation and strategy have emerged as focal points, often posing considerable challenges in their roles.

Google’s incorporation of user experience into its quality rater guidelines underscores the importance of well-rounded E-E-A-T principles. While generative AI has the potential to streamline content production, the demand for it truly stands, and competitive content has grown more formidable.

2. Proving SEO Value Amidst Challenges:

Navigating the complexities of proving and tracking the value of SEO initiatives has proven to be a significant hurdle. Budget limitations intensified competition within search engine results pages (SERPs), and intricacies in client relationships have surfaced as primary barriers to success over the past year.

Heightened competition and the emergence of new SERP features have given rise to communication and budgetary concerns, creating an interconnected dynamic that influences outcomes.

3. Generative AI and Technological Advancements:

Generative AI and the expanding role of AI software have emerged as transformative forces reshaping the SEO landscape. As platforms integrate AI more extensively, its impact is poised to be ongoing.

Although change can be disruptive, most respondents express optimism regarding AI’s potential to enhance workflows and yield favorable business outcomes. Generative AI’s implications for content creation have garnered particular attention, indicating a shift in how professionals approach content generation and optimization.

As AI shapes the future of SEO, its influence will grow. AI-driven algorithms prioritize user intent, personalization, structured data, and natural language processing. To navigate this future, we need to prioritize quality content aligned with user needs, adopt ethical practices, leverage AI tools for insights, and maintain a long-term perspective.

Every day there is a new AI tool or new announcement on how AI will impact search. It’s so fast-paced that it is hard to say how it will play out in the long term.

AI will be a threat for many, but also an opportunity. SEO has always evolved and the top players will continue to adapt to this ever-changing landscape – I hope I can be one of them.

This is an incredible opportunity for all marketing professionals to learn how to use and harness. AI tools have many more uses than we can possibly think of — or have yet to think of.

I’ve seen marketers use AI to conduct market research and even create end-to-end marketing strategies, complete with scoping, budgets, resources, steps, requirements, and deployment plans — from launch to maintenance — and to do it in a fraction of the time it would have taken them to do.

Plus and more importantly, we can use AI to deliver newer, better, and unique experiences to our users and solve their problems more effectively than ever before, which is ultimately the goal of all marketing.

We can use it to become more efficient, but we can also use it to become more effective with our users so they can get the maximum benefit from our products and services.

SEO is always been the most dynamic field in marketing. It’s constantly shifting and evolving. With AI stepping into the limelight, it’s not about replacing it as many are claiming but about enhancing its performance. AI, in its current state, is a tool – a powerful one, no doubt. But it’s the human touch, the expertise, and the creativity that truly harness its potential.

Just as a paintbrush doesn’t create a masterpiece on its own, AI needs the guiding hand of an expert to truly shine. As we move forward, I see a symbiotic relationship where AI and SEO professionals co-evolve, each pushing the other to new heights.

• Right now everything is changing, faster than ever before, AI and SGE (Search Generative Experience), right now we as SEOs can not predict how the pages will look, the speed of iteration is happening faster than ever, if I was to offer one piece of advice, think about the entities and aspects like schema to really enhance your site and create content types that are more usable, including podcasts, video and more.
• Machine learning has been a hot topic for 15 years, with data being analyzed and users being segmented, and in the last 12 years this has accelerated to the point where it an be used to create content, not just in text form but graphics and more, in a world where scale can be critical, learning how to use AI effectively is critical.

It’s… certainly an interesting time to be in SEO. Driving organic traffic through traditional organic SERP results is hard, and it’s only going to get harder. Everyone is fighting for less search “real estate” than ever!

As AI results become a part of the search experience and take visual priority on SERPs, organic real estate is likely to shrink rapidly. At the same time, there will be more competition from sites that adopt “prompt-and-publish” content using AI tools like ChatGPT.

All of this points to the need for authoritative and differentiated content that is actually valuable with regard to the user’s intent when they search for terms. In particular, E-E-A-T and schema markup are two areas of SEO that should be points of focus.

Structured data will offer more context as to the purpose and information of the page, helping sites win priority placements in AI-generated results — just as it does today with featured snippets and free merchant center listings.

Meanwhile, E-E-A-T considerations will help search engines understand whether the ethos of content makes it worth surfacing over competitors.

