How Has the Rise of AI Impacted SEO Best Practices?

Marketers, designers, and content creators have been concerned about artificial intelligence for years. Now that it has worked its way into the leading search engines, its impact is undeniable. Could this technology reimagine search engine optimization (SEO) for the better? Or are AI and SEO best practices incompatible? 

How Is AI Impacting SEO Best Practices?

Generative AI uses optical character recognition, natural language processing, and image recognition technology to interpret and produce media. It can create text, images, video, or audio. Asking these models for recommendations or answers has become an emerging trend, inadvertently taking consumers away from conventional search engines. 

While all AI technologies will undoubtedly take organic traffic from organizations, marketers and business owners should mainly concern themselves with Google’s AI solutions. After all, around 81.95% of people on desktops used this search engine in 2024. It dominates the market — and SEO trends — so its decisions have tremendous impacts.

In a bid to draw consumers back and establish itself as a leader in the AI space, Google has invested heavily in various generative technologies. It started with Google Gemini — a collection of advanced AI models — being released in early 2023 as potential competition for massively popular models like ChatGPT and MidJourney. 

For a while, Gemini was linking to sources it collected from the search engine results page (SERP), driving users back to Google. However, users find it no longer provides URLs and often has to be prompted multiple times before it returns a source or domain name. In other words, it uses companies’ original, human-written content without credit — and takes away organic traffic from their websites. 

Another AI tool impacting SEO best practices is the AI Overview feature. This generative model outputs a text-based answer at the top of the SERP. It effectively scrapes pages to summarize or simplify content for users, providing a link carousel they can click on if they want more information. While its impact hasn’t been all good or bad, it has certainly shaken things up.

Pros of AI and SEO

To be clear, the growing trend of AI and SEO merging isn’t all negative. Business owners and marketers can use it to their advantage as long as they act strategically. SEO best practices will soon shift, putting less emphasis on informativeness and more on uniqueness. Backend optimization will remain important, but creating human-centric content in an AI age will be vital. 

Copywriters and marketers can use AI to discover and fill gaps. A large language model (LLM) can’t create unique responses. Instead, it must pull from existing data — if it doesn’t talk about something, that means few people have brought it up. They can incorporate this process into their content creation strategy, enabling them to increase organic session quantity.

AI also enables hyper-personalization in newsletters, blog posts, and marketing since it can hold multiple conversations simultaneously and rapidly analyze massive datasets in seconds. According to one survey, 62% of people agree they will only remain loyal to a brand if it personalizes their experience, underscoring the importance of this business opportunity. 

Small and medium-sized businesses that lack liquidity can direct a free LLM to take on the persona of an SEO consultant. Research shows machine learning algorithms can predict what will go viral with almost 70% accuracy on average, so this strategy is relatively sound. Various other AI-powered tools — like insight generators or coding platforms — can give them a competitive advantage.

Cons of AI and SEO

Although professionals can use AI to improve their existing marketing and content creation strategies, their efforts may not be impactful if this technology reimagines SEO best practices. Google’s AI Overview feature replaces organic SERP results. Users must scroll through videos, forums, and the People Also Ask section before getting to other results. 

Notably, paid content is still front and center. For queries like “best way to clean a couch,” the sponsored pages are the only content directly above or below the AI Overview. In many cases, even the top-ranking page is barely visible without scrolling. In Google’s own demonstration, this feature takes up the entire page, potentially stealing organic traffic. 

While the AI Overview provides a link carousel, users aren’t incentivized to visit those pages. Unlike a featured snippet or meta descriptions, the information is relatively comprehensive. Google has blurred the lines between an LLM and a search engine at the expense of marketers, business owners, and SEO professionals. 

For example, in response to “what temperature is chicken done,” the model explains what minimum internal temperature is needed, how the cut of the chicken changes things, and how to test if the meat is done — all using exact temperatures and cooking times. Why would any user click on a link when their query is already satisfied to this extent?

Implications of AI’s Role in Google Search

Regarding AI, Google has said, “Google will do the Googling for you,” and “Google will take care of the legwork,” suggesting users won’t have to click links to find the information they seek. The problem with this approach is that their product isn’t really theirs, as they’ve trained their model on human-written content that’s not their own. 

Various groups have accused or taken action against Google for violating copyright during AI development. Regulators recently fined Alphabet, its parent company, upwards of $271 million after it used copyrighted articles to train Gemini — despite it promising not to the year prior. It didn’t secure the publishers’ permission and failed to provide a way to contest data collection. 

