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Celebrate the Holidays with some of SEJs best articles of 2023.

Our Festive Flashback series runs from December 21 January 5, featuring daily reads on significant events, fundamentals, actionable strategies, and thought leader opinions.

2023 has been quite eventful in the SEO industry and our contributors produced some outstanding articles to keep pace and reflect these changes.

Catch up on the best reads of 2023 to give you plenty to reflect on as you move into 2024

It happens every couple of years.

First, it was Jason Calacanis and Mahalo, then the early social platforms.

We saw it again with voice search and smart assistants. For a minute, it was TikToks turn. Then the metaverse jumped the line.

Now, its ChatGPT and AI.

Im talking, of course, about SEO killers.

Every now and then, a new technology comes along, and three things inevitably happen:

Rinse, repeat.

It would seem that search has more lives than a cartoon cat, but the simple truth is: Search is immortal.

How we search, what devices we use, and whether the answer is a link to a website will forever be up for debate.

But as long as users have tasks to complete, theyll turn somewhere for help, and digital marketers will influence the process.

Theres a ton of hype right now about AI replacing both search engines and search professionals I dont see that happening. I view ChatGPT as just another tool.

Much like a knife: You can butter bread or cut yourself. Its all in how you use it.

Will AI replace search engines? Lets ask it ourselves!

Thats a pretty good answer.

Many SEO professionals (including me) have been saying for years that the days of tricking the algorithm are long gone.

SEO has been slowly morphing into digital marketing for a long time now. Its no longer possible to do SEO without considering user intent, personas, use cases, competitive research, market conditions, etc.

Ok, but wont AI just do that for us? Is AI going to take my job? Heres a crazy idea: Lets ask ChatGPT!

Why? Lets dive in.

I still see a lot of SEO pros writing articles that ask AI to do things its simply incapable of and this comes from a basic understanding of how large language models actually work.

AI tools, like ChatGPT, arent pulling any information from a database of facts. They dont have an index or a knowledge graph.

They dont store information the way a search engine does. Theyre simply predicting what words or sentences will come next based on the material theyve been trained on. They dont store this training material, though.

Theyre using word vectors to determine what words are most likely to come next. Thats why they can be so good and also hallucinate.

AI cant crawl the internet. It has no knowledge of current events and cant cite sources because it doesnt know or retain that information. Sure, you can ask it to cite sources, but its really just making stuff up.

For really popular topics that were discussed a lot, it can get pretty close because the probabilities of those words coming next are really high but the more specific you get, the more it will hallucinate.

Given the extreme amount of time and resources it takes to train the model, it will be a long time before AI can answer any queries about current events.

Yes and no. They can cite sources, but thats based on how theyre implementing it. To vastly oversimplify, Bing isnt asking for a pure chatbot.

Bing is searching for your query/keyword. It then feeds in all the webpages that it would normally return for that search and asks the AI to summarize those webpages.

You and I cant do that on the public-facing AI tools without hitting token limits, but search engines can!

I disagree.

All the way back in 2009 (when we were listening to the Black Eyed Peas on our iPhone 3Gs and updating our MySpace top 8 on Windows Vista), a search engine once called Live was being renamed to Bing.

Why? Because Bing is a verb. This prompted Bill Gates to declare, The future of search is verbs.

I love to share this quote with clients every chance I get because that future is now.

Gates wasnt talking about people typing action words into search engines. He meant that people are trying to do something, and the job of search is to help facilitate that.

People often forget that search is a form of pull marketing, where users tell us what they want not push marketing like a billboard or a TV ad.

As digital marketers, our job is simple: Give users what they want.

This is where the confusion comes in, though.

For many queries that have simple answers, a link to a website with a popup cookie policy, notification alert, newsletter sign-up popup, and ads were never what the user wanted.

Its just the best thing we had back then. Search engines never set out with the end goal of providing links to websites. They set out to answer questions and help users accomplish tasks.

Even from the earliest days, Google talked about how its goal was to be the Star Trek computer; it just didnt have the technology to do it then. Now, it does.

For many of these queries, like [how old is Taylor Swift?] or [how many megabytes in a gigabyte?], websites will lose traffic but its traffic they were probably never entitled to.

Who owns that answer anyway? These are questions with simple answers. The users task is simply to get a number. They dont want a website.

Smart SEO pros will focus on the type of queries where a user wants to do something like buy Taylor Swift tickets, get reviews of her album or concerts, chat with other Swifties, etc. Thats where AI wont be able to kill SEO or search.

ChatGPT can accomplish a lot of things.

Its good at showing me how to write an Excel formula or MySQL query, but it will never teach me MySQL, sell me a course, or let me talk with other developers about database theory.

Those are things a search engine can help me do.

ChatGPT can also help answer many common knowledge questions, as long as the topic isnt contested and is old and popular enough to have shown up in the training data.

Even then, its still not 100% accurate as weve seen in countless memes and with one famous bank being called out for its AI-written article not knowing how to calculate interest properly.

AI might list the most talked about bars in NYC, but it cant recommend the best place to get an Old Fashioned like a human can.

Honestly, all SEO pros talking about using AI to create content are starting to bore me. Answering questions is neat, but where ChatGPT really excels is in text manipulation.

At my agency, were already using ChatGPTs API as an SEO tool to help create content briefs, categorize and cluster keywords, write complicated regular expressions for redirects, and even generate XML or JSON-LD code based on given inputs.

These rely on tons of inputs from various sources and require lots of manual reviews.

Were not using it to create content, though. Were using it to summarize and examine other pieces of content and then use those to glean insights. Its less of an SEO replacement and more of a time saver.

What if your business is built around displaying facts you dont really own? If so, you should probably be worried not just about AI.

Boilerplate copy tasks may be handled by AI. Recent tests Ive done on personal sites have shown some success here.

But AI will never be capable of coming up with insights or creating new ideas, staying on top of the latest trends, or providing the experience, expertise, authority, or trust that a real author can.

Remember: Its not thinking, citing, or even pulling data from a database. Its just looking at the next-word probabilities.

Unlike thousands of SEO pros who recently updated their Twitter bios, I may not be an expert on AI, but I have a computer science degree. I also know what it takes to understand user needs.

So far, no data shows people would prefer auto-generated, re-worded content over unique curated content written by a real human being.

People want fresh ideas and insights that only people can provide. (If we add an I to E-E-A-T, where should it go?)

If your business or content delivers value through insights, curation, current trends, recommendations, solving problems, or performing an action, then SEO and search engines arent going anywhere.

They may change shape from time to time, but that just means job security for me and Im good with that.

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Featured Image: Elnur/Shutterstock

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Will AI Kill SEO? We Asked ChatGPT (Festive Flashback) - Search Engine Journal