“I found it useful when talking about things like AI in search results or combined with search results where SEOs, I feel initially, when they think about this topic, think, “Oh, this AI is this big magic box and nobody knows what is happening in there.
And, when you talk about kind of the retrieval augmented part, that’s basically what SEOs work on, like making content that’s crawlable and indexable for Search and that kind of flows into all of these AI overviews.
So I kind of found that angle as being something to show, especially to SEOs who are kind of afraid of AI and all of these things, that actually, these AI-powered search results are often a mix of the existing things that you’re already doing. And it’s not that it suddenly replaces crawling and indexing.”
Mueller is correct that the traditional process of indexing, crawling, and ranking still exists, keeping SEO relevant and necessary for ensuring websites are discoverable and optimized for search engines.
However, the Googlers avoided discussing the obvious situation today, which is the thousands of large and small publishers in the greater web ecosystem that have been wiped out by Google’s AI algorithms on the backend.
The Real Impacts Of AI On Search
What’s changed (and wasn’t addressed) is that the important part of AI in Search isn’t the one on the front end with AI Overviews. It’s the part on the back-end making determinations based on opaque signals of authority, topicality and the somewhat ironic situation that an artificial intelligence is deciding whether content is made for search engines or humans.
Organic SERPs Are Explicitly Obsolete
The traditional ten blue links have been implicitly obsolete for about 15 years but AI has made them explicitly obsolete.
Natural Language Search Queries
The context of search users who ask precise conversational questions within several back and forth turns is a huge change to search queries. Bing claims that this makes it easier to understand search queries and provide increasingly precise answers. That’s the part that unsettles SEOs and publishers because , let’s face it, a significant amount of content was created to rank in the keyword-based query paradigm, which is gradually disappearing as users increasingly shift to more complex queries. How content creators optimize for that is a big concern.
Backend AI Algorithms
The word “capricious” means the tendency to make sudden and unexplainable changes in behavior. It’s not a quality publishers and SEOs desire in a search engine. Yet capricious back-end algorithms that suddenly throttle traffic and subsequently change their virtual minds months later is a reality.
Is Google Detached From Reality Of The Web Ecosystem?
Industry-wide damage caused by AI-based algorithms that are still “improving” have unquestionably harmed a considerable segment of the web ecosystem. Immense amounts of traffic to publishers of all sizes has been wiped out since the increased integration of AI into Google’s backend, an issue that the recent Google Search Off The Record avoided discussing.
Many hope Google will address this situation in 2025 with greater nuance than their CEO Sundar Pichai who struggled to articulate how Google supports the web ecosystem, seemingly detached from the plight of thousands of publishers.
Maybe the question isn’t whether SEO is on a dying path but whether publishing itself is in decline because of AI on both the backend and the front of Google’s search box and Gemini apps.
Check out these related articles:
Google CEO’s 2025 AI Strategy Deemphasizes The Search Box
Google Gemini Deep Research May Erode Website Earnings
Google CEO: Search Will Change Profoundly In 2025
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI Generator