I will not even go further back to 2024 or 2023, where it starts getting dystopian.

As part of a presentation, my boss wanted me to show a timeline of web development adopting SEO tactics to improve client services.

So over the past couple of weeks, I cannot even count how many articles I sent to AI just to give me the punch line. [[🤫 do not tell him I did not read them all.]]

Seeing and not believing is the best way I can describe what people said, predicted, and recommended while AI kept knocking on the door louder and harder, and SEOholics just ignored reality as it unfolded.

Attempting a raise here 😎 My boss is one of the smartest, most focused people I know. About two years ago, he said something like “We are adding content services to web development. Clients have no clue what they are saying, and we cannot ignore the ignorance. As we say, ignorance is not bliss. We have to help them.”

At that time, and I may have already mentioned this before, I was in charge of that. I was still working great with legacy tools known as the top SEO platforms, and I was able to find content elements that improved the pages we built.

Then, being research oriented, [[yeah, forget the part where I used AI food processors just to get the main points]], I asked SEO friends to measure it.

By the end of 2024 going into 2025, I realized that SEO and AI Visibility are only related because LLMs check the background of the top two search results, organic results, and business profiles. That is where it starts and ends 🚫.

I compared sites that already had strong SEO, backlinks, keywords, the whole shebang, against newer sites with some solid, valuable citations.

What I saw was that those newer sites, yes, with decent Google Business Profiles and some reviews, were equal and sometimes even performing better in AI search.

Then we dropped all the good old platforms, hired an in house freelancer, and started using a few platforms he introduced. My boss fell in love at first sight.

Now I still see people writing “SEO 2026,” and soon “SEO 2027,” and a lot of it is absolutely detached from reality.

Yes,

SEO is important, but now it is only a path to get visible by AI search, including Google’s AI snippet.

I do not have to tell you that top SERP traffic on Google does not deliver anything close to the traffic it did before AI came into play.

So why waste time still shoving backlinks at us like it is the main idea, instead of replacing that thinking with valuable and strong citations?

Even technical SEO is not as important unless AI engines decide to measure all those thousands of so called “errors.”

SEO 2027? No.

Getting found in 2027. That is the game.

After prompting since the early days of AI apps...

Is Today’s AI Really That Far Ahead?

Of course, today’s AI is light years ahead of the early days.

And because progress has been so crazy fast, I am not so sure it is not like something I once learned in computer science about CPU production:

In short, even a tiny distance between the CPU core and its inner supporting memory can make the CPU perform better (way faster) than originally designed. Some of those are set aside for the “next generation,” even though they are already in production, while the lesser models are sold.

Same with AI !!! (in my humble opinion)

It sometimes feels like they already have a lot figured out, but they release it "commercially" when and how they want...

Why Does the Warning Still Sound the Same?

One thing has not changed from the early release until today.

That message.

If I am correct, not even one word changed:

“AI can make mistakes. Check important info.”

By now, it should at least say:

“AI can sometimes make mistakes. Check important info.”

Is It Really the Core AI, or Is It the App Logic?

Well, I am certain that It is not only because of AI technology development.

It is also because the UI of AI apps has forced-logic running in the background, It feels forced, like it’s being shoved down the user’s throat.

Naturally, that logic could be designed per user or user profile. But in reality, it has to be one logic fits all.

And by “logic,” I mean this:

When you search, it is not just the web search tool, the famous citations, the sources, or even quick scraping of source code to verify something.

It is the “mind” of the system deciding what the user’s intent is.

Then it delivers results based on that interpreted intent, together with a pile of fixed factors each AI platform has adopted in a sincere attempt to provide what the user searched for.

This is insane. I doubt they can even count how many angry responses they get from users who ask for A and get B instead.

What About Generative AI?

This logic also applies to generative AI.

And again, it has improved tremendously.

Image AI today is not even comparable to the old days.

But how many times do you still get a crack in the result?

Or, more likely, how many times do you just get pissed off?

So What Happened With SEO, AEO, and AI Visibility?

Over a year ago, at the office we found out that old-school SEO tools like were only patching for AI visibility.

