Will AI Kill SEO? We Asked ChatGPT

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by Lindsey Francy Mar 21, 2023 News
Will AI Kill SEO? We Asked ChatGPT

Every few years it happens.

The first two were Mahalo and Jason Calacanis.

It was seen again with voice search and smart assistants. It was TikTok's turn for a moment. The metaverse made a jump.

It's now called chatGPT and artificial intelligence.

I'm talking about "seo killers"

Three things inevitably happen when a new technology is introduced.

  • Thousands of SEO professionals publish posts and case studies declaring themselves experts in the new thing.
  • Every publication dusts off its “SEO is dead” article, changes the date, and does a find and replace for the new technology.
  • SEO continues to be stronger than ever.

You must repeat.

It would seem that search has a longer life than a cartoon cat.

How we search, what devices we use, and whether the answer is a link to a website will be debated for the rest of our lives.

Digital marketers will influence the process as long as users have their tasks completed.

Will AI Replace Search?

There is a lot of hype about how artificial intelligence will replace search engines and search professionals. I don't see ChatGPT as a tool.

It's like a knife, you can make bread or cut it yourself. How you use it is all that matters.

Are search engines going to be replaced by artificial intelligence? We need to ask it ourselves.

Will AI Replace Search?Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

That is an excellent answer.

I have been saying for a long time that the days of tricking the algorithms are over.

Digital marketing has been growing for a while now. Without considering user intent, personas, use cases, competitive research, market conditions, and other factors, it's not possible to do search engine marketing.

Is it possible that Artificial Intelligence will just do that for us? Is my job going to be taken by an artificial intelligence? It is a crazy idea to ask the person.

ChatGPT promptScreenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

AI Isn’t Going To Take Your Job. But An SEO Who Knows How To Use AI To Be More Efficient Just Might

What's the reason? Let's get started.

A basic understanding of how large language models actually work is what leads to a lot of articles that ask artificial intelligence to do things it isn't capable of.

A database of facts isn't being pulled from by an artificial intelligence tool. They don't have an index.

The way a search engine stores information is different. Predicting what words or sentences will come next is what they do. This training material isn't stored by them.

The words are being used to figure out what words are most likely to follow. They can be hallucinating because of that.

The internet can't be crawled by artificial intelligence. It can't cite sources because it doesn't know what's happening It can cite sources, but it is just making stuff up.

It can get close if you know what the next words are going to be, but the more specific you are, the more hallucinating it will be.

It will take a long time before the model can answer questions about current events.

But What About Bing, You.com, And Google’s Upcoming Bard? They Can Do All Of This, Can’t They?

Yes and no, but they can only cite sources that are being implemented. Bing isn't asking for a pure bot.

Your query is being searched for by Bing. It feeds in all the websites that it would normally return for a search, and then asks the artificial intelligence to summarize those websites.

Search engines are able to do that without hitting token limits.

Ok, Surely This Will Kill SEO. AI Will Just Answer Every Question, Right?

I don't agree.

Back in 2009, when we were listening to the Black Eyed Peas on our iPhone 3Gs, the search engine Live was being renamed to Bing.

What's the reason? That's because Bing is a word. Bill Gates made a declaration that the future of search is verbs.

I love sharing this quote with my clients because they know that the future is now.

Gates wasn't talking about people typing. The job of search is to help facilitate what people are trying to do.

People don't realize that search is a form of pull marketing, where users tell us what they want instead of pushing marketing like a billboard or a TV ad.

Digital marketers are supposed to give users what they want.

There is confusion here.

A link to a website with a popup cookie policy, notification alert, newsletter sign-up popup, and ads were not what the user wanted.

Back then, it was the best thing we had. The goal of search engines is not to provide links to websites. They answered questions and helped users.

Even though it didn't have the technology to do it at the time, it talked about how it wanted to be the Star Trek computer from the beginning. It does right now.

For many of these questions, websites will lose traffic, but they were probably never entitled to it.

Who is the owner of that answer? Simple answers are what these are. A number is the user's task. They don't need a website.

If a user wants to buy Taylor Swift tickets, get reviews of her album, chat with other Swifties, and so on, smartseo pros will focus on that type of query.

What ChatGPT Can Do Vs. What It Can’t

A lot of things can be accomplished with the help of chatgppt.

It is good at showing me how to write an excel formula, but it is not good at teaching me how to use a database.

Search engines can help me do those things.

As long as the topic is old and popular enough to have shown up in the training data, it can be helpful to answer common knowledge questions.

It's still not 100% accurate, as we've seen in countless meme and with one famous bank being called out for its artificial intelligence written article not knowing how to calculate interest properly.

The most talked about bars in NYC aren't the best places to get an Old Fashioned.

The talk of using artificial intelligence to create content is beginning to be boring. Answering questions is nice, but text manipulation is where the best work is done.

At my agency, we are already using the API to create content briefs, categorize and cluster keywords, write complicated regular expressions for redirecting, and even generate code based on given inputs.

These rely on a lot of inputs and need a lot of manual reviews.

It isn't being used to create content. It is being used to summarize and examine other pieces of content. It's more of a time saver and less of a replacement for an internet search engine.

SEO Is Here To Stay

If your business is built around displaying facts you don't actually own, what would you do? You should be worried if that's the case.

Boilerplate copy tasks can be done by an artificial intelligence. Recent tests on personal sites have been successful.

Artificial intelligence won't be able to come up with new ideas, stay on top of the latest trends, or provide expertise or trust that a real author can.

It isn't thinking, citing, or even pulling data from a database The next-word probabilities are just what it is.

I have a computer science degree and I don't think I'm an expert on artificial intelligence. I'm aware of what it takes to understand user needs.

There is no evidence that people prefer auto-generated, re-worded content over real human being-written content.

Only people can give people fresh ideas. Where should we put I if we add it to E-E-A-T?

If you deliver value through insights, curation, current trends, recommendations, solving problems, or performing an action, then search engines won't go away.

They may change shape from time to time, but that doesn't mean I have to worry about my job.

There are more resources.

Elnur is a featured image.