Posted by Logan Snyder on February 2nd, 2026How Is AI Affecting SEO?
An increasingly common question we’re fielding here at hasOptimization is “so how is AI affecting SEO?” This is a pretty hot topic in the marketing world right now, and any number of marketing news outlets are scrambling to declare that SEO is dead and AI is the future of search.
SEO Has “Died” Before
Now, I’ve been working in SEO and related fields since 2009, also known as “since forever” in internet years, and I think I’ve seen SEO declared deceased at least a half dozen times, killed off by everything from social media to results personalization. Spoiler alert: Zombified though it may be, SEO is still kicking. Search engines are still kicking. Content remains king.
Yes, AI Is Changing the Internet
We find ourselves now in a new world of the world wide web, though. Artificial intelligence is certainly altering the way we interact with computers, the internet, information in general. It has some potentially really amazing, worthwhile uses, like improving cancer detection and sifting through massive volumes of data quickly. On the other hand, generative AI has devalued artists, is environmentally disastrous and is creating an environment where even video content can be falsified in a near-undetectable way. Meanwhile, large language models like Chat GPT are interspersing their potentially useful behavior with “AI hallucinations”, causing AI psychosis, and creating a generation of college students who have so missed the point of college that it’s dubious whether they are learning anything at all. Why read the material and write a paper if you can just have ChatGPT do it?
Will AI Kill Search or SEO?
And so we come to search. Is AI going to kill search, search engines, or SEO? In my opinion, no. At the end of the day, the AIs are reliant on human-generated content–once they start recycling AI content, they are basically an informational KitKat. They don’t have any real ability to create anything new, because they aren’t REAL. They don’t have experiences. So in terms of marketing and search engine optimization, creating high quality content is always going to matter–whether it’s a traditional search algorithm or an AI bot that’s doing the searching, the cream of the crop for meaningful results is going to be a quality, human-created content piece. Content created by beings that exist in the world (I hate to be the one to remind people, but the internet is not real).
Can We Trust AI for Search?
Will we see a shift to using AI powered searches? Maybe. But that’s probably going to depend on what Google chooses to do, and what powers their searches by default in the future. For me, I’ll keep scrolling past the suspect “AI Overview” because I like to live. But you don’t have to take my word for it, because the folks over at NeilPatel.com interviewed more than 5000 ChatGPT users–free, plus and pro–on what they trusted for their searches. In a landslide result that frankly surprised me, 87% still prefer a Google search to ChatGPT.
Should Small Businesses Be “Optimizing for AI”?
Another key takeaway, which I’ve been saying for quite a while, is that there is a high correlation between ranking well in Google searches and showing up in ChatGPT queries. In other words, the work we do for search engine optimization is ALSO good for showing up in AI results. And as is often the case with the new and shiny things of the internet, “optimizing for AI” is unlikely to be where small businesses should put their money at any foreseeable point in the future. It’s not trendy to say “focus on the tried and true”, but it’s often best practice, especially when trying to grow a business on a budget.
At the end of the day real expertise, experiences, and human insight are what make content worth finding. AI might reshape how people search, but strong, thoughtfully built SEO is not going anywhere.
