What AI means for the future of SEO [Expert Tips & Interview]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rewriting the playbook of so much of our lives — how we interact, how we learn, how we complete daily tasks, and sometimes even what we eat for dinner. So, of course, AI and the future of SEO are no different.

It’s been just over three years since ChatGPT took the internet by storm. While AI was technically nothing new in modern consumer (and marketer) lives, this level of AI had never been so accessible to the general public before, and they certainly haven’t taken it for granted. According to McKinsey, half of Google’s results already have AI-powered results, and trends predict that number to hit 75% by 2028.

What does this mean for marketers? We’ll unpack how AI and SEO are converging, how AI has changed consumer behavior, and what it holds for the future of SEO.

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GWI actually found that 31% of Gen Zers already prefer using AI platforms or chatbots to find information online, while research from Semrush predicts that LLM traffic will pass traditional Google search by the end of 2027.

On top of that, HubSpot research found that 79% of those already using AI for search believe it actually offers a better experience than traditional search engines. Clearly, consumer search behavior and preferences are shifting, and artificial intelligence plays a large role in this.

AI has changed search engines.

Seeing the popularity of AI platforms, Google began rolling out several generative AI-powered features, such as AI overviews and “AI Mode,” that offer more chatbot-like experiences than traditional search results pages.

Google reports that over 27% of searches now end without a click as users get what they need directly from these features. And the traffic implications are significant.

Zero-click searches have climbed from 56% to nearly 69% of queries from May 2024 to May 2025, while search referral traffic to 1,000 tracked web domains fell from 12 billion visits in June 2024 to 11.2 billion in June 2025, according to SimilarWeb’s Annual Digital 100 Report.

With AI overviews taking up about 42% of desktop screens and 48% on mobile, organic listings are further down the page, so even once “high-ranking”, highly visited, high-quality content marketing is getting ignored.

Understandably, that makes anxiety a bit high for us marketers, so we’ve had to adapt.

Pro tip: Use HubSpot’s free AI Search Grader to check how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines and identify where you can improve.

AI has changed search engine optimization.

A Semrush analysis of 200,000+ keywords reported that nearly 95% of keywords triggering AI Overviews have no paid ads or minimal commercial value. In other words, it seems Google is deploying AI summaries mainly for informational searches, while keeping transactional content in the traditional SERP format.

Why does that matter? Well, it means the website traffic most at risk is top-of-funnel educational content that typically grabs a lot of clicks for businesses and builds brand awareness — and Google gets to protect its ad revenue. Clever if you’re Google, cruel if you’re a marketer.

But there are ways to fight back.

Marketers need to incorporate answer engine optimization (AEO) into their strategies to help their businesses appeal to AI features in search engines and generative engine optimization (GEO) to cater to generative AI — but those are not the only ways their SEO is pivoting.

Keyword Research and Topic Discovery for AI Search

Old school keyword research focused on matching exact phrases and measuring search volume and keyword difficulty. Keyword research for AI search encompasses intent mapping, topic clustering, and, most importantly, conversational query analysis.

You’ve likely heard it a lot lately — People engage with AI more like they do with other people than they do with search engines. Instead of typing “ice cream shop nyc” (A regular query for me and my sweet tooth), they’d likely say, “What’s the ice cream shop near me?”

Pew Research Center confirms, finding that longer, question-format queries are most likely to generate AI Overview responses.

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Because of this, marketers need to structure keyword strategies around “what,” “how,” “why,” and “best” queries.

Pro Tip: Build an inventory of the questions your audience typically asks during the buyer’s journey. Connect with sales and customer service to understand the questions they field regularly in each stage.

Mine AnswerThePublic and Google‘s “People Also Ask” (PAA) boxes for your core topics. These reveal what users want answered and what Google’s algorithm considers relevant.

In a very meta twist, many AI tools are also emerging to help marketers optimize for AI.

HubSpot’s Breeze, Semrush‘s Copilot, and Ahrefs’ AI Content Helper, for example, have features to help analyze search intent at scale, identify content gaps, and generate topic clusters that map to the full buyer journey — including the conversational, long-tail queries that AI Overviews most frequently address.

