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Google Speculates If SEO 'Is On A Dying Path' - adtechsolutions

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Google Speculates If SEO ‘Is On A Dying Path’


Google’s latest Search Off the Record podcast discusses whether “SEO is dying” because of AI search. Their assessment sought to explain that SEO remains unchanged with the introduction of AI search, revealing the difference between their “nothing has changed” view of SEO and the actual experiences of digital marketers and publishers.

Google speculates whether artificial intelligence is on the way to death

At a certain point in the podcast, they started talking about artificial intelligence after John Mueller introduced the topic of the impact of artificial intelligence on SEO.

John asked:

“So do you think AI will replace SEO? Is SEO getting tired?”

Gary Illyes expressed skepticism, arguing that SEOs have been predicting the decline of SEO for decades.

Gary expressed optimism that SEO is not dead, noting:

“I mean, SEO has been dying since 2001, so I’m not afraid of it. Like, I didn’t. That. Not. I’m pretty sure that in 2025, the first article to come out will be about how SEO is dying again.”

He has a right. Around 2004, Google started tightening the popular SEO tactics of the time, only to gain momentum in 2005 with things like statistical analysis.

It was a shock to SEOs when reciprocal links stopped working. Some have refused to believe that Google can suppress these tactics, speculating instead about a ‘Sandbox’ that arbitrarily prevents pages from ranking. The point is that speculation has always been the preserve of SEOs who can’t explain what’s going on, fueling the decades-long fear that SEO is dying.

What Googlers have avoided discussing are the thousands of publishers large and small that have been deleted over the past year.

More on that below.

RAG is how SEOs can approach AI search SEO

Google’s Lizzi Sassman then asked how relevant SEO is in 2025, and after some off-topic banter John Mueller brought up the RAG topic, Retrieval Augmented Generation. RAG is a technique that helps keep the answers generated by a large language model (LLM) up-to-date and fact-based. The system retrieves information from an external source such as a search index and/or knowledge graph, and the large language model subsequently generates the response, generating an extended search. The Chatbot interface then provides a response in natural language.

When Gary Illyes admitted he didn’t know how to explain it, Googler Martin Splitt jumped in with the analogy of documents (representing a search index or knowledge base), searching and retrieving information from those documents, and getting information out of the bag.

Martin offered this simplified RAG analogy:

“It’s probably a lot better today and you can just show that, like here, you upload these five documents and then based on those five documents you get something out of the bag.”

Lizzi Sassman commented:

“Ah, okay. So this question is about how the thing knows its information and where it goes and gets the information.”

John Mueller took this thread of discussion and began to weave a larger concept of how RAG is what connects SEO practices to AI search engines, saying that there is still indexing, indexing and ranking in an AI search engine. He’s right, even an AI search engine like Perplexity AI uses an updated version of Google’s old PageRank algorithm.

Mueller explained:

“I found it useful when we talk about things like artificial intelligence in search results or in combination with search results where SEOs, I feel at first, when they think about this topic, they think, “Oh, this artificial intelligence is great magic box and no one knows what’s going on in there.

And when you talk about the augmented part of search, that’s basically what SEOs work on, like creating content that’s indexable and crawlable for Search and kind of feeds into all those AI reviews.

So I kind of discovered that angle as something to show, especially to SEOs who are kind of afraid of AI and all these things, that actually these AI-powered search results are often a mix of existing things that you’re already doing. And it’s not like it’s suddenly replacing indexing and indexing.”

Mueller is right when he says that the traditional process of crawling, indexing and ranking still exists, keeping SEO relevant and necessary to ensure website visibility and search engine optimization.

However, Googlers avoided discussing the obvious situation today, which is the thousands of publishers large and small in the wider web ecosystem that have been wiped out by Google’s AI algorithms in the background.

The Real Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Search

What has changed (and not addressed) is that the important part of the AI ​​in Search is not the one on the front end with the AI ​​previews. It’s the backend part that makes decisions based on opaque signals of authority, timeliness, and the somewhat ironic situation of artificial intelligence deciding whether content is made for search engines or humans.

Organic SERPs are explicitly deprecated

The traditional ten blue links were implicitly obsolete for about 15 years, but AI has made them explicitly obsolete.

Natural language search queries

The context of search users asking precise conversational questions within a few turns back and forth is a big change for search queries. Bing claims this makes it easier to understand search queries and provides increasingly accurate answers. That’s the part that worries SEOs and publishers because, let’s face it, a significant amount of content is created to rank in the keyword-based query paradigm, which is gradually disappearing as users shift more and more to more complex queries. A big concern is how content creators optimize for it.

Background AI algorithms

The word “capricious” means a tendency to sudden and inexplicable changes in behavior. This is not the quality desire of publishers and search engine SEO. Still, capricious back-end algorithms that suddenly throttle traffic and subsequently change their virtual minds months later are a reality.

Is Google disconnected from the reality of the web ecosystem?

Industry-wide damage caused by AI-based algorithms that are still “improveg” have undoubtedly harmed a significant segment of the web ecosystem. Huge amounts of traffic to publishers of all sizes have been wiped out since the increased integration of artificial intelligence into Google’s backend, an issue Google Search Off The Record recently avoided discussing.

Many hope that Google will solve this situation in 2025 with more nuance from their CEO Sundar Pichai who struggled to articulate how Google supports the web ecosystemseemingly detached from the plight of thousands of publishers.

Perhaps the question is not whether SEO is dying, but whether publishing itself is on the decline due to artificial intelligence both in the background and at the beginning of Google’s search box and The Gemini appwith.

Check out these related articles:

Google’s 2025 AI strategy downplays the search box

Google Gemini Deep Research can hurt a website’s earnings

Google CEO: Search will fundamentally change in 2025

Featured Image Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI Generator



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