Why SEO Still Matters in the Age of AI and ChatGPT 

AI is playing a significant role in shaping the search landscape. Though chatbots like ChatGPT have significant margins of error, their ease of use continues to draw users to them in droves and this affects organic traffic to website pages, which is on the decline. This is shaping SEO priorities. Where in the past SEO specialists focused their efforts on getting websites indexed and ranking in SERPs, now they have to focus on getting them to show up in large language models (LLMs) search results.

We have evolved from simply feeding Google keywords to get a website noticed in SERPs, to feeding it contextually accurate keyword phrases to conversational search queries in the search engines, to now needing to shape the content of an entire webpage to get noticed in LLMs, while still executing the previous points. And this is compounded by the fact that, more often than not, these LLMs are downloadable as apps, which takes them out of reach of search engines. This makes their impact on organic traffic all the more difficult to track, which can have an averse effect on optimization efforts. As they say, you cannot improve what you cannot measure.

For this reason, SEO also includes generative engine optimization (GEO) in 2025. These are optimizations directed at AI-driven interfaces like ChatGPT.

But that being said, whether it be GEO or SEO, it all still boils down to your website’s informational structure. In essence, that remains the determining factor for your website’s organic ranking success, whether it be in generative engines or search engines. Which means that improving your organic ranking and visibility in search engines, i.e., the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website, still matters. Building upon that, as a marketing tool, SEO is currently projected to reach up to $107 billion in market revenue this year.

Building upon that, optimizations of a website’s UX, page speed, structure, and brand authority, i.e., search engine-specific optimizations, still affect its rankings. And website pages still need traditional SEO for when they are crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines. In addition, LLMs and other AI tools still value human creativity, i.e. human language without bad practices like keyword stuffing or clunky topic structures, for their assessment of website content. And they penalize content that is completely AI-generated. Thus, the holy guideline of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) still very much applies and will continue to do so well into the foreseeable future.

So fret not, SEO is still very much a human’s game. We just have to adapt. And history has shown that we are kind of good at that.