HubSpot’s Content Hub, in particular, is great for building topic clusters that map keywords to buyer intent and create content that earns citations across both traditional and AI search.

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Content Optimization for Machine Learning

Quality is very much a factor in AI and SEO success. Google evaluates websites using its E-E-A-T quality framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), and Google is one of the many sources AI consults in crafting its answers.

AI tries to generate the most helpful, factual answers possible. Making sure your content references trusted sources and thought leaders, and even shares original research and data when possible, is a great way to appeal to this.

In fact, Digital Marketing Institute has found that content enriched with credible citations and statistics improves AI visibility by 30-40% compared to baseline approaches.

Thankfully, AI tools can help you with both content structure and quality. How’s so?

Ask ChatGPT for feedback on how to improve an article draft to better reach a specific audience. It can also help you brainstorm topics, identify knowledge gaps, write metadata, source data, create visual aids, and even proofread for you.

Heck, I used Claude for ideas on this article’s title.

For existing content, try asking your AI system of choice to identify where information has gone stale, suggest updated statistics, and recommend structural changes to improve E-E-A-T signals.

Rather than creating net-new content on every topic, AI tools like HubSpot’s Content Remix can even help you repurpose and optimize content for other media. Learn about more useful AI SEO tools here.

Of course, you always want to review and edit any work you generate with generative AI, but nearly 70% of companies report better returns after integrating it into their SEO and content workflows.

Read: Is AI-Generated Content Good for SEO?: 300+ Web Strategists Weigh In

Technical SEO Automation

Technical SEO is also a big factor in catering to LLMs. Machine learning systems, both Google’s and the LLMs powering AI answers, favor content with specific structural characteristics.

More specifically, content with proper schema markup, clear headings, concise paragraphs that directly answer questions, and FAQ sections all improve a page’s “extractability” for AI. As a result, marketers should lean more heavily on structured data, header optimization, and overall page formatting.

Platforms like Screaming Frog, Semrush, and Ahrefs (the fave here on the HubSpot blog team) now also use machine learning to automatically crawl sites, identify issues (broken links, duplicate content, slow page speed, missing schema), and prioritize fixes by estimated impact.

What I can personally confirm: what once required hours of manual audit work can now be flagged, triaged, and assigned in minutes.

Pro Tip: Make sure AI crawlers can access your content. Some sites inadvertently block AI bots through robots.txt rules or JavaScript rendering issues. Generative engine optimization (GEO) guides from Search Engine Land emphasize that content must be technically accessible and machine-readable to have any chance of appearing in AI-generated answers.

In an interview with fellow HubSpotter Curt del Principe, Amanda Sellers, Manager of EN Blog Growth, shared her top takeaways for marketers looking to adapt to AI and the future of SEO:

1. Lean into original, comprehensive data.

“It’s not enough to produce evergreen, factual content anymore because ChatGPT can arguably do that,” Sellers explains. “You want to create content that is citation-worthy.”

A large part of this comes back to how comprehensive your content and answers are. AI reads detail as deeper knowledge and, in turn, credibility worth citing. So don’t just scratch the surface on a topic. Dig deep.

Sellers continues, “While LLMs craft their answers from many sources, you‘re much more likely to help shape the answer if you’re cited as a source. Original data and thought leadership help here.”

That means it’s even better if other websites cite you as their data source. Seeing your information cited and backlinked vouches for your authority even in the eyes of your competitors.

2. Prioritize structure and context.

“Design content with structure in mind,” advises Sellers.

As we’ve discussed, “AI retrieves content in chunks and doesn’t ‘understand’ information the way a human would. Writing content in semantically rich sections and strengthening semantic association increases the likelihood of good retrieval and, in effect, visibility.”

What does semantic richness look like?

• AI-powered search engines change how content is discovered and ranked
• Marketers use AI tools for keyword research, content optimization, and technical SEO
• HubSpot’s Breeze suite provides AI-powered tools for SEO and content optimization

It’s statements that are clear and direct; that define explicitly correlations and relationships.

Pro tip: HubSpot Content Hub can help you create structured templates at scale so your team can produce AEO-optimized content more quickly.

3. Expand your presence.

The more often people hear or see things, the more we commit them to memory. AI and LLMs work similarly; the more they see a source mentioned or active across authoritative contexts on the web, the more likely they are to trust them and cite them.

