And welcome back to the Simple SEO Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Lindteigen, and I'm so glad you're here with me today. Now, I told you last week, I wanted to address some really common questions and some concerns that I'm hearing about SEO. And so this is a big one, and that is will AI. So I've had a lot of questions come around this really people are concerned because people are starting to use chat GPT more and they're searching for information there and they're using perplexity. ai and the Google AI overviews with information right there at the top of the Google search results. There's a lot going on. definitely understand where the concern is, especially if you don't yet understand where the AI search engines are getting their information from. I wasn't a hundred percent sure what was going to happen. Just true story between you and I. I kind of wondered the same thing. I wondered if AI was truly going to be the death of SEO. Now, You know, and I've shared before, SEO has supposedly been dying the entire time I've been in the industry. So for like 15 years now, every time a change happens, people say, Oh, that's it, SEO is dead. And we just kind of like a cat with nine lives. We just keep going. It just keeps working. We keep doing our thing. What it amounts to is we change. We evolve. The algorithm changes. The rules change. We adapt. That's really what it amounts to. So, what I want you to understand is that yes, There is concern. Will I kill SEO? People are concerned that it is, but what I want you to understand is that AI is still very Dependent upon SEO. So this is where I think Those of us who have been optimizing our websites for years who are doing it now and working on it are going to find that AI will not kill our websites because the AI search engines and chatbots seem to use SEO practices to help them understand the information and to find the websites that they are referencing. So what we're seeing in the research studies and what we're seeing. The problem with being in real, real world application is that sites that rank high on Google in general are also the ones that rank in perplexity and chat GPT search and chat GPT itself. They have to pull the information from somewhere. So in order for them to find the information that they're looking for, they're going to go through It's similar to Google. They're going to go through and they're going to look to see what the pages are about. Now, the way that people search, especially in ChatGPT or in our chat based searches, is different than how we are used to traditionally searching in Google. In Google, we start with keywords. We put in one keyword or two words or maybe a string or a phrase. And so, That's what we've always optimized for from an SEO standpoint, we've optimized for that keyword or that keyword phrase, whereas if somebody is searching in ChatGPT, they may be having a much more conversational tone to their search, so rather than like, Things to do in Nashville, they might be searching or asking for ChatGPT to help them plan a trip to Nashville with a 10 year old. What are things that I could do? True story, real life example, we just got back from Nashville. Um, on Sunday I had the opportunity to go in for an invitation only event with my men. Or and it was an amazing weekend was such a great experience was also really fun because I used to live there when I was little so I got to drive. We took the family and I got to drag my husband and my son past like my childhood home and my elementary school and all the things that they absolutely did not care about, but it was it's a beautiful area. I lived in Franklin when I was little before we moved to Iowa. And it was just really fun to be able to be back in the area. So, I did use ChatGPT to help me plan that trip and to give me ideas of things that I could do. And you know what? It pulled websites. It gave me information and then I said, Oh cool, where are you finding this from? And it gave me all the websites. And then I clicked through and I went over and I checked some of them. And that's what's going to continue to happen as people start using these AI search engines more. They are still getting their information from Google. They're still getting their information from Bing, so chat GPT search is powered by Bing. Bing. There's really truly nothing different that you need to do from an SEO standpoint for Bing SEO versus Google SEO Bing has a very small market share. So Bing gets right now as of the latest that I've seen in 2025 Bing's market share is increasing. They moved up from 2 percent market share in 2023 to 4 percent market share this year, so they do have a bigger market share. However Google's market share is still like 88 percent of all search. So What we do for Google generally works for Bing. They follow very closely. We're also seeing more increase in AI search. However, it's still tiny in comparison. So chat GPT search is expected to hit 1 percent in 2025, 1 percent market share. Putting that in perspective in the last research study, I saw a chat GPT search was 373 times smaller than Google search. So for every search on chat GPT, there were 373 searches on Google. So we definitely still want to be on Google. We still want to rank high. We still want to create great content. Follow the Google rules. AI is not killing SEO at this point in time. AI is dependent upon SEO. AI is using the information that we are optimizing to understand and to put together these answers that they're looking for. So if you don't know the way that the AI chatbots work, it's a little different from Google. And I'm going to get kind of techie here, but also not super techie because you guys know. I'm not super techie. They're what's called a large language, like a large language model. So they're looking for kind of predictive text. If somebody has searched something or written something, they're looking for the next information that's gonna match what they expect someone to be saying. So they're reading your content, they're reading your information, they're looking for basically confirmation bias. They want something that confirms what they think is gonna be the right answer. Whereas Google, Is based on the keywords that someone's searching for and the matches of the keywords. So we do optimize. Slightly different. That's wrong. We actually