“ChatGPT is going to kill SEO, marketing, and even put your toaster out of a job…”
C’mon.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been making waves, and many marketers are in a rush to jump on the bandwagon. I get it. AI is cool, it’s new, it’s sexy, it’s romantic. There’s good reason to be attracted to it.
Will it kill SEO? No.
“I can’t help wondering, will SEO change or die in the near future with all the search engines diving into AI?”
I get asked this a lot lately. A lot, a lot.
I’ve tested ChatGPT and every AI tool before it.
AI tools like this are not new. There have been countless others before it. Less than a year ago, a tool called Jasper was all the rage in SEO like ChatGPT is now.
Is AI cool? Yes.
Is ChatGPT better than the tools before it? Definitely.
But there are both technical and evolutionary reasons that SEO won’t die.
Technical reasons SEO won’t die:
- Someone needs to input the prompts, to hold ChatGPT’s hand to the desired outcome
- Someone needs to revise and quality control the readability
- Someone needs to fact check any claims or data figures
ChatGPT also doesn’t consistently include citing sources it aggregates its info from. Helllloooo, liabilities.
As coincidence would have it, as I was updating this article, ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, has some legal issues of their own. They were just hit with a 157-page lawsuit of upwards of $3,000,000,000 in damages. That’s three billion, with a B. That opens you up to being guilty by proxy use.
After Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT over privacy concerns, these lawsuits, bannings, legislative motions, and tech leaders of the world urging “artificial intelligence labs to pause development,” warning “profound risks to society and humanity,” this is just the beginning of litigation.
Evolutionary reasons SEO won’t die:
Record players died by cassette tapes. Cassettes died by CDs. CDs died by MP3s, etc. But music never died. The vehicles did.
SEO is music, as the core principal of it is helping sell something online. Selling something online will never die. The vehicles will.
Content sites will be impacted first and hardest by AI. Ecommerce sites are less likely, because you can’t buy anything from ChatGPT. And the things it may recommend to buy to solve your problems, it will still take you to the website of the business. And where do you think ChatGPT got the information to make it’s recommendation from? Optimized content on the website, reviews, etc… *cough* SEO metrics.
While ChatGPT references content from existing sites and repurposes it to create it’s “own” content, it does not birth ideas. If anything, this is an opportunity to differentiate yourself.
While so many corner cutters lean too heavily into ChatGPT and regurgitate unoriginal ideas, you can start building your brand by having a voice. Because compelling story tellers build loyal audiences that last forever.
I love the romanticism around AI’s potential, and continue to try every new program as it comes along. However, if you’re writing for the customer first and not just to shortcut/spam/”SEO” content, it often takes longer to stage, draft, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, trash AI produced content than to do it right the first time, manually.
And there is currently no precedence to who even owns the output. Chances are, it’s not you. You didn’t create the output. You used a tool. So you don’t own it.
Again, AI is cool, and it will only get more amazing. Just offering another grounded side to the AI-drunk mania.
ChatGPT is not a magic pill to solve all of your problems.
Rather, the innovations in AI are more comparable to winning the lottery. It’s an amplifier that enhances our productivity, provided that we are already productive. But, if you were lazy and unproductive before AI, you won’t get much further with it. It will probably even degrade what little work ethic you had.
But, if you were happy and had work ethic before it AI, it’s an opportunity to be more efficient and make a greater impact with your lottery winnings.
