How to use AI for SEO, and if you even should, has been a hot ticket in the last two or three years, especially with the emergence of platforms like ChatGPT (which is continuously evolving), Gemini, and Copilot.
Here are some of the more common questions, rounded up and answered.
Is SEO Really Dead?
In a word, no. SEO is certainly very different from how it was ten years ago, but the people that say it is dead are just trying to make headlines or get clicks.
The number of entries Google gets on a daily basis positively dwarfs what ChatGPT gets. Until people stop using search engines, SEO will never be dead.
Can You Use AI for SEO?
You can use AI for SEO, but how you use it and what you use it for will make a big impact on performance.
AI excels at looking at a website and making suggestions for how to improve it. You can also use AI for SEO with respect to keyword research and website and competitor analysis.
As far as making the actual optimizations to your website, AI is not the best for that – which is something we will dive into a little further in the next section.
Does AI-Generated Content Hurt SEO?
AI-generated content may not hurt a website simply because it is AI-generated, but there is a high likelihood that it will do more harm than good.
The problem is that AI-generated content is reiterative, surface level, and tends to be fluffy. Worse yet, generated content is often riddled with factual errors.
But the worst part is that AI engines scrape the internet and poach what’s already there; this effectively makes AI an echo chamber which can’t produce anything experiential or novel.
That’s probably the area in which AI-generated content hurts websites the most.
How Does AI Impact SEO?
AI impacts SEO because it influences the manner in which users search for information. For instance, one big trend that has popped up has been the rise of zero-click search.
A zero-click search is a search in which the user looks for something and doesn’t click on an entry, but gets their answers from the search results.
AI may also have impacts on eCommerce, but that remains to be seen for the most part.
What Are AI SEO Services?
AI SEO services are either services that optimize a website to show up in answer engines, or that use AI to leverage better economies and performance for an existing SEO campaign. Both can be beneficial.
How Do You Optimize a Website for AI or Answer Engines?
Here’s the good news. The basic way to optimize a website for AI is the same as it has been to optimize it for search engines.
This all comes down to the quality, depth, and brevity of content. Modern SEO and AEO (answer engine optimization) all come down to how accurate and effective copy is at answering a user’s query.
If you answer questions, you’re doing what you need to in order to get featured in an answer engine’s outputs.
What’s the Best Way to Optimize a Website for AI?
The best way to optimize for AI is to put all your best resources in content generation. The better your content is and the more accurately and succinctly it answers user queries, the more likely it is to be featured as an output through an answer engine.
Using AI for SEO: Wrapping Up
All in all, there are ways you can use AI for SEO as long as you don’t allow it to take over and think for you. There are also agencies you can hire that specialize in using AI for SEO, as well as for optimizing websites for performance even in the era of AI and zero-click search. Others specialize in AEO, or answer engine optimization. If you have the marketing budget for it, it might make sense to invest in these.
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