How Much Is AI Killing Traditional SEO?

0:00Alright, let's talk about everybody's favorite subject, AI. This one's from Sonia. I wonder how much AI is killing our traditional SEO and what to do instead. Alright, I've been thinking like most people in our industry a ton about AI and I'm pretty much in the same space that I've been in for about three years, which is the idea of I heard a consomere called it the abundance era. I refer to it as like the the what I think I used to say like the river of shit, right? This so crappy content has always been a thing and and a lot of crappy content has always been a thing. Just remember that even when the

1:03internet first started, there was slop. It was human created slop, but there was slop. How do I know this? You can look at Hollywood. You know how like you at you probably went to block. I mean, if you're my age, maybe you went to blockbuster once and you accidentally picked up a DVD because you thought you were watching Godzilla, but you didn't read the DVD correct and it's Godzilla missing one L and it's called something else and it's like you watch it and you're like, what the fuck is this? This is not the movie. This is not the Godzilla I picked up. This is not the Matthew Broderick one. This is some like fucking sea level movie, right? Those still get made today. They still happen every single time a Marvel movie comes out. You might see like, hey, there's Iron Man and then you

2:03might see a movie at, you know, on streaming right now that'll be like Iron Guy, right? We're the Iron Guy and it's just like a crappy, sloppy ripoff of Iron Man. Point is this has always been a thing. Slop. It used to be human created. Now it's computer created. So like I said from the beginning, what happens when there's a ton of slop? It means that we have to create a pool filter, right? If your pool is filled with slop, you need to clear it. And in order to do that, you need some type of filter. And in life, we as humans have to slowly develop that filter. Now, here's the problem. The problem is back in the day, right? The slop would enter the environment at the same rate that the good stuff was

3:05because it had a limiting factor, which was human creation. So, slop and good, or whatever the opposite of slop is. I'll just call it good. We're made at the same rate. That's it. And so we had time to filter. And we were good filters. Us humans were good at this. All right? The problem is now you have computer generated slop on top of human slop, on top of human good, on top of AI good. So how do we discern? How do we filter? We still do. We're still good at this, but we're much slower because there's so much coming through the filter. We cannot filter everything. So there are things that are bound to slip through. And I'm saying all of this because all of this has been true. The quantity got bigger. So here's

4:14how I, here's how I see it. Let's talk about specifically SEO. People have given me shit because I'm like, hey, I'm going to create content. That's just like answers basic questions, right? And people are like, that's a race to the bottom. Because one day AI is going to be able to create that answer and probably do it better than you. And you know what? Maybe that's true. But not everybody is going to want the computer answer, whether it's right or wrong. Some people are still going to want a human answer. I'll give you a case in point. Let's say you're doing electrical work in your house. And you are changing a receptacle. You know, you're just changing out an outlet, okay? You have two choices. You can watch an AI video of somebody replacing an outlet that

5:21is accurate. Or you can watch a human do it. Now, some people in this audience will say, I don't care which one. I just want the right answer. I'm going to tell you I'm picking the human. And the reason I'm picking the human is because if the AI is even remotely wrong, I die. That's it. It's electricity. So there always has to be that the human element will always matter. And right now, what we are seeing is abundance. And that's a nice word. We're seeing the river of shit. And we're all getting scared. But I believe that there will always be humans wanting humans. It's the same thing. I can use the electricity example. I could use a sales example. Yeah. There are some dumb, dumb on this planet who

6:23are going to be who are going to buy a car from a computer from a computer salesperson. That's fine. Those people can do that. I don't know if there's going to be a lot of those people, but those people are going to do that. So here's what I think will happen. You will have a right now. You will have everyone on edge because it's novelty. It's new. And it's only getting better. Right. So we're just going fuck. Uh oh, it's getting better. Like blah, blah. But it's still new. So you have to. So I think this is an important distinction. We love novelty. Novelty is great. But novelty wears off. No matter how good it gets. And they're going to get to a point where it's so good that what's what's new about it now. Just it's perfect. But now we know it's not real. So there will in the beginning be dumb

7:28dumbs who will. So let's say you have you go to a car dealership. You have an AI. You don't even go to the car dealership. You have an online car dealership, whatever. You have an AI guy and you have a human guy who are selling you this car. You and I might say, well, you know what, I don't really want to talk to a robot. No matter how good the robot is, I really just want to talk to a human. Right. That's that feels fairly normal. No matter how good the AI gets, the AI could be perfect. We're still going to be like, I kind of just want to talk to a human. You know what I mean? And then there will be people who don't like, I don't give a shit who I talk to. I think over time, I hope. And this is my, this is my gut feeling. This is my take. I think over time, there will be less of those people. And so companies will start to pull back from that. They'll say, well, the humans just convert better. The humans just make better stuff. Regardless

