Now, think about this. Let’s say you have all kinds of questions about the world:
- Do I need to wear a jacket out today?
- What’s the best sushi restaurant near here?
- Give me a hint to today’s Wordle.
And what if you had a butler who was brilliant at every subject in the world and could give you the best answer to any question you had, not just an accurate answer but helpful, friendly and thoughtful?
- “It’s a little chilly out, so wear a light jacket in the morning. You can probably take it off around noon.”
- “Sushi Kingdom is a 15-minute drive from here, but they have the most amazing fatty tuna shipped in from Japan.”
- “Think of a five-letter word that means ‘tired’.”
Oh, and your butler refuses to take any money from you. It mainly wants to compete with your dog to be your best friend without all the licking.
If you had someone at your beck and call every minute of every day, would you ever go to a Google Search box again?
True ‘zero click’ is coming
Five years ago, Rand Fishkin was one of the first to sound the alarm on the rise of “zero-click searches,” when Google introduced featured snippets and universal search results.
At the time, we all decried it as a land grab from Google. It had the effect of “trapping” users on Google’s sites so they would click more paid ads and visit more Google properties.
However, in fairness to Google, they really were looking to improve the user experience. They knew that the vast majority of people who search for something don’t want to wade through listing after listing. They just want an answer.
Every SEO professional knows this, too. Nearly 70% of searchers don’t even click past the first three results.
In the search landscape of the future, yes, people will still use the Google interface we know today for things like research and exploration. But expect the 70% of searchers who
don’t click past the first three Google results to flock to AI for answers.
Is SEO dead?
Those of us who’ve been in SEO for a while have lost count by now of how often the mainstream media has declared that “SEO is dead.”
My response to this has always been: as long as there are humans in the world and those humans are searching for something, SEO will never be dead.
Sure, the definition of what a “search engine” is will change over time. At one point, it was called “the Dewey Decimal System.” Then it was “Archie,” “Yahoo” then “Google.”
What will it be called next? “ChatGPT?” “Gemini?” “Grok?” Or something else entirely?
Or will multiple large language models (LLMs) arise, each trained in different areas of expertise?
Only time will tell what the exact landscape will look like, but one thing is for sure: the world will need a lot more “SEO.”
What does SEO look like in an AI-driven world?
To answer the question of what SEO will look like in the future, we need to think about what search itself will look like.
As every SEO knows, today most people search for head terms. A recent Semrush study said that 69.8% of searches use 1-4 keywords in the Google Search bar such as “weather tomorrow,” “restaurants near me,” “nfl scores.”
It’s a terribly awkward way to communicate, but it’s what we’ve all been conditioned to do since the 1990s.
That’s about to change.
Let’s think back to our aforementioned butler. Why would you say “restaurants near me” when you can have a conversation:
You: “Where should I eat tonight?”
Butler: “What are you in the mood for?”
You: “I don’t know. Maybe some Italian. Do you know a good place to get pasta around here?”
Butler: “Yes, Luigi’s Pizzeria is about a half mile away and has pretty good reviews.”
You: “What do the reviewers recommend?”
Butler: “A lot of them recommend the rigatoni with bolognese sauce or the grandma slice.”
You: “I never heard of this place. Have they been around very long?”
Butler: “Yes, they’ve been in business for 15 years, although they recently moved to this location.”
