The Future of SEO in a World Where ChatGPT Replaces Search Engines
We have already seen how generative AI models have caused a major shift in many industries in recent years, and chat-based models like ChatGPT are beginning to lead the pack. The more advanced these models get, the more they’ll not only improve user experiences but also drastically shift the pillars of the digital ecosystem – including the engines of search. Take a hypothetical company like Google, or any other general search engine.
If an AI model like ChatGPT (or any other similar model) were to become the de facto way of accessing information online, not only would it disrupt those companies’ current search monopolies, but also create a whole new way for end users to find information. So, what would the world of search engine optimisation (SEO) look like in such a scenario? How would SEO and digital marketing strategies adapt to this new world?
This blog is a hypothetical look at the possible future of SEO with the rise of a ChatGPT-like model that kills search engines. This scenario is filled with both potential opportunities and challenges that marketers and brands might face and will need to account for, in order to plan for the next generation of online search.
Chapter 1: The Rise of ChatGPT and the Decline of Traditional Search Engines
1.1. The Evolution of Search Technology
In the 22 years since the internet was opened up for everyday use, it has always been through search engines. Google, still the largest player, was created in 1998, and its PageRank algorithm was the first to rank pages by relevance and authority level. It was the dawn of modern SEO. Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) has since become a complex discipline, with ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’ colours, part of an whole apparatus and range of tactics to increase a site’s relevance to searches, therefore maximising visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). On-page SEO consists of keywords, link building, content and technical SEO to improve ranking.
But now AI models such as ChatGPT are changing the game by helping users to bypass search engines. Conversational AI systems demonstrate an understanding of natural language, display human-sounding responses, and deliver information that’s seamlessly relevant. They’re not only good at chatting with us, they’re increasingly good at helping us create content too – whether through customer service bots, or by generating texts for webpages; they can also perform search queries on our behalf – for example, answering questions about musicians. The more that users become comfortable interacting with conversational AI, the less they will need or use a search engine.
1.2. ChatGPT’s Growing Influence
On top of generating text, ChatGPT can summarise briefings, provide answers to detailed questions, write code, provide personalised recommendations, and more. Search engines return a list of information sources but leave the actual searching up to users; ChatGPT provides the answers and analysis directly.
And these changes in user behaviour are a major threat to the search engine. Because what’s the point of a search engine results page when I can get a good enough answer from a search box that is wired directly into any billion-parameter GPT-like model? Google might increasingly find itself in a race it will inevitably lose to the Last Mile of conversational AI. What customers want is a quick and effective answer. The faster it will come, the less search engine results pages we will use.
Chapter 2: The Impact on SEO
2.1. The Changing Nature of Keywords
Keywords have been the lifeblood of SEO. Understanding how users search and refining content to fit the language of search has been a core strategy for businesses seeking to boost their online presence for years. But in a world where ChatGPT supplants search engines, the importance of keywords could shift massively.
Rather than being optimised for niche keywords, businesses might have to be optimised for bigger topic sets and more conversational natural language queries. The ability of models such as ChatGPT to consider context effectively means that content needs to be more thorough to satisfy whatever body of text they are ingesting and to be regarded as semantically relevant in the same way. A looming future sees less emphasis on keyword density and more on semantic relevance, the larger narrative of enhancing query answering at the possible expense of conversational value.
2.2. Content Optimization for AI Models
But, when the best writing tools are AI models that pass the Turing test, content strategies will need to change to focus on articles of deep research and authority that the AI understands to be quality. Then, it is no longer a matter of selling likeables but of learning how ChatGPT processes information and generates thought.
To optimize content for AI, businesses may need to:
Authority first: Creating a website that’s simply the go-to for a certain niche will be key. That means developing in-depth, research-rich content that truly feels like an authority on the subject, and could potentially be cited in an answer from ChatGPT.
Provide Semantic Clarity: For machine-learning models to efficiently extract content, text should be laid out in human-sounding sections. Headings, bullets and short text summarising content should also be used to provide clear answers to potential questions.
Attention to User Experience: Content that delivers a good user experience will be favoured by the AI, including fast page-loading speeds, mobile-optimised websites and easy-to-use navigation. These factors have always been important for SEO but will be especially so in a ChatGPT-dominated era.