optimize pretty much the same. There are some things we do from a formatting standpoint. And I do teach that in Simple SEO content. I added a new bonus lesson just recently on how to show up in chat GPT and the AI overviews and perplexity and all of that. Like how to really work with your SEO so that you're part of this new, this new search opportunity. Really, AI represents a new opportunity for additional visibility for your content in your business. That's really what it is. So if you understand that and you realize that they're still pulling the information from Google, they're still getting the information from Bing, which is going to work the same as Google, they still need you. They still need your website. They still need your content. The other thing you want to understand is like AI, they give you some information, especially if we think about the AI overviews in Google. And Google did announce they are testing the new AI tab where the entire search tab will be AI generated. I don't have access to it yet. I am on the list to be a beta tester as soon as I get access and can start playing around with it. I will do it. A podcast episode and kind of explained to you what it is and what it looks like. Um, but what I want you to understand is the AI generated overviews, they're limited. They give you a little bit of information that they're pulling from a couple different sites. They do link to those sites and what we're seeing is there's actually on. And then a corresponding increase in clicks, clicks to the websites that have information in those AI overviews. Because people come, they see a little bit of information, they want more, they click and they go to read it. Now if it's something more similar to direct answers and I've talked about direct, If it's something more similar to that where it's like how many teaspoons in a tablespoon? Well, there's three teaspoons in a tablespoon. I don't need to go read a blog post on that. So if it's at that level, they may not click through, but also they don't need to read a blog post to find out there's three teaspoons in a tablespoon. Continuing to create great content. Focusing on E E A T, which is your experience, your expertise, your authority, and your trust. That's going to help you to set yourself apart, to have that trust that you build with Google. And when you are that way, You are more likely when you're creating that content, you are more likely to be the one that they choose and that they use and they rank or they reference. And so rather than worrying, will AI kill SEO? I want you to start thinking about how do I optimize for AI? I want to be the answer in chat GPT. I want to be the one getting traffic from perplexity. I want to be the one that is linked when somebody asks for sources for something in chat GPT, because my friend that is. an opportunity for you. And I want you to understand this is not about just being on Google anymore. AI search or AI optimization is happening and it is a way that you can set yourself apart. If you want to be the one that shows up in these places rather than your competitor, then you need to start doing a, doing SEO, which will also include AIO, AI optimization, so many acronyms. You need to start working on it now and you need to learn what to do. So join me in simple SEO content. Let me explain all of this for you, walk you through it step by step, teach you how to do it. And really let's set you apart from the competition and get your website showing up there first. Let's start getting more traffic to your website and more visibility for your brand and your content. Because if we can start showing up in chat GPT the AI overviews and all these other places. Your brand starts to grow, people start to know who your brand is and they're more likely to search you out and to visit your website if they're seeing you in those results because they feel like this must be a really good website because ChatGPT is telling me to go to this one or somebody's telling me to do that and I know people are getting Hmm. People are getting leads because ChatGPT is referring people to them. Hey, can I find, you know, how would I find X? Oh, this is a really good one. Like, I've heard this is a good one. And you can have this work for your business too. So I want you to remember, SEO is evolving right now. AI. It is a huge opportunity for us as business owners and SEOs and digital marketers. There's a lot that we can do with AI optimization to get you to show up more often. Don't worry about it. It is not killing SEO. It's one more place that you can rank my friend. If you want to learn how to do all of this, like I said, SEO content. I have the entire module, the entire bonus lesson on How to do exactly this. I have blog posts that are showing up in all the places we've talked about today as do my students and I would love to help you be the third part of that sentence and have you showing up in those places as well. If you're doing SEO and you've not had a lot of success, something's not worked right, you're not sure, Be sure to join me, or if you're just, you want to learn more, you enjoy the free classes and all that, be sure to join me next week. Yes, next week to learn the three most common SEO mistakes that people make. And how to fix them so that you can start ranking higher on Google, getting more traffic, generating more leads, building your email list, all of that. I will be teaching live on Monday and Tuesday and would love to have you join me. So that we can talk about all of this and you can learn what to do. That registration link will be on the freebies tab on the website, etchedmarketing. com forward slash freebies. It's also in the description and the notes for you today. Thank you so much for being here. I will see you back here next week. We're going to have one more of these like. Hot topics, what's going on with SEO, is this even worth doing anymore? I hope you're realizing by now, yes it's worth doing, no it's not dead, and oh my goodness, there are more places that I can show up than just Google. And I need to do a little bit of work to show up in all those places. And I hope the next thing you're thinking is, I'm going to join Rachel in class because I really need to have her walk me through this and make it easy for me. Alright, thank you for being here, I'll see you next week. Bye for now.