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The SEO landscape is experiencing seismic shifts. Across the entire industry, professionals are changing titles, redefining roles, and reassessing their place in this AI-transformed world. I have many friends that are moving in-house, seeking stability as agencies restructure. Others are closing shop entirely (rip Marin), uncertain how to compete in this new reality. Some embrace AI wholeheartedly, while others resist, fearing obsolescence.

Amid this professional upheaval, it’s easy to feel adrift. This article offers a steadying branch to hold onto—a realistic perspective on where we are, where we’re headed, and how you can position yourself for success regardless of which path you choose.

I am convinced most AI tools claiming to do marketing were built by people who’ve never optimized a page or ran an ad campaign. That shiny AI-driven marketing solution might sound impressive – if you’ve never been responsible for driving real traffic or conversions.

The folks shouting  AI is the end of SEO don’t understand the work. They’ve never worried about site architecture,  on the page optimization, or even as simple as why certain pages rank the way they do. The more some tech people know about AI, the less they seem to grasp about the actual business. People don’t hire SEOs for keywords – they hire for outcomes. They don’t hire consultants to run audits – they hire for peace of mind and business growth!

It is time to stop thinking about AI as a threat, and AI as the new SEO super power. In these situations I roll back to a tried and true tactic. I came from my Intro to Computer science professor back in the 80’s (who was a major 6 Million Dollar Man show Fan) when he said, to address any problem better, faster, stronger; “Start by asking better questions“.  So lets do that:

• What’s the realistic timeline for AI to reshape how site owners operate?
• How can AI make SEOs smarter, not just faster?
• How are agencies using AI today to improve rankings and revenue?
• Will AI content flood the SERPs and force new strategies?
• Are AI chatbots good enough to handle support and lead gen?

We keep seeing AI enthusiasts hovering around SEO, thinking it’s just metadata and backlinks, or tweaking CTRs. The latest AI buzz is all about agentic systems, where bots act autonomously. But for many, SEO has turned back into throw 500 articles at the wall, track what sticks, repeat. Which – umm – we did like 2 decades ago and that stopped working about 1.5 decades ago – and umm – Google like banned it like a decade ago…and umm.

So, AI is opening up new opportunities – for example, ChatGPT referrals are emerging as a novel traffic source that SEOs can capitalize on rather than fear.

Generating content for pennies instead of paying writers sure sounds like a major league game-changer. But content is just one piece of a huge pie. If you’re spending $500K on media, shaving a few hundred dollars off production isn’t going to move the needle. And maybe the part you’re cutting corners on content quality, UX, or authority, absolutely matters more than you think.

Meanwhile, some big-brand and big-name campaigns still have two dozen people weighing in on a single social media tagline. There are brands that agonize over every design tweak. But these excesses on that front are showing up as being as unsustainable in this modern AI web.

Still, we have no illusions:  AI is going to change SEO, content, site design, PPC, and the whole digital “webmaster” stack. Obviously it isn’t coming all at once. And not in the way most people are predicting.

Currently: AI as “What’s Next”

Both SEO’s without technical proficiency and Tech people with little to no SEO experience – build tools that solve narrow problems:

• AI to spin up content and images. (hello Zapier and Make)
• AI ideation to write titles and metas. Got bullets, bolds, and emdashes?
• AI to optimize PPC bids. sigh:  Broadmatch for everybody.
• AI to pull analytics, summarize meetings etc.

This turns out to be just automation – nothing about the process changes. We are just marking it as  “AI” on what we were already doing. Yes, tools get better, faster, and more accessible. But we see more – much much more low-quality content that turns into SEO disasters with baked-on hallucinated data. What we are seeing in the real world, is that companies that cut SEO teams for PR are (shhh) quietly rebuilding them when rankings tank.

Where we currently are is that you get pages that check every SEO box but have no voice, no perspective. It is vanilla speech at rock bottom prices. It is basically rankings without engagement.  And given what we know about NavBoost – this is not going to work for long.

What’s Next? : AI as the Engine Driving SEO

In a few years, SEOs and tech teams will start syncing around AI.  AI can’t/won’t be a bolt-on singular tool – it will have to be part of the entire website tech system. The Agentic system is coming to specialize all the parts-n-pieces. For example: AI-driven dashboards will start feeding real-time search data directly into top-down strategy decisions. It starts to make SEO part of the broader business planning. Content workflows will have to evolve with ideation, writing, and optimization looping together in a nonstop continuous cycle. All of that will be guided by AI but shaped by human oversight. On the tech side, SEO automation is flagging crawl issues and suggesting fixes. It can easily  streamline site maintenance and ensuring that SEO efforts stay aligned with the new ever-evolving search standards (especially in the new AI overview world).

This vision is where AI supports the work but does not replace it. It’s less about tools and more about how things get done – how to get things done right – how to get things done faster!

End Game : AI Reshapes the Entire Game

Maybe a five to seven years from now, AI changes what SEO even means as search behavior evolves and AI-first sites compete alongside traditional ones. We will rethink the basics:

• What really is a website in an AI-driven world?
• What does authority mean when AI generates half the flippin web?
• How do we measure influence when clicks don’t tell even part of the engagement story?
• Entirely new forms of search, ranking factors, and user expectations as SEO becomes more strategic, less mechanical – more creative and certainly less routine.

Big Finish: AI and SEO: Embracing a Brighter Future Together

Exciting times are ahead! AI is transforming our industry in scary, but wonderful ways. It is opening fresh doors to new possibilities.

Consider how AI is enhancing your daily operations – it’s not just about speed, but about unlocking more  data-driven decisions you might never have discovered otherwise. While keeping in mind potential challenges like content uniqueness and brand consistency, these are opportunities to refine our approach rather than throw up roadblocks.

Here is the bottom line: the beauty of AI adoption is that you can integrate it at your own pace and bake it into your existing systems.

SEO has always been a field  innovation.  What we call SEO today, is radically different than just 10 years ago. This AI revolution represents an exciting new chapter in that where forward-thinking professionals who embrace these technologies will discover fresh ways to succeed and lead our industry into a bright future!