• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 31, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) will replace the need for search engine optimization (SEO) in 2025. Wait, what?

Not entirely, so let me explain. No one from Google definitively said AI would replace SEO, but it makes sense after Martin Splitt -- who is developer advocate on the Webmaster Trends Analyst team in Google Switzerland, during the Search Off the Record Podcast published today -- said SEO has been on a “dying path since 2001,” when asked whether AI will replace SEO.

“I’m pretty sure in 2025, the first article that [publishes] will be about SEO dying again,” Splitt said.

No doubt that article would include counterpoints on how SEO remains relevant, but not in this one that closes out 2024.

SEO experts work on making content crawlable and indexable for search.

If AI takes over, where will they fit in -- and how much does that change their job?

AI will force brands to treat SEO like full-funnel marketing. How much does it influence media buying in the process, and will paid media become more of a tool to support the earned media across sites?

NetElixir Founder Udayan Bose believes 2024 will be remembered as a pivotal year for the digital marketing industry. He described it as a year in which the industry moved from using intent actions to complete personalization. Much will occur through automation, AI, and forward thinking.

Bose says 2025 will be known for voice-activation conversational search, AI shopping agents that lead purchase behavior, and AI marketing tools that drive top-line revenue growth for brands. These tools will integrate everything from campaigns to predictive analytics that address specific revenue challenges.

Reasoning, driven by AI, will play a major role in this change.  

Logan Kilpatrick, Google AI Studio product manager, wrote on X that he believes a straight line to artificial superintelligence (ASI) without focusing on intermediate milestones — products and released— is "looking more and more probable” with each passing month.

He initially thought this type of direct path was unlikely to work. “We are still going to get AGI, but unlike the consensus from 4 years ago that it would be this inflection point moment in history, it’s likely going to just look a lot like a product release, with many iterations and similar options in the market within a short period of time,” he wrote, adding it is likely the best outcome for humanity.

Thinking through problems, also known as reasoning, is something Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have been working on. They all have released their own version either in the first release or in beta.

Kilpatrick once said that the idea, which came from Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounder and former chief scientist, might have been a mistake, but now says he likely identified early signs of the potential.

Learning through reasoning will change the ways that AI models are trained and how SEO is done.

Sutskever had publicly said the industry is running out of data to train AI models. He left OpenAI earlier this year to launch Safe Superintelligence, writing in a website post in June that “Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time.”

As we head into 2025, think about how the industry has transformed in the past year. The next 365 days will change even faster.

Happy and safe New Year's Eve to all. See you back here on Thursday.

Write me a note about some possible topics you would like to learn more about in the coming year or simply share your thoughts. I look forward to hearing from you all.