Almost 30 Years of SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process used by website creators and later SEO experts for almost 30 years, since the very first search engines were introduced, to improve the ranking of certain pages in the search results, or merely to be indexed (in the first iteration of SEO).
Initially, without submitting your page URLs to search engines, they wouldn't have been crawled and later indexed, so the process was manual for most content creators, at least.
Nowadays, all you have to do is allow the search engine bots to go through the website and index content, maybe setting prohibited pages or directories that should not be indexed and how often the bot should pay a visit (only an indication, which the bots may take into consideration or not).
Of course, the focus today is about optimizing content and the website for the search engine indexers, to rank higher in the search results rather than submitting your URL manually to be indexed, like in the old days of the Web.
But, after almost 30 years. will SEO continue to be relevant in the future? Are we focusing our efforts on something about to be disrupted?
Will AI Search Replace Classic Search Engines?
At this point Google has a "classic" search engine, despite probably using AIs for advertising purposes.
AIs may create havoc in this sector, if they continue improving and aiming to disrupt it.
Right now, ChatGPT is quite generalized in its capabilities, but it can have in the future branches specialized on different aspects, including why not, searches.
I used it once to search for something because I couldn't find in a short enough time an answer to a question I had.
I asked in my mother tongue too because I wasn't familiar with the terms in English (something about some plants).
ChatGPT offered a satisfactory answer in this case, which made sense to what I was already thinking based on logic alone.
It took 15 seconds to ask my question on ChatGPT and receive the answer. I tried to get an answer on Google for at least 5-10 minutes before I lost my patience because I got no answer even remotely close to what I was looking for. Yep, it depends what you are searching for, but I asked a 10-15 words question to ChatGPT and it figured out what I wanted to know.
I know ChatGPT makes mistakes. I would never use it for something really important at this stage of its development. What I am saying and what I think everyone knows already is the disruption potential is there.
What I'd like to see from an AI search is links to the original sources. Much like Leo uses them for the main ideas extracted from news articles in various domains posted on LeoThreads, with the article linked at the end.
Will This Transition Revolutionize SEO as Well?
The question is how will practices of content creators be influenced if AI search slowly takes over. Let's say, 5 years from now it will be dominant.
What would change for the content creator? Will SEO guidelines be radically different then?
Hard to say. Most search engine optimization guidelines make sense logically and from the common sense point of view, but who knows how things will evolve in 5 years if AI search becomes dominant?
Any thoughts on this?