Will SEO always exist?

No it will not.

The moon is pulling away from the Earth at a rate of about 1.5 meters per year. Eventually it will break free from it's orbit completely changing tides and the weather patterns of the planet. So another ice age will come or the earth will burn to oblivion.

At that point surely SEO will cease to exist?

 

Unless humans are living in space capsules connected via wireless internet and still have blogs and web sites to optimize. Therefore, SEO will still exist!

 

Yeah and I think companies like Google will be tracking you harder as well.

I mean there will be no more mess online like it use to be nowadays

someone needs to tka care of this once and for all

 

seo is just optimization -- in other words adaptation in effectiveness and efficiency


humans will ALWAYS adapt to what ever system surrounds them and grow beyond and find a way to utilize
the same is with security systems there is always a "hole" in the wall..

even when AI is fully matured there will still be AI to organic mechanisms to alter adapt to more advanced AI in the collective as one in a million or billion will change in such a way that he is no longer bound by the same rules that were set by the container or in this case the search engine

etcetcetc

 

As long as something is profitable there will always be a following.

 

In fact search engines are moving in this direction. Google, for example, introduced a digg-alike voting system to refine their SERP quality. I bet it won't take long for Google to start implementing those data (from Google user's account) to it's algo.

From what I see, SEO will not die off... but it'll rather revolve into a complex industry, emphasize more on building link baiting and trustworthy (yes, trustworthy) content.

 

The goal of a search engine is to provide the most relevant results for a user's search query.

There will always be a way to make your site more relevant to specific queries for specific users.

 

the most complex thing that could happen is personalized search occupying a major portion in the algos.

 

I'm not very good with SEO at the moment, But I'm presuming that it will stay around for a loooonnnnnggg time, but it might evolve into different factors

 

SEO will be around while there are people around who do not know how to design a web site or consider SEO a premium service.