AI Isn’t Replacing SEO Because Search Engines Love us Weird Humans

The utter nonsense of the “SEO Is Dead” cheerleaders

For those of us in online marketing – barely a month goes by without someone shouting “X strategy is dead” – “Meta Reels don’t work anymore”, “newsletters don’t work” yada yada – and what it often boils down to is… “I don’t know how to make it work”.

There’s no need to panic, toss in the towel for your website and content creation – because when we look at the facts, we can see SEO is just as important as it always was.

AI Overviews are present in our browsers now when we go to search for something – and, whilst the jury is still out as to whether us consumers like them or not (I’ve seen people asking how to turn these off!) – here’s something that you probably didn’t know:

74% of the links in an AI Overview come from the top 10 pages in the search results.

This means that the majority of websites featured within AI overviews are the same ones that are ranking organically.

Which means… SEO is just as important as it always was – and if you want to get ranked in AI Overviews (GEO) then you need to be ranking highly in the Search Engines just as you did back in 2023.

So, let’s take a further look at the number-crunching regarding AI-generated content and how the search engines view it – and what the search engines are really looking for when it comes to creating content for your customers to consume.

AI Generated Content for SEO – A Layman’s Analysis

• ​74.2% of newly created web pages contained AI-generated content.
• Only 1.74% of newly published pages rank in the top 10 within a year (down from 5.7% in 2017).

When we look at the points above, we can see that the overwhelming majority (74.2%) of newly created webpages are AI-created. As you know if you’ve played about with AI, it throws up junk and unless you very, very, very carefully edit – it’s just that; junk.

But… because only 1.74% of those new pages end up with a good ranking – what we can surmise is that Google (et al) are stamping down hard on the AI junk. Why would the search engines rank your “junk” when they’ve got the LLMs to create their own junk? 

The conclusion we can draw is that original content which ranks high in the search engines has a very big chance of being ranked in AI overviews.

Google’s Smacking Down the AI and Human Generated Content is Winning

In the last section I crunched some numbers to show you what’s actually happening with newly created AI content and how it seems the search engines aren’t rewarding it.

For a while back in 2024, you could get away with generating content from AI, posting it as your own and having it rank.

So, in March 2025 Google started to de-rank AI-generated content – and instead go back to pushing quality and authoritative human-generated content – even if it’s a bit grammatically “wonky”, has spelling mistakes and isn’t “perfect”*.

*I’d argue that AI-generated content is far from perfect too – with its ability to “hallucinate” – i.e., make shit up!

AI Overviews Don’t Rule – and How SEO Still Drives Visibility (Search-ability!)

Because 74% of the links in an AI Overview come from the top 10 pages in the search results we know that to get featured in those AI overviews, it’s essential that your content ranks highly in regular “old-fashioned” page ranking.

Whilst what you see on your Google search looks a little different to how it did a couple of years ago – the information that Google is giving you when you search – still comes from those pages or blog posts with great SEO.

You can chuck out 50 new AI-generated blogs this month – and it’s not going to help your rankings – or your visibility! Visibility just means “getting found” by the right people.

And it doesn’t look like that’s going away any time soon.

So – the SEO fundamentals stay in place:

• Keyword research – use keywords that people are actually searching for. Keyword strategy should be the foundation block of your overall SEO strategy – because, it doesn’t really matter how pretty your site is – if it’s not containing the keywords that your users are actually searching for.
• Page speed – the search engines reward a clean, fast site – and users are fickle, if your site takes aaaaaages (think more than a couple of seconds to load!) – then your users are hitting the back button. I know… it’s a cruel, cruel lack-of-attention world!

ChatGPT and Beyond (Claude, Grok, Gemini et al): Why SEO Thrives in AI Search

Because the AI LLMs (Language Learning Models) have essentially just scraped the entire internet for content (i.e., stole it!) – they’re getting their information from the organic results within the search engines – i.e., anything that was ranked.

And for example, with ChatGPT having a 73% overlap with Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) and relying on those organic results – it’s important that content you’re creating for your customers – is also highly “encouraging” and engaging for those AI bots too.

Which means: clear and intent-driven content.

What is intent-driven content?

In a nutshell – where is the buyer in their cycle?

Wanting to know a little bit more in general about the topic? Leave it to the AI for an overview.

Wanting to go deep, get personal insights and maybe even with an itch to whip out a creditcard?

That’s where you come in with human-generated content.

Let the bots and the newbies do the low-level general stuff.

SEO + Human Imagination = Success

The search engines are strongly looking for evidence that you’re a human being a human, doing weird human shit, talking like a human – and it wants to be like you.

Boo hoo – it’s only a machine and can’t master human emotion – or have a turn of phrase like a real human.

To get ranked either in traditional search engines – or, within an AI overview – you’ve just got to create real content yourself alongside the strong SEO basics on your site.

This is brilliant news for those of you who are touch-typists and love putting your creativity to test.

If you’ve ever used AI to generate content – and I’ll assume you have – it needs an enormous amount of editing before you put it live.

Lots of people are now saying that they’ve trained their own GPTs to sound “just like them” – well, take it from me – a snarky analyst – no, it doesn’t sound human.

There are always tells. And this is why I keep saying to be human. It’s the SPaG errors, the bad spelling, the lost train of thought – and weird anecdotes which really point to that human content.

Would you put your trust in someone who doesn’t do you the service of creating something themselves?

Creating content for content’s sake can be done with AI – but, if you want your potential customers to actually engage with you – and your personality (!) – then they want to see how you tick as a human.

I’m seeing so much AI-generated junk in newsletters I’m signed up for – and even product and service descriptions, that it’s actually turning into a bit of a joke.

Instead of going all “Gordon Gekko” and saying “have your assistant talk to my assistant” – we’ve not got “Have your AI bot talk to my AI bot” – which is total and utter bullshit!

Believe me, anyone churning out AI junk doesn’t deserve my (or your!) dollars!

Good SEO takes grit

Sure you can let AI generate your content – but, as we’ve seen from the stats above – that’s just a massive fucking waste of time – because:-

1. The search engines are just going to ignore it
2. People gonna people – and we can tell when something is AI-generated an we lose faith in the integrity of the person leaning too heavily on AI

Whilst the data from the search engines and the LLMs themselves are telling us that they want us to be human – there’s a lot of screaming about the sky falling in, in terms of SEO.

I’m always telling my kids – that doing the right thing is often not the same as doing the easy thing – which, were we to apply this analogy to website visibility and “going along with the crowd” – would look an awful lot like a) generate garbage, b) generate more garbage, c) generate some AI garbage for socials and then d) say SEO is dead and finally: e) online business is dead.

So… you can either get stuck in and do the “gritty work” – or you can go down with the rest of them.