They kept pushing the same keyword and backlink agenda, as if SEO did not take a hit.

I told my colleagues in the office that I 💪😎 was going to do it all with AI.

At that time, I considered myself an AI prompt champion.

And honestly, I was, and I still am 😊 pretty good at it.

I was helping many people get more or less what they were trying to achieve.

But for SEO, AEO, and getting sites more visible on AI and LLM search, nothing worked like it used to.

Not like in old days SEO when you followed something like the Semrush process to the tee.

Did Prompting Fix It? Nope.

After investigating and testing, and I know it sounds like a quick thing, trust me, the nights 🌒 I spent on it were countless.

I could not get any of the top AI UIs to bend to my needs.

They insisted on sticking to the one-logic-fits-all plan.

And since I have worked with all of them from their birth, I know now that this part will never really change.

Actually, the more commercial they get, and very soon once ads come in, it will probably get even worse....

So What Is the Real SEO Problem Now?

Like many colleagues in the AI visibility optimization industry, I started looking for a solution.

My scientific conclusion was this:

SEO remains important. BUT !! people ranking at the top of SERP still get little or no traffic, or their traffic is exponentially reduced. LLMs use Google and Bing SERP to support web search. BUT !! they do not fully trust it. So they scrape website data to verify what is on top of SERP or GBP.

And remember this, because this is the key:

The content has to fit the user logic. Yes, guys, the interpreted user-intent one. But let’s call it the user search intent.

How Much Does Content Matter?

After deep analysis and more tests (🌒🌒🌒) than I can even count, I told my manager my conclusion:

🚨Content, even raw content on a web page, counts for at least 60% to 70% of the weight in whether a site shows up in LLM search results.

The rest is what we already know: Citations, sources, reputation, footprint, and so on.

Can Prompts Handle Content Gaps?

That question led me back into an insane adventure.

I tried to produce prompts to handle the content gap process. But AI pushes its own agenda. It distorts almost everything you try to achieve by prompt.

That applied logic just does not go away.

What Happens When You Finally Get the Report?

👌 Let’s say I finally get the reports I want...

🚧 Then I am stuck with long chats that barely move anymore. Sometimes they stop ✋🏻completely. And I cannot continue the thread.

📚 Or I end up with tons of files in folders on our network.

😵‍💫 And very quickly, we lose track of everything.

So What Is the Better Way?

Then I realized something.

And this is my take:

Prompting is fun. Challenging AI is fun. BUT for this purpose, it is doomed to fail. Not because prompting is useless. It fails because of all the reasons I mentioned, and some more I did not even get into.

To get away from that annoying magnetic AI logic, to actually achieve results, and to avoid getting lost in files, dead-end chats, and stuck threads, it is better to pay for and use a platform !!!

A platform that uses core AI, but applies the content gap analysis logic properly.

Did Old-School SEO Tools Have the Answer?

Not even close, when I looked it up, Semrush, Ahrefs, and others indeed came up with “content gap” searches.

But mostly, it was just an informational 📖 page.

Then they quickly went back to 👵🏻 old-school SEO.

I was looking for next-generation content gap analysis.

A platform focused only on that.

I found one.

And now I am twice as happy.

No more tedious prompting like crazy.

Even better, with a few clicks, I get the results.

Straight to our content writers.

[removed]

For all those "new generation programmers" who throw something into ChatGPT/ClaudeAI and think they are suddenly on top of the tech world, what about your time?

I always think about a training I attended and a story they told about one filthy rich guy who went with his family for one week to a small, exclusive, high end island. On the last day, while he was still working there the same way he did from his top floor Manhattan office, he met a guy from school. He started bragging about how much this one week vacation cost him. The guy laughed and said, “I have been here for 20 years, having fun all day, and it costs me nada.”

Point is,

people work to have a better life. Life is time, and time is life. So yes, AI can do some new wonders, but it is still your time, and your life goes with it too.

So back to the subject:

There are top notch API services where top programmers have already solved every glitch and bug to allow you to fetch the data you need, regardless of the source.

