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Is SEO dying in an AI world?
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Have you been using ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity instead of Google lately? Or do you stop the search when you get the answer directly in “AI Overviews” in Google?
Then you're not alone. Many predict the end for Google in an era where search moves from traditional results pages to AI assistants that just give you the answer. The question is therefore natural: Is SEO dying in an AI world?
Not quite. Or on the contrary, many would say.
As long as humans search for something, there will be a need for it to show up in the results. AI assistants still function as search engines -- they retrieve, assess, and present information. Thus, SEO is not lost, but expanded to a new surface.
Figures from a study by Rand Fishkin and Semrush in 2024 actually show that Google searches increased by over 20% in the past year, and the search engine is still gaining 373 times more traffic than ChatGPT. SEO has been “dying” for 15 years, and will probably be referred to as “dying” for another 15 years — but the pulse is stronger than ever.
An interesting development is that the latest AI models, such as the GPT-5 behind ChatGPT, are trained on more quality-assured datasets with a stronger emphasis on reasoning. When the model lacks up-to-date information, it often uses search through third-party services — with sources and references sourced from the web.
That means AI assistants, in many cases, build responses directly on search results. If ChatGPT uses search engines, SEO is still relevant.
SEO is changing character, and new terms are emerging: AEO, GEO, AIO and LMO. The most commonly used designation today is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
AEO is about making content understandable and attractive to AI models, so they choose your content when they give users answers. In practice, this means to:
A AEO-audit is a further development of an SEO audit, adapted to an AI-centric search landscape. It reveals weaknesses and opportunities for increased visibility, both in search engines and in AI chatbots.
In our own whitepaper, we show how entities correlate with visibility in search. The hypothesis is that proper use of entities increases the chance that content is categorized correctly and thus gets higher ranking. Entity analysis is only one part of an AEO audit, but a very important element.
SEO is not dying, but changing. Where we previously optimized for Google alone, now we also need to think about how AI models understand and use their content.
WeAssist have compiled the most effective measures in an analysis that shows how to become visible in both search engines and AI.
SEO is not dead — it lives on in a new form. In an AI world, SEO means ensuring that both search engines and language models understand and use your content. Whoever masters AEO in addition to traditional SEO will stand strongest in the battle for visibility.
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