Does SEO Still Work With AI? A Straight Answer for Business Owners

Every couple of years someone declares SEO dead. This time it’s AI’s turn to be the executioner. So let’s cut through it.

Does SEO still work with AI in the mix? Absolutely yes. Even though I’m sure that’s not what the majority of business owners want to hear.

There are a lot of SEO experts positioning themselves under shiny new labels, and a lot of business owners who like that positioning. The majority of business owners want to hear that there’s some kind of new strategy, a new magical approach, new secret knowledge that specifically optimizes for AI.

In reality, new SEO is old SEO done well. And that’s not what most entrepreneurs want to hear.

---

Why every “wave” feels like the end

Every wave feels different, and we can’t blame anybody for that. We’re human, and plenty of us don’t like change. So adapting to change, or embracing it, is what feels “different” or “scarier.” There’s nothing wrong with reacting to change.

But SEO is not dead, and it never will be, as long as people search for things. What changes are the tools people use to perform the search. The search itself is still getting performed. And so the optimization still has to happen.

(This is exactly the kind of thing I unpack in my monthly newsletter, which is designed for business owners who want to stay on top of things and keep their stress levels in check.)

Here’s what I’d push back on in almost every article on this topic:

I’m not a big fan of all the AI optimization gurus.

Yes, it’s true there are certain adjustments in optimization. But your SEO expert would have accounted for those adjustments a long time ago if they genuinely understand user behavior, attention spans, and the rest. In other words: if the SEO work has been done well, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

What actually changed

What changed is where SEO people direct their focus.

If you look at the SEO world over the past decade, the vast majority of experts were chasing trends and optimizing for algorithms. Hence “search engine optimization” instead of “user experience optimization.” But the true north of SEO has always been the user.

With the emergence of AI and AI search, what changed is that now we have an AI assistant sitting between the user and the business. And that “assistant” part shifted the focus back to the user.

Think about it. When you use a standard search engine like Google, there’s no thinking, no machine-thinking, happening in between. There’s an algorithm that works by following a strict set of rules, and for years people optimized for that algorithm while ignoring users completely.

What changed now is that we’re back to square one: optimize for the user. There’s a niche of people who now optimize “for AI,” but the reality is that if you optimize for the user, you auto-optimize for AI. It’s always been this way.

“My traffic dropped but my rankings look fine”

Yes, I’ve seen this, and I think it’s a common situation for a lot of websites right now. And it is not bad.

You now have bots (AI) visiting your website to retrieve information and serve their interpretation to the user. Those are generally informational intents, people searching for information. The commercial-intent users, the people who want to buy, are still visiting your website.

What do you do about it? Content. Keep creating content and you’ll be fine.

By the way, here is a still relevant article that I wrote almost a year ago on content creation without professional writers.

What about zero-click and AI Overviews eating my clicks?

Honestly, this is a threat to neither service businesses nor blogs, at least not in the way people fear.

People who want a quick answer to something will go and get it anyway, whether they visit your website or not, and then they’ll leave forever. So they were never your target audience to begin with. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a blog or a service/product business.

Your real audience is people who are genuinely interested in purchasing (commercial intent) or interested in staying up to date (staying informed regularly). Those people will search for your blog or business, land on your site, and scroll through it looking to emotionally connect with it.

So yes, you’ll see a drop in searches and clicks. That’s fine. If you keep delivering value, you’ll be just fine. And if this moment caught you not generating any content or value at all, take it as a good reminder to pick that activity back up.

For some tips on diagnosing your current “not showing up” situation, see this article.

What did NOT change and won’t for the next decade

The one thing that hasn’t changed, and won’t change in the next decade either, is the true purpose of SEO: creating genuinely valuable content. It worked forever, and it’ll keep working for at least that long.

Stay focused on the true north, the user, and you won’t have to react to every new, trendy, shiny SEO technique. Those will prove a disaster with the next algorithm or AI update anyway.

Here’s something people forget, SEO professionals and business owners alike:

traffic = real humans behind the screens.

They fall into this disconnect between the optimization and who they’re optimizing for. The customer is the true north, and always has been, independent of how many layers sit between the customer and the business, whether that’s a search engine, an AI model, or another human searching on behalf of someone else.

And what we know from the data we collect is that AI behaves a lot like a human. It scans through the pages. It “de-ranks” pages that lack clarity or are vague. It quits a website that’s too slow to load. I’d say it’s almost mimicking human behavior.

So it’s not that now is the time to focus more on humans. It always was. The only difference is that now the entire market is asking for it.

GEO, generative engine optimization, AI SEO, LLMO… what actually matters?