2.3. The Death of the SERP?
If the SERP is replaced by ChatGPT as the portal through which most of us access the internet, what does that mean for businesses that have paid millions in staffing and technologies to gain first-page prominence in search results like Google’s? Rather than scrapping for first-page rankings in SERPs, the battle may become about whether your content is ready for AI’s OK.
Such constraints might in turn give rise to new measures of success in digital marketing. Some possible examples are:
An AI Recognition Score that tracked the frequency with which an AI system such as ChatGPT referenced content on a website.
* Conversational Relevance: The degree to which content satisfactorily answers a question and aligns with the way that users word those queries in natural language.
Chapter 3: New Strategies for SEO in a ChatGPT-Driven World
3.1. Developing AI-Friendly Content
Companies that want to stay ahead of the curve when ChatGPT replaces the search engine as we know it, will have to adapt their content strategies accordingly: in an AI-first world, simply adding a heap of keywords to a piece of text won’t be enough.
Holistic Topic Coverage: Targeting multiple long-tail keywords with individual pages might be replaced with a holistic topic coverage. A desperate blogger trying to draw in light traffic might create one piece of content to attract the ‘best burrito in west london’. A holistically-targeted piece, on the other hand, might cover the entire topic, even trying to be an objective authority on where the best burritos are in west london.
Interactive Content: Embedding quizzes, calculators or infographics can be an attractive feature for site visitors – and the interactivity increases the likelihood that AI will be interested in the content if no other factors are significant. Interactive content keeps users on a site longer, a factor that AI models might use to determine the relevance of content.
Conversational tone: AI already does this well, but experts say it will matter more as AI models get better at natural language. To create text this way means assembling words in a sequence that sounds like human conversation, so that AI is more likely to use it verbatim.
3.2. Emphasizing Local and Personalized SEO
There will always be demand for local and personalised information and a market for businesses who make sure that at least some of their copy is targeted to address these needs.
Near-local Content: Create content in a way that meets the specific needs of the local community using subtle tweaks in your content and strategies including language variations (both in pronunciation and spelling), citations of local events, and optimise for local search keywords and queries considered by AI content generators.
Curation: Robots, learning from human expertise, can provide personalised recommendations. This means that AI models trained on human expertise – such as the algorithmic personalisation employed by one of the authors of the book, The AI Diet (2023) – can offer deep curation to users. Nowadays, almost every business puts an emphasis on recommending content that can deliver on personal goals or out-perform competing content. The ability to qualify that content through a superior system of recommendations would itself provide a competitive advantage.
Personalisation: A corporation could effectively tailor its content to an individual’s user persona, preferences and behaviour Fulfilment: In the realm of AI literature, there are many possibilities, including poetry written from the perspective of someone who is religious, highly educated and happy, but also guilty for persecuting dinosaurs.
3.3. Leveraging Data and Analytics
As they’re able to do less with traditional search-based metrics such as click-through rates and SERP rankings, companies will need new data and analytics, particularly screen-level data, to measure the value of SEO.
AI Interaction Metrics: We’ll need to track how AI models are referencing and using works. Formulas could include tracking which works are cited by AI most often, or how often the style of certain works is imitated.
User engagement: Page views and bounce rates will remain important, but they will be complemented by an expanded focus on user engagement along the AI matrix, such as how long the user spends on a page after a user recommendation, and what actions the user subsequently takes.
Feedback Loops: As AI models get smarter and change through user interactions, companies will need to build a sustainable feedback loop that will help them to evolve: collecting user feedback on AI-generated responses, and then tuning their content accordingly (Feedback to the AI itself).
Chapter 4: The Ethical Implications of a ChatGPT-Dominated Search Ecosystem
4.1. The Control of Information
Since access to information will primarily follow a top-down path through these increasingly powerful AI models, like ChatGPT and others, it will be them and the organisations that develop and train them who will be most responsible for the direction of knowledge bias and misinformation in the future, and whether we can truly democratise information.
Bias in AI: The AI problems algorithmically answer questions with the data they’ve been trained on. If the data is biased – because of research bias or imbalance in team demographics, for example – then the training data will be accordingly biased. The AI’s responses mirror those underlying biases, like the imposition of stereotypes, dissemination of misinformation, and silencing of marginalised voices. SEO strategies will need to account for such biases.
Misinformation: Spurious facts will explode into ‘ebullient facts’ The virality of spurious facts will hold if we deploy certain AI models. Any company with an online shop or a social media presence may well have a duty to produce bona fide information, not digital confetti that confirms preconceived notions: we’re liable if we let it go loose.