8:37of how good the AI gets, the humans are just better at this. And the humans want more humans. And so that the economy is going to dictate the adoption rate. And I think that that's what's going to happen. So here's what I'm seeing in AI right now. I'm seeing that Google has AI mode and they're pushing it hard. But it's interesting because what it's doing is it's just changing the way the search results are displayed. So in traditional search, old school search, you would type in a big ass query, right? All Google could do it that time was give you 10 links that were as close as they could get to your answer. The AI mode is doing the same thing except it has more context and it's

9:37doing multiple searches. And so it's breaking up your query and giving you multiple links for different things. It's answering your question. Yes. In the same way that featured snippets would kind of answer your question to except featured snippets would take the answer from just one search place like one. It would just steal it from one website and put it up. Now it's stealing from multiple websites and it's putting up those links. It's giving it's citing its sources. And for some people, what reading that answer in AI mode and never clicking a link is perfectly fine. That's good enough for them. But some people want to learn from a human being. Right now that may be less than the other people. I think

10:38at some point it'll even out and then it will flip in the human side. And the AI system will still work, but clicks will come through. So even if they don't, whatever, there's still going to be a percentage of people who want humans or who want to trust a brand or a human brand. Knowing that somebody went out into the real world and did the thing and then report it back. Or they're going to want to support fellow humans. It doesn't matter. But that's what I'm seeing now. And the way I and also what I'm seeing is we are writing content answering people's questions that weren't previously answered in either AI or the internet. And what that's and what's happening is we are not only being ranked, but we are being cited. And now the AI has something to steal from us, which I don't

11:39know about you. That sucks. However, we look like the authority. Not the AI because the AI doesn't know anything. The AI only knows what we know. And so it's like, oh, swimming university says that you should add this many pounds of shock to an above ground pool. Or based on swimming universities equation for for shock treatment. This is what we've come up with. And yeah, that's great. But it's still referencing us. It's still brand building. And then when someone wants real world stuff, because look, you can't just operate on the internet, right? You have a pool in real life. You have whatever you're learning, you're doing it in real life. There are things that the AI cannot and will not ever be able to do. No matter how good it gets. And even if it does get that good, there's a limit to what can be created.

12:45Just in general, like, do you really think? Do you really think even though there's data centers all over the world, there's a bunch of human beings. And we can generate all the AI slap we want. And let's say it's absolutely perfect. How many people are going to generate AI slap? Or let's just call it AI content about building a model train set in your basement. Like, how many people are actually going to do that? I'm going to say no one's going to do that because there's no incentive for doing it. There's no like monetary incentive. Because the people who want to learn about model trains are not doing it through a computer. They're doing it because they're watching other guys in real life in their basement building train sets. And then they're mimicking it or learning from them or learning, you know, tips and tricks. Sure, maybe the

13:47AI can call from a bunch of different sources, but ultimately like, no. And I can, you know, keep bringing up examples of this. So it's like, yeah, there's a threat in the short term because it's new, holy shit, it's getting better. Like, it's hypey. I feel like that goes away. And it just becomes what Jeff Bezos said, which fuck him. But he did say something that I thought was really intelligent, which I heard other people say to is that AI is, you have to think of AI more of more like electricity. It is the thing that will power humans, not the other way around. Like, electricity didn't replace, you know, guys turning turbines by hand and go like, oh, now we have electricity. Like, it's all going to be, you know, no, it's a tool. And that's I think what it

14:51should always be. And yet I do think people are like, again, yeah, there are people who watch AI influencers. Okay, if that's your bag, like, fine. But that's like for entertainment. Like, yeah, it's going to take what I say and it's going to remix it. But right now what Google's doing is it's citing sources. It's not claiming it as the AI, the AI is all powerful. It's referencing things. So here's what I think. I think SEO is more important now than it was before. And I don't mean SEO in terms of like, you know, oh, you got to have the correct schema markup. And you have to make sure you do H2s and all the technical side of things. That is like, who cares now? Because

15:53if an AI can, if I can talk to an AI and it can talk back to me, well, then it means what I was saying before is like, Google is smart. And it's Google is reading your website. And not just your website now, they're reading your entire brand, your entire vibe. This thing knows, right? It's reading what people are saying about your brand on Reddit. It's watching your videos. It's reading all of your articles. It's seeing where you show up. It's it knows fucking everything like a human, but with more brain space. And so when you ask the AI, hey, I want a real book on how to take care of a pool. Who do you think it's going to recommend? So I say this. And this is something I got from someone else. I think his name is TJ Robertson. The noisiest brands are the ones who will

