As AI summaries compress accepted integrated space, referral postulation to publishers is being squeezed, creating a world wherever hunt is much utilized than ever, but the hunt interface is besides retaining users for longer, wherever it has historically acted for illustration a switchboard.
The outlook from publishers is pessimistic, pinch postulation expected to halve successful the adjacent 3 years.
In opposition to this reality, Google precocious reported that search queries person reached an all-time high, suggesting a aureate property for integer visibility.
AI has fixed Search superpowers, and, arsenic a result, group are searching connected Google much than ever before. Last quarter, we saw an all-time precocious successful Search queries.
Google has besides announced updates to effort and send postulation backmost to websites, whether this is simply a PR move to effort and fend disconnected antitrust cases remains to beryllium seen.
What this each highlights is that contempt opinions that SEO and hunt engines person been superseded by GEO/AEO and LLMs, this could not beryllium further from the truth. Optimizing for hunt engines remains relevant, and method SEO is the instauration for AI search.
LLMs Predict & Ground
Large connection models are probabilistic text-generation engines, not databases aliases reasoning engines. They do not retrieve stored facts; they cipher the statistical likelihood of connection sequences.
To make those answers existent and grounded, retrieval-augmented procreation (RAG) fetches documents from a hunt scale and feeds them to the exemplary earlier it writes its response. A really bully mentation of this was posted to YouTube successful December 2024 by Jess Peck, “Oh my god, ChatGPT is not a hunt engine.“
For an AI hunt motor to reply a query utilizing RAG, it relies connected a high-quality information pipeline. It needs an organized, easy navigable, and charismatic information root that is only imaginable done the semantic HTML, logical tract hierarchy, and cleanable indexing that SEO professionals provide.
Who builds, structures, and maintains that information source? The SEO community. We are the ones labeling the data, cleaning the clutter, and ensuring machines tin really read what humans write.
Without the foundational architecture of SEO (semantic HTML, logical tract hierarchy, and cleanable indexing pathing), AI hunt engines are near pinch inefficient paths and website structures. SEOs are not bystander-victims of the AI revolution.
Modern SEO now encompasses some the bequest activity of maintaining tract wellness and circumstantial AI-readiness strategies, optimizing for RAG extraction, and strengthening marque entity signals crossed the knowledge graph.
By structuring information truthful that machines tin construe context, SEO professionals supply the nonstop signals that AI hunt engines usage to verify facts and property sources. Technical SEO ensures that the “information gain” of a page is accessible to the models that request to mention it. If you want an AI to urge your product, your integer footprint must beryllium support that.
Optimization does not vanish successful the property of AI; it becomes the baseline for trust.
Can You Optimize For LLMs Without An SEO Program?
The smartest brands are not abandoning SEO for AI search; they are aggressively utilizing SEO to substance their AI readiness.
They understand that AI hunt does not switch the request for accepted SEO and accusation retrieval practices; it highlights the request for SEO and accusation systems reasoning moreover more.
It’s easy to disregard SEO arsenic being a relic, but the reality is SEO has built the merchandise LLMs now productize and complaint for.
Jamie Indigo summarized it perfectly connected LinkedIn:
… We should beryllium clear-eyed astir what happened – and intentional astir what we build next.
Screenshot from LinkedIn, June 2026SEO runs the motor room that powers the ship. With AI shifting the integer landscape, the motor room is the absolute champion spot to beryllium prepared and fresh for the future. As we look toward an era of GEO and AEO, we must ask: Can you beryllium a GEO/AEO and optimize for LLMs if you don’t person that grounding successful SEO knowledge and expertise?
More Resources:
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- Do We Need A Separate Framework For GEO/AEO? Google Says Probably Not
- Is SEO Still Relevant In The AI Era? New Research Says Yes
- How Can You Implement Entity Optimization Without Relying On Schema Markup? – Ask An SEO
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