Governance: If AI reliance centralises access to information under a handful of tech giants, we risk losing the diversity of perspectives currently available, suppressing future innovation and cutting off competition.
4.2. Transparency and Accountability
The more AI models become part of the search ecosystem, the more one can expect demand for transparency to grow.
More Transparency for ChatGPT: The idea that the AI models are generated simply by some magic of the engine will no longer be acceptable. Users and businesses will want to see more transparency in how the responses are generated, including what algorithms ChatGPT and other generative models are using and where they’re getting their information from.
Accountability for AI Text – as AI assumes more autonomy in producing content and conducting research, how do businesses address the issue of accountability for accuracy and ethical responsibility for such work? Can organisations remain accountable for content produced by AI, or influenced by AI?
New SEO: SEO practitioners will adopt more everyday ethical principles, including avoiding highly premeditated machine learning optimisations (ie, the web equivalent of games played against AI models) and instead focusing on how they can create value for users.
Chapter 5: The Future of SEO Careers and Industry Evolution
5.1. The Evolving Role of SEO Professionals
As the pendulum swings back in reaction to AI search, the role of the SEO professional will change. Link building, on-page optimisation and other traditional SEO pursuits could fall by the wayside, with new skills becoming necessary to cope with AI-generated search.
Those SEO professionals who manage to position themselves in front of the flood of demand for becoming an AI Optimisation Specialist – including being an expert in optimising content for ‘crawlability’; understanding how different AI models sense, process and prioritise information; and creating a strategy to make content ‘AI-friendly’ – are going to be well-paid indeed.
Data Analysts and Strategists As AI-driven search grows, the capacity to analyse and draw inferences from AI interaction metrics will become increasingly key. The SEO expert is, in no small measure, a data analyst, someone capable of using analytics tools to track AI performance and leverage inferences to make smart decisions.
Ethical SEO: As the ethics of AI come to the fore, there will be a growing market for ethical SEO professionals, who might advise businesses on how to create content that’s accessible, accurate, and fair.
5.2. The Transformation of the SEO Industry
It’s reasonable to expect that, as ChatGPT and similar models come to replace a lot of the functionality previously handled by traditional search engines, there are aspects of the SEO industry that will be transformed; new entrants will surface offering more-focused AI optimisation services, and existing SEO agencies will carve out a place for themselves as the future of search becomes increasingly tied to conversational AI.
AI Optimisation Agencies: A new breed of specialist agencies may organise around materialising the logic and objectives of SEO for AI models: AI content generation; AI-conducive content structuring; AI performance diagnostics.
Cross-functional partnership: The SEO discipline of the future will rely on cross-functional partnerships with other disciplines. This includes partners in data science, AI development, content and digital marketing. SEO specialists will work together with AI developers and data analysts to develop effective strategies.
A perpetual learning bias: the SEO sector will adopt a new pedagogical model. If the AI models evolve, so do the tricks and hacks and workarounds best used to optimise content to them. SEO professionals and SEO businesses will similarly need to adopt a perpetual learning bias to stay abreast.
Chapter 6: Conclusion – Navigating the Future of SEO
If you truly believe that ChatGPT can usurp search engines as we know it, you have a valid story to tell — it just might be a tough road ahead! All the concepts presented in this article serve as opportunities for businesses and professionals in SEO to develop new innovative strategies in response to whatever technological shakeups that happen in the space.
SEO in this new reality will no longer revolve around how to spoof ranking algorithms for SERPs; it will be all about creating high-quality, authoritative, naturally linguistic and contextually relevant content. We will no longer be targeting individual keywords for rankings on SERPs; instead, we will aim to answer user natural language queries in a human-sounding manner that will not confuse AI models.
But as the nature of SEO changes, business verticals will learn differently: to invest in new forms of content, AI-friendly and ethically solid, so as to adapt and be part of a ChatGPT-dominated search world. If the future of SEO means preserving a place in the online space where your business is noticed, matters, and makes a difference, then it’s our goal to make it as bright as possible.
All in all, while the fall of keyword-focused search, and the entire domain of SEO as we’ve known it, is a grim prospect, it also represents a rare opportunity to refocus our efforts around those people in a true bid to connect with them, aided along the way by algorithms that can provide their own unique form of assistance. With knowledge, flexibility and ethical stewardship, mere businesses become valuable connectors that allow the internet to function.