17:00win. Meaning be everywhere. This is a scale game now. That's business. That is one way to do it. If you are playing the SEO game, I think scale does matter. If you are trying to be recommended by these search, by these search engines and by these AIs, like that is one way to play the game is just go big. However, I do think there's another way to play this game. And that is with quality. Because what we are doing at some university feels like a race to the bottom because it's like, well, why are you creating something that that the AI can create so easily? And the answer to that is because, well, because we want to create, because we have to

18:01create it in order for the AI to create it. And when the AI does create it, it will cite us as its source. Therefore, it's a brand play, not necessarily trying to rank for individual keywords. It's trying to send a signal to the AI that, hey, we're fucking serious about this. And we're doing it at scale because we have to. Our competitors can do it at scale and are doing it at scale with forums. So we have to do it with our small team. I think that's just a way. And that's the way that I prefer to do it at swim university, which means we are investing in just pumping out as much content as humanly possible with the help of AI mind you, with the electricity, the power of AI to help us, right, to assist us. It allows us to do what a team of

19:0220 can do with a team of four. Okay, but I do think there's another way. I do think that quality does matter. And it's going to matter even more in the future, even more now. Again, we are in a novelty stage. This is the beginning. Over time, my gut says it's going to taper off and AI is going to feel less like a marketing, you know, hypey word that's going to be baked into every product that will it better be baked into the product or else how would it work? Just like you don't question like now made with electricity. It's like, well, yeah, no shit. I'd hope so. That's what I think is going to happen. Like everything's just going to be made with it. So the other way to play it, and you can do this with SEO, by the way, I'm not, I'm going to, I'm going to use this example

20:05because I feel like I'm doing it both ways and I'm doing a hybrid. So I'm going to talk about all of the things that I'm doing. But in swimming diversity, we're just talking about scale. At brew cabin, which is again, it's kind of the model train example where it's like, does any home brewer, which is a small community, but does any home brewer really want to watch like an AI home brewer? No, like we don't trust me. We, you know, it's fun to like have the AI generate us a recipe and put that up on the internet. It's like, you know, cool, it makes a fucking recipe. It's like, yeah, no shit. Okay, that's, that's not cool. That's novelty. All right. You got to show me something interesting that the AI is never going to think of, that it's never going to do. You got to do something interesting. And you don't have to do it at

21:08scale. You do it once in a while, but you do it with intention. You do it with quality. And that's going to rise to the top because everybody else is going to do slop. They're going to fall in the slop because it just makes it easier. So it's just easier. But the people who are like, yeah, but easy is not fun. I like the hard. So the people who are doing the hard, the real, real hard. They're going to win. And again, they're not getting everybody. There are still going to be a percentage. Let's call it 20% of dumb, dumb, who they don't give a fuck, right? They don't care if it's AI generated or human generated. They don't give a shit. Their lives are terrible. But like 80% of us are like, come on. Really? That's, I think, what's going to happen? So you have two choices.

22:12But I think you have a third, which is both. Now, how do you do that? So this is something I've been thinking a lot about at Sumi University. So yes, at Sumi University, we want to generate as much content as possible. And unfortunately, you have to sacrifice some quality for that. But what I think is, what I think cannot be taken away from human beings is really the idea of personality. Now, I haven't really pinpointed like what makes a good personality or not. Like, I don't know, or what makes something entertainment, but AI is not entertaining. And the only reason that some people might think it is is because it was prompted by a human who is creative and who has a personality and who has a take. But on its own, it's never going to do that. And it's

23:20get. And again, that makes it great for generic answers to quick things. I use it all the time. I don't need to read a whole article on, you know, what's the best refrigerator buy? Just tell me what wire cutter thinks is the best refrigerator to buy. If you give me the link, I'll just click it right in Google. I never have to go to their website because I already trust wire cutter to give me that answer. They summarize it in the AI. I am just getting to my click faster. That's good. That's good for the end user. But if I didn't know what wire cutter was, then I would have to go digging. I do have to do my research. So at Sunmy University, I'm thinking, okay, we have to do content at scale. How do we make it good? Like, how do we make it better than everybody else's?

24:22Because we're definitely not going to make it better than the AI. We can. But we can make it unique to us. We can add a level of quality that it just like that the AI is never going to have. And I think that it means I have to show myself a little bit more. I have to put myself out there as a true pull care personality without a script without trying to be like without trying to be like something stupid, being like genuine, authentic, and super high quality. And to put that on a fine point, to just be more human. Because right now, the way that we are doing our content is I am basically reading a script that was half generated by AI.

