Google’s latest Search Off the Record podcast discussed whether ‘SEO is on a dying path’ because of AI Search. Their assessment sought to explain that SEO remains unchanged by the introduction of AI Search, revealing a divide between their ‘nothing has changed’ outlook for SEO and the actual experiences of digital marketers and publishers.
Google Speculates If AI Is On A Dying Path
At a certain point in the podcast they started talking about AI after John Mueller introduced the topic of the impact of AI on SEO.
John asked:
“So do you think AI will replace SEO? Is SEO on a dying path?”
Gary Illyes expressed skepticism, asserting that SEOs have been predicting the decline of SEO for decades.
Gary expressed optimism that SEO is not dead, observing:
“I mean, SEO has been dying since 2001, so I’m not scared for it. Like, I’m not. Yeah. No. I’m pretty sure that, in 2025,the first article that comes out is going to be about how SEO is dying again.”
That’s an accurate observation. Google began putting the screws to the popular SEO tactics of the day around 2004, gaining momentum in 2005 with things like statistical analysis. The search landscape today is unlike at any other time in history and is on the brink of major changes for 2025.
RAG Is The Gateway To AI-SEO
Google’s Lizzi Sassman asked how SEO is relevant in 2025 and after some off-topic banter John Mueller raised the topic of RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation.
RAG is a technique that enables large language models (LLMs) to provide up-to-date and factually grounded answers. The system retrieves relevant information from external sources such as search indexes or knowledge graphs, which the LLM then uses to generate responses. Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
Googler Martin Splitt stepped in with an analogy of documents (representing the search index or knowledge base), search and retrieval of information from those documents, and an output of the information from “out of the bag”).
Martin offered this simplified analogy of RAG:
“Probably nowadays it’s much better and you can just show that, like here, you upload these five documents, and then based on those five documents, you get something out of the bag.”
Lizzi Sassman commented:
“Ah, okay. So this question is about how the thing knows its information and where it goes and gets the information.”
John Mueller picked up this thread of the discussion to share that RAG is how he ties SEO practices to AI Search Engines, that there’s still a search engine ranking process that plays a role. He’s right, even an AI search engine like Perplexity AI uses an updated version of Google’s old PageRank algorithm as part of the ranking process.
Mueller explained:
“I found it useful when talking about things like AI in search results or combined with search results where SEOs, I feel initially, when they think about this topic, think, “Oh, this AI is this big magic box and nobody knows what is happening in there.
And, when you talk about kind of the retrieval augmented part, that’s basically what SEOs work on, like making content that’s crawlable and indexable for Search and that kind of flows into all of these AI overviews.
So I kind of found that angle as being something to show, especially to SEOs who are kind of afraid of AI and all of these things, that actually, these AI-powered search results are often a mix of the existing things that you’re already doing. And it’s not that it suddenly replaces crawling and indexing.”
Mueller is correct that the traditional process of indexing, crawling, and ranking still exists, keeping SEO relevant and necessary for ensuring websites are discoverable and optimized for search engines.
Takeaway: That way of looking at it makes it seem like AI doesn’t change anything for SEO. I think most of us know that’s not true.
Impact Of AI On SEO
Yes, crawling and indexing remain largely unchanged. But AI in Google’s ranking algorithms are making decisions based on opaque signals of helpfulness, authority, and, ironically, whether content created by humans is intended for machines or people. That’s the part that matters.
Crawling and indexing doesn’t help the thousands of small and large publishers that have been driven out of the web ecosystem because of algorithm changes, preferential ranking for less authoritative Reddit content, and de-prioritization of expert content in favor of AI-generated summaries.
There are at least three ways AI has changed everything for SEO and publishers:
- Organic SERPs are explicitly obsolete.
- Natural language search queries profoundly change what it means to be relevant.
- Capricious AI ranking algorithms prone to constant changes undermine the stability of the web ecosystem.
Organic SERPs Are Explicitly Obsolete
The traditional ten blue links have been implicitly obsolete for about 15 years but AI has made them explicitly obsolete.
Natural Language Search Queries
The context of search users who ask precise conversational questions within several back and forth turns is a huge change to search queries. Bing claims that this makes it easier to understand search queries and provide increasingly precise answers. That’s the part that unsettles SEOs and publishers because , let’s face it, a significant amount of content was created to rank in the keyword-based query paradigm, which is gradually disappearing as users increasingly shift to more complex queries. How content creators optimize for that is a big concern.
Backend AI Algorithms
The word “capricious” means the tendency to make sudden and unexplainable changes in behavior. It’s not a quality that is beneficial to publishers and SEOs who benefit from relatively stable and reliable search engine ranking factors. Yet capricious ranking algorithms is what we have. They can suddenly change their virtual minds and decide what was relevant last month isn’t relevant today. Then months later change the ranking criteria all over again.
These radical changes throughout the year give the impression that no iteration of Google’s ranking algorithm is ever fully baked.
Is Google Detached From Reality Of The Web Ecosystem?
Industry-wide damage caused by AI-based algorithms that are still “improving” have unquestionably harmed a considerable segment of the web ecosystem. Immense amounts of traffic to publishers of all sizes has been wiped out since the increased integration of AI into Google’s backend, an issue that the recent Google Search Off The Record avoided discussing.
Many hope Google will address this situation in 2025 with greater nuance than their CEO Sundar Pichai who struggled to articulate how Google supports the web ecosystem, seemingly detached from the plight of thousands of publishers.
Maybe the question isn’t whether SEO is on a dying path but whether publishing itself is in decline because of AI on both the backend and the front of Google’s search box and Gemini apps.
Check out these related articles:
Google CEO’s 2025 AI Strategy Deemphasizes The Search Box
Google Gemini Deep Research May Erode Website Earnings
Google CEO: Search Will Change Profoundly In 2025
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI Generator
