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Search marketing is undergoing dramatic changes, and many are debating whether SEO will die out as AI Search grows in popularity. What follows is an honest assessment of what’s going on with SEO and search engines today.
An SEO school by a group called Authority Hackers recently announced its closure, stressing that it’s not because SEO is dead, but because of the collapse of the content page model. They gave three reasons for this situation. The following isn’t about SEO school, it’s just a symptom of something important happening today.
Google updates are one of the cited reasons for the decline of the content website model. Here’s the honest part: If Google’s updates have killed your publish page, that’s kind of a sign that there’s something in your SEO that needs to be looked into.
Here’s the honest part: The top search engine websites have been falling all year long. Search engine first SEO starts with keyword research, followed by stealing content ideas from competitors, scraping Google SERPs for multiple key phrases, and then granularly mapping those keywords into titles, headings, and content.
That’s not audience research, that’s search engine research. Search Engine Research creates Made For Search Engine websites. Worst of all, the process is unchanged from the way SEOs used to build websites for Google over 20 years ago. The only way to make it more old-fashioned is to promote it with directory links and expired domains.
This does not describe SEO for all websites that are losing rankings. But that old-school SEO strategy is endemic right now, and frankly, people need to rethink their strategies because it’s pretty obvious that:
A. It results in content that comes first to people.
B. People who over-optimize like that get crushed in the SERPs.
Another reason given by the SEO school is the “tsunami of AI content”. I’m not sure what they mean by that because that term can mean a lot of things. Does this refer to Google being flooded with AI spam? There was plenty of that in the early part of 2024 and in the second part of 2023.
Or is it a reference to the AI content pages burdening a publisher who publishes two articles a week? Well, it has something to do with page authority and content production.
A third reason for the decline of the content model is the dramatic changes in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is a valid reason, but not for the reason most SEOs think.
Organic SERPs have been dominated by the top three rankings for the last 25 years, with around 20-30% of traffic going to Google Ads for converting search topics. It’s the status quo: three sites win and everyone else loses.
AI Reviews didn’t change anything. AIO has doubled down on the status quo. According to research by BrightEdge, the top-ranking websites in AIO are mostly the same as the organic top-ranking websites. That means three sites are still winning and everyone else is still losing.
The biggest change in SERPs that most SEOs are missing is what I mentioned earlier, which was made for search engine websites being deleted all year. This is related to the people-first signals that Google uses, but there are other signals mixed in with them, besides the quality signals that come after the ranking signals the selected pages to the ranking candidates.
One thing that has been relatively constant over the last twenty years of SEO is that it’s unlikely that a drop in the rankings will be just one thing. Sometimes the other side is simply better.
If you’ve only been doing SEO for five or ten years, it’s understandable that the recent changes seem dramatic. But when you’ve been at it for 25 years like I have, dramatic changes are the norm and absolutely expected. Dramatic change is the status quo.
The Google Medic update was a significant reorientation of query understanding that changed the types of websites that rank for different queries. It was one of the biggest departures from ranking web pages by semantic context (word and phrase level) and the shift to thematic context (what topic the page is about). This was an extremely dramatic change.
We can go back even further to the Penguin update that wiped out thousands of websites, including big brand websites. It was the last time Google imposed real fines on a large scale. Sometime after the Penguin algorithm Google switched from massive penalties to ranking pages where they deserve to rank and ignoring links.
The Google Florida Update is another dramatic update that has affected thousands of websites, including a large number of innocent websites. There are many theories as to what the Florida update was all about, but one thing everyone agrees on is that it was a huge change in website rankings.
That’s what I mean when I say that when you’ve been doing SEO as long as I have, you start to expect changes and join them. The problem is that the SEO industry tends to adapt to a specific way of doing things, and the search engines bypass them, and then SEOs say things like, “I’m doing everything right, but Google doesn’t rank me anymore, it’s unfair.”
It doesn’t surprise me that sites that were heavily planned around keyword research are seeing dramatic changes in rankings. It is long past time to start thinking in terms topics and actuality.
Someone started the discussion with two sentences saying that AEO is the new SEO and that ChatGPT is quickly becoming the leading search engine, inspiring over a hundred responses. The discussion is taking place in a private Facebook group called AI/ChatGPT Prompts for Entrepreneurs.
AEO is a relatively new meaning of the acronym Answer Engine Optimization. Describes AI search optimization. AISEO is a more accurate acronym, but it sounds too close to EIEIO.
Is AEO really a thing? Consider this: All AI search engines use a search index and traditional search ranking algorithms. For goodness sake, 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 isn’t a thing, that AI search engines aren’t a huge challenge to Google yet, and that SEO still exists.
Not everything is upside down with the world, because at least in that discussion the prevailing opinion is that AEO is not a thing. Many have noticed that ChatGPT uses Bing’s index, so if you’re doing “AEO” for ChatGPT, you’re really just doing SEO for Bing. Others stated that the average person has no experience with ChatGPT and until it is integrated into a mainstream browser, it will remain a niche search engine.
There was one person who insisted that Perplexity AI was designed as an AI search engine, completely misunderstanding that Perplexity AI uses a search index and identifies credible websites with an updated version of Google’s old PageRank algorithm.
AI has been a powerful search engine factor in Google for at least 10 years. Longer if you consider that Google Brain started as a project in 2011.
AI in search seems new, but it’s not new. The biggest difference isn’t in the back end, it’s in the front end, and it’s changing the way users interact with data. This is a big change that all SEOs should pay attention to.
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