RIP SEO? Has the AI silver bullet proved fatal for traditional marketing techniques?

SEO is dead! Or so conventional wisdom tells us. The killer? Well, what do you think? It’s 2025. It’s AI, of course, with the silver bullet this time proving lethal rather than empowering. So what’s the reality?

Third party research appears to validate the idea of the erosion of Google’s hold on the search market. For example, digital marketing agency HigherVisibility recently updated its study on How People Search Today: A Study on Evolving Search Behaviors in 2025, which does note an acceleration in the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT to source information, up from 4.1% of respondents in February to 12.5% in August.

But that said, Google maintains a commanding lead when it comes to search, cited by two-thirds of respondents. That is down from February’s 73%, but it does make the point that AI tools have a long way ...