Is AI Search the end of traditional SEO?

Interesting topic. I think the biggest opportunity is going to be connecting traditional SEO with GEO, rather than replacing one with the other.

Before trying to increase AI visibility, I’d want to know whether the business has the fundamentals in place: strong service/topic pages, clear entity information, internal linking, technical accessibility, local/brand authority, and relevant third-party mentions.

If you're already working on this for your own business, drop your website + industry + target market. I'd be interested in seeing where the biggest SEO/GEO gap is and what you'd prioritize first.

 

If it's an actual business site, I'd look directly at contact form submissions, calls, and revenue before stressing over traffic graphs. Dropping informational visitors who just skimmed a quick definition doesn't hurt your wallet the same way losing high-intent commercial traffic does. A pure pageview drop on its own rarely tells you if the business is actually taking a hit.

 

One concrete shift I'd add to the discussion: optimize for being cited, not just ranked. AI engines pull answers from sources that state facts in short, self-contained sentences with clear entity attribution — so breaking complex explanations into quotable units and putting the direct answer in the first two or three sentences of each section makes a real difference. Second, make sure your key factual pages (pricing, specs, dates) aren't blocked from LLM crawlers; I've seen sites accidentally disallow GPTBot in robots.txt while still welcoming Googlebot, which kills citation eligibility entirely. Beyond that, the fundamentals still carry the weight — a strong backlink profile and genuine brand mentions are what make an AI engine treat you as a trustworthy source in the first place.