There is almost an API for everything these days.

Ha, it costs money. Wow, what a surprise. Then again, since life is time and time is money, yes, you buy your life with money, while other systems do all the hard work for you.

So stop prompting like there is no tomorrow, and live the life of today. Enjoy!

I am afraid I am starting to develop a new type of allergy to posts saying they just discovered the ultimate prompt to nail down agentic SEO/GEO hybrid.

As I said before, I agree that Semrush, Ahrefs et al. do not cut it anymore. The problem is, these systems were built at that time and probably provided the best solution as SEO tools instead of doing everything manually.

But you know those movies with a cop from the 70s still holding on to his position while everyone calls him grandpa?

These systems are the grandpas of SEO...

And what about GEO and agentic SEO? they patched the old school with new tools, but patching it is not a new generation solution.

So, I get why many people are fed up with that and run to Claude and ChatGPT, desperately searching for prompts to help them. But here is the deal, after I, like many others, went through that path.

AI LLMs, first and foremost, are freaking lazy entities!!

They will never take the extra mile for you, and if they do follow the prompt well, it is a celebration 🎉

I honestly wonder if anyone counts how many times people rage at them with bad wording :)))

So here is why, take it or leave it:

If you are an AI LLM disciple, let’s separate as friends now. If not, let’s move forward.

On top of the laziness disease of LLMs, they lack the ability to look at the entire picture from high above and understand what you are trying to do, the reason, the rationale, and the big picture.

Then they will NEVER address each component respectively, going back and forth until it becomes a whole response, not a partial answer to the user’s prompt.

This creates loopholes, and this is why every day someone shows up with this annoying “I discovered the best ever prompt, this is all you need” thing. Yeah right.

Another reason this DIY thing is doomed is that you then need to save endless files, Excels, whatever.

There is no history to compare, no structure, and then the chat gets so heavy it stops working properly. Anyway, by then you already lost how it all started...

Second most critical factor, even if all the above is theoretically solvable, this one is not:

LLMs use helpers to do their job. Surely everyone here knows it, but for those who find this surprising, “AI” starts and ends with the “I,” meaning intelligence. With that, it diverts your requests to different libraries, namely Python helpers, to read code, analyze, and so on.

Now the question is, since AI is sooooooo lazy to begin with, will it take the extra mile for you?

In your dreams.

If you want to analyze webpage data, will it correctly “scrape” it, wait for the DOM to complete, get all details, kindly take the time to rebuild it from the code up to see how it actually "looks," analyze every detail, and the list goes on? The answer is darn NO!!

So all you great people prompting your way out of the legacy SEO tools, try looking for next generation tools that understand the inferiority of LLMs and compensate with heavy logic and programmatic fallback solutions, so you get a true agentic SEO/GEO attached AI visibility methodology and actual results.

I’ll be happy to share from my experience over a quick DM if you have any questions.

But please stop wasting your time and effort, then getting pissed off with a bunch of prompts.

Even more, if you are using free AI chat apps, I cannot even imagine the agony you are going through trying to accomplish this that way.

Well, the first question is, is SEO actually dead, or is it just infected by the AI search and LLM era?

The second question is, if search engines, namely and in this order, Google and Bing, are already infected by LLMs, what happens in a year? Should we even bother with traditional SEO anymore?

So, to sum this up quickly and scientifically, and yes, like good ol’ AI, we will assume a little too 😄 but stick more to the facts:

SEO, meaning the weight of overall online visibility, search engine indexing, and appearance in SERP, mainly Google, is not dead at all.

For starters, nothing has really changed for the simple fact that LLMs use Google (+Bing) organic results and other features as a reliable, to a certain extent, source or citation.

So if you are there ranking on top, yes, you will not get the traffic (!!) you could have gotten years ago... 😱 but for visibility’s sake, you will still get good points for it. So no, SEO is not dead. The reasons to do SEO have changed.

For the second question, should you even bother with SEO at all if it is going to become less influential, or maybe have zero influence? This is tricky:

Because SEO can be a costly thing, with some agencies charging thousands of dollars a month, so tens of thousands yearly if you have a large profitable website. So are you throwing this money into the ocean? For this, the answer is not decisive.