25:28My brother is editing that video together. And right now, he can do it. Yes. And AI is going to be able to do that job. That's going to be for sure. But an AI isn't going to is going to make very sterile choices. Because again, its job isn't to be creative. Its job is to be a servant, to be a tool, to be electricity. It is what you do with electricity that matters, not the electricity itself. So I think it's about making more, like injecting more human, like clearly human choices into content. And basically just being as authentic as humanly possible. And it can be produced. It doesn't mean you have to like, you know, dumb down the quality of like I've heard that before.

26:31It's like, well, you know, if you just film it on your iPhone and you have shitty audio, like the AI is not going to replicate that. No, that's what the AI is really good at. That's what it's going to try to do. It can do both. That's not the thing it's replicating. If that's the easy thing, that's the technical SEO part. Right? That's manipulatable by anybody, including a computer. What's the thing it can't manipulate? Like it truly can't manipulate. As hard as it tries, it's not going to be able to do it. That's just being you. That's doing things in real life and then showing them on screen. And yeah, you're giving it data to where it will be able to do that in the future. But if you're constantly, like one of the things I love about AI is that it's pushing people to get even more created. Like it's pushing because now you're like, well, you know, you look at AI music now and you're like, anybody can make AI, like generic AI music. And again,

27:3720% of the population will be like, I don't give a fuck who it is. I just need background music. I don't really like artists. I don't really like music. I just, I like music. Again, it's always been a thing. It's just now being produced. And it like, well, it sounds exactly like Taylor Swift. So that's fine. Dude, okay. Like I don't want to be friends with you. What is that? Like any swear to God? Like I'm a musician. I love music. I listen to records, albums. I don't, I hate playlists. All that shit. Right? Music is important to me. Bottom line. If you tell me that you're like not interested in music, I'm like, we're not going to be friends. I don't get it. How can you not like music? How can you not be interested? Like how can you not have a favorite artist? That's insane to me. Same thing with like television shows. Like don't you like television shows?

28:40Like you're telling me that if the office, if there was a version of the office that you knew was made by AI, you'd be like, yeah, I'm fine with it. I'd be like, I don't think you would be. At first, you might go, it's not that bad, but because it's novelty. It's, you know, like, oh, I know this is AI generated. It's novelty. And then it's like, all right, this is like the same. This is like kind of boring. And then you're going to want like crazy or more interesting creative things with real humans doing insane. Like you're going to crave it. And it's going to push humans to do that. But anyway, I can go on the subject forever. I do not think AI is killing the SEO industry. I think it's actually changing it for sure, but I think it just deleted a lot of the bullshit like, you know, ultra specific, you know, tweaks and hacks that bad SEOs would, would practice like, oh, okay. Um, you know, again,

29:42backlinks. Fucking, I've been saying that for the day one. Come on. Now, are backlinks important? No, but because links are are the same as words now. Talking references is important. So if, if people are on Reddit talking about my brand and saying good things, that's as good as a backlink. If not better. Don't and manipulating that is, is the AI is going to know. Right. Before it was stupid. It couldn't, it didn't know that you, you're the one that like called this company and got a link placed on their website. Now it can tell. Right. Like the technical SEO stuff. Right. Schema markup. Yes. Schema markup is something. But like, come on. The fucking AI knows that this is a product page and it has five stars. Like it can read. It can see. It's a computer now that can hear a C and, you know, compute and

30:50all that shit. So like, you're not tricking it anymore. So all that like technical, you know, like trying to skirt the system gray hat type shit, like wiped out. It's going to get wiped out. And that's why all the SEOs who are terrible were freaking the fuck out. Like, it's over. And I'm like, it's not over, but I don't know what to do next. I always knew it wasn't backlinks. And I still stand by that. Here's how, here I'll give you, again, I'll give you a couple of examples and then I'll end on this. Sumi University. In the, we're trying to publish as much content as humanly possible. We published an article in, I think it was January of 2026. It was an article that we did not, like it did not exist on our website. It was a topic that we had not covered

31:55or a question we had not answered. And so we wrote that content with the help of AI. And then a human, like we had the AI generate a first draft. And then we basically changed it almost completely. And then we added it to WordPress as streamline as humanly possible. Within a week, we were ranking number one for that keyword we were going after. And we started getting clicks to our website. That happened. That tells me they're still value there. Now, I think what will happen is over time. Or even now, that particular keyword is that our link is not getting as many clicks as it would have gotten four years ago. Had we done the exact same thing.

