Normalised noise
We have been drowning in SEOs for a while now. Years, in fact. It’s very noisy. Emails, newsletters, blogposts, articles. They have all become very loud and, if we’re really honest, they’re not saying very much at all. Shoving keywords into the top of content to make sure it comes up in searches doesn’t make for very interesting reading. If I were to ask Claude to optimise this post for SEO, for example, it gives me something like: “🔥 THIS is the secret SEO they don’t want you to know about 🔥 Are you DESPERATE to DOMINATE Google rankings in 2025?! Our MIND-BLOWING content optimization techniques will SKYROCKET your website traffic OVERNIGHT!”
AI will make SEO irrelevant
And I have some bad news, it’s about to get worse. Now we all have access to AI we can just start plugging in our writing into ChatGPT for quick, unfiltered access to SEO bloated content.
But I also have some good news! For this exact reason search engines will fight back this deluge of artificial SEO content by making it irrelevant using their own AI. SEOs will become over-saturated to the point of obsoletion. This was always going to be the case, AI is just the catalyst. Or the gun. Depending on how you view SEOs…
The future is filtered
Once this happens, we will be faced with a new challenge. Perhaps a more interesting one, from a writers’ perspective at least. Rather than losing the impact of a piece to the death machine of search engine optimisation, we will have to up the ante in terms of absolute clarity in the message and meaning. In the place of keyword driven search engines, we will find a layer of AI between the content and the reader. For example, for some email servers and Google searches already, what we see is being passed through an AI summariser.
Write like you’re prompting
In essence, everything will be passed through a prompt. And honestly? That’s not as scary as it might sound. The thing with prompting AI is that you have to be very precise and very clear with your writing. Mostly, you are giving a set of instructions, with a very specific desired outcome, so you have to think carefully about how you write the instructions to get what you want. With a layer of AI generated summarisation between you and your audience, you will want to be writing as clearly as possible to get the message across. Meaningless SEO tags and keywords clogging up your content will just end up more distorted than they already are, a messy and indiscernible message landing in people’s inboxes that (is already) and will continue going into Junk.
Clarity is the new reach
This isn’t “AI summaries means everything I write will get read” this is “let’s take time to think carefully about what we want to say”. This is a good thing, ultimately. If AI can turn the volume down on noise, then noise will become useless. And without just shouting constantly and very loudly into the void, what can you be saying instead to make sure your message is heard? Essentially, can your content be consumed and understood twofold: first by an AI prompt that needs to interpret the core of your writing, and second by a human who, again, needs to interpret the core of your writing.
Let’s imagine that AI wasn’t involved in this at all and that for some reason SEOs were rendered useless anyway, how would you write to get people to pay attention? To be heard? Every email, every post would have to have meaning, have a clear intention, be carefully and clearly written so that the message was right there and the noise was all gone.
And, hey, wouldn’t that be nice?
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