As I see it, AI’s impact on SEO and marketing is most broadly being felt in three areas:
- Content Production Pace
- Search Results
- User Behavior
These three dynamics play off of each other and continue to change each other (as users try new search platforms, for example, Google will continue testing changes to their AI summaries, driving content creators to re-think how they’re generating content, and for whom).
Studying what’s actually going on is hard and changing literally daily.
Still, I believe there are core principles and practices we live by that will succeed regardless of where artificial intelligence and LLM’s take us.
Here’s how AI’s changing the face of SEO and marketing (and how to best respond and optimize for it).
A) The Exponential Increase in the Rate of Content Production
We’ve always known the internet to be an ever-expanding mass with terabytes of data, pages, and video created every second. The pace of our content creation is now exploding with the broadening adoption of ChatGPT (or Jasper, Gemini, SEOWriting, etc.) for a quick 4,000 words on a target keyword.
The good news is that really impressive AI content is really hard to prompt. And then really hard to edit to be good enough to compete with human content.
Not saying it’s not affective, I’ve been testing it on some pet projects to stay in the weeds on what works and what doesn’t. From what I’ve seen, it’s less effective than anticipated and more work than I think people thought it would be.
B) AI‘s Impact on SEO Search Results
We’ve watched in horror as AI generated answers at the top of the search results push organic SEO rankings (and interestingly enough, paid ad spots) further down, lowering click thru, even if you rank 1st.
However, those AI powered answers are featuring more and more citable links and are basically becoming the new Google SERP.
The studies I’ve followed for how to rank in AI’s newly coveted citation links note that the sites showing up as citations tend to:
- lean heavily on data, stats, facts, figures and calculations.
- use expert quotes and soundbites from… you guessed it, humans.
That’s comforting for those of us that already think about marketing and content that way. The algorithms are still trying to find the best human created content for humans – one of my core beliefs in how I create marketing content, landing pages, etc.
Recently, Google’s even made a major shift in what websites they’re using in the AI Summary citations. As mentioned by Mark Traphagen (seoClarity):
“AI Overviews now match one or more of the webpages from the top 10 Google organic search results 99.5% of the time.”
Source: Search Engline Land
3) AI is Changing Searcher Behaviour
Third, user behavior is shifting as people are also going to tools like Perplexity and Meta’s AI powered search in FB and messenger to do their searches. However, Google is still the #1 search engine by millions of miles (and billions of searches).
AI search is trendy, but barely a drop in the bucket in taking market share from Google. Even if these new AI search players acheive what Microsoft couldn’t and steal a decent chunk of Google’s search market share, most of their results and cited links follow the same ranking pattern and similar algorithms.
“Sixty percent of citations on AI search engine Perplexity overlap with the top 10 Google organic search results.”
Source: Search Engine Land
All that to say, these next 2-3 years will be a drastic evolution in search results and searcher behavior I’m looking forward to continue studying. But it seems, at least for now, my core marketing principles actually already attract rankings and traffic from any type of web search entity, AI or otherwise.
But we don’t sit back on that confidence – we’re always learning and testing AI’s impact on SEO and marketing to stay ahead of the curve, wherever consumers are going.