In other words, LLMs are more likely to treat your content as credible and worth citing if your brand is cited in reputable industry publications, discussed in high-quality forums, and referenced in academic or government sources, among other things.

This isn’t just about backlinks and footnotes, however. It’s about establishing proof that your brand is a legitimate subject-matter expert across many different online territories. Think other publications, forums, review sites, and social media platforms.

Here’s what you can do:

• Publish thought leadership posts or articles on LinkedIn.
• Create educational video content for YouTube.
• Participate in relevant Reddit communities and Quora discussions.
• Guest blog on reputable publications or being quoted/mentioned by them.
• Create original research and data visualizations that attracts citations.
• Be interviewed or featured by other trusted sources.

Multi-channel diversification is also built into the Loop Marketing playbook in the Amplify stage. Learn more about it here.

Pro tip: Content Remix can help you with this repurposing in one click.

4. Establish your credibility.

Expanding your presence across the web also helps establish you as a credible expert in your field, but our efforts shouldn’t end there. Showcase your awards, accolades, and social proof on your website.

That means:

• Industry awards
• Relevant company history and experience
• Relevant degrees, certificates, and licenses
• Customer testimonials
• Ratings & reviews
• Case studies

All of these add to your lore as valuable resource to your target audience, search engines, and AI systems.

5. Don’t forget about SEO.

“Feed two birds with one scone,” advises Sellers. “LLMs rely on Google’s index for now, so good AEO is dependent on good SEO. Invest in strategies that will help content rank on search and also increase AI visibility.

For example, think about positioning and the unique things your publication can offer that can’t be found elsewhere. That could mean the input of an expert in your field, industry data your company already collects, or even just a fun tone readers come back for.

While AI systems don’t emphasize differentiation, SEO does. So, creating content that also offers unique value from other sources will help you in both arenas.

SEO for AI — sometimes called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — is the practice of optimizing content to appear in AI-generated answers from platforms like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

While traditional SEO focuses on ranking in search results, AI SEO focuses on appearing in or being cited as a trusted source in AI-generated summaries. But the two are closely related. Both look for accurate, up-to-date, and comprehensive content, an easy-to-follow structure, and technical accessibility, but vary in how.

AI SEO, for instance, favors structured data implementation, a modular content architecture designed for easy extraction, and a presence on authoritative third-party sources when citing pages.

Is SEO still worth it with AI? Is SEO still relevant with AI?

100%. Traditional SEO remains relevant alongside AI-driven strategies. According to Ahrefs, Google still sends 345x more traffic than ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity combined as of September 2025. But the space is evolving.

Organic traffic is likely to become harder to come by as AI preferences expand, but brand visibility, authority, and citations in AI answers will likely prove important throughout the buyer’s journey.

Furthermore, SEO is essentially the foundation on which AI search visibility is built. AI systems like Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity pull primarily from content that has already established authority and trust through traditional SEO signals. More than 99% of AI Overview sources come from pages already ranking in the top 10 organic results.

SEO now needs to optimize for both traditional search results and AI-generated answers simultaneously — not one of the other.

Sites that have strong technical SEO and high-quality authoritative content are best positioned to earn AI citations. Sites that have neglected these fundamentals are doubly disadvantaged as they rank poorly in traditional search and rarely appear in AI answers.

Can SEO be done with AI?

Like most things in digital marketing, yes, AI can help optimize for search engines.

AI tools can assist with:

• keyword research and topic clustering
• content brief generation
• on-page optimization recommendations
• technical audit automation
• meta description and title tag drafting
• content performance analysis.

While AI is a powerful tool for SEO, it should enhance human expertise, not replace it. The winning formula is AI for scale and efficiency, humans for expertise and differentiation.

HubSpot’s Breeze tools are designed around this idea, giving marketing teams AI capabilities that amplify their expertise rather than substitute for it.

What is the relationship between AI and SEO?

Today, AI and SEO are linked in several ways.

First, AI is shifting consumer search behavior. Second, AI is reshaping how search engines work: Google, Bing, and emerging platforms use machine learning throughout their ranking algorithms, and generative AI now powers the summaries and overviews users see before organic results. Third, AI has become a core tool within SEO practice — from automated audits to content optimization and competitive analysis.

