AI is usually framed as an existential threat to SEO and on the surface that seems to be the case. But having worked in search for close to two decades, I’ve seen SEO declared dead many times before, usually in response to technological change.
At a time when Google was increasingly squeezing organic results in favour of paid outcomes, AI has reintroduced real competition and forced a renewed focus on content quality. Rather than killing SEO, this shift may in fact end up strengthening it.
Why this AI shift feels different
When Apple released the iPhone, the impact was not confined to SEO professionals or people working in digital marketing. It was a cultural shift. Everyone noticed it. User behaviour changed almost overnight, and the web had to adapt.
Mobile-first optimisation did not replace SEO, but it fundamentally altered how SEO worked, adding new layers of complexity that could not be ignored.
AI feels much closer to that moment than to any previous search update. This is not an internal change that only search specialists debate on forums. It is something that has entered the wider cultural conversation. You can talk to almost anyone about AI and they will have an opinion on it, because it affects how they work, search, create, and consume information.
Instead of being a change that happens within Google and is pushed out to the market, it is a technological change which has happened outside of Google and been pushed in. That is what makes this shift fundamentally different.
Like the move to mobile, AI sits across the entire ecosystem. It affects users, publishers, platforms, and business models simultaneously. SEO is being reshaped as part of that process, not replaced by it.
The two sides of the debate
Before getting into why AI might actually be good for SEO, it is worth acknowledging how polarised the current discussion has become.
The industry has split into two broad camps (as usual). On one side are those who argue that SEO is effectively dead, that AI-driven discovery will replace traditional search, and that optimisation will become increasingly irrelevant.
On the other are those who believe that nothing fundamental has changed ("good AIO is just good SEO"), and that this is simply SEO with new acronyms layered on top.
I have seen SEO declared dead repeatedly since the early 2000s, often in response to major updates or new technologies that were supposedly going to make optimisation obsolete. Each time, the reality has been more nuanced. SEO has not disappeared, but it has rarely stayed the same. It has adapted, absorbed complexity, and expanded its scope.
As is often the case, the truth here likely sits somewhere in the middle. AI is not simply a new label for existing practices, but nor does it signal the end of SEO. Instead, it represents a shift in the environment within which SEO operates.
It's also important to recognise the split between AIO and SEO. They are not the same discipline and whilst AI may at the moment be young enough to be just seen as part of SEO, it's unlikely to stay that way.
Understanding that context is key to understanding why AI may ultimately strengthen organic search rather than undermine it.
Why AI might actually save SEO
To understand why AI might actually be good for SEO, it helps to look at what was happening before its arrival.
For years, Google has been steadily squeezing organic results out of its search pages. Paid ads expanded. New result formats appeared. Sponsored labels became smaller and less distinct. The direction of travel has been clear for some time.
This was not accidental. Organic clicks generate no direct revenue for Google, while paid clicks account for the vast majority of its income.
From an SEO perspective, this has posed the real existential threat. Not algorithm updates, but a commercial incentive that steadily reduced the visibility and importance of organic results.
Content has increasingly been pushed into a supporting role, there to feed paid outcomes. This has meant that landing pages trying to drive customers to direct outcomes have become more important than well crafted quality content.
We were moving towards a world where content existed primarily to support advertising. What makes content good for organic search is ultimately what is in the best interest of the consumer. The same cannot be said for landing pages designed to support a conversion funnel.
AI disrupted that trajectory.
The introduction of AI Overviews added yet another layer to the search results page, further reducing the immediate visibility of traditional organic listings.
On the surface, this looked like another blow to SEO. Click-through rates dropped. The gap between impressions and clicks widened dramatically — something many of us have seen first-hand in Search Console.
But this is the acceleration of a pre-existing trend, not a new phenomenon. No-click searches are not new and we've been seing the decoupling of clicks and impressions at a slow crawl for years at this point.
SEO vs AI optimisation
That shift forces an important reframing of how we think about SEO versus AI optimisation. In current debates we are treating them as if they are competing for the same outcome. In reality, they are increasingly doing different jobs.
Traditional SEO has always been about driving clicks. It is fundamentally a direct-response channel. When it works, users arrive on your site with intent, engage with your content, and take action. That role has not changed, and it remains critical for performance-driven outcomes.
AI optimisation, by contrast, is far closer to a brand channel. Its primary output is not clicks, but impressions. As AI-generated answers take up more space in search results, users are increasingly exposed to brands without immediately visiting the underlying pages. Seen this way, AI optimisation begins to resemble display advertising more than traditional search.
Enough exposure builds familiarity, and familiarity drives conversions. When that demand turns into action, users still arrive via paid search or traditional organic listings, where SEO continues to do the work it always has.
AI is not replacing SEO; it is sitting alongside it.
SEO remains about capturing intent, while AI-driven visibility increasingly contributes to brand awareness at the top of the funnel. That awareness used to take place on the page, but now it's taking place in the AI Overview. The click, well that's still happening in the paid or organic results.
However, beneath that disruption lies something more important: competition. For the first time in a long while, Google faced meaningful pressure from outside its own ecosystem. Users suddenly had alternatives that could answer questions well, sometimes better, and they were far more willing to move between platforms to get the best result.
AI is helping to correct the market
This is where AI may end up saving SEO rather than killing it. By reintroducing competition into the market, AI has made good content important again. Not just content that exists to rank, but content that is genuinely useful, credible, and worth referencing.
Google's link-based, offsite metrics have been broken for a very long time. It's been the best thing available, but too open to abuse and easily manipulated. Additionally, the measures put in place to combat that abuse made it ever harder for the smaller players to be successful.
The cost of producing text at scale has collapsed, and the web is now saturated with material that adds little new information.
But that abundance changes the rules.
When content is everywhere, search engines are forced to distinguish not just between relevance, but between contribution and noise. The tactics that relied on scale, repetition, and borrowed authority have lost effectiveness.
What remains valuable are the fundamentals that were always supposed to matter: originality, usefulness, experience, and trust.
The sophistication that AI brings in understanding content is something that Google has long been marching towards, with Google MuM, BERT and other initiatives to help bring a more intelligent approach and supercede the over-reliance on faulty link-based metrics. We can see Google's increased interest in E-E-A-T, driving better quality content to surface over AI slop.
From my perspective, this is not the end of SEO. It is a correction.
AI has accelerated trends that were already underway whilst creating an environment where organic content has a renewed role to play in a new platform.
The end game
Where this is eventually heading is the real question. And you need to zoom way further out than the search results.
If AI continues to expand into an 'all in one' platform where the entire funnel takes place in the platform then the web itself will be relegated to second place.
Whether this comes to fruition will depend on the value of the online experience to the consumer.
Will people be bothered about the experience of visiting a dedicated website vs lines of text passed from one AI agent to another?
An eerily similar question to what everyone was asking around the time of the emergence of the internet and shopping online vs offline.
I suspect that what will likely happen is that we will see AI as another channel which operates alongside web as its own dedicated ecosystem, sitting within the digital umbrella. An ecosystem that will go on to have its own channels inside it.
People will have the choice of staying within the AI ecosystem or going to organic search for activity involving actions such as purchases. If people still want to visit dedicated websites (just as people still go to bricks and mortar shops) and have a good customer experience there, SEO will retain its importance in maintaining and facilitating that.