The concept of “ten blue links” has faced numerous challenges over recent years. There was a concern about quick answers emerging in search results, although it’s worth noting that businesses haven’t actually suffered as a consequence.

Although there were differing viewpoints regarding FAQs appearing in search results, we still used them excessively, prompting Google to restrict their use to governmental websites. Even the conventional notion of a first page of search results has evolved due to the implementation of infinite scroll.

We are now faced with the intriguing Search Generative Experience (SGE), and our response mirrors our approach to previous changes. Could this be the transformative factor that reshapes the landscape of organic search? Is the shift ahead of us so substantial that adapting, as we’ve managed before, might pose a challenge?

It’s possible. Time will be the ultimate arbiter. However, it’s not prudent to merely wait for this evolution. Instead, we should be taking proactive steps, focusing on general branding and organic branding for SEOs.

Devoting more attention to this aspect is pivotal. It’s essential that your business becomes the primary focus of search queries, rather than just the products you offer. Shifting the focus towards optimizing for user experience is paramount.

Come to think of it, wasn’t that the recommendation for SEOs all along?

Mostly you have to stay on top of any major technology change. You have to test a lot of different ideas and be on the cutting edge, especially if you do client work.

For example, you can currently use AI to evaluate your content and find gaps in what your articles are missing.
For better or worse, the answer is to test more and really stay on top of it.

Ever since Google unveiled its Search Generated Entity (SGE) experience, there’s been a common assumption that content websites and affiliate marketing are on the decline (yet again). However, I beg to differ for several reasons.

For instance, SGE is relatively slow to load, it will only impact a small percentage of search queries, and user adoption is likely to be quite gradual.

AI and changing technologies are causing search engines to change rapidly. For SEO to stay a relevant practice we need to keep up with these changes and determine their impact on the sites we manage and what we can use to our advantage.

AI is moving SEO in a direction in which personalization and understanding your customers is even more important. SEOs that focus on understanding how demographics come into play will be more likely to succeed.

How we search, what sites we trust for valuable information, and what search terms we use will be super important as AI users typically take a more conversational approach to requests over just using the search bar.

Having the ability to learn and adapt is, and always will be, a skill every SEO person must have. The future will probably be a lot like the past: things will come and go.

Experts will say this thing or that thing. Google will say this or that. Some people will get scared. But the people who keep testing and trying things to see what works and what doesn’t will always come out on top.

The current epoch in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is best characterized as a transitional period. While the fundamental pillars of SEO—namely Relevance, Responsiveness, Authority, and Usability—remain immutable, their embodiments are evolving.

Take, for instance, one of our SEO Case Study websites that was spotlighted by Google during their Google Bard Announcement. This particular website has been optimized with an explicit focus on semantic and linguistic elements, aligning perfectly with Google’s evolving SEO algorithms.

Our unique approach revolves around optimizing our websites to accord with the principles of information retrieval and extraction. We provide the most trustworthy, accurate, and original answers in the most relevant, well-structured, and interconnected manner.

By placing these answers in the most appropriate sections of the web document, we create a network of linked documents. This process, which I’ve termed ‘Semantic Content Networks’, reflects the changing dynamics of SEO.

Search engines today are not merely choosing answers; they are generating new ones by attributing citations to original sources. The selection and generation of these answers depend heavily on their format, context, sentence structure, and discourse integration.

To ensure that your website is selected, cited, and utilized as an information source or a search result page extension, it is imperative to optimize both your content’s format and the information it carries, in line with the operating principles of search engines.

For instance, if a question begins with the interrogative term ‘what’ and includes a plural noun, a listicle format is often best suited.

However, if the number of items in the list is fewer than four, it is advisable to use a paragraph format with incremental ordinal terms like ‘first’, and ‘second’, along with qualifiers such as ‘main’ or ‘major’. This nuanced understanding is gleaned from extensive semantic research and analysis, and I strongly recommend adopting a similar approach.

Lastly, it’s time to let your website communicate more dynamically. There will be content that is openly published, and other content that is hidden, only to be shared through chat windows.

This new paradigm of verbalizing knowledge bases and emphasizing micro semantics is the next frontier in SEO. Embrace it, and let your website speak to its visitors.

AI has been on the horizon for years, and the way we search has been leaning toward it for years. Look at voice search – voice is the most natural form of language we have. Learning models have access to billions of data points, allowing our search patterns to become more and more like a natural conversation.