On one hand, LLMs will push your website if you are number one on SERP plus GBP. Then again, LLMs scan these sites for content. They do not just trust the search engines or take their “word” for it.

Now the billion dollar 💵 question:

In an era where (server) storage per item is almost no cost, are LLMs looking at saved scraped data? Well, they do. But will they adopt, in their evolution, some sort of indexing? Likely not in the exact same sense.

This current fact, while it may change later, does support the continued importance of SEO for Google organic results and GBP.

My testing into this with a next gen content gap analysis platform I use, which uses physical web scraping, search engines, and LLMs all together and in sync, gives the vibe that LLMs are already developing their own agenda, or their own “SERP.”

In some industries, LLMs already seem fixated on who the big players are. For artificial intelligence to decide which user intent demands updating its own “memory” on these things is probably what is already happening.

So before I conclude this, let’s go back to the use of Google Search Console.

In groups and discussion places, I am hearing that people got literally addicted to prompting AI for almost everything... Never mind how stupid (!!) it is to do that just to challenge yourself when you already have a system that has this built in and does it for you in seconds.

But can Claude AI index or fix issues the way Google Search Console can, or alert you with a click of a button? Heck no. So dropping Search Console at this point is not recommended at all.

Now in conclusion:

Content is, was, and will forever be king.

LLMs, at the end of the day, treat content and content gaps as the highest factor that results in visibility or ranking, which are basically the same thing in AI search helpers.

Citations are a term no one, unless they handled GBP optimization, even considered before.

People mostly called them “backlinks,” which is technically similar, but not from a content aspect. Backlinks can come from a site in Russia... with ZERO (LLM) citation quality. A citation can come from a site that does not even link back to your website, but mentions it in a way that supports the user intent interpretation of the LLM search helpers.

Here is the kicker...

Google organic and GBP are now some of your best so called “backlinks” in citation terms to get higher ranking with AI search helpers, namely ChatGPT, which is leading search volume for businesses.

My take is, do SEO harder than before for as long as LLMs are not evolving into a true search engine alternative by indexing, in their own way, millions or billions of websites.

And if you ask whether they can do it, specifically ChatGPT, if they decide to while developing advertising products, the answer is heck yeah, and Altman may have already been dreaming about this day...

Focus on content gaps analysis more than backlinks and other SEO methods.

Keep technical SEO mainly to critical issues. LLMs do not really go (yet) after the technical structure of your website if it is generally good, at least for now.

Use Search Console for finding issues, fixing them, reindexing, and all that good stuff.

While you maintain Google presence and keep a good ranking valued citation, work on reputation with known outlets in your industry and a good online footprint.

When you search for top rivals with desired search terms on AI, look at the sources and citation sites it gives you. It may give you a hint where to push. But I said a hint only. It may work for your rival, but it is not a magic solution for you too.

And finally, since I mentioned it, make sure you close content gaps with rivals. Meaning, if they say buy 2, get 1 free, do it if you can. Discounts, do it. Same day service, do it. One hour service, do it if you can.

AI, the “I” is intelligence.

AI search helpers can and do differentiate value compared to the user intent as interpreted from the search prompt, the user’s memory in their account, and more.

Answer that intent with all the other 'must haves,' and you rock 🏆

On average, between social feeds, forums, and alerts, I see a new post every 3 to 5 minutes claiming to reveal the best 5, 9, or 10 prompts for SEO.

It feels like kids in a candy store. Everyone thinks they just discovered America, with all due respect to Columbus, or whatever the more woke version is now.

Trust me, I have been down the path of the pruzz. I am pretty sure LLMs learned a thing or two from my experiments.

Then I found WebCarrots, a focused niche AI driven solution that uses AI heavily, but also layers in serious logic, data processing, and programmatic analysis.

And wow, salvation. I was finally released from the prison of the pruzz.

They do the work. Why would I keep prompt wrestling all day?

Stop pruzzing. Start working.