In late 2019, I became obsessed with search engine optimization and digital marketing. I’ve run forums and web applications since 2009 and knew of the importance of SEO, but I needed to dedicate more time to really have an intimate understanding. Once covid became an unstoppable force mid 2020 I found myself with more time to research and learn about the mystical world of digital marketing. After I completed some course work and had a couple certifications under my belt–I believed I was ready.
I spun up Semrush and made my reports. The company I was working for needed a marketing department. They had an aggressive outside sales team and did not need marketing, so they thought. I was a man on a mission, out to prove something to myself, and I succeeded. After several meetings with the director of operations, who I would later report to, the director of business development, and the president, they agreed to give this digital marketing idea a shot.
Oh boy, It worked a little too well. The whole damn process was nearly automated a year later. With that marketing automation came growth, and lots of it. Part of that success came from leveraging large language models for content generation. It wasn’t just gibberish that I pushed out; no, the content answered questions potential clients were asking. LLMs just made it possible to scale that high quality content. I wasn’t the only who did this, oh no. Many digital marketing professionals were taking advantage of this amazing technology. That is when I got hooked, bit, taken away on a magic carpet ride by language models.
“We don’t know what a good answer is because the world is complex, but we stop thinking that when we see these direct answers.“
The Dilemma of the Direct Answer – Benno Stein, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Fast forward a couple of years to the release of ChatGPT. I previously worked with OpenAI’s GPT-3 for content generation, and in November of 2022, ChatGPT was unleashed upon the digital realm. That is when I saw the complete change of the SEO and digital marketing landscape going forward. In marketing, you cast a wide net of value proposition. You make this net very easy for fish to get caught in by eliminating objections and proving that your product or service has the potential to be the best fit for the reader.
A chat model that is tied to a search engine is just the beginning—direct simple answers with the opportunity to continue the conversation, intelligent conversations too. As of 2024, Chat models still have their issues and are not correct a lot of the time. But hey, any SEO professionals out there reading this post will acknowledge the quiet part to themselves, “Most search engine results are SEO’ed spam content anyway.” I mean, you reader, have you noticed that Google search results have been absolutely terrible as of late, or even worse?
“Since users often trust their search engines already, the affiliate inherits this trust as a byproduct of a high ranking,”
the authors wrote. But this also creates tension between affiliates, search providers, and users because affiliates are more likely to design web pages to optimize their rankings as opposed to investing in higher-quality product reviews.
Though webpages that have more affiliate links and are more optimized are more likely to come up in search results, on average, they also “show signs of lower text quality,” the researchers said.
And as content generated by AI continues to flood the internet, the researchers said search engine results are likely to get worse.
Lakshmi Varanasi, Business Insider 2024
Will large language models, ChatGPT, or the next generation of AI be the immediate death of SEO? I say yes and no. No, because it will be a slow burn, and yes, because of how Google and Microsoft prioritize chat in their respective search engines. When Google started displaying answers to questions instead of websites in their results, you bet that affected businesses who relied on that traffic. It will be a slow burn because people still trust their search engines and I believe they see AI as their exit strategy when people start to lose that trust. Eh, but what do I know? Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Rich
