SEO in the age of AI means Product-Led SEO
A shift to product-led SEO is the ideal approach to SEO with the impending launch of Google's new search experience. The monumental alteration in search which puts generative AI at the forefront of many search results will transform SEO overnight.
(If you haven’t read my book on the topic, product-led SEO means you build the entire product around the user that will arrive from a search engine rather than just create content in the hopes that a search engine will rank it and a user will click.)
For most companies revenue from search engine channels WILL decrease as the new search engine changes roll out. Denying that fact will not prevent that reality.
A pivot to being product-led and by extension user-led will signal to all stakeholders from investors to customers that a company is adapting to the shifting landscape. At present the future is as uncertain as the price of bitcoin in a year from now, but the one constant will be that users will continue using search engines to discover answers to life’s most interesting questions. (ChatGPT is a search engine even if it looks different than Google).
Adopting a product-led approach also means acknowledging that reality has changed and strategies need to be built around this new paradigm. Products need to be developed or updated that help position a company in a chat result. In addition, rather than complain about the past there needs to be a focus on advocacy to defend plagiarism by chatbots. (This will be even more prevalent when the engines begin to monetize against the content they used others to help create). Lastly, conversion funnels will inevitably need to be adjusted to account for users arriving in a new unpredictable buying funnel.
Old SEO is in the past
Today, much of the industry's best practices are driven around keywords and where websites "rank" on those keywords. Therefore, most of the revenue in the search industry is focused on tools that help discover those keywords, tools that report on keywords, and services that help increase rankings on keywords. The new search experience with generative AI moves away from keywords towards the AI prompts we have all been hearing about for the last few months since the launch of ChatGPT. This means that the primary use of these tools and services are on the brink of obsoletion.
It is the tools and the keyword that underpin SEO on the chopping block and not SEO. Much of the inefficiency that required the need for SEO in the past will change, but the role of SEO will still be to promote sites and products via a search engine channel.
SEO will never truly die until the day users stop searching and while that is unlikely to happen in the near term, search and SEO will irrevocably change on the day the new search experience launches. The ability to prompt AI to generate personal responses rather than being forced into bucketed search queries will allow users to experience their own search and discovery journeys.
In my book, Product-Led SEO, I argued for this focus over the last two years; however, for most businesses, it was nearly impossible to break the keyword addiction. Many companies I met since the publication of my book aspired to do SEO in a product-led approach; but could not gather buy-in from executives who needed the weekly ranking reports in their inboxes.
The future pivot
With the future uncertain in how search engines will look but with the comfort that search will still exist, now is the time for product-led SEO. It is time to declare that the user is paramount and search experiences moving forward should be based on the product experience for the search user rather than the medium of the search engine. Search engines will change as will behavior, but the core human desires will always be the same.
TL; DR
I am happy to help think through that pivot towards product-led SEO please reach out if I can be of assistance with any of these new challenges. A year from now, many will look back and wish they had grabbed the opportunities that exist today. Don’t be that person.
Carpe Diem.