Generative AI vs SEO
- January 24, 2025
- Bradley Taylor
Generative AI is changing the way many people get answers. If a person wants a simple answer to a question, there is no better tool than generative AI. “What day of the week does Valentine’s Day fall on?” or “What time does the Super Bowl start?”. These are the simple answers where AI excels.
When it comes to detailed or niche information, AI still has ways to go. It will often either spit out wrong answers or simply not know what you are talking about. To Google programmers’ credit, they won’t display the AI module when it has nothing on the searched topic. It will simply return website links like before.
AI scans the top few dozen search results to generate answers. Some AI interfaces will show a list of the websites they used to generate the answer. We often see traffic referrals to our websites from OpenAI or Grok. Furthermore, we have not noticed a downward trend in traffic at any of the sites we manage since generative AI came on the scene.
So, what point am I trying to make? Keep going with your SEO. Don’t throw your hands up in the air and give up because Generative AI is becoming a popular tool.
Keep Your Site Clean and Make Sure it Loads Quickly
People don’t have the patience to wait for a slow site to load. They also don’t want to have to close a bunch of pop-ups or cookie permission boxes. They don’t want to have to scroll to the tenth paragraph to find the meat and potatoes of the topic either.
Be honest with your visitor. If your topic is about how bees make honey, don’t spend 500 words describing the history of flowers in North America first. Get right to the topic. You can add supporting or ancillary information after the fact. Remember, you are now competing with the speed and proficiency of Generative AI. People want accurate answers that load quickly.
As John Mueller, former SEO guru at Google, said in an interview recently:
“When I search “when is the Super Bowl” I want to know it’s February 9th. That’s it. End of task. I’m done. …What I don’t want, and go click the first, second, third or 4th result for this, I promise you’ll get it, what I do not want is a website with an overlay ad, a cookie consent notice, and opt in to click in your alerts, an e-mail signup form, and seven paragraphs of unrelated text before it tells me it’s February 9.
…Nowadays… people just want the …answer, they don’t actually want the website. And a lot of SEOs haven’t kept up with that shift or paradigm. …we lost track of what the user actually wants.”
Website Speed Tips
- You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights. This is the very same tool Google uses to test websites.
- Strip out unnecessary code.
- Delete unnecessary plug-ins.
- Make sure your database has been optimized and the server restarted.
- Use a good minifying tool.
- Make sure large images are compressed.
SEO and AI don’t have to compete with one another. Both can be used in symbiosis to give visitors the best experience possible.