Stay true to your customer and you’ll never need those abbreviations. In reality, all those acronyms are just parts of a well-done SEO strategy.

Don’t chase the words. Chase your customers.

Is GEO a genuinely new discipline? No. It’s old SEO done well, wrapped in a fancy new package. There’s nothing new about it. The one shift worth naming is “serve snackable content,” which we already understand from how human attention spans have changed. “Serve more content” and “serve higher-quality content” have always been true. So, again: nothing new.

Now, does optimizing for real customers automatically get you into AI answers? In theory, yes. Optimize for real customers and you automatically optimize for everything else, AI answers included.

In reality, it depends on what “optimizing for real customers” actually means. The biggest chunk of work people skip is white-hat backlinks, simply because it’s a very slow, manual process. That’s the piece of search engine optimization that gets overlooked. We know AI looks for mentions of your brand across the web to confirm you’re a legit company and how reliable you are, and humans do exactly the same thing. So the extra work is usually the PR job that has to be done.

The real challenge: marketing vs. user experience

There’s a popular line that “AI just amplifies whatever your site already is, and if it’s unclear, no optimization saves it.” That statement is a bit wrong. Optimization is exactly for this. To save it.

The main challenge when optimizing a business’s online presence is finding the balance between user experience and marketing messaging.

Businesses want to create their own realities, with their own special look and feel. That translates into marketing copywriting stuffed with fancy words nobody can understand. And while that might create “an elevated feel” when you carefully read every word, it’s also a little disconnected from reality, because in real life, people don’t read every word. They scan through pages looking for one particular thing.

So optimization is often a battle between user experience and marketing. If you go heavy on marketing messaging, then yes, no optimization saves it.

Author’s take

When a business owner comes to me worried AI is killing their visibility, the first thing I look at is user experience, including the content on the website. I’m trying to understand for myself who their target audience is and what that audience expects.

To design a reliable plan forward, I run a complete SEO audit, like everyone else. The one difference: I don’t work inside spreadsheets. My audits are always visual, so it’s easier for the business owner to actually understand what’s going on.

And here’s where I differ from a keyword-and-backlinks SEO person. I see a lot of professionals go deep, hours and hours into keyword data, trying to figure out the best combination and the exact items to focus on. I never go that deep. Not because I can’t, but because it doesn’t make much sense.

Keywords are great, but you don’t need to spend hours researching them and comparing stats. Keywords can guide your content clusters, the group of content pieces you’ll produce, and that’s it. I spend the majority of my optimization time on user experience and content production. That’s where the value is, and I try to spend as much time as possible focused on delivering real value.

Here’s the ideal world I’m working toward:

The first website the customer finds is yours. It naturally sparks their curiosity, and they end up on one of your pages. They know exactly where they are and feel immediate trust and confidence. They easily find the answers to their questions and doubts, and they decide to reach out.

So is SEO worth investing in for your small business in 2026?

It entirely depends on a combination of factors:

1. Market conditions. Are you alone in your niche, or is it highly competitive?
2. Your marketing/sales strategy. Do you have a solid one in place?
3. Your content strategy. Are you planning to generate content, and how often?

If you’re alone in your niche, with a good-enough marketing/sales strategy and a regular cadence of content, I’d actually suggest you postpone investing in an SEO service. You might be doing just fine as you are.

But if you’re in a competitive market with little-to-no marketing strategy and no time to produce content, then an SEO service is exactly the solution you’re looking for.

I’m of the view that an SEO service must solve a real-life problem. It’s not a lifetime must-have subscription. It has to be a service that genuinely serves you.

If you do only one thing

Create more genuinely valuable content.

I wrote a whole article on why your business isn’t showing up on Google, and the one recommendation there is exactly this: do more content. It stays true across the board. It doesn’t matter what your budget is. If there’s one thing to do to start moving the needle, it’s content.

One last thing nobody says out loud

There’s a common misconception that “AI can do it all,” which leads a lot of business owners to wonder, why would I pay someone to do a job AI can do?

In reality, if you spend some time with AI models, you’ll quickly learn that AI without human intervention delivers a very mediocre job, and AI for SEO is no exception. Yes, you absolutely can do mediocre SEO work with AI. And if you have an extremely low budget, that’s probably the way to go, because there’s a real chance AI will do a better job than a $500/mo contractor. (I break pricing down in detail here.)

So I think the market isn’t aware enough that today, humans matter more than ever.

I recently said on social media that we’re transitioning into a world where attention becomes currency.

What I mean is this: experts who dedicate undivided attention to your business will be charging more in the next few years, because the majority will be doing busy work every day while paying zero attention.

And what makes all the difference is exactly that: high-quality attention spent looking at your business.