If you’re comparing AI/LLMs and SEO as competing channels, let alone ditching SEO for AI, you have lost the plot…
People keep calling it “the AI era” and saying “SEO is dead”
They must hate data, facts, and reality…..?
- 66% of Americans have never used an LLM / ChatGPT (Pew Research 2025)
- Google sends 345x more traffic to sites than all LLMs combined (Ahrefs 2025)
- AI sources make up 0.1% of website referral traffic (Ahrefs 2025)
- Traditional search is growing from 83% of people searching 10x per month → 87% in 2025 (SparkToro 2025)
- 76.10% of AI citations are pulled from top 10 in Google (Ahrefs 2025)
- Use of LLMs increases uses of traditional search engines (Semrush 2025)
LLMs are not and never were intended to be a replacement for the traditional search engine. They have existed for years and here we are, still doing traditional SEO.
Remember when TikTok added search, shopping, etc, and every single person screamed SEO is dead and “Gen Z now searches on TikTok”.
If that was you… sit this one out.
We dramatically underestimate the difficulty of changing conditioned human behavior.
AI and LLM tools are simply adjacent, symbiotic platforms that people use to learn more about products, solutions, and is a single touchpoint in their decision making process — not the only and far from the main one.
Compared to Google usage, traffic, and growth potential for your own business, AI is like comparing a single tree in the amazon rainforest.
This doesn’t mean ignore AI, ignore LLMs, and hope for wins. It simply means that your perspective is being warped by echo-chamber content.
You think LLMs are 90% of website traffic right now. Google is gone, done, dusted. Nobody uses that ancient thing, right? Everything happens on LLMs.
The reality is the complete opposite.
And the beauty of it?
Simply building an amazing brand through genuinely good content (not regurgitation and AI slop), getting featured and mentioned on other publications (cough LINK BUILDING and PR cough), and driving engagement on social platforms = winning at AI and LLMs.
Meaning all that content, SEO work, and social community building is….literally LLM optimization too.
There is a reason the biggest brands in the world barely have to do anything, or have done literally nothing, and still show up 999/1000 times in LLMs as the top recommendation.
They are a big brand, and they did the big brand things I just mentioned above from SEO to social communities and everything in between.
Brands that are crushing it with SEO for the last decade are….still crushing it with SEO, and are laughing all the way to the bank as you get distracted by the tree (LLMs, AI) and not the forest (SEO, brand, PR, social, etc).
If you’re “ditching SEO for the AI era” I genuinely want to thank you for making my job easier — I now have less competition and can get my clients even better results in less time.
Thank you for your service!!! 🙏
