generative AI is changing SEO as a career //

The SEO industry is about to undergo a revolution, but not as you might expect.

Your day-today SEO job will most likely look very different in the next few years. Are bots going replace you?

Britney Muller said “absolutely not” and Dave Davies, the Amplification Team Leader at Weights and Biases, agreed. There’s no doubt that the industry is changing.

How will generative AI affect SEO and how can you stay on top of it? Muller and Davies discussed generative AI, the future of SEO and Advanced.

AI does not replace SEO

Muller insisted that AI was not coming to SEO jobs. She did mention that the SEO industry will have to adapt based on how Google integrates AI into its search results.

• AI is not the end-all-be-all. “I think that the luster will begin to fade as we see how large language models (LLMs), and the additional work required to make things good, are limited.
• Researchers have not yet figured out all the problems with LLMs. These are not facts, but are based on a probabilistic distribution.
• “Google does information retrieval well in search. I think LLMs would be a great addition to better define questions and provide additional information.”

Technical SEOs have a distinct advantage

Davies said that SEOs who specialize in technical SEO may be better equipped to deal with the changes that generative AI will bring than those who specialize in content SEO.

• John Mueller, a Google employee, said that technical SEO is important so long as computers can read websites. “I think that sums up exactly the kind of world we are heading to now.”
• “I believe technical SEOs will have an edge – but eventually content SEO will follow. Just change it. “I think the structure they will be optimizing will change.”

Links may evolve

Davies and Muller both agreed that in the future, links could take on a different form and be less of a ranking factor. Mentions or references of a website may be more valuable than traditional links. As Davies explained:

• I don’t think link building is dead but its value will be drastically altered. It might look different from the traditional links we use today, but it will still be useful.
• Think about how LLMs in this space are constructed. To make connections, they use tokens and relationships. These things are still important.”
• “The entire mission of neural networks is establishing understanding between different things. I believe this will still have weight, but it may not look as specific and precise as links and link-building. Maybe it should be mentioned instead? Maybe it can evolve into something else.

Customization is essential.

Muller says that SEOs must master AI customization quickly to get the best results. A fine-tuning approach based on data and goals is more important than a one-size fits all approach.

• You need to learn how to implement prompts strategically, and customize them. Andrew Ng, in partnership with Open AI has just released a great course that explains these key concepts beautifully. Muller added, “I would recommend that you check it out.”
• “ChatGPT has an API you can use for customizing prompts.” It’s a great way to make things easier for me, my team, and my clients.

Save time on content creation

Many SEOs are exploring the use of generative AI to create content, such as headlines, product description and articles. Davies noted that there are concerns about the quality of responses. However, this could be improved over time.

• “Generative AI can write quite well. Does it always get it right? No. Right now, it’s just a hack. This will help me speed up tasks I used to do manually, such as identifying entities on a webpage.
• “I still have to use my brain, and say OK, [generative AI] has missed this or that. Then I need to check the facts. “It saves me about half an hour for each piece of research.”

Search can expand beyond web pages

Search may soon move beyond the pages of the internet to new environments.

• “I think that in the next five to ten years we will see two very different landscapes.” Davies stated that he believes search will decrease a bit and move to, I won’t say Metaverse but different environments which don’t currently exist.

Code Simplification

Muller uses ChatGPT as a code-assistant extensively, and highlights that it is particularly adept at tasks such as generating Python scripts.

• “It’s important to note that code is by its very nature supposed to be unambiguous. Human language is not. So generative AI, to my mind, is much better at generating accurate outputs, whether I am trying to create a Python program script or a pandas file to clean data. It is phenomenal at these tasks.”

Use with caution

Although generative AI is set to transform SEO, it is important that the technology is used correctly. This is why Muller does not believe this technology will end SEO as a professional career. Not yet.

• “Generative AI is a model of prediction based on probability distribution. If you think it has only read 100 sci-fi books and then ask it a question about medicine, it won’t do well. It might be able to create a sci-fi hero,” Muller said.
• “Given this context, generative artificial intelligence is only as good and accurate as the information and text it is trained on. This is problematic, because ChatGPTs and LLMs have been trained on the entire Internet, which may not be the best source to get factual information, or represent marginalized people and topics.
• These models do not have emotions. They don’t reason. They do not have the same logic as humans. You have to be very careful how you use these tools, as it is easy to automate your bias by simply asking a question.

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