AI and SEO – A Partnership of the Future?

With the nature of internet search changing rapidly, many people and experts are discussing the real possibility that SEO experts, like ourselves, will no longer be required. Instead of the old 10 blue links on a search results page, searchers are now seeing AI overviews, which highlight particular businesses being featured. These selected local businesses may not always be the ones on the traditional first page of Google. But they have gotten great visibility by being at the top of the page.

How Google selects businesses is still up for debate, but the main message is that your website needs to be able to be crawled and understood by Google in order to feature on these AI overviews.

Technical SEO is still king (in my opinion).

You can have great content, even written with the help of AI (gulp!), but if search engines can’t access your content or have trouble crawling it, then creating lots of new blog posts or pages will not be of any help. And your chance of featuring on the AI overviews is diminished. So it is vitally important to make sure that your website is technically sound from an SEO point of view. Getting an SEO audit which uncovers any issues will provide the chance to feature on the coveted AI overviews.

Can AI do an SEO Audit for you?

You can certainly try it out with them, but I would argue that at this point in time, they fall really short in terms of accuracy and direction. That’s not to say that one day, things might improve, but for now, they offer generic solutions and cannot offer a holistic view of what a website wants to achieve. In addition, I’d argue that some of the terms used would require some training to implement the instructions correctly.

Should SEO consultants embrace the future of search?

Yes, I’d argue that these AI agents will be a great help to people like myself. Creating efficiencies in how we work, providing ideas and analysing websites and competitors in superfast time. I’m already using AI in many ways to help my clients and, in doing so, am working smarter and getting more done.

So, at this point, the SEO industry is still valid and absolutely required in order to help businesses thrive in the search landscape without needing to resort to Google Ads to gain visibility.