Why is SEO needed still needed here when AI / LLMs can just conjure up answers with references to valid links, bypassing search engines.
Even privacy based search engines like DuckDuckGo, Brave and Kagi doesn't prioritise 'SEO'.
In short: money. LLMs will no doubt change the implementation, but the commercial dynamics are fundamentally the same. It's expensive to build and run a search engine, whether conventional or LLM-based. Someone has to pay for that - and it's not search users. Advertising and its derivatives have become that revenue source, with all the good and bad that brings with it. As long as that commercial dynamic remains, there'll be SEO or some derivative thereof.
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Other than Kagi - but that's a tiny niche.
SEO isn’t dead but it will slowly die off. Being a reference link is second place but by that point you only get visited if the AI wasn’t trusted or didn’t solve the problem.
Therefore I think viral/word of month or links from other engaged sources will become more relevant.
Right now though why lose out on free SEO traffic just because you used JS to render most of your site?
Alternative search engines must rely on AI themselves to filter out good results, or some form of manual curation by humans, like Kagi's boost/block/pin feature.
I hope nobody is using ChatGPT to query for information. This is how you get hallucinations.