Marketing teams are really trying to figure out how AI is changing search engines and if there is any need to invest in SEO anymore. With AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Gemini all providing answers on the search page and the rise of zero-click searches, is it even worth trying to invest in search engine optimisation?
The answer? SEO is not dead, but the SEO of five years ago is gone. What is now being developed is much more complicated and demanding; however, for the businesses that are willing to make the changes, there is a significant pay-off.
Why Do People Say SEO Is Dead?
There is a growing concern that SEO is becoming outdated for a reason. As of now, Google dominates around 85% of web traffic in the US, however, SEO is not dead, it is however undergoing massive advancements. Traditional SEO isn’t being replaced by AI search, it’s becoming the prerequisite for being visible within it. If you don’t rank well organically, you’re very unlikely to be cited in an AI-generated answer either.
Zero-Click Searches
Zero-click searches occur when users receive an answer directly on the results page without having to visit any webpage. Although this scenario has existed in the past, the incorporation of AI has made this a more frequent occurrence.
Of the many types of searches, directly answering ‘how to’ searches has traditionally been a major source of traffic for blogs and websites. This trend appears to be accelerating in the form of AI and other Integrated Web Tools with the capability of providing ‘how to’ answers to the 99.9% of simple, straightforward and non-complex informational keyword searches.
Being Cited By AI Is The New Visibility Metric
Being cited by AI is still an important factor for businesses. Brands referenced or linked in an AI Overview enjoy a higher click-through rate by 35% than those completely unmentioned.
The goal has not changed, although the focus has shifted from ‘own position one’ to ‘be the source that AI trusts enough to mention by name.’ While the objective has changed, the approach remains the same: create authoritative, well-structured and truly valuable content (which is where SEO-strategies come into play).
Not All Queries Are Equally Impacted
AI Overviews have heavily cut into the ‘how to’ broad and general informational queries. Google’s AI Overviews have evolved far beyond early 2025 limits, where they only triggered for 3% to 4% of commercial searches.
Today, Google aggressively embeds AI-generated summaries across highly competitive, transactional and buying keywords to drive its conversational ad formats If your business relies on search traffic that is commercial and at the bottom of the funnel, the disruptions that AI search is causing are, in fact, much less significant than what the headlines are saying.
What SEO Practices Are Dying?
The SEO tactics that placed sites in a search engine’s results page in record time a few years ago, are the ones most especially losing effectiveness and, in some cases, are ruining sites that still rely on those tactics. These include:
- Thin, mass-produced content. Google’s Helpful Content system, now built directly into its core ranking algorithm, has reduced low-quality content visibility by an estimated 45% since its integration
- Unedited AI-generated content at scale. Sites producing AI content without human oversight have experienced mass de-indexing under Google’s scaled content abuse policies
- Bought backlinks and link farms are now actively flagged through manual actions,and recovery from a penalty can take months
- Exact-match keyword-stuffed domains and URLs. These offer little ranking benefit today and can appear spammy to both users and algorithms
- Generic, low-effort ‘best of’ listicles with no original research or insight are increasingly outranked by content demonstrating real first-hand experience.
What Is Currently Working In SEO
There are a handful of things that are proving to work in the SEO-landscape. From E-E-A-T, to searching everywhere and not just on Google.
E−E−A−T Must Be Integrated
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, or E−E−A−T, is now a ranking factor for highly competitive searches.Content is expected to showcase the author’s firsthand experience.
This can be in the form of original research, case studies, screenshots, traffic stats and credentials. Especially when related to queries in competitive niches, AI-generated summaries will miss the mark unless they are edited significantly and in a substantive fashion.
Content Needs To Be Worth Citing
Get rid of the ‘will this rank’ mentality and replace it with the question, ‘will this be good enough for an AI to cite it by name?’ Doing this means providing original and maybe even proprietary, research.
It means taking the depth and care to fully answer the question and avoiding a restatement of the answers given in other articles that populate the first result page. Content that provides an original and real synthesis of insight will outperform other content that is overly optimised, providing no real value in its answers.
Technical Fundamentals Matter More
Current core web vitals still impact search visibility. Only around half of all websites meet these parameters and sites that have unsatisfactory responsiveness scores have seen significant traffic loss with the latest updates.
The impact on business is evident: sites that have moved from ‘poor’ to ‘good’ score on web vitals have seen an increase of around 25% in conversion rates and an overall drop of roughly 35% in bounce rates.
Search Everywhere, Not Only Google
By 2025 and 2026, search will mean much more than Google. Numerous AI chat and textbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, have also become search engines for different audiences. Many users first browse Amazon to discover products.
TikTok has become a more popular search engine than Google for many users looking for suggestions and evaluations. Visibility strategies will require having an online presence for various platforms. This means optimizing product listings, actively participating in online communities and tailoring content for each platform’s discovery system, which will most likely differ from other search engines.
