Latest / Found in AI: AI Search Visibility, SEO, & GEO / Is SEO Still Worth It in an AI-Driven Search Era?

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Is SEO Still Worth It in an AI-Driven Search Era? · Found in AI: AI Search Visibility, SEO, & GEO

• 0:41
  (Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) SEO is as dead as MySpace. That's an actual Reddit comment I read last week, and another user shot back with, cool, so why did SEO bring in 70% of our inbound leads last quarter?
• 0:53
  Honestly, that's a fair question, and it's two completely different realities that everyone is talking about. And if you've been in content marketing for any length of time and your LinkedIn feed is all about this, you have seen this debate in real time. So today we're putting this debate to bed. Is SEO really on life support, or is it quietly dominating in 2025?
• 1:15
  If we haven't met yet, I'm Cassie Clark. I'm a content strategist helping startups and B2B brands get found. AI engines like ChatGPT, Bean Copilot, and Perplexity are changing the rules, but they still rely on the same foundation, which is content that shows up in search and earns trust with the audience. This show is where I test AEO and GEO strategies in real time, with the goal to give you the ones that are worth stealing to increase your brand's visibility in AI search. So to check SEO's pulse, I sat down with Christina Fuenze, founder of WebView SEO.
• 1:52
  Here's part of that conversation starting with her thoughts on whether or not SEO is dead.
• 1:57
  When people say SEO is dead, what's your first reaction to that?
• 2:03
  I think I've seen this comment so many times that at first, maybe five years ago, I would be kind of giving it some weight, even some thought. At the moment, I just kind of ignore it. And I feel like it's just also considering where I read a lot of LinkedIn posts. It's a very good hook to put at the very beginning. But at the moment, even if I see SEO is dead or AI is replacing SEO, I mostly don't read this post just because I feel like maybe it's a bias, but I feel like it might not hold a lot of value because I just don't believe it. I think SEO is still pretty much the foundation of being discovered online.
• 3:02
  So you think it's more like a clickbait reaction when people are on LinkedIn?
• 3:05
  Exactly.
• 3:05
  Okay, that's kind of the feeling that I've got too, because it just seems like it is the foundation of everything else. Have you been on LinkedIn and making comments back, or do you just ignore it and go on?
• 3:17
  No, honestly, I just ignore it and go on, because there is just so much information right now happening, so many updates, that I consume a crazy amount of information online. And I feel like there's not enough hours in a day to also read these kind of posts.
• 3:37
  Yes, I totally, totally understand. I was talking with another content lady this morning, a content person, and she made the comment that AI search is kind of like there's so much information that we don't really know where we're headed at the moment. Do you think that's true?
• 3:56
  Absolutely. I feel like at some point, you get very overwhelmed by the amount of information, and it's almost like you have to take a step back and just breathe a little to understand that, yes, it is uncertain. I don't think anybody knows where it's headed, because I think SEO has been going through a lot of updates over the years, but I think this one is the most significant one, to be honest. And it's just going to change SEO world forever, for better or worse, I'm not sure yet. But I agree with uncertainty piece. A lot of people feel uncertain, especially those that don't really go deep into that, just because that's not their profession. Like, for example, I speak to a lot of VPs of marketing or marketing directors, and they want for their brand to be discovered through AI, but they're just so lost in what to do. So this seems to be the sentiment right now.
• 5:09
  So with the clients that you work with directly at WebUSCO, what shifts are you actually seeing in their traffic? And where do their leads come compared to maybe even two years ago?
• 5:19
  Right. There's definitely a big shift in the quality of traffic. When I see the traffic that comes to AI, it's definitely much more conversion ready, because people do a lot of research before actually clicking through. Because already, like AI overviews, chat GPT, there's not a lot of opportunities to click through to the website. So there's a lot of searches just happening there. And if people really land on your website through any of the AI search engines, that means they're really interested, and they kind of already compared you against other solutions. So the traffic has been increasing since... Well, more and more people are shifting towards searching in LLMs, and me included. But in general, I think it's a good shift, because even if we are seeing less traffic overall, or maybe less traffic from organic traffic, the traffic that comes through AI is much more ready to buy.
• 6:38
  So again, more conversion ready. So are your clients already seeing that jump in revenue, even if it's small so far? Yes, yes. Well, it's interesting, because I see that mostly comes from chat GPT, at least for the clients that I work with.
• 6:55
  Not a lot of... There is some traffic from perplexity, and from AI reviews, AI mode, and things like that. But chat GPT seems to be leading, at least for the class that I work with, in terms of leads. I wonder if that's just because chat GPT is more like a household name compared to perplexity so far, do you think?
• 7:16
  Yeah, that might be it. That might be it. Just because I feel like Google AI mode and chat GPT are kind of the two leading ones, then perplexity, grog, all this kind of clod, and there's just so many of them right now. But these two, I think, are kind of leading and competing with each other as well. Yeah. So one of the things that you mentioned on a document that you shared with me last week is like, this is a rare moment in SEO, and the earlier you act, the bigger the visibility gap between your competitors will be.