Does that change how we optimize, though? It actually shouldn’t. Optimization, in my mind and the minds of my team, has always been a natural, “organic” thing. Add semantic SEO, and it’s even more organic.

With that in mind, I’ll blow the same horn I’ve been blowing for years. Optimize and work for your readers – the humans. Search engines aren’t going to buy your product or service.

Having said that, the biggest challenge in my mind will be overcoming the slew of content and misinformation that has been developed just since ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, and all those learning models have come out. Did you know ChatGPT was estimated to have reached 100 million users – ACTIVE users – within two months after its launch?

And how many do you think were agencies like ours, or small businesses hoping to get a leg up? How do you beat that influx of competition?

For us, user intent has become the number one focus we’re working on with all our clients. It’s going to become more refined as AI becomes more robust. Targeting the lower-hanging fruit with tightly optimized content that focuses on the user intent of those terms is going to be a major deal – especially for smaller brands.

It will definitely transform how we do SEO, and not just that, it will change how people search online, which will also impact the SEO industry. In my opinion, AI’s best SEO use cases are to generate content ideas and create creative meta tags that can help improve organic CTR.

Of course, everything done with AI has to be reviewed by human intelligence as well. That may change in the future, but that’s currently what can be very helpful.

AI is such a powerful tool and is absolutely something we are integrating into our processes. While you can’t simply copy & paste whatever it spits out, it can be a huge time saver by providing you a base to mold into something great.

AI will make a big impact on SEO, but not in the way most people fear. The best SEO practitioners will become more efficient using AI, but consultants who rely too heavily on AI without using their own brains will get burned and unfortunately, burn their clients as well.

It seems to me that on an organic level, Google is still focused on giving users the best experience possible, meaning weeding out spam, penalizing duplicate or useless content, prioritizing search intent, and even bringing social media into the mix, since they know how important it is to the younger generations, and that won’t go away.

So in the coming years, I can predict a few things:

Google will double down on spam penalization

I think that Google is going to do all it can to get rid of any and all duplicate and meaningless content. It will only rank the best of the best, making niche and industry research even more vital to any and every content strategy.

Focusing on user intent, Google will incorporate social media even more

Google knows social media is going away any time soon, and I think that makes them a little nervous. Because of the younger generations using TikTok as a search engine, I believe that Google is going to continue to integrate social media into the SERP even more, whether it be through links, images, or videos. So, I think going forward, focusing on cross-channel strategies between your website and social media channels will become necessary to ensure success.

UX & Readability will become vital

As Google continues focusing on its primary goal of giving users a good experience, I think it will further prioritize user metrics, like how long they stay on a page and if they found what they were looking for. Now, I’m not talking about site speed, but once a site loads, was the user able to easily find what they were looking for? How long did it take? I’ve always said that your article needs one sentence to give a user an answer and a page of content to get Google to rank it. This is true now, but I predict that will only increase as attention spans continue to get shorter.

I’m excited! I don’t think SEO had fundamentally changed for many years, some bits have gone in and out of fashion, changed names, changed tools, but at its core, it’s been the same process.

It’s early days for integrating AI into search and I genuinely think it will have longtime ramifications for how people interact with search engines, which will likely sprout whole new SEO strategies that never existed.

The three main areas I think will be multi-modal search, so lots more searches where inputs and outputs will be images and video, rather than just text. Translation will be huge, and by this, I mean translation becoming close to being “solved” and especially for non-English speakers, those walls coming down.

Finally, I think we’ll see Google doing more to stitch together multiple sources, whether it’s from LLMs or websites, to make answers that cover a linear range of questions that make up the query intent.

I’ve been closely looking at the substantial impact Generative AI has had on the SEO landscape. Our journey with these advancements began in 2020 when we started using transformers to facilitate the creation of new content. Today, we’re navigating an intriguing dynamic that involves two simultaneous forces.

Firstly, as the rate of automatically generated content accelerates, the inherent value of knowledge increases. Paradoxically, Google, our primary source of information, has been tightening its indexing constraints, placing restrictions on the volume and type of content that it can realistically feature.

Often, the focus is placed on the shiny façade of the foundational models, but I always advocate for a more analytical approach. Delving beneath the surface and into the core data that drives these models is crucial.

