Kevin Surace, with 30 years in SEO, says AI recommendation systems like ChatGPT are making traditional SEO obsolete. AI suggests businesses directly without relying on Google's ranking algorithms, bypassing backlinks and the tactics that once drove visibility.
Businesses became obsessed with getting their websites to the top of Google, but AI just changed the game completely.
The turmoil is this: every day more people are using AI to make the recommendations for them, whether it's a local restaurant, a local dry cleaner, or car to buy, or whatever it is, right? We have spent 30 years understanding SEO, and yes, I know that the Google algorithms change and we reverse engineer them, we try to figure it out. You know, we've all been through this, right? But we understood about backlinks, we understood about how you chatted up on other websites, we understood about building all of these other sites so that you're referenced on the sites. Like, this is the tradition of what we do. All of a sudden, you know, ChatGPT isn't recommending you as the best dry cleaner in town, and there is no algorithm that changes that either quickly or easily.
And what do you do with that?
We're going to figure it out. But the whole idea of jumping to websites may be gone. People may not do much at websites. They may take the recommendations of the AI and just execute on them.