• 7:49
  What do you... I know why you're saying that, but can you explain that in your own words exactly, why you think that's going to be the case? I feel like the earlier the brands understand how AI search engines work and implement it, the earlier they will get picked up by AI search engines. And just because LLMs, they tend to... All of them obviously have different ways how they work and retrieve information, but a lot of them kind of grab and retrieve information already from existing database. So the earlier you get into that database and establish yourself there as a brand of choice, the more chances you have to be kind of dominating that space.
• 8:44
  Because at the moment, I know a lot of... There is this rag retrieval augmented algorithm, how LLMs are retrieving information right now. It's a little bit different from how it was before.
• 9:03
  And I would imagine later on, it's going to change and perhaps they're going to become more reliant on newer information, not just on the information that they have already in databases. So I think having that first mover advantage and introducing your brand to AI search engines, and also not just introducing, but making sure that they have the correct information about you, about your brand, because lots of times the information that you have on your website is not what they will get. Sometimes they will grab an information from some aggregator website or review website, and that information not necessarily is going to be beneficial, or maybe it's going to be negative. So you also have to control what AI search engines tell about you. That is a fair point. And that's also something that I've noticed in my own deep dive into this, because I went through and I reworked my entire services page to move from freelance writer to more to content strategy. And so I've been going into ghost mode on chat GPT, trying to see if I'm showing up in the search. And instead of pulling from my own website, it's pulling from other websites where my author bio is landed on those pages. So I'm having to go through and work around that. I will be testing to see if that actually shows up later in the service, and then go through that again. So if a startup starter, let me try that again. If a startup founder came to you and said, what's one thing I should be doing differently with SEO in 2024 to keep showing up now in 2025, what would you say to them?
• 10:51
  I would say start with a content audit on your website. Just start with the simplest thing. You don't need to kind of overhaul the whole website or overhaul your whole strategy. The simplest thing to do is just to analyze your whole website from the point of view of how AI search engines will perceive it. Because there's a lot of components to the visibility. And first of all, you need to make sure that you are not blocking the AI search engines, just because that's also a possibility. You need to actually give them access to your website.
• 11:35
  And I've also seen, for example, chat GPT does not really like the websites that are built on, they don't render the, I keep forgetting that, either a jQuery or one of those that is not static. So your website should be static and not kind of, I keep forgetting that name. I'll have to look it up. But basically, you need to make sure that your website is discoverable. And also, the way you structure your content on a website is a little bit different, just because all the AI search engines, they don't fetch your entire pages. They just fetch portions of the content on your website. So kind of looking at AI friendliness of your website is a good way to start.
• 12:37
  That was Christina of WebView SEO, and she made a really strong point. SEO isn't dead, but it is evolving. She believes a version of SEO that's optimized for AI, like content with structured bullet points, FAQs, and clear schema is going to win out over the old keyword heavy style that we're used to seeing. And that sets up perfectly for this week's experiment. I'm running an actual SEO versus AO battle on my website with two brand new blog posts that cover the same content, probably even the same sentences, just restructured differently. Version A will be the classic SEO. It will be optimized for the title tag and meta description, keyword in the H2s, internal links, and subheads built for keyword targeting. Then we'll have version B, created to AI ready SEO based on what we currently know right now. It will be the same topic, but the intro starts with a two sentence direct answer, right under that, a bullet point summary, plus an FAQ section with three to five conversational answers, marked up with the FAQ schema and subheads written exactly like the search queries or like whatever people are typing into the AI chat box. Both will go live at the same time, but on separate URLs with equal internal links and no cross-linking so we don't skew these results. My plan is to track rankings in Google Search Console, visibility and being co-pilot, and manual checks in chat GPT and perplexity to see which version, if any of them, gets cited more often. Christina's bet was on the AI ready version, but what do you think? I'd love for you to follow along and even try your own version of this experiment. If you do, let me know what results that you're seeing. So the question, is SEO dead?
• 14:28
  Far from it. It's the foundation on which answer engine optimization or AEO is built. Think of SEO as like your house is plumbing and AEO as the fancy new kitchen faucet. Without the pipes, the faucet can't deliver anything and then everyone's upset. So if you're thinking, hey, we need to show up in AI answers, but we don't know where we're starting, that's exactly what I help with. I'm Cassie Clark and I build AI search ready content systems for startups and B2B companies. Let's connect over on LinkedIn or at CassieClarkMarketing.com.
• 15:02
  Next week, Iona Wilkinson, founder and CEO of Innovatech Content, will be joining me to break down AIO versus GEO versus AEO. We're going to define what each acronym actually means and when they use them, and I'm so excited to have her on. We will see you next week.