As a result, we’re committed to developing the necessary semantic networks, a pivotal resource for training and guiding language models. I like to call, among others, this area of research: neuro-symbolic AI

At WordLift, we’re currently concentrating our resources in two primary directions:

• First, we’re investigating how we can aid organizations in structuring their unstructured data using GPT-3.5/4 and open-source language models. Our approach enables the construction of fine grained knowledge graphs at a considerably reduced cost.

• Second, we’re focused on generating and validating high-quality content and immersive conversational experiences. By prompting large language models in-context (and via fine-tuning) using structured data and ontologies, we’re able to produce content that doesn’t merely satisfy algorithmic criteria but also delivers genuine value to users.

In essence, our work is rooted in the intersection of technology and knowledge, aiming to optimize the way we access, understand, and utilize information in the digital age.

The foundations of SEO have always been the same. Everything starts with knowing the keywords you’d like to rank for and creating well-optimized content around the topic in a way that Google can easily understand and crawl.

The biggest changes we’ve seen in the last years have been around having to match the search intent as closely as possible, getting more in-depth with your content, and lastly, topical authority or covering your industry as a whole.

The last thing worth noting is that Google has been heavily prioritizing authority and links – how many industries are dominated by giants like Forbes?

When we consider your ability to rank, a super simplified formula would be “(On-Page SEO + Content Quality + Topical Authority) * Backlinks”.

In even slightly competitive industries, you won’t get very far with links. After all, 100 multiplied by zero is still zero. There are always outliers but I think this is a fair way of looking at the broader industry.

With the advance of AI, a big part of this formula is eliminated. The topical authority has worked wonders in recent years and allowed weak sites to absolutely crush it because it took an effort to cover your entire topical map.

Now this is gone and people are shelling out thousands of articles in minutes that beat most “SEO writers” on freelance sites. Of course, the content isn’t as good as a world-class copywriter, but most sites weren’t publishing this level of stuff before either.

Beyond that, Google works on an algorithm and still can’t truly read. Just look up Kyle Roof’s “Lorem Ipsum” case study for evidence of this.

So what is Google left with? They’re going to have to raise the importance of authority and links yet again. Otherwise, all the upcoming SEO spam from AI content is simply going to break the internet.

SEO is currently in a state of flux as search engines struggle to keep up with the flood of content at a profitable pace and distinguish good vs. great quality content.

SEO teams will need to work more closely with brand alignment to make sure the name and brand promise are tightly integrated. Large language models and future search tools will trend toward including the brand as part of digital chats and answers.

If a brand is a noun or verb, even better, as people will want to know where answers come from and prompt for more specific information and solutions.

SEO foundations will persist and advanced methods of topical authority and marketing can feed content and data to large language models to support predictive text and serve answers to readers, search crawlers, and LLMs.

The current state is that it is the same as it always was. Google will get better at picking up non-factual AI content and the sites that used it will get penalized and have a harder time recovering. It is the same as spun content and Panda, and building backlinks through forums and blog comments.

If you use AI to write copy, you should expect to lose your traffic and have your competitors beat you in the rankings. It is a shortcut and gimmick just like others we’ve seen, and the results will likely be the same.

SEO is continuing to merge into marketing. What used to be specialized tactics is now becoming a much broader skillset that involves more data skills, more audience understanding, and more overall business and customer-first thinking. Unlike many SEOs, I’m not afraid of AI.

If you approach SEO as tricks and tactics, AI can be scary. But if you approach SEO as understanding user needs and then helping meet those needs, there’s plenty of work to be done that AI can’t solve. If your strategy was ranking for common information without additional value, or answers to simple questions, AI is coming for you.

If your business is focused on helping users do something or providing unique or curated information or insights, you’ll be fine. Keep doing that.

As Google rolls out generative AI in the search engine results page, content marketing and SEO will evolve in several distinct ways:

• 📉 Organic traffic will decrease.

This is nothing new. Zero-click searches (a term coined by Rand Fishkin, I believe) have been on the rise for a while. SERP features like Knowledge Panels, the People Also Ask section, and Featured Snippets have all been hindering inbound traffic for years.

• 📝 Content quality will increase.

It’s not enough to regurgitate other articles and plug in the right keywords. Standing out in a generative AI world requires creating content with original research, a unique take, and a human voice. We need to provide the answers that people are confident quoting and the how-to content that achieves their intended outcome.

