Today's AI Moment Pod Answers: Is SEO Dying or Just Evolving In The AI World?

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In this episode of AI Moment, hosts Jonathan Wagstaffe and Danny Denhard tackle the burning question for marketers everywhere: Is AI killing SEO? 🧐

Our consensus is clear:

SEO isn't dead, but it is undergoing a radical transformation. The game has changed from optimising for "search engines" to strategizing for "answer engines."

The core user need to find information remains, but AI has fundamentally altered the journey. Jonathan highlights a critical shift, citing SparkToro data that shows nearly 60% of searches are now "zero-click," with users getting answers directly from AI summaries on the results page.

Jonathan warns, "The days when you could decide on a keyword, write a blog post around that keyword, SEO the life out of it, and then drive a load of traffic to your website have also gone."

Danny introduces a new way to think about this landscape, differentiating between traditional search engines that provide options and new "answer engines" that deliver direct outputs. "You've now got what, a new breed of engine, which is an answer engine, which is like perplexity, which gives you very succinct answers very quickly," he notes.

Understanding user intent is now paramount.

Danny (Denhard) break down the customer journey into four states: Educate, Want, Need, and Action.

While traditional SEO focused on the first three, AI accelerates the entire process. "With AI, you can be very quickly escalated from the education all the way through to purchase really quickly," Danny explains.

Despite the hype, AI search adoption is still only 1-2%, offering a crucial window for businesses to adapt. The episode concludes by looking ahead to the next big shift: the rise of "Agentic AI" within the next 18 months. Now is the time to reassess your strategy for the next evolution of search. 🚀

Tools Mentioned:

Google, SparkToro, Perplexity, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Co-pilot, and Llama.