It wouldn’t be a dramatic blog post about SEO without ironically saying “SEO is dead”, right? The irony is certainly there, but SEO death has never felt closer to the truth than it is now.
Clicks and impressions have decoupled in a way we’ve never seen, with organic dropping across practically the entire web. First-position rankings for valuable keywords don’t matter like they used to. Google’s AI Overviews have sprawled in both size and prevalence to such an extent that zero-click searches are becoming the norm, not the outlier.
Whether or not we try to rename our field (a topic of hot debate throughout the week), I’m convinced that SEOs are set up for success with the skillsets we’ve cultivated over the years to face the future of search. Speaking of:
LLMs may be the future of search, but the future isn’t here yet
By my count, “AI” shows up on the SEO Week Agenda page over 50 times, and LLM appears 11 times (how’s that for TF-IDF)! It’s on all of our minds, and with good reason. Google’s AI Overviews (despite the ridicule they’ve earned from the stupid mistakes they generate) appear to be here to stay, and AI Mode, while still in beta, could very well be the default before we know it.
But what about all the new players in the game? Are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and all their various brethren stealing market share from the behemoth that is Google? The statistic that I can’t stop thinking about came from Rand “Stop Calling Me An SEO” Fishkin.
Google grew searches 21.64% (4 ChatGPTs of volume) in 2024
No matter what cataclysmic headlines you’ve read about Google’s market share dropping below 90%, they’re still the behemoth to beat. ChatGPT would have to grow exponentially to come even close to competing with Google as a search engine. The future of LLM tools overtaking Google search is still far off and by no means guaranteed. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the traffic potential from LLMs!
LLMs are the future of SEO, and that future is here
No more dragging your feet and sticking your head in the sand (I’m talking to myself as much as you); using LLMs in your SEO workflow is practically a must in 2025. This doesn’t mean you should let ChatGPT take over your entire blog, nor should you AI-generate images for every little thing (think of the carbon impact, for one). However, if you’re not finding smart and efficient ways to augment your SEO tactics with LLMs, then you’re lagging behind your competitors. I’ve included a list of my favorite resources from SEO Week in this post, and you can keep up with us on our blog and LinkedIn as we share the new SEO/LLM processes we start using.
Local SEO is relatively unchanged, for now
RicketyRoo specializes in local SEO, so we stay at the forefront of how best to do optimize local businesses for local search. As we’ve seen in our work and as I heard at SEO Week, many of the fundamentals of local SEO have remained the same while the rest of the search world changes around us.
- The pillars “relevance, distance, prominence” are as important as ever.
- You still need to earn positive, relevant reviews from your customers.
- NAP consistency helps define your business as an entity across the web.
The industry is thriving and kinder than ever
This point is obviously subjective, and your mileage may vary, but I’ve personally never felt better about being an SEO. SEO Week was a reminder of just how collaborative and learning-first our industry is. My entire professional life has been in search, so I don’t have a direct comparison point, but I can’t imagine it’s very common elsewhere in the business world for people to hand out tools and datasets for free so their peers can use them. Collaboration is alive and well, as we all need to work together to evolve what we do to the brave new world of LLMs.
Various actionable takeaways for you to run with
Enough with the navel gazing! I’m sure you want to know what you can take from what I learned and do right now, so let me give you what you’re looking for.
Brand strength is more important than ever
Define your brand and what you do clearly. Make it easy for users, search crawlers, and LLMs to understand what you’re about. Make that message consistent across the web in every place you can. Build topically relevant links, and avoid irrelevant ones.
Monitor how LLMs understand your brand
There are a number of tools and ways to automate this, but something you can do easily right now is prompt an LLM with the following:
“What prompt(s) would result in you giving “[BRAND NAME]” as an answer?”
Build on rented land, not just your website
It has long been advised to avoid “building on rented land”: publishing your content on third-party platforms you don’t control. Sadly, that advice isn’t as sound as it once was, as Google AIOs and other LLMs seem to value user-generated content on social media and platforms like Substack and Medium. Lily Ray demonstrated that powerfully by publishing content to LinkedIn Pulse that appeared in a Google AIO six hours later.
Take advantage of the spirit of sharing
Here are just a handful of the awesome, free tools and datasets I’m excited to dive into and apply to our work at RicketyRoo.
- Elias Dabbas: Python notebooks for running your own crawler and using OpenAI to perform a content audit https://github.com/eliasdabbas/seoweek
- Dan Petrovic: AI Rank Tracker https://airank.dejan.ai/
- JR Oakes: Industry Mentions Dashboard https://locomotive.agency/seoweek/
- Manick Bhan: custom GPT trained on verified Google patents related to Search https://searchatlas.com/patentbrain/
Never stop learning
Now more than ever, it takes an inquisitive, open mind to stay on top of SEO (or GEO, or relevance engineering, or AIEOU, or …). Google search and its LLM competitors are evolving at a breakneck pace, so we have to work hard to keep up. For me, that’s why SEO has always been such a riveting field to work in. There’s never a dull moment, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!