The implications of Google attempting to merge AI and SEO this way are massive. Its AI Overview and Gemini model directly compete with companies for organic traffic despite using their content as fuel. As this search engine lowers the incentive to click through, more brands will struggle to receive returns from monetization. 

This possibility isn’t theoretical — it’s already happening. According to one report, the search generative experience feature could cause organic sessions to drop by about 18% on average in the best scenario. While the best-performing outliers saw a triple-digit increase, those on the opposite end of the spectrum lost 95% of their traffic. 

While this change will have an immense short-term disruption on the SEO industry, its long-term effects are uncertain. Since AI must feed on new content to produce relevant, accurate output, its quality will degrade exponentially as more brands switch search engines or adopt new strategies in light of evolving SEO best practices.

Users who are dissatisfied with AI output but unable to return quality SERP results could stray from Google entirely. This may seem impossible, but younger demographics are already using social media as pseudo-search engines. In the scenario where AI and SEO achieve mutual destruction, anything could fill the vacuum left behind, leaving firms scrambling to keep up.

The Long-Term Impacts of AI and SEO 

Frankly, it’s beginning to seem like AI and SEO aren’t just incompatible — the former could destroy the latter. What happens when no one wants to write about low-hanging fruit like “best vacation spots” because they know algorithms dominate informative keywords? While this topic is constantly evolving, AI will be unable to keep up because it has no new content to use.

Since AI can analyze content rapidly — and is only getting faster with each iteration — it may soon run out of content to absorb. Researchers predict it will run out of high-quality material by 2027, putting it in a difficult position. Google may eventually have to accept a drop in quality or find a way to compensate copywriters, effectively rendering their disruptor pointless.

Ravi Sen, an associate professor of information and operations management who studies the economics of e-commerce, states that monetization is a major source of revenue for search engines, as they get a cut of the money websites spend on paid placements. 

A firm as massive as Google has revenue streams from advertising, fiber internet, smart devices, cloud infrastructure, in-app purchases, and YouTube subscriptions. In fact, it made over  $80.5 million in the first quarter of 2024 alone. Sen claims it can afford to offset losses caused by ineffective SEO. Meanwhile, small and medium-sized companies may struggle to survive. 

How Brands Can Become Resilient to AI

LLMs may sound convincingly like people, but they’re just algorithms that were trained well. They can’t think critically, form opinions, tap into emotional intelligence, or get creative. Businesses can adapt to the eventuality that AI and SEO become intertwined by prioritizing the characteristics only humans are capable of. 

Human-centric, first-person content that demonstrates authoritativeness and shows the author has personal experiences that align with the topic will increase in value exponentially. As generative models go for easily summarizable informative content, brands must shift to complex, high-level topics and use long-tail keywords. 

Diversification is another sound strategy since there’s no telling what could replace SEO if generative AI kills off search engines’ popularity. They should organically build a social media following, partner with influencers, start grassroots marketing campaigns, or reimagine their advertising strategy. Even if they don’t implement these changes immediately, a backup strategy is crucial. 

Lastly — and arguably most importantly — companies should prioritize copyright. For years, tech companies have argued they should be able to unlawfully use others’ work during training without compensating them. For instance, OpenAI famously said it would be “impossible” to train AI models “without using copyrighted materials.”

Many leading models steal blogs, photographs, code, and news articles because paying content creators would be too expensive. Frankly, this shouldn’t be an accepted standard. Business owners should strongly consider contacting local and federal policyholders to prompt those in power to create clear, unavoidable consequences for copyright violations. This approach won’t altogether prevent noncompliance, but it may help them offset losses.

The Bottom Line of AI and SEO

How AI and SEO react to one another depends on user behavior. Whether they embrace or shun this technology determines the extent to which algorithm-based solutions will impact best practices. While many people are making fun of the AI Overview’s inaccuracy and LLM hallucinations, many others actively use these tools. 

If the AI bubble bursts within the next few years as the novelty of LLMs and generative AI wears off, SEO best practices will largely be unchanged. Human-centric, first-person, and authoritative content will still reign supreme, but copywriters and marketers won’t have to worry about their core strategies becoming outdated.

On the other hand, if AI and SEO ensure each other’s mutual destruction, professionals could be looking at a very different marketing landscape. In the worst-case scenario, SEO becomes irrelevant alongside major search engines, forcing businesses to organically build social media followings, increase their advertising budgets, or partner with LLM companies.