• by Ryan Jones , November 20, 2024

Search is changing. Bing and Google have implemented AI overviews, new AI search engines like Perplexity have entered the conversation, and recently OpenAI just surpassed Bing to become the 3rd largest “search engine” behind Google and YouTube (Reminder, OpenAI is powered by Bing.) 

This has left many asking the evergreen question that comes up every year: Is SEO dead? The answer depends on what you consider SEO.

The search engine has evolved - and our marketing efforts are going to need to evolve with it.

The days of 10 blue links are gone thanks to images, videos, maps, carousels, featured answers, and countless other search enhancements. None of them killed SEO, but they did change how we approach our marketing strategy. AI is just another one of those enhancements.

In 2009 at a dinner, Bill Gates famously said “the future of search is verbs.”  He wasn’t talking about the words people search for, he was referencing user intent. Bill knew that there are two main reasons users search: they either need a quick answer (How old is Taylor Swift? What is the population of Detroit?) or they are attempting to DO something (Taylor Swift tour dates, things to do in Detroit).

For years, the best solution we had to the quick answer questions was a web page - but users never wanted to click a link, say no to alerts, close the cookie consent notice, find and mute the auto-playing ad, sign up for your newsletter, and scroll past four more ads to find out that Taylor Swift is 34 years old. They just needed the number. 

For businesses based on showing basic information surrounded by ads, SEO may very well be dead. I’m sorry I don’t have better advice for you. We had a good run. For businesses focused on customer intent not much changes. There will always be searchers where the best result for the user is the breadth and diversity of opinions, experiences, and thoughts that AI can’t capture. Reviews, recommendations, use cases, new ideas, interesting perspectives… verbs - that’s where the future of search lies.

We’re going to need to stop thinking like SEOs and start thinking like marketers. We don’t measure traditional marketing channels (TV, print, Out of Home) by traffic or conversions, and it might be time we stop thinking of SEO as purely lower funnel. AI is here to stay, and we need to embrace it. While it might not deliver clicks at the same scale as SEO, AI will mention brands and products and give answers - and marketers are still going to want to be the brands or products that AI mentions. There’s upper funnel value there.

The good news for SEOs is that AI doesn’t work much differently than a search engine. AI crawlers still need to discover our content in a technically accessible way. We still need to make sure we’re using the words our customers use while matching their intent and providing helpful, trusted, authoritative content - even if they’re just going to see it in a mid or upper funnel context. 

If anything, the AI evolution just makes having a good search marketing team even more important - and I’m ready for it. Are you?

Ryan Jones is based in Detroit and leads the SEO discipline at Razorfish - a full-service digital marketing agency. Prior to his two decades in SEO, Ryan was a software engineer - allowing him to bring a unique information retrieval and technical perspective to SEO. Ryan enjoys playing hockey and is ranked top 100 in the state of MI for Cornhole. 

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