Is SEO dead?

There are three main reasons why SEO is not dead in the year 2025:

1. Although voice search and conversational AI are growing rapidly, traditional Google Search remains the dominant way people search for answers. Of 1,300 US questioned citizens, only 8% prefer ChatGPT and 74% prefer Google as their primary search engine September 2024 Evercore survey.
2. SEO is the principal condition for affordable SEA. SEO increases the relevance and usefulness of your landing page towards a keyword, which determines Google’s Quality Score. Together with the maximum bid, the Quality Score determines ad rank ⎯ and improving your Quality Score leads to lower CPCs Wordstream.
3. SEO lays the foundations for creating organic traffic via conversational AI and voice search. See below.

This means that investing in SEO and in Google Ads is still very effective. Nevertheless, there are two things marcom specialists must do to make their activities future-proof.

How to future-proof marketing communication in the age of conversational AI?

Content specialists must more or less adapt their SEO activities to ensure content optimization for conversational AI and voice search. See below for AI SEO guidelines.
Advertising specialists must keep an eye on the advertising opportunities that are being developed for conversational AI searches. They must closely collaborate with content specialists to ensure brand mentions in conversational AI applications ⎯ such as ChatGPT, SearchGPT, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.

Is AI SEO significantly different?

Is GEO significantly different from SEO? The answer is twofold. Yes, shifting from keyword-based SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to content-driven GEO (Generative Engine Optimization ⎯ also called AI SEO) requires adaptations. But the transition will be small for some SEO specialists, big for others. This is because inbound marketing specialists are executing many of these GEO practices already.

Effective AI SEO ⎯ and copywriting for generative AI & voice search ⎯ requires prioritizing contextual alignment, content clarity, and advanced formatting.

What is the difference between SEO & GEO?

The transition will be particularly big for the ones that solely chase rankings for individual keywords instead of producing. AI SEO requires them to create high-quality, comprehensive, and contextually rich content that can be easily understood and leveraged by generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Bard, or future SearchGPT platforms.

In addition to context, authority signals become more and more important. But readability — regarding tone as well as structure — search intent matching and website accessibility has become more important than ever.

The importance of context and search intent matching means that AI SEO requires content producers to take a holistic perspective to decide what is of value to the target audience. Luckily, we created clear guidelines for them to follow.

Are our SEO strategies already AI-proof?

Have you ever heard your SEO specialist talking about topic clusters and pillar pages? Then the chances are high that your content already answers the contextual needs of conversational AI & voice search. If your copywriter keeps harping on using simple language, matching the customer journey stage, and providing long-reads, there are just a handful of practices that they need to adopt to make their SEO practices AI-proof & voice search-proof. Here they are.

5 truly new SEO practices regarding generative AI & voice search

• Write answers to topic-related questions of 40-50 words to increase the likelihood of being featured in AI search engine snippets, voice search and conversational AI.
• Use FAQ schema markup. Its importance decreased last year when Google announced that they would only show FAQ rich results from FAQPage structured data for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. But it makes your content much more accessible, useful and relevant for conversational AI bots. Just make it your standard practice again.
• Directly address user questions in your content. Write concise, direct answers to high volume questions at the beginning of your text, instead of at the end. Traditionally, we aimed to keep readers engaged until the end by providing answers to popular questions at the bottom of the web page. AI SEO experts would advise to turn this around, like I did in this article.
• Measure how often your content appears in Featured Snippets via your favorite SEO tool and in AI-generated answers via UTM tracking. For instance, clicks on ChatGPT mentions show up as chatgpt / referral as source / medium.
• Use a standardized prompt to check brand mentions in the most popular applications of generative AI. Do this monthly to check your progress. There are paid SEO AI tools for this, but manual execution is no hassle at all.

SEO, SEA, GEO: a complementary trio

SEO, SEA and GEO are complementary inbound marketing tools which, combined, enable you to maximize your online visibility and attract traffic. To remain future-proof, companies must adapt their SEO activities to conversational AI and voice search requirements and keep an eye on the advertising opportunities that are being developed for conversational AI-searches. Of course, Centagon is here to help you.