• 🎓 Thought leadership will matter even more.

Google has long prioritized E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, and trust) — which is something chatbots can’t provide. To quote AI consultant Heather Murray: “Things are in beta, or even alpha, mode. That means frequent crashes, errors, nonsensical results.”
Standing out among iffy results is as simple as building a trusted personal brand that delivers more value than the bots.

• 👇🏼 Bottom-of-funnel content will take center stage.

Even with generative AI results competing for clicks, searches with commercial or buying intent will continue to drive traffic and conversions. After all, when I Google “Indian takeout near me,” I’m looking for a restaurant — not a conversation with a chatbot.

• 🤖 It’ll be up to us to train the bots.

We’ve already been doing this, unbeknownst to many. And because large-language models gain their know-how by consuming our content, it’s up to marketers to continue associating their brands with the topics and concepts people are typing into Google.

• 📨 Content distribution and repurposing will become even more important

It’s no longer enough to publish an article and let Google’s algorithms take care of getting it in front of your audience. The honus will lie on content teams to find creative ways to spread the word — ranging from holistic multi-channel campaigns to more native content on social media.

Is SEO dead? Never. Is it evolving? Always.

I think AI will play a significant role in pretty much all areas of our business. It’s hard to avoid it these days. I was slow to adopt it in my business but I embrace it daily now. It’s here to stay.

It can be easy to get carried away with the constant flux and development of AI within the context of SEO and perhaps overshoot in terms of predictions, though it does feel like we’re headed towards a steady(ish) trajectory after a whirlwind 6 months or so.

By that I mean the dawning of SGE (Search Generative Experience) and its eventual rollout to global SERPs. Whether or not SGE or the use of AI answers in SERPs becomes the default model, there is clearly going to be a big disruption in terms of SERP real estate and a potential loss of clicks for some as a result.

Informational-based-listicle queries and articles that target this intent may struggle against AI answers provided in the SERP. For example, if I’m searching for a top-level query like “Best beaches in Costa Rica”, this is something that the SGE could provide me without the need to click through to associated articles.

With that in mind, the bar for unique, quality, and expert-led content (and all the associated E-EAT signals) will undoubtedly increase in this field, as brands will need to come up with an offering that provides more than AI answers.

These are exciting times for brands who have spent a long time establishing their voice, product offering, and content around that, though it may see the end of generic content solely produced for the purpose of capturing keyword opportunity.

In my opinion, the current state of SEO still relies on the basics – optimized title tags, meta descriptions, and on-page copy; avoiding keyword stuffing and other black hat tactics; building complementary messaging across your website, social media profiles, Google Business Profile, and Yelp so they’re all indexed and taking up space in the SERPs for the same queries; etc.

But things are also moving into a more technical territory that is gaining reliance on website elements like load speed and such, so business owners need to engage an SEO during their website build to make sure everything is done per search engine best practices from the start. It’s easier to get indexed and ranked from the get-go than it is to fix issues later.

When it comes to AI: I believe the more a website creator and/or copywriter are dependent on AI, the harder it will be for their copy to stand out.

As a result, those websites will have a harder time ranking. The more website builders/copywriters look at AI as a starting point for their copy but edit it until it’s almost unrecognizable from the original, the better off they’ll be.

The current state of SEO reminds me of when I started. Google was just starting, Yahoo started to go down, and we all were trying to find what works, how we do things, and a lot of speculation. Not so long ago, we were tall excited about generative AI, and now we have a way to block ChatGPT from our sites because we understand more of the risks.

The interesting part is that organizations that are serious about understanding their user’s needs and helping them are still conquering top positions.

The current state of SEO is very stable. Google does a really good job at figuring out the searcher’s intent for every keyword. AI can also help cement their ability to figure out the searcher’s intent.

So long as you can craft content that addresses and solves the searcher’s intent, Google will reward you.

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In conclusion, understanding the impact of AI on SEO has never been more crucial in today’s digital landscape. Businesses and SEO professionals are actively discussing this topic as they recognize its significance.

At Uprankly, we took the initiative to gather insights from industry veterans with years of SEO experience and in-depth industry knowledge. Their valuable contributions aim to benefit all of us navigating the ever-evolving SEO landscape.

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