TLDR: AI is both the environment SEO practitioners work in, and one of the most powerful tools they use to do their work.

Are recent SEO shifts due to AI?

“I believe that the ‘Helpful Content’ algorithm update (and the broader emphasis on EEAT) is in direct response to AI content creation,” says Sellers. If you’re unfamiliar, she’s talking about a massive update Google made in late 2022 to the algorithm that chooses its search rankings.

That kicked off a long series of additional updates 2023-2025 that aimed to promote content that met Google’s guidelines for quality: Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (or EEAT) and roll out AI overviews, AI mode, and more.

The goal of EEAT is simple: To make sure that the most valuable content for humans shows up in the search results, instead of content made to please search engines.

“In theory, generative AI becoming accessible for content creators and website owners means an opening of the floodgates for more content proliferation.” But more content doesn’t necessarily mean better content, especially for consumers.

“Generative AI is very good at providing evergreen, objective information (and regurgitating stances that already exist),” Sellers emphasizes. “It’s less good at providing opinions, unique stances, emotional reflection, or first-party research.”

And those are the qualities that are winning in the traditional search rankings right now. Qualities that tend to only come from real-life human experience.

So we’re seeing changes in response to AI, but what about changes driven by AI?

Is AI-powered search changing SEO?

Coming from the front line, most marketers would say very likely, yes.

Though it still dominates globally, holding roughly 89% of the search engine market, Google’s search market share dipped below 90% for the first time since 2015 in early 2025. This drop is suspected to be thanks to AI search, as AI traffic began to appear in analytics.

However, it’s worth noting many searches that can be satisfied by ChatGPT would likely have been zero-click searches anyway, meaning the user would have gotten their answer straight from the search results page without ever clicking through to your site.

Plus, Google launched its own Search Generative Experiment (SGE) features in response to the rise in ChatGPT, so even the remaining 89% doesn’t result in the same click or website visit traditional search did.

Has AI changed search behavior?

“Changes in search behavior are difficult to quantify,” Sellers cautions. “Especially since these kinds of macro behavioral changes are slow and widespread.”

“I am starting to see demand loss on some queries where I suspect ChatGPT could probably be more helpful than a blog post,” she says. “But with all the volatility, it’s hard to say if AI adoption is the main cause of the loss.”

So, while behavioral shifts are definitely happening, they are currently slow.

What is happening is a significant rise in zero-click searches, and that‘s largely being driven by Google’s own AI Overviews rather than users leaving for ChatGPT. Organic click-through rates dropped to 40.3%, while for news-related queries specifically, zero-click outcomes rose from 56% to 69% year-over-year as AI Overviews rolled out more broadly.

While that’s bad news for raw traffic numbers, optimizing for AI search results can still go a long way in boosting your brand’s visibility and awareness — especially since early data suggests AI-referred visitors convert at significantly higher rates than traditional organic traffic.

Which makes a lovely segue to the question of how SEO fits into a larger marketing strategy — a question that existed long before AI jumped in to complicate things.

Does AI shift the balance of organic vs. non-organic marketing strategies?

“It’s never good practice to put all your eggs in one basket, however powerful that basket is,” Sellers says. “This is an opinion I held before widespread AI adoption, and it’s an opinion I’ll continue to hold.”

(For SEOs, this is an opinion often learned after getting burned by an algorithm update.)

“Google is [still] a powerful channel for blogs because organic search (the behavior) is ongoing and repeatable — which makes it very easy to scale and get performance.”

That’s in contrast to channels like email, paid ads, or social media, which require constant attention (or constant budget). But is AI changing the impact of those levers?

“I think that the effectiveness of Google as a channel is decreasing,” admits Sellers. “But the funny thing is… It’s been continually decreasing for my entire career as a content SEO. The introduction of featured snippets, increasing the real estate for Google Ads, the introduction of images and video on the [results page], the rise of zero-click searches … have all reduced the effectiveness of the channel.”

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And yet, Google still leads the way.

“We adapt and make new strategies in the wake of those things and still see an incredible volume of demand from search as a result,” Sellers says. “The same will happen through the AI boom.”