Did I literally just write two posts on the same day, contradicting myself? Yes.
Writing is thinking, and thinking is learning.
There is a part of me that wants to believe that SEO is going to be more popular than ever with the emergence of AI tools, but there is also a bigger part of me that starts to believe that SEO is gonna be gone in five years. I mean like completely gone, in the same way as dial up Internet is gone-gone.
The only part of me that wants to believe in SEO exists because we built a tool for it (read previous post: https://novice.media/p/should-we-sell-gains-over-pains)
Is there a world where SEO still lives?
I see a future where users get instant, synthesized answers from AI without ever needing to search or click through to a site. ChatGPT and such are currently providing citations to answers, but let’s face it, how many people follow through to see the source? Google, while showing you the results, is also summarizing the best content at the top. No one is doing the research anymore, we just want it done and packaged in a single answer.
Result? Just as dial-up couldn’t compete with always-on connections, SEO can’t survive in a landscape where the “search” happens invisibly inside the AI.
Heck, it’s not just search, based on the recent demos, the whole internet is going to happen inside of these AI applications.
Some say that “Answer Engine Optimization” is the future, but I am starting to wonder if that is the future, or just our hope for survival? If you’re not cited, you don’t exist, but do you exist IF you ARE cited?
In the 90s, we romanticized the screeching modem as “the future,” but once fiber optics hit, no one looked back. Some countries skipped fiber entirely and went straight for cellular internet everywhere. SEO’s seems to be a clunky intermediary born for a pre-AI era of human-curated links. AI isn’t just faster dial-up, it’s Starlink, Internet delivered with no wires at all.
It is possible to assume that, as the future AI takes over, everything becomes so vanilla and so boring that human-generated content once again becomes the focus of our desires, and we seek for ways to resurface it. But can one be on it? Will this happen in 5 years, or will it take 25?
Maybe that's what it is. Maybe the best one can do is to squeeze the maximum value out of their product this very minute, assuming that the future is not guaranteed. If the future comes fast and it’s favorable, great, but if it doesn’t, then at the very least we find out and adopt fast.
— Kirill.
p.s. You might also find it valuable to know what Reddit think about SEO in 2025.