32:56But it still exists there. And now the AI has new information. It has something new to search. And so the more people who are asking that question one form or another, we're more likely to come up. And again, it's not just pulling from our website on our articles. It's pulling from social media. It's pulling from YouTube. Like it's going to give the person the answer they want in many forms. Video form, text form, whatever. We have to be the one who answers that question to win. We have to make the most noise. I think now take through cabin, for example, we still rank number one for hazy IPA recipe. Here's the thing. That is a very easy AI thing to make.

34:00AI can literally make a hazy IPA recipe and and display it at the top. But like I was mentioned earlier, nobody wants that. And they know that. And if they don't know that now, that will they will know that. And so my article still ranks number one, because it was done in the real world. And it's very long. And it's and it's got pictures like it is a well researched article and a well written article. And it's real. It's from me. You can tell by reading it. You don't even have to see a picture. You just know the AI is not replicating that. And again, even if it could, nobody wants it. I have another article that ranks number one, which is how to build a teaser. Because I fucking built a teaser in real life and took pictures of every single part of the process and

35:04included a video on how I did it. And affiliate links are the products that I used and the research that I came across. Like if you want to build my teaser, you can't do that through AI. You can only do that because somebody did it in real life. And as a human, again, you're going to want that information. Because there's nuance there that the AI just like, how do you know it's how do you know? How do you know to trust it? Just because it can pull information from multiple sources doesn't mean that when pulling in that information from multiple sources, it's going to give you one's flat coherent answer that makes sense. It could jumble everything up and give you the worst possible outcome. It doesn't know that. And so they know they can't serve that. And even if they could serve it, they'd still have to reference us. They'd still have to reference our photos because the audience will demand it. I don't think that this is, I don't think there's doom and gloom here.

36:18I don't think it's a race to the bottom. I think the world, I think we as human beings, we are tantalized by the novelty of this new technology. And then at a certain point, it will become as boring and mundane as electricity. No one gives a shit about how awesome electricity is in our homes, but it is truly an awesome piece of technology. And yet we take it for granted. And I think that will happen. It's going to take time, but that will happen. Where it's just like, okay, like, yeah, you might go to McDonald's and you don't need a person on the intercom. But then there may not be drivers. I don't know. They may only be in person. I'll

37:21tell you something that that caught me off guard this year is, so I live very close to a lows. And I go there more than I'd like to admit for just everything. And starting, so I started going on January 1st, like in the beginning of January of 2026. I walked, and this is still happening, because I've been there like six or seven times, you know, within the first month and a half of the year, because we're doing some work. I get approached and asked by every single employee, do you need help? And before that used to never happen, I would have to find somebody and be like, can you help me? But now they look at me and go, do you need help? To the point where it's actually kind of annoying, because I'm like, you know, this is the sixth time that somebody's asked me if I need help. I'm good. Thank you, though. And I'm not going to be a dick, but I'm like, okay, enough.

38:23But that change, I think, is indicative of where humans or where the economics of AI are going. Yes, the AI is very good. Yes, it's interesting. There's novelty to it, but nobody once that. You know, we don't mind if the AI generates a first draft of an article and then somebody edits it and like, it's been looked over a bunch of times. We don't mind that because it's assistant. It's assistance. We like assistance. Electricity is assistance, right? But electricity doesn't build a house. It just powers the tools that build the house. And it's powers the tools that are used by humans to build the house. And yes, maybe one day, it'll be robots who build the house. But

39:24there will be parts of a house where robots won't be able to do the work because we'll just find something else and then human taste will be like, well, I don't want a robot built for you. I want a human built one because I want this special, you know, it's just going to adapt in that direction. So that's why I don't think it's all doom and gloom. And I don't think it's doing what instead. Here's what I think you, if you're talking about what to do instead, I would say also not instead of, but also make video. And this, not only that, fuck it, make video, make audio, make, make blog post or articles, make everything. You can take one article and you can publish it because why the fuck not? You can turn it into a video. You could turn that video into five short videos. And then you

40:24could read the audio and turn it into a podcast or some form of, and then you can present it all of that information as a webinar, which is a live event, which the AI will never be able to do. And you can charge for that because people want to learn from people. So I don't know, man, I don't think it's dead. I don't think you should do it instead of I think you should just add to your SEO strategy. And I think SEO is more important now than it ever was. And the people who are going to win are the ones who are still doing it. And that's why I'm still doing it. So that's my take. Agreed to disagree with it. I don't care. But that's my take. Let me know what you think. Go to jibanesi.com G-I-O-V-A-N-I-S-C-I.com. Sign up for my newsletter. It's all the tea next time.